This Is What Happens After: To Anabel, Anti-Hero

In the months after I turned in my lover, a large cosmetic company offered me my own nail polish line. My father’s lawyer declined that and also the 64-ounce Guzzler or something or other that a mini-mart in Pennsylvania wanted to use my image on. He declined another fifteen other things, maybe more. Once, when the requests were at their height, my mother slammed her wine glass on the table so hard it shattered: “We will not make a mahk-ery of this fahmmily’s name evahhhhrrr,” she wailed.

After TK was sentenced and my information-for-innocence deal settled, I did every interview I was asked to do, because I wanted to and also because my dad’s attorney couldn’t say squat about it. I wasn’t ashamed to do it, but I let my guilt linger. I held onto it not because I had him busted, and not because of all the trouble I caused my parents, and never about my role in the robberies. (Sorry? Yes. Guilty? Not really.) I agonized because I knew with each tape-recorded magazine feature, with every live taping for television, I was lying through my chomping-at-the-bit teeth.

Too many people believed me. They all believed me. They wanted to. They needed to find a reason good enough to explain why it happened and how it ended, and so I became everyone's field hockey player, everyone's Brownie, every mother's baby girl gone bad who did right. I entertained them and relieved them and was worshipped and forgiven.

Tomorrow, I will give my first interview in over eleven years.

It’s been that long since Thomas Kentwell Livermore, son of those Livermore’s, went to jail, and in two months, he will be released. I never tell the story anymore, not because I don’t think people will care (I know they want to ask), but because it’s too awkward to tell that dirty tale in someone’s stainless, perfectly perfect suburban kitchen. When the journalist called from Manhattan, I obliged immediately.

I have not told my husband. I marked the date on the kitchen calendar with a message only I could understand – the words all strung together so that they said nothing. It doesn’t really matter, my sneakiness, because he never reads the thing anyway. I face weekends of yard work, talk radio and all the typical non-drama that makes up a child-less marriage out here in the Everyday. I make the plans now, buy the groceries, pick the paint colors, worry about the money and spend most of it. He complains about never getting to control the remote, about his gut getting bigger, about the market this and the politicians that. We make love every Tuesday, sometimes Saturday. I think I always knew this is how my life would play out.

I have decided this interview won’t be like all the others, though I will start the way I always do, because, frankly, I like best that part of the story I made.

“We shot nine ball at the bar like pros, drank like pros. I’d hear a song on the radio and buy it at the record store; he’d come home singing it,” I’ll start. “We hid out in our walk-up on the lam from school and expectations. We’d hover over Indian food for hours making our ridiculous, hilarious plans.”

(I have it so memorized that sometimes I think maybe I read this whole thing somewhere else and didn’t actually say it the first time, out loud on my own.)

I will crank out the facts for her. TK got the costumes from a friend who distributed programs at the repertory theater downtown: velvet cloaks and plumed hats and belts so heavy with fake jewels they hurt. I’d quote real lines I remembered from Shakespeare or Ovid or event Mamet and TK would improvise. Sometimes, the people in the mini-marts or gas stations we’d hit would throw us tips. When TK would politely, and always in some horrible accent, demand the cash, the attendant always gave it up, kind of smiling, kind of bemused maybe. We never used weapons; we never even scared anyone; we blew the 50 bucks (or less) on restaurant food, French cigarettes and cheap beer. We’d make love for days on that high. We told no one.

The interviewer will ask me vague questions, but I will know already what she wants: our blue blood, my dreadlocks like dirty snakes that fell around me, his mother’s Persian carpet where he lay when the cops came. She will then ask me to tell how I turned on him, so righteously flipped on him, when things went so horribly violent. I will take a deep breath at this part, a breath so deep I might never exhale: I will hold on to it so long she might think I am no longer on the line. I will hold my breath until every last ounce of oxygen is absorbed and swallowed and drowned in my own regular blood. And then I will tell her the truth. 

I turned in my lover for one reason alone: I was jealous.

If he hadn’t snuck out on his own, hadn’t ditched me that day while I showered, hadn’t taken the wooden prop pistol that I had banned from the get go, then maybe it would have been obvious that fools like us swaddled in velveteen capes and hideous pantaloons, part Penzance part wizard, did not carry real guns. If I been with him, if he hadn’t taken my keys and left me home and alone, then maybe the man behind the counter wouldn’t have fired his real one: the bullet hurtling from his shaking hand, smashing through the window, busting the cage of propane tanks and shattering the belly of one.

I heard the explosion all the way on the East Side. Three cars were filling up; one was mine. Three people died. In the confusion and smoke, TK got away and ran all the way home, past my car that had burst, past the burning bodies he must have seen; he ran miles.

When I saw him in our kitchen, I knew right away that he’d done it and I gagged -- not just from his shedding skin but from my own pitiful knowing: I’d been rejected.

He lay on the ancient rug of his mothers and I covered his face and shoulders in water-soaked paper towels – my final gesture of good will – and then split to call the cops from the payphone outside. The swat arrived, vested and armed, and without any rebuke, carried him tenuously down the stairs.  

I stood on the sidewalk, detectives at my side, lights flashing, noise everywhere, and I stared at him in the back of the cruiser: even then when he knew what had happened, what I had done, he had this look of peace on his scorched face, his face still so crisp, alive, unafraid, and beautiful. I just stared. I stared and stared until I could see him no more, until he was no more to me. My dear Thomas, who lived his life under columns with buildings that bore his grandfathers’ names, would soon be as drab as those pillars, costumed by his family in the suit and ties he hated, muffled forever. 

I have an old table in my kitchen and it’s the best place in the house.  I sort the paint chips here, read mail here, put my left foot on the chair and inject the hormones in my ass here.  I’ll probably be in the same spot when the interviewer calls from New York.

I’ll explain that I never did one thing that was just or right. I will confess that I am a wicked, scarred woman like any other. I ruined him because he ruined me. I will tell her what I have been wishing to tell all along: that great love affairs are like petty crimes. They are selfish at best and despite all good intentions, they get terribly ugly and eventually catch fire, then burn, then melt and finally, disappear.

But anger, grief, envy? Those things stay, and they turn a person to stone.

Comments

[Palinode]

That's like a Godard film stocked with performing arts grads. I'm going to go read that again now.

[Mr Lady]

OH SHIT.

Damn.

LIke, dag yo.

[Carolyn Online]

That's way better than god.

[Susan (Trout Towers)]

You can do whatever you want as long as you write like that.

[kelly]

"That great love affairs are like petty crimes"That is the line I can't let go of. I am at the point where I want the burn, and that scares me and thrills me at the same time. This was amazing.

[TwoBusy]

This was loooooooovely, with a nasty streak right down the middle. Delicious.

[Adam P. Knave]

That was fantastic!

[Holmes]

This is awesome. What a fantastic read.

[foradifferentkindofgirl (fadkog)]

I once told a man who tried to come back into my life, one I sort of strung along until I lost my nerve, that I did what I did because I wanted to ruin him the way he ruined me, so when I got to that line, I felt that wicked little chill in my blood. Goddamn, lady, I can't even adequately express to you how much I love this. I want to be you when you do this writing stuff.