Jen Jones is a restless new mom who traded in her art career and moved
back to her home town with her “sensitive-new-aged-husband” cum reporter, Jace. In a pub, she is secretly thinking about starting a club for women who objectify men when she runs into her childhood BFF and nemesis, the Saint, author of lurid letters and purveyor of malaise. The encounter sends Jen rummaging for clues as to how she’s once again lost herself and her art. She blames Women School, where she learned her woman logic.
She’d first met Jace when he interviewed her for a feature about her
touring exhibit populated by bedridden cyborgs infused with fetuses. Jace said her work made him sad, which intrigued her. Their romance began after they
reconnected at her Detroit public art installation, PlayingStation, that
critics compared to psychedelic dog dung.
Now she’s fighting post-partum blues, marital ennui, and the muse has
absconded with most of her money. Freedom, she thinks, involves buying
back her beloved motor scooter in defiance of hubby’s edict that the
wheels are too small.
This small liberation heralds her dance with the abyss, a dance to which
she’s no stranger. Jen finds herself on a yacht with Pete, too much
scotch, and the hope that current best-pal-spinster-teacher-Rosemary will
connect with his friend Paul to distract her from a student who has fallen
for her. Hard.
She later discovers Pete was only a key to a house coming down. Struggling
to stay inside the logic of love, Jen confronts Pete to ask him to stop his lovesick
drive-bys. As she speeds away on her motorscooter to get to a party for
her freshly pregnant agent, Alby, she literally collides with a moving
truck driven by the Saint’s newly ex’d husband. She learns there’s more
than she remembers to her rift with Saint that seven years earlier had
culminated in her own suicide attempt. The evidence is enshrined in
Saint’s den: a clay sculpted fetus and blade.The doctors had told them she’d been pregnant when she tried to take her
life.
Later that night at Rosemary’s house, while Alby and her friends make love
smudges and read Tarot cards, Jen has an out-of-body experience involving
Janis Joplin and the hereafter. The visceral flash of recall from seven
years ago rocks her. So too does the news from mutual friend Janet that
Saint is pregnant. But before all of this has time to sink in, the phone
rings with horrific news: Rosemary’s student has killed himself by driving
through Paul’s picture window, and left a damning letter in his wake.
After a long night at the morgue and a difficult time with Rosemary, Jen
arrives home to find the babysitter still there and no sign of Jace,
though his car is in the driveway. She finds him naked and drunk by the
river, and their vicious words quickly deteriorate into a physical brawl
that surprises them both. Ashamed, and emotionally spent, they try to find
their way back.
But Jace is a reporter, and Jen’s friend is now at the center of a
possible teacher-student scandal that’s threatening to make headlines. The
gulf between them continues to widen. The next night Alby calls Jen to
come help Rosemary, who wants to check herself into a psych ward after
being suspended.
Jen doesn’t want her to go, feels physically sick at her own lurid
memories of the place from her failed suicide attempt years ago, but
accompanies her and Alby to the hospital against her better judgment. She
remembers the stifling rules, the walking wounded shuffling in their
marshmallow slippers, the hopelessness of the place where the broken are
hidden, where the help has turned harsh.
When Alby takes her home the next morning, Jen finds a journal in her
mailbox, an original authored by the Saint. Jen is chagrined to learn that
Saint knew she had slept with Saint’s lover back in the day, a fact and
act she herself can barely remember. The lead burden of it still lingers.
Rosemary’s trip to the psych ward transports Jen back to the events that
led to her own emotional collapse: her complicated relationship with
Saint, where she was the fire and Saint was the sustaining wood, living
through her but never with her, sisterhood-turned-sinister; being
stalked by a neurotic lover who tried to kill her; being too terrified by
a red-hot-platonic connection with her godly Pan; walking her monsters to
run from their collective and distorted ideas of her. And yes, fucking the
man she felt was beneath Saint, maybe to prove it.
She recalls vividly the night she tried to take her life, the river, the
Bloch poem, the awful glaring lights of the ER. But she remembers the slow
warming the following spring, where her clay on the wheel helped her
center herself, gave her shape. The clay work and potting led her back to
huge sculptural installations, and launched her rise in the art world.
As Jen begins to really face up to the pain she caused both herself and
others through her self-absorption, Rosemary is redeemed in the eyes of
the school board, and leaves the psych ward. Both are ready for a new era
when they set off to the bridal store for Alby’s wedding dress fitting.
Throughout their turmoil, Alby remains their rock, though waxing full like
the moon. She’s full of more than baby and wedding plans with her own
troublesome man, though. She’s also plotting Jen’s big comeback. But she
doesn’t get to tell Jen of her plan due to an inopportune sighting of one
of Jen’s ghosts: an ex-lover wheeling away in a wheelchair down the street
past the bridal store. Jen — shocked to see Robert in a wheelchair from
an accident they were in — learns that Rosemary had given him a job
without telling her. It’s a small betrayal, but it rankles.
Jen learns soon enough about Alby’s plan. After nasty road burn from a
spill on her scooter en route to a girls’ night at Alby’s, Jen meets
Mikolaj, the hot new neighbor whose helping Alby build a studio on her
property. The plan is that Jen can get back to work to mount a new show
and Alby will look after Jen’s son while on maternity leave.
Mikolaj reminds Jen of her one true but platonic love, and the attraction
appears to be mutual, if a little honorable for Jen’s taste. The
resemblance is not lost on Jace, who has an awkward meeting with Mikolaj
when he delivers Jen and the offending scooter home in his truck. However,
Jen’s guilt over lascivious and traitorous thoughts about Mikolaj seems to
bring her and Jace closer together instead of widening the rift.
Mikolaj’s intentions appear honorable. He’s a fan of Jen’s art, and is
convinced she needs to make amends with her past so she can shake her funk
and get back to work. He decides kicking her ass is the best way to
achieve this mission.
They start small, with Robert, the wheelchair-bound ex-lover Jen saw roll
past the bridal shop. The resulting meeting with Robert is liberating for
Jen, who’d harbored guilt over his injuries. She’s surprised to learn that
guilt is a two-way street.
Jen avoids the next assignment Mikolaj gives her: making peace with Saint.
Instead, she distracts herself watching him construct the studio, and
stewing about Alby’s imminent marriage to a hard-drinking, unreliable
ladies’ man who Alby seems determine to tame.
On the night of Alby’s stagette, Jen begins to rejoin the sisterhood with
a lighter heart. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t suspicious of Alice, Saint’s
friend and Alby’s employee, suspected of a former dalliance with the
groom-to-be.
Watching the sun rise the morning of Alby’s Wiccan wedding, Jen arrives at
a place of peace. Though addicted to the journal, the vicarious reliving
of her past through Saint’s eyes, she decides it’s time to give the past
up and move forward. She writes a simple note — so simple it will likely
irritate the Saint-of-wordy-tomes — “Thanks for the read.” She bundles up
the journal in a padded envelope, determined to drop it off on her way.
The beautiful morning belies the day that follows. Jen arrives at Alby’s
to learn the groom is MIA, and with Rosemary’s help, they locate him at
Alice’s, where he’s spent the night. Alby is melting down, gracefully, but
forgives him. At the 11th hour, a disheveled George arrives for the hand
fasting ceremony, and the gorgeous wedding resumes its fairy-tale luster.
Jen panics slightly when she sees that Pete has brought Alice as his date.
But the full implication of this is lost on her.
That is, until dinner and the toasts, where an inebriated George makes a
scandalous ode to women. After calling women “the devil,” he jokes lewdly
about Rosemary and her student, rambles on about Jen’s affair with Pete,
and finishes with the implication that Saint is carrying Jace’s child.
Stunned, the wedding party at the table erupts into a brawl.
Alby renounces her marriage in front of scandalized guests and the three
friends absent themselves from the party.
Months later, Jen is getting her son ready for visitation with Jace. She
is living with Alby, working again and clearly in a better frame of mind.
She has gotten some baby clothes hand-me-downs ready to give Saint, who
she notices looks tired and haggard when she arrives with Jace to collect
Chris for the weekend.
She thinks to herself, be careful what you ask for, Saint.