Modern Lovers (26 page)

A
ndrew was in the kitchen, and Elizabeth was in the living room. It was the middle of the day, and he was expecting to hear from Dave about some details on the Waves. The architect had sent his drawings to the city, and they were waiting on approval, but in the meantime Andrew was having his lawyers draw up some documents. Dave had been hesitant—he said he was a handshake guy—but Andrew wanted everything to be aboveboard. Dave had said he'd call or text as soon as he heard anything, and Andrew was lolling around in front of the open fridge like a teenager, neither hungry nor thirsty, just looking for something to do.

When the doorbell rang, both he and Elizabeth stayed put and stared at each other. “You're closer,” Andrew said.

“I have a cat on me,” Elizabeth said back, her face hidden behind a magazine. Iggy was curled up on her stomach. This was their trump card, always, and he respected it.

“Fine,” Andrew said. He wandered over to the door and pulled it open, expecting to see one of the neighbors, maybe, not Zoe or Jane or Ruby, but one of the well-meaning half strangers, the ones who always wanted to tell you which day was alternate-side-of-the-street parking, even though their car was parked in the driveway. It could also be the UPS guy, or FedEx, but it was too early in the day—they
were late on the route. There was always an outside chance it would be a fleet of Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons of New York City.

Instead of any of these, when Andrew opened the door, he saw Lydia.

It was her face exactly—the face he remembered most precisely. Not the bleached-out punker she became, not the fashion model she tried to be, not the junkie. It was Lydia Greenbaum in all her frizzed-out glory, angry at what she'd been given and hungry for everything else. Andrew's eyelids fluttered, and his knees softened. On the way down, he thought he saw her smile, her teeth as white as a shark's.

•   •   •

W
hen he opened his eyes again, Andrew was on the couch, lying in the spot where Elizabeth and Iggy had been so smugly undisturbable. Elizabeth's face was inches from his own, her mouth hot and open.

“Oh, my God, Andrew, are you okay?” she was whispering, and looking around, as if for ghosts. Andrew wished he could ask which ghosts were present. Had he hallucinated? It hadn't felt like a vision. He should ask Dave what one of those felt like, if it was different from a regular dream.

“Wow,” Andrew said. “I fainted? I don't know. Um, I'm not really sure what happened.”

Elizabeth smiled. “I am.” She leaned over and helped him sit up. “Andrew, this is Darcey. Dead ringer, huh?”

His head was sloshy and heavy, a bucket filled with wet leaves. He blinked a few times before turning in the direction Elizabeth was looking. When he did, he was sorry he had. He should have sewn his eyelids shut and stayed down, like an animal playing dead.

She didn't just resemble Lydia, this girl. Andrew got the whole thing immediately; it wasn't complicated. Someone in Los Angeles
had found a girl who looked so much like Lydia that the money just flew into their hands—this was how careers were made, luck and bone structure. But what those people didn't know, what they
couldn't
know, because they hadn't known Lydia, was that this not-Lydia girl possessed the quality that was the closest to Lydia's heart—black, black, black ambition, the darkest little lump of coal right where her actual heart should have been. That was what Andrew saw when he opened the door—Pandora, just before she opened the box. Not-Lydia knew what she was going to do to him, and she was excited about it. Andrew felt sick—the movie was going to give Lydia her due after all.

“Hey,” said not-Lydia. “Nice to meet you.”

Another woman appeared behind her, holding a glass of water. “Oh,” she said. “You're awake. I was going to splash this on your face. I've always wanted to do that, haven't you?”

Andrew looked to Elizabeth.

“That's Naomi, the producer,” she said.

“Well, glad I woke up, then,” Andrew said. “Should I get my lawyer on the phone?”

Naomi walked around to the couch and sat down next to Andrew. “I was really hoping that wouldn't be necessary.” She snapped her fingers at not-Lydia, who nodded and reached down into a large bag sitting by her feet.

“There better not be a stack of cash in there,” Andrew said.

“Right, because no one wants that,” Naomi said, rolling her eyes. Not-Lydia passed her a sheaf of papers. Elizabeth leaned forward to try to see what it was, but Andrew took the stack of pages and hunched over, as if he were a tightwad fifth-grader protecting his spelling test.

It was Lydia's handwriting. Pages and pages of it—small and neat and slanted to the right, her blocky letters. Andrew saw his name over and over again.
And when Andrew kissed me, I knew his mind was somewhere else, in the library even, or with stupid, boring
Elizabeth. . . . Andrew came over again tonight, told me he thought girl drummers were sexy, and I slapped him, and he laughed, and then we fucked on the kitchen floor. . . .

“Who has seen these?” Andrew felt his face turn pink.

“What are they? Let me see!” Elizabeth reached for the pages, and Andrew tucked them under his legs. He looked at Naomi.

“What are you trying to do here, exactly?” he asked.

“Listen, Andrew,” Naomi said, clasping her hands together. “I know you've been reluctant to get on board, and I just wanted to come down and try to answer some of your questions in person. Can we speak freely?” She pointed to Elizabeth.

“Let's go outside,” Andrew said, standing up slowly.

“Are you kidding me?” Elizabeth said. “You watched me push a baby out of my vagina, and I can't listen to your conversation with
Naomi
?”

“I wasn't privy to your previous conversations, so this seems fair,” Andrew said. “Let's go.”

Naomi shrugged. “Hang tight, Darcey.” Darcey shrugged back—Andrew found looking at her so unnerving that he quickly turned back to Naomi, who mouthed,
Sorry,
to Elizabeth and then flashed a megawatt grin. Andrew opened the door and held it while Naomi walked through, then let it slam behind him.

“Ditmas Park is so cozy,” she said. “It's like the suburbs, but without leaving behind any of the grime!” She ran a finger along the porch railing and then lifted it in the air. “So authentic.”

“So, what is this?” Andrew waved the pages by his head. He was trying to breathe deeply, from his belly button, through his scapula, to his third-eye point.

“That is a very small sampling of pages from Lydia's diary.” Naomi opened her eyes wide. “She was very detailed.”

“Yes, I can see that. My question is what you're doing here, in my house, with these pages.” He clenched his jaw.

“And I'd like to hear your reservations about seeing her story on film. We're not going to make her into Saint Lydia, if that's it. Did you see
Ray
?
Walk the Line
? Those were films about complicated people. That's what we're doing. It's going to be
Ray
meets
Sid and Nancy
minus the Sid, meets
Coal Miner's Daughter
, only the coal miner is an orthopedic surgeon from Scarsdale.”

Andrew chuckled, despite himself.

“Listen, she loved you, and you didn't love her, I get it. And then she becomes this superstar. And then she dies. That's a weird situation. And now someone is going to put it all on-screen, and you feel like an asshole.”

“That's really not the problem.” Andrew crossed his arms. There were too many problems to name just one of them. Visions of Harry watching a movie where his father slept with a dead celebrity danced in his head. Ads for
Mistress of Myself
would be on the radio and the television, with movie posters plastered all over the sides of buses. He didn't want to see Lydia's face, even if it was not-Lydia Lydia. Who would call and ask what he's done in the last twenty years?
Entertainment Tonight
? He didn't want to feel old. He didn't want to feel like a sideman in someone else's life story. He didn't want his wife to hate him. He didn't want his wife to leave him. He didn't want his wife to think that she'd fallen into a marriage by accident, by trickery. He didn't want to feel like a failure. He didn't want to feel like a rich kid who'd never had to work for anything. He didn't want to feel like he was selling out. He didn't want to feel like Elizabeth was selling out on Lydia's behalf. He didn't want to feel like he'd chosen the wrong life, chosen the wrong partner. He didn't want to sit in a dark room and watch himself make mistakes. He didn't want any of it. “Or maybe it is, I don't know.”

“Andrew, you've got a few choices here. You can dig in your heels, and make us prove that your wife signed your name, and make a lot of things difficult for a lot of people. Or you can just sign the form,
and give your consent. I know the term ‘life rights' sounds like agreeing to euthanasia, and trust me, we have our people working on that, too, the phrasing of it, but let me be clear: You are not giving us your whole life. You are giving permission for there to be a character in a movie who has some things in common with you. That's it. He won't have your face. He might not even have your name.”

Andrew had the brief worry that all his work at EVOLVEment was making his insides visible on the outside of his body, a giant flashing neon sign.

“So those are my options? Fight or roll over?” It was a hot day, and his upper lip was slick with sweat.

“We have very, very good lawyers. I know you have tons of money, and so you probably have a good lawyer, too, but ours are pretty much rock stars.”

Andrew twitched.

“Bad choice of words. They're the best, is what I'm saying. I'm sure that we can all come to an agreement. You just need to accept that it's going to happen. It's a movie. It'll come out, and then it'll go away. That's how it goes.”

“So you came here to tell me that I have no choice.”

Naomi rolled her neck around, producing spectacular cracking noises. “Well, kind of. I mean, you have choices, but it's sort of like when you go to the dentist. You can choose to bite them, and to grit your teeth, but that's just going to make it take longer. I'm just here to tell you to open up and say ahhhh. You might even enjoy it.”

“The dentist?”

“The movie. In my experience, people often enjoy seeing versions of their lives on-screen. It doesn't happen to everyone, you know.”

All of a sudden, Andrew heard “Mistress of Myself” begin to play, a tinny, canned version.

“Oh, that's my phone,” Naomi said, and reached into her back pocket.

“You're kidding,” Andrew said.

“Hang on,” Naomi said, answering and then skipping down the porch steps to the sidewalk. In Andrew's head the song kept playing, a shitty karaoke version of his life. He closed his eyes and imagined an ocean wave crashing over him and pulling him out to sea.

D
arcey was smiling politely, but Elizabeth could tell that she was doing something else—research, maybe. She was wearing a black tank top and cutoff shorts. She was thinner than Lydia had been at Oberlin, but that was the magic of the movies, the removal of cellulite and blemishes. Elizabeth leaned back and looked out the window. She missed actual Lydia's sturdiness, the prickly hair on her legs.

“What was that?” Naomi was facing the street, and Elizabeth couldn't see her face. Andrew looked pissed off, but then he laughed. She wasn't sure.

“Oh,” Darcey said. She reached back into the bag at her feet. “Copies of this.” She pulled out a marbled notebook and handed it to Elizabeth. “You should really meet my friend Georgia, the one who plays you. You really look like you could be her mom—it's, like, perfect. She's so uptight, and I'm always the one who's, like, let's go run around naked! It's hilarious.” Darcey wiggled back and forth. “Hilarious.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She opened the notebook gently. Lydia's handwriting was distinctive—the product of a carefully crafted personality. That was probably under “traits of narcissists” in the
DSM
. “I feel guilty, but I probably shouldn't, right?”

Darcey nodded. “That's just what Georgia would say. As you, I mean. Classic victim stuff.”

“Excuse me?” Elizabeth said, but then she began to read, and she understood.

She'd never been a jealous girlfriend. That was for other people, insecure people. Elizabeth had always felt as solid as a tree trunk. When she was heavily pregnant with Harry, at her last ob-gyn visit, her doctor had pronounced the baby enormous, but then when Elizabeth had slid ungracefully off the paper-lined table, he had looked at her hips and said, Oh, you'll be fine. She hadn't been wounded. Zoe would have cried. Lydia would have burned the place to the ground. But Elizabeth had thought,
Yes, I will.
She wasn't a saint, of course—Elizabeth had always been jealous of Zoe, and other girls too, high-school friends, or other young mothers she'd had tea dates with when Harry was small. But she'd never been a jealous girlfriend. It was a psychological math problem: Twenty years later, was she angry? She thought about the restaurant, about Lydia's snuggling against Andrew's chest, the way Lydia had always looked at her with crocodile eyes. Yes, she was angry.

“Excuse me,” Elizabeth said. She stood up and straightened out her skirt. Darcey pulled out her phone and started texting, probably writing to Georgia to describe whatever she felt had just occurred. Elizabeth herself wasn't sure. She walked slowly to the door and opened it. Andrew was sitting on the porch with his eyes closed. Naomi was halfway down the block, laughing loudly into her cell phone.

“Andrew?” Elizabeth said.

He opened his eyes and looked at the notebook in her hand. “Fuck,” he said.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “That seems to be the problem.”

“What did you read?” Andrew shoved his fingers into his mouth and began to chew.

“Does it really matter? She's not making it up, right? You were sleeping together?” Elizabeth heard her own voice getting louder at a somewhat alarming rate, like a fire-engine siren. The neighbors would
hear. She couldn't help it. In her whole childhood, she had never heard her parents speak loudly to each other, and during Harry's entire childhood, she had only yelled when he was about to jump off something he shouldn't, or lick an electrical outlet. She didn't shout. And yet her voice was getting so loud that her ears began to ring.

“It only happened a few times. Half a dozen, maybe. Lizzy, it was a lifetime ago.” Andrew started to walk toward her, but Elizabeth put her palms up, a traffic light. A few aggressive bees circled Andrew's head, and he swatted them away. Elizabeth wished they would all sting him simultaneously.

“You were never going to tell me, obviously.” Elizabeth kept her hands out.

Andrew shook his head. “I didn't think it mattered. I mean, at the time. We weren't even married yet. Doesn't that make a difference?”

“Oh, yes, I think it does. I think it does make a difference that I married you without knowing that you'd been cheating on me. Don't you think that might have affected my decision to do so? I'm not saying I expected you to be a virgin, but come on, Andrew.” Elizabeth heard something inside and turned toward the window—Darcey was leaning against the window, her ear to the glass. She waved. “Jesus!” Elizabeth said. “She's everywhere!”

“I was going to tell you.” Andrew crossed his arms over his chest.

“You just said that you weren't!” Elizabeth's voice went up several octaves—if she'd known that her voice could do that, Kitty's Mustache would have been a better band. Across the street one of their nosiest neighbors, a tall woman with a German shepherd, turned to look and gave a half wave.
Good luck ever selling
her
house,
Elizabeth thought.

“Back then I wasn't. But with the movie and all this.” He gestured toward Darcey, still a little goblin in the window. “I was pretty sure I would have to. Can't say I was looking forward to it, but I will say I did not imagine it going quite this badly.”

Elizabeth felt like she had a hair ball stuck in her throat, and hacked up a cough. “I'm so sorry for your experience.”

“Come on, Lizzy,” Andrew said, but even he didn't sound convinced.

“You know what, honey?” Elizabeth tried to speak in her mother's voice—even and cool—“Why don't you go on over to your yoga teacher's house tonight? They have beds over there, don't they?” She laughed. “Of course they do, what am I saying! With girls in them! Go and sleep over there tonight, will you? Because I don't want to look at your face.” The coolness had evaporated quickly, leaving behind red cheeks and eyes filled with tears. She spun around and knocked on the window, startling Darcey. “And you!” Elizabeth said, through the glass. “Out!”

Darcey put a demure hand to her chest:
Moi?
Elizabeth yowled, and then Darcey quickly scrambled to the door. “Can I have the diary back?” she asked on her way out. Elizabeth gave her a look. “It's really important to my process.”

“Have Naomi come get it later,” Elizabeth said. “Now, out, all of you.” She swiped some hair off her forehead, where it had begun to stick in stringy bits, and tucked it behind her ear. “I'm going to take a shower. When I'm done, I want all of you gone.” She could still hear Naomi's throaty laugh echoing down the sidewalk. “Her, too,” Elizabeth said. She went inside and slammed the door, nearly catching Iggy's tail. She wanted to call someone, but couldn't think of who to call, and so she went straight upstairs and into the bathroom. The bathtub was a mess—it looked as if Harry had used every towel on the rack and then strewn them everywhere, as if he were trying to mop up blood at a crime scene, but Elizabeth didn't care. She climbed over the damp mountain of towels, turned on the cold water, and then got in with her clothes on.