he is with me.
He says I am Dorothy to his Cowardly Lion and that we must walk the red carpet together for his latest film, whilst imagining it’s the yellow brick road. So flu-ridden that I am in bed reading
Eloise
, my favorite childhood book, I agree to go. He has successfully booked me for a gig, four months in advance. This pleases him so much, he spends the rest of the afternoon reading me
Eloise
in the voice of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character from
There Will Be Blood
. He is absolutely brilliant. The Noël Cowardly Lion.
I try to think how Dr. R would feel about me walking the red carpet. Am I supporting my partner’s work or am I permitting unwanted cameras into our relationship? What would he say? It’s strange to try to speak for the dead. My scars have gone down, mostly. There’s still a flesh flower on my upper right thigh, and I can tell from the nonchalant reaction of bikini waxers that they’ve become used to this sort of thing: girls who want to prettify and uglify, and cannot find a difference—like that hypothetical circle where communism meets fascism.
An hour into a phone call one night, GH, on the other side of the world, broaches a new topic.
“When I get back from this film, let’s have a miniature human, that grows.”
I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses.
“A baby?”
“Yeah, one of them.”
After all this work with Dr. R, to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else. This is the conversation. I don’t know what to say.
“If it’s a girl, can we call her Pearl?”
“Pearl! My ego wants to fight it”—I can tell he’s smiling—“since I didn’t think of it. But that’s perfect for her. Pearl it is. When I get home.”
I summon again my invisible witnesses, Dr. R, my mum. And once they’re both there, I ask them to give us a moment alone. I can do this myself.
“Do you just want me to give you Pearl? Or do you want me to stay too?”
He tries to answer. I hear his breath catch in his throat. The wait is interminable.
“I want you to stay. Em: I never want there to be a time when we don’t share space.”
He gets home late at night. It’s unbearably hot and I’m sleeping downstairs on the daybed. I’ve passed out with the iPod shuffle on. He creeps in. I don’t know how long he was in the daybed with me. When I wake up he says, “Guess what was playing when I got here?”
“Can’t.”
“ ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ ”
“Portent?”
“Yeh. Yeah.”
He kisses me. As his tongue searches the back of my throat, there is a note I’ve never picked up before either because it wasn’t there or because he hid it, or maybe he’d just never kissed me this deep. Fear. Of me, of himself. Of paying the cost for wanting things that can be found only in the darkness on the edge of town. He wants to tell me something. I can only feel him, in the dark. With his handover my mouth so I can’t answer back, he says: “I would rather die than not knock you up.”
With his hand over my mouth, I answer him back, anyway.
I NVENTORY:
Gifts
3 × Pop rocks
1 × Kenyan Barbie doll
2 × Pig salt and pepper shakers
1 × Snow globe
8 × Goody hairbands
2 × PEZ dispensers
1 × Moose antler catapult
1 × Paddleball game
And that’s all I need.
CHAPTER 23
A T-SHIRT ARRIVES BY FEDEX from a faraway film set. It stinks of GH but, even more important, is covered in a ballpoint love letter, his scratchy handwriting creeping across every inch of the cotton. It is an invitation, in verse, to meet him in Manhattan. He is as gifted a natural poet as anyone I can think of. He writes four, five, six a day, sometimes barely tasting them, like a compulsive eater.
So I meet him in New York. No one knows we’re there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love, like the secret voice you use in a room with a psychiatrist. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we
He says I am Dorothy to his Cowardly Lion and that we must walk the red carpet together for his latest film, whilst imagining it’s the yellow brick road. So flu-ridden that I am in bed reading
Eloise
, my favorite childhood book, I agree to go. He has successfully booked me for a gig, four months in advance. This pleases him so much, he spends the rest of the afternoon reading me
Eloise
in the voice of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character from
There Will Be Blood
. He is absolutely brilliant. The Noël Cowardly Lion.
I try to think how Dr. R would feel about me walking the red carpet. Am I supporting my partner’s work or am I permitting unwanted cameras into our relationship? What would he say? It’s strange to try to speak for the dead. My scars have gone down, mostly. There’s still a flesh flower on my upper right thigh, and I can tell from the nonchalant reaction of bikini waxers that they’ve become used to this sort of thing: girls who want to prettify and uglify, and cannot find a difference—like that hypothetical circle where communism meets fascism.
An hour into a phone call one night, GH, on the other side of the world, broaches a new topic.
“When I get back from this film, let’s have a miniature human, that grows.”
I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses.
“A baby?”
“Yeah, one of them.”
After all this work with Dr. R, to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else. This is the conversation. I don’t know what to say.
“If it’s a girl, can we call her Pearl?”
“Pearl! My ego wants to fight it”—I can tell he’s smiling—“since I didn’t think of it. But that’s perfect for her. Pearl it is. When I get home.”
I summon again my invisible witnesses, Dr. R, my mum. And once they’re both there, I ask them to give us a moment alone. I can do this myself.
“Do you just want me to give you Pearl? Or do you want me to stay too?”
He tries to answer. I hear his breath catch in his throat. The wait is interminable.
“I want you to stay. Em: I never want there to be a time when we don’t share space.”
He gets home late at night. It’s unbearably hot and I’m sleeping downstairs on the daybed. I’ve passed out with the iPod shuffle on. He creeps in. I don’t know how long he was in the daybed with me. When I wake up he says, “Guess what was playing when I got here?”
“Can’t.”
“ ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ ”
“Portent?”
“Yeh. Yeah.”
He kisses me. As his tongue searches the back of my throat, there is a note I’ve never picked up before either because it wasn’t there or because he hid it, or maybe he’d just never kissed me this deep. Fear. Of me, of himself. Of paying the cost for wanting things that can be found only in the darkness on the edge of town. He wants to tell me something. I can only feel him, in the dark. With his handover my mouth so I can’t answer back, he says: “I would rather die than not knock you up.”
With his hand over my mouth, I answer him back, anyway.
I NVENTORY:
Gifts
3 × Pop rocks
1 × Kenyan Barbie doll
2 × Pig salt and pepper shakers
1 × Snow globe
8 × Goody hairbands
2 × PEZ dispensers
1 × Moose antler catapult
1 × Paddleball game
And that’s all I need.
CHAPTER 23
A T-SHIRT ARRIVES BY FEDEX from a faraway film set. It stinks of GH but, even more important, is covered in a ballpoint love letter, his scratchy handwriting creeping across every inch of the cotton. It is an invitation, in verse, to meet him in Manhattan. He is as gifted a natural poet as anyone I can think of. He writes four, five, six a day, sometimes barely tasting them, like a compulsive eater.
So I meet him in New York. No one knows we’re there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love, like the secret voice you use in a room with a psychiatrist. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we
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