Lifesavers by Victoria Morsell Hemingson

cw: disordered eating

The first time you see N, you’re juggling calls and signing in actors for auditions. Then he rises out of the stairwell, giraffe-like, this lanky, charismatic guy. He’s not required to sign in—the casting director is expecting him. Other actors hold scripts, muttering lines, one eye on their new opponent, sizing him up. He towers over everyone; he owns the room. A lop of curls falls in his face as he leans over your desk, grinning, then says, you must be the new receptionist.

On the walls in the waiting room are B movie posters of half-naked women, men holding dangerous weapons. You search for his face up there among the dirt-smeared warriors, bandanas tied around their heads, bare biceps lifting AK-47s somewhere in the jungle.

He’s not exactly handsome, more like a rugged pair of work boots than shiny new oxfords. He asks how old you are. Twenty-four. He’s older, mid-late thirties. He asks if you’re an actor, too. Trying to be, you giggle, always embarrassed by the question. He notices you’re eating Butter Rum Lifesavers. His finger touches your finger when you hand him the candy. It’s so intimate, you might as well kiss. Heat sparks the air between you.

He comes in several more times to read with other actors. Each time, he drops rolls of Lifesavers on your desk—Butter Rum, 5 Flavors, Wintergreen—and smiles with the eagerness of a small boy, that wild hair hanging in his face. You love Lifesavers.

Later, the casting director sits on the edge of your desk, flipping through his stack of phone messages. He has a wife, you know.

No, he doesn’t, you say, wanting your desk back.

Well, he’s practically married. He has a long-time girlfriend.

I didn’t see a ring, so—

It’s irritating, his intrusion. He’s always listening to your phone conversations. Always inspecting you, questioning your fashion choices, picking apart your personality. Are all the women in your family quiet? Are they all big boned like you?

N asks you to lunch. He picks you up in a battered Toyota that smells like a melting plastic ashtray. He asks what you’re hungry for. You’re craving a salad at Soup Plantation. You say, anywhere is fine. He grips the steering wheel and heads south, distracted, leg bouncing. I just need to drive around a bit, he says. Fuck. It’s been a crazy day. He tells you he was about to break up with his girlfriend when she told him she’s pregnant. He coasts around the block, past the office. I’m so screwed. I can’t have a kid. I’m not ready to be a dad. He runs a hand through his hair, drives in big circles through the neighborhood, past your office and back around again. Your stomach grumbles. You hope he’ll remember lunch. You’re starving but feel special. He chose to confide in you, this mysterious, broken man. You check your watch and say, I should get back to the office. You’ve been driving for forty-five minutes.

After work, you stop at 7-Eleven for soft foods: ice cream, Hostess Cupcakes, Twinkies. Your roommate is home, but she is used to you hiding in your room. You both hide in your tiny rooms. Later, you’ll run a bath to drown out the noise, then empty yourself of yourself.

Months go by before you see him again. All that time in Manila left him tan and thin. He invites you to his house in the Hollywood Hills. You’re not sure if it’s his house or somebody else’s. Is it the girlfriend’s house? He makes you a tall screwdriver, then another. You both drink until you pass out. You wake up in his bed, hung-over, ashamed. There’s a lot of vomit in the toilet that isn’t yours. You’d know if you threw up. You’re too familiar with the sensation. You sneak out while he sleeps.

You stop at the corner gas station and buy peanut butter cups, a box of cookies, and two Häagen-Daz ice cream bars. Your roommate is out with her new friends, but you still hide in your room and eat without tasting. You shove it in as if it might be taken away at any moment, as if you might be found out and stopped—a swat team breaking glass, swooping in through your window.

Several months later, he calls you again. He picks you up in his Toyota. The sun has crapped out over the ocean. Streetlights snap on; the world flies past in ripples of neon. You’re going to his mother’s swanky, high-rise apartment building. He tells you she’s a high-powered something or other—judge, real estate agent? Your own mother was such a woman, could have remained such a woman, if she’d made better choices.

He tells you he’s straightening out his life. He was messing with heroin. But that’s over. And I only smoked it, he adds. No needles. Outside your window, the city at dusk folds in on itself, muddied and hard. He looks at you, sincere. He’s always sincere, that’s the attraction. You’re so thrilled to see him, so filled with expectation and energy you don’t even blink at the word heroin. Oh wow, you say. And are you okay now? You’ve known addicts. Your mother was married to one. You know enough to know they aren’t suddenly cured or better. He says what you want to hear. I never shoot up. I’m stopping. I’ve stopped. I’m sober.

At the high rise, you drink screwdrivers. He stretches out on the floor with a drink next to him, pulls up his shirt, and slaps his flat stomach. The sound is the hollow of a tree trunk. He seems embarrassed, but also a little proud. He needs to be thin for his movies. He’s method. He’s a commando in the jungle. Starved and exhausted from fighting evil. You’re charmed by his thinness. You imagine how good it must feel. If you had a film to get fit for, maybe it would be easier, but you know that’s not true.

When you’re both good and drunk, you make out on the living room floor. You taste his cigarettes, the tang of citrus. Somehow, you wind up in the bathroom having sex against the sink. You watch yourself in the mirror: lipstick smudged off, mouth colorless and grim. You glance at him, the moles on his cheek that are somehow not ugly. His flat stomach hard as a clipboard. Maybe it’s from the heroin. Then you switch, a do-si-do turn, and he faces the mirror. He’s kissing you, but it isn’t you he’s kissing. His passion has little to do with you. You know this, but it doesn’t matter, he’s what you want. You feel alive in the wanting, in him wanting you. Even though he is somewhere across the globe. Did he leave a pretty co-star in Manila? Is he thinking of his “wife”? Or nobody at all? Is this how he does sex, from a distance, mind traveling to other time zones while the body performs its functions?

Of course, you worry about AIDS. This is the eighties. It’ll be fine, pretend he isn’t a mess, and you aren’t a mess. You choose to believe he only smokes it, like that’s enough to protect you. Still, the girlfriend/wife is out there, floating between the two of you with her baby, their baby. You’re a home wrecker. You feel awful about yourself a lot of the time. You make poor decisions. You’re having sex in a bathroom even though it’s your least favorite place to have sex. But there’s so much cold stillness in you, so much hard mud to crack through, it’s a relief to feel something, anything. There is no training manual for knowing how to enter into being, for asking what you want, what is true. It’s easier this way, to be merely a stone in the sand, swept along with the tide.

He drives you home right after. It’s what he does, this calling out of the blue, stealing you away, capturing your attention, rushing off in a flurry, before you can comprehend what just happened. Maybe that’s his true drug of choice, skipping off to foreign countries to play make believe, unencumbered, childlike. Maybe that’s why he does drugs, to recapture that slippery brightness of youth.

Later, after sobering up, you walk to the market and buy soft things. Ding Dongs, ice cream bars, SnackWell devil’s food cookie cakes. You binge and purge until you’re exhausted and floaty, and you can breathe again. Is this what heroin feels like?

You’re twenty-five now with a restaurant job, auditioning for theater that doesn’t pay. You no longer work for the production company, but he calls you one evening and invites you over. You drive to Hollywood and look for parking along dark streets, past blooming jacarandas, magnolias, spiny palms. You park several blocks away, proud of your ability to squeeze into tight spaces. The air smells like jasmine, hot garbage, roasting meats. Gripping your keys like a weapon, you walk the several blocks to his apartment. You walk with quick, careful steps. The trees have discarded their blooms along the sidewalk, leaving a slippery carpet of petals.

His apartment is shabby, dreary, everything shades of brown and beige. You sit on a greasy couch while he’s stretched out on the floor drinking tea, hair spun in wild tangles, eyes dull. He doesn’t offer you a drink. He pulls up his shirt, slaps his big stomach, and calls himself fat. Jesus Christ, he laughs, look at that gut. Too many donuts! He’s quit drugs and alcohol and craves sugar. He tells you about his daughter and how he wants to stay sober, to be a better father. He’s going to try again with his ex. Maybe you like him better wasted.

You don’t ask him why he called you over. You never ask why, or what he wants. You don’t want to know if you are one of a dozen other women he calls when he’s lonely or restless. You are mute and passive. Your wants are opaque. You don’t know how to read yourself, let alone him. He tells you he’s flying to another distant country for a movie and needs to get up early. You dissolve like rice paper candy in his mouth. He’s an unreachable island. No boats, not even a sea plane, can reach this distant land.

On the way to the door, you linger for a kiss or a hug, but he stays on the floor, shirt pulled up, stomach swollen and pale and feathered with dark hair. You’d like to be more than a painting on a wall.

Back home, you sit alone in your room, stuffing your face with delicate sprinkle cookies, popcorn, licorice vines. You feel disgusting and weak. You can’t resist him; you can’t stop binging and purging, even though your throat hurts, the back of your hand gnawed and rubbed raw from scraping against your teeth, your face stretched and destroyed, teeth bleached dry from stomach acid.

Weeks pass, maybe months before he calls you again. He wants to come by. For just a minute, he says. It’s his voice that gets you, gentle, apologetic without apologizing. He walks in looking handsome and fit. Your roommate is out. The place is dark. One weak bulb burns in a fringe-shaded lamp in the corner of your small living room. You wear the red silk kimono with the dragon on the back—a gift your roommate brought you from her trip to Japan. He tells you he is flying to Thailand in the morning. He stands behind you in front of the full-length mirror, wraps his arms around you, and looks at your reflection. You’re tingling all over. You’re on fire. God, you look like a kid, he says. You smile at him like it’s a compliment. But he means something else. Like he shouldn’t be here. He’s restless, distracted. You are tired of this routine, swept up and spun into nothing again. You don’t sleep with him; he doesn’t even try.

After he leaves, you stare at the door and think about those fucking Butter Rum Lifesavers. You don’t know where to go, what to do with this ever-expanding hole inside. You open the fridge. Nothing. The lights in the kitchen hum. You get dressed and drive to the store for soft foods, then sit in your car and eat. You get rid of it all in a gas station bathroom. It’s filthy, the toilet is filthy, everything is filthy. This is not who you are. The mirror is warped, smudged, and cracked: your face is in pieces. You feel small, shattered, barely visible. This is not who you want to be.

Driving up Robertson Boulevard, you’re exhausted, tired of swapping one addiction for another. There is so much more. So much more than this. You look for the moon. You know it’s out there somewhere; you can feel its light. Mountains rise out of the darkness, potent and strong. What you truly crave is not some fragile man or a box of cookies. He wants your reflection, and you want to be a thing of substance.

Image Source: Debs / Flickr Creative Commons