But When She Was Bad Read online

  The bitch! The no-good bitch!

  “Nothing’s wrong, Todd,” I manage to wheeze finally. “Don’t worry.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rearranging, Todd. Just rearranging.”

  He’s scared at my outburst and he wants to get out of the suddenly very messy basement and he takes my finger and pulls at me and I turn off the lights in the basement and we go upstairs to see what’s happening on TV with the Magic School Bus or with Bill Nye, The Science Guy and I watch with eyes that keep seeing some other scene, in some little backroom of a little nowhere sculpture gallery.

  The storm outside rages unabated.

  48

  That night I learned hate has a taste.

  I dropped Todd off at Annie’s around eight, saying a quick “Hi” to her, making sure I didn’t make eye contact. Back home, I checked that the three kids were settling down to the rest of their homework and then I went outside and just stood in the damp, cloaking darkness. The storm had passed but its wet, suffocating aftermath was all around me.

  It tastes like velvet, hates does—electrically charged velvet. It coats your tongue and your gums with a thick layer of vibrating molecules that course and twist ’round and ’round. It tastes thick and gummy and it makes a color in your mouth, a color like purple. It tastes vile.

  I stood there in the rain-soaked yard and looked up at the bright pinpoints of stars too far away to give a damn about and I tasted hate and I saw in my mind’s eye the scenes Wolfie had so graphically, yet so naively, sketched for me.

  I saw some unnamed man pushing, time and time again, at an Annie with hiked skirts and a naked Annie and a partially-naked Annie and I see these two people doing all this in some distant time past when the light from those damned stars up there was no different, no different at all, from what it is tonight.

  As if I were editing some pornographic film, I watched it all again and again and I knew not just jealousy and not just rage and not just the knife-sharp edge of betrayal, but also the pulsing need for revenge.

  That any person could so trample on a vow and a trust and a commitment; that anyone could so willfully and cynically use me—no, it couldn’t be countenanced. I had let Annie get away with a number of things but I would not let this go by. At that moment I could have killed Annie White. There were so many reasons to kill her I would have had trouble picking just one:

  Her being a pig, a slut, a tramp? Yes, of course.

  Letting a seven-year-old see it, even inadvertently? Yes.

  Exposing me to AIDS or herpes or God knows what else? That, too.

  Making it possible that we were actually going to birth some other man’s child?

  Maybe that most of all.

  Standing there in the darkness, I rolled the hate around in my mouth and I wanted to kill Annie White for what she’d done to me and to all of us but I knew I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t. I’d think of something else—something better, some other way to pay her back.

  But first I had to know.

  I had to know whether Todd was mine—or whether he was the spawn of some sleaze who fucked my wife in a sculpture gallery’s back room. Then I would decide what to do.

  49

  Day Eight of Nine.

  It’s Thursday again and I have the other three kids in the car when I pick Todd up. We’ll be heading straight for dinner at my mother’s. Todd lights up when he see the kids and they all exchange raucous hellos while I’m belting him into the car seat. Each of the three older ones sneaks out a hand or a finger to touch at Todd. It’s as if they want to make it physical, this closing of the circle. Not three kids and one kid, but four kids, all of a family.

  Parents might not, but kids know how things should be.

  The teasing and bantering starts up right away.

  “Hey, Todd,” Allegra sings out from the front seat. “I had a dream last night. You want to know what I dreamed?”

  “What?” says Todd eagerly. His face is wreathed in a smile. His older sister is paying attention!

  “Oooh,” says Allegra, twisting full around from the front seat so she can almost swoop down over Todd, “I dreamed you were flying over my bed last night and you were wearing this big blue cape and you had a Yogi Bear Pez dispenser with you and you gave me two yellows and a green, all without my asking.”

  “I did! I was!” Todd shouts gleefully, remembering what must have happened because his older sister was saying it was so.

  Jack cuts in. “So why didn’t you give me any, you little pookie?”

  “I tried! But you were ’sleep! O-tay?”

  “It’s not o-tay with me, because you didn’t give me one either,” growls Wolfie. “I wanted a red one.”

  “I gave you a pink one,” Todd says sternly, turning in his car seat to face down someone who was the second youngest kid anyway and who got just a little less leeway because of that.

  “Next time, Todd,” I call out from the front seat, “no more brown pezes, okay? And please don’t be stepping on my stomach again when you’re landing in my room, okay?”

  Todd smirks. It’s perfectly within a kid’s rights to put down his father. “Then none for you, ebber again!” he shouts. Diss-ing the dad.

  Jack picks up now. “Ebber again, huh? What’s that mean, pookie? Ebber?”

  The teasing goes on, shifting from Todd’s occasional mangled word to his new drawings, which he proudly shows around, on to some other quickly passing subject.

  I revel in this kind of nonsense, mostly staying out of it and letting four young people test their wit and their bounds. Allegra, who’s about to pass onto the more weighty concerns of being a teenager, is still the leader of it all but she’s ceding more and more control to Jack and Wolfie. The two boys are jostling for ascendancy and straining to be the one who’s quicker and funnier. Todd takes it all in, trying his best just to follow them, chiming in from time to time.

  Much the same goes on through the meal at my mother’s, with my sister and her husband joining us and joining in. Their three dogs—surrogate children for this childless couple—are twirling around the table throughout the meal, knocking snouts into elbows while begging scraps, trampling on toes, and generally adding to the bustle. Todd has wide, bright eyes through it all, not eating much because he’s too busy being part of the free-form bantering.

  I sit there knowing I’ll likely get an aggravated call later tonight from Annie after I’ve dropped Todd back at her place. Virtually every Thursday night she has some complaint or other Todd’s got a stomach ache from too much candy, or he’s been whining for food all evening because apparently I didn’t feed him. “Can’t you ever get it right, Gil? Don’t you know how to take care of him? Can’t you pay just a little attention to your son?”

  I smile, thinking of the call to come, but I put it out of mind and pay attention instead to what’s going on around me.

  50

  Day Nine.

  It’s a beautiful morning and I’ve been up since 5 a.m. I should be working on putting a slide show together for a new movie trailer but instead I’m pacing. I pace for a while in the studio then I go outside and pace up and down the driveway and then I come back inside and I pace through the house.

  The three kids are all off at school and I have the place to myself. Indeed, more and more of late, I unexpectedly find myself alone in this huge, sprawling house, which was built so large to accommodate more of a family than I have now. I give the three kids a lot of freedom so they’re out a lot. Which is good, I tell myself. Which is dangerous, I hear in response from some other, more cautious me. I shrug. Who’s to say? They’re growing up quickly, these three legacies from another woman who left.

  What would they want in the matter at hand?

  Would they miss Todd if they were never to see him again? Or are they so self-absorbed that they wouldn’t really care? Needless to say, I haven’t brought up my quandary with Allegra or Jack or Wolfie—particularly not Wolfie. I want to do nothing that could
potentially jog his memory of those days he apparently spent squeezed into a back-alley window well, watching his stepmother and some rotten sludge doing things no seven-year-old should see. I’m counting on the fact that memory is so fleeting a thing in young children. Maybe those images will never surface for him. Or maybe they’ll come back only when he’s ready to handle them. Either way, I keep my fingers crossed—and hope that Wolfie’s strong enough.

  He may well be. I’ve called him “dispassionate” and he is, to the nth degree. Nothing really affects Wolfie—not then and not now. He’s so far into himself (and beyond other people) that I sometimes think he’s checked into some neighboring universe.

  Maybe that’s why he’s such an incredible artist. He sketches and paints as naturally and easily as the rest of us breathe—showing rich, naturalistic detail in startling, overlapping perspectives. He’s truly a weird boy.

  For the longest time, I worried that Wolfie was either autistic or schizophrenic—that’s how indifferent he is to us mere mortals. But by now I realize that it’s even worse than that: the damn kid’s a genius. Maybe an idiot savant, granted, but a genius nonetheless at evoking timeless beauty out of the mundane.

  So maybe Wolfie just put all that window-well time out of mind because it wasn’t relevant to Gaynor Wexler and his narrow (though apparently very rich) little universe. Or, just as likely, he’s long since realized what Annie and an unknown “tall man” were doing in that little back room—but he just doesn’t give a damn. Wolfie has been known to put two and two together and paint a “5” for the rest of us.

  Besides, how does an 11-year-old kid approach his father on something like this? Does he say, “Um, Dad, were you aware that your wife was balling somebody else when she worked at that sculpture gallery?” I don’t think so. Any more than the Dad who just found a notebook called JURNUL is likely to approach the kid and say, “So why didn’t you tell me, you little jerk?”

  Painful subject. I push it out of mind. I check the clock. Just an hour or so before the mail gets here.

  As has been the case so much over these past nine days, I move on to thinking of Todd. Is he … or isn’t he? And what do I do in either case? I remember what the young woman down at the LUCIUS HOFFMAN LABORATORY said to me nine days before as Todd and I were leaving her place. She said, “Good luck. I hope it works out the way you want.”

  That was just three days after I’d found Wolfie’s JURNUL down in the basement. So it’s been twelve days all told since the bottom fell out of my life as surely as a hangman’s trapdoor swings open and the condemned man plummets into a new phase of existence.

  Or is maybe just dead.

  If it turns out that Todd is not of my flesh and blood, then logic tells me I should simply fade out of his life. Give him up and let him become one of the millions of kids in the world I have no connection with—no connection at all.

  On the other hand, if he’s mine, then maybe I should try to get custody of him. Take him away from some sociopath known as Annie White and let him grow up with his brothers and sister, the way it was supposed to be. Get him away from a crazy woman and the mess and the filth in that condominium and all the dogs and cats running around and knocking him down and biting and clawing at him.

  And sentence myself to another bout of raising a kid alone? Sentence myself to another fifteen years of coping and worrying and guiding and loving—when I’m already too damned old and too damned tired?

  After a long while, I stop my pacing and I mentally step back and I feel all these conflicting thoughts and urges skittering around in my mind like in some old-fashioned pinball machine where you’ve let loose all five ball bearings at once and they’re pinging! and ka-chunking! and ka-whapping! away, making a hell of a racket, but all inevitably falling down to the flippers where you try like hell to keep them up in play, but one after the other they fall through anyway and you’re left finally with just one of those bright silver ball bearings in play and you whack! it one last time with your flippers and then it, too, is past you …

  … And you know.

  You know there’s no choice whatsoever in some things you have to do. You know that you’ve got to draw a line in the sand, at some goddamned point or other, and tell the world that if it pushes you one more time … then you’re going to take the gloves off and you’re going to do some serious damage.

  Hell, I’ve known for twelve whole days precisely, exactly, with an absolute certainty, what I’m going to do about Todd and Annie.

  And I don’t need a piece of paper from some DNA laboratory out in the Midwest to tell me the what and the when and the how of it.

  But do I really have the nerve?

  That’s what’s been hanging me up for these twelve days. That’s why I was hoping that at the end of Day Nine, I’d be granted a simple, safe answer and everyone would live happily ever after. Cowardice, plain and simple. I’ve been too cowardly to admit to myself that I love the kid and I don’t give a damn whether he’s got my 23 chromosomes or somebody else’s. I love him and that’s enough.

  But wait:

  Shouldn’t I try to forgive Annie, shouldn’t I “move on” and let it be, shouldn’t I “offer it up” and remember that adversity builds character? After all, isn’t this the era of compassion for the loser, succor for the have-not, and love and forgiveness for those who would take from us—given cover of night and half a chance? Well, no. I’ve had my fill of that. Years and years of living amidst all this touchy-feely concern and caring has convinced me that by turning the other cheek, we’re simply inviting more of the same bad behavior we forced ourselves to ignore in the first place.

  If you turn the other cheek, they’ll bash that, too. This much we’ve learned. Isn’t it about time to say No to the New Age notion of a karma which rewards only the meek and the mild, only the compassionate and the forgiving? Because if you tolerate it, you invite more of it.

  But if you crush it, you get it out of your life.

  Annie’s got a price to pay. Because there’s always a price to pay. There have got to be paybacks.

  And I’m going to make sure Annie White gets hers.

  Because I have to. Because I need to.

  There’s a ring at the studio door and I know it’s a certified letter from some DNA laboratory out in the Midwest. The sullen carrier shoves it at me and holds out a pen. I grab my own pen and scrawl a signature. I slam the door, I toss the rest of the mail on a chair, and I hold the envelope in both hands like it’s some GREETINGS from the Deus Ex Machina who’s going to turn my life around.

  I pace some more, turning the envelope over and over in my hands. I do that for a long time, not thinking, just feeling. Scenes of Todd skitter and collide in my mind:

  Todd looking up at me and asking for more time at the house, saying, “Please, Dad? Please?” …

  Todd on Annie’s stoop, being dropped back at her place, looking at me with eyes that have already seen too much hurt and betrayal …

  Todd laughing and giggling with the other three kids, chasing them through our yard and being chased in turn, in some timeless ritual of bonding as they make their brother/sister compact against the world …

  And then I go to the wall safe that’s behind an abstract painting and I twist to 4 left, 54 right, 4 left.

  I look at the unopened envelope one last time and then I toss it in. I slam the door shut and twirl the dial.

  I don’t give a damn what some test says.

  Todd is mine.

  51

  That same day the envelope came, I went to see Mormon F. Applebee, whose presence, demeanor, and widely-heralded talents are as unlikely as his name.

  I’d asked around among the men I knew who’d been through divorces and child custody battles. I asked, “Who’s the sleaziest dirtbag of a matrimonial lawyer you’ve heard of? Who’s the nastiest, most disgusting, most unscrupulous lowlife of a scumbag in the field?” I got at least half a dozen different names in response but one name in particular k
ept popping up, time and again.

  That’s why, that afternoon, I was sitting across from Mormon F. Applebee, Esquire, and telling him exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted him to do it. I told him a lot, but I certainly didn’t tell him all the intricacies and all the details and all the reasons why. To my mind, lawyers are like condoms. You use them for protection and then you throw them away. You surely don’t consult with your condom ahead of time as to your true intentions on any one evening. I’ve never seen the necessity.

  I should mention that Mormon Applebee, Esquire, is a monstrously huge, gelatinous mass of arrogant pomposity. His size alone is intimidating. He is easily 500 pounds of explosively tight fat which threatens at any moment to blast through the tent-sized pinstripes he wears and spray an ungodly mess on his office walls.

  He is an overfed Buddha; he is a Sumo wrestler gone to fat; he is one of those monstrous, repulsive characters in Star Wars. He cannot easily stand (and most judges allow him the dispensation of not doing so). He sits, watching you like the proverbial overstuffed frog eyeing the innocent little fly. You expect at any moment to see his tongue flicking out and engulfing you in its warty, slimy folds … and then sucking you in, in the wink of an eye, down into his monstrous gut.

  His hands are the only things that ordinarily move. They lay laced on his mammoth girth, up high, around where his chest should be, and he looks at you with small, unblinking, obsidian eyes out of puffy slits in the terrain of fat which is his face. The eyes are not happy eyes. They reflect the dark soul of a man trapped, for whatever reasons, in an obscene parody of a body.

  Then he waves a hand.

  “I’ve heard enough, Mr. Wexler. I shall win it.”

  I nod.

  “We will advise you of requisite dates and times with the psychologists, the social workers, the psychiatrists, the other depositions of all and sundry, the solicitation of character witnesses, etcetera. We will serve the appropriate papers. We will arrange for the testing and affidavits and all the other nonsense. You may rest assured the woman will not know which end is up by the time we are fully prepared.” The hand that waved lays down and the other hand takes its turn to wave. “I am five hundred dollars an hour plus expenses. Leave a check for five thousand dollars as a retainer with my secretary. Good day.”