Chapter 8 Some Things Can’t Be Faked #2
Beside her, Virginia stares straight ahead.
Virginia, who confesses every time she eats food that belongs to one of her roommates, and cannot pull pranks.
The usher, satisfied, walks backward up the aisle, keeping his eye on the screen.
The corner of his mouth tricks into a smile right as the audience laughs, and with that, he surveys the crowd, pleased, as if he, personally, is responsible for their joy.
“Shoot. Powder room,” Virginia says, standing up. “Don’t let it start without me.”
When she’s gone, Susan whispers to Frankie, “Fred wouldn’t see this with her. I don’t know if it’s because she’s in love with Jack Sawyer, or because he is.”
“Fred?” Virginia’s fiancé, a quiet man with a receding hairline. He’s a middle manager at the studio and someone always looking for a way up. Virginia, who works for one of the top executives at the studio, could be the closest he’ll come to a promotion, is the way Frankie sees it.
Susan raises a brow. “You never heard her complain when she doesn’t hear from him, sometimes for days?
It happens a lot, Frankie. Nights he claims he didn’t hear the phone or went to bed early.
And that group of guys from his college that he’s close with—something doesn’t sit right there.
But don’t get me wrong, I think Fred loves Virginia, and I think he’ll always be good to her and she’ll have the life she wants, but I’m guessing he bats for the other team. So, if that’s important—”
“If?” Frankie asks.
“There’s not just one way to lead a good life. Not everyone gets handed a house to live in all by themselves.” Before Frankie can protest and inform her that she earned the house, Susan continues. “And really, being alone isn’t everyone’s goal.”
“The goal isn’t to be alone. It’s to be able to be alone.”
Susan smiles. “I’m not sure you’ve helped your case.”
Virginia makes it back just in time, and the audience cheers as the opening credits roll.
First on screen is June, radiant with blond hair so light it looks white, like spun sugar. “She’s practically transparent,” Susan whispers to Frankie.
But Frankie’s bracing to see Jack, and when he appears, it feels as though a hole has opened up in the center of her chest. Because she remembers when he filmed this, remembers him learning the lines.
She mouths one along with him—She’s one of those gals who holds your hand while she stomps on your heart—and as she does, they’re back in his kitchen in Venice, twirling spaghetti around their forks.
The night was hot and the windows were open, the scent of seaweed and salt in the air.
But then he stops being Jack. His talent catches even her off guard, and at one point she realizes she managed to forget him, that for a whole chunk of the movie she’s watched a man whose obsession with a married woman grows and grows, a married woman who will end up dead.
The victim’s husband will wake on Christmas morning to find a present from his dead wife that leads to the arrest of Jack’s character, Charles.
Love, or obsession? Either way, Charles couldn’t handle her with someone else.
Truly, Jack is phenomenal, everything about him transformed.
Even his breathing is different—faster, more panicked inhalations, something Frankie wonders if anyone else has noticed.
Curious, she looks around the theatre, at faces that shine with the shifting light, entranced.
Then the Christmas-morning scene begins.
Frankie takes in the giant tree and flickering candles, all the presents and the garlands, and instead sees a family her mother worked for when Frankie was eight years old, a rich family who lived on Lexington Avenue in a house with crimson damask-silk walls and domed ceilings.
Christmas Day, Fiona had to work, to clean up after the morning chaos and ready the family for a dinner they were hosting that night.
As she often did, Frankie went along, the two entering the house through the service entrance in the back.
Though usually she trailed her mother, this time she saw something in the foyer: the Christmas tree.
While her mother bent over a stain in the rug—Cranberries?
Is that what this is?—Frankie stood before the grand fir, looking up.
It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
As tall as street signs, as tall as the double-faced cast-iron sidewalk clock on Fifth.
A tree like this should not be in a house, but there it was, draped in red velvet ribbons, dotted with candles on its boughs. It smelled cold and warm all at once.
“Santa brought me Kewpie dolls and Crayola crayons so I can draw,” a girl said, “and a wagon and a tricycle, but Mother says that’s for when I’m bigger.
” She was a couple of years younger than Frankie, and had a blue-and-purple stain on the corner of her mouth as if she’d been sucking on a colorful lollipop.
Frankie didn’t see what was under the tree until that moment: crumpled-up wrapping paper, discarded ribbons, and presents. So many presents.
“You mean your parents,” Frankie said. That morning, she’d unwrapped her present from Santa: two Clark candy bars, wrapped in silver foil. “Santa brings one present.”
The second she spoke, Frankie knew she was in trouble. Not only was she correcting someone, but that someone lived in this house. And more than that, Frankie wasn’t supposed to leave her mother’s side. Everything about this was forbidden.
The girl didn’t seem to care about any of that, though.
She shook her head and said no, she meant Santa, because she holds their dog’s leash and she made up her bed and held the door open for this lady at church who smells.
“Santa writes it all down,” the girl informed Frankie.
“If you only got one present, it’s because you weren’t good. You didn’t deserve as much.”
Frankie never saw her mother enter the room.
All at once, she was jerked away, and in that moment, Frankie knew it was true: She was not good.
She’d wandered where she shouldn’t have, and she’d spoken out of turn.
But somehow Fiona was pushing Frankie behind her, and facing the little girl.
Leaning down, her mother let her voice drop to a low hiss.
“Not one thing under that tree is because you’re good, and you’re certainly not better than my daughter.
What you are is spoiled. All of that is from your parents, because there’s no such thing as Santa. ”
In that second, the day blazed into gold.
Later, Frankie realized there wasn’t even a moment when she considered or cared about Santa, nor did it occur to her that this exchange was an axe to her mother’s job.
All that mattered was the look on the girl’s face, the surprise and shock, and the feeling of her mother’s hand in hers as they raced down the street and through Gramercy Park, laughing, faster, faster.
It was the first time she’d ever run with her mother.
It was the last time she’d ever run with her mother.
“Frankie,” Virginia is saying. “Frankie, the lights are on. It’s over.”
She tries to leave her mother in the park, to not think about when they slowed down and reality caught up.
The look on her mother’s face: someone trying to be brave.
Fiona, who’d taken on an unnecessary expense by adopting Frankie, who worked hard and got nothing in return.
Nothing but an overworked heart that would one day stop as if it had simply reached a limit.
The lobby is bright and blaring. Frankie passes the concession stand in a daze, and in the car, she barely hears Susan, who won’t stop rehashing scenes, starting almost every sentence with: And then. Beside her, Virginia is strangely quiet.
“And then, when he realized he could frame the husband—oh my God, I never knew I could hate Jack Sawyer, but wow, so believable as a creep who just couldn’t let someone else have the woman he loved.
And then, and then, when the husband opened the present?
It was like a message from the grave. And you know what?
I don’t know that I’d kick Jack Sawyer to the curb, even if he was guilty.
That scene with him and the punching bag, my God, his muscles.
Imagine loving someone so much that you can’t let anyone else have them and you’d rather they be dead than with someone else. ”
Frankie, finally emerging from her own past, from missing her mother, says, “You mean Jack Sawyer’s character, Charles. You wouldn’t kick Charles to the curb.”
Susan laughs. “Sure, that’s what I mean.”
“Virginia,” Frankie says, noticing her other roommate’s silence. “You didn’t like it?”
Now even Susan quiets, both hands on the steering wheel, concentrated. Because Virginia’s one of Jack’s biggest fans, and should be raving about the film.
“I loved it,” Virginia says.
Frankie’s confused. “Then—”
“Fred doesn’t look at me like that. The way Jack looks at June.”
Again, not the way Jack’s character looked at June’s character, but they, themselves. For people to love them, they need to feel that they know them, Nico’s said. It’s part of celebrity, that false familiarity.
“You just don’t see the way Fred looks at you,” Susan says, and Frankie meets her gaze in the rearview mirror.
Even the thought of Jack looking at her makes Frankie’s skin warm. The way he observes her. How he anticipates everything. And then she remembers his bitter words: You’ve got your priorities, don’t you?
Virginia twists around in her seat. “Frankie, when you don’t say anything, alarm bells go off.”
I’m guessing he bats for the other team. “All that matters is how you feel about it.”
“He’s my best friend. But we’ve been together for so long. I don’t get chills anymore. When he touches me? You can see the electricity between Jack and June. They can’t hide it.”
“They’re acting,” Frankie says, aware there’s an almost defensive note in her voice.
But Virginia shakes her head. “Some things can’t be faked.” Then she’s back to looking out the window, headlights streaking her face.