I got to the producer’s house around nine. It was dark inside, much too hot for a cocktail party. I’d left my pills in the glove compartment, in a gold case I’d bought at a vintage shop a long time ago, back when dosing myself seemed a little more glamorous, and I thought of running back to the car, driving up Mulholland and diminishing my relationship to the world. But I soldiered on because, in between shoots and on the radio, everyone had been complaining about the locusts up there, the locusts were the talk of the town, and honestly it sounded a little terrifying. They’d come two years early and at night they feasted on chaparral and telephone wires or whatever. Lionel said it was all the proof we needed—of what I had no idea.

I plucked a flute of champagne from a catering tray. I don’t like to drink but it’s the kind of thing you do if you want to keep eating lunch in this town. A few people were swishing through the hallway, laughing and touching each other’s hands. One of them complimented my dress and said she’d admired it at a party earlier that spring. I tried to remember a mistake she’d made, even something insignificant—she had a tattoo of cherry blossoms on her forearm and you couldn’t see it very well because her skin was so tan. That’s the best I could come up with.

“Thank you,” I said.

At the end of the hall, I passed a shelf of gold trophies notable because they weren’t Emmys, and from there I found my way to the living room, a lofty space with a high, sloped ceiling made of glass. Dark palms rose from terracotta pots and the cast and crew members mingled throughout the room. After years of working together, their faces were so familiar they’d become the cabinet spices I ignored when looking for the cumin, the only one I ever seemed to use.

“Helen,” a voice said behind me. It was Agnes.

“Am I allowed to talk about it? Can we talk about Hong Kong?” she asked, as if the producers—or maybe I?—had banned the topic from conversation.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? But what’s going on?”

She was sweating. Not a lot, but she had a definite glaze. Her bamboo pattern dress swamped her waist but the top opened as elegantly as a calla lily, and her hair drizzled onto her shoulders like Spanish moss. For a moment, it seemed as if she was not really Agnes at all, she was some equatorial fertility goddess.

“The government is in crisis,” I said. “They won’t let anyone leave.”

“The people are really suffering.”

“That’s Buddhism for you,” I said dismissively, trying to invoke one of the four noble truths but instead sounding vaguely racist.

“Well, it’s unimaginable,” she said, taking a quick drink from a glass of beer.

Agnes had always struck me as vapid. Which, to be honest, is not the worst quality in an actress. It’s up there with narcissistic and insecure. You might expect those behaviors to torpedo a career, but they can make the difference between a callback and a long dark night of journaling. Vapid didn’t bother me. What annoyed me about Agnes was all her evangelizing about the benefits of Jojoba oil, which she apparently rubbed onto her skin after every shower, and her TMI reports about her barely legal boyfriend. And, at some point, she’d developed enough clout to establish a rule—if you had a scene with her that day, you had to meet her for breakfast and review lines, which is when I discovered her revolting habit of putting maple syrup in her coffee.

“Don’t you just love a good party?” she asked. Her lips curled into a smile, and she looked more like herself.

“A good one, yes,” I said.

“Oh, Helen. I really wish you’d stop it,” she said.

“Stop what?” I asked innocently.

“Going rogue,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was about to go on when Cyrus, the hair and makeup artist, wedged between us, accompanied on his upper lip by what was surely a leading candidate for cold sore of the year. He lassoed his arm around Agnes’s waist—how did such an enormous man ever get that job, I wondered—and hauled her over to a pair of skeletal production assistants. As if working from a secret script, they all dipped their heads and laughed.

I lingered for another hour, just long enough, I hoped, to ensure I’d be in everyone’s recollection. Before I left, I saw Lionel. I could tell he was reveling in some delicious secret just by the way he dredged the syllables of my name. Of course I was curious, but not enough to stick around, especially after one of the minor characters, who’d been killed off in the previous episode, came over and made a joke about rising from the dead to get his revenge. I found it a little pathetic. Lionel had the kindness to smile. I slipped away.

The next morning, I made a couple of seven-­minute eggs. Honestly I prefer a fried egg. The sizzle of a frying pan has a certain appeal to an American actress. In our coterie, there’s the archetype of a woman patrolling the aisles of a diner with a pot of hot coffee, dressed in a dusky pink uniform and serving solemn men in flannel shirts. The reality is, though, I don’t need the grease. What I do need is a slightly runny yolk and protein. A seven-­‐minute egg is a good compromise. To keep them from exploding you just have to run them under the tap first.

I sat down in front of the television and found Dry Ice on demand. “A serial killer and his family meet life’s everyday challenges head on—and the heads start rolling.” Lionel—his character’s name was also Lionel—works at a dry ice manufacturer and packages his victims in dry ice before shipping them to a friend’s warehouse, where the bodies are conveniently dissolved in enormous tubs of acid. So, Dry Ice. Part comedy, part soap opera. The show does nothing to explore Lionel’s motivations—there isn’t even a glib backstory of child abuse—but in Los Angeles literally every movie advertisement has a gun on it, so it seems like maybe the world’s OK with some casual unexamined violence.

Agnes plays Charlotte, Lionel’s wife. I’m Vivian, the susceptible neighbor. I fast-forwarded to one of our scenes, where Charlotte and Vivian meet at their children’s school because the teacher has disappeared—Lionel garroted him—and Vivian wants to discuss how the kids are coping.

“Ever since Jack left, the kids…they’ve really been acting out,” Vivian says.

“Maybe Lionel can talk to them,” Charlotte says encouragingly. “Maybe they need a man to set them straight.”

“No, no, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Vivian says.

“Why not?” Charlotte acts surprised.

“I’m sorry,” Vivian says. “I have to ask, is everything OK at home?” Charlotte stares at Vivian suspiciously.

“What makes you ask?” she says.

“Well,” Vivian says, “I had insomnia last night, so I made myself a cup of peppermint tea. I was drinking it by the front window and happened to see Lionel outside.”

“Oh?” Charlotte asks, her eyes widening.

“Yes,” Vivian says. “He was…prowling through the shadows. It looked like he was dragging something heavy.”

“Are you sure it was him?” Charlotte takes Vivian’s hand.

Here, the writers wanted Charlotte to suggest that I’d seen someone else—a sex offender who’d just broken out of prison—and that the steam from the tea had fogged the window. I was supposed to make light of how thank god I wasn’t raped.

As Charlotte begins to speak, Vivian reaches for her and strokes her cheek. “No,” Vivian says. “I know what I saw.”

“What, what are you, what are you doing?” Charlotte stammers.

She shifts uncomfortably on her feet, feeling for a wall that isn’t there as Vivian leans in slowly. The two women look at each other, then Vivian kisses Charlotte on the lips. They bow their heads like lovers weary with grief.

“I know,” Vivian says.

Going rogue, Agnes had called it. Improvising. That had been the first time. Paul, the director, never told me to stop. On shoot days he treated me like a shaman. I tried to be professional about it because I found Agnes so vulgar—everything she did seemed to ooze— and yet Charlotte, with the same raw materials, had cast a spell. There was tension in our storyline—I don’t know how the writers missed it—with me living next door all lonely and lost and Charlotte desperate to escape the prison of her complicity. So I took the initiative, which wasn’t like me at all, and it wasn’t very Vivian either, but it felt right.

The phone rang.

“You left early,” Lionel said.

“God has a script for all of us,” I said.

“Funny you should say that,” he snickered. “Are you free tonight?”

“I don’t need another ambush, Lionel.”

“How many times do I have to apologize?”

“Many, many more times.”

“My stars, Helen. He was not a bad person.”

“No, but he was a bald person.”

“I’m not setting you up this time. I promise. Seven o’clock?”

“Get cigarettes,” I said.

I straightened up the apartment, mostly escorting magazines from one room to another. After a late afternoon shower, I drove to Valley Vino for two bottles of red, then stopped at Gelson’s, where I bought a tin of overpriced Marcona almonds. While walking past the butcher, I was surprised to see so many people in line. Apparently there was a special on pigeon.

In the parking lot, a woman dressed in black kneeled to tie her sneaker. Next to her, an old man in a cowboy hat clapped sarcastically. Were they related? I sensed that the woman was not really tying her shoe, she was trying to avoid the man, and for a second I thought of offering her a ride. I pulled out of my spot but when I looked in the rearview mirror, the woman was gone. The man was still there clapping.

Lionel lived way up in the hills. He said he needed a certain amount of distance from other people, which didn’t make him special, it just made him rich. A wooden gate shielded the driveway from his neighbors. On the inside, stone bodhisattvas presided over abundant flowers. The house itself was a gleaming white cube with tinted black windows. It’d served as a refuge for me many times. When the gate opened and I saw Lionel standing barefoot on the grass, a butterfly on his finger, I found my heart smothered in gratitude.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” I said.

We kissed hello. His breath smelled freshly masked. “Come around back,” he smiled.

On a glass dining table next to the pool, Lionel had laid out a feast. Casually he ticked off the menu items—dandelion greens tossed with lemon juice, caramelized beets, a fennel raita and two steaming pigeon pies, which I should’ve seen coming. A loose gold bracelet dripped from his wrist as he splashed wine into our goblets. I found myself staring at his marvelous black chest hair through his unbuttoned shirt.

Right away he launched into a tasty bit of gossip. He spent a great deal of time on set, much more than I did, so through his stories I could judge everyone without actually having to know them. We often discussed the best way to murder everyone on the cast and crew. It seemed like a natural thing to do. For Agnes, we agreed on poison. For Paul, our director, a decisive gunshot to the temple. For Cyrus, I suggested a staged autoerotic asphyxiation. I really wanted to humiliate Cyrus. I was angry that he believed himself beautiful. I know beauty is relative, eye of the beholder and all that, but if I had to half starve for it, and someone like Cyrus was also beautiful, then the word just didn’t mean anything.

Lionel said one of the production assistants, whose job seemed to be getting out of people’s way, was dating Paul’s son. By accident she mixed up her texts and sent a dirty one to Paul.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He went to her apartment. He didn’t know she was dating his son. Paul thought he was getting a blowjob.”

“Oh my god,” I snorted.

Lionel slid a wedge of pigeon pie in front of me. He was usually an excellent cook but I found the pastry tough, and the caramelized beets more burnt than candied. Probably for the best, I thought, heaping more greens onto my plate.

“Have you ever stayed at the Chelsea Hotel?” he asked.

“In New York?” I asked. “I thought they tore it down.”

Lionel shook his head. “It’s under construction, but they still keep a few floors open for people like us.”

I must’ve looked puzzled because, exasperated, he said, “Celebrities.” “Anyway,” he continued, “I was there last week to shoot a commercial. After we wrapped, I had a gentleman caller over and was doing my melancholy man at the window routine when I saw the most remarkable thing. It looked like a small tornado of seeds churning above the traffic outside. There were thousands of them. But they weren’t moving in a circle, they were all scribbling around in different directions, yet they stayed more or less contained inside the shape of a funnel.”

“What were they?”

“Bees! I couldn’t tell at first but the tornado came closer and closer. They began to settle on a tree branch right outside my window. I mean, there were thousands of them knotted there together.”

“Sounds Biblical.”

“Exactly! That’s exactly right. They were building a nest. Unfortunately, my friend didn’t care. After a few hours, I went back to the window, but the bees had vanished. The branch was as bare as my arm.”

As if on cue, a pair of rabbits poked their heads out from the bamboo stalks surrounding the pool. One hobbled over to the water’s edge and began to drink.

“I read last year that cell phones were the reason all the bees were dying. Did you hear that?”

Lionel shook his head. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me.

“Anyway,” he said, turning back toward me and refilling my glass, “You’re going to want to drink this.”

“No, thanks, I—”

“Helen, I’m leaving the show.”

If you’re an aging television actress, you need three things—coping mechanisms, survival strategies and friends. I took a pill sometimes and I did a lot of Pilates. Like, a lot of Pilates—my heart was probably decrepit but my core could pit an olive. As for friends, Lionel was the closest thing I had, though I trusted him only to a point. Maybe it was because we could never be lovers. Or maybe because actors are always performing and can’t tell what’s real. Or maybe because Lionel was so much bigger than this town and I was just getting the most out of what I had, lucky to be here, who would’ve thunk it, Helen from Ohio. Even so, I had no one else, and without Lionel, it was only a matter of time before everyone looked at me like I was some shriveled up eggplant leeching off the vine.

“I’ve already discussed terms with Stanley and Mitchel,” he continued. “They’re talking to the writers now to find a graceful exit.”

“Why on earth would they let you leave?”

“Actually, it was their idea,” he said. “And it’s working out. I landed a movie deal and we film in Ibiza next month.”

“There’s no show without you,” I said, indignant.

“I’m flattered, Helen. But don’t make me do one of those eye rolls where I see my brain and have a stroke.”

“What?”

“It’s not my show anymore. It’s yours. And Agnes’s, I guess. The network is having a grand mal orgasm because of you. They think you’ve tapped into something big and fresh.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

I drank the wine, leaned back and looked up at the night sky.

“Did you get the cigarettes?” I asked.

He fished a box of Nat Shermans from his pocket—the flavorless neon ones. Sometimes his garish tastes got the better of him. I lit one and breathed in the punishing smoke, and thought momentarily of those black and white images of Marlene Dietrich holding a cigarette, black velvet, silver and snow.

“Aren’t you happy? Isn’t it what you want? You’ve got the lead,” Lionel said.

“I haven’t thought about what I’ve wanted in years.”

“Then you must be a true artist.”

“No, I’m a fool, and you’re a monster for having a laugh at me.”

“Oh, tut tut.”

“What are you accusing me of, exactly? Just so I understand.”

“Well, either you’ve been angling for the lead and your improvisations aren’t improvisations at all, they’re calculated—in which case, congratulations—or you’re genuinely channeling your character, which is what all of us dream of doing, although I haven’t believed in that idea in twenty-­‐five years, but either way, it’d appear that I’m jealous.”

I took a long drag.

“Why did you become an actor?”

“Oh, here we go. Spare me, Helen.”

“To become another person, of course,” I said. “But it feels a little less magical when you start doing paper towel commercials and the other person you’re becoming is a housewife obsessed with countertops. For a while I just wanted to scrape enough money to go to some remote island where I didn’t have to talk to anyone or be anything for as long as possible. Actually, I still want that. But even then, it’s an act. You’re not really there. You’re just performing the tourist. It’s all an act.”

Lionel scratched his nose, looking a little embarrassed and a little angry.

“But why now?” Lionel asked. “You’ve been playing Vivian for three and a half seasons.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It came out of the story. Vivian tells me what she—”

“Vivian is a character,” he said. “She’s a costume you put on.”

“I don’t mean it literally. Anyway, I thought you’d be happy that I took charge.” “But you’re not. You’re being so passive about it. You’re blaming her.”

I felt the flush of wine in my cheeks and fingertips. Half my cigarette had turned to ash. I tapped it, took another drag and closed my eyes. The dishes clattered around me, then the door to the house swung open and closed. I listened to the first locusts scratch up the night.

After a few moments, I followed Lionel inside.

On a long wooden table next to the kitchen, Lionel had piled up murder props from the show—there was the crowbar he’d used to bludgeon the mayor, an old heretic’s fork he made himself, and the bellows he’d shoved into his mother’s mouth and pumped until her lungs exploded. On the back wall, I noticed that he’d replaced one of his paintings with an original Francis Bacon. A face full of butchered meat spluttered from the collar of a suit. The background was bright orange.

Lionel had always been cynical but I’d never been the target. Now that I’d betrayed our shared negativity, he was angry. But it wasn’t my fault. It just happened. I’d begun to notice Charlotte during scenes, or Vivian did, rather, her lips, her skin, her inner frenzy. She was different than Agnes, less cloying, too short to be called voluptuous, though I suppose they were the same size. Charlotte summoned something inside me when I was Vivian, and in some desperate and elemental way, I was drawn to her. I couldn’t stop thinking of her, the two of us entangled, and felt something unusual like hope.

“Let’s go to a party,” Lionel asked. “It’ll be a good one.” There was always a party.

“You sure?”

“Actually, give me a few minutes to think it over,” he said sarcastically.

He went to the bedroom to shower. I sagged onto the couch and called my sister—no answer, not unusual—then scrolled the New York Times. I found an article about Taiwan and the Solomon Islands, and how foreign governments call Taiwan another name whenever they’re speaking with China—it was about “the linguistics of sovereignty” or something like that. It got me thinking about the Falkland Islands, and the war there in the early eighties. I couldn’t remember who’d won. I could still see the drab colors of the land behind the televised soldiers, and I wondered who they belonged to.

Lionel came out in a red silk shirt and white jeans. I looked at my dress. It was black, more of a cloaking device.

“Is this appropriate?” I asked.

“It’ll do,” he said.

I hadn’t realized how airtight his house was until we walked outside. The locusts sounded like knives falling through sheets of glass. I thought of the nervous women in horror movies who never make it to their cars. I reached for Lionel’s arm. He stiffened as we walked. Safely inside the car, with the doors shut and the engine on, I could still hear them.

We drove by boxy houses teetering on beams and stucco dwellings overrun with jungle plants. Occasionally through the trees I could glimpse the sprawl below, a vast grid of glowing yellow embers.

“What’s the party all about?” I asked.

“It’s for a friend of mine. I think you’ve met her. Fiona, from Mexico City.”

“The astrologer?”

“It’s her birthday.”

“Do Libras make good astrologers?”

“What do you know about the zodiac?”

We arrived around ten. I followed Lionel into a grisly looking building with yellow cursive letters affixed to the outside: “Murder Bar.” Apparently in the thirties a struggling actress had strangled her bichon frise there. Inside, everything was covered in red cellophane. Lionel barked into my ear but I couldn’t make out the words, the music was too loud, and he capered off to the bathroom with a man who had long straight white hair.

I thought of running out. I could call a car and be home by eleven. But I had no other claim for my attention, only the depressing prospect of watching television, so I went to the bar and asked for the house red.

A warm hand seized my arm. It was Fiona. Her dress looked like it was made of bubbles. I’d only met her once before, at Lionel’s, when she asked all the guests to select a card from her tarot deck. I’d picked the Tower and she’d acted strangely affectionate toward me ever since.

After I wished her a happy birthday, she smiled anxiously at me, as if I hadn’t finished my line.

“You look gorgeous,” I added, lifting my palms like why do we even try. I scanned her face for signs of aging—there were none, but she was on the edge of some anxiety, I could tell.

“Oh, you’re so sweet. I’m glad you came, Helen.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I love what you’re doing on the show,” she said, dipping her shoulder. “I could see it coming that day at the pool. I mean, all my clients want someone to wag a finger at them and tell them what to do, but sometimes, I tell them, destiny is a selfie you don’t recognize—you have hands, use them.”

I didn’t quite follow her. Probably she’d had a few drinks. It was her birthday after all. So I smiled and said, “When I want someone to wag their finger, I come right out and ask.”

“Oh, Helen. You’re very funny. I see why Lionel’s so fond of you.”

I waited for her to excuse herself, maybe glance over at the door and see someone she just had to say hello to. People were always searching for a way out. But Fiona stood there waiting expectantly. Her eyes were dark liquid tar pits and I couldn’t turn away.

“Well, he adores you,” I managed.

“If they didn’t need guidance, I wouldn’t have a job,” she said.

“Who?”

“My clients.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like a bar needs alcoholics.”

She leaned back and laughed. The bartender gave me a low look. Was he listening? I heard the song for the first time, it was the song about putting on a poker face, the one I always shut off in the car, all the Madonna imposters drove me crazy.

“It’s your birthday. Can I buy you a drink?” I asked, thinking that’s what people do.

Fiona pointed her finger at me, tsk tsk, or come with me, I wasn’t sure, and she whispered in my ear, “You really are something else,” before walking to the dance floor. Her friends gathered around. They looked happy. She looked happy. She looked over in my direction, smiled and flung her arms through the air.

I’ve always felt like a bathroom says a lot about a bar or restaurant. It’s where the owners are more daring in their personality or sense of humor, where they can inflict some kind of experience on you. Maybe it’s because the person inside the bathroom is trapped, they go in alone to relieve themselves, it’s a vulnerable place. Of course there are plenty of cookie cutter facilities with egg-­‐shaped sinks and walnut paneling, but to me those show a lack of aspiration, a desire to be acceptably bourgeois—I’m talking about places that have artisanal cowgirl pornography on the wall or video art of women burning in special effect flames.

I expected Murder Bar would feature a salon of starlet headshots. Something like that. You’d have to puzzle together their connection. Lots of no-­‐name teenagers along with Janet Leigh and Angie Dickinson. Women murdered on film. Women whose main role was basically to die. But after a long wait in line, I found the walls bare. Their color was pale orange, and an odorless prayer candle burned on the upper basin of the toilet. In the mirror, I was the only starlet.

I tried to tease out my hair a bit, it’d gotten a little clumped at the top, and a strange question came to me, do corpses get bedhead? Is that something morticians need to account for? That would’ve been a better job for Cyrus, by the way. To doll up the dead. Yes, of course, I guessed, but did I look like a corpse, to ask such a thing? Too much makeup? The light was a florescent bar on the ceiling. It didn’t help. I peered into the mirror, and thought I looked more like Vivian than me, the way my hair spumed from the center part and over my shoulders like a suburban orgasm. I imagined her inside the mirror, staring back at me, the actress who played her, evaluating my makeup—what a perfect word for all that it accomplished—and what it hid, a face caressed again and again by the hands of a clock.

“Go,” she whispered.

I pushed my way through the crowded bar. Fiona was still dancing beautifully. Lionel was nowhere to be seen.

In the taxi home, I started a mental to-­‐do list. But I got anxious thinking about Monday. It hit me that I wasn’t ready for this next stage. Lionel leaving the show was too steep a price to pay for some simple improvisations. I’d been so defensive when talking to him. I’d clung to my cover story, which I hadn’t realized was a cover story—because the story underneath was much more oblique. Maybe I’d blamed Vivian because I was ashamed of my attractions. I thought of Charlotte, humid, arms joggling whenever she thrust across a room. Our kiss was a chaos. So maybe it wasn’t Vivian, maybe it was me, and so what then? What did that say about Agnes, who I found intolerable? Was it only lust?

What even was a person, a body or a story?

On Monday morning, I drove to the diner to meet her. I found her in a booth next to a window. If I had to bet yes or no as to whether she’d brushed her hair, and my life depended on it, it was basically a coin flip. She could get away with things like that, the wild and unconquerable Agnes.

“Helen,” she said, drawing out the last letter. “I love the oversized buttons on that jacket. Very Audrey Hepburn.”

“I was going for Katharine,” I said. “Good weekend?”

“Marvelous,” she smiled, arching her eyebrows suggestively. “Victor and I never got out of bed.”

The waitress came over. She had an awful lot of blonde hair. I asked for egg whites and multigrain toast, no butter. Yolks were weekends only. Agnes already had her plate of food and was chopping her pancakes into small bites

When I took my script out and laid it on the table, she laughed, “Why even bother with that?”

But she put on her reading glasses and we started to rehearse.

The scene began with Vivian and Charlotte on the front lawn. The neighbor across the street had been hosting parties over the weekends, and we’d both witnessed SUVs full of girls in tinsel dresses arrive with gruesome-looking men.

“What do you think they do in there?” Vivian asks, gesturing toward the house.

“Well, they’re not playing Monopoly,” Charlotte says. “I wonder if we should send Lionel over to take a look.”

She arches her eyebrow, probing Vivian’s reaction—does Vivian understand the veiled threat?

“I feel bad for those girls,” Vivian says.

Charlotte says again, “Let’s ask Lionel to go over there.”

“What if we confront the neighbor instead?” I suggested.

Agnes bit off a sharp look, then said, “That’d change the whole episode. If Lionel doesn’t go over there, he won’t kill him in the second act…”

“The man-protector thing is sort of silly though,” I said.

“Helen, we haven’t been here two minutes and you’re already trying to change the script. Let the writers write. Let the actors act.”

“But what if we went to the door together?” I asked again, reaching for something, the salt or her hand.

“Why do you insist on doing this?” she said, slapping the table. Her fork clattered. A few people turned toward us, then looked away. “It’s ridiculous. You probably want us to take off each other’s clothes and then knock on the neighbor’s door and slash his throat.”

“I thought maybe if we talked about it beforehand, it’d be better. If you were more involved. Instead of surprising you during the scene.”

“Aren’t they improvisations?”

“Yes, but…”

She stabbed a bit of pancake. I watched her chew and swallow. A few morsels clung to her lips. She ate like a young girl who hadn’t learned to hate herself.

“You know what you need? You need to get laid,” she said.

The waitress came over and slid a plate in front of me. I looked over at Agnes, who covered the rest of her pancakes with a napkin. She drank from her mug of coffee. Her skin looked warm. All her rings were silver. I didn’t know anymore about Vivian or Charlotte, or Agnes or Helen. I felt the slowness of my breath, the up and down of it, in my chest, and I heard murmurs from different parts of the room, and I sensed my eyes beginning to tear. This person sitting across from me was someone I despised and someone I desired, and I didn’t want her to be Agnes anymore, and I didn’t want to be Helen, I didn’t want her as myself, I didn’t want to be loved for who I was, I just wanted to be swept away, I wanted to be erased.

She placed a crisp twenty-dollar bill next to her plate, rose from the table and left.

I sat and ate my egg whites. Afterward, I paid the check and went outside. A couple of old men in wheelchairs were parked on the curb, watching traffic. I asked if one of them had a cigarette.

“Well,” one said.

“How about you,” the other said.

“You’re right there, aren’t you,” the first one said.

“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked again.

They turned back to the traffic.

I drove to the studio, which was only five minutes away. I hadn’t had enough coffee so I stopped at the cart. The same man—Alex—was there every day. He handed me a hot Styrofoam cup and smiled. It boggled my mind that we still used Styrofoam. The ocean had a plastic island the size of Texas and we weren’t doing anything about it.

“Thanks, Alex.”

I turned to go but he waved at me. “My name is not really Alex,” he said.

“No?”

“It’s Roberto,” he said.

“Oh. Why do we all call you Alex?” I asked.

“The last man was Alex.”

I told him I was sorry, though he didn’t seem to care that much, just enough to report the error. I told him I’d tell the others, but probably wouldn’t—my stock would rise when everyone kept calling him Alex and he’d think I was the only one who respected him enough to use his real name.

It was still very early. The studio was dark and quiet. Near the equipment room I saw David, the cinematographer, talking to a woman from the network. He had on one of those tweed caps and was straddling a stool, and she wore a gray pantsuit and heels—I don’t actually know if she was from the network but that’s the kind of thing an executive would wear to the set. She touched his shoulder and laughed as I passed by, and I guessed that they were sleeping together.

On my dressing room door someone had affixed a sticky note with nothing written on it.

I went inside and found a terrible mess. I don’t know what it was about protein bars but they seemed to exert some mysterious power that prevented me from ever throwing out the wrappers. On the vanity, I’d left uncapped tubes of ointment and several blotting tissues.

Clothes were draped over the chair. Torn cardboard boxes on the floor. Piles of papers, mail, magazines.

When I was younger, everyone took dating so seriously. And there was an expectation of progress. When a relationship failed, it was supposed to teach you something that helped you later on. Everyone seemed to be striving for the same endgame. I guess marriage. But I never knew what I was doing. I never really learned anything. I grew weary of men and their elaborate idiotic attempts to fuck me. I’d never been with a woman—I didn’t hate the idea, but

I didn’t love it either. I just didn’t really care. If I’d dated women, would that have made life any easier? All my relationships failed because they’d been with actual people, and actual people are the most insincere performances. I’d tried to be a woman—a person people thought of when they thought of what a woman was—and I’d tried to be beautiful, I’d tried to be successful, but they weren’t my ideas, I just propped them up along with everyone else, we all just forced each other to assimilate to these things that lived between us and no one actually wanted.

Call time was eleven. I drank my coffee. After slipping into Vivian’s usual gray cashmere V-­neck and blue jeans, I went out to find Cyrus so he could fix my makeup, but he was blow-­drying Agnes’s hair. A few sycophants stood next to her, watching her hair billow. Agnes glanced my way. When she saw me, she pretended to smile. It was too loud to say anything because of the hair dryer so I just stood there. Finally, Cyrus shut it off, and with his hand he motioned me into the chair even though Agnes’s ends were still wet.

We did the scene the way it was written. Agnes sent Lionel to the neighbor’s house and he eviscerated the man with a pair of scissors. There wasn’t much chatter on set. Everyone was all business. Paul didn’t say anything to me about the scene. Neither did Lionel. At six o’clock, we wrapped, and I didn’t change, I just went straight for my car and took a pill. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t face the emptiness of my apartment and prepare some miserable dinner. I felt sick, like I’d just put an animal to sleep. So I decided to go for a drive.

The sun went down as I made my way to Burbank. I saw the dusty orange sky in the rearview mirror, and ahead, the night was coming on. It wasn’t long before the mountains behind Burbank blended in. There were fewer cars out than usual, and almost no one on the sidewalk. Before turning onto Crystal Springs, I took another pill, why not, then drifted through Griffith Park. I considered stopping at the old Greek Theatre if it were empty, but for what purpose, I asked myself, what good would that do.

I passed through Los Feliz and Silver Lake. By then the lights from the cars and buildings were beginning to blur and I wasn’t sure if I should continue. I remembered Agnes lived in Los Feliz and found myself turning around. Her Spanish style house was set off the road on a steep hill. The baby cypress trees on the lawn weren’t tall enough to hide the windows and I could see Agnes, or her silhouetted figure, fussing about the second floor, maybe searching for her keys or phone.

I slid down into my seat. I remembered I had a cigarette after all, one I’d taken from Lionel the other night, a neon green one, and lit it. The car was still running. I could feel the husky rattle of the engine in my legs. It wasn’t a powerful car. It wasn’t smooth either. The streetlights were bright as heaven. I watched Agnes throw her arms into the air. A dance or exasperation. I couldn’t tell. I moved my hand between my legs and rubbed my palm there. I let the cigarette burn in the ashtray. The locusts screeched all around me. Agnes leaned against a wall. I slipped my fingers underneath the waistband of my jeans. She just stood there. I don’t think she was doing anything. Maybe listening to music. I came. I barely had to move.

Time passed. I might’ve dozed off. I don’t know. A sharp knock on my window startled me. Agnes was peering in, her hand against her forehead like a woman staring into fog.

“What are you doing here?” she asked accusingly.

I’d always admired the softness in her eyes. She was angry but it was a rounded, hospitable anger, something you could work with. It’s what made Charlotte so sympathetic. It didn’t occur to me to say anything. I didn’t even roll down the window. I picked up the cigarette and the ash crumbled off the unlit filter, then looked up at the house, the figure was still in the window, then back at Agnes.

“Do you want to come inside?” she asked.

Her living room was hung with black and white photographs taken in Central America, Africa and Asia. Agnes was always at the center, surrounded by local women. They wrapped their arms around her. There was an abundance of cloth. And teeth. So many smiles.

She led me to the couch. Her boyfriend stood beside her. He was so young and beautiful. A personal trainer, I think. Victor. Short. Maybe Peruvian. In a sleeveless tee and gym shorts. I didn’t see a television. I reached for Agnes’s hand and she let me take it. It was so warm. I wondered if she still had the burden of her parents. Victor left the room and returned with a glass of water for me.

“You can stay here tonight,” she said.

“Do you want coffee?” the boyfriend asked. I shook my head.

They left the room. I heard them whispering. Then Victor returned.

“OK, up you go,” he said, lifting me in his arms and laying me on a bed in another room that smelled like an extreme meadow.

Agnes came into the room and she crawled into bed and covered us with the sheets. I felt her full weight next to me, her warm body against mine. She draped her hand over my hip and I felt her breath, the warmth of its arrival, the chill of it leaving, on the back of my neck.

“I’ll stay with you tonight,” she said. “I’ll stay with you just for tonight.”