Your Voice in My Head (11 page)

That day, hiking Fryman Canyon, I come down the hill and see a car with the license plate
HEWZ VAN
. It makes me happy. It’s cherry red. Maybe Hugh drives children and is a
FUN DAD
. Or it’s only him and he takes joy where he can, this case being his car. I go home and do a phone session with Dr. R. I try to tell him about
HEWZ VAN
and the joy it brought me, but he keeps coughing.

“You’re coughing. Do you have a cold?”

“I’m fine.”

Then I take ten minutes telling him about Abba-Zabas.

“There’s this candy called Abba-Zaba that I bought because I don’t like it—it’s chewy peanut-butter taffy—so I figured I wouldn’t eat it. Instead, I got completely addicted to eating something I don’t like.”

I wonder if I knew this would be the last time we’d ever speak, subconsciously, and that’s why I filled the conversation with flighty inanities, so he’d know I was cheerful and fine.

I don’t have much to say. The breakup with Christopher has been so dignified and respectful. I am ashamed to say I wrap up my session with Dr. R before the fifty minutes are up. I say he sounds sick. I say he sounds like he should go. “I’ll call you if I need you,” I say, though I’ve a feeling it won’t be for a while. And then we hang up.

The next morning, I see Heath Ledger at the Laurel Canyon Country Store, with his little girl on his shoulders. His skin is gray. He’s buying Lilly’s coffee from her cart. He
comes over and sits with me for a few minutes and I give him the half of the
New York Times
I’m done with and he says thanks and to tell Christopher he wants to surf this weekend. His daughter’s wriggling to get going, and he heads off with his paper cup.

The crazy thing is: it turns out to be a magic coffee and it stays in his system so that, a week later in New York, he doesn’t die and instead of taking an overdose at Mary-Kate Olsen’s, he goes to Dr. R, who helps him get back on the wagon and somehow this means Dr. R doesn’t die either, and everybody keeps making strangers happy, and all the children get to keep their dads.

AT A DINNER
, following a film screening, I am introduced to a man with long, flowing hair who is wearing a kaffiyeh. He looks like the world’s campiest terrorist, but he’s actually a movie star with a storied reputation, much of it here, at the Chateau Marmont hotel. In the candlelit garden we sit next to each other and talk and he admits later that every single thing he tells me is intended to translate as “I’m not like you’ve heard I am.”

It works. Because it’s true. This is GH.

GH is supposed to be really good-looking (“Of course,” my father would say “he is
supposed
to be really good-looking”). But I don’t see it. I see something … softly wounded, like distressed velvet. A touchable sadness he has.

Later I say: “You didn’t try to shag me that night.”

“I respected you too much.”

“Oh my God,” I answer, offended, “you only want me for my mind.”

“Don’t be daft!” he replies, “I only want to fuck ya!” He is the saddest man who’s ever made me laugh uncontrollably.

He calls from a remote island where he’s preparing for a role. Thus far it has been a barrage of texts, poems broken up into thirty little pieces. When he calls, it is because it is 5 a.m. and he has a yearning to hear “Skeletons” by Rickie Lee Jones. I cue it up and play it to him down the line. He takes a deep breath.

“I’m probably going to spoil it now. I’d probably better hang up now, Em, before you stop liking me.”

I don’t check in with Dr. R on this. I trust my gut, and tell GH, next time he texts: “I’m not going to get romantically involved with you. I think that you might hurt my feelings.”

The reply is instant: “Ugh, just got a wave of nausea at the idea of ever hurting your lovely feelings.”

Then he lands back in L.A. and is on the way over to my house.

It’s raining very hard and he almost kills himself on the drive over texting his thoughts as he drives.

“Stop texting.” I snap. “Just get here!”

“I just thought it would be safer if I remained your textual suitor.”

He walks in the door, head bowed, paralytically shy. He is ashamed, because he comes bearing his own dinner, a Stouffer’s low-fat lasagna frozen meal, trying to drop pounds for a role. He puts it in my freezer and forgets to ever eat it.

I make tea. We watch an old movie. Then we watch the rain for a long time. Then Junior creeps on the bed and GH
introduces himself (“Hello, love”). Then I show him unseen pictures of James Cagney. Then there is nothing left to show him and it’s well past midnight, so we decide to try to sleep. We lie in silence awhile. Even Junior holds his breath.

And then, with the feather-green darkness pressed against the windows, he puts his filthy fingers on my scrubbed hope face and says, in a tone that falls somewhere between optimism and regret: “If I kiss you, it’s all over.”

And then he does. And then it is.

“I’VE BEEN SEEING SOMEONE
you would probably consider inappropriate,” I tell my sister.

“A neo-Nazi?”

“No.”

“You didn’t get back with Simon?!”

I’m getting impatient. “No.”

Her voice becomes dark. “Not Russell Brand? Tell me it’s not Russell Brand.”

Since he is neither a neo-Nazi nor Russell Brand, the family is OK with GH, who is on a film set again.

Lonely in different time zones, we send the moon back and forth to each other. “Did you get it?” I ask.

“Yes, baby.”

Whenever he comes home from making a movie, he brings me back strange things. My L.A. girlfriends, the ones who have been here too long, snipe, “No diamonds?” and I explain I wouldn’t wear diamonds, never have. “Yes, but he doesn’t need to know that.” “He knows that,” I say, and
understand myself, whilst the gossips are asking, “Why is he
with
her?” Why he is with me.

He says I am Dorothy to his Cowardly Lion and that we must walk the red carpet together for his latest film, whilst imagining it’s the yellow brick road. So flu-ridden that I am in bed reading
Eloise
, my favorite childhood book, I agree to go. He has successfully booked me for a gig, four months in advance. This pleases him so much, he spends the rest of the afternoon reading me
Eloise
in the voice of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character from
There Will Be Blood
. He is absolutely brilliant. The Noël Cowardly Lion.

I try to think how Dr. R would feel about me walking the red carpet. Am I supporting my partner’s work or am I permitting unwanted cameras into our relationship? What would he say? It’s strange to try to speak for the dead. My scars have gone down, mostly. There’s still a flesh flower on my upper right thigh, and I can tell from the nonchalant reaction of bikini waxers that they’ve become used to this sort of thing: girls who want to prettify and uglify, and cannot find a difference—like that hypothetical circle where communism meets fascism.

An hour into a phone call one night, GH, on the other side of the world, broaches a new topic.

“When I get back from this film, let’s have a miniature human, that grows.”

I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses.

“A baby?”

“Yeah, one of them.”

After all this work with Dr. R, to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else. This is the conversation. I don’t know what to say.

“If it’s a girl, can we call her Pearl?”

“Pearl! My ego wants to fight it”—I can tell he’s smiling—“since I didn’t think of it. But that’s perfect for her. Pearl it is. When I get home.”

I summon again my invisible witnesses, Dr. R, my mum. And once they’re both there, I ask them to give us a moment alone. I can do this myself.

“Do you just want me to give you Pearl? Or do you want me to stay too?”

He tries to answer. I hear his breath catch in his throat. The wait is interminable.

“I want you to stay. Em: I never want there to be a time when we don’t share space.”

He gets home late at night. It’s unbearably hot and I’m sleeping downstairs on the daybed. I’ve passed out with the iPod shuffle on. He creeps in. I don’t know how long he was in the daybed with me. When I wake up he says, “Guess what was playing when I got here?”

“Can’t.”

“ ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ ”

“Portent?”

“Yeh. Yeah.”

He kisses me. As his tongue searches the back of my throat, there is a note I’ve never picked up before either because it wasn’t there or because he hid it, or maybe he’d just never kissed me this deep. Fear. Of me, of himself. Of paying the cost for wanting things that can be found only in the darkness on the edge of town. He wants to tell me something. I can only feel him, in the dark. With his hand
over my mouth so I can’t answer back, he says: “I would rather die than not knock you up.”

With his hand over my mouth, I answer him back, anyway.

And that’s all I need.

A T-SHIRT ARRIVES BY FEDEX
from a faraway film set. It stinks of GH but, even more important, is covered in a ballpoint love letter, his scratchy handwriting creeping across every inch of the cotton. It is an invitation, in verse, to meet him in Manhattan. He is as gifted a natural poet as anyone I can think of. He writes four, five, six a day, sometimes barely tasting them, like a compulsive eater.

So I meet him in New York. No one knows we’re there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love, like the secret voice you use in a room with a psychiatrist. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we listen to each other, but we lock it in with touch, and the room vacuum seals it to stay fresh until we can breathe together again.

When he breaks the silence it is to say, “I want you to know that, when you get pregnant, nothing is going to change except your dress size.”

And then we go our separate ways.

He doesn’t like that my front gate doesn’t close properly so, though he is on a film set thousands of miles away, he sends builders to fix it and make me a bolt lock for my front door. He doesn’t like the way I can’t open my windows at night because I don’t have screens to stop the cats getting out. He sends the builders to make screens. He buys me an enormous Flann O’Brien book that I mean to read but end up using to kill a brown recluse spider.

I am always in the bath (in the womb) when his texts whir to life, long distance, late night. I bathe, I towel off, I go downstairs to the daybed by the French glass windows. We never stop texting. “Wait,” I say one night, “a raccoon is staring at me.”

“Don’t be scared, baby! It’s just me in my raccoon suit. I’ll waggle my tail so you’ll know it’s me.” It’s been in the back of my brain all this time: GH reminds me of my father.

He decides that, for my birthday in December, we will go to Istanbul together (we pluck it from our gypsy fantasies), and when we’ve done that, we’ll come back and make Pearl. When he’s not talking about making love to me, he’s talking about Pearl, and when he’s not talking about Pearl, he’s talking about our trip to Istanbul.

One night, for no good reason, I have the panics and fear it is over. I hold my tongue and put my phone under the pillow to hide it from myself. I settle down to write, and as I do, a parade of baby raccoons waddles past my window. I am soothed. “Thank you, GH!” I don’t tell him about it but I thank him anyway. The raccoons come by every night at 8:20, until he comes home.

The TV, faded to blue, is on when I get there. He is on the sofa, naked and quite asleep. I watch him and stop myself from bothering him. I entertain myself as much as I can. It is a big house. I wander from room to room. I open drawers. I pick up a postcard with Venice on it. From the curlicue writing on the back I know it is a girl and feel instinctively he has caused her sorrow. I pace around the postcard. I do not look. I go to the bathroom and use one of her tampons. It has been left for me by “the first Mrs. de Winter.” Finally, after letting him sleep another twenty minutes, I climb on top of him. He opens his eyes, smiles, and, looking straight into mine, says: “I missed you!”

When I get home the next morning, I open the e-mail about Dr. R. It has been sent to an account I rarely check, and has been there some time.

GH SAYS EVERYTHING
he possibly can to help. He writes me poems. We talk for hours. And then there is nothing else he can say. So he sends me something instead.

He FedExes me one Werther’s toffee.

When he comes home, he reads every single obituary of Dr. R. He lets me talk about him for days. He lets me cry. Though he tries to persuade me that Dr. R’s keeping his sickness a secret was not a betrayal, it’s a feeling I cannot shake, apart from when GH is physically shaking it out of me. Outside the bedroom, we bake a lot of cakes. We collaborate on rhubarb crumbles. We do most of it on his time clock, which means we’re cooking around 5 a.m. and closing our eyes around 7:30 or 8 in the morning.

Around the time I find out about Dr. R, the newspapers find out about me.

We read obsessively the nasty comments. When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices
outside
your head. Very often the voices work
to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself. The outside voices are pitching in, volunteer shifts.

I am fat and ugly. GH is an unwashed manslut. We are pregnant. (They always say you’re pregnant before you actually get pregnant, that you’re living together before you’ve moved in, and that you’re soulmates before you’ve said it out loud. It does take some of the joy out of it.)