Open Book by Jessica Simpson

Open Book by Jessica Simpson

Author:Jessica Simpson [Jessica Simpson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062899989
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


13

The Gilded Cage

Spring 2005

We sat in the living room on a rare afternoon home together. By then, it wasn’t often that we were even in the same city. I traveled so much that I no longer had jetlag, just a permanent back and forth of restlessness and fatigue. We were on the couch, and Nick made some crack about me, I don’t know what. Probably one that I used to think was funny, and I said something mean. As usual, we launched into our long list of grievances with each other . . .

And we stopped. At the same time, we looked over to the TV and nodded to each other. Silently, we got up from the couch, left the house, and walked to an empty lot nearby. Only then, safe from anybody hearing, did we quietly scream at each other.

Production had stopped on our show, and the last sad episode ran in late March, but we were paranoid that we were still being taped. Looking back, I know we sound crazy, but when you live in a house with hidden cameras for years—in the TV and in the corners—it’s hard to believe that they’re all really gone. We had reason to be paranoid. Details of our conversations and troubles would show up on the news. Tabloids made up the dumbest things about us, but sometimes they would get something so right it was scary.

So we started leaving the house whenever we had to discuss something delicate. I kept thinking of The Firm, when Tom Cruise’s character finds out his evil law firm has secretly wired his entire house with listening devices. When he tells his wife, she bolts from the house, terrified, and they go to a park where they can talk without anybody listening in. “Everything, every single thing we’ve said or done since we’ve been in that house,” she says, “nothing has been between us.”

He suspected my friends were selling stories, I suspected his. My protective mother had a guilty until proven innocent approach to everyone around us. The one friend we agreed would never do it was CaCee, but I was already becoming isolated from her. She was afraid to even go to restaurants with me because she was convinced someone would overhear me running my mouth and sell it, and I would blame her.

CaCee knew my biggest secret: That I was still in touch with Johnny Knoxville. We wrote these flowery love letters back and forth, often at night with Nick passed out in the bed next to me. We talked about music, and I would listen to the Johnny Cash songs he suggested just to feel like we were still together. Whenever I wanted to read CaCee some gushy letter from him, she would refuse. It was like Johnny and I were prison pen pals, two people who wanted so much to be with each other but were kept apart—by bars, by our stars, by our respective spouses.

I would delete every email, convinced Nick would find out.



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