Postcards From the Edge (11 page)

“Producers have to meet people and pretend we like them,” he said. “Put them at ease. Everybody becomes more sensitive to other people’s feelings and desensitized to their own.”

“You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood,” she said, “because everybody does the fake closeness so well. Your phone rings all the time and you have all these friends, and you feel like if you were a little less successful, they would never call you.,,

“I know just what you mean,” he said. “For years I went to hookers, because, let’s face it, I’m a very successful producer and writer, and I’m thinking of directing-Columbia really wants me to do a picture for them and direct it, and I feel it’s the right time. I mean, I’m certainly developing films I feel I could direct. There’s this one about high school that-Anyway, I’ve been doing this for a while now, and people might like me for my money. So I figured, if someone’s gonna like me for my money, it might as well be a hooker, who’s gonna like me for my money anyway. There was this girl, though. I don’t know that we were in a committed relationship, but we went out for a while. But, you know, I saw other people. It’s hard for me to … I don’t know why, I think … When you grow up the way I did, maybe …”

“You have an intimacy problem,” she said.

“It’s not that I have an intimacy problem,” he said. “I just

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don’t want to be intimate. I don’t see the point. I mean, I’m very involved in my career and … It’s not really that I don’t want to be intimate. I don’t want to be committed. I don’t know, I suppose that’s finally just an excuse. My lawyer says I am afraid of any real involvement. He lives with a girl, and it just looks like, what’s the point? I don’t really know what the point is. I love sex, don’t get me wrong. One could even go so far as to say I’m compulsive about sex. I mean, I hope you don’t think I’m bluntI’m sort of known for my bluntness-but, you know, I’d like to have sex with you. I mean, you seem like someone who’d be great to have sex with.”

“How romantic,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m cold. I’ve recently noticed a coldness about myself that scares me. It scares me that I don’t really care about much but my work. I guess you could say I’m a workaholic. If I wasn’t a producer I’d be a football coach, ‘cause it’s so intense. I need intensity, I thrive on it, I am it. So I love environments that complement me. I can relax at a Bruce Springsteen concert. In the middle of that kind of energy, I can relax. I would have been great in the army, I think, as long as … Well, I wouldn’t have liked being wounded, I don’t like pain. Which I know doesn’t make me unusual.”

“But you thought you might mention it,” she said, “in case I was thinking of stabbing you with my fork.”

“Anyway I’d like to want a relationship,” he said, “because everybody else does, and it looks nice.”

“Intimacy to me is two people sitting in front of a candle listening to important music nude,” she said. “Thinking it means something that you both love the same video and neither of you could finish The Sot-Weed Factor. I was out with someone the other day and I said I didn’t like sushi. I called it ‘whale gums,’ and he said, ‘Really? You don’t like it? I hate it, too.’ And it was like he was saying, ‘Finally! Somebody who understands me!”’

“We live in America,” he said. “Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.”

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“There’s usually one thing that targets somebody for you,” she said. “Like, he says something nasty about shrinks, and you say, ‘Oh, you don’t like shrinks? I think they’re awful, too. You can do it yourself, everyone did for years. What did the pioneers do? I can’t cut down that tree, I’ve got a noon appointment with my therapist? My shrink told me killing Indians was acting out aggression?’ “

“I’ve noticed that people who admit they’re lonely and angry tend to clump together,” he said. “Like that’s enough of a common denominator. A little club of dissatisfied people filled with angst. Phi Beta Rage.”

“Phi Beta Rage,” she said. “I’m stealing that.”

“When you first meet someone on that first date, all the emergency adrenaline is there,” he said. “You bring out your best material as though you do it all the time. As though this is just a natural environment for the great parts of your personality to come through. And it’s not. It’s totally forced.”

“I went out with this senator,” she said, “who kept saying, ‘You are so terrific, what a great girl you are.’ And I thought, ‘Well, shut up about it!’ He was telling me what he thought I needed to hear, rather than what he really felt to be true. And if he really felt it to be true, I would know. I would be able to glean that he thought that. Anyway, I know I’m a terrific girl. I don’t want to be a terrific girl. That’s what I am for auditions. I want to be something else to someone.”

“When the actors come in on my pictures, my heart goes out to them,” he said. “I started out as an actor. I went to acting college, Jeff Bridges was in my class. In fact, I’ve been in a couple of my movies. I think I’m a natural performer. My father was a preacher, so I got that kind of energy from him. A lot of preachers’ sons are actors-Olivier, I mean, you could name a few of them. Anyway, I do all the readings with the actresses. I’m surprised you never came in to read with me.”

“I read for you six years ago,” she said. “You were very nice, but you seemed preoccupied. It was a huge call.”

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“Really?” he said. “I would have thought I’d have remembered someone like you. Wait, was that on Why Is Ruth Dead? I was doing a lot of cocaine then. I read that you were in a clinic recently, so I figure you know what I mean. I never got into freebase, but I was … I was taking a lot of cocaine. And I really, you know, I like cocaine. I had to stop ‘cause I was having anxiety attacks. Still, I would think I would have remembered you, because you’re very attractive and mainly because you’re bright. It’s this new thing I’ve been saying lately-1 don’t mean to quote myself, but if I don’t, maybe no one else will. In India they say that the body is the envelope of the spirit, and the spirit, I guess, is essentially who you are. Well, we live in a city of envelopes. The thing that’s terrific about you is that you are a letter. I mean, it takes a letter to know a letter, and I can see we’re really two letters in a town of envelopes-“

” ‘The envelope, please,”’ she said.

“-so when you find someone who actually has an interesting letter, you want to read it,” he said. “The only problem is, you’ve gotten so conditioned to reading your own mail, so immersed in the letterness of it all, you just … Sometimes I think maybe I’ve met Her, and I just can’t see her because I’m so busy looking at myself to see if I look all right in case she should arrive.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “Sometimes I’m with a guy and I think, ‘I love this person. This is it.’ But who I love is who I am when I’m with him, and it has almost nothing to do with him. It’s me having an excuse to just do myself one more time, proving once again I’m bright and I’m funny and I’m powerful and that I can. That I still know how to pour blood in their shark pools.”

“I envy people meeting me for the first time,” he said. “That first meeting is everything, because I can watch their eyes and see it all happen, and I want to be them. I want to meet somebody like me.”

“What I do,” she said, “is, as soon as I know they’re devoted, I start to find fault with them. It’s not that I find fault with them,

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really. It’s the Sleeping Giant in my system who wakes up with a ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum!’ and says, ‘Yecchh! Look at that hair.’ Or, ‘Oh my God, did you hear the stupid thing he said?’ The Sleeping Giant who knows no pity is hungry for faults, he hunts them like Easter eggs. But the Giant does this. I like them. I feel bad that the Giant is gonna do it. There’s something in me that wants to warn them, ‘Please don’t be stupid,’ like people can help it. And then the Giant says, ‘He’s not good enough.’ And the thing is, I truly-the Sleeping Giant doesn’t-but I truly care about people. Now, sometimes I don’t show compassion but, I mean, I walk around with it. I’m devastated when teams lose in sports. I want to kill myself when they show the faces of the losing team. I know how it feels. I mean, I can barely squash bugs unless I feel directly threatened.”

“My problem is, I only know how to need needy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody who was all right. They could be wearing a sign, ‘I have no problems, you can believe me,’ and I wouldn’t even see them.”

“The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure,” she said. “My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they’re not there. Once you get this routine thing going, you have to take a lot of vacations, so there’s a constant renewal or harking back. When you see them, it’s like your favorite song that was number one that you almost got sick of. It’s been off the radio for a while, and then you hear it one day and it’s like, ‘Oh, greeaatt! How great to hear this again!’ That’s people for me.”

“To me, it’s finding yourself in everybody” he said. “But not enough of you to stay with any one person. There’s so much of yourself, you’re so many-sided. I had a guy in India come up to me on his skateboard and say, ‘My brother, my brother.’ It haunted me that he called me his brother, and then I thought, ‘Yes. Yes! I see that, of course.’ And so if I can find me in a leper … I’m looking for myself and I find me everywhere. Just not enough to make a difference.”

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“I don’t know what I want to find anymore,” she said. “I’ve gotten so involved in searching. I’ve done it for so long it does me. The genesis was truly to find someone, was truly to make an impact, to bond. The difference now is that since I’ve never found it, I proceed as if I never will. Now I’m just into looking, not finding. Winning, not the prize. And the prize is the winning, maybe just the three minutes when you’ve actually won. That’s why the sweetness of the sexual contact is perfect, but it can only be a disappointment afterward. Because all you wanted to do was get there, not be there. All you wanted to do was want, but not have. As soon as you fuck, it’s over. As soon as you fuck.”

“You should see my house,” he said. “I think of it as my bear cave. I like to keep it sort of damp and cool and dark. I’m a creature of habit, that’s why I liked cocaine. There was such a heavy ritual attached to it. So without it, I’ve intensified my rituals in other areas. They’re not all fun, either. I don’t like brushing my teeth, for example-it seems to just hold up the whole process-but I do it anyway. If I waited to like everything I did, I don’t know that I would ever do anything, except talk about what I wasn’t gonna do. So now I’ve decided I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. I don’t have to want to, I just have to go. So I show up. I do love to shave, though. I love to clip my beard and put after-shave on it. And I love the exercise guy to come over. I have a certain terry-cloth robe I wear in the morning after my shower-“

“The Robe Warrior,” she said.

“-and,” he said, “I have another one with another kind of material, I don’t even know what it is, that I wear at night. I have certain sheets that I adore. Pratesi. Italian sheets, the softest, softest sheets. I used to think I would love to loan my sheets out to a clean Norwegian family for three years, and then they’d give them back all beaten in. But now I buy them like that. You know, and I have my alarm clock, and everything is just so. I know it sounds anal, but I take real pleasure in the details of my

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life, in just putting things where they belong. I guess I am anal. It just gives me a great deal of pleasure. You should see my house.”

“You’re not in a high-risk group, are you?” she said. “That’s very funny,” he said.

“Remember at our last session when you said that maybe I shouldn’t date for a while? Until we’d worked more on my awareness in this area? Well, how long do you think ‘for a while’ is?

“Not that I’ve been dating, but I just wondered how long till you think it’s okay? I mean, I know it’s not okay yet, I haven’t been dating, but I did go out with somebody. A couple of … three times. I tried to call you-well, I wanted to call you, but you were out of town. So I figured there wouldn’t be any big harm in going on a little date.

“The thing is, he’s another interesting guy, and that’s what I’m drawn to. I know boring men are the ones to go for, but all I can see is the light glinting off the edges of the interesting ones. And, of course, ‘interesting’ means ‘problems.’ I don’t even think, ‘This time it’s going to be different’ anymore. I think, ‘This time it’ll be the same, in a different way’

“Anyway, my friend Andrea set me up with him. He’s a producer, very successful and attractive and all that. I met him for dinner and we had a nice time. He’s very intense-between him and me there wasn’t a whole lot of dead air. The thing about this guy is, I found him not dissimilar to me. We have a similar attack, similar appetites. Well, he’s more into the sexual appetite thing. I’ve never been good in that area, as you know. I always feel I’m out of my element. I don’t know what I’m doing there. Every time I’m in sex, I feel like, ‘How did I end up here?’ That’s why I like to avoid it as much as possible.

“So I met him and we had dinner, and I really felt like he understood me, or at least like he might if he ever stopped talking. I mean, this guy was like the testosterone version of me, and I’m

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the testosterone version of me, so it was really weird. It was like being with more of myself. You’d think I’d have had enough of myself, but anyway, we had a nice time, and then he wanted me to see his house. I guess I should have known …

“And I didn’t even have contraception. What was I going to do, wear my diaphragm to the restaurant? It’s so embarrassing when they know you knew it was going to be sex. It’s like, sometimes I try to be contemporary and modern, and on some level I just don’t agree with anything I’m doing. So I told him I wasn’t comfortable having sex with people I’d just met, and he seemed to get it. He said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’