Little Known Facts: A Novel (6 page)

She hesitates. “I don’t like that you have a crush on someone else.”

He freezes, and she wonders if he is turning red. In the dim, flattering light from the streetlamps, they are able to keep some things hidden from each other. “What are you talking about?” he says. Each word, to Danielle’s ear, sounds wooden, insincere.

“Elise Connor. You and your dad are both in love with her.”

He laughs a little, feigning surprise. “No, we’re not.”

“You don’t have to lie, Will. I know she’s why you left New Orleans.”

He shakes his head. “No, she’s not. I’m not in love with her. I hardly even know her.” Danielle doesn’t reply.

“I left because he was being a pain in the ass,” Will says. “He’s smug and pompous and thinks that everyone should do whatever he wants every minute of the day. I told you that already. Sometimes I hate him.”

“No, you don’t. Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s how I feel,” he says quietly.

“What kid doesn’t get mad at his parents from time to time? Your father loves you, even when you’re not getting along.”

He keeps his eyes on the car in front of them, one of its taillights burned out. “He thinks I’m a fuckup.”

She sighs. “No, he doesn’t.”

“Yes, he does.”

She doesn’t contradict him this time. She is so tired of his bad moods and self-pity that she will start yelling if they keep talking in this airless way.

When they get to his building, Will looks so morose that she gets into the elevator with him and rides up to the fifteenth floor and sits on his couch while he turns on the TV and listlessly changes channels. She doesn’t have the courage to tell him that she needs space and time, possibly for good. It is hard not to keep replaying the few seconds that Renn pulled her against his chest and kissed her, his arms firmly around her, as if he didn’t intend to let her go until she had figured out that it was him, not his son, who she should be dating. As a devoted viewer of his films, he is someone with whom she has had a private relationship, one-sided but still powerful, for more than half of her life. During all of her teenage years and far into her twenties, she had never seriously imagined that she would meet him one day, let alone become his son’s girlfriend.

She sits with Will in front of the TV for half an hour, then gets up to go to bed. At the other end of the apartment, a few minutes later, she hears him typing in the front door’s alarm code and then his unhurried step in the hall. She will not move in with him. His routines depress her, his grievances, his inertia, his implacable bitterness.

After he gets into bed, he says, “You wish I would take Prozac and snap out of it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking. Not at all,” she says, almost laughing at this absurd presumption.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”

“What if I want to move to New York?”

She stares at him. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“I don’t know. No reason.” He pauses. “I’m not in love with Elise Connor. I just think that my dad should date someone closer to his age. He’s thirty years older than she is. Who the hell does he think he is?”

It is a ridiculous question, something she guesses he realizes as soon as these words are agitating the air between them.

“Will,” she says. “Let’s not talk about this right now.”

“I’m not in love with her,” he insists. “I can see why you’d think so, but I’m not. She’s going to dump him as soon as she meets someone else. Someone closer to her age.”

Like you, she thinks.

“Let your father worry about that,” she says. “You know he’s going to do whatever he wants.” She pauses. “If you dislike him so much, why are you so worried about what he does?”

He hesitates. “I don’t know. I just am.”

“You need to sleep now. So do I.”

“Kiss me,” he says, and she does, reluctantly, but he doesn’t pressure her to do more. She has almost never refused him. Before now, she hasn’t wanted to. His hand reaches for hers under the sheet and she lets him hold it for a long time, even though she has told him that she can’t sleep if any part of her body is touching his. She has been like this since her marriage, when from the first night they were together, her husband slept on his side of the bed and insisted that she sleep on hers.

In the morning she can see herself making eggs and reminding Will of his dental appointment in the late afternoon. She can see him looking at her with mild amusement, or else he will be distracted, the previous night’s problems and controversies returning with the force of a blow. Like her ex-husband, he is unlikely ever to be happy. At least not as he is currently living, measuring his life against his father’s, a man to whom only a tiny percentage of the population can reasonably compare themselves. The kind of fame Renn has achieved, Danielle realizes, is more or less a novelty. Before the camera’s invention, before movies and TV, certainly before the Internet, fame was more local, less colossal. But Will’s misery, she knows, would still be powerful, no matter which century he might have been born into. His father’s life is an aberration; his gifts, his privileges, all of the possibilities to which he has access, also aberrant. In that moment, an hour after midnight, when she can hear some restless soul down on the street gunning a motorcycle, she does not know how either man can stand it.

Sometimes I don’t know what to say when I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I find myself no better equipped to handle it than the last time someone pointed out an error to me. The child was allergic to wheat, not milk. The prescription should have been a hundred milligrams, not eighty-five. I married the wrong man. I married the right man at the wrong time. I shouldn’t have gotten married at all. One thing I do know, something I realized a year or so after the divorce, is that I should have gone back to my maiden name. I didn’t do it at the time because I wanted the same name as my children. Perhaps I also wanted to inspire curiosity or jealousy, anything that might have required me to air my many virulent grievances, to offer my story as a cautionary tale.

For three years Renn, my ex-husband, kept trying to talk to me as if we were friends, to relieve his guilty conscience and prove to himself that I was doing fine, that Anna and Billy were fine too and one day we would all forgive him, but of course we wouldn’t forget him. Renn and I are almost exactly the same age. His birthday is two weeks before mine; he was born in Evanston, Illinois, and I was born a few miles up the road in Lake Bluff. We met during our junior year at USC, and when a year and a half later I was accepted into UCLA’s medical school and was about to finish that first caffeine-fueled semester with high marks, we decided to get married, which we did in downtown L.A. at the city hall, one of Renn’s fraternity brothers and his girlfriend our witnesses. Renn was starting to get roles by then, ones that paid. He was twenty-two and very handsome and so naturally charming that if I had been a little smarter, I would have seen how impossible it would be to keep him from attracting the kind of friends, both male and female, with money and foreign cars and sailboats and, in one case, a private plane, who would tell him not to limit himself, to experience all that he could of life because who knew? Tomorrow he might die. Or even later that same day. What did anyone really know of fate? Carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds, etc. etc.

I hated fate, I told him more than once, barely able to tolerate these new, fashionably blasé friends who couldn’t stand me, the inconvenient wife, either—capable medical student or no, I was heavy baggage. Fate was a con, a fool’s game. There was only life, one day after the other. Then death, of course. Things happened, and no one could predict them. By then, I had seen hematomas in three-month-old babies. I had seen two-year-olds dying of leukemia while their mothers almost managed to overdose on barbiturates in the parking lot outside the hospital. We had an earthquake or two, gas shortages, bad air, wildfires, whales beaching themselves and dying three hundred miles up the coast. We also eventually had two perfectly healthy children, miraculous creatures that I couldn’t and sometimes still can’t believe Renn and I created out of nothing but two fifteen-minute acts in a darkened bedroom, an act repeated millions of times over throughout the country on any given day. We were hardly original in anything we did, but for a while it all felt so fraught and urgent and specific.

Today, December twelfth, would have been our thirtieth wedding anniversary. My daughter called this morning, sweetly apologetic but unable to resist saying that she had noticed this would-be milestone too. My son has not called, nor do I expect him to. He doesn’t always remember my birthday, or his sister’s, or his own, from what I can tell. Am I embarrassed or irritated with myself for continuing to observe, so to speak, the anniversary of my failed marriage? Not really. It is simply a fact of my life, like the myopia I have lived with since junior high, the knobby knees, the forgetful son.

“Dad’s back in New Orleans,” Anna informed me, even though I hadn’t asked if she knew where he was. “He had to reshoot a couple of scenes for
Bourbon at Dusk.”

“I bet he’s just thrilled about that. Have you seen him recently?”

“A few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought I told you that he was in town for a couple of days before he went up to Seattle to visit the guy who’s doing the sound track.”

“Why didn’t he hire a musician in New Orleans?”

“This guy is from Louisiana, I guess, but after Katrina, he moved to Seattle. I think he still has a place down there though.” She paused. “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“I don’t know. Over the summer, I suppose.” I could hear strangers’ voices in the background and wind hurling itself against Anna’s phone. She was probably on break outside the hospital where she and her classmates are doing clinicals.

“Have you talked to Billy this week?” she asked.

“I called him a couple of days ago, but he hasn’t called me back yet.”

“He and Danielle broke up.” She sounded embarrassed, as if she had something to do with it. Since childhood, she has had the unfortunate tendency of taking deeply to heart other people’s mistakes or bad luck, but I suppose it is also this impulse that influenced her decision to become a doctor.

“Oh, no. Why? Was it his decision or hers?”

“Hers. He’s such a bonehead.”

I was very disappointed to hear this. From the beginning, I liked Danielle; she has always seemed honest and kind and not the type of person who wanted Billy only because of his money or his connection to his father’s celebrity. At twenty-six, my son is still rudderless, and he worries me much more than his sister does. Anna is one semester away from graduating with her MD, and I couldn’t be more proud of her if she had won the Boston marathon or the Nobel Prize. Her decision to go into family medicine rather than specialize in pediatrics or obstetrics or something a little more glamorous than country doctorhood was a bit surprising, but I’m flattered that she has chosen the same profession as mine. Thank God, in any case, that she didn’t choose her father’s. For a while, I thought for sure that she or Billy would.

“What happened?” I asked, ninety percent certain that it was my son’s fault.

She hesitated. “I think he has a crush on the lead actress in Dad’s movie. This girl named Elise Connor. You probably know who she is. Danielle found out, and what a surprise, she was upset and broke up with him. He had just asked her to move in with him too.”

I know who Elise Connor is. Of course I do. In more than one flimsy, flashy magazine that I shouldn’t notice, let alone pick up, I have seen her name linked with my ex-husband’s. “Mrs. Ivins III,” one columnist has dared to call her. “I see stars in these stars’ eyes whenever they look at each other,” the so-called journalist crowed. “Are those wedding bells I hear in the distance?”

Reading words like these, I don’t feel the same acid surge of jealousy that I did up until four or five years ago, but I’d be lying if I said that they didn’t bother me. She is a very young girl. Renn is not a young man. He is a fool, but actors usually are, their egos so fragile and enormous. How does Elise Connor feel about his egotism? Perhaps she doesn’t care, accepting it as a hazard of the trade, or else she is still blind to it. She is less than half his age, and I feel a little sorry for him about this May-December cliché. Especially because it is hardly the first time.

None of the gossip columnists ever mention me in connection with Renn anymore, in part because I’m not famous, nor are our children, and of what interest am I, except to the fans who have researched him so thoroughly that they know more about him than most of his close friends do? Those people are out there, a dishearteningly large army of fanatics. I have met some of them, before and after the divorce. How do you live with the fact, peaceably or no, that your husband is an institution, a movement, a cult with numerous irrational adherents? I never quite figured out how. That we stayed married for almost fifteen years was, I have to admit, a miracle.

“Poor Billy,” I finally managed to say. “I wish he knew how to be happier.” Yet who really does? I wonder. I’m not sure if it’s a skill that can be cultivated or a talent a person is born with. I often think it’s the latter, having seen so many people who should be happy but aren’t, and so many who should be miserable but are decisively the opposite.

“I know. I told him to start seeing his therapist again, but I don’t know if he will.”

“I wish he’d never gone to New Orleans to work with your father.”

“Well, he did.”

“Yes, he did.”

In October, he was with Renn for too long on the set of
Bourbon Street,
or whatever he’s calling it.
A Shot of Bourbon,
maybe?
Bourbon in Winter?
Some earnestly poetic name. My son is a grown man, free to come and go as he pleases, but sometimes I wish that Renn hadn’t set up those trusts for our kids after the divorce. So much money, an unconscionable amount, really. Anna has been smart with hers, and although Will hasn’t been a spendthrift, not that I can tell, he hasn’t been able to find a career postcollege that he wants to pursue. Renn’s guilt-stricken generosity has succeeded in robbing our son of any desire he might have had to establish himself in one field or another. But Anna, I have no doubt, will excel at medicine. Her patients, her staff, her community, will adore her. Eventually she will fall in love, marry, and probably have a child or two. She will be happy and will continue to be a source of joy for her father and me until we die. Regarding these predictions, I don’t think anyone will ever turn to me, pretending sympathy, and tell me that I’m wrong.