by Robin Palmer
But while Matt let me into his life, the one place he wouldn’t let me into was his house.
One afternoon, on the way home from the movies in Great Barrington (a double feature of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), he stopped at his house in Ghent because he said he had something for me.
Like most of the houses in the area it was an old farmhouse. It wasn’t super-fancy, and it could’ve used some fresh paint, but it had a down-to-earth charm. Even the unruly manner of the black-eyed Susans and hydrangea in front was sweet. I much preferred the upstate look to the perfectly manicured lawns of L.A., which were as anorexic and lacking in character as the people who owned them.
“Great,” he mumbled when he saw the cobalt-blue Subaru Forester in the driveway. As he pulled up behind it, I could see it was stuffed with magazines, clothes, a busted chair, and a lamp.
“Is that your mom’s car?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he sighed, putting it in park. “I’ll be right back.” He turned the radio on and punched some buttons until a country song filled the air. “You can listen to the radio.”
“Wait,” I called as he jumped out.
“What?” he asked impatiently.
Why was he acting so weird? “I . . . have to pee,” I said. I overdid it with the free refill Diet Cokes at lunch. Plus, I really wanted to see his house.
He glanced at the house and then back at me. “Can you just wait two minutes and then we’ll go to the Mobil station and you can go there?”
He wanted me to pee at a gas station?
“It’s just that my mom is weird about people coming over unannounced. It’s a Southern thing. She likes to be all formal and put out drinks and snacks and stuff.” While he was open about so much in his life, the subject of his mother was one that he reverted to one-word answers when I asked about her. I knew that she was from New Orleans, and that she was a book editor, and that after the divorce she had developed a bad habit of feeding stray cats and naming them, but that was about it. I knew what it was like to be badgered when you obviously didn’t want to talk about something, so I didn’t push, but I was dying to meet her.
“Okay,” I said, disappointed. Why would he bother to introduce me to his mom? I was leaving soon enough. Sure, we had been hanging out every day; our make-out sessions were getting longer and heavier to the point where, had we lived in the same place, and had this had a future, I probably would have started Googling which forms of birth control were least messy/had the fewest number of side effects. But I still wasn’t sure how he felt. Maybe it was just a way to pass the time and avoid having to go to his studio because he was having painter’s block. (“Look, I may not have experience, strength, and hope to share when it comes to dating,” Walter had said as we had FaceTimed the night before, “but I know enough to know that the chance of that not being true is ninety-nine point nine percent.” I then went on to ask what made him feel there was a point one percent chance that it was true, upon which he threatened to hang up.)
Stop getting so attached. You’re leaving in a few weeks, I said to myself. I had decided that needed to be my mantra: Attachment = trouble.
He looked relieved. “Thanks. I’ll be right back.” As he ran toward the house, I saw a curtain open and a head peek out. I couldn’t see her face, but she stared at me for a bit before slowly letting it fall closed again. When he came back out and got back in the car, there was no trace of the gap-toothed smile that I had gotten so used to; the one that I felt a surge of victory about every time I said something that made it appear. His mouth was set in a straight line, and before I could even get my seat belt buckled again, he was backing out the driveway and we were out of there.
“You want me to pull in?” he asked as we neared the Mobil station.
“It’s okay. I can wait until I get home,” I replied.
He nodded and kept going.
I wasn’t particularly musical, or athletic, but the one talent I had developed over the years was the ability to read a room. Or, in this case, a car. And while Matt may have been only two feet away from me, it felt like a thick wall of glass had somehow materialized in the last few minutes. He was still there, but he—everything that made him Matt—had been boiled away. It was like what used to happen with Mom. So I did what I usually did in those situations: I tried to fix things, and went into overdrive. I began to babble on about everything, which, because of the sheer volume of it all, was really about nothing, and then, once I realized I was babbling about nothing, I kept going, in hopes of making it about something. During this car crash of a car ride, Matt would occasionally throw out an “Oh, yeah?” or a “Really?” or an “Interesting,” even though none of what I was saying was interesting. If anything, it was all very uninteresting.
About twenty minutes into the ride—after I shared my thoughts on such topics as the lack of ethnic restaurants in the upstate area (prompted by a restaurant called Park Falafel & Pizza that we passed as we drove through Hudson); how weird it would be to have your house become a historical landmark after you died and know that people were going to traipse through it on a daily basis (when we passed Olana, where the painter Frederic Church had lived); and the difference between fables, folk tales, and fairy tales (as we passed a sign for the Rip Van Winkle bridge, which I decided was a folk tale)—I had exhausted myself. I shut up, in hopes that he’d pick up the slack, but he remained quiet.
“Is anything wrong?” I asked as we passed into Germantown.
“Nope,” he replied without looking at me. “Why would you ask that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
We went back to not talking. Until I couldn’t help myself. “Did I . . . do something?” I asked quietly.
At least I got a quick glance out of that one. “Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
“Well, you didn’t.”
I nodded and stared out the window.
“I just remembered that I need to pick up something from the framer over in Kingston,” he said as we crossed over into Clermont.
“Okay.” I liked Kingston. There was a Target there.
“So I’m going to drop you off and get going, if that’s okay.”
“That’s fine,” I said tightly. I had been thinking of showing him the series of photos that I had been doing of Mom when we got inside—the ones I had shown Billy—but now it seemed like a bad idea.
Needless to say, there was no making out when he dropped me off. Not even a kiss on the cheek. Instead, I pasted on a fake smile and said “Well, see you later!” as I reached for the door.
“Wait—this is what I needed to stop at my house for,” he said, holding out a CD case. “I know the CD thing is kind of old school,” he said, handing it to me, “but it felt more personal than just e-mailing you a playlist.” Inside the jewel case was a CD, and a liner with a painting of black and white and gray shapes.
“Did you paint this?”
He nodded. “It’s an abstract version of the Overlook Hotel. In Woodstock.”
My heart—which over the course of the ride had been returned to where it usually stayed, behind bulletproof glass—stretched open a bit. Back in L.A, in a box in my closet in the apartment on Darlington marked ANNABELLE—PERSONAL, was a notebook full of lists that included one titled “My Ideal Guy,” which I had made one night when I couldn’t sleep. Somewhere around number 12 was Someone who makes me CD mixes. “Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome. Talk to you later.”
I hated the “later” thing. As Mom said, men, like dogs, had no sense of time, which meant that fifteen minutes and fifteen days were the same thing to them.
Once inside I went straight to my room and starting rummaging through the different compartments of my suitcase, praying that somehow one mini Play-Doh ca
n had managed to stay hidden during my periodic sweeps to rid myself from my addiction to noxious fumes. If the car had been there, I would have driven across the river to Target, but it wasn’t, so I was stuck.
I turned on my laptop and slid in the CD. Stretching out on my bed, I closed my eyes. Maybe the songs he had chosen would shed some light on things.
SONGS ON MIX CD AND POSSIBLE MEANINGS
Billy Bragg/”Must I Paint You a Picture?”—The “little black cloud in a dress” line was genius, but was that what he thought I was?
The Clash/“Should I Stay or Should I Go”—Granted, this was probably on here because we had heard it in Swallow one afternoon and had to leave because we were laughing so hard while watching the barista move his chin in a robotlike manner. Or maybe it was because he thought I was putting out mixed signals?
Pixies/”Where Is My Mind?”—The song was about questioning your sanity. Enough said.
Radiohead/”Give Up the Ghost”—Granted, I had mentioned to him that it was my favorite Radiohead song, but it was also about letting go of things.
The Strokes/”You Only Live Once”—While the tempo was upbeat, upon the second listen I discovered the lyrics were pretty negative (“Some people think they’re always right/Others are quiet and uptight”).
I was on my third listen of the song, realizing it was also positive (“Sit me down/Shut me up/I’ll calm down/And I’ll get along with you”) while trying to figure out if I was supposed to sit down and calm down, or if he was, when I heard Mom’s car turn into the driveway, followed seconds later by Billy’s truck.
A few moments later the door opened and I heard Mom click-clack (she was pretty much the only woman in the entire Hudson Valley who wore heels) her way to the kitchen.
“You can’t just run away like that, Janie, when someone tries to talk to you about something you don’t want to talk about,” Billy yelled as he came through the front door.
“I did not run away! I drove away. There’s a difference!” she yelled back. I heard the opening and slamming of cabinets. “All right, if I can’t drink over this, there sure as hell better be some baked goods lying around,” she grumbled. I cringed as I heard the fridge open. “Ha. Jackpot,” she said.
I walked out of my room to find her standing over the sink shoveling in the last slice of the peach pie I had made two nights before. The slice that I had been planning to have once I read Matt’s mind via the CD. “What’s going on?” I asked nervously. It must have been really bad because Mom never ate carbs during shooting.
“So they got some photos of us—big deal,” he said. “It’s not like we were doing anything.”
“But they’ll spin it like we were!” she cried. “Are you so naive that you don’t know how the tabloids work?!” She smacked the side of her head. “Wait a minute—you’re only twenty-six. You’re supposed to be naive.”
“Oh, so this is what it’s about?” he asked. “The age thing?”
Because I was getting more and more nervous, I walked over to the drawer and got a fork and joined Mom at the pie. At first I wasn’t sure she even knew I was there, until we got into a fencing match with our forks.
“You say that like it doesn’t matter!” she said, pushing my fork way out of the way to get the last bite.
“Because it doesn’t!” he yelled back. “It’s just a number!” He glanced at me. “And it’s not like there’s anything going on between us anyway.”
“But everyone will think there is,” Mom replied. She shook her head. “I can see the headlines now—The Cougar and the Cub!”
“What if there was?” Billy asked.
“What if there were posts all over the Internet?” Mom asked. “Then I guess my publicist wouldn’t feel bad about the fact that, other than my arrest, he wasn’t able to get me any press in the last year,” she said wryly.
“No. What if there was something going on between us?” he asked quietly. “For real. Not just on-screen.”
“But there’s not,” she replied nervously.
“But what if?” Billy demanded.
She shifted her weight. “I’m sorry, what was the question again?” Mom may have been a big advocate of clear and honest communication when it came to other people, but when it came to herself? Not so much.
He stared at her.
“I don’t want to have this conversation in front of Annabelle,” she sniffed.
“Fine.” He turned to me. “Annabelle, do you think I could speak to your mother alone?”
I turned to go.
“Annabelle, stay here,” she ordered, grabbing my arm.
He sighed. “Really? This is how you’re going to play it?”
Mom looked like a bug-eyed kitten hanging on to a tree. If the kitten had some piecrust in the corner of its mouth. “Well, you do know something about players.”
He looked at her like he couldn’t believe what she had said. Which made sense because I felt the same way.
“Mom—” I knew it was none of my business, but I couldn’t help myself.
Billy held his hand up. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. There’s obviously nothing to talk about,” he said as he turned on his boot and started to leave. “See you around.”
After he left, she turned to me. “Can you believe he just left like that?”
“Can I believe it?!” I said angrily. “I can’t believe he didn’t leave any earlier! What was that about?”
“You’re taking his side?!” she demanded.
“You mean the side of the sane person in the equation? Yeah.”
“You didn’t even want me talking to him, Annabelle. And what, now you’re rooting for us to end up together?” She shook her head. “Make up your mind here,” she muttered.
She was right. I hadn’t wanted her talking to him in the beginning. Mostly because I was afraid that if they had gotten together, I’d have to sit back and watch as the same thing played out the way it always did. She’d fall madly in love and throw herself into the relationship, and then, as time went on, he would see that the real Janie Jackson wasn’t the beautiful, sexy, kooky, fun person from talk shows and magazine articles. She was difficult and moody and needy, and that need would start to suffocate him—just like it suffocated me.
But the difference was, once he got sick of her craziness, he could bolt—I could not. I had to stay and pick up the pieces of her heart like I always did when it got smashed—a heart that she always gave over too quickly, to men who weren’t worth the gift to begin with. I would have to help put her together again, listening to her vows about how next time it would be different; next time she’d pick someone who could be there for her—for us—and we’d live happily ever after.
If, like they said in meetings, the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then my mother had pretty much spent my entire life totally insane. But what I had witnessed since she had met Billy was that things had shifted. She had shifted. I had watched as she and Billy had become friends and gotten to know each other. He had seen her when she was happy and on. But the difference was that this time she had also allowed him to see her on her not-so-good days. The days when the sadness wasn’t just confined to her eyes but bled out into all of her. Not to the point where she took to her bed and stared at the wall, but when she got quiet and didn’t try to snap herself out of it. And the difference with Billy, unlike the others, was that it didn’t scare him. He didn’t act like somehow the fact that she was human was some betrayal, like she wasn’t holding up her end of the deal. If anything, in those moments, as I watched him watch her being human, holding my breath to see if that would be the thing that made him pull back and leave her—leave us—he seemed to like her more. More than when she was up and on and acting as if she was still the star of a sitcom.
I never loved her more than when
she was like that—when she was being real—and I realized right then that Billy did, too. Loved her. Loved her not in a Hollywood way, but in a true way—the kind of love where you let someone have their moods and their moments, but you’re also not afraid to call them on it.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I’m rooting for you guys to end up together.”
Had I just said that aloud? From the shocked look on Mom’s face, I guess I had.
“But—”
I held up my hand. “Hey, I’m just as surprised as you are,” I said. “But he loves you, Mom. I can see that. I mean, he’s totally willing to put up with you. And before you go getting all offended, I mean that in the best possible way.”
“But what about the age thing?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “He may be a lot younger than you, but he’s pretty smart about a lot of things.” I walked over and took her hand. “He’s a good guy, Mom.”
She squeezed mine. “I know that,” she sighed. “That’s what’s so terrifying.”
“Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t,” I said, “but it seems like, if you’re going to shake things up, you may as well go full force.”
She wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Bug—how’d you get so wise?”
I shrugged as I hugged her tight. “I don’t know. Trial and error.”
“I love you, Bug.”
“I love you, too.”
I waited for her to ask me how much, but she didn’t.
Maybe she finally knew.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The thing is, once you start going outside your comfort zone and taking risks (some people would probably call that living life), a weird thing starts to happen. Something gets flipped, and soon enough the thing that keeps you up at night and reaching for your notebook to make a list is the fear of not taking one. Once you’ve accumulated experience that shows that not only does the risk taking not lead to your world blowing up, but it actually makes your world bigger, it feels more uncomfortable to stay small.