We got lucky: Cole left for a shoot in New York, and I was between projects, so we had the house to ourselves for the next few weeks. She detoxed from the drugs, which wasn’t as horrible for her as it could have been, because she was so new to them. She was protective of her daughter and didn’t want me to meet her until she was certain that I’d be in her life, but we spent every hour she wasn’t with her daughter together, and I fell for her hard and fast. I’ve always been one to fall hard and fast, honestly, but she was different, and not just because she was a woman. Being with her was easy; there was no ego, no hidden agenda, no land mines waiting to be stepped on. I felt more myself with her than I’d ever felt with anyone in my life.
“Okay,” I told her one night as we sat on the edge of my pool with our feet dangling into the water. “Let’s do it. I’ll leave Cole.”
“But, Stella,” she balked, “your career.”
“It’s the twenty-first century. It’s okay,” I said, trying to convince myself.
“It’s one thing to say you like women as well as men,” she pointed out, “or to allude to having had sex with women. Men, who you’ve said a million times are still the majority of the ones making the decisions in Hollywood, find that sexy. But to have a woman as a life partner is a different thing.”
“Yes, darling, but you’re gorgeous,” I teased, stroking her beautiful face with the back of my hand. “How can they fault me?”
“Even if you identify as bisexual, when you leave Cole—the Sexiest Man in Hollywood—for me and they see us together in a relationship, all of a sudden you’re gay, which makes you unfuckable, and therefore uncastable.”
I recoiled at her harsh words.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to have a little thicker skin if you really want to do this,” she said gently.
“What a screwed-up world we live in.” I sighed.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “There’s no such thing as normal when it comes to sex—believe me, I’ve seen it all—but you have to understand most people don’t even share their fantasies with their partners. Americans have these puritanical ideas about what sex is supposed to be, inherited from our prudish ancestors. My parents think that being gay is a sin. Of course, they also think sex before marriage is a sin. But so does a lot of our country, a lot of your fans.”
She was right, obviously, and I’d never been brave. It wasn’t in my genetic code. But she emboldened me. I’d learned more about sexuality in the few weeks I’d spent with her than I had in my entire twenty-seven years. I loved her. And if I couldn’t be with her, then what was the point of any of this? “Maybe it’s time to do something about it,” I suggested. “We could set an example, show people it’s okay to be different.”
“Cole won’t make it easy to leave him. You know that, right?”
I waved away her concern. “He’ll be glad to be rid of me.”
“Maybe.” She bit her lip, thinking.
Later that evening, she spilled wine on her dress while we were cooking and went upstairs to borrow one of mine. I came up shortly afterward to find her standing in a thong in front of Cole’s dresser, staring intently at something in her hand. “What is it?” I asked.
She dropped whatever it was back into the drawer. “Nothing. Wrong drawer.” She turned and gave me a sexy smile. “But now that you’re here and I’m already almost naked…”
She spun me around and slowly unzipped my dress, whispering in my ear as she did. “I have an idea, to make sure Cole lets you go without a struggle.”
“I’m telling you, he’ll be glad to be rid of me,” I said as my dress fell to the floor.
“Divorce is never pretty. And the other women Cole’s split with haven’t fared so well.” She pressed her body to my back and reached her hand down the front of my panties. “Remember the sex tape of Bar Salmaan that surfaced shortly after they divorced? And Keri Kline never worked as an actress again after the rumors about the racist slurs.” The movement of her fingers made it difficult to concentrate. “I should let him sleep fuck me one more time and tape it, just in case he tries anything on you.”
“Iris, you can’t do heroin again. I won’t allow it.”
“I’d do it for you.”
“Please don’t.”
We tumbled to the floor as one and never finished the conversation. But once she left, I opened the drawer where she’d stowed whatever she’d held in her hand earlier and took out a rainbow rabbit’s foot. The initials “CS” were burned into the paw. I asked her about it a few days afterward, and when she didn’t know what I was talking about, I opened the drawer to show her. But the rabbit’s foot was gone.
A week later, so was she.
I closed the journal and spread the final drawing on the bed before me. It was the two of us holding hands, our shoulders squared, feet firmly planted upon a miniature globe. At the bottom in her handwriting was scrawled The world is ours. Only, the drawing was unfinished. Our bodies were filled out and colored in, but our feet and the earth were only a pencil outline, a perfect metaphor for the dreams that, with her death, evaporated like mist in the sun.
Taylor
I sat at the table in my bungalow keying the passport numbers of our crew into the form on the jet charter company’s website while Francisco paced with the phone to his ear, trying to find a decent hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, with a big enough block of rooms to accommodate everyone. We’d chosen Georgetown because the jet charged by the hour and it was the closest city that was
