But When She Was Bad Page 8

  He went on. “Dammit, there was a predatory smile on her face—as if she were up to something; as if to say she had worked very hard for this, and by god, now she’s got it. Mother had the exact same feeling, she told me later. From what you tell me now, so did some of your family. So I had to remind myself that Gil Wexler is a grown man—it’s his problem, it’s his doing.”

  He had more. “The whole damned thing was too orchestrated, too contrived somehow, and I was incredibly uncomfortable with a situation for which I’d somehow been the enabler. I had provided the means for her to get near to you and, dammit—”

  “Okay,” I said. “Enough. I understand.”

  And I did. I understood that I’d willfully blinded myself to the whole situation and that whatever came of it—I had more than earned it.

  Sometimes life seems to be one mistake after another: things rarely turn out the way you intended, much less the way you wanted. And most of the time you seem to be backing and filling—which is to say, trying to fix the old mistakes—so you’re not really paying enough attention to what’s at hand … and you screw that up too.

  32

  Day Five of Nine.

  Wasn’t it Samuel Johnson who said there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics? I don’t know why that comes to mind—maybe the fact that I just read an article on DNA paternity testing in which otherwise unattributed medical studies suggest that up to 10 percent of men who think they are the fathers of their children … really aren’t.

  The 50 or so genetic laboratories now offering such DNA testing are said to be doing about 350,000 such tests a year. Does that mean there are upwards of 35,000 verifiable Annie Whites running around the country?… and (if we extrapolate like the statisticians would) another 13 or so million who haven’t been found out?

  That’s got to be a lie.

  I pick up Todd about 3 o’clock and we go to one of the huge discount stores that are busily chomping their way through the suburban landscape. Todd is focused on finding a new toy.

  It’s one of the ways I assuage my guilt at not being part of his life, at being in this fatherhood-without-influence place. I buy him a $20 toy virtually every time I see him. This annoys the hell out of Annie, so I get a double serving of pleasure whenever I help him pick out a toy.

  I figure that I can’t really give him any pleasure by playing with him in his room or reading him a bedtime story or any of the dozens of other things dads routinely do for their kids when they live with them. Nor am I a part of the Christmas-time ritual wherein a gentleman known as Santa Claus leaves him a bright plastic bounty. So why not indulge us both in the few hours I have with him? It’s much the same dilemma literally millions of fathers in America face. Locked out of their kids’ growing up by vindictive ex-wives and a court system that bows and scrapes to these women, they wonder how to be real dads and they try out all the various stratagems, one by one.

  Todd settles on a bulldozer with flashing lights and back-up beeper and a little plastic guy of indeterminate race who sits at the controls.

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  He nods. “Can we go to your house and play with it?”

  “I was planning on it.”

  We drive home and I do something I likely wouldn’t have done in a thousand years for Allegra or Jack or Wolfie. I spread flour and sugar over the kitchen table, plunk the new bulldozer down for him and say “Go for it, kid.”

  Todd is delighted. He looks at me with a four-year-old’s knowledge that this is not allowed in the kitchen, young man, and don’t you dare even think of it. That kind of play belongs outside!

  Up yours, Annie, I gleefully mutter to myself as Todd and I smoosh up mountains and then bulldoze them down. The flour and sugar admixture is flying everywhere. It slops off the table onto the floor and I go “Grrrr” at Todd. “Sorry,” he says but he really doesn’t mean it, any more than I give a damn about the floor. But we have to follow the protocol.

  We do this for a half hour or so and I find myself really caring about the shape of a particular road which wends its way through the white gunk on the table. I’m as engrossed as Todd is in making something of this mess.

  My oldest son Jack walks into the kitchen at that point, scans the incredible mess, looks at me with scolding eyes, and says, “You’re letting him do this?” I shrug nonchalantly and ask him if he wants to join us. Jack is 12 now, so I’m inviting him more as a courtesy than anything else. To my surprise he says, “Lemme go get another truck or something.” He’s back in half a minute and starts plowing through the mess along with Todd.

  Eleven-year-old Wolfie shows up then and he too looks askance at the scene. I’ve obviously trained these kids too well. I tell him, “Go get a truck or something and you can do it too.” He thinks on this, exits, then comes back with a battery-operated, motorized, remote-control bulldozer I only vaguely recognize as an artifact from his own recent toyhood.

  Necessarily, I add more flour and sugar to the kitchen table and all four of us get down to business. We’ve soon got roads and ramps and interchanges and cliffs that let your vehicle make a wonderful Schummp! of air-borne flour and sugar when it barrels off the road, hangs there a second, and then falls back onto the playing field.

  There are a lot of “Wow!”s and “Watch this!” going on and the three boys are playing together in remarkable harmony. Todd doesn’t really get much time with his two brothers and his sister—but they all seem to like each other. I gradually back away from the table because it’s getting too crowded there and because I know that dads can get too bossy and too dominant when playing boy games.

  But I stay there and watch for a long while thinking about families and how I seem to have given over my life to this one. It’s not at all a resentful or regretful feeling. To the contrary, there’s a vast happiness flooding me, as I see the three boys playing in a moment apart from life’s serious business.

  This is why I would have wanted you, Todd, I find myself rationalizing. This is why I let it happen.

  33

  A couple of weeks after our romantic trip to the mountains Annie picked up a home-test kit and confirmed what she already knew: She was pregnant.

  Given her experience with the miscarriage only four months before, she became extraordinarily cautious at what she ate and drank. She quit her job at the sculpture gallery very soon after the first of the year and she moved about more delicately, shunning any heavy housework or exercise.

  “Relax,” I told her. “You’ll do fine.”

  “It’s the first trimester I’m worried about,” she said. “That’s when most miscarriages happen, you know—like with us last August. If I can get by that, into late March or April, then I can relax. But not until then.”

  The familiar routine of life kept us company while we waited. We didn’t tell the kids or anyone else about the impending baby. We wanted to be sure before facing the raised eyebrows and the halting questions; the unspoken “Why on earth …?,” in other words.

  Very tentatively we addressed the fact that the house, while pretty large and sprawling already, might not do for a family of six. We took a couple of weekends and looked around the area for other houses but found nothing that really made sense for us. I’d been spoiled by the studio attached to the house and I wasn’t anxious to give it up. We called in a contractor I knew and asked for some plans that would add another bedroom. But they, too, didn’t quite make sense: he suggested converting part of the basement to a bedroom/living area … and something in me doesn’t want anyone living partially underground.

  It was getting on to late March now and as Annie’s first trimester with the pregnancy passed smoothly, this matter of extra space was becoming a real concern.

  Annie took me aside one evening. She said she had an idea. “Well,” she started, looking at me with bright, excited eyes, “you know how we’ve always talked about a vacation house? One where we could get you away from the studio every weekend and the kids could h
ave a fresh place to play and make friends?”

  “Sure. Why?” We’d talked now and again about such a place—maybe a small A-frame or a rustic little cabin an hour or two away.

  “Okay,” Annie continued. “Why don’t we buy a second house now, something small around here, and the baby and I could live there and you and the kids could continue to live here and we’d have all the space we need and we could visit back and forth and it would be just like we had a full-time vacation home.”

  I stared at her, speechless.

  She went on. “That way we wouldn’t have to add on to this house and we wouldn’t have to keep on looking for something bigger that has space for your studio.” She smiled hugely. “So what do you think?”

  I tried to come up with some words. “You’re serious,” I said. It wasn’t really a question; it was my mind processing this incredible notion.

  “Of course I’m serious! Absolutely! Don’t you see how that would solve all our problems? Nobody would be getting on anybody’s nerves because of the baby’s schedule and the three kids would be free to make all the noise they wanted and you’d still have your space and—isn’t it a great solution?”

  It’s said there are moments in your life when you realize that everything that has gone before was something of a dream. Just like when you spring awake an hour before the alarm and the cockamamie world you’ve been visiting in your sleep falls away and you think to yourself, Good God! What a crazy world! I had one of those shuddering, queasy moments then. Except that what I was awakening into was every bit as crazy as what had gone before. I realized, with a sense of real fear, that something very basic was amiss here. That just perhaps there was another reality at play in the mind of the woman who sat opposite me this balmy March evening.

  “Annie,” I said, “I’m not sure how that would work. You say you and the baby would be in some new house and the kids and I would stay here. So how would we work meals? How would we keep this place going? How would all of us get to know the baby? How would we still be a family? How would we all be together?”

  Annie’s answer to all these questions was to smile at me. She’d recently taken to this manner of response—which is to say, no response at all. Having practiced it all her life, she was taking the art of passive aggression to new heights.

  “How?” I repeated. “Have you thought about all this?”

  No response.

  “Annie?”

  “Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  “Well then, how would it all work?”

  “I’m sure it would all fall into place, Gil. It’ll just take a little getting used to.”

  A little getting used to. I thought on those words for a while, silent. This whole idea was so apart from common sense that I couldn’t really get a handle on rebutting it. It’s as if the kids’ pediatrician had told us that the surest way to cure a case of head lice was for the kid to jump head first from a 10th-floor window. “Well, I understand, doctor, but …”

  I went off in my thoughts to someplace where I could check that up was still up, and down was still down, and a working marriage and a working family meant that everybody lived together. I was quiet long enough that Annie’s smile gradually faded. “You don’t like it,” she said.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t like it.”

  “Oh well. I tried.” She stood, grim faced, and started to leave the room. Struck by a new thought, she looked back over her shoulder and said, “Then I suppose you’ll be looking for another contractor who can come up with a way to expand the house?”

  “I honestly don’t know what I’ll do,” I said. It was as true a statement as I’d ever spoken. Given this new reality, I was considering everything from a fast divorce to a bullet through my brain—but there didn’t seem to be an answer that could cover all the bases Annie had traveled in my mind in those few short minutes just past.

  Dear Gil,

  Please know that the baby and I would love you and adore you no matter where we were living. You are my only reason for living and I brought all this up about a second house because I know it would make your life easier. You’ve already had three squalling babies to take care of in your life, and I wanted to spare you that with my baby. But whichever way you decide, know that I shall always, always, always love you.

  Annie

  She slid the note under the studio door so it was the first thing I saw the next morning. I read it repeatedly, each time with a mounting sense of dread that fed on itself. Here I was married to a pregnant woman who spoke so easily and so endlessly of love, but who apparently hadn’t the slightest notion what love was really all about. Annie was neither partner nor friend and my sinking feeling that morning was that she would ultimately go to any lengths to get her way.

  More pieces of the puzzle that was Annie White began to click into place in my mind. Annie could write bubbly little love notes to beat the band, but I was finally beginning to see what her notes were really saying: There’s only me in this world, and I’m going to make sure I get mine.

  I’ve come to realize there are a lot of these people around. They are, like Annie White, generally very alluring because they are always giving each of us what we seem to want. But once they get what they want—they’re out the door.

  Now that she was safely on her way to having something of her very own—her very own baby, her very own role as SuperMom—Annie wanted to leave. She was pressing “3” somewhere in her mind and erasing us from her life—much as she had so cavalierly, so casually, erased the stream of phone messages some years back connecting her to her role as Harry White’s wife.

  34

  The lovely actress stops for a long moment every afternoon and looks up at the marquee, savoring those big, black, 42-inch letters. My name! There it is! Right up there for all to see! Up there above the name of the play itself!

  Oh, but the play. That’s another matter. It sucks!

  The play is wonderful, say the critics. The play is marvelous and uplifting and leaves a lump in the throats of all those busloads of tourists down from Connecticut and over from New Jersey. The play will surely run forever.

  It sucks!

  Because it’s a horrible play, a stupid, boring drama that’s really written for the damned man, for Christ’s sake, and even for the supporting cast—way before some stupid little anonymous playwright even considered the leading lady. For the real star of the show—for her, dammit!—it’s a boring, insignificant, nowhere role he’s created … and how galling that is!

  No wonder the reviews for her are so tepid. No wonder the audiences never cheer for her and never insist on curtain calls for her like they do for him, the son of a bitch!

  And, oh, how she’s tried! She’s changed her lines and her interpretations so many times, in so many ways, but the rest of the cast, they just stare at her, too stupid to react to real drama and real acting. And then they complain to the director who yells and storms and screams, “Just do the role like it’s written, dammit!”

  No, I will not!

  She fantasizes that a new play will come along, something that will showcase her for a change, something that will let her spread her wings and show the world just how truly amazing she really is. So she quietly looks around, and every Monday, when the theatre is dark, she sneaks out to auditions here and there. But no. All the new plays up for casting are written by men, too. They’re the same old thing, the same old boring nonsense that has the leading lady as little more than an appendage to some boring old fart of a star. A man, dammit!

  What ever shall I do? Oh, God!

  And then one day it comes to her: Why not write something of her own? Something that really and truly makes her the star! It can’t be that hard to write a play. Look at how she’s made her lines and her role so much better than that stupid playwright ever thought of.

  Yes! A show of her very own!

  A one-woman show starring her, a show the critics will genuinely rave over, a show that will finally let th
e world know just how wonderful life can be when she’s alone on the stage. Just her, alone on the stage.

  Yes!

  35

  I had a couple of bedrooms added to the house, expanded the studio while I was at it, and took to drinking alone at night after my work was done. It wasn’t a solution, but it helped. At least the drinking did.

  The rest of Annie’s pregnancy went smoothly. Ostrich-like, I buried my head in the ongoing flow of the routine going on around me and awaited the baby. Annie seemed off in her own world of fabrics and frills for the new nursery and the three older kids, while given to sidelong glances which begged for reassurance that all would be okay, seemed largely content.

  I’ve made some passing references to the ongoing power struggle between any two people in a liaison or a marriage. For long stretches at a time it may seem a static, unchanging kind of thing; everything seems to have been resolved and life moves calmly ahead.

  That may be an illusion. You can watch a pair of high school wrestlers, for example, as they go through their ballet of takedowns and reverses and escapes, and then see one or the other suddenly close to being pinned. The two kids struggle in near exhaustion as this denouement comes closer; sometimes they’ll both seem frozen, motionless, as their muscles scream in protest against so unnatural a situation.

  Then, in virtually the blink of an eye, the wrestler on top summons up one last ounce of strength and completes the pin—or, just as stunningly, the wrestler about to be pinned explodes upward, and away, in a frenzied spasm.

  Annie and I wrestled with our new reality as those months went on. The power flowed back and forth between us, seeking a new balance. There was a fresh, hard-edged glint in Annie’s eyes when we had our passing discussions about what to do about this or that domestic crisis—the leaking faucet in the kids’ bath, a complaint from Allegra’s homeroom teacher that she wasn’t handing in all her homework, or (a chronic sore spot) Wolfie’s whereabouts at any one minute. Trivial things, transitory things.