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  “I ain’t seen you in how long?” Brad said.

  “I don’t—”

  “Since before Mike left!” Britt interjected. “How are you?”

  “I’m—”

  “Take my picture!” Britt squealed, embracing Maryetta. “I love this woman! I love her so much!”

  Maryetta rolled her eyes, and I captured it in a flash.

  Too bright.

  I adjusted. Caught Brad making a gang sign. Then him with his arm around Britt. Then Sunglasses Guy looking sullen. Brad tying his shoe. Sunglasses trying to run up a wall and losing his shoe. Britt pulling his waistband. Maryetta lighting a cigarette. The alley became a studio, the tight corner of the city a backdrop to a scene.

  “We gotta blow! Come with us,” Brad said.

  “Yes!” Britt added. “I got a driver. It’s so much better!”

  “I can’t, I—”

  “Why not?” the guy in the sunglasses asked. He’d had the most fun in front of the camera.

  “I’m running out of memory, and I want to see what I have. I know that’s lame,” I said. “Next time?”

  A little convincing sent them on their way. They walked down the alley to a small lot on the other side.

  “Wait!” I shouted.

  Maryetta and Britt turned.

  “I need releases!” I said, running toward them. When I caught up, I continued, out of breath. “I need you to sign releases so I can sell these, if it’s all right. I’ll clear them with you first, in case there’s anything you don’t want seen?” I jerked my thumb at the two girls putting a lighter and a foil packet away.

  “Yeah,” Britt said. “Call me tomorrow, and I’ll get you everyone’s contact info, okay?” She gave me her number and said to Maryetta, “Remind me to put her on the list.”

  “Yeah. You sure you don’t want to come?” Maryetta asked me.

  I thought of all the shots I could get. I lived five blocks away. All I had to do was go home and grab a memory card.

  “Next time,” I said. I was tired and done pushing myself.

  They all trotted off to their cars, unencumbered by worry or fear, and I went home feeling the same way.

  I sat in front of my screen, where Phoebe had opened all the pictures of Michael. I spent a minute looking through them for the millionth time. I loved him. Maybe I would always love him, but for the first time, I saw a life outside him.

  Chapter 49

  Michael

  I didn’t care about the Academy Award nominations, but I saw the start of the announcements in the hotel lobby on a screen the size of a headshot. I’d forgotten about them, but once I saw a man and a woman stand at a podium, I knew what it was. They spoke English, and squiggly, indecipherable captioning ran underneath them. I’d worked with her on some blitzy action thing that was releasing in two months, and he acted in mostly fussy period pieces.

  I sat on an uncomfortable chair and ate a roll with tea. I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t curious.

  They announced the nominees for the small categories, and I watched, rapt. I cheered to myself when Big Girls was nommed for sound editing, followed by music, director, and screenplay.

  Then actress—six nominees, with Claire Contreras among them. I was happy for her. She’d been wonderful to work with, and for the first time, I missed being on a movie set.

  I wasn’t supposed to expect a nomination. I wasn’t supposed to even watch the announcements. I should have been running around Kowloon and making plans to move into mainland China. Anything but staring at the TV, waiting for something that promised fulfillment but would never deliver. A reward for doing everything right when nothing had felt right.

  But it came, my name and my face, and I felt exposed again. Minutes after, when I was leaving the hotel with my bag slung across my back and my head down, my phone rang. I only accepted calls from my parents, and as expected, it was Gareth.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Kowloon.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Crowded,” I said. “Rainy. But if I don’t tell them who I am, they don’t know and don’t care.”

  I heard muffled voices from the other side, some rustling, then Brooke got on. “Sweetheart, come back, would you? The whole thing’s died down. No one even talks about that girl anymore. They just talk about your internet things. You can make it back for the ceremony.”

  The ceremony, where I wouldn’t win because no one would vote for a man who may or may not have been a pervert. Everyone else from Big Girls would win, because they’d been excellent. Claire and Andrea, Max, who’d written the hell out of the thing.

  “I can’t,” I said, and that was that.

  She’d stopped arguing with me a month ago. I headed to China because I could and because they didn’t have televisions.

  In the end, my father brought me back, that old son of a bitch. He was getting his liver transplant. When I’d called him, he said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you come home. I’m going to be unconscious. But if I croak on the table while you’re in Asia, you’ll feel like crap about it.”

  I’d been huddled by a pay phone. I’d forgotten to charge my phone.

  “You’re not going to croak,” I said.

  “Damn right, I’m not. I want to see all their faces when you don’t show up to get your Oscar.”

  I hung up thinking maybe I should go see my father pinned to a bed. I could watch everyone I’d worked with and respected win something. It would be fun. Then I could return to going wherever, whenever.

  I hadn’t booked a charter. I wanted to be normal for another three quarters of a day. I wore sunglasses, a too-long beard, and a hat. That had never fooled anyone for long, but it would get me to baggage claim.

  As soon as the plane hit the ground at LAX, my chest constricted, and I felt such a weight on me, my hair felt heavy.

  I fell into old patterns: looking away from crowds, seeming preoccupied, rushing, wondering who would do what for me instead of me doing it myself. I wanted to get back on the plane.

  A photo mural twenty feet long stretched across the concourse, showing a perfect blue sky and the word in white, the bottom tilted to the planes of the mountain.

  HOLLYWOOD.

  Seeing it like that, I didn’t think of the industry or the things I’d run from. I thought of the last time I’d been up there. With her.

  I thought about her all the time. How much she’d like climbing a mountain in Cashmere or learning the infinite corners and cobblestone back ways of Hong Kong. She’d been so far away, I hadn’t thought of calling her, but there I was in LA. I could call her.

  But she’d let me go. She’d been the one to walk away, and she’d dropped off the face of the earth afterward, which was for the best. I was poison for her. I couldn’t call her. Pride, or emotional self-preservation, stopped me.

  I got in a cab. There was a magazine on the seat, an arty fashion thing, with Georgana on the cover, wearing makeup no one should be seen out of the house in. I casually flipped through it as the driver got on the 105.

  I smiled when I saw Brad’s picture. I could stand to see that nutjob again. He was hamming it up in a grainy black-and-white spread while Arnie tried to run up a wall and Britt kissed Maryetta. The detail in the picture was enthralling, seven stories at once, with the alleyway itself a fully-developed character. I couldn’t look at it without smiling. I kept coming back to it and seeing new things. I moved my thumb to examine some detail in a corner and found the photographer’s credit.

  Chapter 50

  Laine

  Pictures had become cheap. If my hard drive got full, I tossed stuff. I took so many frames that storing every single one digitally would have been unmanageable. My attitude was, if I couldn’t find it if I wanted it, it had to go. So I threw stuff out.

  But film? No one threw out actual negatives, or at least Irving didn’t.

  “Is
this George Clooney?” I held up a clear plastic filer of 4x5 negatives.

  Irving put his face next to mine and looked at it against the window. We’d been organizing his piles for weeks, and there still wasn’t much to toss.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking the folder and looking closely. “Handsome guy. Unreal handsome.” He flipped me the folder. “This is pre-ER.”

  “All of these were under it.” I held up a stack of folders with more negatives. “All Clooney?”

  “We had three shoots, so yeah. You know, I bought the guy lunch each time. He ate like a horse. Actors, man. No money.”

  I marked a fat file “George Clooney” with a Sharpie.

  Gareth Greydon’s liver failure two months before had put a bomb under Irving’s butt. They were the same age and had known each other at Breakfront when Gareth was a student’s parent and Irving was a teacher. Irv didn’t want to die in a pile of dust and negatives that would get thrown away.

  “I have no children, but I have a legacy!” he’d said.

  So we started organizing his house. The treasure went deep and wide. I had to stop myself from looking at everything so carefully we stopped working.

  “Laine!” Tom called from the front room. “Your phone’s ringing!”

  “Who is it?”

  “Blocked number. Ignore?”

  “Get it, would you?” I called back, moving a pile of boxes to get Clooney in alphabetical order. Brad and Britt were always blocked numbers, and I thought they might call me when their pics were published in Underground. I took another pile and held them against the window. “We need to get another light box.”

  “We have one. It’s called the sun, and it’s free.”

  “I can get you a light box, you know.”

  “Miss Hotshot gets a few spreads with ‘culture’ magazines and what? She’s buying the teacher stuff?”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at the next set of negatives. “Oh, my God.”

  “What? You found Prince Harry?”

  “Michael.”

  Not just any Michael. My Michael. My Michael from the bleachers. Varsity tennis Michael. How he got mixed in with pre-ER George Clooney was an illustration of what a mess Irv’s house was, and it added to my shock.

  Irv snapped the negatives from my hand. “Nice-looking kid. Move along. Go over there.” He waved me toward the piles on the other side of the room.

  I plucked the negatives out of his hand. “These are mine.”

  We faced off for a second before Tom came in. “There are four boxes of prints with water damage under the sink.”

  “Toss,” I said.

  “Keep,” Irving said at the same time.

  “I’ll put them to the side,” Tom said. “We can do rock, paper, scissors later.”

  “Here,” I said, giving him the clear plastic folder with Michael’s pictures. “Can you put these in my bag?”

  “Sure.”

  As he was walking away, I asked, “Who was on the phone?”

  “They hung up.”

  I attacked a new pile and didn’t give the call a second thought.

  Chapter 51

  Michael

  Brad had a huge crackerbox in Bel-Air, because that was what he was told famous actors lived in. He’d been wrong, but like most things he was wrong about, he didn’t care one way or the other. He just emptied the place of any potentially adult trappings and put in stand-up video games, dart boards, three huge televisions, and a pool table. All it was missing was a dark wood bar with brass beer taps.

  “What are you wearing tomorrow?” Brad asked, lining up a combination shot that would tap the three and sink the nine if he were a better player.

  “A tux.”

  “By who? I have an Armani jacket, but I’m wearing shorts.” He shot and missed.

  “I have one in my closet. I don’t even know who.” I chalked my stick.

  “You could get a comp last minute.”

  “Nah. Hey, I saw that pic in Underground.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned on his stick, cracking his gum.

  “Laine took it.” I leaned over the table, lining up the three for an easy sink into the side pocket.

  “Yeah.”

  “How is she?”

  “Fine.”

  I missed and scratched. “Fine?”

  “Yeah. She’s fine.” He plucked the cue ball out of the rack. “She runs around at night taking pictures and caught us at Grassroots. She’s got a nose for it, you know. Found Dave at Crawlers last night. He told me they hung out and got some cool shit. I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

  “Alone? She runs around downtown alone?”

  He lined up his shot. “Yep.”

  I didn’t know what bothered me more: her toting ten thousand dollars’ worth of equipment around downtown Los Angeles at night or the fact that Brad Sinclair had intimate knowledge of her life when I didn’t. “I called her the other day,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Did she change her number?”

  “Dunno, never had it before. She’s a hot shit photographer now. Maybe she’s not taking calls from nobodies.” He sunk the four in a tame shot that was beneath him and did nothing to set up his next move. “What’s the face?”

  “A guy picked up.”

  “Look, dude,” he said, dropping the five. “You tossed her.”

  “She tossed me.”

  “No…”

  “Yes, Brad. I was there.” I wanted to punch him, and I hadn’t wanted to punch anyone in a long time.

  Brad, for his part, looked unflustered, swaggering around the table looking for his shot. “Did you fight for her, bro? Or did you just let her walk out? You know, she says she’s leaving to protect your precious career, and you just let her go? That what you did? ’Cos to me, that sounds like it’s easier to let yourself think she did it when, in fact, you broke it off. You let it happen because you were scared of all the shit going down.” He leaned over for his shot. “It’s cool, man. People do shit like that all the time, but don’t act like it was any different.”

  He knocked the six into the nine in a shot that looked like pure, stupid luck. The nine spun and barely made it into the corner pocket. Brad fist-pumped.

  I had the sinking feeling that he was right.

  I tried to shake it off, but I thought about it all the way home. Was he right? Had I let her do the dirty work I was too scared to do?

  I couldn’t sleep, replaying what my father had said in the hospital, and how I’d failed to live up to what he thought of me on every level. Then I looped the scene in my house over and over. How Laine had walked out and I’d allowed it. I told myself I’d fought for her, but I was a liar. I’d snapped under the weight of people’s expectations.

  I got up and sat on my patio. The view mocked me, reminding me that I was nothing, powerless, a speck in a monstrous city. I’d felt like that in plenty of cities across the Pacific, but it had been comforting. That night, the spiked lights of downtown jabbed me in the chest.

  Maybe I needed to head down there. Maybe I needed to test out that sixth sense of hers. No one really knew I was back yet. I hadn’t made a call. I was still just a guy in the city. That would last another day but no more. I got into my shoes with anticipation and laced them up with hope.

  Chapter 52

  Laine

  I own this city. I walk with its rhythms, run with its breath, speak its language. Los Angeles is my lover. It knows I’m a survivor. It knows what I’ve done and has found no reason to forgive me, because there has never been a sin. I am brave and strong. I have a good sense of humor. I am loyal and friendly. I have friends around every corner. Celebrities and homeless people, priests and con men. The Mexican dudes playing dice in the loading dock, the guys with the boom box outside the abandoned buildings. The businessmen and actors, the models and personal trainers. The hookers on Sunset know my name, and I know theirs. We all live here. This is our Los Angeles.

  “I want two with extra…” I tilted my head and snap
ped my fingers. “Look, I don’t speak Spanish. The cabbage with the carrots? It’s like in vinegar or something?”

  The lady in the hairnet leaned out of the food truck, three feet above me. She was bathed in floodlights inside the truck, and the rest of the street was washed in the black of a streetlamp-free night. “Curtido?”

  “That! I like it.” My back pocket buzzed with a text.

  —Gusta, gusta!—

  The text was from Maryetta.

  —Where are you?—

  I looked for a street sign and couldn’t find one. Just fifteen or more people at hastily placed card tables with white plastic backyard chairs.

  —East Hollywood. Food truck in a parking lot off the 101—

  —We’re near 18th and Alameda at a thing. Paul Messina is here. He wants to meet you like now—

  Paul Messina, the fashion magnate. A photographer did not turn down a meeting with him, no matter who they thought they were.

  —I can be Downtown in ten—

  The reply came as I was leaning over the hood of my car, shoving pupusas in my face. It was an address I knew well, the Messina Inc. global compound. I got in my little Audi and headed back Downtown.

  Chapter 53

  Michael

  I felt as if I’d never seen downtown Los Angeles before. I’d run through it the way I’d run through everything—head down, noticing things in snippets. I saw it for the first time that night. I drove into the deepest part of the city and parked by the Whole Foods. I wasn’t lying to myself about what I was doing. I was testing myself and her, practicality against hope, just throwing the dice and hoping for sevens.

  I walked the streets. No one followed. No one chased. I didn’t see a camera anywhere. The night embraced me, and when I saw a crowd, they were heading into a club hidden behind matte black paint. It was about ten p.m., and the city was alive.

  I’d walked a dozen foreign cities in much the same way, hands in pockets, living in the dark places, the hidden byways and underpasses. But I’d never done it at home.