The Office of Historical Corrections(28)
The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth spun in circles in the pop-up bar to read her apology and wondered if it would have meant something to get it two decades earlier, if she would have been a different and kinder person if she hadn’t believed it when he told her that she was too smart to want kindness over honesty and she would never have both, if she hadn’t learned so young that you could wring yourself out on someone’s front lawn, and even after everything he’d said about you being the muse, the spark, the reason for it all, he could shut the window, could not just not love you, but not even really see you.
She thought if the artist could make amends, then anyone could, so she called the married man she was sleeping with and canceled their vacation, then called the man she’d once left for the artist years ago and said she owed him an apology, at which point he reminded her that she’d already apologized specifically and profusely years ago, and he did not forgive her then or now. She texted a paragraph of urgent feelings to the man she’d wished she’d left the artist for, who had moved on by the time the artist left her, and he texted back Who is this? The next day she called back the married man and told him to uncancel their vacation, which he’d never canceled in the first place.
The Model/Actress called her marketing people to see if her makeup line could get a volcano-themed fragrance and makeup palette in stores for the fall season. Once they covered the obvious reddish and orangey and brown colors, they rounded things out with a near-black shade called Molten, a light gray called Ash Cloud, and a shimmery white they renamed Rhyolite, after the team decided Pompeii was too morbid.
The Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife wanted to commiserate and compare notes, and so she reached out to the Long-Suffering Ex-wife, who did not take her calls because in her mind the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife would always be the Mistress Who Was Dumb Enough to Actually Marry Him and Deserved What She Got.
The Daughter took the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife’s call and met her for coffee. The Daughter called Shannon and invited her for a drink at the bar that didn’t card anyone. Shannon didn’t come. The Daughter had many drinks and took a car service to the home of the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, so her mother would not see her, and passed out on the couch. Why are you like this? the Daughter wanted to ask everyone involved, but she sensed on some level that the question would be hypocritical, that she too was like something, and just didn’t know what yet.
The Former Personal Assistant holed up in her penthouse apartment and summoned her own personal assistant to bring her good bourbon and ripe oranges, and wept, and read and read and read her apology, which was in the form of one of those mindless point-and-click phone app games she used to play when she was bored during travel. It gave her a new apology for every hidden object she found. When she was certain she’d found them all, she turned her phone off to resist the temptation to write to everyone who’d ever met her account of him with even a flicker of doubt and say, “Did you see it? Did you see I was telling the truth?” because what was this whole life she’d built if not already a way of telling anyone who’d ever doubted anything about her to fuck off?
After the first round, the apologies became less extensive but grew in number and degree of precision. He apologized to:
The Girl He Did Know Was Blackout Drunk Because He Was Actually Mostly Sober
The Girl Who Was So Stunned by Her Apology That It Sent Her to Therapy Because She Had No Recollection of Meeting Him, Let Alone Having Sex with Him
The Girl He Knew Was Only Pretending to Like It Rough Because She Wanted to Make Him Happy but Said Nothing to Because He Liked Making Her Pretend to Like It
The Girl Who Really Did Like It Rough, Who Was Annoyingly Undiminished by Her Pleasure Until He Told Her Nobody Would Ever Really Love Her Because She Was Such a Whore
The Guy He Made Homophobic Jokes About in College but Still Asked to Suck Him Off Sometimes
The Closeted Friend He Never Touched but Whose Longing He Nevertheless Made as Much Use of as He Would Have Any Woman’s
Shannon
The Intern Who Left the Art World After Their Summer Fling
The Woman He Asked to Back Out of a Grant They Were Both Up For and Ended Things with as Soon as She Did
The Model Whose Breast He Grabbed Once as a Joke
The Girl Who Wondered All Those Years What to Call What Had Happened Between Them Because Yeah She Had Intended to Have Sex with Him but She Hadn’t Intended It to Happen Like That and She Hadn’t Expected Him to Hurt Her but Not Notice or Care or Stop
After those apologies were done, he doubled back on the first round of apologies, the latest revelations having made necessary some addenda. He was sorry for the year he’d driven the Long-Suffering Ex-wife to experimental therapy for delusional anxiety, after convincing her that her insecurity was making it impossible for him to love her and she’d entirely invented his flings with the Intern and the Girl He Knew Was Only Pretending. He was sorry about the time he told the Former Personal Assistant she was stupid and bad at her job when she correctly accused him of tasking her with calendaring his dates with the Girl Who Really Did Like It Rough and pretending they were work events. He was so sorry.
He was sorry and he was sorry and he was sorry, and then he was back. Maybe he’d never gone anywhere. No one could remember anymore why they’d all been so certain there had been a deserted island. Now there was a gallery. No one knew quite what was in it. The apologies, they guessed. But what else? The show was called Forgiveness. He invited the critics. He invited everyone he’d apologized to.