But I had to get out. I said I’d drive myself. M.G. rode shotgun. At the bottom of my driveway I crept slowly, carefully, mindful of lawsuits, through my rookery. They filled my windows with their lenses. Their hands suctioned to the glass like starfish. “You want me to get them to move back?” M.G. said. He only speaks when absolutely necessary, generally just hovers stone-faced in my vicinity. But I said no, it was okay. One photographer belly flopped across the hood, shooting into my face. I made a big sideways sweeping motion at him, shouted, “Get the fuck off!” Even with the windows up, the shutters made a din. A swarm of robot insects. Playing cards in bicycle spokes. A hundred old film projectors running at the same time.
Manifest, my trainer said. Manifest. I was supposed to look in the mirror and manifest, in my mind, the body I wanted. Holding weights, I leaned forward, bent my knees, opened my arms out and up. My trainer called it the butterfly. I tried to imagine the body I wanted, but all I saw was a butterfly struggling slowly through heavy, swampy air. “Engage your core,” my trainer said.
A while ago I had a shrink, briefly, who told me to imagine a glowing tiger every time I doubted myself, to imagine the tiger was my source of strength, my essence. I was supposed to imagine the tiger glowing brighter and brighter and a thick layer of dust settling on everything else until the whole world was gray except for my tiger. The tiger was like the vial of white light in that superhero movie. The tiger was preposterous. The tiger was me. The tiger was everything but me.
Everyone knows Los Angeles is a city of deniers. Everyone knows this is a city of silicone and Restylane, of charismatic stationary-bike preachers and kettlebell gurus, of healing crystals and singing bowls, of probiotics and juice cleanses and colonics and jade eggs you stick up your vag and exorbitantly expensive snake-oil powder you sprinkle on your coconut chia pudding. We purify ourselves for life as though it were the grave. This is a city that’s more afraid of death than any other. I said that to Oliver once, and he told me I was being a little negative. I said it to Siobhan, and she gave me the name of a shrink. I said it to the shrink, and he asked me if I thought people were wrong to fear death. I said I didn’t think the fear was the problem as much as the struggle. I said I thought the struggle should be to accept death, not to defy it.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Imagine a tiger,” he said.
Seven
I floated on a raft in my pool. I felt stunned, like a critter picked up by a bird of prey and then dropped, a beating heart inside an inert, sprawled body. The insides of my eyelids glowed blood-orange.
I must have fallen asleep, or almost, because when a very English voice called out, “You really shouldn’t sleep in a swimming pool,” I startled and tipped off the raft into a blue blur. The water stung and fizzed in my nose.
“I didn’t think you were actually asleep,” Sir Hugo said when I surfaced. He was holding the half-empty bottle of Scotch and two glasses and had a canvas tote bag over his shoulder. “Augustina let me in.”
I hauled myself out at the edge. “Are they still down there?”
“The photogs? Oh, yes.”
I wrapped a towel around myself, and we sat at the table where I’d once eaten ancient-grain bowls with Alexei.
Hugo poured the Scotch. He held up his glass. “To an ending.”
I clinked.
“Now, my girl,” he said in a gentle growl. “What do you want to do? Will you take time off?”
I imagined what I would do with time off. I would float in the pool, smoke weed, manifest the body I wanted, imagine my tiger, watch people renovate houses, wait for something to happen. It wasn’t unappealing. But, in rebuttal, the vision of myself holding an Oscar came back to me again, obliterating those laconic half thoughts like a cartoon safe crushing a cartoon cat. I was onstage, raising the statue above my head, living out the default dream of everyone in Hollywood. My arm and shoulder looked perfectly toned. A theater of people was on its feet, even Gavin du Pré. Alexei was there too, looking wistful.
“I’d rather move forward,” I said.
“Good.” He paused for a second and breathed in so hard his nose flattened, signaling he was about to quote something. “？‘Men at some time are masters of their own fates; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’？”
“Men are masters of their own fates.”
“Women didn’t fit the meter.”
“They never do, man.”
“I have something for you. It’s out of print, so don’t be careless with it.” He pulled a book out of his tote bag and handed it over. An old, slender hardback, with a mustard-colored dust jacket crumbling at the edges. On the front cover was an illustration of an airplane flying over the ocean, the sun behind it and a few stretched-out shallow M’s scattered around to suggest birds. The title was in elegant italics: The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between: The Lost Logbook of Marian Graves. The smell of the Van Nuys public library came back to me, and I could almost feel the sweaty vinyl embrace of the beanbag chair in the children’s reading corner.