Postcards From the Edge

by Carrie Fisher

  “But you thought you might mention it,” she said, “in case I was thinking of stabbing you with my fork.”

  “Anyway, I’d like to want a relationship,” he said, “because everybody else does, and it looks nice.”

  “Intimacy to me is two people sitting in front of a candle listening to important music nude,” she said. “Thinking it means something that you both love the same video and neither of you could finish The Sot-Weed Factor. I was out with someone the other day and I said I didn’t like sushi. I called it ‘whale gums,’ and he said, ‘Really? You don’t like it? I hate it, too.’ And it was like he was saying, ‘Finally! Somebody who understands me!’ ”

  “We live in America,” he said. “Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.”

  “There’s usually one thing that targets somebody for you,” she said. “Like, he says something nasty about shrinks, and you say, ‘Oh, you don’t like shrinks? I think they’re awful, too. You can do it yourself, everyone did for years. What did the pioneers do? I can’t cut down that tree, I’ve got a noon appointment with my therapist? My shrink told me killing Indians was acting out aggression?’ ”

  “I’ve noticed that people who admit they’re lonely and angry tend to clump together,” he said. “Like that’s enough of a common denominator. A little club of dissatisfied people filled with angst. Phi Beta Rage.”

  “Phi Beta Rage,” she said. “I’m stealing that.”

  “When you first meet someone on that first date, all the emergency adrenaline is there,” he said. “You bring out your best material as though you do it all the time. As though this is just a natural environment for the great parts of your personality to come through. And it’s not. It’s totally forced.”

  “I went out with this senator,” she said, “who kept saying, ‘You are so terrific, what a great girl you are.’ And I thought, ‘Well, shut up about it!’ He was telling me what he thought I needed to hear, rather than what he really felt to be true. And if he really felt it to be true, I would know. I would be able to glean that he thought that. Anyway, I know I’m a terrific girl. I don’t want to be a terrific girl. That’s what I am for auditions. I want to be something else to someone.”

  “When the actors come in on my pictures, my heart goes out to them,” he said. “I started out as an actor. I went to acting college, Jeff Bridges was in my class. In fact, I’ve been in a couple of my movies. I think I’m a natural performer. My father was a preacher, so I got that kind of energy from him. A lot of preachers’ sons are actors—Olivier, I mean, you could name a few of them. Anyway, I do all the readings with the actresses. I’m surprised you never came in to read with me.”

  “I read for you six years ago,” she said. “You were very nice, but you seemed preoccupied. It was a huge call.”

  “Really?” he said. “I would have thought I’d have remembered someone like you. Wait, was that on Why Is Ruth Dead? I was doing a lot of cocaine then. I read that you were in a clinic recently, so I figure you know what I mean. I never got into free-base, but I was . . . I was taking a lot of cocaine. And I really, you know, I like cocaine. I had to stop ’cause I was having anxiety attacks. Still, I would think I would have remembered you, because you’re very attractive and mainly because you’re bright. It’s this new thing I’ve been saying lately—I don’t mean to quote myself, but if I don’t, maybe no one else will. In India they say that the body is the envelope of the spirit, and the spirit, I guess, is essentially who you are. Well, we live in a city of envelopes. The thing that’s terrific about you is that you are a letter. I mean, it takes a letter to know a letter, and I can see we’re really two letters in a town of envelopes—”

  “ ‘The envelope, please,’ ” she said.

  “—so when you find someone who actually has an interesting letter, you want to read it,” he said. “The only problem is, you’ve gotten so conditioned to reading your own mail, so immersed in the letterness of it all, you just . . . Sometimes I think maybe I’ve met Her, and I just can’t see her because I’m so busy looking at myself to see if I look all right in case she should arrive.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Sometimes I’m with a guy and I think, ‘I love this person. This is it.’ But who I love is who I am when I’m with him, and it has almost nothing to do with him. It’s me having an excuse to just do myself one more time, proving once again I’m bright and I’m funny and I’m powerful and that I can. That I still know how to pour blood in their shark pools.”

  “I envy people meeting me for the first time,” he said. “That first meeting is everything, because I can watch their eyes and see it all happen, and I want to be them. I want to meet somebody like me.”

  “What I do,” she said, “is, as soon as I know they’re devoted, I start to find fault with them. It’s not that I find fault with them, really. It’s the Sleeping Giant in my system who wakes up with a ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum!’ and says, ‘Yecchh! Look at that hair.’ Or, ‘Oh my God, did you hear the stupid thing he said?’ The Sleeping Giant who knows no pity is hungry for faults, he hunts them like Easter eggs. But the Giant does this. I like them. I feel bad that the Giant is gonna do it. There’s something in me that wants to warn them, ‘Please don’t be stupid,’ like people can help it. And then the Giant says, ‘He’s not good enough.’ And the thing is, I truly—the Sleeping Giant doesn’t—but I truly care about people. Now, sometimes I don’t show compassion but, I mean, I walk around with it. I’m devastated when teams lose in sports. I want to kill myself when they show the faces of the losing team. I know how it feels. I mean, I can barely squash bugs unless I feel directly threatened.”

  “My problem is, I only know how to need needy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody who was all right. They could be wearing a sign, ‘I have no problems, you can believe me,’ and I wouldn’t even see them.”

  “The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure,” she said. “My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they’re not there. Once you get this routine thing going, you have to take a lot of vacations, so there’s a constant renewal or harking back. When you see them, it’s like your favorite song that was number one that you almost got sick of. It’s been off the radio for a while, and then you hear it one day and it’s like, ‘Oh, greeaatt! How great to hear this again!’ That’s people for me.”

  “To me, it’s finding yourself in everybody,” he said. “But not enough of you to stay with any one person. There’s so much of yourself, you’re so many-sided. I had a guy in India come up to me on his skateboard and say, ‘My brother, my brother.’ It haunted me that he called me his brother, and then I thought, ‘Yes. Yes! I see that, of course.’ And so if I can find me in a leper . . . I’m looking for myself and I find me everywhere. Just not enough to make a difference.”

  “I don’t know what I want to find anymore,” she said. “I’ve gotten so involved in searching. I’ve done it for so long it does me. The genesis was truly to find someone, was truly to make an impact, to bond. The difference now is that since I’ve never found it, I proceed as if I never will. Now I’m just into looking, not finding. Winning, not the prize. And the prize is the winning, maybe just the three minutes when you’ve actually won. That’s why the sweetness of the sexual contact is perfect, but it can only be a disappointment afterward. Because all you wanted to do was get there, not be there. All you wanted to do was want, but not have. As soon as you fuck, it’s over. As soon as you fuck.”

  “You should see my house,” he said. “I think of it as my bear cave. I like to keep it sort of damp and cool and dark. I’m a creature of habit, that’s why I liked cocaine. There was such a heavy ritual attached to it. So without it, I’ve intensified my rituals in other areas. They’re not all fun, either. I don’t like brushing my teeth, for example—it seems to just hold up the whole process—but I do it anyway. If I waited to like everyth
ing I did, I don’t know that I would ever do anything, except talk about what I wasn’t gonna do. So now I’ve decided I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. I don’t have to want to, I just have to go. So I show up. I do love to shave, though. I love to clip my beard and put after-shave on it. And I love the exercise guy to come over. I have a certain terry-cloth robe I wear in the morning after my shower—”

  “The Robe Warrior,” she said.

  “—and,” he said, “I have another one with another kind of material, I don’t even know what it is, that I wear at night. I have certain sheets that I adore. Pratesi. Italian sheets, the softest, softest sheets. I used to think I would love to loan my sheets out to a clean Norwegian family for three years, and then they’d give them back all beaten in. But now I buy them like that. You know, and I have my alarm clock, and everything is just so. I know it sounds anal, but I take real pleasure in the details of my life, in just putting things where they belong. I guess I am anal. It just gives me a great deal of pleasure. You should see my house.”

  “You’re not in a high-risk group, are you?” she said.

  “That’s very funny,” he said.

  “Remember at our last session when you said that maybe I shouldn’t date for a while? Until we’d worked more on my awareness in this area? Well, how long do you think ‘for a while’ is?

  “Not that I’ve been dating, but I just wondered how long till you think it’s okay? I mean, I know it’s not okay yet, I haven’t been dating, but I did go out with somebody. A couple of . . . three times. I tried to call you—well, I wanted to call you, but you were out of town. So I figured there wouldn’t be any big harm in going on a little date.

  “The thing is, he’s another interesting guy, and that’s what I’m drawn to. I know boring men are the ones to go for, but all I can see is the light glinting off the edges of the interesting ones. And, of course, ‘interesting’ means ‘problems.’ I don’t even think, ‘This time it’s going to be different’ anymore. I think, ‘This time it’ll be the same, in a different way.’

  “Anyway, my friend Andrea set me up with him. He’s a producer, very successful and attractive and all that. I met him for dinner and we had a nice time. He’s very intense—between him and me there wasn’t a whole lot of dead air. The thing about this guy is, I found him not dissimilar to me. We have a similar attack, similar appetites. Well, he’s more into the sexual appetite thing. I’ve never been good in that area, as you know. I always feel I’m out of my element. I don’t know what I’m doing there. Every time I’m in sex, I feel like, ‘How did I end up here?’ That’s why I like to avoid it as much as possible.

  “So I met him and we had dinner, and I really felt like he understood me, or at least like he might if he ever stopped talking. I mean, this guy was like the testosterone version of me, and I’m the testosterone version of me, so it was really weird. It was like being with more of myself. You’d think I’d have had enough of myself, but anyway, we had a nice time, and then he wanted me to see his house. I guess I should have known . . .

  “And I didn’t even have contraception. What was I going to do, wear my diaphragm to the restaurant? It’s so embarrassing when they know you knew it was going to be sex. It’s like, sometimes I try to be contemporary and modern, and on some level I just don’t agree with anything I’m doing. So I told him I wasn’t comfortable having sex with people I’d just met, and he seemed to get it. He said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

  “So I stayed over, and we necked for a while and it was nice. At one point we were kissing, and he said, ‘This would be a great shot of you.’ He told me that when he was in India he looked at the Himalayas and said, ‘Great shot!’ And he was there. It’s like we don’t know we’re there anymore. We’re so detached from our own experience, and so into how we can use that experience. As we’re having it, we’re putting it into another medium. Life is the largest medium we’ve got, and we want to put it in these smaller ones, to get it down to scale . . .

  “Anyway, I stayed over, and then in the morning I felt like he was distant from me. He was still being nice, but he seemed . . . I don’t know, I mean, it was the morning so a little distance is understandable, but I thought I felt him moving away, which instantly made him incredibly attractive, and we had sex. I made him breakfast, which I told him I never usually did, but I kept telling him I never usually did everything I was doing. It wasn’t a brilliant breakfast—the eggs were brown and I burned the first two pieces of bacon. I can’t seem to time food to end together.

  “Then he went off to edit his new movie, Ziz!, and I went home. By the end of the day I’d talked to most of my friends . . . Sometimes I’m not sure I even have any friends. I may just have a large group of people that I tell everything to. It’s like I’ve made intimacy a superficial gesture. Anyway, their consensus was, ‘Watch out, he’s a known sex addict, he fucks everybody.’

  “And I acknowledged that, but deep down—and you don’t get too far deep down with me, because I’ve thrust all the deep down right up to the surface—but somewhere in me, I just thought . . . It’s like when I was younger and I used to fall in love with homosexuals, because they had rejected me before they even met me. Womanizers don’t reject you, but they accept you in a rejecting way, so it’s similar. And just like I used to think with gay men, I thought, ‘I’ll be the one who makes a difference.’ I don’t mean that I’ll have a relationship with him, necessarily. I don’t allow myself to hope for that much, but I guess underneath my nonhoping is the hoping thing . . .

  “I wish you’d been here last week, because maybe if I had talked to you, you might have helped me to not have sex with him. Because I couldn’t seem to not have sex with him on my own. I need people to encourage me not to. Could we just work real hard in this area? Saturate ourselves with work on this, like when they stepped up the bombing and escalated the war in Vietnam? Let’s escalate the war on this area of my life, and if we can’t make me better, can we at least make me not care that I’m not better?

  “Anyway, I knew I should probably cool it. I knew he was supposed to go to this Jackson Hole Film Festival on the weekend, and I didn’t want him to catch me wanting to do something with him, so I made up some story about visiting friends in Napa. On Monday he called just before ten, and we went to lunch, and then we had sex at my house. He likes my house. He was very nice, and I kept thinking I had to try and look indifferent, which was weird, because on some level I am indifferent to him. I mean, he’s cute and he’s powerful and all that, but you have to take his reputation into account. He’s a former cocaine addict and he fucks whores.

  “But we have these great talks. It’s like we talk about the real issues as if we’re talking about the weather. And he said he couldn’t see me that night because he was meeting with this rock group, Bad Hetero, about the title song for his film. And then you weren’t back yet, so I went to Santa Barbara just to get away and not think about him. Or maybe just to get away and only think about him. I guess you could say I was obsessed with him.

  “In the parking lot at the hotel a few days later, I ran into this film editor, Evelyn Ames, who I’ve known from parties for years. This is a real wild girl, and she enjoys her reputation, or at least she keeps up the pretense that she does. Somebody has to enjoy her reputation besides the guys.

  “So we went to lunch, and in the course of talking to her, I mentioned I’d met this guy, Jack Burroughs—his name is Jack Burroughs—and I sort of asked if she’d ever slept with him. I don’t know her well, but she’s somebody you don’t have to know that well in order to ask something like that.

  “She said, ‘Yeah, I slept with him.’ She asked me, ‘Did he make you do this?’ and she drew her knees back over her head right there at the table, and I said, ‘No.’ And I thought, if that’s the only way he demonstrated his respect for me, I guess that’s something. She also said that while he was with her, he talked about another girl he was going to fly in from Boston who had rea
lly soft skin. He rubbed her skin and talked about this other girl’s skin.

  “Then she said that she had, in fact, seen him quite recently. It turned out she’d been with him Monday night, after he’d been with me Monday afternoon. I thought, God, this girl is a lot of girl, and to need two lots of girls in one day is . . . The phrase ‘out of control’ did cross my mind. And she felt bad that she’d told me all this stuff, so she said, ‘He probably really likes you. We just fuck, and he talks about other girls while he’s inside me.’

  “So I thought, I should just stop this. I mean, it’s humiliating to run into someone who’s been with a guy you’ve been with on the same day you were with him. I was furious. When I was driving home I made this hard right turn and the wheels sort of lifted off the road, and I imagined having an accident and being taken to the hospital, and him coming to visit and me having him thrown out of my room. And I thought, I’m really out of the box now.

  “Then, when I got home, I got a call from my business manager, Charlie, who wanted to know if it was true that I was dating this guy. I said, ‘Well, I would hardly call it dating. Why do you ask?’ And he said a friend of his had gone out with this guy Tuesday night, and that he’d told her he was seeing me. So that was three in two days or something—and those are just the ones I heard about. Imagine what I could pick up about him if I got one of those satellite dishes.

  “I wanted to call him and tell him never to call me again, but there was still part of me that cherished the hope that this would make him sorry, and make him realize how much he loves me and what he’ll be missing if he doesn’t marry me. I felt like a total jerk for thinking this, but it’s like I’ve been genetically tampered with. I was born imagining myself with an apron on, with pies cooling on the window sill and babies crying upstairs. I thought that all that stuff would somehow anchor me to the planet, that it was the weight I needed to keep from just flying off into space.