Sweet Karoline by Catherine Astolfo Page A

released, ill used and uneducated, from the shackles of a cruel white master.
    " I been done work" was an oft-repeated phrase. He'd decided, he boasted, to live off the system for as long as he could. Showing up in L.A. with his paltry experience in New York amateur theater, Glenn had expected the film industry to immediately embrace his unusual, dramatic looks, his shiny bald head and sneering mouth. I didn't know how he could expect that they would. There were thousands of his type getting off the bus at Hollywood and Vine every single day.
    Not only that, he criticized me constantly for not properly embracing my black roots. My experience had been so different that I refused to engage with him. I thought I knew far more than he did about the true American dream. What was his version? That he ought to be handed whatever he wanted just because he was black and thought he was unique? He was like teenagers who all dressed the same yet proclaimed to be different. And when the 'Jew film moguls' didn't adore him after all, he decided he would just play the system for as long as he could get away with it.
    I began to quarrel with him but they were senseless arguments that sounded like children squabbling. Karoline would not participate. She'd give a wan smile or simply take him into her bedroom.
    " Get your bloody shorts off the coffee table, asshole," I'd say. "Why don't you get a job? Aren't you ashamed to be a useless prick?"
    " Listen up, asshat, you can't be dissin' me," he'd say, or "You a hemorrhoid," he'd reply, then proceed to explain his remark, sometimes betraying his Black English. "See, an asshole or a prick has its uses, whereas a hemorrhoid…"
    " Karoline, why are you putting up with this bastard's bad manners?"
    A shrug and a thin-lipped smile.
    " I can't stand this anymore. Get him out of here or else."
    A look. Or else what?
    A question I was unwilling to answer.
    I began to go in early and stay late at work. To have dinner with Parris. To take the unreliable transit, several buses and even the subway rather than travel with them by car. By the end of the six weeks, I rarely saw the couple who ostensibly lived with me. When I came home they would be in the bedroom, or out somewhere unknown. I spent most of my time in my room, as did they. The living room was a deserted wasteland, the kitchen a dump, the dining room an echo of a recent past.
    When I think of Glenn Simpson now, I am unable to separate him from that final destructive act. The last straw after an accumulation of straws of which Glenn was only one. The explosion after the long wick was ignited.
    I remember those weeks as living in two worlds, two polar opposites, two planes that I would never have believed possible if anyone had foretold it. On the one hand, there was my life with Karoline and her man, which had become a tense battle of wills. On the other there was my satisfying career and my friendship with Parris. The dissonance ate away at my sanity.
     
    Long after the funeral, on those insufferable commuter drives alone, I slowly began to unravel. The only way I can describe it is that I had no narrative left. There were no voices in my head to guide me. I no longer had Karoline's steady, confident opinion about the minutiae of daily living or the bigger pictures of worldly decisions. Self-assured, arrogant, sarcastic Anne was gone, too, replaced by a hum of confusion and guilt. Hesitant, unglued, vulnerable Anne walked through Los Angeles and prowled our apartment in a daze of denial and indecision.
    The progression is fairly easy to see in retrospect. I had no choice but to face my state of mind once I wrecked our car. Apparently I was not cooperative after the accident. I can't tell you exactly how I behaved, since I have no memory of that incident. I don't remember driving over the embankment, which luckily headed uphill instead of down. I don't remember the police arriving at the scene.
    What I do recall is sitting in the back seat of the