Chapter 32
CHAPTER 32
I GET INTO MY CAR TO HEAD HOME, AND THERE’S A text from Dan: Landed. Did you make it home?
Me: I did.
Dan: Are we going to talk about this?
Me: Probably not
I send that text and the pit in my stomach deepens. I’m crying again, and it doesn’t feel like residual crying from before. I’m crying because I can feel myself doubling down. Dan: Jane
That’s all he says, but when I read it, I hear it in his voice. The way he says my name, the way he whispered it in my ear, into my neck, my mouth. I hate the way I let myself start to believe in this thing.
Me: Just stop. It’s over
My finger hesitates for a second before I hit send and turn off my phone.
I drive to Venice Beach and order a plate of potato skins that I don’t eat. I try to reconcile the passage of so little time. It was eight days ago that I sat here with Dan and agreed with him about the quiet things being the things that move us. It was five days ago that he put his hand on my mouth for the first time. I will not deny the thing that True Story helped me know: permanent, beautiful love is alive and well in the world. But it is not for me. I was better off before I felt it. A week later, I’m right where I started, still in danger of losing my job but also freshly heartbroken.
I start to drive home and am relieved when I remember that it’s Sunday and Clem will be at Grifters until eleven tonight. The last time we talked, I was telling her about love sex. I need to catch her up on my recent cycle of humiliation and rage, and I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. The best thing about Clem is also the worst thing: she knows all my truths. And I think she believed in this thing with Dan too.
I see her car on the street before I notice her on the porch swing. I slow my steps because I know there’s no hiding from Clem. The ocean of sadness in me is rising, and if I let it out, it could drown us both. But when she stands and opens her arms to me, I fall into them. The part of me that’s tired of being angry and tired of lying needs Clem more than anything.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I ask.
“I called in sick. I had a bad feeling when you ignored my text.”
“I don’t deserve you,” I say into Clem’s shoulder. Clem, who’s not leaving. Clem, who’s happy to laugh and cry whenever I need her to. I sat with Clem while she mourned her marriage. I brought her tacos and cranberry seltzer, an odd but frequent request. But that felt like a wound worth tending to; this feels pathetic. It was only a week.
“Bad?” she asks.
“Yes.” I hug her again and start to cry. I am tired from so many things.
“Maybe we should sit out here for a bit? I’ll get you something to eat.”
She goes into the kitchen. I sit under the bougainvillea and listen to the cars drive by. There’s a bit of sunlight hitting the street, and I watch the stripe of it roll over cars as they pass. I close my eyes and imagine the sound of the cars is just the confusion rolling around in my head.
Clem comes out, sits next to me, and hands me a hot mug of soup.
“Soup?” I ask. It’s August, not exactly soup weather.
“I don’t know, I just thought I should bring you something, and spaghetti seemed cumbersome. Take a sip, it’s tomato.”
I rest the soup on my raised knees and give her a sad smile. “Thank you.”
“So you lost the perfect guy and the perfect movie?”
“You’re great at this,” I say.
“Drink your soup.”
I take a sip, and it tastes like comfort, warm and thick. “Jack laughed at me and said no. He also reminded me that I’m not compelling.”
“Compelling?”
“Yep. Also, not attractive. But it was the compelling thing that took me down.”
“Because you believe it.”
“It doesn’t matter if I believe it if it’s true. They kept me in the background on TV. When it was my voice they needed, they knew the song wouldn’t be a hit if I was attached to it. They knew before I did.”
“This isn’t about Pop Rocks,” Clem says.
I take another sip of my soup. It’s the only thing I’ve eaten today, and my stomach wakes up and rumbles.
“I know,” I say.
Clem turns to me. “I’m going to say it out loud. Okay?”
I nod.
“You ruined your mom’s life by not being compelling enough to love. That’s it, right? That’s the whole story you’re stuck on.”
I don’t say anything.
“You’ve been fostering that story as long as I’ve known you, tending to it like a pet. It controls so many things about your life, and I have a feeling it’s torpedoed your chance of love. And the only reason that story has this power is because you keep it chained up inside. You’ve got to talk to your mom, stop all this bullshit. I bet the truth about your dad’s leaving is more complicated than you not being the world’s most compelling five-year-old.”
I rest my head on her shoulder because I really am so, so tired. Tired from travel, tired from crying. I’m tired from staying up all night with Dan.
“I don’t know how to talk to my mom about this. I feel like it would break something between us. It terrifies me.”
“I know.”
“I blew up at Dan.”
Clem gives me a tight-lipped look like she’s trying not to say something.
“What,” I say.
“The movie was a long shot. But the Dan thing sounded real. What did he do?”
“Told me to face the truth.” I let out a hard laugh.
She raises her eyebrows but has the grace not to say anything.
“I hold on to a lot of shame,” I say. “Like it sneaks up on me.”
“Yes, you hold on to it really tight, like it’s your identity.”
I feel that sentence right in my heart, like a sharp, quick fist.
“In other news, Mom’s in love again, so.” I take a sip of hot soup.
“Sometimes love is totally illogical.”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t say more because I don’t want to hear the sound of my voice talking about how it was with Dan, how relaxed I got and how happy I felt just pedaling a bike by his side. I could be funny or quiet or bad at water- colors, and it was all the same to him. And I think about my Manifest a Solid Partner project and all the guys who I just couldn’t get into a natural rhythm with. It wasn’t necessarily something wrong between us—those guys never even met me. They all felt like cardboard because I was cardboard with them.
“There’s a version of me that’s better than the version of me that I show the world,” I say after a while.
“It’s the version I see,” says Clem. “The first time we met, remember we couldn’t stop laughing? I saw who you were right away. And now, I mean, you put on your costume and get in your Lexus and chase a life that you think is going to make everything okay. And the truth is that one day the hostess at the Ivy is going to know who you are, maybe she’ll even escort you to Scorsese’s table, and it’s still not going to change the fact that your dad left.” She puts her arm around me and pulls me close. We’re quiet for a while and watch the fireflies. There’s a palm tree in the backyard of the house across the street. It towers over the neighborhood on its impossibly thin trunk, the secret of its deep, deep roots below the ground.
“Do you want to talk about Dan?” she asks after a while. “The whole week feels like a dream now. The kind you wake up from and slam your eyes shut so you can go back again.”
“So you’re going to go back? It all sounded pretty great.”
“I was myself with him, like it was so easy. I just said the first thing that popped into my head. And I was funny. For some reason, that was okay.” I take a sip of my hot soup. Clem’s watching me because she knows there’s more. “But there’s so much of me that’s broken. It’s a matter of time before he sees all that and bolts anyway.”
Clem gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Ah, your favorite story,” she says.