Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (33 page)

Without all of that, I felt everything, and it was awful, horrible, black. Maybe I wasn't clinically depressed, but I felt as dark as ever in a lifetime of bouts of feeling bad. Looking back over my life, it seemed as if every temporary safety I'd ever found had been wrenched away from me in the most painful way: I had a family, and then my dad had chosen gambling; I had Simon's Rock, and then Wayne Lo had gotten a gun; I had Scott, and then he didn't love me enough to make it work; I had Anthony and Judah, but they had gone on to other women, other cities, other pleasures.

And still I didn't get my period. Thirty days became sixty days.

I began seeing a homeopathic doctor who gave me the few blood tests I could afford and started prescribing me her own herbal remedies.

Sixty days became ninety days.

I tried harder to be good, to be better, but nothing helped. Even though running in the morning made me feel awake and alert all day, I preferred running in the evening when the air was cool and smelled like jasmine, and the palm trees cast pretty shadows in the deepening dusk. I ran up into the lush green foothills on the edge of Pasadena and soaked in all of that beauty and affluence, hearing the sprinklers kick on just beyond the sound of the music in my headphones. It was so beautiful, but the beauty couldn't touch me.

My entire body and soul felt like one dark bruise, a blood blister,
with sick black deposits of hurt visible beneath the skin. As I ran, I began to sob, choking as I tried to catch my breath. I ran harder, but I could never run fast enough.

I
was out at a local Mexican restaurant for an early dinner with a girlfriend when I saw a familiar car in the parking lot. She happened to live on the same street as Judah and had pointed out his black Jaguar on several occasions. Here, now, was a black Jag just a few blocks from where they both lived. The skin at the back of my neck prickled in a satisfying, familiar way. He was here.

He and his guitarist were seated against the far wall. My friend looked at me, her eyes wide. I managed to get into the bathroom to put on some face powder and lipstick without his seeing me. When I emerged, I drew up to his table and cocked a hip.

“Why, hello, Judah,” I said.

“Why, hello, Sarah Tomlinson,” he said. “How've you been?”

“Great,” I said. “And you?”

“I'm still here,” he said. “You live in LA now?”

“Yeah, I'm a celebrity ghostwriter,” I said. “Actually I'm working on a book you'd love. He's explaining how to run girls, you know, like working girls.”

He started to laugh.

“Oh, is he?” he said.

I fished into my bag and held out my new business card.

“So we can stay in touch,” I said.

He took the other end of the card, and for a long moment we were both holding one end of it, our fingers nearly touching, just as we had on that long-ago Boston night.

“We're in touch right now, aren't we?” He chuckled.

A few days later, I was in my room writing when a familiar e-mail address suddenly appeared on my BlackBerry.

“Was there something you wanted me to read?” he wrote.

We flirted back and forth for a few days. And later that week I found myself once again walking up the steps to his house around eleven o'clock at night, wearing a short green dress and my mom's Frye boots from the seventies. He kissed me on the lips.

“Water?” he asked.

“Sure, that'd be great, thanks,” I said.

I laughed to myself about how much had changed since my last visit there, now more than five years ago, as we sipped bottled water. We'd both quit smoking. It didn't take long for us to move downstairs to a new lounge he'd put in, where he opened a nice bottle of wine. And it didn't take much longer for me to find myself in just my bra and underwear. “Leave your boots on,” he said.

During all of our many late-night phone sessions, we had talked at length about almost every sex act, and I knew exactly what he liked.

“Do you want to get fucked or do you want to come back?” he asked.

I wanted nothing more than to, finally, after all of these years, be taken upstairs to his bed. But I also didn't want this newest incarnation of our affair to end so soon, especially because there was something comforting about reconnecting with someone who had known me for so long and who still seemed to have answers I continued to seek. Although I had changed and grown in some ways, I still valued the intensity of the experience over everything else. “I want to come back,” I said.

After he came, I went into the bathroom, still in my bra and underwear and boots. I looked in the mirror. My collarbones jutted out like a model's. I was maybe a little too skinny, but I knew as long as I still had hips and breasts, men found skinny sexy, and so I shook out my hair, seeing myself through his eyes, not my own.

When I left with the sun rising over the freeway, I put in a CD of classical music he'd made for me and felt my mood brightening along with the sky. I sent Judah a flirty e-mail thanking him for our night together. And, once again, I waited.

I was spending that spring working on a final revision of my first novel. Now that I was regularly working with a literary agent on ghostwriting projects, I hoped he'd like it enough to help me realize my nearly twenty-year dream of having my own book published. In order to have quiet time, I'd taken on a variety of pet-sitting gigs. I bounced from house to house, trying to focus. Instead, I composed e-mails to Judah that I never sent. On nights I felt particularly angsty about his silence, I drank red wine.

It was a relief to let myself go, to let the edges become blurry and give up on my constant bid for perfection. But I wasn't the drinker I'd once been, and in the morning I felt foggy and sick, and guilty, for possibly diminishing all of the good work I'd done—and the money I'd spent—toward trying to heal myself.

In the aftermath of my temporary, tipsy escape, the blues came back worse than ever. It felt as if everything I did was pressing on the bruise, and it hurt. I was tired of the hurting, tired of feeling crazy and sad and fucked-up.

I began to have a new fantasy that was much more pleasurable than anything involving Judah, or even selling my novel.

In the fantasy, I was in an elegant hotel room. Everything was clean and quiet and dim. I stretched out on the bed. No one knew where I was. I was alone, and this solitude made me feel safe to do what I needed to do next. I took a handful of pills, and then another. I washed them all down with expensive bourbon. As I started to drift, I lay and sipped bourbon, for the pleasure of it, until I stopped breathing, and everything was silent.

No more pain of my unending, bottomless lack.

I was filled with relief. The image made me feel light in a way I hadn't in so long, maybe not exactly happy, but the next best thing, and far better than I'd felt in months, years, even, maybe in as long as I could remember.

I didn't tell anyone about my fantasy because I knew they would try to stop me. The first step was the pills. I didn't have a regular doctor.
But I knew I could convince a doctor I needed some sleeping pills, just enough to get me through a temporary anxiety about writing deadlines, and blah-blah-blah. I would supplement those with over-the-counter sleeping pills. The booze was easy. That would be a treat.

The hotel room was a safe place I went to every day in my mind. The reality of my daily existence became the background noise to this necessary escape. Even developments that would have pleased me a few months before no longer did. Judah called me from a recording session, wanting me to have phone sex with him while his band went out to get dinner, as we had done so many times before.

“I should get a thank-you on this album,” I joked. “I've given you ‘creative inspiration' on what, three or four albums now?”

He chuckled his great, deep laugh.

“That you have,” he said. “Maybe if we do a vinyl edition.”

I sighed. I was tired of the conditional maybes that never came true. What interested me more was our talk about a female musician who'd been recording strings for his new album a few weeks earlier. When she hadn't turned up for a session one day, he'd called a mutual friend. They'd gained entrance to her apartment and found her dead.

He went on to describe how he'd known she was troubled, and because they were fellow night owls, he'd gone over to her house late a few times, just to listen to music and keep her company. As he talked, I grew jealous, not because he had shown her more care than he'd shown me. Instead, I was jealous because she was dead and I was not.

I pictured the tranquillity of her apartment, the finality of the scene, and how when the intruders had entered, they no longer had any power over her. It made me more determined than ever to claim my own moment of peace. But I didn't tell him any of this. I was sure he wouldn't care. I was sure I wasn't worth even a late-night record-listening session. And so, instead, I moaned when he said moan. And when he didn't come over later that night, I cared less than I ever had before. I had a solution. It was a relief, too, because after a hundred days, I'd gotten my period, but it hadn't changed the way I felt.

Before I could put my plan into motion, I had one more dog-sitting gig in one of my favorite neighborhoods, Mount Washington, a wild snarl of narrow winding roads clotted with overgrown vegetation. I particularly loved to run there in the evening, breathing in the smell of eucalyptus, and watching the whole city twinkle and pulse below me when I crested the highest hill at dusk. The house was a great Spanish colonial mess filled with the clutter of a single mom and her young son. It was hot that summer, and only the son's room had AC, so I sweated all day, nearly hallucinating with the hazy deluge of the afternoon heat, amplified by my laptop, which cooked on my lap, and then after my run, I slept in his narrow bed amid stuffed animals in the artificial icebox chill.

It was there, sitting in the hot, cluttered living room one afternoon, that a scene rose up within me, as vivid and full of emotional resonance as any of the sense memories I had of my past. This new scene felt equally real; it was as if it had already happened, and yet, I knew it was in the future. In it, I was driving somewhere in Los Angeles in a new car, the windows down, cutting through the twilight city with confidence and calm, beautiful, strong, happy, the opposite of how I felt now, and most of all
alive.

Somehow, I knew this vision was inside of me, which meant that it would happen if I could just hold on.

When I got back to my house, I sat on my bed and took a deep breath. I called my mom and told her everything about my hotel fantasy. She was understandably upset, but it was Craig's response that really moved me.

“You can't let that happen again, okay?” he said. “You have to tell us.”

He tried to convince me I should come back east and go with them to my mom's family reunion, which was happening at Grammy's old house the next month. I told him I didn't have enough money and was worried I'd be self-conscious about my special diet. He laughed at how he and my mom had been drawing sidelong glances for being mostly vegetarian for more than three decades and that they'd pay for the ticket.

“Just come home,” he said.

My father made me promise that if I ever had such dark thoughts again, I'd tell him. So did my friend Cathy. My friend Jodi cried when I told her. Even if I still had trouble wanting to live for myself, maybe I could live for them. Finally, as my period came regularly, and my Chinese doctor beamed at me each week, I started to feel better.

T
he Kentucky Derby had come and gone, and my dad had not won us the money for our house in Los Angeles. In fact, he had never even placed his bets the day of the race, or if he had, he'd never mentioned anything about it to me. I knew from long experience that gamblers only acknowledged their bets when they were winning, and if they didn't bring them up, it was better not to ask. Of course I was aware it had been unlikely, but I was disappointed nonetheless. Not so much that we hadn't won the money—it would have been nice, sure, but I'd never had any money, and I'd always assumed if I ever made any, it would be through my own writing. I was let down because if the plan was going to work, my father was going to have to finally believe in himself. After years of listening to him talk his big talk for a time, and then suddenly stop talking because he'd lost interest or given up, I wanted him to actually follow through on something. And after years of believing in him, no matter what, and even when he didn't believe in himself, I wanted a little payout, not specifically of the financial kind.

I knew better than to bring any of this up with my father, and so I let the topic wane. In the meantime, he had raised the possibility of moving out to Los Angeles, which I thought was a great idea. I knew the general interest in health food, meditation, and mysticism would make him feel right at home, and because he'd been approved for Section 8 housing, the move would be fairly easy for him.

“I'm just going to come out to California for a year or two,” he said. “I'm going to find a tank or a hot tub and do my work there. And then I'm
going to find a place in the woods. Maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire. Maybe even get a piece of land. What I'd really like is to build my own house. There are some books I'd like you to look up.”

As I listened to him happily plan for just the kind of healthy, DIY life in the woods that he'd opted out of when I was a baby, I waited for the moment when he realized the irony of this, how sad it was that, thirty years too late, he finally wanted and felt capable of the choice that would have allowed us to remain a family. And then I realized he'd never get it. He was so used to thinking only of himself, that's how it'd always be. And so I would have to learn to think of myself first, too.

“Sure, Dad,” I said.