by Emma Forrest
Just as I was wondering how to get her out completely as soon as possible, my thoughts were distracted by the sight of a large cockroach, dead and decaying, smack in the middle of a glue trap at the base of the bathroom sink. I decided not to wait in for her and scanned the papers for movie programs. Pulling on a pair of flip-flops, I got the hell out of there.
I stood in line to see Gladiator, more distraught than I was when I bolted out of the house, because the line was so long. I think I have a reverse version of the Cassandra syndrome. She could see into the future but her curse was that no one would ever believe her. My curse is that everyone believes me. Of course, I don’t foresee wars or plagues, just pop stars and movie idols. As soon as I started saying that there was this great Australian character actor called Russell Crowe, he becomes the world’s biggest star. When I’m out there, busily collecting rare B-sides by an indie band called REM, they sign to a major label and become the biggest rock act in the world. It’s at a point where I’m scared to like anything for fear that they’ll become huge. Sliced up and handed to the people in such slim portions that there’s nothing left for me.
As the line grew longer behind me, I tried to swallow my panic. Everyone around me was talking about how Russell Crowe is absolutely their favorite actor and I just wanted to cry. I was wearing the same pajamas I had had on for two days and nights. They weren’t even cute, attention-seeking pajamas with blue winceyette sheep, or a sexy negligée, underwear as outerwear. I had on a pair of ratty track pants and an oversized T-shirt I bought on St Mark’s Place that says ‘I love chicks with big tits’. I bought it for Sebastian who thought it was totally punk rock and cool. On me, with my breasts bursting through the print, it was just alarming. The track pants had pieces of cord digging into my stomach and they were hell to sleep in but I was too lazy to take them off. The outfit I had on was unusual, in that it was appropriate neither for the comfort of my bed nor for public viewing.
Of course the man I wanted very least to be viewed by was in front of me on the escalator as I made my droopy way to cinema three. Sebastian had his arm around a statuesque Asian girl, but when he realized it was me, he quickly dropped his arm to his side, as though caught out. We reached the top of the stairs and the Asian statue stood dopey at his side, until he gave her a little shove in the direction of the popcorn stand. I kept turning my head to catch secret glances in the reflection, glances that were about as subtle as my T-shirt. Steering me against a wall holding a poster of Angelina Jolie’s giant eye and mouth, he ignored the T-shirt. I knew he was thinking I had it on because it was something he had worn. He was right.
‘How have you been?’ asked Sebastian. ‘How are you?’
I considered the question. ‘I’d quite like to die,’ I stated matter of factly as if picking fluff from a sweater.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘There was a cockroach in my bathroom. A big one.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the statue teeter toward us, popcorn and soda in hand.
‘And you couldn’t catch it?’ asked Sebastian, studiously ignoring her.
‘No, I did catch it. It was caught, dead in the sticky trap at the base of the sink. I noticed when I went to brush my teeth.’
‘So it was dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was in a trap.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So what was the problem?’
I sighed as if he were the stupidest man on earth, which is how I always treated him even at the very apex of our love affair. ‘The problem is that it was there.’
‘And that makes you want to die because …?’
‘Because I didn’t want it to be there.’
‘Right. Um, we’re all going to see Gladiator, I guess.’ He finally acknowledged the statue who, eyeing me quickly, smiled weak as a cup of chamomile tea. ‘Why don’t you sit with us?’
I thought about it for a moment, breathing through my nose as I imagined sitting on one side of Sebastian with his lady friend on the other. A tear trickled down my cheek, as logical yet unedifying as sweat on the back of a go-go dancer. I started to sob.
‘I can’t watch this film. I can’t watch this film.’
A nice old lady on her way into the theater stopped to offer me a Kleenex.
‘Fuck you! Fuck you! I loved him first. I loved him, you bunch of sheep motherfuckers! Have you seen Proof? Have you seen Romper Stomper? Hands up anyone here who has seen Virtuosity? I didn’t think so.’
There was spit flying out of my mouth as I screamed, ‘Fuck you all!’
That’s when Security removed me, dragging me down the escalator adjacent to the one I had just glided up.
get me out of here
Someone had recognized me and called the Enquirer, who had a photographer waiting to snap a photo as Security threw me out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t help but stop crying as they then turned around and began roughing up the photographer too. Swallowing the desire to kick the photographer in the ribs, Sebastian, thinking fast for once, grabbed the camera. ‘I’ll press charges,’ shrieked the paparazzo.
The taxi pulled jerkily away from the cineplex, Sebastian holding my head on his shoulder, the statue stranded streets behind us.
‘Holy shit!’ screamed Sebastian, stuffing the film in his blazer pocket.
I was laughing hysterically. ‘That was brilliant! That was fucking brilliant. That guy will press charges. You’re going down, Sebastian Chase. Lawsuit!’ My panic ignited again by the word ‘lawsuit,’ I switched back from laughter to tears, realizing, in seven-second time delay, that I was no longer laughing but sobbing.
‘Ruby. Calm down. Chill the fuck out. What is it? What are you really upset about?’
I saw the driver glance in his rear-view mirror, not as if he were worried about having a psycho in his car, but as if he really wanted to know what I was really upset about too.
‘I’m upset about Russell Crowe being successful. I mean, OK, he’s allowed to be successful. He’s allowed to be an in-demand character actor. But he wasn’t supposed to be a leading man. I never said he could be a romantic lead. I NEVER SAID THAT WAS ACCEPTABLE. Nobody asks me anything.’
The driver and Sebastian rolled their eyes. ‘I’m going to ask you again. What are you really upset about?’
‘I’m upset,’ I choked, ‘because there is a cockroach in my bathroom.’
‘Really?’ demanded Sebastian.
‘Really,’ I answered, my voice as sloppy as my own melted-caramel eyes. I often think my whole life, my whole world, would be completely different if only I had blue eyes. It would be completely better, which is what we mean when we use the phrase ‘completely different’.
‘I’m sorry, Ruby, but I don’t understand what’s so awful about a dead cockroach.’
My voice was now flat with disgust. ‘I hate ugly things. That’s why I hate myself.’
‘Ruby, for the last time, you’re fucking beautiful.’
‘That’s very sweet of you to say.’ Ricky Martin was on the radio. He was segueing between two languages, making no sense in either of them. ‘That cockroach looks how I feel. I think my worst fear is of it crawling on me, crawling on my feet or on my face. Because then how I feel on the inside would be on the outside too.’
Sebastian shook his head, the muscles in his thick neck bulging. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t understand why you’re so unhappy.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his faded denim jacket for a cigarette.
‘No. You never did. And I will always love you for it.’
Assuring him that I was OK now, I hugged him goodbye outside my apartment. He took a few steps toward the curb before turning back to me. I was fumbling with my key, trying to breathe through my nose, determined to let him walk away.
‘Ruby, do you want me to come and get rid of the cockroach?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ I almost cried with relief. And then I did cry with relief. He carried me up the stairs and placed me on the bed. Looking at the Guc
ci/Prada debris scattered around what was once the front room, he asked if someone had moved in. The clothes Cyrinda had left behind were so expensive you couldn’t really tell if they were for a boy or a girl because they were too avant-garde. Because he wasn’t sure what was going on, he wasn’t quick enough to mask his jealousy that I might be living with another man. Too tired to lie, I told him about Cyrinda. Later he asked me when I got a room-mate and where she slept.
‘On the trundle bed, of course.’
‘There is no trundle bed.’
The silly bitch had taken the dumb cot and left behind her $6,000 Gucci python jacket.
the bug man
He undressed me, running his long fingers along my flesh. Then he opened the closet door he had seen me open scores of times but had never opened himself, and found a pair of pajamas. Real pajamas, that he had given me, soft blue flannel from Macy’s. I slid the pants over my pale legs. He pulled the top across my shoulders, buttoning it up, closing it across my tummy and above my breasts and away from the sexual tension that lingered beside the tears and terror, like a guest reluctant to leave a party despite the hosts’ protestations that they want to go to bed.
He pulled the duvet up to my nose, having wiped it of snot with his freshly ironed handkerchief. Then he flicked on the bathroom light and surveyed the root of the problem.
I watched from my bed as Sebastian bent down onto the tiles, dirtying his crisp chinos, and scooped up the cockroach, encased in its black glue coffin, into a wad of toilet paper. For a moment he held the off-white wad as if it were a Dickinson knapsack bearing all his worldly possessions. Then he tossed it into the trash and, smiling, placed his hands on my shoulders.
‘Don’t touch me!’ I screamed. ‘You touched a cockroach!’
‘I didn’t touch a cockroach!’ he protested. ‘My fingers never touched it, or the glue trap.’ He wiggled his fingers in front of my face. ‘See, silly girl? I didn’t let it infect me.’
My tears stopped. My face fell. ‘You have to leave now.’
When I woke up the next day, I pulled on a pair of sunglasses I had bought for $199 and went across the street to buy a breakfast cup cake. Digging in my pockets, I scraped together my pennies to make the dollar-fifty price.
Cup cake in hand, I stormed back to my apartment to begin my cup cake ritual. It doesn’t taste good unless you tear at it the right way. If you just bite it, the cake tastes like what it is: eggs, sugar, flour, butter. But if you tear the cup cake apart at just the right angle, you unleash a culinary atom bomb with a pleasantly soothing effect. If you eat the cup cake by chomping right into it, you just feel fat. Eat it right and you get the Valium effect – you still feel fat but you also feel numb and sleepy. Cheaper than John, I laughed.
Of course I don’t actually laugh out loud, which I guess means it isn’t that funny. And if it isn’t that funny, it must be sad. So I started crying. Probably for the second time that morning. I lost track. It’d been so long since I’d had a day without tears.
I looked in the mirror. I heard Cyrinda come in, but my eyes didn’t move from the mirror. I turned the medicine cabinet upside down trying to find a razor. There was only a dirty Bic and I couldn’t get the safety guard off. I had to cut the plastic with a pair of toenail scissors. The banality of self-hatred is perhaps the most alarming thing about it. ‘This razor’, I thought, looking at it as intently as I had my own reflection, ‘is supposed to make me prettier, more touchable, so that I will not disappoint or disgust a man who deigns to fuck me.’
Bending a segment of razor at a right angle, I drew it across my throat. Not deep enough to die, but deep enough to bleed fast enough to match my tears. Then I lay back on my bed and listened to John Coltrane, trying to hear the pattern, falling into sleep as the answer came to me, leaving just as fast when my first snore showed it the door. The cut crusted over with blood and the stream stopped, trapped inside me.
I felt sorry for my blood. Trapped inside me. No way out, no polite excuse to go, circling and circling laps on my body. Sometimes I felt it speeding up its circuit just to relieve the monotony of Ruby legs, Ruby arms, Ruby toes and fingers. That’s when I felt it, there in my extremities. It kicked at the circuit. But I felt nothing in my brain or my heart. The extremes were well nourished but the vitals were dead.
the morning after
When I woke up the next morning, I knew exactly what I had done the night before and raced straight to my vantage point at the bathroom mirror to admire my handiwork. The cut was graphically effective, although it stung somewhat more than any of the cuts I had ever made in my arms, tummy or legs. This was new ground for me and I wanted everyone to see it. If I wanted someone to see the arm cuts, I had to pretend I really didn’t want them to and then casually, and to their loudly voiced horror, let a long sleeve slip just so. The cut on my neck was not disguisable, even pretend disguisable, since the only option was a polo-neck and it was sweltering outside. Lifting my blind, I looked out and saw girls wearing spaghetti strap dresses, men wearing wife beaters. How long had I been out of it? I felt like a drunk awakening from a stag party to find his friends had chained him to a different season.
Tiptoeing through the front room, I found Cyrinda passed out in a pile of her own clothes. I guess it wasn’t working out with whoever she had decided to move onto. She woke as I opened the door and I heard her call out, ‘Seeya later, honey!’ in the cheery slang of those who know they have behaved badly, but I was gone.
Calmed by my excellent cut, I went to see Gladiator. The cinema was almost empty save for a few blue-rinse pensioners who had no idea who Russell Crowe was (‘He’s that British guy, right, Herb?’ and ‘He’s Richard Burton’s son’ were two inventions I heard loudly whispered during the film). Despite the talking, their lack of appreciation for Russell meant that I enjoyed myself tremendously.
Buoyed, I went to see Sebastian at work. He had been installed in an office while his new client tried to set up a production company. He was just leaving his desk for lunch when I made it to the top of his third-floor walkup. ‘Sebastian! I thought you were supposed to be a high-powered PR? It’s got to be ninety degrees outside. Do you think you could move to a building with an elevator? And proper air conditioning, maybe?’
‘What the fuck have you done to your neck?’ he screamed.
‘When are you going to sort the air conditioner out?’ I asked again, softly, as though he had said something rude I was going to rise above by ignoring.
Dragging me by the arm, he pulled me into his office, closing the glass door behind him. I waved merrily at his co-workers, who looked on aghast as Sebastian shook me by the shoulders. I had fully intended to cry for him, and my eyes were just working up to it, when he derailed my train of thought by breaking down in tears himself. Tentatively, I touched his shoulder, but he flicked me away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
But his shoulders were heaving now.
‘I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! Please just stop crying.’
‘I can’t just stop crying, you stupid, selfish bitch. I don’t understand how this can be? You’re not in my life, but you’re still ruining it.’
‘It’s my body.’
‘But you did it to hurt me.’
‘I did not do it to hurt you.’ I thought about this and amended my defense. ‘I showed you to hurt you.’
‘Yeah, well it worked.’ Collecting himself, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his face and clenched his jaw.
Checking past my head, to his colleagues on the other side of the window, he saw they had forgone lunch in order to follow our soap opera. Keeping his voice at an even tone, his mouth barely moving, he hissed, ‘You’re making me fucking crazy. Wherever you go, your problems overflow onto whoever is in the vicinity at the time.’
‘You’re just angry because you loved me so much. And now it’s finished and we didn’t get married or have babies or live happily ever after.’
&nb
sp; ‘I never thought we’d have babies. You’re the baby …’
‘Yeah, I know, but that doesn’t change how much you loved me. I know what makes you try not to think about me, because the same things keep me awake at night too. You wonder, if we’re not together now, what happens to love left in the past? Where does it end? Did it fall into the earth and fertilize your new life? I’m sorry you loved me so hard. I’m sorry I didn’t love you back in a way that could have made sense to you. But I did love you.’
He sharpened a pencil on his desk that was already sharp as a punchline and, without looking at me, said, ‘You have to get help.’
‘I want help.’ Until I said it out loud, I didn’t realize quite how much I did. I knew I cried and wailed and prayed to a God I didn’t believe in to help me with problems I didn’t believe I had. But once I heard the request in my own voice, calm and collected, unfettered by drama-class weeping, directed at something other than my own reflection, I knew it was a real plea and not just a catchphrase.
Sebastian seemed just as taken aback because, laying down his pencil, he folded his hands across his knees like a college boy reprimanded and replied, ‘I can’t help you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you,’ and walked out of his office and back down the stairs, with what little grace I could muster, not complaining about the heat, although this time I actually felt it.
Cyrinda was still asleep when I put my key in the door. I glanced around the corner at the answerphone, willing the light to flash with someone, anyone who could help me. If it were a telephone account salesman living inside the red blink, I would have rung him back. But the only thing flashing was my heart, flicking silently on and off, jam-packed with hundreds of messages I didn’t want to hear and hadn’t bothered to listen to in months. If I could have had a better understanding of my own body, if I’d had the patience to figure out where my heart was plugged in, I would have yanked it right out of the socket.
