But When She Was Bad Read online

  It was more of an indictment than I could process all at once. I couldn’t recall doing any of the things I’d just been accused of. I had to consider, if only briefly, the possibility that I’d lost my mind and was actually following Annie around the house all day giving her orders and critiquing everything she did. And the Jillian thing? No, no way. Jillian was not a topic of discussion or a reference point or anything of the kind when it came to conversation. Maybe because the loss (and the legacy) was still so painful, I virtually never brought her up in casual conversation. Never. So to suggest that I was comparing, say, the way Annie cleaned a sink versus the way Jillian might have cleaned a sink was … well, it was preposterous.

  I shut up about it and hugged Annie and soothed and caressed and soon everything was back to normal. We made love and we slept and the next morning the air seemed to have cleared. I went off to the other end of the house, to the studio, and Annie went hummingly off somewhere else. I sure as hell didn’t check where. I didn’t want to know. Slotted within my mind now was yet another new maxim: ONE DOES NOT KID OR TEASE MS. ANNIE WHITE. This one took its place next to a few other newly-minted guidelines that had me and the kids biting our tongues just a little more often than we were used to.

  My note that evening (found tucked under a dinner plate at the kitchen table as we all sat down to a boisterous meal wherein Wolfie entertained us by tracking his peas ’round and ’round his plate) was a little shorter than had become the norm:

  Dear Gil:

  There isn’t anyone who could love you more than I do. It won’t stop with this lifetime.

  Yours Always,

  Annie

  Of course, always is an intermittent thing with Annie.

  18

  Business went wild at that point. It had been steadily growing over the previous few years; now it took off like a wind-driven prairie fire. There was no rhyme or reason for it—except for the fact that more work does indeed seem to come to those who already have enough.

  And thanks to Annie, I had a heck of a lot more time now, given that she was taking care of the kids even in the intervals of the day and evening I’d generally handled on my own. I didn’t want, to spend this newly-liberated time on work, of course, but there didn’t seem to be much choice. When you’re self-employed, there’s no safety net, there’s no one who can give you the day off, there’s no one else who can pick up the slack if you feel like goofing off once in a while. It’s just you and the wolf imminently at the door. The object is to make enough and save enough to keep that damned carnivore well away from the house, much less the door.

  I went on shoots for DuPont, for Mobil, for Kraft, for The New York Times, for hospitals and retailers up and down the coast, and for a bewildering variety of ad agencies who were suddenly enamored of a competent (but not by any means startling or innovative) journeyman photographer by the name of Gil Wexler. I farmed some of the darkroom stuff out but ended up re-doing most of it when the guys and gals I knew seemed determined to prove that if you wanted something done right.…

  Some days I might see the kids and Annie only for dinner. I’d be back in the darkroom right after, all the way through 2 or 3 or even 4 a.m. Then up again at 6 and off to more of the same. Many a night I’d stealthily crawl into bed, hoping not to disturb Annie, and she’d roll over and sleepily purr something sweet like, “Hi, lover, I was just dreaming about you.”

  I pulled her tight to me and went off to sleep thinking how lucky I was that this jewel of a woman had dropped into my life.

  Then the nightmares began stalking us.

  19

  I’m well aware that I haven’t done an adequate job here in describing just who this Annie White was. I suppose I’m concentrating too much on the why of Annie that I talked about in the beginning of this story: why she would have had that sordid affair … and why she would have wanted Todd’s parentage forever in doubt.

  So let me work for a few moments on the who. If I can get the who right for us, then we’ll both get the why.

  At this point in the story, you know that Annie’s a moderately attractive 24-year-old who’s in the process of divorcing her husband of three years, Harry White. You know that she has a degree in sculpture, that she’s worked in sales, that she seems to like kids and dogs, and that she’s just moved in with a 39-year-old widower who has three children then ranging in age from six to nine.

  But that hardly scratches the surface, does it?

  It might help if I back up a little and mention that Annie had assured me (just prior to our going to bed together) that Harry White was no longer a factor in her life. He’d taken the breakup in his usual placid manner, she reported, not trying to stop her from leaving and not offering any inducements to stay. For her part, she said, the marriage was dead.

  I marveled a little that she could so easily excise from her life a friend and lover and companion of six and more years duration, if you count their time together as high school lovers. Nor did I really believe she could make such a clean break. Virtually all of us sooner or later fall back in with separated and divorcing spouses—oftentimes for just a short while, but sometimes it goes on for quite a little longer before we realize how good and valid were our reasons for breaking up in the first place.

  But Annie seemed not to give her crumbled marriage a second thought. It was almost as if Harry White were the old winter coat she’d considered putting on one chilly morning but then decided, just like that, to put it in the Goodwill bag instead and head on down to Nordstrom’s to pick out a new one. Afterwards, you rarely give a thought to that old coat because the new one’s so snugly and so comfy—And by the way, doesn’t it look good on me?

  Annie discarded all her old friends as well. She listened to their messages on her answering machine (which was still down at Billy Greckle’s) and she erased them all, one by one, by pressing “3” on our phone’s touchpad. I was in the kitchen one day getting a drink of soda and I saw her doing this. She would listen to the phone for a while, then press “3.” Then listen some more and press “3” again. And then some more. With no expression on her face and no taking down of notes or numbers.

  “You okay?” I asked. I’d learned not to question Annie too closely about anything.

  “Fine,” she said. “How about you?” She smiled her gorgeous smile at me and pressed “3” some more.

  Annie erased her history and became a blank slate for me and the kids and, again, I marveled at that. How can someone so easily jettison not only a husband and not just a mother and father, but all her friends as well? Were we really that compelling and that fulfilling?

  In a word, no.

  Something else was going on here.

  The nightmares began about a month after Annie moved in. Night after night, Annie would scream herself (and me) awake in terror. The dreams were about people chasing her, she said, people who were violent and murderous, with slick, horrible knives. Other times, the dreams had her trapped in buildings with no exits and floors falling away from her in lurching suddenness. Still other dreams had something rather terminal and squishy happening to me or the kids.

  I worried about this but another of my many failings is the conviction that things can always be worked out. That things will always get better if you just relax about it. And that any two people can connect and comfort each other and coexist if they really want to.

  So much for wishful thinking.

  The nightmares went on. Annie would hold me tight and say, “Please tell me they won’t come tonight, the bad dreams.”

  I held her tight. “They won’t. We’ll keep them away.”

  More often than not, they came anyway. Night after night, Annie was terrified into screaming wakefulness and I would soothe her back to sleep again and then I would stare for a long time at the black ceiling above me, wondering what I’d gotten us into, until sleep crept back for me too.

  20

  Imagine, if you will, a lovely stage actress who has all her life wanted no
thing more than to be in a long-running Broadway show. Who has always wanted to be on The Great White Way, with her name up in lights, and her life-size photoboard in the theatre lobby and her clippings of praise (replete with the mild rave or two) all neatly arranged in the leatherette Album of Memories her mom and dad gave her when she left home not so many years before.

  Lo and behold, she has all this. There’s her name up there on the marquee, in big, black, 42-inch letters. My name! Life is good. Life is fun. Life is fulfilling.

  Night after night (and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) she declaims and she emotes and she loves and she hates—all in line with the jottings of some anonymous playwright who has imagined a world for her.

  What could be better? What could be missing?

  Well, there’s the fact that she doesn’t have a Tony … and her leading man is a bit of a drag and too frequently smells of Scotch now … and that it’s all become a bit of a bore, doing the same damned thing day after day after day and saying the same tedious lines for the same busloads of blue-haired matrons down from Connecticut.

  A drag! It’s a drag! Oh God, I’m so bored!

  Furtively, she begins looking about for something new. She secretly checks the casting calls and she sneaks into one or two such sessions—but she’s just testing the waters, you understand. She still returns every night (though Mondays are dark) to her accustomed, familiar role in the long-running play that has her engaged in such a fascinating, marvelous life.

  Until the day a friend mentions that she’d be perfect for the starring role in that big new Broadway musical opening up in the fall; the bigger, better production that has HIT written all over it. She temporizes, but then she works up her nerve and she auditions for the part. And they … they like her!

  Modestly, tentatively, she approaches the producer of her long-standing play and asks if she might be released from her contract. He hems, he haws, and he haggles, but he willingly lets her go in the end because she has become (like all these damned actresses, to the producer’s jaded sensibilities), a bit of a pain in the ass.

  Yes! I’m free!

  She bids goodbye to the cast and stage crew—all of whom, over such a marvelously long run, have become the deepest of dear and close personal friends. She says farewell, she vows eternal friendship.

  And then she never again gives them a second thought.

  Because the new play—this wonderful new bigger and better production that has her name in lights on the marquee, up above the name of the play itself—this new play is all that matters now. She studies up on her role and her lines and she rehearses for days and weeks for opening night.

  The play is a hit. But the reviews of her performance? Only mildly affirmative. Lukewarm, perhaps. On balance, more negatives than positives.

  Oh, God! What have I done?

  21

  One day just about two months after Annie moved in, Allegra and Wolfie came unannounced into the studio. Without a word, Allegra laid some scrap of paper on my desk and the two of them proceeded to the door which led outside.

  I was on the phone across the room with a well-paying client from New York so I didn’t intercept them. What’s that all about? tripped through my mind as the client wound up his conversation and I could get back to my desk. The kids had their coats on and they seemed intent on some mission or other. Probably telling me Annie is driving them somewhere.

  Not quite.

  Allegra’s note, in its entirety, read:

  Dear Dad,

  I am running away because of Annie. She has been mean to me and she has made my life miserable. Please don’t try to find me. I love you.

  Your daughter,

  Allegra J. Wexler

  P.S. Wolfie is coming with me. We’ll only be gone till dark. Maybe we’ll come back before dark.

  I laughed out loud, of course, but then checked myself. What was going on here? And how far should I look for the answers?

  For the moment, I shrugged into a coat and went off to search for them. They hadn’t gone far. They were sitting on the curb about a block and a half away and I sauntered up to them, trying to be casual.

  “Well, hi, kids. Where you headed?”

  They looked up at me out of cautious eyes. Allegra, assessing that I wasn’t dangerously mad at them, said, “Just away. Somewhere where she can’t boss us around.”

  I claimed a spot on the curb and sat down. I rearranged some pebbles with my foot and tried to think of some way into the subject.

  “I ran away from home once,” I said finally.

  They looked up at me, interested.

  “Didn’t get far, though. Forgot to bring any food or water. I had to come back after an hour or so and do you know something? Nobody’d even noticed I’d left. It was a real kick in the butt.”

  Allegra produced a sandwich from her coat pocket and said, “I sneaked into the kitchen and made us a jelly and cream cheese.”

  “Good thinking,” I nodded. I looked around at the cold January landscape. The leaves of autumn were long since gone; we were just marking time now for the snow. “It’s awfully cold out here, though. What say you two bring that sandwich back to the studio and while you eat it we’ll talk a little about why you’re running away.”

  We did talk that afternoon and while Allegra’s actual grievances were pretty innocuous—that Annie made her clean up her room and do her homework at a certain time and so on—the implications were not. Why hadn’t Annie and the kids worked this sort of thing out on their own? And why, after only two months, had the kids given up on this woman who was acting as their new stepmother?

  22

  It’s Day Three of Nine.

  This is when the technicians out there in the Midwest will actually start growing the individual strands of Todd’s and my DNA in gels which are then electrically charged.

  They’re basically looking for two DNA strands from each of us that will elongate and then travel the same distance under such a charge. They X-ray the nylon membranes which carry the strands and there on the film, under a powerful microscope, they’ll see if there are any such matches. They’ll do this a half-dozen times, using new DNA strands from each of us every time.

  As with so many things in this brave new computer-driven world, it’s either a “yes” or a “no.” There are no in-betweens. Just yes. Or no. Each of the 100 trillion cells (give or take) in Todd’s body contains 23 pairs of chromosomes. Within each pair, one chromosome matches his mother’s DNA molecules and one chromosome matches his father’s. So either I’ll show a match to the chromosomes Todd inherited from his biological father … or I won’t. Either I’m proven to be Todd’s dad … or I’m proven not to be.

  As I’m thinking on all this, I naturally think of Todd. I wonder how his day is going and I think back to yesterday when we had lunch together and he talked a fairly heavy dose on Frank, who is Annie’s new companion. I try never to ask Todd any questions that will lead him to mention Frank; it just seems to happen anyway—his chattering always includes a generous description of the fellow’s doings.

  This is to be expected: a 4-year-old kid lives in the present. What’s happening to him now is what’s real. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t figure into the equation, as to who was the first man to hold him and the first one to bathe him and the first one to buy him food and clothing and toys. What’s now is what’s real.

  And now there’s a man named Frank who is playing the dad in Todd’s life. It makes me jealous, this new fact of life—that my son is more under the influence of a stranger than his own father.

  Of course, in reality that may not be the case at all. Todd may not really be a stranger to this new man in Annie’s life. Because Annie knew Frank before she knew me. She met him way back when she was preparing to leave her role as Harry White’s wife.

  This is at least the second time—and very likely the third—they’ve become friends and lovers.

  23

  She cooked, she cleaned, she redecorated,
she gave hugs, she made love to me at night, and she had nightmares. This was Annie at the two-month mark in our living together.

  She and I talked (very tentatively on my part) about the kids’ so-called running away from home. I knew they were telling me they’d made a mistake. This Annie person was not the person they thought she was; this stand-in mom was just a little too harsh, a little too cold for their liking. There was a certain apartness they hadn’t counted on. She was not theirs, like I was; she was not on their side. Sometimes it was as if she were following a script that called for her to do all manner of totally alien things which simply didn’t make real sense to her. So it followed that she didn’t have the emotional background to extemporize, to ad-lib her way through the unexpected.

  Annie said very little when I brought up the problem. She laughed, saying it was my fault anyway.

  “Really?” I said as neutrally as I could manage.

  “You’ve apparently been letting them get away with anything they want, so why’s it surprise you that they resist a little order and a little discipline?” Annie was smoothing some lotion on her legs, a nightly bedtime ritual. She looked totally unconcerned.

  I wanted to say, “Where the hell do you get off?,” but I didn’t. It was cowardice on my part but also an awareness that we were closer to ending it than she knew. And while the kids apparently wanted to give up, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Because I told myself—strenuously—that she was good for all of us. The kids now had more than a distracted, too-busy dad to come home to after school. And good old Gil Wexler himself now had someone warm and willing to sleep with every night.

  That makes me sound pretty craven and I’ll admit that it was selfish and flesh-driven and blind on my part. But there was more to it than just the fact that I could get laid now whenever I wanted.

  There was the fact that I’d had five long, long years to miss the partnering that’s supposed to be part of raising a family. Helping kids grow is not something any one person should do alone. To really know how the world works, kids need the yin-and-yang, the good cop/bad cop, the tough love and the soft acceptance that come with the two genders. They need two people who are in love with them to learn how to love themselves—and to love others.