by Caitlin Macy
“Whipple, Josh—it’s not that hard—”
“Whiplash Johnnies or whatever, and it’s the worst night of your life.” While she was in the bathroom Josh decided he would be the good boyfriend and hear this one out. How she almost ended up a waitress, how but for a few chance strokes of Fate.
“Yeah, and after I have my half-hour crying fit I go back there to congratulate her.”
“God, that is so you.” He shakes his head at the realization that she was already following some arcane, self-flagellating code by the age of fourteen.
“And I’m really embarrassed because she’s such a loser, and I’m talking to her, trying to get it over with and get out of there, and instead of thanking me for the compliment, she’s like, ‘I think I saw you at auditions.’ I had tried out, but when I didn’t get the lead I said screw that. She’s like, ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but maybe next time. I’ll bet we’ll be in something together soon. It’s great you’re interested in drama. And he-ey’”—Josh laughs, she does a good dorky ingenue—“‘didn’t I see you in the financial aid office at the beginning of the year, Jessica? I’m on financial aid, too. But I suppose it’s easier for my parents because, you know, I’m a day student, and it doesn’t cost as much.’” Jessica shudders. “She was so—desperate, you know, to draw the line around us both.”
“Good luck!” Josh mutters.
“Exactly. I never even noticed I was on financial aid. It was like, who gives a shit? So, then at some point she tells me she’ll put in a word for me with Mr. Tooker, for Our Town, which they were supposed to be doing next. And I just can’t believe she thinks she can condescend to me like that, so I interrupt and I start asking her all about her special relationship with the guy because of course I’d heard the blow job rumors. I say, all sort of impressed and envious, ‘So, how far have you and Mr. Tooker gone?’ The latest was that she’d fucked him on this drama club outing to Hartford—”
“Hartford!” Josh interrupts, spearing a last bite of steak. “Of course.”
“And she’s not embarrassed at all! She’s like, ‘Mostly—’” But Jessica can’t continue because she has started to giggle uncontrollably. When she can manage to breathe, she locks eyes with Josh and murmurs, “Is she here? Is she in the room? Because this is really bad. It’s like … talking about your hosts or something, when you’re staying in their house. Anyway, she’s like—she’s like—” Jessica cracks up again. After two more false starts, she chokes out, “‘Mostly blow jobs—you know. I did let him ‘put it in’ once or twice, if you count All-State, but that was just for relief.
As she dissolves into paroxysms of giggles, one of the older waitresses gives her a darting glance as she passes, hysterics unusual in this quiet, creaky eighteenth-century room, where indulgence is typically moderate—dessert, rather than another cocktail. Josh laughs, too, but his laughter is detached, like his shrink’s when the guy is legitimizing his worry, as if to say, Dude, you were right to be concerned.
“I’ll never forget her saying that: ‘That was just for—relief.’ God, I told everyone … I must’ve done that line twenty times that night alone: ‘That was just for relief.’” Jessica shakes her head.
“What?” he says, catching her in a half smile.
“No, I just—I just thought of this funny line from a horoscope I used to get: ‘The stars impel, they do not compel.’ So,” Jessica concludes happily, as if this were the foregone conclusion the story had been heading for, “I blackmailed him.”
Josh, who’d thought the punch line had come and gone, sits up in his chair. “You blackmailed the drama teacher.”
She nods. “Oh, yeah.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“I see him in the dining hall the next morning and I’m like, ‘Susan O’Hare was so great last night. I talked to her for a while after the play.’ And he’s getting all nervous and he’s trying to wrap up the conversation, but he’s scared to wrap up the conversation, because he doesn’t know exactly what I’m implying. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, Mr. Tooker? There’s just one thing—I’d love to talk to you about the auditions for Our Town. I think I’d make a great Emily,’ I say.”
Josh gives a bark of a laugh at the shamelessness of it. It’s like listening to his father tell war stories from his early days in Hollywood—the shit he and Paul Furman used to get up to, the fake business cards they printed up—“Score One Productions” … He swallows, as a funny wave of unhappiness washes over him. He busies himself with pouring more wine, does the old everything’s-cool outward glance toward the other diners. In a moment the feeling subsides, and the two of them drink silently, not uncompanionably, but with a certain tension in the air of something unresolved. Josh has the feeling of having skipped a sentence a page or two back. “So, after that—what?” he says. “You got all the leads?”
“What? Oh, yes, I mean—sure, of course, I did,” Jessica says deprecatingly “But see, that was the pointless part of it. I would’ve gotten them anyway.” She sounds a little irritated at the waste of ingenuity, as if she’d been cheated of a victory. “She didn’t come back. After all that, Susan O’Hare didn’t come back. She dropped out at the end of the term. I never even had the chance to beat her.”
“Oh, right,” says Josh. He nods to himself with an air of finality. “Of course.”
It’s not until they’ve ordered dessert and are waiting for their pie that Jessica narrows her eyes, as if studying the color of the wine in her glass, and says lightly, “I’m just curious—what do you mean ‘of course’?”
“I mean”—Josh turns his hands up, bored now—“of course she left.”
“Ri-ight …” Jessica says slowly, as if following a complicated argument. “But, I mean—why would you assume that she left school?”
Heedless—perhaps purposefully so—of the warning note in her voice, Josh says flatly, “Come on, your daughter gets raped by some pervert teacher, you’re not gonna pull her out of the school?” He smiles and says, “Now—on to something else? Un peu de champagne, perchance?”
Jessica regards Josh curiously. “Tooker wasn’t why she left. It was a tuition thing. They couldn’t afford it anymore. I heard—I mean, she told me herself.”
“Right,” Josh says. “I’m sure.”
“Yeah, I think her father lost his job. He was … laid off or something. I forget what he did.”
They are tucking into their mud pies when she says pleasantly, “Yeah, I mean, ‘rape’ is actually a bit strong. I heard—there was this rumor, I mean it was totally assumed—the whole point, Josh, is that she came on to him.”
“Oh, so it was her fault, was it?” Josh says with a laugh. Jessica’s argument is so absurd it’s as if she’s baiting him, as if she’s daring him to disabuse her of her foolishness. And his girlfriend does depend on him from time to time to sort through questions of morality lite, though more often his role is to release her from the agonies of guilt that attend her every success—to tell her she should be happy, she deserved what she got. “Look, legally, it was rape,” he says idly. “Legally speaking, it was statutory rape.”
“Well—statutory rape,” Jessica interrupts. “Date rape! Come on. The point is it wasn’t rape rape, it was—the—she had such a big chest, I can’t even tell you.” She laughs now, too. Part of her shtick with him has always been to be pointedly, provocatively un-PC. “You think she’s chesty now? I swear to God, she’s had a breast reduction.” She eats her ice cream blithely, gesticulates with her spoon. “I mean, if that was rape, we were all raped.”
“You all had sex with teachers?” Josh says pedantically, enjoying his prosecutorial moment. “You all let him ‘put it in’?”
“Well, that part—she got herself into that. She didn’t have to screw the guy.”
“That’s a bit harsh!”
“I’ve often wondered,” Jessica says reflectively, “what the hell was she thinking—”
“Isn’t that pretty obvious—”
&n
bsp; “—going all the way with some skanky teacher.”
“Isn’t that, uh, blaming the victim just a tad?”
“He came on to me, too, you know,” Jessica says, so venomously that for a second Josh thinks it’s some kind of joke. He sits there swallowing, sweating in his shirt and flinching, wondering where this can possibly end. “My sophomore year, he started dancing me around the room—there was this cast party at his house. He’s saying, ‘I made you’—and all this sick Pygmalion shit. He’s got his hands all over my ass and then he’s trying to grab my tits. He suggests—get this—that I may want to stay late after everyone else leaves!” She leans forward across the table, and all at once her tone drops to gentle, coaxing—he’s the remedial student again. “You know what I did, Josh? I laughed it off! I went along with the guy for a little while so he didn’t freak out and then I went and hid in the bathroom all night. Big fucking deal.” Jessica drains a last drop from her empty wineglass, tipping it all the way upside down, her mouth gaping unattractively. “People were all saying, ‘Oh, my God, Jess, weren’t you traumatized?’ You know what? No, I wasn’t! It was one of the least traumatic things that ever happened to me. I still did the play—I did every single play, I got all the leads, why wouldn’t I? For three fucking years! And every year he was all over me. It was like, okay, cast party, here we go again, let’s just let Mr. Tooker grab my tits so we can get it over with.” She draws a dramatic breath. “You know what, Josh? He was a great fucking director. Tooker may have had his problems but fuck, he did sort of make me!”
There comes now the sheepish, fraught silence that follows an outburst; neither of them refers to any television show now. “So … now do you want to rethink your comment about blaming the victim?”
“Of course you laughed it off,” says Josh after a moment.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just”—he weighs whether to be frank—“it’s totally different. You were never not going to make it.”
“How dare you say that?”
He shrugs—no other response left, accused as he is of stating a fact.
She nods briefly, looking blindly into the room. “I’ll remember that the next time I fuck the boss’s son.”
Oblivious, Wine Guy brings the check. Josh tosses down his platinum card without bothering to look at it. “How’d you like the second bottle?”
“Well, I liked yours better,” Jessica starts to say, giving the waiter a brittle smile.
“So, I guess that was really onerous, huh? Fucking the boss’s son?”
“Okay,” says the young man, looking fearfully from one to the other of them and retreating a step. “A little disagreement here, I guess, ha, ha. Let me just go run this through.”
“You have no idea what it takes,” Jess says into the room, her voice trembling. “You don’t have the slightest fucking clue.”
Josh gives a strangled, frustrated sigh. “Why do you act like I’m accusing you? I just feel bad for her!”
“I’ll say it again, Josh,” she says, more evenly now. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“You take your time with this now,” says Wine Guy, returning and retreating hastily, with a frightened mug for the peanut gallery as he goes.
Josh signs; sighs. “So—what?” he says wearily. He’s lost track of the argument—can’t remember what he’s not allowed to say. “You’re actually trying to claim with her it was … ?” He hesitates, looking down at the twenty in his hand, weighing whether to add it to the twenty he’s already put down as a tip. It’s a habit he got from his father, who always tips in cash.
“That’s too much,” Jessica says quickly. She’s much faster at simple math than he is. “That would be thirty percent. That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re actually trying to claim it was consensual? That this fourteen-year-old—”
“Sixteen-year-old!”
“—really wanted to be having sex with Al Delvecchio?”
“She was really passionate about theater,” Jessica says, as Josh takes his wallet from his back pocket to look for a smaller bill. There’s the barest hint of deadpan in her voice now, the first indication, perhaps, that she knows she’s being absurd, that this will shortly end in laughter. It’s not the first time that it’s happened: She delivers the heated, accusatory manifesto, only to turn to him a few minutes later and say, “So … should we watch Idol?” “As you said, you know the type.”
“You’re so fucking naïve,” Josh says kindly.
“Excuse me?”
“How can someone be so fucking naïve and so fucking cynical at the same time? I honestly don’t get how the two strains can coexist in one mind. You, you blackmail a teacher to get what you want, you shake off his attempts at—molesting you—and yet, it never even crosses your mind to think that this other poor girl maybe didn’t have the resources you had, or maybe was actually pretty desperate …” Josh’s voice trails off as he sees the futility of trying to get her to acknowledge his point.
There’s a pause and then Jessica says coldly, “She didn’t have to go along with it.” The humor in her voice is gone and her face sets impenetrably. “She could have hidden in the bathroom, too.”
She sits stiffly in her seat, and after a moment, perhaps remembering that they’re in a restaurant, the ominously pleasant look from the beginning of the meal steals slowly over her face.
“This is so fucked!” Josh cries. Jessica doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react—the picture of composure. “I’m supposed to be the one who was so protected—who grew up with money, who’s been an insider my whole life. You’d think I’d be callous—and it’s like, it’s like—” He stops and looks at her caustically. “Didn’t poverty teach you anything?”
“We weren’t fucking poor,” she says, aghast.
“Of course it didn’t,” he says. “Because it had nothing to do with you.”
“You know what, Josh? I didn’t fuck the guy, okay?”
“You could have! And you still wouldn’t have ended up a waitress in the Colonial Fucking Inn!”
Susan has overheard. She stands a little away from the table, hands clasped behind her back, her eyes brimming, her chin trembling with mortification. “Are you guys all set?” she whimpers.
Looking down at his wallet, which has failed to turn up a smaller bill, Josh says, “You know what? Fuck it. Yes, we are,” and throws down the twenty.
Jessica slides the American Express bill protector toward her old acquaintance. “Susan, we’re going to need some change.”
When she withdraws her hand, Josh slams his down, on the leather case. “Actually, that’s not necessary. It’s all set, Susan.” He looks at Jessica, still pressing his palm down on the case. “Let’s go.”
Jessica faces him tranquilly. “This night is over if you leave that twenty.”
“I can come back later,” mumbles Susan.
“That’s all right—you’re not bothering us.” Josh gets to his feet. Not realizing that he still has his eye on her, Jessica makes a grab for the bill protector. He physically stops her hand against the table and she shrieks.
“Why don’t you leave the ring, too, Josh?” she screams, rising to her feet. “Just leave the goddamn ring, too, while you’re at it!”
ABOUT EIGHTEEN MONTHS later he sees her up on a billboard. He’s driving down Sunset and there she is. It’s goofy Jessica, smiling/grimacing Jessica, arms around Movie Hubby’s neck, knee right-angling for a fifties-style toe lift. It’s some heaven-sent reincarnation thing—there’s a gold halo painted on over her head. He nearly rear-ends the convertible in front of him, craning to see the expression on her face—whether the eyes are smiling as well as the mouth.
He always told her she’d end up in a comedy. She was better in motion than still, something fundamentally elusive—you could even say evasive—about her charm, as if to pin it down would be to kill it. Ironic, that when buddies of his, Rich included, used to give him the old good-ridd
ance pep talk, they’d always remind him of what they saw as her fatal flaw—that she was incapable of having fun. That she just had to ruin everything. And that, Rich used to conclude, that would have gotten really, really old. “’Member that time we drive up to Ojai and we’re sitting there having champagne and it’s gorgeous and she’s just gotten Eden’s Gate and she’s dating my buddy Josh Stein and it’s totally sick how nice it is and she can’t fucking stop talking about those orphans in Romania? That was not fun. That was the opposite of fun.” And aloud Josh would always acknowledge the point. He raises a hand from the steering wheel to signal “Sorry” to the driver of the convertible; starts forward slowly, chastened, leaving an exaggerated distance between himself and the other cars. But while the criticism, unlike most of the others (she wasn’t really a bitch, and she definitely wasn’t dumb), was valid, it never mitigated anything for him. The particular point of her being incapable of enjoying herself has never made him feel any better about being free of her. Lately, he’s kind of gotten over the idea that one day you get there, you stand alone as the fully realized humanoid, needing no one. It just started to bore him, all the self-actualization. Silently he would answer, But that’s where I came in.
The Red Coat
IN JANUARY, TRISH returned to the restaurant she’d been frequenting before the holidays. It was a contemporary Italian café, dark inside, with bare wood tables and narrow metal chairs that seemed to have been designed to give people the impression that they needed to lose weight. Trish had eaten dinner there only once, to celebrate Tim’s promotion. But a cappuccino could set you back only so far, even on Madison Avenue. Trish fancied the idea of becoming a regular, and it worried her a little to think that the progress she had made in December had been wiped out by her recent two-week Christmas vacation. She hurried a little as she walked the crosstown blocks from her apartment, leaning forward into the wind, sacrificing her normally excellent posture.
Despite its being an off hour, there was a noisy party at the bar this afternoon. Two long-haired, angular women—models, Trish guessed—were getting messily drunk and pouring themselves all over the bartender. The man did not detach himself to wait on Trish, as he should have, and after being neglected for a few minutes, she looked around with annoyance, a peremptory hand raised in the air. One of the women had a cigarette between her teeth and was leaning across the bar to solicit a light from the bartender. Oldest trick in the book, Trish thought disgustedly. “Excuse me!” she fairly shouted. Then she put her hand to her temple and hunched down in her chair, hiding herself, just shaking with loathing and the injustice of finding her here. For it was Evgenia.