8.
It’s the Spontaneity That Will Make the Energy Feel Real
The next morning, Julie had to wake up at 5:30 to spend fourteen hours in the editing room. The starfish-focused episode currently in progress at Julie vs. Animals made no sense to anybody narratively or scientifically. “Their mating,” Julie had explained to me a week ago, “is too slow, and when you watch it in fast-forward it looks like fractal art or something. We actually made two of the writers do an enactment in costumes, but that was unfunny because you felt bad for two guys who aren’t actors trying to be actors.” If the episode could not be edited into an acceptable state, Julie would have to put on a puppet show with two dried, store-bought starfish, and make them speak in funny voices. This was a recourse she hoped dearly to avoid.
I had no such reason to rise before dawn. But when Julie’s phone sounded its alarm tone and she rolled out of bed, I followed her into the bathroom. As she showered, I closed the lid of the toilet and sat. We did not speak.
When she emerged from the steam, I moved past her into the shower. Our arms brushed, like the arms of strangers passing on a bus. She washed her face beneath the future-children as I ran cool water over my head.
“I can’t morning-talk with you right now,” she said. “You don’t look like my husband to be, to me, in this moment. When you look halfway like that guy again, I’ll talk.”
When she left the house—no kiss, slammed door—I shadowed her all the way to the front door. It was strange how acutely I felt it, having to say good-bye until daybreak came and the world went dark again.
I drove to Canters, the only restaurant open at 5:55 a.m., and stewed in coffee through the dawn. I did nothing for ten minutes. Only after I had an egg sandwich in my hands did I realize what booth I was in. It was irregularly shaped, secluded, wedged in a shadowy corner. It was here that Julie and I sat whenever she’d need last-minute prep for an audition. We’d convened such sessions three times, the two of us face-to-face, she delivering her lines, I staring at her, trying to hold myself like an enigmatic director.
“I am actually saying these things in front of people in three hours,” she’d said, on one of these occasions, drawing skulls on a script. “This is happening. This is happening.” My main job, I had known, was to persuade her of the possibility of her nonf*ckedness. “It’s being relaxed that will make the spontaneity possible, and it’s the spontaneity that will make the energy feel real,” I said once. “It’ll be more like just you talking and they’ve brought you in because you talking is enchanting.” She called me uxorious; we held hands. Desperation, teamwork in defiance of a fast-falling night, medieval Greenland.
I will write a song about my internal torment, I thought, like Joanna Newsom’s. I took the paper place mat from the seat across from me and lay it beside my own place mat. I will write lyrics about what it would be like being with Khadijah, I thought, on the left, and lyrics about what it would be like being Julie’s husband on the right. But no lyrics came. Instead, to my surprise, I drew two houses.
When the place mats were done, I looked up. Hours had passed. Outside, rainy Fairfax was clogged with lowing rush-hour traffic. If I had written lyrics, as I’d intended, expressing the same sentiments as the drawings, I might have called it a productive morning and gone home to find some chords on the guitar. But these floor plans, and the zeal with which I had composed them, made me pause and contemplate the condition of my mind.
Cruelty manifests in confidence and clean lines, I decided. It’s sanity that resists architecture. I had not been aware of how mean I had become until I found a way to express my meanness.
I had been living in the belief that I could choose between lives, and that these lives were paths with calculable ends. I bit down on the fleshy base of my thumb, moved by the hugeness of my own stupidity. I felt like I had when one day, at age eleven, I turned and knelt on the floor, pants down, before a full-length mirror, in my grandparents’ basement, in order to see, for the first time, what my own bare ass looked like. That seeing-one’s-own-ass-cheeks sensation of I am as soft and absurdly constructed as everyone else.