Permission. Saskia Vogel
on the phone during dinner, as an act of love. In a way it was. He was taking care of us. And as he liked to remind my mother, there was no this, he’d gesture around the house, without this, the ringing phone and files under his arm. My mother wanted his time, she said. But they could never agree on how to spend it. She liked to plan, he liked to see where the day would take him. Only after I met Orly and understood that loving in the way you love is not enough – you have to pay attention to how people need and want to be loved – did I come to realize that they were blind to each other.
As a child, I couldn’t figure out how a story like theirs could turn out so rotten. It had sounded like the stuff of old romantic comedies with fast-talking, strong-minded women, and men who get the girl in the end. My father, the businessman abroad. My mother, his peer, at first mistaken for his secretary. A battle of wills that became a battle for her heart. I thought the fact that I was here meant that theirs was a happy ending. But if a happy ending looked like this, then I needed a love that was greater than theirs. All would be well with a love like that.
Inside the fortune teller’s tent, it was stuffy and hot but for the breeze working its way into my jelly sandals. Across the table, the fortune teller asked for my hand. She studied my lines. I studied hers. The crescents of her nails, the crescent moons hung from her ears and neck. Her eyelids, turquoise demilunes.
She said: ‘When other people fall, they can get right back up, dust themselves off, and keep going. Not you. You break. And you have to figure out how to put yourself back together each time.’
I pulled my hand away.
‘It’s what I see,’ she said.
I never asked about my future again.
The fortune teller could have put it differently: you’re a sensitive person; you’ll need a thick skin. Then I might have cultivated a callus. Instead, I tried not to break, moving through the world without friction, following the path laid out before me. I’d do well in school, I’d curl my hair and make sure my face was done, ever ready for love’s arrival. Love would be my salvation and the force against which my character would be formed. I suppose that’s how I got into acting, to get an idea of some of the many selves I might become once taken in by love’s power. I liked trying on these other lives, stretching each new role over me, covering the fractures inside.
My first audition was for an innovative yogurt product designed for women on the go. I mean, they were basically large ketchup packets filled with fruit-flavored yogurt that you sucked down, no need for a spoon. It was right before my senior year of high school. The casting agent who’d visited my summer drama program called right after the audition to tell me that I was exactly what they wanted: a fresh face for a fresh product with a major national roll-out. Nothing had ever felt so good. I was young, but I wasn’t getting any younger. I didn’t want to end up like Linda.
Linda was my mother’s friend from the shipping company. Unlike my mother, she had kept her job and would visit sometimes when she was in town for business. I remember her copperred hair and eyes like Cleopatra, the way she smoked and touched my dad on the knee when she addressed him. How the touch made him nervous. I think my mom liked watching him squirm, having something over him.
Linda must have been around fifty and me a teenager when I saw her last, same hair and makeup, same hand on the knee. My father seemed to enjoy her just as much. After dinner, he and Linda left the table to finish the wine on the balcony, and as my mom and I cleaned up the kitchen, she asked if I didn’t think it was about time Linda retired the femme fatale act. I remember dutifully agreeing with her that Linda, the way she was at her age, was tragic. But this agreement settled inside me as a seed of agitation. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I liked seeing Dad happy and relaxed. And I liked Linda. There was so much to her: energy, conviction, and mystery. A lightness my mother did not have. A certain style. In Linda, I saw a woman capable of giving and receiving joy, and the effect it had on my dad. Until then, I’d thought my mother’s dissatisfaction was noble and luxurious: it meant her life was full enough for her to be dismissive of its bounty. I thought my mother’s capacity for displeasure was a sign that she was discerning.
My yogurt commercial was still on the air around the Christmas holidays, when everyone else at school was awaiting decisions on their college applications. But I was ahead of the game. I had a career, so I kept at it and stayed in the Los Angeles area long after most of my classmates moved away. I had a good run. Five years where I was exactly what they wanted, but then whatever shine I’d had dulled, and by the time I entered my mid-twenties, I wasn’t what anyone wanted anymore. All I’d been hearing before my agent dropped me was, ‘They couldn’t see you in the part.’ I knew exactly what they meant. I was surprised it had taken them so long to catch on. I’d never been passionate about acting, I’d just gotten into a groove. But the last real role I’d had was two years ago. I played ‘Young Camp Counsellor’ in a reboot of a nineties show about rich high school kids. It was a three-episode arc. I had a few lines. And after those few days up in Malibu, where I mostly hung out in the shade with the rest of the cast, trading stories about life in the canyons – people who got lost, mountain lions, and secret pot farms – I had a decent year’s salary. Enough to make me want to do better, but still enough to not worry about making too much of an effort. I can’t tell you how I spent my time. I read. I treated dating like it was my job. The men were easy fun. There was more to it, of course, but I liked the customs that came with being a woman on a date with a man. I was well-rehearsed. Women gave me stage fright. With women, there was an open space of possibility, a potential to define the relationship on our terms, but that meant I had to account for myself. After Ana, I was afraid of being hurt. And behind that fear was that wish for love, for sensation, the dreams I dreamt in the silence between two heartbeats.
As for acting, I guess I’d hoped I could keep doing what I’d been doing. But since ‘Young Camp Counsellor,’ I hadn’t booked anything of consequence. In the past two years, I played the lead in a student feature, helped out behind the scenes on other people’s passion projects, and danced in a music video privately funded by a musician I’d been sleeping with off and on for a few months. He was beautiful, and our bodies were better in conversation than we were, which was its own kind of rare.
To keep myself going, I’d been doing odd jobs. For a while I was earning enough serving drinks, snacks, and views of my ass at a monthly poker party at a private residence off Mulholland. The tips were good if you could just be a body in a tight uniform. The host said there was more work if I wanted it. Did I have a business suit? I did. It had been a graduation gift from my mother, because ‘everyone needs one someday,’ which was really her way of telling me that I was chasing a pipe dream.
‘Here’s the deal,’ the party’s host said. ‘You come over for a “meeting” when my wife is home. Briefcase, files, office-appropriate shoes, tasteful jewellery and makeup. The whole deal. Business formal. And then we fuck on my desk. Fifteen hundred bucks. You’re in and out in an hour.’
One of the other girls I worked with ended up taking the gig, but I don’t know – after I turned him down, something changed. What had felt like fast cash for doing little more than showing up and being friendly turned sour. There was something in the way he’d claimed me with his offer. And how he started to resent me when I didn’t indulge his advances, even though the woman I became at those events had always played hard to get. His breath on my neck against the pantry door when I was restocking the nuts. How satisfied he sounded with himself when he called me incorrigible. I wasn’t planning on going back after Memorial Day, and I’d been looking forward to the long weekend with my dad to think things through. Dad didn’t need to know the details, though telling him would have probably meant he’d slip me a few months’ expenses. He was like that with gifts, haphazard and practical. He’d never have given me a dime if I asked for it straight out. All I wanted that Memorial Day weekend was to pick his business brain. He was good at being dispassionate, catching loose strands and weaving them into a plan. I wanted a plan, some sort of structure. But then he was gone.
IN THOSE BLANK WEEKS of sorrow, it fell to me to keep our fridge stocked. After we had worked our way through the barbecue food from the caterer, I thought I’d start working my way through the pantry,