Six
June 10, 1976
7:00P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
They call it falling in love because you really do fall. The ground slips out from under you, and you’re in this place you’ve never been—mysterious and dark as a different planet. It’s hard to breathe there. There’s nothing to grab on to. You can’t pull yourself out. Not until the day you fall out of love. And when that happens, when you fall out of love, it’s just as unexpected and hopeless and impossible to get out of as it was when you fell into it in the first place.
For me, that happened a week ago, but it could have happened any time. It wasn’t anything Gabriel did or said. It was his face, close up, as we were kissing. Out of focus like that, Gabriel didn’t look like a boy or a man at all, but like some sort of animal—wolf mixed with bear. And it was consuming me, that animal. It was holding me in its claws like a piece of meat.
Aurora Grace, never open your eyes when you kiss a boy. I swear to God you will not like what you see.
The next morning, I broke up with Gabriel. I did it over thephone so I wouldn’t have to look at him, ever again. I told him Papa Pete didn’t want us seeing each other anymore, because I thought that might make it easier for him, easier for both of us. Mrs. Brixton had suggested it, and she always had the best ideas. A little white lie. That’s what she said.
Gabriel cried. Wet sobs I could feel through the plastic. Boys aren’t supposed to cry like that. It turned my stomach. When I hung up, I thought, thank God that’s over. But it wasn’t, was it? My white lie, the thing that was supposed to make it easier on both of us. That lie killed my stepdad. I killed Papa Pete.
Now we’re sitting in Papa Pete’s car. Gabriel’s behind the wheel and Kool & the Gang is on the radio and I’m not going to cry. I can’t cry in front of him. I can’t even look unhappy, or I’ll get shot too, and Jenny will have no one. So I push Papa Pete out of my mind. Kind Papa Pete who tried his best to cook Mom’s recipes after she died and who told me he loved me the same as Jenny—that I was his real daughter, just as much as her. I tell myself not to think of him, ever again.
I make myself smile. At first, my lips won’t stop twitching but after a while it gets easier. I mouth the words to “Hollywood Swinging” and bop my head to the hey, hey, heys.
Gabriel grins at me. He tells me my smile is sexy. He sings along with the song and then he says maybe we’ll wind up in Hollywood ourselves—a supercouple, like Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors.
He puts his hand on my knee. The smile stays plastered to my face. “Oh baby,” I tell him, “that would be a dream come true.”
Once you tell one lie, you wind up lying forever.
Seven
Robin
WHEN IT STARTS,it’s barely perceptible. An unmet gaze. The flushing of his skin at an odd moment. A late-night work call, taken in another room.
The next phase, though, is harder to ignore. You can feel the rift, the cold whistling through it, that awful unbreachable gap. Or so it seemed to Robin Diamond as she scanned her husband’s Twitter feed while waiting for her boss, Eileen, to read her column, clicking on his “tweets and replies” with her jaw clenched. Eric Diamond, executive producer on a cable TV “news” show calledShawn Labatoir’s Anger Management, always said he had little time for social media. He used it solely to plug his stories, he said. No personal pictures or information.
But clearly, he made an exception for GinnyMarie, a “lover of the beach,” according to her Twitter bio.Proud Mama to My Furbabies, Yoga Is Life, God Bless the USA.The banter between those two... Well, it sparkled, didn’t it? It scintillated. Apparently, Ginny was looking for a funny movie to see and Eric was suggesting the works of Ernst Lubitsch, extolling the virtues ofTrouble in Paradisein five separate tweets, less than a minute apart, all this taking place during lunchtime today, when he’d claimed to be in the throes of a breaking story and too busy to meet up. Granted, a Twitter conversationtook moments, while lunch with one’s wife was more of a commitment. But was Robin wrong to ask for commitment from a man who seemed so distant lately? Who had worked more late nights in the past two months than in the previous three years? A man who failed to mention in half a dozen tweets aboutTrouble in Paradisethat he had seen that very movie with his wife at the Film Forum in NoHo fifteen years ago, that it was one of his wife’s favorites, and that when they were both grad students at Columbia, she’d taken him, well,dragged him to it, actually, as part of an ongoing campaign to educate this otherwise knowledgeable man on films made before 1990?What’s on your mind?Robin had asked Eric last night when she’d rolled over to find him sitting up in bed, eyes open, staring.Nothing, he had replied, which for all she knew was the truth. Eric the enigma. Unreadable, even as his wife transformed into the type of person who stalked his Twitter feed, who was jealous of a lover of the beach in a red, white, and blue bikini top who called her ferrets furbabies and hashtagged the wordblessed.
Robin’s work extension buzzed. Assuming it was Eileen, she closed Twitter and corralled her thoughts back to her column—about a proposed all-female remake ofThe Magnificent Seven, which she was in favor of, despite (or more likely because of) all the online hate it was receiving from men.
Robin cleared her throat. “That was fast,” she said.
“Ms. Diamond?” The voice was male and young. Reedy. Touch of vocal fry.
Robin glanced at the caller ID screen and saw an unfamiliar outside line. A 213 area code. Los Angeles.Movie publicist, she thought, readying for the pitch.What I wouldn’t give for a glass of wine...“Yes?”
“Hi. My name is Quentin Garrison. I work for KAMC, an NPR affiliate in the Los Angeles area, but I’m out in New York right now.”
“Yes?”
“I’m working on a podcast.”
Robin frowned. “Yes?”
“I hear noise in the background. Is it hard for you to talk privately where you are?”
Robin glanced around the room, as though she were seeing where she was for the first time. The Daily Culture offices were set up as an open newsroom—art, copy, and editorial all in the same large space. At the next desk over, Jill the music editor was ordering Thai food in her too-loud voice. David from photo was a few desks away, going over red-carpet art on an enormous screen with Michael the creative director, the two of them complaining about all the rearview poses, the over-the-shoulder. “If I have to look at one more set of ass implants,” Michael was saying.
“Believe me,” Robin said. “No one is paying attention to this conversation.”