by Lynn Crosbie
A REPORTER IN the bushes took a picture of us one day, kissing in the doorway, and it bounced around the world.
We are standing as if we have just started to dance. He is bending me backwards at the small of my back; my dress, in the midday sun, is completely sheer.
Our love hooked us back into the spotlight. We kept saying we were on hiatus, but I started to realize that doing nothing was hurting him.
The last time Joy had done a show, half the audience left during my lecture about the normalizing of sexual violence.
“Jesus, you’re like Lenny Bruce,” Q said later.
“In the dark days.
“People just want to hear music,” he said.
“Take some time off. Write another book.”
I wrote a children’s book the next day called The Rape Man in the White Van, and started sending it out.
HE AND I drove to a pumpkin patch, and as we picked through them, he said, “You need to know, Evelyn.
“Everyone felt obliged to hate me when they thought I hurt you, and caused the miscarriage. But they’re in the clear now, and they only want me.”
I couldn’t look at him.
“That’s true but also so conceited,” I said.
“I’ve done pretty well,” I added half-heartedly.
“You did great,” he said. “But maybe you should quit while you’re ahead. Okay, behind, but just a bit.”
“Motherfucking heartless asshole!”
Nauseated with embarrassment, I found a table covered in baby pumpkins and started firing cutters and forkballs.
He walked away and bought the biggest goddamn pumpkin I have ever seen, for Misty.
“You’re just scared of losing me,” I said in the car, after a lot of smoking and silence.
“Not this time, chubs.”
I had gained a little weight: being clean does that.
I slammed the car door when we got home, and he called after me.
He had carved my face on the pumpkin: heart-shaped eyes and lips.
“I’m afraid of myself,” he said.
I WAS HIDING my body under a bottle of Mr. Bubble when I realized that every time he left me, my popularity nosedived.
Not just because I was blamed for whatever happened, but because he was, clearly, perceived as the real talent.
A lot of people thought he wrote my songs, even.
When he did leave, did he leave knowing this?
I gathered a froth of bubbles and blew them away. Looked up and he was in the doorway.
“You look cute,” he said.
“And yes,” he said, “I do know.
“Imagine if I died,” he said, as I sank below the grey water and listened to the terrible roaring in my head.
“I STILL DON’T know how people got the story about me pushing you,” he said.
He was wearing colossal reading glasses and writing terse notes in a flip pad he kept in his pocket.
“Um, the ambulance guys?”
“No, I talked to them.
“I talked to everyone at the hospital, and to Janie, the girl with us that night.”
“Maybe someone is lying to you.”
“Maybe someone is,” he said, taking off his glasses and examining me.
“You did push me,” I said, backing up.
“Evelyn, you were wearing those stupid shoes.”
I had put on a pair of very high snakeskin mules: “I felt undesirable!”
“It was an accident. I know my getting stoned didn’t help, and I did push you away from me, but how could you tell people about that?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“I wouldn’t,” I said, thinking that I could tell anyone anything I wanted.
“The fact is —” he said, and I cut him off.
“The fact is that he’s dead,” I said.
We rested like a colloid suspension; my righteous lies spilled out like milk; his awful yet solid, truth.
WE SLEPT IN separate rooms; he wouldn’t touch me.
“No,” he said one night when I shimmied into the living room in a black T-shirt that covered my Spanx.
“Just no.”
I TOLD HIM that he had missed my birthday, after he asked why I kept playing “that disgusting Janis Ian song.”
“I’m seventeen,” I said. “I’m learning the truth.”
I put on a granny dress, glasses, and a short, curly wig to irritate him, but he was crazy for this outfit.
He fucked me so much, I had to go to a clinic in dark sunglasses for another UTI script.
“Are you in a violent sexual relationship?” the doctor asked, reading off a questionnaire.
“Yes,” I said. “I like that part, though. But after sex, he just falls asleep!”
She scowled and said that I didn’t seem to realize what I was saying.
“Jealous much?” I said, filing my nails into points.
YET ANOTHER DISTANCE was growing between us.
“Not again!” I shouted to myself, to a telephone solicitor, to a girl gang of tween thugs I passed one night, who tried to hold me up with a green water pistol.
One day, I was playing with the ugly plastic Kurt Cobain doll I got at a swap meet, and his left hand fell off.
Oops, there goes gravity, I worried.
To the world, however, we were young and beautiful, and “blissfully in love,” as several writers and one obsessive blogger wrote.
We had another meeting in the kitchen and went through our emails.
We learned that even though he fired Monotone when I left Q, they were still pursuing him, along with his label and his band.
I had not heard from Q, but Jenna sent me a file of some of her new songs.
They were recorded with her new girlfriend and they were extraordinary. “My Beautiful Mess” was for me, she wrote, and then she said goodbye.
I did have a lot of requests and forwarded fan mail. Most of the letters asked, “Is he a good kisser? Please tell me.”
WHEN WE COMPARED emails, I began to see a desolate trend emerge.
Where I was asked to do a print-only Maybelline ad, to be a panellist on a Canadian television show, and to join Pat Benatar’s reunion tour; he was invited to work with Jack White on a duet, to be sampled by Marshall Mathers, and to be caressed with feathers and fur-covered flatware by Marina Abramović.
On the other hand, a lot of magazines and artists wanted to shoot us together, naked, in costume, in flight.
Our picture was everywhere: it was tempting, I think, to relax into being his devoted wife.
But I was better than that.
“Don’t you think?”
“I think a lot of people would be happy if you didn’t take up so much room.”
He looked pointedly at me: I was squeezed into a pair of tights and a loose sweater. When I moved around, I jiggled.
“I’ll lose weight. But how do I get famous again?”
“Not by sounding like an old cassette labelled Party Grrl Mix.”
“Seriously, fuck you.”
We were changing for bed.
“Oh no, are you going to withhold sex?” he said as I safety-pinned a torn bra and scooped my panties from my ass-crack.
I couldn’t say anything, since I was so mean when he gained weight and, even worse, he had never looked better.
Every day, his supernatural looks were embellished like a fully glittering Twilight babe, but without lipstick, feathered bangs, and dumb, dead eyes.
Except his earlobe was gone. I stared and he quickly shook his hair over the gap.
I slept in the slipper chair by the window. He was right.
No one cared about my heroines anymore: I needed to be more Alison Mosshart than Kim Deal; more Lianne La Havas than Frances McKee.
I felt like the whole world had turned into Thurston Moore leaving Kim Gordon for a younger woman.
And I needed to think about everything he said, and start thinking like a killer.
Start thinking like him.
WHEN I WOKE up, I had several ideas.
I left Il Delicioso on for background, and started making notes.
Onscreen, the enormous man was snipping herbs from his garden and sweating profusely.
I was still writing when he came in with a tray of chocolate muffins, coffee, and bowls of Lucky Charms.
“Baby,” he said. “I’m having a hard time with sobriety, and I’m sorry. You know I love your music, you’re just ahead of your time.”
“Or behind it,” I said, buttering a muffin and gnashing its head off.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll lose the weight. You’re volumptuous,” he said, and hugged me.
We had sex; he rolled over and started sawing logs.
“You like this truffle,” Il Delicioso was saying to his English girlfriend, Miss Paine.
He fed it to her so daintily, my eyes squelched.
HE FOUND ME sitting at the kitchen table, late at night.
“Snack time?” he said, then saw the tears plopping onto the table, saw the twisted O of my mouth, handkerchief stuffed into it: fireball.
“What is it?” he said, and took my hand.
“Why are you mad at me again?” I said. “I’m trying, I don’t understand. All we do is fight —”
“You’re right,” he said.
“But it’s not you, exactly. Please.”
By please, by pulling me up, he meant let’s not dig up something else.
More ruins.
I got up and padded beside him to bed, smiled when he kissed my forehead, and cried again when he closed the door and walked away, a pillow in my mouth this time.
WE TALKED THE next morning, and he said we probably had cabin fever; that we should travel and return a few inquiries, do one big thing each, and come home.
And we slept together that night, for the first time in so long, in the same bed.
His soft snoring kept me awake. I wanted to listen to him forever. He woke up and saw me staring, and hauled me next to him.
Nothing else could go wrong.
“Just keep telling yourself that,” he said.
He was talking in his sleep with his eyes open.
WE PACKED FOR New York and California.
He broke the news of the trip to Misty, who went to his room and wouldn’t come out.
The autumn had landed like a wet yellow caul. We were both taking our methadone, and trying not to relapse: we spent a night finding every dealer’s number and deleting and shredding them all.
“We can quit, what’s the big deal?” we said to each other.
Every five minutes.
He wrote and chain-smoked, drank honey-larded tea. The songs were about feeling nothing, how good that feels.
Except “I’m Ashamed of My Fat Wife.” That one was just for me.
I WORE HIS old jeans, which were skin-tight, and jumbo sweatshirts of Garfield shooting hoops or in little red oven mitts, holding a pan of lasagna.
In the pockets I found a handful of milagros, five hundred dollars, two amber-coloured buttons, and a crumpled piece of paper.
I smoothed it out and it said, “She and I have the contagion.”
He had crossed it out and written, in smaller letters, “Dear God, help us.”
I shook two silver hearts onto my palm and swallowed them.
He was right.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SEEM TO WHISPER TO ME, WHEN YOU SMILE
We signed to do a movie, a remake of A Star is Born, shot in an aquarium with Mandarin subtitles.
It was my only real offer, and chance.
He quit the day we arrived at the Chelsea.
I had agitated for a nice hotel, but he was excited to see Sammy again, and he loved the guitar store a few doors down.
“Ese!” Sammy said, holding him close, then bundling all of our stuff into the little brass elevator.
If he was surprised to see us together again, he didn’t show it. “Be nice to this one,” he said to me, and kissed him goodbye on both cheeks.
We talked about the movie that night.
“Acting is sickening,” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to smile or not smile because someone told him to.
“What kind of a person can?” he said.
He let his hair fall in his face in his videos, and stared a thousand yards ahead in pictures, or hid under hats, glasses, and hoods.
The next day, I met with the director, who said there was no movie without him.
“Does he need some sugar?”
“He’s clean,” I said.
“For now,” he said. “Probably just on pause.
“Well,” he said, “if you lose some weight, call me. Maybe I’ll call back.”
WE WROTE OUR gospel songs and ate whatever Sammy brought to the room, smoked and fought, and slept on opposite sides of the bed.
“I’m going to get going on my thing,” he said, as he dismantled a guitar then started rebuilding it.
His thing turned out to be a show with Bleach at Madison Square Garden, with his friend Vail Fugate opening.
Vail is my age, and tiny, as pretty as a doll.
“How did you two become friends?”
“I told you.”
I remembered a story about the two of them playing mumblepeg with her switchblade that made me sick with suspicion.
I felt ugly, and jealous.
I went to a doctor, who said my weight gain might have something to do with the miscarriage.
I told him about it and he suggested that “it could also be your eating practices,” coughing into his hand as I polished off a ten-cheese sub.
“The rest of you, however,” he said.
I looked in the mirror. My face was puffy; my eyes mean and slitted; and my dirty hair was hidden under a misshapen beret.
“Who am I?” I said, and laughed.
“CAN’T WE DO some stuff together?”
“That’s all we do,” he said, attaching skin-coloured latex and a horsetail to the mutated guitar.
“Come to bed with me,” I said, in the sexiest voice I could summon.
“You sound like a satanic child,” he said, getting up and locking himself into the bathroom.
He took a two-hour bath as I chewed my hair and fingers.
“Things are going really well!” I texted myself. When I got it, I sent back a .
“I THOUGHT OF something,” I said, waking him up.
I was cross-legged beside him, draped in a sheet.
“Why don’t we keep doing our own thing and use this place to meet and talk, until everything’s done?
“And no funny business.”
He seemed to like the plan.
He snapped open his switchblade and slit the sheet off, then, sliding his arms around my curves, said, “Look at you, plumpkin, you’re delicious.”
AFTER THE SOLD-OUT concert, after I caught Vail kissing him backstage, who called me a “junkie whale” before I knocked her out, Bleach did an impromptu show at Santos Party House.
The next day, they finished mastering the Unplugged record, which was set to drop in the next few weeks.
He made a short film with Laurie Anderson, and performed simply as “Mike” at a gospel church in Harlem, drawing a mob.
More often than not, he didn’t come back to the hotel. I didn’t have a manager anymore, or a band.
I tried doing a solo show at the Cake Shop, and four people came downstairs, holding lattes and muffins.
“Oh my God, so loud,” they murmured, and left a
s I hit the sweet spot: “It was more than any laws allow!”
I unstrapped my guitar and sat on the edge of the stage.
Spent the rest of the night talking to a kid who had a good recipe for carob cookies; who said, “Do you know why they call it upside-down cake?”
I did not.
SAMMY TOLD ME he was on TV and there he was, happy and relaxed, talking to some female pit bull about our baby.
“I know, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, but the fact is, it was a tragic accident and that’s all there is to it.”
“And how are you and Evelyn?” she asked.
His smile flickered.
“She will always be really important to me,” he said.
TWENTY-NINE
HE WILL ALWAYS BE REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME
I knew that Mercury had gotten to him.
I played old MC Lyte revenge songs, and decided to focus on my writing. And when it was good enough, maybe he’d listen to it; maybe I’d get a new band, and label.
I could have all of that right away, as his wife.
And with a laparoscopic band.
I was eating more, and probably using food like dope.
“Oh my Jesus, you are disgusting,” a boy in lederhosen said to me in the Village.
I went back to our room and looked around. All of his things were gone. He had taken them bit by bit, during his short, hectic visits.
But, just in case, I wrote “We will be back & better than ever” on the bathroom mirror.
I gathered up my own things and flew home.
I was so tired by the time I got there, I baked a sheet of Pillsbury tofu dogs and carried it to bed wearing oven mitts.
I caught a glimpse of myself, with a ketchup moustache, and remembered the night he painted me with baby oil and slid all over me, calling me Squeaky, then Princess.
I chewed faster: there were four tiny dogs left.
IN THE SUPPORT group I joined, the men and women spoke about food with such grief and self-hatred, I started to think of food as dead people, which still didn’t quench my appetite.
We were all big, and nervous about touching each other: when you get fat, you become acutely aware of your relationship to space.
One man said, “Last night I did really well. I went to sleep feeling proud of myself, like I could do this thing. And the next thing I know, I’m standing in the kitchen shoving Mallomars down my throat until it’s raw and I’m nauseated, but I can’t stop.”