“Yeah, of course, these things really make me want to engage in acting-out behavior. I mean, the terminology makes me want to vomit, but I don’t know what else to call it, so for today, I’ll just say I’m having thoughts. Okay? Does that make you happy? Does that mean that I’m no longer exhibiting resistance? I missed a really important meeting this morning. I used to have a career, you know? I actually made the occasional movie once upon a time. Now I’m cleaning the shit out of the bathroom of my alcoholic mother, who has soiled herself and is sitting in the dry bathtub, drinking, with the television blaring, and I’m thinking about acting-out behavior.”
In their country Hardeep was instrumental in the beginning of the hacker phenomenon. He claimed to have authored a virus. A message would pop up on pornographic Web sites telling the user that a woman’s body is a holy temple of God. Now Hardeep is writing code for large corporations, Web-based products, business applications. It pays handsomely. Hardeep and his wife and children live in a condominium in Jersey City, near the Newport Center. Ranjeet tells his cousin that he must urgently search online databases for the identity of this woman from the movies, and Hardeep asks, in his husky voice that sounds brusque even when he is being sentimental, if Ranjeet happens to know the name of the woman from the movies, and Ranjeet is forced to concede that he does not know her name, for she has not given it. She does not need to give her name to secure a car.
“Don’t do the detachment thing, please,” the large passenger is now saying into her pendulous transmitter. “I don’t need a bunch of questions about how I
feel
about it. I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I feel like I have nowhere else to turn. I feel like I’m stuck with a madwoman. And she’s not even in the attic; she has the better apartment. It’s more like I’m in the attic, and the whole thing is reversed, and I’m the one who’s going out of my mind, and I’ll die first, of boredom, because I can’t take her complaining and her incoherence, her demands and her spontaneous hemorrhaging —”
Ranjeet makes for the Forty-second Street exit. Which means that he will be going past the United Nations. He tells Hardeep that there is absolutely no chance that the woman is a movie actress, because she is very plump, and in this country she would not be a film star, by reason of plumpness. There are character actors who are noted for their plumpness, but they are considered fit only for ridicule. Perhaps in India, where a large wife is to be adored, Hardeep’s wife being an example, she could be an actress. There she would make the sky feel badly about its imperfections. “Perhaps she is a film editor,” Hardeep offers. So Ranjeet is considering just saying something to her, shouting across the seat, over the rhythmical chants of the dispatcher,
Forty-eight, pickup, forty-eight,
“Excuse me, plump young lady, because I’m a film scholar in my homeland and I cannot help overhearing that you are involved in the movie business. I would like to inquire about your employment. In what area particularly are you involved in this film business? You are perhaps an agent? Or a casting director?” But before he can say anything, she shouts in such a way that there is no mistaking that it is he with whom she is attempting to communicate, “Excuse me, uh, I’ve had a little change in plans, and now we’re going to have to go back down to Fourteenth Street; I’m really sorry —”
A turn on Forty-second! No! The whole of this Western civilization rises up against a turn on Forty-second Street! Once you are on Forty-second Street, you must stay on it, this artery. Yet if this is so, then how do people get on and off of Forty-second Street? They get on at one river and then they go all the way to the other river, passing the Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, the Disney Store. Bisection, boundary, limit, emblem: Forty-second Street. There must be persons, visiting from other countries, who have been stuck going back and forth on Forty-second Street for tens of decades!
On the phone, Hardeep protests that the description is inadequate. There are many upon many upon many film producers with blond hair, much of it artificial in color. And there are many plump celebrities. It could be that Ranjeet has in his car a certain very plump talk show host. Actually, there are several plump talk show hosts. It seems that being very plump is an indicator of potential for talk show hosts. Here, Ranjeet demurs. It is definitely not the plump talk show host in question, and he knows this for the reason that his son has a violent hatred of the one plump talk show host. Any time the very plump talk show host appears on the television, his son must be restrained. “Well then,” his cousin offers, “if it is not the talk show host, it could be that woman from the situation comedy, the one who had her stomach made smaller.” The conversation goes on this way, and Ranjeet becomes exasperated, says that his cousin is shooting at the fishes, and he looks back in the rearview mirror and sees that the plump woman is now yanking possessions out of her bag in an animated manner. He sees that there is a baseball cap in there, she pulls the baseball cap out of the bag for a moment, and he nearly rear-ends an expensive vehicle, perhaps a Jaguar, by the Flatiron Building, because he is attempting to read the words on this cap that he sees in the backseat, the cap that says
A Low Life in High Heels.
Hardeep is yelling that he cannot stay on the line all day, but Ranjeet pleads with him, please please, just to punch the words into his computer to see if anything will come out of the computer,
A Low Life in High Heels,
and Hardeep employs the search engine because everything is available on a search engine, for this is indeed the age of information, and soon there will be search engines right here in the Lincoln Town Cars, or so the dispatcher has said.
In fact, there is a movie with this very title,
A good-natured but somewhat pretentious biographical picture about a minor character in Andy Warhol’s Factory, featuring new music by Lou Reed.
This is what Hardeep reads to his cousin. And who are the principals of this movie, the director, the writer? For these are things that can be discovered with the search engine, as Hardeep has described it, and soon Hardeep lists these people and adds his own interpretation of the commentary, “A man from Miami prefers to dress in the clothes of a woman, as you would often see on American television. Yes, of course there was a producer involved in the film,” Hardeep says, “and I am looking at a photo of her right now, and she has very large cheeks, like she is carrying nuts in them, and she has blond hair. It looks as though it is not real hair but rather hair that is dyed. Is this enough information?”
Ranjeet replies, “You are the best cousin I could ever have.”
Now they have arrived at Fourteenth Street, where endless construction is also being practiced by extortionists in unions. Passengers have told him so. There is a construction site that has a large rubber rat out in front of it. It has contented features, this rat, and near to it there are men speaking angrily through bullhorns. They stand flush against the enormous, distended belly of the rat. Ranjeet plunges ahead in the Lincoln Town Car, makes it across Broadway, and soon he is at the stop designated by the plump woman, who is again organizing her personal effects. The adventure is coming to a close. She asks the price. He asks the same question of the dispatcher, whose plosives thunder through the two-way radio. Bills are exchanged. Ranjeet can see that this moment is poised to escape and he realizes that he cannot avoid bringing up the issue; he must bring it up, for to do so is to wrest the promise of a lifetime from the jaws of defeat.
“Excuse me, I am sorry to —”
“No time,” the woman says.
“But I —”
She fumbles with her purse; she closes its latch. She lurches across the backseat in order to avoid opening the door on the traffic side.
“I believe that I overheard that you are in the business of cinema. I was once a student of cinema. Before I came —”
“My assistant will be glad to read your script.”
“I have no script,” he says quickly, as she plants one foot on the curb, exactly as in fifty thousand movies past. “I have only advice. About television.”
There are no rules in the self-help universe. Your average addict hates rules. The Second Avenue Clubhouse, on Fourteenth Street between First and Second avenues, therefore observes few rules. Those twelve traditions everyone talks about? The Clubhouse doesn’t observe them. The Clubhouse puts the group ahead of the sick-and-suffering individual, denies addicts entrance if unwashed, passes the basket twice, collects a yearly membership fee. The addicts who run the Clubhouse are unelected. They refuse to step down. They rule completely. For these reasons, new and untested flavors of twelve-step meetings have found favor here. Down the hall there is Self-Mutilators Anonymous, Shoplifters Anonymous, Nightmares Anonymous, a smattering of sex-addict meetings, including the very anonymous Pedophiles Anonymous. Candlelight meditation meetings for Adult Survivors of Incest.
Vanessa Meandro climbs the stairs, out of breath, sweating. Vanessa imagines that she has compassion for all sufferers of obsession, or she says she does; the pedophile walking down the block alone and passing by a blond nine-year-old girl on a bicycle, guys who spend the day fucking other guys in the woods in the Vale of Cashmere. And yet she has no compassion for sufferers of her own particular difficulty. She strides, in her despond, through the entrance and into the Clubhouse, which is a three-bedroom apartment in the kind of postwar building that used to be considered shabby and uncomfortable but that now rents exorbitantly. The carpeting has stripes of grime. Vanessa passes the Clubhouse bulletin board, which advertises triple-winner meetings for alcoholics who are post-traumatic-stress-disordered, self-employed, compulsive gamblers. Where else would they go? Especially if they are also interested in vegan dietetics, clutter clearing, lucid dreaming, rebirthing, and courses in miracles?
The meeting has already started. Vanessa dreads the door that opens into any self-help group. In her instant of hesitation, she believes that people in the meeting sometimes know who she is. There have been articles written about her, articles that have appeared in large glossy magazines. She once wrote a piece herself, too, for an anthology entitled
Creative Control,
published by a small independent press. Film students read and debated this book. She imagines that the fellow sufferers know who she is, if only because this would make her feel worse. There is nothing to do but cross the threshold into the meeting. There is nothing to do but accept the gazes of her fellow addicts. They’re reading the twelve steps, steps she has entirely ignored. There are a lot of very large people in the meeting, large women, large men. Often there are complaints about the size of the seats. She stumbled into a business meeting once, and rancor about the folding chairs was its sole topic. If the meeting were catering to the needs of this constituency, they should make the chairs larger!
She’ll have to crawl over a half dozen of the beleaguered to get to the vacant seat in the corner. She doesn’t know if she can. An anemic sunshine illuminates dust in the window facing south. Faces of the sufferers are lit up with it, with anemic sun. They are trying hard to make this a better day. Maybe they have acted out already this morning, they have given in to their urges, and they are trying to appear as though they will not do it again. If only there will be evidence of remission. Just for today. They are fervent, for this hour. A coffee pot in the corner cooks down the astringent tar. No cookies, anywhere. In the front, a girl so badly anorexic that she resembles a famine appeal introduces herself again. Paisley, compulsive overeater. Paisley asks, cheerfully, “Anyone new here today or attending their first few meetings?”
The woman sitting next to Vanessa smiles in her direction, inviting her to make herself known. Vanessa fluffs her hair nervously. She does some nervous stretching. “Is that a hand back there?”
“I’m Vanessa.”
Everyone cries out a greeting to the newcomer. Paisley reiterates that it’s not to single out the newcomers that they’re so identified, it’s so they might feel welcome! This
is
a safe place, Paisley reassures them. Then there’s some more nonsense about the steps, during which Vanessa takes out her personal digital assistant and begins scrolling through the appointments she’s missing. Meetings here at the Clubhouse are an hour and fifteen minutes, with a fellowship portion in the middle, where you can’t eat anything. The sufferers stand around nervously, knotting and unknotting their fingers. Last week, Vanessa heard a woman blustering during the fellowship break, enlisting friends in her plan to keep more movie theaters from opening downtown. Just too many movie theaters downtown! Vanessa wanted to invite her to go back to her cave and rot. No one was listening to the woman, but no one was brushing her off, either. She was just there, anxiously murmuring during the five minutes of fellowship.
Since no addict can abbreviate her remarks, since everyone has to blather on until he or she has enumerated everything that has happened in the last twenty-four hours, including specifics about irregularity and skin rashes, one volunteer holds a stopwatch during the meeting to make sure that people don’t go on beyond their allotted four minutes. Vanessa wishes for an even shorter duration. These are the dullest storytellers on earth. They would bore rock formations. They are worse than habitual dream recounters or film agents with their plot summaries. She would like to create some special quarantine for film agents and dream recounters. The next ward over would have the compulsive overeaters.
Now Paisley welcomes her close personal friend, a real power of example, Dean, and Vanessa realizes that she actually recognizes Dean. Dean is not just a regular obese woman with knee trouble, acid reflux, and diabetes. Dean is a former supermodel. Dean is a
Vogue
cover girl, a former lingerie model, and, if the reports are right, an unrepentant heroin addict.
“Hi, I’m Dean, and I’m a food addict. I have to talk first about my esophageal ulcers, because they are very real for me right now.” After which Dean proceeds to the recital, first time as a girl, when, lanky and unloved, teased for her horsey legs, her bulbous nose that she didn’t get fixed until later, she put her fingers down her throat after some uninvited attention from a drunk friend of her father’s. Gulping down drinks with Kahlua in them while the friend, a local minister, tells her about the glory of the Divine, the look in his eyes a mixture of famishment and terror; she goes upstairs to the bathroom, thirteen years old, puts her hand down her throat, bathroom interior like one of those antigravitational swimming pools that astronauts train in. A pleasant thing, ridding herself of the Kahlua, the stolen drinks, ridding herself of the ambiguous glory of the Divine, ridding herself of some middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper beard, so she keeps putting her fingers down her throat, and it is good. It is good to observe purity doctrines because these are doctrines about the glory of the Divine. It is good to refuse food or to feast only on feast days, the saints did it, but some days she would eat a half gallon of ice cream, put her fingers down her throat, try to get her hand out of the way before it all came up; she began to like the look of it on her face, a little bit of vomit, because everyone liked her face so much, which was a face perfected by surgery, its pathos amplified by some rape; every woman gets raped, guys are rapists, that’s the truth of the story, Dean says. Some nights she liked the look of last night’s ice cream on her chin, the chin that was so prominent on the cover of some magazine or another, it looked good to her, vomit on her chin, reminded her somehow of the guys who blacked out the teeth of actresses on subway posters. It all worked fine for a while; she smoked, she had her teeth brightened and then capped, didn’t have a living tooth in the back of her mouth, couldn’t eat more than a cup of soup most days because of how much damage she’d done; in the morning she was empty. She liked mornings when there was both mist and sunshine over the park that her house overlooked, and she was empty, and there was baroque music playing, it was all good, and then the bleeding started. Who cared? Her father had an ulcer, her brother, everyone ulcerated, that was just part of being an American, you bled internally, you oppressed other countries, outside you looked great. But when her esophagus started bleeding, it got her attention, the bleeding got her attention, like the night she ate three hundred and sixty-five caramels, it just seemed like a good number, she was on the phone talking to some guy who’d just had an IPO for a company he started, sold surgical tools and medical materials over the Web, he was twenty-eight, and the stock had appreciated 113 percent on the first day, and he had given her chlamydia, this guy, though she hadn’t told him, and she talked to him and let him tell his stories about his IPO, she let him suggest that she buy some shares, and that was really funny, in a depressing sort of way, and then she went into the bathroom, and there was all this blood, the color of it was shocking, it was Technicolor blood, some of the caramels coming up whole, that’s how horrible it was, they were like the cubist blocks of some painting, the caramels when they came up, but the blood was more red than red, it was like cadmium, fresh from the earth, filings of cadmium from a mine somewhere exotic, the disintegration of her. There was only ice cream and Kahlua, or she was on a diet that consisted entirely of the licorice called the Twizzler because that was what the doctor told her, the doctor of her interior monologues told her to eat only Twizzlers, fuck what anyone thought, she went out to lunch with her agent, who was always trying to keep everyone away from her, except socially acceptable guys like the IPO guy who gave her chlamydia, then she ordered salad and pushed the salad around on the plate in the most brazen way, like when she was a kid and her mother tried to give her laxatives; it was good for a girl to have laxatives. Meals were more like plowing than eating. The day comes when she can no longer eat a meal at all. She tries the occasional Twizzler, just because there is an obscene beauty to the Twizzler. It’s American; it reminds her of times past when candy was still a surprise. These guys are still calling, leveraged-buyout specialists are calling, and movie executives are calling, not the kinds you want to call. She’s embarrassed by it but doesn’t know how not to talk about it, these guys are calling, and basically she thinks they’re probably porn business people, that’s what they look like, always with the gold chains, and then she can’t go a day without putting her fingers down her throat, it’s every day, and sometimes the night, sometimes it’s the last thing that happens after she looks at the meteor showers over her bungalow on Long Island, she goes into the bathroom, insults herself with her right hand, gets her hand out of the way as the food comes up, looks at herself in the mirror, her pride, the sweat on her brow, she uses some deluxe mouthwash, doesn’t smile now, because smiling gives away the lie, avoids men, except when they force themselves on her, never kisses them, just sleeps with them, until she goes to the ear, nose, throat specialist to the stars, and the specialist takes one look at her throat and explains in graphic detail what is going to happen soon: intravenous drip, psychiatric hospital, halfway house, or all three. Later, she goes to a Christmas party with her father—her mother is dead, having left a slim corpse—and who should happen by but the minister. Her father’s friend. Since she last saw him she has become the exemplar of heroin chic photographs. Even though she has never been a heroin addict, she looks dead, and a medieval glow hovers around her. She can’t do her own shopping, she doesn’t know how to balance her checkbook, but she has read and memorized portions of the
Imitatio Christi.
So she comforts her father’s friend late into the night, and she explains that he has fallen far from his path, and she goes upstairs and coughs up a couple of cups of blood.