Read Online You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rosecrans Baldwin
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rent.
“Honestly, Sara, you know if Victor wasn’t my best friend—”
Victor came back. The two of them spent the rest of dinner discussing stereo equipment.
How many cards has this taken?
Twelve cards.
I’m staring at the plastic wrapper from the cards balled up in the ashtray, threatening to uncrinkle and pop out.
I wonder if that night meant anything to Victor. If he ever thought of it again. If it was more than just another dinner out, another New York night, while for me it was an era collapsing by the time we got the check. An evening bigger than a decade.
Victor will never see these cards. I can already hear the Socratic inquiry, his careful investigations, to pry and soothe simultaneously. He’ll say I’ve got it wrong. He’ll say my remembering is incorrect, that I’m over-emphasizing, under-analyzing, the typical dramatist’s approach: emoting. Besides, he’s not coming to counseling again anyway. An hour ago, we had a fight in the parking lot about psychology, “pseudoscience.” He blew up, and one thing he didn’t see was that I loved it. Just to get him shouting, part of me was happy. A lot of me. That was psychological progress I’d pay triple for any day.
Victor listens to neurons, not people. Something he’ll find frustrating or unnerving about someone at a dinner party, he’ll label “interesting” and leave it at that. Right at the moment when anyone else would vent normal human frustration, Victor shuts down, or clasps his hands behind his back and observes and labels. As though to say, never get involved. People don’t change. You can’t bring about evolution, the point is to watch and ponder. And yes, in my exasperation there’s still part of me that likes that side in him, since it’s the opposite of my tendency to pounce or explode.
It was something I once wanted for myself: to step out of myself into the cool-blooded post.
But for all of Victor’s powers of analysis, he never turns them inward. I remember I once urged him to keep a diary. He said, “What would I write about? I don’t spend much time reflecting why I do anything.”
Woman Hits Forty was a big success, up in lights nine months, a great run. The producers got paid, the actress got an Outer Critics Circle Award, and I found my voice and some big paychecks. Late bloomer, but I bloomed. I gave myself four hours at Saks. I called Mark, my new agent, out in Los Angeles.
First thing Mark asked me, “How come you’re not writing screenplays?”
Know what Victor said? “What do you know about writing screenplays?”
Regina’s town, Otter Creek, where Indian campfires once attracted the sights of Mount Desert Island’s first European visitor, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. Sara bought me an edition of his journals when we moved to Maine, so that I’d have an idea of the island’s history.
“This island is very high, and cleft into seven or eight mountains, all in a line,” Champlain wrote around 1600. “The summits of most of them are bare trees, nothing but rock. I name it l’Isle des Monts-déserts.”
In April, when I first met Regina, there was still a foot of snow on the ground. By five on a Friday, in the basin of a mountain range, her bedroom would be a glowing box, a lighthouse in the woods. I’d hang a right by the motel, go two miles on a dirt road, and turn up a gravel drive, and there at the top would be Regina’s cottage, with the sagging roof, shingles in the yard like litter. Shutters off their hooks. Her bedroom light would be on, first floor, southeast corner, and so would the porch light, and I’d walk inside without knocking, knowing the roommate was away, the curtain about to rise.
But that Friday, there’d been no invitation. No e-mail from Regina commanding me to attend. If La Loulou’s show was going up, someone else held the ticket. Russell’s plane would arrive in an hour, and I was still at the lab with my staff gathered for our weekly Friday status
“Honestly, Sara, you know if Victor wasn’t my best friend—”
Victor came back. The two of them spent the rest of dinner discussing stereo equipment.
How many cards has this taken?
Twelve cards.
I’m staring at the plastic wrapper from the cards balled up in the ashtray, threatening to uncrinkle and pop out.
I wonder if that night meant anything to Victor. If he ever thought of it again. If it was more than just another dinner out, another New York night, while for me it was an era collapsing by the time we got the check. An evening bigger than a decade.
Victor will never see these cards. I can already hear the Socratic inquiry, his careful investigations, to pry and soothe simultaneously. He’ll say I’ve got it wrong. He’ll say my remembering is incorrect, that I’m over-emphasizing, under-analyzing, the typical dramatist’s approach: emoting. Besides, he’s not coming to counseling again anyway. An hour ago, we had a fight in the parking lot about psychology, “pseudoscience.” He blew up, and one thing he didn’t see was that I loved it. Just to get him shouting, part of me was happy. A lot of me. That was psychological progress I’d pay triple for any day.
Victor listens to neurons, not people. Something he’ll find frustrating or unnerving about someone at a dinner party, he’ll label “interesting” and leave it at that. Right at the moment when anyone else would vent normal human frustration, Victor shuts down, or clasps his hands behind his back and observes and labels. As though to say, never get involved. People don’t change. You can’t bring about evolution, the point is to watch and ponder. And yes, in my exasperation there’s still part of me that likes that side in him, since it’s the opposite of my tendency to pounce or explode.
It was something I once wanted for myself: to step out of myself into the cool-blooded post.
But for all of Victor’s powers of analysis, he never turns them inward. I remember I once urged him to keep a diary. He said, “What would I write about? I don’t spend much time reflecting why I do anything.”
Woman Hits Forty was a big success, up in lights nine months, a great run. The producers got paid, the actress got an Outer Critics Circle Award, and I found my voice and some big paychecks. Late bloomer, but I bloomed. I gave myself four hours at Saks. I called Mark, my new agent, out in Los Angeles.
First thing Mark asked me, “How come you’re not writing screenplays?”
Know what Victor said? “What do you know about writing screenplays?”
Regina’s town, Otter Creek, where Indian campfires once attracted the sights of Mount Desert Island’s first European visitor, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. Sara bought me an edition of his journals when we moved to Maine, so that I’d have an idea of the island’s history.
“This island is very high, and cleft into seven or eight mountains, all in a line,” Champlain wrote around 1600. “The summits of most of them are bare trees, nothing but rock. I name it l’Isle des Monts-déserts.”
In April, when I first met Regina, there was still a foot of snow on the ground. By five on a Friday, in the basin of a mountain range, her bedroom would be a glowing box, a lighthouse in the woods. I’d hang a right by the motel, go two miles on a dirt road, and turn up a gravel drive, and there at the top would be Regina’s cottage, with the sagging roof, shingles in the yard like litter. Shutters off their hooks. Her bedroom light would be on, first floor, southeast corner, and so would the porch light, and I’d walk inside without knocking, knowing the roommate was away, the curtain about to rise.
But that Friday, there’d been no invitation. No e-mail from Regina commanding me to attend. If La Loulou’s show was going up, someone else held the ticket. Russell’s plane would arrive in an hour, and I was still at the lab with my staff gathered for our weekly Friday status
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