But When She Was Bad Read online

  It gives new meaning to the phrase, We’re always the last to know.

  Todd was born with a glistening thatch of light blonde hair, light eyes, and a chubby face. He didn’t look at all that different from the other three I’d helped birth on other beds in other places in years past. Only as time went by did Todd take on a far more Mediterranean look than Allegra, Jack, and Wolfie. But even that didn’t faze me: his darker coloring and his jet black hair were not that much an anomaly in my extended family. And after all, Annie’s 46 chromosomes had made her the dark lady with blue eyes—so why shouldn’t Todd be free to express her contribution of 23 chromosomes more strongly than my 23? What did it matter anyway?

  I have to concede that never for the slightest moment did I imagine that Todd wasn’t my biological son. Not for the longest time. Because my wife Annie was the very model of the adoring spouse. She loved me so totally that she couldn’t imagine another man to compare me with. She told me that, time and again. She had everything she wanted, so why on earth would she have been open to any other man? Why would she have felt the need? Again, she told me that.

  The devotion to me and the kids was so total that it would have been absurd—I would have been branded as a psychopath—had I doubted Annie.

  Of course, as Johnny Carson used to say in some long-ago TV show (generally with a sneer that sprang from a deep skepticism regarding our partners’ loyalties), “Who do you trust?”

  28

  We had our confrontations, Annie and I. Because Annie would agree with everything I asked or suggested—and then do exactly as she pleased. If I asked her to be a little less sarcastic or abrasive with the kids she’d show me her lovely smile and then go right on doing what she’d been doing. If I asked her to handle this or that chore connected with the business or the house, she’d say, “Of course,” and then when I checked back on how it had gone, she’d tell me, “Oh, I haven’t gotten to it yet.”

  It was a unique form of passive aggression. Annie White would not be told anything. Annie would not bend or alter or adapt. Annie would not compromise her beliefs or opinions for anyone.

  Did I like her? Not all of the time, no. Did I love her? Not really. Did I ask her to marry me? Yes.

  I have no excuses, only explanations.

  You see, I wanted my life back. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be part of something that made sense, that worked, that gave some meaning to the long years of work and the deadening prospect of more and more work to be done in what was left of my life.

  I told myself: So what if she was more often than not a pain in the ass? So what if she was not entirely responsive to the kids’ real needs, not wholly sensitive to my moods, and not a partner in any real sense?

  We do stupid and self-defeating things to ourselves because we are very much afraid of the alternative. The alternative, in the case at hand, was to go back to—and to continue indefinitely—growing the three kids on my own. Simply put, I was too weak for that. I would sometimes sit late at night with a drink in hand and think back on those first days and first years of raising infants and toddlers on my own and I would whisper to the darkness, “No way in hell I could do it again. I’m too damned tired.”

  And I was. At age 40, the sheer, mind-boggling minutiae of growing children was too much for me. The infinite demands for patience and kindness and caring were now beyond me. If you let them, children will suck you dry of all your vitality. In my guilt over bringing them into the world in the first place—and then letting Jillian desert them in death—I had indeed let them suck me dry. For better or worse, they now had all I had to give. There was no more left.

  So in the continual onslaught of Annie’s “I love you” … “I adore you” …“I want you, I need you so badly” … can I be forgiven for finally saying Yes? For marrying her because otherwise the imperative was to go back to an intolerable aloneness?

  No, absolutely not. I cannot be forgiven. No matter what the ethos of the age says—that we can all be forgiven because we are all victims—it was a shameful, cowardly thing I did, marrying Annie White.

  Because it stamped me in my own mind as a fool. And because my marrying her let Annie carry out the agenda she’d apparently always had in mind.

  29

  The even bigger mistake, of course, was getting her pregnant—so that the marriage on that warm evening in August became something of a foregone conclusion. I could note here that the pregnancy was an accident, because it certainly was: a broken condom on the wrong night in the wrong lifetime.

  But then I’d take it all back, about it being an accident. Because to my mind, there are no accidents. On some level or other all of our actions are deliberate. Unconsciously or consciously we maneuver our way into precisely what we want. It’s as true for the person who smacks his car into the rear end of a bus and ends up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life … as it is for the 40-year-old man who has no business making another baby.

  True for Annie as well.

  She was determined to marry me but at the same time she was determined to carry the baby (from my point of view, the whole and entire raison d’etre for the marriage) not a second longer than was absolutely necessary.

  So we had the ceremony, we had the reception, then we had the miscarriage. The doctors cleaned out the residue of what we’d made together and we came home to pick up the pieces of our life together.

  It was a strange time for us. Annie sat for weeks on end after the wedding and the miscarriage, staring out the windows and working the Tarot, asking the cards endless variations of the same question: What is to become of me? She grieved for that baby—and maybe for what she had risked … but not quite dared.

  She’d risked finally moving beyond a lone, isolated Annie White and sharing a life we would see right there in front of us, in the flesh: a new life that belonged to neither of us, yet stemmed from both of us.

  But no. In the end that was too much to ask.

  She didn’t dare take that step—because then she would have been beholden to my involvement in a vital part of Annie White.

  I worked in the studio and I watched her, trying from time to time to cajole her out of the slough she was in. Even more than had been the case before the marriage and the miscarriage, the kids and the house became an afterthought to Annie; she was almost totally absorbed in Annie White’s dilemma.

  We talked a great deal about having another baby. Should we just let it be, or should we try again—this time intentionally? The same arguments I’d entertained in my mind before the marriage were there at the forefront of my thoughts again. I didn’t much take to the idea of voluntarily committing to a baby. I would be into my 60s by the time the kid went off to college or whatever would be taking college’s place some 18 years hence.

  On the other hand, I’d always wondered what it would be like to raise a child in tandem with the actual mother of that child.

  With Jillian having left so soon after our three were born, it had always been me and me alone. But what if I could share that work—and the wonder of watching a child grow—with someone who had as much involvement as I? It was a tantalizing thought.

  Annie worked on me, pressing home that prospect. But at the same time (I’ve since learned) Annie began the affair that would surely have to make her wonder just who the father would be.

  She found a job in a tiny sculpture gallery specializing in contemporary decoration—which is to say, colorful swirling things you might hang on a wall. I thought it all fairly harmless so even though it was a minimum-wage job that probably cost us more in taxes than she netted, off she went for three or four half-days a week.

  The kids were in school for most of her working hours so it had no major impact on our life around the house. The store was close enough to the house that Allegra and Jack sometimes stopped there after school and hung around until Annie closed up for the day and could drive them all home. Wolfie stopped there, too, but skulker that he was, he didn’t go with the other two kids and
he didn’t get a ride home. Being Wolfie, the secretive little tracker of the middle-school set, he never let anyone know about it. Not until much, much later did I find this out.

  Dear Gil,

  It’s been a quiet day, with only a few customers coming in and I think one or two of them just wanted to come in out of the cold. So I’ve had lots of time to think about you and about us. I enjoy it so, thinking of us.

  How I treasure what you’ve given me! You’ve become my dearest friend, especially over these last few months when I’ve been trying so hard, and you’ve been helping me so much, to get over the loss of our baby.

  If it happens that we do ever have a baby together I would be the happiest woman on earth. I’m already the happiest with you and the children I’ve ever been, so I don’t know how I would stand it. But I would, I know. I will love you forever.

  Annie

  We were married in August, she took the gallery job in early October, and as December came on, we were planning on a special weekend trip to a friend’s cottage in the nearby mountains.

  The objective: pregnancy.

  Annie had been watching her fertile times through October and November, so she chose the particular weekend carefully. It would conflict somewhat with Wolfie’s eighth birthday that Sunday but if we hurried home by Sunday night, he’d likely forgive us. We’d go up Saturday morning and stay through the next morning.

  For some reason I remember very well the Friday of that week, the day before we were to leave. I was at work in the studio trying to finish up early enough so that I could get out to pick up a present for Wolfie. Annie called me on the intercom around noon and breathlessly announced, “Ruth down at the store just called and asked if I could come in for a few hours. Somebody’s sick and she has no other backup. Do you think it’s okay?”

  “When would you be home?” I asked.

  “Well, by 5:15 or so. I’d close up the shop and then come right home.”

  “Do any of the kids have anything scheduled for this afternoon? Outings or school pickups?”

  “No, we’re clear on all that.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you at 5:15.”

  That night, as the kids were bedding down, Annie bathed and coiffed and perfumed and then slinked into the bedroom wearing only the top of a very short, very sheer red negligee. I looked up from the magazine I was reading in bed, surprised. Annie liked to save herself for the few special occasions we could fit in—such as a stay in a cozy mountain cabin where only a pot-bellied stove and your own bodies could generate warmth. So our love-making generally stopped a few days or even a week before such outings. Indeed, we hadn’t had sex but two or three times in the full month preceding that weekend. I had to agree: it put an edge on our couplings in those special places.

  “Hiya, lover,” she whispered, climbing atop me. “What do you say? Can we manage a little preview of our trip?”

  We did. We also made love again three times the next day up at the cabin. And again Sunday morning as we prepared to head home. It was then, over a rich, filling breakfast of ham and eggs, small filets, and buttery corn bread that Annie confided something to me.

  “I think it took,” she said, her eyes alight. “I think I can feel life inside me.”

  “Really? So soon?” I was skeptical anyone could tell she was pregnant in only a matter of hours but I kept my silence. She flashed her wonderful smile at me and I murmured something supportive, I’m sure. Still firmly in the throes of ambivalence toward the whole matter of yet another child, I smiled some more and kissed her and packed up our things for the trip home.

  I bring all this up with a sense of awed wonder.

  If Todd is indeed not my son, then Annie was likely already pregnant from some other man that weekend.

  But why, married just four months, would Annie be having an affair? Why, when we had decided to try again to have a baby together, would she willfully be putting the matter of parentage on the line?

  Because (as I said very early on in this story) she had to.

  Think back to those multiple-choice tests we endured during our school years. Typically you would have a rather straightforward question and then a series of possible answers: (A), (B), (C), and (D). You’d scan each possible answer in turn … but sometimes there was an indefinable something wrong with each of them. They weren’t quite right; they weren’t really on the mark. And then remember your relief when you were given (E), too, as a possibility: None of the Above. Ah! you’d breathe. That’s it!

  Here’s how I imagine Annie thinking about it:

  Well, it could have been (A), Gil, because he balled me a dozen times around then, before we left and then a lot up at the cabin and then every night after for a whole week.

  But gee, it could have been (B), the other guy, too, because he balled me before Gil and I left on that trip and then right after we got back. A few times anyway. Actually, a lot of times.

  When it’s maybe not (A) and maybe not (B), then it’s got to be—aha!—None of the Above!

  So the only thing you can know for sure about this new baby is that it’s … all Annie’s. This baby-to-be doesn’t have a definite father. This baby-to-be was sired by None of the Above.

  Which would make it a Virgin Birth. And, in its own way, an Immaculate Conception as well.

  30

  It’s time I told you those things a priggish Billy Greckle should have (but didn’t) tell me when Annie and I were first getting together. Things that would have ensured I steered well clear of a certain Ms. Annie White.

  You’ll recall that Annie was living down at Billy’s huge center-city townhouse at that time. You may also recall that Billy is the consummate queen, the kind of homosexual who delights in helping a woman select her evening wear for a night out … but who would be sick to the stomach at the thought of what that same woman may be doing with some other man in the hours to come.

  Most of his friends knew this about Billy: that the very idea of man-woman sexual intercourse was revolting to him. Those of us who were straight and who heard his reasons generally refrained, I’m sure, from commenting on the alternative lifestyle he routinely explored. In any event, most everyone he was close to knew his feelings on the subject.

  But apparently Annie didn’t.

  Because one night after she and I had already met and already bedded down but while she was still living down at Billy’s, one night when he was in his compassionate mode and bestowing a consoling hug on the fair maiden who had left her role as Harry White’s wife and was still casting about for something better, Annie said, “Billy, more than anything in the world I want to have a baby. Would you give me one? Would you please, please, please just ball me once so I can have a baby all to my self?”

  Even years later, when I finally heard this from Billy over the phone, my jaw dropped. This, from the woman who had avowed to me, again and again, that while she liked children she could never see herself having one? This, from a woman who presented herself to me as the very embodiment of chaste, family-values virtue?

  “It’s true,” Billy Greckle affirmed in a placid voice those many years later when he finally brought himself to tell me. “I was astonished and appalled, Gil.” Billy took a deep breath and plunged on. “Apparently I’m not the only one Annie asked. She asked others, too.” Billy was on a roll now. “This was all at about the same time, you know. She had a steady stream of guys up to her apartment and I heard them, ahem—” (Billy is one of the few people on earth who actually says ahem) “—moving furniture.”

  Billy, you’re a true son of a bitch, I wanted to say. Both for not telling me then … and for taking such pleasure in telling me now.

  “In fact,” Billy added, “One of them said that Annie, whilst asking him to, eh, load up her womb, as it were, assured him there would be no further responsibilities on his part. Because all she really wanted in life was a couple of babies to take care of and no husband to bother with. Unless, of course, he were of the well-to-do, traveling sort wh
o might be in town once or twice a month to have sex with her. To service her, as it were.”

  Thanks, Billy. I needed that.

  31

  While I have Billy Greckle on my mind, let me mention something else he related during another phone conversation we had sometime after Annie’s departure from our house and into her own.

  I’d been listening to Billy ramble on about some nuance or other of the perpetual renovation project for his town-house. I think he was describing the unique sun-blocking properties of his fourth-floor skylights, or maybe it was the tedious search he’d undertaken for the precise cornice embrasures for a first-floor parlor.

  “Billy,” I said, interrupting whatever he was saying, “I could maybe understand why you didn’t tell me all you knew when Annie and I first got together. But why didn’t you tell me something when you knew I was going to marry her?”

  Billy paused a long few moments. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not asking for that,” I said. “I want to know what was going through your mind the day we got married.”

  “It truly did occur to me to stand up when the minister asked if any man or woman present had any objections or whatever to this marriage. But what could I say, Gil? Could I say, ‘Excuse me, but I don’t like the look on her face’? Could I call out, ‘Uh, Mr. Minister, I’ve thought about it and I realize now that she’s a bounder’?”

  I took all this in silently. It was amusing that even in his judgements, Billy is the consummate Victorian, using (and misusing) an archaic word that was once applied to a cad, which is to say, someone without the gentlemanly instincts.