Self-Defense (5 page)

“Loss of control.”

“Yes. The dream’s scary. I don’t want to
be there.”

“What’s the scary part?”

“That they’re going to find me. I’m not
supposed to be there.”

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“Back inside.”

“In the log cabin.”

Nod.

“Did someone tell you to stay inside?”

“I don’t
know.
I just know I’m not
supposed to be
there.”

She rubbed her face, not unlike the way
Milo does when he’s nervous or distracted. It raised blemish like patches on
her skin.

“So what does it
mean
?” she said.

“I don’t know yet. We need to find out
more about you.”

She brought her legs out from under her.
Her fingers remained laced, the knuckles ice-white. “I’m probably making much
too big a deal out of this. Why should I whine about a stupid dream? I’ve got
my health, a good job—there are people out there, homeless, getting shot on the
street, dying of AIDS.”

“Just because others have it worse doesn’t
mean you have to suffer in silence.”

“Others have it a
lot
worse. I’ve
had it good, Dr. Delaware, believe me.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“About what?”

“Your background, your family.”

“My background,” she said absently. “You
asked me about that the first time I came in, but I avoided it, didn’t I? And
you didn’t push. I thought that was very gentlemanly. Then I thought, Maybe
he’s just backing off as a strategy; he probably has other ways of getting into
my head. Pretty paranoid, huh? But being in therapy was unnerving. I’d never
done it before.”

I nodded.

She smiled. “Guess I’m waffling, right
now. Okay. My background: I was born in New York City twenty-five years ago, on
April 14. Lenox Hill Hospital, to be precise. I grew up in New York and
Connecticut, went to fine upstanding girls’ schools, and graduated from Belding
College three years ago—it’s a small women’s college just outside of Boston. I
got my degree in history but couldn’t do much with that, so I took a job as a
bookkeeper at Belding, keeping the accounts straight for the Faculty Club and
the Student Union. Last thing I thought I’d be doing, never had a head for
math. But it turned out I liked it. The orderliness. Then I spotted a job card
from Bowlby and Sheldon on the campus employment bulletin board and went for an
interview. They’re a national firm, had no opening except in L.A. On a whim, I
applied and got it. And came West, young woman. That’s it. Not very
illuminating, is it?”

“What about your family?” I said.

“My family is basically Peter, whom you
met. He’s one year older than me and we’re close. His nickname’s Puck—someone
gave it to him when he was a little boy because he was such an imp.”

“Is he your only sib?”

“My only full sib. There’s a half brother
who lives up in San Francisco, but I have no contact with him. He had a sister
who died several years ago.” Pause. “All my grandparents and uncles and aunts
are deceased. My mother passed away right after I was born.”

Young, I thought, to be so surrounded by
death. “What about your dad?”

She looked down quickly, as if searching
for a lost contact lens. Her legs were flat on the floor, her torso twisting
away from me, so that the fabric of her blouse tightened around her narrow
waist.

“I was hoping we could avoid this,” she
said softly. “And not because of the dream.”

Wheeling around. The intense stare Milo’d
seen in the courtroom.

“If you don’t want to talk about him, you
don’t have to.”

“It’s not a matter of that. Bringing him
into it always changes things.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of who he is.”

She gazed up at the ceiling and smiled.

“Your line,” she said, extending one hand
theatrically.

“Who is he?”

She gave a small laugh.

“Morris Bayard Lowell.” Enunciating.

Another laugh, totally cheerless.

“Buck Lowell.”

I’d heard of M. Bayard Lowell the way I’d
heard of Hemingway and Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas.

When I was in high school, some of his
early prose and verse were in the textbooks. I’d never thought much of his
paint-splotched abstract canvases, but I knew they hung in museums.

Published in his teens, exhibited in his
twenties, the postwar enfant terrible turned Grand Old Man of Letters.

But it had been years since I’d heard
anything about him.

“Shocked?” said Lucy, looking grim but
satisfied.

“I see what you mean about things
changing. But the only relevance he has to me is his role as your father.”

She laughed. “His role? Roll in the hay is
about it, Dr. Delaware. The grand moment of conception. Old Buck’s a
love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. He cut out on Mother when I was a few weeks
old and never returned.”

She smoothed her bangs and sat up
straighter.

“So how come I’m dreaming about him,
right?”

“It’s not that unusual. An absent parent
can be a strong presence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anger, curiosity. Sometimes fantasies
develop.”

“Fantasies about
him
? Like going to
the Pulitzer ceremony on his arm? No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t around enough
to be relevant.”

“But when he comes into the picture,
things change.”

“Who he
is
changes things. It’s
like being the President’s kid. Or Frank Sinatra’s. People stop perceiving you
as who you are and start seeing you in relationship to him. And they get
shocked—just like you did—to find out the Great Man spawned someone so
crashingly ordinary.”

“I—”

“No, it’s okay,” she said, waving a hand.
“I
love
being ordinary: my ordinary job, my ordinary car, my ordinary
apartment and bills and tax returns and washing dishes and taking out the
garbage. Ordinary is
heaven
for me, Dr. Delaware, because when I was
growing up
nothing
was routine.”

“Your mother died right after you were
born?”

“I was a couple of months old.”

“Who raised you?”

“Her older sister, my Aunt Kate. She was
just a kid herself, new Barnard grad, living in Greenwich Village. I don’t
remember too much about it other than her taking Puck and me to lots of
restaurants. Then
she
got married to Walter Lazar—the author? He was a
reporter back then. Kate divorced him after a year and went back to school.
Anthropology—she studied with Margaret Mead and started going on expeditions to
New Guinea. That meant boarding school for Puck and me, and that’s where we
stayed all through high school.”

“Together?”

“No, he was sent to prep academies, and I
went to girls’ schools.”

“It must have been tough, being
separated.”

“We were used to being shifted around.”

“What about the half siblings you
mentioned?”

“Ken and Jo? They lived with
their
mother, in San Francisco. Like I said, there’s no contact at all.”

“Where was your father all this time?”

“Being famous.”

“Did he support you financially?”

“Oh, sure, the checks kept coming, but for
him that was no big deal, he’s rich from his mother’s side. The bills were paid
through his bank, and my living expenses were sent to the school and doled out
by the headmistress—very organized for an
artiste,
wouldn’t you say?”

“He never came to visit?”

She shook her head. “Not once. Two or
three times a year he’d call, on the way to some conference or art show.”

She pulled something out of her eyelashes.

“I’d get a message to come to the school
office and some secretary would hand me the phone, awestruck. I’d brace myself,
say hello, and this thunderous voice would come booming through. “Hello, girl.
Eating freshly blooded moose meat for breakfast? Getting your corpuscles
moving?’ Witty, huh? Like one of his stupid macho hunting stories. A summary of
what he was doing, then good-bye. I don’t think I spoke twenty words in all
those years.”

She turned to me.

“When I was fourteen, I finally decided
I’d had enough and got my roommate to tell him I was out of the dorm. He never
called again. All you get with a Great Man is one chance.”

She tried to smile, lips working at it,
struggling to form the shape. Finally, she managed to force the corners upward.

“It’s no big deal, Dr. Delaware. Mother
died when I was so young I never really knew what it was like to lose her. And
he
was... nothing. Like I said, lots of people have it worse.”

“This issue of being ordinary—”

“I really
do
like it. Not a shred
of talent, same with Puck. That’s probably why
he
has nothing to do with
us. Living reminders that he’s produced mediocrity. He probably wishes we’d all
disappear. Poor Jo obliged.”

“How did she die?”

“Climbed a mountain in Nepal and never came
down. His wives oblige him, too. Three out of four are dead.”

“Your mother must have been very young
when she died.”

“Twenty-one. She got the flu and went into
some sort of toxic shock.”

“So she was only twenty when she married
him?”

“Just barely.
He
was forty-six. She
was a Barnard girl, too, a sophomore. They met because she was in charge of
bringing speakers to campus, and she invited him. Three months later she
dropped out, he took her to Paris, and they got married. Puck was born there.”

“When did they get divorced?”

“They didn’t. Right after I was born, he
went back to France. It wasn’t long after when she died. The doctors called
him, but he never came to the phone. Two weeks after the funeral, a postcard
arrived at Aunt Kate’s, along with a check.”

“Who told you this?”

“Puck. He heard it from Aunt Kate—he went
out to visit her in New Zealand after he finished college.”

“Ken and Jo are older than you and Puck?”

“Yes. Their mother was his second wife,
Mother was his third. The first was Therese Vainquer—the French poet?”

I shook my head.

“Apparently she was pretty hot in postwar
Paris, hanging around with Gertrude Stein and that bunch. She left him for a
Spanish bullfighter and was killed in a car crash soon after. Next came Emma,
Ken and Jo’s mom. She was an artist, not very successful. She died around
fifteen or sixteen years ago—breast cancer, I think. He left
her
for my
mom, Isabelle Frehling. His fourth wife was Jane something or other, an
assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
They
met
because the museum had a bunch of his paintings stored in their basement and he
wanted them exhibited in order to revive his painting career—it’s pretty dead,
you know. So is his writing career. Anyway, he dumped
her
after about a
year and hasn’t married since. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got another
sweet young thing right now. Illusion of immortality.”

She crossed her legs and held one knee
with both hands.

Tossing out details about a man who
supposedly had no role in her life.

She read my mind. “I know, I know, it
sounds as if I cared enough to find all this out, but I got it from Puck. A few
years ago, he was into this discover-your-roots thing. I didn’t have the heart
to tell him I couldn’t care less.”

Folding her arms across her chest.

“So,” I said, “at least we know the log
cabin wasn’t somewhere you’ve actually been. At least not with your father.”

“Call him Buck, please. Mr. Macho, the
Great Man, whatever, anything but that.”

Touching her stomach.

Remembering the ulcer she’d had before
college, I said, “Where did you live the summer after you graduated from high
school?”

She hesitated for a second. “I volunteered
at a Head Start center in Boston.”

“Was it difficult?”

“No. I loved teaching. This was in
Roxbury, little ghetto kids who really responded. You could see the effects
after one summer.”

“Did you ever consider a teaching career?”

“I tossed it around, but after all those
years in school—growing
up
in schools—I just wasn’t ready for another
classroom. I guess I might have eventually done it, but the bookkeeping thing
came up and I just rolled with the flow.”

I thought of the isolation that had been
her childhood. Milo had talked about tough times strengthening her—a mugging of
sorts. But maybe it was nothing specific, just an accumulation of loneliness.