Skylar squeezed Natalie’s hand and waited for her to continue.
“He wants the best for us,” she finally said. “But I don’t want him. Honestly, I’m not sure I ever loved him the way you’re supposed to love a husband, and for that matter I didn’t love Dan, either. I married him before Seth, basically because my dad died.”
Skylar noticed Natalie’s own hand was squeezing a little tighter.
“That’s why I sit out here in the middle of the night. Because I need Seth now more than I ever did, and I’ve never wanted him less.”
“Natalie,” Skylar said. “I am so sorry. But why do you think you need him so much? Because of all this?”
“Yes, because of all this! If we split up, what would we do with the boys? Split them, too?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Even if we didn’t have the twins, I don’t think I could make it through this on my own. But I take it you do.”
“I think I could,” Skylar said. “At the very least I want to try.”
Natalie made a blustery and frustrated sound.
“You know what I think? I think you’re so used to living like a princess that the idea of having to struggle is too much for you. Like this is your way out, walking into Hell in the middle of the night.”
“Natalie!” Skylar whispered fiercely and jerked her hand away. “How can you say something like that? You don’t know anything about me.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you in those stupid magazines. Like at the Oscars when your boobs spilled out of your red dress. How much did that diamond necklace cost? Or was it on loan from Fred’s?”
“So you’ve seen a couple of pictures of me in a magazine and think you know who I am? Weren’t you the high school beauty? It’s been twenty years and Thomas still remembers drooling over you in English class.”
Natalie’s eyes narrowed but she didn’t say anything.
“You know who I was in high school?” Skylar said. “A nerd in Drama no one wanted to kiss. One asshole said my lips were so thin it looked like I had them surgically removed. The only way I made it into pictures at all was because a film director bumped into me on the street. And I was cast as a ten-year-old kid even though I was fifteen.”
“I guess you hadn’t blossomed into your body yet.”
“I’m pretty sure you know I have implants.”
Natalie appeared to nod assent.
“And they’re silicone, which don’t last forever. What happens when they leak? Do I call the warranty hotline?”
“It still makes no sense to go out there and be hungry and maybe get raped,” Natalie said. “You’re one of the most famous women on earth and you must know you’ll attract unwanted attention.”
“I guess that’s part of the point. My life has been so privileged the past few years. It’s made me soft and spoiled and I’m tired of it.”
“Why be a movie star if you don’t want a privileged life?”
“Because I love it,” Skylar said. “Not saying I don’t. But another part of me can’t get past the unfairness of it all. Do you know how hard I fought to be paid as much as men less talented than me? And even then I felt like shit because of all the actors who struggle to get noticed, who get paid almost nothing. Meanwhile I make more money for a single film than most will earn in a lifetime. And do you know why that is?”
“Because you’re talented and gorgeous?”
Natalie said this with emphasis and Skylar couldn’t tell if she was being genuine or sarcastic.
“That’s nice of you to say, but no actor is a million times better than another. I get paid so much because a couple of films turned my brand into something studios could count on. Show business used to be like a family, and a lot of people could make a good living at it. Now it’s a fucking machine like everything else. A few of us get lucky and live like royalty while everyone else earns peanuts.”
“So that’s what this is about?” Natalie said. “You feel so terrible about being rich and famous that you might as well walk into post-apocalyptic hell as a way of forfeiting your good fortune?”
Skylar looked out the window, at the lake where moonlight glinted off the rippled surface like a sprinkling of snow. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to leave.
“In high school I had a group of Drama friends. Beth and Deidre and Molly were the big three, each one more popular than me. Now all of them are mothers, Beth is divorced, and they have jobs and drive minivans. We met for drinks a few months ago and they were so excited to have time to themselves that all three of them got falling down drunk. They smoked cigarettes and wanted to buy pot and you could feel the desperation coming off them in waves. And I thought, well this is a Thursday. I felt so privileged and mean and all I wanted was to go home so I could be around people more like me. Now my high school friends are going to die and here I am, privileged again, and Thomas is making curry, and I just want it to stop. That’s all. I just want it to stop.”
She was still staring out the window.
“Skylar,” Natalie said. “Look at me.”
She reluctantly turned away from the window.
“I can understand feeling guilty about your success compared to your friends. But if they really wanted to act for a living, who better to know than you, right?”
“Deidre was going to move to Hollywood before she got pregnant, but—”
“It doesn’t matter. If any of those women wanted to be in a movie bad enough, you could have made it happen. At least once. Which means something is different about you than them. You gravitated toward making movies and they were more interested in starting families. Unless they asked for help and you refused, this guilt of yours is bullshit. It’s just another way for you to be aloof, to feel sorry for people who aren’t you.”
Skylar’s reflexive urge was to lash out at Natalie, who until then she had dismissed as naïve and unsophisticated. Here was a woman whose husband donated the family’s savings to a casino right under her nose and she only suspected him, predictably, of cheating on her. As if adultery was the worst thing that could happen. What the fuck could she possibly know about Skylar’s life and how she felt?
Still, she held her tongue and eventually conceded there might be some truth in Natalie’s words. Because Deidre and Molly and even Beth could have joined her in Hollywood. She could have helped them. But in the end her friends had been more interested in traditional lives than being in films. They’d wanted stable relationships and families and to watch their kids grow up.
“I resented my friends for being so conventional,” Skylar said. “And all they ever did was complain about how difficult their lives were. But today they would kill to have those miserable lives back. It makes me wonder if people are ever really satisfied.”
“Did you want to switch places with them?”
“No. And now I feel so alone. Other than my parents, my brother, I don’t have anything to care about or anyone to care for.”
Skylar had never spoken these feelings aloud to anyone, not even Roark, whose desire to be a father, she had believed until it was too late, hovered near zero.
“You could change the things you care about,” Natalie finally said. “I mean why did you come here to see Thomas? And don’t say it was to talk about his screenplay.”
“That was part of the reason. In his first project, the women were strong and intelligent. They were integral to the story. But The Pulse wasn’t like that at all. He made it seem as if a woman couldn’t do anything on her own.”
“I understand your point,” Natalie said. “Women haven’t spent generations fighting for equality to watch it all wink out of existence along with electricity.