Richard came by, and I opened the door halfway and peered out. This was partially because I did not want him to see the cinnamon-scented filth in which Sybil and I lived, and partially because I was still wearing his clothes.
“She’s not here, Rick,” I said, too nastily. He’d always hated any variation of the name Richard, explaining that they all seemed like rings in a personal pervert hell. Rick, Ricky, Dickie, Rich, Ritchie, each more infantile and suspect than the last, like a police lineup of guys hanging around a library bathroom. This time he seemed not to mind at all, or to even notice.
“I’m just bringing the mail,” he said, easing a thick stack of envelopes secured with a black hair elastic through the crack in the door. He was dressed for work in his blue coveralls and steel-toed boots from Wal-Mart. He’d shaved and his hair was combed neatly, and I wasn’t certain why these small details seemed so threatening to me personally. Maybe without responsibility men were free to comb their hair more often. Maybe adultery was good for the complexion. I had wanted him to hurt the way my friend was hurting, and the way that I had hurt in empathy, living in such close quarters with the moist-eyed cautionary tale of her.
“Pay your own bills, for Christ’s sake.”
“I always do, Easy. This is mainly just the demand notices from Teen Vogue. I’m not paying those.”
“Whatever,” I said, and when he stalled for a moment I felt for sure that it was my Gloria Gaynor moment to Defend All Women. “She’s not coming back, you know.”
“Yes, I know.” Then he yawned, “Thank god we never had children.”
Thank god we never had children, said partially as a yawn.
“Yes,” I answered, quickly and dumbly, “Thank god, for her!”
“Yeah,” said Richard, not caring enough to be defensive, in a bland and tired way, “The guys from your show have been coming around and calling. I think there’s a letter or two in there from them.”
“My show?”
“Yeah, that … thing. That show you used to be on, that outer space thing. I told them you didn’t have a phone anymore and I tried to remember the address of this place. I remembered the name but I couldn’t remember the apartment number. I think I gave them 33.”
“No, that’s a shut-in,” I said, “one of them, anyway.” We had a few. One was a guy too heavy to leave his apartment, another thought that UPS trucks were monitoring his activity. One lady had a shit-ton of dolls in her apartment and was always having tea parties with them and playing the soundtrack to Man of La Mancha super loudly. The Aloha Terrace really catered to the mentally ill and emotionally bereft, which is why Sybil and me were drawn to it in the first place. Also, they were the only place in town that didn’t threaten to check credit histories.
“Yeah. So,” said Richard. “They said get in touch with them, that it’s pretty urgent.”
“Do I owe them money?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. The one guy with the comb-over …”
“Isaac.”
“Yes, Isaac. He said something about when filming was starting.”
“They probably want me to fucking sign off on something,” I said, bare toes working angrily at the greenly defeated shag of our carpet. The door had opened wider as we talked, a thing I noticed in a weirdly tidal way, as though it had moved on its own.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Just thought you might want to know.”
“Thank you.”
We stood there for a second, pregnant with strangeness. I wondered if he could look at me and know I’d eaten his penis in effigy as an inappropriate cake, if he could see the butter cream phallus in my eyes, laid out and quivering on our coffee table like some kind of ritual sacrifice. I wanted him to say something to me about his relationship with Sybil, to be vulnerable enough to do that even though I myself had lumped him in with such men as Scott Peterson and the old guy from that one bird show who’d brought his gun to a diner while eating with his wife and then denied shooting her. It seemed circular to me, even though I had never known Richard very well, only in the casually over-sharing way that a wife will discuss her husband in front of other women. I knew that once he’d gone to the doctor to get “black wax” drained from both ears. I knew that Sybil often popped whiteheads on his back, and that his semen was bitter when he ate pulled pork, sweet when he ate cantaloupe. It occurred to me standing there that I did not know his middle name.
I said, “Sybil is not doing well.”
“She was never doing well.”
“She misses you is what I’m saying. She’s not doing well.”
He paused and looked away, blowing out air. I saw him choosing to be kind. “You don’t really know anything about my marriage.”
“I know that my friend is hurting. I know that you took vows, and I know that those vows did not include a receptionist at a fucking body shop.”
“Well,” said Richard, “then you really don’t know anything about anything else, either. If Sybil is mad or she has anything to say to me, have her come around. She knows where I live.”
“It’s like you don’t even want to work things out, is the worst thing. You never gave her the chance to forgive you.”
And at that Richard didn’t seem to be thinking that kind was the best way to go with this. He kept his cool, I will give him that, which is more than I could say for most men faced with their wife’s ignorant best friend berating them in a slum hallway while also wearing that man’s clothes.
“I do not choose to forgive her, is the point.” He said, “and this is not a conversation that I want to be having.”
He did this little half salute with two fingers against his forehead that seemed both sad and funny at the same time, and then I was sorry I had called him Rick. He was a sad person at the periphery of my life; he’d let me stay in his house for almost nothing, he’d trusted me with his computer and stereo equipment and even his car. He’d always had a very communal snack policy, even where ice cream was concerned.
As he was walking away I leaned my head out and said, “I will make sure to get all your clothes to you,” and to this he only half-turned, not stopping.
“Keep ’em!” he called, over his shoulder like a summer blonde. The clothes, it seemed, were like his wife, part of something old and smothering as burlap and in shedding them he was shedding everything. There was no place in his new life, it seemed, for three wolves and a moon, or an Old Navy pick-up truck, or cargo shorts with poorly treated bloodstains at the crotches.
He took the stairs and not the elevator, his work boots clicking off the steps like the happiest of music.
3.
SEEING RICHARD HAD MADE ME MISS HARRISON. THE IDEA OF A clean man coming to the door with mail, aside from the mailman, had just tugged me in all sorts of directions, and I settled sadly with my stack of mail by the door until Sybil came home smelling of Dawn—which made a poodle whiter than anything—and wet dog.
“Richard was here,” I said.
“Richard is here?” said Sybil, clawing fingers through her hair like a homeless woman who’s heard that Brad Pitt is in the area. “Where? In the can?”
“Was. He was here.”
“Oh,” said Sybil, looking off mournfully in the direction of the bathroom.
In the weeks since they’d split it had been easier to configure a case against my old friend as co-conspirator in the demise of her own marriage. She’d often been cruel to Richard, pointing out his lack of hair and earning power, the shit stains in his underwear and the wadded white tissues she would find in the bed several times a week in stiffly blooming puffs, all of which happened while I was in earshot. She had disliked any sort of real romance or emotion, choosing instead to turn it into a joke or ask him whether or not he was high. They never got the other’s input on their whereabouts; they’d walked in and out on each other as roommates. Once, Sybil had even suggested that she and I share the master bedroom and Richard take my smaller room at the front of the house, enticing me with such bonuses as a
mini-fridge and all night Patrick Swayze marathons. In the end, it had been me who’d pulled the plug on that particular dream. A line had been crossed that had nothing to do with me, and sharing a room with Sybil would have felt too much like rolling about in the crime scene of a marriage, trying on all the clothes and scenarios like some ghoulish Goldilocks.
I loved Sybil, of course, it was just that I could understand not wanting to be married to her.
“What did he say?” she asked now, her face horrible with expectation, and I could only shrug and hold out our mail in a fan like lottery tickets.
“That ass,” said Sybil. She scanned the letters quickly and then whipped them to the ground as though they were on fire. I actually half expected her to jump up and down on them.
The letter on top was from Isaac Barris, his sticky alphabet-like primitive little huts too influenced by the forces of nature. As Sybil tromped off into the kitchen to swear and splash cold water on her face, I opened the envelope and read:
Dear Kiddo,
How have you been, lol? I have been trying to call but it seems you guys don’t answer your phone lol. I should come by but you know our last conversation wasn’t on the best of terms, haha.
He spoke that way, too, inappropriate laughter scattered like oversized croutons. It made it really hard to talk to him in any venue, even over the phone. In fact, just reading his letter made me want to wash my hands.
But I could use the walk, lol!
That was deliberate. I had made light of his weight problem when we’d last spoken but, in my defense, he’d just uttered the words, “Well, there are crow’s feet and then there are crow’s feet.”
We sure miss you a lot down here, despite the things that were said or thrown, and you may wanna sit down, lol, because have I got some news for you.
It Came from Beyond had been picked to run primetime Thursdays on the Syfy Channel, and although the budget would be bigger, it would continue to shoot out of Troubadour to save money. (“Plus I’m too fat for Hollywood’s standards, lol!”) Most shocking of all, my fans (my nerds, my people) had come to my defense with a letter-writing campaign to the president of Viacom. It was my old ass they wanted dancing inappropriately with men dressed as Japanese Monkey Aliens, not Helen from Marketing’s twenty-one-year-old second cousin with implants. Mine. And as much as my joy was tempered with the fear of having stuffed every cream-filled thing within a thirty-mile radius into my mouth over the previous six weeks, I felt proud of myself and looked forward to bleeding money out of Isaac until he squealed like a pig.
“I know that we’ve had our differences, Easy, but this is such a fantastic opportunity for all of us! The quality of art we can create! Can you even imagine?!”
He closed with his phone number and a bit about me getting my “game-face” on for an upcoming convention in downtown Troubadour, which I guess meant that my eating habits had not been a secret around town. I often left O’Bannon’s with a roast chicken under one arm and an Italian sheet cake under the other. It was cheaper than therapy, and I did not have health insurance.
Sybil poked her head in from the kitchen, eyes punched-puffy from crying. “Wanna binge tonight?” she asked, holding out a fistful of bills like a sad and scrubby bouquet. “I did two St. Bernards and got a bunch of tips.”
“I can’t, man,” I said, thinking of a convention, the mournful pageantry of it, Klingon weddings, group solitude, ironic t-shirts as far as the eye could see. “It’s bad for business.”
I LOST A GOOD DEAL OF WEIGHT AFTER SIGNING WITH ICFB! FOR THE SECond time. Actually, an unreasonable amount of weight, something like twenty pounds when there had only been maybe six to lose, and it had wizened me and made me more than a little goofy, and I came off more as Hunter S. Thompson in the desert than Ann-Margret. I reacted strongly to sudden noises; a headache curled constantly in my left temple like a grub had left my eyes wild, broken as yolks. Still, the people from Syfy had all but cheered when they saw me, resting, I guess, on the notion that they should have kept a twenty-one-year-old in the wings.
THEY SENT ME TO BE TANNED AND WAXED ON SYFY’S BILL; IN THE END I was baked and bare, defenseless as a squab. I had long drool-strips of blonde in my hair, and platinum extensions, and they’d put me on some kind of eye drops that had turned my lashes into rough, spiky fern-like entities that threatened to pierce my eyeballs like toothpicks through cocktail onions.
I took my advance and moved out of The Aloha Terrace, and, of course, Sybil was distraught. Two deserters in two months was too much for her, even though I left all the pathetic furniture and a bit of cash, to boot. For me, it was a sad (but easy) decision. As much affection as I had for Sybil, the kooky Laverne & Shirley-ness of our relationship had really strained its boundaries since we’d moved into The Aloha Terrace. I had not known, for instance, that she liked to walk around naked after work, often while having long, animated conversations on the phone. She, conversely, did not know that I sometimes listened to death rock and cried. These were uncomfortable topics to broach. We parted ways with tentative, awkward humor, like when you have to tell a salesman that after three hours and countless pairs of loafers you couldn’t afford to spend four hundred dollars on shoes, and then ask for a balloon from the children’s department.
I put a down payment on a four-bedroom cottage in the nicer part of Troubadour, near where the library was before it was turned into a cockfighting ring. It had once been a library, anyway, and that subdued my raging ego like a tonic. I still don’t know what I assumed I was going to do with three extra bedrooms at the time, keep a harem? But I was sad and starving and never prone to good decisions, and I’d decided that the house should be mine. It was blue and white and pretty beat up and even before stepping inside I had made peace with the fact that it would stay that way. The front yard was enclosed with this horrid sort of Blair Witchy fence, just slabs of unfinished wood pieced together in the most haphazard way like a train track of toothpicks. It was damn near folk art. It made my heart undulate strangely in my chest like something broken or breaking, a wiggly tooth connected to a doorknob by floss.
It was three short blocks to The Troubadour Center, with its anchor shops of O’Bannon’s supermarket on one end and Señor Squawk’s on the other. Señor Squawk’s was a Mexican restaurant overseen by a colorful parrot in a sombrero. I guess he was left the restaurant in a will, or something. All’s I know is that if you guessed how many sunflower seeds he could eat in one sitting you got free nachos. And they had margaritas you could bathe in. So, yes, that factored deeply into my house scouting decisions. I enjoyed the idea of a leisurely walk down to the Troubadour Center to eat burritos under the watchful eye of an obese bird, even though Troubadour did not have actual sidewalks, just a few littered feet of dirt that separated the homes from traffic and turned into a brownish slop from October to April. Even this was enchanting to me. For some magical reason, when it rained, magnet numbers and letters would rise to the top of the muck and settle there like night crawlers, and then you’d pick them out and carry them home, where you would clean them up and affix them to your fridge and rearrange them constantly looking for signs from God or your future husband or the mole people or whatever. And sometimes a person would push a couch out of his or her house and just leave it there where the sidewalk should have been, and that was good luck, to see that. But it was only good luck if you were walking, since of course to see a couch while driving by seemed no great feat. You couldn’t see the wine stains, say. You couldn’t appreciate the weave of the upholstery.
I was in love with my house and with my town. Of course I guess I should’ve known that something big was going to happen. A girl can’t just love a town that hard without something getting in the way of it. That just isn’t how shit works.
IN MY NEW CONTRACT I HAD A MANAGER/PERSONAL ASSISTANT/MAKEUP artist named Sally Brawn, although after meeting her I, like everyone else, called her Sally Balls. She was always dressed in red, which seemed a natural defense of
sorts, and she had a chemically vanilla scent about her like a car freshener, the kind of smell meant to mask other kinds of smells. It reminded me of living at Aloha Terrace with Sybil and not being able to afford the coin-op wash machines downstairs. We would often Febreze the crotches of our panties and jeans, which sometimes resulted in a nasty sort of yeast infection we enjoyed calling ‘poppin fresh.’ Sally Balls scared me in the way that most people I assume would have me killed for money scare me. It was as though the entire cast of It Came from Beyond! had drawn straws to choose their managers and I had been the one to come up Sally, who had seven ex-husbands, who picked her teeth with her press-on nails, who, at least once that I know of, drank Brut when no other alcohol was available.
She’d driven me to the convention center in her red VW Bug, speaking angrily on the phone the entire time with her latest ex-husband, Ferdinand. I had once made the mistake of mentioning that I liked that name, as it reminded me of the children’s book about the bull. Sally had reacted badly to that.
She Came From Beyond! Page 3