But When She Was Bad Page 11

  No. Not by a long stretch.

  I missed what should have been—not what actually was the reality in our time together, and not what ultimately could have been with Annie White. Worse, I pined for the way things should have turned out; I ached for what might have been. I would look around at the reality of my life after Annie White took Todd and went off to live in her fantasy-land, and I was bitter and unhappy and deeply angry. I had badly misjudged a woman and I had misjudged me and I had misjudged life itself some years before, and I deeply regretted all of that misjudgment.

  If truth be told, the green monster was always with me when it came to Annie White. I was jealous that some other man was screwing her when she should have been in my bed. And I was jealous that she had taken part of the life I envisioned, and was living that part somewhere else, with someone else.

  Some nights, after the work was done, it was as if I’d fallen under a witch’s malevolent spell … as if some ganja-smoking practitioner of voodoo had basted a doll-like replica of me with sweet, sticky honey and was summoning up marching columns of red ants to feast on my delirium. Because I convinced myself that I wanted Annie White back. I found that I lusted for her mind, her body, her presence. I wanted her with me … and the ache of not having her by my side was as bad as any ache I’d ever felt.

  It didn’t help that Annie chose that moment to glide back into my life.

  44

  It was Seinfeld, wasn’t it?, who said breaking up with someone is like tipping over a Coke machine: you can’t do it with one big shove, you’ve got to rock it back and forth until it tips over.

  One sunny morning in early April, just about a year from the time of our divorce, she came rustling back to me on a gossamer-like web of deceit and, fool that I am, I let myself be lured into the trap by her charms. I fell for her breathy avowals of love and, for a brief moment in time, I went back and, even worse, I fell in love with her—likely for the first time ever.

  It happened so abruptly that I had no defenses ready—and no strength in the face of it.

  She’d stopped in unannounced at the studio. Without preamble she launched into a long litany of complaints: I wasn’t buying enough clothes for Todd. I wasn’t feeding him right when he was staying at the house. I wasn’t scheduling him for dental visits. My support checks were getting to her on the 2nd or 3rd of the month, not the first. On and on.

  I remember listening to all this with a sense of wonder. Just who did this woman think she was? Why on earth would she think I cared about all these grievances? Only half listening, I went about my work. Aloud, I gave out periodic, “Umm”s and “Okay”s and maybe a few “Well, no, I don’t think so”s. But for the most part I was paying attention to an array of slides I’d shot the day before on a trucking firm’s operations. Is that yellow on the logotype there too bright … or should I use this one, where the truck’s in a bit of a shadow? Absorbed in such concerns, I barely noticed that she was winding down across the room. Then I heard her sit on the couch and let out a soft sob.

  Oh, Christ, I thought Act III, Scene I, wherein the fair maiden is in distress. I ignored the sounds and went on working.

  But after a while, she began talking very quietly, not so much to me as at me. “Some nights,” she said in a near whisper, “I just sit in the living room after Todd is asleep and I feel so empty. I feel so drained and so pointless, so empty of hope, because you’re not there for us. I sit there for hours on end, not able to move, not able to think—just feeling so lost and so empty.”

  I tossed the slides aside at that point and retreated to the windows across the room from her. Looking out at the April newness, at all the green and all the budding going on in the yard, I tried to close down my mind and retreat to that place where I knew who I was and what I was about … but likely I was listening all too closely to her.

  “I’ll be walking into another room and suddenly joy stabs at me,” Annie was saying, “because I’m convinced that you’ll be there, visiting us, just like you used to. And then you’re not there after all and I ask myself, ‘How can that be? How can such a thing happen? Why isn’t he here?’”

  Shut up, Annie, I was thinking. Just pick up and go away and leave me alone on all this. But she didn’t. She kept on about it, going over the same scorched earth I regularly trod in my own sessions of doubt and regret.

  The should-have-beens … the could-have-beens … the might-have-beens—they all swarmed out of that dank cave of sadness where we keep our sorrows and our failures. They knew full well that it wasn’t really 3 a.m. and I wasn’t really pacing the house alone, touching at the still heads of sleeping children, all the while fighting the demons of Why?… Why is it this way? Hearing Annie, they swarmed anyway. The thoughts and visions of the life I’d once hoped for came at me with full vengeful force, clawing at me, hating me.

  “Can’t we?” Annie was saying across the room. “Couldn’t we?”

  I hadn’t really heard what preceded that but I had a good idea what she was asking for. No, I thought. There’s no damned way we can or we will. We had our chance, lady. Now we live with it. Aloud, I let loose some of that bitterness. I said, “You got what you wanted, Annie, and there are times when I think to myself, ‘Well, I hope you choke on it, sweetheart.’”

  “I know,” she whispered. “But I’m so, so sorry it all happened.”

  Yeah, right. Looking out the windows at all the startling green of new life cycling around yet again, I said, “I’d better get back to work. I’ve got a show due this afternoon.”

  This was all very new to me—this nostalgia on Annie’s part for the way we once were. She’d dropped some hints in the recent past that the single-mom life wasn’t quite all she’d anticipated … but this was the first time she was so boldly suggesting that the divorce was a mistake. Of course, I knew her as a creature of whim, so I figured this latest impulse would pass quickly. But for the moment she probably believed ever so strongly in what she was saying.

  Annie choked back a new sob and I heard her stand. “I’m sorry I took up so much time like this.”

  Then she was right there behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist and laying her cheek against my back. She whispered, “I need you in me, Gil. Can we, just this once?” I felt her pressing her breasts into me; her pelvis moved against my bottom.

  I gave a derisive snort of disbelief. “What, and disappoint Frank like that? You want him to have horns too?”

  She stiffened against me but didn’t pull back. “I’m not seeing him anymore. He’s gone. He’s out of my life.” Her voice was hard, whether with conviction on that score or resentment that I would bring up such concerns, I couldn’t tell. “It’s you I love, Gil. It’s you I want.” At the same moment, she slipped her hands down to the front of my trousers and kneaded at me.

  The battle was probably lost by that time but then Annie clinched it by smoothly pandering to my male ego. “Nobody can make love to me like you, Gil. Nobody ever has and nobody ever will.”

  I turned away from the windows and faced her. Even with the two massages I’d just had in particularly vulnerable spots, I thought I was still strong enough—just barely—to push it all away. “Annie,” I began in what I hoped was a kind voice, “even if we were both free to do this, there’s no future in it. There’s no way we can erase what’s happened, and no way we can ever start fresh. It’s gone.”

  In deference to the warming season, Annie was wearing a T-shirt that day with just a light windbreaker over it. Holding a look directly into my eyes, she shucked off her coat, dropping it behind her. Just as quickly, she lifted the T-shirt up and over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Even as I was saying “It’s gone,” she pulled my hands up to cup her breasts. I felt their hot weight in my palms and their hard nipples whisking against my thumbs, then she was slinking out of her slacks. Again, there was nothing underneath. She moved into me again and pulled one of my hands down to her sex. She was sopping. “Do me,” she whispere
d in a choked voice. “Do me hard, Gil. Take me.”

  45

  Have there ever been times when you’re so ashamed of something you’ve done that you avoid not just the phone but even a blinking answering machine full of messages?

  If so, then you can picture this fool known as Gil Wexler in the days following Annie’s and my little episode of backsliding that April morning. Blinds drawn, doors locked, and all phone calls routed to a muted answering machine, I sat in the studio and brooded over my insanity—both recent and continuing. The three kids tiptoed around me and my funk. After a while, they didn’t even bother to check it out when they heard another crash of breaking glass or an obscene bellow of formless rage coming from the studio. For two full days, I demanded that life leave me the hell alone … and, grudgingly, it did.

  I realized that if my life had been an embarrassment before, now it was a travesty of all I’d ever been or believed. Now it was a mockery. While I couldn’t hear the gods laughing at me behind my back … I knew that they were. Because you had to laugh at a man so bent on self-destruction that he would willingly climb back into the jaws of death after being miraculously set free only a short time before. It’s as if one of the Christians actually got the best of the lion out there on the dirt floor of the Coliseum … and then sauntered back to share a high five with the puzzled animal. Wham! goes the lion’s huge paw. Thank you, sir, says he, licking his chops.

  It was the siren song of Maybe I Can Get My Life Back …

  As we grow older we spend more and more time mired in the highlights of the past. We select out this moment and that event from our faded memories and we define ourselves by them. We conveniently forget how miserable we might have been all the rest of the time … how trapped we might have felt in all the non-Kodak moments. It’s selective memory, it’s wishful thinking, it’s willful delusion—and yet it determines so much that goes after.

  Why would I have gone along with her seduction? Why would I have fallen in love with her over those lonely nights of doubt and regret?

  The simple explanation might be that I learned to love her only when I couldn’t have her anymore. But that doesn’t go far enough. I think the real reason I would have fallen in love with Annie White at that juncture (if only for a few hours at a time) was because loving her could have brought Todd back to me. It could have given me back all my children—all the time. By loving Annie, I could be spared the hateful visitation scenario which is so much a festering, ongoing indictment, a reminder in the flesh, of failure.

  Because even when I had all four children around me—with another woman of the moment acting as my partner—it was never quite right. It was fakery somehow. Even if my companion and I spent a long day with the four kids, doing a ball game or the zoo or just cruising the flea markets, it was all labeled a fraud if, come 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening, Todd had to go somewhere else to be home. The whole pretense was continuously galling if a slice of me was consigned to alien hands. But if I were to love Annie, then the failure and the pretense would be erased and forgiven and forever wiped from my record.

  She held the key to my wholeness. If I loved Annie, then I wouldn’t have to mourn a part of me on Sunday evenings because Todd would still be with me; he wouldn’t be consigned to some limbo of my-fatherhood-without-influence.

  So Todd and my missing him lent a magnetism to Annie that I mistook, in those long nights of festering self-doubt, for love. Having lost what she meant, I had gained a heightened new appreciation of her. She’d become more valuable. She’d finally become important to my life.

  The real mistake, of course, is that years before, with Jillian, I had inadvertently re-defined myself as a father rather than as a man. I had let myself be talked into having children (first by Jillian, then by Annie) and once they were there … I was possessed by these children—in all their magical, other-worldly need and potential. Children had become so central a part of me that I had, over the years, lost sight of the Gil Wexler I’d known when I was a younger man. He was a relatively strong, independent guy, a take-it-or-leave-it sort who wasn’t greatly attached to anything or anyone.

  But then kids reached deep into my soul and cored out little sustaining slivers of Gil Wexler. Those little slivers were like pods on a tether—they were floating extensions of me. But the tethers grow weak over time and soon enough the pods are out there on their own, still orbiting me but loose now. Meantime, I’ve got these permanent puncture wounds in my soul. They ache for the loss of the kids … and for the parts of me they took with them.

  I came out of my immobilization after a while and opened the blinds and unlocked the doors and said “Hi” and “Sorry” to the kids. Annie had called the answering machine a half-dozen times, but I erased the messages without listening. It had been a lapse, nothing more. I told myself that. Vigorously.

  That same night, one of those sudden, unbidden impulses I’m prey to came over me. I sometimes think these impulses are the only genuine responses we have to life—they’re the urgent, unmistakable nudges of God’s finger … the finger that shoves us here (not there) after we’ve aimlessly bumbled through the landscape of our lives, wondering just what in hell we’re doing here.

  After enough of that dithering, God’s finger comes down out of nowhere and shoves at us. As if to say, “You’ve had your chance. Now we’re going to do it my way.”

  These impulses generally aren’t unpleasant. There’s such a certainty there (a kind of robotic acceptance of the inevitable) that, when they come, I feel like the galley slave down in the hold of some huge sailing ship who’s been given an unexpected coffee break (or would it have been a grog break back then?). He feels the 50 pounds of chains fall off his shoulders, he lets go of those damned implacable oars, and he stands, he stretches, he revels. For that one brief moment, he is free.

  It’s the intervals between these rare nudges of God’s finger that give you fits. Just rowing, rowing, rowing—and aching. Always aching.

  But enough of that.

  In this particular slice of time, God’s prodding finger nudged at me to build a fire. Even as the should-have-beens … the could-have-beens … and the might-have-been were being vicious, I built a fire in the studio’s freestanding fireplace. Then I methodically gathered up anything at all that had anything to do with Annie White—pictures, mementoes, love notes, underwear, nightgowns, blouses, even an off-white cocktail dress I’d last seen at some long-ago August wedding.

  It all went into the fire.

  The blaze was bright, the blaze was happy.

  I watched that purgative offering well into the night, sharing my thoughts with a bottle of Wild Turkey, trying to recall the man I was before I was a father—the man who would have never given Annie White the time of day, much less the key to his life. I thought a lot, too, on how we keep on doing the same things in our lives, over and over again … until we finally get kicked hard enough so the needle or the laser light skips on to the next part of the song.

  The fire wasn’t a curative … but it went a long way toward exorcising a past that was an ongoing indictment. Needless to say, the sense of freedom it gave me didn’t last. As the fire died down, I was aimless again, pointless, set loose on a tide of free will that continuously engulfs me with confusion. God’s finger, having writ, had moved on.

  She called over the days to come. Each time she avowed her love. Each time, she invited me up to her condo for a reprise of our lovemaking. Each time I managed to say no.

  Because as much as a part of me wanted to, I couldn’t. Even in my disabled state, I knew the reality that none of us ever really changes … and I knew that she’d re-entered my life for one reason and one reason only: to get back at me. To reverse the roles—and have me servicing her … at her command, on her schedule, in her own little Queen Bee condo-hive which she now owned, lock, stock, and barrel.

  Willingly or not, I’d given Annie White everything she’d ever wanted—a baby of her own and a house of her own and a life of
her own—and that was too heavy a debt. Much as a Galatea will resent the Pygmalion who created her, somewhere inside herself, Annie deeply resented my enabling role in her life. She needed to turn it all back at me. She needed to lure me in … and then spit me back out—on her own terms.

  Watching the fire sputter down into a few hot coals that night, I thought back on the changes I’d seen in Annie over the previous year. Once free of her instant (and far too demanding) family, she had indeed come out of herself. She had blossomed. But she’d blossomed into the quintessential coquette—the woman who coyly cultivates men’s amorous attentions … but who has no affection whatever for them.

  And it had almost worked on me.

  Sure enough, when she realized I wasn’t going along with her scheme, her professed love quickly segued into rage. For several weeks, I heard long, impassioned recitals of my faults over the phone. And of course, Todd was barred from my life. Ultimately, though, she calmed down and we went back to the cease-fire that had been in place prior to our backsliding. Todd was allowed back into my life—still, of course, on the basis of Annie’s whims and needs.

  She went back with Frank. Or had she really left him?

  And there, for the next year or so, is where things stood.

  Until the rage came along—and then things got very interesting indeed. So much so that I finally stood up on my hind legs and said, No. No, I won’t go along with this anymore.

  46

  Finally, it’s Day Seven of Nine.

  Time has slowed down to an agonizing crawl over this past week. I realize anew that so much of life consists of waiting—waiting to see how the coin you’ve flipped into the air … the one that spins so slowly and so tantalizingly, glinting and shimmering in the light … will come down in your outstretched palm. Heads, I get the job/the woman/the life I want. Tails, I get screwed/shafted/beaten down into the dirt.