And Again (36 page)

“You think this is the sort of movie to break back into the business with? It all sounds a little overdone.”

“I think this movie will show that you’re willing to take risks,” Jay replies. “Get your face in the theaters. Maybe some international exposure. I think you try to relaunch your career any other way, and you’re just wasting your time.”

“Makes sense to me,” Harry says.

Jay glances at my plate, which is nearly untouched. “You don’t like the fish?”

“I’m picky,” I reply. A sly smile spreads across his face. His teeth are peroxide-white, so white my own teeth begin to ache just looking at them.

“Of course you are,” he replies.

We end up in his hotel room. Of course, we end up in his hotel room. This is how these things work. This is how I remember it. Harry left us at the restaurant, claiming he had some emergency appointment with another one of his actresses, the way he always played us against each other, keeping us on edge, constantly currying for his favor. I’m too old to play those games now. But then Jay has a town car waiting downstairs, and I’m pretty sure my mother had a rule against refusing rides from powerful men when they’re offered. So we end up in his hotel room.

I remember this. I’m pretty sure I’ve slept with Jay already for a part, back in the day, back when his name had something to do with rotting flesh. It’s kind of hard to keep track. He pours us each a drink.

“I can’t believe you go out in public wearing that,” he says, handing me a crystal glass. The hotel room is expensive, with towering views of the city around us. He really has arrived, our little John.

I glance down at myself. I’m covered from knees to shoulders, but I know what he means, though I pretend I don’t. “Wearing what?”

“Anything but a burka,” he replies, downing his drink. “It should be illegal. You could cause car accidents. Plane crashes. Mass hysteria.”

“You always did have a talent for exaggeration,” I reply, touching my lips to the glass, leaving a bloody mark on the crystal rim. This is going to be a lot more difficult without the benefit of inebriation.

“Stay here in L.A.,” he says. “What are you doing, hiding out in Chicago?”

“I like it,” I reply. “There’s no artifice there. Chicago suits me.”

“Chicago is small potatoes. Christ, you might as well be living in Shitsburg, for all the exposure you’ll get there.”

“Not if you have anything to do with it,” I say, and he smiles, stepping closer to me.

“You know, there were a lot of rumors about why you dropped off the planet for a while.”

“What sort of rumors?” I ask, playing coy, though I know where this conversation is heading. It is, I suspect, the same reason Harry has backed off so easily at my rebuffs for the past few months. No one is sure what my status is anymore.

“Some of the girls from the
Pines
said you were sick.”

I look him square in the eye, because there can be no question of this, not if I ever want my career back. “Do I look sick to you?” I ask, and smile with each and every one of my teeth.

Apparently it’s all the answer he needs, because he leans in then, his mouth closing over mine. He tastes sour. I set the glass down on the side table, leaning into him as he loops a hand around my waist. I can feel the damp heat of his palm through my blouse, and I imagine oily handprints on my clothes.

I think of how I was back then, that little girl, wide-eyed and straight off the plane in Los Angeles, shedding her trailer park clothes for men who promised her fame and fortune, her face up on billboards above Hollywood Boulevard, every camera turned in her direction. How easy it had been, in that body, the one that already felt tarnished at nineteen. The one that didn’t feel quite like it belonged to me. It was easy to loan it out, to give it away. This
body, however, has not yet become a mere tool for someone else’s satisfaction. I have not yet wrought a value from it, weighed and measured its worth in trade. I have not yet put it to work.

I have no desire for Jay, in his expensive suit, with his slicked-back hair and fake tan. I can’t even rummage around inside myself and find a shadow of interest, something to pull me through to the other side, the shape of his hands or the scrape of his stubble or any of the other things that would set me shivering, were Jay another man. But no. I’ve learned long ago that the most difficult battle is trying to make yourself want something. It’s easy to learn to love, or to hate, or envy, or even forgive. You can teach those things, you can learn them. But desire is that most elusive of birds, perched in the high branches of the tallest tree, ready to take flight with the smallest provocation. There is no snaring it, no coaxing it down. And I’m no longer sure if I can make love to a man without it.

Jay tries to hold on to me as I twist away, as if one moment more will shred my resolve and have me tumbling into him.

“What?” Jay says, his eyes still heavy-lidded and unfocused.

“I’m going to go.” I remove his hands from my waist. And then, because I have nothing to lose, “I guess you can contact Harry about sending that script.” He smiles, and I know that the dream of that indie film has evaporated as well.

“I’ll send him the script if you stay.”

It’s my turn to smile now, and I’m not sure if it completely hides my disdain for him. “My price is much higher than that, Jack.”

“All right,” he says, “I’ll give you the part if you stay. I’ll give you whatever you want.” He steps toward me, brushes the backs of his fingers down the column of my throat. And just like that, it appears. That little seed of wanting. It is the wanting of anonymous sex in public bathrooms, of faceless bodies on a dance floor, of disembodied voices on the other end of a telephone. It is a human wanting, so human it is too shameful to be acknowledged. A desire that can only exist alongside revulsion.

He screws me up against the wall. Facing the wall, my cheek
pressed against the beige hotel paint. It hurts just a bit more than I imagine it would if I’d already taken this body out for a spin. All of the blood drops from my head when he comes, and my knees go weak. I don’t fall, he has me pinned, but he slips an arm around my waist and it reminds me of how my mother would hold me when I was a child, getting sick over the rim of the toilet. How I hate that arm, hate needing it to steady me.

The whole messy affair is so much like what I remember of sex. I thought it might be different in a different body, in this more perfect body. But there is that same sense of relief when he finishes, a curtain falling on a great performance. Though I don’t care about this man, don’t care about what he has to offer me, I care that I have been perfect for him. It is the greatest bit of sadness for me, the realization that still, even now, no one cares less about my own pleasure than me. I only care about how I appear to him, ever-beautiful, ever-willing. The stuff of fantasy. I wonder, as he holds me there, if I am real at all.

The Daley Center is all lit up in golden light, a shining meteor of chrome and glass in the hazy Chicago darkness. The space is crowded, and I catch Penny’s eye from across the room, winking, a silent sign of solidarity borrowed from years of going to loud, crowded bars together. Nights when pushy men would con us into dancing, when a wink across the room would signal the need for an escape route. Or other nights, like the night I met Sam, when a wink meant that I’d find my own way home. Tonight, she smiles at me, knowing that my signal means she’s done well, that I’m here, and that she’ll be all right. It was the same wink she gave me when I turned, glancing back at Sam and Penny and Connor before I was wheeled into the operating room.

Her work is phenomenal. It hangs, suspended on wires from the ceiling, huge, wall-sized collages of gauzy paper, sheets layered by the hundreds until they have form and depth and shape. Like terrain, or long expanses of skin. Painted pale watercolor shades and cracked through with light and shadow. I stand in front of one that is all sun-bleached peaches and creamy grays, the one that’s called
And Again,
a battleground of long tears and smooth, polished expanses of color. It feels alive, as I stand in front of it. It looks as if it could breathe.

Penny breaks away from the couple she was talking to as I move toward her. “So what do you think?”

“It’s pretty decent, actually,” I say, pulling her close. She’s her usual jangle of bracelets and earrings and necklaces, all sterling silver and shining against the black silk of her dress.

“Connor is somewhere around here. Jesus, I’ve already lost track of my own boyfriend. I’m already a prima donna in the making.”

“Those are some lovely paintings.”

“Want to know which is you?” Penny asks, and I choke a little on my drink.

“Me?”

“Of course. They’re all people. Connor is right over there.” She motions with her wine glass at a canvas that is all shades of turquoise and sand. The longer I look, the more I can see the calm and subtle quirk that could easily be Connor.

As I look around at the rest I can see it now, the cadmium red and burnt umber of her grandmother in her hot little kitchen, flecked with a blue so clear it could only be the scent of salt water coming in gusts through the windows. Her parents are side by side, the violet and silver of her mother next to the sea green of her father’s eyes, the smooth exactness of his temperament. I look back at the one that drew me in initially, the one that seemed sad and beautiful and alive. And I understand why she titled it
And Again,
because it is not me as I was before. It is now, it is my living, breathing present. And somehow, in a way I don’t wholly understand, I can see myself in it. A clearer vision than any mirror has yet been able to provide me. And I think, if nothing else, this will sustain me. This will draw me forward, at least for a little while.

“Thank you,” I say, and I know Penny sees it in my face, that I understand.

“I started it the day you told me you were sick. The bottom layers are black. I would just coat whole sheets in India ink. I burned some of it, until it was tarry and charred and just desolate. You can’t see it anymore, there’s too much covering it now. Even where I cut into it, I couldn’t go down that far.” Penny looks so sad as she speaks that I nearly have to glance away. I wonder about the sum total of pain I’ve caused the people I love. I wonder if it hangs over my head, a butcher’s bill, waiting to be called up. Or perhaps I’m already paying my price.

“It’s a shame I had to stop,” Penny continues. “Imagine if I’d been able to work on it for another year. Imagine where you’d be then.”

Sam stands in front of my painting. The sight of him makes me seize up, sends a jitter of nervous energy through me. I thought he might be here. I’ve spent most of the night trying not to look for him. But I approach him, end up standing next to him, because I’m nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

“See, I recognized you this time too,” he says, motioning up at the canvas, before he even looks at me.

“You got it out of Penny.”

He shakes his head. “I’d know you anywhere. In all your forms,” he says, meaning it to be a joke, but there’s a stab of poignancy to it as well. “I like your tattoo.”

I glance at the lacy phoenix threading its way up my arm. It’s the deep black of a new tattoo, not yet muted by time and sunlight. It’s like me, in a way. All of our wear is yet to come.

“No you don’t,” I say. “You don’t like tattoos, remember?”

“I liked yours.” He must see my skepticism, because he continues. “You never understood, I liked what it meant, that you had them. That I could walk into the office’s Christmas party with you on my arm, and everyone could see that I wasn’t like them. Because I was with you, and you didn’t play by their rules. I loved that about you.”

“I thought that was what you loved least about me,” I say. It’s hard not to be wistful in front of something so beautiful. “You know, I was thinking the other day about my first drink.” I take a sip of my current drink, which is ginger ale with a splash of gin.

“Which one?” he asks.

“The first one,” I reply. He turns toward me, his eyes on mine.

“You mean the time I gave a twelve-year-old a shot of Jack Daniels in her backyard?” he asks. “I thought we’d agreed never to speak of that again.”

I grin then. “I didn’t agree to anything. I forgot about it. I assumed you had too.”

“I didn’t forget,” Sam says. “I wouldn’t. That night was the first time I really saw you. Not just as Lucy’s sister.”

“What did you see?” I ask, thinking of myself now. What am I but a being made from memory, my flesh and blood a copy of the body that came before it, my mind a knot of history that cannot be untangled, cannot be relived? There is nothing for me to do but move forward and hope that whatever bits of me that housed my soul have been re-created here.

“I saw what I always see.” He doesn’t say more, he doesn’t explain. He doesn’t have to.

“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget every single thing about you. Nothing else worked. Everything else hurt too much.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. I reach forward, brushing my thumb over the crease between his eyebrows, the price of loving me. No matter how badly Sam has always tried to do the right thing, it was always his weaknesses, his failings, that I loved the most. It seems terribly unfair now, that I can’t forgive them as well. I let my hand drop.