I’d forgotten that the rules do not apply to those they are meant to protect. “Don’t be ridiculous. What does it say, Scott? What does the sign actually say? Read it to me.”
Elaine looked up from her salad. She knew how my mother and I could be. “I’ll read it, Jeanne.” She dug through her handbag. My mother, phone in one hand and dog in the other, stared me down as we waited. “Ah,” Elaine said when she found her glasses. “Let’s see. It says, For the privacy—”
“For the privacy of our guests,” my mother hissed, “photography is not permitted in the pool area. Privacy. Taking a picture with some . . . some person in the background isn’t a violation of privacy. But someone snapping my picture? Or Elaine’s?” She set her phone on the table. “All I wanted was to post a photo of Katharine here.”
Katharine was a pug/chihuahua mix who hung in my mother’s hand and looked mournfully at my steak. Here was a place most of her fans—Katharine’s, not my mother’s—wouldn’t even recognize. “I think you’ve been away for too long,” she said, peering over the sugared rim of her sidecar.
It was only then—so skillfully did she sneak these things in front of you—that I noticed she was drinking again. She belonged so perfectly, and always had, among the hotel’s pearl-white umbrellas, its private cabanas, the palms, the pines, the shimmering bar that vanished into the shade.
Elaine removed her glasses. “Where was it you were again, dear? I can never remember.”
“New York.”
“Ah, New York. How lovely.”
“Every day it’s more unrecognizable,” I said. “And yet it never changes.”
My mother laughed. Katharine, in the crook of her arm, convulsed with joy or fear. Her tongue had flopped out and now hung from her jowl.
“You’re far too young to say such things.”
“I’m almost thirty.”
“Thirty!” Elaine shivered.
“Isn’t he ancient? I should post that, my son telling me how his elderly age of thirty is imminent, his life over.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She swiped up her phone. There was nothing I could do, a character in her life. Presumably, she then switched accounts and posted the photo of Katharine, who had twice as many followers as my mother. Jeanne Chamberlain was an actress with decades of career behind her, but Katharine Pupburn was a dog.
You think you know my mother, but your image of her is different from mine. No one could reconcile the two Jeanne Chamberlains into one. But this is how it’s always worked. They’re just like us: there’s a reason you never hear it outside Hollywood. They’re nothing like you, and for that you should be grateful.
Seeing her drink made me realize how badly I wanted one of my own. Instead, I ordered a breve, and she gave her speech about calories, cholesterol, the hormones in dairy: “The hearts in our family are vulnerable.”
Elaine returned to her handbag. Whatever was inside rattled like bingo balls in a wire cage. She surfaced with a burgundy leather clutch, encrusted with diamonds. When she opened it, my mother gasped. “Christ, Elaine.”
“I didn’t know you were working again,” I said.
Elaine laughed as she paid for the three of us, plus an obscene tip. “I’m not working. At least, not in the way you think. I have a sort of—what do you say?—a side hustle?”
My mother slipped her sunglasses over her face. “Please, not merchandising.”
“Not specifically. My nephew set up some online store for me—the Internet.” Elaine’s store, it turned out, was a series of headshots from all throughout her career. Fans could purchase whatever shot they liked and it would print, automatically, to her assistant’s office. Every morning Elaine received a folder—sometimes several—with these photos. Each had a name. Most had a note or a request—to write a line from one of her films, or to wish some person in some place a happy birthday. After going through the photos, she would return them to her assistant, who mailed them off. Each went for over a thousand dollars. “It’s so strangely wonderful,” she said.
My mother had her hand over her throat. “People are such sad creatures.”
“People are lovely, Jeanne.”
I was grateful for my mother’s sunglasses. I knew she wished she’d ordered one more drink before Elaine had paid. I knew because it was what I would have wished. She was tired. I knew that, too—even before she yawned. But I didn’t know, I couldn’t see, if she was thinking about Elaine’s new business, if she had become that desperate.
“Scott,” she announced. “I’m afraid I’ll need a nap before I go.” She summoned the waiter, who would summon the concierge, who would inform her that her room, kept open for moments like these, was ready. “You have the keys? I’ll catch another ride home. At least”—here she turned to Elaine—“if I can afford it.”
Why am I doing this? The story everyone loves to tell is how Jeanne Chamberlain died of one last broken heart. After extensive drug use, the obituaries said. After career decline and Hollywood rejection. All of this upstaged her accomplishments. She had so many; most went unmentioned. After standing trial. After losing a daughter.
It turned out she was desperate.
For clarity’s sake: Jeanne Chamberlain died of complications of cirrhosis of the liver, shortly before her sixty-seventh birthday. I’d been back from New York only three months.
• •
Her plan came together quickly. Fortunately, she said, she’d never had the heart to get Katharine spayed. It was a Saturday, early. “He should be here soon,” my mother said, instead of Good morning or asking how I’d slept.
The dressing gown she wore for photographers. No sidecar, but I could smell the brandy in her coffee. An impressionistic Los Angeles hung beyond the terrace, past the pool and my mother’s grapefruit trees, the bougainvillea. Right there, and I still missed it, as though it couldn’t be touched.
“You’re not even going to ask who?”
I looked down at her coffee cup. It was too terrible to imagine. “Where’s my coffee,” I said.
She waved her arm, a flutter of silk and feathers. “We have a guest this morning,” she said as her assistant, Ethan, brought me my coffee. His eyes met mine, and I could tell he felt ashamed, having sought them. My mother decorated herself with a cigarette she wouldn’t smoke. She nodded toward her feet, where the dog lay curled like a millipede. “Katharine has a guest.”
Something chimed in Ethan’s pocket and he ran into the house. I heard the door, the other door, the gate. A woman’s footsteps on the tile. Ethan’s low, liquid murmur, and then a jangle of tags. Claws on a hardwood floor.
Katharine barked at the intruder, and my mother laughed. “Yes, that’s how we all feel about men.” The woman—not much older than me and stereotypically beautiful—didn’t know what to say. “I mean the pup,” she clarified.
She was at her worst when there were other people around who would remember her, who’d talk about the day they met Jeanne Chamberlain. She was also at her best.
Ethan brought out a new pot of coffee, a plate of fruit, a bowl of Marcona almonds, water with lemon, bottles of tonic no one touched. He took pictures while Bark Gable chased Katharine in circles around the pool. The woman introduced herself as Madeline and spent the rest of the morning telling my mother how much she’d loved her in this or in that, and what one thing or another had meant to her, growing up. I excused myself and stood at the terrace, my mother’s laughter behind me. I knew I was the only one who could hear everything she hid inside of it.
With my own phone, I snapped a photo of the skyline. I deleted it and tried again, deleted again. Before coming home I’d stopped collecting images like these, afraid I’d want to use them when I was supposed to be resting.
I tried very hard just to look.
In New York it would be after two o’clock, the columns of air in between the buildings quaking with rain that would fall that evening. The groaning underneath, the hot breath blown up from the dark: it would still feel like living on a monster’s back. I would be tired. I’d have not eaten. I would be wanting.
“I’m sorry, Katharine,” my mother said. I turned and saw the dogs and turned away. Ethan had stopped taking pictures. Katharine was growling and Bark Gable panted in concentration. Only Madeline seemed delighted. When it was over, Ethan went over the details of the confidentiality agreement. If she was to accept this payment, Madeline could say that she had met Jeanne Chamberlain but would have to adhere to a different story, which Ethan then laid out, step by step, including a time, a location, and a brief list of topics they’d discussed. Ms. Chamberlain would tag her in this official Instagram photo, which looked as if it could have been taken at any table on any patio in the city, and it was this photo and this one only, Ethan said, that Madeline could share with friends, was that understood?
“If we need to set up a second meeting,” he added, “we will be in touch.”
“Of course!” Madeline said, clutching Bark Gable in her arms. She looked close to tears and seemed to feel genuine joy. “I’m just so happy that I—that you found me and—”
“Here you are, dear,” my mother said. She held an envelope, downturned, in Madeline’s direction. It looked like something you’d kneel down to kiss. “It was lovely talking with you this morning,” she added. As Ethan led her away, back into the house, Madeline could only sob. You could never prepare yourself for sights like these. It renewed the awe you felt for someone like my mother, and the fear.
The door again, the gate again. My mother sank deeper into her chair and frowned at what was left of her coffee. Before she could call out to him, Ethan arrived with the day’s first martini. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said as I watched her sip from its trembling rim, as a school of little slivers of ice from the shaker swam toward her lips. She swallowed. She closed her eyes. Her shoulders hiked back as she pulled in one slow, deep breath, as if this were her yoga, as if this were peace. She opened her eyes. “I feel so terrible.”
Katharine sat by the edge of the pool, cleaning herself as best she could.
“She’ll forgive me, I know she will. Besides”—and she took up her phone, waiting for the opportunity—“she’ll appreciate this new moment in the spotlight. Maybe when we’re both gone she’ll be remembered even more than me.” Katharine looked up at her, and my mother snapped a photo, and I’m sure she uploaded it, and I’m sure it got thousands of likes, and I’m sure it really did bring my mother a form of pure joy, so far removed from herself.
“I don’t understand why you always look so unhappy,” she said. “Someday you’ll realize that not everything has to be so serious,” she said. “When I’m gone you’ll wish I was still here to laugh at,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t been born so unlucky,” she said. She had reached the bottom of the glass. “Fuck. I’m just so tired.”
After she’d gone to take her first nap of the day, Ethan threw away the uneaten food and stacked the clean plates among the dirty ones. “Let me help,” I said, and he only blushed. I thought carefully about it, much more than I ever would have thought in the past, when this came so much more naturally to me, back when I deliberately muddied my thinking. I was trembling when I stepped behind him and let my hand rest on his lower back. “I’d like to help,” I said.
I’d been watching Ethan since I moved back home, but I didn’t expect his ass to be so perfect—something you had to behold while it closed around you, just to believe it. It was something you worshipped, pulling out not only to kiss and caress it but to slow yourself down, to make this worship last. When I pushed back inside, I saw the phone in his hand. “I won’t get your face,” he said. “Don’t worry.” He pressed Record and there we were, his face and my body. There were faces he made you see only in porn: I was transfixed. “Fuck me daddy,” he said, practically my age, but there was nothing absurd in it, nothing you wanted to laugh at.
“Yeah boy. You like getting fucked?” I asked, as if there were any other answer, and gave him a swat that made him moan. I said all the things men say in the videos you jerk off to alone, and eventually I grabbed his phone from him and took in his face as fully as I could, watching all the things I did to him manifest on his mouth, in his eyes, in the little furrows above his cheekbones as he cried out. I don’t even think I had much to do with it, which didn’t bother me at all. I made sure, at the end, to record what every man wanted to see so he could know it was real, to verify what we’d felt was truly pleasure, each of us all over his chest, his face.
“I make a killing on my blog,” he explained in the shower. “People send me money all the time, just to do simple stuff. I hope you don’t mind. I never get anyone’s face except mine. You can check if you want, before I upload it.”
How could I mind? I said this as I soaped him up. Somehow I’d never tired of sex, all these years. Even at the end in New York, the binges, the orgies, that haze, it hadn’t lost its wonder. “I want to record you again,” I whispered as I kissed his earlobe. “Sometime. Anytime. Tomorrow. Tonight.” I kissed his neck. Right now, I was about to say, when we heard my mother howling from the other end of the house.
“Scott! Scott!” She was on the chaise in her bedroom, her hand clutched to her mouth. Blood had seeped through her fingers. It was all over her dressing gown, the chaise itself, the bubblegum carpet. “What’s happening?” she demanded. The blood still trickled down her chin, and she sobbed at the sight of it. “Scott, please. Please do something!” I stood wrapped in a towel while Ethan called the ambulance.
By the time they arrived she had stopped bleeding. She’d wiped her face with a damp towel and changed into another gown, dark red. “Really, I’m not sure why he called,” she told the paramedics. Katharine had settled into her lap as if to reassure everyone that yes, things were normal, please leave us alone. “It’s all so terribly embarrassing. Please forgive me for the misunderstanding. Ethan will show you out.”
Ethan—barefoot and shirtless in a pair of my sweats—elegantly led the paramedics down the main stairway and out the front door. When he returned to the bedroom, my mother asked for her second martini, and again he left us alone as he went to make it.
“You can’t do this anymore,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sixty-six years old.” She sat at her vanity and wiped away the last traces of blood and then began her evening makeup. Ethan came with her drink, and she looked at it more than her own reflection. I felt like I should throw it away, like I should toss it out the window, but I worried what would happen if I touched it. So it just sat there and cast its spell over us both. Ethan played with the dog, waiting to be told what to do.
“I should fire you for this,” my mother said.
He nodded.
“You’re going to have to fix it.”
“I will,” he said. It was hard not to think of him differently, not this meek coward who knelt before a queen, but someone with a power of his own he knew to keep hidden.
Three days later, there was still no mention of the ambulance in the papers or on the usual websites. And when Ethan came home with Katharine and said, “Guess who’s expecting?” my mother knew her mercy had been the right path. This was the story everyone would see, her secret safe in the dark.
• •
People loved Katharine Pupburn more than ever, and by necessity had never wanted, so badly, to adore Jeanne Chamberlain. My mother’s dog had more than five million followers. The New York Times ran a profile on the front page of their Style section. There were photoshoots in Vogue, GQ, and—for a record fee—Playboy, in which Katharine, my mother loved to tell interviewers, didn’t even take off her custom-made chemise.
It was quickly understood that she would make over a quarter-million dollars from each of Katharine’s puppies, once they were born and auctioned away.
There was work for her again. Producers who’d abandoned her concocted new movies, new roles. A plan came together to reboot her old sitcom, except now she would be the show’s mother, passing the torch, her agent said, to a new generation’s daughter. People everywhere were upset that Jeanne Chamberlain no longer looked the way she did when she was young, but there were other people, kinder people, who applauded her for refusing to conform to Hollywood’s stereotypes, for showing women that it was OK to age. But surely, they said, she’d have to lose some weight before working again. On most nights the house was claustrophobic with cocktails and men’s voices as they described the visions they had of her in this dress or that suit, nervous or relaxed, regal or neurotic. In one man’s fantasy, she would play Diane Dufresne, an aging actress whose renewed popularity late in life leads to a comeback, despite ongoing struggles with drugs and alcohol. “Think of it like a dramatic comedy,” he explained as he brought her another drink.
One Saturday, she hosted LA’s first celebrity dog pool party. It wasn’t, she clarified, for celebrities who owned dogs, but for dogs whose celebrity was undisputed. Obviously this coincided, for the most part, with actual celebrities—pop stars and movie stars especially—but there was the occasional lost-looking person you didn’t recognize, the owner of some YouTube husky or Instagram bulldog. I tried to talk to these people when no one else would, but they were never very interesting and only wanted to be introduced to some famous person or another. For their own sake, I pretended not to know any of the real celebrities. “Oh, her? Nobody knows her,” I said of one actress who used to babysit me in the days my mother was unavailable. “It’s not really the close-knit club everyone thinks it is,” I lied, and you could feel the disappointment, the realization that I was of no more use than their fucking dog.
Once again, Katharine made it on the front page of the Style section, in her sunglasses and drawstring hat: “The Baddest Bitch: Beverly Hills’s Newest Mom Hosts Party of the Year.” My mother spent two nights at the hotel while a cleaning crew swept through the house and grounds. I stayed with Ethan, and had trouble going home.
Ethan and I had grown closer in those weeks, at least in the way you get close to the men you fuck. He, too, was enjoying success. My mother had doubled his salary after an especially prescient, almost instinctive scheme he’d put in place to protect her when Madeline, inevitably, broke her confidentiality agreement and spoke to all the gossip rags. Right when the story went live, three other chug owners, all prepaid by Ethan, came forward with the same claim—that it was their dog who’d fathered Katharine’s litter. Madeline only looked like a fool, and she disappeared among blurry photographs of Katharine out for a walk or, glamorously bibbed, brunching with my mother at the hotel.
Ethan was also making more money from his blog. We rarely had sex without filming it, which had come to turn me on as much as it did him. It was exhilarating. It gave me a small, cold ache of danger to see all those men, and even some women, liking what we did, sharing it, commenting on it, and sending him money for posting it. “Hang onto this top,” they told him, referring to my faceless body, my untattooed skin, average and nondescript. “You guys have chemistry!” they said, which felt to me more romantic, more intimate, than I could ever have expected. I recorded him with other men, too—usually two at once—and they called our relationship beautiful, trusting, open, hot.
Of course there was the problem of everyone’s drinking or getting high when they first came over, and my sitting there on my phone until it was time.
My mother thought it was funny that Ethan and I should be together, if together was what it was, but a kind of funny that amused her, that kept her interested. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t move in with us. It’s not like we don’t have the room.”
She said he as though Ethan weren’t there with us, bringing another drink out onto the patio. And because of how she did it—how she trapped you—I had to do it, too, bringing her third, her fourth, if Ethan was busy. “I think he enjoys his privacy,” I said.
My mother laughed. “Yes, privacy, I’m sure he knows all about privacy.” For her, privacy was an expensive form of maintenance, like skin cream imported from Japan or the vintage Jaguar she drove only in September, when the light was kindest.
Two weeks before Katharine was due, I was spending most nights at Ethan’s apartment. I tried to be happy for my mother, but she’d always been cruelest when strangers fawned over her, when the world loved her from a distance. I’d heard from Elaine that my mother had sent her a new Mercedes. It was a “thank you,” Elaine told me over the phone, forcing herself to laugh. “She credits me for the idea, this whole circus with that damn dog. And she knows—I know she knows—I haven’t driven in twenty years.”
Increasingly the house was more of a bar than a refuge, the lavishly dressed Jeanne Chamberlain and a dozen or more sycophants looking to profit from this moment, what everyone knew was her last moment. Even my mother knew it. “You’ll have to forgive me my extravagances,” she said, enjoying a Vicodin with her second martini—something she hadn’t done in over a decade. “I just feel as though everything is finally right.” If you’d have seen her face, the way she closed her eyes and saw the Jeanne Chamberlain deep within herself she’d always tried to coax out, to introduce to the world, you’d have believed it, too. You would have seen how everything really was right, for a moment. A moment is all anyone ever needs.
• •
On the night I decided to move out, she wasn’t surprised. It was late. There’d been a party that afternoon, and my mother insisted that Ethan have a drink to celebrate his accomplishments—so much of this, she said, she owed to him. Ethan’s one drink had turned into four, and he lay passed out in my bed. He’d begun to snore, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t stand any of it any longer. I had to tell her this was enough. This wasn’t, I would say, why I had left New York. I hadn’t abandoned my career for this.
Someone I didn’t know was asleep on her bedroom floor, but she wasn’t there. I made my way downstairs. The house looked used. The vase she told everyone she bought in Italy (it was from Palm Springs) lay in pieces on the foyer floor. None of it would matter to her, I knew. There was only one thing that mattered when her life became something she feared instead of something she tried to enjoy.
She was in the den off the living room. The only light came from the enormous television she’d installed behind the paneling, and it made her look, stretched out on that couch in her nightgown, like a drowned woman rocking back and forth above the ocean floor. Katharine lay curled up next to her, wheezing in her dreams. My mother said, “It’s been years,” but it wasn’t the voice I was used to; her lips didn’t even move. I turned and there she was, so much younger, in some movie from long before I was born.
“It’s one of those marathons,” she said—the real Jeanne Chamberlain, here with me in the room. She patted the couch but I chose the chair. “All my movies,” she said. “One after another after another.” It was obvious she was sedated, drunk. Her fingerprints on the glass in front of her tried on different colors of light, like soap bubbles. It could have been a potion swimming in that glass. Not that you could ever distinguish it from magic. It was always magic.
“I was so pretty. That’s all they ever wanted from me. At least I never got any delusions. I never thought I was the real thing.”
We watched her be young for a while. It would take years for people to find out that my mother was, in fact, the real thing, and always had been. Like most women, she had to die to become a legendary actress.
When the credits rolled, I said, “I have to move out.”
She let out a sound—an mmmmm a person might make in their sleep, but she wasn’t asleep. Then she whispered, “I know. Only a fool would stay here. Only a fool would keep you here. I think we’re done being fools, the two of us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Not for anything specific.
“You know the real me. You always have.”
Suddenly the room felt overcrowded. I turned and saw one of those late-night trios who banter over the film they’ve supposedly just watched with you, the viewer. “Most people call that her worst film,” one said. “Frankly—and I say this as a lifelong fan—I agree.”
I reached for the remote but she shook her head. “I’m made of iron, I promise.”
It wasn’t a boast. If anyone could be iron, it was her. “I wish I didn’t have to go,” I said.
“. . . right after her daughter disappeared forever, which is of course the official account. There are some who still believe . . .”
“I understand, Scott. I’ve been where you’re at. I know how hard it is. Believe me, I know.”
“. . . obviously that’s true, Jen. But you have to wonder, right? Even though she was acquitted, the evidence . . .”
She finished her drink and set the glass down thoughtfully, like a chess piece. Katharine stirred in her sleep, perhaps kicked by one of the puppies who, at that very moment, might have been dying in her womb. Yes, my mother had lived through a lifetime of heartbreak, and yes, finding Katharine, only a few mornings later, dead of a hemorrhage among seven stillborn puppies, would be the final hardship of her life, but these aren’t really things, I don’t think, that people die of. People die of cirrhosis. People die of organ failure. Nobody dies of a dead dog or a runaway daughter or a broken heart.
“. . . about her son, who seems to have replaced the sister he never met, but who unfortunately inherited his mother’s taste for drugs and alcohol . . .”
“That’s a lie.”
She only laughed. “My taste. Scotty, we know you’ve always had better taste than me.”
“. . . hard to believe they’re putting her in movies again. Did you see that photo—”
She muted the TV. The remote trembled in her hand until it dropped into her lap. She caressed Katharine behind the ears as her eyes mirrored the light. She said, “The world doesn’t deserve us,” and you could hear how close she had come to not believing it.
They went away, those people, and now there was another film. For a while I only watched my mother watch herself. She’d been alone for years, and I’d only been back home for a couple months, but already it was impossible to imagine her alone, nothing to do but remember.
I took the glass from the table. I told her I would be right back. In the library, I prepared the martini how she’d always taken them, which was how I, too, had come to prefer them, back in New York. Someday I’d go there again. Someday I’d work again. You had to suppose that’s what life was: doing things again, seeing places again. Everything outside of you was just a way of marking time, placing one version of yourself against another and measuring the distance. The drink and I trembled. You can only get up if you fall.