We Are Water
We Are Water
Wally Lamb
From New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb, a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy.As Annie Oh’s wedding day approaches, she finds herself at the mercy of hopes and fears about the momentous change ahead. She has just emerged from a twenty-five year marriage to Orion Oh, which produced three children, but is about to marry a woman named Viveca, a successful art dealer, who specializes in outsider art.Trying to reach her ex-husband, she keeps assuring everyone that he is fine. Except she has no idea where he is. But when Viveca discovers a famous painting by a mysterious local outside artist, who left this world in more than mysterious circumstances, Orion, Annie and Viveca’s new dynamic becomes fraught. And on the day of the wedding, the secrets and shocking truths that have been discovered will come to light.Set in Lamb’s mythical town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, this is a riveting, epic novel about marriage and family, old hurts and past secrets, which explores the ways we find meaning in our lives.
This one is for two strong women:
Joan Joffe Hall and Shirley Woodka
Ghost of a Chance
You see a man
trying to think.
You want to say
to everything:
Keep off! Give him room!
But you only watch,
terrified
the old consolations
will get him at last
like a fish
half-dead from flopping
and almost crawling
across the shingle
almost breathing
the raw, agonizing
air
till a wave
pulls it back blind into the triumphant
sea.
—Adrienne Rich
Table of Contents
Cover (#u418f149d-d638-5cb4-a872-e8042dec35a8)
Title Page (#u856a56de-f680-5d94-a313-fab96cf03384)
Dedication (#uad841fb6-086b-5715-8831-80c0faf3e5ba)
Epigraph (#ueb3d58e6-aba3-5b4d-a1b2-f5847f978f11)
Prologue (#ud82b3f49-61ad-5976-a008-bcf6a0770830)
Gualtiero Agnello (#ud6a29cda-5234-572d-a5fa-ab6b5b72ea26)
Part I: Art and Service (#ub9205368-68cd-54c0-98cf-56c423f63e52)
Chapter One: Annie Oh (#u16a956e9-e8cf-5b4c-99bc-668581a72b6e)
Chapter Two: Orion Oh (#ua31ec73a-3223-55f0-8890-5a3933f73f45)
Chapter Three: Annie Oh (#u16b42901-c6e9-55b0-a8ca-51d9c2466379)
Chapter Four: Orion Oh (#u45625717-ac06-5d44-87d5-8328ba200255)
Chapter Five: Annie Oh (#u1737ca23-76ba-5bc4-9ce5-bb68be268026)
Chapter Six: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part II: Mercy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Ruth Fletcher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Family (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Marissa Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Ariane Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: A Wedding (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part V: Three Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Gratitude (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note from Wally Lamb (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Wally Lamb (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_078ceb3f-62ee-58f4-b8f2-13413c89064f)
Rope-Skipping Girl (#ulink_078ceb3f-62ee-58f4-b8f2-13413c89064f)
Gualtiero Agnello (#ulink_0608a057-1381-5c72-b62e-a500a60b1bce)
August 2009
I understand there was some controversy about the coroner’s ruling concerning Josephus Jones’s death. What do you think, Mr. Agnello? Did he die accidentally or was he murdered?”
“Murdered? I can’t really say for sure, Miss Arnofsky, but I have my suspicions. The black community was convinced that’s what it was. Two Negro brothers living down at that cottage with a white woman? That would have been intolerable for some people back then.”
“White people, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s right. When I got the job as director of the Statler Museum and moved my family to Three Rivers, I remember being surprised by the rumors that a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was active here. And it’s always seemed unlikely to me that Joe Jones would have tripped and fallen headfirst into a narrow well that he would have been very much aware of. A well that he would have drawn water from, after all. But if a crime had been committed, it was never investigated as such. So who’s to say? The only thing I was sure of was that Joe was a uniquely talented painter. Unfortunately, I was the only one at the time who could see that. Of course now, long after his death, the art world has caught up with his brilliance and made him highly collectible. It’s sad—tragic, really. There’s no telling what he might have achieved if he had lived into his forties and fifties. But that was not to be.”
I’m upstairs in my studio, talking to this curly-haired, pear-shaped Patrice Arnofsky. When she called last week, she’d explained that she was a writer for an occasional series which profiled the state’s prominent artists in Connecticut magazine. They had already run stories on Sol LeWitt, Paul Cadmus, and the illustrator Wendell Minor, she said. Now she’d been assigned a posthumous profile of Josephus Jones in conjunction with a show that was opening at the American Folk Art Museum. “I understand that you were the only curator in his lifetime to have awarded him a show of his work,” she’d said. I’d told her that was correct. Agreed to talk with her about my remembrances of Joe. And so, a week later, here we are.
Miss Arnofsky checks the little tape recorder she’s brought along to the interview and asks me how I met Josephus Jones.
“I first laid eyes on Joe in the spring of 1957 when he appeared at the opening of an exhibition I had mounted called ‘Nineteenth-Century Maritime New England.’ It was a pretentious title for a self-congratulatory concept—a show that had been commissioned by a wealthy Three Rivers collector of maritime art whose grandfather had made millions in oceanic shipping. He had compensated the museum quite generously for my curatorial work, but it had bored me to tears to hang that show: all those paintings of frigates, brigs, and steamships at sea, all that glorification of war and money.
“On the afternoon of the opening, I was making small talk with Marietta Colson, president of the Friends of the Statler, when she stopped midconversation and looked over my shoulder. A frown came over her face. ‘Well, well, what have we here?’ she said. ‘Trouble?’ My eyes followed hers to the far end of the gallery, and there was Jones. Among the well-heeled, silver-haired patrons who had come to the opening, he was an anomaly with his mahogany skin and flattened nose, his powerful laborer’s build and laborer’s overalls.
“We watched him, Marietta and I, as he wandered from painting to painting. He was carrying a large cardboard box in front of him, and perhaps that was why he reminded me of the gift-bearing Abyssinian king immortalized in The Adoration of the Magi—not the famous Gentile da Fabriano painting but the later one by Albrecht Dürer, who, to splendid effect, had incorporated the classicism of the Italian Renaissance in his northern European art. Do you know that work?”
“I know Dürer, but not that painting specifically. But go on.”
“Well, throughout the gallery, conversations stopped and heads turned toward Josephus. ‘I hope there’s nothing menacing in that box he’s holding,’ Marietta said. ‘Do you think we should notify the police?’ I shook my head and walked toward him.
“He was standing before a large Caulkins oil of La Amistad, the schooner that had transported African slaves to Cuba. The painting depicted the slaves’ revolt against their captors. ‘Welcome,’ I said. ‘You have a good eye. This is the best painting in the show.’
“He told me he liked pictures that told a story. ‘Ah yes, narrative paintings,’ I said. ‘I’m drawn to them, too.’ His bushy hair and eyebrows were gray with cement dust, and the bib of his overalls was streaked with dirt and stained with paint. He had trouble making eye contact. Why had he come?
“‘I paint pictures, too,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’ I knew what he meant, of course. Had I not been painting for decades, more involuntarily than voluntarily at times? ‘I’m Gualtiero Agnello, the director of this museum,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘And you are?’
“He told me his name. Placed his box on the floor and shook my hand. His was twice the size of mine, and as rough as sandpaper. ‘You the one they told me to come and see,’ he said. He didn’t identify who ‘they’ were and I didn’t ask. He picked up his box and held it at arm’s length, expecting me to take it. ‘These are some of my pictures. You want to look at them?’
“I told him this wasn’t really a convenient time. Could he come back some day the following week? He shook his head. He worked, he said. He could leave them here. I was hesitant, suspecting that he had no more talent than the Sunday painters who often contacted me—dowagers and dilettantes, for the most part, who became huffy when I failed to validate their assumptions of artistic genius. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Still, I could tell that it had cost him something to come here, and I didn’t want to disappoint him either. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You see that table over there where the punch bowl is? Slide your box underneath it. I’ll look at your work when I have a chance and get back to you. Do you have a telephone?’
“He shook his head. ‘But you can call my boss when you ready to talk, and he can tell me. I don’t know his number, but he in the phone book. Mr. Angus Skloot.’
“‘The building contractor?’ He nodded. The Skloots were generous donors to the museum, and Mrs. Skloot was a member of the Friends. ‘Okay then, I’ll be in touch.’ He thanked me for my time. I told him to help himself to punch and cookies, but when he looked over at the refreshments table and saw several of the other attendees staring back at him, he shook his head.
“He stayed for a little while longer, repelling the crowd wherever he wandered, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea, but unable to resist the art he would stop before and study. As I watched him walk finally toward the exit, Marietta approached me. ‘I’m dying of curiosity, Gualtiero,’ she said, her mouth screwed up into a sardonic half-grin. ‘Who’s your new colored friend?’
“I stared at her without answering, waiting for her to stop smirking. When she did, I said, ‘He’s an artist. Isn’t that the reason the Friends of the Statler exists? To support the artists of our community?’ She nodded curtly, pivoted, and walked away.
“The opening ended at five P.M. I escorted the last of the guests to the door. The caterers packed up the punch bowl and cookie trays, folded the tablecloth, and moved the table they’d used back to its proper place at the entrance to the exhibit. The janitors stacked the folding chairs and began to sweep. And there it was, by itself in the middle of the floor: Jones’s box. I carried it upstairs to my office. Then I put my coat on, went downstairs, and locked up the building on my way out. For the rest of that weekend, I forgot all about Josephus Jones.
“But on Monday morning, there it was again: the box. I opened it, removed Jones’s two dozen or so small paintings, and spread them across my work counter. He’d used what looked and smelled like enamel house paint. Two of the works had been painted on plywood, another on Masonite board. The rest were on cardboard. The tears in my eyes blurred what was before me.”
“And what was before you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “Can you describe what you saw?”
“Well, he had no understanding of perspective; that was immediately apparent. Many of the figures that populated his paintings were out of proportion. He knew nothing about the technique of chiaroscuro; there was no play between shadow and light in any of his samples. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive sense of design and a wonderful feeling for vivid color. His subject matter—cowboys and Indians, jugglers and jungle animals, tumbling waterfalls, women naked or barely clothed—possessed all the characteristics of the modern primitive. Yet each gave evidence of a unique vision. And Josephus Jones was indeed a narrative painter; his pictures suggested stories that celebrated the rustic life but warned of sinister forces that lurked in the bushes and behind the trees.
“I called Angus Skloot, who told me where Joe was working that day. And so I carried his box of paintings out to my car and drove to the building site. Joe introduced me to his brother, Rufus; the two were building a massive stone fireplace inside the unfinished house. I suggested we talk outside so that I could deliver the good news about his artistic talent.
“He must have been thrilled to receive it,” my guest says.
“No, quite the contrary. He was unsurprised, unsmiling; it was as if he already knew what I had to tell him. I asked him how long he’d been painting. About three years, he said. Told me he’d begun the day he awoke from a dream about a beautiful naked woman riding on the back of a lion. He had grabbed a carpenter’s pencil and a piece of wood, he said, so that he could draw his dream before it faded away like fog. He wanted to remember it, but he wasn’t sure why. All that day, he said, he thought about the woman astride the lion. And so, at the end of his workday, he got permission from Mr. Skloot to take some of the almost-empty cans from the paint shed. Then he’d gone home and painted what he had first dreamt and then sketched out. He said he had been painting ever since. I handed him back his box of paintings and he placed it on the ground between us. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I said. He looked suspicious, I remember. Asked me what it was I wanted to know. ‘Whatever you want to tell me,’ I said.”
“And what did he want to tell you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “I realize that this was years ago, but it would be helpful to me if you can recall it as accurately as possible.”
It’s strange what happens next. When a painting I’m working on becomes my singular focus—when I am “in the zone,” as I’ve heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me. And now it’s happening not with my art but with my memory. Seated across from me, Miss Arnofsky fades away and the past becomes more alive than the present …
Joe scuffs his work boot against the ground and takes his time thinking about it. “Well, my granddaddy on my daddy’s side was a slave on a Virginia tobacco farm and my grams was a free woman.” After the emancipation, they moved up to Chicago and his grandfather got work in the stockyards. His mother’s people were third-generation Chicagoans, he says. “Mama washed rich ladies’ hair during the week at a fancy hotel beauty parlor downtown, and on weekends she preached in the colored church. My daddy worked in the stockyards at first, like his daddy did. But sledgehammerin’ cows between the eyes to get them ready for slaughter give him the heebie-jeebies, so he quit. Got work at a brickyard and become a mason—a damn good one, too. When me and Rufus was thirteen and fourteen, Daddy started bringing us along on jobs, and that was how we learnt to work with stone and mortar ourselfs.” His father was a better mason than he is, Joe says, but Rufus is better than both of them. “He a artist uses a trowel and ce-ment instead of a paintbrush is what Mr. Skloot told him,” Joe says, smiling broadly. “And thass about right, too.”
I ask him how long he’s lived in Three Rivers. Since 1953, he says, and when I tell him that was the year my family and I moved here, too, his eyes widen, then slowly lock onto mine. He nods knowingly, as if our having arrived in Three Rivers at the same time is more about fate than coincidence.
Both of his parents had passed by then, he tells me, and Rufus had just gotten out of the navy. He urged Joe to come east because he had a plan. They would get good jobs at the shipyard in Groton, helping to build America’s first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus. But the shipbuilders had shied away from hiring coloreds, fearing repercussions and race baiting from their white workers. “So we took whatever jobs we could find. Worked tobacco up in Hartford, worked at a sawmill, dug graves. We took masonry jobs when we could find them, which was just this side of never. The luckiest day of our life was the day Mr. Skloot come to visit his sister’s stone at the cemetery up in Willimantic,” he says. “Rufus and me was digging a grave two plots down, and he come over and the three of us got to talking. Mr. Skloot’s face lit up when we told him we was gravediggers for right now but masons, mostly. He said he’d just fired his mason for being drunk on the job. Well, sir, by the time he got back in that big ole black Oldsmobile of his and drove away, we had us jobs with Skloot Builders. We was spoze to be on trial for a month so Mr. Skloot could see what kind of work we done, and if we was hard workers and dependable, and didn’t get liquored up. But we got hired permanent after just the first week because Mr. Skloot liked what he seed us do—well, Rufus’s work more than mines, but mines, too.”
Mr. Skloot is the best boss he’s ever had, Joe says. When I ask him why, he says, “Because he pay good and he kind. Lets us live out back on his property, and he don’t even care that Rufus got hisself a white wife. Rufe married his gal when he was stationed over in Europe and brung her over here after we was working steady. She Dutch.” Joe touches his work boot to the box at his feet. “I got other paintings at the house, you know. Lots of ’em. If you like these ones, maybe you want to see those ones, too.” I tell him I do and arrange to meet him at his home at six o’clock that same evening.
The house is a small cottage at the back of the Skloots’ property. Following Joe’s instructions, I drive down the Skloots’ driveway, then inch my car over a rutted path out back until I get to a brook. I park and get out, then cross the brook by way of two bowed two-by-six planks that have been placed over it. A thin white woman—Joe’s brother’s Dutch wife, I figure—is outside, hanging clothes in just her slip. When I ask her if Josephus is home, she sticks out her thumb and points it toward the door. Before I can knock, it swings open and Jones invites me in.
The place is filthy. It reeks of stale cooking odors and cat urine, and there is clutter everywhere. A fat calico cat is asleep on the kitchen table amidst dirty dishes, old magazines, and an ash tray brimming with stubbed-out cigarettes. The floor beneath my shoes feels gritty. Josephus’s paintings are everywhere: stacked against walls and windowsills, atop a refrigerator whose door is kept shut with electrical tape. There are more paintings scattered across the mattress on the floor and on the dropped-down Murphy bed. “What’s this one called?” I ask Joe, pointing to a female figure in a two-piece bathing suit standing in a field of morning glories, parakeets alighting on her head and outstretched arms.
“That one there? Thass Parakeet Girl.” When I pick it up for a closer look, the roaches hiding beneath it scuttle for cover.
But housekeeping is beside the point. I look closely at every work he shows me, overwhelmed by both his output and his raw talent. I’m there for hours. Some of his paintings are more successful than others, of course, but even the lesser efforts display an exotic, unschooled charm and that bold use of color. Before I leave, I offer him a show at the Statler. He accepts. When I get home, I tell my wife that I may have just discovered a major new talent.
But “Josephus Jones: An American Original” is a flop. The local paper, which is usually supportive of our museum shows, declines to publish either a feature story or a review. At the opening, instead of the usual two hundred or so, fewer than twenty people attend. Not even Angus and Ethel Skloot have come; they are on holiday in Florida. It’s painful to watch the Jones brothers scuff the toes of their shined shoes against the gallery’s hardwood floor and eye the entranceway with fading hope. Both have purchased sharp double-breasted suits for this special occasion, and Rufus’s Dutch-born wife has apparently bought new clothes, too: a sparkly, low-cut cocktail frock more suitable for an evening at a New York supper club than a Sunday afternoon art opening in staid Three Rivers, Connecticut. Worse yet, she has neglected to remove the tag from her dress, and I have to instruct my secretary, Miss Sheflott, to go upstairs to her desk, retrieve her scissors, and discreetly escort young Mrs. Jones out into the foyer for the purpose of clipping her tag. Later, Miss Sheflott tells me she tucked the tag inside the dress rather than removing it. Mrs. Jones has confided that she can’t afford it and is planning to return it to the LaFrance Shop on Monday.
In the days that follow, there are complaints about the show’s prevalence of female nudity. Three members of the Friends cancel their memberships in protest. In the six weeks the show is up, the number of visitors is dismally low—our worst attendance ever. I’ve penned personal letters to several influential New York art dealers and critics, inviting them to discover Jones. “He is a painter of events commonplace and exotic that are shot through with an underlying sense of anxiety,” I have written. “His compositions are rich with surprises, some joyful, some sinister. In my opinion, he stands shoulder to shoulder with other American primitive painters, from Grandma Moses to his Negro brethren, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, and the breakthrough artists of the Harlem Renaissance.” But none of those busy New Yorkers to whom I’ve written has had the courtesy even to reply, let alone trek the three hours to our little museum to see Josephus’s work for themselves.
The show ends. We keep in touch from time to time, Joe and I. I encourage him, critique the new work he sometimes brings by. I’m sad to learn from Joe that his brother Rufus’s wife has left him, and that Rufus has taken it badly—has fallen in with a bad crowd and begun using heroin. “Mr. Skloot let him go after he found out he be messin’ wiff the devil’s drug,” Joe says. “Booted him out of the house out back, too. I been saving up some to send Rufe to one of them sanctoriums to get hisself clean, but they cost more money than I gots. If I could sell some paintings here and there, I could do it, but ain’t no one like them enough to buy any.” I try several more times to interest my New York connections in Joe’s work—alas, to no avail. Eventually, he stops coming around to the museum and we fall out of touch.
But in the summer of 1959, during Three Rivers’s celebration of its three hundredth anniversary, I am asked to judge the art show on the final day of festivities. It’s a big show; more than three hundred artists, accomplished and amateurish, have submitted work for consideration. Most have chosen “pretty” subject matter: quaint covered bridges, romanticized portraits of rosy-cheeked children, and the inevitable still lifes of flowers and fruit. As I wander the grounds, looking for something to which I can affix a “best in show” ribbon and still sleep that night, I come upon Josephus’s work at the south end of the festival grounds. Delighted and relieved, I scan what I have previously admired: Parakeet Girl, Jesse James and His Wife, his pictures of pinup girls and fishermen midstream, ukulele players and circus curiosities. One theme seems to prevail in Jones’s work: predators—lions and tigers, lynxes and leopards—attacking or about to attack their prey. Then, among these familiar paintings, I see a spectacular new one—twice as large and twice as ambitious as the others. At the center of the composition stands the Tree of Life, lush and fecund. Beneath it are a pale, naked Adam and Eve. The latter figure is reminiscent of the prepubescent Eves of Van Leyden, the sixteenth-century Dutch master. Adam, though his skin is gray rather than brown or black, bears the face of Josephus Jones himself. The benign members of the animal kingdom who surround the two human figures seem almost to smile. But trouble lurks, in the form of the treacherous serpent hanging from the tree. Joe has depicted a moment in time. Adam reaches for the forbidden fruit which Eve is about to pluck. It will be the fateful act of self-will that will banish them both from the garden. Innocence is about to be lost, and we humans, forever after, will be stained with our forebears’ original sin. In Adam and Eve, Jones is once again exploring the theme of the predator and the prey, but he has done so in a more subtle and masterly way. Adam and Eve is a leap forward—a stellar achievement, and I am elated to hang the “best in show” blue ribbon next to it. The festival gates swing open to the public at 9:00 A.M. As I exit, they push past me, eager not so much to view the art, I suspect, as to fill their bellies with the pancakes that are being cooked and served inside the tent by a large black woman gotten up to look like Aunt Jemima. I admire the organizers’ cunning. If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.
Later, I’m informed that the festival committee was unhappy with my selection, and I read in the newspaper the following day that an irate art show attendee rushed Jones’s Adam and Eve, intent on destroying it, and that this would-be art critic had scuffled with its creator. This news delights me! Isn’t that art’s purpose, after all? To engage and, if necessary, disturb the beholder? To upset the apple cart and challenge the status quo? Was that not what the great Michelangelo did as he lay on his back, painting political satire onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Haven’t artists, from that great sixteenth-century genius to Manet and Rivera, outraged the public and forced them to think? Now that his art has been attacked, Josephus has joined the ranks of an illustrious fellowship.
Several weeks later, I am in my office at the museum, working on the budget for the coming year and half-listening to the radio. A novelty song is playing—one that mocks “the troubles” between the Irish and the Brits.
You’d never think they go together, but they certainly do
The combination of English muffins and Irish stew
I chuckle at the words, thinking, well, if paintings can make political statements, then why can’t silly popular songs? But I stop cold when the music ends and the news comes on. The announcer says that thirty-nine-year-old Josephus Jones, a local construction worker, has died accidentally—that he has tripped and fallen into a well behind his residence and drowned. I sit there, stunned and sickened. A promising artist has been cut down by fate just as he was hitting his stride. Unable to work, I put on my coat, walk out of my office, and drive home.
I go to his funeral service at the colored church. The Negro community has come out in impressive numbers to sing and wail and shout out their grief about Joe Jones’s premature demise, but I am only one of four Caucasians who have come to mourn him; the other two are Angus and Ethel Skloot and a distraught young woman who looks familiar but whom I cannot, at first, place. But halfway through the service, it dawns on me who she is: the Eve of Josephus’s painting, reaching for the forbidden fruit that hangs just below the malevolent serpent. Joe’s brother Rufus is one of the pallbearers, but he looks disheveled and dazed, every bit the drug addict that Joe said he had become. The snake, I see, has bitten him, too.
None of the mourners who orate at the service, or who later gossip at “the feed” downstairs after the “churchifying,” mentions Josephus’s relationship to art. But I hear, over and over, their rejection of Coroner McKee’s finding that Joe died accidentally. “A skull fracture and a six-inch gash on his forehead?” one skeptic stands and says. She is a loud, angry woman in an elaborate hat who looks like she tips the scales between two fifty and three hundred pounds, and as she speaks I realize that she is the same woman who played the part of Aunt Jemima at the pancake breakfast. “A six-foot man just ups and falls headfirst into a well that’s seven foot deep and twenty inches across? If that was an accident, then I’ll eat this hat I’m wearing, feathers and all,” she declares. “That’s why we got to keep fighting the good fight in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty! To get Brother Josephus some justice and right what’s wrong in this sorry world and this sorry town!” From various places around the room, people call out in agreement. “Mm-hmm, that’s right!”
“You tell ’em, Bertha!”
“Amen, sister!”
From the other side of the room, I hear a man’s tortured sobs. It breaks my heart when I see that it is Joe’s afflicted brother, Rufus …
“How sad,” Miss Arnofsky says, and her comment returns me from the past to the present, from the basement of the Negro church back to my studio.
“Yes. Yes, it was. Poor Rufus died not long after that, in the flood.”
“The flood?”
I nod. “A dam gave way in the northern part of town, and the water it had been holding back took the path of least resistance, rushing toward the center of town and destroying a lot of the property in its path. Several people were killed, Rufus Jones included. The paper said he had been living in an abandoned car down by the river.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen sixty-two? Sixty-three, maybe?”
“And so sad, too, that Josephus never knew what a success he would eventually become. But at least in his lifetime, he had your advocacy.”
“Yes, I was able to give him that much at least. But it went both ways. Joe gave me something, too.”
“What do you mean?”
I pause before answering her, thinking about how to put it. “Well, Miss Arnofsky, many years have passed since the morning I hung that blue ribbon next to Joe’s Adam and Eve. I’ve judged many juried shows, large and small, always asking myself just what is the function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer? Sometimes I’ll award the top prize to a formalist, sometimes to an expressionist or an abstract artist. Less often but occasionally I will select an artist whose work is representational. But whenever and wherever possible, I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, ‘Wake up!’ Not always, certainly, but often enough, this has been the work of outsiders rather than those who have been academically trained—artists who, unlike myself, are unschooled as to the subtleties of technique but who create startling work nonetheless.” My guest nods in agreement, and I laugh. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” I tell her, “I have to climb down from my soapbox and go downstairs and use the toilet.”
“Of course,” she says. I rise from my chair and stand, my ninety-four-year-old knees protesting as I do. Miss Arnofsky asks if she might have a look around at my work while she’s waiting, and I tell her to be my guest.
When I return a few minutes later, she is standing in front of the shelf by the window, looking at a shadow box collage a young artist gave me years ago. “It’s called The Dancing Scissors,” I tell her. “The artist is someone I awarded a ‘best in show’ prize to years ago, and she gave it to me as a gift. She’s become quite celebrated since then.”
“I recognize the style,” she says. “It’s an Annie Oh, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right. You know her work?”
She nods. “I did a profile piece on her for our magazine when she was just starting out. It was called ‘Annie Oh’s Angry Art.’ She was very shy, almost apologetic about her work. But what struck me was the discrepancy between her demeanor and the undercurrent of rage in her art.”
“Yes, I suppose that was what drew me to it as well: the silent scream of a woman tethered to the conventional roles of mother and wife and longing to break free. I predicted great things for Annie back then, and I’m delighted that that has come to pass. We’ve stayed in touch, she and I. As a matter of fact, she’s being remarried next month, and I’m going to her wedding.”
“Oh, how nice. If you think of it, please tell her I said hello, and that I wish her and her new husband all the best.”
“Of course, of course. But I shall have to extend your greeting to Annie and her wife. She’s marrying the owner of the gallery that represents her work.”
“Aha,” Miss Arnofsky says. “Now tell me about the other paintings here in your studio. These are your works?” I nod.
She wanders the studio, looking through the stacks of my paintings leaning against the walls, both the ones that have returned from various shows and those that have yet to leave my work space. Standing before my easel, she smiles at my half-finished rope-skipping girl. “I so admire that you’re still at it every day,” she says. “I see this is a recurring subject for you.”
“Yes, that’s right. Little Fanny and her jump rope. I’ve painted her hundreds of times.” I explain to my guest that it was my good fortune to have received a scholarship to the school at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was sixteen years old, and how my training there helped to shape my artistic vision. “At first I merely imitated the styles of the painters I most admired. The impressionists and expressionists, the pointillists. But little by little, I began developing a style of my own, which one of my teachers described in his evaluation as ‘boldly modern with a freshness of vision.’ I don’t mean to boast, but I began to be recognized as one of the three most promising students at the school, the others being my friends Antonio Orsini, who came from the Bronx and loved the New York Yankees more that life itself, and Norma Kaszuba, an affable Texan who wore cowgirl boots, smoked cigars, and swore like a man.”
“A woman before her time,” Miss Arnofsky notes. “But tell me about your jump-roping girl.”
“Well, I spotted her one afternoon when Norma, Antonio, and I were eating our lunch in Grant Park. She was just a nameless little Negro girl in a shapeless gray dress, skipping rope and singing happily to herself. Her wiry hair was in plaits. Her face was turned up toward the sun in joyful innocence. As I recall, my friends and I had been arguing about whether Roosevelt, the president-elect, would prove to be a savior or a scoundrel. And as the others’ voices faded away, I pulled a pencil from my pocket and, on the oily paper in which my sopressata sandwich had been wrapped, began sketching the child. Back at the school that afternoon, I drew the girl over and over, and in the days that followed I began painting her in gouache and oils, in primary colors and pastels and monochromatic shades of green and gray. It was as if that guileless child had bewitched me! I gave her a name, Fanny, and came to think of her as my muse. For my final project, I submitted a series of sixteen works, collectively titled Girl Skipping Rope. On graduation day, I held my breath as one of the Institute’s capped-and-gowned dignitaries announced, ‘And this year’s top prize is awarded to … Gualtiero Agnello!’ It was the thrill of a lifetime. And as you can see, capturing Fanny has become a lifelong obsession.”
“Fascinating,” my guest says. “You know, I Googled you before I came over here today. You’ve had shows at several major museums, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes. MoMA, the Corcoran, the Whitney. One of my paintings was purchased for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection a while back—a study of my little rope-jumping angel over there.”
“Wikipedia said you were born in Italy.”
“Yes, that’s right. In the city of Siena.”
“Ah, Tuscany! Well, that was certainly fortuitous. So many great artists came from that region. Who would you identify as your early influences?”
“Well, my parents and I moved to America when I was quite young, so none of the masters. I’d have to say I was drawn to art by my father.”
“He was an artist?”
“Not by trade, no. He was a tailor. But among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on his lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into playful cartoon animals for me. His ability to do so had seemed magical to the little boy I was. But sadly, my parents fell on hard times after my father’s tailor shop was burned to the ground by the vengeful husband of his mistress. It was Papa’s brother, my Uncle Nunzio, who came to our rescue. He assured my father that Manhattan has thousands of businessmen and they all needed suits. He sent money, too—enough American dollars which, converted to lira, allowed Papa to purchase three passages to New York. And so we left Siena, boarded a ship at the port in Livorno, and traveled across the ocean. I still remember how frightened I was during that long voyage.”
“Frightened? Why?”
“Because I thought we would never be free of that endless, shapeless gray water—that we were doomed to sail the sea forever. But twelve days after we left Livorno, we passed La Statua della Libertà and arrived on American soil.”
“And you were how old?”
“Eight. Of course, at that age, I could only understand bits and pieces of the reasons for our uprooting. But years later, after my own sexual desires had awakened, Papa confided to me that he had not wished to be unfaithful to my mother, but that his inamorata, Valentina, had a body by Botticelli and hair so flaming red that she might have stepped out of a painting by Titian. You see, my father was a clothier by trade, but his passione was art. He was like Josephus Jones in that respect. He’d had no formal training, but he had a natural talent and an undeniable urge to draw. He was seldom without his pencil and portfolio of onionskin paper. ‘A gift from God,’ my mother once called her husband’s artistic talent, although she would later describe it as ‘my Giuseppe’s curse.’”
“And why was that?”
“Because it unhinged him. Made him crazy. That’s often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.”
“Like Van Gogh.”
“Yes, Van Gogh and many others. Painters, writers, musicians.”
She nods. Sighs. “So your family settled in New York?”
“Lower Manhattan, yes. We lived above Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market in a four-story tenement on Spring Street. Nunzio knew someone who knew someone, and soon my father was altering men’s suits at Macy’s Department Store on Herald Square. And while Papa was measuring inseams, sewing shoulder pads into suit coats, and letting out the trousers of fat-bellied businessmen, I was mastering proper English in the classrooms of the Catholic Sisters of the Poor Clares and learning broken English at Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market, where I worked after school and every Saturday. In warm weather, my job was to sell roasted peanuts from the barrel outside on the sidewalk. During the winter months, I was brought inside to wait on the customers.” I chuckle as I recall the kerchiefed nonnas who came by each day to shop for their family’s dinner and haggle over the prices of fruit and vegetables. Cagey Siciliani for the most part, who would first bruise the fruit they had selected and then demand a reduced price because the fruit was bruised. “At school, my teacher, Sister Agatha, took a shine to me and, because she thought I would make a good priest, urged me to pursue the sacrament of Holy Orders. But I was my father’s son on two counts: first, when I was in the eighth grade, I surrendered my virginity to a plump ‘older woman’ of sixteen who was fond of roasted peanuts. And second, I loved to draw. Seated on a stool next to my peanut barrel, I began sketching the Packards and roadsters parked along Spring Street, the passersby rich and poor and the fluttering garments hanging from clotheslines, the birds who flew in the sky and the pigeons who waddled along the sidewalk, pecking away at morsels. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook, eager to show Papa my latest drawings when he returned home from his day of tailoring. My father smiled very little back then, but he beamed whenever he looked at my pictures.”
“Like father, like son,” she says.
“Well, yes and no. Papa was unschooled, as I said. But when I was fifteen, one of my drawings won a prize: art lessons. And so each Saturday morning, freed from my job at Uncle Nunzio’s, I would ride my bicycle up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I would receive instruction from a German painter named Victorious von Schlippe. Like Uncle Nunzio, Mr. von Schlippe knew people who knew people, and the following year, at the age of sixteen, I was offered the scholarship at the Art Institute.”
“Your parents must have been very proud of you,” Miss Arnofsky says.
“My father was, yes. But Mama was against my going. She begged me to stay in New York—to find and marry a nice girl from the Old Country and give her grandchildren. Papa, on the other hand, urged me to go and learn whatever Chicago could teach me. I remember the tears in his eyes the morning he saw me off at Grand Central Station, especially after I unfolded the sheet of paper I’d slipped into my pocket when I’d packed the night before. ‘Look what I’m bringing, Papa,’ I said. He stood there, holding in his shaking hands one of the cartoon drawings he had made for me years before. Then he handed it back to me, blew his nose, and told me I’d better board the train before it left without me. And so, without daring to look back at him, I did.
“And oh, I loved the Windy City! Its crisp autumn weather, its warm and friendly people. I loved my classes, too, and was a sponge, absorbing whatever my instructors could teach me. On Sunday afternoons, it became my habit to write long letters to my parents about my exciting new life. But as autumn turned into winter, Mama’s letters back to me began to describe the strange obsession that had overtaken my father. Papa claimed that Catherine of Siena, Italy’s patron saint, had appeared to him in a vision, commanding him, for the edification of Italian Catholics the world over, to illustrate the story of her life: her service to the sick during the Black Death; her campaign to have the papacy returned from Avignon to Rome; her receiving of the stigmata. It was a terrible thing to witness, Mama wrote: a husband’s strange decline into madness.
“That Christmas, unable to afford the trip back to New York, I stayed in Chicago and sent my parents a gift box of candied fruit, sugared nuts, and nougats. Presents arrived for me as well. Mama had sent me three pairs of socks and a week’s supply of woolen underwear. Papa’s gift arrived in a long cardboard tube, and when I opened the end and uncurled the onionskin paper within, there was his charcoal rendering of the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine to Jesus Christ. The lines of the drawing were as frenzied and driven as the brushstrokes of the great Van Gogh, and the paper had several tears where he’d pressed down too hard with his pencil. I pinned Papa’s present to the wall above my bed, next to the fanciful drawing he had made for me when I was a little boy, and, looking from one to the other, lamented. If fate had been kinder to my father, I thought, he might have left New York, traveled west to California, and found work with the great Walt Disney instead of in a windowless back room at Macy’s gentlemen’s department. But as the people of the Old Country say, Il destino mischia le carte, ma siamo noi a giocare la partita. Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.”
“That could just as well be a Yiddish proverb,” Miss Arnofsky says. “But destiny has certainly been kinder to you than it was to your father. A successful painter, the director of a museum.”
I nod. Smile at my guest. “Overseeing the Statler’s collection and hanging shows in its gallery hall is what paid our bills. But painting has always been my primary calling.”
“And there’s ample proof of that,” she says, scanning the room. She asks if I have children. One son, I tell her. Giuseppe. Joseph. “And has he followed in your footsteps?”
“As an artist? In a way, I suppose. He works in television out in Hollywood. Directs one of the daytime soap operas. And that calls for a kind of artistic style, too, of course. Television is so much about the visual.”
“Do you see him very often?”
“Not as often as I’d like. But I’ll see him next weekend. He has to be in New York on business, and so he’s coming up for the weekend. In fact, he’s bringing me to Annie Oh’s wedding.”
“Sounds nice. And you’re a widower?”
“Yes, my Anja died in 1989. Heart failure. One day she was here, the next she was gone.”
“And since then? Any other women in your life?”
“No, no. I suppose you could say that in old age, my work has become my wife. Or maybe this was always so.”
“Two long and happy marriages then,” Miss Arnofsky says.
I nod. “Long, happy, and somewhat mysterious.” My guest cocks her head, waiting for me to explain. “One’s wife, one’s art: you can never know either fully. After Anja died, I read her diaries and learned things about her I had never known. That she wrote verse—lovely little poems about her village back in Poland. And that once upon a time she had loved a boy in her village named Stanislaw.”
“And your paintings? They keep secrets, too?”
“In a way, yes. Sometimes I’ll work on a composition for weeks—months, even—without knowing what it is I’m searching for. Or for that matter, after I’ve finished it, what finally has been resolved. After all these years, I still can’t fully explain the process. The way, when you are deeply involved in a composition, everything else in the room fades away—everything but the thing before you that is calling itself into existence. It’s as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.”
“Forgive me; I mean no disrespect. But the way you describe it, it sounds almost like you experience a form of temporary madness yourself.”
“Madness? Perhaps. Who’s to say?”
Miss Arnofsky points to The Dancing Scissors and says she recalls Annie Oh telling her something similar—that she began creating her collages and assemblages without really knowing why or how she was doing it.
“That was true of Joe Jones, too,” I tell her. “As I said before, he told me he had begun painting because he had to. That something was compelling him. All I know is that at such heightened moments of creativity, I feel as if my work is coming not so much from me as through me. From what source, I can’t say. The muse, maybe? My father’s spirit? Or who knows? It could even be that the hand of God is guiding my hand.”
“So your talent may be God-given? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, I’m afraid that sounds rather grandiose.”
“Quite the contrary,” she says. “I’m struck by your humility in the face of all you’ve accomplished.” For the next several seconds, we stare at each other, neither of us speaking. Then she smiles, closes her notebook, unplugs her tape recorder. “Well, Mr. Agnello, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am. This has been wonderful.”
“I’m just relieved to see that you still have both of your ears. I was afraid I might have talked them off.” She laughs, says she could have listened to me for hours more. “Oh, perish the thought,” I say. She rises from her chair, tape machine in hand, and I tell her I’ll see her out.
“No, no. I can let myself out. You should get back to your work.”
I nod. We thank each other, shake hands. From the doorway of the studio, I watch her disappear down the stairs.
But I do not return to my work as I’d intended.
The sun and the conversation of the past hour have made me sleepy. When I close my eyes, the images I evoked for my guest play on in my head: Rufus Jones, bereft at his brother’s funeral … Papa’s cartoon drawings coming to life before me at the piazza with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, water spilling from the mouth of the stone wolf into the aquamarine pool … Annie Oh’s strange collages that day when I first came upon them. Suddenly, I remember something else about that day—something I had forgotten all about until this moment. I had been wavering about whether to give the top prize to Annie or to an abstract expressionist whose work was also quite impressive. But as I stood there vacillating, a gray-haired Negro appeared by my side—a man who looked eerily like an older version of Josephus Jones. It wasn’t Joe, of course; by then, he had been dead for years. “This one,” the man said, nodding at Annie’s work. It was as if somehow he had read my mind and intuited my indecision. And that had clinched it. The “best in show” prize was hers …
“Mr. Agnello? … Mr. Agnello?”
When I open my eyes, my housekeeper is standing before me. She says my lunch is ready. Do I want her to bring up a tray?
“No, no, Hilda. I’ll be down in a minute.” She nods. Leaves.
Half-asleep still, my eyes look around, then land on the unfinished painting resting against my easel. It confuses me. Why does Fanny have angel’s wings? When did I paint those? I rise and go to her and, on closer inspection, realize that her “wings” are only the clouds behind her … And yet, winged or not, she is my angel. Seventy-odd years have slipped by since I spotted her that day in Chicago, and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people’s cruelty toward “the other”—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them …
Well, that’s enough deep thinking for this old brain. My lunch is ready and I’m hungry. I get up, balance myself. On my way out the door, I turn back and face my easel. “I’m too tired to do you justice any more today, little one,” I tell Fanny. “But I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll see you then.”
On the stairs, I remember that I still have to send back that response card. Let Annie know that Joe and I are coming to her wedding.
Part I (#ulink_dbc42560-a78a-5633-8bec-1d36c82bb3fc)
Art and Service (#ulink_dbc42560-a78a-5633-8bec-1d36c82bb3fc)
Chapter One (#ulink_d0e69de2-fca1-5619-9e3d-e87a6352ec47)
Annie Oh (#ulink_d0e69de2-fca1-5619-9e3d-e87a6352ec47)
Viveca’s wedding dress has a name: Gaia. It’s lovely. Layers of sea green silk chiffon, cap sleeves, an empire waist, an asymmetrical A-line skirt with the suggestion of a train. I forget the designer’s name; Ianni something. He’s someone Viveca knows from the Hellenic Fashion Designers Association. It arrived at the apartment from Athens yesterday, and Minnie has pressed it and hung it on the door of Viveca’s closet.
Gaia: I Googled it yesterday after Viveca’s dress arrived and wrote down what it said on an index card. It’s on the bureau. I pick it up and read.
After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth and the everlasting foundation of the Olympian gods. She was first the mother of Uranus, the ancient Greek embodiment of heaven, and later his sexual mate. Among their children were the mountains, the seas, the Cyclopes, and the Hundred-Handed giants who aided Zeus in his successful battle against the Titans, whom Gaia had also birthed.
Chaos, incest, monsters, warring siblings: it’s a strange name for a wedding dress.
The three Vera Wang dresses Viveca had sent over for me to consider were delivered yesterday, too. (Vera is one of Viveca’s clients at the gallery.) There’s an ivory-colored dress, another that has a tinge of pink, a third that’s pearl gray. Minnie spread them across the bed in the guest bedroom, but after she went home, I carried them into our bedroom and hung them to the left of the Gaia. This morning when I woke up, they scared me. I thought for a split second that four women were standing over by the closet. Four brides—one in gorgeous green, three in off-white.
Viveca is abroad still. She went to Athens a week ago for a fitting but then decided to stay several more days to visit with an elderly aunt (her father’s surviving sister) and to finalize the details for our wedding trip to Mykonos. She called me from there last night. “Sweetheart, it’s the land of enchantment here. Have you looked at the pictures I e-mailed you?” I said I hadn’t—that I’d been more in the studio than at the apartment for the last several days, which was a lie. “Well, do,” she said. “Not that photographs can really capture it. In daylight, the Aegean is just dazzling, and at sunset it turns a beautiful cobalt blue. And the villa I’ve rented? Anna, it’s to die for! It sits high on a hill above town and there’s a panoramic view of the harbor and some of the other islands in the archipelago. The floors are white marble from a quarry in Paros, and there’s an oval pool, an indoor fountain, a terrace that looks out on a grape arbor that’s unbelievably lush and lovely.” Why a pool if the sea is right there? I wonder. “The houses here are sun bleached to the most pristine white, Anna, and there are hibiscus growing along the south side of the villa that, against that whiteness, are the most intense red you could ever imagine. I just can’t wait to share it all with you. You’ll see. This place is an artist’s dream.”
“I’ll bet it is,” I said. “For an artist who’s interested in capturing what’s pretty and picturesque. I’m not.”
“I know that, Anna. It’s what drew me to your work from the start.”
“It?” I said. “What’s ‘it’?”
There was a long pause before she answered me. “Well, it’s like I was telling that couple that bought those two pieces from your Pandora series. Your work looks people in the eye. It comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. But this will be a vacation, sweetheart. You work so hard. Mykonos is my gift to you, Anna. My gift to us. Four weeks surrounded by what’s lovely and life affirming at the start of our married life. Don’t we deserve that?”
The room went blurry with my tears. “I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you, too, Anna. I miss you, too.”
It’s not that I don’t want to be with her in Mykonos. But four whole weeks? In all the years I’ve been at it, I’ve never been away from my work that long. Well, to be fair, she’ll be away from her work, too. “It’s not a very savvy business decision,” she said when she told me she’d rented the villa for the entire month of October. “People will have awakened from their Hamptons comas by then, reengaged with the city, and be ready to buy. But I said to myself, ‘Viveca, the hell with commerce for once! Seize the day!’ I smiled and nodded when she said that, swallowing back my ambivalence instead of voicing it.
You do that for someone you love, right? Keep your mouth shut instead of opening it. Bend on the things that are bendable. This wedding, for instance. It’s Viveca who wants to make our union “official.” And where we’ll be married: I’ve had to bend on that, too. Okay, fine. I get it. Connecticut has legalized gay marriage and New York hasn’t. But why not book a place in some pretty little Gold Coast town closer to the city? Cos Cob or Darien? Why the town where Orion and I raised our kids? She’d wanted to surprise me, she said. Well, she’d achieved her objective, but it’s … awkward. It’s uncomfortable.
Okay then, Annie. If you have misgivings, why go through with it? Why not tell her you’ve had second thoughts? … I look up, look around our well-appointed apartment, and I see a part of the answer hanging on the wall in the hallway: the framed poster announcing the opening of my first show at viveca c. The headline, ANNIE OH: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM!, and beneath it, the full-color photo of my sculpture Birthings: the row of headless mannequins, their bloody legs spread wide, their wombs expelling serial killers. Speck, Bundy, Gacy. Monsters all.
My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable: she’d put it better than I ever could have. It’s one of the reasons why I love Viveca. The fact that she not only promotes my work and sells it at prices I couldn’t have imagined, but that she also gets it. And yes, her apartment is as lovely as she is, and our lovemaking feels satisfying and safe. But for me that may be the foundation of our intimacy: the fact that she understands what my work attempts to do.
Orion never did. But then again, why would he have? I’d been so guarded all those years. A twenty-seven-year marriage of guardedness, based on nothing more than the fact that he was a man and, therefore, not to be trusted with the worst of my secrets.
But come on, Annie. You haven’t told Viveca your secrets either. Why is that? Because you’re afraid she might change her mind? Stop taking care of you? Be honest. Your own mother dies in the flood that night. Then your father drinks himself out of your life. And your foster parents were just stop-gaps. They fed you, clothed you, but never loved you. You wanted the real thing. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Orion and Viveca are the same age? That both your ex-husband and your wife-to-be are seven years older than you?
No, that’s irrelevant … Or is it? Is that the real reason why you married him? Why you’re marrying her? Because Little Orphan Annie still needs someone to take care of her?
I need to stop this. Stop being so hard on myself. I love Viveca. And I loved Orion, too … But why? Because he had taken me under his wing? Because for the first time in my life, intimacy with a man was enjoyable? Safe? Maybe not as safe as it feels with Viveca, or as wild as it had been with Priscilla. But pleasurable enough. And very pleasurable for him. It made me a little envious, sometimes. The intensity of his …
No. I wanted to give him pleasure. But his pleasure had a price.
No, that’s not fair. It had been a joint decision. I had stopped using my diaphragm because we both wanted a child. But when my pregnancy became a fact instead of a desire, I was suddenly seized with fear. What if I wasn’t up to the job of motherhood? What if I miscarried again like I had that time when I was seventeen? I had never told Orion about my first pregnancy, and I held off for a week or more before I told him about this one. The night I finally did tell him, Orion promised me that he was going to be the best father he could—the opposite of his own absentee father. We cried together, and I let him assume that mine were happy tears, the same as his. They weren’t. But little by little my fear subsided, and I began to feel happy. Excited. Until I had that ultrasound. When I learned we were having twins, I got scared all over again. And when, in the delivery room, it looked like we might lose Andrew, I was terrified …
Still, I loved being a mother. Loved them both as soon as I laid eyes on them, and more and more in the weeks that followed. Until then, I hadn’t understood how profound love could be.
Not that having two of them wasn’t challenging. Demanding of everything I had to give and then some. While Orion was away at work all day, I was home changing diapers, feeding them, grabbing ten-minute naps whenever—miraculously, rarely—their sleeping schedules coincided. And true to his word, Orion was a devoted father. When he’d get home from the college and see them, his face would light up. He’d bathe them, walk with one of them in each of his arms, rock them until they’d both gone down for the night. Part of the night, anyway. Andrew was a colicky baby, and it would drive me crazy when he’d cry and wake up his sister. And then Ariane would start crying, too. Our marriage suffered for that first year or so. Orion would come home tired from dealing with his patients and give whatever energy he had left to the twins. I resented that he didn’t have much left for me. But I didn’t have much left for him, either. Double the work, double the mess. Carting both of them to the pediatrician’s when one of them was sick. And then going back there the following week when Andrew came down with what Ariane was just getting over. Sitting in that waiting room with those other mothers—the ones with singletons who were always making lunch dates. Playdates. They’d ooh and ah over my two but never invite me to join them. Not that I even wanted to, but why hadn’t they ever asked? They always acted so confident, those moms. It was as if everyone but me had read some book about how to be a good mother …
But I had read the books. Consulted Dr. Spock so often that the binding cracked in half and the pages started falling out. But I had no mother of my own to rely on the way those other women did. Those grandmothers who could spell their daughters. Babysit for them, advise them …
Still, I could have had that kind of help. How many times had Orion’s mother volunteered to drive up from Pennsylvania and help out? Maria was retired by then, available. She kept offering. It’s just that she acted so goddamned superior! Made me feel even more insecure. When I got that breast infection? Said I was thinking of bottle-feeding the babies because I was in such pain? She just looked at me—stared at me like how could I be so selfish? And then, without even asking me, she had that woman from the La Leche League call and talk me out of it.
Because she wanted what was best for her grandchildren …
And she always knew what was best. Right? Not me, their own mother. She never said as much, but I got the message. Her son had made a mistake, had married beneath himself. He should have stayed with what’s-her-name.
You remember her name, Annie. How could you forget when Maria was always bringing her up to him? “Thea’s gotten a fellowship, Thea’s gotten her book taken.” Thea this, Thea that, like I wasn’t even standing there. So no, I didn’t want her help or her advice. Who was she to pity me?
But you showed her, didn’t you? Didn’t even go to her funeral. Hey, I couldn’t go. Both of the twins had come down with the chicken pox. What was I supposed to do—leave them with a sitter?
Except I did leave them with one. I had just started making my art. I wanted to be down there working on it, not upstairs with two sick kids. So I hired that Mrs. Dunkel to watch them … He was down there in Pennsylvania for almost three weeks! Sitting with Maria at the hospital. Calling me with the daily reports. “I don’t think it’s going to be long now. She seems to be going downhill fast.” And then, in the next phone call, it would be, “She was better today. Awake, alert. I fed her some pudding, and she managed to eat about half of it.” The twins were running fevers, crying, clinging to me. But I was supposed to celebrate because she had had a few bites of pudding? And okay, Maria was his mother. But I was his wife, the mother of his kids. We needed him, too. I was going out of my mind.
But that was no excuse. I shouldn’t have hit him even if he wouldn’t stop scratching his chicken pox. I’d tell Ariane to stop, and she would. But not Andrew. So I slapped him on his tush, harder than I meant to. At first he just looked at me, shocked, and then he cried and cried. I was so scared. What kind of a mother hit her child that hard? It left a mark. But by the next day, it faded. If I had let him keep scratching, he would have had scars for the rest of his life.
And what was Orion supposed to do? He couldn’t abandon his mother, no matter how long she lingered. But when she finally did die, there were the arrangements to make, the funeral, cleaning out her condo for resale … And that babysitter hadn’t worked out anyway. How could I concentrate on my work when they were up there crying, calling for me, banging on the basement door?
But I did not boycott Maria’s funeral. I stayed home with our sick kids. And then he tells me that Thea flew in to pay her respects. That the two of them went out to dinner after the services. And I started wondering about how else she might have comforted him …
Okay, Annie, you were insecure, even if, deep down, you knew he wouldn’t cheat on you. But then when he finally gets everything squared away down there in Harrisburg, he pulls into the driveway and walks in the door like the returning hero. “Daddy! Daddy’s home! Give us a pony ride, Daddy. Read us a bedtime story.” He shows up again, they’re over the worst of their chicken pox, and suddenly I’m irrelevant. The fun parent was back. The good cop. Who cares about Mommy now that Daddy’s back? And I resented that. Held on to that resentment until we landed in couples counseling.
Because he didn’t value my work. That’s why we were having trouble. Because everything was about his work, and mine didn’t count. I was just supposed to be home with the kids all day, at their beck and call, and then grab an hour or two after they were finally down for the night, when I was too exhausted to tap into my creativity. Half the time I’d be down there, trying to work on something, and I’d fall asleep. He’d have to come down, wake me up, and lead me upstairs to bed.
But boy, I balked at that marriage counseling idea. I thought the deck would be stacked. Me versus two psychologists. I was afraid she was going to tell me to give up my art. But instead Suzanne validated what I was doing. Helped Orion to see that my work mattered, too. And she helped me to realize the extent of his grieving for his mother. “Now that my mother has passed, it’s like we’re both orphans,” he said, trying hard to hold back his tears. “I mean, I was the result of my mother’s affair with a married man. A Chinese man who wouldn’t leave his Chinese wife for his Italian girlfriend, and then … took a powder. Just goddamned disappeared.” He had never said much about his father’s absence from his life, and until then I’d assumed he just accepted it. “The only thing I ever got from him was his last name,” he said. “And it’s different. I know it is. I had my mother a hell of a lot longer than you had yours, but …” He broke down in sobs then, and I ached as I witnessed the pain he was in. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. Pulled tissues from the box on the table and handed them to him. Watched him wipe his eyes, blow his nose. For the next several seconds, none of us spoke. Suzanne kept looking at me. Waiting for me to say something. And in the middle of that uncomfortable silence, I almost risked telling him my truths. My secrets were on the tip of my tongue. But then Suzanne glanced at her clock and said we had to wind up. That we’d gone a little bit over and her two o’clock would be waiting.
I don’t know. Maybe if we had kept going to those sessions, I would have told him. But we didn’t. Things were better between Orion and me—more like they’d been in the beginning. The closeness, the way he could get me to laugh. Like that time he took me to Boston—Haymarket Square—and taught me how to slurp oysters from the half-shell. Took me that first time to the Gardner Museum … And being a mom had started getting a little easier by then. The twins were growing out of the “terrible twos.” They had begun to amuse each other, catching bugs out in the backyard or going down to the stream out back to capture tadpoles and crayfish. That bond they’d developed gave me a reprieve. I could sit near them. Keep an eye on them while I was sketching out new ideas for pieces I wanted to make. And thanks to those counseling sessions, Orion had become more supportive of what I was doing. What I was trying to do. He began spelling me on the weekends so that I could do my work, go on my hunts for new materials. When I won that “best in show” prize? It was Orion who had urged me to enter the competition.
And then, in the middle of this better time, I got a little careless about birth control and along came Marissa. Our unplanned child.
He had kept promising he was going to get a vasectomy but never followed through with it. I was furious when I realized I was pregnant again, but only at first. I calmed down, just like I had with the twins. Accepted it. But my work suffered. I had to make all kinds of sacrifices because I put them first. Because I was a damned good mother …
Most of the time. But then there were those times when I wasn’t. When Andrew would make me so mad that … Because he was always goading me. Challenging me. Wasn’t that why he took the brunt of it? Or was it because, of the three kids, he has the most O’Day in him? The reddish hair, the Irish eyes. He resembles my father around the eyes. And he has my father’s walk.
And who else does Andrew resemble? Go ahead. Say it.
“Miz Anna?”
“Hmm?” I look up, startled. Our housekeeper is standing there. “Yes? What is it, Minnie?”
“I axed you if you got anything else needs washing?”
“Washing? Uh, no. Just the stuff that’s in the basket. Thanks.”
“Did I scare you just now, Miz Anna?”
“What? Oh, no. I was just thinking about something else.”
Minnie doesn’t say so, of course, but I get the feeling she doesn’t really approve of two wealthy women marrying each other. Or maybe she just doesn’t get why we’d want to … Our housekeeper: I feel guilty even thinking it, let alone saying it out loud, which I did to Hector yesterday when he showed me the umbrella he’d found leaning against the wall downstairs in the lobby. “This isn’t yours, is it, Miss Oh?” he asked me.
“No, but I’ll take it. It’s our housekeeper’s. Thanks, Hector.” I reached into my purse, took a twenty from my wallet, and held it out to him.
“No, no, that’s okay. This thing don’t look like it cost twenty bucks to begin with. You don’t have to tip me all the time.” But I waved away his resistance and made him take it. I had just withdrawn two hundred dollars from the ATM at that Korean grocery store around the corner, so there were nine other twenties in my wallet. It wasn’t as if I was going to miss the tenth. Twenty dollars: what’s that these days? A taxi ride up to the Guggenheim plus tip? A couple of those fancy coffee drinks at Starbucks and a slice of their pricey pound cake? I’d rather let Hector have it.
Hector’s affable and he’s a talker. He works construction during the week, at the site where they’re building the 9/11 memorial. Works at our building on weekends. I like it when he tells me about his life. He has custody of his three kids for reasons he’s not gone into with me. One boy and two girls—the same as Orion and me, although his kids are still young. They’re beautiful children; he’s shown me their parochial school pictures. Now that school’s started again, he pays a neighborhood abuela to watch the kids from the time they get home until the time he does. His sister takes them on the weekends when he’s here. When I asked him once if it bothered him to work every day in that hole where the towers used to be, he shrugged and said that thing everyone says now: “It is what it is.” Ariane used to have that feminist poster in her bedroom: Rosie the Riveter, flexing her bicep, and beneath her, the motto: We can do it! Obama’s campaign motto last year was a variation on that. “Yes, we can!” he promised, and we needed so much to believe him that we actually elected a black man. I remember staring at the headlines and the TV news the morning after the election, in happy disbelief. But the economy’s even more of a mess than it was, our kids keep dying over there in those wars we started but can’t end, and it’s turned out that Obama isn’t a superhero after all. Maybe that’s the legacy of those fallen towers, all those lost lives: our national feeling of futility. No, we can’t do it. It is what it is. And who’s most affected by the way things are now? Not the people who can still afford the prices at the pump and at Starbucks. I heard on the news the other day that 77 percent of the children in New York’s public schools qualify for free breakfast and free lunch. That by next year, the unemployment rate may reach past 10 percent.
Last weekend, Hector was on second shift. Earlier that day, he’d borrowed his sister’s car and taken his kids to Six Flags for a last summertime hurrah. But coming back, the car broke down, and he was over an hour late. I’d just come back from a movie, and the building manager was berating him right in front of me while I waited for the elevator. There’d been complaints, he said, about the entrance being left unsupervised. Hector was mistaken if he thought he was irreplaceable; there was a stack of applications sitting on his desk. “And who do you think’s going to have to stand there before the co-op board and listen to them gripe this coming Monday? You, Martinez? No, me, that’s who.” I wanted to walk over there and ask that stupid manager if he’d ever been late. If he was perfect. What was that thing Jesus said when he was defending the adulteress? Let he without sin cast the first stone. But then the elevator doors opened, and I got in and pressed five without having said a thing. When Viveca called me from Greece and I mentioned the incident between Hector and the building manager—told her I wish I’d spoken up—she said it was probably better that I hadn’t. “The co-op board doesn’t like it when tenants get mixed up in issues involving the help,” she advised …
My daughter Ariane wouldn’t have been a wimp about it; she’d have jumped right in and stuck up for Hector. She’s been a defender of the underdog ever since she was a kid. There was that time in high school when she had the party on prom night for all the girls who, like her, hadn’t been asked. I can still hear them all, down in our rec room, laughing and playing music, yakking away. And then there was the time when she defended that mentally retarded boy who was being taunted by the bullies. They were getting their kicks by circling him and pitching pennies at him, and Ariane had elbowed her way past them, taken the boy by the hand, and led him out of the circle. The bullies had targeted her for a few days after that, but when they saw that they couldn’t get to her, they knocked it off. It had stopped being fun …
The help: it angered me, that superior tone, but I kept my mouth shut. That co-op board is like some kind of supreme body around here that everyone’s supposed to kowtow to. Before I moved into the building, Viveca had to have them approve my occupancy of her guest room, which, in my opinion, was bullshit. Whose apartment is it? Hers or theirs? The co-op board: they’re like those athletic boys in junior high that the principal picked to be hallway monitors. They’d put on their sashes and boss around the rest of us mere mortals. Move to the right! No talking during passing time! I said no talking! What are you, deaf? How’d you like to get reported? Goddamned Gestapo hall monitors. Well, it was previews of coming attractions. It’s not as if, after you leave junior high, you’re ever going to be free of bullies. They follow you through life. And okay, maybe I didn’t say anything when that stupid building manager was chewing out Hector. But my art says it. What did it say in that Village Voice review of my last show? That my pieces are political. Howls of protest against the misuse of power. Something like that …
Coffee. I need coffee. Maybe a couple of cups of caffeine will motivate me to get to the studio today. I’m not sure why I’ve been avoiding going there, or why I lied to Viveca and said I was going. Is it wedding nerves? Has my creativity begun to abandon me? I take the beans out of the freezer (fair-trade, Guatemalan, thirteen dollars a pound at Zabar’s). Grind them, hit the “brew” button. Everything’s high end here. This new coffeemaker Viveca had sent over from Saks brews espresso and cappuccino, froths up milk for latté. I should check the manual; for all I know, it’ll dust the furniture and wipe your rear end for you as well. When it arrived, I saw the price on the receipt: seven hundred dollars. Jesus! The last I checked, you could get a Mr. Coffee on sale for $19.99 … Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m avoiding the studio because my life’s become too goddamned comfortable.
To stop thinking, I put on the TV, the morning news, and there’s Diane Sawyer, looking as pretty as ever. She must be in her sixties by now. Has she had work done? Have her lips always been that full, or have they been plumped with collagen? These are New York questions. Before I moved to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass one way or another. Well, she’s probably got her burdens, too. Ratings wars, celebrity stalkers. Being that famous must be so strange … Last week, when I recognized Diane’s husband buying toothpaste at that Duane Reed, I couldn’t remember any of the movies he’s directed, but what I did recall was that his family had had to escape from the Nazis when he was a little boy, and that some childhood illness had left him without body hair. Passing him in the aisle, I glanced over to see if he had eyebrows, but when he caught me looking, I had to turn away. It’s not that I’m a celebrity. Far from it, thank god. But I’m known in the art world now to some extent—here in Manhattan at least. How would I like it if some collector knew more about my shitty childhood than they did about my work?
One time on this morning show—Valentine’s Day, I think it was—Diane said that when her husband travels and she misses him, she sometimes wraps herself in one of his shirts and his scent comforts her … The Graduate: wasn’t that one of his films? “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” The evening Viveca came into my room, sat down next to me on the bed, and touched her impeccably manicured fingernails to my lips, kissed them, I remember feeling as confused as Dustin Hoffman was in that scene. But when we made love that night and she brought me to that long, unhurried orgasm, it reduced me to happy tears. It had been so long, and I was so grateful for the release, that I could barely catch my breath. But Viveca isn’t predatory the way Mrs. Robinson was. And our relationship is about much more than good sex. She loves me, and I love her. Trust her. I’ve missed her so much since she’s been away. Miss her the way I missed Orion when he was down there tending to his mother. The way I missed my own mother after those floodwaters carried her away. Missed my father those nights when I’d wait for him to come home from the bars. Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they’re away? To come home and keep you safe? …
There’s the doorbell. I call down the hall to Minnie. “I’ll get it!”
It’s Hector. “Package for Ms. Christophoulos-Shabbas,” he says, handing it to me. When I tell him he didn’t have to come up, that he could have given it to me when he saw me in the lobby, he shakes his head. Reminds me that Viveca’s instructions are to bring deliveries right up to the apartment.
“Oh, okay,” I say. “Hold on a sec.” I go get my wallet. There are a few singles in there, a five, a twenty. Five seems too little and twenty seems too much, but I give him the larger bill anyway. He glances quickly at it before putting it in his pocket. “Thank you,” he says.
The package is from Neiman Marcus, and I know what’s in it: that expensive perfume Viveca wears: Clive Christian Floral Oriental. Yesterday when we talked, she wanted to know if it had arrived yet. When I said it hadn’t, she asked if I’d track the shipment on the computer. Can’t blame her for that, I guess. After I found out it was en route, I went on the Neiman Marcus Web site to see what that perfume costs. I wish I hadn’t. Twelve hundred dollars an ounce: that’s just plain ridiculous … But why shouldn’t she buy these luxury items if she wants them? She works hard, she’s inherited money from both her father and her late husband, she’s generous with the charities she supports—even sits on the boards of a couple of them: Literacy Partners, God’s Love We Deliver. I should stop being so goddamned judgmental. Stop feeling guilty that I love the smell of that perfume on her, the taste of the coffee that our Esclusivo Magnifica makes. I guess I’m suffering from … what would you call it? Lifestyle guilt? I should ask Orion to look it up in that book he was always consulting—the DSM whatever it was. Maybe I’ve got some fashionable rich lady’s neurosis.
Independent of Viveca, I’m financially comfortable now—more than comfortable, actually, because of what collectors pay for my work. Well, independent of Viveca and independent because of her, too. My art is sold exclusively at her gallery, and I’m the featured artist on viveca.com (http://www.viveca.com). But I remember what it’s like to live a nickel-and-dime life. To count on waitressing tips—a couple of pounds of change per shift, plus dollar bills and the occasional five or ten. I doubt Hector would be putting on that gray doorman’s uniform and standing in the lobby every Saturday and Sunday if he didn’t need the extra income. Still, he’s always so good-natured. Hector may be the most noncynical New Yorker I’ve met in the four years I’ve lived here … Unless it’s an act. Maybe that big, warm smile of his hides his resentment. “The service people aren’t your friends,” Viveca warned me once, shortly after I moved in here. “Nor do they want to be. Be respectful of that.”
One time? This was shortly after I began staying at Viveca’s but before we started sleeping together. A customer at viveca c—an investment banker—had just bought one of my pieces for thirty thousand dollars, and I was feeling so flush and free that I opened a window and tossed out a hundred-dollar bill. I watched it flutter end over end toward the street below, then looked away before it landed. I didn’t want to see anyone scrambling after it, or worse, two people fighting over it. I just wanted to imagine someone with a hard life happening by and getting a nice surprise. Picking it up and being on their way, a little less burdened because of that unexpected hundred-dollar bill.
I sit down at the table, unpeel a banana, and eat it while I work on the Sudoku puzzle I ripped out of yesterday’s paper. The Esclusivo Magnifica plays its little snatch of classical music, signaling that the coffee’s ready. I get up, grab a mug, pour, sip. Back in Connecticut, when Orion and I were first married, I’d reuse tea bags to economize. At the grocery store, I would buy whatever coffee was on sale that week: the store brand or Yuban or Chock full o’Nuts. Chock full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee. Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy. Ha! Guess again. This coffee from our high-priced machine is bracing and delicious. So shut up and enjoy it, Annie. You can’t have it both ways—live like this and resent it at the same time. Stop being such a goddamned hypocrite.
I give up on the Sudoku puzzle; this one’s too hard and I’m not that good at them in the first place. In fact, I stink. Numbers, logic: that’s never been my strong suit. On TV, Mario Cuomo’s son—the cute one, not the politician—is reading the news. I’m getting a yogurt out of the fridge when I hear him say something about Cape Cod. I look up. They’re showing footage of great white sharks cruising the water. Has Orion heard about this? He loves swimming in the ocean. I’d better call him. Mario’s son says that the Cape’s merchants and innkeepers are worried that this last hurrah of the tourist season will take a major hit during what’s already been an off year because of the bad economy.
You’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Orion Oh …
I don’t get it. Why hasn’t he changed his greeting yet? Orion left his practice at the university over a month ago, opting for early retirement—something I still don’t understand. Why would a workaholic do that so abruptly? And why, all of a sudden, does he want to sell the house after he was so adamant during the divorce negotiations about not selling it? About staying put whether I’d left or not.
If this is an emergency, please call …
I was shocked when Orion took Viveca up on her offer to use her beach house for his Cape Cod getaway. He’d refused at first, but then he changed his mind. Why? Whatever’s going on with him, I don’t think he’s shared it with the kids. I talked to all three of them this week, and none of them voiced any worry about their father. Has he met someone? No, that can’t be it. If he had, Marissa would have wormed it out of him and called me. Andrew and Ariane can keep a secret but not their little sister.
There’s a long, long beep, which means he hasn’t been picking up his messages. “Hey, there. It’s me,” I say. “Have you left for the Cape yet? I just wanted to tell you, in case you haven’t heard, that they’ve been spotting sharks up there. Be careful, okay? I hope you’re well. Call me.”
Marissa’s probably right. I should learn how to text-message. “Daddy hardly ever answers the phone, Mom. But whenever I text him, he texts me right back,” she told me yesterday. Well, good for her, but I’d prefer to talk to her father—to hear it in his voice that he’s doing okay. Or not. When you’ve been married to someone for as long as Orion and I were, you can hear in a conversation if something’s wrong—not so much in what’s said as the way it’s said. The inflections, the hesitations …
Is it the wedding? The fact that it will be in Three Rivers? Is that what’s bothering him? I didn’t want to not invite Orion. It’s doubtful that Andrew’s coming, but both of our girls will be there, and I know he’d like to see them. And Donald and Mimsy are driving up from Pennsylvania; Orion’s always liked my brother and his wife and he hasn’t seen them in ages. Still, I don’t want him to feel that he has to attend. Yesterday, Viveca’s assistant e-mailed me the list of who’s coming and who’s declined and apparently Orion hasn’t sent in his response card yet … I was delighted, though, to see Mr. Agnello’s name on the list. I want to introduce Viveca to the man who validated my artistic efforts all those years ago when I was struggling against self-doubt, wondering if I should stop kidding myself and just give up. Mr. Agnello must be in his nineties by now. He and I have exchanged Christmas cards for twenty-something years, and when I didn’t get a card back from him this past Christmas, I was worried that he might have …
Is it because I’m marrying a woman? Is that why Orion hasn’t responded? He’s never been homophobic, but maybe this strikes too close to home. Bruises his male ego. That time when we met with the lawyers to negotiate the terms of the divorce, he’d already been drinking. I could smell it. And it wasn’t exactly the cocktail hour; it was 11:00 A.M. I’d wanted to say something to him about it after we left, but I didn’t. I was still trying to figure out what the new rules were about such things, now that we were almost divorced. The other day, I tried imagining what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot—if he had left me for a man. It was a ridiculous exercise: picturing two hairy-chested men in bed with each other, one of them Orion. LOL, as Marissa would put it. LMFAO.
The truth, whether Orion believes it or not, is that I hadn’t left him for Viveca. I’d left him for New York—for the opportunities it offered me, creatively and commercially. What developed between Viveca and me had been unplanned, unpremeditated …
My “defection,” Orion had called it on that awful Sunday back in Connecticut when I finally admitted that Viveca and I had become involved, that I’d fallen in love with her. I was “a Judas,” he said. I could get my own goddamned ride back to the train station, because he sure as hell wasn’t taking me there. He was through with being “a fucking sap.” I’d had to hire a cab to New Haven, and on the train ride back to the city, I’d kept replaying our argument. If I was Judas, then that made him Jesus Christ, right? Well, maybe he should come down from his cross and take some of the responsibility for the fact that our marriage had failed. Which of us had practically raised Andrew and the girls single-handedly all those years when he’d leave for work early and come home late? Sit in his office all day and into the evening, counseling college kids about their problems? What about my problems? What about the fact that I felt frustrated and neglected all those years while he was playing savior to those troubled students of his and then coming home and feeling sorry for himself because of the toll they took? Drinking his beers and falling asleep by nine when I still had laundry to fold and put away, and three school lunches to make for the next morning, before I could go down to my gloomy little studio and grab a measly hour or two for my work.
Thank god the bitterness has subsided on both our parts. We have our kids to thank for that and our mutual investment in their lives, our shared worries about their unhappiness and their safety: Ariane’s failed romances, our worries about where Andrew’s military career might take him, where Marissa’s impetuousness might take her. Our concern for our kids’ well-being binds us despite our divorce. Will always bind us. And he’s come around, made an effort with Viveca despite the fact that I can tell he doesn’t like her … Whether Viveca understands it or not, I still care about Orion, which is why I’m worried about him. Why, maybe, I shouldn’t have put his name on the guest list—made the decision myself instead of listening to Marissa’s “Daddy’s an adult, Mom. He can decide if he wants to go or not.” The last thing I want to do is make him feel he has to come if it will be too weird or too painful for him …
I don’t know. Marriage, parenting, divorce: it’s a complicated equation, but there’s no sense in pretending that we don’t still have feelings for each other, no matter who failed who. Or is it “whom”? Fifty-two years old and I still don’t know the difference. What mistake had I made that time when Marissa, in the middle of her bratty teenage phase, called me on my bad grammar? “Her and I”: that was it. Ariane and I were making supper, and Marissa was leaning against the counter, trying as hard as she could to annoy me. And I was doing everything I could to show her that she couldn’t get my goat. But when I happened to mention that I’d run into Ruth Stanley at the post office, and that “her and I” hadn’t seen each other in ages, Marissa felt obliged to let me know how stupid I was. “It’s she and I, Mother.” Whenever she was mad at me back then—which was most of the time—I was “Mother” instead of “Mom” or “Mama.” She went on to inform me that the way I murdered the English language embarrassed her in front of her friends, and so when they came over, would I please do her a favor and not speak to them? Well, that hit a nerve. I burst into tears, furious with myself for letting her see me cry. But then Ari had jumped to my defense. Had turned to her little sister and demanded that Marissa apologize to me. She did it, too. Ariane’s easygoing for the most part, but she can be fierce in the face of injustice. I’ve often thought she would have made a good lawyer. In the wake of Marissa’s remark, I’d gone out and bought one of those Dummies books on grammar. I studied it, spoke self-consciously for a while. I’m pretty sure it’s no matter who failed whom, now that I think about it, although I don’t remember why …
Orion and Viveca have that much in common, at least: their intelligence and good educations, the way they know how to say things correctly without having to think about it. Viveca’s fluent in three languages, and he used to do the Times crossword puzzles in pen. Complete them most Sundays. Odd how they both got mixed up with me, the girl with three years of high school and a G.E.D. It’s funny. In all the years Orion and I were together, I can’t remember him ever correcting me. And the only reference Viveca’s ever made was that time, shortly after I started living here, when she kissed me on the forehead and called me her “Eliza Dolittle.” Do little: I’d assumed she was implying that I didn’t help enough around the apartment. But later that same day when she came in and I was running the vacuum, she pulled the plug and reminded me that that was Minnie’s job. It wasn’t until weeks later, when they were showing My Fair Lady on the old movie channel, that I finally got it: in Viveca’s mind, I was unschooled Audrey Hepburn to her upper-class Rex Harrison. It was what that marriage counselor Orion and I went to that time called “ouch moments”: when your spouse said something that felt hurtful. You were supposed to speak up immediately, let them know. I never called Viveca on what she’d said, though. It was weeks after the fact, and she probably wouldn’t have even remembered making the comment. And anyway, Viveca’s never corrected my grammar, either. She probably just cringes in silence whenever I make a mistake. Maybe that was what Orion did all those years, too … That day when Ariane jumped to my defense after Marissa embarrassed me, I invited my A+ daughter to let me know whenever I said something wrong. I knew she’d be gentle about it. Clue me in privately. But Ariane never took me up on it. She was not only the best student of my three, but the kindest, too—more compassionate than either her twin brother or her little sister. She has her father’s temperament, his need to help others. Which is probably why she’s a soup kitchen manager, not a lawyer. She and her father have always been close. Ariane is Daddy’s girl. When I told her that morning that we were getting a divorce, she was immediately defensive on Orion’s behalf, and that was before I told her the reason why I was divorcing him. My god, when I did tell her, she was furious with me. But she came around, started speaking to me again soon enough. My mother is leaving my father because she’s in love with a woman, she must have decided. It is what it is …
When I called Ari yesterday to let her know I wanted to pay for her flight in from California for the wedding, she said, “No, no, Mama. You don’t have to do that.” But I want to. I appreciate her making the effort. San Francisco to Boston: how much would that cost? Four hundred dollars? Five hundred? She can’t afford that. Not on whatever she makes managing that food bank out there. Her annual income is probably less than what Marissa makes on the residuals from that insurance commercial she’s in. That thing runs so often: Marissa as a newlywed shopping with her “husband” for insurance from that blissed-out saleswoman with the headband and the big hair. How much must that actress make? She’s on TV all the time, on the radio, in pop-up ads on the Internet. She always acts so hyped-up about the insurance she’s selling, it’s as if she’s taken amphetamines or something. I’m just going to write Ariane a check and send it to her, no matter how much she protests.
I offered to pay for Andrew’s and his fiancée’s flights up from Texas, too, but he says he doubts they’ll come. Can’t spare the time. It bothered me that he said it with such disdain. I told him I was looking forward to meeting his bride-to-be but that I understood, of course. Still, I got the message: he doesn’t approve of my marrying Viveca. I’m just not sure if he’s resentful on behalf of his father, his gender, or his newfound religious conservatism.
Of my three kids, Andrew was the least likely, I would have figured, to embrace evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, he was always the one most likely to break the rules if not the Commandments—the only one of the three his father and I ever had to sit in court with. The marijuana arrest, the shoplifting arrest, the time he and his high school pals got drunk and spray-painted those school buses. And then, at the beginning of his senior year, those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers, and it changed him. I can still see him, glued to the TV on that awful day, tears running down his face. When he started in about how he wanted to be part of America’s response, it had frightened me.
I begged Andrew not to go into the military. Said all the wrong things. Argued that all those stupid Rambo movies he had grown up watching were all just macho Hollywood bullshit. But Orion was wonderful. He calmed me down, reminded me that the last thing we should do was make our son defensive. He was eighteen, after all; he didn’t need our permission to enlist. Then Orion had gone online. Had gone downtown and talked to that recruiter. Armed with the information he had gathered, he had approached Andrew with that measured, logical way of his. Explained to him that if he went to college, got his degree, and still wanted to serve, he could enter as a second lieutenant and be eligible for Officer Candidate School. And so Andrew had gone off to school instead of off to war … It was that goddamned organic chemistry class he was taking junior year in college that had wrecked everything. Filled him with self-doubt every time he flunked a quiz. That, and the fact that the girl he’d been dating since his freshman year had broken up with him. He hadn’t even told us he’d withdrawn from school and enlisted until two weeks before he was due to report for basic training. Well, at least he finished up his degree after he enlisted. Took care of that piece of unfinished business. …
Now he’s found his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And my guess is that the god he’s pledged himself to frowns upon gay marriage. When Ariane sent me the link to the newspaper article about Andrew’s engagement, it became obvious, more or less. Mr. and Mrs. Branch Commerford of Waco are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Casey-Lee, to Mr. Andrew Oh, son of Dr. and Mrs. Orion Oh of Three Rivers, Connecticut. Orion’s and my divorce was finalized almost a year ago, and I haven’t lived in Three Rivers for the last four. Either Andrew is in denial or he’s lying to his in-laws and his bride-to-be. She’s a pretty little thing, a petite blonde. Casey-Lee: it’s a beauty contestant name. Somewhere along the way, I read or heard that Texas has had more Miss Americas than any other state. And those parents’ names—Branch and Erlene. Erlene: I’d bet any amount of money that she’s got big hair. There’s a brother that Marissa says everyone calls Little Branch. Big Branch and Little Branch: good god. Well, if Andrew needs to hide the fact that I’m marrying Viveca, I guess I can be discreet about it. But when they get married, I’m not about to fly down there and pretend that his father and I are still Mr. and Mrs. If I’m even invited to the wedding, that is. Maybe I’ll be expected to stay away, stay under wraps. What was that book they had us read in high school—the one where the crazy wife was locked upstairs in the attic? …
It’s ironic, really, that my son now seems to have an aversion to lesbians. He sure was curious about them when he was in high school. I remember that time when, after I’d told him a hundred times to go upstairs and clean his pigsty of a bedroom and heard “I will, Mom … I’m gonna” that I finally gave up. Decided to go up there and do the job myself. And I did—with a vengeance. Filled up three big garbage bags with crap that I was going to throw out, whether he liked it or not. I was a woman on a mission. And when I went to flip his mattress, I discovered his stash of dirty magazines and all those gym socks that never seemed to make it into the hamper, most of them stiff with I-knew-what … I didn’t much mind the Playboys and Penthouses. Half the teenage boys in America had those hidden away, I figured. But one of his socks was stuck to the cover of a magazine called Girl on Girl. I’d stood there, flipping through it—looking at all those hideous pictures of women having sex with cucumbers and other women wearing strap-on dildos. Fake sex, it was obvious to me, although it probably wasn’t to Andrew. They all had freakishly big breasts, and one of them, I remember, had areolas as big as the rubber jar opener down in our kitchen drawer. They all looked drugged. In the photo that infuriated me the most, two women were wearing nothing but cowboy hats and holsters cinched around their hips, and one was inserting the barrel of a gun into the other’s vagina. I flipped when I saw that one! Marched downstairs and out to the garage where Andrew was fiddling with the gears of his ten-speed. “Where did this come from?” I demanded, and when he saw what I was holding in my hand, even his ears turned red. He told me a kid in his homeroom had shoved it in his backpack without him knowing it. “Baloney!” I said. “You listen to me, young man. And look me in the eye, too.” I waited until he did. “Whoever took these pictures, and whoever publishes this garbage, is committing violence against women. You got that? And whoever’s looking at it is guilty, too. You have two sisters, Andrew. This junk is an assault on them and me and every other woman, including the ones in this picture.” He mumbled something that I didn’t catch. “What? I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I said they posed for them, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did. Probably in exchange for drugs. Or because they’d get beaten up by their pimps if they didn’t. This is violent male fantasy, Andrew. Do you think women want to have guns stuck up inside of them?”
“Okay,” he said. “You made your point.”
But I was just getting started. I waved the two “cowgirls” in his face.
“Do you think women really have breasts this size?”
He shrugged. “Some,” he said.
“Ha! Guess again. These poor girls have had their breasts sliced open and sacks of silicone put in so that men—and boys—can drool over them. Do you know what happens when that stuff starts leaking inside a woman’s body? I’m ashamed of you, Andrew. And if you ever bring this kind of garbage into my house again—”
“Your house? I thought it was our house.”
I rolled up his dirty magazine and whacked him across the face with it. “Don’t you dare smart-mouth me, Andrew Oh! What do you think your father’s going to say when I show him this ‘reading material’ of yours?”
The shrug again. “He’s probably not going to go mental about it like you’re doing.” The next thing I knew, the wrench he’d been using on his bike was in my hand. I took a swing at him and missed. He froze for a second or two, shocked. Then he shielded his head with his arm. “Jesus, Mom, stop! You’re my mother, for cripe’s sake!”
I dropped the wrench. Watched him run down the driveway and out into the road. “And from now on, put your dirty socks in the hamper!” I screamed. “And don’t stick anything inside them except your big, smelly feet!” That was when I realized old Mr. Genovese across the street was standing in his doorway, watching. Fired up still, I shouted over to him. “Mind your own business! Shut your goddamned door!” Lucky for him, he did what he was told.
Fueled, still, by self-righteous anger, I pounded back up to Andrew’s room, lugged those three garbage bags to the landing and flung them down the stairwell. Dragged them out to the car, drove to the dump, and took enormous pleasure in heaving them onto a mountain of trash. By the time I got back home, I had cooled down. I decided not to tell Orion about Girl on Girl after all, and I was grateful that Andrew didn’t tell his father that I’d swung at him with the wrench—something I now felt ashamed of having done. But I have to admit that, in the aftermath of my having cleaned out his room, I enjoyed it whenever he asked me about his stuff.
“Is my Alonzo Mourning jersey still in the wash, Mom?”
“Nope. It’s at the dump.”
“Mom, do you know where that blue notebook is where I’m recording my weight-lifting routine?”
“I guess it’s probably sitting over in the landfill.”
“Mom, Mrs. Kilgallen’s ragging me because I haven’t handed in my copy of Heart of Darkness. You didn’t toss that out, did you?”
“If it was on your bedroom floor, I did.”
“Mom, that was schoolproperty. What am I supposed to tell Kilgallen?” I advised him to tell her he’d go to the bookstore and buy her a replacement copy. “Can I have the money for it then?”
“Not from me you can’t. Use your own goddamned money.”
Poor Andrew. I was always harder on him than I was on his sisters. Maybe his being “too busy” to fly up here for the wedding is payback. Maybe I’m getting exactly what I deserve …
Unlike her brother, Marissa, our free spirit, is all for Viveca’s and my upcoming wedding. Her mother marrying a woman: she thinks it’s hip. And I’m a little concerned about the attention Viveca’s been giving her. They chat on the phone. They’ve gone out a couple of times, just the two of them. It’s not that I’m ungrateful that Viveca’s made an effort with my daughter. I appreciate that she has. But both times when they got back from those lunch dates, Marissa was carrying boxes and bags from Bergdorf’s. Viveca’s bought her that Jimmy Choo handbag she loves, the Prada platform pumps that I’d break my neck if I ever tried wearing. Designer things that an aspiring actress and part-time waitress could never afford. As good a kid as she is, Marissa’s always been a little too status conscious, and it’s almost as if Viveca is trying to buy her affection. And apparently it’s working. What was that thing Marissa said last week when the three of us were at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square? When she pointed out that children’s book? “Look. Heather has two mommies just like me.” It made me feel defensive on Orion’s behalf. She’s his daughter, not Viveca’s …
What’s wrong with me today? Why am I worrying about all these things that probably don’t even matter? I walk around the apartment, wandering aimlessly from room to room. Passing the guest bathroom, I look in at Minnie. She’s down on the floor, wearing her knee pads, scouring the grout between the floor tiles. Viveca’s a stickler about clean grout; she has Minnie use some bleaching agent to get it white. I walk past my poster, ANNIE OH: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM! February 1–March 31 at viveca c gallery. She went all out for that show: ads in the Times, the New Yorker, and New York. Hired that publicist who got me those TV interviews that I was such a nervous wreck about … Back in the kitchen, I grab the remote and change the channel. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy lady is cautioning Ann Curry about some new medical thing we all have to worry about. I channel-surf past Cookie Monster, cartoons, cake decorating. On CNBC, they’re talking about the global economy—the looming debt crisis in Greece that the Germans may or may not rescue them from. Viveca’s mentioned the possibility of Greece defaulting, too, and how, for some reason I didn’t understand, it could be good for her business if the euro is devalued. It’s funny: she identifies so strongly with her Greek heritage. You would think she’d be more concerned about the country’s balance sheet than her own … The old movie channel’s showing Mildred Pierce. There’s Joan Crawford with her shoulder pads and severe eyebrows, talking to her maid, who I recognize. Whom I recognize? It’s that little actress from Gone With the Wind—the slave with the squeaky voice who didn’t “know nothin’ bout birthing babies.” Slaves, maids: it wasn’t as if the studios were going to hire that actress to play anything else. At least Viveca doesn’t expect Minnie to show up at the apartment in one of those old-fashioned uniforms with the little hat and frilly apron. Minnie wears the same clothes most days: her beige Sean John sweat suit and her plaid canvas sneakers. Marissa tells me that Sean John is that rap guy, Diddy or P. Diddy or whatever he calls himself. One time when she was here, she complimented Minnie on her taste. Told her she liked Sean John clothes, too. And Minnie had smiled her toothless smile and told her she picked it up “for cheap” at a street fair in Newark … On the Christian channel, the pompadoured host is chatting about Jesus’s love with a plump old lady in a pastel party dress and bright red lipstick. I suddenly realize it’s Dale Evans. She died, didn’t she? This must be a rerun. My foster mother, the first one, used to send me to school every day with an American cheese and mustard sandwich and an apple inside a rusty Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch box. (No Thermos like the other kids; I had to drink from the fountain.) Roy and Dale were passé by then, and I was jealous of the cool lunch boxes some of the other girls in my class carried: Dr. Kildare, The Beverly Hillbillies, and then that crème de la crème of lunch boxes, Meet the Beatles …
Carrying Viveca’s package down the hall to our bedroom, I glance in again at Minnie. She’s seated on the edge of our soaking tub, taking a break from her grout cleaning. She’s got her knee pads on, her legs spread so far apart that she could be giving birth. I wave; she waves back. When I enter the bedroom, they startle me again: those dresses. The brides.
All three of the Vera Wangs are beautiful, but none is me. What is me is the dress I’d already bought off the rack at that vintage dress shop I like in Tribeca: a basket-weave shift, bright yellow with bold diagonal turquoise stripes—two hundred dollars marked down to $129.99. I like those funky stripes, its above-the-knee length. The label says Mary Quant. I looked her up. Wikipedia says she was a mod British designer, popular during the 1960s. Cool, I thought, but when I tried it on and showed it to Viveca, she said, “Sweetheart, it’s cute and it looks adorable on you, but to me it says sundress, not wedding dress. It’s … youthful. On our special day, I’d love to see you in something a little more elegant and celebratory. Just think of all the lesbians over the years who couldn’t be brides. We’re honoring them, too. In another era, we would have had to pass as spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them.” She’d laughed when she said “spinsters,” it’s so far out of the realm of who she is, who she thinks we are.
Lesbians: that’s what I am now. Right? I’m marrying a woman, aren’t I? And I’ve slept with another woman—Priscilla, the wiry tomboy I used to waitress with at Friendly’s. But I don’t see our marrying as something that necessarily balances the scales of justice or honors the dykes of yesteryear … Spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them: why had she said that? We’ve both been married to men. Viveca says I should pack the dress and bring it along on our wedding trip—that I can wear it when we shop or go out for lunch. She’s also suggested I go with her the next time she gets a bikini wax. “There’s more nudity than not on the beaches in Mykonos and hairless pussies are de rigueur,” she said. Viveca gets a massage and a wax every other week. Her pubic patch is a fashionably thin vertical line that stops just above her labia. I might go topless at those beaches when we’re over there, but I am not going bottomless. And anyway, I don’t even like the beach that much. It’s different for Viveca. She’s Greek. Her given name is Vasiliki, not Viveca. She’s anglicized the name for commercial reasons. She tans so effortlessly. But with my red hair and Irish complexion, I have to be careful. I could burn to a crisp.
I look over toward the bureau, and there’s that index card I scrawled on yesterday. I pick it up and read what I’d written down. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth … Among their children were the Cyclopes, the Hundred-Handed giants. Monsters, like the monsters that are being birthed in the poster hanging in the hallway, the hundred-handed monster in my life—the shark who swims in the waters of my memory. Whose voice I both dread and entertain because it drives my art … I’m hit by a pang of missing Viveca: the sound of her voice, the warm safety of her body next to mine. I approach the Gaia dress. Touch it, run the beautiful green silk between my fingers. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia. I sit on our bed and open the Neiman Marcus box. Unscrew the top of Viveca’s perfume bottle and inhale her scent: orange blossoms, vanilla. I love her. Miss her the way Diane Sawyer misses Mike Nichols when he’s away and she puts on his shirt …
I read the index card over and over, and as I do, I begin to feel the agitation, familiar and strange. Gaia … Gaia. Am I on the verge of something? Is it coming?
Maybe not. Maybe my comfortable life here has begun to snuff out my creativity. Maybe I’ve peaked and it’s all downhill from here.
I shake my head. Shake off my self-doubt. My brain is spinning. My fingers are flexing, making invisible art. It’s exciting and scary when it comes, like watching an approaching cyclone and standing defiantly in its path. Maybe before this day is out, the weather inside my brain will set me spinning. Maybe I’ll find myself in my studio, facing my need to scream out. Fight back against the monster. Make art.
Chapter Two (#ulink_0c9b633f-4b5f-5820-8628-1a62f2d9a735)
Orion Oh (#ulink_0c9b633f-4b5f-5820-8628-1a62f2d9a735)
The sharks and I both arrive at the Cape this first Saturday in September. As I inch over the Sagamore Bridge in this god-awful Labor Day weekend traffic, they’re saying great whites are swimming the coastal waters, heading north. According to the car radio, warning signs are being posted along the oceanside beaches from Chatham to North Truro. North Truro? I reach over and turn up the volume, drowning out the annoying cell phone ring tone that’s playing inside the glove compartment. Everybody’s movin’, everybody’s groovin’, baby.Love shack, baby love shack, bay-ayy-be-ee. “What do you want for a ring tone?” Marissa had asked me that day when she was programming my phone. “Anything,” I’d said. “You pick.” And she picked that awful song I’ve always hated.
It’s not one of the kids calling me; they text me now. Before I left this morning, I deliberated about whether to take the damned cell phone with me or leave it back in Three Rivers. But what if there was an emergency? So I threw it in the glove compartment and locked it. I thought I turned the damn thing off, but I guess not. Ahh, relief. The call has gone to voice mail.
“It’s a little unusual to see them in these cooler Massachusetts waters at this time of year,” the shark expert tells her interviewer, a guy who, for some reason, is calling himself the Mad Hatter. “But the gray seal population’s been on the rise, and we think that’s what’s probably luring them.”
The Mad Hatter chortles. “So you’re saying the problem is that there’s been too much seal sex? Too many pinnipeds puttin’ out?”
“Uh, well …”
The Diane Rehm interview I’d been listening to faded away somewhere between Braintree and Buzzards Bay. Conversely, the Mad Hatter is coming through so loudly and clearly that he might as well be broadcasting from the backseat. “Time now for traffic, news, and weather. And when we come back, we’ll have more with Dr. Tracy Skelly from the Division of Marine Fisheries.”
Despite my initial resistance to the idea, I’m staying rent free at Viveca’s place in North Truro for the month, hoping that a Cape Cod retreat might allow me, after a summer’s worth of drifting and wound licking, to anchor myself. Figure out how to shed my bitterness, forgive myself and others and start over. Orchestrate a reinvention, I guess you’d say. Thirty days has September: it’s a tall order.
My game plan, once I survive this hideous holiday traffic and get settled in, is to eat healthy, cool it on the drinking, exercise. I’ll jog and journal every morning, then bike to the beach for an afternoon swim. After dinner, I’ll read and research—Google phrases like “new professions after 50,” “change career paths.” But with sharks in the water, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing a whole lot of swimming. Of course, there’s always the placid bayside, but what I want is turbulence—bodysurfing along the crest of the five- or six-foot swells and getting roughed up a little by the waves I misjudge—the ones that, instead of carrying me, crack against me. I’ve been hoping the wildness of the water might somehow both cleanse me of my failings as a university psychologist and baptize me as … what?
What do you want to be when you grow up? The adults were always asking me that when I was a kid, and because I liked to draw—reproduce the images in comic books and Mad magazine—I’d say I wanted to be an artist. I’d enjoyed my high school art classes, had gotten good grades for my work. And so I’d entered college with a vague plan to major in art. In my first semester, my Intro to Drawing professor, Dr. Duers, had said during my portfolio review that I had a good sense of composition and a talent worth developing. But the following semester, I’d run up against Professor Edwards, an edgy New York sculptor who was disdainful of having to teach studio art to suburban college kids—who had come out and told us he was only driving up from the city twice a week because of the paycheck. It had crushed me the morning he’d stood over my shoulder, snickered at the still life I was drawing, and walked away without a word. But that same semester, I got an A in an Intro to Psych course I really liked. And so I had put away my sketch pad and gone on to the 200-level psychology classes. And then the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I got a job as a second-shift orderly at the state hospital.
I liked working there. Liked shooting the shit with the patients. Not the ones who were really out of it, but the ones who were in there for shorter-term stays. The “walking wounded,” as the nurses called them. Some of those patients would be admitted in pretty rough shape—straitjacketed and sputtering nonsense, or in such deep depressions that they were almost catatonic. But two or three weeks later, with their equilibrium restored by meds and talk therapy, they’d be discharged back into the world.
The psychiatrists were off-putting. Tooled around the wards like they walked on water. But the psychologists were different. More humane, less in a hurry. “You’re good with the patients,” one of them, Dr. Dow, told me one day. “I’ve noticed.” For him, it was nothing more than a casual observation, but for me—a kid who, up to that point, had never gotten noticed for much of anything—it was huge. On my day off, I drove up to the Placement Office at school and took one of those tests that identifies your strengths, suggests what career paths you should consider. When I got my results back, it said I had scored high on empathy and should consider the helping professions: social work, psychology. And so, at the beginning of my fifth semester, I declared psychology as my major.
I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.
Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.
She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.
“It?”
“The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.
Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”
At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her mouth and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.
One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.
After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.
When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.
That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.
Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited …
That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”
“Name?” she said, huffily.
“Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”
She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”
And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into tears.
I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.
Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”
“Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”
“Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was …
Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it … I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it … Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?
God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.
I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those matchmaking Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.
“Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message: call me. wanna talk 2 U dude. I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”
“Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”
“I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”
“Hey, I thought I was the shrink. What am I scared of?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”
I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.
“Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she never would have done before.”
“Like what?”
“Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”
“Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really am scared.”
She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”
“And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”
“Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”
“I said I was happy enough,” I reminded her. “Dude.”
But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00 P.M., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? …
Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it had been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over: Mog the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head … Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”
And then this past March my malaise was replaced by panic when Jasmine Negron, one of my clinical practicum supervisees, walked into Muriel Clapp’s office and charged me with sexual harassment. It was one of those Rashomon-like situations. I said/she said.
But you were in her apartment, right?
I was. She was frightened. I gave her a ride home and she asked me in for a drink.
And you accepted.
Not at first. I tried to beg off, but she said would I please come in. The guy she’d broken up with still had the key to her place and wouldn’t give it back. A few nights earlier, she’d gotten home and he was there, sitting on her sofa. He wouldn’t leave.
How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?
Two. And granted, she’d poured them with a heavy hand, but … two.
I had to look away from her. Talk, instead, to my fidgeting hands in my lap. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, Muriel. Look, should I have gone into her apartment? Started drinking with her? No. I admit it was a stupid thing to do. Was I an idiot not to get the hell out of there when she started coming on to me? Hell, yeah. Look her in the eye, I told myself. Say it right to her face. But I’m telling you, Muriel, she came on to me, and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying. It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.
And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.
Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.
Yeah.Muchbetter, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working. The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell …
Don’t! I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid or his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here …
Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? …
Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “staycations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo … Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it. At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”
“And what thing was that?”
“He … molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”
“And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”
“It went on over a couple of years. Until he got caught.”
“And how old is his victim?”
“My granddaughter? She’s eleven. It started when she was eight. But anyway, I write to him, okay? Try to be supportive. But whenever I start one of those letters, I think about what he did and it fills me with rage.”
“Well, that’s an appropriate response. But why in the world would you write him sympathetic letters?”
“Because he’s my son. I love him in spite of—”
“And that’s an inappropriate response. Personally, I think convicted pedophiles should get the death penalty. If my son did what your son did, he’d be dead to me.”
Jesus, the poor guy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Show him a little compassion, will you?
“Yeah, but the thing is—”
“The thing, sir, is that your son did something so vile, so despicable, that it’s unforgivable. You should be focusing your energies on helping your granddaughter, not your piece-of-crap son. Stop being a weenie. He’s earned what he’s getting in there.”
Well, there’s a counseling style for you: bludgeon the patient. I reach over and change the station. But what she’s just told that guy—that he should reject his son—ricochets inside my head and transports me back to that drab, joyless room on the third floor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where my mother lay dying. Where, three or four days before she passed, she and I finally touched on the untouchable subject of Francis Oh, the father who had denied my existence. When I was a kid, from time to time I had asked Mom about him, but she’d told me almost nothing. Had gotten huffy whenever I inquired. How could she tell me what she didn’t know? she’d say. And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I had grown to hate the mysterious Francis Oh. Had decided he wasn’t the only one who could play the rejection game. “Fuck you,” I’d tell him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror—borrowing my own face because I had no idea what his looked like. It was around that time that my friend Brian and I went to the movies to see that movie The Manchurian Candidate. I had sat there squirming, I remember. Imagining that every one of those Chinese brainwashers in Frank Sinatra’s flashbacks was Francis Oh. It had freaked me out to the point that I got up, ran up the aisle and out to the men’s room, and puked up my popcorn and soda. By the time I went back in, I had missed a good fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. “You okay?” Brian whispered. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” I had snapped back. A few days later, I hit upon the idea of being rid of my Chinese surname. I would take my mother’s and my grandparents’ name instead—become Orion Valerio instead of Orion Oh. Rather than telling my mother, I walked down to city hall one day after school and asked in some office about how to do it. But the process was complicated and costly, and I gave up on the idea. Instead, whenever anyone asked about him, I’d say my father died. Had gotten killed in a car accident when my mother was pregnant. I liked telling people that. Killing off the father who wanted no part of me. After a while, I almost came to believe my own lie.
But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been …
She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”
She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office wouldn’t give me an address. She was sympathetic after I began to cry. I had started showing a little by then, and I’m sure she put two and two together. But she stuck to her guns. And so I surrendered to the inevitable. Went home and confessed to Mama and Papa.” The following Saturday, her father drove her to the Saint Catherine of Siena Home for Unwed Mothers, she says, and she spent the remainder of her pregnancy there. Got her high school diploma but had to miss her graduation. “The sisters tried for months to convince me to do what most of the other girls agreed to: hand the baby over to Catholic Charities so that some nice childless couple who had prayed for a baby could adopt you. They accused me of being selfish, but I just kept shaking my head. I wanted to keep you and raise you and that was that.”
She’s flagging, I can see. Exhausted and upset. Should I stop quizzing her? While I’m trying to decide, a nurse enters. “Sorry to interrupt, Maria, but it’s time for your breathing treatment,” she says. Mom nods, gives her a wan smile, and opens her mouth. While Mom is puffing away on the device, I stand. Go over to the window and look out on the parking lot. But what she’s told me has opened up more questions, and when the treatment is over and the nurse leaves, I sit back down again. Take her hand in mine. I remind her about that time we went up to Boston—to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant. “How did you know where to find his father?” I ask her.
“Well, Francis was a smoker,” she says. “Always lit his Viceroys with books of matches that said HENRY OH’S CHINA PARADISE on the cover. During one of the times we were at the motel where he used to take me, I slipped one of those matchbooks in my purse as a souvenir of our love. Like I said, Orion, I was naïve back then. I thought sex and love were one and the same.”
She’d gone to Henry Oh’s China Paradise once before, she says, when she was six or seven months pregnant. “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” …
A look of exasperation had crossed her face when she said that—one I recognized. She had had that same look the day we’d walked up the stairs to Henry Oh’s China Paradise so that she could present me to my grandfather as proof of my existence. Proof that, since his son had not done the right thing by me, the obligation fell on him. He needed to help finance the college education of the boy who, whether my grandfather was happy about it or not, carried his family name. Henry Oh, Francis Oh, Orion Oh: we were linked. He was duty bound. And so I practically had had to run after her that day as she exited the restaurant, her head held high, her hand clutching the check that would allow me to attend Boston University. Mom had been fierce that day, victorious. And even at seventeen, when I was still so ignorant about life and love and the repercussions of sex, I somehow knew that, whatever it had just cost her to get that money, she had done it out of a ferocious, almost feral love for the son she had refused to hand over to adoptive parents. And so—
Jesus god, there it goes again. Love shack, baby, love shack … And suddenly I realize who must be calling me. Annie. It’s two days past when I was supposed to RSVP. Well, if she wants to find out if I’m going to her big gay wedding, she can go to hell because—
OH! JESUS!
Shit, that was close. If I hadn’t just pulled out of my fog and slammed on the brakes, I would have rear-ended that Subaru. That’s all I need right about now: an accident that would have been my fault. My heart’s racing, my palms have broken out in a sweat. Refocus. You want to get there in one piece, don’t you? With my eyes on the road, I feel for the radio knob and twist it counterclockwise. Return to the Mad Hatter and the shark lady.
“Okay then, Doc, so let’s say Jaws comes upon a pod of seals that are chillin’ in the waters off of Chatham. What’s his M.O.?”
“Well, first of all, ‘he’ is likely to be a she. Female great whites tend to be larger and more dominant than males. And as to the shark’s ‘M.O.,’ as you put it, great whites are ambush hunters. So what they do is identify a target and then ram it hard and fast, most likely from beneath because the underbelly is what’s most vulnerable.”
The Mad Hatter snorts. “That’s where we’re all most vulnerable. Right, guys? Under our bellies and above our knees?” An ah-ooga horn sounds, but the shark lady soldiers on.
“Once a shark takes hold, it whips its head from side to side, the better to tear open a large chunk of flesh. That exposes the organs and entrails, which will be ingested as quickly as possible. From what we’ve observed, great whites may travel in small clans, but when they’re on the hunt, they separate.”
“Every shark for himself, right?”
“That’s right. Or herself.”
Sharks. Ambush hunters. Viveca Christophoulos-Shabbas …
Annie met Viveca through her art. She’d had a piece selected for that Whitney Biennial, and at the opening Viveca approached her about exhibiting at her by-appointment-only gallery in Chelsea. But in fairness, I guess I’d started losing my wife to her art long before Lady Bountiful came into the picture …
It was strange how Annie’s career had come about. She couldn’t even say why, not long after our twins were born, she’d begun collecting odds and ends from junk stores, swap shops, and the curbside recycling boxes she passed while out for walks with Andrew and Ariane in their side-by-side stroller. She’d not understood it, that is, until she began creating those found-art shadow boxes. She had had no training as an artist. Something just compelled her to make them, she told me, but she was reluctant to explore with me the nature of that impulse. “Orion, I’m your wife, not one of your patients,” she reminded me once when I tried to tease out her motivation. She made it clear that this was her thing. No trespassing.
Her first pieces were humorous, or so I thought: The Dancing Scissors, The Jell-O Chronicles. One Saturday, I remember, she requested a “mental health” afternoon. The twins had been sick, and except for trips to the pediatrician’s and the pharmacy, Annie had been stuck in the house all week with cranky kids. Could I stay with them for a few hours while she went to a movie, maybe, or down to the mall? I got her coat, gave her a little swat on the rear, and said, “Go.” But by the time she got back home, it was after 8:00 P.M. This was the mid-1980s, before cell phones became ubiquitous; if someone didn’t bother to call in, you stared at the phone, waiting and worrying. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded when she came through the door that night. But she was so jubilant, so energized, that she hardly noticed my day’s worth of aggravation and worry. She had driven to Waterford, she said, intending to go to the Crystal Mall. Instead, spur of the moment, she’d hopped onto I-95 South. En route to no place in particular, she decided to get off at random exits and hunt for whatever awaited her at the dumps and secondhand shops of different shoreline towns. And it had been so worth it! She’d picked up treasures at each: a bolt of lace, a bundle of 1940s movie magazines, some wooden soda crates, a canvas bag brimming with hand puppets. Passing a billboard advertising a going-out-of-business sale at a job lot store in New Rochelle, she’d made a snap decision, signaled, and exited.
“New Rochelle?” I said. “You drove all the way into New York?”
Thank God she had, she said, because she’d struck pay dirt at that Dollar Days. Her purchases included two large bags of deeply discounted miscellany, including a twenty-four-piece box of plastic British Royal Family figurines.
I began complaining about my day with the twins—how Andrew had kept making spit bubbles with his amoxicillin instead of just swallowing it. How Ariane had toddled over to the dirty diaper pail, climbed on, and tipped it over while I was at the door with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—and how mopping up the mess, wet-vacing and disinfecting their bedroom carpet, had taken me the better part of an hour. From now on, we were buying Pampers, I told her. I didn’t care how much they cost. I was hoping to generate a little … what? Sympathy? Remorse, maybe? But Annie just sat there, sifting through her stuff, barely listening. And when I stopped talking, she went into the twins’ room, kissed their foreheads, and then, grabbing her new “treasures,” raced down to the studio I’d fixed up for her in the space between the washer and dryer and the furnace. She was down there for the rest of that night.
What had come over her? Was it OCD—some kind of hoarding disorder, maybe? Some sort of anxiety related to motherhood? If so, she could be treated. We could get her an antidepressant or a tranquilizer to take the edge off a little. But Annie wasn’t accumulating stuff solely for the sake of accumulating it. She was making art out of it, so maybe I should back off. Give her the benefit of the doubt … But could you even call it art? Like I said, it wasn’t like she’d had any formal training. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never even taken an art course in high school. Had never even finished high school. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the tough childhood she’d had. Annie’s childhood: that’s always been another “no trespassing” zone. I know the basics. She lost her mother when she was five years old. Her father had gone off the rails as a result and she’d bounced around in foster care. But Annie’s always skirted the details of her early life. Waiting here in stalled traffic, I can’t help but wonder: has she been more forthcoming with Viveca about her childhood? What does Viveca know?
A cruiser passes me on the shoulder, its lights flashing, its siren not wailing but making loud little belches. There must be an accident up ahead, which would explain why we’ve now almost come to a complete stop. Oh man, I haven’t even gotten as far as Sandwich yet. I’ll be lucky if I get to that rental place before they close for the day—or maybe even for the weekend. And what do I do if I can’t pick up the key to Viveca’s cottage? Break into the place? Start looking for motel “vacancy” signs? And now, adding insult to injury, this little jerk in the Ford Focus has his blinker on and he’s trying to squeeze in between me and the Subaru. Smart move, buddy. Nothing like lane-changing when both lanes are crawling along at about half a mile an hour. Atta boy. Nose right in. Be my guest, you little shit. When did you get your driver’s license? Yesterday? He’s talking a blue streak to his girlfriend, oblivious that his directional signal’s still blinking. To my right is one of those big-ass campers that must get about five or six miles to the gallon. A warning sprawls across the RV’s left side: MAKE WAY FOR MEAN DARLENE! A plump white-haired couple sits up front, eating a snack out of a paper bag. Microwave popcorn, maybe? Their jaws are moving in synch. When I was stuck behind them a quarter of a mile ago, I read their back bumper stickers: LET FREEDOM RING! and DON’T BLAME ME! I VOTED FOR THE HERO AND THE HOTTIE.
I honk at the kid in the Ford, and when he looks in his rearview mirror, I point down at his blinker. I can tell he doesn’t get it. Now the girlfriend turns around and looks at me, too. They both shake their heads as if I’ve offended them. On, off, on, off … Should I? Hey, why not? We’ve come to a stop. We’re all just sitting here. I put my Prius in park and get out, go up to his window and tap on it with my wedding ring. I hear the soft clunk of his car door locks. Jesus, what does he think I am? The traffic jam ax murderer?
“Yeah?”
“Your blinker’s on.”
“Is it?” He gives me this look like it’s his inalienable right to drive me crazy. But hey, I’m not about to get into a dustup about it with Junior here. I turn and head back to my car.
He’s a ballbuster, this kid. Lets about a minute go by before he finally turns it off. And when he does, it’s like the relief you feel when one of those ice cream headaches finally begins to subside. The radio’s playing that ominous music from Jaws. “Okay, but let’s separate fact from Hollywood fiction,” the shark lady’s saying. “These animals are carnivores, yes. But they’re not evil manhunters. They hunt and eat to survive, not to kill gratuitously. That better describes our species than theirs.”
“Natural Born Killers,” the Mad Hatter says. “Now there’s a great movie! Woody Harrelson and … Who was the girl? Natalie Portman, right?”
It was Juliette Lewis. One of the students I was seeing at the time—when had that movie come out? 1994? 95?—she kept mentioning how Juliette Lewis and she were half-sisters, and how they looked so much alike, and if I didn’t believe her, I should go see her sister’s new movie, Natural Born Killers. She’d seen it several times herself, she said—had been invited to attend the premiere but couldn’t afford the trip to California. Petra, her name was. She was a nice enough kid, high-strung but high functioning. In the honors program, if I remember correctly. But she was a sad kid who, I began to realize, had no friends. And when I did make a point of going to see the movie, I didn’t observe the slightest resemblance between the two. I eventually diagnosed her with Delusional Disorder, Mixed Type …
“No, seriously, Tracy. You should Netflix it this weekend,” the Mad Hatter advises. Not likely, Tracy says. Tomorrow, she’ll be part of an expedition that’s hoping to locate and tag one or more of the great whites for the purpose of tracking their migratory patterns …
Whatever it was that was compelling Annie to turn her landfill and secondhand shop finds into art, over the next years she created a series of assemblages she called Buckingham Palace Confidential. In Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! Prince Philip and the rest of the royal family sit stiffly at a doll house dinette set while, standing at a toy stove on which sits a blackened toy frying pan, the Queen, wearing a coronet and a polka dot apron, throws up her jointed arms in domestic defeat. In Lady Di Reconsiders, the Princess of Wales, in her famously familiar wedding gown, marries Magic Johnson instead of Charles. Johnson’s in his uniform, as are his ushers, the other members of the 1992 Olympic “dream team.” Diana’s attendants are female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Supergirl. The royal family is in attendance, too, but they’ve turned their backs to the ceremony. So it was art that was driving her, I decided—comic art at that, laced with a little feminist protest. But not dysfunction … And yet, those weird scavenger hunts she was doing on the Saturdays when I was home with the kids? Whenever she came back with a good haul, she’d be wide-eyed, jazzed up, talking a blue streak and fast. What was that? Creative passion? Some kind of mania? I remember worrying that she might be starting to manifest bipolar disorder. But whatever Annie’s behavior did or didn’t indicate, I tried hard to play by her rules, encouraging her without engaging her as to why she was hunting down all this stuff, or what these 3-D collages she was making meant. But not engaging her didn’t mean I wasn’t watching her—trying to understand what was going on with her. Look, she was right: she was my wife, not my patient. I tried not to analyze her, but hey. Bottom line: I was worried about her. I’m a psychologist. I observe, make hypotheses. It’s what we do.
No. Correction: I was a psychologist. When my license came up for renewal last month, I let the date go by. I go back and forth about whether I should have. But what’s done is done …
It was hard for Annie back then, I know. As the house-bound wife of a busy professional, she carried most of the burden of child care, cleaning, budgeting. She had to grab a little time here and there to work on her art. When I was down there in Pennsylvania with my mother, she hired some older woman to babysit a couple hours a day, and I applauded her for that. Told her it was a good idea. But that turned out to be a fiasco when the sitter forgot to lock the basement door and Andrew tumbled halfway down the stairs. Annie’d had to take him to the emergency room for stitches in his forehead and be grilled by the ER doc as if she were a child abuse suspect. She decided it wasn’t worth it. Told the sitter not to come back. And when I got back, mentioned casually that Thea had come to the funeral, Annie’d reacted like a crazy woman. Like some spark between my ex-girlfriend and me had been reignited when the opposite was true. Seeing Thea again had been like a refresher course in why I’d ended it with her.
I’d have liked to help her out more, but the domestic imbalance was unavoidable. Counseling Services was understaffed, we clinicians seriously overworked. Students who wanted to see one of us had to put their names on a list and then wait for an appointment, sometimes as long as two or three weeks. Besides our caseloads, we counselors supervised the clinical practicums of the predoctoral students, got saddled with committee work, ran groups. In addition to all that, it fell on us to plan and implement Suicide Awareness Week, HIV Prevention Week, Alcohol Awareness Week, and so on. Most weekdays, I left for work before 7:00 A.M.—early morning was the best time to catch up on paperwork—and didn’t get home most nights until six or after. On the weekends, I could help out more. Take the twins to the park, fix a cabinet door or rake leaves, make a Saturday night supper while she went off to scavenge. Saturday was our night for sex, too—a standing appointment unless one or both of the twins was up, or one of us was too exhausted for intimacy. Sometimes an extra hour of sleep seemed sexier than having sex. But weekdays? Forget it. I’d get home and my dinner would be sitting Saran-wrapped on top of the microwave, the twins would be asleep in their cribs, and Annie would be down there, creating her 3-D collages amid the basement noises, one ear cocked toward the baby monitor upstairs …
Okay, here we go. The traffic’s finally started to move again. Passing that camper, I put on my directional signal and jockey myself in front of them. Let Mr. and Mrs. Big-Ass Camper stare at my bumper stickers: DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC, TOO and OBAMA/BIDEN ’08 …
Annie had been creating in basement obscurity for three or four years when I urged her to take a risk and exhibit her Buckingham Palace Confidential assemblages at the annual outdoor art show in Mystic. At first she resisted the idea, arguing that her kind of work wasn’t what those big summertime crowds would be interested in. But I kept nudging her until, reluctantly, she changed her mind and reserved herself a space. All that weekend, people paused, smiled, and snickered at Annie’s creations and then moved on to the “real” art: fruit in a bowl, seascapes. She had priced her pieces modestly—fifty dollars for the smaller assemblages, a hundred for the larger and more elaborate ones. She sold nothing. But to the surprise of many—and to the disgruntlement of the Mystic Art Association’s watercolorists and lighthouse painters—the judge awarded the Best in Show ribbon to Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! What was that guy’s name? The judge? He’d been something of a big-deal artist himself back in the day, I remember Annie telling me. Italian guy, little pencil-thin mustache. He and Annie stayed in touch after she got that Best in Show. He must be dead by now—he was already up there back then—but I bet he’d be pleased to know where Annie’s art has taken her.
Along with the five-hundred-dollar prize money Annie got from the Mystic show, she was offered a one-woman show at the Hygienic Restaurant in New London. The Hygienic had long since stopped serving food, but it had become a kind of retro coffee house—a haven for poets, interpretive dancers, klezmer bands—alternative artists of all kinds, and their equally alternative admirers. Until Annie’s opening, I had never seen such a convergence of pierced, tattooed, and purple-haired people. Annie looked adorable that night in her floral dress and purple leggings, that big bow in her hair. “Oh, thank you so much … You do? Really? Oh, my God,” she’d respond to those who approached her to say that they loved her work or wanted to buy it. I was so proud of her that night—so happy to see her on the receiving end of some artistic appreciation, and almost four hundred dollars in sales. I knew more about psychology than I did about art, but I was becoming convinced that Annie was more talented than she or I had realized.
Her modesty about her accomplishments and her natural shyness were a big part of her charm that night at the Hygienic. Annie’s brother Donald and his wife Mimsy had taken the twins for the night—their first sleepover. I’d snuck a bottle of champagne and a half-dozen chocolate-covered strawberries in the fridge before Annie and I left for the opening, and when we got home, we got into bed, drank, ate, and made love. “Good god, I’m crazy about you,” I declared after we were both spent and sweaty. “Love you, too,” she murmured back. If you had told me that night that, two decades later, Annie would leave me for a woman, I would have thought you were crazy … Agnello: that was that judge’s name. Mr. Agnello … Had there been signs all along that she might be bisexual? Cues that I’d missed right from the beginning? …
Annie’s Hygienic show caught the interest of a Connecticut magazine features writer who drove out to our house and interviewed Annie about her work. She’d brought along a photographer, so there was a photo shoot, too. I was happy for Annie. One door kept opening onto another door, and she deserved that. And I guess this was crass of me, but the fact that people had actually begun paying her for her work somehow, in my mind, legitimized her efforts. This was a career, not an emotional disorder. I should stop playing psych detective and just relax. Celebrate her accomplishments instead of stewing about her creative process. She worked so hard and with such dedication down there in our basement, to the soundtrack of the furnace’s drone and the washing machine’s agitation. Good for her!
But until that Connecticut magazine article came out, I hadn’t realized the extent to which agitation fueled Annie’s art. Eventually it dawned on me that her “no trespassing” rule had been my escape hatch, too. I’d been allowed the luxury of assuming that The Dancing Scissors, The Cowgirls’ Revolt, and Buckingham Palace Confidential were playful. Satirical. Proof that my intense and sometimes morose wife had a lighter side, too. But in “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” the writer said that my wife’s compositions emerged from “the blast furnace of her pent-up rage.” That they were “howls of protest against a suffocating middle-class domesticity” and the many ways in which society “tethers women to the mundane.” The mundane? Had Annie been referring to Rice-A-Roni or me? Was Diana’s rejection of Charles in favor of Magic Johnson metaphorical? The UPS driver who made deliveries to our house was a good-looking young black guy. Reggie, his name was. Someone she knew from way back, she said. Twice I’d gotten home from work a little early and found the two of them chatting at the front door. I couldn’t quite imagine that she’d cheat on me, but was I being naïve? The scientist in me advised objectivity, but the husband in me had just been put on alert.
“Good article, don’t you think?” I said, when I looked up from Connecticut magazine to her. I was hoping she’d say she’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. Instead, she said, “Pretty good. It’s weird to see yourself in a magazine, though. I feel … exposed, I guess.”
“Well, isn’t that what artists want? Exposure?”
She shrugged.
“Good picture of you.”
She made a face. “I wish my hair didn’t look so flat,” she said. “I can’t believe that, on the one day I was having my picture taken for a magazine, our hair dryer died.”
“Yeah, well … It’s interesting what it says about your work.”
No response.
“I mean, who knew you were so angry?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Orion. Maybe someone who was bothering to pay attention.” She walked out of the room.
I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, got up, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. For a minute or more, I watched her yank towels out of the washing machine and slam them into the dryer. “You know something?” I said. “I don’t exactly appreciate you projecting your own marital shortcomings onto me.”
She turned and faced me, furious. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Speak English, not psychology.”
“Okay. Sure. Somebody in this marriage hasn’t been paying much attention to the other person, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”
“Oh, right. You’re just the perfect husband, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m the imperfect husband. But I think you’ve got it ass-backward as far as who’s been ignoring who.”
“Oh, really? Gee, Dr. Oh, I’m so sorry for ‘projecting,’ as you put it. And for having a career of my own.”
It was April. I had just done our taxes. “Yeah, speaking of careers, you know how much I contributed to our income this past year? Sixty-two grand. And you know how much you made? A whopping seven hundred dollars. So I think you’d better thank your lucky stars instead of bitching about my career.”
“Oh, you’re right as usual, Dr. Oh. Thanks so much for throwing that in my face and helping me see the light.” And with that, she lifted the lid of our top-loading washing machine and slammed it down. Lifted it again and slammed it. Lifted, slammed. Thanks in part to “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” we had just entered the thrust-and-parry phase of our marriage.
Over the next several days, each of us accused the other of myriad slights and failures, large and small. The fighting exhausted us both, and our lives were already pretty exhausting. She began giving me the single-syllable treatment. “Good day today?” “Yup.” “Want to get a sitter this weekend? Go see a movie or something?” “Nah.” In the midst of that uneasy near-silence, I reread that Connecticut magazine article and came upon a couple of paragraphs I’d missed the first time. She’d told the reporter that, once upon a time, another artist had lived on the grounds of the house where we lived—a black laborer who’d taken up painting—and that she’d discovered one of his “compositions” that had been left behind. I knew the one she was talking about: a crazy-looking circus scene we’d found when we were cleaning out the attic. To my mind, it was strictly amateur, not to mention a little freaky-looking, and I’d wanted to throw it out along with the other junk up there. But Annie had said not to. It had “spoken to her,” she told that reporter, which was news to me, and when she set up her studio in the basement, she’d brought it down there for inspiration. (Oh, she’d set up that work space? So much for the work I’d done for her down there.) In the article, she said she might even have “seen” this would-be artist, who was long dead by the time we moved in. Had seen him twice, in fact. Once out back in the yard—a big, muscular guy in overalls looking up at her as she stood at one of the upstairs windows—and another time down in her studio. Both times, she said, he’d looked right at her, nodded, and then faded away. It hadn’t scared her to see him, she said; it had reassured her. Oh great, I remember thinking. Now she was seeing ghosts? Then how come I’d never heard about this? No, I figured, she wasn’t seeing people that weren’t there, except maybe in a dream she’d had. More likely, she had told the writer that because, hey, who doesn’t love a good ghost story? It wasn’t like Annie to fabricate stuff like that, but since she’d become an artist, she’d exhibited all kinds of new behaviors. And so I didn’t challenge her on it. “Annie Oh’s Angry Art” had already caused problems for us. I let it drop.
I finally got us a referral to a marriage counselor, despite Annie’s suspicion that the deck would be stacked in my favor because she’d be the only person in the room who wasn’t a therapist. I hired us a sitter for Tuesday evenings. (Katie had been my student coordinator for Date Rape Awareness Week.) And so for the next several weeks, Annie and I drove to Glastonbury to see Suzanne in her office full of philodendrons and ferns and hand-thrown clay pots that she had made, glazed, and fired in her wood-stoked kiln. She gave us one of those pots at the end of our first session—an imperfect one. A piece had broken off and been glued back on. “My point is this,” Suzanne said, passing her finger over the crack. “This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.”
“How was tango class tonight?” Katie would ask when we returned home from our marriage counseling sessions. I’d invented our tango lessons so that I didn’t have to tell her we were trying to fix our marriage.
“Great. How were the kids?”
“Super good! They’re such cuties. And you know, I think it’s super cool that you guys are learning the tango. I wish my parents weren’t such fuddy-duddies about stuff like that. Get out of their comfort zone? Forget it. They’d rather just sit there watching TV.”
Whether or not we were doing the tango up there in Glastonbury, we were definitely out of our comfort zone. But it was worth it. We did repair things. For quite a while, actually. Becoming less accusatory of each other lessened the tension. We practiced better teamwork with the twins and the house stuff, better listening skills, worked on more open communication. Hey, I’m a psychologist; it’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of these strategies. But knowing how to advise others in dealing with their shit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to tackle your own without having to check in with a third party once a week. And besides, my patients range in age from eighteen to about twenty-one, twenty-two. Their relationships are more about managing the drama than maintaining a marriage. Suzanne likened the latter to servicing a car you love and want to last. Listen to the engine, rotate the tires, check the oil. Things got better for us intimacy-wise, too. I became more patient. She became more communicative about what she wanted. She had more orgasms than she’d ever had before, and damn if I didn’t enjoy giving them to her … I mean, it wasn’t happily ever after, not by any stretch. She was still distant sometimes, both in our bed and out of it, and I still overdid it sometimes, work schedule-wise. But it definitely got better. Our “tango lessons” went from once a week to once a month, and then to once every three months. Marriage as car maintenance: I was a little put off by the metaphor at first, but as it turned out, Suzanne knew her stuff. Things were much better for Annie and me. And then she got pregnant again and they weren’t …
“Their skin is covered with small toothlike scales, so they’d be virtually unaware that they’re being embedded,” Dr. Skelly is telling the Mad Hatter. “These tags use satellite technology, so that lets us—”
“Like a GPS system?” the Mad Hatter asks.
“Uh-huh. Pretty much. If we get lucky and the tags stay embedded, we should be able to track the animals’ migratory behavior. Which would be fantastic! In other parts of the world, great whites have been tracked successfully, so there’s a good deal known about their migration patterns. But that’s not the case here in the northern Atlantic. Great whites in these waters have always been a bit of a mystery.”
“Well, Dr. Tracy Skelly, thanks for a fascinating discussion. And good luck tracking those great whites. Time once again to check on news, weather, and traffic. But stay tuned, fellas, because when we … two of the self-described ‘guidettes’ who will … in MTV’s latest … Jersey Shore, debuting next …” Mercifully, the Mad Hatter is finally fading away.
Chapter Three (#ulink_fc5aebe7-fa5d-5330-98fd-3b923d4fc115)
Annie Oh (#ulink_fc5aebe7-fa5d-5330-98fd-3b923d4fc115)
I’m goin’ to the market now, Miz Anna. Anything else you need?”
“What?”
“At the market. Anything else that ain’t on your list?”
“No, I guess not. Maybe a pack of cigarettes.”
“Marlboro Lights?”
“Yes, please. Do you have enough money? Here, let me get my purse and give you another twenty just in case. You can keep the change.”
Last month, Viveca reprimanded me for giving Minnie an extra hundred dollars. “Sweetheart, once you start that, they start expecting it,” she said, as if I were a child who didn’t know better. As if Minnie were a dog I got caught feeding scraps to under the table. I kept my mouth shut, but I was pissed. I’m pissed so often lately. It’s nerves, I guess. It’s not that I’m not committed to Viveca. I am. But I’ve already been a bride. And I’m just not comfortable about being married back in Three Rivers … But okay, I’ll get through it. It’s one weekend, that’s all, and I’ll have some time with my daughters in the house where they grew up; I’m looking forward to that. And once we return from Greece, I’ll go back to my studio and Viveca will go back to her gallery and her various charity fund-raising initiatives and things will return to normal.
I’ve slipped Minnie more money since Viveca’s reprimand—hundreds by now probably, although I haven’t kept track. “Our little secret,” I say whenever I press the tens and twenties into her calloused hand and squeeze.
Minnie’s more guarded about her personal life than Hector is, but she’s been opening up little by little, more so since Viveca’s been away and I’ve been staying home instead of going to the studio. We’ve started eating our lunch together, Minnie and me, in Viveca’s study because there’s a little TV in there and Minnie likes to watch The Jerry Springer Show. I’m not sure why, because day after day, it reinforces the worst stereotypes. All the black men on Jerry Springer are dim-witted dogs who cheat on their women. And when Jerry brings out the brazen women these men have been cheating with, the betrayed wives rush them, slapping and punching, yanking off their wigs while the mostly white audience cheers them on. Minnie shakes her head and chuckles and thinks these fights are funny. Doesn’t she realize how racist it is? That it’s staged? I’m at a loss to understand what it is about Springer that appeals to her so much. But hey, I sit there, eating my yogurt and watching it with her.
Minnie smokes at our apartment, which Viveca would be furious about if she knew. But she’s discreet. When she goes into the spare bedroom for a cigarette break, she sits in front of the open window and blows the smoke through the screen. When I walked in and caught her that time, her eyes narrowed—looked more defiant than apologetic—and she said, “You gon’ tell Missuz I been rippin’ smokes?” I told her I wouldn’t and smiled. Asked her to please call me Annie. I thought she’d be pleased by my overture, but she just nodded, not smiling back. She hasn’t called me Annie yet. To Minnie, I’m still Miz Anna, the woman who’s going to marry Missuz.
Since Viveca’s been gone, I’ve been smoking, too. The first couple of times, I bummed cigarettes from Minnie. Then I went down to the market on the corner, the one with the ATM, and bought myself a pack from that effeminate Korean cashier with the bad attitude and the Velveeta-dyed hair. He wears women’s tops and pants some days—size zero, I’m guessing, because he has the narrowest waist I’ve ever seen. He’s over-the-top hostile—resentful when you go up to the counter and dare to interrupt his magazine reading because you want to buy something. He sighs long-sufferingly, slaps his magazine down on the counter, and rings you up with a roll of his eyes. The other day, I got so fed up with his bad attitude that, when he went to give me my change, I grabbed his wrist, looked him in the eye, and told him that whoever or whatever he was so angry about, he didn’t have to take it out on his customers. I watched his expression change from defiance to fear. He was suddenly a scared and miserable little boy, and I knew that, somewhere, in some way, somebody had abused him. I felt bad and looked away—looked down at the counter, at Oprah’s beaming face on the cover of O magazine. He’d dropped my change when I grabbed his wrist and there were dimes on Oprah’s boobs. They looked like pasties. When I looked back up at him, his mask was back on and he looked as ornery as ever. But it was too late. I’d already seen his fear. I can use it if I need to. It’s part of what makes me powerful: I can sometimes figure out what other people’s vulnerabilities are without revealing any of my own. It’s something I learned from my family, I guess; we O’Days were talented secret keepers.
For the last week or so, I’ve been buying two packs at a time: Marlboro Lights for me and Newports for Minnie. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy person keeps harping on the dangers of smoking. Her and her cushy doctor’s life, her little brown bangs. She reminds me of those beautifully dressed girls from high school—the ones whose mothers let them borrow their credit cards and buy whatever they wanted at the Westwick Mall where I worked. That was my first real job, not counting babysitting; I’d scoop, weigh, and bag people’s mixed nuts, dried fruits, jelly candies, and deluxe jumbo cashews at a kiosk called Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. My customers were fat people, mostly, who watched the scale to make sure I wasn’t shortchanging them. I’d keep one eye on what I was shoveling onto the scale and the other on those girls from my school who strolled by with their bags and packages. I recognized them, but they didn’t recognize me or even look my way. I hadn’t had a mother in eight years, let alone a borrowed credit card to buy things with. What did any of those girls know about having to wear used clothes from Love Me Two Times or the Salvation Army store? And what does Dr. Nancy know about what someone like Minnie is up against? That day I caught her smoking? I sat on the bed next to her, lifted the window I was facing, took a cigarette out of her pack, and lit up. And the two of us sat there, inhaling and blowing smoke through our respective screens, tapping ash into the plastic cap of the Febreze can that Minnie uses for an ashtray. Neither of us spoke until we’d each started second cigarettes. That was when she told me about her ten-year-old son, Africa. She’s a single mother. It’s been three years since Africa’s father left, she says, and he’s never paid her one single dime for child support.
Minnie drinks on the job, too. She doesn’t know I know. The other night, I dropped an egg on the kitchen floor, and when I went into the cleaning closet to get something to wipe it up, I found a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano wine hidden at the bottom of a box of rags, mop heads, and vacuum cleaner attachments. It was half full. And when I checked it the following night after she left to go home, it was only a quarter full. The night after that, there was a new jug—Carlo Rossi burgundy this time. She had finished the other bottle and drunk three or four inches’ worth from the new one. Well, as long as she gets her work done and Viveca doesn’t find out, let her drink. Maybe I have Carlo Rossi to thank for the fact that she’s been more open lately. Maybe it’s not so much that she’s begun to trust me as it is because she’s buzzed.
Minnie has medical expenses because of Africa’s asthma, and she’s trying to save enough to relocate to an apartment where there’s no mold. She’d like to get her teeth fixed, too, she told me, so she can find herself another boyfriend. Africa’s father got remarried, she says. “His new wifey LaRue gonna have triplets is what LaRue’s cousin told me on the low,” she said. “Darnell don’t even know ’bout them babies yet, but I do. Well, he in for a big surprise. Serve him right. That man loves his sleep better than anything ’cept hisself—lookin’ at the mirror all the time so he can see how pretty he is. I hope them three babies all get colic and keep him up nights. He won’t look so pretty then. He be runnin’ away from that mirror.” She chuckled at the thought of Darnell’s sleep deprivation in the same way she chuckles when the black women fight each other on Jerry Springer. Then she snuffed out her cigarette, stood, and said she didn’t suspect “Missuz’s furniture gonna dust itself.” I admire Minnie’s flinty bitterness, and the fact that, whenever I give her extra cash, she takes it without acting beholden or even grateful. “Our little secret”: it’s like a contract between the two of us.
Minnie and her boy live in Newark. Africa’s sickly but “sweet as sugar.” For the past two years, she’s paid a Spanish boy down the hall to babysit Africa in the morning “but he growin’ hisself a mustache and gettin’ some attitude lately.” Puberty’s apparently made him less dependable. “He spoze to show up befo’ I leave for work. Fix Africa his breffest, make sure he gots his homework and his inhaler, then walk him to school. But half the time, I gotta go befo’ he come so I don’t miss my bus, and then I gotta call and call his cell phone to see if he there yet so Africa don’t have to walk hisself to school and do his work all mornin’ long with nothin’ in his stomach until hot lunch. I probly gon’ have to fire Oswaldo’s ass pretty soon, but I ain’t done it yet.”
Yesterday Minnie told me she has two grown sons by another man. Twins, Ronald and Donald. Donald is doing time in upstate New York—for what she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. “But Ronald never been no trouble. He come outa me first, thass why. It’s the second twin thass always the trouble chile.” Ronald is married and works at the Friendly’s ice cream plant in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Minnie told me. “I keep axin’ him to come visit us an’ bring his kids so I can see my gran’babies. But he ain’t come yet. Thass okay, though. I understand. He busy.” When I told Minnie that I have twins, too—a daughter who runs a soup kitchen in San Francisco and a son who’s stationed at Fort Hood—she nodded indifferently. And when I told her that, when I was a kid, I had worked at a Friendly’s restaurant, she had no reaction at all. Minnie likes me well enough—not only because of the extra money I give her, I like to think—but she doesn’t seem to entertain the possibility that she and I have anything in common.
Well, why would she? She’s poor; I’m not. She’s black; I’m white. Minnie says her commute takes her almost two hours either way. After she catches an early bus out of Newark, she transfers twice, then takes the ferry from Hoboken into Manhattan. At the South Ferry station, she catches the Lexington Avenue local up to the Spring Street stop, then walks over to our apartment on Elizabeth. The trip in reverse takes longer, she says. Some nights she doesn’t return home until eight o’clock or later. My walk from our apartment to my studio space at the artists’ collective on Bleecker takes ten minutes when I don’t stop along the way, collecting sidewalk discards that I might incorporate into my art. (On trash collection day, that ten-minute walk sometimes takes me an hour or more, depending on what people have thrown out. A few weeks ago, I had such a good haul that I had to grab an abandoned shopping cart and wheel my treasures to the studio. I was going to leave the cart on the sidewalk out front, but then I lugged that up to my workplace, too.) One night when she got home, Minnie said, she put the key in the lock, opened the door, and smelled chocolate. The Spanish kid, who’s not supposed to leave Africa by himself, had done just that. Left to his own devices, Africa had gotten the bright idea to take a bath in cocoa. “He run hot water, then dump this whole big can of Swiss Miss that I got cheap at the flea market because of the gone-by date.” Minnie was headachy and dog tired, she said, and when she saw Africa sitting in all that chocolate bathwater, she beat him silly, splashing cocoa every which way. “He cryin’ so hard, he give hisself a asthma ’tack and I say, ‘Where your inhaler at?’ And he go, while he wheezin’ away, he go, ‘It in school, Mama.’ And so we end up at the emergency for two, three hour. After we get home, I put him to bed and start cleanin’ up all that mess. Seem like no mo’ than a few hours go by before I had to wake up, let Oswaldo in cuz he be bangin’ on the door—on time for once. By the time I got ready, I had to run to catch that bus.”
That’s another thing Minnie doesn’t know we have in common: that I used to hit my boy, too. Andrew, the second-born of my twins. Poor, sweet Andrew, who looked so beautiful when he slept. Who, despite those wallopings, always kept my tirades from his father. His sisters did, too. Why was that? I wonder. Were they being protective of me? Were they afraid that, if they told, I might turn my anger on them, too? Or that I’d be taken away—carted off by the authorities the way I was when I was a little girl? No, that was my fear, not theirs … Of the three kids, Andrew’s the one with the most O’Day in him. This? Oh, yeah, I fell off my bike and bumped my head on the sidewalk, Dad … Me and Jay Jay were horsing around over at his house. It’s just a black and blue mark, Dad. It’s no big deal. If I hadn’t known where those battle scars really came from, I might have believed him, too.
I didn’t want Andrew to enlist; I begged him not to. Every night before I go to bed, I get down on my knees, make the sign of the cross, and ask Jesus to please, please spare Andrew from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes I get scared that God or karma or whoever or whatever’s in charge of retribution will pay me back for the way I singled him out. Or because I walked away from my marriage. It amuses Viveca, I think, to see me praying; she doesn’t believe in God. “What is it you’re praying for?” she asked me one night, and I kept it vague. “World peace,” I said. But mostly what I beg God for is my son’s safety. Please, I pray, let me die if I have to, but spare my son. Let Andrew not have to go to either of those places and be killed.
Okay, I tell myself. If you’re not going into work again today, then do something else. It’s after eleven already. Go down to the lobby and get the mail. Check your e-mail.
Viveca’s two-day-old message is titled Mykonos! I click on it. “Here’s the villa where we’ll be staying,” it says. “Have a look.” In defiance, I decide not to open the attachment—those pictures she wants me to see … Our apartment, our housekeeper. What’s hers, Viveca often reminds me, is mine now, too. Nevertheless, while she’s away, I’m supposed to sign that prenup agreement her lawyer has drawn up. When it was hand delivered by way of messenger from Attorney Philip Liebmann’s Sixth Avenue office, Viveca said, “I told Phil it wasn’t necessary, but he was insistent. Got a little snippy with me in fact. I’ve known Phil since I was a child; he was my father’s lawyer and his tennis buddy. He feels paternal toward me, that’s all. But, sweetheart, it’s just a boring legal formality that’s going to make an overly protective old man happy. Don’t read any more into it than that. What’s mine is yours. You know that.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_faba7b16-9d33-5bb3-bf9a-2fa5040e67b6)
Orion Oh (#ulink_faba7b16-9d33-5bb3-bf9a-2fa5040e67b6)
She didn’t just walk out on me one day; she migrated to Manhattan in stages. Day trips into the city to meet with gallery owners or important collectors turned into overnights. And after she won that NEA grant, those overnights turned into four-day work weeks because she used the money to rent studio space at a building in SoHo—a place that was owned and operated by some artists’ cooperative that Viveca had connections with.
“You’ve worked successfully at home all these years,” I reminded her. “Why do you suddenly need to make art in New York?” Because she wanted to come up from the basement and be in the company of other artists instead of our washer and dryer, she said. Because in New York she’d be able to get on the subway and, fifteen minutes later, be standing in front of some masterpiece at the Met or MoMA, or walking into some gallery in Brooklyn to see a show by some up-and-coming artist that everyone was talking about. “Sweetie, I just want to try it,” she told me. “It’s an experiment. It’s only for a year.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want us to turn into one of those long-distance-marriage couples,” I told her. “Look what happened to Jeff and Ginny’s marriage when they tried it.” For one thing, she said, she took exception to the term “long-distance” when you could get from Three Rivers to Manhattan or vice versa in under three hours. And for another, she wanted to remind me that it was Jeff’s infidelity, not the geographical distance between him and Ginny, that ended their marriage. I considered making the point that being a workaholic was a kind of infidelity, too, but I held my tongue. How many times, when the kids were younger and she was housebound with them, had she leveled that same criticism at me?
“And this is something you really, really want?” I said. “Something you think is going to fuel your work?”
She nodded emphatically, no trace of ambivalence whatsoever.
“Then let me talk to Muriel. Maybe she can do some juggling in the department and finagle me a leave of absence. There’s got to be plenty of sublets in Manhattan, right?”
She folded her arms against her chest. “And what would you do all day long while I was working? Hang around some tiny little studio apartment? I know you, Orion. You’d go stir-crazy.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. “Because I’d never be resourceful enough to get up and leave the apartment. Go out and engage with one of the most exciting cities in the world. I’d probably just sit around, watching soap operas and twiddling my thumbs.”
I smiled when I said it, but Annie looked exasperated. For one thing, she said, Viveca had already offered her a room in her apartment, rent free. What was she supposed to do? Tell her that her husband would be moving in, too? And more importantly, she wanted to be able to immerse herself in her work without having to keep to a schedule, or even look at a clock if she didn’t want to. “But how could I do that if I knew you were waiting around for me to quit for the day?” She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. “Sweetie, this is such a great opportunity for me. It would be for one year, not a lifetime. And we’d still see each other every weekend. I’d like to think we have a strong enough marriage to handle that.”
I smiled. “Just for a year, huh? With weekend furloughs?” She nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s try it.”
If she was preparing for a show or had to hobnob with some wealthy art patron who was in town for the weekend, the only day she could spare me was Sunday. I’d drive down to New Haven and meet her at the train station. We’d walk over to the green, grab some lunch at Claire’s or the Mermaid Bar. Compare notes about the kids—which one of us had heard from which, which of the three we were worried about that week. (More often than not, it was our wild card, Marissa. Or Andrew, who by then had entered the military and was facing the possibility of deployment.) We’d spend a couple of hours together, then head back to Union Station. Stand together out on the platform and, when the train came into view, hug each other, kiss good-bye. Then she’d board the Acela or the Metroliner and ride away. And as her one-year New York experiment turned into a year and a half after a couple of big purchases courtesy of viveca c, those kisses became pecks, the hugs became perfunctory. “My part-time wife” I’d started calling her, at first in jest, then in jest-with-an-edge. Later still, I hurled the term at her in outright anger.
Looking back, I’m amazed at how much in denial I was about her and Viveca. Yeah, I’d get worried from time to time, but what I thought was that maybe she’d gotten involved with some other guy. I’d imagine him, worry about him, even sometimes picture her walking hand in hand with him—some artist or musician type, some lanky younger guy with a porkpie hat and a couple of days’ worth of stubble. But the only time I confronted her about another man, she got huffy—said that it was all about her work and that my insecurity was my problem, not hers. And hey, whenever I called her? She was almost always there where she was supposed to be—at her studio or at night at Viveca’s. Once when I called and Viveca answered, she said, “You know, Orrin, one of these days you and I will have to meet in person.” I let it go that she’d gotten my name wrong, and that we’d already met several years back at the Biennial opening. “I’d like that, too,” I said. I went down to visit Annie at the apartment two or three times, but each time it was when Viveca was out of town for the weekend. I still don’t know when they made the switch from roommates to lovers. Annie’s told me it happened over time, that their affair wasn’t “premeditated.” I believe her. Interesting, though, the way she’d put it. As if it was a crime. Which it was, in a way: the murder of our marriage.
Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true. How many times had I suggested that to one of the undergrads sitting across from me in my office? Some self-deluding young woman who was trying to convince herself that a boyfriend’s having smacked her around was a one-time thing; some young guy’s assertion that, although sex with other guys excited him, he wasn’t really gay. “Put your hand out,” I’d tell these students. “Now bring it closer. Now closer still.” And when their hands were a half inch from their noses, I’d ask them to describe what they saw. “It’s blurry,” they’d say, and I’d suggest that sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked. And that when wishful thinking trumped the reality we might otherwise be able to see more clearly and manage, we were setting ourselves up for a rude awakening … Psychologist, heal thyself. Little by little, I began to withdraw my own hand from my face, as it were. Began to face the fact that Annie and I no longer were together. That she had defected.
The showdown came one Sunday afternoon when, in the middle of an argument we were having about her absenteeism, I said, “Do you even want to be married to me anymore?” We were in our kitchen. I was at the stove, making dinner—frying up eggplant on one burner, simmering marinara on another. Annie was at the table, going through two weeks’ worth of accumulated mail. Of course I do, I wanted to hear her say, but what she said, instead, was that she wasn’t sure anymore. That she was confused.
“Confused?” I picked up the frying pan and slammed it back down against the burner. The noise made her jump. “Well, if you’re confused, how the hell do you think I feel?” At this stage of our crumbling marriage, our battle roles had reversed themselves. Annie had always been the one who yelled and banged things when we argued; I was the one who spoke softly and civilly, maintaining the upper hand. Now I was the shouter, the slammer. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. Stood and walked out of the room, out of our house, and down the road. I stood at the window, watching her go. That was my rude awakening.
Later, when the meal I’d made was starting to go cold, she came back. We sat in silence across the table from each other. Chewed, swallowed. Each bite I took landed like a stone against my stomach. “Look, if you’re confused, then go see someone,” I finally said. “Or maybe we can go together like we did that other time. I can make some calls, get a referral to a good marriage counselor and we can—”
“I am seeing someone,” she said. “Romantically, I mean, not professionally.” I stared at her, a forkful of food poised in front of my mouth. “I still love you, Orion,” she told me in tears. “I always will. But I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
That someone else, she said, was Viveca.
“Viveca? … Viveca?”
Annie had gone with me to see that movie, I remember—Natural Born Killers. It was my idea, not hers. And about ten minutes into it, when Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson began murdering people in a bar for the fun of it, she took hold of my arm and whispered that she needed to leave. “It’s satire,” I’d whispered back. “Cartoon violence. Don’t take it so literally.” But she let go of my arm, stood, and walked out of the multiplex. Walked around the mall until the film was over. I finally found her sitting at a table outside of Au Bon Pain, cardboard coffee cup in front of her, looking sad and lost. Was she thinking of leaving me even back then? Wrestling with her attraction to women, maybe, or suffering because of my insensitivity? There was that lesbian friend of hers who visited us one time—that woman Priscilla. She and Annie had waitressed together back when Annie was in her teens. They’d been close, she said, and for a fleeting moment I wondered how close. But I’d dismissed it. Because even if they had been intimate, it was no big deal. Some kids experiment at that age. It’s how they figure out who they are … No, I should have been more in touch with her feelings and her fears. Should have gotten up and left the movie with her that afternoon—been less of a therapist trying to fathom my patient Petra’s psyche and more of a husband taking care of my wife. But no, I’d stayed, had sat through a film that, frankly, sickened me, too. Well, what does it matter at this point? The divorce is final. Their wedding invitations are already out. Mine, ripped in half, is in the second, smaller duffel bag I packed last night—the one filled with the stuff I’ve taken along for the little oceanside ceremony I’m planning to have once I get to North Truro. Or maybe I should say if I get there. I don’t think we’ve moved a mile in the last fifteen minutes. Well, so what, dude? It’s not like you’re going to be late for work. You’re unemployed, remember?
My “early retirement” from the university was an exhausted surrender, not an admission that Jasmine Negron’s version of what had happened that night was accurate. Instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to a colleague they’d known and worked with for years, Muriel and her cohorts had gotten behind a doctoral student who’d received a lukewarm evaluation from me the semester before. Once upon a time, Muriel and I had been friends. Lunch pals. We’d served together on committees, carpooled to conferences. We two and our spouses had seen each other socially during those early years. But after she was named director, things changed. She informed her counselors of her intent to create a “paper trail” about everything that transpired in our department, then generated a maddening number of forms and reports. And she expected all this additional paperwork to be completed on time, not a day or two late, no matter how much our caseloads had swelled because of the policy changes she had put into place. She was a stickler about those deadlines—a pain in the ass about them—and a strictly-by-the-book administrator who expected the rest of us to recast ourselves in her image, irrespective of our own treatment styles and philosophies. She intimidated the younger members of the department, many of whom sought me out about how to deal with her demands and criticisms. And because I’d gone to bat for some of them, Muriel pulled me into her office one afternoon and accused me of undermining her authority and encouraging others to do the same. She and I had butted heads on a number of occasions and on a number of issues. And so, when Jasmine filed her complaint, Muriel appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate: Blanche, Bev, and Marsha, feminists all, none of whom could be considered my ally. Beyond a shadow of a doubt? Innocent until proven guilty? Not with that gang of four. Muriel went to Dean Javitz and argued that my behavior had undermined the integrity of the entire Counseling Services program.
Word got around. People took sides, and the numbers were lopsided against me. My one supporter was Dick Holloway, a holdover from the department’s “good ole boy” days when men had run the show. Muriel tolerated Dick because she knew she’d outlast him, but he’d told me on more than one occasion that he was “sticking around” for the pleasure of being a thorn in her side. I’d never liked Dick, and when he stuck his head inside my office one morning to offer his support—“I hear the dykes are trying to cut you off at the knees, but hang tough” was the way he’d put it—it was small comfort. As for the other members of our department, some of whom I’d counted among my friends, they began nodding uncomfortably and looking away when we passed each other in the hall. A lot of the women in our department started giving me dirty looks. One lunchtime, I walked into the staff lounge and four women stopped their conversation, stood, and walked out in solidarity against me. It had hurt like a kick to the nuts.
Even my two best friends in the department, Marina and Dennis, began to distance themselves. Look, counseling students all day? You really care about these kids. You root for their mental health and try to promote it, but it’s hard, imperfect work. You worry about the ones who are in the worst shape, and at the end of the day, you can’t always shut it off like a faucet. So there’s this informal support system. When it’s after hours and you can’t stop hearing a patient’s voice or seeing the kid’s tortured face? You can begin to doubt yourself. So you call a colleague you can trust with whatever vulnerability you’re wrestling with. You have them listen to what’s bothering you and maybe offer a suggestion or two, a little perspective. Seek out a little counseling from another counselor. Dennis, Marina, and I had done that for one another. Had helped each other out like that for years. For years.
“Look, Orion, I sympathize with you. I really do,” Marina said when I stopped her and Dennis out in the parking lot one afternoon to ask for their support. “But I’m between a rock and a hard place with this one, okay? Because I’m your friend, yes, but I’m a woman, too. And I’ve been on the receiving end of unwanted—”
I put my hand up to stop her and turned to Dennis. “What about you? Because I’m telling you, this thing is a witch hunt. Was I dumb enough to give the girl a ride home when she came into my office that night like a damsel in distress? I was! Was I stupid enough to say yes when she invited me in for a drink? God, yes! But goddamnit, Dennis, she’s rewritten history. Because it just did not happen the way she’s claiming it did.”
He stood there, nodding sadly.
“So you believe me?”
“I do.”
“Then are you willing to—”
“Personally, I’m with you. But professionally? I’ve got to remain neutral on this one, Orion. I’ve got to be Switzerland.”
“Yeah? Really? Then screw you, Switzerland,” I said. I turned back to Marina. “And screw you, too, if you think you’re the one who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
“But Orion, the thing is—”
Rather than listen to their lame excuses, I turned my back on them and stormed off in the direction of my car. Looked over my shoulder and saw them both standing there, staring at me. The problem was, I couldn’t find my goddamned car. Kept walking back and forth from row to row, on the verge of tears and thinking, Shit! On top of everything else, someone’s stolen my fucking car? Eventually, it hit me that the Prius was in the shop being serviced. That I’d driven to work that day in a loaner. A red Saturn. I found it, kicked the bumper, unlocked it. Driving out of the parking lot, I looked over at the two of them, still standing there, talking. Justifying their reasons, no doubt, for not having my back the way I would have had either of theirs, no questions asked.
The following week, in the midst of my attempts to defend myself at humiliating meetings with the dean, the school’s at-large ethics panel, and lawyers representing the university and the union I belonged to, Seamus McAvoy, a twenty-year-old engineering major with a history of clinical depression, died on my watch. A sweet kid who carried his illness around like a backpack full of rocks, Seamus had been my counselee for four semesters. I’d had to cancel our previous appointment because of one of the aforementioned ethics meetings, but I have a vivid memory of our last appointment.
So you feel you’re pulling out of the quicksand then? He’d told me more than once that his depression felt like being stuck hopelessly in quicksand.
Yeah. I think I’m finally getting over Daria. I joined Facebook? And me and this poly-sci major named Kim have been messaging back and forth. She might be potential girlfriend material. His posture wasn’t slumpy for a change. His hygiene and coloring had improved. For forty-five minutes, he sat there pumping his right leg up and down as if, now that he was feeling better, he was waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off so he could run out of my office and reengage in life.
There was a debriefing, as there is whenever there’s a suicide—a departmental review of Seamus’s case. These meetings are meant to be supportive of both the therapist who’d been treating the victim and the department as a whole. Suicide is hard on all of us, no matter whose patient it is. Several of my colleagues, including some of the ones who’d been shunning me, commiserated. Even Muriel, who was running the meeting, looked right at me when she said how much easier our jobs would be if we psychologists all had crystal balls. She and Dean Javitz had talked to Seamus’s parents, she said, and from the sound of it, they weren’t holding the department or the university responsible. “No inquiry, no malpractice charges, thank goodness,” she said. But absolved or not, I couldn’t forgive myself for having been so goddamned distracted by the Jasmine mess that I had missed the red flag Seamus had waved that morning. When a potentially suicidal patient exhibits rapid improvement—becomes suddenly energized—what it can mean is that he’s finally arrived at a plan that will free him permanently from his unbearable gloom. But I hadn’t probed that possibility. I’d accepted Seamus’s emergence from his emotional “quicksand” at face value. The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.
I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.
That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.
“But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?
Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.
I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers … Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield … No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.
My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.
The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”
Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, I didn’t know how to fill up my days. That first Monday, I sat and stared at the morning TV shows, did the Times crossword, did my laundry. At noon, I drove over to the mall for lunch and human contact. Bought a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.
I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.
After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been Annie’s doing. “Shabby chic,” she called it.
On the first of July, I moved into the bunker. I hate it there. For one thing, there’s a nightly racket from the bar across the street. For another, the old gal in the apartment across the hall is needy. Pesty. She seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”
I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.
Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”
Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.
“Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”
She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”
“I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”
Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”
“New England? Manhattan?”
“All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”
“A bowl,” I say.
“Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”
I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.
Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if … The right says … I care!
After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.
At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him …
“If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.
I told him I disagreed, and so did the experts. “The DSM stopped classifying homosexuality as a sickness way back in 1973,” I said. “It’s as much an inevitability as blue eyes or someone’s shoe size.”
“So why’d she even marry you then? Why did she have us?”
“Because she loves you guys. And she loved me, too.”
“Yeah, well … this Vivian person?”
“Viveca,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. In that note she wrote me? When she said she hoped me and Casey can make it to the wedding because it would mean so much to Mom? Hey, sorry, lady. That ain’t gonna happen.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “It’s your decision.”
“You’re not going, are you?”
“No, probably not.”
“You’ve met her, though. Right? Mom’s … friend?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve met her, too. Do you remember that time when your mom had one of her pieces selected for the Whitney Museum show? And the five of us took the train down to New York? Stayed at that nice hotel and went to her opening?”
“Vaguely,” he said. “Was that when you took us to the NBA store and we saw Rick Fox?”
“Yup. Same trip. But I’ve seen her two or three times since then, too.”
“If you ask me, I don’t even think Mom is gay. I think she’s just mixed up. Living in New York, hanging out with all those artsy types. Who wouldn’t get their head messed up? You know what Marissa said? In this e-mail she sent me? That she thinks everyone’s bisexual, and that some people deny it and some people don’t. Now if that’s not fucked-up New York thinking, I don’t know what is. And I wouldn’t put it past that little twerp to be doing some experimenting with the lesbo stuff herself. You know how many gay bars there are in New York City?”
I said I didn’t. Did he?
“Plenty of them,” he said.
I told him I didn’t think living in New York, in and of itself, would turn anyone gay, so we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one. “And as for your sister, she’s an adult. Whatever experimenting she may or may not be doing isn’t really our business, is it?”
“Yeah, but I’m just saying … So what’s this Viveca person like, anyway? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”
“It’ll take some getting used to, Andrew. I realize that, but—”
“Don’t defend her, Dad. Mom having a wife? It’s messed up.”
“Well, it’s legal now, Andy.”
“Because some asshole liberal judge back there—”
“It wasn’t decided by a judge. They voted on it in the state legislature.”
“Yeah, and what are they going to make legal next? People marrying their dogs or something?”
“Oh, come on now. That’s kind of a specious argument, isn’t it?”
“All I’m saying is, it’s unnatural. Do you think that’s what God wants?”
Instead of getting into an argument about God’s existence, I told him I had no idea what God wants. “Hey,” I said. “Not to change the subject, but I saw on the Weather Channel that you guys are getting a lot of rain down there. Right?”
“Yeah. Last couple of days there’s been tornado watches, too. I mean, if women marrying women and men marrying men was God’s plan, then why’d he make Adam and Eve instead of Adam and Steve?” …
Chapter Five (#ulink_8d8e3ccc-dec1-53ed-86ac-04997c046716)
Annie Oh (#ulink_8d8e3ccc-dec1-53ed-86ac-04997c046716)
Viveca has left the prenup on her desk in the study: six legal-size pages with little cellophane flags to indicate the places where my signature’s supposed to go. She’s signed it already in her deliberate, forward-slanting penmanship. I haven’t signed it yet and may not. What’s she or her father’s lawyer going to do if I don’t? Stop the wedding? No, she wouldn’t do that. I’m not powerless in this relationship. Gallery owners need artists more than artists needs gallery owners … But that’s not fair. I mean more to Viveca than those commissions. She loves me. I know she does. But I also know that she envies me my creativity, my treacherous rides inside the cyclone. “Other agents have approached you. Haven’t they, Anna? You can tell me,” she’s said more than once. That’s where my power comes from. I know what her professional insecurities are, and also her personal secrets: that she terminated a pregnancy by a former lover, a man who refused to leave his wife; that she was not an only child like she tells everyone but had a mentally retarded brother who was hidden away at some training school. Profoundly retarded, she told me. She used to hate it when her parents made her go with them on those visits and she had to look at him, drooling and wearing a dirty helmet, banging his head against the wall. I’ve made it my business to know these things but have told Viveca very little about my own history. I hold my cards close to the vest, the way I did all those years with Orion. I may have been powerless against those floodwaters. Powerless against Kent’s secret visits to my room. But I learned about power the day that I got on that Greyhound bus and the driver pulled out of the depot and carried me away from the black hole that had almost sucked me in. The black hole that my life was about to become with Albie Wignall …
I’m seventeen again, stuck in Sterling because that’s where my foster family lives. I’m dating Albie, not because I like him very much, but because one thing has led to another. Two of those snooty girls from my high school, Holly Grandjean and Kathy Fontaine, finally have noticed me—well, not me so much as what we sell at Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. “Oh, wook. Gummy bears! I wuv Gummy bears,” Kathy says, and Holly says she “wuvs” them, too. I’m not sure why they’re talking baby talk. Are they making fun of me? But then, I decide they aren’t because Holly looks up from my merchandise to me and says I look familiar. “Don’t you go to Plainfield High?” she says, and I nod and tell them that all three of us were in the same gym class freshman year. I’m so grateful that they’re acknowledging my existence, these girls I thought I hated, that I shovel scoop after scoop of gummy bears into an open bag and tell them to just take them instead of paying for them. And then, at the end of my shift, my boss, Leland, points up at the surveillance camera mounted over the entrance to Jordan Marsh. It’s aimed right at my kiosk. Leland tells me to take off my Jo-Jo’s apron and not come back because I’m fired.
But a week later, I get another, better job waitressing at Friendly’s. My manager, Winona Wignall, assigns me to the take-out window, which the newest waitress always gets. But within two weeks, Priscilla is the new girl, and I’m serving people at the counter and making tips. Over the next weeks, Priscilla and I become friends, bonded by the fact that, out of all the Friendly’s waitresses, Winona likes us two the least.
Winona’s son, Albie, is twenty-three but he acts younger. He works at the Midas Mufflers down the road. After work, he comes over to Friendly’s to eat and hang around. He starts picking my section to sit at every time, and it’s kind of flattering, although he’s not much of a tipper. One time all he leaves me is eleven stacked pennies. Albie’s over six feet tall, and he’s blond and broad but not really fat, which is a miracle because when he comes in, he’ll eat a Big Beef with fries and a Fribble, and sometimes after that, will have dessert, too—a sundae, usually, which, when he orders it, he always calls it the Albie Special. The Albie Special is four scoops of chocolate almond chip ice cream, strawberry sauce and hot fudge, and chopped peanuts, the whole thing topped with whipped cream, jimmies, and cherries (three instead of the usual one). Sometimes when I put those sundaes in front of him, our other customers look over at it, and they’re probably thinking, wow, how does that guy rate? This one Holy Roller couple who comes in all the time? (They asked Winona once if they could leave their religious pamphlets for our other customers to take and she said no.) They always stare over at Albie’s sundae while he’s eating it, and I feel like going: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. (My foster family sent me to parochial school, and I can still recite all the Commandments.) Instead of reminding them about the tenth commandment, though, I told the Holy Rollers that Albie pays extra for his sundae. He doesn’t really. He gets all that extra stuff for the price of a regular hot fudge, plus you have to give him his mother’s employee discount besides. Winona calls Albie “Big Boy,” which fits him size-wise but also is pretty funny because Albie acts childish, especially around his mother, who he still calls “Mommy.” He’s not all that much younger than my brother Donald, except Donald is already married and acts like a grown-up, which he is. So is Albie, technically, but he lives in his parents’ basement and still gets an Easter basket, which I know because all during Lent, Winona kept buying stuff for Albie’s Easter basket and hiding it in our break room. One time, Priscilla stole two Almond Joys from one of the bags. She snuck me one, and whenever we looked at each other during that shift, we couldn’t help laughing.
One night, while Albie’s holding up his elbows because I’m wiping down the counter where he sits, he asks me out. I didn’t expect it, and I don’t know what to say at first, so I say, “Let me think about it.” Then later on I tell him yes, okay, I’ll go. Because, hey, I’m not stupid. He’s my boss’s son.
For our date, Albie takes me to the drive-in. It’s a double feature: the first and second Planet of the Apes movies. (I’ve already seen the first one and thought it was stupid, but Albie picked the movie.) At intermission, he asks me do I want anything from the snack bar. I tell him yes please, a box of Good & Plenty. When he gets back in the car, he’s got my candy plus, for himself, three foil-wrapped hot dogs and a big soda. In between eating my Good & Plenty, I keep shaking the box, which is partly just this habit I’ve had since I was little but also partly because I like the sound. It comforts me.
Albie keeps looking over at me while he’s eating and I can smell that he has liquor breath. “Did you put something in your Coke?” I ask him.
“It’s not Coke. It’s root beer.”
“Yeah, but did you?” He nods, smiles, and pulls a half-empty bottle out of his back pocket. When he hands it to me, I squint and read the label. LONG JOHN’S GINGER BRANDY, it says. Eighty proof.
“You know something?” Albie says. “You’re pretty.”
“No, I’m not,” I tell him. I’m thinking about what I heard someone call liquor once: “Dutch courage.” I don’t know why. What’s so Dutch about getting drunk?
“Yes, you are, and you know you are, too,” Albie says. Ha! I think. He’s either drunk or blind. But then I think, well, maybe in Albie’s eyes, I’m like those girls at the mall who I got fired trying to impress. He scoots closer to my side and starts playing with my hair and my left ear. Then he leans over and starts kissing my neck. He’s trying to be sexy, I guess, but it just tickles, plus now his breath smells like both brandy and hot dogs, which isn’t very appealing. After a while, he reaches down and takes my hand in his. It makes me think of that song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that’s on my brother Donald’s Meet the Beatles! album. When Donald got married and moved out of state, he gave me all of his old Beatles albums, which I still play quite a bit, even though the Beatles broke up because of Yoko Ono. Instead of watching Return to the Planet of the Apes or thinking about what Albie’s up to, I start singing that song in my head. And when I touch you I feel happy inside … It makes me think about this girl in my fourth grade public school class named Carol Cosentino who used to wear a pink sailor hat that had all these little metal Beatles buttons pinned all over it. Carol’s favorite Beatle was George, I remember. I wonder whatever happened to her. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Albie, while he’s still holding my hand, is using his other hand to fiddle with his pants. Then I hear this snap-snapping sound and I see his belt flying into the back. From the way he just lifted his butt off the seat, he might have just pulled his pants down. I’m not sure, but I’m certainly not going to look over there and find out. But then he moves my hand over to his side and puts it down there—him and his Dutch courage. I can feel that he’s still got his underpants on, which is a relief, but I can also feel that he’s got a lump in there. A “boner,” I’ve heard boys at school call it when they’re talking dirty in the cafeteria. “Please?” he whispers, moving my hand up and down against his lump. I let him do it, not because I want to but because he said please, which makes me feel, kind of, that it’s me who’s in control of the situation, not him, and also because if Albie likes me, then maybe Winona will like me better, too, and assign me to Section A, where those lawyers from the office building next door always sit, and they’re big tippers. Those booths are Althea’s section, usually. Althea is Winona’s pet and she used to be Albie’s girlfriend. One day I overheard her telling one of the other waitresses that she broke up with him because he has no class. But according to Albie, he broke up with her because, unlike me, Althea is “a bitch on wheels who thinks her shit don’t stink.” That’s one thing I have to say for myself: I never, ever leave a bathroom smelly; I’m very careful about that kind of thing. I keep matches in my purse even though I don’t smoke, and whenever I have to use the toilet and, you know, get the bathroom smelly, I always light a match and burn some toilet paper to, what’s it called? Oh yeah, fumigate it. Part of me wants to yank my hand away from Albie’s lump, but another part of me says, what do I care? It doesn’t even feel like it’s my hand that’s doing what he’s making it do, and while he’s over there, mouth-breathing and making my hand go faster, I try thinking of other things. I make up this game where I have to think of all the songs on Abbey Road in the right order: “Come Together,” “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” I get all the way to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and then I can’t think of what comes after that. It’s like my mind’s gone blank or something. Thinking about other things is something I learned to do on those nights when Kent would sneak into my room. I’d recite stuff they made us memorize in school: the Ten Commandments; the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. I can still remember some of the Mysteries—the Annunciation, the Nativity, Finding Jesus in the Temple. And, let me think … the Resurrection, the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven. (One time, this girl who sat next to me, Tammy Tusia, had to go to the office for being sacrilegious because she leaned over and said to me, trying to be funny, “Gee if Mary got queen, who got first runner-up?” and Sister Presentation heard her say it. Luckily, I didn’t laugh so I didn’t get in trouble.) So that’s how many mysteries? While I’m counting how many I’ve said, Albie starts going, “Oh, god! Oh, fuck! Faster!” Oh, and there’s the Scourging at the Pillar, the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Albie starts to groan and now I can feel the wet stuff. I know from Kent that after the wet stuff comes out, they quiet down and stop bothering you. I finally remember the song that comes after “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It’s “Here Comes the Sun”—the one George sings. I wonder if Carol Cosentino, wherever she is, still likes George the best, even though he has long scraggly hair now and a beard that makes him look like a hillbilly. In my opinion, the Beatles looked better when they had their Beatle haircuts, like on the Meet the Beatles! cover.
It’s after midnight by the time the drive-in gets out, and when Albie pulls up in front of my foster family’s house, he asks if he can kiss me good night and I say no, it’s late and I have to go in, and he accepts it. See? I’m in control. Not him. “Can I call you?” he asks. I make him wait a couple of seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, okay.” Albie’s not handsome or anything, but he’s sort of cute. Priscilla from work thinks he’s borderline fat and has kind of a pig face, and I can see her point, too. Upstairs, while I’m getting ready for bed, I decide Albie’s ugly-cute, like Ringo. Not that he looks anything like Ringo. He looks like Winona, although he acted kind of insulted when I told him that.
On our next date, Albie and I go to the drive-in again. Saturday Night Fever is playing this time, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it because I’ve had a little bit of a crush on John Travolta from when he was Vinnie Barbarino on TV. But Albie’s wrecking it for me because he keeps telling me he’d bet me any amount of money that John Travolta is a homosexual. (How would he know?) I’m sitting there, trying to enjoy the movie, and Albie keeps saying stuff like, “Look! There’s your evidence. That’s a flitty walk” and “You know who dances like that? Queers, that’s who. I swear on a stack of Bibles: that guy is light in the loafers.”
“Do you mind?” I finally say, and after that he shuts up for a while, thank god. Then, halfway through the movie, there’s lightning and thunder and it starts pouring. The movie stops and it says on the speaker that they’re closing but giving everyone fog passes at the exit. When we get ours, Albie says he sure as hell would hate to sit through that faggy John Travolta movie again and, to be funny, I guess, he puts the fog passes in his mouth, chews on them, and then spits them out his window. I don’t like Althea, but she’s right about him: Albie’s got no class.
It’s early still, so we go to Kelly’s Drive-Thru and get Cokes and clam fritters, and while we’re eating our food, the rain stops. Albie throws out our trash, and then he starts his car and drives us out to Oak Swamp Reservoir, which is a make-out spot for kids our age. Well, my age. It’s easy to forget that Albie’s six years older than me. He parks and turns off his engine but keeps the radio on. They’re playing that song “Baker Street,” which I like, but when I say I do, Albie says it sucks and that he wants to listen to some real music. He reaches under his seat and pulls out a Judas Priest cassette and puts it into his player. “Yuck,” I say. “Where’s my earplugs?” and Albie says I obviously don’t know good music and turns up the volume. We start making out a little, and he guides my hand down there again to that same area as last time, big surprise, and he’s got his lump again. “Please, sweetie. Please,” he says. It makes me think of that thing my father said to me that time when he caught me feeding veal loaf to our cat, Fluffy, under the table. “You start that, Anna Banana, and he’ll pester you nonstop.” One thing about my father: whenever he got finished working on our car, he always came in and washed his hands with that scratchy soap powder, Boraxo, to get the grease off. But Albie always has greasy hands, and, when he gets close to you, he smells like … mufflers.
Five minutes later, Albie still hasn’t finished and my hand’s starting to go numb. Then something unexpected happens. He puts his hand between my legs and starts tongue-kissing my mouth at the same time. I let him because it feels kind of strange but also a little bit good, and the more he does it, the less I want him to stop. “Mmm, you’re wet,” he whispers.
“No, I’m not,” I say. Am I?
“Yeah, you are,” Albie says. “You’re so wet, I almost need a mop. You’re good and ready for it, aren’t you?”
I know what “it” is, and I don’t want it in me, but I don’t not want it, either. I’m confused. So when he pulls me into the backseat and gets on top of me, I let him. He pokes his thing all around down there but his aim is bad. Then he finally figures it out. He starts whispering stuff like “Oh, Jesus” and “Oh, baby” and he’s pumping his hips faster and faster, and that’s when, all of a sudden, I think about birth control. “Hey!” I say. “Stop. I don’t want to get pregnant.” He says it’s no problem, that he’ll pull out before he “nuts,” which, I think, must mean when his wet stuff comes. There’s a lot about sex that I still don’t get, but I know it’s their wet stuff that gets the girl pregnant. And Albie does pull out, too, going, “Oh, fuck! Oh, Jesus!” I don’t appreciate the fact that he’s gotten his stuff all over my stomach, and even a little of it on my new pocketbook, which I only bought the day before yesterday at Two Guys because Althea was out sick and I got assigned her section and one of those lawyers gave me a twenty for a bill that was only four dollars and seventeen cents and said to keep the change.
The next Monday in English, Mrs. Sonstroem has us read aloud from the book we’re reading, A Tale of Two Cities. I’m trying to concentrate, but a part of me is back at the Oak Swamp Reservoir with Albie, and him making me feel that tingly way. “Miss O’Day,” she says. “You’re next.” I hate reading out loud and have been hoping the bell would ring without me getting picked. No such luck. Plus, I’m not sure where the last person left off and Jeannie Baker has to lean over and point to where. Before I start, I see Kenny Lalla and John Marchese smirk at each other and I hear Stanley whisper under his breath, “Get ready.” Get ready for what? I wonder, but I start reading. And when I get to the sentence “My father has been freed!” Lucie ejaculated, the boys—first just Kenny and Stanley, and then a bunch of the others, all start laughing. None of the girls are laughing out loud or anything, but some of them are smiling at each other, and Betsy Yeznach’s hand is covering her mouth. I don’t get what’s so funny.
“All right, that’s enough!” Mrs. Sonstroem, who almost never yells, starts yelling. “Maybe if you’re all this immature, we shouldn’t even read Charles Dickens, who happens to be one of the very best writers of all time.” Then she says something about pearls and swine that I don’t get. One of the boys starts making pig snorts and she gives him a detention. Then the bell rings.
After school, and after I’ve changed into my Friendly’s uniform and still have a few minutes before I have to leave for work, I look up ejaculate in my foster family’s dictionary. 1.To utter suddenly and passionately; to exclaim, it says. Then, 2.To discharge abruptly, especially to discharge semen during orgasm. I look up semen. Then I look up orgasm. Okay, now I get it, I think. “Semen” is the guy’s milky discharge and “orgasm” is the highest point of sexual pleasure, marked in males by the ejaculation of semen and in females by vaginal contractions.
The next time Albie takes me out, we skip the drive-in and go right to the reservoir. I’ve put my pocketbook out of range this time. He pulls out in time again, and I think to myself: he just had an orgasm and ejaculated his semen. Unlike the last time, I’m not feeling much of anything myself, but at least I know the names of things now.
For our next date, I have to go over to the Wignalls’ house for dinner. I get embarrassed because once the food’s on the table, I start eating, but Albie and his parents are just looking at me. Then Mr. Wignall says they like to say grace first. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” He and Winona hold out their hands and I take them and Mr. Wignall thanks God for the bounty that’s in front of us. He and Winona have their eyes closed, but Albie and I don’t and Albie’s looking at me with this goofy grin on his face and making cross-eyes to be funny. When Mr. Wignall’s done, he opens his eyes again and says, “Let’s eat.” Winona’s done the cooking and it’s creamed dried beef on “toast points” (which is really just regular old toast, as far as I can see) plus beets (which I hate). The Wignalls pour vinegar on their beets, so I do, too, and the vinegar soaks all into my toast so that I have to eat this mushy pink vinegar bread to be polite. Mr. Wignall has seconds and Albie has thirds. For dessert we have green Jell-O with canned fruit in it, which is something Mama used to make, too. Except at our house, everyone got their own separate dish of Jell-O, but at the Wignalls’ it’s in a big bowl and you pass it around and then squirt Reddi-wip on top. And in the middle of dessert, Mr. Wignall says to Winona, “Sweetness, would you pass me some more Jell-O?” I almost start laughing, thinking about how, the next day at work, I’ll tell Priscilla about Winona’s husband calling her Sweetness and how it’ll crack her up. It’s like I’m a spy or something. Then Winona says, “Would you like more cream, too, Sweetness?” and Albie says there is no more, that he ran the can dry, which is no surprise because he squirted so much cream on his Jell-O that, if he was my kid, I would have yelled at him for being a pig and not thinking about anyone but himself.
After dinner, Albie and I go over to my foster family’s house because nobody else is home. We’re watching Dallas, and Albie says he’d bet me any amount of money that Lucy Ewing is a slut in real life, too—that she probably doesn’t even have to act. Then he tells me that, a few weeks back, he had a dream that Lucy Ewing was sucking his dick. I roll my eyes. No class, I think.
“Hey, can I ask you something, Sweetness?” Albie says. It nearly makes me puke, him calling me that. Who does he think we are? His icky parents?
“What?” I say, and Albie says he was just wondering if I would ever want to try something like that.
“Like what?”
“Sucking my dick. I bet it would really turn you on.”
I get up from the couch, turn off the TV, and tell him to go home. “And if you ever say something like that again to me, Albie Wignall, I’m going to tell your mother you said it, and don’t think I wouldn’t because I would.”
He says maybe I should just become a nun, and I say yeah, that’s a good idea, maybe I will, and he says I’m lucky someone like him even gives me a second look, and I say “Ha, that’s a laugh and a half!” and tell him again to go home. He gets up and, on his way out, slams the door so hard that he’s lucky my foster father isn’t home because he gets real mad when anyone slams things and he’d probably chase Albie all the way down the sidewalk.
The next night at Friendly’s, Albie is all apologies, saying how he respects me, he really, really does. “Let’s take a drive and clear the air after you get off work,” he suggests. I tell him no three different times. Then finally I say yes just to shut him up. And when my shift’s almost over, he gets up and says he’ll wait for me out in his car. When I go to wipe off the counter, I see that he’s left me this tip that’s dimes and nickels and quarters shaped like a heart. He probably thinks he’s being romantic, but all’s I think is that it’s pretty corny. Still, when I scoop it up and count it, it comes to two dollars and eighty cents, which is the most he’s ever left me, so I guess he really is sorry.
But guess where we end up. In a way, he can’t help it, I guess. I read in a magazine last week that, on an average, girls think about sex twice in an hour but for guys it’s seventeen times. This time, after he puts his thing inside of me and I can tell he’s getting ready, I tell him, “Pull it out! Pull it out!” and he says he can’t, it feels too good, and anyways, he doesn’t need to because he’s taken a pill that stops the girl from getting pregnant when the guy “nuts” inside of her. A pill that men take? Here’s how stupid I am: I believe him. So I let Albie have his orgasm inside of me—that night and the next two or three times after that. And then one day at work, I go up to two of the older waitresses, Ginny and Mary Beth, who are both in their thirties. Mary Beth is married and it’s common knowledge that Ginny “gets around” down at the Anchor Clanker where all the sailors go to drink and meet girls. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of this pill men take so that the woman doesn’t get pregnant. Instead of answering me, they just look at each other. Then they both start laughing, and I feel like the idiot I am. I’m three weeks late, which is why I asked them, and now I know why I am.
It’s Saturday, my day off—the day I’ve decided I’m going to tell Albie. I just wish he was in a better mood. He and Winona have just had one of their big fights, and in the car on the way over to Olympic Pizza, he’s saying stuff like how Winona’s “the wicked witch of the West” and his father’s “pussy whipped.” In the fifteen minutes since he picked me up, he’s told me three times already how much he hates his mother’s guts. It’s quiet at the pizza place. We take the booth by the window. Albie orders a toasted salami grinder with fried onions and peppers, plus a quart bottle of Dr Pepper. I order a small Sprite and three stuffed clams. I’ve felt sick to my stomach all week, but suddenly I’m hungry, even though I’m nervous. When our food comes, I tell myself that as soon as I finish my second stuffed clam, that’s when I’ll tell him I’m pregnant. By now I’m only half-listening to his complaints about his mother, but he gets my full attention when he says that sometimes he daydreams about her getting killed in a car accident or getting struck by lightning and dying. “Winona Wignall, R.I.P.,” he says. “I should be so lucky.”
It’s ignorance, that’s what it is. He has no idea how awful it is to have your mother die. “Don’t even say stuff like that,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he says. “It’s a free country.” He takes a huge bite out of his grinder. There’s a strand of shredded lettuce sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even realize it. “Maybe someday I’ll take out my hunting rifle and put me and my dad out of our misery.”
I get so mad when he says it that I kick him under the table. Not that it must hurt very much. All I’m wearing is sandals.
“What the fuck?” he says. “What’d you do that for?” And when I don’t answer him, he lifts up his leg and stomps down hard on the top of my foot with his big clodhopper work boot. The pain shoots all the way up my leg and puts tears in my eyes. For several seconds I can’t even catch my breath. I wait until the nausea passes.
Here’s how I tell him. I say, “That’s a nice way to treat the mother of your child, you asshole!” I didn’t want it to come out that way, but I have to admit that the look of fear on his big fat face is satisfying.
“What did you just say?” he asks. I put my arms tight across my chest and don’t answer him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I nod without looking at him.
“By me?”
“Oh, no, Big Boy,” I say, real sarcastic. “It couldn’t be yours because you take that pill that doesn’t really exist. Remember?”
He tells me to stop fucking with him, and I tell him to pull that strand of lettuce out of his mouth because it looks disgusting.
“Are you having a kid or not?” he says, in this voice that’s loud enough that a customer who’s sitting at the counter swivels his stool around and looks at us. I’ve only eaten one of my stuffed clams, but I’ve lost my appetite and my foot’s throbbing, goddamn him. He better not have broken it if he knows what’s good for him. I get up from the booth and limp toward the door. I have first shift the next day, and it ought to be a whole lot of fun wearing my waitressing wedgies for five hours if my foot’s all black and blue and swollen. Albie follows me out of the restaurant and I scream it over my shoulder, “I’m not having a kid, you jerk! I’m having your kid! Deal with it!”
Albie’s scared to tell his parents, mostly his mother, so it’s me who finally has to call the meeting. “It’s urgent,” I tell Winona. The four of us are seated at the Wignalls’ kitchen table: Albie, his father, Winona, and me. There’s coffee mugs in front of each of us, and Winona’s put out a plate of Oreos that nobody’s touching. Winona doesn’t say much when she hears what we have to tell her, but her nostrils keep flaring and she’s teary-eyed. Then finally she says, “Big Boy, how could this have happened?”
Albie’s face is flushed and it doesn’t help that he’s got this naughty boy grin on his face. “The usual way,” he says. “Male plus female equals baby.”
Winona reaches over and backhands him. “Don’t you dare give me that wiseguy attitude at a time like this!” she yells. At first I think he might stomp on her foot or something, but Albie just reaches for the Oreos. Winona tells him he has to marry me now because it’s the only decent thing to do. “But I guess I better say good-bye to that beautiful church wedding that I’ve always dreamed about for my boy and his bride.” Those tears in her eyes are probably because the bride she’d been dreaming about is Althea, not me.
Albie makes the point, feebly, that he and I have other options.
“Like what?” Winona demands, and when he doesn’t answer her, she slams her coffee mug down against the table and says, “Just what do you think we are, Albert Wignall? Trailer trash? You’ve got obligations to this girl, and you’re damn well going to meet them. And if by ‘other options’ you mean what I think you do, then shame on you!”
“Yeah, but Mommy …,” Albie says. He turns from his mother to his father. “Daddy, what do you think?”
Mr. Wignall looks back and forth between the two of them and takes his sweet time answering. “Your mother’s right,” he finally says. “You had your fun. Now you got to pay the piper.” At this meeting, I’m more or less being treated like I’m invisible. Why is that? I’m the one who’s pregnant. Don’t I count? What if I don’t want to marry him?
But in another two weeks now, I will marry Albie, not because I want to but because he’s 50 percent responsible for the baby that’s growing inside of me. No, more than that—75 percent maybe, him and his imaginary men’s pill that stops women from getting pregnant.
Albie doesn’t give me a ring; he gives me a hundred dollars and tells me to go down to Ogulnick’s Jewelers and pick out something I like. None of the diamond rings are anywhere near my price range, so I settle for this little ring with a garnet chip in it that’s really just a friendship ring, not an engagement ring. Winona says I shouldn’t wear it to work because my male customers will give me better tips if they don’t think I’m “spoken for.” Ha! Like that’s the reason she doesn’t want me wearing it, not because she’s embarrassed that Albie’s “knocked me up,” as he puts it.
When I finally call my brother to tell him about my situation, Donald says I don’t even sound like I like this guy. What am I marrying him for?”
“Because of the baby,” I tell him.
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Yeah. What other reason would there be?”
But after I get off the phone, I start thinking about it, and if I really, really want to be honest with myself, I think I’m partly marrying Albie because, even after all these years—twelve of them now—I still miss my own mother as bad as ever. Maybe Winona isn’t perfect—ha! no maybe about it!—but in under seven months she’s going to be my baby’s grandmother, so she might soften toward me and maybe even start treating me like a daughter a little bit. Who knows? Maybe next Easter, I’ll get an Easter basket like Albie.
My wedding dress is pastel orange with a matching headband. When Winona takes me shopping, she nixes my wearing white or wearing a veil, since Albie and I “jumped the gun” and conceived a child in sin. I have to oblige her because she’s paying for the dress, which she likes way more than I do. There’s no bridal shower, no fancy invitations. There’ll be no graduation this coming June for me, either; I dropped out of school when I started showing. No one from my foster family or my real family is coming to the wedding, not even Donald, who says he can’t in good conscience support this marriage. On Albie’s side, the only people who are coming are Albie’s parents—they’re going to be our witnesses—plus Winona’s mother, who’s always clacking her false teeth and telling me to call her by her first name, Bridey, and Mr. Wignall’s father, who has thick gray hair growing out of his ears and wears a hearing aid that’s always whistling. The only other person I wanted to invite is Priscilla from work. I’ve heard Winona tell Althea that she thinks Priscilla is “one of those girls who should have been born a boy,” by which she means, I think, that she’s a lesbian. Which she is. Priscilla’s not coming to my wedding, though, because I didn’t end up inviting her after Winona gave me this stupid excuse about how she doesn’t feel comfortable fraternizing with people who work under her. What she really meant, I’m pretty sure, is: no lesbians allowed. She’d probably croak if she knew about that afternoon when Priscilla drove me out to the place where she boards her horses, Lucky and Gal, and after we went horseback riding, we made out in the barn and her fingers gave me those “vaginal contractions” that it only dawned on me later was an orgasm—my first.
Even though we’re going to get married to prove we’re not “trailer trash,” as Winona puts it, Albie keeps talking about me getting an abortion. One of the other guys at Midas Mufflers and his girlfriend had “a little complication they had to take care of” a while back, he says, and Albie’s got the name of their doctor. But I am not getting an abortion, no matter that it’s legal now and no matter how much he keeps bugging me about it.
It doesn’t matter, though, because on the day we go to town hall for our marriage license they’re closed for lunch, and when we go back to Albie’s car to wait until one o’clock, I look down and there’s blood seeping through my white shorts. “Uh-oh,” I go.
“Jesus, what now?” Albie says, and I just point.
He drives me over to the emergency room and everyone there is real nice to me, real sensitive, even Albie. When I can’t stop crying and my little box of tissues runs out, he goes out to the nurses’ station and gets me a new box. And when we leave the hospital, he holds my hand on the way out to the car. Back at the Wignalls’, Winona holds out her arms and folds them around me and I cry against her shirt, partly because I’ve lost the baby and partly because this is the nicest she’s ever been to me. Don’t let go, I want to say. Please just keep holding me.
But Winona does let go, and in the days that follow I am both sad about losing the baby and relieved that now I don’t have to marry Albie after all. It’s like when you’re playing Monopoly and you pick up a get-out-of-jail-free card. I decide to get out of Sterling. My foster family’s away at the lake for the weekend. I can pack and leave them a note—tell them I decided it’s time for me to move on now that I’m almost an adult. And I can just not show up for my next shift at Friendly’s. I’ll just disappear.
I call Priscilla and she picks me up and drives us toward Hartford. On the way there, the car radio plays that Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun,” and she and I sing along with it. Little darling, I feel the ice is slowly melting … In the motel room we rent on the Berlin Turnpike, Priscilla and I make fun of Winona, eat pizza, and drink beer. We get drunk and crazy, jumping on the two double beds, flying past each other in opposite directions until I flop facedown on the mattress and realize I’m still a little sore from my miscarriage. It was a silly way for me to behave, especially since I was almost a married woman and a mother. But I’m not either one of those things now, and so what? I’ve been on a starvation diet as far as fun’s concerned, and being free from Albie has made me giddy. I know that it’s only for this one night. Priscilla has to get back to her horses and her job. And I have to not go back to Sterling, or to the stupid clod I almost married. I still feel sad about the baby, but in a way it was for the best. If it had lived, I probably would have never gotten free of Albie and his parents, and even if I did, my baby’s last name would be Wignall. And my name, too. Annie Wignall: yuck! “Do me a favor, will you?” I ask Priscilla. “The next time he comes into Friendly’s and you make him a sundae, spit on it.” She kisses me and says it’ll be her pleasure, and that she’ll spit in his “fucking Fribble,” too.
Later, in the dark, Priscilla climbs into my bed and we start making out. She does the same kind of stuff she did to me that day in the horse barn and I like it and don’t even feel sore anymore. I do the same things to Priscilla, and I like doing that, too. But after we’re both finished, things get quiet. I can tell from her breathing that she’s fallen asleep and I get scared. Get up and go look out the window at the cars going by—the people inside them getting to wherever they’re going. And yeah, I’ve gotten away, but I have no idea where I’m going to. It’s like I’m a little girl again, in the backseat of that social worker’s car the day they came and got me. Drove me away from Daddy. I’m crying, looking out the back window at Kent, who’s running down the road after me. What Kent does to me is bad, but are these people bad, too? Where are they taking me? I don’t even care that my father’s drunk all the time. I just want to stay and live with him. And what about my brother? Donald’s at college and won’t even know where I’m going, where they’re taking me …
I get back in bed. Reach over and touch Priscilla’s shoulder. Take her hand in mine. I keep holding on to it so that I’ll feel safe and be able to fall asleep. And after a while, it works. My panic fades away and I begin to doze. The next morning when I wake up, she’s still asleep. We’re still holding hands.
Priscilla buys us breakfast at a diner next door to the motel, but I can’t eat much. I have a stomachache. On our way out, she asks the cashier how to get to the bus station and then drives me over there. “Where to?” the ticket guy asks me. He waits. “Miss? You’re holding up the line.”
“Three Rivers,” I say. I’m not sure why I’m going back to where my family used to live—where the flood was—except that I have to go somewhere and it’s the only place I can think of. Priscilla gives me two twenties and a ten and says it’s not a loan, it’s a gift to help me start over until I can find a job. She waits with me until the bus comes, and when I get on it and the driver pulls away, Priscilla waves to me and I wave back. I’m crying, partly because I’ll miss her but also partly because I’m doing something daring and powerful. Something life-saving, even. I’ve gotten the hell away from Albie, and from his mean-ass mother, too, and that’s why I’m doing this. Later on during this bus ride, I realize it’s my birthday. I’m eighteen. Happy birthday to me.
Getting a pay-by-the-week room in Three Rivers is easy; I manage that in about an hour after I arrive. But getting a job is harder. There’s a Friendly’s on East Main Street, but when I go in there to fill out an application, the manager says he only wants experienced waitresses. That’s what I am, but it’s not like I can put down Winona Wignall as a reference. Shop Rite says they don’t need any grocery cashiers right now, but they’ll put my application on file and maybe call me in a month or so. A month? I can’t wait that long. My room costs forty dollars a week, and between the money Priscilla gave me and my own money, I only have thirty-three dollars left. And anyway, how are they supposed to call me when I’ve left the space for my phone number blank? A sign in the window of a dress shop says SEAMSTRESS WANTED. Too bad I can’t sew. I go to the library and read the want ads. Some business is looking for a typist. Too bad I can’t type. A drugstore wants a part-time clerk and delivery boy. Too bad I’m not a boy and don’t have my driver’s license. Two days later, there’s a new ad. A “café” called Electric Red is looking for dancers. Okay, I think, I can dance.
The catch is: you have to dance topless on a little stage across from the bar. But my week’s rent at the rooming house is almost up. I’ve been living on peanut butter, Wonder bread, and tap water all week. Forty bucks a night plus tips, the manager tells me. His name is Rusty. He’s the bartender, too. Dancers get an extra dollar for every cocktail they can get the customers to buy them between sets (when you can put your top back on), an extra two dollars if the guy buys another drink for himself, too. “I give you girls ice tea instead of liquor, but the jamokes who are running up a tab don’t have to know that,” Rusty says. “Another girl just gave her notice, so I can start you tonight.” I’m hesitant but desperate, so I decide to give it a try.
My shift goes from nine o’clock until 1:00 A.M., but we get breaks. There are three of us dancers. Gloria is kind of flat-chested, but she’s a wicked good dancer. Rusty’s girlfriend, Anita, is the other one, even though she has stretch marks and is kind of thick in the middle. “Some guy starts getting grabby with you, I’ll give Rusty the signal and he’ll handle the situation,” she’s promised. The sound system blares sexy disco music: “Rock the Boat,” “Get Down Tonight,” that Donna Summer song “Love to Love You Baby.” My dancing is awkward at first because I’m so nervous and self-conscious about my boobs showing. But it helps that the spotlight on us makes it hard to see any of the men who are watching us. Older men, mostly, which somehow makes it easier. After a while I use my technique from before: thinking of things I’ve memorized to take me someplace other than where I am: the Commandments, the Religious Mysteries, old TV jingles. Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed … Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile … It’s not so bad. By my third night, I’ve made enough money to pay for two more weeks’ rent on my room and go grocery shopping. But on my fourth night, while I’m in the middle of dancing to that stupid song “Afternoon Delight,” I look out at the crowd and can swear I see my cousin Kent out there among the old coots. I keep dancing but I’m freaking out, not concentrating, and I fall off the front of the stage and twist my ankle. The music stops and when the lights go on, I can see it’s not him—that it doesn’t even really look like him. But that ends my dancing career.
After the swelling goes down and I can walk on my ankle again, I go looking for other work. My luck is with me, and I get two different part-time jobs on the exact same day. In the daytime, I’m a fry cook at Josie’s Fish & Chips. At night, I work the shoe rental counter at Three Rivers Ten Pin. Both jobs leave me kind of smelly, from cooking grease and from the antifungal spray you have to squirt into the bowling shoes after people hand them back in. I’m grateful for that spray, though, because sometimes those shoes come back smelling like the jar of Limburger cheese my father used to take out of the refrigerator and spread on crackers. But hey, work is work. Every once in a while, one of the bowlers asks me out, but I always say the same thing: “Sorry, but I already have a steady boyfriend.” I’m not that interested in men, or women either for that matter. Mimi, one of my coworkers at the bowling alley, brings me to a women’s bar one night, but all the public affection—kissing and dancing crotch to crotch—makes me uncomfortable. “Not my scene,” I tell Mimi the next time she asks me to go with her. Priscilla and I are still in touch, though, and when she visits me those two times, we do stuff. But then she gets a steady girlfriend, a welder at Electric Boat named Robbin, and we lose touch.
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Wally Lamb
From New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb, a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy.As Annie Oh’s wedding day approaches, she finds herself at the mercy of hopes and fears about the momentous change ahead. She has just emerged from a twenty-five year marriage to Orion Oh, which produced three children, but is about to marry a woman named Viveca, a successful art dealer, who specializes in outsider art.Trying to reach her ex-husband, she keeps assuring everyone that he is fine. Except she has no idea where he is. But when Viveca discovers a famous painting by a mysterious local outside artist, who left this world in more than mysterious circumstances, Orion, Annie and Viveca’s new dynamic becomes fraught. And on the day of the wedding, the secrets and shocking truths that have been discovered will come to light.Set in Lamb’s mythical town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, this is a riveting, epic novel about marriage and family, old hurts and past secrets, which explores the ways we find meaning in our lives.
This one is for two strong women:
Joan Joffe Hall and Shirley Woodka
Ghost of a Chance
You see a man
trying to think.
You want to say
to everything:
Keep off! Give him room!
But you only watch,
terrified
the old consolations
will get him at last
like a fish
half-dead from flopping
and almost crawling
across the shingle
almost breathing
the raw, agonizing
air
till a wave
pulls it back blind into the triumphant
sea.
—Adrienne Rich
Table of Contents
Cover (#u418f149d-d638-5cb4-a872-e8042dec35a8)
Title Page (#u856a56de-f680-5d94-a313-fab96cf03384)
Dedication (#uad841fb6-086b-5715-8831-80c0faf3e5ba)
Epigraph (#ueb3d58e6-aba3-5b4d-a1b2-f5847f978f11)
Prologue (#ud82b3f49-61ad-5976-a008-bcf6a0770830)
Gualtiero Agnello (#ud6a29cda-5234-572d-a5fa-ab6b5b72ea26)
Part I: Art and Service (#ub9205368-68cd-54c0-98cf-56c423f63e52)
Chapter One: Annie Oh (#u16a956e9-e8cf-5b4c-99bc-668581a72b6e)
Chapter Two: Orion Oh (#ua31ec73a-3223-55f0-8890-5a3933f73f45)
Chapter Three: Annie Oh (#u16b42901-c6e9-55b0-a8ca-51d9c2466379)
Chapter Four: Orion Oh (#u45625717-ac06-5d44-87d5-8328ba200255)
Chapter Five: Annie Oh (#u1737ca23-76ba-5bc4-9ce5-bb68be268026)
Chapter Six: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part II: Mercy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Ruth Fletcher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Family (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Marissa Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Ariane Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: A Wedding (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three: Kent Kelly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five: Annie Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six: Andrew Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Part V: Three Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Orion Oh (#litres_trial_promo)
Gratitude (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note from Wally Lamb (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Wally Lamb (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_078ceb3f-62ee-58f4-b8f2-13413c89064f)
Rope-Skipping Girl (#ulink_078ceb3f-62ee-58f4-b8f2-13413c89064f)
Gualtiero Agnello (#ulink_0608a057-1381-5c72-b62e-a500a60b1bce)
August 2009
I understand there was some controversy about the coroner’s ruling concerning Josephus Jones’s death. What do you think, Mr. Agnello? Did he die accidentally or was he murdered?”
“Murdered? I can’t really say for sure, Miss Arnofsky, but I have my suspicions. The black community was convinced that’s what it was. Two Negro brothers living down at that cottage with a white woman? That would have been intolerable for some people back then.”
“White people, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s right. When I got the job as director of the Statler Museum and moved my family to Three Rivers, I remember being surprised by the rumors that a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was active here. And it’s always seemed unlikely to me that Joe Jones would have tripped and fallen headfirst into a narrow well that he would have been very much aware of. A well that he would have drawn water from, after all. But if a crime had been committed, it was never investigated as such. So who’s to say? The only thing I was sure of was that Joe was a uniquely talented painter. Unfortunately, I was the only one at the time who could see that. Of course now, long after his death, the art world has caught up with his brilliance and made him highly collectible. It’s sad—tragic, really. There’s no telling what he might have achieved if he had lived into his forties and fifties. But that was not to be.”
I’m upstairs in my studio, talking to this curly-haired, pear-shaped Patrice Arnofsky. When she called last week, she’d explained that she was a writer for an occasional series which profiled the state’s prominent artists in Connecticut magazine. They had already run stories on Sol LeWitt, Paul Cadmus, and the illustrator Wendell Minor, she said. Now she’d been assigned a posthumous profile of Josephus Jones in conjunction with a show that was opening at the American Folk Art Museum. “I understand that you were the only curator in his lifetime to have awarded him a show of his work,” she’d said. I’d told her that was correct. Agreed to talk with her about my remembrances of Joe. And so, a week later, here we are.
Miss Arnofsky checks the little tape recorder she’s brought along to the interview and asks me how I met Josephus Jones.
“I first laid eyes on Joe in the spring of 1957 when he appeared at the opening of an exhibition I had mounted called ‘Nineteenth-Century Maritime New England.’ It was a pretentious title for a self-congratulatory concept—a show that had been commissioned by a wealthy Three Rivers collector of maritime art whose grandfather had made millions in oceanic shipping. He had compensated the museum quite generously for my curatorial work, but it had bored me to tears to hang that show: all those paintings of frigates, brigs, and steamships at sea, all that glorification of war and money.
“On the afternoon of the opening, I was making small talk with Marietta Colson, president of the Friends of the Statler, when she stopped midconversation and looked over my shoulder. A frown came over her face. ‘Well, well, what have we here?’ she said. ‘Trouble?’ My eyes followed hers to the far end of the gallery, and there was Jones. Among the well-heeled, silver-haired patrons who had come to the opening, he was an anomaly with his mahogany skin and flattened nose, his powerful laborer’s build and laborer’s overalls.
“We watched him, Marietta and I, as he wandered from painting to painting. He was carrying a large cardboard box in front of him, and perhaps that was why he reminded me of the gift-bearing Abyssinian king immortalized in The Adoration of the Magi—not the famous Gentile da Fabriano painting but the later one by Albrecht Dürer, who, to splendid effect, had incorporated the classicism of the Italian Renaissance in his northern European art. Do you know that work?”
“I know Dürer, but not that painting specifically. But go on.”
“Well, throughout the gallery, conversations stopped and heads turned toward Josephus. ‘I hope there’s nothing menacing in that box he’s holding,’ Marietta said. ‘Do you think we should notify the police?’ I shook my head and walked toward him.
“He was standing before a large Caulkins oil of La Amistad, the schooner that had transported African slaves to Cuba. The painting depicted the slaves’ revolt against their captors. ‘Welcome,’ I said. ‘You have a good eye. This is the best painting in the show.’
“He told me he liked pictures that told a story. ‘Ah yes, narrative paintings,’ I said. ‘I’m drawn to them, too.’ His bushy hair and eyebrows were gray with cement dust, and the bib of his overalls was streaked with dirt and stained with paint. He had trouble making eye contact. Why had he come?
“‘I paint pictures, too,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’ I knew what he meant, of course. Had I not been painting for decades, more involuntarily than voluntarily at times? ‘I’m Gualtiero Agnello, the director of this museum,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘And you are?’
“He told me his name. Placed his box on the floor and shook my hand. His was twice the size of mine, and as rough as sandpaper. ‘You the one they told me to come and see,’ he said. He didn’t identify who ‘they’ were and I didn’t ask. He picked up his box and held it at arm’s length, expecting me to take it. ‘These are some of my pictures. You want to look at them?’
“I told him this wasn’t really a convenient time. Could he come back some day the following week? He shook his head. He worked, he said. He could leave them here. I was hesitant, suspecting that he had no more talent than the Sunday painters who often contacted me—dowagers and dilettantes, for the most part, who became huffy when I failed to validate their assumptions of artistic genius. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Still, I could tell that it had cost him something to come here, and I didn’t want to disappoint him either. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You see that table over there where the punch bowl is? Slide your box underneath it. I’ll look at your work when I have a chance and get back to you. Do you have a telephone?’
“He shook his head. ‘But you can call my boss when you ready to talk, and he can tell me. I don’t know his number, but he in the phone book. Mr. Angus Skloot.’
“‘The building contractor?’ He nodded. The Skloots were generous donors to the museum, and Mrs. Skloot was a member of the Friends. ‘Okay then, I’ll be in touch.’ He thanked me for my time. I told him to help himself to punch and cookies, but when he looked over at the refreshments table and saw several of the other attendees staring back at him, he shook his head.
“He stayed for a little while longer, repelling the crowd wherever he wandered, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea, but unable to resist the art he would stop before and study. As I watched him walk finally toward the exit, Marietta approached me. ‘I’m dying of curiosity, Gualtiero,’ she said, her mouth screwed up into a sardonic half-grin. ‘Who’s your new colored friend?’
“I stared at her without answering, waiting for her to stop smirking. When she did, I said, ‘He’s an artist. Isn’t that the reason the Friends of the Statler exists? To support the artists of our community?’ She nodded curtly, pivoted, and walked away.
“The opening ended at five P.M. I escorted the last of the guests to the door. The caterers packed up the punch bowl and cookie trays, folded the tablecloth, and moved the table they’d used back to its proper place at the entrance to the exhibit. The janitors stacked the folding chairs and began to sweep. And there it was, by itself in the middle of the floor: Jones’s box. I carried it upstairs to my office. Then I put my coat on, went downstairs, and locked up the building on my way out. For the rest of that weekend, I forgot all about Josephus Jones.
“But on Monday morning, there it was again: the box. I opened it, removed Jones’s two dozen or so small paintings, and spread them across my work counter. He’d used what looked and smelled like enamel house paint. Two of the works had been painted on plywood, another on Masonite board. The rest were on cardboard. The tears in my eyes blurred what was before me.”
“And what was before you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “Can you describe what you saw?”
“Well, he had no understanding of perspective; that was immediately apparent. Many of the figures that populated his paintings were out of proportion. He knew nothing about the technique of chiaroscuro; there was no play between shadow and light in any of his samples. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive sense of design and a wonderful feeling for vivid color. His subject matter—cowboys and Indians, jugglers and jungle animals, tumbling waterfalls, women naked or barely clothed—possessed all the characteristics of the modern primitive. Yet each gave evidence of a unique vision. And Josephus Jones was indeed a narrative painter; his pictures suggested stories that celebrated the rustic life but warned of sinister forces that lurked in the bushes and behind the trees.
“I called Angus Skloot, who told me where Joe was working that day. And so I carried his box of paintings out to my car and drove to the building site. Joe introduced me to his brother, Rufus; the two were building a massive stone fireplace inside the unfinished house. I suggested we talk outside so that I could deliver the good news about his artistic talent.
“He must have been thrilled to receive it,” my guest says.
“No, quite the contrary. He was unsurprised, unsmiling; it was as if he already knew what I had to tell him. I asked him how long he’d been painting. About three years, he said. Told me he’d begun the day he awoke from a dream about a beautiful naked woman riding on the back of a lion. He had grabbed a carpenter’s pencil and a piece of wood, he said, so that he could draw his dream before it faded away like fog. He wanted to remember it, but he wasn’t sure why. All that day, he said, he thought about the woman astride the lion. And so, at the end of his workday, he got permission from Mr. Skloot to take some of the almost-empty cans from the paint shed. Then he’d gone home and painted what he had first dreamt and then sketched out. He said he had been painting ever since. I handed him back his box of paintings and he placed it on the ground between us. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I said. He looked suspicious, I remember. Asked me what it was I wanted to know. ‘Whatever you want to tell me,’ I said.”
“And what did he want to tell you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “I realize that this was years ago, but it would be helpful to me if you can recall it as accurately as possible.”
It’s strange what happens next. When a painting I’m working on becomes my singular focus—when I am “in the zone,” as I’ve heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me. And now it’s happening not with my art but with my memory. Seated across from me, Miss Arnofsky fades away and the past becomes more alive than the present …
Joe scuffs his work boot against the ground and takes his time thinking about it. “Well, my granddaddy on my daddy’s side was a slave on a Virginia tobacco farm and my grams was a free woman.” After the emancipation, they moved up to Chicago and his grandfather got work in the stockyards. His mother’s people were third-generation Chicagoans, he says. “Mama washed rich ladies’ hair during the week at a fancy hotel beauty parlor downtown, and on weekends she preached in the colored church. My daddy worked in the stockyards at first, like his daddy did. But sledgehammerin’ cows between the eyes to get them ready for slaughter give him the heebie-jeebies, so he quit. Got work at a brickyard and become a mason—a damn good one, too. When me and Rufus was thirteen and fourteen, Daddy started bringing us along on jobs, and that was how we learnt to work with stone and mortar ourselfs.” His father was a better mason than he is, Joe says, but Rufus is better than both of them. “He a artist uses a trowel and ce-ment instead of a paintbrush is what Mr. Skloot told him,” Joe says, smiling broadly. “And thass about right, too.”
I ask him how long he’s lived in Three Rivers. Since 1953, he says, and when I tell him that was the year my family and I moved here, too, his eyes widen, then slowly lock onto mine. He nods knowingly, as if our having arrived in Three Rivers at the same time is more about fate than coincidence.
Both of his parents had passed by then, he tells me, and Rufus had just gotten out of the navy. He urged Joe to come east because he had a plan. They would get good jobs at the shipyard in Groton, helping to build America’s first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus. But the shipbuilders had shied away from hiring coloreds, fearing repercussions and race baiting from their white workers. “So we took whatever jobs we could find. Worked tobacco up in Hartford, worked at a sawmill, dug graves. We took masonry jobs when we could find them, which was just this side of never. The luckiest day of our life was the day Mr. Skloot come to visit his sister’s stone at the cemetery up in Willimantic,” he says. “Rufus and me was digging a grave two plots down, and he come over and the three of us got to talking. Mr. Skloot’s face lit up when we told him we was gravediggers for right now but masons, mostly. He said he’d just fired his mason for being drunk on the job. Well, sir, by the time he got back in that big ole black Oldsmobile of his and drove away, we had us jobs with Skloot Builders. We was spoze to be on trial for a month so Mr. Skloot could see what kind of work we done, and if we was hard workers and dependable, and didn’t get liquored up. But we got hired permanent after just the first week because Mr. Skloot liked what he seed us do—well, Rufus’s work more than mines, but mines, too.”
Mr. Skloot is the best boss he’s ever had, Joe says. When I ask him why, he says, “Because he pay good and he kind. Lets us live out back on his property, and he don’t even care that Rufus got hisself a white wife. Rufe married his gal when he was stationed over in Europe and brung her over here after we was working steady. She Dutch.” Joe touches his work boot to the box at his feet. “I got other paintings at the house, you know. Lots of ’em. If you like these ones, maybe you want to see those ones, too.” I tell him I do and arrange to meet him at his home at six o’clock that same evening.
The house is a small cottage at the back of the Skloots’ property. Following Joe’s instructions, I drive down the Skloots’ driveway, then inch my car over a rutted path out back until I get to a brook. I park and get out, then cross the brook by way of two bowed two-by-six planks that have been placed over it. A thin white woman—Joe’s brother’s Dutch wife, I figure—is outside, hanging clothes in just her slip. When I ask her if Josephus is home, she sticks out her thumb and points it toward the door. Before I can knock, it swings open and Jones invites me in.
The place is filthy. It reeks of stale cooking odors and cat urine, and there is clutter everywhere. A fat calico cat is asleep on the kitchen table amidst dirty dishes, old magazines, and an ash tray brimming with stubbed-out cigarettes. The floor beneath my shoes feels gritty. Josephus’s paintings are everywhere: stacked against walls and windowsills, atop a refrigerator whose door is kept shut with electrical tape. There are more paintings scattered across the mattress on the floor and on the dropped-down Murphy bed. “What’s this one called?” I ask Joe, pointing to a female figure in a two-piece bathing suit standing in a field of morning glories, parakeets alighting on her head and outstretched arms.
“That one there? Thass Parakeet Girl.” When I pick it up for a closer look, the roaches hiding beneath it scuttle for cover.
But housekeeping is beside the point. I look closely at every work he shows me, overwhelmed by both his output and his raw talent. I’m there for hours. Some of his paintings are more successful than others, of course, but even the lesser efforts display an exotic, unschooled charm and that bold use of color. Before I leave, I offer him a show at the Statler. He accepts. When I get home, I tell my wife that I may have just discovered a major new talent.
But “Josephus Jones: An American Original” is a flop. The local paper, which is usually supportive of our museum shows, declines to publish either a feature story or a review. At the opening, instead of the usual two hundred or so, fewer than twenty people attend. Not even Angus and Ethel Skloot have come; they are on holiday in Florida. It’s painful to watch the Jones brothers scuff the toes of their shined shoes against the gallery’s hardwood floor and eye the entranceway with fading hope. Both have purchased sharp double-breasted suits for this special occasion, and Rufus’s Dutch-born wife has apparently bought new clothes, too: a sparkly, low-cut cocktail frock more suitable for an evening at a New York supper club than a Sunday afternoon art opening in staid Three Rivers, Connecticut. Worse yet, she has neglected to remove the tag from her dress, and I have to instruct my secretary, Miss Sheflott, to go upstairs to her desk, retrieve her scissors, and discreetly escort young Mrs. Jones out into the foyer for the purpose of clipping her tag. Later, Miss Sheflott tells me she tucked the tag inside the dress rather than removing it. Mrs. Jones has confided that she can’t afford it and is planning to return it to the LaFrance Shop on Monday.
In the days that follow, there are complaints about the show’s prevalence of female nudity. Three members of the Friends cancel their memberships in protest. In the six weeks the show is up, the number of visitors is dismally low—our worst attendance ever. I’ve penned personal letters to several influential New York art dealers and critics, inviting them to discover Jones. “He is a painter of events commonplace and exotic that are shot through with an underlying sense of anxiety,” I have written. “His compositions are rich with surprises, some joyful, some sinister. In my opinion, he stands shoulder to shoulder with other American primitive painters, from Grandma Moses to his Negro brethren, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, and the breakthrough artists of the Harlem Renaissance.” But none of those busy New Yorkers to whom I’ve written has had the courtesy even to reply, let alone trek the three hours to our little museum to see Josephus’s work for themselves.
The show ends. We keep in touch from time to time, Joe and I. I encourage him, critique the new work he sometimes brings by. I’m sad to learn from Joe that his brother Rufus’s wife has left him, and that Rufus has taken it badly—has fallen in with a bad crowd and begun using heroin. “Mr. Skloot let him go after he found out he be messin’ wiff the devil’s drug,” Joe says. “Booted him out of the house out back, too. I been saving up some to send Rufe to one of them sanctoriums to get hisself clean, but they cost more money than I gots. If I could sell some paintings here and there, I could do it, but ain’t no one like them enough to buy any.” I try several more times to interest my New York connections in Joe’s work—alas, to no avail. Eventually, he stops coming around to the museum and we fall out of touch.
But in the summer of 1959, during Three Rivers’s celebration of its three hundredth anniversary, I am asked to judge the art show on the final day of festivities. It’s a big show; more than three hundred artists, accomplished and amateurish, have submitted work for consideration. Most have chosen “pretty” subject matter: quaint covered bridges, romanticized portraits of rosy-cheeked children, and the inevitable still lifes of flowers and fruit. As I wander the grounds, looking for something to which I can affix a “best in show” ribbon and still sleep that night, I come upon Josephus’s work at the south end of the festival grounds. Delighted and relieved, I scan what I have previously admired: Parakeet Girl, Jesse James and His Wife, his pictures of pinup girls and fishermen midstream, ukulele players and circus curiosities. One theme seems to prevail in Jones’s work: predators—lions and tigers, lynxes and leopards—attacking or about to attack their prey. Then, among these familiar paintings, I see a spectacular new one—twice as large and twice as ambitious as the others. At the center of the composition stands the Tree of Life, lush and fecund. Beneath it are a pale, naked Adam and Eve. The latter figure is reminiscent of the prepubescent Eves of Van Leyden, the sixteenth-century Dutch master. Adam, though his skin is gray rather than brown or black, bears the face of Josephus Jones himself. The benign members of the animal kingdom who surround the two human figures seem almost to smile. But trouble lurks, in the form of the treacherous serpent hanging from the tree. Joe has depicted a moment in time. Adam reaches for the forbidden fruit which Eve is about to pluck. It will be the fateful act of self-will that will banish them both from the garden. Innocence is about to be lost, and we humans, forever after, will be stained with our forebears’ original sin. In Adam and Eve, Jones is once again exploring the theme of the predator and the prey, but he has done so in a more subtle and masterly way. Adam and Eve is a leap forward—a stellar achievement, and I am elated to hang the “best in show” blue ribbon next to it. The festival gates swing open to the public at 9:00 A.M. As I exit, they push past me, eager not so much to view the art, I suspect, as to fill their bellies with the pancakes that are being cooked and served inside the tent by a large black woman gotten up to look like Aunt Jemima. I admire the organizers’ cunning. If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.
Later, I’m informed that the festival committee was unhappy with my selection, and I read in the newspaper the following day that an irate art show attendee rushed Jones’s Adam and Eve, intent on destroying it, and that this would-be art critic had scuffled with its creator. This news delights me! Isn’t that art’s purpose, after all? To engage and, if necessary, disturb the beholder? To upset the apple cart and challenge the status quo? Was that not what the great Michelangelo did as he lay on his back, painting political satire onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Haven’t artists, from that great sixteenth-century genius to Manet and Rivera, outraged the public and forced them to think? Now that his art has been attacked, Josephus has joined the ranks of an illustrious fellowship.
Several weeks later, I am in my office at the museum, working on the budget for the coming year and half-listening to the radio. A novelty song is playing—one that mocks “the troubles” between the Irish and the Brits.
You’d never think they go together, but they certainly do
The combination of English muffins and Irish stew
I chuckle at the words, thinking, well, if paintings can make political statements, then why can’t silly popular songs? But I stop cold when the music ends and the news comes on. The announcer says that thirty-nine-year-old Josephus Jones, a local construction worker, has died accidentally—that he has tripped and fallen into a well behind his residence and drowned. I sit there, stunned and sickened. A promising artist has been cut down by fate just as he was hitting his stride. Unable to work, I put on my coat, walk out of my office, and drive home.
I go to his funeral service at the colored church. The Negro community has come out in impressive numbers to sing and wail and shout out their grief about Joe Jones’s premature demise, but I am only one of four Caucasians who have come to mourn him; the other two are Angus and Ethel Skloot and a distraught young woman who looks familiar but whom I cannot, at first, place. But halfway through the service, it dawns on me who she is: the Eve of Josephus’s painting, reaching for the forbidden fruit that hangs just below the malevolent serpent. Joe’s brother Rufus is one of the pallbearers, but he looks disheveled and dazed, every bit the drug addict that Joe said he had become. The snake, I see, has bitten him, too.
None of the mourners who orate at the service, or who later gossip at “the feed” downstairs after the “churchifying,” mentions Josephus’s relationship to art. But I hear, over and over, their rejection of Coroner McKee’s finding that Joe died accidentally. “A skull fracture and a six-inch gash on his forehead?” one skeptic stands and says. She is a loud, angry woman in an elaborate hat who looks like she tips the scales between two fifty and three hundred pounds, and as she speaks I realize that she is the same woman who played the part of Aunt Jemima at the pancake breakfast. “A six-foot man just ups and falls headfirst into a well that’s seven foot deep and twenty inches across? If that was an accident, then I’ll eat this hat I’m wearing, feathers and all,” she declares. “That’s why we got to keep fighting the good fight in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty! To get Brother Josephus some justice and right what’s wrong in this sorry world and this sorry town!” From various places around the room, people call out in agreement. “Mm-hmm, that’s right!”
“You tell ’em, Bertha!”
“Amen, sister!”
From the other side of the room, I hear a man’s tortured sobs. It breaks my heart when I see that it is Joe’s afflicted brother, Rufus …
“How sad,” Miss Arnofsky says, and her comment returns me from the past to the present, from the basement of the Negro church back to my studio.
“Yes. Yes, it was. Poor Rufus died not long after that, in the flood.”
“The flood?”
I nod. “A dam gave way in the northern part of town, and the water it had been holding back took the path of least resistance, rushing toward the center of town and destroying a lot of the property in its path. Several people were killed, Rufus Jones included. The paper said he had been living in an abandoned car down by the river.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen sixty-two? Sixty-three, maybe?”
“And so sad, too, that Josephus never knew what a success he would eventually become. But at least in his lifetime, he had your advocacy.”
“Yes, I was able to give him that much at least. But it went both ways. Joe gave me something, too.”
“What do you mean?”
I pause before answering her, thinking about how to put it. “Well, Miss Arnofsky, many years have passed since the morning I hung that blue ribbon next to Joe’s Adam and Eve. I’ve judged many juried shows, large and small, always asking myself just what is the function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer? Sometimes I’ll award the top prize to a formalist, sometimes to an expressionist or an abstract artist. Less often but occasionally I will select an artist whose work is representational. But whenever and wherever possible, I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, ‘Wake up!’ Not always, certainly, but often enough, this has been the work of outsiders rather than those who have been academically trained—artists who, unlike myself, are unschooled as to the subtleties of technique but who create startling work nonetheless.” My guest nods in agreement, and I laugh. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” I tell her, “I have to climb down from my soapbox and go downstairs and use the toilet.”
“Of course,” she says. I rise from my chair and stand, my ninety-four-year-old knees protesting as I do. Miss Arnofsky asks if she might have a look around at my work while she’s waiting, and I tell her to be my guest.
When I return a few minutes later, she is standing in front of the shelf by the window, looking at a shadow box collage a young artist gave me years ago. “It’s called The Dancing Scissors,” I tell her. “The artist is someone I awarded a ‘best in show’ prize to years ago, and she gave it to me as a gift. She’s become quite celebrated since then.”
“I recognize the style,” she says. “It’s an Annie Oh, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right. You know her work?”
She nods. “I did a profile piece on her for our magazine when she was just starting out. It was called ‘Annie Oh’s Angry Art.’ She was very shy, almost apologetic about her work. But what struck me was the discrepancy between her demeanor and the undercurrent of rage in her art.”
“Yes, I suppose that was what drew me to it as well: the silent scream of a woman tethered to the conventional roles of mother and wife and longing to break free. I predicted great things for Annie back then, and I’m delighted that that has come to pass. We’ve stayed in touch, she and I. As a matter of fact, she’s being remarried next month, and I’m going to her wedding.”
“Oh, how nice. If you think of it, please tell her I said hello, and that I wish her and her new husband all the best.”
“Of course, of course. But I shall have to extend your greeting to Annie and her wife. She’s marrying the owner of the gallery that represents her work.”
“Aha,” Miss Arnofsky says. “Now tell me about the other paintings here in your studio. These are your works?” I nod.
She wanders the studio, looking through the stacks of my paintings leaning against the walls, both the ones that have returned from various shows and those that have yet to leave my work space. Standing before my easel, she smiles at my half-finished rope-skipping girl. “I so admire that you’re still at it every day,” she says. “I see this is a recurring subject for you.”
“Yes, that’s right. Little Fanny and her jump rope. I’ve painted her hundreds of times.” I explain to my guest that it was my good fortune to have received a scholarship to the school at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was sixteen years old, and how my training there helped to shape my artistic vision. “At first I merely imitated the styles of the painters I most admired. The impressionists and expressionists, the pointillists. But little by little, I began developing a style of my own, which one of my teachers described in his evaluation as ‘boldly modern with a freshness of vision.’ I don’t mean to boast, but I began to be recognized as one of the three most promising students at the school, the others being my friends Antonio Orsini, who came from the Bronx and loved the New York Yankees more that life itself, and Norma Kaszuba, an affable Texan who wore cowgirl boots, smoked cigars, and swore like a man.”
“A woman before her time,” Miss Arnofsky notes. “But tell me about your jump-roping girl.”
“Well, I spotted her one afternoon when Norma, Antonio, and I were eating our lunch in Grant Park. She was just a nameless little Negro girl in a shapeless gray dress, skipping rope and singing happily to herself. Her wiry hair was in plaits. Her face was turned up toward the sun in joyful innocence. As I recall, my friends and I had been arguing about whether Roosevelt, the president-elect, would prove to be a savior or a scoundrel. And as the others’ voices faded away, I pulled a pencil from my pocket and, on the oily paper in which my sopressata sandwich had been wrapped, began sketching the child. Back at the school that afternoon, I drew the girl over and over, and in the days that followed I began painting her in gouache and oils, in primary colors and pastels and monochromatic shades of green and gray. It was as if that guileless child had bewitched me! I gave her a name, Fanny, and came to think of her as my muse. For my final project, I submitted a series of sixteen works, collectively titled Girl Skipping Rope. On graduation day, I held my breath as one of the Institute’s capped-and-gowned dignitaries announced, ‘And this year’s top prize is awarded to … Gualtiero Agnello!’ It was the thrill of a lifetime. And as you can see, capturing Fanny has become a lifelong obsession.”
“Fascinating,” my guest says. “You know, I Googled you before I came over here today. You’ve had shows at several major museums, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes. MoMA, the Corcoran, the Whitney. One of my paintings was purchased for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection a while back—a study of my little rope-jumping angel over there.”
“Wikipedia said you were born in Italy.”
“Yes, that’s right. In the city of Siena.”
“Ah, Tuscany! Well, that was certainly fortuitous. So many great artists came from that region. Who would you identify as your early influences?”
“Well, my parents and I moved to America when I was quite young, so none of the masters. I’d have to say I was drawn to art by my father.”
“He was an artist?”
“Not by trade, no. He was a tailor. But among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on his lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into playful cartoon animals for me. His ability to do so had seemed magical to the little boy I was. But sadly, my parents fell on hard times after my father’s tailor shop was burned to the ground by the vengeful husband of his mistress. It was Papa’s brother, my Uncle Nunzio, who came to our rescue. He assured my father that Manhattan has thousands of businessmen and they all needed suits. He sent money, too—enough American dollars which, converted to lira, allowed Papa to purchase three passages to New York. And so we left Siena, boarded a ship at the port in Livorno, and traveled across the ocean. I still remember how frightened I was during that long voyage.”
“Frightened? Why?”
“Because I thought we would never be free of that endless, shapeless gray water—that we were doomed to sail the sea forever. But twelve days after we left Livorno, we passed La Statua della Libertà and arrived on American soil.”
“And you were how old?”
“Eight. Of course, at that age, I could only understand bits and pieces of the reasons for our uprooting. But years later, after my own sexual desires had awakened, Papa confided to me that he had not wished to be unfaithful to my mother, but that his inamorata, Valentina, had a body by Botticelli and hair so flaming red that she might have stepped out of a painting by Titian. You see, my father was a clothier by trade, but his passione was art. He was like Josephus Jones in that respect. He’d had no formal training, but he had a natural talent and an undeniable urge to draw. He was seldom without his pencil and portfolio of onionskin paper. ‘A gift from God,’ my mother once called her husband’s artistic talent, although she would later describe it as ‘my Giuseppe’s curse.’”
“And why was that?”
“Because it unhinged him. Made him crazy. That’s often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.”
“Like Van Gogh.”
“Yes, Van Gogh and many others. Painters, writers, musicians.”
She nods. Sighs. “So your family settled in New York?”
“Lower Manhattan, yes. We lived above Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market in a four-story tenement on Spring Street. Nunzio knew someone who knew someone, and soon my father was altering men’s suits at Macy’s Department Store on Herald Square. And while Papa was measuring inseams, sewing shoulder pads into suit coats, and letting out the trousers of fat-bellied businessmen, I was mastering proper English in the classrooms of the Catholic Sisters of the Poor Clares and learning broken English at Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market, where I worked after school and every Saturday. In warm weather, my job was to sell roasted peanuts from the barrel outside on the sidewalk. During the winter months, I was brought inside to wait on the customers.” I chuckle as I recall the kerchiefed nonnas who came by each day to shop for their family’s dinner and haggle over the prices of fruit and vegetables. Cagey Siciliani for the most part, who would first bruise the fruit they had selected and then demand a reduced price because the fruit was bruised. “At school, my teacher, Sister Agatha, took a shine to me and, because she thought I would make a good priest, urged me to pursue the sacrament of Holy Orders. But I was my father’s son on two counts: first, when I was in the eighth grade, I surrendered my virginity to a plump ‘older woman’ of sixteen who was fond of roasted peanuts. And second, I loved to draw. Seated on a stool next to my peanut barrel, I began sketching the Packards and roadsters parked along Spring Street, the passersby rich and poor and the fluttering garments hanging from clotheslines, the birds who flew in the sky and the pigeons who waddled along the sidewalk, pecking away at morsels. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook, eager to show Papa my latest drawings when he returned home from his day of tailoring. My father smiled very little back then, but he beamed whenever he looked at my pictures.”
“Like father, like son,” she says.
“Well, yes and no. Papa was unschooled, as I said. But when I was fifteen, one of my drawings won a prize: art lessons. And so each Saturday morning, freed from my job at Uncle Nunzio’s, I would ride my bicycle up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I would receive instruction from a German painter named Victorious von Schlippe. Like Uncle Nunzio, Mr. von Schlippe knew people who knew people, and the following year, at the age of sixteen, I was offered the scholarship at the Art Institute.”
“Your parents must have been very proud of you,” Miss Arnofsky says.
“My father was, yes. But Mama was against my going. She begged me to stay in New York—to find and marry a nice girl from the Old Country and give her grandchildren. Papa, on the other hand, urged me to go and learn whatever Chicago could teach me. I remember the tears in his eyes the morning he saw me off at Grand Central Station, especially after I unfolded the sheet of paper I’d slipped into my pocket when I’d packed the night before. ‘Look what I’m bringing, Papa,’ I said. He stood there, holding in his shaking hands one of the cartoon drawings he had made for me years before. Then he handed it back to me, blew his nose, and told me I’d better board the train before it left without me. And so, without daring to look back at him, I did.
“And oh, I loved the Windy City! Its crisp autumn weather, its warm and friendly people. I loved my classes, too, and was a sponge, absorbing whatever my instructors could teach me. On Sunday afternoons, it became my habit to write long letters to my parents about my exciting new life. But as autumn turned into winter, Mama’s letters back to me began to describe the strange obsession that had overtaken my father. Papa claimed that Catherine of Siena, Italy’s patron saint, had appeared to him in a vision, commanding him, for the edification of Italian Catholics the world over, to illustrate the story of her life: her service to the sick during the Black Death; her campaign to have the papacy returned from Avignon to Rome; her receiving of the stigmata. It was a terrible thing to witness, Mama wrote: a husband’s strange decline into madness.
“That Christmas, unable to afford the trip back to New York, I stayed in Chicago and sent my parents a gift box of candied fruit, sugared nuts, and nougats. Presents arrived for me as well. Mama had sent me three pairs of socks and a week’s supply of woolen underwear. Papa’s gift arrived in a long cardboard tube, and when I opened the end and uncurled the onionskin paper within, there was his charcoal rendering of the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine to Jesus Christ. The lines of the drawing were as frenzied and driven as the brushstrokes of the great Van Gogh, and the paper had several tears where he’d pressed down too hard with his pencil. I pinned Papa’s present to the wall above my bed, next to the fanciful drawing he had made for me when I was a little boy, and, looking from one to the other, lamented. If fate had been kinder to my father, I thought, he might have left New York, traveled west to California, and found work with the great Walt Disney instead of in a windowless back room at Macy’s gentlemen’s department. But as the people of the Old Country say, Il destino mischia le carte, ma siamo noi a giocare la partita. Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.”
“That could just as well be a Yiddish proverb,” Miss Arnofsky says. “But destiny has certainly been kinder to you than it was to your father. A successful painter, the director of a museum.”
I nod. Smile at my guest. “Overseeing the Statler’s collection and hanging shows in its gallery hall is what paid our bills. But painting has always been my primary calling.”
“And there’s ample proof of that,” she says, scanning the room. She asks if I have children. One son, I tell her. Giuseppe. Joseph. “And has he followed in your footsteps?”
“As an artist? In a way, I suppose. He works in television out in Hollywood. Directs one of the daytime soap operas. And that calls for a kind of artistic style, too, of course. Television is so much about the visual.”
“Do you see him very often?”
“Not as often as I’d like. But I’ll see him next weekend. He has to be in New York on business, and so he’s coming up for the weekend. In fact, he’s bringing me to Annie Oh’s wedding.”
“Sounds nice. And you’re a widower?”
“Yes, my Anja died in 1989. Heart failure. One day she was here, the next she was gone.”
“And since then? Any other women in your life?”
“No, no. I suppose you could say that in old age, my work has become my wife. Or maybe this was always so.”
“Two long and happy marriages then,” Miss Arnofsky says.
I nod. “Long, happy, and somewhat mysterious.” My guest cocks her head, waiting for me to explain. “One’s wife, one’s art: you can never know either fully. After Anja died, I read her diaries and learned things about her I had never known. That she wrote verse—lovely little poems about her village back in Poland. And that once upon a time she had loved a boy in her village named Stanislaw.”
“And your paintings? They keep secrets, too?”
“In a way, yes. Sometimes I’ll work on a composition for weeks—months, even—without knowing what it is I’m searching for. Or for that matter, after I’ve finished it, what finally has been resolved. After all these years, I still can’t fully explain the process. The way, when you are deeply involved in a composition, everything else in the room fades away—everything but the thing before you that is calling itself into existence. It’s as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.”
“Forgive me; I mean no disrespect. But the way you describe it, it sounds almost like you experience a form of temporary madness yourself.”
“Madness? Perhaps. Who’s to say?”
Miss Arnofsky points to The Dancing Scissors and says she recalls Annie Oh telling her something similar—that she began creating her collages and assemblages without really knowing why or how she was doing it.
“That was true of Joe Jones, too,” I tell her. “As I said before, he told me he had begun painting because he had to. That something was compelling him. All I know is that at such heightened moments of creativity, I feel as if my work is coming not so much from me as through me. From what source, I can’t say. The muse, maybe? My father’s spirit? Or who knows? It could even be that the hand of God is guiding my hand.”
“So your talent may be God-given? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, I’m afraid that sounds rather grandiose.”
“Quite the contrary,” she says. “I’m struck by your humility in the face of all you’ve accomplished.” For the next several seconds, we stare at each other, neither of us speaking. Then she smiles, closes her notebook, unplugs her tape recorder. “Well, Mr. Agnello, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am. This has been wonderful.”
“I’m just relieved to see that you still have both of your ears. I was afraid I might have talked them off.” She laughs, says she could have listened to me for hours more. “Oh, perish the thought,” I say. She rises from her chair, tape machine in hand, and I tell her I’ll see her out.
“No, no. I can let myself out. You should get back to your work.”
I nod. We thank each other, shake hands. From the doorway of the studio, I watch her disappear down the stairs.
But I do not return to my work as I’d intended.
The sun and the conversation of the past hour have made me sleepy. When I close my eyes, the images I evoked for my guest play on in my head: Rufus Jones, bereft at his brother’s funeral … Papa’s cartoon drawings coming to life before me at the piazza with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, water spilling from the mouth of the stone wolf into the aquamarine pool … Annie Oh’s strange collages that day when I first came upon them. Suddenly, I remember something else about that day—something I had forgotten all about until this moment. I had been wavering about whether to give the top prize to Annie or to an abstract expressionist whose work was also quite impressive. But as I stood there vacillating, a gray-haired Negro appeared by my side—a man who looked eerily like an older version of Josephus Jones. It wasn’t Joe, of course; by then, he had been dead for years. “This one,” the man said, nodding at Annie’s work. It was as if somehow he had read my mind and intuited my indecision. And that had clinched it. The “best in show” prize was hers …
“Mr. Agnello? … Mr. Agnello?”
When I open my eyes, my housekeeper is standing before me. She says my lunch is ready. Do I want her to bring up a tray?
“No, no, Hilda. I’ll be down in a minute.” She nods. Leaves.
Half-asleep still, my eyes look around, then land on the unfinished painting resting against my easel. It confuses me. Why does Fanny have angel’s wings? When did I paint those? I rise and go to her and, on closer inspection, realize that her “wings” are only the clouds behind her … And yet, winged or not, she is my angel. Seventy-odd years have slipped by since I spotted her that day in Chicago, and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people’s cruelty toward “the other”—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them …
Well, that’s enough deep thinking for this old brain. My lunch is ready and I’m hungry. I get up, balance myself. On my way out the door, I turn back and face my easel. “I’m too tired to do you justice any more today, little one,” I tell Fanny. “But I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll see you then.”
On the stairs, I remember that I still have to send back that response card. Let Annie know that Joe and I are coming to her wedding.
Part I (#ulink_dbc42560-a78a-5633-8bec-1d36c82bb3fc)
Art and Service (#ulink_dbc42560-a78a-5633-8bec-1d36c82bb3fc)
Chapter One (#ulink_d0e69de2-fca1-5619-9e3d-e87a6352ec47)
Annie Oh (#ulink_d0e69de2-fca1-5619-9e3d-e87a6352ec47)
Viveca’s wedding dress has a name: Gaia. It’s lovely. Layers of sea green silk chiffon, cap sleeves, an empire waist, an asymmetrical A-line skirt with the suggestion of a train. I forget the designer’s name; Ianni something. He’s someone Viveca knows from the Hellenic Fashion Designers Association. It arrived at the apartment from Athens yesterday, and Minnie has pressed it and hung it on the door of Viveca’s closet.
Gaia: I Googled it yesterday after Viveca’s dress arrived and wrote down what it said on an index card. It’s on the bureau. I pick it up and read.
After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth and the everlasting foundation of the Olympian gods. She was first the mother of Uranus, the ancient Greek embodiment of heaven, and later his sexual mate. Among their children were the mountains, the seas, the Cyclopes, and the Hundred-Handed giants who aided Zeus in his successful battle against the Titans, whom Gaia had also birthed.
Chaos, incest, monsters, warring siblings: it’s a strange name for a wedding dress.
The three Vera Wang dresses Viveca had sent over for me to consider were delivered yesterday, too. (Vera is one of Viveca’s clients at the gallery.) There’s an ivory-colored dress, another that has a tinge of pink, a third that’s pearl gray. Minnie spread them across the bed in the guest bedroom, but after she went home, I carried them into our bedroom and hung them to the left of the Gaia. This morning when I woke up, they scared me. I thought for a split second that four women were standing over by the closet. Four brides—one in gorgeous green, three in off-white.
Viveca is abroad still. She went to Athens a week ago for a fitting but then decided to stay several more days to visit with an elderly aunt (her father’s surviving sister) and to finalize the details for our wedding trip to Mykonos. She called me from there last night. “Sweetheart, it’s the land of enchantment here. Have you looked at the pictures I e-mailed you?” I said I hadn’t—that I’d been more in the studio than at the apartment for the last several days, which was a lie. “Well, do,” she said. “Not that photographs can really capture it. In daylight, the Aegean is just dazzling, and at sunset it turns a beautiful cobalt blue. And the villa I’ve rented? Anna, it’s to die for! It sits high on a hill above town and there’s a panoramic view of the harbor and some of the other islands in the archipelago. The floors are white marble from a quarry in Paros, and there’s an oval pool, an indoor fountain, a terrace that looks out on a grape arbor that’s unbelievably lush and lovely.” Why a pool if the sea is right there? I wonder. “The houses here are sun bleached to the most pristine white, Anna, and there are hibiscus growing along the south side of the villa that, against that whiteness, are the most intense red you could ever imagine. I just can’t wait to share it all with you. You’ll see. This place is an artist’s dream.”
“I’ll bet it is,” I said. “For an artist who’s interested in capturing what’s pretty and picturesque. I’m not.”
“I know that, Anna. It’s what drew me to your work from the start.”
“It?” I said. “What’s ‘it’?”
There was a long pause before she answered me. “Well, it’s like I was telling that couple that bought those two pieces from your Pandora series. Your work looks people in the eye. It comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. But this will be a vacation, sweetheart. You work so hard. Mykonos is my gift to you, Anna. My gift to us. Four weeks surrounded by what’s lovely and life affirming at the start of our married life. Don’t we deserve that?”
The room went blurry with my tears. “I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you, too, Anna. I miss you, too.”
It’s not that I don’t want to be with her in Mykonos. But four whole weeks? In all the years I’ve been at it, I’ve never been away from my work that long. Well, to be fair, she’ll be away from her work, too. “It’s not a very savvy business decision,” she said when she told me she’d rented the villa for the entire month of October. “People will have awakened from their Hamptons comas by then, reengaged with the city, and be ready to buy. But I said to myself, ‘Viveca, the hell with commerce for once! Seize the day!’ I smiled and nodded when she said that, swallowing back my ambivalence instead of voicing it.
You do that for someone you love, right? Keep your mouth shut instead of opening it. Bend on the things that are bendable. This wedding, for instance. It’s Viveca who wants to make our union “official.” And where we’ll be married: I’ve had to bend on that, too. Okay, fine. I get it. Connecticut has legalized gay marriage and New York hasn’t. But why not book a place in some pretty little Gold Coast town closer to the city? Cos Cob or Darien? Why the town where Orion and I raised our kids? She’d wanted to surprise me, she said. Well, she’d achieved her objective, but it’s … awkward. It’s uncomfortable.
Okay then, Annie. If you have misgivings, why go through with it? Why not tell her you’ve had second thoughts? … I look up, look around our well-appointed apartment, and I see a part of the answer hanging on the wall in the hallway: the framed poster announcing the opening of my first show at viveca c. The headline, ANNIE OH: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM!, and beneath it, the full-color photo of my sculpture Birthings: the row of headless mannequins, their bloody legs spread wide, their wombs expelling serial killers. Speck, Bundy, Gacy. Monsters all.
My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable: she’d put it better than I ever could have. It’s one of the reasons why I love Viveca. The fact that she not only promotes my work and sells it at prices I couldn’t have imagined, but that she also gets it. And yes, her apartment is as lovely as she is, and our lovemaking feels satisfying and safe. But for me that may be the foundation of our intimacy: the fact that she understands what my work attempts to do.
Orion never did. But then again, why would he have? I’d been so guarded all those years. A twenty-seven-year marriage of guardedness, based on nothing more than the fact that he was a man and, therefore, not to be trusted with the worst of my secrets.
But come on, Annie. You haven’t told Viveca your secrets either. Why is that? Because you’re afraid she might change her mind? Stop taking care of you? Be honest. Your own mother dies in the flood that night. Then your father drinks himself out of your life. And your foster parents were just stop-gaps. They fed you, clothed you, but never loved you. You wanted the real thing. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Orion and Viveca are the same age? That both your ex-husband and your wife-to-be are seven years older than you?
No, that’s irrelevant … Or is it? Is that the real reason why you married him? Why you’re marrying her? Because Little Orphan Annie still needs someone to take care of her?
I need to stop this. Stop being so hard on myself. I love Viveca. And I loved Orion, too … But why? Because he had taken me under his wing? Because for the first time in my life, intimacy with a man was enjoyable? Safe? Maybe not as safe as it feels with Viveca, or as wild as it had been with Priscilla. But pleasurable enough. And very pleasurable for him. It made me a little envious, sometimes. The intensity of his …
No. I wanted to give him pleasure. But his pleasure had a price.
No, that’s not fair. It had been a joint decision. I had stopped using my diaphragm because we both wanted a child. But when my pregnancy became a fact instead of a desire, I was suddenly seized with fear. What if I wasn’t up to the job of motherhood? What if I miscarried again like I had that time when I was seventeen? I had never told Orion about my first pregnancy, and I held off for a week or more before I told him about this one. The night I finally did tell him, Orion promised me that he was going to be the best father he could—the opposite of his own absentee father. We cried together, and I let him assume that mine were happy tears, the same as his. They weren’t. But little by little my fear subsided, and I began to feel happy. Excited. Until I had that ultrasound. When I learned we were having twins, I got scared all over again. And when, in the delivery room, it looked like we might lose Andrew, I was terrified …
Still, I loved being a mother. Loved them both as soon as I laid eyes on them, and more and more in the weeks that followed. Until then, I hadn’t understood how profound love could be.
Not that having two of them wasn’t challenging. Demanding of everything I had to give and then some. While Orion was away at work all day, I was home changing diapers, feeding them, grabbing ten-minute naps whenever—miraculously, rarely—their sleeping schedules coincided. And true to his word, Orion was a devoted father. When he’d get home from the college and see them, his face would light up. He’d bathe them, walk with one of them in each of his arms, rock them until they’d both gone down for the night. Part of the night, anyway. Andrew was a colicky baby, and it would drive me crazy when he’d cry and wake up his sister. And then Ariane would start crying, too. Our marriage suffered for that first year or so. Orion would come home tired from dealing with his patients and give whatever energy he had left to the twins. I resented that he didn’t have much left for me. But I didn’t have much left for him, either. Double the work, double the mess. Carting both of them to the pediatrician’s when one of them was sick. And then going back there the following week when Andrew came down with what Ariane was just getting over. Sitting in that waiting room with those other mothers—the ones with singletons who were always making lunch dates. Playdates. They’d ooh and ah over my two but never invite me to join them. Not that I even wanted to, but why hadn’t they ever asked? They always acted so confident, those moms. It was as if everyone but me had read some book about how to be a good mother …
But I had read the books. Consulted Dr. Spock so often that the binding cracked in half and the pages started falling out. But I had no mother of my own to rely on the way those other women did. Those grandmothers who could spell their daughters. Babysit for them, advise them …
Still, I could have had that kind of help. How many times had Orion’s mother volunteered to drive up from Pennsylvania and help out? Maria was retired by then, available. She kept offering. It’s just that she acted so goddamned superior! Made me feel even more insecure. When I got that breast infection? Said I was thinking of bottle-feeding the babies because I was in such pain? She just looked at me—stared at me like how could I be so selfish? And then, without even asking me, she had that woman from the La Leche League call and talk me out of it.
Because she wanted what was best for her grandchildren …
And she always knew what was best. Right? Not me, their own mother. She never said as much, but I got the message. Her son had made a mistake, had married beneath himself. He should have stayed with what’s-her-name.
You remember her name, Annie. How could you forget when Maria was always bringing her up to him? “Thea’s gotten a fellowship, Thea’s gotten her book taken.” Thea this, Thea that, like I wasn’t even standing there. So no, I didn’t want her help or her advice. Who was she to pity me?
But you showed her, didn’t you? Didn’t even go to her funeral. Hey, I couldn’t go. Both of the twins had come down with the chicken pox. What was I supposed to do—leave them with a sitter?
Except I did leave them with one. I had just started making my art. I wanted to be down there working on it, not upstairs with two sick kids. So I hired that Mrs. Dunkel to watch them … He was down there in Pennsylvania for almost three weeks! Sitting with Maria at the hospital. Calling me with the daily reports. “I don’t think it’s going to be long now. She seems to be going downhill fast.” And then, in the next phone call, it would be, “She was better today. Awake, alert. I fed her some pudding, and she managed to eat about half of it.” The twins were running fevers, crying, clinging to me. But I was supposed to celebrate because she had had a few bites of pudding? And okay, Maria was his mother. But I was his wife, the mother of his kids. We needed him, too. I was going out of my mind.
But that was no excuse. I shouldn’t have hit him even if he wouldn’t stop scratching his chicken pox. I’d tell Ariane to stop, and she would. But not Andrew. So I slapped him on his tush, harder than I meant to. At first he just looked at me, shocked, and then he cried and cried. I was so scared. What kind of a mother hit her child that hard? It left a mark. But by the next day, it faded. If I had let him keep scratching, he would have had scars for the rest of his life.
And what was Orion supposed to do? He couldn’t abandon his mother, no matter how long she lingered. But when she finally did die, there were the arrangements to make, the funeral, cleaning out her condo for resale … And that babysitter hadn’t worked out anyway. How could I concentrate on my work when they were up there crying, calling for me, banging on the basement door?
But I did not boycott Maria’s funeral. I stayed home with our sick kids. And then he tells me that Thea flew in to pay her respects. That the two of them went out to dinner after the services. And I started wondering about how else she might have comforted him …
Okay, Annie, you were insecure, even if, deep down, you knew he wouldn’t cheat on you. But then when he finally gets everything squared away down there in Harrisburg, he pulls into the driveway and walks in the door like the returning hero. “Daddy! Daddy’s home! Give us a pony ride, Daddy. Read us a bedtime story.” He shows up again, they’re over the worst of their chicken pox, and suddenly I’m irrelevant. The fun parent was back. The good cop. Who cares about Mommy now that Daddy’s back? And I resented that. Held on to that resentment until we landed in couples counseling.
Because he didn’t value my work. That’s why we were having trouble. Because everything was about his work, and mine didn’t count. I was just supposed to be home with the kids all day, at their beck and call, and then grab an hour or two after they were finally down for the night, when I was too exhausted to tap into my creativity. Half the time I’d be down there, trying to work on something, and I’d fall asleep. He’d have to come down, wake me up, and lead me upstairs to bed.
But boy, I balked at that marriage counseling idea. I thought the deck would be stacked. Me versus two psychologists. I was afraid she was going to tell me to give up my art. But instead Suzanne validated what I was doing. Helped Orion to see that my work mattered, too. And she helped me to realize the extent of his grieving for his mother. “Now that my mother has passed, it’s like we’re both orphans,” he said, trying hard to hold back his tears. “I mean, I was the result of my mother’s affair with a married man. A Chinese man who wouldn’t leave his Chinese wife for his Italian girlfriend, and then … took a powder. Just goddamned disappeared.” He had never said much about his father’s absence from his life, and until then I’d assumed he just accepted it. “The only thing I ever got from him was his last name,” he said. “And it’s different. I know it is. I had my mother a hell of a lot longer than you had yours, but …” He broke down in sobs then, and I ached as I witnessed the pain he was in. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. Pulled tissues from the box on the table and handed them to him. Watched him wipe his eyes, blow his nose. For the next several seconds, none of us spoke. Suzanne kept looking at me. Waiting for me to say something. And in the middle of that uncomfortable silence, I almost risked telling him my truths. My secrets were on the tip of my tongue. But then Suzanne glanced at her clock and said we had to wind up. That we’d gone a little bit over and her two o’clock would be waiting.
I don’t know. Maybe if we had kept going to those sessions, I would have told him. But we didn’t. Things were better between Orion and me—more like they’d been in the beginning. The closeness, the way he could get me to laugh. Like that time he took me to Boston—Haymarket Square—and taught me how to slurp oysters from the half-shell. Took me that first time to the Gardner Museum … And being a mom had started getting a little easier by then. The twins were growing out of the “terrible twos.” They had begun to amuse each other, catching bugs out in the backyard or going down to the stream out back to capture tadpoles and crayfish. That bond they’d developed gave me a reprieve. I could sit near them. Keep an eye on them while I was sketching out new ideas for pieces I wanted to make. And thanks to those counseling sessions, Orion had become more supportive of what I was doing. What I was trying to do. He began spelling me on the weekends so that I could do my work, go on my hunts for new materials. When I won that “best in show” prize? It was Orion who had urged me to enter the competition.
And then, in the middle of this better time, I got a little careless about birth control and along came Marissa. Our unplanned child.
He had kept promising he was going to get a vasectomy but never followed through with it. I was furious when I realized I was pregnant again, but only at first. I calmed down, just like I had with the twins. Accepted it. But my work suffered. I had to make all kinds of sacrifices because I put them first. Because I was a damned good mother …
Most of the time. But then there were those times when I wasn’t. When Andrew would make me so mad that … Because he was always goading me. Challenging me. Wasn’t that why he took the brunt of it? Or was it because, of the three kids, he has the most O’Day in him? The reddish hair, the Irish eyes. He resembles my father around the eyes. And he has my father’s walk.
And who else does Andrew resemble? Go ahead. Say it.
“Miz Anna?”
“Hmm?” I look up, startled. Our housekeeper is standing there. “Yes? What is it, Minnie?”
“I axed you if you got anything else needs washing?”
“Washing? Uh, no. Just the stuff that’s in the basket. Thanks.”
“Did I scare you just now, Miz Anna?”
“What? Oh, no. I was just thinking about something else.”
Minnie doesn’t say so, of course, but I get the feeling she doesn’t really approve of two wealthy women marrying each other. Or maybe she just doesn’t get why we’d want to … Our housekeeper: I feel guilty even thinking it, let alone saying it out loud, which I did to Hector yesterday when he showed me the umbrella he’d found leaning against the wall downstairs in the lobby. “This isn’t yours, is it, Miss Oh?” he asked me.
“No, but I’ll take it. It’s our housekeeper’s. Thanks, Hector.” I reached into my purse, took a twenty from my wallet, and held it out to him.
“No, no, that’s okay. This thing don’t look like it cost twenty bucks to begin with. You don’t have to tip me all the time.” But I waved away his resistance and made him take it. I had just withdrawn two hundred dollars from the ATM at that Korean grocery store around the corner, so there were nine other twenties in my wallet. It wasn’t as if I was going to miss the tenth. Twenty dollars: what’s that these days? A taxi ride up to the Guggenheim plus tip? A couple of those fancy coffee drinks at Starbucks and a slice of their pricey pound cake? I’d rather let Hector have it.
Hector’s affable and he’s a talker. He works construction during the week, at the site where they’re building the 9/11 memorial. Works at our building on weekends. I like it when he tells me about his life. He has custody of his three kids for reasons he’s not gone into with me. One boy and two girls—the same as Orion and me, although his kids are still young. They’re beautiful children; he’s shown me their parochial school pictures. Now that school’s started again, he pays a neighborhood abuela to watch the kids from the time they get home until the time he does. His sister takes them on the weekends when he’s here. When I asked him once if it bothered him to work every day in that hole where the towers used to be, he shrugged and said that thing everyone says now: “It is what it is.” Ariane used to have that feminist poster in her bedroom: Rosie the Riveter, flexing her bicep, and beneath her, the motto: We can do it! Obama’s campaign motto last year was a variation on that. “Yes, we can!” he promised, and we needed so much to believe him that we actually elected a black man. I remember staring at the headlines and the TV news the morning after the election, in happy disbelief. But the economy’s even more of a mess than it was, our kids keep dying over there in those wars we started but can’t end, and it’s turned out that Obama isn’t a superhero after all. Maybe that’s the legacy of those fallen towers, all those lost lives: our national feeling of futility. No, we can’t do it. It is what it is. And who’s most affected by the way things are now? Not the people who can still afford the prices at the pump and at Starbucks. I heard on the news the other day that 77 percent of the children in New York’s public schools qualify for free breakfast and free lunch. That by next year, the unemployment rate may reach past 10 percent.
Last weekend, Hector was on second shift. Earlier that day, he’d borrowed his sister’s car and taken his kids to Six Flags for a last summertime hurrah. But coming back, the car broke down, and he was over an hour late. I’d just come back from a movie, and the building manager was berating him right in front of me while I waited for the elevator. There’d been complaints, he said, about the entrance being left unsupervised. Hector was mistaken if he thought he was irreplaceable; there was a stack of applications sitting on his desk. “And who do you think’s going to have to stand there before the co-op board and listen to them gripe this coming Monday? You, Martinez? No, me, that’s who.” I wanted to walk over there and ask that stupid manager if he’d ever been late. If he was perfect. What was that thing Jesus said when he was defending the adulteress? Let he without sin cast the first stone. But then the elevator doors opened, and I got in and pressed five without having said a thing. When Viveca called me from Greece and I mentioned the incident between Hector and the building manager—told her I wish I’d spoken up—she said it was probably better that I hadn’t. “The co-op board doesn’t like it when tenants get mixed up in issues involving the help,” she advised …
My daughter Ariane wouldn’t have been a wimp about it; she’d have jumped right in and stuck up for Hector. She’s been a defender of the underdog ever since she was a kid. There was that time in high school when she had the party on prom night for all the girls who, like her, hadn’t been asked. I can still hear them all, down in our rec room, laughing and playing music, yakking away. And then there was the time when she defended that mentally retarded boy who was being taunted by the bullies. They were getting their kicks by circling him and pitching pennies at him, and Ariane had elbowed her way past them, taken the boy by the hand, and led him out of the circle. The bullies had targeted her for a few days after that, but when they saw that they couldn’t get to her, they knocked it off. It had stopped being fun …
The help: it angered me, that superior tone, but I kept my mouth shut. That co-op board is like some kind of supreme body around here that everyone’s supposed to kowtow to. Before I moved into the building, Viveca had to have them approve my occupancy of her guest room, which, in my opinion, was bullshit. Whose apartment is it? Hers or theirs? The co-op board: they’re like those athletic boys in junior high that the principal picked to be hallway monitors. They’d put on their sashes and boss around the rest of us mere mortals. Move to the right! No talking during passing time! I said no talking! What are you, deaf? How’d you like to get reported? Goddamned Gestapo hall monitors. Well, it was previews of coming attractions. It’s not as if, after you leave junior high, you’re ever going to be free of bullies. They follow you through life. And okay, maybe I didn’t say anything when that stupid building manager was chewing out Hector. But my art says it. What did it say in that Village Voice review of my last show? That my pieces are political. Howls of protest against the misuse of power. Something like that …
Coffee. I need coffee. Maybe a couple of cups of caffeine will motivate me to get to the studio today. I’m not sure why I’ve been avoiding going there, or why I lied to Viveca and said I was going. Is it wedding nerves? Has my creativity begun to abandon me? I take the beans out of the freezer (fair-trade, Guatemalan, thirteen dollars a pound at Zabar’s). Grind them, hit the “brew” button. Everything’s high end here. This new coffeemaker Viveca had sent over from Saks brews espresso and cappuccino, froths up milk for latté. I should check the manual; for all I know, it’ll dust the furniture and wipe your rear end for you as well. When it arrived, I saw the price on the receipt: seven hundred dollars. Jesus! The last I checked, you could get a Mr. Coffee on sale for $19.99 … Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m avoiding the studio because my life’s become too goddamned comfortable.
To stop thinking, I put on the TV, the morning news, and there’s Diane Sawyer, looking as pretty as ever. She must be in her sixties by now. Has she had work done? Have her lips always been that full, or have they been plumped with collagen? These are New York questions. Before I moved to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass one way or another. Well, she’s probably got her burdens, too. Ratings wars, celebrity stalkers. Being that famous must be so strange … Last week, when I recognized Diane’s husband buying toothpaste at that Duane Reed, I couldn’t remember any of the movies he’s directed, but what I did recall was that his family had had to escape from the Nazis when he was a little boy, and that some childhood illness had left him without body hair. Passing him in the aisle, I glanced over to see if he had eyebrows, but when he caught me looking, I had to turn away. It’s not that I’m a celebrity. Far from it, thank god. But I’m known in the art world now to some extent—here in Manhattan at least. How would I like it if some collector knew more about my shitty childhood than they did about my work?
One time on this morning show—Valentine’s Day, I think it was—Diane said that when her husband travels and she misses him, she sometimes wraps herself in one of his shirts and his scent comforts her … The Graduate: wasn’t that one of his films? “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” The evening Viveca came into my room, sat down next to me on the bed, and touched her impeccably manicured fingernails to my lips, kissed them, I remember feeling as confused as Dustin Hoffman was in that scene. But when we made love that night and she brought me to that long, unhurried orgasm, it reduced me to happy tears. It had been so long, and I was so grateful for the release, that I could barely catch my breath. But Viveca isn’t predatory the way Mrs. Robinson was. And our relationship is about much more than good sex. She loves me, and I love her. Trust her. I’ve missed her so much since she’s been away. Miss her the way I missed Orion when he was down there tending to his mother. The way I missed my own mother after those floodwaters carried her away. Missed my father those nights when I’d wait for him to come home from the bars. Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they’re away? To come home and keep you safe? …
There’s the doorbell. I call down the hall to Minnie. “I’ll get it!”
It’s Hector. “Package for Ms. Christophoulos-Shabbas,” he says, handing it to me. When I tell him he didn’t have to come up, that he could have given it to me when he saw me in the lobby, he shakes his head. Reminds me that Viveca’s instructions are to bring deliveries right up to the apartment.
“Oh, okay,” I say. “Hold on a sec.” I go get my wallet. There are a few singles in there, a five, a twenty. Five seems too little and twenty seems too much, but I give him the larger bill anyway. He glances quickly at it before putting it in his pocket. “Thank you,” he says.
The package is from Neiman Marcus, and I know what’s in it: that expensive perfume Viveca wears: Clive Christian Floral Oriental. Yesterday when we talked, she wanted to know if it had arrived yet. When I said it hadn’t, she asked if I’d track the shipment on the computer. Can’t blame her for that, I guess. After I found out it was en route, I went on the Neiman Marcus Web site to see what that perfume costs. I wish I hadn’t. Twelve hundred dollars an ounce: that’s just plain ridiculous … But why shouldn’t she buy these luxury items if she wants them? She works hard, she’s inherited money from both her father and her late husband, she’s generous with the charities she supports—even sits on the boards of a couple of them: Literacy Partners, God’s Love We Deliver. I should stop being so goddamned judgmental. Stop feeling guilty that I love the smell of that perfume on her, the taste of the coffee that our Esclusivo Magnifica makes. I guess I’m suffering from … what would you call it? Lifestyle guilt? I should ask Orion to look it up in that book he was always consulting—the DSM whatever it was. Maybe I’ve got some fashionable rich lady’s neurosis.
Independent of Viveca, I’m financially comfortable now—more than comfortable, actually, because of what collectors pay for my work. Well, independent of Viveca and independent because of her, too. My art is sold exclusively at her gallery, and I’m the featured artist on viveca.com (http://www.viveca.com). But I remember what it’s like to live a nickel-and-dime life. To count on waitressing tips—a couple of pounds of change per shift, plus dollar bills and the occasional five or ten. I doubt Hector would be putting on that gray doorman’s uniform and standing in the lobby every Saturday and Sunday if he didn’t need the extra income. Still, he’s always so good-natured. Hector may be the most noncynical New Yorker I’ve met in the four years I’ve lived here … Unless it’s an act. Maybe that big, warm smile of his hides his resentment. “The service people aren’t your friends,” Viveca warned me once, shortly after I moved in here. “Nor do they want to be. Be respectful of that.”
One time? This was shortly after I began staying at Viveca’s but before we started sleeping together. A customer at viveca c—an investment banker—had just bought one of my pieces for thirty thousand dollars, and I was feeling so flush and free that I opened a window and tossed out a hundred-dollar bill. I watched it flutter end over end toward the street below, then looked away before it landed. I didn’t want to see anyone scrambling after it, or worse, two people fighting over it. I just wanted to imagine someone with a hard life happening by and getting a nice surprise. Picking it up and being on their way, a little less burdened because of that unexpected hundred-dollar bill.
I sit down at the table, unpeel a banana, and eat it while I work on the Sudoku puzzle I ripped out of yesterday’s paper. The Esclusivo Magnifica plays its little snatch of classical music, signaling that the coffee’s ready. I get up, grab a mug, pour, sip. Back in Connecticut, when Orion and I were first married, I’d reuse tea bags to economize. At the grocery store, I would buy whatever coffee was on sale that week: the store brand or Yuban or Chock full o’Nuts. Chock full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee. Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy. Ha! Guess again. This coffee from our high-priced machine is bracing and delicious. So shut up and enjoy it, Annie. You can’t have it both ways—live like this and resent it at the same time. Stop being such a goddamned hypocrite.
I give up on the Sudoku puzzle; this one’s too hard and I’m not that good at them in the first place. In fact, I stink. Numbers, logic: that’s never been my strong suit. On TV, Mario Cuomo’s son—the cute one, not the politician—is reading the news. I’m getting a yogurt out of the fridge when I hear him say something about Cape Cod. I look up. They’re showing footage of great white sharks cruising the water. Has Orion heard about this? He loves swimming in the ocean. I’d better call him. Mario’s son says that the Cape’s merchants and innkeepers are worried that this last hurrah of the tourist season will take a major hit during what’s already been an off year because of the bad economy.
You’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Orion Oh …
I don’t get it. Why hasn’t he changed his greeting yet? Orion left his practice at the university over a month ago, opting for early retirement—something I still don’t understand. Why would a workaholic do that so abruptly? And why, all of a sudden, does he want to sell the house after he was so adamant during the divorce negotiations about not selling it? About staying put whether I’d left or not.
If this is an emergency, please call …
I was shocked when Orion took Viveca up on her offer to use her beach house for his Cape Cod getaway. He’d refused at first, but then he changed his mind. Why? Whatever’s going on with him, I don’t think he’s shared it with the kids. I talked to all three of them this week, and none of them voiced any worry about their father. Has he met someone? No, that can’t be it. If he had, Marissa would have wormed it out of him and called me. Andrew and Ariane can keep a secret but not their little sister.
There’s a long, long beep, which means he hasn’t been picking up his messages. “Hey, there. It’s me,” I say. “Have you left for the Cape yet? I just wanted to tell you, in case you haven’t heard, that they’ve been spotting sharks up there. Be careful, okay? I hope you’re well. Call me.”
Marissa’s probably right. I should learn how to text-message. “Daddy hardly ever answers the phone, Mom. But whenever I text him, he texts me right back,” she told me yesterday. Well, good for her, but I’d prefer to talk to her father—to hear it in his voice that he’s doing okay. Or not. When you’ve been married to someone for as long as Orion and I were, you can hear in a conversation if something’s wrong—not so much in what’s said as the way it’s said. The inflections, the hesitations …
Is it the wedding? The fact that it will be in Three Rivers? Is that what’s bothering him? I didn’t want to not invite Orion. It’s doubtful that Andrew’s coming, but both of our girls will be there, and I know he’d like to see them. And Donald and Mimsy are driving up from Pennsylvania; Orion’s always liked my brother and his wife and he hasn’t seen them in ages. Still, I don’t want him to feel that he has to attend. Yesterday, Viveca’s assistant e-mailed me the list of who’s coming and who’s declined and apparently Orion hasn’t sent in his response card yet … I was delighted, though, to see Mr. Agnello’s name on the list. I want to introduce Viveca to the man who validated my artistic efforts all those years ago when I was struggling against self-doubt, wondering if I should stop kidding myself and just give up. Mr. Agnello must be in his nineties by now. He and I have exchanged Christmas cards for twenty-something years, and when I didn’t get a card back from him this past Christmas, I was worried that he might have …
Is it because I’m marrying a woman? Is that why Orion hasn’t responded? He’s never been homophobic, but maybe this strikes too close to home. Bruises his male ego. That time when we met with the lawyers to negotiate the terms of the divorce, he’d already been drinking. I could smell it. And it wasn’t exactly the cocktail hour; it was 11:00 A.M. I’d wanted to say something to him about it after we left, but I didn’t. I was still trying to figure out what the new rules were about such things, now that we were almost divorced. The other day, I tried imagining what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot—if he had left me for a man. It was a ridiculous exercise: picturing two hairy-chested men in bed with each other, one of them Orion. LOL, as Marissa would put it. LMFAO.
The truth, whether Orion believes it or not, is that I hadn’t left him for Viveca. I’d left him for New York—for the opportunities it offered me, creatively and commercially. What developed between Viveca and me had been unplanned, unpremeditated …
My “defection,” Orion had called it on that awful Sunday back in Connecticut when I finally admitted that Viveca and I had become involved, that I’d fallen in love with her. I was “a Judas,” he said. I could get my own goddamned ride back to the train station, because he sure as hell wasn’t taking me there. He was through with being “a fucking sap.” I’d had to hire a cab to New Haven, and on the train ride back to the city, I’d kept replaying our argument. If I was Judas, then that made him Jesus Christ, right? Well, maybe he should come down from his cross and take some of the responsibility for the fact that our marriage had failed. Which of us had practically raised Andrew and the girls single-handedly all those years when he’d leave for work early and come home late? Sit in his office all day and into the evening, counseling college kids about their problems? What about my problems? What about the fact that I felt frustrated and neglected all those years while he was playing savior to those troubled students of his and then coming home and feeling sorry for himself because of the toll they took? Drinking his beers and falling asleep by nine when I still had laundry to fold and put away, and three school lunches to make for the next morning, before I could go down to my gloomy little studio and grab a measly hour or two for my work.
Thank god the bitterness has subsided on both our parts. We have our kids to thank for that and our mutual investment in their lives, our shared worries about their unhappiness and their safety: Ariane’s failed romances, our worries about where Andrew’s military career might take him, where Marissa’s impetuousness might take her. Our concern for our kids’ well-being binds us despite our divorce. Will always bind us. And he’s come around, made an effort with Viveca despite the fact that I can tell he doesn’t like her … Whether Viveca understands it or not, I still care about Orion, which is why I’m worried about him. Why, maybe, I shouldn’t have put his name on the guest list—made the decision myself instead of listening to Marissa’s “Daddy’s an adult, Mom. He can decide if he wants to go or not.” The last thing I want to do is make him feel he has to come if it will be too weird or too painful for him …
I don’t know. Marriage, parenting, divorce: it’s a complicated equation, but there’s no sense in pretending that we don’t still have feelings for each other, no matter who failed who. Or is it “whom”? Fifty-two years old and I still don’t know the difference. What mistake had I made that time when Marissa, in the middle of her bratty teenage phase, called me on my bad grammar? “Her and I”: that was it. Ariane and I were making supper, and Marissa was leaning against the counter, trying as hard as she could to annoy me. And I was doing everything I could to show her that she couldn’t get my goat. But when I happened to mention that I’d run into Ruth Stanley at the post office, and that “her and I” hadn’t seen each other in ages, Marissa felt obliged to let me know how stupid I was. “It’s she and I, Mother.” Whenever she was mad at me back then—which was most of the time—I was “Mother” instead of “Mom” or “Mama.” She went on to inform me that the way I murdered the English language embarrassed her in front of her friends, and so when they came over, would I please do her a favor and not speak to them? Well, that hit a nerve. I burst into tears, furious with myself for letting her see me cry. But then Ari had jumped to my defense. Had turned to her little sister and demanded that Marissa apologize to me. She did it, too. Ariane’s easygoing for the most part, but she can be fierce in the face of injustice. I’ve often thought she would have made a good lawyer. In the wake of Marissa’s remark, I’d gone out and bought one of those Dummies books on grammar. I studied it, spoke self-consciously for a while. I’m pretty sure it’s no matter who failed whom, now that I think about it, although I don’t remember why …
Orion and Viveca have that much in common, at least: their intelligence and good educations, the way they know how to say things correctly without having to think about it. Viveca’s fluent in three languages, and he used to do the Times crossword puzzles in pen. Complete them most Sundays. Odd how they both got mixed up with me, the girl with three years of high school and a G.E.D. It’s funny. In all the years Orion and I were together, I can’t remember him ever correcting me. And the only reference Viveca’s ever made was that time, shortly after I started living here, when she kissed me on the forehead and called me her “Eliza Dolittle.” Do little: I’d assumed she was implying that I didn’t help enough around the apartment. But later that same day when she came in and I was running the vacuum, she pulled the plug and reminded me that that was Minnie’s job. It wasn’t until weeks later, when they were showing My Fair Lady on the old movie channel, that I finally got it: in Viveca’s mind, I was unschooled Audrey Hepburn to her upper-class Rex Harrison. It was what that marriage counselor Orion and I went to that time called “ouch moments”: when your spouse said something that felt hurtful. You were supposed to speak up immediately, let them know. I never called Viveca on what she’d said, though. It was weeks after the fact, and she probably wouldn’t have even remembered making the comment. And anyway, Viveca’s never corrected my grammar, either. She probably just cringes in silence whenever I make a mistake. Maybe that was what Orion did all those years, too … That day when Ariane jumped to my defense after Marissa embarrassed me, I invited my A+ daughter to let me know whenever I said something wrong. I knew she’d be gentle about it. Clue me in privately. But Ariane never took me up on it. She was not only the best student of my three, but the kindest, too—more compassionate than either her twin brother or her little sister. She has her father’s temperament, his need to help others. Which is probably why she’s a soup kitchen manager, not a lawyer. She and her father have always been close. Ariane is Daddy’s girl. When I told her that morning that we were getting a divorce, she was immediately defensive on Orion’s behalf, and that was before I told her the reason why I was divorcing him. My god, when I did tell her, she was furious with me. But she came around, started speaking to me again soon enough. My mother is leaving my father because she’s in love with a woman, she must have decided. It is what it is …
When I called Ari yesterday to let her know I wanted to pay for her flight in from California for the wedding, she said, “No, no, Mama. You don’t have to do that.” But I want to. I appreciate her making the effort. San Francisco to Boston: how much would that cost? Four hundred dollars? Five hundred? She can’t afford that. Not on whatever she makes managing that food bank out there. Her annual income is probably less than what Marissa makes on the residuals from that insurance commercial she’s in. That thing runs so often: Marissa as a newlywed shopping with her “husband” for insurance from that blissed-out saleswoman with the headband and the big hair. How much must that actress make? She’s on TV all the time, on the radio, in pop-up ads on the Internet. She always acts so hyped-up about the insurance she’s selling, it’s as if she’s taken amphetamines or something. I’m just going to write Ariane a check and send it to her, no matter how much she protests.
I offered to pay for Andrew’s and his fiancée’s flights up from Texas, too, but he says he doubts they’ll come. Can’t spare the time. It bothered me that he said it with such disdain. I told him I was looking forward to meeting his bride-to-be but that I understood, of course. Still, I got the message: he doesn’t approve of my marrying Viveca. I’m just not sure if he’s resentful on behalf of his father, his gender, or his newfound religious conservatism.
Of my three kids, Andrew was the least likely, I would have figured, to embrace evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, he was always the one most likely to break the rules if not the Commandments—the only one of the three his father and I ever had to sit in court with. The marijuana arrest, the shoplifting arrest, the time he and his high school pals got drunk and spray-painted those school buses. And then, at the beginning of his senior year, those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers, and it changed him. I can still see him, glued to the TV on that awful day, tears running down his face. When he started in about how he wanted to be part of America’s response, it had frightened me.
I begged Andrew not to go into the military. Said all the wrong things. Argued that all those stupid Rambo movies he had grown up watching were all just macho Hollywood bullshit. But Orion was wonderful. He calmed me down, reminded me that the last thing we should do was make our son defensive. He was eighteen, after all; he didn’t need our permission to enlist. Then Orion had gone online. Had gone downtown and talked to that recruiter. Armed with the information he had gathered, he had approached Andrew with that measured, logical way of his. Explained to him that if he went to college, got his degree, and still wanted to serve, he could enter as a second lieutenant and be eligible for Officer Candidate School. And so Andrew had gone off to school instead of off to war … It was that goddamned organic chemistry class he was taking junior year in college that had wrecked everything. Filled him with self-doubt every time he flunked a quiz. That, and the fact that the girl he’d been dating since his freshman year had broken up with him. He hadn’t even told us he’d withdrawn from school and enlisted until two weeks before he was due to report for basic training. Well, at least he finished up his degree after he enlisted. Took care of that piece of unfinished business. …
Now he’s found his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And my guess is that the god he’s pledged himself to frowns upon gay marriage. When Ariane sent me the link to the newspaper article about Andrew’s engagement, it became obvious, more or less. Mr. and Mrs. Branch Commerford of Waco are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Casey-Lee, to Mr. Andrew Oh, son of Dr. and Mrs. Orion Oh of Three Rivers, Connecticut. Orion’s and my divorce was finalized almost a year ago, and I haven’t lived in Three Rivers for the last four. Either Andrew is in denial or he’s lying to his in-laws and his bride-to-be. She’s a pretty little thing, a petite blonde. Casey-Lee: it’s a beauty contestant name. Somewhere along the way, I read or heard that Texas has had more Miss Americas than any other state. And those parents’ names—Branch and Erlene. Erlene: I’d bet any amount of money that she’s got big hair. There’s a brother that Marissa says everyone calls Little Branch. Big Branch and Little Branch: good god. Well, if Andrew needs to hide the fact that I’m marrying Viveca, I guess I can be discreet about it. But when they get married, I’m not about to fly down there and pretend that his father and I are still Mr. and Mrs. If I’m even invited to the wedding, that is. Maybe I’ll be expected to stay away, stay under wraps. What was that book they had us read in high school—the one where the crazy wife was locked upstairs in the attic? …
It’s ironic, really, that my son now seems to have an aversion to lesbians. He sure was curious about them when he was in high school. I remember that time when, after I’d told him a hundred times to go upstairs and clean his pigsty of a bedroom and heard “I will, Mom … I’m gonna” that I finally gave up. Decided to go up there and do the job myself. And I did—with a vengeance. Filled up three big garbage bags with crap that I was going to throw out, whether he liked it or not. I was a woman on a mission. And when I went to flip his mattress, I discovered his stash of dirty magazines and all those gym socks that never seemed to make it into the hamper, most of them stiff with I-knew-what … I didn’t much mind the Playboys and Penthouses. Half the teenage boys in America had those hidden away, I figured. But one of his socks was stuck to the cover of a magazine called Girl on Girl. I’d stood there, flipping through it—looking at all those hideous pictures of women having sex with cucumbers and other women wearing strap-on dildos. Fake sex, it was obvious to me, although it probably wasn’t to Andrew. They all had freakishly big breasts, and one of them, I remember, had areolas as big as the rubber jar opener down in our kitchen drawer. They all looked drugged. In the photo that infuriated me the most, two women were wearing nothing but cowboy hats and holsters cinched around their hips, and one was inserting the barrel of a gun into the other’s vagina. I flipped when I saw that one! Marched downstairs and out to the garage where Andrew was fiddling with the gears of his ten-speed. “Where did this come from?” I demanded, and when he saw what I was holding in my hand, even his ears turned red. He told me a kid in his homeroom had shoved it in his backpack without him knowing it. “Baloney!” I said. “You listen to me, young man. And look me in the eye, too.” I waited until he did. “Whoever took these pictures, and whoever publishes this garbage, is committing violence against women. You got that? And whoever’s looking at it is guilty, too. You have two sisters, Andrew. This junk is an assault on them and me and every other woman, including the ones in this picture.” He mumbled something that I didn’t catch. “What? I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I said they posed for them, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did. Probably in exchange for drugs. Or because they’d get beaten up by their pimps if they didn’t. This is violent male fantasy, Andrew. Do you think women want to have guns stuck up inside of them?”
“Okay,” he said. “You made your point.”
But I was just getting started. I waved the two “cowgirls” in his face.
“Do you think women really have breasts this size?”
He shrugged. “Some,” he said.
“Ha! Guess again. These poor girls have had their breasts sliced open and sacks of silicone put in so that men—and boys—can drool over them. Do you know what happens when that stuff starts leaking inside a woman’s body? I’m ashamed of you, Andrew. And if you ever bring this kind of garbage into my house again—”
“Your house? I thought it was our house.”
I rolled up his dirty magazine and whacked him across the face with it. “Don’t you dare smart-mouth me, Andrew Oh! What do you think your father’s going to say when I show him this ‘reading material’ of yours?”
The shrug again. “He’s probably not going to go mental about it like you’re doing.” The next thing I knew, the wrench he’d been using on his bike was in my hand. I took a swing at him and missed. He froze for a second or two, shocked. Then he shielded his head with his arm. “Jesus, Mom, stop! You’re my mother, for cripe’s sake!”
I dropped the wrench. Watched him run down the driveway and out into the road. “And from now on, put your dirty socks in the hamper!” I screamed. “And don’t stick anything inside them except your big, smelly feet!” That was when I realized old Mr. Genovese across the street was standing in his doorway, watching. Fired up still, I shouted over to him. “Mind your own business! Shut your goddamned door!” Lucky for him, he did what he was told.
Fueled, still, by self-righteous anger, I pounded back up to Andrew’s room, lugged those three garbage bags to the landing and flung them down the stairwell. Dragged them out to the car, drove to the dump, and took enormous pleasure in heaving them onto a mountain of trash. By the time I got back home, I had cooled down. I decided not to tell Orion about Girl on Girl after all, and I was grateful that Andrew didn’t tell his father that I’d swung at him with the wrench—something I now felt ashamed of having done. But I have to admit that, in the aftermath of my having cleaned out his room, I enjoyed it whenever he asked me about his stuff.
“Is my Alonzo Mourning jersey still in the wash, Mom?”
“Nope. It’s at the dump.”
“Mom, do you know where that blue notebook is where I’m recording my weight-lifting routine?”
“I guess it’s probably sitting over in the landfill.”
“Mom, Mrs. Kilgallen’s ragging me because I haven’t handed in my copy of Heart of Darkness. You didn’t toss that out, did you?”
“If it was on your bedroom floor, I did.”
“Mom, that was schoolproperty. What am I supposed to tell Kilgallen?” I advised him to tell her he’d go to the bookstore and buy her a replacement copy. “Can I have the money for it then?”
“Not from me you can’t. Use your own goddamned money.”
Poor Andrew. I was always harder on him than I was on his sisters. Maybe his being “too busy” to fly up here for the wedding is payback. Maybe I’m getting exactly what I deserve …
Unlike her brother, Marissa, our free spirit, is all for Viveca’s and my upcoming wedding. Her mother marrying a woman: she thinks it’s hip. And I’m a little concerned about the attention Viveca’s been giving her. They chat on the phone. They’ve gone out a couple of times, just the two of them. It’s not that I’m ungrateful that Viveca’s made an effort with my daughter. I appreciate that she has. But both times when they got back from those lunch dates, Marissa was carrying boxes and bags from Bergdorf’s. Viveca’s bought her that Jimmy Choo handbag she loves, the Prada platform pumps that I’d break my neck if I ever tried wearing. Designer things that an aspiring actress and part-time waitress could never afford. As good a kid as she is, Marissa’s always been a little too status conscious, and it’s almost as if Viveca is trying to buy her affection. And apparently it’s working. What was that thing Marissa said last week when the three of us were at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square? When she pointed out that children’s book? “Look. Heather has two mommies just like me.” It made me feel defensive on Orion’s behalf. She’s his daughter, not Viveca’s …
What’s wrong with me today? Why am I worrying about all these things that probably don’t even matter? I walk around the apartment, wandering aimlessly from room to room. Passing the guest bathroom, I look in at Minnie. She’s down on the floor, wearing her knee pads, scouring the grout between the floor tiles. Viveca’s a stickler about clean grout; she has Minnie use some bleaching agent to get it white. I walk past my poster, ANNIE OH: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM! February 1–March 31 at viveca c gallery. She went all out for that show: ads in the Times, the New Yorker, and New York. Hired that publicist who got me those TV interviews that I was such a nervous wreck about … Back in the kitchen, I grab the remote and change the channel. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy lady is cautioning Ann Curry about some new medical thing we all have to worry about. I channel-surf past Cookie Monster, cartoons, cake decorating. On CNBC, they’re talking about the global economy—the looming debt crisis in Greece that the Germans may or may not rescue them from. Viveca’s mentioned the possibility of Greece defaulting, too, and how, for some reason I didn’t understand, it could be good for her business if the euro is devalued. It’s funny: she identifies so strongly with her Greek heritage. You would think she’d be more concerned about the country’s balance sheet than her own … The old movie channel’s showing Mildred Pierce. There’s Joan Crawford with her shoulder pads and severe eyebrows, talking to her maid, who I recognize. Whom I recognize? It’s that little actress from Gone With the Wind—the slave with the squeaky voice who didn’t “know nothin’ bout birthing babies.” Slaves, maids: it wasn’t as if the studios were going to hire that actress to play anything else. At least Viveca doesn’t expect Minnie to show up at the apartment in one of those old-fashioned uniforms with the little hat and frilly apron. Minnie wears the same clothes most days: her beige Sean John sweat suit and her plaid canvas sneakers. Marissa tells me that Sean John is that rap guy, Diddy or P. Diddy or whatever he calls himself. One time when she was here, she complimented Minnie on her taste. Told her she liked Sean John clothes, too. And Minnie had smiled her toothless smile and told her she picked it up “for cheap” at a street fair in Newark … On the Christian channel, the pompadoured host is chatting about Jesus’s love with a plump old lady in a pastel party dress and bright red lipstick. I suddenly realize it’s Dale Evans. She died, didn’t she? This must be a rerun. My foster mother, the first one, used to send me to school every day with an American cheese and mustard sandwich and an apple inside a rusty Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch box. (No Thermos like the other kids; I had to drink from the fountain.) Roy and Dale were passé by then, and I was jealous of the cool lunch boxes some of the other girls in my class carried: Dr. Kildare, The Beverly Hillbillies, and then that crème de la crème of lunch boxes, Meet the Beatles …
Carrying Viveca’s package down the hall to our bedroom, I glance in again at Minnie. She’s seated on the edge of our soaking tub, taking a break from her grout cleaning. She’s got her knee pads on, her legs spread so far apart that she could be giving birth. I wave; she waves back. When I enter the bedroom, they startle me again: those dresses. The brides.
All three of the Vera Wangs are beautiful, but none is me. What is me is the dress I’d already bought off the rack at that vintage dress shop I like in Tribeca: a basket-weave shift, bright yellow with bold diagonal turquoise stripes—two hundred dollars marked down to $129.99. I like those funky stripes, its above-the-knee length. The label says Mary Quant. I looked her up. Wikipedia says she was a mod British designer, popular during the 1960s. Cool, I thought, but when I tried it on and showed it to Viveca, she said, “Sweetheart, it’s cute and it looks adorable on you, but to me it says sundress, not wedding dress. It’s … youthful. On our special day, I’d love to see you in something a little more elegant and celebratory. Just think of all the lesbians over the years who couldn’t be brides. We’re honoring them, too. In another era, we would have had to pass as spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them.” She’d laughed when she said “spinsters,” it’s so far out of the realm of who she is, who she thinks we are.
Lesbians: that’s what I am now. Right? I’m marrying a woman, aren’t I? And I’ve slept with another woman—Priscilla, the wiry tomboy I used to waitress with at Friendly’s. But I don’t see our marrying as something that necessarily balances the scales of justice or honors the dykes of yesteryear … Spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them: why had she said that? We’ve both been married to men. Viveca says I should pack the dress and bring it along on our wedding trip—that I can wear it when we shop or go out for lunch. She’s also suggested I go with her the next time she gets a bikini wax. “There’s more nudity than not on the beaches in Mykonos and hairless pussies are de rigueur,” she said. Viveca gets a massage and a wax every other week. Her pubic patch is a fashionably thin vertical line that stops just above her labia. I might go topless at those beaches when we’re over there, but I am not going bottomless. And anyway, I don’t even like the beach that much. It’s different for Viveca. She’s Greek. Her given name is Vasiliki, not Viveca. She’s anglicized the name for commercial reasons. She tans so effortlessly. But with my red hair and Irish complexion, I have to be careful. I could burn to a crisp.
I look over toward the bureau, and there’s that index card I scrawled on yesterday. I pick it up and read what I’d written down. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth … Among their children were the Cyclopes, the Hundred-Handed giants. Monsters, like the monsters that are being birthed in the poster hanging in the hallway, the hundred-handed monster in my life—the shark who swims in the waters of my memory. Whose voice I both dread and entertain because it drives my art … I’m hit by a pang of missing Viveca: the sound of her voice, the warm safety of her body next to mine. I approach the Gaia dress. Touch it, run the beautiful green silk between my fingers. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia. I sit on our bed and open the Neiman Marcus box. Unscrew the top of Viveca’s perfume bottle and inhale her scent: orange blossoms, vanilla. I love her. Miss her the way Diane Sawyer misses Mike Nichols when he’s away and she puts on his shirt …
I read the index card over and over, and as I do, I begin to feel the agitation, familiar and strange. Gaia … Gaia. Am I on the verge of something? Is it coming?
Maybe not. Maybe my comfortable life here has begun to snuff out my creativity. Maybe I’ve peaked and it’s all downhill from here.
I shake my head. Shake off my self-doubt. My brain is spinning. My fingers are flexing, making invisible art. It’s exciting and scary when it comes, like watching an approaching cyclone and standing defiantly in its path. Maybe before this day is out, the weather inside my brain will set me spinning. Maybe I’ll find myself in my studio, facing my need to scream out. Fight back against the monster. Make art.
Chapter Two (#ulink_0c9b633f-4b5f-5820-8628-1a62f2d9a735)
Orion Oh (#ulink_0c9b633f-4b5f-5820-8628-1a62f2d9a735)
The sharks and I both arrive at the Cape this first Saturday in September. As I inch over the Sagamore Bridge in this god-awful Labor Day weekend traffic, they’re saying great whites are swimming the coastal waters, heading north. According to the car radio, warning signs are being posted along the oceanside beaches from Chatham to North Truro. North Truro? I reach over and turn up the volume, drowning out the annoying cell phone ring tone that’s playing inside the glove compartment. Everybody’s movin’, everybody’s groovin’, baby.Love shack, baby love shack, bay-ayy-be-ee. “What do you want for a ring tone?” Marissa had asked me that day when she was programming my phone. “Anything,” I’d said. “You pick.” And she picked that awful song I’ve always hated.
It’s not one of the kids calling me; they text me now. Before I left this morning, I deliberated about whether to take the damned cell phone with me or leave it back in Three Rivers. But what if there was an emergency? So I threw it in the glove compartment and locked it. I thought I turned the damn thing off, but I guess not. Ahh, relief. The call has gone to voice mail.
“It’s a little unusual to see them in these cooler Massachusetts waters at this time of year,” the shark expert tells her interviewer, a guy who, for some reason, is calling himself the Mad Hatter. “But the gray seal population’s been on the rise, and we think that’s what’s probably luring them.”
The Mad Hatter chortles. “So you’re saying the problem is that there’s been too much seal sex? Too many pinnipeds puttin’ out?”
“Uh, well …”
The Diane Rehm interview I’d been listening to faded away somewhere between Braintree and Buzzards Bay. Conversely, the Mad Hatter is coming through so loudly and clearly that he might as well be broadcasting from the backseat. “Time now for traffic, news, and weather. And when we come back, we’ll have more with Dr. Tracy Skelly from the Division of Marine Fisheries.”
Despite my initial resistance to the idea, I’m staying rent free at Viveca’s place in North Truro for the month, hoping that a Cape Cod retreat might allow me, after a summer’s worth of drifting and wound licking, to anchor myself. Figure out how to shed my bitterness, forgive myself and others and start over. Orchestrate a reinvention, I guess you’d say. Thirty days has September: it’s a tall order.
My game plan, once I survive this hideous holiday traffic and get settled in, is to eat healthy, cool it on the drinking, exercise. I’ll jog and journal every morning, then bike to the beach for an afternoon swim. After dinner, I’ll read and research—Google phrases like “new professions after 50,” “change career paths.” But with sharks in the water, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing a whole lot of swimming. Of course, there’s always the placid bayside, but what I want is turbulence—bodysurfing along the crest of the five- or six-foot swells and getting roughed up a little by the waves I misjudge—the ones that, instead of carrying me, crack against me. I’ve been hoping the wildness of the water might somehow both cleanse me of my failings as a university psychologist and baptize me as … what?
What do you want to be when you grow up? The adults were always asking me that when I was a kid, and because I liked to draw—reproduce the images in comic books and Mad magazine—I’d say I wanted to be an artist. I’d enjoyed my high school art classes, had gotten good grades for my work. And so I’d entered college with a vague plan to major in art. In my first semester, my Intro to Drawing professor, Dr. Duers, had said during my portfolio review that I had a good sense of composition and a talent worth developing. But the following semester, I’d run up against Professor Edwards, an edgy New York sculptor who was disdainful of having to teach studio art to suburban college kids—who had come out and told us he was only driving up from the city twice a week because of the paycheck. It had crushed me the morning he’d stood over my shoulder, snickered at the still life I was drawing, and walked away without a word. But that same semester, I got an A in an Intro to Psych course I really liked. And so I had put away my sketch pad and gone on to the 200-level psychology classes. And then the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I got a job as a second-shift orderly at the state hospital.
I liked working there. Liked shooting the shit with the patients. Not the ones who were really out of it, but the ones who were in there for shorter-term stays. The “walking wounded,” as the nurses called them. Some of those patients would be admitted in pretty rough shape—straitjacketed and sputtering nonsense, or in such deep depressions that they were almost catatonic. But two or three weeks later, with their equilibrium restored by meds and talk therapy, they’d be discharged back into the world.
The psychiatrists were off-putting. Tooled around the wards like they walked on water. But the psychologists were different. More humane, less in a hurry. “You’re good with the patients,” one of them, Dr. Dow, told me one day. “I’ve noticed.” For him, it was nothing more than a casual observation, but for me—a kid who, up to that point, had never gotten noticed for much of anything—it was huge. On my day off, I drove up to the Placement Office at school and took one of those tests that identifies your strengths, suggests what career paths you should consider. When I got my results back, it said I had scored high on empathy and should consider the helping professions: social work, psychology. And so, at the beginning of my fifth semester, I declared psychology as my major.
I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.
Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.
She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.
“It?”
“The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.
Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”
At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her mouth and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.
One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.
After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.
When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.
That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.
Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited …
That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”
“Name?” she said, huffily.
“Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”
She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”
And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into tears.
I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.
Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”
“Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”
“Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was …
Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it … I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it … Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?
God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.
I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those matchmaking Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.
“Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message: call me. wanna talk 2 U dude. I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”
“Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”
“I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”
“Hey, I thought I was the shrink. What am I scared of?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”
I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.
“Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she never would have done before.”
“Like what?”
“Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”
“Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really am scared.”
She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”
“And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”
“Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”
“I said I was happy enough,” I reminded her. “Dude.”
But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00 P.M., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? …
Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it had been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over: Mog the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head … Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”
And then this past March my malaise was replaced by panic when Jasmine Negron, one of my clinical practicum supervisees, walked into Muriel Clapp’s office and charged me with sexual harassment. It was one of those Rashomon-like situations. I said/she said.
But you were in her apartment, right?
I was. She was frightened. I gave her a ride home and she asked me in for a drink.
And you accepted.
Not at first. I tried to beg off, but she said would I please come in. The guy she’d broken up with still had the key to her place and wouldn’t give it back. A few nights earlier, she’d gotten home and he was there, sitting on her sofa. He wouldn’t leave.
How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?
Two. And granted, she’d poured them with a heavy hand, but … two.
I had to look away from her. Talk, instead, to my fidgeting hands in my lap. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, Muriel. Look, should I have gone into her apartment? Started drinking with her? No. I admit it was a stupid thing to do. Was I an idiot not to get the hell out of there when she started coming on to me? Hell, yeah. Look her in the eye, I told myself. Say it right to her face. But I’m telling you, Muriel, she came on to me, and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying. It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.
And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.
Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.
Yeah.Muchbetter, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working. The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell …
Don’t! I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid or his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here …
Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? …
Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “staycations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo … Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it. At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”
“And what thing was that?”
“He … molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”
“And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”
“It went on over a couple of years. Until he got caught.”
“And how old is his victim?”
“My granddaughter? She’s eleven. It started when she was eight. But anyway, I write to him, okay? Try to be supportive. But whenever I start one of those letters, I think about what he did and it fills me with rage.”
“Well, that’s an appropriate response. But why in the world would you write him sympathetic letters?”
“Because he’s my son. I love him in spite of—”
“And that’s an inappropriate response. Personally, I think convicted pedophiles should get the death penalty. If my son did what your son did, he’d be dead to me.”
Jesus, the poor guy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Show him a little compassion, will you?
“Yeah, but the thing is—”
“The thing, sir, is that your son did something so vile, so despicable, that it’s unforgivable. You should be focusing your energies on helping your granddaughter, not your piece-of-crap son. Stop being a weenie. He’s earned what he’s getting in there.”
Well, there’s a counseling style for you: bludgeon the patient. I reach over and change the station. But what she’s just told that guy—that he should reject his son—ricochets inside my head and transports me back to that drab, joyless room on the third floor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where my mother lay dying. Where, three or four days before she passed, she and I finally touched on the untouchable subject of Francis Oh, the father who had denied my existence. When I was a kid, from time to time I had asked Mom about him, but she’d told me almost nothing. Had gotten huffy whenever I inquired. How could she tell me what she didn’t know? she’d say. And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I had grown to hate the mysterious Francis Oh. Had decided he wasn’t the only one who could play the rejection game. “Fuck you,” I’d tell him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror—borrowing my own face because I had no idea what his looked like. It was around that time that my friend Brian and I went to the movies to see that movie The Manchurian Candidate. I had sat there squirming, I remember. Imagining that every one of those Chinese brainwashers in Frank Sinatra’s flashbacks was Francis Oh. It had freaked me out to the point that I got up, ran up the aisle and out to the men’s room, and puked up my popcorn and soda. By the time I went back in, I had missed a good fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. “You okay?” Brian whispered. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” I had snapped back. A few days later, I hit upon the idea of being rid of my Chinese surname. I would take my mother’s and my grandparents’ name instead—become Orion Valerio instead of Orion Oh. Rather than telling my mother, I walked down to city hall one day after school and asked in some office about how to do it. But the process was complicated and costly, and I gave up on the idea. Instead, whenever anyone asked about him, I’d say my father died. Had gotten killed in a car accident when my mother was pregnant. I liked telling people that. Killing off the father who wanted no part of me. After a while, I almost came to believe my own lie.
But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been …
She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”
She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office wouldn’t give me an address. She was sympathetic after I began to cry. I had started showing a little by then, and I’m sure she put two and two together. But she stuck to her guns. And so I surrendered to the inevitable. Went home and confessed to Mama and Papa.” The following Saturday, her father drove her to the Saint Catherine of Siena Home for Unwed Mothers, she says, and she spent the remainder of her pregnancy there. Got her high school diploma but had to miss her graduation. “The sisters tried for months to convince me to do what most of the other girls agreed to: hand the baby over to Catholic Charities so that some nice childless couple who had prayed for a baby could adopt you. They accused me of being selfish, but I just kept shaking my head. I wanted to keep you and raise you and that was that.”
She’s flagging, I can see. Exhausted and upset. Should I stop quizzing her? While I’m trying to decide, a nurse enters. “Sorry to interrupt, Maria, but it’s time for your breathing treatment,” she says. Mom nods, gives her a wan smile, and opens her mouth. While Mom is puffing away on the device, I stand. Go over to the window and look out on the parking lot. But what she’s told me has opened up more questions, and when the treatment is over and the nurse leaves, I sit back down again. Take her hand in mine. I remind her about that time we went up to Boston—to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant. “How did you know where to find his father?” I ask her.
“Well, Francis was a smoker,” she says. “Always lit his Viceroys with books of matches that said HENRY OH’S CHINA PARADISE on the cover. During one of the times we were at the motel where he used to take me, I slipped one of those matchbooks in my purse as a souvenir of our love. Like I said, Orion, I was naïve back then. I thought sex and love were one and the same.”
She’d gone to Henry Oh’s China Paradise once before, she says, when she was six or seven months pregnant. “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” …
A look of exasperation had crossed her face when she said that—one I recognized. She had had that same look the day we’d walked up the stairs to Henry Oh’s China Paradise so that she could present me to my grandfather as proof of my existence. Proof that, since his son had not done the right thing by me, the obligation fell on him. He needed to help finance the college education of the boy who, whether my grandfather was happy about it or not, carried his family name. Henry Oh, Francis Oh, Orion Oh: we were linked. He was duty bound. And so I practically had had to run after her that day as she exited the restaurant, her head held high, her hand clutching the check that would allow me to attend Boston University. Mom had been fierce that day, victorious. And even at seventeen, when I was still so ignorant about life and love and the repercussions of sex, I somehow knew that, whatever it had just cost her to get that money, she had done it out of a ferocious, almost feral love for the son she had refused to hand over to adoptive parents. And so—
Jesus god, there it goes again. Love shack, baby, love shack … And suddenly I realize who must be calling me. Annie. It’s two days past when I was supposed to RSVP. Well, if she wants to find out if I’m going to her big gay wedding, she can go to hell because—
OH! JESUS!
Shit, that was close. If I hadn’t just pulled out of my fog and slammed on the brakes, I would have rear-ended that Subaru. That’s all I need right about now: an accident that would have been my fault. My heart’s racing, my palms have broken out in a sweat. Refocus. You want to get there in one piece, don’t you? With my eyes on the road, I feel for the radio knob and twist it counterclockwise. Return to the Mad Hatter and the shark lady.
“Okay then, Doc, so let’s say Jaws comes upon a pod of seals that are chillin’ in the waters off of Chatham. What’s his M.O.?”
“Well, first of all, ‘he’ is likely to be a she. Female great whites tend to be larger and more dominant than males. And as to the shark’s ‘M.O.,’ as you put it, great whites are ambush hunters. So what they do is identify a target and then ram it hard and fast, most likely from beneath because the underbelly is what’s most vulnerable.”
The Mad Hatter snorts. “That’s where we’re all most vulnerable. Right, guys? Under our bellies and above our knees?” An ah-ooga horn sounds, but the shark lady soldiers on.
“Once a shark takes hold, it whips its head from side to side, the better to tear open a large chunk of flesh. That exposes the organs and entrails, which will be ingested as quickly as possible. From what we’ve observed, great whites may travel in small clans, but when they’re on the hunt, they separate.”
“Every shark for himself, right?”
“That’s right. Or herself.”
Sharks. Ambush hunters. Viveca Christophoulos-Shabbas …
Annie met Viveca through her art. She’d had a piece selected for that Whitney Biennial, and at the opening Viveca approached her about exhibiting at her by-appointment-only gallery in Chelsea. But in fairness, I guess I’d started losing my wife to her art long before Lady Bountiful came into the picture …
It was strange how Annie’s career had come about. She couldn’t even say why, not long after our twins were born, she’d begun collecting odds and ends from junk stores, swap shops, and the curbside recycling boxes she passed while out for walks with Andrew and Ariane in their side-by-side stroller. She’d not understood it, that is, until she began creating those found-art shadow boxes. She had had no training as an artist. Something just compelled her to make them, she told me, but she was reluctant to explore with me the nature of that impulse. “Orion, I’m your wife, not one of your patients,” she reminded me once when I tried to tease out her motivation. She made it clear that this was her thing. No trespassing.
Her first pieces were humorous, or so I thought: The Dancing Scissors, The Jell-O Chronicles. One Saturday, I remember, she requested a “mental health” afternoon. The twins had been sick, and except for trips to the pediatrician’s and the pharmacy, Annie had been stuck in the house all week with cranky kids. Could I stay with them for a few hours while she went to a movie, maybe, or down to the mall? I got her coat, gave her a little swat on the rear, and said, “Go.” But by the time she got back home, it was after 8:00 P.M. This was the mid-1980s, before cell phones became ubiquitous; if someone didn’t bother to call in, you stared at the phone, waiting and worrying. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded when she came through the door that night. But she was so jubilant, so energized, that she hardly noticed my day’s worth of aggravation and worry. She had driven to Waterford, she said, intending to go to the Crystal Mall. Instead, spur of the moment, she’d hopped onto I-95 South. En route to no place in particular, she decided to get off at random exits and hunt for whatever awaited her at the dumps and secondhand shops of different shoreline towns. And it had been so worth it! She’d picked up treasures at each: a bolt of lace, a bundle of 1940s movie magazines, some wooden soda crates, a canvas bag brimming with hand puppets. Passing a billboard advertising a going-out-of-business sale at a job lot store in New Rochelle, she’d made a snap decision, signaled, and exited.
“New Rochelle?” I said. “You drove all the way into New York?”
Thank God she had, she said, because she’d struck pay dirt at that Dollar Days. Her purchases included two large bags of deeply discounted miscellany, including a twenty-four-piece box of plastic British Royal Family figurines.
I began complaining about my day with the twins—how Andrew had kept making spit bubbles with his amoxicillin instead of just swallowing it. How Ariane had toddled over to the dirty diaper pail, climbed on, and tipped it over while I was at the door with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—and how mopping up the mess, wet-vacing and disinfecting their bedroom carpet, had taken me the better part of an hour. From now on, we were buying Pampers, I told her. I didn’t care how much they cost. I was hoping to generate a little … what? Sympathy? Remorse, maybe? But Annie just sat there, sifting through her stuff, barely listening. And when I stopped talking, she went into the twins’ room, kissed their foreheads, and then, grabbing her new “treasures,” raced down to the studio I’d fixed up for her in the space between the washer and dryer and the furnace. She was down there for the rest of that night.
What had come over her? Was it OCD—some kind of hoarding disorder, maybe? Some sort of anxiety related to motherhood? If so, she could be treated. We could get her an antidepressant or a tranquilizer to take the edge off a little. But Annie wasn’t accumulating stuff solely for the sake of accumulating it. She was making art out of it, so maybe I should back off. Give her the benefit of the doubt … But could you even call it art? Like I said, it wasn’t like she’d had any formal training. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never even taken an art course in high school. Had never even finished high school. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the tough childhood she’d had. Annie’s childhood: that’s always been another “no trespassing” zone. I know the basics. She lost her mother when she was five years old. Her father had gone off the rails as a result and she’d bounced around in foster care. But Annie’s always skirted the details of her early life. Waiting here in stalled traffic, I can’t help but wonder: has she been more forthcoming with Viveca about her childhood? What does Viveca know?
A cruiser passes me on the shoulder, its lights flashing, its siren not wailing but making loud little belches. There must be an accident up ahead, which would explain why we’ve now almost come to a complete stop. Oh man, I haven’t even gotten as far as Sandwich yet. I’ll be lucky if I get to that rental place before they close for the day—or maybe even for the weekend. And what do I do if I can’t pick up the key to Viveca’s cottage? Break into the place? Start looking for motel “vacancy” signs? And now, adding insult to injury, this little jerk in the Ford Focus has his blinker on and he’s trying to squeeze in between me and the Subaru. Smart move, buddy. Nothing like lane-changing when both lanes are crawling along at about half a mile an hour. Atta boy. Nose right in. Be my guest, you little shit. When did you get your driver’s license? Yesterday? He’s talking a blue streak to his girlfriend, oblivious that his directional signal’s still blinking. To my right is one of those big-ass campers that must get about five or six miles to the gallon. A warning sprawls across the RV’s left side: MAKE WAY FOR MEAN DARLENE! A plump white-haired couple sits up front, eating a snack out of a paper bag. Microwave popcorn, maybe? Their jaws are moving in synch. When I was stuck behind them a quarter of a mile ago, I read their back bumper stickers: LET FREEDOM RING! and DON’T BLAME ME! I VOTED FOR THE HERO AND THE HOTTIE.
I honk at the kid in the Ford, and when he looks in his rearview mirror, I point down at his blinker. I can tell he doesn’t get it. Now the girlfriend turns around and looks at me, too. They both shake their heads as if I’ve offended them. On, off, on, off … Should I? Hey, why not? We’ve come to a stop. We’re all just sitting here. I put my Prius in park and get out, go up to his window and tap on it with my wedding ring. I hear the soft clunk of his car door locks. Jesus, what does he think I am? The traffic jam ax murderer?
“Yeah?”
“Your blinker’s on.”
“Is it?” He gives me this look like it’s his inalienable right to drive me crazy. But hey, I’m not about to get into a dustup about it with Junior here. I turn and head back to my car.
He’s a ballbuster, this kid. Lets about a minute go by before he finally turns it off. And when he does, it’s like the relief you feel when one of those ice cream headaches finally begins to subside. The radio’s playing that ominous music from Jaws. “Okay, but let’s separate fact from Hollywood fiction,” the shark lady’s saying. “These animals are carnivores, yes. But they’re not evil manhunters. They hunt and eat to survive, not to kill gratuitously. That better describes our species than theirs.”
“Natural Born Killers,” the Mad Hatter says. “Now there’s a great movie! Woody Harrelson and … Who was the girl? Natalie Portman, right?”
It was Juliette Lewis. One of the students I was seeing at the time—when had that movie come out? 1994? 95?—she kept mentioning how Juliette Lewis and she were half-sisters, and how they looked so much alike, and if I didn’t believe her, I should go see her sister’s new movie, Natural Born Killers. She’d seen it several times herself, she said—had been invited to attend the premiere but couldn’t afford the trip to California. Petra, her name was. She was a nice enough kid, high-strung but high functioning. In the honors program, if I remember correctly. But she was a sad kid who, I began to realize, had no friends. And when I did make a point of going to see the movie, I didn’t observe the slightest resemblance between the two. I eventually diagnosed her with Delusional Disorder, Mixed Type …
“No, seriously, Tracy. You should Netflix it this weekend,” the Mad Hatter advises. Not likely, Tracy says. Tomorrow, she’ll be part of an expedition that’s hoping to locate and tag one or more of the great whites for the purpose of tracking their migratory patterns …
Whatever it was that was compelling Annie to turn her landfill and secondhand shop finds into art, over the next years she created a series of assemblages she called Buckingham Palace Confidential. In Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! Prince Philip and the rest of the royal family sit stiffly at a doll house dinette set while, standing at a toy stove on which sits a blackened toy frying pan, the Queen, wearing a coronet and a polka dot apron, throws up her jointed arms in domestic defeat. In Lady Di Reconsiders, the Princess of Wales, in her famously familiar wedding gown, marries Magic Johnson instead of Charles. Johnson’s in his uniform, as are his ushers, the other members of the 1992 Olympic “dream team.” Diana’s attendants are female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Supergirl. The royal family is in attendance, too, but they’ve turned their backs to the ceremony. So it was art that was driving her, I decided—comic art at that, laced with a little feminist protest. But not dysfunction … And yet, those weird scavenger hunts she was doing on the Saturdays when I was home with the kids? Whenever she came back with a good haul, she’d be wide-eyed, jazzed up, talking a blue streak and fast. What was that? Creative passion? Some kind of mania? I remember worrying that she might be starting to manifest bipolar disorder. But whatever Annie’s behavior did or didn’t indicate, I tried hard to play by her rules, encouraging her without engaging her as to why she was hunting down all this stuff, or what these 3-D collages she was making meant. But not engaging her didn’t mean I wasn’t watching her—trying to understand what was going on with her. Look, she was right: she was my wife, not my patient. I tried not to analyze her, but hey. Bottom line: I was worried about her. I’m a psychologist. I observe, make hypotheses. It’s what we do.
No. Correction: I was a psychologist. When my license came up for renewal last month, I let the date go by. I go back and forth about whether I should have. But what’s done is done …
It was hard for Annie back then, I know. As the house-bound wife of a busy professional, she carried most of the burden of child care, cleaning, budgeting. She had to grab a little time here and there to work on her art. When I was down there in Pennsylvania with my mother, she hired some older woman to babysit a couple hours a day, and I applauded her for that. Told her it was a good idea. But that turned out to be a fiasco when the sitter forgot to lock the basement door and Andrew tumbled halfway down the stairs. Annie’d had to take him to the emergency room for stitches in his forehead and be grilled by the ER doc as if she were a child abuse suspect. She decided it wasn’t worth it. Told the sitter not to come back. And when I got back, mentioned casually that Thea had come to the funeral, Annie’d reacted like a crazy woman. Like some spark between my ex-girlfriend and me had been reignited when the opposite was true. Seeing Thea again had been like a refresher course in why I’d ended it with her.
I’d have liked to help her out more, but the domestic imbalance was unavoidable. Counseling Services was understaffed, we clinicians seriously overworked. Students who wanted to see one of us had to put their names on a list and then wait for an appointment, sometimes as long as two or three weeks. Besides our caseloads, we counselors supervised the clinical practicums of the predoctoral students, got saddled with committee work, ran groups. In addition to all that, it fell on us to plan and implement Suicide Awareness Week, HIV Prevention Week, Alcohol Awareness Week, and so on. Most weekdays, I left for work before 7:00 A.M.—early morning was the best time to catch up on paperwork—and didn’t get home most nights until six or after. On the weekends, I could help out more. Take the twins to the park, fix a cabinet door or rake leaves, make a Saturday night supper while she went off to scavenge. Saturday was our night for sex, too—a standing appointment unless one or both of the twins was up, or one of us was too exhausted for intimacy. Sometimes an extra hour of sleep seemed sexier than having sex. But weekdays? Forget it. I’d get home and my dinner would be sitting Saran-wrapped on top of the microwave, the twins would be asleep in their cribs, and Annie would be down there, creating her 3-D collages amid the basement noises, one ear cocked toward the baby monitor upstairs …
Okay, here we go. The traffic’s finally started to move again. Passing that camper, I put on my directional signal and jockey myself in front of them. Let Mr. and Mrs. Big-Ass Camper stare at my bumper stickers: DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC, TOO and OBAMA/BIDEN ’08 …
Annie had been creating in basement obscurity for three or four years when I urged her to take a risk and exhibit her Buckingham Palace Confidential assemblages at the annual outdoor art show in Mystic. At first she resisted the idea, arguing that her kind of work wasn’t what those big summertime crowds would be interested in. But I kept nudging her until, reluctantly, she changed her mind and reserved herself a space. All that weekend, people paused, smiled, and snickered at Annie’s creations and then moved on to the “real” art: fruit in a bowl, seascapes. She had priced her pieces modestly—fifty dollars for the smaller assemblages, a hundred for the larger and more elaborate ones. She sold nothing. But to the surprise of many—and to the disgruntlement of the Mystic Art Association’s watercolorists and lighthouse painters—the judge awarded the Best in Show ribbon to Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! What was that guy’s name? The judge? He’d been something of a big-deal artist himself back in the day, I remember Annie telling me. Italian guy, little pencil-thin mustache. He and Annie stayed in touch after she got that Best in Show. He must be dead by now—he was already up there back then—but I bet he’d be pleased to know where Annie’s art has taken her.
Along with the five-hundred-dollar prize money Annie got from the Mystic show, she was offered a one-woman show at the Hygienic Restaurant in New London. The Hygienic had long since stopped serving food, but it had become a kind of retro coffee house—a haven for poets, interpretive dancers, klezmer bands—alternative artists of all kinds, and their equally alternative admirers. Until Annie’s opening, I had never seen such a convergence of pierced, tattooed, and purple-haired people. Annie looked adorable that night in her floral dress and purple leggings, that big bow in her hair. “Oh, thank you so much … You do? Really? Oh, my God,” she’d respond to those who approached her to say that they loved her work or wanted to buy it. I was so proud of her that night—so happy to see her on the receiving end of some artistic appreciation, and almost four hundred dollars in sales. I knew more about psychology than I did about art, but I was becoming convinced that Annie was more talented than she or I had realized.
Her modesty about her accomplishments and her natural shyness were a big part of her charm that night at the Hygienic. Annie’s brother Donald and his wife Mimsy had taken the twins for the night—their first sleepover. I’d snuck a bottle of champagne and a half-dozen chocolate-covered strawberries in the fridge before Annie and I left for the opening, and when we got home, we got into bed, drank, ate, and made love. “Good god, I’m crazy about you,” I declared after we were both spent and sweaty. “Love you, too,” she murmured back. If you had told me that night that, two decades later, Annie would leave me for a woman, I would have thought you were crazy … Agnello: that was that judge’s name. Mr. Agnello … Had there been signs all along that she might be bisexual? Cues that I’d missed right from the beginning? …
Annie’s Hygienic show caught the interest of a Connecticut magazine features writer who drove out to our house and interviewed Annie about her work. She’d brought along a photographer, so there was a photo shoot, too. I was happy for Annie. One door kept opening onto another door, and she deserved that. And I guess this was crass of me, but the fact that people had actually begun paying her for her work somehow, in my mind, legitimized her efforts. This was a career, not an emotional disorder. I should stop playing psych detective and just relax. Celebrate her accomplishments instead of stewing about her creative process. She worked so hard and with such dedication down there in our basement, to the soundtrack of the furnace’s drone and the washing machine’s agitation. Good for her!
But until that Connecticut magazine article came out, I hadn’t realized the extent to which agitation fueled Annie’s art. Eventually it dawned on me that her “no trespassing” rule had been my escape hatch, too. I’d been allowed the luxury of assuming that The Dancing Scissors, The Cowgirls’ Revolt, and Buckingham Palace Confidential were playful. Satirical. Proof that my intense and sometimes morose wife had a lighter side, too. But in “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” the writer said that my wife’s compositions emerged from “the blast furnace of her pent-up rage.” That they were “howls of protest against a suffocating middle-class domesticity” and the many ways in which society “tethers women to the mundane.” The mundane? Had Annie been referring to Rice-A-Roni or me? Was Diana’s rejection of Charles in favor of Magic Johnson metaphorical? The UPS driver who made deliveries to our house was a good-looking young black guy. Reggie, his name was. Someone she knew from way back, she said. Twice I’d gotten home from work a little early and found the two of them chatting at the front door. I couldn’t quite imagine that she’d cheat on me, but was I being naïve? The scientist in me advised objectivity, but the husband in me had just been put on alert.
“Good article, don’t you think?” I said, when I looked up from Connecticut magazine to her. I was hoping she’d say she’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. Instead, she said, “Pretty good. It’s weird to see yourself in a magazine, though. I feel … exposed, I guess.”
“Well, isn’t that what artists want? Exposure?”
She shrugged.
“Good picture of you.”
She made a face. “I wish my hair didn’t look so flat,” she said. “I can’t believe that, on the one day I was having my picture taken for a magazine, our hair dryer died.”
“Yeah, well … It’s interesting what it says about your work.”
No response.
“I mean, who knew you were so angry?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Orion. Maybe someone who was bothering to pay attention.” She walked out of the room.
I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, got up, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. For a minute or more, I watched her yank towels out of the washing machine and slam them into the dryer. “You know something?” I said. “I don’t exactly appreciate you projecting your own marital shortcomings onto me.”
She turned and faced me, furious. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Speak English, not psychology.”
“Okay. Sure. Somebody in this marriage hasn’t been paying much attention to the other person, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”
“Oh, right. You’re just the perfect husband, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m the imperfect husband. But I think you’ve got it ass-backward as far as who’s been ignoring who.”
“Oh, really? Gee, Dr. Oh, I’m so sorry for ‘projecting,’ as you put it. And for having a career of my own.”
It was April. I had just done our taxes. “Yeah, speaking of careers, you know how much I contributed to our income this past year? Sixty-two grand. And you know how much you made? A whopping seven hundred dollars. So I think you’d better thank your lucky stars instead of bitching about my career.”
“Oh, you’re right as usual, Dr. Oh. Thanks so much for throwing that in my face and helping me see the light.” And with that, she lifted the lid of our top-loading washing machine and slammed it down. Lifted it again and slammed it. Lifted, slammed. Thanks in part to “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” we had just entered the thrust-and-parry phase of our marriage.
Over the next several days, each of us accused the other of myriad slights and failures, large and small. The fighting exhausted us both, and our lives were already pretty exhausting. She began giving me the single-syllable treatment. “Good day today?” “Yup.” “Want to get a sitter this weekend? Go see a movie or something?” “Nah.” In the midst of that uneasy near-silence, I reread that Connecticut magazine article and came upon a couple of paragraphs I’d missed the first time. She’d told the reporter that, once upon a time, another artist had lived on the grounds of the house where we lived—a black laborer who’d taken up painting—and that she’d discovered one of his “compositions” that had been left behind. I knew the one she was talking about: a crazy-looking circus scene we’d found when we were cleaning out the attic. To my mind, it was strictly amateur, not to mention a little freaky-looking, and I’d wanted to throw it out along with the other junk up there. But Annie had said not to. It had “spoken to her,” she told that reporter, which was news to me, and when she set up her studio in the basement, she’d brought it down there for inspiration. (Oh, she’d set up that work space? So much for the work I’d done for her down there.) In the article, she said she might even have “seen” this would-be artist, who was long dead by the time we moved in. Had seen him twice, in fact. Once out back in the yard—a big, muscular guy in overalls looking up at her as she stood at one of the upstairs windows—and another time down in her studio. Both times, she said, he’d looked right at her, nodded, and then faded away. It hadn’t scared her to see him, she said; it had reassured her. Oh great, I remember thinking. Now she was seeing ghosts? Then how come I’d never heard about this? No, I figured, she wasn’t seeing people that weren’t there, except maybe in a dream she’d had. More likely, she had told the writer that because, hey, who doesn’t love a good ghost story? It wasn’t like Annie to fabricate stuff like that, but since she’d become an artist, she’d exhibited all kinds of new behaviors. And so I didn’t challenge her on it. “Annie Oh’s Angry Art” had already caused problems for us. I let it drop.
I finally got us a referral to a marriage counselor, despite Annie’s suspicion that the deck would be stacked in my favor because she’d be the only person in the room who wasn’t a therapist. I hired us a sitter for Tuesday evenings. (Katie had been my student coordinator for Date Rape Awareness Week.) And so for the next several weeks, Annie and I drove to Glastonbury to see Suzanne in her office full of philodendrons and ferns and hand-thrown clay pots that she had made, glazed, and fired in her wood-stoked kiln. She gave us one of those pots at the end of our first session—an imperfect one. A piece had broken off and been glued back on. “My point is this,” Suzanne said, passing her finger over the crack. “This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.”
“How was tango class tonight?” Katie would ask when we returned home from our marriage counseling sessions. I’d invented our tango lessons so that I didn’t have to tell her we were trying to fix our marriage.
“Great. How were the kids?”
“Super good! They’re such cuties. And you know, I think it’s super cool that you guys are learning the tango. I wish my parents weren’t such fuddy-duddies about stuff like that. Get out of their comfort zone? Forget it. They’d rather just sit there watching TV.”
Whether or not we were doing the tango up there in Glastonbury, we were definitely out of our comfort zone. But it was worth it. We did repair things. For quite a while, actually. Becoming less accusatory of each other lessened the tension. We practiced better teamwork with the twins and the house stuff, better listening skills, worked on more open communication. Hey, I’m a psychologist; it’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of these strategies. But knowing how to advise others in dealing with their shit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to tackle your own without having to check in with a third party once a week. And besides, my patients range in age from eighteen to about twenty-one, twenty-two. Their relationships are more about managing the drama than maintaining a marriage. Suzanne likened the latter to servicing a car you love and want to last. Listen to the engine, rotate the tires, check the oil. Things got better for us intimacy-wise, too. I became more patient. She became more communicative about what she wanted. She had more orgasms than she’d ever had before, and damn if I didn’t enjoy giving them to her … I mean, it wasn’t happily ever after, not by any stretch. She was still distant sometimes, both in our bed and out of it, and I still overdid it sometimes, work schedule-wise. But it definitely got better. Our “tango lessons” went from once a week to once a month, and then to once every three months. Marriage as car maintenance: I was a little put off by the metaphor at first, but as it turned out, Suzanne knew her stuff. Things were much better for Annie and me. And then she got pregnant again and they weren’t …
“Their skin is covered with small toothlike scales, so they’d be virtually unaware that they’re being embedded,” Dr. Skelly is telling the Mad Hatter. “These tags use satellite technology, so that lets us—”
“Like a GPS system?” the Mad Hatter asks.
“Uh-huh. Pretty much. If we get lucky and the tags stay embedded, we should be able to track the animals’ migratory behavior. Which would be fantastic! In other parts of the world, great whites have been tracked successfully, so there’s a good deal known about their migration patterns. But that’s not the case here in the northern Atlantic. Great whites in these waters have always been a bit of a mystery.”
“Well, Dr. Tracy Skelly, thanks for a fascinating discussion. And good luck tracking those great whites. Time once again to check on news, weather, and traffic. But stay tuned, fellas, because when we … two of the self-described ‘guidettes’ who will … in MTV’s latest … Jersey Shore, debuting next …” Mercifully, the Mad Hatter is finally fading away.
Chapter Three (#ulink_fc5aebe7-fa5d-5330-98fd-3b923d4fc115)
Annie Oh (#ulink_fc5aebe7-fa5d-5330-98fd-3b923d4fc115)
I’m goin’ to the market now, Miz Anna. Anything else you need?”
“What?”
“At the market. Anything else that ain’t on your list?”
“No, I guess not. Maybe a pack of cigarettes.”
“Marlboro Lights?”
“Yes, please. Do you have enough money? Here, let me get my purse and give you another twenty just in case. You can keep the change.”
Last month, Viveca reprimanded me for giving Minnie an extra hundred dollars. “Sweetheart, once you start that, they start expecting it,” she said, as if I were a child who didn’t know better. As if Minnie were a dog I got caught feeding scraps to under the table. I kept my mouth shut, but I was pissed. I’m pissed so often lately. It’s nerves, I guess. It’s not that I’m not committed to Viveca. I am. But I’ve already been a bride. And I’m just not comfortable about being married back in Three Rivers … But okay, I’ll get through it. It’s one weekend, that’s all, and I’ll have some time with my daughters in the house where they grew up; I’m looking forward to that. And once we return from Greece, I’ll go back to my studio and Viveca will go back to her gallery and her various charity fund-raising initiatives and things will return to normal.
I’ve slipped Minnie more money since Viveca’s reprimand—hundreds by now probably, although I haven’t kept track. “Our little secret,” I say whenever I press the tens and twenties into her calloused hand and squeeze.
Minnie’s more guarded about her personal life than Hector is, but she’s been opening up little by little, more so since Viveca’s been away and I’ve been staying home instead of going to the studio. We’ve started eating our lunch together, Minnie and me, in Viveca’s study because there’s a little TV in there and Minnie likes to watch The Jerry Springer Show. I’m not sure why, because day after day, it reinforces the worst stereotypes. All the black men on Jerry Springer are dim-witted dogs who cheat on their women. And when Jerry brings out the brazen women these men have been cheating with, the betrayed wives rush them, slapping and punching, yanking off their wigs while the mostly white audience cheers them on. Minnie shakes her head and chuckles and thinks these fights are funny. Doesn’t she realize how racist it is? That it’s staged? I’m at a loss to understand what it is about Springer that appeals to her so much. But hey, I sit there, eating my yogurt and watching it with her.
Minnie smokes at our apartment, which Viveca would be furious about if she knew. But she’s discreet. When she goes into the spare bedroom for a cigarette break, she sits in front of the open window and blows the smoke through the screen. When I walked in and caught her that time, her eyes narrowed—looked more defiant than apologetic—and she said, “You gon’ tell Missuz I been rippin’ smokes?” I told her I wouldn’t and smiled. Asked her to please call me Annie. I thought she’d be pleased by my overture, but she just nodded, not smiling back. She hasn’t called me Annie yet. To Minnie, I’m still Miz Anna, the woman who’s going to marry Missuz.
Since Viveca’s been gone, I’ve been smoking, too. The first couple of times, I bummed cigarettes from Minnie. Then I went down to the market on the corner, the one with the ATM, and bought myself a pack from that effeminate Korean cashier with the bad attitude and the Velveeta-dyed hair. He wears women’s tops and pants some days—size zero, I’m guessing, because he has the narrowest waist I’ve ever seen. He’s over-the-top hostile—resentful when you go up to the counter and dare to interrupt his magazine reading because you want to buy something. He sighs long-sufferingly, slaps his magazine down on the counter, and rings you up with a roll of his eyes. The other day, I got so fed up with his bad attitude that, when he went to give me my change, I grabbed his wrist, looked him in the eye, and told him that whoever or whatever he was so angry about, he didn’t have to take it out on his customers. I watched his expression change from defiance to fear. He was suddenly a scared and miserable little boy, and I knew that, somewhere, in some way, somebody had abused him. I felt bad and looked away—looked down at the counter, at Oprah’s beaming face on the cover of O magazine. He’d dropped my change when I grabbed his wrist and there were dimes on Oprah’s boobs. They looked like pasties. When I looked back up at him, his mask was back on and he looked as ornery as ever. But it was too late. I’d already seen his fear. I can use it if I need to. It’s part of what makes me powerful: I can sometimes figure out what other people’s vulnerabilities are without revealing any of my own. It’s something I learned from my family, I guess; we O’Days were talented secret keepers.
For the last week or so, I’ve been buying two packs at a time: Marlboro Lights for me and Newports for Minnie. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy person keeps harping on the dangers of smoking. Her and her cushy doctor’s life, her little brown bangs. She reminds me of those beautifully dressed girls from high school—the ones whose mothers let them borrow their credit cards and buy whatever they wanted at the Westwick Mall where I worked. That was my first real job, not counting babysitting; I’d scoop, weigh, and bag people’s mixed nuts, dried fruits, jelly candies, and deluxe jumbo cashews at a kiosk called Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. My customers were fat people, mostly, who watched the scale to make sure I wasn’t shortchanging them. I’d keep one eye on what I was shoveling onto the scale and the other on those girls from my school who strolled by with their bags and packages. I recognized them, but they didn’t recognize me or even look my way. I hadn’t had a mother in eight years, let alone a borrowed credit card to buy things with. What did any of those girls know about having to wear used clothes from Love Me Two Times or the Salvation Army store? And what does Dr. Nancy know about what someone like Minnie is up against? That day I caught her smoking? I sat on the bed next to her, lifted the window I was facing, took a cigarette out of her pack, and lit up. And the two of us sat there, inhaling and blowing smoke through our respective screens, tapping ash into the plastic cap of the Febreze can that Minnie uses for an ashtray. Neither of us spoke until we’d each started second cigarettes. That was when she told me about her ten-year-old son, Africa. She’s a single mother. It’s been three years since Africa’s father left, she says, and he’s never paid her one single dime for child support.
Minnie drinks on the job, too. She doesn’t know I know. The other night, I dropped an egg on the kitchen floor, and when I went into the cleaning closet to get something to wipe it up, I found a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano wine hidden at the bottom of a box of rags, mop heads, and vacuum cleaner attachments. It was half full. And when I checked it the following night after she left to go home, it was only a quarter full. The night after that, there was a new jug—Carlo Rossi burgundy this time. She had finished the other bottle and drunk three or four inches’ worth from the new one. Well, as long as she gets her work done and Viveca doesn’t find out, let her drink. Maybe I have Carlo Rossi to thank for the fact that she’s been more open lately. Maybe it’s not so much that she’s begun to trust me as it is because she’s buzzed.
Minnie has medical expenses because of Africa’s asthma, and she’s trying to save enough to relocate to an apartment where there’s no mold. She’d like to get her teeth fixed, too, she told me, so she can find herself another boyfriend. Africa’s father got remarried, she says. “His new wifey LaRue gonna have triplets is what LaRue’s cousin told me on the low,” she said. “Darnell don’t even know ’bout them babies yet, but I do. Well, he in for a big surprise. Serve him right. That man loves his sleep better than anything ’cept hisself—lookin’ at the mirror all the time so he can see how pretty he is. I hope them three babies all get colic and keep him up nights. He won’t look so pretty then. He be runnin’ away from that mirror.” She chuckled at the thought of Darnell’s sleep deprivation in the same way she chuckles when the black women fight each other on Jerry Springer. Then she snuffed out her cigarette, stood, and said she didn’t suspect “Missuz’s furniture gonna dust itself.” I admire Minnie’s flinty bitterness, and the fact that, whenever I give her extra cash, she takes it without acting beholden or even grateful. “Our little secret”: it’s like a contract between the two of us.
Minnie and her boy live in Newark. Africa’s sickly but “sweet as sugar.” For the past two years, she’s paid a Spanish boy down the hall to babysit Africa in the morning “but he growin’ hisself a mustache and gettin’ some attitude lately.” Puberty’s apparently made him less dependable. “He spoze to show up befo’ I leave for work. Fix Africa his breffest, make sure he gots his homework and his inhaler, then walk him to school. But half the time, I gotta go befo’ he come so I don’t miss my bus, and then I gotta call and call his cell phone to see if he there yet so Africa don’t have to walk hisself to school and do his work all mornin’ long with nothin’ in his stomach until hot lunch. I probly gon’ have to fire Oswaldo’s ass pretty soon, but I ain’t done it yet.”
Yesterday Minnie told me she has two grown sons by another man. Twins, Ronald and Donald. Donald is doing time in upstate New York—for what she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. “But Ronald never been no trouble. He come outa me first, thass why. It’s the second twin thass always the trouble chile.” Ronald is married and works at the Friendly’s ice cream plant in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Minnie told me. “I keep axin’ him to come visit us an’ bring his kids so I can see my gran’babies. But he ain’t come yet. Thass okay, though. I understand. He busy.” When I told Minnie that I have twins, too—a daughter who runs a soup kitchen in San Francisco and a son who’s stationed at Fort Hood—she nodded indifferently. And when I told her that, when I was a kid, I had worked at a Friendly’s restaurant, she had no reaction at all. Minnie likes me well enough—not only because of the extra money I give her, I like to think—but she doesn’t seem to entertain the possibility that she and I have anything in common.
Well, why would she? She’s poor; I’m not. She’s black; I’m white. Minnie says her commute takes her almost two hours either way. After she catches an early bus out of Newark, she transfers twice, then takes the ferry from Hoboken into Manhattan. At the South Ferry station, she catches the Lexington Avenue local up to the Spring Street stop, then walks over to our apartment on Elizabeth. The trip in reverse takes longer, she says. Some nights she doesn’t return home until eight o’clock or later. My walk from our apartment to my studio space at the artists’ collective on Bleecker takes ten minutes when I don’t stop along the way, collecting sidewalk discards that I might incorporate into my art. (On trash collection day, that ten-minute walk sometimes takes me an hour or more, depending on what people have thrown out. A few weeks ago, I had such a good haul that I had to grab an abandoned shopping cart and wheel my treasures to the studio. I was going to leave the cart on the sidewalk out front, but then I lugged that up to my workplace, too.) One night when she got home, Minnie said, she put the key in the lock, opened the door, and smelled chocolate. The Spanish kid, who’s not supposed to leave Africa by himself, had done just that. Left to his own devices, Africa had gotten the bright idea to take a bath in cocoa. “He run hot water, then dump this whole big can of Swiss Miss that I got cheap at the flea market because of the gone-by date.” Minnie was headachy and dog tired, she said, and when she saw Africa sitting in all that chocolate bathwater, she beat him silly, splashing cocoa every which way. “He cryin’ so hard, he give hisself a asthma ’tack and I say, ‘Where your inhaler at?’ And he go, while he wheezin’ away, he go, ‘It in school, Mama.’ And so we end up at the emergency for two, three hour. After we get home, I put him to bed and start cleanin’ up all that mess. Seem like no mo’ than a few hours go by before I had to wake up, let Oswaldo in cuz he be bangin’ on the door—on time for once. By the time I got ready, I had to run to catch that bus.”
That’s another thing Minnie doesn’t know we have in common: that I used to hit my boy, too. Andrew, the second-born of my twins. Poor, sweet Andrew, who looked so beautiful when he slept. Who, despite those wallopings, always kept my tirades from his father. His sisters did, too. Why was that? I wonder. Were they being protective of me? Were they afraid that, if they told, I might turn my anger on them, too? Or that I’d be taken away—carted off by the authorities the way I was when I was a little girl? No, that was my fear, not theirs … Of the three kids, Andrew’s the one with the most O’Day in him. This? Oh, yeah, I fell off my bike and bumped my head on the sidewalk, Dad … Me and Jay Jay were horsing around over at his house. It’s just a black and blue mark, Dad. It’s no big deal. If I hadn’t known where those battle scars really came from, I might have believed him, too.
I didn’t want Andrew to enlist; I begged him not to. Every night before I go to bed, I get down on my knees, make the sign of the cross, and ask Jesus to please, please spare Andrew from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes I get scared that God or karma or whoever or whatever’s in charge of retribution will pay me back for the way I singled him out. Or because I walked away from my marriage. It amuses Viveca, I think, to see me praying; she doesn’t believe in God. “What is it you’re praying for?” she asked me one night, and I kept it vague. “World peace,” I said. But mostly what I beg God for is my son’s safety. Please, I pray, let me die if I have to, but spare my son. Let Andrew not have to go to either of those places and be killed.
Okay, I tell myself. If you’re not going into work again today, then do something else. It’s after eleven already. Go down to the lobby and get the mail. Check your e-mail.
Viveca’s two-day-old message is titled Mykonos! I click on it. “Here’s the villa where we’ll be staying,” it says. “Have a look.” In defiance, I decide not to open the attachment—those pictures she wants me to see … Our apartment, our housekeeper. What’s hers, Viveca often reminds me, is mine now, too. Nevertheless, while she’s away, I’m supposed to sign that prenup agreement her lawyer has drawn up. When it was hand delivered by way of messenger from Attorney Philip Liebmann’s Sixth Avenue office, Viveca said, “I told Phil it wasn’t necessary, but he was insistent. Got a little snippy with me in fact. I’ve known Phil since I was a child; he was my father’s lawyer and his tennis buddy. He feels paternal toward me, that’s all. But, sweetheart, it’s just a boring legal formality that’s going to make an overly protective old man happy. Don’t read any more into it than that. What’s mine is yours. You know that.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_faba7b16-9d33-5bb3-bf9a-2fa5040e67b6)
Orion Oh (#ulink_faba7b16-9d33-5bb3-bf9a-2fa5040e67b6)
She didn’t just walk out on me one day; she migrated to Manhattan in stages. Day trips into the city to meet with gallery owners or important collectors turned into overnights. And after she won that NEA grant, those overnights turned into four-day work weeks because she used the money to rent studio space at a building in SoHo—a place that was owned and operated by some artists’ cooperative that Viveca had connections with.
“You’ve worked successfully at home all these years,” I reminded her. “Why do you suddenly need to make art in New York?” Because she wanted to come up from the basement and be in the company of other artists instead of our washer and dryer, she said. Because in New York she’d be able to get on the subway and, fifteen minutes later, be standing in front of some masterpiece at the Met or MoMA, or walking into some gallery in Brooklyn to see a show by some up-and-coming artist that everyone was talking about. “Sweetie, I just want to try it,” she told me. “It’s an experiment. It’s only for a year.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want us to turn into one of those long-distance-marriage couples,” I told her. “Look what happened to Jeff and Ginny’s marriage when they tried it.” For one thing, she said, she took exception to the term “long-distance” when you could get from Three Rivers to Manhattan or vice versa in under three hours. And for another, she wanted to remind me that it was Jeff’s infidelity, not the geographical distance between him and Ginny, that ended their marriage. I considered making the point that being a workaholic was a kind of infidelity, too, but I held my tongue. How many times, when the kids were younger and she was housebound with them, had she leveled that same criticism at me?
“And this is something you really, really want?” I said. “Something you think is going to fuel your work?”
She nodded emphatically, no trace of ambivalence whatsoever.
“Then let me talk to Muriel. Maybe she can do some juggling in the department and finagle me a leave of absence. There’s got to be plenty of sublets in Manhattan, right?”
She folded her arms against her chest. “And what would you do all day long while I was working? Hang around some tiny little studio apartment? I know you, Orion. You’d go stir-crazy.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. “Because I’d never be resourceful enough to get up and leave the apartment. Go out and engage with one of the most exciting cities in the world. I’d probably just sit around, watching soap operas and twiddling my thumbs.”
I smiled when I said it, but Annie looked exasperated. For one thing, she said, Viveca had already offered her a room in her apartment, rent free. What was she supposed to do? Tell her that her husband would be moving in, too? And more importantly, she wanted to be able to immerse herself in her work without having to keep to a schedule, or even look at a clock if she didn’t want to. “But how could I do that if I knew you were waiting around for me to quit for the day?” She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. “Sweetie, this is such a great opportunity for me. It would be for one year, not a lifetime. And we’d still see each other every weekend. I’d like to think we have a strong enough marriage to handle that.”
I smiled. “Just for a year, huh? With weekend furloughs?” She nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s try it.”
If she was preparing for a show or had to hobnob with some wealthy art patron who was in town for the weekend, the only day she could spare me was Sunday. I’d drive down to New Haven and meet her at the train station. We’d walk over to the green, grab some lunch at Claire’s or the Mermaid Bar. Compare notes about the kids—which one of us had heard from which, which of the three we were worried about that week. (More often than not, it was our wild card, Marissa. Or Andrew, who by then had entered the military and was facing the possibility of deployment.) We’d spend a couple of hours together, then head back to Union Station. Stand together out on the platform and, when the train came into view, hug each other, kiss good-bye. Then she’d board the Acela or the Metroliner and ride away. And as her one-year New York experiment turned into a year and a half after a couple of big purchases courtesy of viveca c, those kisses became pecks, the hugs became perfunctory. “My part-time wife” I’d started calling her, at first in jest, then in jest-with-an-edge. Later still, I hurled the term at her in outright anger.
Looking back, I’m amazed at how much in denial I was about her and Viveca. Yeah, I’d get worried from time to time, but what I thought was that maybe she’d gotten involved with some other guy. I’d imagine him, worry about him, even sometimes picture her walking hand in hand with him—some artist or musician type, some lanky younger guy with a porkpie hat and a couple of days’ worth of stubble. But the only time I confronted her about another man, she got huffy—said that it was all about her work and that my insecurity was my problem, not hers. And hey, whenever I called her? She was almost always there where she was supposed to be—at her studio or at night at Viveca’s. Once when I called and Viveca answered, she said, “You know, Orrin, one of these days you and I will have to meet in person.” I let it go that she’d gotten my name wrong, and that we’d already met several years back at the Biennial opening. “I’d like that, too,” I said. I went down to visit Annie at the apartment two or three times, but each time it was when Viveca was out of town for the weekend. I still don’t know when they made the switch from roommates to lovers. Annie’s told me it happened over time, that their affair wasn’t “premeditated.” I believe her. Interesting, though, the way she’d put it. As if it was a crime. Which it was, in a way: the murder of our marriage.
Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true. How many times had I suggested that to one of the undergrads sitting across from me in my office? Some self-deluding young woman who was trying to convince herself that a boyfriend’s having smacked her around was a one-time thing; some young guy’s assertion that, although sex with other guys excited him, he wasn’t really gay. “Put your hand out,” I’d tell these students. “Now bring it closer. Now closer still.” And when their hands were a half inch from their noses, I’d ask them to describe what they saw. “It’s blurry,” they’d say, and I’d suggest that sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked. And that when wishful thinking trumped the reality we might otherwise be able to see more clearly and manage, we were setting ourselves up for a rude awakening … Psychologist, heal thyself. Little by little, I began to withdraw my own hand from my face, as it were. Began to face the fact that Annie and I no longer were together. That she had defected.
The showdown came one Sunday afternoon when, in the middle of an argument we were having about her absenteeism, I said, “Do you even want to be married to me anymore?” We were in our kitchen. I was at the stove, making dinner—frying up eggplant on one burner, simmering marinara on another. Annie was at the table, going through two weeks’ worth of accumulated mail. Of course I do, I wanted to hear her say, but what she said, instead, was that she wasn’t sure anymore. That she was confused.
“Confused?” I picked up the frying pan and slammed it back down against the burner. The noise made her jump. “Well, if you’re confused, how the hell do you think I feel?” At this stage of our crumbling marriage, our battle roles had reversed themselves. Annie had always been the one who yelled and banged things when we argued; I was the one who spoke softly and civilly, maintaining the upper hand. Now I was the shouter, the slammer. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. Stood and walked out of the room, out of our house, and down the road. I stood at the window, watching her go. That was my rude awakening.
Later, when the meal I’d made was starting to go cold, she came back. We sat in silence across the table from each other. Chewed, swallowed. Each bite I took landed like a stone against my stomach. “Look, if you’re confused, then go see someone,” I finally said. “Or maybe we can go together like we did that other time. I can make some calls, get a referral to a good marriage counselor and we can—”
“I am seeing someone,” she said. “Romantically, I mean, not professionally.” I stared at her, a forkful of food poised in front of my mouth. “I still love you, Orion,” she told me in tears. “I always will. But I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
That someone else, she said, was Viveca.
“Viveca? … Viveca?”
Annie had gone with me to see that movie, I remember—Natural Born Killers. It was my idea, not hers. And about ten minutes into it, when Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson began murdering people in a bar for the fun of it, she took hold of my arm and whispered that she needed to leave. “It’s satire,” I’d whispered back. “Cartoon violence. Don’t take it so literally.” But she let go of my arm, stood, and walked out of the multiplex. Walked around the mall until the film was over. I finally found her sitting at a table outside of Au Bon Pain, cardboard coffee cup in front of her, looking sad and lost. Was she thinking of leaving me even back then? Wrestling with her attraction to women, maybe, or suffering because of my insensitivity? There was that lesbian friend of hers who visited us one time—that woman Priscilla. She and Annie had waitressed together back when Annie was in her teens. They’d been close, she said, and for a fleeting moment I wondered how close. But I’d dismissed it. Because even if they had been intimate, it was no big deal. Some kids experiment at that age. It’s how they figure out who they are … No, I should have been more in touch with her feelings and her fears. Should have gotten up and left the movie with her that afternoon—been less of a therapist trying to fathom my patient Petra’s psyche and more of a husband taking care of my wife. But no, I’d stayed, had sat through a film that, frankly, sickened me, too. Well, what does it matter at this point? The divorce is final. Their wedding invitations are already out. Mine, ripped in half, is in the second, smaller duffel bag I packed last night—the one filled with the stuff I’ve taken along for the little oceanside ceremony I’m planning to have once I get to North Truro. Or maybe I should say if I get there. I don’t think we’ve moved a mile in the last fifteen minutes. Well, so what, dude? It’s not like you’re going to be late for work. You’re unemployed, remember?
My “early retirement” from the university was an exhausted surrender, not an admission that Jasmine Negron’s version of what had happened that night was accurate. Instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to a colleague they’d known and worked with for years, Muriel and her cohorts had gotten behind a doctoral student who’d received a lukewarm evaluation from me the semester before. Once upon a time, Muriel and I had been friends. Lunch pals. We’d served together on committees, carpooled to conferences. We two and our spouses had seen each other socially during those early years. But after she was named director, things changed. She informed her counselors of her intent to create a “paper trail” about everything that transpired in our department, then generated a maddening number of forms and reports. And she expected all this additional paperwork to be completed on time, not a day or two late, no matter how much our caseloads had swelled because of the policy changes she had put into place. She was a stickler about those deadlines—a pain in the ass about them—and a strictly-by-the-book administrator who expected the rest of us to recast ourselves in her image, irrespective of our own treatment styles and philosophies. She intimidated the younger members of the department, many of whom sought me out about how to deal with her demands and criticisms. And because I’d gone to bat for some of them, Muriel pulled me into her office one afternoon and accused me of undermining her authority and encouraging others to do the same. She and I had butted heads on a number of occasions and on a number of issues. And so, when Jasmine filed her complaint, Muriel appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate: Blanche, Bev, and Marsha, feminists all, none of whom could be considered my ally. Beyond a shadow of a doubt? Innocent until proven guilty? Not with that gang of four. Muriel went to Dean Javitz and argued that my behavior had undermined the integrity of the entire Counseling Services program.
Word got around. People took sides, and the numbers were lopsided against me. My one supporter was Dick Holloway, a holdover from the department’s “good ole boy” days when men had run the show. Muriel tolerated Dick because she knew she’d outlast him, but he’d told me on more than one occasion that he was “sticking around” for the pleasure of being a thorn in her side. I’d never liked Dick, and when he stuck his head inside my office one morning to offer his support—“I hear the dykes are trying to cut you off at the knees, but hang tough” was the way he’d put it—it was small comfort. As for the other members of our department, some of whom I’d counted among my friends, they began nodding uncomfortably and looking away when we passed each other in the hall. A lot of the women in our department started giving me dirty looks. One lunchtime, I walked into the staff lounge and four women stopped their conversation, stood, and walked out in solidarity against me. It had hurt like a kick to the nuts.
Even my two best friends in the department, Marina and Dennis, began to distance themselves. Look, counseling students all day? You really care about these kids. You root for their mental health and try to promote it, but it’s hard, imperfect work. You worry about the ones who are in the worst shape, and at the end of the day, you can’t always shut it off like a faucet. So there’s this informal support system. When it’s after hours and you can’t stop hearing a patient’s voice or seeing the kid’s tortured face? You can begin to doubt yourself. So you call a colleague you can trust with whatever vulnerability you’re wrestling with. You have them listen to what’s bothering you and maybe offer a suggestion or two, a little perspective. Seek out a little counseling from another counselor. Dennis, Marina, and I had done that for one another. Had helped each other out like that for years. For years.
“Look, Orion, I sympathize with you. I really do,” Marina said when I stopped her and Dennis out in the parking lot one afternoon to ask for their support. “But I’m between a rock and a hard place with this one, okay? Because I’m your friend, yes, but I’m a woman, too. And I’ve been on the receiving end of unwanted—”
I put my hand up to stop her and turned to Dennis. “What about you? Because I’m telling you, this thing is a witch hunt. Was I dumb enough to give the girl a ride home when she came into my office that night like a damsel in distress? I was! Was I stupid enough to say yes when she invited me in for a drink? God, yes! But goddamnit, Dennis, she’s rewritten history. Because it just did not happen the way she’s claiming it did.”
He stood there, nodding sadly.
“So you believe me?”
“I do.”
“Then are you willing to—”
“Personally, I’m with you. But professionally? I’ve got to remain neutral on this one, Orion. I’ve got to be Switzerland.”
“Yeah? Really? Then screw you, Switzerland,” I said. I turned back to Marina. “And screw you, too, if you think you’re the one who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
“But Orion, the thing is—”
Rather than listen to their lame excuses, I turned my back on them and stormed off in the direction of my car. Looked over my shoulder and saw them both standing there, staring at me. The problem was, I couldn’t find my goddamned car. Kept walking back and forth from row to row, on the verge of tears and thinking, Shit! On top of everything else, someone’s stolen my fucking car? Eventually, it hit me that the Prius was in the shop being serviced. That I’d driven to work that day in a loaner. A red Saturn. I found it, kicked the bumper, unlocked it. Driving out of the parking lot, I looked over at the two of them, still standing there, talking. Justifying their reasons, no doubt, for not having my back the way I would have had either of theirs, no questions asked.
The following week, in the midst of my attempts to defend myself at humiliating meetings with the dean, the school’s at-large ethics panel, and lawyers representing the university and the union I belonged to, Seamus McAvoy, a twenty-year-old engineering major with a history of clinical depression, died on my watch. A sweet kid who carried his illness around like a backpack full of rocks, Seamus had been my counselee for four semesters. I’d had to cancel our previous appointment because of one of the aforementioned ethics meetings, but I have a vivid memory of our last appointment.
So you feel you’re pulling out of the quicksand then? He’d told me more than once that his depression felt like being stuck hopelessly in quicksand.
Yeah. I think I’m finally getting over Daria. I joined Facebook? And me and this poly-sci major named Kim have been messaging back and forth. She might be potential girlfriend material. His posture wasn’t slumpy for a change. His hygiene and coloring had improved. For forty-five minutes, he sat there pumping his right leg up and down as if, now that he was feeling better, he was waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off so he could run out of my office and reengage in life.
There was a debriefing, as there is whenever there’s a suicide—a departmental review of Seamus’s case. These meetings are meant to be supportive of both the therapist who’d been treating the victim and the department as a whole. Suicide is hard on all of us, no matter whose patient it is. Several of my colleagues, including some of the ones who’d been shunning me, commiserated. Even Muriel, who was running the meeting, looked right at me when she said how much easier our jobs would be if we psychologists all had crystal balls. She and Dean Javitz had talked to Seamus’s parents, she said, and from the sound of it, they weren’t holding the department or the university responsible. “No inquiry, no malpractice charges, thank goodness,” she said. But absolved or not, I couldn’t forgive myself for having been so goddamned distracted by the Jasmine mess that I had missed the red flag Seamus had waved that morning. When a potentially suicidal patient exhibits rapid improvement—becomes suddenly energized—what it can mean is that he’s finally arrived at a plan that will free him permanently from his unbearable gloom. But I hadn’t probed that possibility. I’d accepted Seamus’s emergence from his emotional “quicksand” at face value. The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.
I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.
That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.
“But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?
Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.
I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers … Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield … No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.
My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.
The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”
Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, I didn’t know how to fill up my days. That first Monday, I sat and stared at the morning TV shows, did the Times crossword, did my laundry. At noon, I drove over to the mall for lunch and human contact. Bought a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.
I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.
After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been Annie’s doing. “Shabby chic,” she called it.
On the first of July, I moved into the bunker. I hate it there. For one thing, there’s a nightly racket from the bar across the street. For another, the old gal in the apartment across the hall is needy. Pesty. She seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”
I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.
Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”
Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.
“Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”
She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”
“I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”
Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”
“New England? Manhattan?”
“All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”
“A bowl,” I say.
“Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”
I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.
Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if … The right says … I care!
After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.
At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him …
“If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.
I told him I disagreed, and so did the experts. “The DSM stopped classifying homosexuality as a sickness way back in 1973,” I said. “It’s as much an inevitability as blue eyes or someone’s shoe size.”
“So why’d she even marry you then? Why did she have us?”
“Because she loves you guys. And she loved me, too.”
“Yeah, well … this Vivian person?”
“Viveca,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. In that note she wrote me? When she said she hoped me and Casey can make it to the wedding because it would mean so much to Mom? Hey, sorry, lady. That ain’t gonna happen.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “It’s your decision.”
“You’re not going, are you?”
“No, probably not.”
“You’ve met her, though. Right? Mom’s … friend?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve met her, too. Do you remember that time when your mom had one of her pieces selected for the Whitney Museum show? And the five of us took the train down to New York? Stayed at that nice hotel and went to her opening?”
“Vaguely,” he said. “Was that when you took us to the NBA store and we saw Rick Fox?”
“Yup. Same trip. But I’ve seen her two or three times since then, too.”
“If you ask me, I don’t even think Mom is gay. I think she’s just mixed up. Living in New York, hanging out with all those artsy types. Who wouldn’t get their head messed up? You know what Marissa said? In this e-mail she sent me? That she thinks everyone’s bisexual, and that some people deny it and some people don’t. Now if that’s not fucked-up New York thinking, I don’t know what is. And I wouldn’t put it past that little twerp to be doing some experimenting with the lesbo stuff herself. You know how many gay bars there are in New York City?”
I said I didn’t. Did he?
“Plenty of them,” he said.
I told him I didn’t think living in New York, in and of itself, would turn anyone gay, so we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one. “And as for your sister, she’s an adult. Whatever experimenting she may or may not be doing isn’t really our business, is it?”
“Yeah, but I’m just saying … So what’s this Viveca person like, anyway? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”
“It’ll take some getting used to, Andrew. I realize that, but—”
“Don’t defend her, Dad. Mom having a wife? It’s messed up.”
“Well, it’s legal now, Andy.”
“Because some asshole liberal judge back there—”
“It wasn’t decided by a judge. They voted on it in the state legislature.”
“Yeah, and what are they going to make legal next? People marrying their dogs or something?”
“Oh, come on now. That’s kind of a specious argument, isn’t it?”
“All I’m saying is, it’s unnatural. Do you think that’s what God wants?”
Instead of getting into an argument about God’s existence, I told him I had no idea what God wants. “Hey,” I said. “Not to change the subject, but I saw on the Weather Channel that you guys are getting a lot of rain down there. Right?”
“Yeah. Last couple of days there’s been tornado watches, too. I mean, if women marrying women and men marrying men was God’s plan, then why’d he make Adam and Eve instead of Adam and Steve?” …
Chapter Five (#ulink_8d8e3ccc-dec1-53ed-86ac-04997c046716)
Annie Oh (#ulink_8d8e3ccc-dec1-53ed-86ac-04997c046716)
Viveca has left the prenup on her desk in the study: six legal-size pages with little cellophane flags to indicate the places where my signature’s supposed to go. She’s signed it already in her deliberate, forward-slanting penmanship. I haven’t signed it yet and may not. What’s she or her father’s lawyer going to do if I don’t? Stop the wedding? No, she wouldn’t do that. I’m not powerless in this relationship. Gallery owners need artists more than artists needs gallery owners … But that’s not fair. I mean more to Viveca than those commissions. She loves me. I know she does. But I also know that she envies me my creativity, my treacherous rides inside the cyclone. “Other agents have approached you. Haven’t they, Anna? You can tell me,” she’s said more than once. That’s where my power comes from. I know what her professional insecurities are, and also her personal secrets: that she terminated a pregnancy by a former lover, a man who refused to leave his wife; that she was not an only child like she tells everyone but had a mentally retarded brother who was hidden away at some training school. Profoundly retarded, she told me. She used to hate it when her parents made her go with them on those visits and she had to look at him, drooling and wearing a dirty helmet, banging his head against the wall. I’ve made it my business to know these things but have told Viveca very little about my own history. I hold my cards close to the vest, the way I did all those years with Orion. I may have been powerless against those floodwaters. Powerless against Kent’s secret visits to my room. But I learned about power the day that I got on that Greyhound bus and the driver pulled out of the depot and carried me away from the black hole that had almost sucked me in. The black hole that my life was about to become with Albie Wignall …
I’m seventeen again, stuck in Sterling because that’s where my foster family lives. I’m dating Albie, not because I like him very much, but because one thing has led to another. Two of those snooty girls from my high school, Holly Grandjean and Kathy Fontaine, finally have noticed me—well, not me so much as what we sell at Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. “Oh, wook. Gummy bears! I wuv Gummy bears,” Kathy says, and Holly says she “wuvs” them, too. I’m not sure why they’re talking baby talk. Are they making fun of me? But then, I decide they aren’t because Holly looks up from my merchandise to me and says I look familiar. “Don’t you go to Plainfield High?” she says, and I nod and tell them that all three of us were in the same gym class freshman year. I’m so grateful that they’re acknowledging my existence, these girls I thought I hated, that I shovel scoop after scoop of gummy bears into an open bag and tell them to just take them instead of paying for them. And then, at the end of my shift, my boss, Leland, points up at the surveillance camera mounted over the entrance to Jordan Marsh. It’s aimed right at my kiosk. Leland tells me to take off my Jo-Jo’s apron and not come back because I’m fired.
But a week later, I get another, better job waitressing at Friendly’s. My manager, Winona Wignall, assigns me to the take-out window, which the newest waitress always gets. But within two weeks, Priscilla is the new girl, and I’m serving people at the counter and making tips. Over the next weeks, Priscilla and I become friends, bonded by the fact that, out of all the Friendly’s waitresses, Winona likes us two the least.
Winona’s son, Albie, is twenty-three but he acts younger. He works at the Midas Mufflers down the road. After work, he comes over to Friendly’s to eat and hang around. He starts picking my section to sit at every time, and it’s kind of flattering, although he’s not much of a tipper. One time all he leaves me is eleven stacked pennies. Albie’s over six feet tall, and he’s blond and broad but not really fat, which is a miracle because when he comes in, he’ll eat a Big Beef with fries and a Fribble, and sometimes after that, will have dessert, too—a sundae, usually, which, when he orders it, he always calls it the Albie Special. The Albie Special is four scoops of chocolate almond chip ice cream, strawberry sauce and hot fudge, and chopped peanuts, the whole thing topped with whipped cream, jimmies, and cherries (three instead of the usual one). Sometimes when I put those sundaes in front of him, our other customers look over at it, and they’re probably thinking, wow, how does that guy rate? This one Holy Roller couple who comes in all the time? (They asked Winona once if they could leave their religious pamphlets for our other customers to take and she said no.) They always stare over at Albie’s sundae while he’s eating it, and I feel like going: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. (My foster family sent me to parochial school, and I can still recite all the Commandments.) Instead of reminding them about the tenth commandment, though, I told the Holy Rollers that Albie pays extra for his sundae. He doesn’t really. He gets all that extra stuff for the price of a regular hot fudge, plus you have to give him his mother’s employee discount besides. Winona calls Albie “Big Boy,” which fits him size-wise but also is pretty funny because Albie acts childish, especially around his mother, who he still calls “Mommy.” He’s not all that much younger than my brother Donald, except Donald is already married and acts like a grown-up, which he is. So is Albie, technically, but he lives in his parents’ basement and still gets an Easter basket, which I know because all during Lent, Winona kept buying stuff for Albie’s Easter basket and hiding it in our break room. One time, Priscilla stole two Almond Joys from one of the bags. She snuck me one, and whenever we looked at each other during that shift, we couldn’t help laughing.
One night, while Albie’s holding up his elbows because I’m wiping down the counter where he sits, he asks me out. I didn’t expect it, and I don’t know what to say at first, so I say, “Let me think about it.” Then later on I tell him yes, okay, I’ll go. Because, hey, I’m not stupid. He’s my boss’s son.
For our date, Albie takes me to the drive-in. It’s a double feature: the first and second Planet of the Apes movies. (I’ve already seen the first one and thought it was stupid, but Albie picked the movie.) At intermission, he asks me do I want anything from the snack bar. I tell him yes please, a box of Good & Plenty. When he gets back in the car, he’s got my candy plus, for himself, three foil-wrapped hot dogs and a big soda. In between eating my Good & Plenty, I keep shaking the box, which is partly just this habit I’ve had since I was little but also partly because I like the sound. It comforts me.
Albie keeps looking over at me while he’s eating and I can smell that he has liquor breath. “Did you put something in your Coke?” I ask him.
“It’s not Coke. It’s root beer.”
“Yeah, but did you?” He nods, smiles, and pulls a half-empty bottle out of his back pocket. When he hands it to me, I squint and read the label. LONG JOHN’S GINGER BRANDY, it says. Eighty proof.
“You know something?” Albie says. “You’re pretty.”
“No, I’m not,” I tell him. I’m thinking about what I heard someone call liquor once: “Dutch courage.” I don’t know why. What’s so Dutch about getting drunk?
“Yes, you are, and you know you are, too,” Albie says. Ha! I think. He’s either drunk or blind. But then I think, well, maybe in Albie’s eyes, I’m like those girls at the mall who I got fired trying to impress. He scoots closer to my side and starts playing with my hair and my left ear. Then he leans over and starts kissing my neck. He’s trying to be sexy, I guess, but it just tickles, plus now his breath smells like both brandy and hot dogs, which isn’t very appealing. After a while, he reaches down and takes my hand in his. It makes me think of that song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that’s on my brother Donald’s Meet the Beatles! album. When Donald got married and moved out of state, he gave me all of his old Beatles albums, which I still play quite a bit, even though the Beatles broke up because of Yoko Ono. Instead of watching Return to the Planet of the Apes or thinking about what Albie’s up to, I start singing that song in my head. And when I touch you I feel happy inside … It makes me think about this girl in my fourth grade public school class named Carol Cosentino who used to wear a pink sailor hat that had all these little metal Beatles buttons pinned all over it. Carol’s favorite Beatle was George, I remember. I wonder whatever happened to her. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Albie, while he’s still holding my hand, is using his other hand to fiddle with his pants. Then I hear this snap-snapping sound and I see his belt flying into the back. From the way he just lifted his butt off the seat, he might have just pulled his pants down. I’m not sure, but I’m certainly not going to look over there and find out. But then he moves my hand over to his side and puts it down there—him and his Dutch courage. I can feel that he’s still got his underpants on, which is a relief, but I can also feel that he’s got a lump in there. A “boner,” I’ve heard boys at school call it when they’re talking dirty in the cafeteria. “Please?” he whispers, moving my hand up and down against his lump. I let him do it, not because I want to but because he said please, which makes me feel, kind of, that it’s me who’s in control of the situation, not him, and also because if Albie likes me, then maybe Winona will like me better, too, and assign me to Section A, where those lawyers from the office building next door always sit, and they’re big tippers. Those booths are Althea’s section, usually. Althea is Winona’s pet and she used to be Albie’s girlfriend. One day I overheard her telling one of the other waitresses that she broke up with him because he has no class. But according to Albie, he broke up with her because, unlike me, Althea is “a bitch on wheels who thinks her shit don’t stink.” That’s one thing I have to say for myself: I never, ever leave a bathroom smelly; I’m very careful about that kind of thing. I keep matches in my purse even though I don’t smoke, and whenever I have to use the toilet and, you know, get the bathroom smelly, I always light a match and burn some toilet paper to, what’s it called? Oh yeah, fumigate it. Part of me wants to yank my hand away from Albie’s lump, but another part of me says, what do I care? It doesn’t even feel like it’s my hand that’s doing what he’s making it do, and while he’s over there, mouth-breathing and making my hand go faster, I try thinking of other things. I make up this game where I have to think of all the songs on Abbey Road in the right order: “Come Together,” “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” I get all the way to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and then I can’t think of what comes after that. It’s like my mind’s gone blank or something. Thinking about other things is something I learned to do on those nights when Kent would sneak into my room. I’d recite stuff they made us memorize in school: the Ten Commandments; the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. I can still remember some of the Mysteries—the Annunciation, the Nativity, Finding Jesus in the Temple. And, let me think … the Resurrection, the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven. (One time, this girl who sat next to me, Tammy Tusia, had to go to the office for being sacrilegious because she leaned over and said to me, trying to be funny, “Gee if Mary got queen, who got first runner-up?” and Sister Presentation heard her say it. Luckily, I didn’t laugh so I didn’t get in trouble.) So that’s how many mysteries? While I’m counting how many I’ve said, Albie starts going, “Oh, god! Oh, fuck! Faster!” Oh, and there’s the Scourging at the Pillar, the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Albie starts to groan and now I can feel the wet stuff. I know from Kent that after the wet stuff comes out, they quiet down and stop bothering you. I finally remember the song that comes after “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It’s “Here Comes the Sun”—the one George sings. I wonder if Carol Cosentino, wherever she is, still likes George the best, even though he has long scraggly hair now and a beard that makes him look like a hillbilly. In my opinion, the Beatles looked better when they had their Beatle haircuts, like on the Meet the Beatles! cover.
It’s after midnight by the time the drive-in gets out, and when Albie pulls up in front of my foster family’s house, he asks if he can kiss me good night and I say no, it’s late and I have to go in, and he accepts it. See? I’m in control. Not him. “Can I call you?” he asks. I make him wait a couple of seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, okay.” Albie’s not handsome or anything, but he’s sort of cute. Priscilla from work thinks he’s borderline fat and has kind of a pig face, and I can see her point, too. Upstairs, while I’m getting ready for bed, I decide Albie’s ugly-cute, like Ringo. Not that he looks anything like Ringo. He looks like Winona, although he acted kind of insulted when I told him that.
On our next date, Albie and I go to the drive-in again. Saturday Night Fever is playing this time, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it because I’ve had a little bit of a crush on John Travolta from when he was Vinnie Barbarino on TV. But Albie’s wrecking it for me because he keeps telling me he’d bet me any amount of money that John Travolta is a homosexual. (How would he know?) I’m sitting there, trying to enjoy the movie, and Albie keeps saying stuff like, “Look! There’s your evidence. That’s a flitty walk” and “You know who dances like that? Queers, that’s who. I swear on a stack of Bibles: that guy is light in the loafers.”
“Do you mind?” I finally say, and after that he shuts up for a while, thank god. Then, halfway through the movie, there’s lightning and thunder and it starts pouring. The movie stops and it says on the speaker that they’re closing but giving everyone fog passes at the exit. When we get ours, Albie says he sure as hell would hate to sit through that faggy John Travolta movie again and, to be funny, I guess, he puts the fog passes in his mouth, chews on them, and then spits them out his window. I don’t like Althea, but she’s right about him: Albie’s got no class.
It’s early still, so we go to Kelly’s Drive-Thru and get Cokes and clam fritters, and while we’re eating our food, the rain stops. Albie throws out our trash, and then he starts his car and drives us out to Oak Swamp Reservoir, which is a make-out spot for kids our age. Well, my age. It’s easy to forget that Albie’s six years older than me. He parks and turns off his engine but keeps the radio on. They’re playing that song “Baker Street,” which I like, but when I say I do, Albie says it sucks and that he wants to listen to some real music. He reaches under his seat and pulls out a Judas Priest cassette and puts it into his player. “Yuck,” I say. “Where’s my earplugs?” and Albie says I obviously don’t know good music and turns up the volume. We start making out a little, and he guides my hand down there again to that same area as last time, big surprise, and he’s got his lump again. “Please, sweetie. Please,” he says. It makes me think of that thing my father said to me that time when he caught me feeding veal loaf to our cat, Fluffy, under the table. “You start that, Anna Banana, and he’ll pester you nonstop.” One thing about my father: whenever he got finished working on our car, he always came in and washed his hands with that scratchy soap powder, Boraxo, to get the grease off. But Albie always has greasy hands, and, when he gets close to you, he smells like … mufflers.
Five minutes later, Albie still hasn’t finished and my hand’s starting to go numb. Then something unexpected happens. He puts his hand between my legs and starts tongue-kissing my mouth at the same time. I let him because it feels kind of strange but also a little bit good, and the more he does it, the less I want him to stop. “Mmm, you’re wet,” he whispers.
“No, I’m not,” I say. Am I?
“Yeah, you are,” Albie says. “You’re so wet, I almost need a mop. You’re good and ready for it, aren’t you?”
I know what “it” is, and I don’t want it in me, but I don’t not want it, either. I’m confused. So when he pulls me into the backseat and gets on top of me, I let him. He pokes his thing all around down there but his aim is bad. Then he finally figures it out. He starts whispering stuff like “Oh, Jesus” and “Oh, baby” and he’s pumping his hips faster and faster, and that’s when, all of a sudden, I think about birth control. “Hey!” I say. “Stop. I don’t want to get pregnant.” He says it’s no problem, that he’ll pull out before he “nuts,” which, I think, must mean when his wet stuff comes. There’s a lot about sex that I still don’t get, but I know it’s their wet stuff that gets the girl pregnant. And Albie does pull out, too, going, “Oh, fuck! Oh, Jesus!” I don’t appreciate the fact that he’s gotten his stuff all over my stomach, and even a little of it on my new pocketbook, which I only bought the day before yesterday at Two Guys because Althea was out sick and I got assigned her section and one of those lawyers gave me a twenty for a bill that was only four dollars and seventeen cents and said to keep the change.
The next Monday in English, Mrs. Sonstroem has us read aloud from the book we’re reading, A Tale of Two Cities. I’m trying to concentrate, but a part of me is back at the Oak Swamp Reservoir with Albie, and him making me feel that tingly way. “Miss O’Day,” she says. “You’re next.” I hate reading out loud and have been hoping the bell would ring without me getting picked. No such luck. Plus, I’m not sure where the last person left off and Jeannie Baker has to lean over and point to where. Before I start, I see Kenny Lalla and John Marchese smirk at each other and I hear Stanley whisper under his breath, “Get ready.” Get ready for what? I wonder, but I start reading. And when I get to the sentence “My father has been freed!” Lucie ejaculated, the boys—first just Kenny and Stanley, and then a bunch of the others, all start laughing. None of the girls are laughing out loud or anything, but some of them are smiling at each other, and Betsy Yeznach’s hand is covering her mouth. I don’t get what’s so funny.
“All right, that’s enough!” Mrs. Sonstroem, who almost never yells, starts yelling. “Maybe if you’re all this immature, we shouldn’t even read Charles Dickens, who happens to be one of the very best writers of all time.” Then she says something about pearls and swine that I don’t get. One of the boys starts making pig snorts and she gives him a detention. Then the bell rings.
After school, and after I’ve changed into my Friendly’s uniform and still have a few minutes before I have to leave for work, I look up ejaculate in my foster family’s dictionary. 1.To utter suddenly and passionately; to exclaim, it says. Then, 2.To discharge abruptly, especially to discharge semen during orgasm. I look up semen. Then I look up orgasm. Okay, now I get it, I think. “Semen” is the guy’s milky discharge and “orgasm” is the highest point of sexual pleasure, marked in males by the ejaculation of semen and in females by vaginal contractions.
The next time Albie takes me out, we skip the drive-in and go right to the reservoir. I’ve put my pocketbook out of range this time. He pulls out in time again, and I think to myself: he just had an orgasm and ejaculated his semen. Unlike the last time, I’m not feeling much of anything myself, but at least I know the names of things now.
For our next date, I have to go over to the Wignalls’ house for dinner. I get embarrassed because once the food’s on the table, I start eating, but Albie and his parents are just looking at me. Then Mr. Wignall says they like to say grace first. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” He and Winona hold out their hands and I take them and Mr. Wignall thanks God for the bounty that’s in front of us. He and Winona have their eyes closed, but Albie and I don’t and Albie’s looking at me with this goofy grin on his face and making cross-eyes to be funny. When Mr. Wignall’s done, he opens his eyes again and says, “Let’s eat.” Winona’s done the cooking and it’s creamed dried beef on “toast points” (which is really just regular old toast, as far as I can see) plus beets (which I hate). The Wignalls pour vinegar on their beets, so I do, too, and the vinegar soaks all into my toast so that I have to eat this mushy pink vinegar bread to be polite. Mr. Wignall has seconds and Albie has thirds. For dessert we have green Jell-O with canned fruit in it, which is something Mama used to make, too. Except at our house, everyone got their own separate dish of Jell-O, but at the Wignalls’ it’s in a big bowl and you pass it around and then squirt Reddi-wip on top. And in the middle of dessert, Mr. Wignall says to Winona, “Sweetness, would you pass me some more Jell-O?” I almost start laughing, thinking about how, the next day at work, I’ll tell Priscilla about Winona’s husband calling her Sweetness and how it’ll crack her up. It’s like I’m a spy or something. Then Winona says, “Would you like more cream, too, Sweetness?” and Albie says there is no more, that he ran the can dry, which is no surprise because he squirted so much cream on his Jell-O that, if he was my kid, I would have yelled at him for being a pig and not thinking about anyone but himself.
After dinner, Albie and I go over to my foster family’s house because nobody else is home. We’re watching Dallas, and Albie says he’d bet me any amount of money that Lucy Ewing is a slut in real life, too—that she probably doesn’t even have to act. Then he tells me that, a few weeks back, he had a dream that Lucy Ewing was sucking his dick. I roll my eyes. No class, I think.
“Hey, can I ask you something, Sweetness?” Albie says. It nearly makes me puke, him calling me that. Who does he think we are? His icky parents?
“What?” I say, and Albie says he was just wondering if I would ever want to try something like that.
“Like what?”
“Sucking my dick. I bet it would really turn you on.”
I get up from the couch, turn off the TV, and tell him to go home. “And if you ever say something like that again to me, Albie Wignall, I’m going to tell your mother you said it, and don’t think I wouldn’t because I would.”
He says maybe I should just become a nun, and I say yeah, that’s a good idea, maybe I will, and he says I’m lucky someone like him even gives me a second look, and I say “Ha, that’s a laugh and a half!” and tell him again to go home. He gets up and, on his way out, slams the door so hard that he’s lucky my foster father isn’t home because he gets real mad when anyone slams things and he’d probably chase Albie all the way down the sidewalk.
The next night at Friendly’s, Albie is all apologies, saying how he respects me, he really, really does. “Let’s take a drive and clear the air after you get off work,” he suggests. I tell him no three different times. Then finally I say yes just to shut him up. And when my shift’s almost over, he gets up and says he’ll wait for me out in his car. When I go to wipe off the counter, I see that he’s left me this tip that’s dimes and nickels and quarters shaped like a heart. He probably thinks he’s being romantic, but all’s I think is that it’s pretty corny. Still, when I scoop it up and count it, it comes to two dollars and eighty cents, which is the most he’s ever left me, so I guess he really is sorry.
But guess where we end up. In a way, he can’t help it, I guess. I read in a magazine last week that, on an average, girls think about sex twice in an hour but for guys it’s seventeen times. This time, after he puts his thing inside of me and I can tell he’s getting ready, I tell him, “Pull it out! Pull it out!” and he says he can’t, it feels too good, and anyways, he doesn’t need to because he’s taken a pill that stops the girl from getting pregnant when the guy “nuts” inside of her. A pill that men take? Here’s how stupid I am: I believe him. So I let Albie have his orgasm inside of me—that night and the next two or three times after that. And then one day at work, I go up to two of the older waitresses, Ginny and Mary Beth, who are both in their thirties. Mary Beth is married and it’s common knowledge that Ginny “gets around” down at the Anchor Clanker where all the sailors go to drink and meet girls. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of this pill men take so that the woman doesn’t get pregnant. Instead of answering me, they just look at each other. Then they both start laughing, and I feel like the idiot I am. I’m three weeks late, which is why I asked them, and now I know why I am.
It’s Saturday, my day off—the day I’ve decided I’m going to tell Albie. I just wish he was in a better mood. He and Winona have just had one of their big fights, and in the car on the way over to Olympic Pizza, he’s saying stuff like how Winona’s “the wicked witch of the West” and his father’s “pussy whipped.” In the fifteen minutes since he picked me up, he’s told me three times already how much he hates his mother’s guts. It’s quiet at the pizza place. We take the booth by the window. Albie orders a toasted salami grinder with fried onions and peppers, plus a quart bottle of Dr Pepper. I order a small Sprite and three stuffed clams. I’ve felt sick to my stomach all week, but suddenly I’m hungry, even though I’m nervous. When our food comes, I tell myself that as soon as I finish my second stuffed clam, that’s when I’ll tell him I’m pregnant. By now I’m only half-listening to his complaints about his mother, but he gets my full attention when he says that sometimes he daydreams about her getting killed in a car accident or getting struck by lightning and dying. “Winona Wignall, R.I.P.,” he says. “I should be so lucky.”
It’s ignorance, that’s what it is. He has no idea how awful it is to have your mother die. “Don’t even say stuff like that,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he says. “It’s a free country.” He takes a huge bite out of his grinder. There’s a strand of shredded lettuce sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even realize it. “Maybe someday I’ll take out my hunting rifle and put me and my dad out of our misery.”
I get so mad when he says it that I kick him under the table. Not that it must hurt very much. All I’m wearing is sandals.
“What the fuck?” he says. “What’d you do that for?” And when I don’t answer him, he lifts up his leg and stomps down hard on the top of my foot with his big clodhopper work boot. The pain shoots all the way up my leg and puts tears in my eyes. For several seconds I can’t even catch my breath. I wait until the nausea passes.
Here’s how I tell him. I say, “That’s a nice way to treat the mother of your child, you asshole!” I didn’t want it to come out that way, but I have to admit that the look of fear on his big fat face is satisfying.
“What did you just say?” he asks. I put my arms tight across my chest and don’t answer him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I nod without looking at him.
“By me?”
“Oh, no, Big Boy,” I say, real sarcastic. “It couldn’t be yours because you take that pill that doesn’t really exist. Remember?”
He tells me to stop fucking with him, and I tell him to pull that strand of lettuce out of his mouth because it looks disgusting.
“Are you having a kid or not?” he says, in this voice that’s loud enough that a customer who’s sitting at the counter swivels his stool around and looks at us. I’ve only eaten one of my stuffed clams, but I’ve lost my appetite and my foot’s throbbing, goddamn him. He better not have broken it if he knows what’s good for him. I get up from the booth and limp toward the door. I have first shift the next day, and it ought to be a whole lot of fun wearing my waitressing wedgies for five hours if my foot’s all black and blue and swollen. Albie follows me out of the restaurant and I scream it over my shoulder, “I’m not having a kid, you jerk! I’m having your kid! Deal with it!”
Albie’s scared to tell his parents, mostly his mother, so it’s me who finally has to call the meeting. “It’s urgent,” I tell Winona. The four of us are seated at the Wignalls’ kitchen table: Albie, his father, Winona, and me. There’s coffee mugs in front of each of us, and Winona’s put out a plate of Oreos that nobody’s touching. Winona doesn’t say much when she hears what we have to tell her, but her nostrils keep flaring and she’s teary-eyed. Then finally she says, “Big Boy, how could this have happened?”
Albie’s face is flushed and it doesn’t help that he’s got this naughty boy grin on his face. “The usual way,” he says. “Male plus female equals baby.”
Winona reaches over and backhands him. “Don’t you dare give me that wiseguy attitude at a time like this!” she yells. At first I think he might stomp on her foot or something, but Albie just reaches for the Oreos. Winona tells him he has to marry me now because it’s the only decent thing to do. “But I guess I better say good-bye to that beautiful church wedding that I’ve always dreamed about for my boy and his bride.” Those tears in her eyes are probably because the bride she’d been dreaming about is Althea, not me.
Albie makes the point, feebly, that he and I have other options.
“Like what?” Winona demands, and when he doesn’t answer her, she slams her coffee mug down against the table and says, “Just what do you think we are, Albert Wignall? Trailer trash? You’ve got obligations to this girl, and you’re damn well going to meet them. And if by ‘other options’ you mean what I think you do, then shame on you!”
“Yeah, but Mommy …,” Albie says. He turns from his mother to his father. “Daddy, what do you think?”
Mr. Wignall looks back and forth between the two of them and takes his sweet time answering. “Your mother’s right,” he finally says. “You had your fun. Now you got to pay the piper.” At this meeting, I’m more or less being treated like I’m invisible. Why is that? I’m the one who’s pregnant. Don’t I count? What if I don’t want to marry him?
But in another two weeks now, I will marry Albie, not because I want to but because he’s 50 percent responsible for the baby that’s growing inside of me. No, more than that—75 percent maybe, him and his imaginary men’s pill that stops women from getting pregnant.
Albie doesn’t give me a ring; he gives me a hundred dollars and tells me to go down to Ogulnick’s Jewelers and pick out something I like. None of the diamond rings are anywhere near my price range, so I settle for this little ring with a garnet chip in it that’s really just a friendship ring, not an engagement ring. Winona says I shouldn’t wear it to work because my male customers will give me better tips if they don’t think I’m “spoken for.” Ha! Like that’s the reason she doesn’t want me wearing it, not because she’s embarrassed that Albie’s “knocked me up,” as he puts it.
When I finally call my brother to tell him about my situation, Donald says I don’t even sound like I like this guy. What am I marrying him for?”
“Because of the baby,” I tell him.
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Yeah. What other reason would there be?”
But after I get off the phone, I start thinking about it, and if I really, really want to be honest with myself, I think I’m partly marrying Albie because, even after all these years—twelve of them now—I still miss my own mother as bad as ever. Maybe Winona isn’t perfect—ha! no maybe about it!—but in under seven months she’s going to be my baby’s grandmother, so she might soften toward me and maybe even start treating me like a daughter a little bit. Who knows? Maybe next Easter, I’ll get an Easter basket like Albie.
My wedding dress is pastel orange with a matching headband. When Winona takes me shopping, she nixes my wearing white or wearing a veil, since Albie and I “jumped the gun” and conceived a child in sin. I have to oblige her because she’s paying for the dress, which she likes way more than I do. There’s no bridal shower, no fancy invitations. There’ll be no graduation this coming June for me, either; I dropped out of school when I started showing. No one from my foster family or my real family is coming to the wedding, not even Donald, who says he can’t in good conscience support this marriage. On Albie’s side, the only people who are coming are Albie’s parents—they’re going to be our witnesses—plus Winona’s mother, who’s always clacking her false teeth and telling me to call her by her first name, Bridey, and Mr. Wignall’s father, who has thick gray hair growing out of his ears and wears a hearing aid that’s always whistling. The only other person I wanted to invite is Priscilla from work. I’ve heard Winona tell Althea that she thinks Priscilla is “one of those girls who should have been born a boy,” by which she means, I think, that she’s a lesbian. Which she is. Priscilla’s not coming to my wedding, though, because I didn’t end up inviting her after Winona gave me this stupid excuse about how she doesn’t feel comfortable fraternizing with people who work under her. What she really meant, I’m pretty sure, is: no lesbians allowed. She’d probably croak if she knew about that afternoon when Priscilla drove me out to the place where she boards her horses, Lucky and Gal, and after we went horseback riding, we made out in the barn and her fingers gave me those “vaginal contractions” that it only dawned on me later was an orgasm—my first.
Even though we’re going to get married to prove we’re not “trailer trash,” as Winona puts it, Albie keeps talking about me getting an abortion. One of the other guys at Midas Mufflers and his girlfriend had “a little complication they had to take care of” a while back, he says, and Albie’s got the name of their doctor. But I am not getting an abortion, no matter that it’s legal now and no matter how much he keeps bugging me about it.
It doesn’t matter, though, because on the day we go to town hall for our marriage license they’re closed for lunch, and when we go back to Albie’s car to wait until one o’clock, I look down and there’s blood seeping through my white shorts. “Uh-oh,” I go.
“Jesus, what now?” Albie says, and I just point.
He drives me over to the emergency room and everyone there is real nice to me, real sensitive, even Albie. When I can’t stop crying and my little box of tissues runs out, he goes out to the nurses’ station and gets me a new box. And when we leave the hospital, he holds my hand on the way out to the car. Back at the Wignalls’, Winona holds out her arms and folds them around me and I cry against her shirt, partly because I’ve lost the baby and partly because this is the nicest she’s ever been to me. Don’t let go, I want to say. Please just keep holding me.
But Winona does let go, and in the days that follow I am both sad about losing the baby and relieved that now I don’t have to marry Albie after all. It’s like when you’re playing Monopoly and you pick up a get-out-of-jail-free card. I decide to get out of Sterling. My foster family’s away at the lake for the weekend. I can pack and leave them a note—tell them I decided it’s time for me to move on now that I’m almost an adult. And I can just not show up for my next shift at Friendly’s. I’ll just disappear.
I call Priscilla and she picks me up and drives us toward Hartford. On the way there, the car radio plays that Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun,” and she and I sing along with it. Little darling, I feel the ice is slowly melting … In the motel room we rent on the Berlin Turnpike, Priscilla and I make fun of Winona, eat pizza, and drink beer. We get drunk and crazy, jumping on the two double beds, flying past each other in opposite directions until I flop facedown on the mattress and realize I’m still a little sore from my miscarriage. It was a silly way for me to behave, especially since I was almost a married woman and a mother. But I’m not either one of those things now, and so what? I’ve been on a starvation diet as far as fun’s concerned, and being free from Albie has made me giddy. I know that it’s only for this one night. Priscilla has to get back to her horses and her job. And I have to not go back to Sterling, or to the stupid clod I almost married. I still feel sad about the baby, but in a way it was for the best. If it had lived, I probably would have never gotten free of Albie and his parents, and even if I did, my baby’s last name would be Wignall. And my name, too. Annie Wignall: yuck! “Do me a favor, will you?” I ask Priscilla. “The next time he comes into Friendly’s and you make him a sundae, spit on it.” She kisses me and says it’ll be her pleasure, and that she’ll spit in his “fucking Fribble,” too.
Later, in the dark, Priscilla climbs into my bed and we start making out. She does the same kind of stuff she did to me that day in the horse barn and I like it and don’t even feel sore anymore. I do the same things to Priscilla, and I like doing that, too. But after we’re both finished, things get quiet. I can tell from her breathing that she’s fallen asleep and I get scared. Get up and go look out the window at the cars going by—the people inside them getting to wherever they’re going. And yeah, I’ve gotten away, but I have no idea where I’m going to. It’s like I’m a little girl again, in the backseat of that social worker’s car the day they came and got me. Drove me away from Daddy. I’m crying, looking out the back window at Kent, who’s running down the road after me. What Kent does to me is bad, but are these people bad, too? Where are they taking me? I don’t even care that my father’s drunk all the time. I just want to stay and live with him. And what about my brother? Donald’s at college and won’t even know where I’m going, where they’re taking me …
I get back in bed. Reach over and touch Priscilla’s shoulder. Take her hand in mine. I keep holding on to it so that I’ll feel safe and be able to fall asleep. And after a while, it works. My panic fades away and I begin to doze. The next morning when I wake up, she’s still asleep. We’re still holding hands.
Priscilla buys us breakfast at a diner next door to the motel, but I can’t eat much. I have a stomachache. On our way out, she asks the cashier how to get to the bus station and then drives me over there. “Where to?” the ticket guy asks me. He waits. “Miss? You’re holding up the line.”
“Three Rivers,” I say. I’m not sure why I’m going back to where my family used to live—where the flood was—except that I have to go somewhere and it’s the only place I can think of. Priscilla gives me two twenties and a ten and says it’s not a loan, it’s a gift to help me start over until I can find a job. She waits with me until the bus comes, and when I get on it and the driver pulls away, Priscilla waves to me and I wave back. I’m crying, partly because I’ll miss her but also partly because I’m doing something daring and powerful. Something life-saving, even. I’ve gotten the hell away from Albie, and from his mean-ass mother, too, and that’s why I’m doing this. Later on during this bus ride, I realize it’s my birthday. I’m eighteen. Happy birthday to me.
Getting a pay-by-the-week room in Three Rivers is easy; I manage that in about an hour after I arrive. But getting a job is harder. There’s a Friendly’s on East Main Street, but when I go in there to fill out an application, the manager says he only wants experienced waitresses. That’s what I am, but it’s not like I can put down Winona Wignall as a reference. Shop Rite says they don’t need any grocery cashiers right now, but they’ll put my application on file and maybe call me in a month or so. A month? I can’t wait that long. My room costs forty dollars a week, and between the money Priscilla gave me and my own money, I only have thirty-three dollars left. And anyway, how are they supposed to call me when I’ve left the space for my phone number blank? A sign in the window of a dress shop says SEAMSTRESS WANTED. Too bad I can’t sew. I go to the library and read the want ads. Some business is looking for a typist. Too bad I can’t type. A drugstore wants a part-time clerk and delivery boy. Too bad I’m not a boy and don’t have my driver’s license. Two days later, there’s a new ad. A “café” called Electric Red is looking for dancers. Okay, I think, I can dance.
The catch is: you have to dance topless on a little stage across from the bar. But my week’s rent at the rooming house is almost up. I’ve been living on peanut butter, Wonder bread, and tap water all week. Forty bucks a night plus tips, the manager tells me. His name is Rusty. He’s the bartender, too. Dancers get an extra dollar for every cocktail they can get the customers to buy them between sets (when you can put your top back on), an extra two dollars if the guy buys another drink for himself, too. “I give you girls ice tea instead of liquor, but the jamokes who are running up a tab don’t have to know that,” Rusty says. “Another girl just gave her notice, so I can start you tonight.” I’m hesitant but desperate, so I decide to give it a try.
My shift goes from nine o’clock until 1:00 A.M., but we get breaks. There are three of us dancers. Gloria is kind of flat-chested, but she’s a wicked good dancer. Rusty’s girlfriend, Anita, is the other one, even though she has stretch marks and is kind of thick in the middle. “Some guy starts getting grabby with you, I’ll give Rusty the signal and he’ll handle the situation,” she’s promised. The sound system blares sexy disco music: “Rock the Boat,” “Get Down Tonight,” that Donna Summer song “Love to Love You Baby.” My dancing is awkward at first because I’m so nervous and self-conscious about my boobs showing. But it helps that the spotlight on us makes it hard to see any of the men who are watching us. Older men, mostly, which somehow makes it easier. After a while I use my technique from before: thinking of things I’ve memorized to take me someplace other than where I am: the Commandments, the Religious Mysteries, old TV jingles. Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed … Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile … It’s not so bad. By my third night, I’ve made enough money to pay for two more weeks’ rent on my room and go grocery shopping. But on my fourth night, while I’m in the middle of dancing to that stupid song “Afternoon Delight,” I look out at the crowd and can swear I see my cousin Kent out there among the old coots. I keep dancing but I’m freaking out, not concentrating, and I fall off the front of the stage and twist my ankle. The music stops and when the lights go on, I can see it’s not him—that it doesn’t even really look like him. But that ends my dancing career.
After the swelling goes down and I can walk on my ankle again, I go looking for other work. My luck is with me, and I get two different part-time jobs on the exact same day. In the daytime, I’m a fry cook at Josie’s Fish & Chips. At night, I work the shoe rental counter at Three Rivers Ten Pin. Both jobs leave me kind of smelly, from cooking grease and from the antifungal spray you have to squirt into the bowling shoes after people hand them back in. I’m grateful for that spray, though, because sometimes those shoes come back smelling like the jar of Limburger cheese my father used to take out of the refrigerator and spread on crackers. But hey, work is work. Every once in a while, one of the bowlers asks me out, but I always say the same thing: “Sorry, but I already have a steady boyfriend.” I’m not that interested in men, or women either for that matter. Mimi, one of my coworkers at the bowling alley, brings me to a women’s bar one night, but all the public affection—kissing and dancing crotch to crotch—makes me uncomfortable. “Not my scene,” I tell Mimi the next time she asks me to go with her. Priscilla and I are still in touch, though, and when she visits me those two times, we do stuff. But then she gets a steady girlfriend, a welder at Electric Boat named Robbin, and we lose touch.
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Wally Lamb
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: From New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb, a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy.As Annie Oh’s wedding day approaches, she finds herself at the mercy of hopes and fears about the momentous change ahead. She has just emerged from a twenty-five year marriage to Orion Oh, which produced three children, but is about to marry a woman named Viveca, a successful art dealer, who specializes in outsider art.Trying to reach her ex-husband, she keeps assuring everyone that he is fine. Except she has no idea where he is. But when Viveca discovers a famous painting by a mysterious local outside artist, who left this world in more than mysterious circumstances, Orion, Annie and Viveca’s new dynamic becomes fraught. And on the day of the wedding, the secrets and shocking truths that have been discovered will come to light.Set in Lamb’s mythical town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, this is a riveting, epic novel about marriage and family, old hurts and past secrets, which explores the ways we find meaning in our lives.