The Red Book (23 page)

“The simple one.”

“Then, no, I did not become a poet. I own a car dealership.”

“That’s so sad,” says Lytton. “What about you, Mia. Did you become an actress?”

Mia thinks of all the times she’s ever answered “actor” when she’s asked what she does for a living. Now, she realizes, is not the time to do so. “No,” she says. “I tried, but no. I pretty much just keep the home running and take care of my kids.”

“What a fucking joke,” says Lytton, again into his lap, and so softly that each of them tries to convince themselves he hasn’t said it, isn’t going there. Now he looks up at Mia, accusatorily, leaving no doubt as to his feelings. “You were so good. I can still remember you in that play about the housewife who goes into debt.”

“
A Doll’s House
,” says Mia.

“Exactly. When you slammed that door at the end, man, that was a scene I’ll never forget. I remember thinking, fuck, I wish my mother were here to see this.” He turns to George. “And you. All those hours you spent, hunched over the dictionary, hunting for obscure words, crafting perfect phrases that made me cry. You just . . . stopped doing that? What the hell’s wrong with you? All of you! You went to Harvard, for fuck’s sake! You had every opportunity in the world laid out on a silver platter at your goddamned feet. You’ve got intact minds. Impulse control. You can get out of bed every morning without the voices in your head telling you to kill squirrels or rape virgins. What the hell’s keeping you two from doing what you’re meant to do, huh? Look at Clay. He followed his dreams. Good for you, Clay. Really, I mean that. High five.” He sticks out his hand for Clay to slap, but Clay is—they all are—too shocked to move. “You’re a tribute to your alma mater. Although I’ll always wonder what you could have done on Broadway, but still, you’re following the dream, and that’s worth something. I mean, holy shit, if I could be healthy for one day, just one fucking day, do you know what I’d do?” He pauses, glancing around the tent now at all that lost potential, all that promise now shrouded in middle-aged fat and khaki. “I’d be sitting in a lab, with my eye glued to a microscope, trying to improve the world just one tiny bit. I was going to find a cure for cancer. Or AIDS. Or multiple sclerosis or any one of a thousand ailments that fucks up human lives. That’s what I wanted to do, ever since I was a little kid. To cure people of their misery. And I used to be more than smart enough to do it, and you know that, George, you know it. Who always helped you with your science homework, huh? Who taught you about nucleic acids and dendrites and black holes and punctuated equilibrium, huh? Ironic, isn’t it? Because now I’m stuck inside this fucking head of mine, wishing someone else was sitting in a lab, trying to come up with a cure for me.

“You know what they engraved on the wall of my high school? It was a quote by Horace Mann, and they must have it tattooed on my skull as well, because I see those words every goddamned day of my pathetic, bullshit life. ‘Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity’ it said. Be
ashamed
to die. Me, I like to think I have an excuse. If I die tomorrow, I can just say to God, fuck you for doing what he did to me, not letting me keep up with my end of life’s bargain. You? You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Cop-outs, all of you. Except you, Clay. High five.” He holds up his hand again for Clay to hit it, but Clay pauses just long enough to infuriate Lytton, who takes his suspended, un-high-fived hand and uses it to flip the table violently onto its side. Plates, plastic utensils, soda cans, a digital camera, someone’s iPhone, and a bunch of half-eaten hot dog buns and half-gnawed chicken bones go flying, distracting the attention of nearly the entire tent. All gossiping stops. Children start asking questions of their parents. Those who once knew Lytton, before he grew the scraggly beard and started talking to himself, strain to place a name with the face.

“Is that . . . Lytton Hepworth?” one former classmate whispers to another.

“Nah,” says the other. “Can’t be. Must be some homeless guy who just got lost.”

And with that, Lytton Hepworth turns on his worn heels and walks away.

For a moment his three former classmates stand mutely, stunned, each wondering what—if anything—to say. Mia picks up Sarah’s digital camera off the floor, the one she uses to scrapbook, and hands it to George for safekeeping. Clay finally breaks the silence with an “Okay, so that’s something you don’t get to see every day either.”

“I think I would have preferred a chocolate-covered penis,” says Mia.

“Ditto,” says George. Then he turns to Clay. “Don’t get any ideas.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me,” says Clay. “I got all the penis I can handle.” He stares back down at the turned-over table, still processing the outburst. “You gotta admit, that was pretty great theater. Speaking of which, Mia, you still up for a quick fly-by visit to the Loeb? I’m dying to get over there before we leave tomorrow.”

“Nothing right now would make me happier,” says Mia, feeling suddenly desperate to revisit the place where she once shined. She links her arm into Clay’s.

“George? You feel like joining?” says Clay, knowing the answer but feeling obligated to extend the invitation anyway.

“Nah, that’s okay,” says George. “I’ll just go find a piece a rope and hang myself.” He delivers this last part deadpan, with a wink, even though part of him is so stung by Lytton’s diatribe, he’ll spend the next two weeks trying, and failing, to translate his ambivalence into verse.

•  •  •

Lodge Waldman was
not surprised when Jane Streeter called him, out of the blue, to ask if she could come see him. In one sense, he’d been expecting her call for years. But in quite another, the fact of her blushing arrival in his office, the effect of her finally sitting across from him, a middle-aged woman now, with faint lines around her eyes and her own daughter ensconced with a Pinocchio video in the waiting room, has rustled up so many simultaneously conflicting emotions, he’s having a hard time sorting and naming them. Not surprise, no, but some other buzzy, dopamine-soaked sensation resembling anxiety, mixed with love, and also grief, and also relief, all braided together into leather reins that yank him back, almost violently, to a cascade of images starring Jane’s mother, Claire: her younger, taut body on the fold-out couch in his old office, the outline of her breasts phosphorescent with afternoon sunlight; her softer middle-aged body, adrift on its widow’s bed, uninhibited and often adamant in its ravenous needs and desires; her cancer-ravaged older body, all sharp angles and ropey veins, wanting nothing more than a gentle touch, the repetitive caress of a windshield-wiper thumb. “So you found the letter, then?” he says to Jane, for want of a better opening.

“I did,” she says.

“I kind of begged your mother to get rid of it, but she pulled a Claire and—”

“Listened to you intently, but did exactly what she wanted anyway?”

Lodge smiles. “You do know your mother.”

“I thought I did.” Jane stares out the window of Lodge’s office at the new leaves on his maple tree, still translucent. She imagines them red. Then brown. Then gone. “I’m glad she kept the letter. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to know my mother completely?”

“That was her exact response. That you’d want to know her.”

“And what was your response to her response?”

“That you already knew her. Look, there’s a reason there’s a door on the master bedroom. The facts and details of your mother’s private life had no bearing on the truth of her life, or on the bond you two shared.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that.” Her eye catches on the spine of a book on his shelf:
Fetish and the Modern Man
. A friend in Paris recently separated from her husband over his inability to give up bondage. Jane was floored when the woman confessed this; she simply couldn’t imagine the husband, a quiet and thoughtful neurosurgeon, tying his wife, night after night, to the bed.

Perhaps her problem, apart from a certain blindness to reality, Jane thinks, is a simple failure of the imagination. And yet she had no trouble at all, out there by the moon bounce, picturing Hervé and Ellen going at it. In fact, it was this image of the two of them, naked, fucking—an image she never actually saw with her own eyes but was nevertheless able to project onto her mind’s eye as clearly as if she’d been there in the room—that made her flee from the picnic and has been haunting her ever since.

“What my mother did, what you two did together,” she continues, “seems completely out of character. Or at least out of the character I knew. It changes my entire perception of her.”

“Well, if you really think about it—about your mother’s exuberance, say, or her heart—it shouldn’t, but I understand why you would think it would. That’s what makes morality both relative and interesting.” He leans back in his chair and fiddles with a paper clip.

“I wouldn’t necessarily use the word
morality
here.”

“Oh? What word would you use?” Now he’s back at the desk, leaning in. He lets the paper clip drop.

“I don’t know. Immorality?”

Lodge nods his head into his tented fingers, ever the shrink, listening for dropped crumbs, clues.

“I’m sorry,” says Jane. “That came out wrong.” She pauses to gather her thoughts. “Look, I’m not here to cast stones. I just . . . want to know my mother better. Okay?”

“Of course okay. So. What would you like to know?”

“Everything,” says Jane. Did they do it in this room? she wonders. In hotels, cars, public parks? Where does one carry on an affair exactly?

“That’s a pretty big umbrella. Can you break it down into smaller pieces?”

“Fine. Here, in no particular order, are the questions I’d like answered.” Jane pulls out a reporter’s notebook from her purse, clears her throat, and reads down a list she composed while Sophie was trying on souvenir sweatshirts. “How did your affair with my mother begin? How did you react when you read her letter? What happened after my dad died, did you start seeing one another again? If not, why didn’t you two wind up together after Dad was no longer in the picture? Did you love her? Did she love you? When was the last time you spoke to her? Did your wife ever find out? What about your kids?” Now Jane looks up from her notebook. “I can keep going, if you’d like.”

Lodge smiles. “No, that’s okay. I get it.” Jane really is her mother’s daughter, he thinks, despite their absence of genetic ties. He is reminded of her dogged pursuit of facts at all costs, as Claire once described her to him, both proudly and warily, the day the Pulitzers were announced. Jane’s prize-winning series had been about a girls’ school in Kandahar, illegal under the Taliban but functioning nonetheless, in a private home where the girls pretended to spend their hours learning to weave and bake nan, to hide the fact that they were actually learning to read books and parse the sentences of Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, James Joyce. Then the sad aftermath, when one of the braver teachers, whom Jane was extremely careful not to identify by face or name, was nevertheless pinpointed as the author of the infamous and oft-republished quote: “For too long, we have been silenced, whether through lack of education, fear of violence, rape. We do not care what ridiculous organs or laws these men try to force down our throats. We will not be gagged by them.” As Lodge remembers, a week after these words hit the newsstand, the teacher was stoned to death.

He’s always wanted to ask Jane whether she thought about the consequences of using that quote before submitting her story. But now, he thinks, is not really the time or venue in which to do so.

It’s hardly ever truth
or
consequences, he tells his patients, especially those who grew up in that TV era and get the reference. It’s usually truth
then
consequences, as many a politician has found out the hard way. Not every statement that erupts from one’s mouth should be printed. Not every thought need be turned into language. Not every complaint should be levied out loud. Not every secret demands revelation, especially if the impulse to tell arises solely out of a desire for guilt expiation. He’s seen perfectly good marriages crumble under the weight of unnecessary confession. He advises discretion, whenever feasible.

But in this particular instance, with Jane seated directly in front of him, asking point-blank for information about his relationship with her mother, the lie of omission would be a type of withholding bordering on callous. And so, with a sigh, he begins. “Your mother and I, as you know, were colleagues,” he says. “Our old offices were down the hall from one another, and sometimes we’d take our lunch break at the same time. Both of us had patients between noon and two
P.M.
—these were popular hours for all those professionals who could only get out during their lunch periods—so by the time we’d wind up ordering our sandwiches in the diner downstairs, we were famished.

“Your mom almost always had a grilled cheese with tomato on toasted rye, two pickles on the side, and an apple juice. An apple juice! As if she were still a little kid in her elementary school lunchroom. I don’t know why, but I just loved that about her.”

“Me, too,” says Jane, the smell of the apple juice and cookies her mother left out for her after school, whether she had office hours or not, almost palpable.

“Anyway, our conversations veered almost immediately from collegial to intimate, even before your father left for Vietnam. We just, I don’t know, got along. Understood one another on this deep, underlying level. Had a conversational shorthand from the start. Both of us were going through various marital issues at the time—hers less severe than mine, but still, there were issues, like I said, even before your dad left. Those lunches, at least for me, were the only thing that got me through that period, and I know if your mother were sitting here right now she’d say the same thing. We were each other’s life rafts. The physical intimacy became just an extension of that, and I know that sounds completely self-justifying, but we could no more stay away from one another than a thirsty person can keep himself from drinking. What’s important for you to understand is that it wasn’t just a physical attraction between us, although of course there was that. Attraction on its own I could have handled. Or at least sublimated. This was love. And it felt more powerful than either of us or our marriages, which is why I proposed to your mother and why she, rejecting my proposal for her own various—although I felt at the time misguided—reasons, ultimately had to move her office across town just to put a physical barrier between us . . .”