Silver Lake
You are hiding in your Honda outside Aegon’s office because you don’t want to see him. You slump way down in the driver’s seat when pedestrians walk by and eye you suspiciously: a teen mom pushing a stroller, an old man with a wiry grizzled mutt, a guy trudging home in a stained and unbuttoned chef coat. Still stalling, you flip down the sun visor and check your makeup in the small rectangular mirror. You randomly remember reading somewhere—a Reddit post, a TikTok video, an Instagram story—that it’s stupid to coordinate your eyeshadow with your outfit, but you’ve been doing this since high school and today is the very first time you can remember feeling self-conscious about it. You wear dull, earthy shades to match your brown floral sundress, the same color the leaves will turn when autumn arrives in Minnesota: Volatile by Anastasia Beverly Hills, Undone by Urban Decay.
You glance at your phone. It’s 11:04 a.m. on Wednesday, July 23rd, and you are officially late. With great reluctance, you drag yourself out of the car and clop up the concrete steps in your wedges. As if to remind you of past transgressions, your formerly-sprained left ankle gives a twinge of complaint.
Inside the rundown half-duplex, Brandon is not at the reception desk. He’s not here at all. From Aegon’s office you can hear that he is talking to someone, a familiar voice that you can’t immediately place, hushed but heavy, gravity in each word like a black hole. Then you realize who it belongs to. You hover just outside the doorway, listening.
“You can’t avoid me forever,” Aemond is saying.
There is spirited clicking, what you assume are Aegon’s thumbs on his transluscent orange Nintendo 64 controller. “Sure I can. I’m doing it right now.”
“Aegon…is everything okay?”
“Yup.”
“Are you…are you afraid you might—?”
“Nope.”
Aemond is exasperated. “Well did you ever take a test?”
“No, you know I didn’t.”
“But, I mean…are you experiencing…do you have some reason to suspect that…? Because you’re still pretty young, but with anticipation...”
“Shh,” Aegon cuts him off, spotting you in the threshold. His Nike Killshots are up on the desk, the Nintendo 64 controller in his hands; he’s wearing a seafoam green button-up shirt and khaki cargo shorts. He looks very retired. “Hey, sunshine.”
“Hi,” you say meekly, stepping into the room. You’ve been caught eavesdropping.
Aemond glares at you. He’s overdressed for Los Angeles: black suit, emerald green tie, shoes that shine like dark mirrors. “Go away.”
“Don’t snap at her,” Aegon flings back. “She’s the one with an appointment.”
“And you’re always so concerned with protocol!” Aemond shouts, and Aegon at last relents and pauses his game—Mario, his ubiquitous red cap adored with two white wings, is flying through clouds high above the castle—and sets the controller down on his desk, cluttered with gum wrappers and loose papers and framed photographs. There’s something else too, a homemade bento box situation with steamed broccoli, slices of tamagoyaki, and onigiri that look like miniature pandas.
Aegon peers wearily up at his brother. “I’m fine, Aemond. Really.”
“Don’t act like you had some sudden realization that Los Angeles is shallow and ridiculous, you’ve been bitching about that your whole life. That’s why you’re working all the way out here in this dump.”
Aegon stretches his arms lazily, pulling one across his chest and then the other. “I’ve been in the game for a long time. Now I’m ready to pack it up.”
“What are you going to do all day in Houston? Swing in a hammock while Becca hand-feeds you barbeque and cornbread?”
“Sure. Maybe.” Then he grins. “She makes fantastic cornbread. Warm and fluffy and slathered with honey butter, I believe you’ve had some.”
“You didn’t tell any of us you were leaving,” Aemond says, and there is more than just annoyance and suspicion in his scarred face. There is hurt. There is betrayal.
“I figured you’d freak out.”
“You were correct.”
“And your concern is both noted and appreciated, but it’s unnecessary.”
Aemond—hovering in his dark suit like a storm cloud—stares at Aegon, hands on his waist, furious, helpless. He notices the blue china bowl full of fresh Honeycrisp apples on the edge of Aegon’s desk. “And you don’t eat fruit!”
“Yeah I do. Guacamole is a fruit. Strawberry ice cream is a fruit.”
Aemond snatches an apple and hurls it at Aegon, who laughs and bats it away with one hand. Then Aemond moves like a gale of wind to where you stand by the door, and he towers over you, and he radiates dizzying heat like midsummer asphalt. “How’s he been?” he demands.
And you are so startled and bewildered by the question that you blurt out the first thing that pops into your mind. “Perfect.”
New creases appear in Aemond’s brow. He turns back to glance at Aegon, who shrugs like he’s just as perplexed by it. Then Aemond huffs an aggrieved sigh and leaves the office, the lobby, the building. You hear the front door slam as he yanks it shut behind him.
“What was he talking about?” you ask Aegon.
He is nonchalant. “Nothing. Industry stuff.”
“Aemond said something about a test…?”
Aegon sets an elbow on his desk and rests his chin in his palm; and as he gazes up at you with those overcast blue eyes, a little pathetic, a little wise, you have a terrifying thought that seems to come out of nowhere: Am I in love with him? “Aemond is worried that I’m leaving because I’m in some kind of trouble,” Aegon says. “Professional trouble. But I’m not. I’m leaving because I hate this place and everybody in it.” And then, when you wince: “Not you. I didn’t mean you.”
“But I’m not enough of a reason for you to stay.”
“Nobody would be, sunshine.”
From out in the lobby comes the noise of the front door opening, and then Brandon sails into Aegon’s office with a tray of three drinks from Starbucks.
“Hi, Brando,” Aegon says, sounding tired.
“Hey, superstar! I saw your brother outside. He looks as stressed as usual.” Brandon gives Aegon his drink, a Frappuccino with whipped cream and chocolate syrup swirled on top, and then passes you a venti-sized iced latte. You take a sip, cold and sweet and with several generous pumps of vanilla syrup, not sugar-free. “Did I get that right?”
“It’s wonderful,” you assure Brandon, smiling. He smiles back and leaves carrying his own selection from Starbucks, a grande-sized Pink Drink. He closes Aegon’s office door as he departs.
“So,” Aegon says, examining a list he’s made on a yellow legal pad. “The Maroon 5 music video is coming out in early August. They’re doing a little premiere thing at a place in Downtown, some fans who won tickets will be there. You’ll walk the red carpet, I’ll be hanging around as usual. It sounds like your Grey’s Anatomy episode will air in November, so that’s on the horizon too. And you got a callback for the vampire movie.”
You slurp your vanilla latte and stare at the mint green wall. “They’re not going to pick me.”
Aegon tosses the legal pad onto his desk; it lands with a thump. “Why would you say that?”
You shrug morosely, still not looking at him. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you? You’re here because you’re trying to be an actress. And it’s working.”
You shake your head, tears brimming in your eyes. “I’ve had two jobs in the five months since I moved to Los Angeles. You lied to get me the first one, and I basically had a mental breakdown at the second and you had to save me. And I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me, Aegon, I really am. But everyone else told me I was insane to do this and I think they were right.”
“I’m your agent,” Aegon says. “I’m supposed to get you jobs. But I didn’t make you talented. You did that yourself.”
“I’m not like these people. I don’t look like them, I don’t think like them.”
“And that’s okay,” Aegon insists vehemently. “You can still be an actress.”
“I can’t handle it.” Now you’re sobbing, dabbing your eyes with a Starbucks napkin that Brandon handed you with your latte. It comes away tattooed with dark smudges from your eyeshadow. “I can’t get told that I need a new body or a new face all the time and keep pretending it doesn’t bother me. I can’t assume everyone has the worst intentions. I can’t be naked around strangers and not care. I can’t…I can’t…” I can’t stop wanting him. You stare down at the napkin, humiliated. “I can’t do horrible things like sleep with an almost-married guy and still believe I’m a decent person. And this isn’t fun anymore, and I don’t feel like it’s working, and when people tell me I’m just wasting time and money by being out here I can’t think of reasons why they’re wrong.”
Aegon gets up and comes to you, leans against the edge of the desk where the china bowl of apples rests, lifts your chin and forces you to look at him. “You’re really, really good at this. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“You were good,” you whimper, remembering all the hours you’ve spent watching his films and his shows and his interviews, all the times you’ve fallen asleep to the deep melody of his voice. “And you hated Hollywood so much you gave up on acting and ran to Elysian Park. And now you’re running all the way to freaking Houston, Texas.” And I’m never going to see him again.
“Just because it didn’t last for me doesn’t mean it won’t for you.”
“I don’t belong here—”
“You want this for the right reasons,” Aegon says with such force you don’t dare to interrupt him. “Not for attention, not to get rich, not so people you’ve never met will want to fuck you. And I can’t even begin to tell you how rare that is. You’re going to see this through. You’re not giving up yet. I won’t let you. Because the world is better with you in it the way you are now—bright, brilliant, hopeful, and yeah, naïve sometimes, sure, but real—than as the bitter, soulless person you’ll become if you walk away because someone else told you to. And I believe in you, and I’m fighting like hell for you, and I—” He stops abruptly, and whatever he was going to say next is lost like a sandcastle to the waves, because when he begins again it is a different line of thought entirely. “Your callback is next Tuesday on the 29th. You’re going to it.”
You sniffle into your napkin, but you’d be lying if you claimed you weren’t at least somewhat inspired. “Okay.”
Aegon plucks an apple out of the bowl, goes back to his chair, flops down in it and watches you as he takes a bite, juice glistening on his lips. “I’ll get you the script once they send it over. It sounds like it’s just a conversation with your on-screen mother. They want to make sure you can do the boring scenes too. Should be pretty easy, I’m optimistic. They’re trying to decide between you and one other actress.”
“Okay,” you say again, rallying. I can do this? I can do this. Maybe.
“You liked the guy, right? The vampire?”
“Santi? Yeah, he was great. Friendly and professional.”
“Awesome,” Aegon says, gnawing on his Honeycrisp apple, a tad preoccupied.
A potential conflict occurs to you. “You said the Maroon 5 music video comes out at the beginning of August?”
Another bite. “Yup.”
“What day?”
“Um…” Aegon checks the legal pad. “Friday the 8th. Why?”
“Because I have to fly to Minnesota. But I’ll be back on August 5th, so it’s fine.”
Aegon raises an eyebrow. “Missing your ex-boyfriend?”
You laugh, wiping away the last of the dampness from your eyes with the napkin and then shoving it in your purse. “No, definitely not. I’ve been summoned for bridesmaid dress shopping. My sister is getting married.”
He chomps on his apple. “Not looking forward to it?”
You hesitate, taking an evasive sip of your vanilla latte. “I always like seeing my family. I miss them. But they don’t take the California thing seriously and I’m going to have to spend like ten hours listening to them trying to convince me to become an entertainment lawyer, and I really don’t have the heart for that right now.”
Aegon admires the bitemarks that riddle his apple. “Do you think your family would take it more seriously if I talked to them?”
You are mystified. “How would you do that?”
“By flying home with you.”
You gape at him, stunned. “You can’t go to Minnesota.”
Aegon smirks. “I’m not on a leash. It’s just a few days, right?”
“Well…yeah. I’m leaving Friday the 1st. My mom wanted a full week, I negotiated it down from there.”
“Would they care that I’m a Targaryen?”
You recall how your dad had recognized the name, how your mom gasps over celebrity tabloids at the grocery store. “Probably.”
“Then send Brando your flight information and he can buy me a seat on your plane, or at least on one that’ll land at the airport in Minneapolis around the same time. And I’ll reimburse him in cash.”
“So Becca won’t know where you’re going?”
“Exactly,” Aegon says like there’s no emotion attached to it, just pure logistics.
You finish your latte as you mull this over. It’s wrong for him to lie to his fiancée. It’s wrong for him to abandon her to fly across the country with me. But soon they’ll be married, and she’ll have him forever, every night, every day, every vacation, every holiday, and I won’t even have scraps like the one lunch a week you’d grab with a casual friend. I’ll have nothing but Becca’s agonizingly idyllic posts on Instagram, glimpses into their sun-drenched filtered forever. “We can’t hook up or anything like we did at the gala. Even if it wasn’t…successful.”
“Agreed.” And then Aegon tilts his head to the side. “I hope you don’t think you were at fault.”
You shrug. Of course you do.
Aegon sighs, then gives you a small, crooked smile. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t overthink it.”
“I’ll try not to.”
He stands up. “Let’s go grab something to eat. In-N-Out Burger?”
You look at the homemade bento box on his desk, and you don’t need three guesses to figure out who must have assembled it with such practiced, painstaking care. “Isn’t that your lunch?”
“I’m craving something worse for me.” He offers you what’s left of his Honeycrisp apple, one lone island of gleaming cream-colored flesh marred around the edges with notches left by his teeth. You consider the apple, then take a bite: chewing slowly, licking saccharine juice from your lips. Aegon holds out a hand, asking for one of yours. When you acquiesce, he places your palm on the front of his shorts so you can feel that he’s hard. “Just so you know you weren’t the problem,” he says cavalierly. Then he puts on his sunglasses and leads you outside into the daylight.
Aegon has gotten his white Sebring convertible repaired: no more dent in the front passenger’s side, no more broken headlight. He drives with the top down and the wind in his hair, and the air is hot and golden, and you can’t stop looking over at him.
I can’t want him. He’s getting married, he’s leaving, he’s a mirage, he’s a time bomb.
Aegon’s iPhone is plugged into the aux. One song ends and another begins, Keith Urban’s You’ll Think Of Me. You immediately recognize it because your dad is a Keith Urban fan; he once dragged you to a concert in Saint Paul when you were in high school. Both Clara and Tripp flatly refused. Aegon frowns and skips it. Next up is You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette.
You ask: “Why do you have a song on your playlist that you don’t want to listen to?”
“I have to be in the right mood for it,” Aegon says. You watch him curiously, and after a moment he adds: “It was my dad’s favorite song.”
“Oh.” His dad who died of a long illness when Aegon was a teenager. His dad who is a ghost that still—I feel, I know—haunts the Targaryen family like a generational curse. “Aegon, what did your dad die of?”
A pause. “Cancer.”
“That’s awful,” you say gently, but in the back of your mind you remember: I searched ‘Viserys Targaryen cancer’ on Google, and nothing came up. Not one article, not one photograph, not a single post on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Is that possible? “What kind?”
Another pause. “It metastasized all over.”
“But where did it start?”
“That’s a rude question,” Aegon snaps, and you are immediately repentant. He’s right, it is.
“I’m so sorry. Never mind.”
Aegon pulls into an In-N-Out Burger’s parking lot, orders two cheeseburger combos with Cherry Cokes and Animal-Style fries, pays with cash like he always does.
~~~~~~~~~~
In your bedroom closet, the sunflowers that Aegon once bought for you in the Flower District hang upside down as they dry, becoming perpetual, becoming eternal like a bloodline or a star. On the calendar affixed to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like pineapples, you write reminders for yourself in red ink: a callback on July 29th, an eastbound flight out of LAX on August 1st, a music video premiere on the 8th. This is more of a habit than a necessity. You have a good memory for dates.
You assume that Jace will be thrilled when you tell him you’ll be home in Minnesota for a few days—no one will be here to ask him to turn the television volume down or not to pound on his Yamaha keyboard at 2 a.m.—but instead he seems sad, like you’re a cat he’s gotten used to having around. Jace’s mood improves drastically when Baela informs him that she’ll be stateside for a visit soon. He doesn’t say it, but you know: he misses her like hell.
Brandon finds Aegon a ticket for your flight, and when Aegon boards he pays a teenager with a hoodie and earbuds a hundred dollars in cash to switch seats with him so he can sit next to you. You aren’t sure why, as Aegon doesn’t talk much; he slides on his sunglasses and naps for most of the three and a half hour voyage. As he dozes, his right leg bumps against yours and rests there, benign pressure, corporeal warmth here at a frigid altitude where nothing should survive. You try not to move so Aegon won’t wake up and reposition himself. And although you alternate between staring out the window at clouds and imagining yourself as the heroine in the murder mystery novel you’re reading, your thoughts are very much contaminated by him, poisoned, drugged, irradiated, enlightened.
I’m in love with him, you think calmly at 35,000 feet. It’s wrong and I wish I wasn’t. But I just am.
The plane hits turbulence during the descent, and Aegon jolts awake. “You’re okay,” you soothe, and he gives you a drowsy, grateful smile, his sandy blonde hair falling in his eyes. There’s a family travelling with a toddler in the row in front of you, and the little boy in a blue t-shirt with a shark on it keeps peeking back between the seats and giggling as you entertain him: a tongue darting out like a frog’s, hands over your head like a moose’s antlers. Aegon watches this, fascinated, wistful, and you think to yourself: That is not the face of a man who doesn’t want children.
Your brother Tripp picks you and Aegon up from the airport in his Land Cruiser. He spends most of the ride asking Aegon about various celebrities lawyers he’s met, Robert Shapiro and Shawn Holley and Harvey Levin. At their ornate three-story home in Apple Valley, Minnesota, your parents are dressed like they’re going to a job interview, because being a Targaryen in Hollywood is like being a Kennedy in Washington D.C. and even the very least of them has a certain glitter that people are always hoping will rub off. Aegon thanks them for their hospitality and offers to sleep on a couch. Your parents laugh and show him the guest bedroom.
While he’s in there unpacking his suitcase, you hear Aegon through the closed door chatting on his iPhone. His voice is cheerful and warm and harmless, the same way it often is with you. You are abruptly struck—as if with a blade or fist—by the reminder that none of this is real. A mirage. A time bomb.
“Hey, babe. Yeah, I just made it to Chicago. Oh my God, it’s incredible, my hotel room has a view of the river. That’s the same one they dye green every Saint Patrick’s Day. Uh huh. I will. How are the dogs…?”
You grab your own phone out of your purse and text Mason: Hey, I’m home. Take me to Target?
He replies after a few minutes: I’m kind of talking to this girl at work…
No, it’s literally just Target, you type. Mason agrees. Thirty minutes later you’re jogging down the driveway to climb into his Chevy Silverado as Aegon glares out of the living room window. Clara is busy pinning wedding inspiration photos on Pinterest, Dad and Tripp are watching CNN, Mom is in the kitchen with Angela the housekeeper preparing dinner. They’re making prime rib.
You purposefully take your time at Target, leisurely perusing the makeup aisles and buying an iced vanilla latte from Starbucks. Mason tells you about how his job is going. You tell him about California. When you run out of things to say, you ring up your items at the self-checkout. Then you hide the shopping bag in the bushes outside your parents’ house so Aegon won’t see it and know where you’ve been.
~~~~~~~~~~
“It’s a middle child thing,” Mom says as she nurses her third glass of red wine, her eyes sparkling, her Ann Taylor skirt suit formal but her mannerisms unusually relaxed. She likes Aegon, perhaps too much; she seems to be flirting with him. Your dad, meanwhile, dissects his bleeding slab of prime rib to excise every globule of fat. Clara is scrolling through her phone and picking at her glazed carrots. Tripp is blithely wolfing down mashed potatoes.
Aegon smiles politely, but he doesn’t know what your mom means. “Middle child…?”
“Clara was the oldest, and Tripp was always so clever and so confident, such a natural leader, and so…you know…she was always scrapping for attention.” Mom gives you a fond pat on the back of your hand. Across the table, Aegon’s brow furrows as he eats a homemade yeast roll plastered with butter. You shoot him a dull, resigned glance. This is how it goes. “That’s the only way I can explain her penchant for acting. No one else in the family is like that. We’re…we’re professionals, you know? We’re serious people.”
Tripp snorts. “Mom, you were a waitress.”
“Only until your father was done with medical school, dear!” Then she turns her attention back to Aegon. “And obviously I don’t mean to say that your family members aren’t professionals, Aegon, no no no, but surely you’d agree that there is a world of difference between being an accomplished producer or agent or screenwriter, and doing this…” She waves her glass around, searching for the right word. Red wine sloshes thickly like blood.
“Dabbling?” Dad suggests.
“Yes!” Mom says. “This dabbling that she’s doing out there in Los Angeles. It’s filling some void for…for…oh, I don’t know, praise or identity or something. But eventually she’ll get it out of her system and she’ll come home and grow up. And we’re all looking forward to having her here again, aren’t we?”
Your dad and Tripp grunt in agreement. Clara continues scrolling.
“I actually think she’s pursuing acting for the right reasons,” Aegon says, cordial yet firm. “And that’s pretty rare, in my experience. I mean, I’ve seen her act, she’s a natural. She’s really good. And I can’t picture her doing anything else for a living.”
Your dad forks a tiny, perfectly square morsel of prime rib into his mouth. “Aegon, you are clearly taking your job as her advocate very seriously, and we’re appreciative of that. But even you have to admit, the odds are just…it’s unrealistic, isn’t it? The competition is so fierce. Our little Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is nothing compared to Hollywood.”
“Guthrie?” Aegon says, intrigued. “Like Woody Guthrie?”
“No, everyone makes that mistake,” you explain. “A completely different Guthrie.” But didn’t I tell him that already? On the day we first met?
“And you did very well there,” Dad says to you. “But the industry out west is cutthroat, I mean you can’t just be competent, you have to be exceptional.”
“I know, Dad,” you reply softly. You keep trying to eat your prime rib, but you suddenly have no appetite. You push the pieces around on your plate, leaving trails of blood and grease.
“She’s found work,” Aegon says, like he’s pointing out something obvious. “It’s not like she hasn’t made any progress. She was in a Grey’s Anatomy episode. She was in a music video for Maroon 5.”
“Oh, I love Maroon 5,” your mom sighs dreamily. She’s barely eaten anything, which isn’t helping with the wine situation.
“But those projects…they haven’t been released yet, have they?” Dad asks.
“Not yet,” Aegon concedes reluctantly. “But they will be soon. We have dates.”
Your mom hums sympathetically. “It all just seems so uncertain, doesn’t it? Maybe she’ll be on tv…maybe she won’t…things can always get shelved at the last minute. Distribution rights can be litigated. Actors can be recast.”
“She’s up for a big part,” Aegon says, like he can’t understand why none of this is penetrating, like he’s trying to convince someone of the color of the sky or the fact that the planet is round. “She has a fifty-fifty shot of being the lead in a movie.”
“A real movie?!” Tripp exclaims. “Damn, that’s lit! What kind of movie? Marvel? James Bond?”
“It’s an independent film,” you say.
His enthusiasm fades. “Ohhh. So like a student film.”
Dad is nodding, vindicated. “Hm. A student film. Hm.”
Tripp begins: “One of my law school friends made student films back in undergrad—”
“It’s not a student film,” you say. “It’s just not funded by a major studio. But it’s still an actual movie.”
“That’s great, honey,” Mom tells you. “Clara, did you figure out what kind of cake you’re going to have at the wedding?”
“This could be her breakthrough,” Aegon says. “Like Winter’s Bone was for Jennifer Lawrence. Little Miss Sunshine was an indie film, and Juno, and Moonlight, and Good Will Hunting, and The Blair Witch Project, this is legit, okay? And if she gets the role, she’s going to be fully committed. Production, press tour, everything. She’ll need your support throughout all of it.”
“You’d need to stay out there in California longer?” Dad asks, looking concerned. You aren’t sure if he’s more worried about his family or his wallet.
“If she’s getting roles, she should stay forever,” Aegon says. “That’s where she wants to be.”
There is an uncomfortable silence that falls over the dining room table. Your parents are frowning, you are shrinking, Tripp and Clara are exchanging a look, some kind of telepathic concurrence on the subject of how ridiculous you are.
Finally, your mom titters woozily. “We’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we? We can cross that bridge when we get there.”
“I knew Kinsley should have been my maid of honor,” Clara mutters, and your parents rush to reassure her that you’ll make time for wedding-related obligations, just like you are now by flying home for dress shopping. Clara resumes scrolling. Tripp scoops himself more mashed potatoes. Beneath the table, one of the Akitas growls at you until you buy its forbearance with a dropped hunk of prime rib.
In the lull between dinner and dessert—Mom and Angela have made an authentic Watergate salad, allegedly invented in Minnesota in the 1970s—you take Aegon out back to show him the patio, the rolling hills, the paddocks of horses grazing as dusk begins to turn the sky the color of gore or flames or love. You are each clasping a glass of wine in your hands; your mom insisted on pouring them. She is in good hostess mode, her own tipsiness notwithstanding.
“And I thought my family was a tough crowd,” Aegon says, gazing at the horses distractedly. “Well, what the fuck am I going to do now? I can’t retire and leave you alone with these people.”
“Guess you aren’t allowed to run away to Texas after all,” you say, smiling weakly. You’re glad he’s here. You hadn’t been able to imagine it before, but now you see it too clearly: trips home with him, holidays with him, a life with him you aren’t entitled too. “Thank you for those things you said.”
“They weren’t favors. They were the truth.”
You look at him, awed, heartbroken, trying to disguise both. “You’re the only person who has ever believed in me.”
“And I don’t even believe in you that much,” Aegon teases, grinning, and he makes you laugh, even here, even now. “If I really am the only one who believes in you, that just means everybody else is stupid. Super stupid. Incurably stupid. Try to remember to mention me in your Oscar acceptance speech.” Then his hand shakes violently and he drops his wine glass, and it shatters on the stones of the patio, and he is mortified. “Oh fuck, I’m so sorry, I’ll clean it up—”
“It’s okay. I’ll help you.” You run inside and return a moment later with a broom and dustpan from the kitchen closet. Aegon takes the broom and you hold the dustpan as he sweeps. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I be?”
“You hand,” you say. “I thought it was a…I don’t know, like a spasm or something.”
“I saw a bug in my glass. I panicked.”
The dustpan is filling up with jagged nuggets of glass that remind you of something, and then you remember: the broken glass on the floor of his office the night you were together there, the first time, the only time. “So guess what,” you say.
“What?”
“When Mason picked me up, we went to Target. Just Target. And I bought a bunch of makeup and we didn’t even hug.”
Aegon looks down at you from where he’s sweeping. “Seriously?”
“I swear to God.”
He is pacified, you think; and yet he doesn’t understand. “Why?”
“I’m a one-dude kind of girl, unfortunately.”
He smiles, puts the broom aside now that the mess is dealt with, and sits down with you on the stone patio stained with red wine. You both gaze westward to where the sun is setting, and when you rest your head on Aegon’s shoulder, he lets you do it. Then you feel his arm circle around your waist, gentle safe insubstantial weight. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. About his marriage? About his retirement? About what he’s done to me?
“Aegon, why can’t you break up with Becca? Why can’t we give this a real shot?” It’s a question that sounds more like a plea, soft and clandestine.
“You’re very young, and you’re idealistic, and you’re happy. And I wouldn’t be good for you.”
“You leaving Los Angeles won’t be good for me.”
“I told you. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
And he has nothing more to offer, and you can’t bear to ask again, so what’s left say?
Late at night, you try to fall asleep knowing that Aegon is just down the hall in the guest room, and you can’t banish the visions in your skull of you padding across the hardwood floor and climbing into his bed, knowing that he would not reject you, knowing that he would take anything you were willing to give like a vampire drains a victim of blood.
I can’t do it. He’s not mine.
To strengthen your resolve, you open Instagram and go to Becca’s account, once private, now a window she has opened to show you exactly what you can’t have. You scroll through hundreds of photos of her beautiful beachfront house in Malibu that she shares with Aegon, of her beautiful cooking and baking, of the beautiful scenery she has captured in snapshots, of her beautiful face and body. Then, for the first time, you click on the link in her bio to her blog: rebeccawilsonwrites.wordpress.com. Most of her entries are recipes or DIY hacks or accounts of her life with Aegon, and her love for him bleeds from the screen. She writes about their anniversaries, their holidays, their vacations, their rituals that all couples have like religions in miniature. She knows his favorite foods and colors. She is forever stumbling upon trinkets that remind her of him and are gingerly ferried home. She calls him her best friend, the world’s greatest dog dad, the love of her life.
You read from this almanac of their relationship until your tears blur the text and you don’t want to walk down the hallway, don’t want to touch Aegon, don’t want to see him, wish you could go back in time and never set foot in his unassuming little office in Elysian Park, a place named for paradise and yet so hellish, sinful, cursed.
You spy a tab at the top of the blog labeled Poems, and you are puzzled. You had no idea Becca was an actual writer. You browse through a dozen poems, mostly about nature, none particularly gripping or revealing. Then you stumble upon one that catches on you like a fang through flesh. Six Weeks, it is titled. And immediately you are dragged back to Venice Beach where Aegon confessed that about a year ago Becca got pregnant, and then she told him about it—this very wanted child, at least from her perspective—and very soon afterwards she wasn’t pregnant anymore. And if that baby had been carried to term, it could have been born around the start of this summer, if your math isn’t wrong. The poem reads:
Summer
was supposed to be our
savior, the tree limbs arced with fruit
and brimming, pumping xylem-flush
through pinstripe veins the width
of a spider’s leg—and the space between
plates weeping—as the world bellied out
and we recalled the taste of indiscretion
on our spines. The Earth revolved
to frost, and our passion
smothered in brown-upholstered, sterile
heat creeping through the office
vents, the paper sheets, the biting
gleam, my own cells pumping anesthetic
and fate, where every cloud has a scarlet
lining and there is nothing
in the trees but
air.
You put your phone down on your nightstand, curl up beneath the blankets, believe wholeheartedly that you do not deserve to have your name written in the stars.
~~~~~~~~~~
Silver Lake has been a haven for counterculturalists since the early-1900s: communists, bohemians, artists, musicians, civil rights activists, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, people who are gay or trans or otherwise incongruous with mainstream American society. It’s Wednesday, August 6th, and you are here—just northwest of Downtown, Chinatown, and Elysian Park, just east of Hollywood—with Baela and Jace. Baela is briefly home from Paris, and she has a million stories to share; everything she sees and does seems to spawn a new one, ever-multiplying like the heads of a hydra. She buys a coffee and gushes about café au lait. She points out all the words that have come from French, roughly one-third of the English language. She laments the lack of public transportation. She decries fast food.
You are clearly in need of cheering up, and so Baela insists you come along to a shabby little club with a storied history. There are photographs covering the walls, portraits of musicians who have performed here over the past century and writers who have read their works aloud. There is a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band playing live. You wish you’d known this in advance so you could refuse to attend. Their music reminds you of Aegon. Your dress is a glittery indigo, and your eyes are painted with shimmering bruise-like shadow to match: Huda Beauty and Anastasia Beverly Hills, Big Dreams and Dark Matter.
It’s crowded and loud, low ceilings and floors wet with spilled drinks. As you wait in line with Baela and Jace by the bar—people are pushing their way to the front to place their orders—you study the photographs on the wall. Right beside where you stand is a massive black and white picture of Woody Guthrie playing an acoustic guitar. According to the plaque below it, he once performed here back in 1941.
“Hey, it’s Woody Guthrie!” you say. “Everyone thinks the theater I worked at back home in Minnesota was named after him.”
Baela nods, a bit forlornly. “Yeah. It’s a shame what happened to Woody.”
“Why? What happened?”
“He died of Huntington’s disease,” Baela says, and then finally sees an opening and surges up to the bartender. She orders beers for herself and Jace and a lemon drop for you. She knows you like them.
“What’s Huntington’s disease?” you ask when she returns.
“Oh, it’s horrible. You lose control of your body and go insane and then you die.”
Viserys? you think, the dread dawning red and primal. “Is it genetic?”
“What?” Baela shouts over the music.
“Huntington’s. Do you inherit it from a parent?”
“I think so,” she says. “Arlo Guthrie didn’t get it. But Woody had two daughters who died pretty young. Around forty.”
Viserys? Aegon? “I’ll be right back,” you tell Baela.
“Don’t you want your lemon drop?!” she calls after you, but you’re already gone.
You sprint into the bathroom, packed with women and drag queens checking their hair and makeup in the mirrors, and barricade yourself in a stall. The light is neon, blue and cold. You yank your phone out of your purse and start Googling. Through the walls, you can feel the quaking reverberation of the bass guitar. You can hear the Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band starting a new song.
“I got a bad disease,
Up from my brain is where I bleed,
Insanity, it seems,
Has got me by my soul to squeeze…”
Yes, according to Wikipedia, Huntington’s is genetic. A parent with the disease has a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to each of their offspring. It is incurable. It is invariably fatal.
“Well all the love from me,
With all the dying trees I scream,
The angels in my dreams, yeah,
Have turned to demons of greed, that’s mean…”
You type Viserys Targaryen Huntington’s disease into the Google search bar and wait for the results to load. When the glowing screen starts trembling, you realize your hands are shaking.
“Where I go, I just don’t know,
I got to, got to, gotta take it slow,
When I find my peace of mind,
I’m gonna give you some of my good time…”
And you find a photo you’ve never seen before, not in all your prior Google searches, not in your five months here in Los Angeles. It’s from the early-2000s. It was taken at a fundraiser for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. In a wheelchair is a twisted greying man identified by the caption as Famed Hollywood producer Viserys Targaryen. His wheelchair is being pushed by a much-younger Alicent, and he is surrounded by faces you recognize, although they were only children then: tiny beaming Daeron, shy Helaena, Aemond, solemn and stoic and already scarred…and Aegon, lurking in the corner of the frame, hands in the pockets of his black suit, gazing hostilely at the photographer from beneath a shock of unruly blonde hair.
Viserys didn’t die of cancer, you realize with horror so visceral it rips the air from your lungs. He died of Huntington’s disease. And that means Aegon could have it too.