Postcards From the Edge (18 page)

As they hit the main highway, Suzanne saw that the Desert Palm Drive-In was showing False Start, a movie she had read for and not gotten. Her spirits sank instantly “We should go back,” she said quietly “They’ll be mad.”

Bobby noticed the sign and smirked sympathetically. “Were you up for that?”

Suzanne pretended to be interested in her gun. “I’ll get over it,” she said stoically.

“When?” Bobby asked, turning the car around and heading back.

“When I have my therapy breakthrough and nothing bothers me anymore.”

“You know,” he said, “there are people who feel bad because they didn’t get this movie. What would you tell them?”

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“To rethink their careers,” she said. “I’m always rethinking mine. It keeps my skin soft.”

“Do you think you’ll stay in show business till the end of this picture?” he asked.

“Do you mean this show business, or the glamorous, fun show business?” Suzanne asked.

“This show business,” he said dramatically, gesturing grandly and stopping the car. Suzanne looked around and saw that the entire crew was mooning her and singing “Happy Birthday.” Marilyn stood at the car holding a chocolate cake with thirty-one candles.

“I had the worst ass, so I got to present the cake,” she said, smiling.

“It’ll be hard to forget this,” said Suzanne, blushing like a desert rose.

“Still,” Bobby said, “maybe with enough therapy…” “There isn’t enough therapy,” said Suzanne.

*

DYSPHORIA

She was going to a party, but she was pregnant and she didn’t want to bring the baby, so she took it out and left it home. While she was at the party, she realized that you can’t do that with babies, so she went home. When she got there, the baby was blue, so she panicked and tried to get it back in. “How could I have done this?” she thought. “How could I have not known what would happen? I didn’t even want to go to the party.”

All of a sudden she was flying, soaring over great stretches of countryside, and it was wonderful. Wonderful. Then, in the middle of her flight, she thought, “I can’t fly!” and she realized she wasn’t flying at all but was actually falling from a great height. She was trying to get the wind under her arms to keep herself in the air when someone on the ground started shooting at her. She felt completely exposed. She couldn’t hide, couldn’t duck the bullets. She wanted to get farther inside her clothes. There was nowhere to go. She couldn’t go down because they were shooting at her, but they were shooting at her so it wasn’t safe to stay in the sky.

Then she was in the passenger seat of a car. The driver was in shadow, but she could tell it was a man. She wanted to get out of the car-it seemed to be out of control-but it was moving

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too fast, traveling great distances in a direction she’d never been. Suddenly they came to a house, and she opened the door and was in a tunnel, a long tunnel. From deep in the tunnel, she thought she heard a little baby crying, and then she heard the echoes of the crying and she got very frightened. She started to run, and then the man from the car was behind her, chasing her through deep snow with a gun …

The phone rang, jarring Suzanne from her dream and out of immediate danger. She lurched across her bed. “Hello,” she gasped, clearing her sleep-filled throat. “Hello?” she repeated, hearing the overseas hiss.

“Hello?” she heard a male voice cry from deep inside the phone. “Is Suzanne Vale there, please?”

“Who’s calling?” asked Suzanne, with her eyes shut tight to block out the morning sun experience.

“Sven Gahooden,” the accented voice carefully said. “I met her at an est intensive several years ago, and she told me to call her if I should ever-“

“Suzanne is on a verbal fast retreat in New Mexico,” interrupted Suzanne.

“The Insight Chaparral?” cried Sven.

“I think that’s the one,” said Suzanne patiently.

“Well, tell her I just wanted to share with her about a breakthrough I had watching a film of hers in Stockholm,” Sven said. “I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne in her best let’s-wind-this-up voice. “And that I’ve quit medical school to work full-time on the Hunger Project,” Sven finished.

“Okay, I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne with some gusto. “Goodbye, Sven.”

“Who is this?” asked Sven politely.

“A friend of Suzanne’s. Ruth Buzzi,” said Suzanne. “Well, thank you, Ruth.”

“Thank you, Sven. Goodbye.” Suzanne replaced the receiver and shook her head. “Ruth Buzzi,” she thought with disbelief. “Maybe I should go on a verbal fast.”

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The storm of sleep had blown her nightgown around her body in such a way that it was cutting off circulation in her left arm. She threw off her blanket as though it was a magic cloak and stood up, preparing to enter the dangerous arena of her day without its much-needed protection.

She untwisted her nightgown, walked into the bathroom, ran some bath water, and moved into the kitchen for some eyeopening orange juice. “A man with a gun,” she thought. “How obtuse.”

Suzanne went back to her bedroom and put a cassette in her stereo. She liked to listen to soundtracks in the morning. In the car she only liked rock ‘n’ roll, but soundtracks were house music. This morning she put on Somewhere in Time, which sounded like what she thought love was like. It sounded like longing. She listened to the music thoughtfully as she sipped her juice and walked back into the bathroom. Her thoughts seemed more like poetry to her, and less like idle chatter, with this music on. She turned off the water and sat in the tub.

The score started to gnaw at Suzanne a little as she bathed. It had been recommended to her by a musician she had gone out with once named Chester Pryce, whom she had liked but had never heard from again. She couldn’t remember whether she had liked him before she never heard from him again or only afterward. In any case, he had told her about this music-he said he listened to it a lot-but he hadn’t warned her that it sounded like feelings you had to be brave about. Suzanne imagined Chester listening to it in his car as he wistfully drove over a cliff.

She reached for her towel, stood up, and got out of the tub, surveying her reflection in the mirror. She had to get thin. In fact, she had to get too thin, so she could eat for a couple of days and not have to worry that much about it. “I won’t eat today unless I absolutely have to,” she thought.

Then she saw the looming largeness of a new blemish on her chin. It looked to her like a new feature. “I’m already worrying about wrinkles and I’m still getting pimples,” she thought.

“Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.” She was especially dismayed because she had to go to her friend Wallis’s party that night, which would have been difficult enough for her to attend with relatively clear skin.

She got into her gym outfit, which was a black bathing suit with little teddy bears on it that she had purchased in Hawaii a few years ago after losing her luggage. She wasn’t what you would call enthusiastic about teddy bears, but it had been an emergency and the suit made her tits look good. She pulled on her turquoise-and-black-checked shorts. Her ensemble was less than stylish, but when Suzanne got used to an outfit, she stayed with it. She pulled on her black socks and turquoise sneakers, sprayed herself with perfume and deodorant, wiped some makeup under her eyes, got her purse, put on her sunglasses, and left for the gym.

She drove out to Venice behind a Kharmann Ghia with a license plate that read suRRRPP. She knew the route by heart so she didn’t even have to concentrate. She thought she was a wonderful driver, and she wished she could build a healthy self-esteem from that foundation. When it got down to the larger issues, though, she didn’t think believing in yourself as a driver meant that much.

With the sunroof open, the windows down, and the radio up full blast, Suzanne felt at peace. She had once decided that God was in her car radio, and He would play her songs she liked when He was happiest with her. The week before-when God was evidently not that happy with her-she had blown out her amplifier playing a Pretenders tape. The speakers had gone dead after she went over a speed bump during “Middle of the Road,” and she’d driven around after that in a daze of silence. She’d had it repaired the next day, and now the music-Bob Seger’s “Still the Same” as she headed west on Olympic-was so loud it made her legs vibrate. She was always a little sad when she turned onto Lincoln Boulevard, because it meant she had only one complete song left before she got to Gold’s Gym.

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She liked going to the gym, or rather, she liked having been to the gym, and the only way to have been was to go. She liked that little blip that she got between her shoulder and her triceps from lifting weights. Still, she knew that no matter how much work you did, the only way to get your body to look really great was to eat right. Suzanne only knew how to eat wrong.

She had always eaten wrong. It was a tradition in her family. Dairy, red meat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and fried everything: American food. She knew what it did to you, but she couldn’t do without it for too long. Her diets lasted until about four thirty in the afternoon, when she couldn’t stand it anymore and ate something absurd like teriyaki beef jerky.

She didn’t like preparing food or sitting down to a meal, maybe because when she was young her mother had the children sit and “visit” after the meals. Suzanne felt that eating was a private thing that should be done in corners or in cars. Food was simply fuel for the body. Her car didn’t “visit” with the other cars when she filled its gas tank. She smiled as she drove past McDonald’s and Jack in the Box and smelled their familiar sodium fumes.

She got to Gold’s Gym fifteen minutes late and saw her trainer Michelle waiting in front. Michelle was a muscular blond girl from back east who had been a PCP junkie and who now used the gym to give her what drugs had.

“Sorry,” said Suzanne.

Michelle shrugged. Suzanne was always fifteen minutes late. “What are we doing today? Legs?” Michelle asked.

Suzanne’s face went into a fist. Legs were the hardest. “Chest and shoulders?” she pleaded wanly.

“Okay,” Michelle laughed, “but you can’t avoid those puppies forever. We’ll do legs tomorrow.” Suzanne was relieved. She had a day’s reprieve. She looked around as she followed Michelle back to the machines, recognizing some of the regulars: the tall guy with the headband and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on his arms, the wiry dark-haired actor who was

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always drenched with sweat, and her favorite, the giant black guy who was there all day, every day, and never spoke to anyone. From the way he acted, Michelle guessed that he’d served a lot of time.

“There’s your boyfriend,” she said under her breath.

“I love him,” Suzanne said moonily as Michelle positioned her correctly in the shoulder machine. “He’s so great,” she said, beginning to struggle with the weights. “He never talks … He’s the epitome of mystery … the paint-by-numbers guy … You can totally … fill him in … ” She was forced to stop talking as the exercise became more difficult.

“I wish I found him interesting,” sighed Michelle. “I wish I found anyone that interesting. I’m on E.”

“On what?” gasped Suzanne.

“E,” repeated Michelle. “Empty. Nothing motivates me. I haven’t had a good crush in weeks. Do five more. Five. Four. Three. Two. One more!”

“It’s too heavy,” Suzanne moaned.

“It’s only thirty pounds,” Michelle exclaimed. She let Suzanne rest for a few minutes between sets, then led her to the next machine.

Suzanne got quieter as she got farther into the exercises. She marveled that she did it at all, especially since Michelle was constantly reminding her that the whole thing was pointless without dieting. Because her dieting skills were so minimal, she ended up with muscles submerged in fat like islands under water. She watched a dark-haired girl with a giant back make her back even bigger and wondered, “What does it all mean?” But then, philosophers had been wrestling with that one since the dawn of man, so who was she to figure it out? She wondered if Kierkegaard had ever been to any place like Gold’s.

Finally they got to the last machine, which Suzanne hated because she had to sit facing herself in a mirror with bad overhead lighting. “Any word about Sal?” she asked, in an effort to take

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her mind off her body. Sal was Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, who had recently disappeared.

“Oh,” said Michelle brightly. “Didn’t I tell you? I can’t believe I didn’t tell you!”

“Well, tell me now,” Suzanne demanded. “What?”

“He’s in a rehab in New York,” said Michelle, with some obvious satisfaction. “One of those year-long programs.”

“A year,” Suzanne said, shaking her head. “I’d go crazy.” “He already went crazy,” Michelle said. “I don’t know how much crazier you can go than shooting coke all day. Do two more. Two, one, okay! One more set, then some abs and you’re through.”

“Well,” said Suzanne, “he had a lot of practice shooting steroids.”

“And he even lied about that,” said Michelle. “Like someone could get a neck like a ham with just good old-fashioned exercise. He had a neck like a ham. You need help to get a neck like that. Ready?”

Suzanne did her last set in silence, trying to concentrate on something high on the wall so she didn’t have to look at herself in the mirror. She had done eight repetitions when she started to give up.

“Go!” cried Michelle. “You’re almost there!”

“No!” screamed Suzanne, embarrassing herself and finishing anyway, then letting the weight fall with a clunk. She did several unenthusiastic sets of abs, after which Michelle walked her to her car.

At the door they met Chad Paley, the Rams linebacker. “Hey, Sunshine,” he greeted Suzanne.

“Chad,” she said, “I bet you know. Who is that big black guy over there on the shoulder machine?”

He stared into the gym in the direction she had pointed, and his face darkened. “Keep away from him,” he said, glowering. “He’s bad news.”