In September of 2005, Paula Bonhomme sat at her computer and poured out her heart to the one person on earth who would understand. Life had become wrenching but vastly more meaningful since Paula got involved with Jesse Jubilee James, her troubled love, and Janna St. James was their mutual friend and matchmaker.
But by the time Paula wrote the e-mail to Janna I began quoting above, the sweet beginnings had advanced to soap opera-ish complexities.
“I seem to do nothing but cause him pain, no matter what I try to do,” wrote Paula. “Janna, the last fucking thing I want is to hurt him. But I can’t keep being hurt by him, either. I know he needs honesty in his life, but telling me how Krista is after him and the dispatcher in the firehouse is after him, and #3 is after him, and Julia is after him, and oh by the way he’d be with her if it weren’t for me, and that he was pretending that the women he was kissing in the kissing booth were all me, he’s got to allow me the luxury of being somewhat affected by all this…”
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In this time of crisis, Janna was Paula’s rock. The day Jesse died they talked by phone for the first time. “Janna had an incredibly thick accent, Brit tinged with Russian,” Paula tells me. “She said because her mother was of Russian descent.” Jesse’s birthday was coming up in September, and Paula thought she’d spend it at a spa in New Mexico she knew had been one of Jesse’s favorite spots. She asked Janna to join her. They wound up driving down from Colorado, where they met so Janna could show Paula some of Jesse’s other haunts. Janna knew the area well—as a young freelance reporter in Colorado, she said, she’d scored an exclusive interview with serial killer Ted Bundy and parlayed that triumph into the job of running the AP’s bureau in Aspen. The one place they couldn’t visit was Jesse’s grave—he’d been cremated, still wearing a $300 bracelet Paula had bought him.
“Is there anything you want to say to her?” Paula’s friends ask Janna. “You could apologize.”
“Two years!” says Janna. She shakes her head fiercely.
