“You know,” Brad says, “you should really keep your downstairs door locked. Anyone could just waltz right in.”
“Like whom? Besides, I keep the upstairs door locked. As long as my apartment is safe, the entryway is irrelevant, don’t you think?”
“No,” he says stubbornly. “The upstairs door is flimsy. Anyone could kick it down. You could do it yourself, I bet.”
“But there’s no doorbell downstairs,” I point out. “And I have a hard time hearing a knock from up here. What if someone came to see me, and I wasn’t expecting them?”
It’s a weak argument. Brad knows he’s the only one who comes to see me. The truth is impossible to explain, though. When the downstairs door is locked I feel like a recluse. I might as well live on an island. I could die, and no one would find me for days. The unlocked door is a gesture of belonging. One locked door between me and the world is enough.
Brad tears the paper wrapper from his chopsticks. He is getting exasperated. “If someone were here, they would text you to come down.”
“What if they didn’t have my number?” What if Carly May showed up at my door? Could that be what I’m waiting for?
“So install a doorbell. Better yet, ask your landlady to do it.”
I spoon rice onto my plate. “What’s gotten into you? Has something happened? I hardly recognize you. And you don’t seem nearly excited enough about this movie.”
“So maybe I’m not,” he says darkly—and, as far as I can tell, absurdly. He serves himself distractedly, glopping heaps of everything on his plate. “Maybe I actually want to be serious for once. Or maybe”—he takes a gulp of his wine—“maybe I just saw that Sean kid hanging around outside when I came in. And maybe I saw him lurking out there a few nights ago, too, when I happened to be driving by.”
“Okay, okay! I’ll lock the door. I’ll lock it right now, all right? Will that make you happy? And I’ll talk to the landlady about a doorbell, I promise. Better? Jesus. And Brad, don’t worry about Sean. He’s a weird kid, but he’s harmless, I’ve decided. He probably lives in the neighborhood.”
Brad pokes at his rice, carves a crater down the middle, watches it fill with brown sauce. Finally he says slowly: “You’re a mysterious woman, Lois Lonsdale. I hang out with you all the time, and I swear, sometimes I wonder if I know you at all.”
“Of course you do.” I wave my chopsticks at him. “Now eat. Watch. Prepare yourself for La Sauvage.”
“It’s le sauvage. It’s masculine.”
“Oh, shut up, I know. Don’t be such a pedant.” Actually, though, I’m relieved. Brad sounds more like himself. I hope his mood has passed; loner or not, I’d rather not lose my only ally.
* * *
I have been telling stories to psychiatrists and psychotherapists of various descriptions for years. Not in this town, though; it didn’t strike me as advisable to acquire a shrink in a small college town, where you would have the same therapist as practically everyone you knew, and you would probably run into her at the grocery store, the coffee shop, the movies. I like to keep my life more compartmentalized than that.
Oddly enough, I haven’t missed it. I relinquished long ago the idea that a psychiatrist might help me in any way, might cure me, improve my ability to function. I am not sick, for one thing. And I am extremely functional. A very strange thing happened to me, long, long ago, that’s all. That does not constitute illness. I don’t dispute that it has shaped me, helped to make me who I am. But so what? Must that process be endlessly probed, analyzed, investigated? To what end?
No one has ever suggested that Richardson’s Pamela was traumatized, despite the amount of time she was forced to bed down with Mrs. Jewkes and suffer her master’s peculiar assaults, despite the current trendiness of trauma theory in literary studies. No, Pamela just gets on with her life. As have I.
The truth is, I only kept up the therapy as long as I did because I enjoyed the audience: a weekly storytelling forum, an open mic at which I was always the featured performer and the audience was small, rapt, and sworn to secrecy. I liked to talk it over: how we spent our days, Carly and Zed and I, what we read, what we ate. I stuck to the truth, but I didn’t dig too deep. I have no idea whether it did me any good, therapeutically speaking, but it gave me pleasure. If anything, that’s what I miss.
And now I have Sean. I can’t imagine that this book he plans to write will ever materialize—and if it did, who would read it? The boy can hardly string two coherent sentences together. I’m safe. I can tell him whatever I want, blend fact and fiction with abandon. This is a closed circle. No stories escape.
Sean’s own story remains something of a mystery; he’s extremely guarded. But the more I see of him, the better sense I have of what it must have been like to be Zed’s son. To lose him so dramatically: first to his parents’ breakup, then to me and Carly, finally to a bullet; to grow up with horror stories instead of a father. Sean is permanently damaged; something is awry in that boy. I’m lying when I tell Brad he’s harmless. But he will not hurt me. He needs me; I can feed him stories until he explodes. And I think he is on some sort of threshold. I can’t say how I know this, but I am convinced that I do. I think he will find that it is time to take the next step.
As Gary is doing now.
Should I be afraid? Am I unleashing some kind of monster? Should I warn Carly? Chloe, I mean?
If I am honest, I think that what I want most is to find out what happens next. How long will mere words be enough—for Gary or for Sean? Their trajectories are coming into alignment.
* * *
For Worse is a good movie—Chloe’s best, maybe. Brad enjoys it in spite of himself. We polish off a couple of bottles of wine and an obscene amount of Chinese food—I can’t remember when I last ate so much. He hugs me before he leaves, and I feel dangerously close to crying. “See, I’m not a monster,” I hear myself saying into Brad’s shoulder.
“No one ever said you were a monster,” he says, sounding surprised. He smooths my hair, gives my back a couple of staccato thumps intended to be reassuring.
But I feel as if someone has said precisely that. The question is who, and why.
Chloe
I haven’t taken every role I’ve ever been offered; I don’t mean to give the impression that I am a complete whore, career-wise. I’ve turned down plenty of parts—one, for instance, in an unbelievably stupid romantic-comedy-slash-art-heist pic that actually went on to make a ridiculous amount of money. I don’t do nudity—or I haven’t; I would, for the right role—but that movie would have required me to cavort naked around a museum for absolutely no good reason. Essential to the plot? Um, no. Essential to the development of the character? Only if it was essential that the character be a dimwit exhibitionist floozy. Which apparently it was. (The actress who did take the part has played pretty much nothing but dimwit-exhibitionist-floozy roles since then. Sure, she’s a household name, but so is Velveeta.)
I do have standards—I really do—though I also take plenty of jobs purely for a paycheck. I’m not ashamed. I need my paychecks. And that’s why this afternoon finds me posing with a shampoo bottle, gently shaking my golden curls while smiling seductively at the camera. “Try it again,” orders the director. “I want your dress to swirl more when you make that turn.” Next, he complains that a strand of my hair has slipped behind my back due to overenthusiastic twirling. The hair people rush in and smooth my outrageously silken locks. (Whatever they’ve done to my hair has nothing to do with Sauvage shampoo, just so you know. It’s all a big fat lie.) Somebody tweaks an eyelash that has apparently gotten stuck to its neighbor. Then we do it again. And again. “Honey, stop acting,” Sebastian yells at one point, and I know that honey is not what he means. “For fuck’s sake. This is about pretty. Be pretty. Be sexy. Don’t act. Be. It’s about your fucking hair. Don’t upstage the hair.” By act, I think he means look human. Humanity is not the point. Personality is not the point. I get it. “Am I crazy,” he asks the room, “or di
d we have this conversation last time? Is it too much to ask her to remember that one … little … thing?” His voice rises as he gestures dramatically at his largely imaginary audience. I flip him off. I know exactly what I can get away with.
This is all to be expected. We shoot a new ad every few months, and he’s always like this. At first I thought it meant he would ditch me, but no, it’s just how he operates. At least with women; I’ve heard he’s different with men. Most of the other people on the set are ignoring him. Occasionally someone snickers.
We’re shooting blue screen. Later I will appear in front of footage of wild animals I have never seen. Lions, mostly, with flowing manes. Originally there was talk of shooting on location—jetting off to Africa or wherever to frolic with actual lions. But in the end they scaled back the budget, and I stuck with them anyway. I am well paid to put up with Sebastian’s abuse. “Send me a goddamned model,” he keeps muttering. “Fucking actresses. You take a model, she knows it’s all about the product. Even third-rate actresses cherish the misguided notion that they matter.”
“Fuck you,” I say sweetly, smiling vacantly at my shampoo bottle. “Sauvage,” I whisper at the end, as my swishing hair settles back into place. I whisper “sauvage” dozens of times. Savage shampoo? It doesn’t even fucking make sense. I don’t knock it, though; if it helps people remember who I am, it’s okay with me. They pulse my name at the bottom of the screen toward the end of the spot; the assumption is that your average viewer might think I look kind of vaguely familiar but will need help remembering my name. Savage, Sauvage. Get it?
Sometimes this is what being an actress is like.
“Prick,” I say, when I finally stalk off the set, and he smacks me on the ass with his clipboard. He likes me well enough, when all is said and done.
“Pervert,” I add, and he lets me have the last word.
Lois
Brad persuades me to attend the end-of-the-semester English department faculty party as we’re walking to the parking lot after work one evening. I would have been happy to skip it, but he says that isn’t an option. “We’re new faculty. Parties are like meetings—they’re mandatory.”
“Which makes them, by definition, not fun. And therefore not really parties.” My defeat is a foregone conclusion, but I can’t help putting up a bit of a fight. I don’t see the logic of coerced socialization with my colleagues. Surely we see one another quite enough.
“They’ve hired a bartender,” Brad points out as we reach my car. “At least there’ll be real drinks.”
“Oh, good. Now it sounds like a frat party.”
“Oh, come on. You know you love a good frat party as much as the next girl.”
I scowl at Brad. Our relationship hasn’t changed, at least not on the surface. But there’s been a dark undercurrent ever since the night we watched For Worse. We might have established a truce by the end of the evening, but Brad had already thrown down a sort of gauntlet, and there it still lies. The gauntlet, that is—which is, of course, a glove. We are ignoring it, but we know it’s there; how could we fail to? Gauntlet: gaucherie, gesneriad, gemmule, gendarmerie.
I ignore the gauntlet, rehearse G words, and agree to go to the party.
* * *
It’s true that Sean has taken to loitering in this part of town. I’d noticed his shadowy lurking before Brad brought it up, and I tried to intuit his motivation. The better I come to understand Gary (who is currently stalking a lovely actress who is, as yet, unaware of his presence), the more insight I think I have into Sean, and vice versa. Sean’s behavior worries me a little more than I am willing to admit. Still, I believe that I can keep unfurling stories for him for as long as he needs them, and I do not think he would risk jeopardizing the stories. They’re all he has—all he will ever have—of him.
A few days ago I sat with Sean in a Pizza Hut on the outskirts of town. The restaurant seemed old and faded, and it was almost empty; a couple of families squeezed into booths could not have been less interested in us, and they made enough noise to cover anything odd that we might have said. Both of us were mashing our Cokes, choked with crushed ice, with our straws.
“Sometimes he invited us to sleep in his bed,” I told him, keeping my voice low. Sean crossed his arms over his chest and slouched into the corner of the booth, listening without comment. “We wore long, old-fashioned white nightgowns. He gave us knives with which to defend ourselves. He said he wouldn’t touch us, not in a bad way, but that if we felt threatened it was only right that we should protect ourselves. We curled up on either side of him like kittens. He took showers all the time, several times a day, and always smelled like soap and shampoo, but the bed itself was a little musty. We liked it, though. He slept flat on his back and never snored, although sometimes he talked in his sleep. I used to lie awake listening to him, trying to make sense of his ramblings. ‘The wolves are here,’ he would say. ‘The squirrels in the attic are dead. Soon we’ll ride the ferris wheel—we have tickets.’ I always meant to write down his words, but in the morning I would forget.
“One night I heard something different from the usual sounds and jolted awake. Carly was sitting up, and she had her knife in her hand. She was holding it out in front of her. He was awake, too, still lying down, and their eyes sparkled at each other. I wondered if my eyes sparkled too, if my eyes were as pretty as theirs. Carly stretched out her arm and brought the point of the knife to his chest. Although it was dark, the moon shone into the room that night, and so I could see his flesh yield to the blade. She pressed harder and drew the blade downward. Blood sprang gently from his chest, amid the sparse curling dark hairs. Just the slightest trickle. After a while Carly lay down again and as far as I know they went back to sleep, but I was still awake, listening to their breathing. I’ve never slept well.”
I don’t plan these stories in advance; I tell them as they come to me. They come with such startling ease that they almost feel true. They frighten me, and I wonder which of us gets more pleasure from them.
Sean suddenly reached into his pocket, startling me, as if a spell had been broken. He opened his hand to reveal a knife—not a jackknife, exactly, though similarly constructed. It looked meaner; less … domestic. “Was it this kind of knife?” he asked.
“No,” I said sternly, taken aback. This was not in the script. “It wasn’t like that.”
“I wish I could see what kind of knife it was,” he said, wistfully.
“We’ll see.” Maybe I can find a plausible picture, I thought. I don’t know very much about knives.
“I’d really like to see it,” he repeated.
“The knife doesn’t really matter. That’s not the point. A knife is a knife. What matters is that he gave them to us. What matters is what she did with hers.”
“A knife is a knife?” he scoffed, as if no one had ever said anything more ridiculous. “Spoken by someone who knows nothing about knives.”
Most likely he was posturing. But I didn’t like this talk of knives. Even though, arguably, I was the one who started it.
There’s a knife store in town. Guns and Knives. It’s next door to a shoe repair shop and across from a bakery. The next day I went for a walk and made a point of cruising past the window of Guns and Knives. I glanced at the displays, feeling too exposed to enter. This would require a field trip. I was thinking of Gary; Gary would have a knife, and I would need to find an appropriate knife for him. I considered doing my research on the Internet, but I didn’t want to trigger offers from crazy white supremacist militia groups or get myself on an FBI list.
Which is why, the Saturday after Pizza Hut, I find myself in a huge sporting goods store in Binghamton, an hour’s drive from campus. It’s possible to shop for perfectly harmless things here—tents and sleeping bags, baseball gloves, fishing tackle, camouflage outerwear—but the deadly weapons section dominates the store. There’s one wall of guns, another of bows and arrows, and several cases full of knives. Neatly dressed young men stand behind the co
unters, looking comically incongruous. As I approach a knife case, one of them offers to help me. He calls me ma’am. “Just looking,” I mutter, as if I’m perusing a display of watches or cupcakes rather than assessing the merits of five-inch blades as opposed to four inches, serrated versus straight, fixed or folding. I’m attracted to a set of throwing knives, which look a lot like daggers and seem to belong more to the world of ornate costume dramas than a contemporary world in which people actually find things to do with these malevolent objects. I might have been inclined to argue, until now, that an object in itself cannot be malevolent. Looking at the weapons before me, though, I am convinced otherwise. These aren’t neutral instruments, equally useful in the service of good or evil depending upon the disposition of their possessors. No. Despite their neat classifications—camping, tactical, hunting, military, the vague “outdoors”—these are designed to rip, pierce, skin, sever, disembowel. These are cruel instruments. I force myself to inspect them all. What disturbs me most is their aesthetic pretension: their graceful curves, sleek handles, tooled sheaths.
Eventually I withdraw my phone from my purse, pretend I am texting someone, and surreptitiously take a picture of a sleek black bowie knife that costs over two hundred dollars. In the back of my mind is the comforting thought that Sean would be unable to afford such a knife. I can visualize it tucked in Gary’s back pocket. It is perfect.
The nice young man at the register is watching me, frankly curious. I replace my phone in my purse and drift out of the store.
From there I drive to the nearby mall, feeling as though I have earned some form of indulgence. It’s not the world’s most impressive mall, but today I don’t care. I wander aimlessly through the Gap, Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, awash in colors and textures and mall smells and piped-in music, thinking desperately about nothing at all. Trying to shut down the part of my mind that insists that this behavior is alarmingly irrational, that perhaps Delia is right to be concerned. I know what I’m doing, I argue, trying on dresses. I’m a writer; it’s research. The dresses are all too big.
Pretty Is: A Novel Page 19
