Inside

TEN

Los Angeles, 2003

WHEN ANNE RETURNED from Edinburgh, there were five voice-mail messages from her agent, Julia, each more frantic than the last.

“Darling,” the last message went, “this is big. Call me today or else, I swear to God.”

Anne stood in the hot, dusty apartment, her unpacked bag on the couch. Though most signs of Hilary and Alan had been removed, the place still didn’t feel like hers again. She walked around opening windows, glanced inside the empty fridge, and found a dead potted plant in the bedroom, tucked behind a curtain on the windowsill. Hilary must have bought it.

Besides Julia, she had no one to call to say she was home.

In the early morning, she ran five miles and was back at the apartment, showered and staring at the clock, by seven thirty. Since Julia never got in before ten, she went for a walk around the neighborhood, bought some groceries, and had a manicure. It was a beautiful late-August day, warm but not humid. Tributes were starting to go up, flowers and photographs, notices of ceremonies, everyone seeming a little teary and brave and on edge, the anniversary bearing down. Anne noticed these things only insofar as she wanted to disassociate herself from them. If she could have managed not to register the date at all, she would have. But as it was, she thought about Hilary’s due date and knew that it had passed.

Back at the apartment, she called Julia, whose assistant put her through right away, an unprecedented act.

“Darling girl,” Julia said, “where the fuck have you been?”

“I told you. Scotland, in a play.”

“You and your plays,” Julia said, trying to sound fond, though her disgust was obvious. Julia was about toothpaste commercials, modeling if necessary. She was about getting your face out there. “Fortunately for you, they waited. You must’ve really done a number on that guy.”

The first guy who came to Anne’s mind was Sergio, sprawled on the unforgiving cobblestones, his eyes flashing when he rose up again to hit her, his anger laid bare. Then she refocused and said, “What guy?”

“Michael Linker,” Julia said, as if everybody knew who this was. “He saw you in that godforsaken thing on Long Island.” At the time, Julia had called the godforsaken thing a masterpiece of contemporary drama.

“Whatever,” Anne said.

“Not whatever! He just got promoted to a new studio-exec position and wants you to audition for this pilot that sounds amazing. Gritty family drama, lots of sex. It’s a cable show. You need to be on a plane to Los Angeles today. Call me back with your flight info and I’ll get you a car on both ends.”

Anne had been telling Julia for months that she didn’t want to leave New York, that she wasn’t interested in television, that independent films were the only projects for which she wanted to be considered. Standing in her apartment, the air conditioner wheezing asthmatically, she realized that nobody cared what she wanted.

“Annie,” Julia said. “You’re on this, right?”

“I’m there,” she said.

That night she got on a plane, no longer tracking whether she ought to be asleep or awake. In California the car delivered her to a hotel, where she took a bubble bath, then ordered room service. Outside, the sun glared over a tangled mass of highways. Her interview wasn’t until the next day, and she had hours to enjoy herself on someone else’s money. So she went swimming at the hotel pool, then took another long bath. She remembered Hilary, when she first came to stay, gulping down donuts and any other food in the apartment. In retrospect, her appetite was surely fueled by pregnancy, but she also seemed to believe in eating while the eating was good, like a feral cat. Anne felt the same way about creature comforts. When luxury was available, she would gorge herself.

Then she pulled out the script that had been waiting for her when she checked in. She read it through and started rehearsing her lines. Low expectations or not, she wasn’t going to sabotage herself. She’d work with what she had. She remembered Julia’s parting words. “You may not be the best or the prettiest, but you don’t have to be,” she’d said. “You only need to seduce one person at a time.”

Her appointment was at ten, on a studio lot. When she arrived, two people were waiting — Michael Linker, her fan from the play, and a woman he introduced as Diane. The office was both lavish and uncomfortable, designed to put newcomers at a disadvantage. Michael sat on a white Lucite desk, lounging in jeans and a crisp white shirt. Diane leaned back against a windowsill piled high with scripts. Anne was given an entire white leather couch to herself, into the depths of which she sank gracelessly, looking up at them.

“Thanks so much for coming in,” Michael said.

“Yes, thank you,” Diane echoed, smiling broadly. “We’re so happy you could make the trip. Michael’s been raving about you ever since he got back from the Hamptons, and finally I just couldn’t stand it anymore and told myself, I have to see this girl!”

“You were incredible in that play,” Michael said. “You ruled the stage, and that final scene was, my God, so heartbreaking.”

“And Michael’s not easy to impress,” Diane said. “I hardly ever hear him gush like that.”

This was clearly a lie. It was their job to gush. Anne crossed her legs, trapped in the couch, and kept smiling. “Thanks. You guys are so nice.”

“It’s our pleasure, really,” Diane said. She had long, dirty-blond hair and wide-set, strangely vibrant blue eyes. Anne wondered if they were colored contacts. She was having a little trouble concentrating. Ordinarily she worked best one-on-one, responding to cues from the person in front of her; with two people, though, each broadcasting a distinct sexual energy, she couldn’t quite figure out how to play the situation.

“Okay, my dear,” Michael said. “Enough shameless flattery. Are you relaxed? Let’s talk about the story. Then let’s hear you work with it.”

The character was an abused woman who triumphs against the odds and finds love again. In the scene Anne had been given, she confronts her cold, unremorseful husband, the abuser, with anger, tears, and recriminations.

Now sitting behind his desk, Michael was reading the husband’s part. Diane had pulled up a chair beside him and was fiddling with her nails.

Anne figured she knew this much: When sex is there at the beginning, it’s still there at the end. Even a woman who hates you still wants you to think she’s beautiful, desirable, so great that you never should’ve treated her so badly, never should’ve let her go. So she played the scene as sexy as she could make it.

When she was done, Diane muttered something under her breath, but Anne couldn’t hear what it was.

“Fabulous,” Michael said routinely. “Could you just give us a minute, darling?”

“Sure.” She stood outside in the hallway, breathing a bit heavily, adrenalized and a little turned on. An old boyfriend, a medical-school dropout, had told her that when he needed to calm down during sex, he used the images of diseased skin from his dermatology textbook. Pustules, rashes, oozing sores. Of course, after he told her this, during sex she was always thinking about him thinking about skin diseases, and pretty soon she was too turned off to see him again. But she kept the technique. After running through the images in her mind, she felt more nauseated than anything else.

The door opened and Diane smiled at her, blue eyes glowing. “Let’s go down the hall and see if the camera loves you as much as we do, okay?”

She went through the scene again, this time with an actor Michael brought out without explaining who he was. Anne didn’t recognize him. When they were done, he unbuckled his belt, peeked down his pants, and said, “Scared the shit out of you, didn’t she, buddy?” Then he laughed and left the room, patting Michael on the shoulder. Anne could have turned this remark over endlessly in her mind, but didn’t. Her mother had once told her that whoever cares the least has the greatest advantage. It wasn’t a motto she herself had been very good at putting into practice. But Anne was.

And it must have worked, because months passed before she went back to New York. She let her apartment languish there, unpaid — it wasn’t her name on the lease, and the furniture was worthless, so who cared? — as a new life in L.A. grew up around her.

She was cast in the pilot and had read-throughs with the actor playing her husband — not the one from the original audition, but a kindly type who brought a charming snakiness to the role that was significantly more disturbing. As she studied the script, she realized that what she’d thought was a starring role was in fact a small, supporting one. How had she gotten this impression? Had they actually lied to her or simply let her believe something that wasn’t true?

The main character was a man who had partnered with her husband in a business deal whose crookedness extended to the top echelons of a major corporation and, from there, to the government. Her job was to be beautiful and damaged — at one point she was taken hostage — and in most of her scenes she had no lines, because she’d been gagged.

Diane found her a place to stay, a tiny mother-in-law cottage on some producer’s estate. It had a sweet little yard clustered with cactus and blooming plants, fuchsia petals leaning gaudy and lovely against the stucco walls. Beyond the garden was the mansion where the producer lived, a Spanish-style villa with a red tiled roof. Diane also leased her a car and gave her an advance on her salary. She was almost impossibly helpful, and from this Anne could only deduce that Diane thought she was going places. When she told Julia what was happening, a tightness stole into her agent’s voice that she recognized as the palpable fear that Anne would screw it all up. This fear was justified. The easier things came to her, the more worthless they felt, and the more she was tempted to cast them aside.

But she liked Diane. She could be catty and obnoxious and she talked shit about Michael behind his back. She told Anne that her little cottage was hideous and had to be redecorated as bluntly as she had told her that her ass was saggy and she needed to join a gym.

“I don’t do gyms,” Anne said.

“Honey, this is L.A.,” Diane said. “You don’t have a choice.”

They compromised by jogging together on the beach, a picture of California living so cinematic that Anne had a hard time keeping a straight face. Fortunately, Diane was extremely fit and the pace she set forced Anne to breathe hard, straight face or not. Afterward she made Anne order an egg-white omelet, paid the check, then drove her home. She didn’t introduce her to anybody else, and for the first two weeks she was the only person Anne knew in town.

At home, she read and reread the script. She sat on a patio chair in the garden wearing a broad-brimmed hat, letting the sun play on her legs. Other than that, she had nothing to do. Sometimes she got in the car and drove around aimlessly, along the city’s wide avenues where no one was on foot, so unlike New York. She never thought about what would happen next; she lived in the bubble of the present moment, waiting, waiting.

On Monday of her third week, Michael called to say that the funding couldn’t be secured and the project was dead. “Fortunately for you, my darling child, you’ll get snapped up by somebody else before you can even turn around. Some of these other assholes are going to be in real trouble.”

After he hung up, Anne called Julia, who said, “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me. The whole deal fell through.”

Julia sighed. “I guess you better come home.”

“Will they pay for my ticket back?”

“Please,” Julia said.

That night Diane showed up with two bottles of rosé, which they drank while sitting on the plastic lawn furniture in Anne’s living room.

On the third glass, Diane burst into tears. “I’m just so fucking tired,” she said, her blond hair shining in the dark.

In front of them, the windows of the producer’s villa glowed with light, though nobody ever seemed to be at home. The lights were on timers that went off and on at the same time every day. There were alarm systems, pesticide warning signs, gardeners, and maids, but no one who actually seemed to live there.

“What happens now?” she asked Diane, who shrugged, her usually erect posture collapsing under the wine.

“We all hustle and find something else to do. You’ll do great, you just have to get out there. You’ve got so much fucking charisma it’s ridiculous. I, on the other hand, will get fired, probably tomorrow.”

“You will? Why?”

“Because this is the third project I’ve had fall apart on me. Three strikes, you’re out. Like baseball and jail.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Diane snorted. “Look for another job, I guess, where I can get fucked over by a fresh set of faces.”

Something about her transparent made-up toughness reminded Anne of Hilary, and she sighed.

Diane looked up, laughing. “Look at how pathetic we are. It’s terrible. Let’s go out or something.”

“I don’t have any money,” Anne said.

“Oh, shut up. You know I’ll pay.”

In addition to paying, she drove. She took Anne to a club where they did shots of tequila and danced and flirted with a couple of guys Diane introduced to Anne, though she couldn’t tell if Diane actually knew them or had just started talking to them on her way back from the bathroom. They were cute, surfers in suits with wavy hair and blinding teeth. Too pretty to have sex with, Anne thought. They’d expect all kinds of gratitude and wouldn’t do any of the work. But flirting was fine, and so was dancing and drinking. She threw her body into it, letting her muscles flow and her thinking stop. It was three in the morning when they got back into the car. Diane was talking a mile a minute — maybe she did some coke in the bathroom? — about how she might go down to Baja and just chill for a few weeks, get her head clear, maybe work on this screenplay she had an idea for, or meet a Mexican guy and get laid and drink tequila on the beach, did Anne want to come? Diane’s voice was ringing in her ears like an annoying phone, and she was on autopilot herself, so she used her usual trick to get someone to shut up, which was to lean over and kiss her. It wasn’t the first time she had ever kissed a woman, but it had been a while.

Diane tasted like lip gloss and alcohol.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “Wow.”

Instead of driving home they went to a nearby hotel. It was expensive, and Diane paid. The bed had the nicest sheets Anne had ever felt. She ran her hands through Diane’s hair. She was a beautiful thing, Diane, scrubbed and shiny and soft. Anne felt like she was stroking a puppy, a feeling made stronger by how little the other woman weighed and the soft whimpering sounds she was making. It didn’t exactly feel like sex — not the sex that Anne was used to — but it felt good, at least until they passed out.

When Anne woke up, she was alone. She had danced off a lot of the alcohol and felt better than she would have expected. She took a long shower, and when she came out Diane was back, wearing a hard-to-read smile.

“I went for a walk,” she said. “My head was killing me. I ordered breakfast for us. How do you feel?”

“Better after the shower,” Anne said.

“I’ll take one too.”

While the water was running, room service came, everything under silver lids, like in a movie. With food in her Anne felt sleepy again.

“You can stay until noon if you want,” Diane said. “I guess I should get changed for work. They’ll expect me to be at the office so they can kick me out on my ass, those bastards.”

She slid out of her robe, revealing her smooth, pretty body, then stood behind Anne and ran her hands down inside her terrycloth. Anne surprised herself by arching her back in response, a need rising up that she hadn’t known was there. They went back to bed, this time sober, and neither of them left the hotel until noon.

Diane did get fired, but she didn’t go to Mexico. Instead, she moved Anne into her little house on a winding side street in Los Feliz. Anne liked the neighborhood, which felt cluttered and cozy. Wide-set bungalows with deep, shady porches and slanted roofs were set back from the street, and in the yards there were tangles of spiky desert cacti. They took walks, Diane pointing out the California plants to her, eucalyptus, yucca, bougainvillea, the words like a new language on Anne’s tongue. Sometimes they hiked in Griffith Park, the city spread out beneath them, clothed in smog. Anne went on auditions and took meetings, and Diane went out for lunches and consultations and took meetings. Everybody in L.A. was taking meetings. When Anne drove around the city now and witnessed its sunny leisure — people dawdling beneath umbrellas, sipping smoothies on the beach — she understood that these weren’t vacation days or tourist pastimes, they were all meetings. After her own appointments, she would join Diane and sometimes her personal trainer, who would run them through an exhausting sequence of repetitions. Anne was in better shape than she’d ever been and she felt great. Inextricable from this were her evenings in bed with Diane, their thin, muscled bodies wrestling and twirling in what felt at times like another session with the trainer, at other times something more serious and important, a real meeting.

Diane was the first person who ever ran her fingers over the delicate white scar tissue, barely raised now, on her torso, from when she used to cut herself. She shivered as Diane’s index finger traced this old map across her abdomen, replaced then by her mouth and cool tongue. Diane looked up at her. “If they need to,” she said, “they can cover these with makeup.”

Anne took a meeting with a friend of Diane’s, a producer named Adam. He wasn’t handsome, but like everybody else she met in L.A., he’d been exercised and tooth-whitened to the point where he seemed like he was. He was developing a pilot about sexy spies and thought she might fit the bill. After lunch, he said, “I have a script you could look over, but I left it at my house. Why don’t we just swing past there, and I’ll give it to you. Do you have time?”

She did. They had a drink in his living room and kept talking about the pilot. His house was full of modular white furniture and bulbous, fluorescent lamps. Then she asked him how he got started in the business — a question that in L.A. always led to a lengthy answer — so she could have a little time to think.

“It’s a cliché at this point to say that the industry chews you up and spits you out, right? For actresses, of course, it’s worse than anybody else. I mean, this isn’t news to you, I’m sure,” he said as they went into the bedroom; he was nominally giving her a tour of the house. “But I’ve been smart enough to navigate it pretty well so far. I’m not one of those fucks who’s looking for one good hit and then wants to buy some mansion in the Hollywood Hills and retire. Those people are pussies, if you ask me. This game is about risk. About gambling your whole life. Don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Anne said. “I just got here.”

“Yeah, spare me the I-just-got-to-town routine,” Adam said. “You’re an operator, same as me. We’re like computers running the same program. Let’s see your body.”

“Just see it?” she said.

“For now,” he said, and checked his watch. He was lying across his bed, a low futon with a black bedspread. Off to the side, in the bathroom, Anne saw a matching black sink, black shelves, and black towels. Diane’s flowery red shower curtain flashed in her mind, not out of guilt but as a reward, what she’d get back to after she was done with the business at hand.

She expected him to take off his clothes, but he didn’t. Instead he circled her, patting, groping, murmuring to himself. “How old are you?” he said at one point.

“How old do I look?” she answered, as Diane had advised her to.

“Too close to thirty for comfort.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t bother trying to make me feel bad.”

Adam smiled. “I like you.” His hands were on her breasts.

“If you say so,” she said.

Back at Diane’s she took a shower, not because she felt dirty but because she was tired, the same as anyone after a long day at work. When she came out, Diane was cooking dinner. Anne poured herself a glass of wine, and they kissed. It was the closest she had ever been to a domestic life, and it was only three weeks old.

“So how did it go with Adam? Did he give you a naked evaluation?”

“You knew about that?”

“He always does it. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, but he doesn’t like it when people are tipped off. I know he’s a creep, Annie, but he’s a successful creep. If it went well, which I know it must have because you’re gorgeous, he’ll get you in somewhere.”

Anne studied her as she flaked salmon into a bowl of salad. Feeling a swell of warmth, she put her arms around Diane and rested her head on her shoulder. They were around the same height, the same weight. The comfort of a double. “He’s a freak,” she said. “He didn’t even want to have sex. Just to grope and look.”

Diane laughed, gently disengaged herself, and carried the salad to the table. “You sound offended.”

“It was a power play. It wasn’t about getting laid. It was about making me feel like shit.”

“Well, obviously.”

“You think I should be grateful for the opportunity.”

“I think, let’s hope it works.”

While eating, they talked about the screenplay Diane was writing, a black comedy about a woman manipulator, an All About Eve for the present day.

“Totally unsellable,” Diane said. “The market doesn’t like black comedies, and it doesn’t like vehicles for women, but what the hell? Now’s the time to take a chance.”

Anne half listened to this jumble of wishes, paying more attention to Diane’s body as it rustled and slid across from her. That night, lying in bed with their legs tangled together, she repeated the words let’s hope to herself. She had a loose, sweet feeling in her body, the sense of a future she might be able to hold on to, and of the risks associated with that future — of landing a job or not, of being with Diane in this strange constellation of sex and friendship without knowing exactly what it meant. It was the feeling of knowing nothing this good could last, of getting away with it for now, for as long as she possibly could. Let’s hope.

A week later, she got a phone call from Adam.

“It’s Mr. Feeler-Upper,” he said cheerfully. “I want you for my pilot. You’re the sexy one. You’ll show some skin, but not too much. It’s a family show.”

Anne rubbed her forehead. Some part of her that distantly remembered her theatrical career was giving her a headache.

Adam was still talking, giving her instructions on where to go and when. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to you,” he said, “so get ready.” Then he hung up.

When she turned around, Diane had her arms outstretched. “I knew it,” she said, her eyes warm and bright. “This is it. The big time.”

Anne accepted the hug, but the big time puzzled her. Did Diane really talk like this? Did she actually believe it? She felt the first separation yawn between them, like a candle snuffing itself out. But then Diane kissed her neck, and she lit up again.

One thing you had to give the television people: they knew what they were doing in the looks department. Techniques and materials had been refined. They were working at the cutting edge. They did her hair, her clothes, her makeup, her skin tone, and she looked like a different person, unrecognizable to herself, a transformation that brought her nothing but pleasure. She looked beautiful, if more generic; she could’ve been any one of the millions of shiny-haired L.A. girls.

Firmly, dictatorially, Adam took over her life, telling her what to wear both on the set and off it, cultivating her soon-to-be celebrity life. “Holistic oversight,” he called it, and made appointments with a dentist, a dermatologist, a nutritionist.

“You’re welcome,” he said, though she hadn’t thanked him. “I’m all about details.”

Once filming started, Diane sometimes came to the set to watch. The first scenes were shot at night, on bone-dry streets that had been hosed down to look like the rain-slickened avenues of New York. She had always loved rehearsals, going over the same lines again and again, each time locating some new modulation or nuance; she and the other actors would argue over blocking and interpretation, over the meaning of a line, or even a word, for hours. But the repetitions of television were entirely different. The mechanics were so elaborate that no one paid any attention to what she said or how she said it; it was all about the camera tracking and how she looked in front of a tree or a stop sign. Over and over she walked out of a building, stood in the street, and looked confused. One, two, three steps, look confused. This went on for five hours, then a break.

Her character was a college student whose father was killed by some evil spies in a case of mistaken identity, so she became a spy herself in order to track them down. In the meantime, as a cover, she worked as a photographer, a job that enabled her to travel to exotic locations and walk around with a camera around her neck, its straps framing her breasts, staring poutily into the distance. Each episode was supposed to focus on a different “photo assignment,” which usually involved her flirting with a man who either turned out to be no good or, if he was good, died.

Now that he’d cast her, Adam took no more interest in her body. Neither did the director, a happily married father of three who often played with his kids during breaks. The only ones who did pay attention to her body were the professionals who tended to it, the hair and makeup people, who were all women and gay men. It felt safe but sexless. Anne had always needed chemistry — the glint in the other person’s eye, the tactical, pheromonal equation — but now her only partner was the camera, and she felt like she was floating in space, unwanted and untethered. She heard herself delivering lines with a cardboard flatness that, coming from another actor’s mouth, she would have cringed at. But nobody noticed, or else they simply didn’t care.

The hours were irregular and insane. Sometimes she was out all night and other times she needed to be on set at five in the morning. She had to work out enough to keep her stomach flat but not so much that her breasts got smaller. Some days she barely saw Diane, or else she was at home all afternoon lounging on the couch, doing her nails, while Diane, annoyed, tried to work on her script. When Anne tried to get back on her good side — sex being her strategy — Diane would push her away and sigh, saying, “It’s not always about that, Annie. I need you to support me on this.”

“Support you how?”

“Read the draft. Tell me what you think.”

“But I don’t know anything about character arcs and whatever,” Anne said. “I’m just a puppet.” She mimed as if her arms were held up by invisible strings. “I’m a marionette.”

“You just think it’s too much work,” Diane said.

Anne started to protest, but they both knew it was true. “I’m not much of a reader,” she said.

“It’s a script. You’re an actor. Come on.”

So Anne read it, and it was terrible. Diane, so sophisticated and well educated, turned out to be a clumsy, fumbling, primitive writer. Without a doubt, producing was exactly the right job for her, not writing. Her script was corny, the dialogue boring, and the characters unsympathetic, with nothing redeemable or exciting about them. It had all the flaws of a commercial movie and none of its virtues.

Of course, Diane walked into the room right as Anne turned the final page. Sidling up to the fridge, not making eye contact as she poured herself some iced jasmine tea, she was so transparent, so endearing.

Without thinking, Anne said, “I love you.”

Diane came over, set her glass down, and put her arms around Anne. “But not the script.”

“God, no.”

Diane snorted. “I can’t believe you won’t even pretend to like it.”

Anne was surprised. How could she? Didn’t somebody this smart know when a script was bad? She felt wetness on her shoulder, and realized Diane was crying. “Do you like it?”

“That’s not the point,” Diane said, wiping her nose on the sleeve of Anne’s T-shirt. “The point is, if you love me, you should support me.”

“By saying the script’s good when it isn’t? What would that accomplish?”

“When you love someone,” Diane said, her lips trembling, “you don’t tell them their script sucks. You give them some notes. You point to a particular detail that you do like. You say, I think it’s got potential but it’s not quite there yet. That’s what you say if you aren’t some robot or a person who was raised in a barn.”

“I’m sorry,” Anne said, taking her hand, but Diane left the house and didn’t come back that night and this was their first fight, ever.

It upset her more than she would’ve anticipated. She felt off-balance, almost nauseated, and couldn’t sleep, and the next day the makeup girl tutted and shook her head at the dark circles under her eyes. This made her mad at Diane, so instead of going back to her place after they stopped shooting, she went back to her own. She had been spending so much time at Diane’s that she’d practically forgotten she still had the little cottage. She had no stuff there anymore, not even a toothbrush, and compared to Diane’s house it was barren. The hulking villa loomed over her cottage, its emptiness both sterile and ominous. There was life in Los Feliz, people walking their dogs, crowding the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, chatting and drinking tea under the umbrellas at the Alcove Café. Anne missed all of this, and Diane most of all, and in the cottage she felt shabby and exiled.

They made up two days later. Anne invented some positive comments on the script, and Diane admitted that she was better at cajoling work out of others than doing it herself. They drank a bottle of wine, then went to bed and found each other again, newly tender. The fight had given texture to their relationship: they had admitted how much they cared, and now things were deeper, stranger, stronger.

Giving up on the script, Diane got a job at an independent production company, and they took a weekend trip to Palm Springs to celebrate. At a restaurant one night, a woman who knew Diane approached their table to say hello, and Diane said, “This is my girlfriend,” and Anne realized that it was true. She was surprised — not about being with a woman, or even about being a girlfriend. The surprising part was how much she liked it.

Shooting wrapped a week later, and now the long pause began as the pilot was edited and presented to the network. In the meantime, Anne became what Diane called “a kept woman.” She had signed a contract that forbade her from working elsewhere until a decision was reached on the show. She worked, instead, on being Diane’s girlfriend. Every day she asked her about her job, the minor details and ongoing disputes. Diane’s work stories were the world’s most boring soap opera, but Anne never let on how she felt. As always, once she started playing a part, she started being the part, finding aspects of herself that she hadn’t known were there. She could grow into it, even things that were really a stretch, like knowing which of Diane’s two bosses she was talking about; they were both named Jim, and Diane never mentioned their last names, differentiating between them only by tone — one Jim she liked, the other she despised.

Anne was good at this, and Diane responded like a plant to careful tending. She almost immediately got a promotion and gave her the credit for it, though Anne couldn’t remember giving her any advice; in fact she rarely did, instead just parroting back Diane’s own opinions.

In the middle of all this, on a Tuesday night, Adam called and invited her out to dinner. “Just you,” he said. “Tell Di it’s a work thing.”

Diane said, “Is he going to feel your tits again?”

“Hopefully not at the restaurant.”

“At least be discreet.”

“Hey,” Anne said, “whatever it takes to get ahead.”

Diane punched her arm lightly, then held her close. “Be careful,” she said.

At an expensive Italian restaurant on Melrose, Adam ordered champagne, poured it, sniffed it, so obviously and pathetically milking the suspense that Anne could barely keep from rolling her eyes. Obviously the pilot had been picked up.

He raised his glass and nodded for her to do the same. “Congratulations, beautiful,” he said. “They chose us.”

They chose me, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. “I expected more squealing, maybe a mad dash around the restaurant, shots at the bar. What’s wrong with you?”

Anne played the dumbfounded ingénue. “I think it hasn’t sunk in yet,” she said. “I can’t even believe it. When will it run?”

“Well, hold on,” he said. “There are still more hoops to get through.”

This discussion took them through appetizers and the first bottle of champagne. By the second, they were both drunk. When Adam ordered dessert, she knew another announcement was coming.

“I’m sure you know what’s next,” he said over flourless chocolate cake. “It’s time for you to get out of your thing with Diane.”

“What? Why should I do that?”

“Until the pilot got picked up, nobody cared, but once you’re on the air, they’re going to be taking pictures of you at the grocery store. I know what you’re thinking, this is the twenty-first century, but trust me on this. I don’t want to see ‘Anne Hardwick and gal pal at Starbucks’ in Life & Style magazine. You’re a sex symbol on this show. A straight sex symbol. Also, any embarrassing trips you need to take, any doctor’s appointments, any purchases you don’t want people to know about, now is the time.”

“But I’m not …” She had been about to say “gay,” then realized how idiotic it sounded. She had no idea how she could explain, in a phrase or two, that this was just about her and one particular person, that it was strange and unexpected and highly specific.

“You’re not Jodie Foster, is what you’re not,” Adam said. “Time to deal.”

Diane was waiting up, and from the look on her face it was clear she’d already guessed what had happened. Anne stood in the living room in her celebration dress, the most expensive she’d ever owned. To dissolve the relationship explicitly would require a more direct conversation than they had ever had about starting it. Diane started crying, and Anne couldn’t listen to that, not right now. “Let’s just go to bed,” she said.

Diane nodded, looking relieved. She gave a lopsided smile, then took Anne by the hand and led her to bed. They didn’t do anything, just lay there holding hands, not talking.

In the morning, Diane was firm and calm, everything Anne could’ve wanted her to be, and she hated her for it. Diane handed her a cup of coffee and said, “If I were Adam, I’d want the same thing. They’ve made an investment in you, and they don’t like risks. That’s how the business works. Why don’t you take the first shower?”

When Anne came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her clothes were packed in a suitcase by the door and Diane was laying out an outfit for her on the bed. Anne looked at her and said, “You’re sure about this?”

Diane shrugged wordlessly. Anne felt a slight sense of relief — that they’d agreed, that there’d be no scenes. “Okay, then,” was all she said. They didn’t even kiss good-bye.

Back at the cottage, Anne burst into racking sobs and wound up hunched over the toilet, throwing up, Diane’s coffee bitter in her throat. Wrecked, she crawled under the covers and woke up an hour later, her skin parched and itchy. Trying to distract herself, she poured body lotion on her legs, arms, stomach. One thing led to another and she made herself come, thinking about Diane touching her, and then she cried again.

She joined a gym and got Adam to hire her a personal trainer, who put her on a diet so restricted and confusing that she spent most of her time shopping for the peculiar ingredients; the rest of the time, low blood sugar made her feel too weak to think clearly about anything, even Diane. One day at the gym, she was drinking a shot of wheatgrass at the juice bar when a guy said, “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

“Then why are you talking to me?” she said.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “It just looks like you worked out a little too hard. You look like you could use a steak.”

Anne picked up her bag and slid off her stool. As she did, she almost fainted; spots crossed her vision, and she had to lean against the counter for balance. The guy grabbed her arm, his muscles rippling. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and Adidas sweatpants and she said, “Yeah, I probably need some meat,” which made him smile.

Two hours later they were back at her place, in bed. There was so much she had forgotten — the roughness and heft of a man, his smell and force. She never even asked him his name.

So began a period of sleeping around, of dates in restaurants, of men in bars. A dentist, a studio executive, a chef, another studio executive, a Pilates instructor, and the original gym guy, whom she ran into at the juice bar from time to time. She finally learned his name — Neal — and got him to take her to a restaurant where she and Diane used to go, whose food she missed, and then back to the cottage. They were dozing in bed around eleven when somebody started banging on the door.

It was Diane, and she was weeping and drunk. “You cunt,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Fuck you. I’m here to call you a whore.”

Neal, hearing voices, came out wearing boxers and holding his cell phone. Anne wondered if he was going to call the police, or ask Diane if she wanted a steak. A good protein source was his answer to everything.

“Well, now you have,” Anne said. “So I guess you can go.”

“You’re a coldhearted bitch,” Diane said. “You had to fucking sleep with guys from my office. I had to hear about this in meetings. You couldn’t at least do me the decency of whoring outside the entertainment industry?”

“Everybody out here works in the entertainment industry,” Anne said.

“I don’t,” Neal said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Diane said.

“I’m Neal.”

“Sorry,” Anne said. “Diane, Neal.”

“Is this your boyfriend? Do you already have a boyfriend?”

“Is this your girlfriend?” said Neal, an edge of interest in his voice.

It was too much. Anne started laughing — it was hysterical laughter, not genuine, but the only person who knew her well enough to recognize this was Diane, and she was lost to her now.

Diane was sobbing. She reeked of alcohol and perfume. Anne could picture it perfectly: she had taken a bath, drunk a bottle of wine, trying to soothe herself, and wound up in a fit instead. Only the image of Diane’s naked body, slick with soap, enabled Anne to stop laughing and calm down.

“Diane,” she said gently. “Go home.”

Sometimes at night her skin ached for Diane, and the only cure for this was to have somebody else in bed with her. Hence Neal became a regular. They worked out and slept together a few days a week. It wasn’t a relationship; it was exercise. Neal bought her gifts: a notebook so she could write down what she ate every day, a heart-rate monitor, a juicer. It didn’t seem to bother him that she bought him nothing in return. But when his parents came to town, he wanted her to meet them. She would have understood if he’d said that he wanted them to see her, to show her off. But he actually wanted them to meet so that she could get to know him better.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Man,” he said, “you really are this cold. My friends thought I was making it up.”

“You’ve never complained before.”

“I should’ve listened to that Diane. Are you, like, autistic? My friends said you were the perfect woman. Sex and a workout partner without any obligations. But that’s, like, weird.” When he got worked up, Neal sounded like a teenage girl.

“If it really means a lot to you,” she said half-heartedly, “I’ll go to dinner.”

“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want to put you out.”

This, for them, was a long conversation. He wasn’t much of a talker, just a teddy bear of physical perfection, something to hold in the night. She’d thought he might be the ideal man, but he was letting her down now. He went around the apartment gathering up the juicer, the heart-rate monitor, the pedometer watch. She understood; it was expensive stuff, he could sell it or use it himself. He wasn’t made of money.

Standing in the doorway, he said, “You aren’t even upset, are you?”

“I’m not sure why you think I should be.”

“The thing is, if you never get upset over anything, doesn’t that mean you just don’t give a shit?”

Anne looked at him, glad they’d never tried having conversations before. “I guess so.”

“And if you never mourn for anything you lose, doesn’t that mean that nothing in your life’s worth anything?”

Anne raised her chin. “Life insights from the gym guy,” she said. “Workout for your soul along with your body and mind.”

“Okay, you mock.” He touched her cheek. “I’m not Diane; I’m not so heartbroken. But I’m not spending much longer around you, either. I don’t want to turn into a robot. You take care. Don’t forget to eat your protein.”

With those last romantic words, it was over.

In her mind, she mocked him relentlessly. But what he said about mourning she knew to be true, because she was alone and thinking about Diane, and about Hilary’s baby being born without her even knowing where or when. Eat your protein. Didn’t he know she’d been trying? She wanted to eat protein, eat muscles and blood, even her own heart, until nothing, not a single ounce, was left.

The night the pilot aired, she watched it with fifty people at the director’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Anne stood outside until the last possible moment, bumming cigarettes from one of her costars, then someone opened the plate-glass doors, said it was starting, and dragged her inside.

To her the pilot looked embarrassing and lame, like a high-school talent show. The pulsing techno music of the theme, the way her mouth pursed in puzzlement as she stared into the distance. Watching this, she ran her tongue over her lips, lush and protuberant from chemical injections, and turned away. It felt like she was masturbating in front of the whole room.

She went back outside, ignoring everyone’s encouraging shouts. For the first time she started wondering about the future. They had filmed three episodes and had a contract for ten more, though she’d been cautioned that the network could pull the plug at any moment. By now she had heard this so often that she assumed that’s what would happen. The idea that it wouldn’t — that this was her life now — felt even more frightening than failure.

Julia was calling all the time these days, but Anne had a new L.A. agent, Molly Senak, who kept sending her scripts for movies she could shoot once the season was over. The parts were always the hooker who dies, the girlfriend who walks away in the early scenes, the cheating temptation for the flawed hero. “Places to shine in small ways,” Molly called them, the building blocks of a certain kind of career.

She missed New York — not the life itself so much as its familiar sense of difficulty and want. And more often than she would have imagined, she also found herself thinking about even more distant times in Montreal. Her father she refused to think about, but her mother sometimes wafted into her thoughts, along with memories of their house, her old room, even her therapist, who she realized now was the closest thing she’d had to a friend back then. Trying to boost her confidence, Grace had once told her to pretend she was a star, that she was all grown up with the life of her dreams. She wondered if any of them would see the show. If they’d be proud.

She left the party fifteen minutes after the director turned off his enormous TV and broke out the champagne. Back at the cottage, she listened to the message Diane had left, stiffly congratulating her. She felt an agonizing twist of pity and longing at the sound of her voice, but set it aside. She set it aside every day, and each time it was easier, more automatic, less twisting.

Reviews were bad; ratings were good. She filmed the new episodes, working sixteen-hour days, and perfected the art of the sudden nap; at any moment she’d lie down on the couch in her dressing room and drop off. She was sleeping one day when a PA knocked on the door and came in. She was a twenty-year-old UCLA dropout, timid and lithe. Anne couldn’t remember her name.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

Anne yawned. “What is it?”

“There’s a call for you,” she said, “that got forwarded from the production office.” She held out a phone. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but this woman’s been calling, first the network and then the producers. She’s very resourceful, and really pushy. On the one hand it’s probably a crazy person but I just thought, what if it’s not? What if she’s telling the truth and I didn’t tell you? I hope you aren’t mad.”

Anne stared at her blankly and took the phone without giving it much thought.

“I’m really sorry,” the PA said. “It’s just, you know, I wasn’t sure what to do. She says she’s your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister,” Anne said. She weighed the phone in her hand, then hung up.

A week later the girl came by Anne’s trailer again and stood in front of her so long that she had to say something, if only out of impatience.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Everything okay?”

The PA’s face wrinkled. “I’ve been here. I think you just didn’t see me.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I’m self-involved, but I’m not blind.”

The PA nodded, apparently taking this as a statement of fact instead of the joke Anne had intended. Then someone swooped in to reapply her makeup, blocking the girl from view, but Anne heard her say, “Anyway, I’m really, really sorry.”

“For what?”

“I brought you this,” the PA said, producing a manila envelope from her messenger bag and handing it to her.

Anne stared at it, having no idea what it was.

“It’s your fan mail,” the girl said. Her walkie-talkie crackled and she turned to leave.

As the stylist kept working, Anne glanced at the letters. It was her first fan mail ever: young girls, middle-aged women, boys asking her to their proms, convicts, men promising they’d leave their wives in a heartbeat if she’d meet them for a drink, they really felt like there was some kind of special connection there, two hearts that could beat as one. If you wanted to feel optimistic about the human race, fan letters to a TV star were not the place to start. She flipped through the stack, not thinking she was looking for anything in particular, until she saw it. A letter postmarked Utica, New York, with Anne’s name written in the bubbly, curly penmanship of a teenage girl.

She thought that waiting to read it would make the letter seem too important. Better to read it as quickly as possible, then throw it away.

She saw the words Annie, we need money before she panicked and crumpled it up. Even though she had stopped reading, words kept throwing themselves at her: television and please and need and baby, each one giving her a strong, unpleasant, sickening sensation. How could she have taken in so much of the letter when all she wanted to do was get rid of it?

“Sweetie, do you want a Xanax?” the stylist said. “Please try not to cry, it’ll be hell on your makeup.”

Two more weeks of twenty-hour days, all workouts and hunger, tanning and fittings. She was stretched into a new shape, her skin and muscles reconfigured, cut from new cloth. At night she dreamt of cheeseburgers and banana splits. She had never had trouble keeping her weight down, but this was a whole new discipline, and she embraced it. She didn’t even have to try to forget the phone call and letter; her body was too busy forgetting everything for her.

She made friends with the PA, who sometimes came over after work with some Zone meals for dinner. They’d watch movies, and several times the PA slept over on the couch in the living room. Her name was Lauren, but Anne still thought of her as the PA. It comforted her to wake up and see her there; Anne would make coffee and bring her a cup, happy to do at least one thing in her day for somebody else.

So she was surprised and a little annoyed one afternoon when the girl brought her a phone and said her sister was on hold.

“Please,” Anne said. She was wearing a leather bustier and five-inch stiletto heels and could barely move. “I thought I told you.”

“She keeps calling,” the PA said. “I know you said you don’t have a sister, but this woman … To be honest, Anne, the producers kind of want to know what’s up. They’re wondering if something’s, like, weird. That the media might get a hold of? No judgment or pressure or anything. They totally understand that everybody has, you know, some family strangeness. But here they’d just like to know the particulars.”

At this, Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Give me the phone,” she said, then held it to her ear. There was breathing on the other end, and she felt like she was going to be sick when she heard a long, gentle sigh, like a sheet settling on a bed. “Hello?” she said.

There was no answer, just another sigh. It was like getting a crank call from a ghost.

“Well, talk to me if you’re going to call,” she said.

What came through the line was the sound of weeping, and this was so unexpected, so shocking, that she dropped the phone on the ground. “Whoops,” she said to the PA.

The girl instantly picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

From her expression Anne could tell that the call was still connected. “Damn,” she said under her breath, and held out her hand.

“Annie,” Hilary said all in a rush. “Please don’t hang up. I saw you on television, and we need help.”

Anne’s stomach twisted uneasily. “What’s going on?”

“Alan lost his job and then the baby got sick and we don’t have insurance, and now the hospital says we owe thousands of dollars, and our parents don’t have any money either.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re at home, we’re still right here.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Anne said, remembering the day in her apartment when Hilary’s uncle revealed all the lies Hilary had told, how Anne had heard nothing from her when the baby was born. Words came back to her from the long-ago past, not her mother’s hysterical voice but Grace’s calm, soothing, maddenly therapeutic one. You can be anything you want to be. You don’t have to be like them. “Don’t call here again,” she said, handing the phone to the PA, who took it back with an expressionless nod and went off to get her some coffee.

In New York, it was late fall. In the year she’d been gone she’d been back only once, for upfronts when the show was picked up, the visit a blur of luncheons and parties with press and execs, questions about how much was she like the character she played and did she enjoy the romantic scenes with the handsome guest star and did she have a boyfriend in real life and was he jealous. Each night she’d return to her room and tumble into bed, too tired even to watch TV, then she’d get up the next morning to face more of the same. She had barely been outside in the three days it lasted, and before she knew it she was leaving the hotel for the airport, hardly having set foot on a sidewalk or sat in a cab or seen anything of New York at all.

This time was different, the city colder and drabber than she remembered, void of the color that gave every day in California a sense of health and possibility. She was in town for some meetings and a magazine photo shoot, but she had a few hours to kill. Leaving her Midtown hotel, she walked south in a daze, not planning her route, trying only to avoid the worst of the crowds. She had always liked the big department stores on Fifth Avenue; they reminded her of old movies and the wholesome glamour of an easier time. Gradually she moved east, then south, past Union Square, not even tracking how many blocks she’d walked, and then she looked up and realized that she was staring at the windows of her old apartment.

Had she really allowed a grubby teenage runaway and her pimply, construction-worker boyfriend to live in her apartment and sleep in her bed? It felt like someone else’s life.

People were walking in and out of the building, all strangers, not a single one of the old ladies who’d once clustered there. Maybe the landlord had succeeded in replacing them all with higher-paying tenants, or had sold the building. There was no movement in the windows of her apartment. There was nothing to see.

The day was brisk, winter skidding leaves off trees, and she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. She wrapped her sweater around herself and walked on. Down the block, a baby was wailing miserably, and she saw the mother pushing a stroller toward her. For moment, she had the insane thought that it was Hilary; but this woman was older and looked wealthy, bundled in a cashmere scarf, her long hair a cascade of glossy curls. The baby had a big round head that rolled from side to side. The wind had whipped his cheeks to a rosy red, like children in old picture books. Jowly and fat, with a cascade of chins, he was a little clown in a big white suit. As they passed Anne, the baby stopped crying and stared at her, and she looked back into his bright blue eyes.

Farther down the block, he started crying again, and the mother took him out of the stroller and held him to her chest, kissing the top of his head. Anne studied the scene for a moment, thinking how strange it was that Hilary would be doing these same things — as if she’d stepped across a threshold into another country, and Anne couldn’t imagine what it was like to live there. Rarely, if ever, did she think about those weeks when she herself had been pregnant, or imagine how old that child would be now if she had decided to keep it. She remembered feeling no physical or emotional change back then, only the sheer sensation of panic, like a bird trapped in a house, flapping her wings in frenzy and desperation.

It all seemed so accidental, how lives were invented and chosen. A child enters the world. A child exits the world. Both for almost no reason at all.

Of the events leading to the pregnancy she thought even less. She had been hanging around at the Faubourg after school, doing homework and drinking coffee to avoid going home to her bickering parents. She used to tell them that she was at a friend’s or studying at the library or seeing Grace. In truth, all she wanted was this hour or two by herself, to drink bitter coffee and bum a cigarette from some guy and inhale until she could feel the smoke burning her lungs. Then she’d go into the washroom, her head buzzing from the caffeine and nicotine, and press those small, precise cuts into her skin. She called it surgery. She’d swipe a finger through the drops and lick the blood; the taste of it was like knowing herself, a confirmation that she existed. Then she’d go back out into the shopping center, feeling a little sticky, a little dirty. It was a trespass on the otherwise pristine routines of her life.

On one such day she came back out and cadged a cigarette off a French guy who was reading La Presse and drinking an allongé in the food court. He was old, wearing a suit, and had touches of gray at his temples, appraising her breasts with an old man’s smile.

“Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans les toilettes?” he said.

“Sorry.” She shook her head as if she didn’t understand the question, although she did. He had been holding the cigarette out to her but now took it away, folding his arms with it clasped in his fist. She put her hand on her hip. Her coat was open and her school uniform visible beneath it, and she could see him looking at her pleated skirt, her wool tights. The schoolgirl thing was such a cliché. They all went for it.

“What you do in the bathrooms for so long?” he said. “You were in there a long time.”

“Makeup,” she said, licking her lips as he stared at her, hard. Suddenly, before she could react, he reached out and lifted up her shirt, then dropped it. In days to come she would wonder how he knew to look there, where the most recent cuts ran in three parallel lines to the left of her belly button. The square of paper towel she had pressed against them fell to the floor. His eyes flickered, and she knew that the blood excited him, even more than the wool skirt and the white button-down and her being sixteen. Before he had been playing, but now he was serious. He wanted something.

He stood up. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was older, a man, and his voice held authority. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He led her upstairs and down a hallway into a part of the concourse that was under construction, where the shops hadn’t yet been opened, the area empty and dark. She was still wondering what it was he’d show her — drugs, she hoped, wanting to try something new — when suddenly his mouth was on hers and his hand was under her shirt scratching the cuts and adding new ones, the other one pressing her shoulders against the wall. Then he pulled down her tights and unbuckled his pants and suddenly he was inside her.

He never covered her mouth, nor did she call out for help. She wasn’t sure, later, if she had even said no. It all happened so fast. She was a girl who did her homework, who pleased her parents, who wrote thank-you notes. She had no practice in refusal.

He groaned into her shoulder and it was over. Without looking at her, he buckled his pants and walked away. Her tights were still around her knees, and her legs wobbled as she pulled them up. After he was gone, she realized he hadn’t even given her the cigarette.

She never told anyone, wanting the secret to be contained and buried. Later, she did tell her therapist she was pregnant. A quiet, brown-haired woman with circles under her eyes, Grace wore earth-toned sweaters and simple silver jewelry, and Anne found it impossible to imagine that she had ever had sex, or done anything bad, in her entire life. As soon as Anne told her, she regretted it. Her eyes turning moony with sympathy and concern, the therapist wanted to understand and to help. Sixteen years old, shaking with hate, trapped at home with her hopelessly unhappy parents, Anne knew that nothing Grace said could help her. In some respects, her life since then had been a repudiation of the whole idea of help, a big fuck-you to it.

Anne now thought of that time and the incident at the Faubourg without anger. It was years ago, and whatever injuries she’d suffered had long since healed over. It wasn’t an excuse for the person she’d become, just another memory; but it was the first time she had learned to walk away.

Being in New York made her L.A. life feel made up, unreal, and now that she was here, she felt no loyalty to California. She spent the day walking around her old neighborhood, looking in store windows, people-watching. The Midtown hotel seemed like a bad mirage, nothing that had anything to do with her. She was eating egg rolls at Panda Kitchen when she finally checked her cell phone. There were seventeen new messages, all from various people she hadn’t attended to, about the events and appointments she had blown off. Five were from Adam, asking her to call him as soon as she could. She deleted these without even listening all the way through, and cutting him off mid-sentence gave her no small amount of satisfaction. The last was from Julia, confirming their dinner tonight. Anne texted her that she wouldn’t be able to make it.

She licked the salty residue of the egg rolls off her fingers. She had a photo shoot in the morning and knew she’d get in trouble; too much salt made her lids puffy and gave her skin a creped quality. But maybe she wouldn’t do the photo shoot. Maybe, she thought with a smile, she wouldn’t go back at all.

She didn’t return to the hotel until midnight, and she threw a blanket over the blinking red voice-mail button on the phone and went to sleep. In the morning, she took a cab down to Tribeca for her photo shoot, where her late arrival earned her a cursory, halfhearted scolding from the publicist. They were used to this kind of thing. They dressed her up in a variety of outfits — a spy, an executive, a nurse, and the president of the United States, if the president were very young and a little bit slutty.

The lights beat hot on her face and people were yelling instructions and a woman kept oiling her cleavage, then dusting it with sparkly powder.

Amid the hubbub she became aware, after a while, that Adam was standing in the back, watching with a lazy, proprietary interest. An hour later, he came up as she was removing the many layers of makeup. Her fake eyelashes felt exoskeletal, and she peered at him through their spiky, bristled edges. Outside of L.A. his posturing looked even more ridiculous, his tan incongruous, his teeth strangely uniform, plastic.

“That was hot,” he said. “You’re going to do fine.”

“Why are you here?”

“The show’s going off the air,” he said. “It underperformed.”

He had arranged his features into an expression not of concern or reassurance, or even of a readiness to listen and explain, but of complete neutrality. Don’t blame me, it said. You’re on your own.

“So that’s it?” she said.

He put a hand on her bare shoulder. “I should’ve canceled the shoot, but there’s this little fucker at the magazine that I’ve been waiting to get back at for years. So now they’ll have to eat the cost. I’m glad you showed up. I thought maybe you were on a bender or something.”

“I don’t do that,” Anne said mechanically. She was out of her pinstriped miniskirt now and slipping on her jeans.

“No, you’re a wholesome girl,” Adam said. “Good luck.”

She cabbed it back to the hotel, where her room had been tidied, her clothes folded, the toiletries replaced. She took a long bath, her skin pruning. When she got out, her cell phone was beeping. There were two messages: the first from Julia, who almost sounded like she was crying. She was sorry about the news, she said, but while she understood that Anne might be upset, the time to get back on the horse was now. It was the most sympathy Anne had ever heard from her, and she was surprised. The second message was from Hilary — there was no doubting the tears in her voice — begging for Anne to call back.

She deleted Julia’s message and listened to Hilary’s again. The baby was making noises in the background, and she thought about the baby she’d seen on the street outside her apartment, staring back at her, curious and unafraid. But Hilary’s baby was in a small town that Anne couldn’t picture and would never see.

Suddenly she was crying too, the short, dry sobs shaking her all over, her body shivering involuntarily. There was no one to go to or run away from. What had Neal said — that if you have nothing to mourn, then nothing in your life’s worth anything?

She was dangling at the end of her particular tether.

She spent an hour like that in the dark, sterile room, and she felt dismantled. Ended.

Okay, she finally thought. Okay.

So everything was over, the short wild ride. She called her landlord in L.A., broke her lease, and told him to sell whatever was left, which wasn’t much. She decided that today she would do one good thing. She rooted around in her purse and wrote out a check to Hilary for the entire amount she’d earned from the TV show, more money than she’d made in her entire life and far more, she was sure, than Hilary had ever imagined. She put the check in an envelope, added the address in Utica, and left it with the concierge to mail.

When she checked out, she was carrying a single bag that was no bigger than the one she had had when she first got to New York. Rinsed of all her trappings, she felt lighthearted and at ease. For years she had been escaping into one life after another, and this wasn’t the time to stop. People like Hilary and Alan were only temporary runaways. They would always go home; they belonged to the place they came from. Other people were destined to keep leaving, over and over again.