Page 18 of A Very Snowed In New Year
I want to know what love is. I want to understand the love of a gruff man from a working-class family who met a vivacious grad student from London and then convinced her and her wealthy family that he would start a construction company and be able to provide for her if she would just stay in New York with him. I want to know the quiet torment that moved Yeats to be the one man who loved the pilgrim soul in a beautiful woman and love the sorrows of her changing face. I need to comprehend the selfishness of lovers that Elizabeth Bowen explored inThe Last September, how two lovers can be so intensely focused on each other when there’s turmoil all around them. Not that Rachel Balfour didn’t do a great job exploring it in theRidersseries too. But I didn’t write an essay on that in college.
And as she so often does, that girl whose journal I found three years ago drifts through my mind like a beautiful woman on a passing train. Or her emails do, I should say. It was such a brief but significant connection. I have no idea who she is or what she looks like. And part of me never wants to know. I want her to remain a pleasant, unknowable mystery in that way that you can really only enjoy things without analyzing them. PiperThanFiction. Author of some questionable fanfic, some excellent tween-girl kissing-book recs, and anAnimal Crossingjoke that was so clever it freaked me out. If that girl isn’t totally adorable and wonderful, then I don’t want to know.
I want a girlfriend that my fourteen-year-old sister doesn’t hate for once.
And I don’t want any of this for bullshit actor reasons.
I need to know that there’s more to life than this—material wealth and career success and physical beauty.
Notfinding love or a deeper connection isn’t exactly going to stop me from having sex with a woman I’m attracted to—I’m twenty-five, not two hundred and fifty—but the longing is there and it’s real. All the more so because I’m alone, surrounded by so many strangers, and it’s the holidays. I am not at home here.
That’s how my friend Justin was able to convince me to go to that agency party last night. He wasn’t wrong—I do need to get some. Turns out, I’m just not in the mood to have one more discussion about who should have been nominated for what this year or where to stay for Coachella next year. With anyone. No matter how shiny their hair is or how bendy they look. I left the party early and agreed to meet up with a few guys I know from NYU at a bar because it was on Sunset, on the way back to the hotel.
I saw a gorgeous girl getting into an Uber right in front of me when my driver pulled up to the curb. Long dark hair with bangs. Sexy boots. A body that would take me more than a minute to explore. The biggest, most beautiful smile I’ve seen in ages. She was gone before I could get my baseball cap on and get out of the car.
Still, it gave me a glimmer of hope. That jolt you get when you cross paths with someone who lights you up. Even if it’s in passing. Just knowing that someone is out there. Someone with the power to turn you on and remind you what it is to be a man, that there’s more to life than this.
But as soon as I got inside the club, I wanted to leave. It had an old-Hollywood-supper-club kind of vibe that was cool, but everyone there was like some generative AI program’sinterpretation of an attractive person. They looked familiar because their features were a combination of five or ten famous beautiful people I’d seen before, and yet nothing about themfeltreal or familiar. But I did get a waft of that perfume. Whatever that scent was that lingered in the cab that time I found the journal—that was in the air. I did two laps around the club, trying to find the aromatic, sexy, wise goddess. But no one there had that vibe.
I left after fifteen minutes and went back to my hotel to order room service. Alone. I usually stay at my uncle’s house when I’m in LA—my mum’s brother owns a really cool house in the Hollywood Hills—but it’s being rented out as a location for some Sofia Coppola film. So I watched the end ofIt Happened One Nighton TV, which is one of my mum’s favorite movies, then switched over toLaw & Order, feeling old and homesick as fuck before falling asleep.
I did not get some.
I did not attain any understanding of love.
I did not experience joy.
I didn’t even get laid.
I got three swag bags filled with about five thousand dollars worth of stuff, a bunch of phone numbers that I didn’t ask for, invitations to yet more parties that I don’t want to go to, and nothing.
It’s not that I don’t know how to have a good time. Iama good time when I’m with the right crowd. I just didn’t find my people last night.
And now, here I am on Sunset again, on my way back to my hotel after a meeting with a producer, and it’s taking twenty-five minutes to drive ten blocks. This city blows.
The thing is, I remember being really into it the first few times I came out here. All of it. I think everything about this place just pisses me off more in December. It’s the Christmaslights in the palm trees.Fuck you, palm tree Christmas lights. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree would steal your wallet and then eat you for breakfast.
Out of the corner of my eye, a twenty-four-hour diner captures my attention.
I need something sweet.
My mouth waters, and I’m craving cherry pie all of a sudden—what is up with that?
Just as I’m calculating how much extra time I’d have to spend at the gym if I can manage to change lanes and get across the street to the diner parking lot, my phone rings. It’s my agent’s office calling. So much for the calorie surplus. I answer the call and wait for Rita’s assistant to put her on.
“Holden Archer,” she says, as if reading my name off a list. “Evahso delightful to see you at the party last night.”
“And you, Rita. Ever so.”
“I got an email from Adam saying your meeting was fantastic.”
“It was fine. I told him when this series is over I want to play an out-of-shape nerd with a desk job. But only if the script is amazing.”
She laughs. And then coughs. As usual. “That’s adorable, kid—you’re adorable. It just so happens there’s a script in development about an attractive but out-of-shape office nerd who gets mistaken for a spy and has to go on the run. Then he saves the entire world from aliens.”
“Why does he have to be mistaken for a spy to save the world from aliens?”
“I just read this shit, hon. I don’t write it.”
