The Red Book (13 page)

“I’m not stalling. I’m just . . . meandering. Like I said, I’ve never told this story before. I don’t have the narrative down pat the way I do with, say, the time Max pooped in the bathtub and Eli tried to eat it. Have I ever told you that story? Now, that’s a funny story.”

“I’d rather go back to the shit you were already shooting.”

“Nice one, Janie!” He looks genuinely surprised at her joke. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Jonathan! So you were in your hotel room
and
. . . ?”

“Right. I was in my hotel room and—oh, I should probably preface this with the fact that we had to stop production for nine days, because the city was basically shut down, and we couldn’t get our trailers in or out of Manhattan, it was a logistical nightmare, the whole thing—anyway I was in my hotel room, and I called up my producer, Shari. I told her she needed to come up so we could powwow about contingency plans: you know, what to do with the crew while we waited to get back into production, how to proceed, what to tell the studio, what to tell accounting about projected budget overages, etc. But really? I just wanted someone to watch the news with me. I couldn’t face sitting in that empty room all by myself seeing those planes go into the towers, over and over and over again. And so Shari came over . . .”

“Yes?”

“She came over and . . .”

“
Shari?
” Jane whisper-shouts. “The one with the . . . ?” She taps on her upper lip.

“Oh it’s not
that
visible. Wait, how do you know Shari?”

“I met Shari. Remember, when she came to Paris a few years ago to work on that film? You gave her my number. I had a coffee with her at the Flore. Can’t remember a word of what we talked about because I kept getting distracted by the cappuccino foam hanging from her mustache.”

“She does
not
have a mustache.”

“She so does.” Jane pauses. “You fucked
Shari
?”

Though Jane is whispering, and it’s well past midnight, Jonathan looks over his shoulder anyway, fearful of prying ears. “I don’t think I consciously thought we would actually go there, physically . . .”

“So what, it just
happened
?”

“Come on, Jane. Don’t be naïve.”

“I’m not being naïve.”

“Yes, you are. And willfully at that.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just . . . shocked. I mean, we’re talking about you. You! The man I always hold up as the pinnacle of all that husbandkind can be. I’m sorry. I just need a few minutes to digest it, that’s all.”

“Look, I’m sorry for bursting your bubble, Janie. I know it was ‘wrong.’ ” He makes air quotes around the word. “I mean, trust me, I know. But . . . well, Shari and I have known each other a long time. She’s produced six of my films, we go way back. She had a boyfriend in LA at the time, too—they’re married now, Mia and I actually went to the wedding a few years ago—but that night, I mean . . .” His voice trails off.

“That night what?” Jane hears the undertone of anger in her voice—anger toward Jonathan, toward Bruno, toward any neat and orderly surface masking an underbelly of chaos, desire, greed, hunger, need. Is nothing ever as it seems? (
Of course!
she answers herself.
Jonathan’s right. I am being naïve. Good is never a shield against need.
) A laissez-faire attitude toward adultery, it strikes her, is the one European convention she has yet to assimilate. Hervé, she was certain, would have never cheated on her, under any circumstances, and this certainty created a sturdy hammock into which she sank and waited whenever he was on the road.

“I don’t know, Janie. I mean, I know it’s a bit of a cop-out to speak about sex in the passive tense, as if I had nothing to do with it, but it just kind of happened. She came into my room to watch the news on TV, and we were both sitting there on my bed, stunned, you know listening to Brokaw, channel surfing from CNN to MSNBC to Fox and back again, trying to make sense of all that sound and fury, which of course was impossible, and Shari knew a guy who worked in one of the towers, I mean, not well, but she knew him from college, or maybe high school, I can’t remember exactly, and before you could say
step away from the curb,
I muted the TV—I just couldn’t take another minute of those talking heads, no one had a flying fuck of an idea what was going on—and I hit the clock radio, and this gorgeous Mozart piece came on, I don’t even know the name of it, but it was just one of those things that grabs you by the gut and won’t let go, and we were holding hands and crying, lost in our own lonely bubbles, and then we were holding each other more intimately and crying, and then we were kissing, and then one thing led to another, and well, whatever. It all sounds so tawdry in the retelling, but . . .”

“Jesus.”

“. . . I still can’t explain it other than to say it happened. I had sex with this woman who wasn’t my wife, and I asked her to stay the night because I couldn’t face sleeping alone, and the next morning, Shari was in the shower, and for a minute, before I remembered where I was or what I’d done, I assumed I was back in LA, and that Mia was the one in the shower, and when I finally came to and processed what had happened . . .” He trails off again, but this time Jane doesn’t interrupt him. “Anyway, it ended as soon as it started. We didn’t even really have to discuss it. I could just see it on Shari’s face, when she came out of the bathroom, shivering a bit, with her towel wrapped really tightly around her, that she was feeling the same, so I turned my back to give her some privacy to get dressed. Symbolically, you know? As if to say, we’re back to where we were before last night, and we sort of shook hands awkwardly before she left, but that felt kind of weird, too, so I kissed her one last time, you know, not passionately but tenderly I guess you’d call it, just to kind of put the proper punctuation mark on what had happened—because there was beauty in it, too, there really was, and it felt wrong to deny that aspect of it—and she kissed me back, and there were a few tears in her eyes, and I’m sure in my eyes, too, and neither of us have ever spoken about it since.”

It takes Jane a few seconds to digest the story properly before speaking. “Not once?”

“Never. I mean, there was this one time we were both at the same dinner party, and this friend of ours was telling a story about where he was on 9/11—a boring story, about being stuck at the airport in Chicago, I don’t even remember the details—but anyway, he was telling this uninteresting story of that night he spent at the airport, and Shari and I exchanged, you know, this brief glance, and then I had to stare at my arugula salad for a few seconds, just to regain composure, but there’s been no intimate contact since, and I can’t imagine there ever will be, and she still produces my films, and she remains my closest, most trusted colleague. ‘My work wife,’ Mia has always called her. Even before 9/11. And—here’s the real kicker—though I feel a
little
guilty about what happened, and I was obviously worried what would happen if Mia ever found out, if I’m being really honest with myself, I don’t regret it. When I think about it, which of course I wind up doing whenever that day is mentioned—I mean that’s my cross to bear, I guess, cheating on my wife on the one day of our generation’s lives that will go down in infamy—it feels like its own, I don’t know, little pocket of craziness. But also like a pocket of tenderness, too. A crease in time, if you will, which, were I given the same set of circumstances again, even with the benefit of hindsight, I’m pretty sure I would still take exactly the same actions I took. I
needed
to have sex that night, Janie. To feel loved. It happened to have been with my producer, which in retrospect was really dumb and could have been a total disaster, both personally and professionally, but really? I’m pretty sure either of us would have schtupped anyone reasonably attractive, kind, and traumatized enough.”

“Nice.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“You’re not sure you know, or you’re not sure you
want
to know?”

“The latter, I guess.”

“Janie, all I’m saying? You were gone, both physically and mentally, for what? Six months while your mother was dying?”

“Seven.”

“Fine, seven months. That’s a long time to be checked out from life’s hotel. That doesn’t excuse Bruno’s actions, but it does offer a decent explanation as to why he might have done what he did. And sending you that e-mail by accident? Stupid, definitely, as in really fucking dumb, and I’ll kick his ass for it in August when I see him, assuming you guys are still coming down to Antibes again, but maybe it was also a subconscious plea on his part. Don’t leave him just because he screwed up. Humans are fallible. You should know that from your work, but it also applies to everyday life.”

“Jonathan,” Jane says, feeling like a shipwrecked sailor on a jerry-rigged raft, “thank you for this conversation. I think. But I’m too tired to process all of this right now. I need some sleep.” And with that, she stands up, gives Jonathan a chaste peck on his adulterous cheek, and heads for her late/gone/vanished mother’s bedroom.

A couple of hours of tossing and turning later, Jane realizes she’ll have to take advantage of either the three Ambiens left in her mother’s stash or these
nuit blanche
hours, while everyone else is asleep, to conquer one or two of the myriad domestic tasks requiring her long-overdue attention.

She opts for the latter, yanking a moving box from the pile of thirty she’d purchased earlier that day, transforming it from two dimensions to three with the satisfyingly noisy thrust and rip of packing tape along its seams. She figures she’ll start with the least personal, most chaotic room of the house—the attic—and steadily move downstairs through bathrooms, the garage, random cupboards, and bookshelves until she’s left with disposing of the clothes in her mother’s closet, an activity she’s been anticipating and dreading since her mother’s diagnosis. Lately, she’s been fixated on the image of all those dresses, all those years and memories, languishing on wire hangers at the Salvation Army. The thought of it creates an instantaneous if short-lived paralysis, but she refuses to go down the same path her mother did during the months after her father died, handing out all of Harold Streeter’s shirts and shoes to the fathers in the neighborhood unlucky enough to possess similar measurements. “Thanks so much, Claire; and thank
you
, Ngoc,” they’d say, unsteadily, when Claire showed up on their doorstep that Sunday morning clutching her newly adopted Vietnamese daughter in one hand, a carefully curated bag of Harold in the other.

It was during this morbid outing that Jane decided to change her name from Ngoc—pronounced “Na” but mispronounced by every family visited, every teacher and kid in the Buckingham Browne & Nichols school by its phonetic parts, “Nuh-gock”—to something both easier to pronounce and modestly unpronounced. She settled on Jane when her mother, when asked to procure a list of single-syllable American names from which she might choose, explained that people often placed the word
plain
in front of Jane. “What does
plain
mean?” Jane—who would answer to Ngoc for only three and a half minutes more, and was still mastering the fine points of English—asked.

Claire, never one to miss an opportunity for a teachable moment, said, “Well, it means simple. Not fancy.”

Fancy
Jane knew from one of the stories Harold used to tell her before bed, about a fancy princess locked in a golden room who longed for a dress of sackcloth and an honest job scooping ice cream. Books about princesses who were “saved” by rich princes and showered with luxury goods were not exactly banned but rather omitted from the Streeter family bookshelves. Both Harold and Claire, the first female in her family to go to college and pursue a well-remunerated career, felt quite strongly that it was their parental duty to instill the idea of self-reliance and a healthy suspicion of consumerist society into their child. That’s not to say Jane didn’t check out such books from the library of her elementary school on the sly, once she figured out how to read and use a card catalogue, but rather that she approached such stories, even then, with a cultural critic’s cold eye. “That’s the name I want,” she told her mother. “Jane.”

“That’s an excellent choice, Jane,” said Claire, addressing the former Ngoc instantaneously by her newly adopted moniker, smiling wistfully at what Jane realizes now, only in retrospect, must have been her first true declaration of independence, a boulder that, once dislodged, would slowly gather steam (Claire must have realized, hence the tears that welled ever-so-slightly in the corners of her eyes) until it rolled away down life’s rocky hill forever. “I’m sure Daddy would have loved it.”

Six months after the clothing handoff, when a now ten-year-old, fully fluent, fully Americanized, fiercely independent and bookish Jane had yet to spot a single button-down shirt or pair of shoes belonging to her father on the back or feet of any of the Belmont fathers, she asked her mother why.

Claire, similarly disappointed—she’d given her neighbors too much credit, assuming they could move beyond the idea of wearing a dead man’s oxford to enjoy the fine workmanship and soft cottons—would shrug her shoulders and say, “I guess maybe it’s too sad for them, sweetie. But what a shame. They’re such nice clothes. Practically new, most of them.”

“Come on, Janie,” Jane now says to herself, out loud, opening up a drawer to an old metal file cabinet tucked under the attic eaves, “let’s do this.”

The files, organized loosely by subject, are labeled almost exclusively in her mother’s handwriting—all caps with a Sharpie—with the exception of a few lighter-colored manila folders with fraying tabs whose labels were manually typed, back in the day, onto now yellowing stickers. In one of these, double labeled first with
NGOC
, then overstickered with
JANE
, Jane finds her adoption papers; a random assortment of report cards (all As with the exception of one B, ironically in eleventh grade French); her inoculation records; summer camp bills; clippings of her
Boston Globe
articles dating back to her very first, a profile she filed from Clichy-sous-Bois, a Parisian
banlieue
, about an elderly Nigerian woman who had been performing back-alley genital mutilations of undocumented Muslim girls; and a single black-and-white snapshot of Harold and her on the American base in Saigon, circa early 1975, when she was eight, just a year older than her daughter Sophie is now. She turns over the photo and reads, in her father’s handwriting, “My dearest Claire, Meet Ngoc, our new daughter,” and suddenly she is there, on that American army base in Saigon, clutching her father’s hand so tightly, Harold said, he actually had to pry her fingers from his whenever he needed to use them to, say, perform surgery or eat.