Chapter 32 Ryan

CHAPTER 32 RYAN

January 2007

Los Angeles

How long would Cass stay? She had said a week, but then a week did not feel long enough. I told her she could stay as long as she wanted. That my schedule was wide open until the following month, when shooting for The Very Last started in Charleston.

I wanted her to stay as long as she could. We spent those first days ordering food in, lying outside by the pool reading, staying up late talking. So much talking, and so deep, that I sensed she’d been desperate to speak, to share herself. I realized I’d been desperate, too.

Talking to a profile writer about “the real me” was about as far from intimacy as one could get. My favorite, and scariest, stories from childhood were too sacred to have them published in a magazine. They’d be poached and “written up” for some nascent online site, then woven into my Wiki page. Eventually, that transformative afternoon when I was caught trying to shoplift the new Mariah Carey cassette in the pocket of my Umbro shorts (true story) would become some stranger’s casual piece of trivia. Not mine at all anymore.

The Umbro story, these were the kinds of stories Cass and I shared as we sat in my living room one night drinking red wine. Unspooling our lives. How we came to find ourselves on the same green velvet couch, our legs either tucked under us (Cass) or extended on the coffee table (me).

I knew she had secrets—I knew she was a secret—but I also knew everything she was telling me was true. Too much detail, and too much pain. I’ve read enough scripts to smell a made-up life when I hear one. Hers was just boring enough to be real, just dramatic enough to be compelling. A hardscrabble childhood in a small lakeside town in New York. An absent father, a preoccupied (the nice way of putting it) mother, an obsession with getting out of there. And then some awful, unfortunate stuff I hadn’t yet gotten the full scoop on.

Neither of us knew much about wine, except that it seemed like the sophisticated thing to drink. We landed on a cabernet sauvignon instead of a pinot noir because the description of pinot suggested that sometimes it could be “dainty” and at this we looked at each other and said, “Nah,” and started laughing. Big and bold were the descriptions for the cabernet. We liked that better.

The bottle was on the coffee table. I leaned forward, poured myself a little more, offered some to Cass. She extended her glass, and I channeled every wine-pouring scene I’d ever watched. I even spun the bottle at the end to keep it from dripping on the sofa. Well executed, I thought.

Cass had underpacked, unaware of how chilly Los Angeles nights could be. This was fine with me because now she was sitting a few feet away in my heather gray Kansas Jayhawks hooded sweatshirt. She was holding her glass in one hand, the other twirling one of the hoodie’s drawstrings.

The more casual she dressed, the more beautiful she became. Her laugh was rich, and she was quick to it. My favorite part was how she squinted while doing it.

I wondered what she was noticing about me. Whether she found me as nuanced and dynamic as I found her.

We hadn’t yet talked about the book. I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure she did. The book seemed tied up with the mysterious part of her life. For a few seconds, we said nothing, each took a sip of our wine, pretended to understand and savor it. Then Cass said, “So…,” injecting the tiny word with steroids, so it was robust. I waited. She dropped her head against the back of the sofa and looked at the ceiling. “You know, I wanted to be you,” she said. “Still want to be you, actually.”

“Me?” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Wanted to be me as in Single White Female ? Even though I ruled it out instantaneously, a pang of fear echoed in my body. (Thanks a lot, fame.)

“I mean an actor,” she said quickly, sensing my weirdness. “It’s why I said yes immediately to coming out here. Even though Sidney said it was, and I quote, the stupidest fucking idea ever, I wanted to come meet you and see what my life could have been like if it hadn’t gone completely off the rails the way it did. Of course, Sidney is terrified that now, after how careful we’ve been, I’m going to fuck it all up.” At this last part, she glanced over at me with her head still back, hair spilling over the back of the couch.

“I’m talking too much,” she said, lifting her glass. She smiled softly.

Was she flirting? I wanted to touch her hair, run it through my fingers.

How to respond, how to respond, how to respond —I wanted something that kept us on this track but didn’t scare her away. “Do you want to… ‘fuck it all up’?”

She was holding eye contact as she said, “I want,” then stopped. Was that the beginning of a sentence or its entirety? Both, probably. We were still looking at each other, one second, two. Then her eyes darted up and to the left. She started shaking her head, subtly. “I want so many things I don’t think I can have anymore, and I’m trying to—move through all that wanting.”

Wanting things, I could relate to that. I often wished a life in Lawrence could satisfy me. But I needed more. It wasn’t just about money or fame; it was something else.

“Cosmic bigness,” Cass whispered. I stared at her, unnerved. Had I heard correctly?

“Wait,” I said. “Say that again.”

“I don’t know, it’s just—” she started, but I interrupted.

“No, I mean, what did you just say?”

“Cosmic bigness?”

“Oh my god,” I whispered back, meeting her eyes. The phrase defined some unnamed thing within me. “That’s exactly what it is.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“Is there a cure?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No known cure.”

“So, we’re doomed?”

“?’Fraid so.” She took a big gulp of wine.

We watched each other over the rims of our glasses, then I asked, “So why does Sidney think us meeting would ruin everything… and what’s ‘everything’?” (I wanted more information on this Sidney Collins.)

Nobody except Janie and my sister knew that I was gay. Matt, if I’d told him, he would have laughed, told me I had a morbid sense of humor. My mom and dad and brother, no way. They were too immersed in midwestern, middle-class culture to understand. They’d think it was some Hollywood affect rather than the way I’d felt since seeing Julia Roberts in Notting Hill when I was a kid. Watching her stand there, just a girl, asking a boy to love her, I realized I wished she’d been asking a girl to love her. And I wished that girl was me.

But this was the 2000s, and short hair and tuxedos were not going to make me America’s sweetheart. I did what was needed, wore couture gowns and painted smokey eyes. But whenever I walked the red carpet I imagined—and this is embarrassingly true—that the cameras were Julia Roberts and my goal was to make her want me.

Now I wanted Cass to want me. Gone were my thoughts of platonic allyship. Did she know I wanted her? And how could I make sure she did? These were the thoughts going through my head as we worked our way through the bottle of wine.

“Sid, well, things with her are impossible to describe.” Cass sat upright again. She switched which leg she was sitting on and draped her arm over the back of the sofa. I couldn’t help but notice her hand was now so much closer to me. Just a few inches from my left shoulder. That obviously had been the purpose of the readjustment, no?

I fidgeted so that I could bring my body a little nearer to the tips of her fingers. Her nails were unpainted, her hands tan I and slender. She continued, “What’s everything? Um, I guess ‘everything’ is this wall we’ve built between me, who I am, my identity, and the book and all of that. There’s a bunch of layers so that it would be impossible to identify me as the author—Sid’s the only one who knows, I guess until now. She said the only way people could find out who I am is by human error.”

“And I imagine she’s worried you”—I pointed at her—“are the human who might commit this error?” The gesture was multipurpose. It reached its full potential when my lifted hand dusted her forearm. Lingering on her arm felt too bold. I let my hand slide off and onto the back of the sofa. Now our forearms were running parallel, separated by just a few inches. She was speaking again, but my focus, and my eyes, was on the space between us. I pictured a ruler measuring how far apart we were, imagined a tiny pencil behind my ear to record the number. Was it two inches exactly? Maybe even less.

I tuned back in midsentence. “—she says it’s about the business, but I think actually it might be about you.”

Shit. That’s a sentence I wish I had heard in full. “Wait.” I shook my head—maybe best to be honest?—“I was, well, my mind wandered for a moment. Can you say that again?”

She raised her eyebrows. Flirtatious, yes, almost definitely flirtatious. I bit my bottom lip in a way I hoped was subtle and sexy, not cheesy. People bit their bottom lip for all different kinds of reasons.

“I was just saying that it seemed to me that her concern about blowing my anonymity was just the pretense, and that really Sid was against this trip because she was jealous.”

“Of… me?”

We both know the answer to that , was the look on Cass’s face. Fair enough; I had been fishing for a compliment. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to look like a picture. Maybe Cass and this Sid had been something to each other. Maybe they still were. And maybe coming to meet me, to see what life was like in Hollywood, was about more than just the book and the movie. Maybe Sidney was beautiful and brilliant and everything Cass wanted, but I was sensing not.

Enter: Ry Channing.

A public relationship was not possible. The allure of Cass, beyond her sexiness, was her commitment to anonymity. Right on the heels of Sarah, she was the anti-Sarah. And my train of thought was chugging along, moving quickly enough that I couldn’t vet each step, and the next thing I said was, “I mean, how bad could it have been, this thing you’re hiding from?”

A cold frost descended on my cozy living room. It was a dumb thing to say. But in those brief seconds, I was playing out the entirety of our relationship. Eventually, Cass’s mysterious background and need for anonymity would become an issue. Maybe I wanted reassurance that it was all being blown out of proportion. We were both young. It was a sample-size issue. Maybe this thing felt like a big deal now, but she’d come to realize it wasn’t? If not, then dating me was off the table.

As the last word left my mouth, I could sense Cass retreating. Then I could see it, her arm lifting from the back of the sofa and crossing with her other arm against her chest. For someone paid to charm millions with a look, I’d managed to alienate Cass with just a few wrong words.

“I think I’m gonna head to bed,” is what she said instead of Why the fuck did you ruin the night?

“Wait, Cass, don’t.” I was in full retreat. “I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to ask, and you don’t owe me an explanation.”

“It’s not that,” she lied. “I’m just… exhausted—it’s late my time.” She stood, extended her arms overhead. Let out a big yawn. It sounded authentic, and caused me to yawn, too. “See?” She seemed pleased my body had inadvertently confirmed her fake rationale.

By the time we made it to the hallway—me in my doorway, she in hers—she had softened again. I tried to shake off the weird energy but couldn’t. I dragged her into my inner turmoil and said, “I’m sorry I asked you that.” I gestured my thumb back toward the living room, where the two half-drunk glasses of wine would stay overnight. “I know how annoying it is when people pry.”

This last part was true. She was already shaking her head and brushing away my words. Her head dipped a little, and she looked directly at me. Then she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Maybe she was waiting for me to move toward her, but I couldn’t be the one. Not after stumbling so hard just a minute earlier.

A beat, another beat, her eyes searching mine. When nothing came, she said, “Good night then, Ryan,” and turned into the room. The door closed noiselessly behind her. Picture me standing there for probably a full minute, wondering if she was just on the other side of the door. II Wondering if she was also waiting, hoping I would softly knock.

I . Note from Cate: My mom once explained our complexion as “Black Irish,” courtesy of some long-ago Spanish traders who had settled in the country. I brown easily.

II . Note from Cate: I was.