My memories are pressed into clay just as soft as anybody’s. Do not think I consider myself some kind of biographer. I wasn’t there when Verity decided to lottery off the movie money. I don’t even think he was there. He was on one, that’s why he didn’t call. He never calls me when he’s on one. He can be mean. He says things. It wasn’t like that when he was younger, but nobody’s a drunk when they’re beautiful and twenty-five. He was certainly very beautiful. Let me think where to start.
I lived in a silly little apartment on Beachwood Drive. One of those Los Angeles bungalow-looking places with a long walkway and seven dwarfy bungalows arranged all around. The plumbing was touchy, sulfuric. The ceilings low. Poor Verity couldn’t even stand up straight when he walked through my front door. He might have been walking into a doll’s house.
I lived there when I met Verity, and I lived there all through his struggling years. When he had no money and slept folded into thirds on my couch. But the television was in my bedroom, and we would often stay up late watching TCM or SYFY together, and fall asleep there in the lilac light that rose and fell with each slipping scene. I began to expect 6 him in my bed. Such a difficult friendship to try to explain! I laughed whenever we made love or anything like that. It was so funny to think about. I could only do it if I was partly kidding. You’d laugh too if you saw us together. Maybe you have. Maybe you’ve seen one of those red-carpet photos, from when he was always leading me out onto red carpets like a little colt around the paddock. Hoofing tenderly in my high-heeled shoes. Trying to remember what I normally did with my hands (Did I use them for something? Should I be holding some papers?). And the people who screamed his name thought I was his mother. On TV, the mother is always around the same age as her children. You get the sense she is choosing to be older than them.
I’ll tell you, he’s a wonderful actor. He is. One of the only wonderful actors alive. With that face he would have gotten famous if he couldn’t act his way out of a shoe, but he happens to be very sensitive and servile as an actor. He almost disappears into it. I mean you can see him there, the way you can see the wall when you’re projecting a movie onto it. That’s what Verity is like as an actor. A plain white wall that opens up and swallows you.
I was still living in the apartment when Verity became a famous actor and got rich. Honestly, he held off getting his own place a long time. He seemed sort of frightened to. But eventually he bought a “cabin” in Laurel Canyon. Beautiful house. Not lavish, beautiful. Windows everywhere and peach pine. It had a round fireplace right in the middle. He burned a hole in the floor once. He was like a child in some ways.
He used to turn on all the TVs in the house. And put them on the same channel. When you walked from one room to the next, you’d hear the end of a line repeated, like an echo.
Then, when was it, over ten years ago. I was thirty-six and working for Karl. A Norwegian director, sort of brilliant but strange. Other people confused him. Little tasks confused him. When he hired me, he gave me a stack of mail about six months deep and said, “I can’t face it.” He said people in Los Angeles had “quite a lot of stiffness. Not so laid back really. You can make a very beautiful life here, not see anyone, live in your nice beautiful house and work. You think, this is a nice place! But when you go out with people, they think you are really offensive. They want everyone to agree all the time. I don’t like Jenny, she is not a nice girl. Oh yes, I do not like her either. Neither do I, who else? Well, Simon. He’s bad. He writes bad books. Also, you are not supposed to want to be around any girls who are young, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, these are children. Not sexy. Pervert. But the women who are thirty, forty, get all these things inject to their faces, why? To look young. To look twenty. And you are supposed to be attract to them. Maybe I agree, I don’t know, but really it should be funny! Only nobody wants to laugh. You know it’s bad when the Norwegian has a better sense of humor than you.”
He was a good boss. He paid me well and on time. He introduced me on set not as “my assistant” but as “a talented filmmaker.” He didn’t flirt with me, and he didn’t expect me to lie down in front of any trucks for the movies.
Of course, everybody works in London now, but they didn’t fourteen years ago. Karl took a job there, directing a play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, at the Almeida. He got me a visa and rented me a nice place on St. Paul’s Road. Verity offered to water my plants while I was gone. That made me laugh. I thought he’d do the first week, then get a job and forget. I’d come back and they’d all be dead. “Thanks,” he said. “Thank you, Helen, it hadn’t escaped my notice that I may have anything else to do in the next four months.” He promised me Stephen would be on hand if necessary. But he wanted to do it, he missed my place. It would be nice to sit and have a coffee there. “Or watch SYFY?” I asked, smiling at him. He blushed, then looked annoyed and said, “No, I don’t think I will.” I loved him so much then I laughed, but I could have cried. You know that rising feeling? Sure you do. Like the Tennyson line?
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.
Don’t worry, it’s the only poem I have memorized. I liked London, sort of. I didn’t mind the high gray sun. Or when the sky dropped low and filled the street with mist. It was like being a head of lettuce at the grocery store. Karl was almost willfully jet-lagged and refused to rehearse before lunch. As a result, in the beginning at least, I had many mornings to myself. I ought to have written with the time, but I found myself wandering all over North London instead. And sometimes down to the museums. One morning I walked down to tacky, gridlocked Angel and along the black-and-white streets to the British Museum and saw the Babylonian map of the world. It’s a stone, roughly the size and shape of a woman’s palm. Carved into its center is a circle, the world. The world contains the Tigris and the Euphrates and a smattering of great cities, like stars. The world is encased by a single river with no beginning or end. The Bitter River, they called it.
There are a lot of dead people in the British Museum. There are a lot of dead people everywhere, but not in plain view. Something to keep in mind is that you’re always closer to a dead person than you think. There is a skeleton arranged in an eastward crouch in a pit of sand. The placard informs you that his fractured feet imply a violent life. There is the skull of a teenage guard, crushed flat at his post. His pancake profile is arranged on a shelf like a commemorative plate. There are things that will upset your balance in the British Museum. You leave Mesopotamia and are overwhelmed by the squeak of rubber shoes. A courtyard hermetically sealed in glass, like those mummies upstairs. Sour coffee with cream and rustling umbrellas and frightened tourists, impervious to death. The stone steps, sagging like mattresses, imply a fugaciousness that doesn’t track with the solidity of the place. The apparent solidity. Then you remember about Mesopotamia. And you’re out once more into the strange world. Gray sun. Rain too light to fall properly, it floats. You part the drops 10 like curtains as you cross Russell Square. Strange world. Difficult to conceive of. You are in one of the smattered cities. You are encased by a black river with no beginning. You have the familiar sensation, as you descend to the Piccadilly Line, that life will rush to start over at the end.
This was my temper in London. I was in no mood for Verity’s voicemails anthropomorphizing my plants in a Herzog accent. Fern is winsome this morning. Something coaxes her into a concerning depression. Possibly Hydrangea to blame? I sense a budding (excuse the pun) rift, but hard to know for certain. A tiresome code of silence bonds the jungle . . .
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I got upset whenever he was seeing anybody, so he never told me outright. The thing is, I could tell. His delivery would change a little, become too cute, and I’d find he was with a costar, PA, costume assistant, assistant editor. Some lovely, buoyant person. She’d be around for nine months or so. And when she was around I’d be “Verity’s friend Helen.” I would conceptually annoy her until she met me, then she’d breathe out, totally unthreatened. She’d laugh at my jokes and delight in my haircut.
In London, I couldn’t stop imagining her in my living room, slouched on my sofa, flipping through one of my magazines, foot tucked sweetly under thigh, while he filled my watering can and babbled at her about wartime Kurosawa. And where the hell does Helen hide her paper towels? Have you seen any? Help me look, so and so. God forbid they dig through my cabinets together. What drove me to such possessiveness? I felt possessive. Whether of the apartment or of Verity I couldn’t tell. Maybe I thought that, if nothing else, the experience of Verity in my apartment belonged to me.
Well if I was so jealous, what of?
A lovely, buoyant person, ten, twenty, thirty years your junior, does not functionally know that she is aging at the same rate you are. She expects to fare better. Sinking breasts, cellulite, jowls—these are surely the result of some lapse in your concentration. You went tanning perhaps, or smoked. She can quite easily avoid these things. She cannot imagine being powerless to halt the approach. But she is too late; it already approaches her. That Ouroboric thing that surrounds us is the approach.
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From Television by Lauren Rothery. Copyright © 2025 by Lauren Rothery. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
