The next few days were consumed with the film shoot. At night, David’s mom would show up with dinner for the cast: homemade meatloaf and mashed taters, fried chicken and cornbread, pulled pork sandwiches with bottomless cups of tea so sweet it made my teeth ache. After we’d wrapped for the day, the cast would retire to a bar downtown where a gravel-voiced woman named Peaches would serve beers and bourbon and moonshine cherries. When we’d get home, nice and liquored up, I’d change into something a little more comfortable and visit David on the couch and every night, he’d already be asleep.
David had given me full access to his life—his past, his family, even his baby pictures—and, at the same time, had denied me access to him, mysteriously stopping his pursuit of me in its tracks. You couldn’t craft a more powerful aphrodisiac. That he’d done it entirely by accident only intensified its power.
By the time we wrapped on the final night of shooting, the deal was sealed: David had sandblasted through my defenses. On that final night, as soon as we got back to his place, I went to him on the couch. I was still in costume, a flannel button-down shirt one size too big with Walmart jeans and no lipstick.
I sat on the couch and watched as he lit the fire and made the room go from dark to dancing in light.
“I’m glad you invited me down here,” I said. “The South isn’t what I thought it would be.”
“No?” he said, closing the grate on the fireplace.
“Neither are you,” I said. It was sickening to be so goddamned exposed, to have nothing to hide behind, but the alternative—leaving David, leaving the warm feeling and the firelight to return to fucking and falling out windows—was even more sickening.
David didn’t reply but he sat next to me on the couch. Close.
I couldn’t see much by the dim light of the fire but I could make out his eyes. They were looking right at me, inviting me in, not pushing it or reaching for it but just leaving the door open.
“I’m not really so cold-hearted, you know,” I said, squirming from the discomfort of being so naked.
“I know,” he answered.
I felt his hand then on my face, brushing my hair back and with that touch, the remains of the Great Wall surrounding my heart fell with a resounding crash. That night, he slept next to me and there, curled in the crook of his arm, I stepped out from where I’d been hiding and told him about my eyes, not just the disease and the prognosis but the secret of it, that I didn’t want anyone to know and I didn’t even know why. It was dark in the room so I couldn’t see his reaction but I didn’t need to because I felt his grip around me tighten.
After he kissed me goodbye at the airport the next day, he told me he loved me, that he had loved me for a long time, that he wasn’t going to let me get away again.
When I returned to Tennessee two months later for the final week of the film shoot, David came into my bed on the first night. Afterward, as we lay tangled in Holly Hobbit sheets, he said he had to show me something.
“A surprise?” I squealed. “A present? What is it?”
“You’ll find it,” he told me.
I ran my hand over his chest, his left arm, then his right. There, above his tricep, was a bumpy patch that hadn’t been there before.
“What happened?” I asked.
I heard him rustling with something and then the bedside lamp flashed on. I reached for his arm.
There, in raised, irrevocable ink, were six lowercase letters.
nicole
“I carry your heart with me,” he said.
When my plane took off a week later, I wasn’t on it. I stayed in Tennessee until David packed up his stuff. Then, together, we drove back to New York—not just for good, but for better and worse.
Tip #8: On driving
Just because you are in possession of a valid driver’s license does not mean you should get behind the wheel. That would be like saying that just because your acid-washed jeans from high school still fit, you should wear them.
8. CALIFORNIA DREAMING
“You’re joking,” my mother challenged, slicing a milky mound of mozzarella. “I don’t believe you.”
I sighed loudly. Spending five minutes around my mother had a tendency to turn back the clock, reducing me to an eye-rolling sixteen-year-old again. And at twenty-four, it wasn’t so far to go.
“I guess you’ll believe me in two weeks when you show up at my apartment and find someone else living there,” I told her. “Because I’ll be in LA.”
My mother sighed right back at me. It was Christmas afternoon and the last thing she wanted to be doing while preparing antipasto was discussing my cross-country move.
“This house is a pigsty,” she sighed. “And everyone is going to be here in a few minutes.”
The mess she was referring to consisted of a half dozen CDs on the coffee table that hadn’t been returned yet to their cases, and my pair of leather boots, kicked off at the door, which were lying haphazardly instead of lined up in the closet. My parents’ ultramodern apartment in midtown Manhattan was appointed all in white leather and glass and my mother prided herself on keeping it immaculate. Not unlike Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, I was fond of pointing out. When I did, it always elicited the same response: “Me, crazy? Please! You haven’t seen crazy!” Precisely the sort of thing, I observed, that only a crazy person would say.
“I haven’t even had a chance to wrap any goddamned presents,” my mother complained, gesturing with her knife at a bunch of shopping bags on the dining-room table. “Why don’t you wrap some of that crap to go under the tree?”
I sat down on the banquette next to the table and unfurled the roll of golden wrapping paper that my mother has used to wrap Christmas presents for the past two decades. I’m not sure where she got her hands on the paper but the price must’ve been knocked down at least 80% because she purchased no less than two dozen rolls of it. It’s like a magic trick; the golden wrapping paper just never ends. I am confident that it will last, literally, a lifetime. And if it doesn’t and she finds one day that she’s come to the last paltry patch, my guess is she’ll outlaw Christmas.
“I don’t understand,” my mother went on. “What’s in LA? All the big actresses live in New York.”
I looked closely at the oversized pink pleather wallet I’d pulled out of a shopping bag.
“Ma,” I said. “You gave this wallet to Marisa last year and she didn’t want it. And the year before that, you gave it to me.”
“She’s right,” my father said, coming down the stairs wearing jeans and a hospital scrub top. “Nobody wants that wallet.”
“Then you’re all a bunch of morons,” she shot back, laying the sliced mozzarella in a neat, overlapping circle on a platter. “That is a gorgeous wallet! I had to rip it out of another lady’s hands at a sample sale.”
She glanced up from the platter, spotted my father, and shrieked. “Why the hell are you wearing those dirty old dungarees?”
“Dungarees” is one of those words my parents refuse to part with, despite the fact that no one else has uttered it since 1929. You could create the world’s best drinking game based on how many times my parents use the term.
“These are my favorite dungarees,” my father protested, taking a London broil out of the fridge.
“Why do we have to have the same argument every year?” she pleaded. “A homeless person wouldn’t accept those dungarees! They’d be highly insulted!”
I reached in the bag and pulled out a three-pack of argyle socks.
“Those are for your cousin,” my mother said, still shaking her head in disbelief at my father. “And don’t forget to take off the price tag.”
“Where’s the scissors?” I asked.
“Over there,” my mother replied, gesturing with her knife. By the time I’d followed the length of her arm to note where her hand was pointing, she’d dropped it to resume slicing vine-ripened tomatoes.
“Where, ‘over here’?” I sighed.
“Right over there, on the table,�
�� she elaborated, nodding her head vaguely in my direction.
Precise, descriptive language was never my family’s forte, which had become bothersome; the more constricted my field of vision became, the more I relied on descriptive language to help me locate missing items. While a normal-seeing person could just sweep their eyes swiftly and effortlessly over the table as a whole and locate the scissors within a second or two, it would take me five or six times that long, because I’d have to make five or six much narrower sweeps, covering one small section of the table at a time. Little hints like “to your left, next to the orchid” or “right near your elbow, by the window,” would speed up the process considerably; but since I’d never told my parents I needed these hints, they didn’t know to offer them. So I just sighed to myself and began my laborious hunt for the scissors, moving my gaze over the table like a spotlight from left to right until I’d found them, in the center of the table, on a stack of blank Christmas cards.
Meanwhile, my mother was catching my father up to speed on my travel plans: “Did you know your daughter wants to move to Hollywood? Are you aware of this?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Who’s moving to Hollywood?” my father grumbled, massaging marinade into the London broil.
“I’ve already told both of you this, like, five times,” I said as I cut a sock-sized square of wrapping paper. “All the TV work is in LA. Everyone moves there eventually. And it makes sense to do it sooner rather than later.”
The last observation hung in the air, its intimation unfolding like a bad smell, curling around the room and making everyone’s stomach clench. In a few years, I wouldn’t be able to audition for the spunky best friend or the tough-as-nails prosecutor. In a few years I wouldn’t be able to audition for anything except for the blind girl.
My vision had held up well in the four years since my diagnosis but I could tell it was slipping. I couldn’t read the newspaper anymore. Finding the bathroom in dark bars was becoming a problem. Just last week, I’d chipped a tooth when I tripped over a planter on Wall Street. If I wanted to have a decent shot at becoming a big-time blockbuster starlet, there was no time to lose.
I’d explained all of this to David when I announced to him just a few weeks earlier that I was going to move to LA. We’d been together for a little over a year, ever since we finished filming the movie in Tennessee and drove back north together. Things between us were going well, unfolding at a comfortable, leisurely pace after an explosive beginning. David wore my name on his arm but that didn’t mean he owned me. He had his own apartment a few blocks from mine, his own circle of friends. If David was hurt that I made the decision to move without consulting him, he didn’t show it. In fact, after considering for a few days, he told me he’d always wanted to live in California and would come along.
But though I’d confided the full explanation for my move to David, he was the only one I was honest with. The closest I got to full disclosure with my parents was dropping the phrase “sooner rather than later” and the pause that followed was so tense, I decided to spare us all by offering the standard justification I was feeding everyone else.
“I mean, I could wait; I could spend a few more years auditioning in New York. But I’m at my peak now, and in LA, the younger you are, the better. It’s like dog years out there - twenty-four is really thirty-four.”
I pulled a meat tenderizer out of the bag.
“That’s for Nonny,” my mother said, looking up. “She broke hers.”
“I already found an agent out there and a sublet off Sunset Boulevard. I’m leaving in two weeks to be there in time for pilot season,” I explained, attempting to wrap the tenderizer neatly enough that my mother wouldn’t go off on a rant about my subpar wrapping skills.
“So the only question is,” I said, finally coming to my point, “can I have your car?”
My father, with a pepper grinder in his hand, piped up: “But you don’t drive.”
Oh for fuck’s sake, I thought, how did I know this would come up?
“That’s not exactly true,” I protested. “I have my license.”
I hadn’t gotten it the first time I tried, when I botched Driver’s Ed in high school. Once I was diagnosed with RP though, this mystery, like so many, was instantly cleared up. Of course I was a lousy driver; I had no peripheral vision. If I wasn’t looking directly at something—the streetlight, the car trying to merge in front of me, the person crossing the intersection—I would have no idea they were there. Unfortunately, while I was busy looking directly at something—say, the red light I missed the last time I took the car out—I’d miss something else, like the car that had come to a stop in front of me.
The sensible thing would’ve been to resign myself to never learning how to drive. I lived in New York after all, and plenty of my friends who could see just fine never got their licenses. It’s a point of pride for New Yorkers not to know how to drive. But I knew it would never be a point of pride for me.
So a year or so after my diagnosis, I decided to get my driver’s license. Now that I knew exactly what my driving deficiencies were, I could compensate for them. My father took me to a deserted parking lot a few times and there, with no living creatures to plow down in cold blood, I pioneered an innovative driving technique for the visually impaired. What it boiled down to was turning my head from side to side a lot. Though my head-swerving style of driving made me look a bit loopy, it was not grounds for denying me a license—at least that’s what the guy who’d administered the driving test had said.
“Just try to relax,” he advised me as he signed his paperwork. “Look out of the corner of your eye.”
“Oh definitely,” I promised him. “I will.”
Passing the eye exam wasn’t hard, since with turbo contact lenses in, my central acuity was still pretty decent and the test didn’t cover peripheral vision. So, with one-third the visual field of a normal person and totally night blind, I got my license—cause for celebration for me, and cause for widespread panic for the world at large.
But as my father was quick to point out, the fact that I’d duped some guy into giving me a license a bunch of years ago didn’t mean I knew how to drive.
“Oh, David will teach me as we drive cross-country,” I persuaded them. “I’ll have plenty of practice on the interstate.”
From his furrowed brow, it was clear that this was just what my father was afraid of. But he didn’t say anything and neither did my mother. This, I knew, was a testament to their love for me, because ordinarily my parents have zero ability to keep their ocean of negative opinions from pouring out. My mother likes to talk about how she bites her tongue until it bleeds and I like to point out that if you’re constantly communicating how much you’re biting your tongue, you’re probably not biting it hard enough. The subject of my eyes was the one area in which my family censored themselves and I knew they did it to spare me feeling upset or embarrassed. It was exactly the same reason I didn’t bring it up with them.
“So what do you think?” I pressed, collecting and balling up the extra scraps of wrapping paper. “You don’t need the car anymore since Marisa graduated and you won’t get much if you sell it. And I’ll be really careful.”
I carried the excess wrapping paper over to the kitchen garbage but halfway there, I found myself doubling over something hard at my waist.
“Shit,” I hissed. Looking down, I saw the metal handlebars of a step stool. Someone had been changing a lightbulb overhead.
“That was my fault!” My mother rushed over to fold up the stool. “I shouldn’t have left the goddamned thing in the middle of the living room. Are you—”
“I’m fine,” I barked, embarrassed. My hip bone stung from where I’d bashed it, but I straightened up and took the last few steps to deposit my garbage in the trash. When I looked up, I saw my father at the sink regarding me with sad eyes.
Not only did his look made me feel sad, it made me feel like a cause for sadness. Though I’d become p
retty adept at tiptoeing around the landmine of The Look, occasionally I’d step right on it and then, it was as if all the things he kept himself from saying poured out of his eyes.
“My daughter,” he said wistfully. “My daughter wants to be a movie star.”
A week and a half later, the day after New Year’s, I was shutting the trunk of my parents’ Subaru Outback, or attempting to, since with all the boxes and suitcases and lamps and hot roller sets, it would barely close. I kissed my parents goodbye, looking over my dad’s shoulder to avoid his eyes.
Then I slid behind the wheel. As my mother would say, God help us all.
Tip #9: On pool parties
Avoid parties that take place around a body of water. If you must go, make sure there’s alcohol present, not for you to actually drink—unless you have a death wish—but to pretend you have drunk. That way, when you fall in the swimming pool fully clothed, it won’t look suspicious. It’ll still look idiotic, just not suspicious.
9. HELL ON WHEELS
It took me exactly three days in Los Angeles to realize I’d made a colossal mistake. It was at that point that I started crying.
David was incredibly sympathetic, in the beginning. He’d sit next to me on the paisley couch of our sublet off Sunset and hold me while I cried, assuring me I’d get used to California if I only gave it a chance. After a day or two, he took to smoking on the balcony and gently reminding me that it was my idea to come to LA. After a week, his empathy depleted, he tried Tough Talk.
“You remember that I quit my job, got rid of my apartment and packed all my shit up so we could come here, right? To realize your dream?”
“I know,” I wailed. “That’s what makes it so awful.”
“I just don’t understand how you can hate it so much already.”
“I have no friends,” I choked out, “and there’s no good pizza and”—I paused to catch my breath—“I’m trapped in this house because I don’t know how to driiiiiiiive.”
Now I See You Page 8
