The Red Book (22 page)

“There’s no shame in admitting your pain,” said the doctor, trying to reason with her.

“I’m
fine
,” said Jane.

She searches the horizon for a place—anyplace—to exhale her pent-up fumes. The few reunion-goers who happen to be standing in Jane’s direct path assume, from the look of shock on the mother’s face and the speed with which she runs, cradling such a large, limby child, that the girl must be hurt. They immediately and instinctively give Jane wide berth. “You okay?” one of them shouts. “Can I call an ambulance?” Jane nearly laughs at the idea of an ambulance offering her succor. “No, no, I’m fine,” she shouts over her shoulder, her biggest lie to date
because I don’t cheat and I don’t lie!
she thinks, running past a large sign pointing the way to the class of 2004’s picnic, emblazoned with the Harvard seal, Veritas. Truth: the temple at which she has always worshipped with a fealty bordering on zealotry. Could she be its sole remaining congregant, its last loyal supplicant? She spots an open gate underneath the Harvard stadium and slips inside the cool shade, her body shaking.

In the safety of the dark, under the large archway, she places Sophie gently on the ground, her own back against a dank wall, then she leans over her stomach, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, in hopes of curbing the hyperventilating. She tries to focus on her surroundings, to bring herself back into the present. She spots a filthy Utz potato chip bag, ripped of its contents long ago; a dirty sneaker print on a program from the 2008 Harvard/Yale game; a plastic Coke bottle housing an old cigarette butt. The past is everywhere, she thinks. You can’t escape it. Though she hasn’t smoked since she was pregnant with Sophie, she would kill for a cigarette right now.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Sophie says, and if Jane is holding it together at all, she is doing so now only for the sake of her child.

“Nothing, sweetie. It’s silly really. Remember when you got bronchitis, and you had to use that nebulizer to breathe?”
Breathe!
she tells herself. One breath after the other. Nice and steady. Pull yourself together.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m feeling a little bit like that right now. Out of breath, okay?”

“Okay,” says Sophie, still looking somewhat concerned. “Do you need a nebulizer?”

No, thinks Jane. I need a fucking tranquilizer. Or a lobotomizer. I need some fertilizer with a large side of nitromethane. I need a scrutinizer: someone to look at my life and dig under the veneer of normalcy to expose what’s really going on, because clearly I’ve been falling down on the job
for years
. I need, it suddenly hits her, a sympathizer. “I have to make a quick phone call, and then I’ll take you over to the Coop to buy you that Harvard sweatshirt I promised, okay?”

“Okay. And we’ll get one for Papi, too?” Sophie had begun calling Bruno Papi, to differentiate him from Hervé, whom she called Papa, during Jane’s frequent absences to care for her mother. And in every way that counts, except biologically and legally, Bruno
is
her father. In fact, he is probably a better father to Sophie than Hervé could have ever been. And it’s about time, Jane thinks, she finally laid to rest not only the ghost of Hervé but the phantom of his perfection. Of anyone’s perfection.

“Sure. We’ll get one for Papi as well. He wanted a blue one, right?”

“Non, gris.”
Sophie was constantly slipping back and forth from English to French whenever the topic turned to her beloved Papi.

“Gray? You sure?”

“Absolument.”

“Fine, gray it is.” Jane takes her cell phone. Starts to dial 911 before remembering it’s 411 she actually needs. “Cambridge, Massachusetts,” she says, speaking slowly into the voice-recognition software, somewhere in the ether. “The phone number please for a Dr. Lodge Waldman. That’s
W
-
A
-
L
-
D
-
M
-
A
-
N
.”

•  •  •

After all six
Zanes have pushed down paper plates into overflowing bins, and Zoe has fallen into a postsuckling stupor in her stroller, Jonathan volunteers to take the kids into Harvard Square so Mia can catch up with her friends in peace. Max, whose science fair project on melatonin and sleep cycles won him third place in the California Intel Science Talent Search, will be applying to Harvard in a few months, and he wants a chance to stroll through the Science Center labs unencumbered—Jonathan explains this with a wink to the assembled group—by a mother who can’t tell her Ohms from her oms.

“Look who’s talking,” says Mia.

“I know,” says Jonathan. “How the hell did you and I make a kid who’s into science?” He leaves Mia sitting at a chicken-bone-strewn, fruit-punch-stained table in the company of Clover, who said it’s so weird, she went to get a water for Jane and a Popsicle for Sophie, but when she got back to the moon bounce, they’d vanished; George Crowley, who lived across the hall from Mia and her roommates’ Adams House A-entry suite and had once sold one of his poems to the
New Yorker
but now sells Subarus to Rhode Island; George’s wife, Sarah, who will not shut up about scrapbooking; Lytton Hepworth, George Crowley’s roommate, with whom none of them have exchanged more than a few sentences (though not for lack of trying) during the twenty years-plus he’s been doing battle with schizophrenia, but who nevertheless showed up at the reunion picnic on a whim after George found him playing three simultaneous games of chess outside Au Bon Pain, and Lytton realized, to his surprise, that his most recent cocktail of meds seemed to be working well enough for him to engage in an actual conversation with an old friend; and Mia’s once-boyfriend Clay Collins, who played Trigorin to her Nina in
The Seagull
and who is today, though it’s hard for his classmates to fathom the unfairness of genetics, even more handsome, winsome, and everything-else-some than he’d been back in college, when he was trying to cure himself of his yen for men by serially dating female cast members who showed interest. (There were, Clay had been surprised to realize, many a young woman who wanted to date a man who listened to her stories, was raised as a southern gentleman, had a knack for finding the perfect suede jacket in a vintage clothing store, and spent enough hours pirouetting in a dance studio to have the abs of the Calvin Klein models after whom he secretly lusted.)

“I mean, you would not
believe
the things you can do with a glue gun, some felt, and a little lace,” Sarah drones on, which causes Clay to choke bitchily on his Diet Coke.

“Buttercup,” he says, his southern twang still raw if somewhat tempered by two decades in northern climes, “whatever you’re doing with your scrapbookin’ lady friends in Pawtucket, trust me, there’s a tranny right now in New York City who is making things with a glue gun and felt you would never in a million years
dream
possible.”

The rest of the group laughs, grateful that Clay has taken the lead to put a halt to Sarah’s endless, pointless monologue, but Sarah takes his statement at face value. “Really?” she says, sounding intrigued. “Like what kinds of things?”

Mia rolls her eyes at Clover, who looks at her watch and pretends to have a hair appointment in Harvard Square. “Oh my, will you look at the time?” she says. “It’s just flying by. Gotta run! I’ll see you all tonight.” And like that, she kisses Mia good-bye on each cheek, pulls out her BlackBerry, pretends to look up an address, and is gone. (1 missed call, she sees on the screen. Her heart drops into her stomach at the sight of her husband’s name, as she flashes back to Bucky’s cock thrusting inside her. She decides to find a quiet place to compartmentalize and call Danny back.)

“Like I was at Jackie 60 for a New Year’s Eve party years ago, back when I lived in New York,” Clay says to Sarah, “and the Meatpacking District actually smelled of raw meat and dried spunk. So anyway this pre-op transvestite had stuck his penis through a bunch of petals he’d fashioned out of chicken wire and orange felt, to make it stick out in the middle like one of the stamens of a tiger lily.”

“Oh?” says Sarah, trying and failing to not look shocked. “Now that’s something you don’t see every day.”

“No, darlin’, you sure don’t. Unfortunately, he had to be taken to the hospital afterward when he decided to glue-gun some Nestlé Quik to the tip of his dick, and wouldn’t you know it, the dang glue got stuck. Wouldn’t come off.”

“Oh my God,” Sarah says. “What was he thinking?”

“He was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if the tip of my dick looked like pollen.”

Lytton, who has remained stonily silent, clamps his lips between his teeth, as if to keep himself from laughing, and stares down into his lap at the paper napkin he’s shredded.

“Was he wearing anything else?” says Sarah.

“Nope, not a stitch. Just the dick flower.”

Sarah fiddles with the collar on her pink oxford blouse. “He must have been pretty cold, considering it was New Year’s Eve.” Then she turns to her husband. “Sweetheart, have you seen the kids lately? I think I’ll go check up on them.” She quickly excuses herself from the table.

“Sorry, George, didn’t mean to chase your wife away,” says Clay, feeling mildly contrite. Sometimes he just can’t help himself. But really, she had it coming.

“No worries,” says George, clearing his throat, knowing that either later today or sometime in the near future, Sarah will suddenly drop whatever it is she’s doing to remark that the gay man at the reunion picnic with the story about the glue-gunned penis was
so rude
. Then she’ll either get angry at George for not defending her or she’ll make up some other excuse as to why she’d rather not have sex. “So tell me about your theater group,” George says, purposely changing the subject. “I mean, aside from what I read in the red book, which, by the way, I thought was just great, Clay, just great, and I’m sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Well, thank you, George,” says Clay, “but his death was a long time comin’, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, tell us about your theater,” says Mia. What she wants to ask is,
How does anyone earn a living running a nonprofit theater group
? What comes out is, “How did it all come about?”

So Clay tells the assembled group about the Fourth Wallers, how they started in an abandoned space with no walls, let alone three, hence the name; how they struggled for years to make a name for themselves, with everyone working as waiters and bartenders and, in one case, as an escort on the side; how they were able to get the old Tower Records building for a song, but then everyone had to help do the renovations with their own hands; how that bonded them even closer together; how they used to rely on ticket sales and corporate sponsorship from local companies like Microsoft and Amazon to make ends meet, but now, with the recession, they’re thinking about putting all of their fund-raising efforts into courting individual donors; how they have a regular troupe of players, directors, and playwrights, who get paid nominal stipends, but most of the troupe, except for Clay and a few others, have day jobs to bridge the financial gaps. “The one perk we do offer all of our actors is health insurance,” he says proudly. “But it costs us. Dearly. I’m waiting for Obama to get his butt in gear on that front.”

“Tell me about it,” pipes up Lytton, for the first time since having sat down at the table, addressing no one in particular and staring off into the mid-distance. His mother, who named him for Lytton Strachey, still shells out thousands of her late husband’s real-estate-generated dollars each quarter, both to the health insurance companies and to three shrinks—one to treat his illness, one with whom he talks five times a week, the third who is constantly tweaking his cocktail of medications, depending upon his symptoms—to keep her forty-two-year-old schizophrenic offspring from offing himself.

The rest of them wait several long seconds for Lytton to elaborate. When he doesn’t, Mia picks up the thread. “How are you doing these days, Lytton?” she says, placing her hand on his, which he immediately removes. “Medically, I mean.” The qualifier is redundant, as Lytton hasn’t been able to hold down either a steady job or a love relationship ever, no matter how many drugs are pumped into him. She remembers when Lytton invited her to shoot pool at the Spee Club one night their senior year, during the start of what his shrinks would later pinpoint as the first signs of his mental decline. She was about to excuse herself from the billiard room, whispering into his ear something benign like, “I’m going to the bathroom, Lytton, I’ll be right back”—she doesn’t remember the exact words she used—but what she does remember, nearly word for word, was his response, which Lytton bellowed, seemingly loud enough to shake the portraits of dead Spee men off the wall, “Mia! Please! Keep your excremental undertakings to yourself ! I loathe being reminded of the putrid peregrinations of human digestion. All that shit and piss. What a revolting system. And please don’t come back here unless you’ve thoroughly washed your hands. None of us needs E. coli on top of chlamydia and herpes.”

The dozen or so other club members in the room that night lost it, some of them actually clutching their stomachs and falling on the ground or onto various leather sofas from laughing so hard, all of them assuming Lytton was either drunk or high or making a deadpan joke. Only Mia had seen the darkness in his eyes, his genuine disgust at the idea of human effluence.

“How am I doing,” he speaks into his lap in a monotone, repeating Mia’s question as a statement. Then, for the first time that afternoon, he looks straight into Mia’s eyes. “Surviving,” he says, without even the hint of a smile to temper it.

“That’s better than the converse,” says George, trying to keep it light.

“I’m not so sure,” says Lytton, now looking searingly into the eyes of his former roommate. “Did you ever become a poet, George? Please tell me you became a poet. I need to hear that right now.”

“Well, Lytton, do you want the simple answer or the complicated answer?”