Been There, Married That (ARC)

by Gigi Levangie

  “You’re new,” he said before digging into his bacon and eggs. “What’re you in for?”

  “They got me for eating disorders,” I said with prison swagger.

  “Brutal,” he grunted.

  “And narcissistic personality disorder lite,” I added. “But that’s bullshit. They just want to keep me here. Because I’m so entertaining. Which confirms my narcissism.”

  He nodded, chomping his bacon.

  “You?” I asked.

  “I’m in for intermittent explosive disorder,” he said. “Really fucking pisses me off.”

  I took a breath. Anger management was a new one. No one here seemed angry. They seemed all happy—too happy. Tamped, not amped.

  “And hypersexual disorder,” he said, giving me a meaningful glance. “Sex addiction.”

  “Check!” I said, jumping up and waving down an imaginary waiter.

  I didn’t look back. I was at the nurses’ station, on the phone with Trevor, within seconds, having dumped my food in the trash as I raced out of the cafeteria.

  “I’m not staying,” I said to him. “I’m outta here.”

  “Agnes, you should stay,” Trevor said. “Let me call someone. Let me call Barnaby. This is not a good idea.”

  “Call anyone, call the cops, as far as I care,” I said, and then sang, “I’mma leaving on a jet plane. I know I won’t be back again.”

  “Well, I’m not sending a plane.”

  “I’m grabbing a taxi to the airport,” I said. “I’ll be home this afternoon.” I hung up, raced to my room, packed my clothes, retrieved my brush and phone from the check-in, and headed for the exit. A taxi pulled up five minutes later. I was free.

  I stared out the cab window as we buzzed down the highway, wondering how a life in which so little happened could suddenly have so much happening.

  My phone buzzed, waking me from my stupor. Unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  “Agnes.” A woman’s voice but deep and throaty. It could only be—

  “Waverly.”

  “Your husband has filed.”

  “Wait—how do you know?”

  “I’m a cognitive. It’s my job.”

  I took a beat.

  “Thank you?” I said.

  “Tell your lawyer you want your case filed under Anonymous v. Anonymous,” she said. “It’s important you keep this private.”

  “What? My lawyer? What lawyer?”

  “I can charge you by the hour or monthly. It’s tax deductible. ICM, CAA, the big agencies, the studios, they do monthly. I can’t talk about it. Trust me, you’re going to need me.”

  And she hung up.

  Southwest gate. Instead of drinking Tito’s on ice at the bar (isn’t that what rehab escapees do?), I headed for Hudson. Oh, how I love a good Hudson—candy, trash magazines, trail mix with chocolate raisins, and books(!), all within arm’s reach of each other. I like the heft, the feel, the smell of books. I feel rich when I buy a book, the same way another woman feels when she buys this season’s bag. And books ground me, touchstones that remind me of who I once was—a chunky kid battling allergies, reading books inside the classroom while her schoolmates played tag outside in the dirty air.

  My phone buzzed as I pondered an author photo on the back of a bestseller. Hello, handsome. I could see dating a fellow author when the divorce smoke cleared. Where’s he from? San Francisco and South Beach.

  Oh.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “Hey, you’re alive!” Gio Metz.

  “Contrary to popular demand,” I said.

  “This is fucked up!” he boomed. “You don’t do drugs. You don’t have the constitution.”

  “I’m hard-core into the almonds, Metz,” I said.

  “You have to get away from this nonsense,” he said. “If you’re looking for a place to land, I’m your guy.”

  “You specialize in broken toys,” I said as I slipped a self-improvement book from the bestseller row. Why not. “We all know your marital history.”

  “Bent, not broken.” He laughed. “And, honey, I’ve read your work. You’re definitely bent.”

  I landed in LA and dragged my overnight bag to the taxi station; Fin was already waiting outside for me, hands on her hips, wearing white-framed YSL sunglasses (mine and yes, they looked better on her). She threw my bag in the back of her truck and drove off without saying a word.

  That’s the first time I’d cried in a long time.

  I didn’t like to cry as a rule.

  “You look fat when you cry,” Fin said.

  You can imagine why I don’t like to cry.

  “Fuck off,” I said, crying.

  9: D-i-v-o-r-c-e: Tell Me What It Means to Me

  Fin switched between Spanish and English, and I switched between understanding and not.

  “Like, como tu put up con este pendejo—”

  My sister, the bilingual ping-pong machine, fidgeted in her seat, tapping the steering wheel, saluting tailgaters with the bird. She talked about job interviews at places that paid “shit wages” and then switched radio stations after three notes. I stared out the window and tried not to think about how she’d suddenly acquired a new truck. Fin had never owned anything with alloyed wheels.

  “Yo rompí con Tone,” she said.

  “You what with Tone?”

  “You should know Spanish already. Everyone in your damn house speaks Spanish.”

  “I took three years of high school Spanish, and all I remember is my teacher asking me for cheerleading photos.”

  “Did he at least ask en Español?”

  “Which one’s Tone?”

  “Where’ve you been? He was my soul mate, you know. The Indian.”

  “Native American.”

  “Okay, Native American; he says Indian,” she said. “How was your vacation?”

  “Rehab.”

  She snorted. “For a big twenty-four hours.”

  “I flunked out,” I said. “What kind of loser flunks out of rehab?”

  “You,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t think I can trust him. Tone.”

  “What gave you that idea? His felony record?”

  She glanced at me.

  “Three arrests in two years isn’t bad,” Fin said. “And two of those were for protesting, but they got him for looting. He’s evolved.”

  “Would it kill you to date someone who doesn’t have a record?”

  “You sound like Dad.”

  “Good, I’m glad,” I said. “Even though he sent me away to rich people asylum.”

  “You married someone who doesn’t have a record,” Fin said. “Look how good that’s working out.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I said. “I can’t compete against the other woman.”

  “Petra?” Fin snorted. “Her pussy probably smells like cabbage.”

  “No,” I said. “Hollywood.”

  “Oh, that bitch,” Fin said, nodding. “Have to get the truck back before four.”

  “What happens at four?”

  “Owner comes home,” she said as she hung a left onto Wilshire from Sepulveda. “Let’s gas it up; that’d be nice for your neighbor, right?”

  “My neighbor?” I said. “Fin!”

  At the gas station on Sepulveda, the air was hot and dry, and a haze lingered over Los Angeles, familiar yet ominous, like the beginning of a Wim Wenders movie. I kept sliding my Amex and it wasn’t working, and sweat started rolling down the side of my face. I’d forgotten to bring my hormone creams to Tucson.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Try another one,” Fin said as she leaned against the truck, holding the gas nozzle.

  I slid the Visa through the sensor.

  Declined.

  I scratched at my neck as my hairs stood on end. Nerves, the suffocating heat, or rehab bed bugs?

  “Do you think Trevor canceled my cards?” I asked.

  “Don’t you have any of your own?” Fin asked.

  “No,” I
said, rummaging through my purse. “Wait. I have a Neiman Marcus card; would that work?”

  “When was the last time you filled up your own car?” Fin asked.

  I didn’t answer. She slapped the side of the truck. “Dang!” she said. “You’re pathetic!”

  “I’m trying to think!” I said. I didn’t need time to think; the Triplets filled up my car once a week. I was surprised when I first moved in, when Caster had taken my car to the gas station to fill it up, then I stopped questioning it. Then I got used to it. Now, I expected it.

  “I have some cash,” I said, opening my wallet. I handed her forty bucks. Fin snatched it and stepped away to the cashier. “I’m getting licorice, too; I deserve it. You want something?” she asked over her shoulder, her hair tangled and bouncing off her shoulders.

  Fin drove into the dead zone and pressed the intercom at the gate. Gabriela answered. Fin told her we’d arrived, said something in Spanish, I heard “Peppy fue something,” and Fin said, “Cocksucker,” then we drove down the long driveway. I thought about the parties we’d thrown there, the golf carts hauling Warren Beatty and Jim Carrey and Jeffrey Katzenberg, not knowing the valet was twenty-five minutes behind and the biggest names in Hollywood were waiting in frigid canyon weather outside our gate.

  Inexplicably, or maybe explicably, the thought made me smile.

  “Before you get out,” Fin said, turning to me, making her nervous face, her teeth bared like the stray dogs that always found her on the way home from school.

  “What?” I closed my eyes. “What now?”

  “Pep isn’t here,” Fin said. I jumped. “Hold on,” she said, grabbing my arm. “Steady. She’s with her dad. He had Petra pack a bag, and we’ll find out where she is; just don’t worry or cry or throw anything.”

  “He can’t just take her; he can’t take my daughter.”

  “This is not the Sally Field movie, okay? She’s, like, a mile away,” Fin said. “He’ll get tired of her soon enough. You know that.”

  “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” I said, my hands on my head.

  “Honey, anyone would lose their mind in this place,” Fin said, gesturing toward the house. “Shit, I feel dumber just hanging out here.”

  Fin laughed, and like some buried impulse, I found myself laughing as well.

  “Where did Trevor take Pep?” I headed to the CNN headquarters of home: the laundry room. I’d called Trevor, but of course, it went straight to voice mail. Proud to say I refrained from guttural swearing.

  Caster was crying into Gabriela’s arms.

  “Missus, Mr. Trevor, he move out, and he want me to go with him,” Caster said, her face slick with tears. Lola opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Three pairs of eyes, each pair sadder than the next, gazed at me.

  “Why you can’t make nice to Mr. Trevor?” Caster asked.

  Fin lit a cigarette and handed it to Caster.

  “No smoking in the house,” I said.

  Caster drew on Fin’s cigarette, smoke escaping her nostrils; she looked impossibly glamorous, a Latin movie star from the ’40s.

  “Let me have a puff,” I said.

  “He packed a bag,” Gabriela said. “He told me he didn’t want me to do it.”

  “Well, you did put a hex crystal in his underwear when he went on that cruise,” I said. “He went soft on a Russian supermodel.”

  Fin snorted and high-fived Gabriela.

  “He wants me to work for him,” Caster said, shaking her head as tears pinwheeled off her face. She took another puff and raised her carefully painted-on eyebrows. “You think Mr. Trevor pay me more?”

  Ensue Spanish flurry as the Triplets discussed. What I gathered was that there was sudden interest from the other sisters.

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “He went to the bish,” Gabriela said.

  “Petra?”

  “No, the bish.”

  “Malibu?”

  “Santa Monica,” Gabriela said. “He rent, how you say . . .”

  Spanish. Spanish. Spanish. Faster Spanish. Flurries, furious flurries.

  “Penthouse,” Fin said. “On Ocean.”

  “The Tower of Testosterone?” I asked. “Where all the divorced Hollywood men go to lick their wounds and girlfriends? Pep is going to hate that place!”

  “I gotta jump,” Fin said, hopping off the dryer. “You need me?”

  “More than graham crackers and milk,” I said.

  “Aw, I miss Li’l Fatty Patty. Remember when you used to eat way too many of those?” Fin said, grabbing my tummy.

  “Thanks again for the ride in someone else’s truck.”

  I happened to look down; her ankle monitor was missing.

  “Fin, what’d you do?”

  “It’s right here,” she said. She opened a drawer. The ankle monitor was hidden, fully intact. “I took it apart and put it back together. I told you about those computer science courses in prison, right? We had to take apart and build a computer ourselves.”

  “Does prison makes more sense than college?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Okay, was only off for two minutes, but I’m gonna scooch down to San Bernardino after I drop off the truck before my parole officer starts barking. I’ll bring her Hot Cheetos; she’ll be fine.”

  Fin gave me a hug, rushed out, then circled back.

  “Oh, hey, sis, can I give her this address as my residence? I can’t go back to Tone’s place. Not after the fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “Don’t freak out,” Fin said.

  I glanced wide-eyed at the Triplets. A new, quiet panic washed over me.

  “I’m just using your address until I find a job. Don’t be a puss.”

  She punched me in the shoulder.

  “Jesus.” I winced.

  “Oh, and before I forget . . .” She took a crumpled piece of paper from her jeans pocket and tossed it to me. “I went to Vicente Foods to fill out a job app; I wound up in the deli line—great meatballs—the lady in front of me was talking to her amiga, and she was saying her jefita had el primero abogado para divorce, and I said, ‘Hey, digame that number, boo.’

  “Stay off those almonds!” Fin added, beating a path to the kitchen door on her Timberlands. I waited until I heard the neighbor’s pickup truck rumble to a start before I rubbed my shoulder.

  Universal truths in LA: death, taxes . . . and divorce. A Hollywood marriage is 80 percent more likely to fail than civilian marriages. Take a look at Star or People. Or the bleating folks on camera at TMZ.

  No one really knows why, though there are theories.

  My theory? It all comes down to this: taking out the trash.

  (You could also fault: filling your gas tank.

  Or: buying groceries.

  And: driving your kids to school.)

  The dirty little secret (that you won’t ever have to clean up yourself) is that after the thrill of the first few weeks of not performing these mundane tasks, less thrilling tasks take their place. Another luncheon. Shopping. A charity event. Therapy (because you feel strangely unfulfilled even though you have more money than God, certainly more than Bernie [though not as much as Hillary]). A premiere. Another dinner with people you don’t care about who don’t care about you. You’ll even plan “family” trips with these people. Even though the only thing that matters is what you can do for each other (until one of you becomes irrelevant—and irrelevance is always just around the corner, conveniently located next to a liquor store).

  Your life becomes more disconnected and less meaningful as the normal daily, monotonous tasks fall away. You’re not connected to your food, your transportation, your waste, your own kids.

  Nice work if you can get it, you’ll say. What’s to complain about? Kids? Kids are overrated. The pay sucks.

  Who wouldn’t trade normalcy for living large in a giant house where no one (except housekeepers and gardeners and assistants and dog trainers and orchid handlers) can hear you scream?

  Mean
while, the spouse making all the money works long, stressful hours, wineglass-thin ego on the firing line, ready to be (publicly, humiliatingly) shattered 24-7.

  The spouse who’s not bringing in the big bucks thinks, I’m going to be a different kind of wife (or husband). I’ll fill those hours with meaning. I’ll be unique. I’ll be super-interesting. I’ll change the world (if not my underwear—leave that to someone else.) I’ll meditate. I’ll become a yoga teacher working in prisons. I’ll write more. (And I did. Not more. Just spread out, like a word every twenty minutes.)

  When you don’t have to worry about rent or heating bills or putting food on the table, the only person you can blame for that nagging discontent is, guess what . . . that clown in the mirror. You.

  But in Hollywood, we don’t blame ourselves.

  So the blame falls on the other. The person lying in bed next to you.

  Hi. Have we met?

  Suffice it to say (or write), in practice, this theory cuts both ways. The comedy director married to the scowling news addict who blamed him for ruining her “photography career.” The action star whose makeup artist wife blamed him for her not becoming the next Laura Mercier. The vegan whose body burst in a full bloom of eczema after her studio chief husband stuck to the no-kid clause in their prenup. (They later divorced after she was past her childbearing years; he remarried a young pastry chef; their Christmas cards include twins. Her Christmas cards include a rescue cat.)

  And so on.

  I can only speak for me. Agnes. I could only dance so fast and jump so high and bob and weave for so long—mid-race, I dropped the baton, tripped over my feet, and skidded down the marriage track.

  Still, there was a time I thought we could beat the odds.

  Trevor and I, in the first years of our marriage, would sip our Ivy margaritas and marvel at all the issues other Hollywood couples had. They had nothing to talk about. They weren’t interested in each other. She’d let herself go. He’d let himself go. She was on antidepressants and drinking. He was gambling millions. She was bipolar. He was bi. Their marriage was bye-bye.

  We’d have a dinner date at least once a week, just the two of us. Other couples would gaze at us from their group tables and ask, “How did we do it after six, seven, eight years? How?”

  This was my marriage. This was it. There were none before; there’d be none after.