Eliza Starts a Rumor(18)
Anonymous: He came back again early this morning on a run. He confronted me about my post; his wife must be on this site, too. If you are reading this, I’m sorry. He says you have not had sex in months, and you have an open marriage. I know men say that. I wish I knew if it were true.
She pressed Post and read it over in situ. The excitement broke through the numbness, and for a fleeting moment she felt alive. Lately she had taken to scraping her thigh with her bathroom razor until it bled to get that effect. This seemed better.
Other insomniacs immediately began commenting, but Eliza felt satisfied and thankfully sleepy. She turned off her computer and headed back to bed.
CHAPTER 11
Amanda Cole
It is commonly said that a woman leaves an abusive relationship an average of seven times before she leaves for good. The first time Amanda tried to leave Carson Cole was just after they were married. It was the first time he had shown his other side.
They were having dinner at the famed Beverly Hills eatery La Scala with an actor that he was touting as the next George Clooney, and his girlfriend. The three of them—Amanda, the actor, and his girlfriend—were contemporaries, while Carson was a good deal older, and in the case of the actor, shorter and balder. Both Amanda and the actor had come to LA around the same time. About halfway through their first course, signature La Scala chopped salads, they figured out that they knew each other from an acting class that both had briefly attended. The more they reminisced about the class, the shorter Carson’s fuse became. By dessert, when they connected over a band that Carson had never heard of, jealousy all but strangled him. He reached under the table and squeezed Amanda’s leg quite painfully. She was meant to somehow keep silent about it but it hurt, and she shrieked. The entire restaurant seemed to stop and stare.
“I’m so sorry, I got a cramp,” she lied, as her eyes filled with tears.
That night she packed up a suitcase and escaped to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had once waited tables at the Polo Lounge. She still knew the manager there. But, like everyone in Hollywood, Carson knew him better. The next morning, Carson came to get her with a dozen roses and two dozen apologies. He promised her that it was not his way, that his new picture wasn’t doing well, and the pressure had gotten to him. He admitted to feeling insecure and overcome with jealousy. He begged her to not to leave him and promised to behave. And he did, for quite some time.
The next time she left, she only got as far as the basement. She stormed out of their bedroom after a fight in which he hurled a barrage of insults at her, including that she was stupid, worthless, and incapable of accomplishing anything on her own. She slammed the front door, but in truth she just retreated to the downstairs screening room. It was late, and she was tired and didn’t want to leave the house. She heard him stomping around yelling out loud to himself, “Let’s see how far you get with whatever cash is in your pocket.”
She cued up a bunch of divorce movies and fell asleep somewhere between War of the Roses and Heartburn. She may have had the guts to really go then, but she was pregnant with their first daughter, Pippa. She had yet to tell Carson. The next morning, she scheduled an appointment at an abortion clinic out in Calabasas. In the end, she couldn’t go through with it and never told Carson what might have been.
The squeeze of her leg wasn’t the only time his rage had become physical, but he was never violent enough to give her real ammunition against him. After hurting her, he would taunt her in a condescending voice, saying, “Oh, I pinched you too hard? Poor Amanda.” It was always just violent enough to belittle her reaction to it. He was way too smart to ever let the words “Carson hit me” come out of her mouth.
Amanda was often the butt of his sexually explicit jokes; his favorites were always the ones that came at her expense.
“We are going home to bed. Anyone want to join us?” he would ask a group of young actresses at a party. Or “Look how well-trained my wife is!” to a group of men in response to her bringing him a drink. He was too full of himself to notice how uncomfortable it made others feel, let alone Amanda, who became instantly mortified. When she spoke out, he would cut her down further, insisting that it was her insecurity talking. He would never accept the blame for her feelings of inadequacy.
As far as other women were concerned, Amanda knew that Carson could get grabby, especially after a couple of drinks, but she had no idea of the extent of it. She often witnessed his hand grazing a woman’s buttocks in a way that could be deemed accidental only the first time it happened, not the second or the third or the twentieth. Once, at her birthday dinner with a table of her friends, Carson became so handsy with their young waitress that it decimated the night. When she approached the table to inquire about dessert she stood as far from him as possible. He got up to go to the men’s room, pausing at her side to listen to the choices. As he stepped behind the poor girl and began massaging her shoulders, all appetites were lost. It was painful to watch, heartbreaking really, yet no one stopped him. The entire table, Amanda included, just sat silently as the young waitress rattled off the list of desserts like she was calling out casualties of war. By the time she got to the tiramisu, a lone tear formed in her eye and rolled down her cheek. She ran off to the kitchen while a clueless Carson headed to the men’s room. One of Amanda’s friends’ husbands handed the manager a hundred-dollar bill for the waitress with an apology, but no one stood up to Carson. If asked, he would probably say it was absurd, and that the waitress appreciated his kind gesture, that she enjoyed having the great Carson Cole’s hands kneading her tired shoulders.