Little Known Facts: A Novel (33 page)

He was standing behind me in line, and I almost jumped when I heard my maiden name. When I turned around to see who the voice belonged to, I know that my mouth opened involuntarily when I saw who it was. “Oh my God,” I exclaimed, much too loudly. “Michael Kinicki?”

There was one person standing in between us, a tired-looking blond woman in running clothes who was frowning at the chalkboards over the cash register, the ones that listed the cafe’s menu in Day-Glo colors. I stepped around her and walked into Michael’s open arms, his body’s warmth enveloping me. He looked fit and happy and had kept himself trim, I would later learn, from years of swimming mile after mile in his health club’s lap pool four days a week, his hair still a little curly and now attractively gray. He paid for my coffee and bought us both oatmeal and asked me to sit with him while we had breakfast. I had to call in to ask the receptionist to reschedule my first appointment, which I almost never do, but I didn’t want to leave him so soon after finding him again. It felt then like I had been waiting a very long time for his reappearance, even though I don’t think I had thought about him in years.

“You look fantastic, Lucy,” he kept saying as we ate our oatmeal. The compliment made me blush, but I loved it. What woman doesn’t want to be told she’s beautiful, especially by someone she also finds attractive? I’ve never been the type of woman who gets angry when someone whistles at me or tells me I’m pretty. I’m confident in my intelligence, but there are plenty of days when I don’t know if I’m still physically attractive. I don’t feel pretty as often as I’d like to, this being one of the more insidious effects of aging because it can’t be treated the way brittle hair or dry skin might be. When I was younger, I didn’t know if I’d care what I looked like after I reached a certain age, but I know now that I will care about it until I die or else senility sets in.

“I heard you’re a doctor,” he added. “Congratulations.”

“For a long time now,” I said, smiling into his cheerful, suntanned face. “Even longer than the Cold War’s been over.”

He laughed. “The Cold War? You don’t hear too much about it these days.”

“No, I suppose not. But you were a history major, weren’t you? I thought you’d get a chuckle from the reference.” I laughed a little, embarrassed. I was trying to impress him, the impulse there as aggressively as anything I’d felt in months.

“Poli-sci,” he said. “Close.”

“Let me guess, you’re an attorney?”

He nodded, his smile a little sheepish. “I am. Sad but true.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “As long as you’re not working for Monsanto or defending the Mafia.”

“No, not even close. I’m an immigration lawyer, but I represent the underdog, not the INS.” He paused and looked down at the table, picking up his coffee mug before raising his eyes again. “You know, I was going to look you up again when I heard about you and Renn.”

“You mean our divorce?” I shook my head, smiling again. “Everyone heard about me and Renn. His fans were mad that he’d left one nobody for another nobody. They were hoping he’d dump me for Meryl Streep or Madonna or something. You can guess how much fun that whole ordeal was.”

“I’m sure it was awful, but you don’t look like it did any damage.”

“That’s because I had a job to go with the kids and the philandering husband. My work kept me sane.” I paused. “Are you married?” He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean much.

“I was, but we’ve been divorced for four years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” But the truth is, I wasn’t.

He sprinkled more brown sugar on his oatmeal and stirred it into the few spoonfuls that remained in his bowl. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “It was a long time coming. Sandy and I wanted to wait until both of our kids were in college, but it should have happened right about the same time you and Renn separated.”

“I tell people that it was Renn’s midlife crisis, even though we were both still in our thirties.”

“Midlife crises keep happening earlier and earlier. Some people even have two. Sandy and I were almost fifty when our divorce went through. You didn’t remarry?”

“No.”

“Didn’t feel like it?”

“No, I guess I didn’t. I was busy raising Billy and Anna and working full-time. I didn’t have much extra time to go out on dates. I did see a few people though, on and off.”

I had dated about a dozen men between the divorce and now, not too many, I don’t think, considering it had been more than sixteen years since I’d signed the divorce papers, but getting my hopes up a dozen times—even more, because there were a few men I was drawn to who ultimately weren’t available—it was difficult and often demoralizing.

“Your kids are out on their own now, aren’t they?” Michael asked.

“Yes. Anna’s a doctor now too, but she’s doing family medicine, not pediatrics like me. Billy’s living in Paris, being a dilettante.”

“Lucky guy.”

“I think he’s writing a screenplay now. I have no idea if it’ll be any good, but who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me and the rest of the world too. I didn’t think his father would be much of a writer, but
Bourbon at Dusk
turned out pretty well. You probably saw that it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.”

Michael nodded. “I thought for sure it would win in one of those categories, but at least Renn got Best Director. Didn’t Marek Gilson also win for Best Actor?”

“Yes, he did.”

“I thought the girl was better. I’m surprised she didn’t win.”

“I was too, but she was lucky to be nominated. There were a lot of good movies last year.”

My feelings about all this were complicated. It certainly wasn’t the first time Renn had gone to the Oscars and won. He had been nominated three times while we were married and had won twice, once for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting, but despite how much hype and anticipation surrounds this awards show each year, I did not look forward to it at all. For one, it was such an enormous hassle to prepare for. Which designers to use for Renn’s tux and my dress? Who should do my makeup and hair, and his makeup and hair? Which after-party invitations to accept? Which congratulatory phone calls to return first, because everyone we knew, everywhere on earth, it seemed, was calling to say how happy they were for us, how excited, and how Renn just had to do his next picture with so-and-so (so-and-so was calling too, of course; multiple so-and-so’s).

Renn couldn’t get a solid night’s sleep after the nominations were announced (which meant that I couldn’t either), because he could not stop thinking about whether he would win, or would it be one of the other heavyweights? Surely he was as good as they were, wasn’t he, if he had been nominated at all? I think that he probably was as good as they were, except in a few movies that couldn’t have been saved no matter how well he performed, like that absurd stinker where he played the transsexual opera singer. I could not believe it when he chose that project. It was after we were divorced, and he and his second wife were on the skids by that time too; I think his judgment must have been impaired. I sat in a theater in West Hollywood and watched him in this movie with all of the absurd wigs and the caked-on makeup and laughed in disbelief almost the whole time. What enormous hands and feet he had, especially in those yellow pumps. How ugly a woman he was! Several other people in the audience tried to shush me, but I couldn’t stay quiet for the life of me or anyone else. If they had known him the way I did, they’d have laughed so much that their stomach muscles would have ached for days afterward too.

As for this year’s Oscars, I watched them by myself at home, a bowl of air-popped popcorn in my lap, a glass of white wine on the table next to the sofa. Anna was busy at the hospital and had told me that they wouldn’t give her the evening off because they were too swamped from a recent
E. coli
outbreak, but I think this might have been a fib. She probably wanted to watch the show with her boyfriend instead of me, whom I still haven’t met. I felt a little uncomfortable watching the red-carpet coverage before the ceremony began; they kept showing Renn with Elise Connor, the commentators practically drooling on them. Whatever else she might be, she is a remarkably pretty young woman. She also seems sweet, and my thought all along has been that Renn, probably as old as her father, is out of his depth. And in fact she seemed to have figured this out too, because she broke up with him a week or so after the Oscars. It took me a little while to find out what was going on, but eventually Anna told me her suspicions, which her father would not confirm when she talked to him about the breakup. I, however, was surprised that even he would do something as selfish and contemptible as carrying on with his son’s ex-girlfriend, if Anna’s suspicions are correct. I still care about the man, but long ago I lost any illusions I might have had about his judgment where his personal life is concerned. He seems quite capable of rationalizing any decision he makes that involves his penis.

At the bagel café, before Michael and I parted ways, he asked for my number, and with his eyes on his feet, he asked if I would like to go out for dinner sometime. “Yes,” I said, feeling my heart leap. “I’d love to.”

“I’m so glad,” he said, raising his eyes to meet mine. “Maybe this weekend if you’re free?”

“Yes,” I said. “This weekend could work.”

He kissed my cheek before we got into our cars, and all day I kept thinking about him and what it would be like to kiss him. I had trouble keeping a smile off my face, especially when a patient’s worried mother was speaking to me about her inability to get her six-year-old son to stop eating dirt from the garden. I almost said, “Maybe he’s pregnant. Pregnant women sometimes crave dirt.” But obviously this would not have gone over well.

The next day, Michael called around six in the evening and asked me out, saying that he would pick me up at seven thirty on Friday rather than have me meet him at the restaurant. During the three days between his call and our date, I felt almost lightheaded with anticipation. But I didn’t want to feel this way; chances were, the date would not be as good as I hoped. It was possible that he would spend the whole evening talking about his ex-wife or his recent pitiful blind dates or some embarrassing health problem that he thought I would be interested in because I’m a doctor. These are all scenarios from other dates I’d been on in the past few years, ones with colleagues’ divorced brothers or cousins or businessmen I’d met online who weren’t anywhere near as charming in person as they were in the e-mails they’d sent before we met. There had also been a few men who had spent the whole date grilling me for every detail I would divulge about my ex-husband: What was Renn Ivins really like, and wasn’t it just the coolest thing to be married to him? The first time this had happened, I’d been so stunned that I’d laughed. “No, it wasn’t the coolest thing,” I said. “We got a divorce.”

For some reason, this had not sunk in. “Sure,” the man said, “but wasn’t it still cool to be married to him for a little while?”

It mystifies me how some people really don’t seem to have any idea what’s polite and what’s jaw-droppingly insensitive. Michael, fortunately, did know what was polite. He arrived at the house exactly at seven thirty and had a bouquet of red roses with him, the pink tissue paper and matching ribbon carefully arranged by a real florist, not some underpaid worker at the grocery store. He smelled very nice and seemed so happy to see me that I felt a lump rise in my throat. I think my children assume that I haven’t remarried because their father did such a number on me that I can’t bear the thought of legally binding myself to another man. But this isn’t the case. I haven’t remarried because the one or two men I’ve dated since the divorce whom I could imagine a future with eventually stopped wanting to see me. I think they thought that I was still hooked on Renn, even though (after a year or two), I no longer was, and I tried to make this clear to them, but they weren’t convinced.

Other, less suitable men haven’t been as quick to leave. In some cases, I’ve had to tell them that I was no longer interested in going out with them. It isn’t easy to do this, no matter how bored or irritated you’ve become with the man. People assume that being the one who rejects is infinitely preferable to the contrary, but it isn’t. I have never enjoyed upsetting other people, even those I suspected were only after my money or the perverse pleasure it brought them to say they were dating the woman Renn Ivins had married before the other woman he married and divorced.

In fact, this other woman, Melinda Byers, has recently performed a small miracle. She has made me feel something akin to sympathy for her. Her memoir about her marriage to Renn,
This Isn’t Gold,
isn’t as stupid and trashy as I expected. It’s actually somewhat interesting and often thoughtful. There were parts that made me angry and other parts that I found wildly self-indulgent and ridiculous, but on the whole, reading it made me feel oppressively sad.

Then, within a couple of days of having finished it, perversely, I began to feel almost happy. This woman, my most hated enemy for a time, had actually worried that Renn would leave her and come back to his children and me. She had suffered over this, had apparently lost sleep thinking that he should follow his conscience if it demanded his return to his family because she apparently felt guilty for having taken him away from us (her parents had also divorced when she was young), but at the same time, she wanted most fiercely for him to stay with her. This emotional schizophrenia has to be partially responsible for why he began to distance himself from her within a year of marrying her. Their marriage must never have been a peaceful one. I know that my kids liked her, and at the time, their affection for her really upset me, but I would rather that she have treated them well than have ignored or openly disliked and mistreated them. I might have said a number of ugly things about Renn in front of Anna and Billy, but I tried not to complain as often about Melinda. It was sometimes very hard to hold my tongue and I didn’t always succeed, but most days, I think I did.

I should say this—I probably wouldn’t have reacted the way that I did to
This Isn’t Gold
if it had been published a few years after their divorce. My wounds would still have been too fresh, my schadenfreude over their marriage’s failure too great—but with more than ten years between their divorce and now, I’ve mellowed. I know that I couldn’t have done anything to change what happened to Renn’s and my marriage. It was not my fault that he left. The fact is, he had too many attractive opportunities, too many available women lying directly in his path with their legs open and their brains closed for business. He was out of town too often too. If a marriage is going to last, I think that you need to be physically near your husband more than a few days a month.