Little Known Facts: A Novel (8 page)

I can feel my face burning. “I’m not sure about those other things, but cooking can sometimes be a meaningful experience.”

“How do you know? You don’t cook.”

“Yes, I do. A lot more than I used to.”

“Then why didn’t you go home after work and cook yourself an anniversary dinner instead of coming over here?”

“All right,” I say. “I’ll leave. You can starve yourself some more if you don’t want to have dinner with me. Try running a marathon on an empty stomach and see how that goes.”

“God, Mom, don’t be so fucking melodramatic.” He says these words with such derision that I almost slap him, something I haven’t done in at least ten years. He knows I’m angry too. He gives me a look that I remember well from his adolescence, one somewhere between condescension and defiance.
How pathetic you are,
his eyes would say.
How above all of this I am. You and Dad are the ones acting like children, not me.

At the door, we make only glancing eye contact and don’t embrace. Before I have taken more than a step into the corridor, he shuts the door firmly behind me.

By the time I get into the elevator, furious and chagrined, all of the old resentments that used to plague me have resurfaced. Most of them, I eventually realized, were directed more toward Renn than at our children, no matter how badly Anna and Billy were frustrating or infuriating me. For at least a year after Renn left, I hated him. It was a corrosive, implacable hatred, the kind that leads tyrants to burn down enemies’ villages, to maim and destroy. I said some very stupid things about him in front of our children, things that I’m pretty sure they remember. One of the ironies of the whole ugly show, however, was that by the time he left me to marry Melinda Byers, a woman whose life, as far as I can tell, has amounted to very little, I didn’t want to be married to him anymore, but I also knew that not being married to him was likely to feel worse.

In the empty elevator, I let out a small scream. Then I let out a second that leads to a third, and when the door opens on the first floor, the three people waiting to step on all give me strange looks. I lower my eyes and walk past them quickly, my face a garish red by now, I’m sure. In the lobby, Carlo is listening to a radio that he abruptly turns down when I push open the glass door, but I hear enough to know that the song is an old one by the Rolling Stones, Jagger’s lascivious wail recognizable in the few notes that reach me before Carlo lowers the volume.

“You don’t have to turn it down,” I say, though I can’t bear to meet his eyes, knowing he will see how upset I am. When he starts talking, I keep moving toward the front doors. “I have to go,” I say softly, embarrassed. “Sorry to be in such a rush, Carlo. Have a good night.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re a doctor,” he calls after me, as if delighted by this fact. “I know you’re busy!”

When I think about it later, after I eat a peanut butter sandwich at home for dinner and drink two glasses of white wine so fast I get the hiccups, I realize that I don’t remember the drive back from Billy’s very well. Did I listen to the radio? I don’t think I did. Was there a lot of traffic between his place and mine? There must have been, but this I don’t really remember either. I do know that my phone didn’t ring, but I kept hoping that it would. I wanted my son to call and apologize. I wanted him to tell me what happened with Danielle, and if it’s true that he has a crush on Elise Connor, and whether or not his father really is serious about this girl. I could call Renn myself and ask him, but I don’t. Even if he is likely to pick up my call and would tell me whatever I want to know. I don’t think he’s ever considered me an enemy, though he must have known that I once considered him to be the worst of my life.

One thing that helped me get past most of my jealousy and rage over our divorce is that his marriage to Melinda (whom he met on the set—but she was a caterer, not a costar) also failed. This does not make me look particularly noble, I know, but being left for another woman isn’t something most wives can forget. Our marriage began to exhaust me once people started to recognize him everywhere we went, after he became famous enough that paparazzi sometimes lurked outside the gate at the end of our driveway, but I was not ready to give up. Still, it was clear that a marriage that lasts does not have the rest of the world pressing in on it; it does not have fanatics or floozies feverishly hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the principals, to touch his hand or whatever other part of him they can reach. A marriage that lasts does not feature one of the principals being paid to simulate sex on camera with someone young and very attractive, which is impossible for the other principal to get used to because this movie sex looks real and therefore it must feel real to the couple being filmed. A marriage that lasts does not have the aura of a siege, of a boat being rocked so hard I felt almost permanently ill. I knew I would lose him; I think I knew this very early on, but it wasn’t something I let myself say to anyone, and I tried never to say it to myself either.

After my sandwich, after the news and an unsuccessful attempt to read a book by a surgeon who is also a skillful writer, I call my son. He doesn’t answer. I call him ten minutes later and still no response. After another twenty minutes, I call again and this time he picks up.

“What now,” he says.

For a half second, I think about hanging up, but it is such a desperately childish move that I manage to quell the impulse. In any case, I don’t hang up on people anymore. I don’t want him to be mad at me for the rest of the night either. He was angry enough with me while growing up, even though his father was the one who left. “I’m sorry that I stopped by unexpectedly today,” I say.

I can hear him exhale. “You don’t have to apologize, Mom.”

“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot about Danielle.”

“It’s understandable that you’d want to know what happened.”

I don’t answer, waiting for him to say more.

“What did you call for, Lucy?” he says.

I bristle. I don’t like it when he uses my first name because it sometimes sounds like he’s spitting it out. “To apologize,” I say.

“Okay, thanks. Apology accepted.”

“Maybe you could apologize to me too.”

He laughs in a short, caustic burst. “Are you serious?”

I’m botching this now as badly as I botched the visit. It’s almost as if I’m observing someone who looks exactly like me, and I want to shake her and tell her to stop. But I’m also so angry that my head is aching, something I’ve been ignoring since leaving his place three hours earlier. “Never mind. Forget I said that.”

“I have to go now,” he says, flatly. “I have someone on the other line.”

Before I have a chance to respond, he hangs up. In the few seconds of silence before the beeping begins, I pretend he’s still there. “I know you’re unhappy,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean you have the right to treat other people like trash.”

It has always been a little disorienting that my personal and professional lives are defined by serious disparities. At the hospital or in the clinic where I take appointments, I am the brisk, competent Dr. Ivins who almost always commands other people’s respect. Outside of work, of course, it’s very different—I am only another driver on the car-choked highways, another impatient person in line at the grocery store; I am someone’s mother, tolerable to my children most of the time but still a cross to bear. I am also a famous man’s ex-wife, the one he left for someone younger and less educated. I have a bad temper; I have fears and grave insecurities. I want always to be right, to have the last word, to be respected and obeyed without question. Some days it takes all of my self-discipline to force myself out of the house. Some days I am almost speechless from regret or loneliness or anger over nothing that I can clearly articulate. Some days I eat nothing but cookies for breakfast and potato chips for lunch. Too often, I get more satisfaction than I should from other people’s disappointments. It is hard to dispute the evidence that we are a race defined to a significant degree by our pettiness, by how vicious our desire is to keep track, to compare, to win.

My phone doesn’t ring for the rest of the night, and although there are people I could call, I don’t. Thirty years ago, my children hadn’t yet been born, nor did I know for sure that I would become a mother. Renn and I were twenty-two, in love, talented in our different ways. A movie star had just become our president. We assumed that we were bound for greatness too, and one of us, I guess, really was. Our children, we assumed—still assume—might also be bound for greatness. It is possible that Billy’s unhappiness will end tomorrow. That he will find something to do with his life that fills him with joyful suspense. I’m still going to order him those cooking magazines. He will probably throw them away, but maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll look through one of them and decide that he wants to open a restaurant or wait tables or chop vegetables for a while, maybe long enough for it to become a career. If he wants to run marathons, he can. If he wants to brood and resent me and the rest of the world, I can put up with this for a little while longer, but after a point, it will have to stop, or else these feelings will define his life, and the thought of this bothers me greatly.

Because his life
is
extraordinary. He has already had so many experiences most of us will never have. He has met some of the most interesting people in the world, and on more than one occasion he has shaken the hands of the leaders of foreign countries, those who invited his father to dine in their mansions while he was in their countries promoting his movies. Billy has seen the Nile, the Alps, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Himalayas, most of the major cities in the U.S. and many elsewhere too. For a while I was jealous of all that his father could offer him and Anna—such remarkable experiences that I would never have been able to produce for them, let alone participate in. I have assumed since they were very small children that their lives would both be better, more momentous, than my own. I don’t know if all parents want this for their children. Many seem to. I’m not sure if I’m one of them, though. I want my own life to be as momentous as theirs, maybe even more so. I don’t think this is wrong—I am simply being honest. If we work hard enough, we should all be able to achieve lasting contentment. Billy’s bitterness and lingering inertia in the face of his astounding good fortune aren’t really surprising. But they are disappointing. Even when he acts graceless and unkind, however, I don’t wish him ill. What kind of mother would wish that on her child?

Anna has two close friends, Celestine and Jill, women she has known since childhood, the three of them from families with live-in housekeepers and feuding parents and assorted, neglected pets. They have gone through periods of intense closeness as well as bouts of jealous competition, which, in one case, resulted in Jill not speaking to Celestine for almost a year because Celestine began dating Jill’s ex-boyfriend two days after he had broken up with her.

It is Celestine’s and Jill’s lives that often have the air of a siege, not Anna’s, at least as she perceives their confessions and self-mocking admissions. Both of her friends are prone to spending too much money on clothes they might wear only once, to dating more than one man at a time, and to having sex with their bosses, or even, in one case, a boss’s wife. They confide in Anna often, despite how busy she has been with medical school over the past four years, how tired but often exhilarated she feels when she’s at the hospital, following around the attending physicians she and the other fourth-year students have been assigned to. Dr. Glass, one of the attendings for her internal medicine rotations, is her favorite. She guesses that he is in his mid-forties, though he looks younger, his face turning especially boyish when he smiles. His credentials make it clear, however, that he has been out of medical school for close to twenty years.

She began working with him in the spring of her third year, when clinical rotations began, and now, a year later, with her coursework finally finished and a full-time summer residency under way, she is with him for nine or ten hours at a time, five days a week, unless he alternates with the other attendings she has been assigned to for the internal medicine rotation, Dr. Fitch and Dr. Kaczmerski, who are older and often humorless. Dr. Fitch also has a wandering eye and on some days, bad breath; Dr. Kaczmerski snaps when he is impatient and favors the male interns.

“The hospital is full of the busiest, most important people in the world,” Anna has joked to Jill and Celestine. “Nowhere else on the planet is anyone’s work as important.”

“If you start acting like your bosses,” Jill said, “we’ll have to kill you.”

Anna laughed. “You can’t kill me. I’m too important. You’d have to call it an assassination.”

But Dr. Glass is not, as Anna has told her friends, a stuffed shirt. He is thoughtful and handsome, and his temper doesn’t fray easily. “I have a
long
temper,” he said soon after they started working together. “But that doesn’t mean I never get mad. I just prefer to handle problems without a flare-up. My expectations are that you will also be on your best behavior and do the most rigorous work you have done so far in medical science.”

Two weeks into her summer rotation, Anna realizes that she thinks about him more often than anyone else in or outside of the hospital, and twice she has had dreams about him, both leaving her with a sexual ache that lasted for an entire day. When she is choosing a carton of strawberries at Von’s or deciding which blouse to wear or else lying restless in bed despite how exhausted her body is, she finds that her mind is running a series of impressions and images that all feature Dr. Glass. She sees his curly black hair, which he had cut very short the week her summer rotation began, his newly shorn head alarming her for days. The curls had suited him, and their removal had struck her as too aggressive, as if instead he had cut off an ear or a finger. More than once she has pictured the clipped curls being swept from a salon floor and dumped without ceremony into a trashcan, his hair forced to commingle with strangers’ clippings, this anonymous intimacy oddly troubling to Anna. There is silver visible on his head now, these strands spikier than the dark brown ones. Many times she has wondered what he would do if she reached up to touch one of these bristling hairs. She thinks that he likes her too, not necessarily in the same way that she likes him, but he seems to keep his gaze on her longer than on any of her classmates. And every morning when she presents herself to him, his face changes a little, as if someone has opened the blinds in a room dark with night.