But When She Was Bad Page 6

  And as Annie was fond of pointing out, there was no long line of applicants outside my door willing to take up that sharing with me.

  Give me a chance, I heard her pleading silently.

  Help me, her nightmares were imploring.

  So I left it alone. And we went on.

  24

  You should know that I never forgave Jillian for dying at the age of 28, when Allegra was still a couple months shy of her fourth birthday, when Jack was little more than two, and when Gaynor, aka Wolfie, was still a month short of his first birthday.

  We’d been together eight years when she died.

  It was sudden, it was unexpected, and it was totally inexcusable.

  Jillian and I had met when I was in one of those very rare periods in my life when I actually had a job. I’d already been freelancing as a photographer for half a dozen years but suddenly got tired of the scramble and the hassle involved in making it on my own. So I took a job as a staff photographer for one of the big defense contractors.

  It was easy and it was fun. There was a group of us twenty-somethings in the division and we partied as only the young and the carefree can do: Drinks every night after work at one of the many bars around town; weekends on the river down at the cottage I was renting; momentary couplings among us that shifted and wafted as casually as did the smoke from the pot that was always around. We may not have known how precious and fleeting and irreplaceable youth is, but we surely lived it for all it was worth.

  Then Jillian showed up. She was among the applicants for a job as my assistant and I remember with a crystal clarity the first moment I saw her. She was slinky, Jillian was. She exuded sensuality. She wasn’t at all a flirt like Annie White—she was one of those beings whose every languorous move was a rustle of silk sheets against bare skin. Long, thick auburn hair down to her waist. A very well-proportioned body. Eyes of a lustrous brown that crinkled a laugh at the world because it was so less rich than the promise in Jillian.

  For me it was the thunderbolt the Italians speak of in hushed, reverent tones, the one that strikes at a man who is suddenly, irrevocably in love. I was entranced with her, bewitched. As we went through the paces of the job interview we spoke of the details of her life and the job, but we were both saying Yes to each other so loudly and so insistently that the vibes reached out across the department and everyone in my circle drifted by. Jillian and I talked and those other people outside my office each smiled and chuckled and whispered among themselves, “He’s gone.”

  Needless to say, I hired her on the spot.

  We were in bed within days. We made love for hours on end, then we fought, then we made love again, then we ate, then we fought some more and made love some more.

  We fought about everything. I was opinionated and sensitive; she was contrary and willful. I’d suggest dinner at a nearby steakhouse; she’d sneer that no one but a redneck would be caught dead there. I would bristle and suggest that’s why she was familiar with the place. We’d stand toe to toe and verbally claw at each other for minutes on end then we’d tumble back into bed and work off the amazement that caused us to fight so. We fought about the stupidest things because any excuse would do. We were malicious with each other because we’d never before gotten away with saying such nasty things to someone else—and still have that other person want us. Somehow we knew that that was the key: push it to the limits and see if it would hold.

  We were amazed because we knew this was a gift from the gods—and so to be feared and shunned and given back if at all possible. We were so needy of each other that we knew it was our doom; we knew that an intensity of this degree meant we were overstepping our bounds … that we were deep into each other’s souls as well as minds and bodies. And that it was forbidden to go so far.

  It couldn’t last but it did.

  Mad with love for her, I quit my job so I wouldn’t have to be near her every day. I went back to freelancing and she stayed on as the assistant to some new boss who, naturally enough, was smitten with her too. I flew into towering rages of jealousy over their proximity, which amused Jillian no end. She flicked away his interest without a second thought, all the while teasing me about how attractive he was.

  I decided we should flee to California and Jillian laughingly dropped her life and we went. We fought our way across the continent, making love in every Podunk part of the country and playfully etching a notch every time in the fenders of the red Volkswagen beetle we drove. The damned thing looked like it had been chewed by a pack of marauding animals by the time we reached Santa Cruz.

  We fought, we made wild love, we fought some more.

  And for a long while it was a wonderful life. She and I explored the West and the Southwest while I built up a better portfolio than I could have imagined. I took photos during that time which, even now, can stop an art director in his tracks. There are shots of cliffs and gorges and ravishing sunsets that could only come from the soul of a man driven by love of life. Some of them weep with beauty; others are so stark and so savage that they make you feel the total indifference of the universe toward our so-inconsequential lives. Either way, they are scary, these photos.

  Jillian, for her part, wrote stories and poems about very real people she’d not yet met. They were all good. Some were beyond good—with characters so deftly drawn that I felt my blood pressure rising when I read about some turd of a man mistreating life, or when I read of a woman so alluring that I would have cheated on Jillian to be with her.

  I nagged at her to have them published and she gave me a sidelong look that said I was too retrograde a soul to appreciate something that didn’t have a price tag on it. So we fought about that, too. Fought and made up, then fought some more. It was soul vs. soul, with each of us whispering a plea for accompaniment in this lifetime while simultaneously rejecting the grasping, greedy foreign invader who would take over our spirit.

  Over the years to follow, Jillian and I split up three, maybe four times. She would go her way and I, mine … but within weeks we’d be back together, laughing at the inevitability of us and fearing it, too. After our last such split-up and reconciliation, Jillian one night held me still above her and whispered, “I want to have our children, Gil.”

  We’d never talked too much about children. I suppose we shared an unspoken awareness that our being together was so chronically tenuous that it would have been foolish to risk them. We knew that we would be daring too much—having already dared each other.

  But without hesitation I said, “Yes” because I would have given her the stars and the sun and the galaxies had my reach been sufficient. She knew it and in lieu of those gifts she asked for our children.

  Boom, boom, boom, the three came. Each only seventeen months apart, they arrived squirming and squalling into my hands, totally changing and bollixing and filling our lives. Suddenly we were thoroughly middle-class, these two footloose wanderers who were more at home in rented houses they could bolt on a moment’s whim … than in the unspeakably boring suburbia in which we found ourselves.

  We bought a house, we settled in to the task of raising these three little replications of two whacked-out people—and by the time of number-three Gaynor, Jillian had gone away. Physically she was still there but emotionally she had left us. I imagine it was some form of post-partum depression, compounded by the triple whammy of so many kids so suddenly.

  Whatever it was, she seemed intent now on escaping us and the life we had built. She wandered the house and the yard in a sad, distracted daze as a housekeeper trailed after the three kids and as I watched from the studio window wondering what was to become of us all. She looked off into the skies and seemed to be willing herself out of this life. She no longer wrote stories.

  In her last summer, Jillian took to swimming every evening in the man-made lake that bordered on our three-acre lawn. The kids and I would sit on the beach I’d hauled in (one agonizing wheelbarrow at a time) and as the sun edged down into night, we’d watch her effortless strok
es through pink-lit water. Even as full dark fell and I herded the kids back up to the house to tuck them in, she swam on, traversing the lake from one end to the next, then back again. She told me she felt at peace there, swallowed up in the mindless hush of the water.

  It made the kids anxious, this swimming. Allegra in particular watched her mother out there, her brow knit as she stood on the little ledge I’d built for her at her bedroom window. “She’s too far,” she’d sometimes whisper to herself, watching Jillian a thousand yards off. Then, to me, she’d say, “Dad, please tell her not to go so far.” I assured her I would, kissing her good night. Then I’d go back down to our beach, a scratchy BabyMinder in hand, listening for the kids and waiting for my woman to come home again.

  There weren’t that many words left between us—either we didn’t need them or we couldn’t find them; I’m not sure which. When she finally came back to shore we would sit a while in silence, smoking, watching the stars and listening to the night. Oftentimes we would make love there on the beach, in slow, soft homage to all we had.

  Then one very bright morning toward the fall of that year, Jillian went off on one of her periodic runs to the factory outlet stores where they sold kids’ clothes. She washed her hair, made herself up, waved happily from the driveway, and drove off. Watching her leave, I thought to myself, How beautiful she still is.

  Two hours later she was dead.

  She’d run off the road, hit a pole, and was still in the car when it burned. The state police said there were only very short skid marks leading off the two-lane into the verge that caught her. They guessed she had swerved to avoid something, or maybe she had fallen asleep at the wheel and recovered too late.

  When they called and told me, I knew that my life was over too. The why and the how of it didn’t matter one damned bit to me. What mattered was that she was gone and nothing made sense anymore.

  Months later, after winter’s grip had let loose from the lake and it was clear again and wind-rippled, I would far too often see the three children down at the beach, alone. Somehow they had escaped the housekeeper again and Allegra and Jack would be holding hands there on the sand, at the water’s edge, with Wolfie, barely a year and a half old, crawling haphazardly around and between them.

  The older two were watching for their mother. They were waiting for her to come home, and seeing them there, I cried vicious tears for all of us. Then I’d storm down to the lake and I’d yell at the kids and I’d fire another housekeeper, and in my mind’s eye I saw ahead of me the flat, endless spread of years and years to come when you must insist to a child that, No, people who are dead do not, cannot, come back.

  Holding the children tight against me, I’d try again to explain to them what had happened and why it was so and even as I was giving reasons that couldn’t possibly make sense, I raged at Jillian for going too far and for not, this one last time, coming back to shore.

  I couldn’t forgive her and I couldn’t forgive us. We had had no right to inflict us on three children—if both of us weren’t going to stay around for them.

  25

  So what was at the root of Annie’s nightmares? Was it just that I wasn’t reaching and satisfying that LITTLE-GIRL-INSIDE … or was it something that went far deeper—and stemmed from much further back?

  When she first began living with us, Annie was a perpetual smile machine. One of my brothers, the sour, dour one, observed, “Whatever drug she’s on, I could make a fortune selling it.” He was later rendered speechless when Annie, in full flirting mode, coyly sat on his lap during a kid birthday party. The brother’s wife boiled. My two sisters, cattier by far, exchanged looks and muttered, phony bitch.

  Of course, I didn’t know all that then. My family is not much into communication, at least not in words. In actions, they’re considerably more eloquent. They soon began avoiding us, turning down casual invitations to dinner or a cookout and somehow forgetting to invite us for the same. They still called once in a great while—about as often as I called them. Which is to say, rarely.

  The kids were a bit put out by this, because they’d spent quite a bit of time over the previous five years growing up with their eight cousins. But Annie and I filled in the gaps with trips to the usual weekend locales that packed in the family set. The zoo, the aquarium, the malls, the ballparks and the exhibits, the fairs, the flea markets—whenever time allowed, we did it all.

  When we were all together, things went pretty well. I did whatever disciplining was called for so Annie was able to plant herself firmly on the good-cop side of the kids. Each of them would get their fair share of attention and they turned it back to her as well. It was all the very picture of harmony.

  Things were different during the week. At least once a day, Annie would burst into the studio insisting that I come break up a fight between Jack and Wolfie or that I tell Allegra that she had to help with the laundry right now. Or Annie would drag the two boys into me, hanging onto their shirt collars, and demand, “Now tell your father what you two were fighting about.”

  Telling the kids that they were to listen to Annie had virtually no effect on their behavior. They would still defy her and still insist on behaving in ways they never had before: fighting constantly, wheedling and whining, and generally acting like savages. Had Annie been hired as a housekeeper I would have long since fired her. Because no matter how much support I gave her in front of the kids (or how much I reassured her in private that she had my backing) she was unable to get in sync with them.

  Now, I hasten to add that several other kid caretakers had not had this problem with Allegra, Jack, and Wolfie. The kids still spoke fondly of Evie and Candy and Judy—transient college students who had worked for me in the house at one time or another.

  Nor were the three kids particularly high-strung or difficult or otherwise a behavior problem for their teachers. They were just kids—and therefore obnoxious to the 97% of us who don’t like any kids except our own.

  So why couldn’t Annie get along with them? Was it just that, despite her bona fides as a former Sunday School teacher, she was among that 97% I keep citing? Why was she in a constant tizzy about the kids? Why didn’t we fit with her?

  The answer came to me out of the blue from John D. MacDonald, that spinner of yarns about one Travis McGee, salvage consultant, Fort Lauderdale tough guy, and dependable fount of world-weary wisdom. I was listening to a tape of The Scarlet Ruse one day in the car while on my way to a photo shoot when I heard Travis say something that was so direct and so much to the point of what had been bothering me—that I had to pull off the road and rewind the tape so I could listen to it again.

  “Children,” said Travis in that droll, throwaway style of his, “lack empathy about how the adults around them feel. Children have a tendency toward self-involvement which makes them give too much weight to trivia, too little weight toward significant things. If the house burned down the charred sister and the charred kitten are equally mourned.”

  Three more times I rewound the tape and listened. Because it was true. And it wasn’t Allegra and Jack and Wolfie that Travis was talking about.

  He was talking about Annie White. He was explaining why Annie had those continuous nightmares. And why I wasn’t reaching and satisfying that LITTLE-GIRL-INSIDE.

  26

  So am I saying that the nightmares came visiting every night because Annie was emotionally a child who’d gotten in over her head? And that she was terrified because the new role she’d taken on (and for which she’d given up a safe and secure life) could abruptly be cancelled at any time?

  Yes. No. Maybe.

  I can’t imagine what was going through Annie’s mind as those first few months with us wound on. I know that she clung to it fiercely—even as she fought all four of us at every step of the way.

  For example, if I were to finish in the studio early (which is to say, by 9 or 10 o’clock rather than 2 a.m.) Annie would follow me around the house, offering me food or drink or distraction—wh
en all I really wanted was some time to wind down. If I suddenly gave up on an hour-long TV show at 10:30 and headed off to bed, Annie would bolt to her feet, switch off the set, and make sure she was in bed at the same moment as I.

  Every bit as closely as Wolfie, she tracked me.

  Dear Gil,

  I couldn’t sleep last night. I tried the living room, the family room, the sun room, pacing between all three, but the only place I wanted to be was in bed next to you.

  So I propped myself up on some pillows next to you. This gave me a very nice view of my sleeping lover. It struck me how truly beautiful you are. Listening to your breath, feeling the warmth of your leg draped over mine. It gives me a great sense of all being right with the world. These are some of the happiest moments that make my life full. A life without you would be intolerable.

  Love,

  Annie

  Is it any wonder I so often woke exhausted, not knowing why? Even when I wasn’t aware of it, Annie was latched onto me, drawing a sustaining breath.

  How could I end it?

  And did I really want to? Because that was the crux of it: did I have the character to say, “Annie, I don’t need another child. I need a partner”?

  27

  It’s Day Four of Nine.

  I’ll bet they know by now. “They” being those anonymous, indifferent lab technicians somewhere out there in the Midwest who are in the midst of testing Todd’s and my DNA for any genetic matchups. They know—but they couldn’t care less; they have to do a series of probes, one after the other, and see if they get the same results every time. Todd and I are just another set of numbers to them, another set among the dozens of packages that arrive daily bearing blood or buccal samples from “child” and “alleged father.”