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By Root 581 0

said it was making your dreams feel like real life instead of dreams. I think that’s what she said. What a strange thing for a drug to do—make things feel “real”— and yet I had the same experience. Your beautiful flowers made me sneeze, so I nipped out to the drugstore and bought some Claritin and took it. When I got home last night, I went to bed and— hey ho!—I dreamed I was in a house at night and tornadoes were approaching. I thought it was nuts, because tornadoes only strike during the day, but Bethany was there, clutching a door sill, saying, “Mom, people only film tornadoes during daylight. Of course they happen at night, too, even without the sun shining and illuminating them.”

Even in my dreams Bethany is more down to earth than me.

Roger, my paper and pen feel so sad.

Bethany

VIA FEDEX

Roger,

Why aren’t you writing me? I’m drunk and overwhelmed and I’m in a bistro not far from the Seine—Left Bank—and I have to tell you what happened to me this afternoon. I was leaving my hotel, feeling spaced out and depressed by the Christmas decorations here—not only because they’re Christmas decorations and hence automatically depressing, but because they’re so much more beautiful and delicate and, I don’t know . . . devoted than the cardboard schlock we put up in Staples windows. And I felt stupid and young and not worthy of all the beauty these Frenchies soak in every day. It’s killing me, all this beauty. I have this feeling the French have X-ray vision and look at me and know that I live with my mother in a Kleenex box on the other side of the planet, that I can’t cook, that I watch too much TV and, when I do, it’s never the History Channel.

So there I was, walking along, lost inside this downward loser spiral, when I passed this hotel and a man emerged, dressed like a doctor in All Things Great and Small—sage greens and browns and that jacket English people wear when Hello! magazine visits their country house—and he was walking with two kids and a woman, and then the blood froze in my veins. It was Johnny Depp, right in front of me. And he was this normal guy with normal kids, and I think Vanessa Paradis was in a crabby mood, but he looked my way, our eyes met, he smiled and winked, and then they all got into a Range Rover and left.

Roger, I was standing on the sidewalk for maybe five minutes, trying to digest what had happened. I put my hand to my cheek and felt all this white makeup I’ve been wearing forever, and I felt so #$%&ing naive and childish. I ran back to my hotel and went to my room, but then, I’d forgotten my key—#$%&ing Europe—and had to go back downstairs to get it. My face was like a mud pie from tears, and I used the shower—this idiotic brassy thing that’s totally hopeless for showering in—and washed away all of the pancake and eyeliner and polonium and all this other crap I’ve been buried under for five years. And beneath it all is my face, my face that I’ve never been able to look at for very long. My relationship with the mirror is usually like locking eyes with a stranger on a bus and then looking away. But this time I didn’t look away, and there was foolish, naive, pink, blubbery, boring, nothing little me. If I saw me on a bus I’d snicker and say, “Well. At least I’m not her.” But I am.

Roger, I feel so stupid, and I’m trying to drink myself into feeling numb, and I’ve never done that before. I think there’s much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world’s probably a better place. Being numb makes you a crime fighter! Is that what happened with you? Selfish me—I write you a letter and talk about nothing but me. How is Zoe? How’s Staples? How’s the weather? I scour the International Herald Tribune every day, and you have no idea how good it makes me feel to know that, back home, the daily high is two degrees Celsius and it’s partly cloudy. I can see the parking lot at work: abandoned shopping carts, a thin crust of road salt, SUVs coming and going— how depressing that visions