(2012) You have been famous for more than half of your life. Both of you. You only made the one movie together, but women still stop you on the street to ask about Meggie. Is she happy? Which one? you want to ask them. The one who kissed me in a movie when we were just kids, the one who wasn’t real? The one who likes to smoke a bit of weed and text me about her neighbor’s pet goat? The Meggie in the tabloids who drinks fucks gets fat pregnant too skinny slaps a maître d’ talks to Elvis’s ghost ghost of a missing three-year-old boy ghost of JFK? Sometimes they don’t ask about Meggie. Instead they ask if you will bite them.

Happiness! Misery! If you were one, bet on it the other was on the way. That was what everyone liked to see. It was what the whole thing was about. The demon lover has a pair of gold cuff links, those faces. Meggie gave them to him. You know the ones I mean.

(2010) Meggie and the demon lover throw a Halloween party for everyone they know. They do this every Halloween. They’re famous for it.

“Year after year, on a monkey’s face a monkey’s face,” Meggie says.

She’s King Kong. The year before? Half a pantomime horse. He’s the demon lover. Who else? Year after year.

Meggie says, “I’ve decided to give up acting. I’m going to be a poet. Nobody cares when poets get old.”

Fawn says, appraisingly, “I hope I look half as good as you when I’m your age.” Fawn, twenty-three. A makeup artist. This year she and the demon lover are married. Last year they met on set.

He says, “I’m thinking I could get some work done on my jawline.”

You’d think they were mother and daughter. Same Viking profile, same quizzical tilt to the head as they turn to look at him. Both taller than him. Both smarter, too, no doubt about it.

Maybe Meggie wonders sometimes about the women he sleeps with. Marries. Maybe he has a type. But so does she. There’s a guy at the Halloween party. A boy, really.

Meggie always has a boy and the demon lover can always pick him out. Easy enough, even if Meggie’s sly. She never introduces the lover of the moment, never brings them into conversations or even acknowledges their presence. They hang out on the edge of whatever is happening, and drink or smoke or watch Meggie at the center. Sometimes they drift closer, stand near enough to Meggie that it’s plain what’s going on. When she leaves, they follow after.