Emily Mandel - Station Eleven

“I don’t know,” Arthur says, at two in the morning. They are lying in his enormous bed at the Hotel Le Germain. He’s here in Toronto for three more weeks and then going back to Los Angeles. She wants to believe they’re lying in moonlight, but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric. “Can you call the pursuit of happiness dishonorable?”

“Surely sleeping with film stars when you live with someone else isn’t honorable , per se.”

He shifts slightly in the bed, uncomfortable with the term film star , and kisses the top of her head.

“I’m going to go back to the apartment in the morning to get a few more things,” she says sometime around four a.m., half-asleep. Thinking about a painting she left on her easel, a seahorse rising up from the bottom of the ocean. They’ve been talking about plans. Things have been solidifying rapidly.

“You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you? Pablo?”

“No,” she says, “he won’t do anything except maybe yell.” She can’t keep her eyes open.

“You’re sure about that?”

He waits for an answer, but she’s fallen asleep. He kisses her forehead—she murmurs something, but doesn’t wake up—and lifts the duvet to cover her bare shoulders, turns off the television and then the light.

15

LATER THEY HAVEa house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There are photographers who follow Arthur and Miranda in the street, who keep Miranda forever anxious and on edge. Arthur’s name appears above the titles of his movies now. On the night of their third anniversary, his face is on billboards all over the continent.

Tonight they’re having a dinner party and Luli, their Pomeranian, is watching the proceedings from the sunroom, where she’s been exiled for begging table scraps. Every time Miranda glances up from the table, she sees Luli peering in through the glass French doors.

“Your dog looks like a marshmallow,” says Gary Heller, who is Arthur’s lawyer.

“She’s the cutest little thing,” Elizabeth Colton says. Her face is next to Arthur’s on the billboards, flashing a brilliant smile with very red lips, but offscreen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her. She is very soft-spoken. People are forever leaning in close to hear what she’s saying.

There are ten guests here tonight, an intimate evening to celebrate both the anniversary and the opening weekend figures. “Two birds with one stone,” Arthur said, but there’s something wrong with the evening, and Miranda is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her unease. Why would a three-year wedding anniversary celebration involve anyone other than the two people who are actually married to one another? Who are all these extraneous people at my table? She’s seated at the opposite end of the table from Arthur, and she somehow can’t quite manage to catch his eye. He’s talking to everyone except her. No one seems to have noticed that Miranda’s saying very little. “I wish you’d try a little harder,” Arthur has said to her once or twice, but she knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet. The best she can do is pretend to be unflappable when she isn’t.

Plates and bottles are being ferried to and from the table by a small army of caterers, who will leave their head shots and possibly a screenplay or two behind in the kitchen at the end of the night. Luli, on the wrong side of the glass, is staring at a strawberry that’s fallen off the top of Heller’s wife’s dessert. Miranda has a poor memory when she’s nervous, which is to say whenever she has to meet industry people or throw a dinner party or especially both, and she absolutely cannot remember Heller’s wife’s name although she’s heard it at least twice this evening.

“Oh, it was intense ,” Heller’s wife is saying now, in response to something that Miranda didn’t hear. “We were out there for a week , just surfing every day. It was actually really spiritual.”

“The surfing?” the producer seated beside her asks.

“You wouldn’t think it, right? But just going out every day, just you and the waves and a private instructor, it was just a really focused experience. Do you surf?”

“I’d love to, but I’ve just been so busy with this whole school thing lately,” the producer says. “Actually, I guess you’d maybe call it an orphanage, it’s this little thing I set up in Haiti last year, but the point is education, not just housing these kids.…”

“I don’t know, I’m not attached to his project or anything.” Arthur is deep in conversation with an actor who played his brother in a film last year. “I’ve never met the guy, but I’ve heard through friends that he likes my work.”

“I’ve met him a few times,” the actor says.

Miranda tunes out the overlapping conversations to look at Luli, who’s looking at her through the glass. She’d like to take Luli outside, and stay in the backyard with her until all these people leave.

The dessert plates are cleared around midnight but no one’s close to leaving, a wine-drenched languor settling over the table. Arthur is deep in conversation with Heller. Heller’s nameless wife is gazing dreamily at the chandelier.

Clark Thompson is here, Arthur’s oldest friend and the only person at this table, aside from Miranda, who has no professional involvement in movies.

“I’m sorry,” a woman named Tesch is saying now, to Clark, “what exactly is it that you do?” Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor. She is about forty, and wears severe black-framed glasses that somehow remind Miranda of architects. Miranda met her for the first time this evening and she can’t remember what Tesch does, except that obviously she’s involved in some way with the industry, a film editor maybe? And also Miranda doesn’t understand Tesch’s name: is she Tesch something, or something Tesch? Or a one-namer, like Madonna? Are you allowed to have only one name if you’re not famous? Is it possible that Tesch is actually extremely famous and Miranda’s the only one at the table who doesn’t know this? Yes, that seems very possible. These are the things she frets about.

“What do I do? Nothing terribly glamorous, I’m afraid.” Clark is British, thin and very tall, elegant in his usual uniform of vintage suit and Converse sneakers, accessorized with pink socks. He brought them a gift tonight, a beautiful glass paperweight from a museum gift shop in Rome. “I have nothing to do with the film industry,” he says.

“Oh,” Heller’s wife says, “I think that’s marvelous.”

“It’s certainly exotic,” Tesch says, “but that doesn’t narrow the field much, does it?”

“Management consulting. Based out of New York, new client in Los Angeles. I specialize in the repair and maintenance of faulty executives.” Clark sips his wine.

“And what’s that in English?”

“The premise of the company by which I’m employed,” Clark says, “is that if one’s the employer of an executive who’s worthy in some ways but deeply flawed in others, it’s sometimes cheaper to fix the executive than to replace him. Or her.”

“He’s an organizational psychologist,” Arthur says, surfacing from conversation at the far end of the table. “I remember when he went back to England to get his PhD.”