“Jealous?” She stood up, her face bright red. “You’ve always been the jealous one. You were jealous of the Portland house, jealous of my parents, and it wasn’t enough to be jealous of my grandmother, you had to move in here to steal her.”
“I didn’t have to steal her. She loved me! And you know I had to come here to live. There was no other place to go.” Her words were so sharp and painful that I instinctively struck back. I narrowed my eyes. “You’ve always been such a whiner! Poor Phoebe in her big house on the hill, with two parents and a grandmother and a fucking swimming pool.”
“Material things are not the only things, Suze. You’ve never got that.”
“It wasn’t about the material part. It was about you having love and people who wanted the best for you. So what, your parents got divorced. Mine tried to kill me, in case you’ve forgotten, and at the worst time in my life, when I was only a few miles away from you in that horrible unwed mothers’ home, you only came to see me one time. Once! Do you have any idea how awful that time was? How much I needed you? And you just deserted me.”
“I did go see you. You were a bitch to me.”
“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t cheerful enough for you?”
She rolled her eyes. “There it is. You poor, poor thing. Poor Suze. You had such a terrible childhood. So what? You have everything. You got everything. You were born beautiful. You dazzled the whole world. You’re as rich as a duchess and still you carry around that old story like it’s some teddy bear.”
“I do not!” Rage filled every corner of my body, my mind, every organ. My liver pulsed fury, and my veins ran hot. “At least I did something, took action, tried to make things happen, instead of rolling over to kiss a bloody jerk’s ass. You just gave up. Beryl and I were both trying to get you to stay in art school and you flung all of it away with both fists. Here, Derek; take this, Derek. You gave all your power away to a man.”
She slapped me. Hard. It stunned me for the blink of an eye, but my anger burst like a lake going over a dam, and I struck back, feeling a wild relief in the connection of my hand against her face. With a screech, she grabbed my hair. “You think you’re the most important person in the world. I’m so sick of you!”
I was much taller and knocked her down, tears pouring from my eyes, feeling a hundred fights in which I had wanted to strike back. I held her arms, keeping her from hitting me. “I’ve loved you my whole life, you stupid bitch!” I screamed. “You want more, more, more—”
Her elbow connected with my cheekbone and eye. Stunned, I fell back. She stood up. Her face was red. “I don’t love you. You take everything. Leave me alone.”
She stormed away. I left in the morning, and didn’t speak to her again until after the attack by the LNB. I woke up in the hospital to find her slumped in a chair, asleep. It touched me that she came, that she sat with me, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with the fallout right then. When she awakened, I thanked her for coming and told her she could go home.
In the quiet of my living room, I take a sip of tea and run a fingernail along the seam of my jeans. I did have a lot of good luck—the lucky break of being born with the kind of face that was fashionable at the moment I came to the movies, the luck of that particular casting director being at the auditions on Broadway, the luck of a great script that fit me like Goldilocks’s chair.
But I also worked hard. I didn’t take the lucky breaks for granted. I looked for the people who could help me and listened to their advice. I did a lot of learning in public and there are definitely roles from those early days that make me wince now.
Phoebe kept saying that she wanted a big life as an artist, but what she really wanted was to be in love, have a boyfriend, and have sex, and be a part of a couple. Derek showed up and she dived in, headfirst. He was wildly good looking and talented, and in his own way, he loved her, when he wasn’t gaslighting her.
Was it so wrong for her to want that life? Is it possible that both Beryl and I were wrong to try to talk her out of that marriage? By the end, she didn’t like art school very much, and although the marriage ended, she found her career anyway.
You take everything, she’d cried. And she didn’t even know about Joel.
Was it true? Did I try to take things from a life I envied? I don’t even know anymore.
We seem to always make our way back to each other, but is there a tipping point where our friendship breaks so completely that it can’t be glued back together?
As if my thoughts called her, my phone screen flashes Phoebe’s face. For a moment, I’m not entirely sure I’ll answer. My emotions and my memories are so tangled I hardly know what to think.
But habits die hard. The news hits me in the middle of the chest like a fist. Juno was such a light, alive with a burning that came through her voice and her songs. She couldn’t have been thirty. Phoebe gives me the details, and images blast through my protective layers, the blow to my head, the fall, the kicks. I close my eyes. Take a breath. If they’d chosen to shoot, I would now be dead, and the first thing that makes me think of is Joel, that I would not have had a chance to be with him one more time. She urges me to come down but I need to do what I’m doing.
I hang up.
I think of Nadine Truelove. Juno Gerhert.
I think of my father and the fact that the LNB failed to kill me. It comes to me that I’ve been looking at all this the wrong way. My father tried to break me and he failed. The LNB tried to kill me and they failed.
What will I do with that gift?
In a rush of emotion, I bend my head over the page. And begin.
I’m still here.
The only way through the morass of thoughts is writing. I’ve never lost the diary habit. I call it journaling now.
I pick up a blank Moleskine, connect my phone to Bluetooth, and settle at the banquette overlooking the ocean. I write the date at the top of the page and pause, wondering how to address it. I think about Joel, about the feeling of him against me, the way I felt when I saw him standing on the porch after such a long time, as if the world had righted itself at last. How he smells just the same. Below the enchantment lurks a darkness I am not ready to face, the things I told Phoebe I need to be here to finally let go of.
Another flash of Joel, eyes closed as he kissed me, plays across the screen of my eyelids. His hands on my body. His laughter in the middle of the night when we found ourselves exhausted and shaking.
How was that possible, that someone could not be part of your life and then suddenly they were so huge, right in the middle of it? But I can’t write about that right now.
Nor can I write about the LNB. I don’t even want to. My heart yearns toward the light, toward something bigger.
I write:
Edwina sent me a bunch of scripts and I am bored by all of them. The women are all the same—over fifty, struggling with families or lonely after being widowed or with husbands who are sick. Why don’t they move me? What am I looking for?
They have no agency, these women. They’re acted upon, not making their lives their own. Which might actually be true, that many women feel that way, but—
What I want are stories about women who are doing all the same things a woman does at every other stage of her life. Setting goals, having adventures, learning new things, having sex with a man (or woman) she finds hot, discovering new things about herself. Maybe I should write my own movie, write a part I’d like to play.
Huh.
What might that be?
I pause and tap my pen against my lips.
Maybe she would be an adventurer. Maybe a biography about Georgia O’Keeffe, striding through her life, living it her way until she died at 98. I’ve always thought she must have had an affair with the young guy who came into her life so late, and maybe that could be a good topic. Why not?
Because people might judge her as being ridiculous, allowing herself to have big feelings for somebody who clearly took advantage of her.
Or did he? Maybe they used each other.