Chapter 10 1989
Late nights, blue lights, everyone smiling, coked, shaking the week off their shoulders, recovering from their plotlines.
You have to become no one again, to disrobe from the character completely, before you can step back into yourself.
Everyone is here tonight at the Whiskey a Go Go: Mark Flowers, Rip McFee, even Shona was around earlier.
Orson is talking to the girl behind the bar, showing her how he shakes a cocktail.
Maybe it’s the line she did an hour ago, but Susan cannot help feeling that everyone here loves her.
That all of them believe in her, that she is a part of their glittering universe.
Sometimes she feels like she is living in a glorious end state, as though the world—America!
—has become its final freest form. Is it fair to be so happy?
Rip is handing her a margarita, sidling in next to her. “I owe you one.”
Today, Susan was attacked by a dog during an attempted bank robbery.
The heist was Rip’s brainchild, and all the most desperate characters were swept up in it.
It took all of Susan’s willpower to keep breathing as the animal experts trained the dog to jump up on her, to let it push her back playfully, allow it to lap her face with its wet, leathery tongue.
Her throat is still sore from screaming.
“Maybe next time you could send her to a fancy hotel or something. You know. A pedicure.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he laughs. She likes Rip, always has. He takes her seriously. And this storyline is big for him; they’re hunting for a new showrunner and all of the writers are trying to show their stuff.
“You know, Susie,” he says. “There are some big conversations about you right now.”
“Is that so.”
Margie has had a controversial reception. The fans are waiting for her to reap her deserts; after all, she’s broken up two marriages, orchestrated an arrest under false pretenses, and slept with almost every man in town.
“Some people want to see you dead.”
“Some people?”
He nods at the other writers smoking by the window. “It’s not you obviously. There’s just a feeling about the moral center of the show.”
A pit forms in Susan’s stomach, a fragile, disposable thing.
“Where do you see her going?” Rip asks. He looks at her and his eyes are kind, interested. No one has asked her this before. She has always understood her job: to take what she’s given, to make it the best it can be.
“I think she deserves love.”
Rip nods at this, sips his drink. “Who, then?”
“Why choose. Maybe it’s a mystery.”
“A secret admirer?”
They riff. Susan is brimming, ideas tap dancing, unshackled out of relief or maybe… intuition? It feels enough like it, organic the way acting is, only this time she’s shifting the order of things, stepping into new power.
“Maybe he’s a serial killer?” she suggests. “Nice big storyline for you.”
“That’s real big,” says Rip. “Showrunner big.”
“Maybe we only see his gloved hand. Max in costumes keeps saying he wants to do more gloves.”
“Gloves for Max.”
“And get Orson involved. A suspect or something. That boy needs a break.”
Rip’s lip curls up into a smile.
“What. I’m talking with my hands, aren’t I?”
“No, no. You’re just a generous person, Susie.”
“How do you mean?”
“I ask you how we can save your career and you just want to make space for everyone else.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to—to overstep—”
Mark Flowers is at her other side. “I won’t let them kill you, Susie,” he says close in her ear.
“And if they do, I’ll give you a spin-off.
” And then, in a blink, he is spinning her off, onto the dance floor, laughter erupting from her whole face, her nostrils, her eyes lined with electric blue.
He grabs her by the waist and picks her up, twirling her round, and in the midst of all the stardust she cannot help but feel like a terrible person.
When Mark sets her down, his hand wanders lower, around to her ass. Smiling, she shifts it back up. It’s the sort of thing you have to get used to, hands like water on you in this city. She waves her own left, ringed hand at him, and Mark mimes looking around the room.
“I don’t see any husband,” he says.
Susan smiles as though it’s all a big joke, as if they’re all playing along, her stomach prickling with sickness, the need to extricate.
It’s make-believe, she thinks, it’s fairy dust. She aches for Al, the solid object of his devotion.
The distance crests in a sudden nausea. Putting on her best cheap laugh, she topples to the bar and drapes herself on Orson’s shoulder. “Time for me to go,” she pouts.
Orson pouts back at her. She knows he hates weekends, that he still feels lonely in this city, that he changes his accent just to be understood sometimes, that he’ll spend long hours at the beach with his Walkman, listening to tape cassettes from his childhood.
“See you Monday?”
She nods. She knows none of them can understand why she’s doing this, the back-and-forth double life.
“Good luck,” Orson says. Does he imagine her time with Al to be more difficult than it is, because of how she complains to him?
It’s not that she tries to misrepresent life at home, but she has to vent to someone.
When she cannot get through to him. When she has to cancel plans.
When they fight. Orson hugs her, kissing her cheek, his scent becoming known to her, sending her out into the bruise-colored night.
Are you sure you trust these people?
She had told Al on the phone last night about the dog, felt like she’d given him an excuse to air his misgivings.
Yes. I mean, they’re professionals. I don’t know.
You sound scared.
I am scared.
Tell them you don’t want to do it.
I want to do it.
Agh. Suze. I just worry about you. You say yes to everything.
Sometimes she feels like she is becoming two different people, the woman out here (expansive, celestial) and the woman at home (protected, held). Perhaps she needs both of these things. Perhaps it is okay to need both.
I don’t want you to worry, she said. You sound like your mom when you worry.
Well, then don’t tell me these worrying things.
So, I should pretend like they’re not happening?
No, just. Make them not happen.
Now we are into wishful thinking.
Oh, good, my favorite. Come home.
I can’t. She couldn’t bring it up again. The conversation only makes both of them sad, and they have become careful not to let it ruin the short sweetness of their moments. Goodbye has developed a new pain in repetition, the dull awareness of acclimation.
Outside, the streetlights are dancing over beetle-wing cars, none of them taxis.
Maybe she should think about herself more.
Margie would. Only the problem is, her interests only ever get her into trouble—they’ve brought her here, on the teetering edge of this star-strung set-piece city, three thousand miles away from the man who is her husband.
The rising wail of Sunset, the smash of music and loud, late-night laughter is dulled by the drone of something bigger.
The heavy inevitable reckoning with what she wants, what she really wants.
She cannot avoid the costs of her interests.