“Listen, I know you think this is bad. But I really think there might be an opportunity here. I mean, you always say characters are verbs, right? And Margie, well, she’s due for a bit of reinvention, isn’t she? If we made a feature of it, we could do all kinds of storylines—I mean, the paternity question alone…”
The words coming out of her mouth are hasty and harebrained, atrue Margie maneuver, but she is willing to do anything (anything) now to keep him from closing the door on her. Because outside she can hear Orson laughing with someone, his high-pitched cackle reserved for only truly funny and slightly naughty comments, and it’s enough to make her cry. This is her family. Every day, they show up, prepared to be vulnerable and brave, determined never to let one another down. They can read you with a single glance, will keep you level with an aspirin or a coffee or a quiet word. Most of them, she’d trust with her life.
Mark still isn’t looking at her. She knows she’s nothing to him, replaceable as a shoelace. But still, she is talking, almost as though she expects this to be a scene from the show.
MARGIE
Whatever it takes, boss. I’ll do it for free if you’ll just let me come back. We can even use the babies, if we need, for filming. Did I mention it’s twins?
If Rip were writing the scene, Margie would be compelling. Her wheedling would move mountains. Mark would scratch his head and say something like:This just might work.Or maybe, appealing to Margie’s regular currency:You can keep the job if you fuck me.
Would she? Now, in the interest of keeping her options open, when her whole world feels like it’s on the line? She can feel the coiled springs under the cushions of the couch, the bodies which have surely succumbed here, before, to the desperate need to please. He is crossing the floor slowly in the direction of his desk, and she is trying to envision whether it could be just another role, because as Susan, she cannot do it. Her husband is fixed in her mind. But surrendering Margie is not an option. Mark leans against the desk and looks at her squarely, his eyes running cold over the shape of her.
She looks at him with all of Margie’s desperation and he looks back at her like a used tissue.
“Listen, Susie. I like you. But if you don’t look the part, you don’t have the right to play it. Contractually, we can do what we want.”
What he’s trying to say is no one wants to sleep with a pregnant girl.
“But what I’m saying is—”
“This conversation is over.”
Susan is descending from the sublet and dropping the keys in the mailbox and folding into Al’s arms. She breathes him in, the unfamiliar way he smells after a month without her, and they rock together as people pass around them, a stone in a stream.
“Miss me?” he asks.
She nods into his shoulder. He has driven across the country to get her. He places both hands on her stomach (his stomach) and looks at her with a wide-open face.
“You want to go home?”
She presses her cheek into his cheek, the stubble where a beard won’t grow. She shakes her head against his head, her nose wiping against him.No.She doesn’t want to go anywhere.
With her suitcase in the trunk of the car, they buy tickets to the Los Angeles aquarium. He takes her hand and leads her through the towering tanks.
“The other night,” he says, “they were showing something about the origins of life on PBS.”
“Trust you to watch PBS while I’m away.”
“Hey, they have good stuff on there.”
“Lifelong learner. See, you act so above it all, but I told you, you’d love having a TV.”
“I was never above it all.”
“I’m just teasing. What did it say?” She rests her cheek on his shoulder, the softness of his shirt, the hardness of his muscle underneath. His glasses are reflecting the blue of the water.
“There are these vents in the floor of the ocean where magma hits the seawater. And they think that’s where life began.”
“Huh,” she says. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah. You’re seawater, and I’m magma.”
He pinches the flesh on her elbow and she wrinkles her nose at him. They pause to make way for a young mother and her small, beautiful daughter who is babbling, pointing, peering up through thick eyelashes as a shark coasts through the tank. The mother lifts the child, who places tiny hands against both of their mouths, in a moment where words can hold no meaning.
“Do you think children look at the water and remember the womb?” he asks.
