Little Known Facts: A Novel (25 page)

“What’s going on between you two?” I whispered to Anna in the kitchen while she was getting ice cream and ladyfingers together for dessert. “I know you and that man out there are more than friends.”

She gave me a look that I had never seen before, at least not on her pretty face. Amused scorn—this is what I’m almost certain it was. “We’re friends,” she said. “But if we were more, I don’t think you’d be the one to judge.”

I bristled. “So you are more than friends?”

“Dad, please, they can probably hear us.”

Elise was laughing in the other room. I really doubted that they could hear any part of our conversation. “Don’t be silly. I can barely hear us,” I said. “Why is he wearing a wedding ring?”

“The usual reason,” she said. She handed me two bowls, each with a ladyfinger slanting up from a scoop of chocolate. “Would you take these in to Elise and Tom?”

“If you’re working with him and having an affair, you could both be fired.”

She gave me a disappointed look. “He wanted to meet you. He thinks you’re great. He thinks you and De Niro are the two best actors in the world. Please don’t get upset. There’s no need to. Everything’s fine. Really, it is.”

“Where’s his wife? Why isn’t she here?”

“She’s playing bridge.”

“Bridge?” I said. “How old is she, seventy-five?”

She ignored this. “Her father used to teach it at the community center in Newark where she grew up. I guess she’s very good.”

“Does she know you two are friends? That he’s over here meeting Elise and me tonight?”

“Dad, please. Can’t we just have dessert and enjoy ourselves?”

So she was already a doctor, already in charge, like her mother had always been.

I took the ice cream into the other room and set a bowl in front of Elise and another in front of the doctor. I tried to smile, but despite my purported skills as an actor, I wasn’t able to move my mouth convincingly and the doctor gave me a wary look. He was no fool. He had probably worked with his share of terrified liars, patients who don’t want to admit to the symptoms they are pretty sure will spell their doom. Or other doctors who pretend they haven’t made the mistakes they’re being accused of. Malpractice, malignant, malign, malingerer.
Mal
as in evil, bad, dangerous. I didn’t think that Tom Glass was evil, but I really did not want him calling my daughter, having sex with her, or worse (from her point of view, anyway), canceling the occasional tryst when she was so looking forward to seeing him—because his wife had changed her plans for the day, or one of his kids had broken his wrist, or his mother-in-law had dropped by unexpectedly. He had someone to sleep next to at night. My daughter did not. She had only his word, the next promised assignation, and she must have known by now that a rendezvous wasn’t a given until he stood directly in front of her, clothes on their way to the floor. It all made me feel ill. I knew this man. I
was
this man. And of course my daughter realized this too. What could I really say to her? Even so, I didn’t care if my displeasure seemed a double standard to her. I wanted to protect her from disappointment, from unfortunate or foolhardy choices. I did not want this walking midlife crisis with his MD and smooth talk to break her heart.

But part of me, I have to admit, liked him. He was funny, intelligent, respectful, at least in front of Elise and me. He was probably a very good doctor and a good teacher. He spoke with confidence but not arrogance. He laughed easily. He looked at Anna with admiring eyes, and I could see why she had been drawn to him. He might even have been thinking about leaving his wife for her, but did I want Anna to be the other woman who managed to steal the husband away from his wife and kids? I was pretty sure that I did not. He was also so much older than she was. If she wanted kids of her own, I had to wonder if he would oblige. If he should oblige.

Elise had a good sense of what was going on too, and when we were in the car heading back to her place, she looked at me and said, “That must have been a little strange for you.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, Renn, let me see,” she said, laughing a little. “Because you left Anna’s mother for another woman, and now it looks like Anna is playing the same role that Melinda did for a while.”

Playing a role. I don’t like that expression when it’s not being used to talk about filmmaking. Life is real; it adds up to something. Yet I understand why we say it all the time. Real life is also surreal in a way that movies are not. One of the reasons I wanted to be an actor was because the best movies felt so much more important to me than my own day-to-day life. Now, ironically, they are my real life.

“It was a little awkward,” I admitted. “I think Anna knows that I’m worried about her.”

“He’s very nice though.”

“Yes, he seems to be.”

“Anna’s a year or so older than me, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

She was silent.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“Has she given you a hard time about me?”

“No, she hasn’t.” In fact, she had made a few comments about our age difference, but I didn’t feel like telling Elise. It would have hurt her feelings and she might have gotten upset, and there was no reason for her to feel that way. It wasn’t like I would break up with her if my daughter didn’t approve, but Elise certainly had cause to break up with me. I had seen Danielle after my return from France and had had sex with her, and I wanted to do it again. I knew that if I continued to see her, it would end badly, but I wasn’t yet ready to stop. It was likely to end badly no matter what. I did not want Danielle to tell me that she was in love with me, but because I have a hard time being a hardcore asshole, I brought her a couple of gifts back from Paris—a little keepsake box filled with handmade chocolates, and a necklace with a tiger’s-eye pendant that I’d found in one of the antique shops on the Left Bank. I bought Elise presents too, five of them. I spent a lot of money on them both, but more on Elise.

My favorite role, I suppose, is the romantic. It’s one that I play well, though romantics are dangerous—to themselves and to their lovers. Sometimes it’s only their stupidity that makes them dangerous. But often it’s also their selfishness.

A final note. About a week after I met Elise’s married boyfriend, I got a call from Lucy, Anna and Billy’s mother, saying that Billy was in the hospital. He’d been taken in because he had collapsed when he was out running earlier that day. He was dehydrated and hypoglycemic, and had apparently been out running something like twenty or thirty miles on the streets and trails near the Rose Bowl without enough water and no energy bars. A couple of other runners found him, probably not long after he collapsed. One of them had a cell phone, and they might have saved his life by moving him into the shade and getting him to swallow some water before the paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital.

I went to see him that afternoon, as soon as I could leave a meeting about a film I was hoping to direct and play the lead in starting in January, and it was only the third time since his ill-fated trip to New Orleans that I had seen my son. About a year had passed since the episode with the poem, and we still hadn’t talked about it, at least not in any meaningful way. No truce had been reached, neither of us having bothered to extend anything like an olive branch, and there I was, fucking his ex-girlfriend on the sly now too. When I went to the hospital to see him, I wondered for a panicked second if Danielle might be there, if Lucy had called her too, but I told myself that everything would be all right if she was. It wasn’t like I had shot and killed someone. We were all adults, capable of making our own decisions, as unwise as they might occasionally be. Elise was working, but I wouldn’t have brought her along even if she had been free. I hadn’t called her on my way to the hospital to tell her what had happened to Billy. To be frank, I wasn’t sure when I would tell her.

Lucy was in the room with Billy when I got there. Anna was too. They had attached an IV to his right hand. He looked exhausted and was sunburned. But he was conscious and alert, and I felt a rush of overwhelming relief, as if I had just opened a window after a very long time of no light or fresh air. I went over to the bed and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” I said. “I hope you’ll take it easier from now on.”

Billy’s voice was hoarse when he spoke. “I will, Dad. I don’t know what happened. I go out all the time with only one bottle of water and usually I’m fine.”

“You have to stop that,” his mother said. “And you need to stop running so far, especially if it’s hot outside like it was today. You’re so thin, and if you’re not going to drink enough water either, I’m going to have to hire a detective to keep an eye on you.”

Lucy was wearing a pair of gray slacks and a white blouse with pearls. She had probably just come from the clinic after a day of seeing children with asthma and food allergies and ear infections. She looked tired but pretty, her light brown hair frosted almost blond now, and she had stayed in shape from sheer nervous will and treadmill runs at six a.m. five days a week. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, maybe two, but it didn’t feel like it had been that long. I went over to hug her, and then to our daughter, who smelled like something I couldn’t quite place, but later I realized it was the brand of cologne that her attending physician had been wearing the night we met for dinner.

“Mom, I run almost every day, and this has never happened before. I did three half-marathons and four ten-mile races over the summer. I’m signed up to do the marathon here next March too.”

“You are?” I said, impressed.

“Yes. It’ll be my first.”

“Wow. That’s ambitious. Good for you,” I said.

His mother, however, was not impressed. “Billy, I don’t know. Marathons are so hard on your body. And you don’t eat enough.”

“I’m fine, Mom. I love running. I’m good at it.”

“Says the dangerously dehydrated guy from his hospital bed,” said Anna.

Her brother rolled his eyes but said nothing.

“Do you want me to go to In-N-Out and get you a burger and fries?” I asked. “Or there’s a Carl’s Jr. just a couple of blocks away. Whatever you want, I’ll go get for you. You need to get some hearty food in your body.”

Billy shook his head. “I don’t eat red meat anymore.”

Anna stared at him. “You don’t? Since when?”

“Since May. But I still eat chicken and fish.”

“I hope you’re getting enough protein,” said Lucy.

“Most people get too much protein,” said Billy.

“That’s true,” said Anna.

“It is?” I said.

Anna nodded. “Yes, and it’s hard to digest if you eat too much of it. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many gastrointestinal disorders in our country. We eat more meat than we need.”

“We eat too much gluten too,” said Billy. “I’ve cut out a lot of bread products from my diet.”

“Why?” said Lucy. “You’ve never had a weight problem.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it, Mom. I just want to be healthier.”

“You’re not going to be healthier if you’re starving yourself.”

I looked at the three of them, these people with whom I had shared a house and a life until I thought I could do better. I wouldn’t say that I regret the divorce, but I do regret causing them the unhappiness and bad feeling that I know I did. I regret missing so much of my children’s adolescence. I also regret that Lucy hated me for a while, and that she hasn’t remarried or found someone to live with who makes her happy. Maybe she is happy on her own, but I think she could probably be happier.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking from Billy’s face to the outline of his skinny body beneath the hospital sheet. He really had become a lot thinner since I’d last seen him, which had been in April on my birthday. Elise had been in Dallas, visiting her sister and parents again, which is probably why I decided to meet Billy for dinner, something we’d always done on or near my birthday if I wasn’t out of town. When we met at an Italian place I like in Santa Monica, I could tell that he’d lost some weight, but he wasn’t as thin as now. He was probably twenty pounds lighter than his normal one sixty-five. His eyes looked bigger and his cheekbones were more pronounced; some would have called him gaunt.

Lucy looked at me. “Why are you apologizing?”

I could feel my face starting to grow hot. “I don’t know,” I said.

Anna and Billy were looking at me intently too. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “I just wanted to say it.”

“We’re all sorry,” said Lucy. “We’re all sorry, and then we die.”

“Mom,” said Anna. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m not,” said Lucy. “I’m only speaking the truth. Your father would agree, wouldn’t you, Renn?”

I looked at her for a long moment, and then I nodded. “Yes, I guess I would.”

In the hall, someone was pushing a cart with a screeching wheel, and when Lucy and Anna glanced toward the door, I looked down at Billy and he looked up at me, his face unreadable. “I’m sorry, Billy,” I said.

“I’m sorry too,” he said, and then he closed his eyes. I reached down to touch his hair, but he was lying so still that I lost my nerve.

Within a week after his arrival from Los Angeles, he had established his morning routine. He liked to walk from the fourth-floor apartment on the tiny rue Tiquetonne that he had found through his friend Luca’s father, into the high-spirited commercial bustle of the rue Montorgueil, where he bought fresh fruit and yogurt, sometimes a croissant too, the best of his life, though he was trying to stick to a low-gluten diet, which was difficult because the bread was so good everywhere he went in Paris. After he did his shopping, he walked the few blocks from this cobblestone street of grocers and butchers and pastry makers to Les Halles and sat on a low wall near the big Brancusi sculpture of a man’s head. There by the enormous sideways head, across from one of the entrances to the church of Saint-Eustache, he would eat his breakfast, even when it was very cold outside. Most mornings he got out of bed a little before eight and brewed a small pot of coffee that he drank as he dressed himself, and then he stepped out into the Parisian morning, where a few million people he would never know were disappearing into the Metro or briskly walking toward the shops and schools and offices where they would spend their day. Will couldn’t have legally worked in France even if he had wanted to, at least not without the proper visa and a sponsoring employer or, perhaps, a French wife.