Em's Awful Good Fortune

  Sundays were my day off. Mostly I just lay in bed, reading, or went to a movie by myself. I didn’t write. I was too nervous to write, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus. And when I tried to write, my voice went sad. Maybe “sad” isn’t the right word. Sadness is situational, Bleu said. It’s temporary—your dog dies. Sorrow is something else—it’s pervasive; it’s your past, your future; it’s today, tomorrow, and all of your tomorrows. When sadness is that heavy, it needs a weightier word to describe it. Paris can be depressing. No one has the nerve to say so, but all the buildings are all the same. The sky is overcast. There’s no color. The whole city is a study in beige and gray, greige. I was terrified of losing the kids and ending up alone. I knew Ruby and Rio would stay with Gee unless I took them home to LA. But if I did that, I’d be a single, working mother with two kids. Which also terrified me. I couldn’t support myself in Paris without working papers. I didn’t want to move in with Bleu, in an apartment with a toilet that didn’t work properly and halls that smelled of cat piss. He said I was venal. I had to look it up in the dictionary. I’m not sure it’s venal to choose not to live in squalor.

  “I’m living my life,” he said. His observation, like Jerry’s, was really an accusation: like I wasn’t. You’d have to hear the way he said it, drawing the word “living” out for five extra beats, like he was Henry fucking Miller, living some grand artist’s life in Paris.

  “How’s Gee doing?” I asked DeeDee the next time we met; our counseling sessions were no longer as a couple.

  “He’s moved on,” she said. “You should too.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked her. But I knew what it meant. Since I was watching the kids mornings and evenings, Gee never had to come home, not for dinner, not for anything. It was therapy-sanctioned payback.

  “What do you want to do today?” Bleu emailed me one Sunday after I had been living at Camp Mom for almost a month. He signed it “xoE,” for “everything.” I’m your everything, he told me, but he wasn’t everything—he was just everything that Gee wasn’t. It wasn’t the same thing. We worked only as a threesome.

  I want to go home, I thought. That’s what I want to do today. I wanted to go home and do laundry, sit on the ugly, pink-and-green-floral couch, the one that Milly had talked me into buying, saying my taste was too severe, suggesting I go with something soft and pretty “for a change.” I had buyer’s remorse immediately. I hated that pinkish, poufy, so-not-me sofa so much that I painted the wall behind it pink—pink camouflage—hoping the couch would disappear into the wall. And then I shipped that couch to Paris, knowing it was never getting in the container back to Los Angeles. And now all I wanted to do today was sit on that butt-ugly couch that I hated, listen to Van Morrison, and read a book. It was Sunday, and I didn’t want to do anything. And the only person I felt comfortable doing absolutely nothing with was my husband.

  “Let’s go to the Pompidou,” I told Bleu.

  “You will not leave your husband,” Ines said to me. “Jamais. You want your cake and eat cake too. Is that how you say it?”

  “Usually we just say, ‘She wants it all.’”

  She was trying to master idioms. It was kind of endearing. We could be friends in another universe; she spoke in linguistic phrases, and I thought in song lyrics.

  Ines was Bleu’s ex, the mother of the daughter Bleu was raising all by himself, the girl who didn’t like the way I laughed. Too loud and American. Ines worked somewhere in the South of France and came to Paris once a month to check in on her daughter. She was wearing low heels, slacks, not jeans, a tailored white blouse, and a scarf, managing to somehow pull off sharp and sexy, not severe. On this day, we were having lunch at Joe Allen’s, a restaurant so American that only French people ever ate there: omelets and burgers, pictures of Hollywood celebrities on the walls.

  “My gut is feeling that you are not serious.” She meant about Bleu. Ines wanted to know if my intentions were honorable, and she concluded pretty quickly that they were not. That I was unlikely to leave my husband and kids, move in with her ex, and raise her daughter for her. And she was right—I would never do that. So I guess DeeDee was right too. You need to know your bottom line.

  “American women don’t understand love,” Ines said. “They talk about being in love, but they don’t want a man; they want a security blanket.” And then she said puh the way Frenchwomen do: lips pressed together, blowing through the p.

  I doubled down on her puh with a humph. And a Tina Turner song: “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” When the lease was up at Camp Mom, I moved back to our apartment on Rue de Turenne.

  SHARKS

  My mother thought being alone was the worst thing that could happen to a woman, but she wasn’t talking about being physically alone. In fact, she liked it when my dad traveled, nobody expecting her to get dressed or make dinner; she’d stay up late, watching TV, drinking and smoking, sleep all day. When I got home from school, she’d be just getting up, face puffy, shiny with sweat, wearing a lavender polyester nightie, cigarette holes scorched and hardened. It’s a wonder she didn’t go up in flames. Anyway, when she said being alone was the worst thing that could happen, she meant being single, no dance partner, like a coat hanging in the cloakroom after the joint shuts off the lights, nobody coming to claim you. The leopard print, the one with the velvet collar, please—it’s mine.

  She wasn’t afraid of the bogeyman. That was my issue.

  It started with a knock on the door. Which was a weird coincidence, because the tea-leaf reader on Tremont Street said someone was knocking on my door and that I should let him in, said she saw the letter G. But that was much later, when I was looking for love and had let my guard down. This time, someone was knocking on my door while I was sound asleep. Dreaming about having my picture taken. Flash, smile.

  Later, I would realize my picture actually was being taken, only to be stuffed ceremoniously in a shoebox hidden in the back of a closet.

  The knocking was incessant, rousing me from bed, so I went to the front door, mostly asleep, partly awake, totally naked, the door chain-locked from the inside.

  I was staring at the chain drawn across the door, hooked into its groove, and I knew for certain that somebody else had drawn that chain. Because I never chain-locked my door. My first thought was It’s a surprise party! I’ll just turn around, and a roomful of my friends will yell, “Surprise!” And then my second thought was, Oh, shit, I’m naked at my own surprise party. Which happens in a nightmare, right? But by then I was fully awake and it was not even dawn and it dawned on me that there was a surprise, but it wasn’t a party. Someone was in my apartment. And it wasn’t someone I knew.

  For one thing, I didn’t have any friends in that city anyway. I had been there only a few months. Columbus, Ohio. Middle America. They test new menu items at fast-food restaurants there: deep-fried cheese. My first job out of college, promo girl for a record distributor. They gave me a company car, an expense account, and moved me to Columbus. My father was so proud of me.

  “Don’t scream,” a voice from behind me said.

  I couldn’t scream, even if I tried. I had no voice. “Help me” came out as a breathless whimper. My legs Jell-O, I slipped to the ground.

  He picked me up by the skin of my back. Later, there would be bruises; I would have to lift my shirt and show them to the company representative they sent to check on me when I didn’t show up for work, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t cry. Visual proof: This happened. The bruises would fade. I didn’t know at the time that it would take years for the psychic damage to go away.

  He carried me like a kitten, the tips of my toes scraping across the carpet, and dumped me on my platform bed. Queen-size, white sheets, black satin comforter, a graduation gift from my mom. It had seemed excessive.

  “A double will be okay,” I had protested. “It’s just me.”

  But she had insisted, looking at me with something akin to longing, thinking, If only I had been born
in your generation, oh, the life I could’ve lived—the freedom, the career, the lovers, that body, my baby girl’s body. She was jealous of my youth and my independence. She did not envision me as a trophy in a box of photos.

  He was wearing a black leather jacket, leather gloves, and a ski mask. He climbed on top of me, pinned me down with the weight of his body, covered my mouth with one gloved hand, and propped himself up with the other, pressing against me. I was thinking, It doesn’t matter, it’s just a hole in my body, it won’t be so bad, I’ve had bad sex before, I’ve been raped before. That time, I knew the guy—he went to law school with my brother. We went to the movies, he spiked my Coke, and the next morning I woke up in his bed, cum between my legs. Afterward, when I asked my brother to come with me to see the dean and file a complaint, my brother said it was my fault—my skirt was too short, my pants too tight, my look too easy, the choices I made, blah blah.

  But this time it was a stranger in a ski mask grinding himself against me, and I was wondering what my brother would say I had done to encourage this. Also, it was taking too long. It was taking too long for my rapist to get hard. And that scared me more than his being there, in my bed, more than the idea of him inside me. It scared me that if he couldn’t get it up, things might get worse.

  He took his hand off my mouth and warned me not to scream.

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  He used his free hand to rub his dick between my legs but still couldn’t get hard. Maybe I’m a lousy rape, maybe I’m supposed to be more scared, maybe I’m supposed to have more fight in me, maybe I shouldn’t be so resigned. What if he gets angry? I don’t wanna die. “Please don’t kill me,” I begged. But he didn’t promise not to.

  And then I worried that if he didn’t get it up soon, he was gonna make me touch him, he was gonna make me use my mouth.

  My brother called me Mouth because I talked too much, said shit nice girls aren’t supposed to say. The rapist couldn’t get it up, and maybe I’d be able to laugh about this someday, but right then, real time, all I knew was, This is getting awkward. And when sex gets awkward, you need a cigarette. So I asked the rapist who couldn’t get an erection if he smoked, and he said yes.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” I asked, and he told me his cigarettes were in his pants, which were in the other room, so it was getting complicated. We were having this conversation like it was a date, because when a guy is rubbing his flaccid dick against you, it feels kind of intimate, his face so close to mine, though not his face, really—his head, covered by the ski mask. My hands wandered and touched the sides of his mask. I could feel his hair through the material, and considered ripping the mask off, just to see if I knew this guy, but then he’d have to kill me for sure. His pants were in the next room, and I realized he must have taken them off before he even woke me up. I saw his legs in the moonlight, and later, when the cops asked what color they were, I would say they were muscular and hairy.

  “Are you alone?” I asked him. He was lying on top of me, his mask-covered ear hovering next to my mouth. We were still negotiating the smoke. Like, maybe if he had a partner, his partner could bring him the cigarettes. “Do you have a gun?” My follow-up question—my mind was conjuring worst-case scenarios.

  He said “no” and then “yes.” He wasn’t alone, and he had a gun. He could have been lying—he was a rapist, after all. Again I promised not to scream, and he slid off me to go into the other room and get the cigarettes out of his pants pocket. I looked at the window and debated for a beat: Should I run or should I stay? What if he’s got a gun? He might shoot me in the back while I’m trying to escape. He might shoot me anyway, I thought. So I flew across the room and jumped out the window into a snowbank.

  When the cops came, they said I was lucky. They were sitting on my sofa, blue, faux Scandinavian modern, a hand-me-down from my sister.

  “Did the intruder do this?” one cop asked, like he was my dad, surveying the mess in my living room. There were records strewn all over the green shag, promo posters, a box of pizza … Maybe it was the pizza delivery guy, or the guy in line behind me at the drugstore the day before when the clerk asked for my photo ID. I wasn’t paying attention to him, but I could sense him, standing too close. It could have been anyone, really. He’d been wearing a ski mask.

  They called him an intruder on account of the fact that he was impotent, so he didn’t get to be called a rapist. But I don’t make such distinctions. Couldn’t tell them what color or size he was, either: black or white or brown, big or small. More distinctions I don’t make.

  “He was male,” I told them.

  “You were lucky,” the other cop said. They had been tracking this guy for a while; he was a serial rapist, and most of his victims got beaten up something awful. That’s when I realized that smoking saved my life. Which is funny. Not funny ha-ha, but dark funny.

  After the cops left me alone in my apartment complex, called the Shadows—you can’t make this shit up—I called my mom and told her what had happened. She asked if I was all right, and when I said yes, she believed me.

  “Gotta run—tennis with the girls. Nice chatting. I’ll call you tonight.”

  Of course she was concerned, but she didn’t offer to come to Ohio. So I decided to drive to Detroit. Right then. Couldn’t get there fast enough. On the way, the cops stopped me for speeding.

  “I’m trying to get home to my mother, Officer,” I said. “I was just raped.”

  The cop asked if I had reported it to the police, and I said yes. So he went back to his car and checked the records, and then he loomed at the window of my company car, a blue station wagon so I could cart all my promo posters and boxes of albums around with me. Cardboard stand-ups. Michael Jackson with the one glitter glove. Probably leather. Thriller? Bad? Dangerous? Not Invincible. Who knows? Who can remember? Details.

  The cop said the report didn’t say “rape”; it said “breaking and entering” and “sexual assault.” A technicality. He didn’t enter, not officially; he broke, though.

  And then the cop wrote me a ticket for going so fast, so far exceeding the speed limit, that I couldn’t simply pay it. It came with a mandatory court date in the middle of farm country somewhere between Ohio and Michigan.

  “You were lucky,” the cop said.

  “Yeah, so I’ve been told,” I replied. “Do you have a daughter?”

  When he said yes, I said, “I hope that someday she will be as lucky as I am.”

  And then I took the ticket and drove away. By then I didn’t want to go home to Mommy anymore, so I got off the freeway to turn around, somewhere in the middle of middle America, between Columbus and Detroit, and it was March. The ground was mucky. I was driving zombie, following a road that turned into a dirt path before it countrified into muddy tractor tracks winding around a farm, until I saw taillights again. It was a straight shot in front of me, only I was about five feet above the freeway, and between the freeway and me was a ditch. I tried to back up, but there was no way I could stay on the tracks in reverse the whole way back to the road, so instead I decided to gun it and fly like Supergirl, fully expecting to land on the highway and keep right on going, like in the movies. But I am not Supergirl, and the car landed in the ditch. It would have been funny if the same cop who had given me a ticket for not being raped, showed up to give me another ticket, this time for driving while in shock, but instead a truck full of farm boys pulled over, picked up my car, and set it right. Maybe chivalry isn’t dead after all.

  When I got home, I put “I Shall Be Released” on the stereo. It was on the turntable nonstop when my boyfriend broke up with me freshman year—well, not exactly broke up, just stopped coming around, stopped scratching at my door. This would be a great song to play at my memorial, I thought. And then I got a yellow legal pad and started creating a memorial mix for myself in case I died young, or went to Hollywood and got a job as the person who made soundtracks for movies. My playlist began to take shape. “I Shall Be Released,”
Nina Simone. “It Isn’t Gonna Be That Way,” Steve Forbert. “Ghost Dance,” Patti Smith Group. “Heaven,” the Psychedelic Furs.

  And then I quit my job and moved back home—to Detroit. In a stroke of either genius or super-bad parenting, my mother and father sold their house out from under me, forcing me to find my own place. Maybe they thought if they let me move back in, I would never leave. They were probably right, so I rented a duplex. It had two floors and a low-tech security system. At night I lined the windowsills and stairs with empty cans and jars, in case of an intruder. And then I pulled a trunk across my bedroom door, barricading myself inside. I didn’t have a gun, so I slept with a hammer. I reasoned that I might not actually be able to stick a knife in someone’s heart, but I could most certainly smash his head in with a hammer.

  A year later, like the lady in the turban said, Gee knocked on my door and I let him in. He seemed harmless.

  UNTETHERED

  Two girls with dirty blond hair and trashy clothes were bumping and grinding onstage. This was Gee’s idea for date night, so I let him run with it. So much of the personal side of our married life has always been handled by me: dinner plans; birthday parties; off-the-grid, thatch-roof, beachy vacations. I was the one who made a house a home, but our home was in Los Angeles and we were living in a fourth-floor walk-up in Paris. It was me who found us the newly renovated, centuries-old building with tons of windows and a cross-breeze in the heart of the Marais. There had been another apartment in the same building with a loft that promised privacy and romance.

  “It’s over our budget,” Gee grumbled.

  I begged him to push for the bigger place, but Gee didn’t want to make waves. Gee is not a bigheaded, self-pumping American guy. That’s why he’s so successful abroad: because he doesn’t intimidate people. In the States, he’s easy to underestimate; overseas, he’s got this unassuming thing going for him. A few years into the gig, he admitted that we could have gotten the bigger apartment if only he’d negotiated harder. So many lessons learned in Paris. Sharing one bathroom with two kids was the price we paid for Gee’s not understanding the value of a romantic loft and private loo. There were other prices, other debts paid in Paris. Date night was one of them.