Dirty Diana

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

—

D o not cry on the sidelines of your daughter’s soccer game. Do not cry donotcry.

It’s almost noon and the day is bright and hot. The opposite of crying weather. Do not cry. All around me, parents chat happily to one another and cheer on their kids. Oliver and I have barely spoken since yesterday’s therapy session, silently passing each other in the halls of our house, afraid we will say something we’ll regret. Something else we’ll regret. Whatever this new path we’re on is, it’s scary and unsettling, nothing like the warm safety of mediocrity. I miss it, suddenly. Feeling nothing.

In front of me, a woman slides her hand into the back pocket of her husband’s Levi’s, easy. In my head, I hear Jenna’s voice from months ago, telling me about how unnerving it was to see Raleigh, post-breakup, crying on the soccer game sidelines. “Maybe she just shouldn’t come?” Jenna had suggested. I look around today, and Raleigh isn’t here. The sun beats down on the back of my neck so I angle my body toward Oliver’s. As I do, he turns away. He offers everyone near us a drink from our cooler.

Everything is fine, I tell myself. The game is only an hour long.

But everything is not fine. And now here I am, standing on the sidelines, biting my bottom lip in an attempt not to cry.

“Emmy!” Oliver claps his hands. “Look alive!” Oliver laughs as Emmy turns a crooked cartwheel then picks a wedgie.

Her coach shouts at her to pay attention—“The ball, Emmy, the ball!”—but now Emmy is kneeling in the grass, distracted by a roly-poly. Usually in moments like these, I would look over at Oliver and we would laugh together. Our horrible little soccer player, surrounded by a sea of kids and parents who are seriously out to win. I reach for his hand and he buries it deep in his pocket.

I lower my big black sunglasses as the tears start falling. I turn on my heels and head straight for the car. Safer to cry there.

I keep walking. I notice Oliver doesn’t call out to me. Just feet from the car, I drop my key fob on the ground. “Shit.”

“Diana?” Liam stands behind L’Wren’s Range Rover, unloading canvas L.L.Bean bags full of halftime snacks. “Are you okay?”

That’s all it takes. I think of Raleigh again—this time in that orange volunteer vest, begging me not to be nice to her or the dam will break. In the glow of Liam’s genuine concern, the tears fall faster.

“Oh, shit, Diana. Here…” He opens L’Wren’s passenger door. “Get inside before the soccer moms smell weakness.”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t even know why I’m crying like this. I’m fine.” I try to laugh but it comes out more like a strangled hiccup.

When I look up, his eyes are full of sympathy. There’s not a hint of panic at the sight of a sad woman crying in his car. He leans over me to the glove box and hands me a tissue.

“It’s okay to not be fine, Diana. What happened?”

“Ugh. Just a bad day. I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

“Yeah, you said that.”

“Things with Oliver suck.” I wipe my nose. “He’s been lying to me about playing poker when he’s really going to a strip club.”

“Shit. That does suck. Which one?”

“Yellow Rose. I think that’s what it’s called.”

Liam hands me another tissue. “That one’s better than most. Not like it’s gonna make you feel better, but at least he has decent taste.”

I blow my nose again. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, Liam, you know?” I can’t really believe I’m confessing all this to a twentysomething, to my friend’s stepson. But now that I’ve started talking it’s like I can’t stop. “I keep ‘making a plan’ but what does that even mean? Most of the day, I feel numb. Like I’m watching my life unravel from the sidelines and there is nothing I can do about it. And the only pleasure I get is from interviewing other women talking about their sex lives.” I laugh-cry. “Meanwhile my own sex life is a fucking disaster.”

Liam looks out the front windshield and exhales. I am stunned with what I’ve just told him—and he seems stunned to have heard it. But I also feel better, lighter somehow. Liam turns toward me, “Uh, let’s pause on this interview thing. What’s all that about?” I chuckle, letting my ragged breathing kill the quiet.

“No? Okay. Wanna hit?” Liam offers up a joint from the pocket of his T-shirt.

Just as I’m shaking my head no, I say, “Sure.”

He lights it, and I take a long drag. A warm sensation washes through me, familiar and nostalgic. I sink back into the passenger seat.

“Does L’Wren have another way home?” I ask.

“Kevin’s here with his car, so yeah.”

“Good. Do you mind getting us out of here?”

“I’d love to.”

It feels incredible to speed away. I roll down my window and hold my arm out into the breeze. I lean into the warmth of my buzz. I have no idea where we’re going.

“So. Interviews?”

I can’t help giggling, like I’ve blown Liam’s world right open.

“Can it stay between us? For now?”

“Naturally.”

I tell him about the site I’m figuring out how to build. “I thought the interviews would be more like they’d been before, like backgrounds for more paintings,” I explain. “But what I’m realizing is how they stand completely on their own, full of longing.”

“Like auditory erotica.”

I like the sound of that. I had never put it that way before. “I guess the thing is, I’m realizing that I don’t feel whole unless I’m making something. It doesn’t really matter what it is.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Liam is quiet for a while, his eyes on the road, before turning down the music and asking, “Can I take you somewhere?”

—

We pull up to L’Wren’s empty house and Liam walks me inside. I’ve been to L’Wren’s house hundreds of times over the years—for baby music classes and playdates, book clubs and so many holiday dinners, but in all those times I’ve never once seen the basement where Liam lives. The door to his stairs is always closed and there’s no reason for me to go down. And as he walks me down the steep staircase, the first thought that crosses my stoned brain is a serial killer must live here.

The room is dimly lit, and L’Wren’s foster cats are sleeping on every available surface. More alarming, two of the cats are playing tug-of-war with what looks like a bloody wound on discarded skin. On the desk, beside Liam’s computer, there’s a bust of something like a bashed-in head and three spare limbs in a pile.

“Welcome to my sanctuary.” Liam holds out his arms and does a slow spin. Despite all the cats, all I smell is acrylic paint.

“Liam? What is all this?” I pick up a silicon wound, one of five lined up on the cookie sheet on top of his neatly made bed. It’s the size of my thumb and an orangey kind of flesh color with a blood-red gash down the middle.

“Yeah. I made all this.”

“You made these?”

“I sell them for Halloween costumes, murder-mystery parties, and to a few people in the industry.” His chest puffs a little when he says industry, just a little. “I have my own website. And a pretty cool Etsy shop. And not to brag or anything, but I just sold three bullet holes to the NCIS makeup team.”

“Liam! That’s great! Does L’Wren know all this? That you make these?” I hold up an impressively deep and real-looking wound the size of a small plate.

“Yeah, that one’s a throat slit. It took me almost three hours to get it right. It still needs some work.”

He holds up the bashed-in head. “Thank you, Wonderland murders. Barbara Richardson’s head was so messed up the top of her skull was flat. It’s on YouTube if you want to see it.”

“Oh. Maybe later,” I deflect. “L’Wren told me you’ve been painting. Does she know you’re making all this great stuff? Or your dad?”

“Painting? Is that really what she says? Or is it more like, ‘he stays in that dungeon all day doing lord knows what!’?” His impression is so spot-on we both laugh. “She and Dad know a bit. I asked if I could practice on them, but they turned me down. I need more guinea pigs.”

“I like this one,” I say, touching a thin, deep wound.

“Yeah, me too. It’s a kitchen-knife gash. Three inches deep. Serrated knife. I have more tentative wounds, but I like the confidence of this one.”

Liam talking about his work with such love and affection is the best thing I’ve heard all day. “Wanna try it on?”

“Sure.”

Liam nudges a sleeping cat off his La-Z-Boy recliner and places a pillow over the seat, which the cats have clawed to shreds. I sit and he explains that he designed this wound to fall across the abdomen. His ears go pink as he realizes I’ll have to at least partially lift my shirt. I roll up my T-shirt to just below my bra then lean back into the massive chair. I close my eyes.

I flinch when the first stroke of some kind of cold gel touches my skin. “Sorry,” he apologizes under his breath. He is deep in concentration, his brushstrokes slow and delicate. I’m reminded of the seaweed wraps my mother-in-law takes us for at the spa. I’m almost drifting off to sleep when Liam asks, “So are you going to divorce Oliver?”

“No. We’re in a weird place, for sure, but we wouldn’t get divorced.” I suddenly wish Liam were my therapist and not Miriam. He’s so much easier to talk to. Or maybe it’s the weed. Maybe edibles before couples therapy is the answer.

“Diana.” I open my eyes and his face is inches from mine, a small makeup brush in his hands. His eyes are red and glassy and earnest. “I’m about to drop some real knowledge on you.”

I laugh, but he doesn’t break his gaze. “Okay.”

“Love the thing that loves you back.”

I smile. “Deep.”

“Thanks. I heard it on a podcast L’Wren and I listen to while we bathe the cats.”

“There is so much to unpack in that sentence.”

“I know. Right?” He stands to stretch his legs and study his work. “But I kind of agree. People are paying me to make this stuff—it’s loving me back and I’m loving it, you know? So can I give you some advice?”

“More?”

“I’ve seen a lot of Rockgate divorces. And it never goes well for the women.”

Again I think of Raleigh and feel a heaviness in my chest. “Yeah, so I’ve heard.”

“A few years later, the men are already remarried and living in even bigger houses and the women are left holding a big shit-bag of resentment. And they’re pissed because they put all that energy into something that wasn’t working.”

“But what if it’s their fault it wasn’t working?”

“Is that what you think? That it’s one person’s fault? It never works that way.”

“Jesus, Liam. You need your own podcast,” I say, then worry it came out too sarcastic. “I mean it. You’re really smart.”

“I just don’t want that to happen to you. Unless that’s what you want.” He dips his makeup brush in two different shades of red, then paints around my knife wound. “I guess what I’m saying is, whether you and Oliver stay together or you split, have the thing that’s just yours.”

He fans his hands over the wound to help the paint dry.

“Do you want some strangulation marks? Around your neck?”

“Why not?”

As Liam brushes on some purple and blue bruising around my neck, I look around his tiny, dark space, covered in makeup and rubber and sleeping cats. I can feel his pure desire to make something that he can call his own. I know this desire.

“Take a look.” He holds up a mirror. “Now you finally look how you feel.”