Suzanne lay in bed staring at the television, waiting for her bacon sandwich, thinking about infinity.
By Wednesday, she felt kind of dingy. She accidentally caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and thought there was a giant shell on her neck. “Is that anorexia?” she wondered. “Is it anorexia when you look in the mirror and your head looks like the top of a squid without all the arms?”
She felt bloated. She’d been going to the gym for a while, and had really started noticing a difference in her body, but now she was getting soft and shapeless again. “Caspar the squid,” she said aloud.
Suzanne identified herself in her voice. She was as close as she ever got to being whoever she was when she was talking. She existed through sound. It startled her to see her reflection, because she didn’t identify with her appearance. She wasn’t what she looked like, she was what she sounded like. That was why she always got confused in the closet. What should she wear? It was hard to dress a voice.
She walked into her closet, Pandora’s Closet, bursting with options, and experienced the automatic reaction: “I have nothing to wear.” That wasn’t it, though. Obviously, she had plenty of clothes, but they were the wrong kind of clothes. They were clothes she had already bought. Suzanne only liked clothes she was about to buy. She knew someday she would find the exact right outfit that would make her life work. Maybe not her whole life, she thought, as she got back in bed, but at least the parts she had to dress for.
Around noon, her friend Lucy called from New York, where she’d gone two weeks earlier to be with the married guy she’d gotten involved with. Lucy liked affairs with married men because, as she’d explained to Suzanne many times, “You don’t have to have entire relationships with them.”
“I met him on that TV movie I did,” Lucy said. “Blood on the Snow, that ski resort murder thing. He played the murderer and he stalked me, and it was very romantic. I mean, he played a good murderer. He didn’t play a regular murderer, he played it like a charming guy. And we were on location in Idaho, and being on location is kind of a permission zone, anyway.”
“You’re a star fucker,” Suzanne said matter-of-factly.
“I like celebrities, I’ve got to admit it,” Lucy said, “but I’m not a star fucker. I’m a talent fucker, and this guy is very talented. Well, actually he’s limited, but the area he’s limited in is more interesting than most people’s entire range.”
“Scott Hastings,” Suzanne said. “He made that name up, didn’t he?”
“No,” said Lucy. “Actually, his first name is Bob. Robert Scott Hastings.”
“Bob Hastings,” said Suzanne, “Colonel Bob Hastings. No wonder he changed it. So, is his wife there?”
“Holster Hips?” said Lucy. “Yeah, they rented a house in Connecticut, but he’s in the city a lot rehearsing for his play.”
“Another married guy,” Suzanne sighed. “I have to say, I never did like that last one.”
“Earl?” said Lucy, with some surprise. “Really? You didn’t like him? I thought you liked him.”
“Well, I told you I liked him,” said Suzanne. “I had to tell you I liked him, because you liked him so much. In fact, you liked him enough for both of us. What happened with him again?”
“He started to get sort of removed,” Lucy said. “I mean, more removed than I like. I need a guy to be a little unreliable so I can stay interested. I don’t know any women who don’t feel that way, but then maybe if I didn’t feel that way, I would know other kinds of women. Anyway, he got so removed he started having an affair with Isabel Hasbar.”
“The English actress?” asked Suzanne. “Reginald Fleemer Hasbar’s sister?”
“Yes, that Isabel Hasbar,” said Lucy. “It was painful, but it was painful in an interesting way. It felt like it was a necessary part of the process, and . . . Wait, I’ve got another call . . . It’s him, I’ve gotta go.”
“Say hello to the Colonel for me,” Suzanne said, but Lucy had already hung up. She switched the channel and saw a girl and a boy having sex. The girl opened her eyes and looked over the boy’s shoulder just in time to see a man plunge a stake through the two of them.
Suzanne looked away, scanning the horizon of her room. Her house had been driving her crazy lately. Whenever she wasn’t in a relationship, her house drove her crazy. First, her curtains didn’t shut out enough morning light, so she usually ended up putting pillows over her head. But then, she also thought that she had too many pillows, and that they weren’t soft enough. One of the paintings over her bed had a tear in its canvas.
Also, there were two orange soda stains on the white carpet, next to her bed. The cover on her smoke alarm had broken off. There were too many exposed electrical cords she was helpless to conceal, and a large basket of cassettes whose plastic cases had been lost sat beside her stereo. There were just too many things. Things growing over the surfaces of her home like a happy cancer.
She turned back to the television screen, searching it as if looking for a sign. A sign of life. Two men were fighting, and one of them went through a plate glass window, and she found herself staring at the bloodied face of Graham Davies, her first in a series of three actor boyfriends. Graham had been the nicest of the three—in fact, he had been her only nice boyfriend, because Suzanne was one of those unfortunate women who did not find nice men interesting. She’d learned her lesson after him. She found undesirables desirable. She sought out unpleasant boyfriends, then complained about them as though the government had allocated them to her. Still, at least she felt like she was taking part in something, even if it was a nightmare.
She changed the channel. Two women in riding clothes were talking on a hill. Suzanne knew one of them. She had done cocaine with her at a David Bowie concert in London. The girl had been wearing a very see-through dress, and she had also been present the night Suzanne started her affair with her second actor. TV was filled with memories for her, a liquid scrapbook. Maybe if she watched long enough, she thought, her whole life would flash slowly in front of her eyes. Now the girl she knew was playing with herself on a bus.
She reached for the clicker again and watched Ronald Reagan getting off a helicopter and waving. He cupped his hand to his ear and shrugged his shoulders while his wife was dragged ahead of him at the end of a dog’s leash. You can see why he has her, Suzanne thought. She’s angular. With that pointed head and all those sharp edges, she finishes him off in a way, so he doesn’t just bleed into the rest of the big picture. She zips him in.
He was still smiling and waving. It’s like he’s our IV hookup in the White House, she thought. Doctor Reagan, with a bedside manner for a dying nation like you can’t believe. Suzanne punched the clicker, and an actor she didn’t recognize appeared on her TV screen explaining that there was no such thing as an actor’s director. There were actors and there were directors. He was very convincing, but then that was an actor’s job. It got very confusing sometimes. Sometimes actors heard that note of conviction in their voices in real life and actually believed themselves. She switched to channel 11, where a movie called The Tattered Dress was beginning, then punched up MTV. She watched a Bryan Adams video, and wondered what life with him would be like. Finally, she switched back to the girl she had done cocaine with. It wasn’t a good film, but she was somehow more comfortable watching someone she knew, however vaguely. The girl was describing how she’d had sex with her uncle.
Suzanne looked at her bedside table, which contained a bag of potato chips, some weird health cookies, a box of vanilla wafers, two empty glasses, one half-full glass of two-day-old orange juice, a half-empty can of flat Diet Coke, and a jar of peanut butter. She went for the peanut butter with two fingers.
The phone rang. She waited through the life-indicating three rings and then answered as though she was in the middle of an enormous amount of carefree fun. “Hello!”
“Hello, dear,” said a familiar voice. “This is your mother, Doris.”
“As opposed to my
brother, Doris, or my uncle, Doris?” said Suzanne. “Since we’re all named Doris in this family, I suppose it is necessary to establish just which Doris this is. Otherwise, it could lead to some highly embarrassing—”
“How are you feeling healthwise, dear?” her mother, Doris, interrupted in a concerned tone. “Because I spoke to Dr. Feldman just now and he says you might have food allergies. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Then you could just stop eating the particular food you’re allergic to and not be in bed anymore. What exactly are you eating?”
“Just foods that lead inevitably to bypass,” Suzanne said.
“Don’t be smart, dear,” said her mother. “Remember my food allergies. I found out I was allergic to shellfish. My lips get all huge and my tongue blows up like a balloon, and they have to give me steroids or something. You could be eating something that makes you tired.”
“Could I be eating something that makes me apathetic and insecure?” asked Suzanne doubtfully.
“You underestimate the power of food allergies,” said her mother confidently. “I told Dr. Feldman you’d be calling him.”
“Just imagine,” Suzanne said. “Here I’ve spent all these years in therapy, and it could have been tuna all along.”
Suzanne was watching a black-and-white film starring Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers late Sunday afternoon, her ninth day in bed, when the phone rang. She grabbed it on the first ring. “You’re on the line,” she said.
“What if I were a guy?” said Lucy. “I would think you’re desperate.”
“I am desperate,” said Suzanne. “Are you back? I thought you were spending the summer in New York with Colonel Bob.”
“New York in the summer is like a cough,” said Lucy. “It’s like the whole country came here and coughed. Anyway, he went back to his wife.”
“How bad do you feel?” asked Suzanne compassionately.
“Not too bad yet, but I always have emotional jet lag,” Lucy said. “I just got home and crawled into bed, so that when the impact hits me like a crippling flu, I’ll be where I belong.”
“I’m going for a world record,” said Suzanne. “I’ve been in bed for over a week. My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.”
“Who am I speaking to?” asked Lucy. “Sylvia Plath?”
“Sylvia Papp,” said Suzanne. “Joe’s wife. Why don’t you come over here and join me in my not-so-silent vigil?”
“I’m going to be too depressed,” said Lucy. “I shouldn’t drive.”
“I’ll send a limo for you,” said Suzanne.
An hour later, a black limousine turned off Outpost into Suzanne’s driveway and Lucy got out. She was wearing her nightgown. She went into the house through the garage, walked back to the huge bedroom, and climbed into the bed. “Actors may know how to act,” she said, “but a lot of them don’t know how to behave.”
“So,” said Suzanne, “was it devastating?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Lucy. “I don’t know that you could be devastated by an actor. But you know what? It’s more insulting that he would dump me because he’s not that good an actor. He’s more like a TV actor than a movie actor, and it’s just not as interesting as being left by a movie actor. I mean, when I was left by Andrew Keyes, you know, it was Andrew Keyes, and I got an anecdote out of it.”
“You have slept with guys other than actors, haven’t you?” asked Suzanne, offering Lucy a bowl of stale popcorn. “I seem to remember you going out with a lawyer.”
“Bill Taft,” said Lucy. “Yeah. It was boring. He used to talk about stuff like clearing miles of forests in Canada. That’s what he talked about for amusement. I wanted to die in my salad at dinner.”
Suzanne reached for the clicker and changed the channel. Their friend Amy Baxter was on the screen in an episode of her series, Honey, I’m Home! “What do you think about this thing with Amy and the art director?” she asked.
“Amy will never stay in that relationship,” Lucy said. “She chased after him and chased after him, and now she’s got him. I think she’ll probably stay for a while because she’d be too embarrassed to leave so soon, but have you ever seen anyone look so bored?”
“That isn’t bored. That’s Amy,” said Suzanne. “This guy is fabulous. He’s real smart, he’s good-looking, he’s nice, and not even that too nice thing. He’s got money, he’s well connected, and he’s got great taste in clothes. It’s not like she found him under a rock. This is a great guy, but you know Amy. She’s holding out for a greater guy. Somebody better could move to Hollywood, and if he did, then she would want that guy. Amy has to keep about thirty percent of herself in reserve just in case.”
“Remember Sam Eisenberg?” Lucy said with a laugh. “She rolled through Sam like thunder.”
“You know who would be a real blocker for her?” asked Suzanne. “Todd Zane. She could try to save Todd Zane. That would be brilliant.”
“Did you ever sleep with him?” Lucy asked.
“Todd Zane?” said Suzanne. “No. Did you?”
“Yeah, I did,” said Lucy. “He is great. He told me someone told him that he gave head like a girl.”
“Really?” said Suzanne. “What does that mean? Good?”
“Yeah, I guess good,” said Lucy. She stuck a few pieces of popcorn in her mouth. “I swear,” she said. “I think I’m so slutty sometimes.”
“Could you go get me a Diet Coke?” Suzanne asked in a small voice. “I don’t want to walk by the mirror. My hair is so greasy it looks like it was poured over my head.”
Lucy went to the kitchen and came back with two cans of Diet Coke. “The last time I had sex with Scott Hastings—excuse me, with Colonel Hastings,” she said, “it lasted three hours.”
“You like to have that endless, nightmare sex,” said Suzanne. “You use it like a flesh feedbag, you just put some guy on your face and you go into it like . . . like I used to go into drugs, I guess.”
“Sometimes I think all I want is to find a mean guy and make him be nice to me,” said Lucy. “Or maybe a nice guy who’s a little bit mean to me. But they’re usually too nice too soon or too mean too long.”
“I think I’m ill suited for relationships,” said Suzanne, “and this is not a thought that’s going away. I mean, I can’t date my whole life. I didn’t even do it well when I was the right age. Think about it. What kind of a wimpy, pathetic guy would be willing to crawl through the moat of my personality and live in my house, with my stuff?” She opened her Diet Coke and sipped it as if she was sucking poison out of an aluminum wound. “I think I’m right on the verge of accepting that I’m going to live out my life in front of a television.” She pointed at the screen. “That’s gonna be the last thing I see before I die,” she said, starting to laugh. “Rob Lowe’s face in St. Elmo’s Fire. I’ll be in a hospital and they’ll be banging on my chest to get my heart started, and I’ll be staring over them at the TV screen, and this movie will be on it. It’s my destiny, I feel it.”
“I know I’m going to get old and be one of those crazy women who sit on balconies and spit on people and scream, ‘Get a haircut!’ ” Lucy said. “I know this, and I don’t really fear it. I’d just like to move toward it with as much grace and dignity as possible.”
On MTV, a new video came on by a pretty singer whose agent was featured in several scenes. Suzanne knew the agent from her high school days. Her cousin had given him a blow job at a party once, but that was before she’d found Jesus, who knocked those blow jobs at parties right out of her.
“Remember what it was like when you’d be getting ready to jump rope,” she asked, “and two people were turning it, and you were waiting for exactly the right moment to jump in? I feel like that all the time.”
“I keep thinking that we’ll grow out of this,” said Lucy.
“Grow out of it?” said Suzanne. “How much growing do you all of a sudden do after thirty?”
“Maybe it’s a hormonal thing,” Lucy offered.
“Maybe it is food allergies,” said Suzanne. “Maybe my mom’s right. Maybe this is all tuna.”
“Could we be having a nervous breakdown?” Lucy asked. “A controlled nervous breakdown?”
“I don’t know,” Suzanne said doubtfully. “I’m not that nervous, and it’s not really a breakdown. It’s more of a backdown, or a backing off. A pit stop. That’s what we’re having, a nervous pit stop. A not-so-nervous pit stop.”
“I feel like maybe I’ve learned my lesson now,” Lucy said. “I want to have learned it. Maybe this could be my epiphany. Maybe Scott Hastings was my epiphany, and now I’ll just move into the rest of my life like it was lukewarm water.”
“That’s the way it works in movies,” said Suzanne. “Something happens that has an impact on someone’s life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that’s not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, ‘Well, what about the impact?’ You have epiphanies all the time. They just don’t have any effect.”
“Maybe they do,” said Lucy hopefully, “only we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. Maybe right now we’re at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, but we just don’t know it yet.”
“I think,” said Suzanne, suddenly serious, “that we should agree that we won’t get out of bed until we decide what to do with the second half of our lives. This is like life’s intermission.”
“It could take a long time,” said Lucy dubiously, “because we’ve really made a big mess of it. We’re in our thirties already. I mean, what’s our plan here? I don’t feel like we really have a plan yet.”
“We could find our plan on TV,” Suzanne said. “That’s where most people learn about morals and ideals and stuff like that.”
“Is it really?” asked Lucy. “Because I watched TV and never got any. Or maybe I did, and didn’t know it.”
Postcards From the Edge Page 18
