Serial Reading: Just Like Suicide pt. 23

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[cont.]
“I think you might have feelings for me. And I certainly have enjoyed spending time with you. We’ve operated very nicely as friends with privileges, haven’t we? It’s just that we’ve come to a crossroads; and, after doing some serious thinking, I’ve concluded that we should stop being lovers. You obviously have needs I cannot meet and I have requirements you cannot keep. I don’t want this to end badly because I am quite fond of you.”
“I don’t think you are thinking this thing through. I want to marry you.”
“Oh, Lawrence, Doris was willing to function that way with you but I’m not. I don’t want to worry that you’ll bring home some venereal disease or that you’ll get carried away with the next new thing and not want to come back at all. I don’t want my affection to become part of a competition. You can’t give me what I need.”
“I’ve helped your gallery…”
“Yes, you have. The gallery has done quite well with your generous help and I appreciate every bit of that. I simply can’t participate in this physical relationship with you anymore. Anyone who stays with you has to accept your need to conquer every beautiful woman you meet. I’m sorry, genuinely sorry. I just can’t do that. It’s just not in me.”
“You can change me.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you to say but you don’t mean a word of it. You don’t want to change. Why should you? You like to win and sex is an easy way for a handsome, successful man like you to do it. I just can’t live by your rules and live with myself.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say we will stay friends and you can go out and screw every woman in sight without pretending any guilt.”
“You don’t understand. I would never leave you. I love you in a way I never loved Doris.”
“Oh, Lawrence, is that supposed to make me feel better? Knowing that you stayed with your wife out of what – duty? And you’d be willing to stay with me for the same reason? How could that possibly be a comfort? It’s just so incredibly sad and empty. Why would anyone willingly accept crumbs?”
He stared at his bread plate, blinking, like he was on the verge of crying.
She didn’t know if he actually meant that he wanted to marry her or if he had just improvised, using the offer to up his bribe to keep her around, but he did look miserable. He was definitely not a man accustomed to being rejected. She stared at him while she drank one last sip from her glass of champagne and left alone, the velvety box still sitting on the white table cloth in front of him.


Forty Six
 As soon as Barbara called, Maggie knew why. Barbara wanted dirt on Larry Cotter for her next film and was going to apologize just enough to Maggie to regain access to Odessa. Before she got through saying hello, Maggie could hear the entire conversation: Barbara would use the victim card, how she found her mother dead, covered in her own vomit. How her father was more upset about the stains on his precious couch than about having a dead wife. How this made her overreact and how sorry she was. Barbara was very good at using that particular ploy for sympathy.
Maybe hearing that story for the fifth time had been the start of Maggie’s emotional withdrawal from the relationship. Barbara was the antithesis of a victim, one of the reasons she was so attractive to Maggie. But a story of catastrophe repeated so often lost its power. Now that Maggie reflected on that, it probably was a good thing. Some hurts are so awful, so debilitating that robbing them of the power to sting was a positive outcome. But for the onlooker, the repetition just looked like a trivialization. Barbara was never trivial, though. She had learned how to use her pain as a precise weapon.
The first little film she made at Sarah Lawrence about the four artists was actually pretty funny, a celebration of being young and making dubious choices. The first version of her second film, the one done at USC about them, seemed to be continuing in that vein, a bit more somber because of the deaths involved. After Maggie split up with her, after the negative critique of her third film about the art critic, Barbara had revised that second film about the four of them as well as the one about the critic into voice-over screeds against the pretensions she saw in her subjects, pretensions that she exaggerated in order to ridicule them. The two films changed from being mildly sarcastic to being downright nasty. They seemed to be her outlet for rage, as if she hated those in her films for appearing to be more important than she was personally. Barbara obviously needed someone to hate and it’s easier to hate people you don’t have to see every day. One mutual friend described her films as the equivalent of flaying, intent upon stripping all flesh and humanity from the subjects. Alex said she dished out aconite when aspirin would suffice. Her films’ maliciousness was unlike anything anyone had seen and Barbara was making a name for herself at film festivals. A national critic described them as “uncomfortable as listening to a takedown by a brutally honest frienemy.”
From Maggie’s perspective, Larry Cotter probably did deserve a substantive put-down. He was vain with that fake dark hair and stretched face and, even worse, he was a dreadful writer. His novels were littered with entire dry paragraphs lifted barely modified from some dated encyclopedia and used too much alliteration in his slightly more animated sex scenes. He wasn’t even as good as the romance writers the girls in Catholic school had tried to lure her into reading. “Oh, you have to read this,” they would titter as they passed the well-worn books to her under the table. Even at thirteen, Maggie could see that the naughtiness implied in these novels did not outweigh the completely predictable plots and all the overheated prose. All the unshed tears glistening every eye and the ripped bodices: page after page filled with the corrosive evil of banality, luring all the impressionable girls reading them into accepting a Neverland of brutally aggressive yet ever so kind-hearted men, opening them to accept, even welcome the possibility of a sugar coated violence, making the pain seem noble.

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