Congratulations on the “top-secret” award news!! You absolute star! You’re a winner to us already. Thanks for all your continued hard work x
A warm feeling spreads through me at the reminder of my good news as it wakes up and stretches inside me.
I send a quick message to my friend Souki who I know is in LA right now too. I do not mention George. After all, I can tell her if I see her. But I’m not ready to let my thoughts go back to him right now. The point of coming here was to move on. I need to keep things light, easy.
I haven’t spoken to Souki in months—another quirk of the job—but she’s exactly the kind of person I should be hanging out with right now. Fun, exciting, and not at all hard work. We basically lived together for three months while we filmed an indie horror movie on location in Bulgaria two years ago. The people you work with tend to become an instant family on acting jobs. You’re thrown into close quarters in strange new countries, which means high-stress bond-forming relationships happen fast. There’s only so many hotel dinners you can share in a row without the polite veneer of professionalism slipping into comfortable familial frankness. Souki and I had a blast—on a job that wasn’t. Though we may drop in and out of each other’s lives, our bond is eternal.
* * *
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An email from Cynthia updates me on the details for the Universal meeting with Kathryn Mayer, which will be at the end of the week—they still won’t let anyone see a script, which of course only adds to the mystery and allure of the meeting.
In the meantime I have a magazine photo shoot for Eyre scheduled for tomorrow morning and my first LA audition in the afternoon. Two big scenes. Eight pages of mostly my lines in dialogue as an overworked female Boston cop who discovers her new husband is involved in historical rape allegations. Sounds intense, but I do get to dust off my Boston accent, which is always fun. I give the empty apartment my best “Car park. Car park,” with New England vowels.
I decide to take my audition sides up to the building’s outdoor pool on the thirty-second floor and combine line learning with a post-flight/pre-bed swim. I wriggle into my swimsuit, shrug a beach cover-up over myself in case I run into any other apartment residents, and slip into sandals.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror, my pale British skin, my tired puffy eyes. I think of Naomi Fairn and try not to compare. But I do. Then like a chain reaction I’m thinking of them together, talking, eating, laughing. As if I never existed. And all I got was four words. I warranted no warning or explanation from a man who, I imagine, couldn’t really care less what happened to me now. I’ve been thrown out like old clothes.
I force myself to stop. I must not obsess. What’s done is done, there is nothing more to be learned from circling back and back and back. The habit that has served me well in my career—that need to unearth the fundamental meaning in any human interaction, to rehearse and rehearse until everything finally makes sense—will not serve me here. He left. He didn’t love me. He found someone else. There is no more. That way madness lies.
I grab a towel, a bottle of sunscreen, and my script and head up to the roof terrace. I need to keep my mind away from the dark places it longs to go.
5
Diving In
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8
My jet lag means I’m up before dawn the next morning.
Lying awake staring at the light seeping slowly in through the corners of the blinds sends my thoughts in dangerous directions. I rehash the first night after George left. I’d started to worry. George hadn’t sent me his four-word text yet; that wouldn’t come till the next day and Andy from Fantastic Movers had long gone. In the quiet of my flat I’d suddenly been convinced that something was wrong. The idea blossomed that perhaps something bad had happened to George; perhaps Andy hadn’t worked for Fantastic Movers. I’d been so convinced at the time that something else had happened, after all, that I’d even made a call to George’s friend Harry to check George was safe. I cringe in my crisp LA sheets as I recall the conversation. George was fine, Harry told me. And while Harry couldn’t tell me if George was seeing anyone new—it wasn’t his place—he gave me his sympathy on our breakup. And of course registered his personal disapproval of George’s methods though he had been the one to help George unload Andy’s truck at the other end. They’d gone to the pub after.