It was Sharon’s first acute and painful realization of the day: She was twenty-six, still in an entry-level position, and all she had to show for it was a stack of rejection letters from the finer and less fine literary agencies in New York.
The second acute and painful realization came exactly two seconds later, when the editor noted Julie had two reasons to celebrate since she had gotten engaged over the weekend.
Blushing, Julie joked, “Well, Daniel and I were coming up on the two-year mark.” On her finger was a round diamond-and-platinum ring that looked exactly like all the rings young women in the office were constantly coming in with after holiday breaks.
A taut spring of anger and anxiety, Sharon spent the next few hours hiding in the ladies’ room. That no one noticed she was gone probably spoke volumes about why she’d been passed over for a promotion. At exactly six she put on her coat and, without any memory, took the subway the three stops to the Madison Plaza.
She didn’t turn on the television or her computer. Didn’t pick up a book or skim Chase’s Wall Street Journal. Just sat on the couch and waited for him to come home. He must have been out with some of the sell-side guys, because by the time he opened the heavy front door it was after nine, and he smelled of beer and money.
“Hey.” Chase nodded in her general direction and set down his messenger bag. “Did you eat?” Without waiting for a response, he opened the refrigerator.
“Why aren’t we married?” Sharon demanded.
“What?”
“It’s been years. Are we ever getting married?”
Shutting the crisper, he’d rubbed his eyebrows, as if he were getting another migraine. “Do you even want that?”
“You know I do,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure her behavior over the past few months had made that evident.
For a long time, he didn’t say anything but studied the grain in the granite counter. Finally, he looked up with the same tortured expression he had when discussing his sister’s lack of direction and poor choice in men.
“I’m sorry, Sharon.” He said it gently, which made everything more real and a thousand times worse. “I don’t want to marry you.”
“But we live together, and we used to talk about that stuff all the time.…”
“I know.” He massaged his forehead. “I wouldn’t have asked you to move in if I hadn’t thought we were going in that direction. But we’ve been unhappy for a while now—a ring won’t fix that.”
She asked how he could say that, but she knew exactly how. It was all those nights they didn’t go to bed together, when she stayed up tweaking her novel or pouting over a rejection letter. The weekends where she’d wave away his questions about how things were going on her rewrites or her agent search and turn back to her laptop. The evening just a few weeks ago, when he’d come home with a whisper of the old excitement in his eyes and told her he’d read that the QT Network was working on an E&E origins show, and she hadn’t bothered to look up from her computer, just snorted a “so.”
“I feel like I don’t really even know you anymore.” He shook his head, as if it might improve the situation. “I’m sorry.”
Maybe if she had cried or apologized or said she wanted to work on things, it might have been different. Maybe if she kissed him or swore she was still the person he had fallen in love with. Maybe if she had simply said nothing.
But he was one more person, in a seemingly endless line of people, telling her that she wasn’t good enough. Her writing wasn’t good enough to represent, her performance at work wasn’t good enough for a promotion. Now she wasn’t good enough to marry.
“If you feel that way, if I’m so horrible, why haven’t you broken up with me already?”
“I don’t know. I kept hoping things would get better once you got past this book thing.” He said it honestly, but she’d laughed, cruel as she could muster, wanting to transfer her hurt and failure.
“You know you’re a fucking coward,” she said.
“Stop.”
“Seriously, if you’re too much of a pussy to dump me, I’ll do it for you.”
“Shar—”
“Poof, we’re over. You’re free. Go run back to your fancy friends, and I’ll get back to really writing.”
That night Chase had slept in his office. Sharon called in sick to work for the next few days and asked Kristen if she could stay with her for a while. When she e-mailed her plans to Chase, he’d told her he’d go to Chicago so he wouldn’t be in the way when she moved.
It made Sharon think of that first Thanksgiving she’d gone home with him, when he’d been thrilled to show her off to his family, about how she’d been so nervous she couldn’t stop talking about the election. She thought about the way she and Chase used to send each other myriad daily e-mails about genuinely mundane things—“Tried some gummy vitamins at work, yummy!”; “Got the worst paper cut, will definitely need kisses”; “If you could only have egg rolls or pizza for the rest of your life, which would you choose?”—about how they used to speak in a hybrid of baby talk and shared references that would have caused his finance friends to explode into hysterics. How excited he’d been to find her waiting for him in Central Park at the end of the New York City Marathon, and how after business trips to LA he’d rest his head against her shoulder and lament his deteriorating relationship with his sister.
Stuff like literary rejection and sucking at work didn’t seem so all-consumingly important then.
And she desperately wanted a Neutrocon so she could hop one universe over and redo their conversation.
* * *
Things are very underwater in her head.
Her head, too, must have been underwater at some point, her face and hair wet.
Bath is cooler now.
Chase isn’t going to call.
Even if he thought she was moving out tomorrow. Even if he forgot to turn his phone on.
She won’t get her chance to say she’s sorry and she loves him.
Picking up the Post-it, she reads his year-old message again.
Had to go to work, Shar, but I love you very much.—C
Ink swelling and blurring from her wet hands.
With the Sharpie, she writes her own line underneath his words.
I love you, too. I’m sorry.
Maybe he’ll see it when he returns Sunday night.
Maybe he’ll call then.
Setting down the note, she picks up the knife.
Was what she wrote more than a simple apology?
No, you don’t have the guts, just like on the balcony.
Presses the blade deeper into her left wrist this time.
Red unfolds like a ribbon.
Not painless.
Stings like a motherfucker.
Looks like a lot of blood, but with all the bathwater, hard to tell how much of it has been diluted. Hard to tell if she’s serious. If she means it.
Presses harder.
A ring.
The sound she’s been waiting for for nearly thirty hours.
So surprising, it takes her a moment to recognize that’s what it is: the rarely used landline.
Caller ID shows “Blocked”—the Fishers’ unlisted number.
Everything slick with blood and water, she drops the phone twice.
“Chase, I’m sorry, I love you,” she says, depressing the talk button, trying to sound stable, sober, and sane.
“Sharon, it’s Phoebe Fisher.” The voice on the other end doesn’t sound stable or sober or sane. “My brother is … on the plane … aneurysm … he’s de…”
“Thank you,” Sharon says.
Get out of this car.
A clatter, and Sharon realizes she’s thrown the phone across the bathroom and it’s in pieces on the floor.
Get out of this car.
Props herself out of the tub and reaches for a towel. She throws open the cabinet under the sink, yanks out the first-aid kit. Breaking the seal on the bottle of Ipecac, she swallows
it in one gulp. Within minutes she’s puking up vodka and vodka and maybe everything she’s ever eaten. Shivering and sweating. Blood from her arm mixes with the bathwater and splashes on the already damp floor. Shaking, she wraps her left wrist tight in gauze, binds that with surgical tape.
In the bedroom, the phone that she didn’t hurl at the wall is ringing. The machine picks up and Chase’s voice announces that they can’t come to the phone right now. Then his model sister is leaving a message that Sharon doesn’t hear.
Get out of this car!
Still soggy and bleeding, Sharon pulls on her clothes in the reverse order she took them off—silky bra and panties, jeans, T-shirt, blue sweater, socks, and snow boots—everything instantly damp.
Phone ringing again.
Grabs her purse from the living room floor. No checking around, no taking any last-minute things she forgot to pack from this life. Before Phoebe Fisher can leave another message, Sharon is gone, the heavy metal door shutting behind her.
She needs to get away from this apartment, from this floor, as soon as possible. No time to wait for the elevator. Sharon pulls open the door to the stairs and hurries down thirty-five flights. Lurching out the side entrance onto Twenty-eighth Street, she’s swallowed into the cold, cold city that’s too lit up to ever truly be dark.
6 i’ve never been, but i hear it’s righteous
“I’ll shave my balls if they want.”
That’s what Adam told his agent when the producers of a basic cable Eons & Empires origins show offered him the role of a young Captain Rowen on the condition he shave his head—no bald caps. It had been nearly four years since the Goners pilot didn’t go. Years of voice-over work and five-line spots on bad sitcoms. Years of sheepishly asking Phoebe for the odd bartending shift when things got really dry. He would have shaved his balls and dipped them in alcohol, repeatedly, had it been a contractual sticking point.
But it’s the fourth day of shooting outdoors in Vancouver, and without hair, Adam is fucking freezing.
Seventeen hours earlier the makeup artist had straight-razored off last night’s growth of sandy stubble (again) and spent no less than two hours applying elaborate airbrush foundation and details—including Rowen’s famous crescent moon birthmark at the base of his skull. While he can carefully be helped into a thick overcoat by a PA between takes, the makeup is too delicate for him to wear a hat, and it’s really, really cold.
So cold he’s forgotten the seemingly permanent knot in his right thigh and the continents of fading bruises along his torso from wire work, where producers probably should have sprung for a stunt double, but Adam was too happy to be working on something that didn’t suck to say anything.
So cold he’s stopped worrying about the pained whine his cell phone kept making and turned it off, accepting it will be on terminal roam for the duration of his time in Canada.
So cold his first instinct is to say no when Cecily Beissel—Cecily of the Jericho Jeans ads—asks him to grab a drink and talk about their upcoming love scene when/if they finish shooting for the night. Of course it’s entirely possible she’s not asking him out and he’s simply suffering hypothermic delusions.
“I figured it would be a nice way to break the ice before we have to put on body stockings.” Cecily has a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve”—she lowers lovely brown eyes—“never really done anything like this before.”
Yep, a model with a jeans-ad-caliber ass is asking him to talk her through their sex scene, off the clock, and he doesn’t want to because he’s chilly. He realizes this would not be the response of the average twenty-nine-year-old heterosexual male. He also realizes it probably has less to do with body heat lost through his naked head and more with the way he’d left things with Phoebe in LA, somehow weirder than the way they usually left things in their long history of leaving things weird.
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal.” Cecily slides a long red hair behind her ear. “There’s a little divey place by the hotel. They serve cheese cubes and crackers.”
Adam has to be shirtless and waxed in their love scene; cheese is far from a selling point.
“I’m not…” he begins.
He would be shocked if he’s slept more than forty hours total since he arrived for preshoots twelve days ago, and because of the head-shaving/makeup applying, his call is a good two hours earlier than everyone else’s. He should go back to his room, eat something other than craft table pretzels, rest, figure out the cell phone thing—a blocked number has been repeatedly trying to call.
But … he only has one scene near the end of the day tomorrow, and he’s so alive and excited from working on a project that might be good that he probably wouldn’t sleep anyway.
“Please.” Cecily smiles.
Which is why two hours later he’s at a bar called Polly’s Cave throwing a flightless dart at a faded board. He hits the bull’s-eye again.
“I get the feeling you’ve done this before.” Cecily laughs and retrieves the darts. She’s changed from Cordelia Snow’s white robes into a pair of jeans and a fitted T-shirt with a pink pig on the chest. Pigs seem to be a big thing for her. Yesterday she’d worn pig earrings, and there’s a pig on the bag where she keeps her knitting supplies; she’s been working on a sweater between takes. “I feel like I’m being hustled.”
“I grew up with my grandparents.” He sips a local microbrew she’d picked out, Enchanted Ale. “I kick ass at shuffleboard and minigolf, too.”
They’re two of a handful of customers, and Polly’s Cave definitely lives up to the moniker, with poor lighting, wood-paneled walls, and a mothbally odor. For added oddity, the bartender, who radiates dislike for Adam, has a black patch over his left eye. They do, in fact, serve cheese and Ritz crackers in lieu of snack mix.
Popping what must be her fifteenth cheddar chunk, Cecily manages to land a single dart on the target. And because they’re in a bar, playing a bar game, and an attractive woman is performing poorly, Adam is required, by bar law, to advise her, position her hips in a better stance, adjust her throwing arm—her creamy skin in his still-cold hand. She’s losing less badly when they abort the game and take seats at the long counter.
“Thanks for doing this with me,” she says, as if the evening has truly been a hardship. “It’s just, we haven’t had much time together, and I wanted to know I was pronouncing your last name right before I had to lick your head.”
“Is that actually in the script?” He grins, realizes he’s having a good time, points to her empty bottle. “Can I get you another?”
She nods and excuses herself to the ladies’ room.
The second she turns, it’s as if his off button has been hit. Instantly he’s so tired the simple act of being upright feels Olympian, and he sags into the bar stool, thankful it’s not backless. He needs sleep and a thorough scrub—he’d washed off all the makeup in his trailer, but he hasn’t showered since dawn. And he’s still freezing, even in the sheepskin jacket he bought his first hour off the plane, when he’d been cold but still had hair.
Staring at his beer bottle until his eyes blur, Adam peels the label off in thin strips wet with condensation. He wonders if Phoebe’s behind the bar at Rosebud.
She’d taken Adam to the airport, hugged him good-bye so tight he could hardly breathe, Anais Anais and vanilla-scented lotion heavy around him. Lips against his ear, Phoebe had whispered, “You know how proud of you I am?” He was only going to BC for three weeks, but it felt like a good-bye for longer, and it dawned on him that it would be much longer if the show got picked up. Still in Phoebe’s death grip embrace, he’d turned her body ever so slightly, until his mouth was on hers. It wasn’t that she didn’t respond, she did, even ran fingers through his hair (he’d still had hair then) to bring him closer. But when she pulled away, there was something about her smile—it was the pouty practiced one she used on auditions and with customers at Rosebud. Like a line drive to the nuts, he realized he might very well end up just one more guy Phoebe F
isher had known in LA, realized that would bother him.
At this bar, in Canada, the bartender gives him a look, and Adam sweeps the shredded beer label off the counter into his palm, dutifully orders another round.
“So are you some famous actor or millionaire?” the eye-patched bartender asks. “I mean, I know who she is.” He cocks his head toward Cecily on her way back from the bathroom. “Should I know you?”
There’s blatant accusation in this guy’s question, and Adam is so beat he doesn’t ask if the bartender has seen Graphic or Super Temps or any of the other movies in which Adam has had small parts. Doesn’t tell the bartender he might recall his voice from the Mortal Warrior video games or the Go Go Trons Saturday-morning cartoon series. No one ever recognizes Adam, and it seems like an awful lot of words to get through.
“Me,” Adam says, “I’m nobody.”
Bartender smirk-sighs. “Well, Mister Nobody, I’d watch myself if I were you; men turn into animals around a girl like that.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
As Cecily makes her way back, Adam physically pushes all remaining energy to the surface, like squeezing final dollops from a toothpaste tube. Unslouching, tightening muscles, turning so she’ll be facing the left side of his face, the cheek with the dimple.
“Did you read the E&E comics growing up?” he asks when she’s next to him at the bar, her chair closer than before.
“Never.” She dips her head to his as if sharing covert information. “Honestly, the first time I even saw the movies was after my screen test. Don’t tell.”
“I’ll take it to the grave.”
“How ’bout you?”
Adam tells her he had a passing familiarity with the comics but actually bought several of the collected volumes before he auditioned.
“They’re incredibly dark, like the ending scene in the first issue is the same from the movie, Rowen blowing up the whole East Coast while Cordelia begs him to stop.” He shrugs, tries to gauge if she’s actually interested; her attention is unexpectedly rapt.
“I’d love to see them sometime.”
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 12
