Now as Betty was reluctantly saying good-bye, all at the magazine were scurrying, though Tessa still refused to budge. This is “fucking history,” she cried again and again, jabbing my arm with the end of her pen but turning soft as a baby as she waved to Graydon on his way out. She was wearing a pink Chanel suit. It was getting later and later. The managing editor, Jan, was not pleased by all the delay.
Everyone was irate at Tessa and at me for not being able to corral her. I was so angry that when Tessa went to the bathroom, I threw her pink jacket out the window. It floated down through the air like a big, colorful bird. Tessa demanded so much. Betty demanded so little. But the bracelet thing was crazy. Betty was worked up in a way that was so unfamiliar to me. The weather had been bad at home. She had been cooped up for days.
She called back. When I had told her that the bracelet plot was going to be pretty hard to pull off, she seemed hurt. “I am here, by myself, all alone, with him,” she said. “I need you to help me with just this one thing. Can’t you help me just this once?”
Jan’s assistant, Lulu, a whopping Texas girl, came in to say that she had to get something off her chest. She said that she had missed her therapist’s appointment because she had to stay late to help with the piece. She felt angry and unsupported. I thought that this was probably the day that Lulu and her analyst had planned to discuss her feelings about cheese.
Tessa was soon looking for her jacket. When the phone rang, it was Betty again. “I need to get out of here,” she said. “We are just stuck here. I’m just stuck here, about to go nuts.”
. . .
“I don’t like the way you sound.” Betty said again and on the phone, time after time, night after night. “I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” I told her a hundred times, but she didn’t believe me. “I don’t like the way you sound. I don’t like the way you sound.”
I was her focus, but as my father’s face got grayer, turning a more ashy color, she became obsessed with him as well, though it was just a bit late, her waking up to take in what was happening.
My father spoke of waking to find my mother, her face right up in his, checking to see if he was breathing. “I’m dead, Betty. I’m dead,” he’d say. “Well, how would I know if you were?” she’d respond. “I’d have to wake up and find you.
“I don’t like the way you sound. I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“I am fine. I am fine.”
. . .
Sucking on a Camel cigarette, hair arranged with perfect artfulness, Graydon, who had grown more and more hostile, eyed me with an expression that nearly knocked me out, a kind of contempt.
“Why,” he asked me, as he surveyed a marked-up Streisand photo (“Don’t tint the lips,” she had demanded), “do you always have to try to be so fucking perfect? Why can’t you let the writers be themselves?”
After that, nothing was really right between us. He ridiculed my outfits, my coffee brand, my story ideas. He exiled me from meetings, accused me of always looking bored. I somehow knew he would never be there anymore, I would never win his affection again. Yes, I had grown increasingly testy; yes, I was holding things up, trying to make the writing fine, missing deadlines; yes, I was marking up my galleys so endlessly that I had blinded more than a few copy editors.
Yes, I was on drugs, but only enough to kill a rock band and only at the end. Whatever it was that took me away from what I didn’t want to feel or remember, I sniffed right up. I had, at some point, made a mistake. I was running fast. I think maybe I had forgotten that Graydon wasn’t my father. When things are changing too quickly, things can get confused. All hands were empty now. No one was reaching out.
. . .
“Put Daddy on the phone.”
“He doesn’t want to talk. He hasn’t left his chair all day. I don’t know what to do about him. He won’t do anything.”
. . .