“Yeah, we are. I’m just check on something. Shawna, she’s supposed to e-mail me sides for that movie I told you about. I actually have to send in a taped audition, which is always weird.”
“But taking out your phone in the middle of a face-to-face is also weird, and rude. You’ve told me that—repeatedly.”
He looked up from his phone, a smile hanging off the edge of his lip. “Best, come on. You know I’m listening, and you know I’m waiting for this e-mail. This audition, it’s PT Anderson. It’s important.”
“So when I’m on deadline and doing my phone stuff, that’s not important?”
He looked up again. The smile was still there, but fading. “We’re not doing this. I’m not doing this. You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m saying that you’re setting these rules here and then breaking them. You were the guy, just last week, complaining about how we don’t pay attention to the moments in our lives, how we’re missing all the good stuff and basically walking around empty, just pretending we know how to respond to life. You then proceeded to mock me for having a Twitter account and caring about my following. That ringing any bells for you? Do you remember saying all that?”
“No, because I wasn’t mocking you about Twitter followers. Who gives a shit about Twitter? I remember talking about how being an actor often makes you feel like a vacant shell, always standing outside of things, observing, recording, just filling up with notes on how people are supposed to feel, how we’re supposed to behave and experience everything, so you can re-create that in a performance. And in the end, you’re walking around with all of these other people’s stories, their lives, their weird hang-ups and fears—you still feel empty. More than empty, you feel nothing. And the really fucked-up part is, you’re stuck there, alone, with nothing.”
“Grant, you didn’t say any of that. You were scolding me—and our generation—for always being on some lit-up device. You were going in on us millennials for being vacant. I think you even used the word cipher. You were basically one line away from shouting, ‘And get off my lawn!’ It wasn’t about loneliness at all. You were pissy because you felt like I wasn’t listening to you talking about some actor thing.”
“Some actor thing?”
“This is nuts. It’s like you’re presenting this revised version of history—how you wanted things to go or sound or be. I mean, it’s a well-shaped story, but it’s just not true. I would remember you saying that you feel lonely or empty sometimes, regardless if I were on my iPhone or not.”
“This is some shit. Here you go, reducing me to some bullshit stereotype—again. And all because I’m out here on a grind, working to keep working. Like that’s a crime? But maybe that’s just some actor thing.” By then, Grant’s lips were stretched across his face as tightly as he gripped his phone.
“I don’t know . . . you tell me. Maybe you should check your trusty black notebook and see.” I said it, but wanted to hit delete the minute I did. His jaw was clenched as he backed away from me, tilting his head. “Grant, I’m sorry. That wasn’t—look, I would remember if you said that. I would remember and I would be with you in that; talk it through. Just like we did at the hotel with the French fries and the bathrobes, when you told me about your mother, about missing her, wanting to go back to before—I would remember that. You know I would remember.”
Misstep.
I saw his arm move; it was quick. Then the dense clash of his phone meeting the hardwood. And he was gone. For three days and two nights. When he came back, I said nothing about the fight or the phone, nor did he. We greeted each other sweetly, but something else was there in the interstices, something that Grant dragged in on the bottom of his shoes, nested in his clothes, resting on the very surface of his skin. It was dark and quiet and strong, and just curled up inside of him, stowed away with no clear plan to leave.
It was like that for the next few weeks: Grant sequestered in his bedroom with his black notebook and twenty pillows. He never bothered to get more than a thick futon mattress. He was only supposed to crash at my place for a few weeks while he waited for news about his HBO project getting green-lit. I blinked and he was full-on living with me. But just because he was in my bed didn’t mean he needed to be in my bed. The second bedroom was free—in theory. Small and dim and always the wrong temperature, I’d often watch movies on my laptop in there, hugging a body pillow on the hardwood floor and wearing this ugly robe my parents gave me in high school, a bra (maybe), and my pilling yoga pants. It was supposed to be my office, then my meditation room, then my wardrobe extension/ showroom, but primarily remained my dark hole until Grant tumbled into it and stayed.
When I left for work in the mornings during those weeks post-fight, his door would be closed. Same when I returned. After the first couple of times I stopped doing the sneaky ear-to-door listening thing. Maybe he was in there, maybe he was sleeping, maybe he was in there wishing he were sleeping. I figured he’d come out when he wants to, when he worked this dark, quiet thing out of his system. But one late night, when I got home from Sex, Ovaries, and Office Politics episode 12, I found the apartment in total darkness. Strange, because I always leave the lamp in the corner of the living room turned on, burning all day long—habit from my mother, who was always spooked about entering a pitch-black house. There was a slip of light leaking from under Grant’s door, and a familiar bottle of water on the bar counter in the kitchen. There was a star-shaped sticky note on the bottle:
Best Lightburn’s
HANDS OFF IF YOU’RE NOT BEST LIGHTBURN
THIS MEANS YOU, MURDEROUS BURGLAR
Whenever Grant was in town and made it home before I did, he would leave out a bottle of water for me. We had gone back in time somehow, and I was too thrown to submit to chuckling or feeling nostalgic about any of it. I just wanted to magically jump time again and cut to the scene where I’m recklessly drooling in my own bed. I grabbed the bottle of water and I tried to breeze past his room.
“Hey, you’re home,” he said through the cracked door. I pushed it open more. He looked just as his voice sounded, hushed and sweet. He was propped up on all of his pillows and had that goddamn black notebook cradled in his lap.
“Thanks for the water.” I rattled it near my face.
He reached out his hand. It’s this thing we started doing early on, giving each other five—up high, on the side, down low. Stupid, I know.
I slipped in. Gave him a soft, lopsided five. He gripped my hand, pulled me into him, into his bed, slowly. I went with it. He kissed me high on my cheekbone, right under my eye. It’s his move. These cheekbones, they’re like ledges. I can’t get enough. Always appraising my bone structure, running his finger and, often, his lips along my collar, my cheek, jaw, hip bone, commenting on the angles.
“Sleep with me tonight?” The look that followed, all deep and doleful like a torch song pouring out of his eyes, only confirmed my plan to break up with him. Grant wasn’t getting too close; he was already there—and it’s not a safe place.
“Grant, I’m wiped. I’ve been staring at crappy copy all night about how dieting fucks up your boobs. My eyes are shot, plus I’m almost certain I’m wearing period panties for no legit reason. You don’t want none of this, guy.”
He nuzzled my ear, when he knows how much I hate that. I even hate the word.
“No, sleep-sleep,” he whispered. “Nothing but sleep. Promise.”
Again, I went along with it. Couldn’t figure out how to turn away from the ache at the base of his request. Saying no, it didn’t feel like an option.
“Okay . . . well, let me go get my jammy-jams on, wash this gross day off my face.”
“You can wear this . . .” He reached for the blue T-shirt on the floor next to his stack of books, “and we can just turn off the lights.”
“Um, so there’s no sex, but I’m slipping into your cozy T-shirt? And, if history is any indication, you are likely nude under those covers—with socks.”
“You know me
well. Does it make me a dick to say that that’s what I love about you most—that you really know me? That’s major, because anyone who knows me would tell you that they don’t really know me.”
“Was that a riddle?”
“No, I change my answer. That—that right there, the jokes, the wry fly shit—that’s what I love about you. Actually,” he said, a drowsy, crooked grin creeping up the side of his face, “it’s everything. I just love—”
“Grant, don’t. I don’t think we should—”
“Oh, but we should. We definitely should.” He smiled again, but this time it was his smile—the earnest one that starts in his eyes. “It’s just sleep, B.”
The next night, he asked me again. Despite having common sense and better judgment and self-worth and all the things (according to every woman’s magazine ever) that a girl should hone before stepping foot one into these kinds of relationships, I said yes—again. Lying in his bed again, awake again, staring up at the skylight again, tracing the cracks from the high window down to the top of the door, and trying to figure out how I might follow that same route. The moment I slid out from under his hot, heavy leg, some other part of him would wrap around me, pull me close. I was sleeping with an anaconda. And it had noting to do with his penis—which, of course, was also unleashed and twitching against my thigh. He smelled like beer and whiskey or maybe it was ethanol. Normally, this would be fantastic. I like kissing a man and tasting alcohol on his lips. But nothing about this was normal. Grant, this beautiful man with the famous jawline and “I got this” swagger, was becoming ordinary, a maudlin and needy cliché, desperate to have someone swoop in with answers and solve it all for him. And I—this woman with the cheekbones that he loves and the scent he loves and the list of detailed, sweet and wonderful things he notices and loves—was choosing to help him by leaving him. Later he won’t see it as me quitting on him or rubbing salt in his eyes or kicking him as he’s falling down. The truth is: He doesn’t need me, with all my broken-doll parts. I was never going to be good for him, because I’m just not good. And later he’ll know this. Later he’ll see that leaving him was the most loving thing I could ever do for him.
We ended up having sex that second night, but it was a mess, and not in the usual sticky way that mixing parts can be sometimes. It was sloppy and sad and just a bad idea. He couldn’t stay hard. He cursed himself, a murmur of hot words breathed into my neck. He pounded a fist in his pillow. He dug his nails into my hip. He cupped my face in his hands, connecting our heads. He stumbled over a scattering of muddled words. And finally, after all of it, he apologized, over and over, before sliding off of me to get dressed—shirt dragged over the head, legs pushed roughly into the pants—and walked out. The hollow click of the front door echoed in my chest. More than ridiculous, I felt relieved. Whatever ledge he was sliding toward, it didn’t matter; I wasn’t going to be there to watch.
I look down at the scrap of paper with its janky directions to the woods of Connecticut, and then over at Grant.
“Just get us the fuck out of Brooklyn, and I’ll help you from there,” he says.
“No need. I’ve figured it all out.”
He’s already curling into the seat, eyes closed, spirit fading. I adjust my rearview and glance down at the paper again. Partridge Hollow. Finders Way. I know exactly where I’m going. I toggle the mirror again, willing it to reshape the road ahead of me too.
CHAPTER 8
My introduction couldn’t have been more awkward or awful. I called Grant’s uncle from the road when we were forty-five minutes out. I had spoken to Uncle Richard exactly zero times before that. The wife, Rosalie, I knew about from the two or three mentions Grant made of her in passing—perfectly pleasant bits, but not enough to go on when meeting a guy’s family for the first time.
I’d never even met Grant’s big sister Gisele, and they were extra-close, especially since their mother died. Cerebral aneurysm. I used to think about the mother a lot, back when Grant and I first got together almost a year ago. From the stories he told, it was clear she—this quiet, white woman from the quiet, white Prairies—lived for him. Even his name—she chose it so carefully, created it to last: Grant King. She changed their surname after he—not Gisele—was born. Hecking wasn’t doing anyone any favors, and with Grant’s black father being a complete deadbeat—and then simply dead—she was happy to shed the terrible, clunky thing. Grant said his mother had long dreamed of being a sculptor, but never found the nerve to step toward it. She remained a grouchy chemical engineer who instead shaped her son’s life until she lost hers.
But there I was, this basic stranger calling them with unsettling news about their fabulous, famous Grant.
Rosalie answered. Her voice was steady and calm, even after I told her what happened—as if I called to reminder her that her dentist appointment was on Tuesday. It was probably the British accent. Her only questions: Where exactly we were on the route and whether I needed directions. We were at a gas station in New Haven, and no, but thanks. I called Gisele next, while Grant was still inside buying more Diet Coke and licorice. Voice mail. Thank Jesus. I’m sure I sounded rambling and ridiculous.
When we arrive at Partridge Hollow, Grant’s whole twitchy-sweating-weirdness is on level orange. He doesn’t want to be here. He barely wants to be in his own skin. Rosalie—short and slight and nothing like I imagined—is charmingly sweet with Grant. She wraps her arms around him; her hugs long, but not lingering, and her offers of tea and blueberry scones and anything else we might need to be comfortable are warm and motherly, but not overdone. Richard is, as my mother might say, your box standard older, white gentleman. He’s tall and also slim, better described as wiry, and he seems more interested in hearing about our drive up and the kind of mileage the car gave us than whatever is happening with his only nephew. Mind if I have a look inside? That’s the only thing Richard has said to Grant in these first few hours since arriving. And he disappears right after. Richard is busy, clearly, and must go bury himself somewhere in the manor.
This place is massive; simply calling it a house is downright disrespectful. And no detail has been left unstudied. Everything in here is considered: from the drop-in, fireclay sinks and footed double-wide tub in the bright bathroom to the giant, yellow French range ($11,000—yes, I’m a stealth Google master) and the ladder in the kitchen. I said, there’s a ladder in the kitchen, on a track. And the bedrooms—the handful that I’ve seen so far—are magnificent. When we step into the one Rosalie says is mine, I gasp. Like literally gasp. The ceiling’s wood beams come to a perfect pitch like a tent. The bed, all white and wide and inviting, is covered in a beautiful quilt that I’d bet was handmade and passed down through someone’s family tree. And the flourishes: rusted, old-fashioned lantern on the edge of a worn-down wood crate used as a night table; bench made from recycled railroad tie; junky-treasure Corona typewriter sitting on weathered cedar bookshelf. It’s as if Aunt Rosalie created the room specifically for me, curated from all of my dreams. I want to fall into the bed this instant, and tell them all I’d prefer to be left alone and only woken when dinner is being served. Decadence suits me.
As soon as we come to the end of the tour, Grant heads back upstairs with Rosalie carrying his flat gym bag for him.
“You can stay down here and have some tea,” Rosalie tells me, gesturing with her chin at the small, round, lacy-top table near the brick fireplace. There’s a full tea service set out. “Or we can carry your things up as well, get a rest. There’s always time for tea later.”
During daylight hours Grant remains in his room in bed or he’s gathered up, small and feeble, in one of the Adirondack chairs that Rosalie has lined up neatly on the west porch. At night, Grant roams around the compound with that notebook. I can hear him—the creaks and shuffles and deep sighs—from my room.
I knew the knock was coming that first night. I could have timed it. He stood leaning on the opened door long after I had said come in. He was smiling, sort of. I moved
my reading short stack aside and pushed the layer of covers back, showed him there was room for him. He poured himself into the guest bed, his cold, tight arm rubbing against the top of my leg, and stared up at the ceiling. He was lying back in that way that I hate—like he’s in a coffin. I offered a back rub. He nodded and rolled over. His body was icy and tense. I slid on top of him, straddled, wrapping my warm thighs around his lower back. He arched up to remove his T-shirt, unleashing this scent—his scent, a mix of soap, sea breeze, and fresh sheets—and he went back down into the pillow with a long sigh. He took more deep breaths and let them seep out slow—I felt each of them pressing lightly inside of me. Running my hands along his back, shoulders, neck, I wanted him. My breath got heavy and I felt my heartbeat quicken. All my bad ideas floated to the surface; my solid reasons for why there could never be an us started to fall away, replaced by this sure craving for him. Splintered and hurting, Grant was still pulling me in. I was leaning into it too, and about to go for it, slip off my tank top and everything else, when he said something.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Yeah. Sorry to drag you into all my bullshit.”
“Grant, you’re just going through it right now.”
He let out another one of those deep sighs, and I slid right off of him. “Look, there’s nothing to apologize for here. You’re in a rough patch and need some time to figure it out. Just do that. Do what it takes to figure it out.”
“You’re good. Really good—to me, for me.”
He squinted his eyes and I swear I saw a flicker of something, a glint of Grant the guy as his head tilted toward me. I let mine fall back, making it easier for him to get to my collarbone. But instead of burying his face in my body, he was sinking into the pillow, sobbing.
There are things that I know and there are things that I do not know. At the top of my list of things I don’t know is this: What to do when a man starts crying. It’s bizarre and terrible and I have no clue where to put my eyes, much more where to lay a comforting hand. What’s the best move? Touch his head? Brush his wet cheek? His jerking shoulder? Like I said: things I do not know.
The Thunder Beneath Us Page 9