Postcards from the Edge

A Banquet of Crumbs

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was in a production meeting. Did my secretary call you?”

“She did,” she said. “It’s all right, I brought my book.”

“What are you reading?” he said. “Maybe I can option it. Oh, great. Siddhartha.”

“Actually, I’m re-reading it,” she said.

“A smart actress,” he said. “I love it. What’s your IQ? Mine’s one forty-eight.”

“A genius producer,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “For all the good it does me in this town.”

“I love that they call it a ‘town,’” she said. “I imagine there’s like a dry goods store, and a clock tower, and a postman: ‘Hey, good mornin’, Mr. Phelps, how are ya? How’s that rheumatism?’ The ‘town’ of Hollywood. Tinseltown. ‘Howdy, I’m the mayor of Tinseltown, and I’m here to welcome you to our fair city. How are ya?’”

“Funny, too,” he said. “Andrea was right. I’m gonna like you.”

“So,” she said. “Do you remember your college board scores, too?”

“Six ninety-six on the English,” he said. “Seven sixty-six on the math. I went out with this girl once who told me she wanted to stick her tongue in my mouth to get closer to my brain. She was a bimbo.”

“How did you meet Andrea?” she said.

“Through Candy,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, she’s great,” she said. “When I was little, I always wanted to look like her. You know, growing up in L.A., there’s such an emphasis on looks. I mean, even in school, I decided what I was gonna wear the next day before I did my homework. There was this girl in my class, Beth Ann Finnerman, whose knee socks always stayed up, and mine seemed to sort of rumple toward the ankles. And I really thought my life would be better if I could do things like have my knee socks stay up.”

“Well,” he said. “You look fine to me.”

“I’ve recently found,” she said, “that to keep up my appearance, it has to be through health. I used to think this was corny, but I guess ‘healthy’ equals ‘attractive’ now, you know?”

“Should we order?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I realize I’m talking a lot, but I don’t want you to think I’m nervous. Maybe I am, but I don’t want you to think I am. I skipped lunch today, and whenever I do that I get really wanged out. Also, I should tell you that I’m on Pritikin. My cholesterol is way up. I could have steamed vegetables or a little protein, like chicken. I mean, I’m not like a fanatic, I’m just trying out the Pritikin thing. Anyway, I don’t go totally over the edge with this, but I do like to know. To be educated in these things, so when I do choose to eat a refined sugar or an oil or an animal fat product, I at least know what I’m doing. That I’m turning my arteries to pizza. And no eggs, ever.”

“You don’t—” he said.

“Oh, and I haven’t had any caffeine since I started meditating a week ago,” she said.

“You don’t have any eating disorders, do you?” he said.

“Actually, I’m a failed anorexic,” she said. “I have anorexic thinking, but I can’t seem to muster the behavior.”

“I dated a girl for a while,” he said. “It turned out she was bulimic, which I didn’t know at the time, but she had a great body. I guess that’s how she did it.”

“I could never be bulimic,” she said. “I could never make myself throw up.”

“You’re so open,” he said. “I like that.”

“In a woman?” she said. “Listen, it’s too complicated to order something special. We’re at Pasta Hello, I’ll just have the lasagna.”

“You’re sure?” he said. “Great. Waiter, two lasagnas, a Heineken, and… ?”

“Diet Coke,” she said.

“And one Diet Coke,” he said. “Thanks. You know, it’s interesting, you mentioned meditating. A transcendental state on an intense person must be really interesting. I wouldn’t think I’d be one to have a mild transcendental experience. I think I’d go straight for satori. I’ve done some reading on Zen. Certainly, if you could get it through reading, I would have it. Of course, if you go by Zen, it always comes down to, ‘I could make the movie, or not.’ That whole ‘or not’ thing. It’s like, how many Buddhists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Fourteen—seven to do it, and seven not to.”

“Did you hear about the Polish starlet who came to Hollywood?” she said. “She slept with all the writers.”

“Yeah, I know that one,” he said. “I love it. Before I forget, I’ve always thought you had a tremendous quality. I loved you in Mist on the Lake, particularly that scene when you’re standing on the cliff in that diaphanous dress and all that hair, just staring. I gotta tell you, I got hard. And not from your cleavage, from your performance. I mean, you were even good in Porky’s Nerds, and I would have said that was impossible. So, I mean, we’re not talking Pia Zadora here. You’ve got good chops. How did a smart girl like you wind up acting?”

“My shrink, Norma, says it has something to do with not getting enough affection as a child,” she said. “So I’m trying to make up for it by getting as much attention as I can now. That’s why I have a very seductive nature. Because, you know, you go off on a lot of calls, and you meet people for a brief period of time, and it’s very important to cram your entire personality into that meeting so they’ll really want you for the job. Even after you get successful it never gets any easier. You always have to please people. Fill their every possible fantasy about you. And you can never show that it’s hard, so you’re always looking like you’re having the best time, and everybody thinks they’re your soulmate. And you don’t feel comfortable with anybody.”

“Producers have to meet people and pretend we like them,” he said. “Put them at ease. Everybody becomes more sensitive to other people’s feelings and desensitized to their own.”

“You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood,” she said, “because everybody does the fake closeness so well. Your phone rings all the time and you have all these friends, and you feel like if you were a little less successful, they would never call you.”

“I know just what you mean,” he said. “For years I went to hookers, because, let’s face it, I’m a very successful producer and writer, and I’m thinking of directing—Columbia really wants me to do a picture for them and direct it, and I feel it’s the right time. I mean, I’m certainly developing films I feel I could direct. There’s this one about high school that—Anyway, I’ve been doing this for a while now, and people might like me for my money. So I figured, if someone’s gonna like me for my money, it might as well be a hooker, who’s gonna like me for my money anyway. There was this girl, though. I don’t know that we were in a committed relationship, but we went out for a while. But, you know, I saw other people. It’s hard for me to… I don’t know why, I think… When you grow up the way I did, maybe…”

“You have an intimacy problem,” she said.

“It’s not that I have an intimacy problem,” he said. “I just don’t want to be intimate. I don’t see the point. I mean, I’m very involved in my career and… It’s not really that I don’t want to be intimate. I don’t want to be committed. I don’t know, I suppose that’s finally just an excuse. My lawyer says I am afraid of any real involvement. He lives with a girl, and it just looks like, what’s the point? I don’t really know what the point is. I love sex, don’t get me wrong. One could even go so far as to say I’m compulsive about sex. I mean, I hope you don’t think I’m blunt—I’m sort of known for my bluntness—but, you know, I’d like to have sex with you. I mean, you seem like someone who’d be great to have sex with.”

“How romantic,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m cold. I’ve recently noticed a coldness about myself that scares me. It scares me that I don’t really care about much but my work. I guess you could say I’m a workaholic. If I wasn’t a producer I’d be a football coach, ’cause it’s so intense. I need intensity, I thrive on it, I am it. So I love environments that complement me. I can relax at a Bruce Springsteen concert. In the middle of that kind of energy, I can relax. I would have been great in the army, I think, as long as… Well, I wouldn’t have liked being wounded, I don’t like pain. Which I know doesn’t make me unusual.”

“But you thought you might mention it,” she said, “in case I was thinking of stabbing you with my fork.”

“Anyway, I’d like to want a relationship,” he said, “because everybody else does, and it looks nice.”

“Intimacy to me is two people sitting in front of a candle listening to important music nude,” she said. “Thinking it means something that you both love the same video and neither of you could finish The Sot-Weed Factor. I was out with someone the other day and I said I didn’t like sushi. I called it ‘whale gums,’ and he said, ‘Really? You don’t like it? I hate it, too.’ And it was like he was saying, ‘Finally! Somebody who understands me!’”

“We live in America,” he said. “Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.”

“There’s usually one thing that targets somebody for you,” she said. “Like, he says something nasty about shrinks, and you say, ‘Oh, you don’t like shrinks? I think they’re awful, too. You can do it yourself, everyone did for years. What did the pioneers do? I can’t cut down that tree, I’ve got a noon appointment with my therapist? My shrink told me killing Indians was acting out aggression?’”

“I’ve noticed that people who admit they’re lonely and angry tend to clump together,” he said. “Like that’s enough of a common denominator. A little club of dissatisfied people filled with angst. Phi Beta Rage.”

“Phi Beta Rage,” she said. “I’m stealing that.”

“When you first meet someone on that first date, all the emergency adrenaline is there,” he said. “You bring out your best material as though you do it all the time. As though this is just a natural environment for the great parts of your personality to come through. And it’s not. It’s totally forced.”

“I went out with this senator,” she said, “who kept saying, ‘You are so terrific, what a great girl you are.’ And I thought, ‘Well, shut up about it!’ He was telling me what he thought I needed to hear, rather than what he really felt to be true. And if he really felt it to be true, I would know. I would be able to glean that he thought that. Anyway, I know I’m a terrific girl. I don’t want to be a terrific girl. That’s what I am for auditions. I want to be something else to someone.”

“When the actors come in on my pictures, my heart goes out to them,” he said. “I started out as an actor. I went to acting college, Jeff Bridges was in my class. In fact, I’ve been in a couple of my movies. I think I’m a natural performer. My father was a preacher, so I got that kind of energy from him. A lot of preachers’ sons are actors—Olivier, I mean, you could name a few of them. Anyway, I do all the readings with the actresses. I’m surprised you never came in to read with me.”

“I read for you six years ago,” she said. “You were very nice, but you seemed preoccupied. It was a huge call.”

“Really?” he said. “I would have thought I’d have remembered someone like you. Wait, was that on Why Is Ruth Dead? I was doing a lot of cocaine then. I read that you were in a clinic recently, so I figure you know what I mean. I never got into free-base, but I was… I was taking a lot of cocaine. And I really, you know, I like cocaine. I had to stop ’cause I was having anxiety attacks. Still, I would think I would have remembered you, because you’re very attractive and mainly because you’re bright. It’s this new thing I’ve been saying lately—I don’t mean to quote myself, but if I don’t, maybe no one else will. In India they say that the body is the envelope of the spirit, and the spirit, I guess, is essentially who you are. Well, we live in a city of envelopes. The thing that’s terrific about you is that you are a letter. I mean, it takes a letter to know a letter, and I can see we’re really two letters in a town of envelopes—”

“‘The envelope, please,’” she said.

“—so when you find someone who actually has an interesting letter, you want to read it,” he said. “The only problem is, you’ve gotten so conditioned to reading your own mail, so immersed in the letterness of it all, you just… Sometimes I think maybe I’ve met Her, and I just can’t see her because I’m so busy looking at myself to see if I look all right in case she should arrive.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “Sometimes I’m with a guy and I think, ‘I love this person. This is it.’ But who I love is who I am when I’m with him, and it has almost nothing to do with him. It’s me having an excuse to just do myself one more time, proving once again I’m bright and I’m funny and I’m powerful and that I can. That I still know how to pour blood in their shark pools.”

“I envy people meeting me for the first time,” he said. “That first meeting is everything, because I can watch their eyes and see it all happen, and I want to be them. I want to meet somebody like me.”

“What I do,” she said, “is, as soon as I know they’re devoted, I start to find fault with them. It’s not that I find fault with them, really. It’s the Sleeping Giant in my system who wakes up with a ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum!’ and says, ‘Yecchh! Look at that hair.’ Or, ‘Oh my God, did you hear the stupid thing he said?’ The Sleeping Giant who knows no pity is hungry for faults, he hunts them like Easter eggs. But the Giant does this. I like them. I feel bad that the Giant is gonna do it. There’s something in me that wants to warn them, ‘Please don’t be stupid,’ like people can help it. And then the Giant says, ‘He’s not good enough.’ And the thing is, I truly—the Sleeping Giant doesn’t—but I truly care about people. Now, sometimes I don’t show compassion but, I mean, I walk around with it. I’m devastated when teams lose in sports. I want to kill myself when they show the faces of the losing team. I know how it feels. I mean, I can barely squash bugs unless I feel directly threatened.”

“My problem is, I only know how to need needy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody who was all right. They could be wearing a sign, ‘I have no problems, you can believe me,’ and I wouldn’t even see them.”

“The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure,” she said. “My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they’re not there. Once you get this routine thing going, you have to take a lot of vacations, so there’s a constant renewal or harking back. When you see them, it’s like your favorite song that was number one that you almost got sick of. It’s been off the radio for a while, and then you hear it one day and it’s like, ‘Oh, greeaatt! How great to hear this again!’ That’s people for me.”

“To me, it’s finding yourself in everybody,” he said. “But not enough of you to stay with any one person. There’s so much of yourself, you’re so many-sided. I had a guy in India come up to me on his skateboard and say, ‘My brother, my brother.’ It haunted me that he called me his brother, and then I thought, ‘Yes. Yes! I see that, of course.’ And so if I can find me in a leper… I’m looking for myself and I find me everywhere. Just not enough to make a difference.”

“I don’t know what I want to find anymore,” she said. “I’ve gotten so involved in searching. I’ve done it for so long it does me. The genesis was truly to find someone, was truly to make an impact, to bond. The difference now is that since I’ve never found it, I proceed as if I never will. Now I’m just into looking, not finding. Winning, not the prize. And the prize is the winning, maybe just the three minutes when you’ve actually won. That’s why the sweetness of the sexual contact is perfect, but it can only be a disappointment afterward. Because all you wanted to do was get there, not be there. All you wanted to do was want, but not have. As soon as you fuck, it’s over. As soon as you fuck.”

“You should see my house,” he said. “I think of it as my bear cave. I like to keep it sort of damp and cool and dark. I’m a creature of habit, that’s why I liked cocaine. There was such a heavy ritual attached to it. So without it, I’ve intensified my rituals in other areas. They’re not all fun, either. I don’t like brushing my teeth, for example—it seems to just hold up the whole process—but I do it anyway. If I waited to like everything I did, I don’t know that I would ever do anything, except talk about what I wasn’t gonna do. So now I’ve decided I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. I don’t have to want to, I just have to go. So I show up. I do love to shave, though. I love to clip my beard and put after-shave on it. And I love the exercise guy to come over. I have a certain terry-cloth robe I wear in the morning after my shower—”

“The Robe Warrior,” she said.

“—and,” he said, “I have another one with another kind of material, I don’t even know what it is, that I wear at night. I have certain sheets that I adore. Pratesi. Italian sheets, the softest, softest sheets. I used to think I would love to loan my sheets out to a clean Norwegian family for three years, and then they’d give them back all beaten in. But now I buy them like that. You know, and I have my alarm clock, and everything is just so. I know it sounds anal, but I take real pleasure in the details of my life, in just putting things where they belong. I guess I am anal. It just gives me a great deal of pleasure. You should see my house.”

“You’re not in a high-risk group, are you?” she said.

“That’s very funny,” he said.

“Remember at our last session when you said that maybe I shouldn’t date for a while? Until we’d worked more on my awareness in this area? Well, how long do you think ‘for a while’ is?

“Not that I’ve been dating, but I just wondered how long till you think it’s okay? I mean, I know it’s not okay yet, I haven’t been dating, but I did go out with somebody. A couple of… three times. I tried to call you—well, I wanted to call you, but you were out of town. So I figured there wouldn’t be any big harm in going on a little date.

“The thing is, he’s another interesting guy, and that’s what I’m drawn to. I know boring men are the ones to go for, but all I can see is the light glinting off the edges of the interesting ones. And, of course, ‘interesting’ means ‘problems.’ I don’t even think, ‘This time it’s going to be different’ anymore. I think, ‘This time it’ll be the same, in a different way.’

“Anyway, my friend Andrea set me up with him. He’s a producer, very successful and attractive and all that. I met him for dinner and we had a nice time. He’s very intense—between him and me there wasn’t a whole lot of dead air. The thing about this guy is, I found him not dissimilar to me. We have a similar attack, similar appetites. Well, he’s more into the sexual appetite thing. I’ve never been good in that area, as you know. I always feel I’m out of my element. I don’t know what I’m doing there. Every time I’m in sex, I feel like, ‘How did I end up here?’ That’s why I like to avoid it as much as possible.

“So I met him and we had dinner, and I really felt like he understood me, or at least like he might if he ever stopped talking. I mean, this guy was like the testosterone version of me, and I’m the testosterone version of me, so it was really weird. It was like being with more of myself. You’d think I’d have had enough of myself, but anyway, we had a nice time, and then he wanted me to see his house. I guess I should have known…

“And I didn’t even have contraception. What was I going to do, wear my diaphragm to the restaurant? It’s so embarrassing when they know you knew it was going to be sex. It’s like, sometimes I try to be contemporary and modern, and on some level I just don’t agree with anything I’m doing. So I told him I wasn’t comfortable having sex with people I’d just met, and he seemed to get it. He said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

“So I stayed over, and we necked for a while and it was nice. At one point we were kissing, and he said, ‘This would be a great shot of you.’ He told me that when he was in India he looked at the Himalayas and said, ‘Great shot!’ And he was there. It’s like we don’t know we’re there anymore. We’re so detached from our own experience, and so into how we can use that experience. As we’re having it, we’re putting it into another medium. Life is the largest medium we’ve got, and we want to put it in these smaller ones, to get it down to scale…

“Anyway, I stayed over, and then in the morning I felt like he was distant from me. He was still being nice, but he seemed… I don’t know, I mean, it was the morning so a little distance is understandable, but I thought I felt him moving away, which instantly made him incredibly attractive, and we had sex. I made him breakfast, which I told him I never usually did, but I kept telling him I never usually did everything I was doing. It wasn’t a brilliant breakfast—the eggs were brown and I burned the first two pieces of bacon. I can’t seem to time food to end together.

“Then he went off to edit his new movie, Ziz!, and I went home. By the end of the day I’d talked to most of my friends… Sometimes I’m not sure I even have any friends. I may just have a large group of people that I tell everything to. It’s like I’ve made intimacy a superficial gesture. Anyway, their consensus was, ‘Watch out, he’s a known sex addict, he fucks everybody.’

“And I acknowledged that, but deep down—and you don’t get too far deep down with me, because I’ve thrust all the deep down right up to the surface—but somewhere in me, I just thought… It’s like when I was younger and I used to fall in love with homosexuals, because they had rejected me before they even met me. Womanizers don’t reject you, but they accept you in a rejecting way, so it’s similar. And just like I used to think with gay men, I thought, ‘I’ll be the one who makes a difference.’ I don’t mean that I’ll have a relationship with him, necessarily. I don’t allow myself to hope for that much, but I guess underneath my nonhoping is the hoping thing…

“I wish you’d been here last week, because maybe if I had talked to you, you might have helped me to not have sex with him. Because I couldn’t seem to not have sex with him on my own. I need people to encourage me not to. Could we just work real hard in this area? Saturate ourselves with work on this, like when they stepped up the bombing and escalated the war in Vietnam? Let’s escalate the war on this area of my life, and if we can’t make me better, can we at least make me not care that I’m not better?

“Anyway, I knew I should probably cool it. I knew he was supposed to go to this Jackson Hole Film Festival on the weekend, and I didn’t want him to catch me wanting to do something with him, so I made up some story about visiting friends in Napa. On Monday he called just before ten, and we went to lunch, and then we had sex at my house. He likes my house. He was very nice, and I kept thinking I had to try and look indifferent, which was weird, because on some level I am indifferent to him. I mean, he’s cute and he’s powerful and all that, but you have to take his reputation into account. He’s a former cocaine addict and he fucks whores.

“But we have these great talks. It’s like we talk about the real issues as if we’re talking about the weather. And he said he couldn’t see me that night because he was meeting with this rock group, Bad Hetero, about the title song for his film. And then you weren’t back yet, so I went to Santa Barbara just to get away and not think about him. Or maybe just to get away and only think about him. I guess you could say I was obsessed with him.

“In the parking lot at the hotel a few days later, I ran into this film editor, Evelyn Ames, who I’ve known from parties for years. This is a real wild girl, and she enjoys her reputation, or at least she keeps up the pretense that she does. Somebody has to enjoy her reputation besides the guys.

“So we went to lunch, and in the course of talking to her, I mentioned I’d met this guy, Jack Burroughs—his name is Jack Burroughs—and I sort of asked if she’d ever slept with him. I don’t know her well, but she’s somebody you don’t have to know that well in order to ask something like that.

“She said, ‘Yeah, I slept with him.’ She asked me, ‘Did he make you do this?’ and she drew her knees back over her head right there at the table, and I said, ‘No.’ And I thought, if that’s the only way he demonstrated his respect for me, I guess that’s something. She also said that while he was with her, he talked about another girl he was going to fly in from Boston who had really soft skin. He rubbed her skin and talked about this other girl’s skin.

“Then she said that she had, in fact, seen him quite recently. It turned out she’d been with him Monday night, after he’d been with me Monday afternoon. I thought, God, this girl is a lot of girl, and to need two lots of girls in one day is… The phrase ‘out of control’ did cross my mind. And she felt bad that she’d told me all this stuff, so she said, ‘He probably really likes you. We just fuck, and he talks about other girls while he’s inside me.’

“So I thought, I should just stop this. I mean, it’s humiliating to run into someone who’s been with a guy you’ve been with on the same day you were with him. I was furious. When I was driving home I made this hard right turn and the wheels sort of lifted off the road, and I imagined having an accident and being taken to the hospital, and him coming to visit and me having him thrown out of my room. And I thought, I’m really out of the box now.

“Then, when I got home, I got a call from my business manager, Charlie, who wanted to know if it was true that I was dating this guy. I said, ‘Well, I would hardly call it dating. Why do you ask?’ And he said a friend of his had gone out with this guy Tuesday night, and that he’d told her he was seeing me. So that was three in two days or something—and those are just the ones I heard about. Imagine what I could pick up about him if I got one of those satellite dishes.

“I wanted to call him and tell him never to call me again, but there was still part of me that cherished the hope that this would make him sorry, and make him realize how much he loves me and what he’ll be missing if he doesn’t marry me. I felt like a total jerk for thinking this, but it’s like I’ve been genetically tampered with. I was born imagining myself with an apron on, with pies cooling on the window sill and babies crying upstairs. I thought that all that stuff would somehow anchor me to the planet, that it was the weight I needed to keep from just flying off into space.

“So I called him up and tried to make a little joke about the situation, and he jumped on me. He said, ‘Well, this is like the pot calling the kettle black.’ Implying that just because I’ve slept with these two other people he knows—over a period of five years—and because I slept with him on the morning after our first date, I’m some kind of slut. I guess anybody who slept with him would have to be a slut. So we had this huge fight, and he accused me of having initiated the whole sex thing with him in the first place, and I said, ‘Well, if I initiated it, then I’m stopping it right now. I make a great memory.’ And I hung up.

“When he didn’t call me back, I decided to call him and tell him not to even think about ever calling me again. His machine was on, and he had a one-word message that said, ‘Slut!’ And I freaked out. I mean, I knew it wasn’t just about me, it was about every woman he’s ever been with, and I was lumped in there somewhere. I was so shaken I can’t describe it to you. I imagined him dead, and I left him a message in a very cold voice. But then he called the next morning, and he said that his message didn’t say, ‘Slut!’ It said, ‘What!’ And then I thought, maybe I made this whole thing up. He was being so charming, and maybe he… I mean, he did say the thing about the pot calling the kettle black, but maybe he meant it in some other way.

“I was so confused that I could have made a ‘slut’ out of a ‘what,’ and I knew he’d said some pretty reprehensible things, but now I was thinking, maybe I did, too. And the night before I’d sworn I’d never speak to him again unless he apologized, and he didn’t apologize and yet there we were having this conversation. And I thought, ‘I love this guy,’ and then I thought, ‘No, I don’t, I’ve got a crush on him.’

“He asked me out to lunch, and I said I couldn’t come. I told him I had low self-esteem, not no self-esteem. Then he called me that night and joked about how we’d broken up. He asked what I was wearing, and I told him I had on a huge ball gown with bowling shoes and a scuba mask and a red wig, and no underwear. We were very funny, and it was like it was new again, only it hadn’t had that much time to get old. But it had gotten old. We had taken it to its illogical conclusion, but it wasn’t finished.

“On Sunday afternoon he called to ask if he could come over that night and watch this awards show with me, and I said okay. I was still keeping a little bit cool, which I’m sure attracted him. He can’t resist people who can resist him. So he came over and we heated up food badly together, and he said he’d missed me and it was great. So he slept over again, and we had some sex.

“This time, though, he got away with a shatteringly low amount of foreplay. In fact, he told me this joke: What is Irish foreplay? It’s when the guy says, ‘Brace yourself, Bridget.’ Then he wanted us to stay in bed all morning, but I had to come here.

“The thing is, I hope I’m not pregnant, because I have a feeling I could get pregnant easily. I mentioned this to him and he said he wouldn’t mind going to the abortion with me if I was. I guess that’s how guys are thoughtful in the eighties—they accompany girls to their abortions. That’s the new manners. It seems so awkward, though, to see each other for a week and then you go and have an abortion together. Maybe I should just have a child…

“What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me, and I just haven’t had enough therapy yet for me to be comfortable with having found him? How long do you think this whole process is going to take? Do you think we should have double-length sessions? It’s like, not only am I changing cabins on the Titanic, I’m dating the crew.

“Maybe I should be coming every day…”

“There’s a lot of pressure to get this new film done in time for Christmas. And what I do when I have a lot of work pressure is, I try to relax, and how I like to relax is… Well, I used to like to get loaded, but now I like to go out with women. Certainly this comes as no shock to you after all these years. I’m not looking for a girlfriend, but I’m going out with girls and keeping my mind open to the right girl if I could meet one.

“It really pisses me off, I met this one girl last week, this actress, Suzanne Vale, and… You know, I’m very up-front about not wanting to get into a committed thing. And girls always go along with this at first, and then suddenly they’re into this relationship thing. Right away it’s ‘Who else are you seeing?’ And if you’re seeing anyone else they call you promiscuous, or a womanizer. I hardly think that sleeping with two or three, maybe four girls a week—rarely more than four—makes me a ‘womanizer.’

“I’m very selective. I only go out with certain types of girls: beautiful or voluptuous. And it’s not that I go out with them just to have sex, but I don’t think you should get into a serious relationship without testing out the sex area. I mean, if that doesn’t work… So, I say this to this girl and she says, ‘What do you mean? Is this like a litmus test, and if your dick comes out of her blue then you know you’ve found a girlfriend?’ I mean, that’s absurd! The point I was trying to make is that if the sexual area doesn’t work, then you shouldn’t really pursue any of the other ones, because you can’t really repair it.

“It’s starting to get on my nerves that I have this reputation for being sexually compulsive. I like sex a lot, I admit it. But, you know, I like food a lot, too, and nobody calls me a foodaholic. I just don’t like that people are always putting a label on you. Women expect you to come on to them. It’s like, if I didn’t, they’d think I was a fag or something. Impotent. Well, it’s not like I couldn’t handle it if somebody thought I was impotent, but I don’t like the idea of people thinking that.

“I’m not defensive, I’m angry. I don’t think I’m defensive. That’s what she said. I don’t know… Everything goes so fast, you know? And I always wait for them to slow it down, and they never do. I thought maybe this girl was going to be different, ’cause she did say she wouldn’t sleep with me right away. She came back to my house, and then she said she wouldn’t sleep with me, and I thought, ‘Well, good. Maybe somebody is finally going to slow the whole proceeding down.’ I could see she was a very intense girl, and everything seemed like it could get very sped up, so I was relieved she was going to be the one to put some brakes on. I don’t know how to do that myself. It’s a skill I’d like to develop, but as of yet I don’t have it, so I usually look to the girls to slow it down. Possibly I should be the one who says, ‘No, no, never mind my boner, let’s not have sex,’ but it’s against my nature. My dick wants what it wants, and then I want what it wants.

“You may be a shrink, but you’re also a guy. You know what I’m talking about. I see a woman mailing a letter, and I see from the way her breast is curved under her sweater that there’s no bra and I want to bend her over a car and have her. You know, you see these movies of prehistoric people who just bend people over and, Bam! I wish it was like that. It’s an appetite men have as mammals, damn it. I’ve always meant to do some more reading on it.

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll be able to have a relationship one day. Or maybe I’m not made for relationships. There are probably some people who aren’t. But, you know, I’m thirty-five now and I’m slowing down… Well, actually I’m not slowing down, I’m just… I’m not slowing down. But I think I should just let my process continue and…

“The thing is, it’s all so interesting. Every part of the sex act is interesting. How they undress, how they look during it, their reaction to it, all of it. And I think I’m really sensitive. It would be hard for me to believe a woman could fake an orgasm with me. I’m that in tune with what’s happening with them, like a safecracker.

“I could write a travel brochure about women’s bodies. I like when a woman is backlit and you can see what’s under her clothes. I like it if she moves a certain way and something is revealed. I like something to suddenly appear that didn’t seem to be there. I like to be surprised in the area of flesh. I don’t necessarily like to be surprised in the area of brain, although I must say this girl did interest me that way. At one point she said something like that I should fuck bimbos and have the cigarette with her, which was a funny line. She says some very funny stuff.

“In another sense, though, she’s the same as all the others. When she said she wouldn’t have sex that first night, I asked her to stay over anyway, thinking that maybe in the morning if I acted a little distant… And sure enough, Bam! Girls just can’t handle that distance business. Even smart girls aren’t so smart about that. And she’s very possessive. I mean, this girl is a little nuts. She called me up one day and I had this very abrupt message—‘What!?!’—on my machine, ’cause I was in a bad mood that day, and she thought it said, ‘Slut!’ She thought I was calling her a slut. I mean, talk about projection.

“I don’t know, I think it’s the wrong time for me to get into a relationship, but maybe something will happen from this. I do like her. Of course, I like to think I’m in love. That’s what gets me through the whole process, so it doesn’t seem cheap. I can’t act like I’m in love unless I am in love, so I become in love each time.

“Sometimes I think I should marry one of them and just fuck around. There are times when I wish I had kids. I just don’t want a wife. I think I need the kind of relationship where if I want to see other women every now and again, the woman I was with would understand it was just a physical thing, and not about loving somebody else. I would certainly be discreet, like I was very discreet when I was with Jill, my last girlfriend. True, she did find out, but not for a long time. And she didn’t leave me because of it. She left me because I gave her crabs—remember? That was the final thing, that I gave her crabs…

“Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe that isn’t the right way to have a relationship. It’s just that I get very claustrophobic and…

“Here’s what I think. I think my areas of expertise are areas of expertise because I do them to excess. I’m expert at my work because I do it to excess. And I think that if I’m finally able to have a relationship, it will be because I do it to excess. It’s almost as if I’m working at it, but it’s a pleasure doing that kind of business. The trouble is, this girl leveled a couple of accusations that really… I don’t think they hit home, but they hit near home. They certainly hit my neighborhood, and I don’t like that.

“I don’t know if I should see her anymore. I mean, we’re talking about someone who’s smart and funny and has great skin and great tits—you know how I love tits—and a great ass and a perfect pussy, but you never know. I mean, she’s great, but there could be a better one. Maybe somebody like me dies looking for the perfect one. I wish I could look and see it all in one girl. I wish I could stay with that one girl and not feel suffocated, not feel frightened of my need, or repelled by it, or whatever.

“It’s like there are so many different facets to each of them, and it’s always interesting, but it’s never interesting for long. This girl’s flaw is that she’s a woman, one woman. She’s only one woman, not all of them. And she’s gonna act like one woman. She’s gonna do all that stuff where she needs me, or she yells at me, or she wants me to be something I’m not. Not that I would respect a woman who accepted me like this. She said something funny, she said, ‘If I could make a man, I’d make him just like you and then I’d try to change him.’ I thought that was pretty self-aware.

“I just don’t like all that nosing around, you know? Where they count the days since you called, and they know exactly what you said you’d be doing, and they remind you of it when you say you did something else? I mean, I think I’m a sensitive guy, but I can’t watch everything I say all the time. I can’t just take care of them all the time. It’s too much responsibility, I’m not ready for that. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.

“At this point, I’d rather make good films than a good home. I’m not saying this is an ideal outlook, I’m just saying it’s how I see things right now. I do think this new picture’s gonna be really good, which will be a drag in a way. Because then, you know, I won’t be able to tell whether women like me for myself or for Ziz!…”

“I was at Helena’s Friday night and I saw George there,” he said. “He was so cold to me I couldn’t believe it.”

“Who were you at Helena’s with?” she said.

“I don’t think… I’m just telling you about George,” he said. “I don’t think that that matters.”

“It’s not that it matters,” she said. “Look, we’ve known each other for three months. I know you don’t see me exclusively, we’ve gone over that. Who were you with?”

“Well, you’ll probably hear about it anyway,” he said. “Charlene Hasselhof.”

“The girl from television?” she said. “The television actress?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Really?” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d go out with somebody from television.”

“Actually, I normally wouldn’t,” he said. “I find it a very limited medium, as you know. But it turns out she’s very… She’s bright. She’s almost as… No, I would just have to say she’s as bright as you are.”

“She’s as bright as I am,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Is she funny?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “she’s not as funny as you, but she is funny. Yeah, she’s funny. I mean, I was very surprised.”

“Why would you tell me this?” she said. “Why would you tell me this?”

“What do you mean?” he said. “You asked me. I thought you’d want to know that there was another smart girl out there.”

“Why?” she said. “Why would you think I would want to know that? What is it about me that looks like I would want to know there are other smart pretty girls? Because I’ll fix it. I’ll change it. Is it something I’m wearing? Is my lip curled in a certain way that says, ‘Got to tell her there’s another bright woman around’? Why would you think I would want to know that a beautiful, gorgeous, supermarket-famous face from television is as bright and funny as I am?”

“I didn’t say she was as bright and funny,” he said. “She’s not as bright. She’s not bright like you. She’s bright in a totally different way.”

“How can she be bright in a different way?” she said. “What is her area of expertise? Is she bright about cooking? Literature? She knows languages?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I really—”

“It’s just so interesting to me,” she said, “that you thought I would want to hear that this beautiful girl is also brilliantly smart and you love her.”

“I don’t love her,” he said. “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation.”

“I’m jealous, okay?” she said. “I admit I am jealous. Look, we don’t have a commitment, but we certainly have an area of commitment, which is that we talk to each other. I mean, we don’t understand each other, but we don’t pretend to understand each other like other people do, and I feel betrayed here. I suppose you talk to her like you talk to me?”

“No, I don’t talk to her,” he said. “In fact—”

“Well, what is she?” she said. “A great fuck?”

“No,” he said. “In fact, we haven’t even fucked yet.”

“Oh, great,” she said. “Great. You respect this one too much to fuck her. You didn’t do that little distance thing in the morning? Or she’s too bright to fall for it?”

“Look, I—” he said.

“You like to have smart girls get stupid over you, don’t you?” she said. “Well, watch out. If they get too stupid, you might as well go back to just boffing bimbos.”

“Look,” he said, “I don’t think we should continue this discussion. I don’t like this side of you.”

“I’m not a box,” she said. “I don’t have sides. This is it. One side fits all. This is it.”

“How did we get on to this?” he said. “Do we need to have this fight? We have an understanding that we don’t have an understanding, and we enjoy it very much. Now I think we should just order some food and have a pleasant evening, if that’s possible.”

“All right, yeah,” she said. “I let myself in for it. I should never have asked you.”

“What do you want to eat?” he said.

“Something bad for me,” she said. “Caffeine and sugar and salt things. French fries, probably some Coke. You know, just stuff that jolts your system. You order.”

“Okay,” he said. “Two cheeseburgers well done, a large order of fries, two Cokes, and whatever other carcinogens you have. Thanks.”

“Oh,” she said, “that guy Gary was going to set me up with called.”

“What guy?” he said.

“I told you,” she said. “Gary was gonna get me a blind date with this friend of his.”

“Really?” he said. “I don’t remember you telling me that. What does he do?”

“He’s a screenwriter,” she said.

“Oh, a screenwriter,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, “he just did a script for Spielberg.”

“Really?” he said. “So you talked to him and…”

“Well,” she said, “he has a huge vocabulary.”

“It sounds like maybe it’s a little too huge,” he said. “I mean, normally you don’t notice people’s vocabularies, do you? It’s like with your teeth. You don’t want people to say, ‘Good caps.’ You want them to think you have a nice smile. A huge vocabulary.”

“No, no, not too huge,” she said. “But he did use two words I didn’t know.”

“Really?” he said. “What words?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I understood the sense of the sentence, but I didn’t know the words.”

“Really?” he said. “So he’s trying to impress you with the way he talks. So, when are you going out with him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He said he’d call me back. He was at his agent’s office and he had to go. I don’t know what he looks like or anything, but he was funny. I told him about the Oedipal thing, about my father leaving when I was very young so I knew how to pine for men, but not how to love them. So he said, ‘You probably would have been perfect for somebody in World War Two. You’d meet him and then he would get shipped overseas.’ And I said, ‘Maybe on our date I could drop you off and you could enlist,’ and he said he would just go out and rent a uniform. So he was very funny.”

“Really?” he said. “That’s funny? I guess that’s funny. You told him that, though? You told him the thing about the pining? Why would you tell him that?”

“Well, he was a very smart guy,” she said. “It was interesting. Gary says this is a great guy. He’s very young.”

“Really?” he said. “How old is he?”

“He’s younger than… he’s thirty-two,” she said. “Gary says he’s real good-looking and he has a great car, like I give a shit about that, but you know… I wonder, you know, what could be the matter with him if he’s available. He’s thirty-two, he’s got all this money, and he’s smart… Why is he alone?”

“Yeah, exactly,” he said. “Why is he alone?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he… Why am I alone? Well, I’m not alone, I’m with you, but really I’m not with you, so, in effect, I’m alone.”

“So, you told this guy a voluminous amount of shit about yourself?” he said. “All this intimate stuff? I thought we reserved that area for this.”

“Honey, we don’t know what this relationship is,” she said. “What is your relationship with the actress?”

“Well, I don’t know what’s happening there, either,” he said.

“You don’t know what’s happening there,” she said. “You don’t know what’s happening here. None of us knows where we stand, so we’re sitting all over the place. Maybe we could all double-date. You’ve got your cutie from TV with the IQ. She’s got TVQ and IQ, this is an extraordinary date for you. And who knows, maybe this guy has more IQ points than you. Oooooo.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “Don’t make fun of me about the IQ thing. I didn’t make fun of your reaction to my thing with Charlene. So, what’s this guy’s name, by the way? Have I ever heard of him? Spielberg. Spielberg has so many projects…”

“His name is Arthur,” she said. “Arthur Soames.”

“Really?” he said. “Oh.”

“Have you heard of him?” she said.

“Yeah, I read a couple of treatments he did,” he said. “They were all right. I mean, he has some raw talent, I suppose. I don’t know.”

“Have you ever met him?” she said. “Is he good-looking?”

“I believe I did meet him,” he said. “I can’t remember that he was that remarkable-looking. I can’t… I don’t want to say, because I feel like I might be prejudiced in this area. I have certain odd feelings of jealousy in this area myself. Not that I… Well, I feel attached to you, let’s say. I feel an attachment to you. I’ve grown accustomed to whatever this is, and I like the ambiguity of it, and yet… Where’s the food? I’m really hungry. Aren’t you hungry? I’m famished. I could eat a—”

“Television star?” she said.

“That’s not funny,” he said. “I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”

“Eddie Samuels said the other day that you sounded just like me in a meeting,” she said.

“Well, we spend a lot of time on the phone,” he said, “but I doubt I sound just like you. We sound like each other a little bit. We talk a lot. I mean, Eddie Samuels is a putz, okay? That’s why he’s a production secretary. He doesn’t know dick about shit.”

“Dick about shit,” she said. “That’s so beautiful. There’s that IQ rearing its ugly head. Hey, my shrink said this great thing this week—”

“Norma the Insight Queen?” he said.

“She said you were my fantasy playmate,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “It sounds like a Playboy title or something. What else does your shrink say?”

“She calls us the Mind-Fuck Twins,” she said. “She says I’m feasting on a banquet of crumbs.”

“Sounds like she should be writing scripts,” he said. “You really think you’re going to a good shrink? Those don’t sound like such enormous insights. I mean, forgive the pun, but I don’t think I’m so crummy to you. I think we have a very modern relationship. I think it’s a reaction to the times. You know, we have no real rules, and we’re both very independent, but certainly we kind of respect one another. In a certain way, I admire you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I admire you, too. I love your work and your eyes. No, I think she was just saying… She actually doesn’t like the idea of me seeing you. She thinks it’s not good for me. She thinks I sort of use you because I would have a lot of difficulty having another kind of relationship.”

“What’s wrong with this relationship?” he said. “I mean, it’s not a relationship, but what’s wrong with this? We both have similar feelings, we feel cut off from other people, we share a certain disdain for the Hollywood lifestyle we love, and I think we have a camaraderie that’s very—”

“Come on,” she said. “We have a camaraderie, but this is kind of a weird thing we’re doing. I mean, it’s weird. We have an oddness… What does your therapist think?”

“I don’t let my therapist run my life,” he said. “You know, I go in, I talk to him… I think of him as a good bounce. Mainly I go to hear myself think, and sometimes I’ll discover something through what I say. I’ve been seeing him for a lot of years, and we did most of the main thrust of the work on my early family stuff in the beginning. Now it’s just… It’s like going in for a brushup, like teeth-cleaning. Anyway, you’re probably not describing this accurately to your shrink, or she wouldn’t object to it. I mean, she doesn’t know me, so she’s not basing her objections on an experience of me but on something you’re telling her. And I think you must have misrepresented this situation, because I don’t think there’s that much wrong with it.”

“Well,” she said. “So the screening is what, Thursday?”

“The Ziz! screening?” he said. “It’s Thursday. You know that. Which one are you coming to, the seven or the nine?”

“Which one are you going to?” she said.

“I’m going to both,” he said. “I’m the producer. Obviously I’m gonna go to both.”

“Well, I’ll go to the late one,” she said. “Are you nervous?”

“I think it’s a fabulous film,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “but what if everybody else doesn’t think so?”

“Well, fuck ’em,” he said. “I think it’s a fabulous film.”

“Remember that line from The Philadelphia Story?” she said. “‘To hardly know him is to know him well’? I feel like that’s us, like we’ll just go on and on and on like this, but we’ll never quite get past the incandescence of that first meeting. There’s this sort of dull phosphorousness we maintain now, but… I mean, on a certain level, you’re the closest thing to love I have in my life right now, but it’s still far away. The closest thing I have to a relationship is very far away. I think that’s interesting.”

“I’d like to meet someone like you,” he said. “But there’s no one more like you than you.”

“Maybe we can get somebody to introduce us,” she said.