You Lost Me There (28 page)

I saw Sara’s screenplay through the music room door.

Saw Sara arriving at LAX, saw her standing at the Hertz counter, saw her driving to West Hollywood, to the bungalow she’d found at the last minute. I saw the car dealerships on every corner and their huddles of repossessed Porsches. Saw the walled-off fortresses and the street-level billboards hawking stars. Saw Sara writing at someone else’s desk, in someone else’s house, harking back to Maine.

Twice I lost her, three times she left me: to California, to death, and now to this.

Dan’s starfish necklace lay on the coffee table. I hung it around my neck. It was a real starfish, with a piece of hemp cord cinched around the middle. On the table was a wadded-up piece of Kleenex. I held it to my nose, smelling the used condom inside. Dan rustled in his sleep and adjusted his arm, like an oar reaching out over water. Cornelia responded, turning to spoon against him. One of them farted.

I dressed for work, grabbed my briefcase off the dining table, and tossed it in the trunk.

It clattered against the antlers.

Cornelia was snoring when I tiptoed back inside and delicately placed the rack above their heads. I collected the screenplay, drove down to the beach, and read the first thirty pages in my car.

The movie was a thriller that began with a dinner date: a single, childless writer in her forties living in Bar Harbor is set up by her best friend with a widowed doctor newly arrived to the island. He’s perfect husband material, says the friend. Must be some reason he’s still on the shelf, the writer says. Still, she shows up for dinner, and waiting at the bar is an older Bruce Willis type: handsome, tall, and quietly projecting confidence. He tells her about his work as an infectious disease specialist. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s self-deprecating. She can sense he’s good in bed, and her research that evening proves her out. They fall in love and marry three months later at Otter Cliffs. In her toast, the writer thanks her friend for tracking down the perfect husband, and in coastal Maine, no less.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon’s cut short a few weeks later when an oddball cousin the writer met at the wedding, the one her husband referred to as his family’s black sheep, urges her to investigate the previous wife’s death. Wasn’t it odd, the cousin says, that she died from the same disease the doctor made his specialty?

I left the car unlocked.

The sky was pale. Down on the beach, the air was warm and tinged with wood smoke. The surface of the bay was perfectly flat out to the ocean. I swam at an even chop past Rockefeller Island, went another five minutes, stopped, and doggie-paddled. The clarity was exceptional. I took a deep breath, took another, and dived, striking the water, and released the air slowly as I pulled myself down, kicking for probably twenty feet until my lungs were empty and I stopped. I touched seaweed on the bottom, and the wildfire started. I focused my attention on listing the alphabet backward, though by the time I reached K, I couldn’t continue. I thrust my hands into the seaweed to find rocks. I tried holding on to whatever my hands could grasp, pulling up plant stalks and fistfuls of muck, but I needed air—the inferno was burning my body inside out.

See the perfect human enter a park. He finds a peak to climb. He climbs for two years through winter blizzards, across rushing creeks in spring, an alpinist on an island full of humpbacked mountains, the summits mostly bare. A deserted island, but he prefers it that way, to be alone and unobserved. Mourning as the best way to meet nature, dust to dust. Perpetual mourning. Occasionally he hears sounds from town, the hum of cars like animals prowling around the base of a canyon, but he sees no one, not a single person on the trails.

The perfect human climbs. He never tires. He is ceaseless in his state, where it never occurs to him that it should be any different.

Why should it?

The bay was full of sailboats. The closest to me was a sixty-foot cruiser with a kelly-green hull. A ladder hung off the stern near a small American flag with thirteen stars. I pulled myself aboard. Near the bow was an anchor and some loose chain. On a cabin door was a padlock someone had forgotten to latch. I laughed and quickly made myself a belt.

My hands were shaking.

I cinched the chain around my waist and clicked the lock closed.

Then I grabbed the anchor and almost dropped it from shock. It was a decoration. I’d thought it might weigh two hundred pounds, but it was as heavy as a crowbar. As a flute.

I had to piss.

I pulled off my trunks and kicked them overboard, opened the cabin door, and pissed down the chute, waving my penis around, urinating everywhere .

Then it came back to me finally, the name of the movie Sara and I had seen that first night we met in New York: the fucking
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
.

 

 

 

Darling, it’s
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
a pleasant little French musical. There’s not much fucking involved.

Go away.

Spur-of-the-moment decision.

I was going to—

I wasn’t the one who refused to wear a seat belt.

Nice. Tell me about the screenplay.

It’s the fifth card, the fifth change in direction.

Not only am I a workaholic, I’m capable of homicide?

You and Bruce weren’t able to get it into development in time.

You wrote it, you tell me.

Sara, why couldn’t you pick up the phone?

I apologized a hundred times.

What should I have done?

I called Mark. I found his number after I got into your computer. He has no idea.

I don’t have to give it to anyone. I could delete it tonight.

Don’t give me that. A scientist in Bar Harbor, married to a writer—

Try me.

Sara, I need to know.

Was there someone else?

Did Russell go out to California?

You were never vindictive.

I remember you every day.

But your memories aren’t true. The more you recall something, the more false it becomes, remember? You taught me that. What are the signs of Alzheimer’s? Memory loss, disorientation, poor judgment, problems with abstract thinking
—

Sara, how could you do it?

Oh, and that’s a good thing.

I don’t believe it.

I never cheated on you.

I don’t know what to think.

I always hated your sarcasm.

You don’t know what it’s like to be left behind.

You edited me out of my role.

I loved you.

Go away.

 

 

 

Sara, I can’t do this.

You don’t know her.

I know her poetry, at least it’s better than Uncle Bill’s. And you think you’ve got a clue? A dancer and her impotent audience, e-mails and midnight phone calls
,
that’s a relationship?

So we should have been more status quo, then you’d approve.

That’s a lie. The deception was hers, it was her wish from the start.

But you fell for it. I’m dead, Victor. You think it’s easy being your belly dancer? Poor girl, trying to figure out what you wanted, putting on a tough face
—

She loves dancing.

That’s not fair.

I’ve done my trials.

You left me. You left me here.

How can you—

No one’s perfect.

That’s insane. I have grieved more than anyone could possibly—

You have no right.

What?

He says I’m trespassing. He says I have to leave.

What should I do?

What if I don’t know what I want?

A fresh start.

Show me.

I don’t know. I never knew.

You loved me.

How many times have you seen
The Perfect Human
since I died?

I don’t know.

Twenty-three.

I don’t know.

How am I supposed to know? How can I possibly?

But I knew what he was planning. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m r esponsible.