There is wetness on my face. The woman leans in with a tissue and dabs at my cheeks.
“Can you give us a minute?”
The nurse, reluctantly, leaves.
“Listen to me very carefully,” she says. “We’ve always taken care of you. Lew and I. We will take care of you now, too. Do you understand?”
“You and Lew.”
“We’re like parents to you. You’re like our child.”
“You’ve always taken care of me.”
“Always,” she says. “And what you’ve done, the bad place you’ve put us in, it doesn’t matter. We will shield you, and we’re the only people you can count on, and this is why you must pay attention.”
The nurse taps on the door.
“Quickly now. Listen to me. I need you to listen very carefully. There is something I believe you have.”
“I might have forgotten,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t play stupid with me. There’s footage. You’re on tape, hiding it away. I already know you have it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “Do you want it back?”
The woman releases a short, cheerless bark of laughter. “Currently, I am under a certain amount of observation. I am subject to search, at this particular moment. Not to mention other threats. And, Mellie, these threats could land at your feet, too. Who is to blame? There’s a real way of thinking that could put it on you. So, wake up. Listen very closely. There is also the possibility of correction. Let me remind you of certain things you want, that we can do for you. Of promises, specific promises, you have made. Can we still count on you?”
“I promised,” I say.
“And then the house, everything you wanted, all that can still happen, too. That life. We are the ones who can take care.”
“You take care of me.”
“We are your family, Mellie. You have no one else. You have to promise.”
“I do,” I say. “I promise.”
“There’s a safe place. You take what you have, and you bring it to this place, and you can rest and recover, let us clean up the mess. You’ll be safe, and everything will be nice.”
“I’ll be alone?”
“A couple of days. We’re coming. Just wait for us.” She hands me a bus ticket. “Where should I put this, Mellie, that you won’t lose it? Is this good?” She is riffling through pages of a book on my nightstand.
The nurse leans in, now. “All set?” she asks.
“It’s very hard to do things alone, Mellie,” says the woman.
The nurse appraises us, and then moves close to my bedside, muscling the woman out of the way. She has the manner of a school principal talking to a repeat offender. She leans in. “I want to be clear about what we are already looking at with regard to normal development: the outcomes may be mild, but they range to conditions which are extremely painful. There is the real possibility of a potential child’s physical suffering and early death. In light of that, as well as your own comfort, you may want to consider options with regard to bringing the baby to term.”
“There are options,” says Trudi. “But some are worse options.”
“If you choose not to terminate, I want to be clear on the kind of responsibility you are facing. Even someone equipped, even someone fully equipped might falter before such a commitment. We are talking about the potential for a very vulnerable being.”
I know what they want me to say, and it might even be right, but I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I’m not considering any options.”
part three:
this must be the place
One
Los Angeles, California
2008
Paul and I share an apartment in a two-story building in Carson City. It has Spanish-style architecture, SoCal pastels, a few potted palms in the courtyard. To a recent arrival from the East Coast, the place might look posh, but I’ve lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years and I know the signs of cheap housing. Shirtless men smoke on the open-air walkways, ashing over the railing. Between the units, the walls are so thin, you can hear the whine of the neighbor’s caged dog and when you turn out the lights, large insects begin to move across the Formica countertops. This is what you can afford when you work in a cash business, when your credit history looks like you’ve spent your twenties under incarceration.
Now it is evening, and he’s been gone for fourteen hours. I stand at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables for salad and trying to sit with the anxious static of my thoughts. When I called into his voicemail today, seeking any reassurances that he was safely through the checkpoint, any clues as to the hour of his return, there were only three calls: a hang-up from a buyer, a message from the club regarding a missed training session, and then there was one from the woman.
“You’re perfect,” said the woman’s voice, which is a thing we’ve never been for each other, Paul and I. Never perfect.
We had cloud, for a while. Back when Paul was still getting some auditions, and I was working the production end for Lew, we’d come together at the end of a dry, hot day, pour ourselves giant glasses of lemonade or beer, point the window fan at our faces and eat cloud. Very occasionally, cloud produces hallucinogenic properties, typically for new users or after a dry spell. Paul got into being a gourmet about it, started to chase the hallucinations with herbal additives, etc. that his guy at the gym got him. Then, abruptly, Paul quit cutting in the cloud altogether. For the past nine months, even during our shared evenings, we are residents of separate chemical countries, speak only across the border in untranslatable languages.
What happens, I write in my old paperback, when you love someone for many years, and you disappoint each other for many years. What happens when every day makes you both smaller and angrier but never enough to leave?
Paul has evolved this routine in the nine months since he started dealing. He’ll bulk up, get puffy and forgetful, then he’ll go on a starvation diet. I know when he reaches the hungry limit of the cycle and it will seem like the secret thing he’s holding is just about to surface. What we both know: this cannot go on forever. There are not old people who live like we do. Last night, he was there, at the malnourished edge of his cycle. Say it, I thought. Tell me. Make me tell you.
Instead, in the morning, the Lexus was gone and I knew he’d left on yet another run for incendario.
Paul’s point is that a little slackening of enthusiasm in a long-term relationship is natural, is just to be expected. There’s this plateau, now, and if he hits it, he can’t orgasm unless he pulls out and I tell him variations on this one particular story in which he is being held under water by a woman who isn’t me.
There is a dopey side-effect to the drug, a slackening in his speech, that doesn’t entirely lift when he comes down. He’s only half himself as he travels back from Ensenada Sur with the incendario tucked in the hollow of his dashboard. Paul at the border, Paul in a dumpster, Paul with another woman. There are ways, and ways, and ways he could leave, and for the past nine months, I’ve felt it closing in.
You’re perfect, she said, and I could not tell if it was a role or a romance she had in mind, acting or action. In the background, there was ambient noise; the sense was muffled. Still, I caught the mood. The mood said, soon talk won’t be enough; soon, steps will have to be taken.
I have my own secrets to share, my own things cracking out of me. Today, I called Lew and told him I was ready to move on our arrangement. I am at my limit. My chicken is uncooked, my vegetables only half-chopped, but I have held off as long as I possibly can, have pushed myself until I am ravenous. I open the lid of my bureau, move aside the birth certificate, the unused ticket to Belize, and the three shoeboxes where I keep my future. From beneath, I extract a Lucite box of cloud.
Most junkies eat through their restraint two years into a serious habit. But me, I’ve got it still. Nearly twenty years after I started using, I still sustain the hunger. Mornings, when I’m in the classes Trudi pays for, I dole out my
fixes like someone who is trying to dose down. Getting high isn’t hard. It’s not getting high; it’s coasting from hit to hit, always at the edge of craving, that ruins me.
But it’s why I’m not dead. It’s why I have a job and a union card and a couple of friends. And Paul, of course. Paul needs someone who can pay for things, will always need a girl to take care of things, but I’m aware, even as his hair thins, and his face develops lines, that it does not necessarily have to be me.
Nine months ago, we were at the cusp of a different ending. Paul wouldn’t tell me the details, but there was an audition. It wasn’t for something small. Twice, he took phone calls outside, curling sides left beside the sofa. A few days after, he left the house in a borrowed business suit, muttering cues to himself. As the callbacks approached, he entered a state of tamped frenzy. Paul from those days: not eating, still spending hours at the gym. In my own world, things teetered. In the previous year, Lew had banked seven and a half million on a pay-per-use model, then lost twice that on a subscriber interface. In the interval, one of Lew’s actresses, a woman named Caty, had gone missing, and there were intimations that he was responsible.
This, then, was the climate in which I decided to board a plane to Belize. My mother had taken up with a man from Al-Anon, and together, they’d been duped into buying a hacienda in the jungle. The place was twenty miles from the nearest internet and, it turned out, already inhabited by squatters who could not be evicted. A problem that wasn’t mine appealed to me, maybe, or my instinct was more for flight. As it turned out, I’d overestimated my capacity for even the gutless getaway. In Houston, I dumped out of the airport to score more cloud and missed my connecting on a three-day bender. When I emerged, I was in an American sedan, at the edge of a city, flat, dry palms poking into the wide sky.
In my absence, for Paul, there was a period of dwindling hope, followed by a terrible bleakness. What the casting director told him by way of rejection: he looked too different from his headshot and should consider getting a more recent one done. The path from that phone call to the Medicaid ward at Dignity Health ran through his gym drugs and a sudden decision to quit cloud. They called it an apparent overdose, but I don’t think that describes it, fully. He was withdrawing, as much as anything. Withdrawing from cloud, and from a possibility which had been dangled in front of him, and then cruelly rescinded.
When I finally got back to the house, Paul had already been released. Three-day-old cereal was drying in a bowl, and the rooms smelled of neglect and sickness, and every screen in the room glowed with pictures of my boyfriend. He was studying himself, as if some secret was contained in those flickering images. Then, he looked at me, and he saw how I had been.
“What should we do?” he asked me.
We were just kind of freaked out and staring at each other, and then, without really discussing it, we got in the car and started driving south. Nancy had been living in this weird desert town on the cliffs past Ensenada Sur, some guru lodge/ bullshit factory. In her emails, she was alternately the filthy-mouthed teenager of our memories, and a self-help alien. Still, there were natural hot springs in the cliffs overlooking the sea and these magical stones which were supposed to fix everything; Mexican natural resource law required they be open to the public, so between the hours of three and five in the morning anyone could go and bathe in the living waters. Nancy implied, without being explicit, that the compound ran a sideline in truly excellent and diverse substances, but it had taken the failed audition and the weirdness on Lew’s sets to get us to finally make our way down the peninsula.
Los Angeles had made a driver out of Paul, but we maintained the practice from when he was still learning that if it was both of us, I took the wheel. It was leased, the car. Lew knew a man who knew a man, who’d gotten us the credit despite the lack of history. Paul said, you couldn’t show up to auditions in a beater, so I mostly drove the Corolla and gave him the Lexus, even though they were both in my name.
When we reached the border guard, Paul got the usual brownish person pat-down, then we drove along the twisty coastal roads and across the desert talking.
“I’m the king of second-guessing,” said Paul. “Which is the opposite of acting.”
“The problem is not with your acting, Paul.”
“Then what is it?” he asked. “Because I would do it. Whatever it was. I would cut off my fingers.”
Fact, we weren’t twenty-five anymore. Even Nancy had left her commune for better digs. It was fine, easy to be charming and righteous about poverty, about not racking up the accouterments of adulthood, kids and mortgages and retirements savings, until a certain point. Then you became sad or mentally ill.
“Honey,” Paul said. The endearment surprised me. And then he said it again. “Honey. I’ve had an idea. Maybe we should leave California.”
“Finish college, register to vote,” I told him. “Live in a yurt in a national park.”
“Work in a pet store selling tropical fish.”
“Show up for jury duty. Mow the lawn.”
This was the filthiest fantasy we could contrive: that someday, in some life, we’d get clean. Out there in the darkness, under the clear desert sky, it felt like we were the only people in the universe, that we would make whatever choices we wanted and nothing practical or trivial could constrain us.
“Teaching certificates,” I said. “Nonprofits.”
“Get married,” he said. Which was a joke. Which was only a joke.
At the edge of the blackened desert, there was a beer shop and we stopped for cold Tecates. It was the middle of the night, but there was this family, kids and all, in bright polyester clothes selling large unfamiliar fruit from baskets. We stopped talking about our difficult lives for a stretch after that, and just watched the rutted road in the headlights.
The landmarks for the route to Nancy’s were natural rock formations and ruined churches. Paul and I had fallen silent, and in the air between us, I thought I felt a weighing of possibilities. I thought we were really thinking about living some other life. The night was wide and empty.
We arrived at OneLife at three thirty in the morning. The gates of the compound were made of the large, local stone which appeared like dried sand formations, but which was metallic and cold to the touch. There was a pervasive mineral smell. A mist collected around the place, the drift-off from the springs. Nude bikers and Wiccan girls with piercings and non-American white people passed us looking stoned or strung out. Nancy’s around, man. She’ll find you. Relax. Dig the vibe.
It took the better part of an hour, wandering the narrow camp trails between the villas. I was disconcerted by the apparent luxury, the screened-in yoga studios, the tiled fountains and the white-graveled paths set with torches. The parking lot was full of Mercedes with leopard seat covers and Tibetan prayer beads dangling from the rearviews. Finally, we found Nancy running a stone therapy table down by the big cold pool. Even from a distance I could see she’d been eating better. She wasn’t back to the double Ds of her Brookline days, but she had a little tummy again. A couple was just finishing up their treatments, and they were audibly enthusing to Nancy while she stacked a dozen or so palm-sized, flat rocks beside the benches.
“There can be something like a high,” she said. “After an enversion. Think of this as a kind of preview, of where you’ll arrive after you complete the program. For now, you must take it gradually. The results, after the present state wears off, will be subtle for the present.”
“If it was up to me, I’d be back for more tomorrow.”
“Two weeks, minimum, before your next treatment. If we move too quickly, there can be a kind of disorientation.”
“You warned us,” said the woman. “You can’t become a new person overnight.”
“Or if you can, it wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea.”
The couple retreated respectfully when they saw us coming down the path, still cooing. Nancy nodded at us, like everything was just what she expected.
“Let go,” said Paul, pulling away from the embrace. For a brief moment, I saw his failed audition face, a spasm of self-loathing, but Nancy wouldn’t release him until he hugged her back. I could see we’d been right to come. We stood there hand in hand while she looked us over and waited for her to make her assessment of the fucked-up place we’d landed.
After a moment, she shrugged. “This thing with you two still makes me retch, a little.” Then, she signaled for us to follow her toward the pools.
The OneLife compound was enormous, but as we moved from space to space, each one felt serendipitous, nestled into trees, or a circle of the stone benches, or at the edge of a cliff outcropping. You’d catch a whiff of something in certain spaces, see someone scurrying out of sight as you approached, the hint of a secret life to the place, but the surface was still more or less seamless.
“This place is impressive,” I told her.
She smiled. “I think it’s moving toward its potential. There’s more to be realized, of course.”
May I say, for a girl who works in porn, I pretty much detest being naked around strangers? I don’t mind their nudity, but with my clothes off, I always feel flabby and misshapen, and can never chill out enough about it to enjoy myself. So, among the Hell’s Angels and the Mexicans and the Israeli kids slipping into and out of the pools that night, I was the only one who wore a bathing suit. But we were in natural rock springs set at the edge of the world, the ocean far below us, cliffs hanging into the night, and I made cracks about my clothing, and this one Swedish couple thought I was funny, and Nancy hooked us up with some herbal ice tea at just the right moment, and it was like being high for a little while, like being high and clean at the same time. Obviously, drugs were being done out of sight, the famous Ensenada Sur dope, but Paul and I weren’t moved to join them for once. His hand found mine through the water. I thought, maybe I’ve eaten my last cloud. The terrible days behind us seemed like they belonged to another continent. Maybe the future was as easy as that.
The Likely World Page 33