Page 48 of Hollywood, Ending

“Shut the fuck up, Lon,” Ellen said.

“Am I wrong?” he asked.

“What you are is drunk,” Ellen said.

I took a sip of my wine.

_____

The funny thing was, I knew a fair amount about holding a gun. I owned a gun, somewhere. My grandfather had given it to me on my thirteenth birthday. A double-barreled .410 made in Italy. It was probably still at my parents’ house. We’d shot skeet a few times, but I’d only killed something with it once. My Pawpaw came to town for Thanksgiving and we ended up quail hunting in southern Indiana. We had hunting dogs with us and I wore a bright orange vest. I was a freshman, and terrified of killing anything. It had just started happening.

The gun felt like a lot of responsibility, which of course it was. I kept thinking that if I turned and shot, I could kill my father, or my grandfather. It felt weird to hold all that killing in one hand, barrel pointed down.

I wondered if Lon had ever shot anything. He didn’t look like it.

Ellen leaned in toward me and said, “Seriously, Kai. No one at this bar including the pianist knows less about twenty-first-century Hollywood than Lon, okay? That’s why he has Natalie. Todd likes you for it, and he’s the executive on the movie, so his opinion actually counts.”

I nodded, but I was thinking about hunting in southern Indiana with my grandfather. He only had a year to live, as it turned out, but he was healthy then. I remember telling Pawpaw that I’d been cast as Hamlet, and he said, “ ‘The devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape.’ ” I was surprised my Pawpaw knew the play. “You must keep reading,” he told me. “You’ll never be alone in this world so long as you have a library card.”

In my memory, the dogs flushed out a covey of quail moments later. I raised my gun to my shoulder and carefully took aim a little bit away from the quail. I wanted to look like I was trying without risking an actual kill. But I was scared of the gun’s kick against my shoulder, and so as I squeezed the trigger my arm jerked a little, and I watched in stunned horror as a quail fell in a descending spiral out of the sky.

I felt my grandfather clapping me on the back. My dad shouted that I was a natural as one of the dogs came running toward us with the dead quail in its mouth.

14

Ellen called me the next morning. “Three things, very quick. One, I am going to call Jill from The New Yorker and pitch a profile, but I need your permission.”

“Okay,” I said.

“She won’t know about it. It will not be an issue.”

“Okay,” I said again. It’s amazing how people always refer to it as it. They look at me, and I know they’re thinking about it, which makes me think about it, and then the room is supersaturated with it, and it is the only noun in the room. Why did he let it happen? Why didn’t he tell anyone about it? How long did it go on? Who else knew about it? What did it involve exactly? I heard it was even happening at school.

It overwhelmed me. In a way, it made me the it.

She told me that I was naturally good with the press, and that The New Yorker almost never profiled new actors. She said we could maybe even be at the beginning of an awards push, and that Jill was perfect for the job, provided I liked her. “Yeah, she seemed fine,” I said.

“Jill’s great. Such a writer. I’ll send you her profile of Michelle Obama. I’ll get working on that. I just don’t want you to worry, okay, Kai? This is literally why I’m here. Second thing, when are you reading for Andromeda?”

“Tomorrow, I think. I don’t know; Bob hasn’t called me.”

“Great. Third thing, are you planning on going home? You’re here today obviously, and tomorrow, and then I don’t think I need you for the next eight days, so you would be welcome to go home. That is also my subtle way of saying that your stay here ends on Friday.”

“And it’s currently Wednesday?”

“It’s currently Wednesday.”

“Yeah, okay, I guess I’ll go home.”

“Great. I’ll book you a flight for Friday morning…to…?”

“New York, I guess. Or Indianapolis. I’ll get back with you on that.”

“Great. It’ll be commercial, sorry to say. First class though. I have to go now to attend an Andy Warhol Never Gets Old marketing meeting. It’s all you all the time, Kai. You can call into the meeting if you want, by the way. God knows Juniper will.”

“I’m gonna pass.”

“I love it. Beautiful. Speak soon.”