Outtakes from a Marriage (14 page)

“Oh Christ!” I said.

“You’re gonna love it in a few days. Trust me.”

I hung up the phone and I dialed Joe’s number. Dialing it had become almost a reflex during the past few days. I did it pretty much any time I was near a phone. Of course, sometimes Joe would answer and then we’d chat about the kids or our plans for dinner, but often enough, I’d get his voice mail.

On the day of the lips I had a little breakthrough.

“Hi, baby. It’s me. Jenna. I was thinking of stopping by the set today. I had visions of strolling into the makeup trailer and rubbing my hot little body up against yours when nobody’s looking. How’d you like that, baby? I’m getting all horny just thinking about it. Call me!”

Jenna or Gina? I played it back five times before I knew for sure. Jenna. The only Jennas I had ever known were still in preschool. I’d never met an adult Jenna, had never heard my dad describe one.
Young
was the only thing I could associate with her name. She was young, that was for sure, with a name like Jenna.

“How’d you like that, baby? I’m getting all horny just thinking about it. Call me!”

Horny this, horny that…
This slut needs a new line,
I thought. Would she never shut up about her alleged horniness? And the thing that killed me was that the word actually sounded cute and sexy when she said it. Something about her little accent and the breathiness of her youthful voice. I knew that if I ever called Joe, or anyone else for that matter, and nattered on about being horny, it would come across as nagging and whiny, or even worse, offensive and threatening—not sweet and beguiling like Jenna.

The fact that Jenna felt as if she could just pop into the makeup trailer made me wonder if she worked on the show. I knew a woman named Andrea who was the head of makeup and always gave Ruby makeup lessons and false eyelashes whenever she visited the set, but she was an incorrigible gossip and Joe would never allow his secret girlfriend to visit him there.

I knew all the women who had regular parts on
The Squad.
There was Tanya Irwin, Hope Ball, Ilana Wakefield, and Jane Wendell. None of these women were from the South. But there were also the smaller recurring roles to consider, and I found the boxed DVD set from last season and scanned the list of credits. I found no Jenna, but then again, they only listed regular cast members. I logged onto the show’s Web site and did a search for the name
Jenna
but came up with nothing. But while I was there, I decided to peek at the message boards.

—How friggin’ hot was Joe during last week’s episode? the scene where he was kissing that callgirl?

—HOT

—I don’t like the whole callgirl story line. I don’t believe a guy like Mitch Hollister would actually fall in love with a ho

—she’s supposed to be like a Heidi Fleiss girl. A notch above ho.

—lol. Not too ho. Just the right amount of ho.

I don’t care about the girl. I heart JF.

I had always lurked the boards in the past, but, of course, had never posted anything. Suddenly my fingers flew to the keyboard and typed in the “Post Message” box:

He’s gay in real life.

I didn’t send it right away. I sat there for a moment, reading the sentence over and over, relishing the sense of power, the utter wickedness of it. Honestly, if her name hadn’t been Jenna, I never would have done it. I can see that now. If it was a name that was at least close to my age—something like Jennifer or Susan or even Brooke—I might have had a clearer head, but the sheer profanity of the name Jenna, the almost criminal youthfulness of it, was like a slap in the face. And my face hurt so much already from trying—trying so hard…

I clicked “Send” and then quickly closed the cover of my laptop. It was time to make dinner and help Sammy get ready for his bath.

Later, after the kids had gone to bed and before Joe came home, I logged back on and scrolled down to the thread about Joe. To my great surprise, right beneath my line about Joe being gay, somebody had posted:

—I know. I’ve heard that too.

—What? Gay? Really?

—Not true. He’s married. With kids.

—That doesn’t mean anything.

Good point,
I thought. Then I typed:

—I know him and his “wife” in real life. He’s definitely gay.

I logged off
The Squad
’s message board and logged on to
Gawker.com
. I typed Joe’s name into the search box and began to read all the sightings of him. There were quite a few, averaging one or two a week just over the last year alone. Gawker is New York–based, so the New York celebrities—Kevin Bacon, Kyra, Ethan Hawke, Sarah Jessica Parker—are all site regulars, with occasional appearances by more exotic personages like Madonna and Amy Winehouse. The Joe sightings were, for the most part, pretty innocuous:

Saw Joe Ferraro with teenaged daughter walking into Virgin Records. Followed them inside. Daughter was shopping for something in the Soundtrack section. Joe followed her around talking on his cell phone. I saw a teenager approach him for an autograph and he shook his head, still talking on the phone.

Or this:

Joe Ferraro standing in line at the Angelika Theater with wife. It was a dark, cloudy day but Joe still wore his sunglasses inside theater lobby. I guess he was afraid nobody would realize he’s a celebrity if he took them off.

I could have submitted that entry myself. It never ceased to embarrass me the way Joe wore his sunglasses indoors. “You’re actually calling attention to yourself,” I always said. “I didn’t even realize I still had them on,” was usually his response.

The Gawker posts were all listed in reverse chronological order, the most recent sightings first. There was even a “Gawker Stalker Map,” which actually highlighted, on a map of New York City, where each celebrity was sighted. Most of the sightings of Joe occurred in our neighborhood, but a handful were in the West Village.

Saw Joe Ferraro leave a black Escalade in front of a brownstone on West 11th Street. He was impatiently pushing a buzzer to get in the building and finally was buzzed inside.

The date of that sighting was last October. October 27th. I got out my calendar and looked up the date. It had been a Thursday. There was nothing listed in my date book, which meant that I had been home that night. If Joe wasn’t home, he was usually working or playing basketball. Instead, on this night, he was visiting somebody in a brownstone downtown. It couldn’t be a coincidence that last fall was when I started obsessing about Dr. James. Joe was running off to his girlfriend’s house and I was lusting after my poor shrink.

I clicked on the “Tips” box on the sightings page and typed:

Saw Joe Ferraro leaving Bungalow 8 with a young male, very early this morning.

Then I paused. My lips throbbed. I entertained various scenarios in my mind and then typed:

Ferraro’s chauffeur-driven Escalade was parked outside and he seemed to be trying to persuade the young man to get in the car with him. After a few minutes of discussion, the man got in the car with Joe and they drove off.

I had forgotton how much I liked to write.
I’m good,
I thought. Why had I been studying journalism in college when clearly I was meant to write fiction? I closed the laptop. I knew my behavior was nuts. I thought about Dr. Boyfriend.

My last session before Dr. James’s summer break, I had arrived at his office slightly unraveled. His impending vacation loomed. Joe was shooting every night (he said) and I was having trouble sleeping again. At the beginning of the session, I had tried to talk about issues regarding my children and my marriage, but before the hour was half over, I started talking about my feelings for Dr. James. Again.

“You know, I think about you all the time,” I said.

“All the time?” he asked, frowning and cocking his head to the side. There it was, the frown, the head cock. Nothing was new. His actions and reactions were hopelessly predictable, but rather than being bored by their sameness, I was always entranced by their comforting reliability.
There,
I thought when he nodded encouragement at me.
There,
when he furrowed his brow with concern.
There,
when he cast me a sidelong look of doubt in those moments when he felt I was selling myself short…
There, there, there again.

“I just feel so hopeless about this process. I don’t think it’s normal to become so…infatuated with your shrink.”

“Well, I think what you’re going through
is
normal. It’s not really me you’re attracted to. You know this. We’ve discussed this.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Your attraction to me is really a longing for connection. Probably to your father. It’s really quite common.”

“I guess…” I said, unconvinced.

“You don’t even know me,” he said. He had said it before.

“I think you’re wrong about that. I think I know a lot about you.”

There it was—the sidelong look of doubt.

“I know that you’re honest,” I began. He
was
honest. There had been times when I had asked him very pointed questions—questions about himself—and he always answered carefully and honestly.

“You’re reliable,” I said. He never canceled appointments, and his appointments began and ended on time. Always. Okay, so now I can see that this isn’t much to set store by. Really, though, when I was going through this, it was enough. I felt I knew everything about Dr. James that I needed to know. He was perfect.

I had been staring at the floor, but now I looked up and saw that he was studying me. He looked into my eyes and I looked back, blinking, into his. We had been locked in looks like this before, but no matter how I tried to delude myself, I knew he wasn’t trying to engage me in some kind of hypnotic stare of seduction. He was studying me with a clinician’s eye and it was always me who looked away first.

“What’s going on with Ruby? You were saying that you were having trouble setting limits with her?” he asked finally.

“Ruby?”

“Yes. You felt that she sometimes bullies you….”

“What would you do if…one of your patients…unbuttoned her blouse? If she showed you her breasts?” I glanced at him quickly, then stared, blushing wildly, at a point on the ceiling.

There was a very long pause, then: “What would I do?”

I glanced back at Dr. James. He was looking at me very carefully now. He didn’t look happy.

“Julia?”

Outside, a car alarm started, and after three or four identical rising screeches was shut off. I remember those moments in that room now as if they had just happened, it’s so clear in my mind. A small child could be heard laughing and chattering right under the window, and the solid, heaving bass notes of a reggae tune pulsed from an approaching car.
It’s already August,
I thought. I would need to make appointments for the kids’ school physicals. I would need to register them for fall sports camps. Where had the summer gone? The music got closer and louder, throbbing for several minutes right outside the window, and then it faded off up the avenue.

“I don’t know why I just said that,” I said. “I would never do anything like that, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m just curious about all the crazies you must get in here,” I said. “The situation with Ruby is better. We had a talk. I think a lot of it is hormonal….”

And I talked to Dr. James for the rest of my fifty minutes. I recalled a dream about a house that was actually a ship, and as I recounted it, he took notes. I described my efforts to communicate better with Joe and my difficulties setting limits with Ruby, and when my time was up, Dr. James told me so by glancing at his watch. Then he followed me to the door, and this time he paused for a moment before his customary handshake.
Who could blame him,
I thought, but when I went to sidle past him, he reached out and clasped my hand in his. I had a fleeting sense of pulling up on him for balance—a feeling that his solid presence made it possible for me to stand. The day, the daughter, the August afternoon—he was handing me off to my life, cutting himself free with his brief, work-manlike grip that said,
Keep trying, you’re fine.
Then it was over. Then I was on my way. We had left it that I would call him when Joe and the kids and I returned from Amagansett in early September. But I never called.

[
twelve
]

H
ow can you not have Vicodin?” Alison asked.

I was right: Beth had told Alison. Beth had told Alison and now I was glad, because Beth had a job and wasn’t available to talk to me endlessly about the Joe situation. Alison was. I called her with an update every time there was a new message and we mulled over any possible “clues,” but today I hadn’t called just to talk about Jenna or Joe. Right after I dropped Sammy off at school, I called because Alison lived in Los Angeles, had a very wealthy husband, and had started messing with her lips and her crow’s-feet when she was in her thirties.

“My lips always kill for at least three days after I get them done,” Alison said. “I don’t like Calder’s work. She does my friend Sasha…you know, Sasha Millicovic?”

“Mmm-hmm.” It was always a little annoying when Alison did this—dropped a name like Sasha’s just so everybody would know that while she might not have been on the A-list herself, many of her close friends were.

“Well, anyway, my doctor would have given me something for the pain, and I always keep plenty of Vicodin and OxyContin around. I can’t believe you don’t even have a single Percocet lying around! Have you and Joe become Christian Scientists?”

“No, Alison! Nobody I know takes that stuff. Unless they’ve had surgery or something.”

“Wow,” said Alison. “The Upper West Side sounds so different from the New York we lived in. Whenever you talk about your life up there, it all sounds so…wholesome.”

“It’s not!”

“Honestly, I picture all you moms walking around in Amish clothing with giant aprons….”

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’m not looking very Amish with these lips.”

“Are they still swollen?”

“Not so bad. They look a lot better today. Just a little bruising on one side. It’s pretty easy to cover with makeup. So that’s why I’m calling. I think I can actually go out in public today, and I have some time before I get my extensions this afternoon, so I want to pop in unexpectedly at the set. To see if Jenna’s there.”

“Excellent,” said Allison.

Alisons are “game,” my father said. He always loved Alison.

“How will I know where they’re shooting?” I asked. “They shoot in different locations each day.”

“Look at his call sheet,” Alison replied. “Doesn’t he come home with one each night, telling him which scenes they’re shooting the next day?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

I recalled once opening Joe’s gym bag—the male equivalent of a purse—and finding it full of loose change and protein bars and many crinkled-up call sheets. Here I’d been listening in on his private phone messages but hadn’t had the wherewithal to open his gym bag!

“He keeps them with him, though,” I said. “And I want to go today.”

“Just call somebody at the production office. They’ll know,” Alison replied.

“I wish I knew if Horny Jenna was planning to stop by for a body-rubbing session.”

“Even if she doesn’t, there’s a lot you can learn on the set. People gossip, they’re resentful, they let things slip. If you can find some time alone with somebody on the crew, you’ll be amazed at what you’ll discover.”

“Right. Of course,” I said. Alison’s half-baked career in television and films was now paying off for me. She had worked on scores of sets.

“And remember, the makeup girl’s going to be your biggest resource! They never shut up, any of them. Also, the prop truck is a good place to get information. Okay, I have to go now. Pilates.”

The Squad
was shooting in Harlem that morning. Off 125th Street, next to the West Side Highway. “Right behind Fairway,” a member of the production staff had told me on the phone. Back when I did all our grocery shopping, Fairway was my favorite store because, in addition to having arguably the city’s best selection of meat, produce, cheese, and breads, it has free parking right across the street alongside the Hudson River Parkway. Where else in New York can you drive your car to the grocery store and load it up, just like a regular American mom? When Ruby was little we used to go to Fairway and buy chocolate-chip cookies that we would eat sitting on the tailgate of our old beat-up Subaru while we watched barges being pushed up and down the Hudson by tugboats that Ruby would give names—like Josabelle. Josabelle the tugboat! That was going to be the name of another children’s book I was going to write.
When I have the time,
I told myself then, when I was really quite busy being Ruby’s mom, keeping our apartment clean, and encouraging Joe while his career lagged. Now I recalled that there was a certain comfort in not having the time to do the things I wasn’t sure I could really do. I had the time now. I had all day, each day, that I could be working on projects. Somehow, instead of writing a book, or even an essay, I was being a nothing. A husband-stalking nothing.
When I’ve sorted all this out,
I told myself now,
when I’ve sorted it all out with Joe, then I’ll write the book about Josabelle, and the one about Annie Acorn. And the screenplay. And the article about breast-feeding.

I arrived at the set just before ten, hoping that I would get there around the time the crew would break for coffee. (Everything on a television and movie set is more or less dictated by union standards, including the timing and duration of coffee breaks and meals.) I wanted to be there when everybody was acting all chummy and perhaps rubbing up against each other.

There was very little traffic as I drove up Broadway, and as soon as I turned left on 125th Street, I could see the caravan of long white trucks, vans, and trailers that always strike fear and loathing into the hearts of New York City residents. Their presence indicates that a movie or television show is using that spot as a location and that the people who normally inhabit the area will be treated like annoying but easily removable pests. The roped-off sidewalks were busy with electricians unloading lighting equipment and dollies loaded with heavy pieces of scenery. There were plenty of empty parking spaces on the street around the trucks because
The Squad
had commandeered all the spaces. Those cars whose unlucky owners hadn’t taken heed of the numerous orange flyers forbidding parking by anyone not associated with the production were being towed.

When Beth, Alison, and I lived on Avenue B, film productions frequently used our block when they needed a “ghetto” location, and we were always outraged by the sense of entitlement these movie people felt when they came barging into our neighborhood. One morning I was late for work, as usual, and when I went to run across the street in front of our building, I was stopped by an enthusiastic young towhead wearing a black parka and holding an oversized walkie-talkie.

“Excuse me. You can’t cross here. We’re shooting a scene,” he whispered.

I looked across the street where there was a large crowd of people standing around a cluster of video monitors. A few feet down the sidewalk, lights shone on two male actors, or perhaps stuntmen, simulating a fight. The rest of the street was lined with those dreaded white trucks, vans, and RVs.

“But I have to cross here. I have to get a bus.”

“Shhh!” he whispered. “We’re rolling.” He gave me an “Isn’t this exciting!” look and I said, “I don’t give a fuck!” I couldn’t believe this little creep.

“Look, we’re
shooting a feature film.
That’s Wesley Snipes over there,” he said, quite superior and condescending. “I can’t let you cross here. You can cross on the next block.”

“What makes you think your job—or Wesley Snipes’s job—is more important than mine, huh?” I asked, furious, and louder than necessary. “I’m late. This is
my
street. Why should
I
have to change
my
life so that Wesley Snipes can make millions of dollars shooting a film in
my
—”

“Cut!” came the command, garbled and static, over the production assistant’s walkie-talkie. A police officer, whom I had thought was an actor, walked over to where we stood.

“What’s the problem here?” he asked.

“I don’t see why my life has to be…altered, just so these people can make their stupid little movie.”

“Oh. Okay, then, I’ll explain why your life has to be
altered,
” said the officer. A large African-American man with a round belly, he used the slow, patient, authoritarian voice that I had heard my father and other former military men use my whole life. “This production has purchased a permit from the city of New York that enables them to shoot here and also to direct pedestrian traffic in the immediate area.”

God, I thought I was cool back then. I think I gave some kind of haughty, wise-assed reply and then flipped the PA the bird over my shoulder as I stomped off down the block. Now driving along, feeling slightly old and conspicuous in our shiny black BMW, I thought of Ruby’s youthful outrage at similar ridiculous situations and I had to smile.

I pulled in behind a large RV parked a few empty spaces in front of a smaller RV. Joe had top billing on the show, which I knew guaranteed him the largest trailer. This was perfect. I pulled in behind the vehicle and then sat waiting to see if anyone was going to try to chase me out of the spot, at which point I planned to icily tell them that I was Joe Ferraro’s wife. Members of the production crew walked hastily back and forth on the sidewalk, but nobody seemed to notice or care that I was there. I removed a piece of lined paper from one of Ruby’s notebooks in the back and with a broken crayon that I dislodged from Sammy’s car seat, I wrote, “JOE FERRARO’S CAR.” I placed the paper in the windshield. Then I removed the paper and squeezed in the word WIFE’S so that it read, “JOE FERRARO’S WIFE’S CAR.” Then I removed the paper, crumpled it up, and threw it on the floor.

I opened my purse and removed a lipstick that I had borrowed from Ruby recently. Pink Expectations, it was called. I liked it because it was a darker pink than I usually wore and it covered the bruising that still lingered on the left-hand corner of my lip. Otherwise, I thought as I studied myself in the rearview, not too bad. Although Dr. Calder had told me that the full effects of the Botox could take a week or two, I could already see a slight difference in my face. That worried, angry look seemed to be gone, or was it my imagination? The furrow between my brows seemed less severe. And my lips, except for the little bit of bruising, looked more voluminous than they ever had, even in my youth.

Suddenly there was a rapid knocking on my window. I screamed and Ruby’s lipstick flew out of my hand. I looked up to see Catherine, Joe’s assistant, waving excitedly to me from outside the car.

I composed myself and jumped out of the car. Catherine gave me a big hug.

“Joe didn’t tell me you were coming!” she exclaimed.

“I know, I wasn’t planning to, I just happened to be in the neighborhood. I was on my way to Fairway and when I saw the trucks I wondered if it was you guys.”

“Cool!”

“Is my car okay here?”

“Yeah, I’ll have one of the PAs keep an eye on it.”

“Where’s Joe?” I was trying to be casual and breezy.

“Oh, you just missed him. He was in his trailer all morning because they had some problems setting up his shot, but now he’s on the set. It’s down at the end of the block. I’ll take you there.”

As Catherine and I walked down, I marveled, as I always did, at the number of people it took just to shoot one small, uncomplicated scene. Production assistants, assistant directors, personal assistants, electricians, sound technicians, script supervisors, child wranglers, and caterers were either racing around doing their jobs or standing around waiting for somebody else to do their job, sometimes for hours on end. The first time I ever visited a movie set I expected to find something out of Truffaut’s
Day for Night.
I thought that the crew would be made up of glamorous and sexy young men and women who, when they weren’t flipping through pages on their clipboards and chasing down wayward actresses, would be sipping espresso, discussing Bergman and Fellini, and seducing one another in the wardrobe truck. Instead, what I found was a typical work-place full of ordinary-looking people who, like workers anywhere, were doing their time in a job where they often felt bored, resentful, and unfulfilled.

“I just have to stop in Joe’s trailer for a minute,” Catherine said, and I followed her inside with some enthusiasm. Since Joe wasn’t there, I could snoop to my heart’s delight.

The TV had been left on, tuned to ESPN. An overflowing ashtray and several empty cans of Diet Pepsi sat on the table. Newspapers were strewn everywhere. A half-eaten plate of fruit salad was sitting in the sink, surrounded by dirty drinking glasses. I wandered casually to the back of the trailer and glanced into the small bedroom. Joe’s gym bag and coat were thrown onto the bed, which was completely made up in a tacky, seventies-inspired psychedelic bedspread. I realized that Joe would never bring his girlfriend here for sex. For one thing, people like Catherine were always wandering in and out.

And also, Joe’s trailer stunk.

Catherine seemed to notice this as well. She sniffed the air a few times and then threw open the door to the tiny bathroom.

“Shit!” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Somebody took a shit in Joe’s toilet again! Goddammit! Joe is gonna freak!”

“He is?”

I could hear Catherine pushing the flush button over and over again.

“Yes!” she said. “He is.”

“Umm…How do you know it wasn’t Joe?”

“It wasn’t Joe!” Catherine said. She emerged from the bathroom and began looking wildly around, apparently for clues. “Joe already went this morning!”

Wow,
I thought,
no wonder Joe felt that I didn’t pay enough attention to him at home.

“Somebody keeps sneaking into Joe’s trailer and shitting in his toilet, and then just leaving it there. And Joe is freaking out!”

People aren’t kidding when they say there’s really nothing glamorous about show business. My heart swelled with pity for Catherine, who, having worked for Joe for almost a year, was his longest-employed assistant yet. The last one had lasted four months.