Breakfast at Bethany's |
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You are at Bethany’s. Again.
You have promised yourself, over and over, that you would not
end up here. In the morning. Like this.
Fourteen hours, and several dozen drinks ago, you thought the
two of you looked like an advertisement for cool, heterosexual
Los Angeles. Staring at Beth now, with her rat’s nest and
raccoon eyes, and at your own shaking hand, you decide this is
no longer the case. In the hyper-white light in the kitchen of
Beth’s tiny Studio City apartment, you decide the only thing the
two of you could possibly be used to advertise at this point is
the Betty Ford Center.
You have been leaving messages on the answering machine of a
friend who’s out of town in a vague attempt to document the
summer. In June, these messages often began, “Guess whose bed I
woke up in this morning?” In July, this progressed to “Guess
whose floor I woke up on this morning?” If you had to leave a
phone message concerning the events of last night, it would run
something along the lines of, “Guess which exit on the Santa
Monica Freeway we took before passing out on the side of the
road for three hours? Don’t worry, your guess is as good as
mine.”
Bethany is lighting a cigarette from a burner on the stove.
Lighting cigarettes, she has told you, is the only reason she
hasn’t had the gas turned off. She doesn’t cook, ever. And she
can’t keep her shit together long enough to depend on being able
to find a lighter. Bethany takes a kind of bizarre pride in
facts like this. This is typical of the people with whom you
have been spending your summer.
Breakfast will consist of too strong Kenya AA, cigarettes, and
possibly an argument. Beth and you seem to argue a lot, in the
way that people who have been married for a long time argue.
Which is ridiculous. You have only known each other for three
months.
“Hey,” Beth says, “Whatcha thinkin’ about?”
You consider responding with the old Andrew Dice Clay joke, “If
I wanted you to know, I’d be talking.” You decide this may not
be the most rewarding salvo in your efforts to achieve domestic
felicity and accrue goodwill.
“I’m thinking,” you say instead, “about how it is you can look
so beautiful, even on mornings like this.”
Although this is in no way what you were thinking, it is also
not entirely untrue. Bethany’s brand of beauty is the kind that
gets you into nightclubs owned by movie stars and shows through
even the worst hangovers — which is not at all important as you
both passed the stage in drinking where one suffers hangovers
weeks ago. For you and Beth, being wrecked and recovering from
being wrecked has become freakishly normal.
“I wish,” Beth responds, “that you wouldn’t say things like
that.”
“Why not?”
“Because, I don’t know.” She stares at her burning
cigarette.
“Because it makes me uncomfortable.”
Last night, late, lying in bed, after several very public
drunken scenes in various nightclubs from West Hollywood to
Marina del Rey, you and Bethany had an intense, honest, private
argument, the details of which are just now coming back to you —
filtered through a blood alcohol level you imagine to still be
at least .015.
“Oh, well, in that case,” you say. Smug, a little mean.
“Jesse,” Beth says, “Just stop.”
Later, you will drive Beth to the studio at Universal where she
will be late for work as a seamstress in the wardrobe
department. You have told your friends back in New York that
she’s a designer—which is not a total lie because she did work
as one for two weeks in June when the real one came down with an
especially nasty case of stomach flu. You are finishing your
masters at UCLA film school and have a summer job you don’t
enjoy, can’t seem to get to very often and will soon, with any
luck, lose.
“You’re going to be late for work,” you say.
“It won’t be the first time,” Beth says.
This kind of understatement is characteristic of Bethany’s brand
of banter. The first night the two of you went out ended at 11am
the next day with you getting a parking ticket and Bethany being
four hours late for work. You are aware, however, that you are
not the only person of the male gender responsible for Bethany's
bout with excessive tardiness.
“It’s not so much going to work that bothers me,” Beth smiles.
“It’s that they expect me to stay. I mean, I like the drive and
all.” Beth enunciates each word not unlike a five-year old
child, seemingly uncertain exactly of how the words will sound
and mildly surprised that they all come out in the right order.
You are immeasurably charmed by this. You do realize, however,
that this seeming ad lib is a piece of well-rehearsed cocktail
party conversation.
Beth doesn’t drive to work. She rides a bicycle, and furthermore
it’s mostly uphill and she hates it.
You should let this go. In the social contract the two of you
have established, remarks such as this one are not only
acceptable, but expected. Your inability to continue the
maintenance of that social contract, you remember, moved from
the wings to center stage in last night’s argument.
“That was some night,” you say, fully aware that every night has
been more or less some night since you were introduced to Beth
by one of her college roommates. Or, more accurately, since you
were warned about Beth by one of her college roommates.
“Yes,” Beth says. She pours herself more coffee and lights
another cigarette from the stove.
“Beth,” you say, “I’m crazy about you.” You had not planned to
say this. You might as well go for broke. “And I know you’re
crazy about me.”
“I see,” she says, mashing out her cigarette.
“Faulkner once wrote,” you say, “that between grief and
nothing—I would choose grief.” You turn away to look out the
window. “But I am not William Faulkner.”
“Jesse,” Beth says, her voice full of the slow, exaggerated
caution one uses when one may, quite possibly, be speaking with
a lunatic. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about us, Beth. I can’t do this anymore. Every
night for us is like a New Year’s Eve party full of psychopaths.
I mean, every night is like shaking dice.” You know that you are
being spectacularly unpersuasive. You also realize that you are
making almost no sense. You consider telling Bethany that
together you could be the next Scott and Zelda. Then you
remember what happened to Zelda. You decide this not a good
tack. You also remember what happened to Scott, but this is not
something you can afford to think about right now.
“I need more from you,” you say. "I need commitment.”
“Um,” Beth says.
“Um,” Beth says.
“I mean...”
You stop talking. You realize you have nothing more to say. In
tennis parlance, the ball is no longer in your court. You
realize, upon understanding this, the ball hasn’t been in your
court for quite sometime. This is the argument you had last
night. This is the argument you have been having since you met.
This, you also realize, for the first time, is the last time you
can have this argument.
You will understand, a few days later—in the middle of a lecture
on Contempt that things must get as ugly and as vicious as they
are about to. Only then, with your backside half-asleep pinned
to the auditorium’s stunningly uncomfortable seat and your eyes
pegged to a chiaroscuroed still of Brigitte Bardot’s frozen,
perfect grimace, will you comprehend that the only way you can
keep yourself away from Bethany is to make perfectly and
unquestionably sure that she will never want to see you again.
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