And Again (25 page)

Then there were the boys at school. Older boys, teenagers already out of junior high. My friends and I would pass by the high school’s football field on the way home, and the boys at practice would shout at us, calling me “blondie,” trying to get us to stop. We didn’t stop because that was where our power came from, to be wanted and to have the ability to deny ourselves to others. Instead we’d walk to the 7-Eleven and buy pops and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot until the sky darkened above us and we were no longer afraid of being recognized walking in the direction of the trailer park. It was easier that way, better to be from nowhere than to be from there. Better to be anonymous, to be wanted from afar and always called a name that wasn’t my own. Up close was when things got difficult; it was harder to be perfect when you were spread out beneath some boy in a truck or in his grandma’s basement, hearing the blare of Telemundo on the TV upstairs, the mildew of the carpet permeating everything and making your skin itch. Up close I’d have to close my eyes and imagine Hank and the way he looked at me to get myself to come. And I never felt powerful afterward.

I learned my mother’s lessons well, in those years. What she meant when she talked about the ballerinas, women so beautiful they could command silence and stillness and admiration from crowds of onlookers simply by the way they moved. I understood that beauty was a currency, so highly valued that it burned ancient cities and ruined the most powerful of men, so potent that it could pluck me from my meager upbringing and wipe out all of my
history like a tide washing away footprints in sand. If you had enough, it didn’t matter who you were. You could be anyone.

I can feel it as I walk east on Wilshire Boulevard. Even in the corners of L.A. where wealth and culture and beauty are at their most concentrated, I can feel people notice me. Some pause for a moment, trying to place me, wondering if I’m some young starlet they saw in a movie once. Some pretend like their eyes aren’t tracking me as I pass, women mostly, looking at me with expressions that range from admiration to unadulterated envy. And then there are men, who seem not to care if they’re caught staring, men with eyes like two dark challenges, who want me to look back at them. Men who look me up and down as I walk, men who honk from taxis or cat-call from construction sites. I’ve forgotten how intrusive it is, to be the object of such universal male attention. Sort of like being naked and on display. Sort of like having no skin at all.

My old agent, Harry Kramer, has an office in one of the high rises that are ubiquitous along Wilshire. I don’t realize how cold I am until I’m in the lobby, where the light from the antique chandeliers overhead seems to bathe everything in warmth. I bypass the front desk and head straight into an elevator, my ears popping as it lifts me to the twentieth floor. Harry’s office is the same as I remember it, all polished wood and frosted glass, though the girl at the desk looks so young I nearly turn back around as soon as the elevator doors open. But she looks a little startled when she sees me, and there, the powerful feeling is back. I take off my sunglasses, the large Audrey Hepburn frames, and smile at the poor thing.

“Is Harry in?”

“He is but . . . do you have an appointment?” she asks, faltering a bit, her eyes flitting between me and the blue glow of her computer screen.

“No, but he’ll want to see me. Tell him Connie Kavanagh is here.” I give her my stage name, because telling her that he’ll want to
see Connie Duffy would probably ruin the effect. She’s too young to recognize my name so she just nods, pressing a button and speaking into her headset, her eyes on me as I stand there tapping a fingernail on the glass countertop. I should have a manicure, I realize, though I’ve been enjoying the clear smoothness of my bare nails, now that they aren’t thickened and discolored with the fungus that overtook them in the past few years. It’s all in the details though, this business, so it’s a mistake I’ll have to correct by the next time I see Harry. The girl presses another button and looks up at me with wide eyes, like a teenage babysitter who’s been caught smoking a joint after the kids are asleep.

“He’s on an important call at the moment, ma’am. But I can set up an appointment for you if you’d like to come back. Maybe sometime next week?” I know how this goes, I’ve partnered in this particular dance before. Harry became an expert at dodging me after I got sick, back before I realized that my career was already gone. He’d cancel appointments and reschedule me and have business trips or personal crises pop up at the last minute. Once he even stood me up for lunch in Chicago, leaving me sitting alone drinking glass after glass of chardonnay at the Park Grill until I finally staggered into a cab and cried all the way back to my apartment. I heard later from a mutual friend that he’d had a minor breakdown over my diagnosis and spent the next six months bingeing on OxyContin and having panic attacks until his own HIV tests came back negative. It didn’t make much sense; we’d had a brief string of sexual encounters years before I started doing heroin, but he apparently didn’t take my word for it.
Serves him right,
I thought at the time. That’s what he gets for his aversion to condoms.

It occurs to me again that I should find a different agent, that Harry’s behavior—and our history—should disqualify him from benefitting from my newfound advantages, but the only thing more dangerous than having Harry on my side is having him find out I’ve started working again with someone else. Hollywood has a fifteen-minute memory for people like me—actresses with all the potential
in the world who never really make it past that first starring role—but agents like Harry never forget a face they’ve represented, no matter how altered it’s become by time or cosmetic surgery or genetic rebirth. No, I need him working with me to keep the transfer a secret, so I smile at the girl at the desk until she practically wilts in front of me, a flower burned by too much sun.

“Listen, sweetie, a word to the wise—I know you’re about fifteen years old—but women like me are always ‘miss,’ never ‘ma’am,’ understand? Very important.” I tap my finger on the desk to emphasize my point. She turns the color of an under-ripe tomato, her blush competing with an almost green tinge of nauseated embarrassment.

“Of course, miss,” she says.

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to pop in and say a quick hello.” I move toward the frosted glass of the door to Harry’s office and the girl half-rises out of her chair, unsure how to halt me in my progress, or maybe debating whether or not to try to warn Harry of my impending intrusion.

“But, miss—” she says, though I’m already through the door. Harry is at his desk, a paper napkin stuffed in the collar of his shirt and what looks like a ham sandwich spread before him on his desk. He nearly jumps from his seat when I enter, forgetting to remove the napkin, and I watch his face transform from shock to outrage and back again with almost comic rapidity. He’s a short man with round glasses, and, though he still has most of his hair, the years of sunning himself in the Bahamas have caught up to him in the soft mesh of lines on his face. He gapes at me like a well-dressed trout.

“Afternoon, Harry,” I say, wishing I’d worn white gloves that I could pull off and tuck in the crook of my arm. But, despite my lack of props, I make a good show of dropping into one of his chairs and crossing my legs. The dress rides up a bit. “Please, have a seat,” I say, motioning to his chair. He drops back into it like he’s been knocked over by a gust of wind. See, I think, this is the man whose attention I begged for five years ago. This is the man who swept me off his
desk like so much old paper. But now he’s sitting down, in his own office, in one of Los Angeles’s most fantastically expensive high rises, because I told him to. This is the power my mother worshipped so enduringly.

“Connie,” he says, bringing his hand to his mouth and brushing the napkin as he moves. He glances down then yanks it from his collar and balls it up in his fist.

“It’s been a while,” I say.

“Yes, and you look, hell, you look . . .”

“Better than the last time you saw me, I’m sure,” I reply, unwilling to let him say anything until I’ve finished. “I’m ready to start working again, Harry. Despite how we left things, I decided I owed you the professional courtesy of coming to you first with the opportunity of representing me.”

He looks at me like I’ve propositioned him using the most pornographic language imaginable; it’s a mixture of carnal awe and blind disbelief. “Representing you?”

“I’ve decided to return to acting. I assume you’re still an actual agent and this isn’t all just for show?” I motion around the office. I feel like I’ve turned up a winning hand in high-stakes poker and I’m watching the man across from me debate whether or not to call. It’s a moment of pure, vengeful jubilation.

“Of course, but . . . my god, Connie. What on earth has happened to you?”

“Modern medicine, my friend. Now, would you be a dear and get me a glass of water?”

I detect a bit of a tremble in Harry’s hand as he reaches for the button on his intercom.

I bring the awful second painting home, propping it up on our kitchen table, and wait for Sam. His flight got in this afternoon, but I know that he’ll stop at his office before coming home, getting some last moments of work in. Since I’ve recovered from my illness, he’s recommitted to his job with the fervor of a kid diving into summer vacation. As if his work is the reprieve from everything outside of it.

I don’t know what I expect when he arrives, but he lights up when he sees me with a canvas. He barely kisses me hello, a chaste peck on my forehead, before his eyes alight on it.

“God that’s incredible,” he says, picking it up and holding it at arm’s length. “It’s really, really great, Hannah.”

“No, it’s not,” I say, already weary at his ignorance. He warned me about this, I remind myself. That night in the gallery, he told me he knew nothing about art. And I have grown to resent him for it, his disinterest regarding the hinge on which my whole life moves.

“Of course it is. It’s the best painting I’ve seen in a long time,” he says, setting it down on our coffee table. “It’s just great that you’re painting again. Reentering that part of your life.”

“All this does is prove the fact that we’ve been avoiding this whole time. I can’t try and force everything back to being the way it was,” I say, willing him to understand, to stop avoiding all the ways in which we are ruined. In which I am ruined.

“But you did it,” he says. “It’s right here. And it’s great.”

“It’s not
great
.” I say the word like it’s something sour and raw I need to expel from my mouth. “It’s not even close to great. It’s a
failure. That’s what it looks like to fail at the only thing I’ve ever been able to do.”

“You just need to keep working at it,” Sam says, though now his voice is threaded with tension. His veneer of calm is wearing thin.

“It’s not going to make a difference.”

“Fine,” he says, throwing up his arms. “So paint for yourself then. Forget what anyone else thinks. It didn’t matter to me what prizes you won. It never mattered to me.”

“Of course it mattered,” I say, because this is what I want. This argument. It’s why I brought the painting home in the first place, for this reason alone. Because losing my ability to paint is perhaps the most profound tragedy of my life. And for Sam, it doesn’t even register. The thought of it makes me so angry, I have no compunction about going for the throat. “It mattered. That’s the thing about being a hotshot journalist, isn’t it? It looks damn cheap if your girlfriend’s only marketable skill is taking her clothes off for worthless art students.”

“I don’t care what it looks like.” I can feel him disengaging.

“Of course you do. This is what you want. This is just the right turn for you, isn’t it?” I think of the expensive clothes I threw out, the perfect apartment I helped create. How hard I tried to become the sort of woman he could love. Someone wholly unlike the girl I was. “There was always too much about me that wasn’t what you wanted. And that was fine in the beginning, because you were twenty-seven, right at the point in your life when everything you liked started to seem boring. That’s what made it interesting at first, that there was a lot about me you didn’t like.”

“I never asked you to change anything,” he says.

“No, you didn’t ask. But you’ve always wanted it,” I reply, stepping toward him. “Don’t you like me like this? All perfect for you now?” He is grinding his back teeth together, everything in him straining away from his own anger. But I want it, I want his rage, I want something from him that will match my sadness, my guilt. “Maybe I can be what you want now, hmm? Maybe I can be what
you’ve always wanted, the perfect replacement for Lucy, staying home and keeping your house and having babies for you?”

There are tears in his eyes when he looks at me. And I hate him, in that moment. Hate him because he can’t be as strong or as cruel as I am. He is no match for me, for the things of which I am capable. Hate him because he is a good man, and so all of his cruelty is born of weakness. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks. “What makes you think I deserve this?”