The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements

Chapter Ten

Kuffel Canyon, California, is a stone’s throw south of Lake Arrowhead. Because of the thickness of the pines, it feels like there’s a great distance between you and any other people, even though the woods are dotted with cabins and holiday homes. There’s a small village on the south side of the lake, with a harbor, a rinky-dink amusement park, and a general store where you can pick up candy and fresh-cut watermelon. The store closes at eleven p.m., so every night that summer at around ten thirty, Lila and Leo and whoever else was awake would pile into her secondhand Ford Fiesta and cruise into the village. Most of the bars and restaurants stayed open late at that time of year, but the village still felt sleepy, and the cashier who rang up their purchases of green vegetables and Anchor Steam beer was usually yawning. Some nights the sky was clear enough that they could see the starry rim of the San Bernardino Mountains from the parking lot.

The band split the rent of their cabin fifty-fifty with their label. There were two bedrooms, one occupied by Alex and Hae, the other by the band’s drummer, Jennifer. Officially, Lila slept on the foldout camp bed in the laundry room, and Leo had the couch. In reality the cabin was furnished like a kid’s fort, every surface soft and roomy, full of cushions and beanbags and love seats, and they tended to fall asleep wherever they fell. More than once Leo had lost track of time and spent the night in the hammock on the porch. He woke up covered in insect bites and had to spend the next day taking ice baths in the porcelain tub.

Eighteen months before he came to Saint-Tropez, Leo had arrived in LA for the spring, because his dad had requested Leo’s presence at the thirtieth anniversary party of one of his hotels. He’d also requested that Leo take a room there for the week, but Leo told him he already had a place to crash. Alex was a friend from New York who used to project kaleidoscopic animations on the walls of loft parties until he moved to LA to start a band. He came to pick Leo up from LAX, along with a girl wearing a ripped denim jacket and Birkenstocks. They were arguing at the arrivals gate. After Alex had introduced them, she grabbed Leo by the elbow and said, “Settle this for us, do you think this text is scary or sexy,” and held out her phone to him. Leo was jet-lagged and confused. It took him several blinks to make a judgment.

“Both,” he said, and the girl crowed in triumph.

“You’re too good for Alex,” she told him, hitting send. “You’re mine now.” Leo stretched and thought, Well, why not.

The party came and went, and Leo shook enough hands and drew in enough photographers for his dad to send him a grudging thank-you note signed, With all due respect, Bernard Milanowski.

“I’d say he’s a dick,” Lila said, “but I’d kill for your trust fund. You can deal.”

Lila had lived in LA since she was twenty and had worked at a greengrocer, an anarchist pet store, and several vegan restaurants before her music finally started bringing in enough money for her to focus on it full-time. The band never hit the mainstream, but they had been featured on a few indie movie soundtracks, and they had a scrappy cult following across the States. She had also cowritten a love song that was passed down the line and reproduced into a one-hit wonder, and the royalties from that twinned with various other songwriting credits made her enough money to live on. She rented a room in a house in Echo Park with five other people and an outdoor kitchen. The floor was always sticky and her room was full of empty bottles, but Leo loved to wake up there, to hear the early morning sounds of her roommates around him while they lay curled in her bed.

When she told him that they were renting a cabin for the summer where they could write their next album, Leo signed up to join them before she’d even offered. He had spent the last two months drifting between Alex’s and Lila’s houses, and now he looked up for the first time and realized he had no plans to leave. His father was spending the summer at one of his resorts and was unlikely to need Leo. Gum was busy fumbling deals in New York, and Hannah had dropped off the radar since March. Win was filming back-to-back projects and had been seen holding hands with a panel show host, so nobody was looking for Leo. He disappeared with Lila into the woods.

“You can pay for groceries,” Lila said. “And you can have my back when Alex starts messing with my lyrics.”

In the early evenings when the air was cooler, they would take hikes into the pine forests or drive to the lake and swim together in the shadow of the mountains. Depending which beach they were at, they could sometimes see the watchtower at Strawberry Peak glinting in the darkness. This always made Alex paranoid, because he had read too many articles about government surveillance and was distrustful of lights that came on at night with no apparent function. He avoided cameras, security checks, and social media, and the rest of the band indulged him. Leo’s online presence shrank down to his weekly video calls with Gum, who gave forlorn monologues on various feuds with more-successful businessmen and chastised Leo for the state of his personal grooming.

It was the sort of idyll Win would’ve rolled her eyes at. Lila rolled her eyes a lot, too, but she also took pure enjoyment from her surroundings in a way that Leo had only seen imitated before. She stayed up the latest and woke up the earliest. She wrote strange, yelping, sexy songs, and she played her own albums at her own parties. When she wanted his attention, she would wave a hand in front of his face like he’d fallen asleep. When he wanted her attention, he would reach out as she ran past and hook a finger in the belt loop of her shorts to slow her down. They took long drives together and climbed to the top of the Pinnacles. Once when they were both sick, she flew her older sister in from Orlando to look after them.

He’d wondered for a while what would happen if Lila and Win met. But the possibility of it seemed so far-fetched, like trying to imagine the boulevards of LA cracking open when the Big One hit. Unthinkable. They moved in different orbits. In his own head he never let them touch. He waited for Lila to ask about his turbulent relationship with Whitman Tagore the movie star, but she never brought it up. Eventually he brought it up himself, telling her unprompted about their first week in New York, about their deal, about the way Win made him feel useful and important but sometimes also claustrophobic, like he was caught in a net.

Lila said, “You could just be like, I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“But then I’d never see her,” Leo said.

Lila shrugged, went back to painting his toenails, and changed the subject.

The band returned to LA in the fall, with twelve completed tracks, several garbage bags full of dirty laundry, and Leo in tow. Leo checked his emails for the first time in months. He hadn’t missed anything important. He called Win on a whim at Alex’s birthday party, barefoot out on the porch among the prickly pear and cigarette butts. She wasn’t entirely tuned in to the conversation, said there was a bit of a shitstorm going on with one of her projects and thanks but I don’t think so, when Leo asked if he could help. He came back inside just as they were lighting candles on the cake, everybody singing “Happy Birthday” at different tempos and with terrible harmonies. It was good not to be needed, he told himself; it was good to go only where he was genuinely wanted. Lila told him that the band was preparing to spend the rest of the autumn on tour. Leo had never lived on the road before. He was curious.

They rattled off in a van, unspooling months of Leo and Lila rambling across the country together underneath a highway sky. He got used to the dim lighting of basement shows and motel showers. He developed competencies he had not thought possible. He learned how to take apart a drum kit and put it back together again, how to push-start the van, how to hit and hold a low C. He goaded Lila into writing a song about him that she would never record. They indulged each other. Lila picked fights with Alex constantly but with Leo she was lenient, unconcerned. Leo never had to parse his thoughts in his head before he said them out loud. It was cold on the East Coast, and they were forever finding new hidden places to sneak away together and get warm. They talked through sex, as they talked through everything.

Leo got used to a different scale of problem, no longer caring about international press scandals or navigating billion-dollar industries. Now a problem meant a motel owner catching them trying to sneak four people into a two-bed room, or beardy technicians talking over Lila at sound check, or neighbors yelling at them through the drywall to turn their music down. Lila snapped back at anyone who was rude to her and seemed surprised when Leo asked if he could help. “Just don’t be a dick,” she said. “What else are you supposed to do?” It was what Leo had always wondered, too.

By December they were deep in the Midwest, and Leo thought, looking out at cornfields and eating his drive-through meals, that he had found the real world at last. “Poor runaway Leo,” Lila said, “like the Little Prince coming down to earth,” but she took him wherever he wanted to go.

Once he woke up early because Win had messaged him. She’d mentioned him in an interview coming out the next week, no big revelations but a hint that they were still in communication, and wanted to warn Leo not to be surprised by an influx of messages when it came out. Marie thought it might get them trending for a while, and Win didn’t want Leo to wake up and think someone had died or Gum had tried to sue the Rockefeller Foundation again. Everything’s okay, she wrote, just more of the usual. Call when you’re back in London. Miss you!

It occurred to Leo then that he ought to tell Win about Lila. She had always known about his past relationships, coming up whenever they spoke (“Not another performance artist,” she would groan, “the last one livestreamed her appendectomy,”) but Win had been busy and Leo had been asleep in Lila’s bed, without much cause for talking. He considered it for a week, back and forth. Win’s interview came out, and Hae read the part about Leo aloud in a silly voice while they were stuck in traffic on the interstate. Leo laughed along. He decided that no, Win didn’t need to know about this. The decision gave his feelings a solidity they hadn’t had before. He sometimes felt that Win knew more about him than anyone else, could feel her cool assessment tracking everything he did, so the very act of keeping something from her made it significant.

He communicated some of these thoughts to Lila, and concluded with “Anyway, I think I’m in love with you.”

“Oh, Lenny,” Lila said. “That’s a little bit fucked up, but I love you, too.”

They got back to LA just after New Year’s. Leo stayed at Lila’s place and spent his mornings cleaning her kitchen to the sleepy approval of her housemates. He kept himself busy, helping Alex set up a short film exhibition and organizing an elaborate homecoming party. He laughed and shrugged when Lila’s friends asked him what he did for a living; it was LA, so living off your parents’ assets wasn’t rare.

In the spring Leo flew to New York for Gum’s twenty-ninth birthday party. It was held in a rented-out nightclub in Chelsea, and he spent most of it locked in a back room with Charlie and Gum, who smoked furiously and performed live readings and rebuttals of his own hate mail. There were numerous VIPs at the party and a cohort of press outside the gates. Diving into the attention and crush of bodies felt like falling into a cold spring after spending hours in a sauna. While Leo had been playing house, Win’s panel show host had turned into a serious boyfriend, and people were eager for his opinion.

In the absence of direction from Marie, Leo performed as a cocksure playboy: sure, he was happy for Win and the new guy; no, he hadn’t heard of Nathan Spencer before; and no, he didn’t care to comment on his own relationship status at this time. In his hotel room he googled Spencer in the middle of the night, and was immediately snowed under by photo after photo of Whitman Tagore and her new lover. He slammed his laptop shut with a shock of guilt. He went to sleep.

The morning after the party he half expected a call from Win; she normally checked in with him when he came up on her radar. Usually these were long, spiraling calls that got away from both of them, where Leo would look up absently and see that two or three hours had passed without either of them noticing. If she was filming, she would video call and prop her phone up against the mirror as the makeup artists went to work, talking to him out of the corner of her mouth, telling him off when he made her laugh. She waited until the last minute to hang up, as though speaking to Leo were a charm that needed to be drawn out for potency. But this time there was nothing. He would find out later that she had been filming in rural Scotland and mostly off-line. That was fine, obviously. Win lived strangely in his head. She didn’t follow patterns, like a body of water that was always there but emptied and refilled erratically over time. He packed up his bags again and left New York with relief.

In LA, all his new friends were waiting for him in the backyard, burning hickory firewood in a pit in the ground. The stars were out, and there were plans to get up early the next morning and go whale watching in Monterey. Lila and Leo snuck up to her room and ended up having sex half-dressed on top of all the debris on Lila’s bed.

“Welcome home, for real,” Lila said, smiling hazy-eyed, and Leo had that feeling of wanting to be trapped in one place, wanting to dig his heels in. It didn’t need to matter that he had no plans. It didn’t need to matter that Win hadn’t called. He wanted to be on the road again, wanted to sleep in the woods with Lila and be nobody, mean nothing to anyone except her.

If his mood had noticeably changed, Lila didn’t comment on it. They got married in Vegas a week later.

There was no honeymoon, just a hangover the morning after, eating pancakes for breakfast at three p.m. Leo rapped his new ring against the plastic tabletop and Lila said, “Hey, does this mean I get half your trust fund?” They piled back into Alex’s car together and took turns napping on the drive home. It took them a while to realize their mistake.

Lila took on a few different projects, songwriting and production, and came home late in the evenings. Leo wasn’t sure where to be while she was gone. He started losing sleep, milling about the house in the early hours before dawn, and picking up books that he never read to the end. In the evenings he stayed up until she returned, and warmed up dinner for her, and they kept running out of things to say. He slept over at Alex’s place a few times, and after a while he moved his things over as well. Alex’s place was bigger, and it wasn’t fair to Lila’s roommates to have Leo there all the time, sloping about, buying the wrong kind of cereal and getting in the way. He could sense the disintegration as it happened, like watching crushed ice melt in a glass.

He didn’t know what he had expected from the marriage. Were he and Lila going to buy a house together, have kids? Did he think he could just step out of his own life and disguise himself in Lila’s? As if everyone would eventually just forget who he was, and let him go.

Finally Lila said it, brightly, the same way she’d announced a wrong turn while they were on the road. Oops! “I think maybe we killed it, Lenny.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “I think that was my fault.”

She patted him on the arm. “Look, everyone says you’re supposed to marry your best friend, right?”

“Right,” Leo agreed, and for some reason thought of Win. He knew then that he needed to leave.

He left LA in the first throes of summer, first to London and then, when that didn’t feel far enough away, to Berlin. He kept himself busy scouting artists for his dad, and with the time difference it was easy to dodge Lila’s occasional calls. He felt as though he’d spent a year in orbit, circling without ever touching down. Berlin at the start of July was like living between the first two dots of an ellipsis. The sun went down but the streets never cooled, and the rain fell like steam. Leo ate vegan pizzas and spent time with the handful of expats he knew and tried to ignore the itch of failure that had settled over him.

When Marie called him out to Saint-Tropez, she had not given him time to think, and Leo didn’t want to think too much anyway. He buzzed his hair down low, blinking at himself in a bathroom mirror, while he waited for the private car that would take him to the airport. He felt clean and ready, made new. Win needed him again, and he would be good at this, he knew; he would be good for Win. It was the only thing on his mind.

That made things all the worse the night of the Chavanne party, after Win had put her hand over the speaker of her phone, looked at him coldly, untouchable, and said, “I can’t deal with this right now.” She disappeared, like Leo was an annoying fan, a problem beneath Win’s attention. He turned on his heel and headed straight for the bar.

Lila was there, chewing on a straw, and her stricken face made him angrier.

“Hey,” she said, “Leo, look, I didn’t mean to piss her off—”

“It’s fine,” Leo said. Lila reached one hand out to his face but didn’t quite make contact. “Let’s get some shots.”

“All right,” Lila said, but she was still watching him. She waved the bartender over and ordered tequila. Leo passed on the salt and lime. Lila looked concerned, but nodded, and they did them straight, standing up at the bar. Leo signaled for another.

“Baby,” Lila said. She looked unsure. “I’m really sorry, I was just excited to see you—”

“It’s not your fault,” Leo snapped.

Lila’s eyebrows went up. “I know. I would have called if I thought you’d pick up the phone.”

The first shot was lingering in Leo’s throat, like smoke after a forest fire. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Lila did touch him then, stroking a hand roughly over his head.

“Why didn’t you tell her? I wish I could tell everyone. It would be my opening line at parties. I’d say, like, My husband is in Saint-Tropez with another woman, and they would all buy me drinks.”

Leo took the second shot and ordered a third, which was a foolish thing to do. Lila watched him. The space between her question and his answer was growing.

He spent the night refusing to think about why he hadn’t just told Win. Lila stayed subdued and guilty, sticking close to the bar and not seeking Leo out. Leo passed from guest to guest, finishing their drinks for them and telling anyone who asked that Win was in the next room, they had just missed her. He found some of the male models he’d met in Paris hanging shiftily about the bathroom, and took what they gave him, came back grinning, and dragged Alex out to dance.

The night blurred. The music took on a wilted, end-of-the-wedding tone, a few lone couples on the dance floor. He stumbled through the smoke and back out into the long driveway. Lila was behind him again. She put a cool hand to the back of his neck. There were cameras and photographers shouting, as always, though not as many as when Win was about; they hadn’t worked out yet that anything was wrong, though Leo was sure it was only a matter of time. He let Lila lead him away and out of the crowd, past security and into a quieter area, just the waitstaff smoking and valets running past to bring out the cars. Leo couldn’t remember where they were and handed Lila his phone so she could call him a cab.

“Leo,” she said, “I think you should—you have all these missed calls from a Marie, is it—”

“Ugh,” he said.

She patted his neck again. “All right.” She waited with him until the car arrived. She’d once told him that she was at her most brilliant and functional at the end of a bad night out, while everyone else was relighting cigarettes and sitting cold on the curb.

“Hey, Lenny,” she said, and straightened up, solemn-faced. “I really am sorry.”

“All you did was tell the truth,” Leo said. “Lila. I’m sorry.”

Lila thumbed over his ear. “We’re good. Talk to me sooner, this time.”

She helped him into the back seat. Leo must have gotten the cab to drop him off a few streets away in the hope of avoiding the paparazzi, because he could remember stumbling down several graveled pathways before he found the hotel. His phone rang again, Marie’s name and a picture of Cruella de Vil flashing bright on the screen, and he tossed it into a dumpster before he could stop himself. Later he would wonder if the press could get hold of it. Anyone might find it there, but he told himself he didn’t care.

He managed to enter La Réserve through the garage, but once he was inside he got lost, not sure what floor he was on, wandering down corridor after corridor and holding his key card up to doors that seemed familiar, even though they all looked the same. He made it to reception eventually, where he sat waiting in a plush armchair while the concierge booked him an early morning flight back to London. He kept fishing in his pocket for his phone, and then remembering.

*  *  *

In London’s misty dawn Leo got a cab from the airport back to Primrose Hill and the apartment he shared with his sister. Hannah wasn’t there. They both saw their apartment as more of a crash pad and storage space than an actual home. The kitchen was a mess of coffee cups, empty beer bottles, orange peels molding on the countertops, and several copies of Gum’s self-published autobiography (Gums Away!) covered in cigarette ash. He spent a laborious, grim-faced hour clearing as much of it as he could, stripped down to an undershirt and jeans, stalking out to the trash with garbage bags five times in a row. His mouth tasted sour and there was nothing to eat.

When he was done, he sat on his sofa and rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyes until his vision went blurry, little sparks going off in the corners of his eyelids. He needed to get a new phone. He needed to let his mums know he was in the city before they found out and got pissed he hadn’t told them. He needed to listen to the inevitable tirades Marie would have left on his voicemail and see if there was anything he should actually care about.

He took a shower instead, and found some beer hiding at the back of the fridge. He watched a documentary about the ice caps.

September was long and extraneous. Word got out that he was in London, and people started coming around, the old crowd bringing over food and drinks and gifts and purposefully not asking about anything they might have seen or heard about him. His mother Gabrysia showed up and spent half an hour stacking the dishwasher badly and asking him leading questions that he ignored, sulky like a small boy. For the whole month he was so angry that it almost bored him. He woke up with his fists clenched. He felt stupid and abandoned. He started doing yoga again to try to calm himself down, but he couldn’t hold the poses for long, sliding back down to the floor with a satisfying thud.

There were photographers hanging around, of course. They showed up gradually, a shuffling, smoking crowd on the pavement, talking shop to each other while they waited for him to come out. Leo didn’t really care, and his friends were used to it. He wondered if the press had found out about the marriage. Twice he went to go outside and tell them, and then stopped himself, scowling. He gathered from his friends and the occasional glimpse of a magazine cover at the corner shop that Win was also back in the UK, and had gone silent, holed up in one of her homes on the coast. He’d thought she was starting some amazing new project this month. He told himself he didn’t care about that either.

The first time he ventured outside properly was to visit Thea’s studio—he still didn’t have a phone, so she had, quite inventively, sent him an insistent postcard. On the way to his car there were stirrings of attention from the paparazzi and a clamor of calls.

“Leo, what happened? Did you guys have another fight?”

“Did she go back to Nathan, Leo? Did you fuck it up again?”

Leo glanced at them and yawned, unimpressed, as he unlocked the car. While he was climbing in, one of them called, “You’re looking tired, Leo.”

He tried to go out more after that. He went to a friend’s gallery opening and came back mutinous; it was the kind of show he would normally have enjoyed, but he’d had Win’s voice ringing in his ears the whole time. You just talk about it to cover up how empty your life is. He got a new phone with a new number. He checked his emails once, for five minutes, but there were about three thousand messages waiting for him, and he logged off again. Every time an unknown number called, he hit decline, but he had reluctantly saved Marie’s and Win’s numbers, and neither of them ever rang.

Gum came to visit, depositing piles of duty-free aftershave and cigars onto Leo’s kitchen counter. Their father was concerned that Leo was nearing a public breakdown, and wanted Gum around to keep him from doing anything that would damage the Milanowski brand.

“How does he think you’re going to help?” Leo asked, and Gum shrugged.

“Beats me. I think he just wanted an excuse to get me out of New York.”

Leo was surprised how much of a relief it was to have someone to talk to. On the first night, they covered the marriage (“Very gauche!” Gum said), the fallout with Whitman (“A bitch!” Gum said), and Leo’s current state of low-level fury (“Tiresome!” Gum said). He advised Leo to come back to the States, roll up his sleeves, and bury his troubled mind in the business. Leo, who could not think of anything worse either for himself or for the business, declined.

In an attempt to convince him, Gum dragged Leo to a series of lunches and unending dinners with various family acquaintances. Gum still believed that he had been born into wealth for a reason, and was trying to live up to it by becoming the spitting image of their father. Leo watched Gum falter through meeting after meeting, trying to be liked, trying to be the real deal rather than a hapless heir with an anxiety disorder and a complete lack of business sense. It was another life that Leo could have chosen, and it would have been even more pointless than bumming around LA with Lila. The idea that any of them could be worthy of their wealth seemed ridiculous.

All the time Leo’s bitter mood circled them, present in every room. At the end of the week, Gum gave his prognosis: Leo was spoiled, the entire episode was trite, and he needed to get over it.

“Hannah says we’re all spoiled,” Leo said.

“I don’t think she meant that to be an excuse,” Gum said. He headed to the airport several hours later, leaving behind a bottle of Xanax, a vape pen, and a pile of tabloids, most featuring Leo’s face. The note on top said: You look like shit! Move on!!

Leo flipped through them with a desultory hand. Flashes of his own face, sunglasses on under gray skies, mouth twisted down and disapproving, and then of Win, all her photos taken at bad angles and timings so that she looked tired, stretched out, worn thin. His gaze darted over the headlines: WIN’S BREAKDOWN; LEO’S GONE AND SHE’S OUT OF CONTROL; and perhaps his favorite, THE EX FACTOR: LEO AND NATHAN DISH ON THE BISH. He thought idly about beating Nathan Spencer up, then threw them all out.

He’d been lulled the way he always was when his family were around, but after Gum’s departure Leo was alone again. Win’s silence felt deliberate and communicative, not a missed connection but a closed door. Over the next few days he did his best to follow his brother’s advice, but it didn’t take long for the anger to creep back in, insidious and nasty, whispering in his ear. Did you think I was jealous?

The year was closing in on October when Leo got stopped outside his apartment. He had his usual chaperone of photographers talking at him in an indistinct chorus, when one of them yelled out, “What happened at the hospital, Leo?”

He paused. “What?”

The paparazzo’s eyes widened, like he couldn’t believe his luck. “Is she on drugs? An eating disorder? Don’t you know?”

Leo stared, opened his mouth for another question, but he’d stood still for too long, and they were circling him. Another guy stepped forward.

“Did you do something to her?”

Leo closed his eyes, then blinked them back open. “No. C’mon, guys, I have places to be.” He shouldered his way through.

He only had to type Whi into the search bar before she came up in suggested searches. The second suggestion was Whitman Tagore and Leo Milanowski. The third was Whitman Tagore rehab. The headlines were much worse. TRASHED TAGORE. IN AND OUT OF HOSPITAL WITH WHITMAN’S SECRET ADDICTIONS. DRUGS AND DESPAIR: LIFE AFTER LEO.

He opened the first article, scrolling quickly. When he was done he read another, and another.

He stood up, hovering in the center of the room. He wondered what Marie was doing now. Then, determined and undone, he picked up his phone, and his keys.