“Coming up on two years,” he says. “Tried a few times before, but this is my longest stretch so far.”
I wondered how much Gabe remembers from all those years ago. If he even knows who he spoke to the night before he went to rehab that first time.
Like the question of Jacinda, I’m torn between wanting to know and wanting to willfully ignore the elephant in the corner.
“How does that feel?” I ask instead. Even if I want to know the truth, this isn’t the time. “Maintaining your sobriety for that long?”
He leans back. “Honestly?”
“Of course,” I say.
“It’s the accomplishment I’m proudest of,” he says. “Bond is nothing in comparison.”
He looks up at me.
“What are you most proud of, Chani?”
What a question.
“This isn’t about me,” I say, annoyed that he’s trying to turn this interview back at me. Again.
He shrugs.
“Is it a struggle to maintain your sobriety now that you’re working again?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” he says. “But I have a great sponsor and therapist, and I lean on them when I feel the urge to drink. I’ve had to reframe my impulses—training myself to go for the phone instead of the bottle. Or to a meeting, but that’s a little harder when you’re not really able to be anonymous.”
It’s sort of a joke, but I don’t smile. Because even though I didn’t give Gabe an answer to his question, I’m still thinking about it.
And I realize, in a way, that article is the one I’m proudest of.
It’s not because it’s the one that went viral, and got me an agent and a book deal. It’s because it was special. Because I made it special.
Nothing since then has come close to feeling as satisfying or triumphant. And even so, that pride I feel at the work has been tempered by the reality of how it’s been received. How I’ve been received.
There’s no denying that my career is intrinsically linked to Gabe’s. To Gabe.
No matter what I do—no matter what I write—that will always be a footnote in my career, if not the footnote.
It makes it hard to know if my pride in that piece is well-earned, or if it just went viral because of its content.
Our drinks arrive and we both stare at my beer.
“It’s okay, really,” he says. “I don’t spend a lot of time at clubs or bars anymore, but I can handle someone having a drink at lunch.”
I take the world’s tiniest sip.
“How has sobriety changed your life?” I ask.
There had been rumors of Gabe’s drinking problem during the filming of Murder on Wheels—his second Bond film—six or seven years ago, but his management had denied and distracted until they couldn’t anymore.
“How hasn’t it?” he asks. “Sobriety—like addiction—informs almost everything I do. When I was deep into my addiction, all I thought about was getting drunk.”
“What did drinking give you?”
“Distance,” he says.
“Distance.”
“It was a way to avoid the things I didn’t want to confront,” he says. “Drinking was a way to pretend that they weren’t happening. A way to escape what I was feeling. My insecurities. My fears. My shame. My inadequacies as an actor. As a person.”
I notice then how still Gabe is. How he’s sitting there, across from me, and not fidgeting, not restlessly moving.
“Sobriety gives me strength,” he says. “The strength to face the things I wanted to hide from.”
“Like your marriage?” I ask.
“Success” was what I’d meant to say. Not marriage. And I definitely hadn’t meant to ask it in that bitter, angry tone.
I didn’t really want to talk about him and Jacinda.
This interview already feels dangerously personal, with Gabe being as vulnerable and open as he is. It makes it hard to be angry at him. But that anger is what’s protecting me. I need it.
“Chani,” Gabe says, and his eyes are so very sad.
But before he can say any more, our food arrives.
He watches me put my fries on my burger and after I’ve taken a bite, swallowed, and glanced back at my notebook looking for another question, he picks up right where we left off.
“I fucked up a lot,” he says. “And my marriage…”
He pauses.
“It was complicated. But I don’t regret it.”
It’s a bit like a boot to the chest, those words.
“Why would you?” I ask, going for breezy. “?‘Jacinda Lockwood is the most beautiful woman in the world.’?”
That had been the headline they gave her when she landed on the cover of Vogue this last spring.
“She was a good friend to me,” Gabe says. “Is a good friend.”
“Mmhmm,” I say, looking down at my notebook, looking for questions that will get us away from this topic.
“What about you?” he asks.
“I didn’t marry Jacinda Lockwood,” I say.
“You did marry the Novelist,” he says.
“Jeremy,” I say.
“?‘The man with his finger on the pulse of modern literature,’?” Gabe says.
It was a pull quote from The New York Times’ review of Jeremy’s first book.
The day he’d heard had been a good day.
It had been a struggle for him to write the book. When I moved to New York, the release date had been pushed out twice and he still barely had a manuscript. This time he had been the one struggling with focus. By that point, I was working consistently and managed to convince Jeremy to stick to a rigid writing schedule in order to get the book done.
He’d resisted at first, but it was successful in the end.
When we heard the news, we’d both been working nonstop—him gearing up for his book’s release and me with an avalanche of projects that I had been happy to have but happier to be done with. We’d taken a day to enjoy the city, spending the morning at the Met and then walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, getting ice cream on the other side. The whole outing, really, had been an attempt to distract from the news that would be coming from Jeremy’s publisher. And it had been there, at the base of the bridge, ice cream melting down my wrist, that Jeremy had learned that The New York Times had loved his book.