But When She Was Bad Page 3

  The kids loved it. We’d do a Dr. Seuss or a Sesame Street with Oliver (the fat black cat) acting out all the scenes and trying all the while to bite my wrists. Or we’d do some fairy tale with Oliver taking all the roles and the kids in hysterics in their beds.

  The phone cut in just as Oliver was reaching a crescendo of emotion. Usually I’d let it ring but that night I grabbed it up and had Oliver hiss, “What!? We’re in the middle of a story here!”

  The kids bellowed their delight at this and a very confused Annie White said, “Gil? Is that you? It’s Annie.”

  “Oh. Hi. Sorry about that.”

  I called her back a few minutes later.

  “I tried to get you out of my mind,” she began. “But I can’t.”

  “Um, well, uh …” I said, acting the part of the fool. It wasn’t much of a stretch at the moment. I’ve always had incredible difficulty in saying things people don’t want to hear. Like “Goodbye.” Or “I don’t want you in my life anymore.” It always comes out, “Um, well, uh …”

  Annie said, “I want to see you. Can we have dinner tomorrow night?”

  Of course I wanted to say No, but a large part of me wanted to say Yes, too. Billy had scared me with his news that Annie was maybe a trifle highly-strung—but in the absence of any stronger reasoning, I have to admit I was intrigued at the same time.

  Again, it’s that element of flattery. I suppose we tend to forgive a lot in people who like us. Then too, while I wasn’t even sure I liked Annie, on the other hand I wanted to be with her and be in her and do all those things with a woman I’d been missing so much in the years since Jillian left. Besides, I could always cut it off over dinner. The old public-place-and-maybe-she-won’t-cry notion.

  “All right,” I said. “Okay. Why not?”

  9

  I’ll fast-forward here a little bit and say that, yes, we had dinner and, no, I didn’t cut it off, and, yes, eventually we went to bed together.

  You knew all that was coming—just as surely as I did. I knew it the same evening I was getting ready for dinner with Annie while also getting the kids ready for bedtime and for the sitter. Allegra, my eight-year-old, was watching me tie a tie. She said, “You don’t go out much, Dad, do you?”

  “I know,” I said with a laugh.

  “Is this with a lady? Are you having dinner with a lady?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Good,” Allegra said. “Is she pretty?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Can we see her?”

  I turned and looked at her and I saw a miniature of Jillian standing there, with all of her dead mother’s beauty and need and intensity. She looked more than a little sad and yet hopeful, too. As if her world might change if she said or did just the right thing. I crouched down to fuss at her crunched pajama collar and by chance the two boys zoomed into the room at that moment. Jack, the soulful, moody seven-year-old who most looked like me (and still does), skidded to a stop at Allegra’s side. She pushed at him. “Get away,” she said, annoyed at his breaking into our little meeting. “Won’t,” he said and jumped onto the bed behind us.

  “No jumping,” I said.

  “I’ll jump,” announced Gaynor, the five-almost-six-year-old who’d been so unwisely burdened with that family name that we stuck him with the even worse nickname of “Wolfie.” He started jumping and I snatched him off the bed and held him out in front of me. I growled at him. This was standard fare with Wolfie. We called him that because he skulked and tracked all the time and would sneak up behind you to pounce and growl. I don’t know where we went wrong. He was otherwise a pretty nice kid.

  I set him down and started in on my pre-baby-sitter lecture. You listen to what she says … you go to bed when she says it’s time … you don’t jump on beds … and you, Wolfie, you don’t track her … and on and on.

  All the while I was going through this rote, I was looking at their faces, reveling in their Jillian-esque beauty and feeling so sad for them that they had only me to raise them. And I thought to myself, It’s now or never, isn’t it? These kids need a damned mother.

  The worst part of it is—it was true. Like I’ve said, I’m not a kid person. I don’t yell that much and I’m not mean to kids and I sure as heck don’t beat them … but I’m just not soft. I can wipe their tears when they’re hurt and I can hug them when they’re down or lonely … but I can’t wrap them up in my arms and make them feel like they’re home again. I don’t think any man can. I think you have to have a womb to be able to offer the kind of comfort and the feeling of total acceptance that kids need.

  So that’s the mind-set I carried off with me to that first dinner with Annie; that’s the final fatal flaw that was piled on top of all the other flaws I carried with me that night.

  10

  Annie was born in a working-class neighborhood on the east side of town. She was the late exclamation point to a family that thought it was finished with child-bearing some fifteen years before when a boy named Marcus was born.

  Her father was a machinist. Her mother was a professional nut. And don’t snicker like that—that’s exactly how Annie described her: “She can’t cook, she can’t keep house, she can’t be nice to my father because she spends all her time pissed off at the world and then going after this or that company or person who did her wrong.”

  Annie and I were sitting in the back yard, watching the kids play on the swing set and taking turns terrorizing each other. Annie had met them when we were at the beach the month before; she came for an overnight and got along with them, I thought, remarkably well. She didn’t make the mistake of pushing herself at them, but stood back and let each kid in turn sidle closer and check her out with their various unique stratagems.

  She apparently showed up as a fairly benign blip on their radars because they left her and me alone with each other while going about their usual kid games.

  Had they disliked her they would have attacked in force—pestering me constantly, whining about this or that, and trying their damnedest to make life within a 20-foot radius of me as unpleasant as possible. They’d done it before, with other casual female visitors. They were very good at it.

  I asked Annie for more. “So what does your mother do? I mean, to keep busy.”

  Annie shrugged. “Not much of anything, as far as I know. She worked when she was younger, during the war, at some defense plant. Later on, she was a professional photographer.”

  “No kidding?” I said. I’ve always been a sucker for synchronicity, the casual little tweaks of coincidence the universe will direct our way.

  “But then she stopped when my brother Marcus was born and she hasn’t really done anything since, except to go off on crusades of one sort or another.” She thought momentarily and corrected herself. “Witch hunts, not crusades. They’re really witch hunts against whoever’s offended her.”

  I offered a diplomatic shrug.

  Annie waved a hand, dismissing the subject. “She’s a nut. She’s not worth talking about.”

  For a long while, she wasn’t. I wasn’t yet that heavily into the notion that genes will inevitably out. I am now.

  “They were both adopted, you know. Both of my parents were adopted—by separate families, of course.” Annie looked at me with a smile. “Isn’t that curious?”

  I agreed that it was certainly curious but passed it off as just another instance of playful synchronicity. What could be more natural than for a person who didn’t know his or her real parents to fall into the orb of another such person? Life is very much like a college sophomore sometimes—its sense of humor is both very obvious and very bad.

  Sitting there in my backyard that late summer afternoon, Annie told me more about her growing up. Her brother Marcus had left home in a storm of anger and recriminations when she was barely three years old so she was raised as a virtual only child. She told me tales of a lonely girl entertaining herself in a household strapped for money and dominated by a mother who was likely a paranoid
schizophrenic. She told me how she went from imaginary playmates … to the ones she would meet on the streets after midnight when she stealthily climbed out of her bedroom window.

  She told me a lot that afternoon and hinted at more. She didn’t, of course, let slip any mention of “love” or “adore,” those two words which had so rattled Billy Greckle, but compared to later years, Annie was relatively loquacious in the beginning.

  She would talk freely, seemingly without censoring too much. In times to come, that would not be so. As you’ll see a bit further on, Annie eventually became my very own Delphic Oracle, a lady of riddles without many clues.

  Allegra glided up to us then and just stood there, smiling softly at Annie.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi again,” Annie answered. She smiled back and kept quiet.

  Allegra fidgeted a bit then blurted, “I have a lot of dolls and I have cups and saucers, too, in case they ever want to have a tea party or something.”

  Annie nodded solemnly. “My dolls were like that, too. You could never tell when they wanted to have a tea party. You just had to be ready for it, I think.”

  Allegra nodded a lot, excited. “Do you want to now? I mean, see if they want to have one?”

  Annie stood up and held out her hand. “Let’s do it,” she said. Allegra grabbed onto the hand, let loose a torrent of gabble, and that quickly they were gone into the house. Without so much as a backward glance from either of them.

  Jack, the seven-year-old, marched over indignantly. “Where are they going?” Wolfie was suddenly there, too. “Where’s the lady?”

  “They’re going to a tea party, I think. And her name’s Annie, not the lady.”

  Jack huffed. “Well, then, I’m going too. To the stupid tea party.”

  “No you’re not,” I said. “It’s girls only today. Boys are going to find the plastic ball and bat and go down the hill and play some ball.” I saw Wolfie sneaking past me. “Wolfie!” I called. “You are not tracking them. Go find the ball and bat.”

  Wolfie gave me a look that could have singed my eyebrows but changed course anyway and went off in search of the ball and bat. The kid could find anything. He was great to have around.

  We played some ball and the girls did their thing with dolls and tea cups in Allegra’s room. I did a lot of thinking that afternoon while chasing a stupid plastic ball around the yard but it mostly consisted of Hmmm and I wonder … and then some more Hmmm’s. For better or worse, I tended to trust my kids’ judgement.

  11

  Summer turned into fall and because of Annie’s and my increasing togetherness Billy Greckle went from friend to hostile acquaintance. We’d never been much on face-to-face meetings (and given Billy’s wondrous capacity to forget a face, that was no great loss) but at least we’d talked regularly on the phone. I always enjoyed it—Billy is such a priss I tend to think of him as a gay Miss Manners; he has righteous opinions on everything under the sun. While mostly wrong-headed, they’re fun.

  That fall, however, there was definite frost on the line when Billy called.

  “My tenant, my upstairs tenant who is virtually never here—do you think perhaps I might speak with her, please?”

  “Hi, Billy. Long time, no hear.”

  “Yes.”

  “I gather you’d like to speak to Annie.”

  “Correct.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Unless you think that battle-ax mother of hers calling my line four and five times a day looking for her wayward daughter a problem, then, no, there is no problem. Would you please tell Ms. Annie White to call her goddamned mother, please? And to once in a great while, check on her goddamned answering machine since that is the purpose of such machines: to retrieve and then respond to calls?”

  “Rough day, Billy?”

  “I do not wish to discuss it.”

  Of course with only minimal prodding, he did—at great, indignant length. Billy was aggrieved that not only had I ignored his warning about getting closer with Ms. Annie White, but (more importantly, I’m sure) that he seemed to be in danger of losing yet another paying tenant.

  “I mean,” he said, “how long will anyone retain an apartment for which she seemingly has absolutely no need whatsoever?”

  I answered that one very quickly. “Indefinitely, I hope.”

  “Ah,” said Billy, his voice brightening for the first time in this otherwise chilled conversation. “Then there are not imminent plans for cohabitation?”

  “Nope,” I said. “No plans, no intention, no desire.”

  “And you’re speaking for both of you?”

  “Well, just me, actually.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment resurfaced in Billy’s voice. “Then you’re screwed.”

  Annie was in fact spending a great deal of time with me and at the house but not nearly so much as you’d suspect from Billy’s conversation. Her office was nearby the studio and more evenings than not we’d get together at my house for a quick dinner we’d both throw together. A couple or three nights a weeks she might spend over, but mostly she went back down to Billy’s place to sleep. At least I assumed she did. Had Billy and I compared notes more closely, maybe I would have known for sure. But again, I think I’m getting ahead of the story.

  A good part of the reason Annie didn’t stay overnight more often at my place was Gus, a timid, part-Labrador stray she’d retrieved from her broken marriage with Harry White. Gus was a true caricature of a dog. You’ve heard exaggerations that something is scared of its own shadow? Well, Gus was not just scared of his own shadow—he was so stupid he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t get away from that shadow.

  The kids and I would watch this on occasion. Gus might happen to slink accidentally into a patch of sunlight out in the backyard and then catch sight of this dark patch over his shoulder. He’d actually yelp in fright and take off down the hill, trying to outrun it. Thankfully he was afraid of trees also so he’d turn back at the row of white pines I’d planted at the property line and hightail it back toward us, bleating in terror and snapping fitfully over his shoulder. Then he’d see us and turn around again, heading back down toward the trees because he was scared of us too. This would go on. The kids were amazed. Allegra summed it up. “I’ve seen rocks that are smarter than Gus.”

  Eventually Annie would retrieve the dog and glare at all of us for just standing by and watching this absurd show. Or the sun would go behind a cloud and Gus would be okay again. He’d slouch over to a corner of the yard and hunker down under a bush to watch balefully out on the world, waiting for the next nightmare to come along.

  In any event, Annie said she didn’t want to leave Gus alone for too many nights, so she went back to Billy’s to sleep. She tried bringing Gus along up to the house a couple of times but it didn’t really go well. I didn’t want the dog around the kids because he was scared of them (and might snap at them because of that) and I didn’t particularly want him with the two of us either. No matter how many times I kicked him off the bed, he’d try to slink his way back on. Or he’d lie next to the bed alternately crying and growling.

  Now, I’m not at all anti-dog. In fact, I remember quite clearly when I was about 9 or 10 leaving Santa Claus notes all over the house, begging and pleading with that gentleman for a dog of any kind, any breed, any color. And I’ve owned a few dogs, too. I’m just not that deeply into dogs as some people. I’ve heard of psychologists and others of that ilk who will say that it’s a kid’s thing, this owning of the dumb and the helpless and the dependent; and that if a grownup is still doing it—doting on pets and letting their needs dictate a lifestyle—it’s a sign of arrested development and a sure indication they’ve given up on the far more difficult job of getting along with other grownups. I wouldn’t go quite that far … but only because I don’t think about it a great deal.

  So dogs named Gus and landlords named Billy Greckle aside, where did Annie and I stand as that first summer faded into fall? I suppose I
could best answer that by talking about sex.

  12

  I hate talking about sex. I love doing it, but I don’t want to describe it, analyze it, read about it, watch it, or even think too much about it.

  Sex with Annie at the beginning was …

  Nice.

  That’s about the extent of it: Nice because it was sex. Not beyond nice because there really wasn’t any spark there.

  Now, I’ll grant you that the first time any two of us couple is oftentimes a little forced—simply because we have to get it out of the way. Afterwards we can both lie back and sigh inwardly, Thank God that’s over. Sometime later, though, one would hope that the sex would become either great fun … or more than slightly meaningful.

  I’ll bet we can all agree that sex is, first and foremost, a power struggle. She’s got the treasure … and he wants it. Which means she’s in control until he gets it. Then he’s indifferent for a while and she slips out of control. Then he wants it again and she’s back in the saddle.

  I oversimplify.

  But that’s really it in a nutshell—no pun intended. We men are at the mercy of women because, come hook or crook, we need to get back into that womb. It’s warm, it’s wet, it’s safe—and best of all it shuts down our brains while we’re there. If the woman happens to be good looking and well proportioned, all the better. But it’s not really essential. What is critical is that we men make happy that LITTLE-BOY-INSIDE-OF-US who’s unhappy with life or the world or ourselves. Obviously, that’s a variable from one man to the next—what makes my LITTLE-BOY-INSIDE unhappy is likely very different from what makes some other guy’s LITTLE-BOY-INSIDE unhappy.