Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

“I thought you said I was fine,” Lucy said. “Were you watching the wrong channel?”

“You were fine,” Suzanne assured her. “I saw everything but that. I looked away for a second—”

“At what?” Lucy demanded.

“I was talking to a guy,” Suzanne said. “The author guy.”

“Did he think I was good-looking?” Lucy asked. Suzanne nodded. “And you didn’t hear the father thing? Do you know what I said about my father? That he was a giant whale and I wasn’t sure he was actually my father. I called him my alleged father.”

“So?” said Suzanne. “He’s got a sense of humor, doesn’t he?”

“My father? The Republican nightmare?”

“Well, are you counting on his will for anything?”

“Don’t be funny about this,” Lucy said. “Oh, all right, be funny. The show is over, you can make fun of me now. So, you didn’t think it sounded slutty when I said I went on talk shows to meet guys?”

“To meet guys, no,” Suzanne said. “You didn’t say to blow them, did you?”

“You wouldn’t know,” said Lucy. “You were busy cruising the green room.”

“I was not cruising the… I was talking to… You tell me to do this stuff.”

“I don’t tell you to do it while I’m on TV,” Lucy said.

“Oh, it’s scheduled around your career now, my talking to guys?” Suzanne said. “Let me just tell you this one thing. You look great and I gave the guy my number. It’s been a breakthrough night for both of us. Now we can go and have some French fries and doughnuts and really live life.”

They walked out of the building and got into the limo. “What’s his name?” asked Lucy, settling into her seat, and Suzanne talked about Jesse all the way back to Hollywood, thinking the whole time, “He’ll never call me.

“And if he does, what if he’s a murderer?”

Suzanne was dreaming that she was hanging by her hands outside the window of a speeding car with her hair flying behind her. Driving down a street and flying through the air. It was frightening, terrifying, but as she sped along it became almost exhilarating. She passed through the danger into the creamy filling of Wheeeee! and then woke up, her heart beating very fast. She had the strange sensation that she actually had cried out, “Wheeeee!” but she saw Jesse fast asleep beside her and knew she hadn’t.

They had been living together for almost a year—though he’d kept his apartment—and she was still always a little surprised to find him there in the morning. She liked to study him when he was asleep—he seemed unarmed somehow without his glasses on—but she could only engage in this activity on weekends. During the week Jesse got up at seven to write. “Look at him,” she thought. “He looks like somebody you could go up to at an airport and say, ‘Could you watch my bag?’”

He remained curious to her. She knew she cared about him—her latest analogy to Norma was that he was a wounded Confederate soldier and she was this sweet Yankee woman who’d found him on her lawn—but she wondered why. It was as though she doubted her own judgment, which in fact she did. For years her judgment had told her to take drugs. Why should she think her logic had improved that much in just two years?

What did she see in him? He said that the sky was “bucolic”; she asked him what “bucolic” meant. He said he liked Steely Dan and the color black. Well, so did she. What did that make her? He drank coffee black, or sometimes with a little cream. What did that mean? She felt like she was on a scavenger hunt, searching for clues as to who he was and what he wanted from her. She had no idea whether, if she found out, she would give it to him or not.

Was Jesse a good man? she asked herself. He probably was, because he bored her to death sometimes. “You think that if it isn’t dramatic, nothing is happening,” Norma had told her. “The idea is to get old with them, not because of them. Pretend it’s an acting assignment. Act like someone who enjoys the quiet that can be found in a mature relationship. Act normal, and see if some feelings of normalcy don’t eventually follow.”

“Normal. People don’t get much more normal than us,” she thought. “We’re prototypes for the new normal line of people who were designed to pave the way for the nineties.” She realized that she and Jesse were getting serious. Serious. She hated the sound of it. “I joked myself into a serious situation,” she’d told Lucy.

“You’ve backed into normalcy via Cambodia,” Lucy said, “so you can appreciate it more. It’s like you applied for a weird life and got a regular one by accident.”

Lucy liked Jesse. She thought he was good for Suzanne, that people would take her more seriously if they knew she was going with “an author.” For a while she even considered finding herself an author, but one who was, as she put it to Suzanne, “maybe just a little famous, like John Irving or Philip Roth.”

Then Lucy met Lowell Stephenson. When No Survivors came out, she received a lot of attention, so when she went to Seattle over Christmas to make up with her father for the things she’d said about him on the talk show, Lowell—the head of New Age Studios—recognized her on the plane and struck up a conversation. She was seeing him fairly regularly now.

Sometimes the four of them would go out together. Lowell even cooked for them once. “This is exactly how I like it,” Lucy had whispered to Suzanne while Lowell was perfecting the salad dressing. “Breadmaker and breadwinner all in one.”

“How did we ever end up as parts of couples?” Suzanne asked, as they watched Lowell show Jesse how to sauté shrimp.

“Think of it as an experiment,” Lucy suggested.

“Does one of us have cancer?” Suzanne had asked Jesse on their fourth date, after they’d sat in her house talking for eight hours straight.

“Pardon me?” he said.

“I just wondered. We spend so much time together, it’s like you have a twelve-hour shore leave, or we’re cramming for a state exam on one another, or…”

“Cancer,” he said, nodding. “That wouldn’t have been the analogy I would have chosen.”

After their fifth date, he hadn’t called her for six days. Suzanne was stunned. She forgot what he looked like. “Smoke in a room, that’s what he is,” she told Lucy. “Smoke in a room.” She started thinking about him as the guy she liked who never called her again.

“What’s the matter?” Michelle asked her.

“I’ve been in a dating accident,” she announced dramatically. “A terrible, terrible dating accident.”

It became Suzanne’s favorite phrase. “Ask me what’s the matter,” she said to whomever she talked to.

Then he called, and again she was stunned. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” she told him.

“Why?” he asked. “I told you I was going to New York and that I’d be back on Monday—today.”

She had forgotten, but because of this mistake he had become more vivid to her, more real. They’d had a crisis in common—though, to be sure, in Suzanne’s mind more than anywhere else—and they’d come through it. They had survived the dating accident together, and on their sixth date they had total endless nightmare sex. “Big Kabuki Sex,” Suzanne called it.

“This is interesting, isn’t it?” Jesse remarked during a rest stop, then said, “That sounded odd. I just didn’t want to frighten you with affection.” Suzanne thanked him, and wondered if she should say that she, too, thought the sex was interesting.