Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

“I was in the office off the bedroom dusting, and I notice that this guy has a big Rolodex with a lot of handwritten numbers on it.”

“So,” Jelly said. “I thought you were going to say you found a drawer of whips or something.”

“They all have that drawer, believe me, but I started to flip through the Rolodex, and you won’t believe the numbers—”

“Who?”

“Jack Nicholson. Warren Beatty. Robert Evans.”

Jelly took vegetables out of the crisper drawer and rinsed them in the colander in the sink.

“I see the circles he runs in,” Jelly said. “What is his name?”

“I don’t know. No one you would know. Wait, it is on the schedule.”

Jelly moved the phone to the other shoulder and the other ear, and she began to arrange the vegetables on the cutting board.

“His name is David Weintraub.”

“He is a producer, a very important producer,” Jelly said.

“How do you know that?”

“How do you not know that? I read credits,” Jelly said. Jelly had been so thrilled when she recovered enough sight to see the words clearly again, she now stayed and read every name of the credits.

“Plus you see more movies than anyone.”

Jelly cut the onion in narrow slices. The fumes wafted up and she sniffed.

“Should I call one? What would I say, though,” Lizzie said. “Give me a job?” She giggled. “You can’t call people that famous anyway. They will just hang up on you, or their assistant will answer, I guess.”

Jelly stopped cutting and ran the water, rinsing her fingers. She stopped and sat down.

“You know what?”

“What?” Lizzie said.

“Next time you go to this guy’s house, or any really fancy house, write down some of the numbers for me. The names and numbers.”

“All right,” Lizzie said.

“But not the really famous ones, the huge names. The other names, the names you don’t know.”

“You are weird, Amy.”

* * *

Once Lizzie gave her some numbers, Jelly began to do a little research. She went to the university library and looked up the names. She began to read the trade papers. When she felt that she had sufficient background information, she started to make calls. It was just for fun, and for a few years she only did it occasionally. But as she talked to more men and learned more background and connecting details each time, she began to feel that she was a part of this wondrous world. She began to believe that the distance between her life and their lives was not so big after all. The greatest moment came when she called a sound engineer and he said to her, “Nicole? The Nicole? I heard something about you.”

“Good morning,” he said. His voice was croaky, as if he hadn’t spoken today.

“Good morning! How are you feeling?”

There was a long pause. Jelly pulled a velvet pillow onto her lap. She rested her elbows on it, the phone carriage on the pillow between her arms, the receiver held lightly by her ear. The room was bright. It was mid-morning. She was still in her silk pajamas. Her kimono robe opened to the morning air. The sun was strong and warmed her face as she spoke. She heard Jack light a cigarette. She resisted the urge to fill in, jump in, talk. She waited for him to speak.

“What if I said something crazy?”

Jelly waited some more. But she could feel what was coming. It always came.

“What if I bought you a ticket and you got on a plane to come see me?”

She laughed. Not a mocking laugh but a fluttery, delighted laugh. It was a delicate situation. She could feel his want. All down the wires the want traveled. In his scratchy morning voice, his cigarette voice, his sentence didn’t sound like a question until it went up a half register on the word me. It was touching.

Still she didn’t speak. This was the moment she was longing for but also dreading. It always fell apart after this.

“I mean it. I have been thinking. I think — well, not thinking. That is the wrong word. Feeling. I have these feelings for you. I want to be with you.”

“I have feelings for you too,” she said. She did. She loved Jack.

“I’m in love with you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. As they spoke, she could feel her heart beating in her chest. She was not calm; her body was going faster and faster.

“Is that crazy? Never meeting in person, feeling this way?”

* * *

After she got off the phone, Jelly began to cry. She let herself feel loved, in love, the incredible feeling of connection, however fleeting. No chance for them, not after what she had done. She had no choice. She only wanted their perfect connection to last longer. It seemed harmless.

The first time Jelly had come to such a pass was with another man she called, Mark Jenks. He was a mildly successful film director. Things had gone on for months; things had gone as far as they could (nothing stays in one place, people need more), and one day he asked her what she looked like. She had described herself accurately but not too specifically: long blond hair, fair skin, large brown eyes. Those true facts would fit into a fantasy of her. She knew because she had the same fantasy of how she looked. But after a few weeks of that, there came the request for a photograph. She took some photos of her beautiful friend Lynn. She had met Lynn through the Center. She was the mother of one of the low-vision kids Jelly worked with. Lynn was lovely to look at: a slender girl with delicate-but-significant curves. She was not that bright and had a flat, central New York trailer accent, but she also had the most appealing combination of almost too pouty lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and an innocent spray of freckles across her tiny nose. Lynn invited her to the beach with her son, Ty. Ty was six, and Jelly met with Ty once a week to help him adjust to his fading eyes. Although she had regained nearly all of her own sight since Oz, she still had to use extremely thick glasses, she was tunnel-visioned and had great difficulty in low-contrast situations. Like Ty, she didn’t fully belong in either world, sighted or blind. She was like a character in a myth, doomed to wander between two places. Belonging nowhere. That’s the word, belong. How much she would like to be with someone, and be long —not finite, not ending — with someone.

At the beach that day, Lynn looked even more beautiful than usual. She wore very little makeup. She had a tan and wore a white macramé bikini. She looked happy, relaxed. Jelly took three photos of her. Just held up her cheap camera and clicked. One showed Lynn looking away, thoughtful. One was blurred. The third showed her smiling into the camera. Lynn looked sexy but not mean. A happy, open, sweet-looking girl. Jelly knew as she took the photos what she would do with them. She dropped the film at the Kodak stand to be developed. She made sure she kept the negatives in a safe place.

The photos bought her some time with Mark, but they also escalated things. She knew there was no coming back from the lie. She tried to enjoy the moment, the delicious male desire directed at her. She often imagined herself looking like Lynn and being worshipped by Mark.

Jelly never thought, even in her fantasies, of Mark loving Jelly the way Jelly looked. She was always Jelly but not Jelly, even as she lay in her bed with the lights out after Mark had whispered his love for her and she had replaced the phone on the cradle. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her pillow. Her hand found the top elastic of her panties. The curly hair and then the tiny wet bump. She took her time, and she thought of Mark meeting her at last. With all the possibilities of the world at her beckon, she did not imagine Mark loving Jelly, squishy middle-aged Jelly. She was herself but in Lynn’s body. She imagined Mark undressing her and touching her perfect pink-tipped breasts as they spilled out of her bra, her smooth thighs under her skirt, her supple-but-taut midsection, her round high ass. In all of Jelly’s fantasies she looked exactly like Lynn, not even a better version of Jelly. She watched her fantasy as if it were a movie; she could see the man — Mark — undress the perfect girl, and Jelly could feel him lose his breath. He cannot believe how exquisite she is. And after Jelly came, she didn’t think too much about it. Was it unusual to exclude your own body from your fantasy? Why not imagine he loves you as you are, if anything is possible? Because (and she knew this absolutely without ever saying it to herself) her desire winds around her perfection in the eyes of the man. The fantasy — and her arousal — was about her perfect body. That’s what excited her. And how a man like Mark — a man who already loved her in theory — would worship her in that body. It was impossible to fulfill, and she was never dumb enough to believe that Mark could love her as she actually was.