“Hey, yourself.”
“Everything okay?”
He takes a swig of his drink, nods, and then starts back toward the bedroom. “You keep taking phone calls in the courtyard, I’m going to start getting suspicious.”
In the first week of July, after the American election had whittled down to a two-person race and the rest of the world was reeling from the outcome of the Brexit referendum, I shoot Cressida James at her home. The images are moody, atmospheric. Sultrier than her typical portraiture. Lace camisole, smudged smoky eyes, slept-in hair. Shot lying across a daybed, gauzy curtains in the background. We are both happy with the photos, but it’s her sound bites that I find invaluable. She talks freely about aging in Hollywood. How consuming the upkeep. Facials, peels, Botox, filler. How everyone has his or her line that they refuse to cross. How she is torn between the need to pivot to directing or producing, as the interesting roles for women her age become fewer and further between. How she’s very aware of the ideas about beauty she is passing on to her daughters. Particularly Lilah, the one from Ethiopia. And she confides that she regularly agonized over who she used to be. The fact that her younger self had been immortalized on film and revered for two decades, and that the public still wanted that fresh-faced, unlined English rose. That she felt tortured because she could no longer give them that.
“I had to let all of that go. I had to find an inner peace at forty-two, because I was so tired of playing the game. I’m in a much better space now. But I used to have this dread of turning fifty. Because I kept hearing, ‘No one wants to fuck you after fifty.’ You know who especially doesn’t want to fuck you? Men over fifty. It reminds them too much of their own mortality. So, you know, my clock is ticking. Tick. Tock.
“In this business, at a certain age they’ll call you things like elegant, classic, timeless. You might still be beautiful… but it’s a distant beauty. It’s a beauty removed. Like art. It’s not a beauty that asks tobe fucked. They don’t want to fuck you. And often if they don’t want to fuck you, they don’t want to hire you.
“This industry recycles. It doesn’t take the old and make it new again so much as it kicks the old aside to make room for someone new. Is that recycling? Perhaps it’s cycling out. The circle of life. Anyway, fifty… ticktock.
“Might just move back to England and get a cottage in the Lake District. But now with Brexit… God, that’s a mess. This world.” She shakes her head, exasperated. “So much hate.”
This, I think,thisis what I want to share with the world. This is why I make art.
XXXVI.THINGS FALL APART.
LOS ANGELES.
SEPTEMBER. 2016.
The first Friday in September, after we’ve returned from two weeks in France but before school has begun, Julien hosts a party at the tree house. He planned on it being a blowout, but only fifteen or so kids show up. Mostly Bancroft boys. They mill in the courtyard, occasionally spilling into the living room where Julian is blasting hip-hop. François, Lucie, and I have been instructed to stay in our rooms.
At some point in the early evening, I slip out to grab a drink from the kitchen, excusing myself as I navigate the teens who’ve taken over my home. Julien throwing me a disapproving look from his spot in the corner where he is chatting up a pretty blond. Pants riding low on his narrow hips. My father would not approve.
And as I cross into the dining area, I hear it. Some artist rapping aboutniggerthis,niggerthat.
Nigga. Nigga. Nigga.
It stops me in my tracks.
My eyes scan the partygoers, both in the living room and the courtyard. My son is the only noticeably Black one. There are two boys who look to be mixed with Asian. One Asian American girl. The others, including Eryx Barlow and Topher, are all white. None of Julien’s friends from the track team are in the bunch. Not even Isaiah.
This is not okay.
I abort my trip to the kitchen and scuttle back into the bedroom.
“We have to turn off the music.”
“Pourquoi?” Fran doesn’t look up from where he’s reading a book on screenwriting by Blake Snyder, Leelou curled beside him on the bed.
“I don’t know what they’re listening to. Kanye or something. And he’s dropping the N-word all over the place, and Julien is the only Black kid out there and this isnot okay. Where are his Black friends? Did he not invite any of his friends from track??”
My husband looks over to me then, not sufficiently concerned. “He said they were all away somewhere.”
“Somewhere? Where?”
“Some island, I think. On the East Coast. With their families.”
It takes me a moment. “The Vineyard? Martha’s Vineyard?”
“Oui. C’est ça. You know it?”
The Vineyard is where many of my wealthy Black friends from Yale summered in their youth. It’s where they still summer. Along with the Obamas.
“Not personally,” I say. “Please make the music stop.”
