You Love Me(You #3)(51)
“Oh, come on,” she says. “Barn jacket Goody Two-shoes wives are always blind. These past few days… Being away from my life… well now I get it. Phil’s married to MK. You’re in love with MK. That’s the story of my life here. And here’s the kicker…” The long dramatic pause and I am the Bonnie Hunt to her Zellweger in Jerry Fucking Maguire. “You’re right, Joe. I’m not a woman supporting women. I don’t want to leave. I have to leave.”
She takes a stage breath and I feel played. “Melanda, I think you need to eat something.”
“You’re judging me. And you’re allowed. I was dumb like Anjelica Huston. Who knows? Maybe I’m too romantic…” Oh, for fuck’s sake. “And yes, Joe, yes, I have dreamed about Mary Kay catching a rare heart disease or a fast-moving cancer but that was only because I wanted Phil to be free.” She rubs her eyes. “And now I’m just… tired. Now I just want out.”
I picture her in Charlize Theron’s apartment in Young Adult, drunk and alone, calling you up in the middle of the night and telling you what I did to her as she underplays what she did to me and I knock on the glass and she sighs, ever the condescending teacher and she says she hears me. “Look at it this way. If there’s one thing you can be sure about, well, I know how to keep a secret. I never gave Phil an ultimatum. I never threatened to tell MK. And I don’t want to hurt her anymore. And this time around… this is a secret that I would hold on to because I don’t want her to know. I’ve done enough damage to them.”
“You’re not the one who’s married, Melanda. He took advantage of you.”
She looks me right in the eye. “No, Joe. I took advantage of them.”
She kicks the wall with her bare foot and now she’s rubbing her foot and she reminds me of my son, always banging himself on the head, his mother begging her Instagram audience of cunts for advice. How do I get my little boy to stop beating himself up? Do I put him in a helmet?
I tell her this is a very creative story and she accuses me of saying she’s not hot enough for Phil because she doesn’t prance around in miniskirts like you and I tell her she’s twisting my words and she tugs at the GUN on her T-shirt. “Did you read that book The Beloveds?”
“The Maureen Lindley? No, I haven’t read it yet.”
Her face is the reason people like RIP Benji lie about reading books and her eyes fill with judgment. Thick, ugly snobbery. “Well, it’s this theory. Some people get to be loved and some people don’t.”
“That’s a crock of shit. You just said that Phil ‘loves’ you. So which is it?”
“You’re a kidnapper. I’m a husband fucker. Let’s agree that we’re not model citizens. You want in, I want out.” She makes it all sound so simple, Mary Kay, like a bizarro-world Pacific Northwest fairy tale where it’s happy endings all around. But that’s what teachers do. They simplify things. She rubs her eyes. “Well, if you won’t put me on a plane right now, can you please bring the TV in here? I have such a migraine.”
I’m tired too, Mary Kay. And I can’t deal with her remains, not with the fucking Strawberry Killer out there. I’m a nice guy, and she’s starting to cry, so I bring the TV into her room. She rolls over and picks up the remote. “Thank you,” she says. “And if it’s not too much… I’d love a nice big fast-breaking last supper. Steak or salmon. Or even chicken.”
“It’s not your last supper, Melanda.”
She cues up the third and last Bridget Jones movie. “Can you just let me watch in peace?”
I leave her to be loved vicariously through Bridget Fucking Jones and there are moments when I want her to be happy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she really does want a fresh start. I imagine a world where you and I are living together. Phil is gone, finding new women to suck on his Philstick and Melanda calls you once a week from her new life in Minnesota. She never tells you about that night in the woods and you never find out that she betrayed you. We take our secrets to the grave and people do that. I want to do that because I want to be the man who fixed your life. Not the man who killed your best friend.
But then I remember her Sorel boot in my ribs. I remember how the corners of her Carly Simon mouth turned up as I left her just now. I can’t fucking trust her, Mary Kay. I have to fact-check her soap opera saga so I throw a salmon on the grill. I pop a steak in the oven—Nice Joe! Chef Joe!—and I play the Sacriphil songs from the year Melanda turned thirty. It’s no use, Mary Kay. This is a concept album about a day in the life of a ghost—oh, Phil, you should have quit after your Shark—and I turn off the fucking “music” and text Phil from my burner phone: Hey, you around?
A good five minutes later my man Phil responds: Hell yeah Joe!
I step on Riffic’s tail and he hisses and my veins shrink up on me. Phil called me Joe. To him I’m Jay. Does he know? Am I fucked? Ten seconds later: I mean Jay. Sorry man!
Fucking prick.
I write back: Question. Banging the girlfriend’s best friend. Am I going to hell for that, or is that kinda shit good for the music?
Phil responds with an all caps warning—FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, HAVEN’T LAID DOWN THIS TRACK YET—and a page of his notepad. The title of the song is “A Diamond for You, A Ruby for Me” and I scan the lyrics and he’s mining rubies at Fort Ward and Jesus, Mary Kay. It’s true. Her story wasn’t “creative” and sometimes truth really is more repugnant and useful than fiction.