When the Messenger Is Hot (3 page)

Anyway so Apple asks a few questions about my love life and looks like she's about to cry when I tell her I felt at my absolute loneliest when I was in love the one time (not the same prerehab ex; in hindsight I don't know how to describe that other than as a hostage situation), and I guess I don't do a very good job of explaining, since she does seem to understand that we were right for each other but not the part about why I broke it off. Maybe I'm not so sure my self. I know I lose Apple somewhere in the middle of this story, but anyway, she listens to all this and looks at me empathetically but in that way that you know she has no resources to draw upon for this “part,” and look, I don't wish these resources on anyone.

She practically begs to come along to my regular A.A. meeting, which I explain is not open to nonalcoholics, and I try to emphasize the word
anonymous
in some way that will make her grasp its meaning. I give her a schedule of some meetings that are also open to nonalcoholics. But she shows up at my meeting a few minutes after it starts and raises her hand and says,
Hi, I'm Wendy and I'm an alcoholic
, and proceeds to share about how much gratitude she has for her sobriety and how her life is very small (oh really?) and that in spite of the difficulties that
most of you
know about, the promises of A.A. have really come true for her and that she has found an inner peace, and for the first time feels fully present in her life one day at a time. Like I'd ever say anything so cheesy. And then, as if it isn't enough that she's stolen my name and my difficulties, some of my friends go up to her after the meeting and tell her how great she looks, that she seems really well rested and more open or something, and they ask her to go to coffee at Utopia as though she's me, as though I weren't actually there in plain sight, as though someone who weighs easily forty pounds less than I do and who has an obvious nose job and a tattoo around her wrist and
is a movie star
is the same person they've known for nine years. I finally walk over to the group and I go,
Um, hello? Did we have a vote that it's okay to drop acid in Alcoholics Anonymous today? Because you seem not to be able to tell the difference between me and Apple Fowler
… And my friend Josh goes,
Did you hear something just now?
and my friend Sue goes,
Something kind of mumbly
, and my friend Missy goes,
A little bit like the grown-ups on Charlie Brown
, and Josh goes,
Wohwohwohwoh wooooh
, and everyone laughs like nothing unusual is going on. Then Sue looks right at me and puts on some lipstick as though she's confused me with a compact, and I rush to the ladies' room to see that I look the same as always but as I'm walking away I notice in the reflection that the shape of me matches the ancient wallpaper that's peeling off the walls, and so I move to a section of the wall that's painted that kind of icky pea green and I see that the shape of me is now pea green, and when a woman comes out of the stall I touch her arm and say to her,
Excuse me
, and I'm about to ask if I look all right to her but she sort of looks past me and brushes her arm like she has an itch and then walks away. My friends are already gone when I go back to the meeting room and I notice that I'd been standing in front of a shiny new filing cabinet when Sue was putting on her lipstick, but I still feel sure it wasn't the cabinet she was using as a mirror.

Of course, as I walk away I plan to tell Apple I know I said she could stay longer but I really need my privacy now and that she needs to leave, but when I get home her stuff is already gone, which is a great relief to me since I'm not very good at confronting people. There's a giant houseplant and a note that says, “Thanks so much for sharing yourself with me.” I do freak out for about five minutes because Leo doesn't come running to the door to greet me, during which time I become certain Apple's taken him too, but I finally find him sleeping next to my bed. I have eight messages on my machine, which is highly unusual, and I take the tape out and play them back on the stereo and there are messages from Sue and Missy and Josh saying how happy they are to see me doing so well now and there are a few more from some other friends of mine who seem to think I've talked to them recently, which I haven't, and worst of all, messages from my sister and my ex, both saying how great it was to see me and how much lighter I seem (I think they mean this metaphorically) and my ex has that phone voice I haven't heard since a few months before we broke up, that sex voice. Leo refuses dinner on the sofa, and when he finally eats, it's not very much, and it's on the floor, like normal dogs, and he continues to act generally mopey for a while.

And then don't you know the next day in the supermarket I get to the checkout line and there's a picture of Apple holding hands with my ex-boyfriend under a headline reading, “Apple Fowler's New Mystery Man,” and if that isn't bad enough, the checker thinks I'm a shelf of Wrigley's spearmint gum and I have to go home and order all my groceries all over again from the Internet, which is obviously, at this point, the least of my problems.

I continue to go to my A.A. meeting for a while, but people mistake me for a broken chair or an exhaust vent and every time I try to share, all they hear is a muffled noise and they just ask everyone else to speak a little louder. For a few months I try to phone my friends, but it's the same thing every time,
Hello, hello?
and they hang up. My e-mails all come back to me, although for some reason the landlord and the utilities still like my money and most Internet businesses seem to have no problem accepting my credit cards, which I guess isn't so surprising, and so I order everything that way.

It was sort of disorienting at first, to put it mildly, living this way. Leo finally came around after he realized Apple wasn't coming back, but I'd be lying if I said we were as close as we once were. I still go out to the park sometimes, or to the museums, since you can obviously get in free when you pass for a Picasso, but I was starting to feel like I was in a bad horror movie and I did think about messing with people's heads or robbing banks or something but it's not really in me and I never did get interested in taking advantage of my . . well, I don't even know what I am now. I'm not invisible. I'm sort of just hidden. Like a chameleon, but without the taste for insects. So finally I just gave up hoping I'd be seen and decided to stay in most of the time. Which, to be honest, is not a dramatic change in lifestyle.

So Apple makes the movie and it gets rave reviews, movie of the year and all that, and she's on the cover of every magazine and gets nominated for best actress but I am of course overlooked for the screen-writing credit or any kind of credit; it seems all but forgotten that this movie is about a real person's life, but apparently Apple Fowler is better at being me than me because not only does she show up on the red carpet wearing a tiara and my Prada dress, she actually wins the Oscar, wins the Oscar for being me, and she bursts into tears and thanks her higher power and her agent and my sister and her
fiance
my ex-boyfriend, who is naturally also weeping in the audience, and she's America's sweetheart and she's Apple Fowler again and there is something shiny with my name on it but there's still no me.

O
NE DAY MY RICH FRIEND ANNA said,
Oh next time you come to New York we can go up to the solarium it's so beautiful and quiet and no one's ever there and you can write and have privacy and coffee
. Anna knew perfectly well how much New York caused me to go kind of mental (like being on an IV drip of crack cocaine), hence my having moved away, and Anna's a very thoughtful person, and so knowing this, when I did have to come, family obligations and all that, she was, I'm sure, just trying to make me as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. Got me milk and cookies and Raisin Bran and coffee and the right kind of cream and those Kleenex tissues with aloe, and a bigger TV. A few days into the visit (picture one of those films where everything is accelerated and the person is seen only as a blur of light, moving from place to place almost as though they're on a track, with some weird implication that they have no control over their course), Anna said again,
Let me show you the solarium, you'll love it
, so I grabbed my notebook and she brought me upstairs, even though the elevator man said,
I see nothing
, in some vaguely Eastern European accent, because theoretically you're only supposed to access the solarium by going down to the lobby and back up an elevator bank in the opposite section of the building, so as not to disturb the Chihuahuas on the twentieth floor in Anna's section, who, apparently, were in the middle of being sued for barking inappropriately, and I guess the idea was that we not bring any new lawsuits against the dogs by causing them to bark when we walked by their door to enter the stairwell to the roof. Which they did, and which Chihuahua owner gave us some particularly rude looks, as though we were the ones doing the barking. Plus there was a sign with bold red letters on the door, one of those official ones carved into a big piece of wood paneling, that read
DO
NOT
OPEN
DOOR
ALARM
WILL
SOUND,
which I didn't even notice, and Anna seemed to know was a big fat lie, because in fact no sound was heard except for the fading cries of the Chihuahuas.

So we opened the door at the top of the stairs and came out onto this indescribably huge terrace, which was about three times as big as my apartment back in Chicago, and I want to say that to me, as a New Yorker, my apartment in Chicago is pretty big. Obviously it's nothing like Anna's. Anna and I both have two bedrooms, but on Central Park West, you know, my two-bedroom could fit into her living room. Still, when I left New York, my studio apartment had no windows, literally. They weren't sealed or facing a brick wall: there were none. I guess the landlord figured what's the point, since they would have been facing a brick wall if there had been any, and why lie? In Chicago, I grow plants. I sit on the porch. There aren't so many people out on the street. There's less pressure. I'm not saying I go out a lot to verify that. It's just that when I lived in New York in the window-free apartment, I pretty much felt like I had no choice, but then I'd go out, and there was just too much to think about, and I'd end up coming back in, and finally I thought well let me at least move someplace where I can afford to look out, without the mental overload of actually going out. (Which I do, but maybe not as often as other people. I like to go out on Saturday mornings. I have no problem with that.) Anyway, there was this giant open terrace, overlooking Central Park and the entire city in all directions, and naturally it's semifoggy, and there's a full moon, and maybe Anna's used to it, but even though I live in Chicago now, I'm still a New Yorker, and when you get a view like this, you can't help but feel like it's not even real, like you're in some Woody Allen movie, and I have to tell you, I still love Woody Allen movies, that's probably not politically correct to say anymore, but I do, still, and when I watch those movies with their giant memorabilia-and-art-filled New York apartments I always think, who
are
these people? (Sometimes when Anna and I were in high school we'd get invited to parties by kids of rich and famous people who lived in these duplex and triplex penthouse apartments on Fifth or Park, but [a] we always had a big thing about going to the East Side [the West Side being just better (less snooty more down to earth)], and [b] the parents were never at the parties, so it wasn't like you could get any picture of them in their Woody Allen life, cheating on each other and laughing jovially later among the art books and panoramic city views. Okay, well, Anna did grow up in a kind of giant art-book-filled apartment in a historic landmark building on the West Side, with intellectual parents. But I think they were faithful, and it never seemed so funny.) Then I turned around and Anna opened the door to the solarium, which I'm more inclined to describe as a terrarium, which it seems like it had to have been at some earlier time, filled with greenery and condensation and maybe a turtle, a glass house now occupied by a plain living room set, a table, and a couple of lamps. It was the exact reverse of my last New York apartment, not just because of its all-window feature but for its sparse decor, which I've never been known for. And it's true, no one was there.

Anna left me alone to write for a while, and I dragged a chair out onto the terrace because it was warm enough and the glass is warped or something inside the solarium. You can totally see out, but everything looks just a little bit wavy. I didn't really get any writing done at all, it was just too much, looking at the stars from up there, and when Anna came back a couple of hours later to check on me, I didn't know I was going to say this, but what came out of my mouth was,
I think I'm just going to sleep up here tonight
. And she, being Anna, said,
Well I'll just go get you a blanket then
. Thoughtful, like I said.

I couldn't really sleep that first night, so I rearranged the furniture in the solarium, mostly just for something to do, but it ended up being kind of unsatisfying because it was all so Swedish plain, and didn't look dramatically different when I was done than it did before I started. Anna came back in the morning and said,
Oh, I like what you've done with the place
, and reminded me that my flight was leaving for Chicago that afternoon, and I said,
Anna, I think I'm just going to stay
. I'm pretty sure she knew what I meant as soon as I said it, but at first she got kind of overexcited because she thought I might possibly have meant that I was going to move back to New York, and when she said,
That's so great!
I finally said,
No, I mean up here
, I think for a second there might have been some mental adjustment she was making, but in a way it worked out well for both of us, since the days are long gone when I could afford to live on the Upper West Side even if I wanted to, and as soon as she figured out that I was serious she said,
Is there anything I can get you?
and I said,
I think I need some wood
.