She sat on her bed and suggested we talk later about this. So far she hadn’t admitted any wrongdoing. Her apology was limited to keeping me waiting.
(Writing this now, years later, clearheaded, I realize that there really was no wrongdoing — we were not married, had made no vows to each other. But what did this mean to me, who had spent hours in her kitchen, fantasizing a distant future in which she would be telling our grandkids that I had rescued her, that she used to be a bad girl until I had come along?)
She collapsed on the bed and said again how tired she was. Her sunglasses were still on.
Again, I felt like a parent here, dealing with an unruly teen who’d stayed out past her curfew. I picked up my laptop bag and checked its contents and then delivered my speech. It was fairly short and ended with the line And I don’t like being made to feel like a fool! In my head the line sounded powerful, a perfect expression of my pain, but when I said it out loud, I just sounded sad.
And I didn’t get the feeling that she was listening too closely. She told me that she didn’t think I was foolish and that we should definitely talk later, after she’d had a chance to catch up on some sleep.
I told her that I had nothing else to say, that there was nothing left to talk about, that I didn’t want to talk later.
I left. Walking down the street, I felt good. I felt the righteous anger of the wronged. I felt a certain power in rejecting Viktoria. I savored it on my way to work.
Suriyaarachchi was there, browsing the Web. Dave was making a pot of coffee. I could have hugged them both but instead handed them the egg sandwiches I bought and spent the morning in the editing suite, watching the rented videos on the one-hundred-thousand-dollar editing machine.
They took me out to lunch and let me mope. They told me that I deserved better, that we would go out tonight and get drunk, the three of us. Suriyaarachchi said he would help me pick up any girl I chose, whichever one my heart desired, that he had a way with women, and he could see to my wishes. Dave joked that the only women Suriyaarachchi had a “way” with were the ones who advertised in the back of the Voice. Forget girls, Dave said. Tonight was just for us guys: scotch and cigars. A round of steak dinners on the house!
Whatever I wanted, Suriyaarachchi said. Today, I was the boss.
That night Viktoria came to see me at the movie theater and insisted on us talking. We sat in the carpeted window casement, and she took my hand and told me how she’d never wanted to hurt me and that she had things she needed to work out in her life, and she was working on them. She said she would understand if I didn’t want to see her anymore.
I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore.
She seemed surprised at this. I got the sense that there was a way this was supposed to play out for her — that she was supposed to be contrite and that I was supposed to forgive her and that I would come back to her apartment and pick up where we left off. But I wasn’t saying the right lines in her drama. Or at least that was what I hoped she was feeling. I was stone, Teflon. I told her good luck with her recovery, with her life — I hoped things would work out for her.
She thanked me and got up. She hugged me, and then she left, somewhat dazed, saying that she would call me.
I told her not to bother, that we didn’t have anything to say to each other.
A few days later she called and left a message on my mother’s answering machine.
The humiliation of this experience would come back in waves. I spent weeks coming over, cooking for her, cleaning the dishes, listening to her stories of her attempted suicide and her recovery, encouraging her against relapse. I was like her puppy, eager for her affection, frustrated at not getting it, caged off from her bedroom, from the rest of her life. Meanwhile, she was out having sex with her ex, while I was waiting at home. I was convinced of my worth as a boyfriend, baffled that any girl who had experienced the full warmth of my goodwill would want to squander it. Why would she want to squander it? I was such a good listener! She said she thought my pasta was delicious! She said I was the sweetest person she’d ever met! So what was any of that worth, in the end?
I erased her message, hoping my mother hadn’t yet heard it. But she called again the following day, and again the day after that. She didn’t sound bored anymore, or tired. She was wide awake. She said that she was sorry, that she needed me, could I come over. She sounded desperate, each message more urgent than the last. She called a dozen times over the following week. By the end she was weeping into the phone, begging me to return her call.
After the first couple of messages, I felt good, satisfied. It was a balm to my humiliation. But each successive message made me feel worse. I became alarmed. She had talked so abstractly about her condition — its symptoms and causes — and it seemed so hypothetical, like it no longer applied to her specifically, as though she were talking about someone else. But here it was, revealed in these messages. They were frightening. I felt guilty, like I had caused this, and fought an urge to call her back, to go back to her and try to make it all better. I erased each message as it came.
And then the messages stopped. I thought she might have done something drastic. But, I also reasoned, it was just as possible that she’d found someone else, another me. And then I stopped thinking about her at all.
After breaking up with Viktoria, I felt a loneliness deep in my bones. At first it seemed the result of losing her, but as the days passed, I saw that, in fact, it was the other way around. In the way of certain drugs, whose side effects may include the irritation of just those symptoms one is trying to relieve — an anti-inflammatory, say, that in fluke cases causes one’s swelling to worsen — so dating Viktoria had made my existing loneliness more profound. My only relief came now from the time I spent with Penelope and Arthur. They welcomed me. They wanted me between them. With Penelope I had an audience for my misadventures in love and with Arthur — suddenly interested — my misadventures in film. I think they needed me there. I kept their focus off each other, off their problems; hearing about mine was a way for them to forget their own, and in that sense I became the ballast holding them together.
As an only child of divorced parents, I was adept at the art of diversion, an art I noticed Will was good at, too. We worked as a team. Will’s strength was games — board games, tile games, card games, puzzles and all manner of brain teasers — and mine was anecdotes. Between us we were able to keep Arthur and Penelope distracted through most of an evening. Then Will would go to bed, and I’d have to work twice as hard to keep the subject trained safely on me. I told them about the hair and makeup artist I fooled around with on the set of Dead Hank’s Boy, the one with the insanely jealous boyfriend rumored to own a hunting rifle — and how, when the jealous boyfriend got wind of me, I had to hide under a desk in our production office to avoid his wrath. I told them how ushers amused themselves on any given night at the theater: by lip-synching as lewdly as possible the closing ten minutes of Good Will Hunting and Shakespeare in Love. Or by performing cross talk at the rear doors as the audience filed out, loud enough to draw attention: Did you hear, Emma Thompson is upstairs! Another usher: That crazy bitch? Last time she was here, I was an hour in the ladies’ room cleaning up her meth-induced rampage! The trick, I told them, was in making the actor and the outrageous act as unlikely a pair as possible: Steve Martin fistfighting a man for trying to cut him in line, Dame Judy Dench thrown out for spontaneously barking during a show. Paul Newman’s petty theft, Angela Lansbury evading arrest.