Postcards from the Edge

The Dating Accident

Suzanne was dreaming that she was hanging by her hands outside the window of a speeding car with her hair flying behind her. Driving down a street and flying through the air. It was frightening, terrifying, but as she sped along it became almost exhilarating. She passed through the danger into the creamy filling of Wheeeee! and then woke up, her heart beating very fast. She had the strange sensation that she actually had cried out, “Wheeeee!” but she saw Jesse fast asleep beside her and knew she hadn’t.

They had been living together for almost a year—though he’d kept his apartment—and she was still always a little surprised to find him there in the morning. She liked to study him when he was asleep—he seemed unarmed somehow without his glasses on—but she could only engage in this activity on weekends. During the week Jesse got up at seven to write. “Look at him,” she thought. “He looks like somebody you could go up to at an airport and say, ‘Could you watch my bag?’”

He remained curious to her. She knew she cared about him—her latest analogy to Norma was that he was a wounded Confederate soldier and she was this sweet Yankee woman who’d found him on her lawn—but she wondered why. It was as though she doubted her own judgment, which in fact she did. For years her judgment had told her to take drugs. Why should she think her logic had improved that much in just two years?

What did she see in him? He said that the sky was “bucolic”; she asked him what “bucolic” meant. He said he liked Steely Dan and the color black. Well, so did she. What did that make her? He drank coffee black, or sometimes with a little cream. What did that mean? She felt like she was on a scavenger hunt, searching for clues as to who he was and what he wanted from her. She had no idea whether, if she found out, she would give it to him or not.

Was Jesse a good man? she asked herself. He probably was, because he bored her to death sometimes. “You think that if it isn’t dramatic, nothing is happening,” Norma had told her. “The idea is to get old with them, not because of them. Pretend it’s an acting assignment. Act like someone who enjoys the quiet that can be found in a mature relationship. Act normal, and see if some feelings of normalcy don’t eventually follow.”

“Normal. People don’t get much more normal than us,” she thought. “We’re prototypes for the new normal line of people who were designed to pave the way for the nineties.” She realized that she and Jesse were getting serious. Serious. She hated the sound of it. “I joked myself into a serious situation,” she’d told Lucy.

“You’ve backed into normalcy via Cambodia,” Lucy said, “so you can appreciate it more. It’s like you applied for a weird life and got a regular one by accident.”

Lucy liked Jesse. She thought he was good for Suzanne, that people would take her more seriously if they knew she was going with “an author.” For a while she even considered finding herself an author, but one who was, as she put it to Suzanne, “maybe just a little famous, like John Irving or Philip Roth.”

Then Lucy met Lowell Stephenson. When No Survivors came out, she received a lot of attention, so when she went to Seattle over Christmas to make up with her father for the things she’d said about him on the talk show, Lowell—the head of New Age Studios—recognized her on the plane and struck up a conversation. She was seeing him fairly regularly now.

Sometimes the four of them would go out together. Lowell even cooked for them once. “This is exactly how I like it,” Lucy had whispered to Suzanne while Lowell was perfecting the salad dressing. “Breadmaker and breadwinner all in one.”

“How did we ever end up as parts of couples?” Suzanne asked, as they watched Lowell show Jesse how to sauté shrimp.

“Think of it as an experiment,” Lucy suggested.

“Does one of us have cancer?” Suzanne had asked Jesse on their fourth date, after they’d sat in her house talking for eight hours straight.

“Pardon me?” he said.

“I just wondered. We spend so much time together, it’s like you have a twelve-hour shore leave, or we’re cramming for a state exam on one another, or…”

“Cancer,” he said, nodding. “That wouldn’t have been the analogy I would have chosen.”

After their fifth date, he hadn’t called her for six days. Suzanne was stunned. She forgot what he looked like. “Smoke in a room, that’s what he is,” she told Lucy. “Smoke in a room.” She started thinking about him as the guy she liked who never called her again.

“What’s the matter?” Michelle asked her.

“I’ve been in a dating accident,” she announced dramatically. “A terrible, terrible dating accident.”

It became Suzanne’s favorite phrase. “Ask me what’s the matter,” she said to whomever she talked to.

Then he called, and again she was stunned. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” she told him.

“Why?” he asked. “I told you I was going to New York and that I’d be back on Monday—today.”

She had forgotten, but because of this mistake he had become more vivid to her, more real. They’d had a crisis in common—though, to be sure, in Suzanne’s mind more than anywhere else—and they’d come through it. They had survived the dating accident together, and on their sixth date they had total endless nightmare sex. “Big Kabuki Sex,” Suzanne called it.

“This is interesting, isn’t it?” Jesse remarked during a rest stop, then said, “That sounded odd. I just didn’t want to frighten you with affection.” Suzanne thanked him, and wondered if she should say that she, too, thought the sex was interesting.

Instead, she said, “I called someone the other day, and his message gave the number of his car phone. I left my home number and said that if I wasn’t there, I could probably be reached in my crop duster.”

“I consider it a kind of defeat to call someone in their car,” Jesse countered, stifling a yawn.

“Do you want to stay over?” she asked, her chest tight.

“I really should go. I’m writing in the morning, but I—”

“Okay,” she interjected quickly. “Okay,” she said again, this time quieter.

“I’d love to, though,” he said, nuzzling her affectionately. “You’re so calm, so still.”

“I’m like a peaceful flesh rock,” she said moodily.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he said ironically. He turned her toward him and put her head on his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.

“Which nothing?” he asked.

There was a beat, after which Suzanne said quietly, “You’re leaving me.”

“I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving to write. I have to—”

“It’s okay,” she sighed. “I’ll get over it. I’m getting over it already, look.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “My hand on your chest looks like a flesh shell on a hairy beach.”

“Do you have an alarm clock?” Jesse asked wearily.

She had had relationships before. Well, people had had relationships with her. Eventually, she would always end up on drugs, and there were only two roles you could play with someone doing drugs: you could either do them, too, or you could object to doing them. Or both. In any case, the relationship then became, in part, about drugs, and then it was just a matter of time until the drug part wore away whatever it had been about before.

Jesse had done coke twice and found it wanting. Occasionally he smoked dope, but never around Suzanne. Her only other relationship with a nondruggie—that is, with someone who wasn’t taking drugs while she was involved with him—was her nonrelationship relationship with Jack Burroughs. Suzanne had recently heard Jack had begun free-basing again now that Ziz! II was such a hit, but then, that could just have been a rumor.

She was horrified at the surges of sentiment that rose up in her. She fought the tenderness, kept it down like nausea. When she finally started saying the barest of nice things to Jesse, they were accompanied by facial expressions more appropriate for swallowing cough medicine. It was like a punishment to fit the reward.

She explained to him that she hated “the L word”—that she always felt like she was under some kind of obligation when she heard it. “Why do you tell him these things?” Norma had asked. “One day you might want him to say this terrible phrase.”

To Suzanne’s surprise, that day came. She began watching his mouth, imagining what it would be like if he ever said the sentimental trio. One night while they were kissing, he looked into her eyes, his expression almost sad. After the briefest moment—she hadn’t even realized they were gazing at each other through pounds of air—he cleared his throat and looked away shyly. “I wasn’t going to say, ‘I love you,’ I swear,” he said. “I know it looked like it, but I wasn’t.”

“He’s smart,” Lucy said. “You told him it freaked you out to hear all that mushy, romantic, great stuff, and so now…” She shrugged. “Hey, why don’t you tell him? You love him, or at least you do have great big cheerful feelings for him.”

“You think I should tell him I love him?” Suzanne said.

“Why don’t you write him a note?”

“What if he showed it to people and laughed?” Suzanne said.

There was a period early on, when she knew for certain he liked her a lot, that was decidedly unpleasant. Suddenly, everything he did annoyed her, everything he did after liking her.

The Sleeping Giant reigned. Jesse held his head too still. He walked like a burglar. He touched his hair a lot, and he chewed too much gum. It was prissy to be so smart, he wasn’t that smart, why was he that smart? Who was he, anyway? Why had he been available? Who had put him up to this? The Russians? That was it. The Russians had trained Jesse to impersonate a great guy on a date in order to penetrate Hollywood through Suzanne Vale. Well, she could see through their game. Did they think she was a fool? Maybe they should try being apart for a while. Maybe they should see other people. Maybe there was someone better.

All this would go on and on in her head, and she would just clench her jaw until it subsided, trying to keep the withering contempt out of her eyes. She refused to let the Sleeping Giant win. This was a nice guy. He didn’t deserve the horror that hid inside her. She held on, and after a while those feelings began appearing less and less frequently, like reverse labor.

Suzanne asked her mother for some “relationship advice,” to which Doris replied, “For what age?”

“Thank you,” said Suzanne.

She wanted to walk up to couples in the street and find out what their relationships were, as if that would somehow help her determine how hers was going. One Thursday she spent the entire afternoon in the Bodhi Tree bookstore. She discovered two things: you should communicate openly with your partner, and red meat is bad for everything, including relationships.

She also found a book about the trend in world history of westward migration. Suzanne figured that meant that eventually—probably right after she was dead—all the intellectuals would finally get to L.A. She imagined them arriving just in time for her funeral, and talking about how they wished they could have gotten there just a little bit sooner, because they had this incredibly salient point they wanted to make to her so she could carry it into the afterlife. At this point, though, she thought, it appeared that the intellectuals were only in New York, and the people they wanted to fuck were out here in L.A.

“I think we have compatible kissing styles,” Jesse said one afternoon, brushing her hair off her forehead.

“You have a very soft mouth,” she said darkly. “Why is that, do you think?”

“Probably because I chew so much gum,” he said. The Sleeping Giant was strangely silent. “I like everything about you,” Jesse said, stroking her hair. “That probably bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“No,” she said, smiling sweetly, “because I don’t believe you.”

He was suspiciously nice. He had to be hiding something. “You leave him alone,” warned Norma. “He’s fine. You’re the weird one. You just don’t know what to do when there’s no trouble. You’re looking for something to fix. Watch out you don’t fix it till it breaks.”

“You sound like a bumper sticker,” Suzanne said.

“Don’t sulk.”

“Am I sulking?”

“You’re sulking because you’ve lost your favorite toy,” Norma said, “the exploding man. Now you have a nice gentle man, and you want him to explode.”

“I don’t—”

“You’re having a normal relationship,” Norma said firmly. “You don’t feel normally about it, but that’s another step.”

“I don’t wonder if he’s a murderer anymore,” she said.

“Very good.”

“I think he’s a narc.”

Jesse did the thing Suzanne had always imagined her ideal mate would do: he read the paper. The whole paper. He was stunned that she had never done this.

“That’s a guy thing to do,” she said, by way of explanation.

“I hardly think it’s the province of one particular gender.”

“So, you tell me what’s in the paper,” she said. “Like it’s gossip.” Sometimes he did. He told her what was happening in the world that he belonged to and she visited.

She postponed reading Jesse’s novel for the longest time, until Lucy finally volunteered to read it first and sort of test the waters. When she finished it, she was quite enthusiastic. “It’s real good. Go ahead and like him,” she told Suzanne. “It’s about a bunch of obsessives—one of your favorite subjects. It’s funny. Read it.”

“Is it smart?”

“Smart? Yes, it’s smart, funny, all that,” said Lucy. “It should even make a good film. I might ask you to sleep with him an extra time to get me the part of Leslie.”

So she read it, and was relieved to find that she thought it was very good. Even the Sleeping Giant seemed to like it, except for a couple of the sex parts.

She was calming down about her career. She had worked three times in the last year. She had done a small part in a movie called Mood Swing and a limited run in a Los Angeles theater of a play called I’ll Buy You a Cherimoya, and had costarred in a terrible TV movie called Cut to the Chase, which also starred Lucy’s ex-lover, Scott Hastings. (Neither of them ever acknowledged that they knew Lucy.) She felt show business was not her life now. It was becoming part of her life. Lately, there had even been times when she regretted not having studied criminal psychology, after all.

She had seen Alex recently, at Wanda’s funeral. Suzanne was with Jesse and Alex was with Amy Baxter, the star of the sitcom Honey, I’m Home!, who had played the part of Katie in Rehab! Rumor had it Amy had fallen in love with Alex during filming, and had left her boyfriend to move in with him. Amy was standing near Wanda’s family weeping, and Suzanne wondered if Amy had ever met Wanda. Stan and Julie were also there, along with Carl (who was now a therapist at a halfway house), Carol (who was now pregnant), and Sid (who was now dieting). It was a strange little scene.

Afterward, as everyone was walking to their cars, Suzanne and Alex paired off for a moment. She congratulated him on his network job and Emmy nominations, which Jesse had told her about.

“Listen,” Alex said earnestly, “I begged them to use you for Katie, but…” He shrugged. “They said your TVQ was low.”

“Forget it,” Suzanne said. “Amy was perfect for it. Very understated.”

“Wasn’t she brilliant in the swing scene?” Alex enthused, as he watched Amy talking to Jesse and reapplying her makeup.

“Brilliant,” Suzanne agreed.

Carl and Sid joined them. “You kids feel like a meeting?” Carl asked. “We’re going over to the eleven-thirty Gardner.”

“If Jesse drops me, can one of you drive me home?”

“Sure,” said Sid.

“I really can’t go,” Alex said. “Amy and I have a real meeting—I mean, a business meeting—at Trader Vic’s at one fifteen to discuss Beyond Rehab!”

“Don’t sweat it, man,” Carl said. “I make my living out of being an ex-junkie, too.”

Suzanne and Jesse drove out of the cemetery behind Carl’s car, which had a bumper sticker that said EX-HEADS GIVE BETTER HEAD. Suzanne looked back and saw Alex in the parking lot talking excitedly to Carol’s husband Rob, who, Suzanne knew, had just signed a production deal with Lowell Stephenson. “He’s probably pitching an idea about a model who ODs in Hollywood,” she said.

“A vehicle for Amy,” Jesse said.

When they’d first started seeing each other, she’d been unable to remember anything he said. She’d wondered if and when his words would stick, and what the sentence would be. Then, in the space of a week, she’d recalled three sentences of his. Random ones, but it was a beginning. First there was “I talked to my friend Roy on Friday—I told you about Roy, didn’t I?” Then, “I run five miles a day.” And there was something else about chili dogs, but she couldn’t remember the exact phrase. She was also making strides toward remembering what he looked like. She’d have a sudden image of his face while waiting for the light to change, or sitting in the bath.

Sometimes she disliked the sight of his feet, or the glint of his glasses when the light hit them at a particular angle, or the sensation of hearing him use a word that she didn’t know the meaning of. But then she’d smell his soft Jesse smell, or he’d read something to her about some South African riot, or she’d watch him bent over his typewriter making a correction, and she’d think, “He’s mine. I own him.” Or, in a healthier vein, she’d feel a sense of belonging, a corny feeling that embarrassed and thrilled her. She felt like a What’s Wrong with This Picture? element in a Norman Rockwell painting.

She wasn’t sure exactly when he’d started calling her Gail, but it was pretty soon after he’d moved in. She called him lots of things, ranging from Joseph to Sir. It was their understanding that she called him so many names because he was so many things to her.

Sometimes she would go to him to discuss the notion of happiness. “Remember in Ethan Frome,” she said earnestly, “where they’re sledding in the moonlight? Where they’re wailing with laughter in the glistening snow? That’s what I think happiness is.” She stared at the floor in front of her.

Jesse removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. “More than anything,” he said, “it’s probably just the absence of pain or anxiety.” He squinted across the desk at Suzanne. “What does Lucy say? Did you ask her?”

“She said it’s a penis the size of a wastebasket, which hardly covers absence of pain, unless you like cystitis.”

“Which apparently she does,” Jesse said. “So, Lowell has a penis the size of a wastebasket.”

“How did we get on this subject?”

“Happiness,” he said, his glasses once again on and his hands folded in front of him. “Have you eaten today?”

“I think so,” she said vaguely.

“You’d be happier if you ate, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Want me to fix you a peanut butter sandwich?”

Suzanne smiled. Maybe she was just hungry.

One morning, while driving to the gym, she suddenly panicked. “I’m going to die,” she thought. “I’m going to be killed in a car crash.” Her hands gripped the wheel and she slowed to the speed limit.

Suzanne was convinced that now that something nice and regular was happening to her, she was going to die. Whereas she used to hasten her death through substance abuse, she now feared for her life because she had reason to live it. She had felt the hot breath of irony on the back of her neck for years. Now she was breathing irony, filling her lungs with invisible irony, its buoyant dread charging the atmosphere, moving in like a cold front.

She predicted her death flippantly to Lucy, so that in case it actually did happen, at least someone close to her would know that she knew. She didn’t want them to think she was one of those putzes who died unwittingly. She could hear Lucy telling people, “She predicted it—she knew somehow. What a talent.”

Gazing at him now across the abyss, she felt as though she was somehow displaced, but she realized now that she’d always felt that way. She’d thought she felt that way because it was true. Now she saw she felt that way because it was her.

She moved out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb Jesse. He stirred and opened his eyes. “Was it something I said?” he asked groggily.

“You’re suffocating me,” she whispered lovingly. On the way to the bathroom she had an idea. She’d make Jesse some waffles. Waffles and muffins and bacon and… That was probably enough. Oh, and orange juice and coffee. Coffee with cinnamon in it.

Maybe she shouldn’t make waffles, though. Her slapstick tendencies had a habit of rearing their ugly heads during waffle preparation. Still, she wanted to do something nice for him. She’d been staring at him for half an hour, and now she’d sort of woken him up… All in all, she felt she owed him waffles. That big waffle gesture was the only one that would do. She smiled at her reflection, filled with the enthusiasm of bold resolve.

Twenty minutes later, on the way to the hospital, Jesse said, “But why waffles? I don’t even really like waffles.”

“Look,” said Suzanne stoically. “It’s already starting to blister.” She held up her left hand, with its domestic scar across the knuckles where the waffle iron had landed.

He shook his head in bewilderment and patted Suzanne’s head. “Isn’t this the emergency room where… they know you?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling slightly. “I should open a house account there.”

“They should at least give you a quantity discount,” he said, heading south onto La Cienega. “What was the last thing? The dog bite?”

“The dog bite,” she said cheerfully. “Unless you count the time I had to take Lucy to have her IUD removed.” She held out her hand to him. “It hurts,” she said, with some surprise.

“You’re a brave girl.”

“Soul,” she corrected him. “I’m a brave soul.” She sighed. “This is what I get for trying to be the cooking half of a couple.”

“Gail, don’t be dramatic,” Jesse said. “You’ve made meat loaf and spaghetti several times without incident.”

She was quiet for a few moments, then asked meekly, “Don’t you have your dudefest tonight?”

“You mean am I leaving you alone with your hand tonight?” he said. “No, Gail, I’m staying with you.”

“Oh, goody,” said Suzanne maturely.