It was early, the morning of the last day, and Ellen Gregory slipped out of bed and went to the window in the bedroom of the rented beach house and pulled back the curtains to look. It was June 11, 2001. She was 32, at the apogee of her career. It was a new century, it was a gorgeous day with a cloudless sky, the kind of weather you expect in June, but somehow more perfect.
Everything should have been happy, happy, happy, but there were electric clouds of anxiety.
It wasn't just that almost exactly eight weeks ago, a complete emotional wreck, she had cut off all her blond hair and dyed it black and surreptitiously left LA and the shooting of the new season of her smash hit sitcom, Girlfriends. It wasn't just that she had shot to death—in her own home—the man who had kidnapped her at gunpoint. And it wasn't just that, because of her disappearance, there were black-suited lawyers and angry producers who wanted to eat her heart, carpaccio-style, in the best restaurants in LA. And it wasn't just that, only a short time after her flight from LA, she had met Michael Webster, PhD candidate at the University of Iowa—which was around the putative corner from the place of her birth and idyllic childhood—and fallen in stupid, wake-up-with-drool-on-your-pillow, love.
It was all of them. Or perhaps none.
She had always prided herself on not examining her own personal narrative too closely. On just saying fuck it all and letting all that submerged crap seethe like a cauldron of boiling snakes. And hey, it made for good comedy.
She had figured everything else as part of the price of trying to find her soul. But the thing with Michael hit her out of the blue. Finding Michael was one of those coincidences that, if you saw it in a movie, the critic in you would probably fart with contempt. The sort of thing that either made you believe in God or believe that there was no god at all.
And yet so even despite the slobber on her pillow, despite now and again choking up and crying in private at the thought of separating from him, there was a part of her that looked forward to going back. To seeing her friends, talking on the phone with Jon Stewart or Edie Hyde or Kevin James and laughing about it all.
She was in love with a complete computer nerd who had spent the last ten years, while she was working her way up the comedy ladder, buried in computer code.
She was still naked and so was careful—ever watchful of enterprising paparazzi—to shield herself with the curtains. It was early but the sky was clear and there was no sign of yesterday's torrential rain.
Michael, still in bed, woke and said, Hey, and propped his head on his hand and watched her. She started to cover herself but then didn't.
Hey, your own self, she said, and then stood watching him watch her. Even still mostly asleep, his eyes gave off enormous heat. His dark, curly hair was an unruly mess. He said: Come over here so I can get a better look at your birthday suit.
She planted her hands on her hips and said, Well, I do declare.
Don't make me chase you around the room.
That sounds like fun.
But you'd win. Unless of course you let me win.
Anxiety Alert: In two days, she would wake up at home, without him.
This was a thought that she could barely wrap her mind around. She had picked the date for her return after heavy pressure from Marty, her manager—he was getting hideous vibes from very powerful people, whose own people were leaping against their leashes, gnashing bared teeth. There was money at stake. (How long does goddamned rehab take, anyway? As long as it needs to, asshole. Ellen, we both know... What, Marty? We both know what? Nothing. Listen, just get your gorgeous peach-blossom ass back here, please. Save me from this inquisition.)
She came next to the bed and his hand reached out. She watched his eyes, the way they studied her. No other lover she'd had had looked at her the way he did. No one in LA had ever seemed to look at her at all, except in a sort of photographic way (click: got that); she was interchangeable with any other A-List blonde. He looked at her with longing and with love, and the latter was, frankly, freakily unfamiliar.
She got back in bed and straddled him. He wrestled her onto her back and got to his knees.
She had a good sensation of being out of control, of her whole being focused on this single moment. His chest was taut and when he moved his arms, you could see the cords and fibers move beneath his uncharacteristically tanned skin.
She was overcome with a sensation of longing, which was strange because her longing was for this particular moment. She wanted to hold it the way she held him, and it made her heart feel weak and frail and human to think it. To desire to have one thing so completely.
There was so much of her life that was caught on film, on tape, but none of it was her, and this was so real and so delicious that it hurt to think it would end.
She said: Do you think the machine—the Black Box—could record this?
He said, Actually, I tried.
You did?
He held himself above her, and she watched his shoulders, his chest. She put two fingers on his sternum. She watched his eyes hopefully.
I dumped the memory from trips we took onto a couple of disks. It turns out you can't really control it. I still have a lot of figuring out to do. Some of it sort of works.
He got a distant look, and she wanted to hold him, envelope him. She could feel the heat of him, and wriggled her hips a little. He started moving again.
You can do it, Geek Boy.
He lowered himself to his elbows and moved his hands over her breasts, closed his eyes. Ellen, he said.
She reached up and took his head in her hands gently.
When it was over, she got out of bed and said, I'm going to go for a run. Go back to sleep.
Ellen was, herself, not big on sleep—she was one of those people who just didn't need much: she always woke early and went to bed late. And even though they had only spent the night together for a little while, they had done so long enough to establish a routine of her waking before him, then going running, coming home to the coffee he made (which he made very well).
Right now, she needed to run. A cloud of anxiety hung over her, and she could think of no other way of assuaging it. And so she got dressed in her running clothes, put on a baseball cap and sunglasses, and went outside to stretch. In New York, she would have run with at least one bodyguard, though sometimes you could get away with it. Once she passed Madonna running in central Park and hadn't even recognized her until long after they had passed one another. In LA, it would have been in a gym. Here, she was probably taking a chance going alone, but the hat and the baggy shorts and sunglasses were good enough unless someone was actually looking for her, tracking her, and, anyway, even if that happened to be the case, there wasn't much she could do without a security detail.
The landscape was sere and mostly without shade. What did grow on the dunes did not grow to great height, and there was a quality to all of it of caprice—a narrow spit of sand that edged the North Carolina coast but could, seemingly, be wiped away in a single strong storm. She started slow and had the sensation she often did that she would much rather turn around and quit. But she needed this. She needed to think.
Over the last three evenings she had been on the phone with Marty—the cell phone that Michael had rejiggered to make it appear that she was far, far away, on the other side of the planet. She had agreed to do the morning shows, but she wanted to do Letterman first, because Dave was a friend, a mentor, and anyway it would be advantageous to do it once on late night TV, and then look at the reaction from the critics and bullshit peddlers before going in front of the much larger, and possibly less forgiving, daytime audience.
It took her a mile or so to warm up, even though the day was shaping up to be blazing, if not so humid as it had been before yesterday's thunderstorms and torrential rain. She and Michael would both get on separate planes tomorrow. As much a done deal as if they had signed contracts. But it was hard to know—precisely—how or why she was sticking to a deadline that no real meaning except that she had to do it sometime.
Running was good. When she got into a rhythm, the anxiety lifted somewhat. She was addicted to running. She had been known, now and then, to run pretty much ridiculous distances—marathon training distances—just because it helped to exhaust her, made the anxiety easier to live with.
A therapist told her that she might be running away from something. Sure, fame. She had done an hour of standup on HBO that had become her second CD, and the money was good, but she could still walk down the street. When she did the pilot for Girlfriends, suddenly she was besieged. Even people who had never seen the show knew who she was, thanks to 24-hour news feeds, gossip magazines, the Internet. And then she had actually seen the show—of course she had seen it, but had actually seen it in an airport, on an airport bar TV, and it was strange to see herself. Not strange in a happy way but strange in a that-girl-is-not-me way. And when the network executives saw what she could do and started giving her more and more of the A-story, started emphasizing her abilities at physical comedy, it had got worse.
It—the pathological running—had started when she first saw the show and it had sent her into a weird downward spiral. She went from her usual four or six miles to ten or eleven, half marathons. Sometimes at night, restless, sleep escaping her, she ran the perimeter of the house she rented then, and like a dog wore a path next to the fence. She lost weight. People murmured about an eating disorder. But it was the running. She actually ate more. Let people see her, let herself be photographed eating happily, food spilling out of her mouth.
She liked the way when she got into a rhythm she could at least feel that she could think more clearly. And what she wanted to do now was think what to do.
She kept thinking that she should call Marty. Call him up and say ... What?
Last night when she was fretting about this, when it was raining and the dinner was over and they were in bed after making love, Michael had said, Why not the truth?
She had got up in the dark and paced. She didn't say it but she had no idea what the truth was or how to speak it if she knew it. There was likely no use for it, anyway.
Although she knew that she knew why she left, it was not something she could have put into words. The closest she could come was that it was better than suicide, and while she didn't want to kill herself in the least, she also didn't want to live the way she had been living. The constant feeling of disassociation from her own narrative, her own volition. Watching her whole life like it was an out of body experience.
Why she left was still largely an unconscious, or subconscious, morass. It wasn't the burnout thing, it wasn't the psycho stalker thing, it wasn't the midlife actress thing. She had told Marty before and she told him again that she had felt like she had had her soul stolen, that when she saw herself on a TV, she had no idea who that person was—not the person on the screen, but the person she was now, this minute. The person on screen had more substance. And that's the way she had felt, even when she first came home. Even when she first met Michael. But then something had shifted. Something had melted or something had annealed, and that separation seemed to have gone away.
This time spent being with Michael, being away from LA, was the first time in ages she had felt like her soul had reentered her body—somehow.
She said to him last night: I can explain this to you and you nod and get it, but I can't explain it to Marty. It would be so much easier if I did have a drug problem.
I guess just because a person doesn't have a drug problem doesn't mean that a person doesn't need rehab.
She said: I feel like doing the opposite of calling in sick. You know: Hi, I feel too good to come into work today.
He laughed.
When she finished her run and got back to the house, she was sweating like a boxer after fifteen rounds.
Michael shouted, Hey, black-haired girl running on the side of the road. She had been gone more than an hour, and he was awake—just—sitting on the wooden step, a mug of coffee in his hands, and another on the stair beside him.
This brought her to a halt, and she looked up—she was so deep in thought that she had not noticed him. Her feet skidded on the pavement and sent splashes of sand up.
You're beautiful, he said.
This was what she wanted. To come home and have him waiting there with a cup of coffee.
Michael, she said, shaking her head, You're the one who's beautiful.
He said: I brought a towel for you. He raised a white towel and waved it at her.
She looked at him long and hard—this was what she wanted. This. This moment to be stuck in amber: to have made love with him an hour ago, to have got in a good run and been ignored, to come back and have him waiting, happy to see her because—and only because—he was happy to see her.
He said: You think you'd like to fuck? I haven't been laid in ages. You're beautiful.
She laughed and came to where he was.
You think I could shower first?
I don't care. I like it when your slippery as a seal.
While she stretched and cooled down, he said: Last day. And when he said it, the words shivered her to her bones.