Chronicles of a Midlife Crisis (6 page)

“Calm down,” I say, suddenly fearful that she might crash her Forerunner into a power pole. “There’s no need to panic. Sam’s fifteen. This is pretty normal teenage behavior.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down, Trent. Our daughter is drunk at school. Would you prefer we wait until she’s a crystal meth addict panhandling on Hastings Street before we freak out?”

“No, of course not. I’m just saying—” But my wife cuts me off.

“What have you got on tonight that’s more important than dealing with your daughter’s drinking problem? Are you going out with Mike again? Or have you got a date or something?”

“No!” I cry. “Of course not! I just thought … I don’t know … that maybe you could handle this on your own.”

“Oh, I’m sorry I’m so weak and incapable,” the queen of sarcasm continues. “My husband walked out on me at the beginning of the week, and now my fifteen-year-old daughter’s drowning her sorrows in a bottle of gin. But you’re right, it’s no big deal. I should just toughen up.”

I know when I’m defeated. “Fine. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Before she can say another word, I hang up and start to punch in Annika’s number. Strangely, I feel just the smallest glimmer of relief.

Lucy

“
WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO SAY FOR YOURSELF, YOUNG LADY?
”Samantha looks at me, her eyes slightly unfocused. Then she bursts into laughter. “You think this is funny, do you? Well, let me tell you, little girl, this is not funny!”

“Don’t waste your breath on her right now,” Trent interjects. “She’s hammered. We can deal with this in the morning.”

I turn on him. “Don’t you mean
I
can deal with this in the morning? You’ll be at your hotel, maybe having a massage or enjoying the brunch buffet.”

“Right, like I’m on vacation.”

“Well, it sure as hell beats staying here and dealing with all this shit!”

Samantha finally speaks. “Here you go again,” she slurs. “Can you blame me for having a couple gin and orange pops at lunch? God!”

“Don’t you try to blame us for this,” I snap. “You’re old enough to take responsibility for your actions.”

“Right,” she mumbles. “I’ll be responsible … like you guys are.”

“Watch it, Sam,” Trent growls. “Don’t say something you’re going to be sorry for later.”

“Okay,” she says. “Can I have some nachos?”

“No, you cannot have nachos!” I scream, finally losing it with her nonchalance. “Go to bed and we’ll talk about this when you’re sober.” The words prompt an uncontrollable swelling of emotion. Trent and I have handled our separation so badly that my fifteen-year-old daughter has turned to alcohol! At lunch! At school! I burst into tears.

Trent looks at me and then puts his hands on Sam’s shoulders. “Let’s get you off to bed,” he says to her, steering her weaving form out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

I try to gain control over my emotions while he’s out of the room. I don’t need him to know how alone I feel, how defeated and lost. Who would want such a pathetic, emotional wreck of a woman back? It’s no wonder he left me, really. I’m a terrible mother and I was probably a terrible wife too. And now my husband is gone, my daughter’s a teenage alcoholic, and it’s all my fault.

Of course, this train of thought makes it significantly harder to calm down. When Trent returns to the kitchen I’m still weeping. As he approaches, I grab a paper towel and hold it to my face.

“She’ll be fine,” he says. “In the morning, she’s going to be so hungover that she won’t drink again for years.”

I snuffle a response into the paper towel.

Trent moves toward me, his voice soft. “This isn’t your fault, you know. If you want to blame me, I understand. I guess I could have handled this better … with Sam and everything.”

My face remains buried in the paper towel, but I manage to shake my head. I don’t want to blame Trent for this. I don’t want to be angry at him anymore. I want us to join together as a team, to discuss how our daughter has fallen in with a bad crowd, how getting drunk at school is really just a rite of passage, and how we’ll all laugh about this one day. For the first time, I raise my face and meet my husband’s eyes. Instead of the pity or disgust that could be there, I see only tenderness.

Uh-oh.

Trent

IT WAS PROBABLY A BAD IDEA.
It’s just that she looked so sad and alone, and I guess I was still a bit worked up because I had that date planned with Annika, and … it just happened. I’d only meant to comfort her, so I gave her a hug. And then she was playing with my hair, which she knows perfectly well turns me on, so obviously, she wanted it. Then the next thing you know we were going at it on the living room sofa. It was pretty fantastic, I have to say. If we’d been having sex like that all along, I never would have left.

I ended up staying over, which I’m afraid may have sent the wrong message. Lucy looked kind of disappointed when I left for the hotel that afternoon. But one good fuck on the couch doesn’t erase three years of living separate lives. There’s no way she could think we were getting back together already. And on the bright side, the sex did make us stop fighting long enough to deal with Sam’s drinking, so … I guess it wasn’t that big of a mistake. As long as Lucy understands that we’ve still got a lot of problems we need to work on before I can think about coming home. I’m sure she gets that, right?

Annika walks by with a coffee cup in her hand and doesn’t even glance into my office. Does that mean she’s mad at me for bailing on our Friday plans? Surely she understands that a drunken teenage daughter constitutes an emergency situation. Although, how can I expect her to understand? She’s only thirty-two.

Swallowing the remnants of my coffee, I decide to follow her into the kitchen to make sure. Ugh! It’s ice cold, but I need an excuse to enter the coffee room. I can’t chase after her like some love-struck kid.

Annika is making herself a cup of some kind of herbal tea when I approach. “Hey,” I say casually, going to the coffee pot.

“Oh, hi Trent,” she responds cheerfully. She doesn’t sound pissed, so I decide to continue.

“How was your weekend?”

“Great. I went snowboarding on Saturday. It was amazing.”

“Awesome,” I say, as if I actually find snowboarding amazing as well. The truth is, I’ve never snowboarded, and rarely even ski anymore. I hurt my hip getting off the chairlift a few years back and it still bothers me in the cold. Plus, at my age, a snowboard getup would be laughable.

“How’s your daughter?” Annika asks, tossing her tea bag in the trash.

“Oh … yeah, she’s fine. She went home for lunch with one of her girlfriends and they decided to have a couple of highballs. It was just stupid. She’s not a bad kid.”

“Of course not,” Annika says. “I remember drinking half a bottle of rye one lunch hour in tenth grade. And look how well I turned out!”

This is a perfect opportunity for me to say something suggestive, like, “Yeah, you turned out great” or “I love the way you turned out,” but I hesitate too long and the moment’s gone.

“Actually,”Annika admits, “I had a few too many on Saturday night. My girlfriend and I went to check out this new club. It’s called Mania. Have you heard of it?”

“No,” I mumble, stirring cream into my coffee. I suddenly feel like some mid-life crisis Michael Caine character. What am I doing? Why am I chasing after a hot young thing who spends her weekends snowboarding and clubbing when I have a perfectly good, age-appropriate wife at home? A wife with whom I had incredible sex not three days ago! Am I really such a cliché?

“It was wild,” Annika continues. “But I paid for it on Sunday.”

I give a small laugh and prepare to slink back to my office. But before I’ve gone far she says, “So, how about a rain check for last Friday?”

I stop. “Sounds good,” I say. And suddenly, I’m eighteen again.

Lucy

THE BOTOX FINALLY KICKED IN THIS MORNING.
I’m grateful I still had the ability to frown over the weekend so that I could show Sam my extreme disapproval over her lunchtime cocktail party. Trent and I were very calm and collected when we talked to her about her behavior the next morning. I’m glad we didn’t end up bickering and pointing fingers. I guess having sex helped us reconnect.

I hadn’t expected it to happen, but I was upset and he comforted me. One thing led to another and we ended up having sex on the living room sofa. It was really spontaneous and quite risky. Of course, we knew we wouldn’t be discovered since the only other person in the house was in an alcohol induced coma, but we hadn’t done it outside of our bedroom for years. It was pretty incredible, I must say. Not that we don’t still have issues to work out, but I think it was a step in the right direction.

So whether it’s the Botox, the highlights, or the hot sex, I feel really confident today. I spent a little longer on my hair and makeup this morning, and evidently, it’s paid off. Even Tanya, the nearly mute receptionist, says “You look nice today” when I walk past her.

Camille is more verbose. “Why, Eliza Doolittle!” she cries when I walk into our shared space. “Don’t you look fantastic— if I do say so myself.”

“Thanks,” I say, giving my hair a little flip as I deposit my purse under the desk. “I had a pretty great weekend.”

“You did?” Camille looks shocked. “I thought Sam getting drunk at school on Friday would have set a bad tone.”

“Shhhhh!” I look around to make sure no one heard. “Well, of course that part was bad, but we dealt with it really well. Trent came over—”

Bruce pops his head into the room. “Script meeting starting now, ladies. Let’s go.”

With notepads and pens in hand, we follow him to the boardroom at the end of the hall. Kev, the director, a twentyeight-year-old weenie who considers himself the next Woody Allen, is already there, eager to dictate his vision to the various departments.

Each week the scripts get less and less inspiring. Our overage teenager seems to find himself in more predictable predicaments as the show progresses. This week he’s got to pretend he has a twin brother so that the girl he likes doesn’t think he’s a complete idiot. Of course, she ultimately finds out there’s only one Cody—and that’s just the way she likes it. If I wasn’t in such a good mood about the positive direction my marriage is headed, I might gag.

Bruce is rattling off the props that Cody and his fake twin will need this episode when the door suddenly opens.

“Wynn!” Kev says, jumping to attention as the star of our show enters.

“I need to talk to you,” Wynn says, with no regard for the twelve other people in the room.

“Right … okay. Take a break everyone.”

I watch Wynn Felker as he stands in the doorway, waiting for the director to hurriedly gather his scripts. He’s an extremely good-looking guy, but he’s too good-looking really, almost pretty. I prefer a more masculine type, like Trent. I look down at my notes and doodle my husband’s name. It’s juvenile, I know, but he’s on my mind. Trent has always been my type, physically. He’s aged over the years, of course, but I’m not one to complain about a bit of a belly. It’s not like I’m perfect … though at the moment, I would have to say I’m pretty damn good.

“Sorry to interrupt your meeting,” Wynn says as the director hustles over to join him. There is a general outpouring of obsequiousness.

“No problem at all!”

“Oh please! I’m sure your needs are more urgent.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I roll my eyes just as Wynn looks at me. Oh shit. But surprisingly, I see a hint of humor in his gaze. He reaches for one of the pastries sitting on a tray in the middle of the table. “You don’t mind, do you?” He’s saying this directly to me. Obviously, he thinks I’m the person responsible for the pastries instead of Tanya.

“Go ahead,” I say coolly. It’s not that I’m
above
arranging the morning pastry delivery, but it would be nice if he ever paid attention to what anyone else’s job was.

Wynn reaches for a Danish then lifts his gaze to me. Our eyes connect for a moment, and I feel the burning of attraction between us. But that’s stupid. Wynn is Choice Hottie after all, and while I’m feeling rather attractive at the moment, I’m not going to kid myself. Hurriedly, I drop my eyes to the notepad in front of me. I must have got it wrong.

Casually, I look up and our eyes meet again. Oh god, what is with that intense staring? I can’t help but blush as I quickly look away. I glance back. In response, Wynn chuckles and, turning on his heel, leaves the room. Oh, I get it. This must be something he does to women who get too full of themselves. Well, he certainly brought me down a peg or two. I suddenly feel exceedingly plain and frumpy.

Camille leans over. “So, tell me about this great weekend you had.”

Her words return me to my former glory. “Well, this thing with Sam … it really allowed Trent and me to reconnect.”

“Reconnect how?”

The disapproving tone of her voice and the look in her eye keep me from admitting that we reconnected on the living room sofa. “We just came together as parents and … it felt really good.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah … that’s it. And of course …,” I lower my voice, “the Botox kicked in. I should have done this years ago! Even when I’m feeling really angry and unhappy, you can’t tell!”

“I know. It’s great, isn’t it?”

“What about lip injections? Have you ever done those?”

The director barges back into the room. “Sorry about that, everyone. Okay … where were we?”

Trent

ANNIKA AND I SET A DATE FOR THURSDAY NIGHT.
She suggested George, this trendy Yaletown place. I wish we were sticking with Plan A—celebrity spotting at the hotel bar—but I felt awkward suggesting it. Besides, I’ve gotta move out of there soon. Lucy’s car needs new tires and hotel living costs a fortune. I’ve become addicted to my minibar Grolsch and Toblerone, and that alone is costing me over twelve bucks a night.

So with my beer and chocolate bar on the bedside table, I call some apartment listings. There are two that would work—both in Yaletown. Yes, moving into that neighborhood will feed into the mid-life crisis cliché, but I don’t give a shit. It’s time I stopped caring about what looks good to everyone else and started caring about what feels right for me. I played that game long enough. This is my time.