Page 56 of Main Characters
‘Everyone’s going to want a piece of you, babe,’ he says. ‘You need to decide how much you can give.’
The film debuts at Cannes, in Critics’ Week. One third of their trio is conspicuously absent, and publicists hiss through their teeth at reporters who look like they might bring up Seb Bonami. Jacob finds the whole thing funny. Clara, clearly, doesn’t.
The lights go down, and a title card comes up. Clara had wanted to call itSons of the Inferno, but a chorus of execs had told her it sounded like a rock band or a biker gang. In front of a hundred discerning reviewers and judgemental peers, a huge screen says:The Sons. Afterwards, a standing ovation in the double digits. Jacob knows Clara, and he knows that as soon as she’s back in London, she’ll be back in the mix, tinkering until her fingers bleed.
‘I’m a perfectionist,’ Clara says to one interviewer.
‘Well, that’s clear,’ they reply. ‘The film is pretty perfect.’
Clara giggles, in the way she only does when she’s drunk and trying to hide it.
The interviewer goes on. ‘And isn’t Jacob Steele just a revelation?’
Jacob doesn’t intentionally steal the spotlight. Spotlights just have a tendency to sway towards him.
Jacob will remember this as a golden era. He and Clara, in Austin, in Austria, in a plane bathroom somewhere over theAtlantic. Coming and going and coming back together again. The rest of the festivals feel like stops on a victory tour. They collide at each of them. Everywhere, Clara is fêted as an auteur, a visionary filmmaker, a bastion of feminism. Jacob must have seen it all along. He could have had anyone, and he still chose her.
In Venice, Clara gets into a shouting match with a journalist during a press conference. She says that she only ever gets asked boring questions or sexist questions. She says that film festivals make her feel dirty, that the purpose isn’t celebrating movies but whoring yourself out to potential buyers. She stumbles on red carpets, presses powder into her gums. In Park City, Jacob is asked about #MeToo. An old co-star has been cancelled for straying too far into a grey area, and he’s expected to issue a condemnation. He gives the right answer. He’s an active listener. He’s all for intimacy coordinators. Secretly, he wonders if his name is on some list somewhere, waiting to be published. He hasn’t done anything, to anyone. Has he?
‘It’s worrying,’ he says, later, in the latest hotel suite.
Clara looks at him, her loathing laid bare. ‘Why areyouworried?’
Amsterdam feels like the beginning of the end. They fight before the festival even begins, only speaking when they’re forced to share a panel. Ren appears from nowhere, still meddling after all this time, hanging around after the screening like any other hanger-on. She’s disappointed. She’d expected a different Clara. And yet, after she’s gone, Clara blames the argument on him.
‘Stop trying to control me!’ she screams.
‘Someone has to,’ he shouts back. ‘You’re a fucking mess.’
He shouldn’t have spat at her. That was beneath him.
Clara has stormed off before. But Jacob can see the future, and he knows that she always comes back. The premiere ofThe Sonsis in London that winter. Clara rents a flat, in Islington. They end up in the same bed, the same old rhythm of sniping at one another, of each trying to bring the other down a peg. This time, four walls can’t contain them. They argue in the street, because one of them doesn’t want to be seen with the other. They argue in bed, because the sex is no good otherwise. Clara spends a long time in the shower afterwards.
One such contretemps. Clara lies on her side like a wounded animal, staring at the door. The sight enrages Jacob.
‘Who the fuck are you expecting to walk through it?’
Another disagreement. She tries to get around him, but he slams his arm over the only exit. He grabs her wrist, hard.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he says. ‘I forbid it.’
‘You forbid it?’ She laughs. ‘Youforbidit?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘You’re pathetic.’
How many times has Jacob called Clara pathetic? How many times has he told her that she’s nothing, or that she’d be nothing without him? He watches himself spew vitriol as if he’s outside on the balcony, looking in. This argument has happened before, and it will happen again.
The film comes out in December. The reviews are good. Better than good. They’re all about him.
They don’t plan to see each other at the Claridges Christmas party. The other guests treat Clara like a messiah. Afterwards, Jacob tells her that no one would miss her. That no one would care. He’s sick of her fucking crying. When the vase explodes in slow-motion against the wall, he has the time to be surprised that there’s no water inside it, that the flowers the hotel provided must be fake. He’s even more surprised when he realises that he was the one who threw it.
When Jacob wakes the next morning, Clara is standing over the debris of the night before. The broken vase. The torn newspaper beneath it, the five-star review of their film.
‘Look at me,’ she says.
He sits up in bed and looks at her, but not because she asked.
‘I’m done,’ she says. ‘This won’t happen again.’
