All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  a few minutes later, when she is sitting stiffly on the couch, frozen in shock, she finds herself staring fixedly at their wedding photo framed in crystal on the side table. It was taken after the brief ceremony they had in South Lake Tahoe two weeks after Paul proposed: a snapshot of herself, in gloves and a borrowed white sheath dress just a little too tight around the stomach, looking up at Paul with her arms flung around his neck, and Paul in his suit, looking into the camera with a startled expression, as if someone behind the camera had just said, “Boo!” She thinks of the words of their vows: “In sickness and in health. For richer and for poorer.”

  That is what marriage is, she thinks; it’s not about some sort of childish notion like “passion,” because the grown-up truth is that life, partnership, love, is hard. It takes work, in good times and bad. It takes sacrifice. She had thought Paul felt that, too: a respect for the institution of marriage, the center and stability it provides. And yet he’s throwing all that away because, why? For Beverly?! Divorce: just the thought of it makes her ill. It’s the lazy way out, she thinks. It’s not like she’s been blissfully happy all the time, either, but you are supposed to keep trying, even when your husband looks like a chilly balding stranger on the other side of the dinner table, even when you hear him talk impatiently on the phone to his ailing mother and realize that he is capable of cruelty, even when he leaves you alone night after night and doesn’t even try to make it up to you. You stick with it, because marriage and family are sacrosanct. A fortress against a difficult world. Maybe things haven’t been perfect lately—she’ll grant Paul this—but why is he so quick to give up? She thinks of Beverly, her best friend, coaxing her husband away with open arms and open thighs, and feels ill—ill that Beverly could do this, and ill that Paul would succumb so easily.

  Janice tries to imagine her life without Paul and is overtaken by a surge of feeling, as if she’s falling off a tightrope and realizing as she plummets downward that there is no net below her. She grabs the photograph and hurls it across the room as hard as she can, so that the glass shatters into a hundred pieces against the mantel. And then she stands in the living room, motionless, as the silence restores itself, the crash vanishing in the vacuum of wall-to-wall carpeting and brocade drapes. And then she bends to pick up the shards—she doesn’t want Lizzie stepping on them barefoot—before going to the kitchen to swipe the bottle of champagne from the refrigerator.

  two

  four hundred miles south, in los angeles, Margaret Miller’s phone is ringing again. It shivers to life in the passenger seat of her car, belting out a shrill electronic arpeggio, its screen illuminating in phosphorescent blue as the red “Call” light flashes. The phone teeters on the far edge of the passenger seat. Margaret has to stretch for it, one hand on the steering wheel, one eye on the traffic on Beverly Boulevard, her dress pulling tight under her thighs. It’s just beyond her reach.

  The phone rings again, the same three bars of a mangled Chopin étude ringtone that she once found acceptably benign but that, these days, makes her want to scream. The ringing phone starts her pulse racing; she feels as jumpy as a gazelle. She reaches a little farther, the thin vintage cotton of her dress complaining again at the strain—she can feel a seam pop under her arm—and her Honda swerving slightly, until her fingertips scrabble ineffectually against the phone’s metallic case.

  She should just turn the damn thing off, but she’s afraid she’ll miss an important call, the important call, the one that will turn everything around. The provenance of this call is not clear to her—perhaps it will come from her so-called investor, Stuart, a call in which he tells her that he’s changed his mind entirely and wants to do the financing after all. Or—less likely—from Bart, her ex, telling her not to worry about his e-mail. From her father, perhaps, with an offer Margaret can’t (even if she should) refuse. But something—right? Margaret has never considered herself an optimist—optimism being for hopeless idealists like Anne Frank (who, let’s face it, in the end perished in a death camp) and mung-bean-chewing Age of Aquarius types—but for the last few years she has been living on the fumes of hope, and she’s not quite ready to give up.

  And yet. In the back of her mind, a red light flashes in time with the cell phone’s call light: Danger. Danger. Danger. Margaret blinks and realizes that the brake lights of the car in front of her have lit up. She jerks upright just in time to jam her own brakes on. Her tires belch burnt rubber, while behind her a chorus of horns condemn her driving skills. Stopped at the intersection, her heart pounding, Margaret lurches all the way across the seat and grabs the phone.

  The caller ID reads “RESTRICTED NO.” She knows better than to answer that. She drops the phone into her purse instead. The ringing stops, abruptly, mid-trill.

  The light turns green, the traffic around her accelerating heavy-footed into the gap. The evening sun setting directly ahead burns blinding circles into Margaret’s retinas as she steers her whining Honda down Beverly Boulevard toward Acqua Trattoria, noting the time on the car’s clock display and berating herself for being so late. She’d walked out of her apartment in Echo Park three times, hesitating twice just outside the door and then turning to go back inside, thinking, I can still skip it, I’ll just call Josephine and tell her I’m sick. But she finally left anyway, lured by the promise of a night out with her girlfriends—always so intelligent, always doing such interesting things—in which she won’t be sitting at home mulling over her various intractable problems.

  Still, it was stupid to come, considering. A salad. She’ll just order a salad. That can’t possibly cost more than, what, fifteen dollars? With a glass of wine, maybe twenty-five, thirty. That’s not exactly in her budget—nothing is in her budget anymore—but it’s not wildly extravagant either.

  The phone jolts to life again, this time emitting one long beep. A text message. Margaret flips the phone open and reads: “VZW MSSG: Your VZ Wireless bill 60 days past due. CC declined. Bal due $126.30. Service terminated tmrw unless immediate pmt.”

  Not now. “Shit,” she says out loud. On her right looms a Bank of America, and, spying an empty meter, she swerves between a BMW and a Hummer and parks the car amid another cacophony of honks. She sits behind the wheel for a moment, sweat beading at her hairline. It’s no big deal, she thinks. I can fix this. So her credit card was declined again, and her checking account has been frozen—she still can use cash, right? She’ll just drop by the cell phone store tomorrow morning and pay it off in person. What other bills require her urgent attention? The rent, yes, but the landlord, a nice old gentleman named Al, loves her—she fed his portly Persian cat when he went to visit his grandchildren last month—so surely he’ll be lenient for just one more month. FedEx? Not a priority. Cable? Already turned off, along with her home phone. The gas and electric bill? Yes, that one is frighteningly overdue. On-the-verge-of-being-cut-off overdue. Will-have-to-cook-with-candles overdue if she doesn’t come up with $142 quickly.

  Bart? The words of the e-mail she received this morning from her ex-boyfriend drift back. “Margaret—I know it’s been a while and I haven’t wanted to bug you about this until we both had some space to cool down, but it’s time we talked about the $12,000+ you owe me. I saw your dad on the news the other day, by the way. Lucky him. I’d rather you paid me back in full, of course, but if nothing else let’s establish a payment plan. Bart.” Sneaky Bart with his oh-so-coy mention of her father’s IPO. He knows she’d never ask her family for money. He knows that she has always prided herself on her utter independence from her family, and that even the suggestion would upset her beyond all belief. And God knows he doesn’t really need that money, anyway—not when, according to last week’s Variety, which featured the headline “CAA Nabs Boffo Payday for Up-and-Comer Johnson,” Bart’s going to be paid $1.2 million for his next film role. (The Variety story ran with a photo, the old head shot she knew well—she had been there when he’d had it taken, making ridiculous faces at him so that he’d relax for the photogr
apher—and she hadn’t been able to force herself to throw the magazine away but had tucked it, instead, deep in a file box.)

  No, Bart isn’t on the top of her priority list anymore.

  She’ll just take out enough cash to cover the cell phone and electricity bills, plus some money for dinner. As she runs to the ATM, tripping on the sidewalk in her thrice-resoled heels, dizzy from the rush-hour exhaust fumes and the glare of sun on parched concrete, she flips through the cards in her wallet and selects one—surely she still has a little cash left in her savings account? But the ATM machine ruminates on the card, tasting it, and spits it right back out. Growing anxious, Margaret rifles through her wallet. The MasterCard is maxed out, and so are her Visa and Discover cards…but what about the Bank of America business account? Maybe she could get an advance on that. The machine considers the plastic rectangle and then blinks the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS at her, in all caps. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.

  The cell phone in her purse—an aged brown leather satchel that has seen better days—chooses that moment to start ringing again. RESTRICTED NO. All caps, again. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. The machines are yelling at her! The machines are just like her mother, who, in her e-mails, always nags her in capital letters: “DON’T FORGET YOUR GREAT-AUNT EDNA’S BIRTHDAY AGAIN PLEASE.” “WE’D VERY MUCH LIKE YOU TO COME HOME FOR THANKSGIVING THIS YEAR SINCE YOU DIDN’T LAST.” “Don’t forget your TEN-YEAR REUNION, honey—Kelly Maxfield told me that it’s LABOR DAY WEEKEND and it would be a SHAME to miss.” The missives make Margaret grit her teeth: Why does Janice bother crafting these artfully passive-aggressive guilt trips if she’s just going to SCREAM THEM IN ALL CAPS? Anyway, Margaret didn’t mean to forget Aunt Edna’s ninety-second birthday last year (she hasn’t seen her in a decade anyway). And if she skipped Thanksgiving it was only because, as usual, she had to work straight through the holiday to finish editing the cover story for the January issue of Snatch, her magazine—though, of course, that’s the kind of focus and dedication her mother would never really understand, having never held a real job in her entire life.

  The ATM spits out her card. The only card left in her wallet is the new American Express she received last month, the card that has a cash-advance option with a usurious 29 percent interest rate—the card she swore she’d use only for emergencies, but if this isn’t an emergency (no phone! no electricity!), what is? The machine—thank God—offers her the option of a cash advance. She hits SELECT and punches in $300. RESTRICTED NO., whoever it is, gives up as Margaret retrieves three crisp hundred-dollar bills from the machine and tucks them in her wallet. As she walks back to her car, she gulps down a not-at-all refreshing lungful of humid air, blots her damp hairline with a tissue, and tries to calm down. She’ll find a way to pay the advance back next week, before the interest accumulates; but at the back of her mind that red alert is going off again: Danger. Danger. Danger.

  She’s twenty minutes late by the time she arrives at Acqua and grows even later as she drives around looking for a parking space. She is unwilling to relinquish $4.50 to the line of exhausted-looking Armenian valets lining the sidewalk and, honestly, embarrassed to pull her rusting Japanese import up amid all the shiny sports coupes and German sedans. Instead, she finds parking seven blocks away and half-jogs back along the empty sidewalks toward the restaurant, the straps on her heels cutting blisters into her feet. She arrives at the restaurant feeling limp and sticky and examines her reflection in the window before entering. Too many hours in front of a computer have left her with a permanent hunch, her head leading her body by a good three inches, her sharp chin pointing the way. Dye jobs and haircuts have long gone the way of dentist visits and new underwear and other unnecessary luxuries, so that her hair has reverted to its natural, prematurely gray-flecked muddy brown and hangs limply to the center of her back. At least her eyes are an arresting cornflower blue tonight, but that’s just because the whites are so bloodshot. She looks like hell.

  Inside the door, Margaret maneuvers around a two-story wall built entirely of glass blocks filled with water, inside which brilliantly-colored betta fish petulantly float. The foyer is blocked by a clot of immaculately attired Hollywood aspirants, living the Los Angeles cliché: the fashionable emaciation, the glowing tans, the second-skin designer jeans and pillowy cleavages hoisted toward the ceiling by complicated undergarments. The hostess, who looks like a Slavic supermodel, with her sunken cheeks and jutting clavicles, assiduously ignores everyone, including Margaret.

  Who chose this place? Josephine? Alexis? Margaret avoids coming to the West Side of Los Angeles; it’s like there’s a beauty tax charged for the privilege of being in proximity to such dewy, manicured—no, manufactured—youth. At twenty-eight, Margaret feels old when she comes to Hollywood. She considers her hair, pulled back into a limp ponytail, and her vintage 1950s polka-dotted housedress, slightly discolored under the armpits, and feels frumpy. But at least she’s being an individual, she tries to cheer herself. Unique. Quirky. No fashion victim, not Margaret. Even if she had that much money, she wouldn’t succumb to $300 jeans.

  Once she would have seen this restaurant as a sort of petri dish, a culture to be studied under a microscope. Los Angeles might not have seemed the most logical place in the world to start a pop-feminist magazine for young women—New York, yes, San Francisco or Seattle, sure, but not the city dismissively referred to as “La-La Land”—but when Margaret had moved here with Bart four years earlier and started Snatch she’d thought of Los Angeles as a source of material. This was the lair of the entertainment-industrial complex that shaped the world’s perceptions, and living in the belly of the beast endowed her, as a media critic, with authority.

  Running a magazine had been her secret fantasy since high school, when she served as the film critic for the Fillmore High Bugle (trying, futilely, to convince her classmates that they should eschew Jim Carrey for Federico Fellini). As long as she could remember, she’d felt like she had something she needed to tell the world, and after she’d finished her double major in media studies and women’s studies at Cornell, then completed her master’s at U.C. Berkeley—and, critically, met Bart—she’d identified exactly what that something was: America’s young women were adrift in a culture of consumerism, celebrity worship, and vapid pop entertainment; with Snatch, she would cut through the crap. Snatch: Because Girls Can. It would be a new voice for young women, one that looked at pop culture with a critical eye, identifying unrealistic body images and sexist clichés; a voice that embraced real female sexuality and encouraged strong role models. Snatch would be the antidote to Us Weekly. She would help change the face of contemporary entertainment and make feminism relevant to young women again—women like her sister, Lizzie, who already suffered from a troubling addiction to tabloid magazines.

  Except that four years on, and especially after the events of the last week, she’s starting to wonder whether anyone has actually been listening to her. Certainly here, at tony Acqua, where the spray tans abound, it appears that she’s made no difference at all. Margaret discovers that her eyes are filling with tears and blinks rapidly so that her mascara doesn’t end up on her chin.

  But then she sees Josephine, Claire, and Alexis seated at a table near the back, waving frantically to catch her attention, and locates the necessary stamina required to pin a grin on her face and shove her way through the crowd. Josephine—the queen of the evening, the beloved birthday girl, the celebrated screenwriter—sits at the head of the table, slurping at a crab leg with eyes closed in pleasure. There is a pile of presents by her feet—oh God, Margaret forgot a present! A bottle of expensive-looking champagne is cooling in an ice bucket, and a heaping platter of raw seafood dominates the center of the table. It looks like the entire Pacific Ocean has been emptied onto the plate.

  “Happy thirtieth,” Margaret says, reaching down to bestow a parched air kiss on Josephine’s moisturized cheek. “Sorry I’m late, but, you know. Traffic.” From across the table Claire kisses her fi
ngers and waves them through the air, magic fairy pixie dust of love sprinkled from her tiny hands, the pale fingers still carelessly crested with blue specks of paint from her art studio. Alexis merely grunts, too busy dismantling a lobster claw with a pair of stainless steel pliers and scattering bits of its flesh across her lap.

  “This really is so barbaric,” Alexis complains, throwing down the shell. “Why did we order this, again? I’m not sure I like to be so hands-on with my dinner’s demise.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a grump,” says Josephine, who—God bless her—is blithely wearing an African-print headwrap with her black cocktail dress and doesn’t look the least bit ridiculous. Margaret’s old grad school friend radiates Pan-Ethnic Urban Goddess: Her toffee skin shiny and plump, she oozes comfort and well-being and for a half second Margaret hates her for that. Josephine pushes a dish of green liquid toward Alexis as she scoots over to make room for Margaret. “Try the wasabi dipping sauce.”

  “I’m allowed to be a grump,” says Alexis. Her thick black bangs fall over her eyes, which are makeup-free and puffy from lack of sleep: Alexis thrives on a state of near exhaustion and grows jumpy and even more irritable when not under extreme stress. “I had a dismal day on set. My DP got sent to rehab and the record label slashed the budget in half and now the singer refuses to wear the pink Victorian wig she said she wanted to wear just last week. Remind me why I haven’t quit directing music videos yet?”

  Margaret struggles to sympathize but can only muster a small shake of her head. “Because you get paid ten thousand dollars a day to do it,” she says, hoping that this doesn’t come across quite as bitter as it feels rolling off her tongue. When she met Alexis, three years ago, after Alexis directed the no-budget independent film Josephine had written (the film that had, in fact, ended up going to Sundance and jump-starting both their careers), Alexis and her then roommate Claire were so broke they’d been sharing a studio apartment. How had things changed so quickly?