When the Messenger Is Hot (13 page)

Joe left a bunch of messages, even though we were on this break. He seemed like he genuinely missed me and wanted to try to work things out. Christina had never met him, but she tried a bunch of times to get me to invite him over; I just couldn't. I hadn't told him about her, and I know he loves kids (although I'm not sure how he feels about ghosts); that wasn't it so much as I just wanted her to myself, even the idea of her. I'm sure the thought briefly crossed my mind that he wouldn't see her at all and wouldn't believe that I did, but honestly I was more afraid that he
would
, and that if he got to know her he might have something I wasn't sure I wanted him to have, and I couldn't explain that to either of them.

Well, at least call him back
, Christina finally said.

I left him a message when I knew he wouldn't be home; it was kind of awkward and dopey. I couldn't think of anything to say.
I'm just calling you back
, I think I said. Naturally he called right back and left another bunch of messages I didn't return, and then he stopped calling altogether for a couple of weeks, which was more of a bummer than I expected, still, I wasn't especially motivated to call him again. Christina and I were having a really good time. Finally he showed up at my door one day with some flowers, not his general thing (he was more of a meaningful book kind of guy), and it was really sweet and I was tempted to talk, but I just couldn't let him in, not having told him about Christina. I said, I
think I need a little more time for me right now
, which sounded horribly hollow and TV-movieish as soon as I said it, and between that and Christina, I felt like he'd think I'd been lying to him. Okay, which I was, but that wasn't our original problem, which was him getting upset with me all the time. I might not have mentioned that he wasn't abusive or he didn't call me names or anything, it wasn't like that at all, more like he'd get extremely frustrated because, he said, I kept things to myself. I've always fancied myself a big talker, and I could never figure out what he could have wanted that I wasn't giving him. I told him everything.
It's not about what you say
, he'd say.

When I mentioned this to Christina she said,
He wants to know how you feel
, and I was like,
But I tell him that all the time
, and she just shook her head. Like she was my mother, but not the mother I had when I had a mother, who would never have butted into my love life. Even if I had mentioned it to her. (Particularly impossible, though, when said mother isn't informed that there even is a boyfriend.)
He doesn't know
, she said.

Okay, now, I understood that, but when a baby is essentially siding with your boyfriend, the
ghost
of a baby, I have to say, it's a little upsetting. But I hadn't lost anyone close to me before my mom died and quite frankly, I couldn't possibly have imagined how much it would suck and also I would have had no way of knowing that I would instantaneously realize that anyone I knew could die anytime, I would not ever have guessed that I would become obsessed with combing obituaries of any people under retirement age for the word
cancer
(about nine out of every ten), I would not have thought that I would write letters to a dozen astrologists at publications around the country asking them to remove the cancer sign from their forecasts or at least change the name (citing bad karma as my primary argument, which I figured might be a reasonable way to appeal to the astrologists), I might not have noticed that there seemed to be one continuous broadcast about that Tour de France guy who triumphed over his cancer of everything (implying it was some sort of matter of will or something, which I kept thinking,
Oh really because I'm sure if they'd informed us about that cure at Sloan-Kettering we would have checked it out
) but a suspicious lack of information about whether or not my bitterness over the entire month dedicated to breast cancer awareness (the pink Princess phone of cancers) was in any way normal at all. I wasn't so much interested in remodeling our entire calendar to include a cancer-of-the-month so much as I just got into a kind of shouting thing during the interminable month of October, when I began screaming at the TV to just fucking cure all the fucking cancers. I enjoy having breasts, but I'm just going to go ahead and say that my mother, like many people, enjoyed having
lungs
. (And it was not possible to convince me that because of the association with smoking that the cancer-curing/awareness/ fundraising people thought the lung-cancer-afflicted people [the rotary phone of cancers?] got what they deserved when, in fact, vast numbers of people like my mother held such an enjoyment of breathing that they never took up smoking and came down with lung cancer anyway.) I would not have guessed that after someone dies I wouldn't just cry for a month or two and then say,
Well there's nothing I can do
, but instead cry for a month or twelve or more and then also talk to her photos (which, unlike Christina, do not talk back), and repeatedly ask her to just come back, making all kinds of deals with the photos, completely believing that somehow via my negotiating with the photos she would actually come back (having no problem at all, obviously, in believing that it was entirely possible for the dead to come back), I say to the photos,
I know we gave away most of your clothes but I have a lot of your nice sweaters and scarves and I think some of your coats might still even be in the coat closet at Dad's and I will of course give you all the jewelry back and I will give you your car back and all the money so that you can go buy whatever else you need and if you would just come back even for five minutes so I could ask you a bunch of stuff I forgot, I would pretty much do anything
, and so with regard to my showing some kind of feelings nonverbally to Joe I was pretty much thinking,
Well what's the point really? So I can have a long-term commitment with another photo?

I didn't hear from Joe for a while, and I was pretty sure he'd given up until one day the doorbell rang while I was taking a bath; Christina was listening to Lenny Kravitz and dancing a little. I hadn't been counting on anyone coming to the door, much less that Christina would answer it, and I don't know how she did it, but she got herself up on a chair and finagled that doorknob and there was Joe, no doubt more than a little surprised to see a ghost baby standing there and no one else. I got out of the tub and was reaching for my robe when I heard the door open and I heard Christina saying,
Come on in
, and since he didn't run screaming into the street, I guess he wasn't as freaked out as I imagined he would be, and the next thing I knew, there they were in my living room, dancing to “Fly Away.” I burst into tears immediately, and Joe took me by the hand and spun me around and we all wiggled our hips and waved our hands in the air, solemnly.

I
T SEEMS SO DUMB NOW. It seems like this day and my dumbass love life are irrelevant under the circumstances, it seems like the fact that most years I'm single on this day and that the years when I'm not single on this day have been — well, not a lot better than the years when I wasn't, sometimes inarguably worse, it seems dumb, it seems super lame, like,
Who cares?
It seems like I should be thinking about something more important, like volunteering, like giving blood, like
enlisting
, like I should convince whoever's in charge to let me enlist even though I'm too old and I've never even worked out, you know, ever, and would probably be sent to the infirmary on day one after the third push-up. Half the people I know already understood this day to universally suck, and I don't think that's different now — no, I take that back, I think it is different now, I think it sucks more. I think it sucks more now, and I'll tell you why it sucks more, this is why, for the same reason that Mother's Day sucks for me, for the same reason that Father's Day sucks for my friend Jane, because we no longer have a Mother or a Father, because we are assaulted on these days with greeting-card commercials and human-interest stories and dinner specials and catalogs for gifts we can't give anymore, and so although this day ordinarily sucks for me on what now seems like this super lame level, what I'm trying to say is that this day, for years to come now, is going to suck more because a huge number of people suddenly lost their boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancees, spouses, life partners. You can imagine that February 14 sucks now for a lot of these people where it probably didn't ever suck, or that it once sucked and then they forgot that it sucked, or maybe even a few of them remembered how much it sucked and were really really grateful when it finally didn't suck, that what used to be a day of chocolate and champagne and roses and proposals and Vegas weddings is now a day to remind them of their grief, a day where they might otherwise have had moments when they smiled, or chuckled, or forgot for five or ten minutes or stopped feeling guilty about going to a movie but then were reminded of their grief, like, Oh right, Valentine's Day, my wife died, I almost forgot. So I want to propose that since Valentine's Day now sucks on multiple levels that we scrap this day altogether and call it something else and make it about something else, something more important, Memorial Day is taken and Grief Day is too depressing, so maybe something like a day about friends, something like Friends Day, I know, corny right? but whatever, that's what I think. Maybe there's already a Friends Day, I don't know, if there is it's obviously not that popular, but if there already is a Friends Day I propose it gets moved to February 14 because we all have friends, right? and even if we've lost friends, which many of us have, even if we've lost friends, we surely have other friends, right? and we could take the day to appreciate these friends, we could remember our lost friends, but not in a sad way, and not in a cheesy way, maybe there could be a rule that if you were going to send a card on Friends Day it would have to be a card that you made, to avoid the obvious pitfall that Valentine's Day has suffered over the years, the cheap dime-store cards and the whole obligation aspect of it, which is also super lame if you ask me. So that is my proposal, that we take this day and call up our people, and we send them cards that we made out of whatever, and we tell them things, we can just say, Hey, hey, you, if we can't think of anything else, or if we are not the type of people to tell our friends we love them, you know, openly. Or we can even go ahead and tell them cheesy things if we are the type of people who like cheesy things as long as we make up the cheesy things ourselves, we can tell them why we're glad they're alive and tell them to call us tomorrow and say they're okay. Because otherwise my best hope is that years from now, when these people who have lost people meet new people, when they get new valentines and new champagne and roses and proposals and Vegas weddings, that this day will at best rise to the level of bittersweet.

L
AST
THURSDAY
I came home and a half dozen of my closest friends and family members were sitting around my living room looking very serious like someone had died and since I'm a little bit psychic I knew right away what was going on. It was an intervention.

Alice
, said my best friend Jolie,
we are here because we care about you
.

We have all been talking
, said my dad,
and we can no longer pretend that we don't see what's going on
.

We want you to know
, said my therapist,
that we all have your best interest at heart, and that we will help you through this in any way we can
.

Alice
, said my friend Adam,
you are not an alcoholic
.

I realized this wasn't usually the way these things went. I had seen
Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic
, the movie-of-the-week starring Linda Blair as a very bad alcoholic girl in the suburbs. But I've been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for nearly ten years, and I'm not in denial. It's where I belong. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking; I have that. And frankly, some of those people intervening, they could stand to join up too. Let me go back.

Ten years ago I was in what stands as the worst relationship among the mostly very bad relationships I've had. This particular guy was almost twenty years older than me, a sort of minor movie star, well past the prime of his minor movie stardom, who bore little resemblance to the good-looking young actor I'd admired in some independent movies I'd seen when I was in high school. Plus, although he had been sober for several years at that point, there was clearly something really wrong with him mentally. Partly he was your basic abusive/angry guy, kind of a stalker (not my thing really, although I stand by the worst-relationship claim, against my own record) and even though there were things he was angry about (
Cars
, he'd say,
there are too many cars on the street. I can't live like this anymore
.), when he'd tell his life story it didn't seem so bad. He'd say,
You'd like my parents, everyone does
, and he'd talk about them and it didn't sound like they were any more strange than anyone's parents, maybe less so. Which got me started on thinking about him having some actual mental problem, besides alcoholism, I mean, because it seemed like that chip was missing that most people with ordinary problems have who know in even the vaguest way that their problems are not someone else's fault. Or you know, that even if they are it's still their problem to deal with. Plus a lot of the time he'd say stuff that just didn't make sense, but you knew he really thought it did, and that he was sharing some big life truth with you that was the equivalent of “New York City is essentially run by a big blue horse.” You know, nodding and winking a lot. It was possible that he was a compulsive liar, but I had no way of confirming a lot of stuff he said. (I understood that New York was not run by a big blue horse, but I was never sure if he believed it or if it was his sense of humor or, like I said, if he was a liar.) Anyway, if I'd bothered to mention it to anyone, they might have advised me against going out with someone whose picture had been on the front page of the
Daily News
for hitting his ex-wife, and it's not that I didn't take that into consideration, believe me. He had been asking me out for months already. I worked for his agent, and he started asking me out over the phone long before we ever actually met, and I'd heard about him even before the
News
thing, and like I said, he didn't really meet the criteria of Bad Boyfriend I was used to (charming and funny and exceptionally bright and noncommittal but somehow making it seem like they
were
committal even though it was still really obvious always that they weren't). He was pretty nice on the phone, but I sincerely just wasn't interested. He'd ask me out and I'd say no and he'd call back later and ask me things like,
Would you go out with me if I weren't fat?
and I'd say,
No
, and he'd ask me out again the next day and I'd say no again. I can't say I didn't like it at all, the attention, but I had other things on my mind, like how much and in what way my life sucked. It just kind of happened that he stopped by the office one day to pick up a script and I passed him by the reception desk on my way to the bathroom and in addition to really having to pee, it had been an especially bad morning at work, phones ringing off the hook because my recently promoted twenty-four-year-old boss had made some mistake on someone's contract like he always did and tried to blame it on me since I was the one who typed up the contract, except it wasn't a typo, he had forgotten to negotiate for a double-wide trailer for one of his bigger clients and when she got to the set she was super freaked out about why her costar had a double-wide and why did she have to languish in a single-wide and there was no way my boss would ever take the blame for that kind of thing. (I tried once, very diplomatically, to point out evidence of an earlier mistake, and he said,
I'm an agent and you're not
, which, you know, what do you say to that, really?) Not to mention that a double-wide trailer would have been a vast improvement over the apartment I was living in at the time, and my patience was growing a little thin about this kind of thing.