A few days later the A.D.A. gives an interview. I am trying not to be insulted that they’ve passed my case down to an assistant, a plain-Jane type with an angular Picasso face who from what I can tell wears only gray. She is pleased the judge denied me bail and says it points to the seriousness of my crime. A heinous murder and the worst case of erotomania this city has seen since Mark David Chapman.
She’s found a word for loving too much and I am it.
I am an erotomaniac.
I like the sound of it.
The shrink tells me not to think too much about anything they say. She’s never heard of plain-Jane Picasso’s word and she’s been to grad school. It’s the American way to turn the things people do into diseases, she says. I think she was born somewhere else, this shrink, in Europe or Australia. Her accent reminds me of Clay Thompson from World, especially when she says the word darling. I stopped talking to her briefly last fall when Angel said it was a red flag, like tattooing the word sicko on my forehead.
But Angel is in the prison hospital and I am confined to my cell most of the day without anybody to talk to. Without you.
Perhaps I should be in a hospital as well. The love hospital. It has pink walls and heart-shaped hospital beds. Pretty nurses deliver meds in champagne glasses. At the love hospital there is no such thing as loving too much. Everyone is an erotomaniac.
I write the word with my felt-tip pen. No ballpoints for me anymore. They’re afraid I might use them to puncture my veins. My sentences look different in felt tip; they’re fuzzier, almost crying into the page. Calling out for you the way I can’t do otherwise. As hard as I try, I can’t make the tears come. At first I had to be tough. Now I am simply blank.
You don’t come to me in my new cell. The shrink says this is also normal, there’s a word for it, too, probably. Something that means you were never the person I thought you were, meaning I invented the whole thing, meaning … I keep remembering the gun and the hole in your chest with smoke coming out of it. It’s like it’s not real. Like I’m living in the endless middle of World Without End (soaps aren’t big on endings), but this is real life, where no plot on the planet can ever bring you back. No swindle or cover-up, no “Hah! It was my identical twin you killed!” Even on the show, they left few openings: You were run down by a drunk driver, and everyone in Foxboro mourned for months. It was good for the cast, producers said. A natural outlet for their grief. But it must have been awful watching those episodes knowing the ending was real. At least it gave fans a sense of finality. They could see you were really gone, in life and on television.
And this is the crazy part: I am still here.
Trapped in a world without end, without you.
ICE AND SNOW PILED UP ALL WINTER LONG. Jack tucked his wool slacks into waterproof boots before getting in his car and driving into the city. He’d had a special closet in his office built for his fancy shoes, although he barely touched ground from garage to garage. At home, he hung a bumper sticker on our refrigerator with a picture of a dog lifting his leg to pee. Underneath it said: Just Say No to Yellow Snow.
In February we took a ski trip to Vermont and ate piles of snow with maple syrup on top. Nancy got the flu and was bedridden half the week. I took a lesson every morning. In the afternoons, Jack and I skied black-diamond slopes. At night I watched the sky, first awash in stars, then as the week wore on a sheet of heavy gray clouds that finally dragged in the rain. A skier’s worst enemy. People forfeited their weekly tickets and called it quits or spent their final days of vacation driving into town, sipping hot chocolate, playing backgammon and Boggle and Parcheesi in the lodge. We went shopping for new equipment—the sales were fantastic—although Jack said it was the last time he would ski the East Coast; conditions were too unpredictable. I got a new pair of skies I never even tried. The storm had wiped out everything. I swear, you could hear the mountain cry.
One rainy morning, a man in a bright yellow raincoat with matching hat and boots knocked on our door and told Nancy her mother had just called the condo office, and my mother, looking perplexed, said, “I didn’t give her that number.”
“She says not to worry, but she needs to speak to you immediately. You can call from the office if you’d like.”
Nancy grabbed her ski jacket and pointy wool hat that made her look like a woodpecker and stepped quickly into her furry after-ski boots. Jack looked up from the counter and murmured, “Need me?” but she’d already shut the door behind her. He returned to whatever it was he was doing. I walked to the windows and looked out at the gray parking lot. The clouds hung so low you could barely see the mountain. My throat was dry. Back in the kitchenette, Jack sat at the counter.
“What do you think’s going on?” I asked, joining him.
“What am I, psychic?” He didn’t look up, wasn’t even interested. She wasn’t his mother.
I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Drank straight from the container. Jack stared at me. I guess I wasn’t supposed to, but he did. It tasted better. “Hey,” he said, “did you know there’s a maple syrup farm near here? I wonder if it’s the season. There’s only a couple a weeks a year you can bleed the trees … You know what they do? They make a hole in the tree and then they tie a bucket underneath to catch the sap. It’s wild. I mean, I’d really love to see that. You know, here we are putting a man on the moon and we’re still catching maple syrup in metal buckets. Yeah, I’d really like to see that.”
“Me too.”
He raised his head. “You’re humoring the old man?”
“No, really.”
“Okay, then let’s see if the trees are drooling yet.” He hopped off his stool and walked toward the back of the condo, speaking over his shoulder. “And if they’re not, we’ll come back. We can come back, right? There’s nothing stopping us. This shitty little town might be all right in the spring …”
He disappeared behind the bathroom door. I sat down at the counter where he’d been sitting. The seat was still warm and felt good. Jack generated a lot of heat. When I was a kid and we used to sit together on my bed, it was always cozy when I got underneath the covers. He’d filled up my room with his body, his words, his maple-y smell. Now he couldn’t talk to me without doing a million other things.
Seeking a distraction of my own, I dug up the copy of Babbling ’Bout Brooke I had in my backpack. A new woman had taken over your fan club, and for weeks she’d been organizing a letter-writing campaign to an archbishop in the Midwest who had condemned a conflicted and heavily flashbacked kiss between Jaymie Jo and Father Brody. It was a disgrace, the bishop said, a total disparagement of the cloth. He was begging advertisers, in the name of decency, to pull their spots. But this new president of your fan club, a frosted blonde with fat cheeks and red blotches like Gorbachev’s on her neck and face, said it was just art imitating life and if the church couldn’t deal with having a mirror held up to it then that was its own problem. She was right, even though I hated her guts. The way she said everything was “hunky-Dorito”; her subservient moonbeam of a smile. You couldn’t have had anything in common with her.
Anyway, I didn’t care much about the church, those bishops were always railing against something, but I was pissed at the writers. They were totally out of touch with your character. Last fall you told Soap Opera Digest you’d stopped having sex with your boyfriend to get into Jaymie Jo’s head and this had given you strength you never knew you had. I could totally relate. After me and Bobby broke up I decided I was finished with sex. Any idiot could secrete a hormone. It was the opposite that took real work. This is what you’d learned, and now they wanted your Jaymie Jo to give it up because the priest was good-looking, when he wasn’t even half as cute as John Strong, and you’d managed to hold him off. Nobody was going to buy it.
I’d crafted these thoughts into a letter to you and cc’d the producers. A response came back, typewritten, so nobody would question it. You wrote (and I quote this from memory): Dear Lillian G. Sp
eck, I am aware of the problems some people have interpreted in Jaymie Jo’s decision. We are working to resolve these very sensitive issues in a way that is satisfactory to everyone without compromising the integrity of the story or anybody’s character. I am very thankful for your letter. Without the loyal support of fans like you, the often groundbreaking work we’re doing on the show would be impossible. Always, Brooke.
You scribbled your signature with a prominent B, a sign of confidence and complicity, but the letter sounded nothing like you. I knew you were angry about Jaymie Jo’s decision, I could read between the lines, but I also knew you had to do what the producers said. In Babbling you said you would never intentionally offend the church, and once people saw where the story was going they’d understand. The message was really about “love on the macro scale.” And your new fan club president said if anyone knew about macro-love it was you, and I thought, What right did she have to talk about your love? This woman who looked like the leader of the Communists. Who loved her so damn much?
I tossed the newsletter and returned to the windows. Mountain still weeping, maples drowning in their tears, drooling. Did the rain help loosen their syrup glands the way my nose always ran in the cold?
Nancy returned, drenched and heavy. Looking at her gave me a chill. The toilet flushed behind the bathroom door and Jack stepped outside. Their eyes met for a quick second, a gray field beaming between them. My throat clamped. Shaking off her hat and coat, Nancy spoke calmly: “My father’s in the hospital. He ran the car into the divider and flipped over. He’s okay, miraculously. Just a few scratches. But he doesn’t remember any of it. He keeps asking why he took the bus to the mall when he has a car, why the driver wasn’t more careful. My mother says he’s worried about the other passengers, and every time she tells him there were no other passengers, he was driving, he nods, says, ‘Oh, that’s good,’ is quiet for a few seconds, then asks why he took the bus to the mall.”
“Okay, that’s it, the party’s over,” Jack said. “The car is history. I told you he shouldn’t be driving, he can barely see two feet in front of him on the shuffle board court. What is with motor vehicles out there? Aren’t they supposed to test you again when you hit a certain age?”
“This isn’t about his driving.”
“How many times has he run off the road? Huh? It’s always, ‘One more time and we’ll take the car away.’ Well, one more time has come.”
“He doesn’t remember any of it.”
“He’s too old, let me tell you—”
“Did you hear me? He doesn’t remember any of it!” Nancy shouted, and Jack and I both stared at her, so stiff. Like a mannequin. Rain pounded the glass doors, melting the clouds and trees and muddy roads outside. The wind was howling. Nancy walked to the kitchenette, took a glass from the drying rack, and turned on the sink, testing the water with her fingers before filling it. She drank two glasses of water in two long sips, then went for the gin. It wasn’t even noon. Jack said he was going out to find the paper, and I asked if I could go with him.
He didn’t answer, but I put on my ski jacket and hiking boots and followed him outside. We walked fast, although the rain letting up a bit felt good. Jack talked about the weather, how you don’t really notice it until it gets in your way. I noticed it all the time, especially the rain. At home I really liked the rain. Here, it turned this magical wonderland into a scalped mountain. Who’d thought of cutting into it like that? Out there in the rain it didn’t seem right.
Jack asked me if I’d met anyone in my lessons, and I shook my head no. “There were a bunch of kids in my class,” he said. “We probably got into the wrong groups.”
“There were kids in my group, I just didn’t talk to them. They were kind of pompous.”
“They were all much better than me. Don’t say anything. You’ll see when you’re my age, it’s not easy watching people who aren’t thinking, If I go too fast I could lose control and break something or wind up dead or paralyzed or worse. One guy literally jumped from mogul to mogul, it was really something.”
“A lot of people in my group did that.”
“It was like the kid was flying,” Jack smiled. We’d reached the general store and went inside.
Jack picked up his newspaper and asked if I wanted anything. I took a few root beer sticks from a glass jar on the counter, he paid, and we left the store. Jack was going over to the lodge to read. “I’ll see you back at home,” he said, and then must have sensed I wanted to go with him. “You know, one of the guys in my class mentioned a teen center … I think it’s in the old barn. Why don’t you try and find it? I bet there’s a lot of kids hanging out. I mean, what else is there to do now, right?”
“Nothing,” I said, and feeling the clamp around my neck, barely got out the words, “maybe I’ll go,” knowing I wouldn’t be caught near anything called a teen center. I broke apart from Jack and walked toward the base of the mountain. The chair lift was running without passengers. Every thirty seconds or so one chair disappeared into the clouds as another one emerged from the mist on the other side. I thought it would be cool if we could ride into the clouds together. I like it down here, you said. Let’s walk through the woods back to your house. I want to hear more about you.
No matter what was going on in your life, you always wanted to hear about me. This is exactly why I loved you. And did I have a lot on my mind. I’d been thinking about celibacy. About how sex really wasn’t such a big deal. It was one of those things like drinking beer, or root beer for that matter—anybody could do it. Like the song says, birds do it, bees do it, my parents do it … You didn’t have to be smart or funny or know anything about politics. In fact, you didn’t have to know anything at all. It was the lowest common denominator.
And another thing I loved about you was you understood this. Since the bishops had been accusing you of cursing the priesthood, you felt like you had to defend sex, but only when it was tied to love. You said the story line was about a love so strong that—even though it went against all of society—to deny it physically would have been wrong. You said it had nothing to do with sex as we commonly refer to it and I knew exactly what you meant. Sex was everywhere. You’d see it in guys and girls together, holding hands like little commercials for it. Like you’re nothing if you’re not having sex. I hate to say it, but you were like that with John Strong: Watching you guys together was like looking at sex. But I knew you wanted more.
In Babbling you said you were really depressed when you and John broke up. You really loved him, and even though all the tabloids said he was having an affair with the TV star Robyn Carlyle, you swore you never believed them. Publicly, you said you hoped the two of you could work out your difficulties and get back together. But I knew better. There was nothing between you but common everyday sex.
And the breakup was good for your career. Already you were reading through movie scripts and thinking about directing. You didn’t need John Strong eating up your time and mental energy. He didn’t deserve it.
We’d come to the end of the muddy path that led to the parking lot behind the condo. The drizzling had just about stopped, and it was much colder. If the temperature kept falling, they could maybe turn on the snow machines overnight and fill in some of the grassy patches. We could get in one last day of skiing. I wanted you to stay and ski with me tomorrow but you had to work. It wasn’t your fault, it went with the territory, and I was respectful, careful not to throw myself on you like the rest of your desperate fans.
As quickly as you’d come, you were gone. I stood alone in the half-empty lot, feeling as soggy as the barren mountain. People were leaving; they’d had enough. Through the glass doors of the condo, I could see Nancy curled up like a baby on the couch, the empty glass on the table in front of her, and I wished like hell I could have gotten out of there, too.
EACH DAY IS NO DIFFERENT FROM THE NEXT. I wake up to the sounds of the guard depositing my breakfast tray and walk over to the sink. Splash cold water on my f
ace, try to see my reflection in the rusty pipes. Mirrors are taboo. Afraid I’ll break the glass and use the pieces to slice up my wrists, they won’t even let me keep the compact Nancy gave me.
You don’t realize how much you miss your face until you can’t see it—or maybe you do, Brooke. Is that what being dead is like? No concept of yourself other than your feelings. And nobody to share them with. You’re totally alone.
When you think about the word alone, what does it look like? A desert with sweeping sand dunes as far as the eye can see? The busiest of streets in the busiest of cities where faces pass at lightning speed and not one is familiar? Alone. Say it as if it were an article and a noun: I am a lone.
And what does it feel like, that word? Alone. Something like nausea, but it breaks the skin in tiny red bumps. Alone is a physical thing.
The water in my sink won’t get hot, and the soap barely lathers. It’s white with dirty brown grooves in the bar and reminds me of the soap in Edie’s bathroom. Her mom bought soap, paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo in bulk for discount prices, and everything seemed distilled, a lesser version of what it was supposed to be. Like Edie after Los Angeles.
Frantic for suds, I rub my fingers and palms over my face, trying to generate some sort of chemical reaction. Spontaneous combustion. If only I could blow myself up like a giant star. Incinerate the person I no longer see. What do I look like in here? What did I look like outside? When I was young I used to think people ignored me because I was so ugly. Jack and Nancy couldn’t get too close, fearing the disease might rub off on them. Kids teased me about the white streak in my hair. Whenever strangers looked too closely I assumed they’d never seen a child so disgusting.
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