“Hey,” the man with the cigarette says, and reaches for his camera. He’s about her age, with sideburns and dark hair that falls in his eyes.
“Don’t,” she says sharply, and he hesitates.
“What are you doing out so late?”
“Are you going to take my picture?”
He lowers the camera.
“Thank you,” she says. “In answer to your question, I just came out here to see if you might have an extra cigarette.”
“How’d you know I’d have one?”
“Because you’re in front of my house smoking every night.”
“Six nights a week,” he says. “I take Mondays off.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jeevan Chaudhary.”
“So do you have a cigarette for me, Jeevan?”
“Sure. Here. I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I just started again. Light?”
“So,” he says, once her cigarette’s lit, “this is a first.”
She ignores this, looking up at the house. “It’s pretty from here, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says. “You have a beautiful home.” Was that sarcasm? She isn’t sure. She doesn’t care. She’s always found the house beautiful, but it’s even more so now that she knows she’s leaving. It’s modest by the standards of people whose names appear above the titles of their movies, but extravagant beyond anything she would have imagined for herself. In all my life, there will never be another house like this.
“You know what time it is?” he asks.
“I don’t know, about three a.m.? Maybe more like three thirty?”
“Why’s Elizabeth Colton’s car still in the driveway?”
“Because she’s a raging alcoholic,” Miranda says.
His eyes widen. “Really?”
“She’s too wasted to drive. You didn’t hear that from me.”
“Sure. No. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You people live for that kind of gossip, don’t you?”
“No,” he says, “I live on that kind of gossip, actually. As in, it pays my rent. What I live for is something different.”
“What do you live for?”
“Truth and beauty,” he says, deadpan.
“You like your job?”
“I don’t hate it.”
She is dangerously close to tears. “So you enjoy stalking people?”
He laughs. “Let’s just say the job fits with my basic understanding of what work is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You don’t have to work for a living.”
“Please,” Miranda says, “I’ve worked all my life. I worked all through school. These past few years are an anomaly.” Although as she says this she can’t help but think of Pablo. She lived off him for ten months, until it became clear that they were going to run out of money before he sold another painting. In the next version of her life, she decides, she will be entirely independent.
“Forget it.”
“No really, I’m curious. What’s your understanding of work?”
“Work is combat.”
“So you’ve hated every job you’ve had, is that what you’re saying?”
Jeevan shrugs. He’s looking at something on his phone, distracted, his face lit blue by the screen. Miranda returns her attention to the house. The sensation of being in a dream that will end at any moment, only she isn’t sure if she’s fighting to wake up or to stay asleep. Elizabeth’s car is all long curves and streaks of reflected light. Miranda thinks of the places she might go now that Los Angeles is over, and what surprises her is that the first place that comes to mind is Neptune Logistics. She misses the order of the place, the utter manageability of her job there, the cool air of Leon Prevant’s office suite, the calm of the lake.
“Hey!” Jeevan says suddenly, and as Miranda turns, the cigarette halfway to her mouth, the flash of his camera catches her unaware. Five more flashes in quick succession as she drops the cigarette on the sidewalk and walks quickly away from him, enters a code into a keypad and slips back in through the side gate, the afterimage of the first flash floating across her vision. How could she have let her guard down? How could she have been so stupid?
In the morning her picture will appear in a gossip website: TROUBLE IN PARADISE? AMID RUMORS OF ARTHUR’S INFIDELITY, MIRANDA WANDERS THE STREETS OF HOLLYWOOD AT FOUR A.M. CRYING AND SMOKING. And the photograph, the photograph, Miranda alone in the small hours of the morning with obvious tears in her eyes, pale in the flash, her hair standing up and a cigarette between her fingers, lips parted, a bra strap showing where her dress has slipped.