“I Don’t Know How She Does It,” boomed the boom operator.
• • •
THERE WAS ONE PLACE in her neighborhood that Julia avoided, a playground on East Thirteenth between Avenues B and C, a relatively pleasant, clean spot, with a metal climbing frame, a few actual trees, and two pergolas on each side that were covered in jasmine in May. She took the ugly dog on circuitous routes around it, for it was somewhere she had no desire to see again. It was a key location, the scene of the “inciting incident,” the snapping point, the straw that broke the camel’s back (and Julia was the camel).
It happened on a Wednesday and, that evening, Julia waited until Kristian came home after another futile day drumming up business, which seemed mainly to be playing backgammon on his laptop and drinking too many beers, and walked out of the loft on Rivington Street. She took a cab to the small apartment on East Tenth (the unpleasant and litigious life coaches had terrorized her most recent tenant out of the building), pulled the sofa bed out, and crashed for eighteen hours. She did not come back.
Julia and Kristian lived separately, Kristian in the loft with the kids, Julia in the small apartment with her laptop. They took turns taking Romy and Lee to school. Kristian stopped working “outside the home” (Christy told Julia he kept saying this). Julia paid all the bills. Apart from the month Julia spent at the Wellness Center, they swapped over most weekends. Julia became reacquainted with sleep and, although the dull ache of separation never left her (the umbilical cords had been physically cut, but Julia felt them dangling from her heart, invisible to all but her, like amputated limbs), she discovered she could hang out with her children, and enjoy them and even get them to do what she asked, something which had seemed almost impossible before. When she rang her mother to tell her this, there was no weird laughter or heartbreaking begging. Julia’s mother was matter-of-fact.
“It may work better for you all,” she said. “I was talking to some parents last week, and the mother said that the only good thing about their separation was that they both got time off from their kids.”
This reminded Julia of a college friend of hers who had rediscovered religion in order to escape her three sons for two hours every Sunday.
One Saturday the second month, one of Kristian’s former partners suggested they go to a yoga course together (they had both discovered yoga as a displacement activity from the website design business), and Kristian found his calling. He decided to train as an instructor, traveling upstate most Friday nights. He didn’t ask for much money for himself (he was far cheaper than an undocumented, resentful nanny), and, although it was expensive to run the two apartments, Julia could never have guessed the dramatic effect the new arrangement would have on her career.
She won an Emmy. She got a new agent. The new agent, Clarice, shouted, “There’s a new sheriff in town!” at the Asshole and got Julia off the Crime Show. She then negotiated a deal with a studio and instructed Julia to write romantic comedy. Clarice told Julia that Julia had been brutalized by her work environment, and it was time for her to get back in touch with her woman-y side. Although Julia thought that was rich coming from someone who had turned an anger-management problem into a negotiation technique, she appreciated Clarice’s point. While ALWAYS BLAME, NEVER APOLOGIZE might be the way to terrorize the Writers Room, it is not the basis for successful interpersonal relationships.
“Everything you write is so depressing,” Clarice barked at her. “We all want to see a happy ending.”
So Julia stopped worrying about things like the future, or the children, or Kristian, for, particularly with his new body, it was only a matter of time until he was snapped up by some single yoga person with limbs like overcooked spaghetti, and the children would have a lovely young stepmother who might well do a far better job of the whole happy-family thing than she had ever managed. Sometimes, though, Lee would tell her that Kristian had said he had more spiritual insight now and he loved Julia more than ever, that he was so sorry for what had happened and how he wished they could all live together again. And Julia realized that despite everything, that was what Romy and Lee wanted, too. But although she hugged her son tight and told him she loved him, and she knew he loved her, she didn’t do anything about it. She was still feeling too feral and urgent and enraged.
• • •
“JULIA KIRKLAND, JULIA . . . DARLING!” The mellifluous Britmerican tones reverberated outside the Strand bookshop. Julia looked up from the one-dollar remainders to see Benedict Hart-Barrett in front of her. She was happy. It had been many years; in fact, the last time she’d seen him in the flesh, she was twenty-seven and Benedict had escorted her to a Halloween party in Park Slope, where they had dressed up as red devils. She’d watched him on TV, of course; he had become a bit of a regular on cable, always playing the smooth-slash-dastardly European in roles that had at one time been intended for Hugh Grant, and she had heard he was living in a gated community in Calabasas, occasionally playing in the English expats’ cricket team in Santa Monica.
They embraced; he started telling her that he was in New York for a few months, had landed an ongoing role playing a cardiac surgeon in a new series for HBO written by a mutual acquaintance of theirs; “it’s dramedy, I’m going to be HUGE,” he said. Julia squashed her immediate feeling of jealousy and opened her mouth to say something positive when Benedict caught sight of the dog.
“Good lord, love,” he said, like Kristian, immediately recognizing the dog’s provenance. “Have times got hard? What are you selling? Ooh. Hark at her. I’m trying to be a good girl these days.”
Julia explained about Marjorie and Courtney and the freak accident, and Benedict fell in step beside her so they could talk. Benedict was marvelous company, unfailingly indiscreet and camp. He started telling her about his costars on the dramedy, including a once extremely famous film actress. They had reached Tompkins Square Park by this stage, and he looked around, wrinkled his nose, and said, “Darling, what she’s done to herself with the booze and the blow and the Botox. It’s vile. If she walked through here without makeup, the rats would throw themselves on the poison.”
After this chance reunion, Benedict and Julia met most days. Benedict was on call, but the unfortunate-looking ex-film actress was so demanding that shooting was frequently delayed and he found himself at a loose end. One day, to Julia’s amazement, he told her he had a daughter, the product of a brief liaison with a makeup artist, which goes to show that you can never tell with upper-class Brits.
(Lucy had said that to Julia, and then, Julia’s world being smaller than a village, it turned out that Lucy had been best friends at university with Benedict’s younger sister, Camilla. Benedict cheerfully recalled shinnying up a drainpipe and breaking into Lucy’s room as proof of his overwhelming desire for her. Lucy gleefully reminded him that she had pushed him back out the window onto the bicycle rack below, and he had broken his arm in two places. They roared with laughter at these memories. Julia did not. Why did they find attempted assault or grievous bodily harm, even in self-defense, funny? And then she remembered she had had the same bemused feeling the first time she had watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One morning, she came upon Lucy and Benedict sitting side by side on a bench, earnestly calling the names of London Underground stations out to each other: “Paddington!” “Theydon Bois!” “Bethnal Green!” culminating in one of them shouting “Mornington Crescent!” Lucy said it was a game made famous on BBC Radio 4 and there was no point in trying to explain, as it would make no sense at all. From that moment Julia would say “It’s like Mornington Crescent” whenever she and Lucy experienced culture clash.)
Soon Benedict started coming up to Courtney’s, enjoying a larger audience. Courtney was appreciative and amused, and getting more attractive by the day as she limped off to facials and bought shorter skirts that exposed her one good leg. Sometimes Julia left them alone, and her writing would be disturbed by peals of giddy
hahhahhahs from upstairs, punctuated by the occasional growl and a door slamming as the dog was locked in the bathroom.
A fortnight or so later, Courtney told Julia that she was worried about Marjorie. Had Julia noticed her behaving oddly? Julia shook her head. She had got so used to the dog’s demeanor that it seemed perfectly normal. But Benedict pointed out that Julia was often so matter-of-fact about things, so LITERAL, so New World, really, that, lacking the sophistication of a non-American, she mightn’t have a clue what was happening under the surface of anyone’s world.
“That’s true, Benedict, I always thought you were gay,” Julia responded, and once again he roared with laughter like he was in an acting class, and Courtney exhaled with such relief that even Julia the Literal American got what was going on.
Benedict took over the counseling role with Courtney, but his recommendations on the subject of Marjorie were not consoling. He wasn’t a “one man and his dog”-style Englishman, the kind who have portraits of their faithful Labrador Arthur above the mantelpiece on a larger scale than their children. He was ruthlessly unsentimental about the animal kingdom, a trait he had learned from his mother, Lady Fiona, whose way of dealing with troublesome pets was to load them in the Range Rover, drive down the nearest motorway, and abandon them. Benedict, who had been sent to boarding school at the age of seven, thought this was eminently sensible. He detailed various ways of restraining, muzzling, and whipping animals into obedience, with or without leather implements.
“There’s only one way to deal with a difficult mutt,” Benedict would conclude. “Let it know who’s boss.”
It was a good job Courtney was draped on the sofa, because by now she was weak with excitement. Julia made her excuses and left, not that they noticed, and then had to go out walking without Marjorie, as it felt extremely strange to listen to the groans, growls, slamming, and shrieking that then emanated through the reclaimed floorboards from the humans upstairs.
Oh, yes, Courtney looked a little embarrassed in the doorway the next morning when Julia bumped into Benedict bouncing down the stairs, the dog grizzling and snapping at his heels. He asked her if she was coming on the walk, and although Julia felt usurped, she thought Marjorie looked pleadingly at her, so she agreed.
It was a beautiful morning, the sun shone on the queue outside Abraço, the coffee tasted better than any cup of coffee ever, and Benedict was in sparkling postcoital form. It was marvelous to be ten years younger for a couple of hours. Julia laughed and laughed as Benedict reminisced, and then Benedict laughed and laughed as Julia regaled him with stories from her time on Rage Undercover, the horrors of it fading by the moment as they became funny stories. She had just got to a bit about the day she had volunteered to lie underneath a mound of fake dead bodies on set in order to propel one into the air during a supernatural sequence, when she looked up and realized they were right outside the children’s playground on East Thirteenth Street.
Julia froze.
Marjorie, sensing something, clamped her muscley body next to Julia’s leg, growled viciously, and farted aggressively in Benedict’s direction. He yelped and held his nose and ran over to a bench in the park. With hindsight, Julia would realize that Marjorie’s behavior was odd indeed, but at that moment she gently patted the elephant dog’s bulbous head. Her head was full of her own dark thoughts, and when Benedict asked her what was wrong, she told him.
Almost exactly a year earlier, Julia had hidden from the Asshole and absconded from the production office to bring Romy and Lee to the park after school, in a poignant attempt to convince herself that she was in control of her life. She released them into the playground, where they happily charged and screamed, and then ran over to the huge overhanging tree where other children were climbing and playing pirates and swinging on the branches.
Julia was preoccupied, as always. Her phone kept ringing, and the Asshole had handed her a voluminous set of notes, which she was trying to read while preventing Lee from breaking a limb, or Romy from breaking another child’s limb. They didn’t break any human limbs, but just as Julia had resolved how to connect an A story with a B story in the third act by an extraordinary event that bridged the distinct plotlines in an unexpected but thematically satisfying way, her children hurled themselves onto a large branch so wildly that it broke and they thudded butt first on the ground, laughing hysterically.
Suddenly Julia heard a female voice screaming, “Stop! Stop!” and spun round, assuming someone had been mugged, but no, a woman was charging full tilt toward Romy and Lee, pushing her double buggy in front of her. She skidded to an impressive halt involving a deft sideways tipping motion of her front right wheel and, at the top of her voice, berated them for damaging the tree, nature’s gift to us all.
Now, at another time, Julia would have been cross with her children and herself. She knew they were acting up, and she loved trees and hated the violent crunch of sap and wood. But Lee began crying and the woman didn’t stop. She turned to Julia, her hemp jacket quivering with indignation, and accused her of being a bad mother with out-of-control children. (She didn’t use those words exactly, but that’s what Julia heard, a crucial distinction, as the family therapist at the Wellness Center pointed out.)
And that was it. Julia erupted. She picked up the broken branch in both hands, ran full tilt toward the tree, and attacked it. She thumped the trunk, she whacked the roots, she screamed up into the leaves, “I can’t take this anymore! I can’t take this anymore!” and, as the exhilaration of anger coursed through her, she thought of Lee running round the apartment in his inflatable green Incredible Hulk costume shouting, “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets!” and, transformed herself, she kept thumping and whacking and screaming “The madder Julia gets, the stronger Julia gets!” (For Julia, even while having a nervous breakdown, could not help referencing movies.) Bits of bark flew everywhere.
After only a few seconds, but to the playground visitors standing in horrified silence it must have felt like ages, Julia spun round to Buggy Mother, brandishing the branch aloft. The woman ducked behind the pergola, her baby started to wail, and Julia glimpsed Romy and Lee and the fear in their eyes. A kindly-looking elderly man stepped toward her as if considering an intervention, but Julia stopped herself.
“Sorry,” she said to the woman, and she hurled the branch onto the ground. “You see I can’t take this anymore.” Now her tone was matter-of-fact.
Character is action, Julia, she thought.
Benedict put his sympathetic expression on. “We all have to face our demons,” he emoted, and Julia was reminded how much she hated it when actors ad-libbed their lines. He took her hand and waited, presumably for her to sob uncontrollably onto his cravat and declare herself healed, forgiven for savaging the East Village mother, or rather Mother Nature herself in the form of the injured tree. They both wanted the big finish, the bit where Julia had an epiphany that would change her life, but it didn’t come.
And then Marjorie leapt up and bit Benedict on the ankle.
Julia has tried to reconstruct exactly what happened, but she was shocked and does not know now if it’s memory or imagination that has kicked in. She is convinced she heard a CRUNCH! as the dog’s teeth met Benedict’s bone, but it could be that she was remembering the previous CRUNCH! of sap and wood in some weird parallel experience. Unfortunately for Marjorie, Benedict had once done six weeks’ training with the Special Forces for a thriller that had never gone into production, and, in fury, he grabbed the metal section of her lead, flipped it round her neck, and choked her until she was dead.
“What have you done?” screeched Julia, and she fell to her knees, crying and clutching the dog’s corpse as Benedict hopped up and down in agony and asked a passerby to ring his manager in L.A. to get the name of New York’s best plastic surgeon.
• • •
THERE IS SOMETHING SO terrible about death, something so finite, so irrevocable,
that, whether it be a pet fish floating on the top of a bowl, or a parent in a hospital bed, or an ugly dog inert on tarmac, the realization that there is nothing you can do to bring them back and that life will end whether any of us like it or not cannot be ignored. Julia was so traumatized by what had happened that she took to her bed for forty-eight hours. She was aware this was an overreaction. At eleven o’clock at night on the second day the phone rang. It was her mother calling, and not by appointment, but Julia was happy to hear from her and she described her feelings about the terribleness of death, omitting the bit about the parent in a hospital bed. Julia’s mother understood. She said that life certainly did go past in a flash, far quicker than she could ever have imagined, but that teenage Julia had helped her accept that.
“You remember what you used to say, sweetheart: ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’”
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