by Claire Adams
I’m waiting for an answer, but one doesn’t come.
“I’ve found,” I continue, “that that want is just a lie. It’s impossible, and you’re the one that made it impossible. Before that want existed, you might have had a shot at some kind of normal life, but it’s there now and it’s not going away. The world you live in isn’t the world that everyone else lives in because you’ve separated yourself from everything and everyone that doesn’t fit into your narrative. It doesn’t work,” I tell her. “Your best bet is just to stop trying, and realize that life just fucking sucks.”
One last time, I wait for an answer. The woman, assumedly Rita, is still crying, but it’s more controlled now.
“If you want to make a real difference in someone’s life, make a real impact that’s going to show you just how much power you’ve got?” I ask. “Leave me, my friends, and my family alone,” I tell her. “You will have absolutely changed my life.”
For once, the line is silent, but I don’t hang up. It’s just kind of nice having someone to talk to.
Chapter Seventeen
The Talk Show
Emma
It had to happen at some point, but I was hoping to actually be well on the other side of this whole thing before it did.
I’m standing in the green room of Ida!, the upstart, feel-good talk show that’s supposed to replace Oprah, even though we all know that that’s never going to happen.
Nobody replaces Oprah.
I’m on in a few minutes, and they’ve devoted the whole show to talking about the second worst period of my life.
This should be something really special.
There’s a TV in here, tuned to the station Ida! gets broadcast on, and the promo comes on the screen, “Today, on Ida…”
The music is very somber, even a little tense at times.
“Jesus,” I mutter to myself, “I’m the fucking Hollywood sob story.”
The promo continues, “…after a long road to fame and fortune, Emma Roxy…” and I just tune out.
This feels like a bad sitcom where the writers decide they’re going to show their range and do a sad episode, only it almost never works out. They did a couple of those episodes on Fresh Prince that weren’t bad, but that’s really neither here nor there.
“Emma?” a man in a very busy sweater says, speaking as if he’s interrupting a funeral.
“Yeah?” I respond, facing him.
“We’re about ready for you. I’ll escort you to where you’re just on stage and I’ll cue you when it’s time to go out. Did you have a chance to walk over the set and kind of get an idea where you’re going?”
“Yeah,” I lie. I didn’t need a tour of the set. It’s actually a guilty pleasure of mine.
“Great,” he says. “If you’ll just follow me…”
We walk down the hallways and everyone I pass gives me the kind of smile people give when you’re a kid and your dog just died. It’s that smile that’s supposed to communicate, “I know you’re going through a rough time, kiddo,” but always comes across more like, “When can I get out of here? This whole thing is really bumming me out.”
Smiles are rather expressive, you know.
We get to the side of the stage, just out of view of the cameras and the audience, and the man in the sweater takes my hand in both of his and says, “Because we’re taping this for later, commercial breaks are going to be pretty short, usually just a couple of minutes for Ida to go over her notes, that sort of thing. If you need to take a break, let Ida know and they’ll stop filming until you’ve had a chance to collect yourself. I’m going to be right here with you while you’re waiting, I’ll be standing right here while you’re on and I’ll be right here when you’re done, okay?”
They really know how to do the sympathy thing around here, don’t they?
A couple of minutes go by and I’m waiting. I was kind of hoping to meet Ida Falcone before I went out there, but it’s not my set.
There’s the uproar of applause, and my heart starts pounding hard and fast.
Sweater guy isn’t helping things, as he’s still holding my hand and gripping it a little tighter as every second passes, bringing ever closer my no doubt heartbreaking tale of abuse and blackmail. I can see why they’d think it’d make for good television.
From off set I can hear Ida starting the show.
“Welcome everyone to a very special show. Tonight, we’re going to be talking to Emma Roxy, who—” she’s interrupted by a strange applause. “Yeah,” she says as every member of the audience tries to show just how kindhearted and sympathetic they are for supporting a wretch like me. “As you all know,” she says, “Emma’s filming a new movie with Damian Jones—” another applause break, and I stop listening.
“Tell me when it’s time for me to go on, will you?” I ask.
“Of course,” Sweater Guy says, and I walk away from the stage entrance a little to pour myself a cup of water from a nearby water cooler.
I take a sip.
Usually, when I get nervous, I try to battle my nerves and work through the situation, but now, I’m just trying to clear my mind. I’ve gone over the story enough times in my head and in my house by myself that I think I’m comfortable with whatever she can throw at me, but that doesn’t change any part of the story I’m going to have to tell.
“Emma?” Sweater Guy says, and I set my cup down and walk over to him. “It’s just going to be a few seconds,” he says. “Are you ready?”
“Nope,” I answer.
On the stage, Ida announces, “Miss Emma Roxy!” and I pat Sweater Guy on the shoulder as I walk past him and onto the stage, waving at the drama-thirsty audience as I make my way toward Ida.
She gives me a big hug that I have to bend down for, as she’s a lot shorter in real life than she looks on TV, and I just wish everyone in the audience would just drop right fucking dead.
I’m sure they’re decent people, but the fact of the matter is that they’re in this room with me right now and because of that, I hate everything about them.
“I’m so glad you could make it,” Ida says through the continuing cacophony, and I smile and I nod my head.
“I’m glad to be here,” I respond, though I’m sure not even Ida could hear it.
We sit down and the applause slowly dies down.
“Emma,” Ida says, “I know we’re going to be talking about a lot of harrowing things today, and I would just like to tell you that I admire you, so much—” the audience starts in again with their fucking clapping, and I’m trying to hide my contempt. “Really,” Ida says. “I think that you are a strong role model for our children, and I am so excited that you’ve got your entire career ahead of you.”
“Thanks,” I answer.
“Now, this all started just a few months ago after you started on your new film, right?” she asks.
“That’s when I first heard from him,” I tell her. “I hadn’t spoken to him for about a year before that.”
“Did you ever suspect that he might do something like this?” she asks.
“With people like him,” I tell her, “you learn to expect the worst at all times. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that he would do this specific thing, but—”
“—but he was just that kind of guy, huh?” she interrupts.
“You could say that,” I tell her. “I think I always knew, even after we broke up, that he wasn’t just going to let me go—”
“He was controlling?” Ida interrupts again, and she’s really starting to irritate me with all the interrupting.
“Very controlling,” I answer. “Everything always had to be exactly the way that he wanted it, and that everything included me. For a while there,” I tell her, the studio audience, and a couple million viewers at home, “I was, effectively, his captive. Even when he wasn’t around, he—”
“So, if you don’t mind talking about it—” Ida starts.
“That’s why I’m here,” I interrupt out of spite, hop
ing she takes the hint and learns how to let me finish a sentence.
“How did the two of you first meet?” she asks. “You and Mr. Cole, that is.”
“I first met Ben a couple years ago,” I start. “I was doing made-for-TV movies and he was the first guy I met in a bar who’d actually seen one of them. That was a pretty big deal for me at the time.”
The audience laughs.
“So, you met him in a bar?” Ida asks, and it’s really difficult to tell through all that makeup if she’s being judgmental or not.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I was there for a wrap party with the cast of one of my movies and he recognized me. We started talking and one thing led to another—”
“So, how long into the relationship was it before you knew that Ben had this side?” Ida asks.
I want to scream.
“It’s not a side,” I tell her. “It’s him. The abuse, the whole nightmare, that’s just who he is. He’s a person that enjoys hurting people. The charming guy I met in the bar—it wasn’t a side. It was an act.”
“So, it happened pretty quickly then?” Ida asks. She’s pushing for more information, and she’s trying to do it in a way that nobody but me knows just what a bitch she’s being.
“The formal abuse or whatever you want to call it,” I tell her, “that took a couple of months, but the warning signs were all there from the start. He’d get really upset over the smallest things, things that didn’t even make sense to get upset about, you know? At first, he would stay quiet about it, but you could just see him shaking from the anger.”
“When did it finally take that turn for the worse?” Ida asks.
The audience is silent. Nobody’s so much as wiping their nose.
This is the money shot. This is why everyone’s here today.
“I think it really took a turn after we got back from visiting his parents,” I tell her. “We got home, and as soon as the door was closed, he was in my face, screaming at me about how I had been impolite to his mother by not taking a piece of pie that she offered—it was always over the stupidest things…”
“Did he hit you?” Ida asks, and I can almost hear her getting wet between the legs thinking about the ratings bump she’s about to get.
“That was the first night he hit me,” I tell her. “I told him that he was being stupid and he slapped me across the face. When I tried to leave, he grabbed me and pulled me to the ground, and that’s when he just started hitting me. I tried to fight him off, but he was too strong. All I could do was curl up and hope that maybe he’d find it in his heart to stop.”
I can actually see a tiny smile flash across Ida’s mouth, but it’s gone so quickly, I doubt the cameras really caught it.
“What happened next?” she asks.
“He was yelling at me while he was hitting me,” I tell her. “He was saying that he’d been so patient with me, but that he’d had enough of my…well, I can’t say the word on TV, but you get the idea. I don’t remember when he stopped hitting me, how long it was, but I do remember that he was out the door and his car was peeling out almost as soon as he did.”
“The pictures of you with the bruises…” she says. “Those were from another time?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “After that first night, I never knew what was going to set him off. Sometimes, he’d let things that would make a normal person angry go completely, saying they didn’t bother him, while other times, he’d fly off the handle about absolutely nothing, although I do think the pie incident was the most ridiculous reason he ever hit me. Not that there were any good ones.”
A few of the misery junkies in the audience applaud, and within a second or two, the whole crowd is applauding. The funny thing is, I’m not quite sure what it is I said they’re showing their approval for—maybe the “no good reason to hit me” thing?
The crowd calms down again and Ida leans toward me, saying, “Did you try to leave?”
“That kind of depends on your definition of the word ‘try,’” I tell her. “I convinced myself a few hundred times—that’s actually not hyperbole—to leave him, but every time I got close to doing it, I just felt this huge wave of fear rolling through me. I just imagined him tracking me down and what he would do if he caught me trying to leave him. It really wasn’t very easy. Luckily, though, I got—”
“You know,” Ida says, “I hear that so much, that women in these relationships often do want to leave their abusers, but that fear keeps them from doing it.”
“You feel like your life isn’t yours,” I tell her. “You feel like you’re a possession of this person who’s just as likely to put your head through a wall as he is to hold a door open for you. After that first time, he was so apologetic…” I sigh. “You know, before I was with Ben, I used to look at women whose boyfriends or husbands treated them like crap and I used to think they were so weak for going back to them time and time again, but it’s not weakness. You literally feel like you do not have the option to leave until that day comes when you finally decide that enough is enough, and even then, you’re still scared for your life. If anything, you feel like you’re deciding whether you’d rather stop living like you’re living or whether you’d like to keep living. That’s really how it feels and too much of the time, that’s really how it is.”
“What happened that weekend he took those pictures of you?” Ida asks, and it feels like she’s completely ignoring everything I just said.
I try to move my hands out of camera frame because they’re clenched into fists.
“It was a few days before we were supposed to get away and I had just gotten a callback about this role I really wanted,” I answer. “The problem was, the callback was on the same day we were supposed to leave for our vacation. I knew it was a mistake before I did it, but I asked him if he’d be willing to leave a little bit later than we’d planned so that I could make it to my callback.”
“And that’s what led to…?” she says.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “After I asked the question, I could see that change come over him and I tried to walk it back, tell him that I’d call back and see if I could get in on an earlier day or just skip the callback altogether so we could go on our trip, but I’d already committed the chief sin in his eyes. I questioned what he’d already decided. Those pictures,” I sigh, “those, I think he just took so he’d have something to remind me what happens when I…”
I trail off.
“When you go against him?” Ida asks.
He used to say the words to me all the time, but now that I go to repeat them, they catch in my throat.
“It’s time for a commercial break,” Ida says. “I’m here talking with Emma Roxy. When we come back, we’ll be talking to Emma more about her ordeal and what kind of things she sees in her future. Stay tuned.”
Someone offscreen calls, “We’re out!”
Ida leans toward me. “I know this is hard for you,” she says, “but we’ve got to keep things moving if you’re going to be able to say everything you want to say.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better,” I tell her, and with that tiny act of me humbling myself before her, she’s no longer trying to hide that smile.
Right now, I hate Ida and I hate the studio audience and I hate the home audience and I hate everyone who has anything to do with this show. Right now, they are all just projections of Ben, every single one of them.
I know intellectually that I’m feeling this way because I’ve kept this toxic memory inside of me long enough to hate anyone I talk to about it, but sitting here, I feel like I’m back in that relationship and every person in this room is just another aspect of him.
“We’re back in five, four, three…”
Ida pats my knee for reasons alien to my understanding, and she turns toward the camera, saying, “We’re back with Emma Roxy, talking about the relationship that almost ended her career before it began.”
I don’t know where she got that. The only time Ben ever got in the way of m
y career was before that trip to the lake. Most of the time, my success in the movies was his own wet dream because that would only increase the value of his thrall.
“Emma,” Ida says, “we’ve talked a little about your history with this man, but let’s fast-forward to when he comes back into contact with you. Did you know from the start that he was trying to blackmail you, or—”
“I wouldn’t say that I knew he was going to blackmail me, specifically,” I tell her. “Once I knew who I was talking to, though, I knew the conversation wasn’t going to mean anything good.”
“How much did he ask for?” Ida asks.
“While Ben’s still in pretrial, my attorney advised me not to go into specifics on that, but I can tell you that it was a substantial amount,” I tell her.
“Okay,” Ida says. “What can you tell us about that arrangement?”
The way she speaks the words makes them come across less accusatory than she actually means it.
“He informed me that he had those photographs of me, and that, if I didn’t want them to become public, I’d do what he wanted me to do,” I answer.
“And you went along with this?” Ida asks.
“I didn’t know what else to do at the time,” I tell her. “Maybe that sounds stupid, but—”
“No, sweetie,” she says in a saccharine voice that only proves my point that nobody’s going to be able to replace Oprah, “it’s not stupid at all.”
“This all happened, the blackmail, after we started working on this movie and it’s my first major feature, so I was trying to keep my name out of the tabloids if at all possible,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, and I’m done pretending.
“You know what?” I ask. “That’s actually not true. The truth is that I remembered what I looked like the weekend those pictures were taken—at least that I had bruises all over me. I didn’t want that to be what people saw when they came to my movies or when they met me in person. I don’t want those bruises to be what my life is all about. Maybe that’s what’s happened now, maybe not. It’s too soon to tell, but I just didn’t want people to see the bruises.”