But When She Was Bad

  But When She Was Bad

  A Novel

  Lou Peddicord

  New York

  For Leah, Garrett, Hunter, and Griffin

  There was a little girl

  Who had a little curl …

  And when she was good

  She was very, very good,

  But when she was bad she was horrid.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  1

  Annie White and I married on a warm but not uncomfortable Friday evening in August.

  We had the wedding reception at my home—a home she and I had been sharing for about a year and a half as we explored and then committed to the notion of making a life together.

  Annie and I were planning a honeymoon trip that weekend to some ramshackle but romantic old hotel a couple of hours away; we’d stumbled across it during a motorcycle trip the summer before. The three young children from my earlier marriage (one which had ended some seven years before with my wife’s death) were safely away with my relatives.

  We never got to that hotel.

  As the last of the wedding guests were leaving, Annie told me she’d been having cramps for a good part of the day. She was scared, she said, scared for the baby she was carrying, the eight- or nine-week-old baby which was the only real reason for our deciding to marry at that particular time. Why else would anyone get married in August?

  I was amazed when she told me this, and as I drew her toward me to comfort her I wanted to ask, “Why?” Why hadn’t she said anything? Why had we gone through this whole day without her giving even a hint that something was wrong? Why hadn’t we stopped the ceremony or put it off or done something to forestall a miscarriage?

  Annie had seemed fine to me that day: happy, relaxed, and not particularly nervous as we faced such a big step—along with the complexities of fifty or so wedding guests, a caterer to oversee, the myriad details of a church ceremony, and all the rest that goes along with a marriage which would redefine a family.

  But even as I was trying to find a way to ask this “Why?” Annie pulled away from me and ran off to a bathroom.

  Minutes later, she had lost the baby.

  For a while, we stayed at home, dealing with her pain. When it worsened, we called the paramedics in and stayed several hours in a hospital emergency room. Annie’s pain gradually ratcheted down. We spent the rest of the weekend at home, not telling anyone we hadn’t left town—and certainly not broadcasting the news of the miscarriage. I think we all have an inborn aversion to letting the world know how obviously the fates toy with us.

  She mostly slept that honeymoon weekend, snacking now and then from the mounds of food the caterers had left behind.

  I mostly wondered what in hell it all meant.

  I had always been of the mind that things happen to us, or come to us, or open up to us, at precisely the right time—at exactly the moment we’re ready for them; not a minute late, not a second early. Even more do I believe that now. Because only now have I realized what I should have understood then: Annie had that miscarriage only hours after we took our vows together as husband and wife because she had to. Because she could not have survived as Annie White otherwise.

  But that’s only part of the reason I’m relating all this now.

  There’s much more to it—enough so that it makes Annie White’s story not just a recital of how one man courted failure and invited disaster into his life … but something of a cautionary tale as well. Because there are a lot of Annie Whites out there, and they’re deadly. Unless you know what to look for, you can easily be taken in by them.

  Just a few days ago I learned something else about Annie—and about me. Again, I surely should have seen this earlier; there were certainly enough clues and tell-tale signs strewn about. But I suppose I wasn’t ready until now to understand it.

  The fact is, less than two months after her marriage to me that warm August evening, Annie began an incredibly sordid affair with another man—all the while she and I were trying to have a second baby together. Which means that even as I’m telling you this, I do not know whether the four-year-old who was ultimately born to us at home, on our marriage bed, was actually fathered by me.

  Why, you might ask, would she have had an affair just then—and risk the baby being his, rather than mine? Again, I think I know the answer now:

  She had the affair and she took the risk because she had to. Because Annie White didn’t know any other way to protect herself. To protect herself from real intimacy and from any genuine involvement in anyone else’s life. But she also did it so she would finally have something she could genuinely call her own—no one else’s, just Annie’s.

  I found out about the affair only three days ago. Todd and I are going to a laboratory today, to take a DNA test which will determine, to a 99% certainty, whether I’m really his father—and determine, at the same time, just how this story will end. We can be sure of one thing: It will almost certainly end even more badly than it started.

  It takes nine days to complete this DNA testing. Which is just about time enough to tell you about Annie White.

  2

  My name is Gil Wexler.

  I’ve been a commercial photographer for a fair number of my 40-some years, and I suppose I’m pretty good at it. Or at least competent enough to have earned an adequate amount of money from taking photos of skinny models and ugly buildings and things that skitter up and down assembly lines in factories. It’s a living.

  It’s also how I met Annie. She was in sales then, working for a local distributor of photographic papers and chemicals and the like. I don’t ordinarily even return calls from the steady stream of salespeople who leave messages with the service or who, worse yet, catch me answering the phone myself. But Annie I made an exception for. Largely because I was curious.

  Billy Greckle, an old acquaintance who dabbled some in photography (and who, like most people I knew then, couldn’t understand why a widower of five years duration with three young children underfoot wasn’t actively looking for a woman), had told me I should meet Annie. Billy is of the homosexual persuasion so when he said it for the fourth or fifth time, I started to pay attention. If he noticed a woman at all it was generally to criticize her clothes.

  “Why would I want to meet her?” I said into the phone. “What am I going to do with her?”

  “Just meet her, for Christ’s sake. You don’t have to go to bed with her.”

  “I don’t want to meet anybody in sales, Billy, much less go to bed with them.”

  Billy sighed dramatically, letting the phone carry his deep exasperation with the straight world.

  I bent a little. “What’s she look like?”

  Billy jumped at the opening. “She’s pretty. I think she’s a blonde. Anyway, she’s got big boobs. You people like that, right?”

  I laughed. “You think she’s a blonde, Billy? Haven’t you looked?”

  “Maybe it’s red; maybe she’s got red hair.” Billy paused and I pictured him trying to remember just what this Annie person looked like. It was a unique debility, his total amnesia as to what anyone looked like. I’d known him for years but I was sure I could pass him on the street and he wouldn’t have the slightest clue who I was unless I spoke to him or I was wearing a nametag that said GIL WEXLER. YOU KNOW ME, BILLY.

  I sometimes imagined that Billy must recoil in shock whenever he passes a mirror. He just can’t remember a face—even his own. I’ve since learned that there’s a medical name for this particular malady. It’s called prosopagnosia and they say it’s caused by bilateral lesions of the ventromedial occipitotemporal regions of the brain. Which is to say, it can happen when you drop a baby on his head.

  Someday I’ll mention this to Bill
y, but only when I have the patience to endure his inevitable half-hour riff on just when and how such an injury could have occurred. Likely I’ll hear that Billy’s distracted (perhaps besotted) mother did indeed drop him repeatedly to the floor while transferring him from crib to highchair and back again.

  “So how do you happen to know this Annie with the blonde or maybe it’s red hair?”

  “I’m renting her a room upstairs. Plus she used to work at the University, so I knew her from there. She’s really pretty interesting.”

  Billy owned a huge, turn-of-the-century townhouse downtown, something he’d picked up for a song because no one in his right mind would choose to live there. The neighborhood had long since gone over to the druggies and prostitutes and the other detritus of America’s cities. The house, most recently home to a half-dozen rapacious welfare families who ripped apart and ripped off even what was nailed down, was now under perpetual, energetic renovation.

  Billy was determined to reclaim its former glory (from the time it was summer home to one of the city’s excessively rich titans of industry) and he occasionally rented out space to help meet the staggering bills from a small but very happy army of carpenters and electricians and plasterers who seemed to work there full-time.

  No one among Billy’s far-flung circle of friends was quite sure how he managed to support himself, plus his live-in mother, plus his once-and-future mansion … because Billy no longer worked.

  He’d been a teacher once but he gave that up when he finally realized he just couldn’t tolerate kids. Then he’d been a cartographer but gave that up when his employers objected to the creative license he took with the precise location of roads and towns and such. Since then he’d dabbled some with portraiture but got very little done (and, one assumed, billed out equally as little) because Billy was a perfectionist who could not easily let go of a photo without compulsively retouching it again and again. It would take Billy weeks to get a simple head-and-shoulders shot out the door—and then, when the person showed up finally to claim it, he’d more than likely grab it back for some more retouching when he saw anew what the person actually looked like.

  “Billy,” I said with not nearly enough conviction that day we first talked on the phone about Annie, “I don’t need a woman. I’ve got three kids—who are, as you’ll recall, ages eight, seven, and six—and that keeps me busy enough as it is. So I sure as hell—”

  “They don’t serve the same function, Gil, for Christ’s sake! Kids you feed and you wipe their noses and you tell them all kinds of wise things until they grow up enough to hate you and do it all themselves. Women, you do things with!”

  “How would you know?”

  Billy was not to be deterred. “This is what I’ve heard. This is a fact.”

  Obviously, of course, I gave in eventually and let him tell this salesperson Annie with the huge breasts and the blonde or red hair she could call me—but it wasn’t very likely I’d buy anything. Billy was pleased. Why is it that gays are such matchmakers?

  A week or so later, Annie showed up at the studio attached to the house. She had black hair. She did not have huge breasts.

  3

  But she was very married—except I didn’t know that then.

  We got on fairly well that first day, though I certainly wasn’t bowled over. I thought she was … cute, but not really my type. She smiled too much, I thought, and she seemed nervous as hell. She wore a fire-engine-red business suit, she was a little plump, she’d painted a startling gash of lipstick against her olive skin, and she had her black hair slicked back in a tight bun. Her eyes were delicious, though. A startling bright blue with milky white sclera.

  Billy Greckle called within an hour after she left. “Well?” he said archly. “What did you think?”

  “She’s nice,” I said.

  “Oh, Christ, not nice,” he moaned, scraping the word off his tongue like it was some dog turd he’d just stepped in. “Surely not nice!”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Billy. Nice is all it goes. No Roman candles, no bulges I had to hide behind the desk.”

  “You’re just not looking, Gil! Annie’s a very sweet, very charming person!”

  “I’ll grant you that, Billy. Very sweet and very charming.” I waited a beat. “Nice, too.”

  Billy clicked with his tongue and I knew it was on its way—his standard harangue on the appalling, abysmal lack of taste all straights in general and I in particular exhibited. I let him go on for a while along those lines, then got off the phone as graciously as I could, claiming I had an appointment I was already late for.

  Which certainly should have ended it. I know for a fact that I didn’t give two thoughts to Annie White after Billy Greckle and I talked that same day she and I’d met. I didn’t have the interest—and I sure as hell didn’t have the time. The business I was running and the three kids I was raising made sure of that.

  I should mention here that, of course, I had help with the kids. Virtually from the moment my wife Jillian died (at a shamefully young 28—and yes, I’ll get into that later on) I had someone in, whenever possible, to do the 9-to-5, minute-to-minute things with the kids. Diapers, feeding, cleaning, nurturing: the whole lot. Memory being what it is, I recall firing more of these misfits and losers and generally bad people than I ever hired, but I know that’s not entirely possible. Let’s just say that I fired them all. Some sooner than later. As in within a few minutes of their hiring.

  Because while I am not, never was, and never could be a “kid person,” I’m like the typical philistine who can’t draw a curved line but who can recognize great art. I know when someone likes kids. And I know when someone is going to do good things with my kids. It’s not predictable in an interview setting (which is why so much firing goes on, I suppose). Neither is it definable as to exactly what qualities you’d want in someone who watches your kids.

  To the contrary, I think what all of us do is—we watch how our kids relate to the new sitter or governess or housekeeper or stand-in mom. Even pre-verbal kids know an asshole when they see one. And they let you know.

  You can see it in a three-year-old’s face when she rolls her eyes at the new lady in her life and gives you a Jesus-Dad-what-the-hell-were-you-thinking? look.

  You can even see it in the ten-month-old who adjusts the aim on that little weapon so he can pee an arc smack-dab onto the new woman’s blouse; then he evaluates her reaction, makes a snap judgement, and lets you know. With a decibel-crunching yowl that means “Deep-six this turkey, Dad” … or a coo and a purr and a gurgle that translates, “Keep her: she’s got the right stuff, old man.”

  Let me note here that I am one of the majority who doesn’t even like kids. They’re greedy, puking, pissing, pooping savages who have no redeemable social value whatsoever. Unless they’re mine. Then I love them … I treasure them … I dote on them. And I’ll bet that at least 97% of the adult world shares my dislike of kids in general.

  My late wife Jillian and I used to crawl into bed after a long, long evening of finally tucking our three very young ones into bed and then just lay there catatonic, wondering why in hell all of us so slavishly follow some stupid biological imperative to replicate ourselves.

  “Fifteen I.Q. points per kid: they say that’s what you lose,” Jillian noted on more than one of those late evenings, laying there in our bed perfectly still, unable to move.

  “Ah, what’s 40 points between friends and lovers?”

  “45.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Plus the business was a bit of a distraction. I was busy enough during the day and then into the night in the darkroom after the kids were asleep that I didn’t have the time (or, thankfully, the need) to think about any of the Annies out there. That’s the saving grace of work: it keeps your mind off the really important things in your life.

  I’d done commercial photography from the time I was in high school and it was all I really knew. And life does go on, as all the kind folks confided after Jillian died. So
I went on, too. I kissed the right tushes to get the right jobs and I managed to push the right buttons at the right settings to get the jobs done. Beyond that, give me sleep. That’s what I truly craved in those years after Jillian left us. Sleep.

  So nothing really changed in my life in that time after meeting Annie White. But then she called a couple, maybe three weeks later. It was early, barely 8 a.m.

  “Hi, it’s Annie.”

  Just that. No further clues as to who this “Annie” person was and why she was calling me at such an hour, when coffee was the only imperative. I thought quickly, then placed the name and the voice. She sounded very merry and very cheery—almost manic in her joy. I said my hi’s and how-are-you’s and she came back with, “Are all the kids off to school yet?”

  I was startled at the quick veer into the personal and batted it away with whatever came to mind. Maybe a “Not quite” or maybe “Just moving out the door now.” I don’t remember which because what she said next was even more startling.

  “Well, I was just about to climb into the shower and I was thinking of you and I didn’t even grab up a robe, I just thought I’d call and see if maybe you were free for lunch?”

  And here’s where I took the first step, one of those stupid flirtatious moments a guy tends to have when somebody rings his chimes just the right way. I said, “So you’re just standing there outside the shower without any clothes on and you’re calling me about lunch?”

  She giggled. “Well, actually, I’m sitting on the bed without any clothes on and, yes, please say you’re free for lunch. I’ll make sure to put something on.”

  I may be an ass but I’m not dead below the waist. I said yes and after a little more banter I hung up feeling strangely bemused and maybe just a little bewitched. I have all the usual excuses, of course—I like flattery as much as the next guy and I like sex even more than the next guy. And there’d been a real dearth of that sex in my life in recent times. In fact, in the five years since my wife had died, I’d been with only three women, and one of them (a neighbor who turned out to be very strange indeed) happened only once. So I suppose I was what they call available.