Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “But the betrayal is the same, Mr. President. Whether you are justifying the ruthless carpet-bombing of Laos with lies about the secret location of enemy headquarters, or justifying the invasion of Iraq with lies about the ability of Saddam Hussein to attack the United States with WMD’s, the betrayal is the same. Whether our government strings us along with assurances that we will be out of Viet Nam in six months, or it strings us along with assurances that the Iraqis will greet us as liberators, or that the Iraqi insurgency is in its final throes, or that the war will largely be paid for from Iraqi oil wealth, or that the war will only cost $50 billion rather than the $600 billion and counting we have actually spent, the betrayal is the same. The rejection of any meaningful and honest dialogue with your countrymen and with Congress about the death and destruction a President inflicts in the name of his country is the same. The readiness to lie and to dissemble and to act in utter disregard for the role of Congress in matters of foreign policy is the same. The calculated dimming of our Constitutional lights, the spying on our citizens, the equation of dissent and treason, the lacing of our national dialogue with the poison of patriotism, is all the same.

  “I am just an Ohio housewife, Mr. President. A mother, a wife, a former schoolteacher, an erstwhile idealist. But, as I said, I have been paying attention. And I am appalled at what I see and at what I have done.”

  “I have told you what I see. I will now tell you what I have done.”

  CHAPTER 70 – Tilly

  “No offense to your stately stoop, Matilda,” said Angus, “but I’ve been out here forty-five minutes. Your neighbors are starting to compare theories about me.”

  I stepped back, taking the door with me. Self-consciousness dawned. I touched my snarled, matted hair and clutched at the seams of my robe to be sure it was closed.

  Angus bent to snub out his cigarette on the concrete and then strode past, a blur of chinos and tweed that had become to me a familiar part of his presence. He walked down the hall to the living room, hands clasped behind his back, crumpled yellow filter between his fingers. I watched him stop and rotate this way and that, taking in his light-starved surroundings – my habitat – and drawing his silent conclusions.

  The place was a disaster; like something big had died and exploded. That much even I could appreciate. What I could not appreciate was how it must have smelled. I wanted to apologize but I could only stare at his tweed shoulders. He turned and looked back at me still holding the door.

  “Are we expecting someone else?” He turned back without waiting for an answer and held up his pinched fingers. “Where do you put your dead cigarettes?”

  I closed the door and began shuffling forwards. Every step hurt my head.

  “I don’t smoke anymore,” I said, turning on a lamp. “I quit.”

  “I see. And have you also forsaken trash cans? Looks like maybe you have.”

  I held out my hand. He dropped the butt into my palm and I tucked it into a mostly empty wine bottle. I began tidying, stacking the cold crusted Chinese food boxes on one corner of the coffee table. It was the last thing for which I had any energy.

  I was not prepared for the smell of old food. My stomach flipped over and I had to stand quietly for a moment to keep from vomiting. I was acutely aware of Angus watching me, his typically ferocious eyes burning like green torches above his impassive, snow-covered expression.

  “I’m sorry for all the…” I broke off, not quite knowing how to describe the embarrassing shambles around me. “Angus, what are you doing here? I’m not feeling …”

  “I’m sorry about … your friend,” he said, I think less out of anything truly empathetic than to avoid having to listen to me lie about contracting the flu or some other contagion. “Mr. West.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I just needed to … I don’t know. I needed to be alone. I’m tired of people, Angus. I want them to leave me be.”

  “Yes. Well. A more sympathetic ear you will never find,” he said with something of a smile. “The more people leave me be, the more I like them. The converse is also true of course. But I’m not here to keep you from your grief or your…take out food.”

  “Angus, where’ve you been? We’ve been looking all over. Blaire’s called ev …”

  He held up a hand.

  “I needed to be alone. I thought we were kindred spirits on that point. May I?”

  He pointed to the chair in front of him. I nodded. He handed me the pizza box and sat down, crossing his legs. I opened the box a crack before setting it precariously on top of a carton of lo mein. My stomach seized. I made my way to the sofa and sat down.

  “You look like Hell,” he said.

  “Thanks. You could have called.”

  “I did.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your mailbox is full. I was roundly rejected by a disturbingly sterile, human-like voice. I would not have thought it possible to loath voice mail any more than I already did. Life is full of surprises.”

  “Sorry. I guess I…”

  “You wanted to be left alone. Yes, I got that.”

  I looked up at him, into that stolid expression, and I could read his disappointment in me like a map. I disgusted him. My inability to manage my own life. My penchant for scandal. My low character. My loathsome blend of personal and professional promiscuity. My lack of substance, lack of accomplishment, lack of intellectual ambition. I was, in short, everything that Elena Ivanova was not.

  I knew why he had come. Why a phone call would not have sufficed. He had come to tear me into shreds for ruining his art; for my apparent willingness to drag Ivanova through the streets of Hollywood by her hair. For making him and his ideals and his talent, a casualty of my generation. For harnessing his brilliance to the pathetic, pointless task of illuminating my depraved and shallow existence with all of its drugged-up sexual cinematic mayhem.

  I knew why he had come and yet, as I sat there feeling increasingly sick to my stomach and my head rupturing in new pain with every thought or move, I wanted it. I wanted to be savaged. I wanted him to unleash his deadly opinions. I wanted him to gut me with his rage. I wanted it to be personal. I wanted to dispense with the deferential pretense of professional differences. He hated me. Hated what I represented in his world. He hated me and I wanted to feel it. I needed to feel it.

  That he had come in person to tell me these things, that he still felt compelled to tell me at all, meant that he didn’t know. I was his first point of contact in the real world upon returning from wherever he had been. He had not yet spoken with Blair.

  He didn’t know.

  Which meant that he would be leaving my home satisfied at having vented his spleen and with some good news to boot. And not just good news, which everyone loves, but the kind of good news that gushes from irony and causes unique agony to the deserving, which all writers love. Ivanova was safe and free precisely because I had acted in accordance with Angus’ low expectations of me. I had slept with my director, causing all manner of emotional turmoil, and had gotten myself fired. Angus had told me – that hot night in Kenya by the elephant fountain as Blair sat at a table arguing with the script writers – he had told me not to do what he and I both knew I was going to do. And I had done it. And because I had done it, the forces of chaos had been loosed, Blair had come undone with love and jealousy, and Ivanova was to be spared the catastrophe of Tilly Johns. So, yes. Good news. Perhaps Blair would finally throw in the towel and the movie would not be made at all. Even better news for Angus.

  I wanted to draw out his anger; my guilt over Zack, fully awake and rejuvenated by that point, conspired with my long-simmering shame over the disappointment and disgust I knew Angus felt for me. A good vengeful rage from Angus was the only thing that made sense in that moment.

  But I was going to make his day with good news.

  A rolling spasm in my stomach forced a pocket of hot, fetid gas up my esophagus.

  “Look,” I said after it passed. “I know why you’re here. You have
every reason to want to take my head off. I wish you would. I really do. I know I’m not who you need or who you want associated with this movie. I know I’m the opposite of that person. But when you talk to Blair, you’ll learn that he’s already fired me. I’m off the picture. For good this time. We’ve had a falling out that I don’t think can be repaired.”

  I waited for him to react in some way, or at least to tell me that such is among the reasons that intelligent people – who nevertheless find themselves in the movie business – would be extremely disinclined to pursue sexual relations with their director. Or something like that in the serves you right category.

  But Angus did neither. He looked at me. I rushed to fill the silence.

  “So … you know. You don’t have to waste your breath if you don’t want to.”

  “I’ve had my last talk with Blair,” he said. “I’m here to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye? Where are you going? You just came back.”

  “You can’t come back if you never left. Just because you haven’t seen me…”

  “I did see you,” I blurted. I pointed through the walls toward the street. “I saw you drive by my house. What was that all about?”

  He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, body language which I took to be quietly defensive and covering his surprise that I had seen him.

  “I wanted to know why there were no police patrolling the streets of Los Angeles arresting kleptomaniac celebrities and chasing white Broncos. Turns out they were all over here in your driveway.”

  “Funny. Why?”

  “I was pursuing a misguided notion that it might be productive if someone took the time to talk to you.”

  “About?”

  “The birds and the bees, Matilda. About how you choose to live your life. About the fact that you must choose to live it, consciously, or it will get away from you.”

  “I see,” I said, feeling and sounding like a teenager. “And now?”

  “And now I’m saying goodbye. Now it is too late for misguided notions.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back home. Back to Ohio. Back to stringing words together like little ink beads.”

  “Like … you mean … for good?”

  Angus gave a slow nod.

  “For good.”

  “What about the movie?”

  “There is no movie. We’re done.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Shouted it, actually. It was not an especially civil exchange.”

  “Because of me? It’s done because of me?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean?”

  “He did tell you that he fired me, right?”

  “He told me he’s sacked you, it’s how Australians put things like that. He might have meant that he’d bedded you, but I don’t think so. If anything, I suspect it was the other way around, given your extraordinary will and his extraordinary weakness for you.”

  I looked at my hands, letting the accusation sting. Letting my silence confess.

  “Even so,” he continued. “In my experience, such indiscretions are rarely unilateral.”

  “In your experience?”

  Angus shook his head apologetically and with an expression of mild irritation.

  “It’s your business, Matilda. Sorry I mentioned it.”

  “Did Blair tell you why he’s pulling the plug?”

  “We have an understanding, Blair and I, forged over a bottle of very old Kentucky bourbon. If he wants my stamp of approval on his movie, then I have full approval rights on all matters pertaining to the script and we each must agree on the cast. We each have veto rights. Blair has full technical and directorial discretion and he always has the ultimate ability to do without my blessing and to make the movie however he wants to make it. I can’t stop him legally. Technically, he owns my story. I suppose I should be more grateful for having any input at all.”

  “Not especially surprising,” I said, “given your extraordinary will and his extraordinary weakness for you.”

  “Touché.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He insisted on recasting Ivanova. I refused. He exercised his right to veto you and I exercised my right to veto everyone else.”

  It was as though he had changed genders or sprouted wings and horns right before me, sitting in my living room chair. The very idea that Angus would have fought for my inclusion, as opposed to grudgingly accepting it, was so alien, so counter-factual, that I could not at first accept the truth of my own ears.

  The jolt of unreality tipped the delicate balance of forces that had managed to keep my stomach stable and my mind focused on something other than swell of nausea that had done nothing but grow since I had first sat up in bed. I closed my eyes to beat the feeling back down.

  “I thought … I thought…”

  “You okay? You’re looking…”

  “No.”

  I stood abruptly from the couch intending a beeline for the bathroom. My first step caught the top of Angus’ shoe and I went sprawling, head first, into the ornately fluted corner of the bookcase that stood quietly against the wall of my living room like a sentry. I felt the polished wood, like a book forced in between other books on a shelf much too small, make room for itself in my forehead. I cursed loudly, scrambling back up to my feet and continuing on, losing the race to the rising bile in my throat.

  The kitchen was closer than the bathroom. I tried for the lights with a flailing slap at the wall, but missed. I made it to the sink just as the retching with which I had left the living room and entered the dim kitchen began to produce, in great soggy gulps, the contents of my abused and beleaguered body.

  I hunched over the lip of the sink and vomited violently. The sound was inhuman. A kind of raw, savage grief, amplified on all sides, filled my ears. Between heaves, the blood collecting in the thatch of my left eyebrow from the gash just above dripped onto the porcelain in brilliant, sanguineous spatters. I felt my heart beating in my aching temples. The heaves kept coming, like aftershocks to an earthquake as my body wrung itself dry.

  I felt a hand splay itself against my lower back.

  “Go away!” I shouted into the drain. “Get the fuck …”

  I heaved again. Angus moved his hand in long, slow circles. He gathered my hair from out of the sink, holding it clear of the evacuation route. He gathered it in one hand and returned his palm to my back, saying nothing.

  The retching thinned and then gave way to coughing and spitting and then panting. I splashed my face repeatedly and used my fingers to press against the cut on my forehead. Eventually, the only sound was the furious hiss of running water. Angus’ voice came like something warm and baked.

  “Let’s get a look at your head.”

  He cupped each shoulder and gently rotated my body. I resisted, of course, gripping the sink. My robe had come open in the fall and flurry of sickness. I couldn’t look at him; knowing how I must have looked. And smelled. Hating that he was there to see it all. Hating that he had fought for me. Hating that he actually wanted me to play Ivanova after all. That he had insisted on it, to the point of bringing the entire production down around our ankles.

  I hated that he was leaving. And that he was taking her with him.

  “Come, come,” he said. “Bleeding out in the kitchen sink is a level of ignominy befitting only the very biggest movie stars. You’ve got potential but you’re getting way ahead of yourself here. Come on. Let’s have a look.”

  I let go of the sink and let him rotate me until we were facing each other. I clutched my robe together at the waist. I could feel a fresh trickle of blood reach my eyebrow.

  “Ahh.” It was a dismissive sound. “You’ll live. Let me see your eyes.”

  I looked directly at him, only a foot or so from his face. His eyes had grown calm and had deepened in color. His brow was pinched in a concern that belied his tone. He touched the bridge of his nose.

  “Keep focused right here,” he said.

/>   One hand on each side of my damp chin, he rotated my head slowly, left and then right, and then again, all the while peering into me as if into a darkened well or the hull of an abandoned ship, looking for something or someone long lost to him. He brought me slowly back to center, keeping his fingers on the sides of my face. We looked at each other in silence. The air between us held the pencil beams of light penetrating the perforations in the blinds that I had, days before, drawn against the window. Behind me, well beyond my conscious reach, the constancy of water hissed into the sink. Angus blinked rapidly, as if coming back into the moment.

  “Let’s get some ice on it,” he rasped, then clearing his throat.

  As he turned for the freezer, a feeling of desperation seized me. A convulsive unease far worse than I had just experienced, and emanating from someplace far deeper, simply took control, rolling up the length of my body.

  I grabbed him, encircling him with my arms, pulling the blood-free side of my face down to the flat of his chest. I felt him freeze, arms hovering away from his sides. I heard his heart beating in my ear.

  The more I tried to hold it in the greater the pressure grew to let it out. It started as a silent wail, the muscles in my face pulling against the black threads of his shirt, the rim of my eye bisecting the sloping fold of his blazer. I felt his arms close around me, the scent of him enveloping me, containing me to the part of the world within my world that he controlled.

  There was no resisting after that. The sobs came like a flash flood, exploding through rocky mountain passes and down into the barren riverbeds of my life carrying broken, colliding chunks of granite that eventually became words.

  “I sorry,” I choked. “I’m so sorry.”

  I think I believed that I was apologizing for making his parting visit so inexplicably wretched. But I was not. I think I believed I was apologizing to him. To Angus. The writer. The purist. But I was not. I think he must have believed that his unexpected tenderness and concern had provoked my emotions, drawing my grief over Zack’s death to the surface, and while he would have been at least partially correct, it does not explain all or even most of that moment.