My stomach feels bloated and empty all at once. I sit there swinging back and forth on the egg chair, my legs kicking out. The lack of closure closes in on me.
I’d thought maybe this could give me a sense of purpose, bringing his atrocities into the light, helping protect others against his evils.
But now there is no lawsuit for me to pursue, no poetic justice to serve.
“You coward,” I snarl aloud to Mr. Hubert. “Going and dying before I could press charges and make everyone see you for who you really are.”
I suppose I could still go public with my story, but it hits differently when you’re accusing a dead man. Not just the optics of it—I don’t care about that—but there’d be no sense that my trauma was really helping anyone. I could donate to a nonprofit or even start one myself, but the news that Mr. Hubert is six feet under has taken the wind out of my sails.
Maybe it was my ego wanting the attention of a sensational lawsuit, but the motive has some good in it too. Everything is tangled. Isn’t that just how life is?
To counteract the rage or maybe just add more, I look up Chris’s wedding site to see if he and Olivia are married yet. It turns out they’re not, which makes me more relieved than it should, as if I still think there’s time to sabotage the whole thing. My ruinous tendencies are still there, but I’m not going to indulge them like I used to.
The wedding will be October 3 at the Plaza Hotel. It’s as typicalof a venue as I would’ve expected, all chandeliers and New York opulence. I don’t scheme to crash it, just put a card in the mail congratulating them and apologizing to Olivia.
It’s not any grand confession or anything. I just tell her that I feel bad that we got off on the wrong foot and I hope we can all do something together soon. I’m not expecting them to take me up on this but I feel better inside, like I’ve scrubbed away some of the muck that I thought made me cool but actually just made me cruel.
I put in a little gift for Arnie too, a “best man” chew toy. It’s pretty adorable. I know Chris will like it and I hope Olivia will too. It’s pretty obvious now how Olivia was never to blame at all. She didn’t force Chris to be with her. He chose that with his own free will and I was just too jealous to accept it.
Chris ends up calling me to thank me. I let it go to voicemail and I listen to the voicemail a lot of times in a row, but then I delete it. That part isn’t out of spite; it’s out of respect. He’s about to marry another woman and I don’t want to tempt him or tempt myself. I unfollow him on social media too.
Tara seems surprised by these developments, says she’s proud of how far I’ve come. “Now you can start opening yourself up to new people who are actually emotionally available,” she tells me one morning while we’re sizzling up some blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I’ve started getting up earlier now so I don’t miss so much of the day.
“No thanks,” I say. The thought of meeting someone new doesn’t excite me; it just makes me feel like I let something precious drop through my fingers onto the concrete and shatter. “And what about you? Why haven’t you professed your love to Niles yet?”
Her face contorts. “I don’t want to mess things up.”
“The only way you can mess it up is if you let fear hold you back,” I reply, since I’ve pretty much become a fortune cookie these days. “Now I’m giving you three days or I’ll do it for you. And you know I’m not joking.”
Tara is cramped with nerves. She rocks her knees back and forth on the couch. I sit down next to her and give her a side hug. “Look,” I say. “Maybe I’m not the best role model on the whole relationship thing, but just go for it. You don’t want to have regrets. Trust me.”
“What about your view that monogamy is monotonous?” Tara wants to know.
“Well, it depends how deeply you dive into another person’s spirit and grow with them,” I say. “We all have a choice about how boring or interesting our relationships are. Confinement doesn’t always come in the form of commitment. Sometimes it’s the opposite. And on that note,” I go on, “I think it’s time to formally announce that I’ve dissolved the Anti-Marriage Pact.”
Tara’s brown eyes bulge. Maybe she’s been trying to ignore the signs that we were headed that way, headed to the end, which is actually the beginning. I wish Tara could’ve been up there on the mountain with me and the fawn and the stars. Then she’d understand.
“Here’s the thing,” I explain, trying to help her see the starlight. “Rules against convention can be just as confining as conventional rules. That’s something the divine woman helped crystalize for me. Being free doesn’t have anything to do with whether we get married or not. It has to do with how liberated we are in our choices to marry or not marry, and then how we heal and grow and love with someone else and most of all with ourselves.”
Tara runs her hands through her Afro, untamed these days. It’s like she’s trying to convince herself that I’ll get bored of my enlightened self and go back to how I was before. I have to admit I’m kind of scared of that happening too, but at the same time I know that it’s a permanent shift—that once a blind woman can see, she doesn’t wear eyepatches just for the hell of it, except maybe on Halloween.
“So by that logic, you might get married?” she asks me, like she’strying to catch me in my own trap so I’ll backtrack on the whole thing.
“Perhaps.” There’s a thrill at how many doors have been flung wide open. Not just with relationships but with everything else that I’d previously prohibited. “It’s still unlikely,” I admit. “But I’m open to evolving and you should be open too. If you want to be with Niles, then just go for it. I’ll buy you three pints of pea milk ice cream if it doesn’t work out. How’s that?”
“Pea milk ice cream is disgusting,” Tara says. “I’ll need the coconut milk kind. And make it five pints, not three.”
“You’re worth the splurge,” I assure her. “Now woman up and tell him how you feel.”
Chapter 36
My pep talk must be an inspirational one because Tara and Niles become an official item soon after. Apparently Niles was wanting to make a move and they were both waiting it out. Life can be like that, one big game of chicken.
Without the clubs and all the love affairs—or lust affairs I guess I should call them, now that I can see their flimsy frames in daylight—I need other things to focus on. I set myself a goal of reaching one hundred rejections of any kind. It feels overly analytical to have a number in mind like that, but I like the clarity it brings. How it’ll mean I’m really trying and going for things that I wouldn’t have in the past.
I work hard on a script, three full acts. It’s an expansion of the concept I dreamed up on the mountain about the woman who falls to her death and confronts all her regrets. It feels good to sit down and see something through to the end. I always kind of knew what I was doing, what I was avoiding, by jumping from script to script, the same way I knew what I was doing by jumping from body to body. But it’s amazing how much you can justify and deny your own actions until suddenly it all comes crashing down so you can rise again.
I submit the play to a bunch of contests and theater companies and agents and managers, and by the time September arrives, I’ve gotten thirty-eight rejections and am waiting to hear from a coupledozen more. Sometimes success doesn’t start as success, I keep reminding myself. More often success starts as failure that you refuse to interpret as failure. You look at it as a stepping stone instead of a sunken stone.
