I was filled with resentment at S for making me come to the party, for putting me in this position. I wanted to scream at him, I am past this! I am better than this! I thought about the way that S had glided through the room, a room full of men who only two years before had been kissing Harvey Weinstein’s ring and encouraging their young female clients to take meetings with him in hotel rooms. I hated that my husband was at all connected to these men, and I hated that I couldn’t scream in Berg’s face on account of him. I hated myself for trying to look beautiful. But more than anything, I resented S for making me need him.
“No? Too far?” Berg said quickly, his eyes shifting between us. I could hear Berg talking, but his voice and the sounds of the party fell into a dull, blank space.
I pulled my coat tighter around my body and slid over to Nate, sitting a few feet down from me, tucking myself next to him. I caught his eye as he laughed, mid-conversation. He studied my face. “You okay?” he asked.
The words poured out of me. “Berg is drunk and he just said, ‘You’re like Pamela Anderson before the hep C,’ and I don’t know what to do and S is still over there with him.”
I wanted Nate to tell me what to do, to tell me I should disappear, to give me permission to be outraged. Anything.
“I’m searching for how he might’ve meant that in a good way and I have to admit, I’m coming up with nothing,” Nate offered. “I’m sorry he said that to you. He’s an idiot, anyway.”
S appeared in front of me then, not looking at me, as he talked to yet some other man, his mind somewhere else.
“Can we please go now?” I asked in a small voice.
Cars lined the street outside as we stood under an awning, rain tapping against the fabric. I called an Uber. When we stepped out into the rain to climb into the car, the white flashes of the paparazzi’s cameras nearly blinded us. I kept my eyes on my feet, praying I wouldn’t slip in my stilettos against the wet concrete. S slammed the door shut, the world suddenly quiet. A pap ran to the front of the car, a red baseball hat backward on his head, his camera held up, flashing away through the front window into the backseat.
“Jesus Christ,” S said. The car could barely move in the traffic. My eyes burned with tears. I hated myself for crying, and that was when the tears really started, unrelentingly and uncontrollably.
The car crawled forward; I heard the driver signal a turn. Tick, tick, tick. The bright pops of light were gone. We were silent for a moment. “Well, that was…” S paused. “Listen, I am so sorry he said that to you. That was awful.”
“I’m so sorry,” I cried. “I’m so embarrassed.” S put his arm around me, but nothing felt right. I didn’t want S to apologize for Berg; I wanted him to say how much he hated everything Berg stood for. I wanted him to pick a side, but I knew that wasn’t fair; it wasn’t so simple. I cried harder.
“You shouldn’t be sorry! God, no,” he said. I lay down in his lap, my face away from him, buried in his thighs.
“I just … It all would have been okay if I just wasn’t there,” I said. “It all would have been normal. You could’ve had a good time.” I shuddered. I thought about my stupid selfies, my stupid dress, and my stupid eyeliner. I shut my eyes tight. I felt a sudden urge to disappear. I imagined being able to breathe in so deeply that my body would dissolve into the air I’d sucked in, and then I’d no longer be in my body, in my physical self, in this car with S, or anywhere at all. You are the problem, I thought to myself. Something is wrong with you. And if you were taken out of the equation, everything would be just fine.
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