When the place closed, he’d usually get on the subway to Brooklyn, where he lived with his mother, or sometimes he’d sleep on the floor of my dormitory. The dorms weren’t segregated, but our friendship raised some eyebrows, particularly from the Southern students in the cafeteria. They usually didn’t say anything outright but they watched us. Dennis wasn’t my first white friend, but he was the first white person who truly felt like my brother.
When we heard about the Freedom Rides, we signed up. I couldn’t believe what I believed and not go, but I was scared. I understood what I was getting into. For me it was never a game. I knew that I was risking my life and that my life was worth nothing to a lot of people. At the same time, what kind of life could I have if things didn’t change?
After the arrests, Dennis and I stayed down South and worked to help register people to vote. Then we came back to New York together and re-enrolled in Columbia. For a while we were as close as friends could be. And then we weren’t.
To this day, my arm hurts every time it rains and I have no more depth perception, but I’ve never regretted going. I met my wife there. Our children’s lives are better because of what we did.
DIANE
Everyone was singing on that Greyhound bus. I’m tone deaf, but I sang anyway. Fred thought at first that I was singing poorly on purpose, that I was goofing around. Well, it was embarrassing but it got his attention. He asked Dennis to trade seats with me so that we could sit together. We talked for hours. By the time we had crossed the border into Louisiana, we’d been on that bus for several days. It was just starting to get dark out. It was hot, a summer day in Louisiana, you can imagine. I was half-dozing, my head on Fred’s shoulder. I woke up because I felt him tense. The bus slowed down and stopped in the middle of the two-lane highway. And then I felt like there was an elevator shaft inside of me and I was falling down into it. I knew that I had no control over what was about to happen to us.
If Jackson McLean hadn’t gotten us out of there, I doubt Fred would be alive today, or he’d be a vegetable. The way those men kicked and kicked his head. It was horrible. I don’t think about that very often, so much has happened since, but seeing the mugshots at the book party brought everything back. It was strange, having our faces billboard-size at a trendy art gallery in Chelsea. We looked like Calvin Klein ads. What are we selling here? That’s what I kept asking myself. That book, I guess.
Anyway, I sound like an old crank, which is probably what I am. No, it was a great evening. It was great to see everyone we’d lost touch with. Even Ann Carter was there, using a cane and hoping nobody would notice. I guess we were all old. That was the point of the show, wasn’t it? Living historical relics.
I don’t know if I’d be willing to die for anything anymore other than my children. But I had at one point, we all had, and that night in New York together during the party it had felt like we were those same people we’d been decades earlier. I remember asking Fred on the cab ride back to our hotel, both of us feeling buzzed and exuberant: “Fred, why did we lose touch with all these people? We were such good friends. Why don’t we ever see Dennis? What happened? We had all been so close.”
And Fred said: “You know. Time. People drift apart.” Of course, it was more than time. It was Dennis’s damn book. It had hurt Fred and me. It had hurt a lot of people. It was hard not to feel like Dennis had used us up and then moved on. But who hasn’t done something they regret? And overall the evening had been nice.
The one slight stain was Fred’s grad student, Amanda. Fred claimed he’d told me she was coming but I know I would’ve remembered that. I don’t know if Fred was having an affair with her exactly, but I don’t think for a second that his interest in her was avuncular. I think he’d introduced her to Dennis as a way to show off, and that backfired because she was glued to Dennis’s side all night. She was young and attractive, and God knows, attentive, but anybody not guided through life by their penis could see that something about her was not right. She was unhinged. Not the kind of person Dennis’s daughters needed to have around them.
EDITH (1997)
There’s Dennis: huge, beardless, young, in black and white. Handsome. And there’s the whole bad boy thing (it is a mug-shot). He looks like he thinks he knows everything, like even with the cops he had the upper hand.
I look over at Mae and she’s still staring at the picture. Every time I look at her, her eyes are suctioned on it. Amanda too. It’s creepy.
“Stop,” I tell Mae.
I pull her arm and she ignores me. I catch a glimpse of something in her face, something repulsive. I don’t know how to describe it, but it makes me feel lightheaded. I glance to see if Amanda noticed. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I probably shouldn’t have smoked a bowl with Charlie before coming here, but he’d offered and it didn’t occur to me to turn it down. We’d spent the afternoon sanding wooden spoons in his apartment. He said he’d come by the gallery, but he hasn’t. He was probably just being polite. The more I look at Mae the worse I feel. I look away. Dennis is spitting olive pits onto his cocktail napkin. Amanda is watching him like a dog.
A group of women have surrounded Mae. They recognize her as “Marianne’s.” They touch her face and her hair, and she smiles and lets them. They don’t notice me. I take a step back and then another. I’m invisible. I walk backwards until I run into a woman in a tuxedo, holding a tray of champagne glasses. I take one. The bubbles tickle the back of my throat. I reach for another, but she pushes me away.
“You’re gonna get me fired,” she hisses and hurries off.
A small belch. Voices are echoing off the cement floors and bouncing around in the rafters. The front window is fogged up. I press my hand against it and look at the mark it leaves. Turkey.
I turn back to face the party. A cluster of “well-intentioned” women is looking at me. They’d asked about Mom, and I told them that Dennis locked her up in a mental hospital. The conversation ended quickly after that and now they’re hugging Dennis and giving me pitying looks.
Fuck all of them. Having a party and calling each other heroes for something they did a million years ago. What heroic things have they done lately? Do they recycle? Did they adopt a fucking whale?
I write on the fogged-up window: “Fucking Cunts.” I turn to see if they see it, but they are facing the other direction now. I look for Mae, but she’s blocked from view.
She’s been ignoring me since the cemetery. Last night it got so bad, I held her hand and cried. She let me, but I could tell it wasn’t her hand really. She’d removed herself from it. Like when we were kids, holding on to each other’s sleeves and slipping out of our shirts. Her hand was this limp thing I could have, but she wasn’t in it, and it didn’t mean anything. She was closed off to me, and I was nothing to her, and that was it. I am nothing to her now.
I feel the panic begin to radiate out from my chest. No. I press it down. I shouldn’t have smoked. That was a mistake. It’s making me dizzy. I wonder if Charlie is feeling this way too. I lean back against the glass, but this only makes it worse.
When I open my eyes I see a man across the room, staring at me. Snaggletoothed wolf.
“PERVERT,” I write on the glass.
Through the letter T, I see the people on the sidewalk below, milling around, smoking cigarettes. A cab pulls up. A fat woman and an old lady climb out. The old lady is very short and has a poof of white hair like a troll doll. She leans on the fat lady and hobbles towards the front door. Someone outside takes a picture of her with flash. The smokers are watching her like she is someone important. She doesn’t seem to notice them, just keeps hobbling towards the building.
Then, suddenly, she stops and looks up at the window. Our eyes lock and she smiles.
It’s the first time anyone has really seen me all night. I quickly wipe the words I wrote with my sleeve and step back to hide behind the fogged-up glass.
MAE
It’s probably why I became a photographer—this power of a two-dimen
sional image to make you feel something so deeply. I looked into my dad’s black-and-white eyes and felt like I understood him completely, like I had never seen anybody before who looked this good to me. And then I looked at him as he was at the party—old—and I couldn’t help feeling like my mother had eaten the orange and handed me the rind. I noticed Amanda looking at that picture too. I wonder if she felt the same way.
JANET
That party picked a scab for me. Afterward, I lay awake with my menopausal insomnia, revisiting ancient slights. Dennis and that horrible book. “Claudine,” the clingy sad sack. “Blundering and bovine,” his exact words. And how he’d insulted me afterward when I confronted him, told me I was imagining things, that I wasn’t worth writing about, basically.
“All the characters were made-up composites,” he’d said and even had the gall to offer to sign my copy. Right. Composites. Then why was I so recognizable that my ex-husband followed me around the house, quoting lines about me from that book?!
I slept with Dennis and I liked him and I tried to make him like me. Is that really so pathetic? No. What’s pathetic, truly pathetic, is my bad taste in men. If my daddy hadn’t been a total asshole, I probably would’ve been able to see that Dennis was no good. I don’t think he was capable of love. Not really. Why else a child bride and not a fully formed person? It’s sick. That little girl was always following us around at Jackson’s house. Even when I’d insist we go into the woods to get away from her she’d track us down and ask endless questions or offer to braid my hair.
I heard he wrote her letters and tried to groom her. Well, how’d that work out? I heard not so great.
PHONE CONVERSATION
BETWEEN EDITH AND MARKUS
MARKUS: Where are you? I can’t hear you.
EDITH: I’m at a party.
MARKUS: Well, do you want to call me later?
EDITH: No. Obviously I wanted to call you now if I called you now.
MARKUS: Okay…
EDITH: Do you miss me?
MARKUS: Sure.
EDITH: What do you miss about me?
MARKUS: I don’t know.
EDITH: Remember what you said to me after you fucked me on the couch in the attic? How you—
MARKUS: Edie, my parents are home.
EDITH: So what?
MARKUS: So, I don’t want to talk about that right now.
EDITH: Fine. If your parents are home, then you can ask them about Mae and me staying with you for a bit.
MARKUS: About that…
EDITH: What do you mean, “About that…”? What, you heard someone say that in a movie?
MARKUS: You can’t stay here. You just can’t.
EDITH: Because you don’t want me to?
MARKUS: It’s just not going to happen.
EDITH: If it’s because you’re dating someone else, I don’t even care.
MARKUS: Aren’t you at a party. Shouldn’t you be getting back—
EDITH: You’re just like Mae. There’s something wrong with you. You’re a cold person. You have no idea what it means to love anybody, to care about someone other than yourself. Now that I’m not directly in front of you, sucking your dick, I don’t even exist for you anymore.
MARKUS: Whatever, Edie. You’ve sucked my dick a total of like two times, and I didn’t even cum.
EDITH: You’re a coward and a liar and a terrible friend.
MARKUS: I’m a terrible friend? I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation. It’s always you, you, you. You need this, you need that. You dumped me, let me remind you, and then I was supposed to just pretend like you didn’t?… Hello? Hello?…
TILLIE HOLLOWAY
My life changed after I got the part of Cassandra in Yesterday’s Bonfires. At the time, I was married to my agent. We were very rich and I was deeply unhappy. My husband made sure I was cast steadily in small roles, but when something substantial finally came along, he balked. He wanted me to stay away from politics, stay behind my white picket fence. He was furious when I accepted the part and the studio flew me, and the rest of the cast, out to New Orleans for the weekend. The movie was going to be shot on a sound stage, but they wanted us to absorb some of the local color. They arranged a boozy luncheon with Dennis Lomack and Marianne at one of the oldest and fanciest restaurants in the French Quarter.
I was surrounded by actors and professional charmers all day long, but they were just mimics. Marianne and Dennis were the real thing. Marianne especially. She was… magnetic. Maybe it was her voice? She had a great voice, low and gravely. It made you want to lean in as close as you could.
I remember Dennis was holding court. He was telling everyone the story about how the restaurant made its turtle soup—supposedly it was prepared in one of Napoleon’s very own pots and had been boiling continuously for centuries. I was listening, but it was Marianne who I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. Consciously or unconsciously, I was adjusting my posture to mimic hers, parting my lips the way she did. In that moment, I wanted so much to be her. We locked eyes and only when I was caught did I realize what I was doing. I felt deeply embarrassed but Marianne was kind. She took my hand and held it to her cheek.
“It’s hard sometimes,” she said, “to know where you end and where others begin. You’re an actress, so you understand.” I told her that I did.
Her husband called for a toast and she stood up, and only then did I realize how heavily pregnant she was. In his toast Dennis thanked the studio and the director, said he gave them his blessing to take his book and make origami or confetti or whatever their plans were for it and everyone, fairly drunk by this point, laughed.
The meal lasted through many more courses. I was so focused on Marianne that I wasn’t too aware of anyone else. She had such a vivid way of talking and drawing you into her world. I only knew how to talk like that when someone else had written the words for me. She told me about her childhood, growing up in Louisiana, wandering the swamps, watching her father paint. Her mother had died when she was a baby, so she and her father had been very close. I remember being moved by the way she talked about him, and by the way she talked to her husband. They seemed very close. My own marriage was sexless, unbearable, and I remember seeing the way Dennis couldn’t keep his hands off Marianne and thinking that this is what a marriage should be. At any rate, I was enchanted with her and thrilled when she agreed to let me spend the weekend with her. She even promised to take me to her childhood home.
But the next morning when I showed up at her house, as we had arranged, and rang the doorbell, nobody answered. I knew she was home. I could see her through the frosted glass, her pregnant form, as she disappeared up the stairs. It was the strangest thing. I knocked again, sat on the front porch, and waited. Periodically, I got up and knocked, on the off chance that she hadn’t heard me and that it was a misunderstanding.
How tenacious I was! But I didn’t know how else to be. The part was important. “Fame had begun to feel like something waiting for me on the table, getting cold,” to quote the book.
Eventually, Dennis Lomack pulled up in front of the house. Had I done something to offend her? I wanted to know. She’d seemed so eager to help the night before.
“She’s an unreliable person,” Dennis said. In my world this is a very damning thing to say, but I think he was just stating a fact. He could tell I was upset, so he told me the part had nothing to do with his wife anyway. She’d been a kid at the time the events took place. The screenwriters just combined all the female characters into Cassandra. “You can play her any way you want,” he said. And that ended up freeing me to bring more of myself to the part.
The movie was silly in a lot of ways, a product of its time and by no means a classic. But I ended up learning a lot about the Movement as a result. After living in the world of these brave young men and women struggling for social justice, how could I walk back into my stultifying and privileged life? I couldn’t. I tried to model myself after Ann Carter and others. I opened up my enormous
house, the one I got in the divorce settlement, to girls who needed a place to live. Some of them have been through unimaginable horrors. We became a tiny army up in the Hollywood Hills. And with Edie’s help later, I turned this project into a foundation, and set up other houses like it throughout the state.
EDITH (1997)
“I would love to paint you.”
The Pervert has me cornered. I don’t understand how I got here. I’m still fuming about Markus. That shit. That shit, shit, shit. I was on my way to Mae but she slithered off. And now, the Pervert’s arm is blocking me from passing. His fingers are in my hair. “Maybe you could pose for me sometime. I paint women’s heads on animal bodies.”
“Oh, Xander, stop. That’s Dennis’s daughter,” a woman next to him comes to my rescue. “Dennis,” she calls through a group of people. “Xander wants your daughter to model for him. Xander has discovered your daughter. My drunk husband’s a regular Vasco da Gama!”
Dennis appears by my side, Amanda trailing after him. His lips are greasy from the hors d’oeuvres. He kisses that woman on the cheek, leaves a shiny smudge with his slug lips that Amanda stares at for a moment too long.
“My daughter? Discovered? My angel on stilts? My untrammeled continent? Discovered?”
The woman tilts her head back and brays, showing everyone her rotting back teeth.
“Your father,” she says, and puts her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, “has always had such a way with words.” She starts to tell me about the good old days in Louisiana. Amanda moves in closer to Dennis.
And then, a blond woman sweeps into the room. I know her. Was she a friend of Mom’s? She looks like a doll. Tiny and precise.
They’re all looking at me like I just said something.
“What?” I say.
They laugh again. Ugly and insane.
I pry past the Pervert and move towards the woman. Where do I know her from? She’s trailed by a group of girls, and this makes her look like a nun or schoolteacher. But she’s too pretty to be either of those things. The girls look rough. They’re dressed nicely, but their clothes look too new, like they don’t really belong to them. These girls follow her through the room, a gaggle of them. Who is she? A pied piper. Could I join them?
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Page 8