Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF

gorgeous blond hair in a tight braid. She’s fierce in sleep. Determined. Driven. The sunshine and bunnies thing is an act.
    In scattered bits and pieces, the night comes back to me.
    I sit, alone in my private study, bottle in my hand but still stone-cold sober, looking at the handgun that was given to me as a gift after I first played New York City cop Pierce Cane. I’ve used guns before, plenty of times. I’ve done the training. I know how to handle it safely. I know how to fire it. I know the kind of damage it can do.
    And I sit there, imagining my brains on the wall behind me.
    It was then that Irene came in. “This,” she says, “I will
not
let you do.
    “This,” she says, “is fucking stupid.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her drop the f-bomb, and I have to admit that it’s startling. But she’s not done. “Too fucking stupid even for you.”
    “I can’t breathe,” I tell her.
    “Of course not,” she says. “Look where you are, in this stupid, dark room. Who has a room like this, anyway?”
    “It’s a man cave,” I say defensively.
    “You don’t need a cave,” Irene says. “You need a mountain top. You need a beach. Joe, you need the sky. You need a life that’s not here, under this rock.” She leans across the desk that I’ve used to read countless scripts, to study countless characters as I prepared to live their lives instead of my own. “What kind of moron are you, anyway, that you would even take that gun out of its case? Here’s a newsflash, shit-for-brains, if you kill yourself, you’ll never make another movie. Which is exactly what you’re afraid will happen if you go running after that man who came to Henny’s to talk to you today, right?”
    “I’m not
afraid
it will happen,” I tell her as the idea of my actually finding the courage to run after Tommy makes my hands shake. “It
will
happen.”
    “You don’t know that for sure,” she says, but when I shake my head, she relents, even as she uses two fingers to pick up the handgun and gingerly put it back in its case. She closes and locks the box, and moves it clear across the room as she tells me, “Okay, so let’s live in that reality. You’re never going to make another movie. So what? You hate making movies. You hate your life enough tobe sitting here thinking about ending it. So why go straight to Plan Dead without trying Plan Gay?”
    I stare at her, uncomprehending.
    She spells it out. “Why not commit career suicide instead?” she asks me as she takes my open bottle and pours herself a drink. But she puts the bottle back in my liquor cabinet across the room, too. It sits there, well out of my reach. “Come out in some massively huge way. Skywrite it or announce it via megaphone down on Rodeo Drive. And then go chase after what’s-his-name—”
    “Tommy,” I tell her in a voice that sounds like I’m already dead and gone. “His name is Tommy Howe.”
    It’s the first time I’ve said his name aloud in years. And I can tell from the way she’s looking at me, with tears suddenly brimming in her eyes, that she knows that, too
.
    “Tommy Howe.” Irene repeats his name in her musical voice. “Oh, Joe, he still loves you, too.”
    “No,” I say, and the misery nearly chokes me. And now I’m also going to cry. “He doesn’t.”
    “Yes,” she says adamantly, brushing her tears away as she leans forward. Her urgency radiates from her. “He does. Call him. I dare you. And then go and reinvent your life.”
    “I can’t,” I whisper as my fear presses down on me.
    “Of course you can,” she tells me, and then asks, “What would it be like to wake up in the morning and just … be happy?”
    Anger sparks and I cling to it. It’s so much better then the soul-crushing sorrow. “Says the woman who got married to advance her career.”
    Irene laughs at that. “I’m not you, ass-hat. I’m not hiding, I’m not unhappy. And I
am
happy when I’m acting. Have you ever been happy?”
    I