The Red Book (19 page)

Trilby, momentarily disarmed by direct, physical interaction with her crime’s victim, blurts out, “You left your wallet in the office. I mean, I think it’s yours. It could be someone else’s, I don’t know. I just thought you should know, so yeah, okay,” before slinking down the hallway to the bathroom.

•  •  •

Jane glances down
at her watch, in the midst of all the breakfast hubbub, and wonders whether it’s still too early to call Bruno. 9:15
A.M.
Boston. That means 3:15
P.M.
Paris. He’s still at the office,
en permanence
. She’ll wait. No point bothering him when he’s editing seven different stories streaming in from around the globe. She wonders if there’s an equivalent American phrase for
en permanence
. “Weekend duty”? Maybe. “On call” could work, too, but isn’t that more for doctors? She wants to tell Bruno about her conversation with Jonathan, about her mother’s letter to Lodge Waldman. She feels not unlike the last monogamist standing.

Max Zane, at seventeen looking every inch the scruffy-teen, male version of Mia, is busy cracking open eggs while Jane’s daughter, Sophie, who can never get enough of Max, whisks them inexpertly. Eli and Josh have been given the task of setting the table. “How many are we?” says Eli, who must have grown a foot taller and six inches broader since Jane saw him last summer. He definitely got the best of both Mia and Jonathan in the genetic lottery. A good-looking kid, and nice, too.

All the Zane boys, in fact, are nice. Mia may have squandered the best years of her life shuttling them back and forth to school and soccer, but Jane has to hand it to her: She raised three thoughtful, well-adjusted, polite kids. That being said, Jane was a bit shocked when she heard that Mia was pregnant with Zoe. The night she received the e-mail from Mia, with the subject header “Zane train to get new caboose!” Jane told Bruno she thought the whole thing was less about wanting a girl, as Mia maintained (“We spun sperm!” she wrote in the e-mail, in her typical ebullient, candid way. “I know, totally nuts and embarrassing, but I wanted to be sure . . .”), than it was about avoidance. Plus, four kids? She’d heard that four was the new three in America, but still, even the wealthiest American families had to feel the strain of four.

Jane experiences a tiny jolt of self-righteous smugness for having chosen to raise Sophie abroad, in a country with a social safety net. The idea of being bankrupted by child care and medical expenses runs counter to everything the French believe. Then she’s reminded, once again, that her immersion in the land of
liberté, egalité, fraternité
might be coming to an end. She’ll have to buy medical insurance, figure out how not to get caught in its complicated web. She’ll have to hire someone to pick up Sophie from school. So crazy, dismissing kids at 3 
P.M.
! As if parents still required their progeny home midday to milk the cows and harvest the wheat, when what they actually need is to have them somewhere safe and stimulating until dinner. An old phrase bubbles up, from the one class she ever took in Latin: “
Cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex
.” When the reason ceases, so too shall the rule.

(She wonders if that was the same phrase that bubbled up into Bruno’s mind when she was off caring for her dying mother.)

(She doubts it. She imagines his brain was pretty much turned off at that point.)

(Why can’t she just forgive him?)

(Everything would be so much easier if she could just forgive him.)

(She can’t. She just can’t. And so she’ll buy medical insurance. Hire a sitter for Sophie.)

“How many are we?” Jane counts on her fingers. “Let’s see. Well, there’s your family, that’s six.”

Josh Zane, whose decade-long stranglehold on the position of baby in the Zane family was grievously usurped the day Zoe was born, corrects her. “Zoe doesn’t count,” he says, unaware of his transparency. “She’ll sit on Mom’s lap.”

“Right,” says Jane. “Okay, so you guys are five, then there’s Sophie and me, that makes seven, then Clover said she might bring Bucky, depending, so that’s nine—”

“Depending on what?” says Mia, ramming another half orange onto the automatic juicer with perhaps more force than necessary.

“On whether he can face our firing squad?” says Jane, shooting Mia a wink that goes unnoticed by everyone else.

“I think twenty-plus years since having broken our dear Clover’s heart is a long enough period of penance, don’t you? Call her back. Tell her to tell him we won’t bite.”

Trilby, who sits slumped in the window seat in her black pajamas, texting furiously, says, with a touching meekness belying her nail-hard exterior, “What about my mom? When is she coming back?”

“Oh, sweetie,” Mia says, taking a breather on her manic juicing to walk over to the window seat and put her hand on Trilby’s knee, which retracts like a snail to the touch. “They said the judge will see her at eleven. I’ll drive you over there as soon as Zoe wakes up from her nap. But I promise, they’ll let her out, maybe even earlier than that. An old friend of your mom’s is heading over there right now to try to sort it out.” It was Mia who’d called Bennie Watanabe, earlier in the morning, to tell her about Addison’s past catching up with her. She had no idea how Bennie would react to the news of her ex’s incarceration, but Mia figured she might as well inform the one person she knew in their class for whom lending a hundred grand would not feel like a hardship and who, coincidentally, once loved Addison.

“Whatever,” says Trilby, shrugging. “I don’t really give a shit.”

“Trilby, I know this is hard,” says Mia, trying to rise above her distaste for her roommate’s child. Some of it was dumb luck, she knew, pulling the short straw of a difficult child. Her brother’s youngest, whom everyone else in the family secretly called Pinball, was recently diagnosed with ADD, but not before that whirling dervish wreaked havoc on both her brother’s two older kids and his marriage. But Mia had met Trilby when the girl was a giggling, towheaded toddler, full of optimism and life thirst. This cloud-covered Trilby before her seems much more the product of nurture, not nature.

“So how many are you guys then, without your mom?” Eli asks Trilby. “Four, right?”

“No, three. Just me, Houghton, and Thatcher.” (The latter two who are, at this very moment, watching a man ejaculate all over a woman’s face on Jane’s late mother’s computer, forever altering, to the detriment of future relationships, their understanding of what constitutes fun for most females.)

“Three? Where’s your
dad
?” says Mia.

“He said he was going into town to the library to write before Mom’s judge thing,” says Trilby. “He has to get his five hundred words in every day. Like Graham Greene.”

Jane and Mia exchange another shared, knowing glance. He’s at the
library
? When his wife’s in
jail
? If nothing else, Gunner’s sense of timing, Jane thinks, has been consistent in its insensitivity. Two weeks after Trilby was born, Gunner and his childhood friend Barrett decided to renovate an antique schooner, built in 1935, that the friend, whose trust fund was significantly larger, purchased that summer on Block Island. So while Addison was busy nursing, changing, and caring for her new infant, never sleeping more than two hours at a time, as Gunner refused on principle to lift a finger—“You wanted a baby, you got a baby”—Gunner spent all day, every day, sanding this and repairing that, punctuated by short breaks to smoke weed, until by September the vessel was seaworthy enough, or so he and Barrett decided while high, to sail through the Panama Canal. So he packed a small bag and left the rest of his clothing and gear in the car his wife and infant child would have to drive back to New York alone, in Labor Day traffic, while he and Barrett spent the next three months overstaying their welcome in various ports up and down the eastern seaboard, repairing more holes, trying to save the hull, running out of dope, until the schooner finally sank off the coast of Florida the day before Thanksgiving, and the Coast Guard charged them thousands of dollars—fines that Barrett insisted they split—for violations too numerous to mention.

“Graham Greene wrote five hundred words a day?” says Jane. Since
You poor thing, having a father like that
seems imprudent, under the circumstances.

“I guess.”

“Has he let you guys read any of his novel yet?” says Mia, with a knowing sidelong glance at Jane.

“No, not yet,” says Trilby, rubbing her spiky tongue ring back and forth across her teeth. (How can that be comfortable? Mia wonders. Does food get caught under it? Does she impale the roof of the mouth when she chews?)

Mia’s son Eli is still focused on his numbers. “Okay, so that’s five of us, Jane and Sophie, three Griswolds, one Clover, and maybe an extra, right? That makes twelve.” Eli steals a glance at the bowl full of unadorned batter sitting next to the empty griddle. “Wait. What about the bananas and chocolate chips?”

“Got ’em!” says Jonathan, bursting through the door, a charismatic blur of sweat and spent energy hovering above a pair of brand-new Nike Roadsters. Under one arm he clutches a perfect bunch of bananas, stickered over with the word
ORGANIC
; with the other he holds aloft what looks like a dark brown brick. “Can you believe it? They had Scharffen Berger at your little local deli! I can’t even get our local deli to stock Nestlé’s.”

Jane takes the chocolate brick from him and looks at the price tag. “Fourteen dollars? You could have bought the Tollhouse for three bucks.”

“Jane Streeter, you will be eating those words when you taste my pancakes.”

“No, I’ll be eating your pancakes when I taste your pancakes.”

“Oh my God, always such a rationalist.” He winks. “God, what a gorgeous morning, isn’t it?” Now he turns to Mia, who notices the slight flirtation between Jane and Jonathan with bemused detachment. He would never touch another woman in a million years. Of this she is certain. “Did you make the batter with a dash of lemon like I told you?” he asks.

“Yes, Mr. Control Freak, I did.” Mia says this, Jane notes, without a trace of annoyance. She clearly loves both her husband and his idiosyncrasies. And Jonathan doesn’t flinch at the sugar-coated insult. A lucky accident of compatible temperaments, so rare, Jane thinks, as to be almost shocking.

And yet he’s an adulterer. An adulterer who smiles and loves his wife (who doesn’t know he’s an adulterer), and loves his kids (who think he’s God), and makes twenty-dollar pancakes (because he can).

How is it that she’s just learning about the vagaries of human nature at this late juncture in her life? Her entire career, the accolades she has received, have been based on her innate understanding of the human drama simmering just below the surface of violence and war, and yet in her own personal life, in the lives of her friends and their spouses, she’s an imbecile.

Jonathan gets to work, shaving the chocolate with a cheese grater while Mia slices the bananas into thin slivers. “No, no, throw them in the Cuisinart or mash them with one of those thingamajigs, so they get nice and mushy,” says Jonathan.

“Yes, sir,” says Mia, smiling, rolling her eyes in mock frustration.

Eli sets the table for twelve.

Trilby texts.

Max and Sophie beat the eggs.

Houghton and Thatcher watch a woman pretend to like licking the cum off her philtrum.

Gunner stands at the new fiction shelf in the library, scanning the spines of productivity.

Clover kisses a sleeping Bucky chastely on the forehead and texts “it’ll just be me” to Jane’s phone.

Eli resets the table for eleven.

Bucky sighs, turns over, and dreams about boats, aware neither that Clover has quietly snuck out of the room nor that there’s any probability, let alone a high one, that one of his sperm might be boring its way into her egg.

Addison arrives at Jane’s late mother’s house, leaning heavily on Bennie.

Bennie carries two dozen bagels, a pint of cream cheese, and a pound of nova for the bereaved.

Eli resets the table for thirteen.

Zoe wakes up from her nap and starts to scream.

Jane takes it all in, the part she can see, the part she imagines, and finds it mind-bending, overwhelming. What does it mean, all these tiny actions, these hidden secrets, these fragile humans with their hardships and friendships and fuckships that survive the slog-sprint through time?
Don’t you all realize?
she feels like shouting.
We all end up dust.
Instead she wipes her wet hands on her late mother’s kitchen towel, gives Addison a bear hug, and says, in the best American argot she can affect, “Okay, guys, time’s a-wasting. Let’s get a move on with those pancakes.”

E
LLEN
E
LISE
G
RANDY.
Home Address:
34 Mount Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA (617-497-9676).
Occupation:
Physician.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
M.D., Stanford ’93.
Children:
Eleanor Frances, 2002.

After a decade spent overseas as a physician with Médecins Sans Frontières, I moved back to the States a few years after my daughter Nell was born, joining a wonderful family medical practice started by my freshman roommate, Andrea Lebenthal. There are seven of us in the practice now, all women, which means we each take call just once a week, a godsend for the two of us who are single moms.

I still hold out hope that there’s a life partner out there for me, a father figure for Nell, but the older I get, the less likely this seems. I can’t complain: I’ve had my fair share of love, and for this and especially for Nell I will always be grateful, but because of the itinerant nature of my work in the past, none of these often already complicated relationships were able to withstand the pressures of so much time and distance apart. Since moving back to Cambridge and settling down with my daughter, I’ve tried the online dating thing, and let’s just say I’ve now also had my fair share of creeps, stalkers, and men who think posting a photo of themselves fifteen years younger and forty pounds lighter won’t make me immediately dislike them when I spot them at the bar, beer-bellied, sweating, and bald.

Okay, so fine. I guess what I’m saying is if you’re reading this right now, and you either happen to be or happen to know a decent, kind, intelligent, and relatively attractive (unsweaty, please; bald’s fine) middle-aged man in the greater Boston area who is either divorced or coming out of a long-term relationship or a widower—I’ve tried dating men my own age who’ve never cohabitated, and let’s just say there’s invariably a good and often disquieting reason they’ve remained unhitched for so long—I would gladly entertain the idea of being set up on a date the old-fashioned, nonvirtual way.

Shameless, I know, to write this here, but what the hell. I figured you’re as good a population to ask as any, and I’m getting too old for pride.

G
EORGE
R
AWLINS
C
ROWLEY.
Home Address:
2385 Walcott Street, Pawtucket, RI 02861.
Occupation:
Owner, Rawlins Subaru.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
Ph.D., Oxford ’96.
Spouse/Partner:
Sarah Blake Crowley (Boston University ’93).
Children:
Finn Jessup, 1999; John Andrew, 2001; Lilly Phelan, 2003.

What can I say? Did I ever imagine as I was spending all those years in Oxford writing my doctoral thesis on the conception of love in the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay that, years later, I’d own a Subaru dealership in Pawtucket? No, I did not. What I can say is that what St. Vincent Millay taught me about love wormed its way into me in some lasting, profound way, and when I met my wife Sarah, and we decided to start a family together, I realized I didn’t have to choose between love and food. I could choose both, so long as I was realistic about what was possible, given my area of expertise, and what was not.

I tried taking the academic route, but doctors of poetry, suffice it to say, are a dime a dozen, especially these days, and after years of adjuncting here and there and fighting for the scraps of a tenure-track slot somewhere, anywhere, my desire for stability, for the ability to take a vacation now and then, for a decent home for my family and good schools for my kids won out, in the end, over poverty and poetry. Or, rather, the poetry is still in me, and I will always be an avid reader, and sometimes writer, and forever admirer of the form, but the minute I stopped depending on it as a means of putting food on my table, I found a sense of peace and well-being I never realized existed.

Do I love my work? Some days I do, and some days I don’t, but what I do love, always, is that owning my own business allows me immense freedom to attend the kids’ soccer games and parentteacher conferences, and it pays the bills, and for now and maybe forever, that seems to be enough. Plus, every night, before bed, I allow each child to fish out a book of poetry from the shelf, and we open it up to a random page, and we read. A few weeks ago, my eldest, Finn, happened upon my favorite St. Vincent Millay poem, “Love is Not All.” He’s ten now, old enough to parse the meaning of the words with some help from Dad, so after we read it, we had a lively discussion about the poet’s intentions.

It was one of the happiest half hours of my life.

C
LAYTON
J
ESSUP
C
OLLINS.
Home Address:
5408 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98105 (425-283-8017).
Occupation & Office Address:
Artistic Director, the Fourth Wallers, 4512 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 (425-283-3200, x664).
E-mail:
[email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Anthony DeRosa (Tulane ’97).
Children:
Koby DeRosa-Collins, 2005.

For years my father, a part-time carpenter and full-time drunk, was furious with me for not having studied medicine after college. I was the first in my family, hell, in my entire hometown, to go to college, and I was the only child of a widower, and there was no way I could have lived up to those expectations. “But you graduated
Harvard
!” he kept saying, as if that meant I should have magically taken an interest in slicing open humans. Trust me, people, you would
not
want me dissecting a frog much less performing an arterial bypass on poor Uncle Fred.

On the other hand, I do know a little bit about taking an emotional knife to the human heart, and I’ll be damned if the little theater group I founded in an abandoned milk bottle factory seventeen years ago, the Fourth Wallers, hasn’t had its best run this past year. For starters, we finally built our own space “on the Ave” (as we refer to the main drag here in the University District), in an old Tower Records store that was scheduled for demolition. We actually kept one of the plate glass windows of the previous structure intact, turning it into a one-way mirror for the folks seated on the inside, so that some poor kid passing by on the outside—some poor kid, say, from Marietta, Mississippi, whose father might have told him that only fairies go see any kind of theater aside from a passion play—might be able to press his face against the glass to watch the magic. Meanwhile, one of the works I commissioned last fall,
Mister Sister
, a musical about a nun who gets a sex change, is making its debut at the Manhattan Theatre Club. I know, just in time for the recession, but whatever, right? It’s still exciting, and two of our original cast members will be in it, and this brings me bucketloads of joy.

Mister Sister
was also a breakthrough in other ways. My aforementioned father—who stopped speaking to me a few years ago after I came out to him and told him my partner Anthony and I were adopting a son—just up and decided one day, after I e-mailed him a review from the
Post-Intelligencer
, to hop on a plane to catch closing night and meet his grandchild. The next morning, after he’d stayed up until 2
A.M.
helping my cast and crew strike the set, we were sitting there drinking our coffees in my kitchen when he said, “You done good, son,” giving me a quick pat on the back while Koby slurped his Cheerios and Anthony scrambled some eggs, and I had no idea if he was referring to the play or my kid or my life in general, but damn if I didn’t cry like a baby into my coffee mug.

A couple of months after that, I got a call from Pop’s neighbor, telling me my father had passed. His liver just gave out one day, as I suspected it would. The neighbor then asked for my home address, so he could ship us the rocking horse Pop had been carving for Koby in his wood shop. It just needed to be sanded down a bit, the neighbor said, but he’d take care of that.

Koby and Anthony will be staying in Seattle when I head back east for reunion, but if you ask nicely, I’ll show ya’ll a photo I recently shot of my son rocking on that hand-carved wooden horse. He named it Jessup, after my father. He says he wants to be either a cowboy or a doctor or both when he grows up, so he can ride wood horses and fix broken livers. I told him, hell, Koby, you can be whatever the heck you want to be.

L
YTTON
W
ALLINGFORD
H
EPWORTH.
Last Known Address:
960 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10021.