Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

Doc…Doc… He tried to make his mind form the image, but it wouldn’t take shape.

He stood up and carried the ball back around the garage to the hoop. He began to dribble. He was Julius Erving, a little slower than he used to be, but still a giant, still flying…Doc.

Instead of the roar of the crowd, he heard a different sort of music playing in his head.

Inside the house, the hours slipped by and the pile of discarded manuscript pages grew at Fleur’s feet. Her hair slipped from its combs, and her back got a crick from sitting in the same place for so long. As she reached the final page, she could no longer hold back her tears.

When I think of ’Nam, I think of the music that was always playing. Otis…the Stones…Wilson Pickett. Most of all, I think of Creedence Clearwater and their bad moon rising over that badass land. Creedence was playing when they loaded me on the plane in Saigon to go home, and as I filled my lungs with that last breath of monsoon-heavy, dope-steady air, I knew the bad moon had blown me away. Now, fifteen years later, it’s still got me.

Fleur found Jake by the garage, sitting on the ground just beyond the reach of the floodlights. He was leaning against a stone wall, a basketball propped in his lap, and he looked as though he’d walked through the fires of hell, which wasn’t far from the truth. She knelt beside him. He stared up at her, the shutters drawn and tightly locked, daring her to pity him.

“You’ll never know how much you scared me,” she said. “I forgot about you and your damned metaphors. All that talk about massacres, and the little girl in the shirt with the yellow ducks…I saw you wiping out a village full of innocent civilians. You scared me so bad…It was like I couldn’t trust my own instincts about you. I thought you’d been part of some obscene massacre.”

“I was. The whole frigging war was a massacre.”

“Metaphorically speaking, maybe, but I’m a little more literal-minded.”

“Then you must have been relieved to learn the truth,” he said bitterly. “John Wayne ended his military career in a psychiatric ward pumped full of Thorazine because he couldn’t take the heat.”

There it was. The secret that haunted him. The reason he’d erected such indomitable walls around himself. He was afraid the world would find out he’d broken apart.

“You weren’t John Wayne. You were a twenty-one-year-old kid from Cleveland who hadn’t gotten many breaks in life and was seeing too much.”

“I freaked out, Flower. Don’t you understand that? I was screaming at ceilings.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t write beautiful, sensitive plays that look into people’s hearts and not expect to be torn apart when you see human suffering.”

“A lot of guys saw the same things, but they didn’t freak.”

“A lot of guys weren’t you.”

She reached out for him, but before she could touch him, he stood up and turned his back toward her. “I managed to arouse all your protective instincts, didn’t I?” The words whipped her with their scorn. “I made you feel sorry for me. Believe me, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

She stood, too, but this time she didn’t try to touch him. “When you gave me the manuscript, you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to react to it. Did you expect me to respond as though I’d just seen one of your stupid Caliber pictures? I can’t do that. I don’t like watching you drill people full of bullet holes. I liked you a lot better curled up on that cot in the hospital, screaming your heart out because you weren’t able to stop what happened in the village. Your pain made me suffer with you, and if you can’t handle that, then you shouldn’t have given me the book.”

Instead of settling him, her words seemed to make him angrier. “You didn’t understand a damned thing.”

He stalked away, and she didn’t go after him. This was about him, not her. She made her way to the pool and stripped down to her bra and panties. Shivering with cold, she looked into the dark, forbidding water. Then she dived in. The frigid water stole her breath. She swam to the deep end and turned over to float on her back. Cold…suspended…waiting.

She felt a deep, wrenching pity for the boy he’d been, raised without any softness by a mother who was too tired and too angry over the unfairness of her life to give her child the love he’d needed. He’d looked for a father in the men who frequented the neighborhood bars. Sometimes he found one; sometimes he didn’t. She considered the irony of the college scholarship he’d received-not for his fine, sensitive mind, but for a ruthless slam dunk.

As she floated in the icy water, she thought about his marriage to Liz. He’d continued to love her long after their relationship was over. How typical of him. Jake didn’t give his love easily, but once he gave it, he didn’t withdraw it easily, either. He’d been numb with pain when he’d enlisted, and he’d futilely tried to distract himself with war, death, and drugs. He hadn’t cared if he survived, and it frightened her to think about how reckless he’d been. When he hadn’t been able to stop what happened in the village, he’d broken. And despite all those long months in the VA hospital, he’d never really recovered.

As she looked into the night sky, she thought she understood why that was.

“The water’s cold. You’d better get out.” He stood at the side of the pool, his posture neither friendly nor unfriendly. He held a beer in one hand. An orange beach towel dangled from the other.

“I’m not ready.”

He hesitated, then carried the towel and the beer over to a lounge chair.

She studied the racing clouds overhead. “Why did you blame me for the block?”

“The problem started when I met you. Before you came along, everything was fine.”

“Got any ideas about that?”

“A few.”

“Care to toss them out?”

“Not particularly.”

She pulled her legs under her and began to tread water. “I’ll tell you why you couldn’t write. I was storming the fort. Breaching those walls. You’d built them thick and strong, but this funny nineteen-year-old kid who ate you up with her eyes was tearing them down as fast as you could build them. You were scared to death that once those walls took their first shot, you’d never be able to build them up again.”

“You’re making it more complicated than it was. I couldn’t write after you left because I felt guilty, that’s all, and we both know that wasn’t your fault.”

“No!” She cut through the water until her feet touched bottom. “You didn’t feel guilty. That’s a cop-out.” Her throat was tight. “You didn’t feel guilty because you didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. You made love to me because you wanted me, because you even loved me a little.” A painful lump made it hard to breathe. “You had to have loved me, Jake. I couldn’t have generated all that feeling by myself.”

“You don’t know anything about what I felt.”

She stood shivering in the water, the wet bra clinging to her breasts, the flower necklace stuck to her skin. Suddenly she saw it all so clearly that she wondered why she hadn’t understood it before. “This is about macho. That’s all this is. With Sunday Morning Ec1ipse, your writing had become too self-revealing, and then I came along at the same time and all your warning flashers went off. You didn’t stop writing because of me. You stopped because you were afraid to peel off any more layers. You didn’t want everybody to know that the tough guy on the screen-the tough guy you’d had to be while you were growing up-wasn’t anyplace close to the real man.”

“You sound like a shrink.”

Her teeth had begun to chatter, making her words come out in short, broken bursts. “Even when you joke about your screen image, you’re subtly winking your eye. Like you’re saying-‘Hey, everybody, sure it’s just acting, but we all know I’m still one hell of a man.’”

“That’s bull.”

“You started playing the tough guy when you were a kid. If you hadn’t, you’d have gotten swallowed up by those Cleveland streets. But after a while, you started believing that’s who you really were, this man who could handle anything. A man like Bird Dog.” She climbed up the steps, shivering as the air hit her. “Bird Dog’s exactly who you want to be-someone who’s emotionally dead. Who never feels pain. A man who’s safe.”

“You’re full of crap!” The beer bottle slammed down on the table.

Instead of accepting that he wasn’t invulnerable, he was lashing out against the closest target. Her. She gripped the railing, her shoulders hunched against the cold, her chest tight with anguish. “Bird Dog’s not half the man you are. Can’t you see that? Your breakdown is a sign of your humanity, not your weakness.”

“Bullshit!”

Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak. “If you want to heal yourself, go inside and read your own damned book!”

“Fucking unbelievable, you’re so wrong.”

“Read your book and try to feel a little compassion for that poor, brave kid who’d had his nerves burned raw-”

He jumped up from his chair, his face white with fury. “You missed the whole point! You don’t get it! You didn’t see what’s right in front of you. This isn’t about pity!”

“Read your book!” she cried into the cold night. “Read about the kid who didn’t have a single person in the world who gave a damn about him!”

“Why can’t you understand?” he shouted. “This isn’t about pity! This is about disgust!” He kicked away a chair that stood in his path and sent it crashing into the pool. “I want you to feel disgust so you get out of my fucking life!”

He stormed toward the house, and the gates of the couvent slammed shut on her for the thousandth time. He walked away like they all did, leaving her stranded, cold, and alone. She sank down on the concrete, shivering and numb. The old cedars around the house groaned. She grabbed for the orange beach towel and wrapped herself in it. Then she rested her head on her pillow of ruined clothes and drew up into a ball. Finally she let herself cry until she had no tears left.