The Year of Yes by Maria Headley

Author:Maria Headley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins

A COUPLE WEEKS LATER, my friend the Actress came to town. She was an onstage goddess, one of the most stunningly talented people I’d ever met. She lived, to her frustration, in L.A., where she was making a reasonable if unsatisfying living doing film, television, and the occasional worthwhile theater assignment. She came to New York intermittently, because L.A. was not the town for a woman like her—wild, dreadlocked, and unapologetically exuberant.

I owed the Actress. Just prior to the beginning of my Yes Year, she’d saved me from Martyrman. I’d met both of them at Sundance, and the fact that I’d immediately felt compelled to start lying to her about whether or not I was sleeping with him ought to have told me something. I’d still been a teenager, though, just out of high school, and he’d been tenacious. For over a year, we’d had a long-distance thing, him calling me every week or so and periodically coming from L.A. to visit me, while I dated all of NYU and bemoaned him to my roommates, too ball-less to break it off. One day, the Actress had called me up.

“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivaaaaaaaaaaa! Diva! I know you don’t care if I sleep with Martyrman, right? I’m sick of looking for anything else in this stupid size-two town.”

“Please,” I’d said. “Take him! Absolutely! Need his number?”

“Does that mean he’s bad in bed?” The Actress sounded suspicious.

“Not all that bad. Not all that good.” I had to be honest. She was a friend.

“Oh well, screw it, I’m desperate.”

She’d called me a couple of days later, and said, “Here’s the good news: It reminded me that I’m tired of men. I’m trying girls again.”

He, on the other hand, had said nothing about it. I’d therefore felt at least tangentially justified later that month when I’d broken up with him at a bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the useless folk-art capital of the universe. I’d happened upon him in the bathroom, putting talcum powder on his thighs, and that had been the end of whatever attraction I’d had left. Lubricated by an entire bottle of the bed-and-breakfast’s homemade apricot brandy, I’d swiftly ended things, using his liaison with the Actress as an excuse. Yes, this was beyond shallow, and yes, I felt guilty about it. I’d behaved rottenly, but then, so had he. He’d informed me, over and over, that I reminded him of his ex-wife, an Oscar-winning actress who’d left him for a grip. She, though brilliant, was fifty, and I was vain. After we’d broken up, he’d refused to take me back to New York, saying that (a) he just wanted to spend the rest of our romantic weekend together, and (b) he’d already paid for the B&B.

I’d been too broke to escape by train, and so we’d ended up spending three torturous nights together on a feather bed, trapped by out-of-season rains, the only people within a hundred miles who weren’t in love. We’d hunched bitterly over the frilly breakfast table, flinging scones like hockey pucks.

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