But the mysterious part is that I didn’t even have to see Michelle to be turned on by her. The sight of the book—its slick covers, the raised gold letters, the solid block of pages, the big pyramid displays in stores—every copy, every ad, every press release was a love-potion. A glance at the book was like seeing a naked, silky and inviting and famous Michelle who had been fused with every celebrity babe and world-class body (including implants) ever there was. I couldn’t wait to get home and make love to her. And I have to say that even at the best of times, it had never been like that before. Never. “Famous, famous!” I’d cry at the crucial moment. We wrote the book on how to get bliss, and damned if it didn’t work.
At least for me. The same chain of events stunned and numbed Michelle. She was too stubborn to admit that a good thing was happening to her. Just the opposite. Every step literally sickened her. She did the interviews and the talks and the seminars and the workshops, but afterwards, she wept and said that the energy it took to perform exhausted her. We had to allow time in the schedule for her to throw up before every single appearance. She hated public speaking and she was too immature to grasp the idea that grownups sometimes have to do things they’re not crazy about.
I explained the real facts of life to her, showed her the bottom line, asked if she wanted to go back to working in the pharmacy, and she dragged herself up to the podium, faced the crowds and shared the secrets of bliss.
The joke was that Michelle, the angel of heavenly sex, was too tired for it. Always. And there I was, dying for her. Life is strange and cruel, and so are women.
And despite what I’d said, she still threatened to quit, to plug up the money flow and cut off her nose to spite both of our faces. She did nothing except appear and complain and hole up in her room and write whatever was next. It was up to me to make every single arrangement and drive her to each speaking engagement and to then stay with her so she didn’t bolt. Finally, I had to resign from my job and make Michelle my lifework.
Now always up close to her, I could sense when her motor started to slow down and creak, and I knew about how she was sleeping all the time when she wasn’t performing or writing, always writing the workshop diaries (Journaling for Bliss) and gift books (A Blissful Thought A Day, A Blissful Thanksgiving, A Blissful Fourth of July, et al.). I was worried about the state of her health, her general decline, including her temper. She’d tell me to leave her alone, but of course, that was the last thing I would have done. Instead, I became proactive, easing her burden by officially making us a couple’s act. There was no way I could abandon her or make her shoulder the entire load. I was up there only to catch her if she fell—literally or figuratively, and to help her answer questions when she choked up or got tired, which was often.
By now I was medicating her for depression, exhaustion and such. The doctor and I decided to slip it into her food because she was too bullheaded to admit she needed help. She said all she needed was a vacation from me but those irrational tantrums were symptomatic of her delicate emotional and physical state. In any case, my becoming more visible seemed natural and right. Vicious people accused me of horning in on her, smothering her, stealing her thunder, needing to get a life of my own. One viperous columnist called me a fungus destroying an otherwise healthy plant. And poor, sick Michelle said she agreed, that her life had become one long hell. Just to show how out of touch with reality she was, she said this while we were sitting in our suite at the Ritz. Did she prefer our former one-bedroom bathed by freeway fumes? Was that less hellish than room service and gigantic marble bathrooms?
I alone knew how desperately Michelle needed me to keep her steady. She was fragile, increasingly disoriented, requiring constant assistance. The medications didn’t seem to cure her, no matter how I upped the dosage, but we couldn’t stop them—they were all that kept her able to maintain her arduous schedule. I found a new doctor who prescribed pep pills, and I added those to the mix. I would do anything to help my wife, to save her.
Publicly, we were a hit as a duo. Privately, we flopped. Again, sad and ironic, because being in front of a crowd myself, being on TV, being interviewed, all that was as powerful if not more so of an aphrodisiac than the book itself had been. But on the home front, Michelle became still more tense and lethargic, with energy only to perform and write. She met each deadline:
Blissful Exercises 101, The Bride’s Bliss 101, Second Time Around Bliss 101, The Golden Years Bliss 101. Bliss was everywhere, except at home, but isn’t that always the way? The cobbler’s children going barefoot, and all that.
I hope you see the bind Michelle put me in. There we were, all our dreams come true, rich beyond our wildest fantasies and famous. Is it my fault I’d become the symbol of the great husband and lover? It was what Michelle preached, so if the multitudes wanted to practice what she preached, am I to blame? Is it my fault that our fans treated me like a combination of Elvis, the Beatles, and George Clooney? Me! From ordinary Joe to Mr. Wonderful.
With a wife made of ice. A cold fury who accused me of ruining her life and trying to kill her. She had zero appreciation of the effort and attention I’d lavished upon her and her career and her success. Her. Her, her. It was always her.
And see, the whole program was geared to women, to how they could make home life terrific. I had figured that angle out right from the start. That’s why only Michelle’s name was on the cover. If we’d aimed the book at couples, the way Michelle had wanted, we’d have bombed. Guys don’t want to be told how to act, or told they should change. Guys wouldn’t shell out a thousand dollars for a weekend seminar telling them what they didn’t want to hear in the first place. But women will do damned near anything to get a little love, a little romance, into their life. Especially pay through the nose.
So there they were, millions of unhappy, unfulfilled women, looking up to one of their sisters who tells them she’s got the greatest thing on earth going with me. And there I am, the only male on the horizon, drinking in the love potion of stardom—and nowhere to put the desire. The King of Romance with not a bit of it in his life. Is that fair? Is there a human alive who could have resisted? Supposing the one you wanted shunned you, but everyone else wanted nothing but you. For how long would you, could you, keep to your moral course?
It wasn’t as if I got really involved. These were one- or two-night stands, nothing more. And if there were a lot of them, well, there were a lot of cities and a lot of those nights.
Eventually, even as sales doubled, I could no longer hide the fact that Michelle was not at all well. I did solo interviews to spare Michelle’s ever weakening reserve of strength. I was glad to oblige. Mostly, they were about male nurturers, guys like me.
I had Michelle write a book about it, The Blissful Caretaker.
It did remarkably well and to my surprise, turned me into a kind of hero. The poster boy of T.L.C., somebody called me. Mr. Bliss. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt me with the women, either. Given my romantic inclinations and my sick wife, it was more or less a public service the ladies performed.
Then somehow, although I was nothing if not discreet—the last thing on earth I wanted to do was hurt my fragile flower—Michelle found out. Found out names, places, specifics. Things even I’d forgotten.
I can’t begin to describe how the possession of a few meaningless statistics and names transformed my beloved into a shrew. The things she called me! The words she knew! The energy she suddenly found! She stood on the terrace of our home in Malibu, her backdrop the Pacific Ocean, far below, and above her, the wheeling stars. Very romantic she was in layers of frothy Victorian nightwear. She looked like an angel with her hair wild and her face flushed, and she screamed. If we’d had near neighbors besides the fish at the bottom of the stone staircase, they’d have called the police. She was a harpy, a lunatic, turning reality inside out, looking at events backwards, fouling all of it into something ugly, something foreign. She accused me of forcing my adolescent dreams onto her, stifling her own hope
s and artistic ambitions, of backing her into a corner and keeping her there, weighing her down with obligations she’d never wanted and couldn’t stand, making her ill with what she actually called repeated rapes—her words for all those nights of love, those times I’d been so enraptured, so full of ardor!
Rapes! You see how sick she’d become. She said I capitalized on her illness after creating it and then abused her by whoring around. She said she’d been poisoned with drugs and kept ill.
She obviously no longer comprehended reality. She even accused me of siphoning off profits and hiding them from her when the truth was, the intricacies of finance were beyond her, so I hadn’t burdened her with the details of investments I’d made abroad, or how some of them hadn’t exactly worked out. And what was the point of making her sign more papers? So I left her name off some of them to spare her.
I’d devoted my life to her needs, but all that was for naught, and she was vile. Michelle’s betrayal was the worst I have heard of in the entire history of mankind, with the possible exception of Judas. I felt wounded, possibly mortally. All our dreams, the fame, the Double Mike fortune, I reminded her. We’re a team. We’re romance itself! “How can you destroy all that?” I asked.
“All what? I quit this lie, this sham!” she screamed. “It’s my own fault. I sold my soul to the devil—you—to get you off my back, to leave me to my real writing. And then I let you force me to invent you in that book, the perfect man you never were even in your dreams. So maybe I deserved to be punished for deceiving the public, but for how long?”
“You’re not making sense. You need to lie down, take a nap.”
“Get out, you no-talent parasite! You’re nothing without me and it’s high time the emperor went naked! Let’s see how many ladies pursue you when you’re a penniless, discredited, alcoholic, womanizing jailbird. You’re going to pay for the drugs and the embezzling! I made you a household word and you’ll stay one, but it’ll mean something new. Goodbye, Mr. Bliss, hello, slime. My new book is going to change everything you—”
I waved off her words. I didn’t have to listen. The next book was about blissful romance after children. Okay, we had to stretch the truth a little bit there because we didn’t have kids, but then, we’d written one for senior citizens, too, and we were still young. Anyway, I didn’t listen to the words screeching out of her mouth. The next book was my idea, like everything else had been. She was just the self-important transcriber. But it was irrelevant now, anyway, because she was going to trash everything I’d worked so hard to build. She’d said jail!
She looked like an avenging angel in that white embroidered nightgown and all around her I could foresee the disaster she was hell-bent on creating.
For once, I couldn’t summon my usual empathy, caring and concern. For once, I thought about myself. I knew there was no way to talk sense to her.
“You’re ruined, Mike!” she screamed. “Might as well be dead as locked up in—”
A man can handle just so much stress before he cracks, gives under the strain, so I picked her up and carried her to the terrace edge with the cliffs and the surf far below and for a moment I held her there while she ranted, her words floating out over the ocean, to distant shores, to the whole wide world she was ready to snatch out of my hands—and I let her be snatched out of my hands instead. I tossed her down onto the stone steps and watched her tumble and bounce until I couldn’t see or hear her any longer.
It was a tragedy, everybody agreed, her being so disoriented while I tried to get her off the pills she’d been sneaking behind my back, and falling that way. The terrace was glamorous but dangerous, with that open staircase. We put up a gate in her memory.
And that should have been the end of the story. The Bliss business had played itself out, anyway, so I decided to be perfectly happy resting on my Laurels—and my Juliannas and my Faiths and whoever else was there for me to rest on.
But in a last malicious act, Michelle ruined me from the grave. Not even death could limit her treachery. The book she’d been writing, the one she called “the new book” and babbled on about, knowing I’d assume she meant the one she was supposed to have been writing about postpartum bliss—that “new” book was her mystery, the same damned mystery she’d been harping on from day one.
She could have—should have—told me, made that clear, but she didn’t.
And she’d surely never told me that she’d named the villainous husband “No-talent Michelangelo,” who uses his wife’s success as a ladder to his own, unfounded celebrity. Or that he drugs, manipulates, embezzles from and ultimately murders her. And is also a fool and a lousy lover.
Love Is a Many Splintered Thing, she called it. I don’t think that’s funny, or “wry” the way the critics said, but you know, I think they were just being kind to her because she was dead.
And Michelle absolutely didn’t tell me that the damned manuscript had been sent to her agent—our agent—the day of the quarrel, her last day on earth.
Our agent didn’t tell me anything, either. First, she worried over it, then hired her own set of detectives before saying a word to me. Even after they’d dug up whatever it was they wanted, she still didn’t say a word to me, but she said lots of them to the police. And she turned over something else Michelle had sent her—a damned journal. Talk about not being open with your mate! I had no idea she was keeping detailed notes on every aspect of our life. Or that she’d also mailed in prescriptions, her detective’s report, the names and addresses of some of the women I’d known. “For safekeeping,” she’d said in a note. “Just in case anything happens to me.”
I didn’t have a chance. Because of a vindictive, mean-spirited wife.
You know what hurts the most? It isn’t being in jail, or her betrayal, or the way I’ve been defamed. What rankles is that insult has been added to injury. Her book is Number 1 on the Best Seller List. For fiction. Meaning not true, am I right? Not true, but her lies did me in.
And worse, worse, worse! She’s famous again. A household word. Can’t read the newspaper or watch TV without seeing mention or a photo of her. Or worst of all, full-color shots of the book jacket with its slick soft pink paper and its silver and gold raised letters and her name in large gold script and the full-color author photo of my Michelle…incredibly famous Michelle… I hear there are pyramids of those books in the store windows, and you know what that does to me…
Except she’s dead, so it’s like her one last taunt and rejection.
My point is, and you can quote me on this: never give a woman an inch. You can’t trust them. Take it from me, that’s no fiction.
Murder, She Did
I was having a bad day. Or maybe a bad decade. On this part of this hideous day, I was trying to survive a flight on Sadist Airlines during which I’d been forced to be entirely too intimate with a toe-tapping, gum-snapping, knee-jiggling behemoth in the seat next to me. My special meal had been misplaced and they ran out of vodka before they reached my row. And then we began a descent that felt like being dragged head-first down a flight of stairs.
I was not at all happy.
My name is Jessica Branch. You’ve probably heard of me. I write mysteries. Yes, like that Jessica, the one in Cabot Cove. For years I have suffered ill treatment because of my first name, but I’ve said nothing. Smiled, in fact. Damned graciously, too, the way I was supposed to. But six arduous days into my book tour, the muscles of my mouth had refused to continue the charade, to grin and imply that it was fine for strangers to publicly mock my very existence. Today, when I was once again introduced as “the other Jessica” by a TV hostess, I quit pretending that such words were tolerable.
Instead, I spoke from my heart. We were on national TV and I wanted the world to understand my pain. “She’s the ‘other’ Jessica!” I cried out. “I’ve been writing years before she popped up—and she’s only in reruns now, still not writing those books! But how would you know? Have you read anything, ever, besides a prompt card?”
My publisher was peeved by my heartfelt words. Okay, I admit they went on to include, “That’s it, you silicone-augmented bitch!” But the bimbo-interviewer had called me names, too, “crone,” “witch” and “harpy,” maybe more. My publisher made oblique threats about my future. He called me “difficult.”
I am not difficult, but neither am I a dishrag. I have a backbone, but of course, that isn’t acceptable from a woman of a certain age. We are supposed to be mild little grannies. Crone, indeed!
I sat inwardly fuming as the plane lurched and bumped onto the tarmac. My seatmate’s beefy forearm occupied every inch of the armrest, as it had most of the flight, despite the fact that half is mine by rights. I aimed for the spot near his elbow we called the “funny bone” as children, although why the place that sends hot wires of pain down to the wrist is called funny, I can’t say—and I whirred into it with the corner of my book, my own, newest title, hard as I could. His arm shot out straight and the papers it had held fell to the floor. “Sorry,” I murmured, but I smiled while I said it.
That small strike for equality made me feel better, although only because I didn’t yet know what was still ahead.
I took out my compact and tried to redo my face. I may be “the other” to TV airheads, but as Jessica Branch I have a public of my own, after all. My works enjoy a modest measure of fame.
Modest. Right there is the problem. I suffer from an insufficiency of fame. Jessica Branch is not a household word. The other Jessica, the Fletcher one, is, even in her damned reruns. This unfair disparity is nowhere as apparent as during my annual Trail of Tears, a.k.a., my author tour. From one assigned city to another go I, sitting next to inconsiderate louts on planes, like now, wrenching my shoulder as I drag my suitcase plus a tour bag of emergency supplies—makeup and clothing changes and hairspray—banging the drums for my latest mystery.
Murder, She Did Page 14
