Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

“So I stayed over, and we necked for a while and it was nice. At one point we were kissing, and he said, ‘This would be a great shot of you.’ He told me that when he was in India he looked at the Himalayas and said, ‘Great shot!’ And he was there . It’s like we don’t know we’re there anymore. We’re so detached from our own experience, and so into how we can use that experience. As we’re having it, we’re putting it into another medium. Life is the largest medium we’ve got, and we want to put it in these smaller ones, to get it down to scale…

“Anyway, I stayed over, and then in the morning I felt like he was distant from me. He was still being nice, but he seemed… I don’t know, I mean, it was the morning so a little distance is understandable, but I thought I felt him moving away, which instantly made him incredibly attractive, and we had sex. I made him breakfast, which I told him I never usually did, but I kept telling him I never usually did everything I was doing. It wasn’t a brilliant breakfast—the eggs were brown and I burned the first two pieces of bacon. I can’t seem to time food to end together.

“Then he went off to edit his new movie, Ziz! , and I went home. By the end of the day I’d talked to most of my friends… Sometimes I’m not sure I even have any friends. I may just have a large group of people that I tell everything to. It’s like I’ve made intimacy a superficial gesture. Anyway, their consensus was, ‘Watch out, he’s a known sex addict, he fucks everybody .’

“And I acknowledged that, but deep down—and you don’t get too far deep down with me, because I’ve thrust all the deep down right up to the surface—but somewhere in me, I just thought… It’s like when I was younger and I used to fall in love with homosexuals, because they had rejected me before they even met me. Womanizers don’t reject you, but they accept you in a rejecting way, so it’s similar. And just like I used to think with gay men, I thought, ‘ I’ll be the one who makes a difference.’ I don’t mean that I’ll have a relationship with him, necessarily. I don’t allow myself to hope for that much, but I guess underneath my nonhoping is the hoping thing…

“I wish you’d been here last week, because maybe if I had talked to you, you might have helped me to not have sex with him. Because I couldn’t seem to not have sex with him on my own. I need people to encourage me not to. Could we just work real hard in this area? Saturate ourselves with work on this, like when they stepped up the bombing and escalated the war in Vietnam? Let’s escalate the war on this area of my life, and if we can’t make me better, can we at least make me not care that I’m not better?

“Anyway, I knew I should probably cool it. I knew he was supposed to go to this Jackson Hole Film Festival on the weekend, and I didn’t want him to catch me wanting to do something with him, so I made up some story about visiting friends in Napa. On Monday he called just before ten, and we went to lunch, and then we had sex at my house. He likes my house. He was very nice, and I kept thinking I had to try and look indifferent, which was weird, because on some level I am indifferent to him. I mean, he’s cute and he’s powerful and all that, but you have to take his reputation into account. He’s a former cocaine addict and he fucks whores .

“But we have these great talks. It’s like we talk about the real issues as if we’re talking about the weather. And he said he couldn’t see me that night because he was meeting with this rock group, Bad Hetero, about the title song for his film. And then you weren’t back yet, so I went to Santa Barbara just to get away and not think about him. Or maybe just to get away and only think about him. I guess you could say I was obsessed with him.

“In the parking lot at the hotel a few days later, I ran into this film editor, Evelyn Ames, who I’ve known from parties for years. This is a real wild girl, and she enjoys her reputation, or at least she keeps up the pretense that she does. Somebody has to enjoy her reputation besides the guys.

“So we went to lunch, and in the course of talking to her, I mentioned I’d met this guy, Jack Burroughs—his name is Jack Burroughs—and I sort of asked if she’d ever slept with him. I don’t know her well, but she’s somebody you don’t have to know that well in order to ask something like that.

“She said, ‘Yeah, I slept with him.’ She asked me, ‘Did he make you do this?’ and she drew her knees back over her head right there at the table, and I said, ‘No.’ And I thought, if that’s the only way he demonstrated his respect for me, I guess that’s something. She also said that while he was with her, he talked about another girl he was going to fly in from Boston who had really soft skin. He rubbed her skin and talked about this other girl’s skin.

“Then she said that she had, in fact, seen him quite recently. It turned out she’d been with him Monday night, after he’d been with me Monday afternoon. I thought, God, this girl is a lot of girl, and to need two lots of girls in one day is… The phrase ‘out of control’ did cross my mind. And she felt bad that she’d told me all this stuff, so she said, ‘He probably really likes you . We just fuck, and he talks about other girls while he’s inside me.’

“So I thought, I should just stop this. I mean, it’s humiliating to run into someone who’s been with a guy you’ve been with on the same day you were with him. I was furious . When I was driving home I made this hard right turn and the wheels sort of lifted off the road, and I imagined having an accident and being taken to the hospital, and him coming to visit and me having him thrown out of my room. And I thought, I’m really out of the box now.

“Then, when I got home, I got a call from my business manager, Charlie, who wanted to know if it was true that I was dating this guy. I said, ‘Well, I would hardly call it dating . Why do you ask?’ And he said a friend of his had gone out with this guy Tuesday night, and that he’d told her he was seeing me. So that was three in two days or something—and those are just the ones I heard about. Imagine what I could pick up about him if I got one of those satellite dishes.

“I wanted to call him and tell him never to call me again, but there was still part of me that cherished the hope that this would make him sorry, and make him realize how much he loves me and what he’ll be missing if he doesn’t marry me. I felt like a total jerk for thinking this, but it’s like I’ve been genetically tampered with. I was born imagining myself with an apron on, with pies cooling on the window sill and babies crying upstairs. I thought that all that stuff would somehow anchor me to the planet, that it was the weight I needed to keep from just flying off into space.

“So I called him up and tried to make a little joke about the situation, and he jumped on me. He said, ‘Well, this is like the pot calling the kettle black.’ Implying that just because I’ve slept with these two other people he knows—over a period of five years —and because I slept with him on the morning after our first date, I’m some kind of slut. I guess anybody who slept with him would have to be a slut. So we had this huge fight, and he accused me of having initiated the whole sex thing with him in the first place, and I said, ‘Well, if I initiated it, then I’m stopping it right now. I make a great memory.’ And I hung up.

“When he didn’t call me back, I decided to call him and tell him not to even think about ever calling me again. His machine was on, and he had a one-word message that said, ‘Slut!’ And I freaked out. I mean, I knew it wasn’t just about me, it was about every woman he’s ever been with, and I was lumped in there somewhere. I was so shaken I can’t describe it to you. I imagined him dead, and I left him a message in a very cold voice. But then he called the next morning, and he said that his message didn’t say, ‘Slut!’ It said, ‘What!’ And then I thought, maybe I made this whole thing up. He was being so charming, and maybe he… I mean, he did say the thing about the pot calling the kettle black, but maybe he meant it in some other way.