“The desert,” I said. “Wesley and I wanted to watch the sunrise. It’s not a big deal.”
“How old is Wesley?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t actually know. Mitch turned a page of the paper. After a while, he said, quietly, “Do you think you might be getting a little out of control?”
Ordinarily I would have bristled at his hypocrisy, but because he asked with what seemed like genuine curiosity, like he didn’t already know the answer, and because I’d never expected him to ask at all, and because I’d gone to the desert looking for awe and come away with terror, I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He turned another page. “You don’t need to do this wild phase, you know. You could just skip it.”
But I did need to. I didn’t see another way. I needed to spring-jab out into my life like a switchblade. “You only live once,” I said.
* * *
—
Gwendolyn didn’t leak it, the sex tape, but I still got fired. I got fired so quickly I couldn’t help but be impressed by the swiftness of her vengeance.
Gavin du Pré called me himself.
“Do you know who this is?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you know why I’m calling?” His voice was quiet, ratcheted so tight it was a miracle any sound was escaping him at all.
“I have a guess.”
“Gwendolyn is threatening to leak a sex tape of you and Oliver unless I fire you. Do you know where she says she got it?”
“From me.”
“That’s right. From you. So you see I’m in a difficult situation here, Hadley. What would you do if you were in my position? If you’d given an actress the chance of a lifetime, and she’d repaid you by being staggeringly ungrateful and disrespectful?”
“If I were you,” I said, “and I can’t pretend to know you all that well, but from what I do know, I would probably offer some kind of bargain that involved sucking my dick again.”
He was silent. I recognized it as the horror-movie silence that precedes someone jumping out of the shadows and stabbing you to death.
Finally, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if you were to make any such slanderous insinuations publicly, you would find yourself on the receiving end of a very damaging and protracted lawsuit that would expose everything—and everyone—you’ve ever done. But, yes, you are fired, and I will make sure your career is over. You’re finished.”
I turned off my phone and went into a windowless room downstairs in my house, a sort of Moroccan-themed screening room, and I lay on a big tasseled pillow and watched a show about a woman who fixed up decrepit old houses. She was tiny and strong and used a nail gun a lot. The houses always ended up with claw-foot tubs and wainscoting and subway tile. From the pictures I’ve seen from when I was a baby, my parents’ house outside Chicago looked like one of her projects if she’d abandoned it halfway through. There’s a photo of my mother bathing me in a claw-foot tub, but you can see the linoleum floor is peeling and discolored. In another you can see nice wood floors but also a sad-looking futon covered with a rumpled sheet. I don’t know why they didn’t fix it up nicer. They had some money, enough for the Cessna that killed them. I don’t know if they wanted to live that way or just didn’t want badly enough to change.
Eventually I fell asleep.
By the next morning, the news was everywhere, spreading from The Hollywood Reporter to celeb gossip sites to CNN, glee dolloped all over it like whipped cream. I had three thousand Twitter notifications. “News flash,” I tweeted. “Nothing lasts forever. Get over it.” Then I deleted my account and turned off my phone.
Of course I’d meant to piss off Gwendolyn, to flaunt that I’d not only had what she most wanted but had tossed it away. I’d known this was the probable outcome, but still I reeled like a charred and tottering cartoon knight who’d just been flambéed in dragon’s breath.
I was lying on the couch watching a different real estate show, one where unreasonable people shop for cheap houses in boring places, getting little endorphin rushes from random strangers making decisions, when Augustina reminded me I’d scheduled a session with my trainer. I was supposed to be getting into shape for the fifth movie, eating nothing but fish and kale, thinking only of my triceps, but that was irrelevant now.
“You could cancel,” Augustina said. “He’d understand.”