by Lynn Crosbie
She drained half her pint and replied, “I have loved James Franco for three years.”
“So?”
“So, he doesn’t love me! I slipped him a roofie once and he still wouldn’t fuck me.”
“Aaand?”
“He wants you,” she said, gesturing to Dumb Sylvia Plath for another round.
“Not after what you did,” I said, waking up from the semi-freeze of two days and sizing her up. I could lift her chair and —
“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling and finishing my beer.
“You should be. I don’t know what to do,” I said, feeling defeat fill me like cyanide gas.
“He likes honesty,” she said.
“I can do that,” I said, as a perfectly formed plan appeared in my head, wrapped in licorice whips.
“Still,” I said. “Why are you still here and why am I not hurting you?”
“I mostly live with my parents in Ajax,” she said. “The roles are drying up. And I’m a bleeder,” she added nervously.
“Ajax,” I said sadly, placing my hand over hers.
“You poor dumb bitch.”
I went to Metro and bought ingredients for his favourite meal, which he had told me about while fucking me against my pulsating washing machine: macaroni and cheese and cherry pie.
I picked up the pink tulips he liked, then had three new rows added to my hair, making it waist-length, and blown out at 4 Your Hair Extensions, while bitching in Amharic about the things we do for men.
At 100 Vintage I squeezed into a black, off-the-shoulder, panne velvet dress with long Morticia sleeves and Miu Miu heels, walked outside and into one of the cabs that followed me around the neighbourhood.
It was Saleem, one of my favourite drivers.
I told him what had happened, and while he liked my plan to fill my place with the Mylar balloons I had ordered and seduce him —
“I’m going to get a ring on him,” I said, snapping open the velvet box my intern had picked up at Tiffany’s.
“It’s beautiful,” Saleem said, admiring the platinum band. “But why this man never call you?”
“Because, well. He left the note.”
“A note,” he said sadly, and suddenly nothing had changed.
At home, I climbed into my bed and lay on my side, barely breathing.
The ingredients and flowers sat on the counter, dying in increments.
I turned on the TV.
Eat, Pray, Love was on. At some point I got up and made the pie filling, and ate it as I watched him act sad (he told me he didn’t have to act) while kissing Julia Roberts.
Another note appeared.
MEET ME AT THE BLUE LAGOON.
Our name for the pool.
I thought about it. I still wanted to hurt him. But I remade my face, shook out my hair, and stalked to the elevator in a leopard sari, matching heels, and bikini.
James Dean-Franco was backpaddling when I arrived and crossed my arms.
He whistled, ineptly, and swam to the ladder, shaking his head.
When he reached up, I dropped my robe, kicked off my shoes, and dove in.
We swam in silence for a while. Ultraviolence seeped in from the custodian’s room, and after a while he seized my hand and inched me back to the ladder.
His pupils seem vertical when he’s excited; his trunks distended as though he were shoplifting a log.
“Listen,” he said, divesting me of my suit in one second flat.
“No,” I said weakly, and let him tear into me, feeling this pain as another; memorizing his beautiful, wolfish face for the lonely days that never fail to come.
He cursed when he was done, and collapsed against me.
I pushed him off and quickly grabbed my stuff, leaving my suit floating in the pool.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said as I crammed my feet into my shoes.
“I called you a fucking hundred times,” he said.
I paused, remembering.
On the tenth, tabloid, day, I drank absinthe when I went home, filtered through a cube of sugar and a 30 mg OxyContin.
I took pictures in the bath when I noticed that my hair looked like blood.
There are gaps after that, but I went to the Rogers on King, where the guys replaced the soaking wet phone instantly, and asked me to go to the Wheat Sheaf, where they showed me off like a trophy as I called a hundred wrong numbers I thought were him.
“Oh,” I said. I looked at my phone settings, and saw that the guys had given me a new number, IAM-SMKNHOT.
He was out of the pool and standing beside me, furious.
“Look. What was I supposed to do?”
He kept yelling until I felt smaller and smaller. When I was a little “boy” and being tormented, I used to imagine I was a microbe, and disappear into its invisible, lush green tininess.
I was a grown woman now, I realized, as I felt his angry words pelt my ears.
“You were supposed to stand up for me! And tell your people that the story was, however horribly presented, true!”
Now he looked small.
“I don’t believe in drawing lines between reality and illusion,” he said, reaching for a towel.
“What, so you are Oz?”
“Zizek says fantasy should not be interpreted, but traversed. He talks about a ‘traumatic kernel’ —”
“We are not a fantasy.”
“As far as everyone else is concerned, we are.”
“I think that all of your coyness about your sexuality is just a derivative of fear. Fear of being ordinary, or fear of not being ordinary.”
His eyes flashed. I had gone too far.
We were two strangers, shaking with cold and anger on a turquoise-tiled floor.
“… I know what you’ll do,” the song bleated.
“I dated Lana Del Rey,” he said defiantly.
I pushed him into the pool.
Enough.
James Franco’s show opened on the fourteenth day.
It was billed as “‘My Bloody Valentine’ by General Hospital’s Franco.” The posters showed a series of interconnected crime scenes, linked by dull-red footprints.
There was a beefcake shot of him on the back that was credited to “The Gay Porn Archives/SF.”
He was going to give a talk beforehand.
I was going to be there.
I had to see him before he left, no matter what.
Good luck, I texted him, having had his and all other male numbers unblocked from my phone.
Come, he wrote back, and I dropped the phone like it was hot.
You’re my Plus One, he texted, then shot me one more: a GIF of me and him kissing then pulling apart.
“Devon.”
She had been sleeping on my couch.
“Advise,” I said, showing her the texts.
“Go,” she said, rolling over.
Jason from my office banged on the door.
“Get up,” I said, and a smile crawled up her face as she took him in: black shirt, plaid skirt, and Docs.
When he asked for her autograph, she finger-combed her hair, and obliged.
Jason had tickets to the show.
Devon and I got dressed: halter dresses, high boots, and short, furry jackets.
“Let’s git ’r done,” I said, even though I was scared, even though, for one second, I saw myself as a joke. I started to tell Devon this, and she slapped me.
“Don’t you ever talk about yourself that way. You’re so beautiful I want to slice off your skin and wear it like a sable coat.”
Of course, we started crying, and had to fix our eye makeup, then Jason’s.
We finally stepped onto the street and caused a flurry of commotion as we walked east, toward the gallery.
“I can’t do this,” I said, standing mulishly outside the gallery, just removed from the buzzing super-organism of fans.
I couldn’t. The small, compact part of my mind where I kept my secrets had been invaded by my marauding conscien
ce.
So I turned around, fled past a bunch of guys in coveralls removing huge boxes and furniture from the gallery — That’s odd, I thought — and zigzagged home, hearing Devon’s and Jason’s calls grow fainter as I moved like Atalanta, deployed to the military.
I had to change.
And then, no matter what, I had to tell Was-That-DNA-Place-Full-of-Shit-Franco how I felt.
I had to tell him the truth.
Oh, and pulled up a picture of Lana Del Rey on my computer then beat it with a bat.
Check.
Meanwhile, back at MOCCA, guests were filing into a large, almost empty room and staring at a small draped table. Behind it, a small Super-8-ish film looped: the sex film he shot of us, grainy and ultra-graphic.
People gasped as they stood there filming it back.
After a while they realized that James Franco was standing next to them, and it was cool at first, then it wasn’t.
A man in a low-slung cap and dark jacket walked in, and Franco blanched: the man — soon joined by the staff — helped Franco shake everyone off, and stand, unmolested, in front of the table.
The gallery staff poked the crowd back farther; video cameras lit up, and he started to speak.
I could tell he was nauseated with anxiety.
“I’m James Franco,” he said, and everyone went crazy.
“Not ‘Franco,’ or Edward. And this is what I made.”
He pulled the cover off to reveal two ceramic figures with wet hair and towels at their waists embracing under a black snow cloud.
The cloud heaved jagged broken hearts, making the figures bleed: infinitesimal jets shot out of their carotid arteries and their exposed hearts.
“Little Snowfall,” he said, and everyone clapped.
After everyone had seen it and had written in the guestbook, he did a Q&A.
“What does it mean?” was the first question, of course.
“It’s about love and pain,” he said.
“It’s for someone I love who wants me to be more honest.
“Someone who should know better.”
He found me at the perimeter and tore my cap off, letting my hair barf down my back.
“This is one of my favourite writers,” he said as I struggled. “An abnormally solitary, meretricious genius, whose coyness about her identity underlies her fear of being ordinary.”
He had me dead to rights.
I had become “Charlie Bankhead” as an adolescent because I was afraid no one would like who I really was.
And when I achieved so much acclaim, I was stuck performing as a man, which I hated. The loathsome flat shoes, the large underwear!
But I had to admit that I liked the confusion, the lack of definition.
“There is a balance in my life,” I said, shaking. “There’s reality and there’s the part that looks really glamorous … but we’re all just people in the end,” I said.
“Olivia Newton-John said that,” James said, as I flushed. Busted.
“And she’s right. We’re all just people, Jesus Christ!”
“Admit that you’re gay,” a flaxen-haired lumberjack said.
He said, “How can I do that if I’m in love with a girl?
“This piece is for Pixie,” he said, rolling up his sleeve to reveal my name in a raw-looking heart tattoo on his shoulder, “who lied and made an honest man of me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, kissing him.
“I should have defended you all along,” he said.
We walked away hand in hand to whistles, cheers, and some derision, naturally.
“Careless? Stupid?” he said, as we stepped into the cold night.
“I never said ‘stupid.’ I just thought you could have worked harder,” I said. “And when I told your manager that, she laughed in my face.
“She said that ‘James Franco can publish the alphabet…shaped like the alphabet!,’ and hung up on me!”
“She’s not wrong,” he said, smiling.
As we walked, the cloud followed us, throwing bolts of lightning and lowering soft masses of snow.
He held me tight in front of the park gates.
“Didn’t you like any of the book?”
“Yes. I liked the one about your dad. And the Chateau Marmont.”
He squeezed me and said, “Don’t forget we’re leaving tomorrow.”
For New York then Hollywood. To be surrounded by hangers-on, avaricious ultra-vixens, and his incredulous acquaintances.
“I just came out twice,” I said. “I need to take it all in. Plus there’s my place, my job, my developing friendship with the scary woman in Payroll —”
He laughed. “This has happened to both of us. Are you just going to let me go?”
I thought about my life without him. All I could see was a blank page, slowly being covered with black crayon.
“I’m coming,” I said, grinding against him.
“For a girl,” he said heatedly, “you have a really big —”
“Shhh,” I said.
I was thinking of the poem of his I liked the most, about mermaids swimming in “zinc blue,” and sad, Senecan nights.
He took a box from his pocket and handed me an obscene diamond ring, which devoured the night from its perch on my finger.
“Oh, I love you,” I said, crying voluptuously and branding him with the platinum ring I had been wearing around my neck.
“We’ll only tell the truth from now on,” I said.
“I hate Toronto,” he said.
“Your paintings make me wonder if you are blind.”
“You look boxy in couture.”
“Enough with the Seth Rogen.”
“I’m afraid of you,” we both said at the same time, and a drunk chick staggered by and said, “Jinx!”
We talked until our mouths were dry and clicking.
About the veils we wore to protect ourselves and, sometimes, to repel others; about writing and acting and art; our families, tragedies, and joy.
When we ran out of steam, he said, “It’s Valentine’s Day.”
I jumped up and pulled out the bag of cinnamon and candy hearts, and poured them all over the bed as he ignited fireworks from the window that coiled into big, beating planets.
We undressed each other and rolled around, getting phrases like OH YOU KID and BABYCAKES stuck deep into our skin.
“Where do we go from here?” I mumbled.
He was on his side, with his knees pulled to my chest: his mouth was full.
Mine was too.
“We hold hands,” he said. “And jump.”
Throughout the morning, we poured starlets of cum into each other that shimmered inside us, like all the beautiful things we would go on to make and do.
The business end of the moon shattered the window, and we moaned at the holiness; the pure, effulgent emission that is true love.
THE END
Acknowledgements
Cover Design: Spike Morris
Thanks: Janice, Sarah, Sherwin, John, Nyx, Carolyn, Christine (for the heart,), Mom, Janet, Margaux, Frank, Blaze: Valentines.
And, respectfully, James Franco’s writing, particularly the following, referenced, poems from Directing Herbert White: “Hello,” Love,” and “Chateau Dreams.”
Also, Anne Sexton’s “Consorting with Angels,” (“I am no more a woman…”) as Pixie does.
Notes: This story is a work of fiction: the epigraph is fraudulent, and James Franco does not do drugs of any kind. The phrase “empty, lucent brown and serene” is from an ardent synopsis of The Sound and the Fury.
Copyright © 2015 Lynn Crosbie
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