Sebastian is looking at his knees. Viola can feel the racing of his mind.
At the ticket counter, tingling, she hands over $8.50 in exchange for two hours and twenty minutes with the love of her life. Hurry into screen seven, scramble for seats in the back row! As the lights dim there is nothing else to think about, not the couple sucking on each other’s face or Zach Papadopoulos’s thick scent or the empty candy wrappers on the floor or whether your grandmother has noticed your absence. The title card falls and the romance begins.
Paris, the thirties. Viola is absorbed by the direct address, the searching look in Orson’s eyes that only ever seems to call out to her.
The warden is slipping Orson pages of the newspaper to read. She is also, as it turns out, a romantic, and understands that man cannot live on bread (or in this case, beef stroganoff) alone. Viola can no longer tell if the look of wry gratitude that Orson is giving the warden is the sameas the look he gave her on the night of the funeral. As she looks around at all the faces basking in the great projected light of him, she feels an almost-jealousy, a rupture of the illusion that he is hers alone.I’m the only one who actually knows him, she thinks, a memory of dashboard heat blasting onto her hands. Even as a child, he saw her clearly—someone to be taken seriously. No: despite his miraculous rise to fame, despite all the world thinking they own him, he has always been her secret friend.
Orson scrawls a poem on the back of the newspaper.Maybe I should learn French, she thinks.Maybe I should cut my hair short like Juliette Binoche.
“Honh Honh Honh.” Zach is applying a bad French accent to Orson’s moving mouth. “You very pretty lady, let me show you ma baguette.”
“Shut it!”
In the light of a full moon, the warden opens the cell to Orson’s room and removes her trousers. As she watches, Viola awakens to Orson as a man with cheekbones like cut gems, a man who looks good with his shirt off. Though the air conditioner is aggressive, a pleasant warmth enters her body. Around them, parents who had underestimated the PG-13 rating are instructing their children to avert their eyes. Sebastian looks uncomfortable.
“Ooh! Make me a nice French bébé with a leetle mustache!” Zach whispers. Sebastian snorts so loudly that a man in front of them turns around and glares.
“I will kill you,” she whispers.
In blessed silence, Juliette opens the window to a new morning. Viola imagines herself living in this beautiful way, autumn sunshine hitting the terrace of her European apartment, a book at a thirty-degree angle to the table, a tiny coffee in an exquisite ceramic mug. A pastry. A man, sitting across from her, unspeaking but glowing in mutual presence, each of them thinking profound, essential thoughts. Clean. Perfect.
“Dad, was Mom, like, a celebrity?”
The question is a nonquestion, unanswerable. Al’s son is helping himself to seconds, tearing up bread into small pieces and mopping up barbecue juice. He’d been talking about high school, how different it was going to be, how they should start by impressing their teachers with the summer reading.Everything counts, he’d been saying, but he hadn’t counted on this.
“Well, there are gradations of celebrities.”
“Okay, but like, would people call her that?”
“Some people, maybe. But it would be an overstatement.” To him, she was Susan. And now she is no one. Seven years have made her a figment to them, a voiceless, smiling woman in family photographs. He has simplified her into a person who existed solely for them. What is he afraid of? The door to another reality, the invitation to imbalance.
“Can we watch her show anywhere?”
“You know, Seb, it was really just a few episodes. I’m not sure there are copies. Soaps, they never had that sort of thing.”
No, he can’t admit to it; not to the tapes, not to any of it. He used to worry that they would hate her for all the time she denied them. But now he worries that they might hate him instead.
“How’s Grandma?” he asks.
“Oh,” says Viola. “She’s good.”
1989
“I saw your wife yesterday.”
All around, the laughter of women—white women drunk on white wine—ripples over the manicured golf course of Anopsia Country Club, where, at the eighteenth hole, Mr. and Mrs. Dunning are celebrating their son’s engagement. Behind, the Club House rises majestic: an alabaster estate girded by a large wraparound porch. Bodies move impressionistic, pastel blurs of familiar and almost-familiar faces, and everything is perfect except for the missing space where Susan should be, the vacant area between Al’s breastbone and his hip, his empty back pocket where, when she’s happy, she sometimes slips her hand. She was supposed to be here by now. Her flight was supposed to get in around noon, and she was just supposed to be an hour or two late, but now it’s been three and everyone’s tipsy and loose under the afternoon sun, finding excuses to say the things they’d been wanting to say for hours.
Maybe she was delayed, Al thinks,or maybe the plane crashed. He’s started having bad dreams after seeing pictures of the smoldering fuselage in Sioux City.Stop, he tells himself,it could be a million things. She probably stopped to get a milkshake or can’t decide what to wear. Despite the increase in her filming trips, Al is still unused to her absence. He has come to rely on her in so many unanticipated ways; her coffee is stronger and deeper, she fills the kitchen with fresh, juicy fruit, which he never thinks to buy but always reaches for when it’s there. She makes him laugh so hard he forgets himself—small tragedies become a source of silliness: their evil downstairs neighbor, the slow demise of his car. She rescues him from his tendency to ruminate. Skillfully, she handles the rodent problem, somehow catching them without killing them usingonly empty rolls of toilet paper. When she is gone, he resorts shamefully to the traps. Their corpses sicken him, and he has to hold his breath while taking them to the dumpster.It’s going to be haunted by mice ghosts in here!she cries, when he confesses.Well, I guess you should never leave, he jokes, though really he couldn’t be more serious, because how else is he supposed to convey the discomfort of situations like this, in which Sloane Roberts is swilling her lemonade and looking at him sidelong, setting him up to be the butt of a joke.I saw your wife yesterday.
“Tell her I say hello.” He’s learned this much: get ahead of the punch line. If you laugh at yourself first, you seem in control. And the joke of his wife’s absence has become common enough among his friends that he can smell it from a mile off. He smiles now as though he’s in on it, as though the insinuation isn’t pissing him off.
“She was on the TV,” Sloane says knowingly. Al can feel the skin of his neck flushing, a few beers threatening to give him away. He hasn’t watched an episode in months. He’s begun to flick through channels while she’s away, hoping to catch her, hoping he won’t. Only once in a blue moon does Susan sit him down to watch one together. And even she’ll admit that watching them makes her squirm: the strange hyper-awareness of her own voice, the back of her head. The dissonance, perhaps, between the wife on the couch and the woman in the scene.
Resting against Sloane’s engorged bosom, a four-month-old infant wipes its face against her chest, threatens to wake.
“Hang on, is that what you’ve been doing all day, left to your own devices? Watching soaps?” Her husband, Rod Roberts, an investment banker by birth, feigns shock. “I thought we were going for partner!”
“Well, I just stumbled across it when I was looking for the news…” Sloane colors with embarrassment. God forbid anyone at Arrow and Munch discover their senior associate has succumbed to the intellectual poverty of daytime television.Come on.It’s one thing to think it, but another to insinuate it so nakedly. “Anyway,” Sloane deflects, “she gave me quite a shock.”
