Now I See You (10 page)

A month later, I was flying south on a discount-fare puddle jumper. David was waiting at the airport to drive me back to his parents’ house, where the out-of-towners—myself and an actor friend from college named Paul—were staying. David wheeled my suitcase through a hallway lined with framed school pictures into his childhood bedroom. Model airplanes hung from the ceiling and piles of Marvel comic books in plastic sleeves filled the shelf behind the bed.

“You can sleep here, and Paul will be in my sister’s old room,” he explained.

“Where are you sleeping?” I asked, leaning back on the bed with what I thought was a potent air of seduction.

“On the couch,” he replied.

“You don’t have to sleep on the couch,” I pressed, rolling on to my side to amplify my cleavage.

To which bald-faced advance, he laughed.

“You better get some sleep,” he recommended, walking to the door. “I’m waking you early tomorrow to start shooting.”

What the hell?
I thought.

“Oh, and I meant to ask.” David paused in the doorframe. “You can drive, right? I’m leaving early to set up and I bet you’ll want to do hair and makeup here, instead of on the mountain. So I’ll leave you the keys to my mom’s car?”

“Sounds great,” I lied.

A little later that night, after I heard Paul shut his door and the TV turn off in David’s parents’ room, I sneaked into the living room. At least, I tried to sneak. I was about as stealthy as a drunk rhinoceros. It was pitch-dark in the hallway and as I groped my way through, I managed to knock every single one of those school pictures out of whack. Once out of the hallway, I followed the sounds of a crackling fire to the living room where David lay sleeping on the couch, his face illuminated by the light of the flames. He wasn’t waiting up for me, all knotted up with desire, as I’d expected. He was conked out, with a Lord of the Rings blanket circa 1982 pulled up to his chin.

As I sat on the couch and watched him sleep, an unsettling warmth spread through my body.

He looks so peaceful,
I thought.
Better not wake him.

Instead, I “crept” back to my bedroom, knocking over a decorative vase in the process, and spent a good hour or two snooping around. I flipped through spiral notebooks filled with poetry David had written from the ages of eight to seventeen and sifted through a stack of birthday cards he’d saved from various grandparents. I found an envelope of photos from prom and some old programs from high school musicals he’d starred in. By the time David woke me in the morning for our first day of shooting, a small but inarguable crack had formed in my armor.

The crack on the siding of his parents’ house when I backed the car into it the next morning—that wasn’t so small.

“Honey, why don’t you let me drive you over to the mountain,” drawled David’s mother when she heard the thud. “I don’t mind.”

The next few days were consumed with the film shoot. At night, David’s mom would show up with dinner for the cast: homemade meatloaf and mashed taters, fried chicken and cornbread, pulled pork sandwiches with bottomless cups of tea so sweet it made my teeth ache. After we’d wrapped for the day, the cast would retire to a bar downtown where a gravel-voiced woman named Peaches would serve beers and bourbon and moonshine cherries. When we’d get home, nice and liquored up, I’d change into something a little more comfortable and visit David on the couch and every night, he’d already be asleep.

David had given me full access to his life—his past, his family, even his baby pictures—and, at the same time, had denied me access to him, mysteriously stopping his pursuit of me in its tracks. You couldn’t craft a more powerful aphrodisiac. That he’d done it entirely by accident only intensified its power.

By the time we wrapped on the final night of shooting, the deal was sealed: David had sandblasted through my defenses. On that final night, as soon as we got back to his place, I went to him on the couch. I was still in costume, a flannel button-down shirt one size too big with Walmart jeans and no lipstick.

I sat on the couch and watched as he lit the fire and made the room go from dark to dancing in light.

“I’m glad you invited me down here,” I said. “The South isn’t what I thought it would be.”

“No?” he said, closing the grate on the fireplace.

“Neither are you,” I said. It was sickening to be so goddamned exposed, to have nothing to hide behind, but the alternative—leaving David, leaving the warm feeling and the firelight to return to fucking and falling out windows—was even more sickening.

David didn’t reply but he sat next to me on the couch. Close.

I couldn’t see much by the dim light of the fire but I could make out his eyes. They were looking right at me, inviting me in, not pushing it or reaching for it but just leaving the door open.

“I’m not really so cold-hearted, you know,” I said, squirming from the discomfort of being so naked.

“I know,” he answered.

I felt his hand then on my face, brushing my hair back and with that touch, the remains of the Great Wall surrounding my heart fell with a resounding crash. That night, he slept next to me and there, curled in the crook of his arm, I stepped out from where I’d been hiding and told him about my eyes, not just the disease and the prognosis but the secret of it, that I didn’t want anyone to know and I didn’t even know why. It was dark in the room so I couldn’t see his reaction but I didn’t need to because I felt his grip around me tighten.

After he kissed me goodbye at the airport the next day, he told me he loved me, that he had loved me for a long time, that he wasn’t going to let me get away again.

When I returned to Tennessee two months later for the final week of the film shoot, David came into my bed on the first night. Afterward, as we lay tangled in Holly Hobbit sheets, he said he had to show me something.

“A surprise?” I squealed. “A present? What is it?”

“You’ll find it,” he told me.

I ran my hand over his chest, his left arm, then his right. There, above his tricep, was a bumpy patch that hadn’t been there before.

“What happened?” I asked.

I heard him rustling with something and then the bedside lamp flashed on. I reached for his arm.

There, in raised, irrevocable ink, were six lowercase letters.

nicole

“I carry your heart with me,” he said.

When my plane took off a week later, I wasn’t on it. I stayed in Tennessee until David packed up his stuff. Then, together, we drove back to New York—not just for good, but for better and worse.

Tip #8: On driving

Just because you are in possession of a valid driver’s license does not mean you should get behind the wheel. That would be like saying that just because your acid-washed jeans from high school still fit, you should wear them.

8. CALIFORNIA DREAMING

“You’re joking,” my mother challenged, slicing a milky mound of mozzarella. “I don’t believe you.”

I sighed loudly. Spending five minutes around my mother had a tendency to turn back the clock, reducing me to an eye-rolling sixteen-year-old again. And at twenty-four, it wasn’t so far to go.

“I guess you’ll believe me in two weeks when you show up at my apartment and find someone else living there,” I told her. “Because I’ll be in LA.”

My mother sighed right back at me. It was Christmas afternoon and the last thing she wanted to be doing while preparing antipasto was discussing my cross-country move.

“This house is a pigsty,” she sighed. “And everyone is going to be here in a few minutes.”

The mess she was referring to consisted of a half dozen CDs on the coffee table that hadn’t been returned yet to their cases, and my pair of leather boots, kicked off at the door, which were lying haphazardly instead of lined up in the closet. My parents’ ultramodern apartment in midtown Manhattan was appointed all in white leather and glass and my mother prided herself on keeping it immaculate. Not unlike Joan Crawford in
Mommie Dearest,
I was fond of pointing out. When I did, it always elicited the same response: “Me, crazy? Please! You haven’t
seen
crazy!” Precisely the sort of thing, I observed, that only a crazy person would say.

“I haven’t even had a chance to wrap any goddamned presents,” my mother complained, gesturing with her knife at a bunch of shopping bags on the dining-room table. “Why don’t you wrap some of that crap to go under the tree?”

I sat down on the banquette next to the table and unfurled the roll of golden wrapping paper that my mother has used to wrap Christmas presents for the past two decades. I’m not sure where she got her hands on the paper but the price must’ve been knocked down at least 80% because she purchased no less than two dozen rolls of it. It’s like a magic trick; the golden wrapping paper just never ends. I am confident that it will last, literally, a lifetime. And if it doesn’t and she finds one day that she’s come to the last paltry patch, my guess is she’ll outlaw Christmas.

“I don’t understand,” my mother went on. “What’s in LA? All the big actresses live in New York.”

I looked closely at the oversized pink pleather wallet I’d pulled out of a shopping bag.

“Ma,” I said. “You gave this wallet to Marisa last year and she didn’t want it. And the year before that, you gave it to me.”

“She’s right,” my father said, coming down the stairs wearing jeans and a hospital scrub top. “Nobody wants that wallet.”

“Then you’re all a bunch of morons,” she shot back, laying the sliced mozzarella in a neat, overlapping circle on a platter. “That is a gorgeous wallet! I had to rip it out of another lady’s hands at a sample sale.”

She glanced up from the platter, spotted my father, and shrieked. “Why the hell are you wearing those dirty old dungarees?”

“Dungarees” is one of those words my parents refuse to part with, despite the fact that no one else has uttered it since 1929. You could create the world’s best drinking game based on how many times my parents use the term.

“These are my favorite dungarees,” my father protested, taking a London broil out of the fridge.

“Why do we have to have the same argument every year?” she pleaded. “A homeless person wouldn’t accept those dungarees! They’d be highly insulted!”

I reached in the bag and pulled out a three-pack of argyle socks.

“Those are for your cousin,” my mother said, still shaking her head in disbelief at my father. “And don’t forget to take off the price tag.”

“Where’s the scissors?” I asked.

“Over there,” my mother replied, gesturing with her knife. By the time I’d followed the length of her arm to note where her hand was pointing, she’d dropped it to resume slicing vine-ripened tomatoes.

“Where, ‘over here’?” I sighed.

“Right over there, on the table,” she elaborated, nodding her head vaguely in my direction.

Precise, descriptive language was never my family’s forte, which had become bothersome; the more constricted my field of vision became, the more I relied on descriptive language to help me locate missing items. While a normal-seeing person could just sweep their eyes swiftly and effortlessly over the table as a whole and locate the scissors within a second or two, it would take me five or six times that long, because I’d have to make five or six much narrower sweeps, covering one small section of the table at a time. Little hints like “to your left, next to the orchid” or “right near your elbow, by the window,” would speed up the process considerably; but since I’d never told my parents I needed these hints, they didn’t know to offer them. So I just sighed to myself and began my laborious hunt for the scissors, moving my gaze over the table like a spotlight from left to right until I’d found them, in the center of the table, on a stack of blank Christmas cards.

Meanwhile, my mother was catching my father up to speed on my travel plans: “Did you know your daughter wants to move to Hollywood? Are you aware of this?”

“What the hell are you talking about? Who’s moving to Hollywood?” my father grumbled, massaging marinade into the London broil.

“I’ve already told both of you this, like, five times,” I said as I cut a sock-sized square of wrapping paper. “All the TV work is in LA. Everyone moves there eventually. And it makes sense to do it sooner rather than later.”

The last observation hung in the air, its intimation unfolding like a bad smell, curling around the room and making everyone’s stomach clench. In a few years, I wouldn’t be able to audition for the spunky best friend or the tough-as-nails prosecutor. In a few years I wouldn’t be able to audition for anything except for the blind girl.

My vision had held up well in the four years since my diagnosis but I could tell it was slipping. I couldn’t read the newspaper anymore. Finding the bathroom in dark bars was becoming a problem. Just last week, I’d chipped a tooth when I tripped over a planter on Wall Street. If I wanted to have a decent shot at becoming a big-time blockbuster starlet, there was no time to lose.

I’d explained all of this to David when I announced to him just a few weeks earlier that I was going to move to LA. We’d been together for a little over a year, ever since we finished filming the movie in Tennessee and drove back north together. Things between us were going well, unfolding at a comfortable, leisurely pace after an explosive beginning. David wore my name on his arm but that didn’t mean he owned me. He had his own apartment a few blocks from mine, his own circle of friends. If David was hurt that I made the decision to move without consulting him, he didn’t show it. In fact, after considering for a few days, he told me he’d always wanted to live in California and would come along.

But though I’d confided the full explanation for my move to David, he was the only one I was honest with. The closest I got to full disclosure with my parents was dropping the phrase “sooner rather than later” and the pause that followed was so tense, I decided to spare us all by offering the standard justification I was feeding everyone else.