“Well, go ahead then,” Will said. “Your turn.”
“Okay,” Whitney said, cautiously. “Um…it happened early.”
“I don’t doubt it. The whole thing was your idea. You were hungry.”
“I didn’t do anything to prompt it, it just…”
“That face, that body, that California light…who could resist?”
She shook her head faintly. “More like: locked inside a hotel during a lovely sunset, hiding in the corner of the restaurant, drafting notes.”
“Stretched out long and lithe on the striped yellow beach beds of a hotel on the water,” he continued. “A handmade sign that says, ‘I may be engaged but I’m DTF.’”
Now she was the one looking around at the staff, looking for anyone listening. She forked a shrimp. “Alone in the hotel restaurant, not even late, but the place has the feeling of it being late, the way everything does out there. The restaurant’s cleared out by nine-thirty. I’ve got a glass of wine and a shooting script that needs to solve a location fuck-up. Flooded basement in a bar they scouted for weeks.”
“You told me about it. I assumed you figured it out and went to bed.”
“That was the plan,” she said. “But I’m no longer alone in the restaurant. There’s a man at the bar. He’s ordering a drink. He flips over a shoulder and catches me staring.…The guy looks like Adrien Green. The guy really looks like Adrien Green. Turns out it’s Adrien Green.”
“Come on.”
“At the bar. All alone. Waiting for a drink. And he smiles at me.”
“You spend forty-eight hours in L.A., single in the world for the first time as a functional adult, and your first night out you run into one of your top five dead or alive?”
“I thought for a minute you’d sent him. A 1-2-3 welcome gift.”
“I should’ve thought of it,” Will said. He was wearing the shock in his face still. He shook his head. “So does he do the smile?”
“He does the smile,” Whitney said. “You can see all of his teeth. The big rubbery gums. He does the whole thing in a flash—GQ-cover-serious to mischievous little boy—and I start to feel my skin, like, getting turned inside out.”
“All right, fewer Tiger Beat sensations.…So you go up and tell him about your predicament.”
“The flooded bar or the fact that I’ve only got thirty days to hit three?”
“You tell him you need to ask him for a favor…” Will said.
“Weirdly, he gets his drink and walks straight over to me,” Whitney said. “Stands right there and keeps smiling. Asks what I’m working on. Asks if he can sit down.”
“Do you tell him that you’re a professional woman with an important job that can’t be disrupted by German-English movie stars of a certain woman-melting age?”
“I tell him about the show and he says it’s exactly the sort of thing he wishes he got asked to read for more often. That it’s just another strike against an agent who hasn’t given him anything good to look at lately.”
“By this time he’s sitting?”
“He’s sitting, and I guess I’m pretending that he’s just another person staying at the hotel who’s come down for a nine-thirty nightcap.”
“But you don’t tell him that while you’re a perfectly responsible twenty-nine-year-old woman, you have zero control over your heart, mind, and pussy in the presence of a bona fide celebrity?”
Her face was overtaken by a wide wine smile. She really did love him. “I think it became clear by the end of the encounter.…But no, at that moment I acted as though I was just another industry executive who spends her life in meetings around famous people.”
“You don’t tell him to forgive you, but you know everything about every woman he’s dated, every film he’s gone out for and failed to land, and how every critic described his cock when he unzipped his pants in the gigolo movie?”
“A burnished bronze bell clacker,” she said.
“A hazard in a lightning storm,” he said.
“I edged up to it. We talked about streaming services. We talked about shows he liked. He talked about the mutant thing and the new PTA. I finished my drink and told him I’d seen a couple audition tapes of his. For something that never got made, from when he was fresh off the boat. West End straight to here, he’d said on the tape, and they asked him where he was living and he’d said a couple blocks off the park in the East Village. So I told him I lived right there these days.”
“By yourself, all alone,” Will said.
“It never really came up,” Whitney said. “But I got the sense that he wouldn’t have cared, either way.”
“So it’s all just as you’d hoped it’d be out there. Shooting scripts and audition tapes and Adrien Green.”
“We had another drink. He slid around the booth to look at the scenes I was reviewing. He gave some suggestions I didn’t ask for, and at some point his hand fell into my lap.”
“Just like that.”
“A nice little rhyme to your and my experiences.”
“Bare legs, too?”
“Jeans for me. But I got the picture. He paid for the drinks.”
“So it’s his room or yours, then?” Will said. “I still can’t believe this.”
“Here’s the thing,” Whitney said, smiling helplessly again, “he wasn’t even staying there. He was just making a dutiful little sweep of the hotel bars after a charity dinner he’d attended nearby.”
“God, why didn’t I think of that? Get off the subway after work, scour the Standard and the Bowery. See if any beautiful bundles of nerves seem lonely?”
“So he comes up to the room,” she said. “He plugs in his iPhone and puts on some English band from the eighties. He flips through the books on the coffee table…he actually uses all the stuff they set out to make the room look cool.”
“And from there it’s from there.”
“I…I guess that’s right. How much detail?…”
“I don’t need to know much, I guess. I mean, I’ve seen the guy shirtless in every magazine we work with. And
