Opening Belle (31 page)

“Cut the cord with other women at work?”

“Cut the cord with everyone who isn't helping Belle get everything she wants every minute of every day.”

I digest this odd thought for a moment. I review my list of dependents and codependents that I adore. I'm beginning to believe Kathryn is possibly the loneliest person I've ever met.

A door closes on the far side of the apartment and I hear the sound of barefooted steps. I turn to see a thirtysomething, dark-haired Adonis step forward. He's a goateed, tight-white-T-shirted-with-tight-black-shorts guy. He's carrying a green sludgy drink. Before he hands the drink to Kathryn he leans forward, never acknowledging me, and kisses her passionately, which flexes his sculpted thighs. As she holds the drink he rubs her shoulders and my own neck aches with sympathetic desire, not for Buffy Boy, but for touching of any kind. Kathryn does have a connection with another human! I'm relieved and happy for her all at the same time. Adonis moves behind her to get further down her back as she sips the slithering green muck.

“A visitor?” he inquires with a raised eyebrow tilted toward me. His tone is more accusing than inquisitive.

“This is Belle McElroy. We work together.”

“Together?” he asks with soft deprecation. “Kathryn Peterson works with nobody. She works for Kathryn.”

Kathryn seats herself on the couch, thoughtfully sipping. “Yes,” she responds, as if hypnotized. “I don't know where that came from.”

“It came from the old Kathryn, the gone-away-forever Kathryn,” Adonis says.

“Yes,” she says dreamily. “Forgive me, it's been so long since she was here.”

“Let's make certain old Kathryn doesn't come back.”

Quack-face comes around the couch to stand before me. He closes his eyes and does that yoga breathing thing, inhaling through his nose, holding it for several seconds, and exhaling through his mouth. He does this three painful times. I awkwardly extend my hand to a man who can't see it.

“He's testing your aura,” Kathryn whispers. “His name is Apollo.”

Apollo opens his eyes and shakes his head the way my father did when my brother took the car for a joyride at thirteen years old. There's disapproval and then there's that sigh that implies great disappointment in the person. It's too much for Kathryn. She immediately stands up and walks toward the door. Something in her manner tells me I should be following her, as I clearly haven't passed the Apollo sniff test. Kathryn pushes the closet door aside and we both enter to retrieve my coat.

“Well, you have a cute boyfriend,” I say, that being the best thing I can come up with.

“Oh, I don't have a boyfriend,” she says as if I have accused her of insider trading. “Apollo just services me. It's a mind-body connection that I pay for. I needed someone available by contract with no attachments and no drama. In fact, I believe he has a girlfriend or maybe she's his wife.”

Again, I try to comprehend what she's saying. Didn't they just kiss? Is she saying she pays him to touch her?

“Well, I'm about to begin my practice,” she says, and removes my coat from the hanger.

Apollo has put something in a bowl and I see him light a match and begin to burn it. As the elevator arrives my nostrils fill with a smell I know but have trouble naming. I focus on this, knowing I've cooked with this familiar herb. When the elevator reaches the ground floor again, it hits me: sage. He's burning sage to rid the bad energy of Belle McElroy from the white, perfectly ordered, and purchased world of Kathryn Peterson.

W
HEN MY
family boards an airplane and the seating configuration is two rows of three seats, there will be one lone passenger stuck with the five of us. I always feel for that person, sitting there innocently, not knowing we're about to become their living hell for the next few hours.

Today that person is an elderly woman, neat and prim. Except for the visual groan on her face as we settled ourselves, she's been ignoring us. We'll be in her turf for hours and my sense is she already can't stand us. We do better with sullen teenagers or Hispanic men. Not to categorize humanity, but I've come to learn which bunches of people come installed with a gracious tolerance for small children.

Bruce and I had one magnificent showdown, worthy of reality television. It happened in the comfort of our home, in front of our caregiver, in front of our kids. It was a textbook example of everything you aren't supposed to do as a parent.

I had come home from a business dinner where I only stayed for the cocktail portion of the evening. Instead of my usual glass of white wine, I had not one but two dirty martinis and not one bite of food. Drinking my dinner turned me positively fearless. I walked into our apartment at 9 p.m. with some vision of a quiet house and possible husband romance. Instead I opened the door and was assaulted by the television blaring some sexy talk in front of three young faces. Caregiver and Bruce sat there, bookending the kids and both talking animatedly into their cell phones. The whimpering dog told me he hadn't been walked, and my peripheral vision caught sight of the dish-strewn kitchen table. The children weren't tuned in to
Handy Manny
but what seemed like an X-rated movie,
Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
This wasn't some cozy movie night at the McElroys, this was the television babysitting my kids long after bedtime because neither adult in the house could summon the energy to put them to bed.

“I've just finished my fourteen-hour work shift so I thought I'd skip dinner to come home early and help you two out,” I said sarcastically.

Caregiver jumped up. “We thought you were coming home later,” she muttered as she headed to the kitchen and started banging things around.

Moments like that parents expect young children to run with outstretched arms to their mother, but I was no match for Mrs. Smith—er, Angelina Jolie—who picked that moment to mount Brad Pitt's hip and keep my kids' eyes on her flawless thighs. While straddling Brad, her knife, which she kept tucked into her garter belt, revealed itself.

Bruce, whose finger was in the air—implying I should hold my fire—finished some sweet sign-off and ended the call.

“Who the hell were you talking to?”

“Belle, Jesus, my mother called.”

“Your mother? You don't give your mother the time of day, never mind miss a movie for her. When the hell did you start being nice to her?”

“I'm always nice. I'm like a bag of niceness, all the frickin' time.”

Jolie and Pitt then attacked someone, breaking stuff in their house, shooting at bad guys, destroying everything, implying the sex was inevitably great and by all appearances not having to clean up the mess they made. That was exactly what I wanted to do.

I made a dive for the television, trying to turn it off manually, but some plastic stacking rings on the floor got under my feet. I fell flat on my face.

“I want to break stuff too!” I yelled, grabbing some of the rings and furiously throwing them at Bruce. “I want to HIT someone.” Even the rings disrespected me, being too light to get far and falling about three feet short of Bruce.

“Chill, Belle. This movie is, like, PG-13 and these kids are being parentally guided. What the hell is your problem?”

“My problem is you won't get off your fat ass to either work or turn into a dad who acknowledges he needs to do more of the mom stuff.” The red plastic slide that's been sitting on its side was next on my hit list.

“Would it kill anyone in the house to do this?” I said as I turned the slide upright, letting little rubber balls spill everywhere. “Am I the only one who notices anything around here?”

“Oh, because having an orderly house where the slides are set upright would mean that I'm a better dad?”

“It would make you a better
partner.
Do you know what this here says?” I asked as I kicked the slide because, dammit, that's what Angelina would have done. “It says nobody cares at all. It says, let all this shit hang out till Mom comes home because she'll fix everything. She'll earn all the money! She'll order all the groceries and arrange for cleaning and cooking. She'll get the car fixed on weekends and walk the dog at midnight, so let's not get our fat asses off the couch EVER!”

“That's the second time you mentioned my ass being fat and it's not” was all that Bruce said before rising and walking out of the room.

The couch still held three, now sobbing, children. What had been a relatively calm room was then a disaster sight.

“Mom,” Kevin sniffed. “The slide was like that 'cause it was our fort. We played Forts tonight and the balls were the ammo and Daddy had to make a phone call so he just put on the TV, like, a minute ago.” Kevin stood up and stalked away.

“Oh,” I said weakly to his retreating back. I felt a little stupider and turned to Brigid.

“Oh, Brig, please stop crying. Mommy didn't understand what she was looking at. I think I may have made a mistake.”

Brigid stood and pointed at my feet in disgust. “You changed your shoes,” she wailed, and threw her stuffed bunny down in protest. She too marched out of the room. Usually I remembered to just take my shoes off when I came home to keep the shoe deal between Brigid and me unquestioned. That night I had assumed she'd be asleep.

Several teary hours later, Bruce and I were speaking again. He can't take my having this job any longer; the hours are too long and our kids are too young and I'm too uptight about the state of the financial world. He's never said I'm a bad mother but I know he thinks that.

From my point of view, he's too lazy in his life, he doesn't share any financial worries, and never takes care of any family logistics. He gives our credit cards too much of a workout for an unemployed dad. I can hardly do more than glance at our statement of charges each month to spare myself from exploding over things like a $250 massage at a SoHo men's spa. A spa during the day? He got his chest waxed, he told me, and “maybe” a hot stone massage. The hypocrisy hurts my stomach.

His defense is that he's able to bench-press far more than his weight, he's skateboarding again, and he can stand on his head in his yoga class. Achieving these mighty aspirations makes me a lucky woman, according to him, and aren't I glad he's not some paunchy guy headed to his middle-aged Barcalounger? We've cranked up our mutual feelings of frustration to full relationship distress.

To end our repetitive discussion about why I should quit my seventy-hour-per-week slog, and our only paycheck, Bruce insisted on this trip—his quest for me to gain some clarity, to see things his way, while deep down I feel he's asking impossible things of me to justify his own immaturity. There, I said it. My husband hasn't aged a day since we met because he hasn't matured a day since then either. When I calmed down enough to reach for an olive branch, I would have agreed to anything to make our circular discussions stop and to find some common ground, so this trip seemed to be the solution and so here, on the runway, we sit.

My sister is married to a former member of the French ski team who now instructs three-year-olds to assume the pommes frites position with their baby skis. They moved to the small town of Argentière, in the French Alps, to rise above the sort of lunacy Bruce and I live within. They have four young girls, which should be just the happy ticket we seek: seven small children, two maritally challenged adults, and two other adults living out some scene from
Heidi
, all within the confines of a cabin and its wood-burning stove. We are calling this plan our vacation.

Frolicking in alpine beauty in spring or summer is for amateurs. We're going in March because it's spring break, which feels more like a winter break and promises to have the most delays. It's snowing here at JFK Airport and that's why we're sitting and sitting on a runway in Queens. We've been sitting here for four hours.

Kevin's Nintendo DS has run out of power. I've changed Owen's diaper twice. He's three now and still in diapers because nobody is showing him the path to the toilet. Brigid has tired of drawing in her coloring book and has decided her forearms are a good canvas, coloring both of them solidly green. She tells me she looks like Little Pea. She says this over and over to my blank face until Bruce disgustedly tells me that Little Pea is the small vegetable boy on the Green Giant box, where all of our children's frozen vegetables come from. He shakes his head with disgust; his wife and Brigid's own mother does not know this rather crucial bit of information. It takes every ounce of self-control for me to not turn on him and say, “Dickface, the little green kid's name is Little Green Sprout, not frickin' Little Pea.”

When Brigid's self-mutilation is complete she moves to my arms, and since I have no dignity anymore I let her. She gives me stripes of deep navy, angry vein lines all over my arms and somehow the graffiti suits me. I'm craving a hit of my office, just a simple phone call while the stock market is open and we're sitting on this runway, solidly within U.S. cell phone range. The markets have been trading wildly, a few hedge funds have failed, and here I am going on vacation. One of the vows Bruce insisted I make for this trip is that I live unconnected during the week of European frolic. I sit in my seat trying to rationalize that this moment cannot possibly be considered the start of my technology cutoff, can it? I'm afraid to ask him, afraid of his wrath, so instead I just sit, feeling the heat of the clear airplane Wi-Fi signal burn an imaginary hole through my ski jacket.

I glance across the aisle to look at Bruce, Owen, and the elderly woman now wearing radio headphones, circa 1989. Bruce is playing the good daddy by reading
GQ
magazine to himself. I watch him chuckle, blissfully unaware that Owen is standing and bouncing on his seat, and I pretend I'm not with those people.