Station Eleven (26 page)

“You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.

Miranda set out in the early twilight. The air was clear and sharp, a cool wind off the lake. The familiarity of these streets. She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. “Your hair’s beautiful,” she said, and the barista smiled. The pleasure of walking cold streets with a hot coffee in her hand. Why did no one on Station Eleven have green hair? Perhaps someone in the Undersea. Or one of Dr. Eleven’s associates. No, the Undersea. When she was three blocks from the theater, she put on a knit hat that covered her hair, and dark glasses.

There were five or six men outside the theater, zoom-lens cameras on straps around their necks. They were smoking cigarettes and fiddling with their phones. Miranda felt a deathly stillness come over her. She liked to think of herself as a person who hated no one, but what did she feel for these men if not hatred? She tried to glide by as unobtrusively as possible, but wearing sunglasses after sundown had been a tactical error.

“That Miranda Carroll?” one of them asked. Fucking parasite. She kept her head down in an explosion of flashes and slipped in through the stage door.

Arthur’s dressing room was more properly a suite. An assistant whose name she immediately forgot ushered her into a sitting
room, where two sofas faced off across a glass coffee table. Through open doors she glimpsed a bathroom and a dressing room, with a rack for costumes—she saw a velvet cloak—and a mirror ringed in lights. It was from this second room that Arthur emerged.

Arthur wasn’t old, but he wasn’t aging very well. It was disappointment, it seemed to her, that had settled over his face, and there was a strained quality about his eyes that she didn’t remember having seen before.

“Miranda,” he said. “How long has it been?”

This seemed to her a silly question. She’d assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date.

“Eleven years,” she said.

“Please, have a seat. Can I offer you something?”

“Do you have any tea?”

“I have tea.”

“I thought you would.” Miranda shed her coat and hat and sat on one of the sofas, which was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked, while Arthur fussed with an electric kettle on a countertop. Here we are, she thought. “How are the previews going?”

“Fine,” he said. “Better than fine, actually. Good. It’s been a long time since I’ve done Shakespeare, but I’ve been working with a coach. Actually, I guess
coach
isn’t the right word. A Shakespeare expert.” He came back to the sofas and sat across from her. She watched his gaze flicker over her suit, her gleaming shoes, and realized he was performing the same reconciliations she was, adjusting a mental image of a long-ago spouse to match the changed person sitting before him.

“A Shakespeare expert?”

“He’s a Shakespearean scholar. University of Toronto. I love working with him.”

“It must be quite interesting.”

“It is. He has this extremely impressive pool of knowledge, brings a lot to the table, but at the same time he’s completely supportive of my vision for the part.”

Supportive of my vision?
He’d adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she’d last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now. “What a great opportunity,” she said, “getting to work with someone like that.” Had she ever in her life sat on a less-comfortable sofa. She pressed her fingertips into the foam and barely made an impression. “Arthur,” she said, “I’m so sorry about your father.”

“Thank you.” He looked at her, and seemed to struggle to find the right words. “Miranda, I have to tell you something.”

“This doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t. Listen, there’s a book coming out.” His childhood friend Victoria had published the letters he’d sent her.
Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander
would be available for purchase in a week and a half. A friend who worked in publishing had sent him an advance copy.

“Am I in it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, Miranda.”

“Tell me.”

“I mentioned you sometimes, when I wrote to her. That’s all. I want you to know that I never said anything unpleasant about you.”

“Okay. Good.” Was it fair to be as angry as she was? He couldn’t have known Victoria would sell the letters.

“You might find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but I have some sense of discretion. It’s actually one of the things I’m known for.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you just say you’re famous for your discretion?”

“Look, all I mean is, I didn’t tell Victoria everything.”

“I appreciate that.” A strained silence, during which Miranda willed the kettle to start whistling. “Do you know why she did it?”

“Victoria? I have to assume it was the money. The last I heard, she was working as a housekeeper in a resort on the west coast of
Vancouver Island. She probably made more on that book than she’d made in the previous decade.”

“Are you going to sue?”

“It would just be more publicity. My agent thinks it’s better if we just let the book run its course.” The kettle whistled at last; he stood quickly, and she realized he’d been willing the water to boil too. “Hopefully when it comes out it’s only a story for a week or so, then it sinks and disappears. Green tea, or chamomile?”

“Green,” she said. “It must be infuriating, having your letters sold.”

“I was angry at first, I’m still angry, but the truth is, I think I deserved everything I got.” He carried two mugs of green tea to the coffee table, where they left rings of steam on the glass.

“Why do you think you deserved it?”

“I treated Victoria like a diary.” He lifted his mug, blew on the surface of his tea, and returned the mug very deliberately to the table. There was a studied quality to the movement, and Miranda had an odd impression that he was performing a scene. “She wrote to me at first, in the very beginning. Maybe two letters and three postcards, back when I first started writing to her from Toronto. Then a couple of quick notes telling me about changes in address, with a cursory note at the beginning, you know, ‘Hi, sorry for not writing more, I’ve been busy, here’s my new address.’ ”

“So all the times I saw you writing to her,” Miranda said, “she never wrote back.” She was surprised by how sad this made her.

“Right. I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.” He looked up—and here, a pause in which Miranda could almost see the script: “Arthur looks up. Beat.” Was he acting? She couldn’t tell. “The truth is, I think I actually forgot she was real.”

Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.

“It sounds like you’ve had a difficult year,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It hasn’t been easy, but I keep reminding myself, people have much worse years than mine. I lost a few battles,” he said, “but that isn’t the same thing as losing the war.”

Miranda raised her mug. “To the war,” she said, which elicited a smile. “What else is happening?”

“I’m always talking about myself,” he said. “How’s your life?”

“Good. Very good. No complaints.”

“You’re in shipping, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Married?”

“God, no.”

“No children?”

“My position on the subject hasn’t changed. You had a son with Elizabeth, didn’t you?”

“Tyler. Just turned eight. He’s with his mother in Jerusalem.”

There was a knock at the door just then, and Arthur stood. Miranda watched him recede across the room and thought of their last dinner party in the house in Los Angeles—Elizabeth Colton passed out on a sofa, Arthur walking away up the stairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing here.

The person at the door was very small.

“Hello, Kiki,” Arthur said. The visitor was a little girl, seven or eight years old. She clutched a coloring book in one hand, a pencil case in the other. She was very blond, the sort of child who appears almost incandescent in certain lighting. Miranda couldn’t imagine what part there could possibly be in
King Lear
for a seven- or eight-year-old, but she’d seen enough child actors in her time that she could recognize one on sight.

“Can I draw in my coloring book here?” the girl asked.

“Of course,” Arthur said. “Come in. I’d like you to meet my friend Miranda.”

“Hello,” the girl said without interest.

“Hello,” Miranda said. The girl looked like a china doll, she thought. She looked like someone who’d been well-cared-for and
coddled all her life. She was probably someone who would grow up to be like Miranda’s assistant Laetitia, like Leon’s assistant Thea, unadventurous and well-groomed.

“Kirsten here likes to visit sometimes,” Arthur said. “We talk about acting. Your wrangler knows where you are?” In the way he looked at the girl, Miranda saw how much he missed his own child, his distant son.

“She was on the phone,” Kirsten said. “I sneaked out.” She sat on the carpet near the door, opened her coloring book to a half-completed page involving a princess, a rainbow, a distant castle, a frog, unpacked her pencils and began drawing red stripes around the bell of the princess’s dress.

“Are you still drawing?” Arthur asked Miranda. He was noticeably more relaxed with Kirsten in the room.

Always. Yes. When she traveled she carried a sketchbook in her luggage, for the times when she was alone in hotel rooms at night. The focus of the work had gradually shifted. For years Dr. Eleven had been the hero of the narrative, but lately he’d begun to annoy her and she’d become more interested in the Undersea. These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored. The Undersea was limbo. She spent long hours sketching lives played out in underground rooms.

“You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.” She had finally assembled the first two issues of the
Dr. Eleven
comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of
Dr. Eleven
, Vol. 1, No. 1:
Station Eleven
and
Dr. Eleven
, Vol. 1, No. 2:
The Pursuit
from her handbag, and passed them across the table.

“Your work.” Arthur smiled. “These are beautiful. The cover of this first one was on the studio wall in L.A., wasn’t it?”

“You remember.” An image that Arthur had once said was like the establishing shot for a movie: the sharp islands of the City, streets and buildings terraced into the rock, high bridges between.
Far below in the aquatic darkness, the outlines of the airlock doors that led to the Undersea, massive shapes on the ocean floor. Arthur opened the first issue at random to a two-page spread, ocean and islands linked by bridges, twilight, Dr. Eleven standing on a rock with his Pomeranian by his side. Text:
I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth
.

“He was on a space station,” Arthur said. “I’d forgotten that.” He was turning the pages. “Do you still have the dog?”

“Luli? She died a couple years back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. These are beautiful,” he said again. “Thank you.”

“What is that?” the little girl on the carpet asked. Miranda had forgotten about her for a moment.

“Some books my friend Miranda made,” Arthur said. “I’ll show you later, Kiki. What are you working on there?”

“The princess,” Kirsten said. “Matilda said I couldn’t color her dress with stripes.”

“Well,” Arthur said, “I can’t say I agree with her. Is that why you snuck out of your dressing room? Were you fighting with Matilda again?”

“She said it wasn’t supposed to have stripes on it.”

“I think the stripes are perfect.”

“Who’s Matilda?” Miranda asked.

“She’s an actor too,” Kirsten said. “She’s sometimes really mean.”

“It’s an unusual staging,” Arthur said. “Three little girls on the stage at the beginning, playing childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and then they come back as hallucinations in the fourth act. No lines, they’re just there.”

“She thinks she’s better than everyone because she goes to the National Ballet School,” Kirsten said, returning the subject to Matilda.

“Do you dance too?” Miranda asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a dancer. I think ballet’s stupid.”

“Kirsten told me she wants to be an actor,” Arthur said.

“Oh, how interesting.”

“Yeah,” Kirsten said without looking up. “I’ve been in a lot of things.”

“Really,” Miranda said. How does one talk to an eight-year-old? She glanced at Arthur, who shrugged. “Like what?”

“Just
things
,” the girl said, as if she hadn’t been the one to bring these things up in the first place. Miranda was remembering that she’d never liked child actors.

“Kirsten went to an audition in New York last month,” Arthur said.

“We went in an airplane.” Kirsten stopped coloring and considered the princess. “The dress is wrong,” she said. Her voice quavered.

“I think the dress looks beautiful,” Miranda said. “You’ve done a beautiful job.”

“I have to agree with Miranda on this one,” Arthur said. “The stripes were a good choice.”

Kirsten turned the page. Blank outlines of a knight, a dragon, a tree.

“You’re not going to finish the princess?” Arthur asked.

“It isn’t perfect,” Kirsten said.

They sat for a while in silence, Kirsten filling in the dragon with alternating green and purple scales, Arthur flipping through
Station Eleven
. Miranda drank her tea and tried not to overanalyze his facial expressions.