By Alyssa Knickerbocker
Ava saw him first from behind: his dark, curly hair and erect, arrogant carriage, shirt sleeves rolled up over his forearms the way he always wore them. She went cold/hot and her heart emptied out, spilled through her body. The adrenaline hit her blood like a shot of alcohol, like the first drag on a cigarette, like the moment before pain sweeps you, like the moment before a kiss.
She swiveled around on her bar stool so he couldn’t see her face if he looked over. She watched him in the mirror that ran behind the bottles of gin and vodka and tequila, all lit up and glowing white and blue, white and blue, like those Christmas lights that atheists put up.
She was shocked to see him standing there, somehow still existing. She had ceased to think of him as real. At this point he had become part of the story of her past, a blend of fiction and truth that she was always shaping and revising—a one-dimensional character who served mostly to advance the plot, to give depth and complexity to the main character: Ava. In some versions he was the one at fault. “He was totally self-obsessed,” she’d said on at least one occasion, probably to Helena, who had known her longest, knew all her secrets, and still loved her. “He wanted me to be something I couldn’t be. He didn’t leave any room in the relationship for me to be myself. Really, what choice did I have?”
Other times, she cast herself as the careless vixen, the woman who behaves like a man and doesn’t apologize for it. “I slept with a fisherman once because I lost a game of cards,” she’d say in mixed company, at a party or happy hour, holding up her cigarette so the smoke sifted over her face like a veil, making her brave. “Of course, my fiancé wasn’t too pleased about it.”
And people would laugh, startled—they would examine her face, smiling uncertainly, trying to determine if she was joking or not. She could feel the energy shift. She would suddenly have become a Person of Interest, someone to be enjoyed—she could now be expected to say eccentric, intriguing things—but also slightly feared. After all, a woman like that might do something crazy. A woman like that might do anything at all.
She never used his name, never spoke it aloud, not even when she talked to Helena. It made him seem so human—a name turned him into a complex and sympathetic character with a beating heart and probably some good qualities. She liked him as an archetype, a bloodless paper doll: he was so much easier to handle that way. So she called him by the male pronoun, dragging it out for emphasis.
“Oh Ava,” Helena was always sighing over some caustic comment Ava had made. “You’re terrible.”
“That’s what he was always saying,” she’d reply.
In fact she could no longer remember what he was always saying. She had snipped the reel of film out of her memory, like the violence or cursing or sex in a movie shown on TV, leaving behind only the bland, acceptable parts. When she did stumble upon a memory, a real memory—running hand in hand across the street in the rain, his palm hot in hers, the asphalt a sparkling mirror—she winced, turned away. It was like accidentally catching an eyeful of unsheathed pornography at a gas station when all you wanted was a pack of cigarettes; you were so unprepared, just going about your business, and then it popped into your head—the memory—with all its embarrassing nakedness, all that emotion and longing and regret bobbing around, asserting themselves obscenely, like an erection. She hated it.
Every once in a while, though—and this she never mentioned to Helena, or to anyone— alone in the house, she cried until her head ached, wandering from room to room, wiping her sopping face on whatever was at hand: toilet paper, a dishtowel, her own sweater sleeves. She looked at herself in the mirror. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” But even then she suspected herself of putting on a show—she knew she didn’t mean it. Not really.
* * *
It had been two years since she’d last seen him, or the house they shared—the gorgeous falling-down house out on Vashon that had been her idea, and that he’d ended up with. She hadn’t fought him over it—they hadn’t even talked about it. They weren’t married, so there was nothing official about who got what. He got everything. She ceded everything to him without discussion. She knew she had no rights.
Get out.
That was the last thing he had ever said to her. And she had, calmly putting on her clothes and her coat and doing up the zipper, pulling her hair from the collar and smoothing it over her shoulder. She took her time getting dressed, to show him that he hadn’t won. She picked up her purse and walked out the door and there was the Seattle skyline over the water, outlined in lights against the night sky. She walked down the porch steps, past the spot where they’d sat and watched the New Years Eve fireworks, draped over each other in the cold. She’d known that he was not watching her go, as she wished he would. She could feel the absence of his gaze, like a window with the curtain drawn.
That had not been in the screenplay, which she’d written and sold—freakishly, through a cousin who had an agent in L.A.—in the months following that night. In the screenplay—and then in the movie that got made, after many changes and cuts and a general dumbing down of the language, Ava thought—the boy and girl made love (tastefully, and largely off-screen) and all was forgiven. In the end, filmed with a faux-shaky lens meant to evoke a hand-held video camera, they held hands in the apple orchard behind the house and got married. There was no dialogue during this part—people talked and laughed, but the film was silent. It was set to sweet, twinkly indie rock, the kind of music that makes you nostalgic for something that never happened in the first place. And while the credits rolled, a snapshots scrolled by, meant to suggest the continuing adventures of the couple—the two of them traveling, riding on camels, holding the hand of a toddler, smiling in the snow. These were all in black and white.
She wondered now if he had seen the movie. She hoped wildly that he had, and then in the same heartbeat that he hadn’t. The movie was unmistakably about them, about their relationship. But it was also a giant lie. It was their story crammed into the arc of a romantic comedy, as awkward and obviously wrong as a fat person in a bikini.
But it had made her a shitload of money. And while she was writing it, tweaking the story to make it screen-worthy, and then making the changes they wanted, which took the story even farther from the thin truth she’d managed to preserve, she was thinking, I’m allowed to do this, it’s my story too. Still, she’d felt like she was trespassing in a graveyard, pissing on the monuments. She’d felt like a criminal, like a thief, and the feeling welled up again as she watched him in the mirror, sipping from his glass of whiskey. She wished Linus was with her, because of everything it would telegraph: 1.) That she had moved on; 2.) That she was doing great; 3.) That someone wanted to marry her; 4.) That someone extremely good-looking wanted to marry her.
Linus, her new husband of less than a year, was a kindergarten teacher, the rare male variety—an endangered species like the blue-footed booby. It was a luxe, West Coast, alternative school, with mural-painting and finger knitting and kiddie yoga. Since Linus had come on as lead teacher, enrollment had increased and retention was close to perfect. He liked to talk about the innovations he was making to the curriculum, but Ava suspected that these successes had more to do with the many divorced mothers who came to pick up their children and then lingered, finger-combing their highlighted manes with ringless left hands . But Ava did not worry about him running off with one of these perfumed divorcees—she knew, as he did not, that it was he who should be worrying about her. She felt powerful and secure with Linus—she made more money than he; he was more attractive (it was true, Ava was willing to admit this) and yet seemed to love her more than she loved him.
She liked it this way. The possessive way she felt about him made her feel that she understood what it was to be a man. He was hers, her trophy, a talisman of her worthiness. She had been lucky to bag him. Bag him. This was a phrase she would never actually say out loud—it was too retro, too pre-feminist—but she thought it, to herself. She had bagged him—she had seen him, wanted him; she had netted him like a pretty butterfly, scooped him into a sack and lugged him home, all before he even knew what was happening. He was a good kisser, he was sensitive but not needy, he held her hand and yet understood that she did not want to see him cry. Ava’s female friends were always exclaiming over Linus—his handsomeness, his goodness, his blondness. He was awfully cute. She liked him a whole lot. Being with Linus was lovely— effortless and relaxing. It was like being in a warm bath.
“It’s just such a relief, this relationship,” Ava told Helena once over tea, which they had almost every day at tea shop in Wallingford, the kind of place where the tea menu is the size of a dictionary and the only thing you can get to eat are tiny biscuits apparently meant for babies or hobbits. Helena loved it there. “I think I married him because being with him is so easy—I don’t have to think about it. Is that selfish?”
“Of course not,” Helena had said, with biscuit crumbs in the corners of her mouth. She took Ava’s hand. She was big on comforting touches. “I’m sure you do the same for him.”
Ava had her doubts about that. But it was just the kind of thing for Helena to say, and to mean. Helena always wanted to think the best of people—Ava in particular. She believed that everyone was essentially good. Ava liked to constantly poke at this belief by making provocative statements—“Sometimes Linus wants to have sex and I say no, and then I go take a bath and masturbate” or “Sometimes I wish my father would just go ahead and die, it would be better for everyone”—which she justified by reasoning that there was truth in them, even if they weren’t always strictly true. When she dropped these bombs into Helena’s lap, Helena’s forehead would crimp and she would look worried, and then she would come up with a response—“Human sexuality is extremely complex,” and “He’s been sick for so long, I know it must be heartbreaking for you”—and her face would smooth over, and she would smile at Ava, and Ava would feel cleansed, weightless. Ava told Helena everything, all her transgressions, as though she were a priest, and Helena accepted them way water accepts a stone.
Part Two
Helena, whom Ava had met on the first day of college when they were matched together randomly by a computer, was a strange kind of friend for Ava to have. She was truly good, and never judged. This annoyed Ava sometimes—she often found herself judging other people, swiftly and harshly. A heavy woman would get on the bus, lumbering up the steps, drawing her wallet out in slow motion as though performing tai chi while the bus waited, and Ava would watch the woman try to squeeze her large behind into one of the plastic seats and think, Fat cow. Then she would feel guilt (she should have more compassion) followed by nervousness (one of these days she was going to say something out loud, like the old homeless woman who hung out on the Ave in the U District, eyeballing all the female undergrads in their tight black leggings and slouchy boots. “Whore…whore…” she muttered, as though counting sheep, all the while stroking her large, tumorous stomach. “Slut, slut, whore.” That could be Ava, if she wasn’t careful). Helena, Ava was sure, never looked at an overweight person and thought fat cow. Helena had a purple painting in her living room that said Let Me Be Naked As a Moonbeam; she didn’t own a television but loved NPR; she actually knew how to make polenta. She was soft and fuzzy as a peach, or one of those old, slightly unfocused photographs, tinted with pastels. And she was Ava’s frequent excuse, her white lie.
Leaving the house earlier, she’d kissed Linus on the cheek and told him she was meeting Helena for dinner. He perked up when she said dinner, so she quickly added that it was a female thing, just she and Helena talking girl talk, having private girl time.
“Oh,” Linus had said. “Well, have fun. Say hello to Helena for me.”
She was not, in fact, meeting Helena. She was going out alone. She did this once a week, if she could—went off with a novel and her cigarettes and sat alone at the bar, drinking glass after glass of wine and reading until her focus went off, until the black words floated over each other, overlapping like decoupage.
Tonight, at least, was a good night to run into an ex. She looked good. She had on a silk top, very low cut. An excellent bra. Now that she was edging into her thirties she understood the magic of a good bra—this was another thing she liked to say at parties, imparting her wisdom to other, younger women who were awed by her. Because she was loud, because she said sexy things, because she had sold a screenplay and the movie had been made, and had appeared in major theaters. This had made her name minorly recognizable—at least in Seattle, a literary vacuum that she had rushed in to fill. She gave talks, at one of the smaller auditoriums at Benaroya Hall, or the basement of Elliot Bay, or once, the art museum downtown, the giant metal automated man with his hammer banging dully away while she delivered snappy, practiced one-liners and the audience laughed. At the receptions after, the young women flocked to her—the girls of Seattle who thought dressing up meant putting on an organic cotton yoga shirt and their red Danskin clogs. She caught them examining her the way she examined other women: they scanned her body, hair and clothes with thirsty, calculating eyes when they thought she wasn’t watching. “Spend your money on underwear,” she told them, handing someone her drink for a refill. “Get a ten dollar sweater and a two hundred dollar bra. No one will tell you this, but the scaffolding is the most important thing.”
Her scaffolding was in great shape. She had checked herself out in the mirror, tipping the closet door and craning to get a good look at her ass. She had been pleased. She’d slipped her secret pack of cigarettes out from behind the peas in the freezer, which they never ate and where Linus would never look, and then smoked one while she walked downtown, to the desolate, stainless steel center of the city. It was emptying out, all the people in business suits hurrying away, their hair end-of-the-day frizzy, their makeup faded. It was happy hour but still bright out—in Seattle, the sun didn’t set in the summer until nearly ten. There was a breeze from the water, almost cold, smelling both fresh and fishy. She thought she might go down to the piers, stand at the end of one of the long docks, and look out at the purpling sunset and the ferries floating by like brilliant birthday cakes, white and regal and spilling light from every window. She would smoke her cigarettes, a mysterious figure against the water. It appealed to her.
Walking down Pine she made resolutions about her life, as she had taken to doing lately. They had come to nothing, but this time, she decided, it would be different. She was under contract to write another screenplay—it was supposed to be halfway done already. Her agent called her every few months. “Just checking in!” she said, always sounding like she was talking and driving at the same time. “How far along are you, would you say?”
Ava always made up something reasonable, something she believed she could actually achieve before the next time her agent checked in. “One quarter done,” she said the first time, thinking that she could really buckle down over the next few weeks and bang it out. But she did not. She spent the day sipping coffee and wandering around from room to room, reading the paper, looking out the windows, petting the cats and checking to see if their nails needed to be trimmed. In the mid-afternoon she switched to wine. If Linus was going to be at school late, for conferences, or planning, she called Helena and said, “Come over.” Most of the time Helena had some reason that she could not—she needed to replant her rutabaga or comb her wool (or whatever hippie shit she did at night when normal people went out drinking), and she would explain her plans to Ava in great detail, and Ava would wait patiently for her turn to talk, knowing she would win. Helena would arrive, and they would drink wine—Ava taking down three glasses for Helena’s one—and by the time Linus came home Ava would be extremely happy and talkative.
“Tomorrow I’m going to write ten pages,” she would say as they got into bed, Linus setting his alarm clock while she twined her arms around his neck from behind, breathed her wine-breath into his rosy, cockle-shell ear. “Tomorrow I’m going to set up the desk by the window like I’ve been wanting to. All I need is a view instead of that blank white wall. It terrorizes me. With a view out the window I could write twenty pages a day!”
But she did not. And when her agent called back again, wanting to know how far she was now, would she say, Ava calculated how much time had passed since the last phone call and said, “One third.”
She was headed towards the water, thinking about what she should say the next time her agent called—could she say one half done? or had it been so long that she had to vault all the way to three-quarters?—she passed a little pub she recognized and wandered in. Everything was familiar—the walls made of bookshelves, the wine-keg tables, the bartender with the suspenders polishing the rocks glasses. She hadn’t realized where she was until she saw him. They used to come here together, back when they were happy. If she had thought of it at the time, she would have set one of the scenes of her movie here, in this bar. She would have had the girl and her fiancé meet here after work. They would hold hands and discuss plans for their wedding, but already you would be able to see the fault lines, the fractures. He is overbearing, critical. She smiles and puts on a brave face—after all, she loves him, even with all his flaws. But the seeds are sown for the moment she betrays him.
What you want out of a scene like that, early in the movie, is for the audience to sympathize with the girl. You want them to understand why she does it.
* * *
What she had done was terribly ordinary: she had slept with someone else. Once. And then again, and then again and again.
She met the guy at a bar. He put his leg up on her barstool and said, “Whatcha reading?” He grinned at her, bought her a drink without asking if she wanted one. He didn’t ask if she was married, attached, whatever—he clearly didn’t care.
He was down from Alaska, he said, where he worked on a tender boat. He showed her a picture of a tanner crab on his phone—it was huge and terrifying, a pale white spider the size of a kiddie pool, and it made her skin prickle. Which was exactly what he wanted—for her to be thinking about her skin, her body, his body, bodies in general. He stood close enough to her that she could feel his heat, but did not touch her. If Helena had been there, she would have been sweet as a grandmother to the guy; she would have lead Ava home by the hand. But Helena had not been there.
In Ava’s screenplay, the heroine is seduced by the fisherman, who is dark and brooding and sits on the other side of the bar, smoking and watching her read in a predatory way. The man is very handsome and he wears fishing boots and flannel and says dark things about the sea.
In real life, the guy was not her type at all. He was solid, muscled, and wore a t-shirt, baseball cap and short ponytail. When she chose to go back to his hotel room with him, to “play some cards, have a drink, you know,” she was not choosing this man over her fiancé. She wasn’t choosing one life over another. She was having both, having it all, as if she deserved it.
Part Three
In the mirror, circled by the blue lights, her ex-fiancé looked relaxed, happy, maybe even forgiving. His stance was loose, open. This was an opportunity. She asked for another glass of wine, though she had already had most of a bottle—she would need it for this. She was going over to say hello. It was the normal thing to do. She would touch his elbow, just gently, and he would turn, look down at her.
“I thought that was you,” she would say, and smile a little—a rueful smile that implied many things.
He would shake his head and look down and away, like he couldn’t believe his dumb luck—her, in this bar, on this day. But he would be smiling a little, too. Trying to hide it, but still, he would be smiling. They would talk, they would make shy, grazing eye contact. Just touching gazes would be as intimate as sex. Of course, he would be startled to hear that she was married already. Perhaps she wouldn’t tell him—it hadn’t been that long ago, not really, that they had been planning their own wedding. It might seem crass of her, to be married so quickly; it might prove to him irrevocably that she was shallow and heartless. She could slip her ring off, wedge it down into her pocket.
But perhaps, she thought, she should leave it on after all—seeing it might cause a flicker of regret to pass over his face, something she longed to see.
She considered only briefly the possibility that he might behave differently—that he might take one look at her and throw his drink in her face, grab his coat, and stalk out the door, ducking as he went through it, running his hand briskly up the back of his neck, that old gesture of anger she remembered so well. He might ask her to leave, in that haughty, imperious way that left her no choice but to obey, gathering her things and slinking out the door like a punished child. Or, worst of all: he might look through her, as if she did not exist at all. He was very good at that.
She retouched her lipstick, drank down her wine as slipped through the crowd, angling up behind him. She touched him gently between the shoulder blades, and as she did she thought how well she knew his body under that crisp blue shirt—the muscles of his back, the sharp wings of the shoulder blades, the dip of his spine at the lower back, places she used to touch with her mouth and her hands. She could feel warmth radiating off him, and she remembered this about him, that he always threw heat like a fire, that even when she was lying in bed with her back to him, not touching him, as far from his sleeping form as she possibly could be in a queen-sized bed, thinking Oh my god, what have I done, she could still feel the heat from his body, surrounding him like a shield.
She tapped his shoulder and began her smile as he turned. He turned and she was ready, she was gripping her glass and taking a breath to say the words she had prepared. But there was something off about his face—it wasn’t put together right. It had been broken and reassembled, all in the wrong order. Or: it wasn’t him.
“Hi there,” said a man she had never seen before. No, not a man—a boy. He looked like a college student, all gangly and baby-faced. She was speechless. “Eric.” He stuck his hand out, then retracted it and wiped it on his jeans, smiling sheepishly. “Whoops! Whiskey hands! Don’t want to get you all covered in liquor—at least not yet!” He laughed and glanced at his friends for approval; they laughed.
Ava set her wineglass down on the table in front of him; she turned abruptly and walked out the door.
“Hey,” she heard him say, confused. “Hey!”
She walked swiftly but aimlessly, heading downhill, towards the water. She was relieved that it was not him. And she was devastated that it was not him. She felt shaken apart—all her bones were loose, loose and floating through her body. She was so stupid—even from behind she should have been able to tell. But the kid had looked so much like him, the way he’d looked ten years ago when they first met. It shocked her that so much time had passed already. Ten years seemed impossibly long ago, another era like the Jurassic, a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when ferns were larger than your car, when she lived in an illegal basement apartment with no windows and concrete walls painted Pepto-Bismol pink—she supposed for a little cheer. They were both fresh out of college, new to the city, working starter jobs and putting beer, concert tickets and cheap flights to Mexico on credit cards they didn’t think about. She had been so different then, at the beginning. It was amazing that this was still her, that she had not shed her body entirely and turned into something else, like insects do.
She wondered what image of her he carried around with him, in his mind or his heart, like a snapshot folded in half, folded in half again, so that he didn’t have to look at it every day. But of course it was there, stuck in between his ribs like a screwdriver. Sharp. Maybe it was a shot of the twenty-two year old girl he met at a barbecue at Golden Gardens park, with her bangs and short skirt and pierced nose, the one who let him lock his fingers around her ankle under a blanket by the bonfire, before they even knew each other’s names. Or maybe it was her at twenty-nine: an image of her face the day she came home and found him sitting at the table with her journal in his hand, neatly bookmarked with the attached silk strip on a very particular page. That was how he had found out. She’d written the whole thing down in excruciating detail— where he touched her and how, the things he whispered to her, the way the affair made her feel so exhilarated, so interesting, so adult. She’d written about the first meeting, and the second, and the third, and all the ones after—she’d even written down the lies she told to get there.
She can’t conjure the expression she must have made when she saw him there, looking at her in that cool, decided way. But she can remember the way she felt, and it comes back to her now, filling her all over again as though it had all happened yesterday. It was horror, and it unfolded in her belly petal by petal, like some kind of black, poisonous flower. She stood absolutely still as it bloomed; she was paralyzed by regret and defiance, terror and relief. She was thinking, Thank god, it’s finally over and also No no no no no no no no no—
Of course, things dragged on for some time after that. She left, she came back, there were phone calls, confrontations on the lawn, in the living room, through the shower curtain, in a hotel room where she stayed for a while. Why? he kept asking her, over and over, as though if she could just answer this simple question, everything would be OK. Why?
She wanted to answer, but silence filled her throat, swelling until she could not speak.
Get out.
She keeps hearing it now, louder and louder. It was the last thing he ever said to her, but not the last thing she ever heard him say—she called him once, the night before her wedding. She was drunk. She and Helena had broken into the reception champagne and swilled it.
“We’ll just open one,” Ava had said, pressing on the champagne cork.
Helena furrowed her brow. “Those are supposed to be for tomorrow.”
“Oh Helena,” Ava said. “I’m the bride. I guess I can have some of my own fucking champagne if I want.”
They were sequestered in the W Hotel, all chic black and white décor and low, bluish lights. It was like being in a very fancy submarine. They were doing a beauty routine, shaving their legs and exfoliating with sugar scrubs and such. She’d thought it would be fun, to do the whole virginal pre-wedding thing, with all the girly stuff: nail polish and curlers and torch songs on the radio. She thought it might distract her from what she was doing and how fast she was doing it. She’d met Linus only eight months previously, at a bar the night she got the call from her agent. She and Helena had gone out to celebrate. After that last night, when she’d walked out of his house and his life, she he had written the screenplay swiftly, feverishly. She’d written the ending that she wished had happened, instead of what actually did, and it was exactly what everyone wanted out of a movie like that—to feel satisfied and relieved, to feel like the mistakes they made were not irrevocable.
Celebrating the screenplay sale at the bar, she’d ordered a series of fancy drinks: a gin fizz followed by a sidecar followed by a mojito, buying Helena the same even though she did not drink them. She’d seen Linus from across the bar and thought, I’ll have that next. She’d picked him up like a penny, thinking it was all locked up—they’d drive back to her place, he’d come in, she’d pour drinks, they’d maneuver into the bedroom, and then maybe she’d never see him again. But he had not come inside with her; he got her keys out of her purse, opened the door for her, kissed her hand. His lips left a warm place on her skin, and she’d felt an ache welling inside her, a pressure in her throat.
That last night with him, he’d thrown her on the bed, kissed her so hard her lip split. He’d slammed into her until her head slammed into the wall; he’d held her wrists down and leaned his weight on them until they went numb. He flipped her over and held her down, his elbow in the center of her back, right on her spine, above her heart.
She’d let him do what he liked. She thought if she let him reclaim her, mark her as his, that he might decide to keep her. She thought the pain could bleach her clean, make her pure for him again. She thought, I deserve it.
Linus came after that, gentle and sweet. She told him she loved him and he said it back. He asked her to marry him and she said yes. The movie came out; they planned their wedding, picking flowers and invitation templates and appetizer courses and bridesmaids and wine flights; they were swept along on a happy, spinning raft of planning. The night before the wedding, she and Helena finished one bottle of champagne and opened another, then another. Ava drank more than Helena, but Helena drank more than she usually did, and her face flushed bright pink with the alcohol and her eyes went dreamy. She’d done Ava’s fingernails very nicely earlier in the evening, and now she was doing her toenails badly.
“Oh no,” she said, sounding desolate. “I just polished your toe-knuckle. Wait—is there such thing as a toe-knuckle?” They both dissolved into hysterics.
Somewhere into the third bottle Ava began to feel a cold dread, the urge to backpedal, to throw on the brakes, coupled with the knowledge that it was too late, the hill was too steep. She told herself all brides felt this way. She found herself thinking of him, of him—the passion she had felt for him, and by the end, the hate. They had been so braided together that after a certain point she couldn’t look at his face without wanting to put her lips against his, and at the same time to shove him off a curb into traffic. With Linus there were no extremes—just a steady pleasantness, like a sailboat bobbing on a windless lake. Such stillness, suddenly, seemed terrifying.
She tried to explain to Helena, but she was dizzy.
“There something I have to tell him,” she slurred, “just one important thing.” She picked up the phone over and over, but somehow it kept ending up in Helena’s hand.
“This is not a good idea,” Helena was saying. Every time Ava would start dialing, Helena’s hand would snake in and hang up the call. Ava kept trying to push her away, but she seemed to have unlimited arms. They ended up on the floor, wrestling, Ava holding the phone over her head, Helena’s legs wrapped around her waist.
“Helena, leave me the fuck alone!”
“No!” Helena shouted back. “I’m saving you from yourself!”
She wrested the receiver away from Ava, wrapped the cord around her neck and fell on the ground, eyes crossed, tongue out.
“Now look what you’ve done,” she said. “I’m dead.”
And then they were lying next to each other in the bed, the ceiling spinning.
“It’s the loss of autonomy that concerns me,” Ava said, which was perhaps something she’d overheard somewhere. She began to cry, while Helena stroked her hair rhythmically, nodding and humming a comforting agreement—Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmmm—while Ava sobbed.
She did make the call, finally, when Helena passed out. Ava could tell she was really asleep by the way she moved her fingers as she dreamed, little delicate movements as if playing the piano on the plush white hotel pillow. Ava lifted the phone, dialed silently. She didn’t really expect him to pick up. People never answered phone calls from strange numbers. She listed to the hypnotic ringing and waited for automated message to leave a voicemail after the tone. She would leave a voicemail—it would be silence. She would hold the phone to her ear and not move, not breathe. She would let the silence go on and on, and somehow, when he listened to the message, he would know it was her inside that silence. And then he picked up.
“Hello?” he said. “Julia?”
She did not breathe. She reached over, pressed down on the receiver until the dial tone sang its low, mournful note in her ear.
Part Four
The next day she married Linus, only slightly hungover, wincing into the afternoon sun as they stood holding hands on the porch of the rented hall looking out over the bay. She was happy to be marrying Linus. It was a wonderful party. She hugged and kissed people, she had a little cry with her mother, whose mascara came off, leaving her alarmingly naked looking with her pale eyelashes, like a little blind vole. She danced furiously, she sweated and swilled mojitos, she threw her arms around Linus’s neck and laughed, left lipstick kisses on his neck and freshly shaved cheek. She loved a close shave. She loved Linus, sure she did.
She only thought of him once, when she saw him standing there at the back of the hall, in the shadows, with his hands slung in his pockets. But of course she was mistaken—when she looked again, there was no one there.
* * *
She found herself down by the piers. The sky was almost dark, wispy with clouds, like a gray marble dome. You could see stars, but they looked small and dull compared with the city lights, and the lights of the ferries that waited at the terminal, their many decks ablaze, like a house where someone has run through the rooms, turning on every switch. Ava walked to the end of the long wooden ramp, paid her money, and boarded the ferry to Vashon. She would go to his house. Her house. She would knock on the door, and he would answer. She would stand before him and speak and somehow everything would make sense.
She called Helena from the deck, standing against the railing at the prow of the ship, cupping her hands over the receiver in the wind. She needed Helena now. She wanted to knock on that door knowing that it was the right thing to do—Absolutely, Helena would say. You need closure, and so does he. Or something else that was wise and calming and good.
When Helena picked up, she just started talking—babbling, really—about the bar, how it was him, and then not him, and finally Helena said, “What? I don’t follow. Where are you?”
“I told you,” Ava said, frustrated, “I’m on the ferry. I’m on my way there now!” There was a long silence.
“Ava,” Helena said. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this with you.”
“What do you mean, with me? You’re not with me—I’m doing this alone!” Ava had been shouting over the wind, but now she was just shouting. She didn’t need this sort of crap right now—she needed Helena to be Helena.
“Ava,” Helena was saying again—why did she have to say Ava’s name like that every time she started a sentence?—“Ava, I am always with you. I am with you through all of this. Because you drag me into it with you.”
Ava laughed, incredulous. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this now. After all this time. After fifteen—fuck, sixteen—years, you tell me that I drag you down?”
“That’s not at all what I said.”
“Well, that’s what I heard.” Ava’s throat was filling. It was hard to speak. “I heard you say that I drag you down, that I’m a burden. If that’s the way you feel, then maybe you should just cut me loose. Maybe I should let you go and stop dragging you down. Maybe we should just not be friends anymore.” She said it, but she didn’t mean it. She said it and waited for Helena to retreat, to take her back into her sphere of goodness.
“I agree,” Helena said. She was speaking softly, tenderly, the way she spoke when she was comforting Ava, which made the whole situation surreal—Ava could not grasp what was happening, exactly. “I think we should each take some time,” Helena continued, “and think about what we want out of this friendship.”
“What?” Ava was shrieking now. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“Of course not,” Helena said. “I love you and I always will.”
“That sounds like a breakup, Helena. Is what that fucking sounds like. That sounds like fucking bullshit is what I think—” Ava felt lightheaded; was she breathing? was she making sense? Probably not. “Fine,” she said. “Goodbye. If that’s what you want.”
“Ava, please don’t—”
But Ava hung up. She threw her phone in her purse and paced to the front of the ferry, standing on the bow and hanging onto the green railing. The wind slammed into her, whirling her hair around, taking her breath away, telling herself everything would be fine, that she didn’t need Helena, that sometimes you had to shed people to move forward. The water rushed beneath her—she was moving forward, she felt fine.
The walk to the house from the ferry dock was dark, and longer than she remembered—maybe because she never used to walk, but always drove, the radio turned up, whipping around the corners too fast, the grey-green forest streaming past her windows. Driving to the ferry to meet the fisherman in his downtown hotel room, totally high on it—the kind of high you get from the best drug, but cleaner, purer. That was the worst part—that she had enjoyed it. She should have felt guilty, while she was doing it, but she did not. She felt allowed. She felt entitled. She felt amazing. And when—in the middle of one of their wrenching fights, when he finally stopped asking her why, and instead said, Do you regret it? If you could go back and undo it, would you?—when he asked that question, which only has one answer, she hesitated. All she had to do was say: Yes. Of course. Of course I would undo this, of course I would unwind this terrible knot I’ve made of our lives, of course I would make the broken thing whole again. But she hesitated, and the silence stretched between them, and she could see in his face that his heart, in that moment, hardening against her, like clay in a kiln.
In the screenplay, the girl realizes she’s made a mistake, and she leaves the dark and brooding fisherman. She goes back to her fiancé, stands on his porch in the rain and delivers a speech about what he is to her (everything) and who she is without him (nothing). There is a long, tense moment where you think he is going to close the door in her face, but then you see something flicker across his features. He looks up at her. They lock gazes. And then they are in each other’s arms, kissing, drenched in the rain, but they don’t care, because of LOVE.
When Ava had written this scene, she had cried. She’d sobbed into the collar of her t-shirt while she typed, not because it was similar to something that had happened, but because it was not.
“What was the one important thing?” Helena had asked her the night before her wedding, after the wrestling over the phone and the hilarity and the crying. They’d realized how drunk they’d become, drank water, swallowed aspirin, ordered a plate of French fries and ate it with their fingers, Ava wiping her greasy hands on her white satin nightgown, the one she’d bought to be ironic, to be a bride. They’d washed their face masks off, brushed their teeth, wobbling before the marble counter, and then lay together in bed in the dark, between the sheets meant for lovers.
“What?”
“The one important thing you wanted to tell him. What you said when you were calling.”
“I didn’t say that,” Ava had said. “I don’t remember saying that.”
If there had been one important thing she wanted to tell him, it couldn’t be put into words. It was not love or regret or sorrow; it was not apology or defiance—it was none of those things and all of those things. It was a feeling, a black and desperate feeling, and it welled up in her like bad water, swallowing all the words, all the possible things she could say. Because she had never been able to answer him when he asked her why. There was no reason, no answer to the question. He had done nothing wrong, and she did love him. Maybe, she sometimes thought, she was just the kind of person who could not walk past an unlocked door. It was like an itch, an alcoholic urge: she had to see what was on the other side.
Part Five
By the time she got to the house, it was almost dark. It looked like no one was home. The house was a black shape through the trees—no lights on. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, they were already asleep: he and Julia, whoever she was, curled into each other like nesting cups. Even better: perhaps he was alone, in the dark living room with the television on. Clicking through the channels, thinking about her without meaning to. Maybe she stepped into his thoughts as often as he appeared in hers—she would flicker before him in the guise of an actress on a TV show that vaguely resembled her, and then there would be a knock at the door, and he would stand, wondering who that could be at this hour.
But as she crunched up the gravel drive, she could tell the house was empty. And it wasn’t just that no one was home: there was no one living there. It was obvious. It had the stillness of an uninhabited place, or of a photograph of a person who has died. The grass was long, and it drooped to the side in the wind, laying down as if sleeping. The windows were like closed eyes. There was a white sign flapping on the lawn, announcing the name of a real estate agent and a number to call. For Sale, it read it bold black. Sellers Motivated!
She remembered standing here with him, giddy with excitement—they were buying a house! Maybe it was a beater, but they would fix it up. They would strip off the rotting Victorian latticework; they would repaint, refloor, recabinet, re-everything. It had been so clear to her, what the house would look like when they finished it, and what their life would be like when they inhabited the perfect, finished product. But the house looked the same as it had the last time she’d seen it—the paint flaking off in patches, the porch sagging on one side.
The front door was locked, but the back door was not. When she reached automatically for the light switch as she always had, coming in this door late at night, the ceiling bulbs blazed on, the room art gallery blank. The house was empty, echoing. It smelled like lemon floor polish, fresh paint, and a little bit like the sea, a whiff of salt and fish—a window had been left open in the kitchen, the one over the sink. She leaned over and closed it. It would not do for the house to be damp and moldy when a new couple came to look at it, hand in hand, trying to picture it fixed up and perfect.
She walked through the rooms that had once been hers, skirting the ghosts of the furniture that was not there—though the living room was bare, she stepped around the coffee table, the sofa, the bookshelf by the doorway that lead to the foyer, and then upstairs. She wondered what had happened to these things, the trappings of her life with him. Perhaps he had burned them, or thrown them into the sea. Or perhaps they were with him wherever he was—someplace sunny, she imagined, with Julia—being sat on and slept on, being used as if they meant nothing, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe he never thought of her at all.
Only the bathroom looked the same. You don’t take anything out of a bathroom when you move away. There was still the same sink and mirror, the antique turquoise water taps she’d found at a flea market, the wooden toilet seat that she’d hated and intended to replace, and of course the door that lead to the master bedroom, which was closed. There was light from somewhere coming in the window—diffuse city light from the sky, silvery and thin. She left the lights off, sat down on the edge of the tub in the dark. It felt like she had been zapped back in time. She could almost believe that he was just through the door, in their vast white bed, happy and dreaming, waiting for her.
She turned the taps on and water poured out, first cold, then scalding hot. The steam calmed her like a drug, lulled her into a kind of hypnotic daze. Out of habit or nostalgia or drunkenness, she peeled her clothes off, swung her legs over and slid into the tub, her body clicking into place in the exact spot she once occupied so long ago, before everything, when she was still that other, better version of herself.
The actress they had hired to play her in the movie was medium-famous, a young, wholesome looking blonde. “She can’t be too sexy,” the casting director had said. “And she absolutely cannot have dark hair.” Sitting in that L.A. conference room, everybody with their bottled water and their destroyed plates of shrimp cocktail, Ava had looked down at her hair lying darkly on her shoulder; she’d thought, I was doomed from the beginning. She felt cursed but also absolved—it wasn’t her fault. It was written into her genes, like a birth defect, a mangled chromosome, a little bomb of badness.
She was drunk, she realized, still, from the bar with the blue lights. She was lying in a tub in the dark in an empty house that did not belong to her, her clothes strewn everywhere. She was a naked, drunk, trespassing criminal—what was she doing? She needed to get up, get herself home to Linus, to her beautiful apartment, to her beautiful life she didn’t deserve, before she let it, too, drop from her fingers like a stone into water. Tomorrow she would call Helena, she would fix it. Tomorrow she would kiss Linus and mean it. Tomorrow she’d write something amazing, and the next time the agent called, she would say, I am one hundred percent done, and she would deliver to the woman something beautiful and true. She grabbed the sides of the tub and heaved herself up, full of resolve; her body still buzzed with wine, her head swimmy and warm, and as she stood she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the moonlit mirror. Her hair was slicked back and dark, streaming water, and her face, in an unguarded moment, was strange and sinister looking. For a brief, whirling moment she did not recognize herself—she was certain that this stranger had burst in on her, intent on doing her harm, and her body went loose with terror.
“Get out!” she screamed, before she realized her mistake.