by Ali Benjamin
When Alex finishes Evie’s ice cream, she offers Evie one of the earbuds. Evie takes it, then the two of them dance, sharing some song he can’t hear. Ethan watches them move. It’s like Evie, too, is split into multiple parts. She’s in front of him now, this midlife version of herself, no longer ethereal, maybe, but still gorgeous. At the same time, he can also see all those other Evies: the barely-out-of-girlhood version who first walked into the Bränd office. The flickering ingenue who captivated New York in the “Heaven Is a Gal named Audrey” campaign. The woman who stood with him in Columbus Circle, telling him she wished he would move to L.A. All those versions from the movie posters. The Evie who understood that Randy’s audition script was wrong. The Evie who read it anyway. And another Evie too: the one who exists only in a life he did not choose. All these Evies are together, all at once, like a mirror image reflecting toward infinity, except that every reflection is a little different.
Ethan notices the server behind the counter pick up her phone, pretend to read something, but Ethan can tell by the angle: she’s trying to get a video of Evie dancing. He clears his throat, shoots the girl a warning look.
Just this once, let the woman be. Let her dance without the rest of the world offering up their opinion on it.
* * *
—
Ethan and Alex walk Evie back to her Prius. Alex skips ahead, nearly running over an octogenarian shuffling along the street in bright-green chinos.
“Alex!” Ethan hollers at her. “Careful!”
“Sorry!” Alex glances back at the man without slowing down, and only narrowly avoids running into a parking sign.
“See what I mean?” Ethan says. “I can barely keep her from running into large inanimate objects. How am I supposed to help her navigate a world like ours?”
“Well,” Evie says. “I never got the chance to be a parent. But I’m pretty sure you’re just supposed to love her. Be there for her if she gets hurt.” A pause. “When she gets hurt.”
At the car, Evie gives Alex a generous hug. “I’m so, so glad I met you, Alex!”
Evie hugs Ethan, too, warmer than before. “It’s been really nice to see you, Ethan. You seem happy. I’m glad. You were always one of the good ones.”
* * *
—
When he and Alex get home, Ethan finally looks at his phone.
Randy: how did it go?
Randy: ????
And then a few seconds later:
Randy: ???????????????
And then:
Randy: E, YOU ARE KILLING ME HERE.
Ethan thinks about standing at the parking lot, absurdly, note in his hand. The ultimate weenie, world’s biggest prick. He sets the phone down on the kitchen counter, walks outside to the far edge of the yard. He pulls the B-movie ransom note from his pocket, stares at it. Already, it looks unrelated to him, an artifact from another world. This can’t possibly be his.
He tears the whole thing into pieces, holds the fragments in his hand until he feels a gust of wind. Then he opens his palm. The torn paper scatters, a bad idea dissolving into nothing.
It’s time, he knows, to talk to his wife.
He finds Zo in the bedroom, hand-lettering a poster-board sign. She’s only got the first letter down: a B.
Blackmail, Ethan thinks.
Botched.
Better off, probably.
Bad karma. Seriously bad.
Zo sets the Sharpie down. “Thank you for taking Alex out of the house, Ethan.”
He nods. “Everything okay?”
Zo shrugs. “Sort of. Listen, Alex doesn’t know this yet, but I just told Maddy she had to leave our home.”
So Zo’s seen it all apparently, everything he’s done, everything he wanted to do, everything he almost did. She knows the whole of it, of course she does. Zo’s always been smarter, more observant, than he, why did he think he could get away with anything?
“But where will she go?” he asks.
“Frankly, that’s her problem.” Zo picks up the marker again, begins moving her hand over her poster board, up and down, up and down. A downward curve, then up again.
U. This letter is a U.
BU, she’s writing.
Buffoon, maybe.
Bungled: absolutely everything.
Bullshit, this is fucking bullshit.
“I don’t think it’s Maddy you’re mad at, Zo.”
His wife presses her lips together, begins tracing out a new letter. A straight vertical line. She’s like Madame Defarge and her knitting right now. Zo and her poster board, writing messages about the revolution, inscrutable to most. Or to him, anyway.
“This is about me, right?” he asks.
Zo lifts her eyes. “You think this is about you, Ethan?”
“About me and Maddy…having dinner or whatever?”
Her hand freezes in the middle of making a right-facing bubble. The next letter is a P or another B, maybe. “This is not about your little infatuation, or whatever it is.”
So there it is. All this time, she was watching him, making mental notes. Waiting for just the right time to spring it on him.
Zo returns to the poster, then adds, “But I do hope your evening together was, ah, a trip.”
That last word lands. He swallows. “So you know, then. About the mushrooms.”
“I know about the mushrooms, yes.”
But how?
“It’s not such a big deal,” he tells her. “Did you know that Harvard research shows mushrooms are a breakthrough for PTSD and anxiety? There’s this one study with cancer patients, and they found—” He can’t exactly remember what they found, actually, or if Maddy ever finished telling him.
Zo keeps her eye on the poster. “If you want to know the truth, Ethan, that’s the worst part of Maddy leaving, because Maddy’s been my supplier, too. And no, this is definitely not about you wanting to sleep with her, or who knows, maybe you already have.”
“I don’t want…We never…” Then the first part of Zo’s sentence sinks in. “Wait. Your supplier?”
“Yes, Ethan.” Eyes on him now, a look he can’t read. “I’ve done mushrooms. Nice to meet you.”
She looks down, finishes the letter. It’s an R.
B-U-R
Burden.
Burned the hell out.
Bury me now, just fucking put me in the ground already, will you?
“So, like…Maddy’s your dealer, Zo?”
“Was.”
He thinks about what Maddy said last night: It’s possible, Ethan, that you and your wife don’t exactly tell each other everything. He understands that he is talking to a stranger right now, that he doesn’t know Zo at all.
That’s all over now.
He waits in silence while Zo finishes her poster. Finally, she looks up, sighs. “You really want to know what this is about?” He nods. She gets up, moves to the bedroom, leaving him alone with the sign.
Burn it all down, it says.
Zo returns with her laptop, open to a YouTube page. Some video queued up and ready to go. The title: “HEY, PROFFESSOR: HERE’S WHAT THE WORLD THINKS OF YOU!”
Zo sits down next to Ethan, hits Play.
He can’t make sense of what this is. A bunch of faces. Men, women, black, white, young, old. Mostly English-speakers, a few subtitled phrases. All of them are saying more or less the same thing.
“A liar.”
“Definitely a liar.”
“She’s a skanky liar is what she is.”
“Miente”
“Tā shuo huang.”
“That rachet-ass woman ain’t nothing but a lying bitch.”
“She’s a lying liar who tells dirty lies.”
And then, incongruously, there’s Maddy’s face on the scre
en, still with her long blue hair. She’s got a wry smile. She’s in her bedroom, the one right here, in Starkfield.
“She’s a fuckin’ liar, that’s what she is,” Maddy says.
Zo hits Pause, freezes Maddy’s face.
By now, Ethan understands: they’re talking about the woman from the hearing. The professor, the one who accused the Supreme Court nominee of assault. This film, posted yesterday, already has 1.9 million views, a near-equal number of thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings.
“This video was made by a guy named Christian Ariosopher,” Zo explains. “Not his real name, but that doesn’t matter. The kid’s a Nazi. Or alt-right leader, or far-right provocateur, or white nationalist, or free-speech activist, or whatever it is they’re calling Nazis these days.”
She types the guy’s name in, brings up a Wikipedia page, passes her laptop to Ethan. At the top of the page is a guy in his late twenties. Good-looking kid: clean-shaven, dimples. Preppy look to him, Brooks Brothers type. Ethan scans the Wikipedia subheads: Role in Gamergate. Inciting Violence on College Campuses. Doxxing of Rape Victims. He clicks back to the video, watches it again.
Anything. Maddy’s profile said she’d do anything.
“How did you find this?” he asks.
“Through that site of hers.”
“Ten-Spot.” Of course Zo knows about Ten-Spot too. Jesus.
“Yeah, that. As soon as she told me about it, I decided to make my own account, started following her. Not a huge thing, I just wanted to keep my eye on it, you know? So every time she had a transaction, I got a notification. I’d do a little digging about the person. I mostly didn’t care, I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t putting Alex in any danger, that’s all. But this.” Zo shakes her head. “I just can’t believe she’d do this.”
Ethan knows: He might as well have fucked Maddy, because this, for Zo, is the uncrossable line. Only eight words, She’s a fuckin’ liar, that’s what she is, but there will be no going back. Not for Zo.
“When?” Ethan asks.
Zo closes her computer softly. “The video was posted early this morning. I don’t know when she recorded it.”
“No, I mean when does Maddy have to leave?”
“I gave her until tomorrow morning to be out of the house.”
He nods, and they sit in silence for a long time. Alex’s voice, singing, drifts in from time to time. Finally, Ethan says, “So can you tell me what happened in the appointment? At Children’s?”
“Honestly, they didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already. Alex is impulsive. Inattentive. Oppositional. Her executive functioning and working memory are for shit.”
“And?”
“Well, there’s some skills training they recommend. Memory games and such. Expensive, all of it. But even with that support, she is who she is. She’s going to have a harder time with some things, in school, and also in life. Honestly, that’s it. I was like, ‘Tell us something we don’t already know.’ ”
He nods. Lets this sink in.
After a while, Zo says, her voice quiet, “Ethan, do you remember when I lost my cool the other night?”
He waits. There could be so many times.
“After Parents’ Night. When Alex refused to go upstairs, and she just kept flopping around on our bed?”
He nods. He does remember. Zo’s reaction to Alex, like all her reactions to everything these days, seemed out of proportion to the circumstance. Opposite and amplified. “It was late,” he reassures Zo. “You were tired. I lose it with Alex all the time.”
“No. You don’t. Not like I do. But…can I tell you what I was thinking about as I watched her flopping around like that?”
“A jumping bean? A fish out of water?”
She smiles sadly. “I wish. No. I was thinking about this game I heard about. It’s called Rodeo. You ever hear of it?”
He hasn’t.
“It goes like this: a guy goes out to a bar, picks up a woman who seems lonely. He tells her she’s beautiful, funny. Whatever it is he has to say to get her to come home with him. They start fooling around. Then as soon as she’s naked, he ties her arms and legs to the bed. That’s when he calls in his buddies. They all take turns trying to fuck her while she flails. Whoever can ride on top of her the longest as she resists wins the rodeo. You know, a fun game that guys can play together.”
Ethan feels a wave of nausea. At this game she’s describing. At the fact that Zo thought about this game near their child. He doesn’t want that game—even the idea of it—anywhere near Alex. “Zo, how do you even know about something like that?”
“It happened to Jackie. Well, almost. The guys were so drunk that she was able to get away. But she says it feels like they’re still coming for her, all these years later. Like they’re right behind her, and they’re ready to drag her back.”
Ethan pictures the version of Jackie he knows: wire-thin and running like hell through Starkfield, her face hard as stone.
Zo closes her eyes. “The thing is, Ethan, Alex is going to go out there into a world where stuff like that happens all the time. And I don’t know how to warn her. I don’t know how to teach her everything she needs to know: who she should be wary of, how to keep herself safe. There’s not enough information I could possibly give her that could protect her. I love Alex, love how fearless she is, how unself-conscious. But I’m scared for her, too, I really am. I’m scared all the time.”
Ethan nods. He is too. But maybe not enough.
“Some days, it feels like I’m trapped inside a soundproof building,” Zo continues. “And Alex is outside, I’m watching her, and she’s moving through all of these dangers, they’re right next to her, and they’re coming for her, and she doesn’t even see them. I keep trying to warn her. I’m banging on the window and screaming her name, but she can’t hear any of it, and I just have to watch and hope. I swear to God, sometimes I think I’m going crazy. I’m trying so, so hard to stay sane.”
Ethan sits there for a while, lets this sink in. He thinks about the furniture she’s been buying, the carpets and throw pillows.
There are worse ways, he supposes, to try to stay sane.
Zo seems to understand what he’s thinking. “I have so little control. Over anything. All I can do is shake a sign, and howl my rage at the sky, and spend money we don’t have on home decor we don’t need. But I tell you what: when someone in my home does business with a Nazi like Christian Fucking Ariosopher, when someone I live with deliberately contributes to making the world a more terrible place, I can draw a line. I can ask that person to leave. That is one tiny thing I can do.”
* * *
—
Upstairs, Ethan raps on Maddy’s door.
Maddy throws it open so hard it makes a dent in the wall. “What?” Her suitcase is on the bed behind her, and clothes are strewn all over the floor.
Ethan thinks about those Rainbow Seed Rules.
Tell the truth.
Listen as much as you talk.
“So…this is a really big deal,” he says. “To Zo.”
“Yeah.” Maddy’s voice has gone flat, a little snippy. Pissy. Like a teenager, like a kid. “I can kinda tell.”
Ethan takes a deep breath, leans against the door frame. Assume good intentions. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix this, Mad.”
She lifts her eyes to his. Her purple lips twist into something ugly. “Don’t worry. I already knew you couldn’t.”
A dig. She’s calling him weak, ineffectual.
Maddy turns away from him, starts rolling up clothes, pitching them into her suitcase. “It’s fine,” Maddy says, a little less bitterly. “I contacted an old buddy in Burlington. Maybe I’ll give Vermont a try.”
“Vermont.” He smiles. “I can kind of see you there.”
“But I don’t know. I’m th
inking that if I can scrounge the cash, I’ll head out to Los Angeles.”
“L.A., wow. City of Angels. Quite a place, L.A.”
The last time Ethan was in L.A. was a dozen years ago. Randy had scored invites to the Oscars. He’d called Ethan last-minute to say he had an extra ticket, and did Ethan want to fly out? I want you to see what you helped start, Randy had said.
So Ethan had flown to California, paying a nauseating sum of money for a room at the Four Seasons. There, he rode in an elevator with Alan Arkin, sat in the lobby in a rented tuxedo watching makeup artists wheel carts filled with cosmetics and brushes and hair dryers and spray bottles in and out of the elevators. When the time came, Ethan sat in a limousine with Randy and a bunch of strangers. He clinked his glass against theirs and listened to them talk about campaigns they’d done on behalf of films he hadn’t seen. Outside the limousine, the streets were lined with chain-link fences, the crowd at least five people deep, everyone craning their necks. The Westboro Baptist Church was in that crowd, too, shaking signs that said God h8s Hollywood and You’re going to hell and Your sins have doomed America, and all the while, there had been a buzzing in the background, some kind of low-grade hum, like a swarm of mosquitoes.
Ethan had been the first to step out of the limo. When he did, the crowd erupted into anticipatory cheers, then instantly quieted. They’d expected a star, but they could see he was a nobody, he was nothing, and that’s when he understood that the mosquito buzz was, in fact, a fleet of helicopters, circling overhead with cameras trying to catch views of somebody famous, anybody but him.
That night, a toilet at the Kodak Theater exploded, sending filthy toilet water all over someone’s gown; Randy had laughed when he heard. “Nobody important,” he said—the mother of someone nominated in the short-doc category, the category for which Zo had heard a rumor, many years ago, that she might be shortlisted, then wasn’t. Then Randy went off to his seat (rear orchestra) and Ethan to his (third mezzanine), and for the rest of the night, he sat alone among strangers, watching the awards from so far away it was like watching a dollhouse version of an award show. Halfway through, Randy texted him to say he was at the bar on the first level, and Ethan should come downstairs to join him. But Ethan’s ticket didn’t provide Level One access, and Randy didn’t respond to his texts, so in the end, Ethan had finished out the ceremony at a nosebleed bar, talking to some kid bartender about his walk-on roles on Law & Order. Ethan left for the airport from there, and flew home on a redeye. That was the last time he’d seen Randy in person.