Funny You Should Ask(51)

The last time I had flown, I was leaving New York. Leaving Jeremy.

Katie and I had spent the first half of the flight watching the feminist masterpiece Magic Mike XXL on the plane until she fell asleep. I did what I was doing now—staring out the window, looking for the meaning of life in the fast-passing clouds.

I hadn’t found it then and I didn’t think I was going to find it now.

Moving to New York to be with Jeremy had been a mistake. I was fairly certain that going to Montana with Gabe was also a mistake. A different kind of mistake, but a mistake.

If I was smart, I’d never leave California.

Even though I’ve never once in my life been able to fall asleep on an airplane, the private jet manages to lull me into sleep and I don’t wake until I hear the pilot say we’re beginning our initial descent into Cooper, Montana.

The first thing I see once we pass through the clouds is the cathedral. It’s a proper one with a tall, reaching spire and a wide spread.

Cooper is small. The airport is at one end of the town and from this distance the whole place—Gabe’s hometown, the keeper of his childhood adventures—feels like it could fit in my palm.

Whenever I would fly back to L.A. to visit my family, I always felt this relief that I hadn’t known I had been missing. As if I’d become accustomed to breathing out of one lung.

It feels like that now. Like I’d been operating on half-oxygen for who knows how long.

I take a deep breath.

Below me, everything is covered in snow.

I’m glad I borrowed a huge, extremely puffy coat from Katie that I had to strong-arm into my suitcase along with a pair of snow boots she insisted I buy. The world looks brisk and vast and unknown. I shiver, but it’s not just from the imagined cold.

It’s almost like I’m coming home. Not to a place, necessarily, but to a feeling. To a possibility of more.

And that completely and utterly terrifies me.





VANITY FAIR


OLIVER MATTHIAS: He Is What He Is

[excerpt]


By Chani Horowitz


We’re sitting in Oliver Matthias’s backyard and he’s telling me about the first time he fell in love. It’s the perfect setting to hear a love story. It’s fall and the air has just the right amount of crisp in it. We’re sitting on lawn chairs, covered in Pendleton blankets (“a gift from a friend”), drinking hot apple cider.

Halloween is just around the corner. Halloween is when Oliver first fell in love.

“It’s always been my favorite holiday,” he tells me. “There’s a freedom to it—where everyone gets dressed up and pretends to be someone else and it’s not because you’re hiding or you’re deceiving, it’s because on that day we all seem to acknowledge that it’s good to put on a mask once in a while.”

He takes a long drink of his apple cider. I’m content to let it warm my hands for now, though the rich smell of apples and butter and cinnamon is just as intoxicating as the splash of whisky we added to our mugs before we came outside.

“Fortification,” Oliver told me.

We both know why I’m here, but I’m not about to rush him, because if I know anything about Oliver Matthias, it’s that he knows how to tell a story.

“I’d bet a lot of actors have an affinity for Halloween,” he says. “Though, we do it a little differently in Britain.”

I nod as if I know—I don’t. I’ve lived in the United States my entire life. My only trip abroad was to Amsterdam to visit Anne Frank’s house with my temple youth group.

Oliver has been all over the world, but has recently settled in Los Angeles, buying a house in Brentwood, up in the hills.

“It’s a good neighborhood for trick-or-treating,” he says. “Or so I’ve been told.”

This will be his first Halloween here.

“Every year I would go all in,” he says. “And that year, I wanted to go as Xena.”

He smiles, remembering.

“My mum had always made my costumes and she went all out that year. I’m one of four boys, you see, and the whole thing about a mother wanting a daughter was quite applicable.”

“Are you still close with your mother?”

He nods. “There I am, in full Xena regalia, marching down Piccadilly with my brothers, who were, of course, dressed as soldiers. They were always dressed as soldiers.”

“Technically,” I interject, “you were a soldier too.”

Oliver laughs. “Not quite,” he says. “I was a warrior.”

I stand corrected.

“There I am, full warrior mode, strutting my little heart out when—bam—I walk right into someone else. Another Xena.”

It’s easy to picture this. A young, adorable Oliver Matthias, his blue eyes glinting, his chin lifted high, too high for him to realize that he’s about to collide with someone else dressed exactly like him.

“I’m furious, of course,” Oliver says. “How dare this other Xena—this imposter—ruin my walk?”

“Of course.”

“I look up—because this person is much taller than me—and I see that this Xena is also a boy. Well, a man, really. He looks down at me, smiles, and gives me a wink. And then he’s gone.”