Outtakes from a Marriage (21 page)

“How do all these people know your name?” I asked. I still thought everyone knew him as “that guy.”

This annoyed Joe. “I’ve told you again and again,” he hissed, “I’m fucking famous, Julia!,” which made me giggle, and Joe started laughing, too, at himself, at his
fucking famous
self, and we clasped hands and walked, blinking and dazzled, right into those blinding lights.

[
seventeen
]

I
t was on the red carpet in front of the
Entertainment Weekly
party that Joe’s cover was blown. People wonder why actors are always hitting photographers. Here’s why: As we walked along that red carpet, posing and smiling, a rogue photographer, somebody from the street who hadn’t been allowed into the approved, cordoned-off press area, pushed himself into the crowd and yelled, “Joe, where’s Jenna McIntyre tonight?”

Joe’s head swiveled around and he glared at the photographer, who was rapidly snapping off shots. I saw Joe glance at me, saw him out of the corner of my eye, but I pretended I hadn’t heard the guy. I just held Joe’s hand and posed, waving gaily, blinking at all the flashing lights. They make your eyes tear after a while, those lights.

When we got inside, Alison was already there. She was with Richard, her husband, and Isaac Mizrahi, an old friend of hers from New York. We all sat at a table in a corner of the vast outdoor party space, and everybody gossiped about all the celebrities who walked by. I tried to join in the merriment but mostly I just sat there quietly. I was thinking. I was calm. I realized that I had already known, that I had never believed Joe, really. We sat on one side of the table, on a bench covered with cushions, and several times I heard Joe’s phone ringing in his jacket pocket. He didn’t answer it. The third time it rang, he looked at the caller ID, then shut off the phone.

“Who was it?” I asked. Casually.

“Hmm?” Joe said. He was gazing off into the crowd. “Hey, isn’t that Cloris Leachman over there?”

“Can I use your phone, honey?” I asked. So casually. I was squinting out at the crowd, acting as if I was trying to see Cloris Leachman. “I want to check on the kids.”

“Sure,” Joe said. He handed me the phone.

I touched the 1 key. Hers was the first message. And the second.

“Hi, baby. I miss you. Call me,”
was the first. The second said,
“When are you coming back? I just got a job in L.A. and might fly in on Tuesday! I know you said we shouldn’t see each other for a while. I’m only going to be out there for a couple of days….”

“What’s up? Nobody home?” Joe asked.

“No,” I said, slamming shut his phone.

“C’mon. Let’s get out of here,” Joe said.

Outside, he put his hands into his pants pockets and his phone rang and made him jump.

“Maybe it’s the driver,” he said. “I just called him a minute ago to say we were on our way out.”

“Well, answer it,” I said.

Joe pretended he didn’t hear me.

“Here’s the driver,” he said, and he opened the back door of the Town Car so that I could climb in.

I didn’t sleep that night but Joe did, which is another of his pluses. He doesn’t let anybody rain on his parade. You’d have thought he might feel a little guilty about the messages. Instead, he seemed almost jubilant on the ride home, and when we walked into the room, he leaned against the little bar in the living room and said, “C’mere.”

I pretended I didn’t hear him.

“Julia,” he said, and then he stepped up behind me and pulled me close.

I turned and planted a brief kiss on his lips.

“Can you believe we’re here?” he said, smiling. “Did you ever think, back when we were living in that dive in Alphabet City, that someday we’d be in a suite at the Four Seasons waiting to find out whether I would win a Golden Globe award?”

“No.”

“Oh, thanks a lot,” he laughed. He opened the mini-fridge and grabbed a beer. “You want anything, hon?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

“So, you never thought I could do it?” he said, taking a swig off the beer.

“No, it’s not that I doubted you’d succeed…. It’s just that I don’t remember this being the dream.”

“It was mine, baby,” Joe said, and he walked out onto the terrace and lit a cigarette. He leaned his back against the balcony rail and smiled at me. It was the old spaniel smile—and yet it wasn’t. The old, heart-melting spaniel look had been replaced, over the years, by something more confident. More take-it-or-leave-it. His old expression said,
I can’t bear to look at you for another second, I want you so badly,
and it was just for me. The new one was his “Yes, it’s me” look. Joe shared it, generously, with everybody.

“My battery’s dead. I want to see if Ruby or Catalina called,” I said. “Can I use your phone?”

“Sure.” He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to me. Then he turned around and gazed across the city. I opened his phone and pressed the number 1.

Hours later as he slept, naked, curled up on his side, I marveled at the vulnerability of the human body. Devoid of fur, shell, claws, and quills, when our brains are at rest we are really as vulnerable as newborn babies. I was sitting on a chair next to the bed, smoking one of Joe’s cigarettes, and I watched his eyebrows raise and lower and his lips quiver slightly in some kind of a dreamy soliloquy. Perhaps he was dreaming of his acceptance speech, or a scene he had been reading earlier for next week’s show. Maybe he was having a conversation with a buddy or perhaps he was professing his love for Jenna. Maybe he loves her, I thought and watched, exhaling slowly, as Joe rolled from his side onto his back. His fingers were curled in toward his palms and his legs were splayed. I thought about a nature documentary that I had watched recently with Ruby, and how I learned that a wolf goes belly up when confronted by a more threatening member of the pack, exposing his throat, his soft belly, and his genitals to the menacing wolf. The narrator of the documentary commented on the effect this show of submission has on an aggressive wolf, who will sink his teeth into the throat of an upright, fangs-baring challenger, but will simply ignore the wolf who offers his gut, his balls, his soul. I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. Joe sighed contentedly in his sleep. I watched him for some time. I sat in that chair, watching and smoking, until the silvery light of dawn crept over the City of Angels, under our drapes and into our suite, marking the dawn of Joe’s big day. Then I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and called down for the car.

I drove down La Cienega and took the 10 West toward the Pacific, my bare foot pushing the gas pedal to the floor at one point, just to see how fast I could really go on an almost deserted highway. I exited the freeway and drove west until I found the beach, and then I drove out onto the Santa Monica Pier and parked the car. Gulls dive-bombed the pier, snatching up stray french fries and pieces of hot-dog rolls, and as I walked along the splintery planks, I thought that it must be close to six in the morning. The sun was behind me, rising over the Malibu hills, and I walked down the stairs of the pier and onto the beach heading south. It was slow, heavy going in the deep sand, but when I got down below the tidemark, the footing was so delightfully firm and fast that I broke into a little jog. I followed the coastline, traveling just at the frothy hem of the surf, and when a rogue little wave suddenly wrapped itself around my knees, I found myself giggling helplessly. I remembered a game that Neil and I used to play in the surf and I made my way along the beach, running away from each wave and then following it as far back into the sea as I could without getting wet.

The early-morning crew was out, the beachcombing tractors making their way around me. Up on the wide-paved walkway there were garbage collectors and cops on bikes and fitness buffs getting in an early-morning run. I kept following the beach, in and out of the surf, past playgrounds and volleyball nets and homeless sleepers and dog walkers.

I walked and walked until I arrived at Venice Beach, and the sight of the boarded-up, surfer-inspired souvenir shops and tattoo parlors somehow eased this sense of doom that I had felt welling up inside me all night. I had seen these shops many times during the day, and the tattooed vendors and freaky locals and smell of marijuana and sounds of bongos and reggae music had all given it an authentically exotic air then, but now that the walkway was deserted, it seemed as if it had all been staged. As if nothing was real. I felt as if I was walking past an abandoned movie set. Even the hazy morning light seemed filtered and artificial and temporary.

I sat down on a bench. A woman wandered past me pulling a shopping cart that appeared to hold all her worldly possessions, and she stopped for a moment to search through its contents for something. She appeared to be in her sixties, and when she glanced up at me, I could see that her face had been cured to the color of an old paper bag, and was deeply creased and wrinkled from decades in the sun. The dark brown tones of her skin made her eyes appear to be an unnaturally pale shade of green. Her hair was caught up in a long braid, and while it was mostly gray now, there still remained a few yellowy blond streaks. She had the handsome bone structure of a Daughter of the Revolution, and I imagined her arriving here sometime in the 1960s from someplace like Boston or Greenwich and being absorbed into one long, wild night upon her arrival in California, only to find herself, one morning, living out of a cart. I wondered if her family missed her or whether she had children who spoke about her resignedly in crowded Al-Anon meetings. When I was a teenager, I sometimes tried to imagine that my mother wasn’t really dead but that she had just run away. If she had, I could see her coming to a place like this and finding her tribe and never leaving.

I was tired. The bench was hard on my back and I decided to go rest on the sand for a few moments. I would just lie there for a little while and then drive back to the hotel to get dressed. I wasn’t ready to make my morning call to the kids. It was Sunday, so I couldn’t call Beth’s lawyer to see about having separation papers drawn up. I had decided, while watching Joe sleep, that I would (a) let him live and (b) kick him out. But I decided to wait to tell him after the awards show. Maybe on the flight home. I had Googled Jenna McIntyre while he slept and learned that she was a young actress who had had small parts in a couple of television pilots, and a film here and there. Now I just wanted to rest. I stretched out on my side on the sand. My feet were cold and I grabbed a half-buried T-shirt that somebody had tossed on the beach. It was a large ripped yellow shirt with a faded portrait of Jimi Hendrix silk-screened on the front, and I wrapped it around my feet and placed my head back against the sand. The breeze was cool but I could feel the first rays of the morning sun on my face. The skin on my cheeks and forehead grew warm and then, gradually, hot and tight. I heard the sound of the waves slapping the shore. I heard the gentle chatter of a little girl playing on the sand nearby, and the lonely call of a gull. A plane droned overhead. The girl, the gull, the engine of the plane, and the foamy wash of the surf all began a staggered descent with me. I was falling asleep, leaving the waking world for just a little while, and the singsong voice of the little girl and the cry of the gull and the sound of the waves on the beach washed over me.

[
eighteen
]

T
he drone of airplane engines and the whisper of the distant surf were interrupted every few moments by the clear, earnest words spoken by a young man.

“Did you know that you have unlimited capabilities,” he was saying, “and that your dreams and aspirations
can
be realized?”

There was a pause and I heard the clacking of skateboard wheels and the far-off pounding of some kind of drum-dominated world music. Then a girl’s voice said, tentatively, “No?” as if she was afraid of getting the answer wrong.

“It’s true. I’m only maybe one one-hundredth of the way to realizing all my capabilities, but the discoveries I’ve made so far about myself are fucking mind-blowing.”

“Shit!” said the girl. “But what were you saying about a test? Do I have to take the test?”

“It’s not like a test you take in school. It’s a personality test. It’s fun!”

“Oh. So it improves your personality?”

“The test itself won’t improve it. But if you want to improve your personality, taking this test is the first step.”

I sat up and blinked at the gawky, pimpled red-haired man—a boy, really—who stood over the teenaged girl sprawled out on the sand just a few feet away from me.
The girl is an easy mark,
I thought. It didn’t take a Scientologist to see that her life could use a little changing. She was underweight and dirty. She looked like she had been “rode hard and put up wet,” as my father had said once, much to Neil’s and my great amusement, about a floozy in a bar.

“Where do I go?” she asked, and the boy kneeled down next to her and handed her a brochure.

The air smelled beautifully of the sea and of Coppertone, and every few moments the smoke from somebody’s cigarette wafted past me in pungent, languid gusts. I just sat for a moment, blinking at the bright stillness of the sand all around me, and I breathed in the dissipating smoke, sucking it in through my parched nostrils. All that smoking last night had sparked up the old urge. My father is a smoker, so is Joe, and now the smell of tobacco filled me with a nostalgic sense of longing for men I have loved, and for my youth. The sun was high and I knew I shouldn’t still be on the beach, but I sat there for another few minutes. Then I rose to my feet and kicked the soiled T-shirt onto the sand and began walking, sleepy and sluggish, back along the now-crowded beach to the Santa Monica Pier.

I arrived at the hotel almost an hour later, dizzy with hunger, and realized I had forgotten my key card. When I rang the doorbell to the room, I braced myself for Joe’s enraged greeting. It was almost two o’clock and our car was picking us up at three-thirty.
He must be in a complete panic,
I thought, but when the door opened, it wasn’t Joe but his agent, Scott Lendel, who greeted me.

“Hey! Julia!” he said exuberantly, and he pulled me into his arms for a rough hug. “It’s the big day, huh? Where were you, at the pool?”

“Uh, no…Where’s Joe?”

“He’s in the shower, Julia,” said a loud woman’s voice. It was Joe’s publicist, Laney, who was now pushing Scott aside to give me a hug. “Where have you been? Listen, I’m going to do the red carpet with you and Joe, hon. I’ve done the Golden Globes every year for the last ten years and it’ll be a breeze.”

“Okay.”

I looked around the suite and saw that it was crowded with people: Joe’s agent, business manager, publicist, network producer, and various wives and girlfriends. They were all dressed up already, and when I stepped into the room, they seemed to spontaneously form a sort of receiving line.

“Hi, Julia! Justin Fairlawn from NBC. You remember my wife, Helena? Just dropped by to wish you all luck!”

“Julia, so great to see you again. Love the hair! Love it!”

“I know Joe is going to win, Julia!”

“You must be so proud!”

Several room-service tables had been wheeled in, and a buffet of bagels, pastries, and salads had been set up and picked over.

“The groomers just got here,” Laney said. “They were hoping to start on you, but since you weren’t here, they’re going to start on Joe first. Do you need to shower? You should jump in right after Joe.”

I didn’t have too many occasions where I had to interact with Laney, but I recalled now that all of her conversations were like this. More like monologues in which she rambled on and asked multiple questions and had no interest in the answers.

“I need coffee,” I said, and Laney screamed, “Where’s that girl that works for Joe? Kathleen! Julia needs a coffee!”

“Her name’s Catherine,” I said, wincing, as everybody in the room dove for the coffee table at once.

All the stares and smiles made me feel like a self-conscious bride, and I bit my lip and glanced at the closed bedroom door, and then down at the floor.

Laney clasped my wrist. “Uh, Julia, honey, you look a little burned.”

“Yeah, I can feel it on my face,” I said. “I fell asleep on the beach.”

“You went to the beach? Today?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, well, you should have used a little sunscreen. Half of your face is really burned.”

Somebody handed me a cup of watery-looking coffee, and I made my way through the crowd and into the bedroom, where I found Joe seated on the bed with a towel wrapped around his waist. Catherine was using a hand steamer on his tux and he was watching ESPN.

“Hey,” he said, glancing up at me. Then something on the television screen caused him to cry out as if he had been stabbed.

“No! That’s it!” he said. “I’ve had it with the fucking Knicks! Let’s see some fucking defense, guys!”

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Okay, hon. Where were you? Getting your nails done?”

“I went to the beach.”

“No, no, no, NO!” Joe hollered at the television, leaping to his feet and almost losing his towel.

“Joe, do you know that there’s a roomful of people out there?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” I said, and I went in to the bathroom to take my shower.

When I came out, Joe and Catherine had left the room and there was a petite “groomer” named Annette seated on our bed. She wore black jeans and her blond hair was pulled loosely back into a ponytail. “I’m doing your makeup,” she said, standing up, and she studied my face carefully. She pointed to a stool that she had set up next to the window, and when I sat down, she pulled the heavy bedroom drapes open as far as they would go, allowing the midday sun into the dark room.

“Laney warned me about the burn. You’re swelling up already,” she said with a sympathetic pout. “Let’s put something on that….”

Annette applied creams and then a foundation to my face. I closed my eyes and felt the light, upward stroke of her delicate fingers against my tired, sun-ravaged skin, and I breathed deeply, relaxing for the first time since I left the beach.

“I shouldn’t have taken the 10,” she said, and I thought that I had never heard anyone speak with a voice so sweet and whimsical. “The local roads would have been the faster way.” My eyes were shut tight. I heard the clean sound of a lid joining a porcelain jar. I had a sudden memory of my mother’s nightly cold-cream ritual—her long fingers sweeping rapid white circles all over her face as she glanced at herself in the mirror, first from the outer corner of her left eye, then from the right. She smoothed the cream into her forehead and cheeks and down her throat before she plucked a tissue from a box next to the sink and wiped her face clean with quick swiping motions, her lips pursed, her eyes open wide. Sometimes, without taking her eyes off herself in the mirror, she managed to dip one of her fingers into the tub of cool, slippery cream and plop a dollop right onto the tip of my nose to my delighted squeals.

Did it happen once? Every night? Ever?

Once, when I was pregnant with Ruby, I opened a jar of cold cream in a Duane Reade. I had to smell it. I intended to buy it and start using it, but when I found that there was no smell, I slid it back onto the shelf next to the other cold-cream jars. I had thought there would be a fragrance, that I’d remember my mother clearly when I inhaled it, but there was nothing.

When I left Dr. James’s office—was it just a week ago? It felt like years since I had slapped poor Sammy—he had shaken my hand as usual on my way out.

“I wish I could kiss you,” I said, and then I had blushed and bit my lip, because I had really meant to say
hug.
Really. I meant to ask him for a hug.

He loosened his grip on my hand. “That’s probably not a good idea,” he said.

“I know, I know, it’s not you I want. It’s my father…blah, blah, blah.”

“No, it’s because it’s me,” he had said. Then: “Did it ever occur to you that you’ve created this idealized persona and assigned it to me?”

I squinted at him through my puffy eyes.

“And that these traits—honesty, reliability, genuine caring—might be what you’re looking for in a partner and that you might find them someday, either in Joe or in somebody else?”

“I don’t think genuine honesty will ever be one of Joe’s pluses.”

“People change. Act as if you believe he’s capable of changing. He might surprise you.”

Act as if.
Two hundred dollars an hour and that’s what I get.

I opened my eyes. Annette was removing compacts and brushes from a makeup box and I realized that I was starving. I hadn’t eaten all day.

“Can I get up for a minute?” I asked.

“Sure!”

I walked to the door, but when I opened it, I saw all of Joe’s people again. They were still there and Joe was with them now, in his tuxedo trousers and a wife beater, smoking a cigarette and taking a sip of coffee. Somebody had turned some music on, so I couldn’t hear what Joe was saying, but I didn’t need to. I could see by the glimmer in his eye and by his smirk that he was trying to be amusing, and he had a great audience—most of them were on commission and the laughs came easily, the adoration already bought and paid for. I returned to Annette’s stool.

“How do you feel about eyelashes?” she said.

“Hmm,” I said. I supposed that I liked eyelashes.

“I think we should do eyelashes. Definitely,” she said, and I watched her remove a delicate curving wisp of black lashes from a case.

She smiled and slowly lowered her eyelids for me, then opened them. “Close,” she said, and I closed my eyes, just as she had shown me. I felt the lovely tickle of lashes against my eyelid and I thought of butterfly kisses and the tender touch of my children.

“What the hell is all this grit in your hair? Is that…sand?”

My blowsy hairstylist’s name was Lana. Annette was packing up her case and I had just nodded off for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said, stretching my cramped legs out in front of my stool. “I fell asleep on the beach.”

“You went all the way to the beach? This morning?”

I didn’t answer. I just looked at my reflection—at the thick matte complexion, the smoky eyes with the heavy cow lashes, the bronzed cheeks and the glossed lips.

Who?

“It seems like the bonding agent on your extensions kind of melted and then hardened again with sand attached. It’s like your head is covered with…spackle.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oops!” It was like I was drugged. I was almost giddy with exhaustion.

I dozed off once or twice while Lana chiseled away at my hair. At some point I dreamed that I was a Persian princess being attended by beautiful handmaids. Their faces were veiled with brilliantly colored scarves, and all I could see were their dark, almond-shaped eyes, heavily lashed. I lay on my back and they rubbed scented oils into my scalp, and instead of dressing me, they placed delicate silk panels across my body, one on top of the other. The silk swatches formed a paper-thin gown that accented my breasts and youthful, tanned skin and made my lower body look long and lean, but if I moved, the swatches would drift off to the side, revealing a lumpy, shaggy, wrinkled body underneath. I asked my handmaids to help me sew the panels together, but they couldn’t understand me. They just continued laying the silk panels across my skin.

The phone rang. Lana answered it and said, “Just a minute, sweetie!” Then she handed me the phone. “It’s a little one!”

“Sammy?” I said, my voice hoarse. I had to hold the phone away from my just hair-sprayed coif.

“Hi, Mommy!” he said, and I could see his sparkly face.

“Hi, baby,” I said.

“Come home, Mommy,” Sammy said.

“I will, baby. Tomorrow.”

“Is Daddy coming home tomorrow?” he asked.

“No,” I said. Almost cheerfully. “I love you, baby! Now can I speak with Ruby?”

I could hear Sammy drop the phone, and then, after a lot of calling back and forth between the two kids, I heard Ruby pick up.

“Hi, Rubes!”

“Hi, Mommy!” She missed me. She only called me Mommy when she really needed me.

“What’re you up to?”

“We’re watching the pre-preshow. I can’t wait to see you and Daddy.”

“I’ll tell Daddy to say hello to you when he’s on camera.”

“No! Mom! Do
not
!”

“Okay.” I laughed. “Let me speak with Catalina.”

“I miss you, Mommy.”