The Hummingbirds Read online

  She finished the shower, toweled off, and took a moment to file her nails over the drain. Someone’s fortune: she’d never felt that way with Grant, but then again, feeling that way hadn’t been what she’d wanted all those years ago. She’d wanted fame. She and her agent had used words like momentum and trajectory as if a fabulous career was simply a physics problem in need of the right figures. But she’d felt like a pretender, worrying that all of it was just a dream. Delighting in the company of anyone who believed her rise was inevitable.

  She combed her hair and her ends kept catching in the teeth. Lately, she wished it all had been a dream. That fame hadn’t come so quickly, so easily. The whole world was full of Aprils, damning her for voicing even a hint of disappointment. But that didn’t change the fact that she hated her situation. Had now for years. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn’t just don a disguise and hop on a plane and never again see anyone from this life.

  But she couldn’t. She’d only ever gone as far comparing ticket prices to various dreamy isolations. Something kept her from leaving. Something that wasn’t small. When she was acting a part, becoming someone else entirely, she felt free in a way that she never could be while being herself. And to know that her fabrications would be seen and judged and valued by those whose opinion she respected? This was no small thing, either.

  But that feeling was short-lived, and had become more and more so as time went on. She loathed the way each performance, once complete, was left to be managed by people with grossly different ambitions. She’d watch the films after production and see how much of her pure, initial energy had been left on the cutting room floor, even how a camera angle captured the studio’s vision instead of her own. Her parts lost all dimension, ripping the focus from the character she played to her figure and features and however they’d best arouse the audience.

  Again she checked her phone for messages. Nothing. She brushed her teeth, inspected blemishes, applied creams, appraised herself, and let the sadness run through her. Only thirty-five, and were it not for those blessed digital touch-ups, out to pasture.

  People were wrong, of course: the years didn’t take, they traded. Sexual allure for complexity. But who wanted complexity from her? All these films and photo shoots betrayed a bitchy vixen with simplistic desires. And people, all these people, they assumed that her typecast role was a thinly veiled biography. Like that girl April. In her eyes, Sybil was nothing more than a caricature.

  Not that she could lay all the blame on others. She knew she was complicit. It wasn’t as though she’d put up a fight all those years ago—far from it. She chalked up the attention she received from playing her typecast in real life as proof that she’d finally, at long last, found herself. She was glad to be the vixen. Relieved by it. She was getting everything she wanted. More than she could have hoped and far more than she’d ever experienced just being herself. The phone never stopped ringing. Paparazzi followed her everywhere. And once the Internet started humming in earnest, the melee went to another level. Parties, not-so-secret getaways, rumors, wardrobe malfunctions, vapid heartthrobs, clashes with rivals, trumped-up run-ins with the law—sure, looking back, she could say that it was shallow, that she was click-bait opium, catering to the lowest common denominator, but in the moment, it was her life, and life was fucking great, at least while it lasted. Sure, she was off the rails. Self-destructive. Trying to keep at bay the growing fear that she’d long since peaked and the only way to go was down.

  Yeah, she was caught up in it, but that was no small thing. Anyone who said otherwise was, at best, ignorant. People spent their lives trying to get caught up in something that might make them feel good enough to forget themselves.

  People didn’t understand what it did to you, being famous. Everyone already knew about you, so they assumed they knew you. All you needed to do was agree, and you could hide in plain sight, and reap the rewards. Yes, notoriety was just another form of anonymity, but what a glorious anonymity could be.

  But then a few people tired of you. It started with jokes and unflattering pictures, progressed to caricatures and memes, then everyone started to add former to all you’d done. Former B-lister. Former It girl. As in, formerly the phone rang. They blamed it on your antics, but it was your face, your name, the sound of your voice. You were no different than a bag of chips displayed by the cash register, binged on one too many times. People knew you by flavor alone, never thinking that you’d been born from an eye, roots stretching out deep into the dark soil, stalks reaching toward the warmth of the sun.

  She sat down on the toilet. It was amazing how quickly the drop occurred. She’d fought it, tried to reinvent herself, but only ended up looking more desperate. She enrolled in a poetry class at UCLA, and when word got out, the tabloids mocked her endlessly. She helped build a home for an underprivileged family outside of Oxnard and everyone called her bluff. She went on a medical relief trip in the Amazon and people howled.

  She wiped and flushed and washed her hands. God, she needed to stop thinking about it. She closed her eyes, trying to center herself. Breathe. Breathe.

  She gave up. In the end it was no use, was it? Trying to prevent what had already happened? Trying to forestall the inevitable? She looked in the mirror and picked at a blemish until it bled. She left the room and circled down the staircase, hand sliding along the reclaimed walnut banister. And so, Ezra, the gorgeous young man whose affection might ruin her further, whose affection she was nonetheless so, so grateful for.

  Yes. She needed to stop thinking about everything and everyone and instead focus on this: Ezra would be done working by lunch and they would make love. God it felt good to have a body pressed into hers, to run her hands through someone’s hair without a camera to capture it. Her mind would glint when Ezra buried his lips into her neck. It felt pure, bordering on perfect. Not that it was sterile, or well performed. Thank God it wasn’t. He was often awkward, fumbling. Muscular, but not like those gym lurkers whose skin looked like an overripe tomato ready to split. He smelled of soap, but below, faint on his skin, was the scent of fresh-cut grass. And he was less attractive up close. He’d lose the innocence in his face: his thick, dark eyebrows were a mess and his wide eyes and full lips seemed at odds with the rest of him.

  But all of that served the wonder. With him, she was allowed to be a mess, and pure, and young—and goddamn, how old was thirty-five old? Afterward, they’d relax in bed, sun streaming through the windows, overhead fan spinning. If staged for screen, someone might place a pitcher of ice water with lemon on the nightstand next to the bed and make sure to get a sound bite of ice cracking as it melted.

  The balls of her bare feet slapped lightly against the cold shale of the kitchen, numbing the arousal thinking about Ezra had provoked. She knew that from Grant’s perspective, she was using Ezra. But she’d relied on Grant’s perspective for too long, and what had it gotten her? Miserable success.

  She caught herself picking at that blemish on her face again and froze. What if she and Ezra were at that very moment being recorded? She glanced around, looking for anything suspicious. The cabinets, the windowpanes, the shelves. She found nothing, of course. And as she considered it, the idea became more and more laughable. This was a rental, and Grant was far too consumed with his own matters to worry about her—that being, of course, the problem, if not the root.

  Many times, over the phone, she’d cried about it to her mother, who’d replied—time and time again—just follow your heart, until finally, in a moment of frustration, she blurted out why the hell don’t you just leave him? But her mother’s heart hadn’t ever desired a career, much less fame and acceptance beyond friends and family. She loved the Pacific Northwest and she only ever wanted to find a good man, raise a family, and live there. And she was there still, to this day, in the Cascade foothills edge at the of the city, only instead of kids to rear, she now had a yard filled with rescue dogs.

  Her father’s heart might have wanted more: a few times he’d men
tioned a mining company headquartered in Juneau and an import/export company in San Diego. But when she’d asked whether he regretted not pursuing them, he’d shifted in his seat and said, with his usual annoying-yet-forgivable condescension, A better question is whether there are any decisions a person doesn’t in some way regret.

  In short, her parents’ desires never asked them to be anything other than conventional. They were free to judge her ambition and success from the safe confines of their couch without the least worry of consequence.

  Like Ezra. How many people would die to be in his shoes—dating a movie star while still living a common life? Reaping the rewards without any of the risk? Didn’t they, every night, make love next to a showcase of Grant’s awards? Even her bathrobe was embroidered with a G looped around her S.

  Now that she thought about it, she might die to be in his shoes.

  But here she was, diving into that cycle again. Obsessing over matters that wouldn’t be resolved by thinking. She opened the refrigerator and felt the cool air rush against her face. The leftover Brie from the night before made her stomach growl. It would taste amazing in an omelet and the indulgence might bring her back to reality. But she’d crushed her calorie count for the week in the last three days, and she didn’t want to get back into the habit of binging and purging. You never knew when a screen test would pop up and she’d be called to take someone’s breath away.

  A breathtaking role. What she would give for one of those. It had been years. She’d been nominated for one Oscar in that first film with Grant, where she played a prostitute that fell in love with a self-destructive Vietnam vet. As she’d sat through the ceremony, surrounded by fellow actors and industry folks, one of the most profound feelings she’d ever experienced in her entire life struck her dumb. The only way she could describe it was a warm, honeyed glow of belonging. She’d never felt as though she really belonged anywhere before that moment.

  She grabbed some vegetables and a tub of Greek yogurt and dragged the food processor from the drawer. The blades screamed their way through the hard bits until its contents spun into a tan mulch. Something tickled Sybil’s neck and she whipped around, startled. Ezra, trying to kiss her. “What the hell?”

  He laughed. “I didn’t mean—”

  She felt like hitting him. She was amazed at how agitated she’d become just by thinking about Grant and the business. “Aren’t you supposed to be mowing my lawn?”

  He feigned offense. “Yours? It’s a rental.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  He laughed.

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him close and kissed him near his ear. He smelled of lavender. He moved to take it further but she pushed him back.

  He chuckled and took a seat on a stool near the island.

  She poured herself a highball glass of the mush and thought of how easily she’d just slipped back into her role. My God, it frustrated her. As long as she never had to speak with anyone, she could be thoughtful. But the second the outer world intervened, her impulse control went to shit, and she became that girl. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You surprised me.”

  “I’m the one who should be sorry.” He was wearing a black T-shirt and specks of sweat had soaked through on his chest and armpits. His skin was shining and there were smudges of dirt on his arms.

  Just looking at him tamped down some of her anxiety. “No, you’re fine. We’re still figuring each other out.”

  “Anything else you want to figure out, before I continue with my duties?” he asked, nabbing a sprig of broccoli from the plate of the previous night’s hors d’ouevres.

  Anything? He meant sex, of course—the nerd—which, granted, made sense, considering. But if anything truly was in play, she’d rather ask him what he thought about the time she’d first met Grant, at that party in some studio head’s rental house up north on the beach, and why she’d let that meeting determine the next ten years of her life. She’d come with another actor who knew someone who knew someone and they’d wandered the obsidian floors, trying not to laugh at the ridiculous postmodern trash art vomiting from the walls, and then there was the furniture, which probably cost tens of thousands of dollars but looked as if it’d been cast out into an alley and picked up.

  She remembered how, at the party, Grant had grabbed her by the elbow and held her firm, and then looked over her face like he was at the butcher shop inspecting steak cuts for a dinner party.

  “Who are you?” he’d asked.

  “No one,” she’d said, because that was precisely how he’d made her feel: no one without his approval, without those impossibly direct eyes carving pounds of flesh from her frame. It was captivating, if to be captivated was a mixture of terror, exhilaration, and submission.

  Back in Seattle, at that stupid private liberal arts high school she’d attended in hopes of better pursuing drama, she hadn’t even been asked to the lame anti-prom the faculty had organized around their own childhood regrets, even though more than a few of her classmates had likely spent their awkward dates wishing she was on their arm. But Grant? He looked her over and remained unfazed, frosty, emotionless to the point of objectivity. Her entire life she’d been desperate for someone whose opinion wasn’t too clouded by relationship or insecurity to tell her who she was.

  “You’re a star,” he’d said, and in many ways, that initial comment—its coldness, conviction, and stern evaluation—held her fast all these years.

  So, was there anything she wanted to talk to Ezra about? How about everything, from the very beginning to the end, released slowly into his dark eyes. But there were things she felt comfortable sharing, and things she paid a therapist to listen to, knowing no small part of what she was buying was discretion. “If you really want to know, it’s just work,” she said. “Looming.”

  He nodded. “Your next movie?”

  “There isn’t one, yet. I passed on a dandy last week, about a road trip. It required me to be sexy, stupid, and eventually, dead.” She didn’t mention the other she’d passed on, which asked that she play the part of the mom who got in a love triangle with her teenage daughter’s boyfriend. It was directed by the same guy who’d filmed her most recent picture, which—surprise!—the MPAA had deemed NC-17, but not because the illicit material was artsy. Quite the opposite. She’d agreed to do it out of spite toward everyone and everything during a period of extreme desperation and intoxication. It debuted this last week in movie theaters that catered to perverts and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  “What sort of role do you want?” Ezra asked.

  “I’d take a pizza commercial if the writing was decent.”

  He laughed and crunched a nub of broccoli, perhaps not realizing that the noise was disgusting. God, he could be such an innocent.

  “You really want to know?” she asked.

  “Sure.” He got up and poured what was left of the shake into a mug.

  “How about you show me some of your photographs first?”

  “You’re into boredom?” he said, taking a sip of the shake. “This is terrible, by the way.”

  “You’re talkative this morning.” She gave him a pat on the ass, stepped into sandals, and led him to the entryway.

  NINE

  They walked out onto the patio and down through the grass toward the pool house. Birds buzzed. The cool morning dew worked its way between her bare toes.

  “I’m actually kind of curious to see where you live,” Sybil said.

  He shrugged. “It’s basic.”

  “Anything’s better than that monstrosity.” She gestured back to the mansion and felt a kiss of shame. Living there wasn’t necessarily better than living in someplace smaller—she’d thought many times she’d be much happier in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness—but to imply that was poor taste, and murder was easier for the public to forgive than elitism. “I mean, it’s fine as far as—”

  “—it’s okay, I feel you. The outside is foreboding, and the inside—”

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sp; “—is nice,” she said. “But thanks.” They passed the pool. Leaves floated on the water’s surface.

  He paused. “I’ll take care of that later this afternoon.”

  “No worries,” she said. Of course some of his duties had slipped. She’d been the cause. Probably the only reason he’d mentioned it was because she’d tried to take back the mansion comment. By trying to clarify her position she’d only reinforced what didn’t need reinforcing. It occurred to her that a part of her feared him, not because he made less money and wasn’t famous, but because his position ensured him the public’s sympathy.

  He laughed, but fumbled the key into the door.

  They should have stayed at the mansion. She should have had him bring the pictures up from the pool house. But there it was again; even up had its connotations.

  Grant was always going on about how equality was child’s play, a dream that could only be sustained in a vacuum, because deep down everyone seemed hardwired to enforce ancient social mores. She disagreed on principle, but he had a point. If she wore old sweatpants and a T-shirt to the gym, someone would take a photo that would go viral and she’d be shamed for looking dumpy. Americans claimed they wanted equality, yet insisted on a monarchy, if only to see it suffer.

  She reached into her pocket to glance at her messages. Nothing.

  When the door to the pool house opened, she was greeted with the smell of Ezra’s space, which like him was warm and earthy. The place was okay. She felt a bit guilty for not having known what it looked like. The décor was comfortable: clean tan carpeting, bulbous brown leather couch, a black armchair. The mismatched furniture reminded her of the collection in her parents’ basement. The living room opened to a kitchen with new appliances and a decent countertop. On the kitchen table were stacks of magazines, photography and nature. “Your place is nice.”

  “The neighborhood’s decent.”

  She surveyed the walls and found one filled with photographs, most of which were hummingbirds. A few she recognized were taken on the grounds—she’d spent an occasional boring afternoon, waiting for work, in search of distraction among the flowers. She stopped at a close-up of a hummingbird midflight, its chest splashed with different shades of pink and purple, wet with shine. She enjoyed watching their neurotic flights. “I like this guy.”