Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  ‘Hey, movie star,’ boomed the Red twin. ‘You’ve been there all day.’

  She knew because she had been watching from her window, as she bathed a dog in a tub filled with Kiehl’s. I couldn’t really talk. I could just about hear. Hers was a new accent and I liked it straightaway. Liev’s non-specifically other accent was still my favorite, although Sebastian’s drawl came a near second.

  She insisted I come up to her apartment for peppermint tea. It was her apartment because it was in her name, but her boyfriend had all his records stored in the living room and her sister regularly rang up phone bills totaling hundreds of dollars. An unexpected ferret slouched across the floor, arrogant and louche, and a baby alligator had meek occupation of the bathroom sink.

  I sat on the sofa and petted her teacup chihuahua, which was still a little wet and smelled of Kiehl’s vanilla cleanser. Its short hairs dotted my freshly painted nails. As I drank a few sips from the cracked mug, the Red twin kept disappearing and coming back flustered. I thought she was taking coke, and I thought it sucked that she was sharing her stinking peppermint tea but not her drugs. The Red twin later told me that she kept running to the back bedroom to try and wake her napping boyfriend.

  ‘Guess who’s in the front room. You have to get up or you’ll kick yourself.’

  ‘Is it Led Zeppelin?’ he enquired, raising his head of curls from the pillow.

  ‘No,’ she answered, frustrated, and he went right back to sleep. Once her boyfriend and I did start hanging out, he still didn’t know who I was. He introduced me to the drummer in his band with great excitement. ‘Guess who this is! It’s Ruby. She’s famous. She was in that show My New Robot! You know? From when we were kids? The one about a little girl whose best friend is an android.’

  ‘What the hell is My New Robot?’ I asked, perplexed.

  We determined it to be a sitcom he had dreamt. Jesus, I could pitch My New Robot to my former agent and he’d probably think it was a great vehicle for my talents.

  My talents are: I knew what I wanted. I knew what I didn’t want. I knew at a young age. I had big breasts at a young age. I have a round white face like the surface of the moon. It looks fat in real life but girlish on film. I carved myself an unforeseen niche as the fucked-up girl for any kid who thinks they are remotely interesting or unusual to fixate on. The people who like that really like it. I have the added advantage of scrubbing up nicely when I feel like it, so I look like I have range, when really I just have good skin.

  The Red twin and the Yellow twin, their boyfriends, puppies and ferrets distracted me from the worst of the drugs. We smoked pot now and then and laughed at the animals. Sometimes I’d go on my Vicodin benders, but that was it. The kids next door had never met Sebastian Chase, but I regaled them with enough stories that now whenever I mention him the Yellow twin spits, ‘I hate that asshole. I hate him.’

  I had reinvented Sebastian for those who weren’t present in my life before he left it, and I was damned if I knew what was true or not. He must have done something to make me send him away. I never told them about how he knew which tear was which. It didn’t seem like such an engaging story. I didn’t want to hand it out as we fed the ferret or washed the puppy. I’d been thinking about Sebastian for a couple of days. I thought about how nice his body was. Then I thought about how, when you really really think about it, sex is a pretty weird thing.

  Then I started thinking that blow-jobs are especially weird. Then I thought about it so much that, for a whole day, I convinced myself there was a cock in my mouth that no one else could see. I thought about it some more, and then I was leaning over the toilet bowl, heaving up my guts. ‘Please don’t let there be a cock in my mouth, please don’t let there be a cock in my mouth,’ I was weeping when John arrived at my door that afternoon. He pulled me just about together with a couple of Xanax. I got to work the next morning.

  I had to owe him the cash. Even though my previous film did great business, I still needed money. I don’t know where it goes. I have a grand and then the day ends and I have nothing to show for it, except bits of string, maybe some chewing-gum wrappers.

  I missed getting to look at Sebastian. I missed watching his abs flex with each breath he drew. I missed the way his long lashes curled at right angles. I missed the way the clean lines of his body made me feel clean, redeemed just because I was with him. It seemed so preposterous to me when cabs wouldn’t stop for him. Everyone should stop for Sebastian.

  Is it OK to like someone just because they are beautiful? Yes. They make us feel less alone. I like beautiful people the same way others love sport. It is a definite answer for those of us who don’t understand mathematics. In beauty as in sport and math, there is right and wrong. There is a winner. Whereas art and music are open to interpretation and people are still arguing about whether or not Bob Dylan is as significant a poet as William Blake.

  The answer is they both lose because they are both ugly. Jakob Dylan is the winner. And Blake is the runner-up because he’s dead so no one cares what he looks like. You see where my mother comes in? That’s how she saved herself. Why is Audrey Hepburn a saint? Because she was beautiful or because she is dead? Both. It’s the best way to be. Did the woman who leapt to her death from a Lower East Side tower block last week feel less pain than Marilyn Monroe? Or did she not have hair like spun cotton candy and a face with all the airy sweetness of angel-food cake? You know the answer. You know as well as I do that if you’re going to kill yourself, you better be beautiful or everyone will think you were just being a whiner.

  Liev wasn’t beautiful. He wasn’t yes or no. He was confusing. If he was yes, or even no, I might have got over him. I spent so many years mourning Liev – years when I could have been meeting boys, going dancing, smoking illicit cigarettes. It was only when I emancipated myself from my dad that I kind of emancipated myself from Liev too. If he did not want to come back or be with me, or even get in contact, then I decided he was no longer alive.

  The time came when I decided to declare him officially dead. Like a kid seeing off an expired hamster, I took his photo into the back garden of our house in Brooklyn and buried it a foot beneath the earth. I stuck a little cross in the re-shifted earth, which failed him on both levels – that we were Jewish and that I still dreamed him a vampire. Rest uneasy, Liev. If you choose not to return to me, then do not rest at all. I think it backfired, because my life since the day I buried my first love in the backyard, has been tumultuous and lonely. Maybe I am now the vampire. I went out and found myself an agent that day.

  In the back of my mind, the mind that I had left, somewhere under the earth with his picture, I never stopped wondering what became of him. The last postcard we received was postmarked Paris. I remember being incensed that it was addressed to the whole family. I suppose if I really did love him, if I thought there was any realistic chance that we could forge an adult relationship, I would have gone to France as soon as the emancipation documents came through. But I didn’t. I never even went to Europe. In fact, when it came to press I actively avoided it. I’m notorious within the business for my refusal to promote the product overseas. I was sure that if I could just fall in love, really in love, rather than the smug – Hey, everyone, I have a boyfriend – emotions I felt when I was living with Sebastian Chase, I might be able to banish The Vampire from my thoughts for good. I was wrong. Twins of many hue, drugs of different sizes and all the unexpected ferrets in the world couldn’t distract me from him.

  why sebastian should have

  been happy I dumped him

  ‘I want to kill myself,’ I said as I dragged kohl across my heavy lids. ‘I want to kill a baby. I want to die from an abortion.’

  Sebastian pulled a white T-shirt over his six-foot three-inch frame, his broad shoulders stretching the fabric. Speaking through his teeth, which he did when he was tired, he replied, ‘I want an ice-cream.’

  My brown eyes narrowed to black as I considered his request. ‘OK, then.’

>   I stomped behind him as he skated to the Polish 24-hour diner on the corner of 7th street. ‘Christ Ruby, I feel like I should request a child’s booster seat for you,’ he said as I bounced around my chair, fizzing from the sugar in the chocolate-flavored syrup. Grinning, I dribbled it down my chin.

  ‘Ruby, that might be erotic if it were strawberries.’

  I smeared it across the whole lower half of my face until I was wearing a sticky chocolate beard. How ugly can I get … how ugly, before he cannot look at me?

  ‘It’s not working,’ said Sebastian wearily, for we had been through this many times. ‘I’m not going to stop liking you.’

  Defeated, I tossed my maraschino cherry at him. He deftly caught it, folded it into a napkin, placed it in an ashtray and went on with his sundae, picking around the nuts. He rethought his words, upgrading them like a steward at the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk.

  ‘I’m not going to stop liking you. I’m not going to stop loving you.’

  But then he did.

  compare and contrast

  I loved her. I really loved her. I still do. But all that kicking in her sleep, all the crying and talking about the vampire. It was hard. I’ve had a lot of girlfriends. I’ve had girlfriends before who had eating problems, anorexia or what-not. I wish she had taken better care of herself. All my girlfriends before her, even the anorexic ones, they always did exercise. I was on the college track team. Most of the girls I met were running track too. They were pretty buff, tough girls. Some of them would get fucked up on coke and start bawling. But none of them, even the anorexics, were fragile like Ruby was. I guess like Ruby still is.

  Just ’cos I’ve stopped seeing her doesn’t mean she’s ceased to exist. I care about her. I just can’t have her in my life. I bet she’s driving some other poor schmo crazy. I did feel, at times, that I could be anyone. It was kind of like Ruby going around town shouting, ‘Hey, everybody, look at the size of this black guy I caught.’ I think she really hated herself for liking me because I’m black. Ruby’s dad was really fuckin’ racist. He says he’s so liberal, but he wanted her to be with a Jew. That’s why she secretly loves being a movie star and loves Hollywood. ’Cos everyone knows that it’s all run by Jews and that’s not anti-Semitic, it’s just the truth. I think she feels she’s doing her family right.

  She was always telling people how tall I was, how beautiful I was, how well built.

  She wanted me to fight all the time. We’d be at a party and she’d press her face into my chest and say, ‘Him over there! He tried to make me dance with him and, when I wouldn’t, he said I was ugly!’

  Nobody said she was ugly. Except her. But I’d have to step up and we got escorted out of a few parties I was really excited to be at. When we were in front of other people, whenever we were in a crowd, she wanted to be protected. But when we got home, and it was just us, she wouldn’t let me help her. It was like the guy trying to prove that he’s heterosexual by making out all over his girl in public and then not touching her in the cab afterwards. She wanted everyone to see that she needed help. And it made people not want to help her. I was the only one. And she screwed with my heart. Intricate little screws in my heart, tiny and sharp, nailed tight whilst I was sleeping, until my heart was screwed so close to my lung I couldn’t breathe right.

  She would get drunk and start telling everyone in the bar about the size of my dick. It was humiliating. I know on paper it shouldn’t be: ‘Oh God, I’m so upset because my girlfriend’s telling everyone I’m hung like a donkey.’ But it was fucking humiliating. I’m not like that. I don’t talk about things like that. I mean, I’ll talk about it in the bedroom, if it’s me and some girl. But I didn’t even want to talk about it to her. I didn’t like talking dirty with Ruby because, I told you already, I really, truly loved her.

  I tried to tell her she was making her life crazier than it needed to be. That nobody ruled her. That nobody said she had to slash her arms and leave ten minutes into any meal to throw up in the john. I tried to tell her that she wasn’t going to become who she thought she was by reading biographies of people she thinks are geniuses. I tried to tell her that I wasn’t all shiny, happy person myself and that she made me feel less alone. That if she felt the same, then we were in love.

  She didn’t feel the same.

  i love you, fuck off

  Yes, I heard him going around town saying how much he loved me, but that doesn’t matter because he couldn’t help me. I was begging him to help but he couldn’t understand. He thought help was going down on me. He thought that made me happy, made me saner with each lick. The only part I liked was being fucked, no orgasm in sight, just something huge inside of me, filling out the spaces coveted by demons. I tried to get him to smash me, so that the demons would be smashed too. But he wanted to be nice and slow and please me. He didn’t understand.

  I would try not to be sad, but I couldn’t help it. And it wasn’t long before his concern turned to frustration and then to disdain. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ruby, cheer the fuck up.’ I heard it as ‘Cheer the fuck-up!’

  I pictured myself being encouraged from the sidelines of the football field by a squadron of tan blonde girls: ‘Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate? Breakdown girl! Breakdown girl! Go! Go! Go!’ And so I behaved like even more of a fuck-up, because the girls in my head wanted it so much. When I slumped over the dinner table, head in hands, Sebastian would say, ‘Stop acting out!’ It was a phrase he had heard from my therapist in a session he attended with me, and he put it to good use.

  I wonder, sometimes, if I might have stayed afloat longer if I hadn’t have been with a man who had so very few problems of his own. The only problem he admitted to was me.

  ‘You know, Ruby,’ he threatened after a fight one night, ‘I don’t know that it’s such a good idea for me to be seen out with you. You’re too volatile. It’s not good for someone in my line of work.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re a personal assistant. How many personal assistants actually get to date the movie stars they work for?’

  ‘And how many movie stars are being put off from hiring me because of my association with you?’

  ‘You motherfucker.’ His mother was beautiful. She loved him. He should fuck her.

  ‘Oh come on. You don’t do the premières. You don’t cooperate with the press. You’re not putting yourself out there, unless it’s some awful, tabloid shot of you shoveling donuts in your mouth.’

  ‘You said you liked my body. I thought you liked me this way?’

  ‘I do like your body. You’re just so unhealthy. It’s disgusting.’ He calmed down. His voice lowered as he tried to say, as nicely as he could, that he could help me formulate a better diet. ‘If you just had a plate of steamed vegetables every day instead of all that greasy carbohydrate and empty sugar calories …’

  ‘Oh, fuck you.’

  ‘Oh, fuck him!’ yelled the Red twin, incandescent with rage. I remember telling the Yellow twin, whose mind I had polluted against him, that I might go back with Sebastian.

  ‘You won’t,’ she snapped, ‘because he won’t let you.’

  ‘But,’ I reasoned, ‘the last time I saw him, we were walking through SoHo, looking at shops and holding hands.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ she sneered, clutching a ferret to her voluminous bosom, ‘and stop holding his hand.’

  I stared out the apartment window, as my mother had taught me to, and murmured, ‘I liked him. I liked him because he was so quiet.’

  The Yellow twin snorted her disgust. ‘Well, he’s obviously going to be even quieter in your life from now on.’

  pa

  The studio head first assigned him to me. I didn’t ask for an assistant but in the end he was very helpful. Straightaway, I wanted to be his girlfriend. I wasn’t sure that I could love him, or he me, but if ever there were good boyfriend material it was him. He was so clean, so healthy, I wanted to lick his skin. The educated black man with the good-money job and the skat
eboard. Sebastian with the trim stomach and neat dreadlocks. Sebastian with the good heart and wicked vocabulary.

  I drifted home, dreaming of ways to torture him, schemes to get him to buy me things. John came over and I took a Vicodin and watched David Letterman. When I fell asleep, my subconscious took over, and I dreamt I was strong.

  Sebastian Chase rang a few times, but I said I was busy. I wasn’t. I’d let the phone ring and ring, desperate to pick up, desperate for help. I’d try and pick up the receiver, but the phone would go numb in my fingers and drop to the floor. I could not leave my bed. John went away to Jamaica for a week on research and there was no one to administer relief and nothing for me to do.

  My body shook. My chest and stomach broke out in tiny hives. My forehead was dotted with spots. My hair sat in useless half-curls about my ears. I lay in bed, unmoving. And then, when I looked as bad as could be, I found his number and called him.

  ‘Hi, Sebastian. It’s Ruby. I was wondering if you wanted to …’

  ‘Hi, Ruby!’ He was so bursting with good health and cheer that I had to plug my ears. ‘I’m going sailing this weekend. I’m running out the door right now.’

  ‘Sailing?’

  ‘Yes, sailing. What do you think I do at weekends? Play basketball?’

  ‘No. I never said that.’ I sunk back into bed. ‘I’d better let you go.’

  ‘No, it’s cool. Look, I’ve got to catch this train. But you can come with me.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Come on! Meet me at Penn Station in half an hour.’