Final Revision: “All My Pretty Hates” April 6, 2009

All My Pretty Hates

Wail

Love has gone a-rocketing.
That is not the worst;
I could do without the thing,
And not be the first.

Joy has gone the way it came.
That is nothing new;
I could get along the same —
Many people do.

Dig for me the narrow bed,
Now I am bereft.
All my pretty hates are dead,
And what have I left?

-Dorothy Parker

Jane steepled her fingers over the keyboard. Was she really going to write this?

Dear Sean,
I am writing because I want your permission to disclose-

No. She looked up from the computer and let the shimmering afterimage of the screen fade. She tried to sketch the moment in her mind, although her life was far too dull to illustrate.
She’d show herself from above, so the reader would see the laptop over her, warming her. She would also have to show how drawn her face was. Not that it ever was an especially perky face, but lately she hadn’t been sleeping more than four or five hours per night, and was old enough to show it.
She settled deeper into the chaise lounge, grinding her cigarette into the overflowing ashtray on the floor. She was sitting, as she did for vacant hours every day, in the only room she ever really used in her second home in Scottsdale. If she went to the balcony, she could see Alice Cooper’s mansion. If she didn’t have writers’ block, that would be a detail to include. She was too serious; she needed to notice lighter things that readers enjoy, as her editor often reminded her.

Dear Sean,
It’s been too long. Can I see you? There’s something I need to talk to you about. I’m considering doing a comic involving something personal that concerns you. My editor would like a signed release before I even get started.

This was a bold-faced lie. Her editor hadn’t exactly encouraged this project. “Jane,” her editor had said six months ago, when they met for a State of the Writers’ Block meeting over screwdrivers and wilted greens, “After looking at the sales for Scars, I’m not sure if another confessional comic is what your audience wants. Have you considered returning to your childhood, maybe something lighter, more nostalgic?”
Even if she were begged to write it, and even if she could, Jane wouldn’t have needed to contact Sean. Getting permission to discuss the aftermath of the shooting would just inhibit her. She’d never write anything that revealed how fixated she remained.
Had she considered returning to her childhood? No, in the sense that she’d said all there was to say. Yes, in that it was the only thing Jane ever really considered.
Her first graphic novel, Clean Slate, was about what the media dubbed the first “home school shooting.” Her older brother had murdered their parents and their two little sisters. The murders were the sensational, bestselling part. But throughout Clean Slate, and again in her subsequent books, were smaller stories, peeks at private conversations translated from her family’s secret language. She’d told the story of her childhood from so many perspectives that she should have worked in a Rashomon reference, but she still couldn’t stop thinking about it, being stuck in her past. Ruminating, one of her therapists had called it. Therapist, the rapist. When she wasn’t ruminating she was playing with words until they broke. Ruminating, a stupid cow chewing on the same old thing over and over again.
She’d said everything there was to say, and there was still no explanation, no making sense of it. There was no word or picture that would tell that truth. Could you tell the truth about a car crash, a fire, a flood? Could you even lie about it? Maybe she should have written a police report instead of a graphic novel.
She’d written books from the age of four. Those early efforts had been bound with string and illustrated and lettered in Crayola, true. But she’d begun Clean Slate after the murders when she was seventeen, staying with her appalled aunt and uncle in an upstairs apartment that they normally rented out. She had to tell her story, and she couldn’t tell her story with words alone, or with pictures. Each, by itself, was too painful. But somehow framing each moment as a series of moments, panels with a beginning and end, words carefully edited and bolded for effect, helped her maintain perspective. The first scene she drew wasn’t terribly painful or revealing. As she drew it, and every time she reread it, she was drawn back in, frozen in time, helpless to do anything but be the girl who had let all this happen.

#

She sat straight-backed and tense on the couch, a drawing at her feet that she’d put down during the exciting parts of the movie. Her sisters were on one side, and her father was on the other.  Her mother and brother sat on the love seat opposite. Her father’s arm was draped across the back of the couch, corralling her. She smelled him, like mildewed towels and garlic, and also smelled the strawberries her sisters were eating. They weren’t allowed to eat whipped cream or sugar with the strawberries; that was unhealthy and wasteful. They didn’t know what they were missing, and thought strawberries were a rare treat.
But wait, the panels, the frame. The television threw up its antennae in the center of the room like an idol; the dirty white walls projected their layer of grime: her mother stayed at home to educate them, not to be a housewife. But this was Now-Jane intruding. Back in the moment. Child-Jane hadn’t known anything other than filth and decay. It was comforting and familiar. She breathed in mildew spores that wouldn’t blossom in her brain until much later. They smelled sharp but right.
They were almost at the end of Back to the Future. They were watching it for a second time, since it had to be returned in three hours, and they tried to get as much value out of rented videos as possible. Marty and his girlfriend were driving, stopped at light, when his arch-nemesis pulled up. Marty resisted the urge to drag race. Her parents exchanged a grim look, and her mother stood, carefully blocking the VCR with her body, subjecting her family to her tie-dyed shirt and torn jeans. The beads on her leather headband shook along with her disapproving head. She stabbed the fast-forward button until the offending moment passed. Jane and her siblings all knew what it was: they had seen it the night before, after all. Marty had said “He’s an asshole!” But, never having heard the word before, the kids didn’t know exactly what it meant. Now that they knew the word was a bad word, it would become part of their family’s secret language.
Their parents, despite their hippie exterior, were big on censorship and control. Jane’s family would watch the same tapes over and over, and her mother would hover, alert, waiting for her moment to swoop in. She would stand in front of the TV and stab her finger into the VCR’s fast-forward button until the offending scene passed. She didn’t let them watch the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when all the Nazis melted, or the parts of Labyrinth that involved close-ups of David Bowie’s spandexed crotch.
“Asphalt!” Jane called her brother when the movie ended and he stepped on her drawing and left a dirty footprint. She was spanked and sent to her room. In the Phoenix summer, parking lots actually melt a little; they become sticky in the extreme heat. It didn’t seem at all implausible that the black, rough substance that would stick to Jane’s shoes was an insult. None of them learned the word “asshole” for years.
#

After the shooting, the homeschooling community had been quick to denounce Jane’s family as something else – not “real” homeschoolers, but abusers, crazies, flukes. But no one was a pillar of the community behind closed doors. Utah had the highest pornography consumption per capita in the U.S., for example.
Jane collected statistics like that about people. Her idea of normalcy was just an approximation arrived at by probability. When she met someone new, she recalled that one out of three sexually active adults has genital warts, or that one out of nine women will develop breast cancer. If she was in a crowd of over a hundred people, she could be sure that someone was schizophrenic. If she was in a room with ten other people, she tried to figure out which one of them was gay. Whenever she drove, she considered the time of day and knew what her odds were of being involved in a fatal accident. When she used a public restroom, she knew that the first stall is statistically the least used and therefore the cleanest.
When Jane published Clean Slate, there had been a lot of speculation about why she chose not to name any of her family members. After all, their names had pretty much entered the pop culture lexicon at that point. The truth was that, even to this day, she just couldn’t bear to think of their names. The abstraction “my brother” was painful, but not nearly as painful as when she actually pictured him, named him, categorized him, and recalled him. She hadn’t drawn him as he was, but as he was captured by the media. The same with her sisters – she didn’t give them their own faces or characters. They were just a Greek chorus of shame. She’d been called a confessional writer, but there had to be a layer of distance, of social commentary or irony or abstraction, between Jane and the subject matter. The things she liked about telling the truth were the same things she liked about lying. She didn’t care about the truth, only the reaction.
She flitted from one website to another. She couldn’t focus on anything, not even a YouTube video, or a single reply in an advice column. To her surprise, Sean wrote back within twenty minutes. She decided to take a shower before opening the email, knowing that her impulse to reply immediately would get the better of her and make her appear pathetic.
She and Sean had stayed in touch through the years, intermittently. She had congratulated him on his marriage, and he’d been delighted to hear from her, but she’d found out about it after the wedding, via Facebook. He never wrote her first, but sometimes, he was eager to respond. “Love, Sean,” he’d signed a few times. (Of course, when she wrote back with a “Love, Jane” there was no follow-up.) He would say things that worried her, about his drinking, or his troubled marriage. He implied that he couldn’t talk to anyone else, that Jane was the only one who understood him.
She stepped into the shower without bothering to wait for the hot water to kick in. She exfoliated with something gritty that stung, then shaved her legs, then exfoliated a second time, enjoying that it stung even more on the open cuts from her rusted disposable razor. She hadn’t showered in days, maybe weeks. Disgusting. Jane was always disgusted by herself, no matter how many pills she took, or how many people she paid hundreds of dollars an hour to pretend to care. She used to think that as she got older, she’d get things together. However, as she got older, her body only became more contaminated, from the outside, and from age and neglect. It became less hers every day.
Jane padded to the kitchen, leaving snail-trail footprints that evaporated in minutes. She traced a finger around the frame of her mother’s photograph. She was the only one of Jane’s family who warranted a memorial photograph. There were no photographs of anyone else in this house, not even of Jane herself. That was one of the elements that made Jane’s second home seem unlived-in, impermanent, as though she were going to return to her bloodstained family home sometime soon. (She did still own it, after all.)
Above the stove was a good place to keep her mother. Jane never saw the photograph unless she intended to, since she didn’t cook. She ate like a feral animal, in bare snatches of unpleasant things that sustained her just enough to keep her moving to the next unpleasant thing.
What would someone else see? Her mother’s smile didn’t seem friendly.  Her top lip was pulled back, buck teeth bared, a rabid beaver ready to defend her dam. Everyone used to say she looked so young for her age, but she seemed very old, stressed and haggard, to Jane.

#

Last year. Jane was lying on her chaise lounge, naked, smoking, as her inker boyfriend made breakfast. Inkers didn’t illustrate their own comics, they just traced over someone else’s penciled drawings. This inker had always dreamed of drawing his own comics, a strange story that involved a virus spread by automotive exhaust, but he wasn’t a good enough artist or storyteller to get it published. She was lucky, being female, a quasi-celebrity, and not really part of the comic book industry. She wasn’t particularly lucky to be dating him, though. He was potbellied and married, and she was the other woman. At least he cooked.
“Who’s this?” he asked, gesturing at the photograph.
“Oh. I um, I was dating this girl for a while–”
“What was her name? She doesn’t really look like your type.”
“Shut up! Let me finish. I was dating this girl, at Sarah Lawrence, because that’s what one did at Sarah Lawrence.” She hadn’t gone to college.  “Well, she took me home for spring break, and she totally dumped me for her ex, can you believe it? He was so gross. He had a neckbeard. He was like, totally Neolithic.” Jane smiled to herself. Sean had called someone totally Neolithic once. “Anyway, then I had an affair with her mother. She was a total MILF, as you can tell from that lovely photograph. Okay, maybe she wasn’t, but she baked me cookies.”

#

Jane couldn’t look at the photograph any longer, not after she caught a glimpse of her own face, reflected in the glass. She hated looking at herself. Her pores reminded her of strawberry seeds. Towel enshrouding her damp hair, she returned to embrace her laptop.

Im his wife HE TRUSTS me with his email address and I TRUST Him to not talk to stupid bitchs who cant get a clue. Do you realy think he cares!? Dont put him in you’re stupid books or talk to him any more. Just leave us a lone

Jane had never met Sean’s wife; it didn’t look like she’d be invited to do so anytime soon. This thought was light, but her breath was fast; her body shuddered, betraying her.
Yes, Jane had fantasies of reconciling with Sean, of a happy ending. She only let herself think about him a few times a month – any more, and she’d be lost. Or maybe, any more, and she’d realize what a stupid, impossible idea it is. Neither of them were any good at relationships. Jane had two modes: depressed (currently) and obsessively writing (all other times, although those times were becoming a distant memory). Men started dating her because they thought that she must be unique, or wild, or interesting. She wasn’t. There were people lining up for her autographs and photos at conventions, but there wasn’t anything interesting behind the curtain. She didn’t have to work, because of the life insurance. If that money ever ran out, she could always sell the house.
She walked over to her bookshelf and opened one of her books. There was something oddly soothing about seeing her own creation, even if at this moment, she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to write anything new again. She closed her eyes, feeling trapped again, surrounded by the ramada and the heat.

#

Smoldering Phoenix sun, smashed dead grass, bare withered trees, and there was Jane, hunched at the end of an empty table in a ramada with four concrete picnic tables. One of the tables was occupied by giggling girls her age, another, by boys standing on top of it, the last, by younger children playing with G.I. Joes and Barbies.
She always sat alone. She had to go to the weekly homeschooling group, which was pure torture for the nine hot months of the year. She imagined that she’d be as much of an outcast in school, but at least she’d be an air-conditioned outcast. She had no friends – her family was too weird even for the other homeschoolers. Her sisters were still young enough to fit in, but she and her older brother would spend all day, every Wednesday, being bullied or ignored by the other kids. By the time she was thirteen and her brother was fourteen, her brother had started sneaking away from the homeschooling group. He’d be punished terribly when he was caught, but Jane supposed it was worth it. He wasn’t there today. He was probably back at Second Amendment Sports, his favorite store.
Jane didn’t escape lately, partially because she was punished worse than her brother when she got caught, but mostly because she had a crush on Sean, a new boy who’d come from San Francisco with a Mohawk and a skateboard and a vast knowledge of Christian punk rock. He never talked to her, but he never bullied her. She liked watching the way he walked, spine undulating like a rattlesnake, and the way his laugh sounded younger than the rest of him.
One of the girls, Melanie, said in her prematurely deep Mae West voice that she was starting a zine.  Jane knew that was like a magazine, but cooler and more xeroxed. “It’s called Outspoken,” Melanie explained to her circle of friends, her face a lemon under meringue curls. Melanie’s father was dying of cancer, and she’d been taking it out on Jane for months.
Jane crept up to the girls’ table and asked if she could try writing something for the zine. She couldn’t stand the sound of her own voice. She felt as though she were speaking in a foreign accent.
“Why?” Melanie said, with a put-upon sigh. Why don’t you come up and see me sometime? “You’re the least outspoken person I know.”
They all laughed, the girls, the boys, even the younger kids. Even her sisters.
Jane retreated to the farthest bench and stared her book, although she was too upset to read it.  She didn’t know why it bothered her more to be rejected today than any other day. Maybe it was because she’d never told anyone she wrote. She felt naked.
She was reading something she’d stolen: A Clockwork Orange. She enjoyed shoplifting (no matter how badly she was punished the two times she’d been caught), but she enjoyed reading forbidden books even more. Then, Sean came up to her, to talk to her!
“Hey?” He spoke like a Valley Girl. Everything was a question.
“Hey. What’s up?” God, I sound like an idiot, she thought.
“I was wondering, um, do you want to get out of here for a while and um, go to the library over there? I mean I see you like, already have a book, I’m sorry, you’re totally reading and I’m totally bothering you and now you think I’m like, one of these idiots…” Sean trailed off and stared at the scuffed toes of his All-Stars.
“No, I love the library! Oh great, now you totally think I’m a dork, like these idiots do.” She tried to make her smile as conspiratorial as possible. I said totally, she thought, I am just like you.
“At least you’ve got something going on up there…Hey, do you want to show me something you’ve written? I’ll bet it’s too good for her stupid zine.”
Jane went off with Sean. Her thoughts were mostly of Sean and not making an ass of herself, but a small truth stabbed through her brain, like seeing stars after a blow to the head: I hope her father dies soon.

#

Jane put Clean Slate down and picked up Scars. There was something in there that was kind of about Sean, too. Of course, no one knew that but her, step off, crazy wife. In the chapter that wasn’t about external scars at all. She’d seen the lungs of a smoker at Body Worlds a few years ago. She still hadn’t been able to bring herself to give it up, but had realized how wounded her lungs were, invisibly. It had been fascinating to sketch the inside of her body like that. And of course lungs were very symbolic. They contained every gasp, every word spoken; the air surrounding her. It all came from there, and would end there. Every time she inhaled smoke she imagined playing Whack-a-Mole with the cells; smashing down their tiny lives gave her great pleasure.

#

Later: Jane was seventeen and Sean eighteen. Sean had grown his hair out, and it was already starting to thin in the front. She was wearing makeup that she’d stolen; she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or shave her legs, even though she was almost a legal adult. It made her eyes feel like she’d been crying, but in a good way. She was trying to convince him to buy her cigarettes. They were in an alley downtown; his hand was up her shirt, because he was trying to distract her from her mission.
“No way,” he said. He still spoke with that rising intonation, but there was no question in his voice about this. “Cigarettes are bad for you. Haven’t you seen the PSAs? Smelly, puking motherfucking habit.”
“I don’t think they say motherfucking on TV or billboards,” Jane pointed out, sneaking her hands into his pockets, rummaging amongst change, guitar picks, and wads of lint. Two could play at this distraction game.
“Are you trying to steal my ID?” Sean raised his eyebrows. She loved the delicate Satanic arch to his eyebrows.
“I have a feeling they’d figure out I’m not you, somehow.” She looked down at his hands, defining her breasts like the equator on a globe. “Those stupid things are just a dead giveaway, aren’t they?”

#

To this day, she had never felt as cared for as when he’d forbidden her to smoke. Yet he smoked two packs a day now; he had confessed to it ruefully, twice, by email. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to emphasize it, or if he’d just forgotten he’d already told her.
Her phone made a startling noise and she jumped. Her phone hadn’t rung, or received a text message, in a long time, she realized. It was from Sean! Well, at least Sean’s number. And it was spelled far too well to be his wife’s handiwork.

I’ll meet you at 3 at Young Turks.

A meeting. She was excited and terrified. The other shoe was finally dropping. She left immediately, although it was only noon. She was too agitated to sit on her sepulchrous couch any longer.
She drove up her pink Vespa up and down hills, in and out of traffic. She’d bought a new cotton-candy helmet a few months ago, but hadn’t bothered wearing it. Now, she was excited that Sean might see her, see how light and free her spirit was.
She stopped at a light behind a man driving a gray SUV. The SUV’s window unfurled like magic and the man poured a half-full cup of something dark and chunky – coffee? – onto the street. When the light turned green, her little scooter’s front tire engulfed the tiny mountain of ice with only the smallest crunch.
Sean lived in Flagstaff, and although they theoretically could have met up before, they hadn’t spoken in person years. She just couldn’t get the concept of time passing. She always felt the same. She never felt like she’d learned anything, or grown up, or improved.
She was surprised that he’d pick Young Turks. It was a cool little hole-in-the-wall, with low-to-the-ground seats, hookahs, vegan cookies, all that good stuff,  and definitely not the kind of place that out-of-towners usually visited. She figured that meant he must have been in town at some point, probably more than once, without bothering to visit. Maybe he has friends here, she thought. Maybe he has a mistress here. That thought hurt even more. She did understand, though. She told herself, for the umpteenth time, I’m not angry, I’m just sad.
As she did at least once a month, she drove past her house in Phoenix proper. It was empty and boarded up. She paid for an expensive alarm system; she didn’t want any squatters living with her ghosts. She never slowed or entered, but she’d often circle it a few times, seeing it from different angles.
She couldn’t help remembering, every time, how she and Sean had driven up that day, parked right behind the barricade, run up past the flashing lights and ambulances. Even a fire truck, although the only fire had been a figurative one, something that had been smoldering in her brother’s brain, something that must have exploded while she and Sean were making out at the movie. End of Days.

#

They sat in the back of the theater so that they could make out. They still hadn’t had sex – despite his rebellious exterior, Sean was too moral to believe in premarital sex – but his morals didn’t extend too far. And since they were seeing a movie starring Gabriel Byrne, obviously Jane was going to be up for whatever. Sean teased her about it.
“He’s old enough to be your father,” he’d say. That would bother her, but she had never told him why.
“Yeah, well,” she said with a carefully cultivated ironic tone that didn’t give a whisper of vulnerability, “What’s-her-face is old enough to be your mom, so.”
“What’s-her-face? Her name’s—”
The people sitting at the row in front of them shushed them, and they giggled, retreating to a language of touch and sideways glances. A language in which neither could ever say the wrong thing.
Then there was a scary part – a fire, dead bodies. Sean covered her eyes.
“Stop it, you misogynist jerk,” she protested, peeking through the gap between his fingers, seeing red, and then closing her eyes.
She had never felt as protected, as cared for, as she had with Sean. He covered her eyes, because he didn’t want her to see. He hadn’t covered her eyes when they’d come back to the house and everyone was dead. His hands had hung, limp and stretched at his sides. When she’d drawn that, she’d made them look like pantyhose, the way it retains shape after being worn, like shed skin.

#

After the murders, Sean’s family had moved back to San Francisco. Sean was almost nineteen, old enough that if he’d wanted to stay with her, he could have. He hadn’t. He’d told her that he loved her, but they’d gotten too serious, and he just wasn’t ready to handle the mess left after that, the sole survivor. He told her a lot of things, though. He also told her that he’d never forget her. He didn’t just say he loved her, he promised that he’d always love her.
Finally, she got his text, half an hour past three. She was too nervous to open her phone. She was embarrassingly close to the address – have she just been circling it all this time, since she’d passed her old house?
She approached Young Turks, and no one was outside. Jane wondered if maybe he chickened out. Maybe he’d canceled, or texted that he’d arrived, then reconsidered, thought “What the hell am I doing here?” and left. That sounded like something Jane might do, to someone else. She had an enormous capacity for self-pity, and pretty much saw all the things she’d been through as an unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card for all the shitty things she did to other people. She wore her own scars so openly. A scarlet “A.” Not scarlet, but faint white lines, like a lip print in dried froth on the rim of an empty coffee mug.
He wasn’t there. Jane leaned against the back wall and read the text. It was from his wife. She’d found out, Jane gathered, although it should have been ambiguous, considering his wife’s shaky grasp on English syntax and spelling.
She sat and imagined what their meeting would have been like. He was probably paunchy and red-nosed after years of hard drinking, like a ghost superimposed on his younger, leaner, more attractive self. She wondered how bald he was now, and if his forehead felt smooth or oily. She imagined his smell, summoning it over the cinnamon and patchouli aroma of Young Turks – his old scent of laundry detergent, laced with new additions: beer and cigarettes.
She imagined a passionate greeting, and then an awkward one, and then finally a polite, gentle one. She liked the latter best.
They would have sat at this very table. He would have saved the seat against the wall for her. She only felt at ease with her back against a wall. After all this time, he would still know her so well. It was terrible that she hadn’t changed, hadn’t become a person capable of surprising him.
She imagined lying to him. She’d always had this impulse to disclose, to make peoples’ eyes widen. She used to get in such trouble for it. Sometimes she satisfied this impulse with truth, and sometimes, with lies. She enjoyed lying, the creation of infinite universes, each more real than the next. She could have told him she was dying of cancer. That she was happily remarried. That she was a lesbian. That she’d recently been released from a mental institution. That she had herpes, or AIDS. STD lies were her favorite – they created a wonderful interplay of intimacy and disgust.
She imagined his taking her hand across the table. It had been so long since she’d been touched. She’d read an article about the lonely elderly who look forward to doctors appointments, because then someone will actually touch them. Perhaps wellness efforts fail because they would rather be sick than untouched. Waving off a waiter, she imagined the conversation they could have had.
“Sean, why didn’t you-”
She pictured his squeezing her hand. At first, he also stroked her fingers, but she decided that was a bit too on-the-nose. “I couldn’t,” she imagined him declaiming. “I still can’t. I don’t know if I’m just making it harder for you by coming, but you just seem so sad when you write me. I hated it when you were sad. But you know how my wife is. I really need to make this work.”
She drew a comic in her mind’s eye. She added some extra shadow, cast by their clasped hands and reaching arms. She put “hated” in bold. Emphasis on the past tense. Maybe that’s what she should call this hypothetical comic that she wouldn’t be writing, could never have written. Past Tense. Her whole life was in the past tense. Her life had ended that day, after End of Days. My brother should have shot me, she thought. She imagined saying that to Sean, but then took back the words. She liked that in imaginary conversations, you got do-overs.
“I wasn’t going to ask why you didn’t come. I was going to ask why you didn’t protect me. Why you didn’t do something to stop it.” Imaginary-Jane sounded so emphatic.
But maybe he’d have said something else. Maybe he would have asked her why she didn’t do something to stop it. Why she didn’t call CPS. Why she didn’t see what her brother was capable of.
“I’m not angry, I’m just sad,” she imagined telling Sean. This meant even less, now. Imaginary-Sean looked down at the napkin and straw wrapper she’d torn, in real life, into little white flecks. She didn’t know why it took a figment of her imagination to finally get her to notice how angry was.
She wanted to tell him that when she wrote Scars, she had imagined showing each scar on her body to him. She was embarrassed by this fantasy. Embarrassing situations were the only thing she’d ever been good at. She realized that applied to her work as well. If she wasn’t embarrassed, if she wasn’t scared by it, then what was the point of saying anything?
She wanted Imaginary-Sean to tell her things, confide in her, too. But she just couldn’t imagine him as being warm, or fond of her, or rescuing her. She put the words in his mouth, but his image flickered, a faulty projection. She couldn’t imagine him feeling anything but pity or guilt toward her. The only reason he hasn’t broken off contact was that his life was so empty and he had fond memories of first love, and maybe a lingering notion of responsibility. But his life was less empty than hers. She was far less a part of his consciousness than he was of hers. Sure, this seemed like his wife’s doing, but it would have been so easy for him to go around her back, or divorce her.
She mentally drew another panel of the book she’d never write: almost the same as the last one, but he was straightening, getting ready to leave once he’d been decent, once he felt that he’d accomplished all he could. He’d go back to being normal. Normal was always what he wanted. He could never find normal with Jane. He didn’t want embarrassment; he didn’t want to be scared; he wasn’t ready to stare anything down. He still wanted to look away.

#

She went home and sat, hands clasped so tight that they bloomed with red and white splotches. What an odd feeling. This hope she’d clung to so long had been taken away. It was as though a reunion with Sean had been a giant red button, a panic button, but when she finally pushed the button, it turned out to be a joke. Confetti, noisemakers. Surprise!
She didn’t turn on her computer. She slept through the day and the darkness and then more light. When she got up, the sky was red. Maybe a day had passed; maybe two. She smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, or maybe she had run out of cigarettes and just felt like her lungs had been crushed for some other reason. She ate some stiffening bologna and limp pickles. She turned away from the sink, which she’d stood over to catch the acidic pickle juice, and looked at her mother’s photo for a long time. She wasn’t sure how long. It could have been two minutes, or three hours, or two days. It stopped looking like a person she recognized. Just some sad sack in a hippie costume.
There was a knock on the door. Registered mail. She hated being unexpectedly forced to interact with people, although the mailman was perfectly polite. She needed to plan for social interaction within context. She needed preparation. She needed to steel herself.
She opened it with trembling fingertips, and ripped the top edge of the thick, expensive-papered letter within; that’s what she got for not trusting herself with a letter opener.
It was a letter from an attorney, hired by Sean and his wife. Had they ever had occasion to retain an attorney besides this one? The attorney requested that Jane cease and desist doing certain things, such as contacting Sean in any way, or using his name or “likeness” in published works.
Likeness was such an odd Anglo-Saxon word in a sea of fancy French terminology. It was the only word in the letter that seemed like it might be one of Sean’s words, but of course none of them were.
She turned the paper over and began making a list: an itinerary for the European signing tour she’d been begging off for so long.
She sketched herself, with bold, jagged strokes, sitting by a fountain in Italy, surrounded by hunky Italian men and kindly Italian matrons, on a pad that had been shrinkwapped so long it was covered with a thin film of dust. Words began pushing their way into the pictures, her words, vigorous and new like weeds breaking through the asphalt of an unused street. She began sketching the rest of her life.