Live a Little (14 page)

“Hey, buddy. I had to schedule an otoplasty for late Wednesday. Can we move the game to Thursday?” Ren says.

Phil says sure, and they launch into a discussion of major-league sports that would have made me whimper with ennui if not for the way the afternoon light is falling on Ren’s fair hair (like Robert Redford’s in
The Way We Were,
if you want to know).

Sometimes I hate myself.

Of all the things that bug me about the way Ren has acted with me since the fateful moment he shook Laurie’s hand in my parents’ avocado-colored kitchen, it’s the way he is with Phil that bothers me most. In the twenty years that have elapsed since my date fell in love at first sight with my sister, Loren White has never shown the slightest subtlest inkling that he begrudges my husband his catch.

CHAPTER 10

Good Like Back Fat

Lies don’t spring fully formed from nowhere. Like parasites, they hunt for a welcoming environment, a warm, moist haven of subterfuge in which to burrow.

Also: Years of hands-on research have led me to believe in a connection between lies and fighting. Shocking, I know.

Phil and I fight about money. Not so original. However, we also lie about money. What I should say is,
I
lie about money. This, it turns out, is infinitely worse than the fighting part.

I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t allow the occasional financial fib to sully the otherwise sparkling web of honesty between herself and her husband? Perhaps it’s that daily trip to Starbucks you leave out of the monthly food budget, or the oxygen facial you passed off as a teeth cleaning. So what if you bury your
Star
magazine addiction under a mound of property-value-enhancing perennials?

That’s not what I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about is that for the past eight years, I have accepted a monthly check from my rich stepfather that funds, among other things, our children’s education, the occasional family vacation, and a large chunk of our mortgage. Since money doesn’t grow on trees—or pool algae; we’ve tried—I allow my husband to believe the allowance comes from a stipend from my own father’s trust. In conversation, I have even called it that: The Stuart Myron Schultz Family Trust. Six words that, together, represent an entity about as real as the Bermuda Triangle Neighborhood Association. Not real, but so unimpugnable. Who, after all, would deny a dead father the privilege of gifting his beloved daughter with a monetary bridge between ends meeting and financial ruin? A scrooge, that’s who.

Part of me wishes I had told Phil the truth about why our perennial beyond-our-means existence—not uncommon or particularly stigmatizing in the ridiculously expensive Bay Area— stresses me out so much. Because Eliot’s checks don’t come for free: The little string-trussed albatrosses are the monetary equivalent of a leash. On me. I feel the tug every time I argue with Ma and meet Eliot’s godfatherish eyes across the table, reminding me of my promise to make nice. Every time Phil and I charge something massive and feverishly desired—competitive soccer camp, weekends in Tahoe, bathroom renovation—and Phil says, “Here’s to Stu! God bless dinette sets.” (Dad was in the furniture business.)

I feel the tug. Yet I continue to cash those checks. So, you see, my career in deception, self and otherwise, began long before a cancer misdiagnosis.

But back to the fight.

“Let me put this in a way you can understand,” Phil says to me now as I tremble with anger and shame, a thick spray of ugly sympathy daisies separating us on the counter. “No French immersion class. No Spanish. No Italian or Greek or fucking Tagalog. Because. There’s. No. Money.”

I feel the chasm open in front of me, yawning wide.
I should leap it,
I think.
Leap it. Then run. Run fast.

I fall in.

“If you’d stuck with the program, you’d have tenure and a patent by now, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation!” My voice is thin, shrill, hateful. I detest the words the minute I release them into the atmosphere, but none of it matters, because I’m sliding down the cliff wall, frantic heels scudding grooves into dirt, sending plumes of shale and stones raining around us. Like all fights, this one has a surface topic and a deeper, truer subtext; a twisted little part of me knows I’ve been mad at Phil ever since he diminished me by marrying me, thus setting me on the path toward disgruntled housewifedom.

Phil thrums his fingers on the chair back. “Oh yeah, you’d have loved that. Years of dinky apartments until the great Ph.D. ship came in. And no control over where we lived. Being the little academic wife. Kissing department-head ass while I developed something market-ready—”

“That’s not true! You’re the one who decided for us, Philly! If I’d had a say, we’d have stayed in the city and rented a one-bedroom in the Sunset! I could have stayed at the museum. The kids could have gone to public school. We’d have been fine. You’re the one who said, ‘Stay home with the kids, Quel. I’ll take care of it.’ What’d you say? ‘Kids need their mother at home.’ Isn’t that what you said? ‘
Kids need their mother!
’ Not this. . . this McMansion!” This is true, isn’t it? Phil likes the house in the suburbs, relishes the deeply sunk fence posts and sturdy convention of the French doors and brick facade, even as I find the house and its environs square, spirit-killing, provincial, and deeply, humorlessly unimaginative.

I need to believe this—that it is to satisfy Phil’s and the kids’ aspirations, not mine—that I swallow my pride each month and let the many zeros on Eliot’s checks stain my clammy fingers. It’s the dank, abiding shame inside me that blots out what I know to be true, even as I deny it: I, too, want the McMansion. Maybe not the fussy doors and the bourgeois landscaping and the many miles between us and the nearest decent cappuccino, but certainly the idea of it. The ethos. The illusion of strength it projects to the outside world, as if to say,

Don’t fuck with those who reside herein; they are solid. They are successful. They have
pillars.

Weighing my accusations, my husband’s shoulders stiffen. “You’re crazy. You are just . . . You’re so fucking nuts, Quel. Don’t think I’m going to put up with this shit because you have fucking . . . because you’re sick.”

“
Say it!
” I scream, more enraged than I’ve possibly ever been. I’m not even sure what I want him to say. What I know is, the cancer is a test, and he is in danger of failing. What if I’d really had it? Would he have risen to the occasion or smothered me in useless euphemisms that did fuck-all to show me real devotion?

“
I’m so over this!
” I scream again. The “this” goes on and on, a grim echo against the sanitary confines of our stainless-steel appliance-heavy kitchen, which has recently begun to emit the self-important stench of the early nineties.

For a long, agonizing fracture in time, Phil says nothing, just stares at me, his green eyes stewing anger, resentment, hurt, disgust. Then he turns and moves toward the door. His calves are muscular from all that supposedly noncompetitive racquetball with Ren. His gait is stiff. Phil has problems with tendons, ligaments, parts that hold things together. I wonder if he is doing his stretches or simply taking lots of ibuprofen and shark cartilage supplements.

“I’ll get dinner out,” he says to the wall on his way out.

She sees me first.

Later, I’ll wish I had been paying attention. I’ll wish I had swung the Sienna into the Nordy’s lot instead of Neiman’s, stayed home and sucked down a gin and tonic instead of barreling through In-N-Out blindly hunting the tried-and-true post-combat comfort of ground beef and fries.

Still reeling from my fight with Phil, I lurch blindly from makeup counter to jewelry rack, seeing nothing but the dim glow of shrink-wrapped packaging and candy-colored jewels. Our arguments about finances, not an original thing to wrangle over by any means, nevertheless leave me feeling empty and remorseful and terribly alone. Shopping helps.

“Raquel? I didn’t recognize you for a second. What did you do to your—”

“Oh, hi!” I yelp. I don’t recognize the goofy teenage squeak I produce. All I know is, I’m staring into the wan face of Wendy Yen, she of the (real) cancer, shelved medical degree, and petites wardrobe.

“You’re Raquel Rose, right? I think we met once at a charity event. But your hair. . .” Wendy begins, allowing a dainty frown to crease her otherwise flawless forehead. I ransack my brain for awareness of how far the grapevine could have stretched vis-à-vis my not-cancer, arcing from Annunciata Milk to Rochelle Schitzfelder— who may never forgive me for not telling her first—to Robin Golden to Mimi LeMaitre like a thick spine of Napa Valley fruit. Wendy and I barely know each other. But if Wendy knows, she may tell her boy toy and my would-be doctor, Babyface Meissner.

As I sweat this revelation, a small nudge of memory tells me Mimi is out of town. I pray that my analysis is accurate— and that the gossip train creaked to a halt before it reached Wendy—and plunge into the game.

“I know,” I say. “Isn’t it horrors? I was getting a double process over at the salon and, well, Jesus, they just fried me. Everything fell out. They said they’d never seen anything like it. I’m considering a lawsuit.”

Wendy is looking at me, her smart, penetrating almond eyes searching for something fishy about my bald, lying, demented person. If I allow further assessment, she will guess. I know it. This is someone who is legally entrusted with applying glycolic acid to people’s faces, after all.

I glance at my watch. “I’ve got to go. Picking up Taylor.” I lay my hand quickly on Wendy’s pale olive arm, which, I realize with another kind of horror, is itself weirdly yet predictably hairless, unlike her head, on which, I recognize now, she must be wearing a wig, so thick and silky-black is her hair, even after chemo.

“You look great,” I nearly yell at her as I leave, knocking over a pyramid of anti-aging creams that shower the aisle like chunks of Sheetrock upset by earthquake.

This has to stop.

The words visit me in the studio, silently deafening, uncomfortably vibrato against the inside of my skull. My hands, which I like to think are gentle, soothing, on my subjects’ tortured flesh, halt midwrap, sticky with mâché. The subject, a heavyset black woman in her fifties—an attorney at a nonprofit before she had to quit her job to get on Medicaid— glances at me quizzically.

“Need a break?” she says to me. The lawyer’s kiwi-green eyes are less a surprise than a bonus, knowing and clear and pitiless in the way only the most striking eyes can be.

“I’m supposed to be asking you that.”

She laughs, a chortle rich as ground coffee. “And I’m supposed to be litigating
Hough v. Grossman
before the California Supremes. And if we had national fucking health care, I would be.” The large woman slides off the neat podium, an unheralded gift from Arlo that had brought tears to my eyes. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Not that I’m complaining,” she repeats, shrugging unself-consciously into a hibiscus-covered silk robe. Her hefty remaining breast flows toward the rolls of flesh at her stomach like a chunk of lava, puckered from surgery. With one breast, I’ve learned, there is no cleavage—just a soft, lone outcropping, jutting or drooping into space.

I excuse myself, quickly rinse my hands at the work tub, go to the toilet, then sip cold unsweetened green tea from the jug Sue leaves for me each morning before she heads for the restaurant. My hands are shaking slightly.

The lie is getting to me. Lies, I should say. That’s something I suppose I should have predicted, how lies multiply. Like cancer itself—how can I not make the tired metaphor?—the original deception clones itself madly until one’s life is littered with potholes, mines, no-go zones, potential missteps.

Lies.

“Jean, what’s your day looking like tomorrow?” I ask.

“Just not feeling it today, huh? Well, tell me about it. I haven’t felt it since Goddess knows when”—she clicks rapidly through her BlackBerry— “let’s see. Radiation at ten
A.M.
Survivors’ group at noon. Lunch with my partner’s daughter at one-fifteen. And I have to buy shoes.” A smile. “I can deal with the cancer and the surgery and the insurance bullshit and the rest, but damned if I’m going to wear nurse shoes.”

I think I might love this woman. “Can you fit in another casting?”

She snorts. “Are you kidding? This is the highlight of my week. Maybe my month. Who else is brave enough to put these girls in bronze for posterity? Girl, I should say,” she finishes, hefting her monoboob in a way that is more tender than lewd.

“Thanks, Jean. We’ll finish you up tomorrow.”

“No problem.” She turns around before heading for the dressing area. “You in a survivors’ support group yet?”

“Uh—”

“No? Honey, you’re going to need people to talk to about this. People who know what the hell they’re talking about. This is not something you do alone. Why don’t you come with me? We could use some new blood, bunch of old battle-axes with anger-management problems and bad brassieres.” She laughs at her own joke.

“Oh. Well, tomorrow. . .”

Jean holds up her palm. “Doesn’t have to be tomorrow. No pressure. You’ll come. Whenever you want in, you just let me know. But I’ll be after you, girl, make no mistake.” She wags her finger at me in what I want to believe is a fond way. I hear her muttering to herself behind the modesty screen. When she leaves, she hugs me.