The Comeback(13)
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When I come downstairs to find coffee, Wren is sitting at the dining table with a boy who is about eleven or twelve years old. Or he could be fourteen; I actually have no idea. Wren holds up a card with a photograph of a teenage girl on it, and he pulls the same face I do when I’m expected to know anything about technology.
“Okay, Barney, try this one next. If Amy says to you, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and she’s making this face, what do you think she really means?”
Barney studies the photograph carefully. Amy is grinning in the photo and she looks like she’s being a bitch, but I manage to refrain from joining in the conversation.
“Ummm . . .” Barney frowns and holds the card at a variety of distances as if it’s one of those Magic Eye puzzles.
“It’s okay, take as long as you need. Do you remember the first clue we look for?”
I walk into the kitchen, where Dylan is grabbing a box of water from the fridge. I guess people are drinking water from boxes in LA now.
“What’s Wren doing in there?”
“She’s a speech-language pathologist.”
“Cool.”
Dylan looks defensive. “I said it was all right to use the house for her pro bono cases.”
“Of course it is, that’s fine.”
“I wasn’t asking, Grace, you haven’t been here for over a year.”
We’re both silent while I figure out what to say next. I take a banana from the fruit bowl in the middle of the kitchen island, then realize I didn’t buy it. I did pay for the bowl, however, and the marble island. I turn the banana over in my hand and try to work out what to do next.
“Do you think your new girlfriend can teach me about nonverbal cues? Or is the catastrophically self-absorbed actress a lost cause?”
Dylan shakes his head but I can tell he’s trying not to smile.
“You’re not catastrophically self-absorbed, Grace. Humans have just never been your strong suit. It’s different. And she’s not ‘new.’”
I think of all of the questions Dylan has every right to ask of me that I know he isn’t going to because he doesn’t want to hear the answers. Dylan packs up his laptop and a camera I haven’t seen before, and puts them in his camouflage backpack.
“You still dress like a teenager,” I say.
“The kids at work call me sir,” he says, and he’s smiling slightly now.
“You’re not even twenty-four.”
“I’m working with sixteen-year-olds all day. I’m an old man,” Dylan says.
“More surfers?” When I met him, Dylan was making a film about surfers in Malibu. He spent three years following a group of kids, and then he turned it into a Sundance-winning documentary about teen suburban malaise and prescription drug abuse.
“The same ones. It’s harder. They’re hyperaware of their online presence and, like, their ‘aesthetic’ this time around.”
“And nobody has been maimed yet.” I can’t resist. He never denied that his first documentary would have been less gripping if one of the surfers hadn’t gotten into a car accident while high and lost a hand during the shoot. No pun intended. I hate puns.
Dylan stops by the door, and something flickers across his face.
“What are you doing today?” he asks.
“I’ve got an NA meeting this morning.” The lie slips out of my mouth easily, a throwback to a former version of myself. Dylan nods, relieved that I’m not going to be pouring out lines of coke in front of autistic children in his house.
As soon as he’s gone, I walk up to the pool on our roof. The water has a layer of something oily on the surface and a cluster of dead insects floating in one corner, but I get in anyway so that I can lie on my back while the winter sun explodes behind my closed eyes. I feel weightless for the first time in a while.
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I arrange to meet Laurel at Gjelina, a restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I stand in front of my untouched closet for nearly half an hour before I leave, stroking the silk dresses and cashmere sweaters that hang from the bar across the top. I pick out a rose-gold, floor-length Calvin Klein slip dress that I wore to the Met Gala on my eighteenth birthday, an evening I mainly spent hiding in the toilets to avoid the lethal combination of small talk and selfies—not because I thought I was any better than anyone there, but because I didn’t understand them.
I pull the dress on over the stained Winnie the Pooh T-shirt I’m still wearing, and then I stare at myself in the mirror until it’s time to leave. I walk to the restaurant with my skirt trailing on the ground over my Converse, picking up pine needles and dirt. Everything seems too bright.
Abbot Kinney is the same as when I left, only more. It’s a ten-minute walk from the coast and it has transformed from a local neighborhood with a few restaurants into a bourgeois, farm-to-table influencer heaven—Beverly Hills by the sea. I push past teenage girls posing with brightly colored juices outside storefronts painted pink just for them, while women with bodies like Victoria’s Secret models line up for coffee outside the minimalist spot with the amphitheater seating. There are fewer stores selling healing crystals, more stores selling $800 shirts, and men with full beards wandering aimlessly at eleven a.m. on a Friday, holding babies with names like Hudson and Juniper in slings around their necks.