Page 64 of Hollywood, Ending

“Because you don’t work for me. You work for the studio.”

“Yeah, not for much longer if Jill publishes the story. The studio will want someone to blame and I pitched the piece. What’d you say to her?”

“That it was above my pay grade.”

“Not a bad answer,” she says. “Fuck, the studio’s gonna look so bad.”

“Gonna look bad? The studio is bad.”

“Kai, it sucks, but they’re selling movie tickets. And it works, okay? It worked. You trended on Twitter. Probably got you Gavinth. Todd’s the reason you got Gavinth. Good for our movie, good for the next movie. And it’s not like Juniper got hurt.”

“I have to go to a party,” I say.

5

I go upstairs to change into an outfit appropriate for the party—black pants and a short-sleeve button-down from Prada. I can’t believe how many clothes Prada makes, or how happy they are to send them to me. They even send me nice socks. Who wears Prada socks? Me, I guess. This is the part I didn’t tell Jill from The New Yorker—I like nice shit. I like getting dressed in Prada to go to a Matthew Malone party at a nightclub he has rented out in its entirety.

The club is off Broadway, and I get there at nine fifteen for a nine p.m. start, so it’s mostly empty, but Lon is there. “You look tired, kid,” he says. “I’m so glad I don’t have to do that junket shit. Worst part of movies.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a hell of a business.”

“Sure is, kid. But you look good in Prada. All right, I gotta go schmooze with that guy over there. He’s the fucking head of IP at Mattel. Can you believe it? They’re making movies out of toys now. Hot Wheels movie. Barbie movie. American Girl dolls come to life, out on the prairie, dying of consumption. People say he’s the next big thing, though.”

_____

Juniper shows up after a while wearing a whisper-light silk shift dress that does rather make it harder to swallow. “I need to talk to you,” I say. We find a quietish corner and I tell her about the sweaty guy being a studio plant.

“Pretty nasty,” she says.

“I’ll say.”

“It was good press, though. You gotta give ’em that.”

“It traumatized you.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“You’re not pissed?”

“I mean, they didn’t put us in danger or anything.”

I don’t know what to say to her after that, so I head to the bar to order a beer and get Juniper a club soda. I think about how sometimes I used to work parties like this one for extra cash, used to carry around nibbles for people. Now I am the people.

I am so goddamned lucky, and so goddamned immune to my own luck.

“How was The New Yorker?” Juniper asks when I return.

“Intense. Smart lady. Probably got me to say too much. What’d you do?”

“Photo shoot, mostly, for Marie Claire. They had me in fifteen different looks. Then I did an easy interview with them.”

“In case it’s in the story, she asked me if I was in love with you.”

“And you said?”

“I said sometimes.”

Juniper laughs and shakes her head. “So you told her the truth,” she says finally.