“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t really need an agent.”
“Sweetie pie, I don’t give a shit about that. I’m here to talk to you about your choice in men.”
My choice in – “I’m sorry … but how is that any business of yours?”
She grabbed me by the bicep and quickly led me away from set, before you could reappear. “Walk with me.”
I don’t have to tell you Ezra’s little more than a brick through a window – a thin pencil sketch of greed, bluster and vermouth. She doesn’t pretend to be nice, doesn’t mince words and never holds anything back. Strange as it is, though, you need her. She’s your fulcrum of normalcy – the one person in your life you trust, on whom you can count to carve a path through all your crap without needing or wanting anything but for you to do your job and make her rich. It’s a match made in heaven, if heaven were a wooden slat wall with a glory hole in it. How did she know who I was, I wondered in the back of my brain. Simple: you’d told her; you’d confided in her as if she were your mother. With Ezra in the picture, I never even had a chance.
“You’re my own personal X factor,” she said, leading me to the far end of the building. “You’re mucking up the works, honey, and I don’t like that – not one bit.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, truthfully.
“And the worst part is,” she said as she snare-drum smacked a piece of nicotine gum, “that you’re so fucking green you don’t even see it.”
“Please, don’t hold back. Tell me what’s really on your mind.”
She raised a wrinkled, spray-tanned finger to my nose. “Don’t you get snotty with me. I’ll have you strung up by your ankles and left to rot.”
“Such a charmer you are.”
“Charm’s for whores and producers, honey, and all too often they’re one and the same.”
“All right,” I said, and pivoted in front of Ezra, wrestling free from her grip. “Get on with it then. What do you want with me?”
Ezra glanced over her shoulder, back across the set to where you were being cleaned up and made current again. “You’re not the first, you know,” she said. “Others have tried to be with him. It never works. It can’t – it won’t. It’s better you know this now so you’re not surprised in a week or a month or five when he up and vanishes like a cardinal’s finger up a choirboy’s ass.” She exhaled, pinched the bridge of her nose, jangling one row of bracelets. It all seemed so dramatic, so … intentional. Like she was putting on a show. Or was a show – she’d lived this hustle for so long she didn’t know how to turn it off. “I’ve swept up after him before and I’m prepared to do it again, but I thought I’d try to talk some sense into you first. See if I couldn’t get you to look at things with a clear head and a cold heart.”
“You said there’ve been others …”
“Is there a question in that statement?”
“A … yes, I suppose.”
“Suppose nothing. For god’s sake, be a – Grow a pair. Speak up.”
“What happened the other times?” I asked, nervously, as if I were giving a book report and my teacher was standing just two feet away, one arm stiff at her side while the other taps a wooden ruler against her pleated thigh.
Ezra bit the nail of her left index finger. It looked rough, with dried blood around the edges – one dead soldier out of ten. She severed the half moon, crudely spitting it to the ground. “I’m all he has,” she said, ignoring the question. “And don’t think for a second I don’t see the angle you’re pulling.”
“Angle? What angle? What am I doing that’s so wrong? How do you even know who I am?”
She leaned in close, exuding an odour of Red Bull and nail polish remover. “Do you think I’m stupid? Listen, honey, and listen well: I am a goddamn hawk – my eyes are on every frame of every job he’s ever done. I know you’ve been tracking his movements. Maybe you’ve got friends on other sets keeping tabs on him, or you’re watching the trades, keeping your eyes on his where’s, what’s and the other two.”
“Three.”
“Three?”
“There are five Ws.”
Ezra stared blankly.
“… Sometimes how, too.”
“The fuck I care? Look, you’ve got yourself a fine career doing –” she gestured with her hand, limp and dismissive “– whatever it is you do. No one’s telling you to walk away from that. I’m just warning you … however you’ve managed to catch his interest, it won’t last. He can’t sit still for long – he doesn’t have it in him.”
And there it was: the truth, as blunt and menacing as only Ezra knew how to be. For as good as we were at lying about ourselves, D____, we had nothing on Ezra’s ability to slice open a person’s throat with only brutal and honest facts. At first I thought she was just jealous; without meaning to, I’d become the “other” in your amicable and very profitable twosome, and she was none too thrilled about the competition. But her doom-and-gloom outlook was a little too stay-away-from-my-boyfriend-bitch for it to be just about business. She loved you, I remember thinking at the time, but she knew, for probably too many reasons to count, that it couldn’t and wouldn’t have worked between you. This was an if-I-can’t-have-him-no-one-can scenario – how very high school of her.
It was over time, though, that it became clear she was more interested in being like your mother than your lover. After all, you were her golden goose; she saw more action – and more dividends – from your incomparable ability to roll over onto a hand grenade than probably any other client on her roster. The more work you got, the fewer children she probably had to keep chained to the wall in her pantry. When she came to me with sweet-granny threats and jabs to my self-confidence, it wasn’t cruelty that motivated her but “proactive risk assessment” – she was protecting her retirement investment.
“Look,” she said, temporarily dropping her vitriol for sugar-free sweetener, “you seem like a nice kid, but D____ isn’t made for love. He’s a looker, sure, and this … proclivity of his, it might seem like a rush at first but it won’t last. You’d do well to remember: his eyes need to be on the prize at all times. The last time he allowed himself to get tangled up with someone like you –”
“The hell do you mean, ‘someone like me’?”
“– they broke his heart, and he was so torn up about it he skipped out on a month’s worth of work, started begging me to find him something friendlier, something where he could keep his insides inside of him. He started to doubt what he did – which he does better than anyone, I’ll have you know. It broke my heart to see it. Took some hard work and convincing before he was made right again, and I am not going to let anything – or anyone – mess that up.”
She paused, sighed. “He doesn’t ‘do’ the whole ‘people’ thing. Not for long. He says he wants it, sure. He probably wants what any of us want out of love – someone to be there when the money comes in but also when you’ve got your head in a toilet.”
“Real great relationship goals you’ve got there.”
“He wants it,” she continued, “but he can’t have it. It doesn’t work for him. He can’t keep dying if he’s lost his reason to live.”
I honestly had no idea how to respond to any of what she’d just said. I couldn’t even process it, not really.
“What is it?” she asked, and I realized I’d been staring off into space. “Why put yourself through all this just to be with him?”
If she’d asked Louise this, my sister would have said I was a naive masochist who didn’t know any better – an unrealistic dreamer who did what I could to make my life as hard as possible. Aud would’ve said the same – that I liked to make things difficult for myself. And that I was probably as interested in D____’s ability to die and be reborn as was Ezra, albeit for very different reasons. But there and then, as your agent detailed, in vague terms, your m
yriad shortcomings, I thought of all the ways I’d never been enough for the people in my life – of the role I was expected to occupy: the strong one, the provider; of the things I should have been, that my parents wished I had been – and of all the things I could still be with you.
“Because he fascinates me,” I said, not telling her all that I was thinking. “Because I’m like him, more than you know. And I care for him.”
“You care for him,” said Ezra, “because you think he’s something more than he is. But he’s not.” Her voice dripped with bitterness and pity. “He’s a cipher, built for a singular purpose, and that’s all he’ll ever be.”
And you know something, Ezra? You were right. You’re a callous, unsentimental cunt, but you were right.
20. Venom
Posted: 03/01/2014
Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday night around nine-thirty, I saw a woman standing in the produce section at the Pavilions on Jefferson Boulevard with a melon balanced in the palm of each hand, carefully guesstimating the difference in weight between the two items. I didn’t know who she was; I’d never seen her before, but once I noticed her it was impossible for me to look away. She was maybe five nine, five ten, two-twenty at least – as perfect an hourglass as I’ve ever seen, with ample hips and a soft, pliant midsection. Her face was teakettle-round and gentle, like something out of a nursery rhyme. This woman, in her quiet, fallow shade, moved elegantly through the aisles, every ten or fifteen paces stopping and checking the list she’d written on her phone, to make sure there was nothing she was forgetting. I stayed far enough behind her that she wouldn’t notice me, watching her from neighbouring aisles and through gaps between products on shelves. When she made her way to one of the open checkout lines, I quickly redirected my attention to why I was there in the first place: I pocketed a couple of granola bars and a small bottle of mouthwash – just what I could stuff into the lining of my coat – and hurried for the exit.
Standing beneath a burnt-out street light at the far end of the Pavilions’ parking lot I took two large swigs of mouthwash, to get rid of the dense film of vomit that had coated my tongue and the back of my throat for the better part of the day. The combination of the two tastes was like mint-flavoured vinegar, though not as pleasant.
It’s getting harder and harder these days to keep my head above the tide. The last paying job I’d had was more than two months ago – a bit of background work in a hospital drama; the Times let me go after I’d missed a deadline for the third time in a row. I tried to tell them it wasn’t my fault – that I wasn’t feeling well and was waiting on my insurance to come through. Doctor None-of-Your-Business informed me that I couldn’t come back and talk to her until I’d gone and seen a medical professional, put back on a few pounds, got the help she claimed I so desperately needed. Little did she know: I tried to get help, but they turned me away at the hospital – I had no money, and they discovered that my passport was fake when they tried to run it through their system. Far as they were concerned, I didn’t exist – they even threatened to call the cops on me.
I’d never before been asked to show so much ID. Figured when I gave them my driver’s licence that would’ve been enough, but no, they said. They needed something more. They asked for a passport, a credit card and a utility bill, saying they needed to know I was who I said I was. I’d thought something like this might happen, Ezra, that you’d make some calls, use whatever pull you still had to try and silence me. That you’d use what I’d revealed on this blog, namely my illegal status, against me. I wouldn’t have put so much information out there if I hadn’t been willing to deal with the consequences. I just didn’t expect it would happen so fast. The hospital asked if there was someone they could call on my behalf, even as they were motioning for security to come and, I don’t know, take me to a holding room or something, but I left quickly and without giving them my real name – any of them.
The curvaceous woman stepped out of Pavilions a few minutes later. I noted the make and model of her car, and her licence plate, memorized them as she lined her bags of groceries in a tidy row on the back seat.
I kept an eye on the lot, which was just a short walk from my apartment, searching row by row for her car every time I passed by. Three days later she was back, and this time I’d come prepared. Earlier that afternoon I’d slipped into a weathered skin I’d harvested two summers ago – Alaina. She was special to me. D____ liked to get his hands all knotted up in her curly strawberry-blond hair when he pulled her – my – face toward his. I pleaded with him to stop every time he did that, said he’d damage the sleeve if he wasn’t careful, but I was speaking in subtitles and he couldn’t be bothered to read.
Alaina was coming apart at the seams. I’d patched her with swatches of Charlotte from Gainesville and Claire from Portland – dancers, both, limber, their legs like lithe collections of rubber bands. Alaina was, once upon a time, one of my better sleeves, but her days were numbered. This woman, though, the one I’d seen just a few days earlier, she had the look of soft maple cream, unscathed, unburdened by the world around her. She looked bright and healthy in a way my own skin hadn’t in months, possibly years. Hers was a skin I could take whole cloth, like Eleanor’s, and be protected inside. I waited for her to enter the store and collect her items again. When I next saw her, through the large panel windows at the front of the store, standing in the checkout line, getting ready to come outside again, I pulled a cutthroat razor from my inside jacket pocket and started walking toward her parked car. I arrived there at the same time as the abundant would-be sleeve in front of me. She held her two bags of groceries in one hand and reached for the rear passenger door of her car with the other.
“Here, let me help you,” I said, rushing over to her, taking the bags from her hand so she could get at her keys. The bags were like weight plates cradled in my arms, which had shrunk and were far weaker than I’d realized. I was glad to be hidden in clothes too big for my frame, lest my increasingly wiry appearance be cause for alarm.
“Thank you so much!” she said. Her voice was melodic. She quickly unlocked the back door and opened it. I could feel my body beginning to tremble from the weight in my arms. “I got it,” she said, taking the first bag from me and placing it on the back seat. She took the second bag from me then, and turned and offered her thanks, and I slashed out with the razor, cutting a small red canyon across the palm of her hand. She shrieked and fell against her car. I swiped again, shredding her blouse just above the elbow. She clutched herself and slid to the ground. I was getting dizzy, reckless with my motions; the blade shook like a feather in my hand. I tried to steady myself, to start the incision proper at her side, right above the hip, where I could take it all the way around. She whimpered, begged, asked me why, what did she do? The closer I got to her, though, the more I smelled it – something I hadn’t smelled in any of the others: crackers and apple juice and cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. These scents and more – of children, of an entire family – exhaled from the cut on her hand and instantly I tasted bile like lemon rind and bitter almonds climbing up my esophagus, touching my tongue, the backs of my teeth, and I ran.
21. Because Dying’s a Bitch, That’s Why
Posted: 03/15/2014
“It isn’t the readership that’s depressing,” I slurred the other night over the phone to Doctor None-of-Your-Business – her home number, not her office. She’d given it to me on our sixth session, in case of emergencies. “It’s that in all these emails and comments that keep coming in, I’ve still not heard from the two people I want to hear from most of all.” I started laughing, coughing into the receiver. “Maybe you were right about this – it’s all just a cry for attention.”
“M_____, I appreciate that you’re hurting, but we can’t be talking about this right now.”
“You said if I needed help that I could call you.”
“Yes, and I promised I’d find someone for you. Someone �
�� more equipped to help get you over this hump.”
“You mean someone I can afford.”
“…”
“But I want to talk to you, not some public health flunky just out of psych school.”
“Please, we’ve been over this. You sound … you don’t sound well.”
“Is it about your chin? I didn’t mean anything by the Witherspoon comment.”
“M_____, it’s not –”
“I’ll go back and delete it. I’ll leave you out of the blog from now on – from here to the end, no more posting our sessions. Scout’s honour.”
“I won’t do this over the phone.”
“Then I’ll come in again. When have you got an opening?”
“… Are you working yet? Have you gotten your finances sorted out?”
“No. But … No. Fuck it – I’ll figure something out.”
“M_____, stop. You need to go home. You need help I can’t provide. What you’re doing … You’re only hurting yourself now. Call Louise. Talk to her. Get taken care of before it’s too late.”
“But … but we’re not done here. There’s still more to do!”
“Goodbye, M_____, and good luck.”
* * *
††
NyQuil and Tylenol 3 on an empty stomach. That’s my excuse. Doc, if you’re still by some chance reading this, I’m sorry for my behaviour. For … all of it, really. I know it’s not much, but it’s the truth. And I’m all about the truth these days.
Ezra, I know you care about the truth more than anyone. So where was it we left off? Right. You telling me D____ wasn’t what I thought he’d be, and that he never would be. But that was then, and despite maybe your better instincts, it was honest; it would seem now you’re more concerned with keeping whatever you can under the rug. I’m happy to see you’ve at least graduated from faxes to email, but you still don’t have a leg to threaten on. You’re between a rock and a bear trap: you want to protect your client’s identity(ies) and your own from being towed through the mud any more than they have already been, but you can’t come right out and claim it’s all lies and untruths without unintentionally lending credence to at least some of what I’ve said. Because this is the Internet, bitch, and you know as well as I do that the court of public obsession won’t allow this blog a quick death – not with the kind of numbers I’m pulling in. No, you might as well admit we’re bunk mates: you’re in this for the long haul.
The Death Scene Artist Page 12
