Everyday Psychopaths Read online

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  I didn’t see B for the rest of the day. She had told me she wanted to stay unreachable and I forwarded the message to Julianne. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to shut the world out, a day after vomiting all over it. I sat down and looked at the upcoming scheduling, the month was going to be rather quiet, she had a few meetings booked about upcoming roles, a short interview with Vogue on her dress sense and one appearance at some celebrity fundraiser for green energy. I wondered how long she would feel like hiding from the spotlight, would we need to cancel everything or would she walk out of her room like a new being, ready to forget about the whole thing and start anew? Despite working closely with her for years, I couldn’t really know, because we had never faced this kind of pickle before. Not that she was easy to read from the start - she would better be described as an emotional tsunami. When she was happy, she was phenomenal to be around, and when she was sad or angry, difficult was an understatement. With B, everything came in extremes and you had to take the good with the bad.

  I poured myself a glass of wine and contemplated possible causes for her recent destructive behavior. I spun around in my leather chair and sipped the lukewarm liquid and let it fill me with goodness. Wine had become such a passion over the years, a passion I desperately hoped to turn into a dream one day, opening my own wine bar. I put a slice of brie cheese in my mouth and thought back to brighter days. It was hard to pin down exactly what had happened to B since I entered her life, maybe things had just caught up with her? She sometimes complained about the industry and how she had been pinned into one category of roles and films and how frustrated she was with never being able to show her true range, but it was difficult to see her career as bad enough to make her feel like a train-wreck. Surely there must be something more, something deeper.

  There were her parents of course. Her “unloving” (B’s wording) mother Katherine who had pushed her to the top, taken a slice of the cake and then left her there and who only seemed to have harsh words for her own daughter. And her father who had gone away when B was three years old, leaving a big dent in her upbringing and making her seek the approval she could never get because of his death in a car accident, six or seven years ago. He had been a painter who had gotten tired of diaper-changes and screaming and decided to move to France and become a full-time - but never famous or successful - artist. B had been left with her troubled mother and it must have made its mark, although for some reason she wouldn’t admit it to herself. She was strangely too proud to seek any kind of counseling or therapy and her stubbornness had, to my mind, proven to be mentally costly. For all of us.

  So parents, career troubles and fading fortunes in her marriage - not a cocktail to celebrate with. The marriage problems could probably be traced to one big thing, her reluctance to bring a child into the world. Her husband had been on her for years and tried all his might to convince her, but to no avail. Although she was emotionally rather unstable, at the same time she wasn’t easily swayed.

  There were, to summarize, many reasons B’s boat was rather rocky and maybe the vomit incident gave it its final push and tumble.