4. This City Bled for Its Water and Sometimes so Do I
THIS CITY BLED FOR ITS WATER AND SOMETIMES SO DO I
THE NEXT MORNING, JR was up early, hammering away in the alley.
A makeshift fixture was gradually taking shape beside Tita Linda’s altar of trash, where even my mother’s wrath had limits.
The back side of Tita Linda’s apartment, away from the courtyard, faced the driveway to the carport, making it visible only to those who already lived here.
Possibly that was a factor in my mother’s chosen battles.
I thought of the distance my mother kept from this part of the apartment building as more of a mystical thing, like it had been salted to keep away evil spirits.
Grandma said it wasn’t salt, just mess. My mother preferred to live her life tidily, and there were certainly living organisms in whatever this pile of stuff had become.
“Where are you going?” JR called to me as I passed by, heading for my car with a yawn.
“Callback,” I replied. It took a while. The yawn was profound, almost earth-shattering.
“Did you stay out late?” JR asked. Never with sarcasm, only earnestness.
“Why, do I look like I stayed out late?” I felt a pang, a sharp panic, that ugliness had crept in despite my stringent defense.
“No, I just thought, you know. Maybe you went out with that guy from yesterday.” JR had an apologetic look on his face, like he’d been caught red-handed observing too closely, caring too much. It was really too bad he’d been born into the realm of my mother’s natural enemies.
“Oh, you mean Teddy?”
“Yeah, the white guy.”
Unfortunately that could have meant almost anyone. Given my ambitions, I went around with a lot of white guys. I didn’t exclusively date them or anything, but lately, in my desperation to repair my lost future, I’d had to zero in on a particular role.
That, I think, is what made me more amenable to Teddy than I otherwise would have been. I really couldn’t judge Teddy for his fetish when I had predilections of my own to contend with. Glass houses and all that. Though, when it came to power differentials, one was historically far worse.
“JR,” I posed with a sigh, “are you trying to ask me if I fucked Teddy?”
“No.” He looked horrified. “Of course not, I just meant—”
He was only trying to ask me how my night went. Alas, my mother had raised me mean, such that niceness was something I had to forcibly engage, more like muscle than reflex.
“Well, I did, not that it matters.” After my conversation with Emmanuelle, I no longer needed Teddy, so theoretically it was safer to want him.
I’d had another drink by then and felt an internal softness, a tenderness that needed to be stroked.
So I went back to his place. We dry-humped a little on the couch before I let him unzip my dress and put his hands down the back, where I already knew he’d been looking.
The sex was a little bit characterless overall, but not bad. I didn’t usually orgasm from penetrative sex and my evening with Teddy was no exception, albeit not in a bad or even memorable way.
“Oh.” JR looked mortified. I knew he had a sex life—I just didn’t know anything about it. I think we both liked it that way. “Well, good luck at your audition.”
“Thanks. Bye, Alistair,” I added to the bird, who was looking ruffled in his container.
I still wasn’t convinced about my grandma’s messages from the beyond, but I wasn’t going to write them off completely.
I missed her, hollowly, often. Life had been easier with her as the go-between—the pacifist between Mom and me, and Mom and Tita Linda, and Mom and JR, and Mom and the world.
Mostly, I didn’t think it would cost me much to offer some degree of deference to her wishes, just in case.
Which is really how I approached most things—with respectful skepticism.
The paranormal. The supernatural. Catholicism.
The future. The only thing I really placed on an altar was Hollywood, and even then I didn’t trust it. I just routinely tithed.
I knew instantly that I hadn’t gotten the part, even before I left the room.
The casting director looked through me, the producers were eating lunch, the entire thing had the vibe of hitting marks just to hit them.
We had all agreed to be there, and so we were.
My performance was okay, a bit lackluster after waiting almost two hours past my scheduled time slot.
There was always a sense of timing to these things, a pulse. You could just tell when something was flatlining.
“You know what it is? You’re just not believable as a person who could be dumped,” my agent said to me later on the phone. “You have way too much star power for a role like that.”
I suddenly became seized by the fear that my agent would drop me soon. I could already envision the call. He’d say I had too much star power for him to handle. That it wasn’t me, it was him. “I’d love to be dumped, Dan, seriously. I’d love it.”
“Entirely the wrong attitude,” he chirped, “but as usual, love the hustle!”
“Is there anything I could have done?” I asked desperately. Another prayer: If I fail, it won’t be because I didn’t do the work. It won’t be because I put all my faith in lucky stars or games of chance. “Is there something I could have, like, improved? Or something to work on for next time?”
“Sounds like you had a strong audition,” Dan said. “Maybe you could work a little on your pain?”
Pain. Right. What was a feminine role without pain?
Wasn’t there something about it being built in?
I knew pain. I knew grief. I knew loss. Was it that I didn’t know the right pain, or that I didn’t experience it the right way?
In an obvious way? In a feminine way? Was I dead-eyed or something, too stoic, because that was what this life had demanded from me?
Because rejection had grown over my body like scar tissue?
Could I not properly mourn the loss of White Guy No.
35 because I was accidentally playing the kind of girl who knew too intimately how to lose?
Had I been too graceful with my loss? Too reserved with my devastation?
Had the look in my character’s eye read too plainly that this had happened to me before and, indeed, would happen again?
Did I know in my heart of hearts that my character should stop dating emotionally unavailable men who saw her like a revolving door, just a placeholder for White Girl No. 23?
“Okay,” I said. In my head, I was doing the work.
I was inventing someone new, a person who built a new life each time she fell in love.
She became a new person. She became a this time, I’ll win!
person. Sally played by Holly played by Audrey played by a teen actress in a Disney movie about moving to the country after her family died in a tragic accident.
Someone who was underwritten by girlhood—by someone else’s girlhood, like maybe Taylor Swift’s.
My own adolescence was one of otherness without expectation of acceptance.
I’d gotten too comfortable standing out, so I started to crave it.
If I couldn’t belong, then I’d take what was mine.
But that wasn’t the kind of vulnerability this role required.
I saw it now, the evidence of my failure.
Fuck, I hadn’t sweated hard enough. I gave the new character a name: Sarah.
Poor Sarah, ripped away from everything she’d ever known, from every love she’d ever had, believing anyone who told her with any degree of sincerity that she was the right ending to their story.
God, imagine believing in someone. Believing that people were capable of forever. Easier to believe in devils. Or pigeons.
“Chin up, kid,” said Dan’s voice on the phone. “Something’s out there for you, I know it.”
Internally, I sighed.
“I actually just got a job offer from William de Witt,” I said.
“Well, from his wife or something.” I’d googled Emmanuelle from the waiting room of my callback, but as with most non-actors in the industry, I uncovered very little—a mention in Deadline, a few production credits, all related to films made by William de Witt’s company, Ara.
Fair enough. What actor with a production company didn’t closely involve their spouse?
His touch on her back lingered in my mind, seared there like a permanent impression.
“No shit,” Dan said. “He’s married? I thought he was one of those eternal bachelors, like Leo. Or George before he became a wife guy.”
Hm. “Maybe it’s his amicable ex-wife? Like some kind of ‘conscious uncoupling’ thing?
” That would better explain their dynamic, or maybe I was just telling myself something I wanted to believe, as if his availability would have made any significant difference.
Still, they each seemed to have an acute awareness of the other despite little outright interaction, at least as far as I’d observed.
“I’m supposed to go to his house to talk to her later, so as far as I know she lives with him. ”
“Oh, Emmanuelle.” Dan’s voice changed.
“You know her?”
“Everyone knows her. She’s his sister.”
“His sister?” That definitely wasn’t what I expected. That touch on her back, the specificity of its placement and all implications therein, remained unavoidably present in my thoughts, replaying at random intervals in my head.
But then I recalled William de Witt’s eyes on me, the way they sent a shiver through me. If there was one thing I was never wrong about, it was the attention of a man who wanted me.
“That’s pretty legit, actually, if Emmanuelle likes you. She’s crazy, but he listens to her.”
“When you say crazy—” I couldn’t figure out how to ask if he was saying that as a man or more generally. There was a distinction, in my head.
“She’s always in a fucking mood,” Dan said, so it was the man thing. “Really demanding. She’s involved in all his deals, though. You wouldn’t know it from meeting her, but nothing gets made without her express approval.”
“Oh, wow.” Jackpot.