It was going to be sweet.
Like most plans for revenge, mine was both simple and petty. For weeks I had been keeping track of every insult, every indignity, every bizarre, paranoid accusation slung my way by the woman whose face swims up from the inky black depths when I close my eyes, whose very name has become to my ears the sound of a rusty door slamming shut. This nightmare of a woman, this swollen deer tick of prozac-fueled Stepford sensibility, burrowed her way into my skin and sat there for weeks, growing fatter and more entrenched with each passing day. Toward the end of the show, there were days when the only thing that kept me from hurling a dish of semi-homemade bacon-wrapped dates into her face was the knowledge that, in the end, it would be a temporary joy - a brief surge of adrenaline followed by the realization, probably as I stepped through the door to my apartment, that I was once again jobless in New York City, with several bridges burned.
No, in the end I knew that such satisfaction, though sublime beyond words, would be nothing more than a temporary and minor embarrassment. The makeup artist would scrape the bacon grease from her hair and teeth and she'd change into a new dress. By the time I reached the subway station three blocks away it would be like it never happened.
The plan, then, was simply to wait until the show was finished and, the very minute the non-disclosure agreement no longer applied, hit the internet and shout from the electronic rooftops that the host of the show is a horrible cunt. More than that, I would spell out, in excruciating detail, the exact manner in which she is a horrible cunt. On days when her behavior was particularly cruel or bizarre, the only thing that kept me from getting into a red-faced shouting match with her was the certainty that even the ugliest, most wretched names I could sling into the gaping blond void of her face would pale next to the merciless and infinitely more public excoriation I had planned - the very blog entry you're now reading.
I kept a piece of paper tacked up on the wall above my bed that listed, day by day, exactly how much money I would have lost had I quit my job. Next to it was a second piece of paper, crumpled and creased from weeks of being pulled from my wallet and hastily scribbled on. It is covered, front and back, by an exhaustive list of this woman's wrongs. They range from the mild and prosaic (SL told the head cook she'd be pretty if she didn't dress like a boy) to the aggressively unpleasant (SL told one of her guests not to say "please" to me when he asked me to get him some water) to the unsettling (SL hissed at me in the hallway that she knew I was putting soap in her food). And these a just the tip of the iceberg. The rabbit hole gets much, much deeper.
Two weeks ago, however, it fell upon me to stick around after work while SL talked with the director at a bar so I could drive her back to Manhattan. The idea of being in a car alone with a woman who had announced to a room full of people that she didn't like me made my head ache, so I sat in the van on the street outside the bar, arms crossed over my chest in sullen anticipation of the awkward half-hour to come, and told myself not to say anything stupid.
When she finally climbed into the car she started asking me about myself in that overly-friendly way that two people who dislike each other have when they're suddenly thrown into such close proximity for the first time. Plus she was drunk. I told her I had just moved to New York from California, she told me she was going to be on the weekend version of the Today Show, and so on and so on, in a robotic approximation of a real conversation. She asked me if I had any plans for Valentine's Day, I said not really and asked her the same. She didn't say anything for a while, and I assumed she either hadn't heard me, or the friendliness put there by the booze had started to wear off. After a couple of minutes I heard a small, choked sob and realized that she was crying.
There is something of a running joke between me and my friends that women - for reasons which, truth be told, I prefer not to examine too closely - are compelled to confess to me, in grim and unsparing detail, how lonely they are. And while there's something to be said for baring one's soul, there's also something to be said for timing. A lot to be said for timing. A lot.
Loneliness - desperate, cold, suffocating loneliness - has been confessed to me, among other places, in crowded movie theaters, in rambling five-minute voice mails, on flights to Japan, and in the middle of an up-until-then normal blow job. Add to that long and storied list one more: in a minivan idling in traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, by the host of a nationally televised cooking show.
The problem, of course, is that while growing up with three younger sisters has endowed me with the ability to mask my discomfort while a woman tearfully talks out her problems, I've very seldom said or done anything to warrant such a wide and sudden window in the deepest recesses of her soul - and whether it is simple unluck of timing, or some pheremonal signal, or a strange confluence of the two, when their confession is met only with understanding nod and generic shoulder to cry on, it hits them that they've spilled their guts to a sympathetic stranger on a plane, or in a voice mail, or to a guy whose dick was just in their mouths, and their desperate, unfettered honesty is replaced in quick succession by embarrassment - close cousin, I imagine, to the embarrassment you feel when you realize you've been talking into a telephone line that's gone dead.
So I found myself trapped in a minivan with a woman for whom I feel nothing even remotely positive, while she sobbed into her hands that she doesn't have anyone, torn between telling her that she'll always be lonely if she treats everyone around her with such contempt and saying something nice, however unheartfelt. In the end I said only that it's easy to be lonely in New York. She wiped her eyes and we passed the rest of the ride in silence.
The next day the woman who had once threatened to fire me for using the wrong towel to wipe up a spilled cocktail, who'd once accused me of putting a dead cockroach in her room, who'd asked me in front of a set full of people if I was gay, then followed it up by saying I couldn't be because she likes gay guys, was all smiles and please-and-thank-yous, all shoulder rubs and sweetie this and that. The transformation was, at the risk of understatement, noticeable, and even the makeup artist, a six-foot-four flaming queen from some Balkan backwater, told me that she'd stopped complaining about me by name and had taken instead to saying blandly unpleasant things about the crew as a whole.
And I now realize that I can't bring myself to expose all of this woman's wrongs, to call her out by name and show the world - or a very, very small slice of it - what an ugly human being she is. She is many things, but for all of her outward cruelty, for all of her acid-tongued spite, for all the many ways in which she brings upon herself every ounce of contempt burning in the chests of the decent, hard-working people who surround her, she is above all a deeply unhappy woman so burdened by the great weight of her own self-loathing that she is incapable of doing anything but hurling it at the people around her. She is, in the end, just another lonely New Yorker.
We filmed the final episode of her show last Friday, and I was once again called upon to stick around after work. We were scheduled to start dismantling the set the next Monday, and she wanted to use it for a photo shoot. Our crew went home, and I sat in the production office while a bunch of photographers from some magazine snapped pictures of SL out on the set. Around one o'clock there was a great commotion in the hall outside the office, and I stuck my head out the door to see a crowd of people standing outside the door to her dressing room, trying to coax her out. After a couple of minutes she emerged to their enthusiastic applause, eyes puffy and cheeks wet (though, as was pointed out to me in a flamboyant lisp, makeup still perfect). She was leaving the set for the last time, the last time ever, and dozens of hands fell upon her back in a round of good-jobs and we-all-love-yous.
The crowd moved toward where I stood somewhat uncomfortably by the craft service table, arranging and rearranging the packets of gum and candy and trying not to appear as if I were paying attention. As she passed me our eyes met and I mumbled something about, y'know, good luck sandie. She raised her hand for a high-five, which I met noncommittally and which collapsed into an oddly intimate half-handshake, with our fingers interlocking. We stood there for a moment, hands held in mid-air, and I was just about to pull away when she threw her arm around my shoulders and hugged me. Then she disappeared again into the sycophantic swirl of bodies, which carried her off to the town car idling outside.
Once everyone was gone, I took out the trash, shut off all the lights and drove home feeling angry, but not sure at what. I decided to take surface streets up to 119th instead of taking the highway, and at a stoplight near Union Square I saw a bunch of drunk NYU kids patting their friend on the back as she threw up onto the sidewalk. By the time I got home it was two in the morning and I was too tired to do much more than pass out.
At some point in the night, the list of her wrongs fell off the wall and landed on the bed, and when I woke up the next morning it was stuck to my face. I pulled it off and threw it in the trash.
