You Love Me(You #3)(60)
“Did Dylan’s mom’s book get here yet?”
“Sorry, honey, I’ll text you when we get it.”
She storms out the door without saying goodbye and still you are calm. Dead calm.
This is the calm before the storm. I know that foxes are stealthy and you’re busy designing your escape. I see you, Mary Kay, I see you on the cusp of blocking out what happened between us because it’s too much, on top of that note you got from RIP Melanda.
But I am busy too. It’s not easy having a stalker and Oliver Fucking Potter is a stalker, and I need to get off this rock and pick up some supplies if I’m going to save you from your overly active guilty conscience. Think, Joe, think. Oliver’s motel is across from the Starbucks and I tell him I’m placing a mobile order and I ask him if he wants to meet up. He asks for a tall hot blond—such an asshole—and I place the order and tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.
Now he’s at Starbucks, blowing up my phone—where are you—and I tell him that I had a change of plans—Sorry Oliver, I have to go to Seattle for an interlibrary loan issue. He’ll never catch me now and he knows it. His response is terse but respectful: Well played, my friend.
Amen to that, Oliver, and I board the ferry with all the passive-aggressive cliquey commuters. I sit in a chair and a limp-dick Amazon drudge juts out his jaw.
“You’re gonna sit there?”
“Yes, I’m going to sit here.”
“Well, sometimes one of our friends sits here.”
Fascinating. I smile and put on my headphones. “I guess not today, then.”
In the city, I use my Quinn cash to buy cameras and that’s one good thing about Oliver Fucking Potter. He reminded me that I have money. And money is power.
I book a hotel room in a Marriott and I send Oliver a picture of the receipt and then my phone rings. Oliver.
“Not cool, Joe.”
“Oliver, I’m too freaked out to be in my house. I just need one night.”
He hangs up on me—all friends fight—and sends me a link to an Andy Warhol print on 1stdibs called Peaches. And then a text: Don’t fuck with me again, Goldberg.
I buy him the Peaches and I leave the Marriott and hop back on the ferry—no cliquey commuters, just lonely lost souls hoping that the cutesy ways of Winslow lift them out of their misery—and it’s a relief knowing that Oliver won’t be tailing me for the rest of the night.
I buy a beer from the canteen—it’s stressful, having a stalker—and I check Melanda’s phone when I disembark. I can’t use her to get to you anymore—I miss our talks, me as Melanda, you as you—and you didn’t write anything more. The beer is cold. You are cold. You don’t reach out to me and I wish you would, Mary Kay. I worry about you. Did you sleep last night? Are you crying in the shower like Glenn Close in The Big Chill or are you attacking your rat husband like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?
I have to know how you are, Mary Kay. I know Melanda’s message was a lot to take in. I know you probably think you’re a bad person and you’re not a bad person. I relate to you more than ever. I couldn’t worm my way into my family with Love and you’re still trying to find your place on this rock after twenty years but your place is with me.
You need me to watch out for you and I jog on the Eagle Harbor trail and it’s a little unnerving, to be honest. I’m still not over what happened—damn you, RIP Melanda—and I step off the trail onto your lawn and I pause. The quiet. The stillness. You and the Meerkat went to Costco after work—Nomi calls it #RetailTherapy, buying paper towels in bulk to clean up the mess of your life—and your rat is in Seattle waiting for a former Sub Pop photographer to show up. Alas, that’s not gonna happen because I’m the one who sent the fake email and I’m the one apologizing to Phil, assuring him that I’ll be there soon, man. In the Richard Scarry sense of the world, everyone in my life is busy being busy. And I’m busy too.
It’s only ten steps to the sliding glass door and it’s a good thing that your husband is such a devout we-don’t-lock-our-doors kind of asshole because that means your door is open. I grip the handle and the door squeaks—Jesus, Phil, take care of your home—and for the first time in our life together, I am in your house.
Nomi wasn’t kidding, Mary Kay. You really do like your tchotchkes and your shelves are littered with literary toys. I spy a Shakespeare doll and a Virginia Woolf puppet—who makes that, who?—and a tiny Bell Jar and I know what this is all about. You buy tchotchkes so that you can pretend that your home is the Empathy Bordello Bar & Books. It’s how you cope. You’ve been living in denial for nearly twenty years, trying hard not to see the horror around you—RIP Melanda playing footsie with Phil at the pub while you all eat brunch—and Phil’s passive-aggressive refusal to let his old songs go—a crate in a barrel, a barrel in a gun—and you’ve spoken no evil, throwing salmon steaks into the freezer, onto the grill, repeat infinity.
And it’s not just the tchotchkes that alarm me, Mary Kay. Your house is a shrine to the nineties and the early aughts, when you all lived up by Hidden Cove in Manzanita. It’s like the two of you are sending a dangerous message to your daughter, that everything good, every memory worth preserving was almost twenty years ago, before she was even born.
You have his debut album framed, but all the other albums are in your garage, as if they don’t exist. I pick up a picture of you that’s almost nineteen years old. I recognize the background, the tiny one-home island they call Treasure Island. You cradle your newborn baby and you look like a child bride. Your smile is a cry for help and you are trying to hide a second set of teeth while you just die underneath and I see what no one else wanted to see. A woman trapped, held at gunpoint but in this case the gun is your husband’s Philstick.