“With that,” he says, and he means the masking tape, on the desk of the False Guru, in the office of the False Guru, in the Ashram of the False Guru, where he’s located with a woman named . . . what’s her name again? Her name is Nora. He has removed many items from this desk, just in case a surface is needed. His good fortune owes to the fact that he has agreed to be a part of the next gala benefit thrown by the False Guru for the Foundation of the True Practice, a foundation that aims to bring remnants of Eastern wisdom to the thirsty Western masses. The False Guru has the cooperation of a number of persons with perfect skin and large fortunes, and Thaddeus Griffin has now agreed to lend his name, in concert with these persons who have fortunes, and this has caused the office of the False Guru to be made available on short notice, for an important private lesson with one Nora Richards, whom he’d earlier thought to be merely another student of the False Guru. But no. She’s not simply a student, she’s a yoga instructor in training, and she has proven her willingness to conduct this private lesson in the office of the False Guru, a lesson commencing in seated posture on the Oriental carpet. Quite a lovely and expensive carpet, when you pause to consider that the False Guru was at one time a practitioner of the fine arts, a free-wine-in-plastic-cups-drinker at local art openings. But then the False Guru traveled to India to learn the binding poses. He practiced renunciations and the diverse skills that would enhance the business that he was launching here on the fringes of Noho.
One with the carpet, one with the tumbleweeds of dust on the carpet. Thaddeus accepts a gentle correction in the performance of the auspicious pose, bhadra-asana, bringing the soles of his feet together under the scrotum, hollowing the hands above the feet in the shape of the tortoise. He allows Nora to push roughly upon his shoulders because the problem is that his shoulders are always up around his ears, and this is inauspicious. Thaddeus makes the shape of a tortoise, indicating receptivity. There is a siren going past the Ashram of the False Guru, and somewhere there is the faint tinkling of the indoor fountain installed at considerable expense, also the chittering of beautiful yoga practitioners in their expensive outfits. This is the poetry of sounds, respiration, siren, fountain, and the liquid vowels of practitioners, and this is the magnificence of incense, and this is the raising up of prayer, and this is the knowledge of subtle things, a knowledge of things that are hidden away, which is one of the tasks of the yogin. When the yogin knows these subtle things, then shall he mash his mouth against the mouth of his yogini.
She was once employed in the helping professions. She told him so. She was once employed in the profession of exotic dancing, and so it does not seem as though she will turn away from the desperate collision of soft tissue, this mashing of faces. She has an Indian guru. She has learned to play the harmonium. She is allowing herself to be kissed by Thaddeus Griffin, movie star and practitioner of yoga, and she is kissing back a little bit, and this is the pose called the Adulterous Union, wherein two practitioners, who are elsewhere participants in love’s vast covenant, conjoin their mouths on the Oriental carpet in the ashram.
“I really can’t help myself, you know, I can’t help what I’m going to say, so I’m just going to say it. Because why hold back, you know? You’re just incredibly beautiful, do you know? Do you know how beautiful you are?” The yogin says these things as though to say them were a chant. It’s no falsehood to speak in this way. Falsehoods are not noble truths. She is beautiful, even if it is also true that the yogin thinks virtually everybody is beautiful. Fully two-thirds of the yoginis he passes on the street are ravishing. They don’t know this about themselves because a ravishment doesn’t know what it is. For example, the way a certain woman wears glasses, tiny spectacles, pinched onto her nose like a fence that protects the male of the species from the memorable hue of her eyes. She probably works for Internal Revenue. There’s a way she shifts her weight from side to side as she walks, she has the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen, and this ass was created as an evolutionary novelty so that men would see the ass of this Internal Revenue employee and these men would beg to be with her, and she would preserve her rajas, or genital ejaculate, and suck up bindu, thereby ensuring fruitful multiplication, in turn creating the chromosomal reproduction of the perfect ass, and thus the continuity of a brave line of Internal Revenue employees.
However, upon seeing this woman on the way to the Ashram of the False Guru, the yogin’s reverie about her ass is interrupted because passing close by her, in the opposite direction, is another yogini in a conservative suit who is wearing a high-visibility hard hat. She is so beautiful with the hard hat on that it is almost impossible not to propose to her on the spot, and the fact that she has a mole on the side of her nose is completely irrelevant to the enlightened yogin, she has to wear that hard hat, she must keep wearing that hard hat, and as a matter of course he’d still be thinking about her, except that now he passes a woman with that little calf muscle, the calf muscle from too much high-heel wearing, or perhaps it is just the advanced practice of uttankoormasana, resulting in a sculpting of calves; she smiles as she walks, the yogini, and the smile of a yogini is philosophically overwhelming, emanating from the third eye center; it is as if the yogini knows that the universe is situated in her body; it is as if the yogini drinks the water from the cranial bowl of the yogin; if they all smiled while walking, yogins would be as idiots stunned by the multitude of smiling yoginis, and still he is thinking about these calves, that smile, wondering if he should run after the yogini in order to get to know her in her quintessence, in her rajas, whoever she is, this as he enters into the ashram, signs in for class, only to find, again, by the sale leotards and the CDs of thunder drums, as the fountain spills into its retaining pool, the aforementioned Nora Richards.
“So how much for a private lesson, anyway?”
Which brings us to this moment. Nora is attempting to observe the rigors of private tutelage, pushing against his pelvis as she tries to get him to do the second warrior pose with binding, reminding him to lock in the belly, performing in this way the mula bandha. Close the anus and strongly draw upward the excreting energy. She reaches under, and she must know how enlightening it is to have her reaching under him in this way. He is truly experiencing the enlightenment and the freedom from rebirth. And it is then, in a state of enlightenment where there is no room for individual consciousness, that Thaddeus suggests that she masking-tape his wrists together in order to ensure that the binding in the pose is performed according to tradition.
“What?” Nora asks.
He is balanced in sushumna, between inhalation and exhalation, between the masculine and the feminine. He is thinking that this is a bad idea, this private class, in that it does not observe abstinence from the eight kinds of erotic action, namely, to think it, to praise it, to joke about it, to look with desire, to converse in private, to decide to do it, to attempt to do it, to perform it. And yet it seems like a very, very good idea at the same time, because self-discipline splits the personality in two, as the masters say, and without self-discipline one drinks in the fluids of the moon.
“With that.” He selects from among the personal effects of the False Guru. Standard-issue American masking tape, the sign of a well-equipped desk.
“Isn’t it going to hurt?”
“It’s going to make it so that I do the pose right, you know, and that’s what I’m after. I’m all about trying to do the pose right. That’s why we’re here.” He’s in the pose and he really does feel like a warrior, because he is a warrior of the Adulterous Union, he is a warrior of expedient decision making and inadvisable seductions, and he’s in the pose, the warrior pose, and this is the presentation of the lingam, the gesture of the lingam, in which concentration on longing is in the shape of an arrow shining like a thousand suns, and this is good, because sometimes he has to resort to the philters of Western medicine to achieve the proper presentation of the lingam, and he reaches one arm under himself and one around his side and says, “Bind me.”
“What about getting it off later? That’s going to burn.”
His impatience is plain to see. For this is the lingam gesture. Nora peels up the end of the tape, wraps it around his wrists twice, and then, under pressure, a third time. This is the pose of the Humiliated Pupil, and once in it, he scuttles, as if crustacean, closer to her, where he can plant his five o’clock shadow on her hams, and she giggles, and he kisses her thigh. Her thigh has the excellence of distant galaxies.
“Take off the gear.” He means that the time is so short. And she does the perfect yogic removal of layers, one leg at a time, like a pink flamingo of yogic abandon. And because she has the experience in the helping professions, she has eliminated coarse overgrowth from her body, except for a landing strip, in the Brazilian style, and she giggles as he cranes with his neck, winching forward to make a landing in the folds of her, though she cannot help but say, “Flat back, shoulders down, please. Shoulders down,” and then there’s a little rush of the breath of the ocean, a silencing, as he has now placed his tongue where he would prefer to have his tongue, his subtle tongue of the candle flame. Exertion is involved because his hands are in the binding position and so his hands cannot be used. And it is said that meditation upon the mandala on the wall in the office of the False Guru shall alleviate conditions of suffering, the mandala on the tapestry, that representation of Shiva the destroyer, but this causes distraction from the presentation of the lingam, which causes the lingam to fail. There is no other explanation but the explanation of unnecessary concentration upon the mandala. How could this always happen? Losing himself in the shambhavi mudra when he should be engaged with the tantra and the yogini. How could it happen?
He collapses onto the floor. “Bow pose. Can we do bow pose?”
The yogini expresses hesitation at causing pain to the yogin in the pursuit of the bow pose, which is better performed by seasoned practitioners. And yet the entire alimentary canal will be toned in this practice, which is the practice of dhanurasana, likewise adrenal glands and thyroid gland.
“Tape my ankles, too, when I —” and he rolls onto his stomach, the bow pose, with one arm pinioned under him, left over from the binding, “and then you can sit on top of me and you can do a correction. On top of me.”
The instructor must know the shape of the cosmic being. The shape of the cosmic being is the guise of the star of the action film, star of distant light, star of the eternal cosmos, and the yogini is a drinker of the light of the cosmic star of the action film. And she kneels over him, reaches in through his shorts, massages his buttocks, as if he were clay and she the potter, and then she shoves his ankles together and starts circumnavigating these ankles with the standard-issue American masking tape, twice around, three times around. And then she yanks his workout shorts down, without even asking, there he is, the cosmic being, in the office of the False Guru, extremities taped, and his shorts around his ankles, and he’s a cosmic being who has a most fleshy lingam, and he needs something more, something, in order to perform the gesture of the lingam. It has to be real suffering for him to be able to do it, something that increases the wattage of the prana. And this is what he says to Nora: “Can’t you put some fingers up me? Could you maybe just put a few fingers up me or something?”
Which, as has been explained above, is the digital exploration of the mula bandha, root contraction, which conquers old age and death. It would be better, of course, if these things did not need to be explained. When the breath is held, the prana is still, and so the yogin holds the breath, and the prana is still, and there is the digital examination of the mula bandha, which is a part of the tantric exploration, which is the moving of the lingam without allowing the seed to fall. And so we have again the placement of the mouth of the yogin at the yoni of the yogini, which is the gesture of the beginning of the worship of the yoni, where a thousand petals crowd the mind of the yogin, and the deities dwell in the subtle centers, and what could be better, for the lingam once again desires to perform the lingam gesture, and the yogin thinks now of all the crowding images of humility that are upon him, on the carpet of the False Guru, under the tapestry with the mandala upon it, the image of humility in which he could perhaps be on the desktop of the False Guru, with his mouth against the yoni of the yogini, and then even more than this there is the expelled cleansing of the yoni, bahish-krita-dhauti, perhaps there could be an expelled cleansing of the yoni onto the yogin, for the yogin believes that his practice could improve significantly in the presence of this magnificence of the yogini, because the life force lies in knowing these things, in doing all things with the body of the yogini, the things that he has not yet done, or at least has not done recently, and what about gajakarani, or elephant technique, perhaps the yogini could teach him of this ritual cleansing, because if anything, the yogin needs cleansing, needs to be cleaned of the wastes, mucus, gas, and acidity, there is a shortage of cleanliness, and he presses his mouth against her, and there is the bellows breath. The yogini is practicing the bellows breath, and then perhaps the yogini is performing the humming bee breath, which stretches back to the centuries before the birth of the Buddha, the breath that is indicative of tantric ascension, and that is when the yogin asks about the amorali, reminding the yogini that we need not think of amorali as consuming something unclean, like solid wastes, because the practice of amorali, the yogin thinks, is about immortality, except that he uses more coarse language, to ask about it, and he asks about it, because the drinking of the urine will be of the midstream, for the midstream has no bile in it but rather hormones, enzymes, and other by-products that are a surfeit, a supplement to the harvesting that the body does, and therefore it will be —
“What did you say?” she asks.
The yogin asks again.
“Are you asking what I’m thinking you’re asking?”
“It’s not going to be messy,” he says. “I’ll be careful.”
“Are you kidding me? Who do you think —”
It’s so sudden! The way the yogini performs the pose known as smacking the face, after which she makes her exit. Drawing up her workout clothes as though she is shuttering her own personal lingerie shop. The class was going so well, there was so much admirable work being done by the yogin, who really is getting close to being able to do a split, and to be here making this completely admirable progress, and to be entirely willing to pay the yogini as much riches as she desires, and then to have her perform the smacking pose while he’s in the middle of an extremely demanding asana, well, it’s inexplicable, and it’s sad, and, moreover, the lingam is limp on the carpet of the floor of the office of the False Guru, and his limbs are all taped up, his limbs are bound, and he is wearing no shorts. His shorts are around his ankles. He is wearing a loosely fitting T-shirt, and the room smells as if it was sweated through by professional wrestlers, and he is having a little trouble getting onto his knees, and there are pens and pencils that he swept off the desk in his enthusiasm, and they are on the floor and he has made a real mess, as always. He needs to get to a pair of scissors. He’s sliding awkwardly to the floor and attempting to loft himself somehow onto his feet so he can reach backward with his bound hands. He uses his head on the seat of the desk chair to lever himself up. He hops several times, closer to the desk. He’s fervent in his wish that there are some scissors in the desk of the False Guru that he can use to cut the tape, and then he can be on his way.
This is what is called the after-loneliness of the Adulterous Union. It was loneliness that launched him upon this difficult pose and it is loneliness that will accompany him onto the street. He is lonely, enfeebled, not like a proper yogin, not like a proper star of the firmament. He is not like the wandering mendicants of yogic practice, who withstood loneliness for two thousands of years. He is not a meditator in a cave of loneliness. Why can’t an actor in matinée films with a beautiful wife withstand loneliness for even a day, for even twelve hours?
Once freed, having torn out a surfeit of wrist and ankle hairs, he flees past the front desk of the ashram, past the battery of attractive employees at the console, checking people in, and his cheeks are flushed as he heads east, on foot, into the East Village, waving off a guy on crutches, a true mendicant, who recognizes him from Single Bullet Theory or some other action film from his oeuvres complets. Thaddeus shouts a half-hearted hello to the mendicant and to Asian tourists on St. Mark’s place, “Hey! Thanks for your support!” until he is below the window of one Annabel Duffy, and it is dusk, in November, and he is yelling at the window of Annabel Duffy, “Come on down! Hey! Let me in! Let me in! It’s me! Let me in! I haven’t smoked in at least seven hours! I won’t smoke in your apartment, and I’ll be nice to your cat, and I’ll buy . . . stuff! I’ll go home with you for the holidays! I swear!” But there’s no answer, no way in, as if the after-loneliness we have just mentioned is a condition of the improper practice of the hatha yoga, which is only exacerbated by the presence in the world of laundromats, shuttered television repair shops, half-abandoned shopping malls, feral cats. A neighbor calls out her window that he should please shut the fuck up, “And your movies are not good.” He can see the arm of the woman, the silhouette of her arm, as she backs away from the window and pulls the blind. The glimmer of a bracelet.
The cell phone rings as he’s heading back toward Avenue B. His agent. There’s a great opportunity here, his agent is saying, a really fabulous opportunity, in a picture that’s getting set up at one of the large studios, called Assassins. Big-budget picture. Set in the Middle East. He would get to ride camels and sleep under the stars in the desert and see a politically unstable part of the world, and it will be directed by that director of action classics, Waldo Schmeltz, the guy who made the one about the Amsterdam hookers who are informants during the Nazi occupation.
“I can’t talk right now,” Thaddeus tells him. It’s more that he doesn’t want to talk.
“Hey, pal, I’m sorry about the thing in the paper.”
“What thing in the paper?”
“You know . . . that thing?”
“Which paper are you talking about? And what thing? What do you mean thing?”
“Listen . . . there’s my other line. I’ll get back to you. We’ll catch up. Pal, think about Assassins. Let me know how you feel in the next day or so. Could be huge. Could be top ten. Plus the possibility of awards.”
“You said thing just now. What is that? And I have a question for you, too. About The Diviners. Have you heard —”
But the connection is severed. Too logistically difficult now to duck into a men’s room in order to rinse off this conversation. Usually a powerful antibacterial soap will get rid of any oily residue associated with a film agent. Now he’s in a cab. The cabbie is fleet, but why the fuck does Thaddeus live on the Upper West Side? He hates the Upper West Side, with its socialism lite and Zabar’s and people wandering around with new food processors and fancy cheese assortments and laser-whitened teeth. Perambulators clogging the sidewalks, SUVs double-parked, all because they have to pick out some cheeses to serve tonight, out in the Hamptons, to their friends from the corporate-law firm. They will eat veggie chips in the SUVs stuck on the LIE on the way to the Hamptons to serve up their cheeses. Thaddeus wants to live in Tribeca, in the shadows of Wall Street, where it’s all painters with drinking problems flinging pigment straight out of the tube onto the canvas before going to some screening of a Hong Kong action film. Painters with lead poisoning, short-term memory loss, tossing back shots at Fanelli’s, because they’re willing to die for what they do. That’s how passionately they feel about their craft. Thaddeus is willing to die in what he does, at least if someone else does the stunts.
He lives on the Upper West Side because his wife’s father gave them a duplex. At the time, they were scrambling. Her dad the corporate lawyer was on retainer for the tobacco manufacturers of the world. And Thaddeus is stuck here with his wife, who’s out in San Diego filming a commercial. What is the commercial for? He can’t even remember, feminine products maybe. She’s filming a commercial for feminine products, and soon he’ll be making a film in the desert, where he gets to ride a camel and eat hummus until it becomes impossible to eat it again, and his wife will be making a commercial for feminine products, and they never will see each other again, except in airport lounges. Thaddeus strides past the doorman with a salute and a lopsided grin that says, I know I’m supposed to feel lucky.
In his apartment, Thaddeus Griffin is nobody. In the living room, in the pantry, in the dining room, in the spare room that is never used for anything at all. Most of all in the bedroom, he’s nobody, and his condition of being nobody in his apartment dwarfs the lack of privacy that is his burden in every other place. He’s afraid to go outside and he can’t wait to go outside. On the street, he’s somebody, can’t walk a block without being Thaddeus Griffin, but here in his apartment, he’s another lost guy with another case of after-loneliness. In his apartment, he watches television, plays video blackjack, practices darts. He’s really good at darts. In his apartment, he’s among the best player of darts ever.
The lights are off.
And he’s not alone.
Because, sitting in the dark, in the living room decorated by Marcus Atkins, is his betrothed. His bride. In one of the big stuffed easy chairs, bent over as if she’s hinged, face in her hands, her hands hollowed like a tortoise shell, holding her face. Sobbing. How long has she been here, he wonders, when instead she was supposed to be hawking feminine products for a network commercial that would have meant residuals, et cetera? How long was she just waiting for him? In order to perform these sobs? Is this an Equity-approved showcase?
“Honey, I didn’t —”
She’s so startlingly beautiful that people draw up short on the street. As if she were the diagram in the physics textbook labeled “Electromagnetism.” Dark hair, which right now has blond highlights in it, falling all around her face, blue eyes the color of a blue screen, easy smile, freckles that the makeup people like to cover up for some reason, especially across the bridge of her slightly pudgy but adorable nose, and she is often to be seen in bulky sweaters that cover the swell of her completely perfect breasts, and tonight, when he turns on the light, he sees that she is wearing an old pair of jeans, used to be his, and they always look really good on her somehow, because she’s tall enough that she doesn’t even have to cuff them or anything. Yes, his wife implies an eternal question, one that has haunted him through the seven years of their union. How can someone this beautiful have an inner life? And if she does, why is it that he has never, ever had a part in it?
“Did you happen to look at this?” she asks. A newspaper cylindered into the gap next to her in the chair. When she flings the paper into the space of the living room, the leaves drift in several directions, separating. “Did you happen to see your picture in the paper today?”
“I don’t know what —”
“Don’t be full of shit.”
He didn’t read the tabloids this morning. Because he didn’t go into work. He took the morning off because there was nothing going on at the office and the scripts on his desk looked dull. He was thinking he would go to an audition or two today. He wants to play a romantic lead instead of an action hero, and if he has to audition, well, okay. But then he didn’t go to any auditions, he just called his broker and played solitaire on the computer. He made an omelet with week-old Brie. When he went into the office, in the afternoon, it was quiet because it was Monday. Vanessa had already left. He didn’t talk to her, nor to the girls in the office. Was there a reason that the girls in the office were so quiet? This afternoon? Was there a reason that Madison didn’t come out of her office when he went past? Was there a reason Jeanine was pretending to be involved with some new intern? And why was Annabel all cool and businesslike? Why didn’t she say anything about the script? Was there a symbolic meaning to the moment when Annabel walked past and went to the water cooler? Could he construe this as a judgment of some kind? A moral disapproval? He and Annabel were supposed to be talking about sketching out the miniseries, they were going to do it together, it was going to be their thing, and she didn’t say anything about it, not a single word. She walked by him on the way to the water cooler and she filled up a plastic bottle at the water cooler, and she turned smartly on the heels of her boots, and he didn’t think any more about it, not then.
His wife rises, crosses the room, finds the correct page from those disparate on the carpet. The picture of him. It is, in fact, unmistakably a picture of him leaving Annabel’s apartment over the weekend. He recognizes the large Hispanic woman sitting on the stoop behind him. It’s kind of a bad picture. He seems to have a number of chins in this photograph. And below the photograph there’s an item about him leaving the apartment, including the time that he left the apartment, which was not long before sunrise. Waking up in a strange bed makes him feel more ashamed. Always a problem. The item goes on to note how much weight he seems to have put on.
“Don’t say anything, okay? I think you should give me, you know, at least four or five minutes here where I get to be the one who talks. And the first thing I want to say is that you are just so incredibly stupid, Thad. Do you know who this girl in the office is? You’re carrying on with some girl in the office? Do you even know who she is? She’s related to some guy who . . . who committed a crime, you know, who just hit a woman on the street with a brick; isn’t that what the paper is implying here? You don’t think that the sister of the guy who hit a girl in the head is going to be of interest to the papers? Doesn’t cross your mind? While you are getting your freak on with this girl? Didn’t cross your mind that you might try to keep your name out of the papers, for me, for example?”
“Uh, actually, her brother didn’t do it, the thing with the . . . whatever. He didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that, Thaddeus? The newspapers don’t know, and for the moment they don’t care. They only care about this juicy story. The issue here —” A stifled gasp and some more tears. “The issue is not whether this guy really hit the woman with the brick, Thad. The issue is whether you have any respect. For your marriage. For anyone at all. The issue is whether I’m supposed to do anything about it, the fact that you don’t have any respect for me, or the fact that you stood up in front of our parents and friends and vowed certain things, in fancy language, and we released doves, and five years ago you even danced in an Italian fountain with me, and now you are spitting in the face of —”
“Of course I do have respect for my —”
“Then you deny —”
“I —”
He tries to figure out a position that he can take. He tries to figure out a debating position he can occupy, and he finds that there is no such position. He goes around the room turning on lights, in a madness of switching things on. He realizes that he is still carrying his knapsack with the warm-up clothes in it, all this time, and so he sets the knapsack on the floor. The warm-up clothes seem to come from an entirely different epoch, the epoch before this. Time is divided, there’s a forking of events, and the time before now is commercial and jovial, like a holiday billboard advertisement for advanced shaving technologies.
“You don’t deny it?”
“I thought you were out filming the commercial in California.”
“I had an emergency.”
“Well, I thought that you were getting with what’s his name, the director. With the ponytail.”
“You thought what?”
He can feel that the point is Neanderthal; he can feel that everything that comes out of his mouth is Neanderthal. He feels like a schoolyard antagonist who has beat on the fat kid and who is now quivering in the hands of the relevant authorities. And if he’s been anticipating this moment, the moment when the scam unravels, he has nonetheless managed to deny its foreshadowing. This moment seems as though it has two moments in it, one in which he loves the truth and one in which he loves to lie to himself about how much he loves the truth. He loves the truth in which there is the comfort of the fiction about his wife and the commercial director. It has been the big happy fire in the fireplace of his consciousness, so refreshing that it felt better than the truth, which is desolate.
“What are you saying about Derrick?”
“I’m saying that you were getting next to Derrick. And I hate the way you say the guy’s name. How can anyone really be named Derrick? He sounds like a lacrosse player or something. I bet he does a lot of stomach crunches.”
The argument is vaporizing before him. It seemed so good when it was propping things up, but now it feels like one of those defense-lawyer strategies. Your Honor! My client’s dental work receives radio signals!
“Derrick is happily married, believe it or not. Some people really are happily married, Thaddeus. Some people really love their wives and their children, really cherish them. And maybe, just maybe, these men who are happy with their wives and their children, maybe these guys just like the work of certain actresses and look forward to working with them. Has that crossed your mind? That Derrick likes to work with me just because I’m good at my job? Maybe I’m not as important as you are to the teenagers in the malls across the country. Maybe I’m not as important to you, but I’m an actress and I do my job, no matter what the job is, I do my best, and if it means that I have to go three thousand miles away to work, and I have to leave you alone, and I have to sleep in some pretentious hotel with fresh flowers in the bathroom and watch wannabes in the bar on my way through the lobby to go sleep by myself, knowing the whole time that the second I’m not here you’re going to be out all night, so that I don’t know what to think, that you’re going to injure yourself somehow, that you’re going to be belly up in a ditch, run over by a taxi, out-of-control drunk, falling into the Hudson, because you don’t have enough sense to respect yourself, or me, if I have to live like that, well, I do it because I just want to try to have my own job. You don’t even have the sense to know that I’m working for my own self-respect. And because I love you enough to leave you alone. And so this is what you do for me. You get your picture in the paper coming out of the apartment of some black girl whose brother committed an assault, and I don’t even know what the next thing is, what the next problem is going to be, what to think of next: your drinking, or the women, or some gambling rampage, whatever. I don’t know what to think. Except that I should be allowed to work, just like you. My work shouldn’t call our marriage into question, and it shouldn’t be disrespectful to you, and it shouldn’t be an affront to you. Maybe I’m not the greatest actress or maybe I am a really good actress, I can’t tell anymore because I’m used to feeling awful about myself because of you. Because I try to pretend like I don’t care about what’s going on with you, but I care, I care about how everything always seems to be falling apart, and I don’t want to live like that. Get it?”
What is there to understand? With a pathetic grin on his face, he goes to embrace her, because he really does feel impressed with her commitment and her sense of fairness, and he admires her. The admirer can stand beside the Thaddeus that is the failure in the room, and he can admire his wife, so he tries to embrace her, though she gives no indication that this strategy is welcome. In fact, she fends him off.
“Isn’t it something we can fix?” he inquires.
“Not if what you’re going to do, while we repair things, is mess around some more and pretend that there’s no problem and pretend that you don’t know the extent of the damage.”
The phone rings, and then his wife’s voice, on the outgoing message, sings out in the front hall. The machine mumbles with the tones of some whispery caller.
“Do you want to tell me what you’ve done?” she says. “Do you want to begin by telling me what you’ve done? Because if you tell me some stuff, then maybe that will shine a little more light into the dark spaces. The way I see it, it’s like this, Thaddeus. It’s like you traded all those moviegoers for me. The people in the theaters in Sandusky and Pittsburgh, you traded what they know of you, the you who is filmed carrying firearms, for me. I’ve known you for eight years, and apparently I know nothing. So why don’t you start by telling me what you’ve done. Tell me just one thing that you’ve done, so that I can get to know you, the you that exists in real life, instead of in front of some blue screen.”
It was important that the apartment look as though it could be in some magazine. When Marcus Atkins decorated it. So that now, as they are sitting in it, it’s impossible to sit in it as though it wants to be inhabited, this room, as though it means to be comfortable and inviting. Its inhospitality makes it hard for him to get his tongue wagging, makes it hard for this moment to be what it ought to be.
“I don’t think you really want me to do that.”
“Why?” Sabrina asks. “Because it’s awful?”
“Pretty much,” mumbles Thaddeus, action film star of the side of right and justice, the guy who prosecutes the corruption, the guy who brings down the international cartel of terrorists. Usually when he’s supposed to cry on film, he needs the glycerin, and he needs strong direction.
“Maybe it’s not an isolated case.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Well,” she says, and appears to ruminate. “I guess I want apologies that last for days at a time, and I want them in the press. I want your apology to be as public as your bullshit has been.”
“How?”
“You can go to the window right now and shout out of it. Or you can call the papers. You can call the papers and pretend to be an anonymous source. Or you can call your publicist or you can call your agent, and you can have them issue a statement. Or you can write a press release where you list all the movies you’ve made before going on to talk about what a wretched philandering fuck you are, and how you have arrived at this amazing decision about the spiritual value of telling the truth for a change, even though you’re a philanderer. But whatever you decide to do, you’ll have to do it by yourself, because I’m going across town to stay with my parents. I don’t want to have to feel like all I do is harass you about this stuff. I don’t want to be that person. So I’m going to stay with my parents, and you can begin the publicity campaign to save your marriage, and then you can go to sex-addiction rehabilitation or whatever else your team of psychiatrists advises, and we can meet each other at marriage counseling and discuss it there, and that’s the way it will go for a few months. You can do it my way, I mean, unless you want my lawyer to contact yours.”
Now she’s standing, hands on hips.
When she’s gone, it’s as if she wasn’t there at all, as if the conversation never took place. It’s all silences again, inhuman interior decorating, after-loneliness, and he can do what he wants. He can go play a computer game, or he can do some sun salutations, or he can go looking for hotties on the Web. He can call Annabel. Or he can feel this burning sensation. The burning sensation wants him to act, even if he doesn’t want to act. There are remedial steps in human behavior, and these could be first. He could change the sheets. In the master bedroom. There’s a woman who comes once a week to do the cleaning, but it suddenly feels as though changing the sheets will ensure a really good night’s sleep. Changing the sheets will muffle the burning sensation. It has been years since he changed his own set of sheets. So this is medicinal, going into the closet where Sabrina, his wife, has stacked up the sheets just so, and he takes a pale blue top sheet and a pale blue fitted sheet, king size, a couple of pillowcases, really high thread count, or so Sabrina has told him. He goes into the master bedroom and rips the bedclothes from the bed and makes a tangle of them on the floor of the bedroom, and then he falls into this tangle, facedown. When he gets up, he will start to do something, maybe write that miniseries. Yeah, he’ll write.