All the Girls in Town

RED-2

Peter’s wounded ego turned their lives into an emotional roller coaster.

There were days of tender and harsh words, nights filled with kisses and fights, a weekend of laughter, followed by an unkept promise, suspicious behavior, ignored red flags. Their love made her happy, made her terrified, left her feeling crazy, but she clung to it fiercely, certain that one day the good times would return.

Red went on a big job interview for a regional coordinator position at Planned Parenthood, and Peter f****d Prisha, an Indian immigrant he’d met at the laundromat.

Red got the Planned Parenthood job. Peter took her to dinner to celebrate. Over the tiramisu, he broke the news about Prisha.

“Why?” Red had sobbed.

“Sometimes, a guy wants something different.” Peter had shrugged.

After Peter had carried his last box to the car and driven away to Prisha, Red walked to the Liquor Mart at the corner and bought a bottle of Chianti for seven dollars. That night, she laid on the couch and drank the whole thing, listening to Joni. If the neighbors heard her sobs, she didn’t care. She woke up in a fetal position on the floor at four a.m. and threw up what little remained in her stomach. That afternoon, she bought another bottle. She called in sick to work for a week, eyes swollen from crying, head pounding, stomach aching from alcohol and sorrow. She never slept in their bed again. She took kitchen shears to the red locks he’d loved, burned the lyrics he’d written her in the kitchen sink, and stomped on every Joni album until they were shards of plastic. A month later, she donated what little furniture they’d shared to Goodwill and moved into a studio apartment across the Valley. But she never gave up the wine. Wine was the only thing that dulled the hurt.

A year later, she heard that Peter had kicked out Prisha to marry an ordinary, dumpy white girl named Danielle. Life was all gray.

Twenty years later, she was drinking Mai Tais with Matt at La Cita downtown, and suddenly, there stood Peter. Still handsome. His dark eyes lit with warm recognition. She’d smiled, nodding her head.

“Girl, be careful,” Matt had warned placing a hand on her arm.

A few more Mai Tais and an impromptu set on stage drove the girls crazy. Peter’s eyes bore into her soul from the stage. There was chemistry, intimacy, and yes, understanding, I see you, and you see me for who I really am. She’d felt the connection as strong as ever. He was singing original material. It was f*****g good. His voice was rock solid real. He was famous, for God’s sake. He’d overcome his fears.

Twenty years erased like a day.

How to explain a relationship out of time in the real world? How to make sense of a recognition for another soul? He felt like a member of her family, a twin, brother or husband, returning from another lifetime.

Sure, she’d glanced for a while at the tabloid covers in line at the grocery store. The divorce and subsequent legal battle over rights for his first hit, the song that had skyrocketed The Disasters from playing KROQ’s Weenie Roast to Coachella. Peter’s charisma had propelled the band to the top of the charts. Red didn’t own a TV, but even she’d heard he was living with the beautiful backup singer in his band.

“Tabloid rumors,” Peter said, promised even. He’d been unhappy in his marriage for a while. “Sasha let me crash at her pad when Dani kicked me out. She’s cool, more like a sister. I don’t even think she’s that pretty. Not like you. You . . . .” He’d clasped his hands to his heart in that familiar gesture, and Red had instantly fallen for him all over again.

She ignored Matt’s vocal warnings, “I’m watching the red flags as they sail on by.”

God, she’d missed this, the insatiable hunger—yes, to be desired completely by this man. She continued to ignore the red flags. She swatted away Matt’s whispers and pleas until he left the bar.

Drinking made it easier to forget, to forgive—whatever it was that alcohol did for her.

Yes, yes, smell, taste, all of it. All of the mistakes, yes, he’d agreed. Mistakes made for wisdom, he’d repeated, “You’re really different. I like it.”

Another red flag unfurled and sailed into the wind as Red surrendered, inviting him to her home and into her bed before three a.m.

Years of cognitive behavioral therapy, self-help book groups, several fairly healthy, very boring boyfriends, a supportive girlfriend, Al-Anon and spiritual study, and true love had returned to Red. Peter was weary of his animal ways and ready to be a better human.

That’s the story Red told herself. She had changed her bad love karma, and love had returned a changed man, ready to make up for his mistakes.

For ten blissful, s*x-filled days, they’d hidden from the world in her small blue house in Echo Park, a sliver of greenish pond viewable from the bathroom window. Peter, anxious to stay far away from paparazzi, said, “No, let’s stay in,” ordering takeout or making pasta, drinking Chianti, making love on the living room couch, on a chair in the kitchen, the bathtub, on the floor of her bedroom next to the golden eyes of the curious cat. Red wanted to drink in every bit of him before The Disasters left on the first leg of their North American tour.

She’d think of those late nights, naked in the bath, curled against his body, glistening in the candlelight, so tender and intimate. I could drink a case of you, and I would still be on my feet.

I would still be on my feet, she sung in reply, completely forgetting that she’d grown to hate the melancholy of Joni Mitchell.

“I always thought you had the most beautiful voice,” Peter whispered, stroking her hair, winding his finger around a strand. “I wish you were singing backup on my tour. Come with me?”

“I have a job, silly.” She splashed warm water at him. “I can’t just drop everything for months.”

“I’m kinda nervous,” he confessed. “I’d be all right with you by my side.”

This should have been the biggest flaring red flag.

Like a drag on a cigarette after years without, the brain remembered yes binding to synapses, yes, this was coming home chemistry. Be mine, baby. Baby, be mine. Yes, she’d cried into his shoulder. Red and Peter, love is touching souls because surely you touched mine.

Red had used all of her sick days and vacation time at the clinic to reconnect.

Standing together on the sidewalk outside of her house that last morning, she’d wrapped her arms around him, smelling the clean, soapy scent of his neck, winding her fingers through his luxurious locks, feeling like her heart might burst.

Peter bent down, tenderness in his eyes and kissed her again.

“I’ll miss you,” she’d repeated.

A black town car pulled to the curb.

Peter offered a distracted smile. “Oh, yeah. Talk to you soon, babe.” Climbing into the backseat, he said hello to the driver and shut the door without looking back, as another red flag sailed past.

The town car disappeared around the corner. Red walked back inside and shut the door, the high still lingering but the house quiet. She hit The Disasters on Apple Music, humming to his vocals on the new hit, “Postal Blues,” while she picked up sticky, half-finished cartons of Chinese food, empty wine bottles, even a pair of his dirty socks, carrying the trash bags out to the street. She folded the greasy pizza boxes and put them in the recycling bin. A slight breeze rustled the bamboo leaves lining the front yard, a quiet hum in her body still warm in oxytocin and melancholy. She’d shielded her eyes from the bright, midday light and looked across her yard at the boxed garden of carefully tended vegetables and herbs. Once vibrant and alive, they were now tinged with burn, limp and abandoned, almost dead.

A whisper of fear spread through her chest.

For several hours, Red had apologized to the withered plants, pulling weeds, until a small rain shower drove her back indoors with the cat to finish the last bottle of Chianti, convincing herself that it was old stuff, PTSD. Peter was different. The small house was too quiet, and when she knew his plane must have landed in Chattanooga, the first stop, she sent a text.

RED: Miss you! xo

And waited. She finished the wine, while raindrops pounded the sidewalk, the cat slept, and the world pulled away again.

That night, after several more unanswered texts and a voice message, Red finally went online, in a frenzy, to The Disasters’ i********:, driven by an unsettling dread. There were a lot of pictures of him with several pretty girls pouting out their lips and hanging onto his body. She scrolled deeper, moving away from the current successes and into older posts and band gigs until she found her—the girl he said he loved like a sister, onstage with the band in a small gig. The young woman he said wasn’t even that pretty. Like a sister. No, Sasha wasn’t pretty. She was luminous, curvy with dark, voluminous hair, big dark eyes, and light brown skin.

Her beauty hit like a bullet. Sasha was much different from Red’s pasty, freckled face.

Two days later, somewhere outside of New Orleans, Peter tried to ease her anxieties during a phone call. “Red, babe, listen. Sash isn’t on tour. Remember, I wanted you to come? I really needed you. We have twenty cities. A total gruel. When we’re not onstage, we’re sleeping.”

The Disasters’ pages told a different story: an orgy of late-night parties, bodies of drunken bandmates with fans and selfies of groupies, women half-dressed, laughter, crazy late-night stoned or drunk, heavy-lidded. Peter, red-eyed, tired or high. Both? She hated that he got high—that it relaxed his nerves before a show, only to put him down after. In truth, Red knew that as long as Peter was awake, he had to be using something—alcohol, drugs, women. He couldn’t live his truth sober.

While counseling women at her job at The East Valley Women’s Center, whether it was pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, listening to women who’d been battered, abused, or r***d, women who were addicted, anorexic, or bulimic, victims of hate crimes, cancer survivors, rich or poor, Red’s thoughts were elsewhere. She became obsessed that Peter was cheating or lying again to her. She worried like a needle on the groove, heart pounding to the music of anxiety. The shortness of breath, feeling of panic tight against her ribs. The images of him having s*x with other women invaded her at work, at the grocery store. Even while pumping gas, she had to fight to keep the demon of jealousy at bay. She needed to get a grip. She was a therapist for Christ’s sake. She had gone back to college to get the Ph.D. to prove it and then landed a better position. Peter became her drug again; she drank him night and day, fed off the anxiety, the release, the lies that kept her digging harder for the truth.

Six weeks later and no period, Red was forced to take real action when the test came back positive. She had to stop being the victim, waiting, looking at his social media pages, and do something to ease her suffering besides drinking red wine. “I’m flying out to see you,” she said through an announcement on his voicemail. “I’ve got exciting news.” It might have been a false positive, but her body told her differently. She booked a ticket. “I’ll be at the Oklahoma City show on Thursday. I love you.” A pit in her stomach. When he didn’t call back the next day, she’d sent a text. She must have sent over fifty without any reply.

On the day of her flight, she sat in her parked car in Burbank Airport’s long-term lot and texted him.

RED: I’m pregnant. (baby emoji)

Her cell rang.

“You work at Planned Parenthood.”

Her chest tightened. “I haven’t worked there in ten years.” She took a deep breath. “What’s going on?”

“Babe.” His voice softened. “Sash and I were secretly married six months ago in Bali. It’s all cool. She doesn’t care about other women. I wanted you on the road singing with me. I miss that, us together onstage. We work. But, this baby s**t, I really can’t handle it. You have no idea.”

She opened the car door and vomited onto the asphalt.

What a f*****g i***t she’d been.

Red tossed the empty beer bottle into the desert night, hearing it land with a soft clank on the earth. What kind of man acted like that? A sick man, a bad guy. A man who liked to hurt women because he could. A man who was selfish, who only saw love as a transaction and nothing more. Man, she hated it—needing him, like a drug. She danced, around the oil drum, screaming like a hyena. She was like a wounded animal, pounding her fists on her chest, swinging her red hair, like a circle of fire catching, unwinding her pain counter-clockwise, stomping back the last few months, the last twenty years, that one night, one man, who hadn’t cared. Peter again had unraveled her. She had to weave herself back together.

All day long she counseled women, girls, those who didn’t want another child, a runaway hiding from an abusive parent, or those who were impregnated by a deadbeat boyfriend who didn’t like condoms. Was there a choice? Whose choice was it? The woman. The woman. The woman. The woman got to choose, had to make the choice, to be in charge. It was all right to be a single mother, or to choose to be one later.

“For now, it’s legal, safe, and available,” she’d tell a terrified or defiant pregnant woman seated across from her.

I want to finish my law degree.

I want it.

I can’t afford it.

He hits me.

We don’t have the money for another baby.

I won’t make it. My diabetes.

It’s a baby.

It isn’t a baby.

It’s tissue.

It’s God.

It isn’t his.

It can be reincarnated.

I don’t feel anything for it.

What happens to it?

I always thought I’d want a baby.

I want to put her up for adoption.

I don’t want a kid.

He forced me.

Can’t I just get this over with?

How could this have happened?

I didn’t tell him.

I’m on the pill.

My parents would kill me.

Literally. He beats me.

My girlfriend says she’ll leave.

He wore a condom.

Am I a bad person?

Will I go to hell?

It isn’t the right time.

Does it hurt?

Yes. Yes, she assured each woman, the procedure would hurt a little, there would be a tug, cramps, like a period, but not much. Or nothing would happen at all. Either choice. Life was about suffering, except when it wasn’t. It was filled with hard choices. All gray, not black and white. This hard choice, to end her pregnancy, had broken the last of her heart.

How would she feel if she’d kept it? She would have been a good single mother. But what about the baby? What would the counselor tell this patient? The father was a s*x addict, a pothead, a pathological liar, possible sociopath with no sense of remorse, but he was also famous and rich. He had piles of cash to throw at a child with a dark pit in his heart. She did it knowing that all of the love she had to give in the world would never be enough for a kid with an unloving father. She promised herself that she did it knowing that Peter would leave an open wound in a child because he couldn’t love. Narcissists only loved their own reflection. She did it knowing that her decision would haunt her for the rest of her life. And there would be a karmic consequence.

When the doctor at the clinic performed the abortion, it had hurt a little, yes, like a tug, but it also felt like nothing for such a big something. It happened quickly; the nurse had offered a maxi pad like it was an answer or a salve to losing the hope of a life. To losing a life. Red stuffed it in her purse and walked away empty.

Sweating and exhausted, Red sat on the ground, finally, spent, all cried out. She gazed up at the dome of stars over the desert, one pinpoint brighter than the rest. Planet or satellite? The moon, a small sliver of white hung on an invisible thread, weightless, magical, and beautiful.

“Fool,” she yelled into the darkness. The wind picked up, a quiet growling across the desert floor, sending detritus skipping across the earth, remembering the words, the Buddha turns the wheel of the law: birth, sickness, old age, and death. Jesus wept.

But Red was going to take her f*****g power back.

She needed a solid plan, a way to get close enough to Peter’s shiny new life so that she could destroy him. Who could be an ally? Who hated Peter as much as or more than Red?