The Red Book (2 page)

I took predictable joy in these tragedy-free years, but as they began to accumulate, year by year, I started to get cocky, believing that the “curse” of bad luck that had plagued my earlier life was finally, thrillingly over.

Then, in late 2004, my husband’s car was hijacked near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where he was on assignment for the French newspaper
Libération
. Or at least that’s what we think probably happened, as his body wasn’t found until six days later, tossed into a ditch. For the next six months, our daughter, who was only two at the time, kept looking for him in all the places she remembered her father taking her: a restaurant in our neighborhood, the patisserie on the corner, the playground in the Place des Vosges. And then she stopped looking or even talking about him altogether. A year later, I fell in love and moved in with my current partner, the wonderful Bruno Saint-Pierre, who was Hervé’s editor at
Libé
and the shoulder I often leaned on after Hervé’s death.

Then, a few months ago, Claire, my adoptive mother, the most solid rock of my life, called to tell me she’d been diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Her prognosis is not good. The doctors won’t give her an exact time frame, but they said she’s probably looking at six months tops. She still lives in her (our) old house in Belmont, so I’ll definitely be back and forth between Paris and Boston this fall and winter, but I’m also hoping she sticks around long enough to see the buds on her rosebush in May and the smile on her grandchild’s face in June when Sophie and I arrive for reunion.

Chapter 1
Addison

It had simply never occurred to Addison that the Cambridge Police Department not only kept two-decade-old records of unpaid parking tickets, but that they could also use the existence of her overdue fines, on the eve of her twentieth college reunion, to arrest her in front of Gunner and the kids. If such a scenario had struck her as even remotely possible, she’d be thinking twice about zooming through that red light on Memorial Drive.

But it hadn’t, so here we go.

“Oh my God, look at these idiots,” she says, slamming her hand down hard on the horn of her blue and white 1963 VW Microbus, which she purchased online one night in a fit of kitsch nostalgia. Or that’s the story she tells friends when they ask what she was thinking buying a vehicle that takes weeks or even months to fix when it breaks down, for want of parts. “Take my advice: don’t
ever
go on eBay stoned,” she’ll say, whenever the conversation veers toward car ownership, online shopping, or adult pot use. “You’ll end up with a first generation off the master Cornell ’77 along with the friggin’
bus
the dude drove to the show.”

While the story is technically true, the impetus behind the purchase was much more about economic necessity, practicality, and appearances than Addison likes to admit. For one, she and Gunner couldn’t afford a new Prius. They refused, on ecological principle, to buy a used SUV, or rather they refused to be put in the position of being judged for owning an SUV. (While they loved the earth as much as the next family, they weren’t above, strictly speaking, adding a supersize vehicle to its surface for the sake of convenience.) A cheap compact, with three kids and a rescued black Lab, was out of the question. And they couldn’t wrap their heads around the image of themselves at the helm of a minivan. To be a part of their close-knit circle of friends, all of whom have at least one toe dipped in the alternative art scene in Williamsburg, meant upholding a certain level of épater-le-bourgeois aesthetics. If a minivan or even a station wagon could have been done ironically, believe her, it would have.

Traffic in front of the Microbus has halted, an admixture of the normal clogged arteries at the Charles River crossings during rush hour compounded by the arterial plaque of reunion weekend attendees, those thousands of additional vehicles that appear every June like clockwork, loaded up with alumni families and faded memories, the latter triggered out of dormancy by the sight of the crimson cupola of Dunster House or the golden dome of Adams House or the Eliot House clock tower, such that any one of the drivers blocking Addison’s path to Harvard Square might be thinking, as Addison is right now (catching a glimpse of the nondescript window on the sixth floor of that disaster of a modernist building that is Mather House),
There, right there: That’s where I first fucked her.

No, that wasn’t a typo. Prior to marrying Gunner, Addison spent almost two years in a relationship with a woman. This, she likes to remind everyone, was before “Girls Gone Wild,” before the acronym LUG (“lesbian until graduation”) had even debuted in the
Times
, so she’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t accuse her of following a trend, okay?

If anything, Addison has come to realize, thanks to a cut-rate Jungian who came highly recommended, Bennie was just one more way—like the roommates she wound up choosing—she’d been trying to shake off her pedigree, to prove to herself and to others that she had more depth and facets than her staid history and prep school diploma would suggest. Addison may have been one of the eighth generation of Hunts to matriculate from Harvard, but she would be the first not to heed the siren call of Wall Street. For one, she had no facility with numbers. For another, she’d seen what Wall Street had done to her father. He, too, had been enamored of the stroke of fresh Golden’s on canvas from the moment he could hold a paintbrush, but he’d tossed his wooden box of acrylics into the back of the closet of his Park Avenue duplex—where it gathered dust until Addison happened upon it one day during a game of hide-and-seek—because that’s what Hunts did: They subsumed themselves into their Brooks Brothers suits. The cirrhosis that killed him in his early fifties, when Addison was just a sophomore in college, was no act of God. It was an act, every glass-tinkling night, of desperation.

Bennie was the first person in her life to make that suggestion. Out loud, at least, and to Addison’s face. And though both Bennie and her pronoun were aberrations in the arc of Addison’s sexual history, what the two had together—although Addison would only be able to understand this in retrospect, per the cut-rate Jungian—was love.

“Is Bennie coming this weekend?” Gunner asks. He’s been hearing about this mythical creature, Bennie Watanabe, ever since he and Addison bumped into each other that summer at a seaside taverna in Eressos, where Addison had gone with some vague and mostly unrealized notion of studying the poems of Sappho in their place and language of origin as inspiration for a series of abstract studies of the Isle of Lesvos she never ended up finishing, and Gunner had retreated to start what would become, ten years later, his first and thus far only published novel, a coming-of-age tale that would feature, after his run-in with Addison, a girlfriend/muse from a socially prominent family who dabbles in bisexuality with a Japanese American lesbian before marrying her old boyfriend from prep school following their chance encounter at a taverna in the Lesvos city of Molyvos (because something had to be fictionalized, and it had a picturesque port he could describe, knowing boats as he did, in intimate, Moby Dick-like detail).

The Walls of St. Paul’s
had been sufficiently well received—especially the boat parts, which the
New York Times
critic, an aquatic enthusiast himself, dubbed “Melvillean”—that Gunner was paralyzed by a decade-long writer’s block. Though publicly he’s always insisted that Tilly, his protagonist’s self-delusional, bisexual wife, is nothing like Addison, privately Addison knows that the vaguely unflattering, unhinged portrayal of their early years together is a roman à clef in every sense of the phrase except for the inventively imagined scenes of three-way sex among the protagonist, his wife, and the random assortment of foreign women they picked up along the way during their first year of marriage, which was spent, as Addison and Gunner’s had been, backpacking around the globe. For as much as Gunner had begged his new bride to bring another woman into their bed, Addison did not share this same fantasy, and, in fact, she resented her husband’s preconceptions that such a scenario was possible. Bennie was an anomaly, she kept telling him. A momentary slip of the self.

“So what exactly is your regular self when it comes to sex?” Gunner recently asked, after Addison once again claimed exhaustion as an excuse against her husband’s amorous onslaught.

“I’m just tired, okay? I deal with three kids and their endless pits of need all afternoon while you’re off in Dumbo in your ‘garret’ writing the great American novel, and my paints go untouched. I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood.”

“You’re
never
in the mood,” said Gunner, sulking. “We need to talk about this, Ad. It’s affecting my work.”

Don’t you fucking blame me, she thought. And while we’re on the topic, what about
my
work? But wanting to avoid conflict at such a late hour, she said only, “Yes, sure, okay,” and kissed his forehead. “Let’s talk about this when I’m more rested. I’m sorry, I really am. When you finish your novel and sell it, maybe we can use some of the money to go away, just the two of us.”

“That’d be great,” his voice said, though the rest of him seemed less convinced.

And another night of lovemaking was once again averted.

It’s been a year—no, fourteen months—Addison figures, since they’ve had sex. All right, maybe fifteen or sixteen. She’s kind of lost track. She understands this must be frustrating for her husband, but she can’t will herself to feel passion where none lingers. She tells herself it’s all because of him—his lack of a successful follow-up, his moping around feeling sorry for himself, his sullen moodiness, his financial impotence. But at night, when she finds quiet moments alone for release, it’s images of ripe breasts and swollen vulvas that send her over the edge.

“Oh, please, I’m as heterosexual as they come, and I have an entire encyclopedia of breasts and va-jay-jays in my head,” her friend Liesl recently told her when Addison wondered aloud, over a Red Stripe, whether her pregame masturbatory fantasies were within the realm of heterosexually normal. “There’s no such thing as ‘normal’ when it comes to sex. You of all people should know that.”

“But do you fantasize about other stuff, too?” Addison wondered. “You know, besides the lady parts.”

“You mean like the scene where I’m lying on the pool table at a frat house? Or where I’m Kate Winslet on the
Titanic
, being sketched by Leonardo DiCaprio?”

“See? I don’t have any stuff like that,” Addison lamented.

“Oh, please,” Liesl said, laughing. “You’re welcome to borrow mine.”

But later that night, when she tried to conjure the pool table scene, the undergrad boys turned into undergrad girls. And on the
Titanic
she herself was being sketched by Kate Winslet.

“I have no idea if Bennie’s coming,” she now tells Gunner, “although she did just send me a friend request on Facebook.”

“Really? What’d she say?”

“Nothing.”

No matter how many times her kids have made fun of her for feeling insulted by friend requests made without even an intimation of a greeting—a “Hello there!” or “Long time no see!”—Addison is pretty sure she’ll never get used to the idea that modern online social interaction completely eschews the laws of common courtesy, never mind dilutes, forever, the meaning of the word
friend.
Her fourteen-year-old daughter has 789 “friends.” 789 friends! What can that even mean when Addison, with forty-two years of nonvirtual social interaction under her belt, has 139 “friends,” all of whom sought her out like cancer cells in search of a new blood supply from the minute she created a login and a password, half of whom she only vaguely remembers, if at all, from this or that era of her life?

Sure, anyone who showed up in college with a typewriter, as she did, then wound up purchasing one of those pathetically quick-to-crash first Macs, was just finding her sea legs in the world of online social networking, at first to monitor her still-technically-too-young-to-join-Facebook children’s profiles, then because, once ensconced and entrapped, it felt mildly comforting to reconnect with those who’d disappeared from one’s Filofax-era life. Even if reconnecting meant simply scrolling down an endless stream of mundanities—Joe Blow has the flu; Jane Doe is contemplating eating the last Girl Scout cookie—and wracking one’s brain to come up with a comeback that was both restrainedly witty and seemingly effortlessly so. “Blow, Joe, Blow!” “Courage, Jane.”

When Bennie’s message-free friend request suddenly appeared on Addison’s screen, attached to a profile photo containing Bennie, her children, and her partner, Katrina Zucherbrot—aka Zeus, the German-born artist whose ten-foot-tall sculpture of a phallic vagina had recently been added to the permanent collection at the Whitney—Addison felt slight tinges of nostalgia (for time past), jealousy (over Zeus’s success), and curiosity (to check out Bennie’s photos), but she was otherwise unmoved. On the other hand she’d read, with breath-accelerating, body-chemical-changing fascination, all about Bennie and Zeus and their Petri-dish progeny five years earlier, in the Fifteenth Anniversary Report, wherein Bennie had described, in raw detail, how each partner had given birth to one child using sperm from the other’s brother. And she’d been riveted by the recent Twentieth Anniversary red book, in which Bennie announced her intentions to retire from Google at the end of 2009 to begin the next phase of her life, in which she planned to start a foundation that would give scholarships to bullied gay teens and fight for the right of gay marriage.

Clicking through Bennie’s photo albums on Facebook had been voyeuristically interesting, to be sure, but the act lacked both the context and enlightenment that Bennie’s narratives were able to offer. Addison was struck only by the universality of the visual banality therein: Here’s the happy family on vacation at the beach; and here they are opening presents on Christmas; and oh, look, here they all are standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate with Zeus’s parents.

“That’s bullshit!” Bennie had hurled at her, that frigid January of their senior year, just after finals, when Addison abruptly broke off the relationship. “You’ve never heard of a turkey baster?”

Addison had come to Bennie’s spartan room in Mather House, dry eyed and rational, to explain that as much as she’d enjoyed the nearly two years they’d spent together as a couple, as much as she’d learned about herself and about her body’s ability both to give and receive pleasure—skills she would, she assured Bennie, touching her lover’s forearm, treasure forever—she’d decided that she simply couldn’t wrap her head around the concept of spending the rest of her life with a woman. “I mean, experimenting in college is one thing, but I want to have kids one day,” she said. “A normal family.”

Hence Bennie’s initial comment about the turkey baster, followed by more colorful castigations after Addison admitted to having joined the mile-high club with her male seatmate on the Delta shuttle home from break. “You bitch!” Bennie wailed. “You fucking two-faced, dick-sucking bitch! And if you touch my arm one more time in that patronizing way I will deck you.” Which was soon followed by: “And what the hell do you mean by ‘experimenting,’ you entitled piece of shit? What happened to ‘
I’m in this for real, Bennie, I promise. You’re my soul mate. My snuggle bunny. I want to make love to you forever
’? Jesus fucking Christ, Ad, I’m not some tab of acid you ate in prep school to gain ‘experience’ or cool points. I’m not your Dead show phase or a stranger you fuck in an airplane restroom because
it’s on your list of things to do
. I’m a person! I have feelings! And up until five minutes ago, I was stupid enough to have given you the benefit of the doubt that you were an actual human being with feelings, too.”