Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

“Stick it, Gayle. I know what I’m doing here. I’m not an amateur. And you don’t have to like it, but I guess the ugly truth is that you, Susan, are here dabbling in something, maybe a number of things come to think of it, that you know nothing about. I appreciate that you are looking for some sort of diversion from your heterosexual domestic routine, but there is too much at stake here for this to be a mid-life coming out party for you. I am not proposing that we hold a pep rally and wear blue. The point is to focus media attention on our cause and to use that attention to expose the lies of this Administration that have senselessly killed so many people. The point is to show the American people that our foreign policy is a fraud.”

  “No. The ugly truth, Kristen, is that most people are complacent. The complacence on which the Administration depends is the complacence we have to challenge. We are protesting a war, here, not selling breakfast cereal. People are dying. Speech-making and pep rallies should not be enough for us. We should not be satisfied with that.”

  “And just what are you proposing?”

  “I don’t know what I’m proposing. I came here expecting to learn not take over.”

  “Sorry you’re disappointed. Maybe you should go home.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Kris…”

  “Oh, Kristen, let’s not…”

  “Maybe I will go home. But for the record, I was protesting American foreign policy before you were born, Kristen. None of this is new to me by a long shot. Nor is it something I am dabbling in to escape a heterosexual domestic routine, as you put it. So let me leave it at this. Unless you find a way to interrupt people, inconvenience them, drag them away from their own lives, connect with them on a personal and visceral level, even to the point of really pissing them off, then you are wasting your time.”

  “You want to make people angry at us? That’s the big plan?”

  “If that’s what it takes to wake them up.”

  “Great. Terrific. Well you can do what you want, Susan. You and Gayle go stand on your heads someplace. Go shit on people’s lawns. Whatever. You obviously have no sense of strategy in a media driven civic protesting model. The rest of us will be in Springfield with Cindy Sheehan setting up Camp Mason.”

  “Springfield’s all wrong, by the way.”

  “Oh it is, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I suppose you have a better place in mind.”

  “Yes. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “And why is that, Susan?”

  “Because, Kristen, while I may have no sense of strategy in a media driven whatever you just called it, you obviously have no sense of history.”

  “History.”

  “Yes. History. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go submerge my old body in slightly older mud and have one of those lovely young masseuses wrap me in seaweed.”

  CHAPTER 36 – Tilly

  The appeal of a romance with Hollywood’s newest toothsome prince of action proved less enduring for me than the romance itself; although it must be said that neither the romantic appeal nor the romance lasted very long by any standard. Within a number of months, both had perished, leaving only the tabloids and the gossip mill to harness the sycophantic imagination of the Zack West fan base and prolong the public’s fascination with something that no longer actually existed.

  Once the relationship was over and we were no longer seen together in public, Zach and I were conscripted by telephoto zooms, large-eared waiters and imaginary friends, into unbearably cruel and cheesy productions of our own romantic afterlife. These were all terribly overwrought, poorly executed dramas in which the truth played but small, unremarkable cameos. Sometimes the story was that I had been scorned, a victim of Zack’s extra testosterone and lust for danger. Far more often, I had punctured Zack’s heart with a cruel stiletto heel on my way to someone else’s bed. And it was not always the bed of another man. I once read that I was irreconcilably lesbian, but lacking talent, and quite taken with Zack’s rapidly amassing fortune.

  The more optimistic narratives tended to cling to the notion – based on old photos reported as current, or current photos altered to support a caption – that we had manufactured a faux hiatus. The polite version was simply that news of our love’s demise had been greatly exaggerated and that we were simply stealing privacy from a life that had none to offer. We had, they reported, banished public displays of affection and had taken vows of discretion. “Friends,” conveniently not wishing to be named, assured that I had sworn off the notorious Zack West beach parties not because of any diminished affection for Zack, but because I wanted my time with him to be less of a circus and more intimate. Tilly-time, these friends had said, was quality time.

  The more cynical version was that the relationship had always been about public attention and that the apparent break up had been manufactured every bit as much as the initial coupling, and for the same reason: to tweak the public curiosity and to keep our names in fresh circulation. This version tended to predict a dramatic rekindling of our affections just when Zack’s public was finally satisfied that the relationship was dead. It was the tabloid twist on the old Hollywood cliché in which the supposed corpse suddenly twitches and stirs in the background of the shot.

  The truth – the original work on which all of these various productions had been based – was far more ordinary and, at the same time, more shameful. The truth is that however much I wanted to love Zack, and however much I convinced myself that I had found adult love with a man of my own generation, I never really did love him. Not because I was a secretly scheming lesbian, but because I was incapable of loving anyone who needed and approved of me. I was incapable of loving in return.

  Not incapable. That would be too kind. Unwilling is a better word. I was so blindly stubborn about such things. Like everyone else who opened up to me in my youth, I never gave Zack a fighting chance.

  How absurdly easy those words are to say. Now, so many years after unburdening the present, untangling it from the past, like two fishing lines perpetually raveled beneath the level of my own understanding. Hindsight, with all of its clarity, can bring a cruel perspective to one’s life. If I could go back and do it differently, if I could end things differently with Zack, I would.

  Not that Zack West needed or approved of me in the least. He was riding so high on the wave of his own popular approval that earning my affections was well down on his list of priorities. Had my relationship been with Zack, I might have been drawn closer in by the luxury of his indifference.

  But my relationship was not with Zack West. It was with Zel Wippo. And unlike his alter ego, Zel approved. Zel needed. Zel loved. I may have been Zel’s only friend in Zack’s world. I did not see him much. It took the right environment and the right blend of intoxicants for him to show himself. But even with hard-partying Zack in full command, I always felt Zel looking at me, pleading with me, from behind Zack’s eyes. He was the breath between Zack’s words. It was Zel’s fingers that interlaced with my own. Zel’s lips on mine. And because I was still that oblivious, unenlightened prisoner of my own past, that was the kiss of death for both of them.

  Even if it was my unconscious that wanted out, my conscious mind demanded a reason, a good reason, for euthanizing a romance envied by straight women and gay men the world over. It was not difficult. The raucous life of Zack West provided an abundance of plausible reasons. The increasing undercurrent of drugs and the looming prospect of addiction might have been a good one. His sophomoric antics. His slavish devotion to the fawning Zack Pack. His near obsessive concern with his own media image. His immunity to books. His irritatingly insouciant outlook on all matters of national and international concern.

  But, in the end, my own immaturity and dysfunction found an excuse in the prosaic purlieus of the heart: sex and lying about sex.

  Maria Beckwith was not some star-struck roadie. She was part of the inner circle; the girlfriend of a Zack Pack regular named Tiki Immanuel. Tiki was a well-sculpted production assistant
with corner office aspirations. Plan B was a thriving designer drug racket that kept him flush despite his extravagant tastes. He had sharp, appraising green eyes, a fetish for European sports cars, and a proclivity for wearing formal attire to casual functions. Tiki also liked to be the last to speak in any exchange, wrongly suggesting that while others had been busy contributing, he had been busy judging; separating the wheat from the chaff. If James Bond had been written as younger, shorter and Malaysian, the MGM casting agents would have beaten a path to the doorway of Tiki Immanuel.

  Maria, six years Tiki’s senior, was a Nebraskan beauty queen with a passion for celebrity event planning. She was a dead ringer for a lean, over-caffeinated, ambition-twisted Doris Day. For all of her apparent fresh-off-the-bus wholesomeness (a personae she had honed to perfection and knew how to play to great effect), Maria brought a conniving, clandestine, quasi-paramilitary approach to the weddings, wakes and bar mitzvahs of the Hollywood elite. In her more candid, usually gin-soaked moments, she liked to boast about her latest machinations to insinuate herself into the personal lives of prospective clients.

  Famously, Maria once feigned affection for the only grandson of a movie mogul who, as a sixty-four year old widower, was openly wooing a starlet barely one-third his age. When the mogul inevitably popped the question, Maria was well positioned to begin planning what would be a fifteen million dollar wedding out on the scenic, sea-battered cliffs of Carmel. Maria all but hand-whipped the ocean spume and spindrift into a delectable frosting for a ginger-lemon cake that served over four hundred guests.

  Five days following the nuptials, the groom suffered a massive coronary in a Cabo San Lucas honeymoon suite. By that time, Maria had unceremoniously dumped the grandson but she was by then so close to the new bride cum widow, that she was the obvious choice to conceive, plan and coordinate the cooling mogul’s Celebration of Life, a three million dollar fete.

  That was a real twofer, Maria liked to say to the rest of the Zack Pack retinue, usually lifting some toxic-colored libation in a toast to her own dubious accomplishment.

  Tiki and Maria, each in their own way, saw Zack West as the missing element to a larger plan. For Tiki, Zack was his ticket to the corner office. He always seemed to have something that he needed to discuss with Zack privately, making quiet apologies to others as he whisked him away into the empty corners of crowded rooms. Once there, Tiki set about hard-selling Zack on the next blockbuster production that no one but Tiki Immanuel seemed to know was coming.

  Maria, meanwhile, was perpetually and not-so-secretly editing a mental guest list for Zack’s wedding to whomever he may ultimately choose to propose. She tended to stand out from the others in the constancy of her efforts to stay in my favor, not because she genuinely sought my inclusion in the group or even because she thought the name of Tilly West was written somewhere in the stars, but because for Maria I represented the shortest path between wanting and having. If there was any inclination by the rest of the Zack Pack to think of me as a passing fancy or a purely sexual enthrallment that was likely to burn itself out in time, Maria was quick to course correct everyone back towards a more romantic horizon.

  “You two were meant for each other,” she would marvel when we were alone, usually in some marbled restroom reapplying our faces. “I’ve never seen him act like this with other women. You really ground him, Till. Zachary needs that.”

  I have no doubt that Maria was planting similarly encouraging seeds with Zachary, which, I am still petty enough to note, was not even his fake name.

  It was thus with considerable irritation and disbelief that I received the rumor that they – Zack West and Maria Beckwith – were carrying on behind my back. An entertainment reporter posing as a grounds keeper approached me one morning outside my Pilates class and asked me for a reaction. My reaction was to laugh and dismiss the notion instantly. He said there were pictures. I left him with his recorder and his hedge clippers and no printable comment. Not only was I permanently disinclined to believe anything “suggested” as fact by incognito entertainment news reporters, I also thought I had Maria’s number. I never exactly trusted her motives, but I never expected that she had any designs on Zack.

  That afternoon Zack and I attended a birthday party for a friend of a Zack Pack regular who lived up in Laurel Canyon. Zack had promised that we would just make an obligatory appearance and then head off to a Culver City blues club he liked near Leimert Park called Babe and Ricki’s. That plan suited me just fine, since I was not particularly in the mood for Zack’s friends and I was all for avoiding the shallow patter that passed for conversation at such affairs. But within forty-five minutes, I knew that the quick, obligatory appearance plan was dead on arrival. Zack was always the cynosure. He was greeted like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Leaving early was unthinkable. Not impossible. Unthinkable. Tiki Immanuel was there and, per the norm, found a way to sequester Zack down by the swimming pool for large chunks of the evening.

  It was late when we finally left. Zack headed south, still thinking the night might yet hold the second act we had discussed. But by the time we reached Mulholland, we both agreed that we had missed our window of opportunity. Zack asked if I wanted to go to the beach house. I declined, asking him to take me home. He nodded, strangely moody.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You seem… a little weird.”

  Zack shrugged.

  “Tiki sure had your ear tonight.”

  “That’s Tiki,” he said. “The guy loves my ear.”

  “You didn’t …”

  “What?”

  “Take anything. Did you?”

  “Nothing much. I’m good. Really.”

  He turned east on Mulholland Drive, cutting across the slope of the canyon lands above the city. It would have been faster to simply turn around and climb Lauren Canyon Road back up to the Ventura Freeway, which would have given us a straight shot into Glendale. But I said nothing, knowing from experience that second-guessing a decision already made was pointless, as was arguing with Zack when he was numbing out on something. He did not seem at all impaired so I did not insist on driving. I could, however, sense his mood darkening and a lengthening silence brought on a familiar fog.

  Over the embankment the lights shimmered up from the depths like phosphorescent algae and the back of the Hollywood Bowl floated in the dark like a pale jellyfish. Trying to keep the connection bright and alive, I told Zack about the reporter and the rumor about him and Maria, laughing as I did.

  “Would you ever in a million years do Maria Beckwith?” I asked.

  Zack laughed, shaking his head. But that was all. He stayed focused on the road as I prattled on about the encounter.

  “Would Maria Beckwith… ever… in a million fucking years … pass up an opportunity to make a fee off of your wedding?”

  Zack laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. I thought he might drive us into the ravine. And it was funny. But I soon regretted making that crack, not out of any respect for Maria, but because it took the conversation down a path of dark hilarity, away from the light. Away from controlled revelation. In a different conversation he might have come clean. He might have at least stopped digging.

  Two days later I learned that Maria and Tiki were not speaking. Two days after that, the photos of Maria and Zack hit the tabloids. My friends told me that they were obvious fakes, but I knew better. Never have a tryst in a hotel room with a city view. Too many buildings. Too many windows. Too many eyes. Whatever passing resemblance Maria Beckwith may have had to Doris Day, it utterly vanished in her snapshot-parade of coital grimaces. As for Zack, even as Maria devoured him for the camera, he was as I remember him today. Lost and running.

  Zack admitted the affair, but not without a lot of protestation and misdirection that insulted us both. Zack’s incredulity at being accused – a poorly rehearsed reaction that he wrapped around a lecture about the tactics of the tabloid press – eventually
broke open, spilling pathetic high school-caliber excuses. Maria had invited him to lunch. She and Tiki were having troubles. Zack had had too much to drink. It all happened so fast. Ultimately, with the kind of determined zeal my father always hated in me, I wore him down, clawing back the layers of personae until I found Zel, cowering and horrified at what he had done. It had not been his only time with Maria, and Maria had not been the only one in the short period that Zack and I had been dating.

  I had never previously had occasion to confront a cheating lover. And yet my reaction had been scripted and played for me a hundred times. I recalled Angus Mann standing in the moon shadow of the elephant fountain outside of our hotel in Kenya, lamenting that the ubiquity of television and the motion picture had robbed us of virgin experience. We have all confronted the cheating lover. I knew exactly what to say to Zack and exactly how to say it.

  The irony is that between the two of us, he was easily the more honest. To the very end, I let him believe that he had betrayed something sacred that had never really existed in the first place. I left him believing that deceit and betrayal was tantamount to rejection and he believed, because I let him believe, that I thought more of myself than to trade love for rejection. He could not have known, for I never told him and I did not even know myself, that in rejecting me he had given me everything I wanted. Everything I needed. And that everything else – the acceptance, the love, the kinship of lost souls – was what had driven me away.

  “Can you forgive me?” he asked. Beaten. Exhausted. Humiliated.

  “Yes,” I said after a long and measured silence. “I can forgive you. But I can’t be with you, Zack. Not like this. Not anymore. I’d rather be your friend.”

  And like a thief in the night, I was gone.

  Again, the break-up did nothing to stop speculation that the union for which there had been such a froth of attention was not really done and over. Zack and I did our best to remain true to the “friends to the end” mantra. But if I could not stomach the romance, Zack could not stomach the friendship and Zel could not stomach the guilt. What remained was an uncomfortably cordial business relationship marked by hollow laughter and unnecessary touching. The zoom lenses then made of that husk what they did and the public drew its own self-interested and hopeful conclusions. In all the awkwardness, with my ribs mostly healed and Zel’s heart mostly broken, the Pryce Point production soldiered on out of sequence, working to capture the early scenes: Jack and Sienna Pryce living an idyllic married life against the studio magic of our out-the-kitchen-window backdrop of New England autumn foliage, before all of the excitement that would test their metal and threaten western democracy, and clutter the Potomac with maniacal Muslims and bits of charred aircraft. Jack is devoted and tender. Sienna is wise beyond her years.