The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  I laughed. “You did not.”

  “Of course I did. Every punk I knew was like that where I grew up.”

  “You would have found your way to L.A. eventually. Especially since you were only an hour and a half away.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m telling you, it wouldn’t have happened. Bakersfield is like another planet. It was luck, nothing else.”

  His rise was fast and without real difficulty, a fact he admits to most people because he thinks it adds to his appeal. There is no odor of desperation about him, no stories of violent hand-wringing or sobbing before the security gate of some powerful director or casting agent’s Bel Air mansion. He embodies the most glittering American dream—the version that dictates that success is one’s birthright and should come easily. Americans romanticize struggle and hard work but do not, in fact, like to work hard.

  It was January when our marriage split open, which didn’t mean much because we lived in Southern California, in Laurel Canyon, and it hadn’t taken me long to prefer it to my snow-choked hometown of Minneapolis. “You probably knew this was coming,” he said. He wasn’t lying next to me or sitting across from me at the dinner table, avoiding my gaze. He didn’t have to look at me at all because he said these words over the phone. I hadn’t seen him in three weeks. He was in Canada filming a movie about caribou hunters, and I’d heard that he was with another woman. She wasn’t in the movie and she despised cold weather, but I knew she was up there with him. We had friends in common, this woman and I. The film industry really is a small world, its tributaries and rivers and landmasses all mapped out by our mentors, our adversaries, our lovers past and future.

  “I didn’t think this would happen so soon,” I said.

  He hesitated. “You don’t sound upset.”

  “I am upset.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “I’m not going to yell at you, not over the phone. I want you to come home and talk to me about this in person. Ask Jeff for a couple of days off. Tell him I’m sick, that I’m in the hospital. Tell him to shoot some of the scenes you’re not in.”

  “I’m not going to lie. He could easily check.”

  “Then tell him that your wife of five and a half years has asked that you come back and talk to her before you try to divorce her.”

  There was a tense pause. “Try to divorce you? What do you mean by ‘try’?”

  I hung up on him. When he called back, I didn’t answer. He called me sixteen more times that night, maybe even twenty-six—I can’t remember the precise number, but I didn’t answer any of those calls, each new sequence of rings sounding more and more desperate and enraged. I didn’t turn off the phone because it felt better to hear his distress than to sit in stunned silence. There was no prenuptial agreement; we had talked about it, but the idea had deeply embarrassed both of us. He had ignored the advice of his friends and his agent before our wedding because, again, he believed in success, not failure. He also thought that as a writer of literary screenplays, of character-driven political and romantic satires, I was not as interested in money as other people were. He was right, but I was interested in revenge.

  I wanted him to come home and tell me to my face that he was leaving me for another woman. As you can see, I wanted to make it difficult for him.

  3.

  When you are thirteen, a recent initiate into the tragicomedy of adolescence, you imagine yourself marrying the boys whose dazed or beaming faces greet you from the dog-eared pages of teen magazines. You imagine yourself marrying your girlfriends’ older brothers, those with driver’s licenses and beginners’ mustaches and possibly an alarming tattoo or two they have tried to hide from their parents. You imagine yourself, after the prom or on the night they propose, being deflowered by these boys, both the famous and unfamous ones. You peer at your face in the mirror for hours after school and worry about your nose and cheekbones and slightly crooked teeth. You know yourself to be pretty enough, but probably not beautiful. Your legs are bony, or else they are too fat—you unwillingly, helplessly, wear the evidence of a loving mother’s after-school cupcakes and cookies and Friday night deep-dish pizzas.

  Anders Gregory is only three and a half years older than I am. He was a senior in high school when I was a freshman, and from a young age, he did not carry with him the sense that he would be famous, as many other stars apparently do. The same night that he had talked about serendipity, he told me that he had planned to become a structural engineer and design vast, intricate bridges; he had always liked science and math. He was not a spendthrift, not in the hysterical fashion that many famous people are. There was never any fear of bankruptcy because he did not insist on having seventeen vintage Rolls-Royces in storage or a large staff of servants who all lived in his palatial home. We had a cook and a housekeeper who each worked four days a week. Someone came to do our landscaping; someone else came to take care of the pool. This is, of course, the manner in which many people live in the wealthier towns and cities of the world. I loved Anders and did not want to lose him. I thought that I might be able to forgive him if he appeared at the foot of our bed the morning after his call from Alberta and proclaimed that he had spoken too soon, that he had made a mistake.

  4.

  I know that contradictory examples do exist. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s long marriage was astonishing, but people forget that he left his first wife to marry her. If Joanne had been his first, I’m not sure it would have lasted.

  I wonder about Elizabeth Taylor, hardly an example of spousal fidelity, but nonetheless—would she have stopped at three, if her beloved third husband, Michael Todd, hadn’t died in a plane crash a year after their marriage, in a plane he had named Lucky Liz? Or would Richard Burton’s appearance have been inevitable, their own two marriages and divorces, and the 69-carat diamond he bought for her at Cartier, also inevitable?

  5.

  Other men I have had relationships with have not been as famous as Anders, but hardly anyone on earth is. He is in an exclusive club, the .001 percent of the world’s population with instantly recognizable faces. The members are musicians, miscreants, politicians, movie stars: Mick Jagger, Cher, Che Guevara, Hillary Clinton, Bozo the Clown.

  I was seeing someone else when I met Anders, one of my former graduate school classmates who was trying to earn a living as an actor. His name was James, as in Jesse, he liked to say, not Henry, which confused most people who heard this because James was his first name, not his last. By the time we started dating, he had been hired to act in a few commercials and had also had nonrecurring parts on four or five TV shows. He was funny and a little strange and often unpredictable in that he might tell me to meet him for dinner at a nice restaurant where he would show up wearing a police uniform and handcuff me to him. We would walk into the restaurant and he would tell people that it was all right, I wasn’t dangerous, no cause for alarm. He loved attention, and not surprisingly, I did too. I liked him quite a lot, though I couldn’t imagine that we had a real future. He was probably depressive and sometimes would descend into days-long funks when he didn’t get a callback, but most of the time he was sexy, spontaneous, enthusiastic. As far as I was concerned, we were having fun. We made each other feel less lonely, and in a big city, especially one like Los Angeles, this isn’t so easy to do. Ordinary people feel lonely in a way that the famous do not, and despite how it might seem to those who do not live in southern California, there are so many more ordinary people than movie stars sitting in traffic jams or buying their coffee beans and wheat bread at Vons.

  6.

  What happened is nothing new or surprising: Anders left me for a popular actress, one he had met on the set of his fourteenth feature film. The film flopped, which pleased me. Before I married him, other people’s failures had rarely made me happy, but under his unobservant gaze, I turned petty, often mean. The actress was his lover in the flop, and I’d known as soon as he told me that she had been cast to play the female lead that things I cou
ld not hope to control were going to occur. She was impossible to dismiss. It wasn’t only her beauty and fame, both greater than mine, or her age, which was less than mine. She is the type of person who cares about causes. She cares about them publicly, but genuinely, I will admit. She has raised and donated sizable sums of money for the construction of schools and hospitals and women’s shelters in countries I had never previously considered visiting, let alone donating any portion of my earnings to. Hers, somehow, is a voice that people in power, here and abroad, listen to. For more than any other reason, I dislike her because she reminds me that I am not good and kind enough, that my causes are laughable because few extend beyond my front door. I am aware that most people live their lives the same way that I do—no one is more important to us than ourselves—it is simply the nature of our species, of any species, I suppose, but this thought is not a comfort.

  We had one phone conversation, accidentally, while Anders and I were in the process of divorcing. She picked up his cell phone one morning, probably forgetting to look at the display to see who was calling. But I also wonder if she saw my name in the liquid crystal, and for a wild, breathless second she needed to know the words that I’d been saving up to say to her.

  We both froze when we heard each other’s voice. I finally mumbled, “I guess Anders isn’t free?” I couldn’t even pretend that I didn’t recognize her voice.

  “He’s not here.” There was something in her tone I couldn’t pin down—shame? Or only wariness?

  “When will he be back?”

  “I’m not sure. A few hours maybe?”

  If I’d been capable of organizing a coherent thought, I would probably have said something unforgivable to her then, something she would remember and worry over, possibly for the rest of her life. Something that she would think was true, even if it wasn’t—that she had no talent; that he would cheat on her too if he hadn’t already; that he was cheating on her now with me.

  I only asked her to tell him to call me back, my heart beating so hard I was sure that it would have burst from my chest if my breastbone hadn’t been there to hold it down.

  The caribou movie was his sixteenth feature film. It ended up doing very well, its box office receipts respectable, the director and one of the costars winning prestigious awards. I didn’t go to see it. Anders did not appear at the foot of our bed the morning after his break-up phone call. He did not appear in person at our home until two and a half weeks later, during a scheduled hiatus in the film’s production. Instead, he sent emissaries, three of his closest friends, one at a time, to tell me how embarrassed and regretful he was, how he hoped we could both be reasonable, how he hoped I’d eventually understand and forgive him. Coward, I said. Stupid fucking cowardly bastard. I wanted him to fall through the Canadian ice. I wanted him to get frostbitten. I hoped that certain crucial body parts would fall off. I said these childish things to anyone who would listen, and at first there were many people who did.

  Then, within four days, the news of our collapse began to appear in the papers, a big headline in a few of the sleazier ones, in falsehood-riddled articles with the most unflattering pictures of me they could find—ones where my eyes were half-closed or I appeared to be snarling, ones where I looked drunk but wasn’t at all. Anders looked angelic, innocent, desirable—the onus, somehow, on me—I had driven him into the arms of a more beautiful and worthy woman. In some photos, her head was superimposed onto pictures where my head had actually been—Anders with his arm around my waist, whispering in my ear, kissing my cheek, looking the adoring husband; his hand at the small of my back, his body leaning protectively toward mine. These were old pictures, ones from our courtship and first year of marriage. I wanted to sue these sleaze rags but knew that it would be wasted time and money. The pictures and the stories were already out there. Nothing could be done to take them back.

  7.

  “No.” When I thought about it, I realized this was a word we had said to each other often.

  We didn’t have any children. Nor did we adopt. We had thought that we would do one or the other, possibly both, but after two years, then three more, it hadn’t happened. There was always a bigger, more important movie to make, more time to be spent apart, another topic that I hoped to research, another screenplay to adapt or write. I had known after year four that it wouldn’t happen. I had stopped wanting a baby as much as I had at the beginning, and he had stopped talking about becoming a father. There was, at least, no vicious custody battle to add to the war over our finances.

  “You didn’t earn any of this money that you’re trying to take from me,” he said not long before the divorce was set in motion, angry that I wasn’t going to settle for four million in cash and the house in Laurel Canyon, leaving him the New York co-op and the Miami villa and over sixty-seven million in stocks and other more liquid assets. “You have your own fucking money, Emma.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but I’m not the one leaving you for someone else.”

  He exhaled loudly. “You know that I’m really sorry this has happened.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe.”

  “You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true anyway. I don’t want us to be enemies. Maybe we could eventually be friends.”

  I snorted. “Sophie would love that.”

  “She’d understand.”

  “I really doubt that, Anders. Not everyone wants the same things you want.”

  When the outrage and jealousy dissipated, there was only abjectness. I knew in those moments that I would have taken him back. I knew that I would never be as close to another man like him. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, he was extraordinary, and being with him had made me feel as if ordinary concerns, ordinary disappointments and sorrows, had less to do with me than with other people. That is what celebrity signifies more than anything else—it is the apparent refutation of the banal.

  “How can you still care about him?” asked one friend, a divorced woman herself. “After all of the things he’s done to humiliate you? You have more self-respect than that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, because maybe I didn’t. I had the idea, obscenely childish and predictable but one that could have been a very potent kind of revenge, of writing a book about our marriage. In a self-righteous fever, I wrote ninety pages before I knew that I didn’t have the will to finish it. By this point in our separation, Anders doubtless considered me a hardened opportunist, but I was not completely unhinged. In spite of my bitter, lingering feelings of betrayal, I knew that it would be better for me to retain my self-respect and the notions of decency that had been ingrained in me by my Midwestern upbringing: you do not let people know what you’re thinking, especially if your thoughts are uncharitable; you do not profit (emotionally or financially) at other people’s expense; you do not intentionally hurt the people you care for or once cared for very much.

  I missed him fiercely at times and awoke in the middle of the night, my face damp with tears, wondering if I could win him back. The clock on the bureau ticked unyieldingly, its answers all in riddles. After several nights in a row of this, I couldn’t bear the sound of its ticking and threw it away.

  Friends, my parents, my one sibling (an older brother who liked Anders quite a bit), thought that if nothing else, I should have been relieved that the pain and anxiety and implacable jealousy were ending: the innumerable days during our marriage when I had been at home, trying to work, picturing him having a very good time with the other cast members in a film that was shooting in Moscow or Key West or Nairobi or Paris or Kuala Lumpur, picturing all of the fans who hoped to get close to him, to smile at him and be smiled upon in return, the fans who wanted to touch him, hold his hand, look him directly in the eye and then go home to remember this one-minute interlude for the rest of their lives.

  As I saw it, he was always off somewhere, living the best days of his life. If I went with him on a shoot, I wasn’t precisely welcomed, by him or by anyone else wo
rking on the film. I was a potential fuck-it-upper, though some people were kind and decorously curious about my current writing projects. Anders needed to concentrate, memorize his lines, rehearse, get into character, which I understood but resented. I wanted love, physical proof that he needed only me—an outrageous and absurd desire.

  N.B.: No one who marries someone famous knows precisely what will happen to his or her self-esteem. If you are famous too, there is even more potential for competition, for keeping track of who is more adored, who is getting better roles, more media attention, more critical acclaim and money. You might search fan sites, fruitless and stupid as this would be, to determine who your far-flung enemies are, who has proclaimed the most ardent love for your husband, who plans to act on it as soon as possible. Despite how pitiful these sites and their custodians are, you feel corrosive jealousy. You want to go through the fan mail that arrives at the studio before your husband sees any part of it, throw most of the letters away, threaten with bloody bodily harm those who have sent lewd photos, written bad erotic poetry: “I Want to Suck Your Dick for Sex Days Straight, Mr. Gregory.”

  If they all weren’t so stupidly earnest, it might have been funnier.

  8.

  After seven months of bickering, we settled for much more than four million in cash, for more than the Laurel Canyon house, and after we both signed the papers, we didn’t speak again for two and a half years, not until our paths overlapped at a fund-raiser for an AIDS research foundation that his second wife had insisted he attend with her. He married her a year after leaving me, this time each of them signing prenuptial agreements. Five months later, they were parents.

  I’m not sure why I did it, but I started seeing a married man. He had been a friend for a number of years, one I had always been mildly attracted to but hadn’t done anything to encourage. His name was Otik, a Czech man who directed commercials and music videos. Barring the gambling addiction, he wanted to be Dostoyevsky. I had read some of the novel he was writing before I became his lover and it impressed me, though it wasn’t likely to be published—there was nothing American about it, no levity in its pages, false or otherwise. I did not see how it could possibly sell here. I didn’t tell him this and I turned out to be wrong. When his book sold, The Monk’s Arsenal, he sent me three dozen roses—red, yellow, and pink. I tore off the tissue paper and felt the heated rush of tears because this was something Anders had done during our first two or three years together. Enormous bouquets with quotes from Keats or Shakespeare scribbled onto the cards would arrive for no reason. I liked to imagine the people in the flower shop, the young girls who took the order from Anders’s assistant, knowing that this Anders was the Anders and wondering if they would ever be loved by a famous man who could give them everything they desired.