Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  ‘They’re not funny. They’re solid silver.’

  ‘Whatever. Why are they so small? When you make something stay small, that means you really care about it. You want to be able to carry it with you if you have to flee on foot. Why do you care about a model you posed in front of a fire or some old people you don’t even know?’

  Rachel didn’t answer. Ruby walked around the room, touching things. She absentmindedly ran her stubby fingers through a bowl of chocolate nonpareils, as though mistaking them for the hair of a lover. She opened a cigarette case and took a pink Sobranie to play with. She held it grandly between two fingers as she leafed through magazines and plucked books from the shelves. Rachel felt it more sharply when Ruby touched her photos and her books than when she had touched her back. Hands clenched in discomfort, she walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on. When she came back, Ruby was trying on her new Gucci trenchcoat. She looked like a child prostitute hidden in the folds of a pervert’s mackintosh.

  She took it off and, though she tried to hang it back up, it was all wrong and Rachel had to tell her. Rachel eyed her hacked hair; her body that went in and out in all the wrong places; her chewed lips and nails. ‘You. You are all wrong.’

  ‘I know!’ Ruby squealed with delight at the recognition. Over-excited, she sank into the sofa, a dark look bleeding across her face.

  Rachel turned the hanger so that the coat was facing the same way as all her others, a rail of down-filled Gucci. ‘What do you eat?’

  Ruby had a fistful of chocolates in her red mouth. ‘Nothing,’ she said, nonpareil slipping down her chin.

  ‘You don’t look like you eat nothing.’ Rachel paused long enough to decide she needn’t say the next sentence, then said it anyway. ‘I don’t think you should be eating quite so many of those.’ Her tone was that of an underpaid, over-aged babysitter.

  She felt ashamed as Ruby held back tears. Still, she thought, ‘Please don’t let her cry.’ She didn’t want to have to comfort her.

  ‘My agent says I shouldn’t eat like that either. My former agent.’ Ruby clasped a throw cushion to her tummy. ‘I eat mainly at the pastry shop across the street from my apartment. The women who work there are very thin. Like you. There’s a thin Asian girl. A thin black girl. A thin blond. It looks like Scott’s casting office,’ she added, laughing.

  She didn’t apologize because she was too far gone to know she had said anything wrong. Rachel felt a wave of unease as she realized that they were discussing her husband, whom Ruby had stolen away because she was bored.

  ‘You should date rock stars. There was this one who wanted to throw me out of a window. I didn’t mind. I thought it would be a pretty great way to die. He chickened out though.’

  Sick of her babble, Rachel interrupted, ‘So what was the sex with Scott like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ huffed Ruby, suddenly demure.

  ‘You fucked my husband. You must know what he was like.’

  ‘I never know about … stuff like that.’

  Rachel looked at the red-faced little girl and felt like a sixty-year-old biology teacher forced to cover the facts of life. But no one was forcing her. And yet she could not stop.

  ‘What did he like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he ask you to put a finger up his ass?’

  ‘No!’ she screamed and hid her face behind the throw cushion.

  Rachel pried the pillow away. ‘He liked me to do that.’

  Ruby was sobbing, her small shoulders moving up and down like a merry-go-round.

  ‘Please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I want to go home.’ She picked up her bag and scurried to the door.

  ‘No,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s snowing too hard. Stay here. Stay in the spare room.’ Ruby looked at her nervously. Rachel smiled, as naturally, as genuinely as she could.

  ‘I’ll cook you dinner.’

  ‘No! You’re just inviting me to the prom so that you can pour a bucket of pigs’ blood on my head.’

  ‘No. I’m not. It’s nasty outside. We’re both hungry. I love cooking. I’ll make you salmon pasta.’

  ‘Really?’ She let her bag sink to the floor and followed it seconds later. Leaning against the wall, Ruby whispered, ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a meal that someone actually cooked.’

  ‘You’ve been to restaurants, right?’ laughed Rachel, trying to get her to snap out of it.

  Ruby stayed serious. ‘I mean, someone who wasn’t obscured from view by swinging metal doors. If I can’t see them cook it, then it doesn’t count.’

  Rachel looked at the food while she cooked, glancing up now and then at Ruby, perched awkwardly on a stool at the kitchen counter.

  ‘I dreamt about you,’ Rachel announced, bringing the pasta to boil. ‘The last few weeks I was with Scott, he was dreaming about you so much that I started dreaming about you too.’

  Ruby, coming back to life, couldn’t begin to fathom an appropriate response. ‘I guess you get that kind of closeness when you’ve been with someone as long as you two.’

  ‘Yes, you do. But he was in love with you.’

  ‘How unfortunate for him,’ snorted Ruby.

  ‘It was unfortunate for him. And for me.’

  Ruby stared at her shoes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I don’t think it’s your fault. Do you like your pasta al dente?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As she ate her meal she started to cry.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ asked Rachel. She did not sound kind. She did not sound unkind. She sounded disinterested.

  ‘Because I am sad.’ She wiped away a rivulet of tears. ‘You don’t understand how hard my job is.’

  ‘Ha!’ spat Rachel. ‘Acting’s not hard!’

  ‘No, not acting. That’s what I do to make money, but it isn’t my job. My real job is to make men realize that the hot young girl isn’t worth it. That the hot young girl is nowhere near as good in bed as his own girlfriend is. The hot young girl isn’t just a handful, she is actually fucking irritating. I’m the last affair, the sordid, nasty, futile fling, before the guy decides he never wants to stoop that low again and gets married. I am,’ she laughed nastily through her tears, ‘the Madonna to other women’s Annette Bening. I just got the timing wrong with you. Sorry.’

  ‘Well even Madonna settled down eventually, didn’t she? She had two babies.’

  ‘But that’s terrible! Now she can’t be the baby!’

  ‘She’s in her forties!’

  ‘You’re not listening to me!’

  ‘Let me get this right. So what you’re saying is that God put you on this planet as some self-sacrificing whore of Christ to prove to straying men that monogamous relationships are more rewarding than infidelity?’

  ‘I think so, yes,’ smiled Ruby, wanly.

  ‘Bullshit! You do it because you want to.’ Rachel stood straight in front of her, squaring up for an imaginary playground fight. ‘You don’t want the responsibility of a real relationship. You’re afraid of needing someone. Of missing them.’

  ‘I have needed people. I need them like crazy. I’ve missed them too. You don’t know about my mother. You don’t know about Liev.’

  ‘That’s true. I know nothing about either of them. The only person I know that you know is my ex-husband.’

  ‘OK. This kid. This dumb, invisible, shape-shifting kid called Aslan. I miss what he isn’t going to let me have. I don’t have anything to miss yet and that’s what’s killing me. My boyfriend Sebastian. When things were great between us, I missed him like crazy. When I heard he went to the Venice Film Festival to be a PA for Cameron Diaz, I thought I might die.’

  ‘My mother just died. But it was because of cancer. Not Cameron Diaz.’

  ‘My mother’s dead too. My mom was too fragile, too thin-skinned to handle life on earth, so she left it all behind. She didn’t have the luxury of being a heroine to cancer. She didn’t have the chance to be brave and fi
ght it off with wit and wisdom. The thing that took her, took away the wit and wisdom too, and left her not only dead, but a coward as well.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? You don’t like me anyway. Why would you have liked my mother? She’s just like me, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t say I would have liked her. I said that I was sorry.’

  ‘Why? Why the fuck are you sorry that my mom killed herself?’

  ‘I think … I think because it probably made you how you are.’

  ‘How am I?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘I am alone. Completely. Whereas before she died I was mostly alone. I think I prefer it this way.’

  ‘I don’t think you do.’

  ‘And what makes you think that?’

  ‘I think because you have loveless affairs with other people’s husbands, for one. I think because you stagger drunk as an elephant into Park Avenue boutiques. I think because you make yourself look so awful, so … ugly. If you wanted to disappear and live alone and unnoticed, you would be beautiful, as you were intended to be. You think that if you make yourself ugly enough, people will want to help you? You’re being ridiculous. It doesn’t work like that. Even the best-hearted people would rather be around beauty. It is the worst-hearted people who will be intrigued by you, the way you are now.’

  i was there first

  Placing her empty pasta bowl neatly in the dishwasher, Ruby excused herself politely and went to the bathroom. Turning the faucets on full, she leaned over the toilet bowl and started the evil orgasm. ‘Oh God!’ she panted as the last piece of salmon fell crushed, but still pink, into the toilet. ‘Oh God, I’m disgusting,’ she breathed, pulling herself back up. Her knuckles flamed puce as she held her hands under the water. Rachel’s bathroom was a temple to cleanliness. Five different facial cleansers sat on the sink and she deliberately picked the most expensive with which to wash her fingers. She took a cotton ball and patted toner across her face. When she went to the towel rack, she meant to dry her hands. But instead, she took a fluffy blue bath towel and wrapped herself in it, crouched with her back against the bathroom door. She had been there fifteen minutes when Rachel started to knock. Ruby had not bothered to lock it and her hostess let herself in, shoving Ruby into the side of the tub as she did.

  Rachel crouched down beside her, then, sensing that she may be there some time, let herself lean back against the wall too.

  ‘Are you a drug addict, Ruby?’

  Ruby shook her head.

  ‘Are you bulimic?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You have to stop.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘A lot. You want to know personal or academic?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘OK. Bulimia is clearly self-loathing, but it’s also quasi-sexual. But it’s a dirty shameful Victorian brand of sexuality that is never ever erotic. You want it so bad and then you feel lousy afterwards. Being bulimic is like having rough toilet sex all the time – quick, jam your foot in the door, bend over, hurry up kind of sex with no variation. No love, just a means to an end. A way to while away the time so you don’t have to think about how much you hate yourself.’

  ‘I think, if it’s OK with you,’ demurred Ruby, ‘that I’ll be running along to bed now.’

  But she didn’t run, she walked, very, very slowly, hoping, with each step, to feel Rachel’s arms around her.

  In the morning, Rachel was exhausted and Ruby was cheerful again. She tidied the kitchen, picking up the cutlery where it had been abandoned during their discussion. ‘What are you doing?’ asked Rachel through fuzzy teeth.

  ‘Tidying! I enjoy it in other people’s houses. I can make sense of other people’s apartments. Just not my own.’

  ‘Uh, thank you,’ nodded Rachel, blearily drawing her robe tighter across her swan neck. Opening her mouth as wide as a Muppet, she gave an enormous children’s-television-workshop yawn. As Rachel stretched out on the sofa, Ruby bounced around the room, before coming to rest at her feet.

  ‘I have a question, Rachel.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ yawned Rachel, curling away from her, her whole body facing the side of the sofa.

  ‘Tell me about your husband.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You knew him well enough.’

  Ruby shrugged her shoulders. ‘I fucked him. I didn’t know him. I’m not really very interested in him, to be perfectly honest. I’m interested in you. So anything I want to know about Scott is in reference to you, OK?’

  ‘Ruby, this is all getting a bit strange. I’m not quite sure what’s going on here.’

  ‘No, neither am I. But I like you and I think you like me. I think, perhaps, we might be able to help one another.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Listen, you know I’m screwy. Everybody knows that. But I know something not everybody knows. And that is that you’re screwy too. You hold it together well, with your shiny hair and all. It is shiny, I’m not denying it for a second. Congratulations on your hair. But it’s supposed to deflect something, right?’

  Rachel snorted as if this were all too ridiculous. But she could not look away from her pasty-faced interrogator.

  ‘He did something to you, didn’t he? We’re friends now, Rachel. Tell me how he hurt you. Tell me what would have happened to me if I had been the one he married.’

  rachel’s story

  As Ruby set coffee and toast down in front of her, Rachel drew deep on her cigarette. The toast was burnt and the coffee was too weak. Rachel almost cried then and there, for the state of the toast seemed to be an accurate representation of her, whilst her young house guest’s problems were encapsulated by the coffee.

  Pushing the toast away, Rachel exhaled a stream of smoke, admitting with the exhalation: ‘He took things from me.’

  ‘What did he take?’ asked Ruby, gossipy eyes agog.

  ‘He took my curve,’ she answered matter of factly and stubbed her cigarette out, half-smoked, in an ashtray stolen from a Parisian bistro. ‘I didn’t notice it at first. Until one night, five a.m., when we were lying in bed, and I happened to run my fingers across my left hip. Scott lay beside me, asleep. Valium, champagne and Temazepam asleep. And I was awake. Coke, coke and cookies awake. Staring at the ceiling, hearing him breathing so slow, so languorously, as if he were too jaded and self-important to bother with air. Let it come to him.

  ‘For our whole relationship, through all the ups and downs, I never allowed myself to stare at the ceiling. I’ve stared at the blinds, the carpet, the electrical fixtures, the en-suite bathroom, and the walk-in wardrobe. But not the ceiling. I can’t look up. Whenever I look up in Hollywood, I see clouds in the shape of out-of-work actors. If I look up, I’ll fall. I always turn on my side before I let myself do that.

  ‘Before, when we were still on the East Coast, we’d have a fight and I would just get a cab back to my mom’s. But there is no cab in the world that can give you back the last ten years of your life. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Look. I’m in great shape. I’m really a rather ordinary-looking woman. But I’m well turned out. I worked hard at it. From the night we married, I did five hundred sit-ups a day, starting right there in our wedding suite. Then one day I realized, staring at nobody’s floor, with my everywife life, that the deep, deep curve was a straight line.’

  ‘You didn’t just gain weight?’

  ‘I don’t gain weight. I don’t eat.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘So I glanced at the dresser-table photos. Us at a première, him in Armani, me in a Dolce gown, my waist nipped in, his arm around it. I raised the duvet and looked at him. Champagne was seeping through his pores. But he was thinner, tanner, tauter than when I first met him. He looked better than ever. Tentatively, knowing already what I would find, I dragged my palms from my ribs to my hips. The curve was gone. And I could not let him have it. So you see, in the end it was really nothing to do with you at all.’


  ‘You look curvy to me,’ enthused Ruby, delighted with the tale.

  ‘You know what, honey?’ laughed Rachel, stretching her hands above her head as if to emphasize the point. ‘I feel curvy.’

  critical respect

  I fell in love with the kid, I really did. I worried about her immediately. At first she just seems like this obnoxious little brat. But she is very fragile. I don’t know what she is doing, depending upon the kindness of strangers at such a young age. That’s so dangerous at the age she is, the profession that she works in. The city she lives in. There is no depending in New York and definitely no kindness. There are strangers, though. She got that part right.

  Everyone always makes fun of Los Angeles. New Yorkers are so snotty about the West Coast. But you know, even though I did have my facials, my hairdresser, colorist and masseuse, they were all good people. Good, kind souls working crappy jobs. I mean, I like to think, naive as it sounds, that I would have felt it otherwise. Bad people have vibes, like the energy left behind by the dead. I saw that masseuse twice a week. I would have known if she had been a duplicitous evil bitch. Ruby can’t feel the energy from dead people because she’s convinced herself that she is dead already.

  Most people in California are pretty decent. I think it’s because we always see such a large expanse of sky. Things fall into perspective. In New York, you barely see the sky at all, and your life becomes tinier and tinier the more you look up. You look up to the heavens for help, for salvation, but there isn’t anything up there that isn’t man-made, so you look back down again.

  I’ve lived on both coasts. Ruby’s worked on both coasts and that’s different. She doesn’t have that same intuition that I do. She gives pieces of herself away, for way below the fair price, as though her soul were a closing-down sale.

  It was such bad weather. And she was in such a bad state. I don’t think she realizes, even now, how sick she was that first night. I mean, she was totally looped. Of course, I hated her, I was furious about the cavalier manner in which she had destroyed my marriage. But I couldn’t hate her for long. First of all, I was worried that if I let her go home, she would die and I would have to answer a lot of police questions and the tabloids would get hold of it and it would be a big mess. And secondly … well, it sounds ridiculous … but this all happened right after Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp.