Postcards From the Edge (22 page)

particularly close to her, and ventured forth into the huge house. There was no one in the little waiting room, so she went into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. The walls were all soft rose-colored cloth, and the sink was rose marble. Suzanne put the toilet seat down and began some real party breathing.

She heard someone enter the tiny room just outside. Two voices. Two women. They seemed to be reviewing the evening. “Did you see Selena Warner?” one of them said. “She looks ancient.”

“And what about that burp of a husband she’s got,” said the other.

“Well, you know what they say,” said the first voice. “TV stars can’t be choosers.”

Suzanne was not breathing as comfortably now. Their voices suddenly became more muffled. Why couldn’t she hear them? She put her ear against the door.

“I feel sorry for her,” one was saying. Who? thought Suzanne. Me?

“She hasn’t worked in a while, and she lives alone,” said the other.

It is me! she thought. Oh my God, they’re talking about me. How will I ever get out of here?

“Why can’t she get work? She’s a pretty good actress, and she certainly has connections.”

Suzanne was humiliated. I can never leave this powder room, she thought. She was breathing like a sick baby. “Haven’t you heard?” said one of the voices. “She’s put on a lot of weight.”

Everyone knows! Everyone’s talking about me! “Really?” said the other.

“Oh, yes, about thirty or forty pounds.” “Really?” said the other.

Oh, thought Suzanne. Who? Thirty or forty. Oh.

She was devastated now. It hardly mattered that they hadn’t

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been talking about her. The way she felt now, they might as well have been. She had to get home, that much was clear. She flushed the toilet and walked out into the little room. The voices belonged to two attractive women in their forties, neither of whom Suzanne knew. She smiled and nodded at them as she passed, trying to look hopeful and thrilled.

She considered leaving without saying good night, but ruled that out when she considered how it would look. She went back into the dining room, where Wallis was presenting Brian to yet another table. Many of the guests were moving to the living room with their coffee and after-dinner drinks. Suzanne waited on the edge of the party, on the outskirts of the in crowd. When Brian began his story again, she caught her hostess’s eye.

Wallis came over. “I just can’t get over Brian’s story,” she said. “Imagine interrupting a conversation with royalty.”

“I was on acid when I met Princess Margaret,” said Suzanne. “Listen, Wallis, I gotta go. It was great. Great cake.”

“So soon?” Wallis pouted. “Phil Esterbrook might play one of his songs. Are you sure you can’t stay?”

“No, really,” said Suzanne, letting Wallis kiss her as she moved toward the door. “I’m retaining water for a couple of people, and I’ve got to return it by midnight.”

When she put her nightgown on and went to bed, she didn’t know that she intended to stay there. By Sunday afternoon, though, she was fairly dug in, with empty soft drink cans piling up on her night table and the slow burn of television branding her cowlike brown eyes.

“Hemingway needed his rest,” her mother assured her over the phone. “So did Paul Muni. Alfred Lunt would just retreat to his garden and let his wife answer the phone.”

It always relaxed Suzanne to hear her mother compare her favorably to someone like Paul Muni or Alfred Lunt. She settled down under her covers. “You’re just like me, Suzanne,” her mother said. “You just get overwhelmed sometimes. I don’t

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think you should feel bad about going to bed for a few days. You’re a sensitive, questioning personality.”

Suzanne wondered when she had begun to be more of a personality than a person. When her shrink had pointed it out to her, she’d felt as though she’d actually known it for a long time. When she was twenty-one she had written in her journal, “I narrate a life I’m reluctant to live.” Soothed by her mother’s voice, she found herself recalling the maternal voice of her therapist at her last session.

“I think that basically you are a very frightened, shy person,” Norma had said, her eyebrows slightly raised with the effort of insight. “You seem very open about yourself, but it’s really just part of your need to control. You want people to know that you’re well aware of the truth about yourself. It’s like a fat girl walking into a room and announcing that she’s fat.”

Suzanne had sat there glowing with a deep, happy blush. “That’s wonderful,” she exclaimed, gazing at Norma in admiration.

“You’re just excited because now you have another truth to entertain people with,” Norma had said. “Part of your little honesty show, which exists to make people think you’re not trying to stay as far away from them as you actually are.”

Suzanne had been thrilled. She’d been caught. Even as she had been hearing these new truths, she was storing them where she stored all the pertinent information she used when describing herself to new people, or when describing herself to old people in a new way. Describing herself was Suzanne’s way of being herself. It was as close as she got, and it was way off the mark. She had shaken her head with wonder and asked, “So, now what do I do?”

“Nothing,” Norma had said, as though this should have been obvious. “What could you do? This is simply how you operate.” “So this is it? I’m sentenced to a life of lifelike behavior?” “We obviously have a lot of work to do,” Norma had said. “You will, of course, always be like this to some degree. You

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have fashioned yourself a personality of highly intricate design. It would be almost impossible to dismantle, and that is not our purpose. I just want you to feel something, in between all this talking and thinking that you do. I want you to lead a life instead of following one around.”

Now, in bed, Suzanne heard her mother mention Jane Powell. “… and Shirley MacLaine took several years off,” her mother said. “Listen, dear, do you want me to send Mary up to fix you something? She has nothing to do when I’m out of town. She’s just sitting in my house watching TV and eating Fritos. She could come to your house and fix you a bacon sandwich, or chicken crepes. It always makes me feel better when I’ve eaten something…”

It was decided that Mary would come up and fix her a meal and straighten up her house. Suzanne hung up, sighed, and rolled over in bed to face the TV Someone exploded. She searched her bedding for the remote control clicker, found it under several pillows, and scanned the stations for solace.

When Mary arrived she removed all the empty cans from the bedroom. Suzanne loved Mary, who had taken care of her since she was six. “What was I like when I was little, Mare?”

“You were a good li‘1 child,” said Mary, straightening the pillows behind Suzanne’s head. “You were always a good li‘1 girl. Now, what can I fix you for lunch?”

Suzanne asked for a bacon sandwich and German chocolate cake. Mary went off to the kitchen, and Suzanne rolled over on her side. She wondered how long she was going to stay in bed. She wondered if she would awaken one morning-maybe tomorrow morning-and feel like bounding back into her life, refreshed and unafraid. Just now, though, she felt stale and paralyzed.

She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling

through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned. She had plenty of evidence that she had a good life. She just couldn’t feel the life she saw she had. It was as though she had cancer of the perspective.

She was having trouble sleeping again, lying still with her thoughts tossing and turning. As far back as she could remember, she had had trouble sleeping. As a child she would wait out her naptime like a prison sentence. She would lie in bed and stare at the wallpaper pattern and wonder what would happen if there were no heaven. She thought the universe would probably go on and on, spilling all over everything. Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged.

Suzanne lay in bed staring at the television, waiting for her bacon sandwich, thinking about infinity.

By Wednesday, she felt kind of dingy. She accidentally caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and thought there was a giant shell on her neck. “Is that anorexia?” she wondered. “Is it anorexia when you look in the mirror and your head looks like the top of a squid without all the arms?”

She felt bloated. She’d been going to the gym for a while, and had really started noticing a difference in her body, but now she was getting soft and shapeless again. “Caspar the squid,” she said aloud.

Suzanne identified herself in her voice. She was as close as she ever got to being whoever she was when she was talking. She existed through sound. It startled her to see her reflection, because she didn’t identify with her appearance. She wasn’t what she looked like, she was what she sounded like. That was why she always got confused in the closet. What should she wear? It was hard to dress a voice.

She walked into her closet, Pandora’s Closet, bursting with options, and experienced the automatic reaction: “I have noth

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ing to wear.” That wasn’t it, though. Obviously, she had plenty of clothes, but they were the wrong kind of clothes. They were clothes she had already bought. Suzanne only liked clothes she was about to buy. She knew someday she would find the exact right outfit that would make her life work. Maybe not her whole life, she thought, as she got back in bed, but at least the parts she had to dress for.

Around noon, her friend Lucy called from New York, where she’d gone two weeks earlier to be with the married guy she’d gotten involved with. Lucy liked affairs with married men because, as she’d explained to Suzanne many times, “You don’t have to have entire relationships with them.”

“I met him on that TV movie I did,” Lucy said. “Blood on the Snow, that ski resort murder thing. He played the murderer and he stalked me, and it was very romantic. I mean, he played a good murderer. He didn’t play a regular murderer, he played it like a charming guy. And we were on location in Idaho, and being on location is kind of a permission zone, anyway.”

“You’re a star fucker,” Suzanne said matter-of-factly.

“I like celebrities, I’ve got to admit it,” Lucy said, “but I’m not a star fucker. I’m a talent fucker, and this guy is very talented. Well, actually he’s limited, but the area he’s limited in is more interesting than most people’s entire range.”

“Scott Hastings,” Suzanne said. “He made that name up, didn’t he?”

“No,” said Lucy. “Actually, his first name is Bob. Robert Scott Hastings.”

“Bob Hastings,” said Suzanne, “Colonel Bob Hastings. No wonder he changed it. So, is his wife there?”

“Holster Hips?” said Lucy. “Yeah, they rented a house in Connecticut, but he’s in the city a lot rehearsing for his play.” “Another married guy,” Suzanne sighed. “I have to say, I never did like that last one.”

“Earl?” said Lucy, with some surprise. “Really? You didn’t like him? I thought you liked him.”

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“Well, I told you I liked him,” said Suzanne. “I had to tell you I liked him, because you liked him so much. In fact, you liked him enough for both of us. What happened with him again?”

“He started to get sort of removed,” Lucy said. “I mean, more removed than I like. I need a guy to be a little unreliable so I can stay interested. I don’t know any women who don’t feel that way, but then maybe if I didn’t feel that way, I would know other kinds of women. Anyway, he got so removed he started having an affair with Isabel Hasbar.”

“The English actress?” asked Suzanne. “Reginald Fleemer Hasbar’s sister?”

“Yes, that Isabel Hasbar,” said Lucy. “It was painful, but it was painful in an interesting way. It felt like it was a necessary part of the process, and … Wait, I’ve got another call … It’s him, I’ve gotta go.”

“Say hello to the Colonel for me,” Suzanne said, but Lucy had already hung up. She switched the channel and saw a girl and a boy having sex. The girl opened her eyes and looked over the boy’s shoulder just in time to see a man plunge a stake through the two of them.

Suzanne looked away, scanning the horizon of her room. Her house had been driving her crazy lately. Whenever she wasn’t in a relationship, her house drove her crazy. First, her curtains didn’t shut out enough morning light, so she usually ended up putting pillows over her head. But then, she also thought that she had too many pillows, and that they weren’t soft enough. One of the paintings over her bed had a tear in its canvas.

Also, there were two orange soda stains on the white carpet, next to her bed. The cover on her smoke alarm had broken off. There were too many exposed electrical cords she was helpless to conceal, and a large basket of cassettes whose plastic cases had been lost sat beside her stereo. There were just too many things. Things growing over the surfaces of her home like a happy cancer.

She turned back to the television screen, searching it as if

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looking for a sign. A sign of life. Two men were fighting, and one of them went through a plate glass window, and she found herself staring at the bloodied face of Graham Davies, her first in a series of three actor boyfriends. Graham had been the nicest of the three-in fact, he had been her only nice boyfriend, because Suzanne was one of those unfortunate women who did not find nice men interesting. She’d learned her lesson after him. She found undesirables desirable. She sought out unpleasant boyfriends, then complained about them as though the government had allocated them to her. Still, at least she felt like she was taking part in something, even if it was a nightmare.

She changed the channel. Two women in riding clothes were talking on a hill. Suzanne knew one of them. She had done cocaine with her at a David Bowie concert in London. The girl had been wearing a very see-through dress, and she had also been present the night Suzanne started her affair with her second actor. TV was filled with memories for her, a liquid scrapbook. Maybe if she watched long enough, she thought, her whole life would flash slowly in front of her eyes. Now the girl she knew was playing with herself on a bus.