Chapter Twenty-Eight - Ixion
When I get back to the house I rewind the footage of her return. See the slump in her shoulders. The sadness and uncertainty in her expression. She is the perfect image of complete surrender.
I wonder what she thought of Jordan. I wonder what was going through her head when she found him staring at her.
Was it intrigue? Fear? Longing?
Whatever it was, this was a good day for me. And the night is about to get even better.
I remember the notebook in the kitchen and go upstairs to retrieve it and read what she wrote.
Did you ever feel like a diamond ring?
Just a ring on a finger, sitting pretty
on the hand that that makes you sing?
Preposterous child with anonymous smiles
and weariness dancing on your strings?
Well, I have.
That was me.
Invisible except for my ability.
So I said no and threw a fit
And yes, became a little sick
of the music and the stage
and all the things they made me play
until they sucked me dry
and left me standing there alone
small, but tall
and refusing to cry.
I am just a diamond ring.
That’s why I’m here.
Hmmm. I have to read it like fifteen times. Not because I don’t understand her metaphors, or literary interpretation of what a diamond ring is. But because I do.
I wasn’t going to write more of my story, but maybe she just needs to know… well, that people have fucked-up experiences and they’re OK afterward.
Except I’m not really a good example, am I?
Rational me pops up, taking my side for once, telling me, Could’ve been worse.
Could’ve.
You’re still here.
I am.
You’re helping her.
Just another stand-up guy, I guess.
Which makes me sigh. And roll my eyes. And pick up the pen and start to write.
I could start my story with boring details about how we all met, what we all do, and how it all intertwined to make us what we are today. But no one wants the boring backstory and I’m sure you’re far more interested in what she looked like. Or what he and I saw in her, or how we ended up fucking each other just a few years later.
She was a foul-mouthed tomboy who did her best not to look like she was modeling underwear on a catwalk while wearing wings, but failing miserably at it. But that was how it came off.
She is that girl. The elusive dream woman who can play poker and look like she’s only there as a prop for her equally beautiful boyfriend until she kicks your ass and leaves you broke.
We had the same passion. Filmmaking.
Jordan was in undergrad at Stanford at the time. She and I went to UCLA. Alexander, the fourth wheel in this quasi-quad, was a consultant for the film industry. He, like Jordan, fell in love with Augustine the moment he saw her.
It’s just a natural consequence of meeting her.
She fell in love with me.
But not the way they thought.
She dated them both. Sometimes together, sometimes not. It was always a game.
I was just her best friend. A guy she could—and would—come to, just to talk things through. Just to get a bad day off her mind. Just to have fun and not have the night end with drama or jealousy.
Alexander and Jordan shared her regularly for a couple years. And it was fine because Jordan was up at Stanford and the rest of us were in LA, and he only came down every once in a while and Alexander didn’t mind sharing a few times a year if it meant he could have her to himself all those other nights in between.
But then Jordan got into UCLA law school and suddenly there he was. Every day, every night, every time we turned around, there he was.
And he said to me one night, “Ixion…” I can remember that night like it’s happening right now. What we were wearing, what we had for dinner, what we were drinking. How he almost whispered the words in the bar that night. He said, “Ixion, why haven’t you ever…”
He never finished because just then Alexander and Augustine joined us, and drinks were flowing, and we were all talking, and laughing, and you know how it goes.
Why haven’t I fucked her? That’s what he wanted to know.
He asked me again a few days later, but looking back it all started that night. When they took her home and I didn’t join them.
And my answer was, and still would be—if we were still friends, that is—“Because I have the relationship with her that I want.”
I should’ve stuck with that.
Should never’ve let him talk me into it.
Should’ve just walked away.
But of course… I didn’t walk away.
When I’m done writing I leave the book on the countertop for Evangeline to find when she wakes up.
She’s stuck in her own privileged childhood.
I have decided that’s her problem. Her mind didn’t mature with her body. She never developed coping mechanisms as a teenager.
Why?
It’s easy to assume. I mean, she was a child prodigy. Literally born a genius. Celebrated for her talent. Paraded all over the world to perform, applauded by the most important people imaginable.
Maybe never even told no.
That’s the assumption, anyway.
But I’ve learned a thing or two about assumptions over the years. And it’s almost never that simple.
I hold myself up as Exhibit A.
If you were looking at me from a distance, like… say… that sheriff back up in Wyoming, you’d see what everyone sees. Scruffy-faced, thirty-something man with no direction or purpose, who spies on people to make money.
If you were a little closer you might see the trust fund. The exile from the wealthy family. The aimless wandering. The loss.
But you’d have to be really intimate with me to see who I really am. What really happens inside my head. You’d have to be Jordan, for example. Because he’s the only one who knows me.
It’s a secret he’ll keep, I have no doubt. It’s not in his best interest for people to see the real me. Because then they might see the real him.
I ran into Augustine once. About four years ago. Few years after all that other shit happened, so she hated me at the time. She didn’t even know I was there, probably. I had been erased, for lack of a more literal term.
I didn’t say anything to her. Didn’t offer up an explanation. Didn’t defend myself or my actions. Because she wasn’t interested. She threw me back the day we sat in that conference room with our respective lawyers and dissolved our business partnership.
Over.
I was the glue. That was the only thought that swept through my mind that day she pretended I didn’t exist.
I was the fucking glue.
She just never knew it.
Jordan was there too. Smiling in that fucking suit of his.
The only thing that kept me from walking over to him and kicking his ass was the fact that he and Augustine weren’t together. She didn’t even look at him. I mean, she didn’t look at me, either, and he wasn’t the one she hated. That was me.
But it was clear, whatever they had was over. Long time ago.
They were on opposite ends of the party. It was her wedding. And why Alexander invited us… I can only guess because he never said. I just showed up, and I’m pretty sure that was what Jordan was doing as well.
Augustine never even looked at me.
“I’m not going back tomorrow,” Evangeline says, obviously awake and walking down the stairs to the main floor.
I’d forgotten where I was for a moment. Lost in my last secret memory of Augustine. What’s her last memory of me, I wonder? Not her wedding, that’s for sure.
That day at the table? With the lawyers?
Or did she sneak in somewhere I was and see me from afar once?
I hope she did. And I hope it was a good memory. Maybe her wedding day? Maybe she did see me that day? Maybe Alexander told her I was there and she walked around, looking for me in the gardens?
Is it fate? Or irony? Or was it planned? The fact that Augustine got married at the Denver Botanic Gardens? The fact that Jordan put me here? Brought me into this new game of his. If all the world’s a stage, then how do you ever know what’s real?
“Did you hear me?” Evangeline yells as she reaches the kitchen. I watch for a moment as she spies the waiting book.
She looks down—hiding a smile, I’m sure of it, even though I don’t have a good view in here anymore—and then she takes the book and walks away to read it.
I let her go and press Jordan’s contact on my phone.
He doesn’t pick up. But I leave a message, so who cares. And the message is this: “Did you get what you wanted out of her? And that’s not sarcasm or cynicism. It’s an honest question. Was it worth it? Because it wasn’t for me.”
I wait, like he’s there or something. Like in the old days you could leave a message on the machine and wonder if the person just didn’t pick up and was standing right there listening as you poured your heart out.
But this isn’t those days. And no one has a machine anymore. So it’s just voicemail. Just some digital cloud that hears your desperate message and gives no shits whatsoever.
I end the call and look back at Evangeline, who is sitting on the couch in the ballroom, facing the windows that open to the backyard. She’s very absorbed in my story. It’s only a few paragraphs, so maybe she’s reading it twice?
I wonder if Augustine is happy with Alexander.
I heard they had a serious separation a few years ago, but got back together. Nothing since that.
Evangeline is talking again. “Where’s the rest of it?” she asks, holding up the book. “I want the rest of it.”
I press the button on the intercom and say, “Where’s the rest of your story? I want the rest of that too.”
She sighs. Loudly. Then says, “My story is a poem. It takes time to compose.”
“I never told you to write a poem, Evangeline. A few scribbled words will suffice.”
She just scowls at me. I can’t tell if that comment makes her angry… or sad.
“Go compose it then,” I say. “Leave it on the counter when you’re done and then go upstairs and wait for me.”
“Will you come up?” she asks.
I wonder if Augustine called Jordan when she and Alexander separated? I wonder if they got back together for those few months? I wonder if they talked about me?
“Why are you ignoring me?” Evangeline asks.
It’s such an honest question. And the desperate tone in her voice mirrors my own feelings at the moment. So I say, “I’m just admiring you,” and it’s a lie, of course. Because I’m stuck in the past, just like she is.
But it’s also sort of true. Because she is very beautiful. Especially when she’s emotional. It’s a tragic kind of beautiful. The kind that makes people look twice. The kind you see in perfume ads, or on a fashion runway with the too-skinny girls, dressed up as someone else, walking with hidden purpose that’s really nothing but obvious anguish.
Dark. And hopeless. And emotional.
My answer soothes her to the point of softening. She looks at our book in her hands. She’s sitting Indian-style on the couch, long, dark hair hanging to cover her pretty face.
And it makes me sad that lies… can be so soothing.
Makes me feel guilty too. Because it’s way too easy to soothe people. You just say what they want to hear and they believe you.
Trust you.
It works on men too. I know. I’ve been that man.
But I was the glue, I remind myself. That part wasn’t a lie.
And I’m the glue now too. I’m the only thing holding Evangeline Rolaine together at this point.
It occurs to me that this is a very serious role and I’m neglecting my duties. Neglecting her in favor of a past mistake. Forgetting why I’m really here. Not here, according to Jordan or her doctor. But here according to me.
I don’t want to hurt her. I just… don’t think I can help it.
“Write your poem,” I say into the intercom. “And then go upstairs and put on the blindfold.”
She looks up at the camera I had to rig up after her last tantrum, her expression one of total and utter confusion. Kinda like mine if I could see it.
“What?” she asks in a soft voice. But there’s a hint of disbelief in her question. Like it’s exactly what she wanted to hear next, but she can’t believe she heard it.
“Do it.” I whisper now. Let most of my words be muffled by the static and crackling of the intercom.
She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders like she needs the courage, and begins to write.
That’s when her phone, sitting on the desk in front of my computer monitors since she left it on that hallway table the second day she was here, beeps an incoming alert.
I pick it up, unable to read the message, but I think it’s a voicemail. There are two icons with enough uncracked screen to press them, and neither are for the phone. But I press one until it starts to wiggle and rearrange the icons until the phone is in the right spot. Then I press it and play the message.
I listen to it three times, then call the number he left, plotting a new twist to the story we’re telling.
Evangeline sits there agonizing over her words for hours. Hours.
So long, the arrangements I start making get made.
So long I run out of memories of Augustine to dwell on.
So long I get hungry and make a peanut butter sandwich and snap still images of her and then retouch them like I would back in school when I cared about how the fucking pictures turned out.
So long, I’m just about to scream that nobody gives two fucks about her stupid poem and to just get her ass upstairs so I can come up and fuck her.
But then she says, “OK,” and stands up, walks to the kitchen, and leaves the book on the counter. She turns, but her hand remains on the cover. Which is just your run-of-the-mill notebook cover. No picture or anything. Just plain black.
And then she turns back. Like she might want to rip those words out of that book and stuff them down the garbage disposal so I never get to see what she wrote.
I’m just about to say something when she draws in a deep breath, turns, and walks away.
I don’t bother following her steps up the stairs on camera. Or along the hallway to the second set of stairs. Or up to the bedroom. I don’t even watch her take off her clothes, even though I never told her to do that, and slip the tie around her eyes like an obedient child.
I’m too busy thinking about the words in that book. Words she wrote but didn’t want to write.
I just look up a few minutes later and there she is.
Lying on the bed naked. Her fingers between her legs. Her mouth slightly open as she rubs her clit. Her perfect breasts rising and falling with the fast beating of her heart.
She waits for me.
I make her wait.
I watch, forgetting about the past for once. Putting Augustine and Jordan behind me for a while.
And just be… present as I go upstairs, get her book, sit on the couch where she just was, and open it to the last page.
Did you ever feel forsaken?
Just a lifetime of waste
as people say they must’ve been mistaken?
Autonomous child now blasphemously wild
alone, and lost, and afraid of being broken?
Well, I have.
That was me.
Tired of all the publicity.
Choppy waves of tattered lace
and only shadows on the stage.
So I withdrew and stayed alone
withdrawing further from my throne
of greed and hunger
and all the ways they threw me under
until there was nothing left
but the fractured lights of night
and the disillusionment of wonder.
I have been forsaken.
That’s why I’m here.
I think I stare at that poem for eternity. Several eternities. I read it nine hundred and twenty-three times. Or a dozen, at least. I scrutinize every word she chose for me. Every secret she just revealed.
And now I’m her. I hold the book up to the camera lens she is most definitely not looking through, and ask myself, who is not on the other side, “Where’s the rest of it?”
I need the rest of it.