I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  Trying to describe Vaughn’s show made me wish I could get my shit together. For the first time since I’d entered and lost that stupid literary contest, I wanted to say something that mattered to another human being. I wanted to whisper in the ear of the anonymous public, to entice and entrance with my words.

  Eve had failed to make good on her threat to select my shows for me. I hoped it was because of Nate, the nemesis I had introduced into her miserable life. With Nate mocking her every action and Carl criticizing her every decision, I suspected Eve had her hands full.

  I stayed home for two days, in my pajamas, writing and revising. I didn’t see any other shows and I decided to commit all fifteen hundred words of my section to Hedda and to Vaughn’s company. I couldn’t stop thinking about the show, reliving it in my imagination. I couldn’t slow down or concentrate on anything else. I wrote draft after draft until it was exactly what I wanted it to be. I told myself this was a process Lee Todd would never understand. He was a hack, a selfish money-grubber. This was real writing. This was an act of love.

  At night I felt the spring chill and kept the windows shut. In the past I was accustomed to keeping them open a sliver to let the fresh air flow. Since Christmas I’d begun to experience a peculiar uneasiness about this habit. Even the thought of a cracked window gave me a nasty sense of being seen and vulnerable, at the mercy of something I couldn’t name or describe.

  As I said, it wasn’t my conscience driving me on. I’d been reading Nate’s awful stories with relish, amazed and impressed by his growing success, only bothering to stifle my glee at Eve’s discomfort during staff meetings. I was dying to feed Nate stray bits of gossip about her whenever she wasn’t around but he avoided me. At first I chalked this up to his undercover dedication. As time passed I wondered what was really driving him. He had long since proven the point I wanted him to prove. He had stolen a paying gig at a grunt newspaper by stalking then charming its publisher. During our preliminary sex he had said nothing about being a real journalist. I had no idea from which orifice he’d pulled his so-called credentials. Editors recommended him but I never knew if these were people Carl contacted or friends of Nate’s who contacted Carl with fake endorsements.

  What I knew for certain was that the guy wrote like one insane motherfucker. Fast, loose, unconcerned with critical or public reception. He wrote like a kid who had been told every day of his life that he was the greatest writer on the planet.

  His energy and stamina and his (false or true) zeal for journalism made Eve seem older than she was, by comparison. Carl and Nate never invited her to their frequent bull sessions and Carl never asked her opinion any more.

  Circulation was still climbing, not to Stranger or Weekly levels, but higher than anything Boom City or any of the other wannabes had ever experienced. Nate handled the situation by taking full credit, granting brief interviews to half the publications in town, and predicting we would overtake all of our competitors in the next two years.

  As a confirmation of Boom City’s growing success Carl was invited to spend a non-holiday weekend with his father. This was the morning I stopped by the office to hand in my review. I had to laugh at the childish joy with which Carl hoisted his jacket on and smiled and buttoned up for the long drive after coyly mentioning his destination.

  “It’s so sad,” Moo told me privately. “The way that man loves his father. And the guy’s a monster, a real dick.”

  I gave my review and profile of Vaughn’s company to Steve, who read it and promptly left the office for coffee. I didn’t care. Steve had his own process. Soon he would come back, do the edit and hand off my copy to Charlie. If I needed to trim the piece, Charlie would let me know. My plan was to read my mail and decide on a couple of shows and then head home once my word count was approved.

  “I’ll be in Port Townsend for three days,” Carl reminded Shelly, with a nod to Nate. “Should be good weather. Maybe I’ll stop by and see that secret mansion Knudsen’s building…”

  If a grown man could shit his pants and get away with it, Nate would have. That I saw him blanche and shake his head like a sick dog was a complete fluke. I wasn’t supposed to be there. But I was there and I had time to take it in. And Nate saw me take it in.

  “What am I thinking?” Carl said, oblivious, still wrangling the buttons on his jacket. “We’ll be on the boat, we’ll be on the boat all weekend. I won’t have time for Knudsen! Oh well.” And he waved goodbye before dashing away.

  I dropped my chin and shuffled through the batch of mail in my hands.

  “That guy!” Nate said loudly enough for everybody to hear him. “What a guy, huh?”

  It was his usual bluster, a constant echo of Carl’s manner. But his timing was off, just a bit. I wondered if he was losing his nerve.

  My relief at turning in my first rave review, which was also my first profile piece, and the anticipation of how pleased Vaughn would be, doesn’t explain why I failed to read the mood of everyone else in the office. I was killing time shuffling through the latest batch of press kits when Steve tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Eve wants to see you,” he said. “Right now.”

  I scanned the reception area. That’s when I finally noticed Charlie, Shelly, Ed and Ginny were skulking around. As I glanced at each of them one by one they turned away and pretended to be busy.

  “Really?” I said. “I was on my way home. Unless you want me to make changes to my review.”

  “Now,” he said. He had never looked as grim as when he informed me, “She wants you to meet her at Rosebud right now.”

  I was tired. On the walk to the café I could feel my legs slowing down. My body craved sleep. I barely noted the row of teenage girls sitting on the sidewalk, feet in the gutter, holding one another and sobbing. My mind registered only the ripped flower-print dresses and boots and the twists and barrettes in their hair.

  Inside the mauve temple of floral doom I went directly to Eve’s table and sat down. In the Nate era she had lost so much of her authority I rarely bothered to extend any courtesy. I was almost giddy whenever I imagined the day when she would finally have to leave the paper.

  “What’s up, Eve?” I slouched in my chair, still clutching my mail and my bag.

  She studied me with a combination of anger and the expression I’d once seen on my mom’s face before she stomped on a snail in her rose garden. She reached into the pile of papers before her, extracted a newspaper folded back to highlight an article, and slapped it down in front of me. Her manner shocked me until I gave the newspaper my attention and the first paragraph came into focus.

  Over the summer, all the girls traded in their scruffy oxfords for boots, steel-toed if they could afford it. Laced up tight and knotted for security. We wore them with flannel shirts and jeans so threadbare they nearly fell off our hips. We wore them with flower-print dresses slipping sideways to reveal black bras and tattooed thighs. We wore them to cafes and grocery stores, to work and to weddings. We wore them to bed…

  Surely my mouth was open when I looked across the table at Eve. Over the preceding months I had allowed my theft of Daisy’s essay to recede until it drifted away on a current of negligence. I hadn’t exactly forgotten what I’d done but I’d put a lot of people and work between my crime and myself. Gradually it had taken on the nature of a dream or an anecdote someone told to me over lunch. Now here it was in print under my nose. I flinched when Eve jabbed an index finger next to the byline and said, “I take it ‘Daisy Parrish’ is not your pseudonym?”

  Some people would have broken down and confessed. Others would have run away in tears. Here’s what I did. I stared at my nemesis, right into her bloodshot eyes, and asked, “What if it is? You can’t blame me for freelancing to pay the rent.”

  Eve could not have been more stunned if I’d dunked my hand in her cup and flicked cold coffee at her face. Then she did something I’d never seen her do before. She tilted her head back and she laughed, a sharp,
barking laugh like the sound a sea lion makes to call its mate. The ragged lines across her throat quivered and her saggy breasts jiggled. She laughed the way some people clear their windpipe of phlegm. When she was finished she fixed me with a grimace of pure contempt.

  “So you want to add a flagrant impersonation to your list of crimes,” she said.

  “What crimes?” I asked and I could hear my voice diminishing.

  “You are a plagiarist,” she said. “The worst kind of criminal. The lowest and most contemptible of creatures.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her.

  “Is this how you want to defend yourself? With more lies?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what you mean,” I said feebly.

  “I knew there was something wrong when I met you the first time.”

  “You hired me the first time we met,” I reminded her.

  I was still trying to push responsibility onto this woman I hated. How could it be my fault? I was the person who had been wronged. She had stolen my future, scuttled my plans for a literary career, and now she was accusing me of the worst thing a writer could do—which I had done, of course; nevertheless I was determined not to give her any extra satisfaction.

  “You stole this essay. You passed it off as your own. I know it’s true because I called the editor of the paper in Portland, and I warned him he might have printed a plagiarized essay. He contacted the author right away. She provided him with every draft she’s written. She also said she knew you. She said you were friends, and you advised her not to submit the essay. Now we know why, don’t we?”

  Every thought I’d had that day began to spin around me, gaining momentum, blurring in the background of the one thing I knew for certain, the one thing that mattered most. Daisy knew. She had been accused then interrogated by her boss. In her innocence she had followed the steps a real writer would follow, she had presented evidence to exonerate herself. Only then had she realized what a liar I was. We weren’t two journalists starting out together. She was a writer and I was a thief.

  “I didn’t submit this for publication,” I said. Treading water, as usual.

  “No. You put your name on it and passed it off as a professional sample. And…”

  I felt all the words in the universe gather around my head like a raincloud about to burst.

  “You’re fired.”

  “You have to pay me for my last week, and my last review,” I said. It sounded crazy even to me but it was all I had left.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Eve said, her lips drawn into wicked, thin lines. “I told Steve to throw away your last review. You’re lucky I don’t print a public apology to all the people you’ve maligned.”

  “You’re a fucking bitch, you know that?” I said.

  “You’re a fraud,” she said. “Go home.”

  A greenbelt in Ravenna, near dusk, trees shot through with orange-gold rays, leaves rustling and the faraway howling of a neglected dog.

  Oh, my goodness, look at both of you. Geared up and ready for duty. Tiny flashlights, whistles, and water bottles, and where did you get the dun shirts and camouflage khakis? Are you on safari?

  No, wait a minute. You’re on a date, a married date. You’re stomping around out here in the cold on a good-citizens-doing-good-things date.

  Your neighbor, the one who lives in the renovated bungalow surrounded by kitschy clocks and pricey lawn furniture, gave you a phone number to call. Homeowners are doing it for themselves, pitching in to clean up the metro area. Tidy the greenbelts in your neighborhood by gathering plastic, bottles, tin cans, pots and pans, clothing and backpacks, and throwing them away. If you throw away their belongings, do you expect the homeless people will follow? Will they disappear and move on to someone else’s neighborhood? Is that your ultimate fantasy here?

  Swinging your garbage bags full of clothes and food, you stumble over some roots, right yourselves, and giggle. This is exciting work, isn’t it? Better than the couples golf lessons and much better than movie night. Know why? It’s the element of danger. You’re like children stealing change from an elderly aunt’s purse. What can you get away with and not get caught by those horrible, cranky old men living in tents and boxes all around your otherwise adorable neighborhood?

  Tell you what, why don’t you kiss for luck? That’s right. On the lips, the way you used to kiss, before you bought an over-priced house in a dull part of town and worry became your only pastime.

  What do you have to worry about? The mayor wants you to pay higher property taxes, for one thing. More taxes to fund shelters for the homeless people who keep sleeping on your lawn and shitting under your shrubbery.

  Tell you another thing. All of this skulking around is hot. Go ahead. Kiss and make it count, tongues exploring, garbage bags dropping to the ground, hands feeling for purchase and pulling at khaki, sinking into the leaves with a final, mad giggle.

  Feel that? It’s thrilling because it’s wrong. It’s so wrong it makes you hard and wet, respectively. Ordinarily you wouldn’t dream of fucking here, in the leaves, practically on another person’s doorstep. All right, there’s no actual door to his tent, and that’s what makes him a vagrant while you’re a good citizen. Feel free to tumble over, sucking lips and dipping fingers into orifices. Go on. Enjoy acting like randy teenagers getting away with something.

  You’re so taken with yourselves you never hear the snap of twigs and the snick of a pocketknife opening. Oh, you won’t understand what’s happening because such things don’t happen to lovely people like you. But just in case you ever wonder, your murderer has a name, Griffin, and this is his home, and here you are the intruders.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  There wasn’t much to do at my apartment. Wash my three plates. Wipe the wine stains off the coffee table. Stare at the shitty orange carpet and pretend I would clean it if I had a vacuum cleaner. Ignore Vaughn knocking at the door and calling my name.

  On the way to my apartment I’d seen couples and small groups of people embracing, fighting back or giving in to tears. Sitting alone by my window above the street I lit a cigarette and watched the drizzle. Several kids gathered in the ATM alcove. One boy carried a bunch of wildflowers and he passed some of them to the others. A girl stood at the edge of the sidewalk leaning out into traffic as though deciding whether or not to fling her body into the street. One of the boys from the group went to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and drew her into his arms.

  “What the fuck?” I said out loud.

  “Oh no! No, no, no!” The words bounced up at me from the pavement. The barber from the shop below stood down there, shouting and weeping in the rain.

  From these clusters of random individuals, word spread in all directions, first across the city and soon across the world. Traffic didn’t stop. Restaurants didn’t close. Performances weren’t canceled. But everywhere, all afternoon and night, people would stop in the middle of a meal or a show or a concert and ask for a moment of silence or offer a tribute of some kind. I heard a company called Run/Remain began their performance with a solo dance, hard, passionate and heartfelt, to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I wouldn’t know for sure because I sat at my window all night lost in the wasted desires of my pathetic existence while half of the city around me mourned.

  In the days following the discovery of Kurt Cobain’s body there were thousands of tributes. Many were sincere and many were just a way to steal some of the spotlight. People who knew him divided into those who were stunned that he would commit suicide and those who had seen it coming. There were the compassionate observers who wished the best for his family and friends. There were the vicious curmudgeons who wished it had been someone else, someone they disliked. There were suicide experts and conspiracy theorists, followers and critics, and there were the few inevitable copycats. Guess which of these topics Boom City decided to feature and mock?

  I crawled back to Copy-Z after applying f
or work at almost every paper in town, and after receiving not so much as a phone call. By this time Tam was the new manager, and she was happy to have me back although she said our old scam wasn’t allowed on her watch, and she never left me alone in charge of the till.

  As soon as a couple of actors found out where I was working, theater folk started dropping by on a regular basis. They practiced their skills, playing out scenes in which they were shocked to see me in what they referred to in hushed tones as ‘reduced circumstances.’ They expressed their best wishes for me in my awful situation and invited me to come and see them in their latest shows. ‘Just ask so-and-so at Will Call for a discount ticket. No problem!’ Their icy, over-pitched laughter followed them down the street. Or they would come in with a set of flyers and posters and spend an hour deciding on sizes and colors before snapping the originals shut in a folder and heading off to another copy center.

  One day I was clearing sample pages off the counter when I saw Charlie walking past the shop. I waved and caught his attention. The way he glanced at me, as though he’d seen a fly buzz past or heard a ghost whispering and then turned away and walked on, was far worse than Eve’s condemnation.

  Until I saw Charlie that day I’d been thinking I was back where I started. I thought I was nothing again. But this was worse. I was less than nothing. Nothing still has the potential to be something. Nothing might wake up one morning and do something surprising.

  Back when I was nothing I thought I’d given up but it wasn’t true. You never really give up until other people give up on you. When you see someone who liked you or liked what he thought was you and he looks through you, past you, as though you’re another window, then you’re less than nothing. I was nobody and would be nobody forever. This is what everyone I met conveyed to me, with and without words.