Charlotte Lucas’s restaurant is tucked away on a quiet, leafy side street in Silver Lake, the sky streaked pink and indigo through the dense, heavy branches of the mimosa trees overhead. Will is expecting some kind of echoing, gentrified macaroni factory but in fact Lodge is small and intimate and familiar in a good way, the walls painted a warm cream and votives flickering in tidy lines on the wide wooden tables. Out back is a courtyard, wisteria vining along the brick walls and tiny white lights strung up overhead. It reminds him of the kind of place you’d find hidden down at the end of a pee-smelling alley in the West Village back home, and for a moment he misses New York so much and so viscerally the inside of his head starts to roar.
Lilly and her sisters are already clustered around the bar when he and Charlie arrive, the five of them wielding champagne coupes like cudgels in their delicate, manicured hands. Will stops short at the sight of them, somehow startled even though Charlie explicitly told him they’d be here. Every time he thinks about the other night at Rebecca Barnes’s party—Lilly’s hair and her jaw and the sound of her laughter, the look on her face before she turned away—it’s like trying to hold his brain against a hot stove.
Charlie heads directly for June, the two of them peeling off from the group and disappearing in the direction of the patio. Will orders a drink from a passing waiter and leans back against a wall near the door. He glances at Lilly—watching in spite of himself as she runs a distracted finger around the rim of her glass, tilting her dark head close to Olivia’s—then glances away.
Glances back.
She catches him once, rolling her eyes a little before turning back to her sisters. When it happens a second time, she marches over like a nun in a Catholic school about to pinch his ear for masturbating under his desk.
“Look,” she announces, grabbing his arm and hustling him around a corner into the short hallway that leads to the bathroom, “enough. You can either apologize to me or you can fuck off, but stop brooding in my general direction like you’re Heathcliff on the fucking moors, will you? It’s weird.”
Will opens his mouth, then closes it again, heat flooding his face. “I’m not brooding,” he protests finally.
“Oh no?” she asks, crossing her arms. She’s wearing a slinky black dress that hits midway down her calves and a pair of sandals with a million fiddly straps, her hair in a long, loose ponytail over one shoulder. “What would you call it, exactly?”
“Standing,” he says uselessly. “Minding my own business.”
“Well.” Lilly looks deeply dubious. “In that case, feel free to mind it elsewhere.” She gestures toward the dining room, and when he makes no move in that direction, his feet dumbly rooted to the floor, she sighs. “Can I ask you a question?” she says, then doesn’t wait for him to answer before she forges ahead. “Why are you even here?”
Will looks around at the warm bustle of the restaurant. “I . . . was invited?”
“Not here,” she says impatiently. “Here. LA. Why come at all, if you hate it so much?”
For one preposterous second, Will almost tells her—about New York, about Hamlet, about Georgia finding him curled unconscious on the bath mat in his apartment, his skin gone waxy and blue—before, thankfully, coming to his senses. “To work with Johnny Jones,” is all he says.
Lilly nods slowly, though he can tell she isn’t buying it. “Right,” she says. “Johnny Jones.”
Will grits his teeth. “Look,” he finally tells her, “about the other night at the party. I should apologize.”
“Okay,” she agrees. Then, when he doesn’t say anything quickly enough: “Wait, was that it? Because you realize that saying you should apologize isn’t actually—”
“Can you give me a minute?” he interrupts irritably. “Jesus.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he tries. “I am. I handled that badly. I didn’t know who you were—”
“Wait a second.” She holds a hand up. “That’s what you’re sorry for? Not knowing I was—how did you so cleverly put it?—‘a reality show trash bag who—’”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No,” he snaps. “Of course not. I didn’t—what I’m trying to say is—there’s nothing wrong with being famous for—for—”
“For what, exactly?”
“For being famous, I guess.”
Lilly’s eyes flash. “I knew it! See, that drives me up a tree when people say that, ‘famous for being famous.’ What does that even mean?”
Will feels his face get warm. “It means—”
“Because my father got famous for starting a chain of successful Italian restaurants that had a commercial that people found memorable,” she interrupts, ticking the list off on her fingers. “My sisters Kit and Olivia are brand ambassadors, which is in fact an actual job, regardless of what you might think of it, and one that they’re extremely talented and savvy at. June sits on the board of an animal welfare foundation that’s raised millions of dollars for abused and neglected dogs and cats, not that anyone ever talks about that because she also likes to get dressed up and go to parties on the weekends. And Mari . . . well, fine, nobody really knows what Mari does, exactly, but that means that you don’t, either, so. I would argue she should be exempt from whatever judgy bullshit you’re putting on the rest of us.”
Will sputters, cowed. “And you?” he can’t help but ask, trying to recover. “What did you get famous for?”
Lilly fixes him with an expression of deep loathing. “You heard your friend Caroline,” she says evenly. “I got famous for killing my boyfriend.”
Right away, he feels about two inches tall. “Lilly—” he says, and he’s about to apologize again—properly this time, he tells himself—when she cuts him off.
“Do not play with me about my sisters, Will. I will fight you, and I will win.”
Will smirks at that, even though he knows it’s only going to make her angrier. She just looks so serious, like she’s fully intending to take him out to the parking lot and stab him in the carotid artery with a hairpin to defend the honor of a family whose principal contribution to arts and letters, so far as Will understands it, is a viral video of four-sevenths of them getting into a physical altercation with an Uber driver outside a Sweetgreen in Calabasas. Her loyalty would almost be admirable, if he wasn’t so annoyed. “You know, not for nothing,” he tells her, “but you’re awfully indignant about my failure to respect the many accomplishments of the Benedetto family for a person who purposely didn’t mention she was one of them.”
“I literally told you my first and last name, asshole!” Lilly looks incredulous; still, by the way her shoulders straighten Will can tell he’s hit a nerve.
“And when you said you were a writer?” he presses. “I guess I didn’t realize we were counting Instagram captions.”
Lilly’s eyes flash. “Fuck you,” she says. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Unlike the millions of social media followers who are privy to your every split end and cold sore.”
“Wow.” She barks a laugh. “You are really a miserable snob, do you know that?”
“I do, actually,” he counters. “But at least I’m honest.”
“Oh, is that what you’d call it?” Lilly fires back. “Because it sounds to me like you’re too much of a tight-ass to admit you had a little itch for a Benedetto sister, so now you need to compensate by being a complete and utter dick. I’m working on a novel, not that it’s any of your business. And my Instagram captions? They’re works of fucking art.”
Will opens his mouth, closes it again. Opens it one more time. He wants to keep fighting with her. He wants to back her up against the wall. She’s not wrong, clearly—he does have an itch for her. He’s got more than an itch for her, potentially, but he’ll audition for the Whitney Houston role in a genderbent remake of The Bodyguard before he ever says that out loud.
They face off like that, neither one of them saying anything. Both of them are breathing hard. Just for a second Will lets himself imagine doing it: wrapping a hand around her waist and pulling her even closer, pressing his mouth against hers. He can tell she’s thinking about it, too—the way her lips have parted, her haughty chin just barely tilted up. He takes a deep breath, ducks his head—
—and catches nothing but the faint smell of citrus as she skirts neatly, nimbly away.
“Better luck next time, Birdman,” Lilly tells him, then turns on her heel and slips back into the warm, crowded bustle of the dining room. Will stands and watches her go.
* * *
Back at Charlie’s house there’s a big, padded envelope waiting for Will on the doorstep, another package from his sister Georgia at home in New York. Ever since he came out here she’s been sending him shit from Amazon what feels like every other day—sunscreen and undershirts and an expensive insulated tumbler for iced coffee even though caffeine gives him heart palpitations. He’s not entirely sure what her deal is. Also, he’s starting to run out of room.
Tonight it’s an enormous box of PowerBars, like possibly she thinks he’s going to climb K2 really quick before the movie starts shooting. Will dutifully puts them away in the kitchen cabinet, texting to thank her on his way up the stairs.
Georgia texts back immediately, just like always: How was your dinner thing? she wants to know.
Will frowns. How did you know I was at a dinner thing?
I saw you in the background in Charlie’s insta stories. Then, a moment later: You need a haircut.
Upstairs in bed he tosses and turns for hours, throwing the blankets off and pulling them on again. Telling himself he’s not thinking about anyone in particular at all. Finally he gets out of bed, shivering at the blast of cold air piping in through the floor vent. Charlie’s house, like everything else in California, is violently air-conditioned, and the chill of it always gives Will the uneasy feeling that his body is being forcibly preserved for some later purpose, like organ donation or a hungry giant’s Christmas feast. He opens the window and sticks his head out, but all he smells is chlorine from the pool and the scent of some far-off burning.
Finally he picks up his phone, opens a new browser window. He’s not supposed to do this—his therapist back in New York explicitly told him to stop doing this, actually, on top of which it’s not like he doesn’t have the whole thing memorized—but he types in the first few letters of the address for the New York Times review anyway, his phone autofilling the rest. “A Sea of Troubles for Hamlet at the Hayes,” the headline reads, right below an enormous photograph of Will’s pale, sweaty face.
He’s halfway through the second paragraph when he’s interrupted by a soft knock on his door; Caroline doesn’t wait for him to answer before she eases it open and slips inside in leggings and a tank top, her hair combed out for bed. “I thought I heard you rattling around in here,” she says, perching on the edge of the dresser and stretching her long legs out so her bright red toes just brush the edge of his mattress.
Will shakes his head, rubbing hard at the nape of his neck. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Caroline grins. “Poor baby,” she singsongs softly, then slips like a cat off the dresser and stamps her mouth against his.
Will lets out a quiet oof, catching her weight and falling back against the pillows, his fingertips tangling in her silky blond hair. They haven’t told Charlie about this. It’s been on and off for almost a decade, since the summer Caroline’s old agency sent her to New York to sign an up-and-coming director based in Brooklyn. Will was in Coriolanus in the park that year, grit and sweat and pollen creased into his elbows as they collapsed into her fancy hotel bed. It’s friendly, their arrangement, both of them entirely free to see other people. There have been years when they met up every other weekend; there have been years they didn’t meet up at all. “No strings attached,” Caroline told him the morning after the first time they slept together, bending down to scoop her lacy underwear off the carpet, and he’s never had any reason to think she didn’t mean it. Still, it occurred to Will when he accepted Charlie’s invitation to come stay here that possibly it was a bad idea for them to be living in the same place for an extended period of time.
Caroline, evidently, has no such reservations: in the half dark of his borrowed bedroom she slings a leg over his hip bones, planting a hand on either side of his head and leaning forward so that her hair makes a shampoo-scented curtain around his face. “Do you have a crush on Lilly Benedetto?” she asks.
Will freezes. “I—what?” he asks, his voice cracking a little. “Of course not.”
“Because she’s sexy, in a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show kind of way,” she continues, sitting back so that her ass grinds against his dick. “I’m just saying, I would get it.”
Will huffs out a laugh that sounds more like a wheeze. “Caro,” he says, reaching for her hands and lacing their fingers together, his hips bucking up against hers, “there is nothing going on between Lilly Benedetto and me.”
Caroline gazes down at him with great skepticism. “Prove it,” she says imperiously, then reaches back behind her and pulls her tank top over her head.
* * *
Caroline slips out of his room sometime before dawn, Will stirring awake as the door snicks shut behind her. He lies there for a while, watching the light get gray out the window and trying to ignore the creeping feeling that he’s doing something wrong or dishonest or sleazy. He meant it, what he said to Caroline: there’s nothing going on between him and Lilly Benedetto. He barely even knows Lilly Benedetto.
He reaches for his phone on the nightstand one more time, scrolling news headlines long enough for plausible deniability before blowing a noisy breath out and typing the name of her show into the search bar. He has to subscribe to some obscure streaming service to get access to the episodes; the whole thing gives him the queasy feeling of paying for pornography—not that he’s ever paid for pornography, for the record. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t think sex workers deserve a living wage, or that he—oh, for fuck’s sake. Will grits his teeth and hits play.
The show is . . . not good. The plots are farcical—one episode revolves entirely around two of Lilly’s sisters going to war over an excruciatingly ugly dress both of them want to wear to a launch party for a vegan food product of their father’s invention that is called, regrettably, WheatBallz—and the whole thing looks like it was shot on a flip phone and edited with scissors and tape. Still, he guesses it’s not entirely without its charms—the way they talk and laugh and argue, the rise and fall of their voices like a chorus of sirens in a myth. He always thought it might be nice, to be part of a big family. All this time it’s only been Georgia and him.
He watches all three seasons in one long feverish binge, morning turning to late afternoon outside the window. The theme song is so loud and jarring he’s sure the whole house can hear it, and he frantically lowers the volume on his phone every time it jangles out into the room. The whole thing ends with no ceremony, a snoozer of an episode about a dopey, contrived family garage sale; at first Will thinks maybe there’s something wrong with the website but a quick Google search confirms that that’s all there is. A spin-off of the show focusing on fan favorites Lilly Benedetto and her fiancé, Joseph Ianuzzi, was greenlit by the Tinseltown Network, Wikipedia informs him, though production was shut down following Ianuzzi’s death by heroin overdose during the filming of the pilot. It is rumored that there is video footage of Benedetto discovering Ianuzzi’s body in the couple’s downtown Los Angeles apartment that was never released. Will thinks of the look on Lilly’s face the night of Rebecca Barnes’s party—It was heroin, actually—and feels a little sick.
He throws back the covers and jumps out of bed, striding across the room and out the door to—do what, exactly? He stops short on the second-floor landing, dehydrated and dazed. “Television rots your brain,” Charlie informs him cheerfully—jogging down the steps in his gym clothes, humming the Meet the Benedettos theme song under his breath.