Where Are You, Echo Blue?, page 23
“That’s what you told them?”
I came to learn that nothing of Paul’s was ever on the floor. He was meticulous about looking disheveled. The clothes in his closet looked like a retail store, everything folded.
“What was I gonna say? I have a stylist? It was a metaphor or whatever, Echo. Jesus.”
I wanted Paul to be in love with me the way it was in the Cotswolds. I was used to volatile men, and I wanted to help him feel better.
Later, after hours of me placating him, he apologized for snapping at me and crawled into the bed. The two of us wrapped up in his soft white sheets.
“You’re going to leave me because of my temper, aren’t you?” he said.
“Are you crazy?” I said, caressing his face, stubble barely coming in on his jawline. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
“I’m sorry about getting angry. You made it look pretty in here, baby. It’s these vultures. They’re trying to make me be someone I’m not. I can’t be their poster boy and stare into the camera making googly eyes at girls.”
“Girls love you, though.”
“But what does this say about my mind?”
These were the kinds of lines I fell for as a seventeen-year-old. Paul wanted to be known as an artist, not as an actor. Was it possible to be true to yourself in this business? I loved him more for being true to that. The problem wasn’t us or my age or Paul’s temper. The problem was Hollywood’s unrealistic expectations. I held on to that thought—us against the world—as I kneeled on the bed and unwrapped myself from the sheets.
49.
I promised Paul I would disguise myself when we were in New York. At least until my eighteenth birthday. I wore a baseball hat, and I tucked my shaggy hair underneath it as best as I could when I left the apartment. The paps got one picture of us at a little Greek restaurant together, but it was from far away and very blurry. No one ran with the photo except one small outlet. Hazel had threatened everyone else.
Paul bought two new red velvet couches because he wanted his place to look like a painter’s apartment in Paris. Then he and I painted the floor black in our underwear. He didn’t care that it was a rental. He said that he needed to feel like it was his space. He painted an X on my belly and told me I was his. I painted a Y on his chest and told him he was mine. We showered each other after, washing the black paint off our skin. “Don’t wash it all off,” I told him. “I want the shadow of your X forever.”
I had turned into a bad poet.
When he worked, I paced his apartment with his pajamas on, smoking his cigarettes, filling up on old movies. There was a DVD shop on the corner, and no one noticed me there. If they did, they didn’t care. Citizen Kane; Suddenly, Last Summer; A Streetcar Named Desire; Double Indemnity—actors’ classics. Sometimes I’d take pictures of myself naked with my Polaroid, which is very tricky because you technically have to hold a Polaroid camera with two hands, but my skin crawled, waiting for him to come back and touch me again, for him to put his whole mouth, his tongue, over me. I’d slip the pictures in his jacket in the morning.
At first, it felt so amazing to be there, to wake up and go to sleep every night with Paul. I ignored Hazel’s calls and checked in with my mother just enough to appease her. But as the days went on, most of which I spent on my own, I began to feel lonelier than I ever had in my life, which, ironically, was exactly what I’d come here to avoid.
I began spying on the neighbors across the courtyard with binoculars for a sense of company (I may or may not have been inspired by a recent viewing of Rear Window). He was a stay-at-home writer, and she came home from work at seven at night, at which point they ordered takeout and went to bed.
Another day, I sat by myself in the secret garden at St. Luke in the Fields Church. The berry trees reminded me of Belinda and Sandy’s backyard, and I missed them so much it hurt.
But I didn’t want to bring that negativity into my time with Paul. One morning he recited “The Sun Rising” by John Donne, a poet from the 1500s.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
“That’s us, baby,” he whispered. “We’re lovers who can’t leave our beds. We can’t leave the house. The sun shines on us. And our world is the bed, you see? The walls are the planets revolving around us.”
His face was so sweet as he explained this to me. I didn’t know how to tell him I was bored and claustrophobic, that “thy sphere” was closing in on me. That this apartment was my whole life, and as unsettling as it felt, I was incapable of doing anything else. I should have been studying for my GED or something. I should have taken an acting class. But I slept and watched old movies and took Klonopin and waited to turn eighteen.
This was what love was, I told myself. You were supposed to sacrifice yourself for the other person. This was what my parents were incapable of. My mother was in a relationship with her fear of the public eye and her depression. My dad was in a relationship with himself. Neither of them could focus on the other.
Paul focused on me—at least when he was around. At least when he was happy. That’s all that mattered.
* * *
• • •
The days he’d recite me poems were the moments I knew things were going well for him on set. But on bad days, Paul was very different. One night, a few weeks into my stay, he got home from a demanding day of shooting and grabbed everything off our bed and threw it in the hallway. “When was the last time these sheets were washed?”
“What do I look like, a maid?” I retorted. I liked the idea of being a housewife in theory, but I’d actually never done laundry. Alma had always been around and even started coming to my new home when I moved. I gathered the sheets around my shoulders. “I want to smell like us. I’m never going to wash these sheets. How’s that? ‘This bed thy center is,’ is it not?”
He paused, surprised that I’d have a response other than coddling. He took in my appearance, as if just noticing that I was still in pajamas and unshowered. “You don’t seem okay,” he said. “You seem depressed.”
“Of course I’m depressed,” I said, yelling at him. “I’m in love with you and I’m stuck in this apartment because of society’s stupid rules. But I’ll rot in this apartment until I can hold your hand in public if that’s what you want.” I wondered if I was telling the truth. If I were eighteen right then and there, would I really be acting differently?
“I want to get out of here. Please, Paul, let’s go somewhere.” He could see how desperate I was, so he agreed to go to a dive bar on Second Street and B, a place no one would look for us.
“I can order a Coke,” I said.
“You’re going to drink what I tell you to.” He winked.
I wanted to be told what to do by a man as long as he loved me. No one knew who we were, and we drank vodka on the rocks and made out, sitting on the barstools. “You get more and more beautiful,” he said and pushed my greasy hair off my face. The roots had come in on top so they were an inch thick, but he liked that. He said I looked like Debbie Harry in the ’70s, and I drifted closer to him. I didn’t tell him I brought photos of her to my stylist. I wanted him to think I came up with it on my own.
When Paul went to the bathroom, a woman with tattoos all over both arms stared at me like she knew me. I wanted to give her the finger, and why shouldn’t I? I was a famous actress. I looked like Debbie Harry. I was a badass. And I didn’t want her to watch me. I wasn’t an experiment to observe. So I stopped holding back and flipped her off. No more Disney chick or Pollyanna. I finally felt free. It was the best night of my life.
We took another chance the next day when he had a break from shooting, but this time it was the middle of the afternoon. Paul was getting sick of the apartment too. Plus, as he said while getting ready, “We make our own rules, baby. You can’t stop love.” I wore big glasses and a baseball cap that read CBGB. I didn’t want to seem out of place or paranoid, so I took half a Klonopin. Actually, a full one. Actually, two. My tolerance had grown considerably.
We walked down to the river where they had built the new pier.
“I want to marry you,” he said to me. He stroked my cheek and kneeled down, the Hudson River whitecapping behind him. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
I wasn’t sure if we could legally get married in New York State, but maybe when he did his next movie in Kansas, we could get married there. I was sure Kansas had easy laws, or breakable laws.
He pressed his face into my belly and I kissed his head, ruffled his hair. “I would marry you anywhere, any place, my love.”
50.
My mother called me the next day and asked what I was doing with my life. She could only believe so many of my excuses.
“I’m doing a lot of staying in. I like it. It feels very interior. Floor-level apartments in Manhattan have exposed bricks. Did you know that, Mom? Maybe I’ll write a screenplay about a woman who counts bricks.”
“This isn’t funny, Echo. This is exactly why I didn’t want you to go into show business. You’re becoming a recluse just like me.”
I felt affronted. It had been a while since she’d given me anything but comfort. I was nothing like her. I wasn’t a washed-up television actor past her prime. I was an Oscar winner. I had a future.
“I’m fine, Mom. This is a self-imposed break from life.”
“Are you on something? Your voice sounds slurred.”
“I was taking a nap,” I said. “Look, I gotta go, Mom. Come visit me in New York if you want.” But I knew she wouldn’t.
“Same as me,” she said, sounding sadder than I think I’d ever heard her. “You’ll turn out the same as me.”
A few nights later, Paul and I went for a walk through the Lower East Side. The more we went out and didn’t get caught, the bolder we got. There was so much construction going on in the area. Buildings for sale all over Avenue A. “I don’t think I’ve seen one squatter since I’ve been in New York,” Paul said. He stopped walking and pointed to the buildings on the opposite side of the street. “All those buildings used to be filled with squatters.”
“I thought you grew up in Pennsylvania.”
“Research for a role. My first movie. Squat,” he said. “You were probably too young to see it.”
“I saw Squat, Paul,” I said defensively. I had never seen Squat. It was one of those pretentious slacker movies that did well at Sundance.
Paul seemed annoyed now, and we were out of cigarettes, so we went into the bodega on the corner. I asked for a pack of Marlboro Lights from the old guy behind the counter.
“Excuse me? Aren’t you…” It was a man’s voice from behind us.
He was in his early twenties, maybe younger, a college student in a navy blue windbreaker. He wasn’t hard to size up. A frat boy probably just down here to buy weed. But my lawyer had already filed a restraining order against one guy who thought he was my boyfriend. A drawing of me dead on a balcony had shown up at Hazel’s office. I was nervous when people approached me now.
“You’re Echo Blue, aren’t you?”
“No, she’s not Echo Blue,” Paul said, that anger in his voice. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
“Paul—”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning. This guy needs to start talking to you right here? Now?”
“I’m a huge fan,” the guy said, and it was clear that he was drunk, tripping over himself toward us.
Paul let go of my hand, squeezed himself between me and Frat Boy, putting his palm on the guy’s chest.
“Step back, asshole.”
“I just want an autograph,” Frat Boy whined.
“Well, you can’t fucking have one.”
Frat Boy continued to assert himself, coming toward me, as if Paul weren’t even standing between us. The man behind the bodega counter was yelling in Spanish, and everything became a blur as I watched Paul, fully enraged now, shove the guy backward into a wall of cans. They came tumbling down on top of him, his body crumpling to the ground. Why couldn’t they have been cereal boxes? It would have been so much softer.
Paul tugged on my arm, yelling, “Let’s go, let’s go,” and we ran out of the bodega. The man behind the counter had one ear glued to his cordless phone as he rushed to check on the frat boy passed out on the floor.
Outside, I begged Paul to stand still and listen to me. I wasn’t stupid. I had been in bad situations before. I grew up with chaos, and I knew we’d hear police sirens soon. A woman and her friend on the corner pointed at us. Our bubble had burst. We were out as a couple now. We were public property.
“Paul, we have to stay. That guy knew who we were. We’re probably on camera in there.”
“You know what’s going to happen next, don’t you? The paps are going to find out about this. We’re going to be in the newspaper. We’re going to be all over every single piece-of-shit gossip magazine.”
“So what? I don’t care. And I thought you didn’t care about what people think either.”
He looked at me funny, took my face in his hands, and lifted my chin up to his.
“I will protect you no matter what. I will throw a million guys into a wall of cans if I have to. I’ll kill anyone who comes near you.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
Paul often played this part, the macho guy coming to my rescue. I had to admit I liked how he wanted to protect me. But the real problem here was that Paul didn’t like me calling him out on his hypocrisy. He could say it was about protecting me, but I knew it was about protecting himself. Wasn’t he the guy who hated capitulating to Hollywood’s image of him? Then why was he so obsessed with hiding our relationship?
The two women kept pointing at us and whispering. I pushed his hands away from my chin.
“Paul, I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid. My dad has been doing this forever. My mother…”
“And they protected you?”
“Paul.”
“Did they protect you?”
I shook my head. I could hear the sirens. Maybe he was right. Maybe we should have tried to leave. Now it was too late.
“We have to go back in there. We can’t leave. They’ll tell the police that I was there. You can get into this kind of trouble. I can’t. Don’t you see?”
I needed to calm him down, get a hold of the madness. Press the pause button. I wished I had a Klonopin, but I hadn’t brought a purse. There was no keeping this under wraps. Paul would probably be charged with assault.
I took his hand and led him back to the bodega because it didn’t matter that he was older than me. I was the bigger star. I was a household name. We’d have to stick to the story that this stranger, this “obsessed fan,” was trying to attack me. No matter what the video cameras showed.
Goldie
• • •
51.
I was wrecked the next morning, like a hangover, that heavy anvil on your head, and I hadn’t even had a drink. In the bathroom mirror, I hated myself. It should have been obvious that when I bleached and chopped my hair, I would end up looking like a cheap groupie, like Belinda called me.
The phone rang and it was Pench.
“Why aren’t you in the office? Sick?”
Was I sick? I wanted to make a joke and say, Yeah, sick in the head. That’s what Sam and I used to say to each other when we’d fake being sick so we didn’t have to go to school.
But I did feel sick. It was hard to explain the disturbance of emotions that swept over me, the fullness of contradictions about Echo—about Belinda too. I didn’t know what was real and what I had convinced myself of. If I really did know Echo. Why I was drawn to her.
I shuffled into the kitchen and stared into the fluorescent light on the ceiling. I could see Echo, her makeup washed down her face. Fake black eyelashes like ribbons on her cheekbones. I was opposite her. I was the one making her cry.
“I feel like I’m chasing Echo down like an animal. And I hate myself for it,” I said. “I even bleached my hair out. Like hers. And I’m sure I look like some diabolical carbon copy, but I was really trying to embody her, you know? Be the committed journalist. Please tell me you know what I’m talking about.”
Instead, he said, “Have you talked to anyone recently?”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
“But, Goldie, seriously. Have you?”
“Talked to anyone—like who?”
“Like a professional.”
“I don’t want to go to a therapist, Pench. I told you I’ve done the therapy route.”
Going to a therapist would be an admission of defeat. It would be as if I had disappointed my father, because there I was, regressing to that place when I was a teenager, obsessed with a person I didn’t know and throwing my whole life into her.
“Sorry to use this awful metaphor, but the therapy route doesn’t have to have an off-ramp. Like, you can start and stop. This is a big story for you, Goldie. You’ve been consumed, as a journalist should be, but it might be good to work out some of the emotional stuff with someone.”
“That was a really bad metaphor.”
“I warned you.” We tried to laugh. Nothing was funny. I was so tired.
I took a long pause. “I feel stuck,” I said, realizing that I might be alluding to my life, and I didn’t want to sound that way. So I clarified. “What do you do when you feel stuck in a story?”
