Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [112]
“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I could come up with. “We were too young?” I guessed. “Could that have been it?”
“You never trusted my feelings,” she murmured to herself. “I don’t think you ever really believed I liked you.”
“That’s not true at all,” I said. “I did. I did know that. I just . . . wasn’t ready.”
“And you are now? After one particularly volatile session?”
“On the volatility scale I would say that was only about a seven.”
And then after we both tried to smile, I said, “Maybe you never really understood me.” I said this in the same soft voice I had been using since we entered the restaurant. “You say that you did. But maybe you didn’t. Not really.” I thought about this. “Maybe not enough to resolve anything? But that was probably my fault. I was just this . . . hidden person and—”
“Who made it so impossible to resolve anything.” She finished the sentence.
“I want to now. I want to make things work out . . . and . . .” My foot found hers beneath the table. And then I had a flash: Jayne standing alone over a grave in a charred field at dusk, and this image forced me to admit, “You’re right about something.”
“What?”
“I am afraid of being alone.”
You stumble into a nightmare—you grasp for salvation.
“I’m afraid of losing you . . . and Robby . . . and Sarah . . .”
If something is written, can it be unwritten?
I tensed when I said, “Don’t go,” even though this wasn’t meant literally.
“I’ll only be gone a week.”
I thought about the week that had just passed. “That’s a long time.”
“ ‘There’s always summer,’ ” she said wistfully, a famous line from a movie she had made—the elusive love interest who strands the fiancé at the altar.
“Don’t go,” I said again.
She was unfolding a napkin. She was quietly crying.
“What?” I reached for her. I felt the corners of my mouth sag.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me.”
This would be the last dinner I ever had with Jayne.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5
19. the cat
I woke up staring at our darkened ceiling in the master bedroom.
The writer was imagining an intricate moment: Jayne saying goodbye to the children, kneeling on the cold granite of the driveway, a sedan and its driver idling behind her, and the kids were dressed for school and she’d left them so many times before that Sarah and Robby were used to this—they didn’t sulk, they barely paid attention, because this was just business: Mom going nowhere again. (If Robby was slightly more emotional that day in November, he did not reveal it to Jayne.) Why was Jayne lingering when she said goodbye to Robby? Why was she searching his eyes? Why did Jayne stroke his face until Robby pulled back and flinched, Sarah’s fingers still restlessly entwined with her mother’s? She crushed them in a hug, their foreheads touching, the front of the house looming over them with the wall that was a map sprawling across its surface. She would only be gone a week. She would call them that night from her hotel room in Toronto. (Later, at Buckley, Sarah would point at the wrong plane cruising the sky, passing in and out of clouds, and tell a teacher, “My mommy’s up there,” and by then Jayne’s pain would have faded.) Why did Jayne weep on the ride to the Midland Airport? Before Jayne left the darkness of our bedroom, why had I said the words I promise? My pillow was wet. I had cried in my sleep again. Sun was now filtering into the room and the ceiling was lighting itself indifferently in an enlarging diamond, and the umbrellas were still spinning and iridescent halos revolved around me—the remnants of a dream I couldn’t remember—and mid-yawn my immediate thought was Jayne’s gone. What the writer wanted to know was: why was Jayne so frightened the morning of November fifth? Or, more accurately, how did Jayne intuit what was going to happen to us during her absence?
Ignoring everything is very easy to do. Paying attention is much harder, but this is what was demanded