Party Girl

by Anna David

  I shake my head and Ryan pouts somewhat adorably. “Are you sure?” he asks. “It would be so sweet—the kiddies are up in my bed.”

  I sit up suddenly, too surprised to worry about how I’m probably killing the moment. “The kids are in your bed?” I ask.

  “Sure.” He smiles and reaches for a Marlboro Red, which he lights with a Zippo. “That’s where Diego likes to sleep.”

  “And you want me to sleep there with all you guys?”

  He nods and smiles and inhales on his cigarette and I can’t decide if I’m a secret straitlaced conservative or if asking a girl you just met to spend the night in the same bed with your son and his friend is normal. I gesture for him to let me take a drag off his cigarette and decide that the sooner I leave, the less time I have to discover other potentially disturbing things about my adolescent obsession.

  “I should go,” I say when we finish the smoke. He nods, kisses me on the nose, pulls himself up off the couch, and takes my hand to lead me out through the kitchen.

  “Thanks for a great night,” I say as he walks me to the door. What am I supposed to say—Thanks for drumming throughout dinner and inviting me to your Michael Jackson-esque slumber party?

  25

  “I need to talk to you,” Justin whispers in my ear as he walks behind me in the middle of a Pledges meeting.

  “There you are!” I yell, getting dirty looks from a few people standing around me.

  For the past three days, I’ve been throwing myself into a manic schedule of round-the-clock shopping and working out to distract myself from the fact that Adam still hasn’t called, and peppering Stephanie and Justin with constant he’s-going-to-call-right? messages, none of which Justin has returned. It occurred to me after the third unreturned message that I essentially haven’t seen or talked to him in the past month and a half. “Where the hell have you been?” I ask him.

  An emaciated man with a shaved head and tattoos covering every bit of visible skin glowers, and so Justin grabs my hand and starts to lead me out the front door of the meeting. As we pass people, I feel the weight of their stares on me. It’s strange because before the column and all the hype, I’d have sworn up and down that I could never receive too much attention. But I hadn’t been prepared for what comes with it. I feel like I hear whispering now wherever I go and I’m not sure if it’s real or coke has left me permanently paranoid. I’ll walk by two girls and swear that I hear one of them mention “Party Girl” or the word column or something, and then I’ll feel them dissect everything about me. Are they criticizing what I’m wearing, deciding that I should be more put-together? Are they accusing me of not really being sober, speculating that a girl who goes by the moniker of Party Girl and lounges in champagne-soaked magazine shots couldn’t possibly be clean? Pledges has taught me that what people think of me is none of my business, but I guess I wasn’t really prepared to have to remind myself of that so many times a day.

  “Ick,” I say to Justin, as we make it outside and I light two cigarettes.

  “What?” he asks as I hand him one of the smokes.

  “The way people look at me now is annoying,” I say, wishing that he noticed this without my having to point it out to him.

  “Oh, Amelia,” he says, flicking his cigarette ash to the ground. “Most people are just thinking about themselves. I think you’re too in your head and just being a typical self-absorbed addict.”

  For some reason, I want to take my lit cigarette and mash it into his face—or at least onto his hand, where it wouldn’t cause as notable a scar. While the whole world seems to have jumped up to speed and is treating me like I’m worthy of being celebrated, Justin has barely seemed to notice. And suddenly I hate him for this. I’ve always really liked friends agreeing with what I’m saying, and if they disagree or don’t seem to want to indulge in the conversation, I feel like they’ve broken some unspoken contract we have about always backing each other up. In recovery, people get away with this so much—by saying things like “I’m not going to cosign your bullshit” or accusing someone of being too “in their head” or self-absorbed—and I suddenly feel myself as much annoyed with the Pledges world as I am with Justin.

  “Whatever,” I say, not even looking at Justin. “They’re probably just jealous.” I pause, and then, “Did you get my messages? Do you understand that I’ve basically been heartbroken?”

  Justin takes a drag off his cigarette and nods as he exhales. “Look, I’ve got to tell you something,” he says after a beat.

  “Shoot.” He’s still bugging me but I’m willing to let it go—something that wouldn’t have even been a remote possibility before the program.

  He tosses his cigarette to the ground and smashes it out. “I’m not really sober,” he says.

  “What?” I feel suddenly dropped into a moment of surreality. He’s lying, I think. He’s sober a week longer than me and I almost have six months. “That doesn’t even make sense,” I say, feeling myself start to panic. “How is that possible?”

  “Well, I smoked pot last week, had a couple beers a few nights ago, and the night before last, stayed up all night with this guy I met at Marix, doing blow until sunrise.” He says all this completely casually, like he’s explaining the errands he ran at lunchtime yesterday. Where the hell are his emotions?

  “Why would you do that?” I ask, and even though I can hear my accusatory tone and know it’s not the right one to have, I can’t seem to stop it.

  “Why? Fuck if I know. Maybe because I’m an addict.”

  “How did it happen?” I ask.

  “Well,” Justin looks down, sadly. “I moved back in with Jason and everything was amazing at first. Turns out I must have been the one instigating all the fights before because with all my new rehab knowledge, we were suddenly one of those sickeningly perfect couples planning picnics at the Hollywood Bowl, going antiquing on the weekends and all that.”

  “And then…?” Something has kicked in, some almost maternal instinct that makes it seem like the only thing in the world that matters is making sure Justin is okay. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze.

  “Nothing monumental—Jesus, I wish it had been,” he says. “We just started hanging out with other couples, going to Dragstrip, house parties, dinners, whatever. And they all drank—wine with dinner, beer at house parties, nothing big…I mean, none of them drank alcoholically.”

  I nod. I’d noticed the same thing when I went out to dinner with some publicists—one of them ordered a glass of wine and nursed that same glass the entire night, and the other had a gin and tonic. A single gin and tonic. And I’d sat there, silently marveling over what would make someone want to drink just one drink when all one ever did to me was make me achy, tired, and coke-hungry. Tommy would tell us that when a normal person drinks and starts to feel a little buzzed, he’ll see a figurative red light and know that it’s his cue to stop drinking. When an alcoholic or addict gets to that same place, however, all he sees is a green light.

  “And then last week it occurred to me that smoking pot wouldn’t really be such a bad thing—that it didn’t really count,” Justin says. “I didn’t tell my sponsor or anyone and nothing bad happened when I did it. So then I had a couple of drinks with Jason. He doesn’t know shit about recovery—just what I tell him, really—and when I explained that drinking would be cool as long as I only had a few, he basically bought it. Cut to a couple nights later—me coked out of my gourd at this total stranger’s house.”

  “Was it horrible?” I ask, and my whole body clenches in anticipation of his answer. I picture Justin, teeth grinding, paranoid as hell, getting creeped out by this weird guy and tearfully calling his sponsor.

  Instead he says, “I wish I could say it was, but it was fun as hell. I don’t know why people say that a head full of recovery and a body full of chemicals is a bad combination, because I felt amazing. It was nice to just get out of my head for once, you know?”

  That’s when I feel horribly betrayed. Wh
y is he acting like this? I wonder. Why isn’t he horrified and crying, begging everyone in here to understand, the way other people who slip do? Even when I remind myself that this could be Justin’s “disease” talking, I resent him for casually embracing a way of thinking that’s different from the one we’ve shared since we met. And I feel something else: jealous. I want to be able to get out of my head, to have coke rush up my nose and through my veins, and not feel guilty about it. But then I remind myself that that’s my disease, and that I know for a fact that even allowing my thoughts to go here is wrong.

  So I say what I know I’m supposed to. “You should call your sponsor,” I tell him gently, “and raise your hand in meetings.” When you relapse and have to start counting your time all over again, you have to raise your hand in meetings and reintroduce yourself to the group as a “newcomer.”

  He nods. “I know,” he says. “I just don’t feel ready yet.”

  We sit there in silence and I glance back in the meeting. “I’m just really sort of weirded out by this,” I finally say.

  “I know,” he says, and looks uncomfortable. Then he catches my eye and says, “I love you, Amelia. And I could really use your support right now.”

  It’s the first time Justin has ever said this to me, so I’m surprised. In rehab and recovery, “I love you,” roughly translated, seems to mean, “Hey, we’re both sober” or “You’re cool,” but since I’ve been out of there, I haven’t been comfortable saying it. Even though I grew up in a family where we said those three words constantly, it always felt obligatory—like it was the way you had to end a conversation, whether it was true or not. So I seem to be much slower than everyone else at tossing the phrase out. My neurosis kicks in, and I go, Wait, do I really love that person? I don’t even know them well enough to say and then I start to feel disingenuous.

  I want to feel perfectly comfortable saying it back but I don’t.

  “I love you, too, Justin,” I finally say, but the sentence sounds and feels awkward and we both just stand there uncomfortably as people start filtering out of the meeting and lighting their cigarettes.

  26

  It’s a Sunday night, arguably the most depressing time of the week, when I realize that Adam is never going to call. It’s been months since we talked and he’s obviously either completely psychotic, a pathological liar, or both. But since I have a column due tomorrow, I’m desperately trying to take all the anxiety and burgeoning depression I feel over being rejected by Adam and convert it into work obsession. I’d heard people in meetings talk about “trading one addiction for another,” so as soon as a thought about Adam pops up, I force myself to write about the Truth or Dare night, which seems oddly appropriate. Before I know it, I’ve written the beginning.

  The bar for wild behavior had already been raised higher than it should have. Yet somewhere between making out with a girl and having the nether region of a guy I’d just met shoved in my face repeatedly, I realized that it was too late to turn back now.

  I finish the column, describing my impromptu striptease and the horror I felt when I realized someone was watching it, ending with a line about how much Truth or Dare had changed since I was a kid.

  As soon as I finish the piece, I realize that what I need to do to feel better is call Adam and find out what the hell happened. There’s probably a really good explanation for why he hasn’t called, I think. Maybe he lost my number or has been so crazed with his show premiering that he literally hasn’t had a free moment to get in touch but would be absolutely thrilled to hear my voice.

  As I contemplate this while staring at the TV screen half watching The Surreal Life castmates throw plates at each other, a commercial comes on and I suddenly see Adam, in a three-piece suit and talking on a cell phone as he walks down the street, looking so good that I can’t believe I ever doubted his attractiveness. “The Agency,” that guy who seems to narrate every single commercial in the world blathers, “promises to be the hottest show of the season, says TV Guide.”

  I’m so convinced that seeing his commercial is a sign I should call him that I pick up the phone almost subconsciously and am horribly disappointed when I get his voicemail. This isn’t what I’d imagined happening when I allowed myself to fantasize about calling him but I improvise, leaving a message that I diligently try to make sound both sweet and mellow. And then I wait.

  And then, realizing I’m on the verge of driving myself mad, I call Stephanie and ask if she wants to go on a walk.

  27

  “He didn’t call me back,” I say into the phone as I take a bite out of my thumb’s cuticle. It’s five days of intense cuticle picking later.

  “Asshole,” Stephanie says, sighing.

  “Who the hell doesn’t return a call after five days and three hours?”

  “Well, you want the truth? You. Me. All of us, at one time or another.”

  “But that’s only when we don’t want to actually talk to the person!” I wail.

  Stephanie lets that sink in for a bit, and then says, “I know it hurts.” In the last five conversations we’ve had about this, she’s been the perfect sport, trotting out and analyzing every last possible reason—maybe Adam is intimidated by me now, or was just completely immature like Gus (who she’d stopped hanging out with months ago) or was worried he’d end up fodder for a future column or was temporarily fucking his costar and she deleted all his messages because she was psychotically possessive. I don’t blame Steph for feeling exhausted by the process of coming up with more excuses for him, but accepting that he simply doesn’t want to talk to me causes me to hang up and curl into a small ball of messy tears and torn cuticles.

  I’m not entirely sure why I’m taking this Adam rejection so hard. Of course, I have some ideas. In rehab, I’ve learned about how dangerous it can be for alcoholics and addicts to have expectations because we tend to not be able to handle the disappointment of having them not met, but that realization isn’t doing anything to get me out of my doldrums. The day I spent with Adam was the first time in my life I felt like I knew what people meant when they talked about finding the one. But they usually got years, or at least months or weeks, with the person. Why the hell did my discovery have to be so ephemeral?

  Once the crying turns to sniffling, I realize that I’m in the midst of a full-blown depression. Depression is something you’re bound to experience, Tommy would say, and it would stun me how casually he’d mention the word “depression”—like he was talking about having the flu and not something completely overwhelming and debilitating that made life seem unlivable. It, too, will pass, he’d always add, sounding like someone who couldn’t ever possibly have lived through a depression.

  After three solid days of not showering, cleaning, eating, answering the phone or really doing anything beyond dumping cat food into dishes and coating my pajamas in cigarette smoke, I decide it’s time to check voicemail. My mom, Stephanie, the CSI actor who’d tried to put his hands down my pants in New York, Tim, Stephanie again, and what seems like about a thousand hang-ups. Even though I already knew that none of the messages would be from Adam, it doesn’t stop me from crying when I get to the last one and it’s not him. When I hear who it is, however, I cry even harder.

  “Amelia,” says a voice that’s at once both immediately familiar and hard to place. “What can I say? You’re the cat’s meow. The toast of the town. The bee’s knees.” Who do I know who would use those expressions?

  And then it hits me.

  “I guess part of me is glad to see that you actually remembered what happened between us,” Chris says, his voice cracking slightly, “but, what did you think—that I wouldn’t see it? Or did you just not care?” I sit there, frozen, as he does exactly what I hope he won’t and starts reading from my column. “It was only after an impromptu reunion several weeks after the fact that I realized I’d gotten the basic elements of the ménage altogether wrong: most girls had them with their hottest female friend and, say, a Red Hot Chili Pepper. I�
�d had mine with a couple of guys who’d probably have an easier time working their way around the Starship Galaxy than they would a woman’s body.” Chris clears his throat. “Maybe I wouldn’t care if you hadn’t treated me like a leper ever since,” he says. “But Jesus, think of someone besides yourself for once.”

  That throws me into yet another crying jag—though, much like someone covered in tattoos might have a difficult time identifying how many there actually were, I decide I needn’t bother calling them crying jags anymore but just consider the entire day one long, extended singular crying jag. Afterward, I set about smoking myself into oblivion. I contemplate calling Stephanie to ask her if it’s possible that I’m the worst person in existence but settle instead for falling asleep on the couch when I’m too exhausted to cry anymore.

  Sometime later—it could be twenty minutes, it could be two hours—I wake up to the sound of someone banging on my front door. I stumble to it, groggy to the point that I almost feel hungover. Stephanie stands there, a bag of Trader Joe’s Sweet, Savory & Tart Trek Mix in her hand, and a plump Mexican woman behind her.

  “Don’t say a word,” she says, gesturing for the woman to go inside. “I told Rosa I had an emergency for her.” Handing me the bag of trail mix she adds, “I wanted to bring you something healthy to eat but knew I’d have to start you on something you wouldn’t reject outright.”

  “Thank you,” I croak gratefully, as she opens my living room window and starts dumping overflowing ashtrays.

  “You’re welcome,” she says. “Now, will you please let Rosa clean your apartment and stop Plath-ing it over this guy?”