Brad also forces me to look at some painful truths about my own anger and discomfort. He tells me that you should just say what you are thinking about someone. I tell him that I hate when strangers start talking to me about my height.
“So, if someone says, ‘God, you look tall,’ do you get offended by it still?” he asks me.
“I don’t get annoyed,” I say. “It’s just boring.”
“Well, boredom is anger and you haven’t expressed your anger sufficiently to all those people who ask you about being tall,” he says. “You still have a lot of resentment about people—and probably some resentment about being tall. So when someone says, ‘What’s it like being so tall?’ just say, ‘Fuck you! Eat shit and die! And I resent you for saying I’m so tall.’ ”
I crack up. “Then I would appear like this easily hurt social leper,” I say.
Then he reveals the real key, the real magic of what he is preaching.
“You’re worried about how you would appear, see?” he says. “That’s what you think your identity is. It doesn’t matter how you appear. You’ll appear differently in another half a minute anyway because people’s registry of how you appear changes very dynamically. For a while, you appear to be a leper of some sort, and a little while later you’ll appear to be someone who’s very brave and willing to talk about things honestly. Later on, you’ll appear as a kind of person to be trusted because you’re not going to be withholding.”
When I am assigned the piece, I assume it will be the usual “shtick lit” where you stunt it up and write the reactions. Instead, I find myself unnerved. Emotions are bubbling up.
Earlier that day, I bought a fancy $350 red coat from Ann Taylor to wear because the photos are to be in color, and one of the photo editors told me I need something to make me “pop” in pictures instead of my black overcoat. After I file my piece, I am exhausted, and Katherine joins me to return the coat to the store right before closing. We are walking in the rain, when I realize I left the receipt at my desk. But all the tags are on, and I bought it that day. I explain all this to the clerk at the counter, but she cops an attitude like a Soviet bureaucrat.
“No receipt, no return,” she says.
“I really don’t appreciate your shitty attitude,” I tell the clerk, and now I am both livid and ashamed of my behavior. I hate myself. I hate everything.
“Are you okay?” Katherine asks, and I am embarrassed and confused. I can’t see straight, I am so angry over nothing.
“Are you a manager?” I ask the clerk. I am now just gone completely, riding a wave of fury.
“No,” she says.
“That’s what I thought!” I snap, and I leave the store with Katherine.
“You’re not crazy; she was a total bitch,” Katherine consoles me, and I start crying at the stupidity of it all. I give her a hug good night, and walk away.
I trudge back to the office, now soaked in rain, seething with irrational rage and even more anger directed at the anger itself. It’s like a cycle of shit.
I haven’t let myself feel this way in a while. Only when I am drunk does it come out.
I sit at my desk. I text Katherine and tell her I feel sick, “like congealed lamb fat left over from lunch now in the fridge.”
I keep texting. I say I miss being her friend now that she has been promoted.
I am . . . radically honest.
She is kind. Katherine is always so kind.
And I keep sitting there, unable to move. The clock says 7:55 p.m. It is me and my best friend, Angie, the cleaning lady, once again. I look in an email folder I haven’t checked in ages. “Old Mail.” Therein lie emotional land mines. The soul equivalent of photographs taken right before an assassination—or, in this case, a marriage’s end.
In one email to my ex-husband, James, I tell him how some of my new friends, like Michael Malice, a very funny provocateur and author, remind me of him a little bit.
“They don’t remind you of me,” James wrote back. “They remind you of aspects of me. No one reminds me of you.”
I keep wanting to scratch the pain.
Angie, the cleaning lady, maneuvers politely around me to remove my trash as I sit there, weeping openly. We talk all the time, but right now she knows to just let me be. I am having what Blanton calls “an orgasm of grief.” I have several.
I pick up my cell phone, and I have no desire to talk to Blaine. I know he doesn’t want to see or know about any of this weirdness. I know it is “a little strange.”
Impulsively, I call James, and I tell him about what an asshole I’ve been tonight. I tell him about finding these old emails, about being reminded of our old life in our ridiculous run-down house in Chicago with the stripped old cars in the yard and the concord grape mini-vineyard that we lay under looking at the stars and how it felt like the Grand Canyon. I tell him how badly he hurt me and how I want to forgive him but that everything is so contaminated by anger.
He tells me how I hurt him.
“I know you didn’t think you did, but when you said I was like an ‘alien,’ that hurt me,” he says. “It made me feel terrible.”
“I am sorry,” I say, bawling. “I am so sorry.”
He tells me about his girlfriend. I tell him about Blaine.
“You only call me when you want to talk about things that make you feel bad,” he says.
“Do you . . .” I choke out. “Do you want to hear about things that make me happy?”
“Yes,” he says, and
