Annie loved him and felt secure enough in that love to make him miserable. Yes, it was madness, but it was madness that made sense. The supreme irony. Her love for him with its attendant hostility was destroying his love for her. So Evan, marching down Mont Royal one morning, as he did almost every morning, decided he had to develop weapons to protect their relationship when it approached the rocky shoals that now seemed decorated with shards of broken glass, pieces perhaps of his TV screen.
As dawn approached, the birds had starting hunting worms, and Evan contemplated the computer screen, glowing with descriptions of Adult Children of Alcoholics, which followed 10 point charts of abusive relationships and control freaks.
And then there was the new thinking about nature or nurture. Some shrinks believed children of alcoholics were not debilitated by the rancour of the homes they were raised in, but rather by the faulty wiring they had inherited, the same wiring that had turned their parent(s) to the bliss of the bottle. Twins raised in different environments grew up with identical personality disorders. It was not her chaotic home life and her father’s drinking, after all, no matter how much she insisted it was. It was the brain she inherited. She was born that way and she would die that way. The realization made him insufferably sad. Was he crying for her or them?
“I know, I know,” Annie’d say, sometimes burying her head in his chest, looking for comfort. “I’m a control freak. I’m a control freak.” Saying it as an actor might in a sitcom. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Uh, not really, but he’d laugh. Anything to make the peace. But she was funny, and vulnerable, so in need of being scooped up and held like a child, her head on his shoulder.
“No one knows me but you,” she said.
So to make this thing work, the love that would last forever, he needed to accept being a punching bag. No problem. Hadn’t he been abused much of his childhood. It was easy to go back there. It was his due.
Evan was chewing souvlaki, happily wiping lamb drippings and tzaziki away, while his theatre brother Franklin lectured him. It was after yet another battle. It had been seven years and so many skirmishes, battles and all-out wars.
“Why do you stay? Why do you let her treat you like that?” Franklin said. “You’re almost as crazy as she is.” Franklin thought Evan was being weak, whipped.
“She can’t help herself,” Evan said, eyeing a woman at the next table. “She’s not well. She needs help.”
It had become Evan’s fallback position. How could you abandon someone who was ill, who needed you?
But he was watching the woman at the other table.
“She’s just sick. I love her.” The woman at the other table looked exotic. He wondered if she was Greek or Lebanese and contemplated slipping her his phone number which she undoubtedly would have left crumbled on the table with her meat-stained napkin. It was a sure sign he was going crazy. Or maybe going sane. He recognized the signs. He had begun women shopping. His subconscious was packing.
Time did not pass fast in jail. There was no clock. They had taken his watch. There were no windows. If you’re behind bars what else is there to do but contemplate how you got there and how the hell you’re going to get out of there?
The mistake had been to give in, make concessions. She was like the proverbial camel. He let her nose into the tent of his ego and soon she was shitting on it.
It started soon after he moved into their love nest. He suggested they work together on a film script. They had met, after all, when she took a screenwriting workshop and she wanted to try her hand at a script. He had sold a few, optioned others, had a couple of films produced. He wanted to explore a free-thinking woman who lives on her own terms, has many affairs and finally falls for the wrong guy who begins stalking her. Usually Hollywood films of this vein had the woman crazy. He wanted to make the story about a liberated woman and a crazy male antagonist. He thought the famous feminist who slept with him would love it. But she didn’t. It would take him years to understand that if it came from him she would automatically reject it but he was a neophyte in the orbit of a control freak. But the learning curve was quick.
Annie attacked the idea immediately. The woman was too upbeat, too happy. She wanted their hero to be depressed, self-destructive with self-esteem issues. She wanted despair.
“All women have self-esteem issues,” she said.
Her hero was a troubled, unhappily married woman, miserable at the beginning of the story and miserable at the end. When he told her this didn’t work, she went to work on him. This was the curtain raiser on what would be his life for the next decade or so.
“You don’t know anything about script writing. You’re so Hollywood, so conventional.” The control freak handbook calls it diminishment. He didn’t know yet that rejecting her or her ideas was poking the hornet’s nest.
“Why don’t you write it yourself?” Evan said. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”
She started to scream. “If we can’t work together, we shouldn’t be living together. There’s no point.”
Perhaps if he had made a stand then? But he accommodated, a variation on “yes dear.”
This was to set the pattern. Working with her inevitably meant working for her.
They wrote the treatment Annie’s way though she urged him to do the bulk of the writing and then she would critique it. She had too much other work to do and wasn’t he the real writer? He showed it to a friend who produced films and he said real life was despairing enough for him, he wasn’t going to spend a couple of years of his life putting despair on a screen. Their request for script development money was rejected. Annie was surprised and dejected. She had never been turned down for a grant before.
She dove into a depression and barely spoke for several days. Evan was relieved. He would not have to work with her on that script. But the courting phrase of “Maybe you’re right” was gone. He was never right.
When she didn’t get her way, there was no discussion or debate. She became agitated, started to rant, insult, and would usually leave the room, often with an ultimatum or in tears.
At the beginning he just shrugged or got angry. Later, desperate to find the key to unlock the door to wherever her sanity hid: “Annie, stop running away. Come back here and we’ll talk about it.”
Sometimes he would take her hand and try and get her to listen. And sometimes she’d calm down. It just took work. Lots of work.
If she read a play of his she would tell him how she would do it. “If it was me …,” she’d say, but it wasn’t her, because she wasn’t writing plays. Like films and novels and songs, she didn’t write them, she criticized them. And then she would get angry if he didn’t agree. It was often easier and easier to say “yes dear.” Bit by bit, he gave up pieces of himself, becoming his father.
“I know more about theatre than you,” she told him after he refused to rewrite a scene in a new play to her specifications, four days from opening.
“There’s nothing happening here in the second act. If I was writing it, I would have him leave her or assault her, something, you’re spinning your wheels and there are too many sets. If I was writing it I would just have a bare stage and a sheer gauze backdrop and I wouldn’t make it funny, you have this dialogue on page 28 and it’s just for laughs …” She took a breath.
“Called comic relief, Annie,” Evan said, exhausted.
“You just don’t go to the theatre enough, you’re not seeing enough plays and you keep going to English plays and they’re all dreadful, you need to see more French theatre, it’s much more interesting, this is just so … why do you need a happy ending …?”
It was no longer a question of what was on the page for Annie. She was annoyed he was writing and getting produced and selling tickets and getting media attention. Sometimes people stopped him on the street to say they had seen his play. He was confiscating some of her spotlight. He needed to be punished.
Took several years before he told Franklin at a lunch break during rehearsal: “Funny t
hing. I don’t care anymore.”
“‘Bout fucking time,” he said. “She’s another wannabe. Since they can’t do but want to, they need to destroy those who do. Fuck her. Sorry, that was inappropriate. You live with her, you even love her, though I have no fucking idea why.”
Increasingly it didn’t seem worth the effort. Put out one fire and there would shortly be another. It was exhausting, but what price love, how hard do you work at a relationship? It’s what he constantly puzzled over, whether he was eating a burger at lunch or riding his bike or driving up north to get away from her. How much was too much? His next check up the doctor said his blood pressure had vaulted from 120 over 80 to 137 over 90.
On the autoroute, car pointed north, often at midnight when curling up next to Annie had no appeal, his neck would relax, his shoulders softened, his fingers drummed tunes on the steering wheel. The highway was his blood-pressure medicine.
Evan accommodated. Annie insisted they go to the therapist together. She had done a one on one with her and liked her. Now, she was convinced if Evan joined her in a session, the therapist would set Evan straight, show him that he was too sensitive, show him how difficult it was to live with him.
“It’s going to be great, you’ll see,” Annie said, hugging him. “We’ll do the couples’ thing and we’ll iron out the wrinkles. But it didn’t work out that way.”
“I’m working hard and he’s doing what he wants,” Annie told the therapist as Evan began pacing. He had heard this nonsense before and walking back and forth in the little office staved off the urge to start screaming at her.
“He’s writing and performing and in the theatre and it’s what I always wanted to do, write, and he’s doing it and I’m working so damn hard.”
“Haven’t you always worked hard?” the therapist asked. “Did you write before you met Evan?” Annie didn’t answer. It wasn’t going as she had imagined and now there was fire in her eyes, a look he was all too familiar with.
They were in the Keys on their first vacation. Only vacation it turned out. Taking her away from her computer, her toilet and her jogging was akin to taking the needle and the spoon out of the addict’s hand.
He knew well a place just off Marathon, called Colony Key, a short drive from Highway 1A, a motel built in the ‘60s with a private beach and a suite that looked over the ocean. He loved the place and he wanted to share it with her. It was cheap and quaint and secluded, a playground for squadrons of pelicans and the occasional dolphin.
“It doesn’t have a hairdryer,” she said, after digging through the two rooms.
“We’ll pick one up at the pharmacy, cost eight bucks,’ Evan said.
“I already have three at home.”
The suite was $89 but she soon loved it. Once she got over computer withdrawal, she buried herself in the Wall St. Journal, Today and the New York Times that he fetched every morning from the boxes a couple of blocks away while she attended to her bowels. He thought she looked pretty then, sitting under the thatched roof on the beach, the newspapers assuaging her demons.
She jogged in the 100 F heat, rented a bike and patrolled the bike paths up and down Highway 1A religiously and signed up for snorkelling. Her mania dissipated finally and she soon seemed to be relaxing. He gave her the latest draft of a new play to read. She was trying to learn to vacation, but he was working several hours a day on a rewrite. He had been doing that for several years, coming here to work by the sound of the ocean and then spending afternoons in the water, at the local gym and catching up on sleep.
Evan sat on the beach as she read, went for a swim, lay in the sun, watched the young women in bikinis at the beach club next door, read the papers.
She finished reading and attacked. “I don’t know what the story is, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would I care and the characters, I just don’t believe that woman. I think it’s even sexist. Why does the boss have to be a man? Why can’t the man be a little crazy and the woman be the so-called sane one in charge?”
She was building up steam and grew angrier. He stared at her wide-eyed. She was killing him.
“You have all these sets. If I was writing this I’d get rid of the sets. You don’t need sets.”
“Franklin wants to do a realist play with a realist set.”
“That’s so Anglo, so dated. I don’t know why people think he’s such a great director. It’s ridiculous to have a newspaper set just cause you’re doing a play about a newspaper.”
“Maybe a nuclear research facility?” Evan said.
“And you try too hard to be funny, in the play, too. Nothing happens here in the second act, you’re just spinning your wheels. If I was writing …”
Evan tuned her out.
He was trying to recover over dinner that night, a pretty place with the Atlantic Ocean behind them, the sun setting in the Gulf in front of them, and the requisite glass of wine softening her up. Had she ever eaten a dinner without a glass of wine? And then he broached her attack on the play.
“Your critique seemed to be a tad over the top, let’s say steeped in vitriol,” Evan said, steeling himself for a blistering counter attack. “I don’t think the play is that bad. I mean, it’s pretty good according to the actors and Franklin. Needs a polish here and there …”
“I’m … I was jealous. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to write plays. My sister is an actor, you know. We used to do plays when we were kids, just like in the movies, two kids playing pretend. I guess I’m envious of you doing that. And you write well, it pissed me off. I’m sorry. It’s a good play. And it’s original. I mean you don’t need those sets, that’s really old-fashioned realism and no one does that anymore, but it’s good.”
He loved her all the more because she was honest. But it was a theme that resurfaced often in later years. Enjoying life was heresy, his successes invariably were met with scorn and Annie had trouble being happy for him. To elevate herself, she needed to bring him down.
She started saying she should never have quit the TV show where she was making real money. The TV show was a bore, she had often said, but now life was about money. She was in tears sitting at the dining room table by the glass sliding doors that opened onto the garden. She gravitated there when distressed as if proximity to the 10-foot walls she had erected around the property to keep the world out could also keep the critics at bay. She loved to criticize but could not handle criticism.
Her new book was not selling as she had hoped. She was a failure, she said, a mediocre writer doing pedestrian provincial work.
“You’ve had a great career,” Evan said, taking her hand. “You’re respected, you’ve done good work, you’re well known. You’ve won awards, your peers admire you, people stop you on the street. You’re a bright, intelligent woman, beautiful. You have friends that love you. I love you. We have a great life. You can take pride in what you’ve done.” Her tears dried. She thanked him, but she was miserable. She was in the depressive stage of her cycle. And would not resurface for several days.
Evan remembered his mother, locking herself in her room for a few days, him knocking at the door, asking her to come out. Annie didn’t lock herself in her room, she sealed herself inside her depression.
After dinner and her two or three glasses of wine, she said: “I had a better career than you and I make more money.”
“Is that why you enjoy your life so much and drink every night?” He went for a walk with the cat. Fritz was always game for an outing, no matter the time, no matter the weather, he liked to patrol the back alleys. They left Annie at the table staring into her life.
They sat together on the sofa, holding hands. She stayed calm and listened, a rare circumstance.
“We have a house here with about $400,000 or $500,000 equity in it,” he said. “Prices keep going up. We each have about $100,000 in RRSPs. That means we have net worth of about $700,000. That’s not poor. Then we have pensions coming soon and we’re working. We don’t make a lot working but if
we sell the house, buy a cheaper house for cash somewhere, pay off the debt, live without a mortgage, we’re laughing. Plus, you won’t have to scramble working on shit you don’t want to do. You could work on whatever you like. And you wouldn’t have to worry all the time.”
“That money’s not real.”
“It is if you want it to be.”
“We could never find another house.”
“Annie, there is more than one house in the city. Just like there is more than one salad dressing, more than one photographer to work with, more than one contractor to screw us on the house renovations and repairs.”
“I don’t like change,” she said.
“I know. Darlin’, change is the only constant in life. Sometimes it’s necessary. And if you open yourself to it, you might find it not only palatable, but pleasurable.”
“I know,” she said. “I just can’t see how we’re going to find another house as good as this for less money.”
“The neighbourhood is way overpriced. It’s not worth anywhere near what the market says it is. It’s dumb not to take advantage of the equity in the house and use it to make life easier.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t. You just have to make more money.”
His money was wrapped up in the house and he needed it. This was of no concern to her. Nor was the fact he didn’t really like the house where he had to constantly make sure even the change in his pocket didn’t jangle her nerves.
“We are half a block from a major thoroughfare,” he said. “Traffic lines up out the front door everyday at rush hour. We hear sirens all night. The bedroom has no closets. The house doesn’t work as an office, too, because there are no closed rooms and you have a noise phobia. There are better places to work and live, a place with a basement where I could have privacy and make all the noise I want would be great.”
“You could rent an office.”
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