The Comeback(41)

Afterward, I tried to justify what happened. I’d let him believe that we had a special relationship because it had benefited me too. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t had a choice in any of it, and even when the disgust eventually flooded every inch of my body, it was an uninvited, complicated disgust after so many years of believing that his attention meant I was special. Every time he accused me of wanting him or needing him, or making him act this way, a tiny part of me believed him. He’d always warned me that I couldn’t trust myself, and deep down I knew I never fought back as hard as I could have.



* * *



? ? ?

At some point, I started referring to what happened in Able’s office only as “the incident” in my head. I’d had to work harder to repress it than ever before, and it wasn’t just because the physical act had been so alien to me. It was what he’d said to me before it happened that really made me feel like I was drowning. In telling me he was finally giving in to me, Able had confirmed my worst, darkest suspicions—that I had some sort of power I had been unintentionally wielding over him all these years. On the rare occasions I did allow myself to think about it, usually if I hadn’t drunk enough to blunt the edges of my mind, or if I hadn’t topped up my Percocet prescription in time, I decided to believe that there had been a miscommunication at some point, like in one of those sitcoms where everyone’s wires get crossed, only instead of ending up on a fancy blind date with my ex-boyfriend, I ended up alone in Able’s office. If I thought about it only in abstract terms, without remembering the way I’d brushed my teeth until my gums bled when I got home that night or how I couldn’t look in a mirror for three days after it happened, I could tell myself that the incident wasn’t quite so bad. I flinched every time someone came near me.

My agent informed me that I had the best part of a year languishing ahead of me while Able developed his new project, the one he had been “showing” me the early draft of that night in his office. At first I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to see him, but after a couple of months, when I hadn’t heard a word from him, my disgust made way for an all-consuming terror that he no longer wanted me for the part, even though Nathan and Kit assured me that he did. I was so used to our usual pattern—Able’s focused dedication at the start of a project, the rare flattery he would display to get me to sign—that I figured I’d done something really bad for him to be ignoring me like this.

For the first time in my life I was filled with both an expanse of free time and an acute, overwhelming awareness of how much trust we put in the hands of other people every single day of our lives. It was a crippling combination. There was no guarantee that the car coming toward me at a crossing was actually going to stop at the red light, yet I was still expected to step right out, and nobody could promise me that one of the many strange, older men waiting outside my hotel with a camera wouldn’t just cross that line one night and force his way into my room. It all seemed so fragile to me, the trust we put in others without thinking about it, and once I realized it, the loneliness hit me like nothing I’d felt before.

When I woke up on my nineteenth birthday with my cheek stuck to the dirty floor of a strip club on the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard, watching underneath the toilet cubicle door as the girls adjusted their wigs and stiletto fastenings, I couldn’t even lie to myself that I was okay anymore. Something was broken in my brain, and the more I tried to block it out, the worse it was getting.

I texted Nathan to tell him I wouldn’t be doing the movie, and that I was done with it all, and I asked him to pass the news on to the rest of my team. Then I turned up at my parents’ house in Anaheim much like I have every other time before and since, with my tail between my legs and a duffel bag filled with designer clothes, only this time I sank to my knees the moment my dad answered the door.

For a couple of weeks everything seemed like it was getting better. I told my parents I was recovering from a bad flu and stayed in bed, watching old sitcom reruns on the TV in my room. My dad brought my meals to my bedroom door, and even my mom, whom I’d barely had one civil conversation with since I left home, seemed to enter into an unspoken peace treaty with me. One night, she even ran me a bath filled with bubbles that smelled like rose petals, and in return I listened to her stories about Esme with a fixed smile on my face. I knew it was a fragile peace, effective only until I informed them of my decision to leave behind everything they had sacrificed for me to have, but it still felt better than anything else I could be doing.

One evening, I heard the front door bell ring. I looked out my bedroom window and saw Able’s Jaguar parked in front of the driveway. It was low and dark silver like a shark, and it reminded me of another world I had been trying to forget. I closed my bedroom door and sat with my forehead pressed against my knees, my breathing shallow. I hate you, I thought, at the same time as I hoped he would come up and find me, tell me he was sorry and forgive me for whatever part I played in what had happened. I was confused, disgusted with myself, but the one thing I understood with perfect clarity was that my parents could never find out about the incident. Whenever I thought about it, the shame would burn through me in rings, then it was waves; before long it became impossible to tell who I was without it.

Half an hour later, I heard the front door close and a car engine start outside. My mom knocked on my door a few minutes later.