My first paying acting job was a small supporting role in a low-budget tragicomedy film. I played a mousy vampire/college student named Margaret Moon, who went on a blind date with the intention of murdering the guy for his blood, but then chickened out and ended up dying in the middle of act two. The movie bombed and spent less than two weeks in theaters. It was made right on the tail end of the vampire craze, and between filming and when the film was released, zombies became the new vampires. In the entire history of my career, no one had ever told me they’d loved me as Margaret Moon. Before Emily St. James.
I found myself relaying this weirdness to Will as we waited to meet Emily at the Ba(r) close to Gloria’s house later that night. Emily, eager to chat and to meet Margaret Moon in person, had offered to drive out here to me.
Will and I had both just endured a very silent dinner of brisket and kale salad with Gloria. I’d watched her slice through the tender meat with her fork, douse it in ketchup, frown at the kale salad on her plate and skip it altogether. Will had spent the meal averting his eyes from me, I’d assumed trying not to let on to his mother that we had made any sort of connection. The room had been so silent, I’d been thankful for the sound of Jasper’s little claws clicking on the floor as he’d run under the table hoping for scraps. After that, I was honestly in need of a glass of wine, even a bad one.
“So it’s possible Emily St. James is a vampire herself, and she’s meeting us for nefarious reasons,” Will said now as we grabbed a table in the corner. The bar was even more empty tonight. We were the only ones here.
“Sure, sounds reasonable.”
Will leaned in close to me, across the table. “The bigger question is, where can I see you as Margaret Moon? I’m intrigued.”
“You can’t. It’s not streaming.” I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. But my face reddened at the thought of Will watching me in my first and most embarrassing role. It was in my pre-Method days, and far from my best work. I didn’t want that to be the first time Will saw me acting. “You should check out Saving Addy, if you really have any interest in watching me act. I mean, it’s also fine if you don’t.”
Will laughed and pulled out his phone like he was about to search but we were interrupted by the bartender asking us what we wanted to drink. I decided to try my luck with the local sauvignon blanc tonight and Will ordered a beer on tap.
And just then Emily walked in, saw us, waved and walked over. She looked about Gloria’s age, but her hair was a natural wispy gray, tied back in a messy ponytail, which made her seem simultaneously older and younger than Gloria. Will put his phone down and stood up to pull out a chair for her. The bartender asked her what she wanted, and she said she was sure whatever I was having would be great. Great hadn’t been my experience the last time I’d been here, but I didn’t say that.
“Thank you so much for meeting me here,” I said instead.
“Are you kidding?” She grabbed my hand and clasped it tightly between her own. “What an honor it is to meet you. We watch The Sharpest Bite in my book-to-film class every semester and you are just a delight as Margaret Moon.”
Will bit his lip and looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh. I narrowed my eyes at him, and he turned his attention back to Emily. “Sorry, I should introduce myself,” he said. “I’m Will, Gloria’s son. I hear you know my mother, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“Nice to meet you, Will.”
This didn’t sound like the same woman Marge had been talking about, the one who had taken care of Will after Gloria was in a car accident. Certainly, that woman would’ve met Will before.
“How exactly do you know Gloria?” I asked.
“Oh gosh...we met at a writers’ conference here in Seattle so many years ago. You were a baby, Will. I remember she’d left you at home with your father, and it was her first week away from you and she kept worrying about that.” She paused as the bartender set down our drinks and she took a slow sip of her wine. She didn’t grimace, so I took a sip of mine. It wasn’t too bad! “Anyway,” she continued. “We met at this conference—we were paired up as critique partners—and then we stayed in touch over the years. Even after she became The Gloria Diamond she was kind enough to blurb my first novel.”
I made a mental note to google exactly what that novel was later. Then I tried to digest everything she had just said. That once, Gloria was a struggling writer. That Emily had met her when George was still alive, which was the time period when I would be portraying her. And also, that she was kind?
“So what was Gloria like at that time?” I asked. “Anything you can share, any details you remember, could help me play her in the movie.”
Emily smiled widely at the mention of the word movie, and I could practically feel her excitement radiating in the shimmer of her pale brown eyes. “Well, she went by Mare back then,” she said, once she caught her breath. I nodded. “And she was quiet. Very unassuming. But she had an edge to her. She was cool but she wasn’t trying to be. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said, but then I thought about my friend Jemma from college, who was a theater and dance major with me, but whom I never got super close with because she was always somewhat aloof. Well-dressed and pretty and quiet enough that I couldn’t tell if she was silently judging me or if she was just shy. I could see Gloria having been like that too. “Well, maybe, I do,” I added. “Clarify edge.”
“I got the sense she was... I don’t know, hardened somehow. Or maybe that was just the vibe she wanted to give off back then? She wore ripped black jeans and a black T-shirt and a lot of black eyeliner. And I remember being shocked when she said she had a baby because she didn’t look like one bit like a mom.”
Will frowned, and I felt a little sorry for him. Gloria was a lot of things, but in spite of her telling me how much she loved Will, it sounded like she had never been very maternal. Not in the years he was throwing a tantrum at the Eiffel Tower, not now. But then I remembered what she’d said about not knowing how to be a mother at first because she’d never had one herself, and I felt sad for both her and Will.
Emily took another sip of her drink and thought for a moment before she spoke again. “Also, I don’t know if this helps you. But I find it interesting. Back then, her work was very dark. Nothing at all like the Gloria Diamond books.”
“Dark?” I raised my eyebrows. That seemed to fit with the black clothes and black eyeliner vibe. After having spent the last few days with Gloria I could weirdly picture this being more fitting than her Queen of Romance title and her obsession with diamonds.
Emily nodded. “She was working on a literary novel about an abusive family at that time.” Emily shook her head. “I remember it to this day. Her writing was so gorgeous, haunting really. It made me cry.”
“I wonder how she went from that to writing romance novels,” Will mused.
Emily shrugged. “I think after your father died and she moved out here, it shook everything up for her. Sometimes as novelists we write what we know and sometimes we write to escape what we know.”
I understood that, felt that as an actress too. Sometimes I took roles to escape and sometimes I took roles to understand. With Gloria, it felt like both. I didn’t believe in the afterlife, yet, it felt like this role had a straight line to my recently dead mother. I could still remember the warmth of my mother’s smile when a new Gloria Diamond book would come out and she’d rush to Vroman’s to buy it. I felt tears welling up again just thinking about it and I bit them back, determined not to cry in front of Emily, or Will again.
“Oh!” Emily exclaimed, digging through her bag. “I almost forgot, I brought a few pictures.”
Pictures. Jackpot!
She pulled two worn Polaroids from her oversize purse and handed me the first one: a young Gloria, dressed all in black as Emily had said. Her hair was, what I assumed to be her natural color, a light brown, the color of honey. She wore it in a high ponytail, big bangs teased up and framing her forehead. She had her arm around a very young Emily, who in contrast to Gloria, wore a hot-pink oversize sweatshirt.
“This is great,” I said. I asked her if she minded if I snapped a photo with my phone to study later and she shook her head. When I was finished, she traded me for the other photograph. This one was a group of maybe ten of them in what looked like a bar. They stood in front of some very ’80s wood paneling, in two rows, a few of them holding on to frosted mugs of beer. “Were these all the writers at the conference?” I asked Emily.
She pulled up a pair of readers from a bejeweled chain around her neck, and then reexamined the photo. “Yes,” she said. “All except this one. This was a friend of Gloria’s who we ran into at the bar that night.”
She pointed to someone in the back row, next to Gloria. Half his face was covered by a taller guy in front of him, but he looked vaguely familiar. I turned and met Will’s eyes, and his raised eyebrows told me he was thinking exactly what I was. This kind of looked like the man in the photograph I’d found on Gloria’s diamond-studded desk.
“Do you know his name?” I asked.
Emily thought about it. Then shook her head. “I don’t remember. It was an old friend of hers from college, I think. And we just happened to run into him at the bar—actually I think he might’ve worked there—and then he joined us for drinks. There were a lot of drinks that night.” She laughed, and then she took a small sip of her mediocre wine as if to emphasize her point.
“And you and my mother...you stayed close after that week?” Will asked her.
Emily shook her head. “I wouldn’t say close. We certainly have kept in touch here and there over the years. We both ended up back here in Seattle by some weird fate, but we don’t see each other often.” I guessed that explained how she had never met Will. She stopped talking and finished off her mediocre sauvignon blanc. “I’m so excited for her success, though. A movie about her life!” she added cheerily. Then she turned and smiled at me. “And Margaret freaking Moon.”