Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [42]
But let’s say you were made of sterner stuff and gradually learned to tune all this out. “It’s just a photo,” you might have thought, as you tried to remind yourself of every cheery, uplifting thing you had ever read on a refrigerator magnet. For example: “Failure provides the opportunity to begin again intelligently” and “Just because you make a mistake doesn’t mean you are a mistake.” Even though maybe a littler voice in your brain was also muttering at the exact same time, “Yes, but God must be in on this. Bus fumes are so over-the-top symbolic.”
But then what if ten, fifteen, twenty more years went by and you got on with your life, went to therapy, pursued your career, owned a lot of dogs, fell in love a bunch of times, and began to feel so healthy emotionally that you could appreciate the good part of Bobby again? Maybe this made you feel proud and optimistic, not just about yourself but about mankind in general and its ability to forgive and to heal. What if you felt so grown-up and balanced and distanced from your own past that one day when someone sent you an announcement that Bobby had gotten married, you thought, “How great for Bobby!” But what if, as you were perusing the details of the national press release, you realized that according to the dates Bobby offered, the years you and he had spent “working on the relationship” overlapped exactly with the early dating period of his current relationship? And what if in that moment of comprehension, an odd sucking metaphysical vortex opened up in the center of your handsomely renovated unconscious, and out of it sprung a dendrite-like coiled appendage that vacuumed up the DNA from your positive emotional growth, took all your feelings of goodwill, tumbled them around in a giant metaphorical reactor, and spit them back out in an emotional tsunami of unpleasantness?
“What the hell is this?” is what you probably thought, even as you did your best to let it pass. Because so what, really? Who gives a shit? It was twenty years ago.
But what if mere weeks after that a big, stupid scandal broke around Bobby, involving assorted charges of infidelity and extortion? And what if the resulting wave of media attention that came in its wake caused all kinds of people to try and drag you back into the maw of Bobby all over again? What if it was big enough that you looked up from your messy desk one day to find a reporter from the New York Post and another one from some newspaper in London standing in your driveway? And what if then, in the space of a few days, you were also contacted by Good Morning America, the Today show, the CBS Early Show, and Nightline, as well as by individuals from different day parts of CBS and ABC News and assorted magazines, all wanting to talk to you not about whatever you were doing—for example, your new shoe store or haircut salon or the new book you had out or whatever—but instead about Bobby? And what if even when you said no, ABC News called some relative of yours who was completely unconnected to any of this—like, say, a brother who lived in the Midwest—to see if he could shed any light on the whole situation? And then, to top it all off in an orgy of overuse of the fifth letter of the alphabet, what if you also received an email from E! Entertainment Television asking you for an interview and a few pictures from your private collection, to be included in a new show they were doing called Doomed by Lust? Yes! What if they really said the show was called Doomed by Lust? How did you get connected to a show with a name like that? When did you turn into Charlie Sheen? Or Pamela Anderson?