Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt


That afternoon was special.

When things were falling apart, there were miraculous days between us of exquisite and suffering beauty.

On those afternoons, we were better than the best and I felt like nothing had changed. I believed that the chaos had made us stronger; that he loved me more than anything. These days were bright spots in the darkness that descended upon us. They were moments of hope that I clung to, proof that everything was okay.

The harder he made it, the more determined I was to need him.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



Fifteen minutes later, he brings us gin.

By this point, we have gone over that although Andrew and I are going to break up, we haven’t yet. Or more, this is how I have lied to him. I lie to people not by omission or by statements, but by varying degrees of confidence. I have acted like I am certain we will break up but I am not.

I have never been certain of anything in my life.


“He thinks I shouldn’t go and talk to people about my Dad. That it will fuck me up and that I need to get out of Toronto. That I have to think about my career.”

The gin and tonic hit the glass together and it’s all I care about.

“You always wished I was more supportive of your career.”

I’ve aged a hundred years since being with him. A thousand years. Roles shift through us. I feel like a fifty year old man, drunk, who waked shoeless to his high school football field that is still around the corner from his house, propelled by nostalgia. Pathetic. Sad, how did it go so wrong?

I want to be anywhere but here.

“I know.”

“You two didn’t break up, did you?”

“I don’t know.”

He puts on Cosmic Dancer by T-Rex. He holds me close to him and we sway, naked.

“We were dancing when we were twelve,” I say and he laughs.

We spend the rest of the night getting drunk and laughing until we cry about the summer I was sixteen and my Dad trapped raccoons. He caught thirty-two, released them into the wild, a ravine around the corner, convinced they wouldn't return. I’d never seen him happier.

“You know I see him, right? That I have visions like he did?”

Mike doesn’t move.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask.

“No. I think this is hard.” He loves me.

“They’re becoming more real.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Reckless.”

He takes my hand and places it on his stomach and then he puts his hand on my stomach. This scene is familiar and it fills me with dread.

“Do you think I should go talk to everyone I want to?”

“You should do what you want to. You need to do what you have to,” he tells me.

“What if I don’t like what I find out?”

“That’s a risk you take, I guess. Are you happy with him?”
 He asks like they are not two separate statements.

“I don’t trust myself to assess anything right now.”

“Is he happy with you?”


I don’t make him happy. I’ve ruined every man I’ve ever loved. What's haunting is that they are so convinced I am the cure.

“He wants to be,” I tell Mike.

“I heard a quote the other day. You’re only smart if you know how to make yourself happy.”

“I’m pretty fucking stupid, then, aren’t I?”

He shakes his head, and pulls me closer against him. He is so tall that I can feel my ribs digging into his lower abdomen. He is mine completely.

“Do you think it’s possible to love more than one person at once?” I ask him.

“No.”

He is so certain. I have a never felt worse.


Monday, July 18, 2011



“The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.”

Daniel Day Lewis

Saturday, July 16, 2011

You Are Talking To God Now


"I always base everyone I write on a real person."

He had asked me to meet him for lunch. "When you're back in Toronto, come by the office so I can give you a squeeze." He always says that, give you a squeeze.

I met him after an audition and I walked quickly against the cold I didn't like.

"It's May! Why is it so cold?"

"You got me, doll." He always calls me doll.

"How are things?"

"Good. Great. It's getting busy in Toronto."

We sat in the corner of a cafe, on the second floor and overlooked Yonge Street. The waiter hovered and his eyes liked my dress, but we sat laughing.

Laughing exhausted him, I could tell.

"All he needs, right now, is Advil for the pain," is what our friend told me over the phone yesterday.

I ordered a Greek salad with chicken because I like routines. My life has no order so I ask for the same item at every restaurant, my vague and desperate attempt at sameness, predictability.

"And for you, sir?" the waiter asked him as he looked at me.

He didn't respond.

"Do you know what you want?" I asked him as I touched his hand.

He looked up at me and then, the menu, confused, like he didn't recognize anything being offered, like he didn't know my face, like he couldn't read the letters beneath him.

"I'll have the same."

He was sick. I should have known.

Looking back, there are always signs. They get heavy with the atmosphere of knowledge, they slip away and slide before you, teasing. They whisper, outlined with permanent marker, "You knew I was here all along."

"The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity."

We ate, fast or slow, I can't remember. We talked about my career.

"She said you go so deep into everything, like it was a bad thing. It's not a bad thing."

I felt a giant relief, like maybe everything would be okay. I felt so happy to be sitting with him. I think he was happy to be sitting with me, too.

"I woke up this morning, Katie, and I had the most beautiful feeling that you are going to get that movie. You are going to be shooting that movie next week."

"From your lips to God's ears."

Apparently, that day, his lips did have God's ears. If only my lips could have God's ears now.

This was the last time everything was still the same and somewhere, looking back, we both knew that, while not knowing it at all. The strangeness, beauty, tragedy of the world is that you both never know a thing and have always known everything. All along.

"Everything's going to be okay, doll. I just know it."

I hugged him goodbye outside the office and he hugged me back. I told him I loved him. I don't know that he heard me.


Monday, July 4, 2011

Meet Me In Montauk


"I thought maybe you were a nut, but you were exciting."

Come back and make up a goodbye, at least. Let's pretend we had one.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



When I get home, Andrew is waiting for me in my bedroom. He’s lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My tall, beautiful man hidden in flowered blankets.

“I thought you were leaving,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. His eyes are mourning.

“That was for show.”

I notice the suitcase, zipped at his feet.


“Your bags still packed.”

“I got that movie. I’ll say no if you want me to.”


“No, go. Go.” I’m not sure if I mean it. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?” My heart is beating and it makes such an Almighty sound I know that he can hear it.

“First thing.”

“Well, it’s late. Let’s go to bed.”

Thank God, we’ll just miss each other at the airport.

I press my face against his chest.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, too. I have to go to L.A. to just...tie up some loose ends.”

“What?”


“I booked the ticket last night, drunk. I thought about what you said. You were right.”

That’s half true. I guess if I learned one thing from my father it was to shade your lies with truth.

“Are you drunk now?”

I nod.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving at breakfast?” he asks.

“Because I hadn’t really decided if I wanted to go.”

“Why do you have to go so soon?”

“It’s not a big trip. I just want to pack more clothes, tell my agents what’s happened in person. I’ll probably be here for awhile again.”

I can’t look at his eyes.

He nods. “I understand,” he says. He doesn’t though.

“Is it wrong if I ask you what’s happening with us?”
 he whispers minutes later.

“No.”

“So what’s happening with us?”

“I’m just really fucked up right now.”

“Are we breaking up?”


“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t think so. I just need some time to figure everything out.”

He turns on his side and puts his hand on my hip, awkwardly, beautifully. I kiss his chest and I tell him that I love him but he doesn’t notice. He’s too busy trying to wipe his tears.

I take off my dress, leaving me naked, vulnerable.

We don’t make love.

He leaves the next morning. I drop him off at Pearson International, and six hours later, when he has landed in Nova Scotia, I am back at Pearson, boarding a plane to Belfast.

Put your dreams away for now. I won’t see you for some time. I am lost in my mind.

I am lost in my mind.

Over the Atlantic, I drift in and out of sleep, twisted like a Chinese contortionist.

It helps that I stole some of my Mom's tranquilizers.


Black Sheep



"Shit, Marl, I’m sorry. Should I have told you when you suggested we meet here?”

“No. It’s okay. I knew he came here a lot...what’d he have to say?”

“Well, I asked him about you. I realized afterwards maybe I shouldn’t have. I just wasn’t sure what else to talk to him about, you know? He was pretty funny. He cracked a couple jokes. It was a pretty short conversation. I just asked him to get you to call me and then I felt really stupid for saying that after.”

“What’d he say when you brought me up?”


“Nothing really. That he would get you to call me. I thought maybe he didn’t know that I knew. He didn’t seem angry or anything.”

“How did he seem?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Sad.”

“Sad how?”

“Alone.”

I am getting the shit kicked out of me.

“Can we not talk about my father anymore?”


“Okay. I’m sorry. What do you want to talk about? What do you want to do? We can do anything you want.”

...

“Look, you can pretend that you’re not totally fucked by the fact that Dad died and things were left between you how they were but I know the truth.”

“How is this different for me? He was horrible to you, too.”

“I know that, but I made my peace with him. We...were okay when he died. In our own fractured way.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Attacking me. I’m drunk all the time? Fuck you, Matt. You’re a fucking drug addict.”

He grabs me by the shoulders.

“Marla, listen to me. You can insult me all you want but you are fucked right now and you aren’t going to get better anytime soon. You can’t duck this.”

“I’m not ducking it.”

“No, but you’re trying.”

I can feel my eyes getting wet. Not now, not tonight, when things are light-hearted.

“Its just...why could you two work things out? Why didn’t he want to with me?”

“Well, we never worked them out, not really.”

“You know what I mean. ”

He nods. He stands before me, strong, silent. He looks exactly like my father did to me before I got lost in his malformed soul.

“How am I supposed to deal with this, Matt? I always somewhere thought if I got married, or if I had a kid... one day out of the blue, things would just work themselves out. That can never happen now. Things ended how they were. Broken. That was the end of our story.”

“I know.”

“No, no, I don’t think you do. When Dad was terrible to you, it pretty was one-sided.”

“I wasn’t easy.”

“No, but you were...”

“I was sick, you can say it.”

I swallow. I don’t want him to feel ridiculed. I don’t think I’m better than him.

“I let it happen like this, I had a hand in it. I ruined my relationship with Dad, too. Do you understand that guilt?”

Matt takes me by the arm.

“You’re not guilty.”

“I fucked everything up in a spectacular way.”

We stand in silence for awhile. He takes a smoke out, his hands shaking. Halfway through he looks back at me.

“Hey, Marla?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m here, you know. You need me and I’m here.”

I nod.

I sit on the concrete for the next fifteen minutes and slowly finish my drinks. I tell myself that I have to believe what my father always told me.

The belly of every black thing is white.

“What are we going to find out next? That he was a secret agent?” he asks.

I don’t have it in me to laugh.

“I just feel ripped off, you know?” I hear the sounds of weeping, heart beating, heartbroken, heartbreaking, my voice cracking. “Why didn’t he tell me he was married in Belfast? I would have understood how angry he was. Things could have been different.”

Matt hugs me.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m crying.”

“I won’t.”

“Are you crying over Dad?”

"Over it all.”

My brother stays with me for a few more minutes and I watch him as he walks back into the bar. The shock of his face reverberates off the sidewalk and hurts me, so I decide to leave, too.