Most movie stars have had plastic surgery, I’m sure of it, even the young ones. They have that work done and still they need to sit in a makeup chair for hours each morning, so they can look perfect on film. That’s a fact. Still, after the surgery and the makeup, they need to be photographed from their good side and in the right light. So, at the end of the day, it ends up being about the magic of certain angles. You see, no matter what you think, absolutely nothing you see on a movie screen is real.
I’m not an actress, I’m just a regular person, so I can say all that, but you don’t have to be in the movies to have people like you. I visit people when I make claims visits for the insurance company I work for and I make people happy in my work too. Isn’t that just as good? And that’s real life. That’s real-life happiness. I make them smile and I’m a normal person. But what is happiness, really? The poets tell you that being happy and falling in love is a fleeting proposition, anyway.
We hadn’t been out in months and I begged Michael, my fabulous husband of nineteen years, to go see a movie. We both needed a break. Do something, away from the TV and our books, and escape the confines of our modest but suffocating Victorian with the dated furniture, mounds of clutter, and peeling plaster. Sure, we live in a nice town, but our house is the smallest one on the block, our lawn has a lot of brown patches. I thought when you married a lawyer, you’d live the good life, you’d be comfortable, you’d have money to travel and do things, but we’re definitely not well off. We hate flying and we don’t get away on the weekends much anymore, so a trip to the movie theater seemed like a mini-vacation. To me, anyway. Michael’s a litigation lawyer at Orrington, Crane & Associates, a small firm in the city, and where the money goes is beyond me. I don’t care about the money, though, I never have. All I ever wanted was to have a comfortable marriage with Michael, like my parents had, and have a good life.
It was in high school that I really fell in love with literature. Maybe it was because of Mr. Berry in tenth grade, I’m sure it was, since everybody had a crush on him, even the boys. He wore cardigans with turtlenecks underneath and he’d push the sleeves up to his elbows as he sat on the corner of his desk, one leg swinging. He was so convincing, discussing the characters, and the plot twists. I read Anna Karenina in his class and remembered liking it. It was hard not to love the classics, listening to Mr. Berry talk, moving his arms and pushing up his glasses. He was smart and very handsome, a real-life cross between Mr. Darby and Dean Moriarty.
Michael loves thrillers, but I love the classics. Shakespeare— oh, how I loved MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT DREAM and the sonnets— Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Brontë, Eliot and Dickinson. I wished I could write like them, I wished I could make people happy like they all made me. I loved the plots and the characters, and I loved getting lost in the romance of the words, strung together before me like endless rolling waves on a shoreline.
I usually try to stay away from film adaptations as they are never, ever as good as the book, but I heard that they made a new movie of Anna Karenina and it was playing at the multiplex near us, so I suggested it to Michael. I knew he wouldn’t like it, but it was a chance to get out, and it made me think of Mr. Barry and everything I loved. It ended up being the biggest mistake of my life.
When we got back in the car, Michael said the film was “alright.” That’s what he said. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was alright,” as he started up the car. That reaction was what I expected, I thought to myself, that’s all I could ask for. Michael’s smart, but he could be a little dense sometimes and miss the point of any great story unless it hit him in the noggin. I gathered my coat against my chest and said that I liked it. Zoe Robeson was the actress who played Anna and she was good and the actor who played Karenin was very good looking but awfully stiff, I told Michael. I still loved the story. I liked the pace and thought the cinematography was lovely, especially the scene at the station where she steps in front of the train, with all the fog and rain. That’s what I told him, like I was a movie critic or something.
For days afterward, Michael seemed down. He was quieter than normal, and he kept frowning, like he was vexed with a case at work and could not, for the life of him, figure it out. I thought maybe he was mad at me, but it didn’t make sense. I hadn’t done anything. I asked him if he was okay and he just nodded. On Thursday night, a full four days later, Michael got home from work and put his leather briefcase on the dining-room table. He never does that, he usually sets it on the floor, by the shoe mat near the front door. He walked into the kitchen and looked at the floor tiles for a few seconds before he raised his head.
“Avery, can we talk?”
Just from that, I could tell it was serious. He never calls me “Avery”; he usually calls me Avy.
“Okay,” I said and wiped my hands on the towel and turned towards him. His face was ashen. “Is everything okay? Did they let you go?”
“No,” he shook his head.
He cleared his throat and loosened his tie. “This is going to be hard.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Something happened.”
“What happened?” I couldn’t take it. “Did you get into a car accident? What happened?”
“I’ve fallen in love.”
He said the words, those four words, and everything stopped. Everything in my world stopped. Those four words floated above his head, like a puff of thick smoke. They hovered in the air, formless but pregnant with intent, slowly inching their way to me. I couldn’t say anything, really, I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes and let those four engorged words land on me, like a wet bag bursting open and revealing scores of spiders, shuttering and twittering over me in all directions, making my skin crawl. Michael faded away behind a foggy glaze, and I must have looked ridiculous, standing there, frozen, mouth slung open, eyes glistening as I waited for him to come back into view. I wanted a clearer Michael to stand in front of me, one with better answers. Michael was a sluggish man, a little frumpy, slow and methodical; that’s how my sister talked about him, but he was a good person, he meant well. I never would have thought he could’ve said something like that or that he would even think that. I couldn’t fathom that he could say those words out loud to me.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, and really, it makes no sense at all, I know that. I mean, I’m not stupid. I can see how this must look, but it is what it is, and I have to face it. We just have to accept that.”
How quickly your life changes in a heartbeat, a whisper, the blink of an eye, from one frame on a roll of film cascading to the next.
“Accept what? What are you talking about? Don’t tell me to accept it.” I put the dishtowel on the counter. “Are we getting a divorce? Are you saying we’re getting a divorce? Just like that?”
I couldn’t believe I said that word, that all of this was happening. Suddenly, I realized we were now one of those couples that, in the past, we would’ve shaken our heads at and said to each other, with a smile, “At least that’s not us.”
“Yes, I would think so,” he said. “I think it’s only fair to you. And to me, of course.”
“You’ve fallen in love with some other woman?”
He seemed to wince at the question, so I altered the wording. “Or is it a man? Are you in love with a man?”
“No, no, don’t be crazy, no, it’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like, Michael? What’s going on? Tell me what it’s like.”
“I’ve fallen in love with someone else and I think we should get a divorce. Before I said anything to you, I needed to make sure of my feelings and I had to be sure of the next steps, of what needs to be done. I know this is crazy, but I had to be sure. If I had fallen in love—and I have—I wanted to be fair and to be realistic. I thought a lot about it and I really want to be fair.”
“Yeah, you said that already. How very thoughtful of you. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How is this fair? How is any of this fair? How long has this been going on?”
“Not long. I mean, well, I wanted you to know as soon as I was sure. I didn’t want to hide it.”
I walked past him and sat on a chair in the dining room. My legs felt rubbery and my stomach queasy. “Who is it? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just tell me, is she younger than me? She’s really young, isn’t she? No, don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know.” Suddenly my head began to throb. “Oh God, is it someone I know?” Michael shook his head. I pushed my hands against my temples as the batch of spiders began to make their way over my skin, the tickly, soft scuttering of their legs pinning a great weight beneath them. I felt itchy and antsy and very, very sick, all over, all at once. “God damn you, Michael, God damn you!”
“I’m sorry, Avery, I really am.” “Oh, shut up.”
I wanted Michael to stop talking, but at the same time, I wanted to know so much more, I wanted him to tell me things, everything in his heart. I had so many questions but the answers, I knew, I’d never get from Michael.
“I didn’t want to hurt you, but sometimes things happen and you can’t plan for them. I see this kind of thing happening all around—we both have—the craziest things happen. You can’t foresee them. You can only accept them. You have to realize that fate is what it is, and you have to go with it. Both of us do.”
He was reasoning this out, methodically, like he always did, like a legal summation, but I wanted more of his emotions, I needed more.
“It’s fate? Is that what this is, some kind of once-in-a-lifetime miracle?” He didn’t say anything. “Is that right, Michael? The stars aligned for you and you finally found your soulmate? Your true love? Oh, how lucky for you.”
“Yes. I didn’t want to say that out loud, but yes, I think I have. I’ve been thinking about that and I think I’ve found something. I mean, I know I have. I think I’m happy.”
“What are you talking about? You’re happy? What the devil are you talking about? What do you know about it?”
He stood next to the dining-room table, his arms dangling at his side.
He didn’t look happy: He looked uncomfortable, he looked miserable, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days, a spare tire hanging loosely around his midsection, his skin pasty, his thin hair pushed tightly across his forehead. Through the middle-aged veneer, something in him seemed vulnerable, like a schoolboy standing in a doorway of a new classroom at midterm. His eyes looked sad, his brows pinched in fear. He didn’t know which way to go. As much as I wanted to hit him as hard as I have ever wanted to hit anyone, I also wanted to pull him back from that doorway, hug him, assure him that he didn’t need to do this to make himself feel better. We could work on it. It would pass. He was still my Michael and I was still his Avy. There was no one else.
“Who is this person? Who is this woman?”
“This is the really hard part,” he said and scratched at his cheek. “Oh God. Who?”
“Well, it’s going to seem strange, but it really makes all the sense in the world.”
“I feel sick. Is it someone I know?” Michael stared at me.
“I’m waiting.”
“Zoe Robeson.”
“Who?”
“Zoe Robeson.”
“Zoe Robeson? Is that what you said? Zoe Robeson, the actress?” I couldn’t believe what he just said. “Zoe Robeson? I really don’t understand anything that’s happening right now. Do you know Zoe Robeson? Zoe Robeson, the actress? Who probably lives in Hollywood, a million miles away from our house in Middleton?”
“She has a house on Long Island too.”
“How do you know that?”
“I looked it up.”
“You don’t know Zoe Robeson, Michael, she doesn’t know you. Are you joking about this?” I shook my head and began to laugh. But I really couldn’t laugh, so it came out like a muffled cough. “I can’t believe this. You have a schoolboy crush on a movie actress young enough to be your daughter, the daughter you never had, and you want to throw away our marriage on that? We’re supposed to celebrate our twentieth anniversary next year, or did you forget that? Jesus, Michael, what are you thinking? And you’re okay, throwing all that away, pushing it aside for the movie star, Zoe Robeson, someone you don’t even know? Have you seen any of her films before the one we saw the other night?”
He shook his head.
“Zoe Robeson is an actress, Michael. You know that, right? You know she’s really not Anna Karenina? She didn’t really get hit by a train. She doesn’t need you to save her.”
“Yes, of course I know that.”
“So, let me get this straight. You have a crush on an actress playing a role, a role in a movie, which is based on a novel by Tolstoy? I mean, are you serious? Have you lost your mind?”
Michael tightened his lips and stood up straight, better to deflect my responses.
“She’s an actress, Michael, one you will never, ever in your wildest dreams, never actually meet, yet alone have a romantic relationship with. What do you plan to do—leave me and go live at the movie theater, watching her movies over and over at every showing? Jesus.
“She’s an actress. And not a very good one. I think you can agree with me on that. You saw her once on a big movie screen. She was playing a role, and she got paid to say those lines. The character and the words are not even her words, do you know that? If you think about it, Michael, if you really think about it, you really have a crush on Tolstoy. You’ve actually fallen in love with Leo Tolstoy. Your true love is a Russian writer from two hundred years ago, with a stern brow and large crinkly white beard. That’s your soulmate, Michael, that’s who you really fell in love with. Let that sink in for a while.”
I buried my head in my hands and squished the skin of my cheeks into my cheekbones.
Michael rested the tip of his fingers on the table, close enough to finger-walk over to my bent arm, but he didn’t touch me. He cleared his throat.
“You’re wrong, Avery. I didn’t fall in love with Tolstoy. That’s ridiculous. I fell in love with a woman, who just happens to be a famous actress. Love is crazy like that; I know that now. What you don’t think is possible is suddenly possible, if you fight for it. I know it was the character she was playing, I’m not stupid, but I could see the struggle in her eyes. It was her eyes. It was the character, but it was her. It was real. I connected with that. I know it’s crazy, but I know what I’m doing.”
I needed for him to stop talking for a bit. Or forever. I covered my ears. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel anything, I couldn’t begin to do anything except try to move very slowly and ease myself out from under the layer of spiders crawling all over my body, one by one. Every part of me hurt to think of Michael like this, gone off the deep end, under a spell of fantasy overtaking reality, and throwing our relationship away with it. Bathed in the silence, our bodies were so close, almost touching, yet Michael seemed like a negative version of his old self. I wanted to go back, to just a day ago, a week ago. I missed our lives, our marriage; I missed Michael’s laugh, and it seemed so wrong that he would toss away everything with me so easily, without a second thought.
He slept on the couch that night and then moved out the next day. Just like that. On Friday, five days after we saw that stupid movie, he was gone. He left quietly and without saying good-bye to our Labrador, Willie, named for William Shakespeare. Within a week, he had quit his job and moved to California. He called me from the road or somewhere and told me that.
“I just wanted you to know. Where I was, and what’s happening.”
“Why, Michael? What do I care? You closed the door on your life here, forgot it ever happened, quit your job. What did they say at work? What did Orrington say when you told him you were leaving? Did he punch you? Did he hit you?”
“No, I didn’t get into it. I didn’t want them to know everything. I told them I had a different opportunity, that I had to oversee a special project.”
“A different opportunity? Oh, that’s perfect. You should have told him that your special project was to be the President of Fantasyland. But instead you made it nice and clean, huh, Michael? Of course.”
“You’re still angry, that makes—”
“Yeah, probably best not to burn any bridges, Michael. You may need all the people you’ve thrown away on a whim, all the people you’ve just pushed aside.”
“It’s not a whim, Avery.”
“Did you realize you didn’t even say good-bye to Willie? He mopes around the house. He still thinks you’re going to walk him each morning and each night. And he growls when I feed him.”
It hurt that he was calling me Avery now. It was like I didn’t exist anymore as a person, that I had been reduced to my birth name imprinted on a piece of paper.
“I wanted to call and say I was sorry about all this. I wanted to tell you that I’m really—”
“Next time you want to release some guilt, don’t call Avery, call Zoe Robeson, okay? Good luck with that, Michael,” I said and hung up the phone.
Life without Michael, after so long, was strange. We hadn’t really ever been apart in all our years together. A night here or there, but nothing more than that. This felt empty and deathly and permanent. I wondered if he felt that way too. I had Willie, but he was mostly Michael’s dog before, so I was alone, really alone. I hadn’t really been alone before, not like that. I would sit in the living room and stare at the waves in the cushion fabric where he used to sit. I wondered when it was that he last sat there. I sat in the kitchen and looked at the wall behind Michael’s chair, the space that I didn’t see before because he was sitting there. All the rooms in the house were empty. Every room I entered now knew only my movements and rhythms. I did everything I used to do before, but somehow I had a lot more time. I began to read again, Shakespeare and Poe and Tolstoy and Chekhov. I also read Stephen King, and Sue Grafton. The evenings dragged on; the nights lingered. Everything was quiet, so quiet, every thought was amplified in my brain, like a fuzzy announcement at a train terminal. It gave me time to clean the house: I got rid of the piles, threw a bunch of stuff away, most of it without a second glance. I cleaned everything off the dining-room table and the coffee table, for the first time, in what seemed like years. I had direction, but at the same time, I was also immobile. I could only move in circles, so I always ended up where I started. I moved through each day feeling as if I was on the verge of something or waiting for something else to happen. I just didn’t know what, but I kept waiting. Waiting. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for—a knock on the door, a phone call, a familiar face or a voice, a smell, anything. I waited to see Michael again, for him to call and tell me how wrong he was and beg me to take him back. I waited and waited, and then the waiting turned into a constant, nagging hum. I waited some more. I longed for him to return, his tail between his legs, saying he’d been foolish, to say that he dove in blindly and was in way over his head. I needed to hear him say he was sorry he hurt me.
How long does it take to try to find a movie star’s house, but then realize that there’s no way to get past her large wrought-iron gates or wriggle past her bodyguard? Would he ever even catch a glimpse of her? How long would he try? Would he get arrested for bothering her or stalking her? I hoped he wouldn’t call me to bail him out, but then, if he did, I could probably be out there the next day. Instead, I just kept waiting. How long would he try before he would give up? How long before he realized how truly delusional he had been?
At first, if people asked, I told them that he was on a business trip, but it soon felt like I was covering up for him. I then started to tell people that Michael left, he went to California to “find himself.” I’d shrug my shoulders, their jaw would drop, and they’d bring a hand to the cheek.
There was nothing I could do. “You mean he left? Just like that? Oh, how awful for you.”
.
I’m not sure when I lost him; I don’t know when it all went wrong. I remembered that Michael said something one night when we were grocery shopping, maybe six months before. He was standing near the cheeses and he muttered, “There’s got to be something more than this.” At the time, I thought he was talking about gouda and extra- sharp cheddar, but maybe he meant something else. I tried to go back through old photographs, and dig through my memory for any clues, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t remember anything else. I expected some clarity, some answers, but everything got cloudier and further away the more I thought about it. Michael had said that he didn’t plan on getting a divorce, that all of this “just happened” so maybe there wasn’t anything to find. I took some comfort in knowing that maybe things were good before, just like I thought, but in the same breath, I hated him for throwing a good thing aside so quickly. That’s what kept coming back to me—how suddenly it all happened. “You have to go with those feelings,” he had said that evening, “You just have to go for it.”
It was right around the four-month mark that the second big event happened. It was a Saturday, my usual day to run errands. As I walked around the car that morning, I noticed the stick figure family decals—a man, a woman and a dog—on the back windshield that Michael had been so tickled to attach years ago. I’m not sure why I hadn’t remembered them before that, but there you have it. I went back into the house and down the stairs to Michael’s workbench, came back, and covered the stickers with one large swathe of gray duct tape. I threw the roll of tape into the back and with a smile, slammed the trunk shut. The grocery store was quiet that day and as I headed to the checkout with my cart halfway full, I noticed it. The National Enquirer or whatever it was seemed to suddenly come alive, waving to me from the vertical magazine rack. I picked it up. “America’s Sweetheart Quits Hollywood!” the headline screamed. There she was walking down the street in Hollywood, dark sweatpants, a yoga mat curled under her arm, smiling full and wide. I picked up the paper and held it in my hands. “Zoe Robeson says that she has made her last film and will now devote her energies to saving the lives of wild dogs.”
I looked back at the photograph, her blond hair pushed back in a loose ponytail, her blue eyes, her head tilted back in the sun. And then I saw it. Right over her shoulder, standing a little behind her, just under the r and t in the headline was Michael. He was blurry in that grainy newsprint, but it was definitely him. He looked serious, thin, in khakis and a button-down shirt. His hair was pushed up and his face had color.
He looked good, he did, like he was on the vacation that we never went on. I smiled. It was nice to see him. He looked like himself but happier. I don’t think he had ever been in the newspaper before and now, there he was on the cover of the National Enquirer, part of the lead story. It seemed like a weird dream. Maybe it was strange for Michael, too, I have to think so. I pushed some stray hairs around my ears and scanned the photo. The white blurry building in the background, the portion of a palm tree hanging in from the side, and Zoe in her little, tight outfit next to Michael, my Michael, all in the same shot. The oddest thing is that his right hand was near Zoe’s left elbow, as if his first two fingers were assisting her, perhaps guiding her away from the paparazzi. He was so close he was almost touching her. I threw the paper on the conveyor belt and checked out.
When I got home, I put the National Enquirer on the kitchen table and slid it toward Michael’s side. I thought the old Michael should see it. I poured myself some water and sat in my chair and took small sips until my glass was empty.
“Well, there you have it, you did it,” I said to Michael and to no one in particular. The old Michael wasn’t coming back.
Three hours later, my heart was beating in my throat. I slid my hand into my bag and pressed my palm flush against the cover of the National Enquirer, as I stood at the counter and bought a one-way airline ticket for Los Angeles, California.
As we landed, I looked out the small window: The sun was shining over the mountains, and the sky was so big, a deep, rich blue with perfectly shaped white cloud puffs. It was beautiful. Nothing looked real, like it was all in a movie. I hugged my bag to my chest as we taxied to the gate. I’m going for it, Michael, I told myself, I’ll be there soon.
David Bontumasi’s stories have previously been featured in Hypertext Magazine, as well as Poached Hare, the Write Launch, Black Mirror, the RavensPerch and others. His novella, Of This Earth, was set in Sicily and Michigan in the 1920s, and he’s hard at work on a collection of short stories. Born and raised in Flint, Michigan, David lives just out- side Chicago with his wife and two sons. Visit him at davidbontumasi.com
