CHAPTER 18
One day I wake up and I’m a feminist hero. Which is funny because I’m still fantasizing about the really cute guy showing up and rescuing me from myself. The Tea House is being called “a primer on retaining your personal power.” Women are comparing it to both their own life experiences and those of women throughout history. My favorite quote is from one of the women on The View: “The Tea House shows us that victimhood is a choice. We get to decide how we feel.” What a load of crap.
People want to interview me, but I’m pretending to be reclusive and hard to get. God knows I’m not the latter. I’m afraid that if they really press me on it, I’ll burst this movie’s bubble. I’ll have to admit that it wasn’t that I refused to be a victim. It’s just that I didn’t care for Ben all that much.
Naomi doesn’t seem to be as camera shy. She’s on the daytime shows and the evening shows talking about what the film has meant to her. She looks radiant every single time. “This film was really important to me from the beginning,” she tells Ellen. “I feel like if someone leaves you it’s a self-correcting problem. Why would you want to be with someone who didn’t want to stay?” The audience erupts with applause. Sure, take my line, because it’s stupid. You’d want him to stay if you loved him. You’d want him to start loving you again so you can stop hurting. Duh, Naomi.
I have $0 in the bank and a balance of $3,463 on my credit card, and it’s a week before Jackie wants to start marketing Sunrise. I seem to have backed myself into a bit of a corner. I need to sell this movie, but I cannot send the true story of how Leo broke my heart into the world. I also can’t show the world my fantasy version, the one where Leo comes back. Nothing would make me more vulnerable than that. I’m running out of time so I start brainstorming several choppy, sentimental endings. Bernadette finds me on the porch swing with my notebook and sharp pencils after dinner. “What’re you doing?”
“Trying to figure out how to end my movie.”
“End it happy.”
“I’m not sure this story has the ingredients for a happy ending. It’s a love story, and the people aren’t meant to be together.”
“Can you change the ingredients?” Bernadette pulls her legs into her chest and lets me put my arm around her. She’s turning nine this month and I try to imagine her as a teenager, raging against me. It doesn’t seem like she has it in her.
“How do I do that?”
“Switch them up. Make them different. So that they’ll end up in a different place.”
“I kind of want one of them dead. Too dark?”
“Jeez, Mom. Yes. Too dark.”
Bernadette has a point, though it’s not until I’m in the tea house the next morning that I see it. Something needs to be switched up, and I decide to change the power structure. She’s a pop star who comes to the country from Manhattan to film a music video on the property of a widowed father of two. They butt heads a bit but get to know each other over the duration of the shoot and fall in love. She even offers to help with his daughter’s school chorus concert.
I leave in all the feelings. She tells him, in a clearing full of birds, that he’s the first man she’s ever been in love with. He believes her and thinks it’s forever. In the end, he’s the one who’s abandoned. I’m going to ghost him.
And then it can have a happy ending. She’ll write a song for him, and he’ll hear it on the radio driving down a country road, and he’ll know that she really loves him. She’ll win a Grammy for it and mention him in her acceptance speech. Then the next day he comes home from whatever he does all day and finds her strumming her guitar on his front porch. Big moment, big kiss. It seems to work when I’m in charge.
It’s November and I’ve sold Sunrise to Purview Pictures for $750,000. Martin has signed on as director, and they’re starting casting soon. I ask Jackie if I can cash my check and not have anything more to do with the film. I have the right to be on set, which they tell me will be in Mississippi, but I have no intention of going.
I have money now, and I like it. I can’t get over the fact that I actually made that much money, like I made it out of nothing but words and heartbreak. I want having that money to be worth it, so after paying my credit card bill I let the rest of it sit in my account for a while and try to decide what to do with it.
On a Thursday night, after Wheel of Fortune, I scroll through Leo’s Instagram feed one last time. Movie promotion, fancy-looking cheeseburger, a sideline shot of a football player I don’t recognize. When I’m done, I ceremonially delete the Instagram app and move my banking app to the exact spot where it used to sit. I get in bed and scroll through my account. The big deposit, the interest. It’s infinitely satisfying, and I wish there was a LIKE button to press.
My parents aren’t necessarily frugal people. And Penny certainly isn’t. I came by my spartan ways out of necessity. Every time I would get ahead financially, Ben would go on some kind of bender. I never knew when it was going to happen, so I learned to live in a state of preparedness. Buy the chicken on sale because Ben might decide he needs flying lessons. Let the hem out of Bernadette’s Easter dress because Ben might decide he wants office space. I am not covering for Ben anymore, I remind myself. It’s my own money. When I wake up in the morning, it’s right there where I left it.
I call Penny to discuss this, because she’s the only person I know with this kind of money. “Money’s energy,” she tells me. I roll my eyes because I know this is going to be like the time she told me to move my bed to another wall to improve my sex life. I should probably tell her that the real fix was moving Ben to another continent. “You sent your heartbreak out into the world, and it brought you money. Now before you send the money back out, try to imagine the feelings you want it to bring.” Oh brother.
“Pen. Seriously.” This is the last brand of crap I want to listen to right now.
“I’m dead serious. And you need to be honest. What you want is to feel the way you felt when Leo was there.”
“You want me to pay Leo to come back?” Honestly, sometimes she makes me a little violent.
“No, just replicate the feelings. Think about it, even just for a day. How do you want to feel?” We hang up after I tell her I love her even though she has no concept of reality, and she replies that we create our own reality. We end many, many conversations this way.
But I give it some thought. It might be worth thinking about how I want to feel, because I’ve really burned out on feeling the way I currently feel. My first thought is that I want to feel secure, like the future is solid, so I open college accounts for my kids. This is something I never thought I’d be able to do, and I luxuriate in it. I replace the sleepless nights that I spent worrying about the future with daydreams about how that future might be. It’s possible that I’m two inches taller standing on solid ground.
There’s another feeling though, a little harder to face. At Penny’s suggestion, I think about how it felt when Leo was here. Not the feeling of being loved—I hear you can’t buy that—but just the feeling that it’s okay to enjoy nice things. I liked the better wine and the nicer sheets. I really like those new towels. I liked letting go of my prairie woman mentality and enjoying something as frivolous as lights hanging over a picnic table. With Ben, nice things meant we were about to go without. They felt like an assault on my hard work, a punishment. With Leo, nice things weren’t so loaded. They were just nice.
So I hire a contractor to start renovations on my house. He’s not to touch the porch or the tea house, but we design a new kitchen where everything works and add a powder room on the first floor. I order new windows that look exactly like the original ones but are airtight. Suddenly my house is stronger and so am I for having taken care of it. Money, I decide, is not evil.
On November 22 at two A.M., I get a text. The chime wakes me up and I’m sure someone’s dead. It’s Leo: How could you write this?
My heart races. The last text I have from him is when we were still in the bubble. I love you. I miss you. Love you too. Followed by my eternally dangling Hey. And now right under it, all these months later, he’s back.
Me: Sunrise?
Leo: Yes, fucking Sunrise. You took the whole thing and packaged it and sold it. How did you think I was going to feel when I read it?
Me: Why are you reading it?
Leo: They sent it to me to see if I want the part. To play you, I guess
Me: Ha. Walk a mile in my shoes
Leo: You’re ruthless
Me: I literally don’t know what you’re talking about
Leo: It mattered and you turned it into one of your bullshit stories. I’m surprised you didn’t give yourself a cupcake shop
Me: Leo you’re the one who left
Leo: I was coming back
A thousand replies run through my mind: Have you been in traffic for seven months? Were you incarcerated? Sidetracked? Sleepy? Goofy? Before I’ve chosen one, he texts:
Leo: Forget it. I’m glad you’re happy. Go back to sleep.
I wait for another text. I have the feeling of just having woken up from a dream where I’m trying to sort disjoined fragments into a narrative.
I type: Why didn’t you come back? But erase it. I type: I am happy, and hit SEND. I say this in part because I don’t want him feeling sorry for me and also because it’s nearly true, I’m not too far from happy. I’ve gotten through the worst of this heartbreak. I’m getting a new kitchen. Arthur has friends in middle school and a part in the winter play.
I sense that he’s gone. I type: Leo? And it turns out I’m right.
The nice thing about a text exchange is that there’s an official transcript. I read the whole thing over and over again. In the morning I screenshot it and send it to Kate.
“Was there any indication while you were together that maybe he’s psychotic?”
“Seriously. I thought the same thing. ‘I was coming back.’ I mean you don’t call, you don’t text, and then in the end you don’t come back, so what does ‘I was coming back’ mean? I’ve seen him on TV and in person, actually; he hasn’t lost both of his legs.”
“I wondered about that too,” Kate says. “An Affair to Remember. But I didn’t want to say anything. Maybe he’s a narcissist.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Do you even know what that means?”
“I do not,” she consents.
“Me either.” We laugh.
“It could be that the technical term is ‘asshole,’ ” she says.
“Maybe.”
“He tells you you’re the first woman he’s ever been in love with while he’s nursing a broken heart over Naomi. Then leaves you to go back to her and accuses you of being heartless. There’s a diagnosis in there somewhere.”
“Did I tell you my contractor’s kind of cute?” I say.
“Oh, here we go.”