“Blood wherever you like, Marion.”
Marion smiles, adjusts Susan’s blouse, and busies off to massacre someone else. Orson lights her smoke. Looks out to the road again. That face. Her heart. The edge of the world. She wonders, after she dies, whether California will keep rising out of the water or fall back into the ocean. For a long time, she thought that she was living at the end of time, that everything would just continue on in its final perfected state forever. But standing here feels like the opposite. Like the earth can’t help but keep moving.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
She nods. She breathes in the smell of him. She’ll give him his chance, now, to say what he needs to say. It’s the nicest thing she can do.
“Orson,” she asks. “Does any of this matter?”
“Of course it matters.” He is looking at her fixed, scrambling for words. “It matters. Even if it’s not us, even if it’s not always good or meaningful, it helps people understand their lives. It matters that we show up for them day after day after day. It matters that we’re here, that we spent this time together—”
“Susie, can we get you in place, please—”
“Sure, sure.” She looks at Orson. “Hold that thought.”
She lies there heavy while around her are voices of people swapping out functional cars for busted-up ones. She has been thrown from the vehicle through the windshield, and a props woman carefully places broken glass around her body. When she was little, she and Sadie used to outline each other with chalk on the sidewalk in front of their house. Her stomach is killing her, the surgery wounds have been so slow to heal.
ROLLING.
She tries not to breathe. Orson is screaming at her motionless body and she feels, in the vacuum of Margie, Susan leaking in. An untenable pride, at having begun this, at having finished it. At having nothing left to say.
When they cut the final shot, she walks away from the scene of her death, and into the waiting cab. Orson is looking around for her, distracted, as the car pulls away from their world. Don’t look back, don’t let yourself fall apart. She’s learned this much: in real life, there’s no such thing as a satisfying goodbye.
2012
They hit the Grand Social, the room pulsing with electricity, and Viola allows herself to be dragged through the tapestry of movement, fed pints of Guinness. Music splashes out of windows and voices call and heavy feet hit the ground and everywhere is senseless laughter, senseless joy.
She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want to be wearing makeup or her best-fitting dress. She wants to be liquid, to sink into the ground. Dublin becomes a contemptuous purgatory. Somewhere she was meant to belong but never would.
“I’m going to say something you won’t like, okay? Because I’m drunk. And I know this is going to sound stupid coming from the girl living with her monogamous whatever, but I am just begging you. You have to interrogate your own happiness. Sometimes I think you’re so set on one image of love that you might be depriving yourself of everything it might be. Love is not just one thing.”
“Okay,” Viola says. “I will think about that.”
They walk back across the Samuel Beckett Bridge, harp-like and impossibly suspended, a model of asymmetry. Her mother had come here to visit her relatives as a child, Sadie once said. How many cobblestones have changed in the interim? This bridge didn’t exist then, nor did any of the glassy buildings or fiber-optic cables or rich Europeans in fancy glasses.How did it feel to be here?Did she love it or hate it or belong or wish she were somewhere else? What would she think of it now? What would she think of her child, here? It’s all gone. No one, not even Orson, can tell her.What you miss is an absence, he said.
None of those feelings matter anymore, do they.Nothing I feel matters much either, she thinks.
Under the cold stars, they pass a homeless woman with sores on her face singing to a dog. Normally she would pass. It’s a matter of safety, in the city, only seeing what you’re supposed to see. But she can’t, not tonight. She reaches into her purse and gives her all the money she has. She can’t take it with her, anyway.
A thought flutters across her mind, freed at last from her own self-consciousness and the threat of Orson’s feeling. Her mother, naked, was beautiful.
1996
“Okay,” she says. “Are we going to do this?”
As he leads her up the stairs, she is surprised to find herself nervous. Conscious of her posture. As though this were their first time together.
“Is this okay?” he asks. In the far corner of the bedroom, he has used about a million thumbtacks to peg up a cheap black cloth along the top of the wall, carried up the stool that sits by the kitchen phone.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it’s perfect.”
He sighs and looks at her. Looks away from her.
“We need to make this fun.”
“Yeah.”
“Sexy.”
