The Red Book (33 page)

“You’re joking.”

“Why would I joke about this?”

“Am I really that much of a killjoy that my own mother had to keep a secret from me?”

“What is this word,
killjoy
?”

“That one you can translate directly. A killer of joy.”

“Yes. Sometimes you do this. Kill the joy. But this is of no worry of me. I love every part of you. Even the part that shakes her finger no-no-no.” He takes Jane’s small hand in his and kisses her fingers. “Please, Jane. Do not kill the joy because I make a fuck-up.”

“No, you don’t ‘make’ a fuck-up. You fuck up.”

“Oh, but I did. I make an immense fuck-up.”

“Fine. Okay. You
made
—past tense—an immense fuck-up.” She rubs his palm with her thumb. “Speaking of which, I met this woman today, Ellen Grandy . . .”

“Wait, I know this name,” says Bruno, screwing up his face trying to place it. “
Ah,
oui.
She is the doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, yes?”

“Was.”

“Huh?”

“She
was
a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières. Now she works in private practice here in the States, but wait, how do you know her name? Did you edit a story on her or something?”

“No,” says Bruno, suddenly feeling entrapped, once again, by the lie of omission. No more, he thinks. He will be as honest as he can without compromising Hervé’s confession. “She was an ancient friend of Hervé’s.”

“Old, you mean.”

“No, she must be only, I do not know, in her early forties? Your age, I think. This is not old.”

“No, I meant old as in not ancient. We don’t say ‘ancient friend’ in English. She was his
old
friend. And she was more than that, is what I actually found out. She had an affair with him. Can you believe it?”

Bruno shrugs. “Yes, of course I can believe this.” He feels relieved, like when a blocked ear finally pops as the plane soars skyward.

Jane is floored by Bruno’s lack of reaction to the news. Which could only mean . . . “Wait. So you
knew
about Ellen?”

“Yes, for a long time.”

“So what the fuck, Bruno? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“To you?”

“Yes, to me? Who else would I be talking about?”

“Wait, is it not
whom
else?
Whom
else would I be talking about?”

“Bruno! Who, whom, whatever! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why would I tell you such a thing? You were married to him. He tell me this in confidence many years ago. Then, when he die, I see no point in killing him twice. It would only cause you hurt.”

Jane’s head feels heavy with dissonance, discovery. “But I was screaming at you when I found that e-mail! Saying Hervé would have never cheated on me! You didn’t once consider setting me straight, if only to put yourself in a better light?”

Bruno seems shocked that Jane would even consider he could do such a thing. “No. Never. I made a promise to Hervé to rest silent, and I keep it.”

“Wow.” Jane contemplates the enormity of this omission. She, like Bruno, is often the trusted friend in whom others confide, but given the same set of circumstances—the same accusations from a partner, the same ill-informed lionizations of the deceased—she’s not sure she would have had the same moral rectitude and dutiful devotion to the kept secret as Bruno to let the myth stand. Morality, in her mind, has always wanted to be a binary entity—good on one side, bad on the other, sturdy guardrails between the two marked by well-lit signs—when, in reality, the moral path rarely offers itself up so tidily. Most of the time, trying to do the right thing feels much more slippery, haphazard, and comical, like crawling around on the bathroom floor with two playing cards, trying to retrieve drops of mercury from a broken thermometer.

Truisms her younger self held so dear have not held up to the scrutiny of time and circumstance. Military intervention is always wrong, she was convinced—she even wrote her senior thesis on it, with regard to Vietnam—until she saw what was happening on the ground in Kosovo. Lying is bad, she always thought, until her mother lay on her deathbed, fretting over the way she must appear to the steady stream of visitors who kept showing up with roast chickens and pies.

“Don’t be silly, Mom,” Jane would say. “You look great.” Claire knew she was lying. Jane knew Claire knew she was lying. But they both kept up the pretense because the truth—that her mother looked like a skeleton stretched with a thin canvas of skin—was too painful. By the end, it became a private joke between them. A guest would ring the doorbell, Claire would say, “How do I look?” and Jane would reply, cheerily, “Breathtaking.” It wasn’t a lie exactly—there is a weird, undeniable splendor in the face of the doomed—but the word and its verb root allowed them the open-to-interpretation elasticity that less malleable adjectives (
beautiful
,
lovely
) could not provide. Claire did cause those who showed up at her deathbed to lose their breath, gasp. Just not in the usual manner.

Sophie, awakened by the bass undertones of Bruno’s voice, bounds into the entryway, the back hem of her nightgown fluttering behind her calves. “Papi!” she says, leaping into his arms, squishing herself expertly between Bruno and Jane.

“Oh my little cabbage,” he says, kissing her forehead, “what are you doing on the outside of bed?”

“What are
you
doing speaking English?” she says, looking at him askance.

“Practicing. You will to help your Papi?”

“Okay,” she says, with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “But you’re going to have to work really hard. No one says ‘little cabbage’ in English. That’s just silly. And they also don’t say ‘on the outside of bed.’ They say ‘out of bed’ or just ‘awake.’ Did you bring me a bear?”

“But of course.” Bruno pulls a purple stuffed bear out of the top of his suitcase, one of many he has purchased here and there since the death of her father. It’s become such a habit, the entire foot of her bed is covered with a rainbow of ursine fur. “But I will only give it to you if you promise to take him directly back into the bed, okay?”

Sophie hesitates a moment before agreeing to the deal. Taking the new bear into her arms, she hugs and kisses Bruno, then her mother, and heads back to bed. “
Je t’aime
, Papi,” she says, once they’ve tucked her in. “
Et je suis ravie que t’es venu!
”

“I’m happy I came, too,” says Bruno, kissing her forehead. “And I love you right back.”

“Bruno,” says Jane, flicking off the light in Sophie’s room and shutting the door. “What if you’d shown up here, and I’d said, I’m sorry, you can’t stay?”

“I imagined such an event. I tried reserving a hotel,
en cas ou
, but do you realize there’s not a single hotel room in a twenty-kilometer radius of this city?”

“Tell me about it,” says Jonathan, appearing in the hallway, on his way to the bathroom. “Reunion weekend. Apparently, although I did not know this until last night, people book a whole year in advance. Bruno, I have an excellent bottle of cognac in the kitchen if you’d like to
prendre un verre
with us.”

“I would love to take a glass with you,” says Bruno, “but right now I have a promise to Jane I must to fulfill.” He walks into the kitchen, where the adults are gathered around a bowl of microwave popcorn, and greets them with hearty two-cheek kisses and
h
-less
hellos
. Then he heads directly to the lower cabinet where he remembers Claire having kept her ample supply of used shopping bags, organized by size (large/small) and material (paper/plastic). He pulls out a dozen or so of the large paper ones. “So,” he says, handing a brown grocery bag to each person, “who will help me to paint the fence?”

“What?” says Clover. They’re all used to Bruno’s creative interpretation of the English language by now, but that doesn’t mean they actually understand him.

“He’s been reading
Tom Sawyer
to Sophie,” says Jane.

“Come,” says Bruno. “We will, how do you say
vider
?”

“Empty,” says Jonathan.

“Ah yes. We will to empty the closet of Claire.”

Jane thinks to herself,
The Closet of Claire
: a good title for a book about a mother with a secret life. Then she frets over what to do with her mother’s underwear. She can’t give it away. But throwing it out seems wrong. Too final.

Addison has a visceral reaction to the word
closet
.

Mia, who saved every playbill and review from her thespian half-life, wonders which of her kids will get stuck emptying out her drawers when she is gone. All that useless, well-organized paper will have to go. Why does she even hold on to it? To remind herself of who she once was? Yes. And so what? There are worse reasons to hold on to scraps.

Clover, who has decided that her recent crimes—sperm theft, aiding and abetting in the collapse of the housing market—require some serious counterbalancing with good deeds, grabs three bags from Bruno. “I’ll help you paint your fence,” she says. “Come on. Let’s do this. Who needs sleep?”

“Not me,” says Addison. Some of her favorite memories from college sprang from all-nighters. They also sprang from copious amounts of drugs, but that was back when her body could handle the affront. She and Gunner, hoping to rekindle some minor spark of the couple they used to be, popped some Ecstasy last New Year’s Eve after the kids had gone to bed, and though she did wind up feeling some sort of chemically enhanced version of spousal love, the spell lasted only eight hours while it took her body until mid-January to feel like itself again.

“Me, too,” says Mia, grabbing two bags, one for her, one for Jonathan. No doubt Zoe will be up in a few hours anyway, fish-lipped and hungry.

Ten minutes later, at a hair before 1
A.M.
, Clover, Addison, Mia, Jonathan, Bruno, and Jane have all changed out of their formal clothes and into their pajamas, standing back to back in Jane’s mother’s walk-in closet, their eyes busily scanning the jam-packed if well-organized racks and shelves, trying to figure out where to begin. Bruno takes charge. “Okay, Jane, what, if anything, do you want to guard?”

“Keep,” says Jane. “
Garder
means to keep. You guard an entrance. You keep objects.”

“You can keep people, too,” says Jonathan, raising his second eyebrow of the night in Jane’s direction.

Jane grabs Bruno’s hand and squeezes it, tightly.

“And secrets,” says Clover.

“Not Jonathan,” says Mia, remembering the surprise fortieth birthday party he tried to throw for her, accidentally cc’ing her on the Evite. “He can’t keep a secret worth shit. It’s like he’s constitutionally unable to lie.”

Jane catches Jonathan’s eye and has to look away. She feels both cursed by the burden of his story and grateful for his having shared it.

“You can also keep appointments, keep up appearances, keep breathing, and keep friends,” says Addison, putting her arm around Mia. “Even if your friend’s son and your daughter just, well . . .”

“Good lord,” says Mia, “did that just happen or did we dream it?” The two of them shake their heads, not knowing how to approach this new chapter to their story, but then Jonathan’s nervous laughter bubbles up to the surface, and this gives everyone else permission to lose it, and it becomes a chucklehead free-for-all (“Oh my God, the condom, the
condom
!”; “The poor girl, standing there in that T-shirt”) despite the impetus and the venue. Mia literally has to steady herself by holding on to the edge of a shelf. The laughter feels vital, like food.

Only Bruno is confused, but Jane says, “Trilby and Max . . . ,” without finishing the sentence, and Bruno adds, “
ont baisé
?,” and when Jane nods yes, he, too, is now smiling, if still slightly baffled. He would have been more surprised had Max and Trilby
not
jumped into bed together,
mais bon.
He just finished editing a three-part series on the abject failures of U.S. teen abstinence programs, whose very existence so appalled
Libé
’s readers, they shut down the paper’s servers for over an hour with their comments.

“Well, at least it wasn’t Max having sex with
you
,” says Mia to Addison, still clinging to the shelf. “Remember Lizzie Wainwright?”

“Oh my God,
yes
!” says Addison. Lizzie Wainwright, or so the story went, had gone out to the Hong Kong one night in the fall of freshman year with her roommate Bree and Bree’s newly divorced father, Fred. After several rounds of Scorpion bowls—large vessels of alcohol-laced punch, drunk communally around a table through elongated straws—Lizzie and Fred had to help a well-lit Bree back to her room in Wigglesworth, the freshman dorm where Fred, twenty-five years earlier, had also regurgitated Scorpion bowls into his bedsheets. Upon his arrival in his daughter’s room, Fred felt overpowering rushes of both nostalgia and abject fear as he suddenly remembered he had a package from Bree’s mother back in his hotel room containing a six-month supply of his asthmatic daughter’s inhalers he was supposed to have delivered upon penalty of death and/or higher alimony payments, the latter his ex would have made sure to levy were he to neglect to do so, but he had a 6
A.M.
flight he had to catch the next morning, so Lizzie, who’d been more or less moderate in her Scorpion bowl consumption, volunteered to go back to Fred’s hotel room to fetch it. The next morning, around 5
A.M.
, Lizzie slunk home, carrying the package and wearing, as a buttress against an overnight drop in temperature of twenty degrees, Fred’s vintage Harvard crimson-and-white-striped scarf. At first everyone couldn’t believe it: Lizzie Wainwright and Bree’s
father
? Oh my God, gross. No way. Then, when the shock of it wore off, the story became just another crack in a long line of we’re-not-children-anymore potholes that would keep cropping up along the roads of their lives. “I hear she’s now the brand manager for that adult diaper company, what’s-it-called,” says Addison.