All's Well(20)

You’re so fucking lucky, my actor friends would say, seeing Paul in the audience yet again, bearing flowers yet again, a look of naked admiration on his handsome face. You eclipsed them tonight, Princess. Princess is what he called me then. A nickname teasing me for my Snow-White-in-Florida days. Or maybe it had been born on our honeymoon in the Highlands, when I’d made a comment about the toughness of the mattress at our inn. You’re like the Princess and the Pea, he’d said, joking but fascinated. Cruel irony that in a few years, I’d be relegated to the living room floor, to the pullout mattress of stone. Paul hasn’t called me Princess in a very long time.

I have to never call him again, I thought, my phone hot in my damp fist. This has to be the last time.

Look, Miranda, this isn’t a good time, all right? Can I call you back?

No! And my voice was pathetic, desperate.

I’ll call you back, ’kay?

He didn’t call me back, of course. Probably his new girlfriend was calling him to dinner. They’d made the meal together, both of them standing at the marble island in our kitchen, chopping and stirring. Spaghetti with a marinara sauce made from last summer’s tomatoes, from the garden they grew together. Both of them out there in the backyard that I let go to shit, bending down easily to the now fertile earth, tilling the soil and smiling at each other in the sun.

Who was that on the phone? she’d ask, sitting easily in the kitchen chair, her legs tucked neatly under her.

Oh, just Miranda, he’d say.

She needs to stop calling you, Goldfish. In my nightmares, she also calls him Goldfish.

Oh, I know, I know. But how can I tell her that? She doesn’t have anyone else, you see. She lost her mom when she was in college. Her dad died when she was little. I was kind of like a brother or a father to her, you know?

It makes me well up to imagine Paul saying that. He’d be right about him being like family, but wrong about who in the family. Paul was more like my mother without the alcoholism and the dark desire to live vicariously.

Also, Paul would remind the new girlfriend, she’s not well.

That’s her own fault, the new girlfriend would point out sagely. That’s not your problem anymore, is it? She’s the one who left you, remember?

Probably they had sex afterward, her on top. He loves that she can fuck without wincing. She’s not worried about pissing off a nerve or a joint. She’s willing, energetic, experimental even. And fertile, of course. Fertile as the rich, tilled earth in their lushly growing garden. Oh god. Probably they’re even trying for a—

I spent the rest of last night weeping. Not grading idiotic essays. Not prepping for the two classes I was to teach today. Not going over my rehearsal plans, which consist of a blank sheet of paper with All’s Well??? scrawled at the top in red ink. Instead I watched hideous television that made me want to kill myself. Ordered Greek delivery, which I ate standing on one leg. I peed standing too, for fear of sitting down and not being able to stand back up. I gazed at my lovely red couch, which I hadn’t sat on in a year, like it was a mirage. I looked at my phone and longed impossibly to call my mother, though even if she’d been alive she would have likely offered little comfort. Still, she would have been a voice, a voice I missed terribly even for all its slurred, careening descents into darkness, there was love in there always.

Instead I lay on the living room floor, my laptop suspended in the air above my head thanks to a Korean “lying-down desk” I ordered on eBay, and I donated more money to a sickly black goat in Colorado. I’ve given the goat money before. He was born with some sort of terrible disease that prevents his legs from working correctly. He even has one prosthetic goat leg. I watched his GoFundMe video again and again. His owner is a young woman bursting with blond health and yet hysterical with love, worry, and deluded hope over a bloated paraplegic goat whom she has insisted on saving.

I watched footage of the goat enduring his many medical trials, his many backslides into near death. I watched his brief moments of recovery, in which he limps along on his prosthetic goat leg in a hand-knitted sweater or gets pulled down a snowy hill on a sled. I watched the goat’s ears flop in the wind and my heart shredded. He looked so indescribably happy being pulled in the sled. I cried at what I perceived to be his small smile. So vulnerable. So helpless. His pain bottomless, yet he takes his joy when he can. I watched the video again and again until I passed out on the floor.



* * *



Now as I lie here in my office, I hear a knock on the door. Then another. I shiver. Fauve, probably. Definitely. Checking in to see how I’m doing, which is bullshit.

How goes the play, Miranda? she’ll say, looking down at me on the floor. Smiling sorrowfully. Oh dear, performing our misery again, are we?

Normally I would have nothing but empathy for an adjunct. But Fauve is another animal, you know the kind I mean. She believes that it is she, with her PhD in Cats and her spotty career in musical theater, who should be an assistant professor here, not me. That this should be her office. That she should have the privilege of clawing her way to tenure. Because she has the claws, after all. Always freshly painted, always shimmering.

And because I’m a fraud. She can smell it, absolutely.

Where did you get your doctorate, Miranda? she asked when we first met. Like she was only just terribly interested. Didn’t already know the facts.

Miranda’s a stage actor, Grace said, patting me on the back. Grace still loved me then. Loved that I was an actor and not a scholar. That I didn’t have a stick up my ass like the rest of the department.