Doug?
And the coffee chick vaults over the counter and grabs the business lady who is just pumping blood at this point—
She said, “Oh my God this hurts. Oh my God this hurts.”
Oh my God this hurts.
It looked like the coffee chick was hugging her. Like they were slow dancing. I was still on the phone, and I could hear the sirens coming.
I would not let her fall.
It was over so quickly, Doug.
You’d better believe they’re all going right in that fucking script.
Even though I knew there was nothing.
Doug?
Call it, The Valley Gangbangers and the Business Lady and the Coffee Chick.
I would not let her fall.
It was over so quickly.
Jane’s Wife
The magnet clung to the door of Liz’s refrigerator, what used to be Liz and Jane’s refrigerator, front and center, a square needlepoint sampler, with nothing fastened beneath, no shopping list or funny postcard, with no other job than displaying its message, in a voice, Liz imagined, due to the magnet’s homespun style, as deadpan, sardonic, Nebraskan, maybe, or Iowan, the bold block letters stitched across its white face in bright blue thread: HAVE ANOTHER SNACK FATTY.
The magnet was a recent purchase, an impulse buy from last week’s Rose Bowl Flea Market. Liz had discovered it stuck to a large sheet of brushed metal alongside other magnets with similarly pithy expressions. Seeing it was like making unintentional eye contact with someone she would have liked to avoid, or, more precisely, encountering a deep, unpleasant truth. Once recognized, looking away seemed impossible. It had been made for her. It had been stitched, specifically for Liz, by this kindly, grandmotherly looking lady sitting behind the metal display board thumbing through a copy of TV Guide.
Was buying it unnecessary? Was displaying it cruel? Had she nearly doubled in size since the breakup? Not really, but close enough. Liz had gained enough weight in the four months since Jane had been gone that she sure felt doubled, as if she’d stepped into one of those inflatable Halloween fat suits, just to try it on, and couldn’t get the damned thing off.
So, yes it was cruel, yes it was grammatically incorrect (where was the comma before the direct address?), but could she honestly look at the body reflected in her (their?) refrigerator door’s shine, or the part of her body’s reflection that still actually fit in the refrigerator door’s shine, and say that the magnet was unnecessary?
Uncurl your fingers from the door handle Fatty. Or, comma, Fatty. Step away from the fridge. Haven’t you done enough damage already?
* * *
She ran instead of eating lunch. Down the street and across the boulevard, waiting at the light, high-stepping in place, then out into the nicer half of the neighborhood, restored Craftsman homes with German cars in the driveways, moist green lawns, sprinklers spraying rainbows in the sun. Liz was a graceless runner: shambling, breathless, heavy-footed. She had always suspected she was at least a little asthmatic, and her daily turn around the soft grid of streets was beginning to convince her that she may have been right. Running didn’t really describe what she did; jogging was the correct term. Whoever had thought of the word was a genius of wicked precision. Every part of her jogged, up, down, right, left, handfuls of flesh bouncing with each sharp step.
Turning a corner, she stumbled to a stop. That dog was there, the blunt, squat, black-and-white lump that was always loose. He stood right in the middle of the street, oblivious. A pine-green pickup loaded with gardening equipment slowed, then inched toward the dog as if to nudge him along. The dog turned, looked up at the pickup’s looming grill, then gave out a bratty bark and waddled to the sidewalk. The truck moved on, the driver yelling a curse in Spanish out the open window.
The dog was maybe fifteen feet away. Focusing on Liz now, he bared his teeth. Liz had no idea what kind it was, what breed. She didn’t like dogs. When she was eight, she had been bitten by a neighbor’s terrier. She still flinched at the thought of that dog’s lunge, could still feel his hot breath on her face, the grab and pull. The bite had scarred her, leaving a string of tiny pocks along her left cheek. She had a habit of tapping them with a fingertip, one after another, when she was nervous.
What was this one, a French bulldog? Liz thought she had heard someone, the mailman possibly, describe the dog that way. That fucking French bulldog is loose again. Chased me half a block. Fingering the pepper spray clipped to his belt.
What she wouldn’t give for her own can of pepper spray. The dog growled, narrowed his gaze. He had a flat-nosed face, white with fat black spots around his eyes. He looked like a cartoon burglar. From somewhere behind the closest house, a little girl’s voice called, Bandit! Bandit! At least they got the name right. The dog didn’t budge. Liz imagined unclipping a spray can, running forward like a riot cop, reversing a little of her fear. Instead she changed direction, crossing the street to the opposite sidewalk. Jogging unpursued was hard enough.
The jacarandas were flowering, soft blasts of purple cloud along the rooflines. The flowers dropped slowly, a few at a time, sweetening the air. Liz reminded herself to breathe, to keep her head up, force her mouth into a determined smile. Her hope, of course, was that Jane would be driving along for some reason, an errand in the old neighborhood, and see Liz jogging by. The mortification of Jane discovering her new size, which Liz was sure she had already heard about through the long grapevine of mutual friends, would be a worthwhile trade-off for the keen pang of admiration Jane might feel at seeing Liz fighting against her body run amok. As if Liz had reached rock bottom and now there was nowhere to go but up. She could picture Jane’s car slowing, Jane’s head turning, realizing that she was going to miss it, the struggle and the payoff. It would all be accomplished without her, shared with someone else, maybe, a lucky unknown still out there, waiting to be discovered and included in the victory, the spoils of.
Jesus, her lungs. They felt hot and heavy, like they were full of hardening concrete. The boulevard was in sight again, the end of her little course, but Liz was losing strength by the step. She sputtered, wheezing, bent at the waist, nauseous and dizzy—actually spitting a gob of phlegm down at the curb like a baseball player. Disgusted, disappointed.
There had to be another way to do this. How did people do this? It had been so easy to get fat. That part she had mastered. This part, though. She walked the rest of the way, limping almost, gagging and coughing, finally stopping at the boulevard and waiting for the light to change.
* * *
After ten years together, Liz and Jane had married the previous July, during that brief window, that summer of possibilities, after all the talk and debate, the dinner party games, the late night bedroom discussions after a second bottle of wine: Would they if they could, and what would that mean, what would that change? When the court decision came down and it was finally possible, they’d decided to do it, just like that, sitting on the couch watching the news. They would be the first of their friends. That had been important to Jane, to lead the way.
They held the ceremony in Dave and Josh’s beautiful backyard in Silver Lake. Kongming lanterns rose to burn in the sunset; a string quartet played Brahms. They even splurged on a honeymoon down to Baja, a week bodyboarding in the ocean and hiking in the hills, touring the blossoming wineries along the inland highway. But nothing had changed, really. That became apparent after the first couple of woozy weeks, once they were home again. The same house, the same discouragements and triggers and resentments. The only difference was that they were official now, card-carrying members in a club of people whose opinion shouldn’t have mattered.
Then there was that ecstatic, heartbreaking night in November, the election party at Dave and Josh’s, everyone crowded around the TV with the kind of anticipatory anxiety usually reserved for the public confirmation of disaster. When the final presidential returns were announced, the room burst into shouts and cheers of joy and disbelief. Josh sank to
the floor, his face covered in tears, and Dave joined him, wrapping his arms around Josh’s shoulders, and then everyone joined, as if they couldn’t stand upright in the weight of the moment. Liz lay at the bottom of the pile, her eyes closed in the shared warmth.
A voice cut through the celebration then, someone calling out from the kitchen, another TV tuned to another network. Quiet, everybody quiet. The returns were in from Prop 8. The initiative had passed. Marriage had been struck down, struck back. The feeling in the house shifted. Shouted obscenities, more tears. Before Liz could fully realize what was happening, someone was hugging her, someone else was rubbing her back. She looked across the room to find Jane caught in a similar consoling embrace, but when their eyes met Liz didn’t see any anger or sadness, only confusion.
What were they now? A clerical anomaly, a historical footnote. Accident survivors, standing beside the wreckage. A strange new group within a group, even more apart from the rest of the world than they had been the day before.
In bed that night they lay awake, not speaking, too stunned by the overload of events. Liz was the first to break. “Now what?” she had said, finally. The words shook the black silence. It was almost like she could see them floating in the air above, sky-written, the letters and question mark bright white and demanding. After a while without any response from Jane, they began to unravel and fade away.
* * *
Wet from the post-jog shower, she lay on the bed, avoiding work. The new material from the studio was still in its folder out on the dining room table. Liz didn’t have the courage to open it yet. During yesterday’s meeting, a low-level producer had asked her how the book was coming and Liz had said, “Great!” with such sudden and artificial enthusiasm that she immediately shut back up and waited for someone at the oblong conference table to call her on her obvious insincerity. But nobody had. They’d all just smiled, happy to cut the meeting short on a high note.
Liz stretched her arms up and out, then pushed her legs down toward the far corners of the mattress. She pictured herself from above, frozen in some kind of naked jumping jack. How many mornings had she woken in this bed? Years of them, now. She and Jane had bought it right after they bought the house. Two thousand mornings. Finding each other across the sheets, hands, lips on necks, on lips, Liz lost in Jane’s smell, in her skin. Desire, desired. It had turned by the end, those feelings lost in the final barbed months when they began avoiding contact upon waking, finding the sting from the previous night’s argument still there, like another body in between.
They had argued bitterly, the night before Jane left. Liz couldn’t even remember the reason, the details. It didn’t matter. The fight was the thing, was the way they communicated now. They had forgotten how to live together any other way.
She had watched as Jane pulled clothes from dresser drawers and shoved them into one of their suitcases.
“Do we even need to get a divorce?” Jane had said.
Liz didn’t answer; she didn’t have an answer. Jane moved her hands to the top of the dresser, the few pieces of jewelry she owned, a photo of her niece, a bumper sticker from the election just passed. She stopped packing and stared at the sticker.
“They’ve already decided for us, right?” she said. “One of us just needs to leave.”
* * *
Dry and dressed, finally. Out in the dining room, Liz shuffled the studio’s new material. Other-planetary renderings, mostly—artists’ sketches of the alien world, the stark desert landscape, red and brown. Then a few pages of the colonists’ settlement, a fantastic, incongruous facsimile of a 1950s suburban tract development, spiraling streets of neat, clean ranch houses in pastel colors shimmering in the heat.
Sketches, script pages, photographs from the set covered the dining room table, the three unoccupied chairs. The movie she was working with was a remake of a big-budget failure from more than thirty years ago, one of the unremembered losers from the late ’70s science fiction boom. Liz had never seen the original and the new movie’s producers had told her not to bother, that it held no relevance to their updated version.
Whenever she explained her work to someone and received a slightly pained, uncomprehending look in response, Liz was reminded that this was a strange way to make a living. Books based on movies? Didn’t it usually work the other way around?
She had spent the first decade out of college writing her own stories, two kitchen-sink domestic novels that garnered no takers, just some nice and not-so-nice rejections. When her agent had suggested Liz try a novelization, she felt like he was offering her a consolation prize. Jane encouraged her to wait, to keep plugging away at her own work, but Liz had just turned thirty, and the disparity between Jane’s success and her own was beginning to wear. Jane had been making a living as an artist for years, exhibiting in shows around L.A., in New York, then Paris, Venice, Prague. Alone with her laptop at the dining room table, Liz had begun to feel like a TV housewife, procrastinating from writing by pushing the vacuum, cleaning the toilet, scrubbing the kitchen sink. Whenever they discussed it, Jane was sympathetic, encouraging. Liz’s time would come. She just had to keep working, and refuse to settle. To make light of the imbalance, they made Donna Reed jokes, Ozzie and Harriet jokes. Jane had even started coming through the door after a day’s work, announcing, “Honey, I’m home!” like some impossibly sunny sitcom breadwinner, until Liz asked her, please, to stop.
That was the start of what Liz felt as a gradually increasing separation, the splitting of their life into their lives. Early on, they’d seen themselves as artists struggling together, a united front against the world. Each one’s rejection could be understood and dismissed by the other, used as motivation to try harder. Fuck ’em, Jane would say, tearing up another pass from another publisher. But once Jane started to have some success, and Liz’s discouragement turned to inertia, the balance began to slide, until it was no longer there at all. Jane was a working artist; Liz was an artist who avoided work. She couldn’t help but feel as if she’d been left behind.
Liz ignored Jane’s advice and took that first novelization job. The publisher and studio liked her work, and more assignments followed. Spy thrillers, police procedurals, bodice-ripping historical dramas drenched in sweat and palace intrigue. At first she was simply happy to be published. Her name was on the covers; her work was in bookstores, was read, even discussed, sometimes endlessly, on internet forums devoted to the obsessional dissection of every facet of certain film franchises. Some of the books sold well—the ones whose parent pictures became blockbusters or objects of cult worship—and Liz had been able to hold up her end of the mortgage, pay for a vacation or two, the down payments on the cars.
The level of concentration required to write the books surprised her. It was greater even than with her own novels. Liz learned to plumb a depth of imagination she hadn’t been aware she possessed. A shooting script might be a hundred pages, but her novelizations needed to be at least two-fifty, so what she was looking for were the unexplored lives, everything said and done off the screenplay page. She enjoyed digging deep into the material she was sent, solving the mystery in it, what the pieces added up to, as if she had been given only ancillary evidence of the real story and now had to divine the truth from the clues.
In those first few years, the only genre she turned down was science fiction. She had never read much of it, didn’t think she was attracted by such obvious escapism. All those warp drives and black holes, men going boldly. But during a dry spell she took one on, then another, and those books had become her favorites. Their scripts tended to be so focused on action that Liz found the most open air around them, room to breathe and create. It seemed like the boundaries in these stories were further out, if they existed at all. She could keep pushing, moving further from the center. She could walk into unknown spaces, frightening spaces, exhilarating spaces. These stories were generous, she realized, and open. These stories were all possibility.
Jane had even softened her stance.
She hated Hollywood movies, but she read all of Liz’s books, some numerous times. I don’t need to watch the movies, she told Liz. I don’t care what somebody else sees. I’m only interested in your version of the story.
Liz shot out an arm and caught a sketch as it slid south off the table. This was the first job she had taken since the breakup and she was way behind schedule. She had bought herself a little time at the studio meeting, but she needed to get serious, sit down and write, zero in on the script’s byzantine plot. Every time she tried, though, she ended up playing around in her notebook, hung up on this one minor character, the unassuming wife of the movie’s lead, filling pages with the woman’s daydreams and memories, her days alone on the alien planet. The character didn’t even have a proper name in the script. She was simply and only, Dean’s Wife. Liz knew she was wasting time, sabotaging this job, maybe future jobs, but she felt she was getting close to something, that if she just continued writing, following her slowly unwinding trail of thought, she could describe the woman’s fears and desires so completely that she would unlock and release, blooming into a real character, full and round and breathing on the page.
Liz stood and the room tipped, a little hypoglycemic list to the left. Her skipped lunch’s revenge. A quick mental inventory of the fridge didn’t yield much hope. Last time at the grocery she’d forced herself to buy only what seemed healthy, calorically inoffensive, nonfat yogurt and bags of precut broccoli and carrots. None of it appealed to her now. What she needed was real food, some serious energy, a burger and fries from the grease stand down the street. There was no point torturing herself. She would go get something to eat, then come back and forget about Dean’s Wife and knock this thing out. She should run down to the burger place, or at least walk. It was only about a mile away, but the thought of making it down there in her current weakened state and the possibility, however remote, of Jane passing by to see her lumbering down the sidewalk clutching an overstuffed bag of sweet potato fries moved Liz away from her running shoes and back toward the car keys.
A Perfect Universe Page 3
