The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements

Chapter Three

The days that started with Marie instead of Emil were never good. The morning after Leo arrived in Saint-Tropez, Win was out of the shower and applying her moisturizer when Marie knocked on her door and came in, face hard.

Win was immediately on guard. “What,” she said.

“Nathan Spencer went off on last night’s show,” Marie said. “It’s been doing the rounds online all night. You can watch it, or I can just tell you which questions to expect.”

Jada and Matthew, Win’s hair and makeup team, paused laying out compacts and curling wands. “You want us out, honey?” Matthew asked.

Win made a face, smoothing cream down her jawline, over her décolletage. “Better not, we’re already running late. You’ve seen worse,” she said, and Jada winked at her.

Marie propped a tablet on the dressing table and hit play. Win glanced at it and then back to Matthew as he moved in, brandishing concealer like it was the answer to all their problems. Nathan was surrounded by his usual panel of celebrity guests, loosely organized into teams, even more loosely organized into the idea of a game. He wore a dark suit, and his eyes were glittering.

“I mean, speaking of celebrity romance,” said a young guy whom Win recognized as having just transitioned from a soap opera to a Victorian BBC drama, “we’ve got to— Are you still pretending not to know what we’re talking about?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Nathan said. “Little old me and my little old nondisclosure agreement, we haven’t got a clue—”

“Oh my god,” another guest said, manicured red nails pressed to her mouth. “An NDA! That’s the big guns. That’s how you know you’ve messed that relationship up.”

“Actually, I object to that,” Nathan said. Win didn’t need to look at the screen to know what he’d be doing; eyes sparkling with that laddish mischief that so endeared him to viewers, waggling a finger in jest. “I didn’t mess anything up enough to deserve an NDA, that was brought out on our first date.”

Jada hissed, fingers gentle on Win’s hair. Win said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She tilted her chin up when Matthew nudged her.

“Wait,” Marie said grimly.

“Guess that’s the price you pay, innit?” the first guest said. “When you’re dating, like, the most beautiful woman in the world—”

“You pay a lot of prices, is the thing,” Nathan said. “First it’s the NDA, then it’s being told where to go, what to wear, what to say. You end up having her publicist on speed dial, instead of her. Then you get told that certain things about you don’t suit her image, and you have to change them, and you start to realize you don’t even recognize yourself, let alone her, and when even her mum thinks it’s a bad idea—”

“Oh my god,” the latest X-Factor winner yelped. “Really?”

“Oh yeah, mate,” Nathan said, laughing. “It makes sense for the mum to be a bit more involved. Every guy’s a prospective son-in-law, you know. But she warned me off. Said that I was a nice kid and my daughter’s media machine will eat you alive, dear boy.” This last was delivered in a cartoonish, head-bobbing imitation of Pritha’s accent. Win didn’t think Pritha had ever used the words dear boy in her life.

There was a general round of gasps, and he held his hands up, still smiling enough to make the whole thing look like a grand joke. “It was a bit like getting a bad diagnosis from your doctor. Did what I was told, didn’t I. I bolted.”

“Looks like she’s not exactly pining, mate,” the first woman said, and the audience went, Ooooooh.

Nathan was still laughing but his eyes were hard. “Ah well. Signing NDAs is probably the only thing keeping life interesting, when you’ve got no other talents to speak of—”

“Someone’s jealous,” the X-Factor winner said.

“Sorry, I forgot,” Nathan said. “He’s an artist, right? Daddy, will you buy me another gallery?” and the audience fell apart with laughter.

Marie paused the video. “Then they start talking about the most spoiled people in show business, but he doesn’t bring you or Leo up again.”

Something yawned, hungry and lonely, in the pit of Win’s belly. It was as though Nathan and Pritha—clearly conspirators—were leaning over her shoulders, Pritha’s disdain in one ear and Nathan’s disgust in the other, and Win cold and stranded between the two. Jada and Matthew were watching her closely, faces sympathetic. Under their scrutiny and Marie’s keen gaze, Win drew herself upright. “Has anyone spoken to my mother?”

Marie hesitated. “I wanted to talk to you first. I’m not sure if you want to talk to her or let me—”

“I don’t have time for this now,” Win said, and pushed the tablet away. “You call her.”

“Whitman—”

“It’s fine.” She shook her head. “Are we saying anything?”

“It looks better if you stay quiet,” Marie said, “at least for now. I’ll leak some insider quotes about how you’re too caught up reconnecting with an old friend to care.” She looked back at the frozen image of his smile. “I give him two years.” Marie had an uncanny ability to calculate a celebrity’s use-by date, the moment attention would shift and they wouldn’t know how to hold it.

“What about Paramount?”

“Patrick has a breakfast meeting with them in LA. I’m on damage control. If it goes away quickly, it won’t be a big deal. You and Leo will need to put on a good show. We should get the first kiss on the yacht.”

“We can do that,” Win said.

Marie had an entourage of famous friends queued for the yacht, and outside the sky was flooded with sunlight, swept like a carpet over the bay. While Matthew and Jada were finishing her hair and zipping her into the day’s outfit, Marie called Win’s mum in another room. After that Win’s phone buzzed a few times, texts from Pritha that read Call me please and then Whitman call me now, until she gave her phone to Emil.

“Only important work-related stuff, please,” she said.

“On it,” Emil said. Win loved him at these moments, brisk and businesslike, uninterested in the messy details. He’d always been able to sympathize with her about Pritha—Emil’s parents didn’t understand his job, either, wanting him to come home ten times as often as he did, and as the child of Haitian immigrants he understood the kind of gap between parents and children that spanned more than just years. Win let him blame his absences on her, his overbearing boss. More than once she had wailed, “Emil!” in her best diva voice to give him an excuse to cut a video chat short. In return he had no scruples about helping Win avoid the calls that she really ought to take.

“Is Leo ready?”

“Well,” Emil said. “He’s dressed.”

“Just send him in,” Win said.

Leo was sporting a linen shirt, boyish blue jeans, and that sly look he got when he knew she was in trouble.

“Ah, the monster herself.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek, and Win jerked backward, eyes narrowed. Sometimes it unsettled her when Leo touched her in private. She didn’t know how to react. She always felt too hot. “You look radiant this morning. No one would think you’d been up all night, eating hearts, oiling up the media machine—”

Win put two fingers to her temple and massaged. “Leo—”

“You have really shitty taste. I think this is worse than that girl I dated,” Leo said, flinging himself into a chair. “What’s-her-face.”

“Kristina.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Definitely worse than her.”

“She set fire to your car, Leo,” Win said.

Leo made a dismissive gesture. “So what?”

“I mean,” Win said, “she threw a brick through the window, and then she set fire to your car, but sure, make fun of me—”

“Hey,” Leo said, grinning, “at least she wasn’t mean about my mum.”

“Technically, if my mum wasn’t so judgy—”

“Aw, don’t you start on her,” Leo said. “She didn’t deserve an impression.”

“My mum’s a judgy bitch about you, too, you know.”

“I know,” Leo said. “That’s my type.”

Win seized a hard little embroidered cushion and hurled it at his face.

Leo caught it, laughing. “C’mon, Whitman, don’t be like that—”

He took Win’s hand on the way to the elevator.

“I’m just saying. Wasn’t some of that stuff a bit…overboard? The son-in-law thing? The accent?”

“Yeah, but what do you want me to do, Leo?” Win said. “Release a press statement calling Nathan Spencer racist? People will say I’m playing the race card because I’m mad that he talked shit about me.”

Leo gave her a disappointed look that she had seen several times before. It wasn’t the first time he had been eager for her to denounce someone for an off-color comment. He had too much belief in her and thought that with a little push she could change the world; he also had no real idea of what the consequences of that push would be. He was naive enough to think that Win would be given the same respect as him, if she only spoke up.

“But what if you’re playing the race card because he was racist?”

Win shook her head. “If people care about that, they’ll figure it out on their own. Nobody needs to hear it from me. They’re too busy hating me.”

“Oh, people love to hate you,” Leo said, drawing her in close, ready for the elevator doors to open. He swung his arm around her neck, and Win tilted toward him in a gesture of intimacy. “I just mean it’s okay to hate them back. Especially an asshole like that.”

“Of course I hate Nathan,” Win said. “I just don’t think it would help anything to say so.”

Then they were out on the hotel steps and walking into the glare of flashing cameras, Win’s bodyguards a circle around them. Win deployed her devil-may-care smile, while the paparazzi yelled questions at her about Nathan and her mum and whether she controlled all her boyfriends like this.

“Leo,” one guy yelled, “hey, Leo, did you catch Lad Rags last night?”

“Nah,” Leo said. His arm hooked around Win’s neck, drawing her in closer. Win turned, her nose brushing his jawline, and Leo gave the paparazzo the slow, cocky grin that got him plastered over front pages. “I’ve been busy.”

Behind the tinted windows of the car he let her go, leaned back, and waited. Win put her hand over her mouth, hiding her smile.

“All right,” Marie said, lips twitching, “that was pretty good.”

Leo stuck his feet up on the opposite seat with aplomb.

Win reclaimed her phone from Emil and texted her mum: Now who’s in the magazines?? Everything fine, talk to you later, love you xx. Then she let Leo make fun of Nathan all the way to the harbor.

*  *  *

Seven years ago, the interest in Leo Milanowski and Whitman Tagore hadn’t died when the novelty of their relationship did. After their first date at the Lattimore Hotel, every day they spent in each other’s company attracted more crowds, more headlines, more feverish online speculation. The press was wild for them. Everyone was wild for them. Whenever they were together it was like they were disgraced politicians, or the Beatles; cameras followed them everywhere, and Win learned to enjoy performing for them. Her fame had shifted again, from the serious-eyed teenage actor the Guardian had called “the first wholly original talent to arrive in British cinema in a long time” to the American meme, a stand-in for hysterical ex-girlfriends everywhere, to this: Hollywood’s darling, a romantic fantasy roaming city streets, careless and beautiful, caught close in Leo’s arms. She couldn’t look away from him, and nobody else could look away from her.

In that first week in New York, they veered from nightclubs in Manhattan to upstate wanders through apple orchards, from lunches with phone number–sized bills that Leo threw his card onto without interest to late-night runs to the bodega, the two of them hand in hand, dodging the paparazzi and screaming with laughter.

Win supposed it should have been exhausting or dull, but Leo was neither of those things. Instead, he flung himself into every scheduled activity with a kind of laconic glee that kept her constantly awake. Leo would derail plans if he could, but he never ruined them. He took great pleasure in making things difficult for Marie, but after the first night when Win caught his attention, he saw her as a coconspirator, someone who could be talked into fun, someone whose concerns should be taken seriously but not absolutely.

They weren’t particularly similar people. She disagreed with him all the time, and he was more than happy to fight back. It seemed to make it better, not worse, like the juddering energy between them was lighting them up, like they were emitting their own spotlights.

“If you seriously think,” Win had said as Leo helped her into the creaking wooden Cyclone car on Coney Island, both of them acting like they hadn’t noticed the group of teenagers below screaming their names, “that privacy is a luxury and not a right, you must be either a self-sabotaging moron or the world’s most ridiculous narcissist.”

“Aw, Whitman,” Leo said. “I can’t be both?” He put his arm around her as they jerked into high gear, and by dinner, there were photos of them both flashing peace signs at the roller coaster camera all over the internet.

Two days later, on a private walk in the Hamptons with paid paparazzi cropping up every half mile or so, Leo argued, “But you can’t control what other people think of you. That’s just subjectivity at work—”

“That’s completely different!” Win said. “People can decide whatever they like about me, but they don’t need unlimited access to my personal life to make the decision.”

“They don’t have that,” Leo said, and shrugged out of his leather jacket, tucking it around her shoulders. She gazed up at him. There was a man twenty feet away scrambling over a boulder to get his shot, and Win kept laughing, unable to get over how silly the whole thing was, but all that meant was the photos splashed over tabloids the next day gloated over her happiness, their infatuation with one another. TEENAGE DREAM, the headline screamed, though in actual fact Win and Leo were both twenty then, separated by a season.

Somewhere along the line, the kisses started to linger. They began to take on an unscripted quality. Win told herself she was taking the initiative. She was an actor, getting into character. She let herself look longer and longer at Leo, the width of his shoulders, his big hands, the secretive curve of his mouth. Whenever she looked at him, he was always looking back at her.

“I can allow people subjectivity without having to give up my privacy,” Win said as they leaned opposite each other in the hotel’s lift. It was fairly common knowledge that Win and Leo had booked into a suite in East Hampton; no one seemed to notice that there were two bedrooms up there. “That’s not fair.”

Leo shrugged. “It’s not fair that I’ve got money and other people don’t.”

“Please,” Win scoffed. “You think the way to make that fair is to smile nice for the paparazzi? Why don’t you give away all your money, rich boy?”

“Oh, my father wouldn’t like that,” Leo said, laughing now. “You just have to remember it doesn’t matter what people think.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter for you,” Win said. “But that’s because your career doesn’t depend on it.”

Leo was fixing them drinks from the private bar, but he paused to look at her.

“You’re talented, Win. I don’t think your career depends on what random people say about you.”

He seemed to believe it, too. Win didn’t have the heart to argue with him, even though the episode with Josip and her voicemail had taught her exactly how wrong he was.

But Leo had been born into fame. He had always lived his life doing whatever he liked and still being adored, whether he was falling drunk out of cars or attending charity launches. He only had a handful of people that he needed to please: his father, his mothers, and his siblings. It would take much more than a nasty breakup to harm their legacy. The press could forgive Leo for things that would have them baying for Win’s blood. Leo courted public opinion as a mark of respect to his family brand, but he had no producers to impress, no directors to charm, no casting managers to convince that he had the right image for a role. His dreams, if he had any, were unlikely to collapse at his feet.

Patrick had told Win seriously when he signed her that he believed she could make it to the big leagues; in the same breath, he warned her to expect significant pushback. Win didn’t need him to fill in the gaps. It wasn’t like Hollywood was full of Indian movie stars. Almost none had made it past the sidekick computer geek role. If Win messed this up, she wouldn’t get a second chance, and it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that Hollywood wouldn’t take a chance on another Indian heroine for a long time after that.

It wasn’t enough just to work hard and stay true to herself. People needed to like her. They needed to like the Whitman Tagore act that she performed for them, because that was what made them want to see her movies, and she needed an audience so she could keep doing what she loved. When they saw her and Leo living a fantasy romance, they loved it, and they wished they were her, and they could relate to her at last. Even though she didn’t look like them. Even though she wasn’t white.

Leo had always thought she should talk about it openly. If Win wanted, she could become the spokesperson for her generation, fight the good fight from inside the ranks. She had tried to explain to him the tightrope act of making vague political statements or tacitly acknowledging the existence of a power imbalance while avoiding anything more specific, anything based on real experience. It would be seen as complaining, playing the victim. White directors would be afraid to work with her, and white audiences would feel alienated by her. Leo could be exhaustingly self-righteous in response, but as part of Marie’s cleanup team, he came in after the crisis. He missed the long, tense weeks when a director was messing Win around or a thousand different people on social media came up with a sly new campaign against her. He was there for the explosion and he wanted to fight fire with fire; he didn’t see that most of the time, it was more like she was drowning and needed to tread water.

Win kept the focus on her career. She was playing the long game. She developed a skill for ignoring her frustrations.

Five days after Win and Leo met, screaming groups of fans and paparazzi had become a reliable constant. Leo drove her home after dinner at Via Carota, mostly so that the paparazzi could get photos of him kissing her goodbye in the hotel lobby. Win leaned into him, closer and closer, until the kiss was too much, turning messy, turning hard, turning demanding. She’d had two drinks with dinner and nothing to explain the hot jerk in her belly. Leo ran his fingers through her hair and over the nape of her neck. In her ear, he said, “It looks better if I go upstairs, anyway.”

They went upstairs.

In Win’s hotel suite they sat on either side of the dining table. Win folded her hands in her lap. Leo leaned back, legs spread.

“So,” Leo said. “Let’s discuss.”

“It might ruin our working relationship,” Win said. “And our working relationship is returning impressive results.”

“That’s very true,” Leo said. “On the other hand, abstaining might also ruin our working relationship.”

“Oh?”

“The curiosity,” Leo explained. “It’ll eat you up inside. You’ll pine away for me.”

“And if I sleep with you, I’ll be cured of any need for a repeat? Is that your usual guarantee?”

Leo laughed, pleased with her. Win was pleased, too. The table wasn’t as good a boundary as she had hoped. They were leaning closer and closer over it. She’d caught his hand and was touching his fingers one by one, watching them curl like he wanted to grab her and was just barely holding back.

“Your publicist will be very cross,” Leo said.

“Is that a plus or minus for you?”

“I’m just making sure you have all the information.”

“We would have to be careful,” Win said.

“That’s boring,” Leo said. “You be careful for both of us.”

“Okay,” Win agreed, and crawled over the table.

She’d thought she would be measured; she felt very grown-up, after the slow anticipation of a week’s foreplay and their conversation. But Leo caught her up in his arms hard enough that Win realized he had been holding himself back, that his performance had been just that, a performance, and now he was offering her something real. She wanted it with a fierceness that surprised her. She wanted to fight him, to push him, to see what else he’d been hiding from her.

The first time, they barely made it to the next room and gave the bed up as a lost cause entirely. Leo kissed her messily against a wall, and that seemed good enough, her fingers digging into his shoulders and her legs up around his waist. The second time they made it to the couch, where Leo pulled her into his lap and settled her with her mouth against his shoulder, writhing against his fingers, cursing him out and finally saying, broken, like she was annoyed about it, “Please.”

“There we go,” Leo said, and lifted her up.

The third time was some hours later, deep in the heart of the night, the window flung open for air and traffic blaring far below. Win’s wrists, pulled above her head, were caught unthinkingly in Leo’s hand as though he just wanted to keep her safe. Leo moved slow. Breathing felt strange and hot, like each deep drag of air lit up every part of her body.

In the morning they reached for each other before their phones, elated with their own good idea, pleased with themselves and laughing breathlessly as Leo toppled her underneath him again. The day was busy, packed with a fashion show downtown and a nightclub uptown. Win was high on success the whole way through it, playing two games, one for the public and one for her and Leo. They overlapped, but they weren’t the same. When she danced with him at the club, he murmured, “Still curious?” in her ear, and they left earlier than they should have. It didn’t matter. The next day there were photos of them splashed across the New York Post, tumbling still kissing into a waiting cab. CAN’T GET ENOUGH, the headline said. Win read it in bed with her coffee, smiling as she flipped through the photos and listened to Leo in the shower.

Then Patrick called. She hadn’t spoken to him for a few days, and she was panicking as she picked up. “Is everything okay?”

“Over and Over starts shooting on Monday,” he said, meaning Warner Bros.’ next big rom-com, already tipped to be a blockbuster. “They want you.”

Win made a face, turning the page of her paper. “I don’t know, Patrick. I’ve had enough of being the sidekick. I think this stuff with Leo Milanowski is working. Something better might turn up soon.”

“Whitman,” Patrick said, “are you watching any news besides your own? Katie Berger dropped out. They want you for the lead.”

By the time Leo was out of the shower, Win’s flights to LA were already booked. She flung herself across the room and into his arms and said, “You’re gold dust, I swear to god,” while he swung her around.

“So they tell me,” Leo said. “I think your ascending star was probably just a matter of time, though.”

Win looked down into his smiling face and heard him say again, You’ll pine away for me. She saw then that in Leo’s lazy arrogance and good humor there was real danger; that if she allowed herself to tumble like this into his arms, that if she shared her confidences and her bed, a very productive working relationship would crumble. Leo had accelerated her career like nothing else, and she liked him, very much. She did not want to ruin everything by loving him.

*  *  *

It was the right thing to do. That morning, after Nathan Spencer’s on-screen rant, Win was grateful all over again that Leo was still around, dipping in and out of her life when she needed him. If they had fallen into the messy trap of costars slash lovers, it probably would have ended in disaster years ago. It was better for both of them if the relationship stayed professional. The idea of something real was a lacuna of hesitation and desire; unpredictable, unplottable, never something Win could depend on or be sure of. Leo was too important to risk losing. Everything was safer this way. When Leo held the car door open for her at Saint-Tropez harbor, his hand was thrown out like an invitation.