Imagine two stones dropped into a pond close together. When the resultant waves superimpose this is called an interference pattern. If the crest of one wave meets the trough of the other it flattens both, but if the reverse happens—peak-to-peak, valley-to-valley—the magnitude of displacement is equal to the sum of both magnitudes. We doubled each other, our best and memorable worst. She the manipulator addict by-product of a manipulator addict, he the autistically stubborn Texan whose gift for admitting he was wrong—or recognizing the moments when for the sake of all involved he should do so even if he didn’t mean it—rivaled a penguin’s for flight. So there was always something to torture him over, and, unlike Mark, he was incapable of getting me to stop by submitting until I felt sorry for him. As far as I was concerned his eye was always roving to some slut or whore in our social circle, the given object generally inspired less by plausibility or Jason’s actual tastes, and more to proximity and whether she was skinnier than me. (Him: “You know that only crazy women call each other sluts and whores?” Her: “It’s fine! If you want to fuck her, IT’S TOTALLY FINE.”) I know now in a way it was impossible for me to know then how much it hurt him when I went so low as to give voice to my own darkest thoughts, using the worst word against myself. Him: “Ugly is an ugly word”—as if to a child, and I would scoff like a child, as if he wasn’t right. I had a Charles Gilbert picture taped to the corner of my bathroom mirror, the image of a Victorian-era woman sitting in front of her own mirror creating the optical illusion of a grim skull with the caption: All is vanity. Him: “Do you honestly have no idea how awful that picture is?”
Not that he was blameless. His preferred method for dealing with vulnerability was avoidance, his biggest allergy was to compromise, and while he came to be even more aware of my triggers than I was, he would continually set them off out of what had to be masochistic boredom. He especially enjoyed telling stories about ex-girlfriends or sexual conquests, and when we were first together he had a pair of panties hanging from the rearview mirror of his truck. A PAIR OF PANTIES. He maintained that this was a design element independent of the panties’ provenance, and that it wasn’t a respect issue toward me one way or the other. A PAIR OF PANTIES. You idiot. Even he was smart enough to lose this one, eventually, after much blood loss.
The time smoking coolly in bed I pick a fight that makes him put his fist through my wall, not an inch from the crossbeam. I tell him to be careful, he writes with that hand.
The time driving down I-35 he loses himself in his favorite kind of anecdote—the triumphant adolescent sexual exploit kind—and I take his wrist and bite the fleshy part of his palm very hard. He shoves me, eyes wide with the desire to retaliate more, and points out we’re going eighty miles an hour, as if it’s relevant.
The time driving to his mother’s house for dinner that I refuse to let up on whatever the day’s offense is—my recollection doesn’t extend to what it was, or whether it was real or imagined—and he feels so impotent to put on a nothing’s-wrong face for his mother at the same time as fixing whatever impossible thing I need to be fixed that he pulls to the side of the road and screams at me till his voice cracks. That does fix things for me, a little.
The time he gets tired of a fight before I do and leaves in the middle of it to get drunk with Harry and I leave him eleven voicemails calling him a faggot.
Of course, roughly half our fights were about Harry, subtextually. No matter who I was accusing him of wanting to sleep with in a given moment there was no question who my actual enemy was. This went both ways. Harry hated that there was a part of Jason that would only belong to me and not him, just as much as I hated the opposite, and we made him suffer for it like a child of divorce who could not comprehend why he should be punished for loving who he loved.
Of course, roughly all our fights were about his plan to leave for Los Angeles when he graduated and became famous, as even his detractors knew was somewhat inevitable—or the only possible way for a Galvan to see it: his plan to leave me.
The script went out on a Wednesday. This was a complicated process that Jason attempted to explain to me, and mostly consisted of feigning a blasé posture and qualifying things that should have been insanely exciting.
JASON: Leo’s company loves it.
LEDA: Leonardo DiCaprio? That’s amazing.
JASON: Not him, per se. His…people, I guess is the terminology.
LEDA: Are they going to buy it?
JASON: They’re going out with it.
LEDA: I thought it went out already.
JASON: It did. To production companies. Now it’s going out to territories.
LEDA: What’s a territory?
JASON: A movie studio.
LEDA: What’s the difference between a movie studio and a production company?
JASON: The studio is the bank. The producer’s first job is to get a bank.
LEDA: Why do they say “territory” instead of just studio? It’s actually more syllables.
JASON: To be less comprehensible, I guess.
LEDA: Well you have to be in good shape with LD producing your movie. I’ve decided to call him LD in social situations. I hope it doesn’t compromise your professional relationship when he falls hopelessly in love with me.
JASON: They’re not actually attached; they’re just getting a territory. I think their deal is with Warners.
LEDA: Who’s getting other territories?
JASON: I didn’t know all of them. Bruckheimer has Disney. Rudin has Sony.
LEDA: Baby, this is unbelievably good news.
JASON: …Potentially.
LEDA: What’s not good about this?
JASON: It’s not real yet.
LEDA: When is it real?
JASON: When there’s money.
But as much as Jason tried to hide behind the newly acquired front of insider cool, he could not extinguish his excitement. Rudin, Bruckheimer—presumably there were irrelevantly mortal men somewhere attached to these names, but this was beside the point; his life had reached the threshold of the mythic dimension he believed he had been intended for. He was knocking at the door. The timing raised another possibility: if Jason sold this script he didn’t have to move to Los Angeles.
This led to a very long weekend. We live or die by Monday, Malloy told Jason. But on Monday he did not, as he expected, wake up to news on Deadline Hollywood that his script was in the middle of a bidding war. He waited all day for his phone to ring, speculating uselessly on why it wasn’t. The two-hour time difference, whether an offer would come in before or after lunch, whether they would call him until they heard from all parties, etc. He drove around fretfully listening to music at full volume. He went to the local independent video store and browsed every title, the ritualistic way he had to before making a selection. He rented nothing. His mind would not still. The entire time he wanted to call Malloy but restrained himself out of the same superstitious (and correct) instinct that calling someone you like first will make them stop liking you. But, as is always the case, Jason caved in the end, and called just before the end of business day, Pacific time.
MALLOY: What’s up?
JASON: …Are we alive or dead?
MALLOY (a pause, chewing)
JASON (a pause, having an embolism)
MALLOY: Sorry, I’m eating. (swallowing sound) No one has passed.
JASON What does that mean?
MALLOY: It means no one has passed. They’re getting their heads around it.
JASON: Getting their heads around what? It’s a binary. What’s so complicated about yes or no?
MALLOY (a pause, chewing): We live or die by tomorrow.
But this was not the case. Nor was it the day after, or the day after that. A pass or two came in, but for the most part the situation remained unchanged: multiple territories were interested, but none would make
a move.
“It’s a Mexican stand-off,” Malloy told Jason. “Everyone’s waiting for someone else to pull the trigger.”
“But…if everyone really likes it, why won’t anyone make a play for himself?” said Jason.
“They just need someone else to do it first to know how much they like it. Keep the faith, these knuckleheads will never let a spec with this much action on it pass them by. I guarantee we’ll have a definitive answer by weekend.”
But the waiting was taking its toll on Fort Jason; the walls were beginning to crack. He was tense and dislocated in conversation, and whenever his phone rang a jolt would run through him and his face would go from not wanting to be excited to annoyed with his own disappointment in less than a second. Eventually, he said he’d had enough and started to keep his phone on silent, which he stated was for his own sanity but I knew it was really for mine and he was checking it every time my back was turned. I was grateful for the consideration.
One night at dinner we ran into an old screenwriting professor of Jason’s from undergraduate, the one who had sponsored his Hogwarts application. Jason gave him a rundown of the situation, hoping to get some perspective.
“You know,” said the man, “this isn’t going to be your last professional opportunity.”
We sat down and Jason said, “That smug prick.”
His tone was so bitter I could have been talking to my father.
“He wrote on Law and Order when the first Bush was in office and now he wants me to fail so it validates his own failure. Harry is right. They’re all fucking vultures who feed on failure.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I said.
“Fuck him,” said Jason.
“I was standing right there. I didn’t see what you’re seeing. Jason, you’re twenty-three years old. I think he was just trying to say this isn’t the end of the world.”
“Are you really saying that? Are you really trying to say to me this isn’t the end of the world?”
Though he was not raising his voice, it was still upsetting to see him this unhinged. But I tried not to let it get to me. So often it was me going off and Jason reigning me in that I told myself it was now his turn. I would take care of him like he took care of me.
“Baby, I know this is really hard on you, but what you’re doing is called ruminating, okay? It’s the way cows digest, it just keeps passing from stomach to stomach and it’s not getting you anywhere, it’s just turning more and more into shit. You need to stop thinking about it, okay? I know that’s so much easier to say than to do, but you have to try really hard to think about other things.”
“I agree with you. That would certainly be the enlightened approach to this. But there is a complication, which is that when I’m successful at silencing my brain and not ruminating on this topic, a sound fills the silence. It is like I’m alone in a vast cave with the deafening sound of chewing echoing in my ears.”
“You tell me what there is for me to do to help you.”
He was quiet.
“I think the thing only you can do is…let this happen and still be here when it’s over.”
I took his hand and kissed it.
No answer came the next day. It never did. Another week passed and it sunk in that nothing was going to happen. Everyone had waited on everyone else until they forgot what it was they were waiting on.
“Goddamn spec market,” said Malloy, finally throwing in the towel. “This was the nineties you would have had a seven-figure sale and an overall deal.”
“That is good information,” said Jason. “Thank you.”
“Would it make you feel better if I told you you are going to be a fucking star?”
“…Somewhat.”
“Then get your ass out here so I can make you a fucking star.”
Jason’s class graduated, but his eyes were on the horizon. He lined up a subletter for his apartment in Austin and was hitting up Craigslist to get a sense of the LA market. This was daunting. He had saved up enough to live half a year by Austin standards but saw that this wouldn’t go nearly as far in Los Angeles.
And, inevitably, Harry won the prize. I knew it was coming. The night before it was announced I had dreamed of receiving a phone call from the prize committee, but upon answering a vomitous torrent of black bile issued from the phone. I sent him a congratulations text the next day just before receiving the actual news. Though he was conserving money for the move, Jason presented him with an expensive bottle of Scotch at the celebratory drinks. Harry was sitting at the end of the table wearing a plastic tiara. Jason stood behind him with his hands on his trapezii, kneading.
“I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy for someone and this furious,” said Jason.
“Bottle it,” said Harry. “No plan B. I lived my plan B for ten years and turning my back on it was only possible by having every vestige of my manhood served to me on a plate. Now is the time. You have nothing to lose.”
But Jason didn’t need the encouragement. Though this process had been painful, it was the waiting far more than the outcome. The defeat only primed him for the fight. It was a turn-on. It is a highly satisfying feeling to see your man is up to the task. This was the first major test of Jason’s idea of who he was and what he was capable of, and his recovery time from heartbreaking disappointment to packing his suitcase was nearly instantaneous. I was even prouder of him in defeat than I had ever been of his terrific promise, this preview of the man he was becoming.
So this is how I showed him.
One evening in mid-May, Jason came by to discuss arrangements. At the time I was dog-sitting for a friend. Though growing up my home situation was never stable enough to own a pet, historically the animal kingdom has been overly attached to me. Stray cats come to me in the streets eager to rub deposits of musk, and my presence has been known to cause great consternation in the primate house of the Pittsburgh Zoo. It is my theory that this is how the concept of the witch’s “familiar” came to pass: some of us are simply selling what they’re buying. Zion, a large malamute, was no exception to this trend. There was none of the separation anxiety typical of dogs removed from their home and master; he could hardly have been happier in my care. Except when Jason was around. It was funny: under other circumstances the dog liked Jason well enough, but as soon as he started staying with me, Jason’s presence in the apartment would make Zion surly and possessive—barking and growling aggressively at his arrival and sulking once chastised, keeping me between him and Jason while giving furtive resentful looks. “Mad-dogging me, fuckin’ dog is mad-dogging me,” Jason would insist. I would pretend it was all in his head, preventing myself from smiling. And the ruckus the brute made when these visits took a turn for the carnal! He would howl such a storm when Jason touched me we would have to lock him up in the bathroom to prevent him from damaging any furniture, and the dire yelping and scratching that would follow made concentrating on the act itself nearly impossible. At one point Jason became so frustrated he stopped mid-coitus and stormed to the bathroom, throwing open the door with the intention of staring the dog into submission: a hierarchy had to be established. But before Jason had the opportunity to assert his dominance the dog shot past him with unexpectedly feline cunning, seized my panties from the floor, and settled into the corner with a defiant grip on his prize.
“Nice. Very nice. We’re definitely sending a consistent message here,” said Jason.
But how could I stop laughing? What more buoying feeling is there than when there is not enough of you to go around?
This was the situation when Jason and I were walking the dog and solidifying our agenda for the drive as dusk settled this May evening, the prettiness of it auguring that same shipwreck feeling I’d felt back when we were in the lunatics’ cemetery, the beauty possessing a flair for the apocalyptic. The pla
n was for me to drive out with him and then fly from Los Angeles. It was a straight shot from the 10 but we were going to allow ourselves a few extra days to make things more interesting.
“I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon,” he said. “I mean, F for originality, but what are you gonna do—it’s the fuckin’ Grand Canyon. And Susan and Jeff are in Santa Fe. She’s teaching at that hippie school where all they do is read good books instead of learn. Was also thinking in California we could go check out the Winchester House. Do you know that one? It’s this mansion that’s like a crazy labyrinth with no building plan, no windows, and stairways to nowhere. The story is the widow of the Winchester fortune was convinced that the family was cursed by the ghosts of everyone who had been killed by a Winchester rifle, and required the house to be perpetually under construction.”
I nodded vaguely at whatever he was saying, distracted by the swishing of Zion’s bushy tail, reminding me of a feather duster. It was a monologue in my direction, not a conversation; it passed through my ears like the cries of the grackles. This trip was nothing more than a metaphor for the world of possibility lying ahead of him.
The Lights Page 11
