Miranda, Paul said, you’re going to have to speak up. I can hardly understand you.
I said I’m broken. They broke me. And then I cried for a while into the crackling silence.
Who’s they? Paul asked at last.
My physical therapists.
Oh. Are we talking about your knee again? He sounded annoyed.
For a moment, I was startled out of my sadness into outrage. My knee?
Not my knee, Paul. My hip and my back. Remember I had to have hip surgery?
Yes, Miranda, I—
And then I hurt my back in recovery? And now my legs are—
Look, it’s just hard for me to keep it all straight is all. He sighed.
Right, I said. Of course. That must be very hard for you.
Silence.
Are you there? I asked him.
I’m here.
You were never there, I thought. Which was unfair of me, I suppose. Paul had been there for me at least in those early years, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he run lines with me in our living room? Sat on the blue couch countless times, patiently watching my auditions? He even read my reviews before I did, shielding me from any potential harshness. Fuck this prick, he would always declare, if it was a bad one. You eclipsed them all.
And just like that, he’d conjure my mother. She used to say these very words to me all the time drunk. She’d said it first when I was in second grade, after I’d bungled my lines as Father Bear in our school production of Goldilocks and all the kids onstage had laughed. Fuck those idiots, she’d slurred when she found me crying in a shamefaced ball backstage. Her hands on my furry seven-year-old shoulders, her chardonnay breath in my face. You’ll eclipse them, do you hear me?
But Paul said it sober, with clear eyes and a face full of warmth and conviction. I remember in those moments, he felt preordained.
You’re so fucking lucky, my actor friends would say, seeing Paul in the audience yet again, bearing flowers yet again, a look of naked admiration on his handsome face. You eclipsed them tonight, Princess. Princess is what he called me then. A nickname teasing me for my Snow-White-in-Florida days. Or maybe it had been born on our honeymoon in the Highlands, when I’d made a comment about the toughness of the mattress at our inn. You’re like the Princess and the Pea, he’d said, joking but fascinated. Cruel irony that in a few years, I’d be relegated to the living room floor, to the pullout mattress of stone. Paul hasn’t called me Princess in a very long time.
I have to never call him again, I thought, my phone hot in my damp fist. This has to be the last time.
Look, Miranda, this isn’t a good time, all right? Can I call you back?
No! And my voice was pathetic, desperate.
I’ll call you back, ’kay?
He didn’t call me back, of course. Probably his new girlfriend was calling him to dinner. They’d made the meal together, both of them standing at the marble island in our kitchen, chopping and stirring. Spaghetti with a marinara sauce made from last summer’s tomatoes, from the garden they grew together. Both of them out there in the backyard that I let go to shit, bending down easily to the now fertile earth, tilling the soil and smiling at each other in the sun.
Who was that on the phone? she’d ask, sitting easily in the kitchen chair, her legs tucked neatly under her.
Oh, just Miranda, he’d say.
She needs to stop calling you, Goldfish. In my nightmares, she also calls him Goldfish.
Oh, I know, I know. But how can I tell her that? She doesn’t have anyone else, you see. She lost her mom when she was in college. Her dad died when she was little. I was kind of like a brother or a father to her, you know?
It makes me well up to imagine Paul saying that. He’d be right about him being like family, but wrong about who in the family. Paul was more like my mother without the alcoholism and the dark desire to live vicariously.
Also, Paul would remind the new girlfriend, she’s not well.
That’s her own fault, the new girlfriend would point out sagely. That’s not your problem anymore, is it? She’s the one who left you, remember?
Probably they had sex afterward, her on top. He loves that she can fuck without wincing. She’s not worried about pissing off a nerve or a joint. She’s willing, energetic, experimental even. And fertile, of course. Fertile as the rich, tilled earth in their lushly growing garden. Oh god. Probably they’re even trying for a—
I spent the rest of last night weeping. Not grading idiotic essays. Not prepping for the two classes I was to teach today. Not going over my rehearsal plans, which consist of a blank sheet of paper with All’s Well??? scrawled at the top in red ink. Instead I watched hideous television that made me want to kill myself. Ordered Greek delivery, which I ate standing on one leg. I peed standing too, for fear of sitting down and not being able to stand back up. I gazed at my lovely red couch, which I hadn’t sat on in a year, like it was a mirage. I looked at my phone and longed impossibly to call my mother, though even if she’d been alive she would have likely offered little comfort. Still, she would have been a voice, a voice I missed terribly even for all its slurred, careening descents into darkness, there was love in there always.