Little Known Facts: A Novel (7 page)

“I’ve been thinking about where I want to do my residency,” Anna said. “I think it should be at a hospital with an underserved population. I’ve thought about going down to New Orleans or Biloxi, but there are so many people in L.A. that need help too.”

“Yes, that’s true, but if the hospital doesn’t have a lot of resources, you’re not going to learn as much as you would in a place that’s well funded.”

“Actually, I think I could learn more.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Don’t decide on anything until you talk to me first. You have the medical centers at UCLA to choose from, and they’re both excellent. Or you could apply to work at Cedars-Sinai with me.”

“I know, Mom.”

“If you really want to work with the poor, you should do it in L.A. Your friends and family are here.”

“I’d make other friends.”

“I have no doubt that you would.”

“I want to live somewhere else at some point. I’m not going to stay here forever.”

I hesitated. “No, I suppose you won’t.”

She has already traveled to so many places, so many different countries. Her father and I have both made sure of that. She has never been deprived of anything, which, I realize, some would say is a different kind of deprivation. What’s life without the struggle? Without the hunger to accomplish the right things, those that will bring you the respect and admiration (and envy) of your peers? But I wonder this—if you don’t have to struggle, why would you? I don’t think too many of us would choose to take the harder route. We simply take it because that’s the only one open to us. I realize the irony here—my own children serve as examples of people who haven’t had to struggle in any kind of traditional sense. The one seems to be quite happy, but the other not so much.

I don’t know what to say about Billy’s inertia, which isn’t a recent development—it has been with him since early adolescence. Since before Renn and I divorced, I suppose. Billy saw the divorce coming too. It’s clear to me, having worked as a pediatrician for so many years, that most children are very perceptive, more so than their parents are. But I don’t think the problems Renn and I had caused Billy’s inertia. For one, Renn was often only home for two- and three-week stints, and even when he was with us, he came and went constantly. Scheduling a family dinner was akin to arranging for an audience with the pope, something I said once to Renn, which he thought was funny, even though I hadn’t intended it to be. Our children didn’t see us fighting very often because toward the end, they didn’t see us together very much at all.

After Anna and I said good-bye, I called Billy. He didn’t answer. I tried him a second time an hour later. My call went into voice mail again. Now, at five thirty, when I’m done with appointments for the day (twenty-six patients, all crammed into seven hours, along with several phone calls), I take the 10 to the 405 and make it to Billy’s place faster than I expect to during rush hour. I want to take him out for dinner. We haven’t had a face-to-face conversation in several weeks, in part because he didn’t come over for Thanksgiving this year. He told me that he had been invited to Danielle’s mother’s house and said that I could go with them, but I was hurt that he hadn’t first asked me if I wanted them to come to my house before he agreed to go to Danielle’s mother’s. I told him that I had already bought a turkey and ordered two pumpkin pies. He apologized perfunctorily but didn’t budge, and part of this intransigence, I realize now, was likely caused by his desire to appease Danielle, but then she broke up with him anyway. Anna and I celebrated without him, and she brought along Jill, whose parents were traveling in Europe, but it was still a subdued, almost somber, occasion without Billy, even though he isn’t known for cracking jokes or playing the family clown. Anna and Billy’s father was in Rome or maybe it was New York, both cities where he keeps apartments, but Anna couldn’t take any days off from the hospital to spend the holiday with him, and Billy doesn’t spend as much time with Renn as he used to. I hope this will change, but I’m not sure how or when it will.

The building where my son lives is all gleaming steel and mirrored glass, and it reminds me of a monstrous robot. Sometimes, to get a rise out of me, he calls his home Robotland. “If I live here long enough, maybe I’ll turn into one too,” he once said.

“That’s not funny,” I said, but laughed anyway.

The doorman, a young guy named Carlo (“Not Carlos,” he said with a shy smile when he introduced himself to me last year) who is maybe twenty-one but already has two daughters whose pictures he has bashfully shown me more than once, calls upstairs when I get to the lobby because my plan is to ambush my son. If I called Billy again from my cell and told him that I’m downstairs, he wouldn’t answer and he’d know not to answer the doorman’s page either.

It still takes him several rings to respond to Carlo’s call. “Good evening, Mr. Ivins,” Carlo says when Billy finally picks up. “You have a visitor. Would you like me to send her up?”

I can’t take a normal breath while my son responds.

“Your mother,” says Carlo, nonchalant. “Is it all right for me to send her up?” He is a professional, graceful and charming, despite his young age.

Carlo says thank you and hangs up. He gives me a look of apology; his unlined face, almost hairless too, is very kind. His wife, I hope, adores him. “Mr. Ivins asked if you’d give him ten minutes.”

“All right,” I say gloomily. A son should not keep his mother waiting in the lobby. It both worries and annoys me—what is it that he wants to hide? If he needs a shower, I could sit in his living room and wait for him there. If empty beer or wine bottles are all over the place, or take-out containers, or cigarette butts, I could probably do a better job cleaning up than he would. If he has a woman up there who is not Danielle, so be it. He could at least introduce us. I know he wasn’t expecting me, but I don’t drop in on him unannounced very often.

Despite how pleasant Carlo is, I don’t feel like making any more small talk. I go outside into the traffic noise and late-afternoon sun and make a phone call to a patient’s father who left a message at my office earlier in the day. One of the reasons I love my profession, despite its occasional sorrows and nuisances, is that I like knowing things. I like being an expert on something in our crowded, chaotic world.

This man’s child has asthma, one of several dozen cases that I have diagnosed in the last year. The air quality here is as bad as advertised and is particularly hard on new and old pairs of lungs. When this father asks what more he and his wife can do, I repeat the prescription from their recent office visit—the inhaler as needed, a healthy diet, enough sleep, moderate exercise. The child should, as much as possible, be allowed a normal life, with games and friends and horseplay, and parents can also consider moving somewhere with better air quality, which they won’t or can’t often do.

It is almost fifteen minutes before I can end the call and take the elevator up to Billy’s apartment. Carlo smiles as I walk by. He is on the phone and buzzes me through the glass door that leads to the elevator bank. There are three elevators for this twenty-story building, and a freight elevator that goes down to the garage, one filled with Mercedes and Jaguars and BMWs. My son drives an Audi; Anna a Prius, though her first car was a white Corvette, one her father gave her when she turned sixteen. I asked Renn if he was kidding. Offended, he said, Why the hell do you think that? Anna is not a Corvette type of girl at all, I told him, but out of politeness mixed with embarrassed pride she drove this car for a year before trading it for a Sebring convertible, which lasted until the Prius. On Billy’s sixteenth birthday, he was given a 1968 powder-blue Mustang. It really was beautiful, but I didn’t tell Renn that I thought so. Billy drove it until he wrecked it during his sophomore year of college. Or rather, until his roommate wrecked it by driving into a row of parked cars while trying to send a text message or change the radio station or I’m not sure what—Billy never would give me a straight answer.

When I knock on his door, the hallway light tastefully muted, the walls vanilla-colored with their big abstract paintings by artists I don’t know, it takes Billy several long seconds to answer. To my relief, he is dressed neatly—clean blue jeans and a red Polo shirt—but there are dark circles under his eyes and he needs a haircut, and if I’m being honest, he doesn’t look very happy to see me. He seems barely capable of forcing a smile, and I feel both heartsick and angry.

“Come in, Mom. Sorry to make you wait,” he mumbles. “I was on the phone.” He looks thin, too thin, and in the foyer right by the door, I notice four pairs of running shoes lined up along the wall, all new. Billy ran track in high school, but he wasn’t one of the team’s stars. In college he didn’t play any sports, except intramural soccer and pickup basketball.

His place is tidy, more or less, though it looks like the cleaning lady is due for a visit soon—from the light of a nearby lamp, I can see dust on the window ledges in the living room where I sit on one end of the sofa and Billy on the other. The sofa is brown leather and not particularly comfortable, but it looks stylish and expensive, which it is. All of his furniture is from a Danish design showroom, one where he worked for a few months as a salesperson before growing bored. Sofas aren’t my thing, he claimed. What is your thing? I wanted to know. I’ll tell you when I find it, was his response, his look both defiant and sad.

“So Anna told you?” he says quietly.

I study his face for a second or two. He really does look exhausted. He must not be sleeping very well. I could write him a prescription for Valium, two or three milligrams, nothing too serious, but I am not in the habit of offering my children or friends drugs, even if some of the latter have asked for them over the years. Los Angeles is a city filled with highly and creatively medicated people. Though I suppose most cities are. I suppose this is how city dwellers keep pace or set the pace or set the traps that catch the biggest monsters.

I decide not to take his gloomy mood head-on. “Told me about—?”

“Danielle. We broke up last weekend.”

“She did mention it, and I was very sorry to hear this.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Why do you say that?”

He shakes his head. “Not many relationships work out. Why should this one?”

“Billy, that’s not a good attitude.”

“You should talk,” he says.

I stare at him. “Why? Because your father and I got a divorce? We were together for fifteen years, remember.”

“Barely.”

“We were together until the divorce.”

He turns his head away, and in this mulish slant, I can see Renn in him very clearly, his old attitude of surly silence, his conviction that he had been wronged, despite the fact that he was the one who was always going off somewhere interesting while I stayed home with our children and my patients and hospital protocols and myriad resentments. Renn was making so much money by the time both of our kids were out of diapers that some of my friends thought that I should have been able to live with his absences, because weren’t we set for life? I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to, right? Renn had paid off my med school loans by writing two separate checks, and what, realistically, did I have to complain about? What a gorgeous home we had, what healthy, pretty children, what nice clothes/cars/ crystal/linens/curtains/pool furniture. Not to mention, I had a movie-star husband. And after a few years, didn’t all married couples lose interest in each other sexually anyway? Just why was I in such a rotten mood all the time?

“Okay. You were together,” he says, still not looking at me.

“Let me take you to dinner,” I say, suddenly very tired and feeling as if I might start crying. An oppressive malaise hovers around us like smoke. It doesn’t help that almost no lights are on. His unhappiness makes me feel both lonely and worried for him. No mother, no matter her children’s ages, ever stops fearing that they will somehow come to harm.

He shakes his head. “No thanks. I already ate.”

It’s only six thirty, and I’m certain that he’s lying. “Come out with me anyway. There’s a Thai place a few blocks from here that I like.”

He doesn’t reply.

I hesitate, but then I say it. “Come on. Today’s a special occasion.”

He regards me, only slightly interested. “What is it?”

“Your father and I have now been divorced for as long as we were married,” I say. “It was thirty years ago today that we said ‘I do.’ ” I know that I’m being ridiculous, that Billy will find this fact and the occasion I have made of it ironic and possibly perverse, but nothing’s right with him tonight.

“Wow. Alert the media.”

“Oh, Billy.”

“What? Congratulations to you and Dad. Many happy returns.”

“Can we talk a little about what happened with you and Danielle?”

He shakes his head. “No. I’d rather not.”

“Maybe you’ll feel better if you do.”

“I feel fine.”

“Let’s go to dinner,” I say. When I stand up, the sofa groans in a voice that sounds almost human.

Billy exhales. “Mom, I don’t want to go out.”

“Should we order in?”

“I told you that I already ate.”

“It doesn’t look like it. How much weight have you lost since I saw you at Halloween?”

“I don’t know. A couple of pounds maybe.”

“Are you doing a lot of running? I saw several pairs of shoes on my way in.”

“I’m training for a marathon.”

I look at him, wondering if he really means this, if he will see this project through to some favorable outcome. “Good, but you need to eat if you’re going for long runs.”

“Jesus. You sound like Danielle.”

I don’t say anything. I know that I should leave him alone, that my visit hasn’t done anything but upset him. But I go ahead and make it worse. “I’m going to order you a subscription to
Gourmet
and
Bon Appétit,”
I say. “Why don’t you learn how to cook? You have the time.”

He stares at me, and then he laughs. “Why don’t I learn how to cook? Why don’t I learn how to fly too while I’m at it? And why don’t I learn how to drag race? When I’m done with that, I’ll find the cure for cancer and bring you to the White House with me when the president throws a banquet in my honor.”