by Lynn Crosbie
“Well, hello,” she said, as I looked up at her hairless pussy, and he groaned.
We stood up, and after a long, fraught pause, I said, “You were really good in Makin’ Mr. Right.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I liked you in Stealing My Boyfriend!”
“I’m not your boyfriend,” he said, and since he was looking at both of us, everyone scattered.
Oh my God, the crying.
Devon and I wept at my kitchen table while Franco paced back and forth, not crying as much as raging.
Every time he tried to talk, we would interrupt.
“You met my father!”
“You asked me to watch a DIY art film!”
Finally, he slapped his hand on the table.
“Listen! I did like you, Devon, but I met someone else. And that’s it.”
“Your skull looks deformed when you shave your head!” I said, and he kneeled down and said, “You. I met you.”
“Oh,” I said, stunned. It was hard to shake off the anger: I hadn’t even gotten to The Interview.
“You fucking bitch!” Devon tore out of the room, tearing Psy off the wall and kicking over a chair on her way out.
I followed his eyes to the gap in the wall.
“That’s some glory hole,” he said, smiling.
Fully Rise of the Planet of the Apes James Franco.
Glorious.
On Night Six, we never left my bed, even though Devon came back in at some point, and walked out with all my shampoo and conditioner.
Devon would prove to be a problem, but I was so happy she was gone, I dropped the guard I had worn my whole life.
James Franco in Milk photographed and texted me constantly: I even let him film us in bed. Sick passion is like that.
In one text he is shirtless, holding Joan the bear.
U knew?
Ha ha.
fml.
He walked over in his black boxers and a matching silk robe, and walked right in.
“I copied your key,” he said, still holding Joan, who got lost under a strata of blankets as we fucked like superstars.
I woke up when he loudly said, “Don’t leave.”
I pinched him.
“I was dreaming I met my soul,” he said irritably, and fell back asleep as I bit my expensive nails, and stared at him, wondering how it is that one keeps beauty’s wanton attention.
At the end of Week One, he became preoccupied with his show.
His place was covered in equipment, rolled-up prints, tubs of deep red paint, and a bizarre amount of home furnishings.
Having copied his key, I let myself in that afternoon, and heard him on his phone.
“Best performance ever,” he said, and laughed.
He listened, and said, morosely, “It’s not easy.”
I started to panic and walk backwards.
He saw me.
“Honey!” he said, throwing his phone on the ground.
It took me a while to thaw: the call had spooked me.
“You’re so cold,” he teased when I wouldn’t return his kiss.
“Only on the outside,” I said. “I’m melted slush on the inside.”
“I understand that,” he said. “I’m shy, but everyone thinks —”
“— that’s crazy?” I said, mentioning Pineapple Express. “Even your pants aren’t shy in that movie,” I said, and he got up and locked himself in the bathroom.
I broke in with a hammer and screwdriver and found him sitting on the edge of the tub with his head in his heads.
“I am shy!” he said, his eyes squeezing out fat-bottomed tears.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, daubing each one away as he told me about having no friends as a kid, and roaming around the playground, standing at the edges of different groups to at least look like he knew someone. And about a teacher who made him talk about Animal Farm in front of the class, where he promptly pissed his pants.
I countered with my own stories, and said, “Maybe we’re more like those matryoshka dolls, shy and bold and sad, and the undivided one at the bottom is —”
“— a hard little bastard,” he said, and we shook on it.
But in bed, he called me his “small, soft bird.”
As we got closer, I felt we were two incomplete transparencies, forming a whole, perfect picture.
Hours later, I tried to explain to him how his smile reminded me of a Ring Lardner story (which it turned out he knew), and of the Gateway Arch upside down. Of Christ kicking a hole into the ice palace of heaven, with one huge, bleeding foot.
“Your tits are like melons,” he said, which I am embarrassed to admit made me cum harder.
I looked at his phone later: he had been talking to his mom.
On Day Nine, he said he had to work, so I wrote copy for the e-crack pipe we were now advertising (called Base Free) and watched YouTube videos of General Hospital, or him as “Franco,” the performance artist and sexy villain.
I had seen all of his movies by then, but this performance was the best.
He was in full cherry-lipped, pretty/rough boy mode, variously banging a boring girl with a hideous tramp stamp, offering red M&M’s to guests, and delivering his stiff lines with bemused, sweet conviction.
I screen-capped his artwork, and reluctantly watched his death scene.
Through my tented hands: a thick blond man points a gun at him, and he cautiously tries to dissuade him.
Bad-assedly!
The gunman yells, “Why did you let me find you?”
Franco lets loose a litany of enigmas, culminating in, “Maybe I was too lazy to change my underwear today. Maybe my finale will be the beginning of something worse for you.”
But he gets shot anyway, right in the heart.
He falls against his graffiti-covered studio wall, bleeding blackberries from his mouth.
The DNA results from the epithelial cells I swabbed from his mouth with a Q-tip while he was sleeping had returned this morning.
I was 100 percent in love with James Franco, Palo Alto native, painter, and teacher. The lab tech who ran the sample scrawled a note on the bottom of the report, begging for his phone number.
I watched him die again and again, sick at heart.
Because he and I were obviously one of his performances, and I didn’t even care.
James Franco, poet, sent me a quatrain on the ninth night as the sun set:
I told her that the snow had started to fall
In carved bone and cold clockworks
She looked at me, saying nothing
Her vein-blue eyes opened
Like doorways. I tasted the ocean of blood they let
Loose, that flowed between us like a covenant
Her hands are filled with the tiny animals she means to save.
Like me, I say, inaudibly.
I don’t get it, I wrote back. But it sounds scary, so it’s okay.
Tx, he answered. How was I supposed to know the poem was the “work” he had been doing all day?
That he had sat at his desk with a legal pad, writing and redacting and balling up sheet after sheet; that he called David Trinidad and Carolyn Forché, who walked him through “For Pixie” until he could let it go?
“It’s a draft,” Trinidad had said. “And it’s more about the feeling: she’ll love it.”
I did not, and he knew it.
He promised himself, he told me later, to try harder.
I wish I could have seen this determination fill his Jesus-fish-shaped eyes.
Later, on the poem-night, Edward invited me to his place for the first time.
It was largely empty, barring a subcontinent-sized bed, and a big wooden table crammed with computer and film equipment, a projector, and hundreds of handwritten sticky notes making a pink cancer of the desk surface.
“Is that the Tay Tay stuff?” I said, and he smirked.
“I’m redoing the whole show,” he said.
I was fairly nauseated with my knowledge that
he was the real James Franco, dressed in Sonny-style tight white jeans and a black Rodeo Drive T-shirt.
I even snapped up a sticky paper he had covered with ladybugs and pocketed it, then tried to escape dumb-fan mode.
“What’s it about now?” I said, examining my long, baby blue nails.
“You,” he said. “It’s called Little Snowfall.”
“Oh. What?” I sat on the floor, and stared up at him, my eyes resting on his meat-packed crotch.
“Yeah, and I have to make all new stuff. I’m keeping this, though,” he said, showing me a short film of us kissing in slo-mo under a veil of big soft flakes.
We are standing by the gates of Trinity Bellwoods Park, with six tiny dogs in matching varsity jackets he agreed to walk for Chud, the old man below us.
I am shining in a long crimson coat and high black ankle boots, my hair rising like a kite against his dark wool coat. His head is buried in my neck at the pulse.
He had added a short soundtrack, Lakmé spliced with Led Zeppelin, and a poem that crawled the screen’s bottom:
She is the best of he, hissing in her sleep/You take the toy truck
& stuff it somewhere deep: Gloria mundi.
“Honey, that actually happened to me,” I said, remembering the camo-truck my dad had given me as a going-away present when he went away with his pneumatic receptionist and never came back.
I had thrown it at his fat argyle back.
“I guessed. I know what you like,” he said, handing me a bag filled with Tom Ford lipsticks, Violet Fatale, Cherry Lush, and Casablanca; a bird’s nest, a bottle of Mitsouko; a switchblade and a copy of The Red Badge of Courage.
And a Solo in the Spotlight Barbie, NRFB.
I used my new knife to free her, and held her to my face.
“Who are you?” I said, and he said, “Franco.”
The performance artist!
I let him manoeuvre me to the giant bed, where we remained for hours and hours of blinding kisses and raw, screaming sex.
Somewhere in the middle of my third orgasm, I told him how good he made me feel, and he looked at me like The Sound and the Fury Franco, nodded curtly, and staring down, his eyes empty, lucent brown and serene.
We were sex fiends for each other, if you must know.
He was funny and dirty and tender-hearted: I began to feel like some undead monster, its need intact and ravenous.
“Be the psycho boyfriend,” I would plead as he bit each of my vertebrae, leaving violet bruises.
“Tell little daddy-man that you want the felt rope,” he demanded in a high, adenoidal voice.
“Do it,” he demanded, as I laughed and complied; as he trussed and cannibalized me.
Sometimes I would be the trashy, jealous girlfriend and smell him, demanding to know, “Is that my sister on yew?”
During this painful, liquid period, we became experts at filthy improv, and never breaking the fourth, porn-film-screening wall.
He even came to my work.
No one recognized him: he was holding a bunch of daisies and wearing a hoodie, and Sara just waved him to my office.
“I may like you,” he said, sitting uneasily in one of the white bucket chairs.
I looked up from a board filled with shots of scratchers and grain alcohol.
“Oh,” I said.
“How do you feel?”
I thought about something he had said, about sincere love breathing and growing like bread dough in a bowl.
Anxiously: there is too much ugliness inside me.
Images filled my head: a fast, shaky montage of blind, deformed creatures; the face of my dying mother, as I closed the door and left her; a knife slicing the hand of a man who insulted me at a party; his mouth, open, and bawling.
Me, fast-forwarding through Spring Breakers.
“I like you too,” I said, taking the daisies, and then him.
We opened the windows and companionably held hands as the winter sun fell in its beheading.
I had no idea what was about to happen, and how badly it would hurt.
Oz the Great and Powerful Franco woke me up on the tenth day and pushed a tabloid newspaper at me: JAMES FRANCO’S TWISTED NIGHTS WITH THIS MAN!
Devon was interviewed in the feature story, which was accompanied by a seriously unflattering picture of me and another shot, showcasing my meds.
“I have nothing against the LGBT community,” she is quoted as saying. “But these two are revolting. James Franco is a liar and he needs to set the record straight.”
The article called us both “freaks,” and enlarged a freckle on my inner elbow, captioning it “TRACK MARK!”
It suggested, further, that he was “on a sickening downward spiral,” and that his “friends and family” were “very concerned.”
An unnamed source said, “I don’t think this guy IS James. And there’s no way he’d be serious about this girl.”
I jumped up, gathered my clothes, and went to my place to sit in the bathtub with my heart in my throat.
I stayed there, while he knocked, again and again, and called. I couldn’t stop shaking: the article had also quoted a friend of his, a famous guy, who said that James Franco and I were nothing but a conceptual project and a joke.
My secrets were catching up with me.
Under the water, my hair spread into two blood-red jets.
I heard his apartment door close with a bang.
I woke up alone on the eleventh day, after reaching for him, but I found nothing but a pillow, still emanating the cheap, potent cologne he wore, Bijan Nude for Men, and the ineffable meaty and sweet smell that lived inside him.
I spent the whole day at the office, jumping every time my phone chimed, but he didn’t call.
Everyone avoided me, even though copies of the tabloid filled the office.
I distracted myself with vetting copy, and meeting with the design team about Baby Bender, a whisky bottle–shaped sippy cup for enormous kids.
I OK’d the image of a drunk infant strapped into the back seat of a police cruiser, checked my phone, then buried myself in the high-end magazines that covered my cubicle.
It was Jason, the office cad, who had the audacity to page me, “Mrs. Franco? Mrs. Franco, we have your padded bra at reception.”
You know the Flat Block Marina scene in A Clockwork Orange, when Alex suddenly turns on his gang, and slo-mo attacks them, kicking two into the water?
When I found Jason, it was that kind of ballet, that kind of grace that found him landing fifteen feet from the front desk and in the centre of what we called the Town Square.
Sara, the receptionist, despised Jason, and quickly helped me clean him up and prop him in front of the entrance to the Ladies’ Room.
One of the VPs came out and asked if I was all right.
“Blood,” Sara mouthed, pointing to my face.
“Barbecue sauce,” I said, licking my lips and letting my hair curtain me.
Jason had three broken ribs, it turned out, and a scar on his face that would never fade.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it made him a better person.
He started wearing skirts to work, and apologized with a Gorilla-gram that scared the hell out of me.
I cried on the morning of the twelfth day.
He hadn’t texted or called or written, let alone hearted the Instagram selfie I posted, of myself topless, my hair streaming over me, and long, spidery false eyelashes splayed beneath my right eye, the other fluttering above.
He wasn’t home or at the pool or any of the places we liked: the Saigon Flower, Fresh, the Dunright Inn, or the Cadillac Lounge, where we had gone to see Whiskey Jack’s tribute to Stompin’ Tom late on Night Seven, a show that mystified him completely.
We had wound up on the leopard-skin make-out couch in the back, where I now stood, stroking its back as if it were a great sleeping cat, drinking shots of bourbon, and telling the skeptical waitress every detail of my romance.
I ate fries o
ut of a plastic bag on the walk home, ignoring the lewd remarks about my outfit: his redolent Van Lear Rose T-shirt, panties; thigh-high, needle-nosed boots; and a long velvet coat that flew open as I walked.
“You look like a sexy bat!” a construction worker said. I stopped, then thought, “Not bad.”
There was an envelope on my door when I got home.
A letter on lined paper inside.
“My dear Miss Pixie Belle, I am working on my show and I am sorry I haven’t been able to reach you. I came by but I must have missed you. There are things to talk about,
“Yours, Franco.”
That night I forgot to wonder why he didn’t buy another phone, or use someone else’s, or why he wasn’t at MOCCA when I checked.
I made tomato soup, poured it into two bowls, and set the table, eating across from the letter that was resting on an enormous pillow, facing me.
Day Thirteen.
When I got to work, my boss called me into his office, and I was sure I was going to be fired. My attendance was bad; my ideas scared him. But instead, he wanted to capitalize on my love affair.
He had given it some thought, he told me, and he wanted me to record a PSA for trans-girl estrogen users, given their “cancer risk,” he said.
“We want to call it ‘Love Drug,’” he said.
“You want me to push drugs, using my broken heart?” I said.
“Well. Yes,” he said, quite vigorously.
“It’s a concept I admire,” I told him. “But — I can’t. My aunts died of breast cancer. Older women will look at me and think they just need to stick on a patch to fuck a movie star.”
“Oh Jesus, that’s brilliant copy,” my boss said.
“Then go ahead and use it. But not me.”
I swept out, and sat with Sara.
We played Who Wore It Worse? with the staff and visitors.
The winner stormed in wearing pigtails, cut-off overalls with an elastic belt, combat boots, and a repugnant Canada Goose coat.
It was Devon. The insane narc.
“Let’s go,” she said, and I followed her to the Brazen Head, put my pillbox hat on the table, and adjusted my matching suit.
We ordered Budweiser, which the feral-looking waitress — with a tattoo that said “I does it so it felt like Hell” written, ludicrously, down her forearm — sneered at.
“You’re mad at your tattoo artist, not me,” I said, then turned to Devon and said, “What?”