Postcards From the Edge (12 page)

“So I stayed over, and we necked for a while and it was nice. At one point we were kissing, and he said, `This would be a great shot of you.’ He told me that when he was in India he looked at the Himalayas and said, ‘Great shot!’ And he was there. It’s like we don’t know we’re there anymore. We’re so detached from our own experience, and so into how we can use that experience. As we’re having it, we’re putting it into another medium. Life is the largest medium we’ve got, and we want to put it in these smaller ones, to get it down to scale …

“Anyway, I stayed over, and then in the morning I felt like he was distant from me. He was still being nice, but he seemed … I don’t know, I mean, it was the morning so a little distance is understandable, but I thought I felt him moving away, which instantly made him incredibly attractive, and we had sex. I made him breakfast, which I told him I never usually did, but I kept telling him I never usually did everything I was doing. It wasn’t a brilliant breakfast-the eggs were brown and I burned the first two pieces of bacon. I can’t seem to time food to end together.

“Then he went off to edit his new movie, Ziz!, and I went home. By the end of the day I’d talked to most of my friends … Sometimes I’m not sure I even have any friends. I may just have a large group of people that I tell everything to. It’s like I’ve made intimacy a superficial gesture. Anyway, their

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consensus was, ‘Watch out, he’s a known sex addict, he fucks everybody.’

“And I acknowledged that, but deep down-and you don’t get too far deep down with me, because I’ve thrust all the deep down right up to the surface-but somewhere in me, I just thought … It’s like when I was younger and I used to fall in love with homosexuals, because they had rejected me before they even met me. Womanizers don’t reject you, but they accept you in a rejecting way, so it’s similar. And just like I used to think with gay men, I thought, ‘I’ll be the one who makes a difference.’ I don’t mean that I’ll have a relationship with him, necessarily. I don’t allow myself to hope for that much, but I guess underneath my nonhoping is the hoping thing …

“I wish you’d been here last week, because maybe if I had talked to you, you might have helped me to not have sex with him. Because I couldn’t seem to not have sex with him on my own. I need people to encourage me not to. Could we just work real hard in this area? Saturate ourselves with work on this, like when they stepped up the bombing and escalated the war in Vietnam? Let’s escalate the war on this area of my life, and if we can’t make me better, can we at least make me not care that I’m not better?

“Anyway, I knew I should probably cool it. I knew he was supposed to go to this Jackson Hole Film Festival on the weekend, and I didn’t want him to catch me wanting to do something with him, so I made up some story about visiting friends in Napa. On Monday he called just before ten, and we went to lunch, and then we had sex at my house. He likes my house. He was very nice, and I kept thinking I had to try and look indifferent, which was weird, because on some level I am indifferent to him. I mean, he’s cute and he’s powerful and all that, but you have to take his reputation into account. He’s a former cocaine addict and he fucks whores.

“But we have these great talks. It’s like we talk about the real issues as if we’re talking about the weather. And he said he

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couldn’t see me that night because he was meeting with this rock group, Bad Hetero, about the title song for his film. And then you weren’t back yet, so I went to Santa Barbara just to get away and not think about him. Or maybe just to get away and only think about him. I guess you could say I was obsessed with him.

“In the parking lot at the hotel a few days later, I ran into this film editor, Evelyn Ames, who I’ve known from parties for years. This is a real wild girl, and she enjoys her reputation, or at least she keeps up the pretense that she does. Somebody has to enjoy her reputation besides the guys.

“So we went to lunch, and in the course of talking to her, I mentioned I’d met this guy, Jack Burroughs-his name is Jack Burroughs-and I sort of asked if she’d ever slept with him. I don’t know her well, but she’s somebody you don’t have to know that well in order to ask something like that.

“She said, `Yeah, I slept with him.’ She asked me, ‘Did he make you do this?’ and she drew her knees back over her head right there at the table, and I said, ‘No.’ And I thought, if that’s the only way he demonstrated his respect for me, I guess that’s something. She also said that while he was with her, he talked about another girl he was going to fly in from Boston who had really soft skin. He rubbed her skin and talked about this other girl’s skin.

“Then she said that she had, in fact, seen him quite recently. It turned out she’d been with him Monday night, after he’d been with me Monday afternoon. I thought, God, this girl is a lot of girl, and to need two lots of girls in one day is … The phrase ‘out of control’ did cross my mind. And she felt bad that she’d told me all this stuff, so she said, `He probably really likes you. We just fuck, and he talks about other girls while he’s inside me.’

“So I thought, I should just stop this. I mean, it’s humiliating to run into someone who’s been with a guy you’ve been with on the same day you were with him. I was furious. When I was

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driving home I made this hard right turn and the wheels sort of lifted off the road, and I imagined having an accident and being taken to the hospital, and him coming to visit and me having him thrown out of my room. And I thought, I’m really out of the box now.

“Then, when I got home, I got a call from my business manager, Charlie, who wanted to know if it was true that I was dating this guy. I said, `Well, I would hardly call it dating. Why do you ask?’ And he said a friend of his had gone out with this guy Tuesday night, and that he’d told her he was seeing me. So that was three in two days or something-and those are just the ones I heard about. Imagine what I could pick up about him if I got one of those satellite dishes.

“I wanted to call him and tell him never to call me again, but there was still part of me that cherished the hope that this would make him sorry, and make him realize how much he loves me and what he’ll be missing if he doesn’t marry me. I felt like a total jerk for thinking this, but it’s like I’ve been genetically tampered with. I was born imagining myself with an apron on, with pies cooling on the window sill and babies crying upstairs. I thought that all that stuff would somehow anchor me to the planet, that it was the weight I needed to keep from just flying off into space.

“So I called him up and tried to make a little joke about the situation, and he jumped on me. He said, ‘Well, this is like the pot calling the kettle black.’ Implying that just because I’ve slept with these two other people he knows-over a period of five years-and because I slept with him on the morning after our first date, I’m some kind of slut. I guess anybody who slept with him would have to be a slut. So we had this huge fight, and he accused me of having initiated the whole sex thing with him in the first place, and I said, `Well, if I initiated it, then I’m stopping it right now. I make a great memory.’ And I hung up.

“When he didn’t call me back, I decided to call him and tell him not to even think about ever calling me again. His machine

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was on, and he had a one-word message that said, ‘Slut!’ And I freaked out. I mean, I knew it wasn’t just about me, it was about every woman he’s ever been with, and I was lumped in there somewhere. I was so shaken I can’t describe it to you. I imagined him dead, and I left him a message in a very cold voice. But then he called the next morning, and he said that his message didn’t say, ‘Slut!’ It said, ‘What!’ And then I thought, maybe I made this whole thing up. He was being so charming, and maybe he … I mean, he did say the thing about the pot calling the kettle black, but maybe he meant it in some other way.

“I was so confused that I could have made a ‘slut’ out of a ‘what,’ and I knew he’d said some pretty reprehensible things, but now I was thinking, maybe I did, too. And the night before I’d sworn I’d never speak to him again unless he apologized, and he didn’t apologize and yet there we were having this conversation. And I thought, ‘I love this guy,’ and then I thought, ‘No, I don’t, I’ve got a crush on him.’

“He asked me out to lunch, and I said I couldn’t come. I told him I had low self-esteem, not no self-esteem. Then he called me that night and joked about how we’d broken up. He asked what I was wearing, and I told him I had on a huge ball gown with bowling shoes and a scuba mask and a red wig, and no underwear. We were very funny, and it was like it was new again, only it hadn’t had that much time to get old. But it had gotten old. We had taken it to its illogical conclusion, but it wasn’t finished.

“On Sunday afternoon he called to ask if he could come over that night and watch this awards show with me, and I said okay. I was still keeping a little bit cool, which I’m sure attracted him. He can’t resist people who can resist him. So he came over and we heated up food badly together, and he said he’d missed me and it was great. So he slept over again, and we had some sex.

“This time, though, he got away with a shatteringly low amount of foreplay. In fact, he told me this joke: What is Irish

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foreplay? It’s when the guy says, ‘Brace yourself, Bridget.’ Then he wanted us to stay in bed all morning, but I had to come here. “The thing is, I hope I’m not pregnant, because I have a feeling I could get pregnant easily. I mentioned this to him and he said he wouldn’t mind going to the abortion with me if I was. I guess that’s how guys are thoughtful in the eighties-they accompany girls to their abortions. That’s the new manners. It seems so awkward, though, to see each other for a week and then you go and have an abortion together. Maybe I should just have a child …

“What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me, and I just haven’t had enough therapy yet for me to be comfortable with having found him? How long do you think this whole process is going to take? Do you think we should have doublelength sessions? It’s like, not only am I changing cabins on the Titanic, I’m dating the crew.

“Maybe I should be coming every day…”

“There’s a lot of pressure to get this new film done in time for Christmas. And what I do when I have a lot of work pressure is, I try to relax, and how I like to relax is … Well, I used to like to get loaded, but now I like to go out with women. Certainly this comes as no shock to you after all these years. I’m not looking for a girlfriend, but I’m going out with girls and keeping my mind open to the right girl if I could meet one.

“It really pisses me off, I met this one girl last week, this actress, Suzanne Vale, and … You know, I’m very up-front about not wanting to get into a committed thing. And girls always go along with this at first, and then suddenly they’re into this relationship thing. Right away it’s ‘Who else are you seeing?’ And if you’re seeing anyone else they call you promiscuous, or a womanizer. I hardly think that sleeping with two or three, maybe four girls a week-rarely more than four-makes me a ‘womanizer.’

“I’m very selective. I only go out with certain types of girls:

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beautiful or voluptuous. And it’s not that I go out with them just to have sex, but I don’t think you should get into a serious relationship without testing out the sex area. I mean, if that doesn’t work … So, I say this to this girl and she says, ‘What do you mean? Is this like a litmus test, and if your dick comes out of her blue then you know you’ve found a girlfriend?’ I mean, that’s absurd! The point I was trying to make is that if the sexual area doesn’t work, then you shouldn’t really pursue any of the other ones, because you can’t really repair it.

“It’s starting to get on my nerves that I have this reputation for being sexually compulsive. I like sex a lot, I admit it. But, you know, I like food a lot, too, and nobody calls me a foodaholic. I just don’t like that people are always putting a label on you. Women expect you to come on to them. It’s like, if I didn’t, they’d think I was a fag or something. Impotent. Well, it’s not like I couldn’t handle it if somebody thought I was impotent, but I don’t like the idea of people thinking that.

“I’m not defensive, I’m angry. I don’t think I’m defensive. That’s what she said. I don’t know … Everything goes so fast, you know? And I always wait for them to slow it down, and they never do. I thought maybe this girl was going to be different, ‘cause she did say she wouldn’t sleep with me right away. She came back to my house, and then she said she wouldn’t sleep with me, and I thought, ‘Well, good. Maybe somebody is finally going to slow the whole proceeding down.’ I could see she was a very intense girl, and everything seemed like it could get very sped up, so I was relieved she was going to be the one to put some brakes on. I don’t know how to do that myself. It’s a skill I’d like to develop, but as of yet I don’t have it, so I usually look to the girls to slow it down. Possibly I should be the one who says, ‘No, no, never mind my boner, let’s not have sex,’ but it’s against my nature. My dick wants what it wants, and then I want what it wants.

“You may be a shrink, but you’re also a guy. You know what I’m talking about. I see a woman mailing a letter, and I see from

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the way her breast is curved under her sweater that there’s no bra and I want to bend her over a car and have her. You know, you see these movies of prehistoric people who just bend people over and, Bam! I wish it was like that. It’s an appetite men have as mammals, damn it. I’ve always meant to do some more reading on it.

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll be able to have a relationship one day. Or maybe I’m not made for relationships. There are probably some people who aren’t. But, you know, I’m thirty-five now and I’m slowing down … Well, actually I’m not slowing down, I’m just … I’m not slowing down. But I think I should just let my process continue and …