I stood outside the courtroom all the while, listening, along with a suffering Billy Greckle, to Annie’s halting drone and her occasional sobs. Several times Judge Biers commanded “Louder!” and I flinched.
For me and for Annie White.
Because what was going on in there was nothing less than the deconstruction of a human being. With each new description of what bodily part was going where and exactly how Annie and this unnamed man-friend of hers contorted themselves … a little bit of Annie White chipped away. As it came fully out just how removed she was from the standard of common decency which says that a woman should know who the father of her child really is—the whole, entire structure of her defense against the world dissolved.
The judge didn’t need to hear all that went on for those twenty-five minutes. No one did. I sent a note in with a deputy sheriff after a few minutes of it. It was for Mormon Applebee and it said, “Stop it. I’ll pay you, win or lose.” Looking through the narrow slit between the courtroom’s swinging doors, I saw him give a prim shake of his head and crumple the note into a tight ball in his fist. He keep on with his slap! slap! pacing across the courtroom floor.
But that was the extent of my trying. I didn’t go bursting through the courtroom doors and cry out, “Judge, stop it! Enough! Let her stop!” Because, remember, I wanted Annie to pay like that. I was getting exactly what I wanted … and so typically, I wasn’t any longer sure I really wanted it. Get back at her, yes. Get her the hell out of my life, yes. And give me Todd to raise. But don’t make me watch it. Don’t make me watch and listen while this woman I once lived with was reduced to titillating talk-show fodder.
By crumpling my note in his fat fist and ignoring my demand that he stop Annie’s reading, Mormon Applebee made sure that I knew who was in charge of my case. It wasn’t me, he was saying. It was him.
Of course, by picking him in the first place, I had ensured that it would get this far; I had guaranteed that, one way or the other, the JURNUL which had so altered my life when I first came across it in a forgotten file carton … would shatter Annie White’s life, too.
Sometimes we do indeed get what we wish for.
But seeing and hearing her eviscerated that way on the witness stand left me with a clog of sadness that will never dissipate, no matter what. I was forever marked with shame—for the both of us.
Out of my pride and my hurt had come the will to fight back; but from the fighting back came the pyrrhic victory of someone who surveys all that he has won … and sees before him only the rubble of lives destroyed, of hopes and dreams plundered.
A wave of remorse broke over me as Billy Greckle and I paced the halls outside the courtroom. I tried my damnedest to counter the regrets with a renewed, righteous anger. Because Annie had earned her paybacks, hadn’t she? She’d made a mockery of her vows and our marriage and our son’s birthright—his right to have two parents who purposely conceived him and who would be with him as he grew up. Should I have turned the other cheek to all that?
No, I tried to insist to myself. It was right, what was happening in that courtroom. It was right that she should pay. Because it was Annie’s choice all along, to make sure it came out this way. By coupling with that other man when she decided on None of the Above as the father of her baby, Annie let the rest happen.
The end is always implicit in the beginning.
I said it earlier, I’ll say it again: there are no accidents. The moment Annie chose to have a sleazy back-room affair, she set the rest in motion—Wolfie’s scribbling in a cramped little window well, my eventual discovery of his JURNUL, even this day in court where it all came out for the world to hear.
Her reasons for the deceit are beside the point. Maybe she did it because she didn’t know any other way to safeguard against the terrifying risk of intimacy. Maybe she was getting back at me for something I’d done … or not done. I can only guess at the why.
Whatever her reasons, Annie’s choice led inexorably to mine. Once I found that JURNUL and found out what she had done to our lives, there was no real turning back for me. Had I not loved Todd so much, maybe I could have let it pass, and let it be.
But how could I abandon him? How could I walk away from a boy I’d come to love? And, given the courts’ bias toward women, how else—short of introducing that JURNUL—could I have had a chance at gaining custody of Todd? All these rationalizations aside, for the rest of my days I’ll wonder whether I should I have been so vengeful. I’ll wonder whether I really had the right to act as badly against someone who acted badly toward me.
I’d known for a long, long time that, when it came to love and sharing and commitment, Annie was one of the walking wounded. So couldn’t I have done something along the way to forestall this inevitable end? Couldn’t I have found a way, much earlier on, to reach Annie White … while still reaching out for Todd, my son?
The should-have-beens … the could-have-beens … the might-have-beens … they all swarmed about me that day as I paced the courthouse halls. They’ll besiege me for as long as I live. Thanks to that day in court, they’ll know that it’s always 3 a.m. for me, and they’ll be there to haunt and tease.
They’ll swarm even though she vindicated all my actions and all my decisions in what she did later that day. Because the last choice Annie White made told the world that she truly had no capacity for love—not even for Todd.
59
When it finally ended that afternoon, when Annie finished reading Wolfie’s JURNUL, Judge Biers ruled instantly. I was given legal custody of Todd then and there in a so-called “transition order.” Annie could appeal, of course. The judge made that clear—in fact, repeated it several times. Mormon Applebee, his hand extended toward his four assistants even as he heard this decree, handed up to the judge some more prepared motions.
The first: Given that she had obtained such residence through “deceit, fraud, and base immorality which do effectively invalidate any contract thereto,” Annie White would vacate her condominium within 30 days, and thereupon sign ownership and possession over to me.
Judge Biers: “Granted.”
The second motion: Annie White shall rebate any and all child support fraudulently obtained from said provider, Gilbert Wexler, and shall re-pay such in no more than 36 monthly installments plus 8% annual interest.
Judge Biers: “Granted.”
The third: Annie White shall be permitted visitation rights with her minor child, Todd Wexler, only when accompanied at all times by a social worker certified by the state; Annie White shall be responsible for paying said social worker’s fees.
Judge Biers: “Granted.”
Annie White had sat down in that witness chair a secure, relatively content woman. She left it as a pauper robbed of her child and her dignity.
And you and I know that all of this is absurd.
Not just the harshness of the verdict. We’ve all come to realize that a great many judges are nasty, vindictive, small-minded people who relieve their failures as human beings by lashing out at the few who’ve been caught. Mormon Applebee picked Judge Biers with a very knowing awareness. The judge, as a born-again Christian who’d been through his own divorce and custody battles, predictably frothed at the mouth over Annie’s back-room activities. So, no, it’s not particularly remarkable that Annie would evoke such a punitive “sentence.” What’s truly absurd is that we willingly give one man in a flimsy $20 polyester robe so much power … that we let a political hack and a jerk like Judge Malcolm Biers decide our lives for us.
It’s a marvel that any of us consent in this fashion to letting our private, hidden selves—with all our weaknesses, all our foibles, all our faults and failures—be paraded out in public. It’s beyond belief that we give such consent to the system that has us doing these things.
It’s the same system that so routinely makes men’s lives a living hell by depriving them of their children. And now, thanks to Mormon Applebee and Malcolm Biers and Albert Redding, the system has done a tur
nabout-is-fair-play number on Annie White.
The system lets her know that paybacks are hell.
60
The applause! The ovations! The adoration!
The play is a marvelous hit, a celebration of one woman’s indomitable spirit. One’s woman’s fortitude and grace and talent. One woman’s vision of a much fuller, far more elevating life.
Thank you, thank you so much.
Bowing to the audience, drinking in their love, taking her leave.
Thank you, thank you so much.
The lovely actress leaves the stage, a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses in her arms. She smiles gloriously at her crew—these traitors who are going along with some bastard’s decision to close it down, to end it. We’re papering the house, honey, the producer says. No one’s really here, honey, he says. It’s all smoke and mirrors, honey, he says.
She stands a moment behind the lowered curtain, she touches at the roses, she smiles some more.
So fuck them, she thinks. There are other plays.
She drops the roses into a trash barrel.
Then she’s out the door.
And free again.
Thank God!
61
She could have appealed, or she could have taken Todd and run, or she could have enlisted the feminist cabal and sat tight, waiting for a politically correct ground-swell to overturn Judge Biers’ decrees.
Annie White did none of that. She blindly stumbled down from the witness stand that day, retrieved her car from a parking lot, and simply ran away from her life. She left her possessions behind, she left her on-again, off-again lover Frank behind, and not least of all she left Todd behind.
It seems preposterous that she would do that, but you have to see it from Annie’s perspective. Here she was, a 29-year-old woman who’d just been stripped of her child, her home, and her future. Should she stay and endure that? Should she fight it, maybe for years and years to come? Should she try to win her son Todd back?
Or, hell, should she just head out to someplace new and shiny, someplace where no one knew about Annie White, someplace where she still had time to do it all over again?
If you’re one of the Annie Whites of the world, you know that everything and everyone is fungible—people, places, things; they’re all interchangeable, they’re all replaceable, they’re none of them really personal, after all.
62
I think often of Annie White and I wonder if she thinks at all of us, the four children and me. Probably not. If she’s still alive, I would imagine that Annie is busily, happily absorbed in a new life that is all-encompassing, and very, very fulfilling.
Maybe she’s writing love notes to someone.
In my thoughts, I try to wish her well.
Night after night, I fight against the images, but they come anyway, insistent. They are of the good moments she and I had: the joys, the intimacies, the shared discoveries. I find myself stepping out of time and seeing all six of us—the four children, Annie, and me—frozen in a happy, smiling pose where we each are touching, hand to hand, impervious to any occurrence that would come after. Then the image dissolves and Annie becomes Jillian, the other woman who captured my soul with her need … before leaving with a legacy of lost love.
God help me, but I miss them. I miss the her that they have together become. The two women mix and mingle in my mind and in the long nights I wonder what the lesson is.
63
It’s a beautiful late summer day and Todd and I are out hiking his favorite trail, the one that encircles the reservoir nearby our house.
He’s doing all right. I know he’s hurting inside—just as I knew that Allegra and Jack and Wolfie were hurting when their mom left so abruptly. But I’ve taken him out of day care and I’m giving him a lot of time. It doesn’t make up for it, I know. Todd didn’t really want one or the other of us—he wanted both of us. He wanted the way it should be when two people make love and make a baby and make a life together.
I still haven’t opened that envelope from the first DNA laboratory out there in the Midwest. All that sound and fury over nine days, then eight days, then seven, and so on—and then I just turn my back on what science has to say about us. I hope I never do open it. At least not until Todd is all grown up and gone from us. Because I don’t want to know. For now, he’s mine to guide and mine to love. Soon enough he’ll be gone.
Todd’s finally losing his mangled words and it saddens me. They grow up so quickly—but no matter how quickly they grow, they never forgive the mistakes their parents made. I suppose that’s a non sequitur, but it keeps coming to mind.
Ahead of me on the trail, Todd has stopped his purposeful march down to the water’s edge. He’s squatting, touching very hesitantly at something. “Todd!” I call and start running. I’m thinking snake or rabies or just danger. I yell, “Don’t mess with it!”
I get there to his side and I see that he’s touching at a wounded sparrow. “Don’t,” I say, imagining disease and parasites and all the other things parents conjure up.
“Her swing is broken.”
“Wing.” The bird has a bent wing arched up from its body and its beak is chattering. The one eye I can see looks terrified. There is other damage visible on the body. The thing is clearly terminal. Something very nasty has chewed on this poor bird.
“Can we take her home and fix her?”
“No, Todd, we can’t help it.” I try to pull my son to his feet but he resists.
“But Dad, it’ll die, won’t it? It’ll die if we don’t help it.”
“It’ll die either way, Todd. Whether we help it or not. That’s just the way it’s to be.” I wait a tick or two. “Come on. Let’s move on.”
Todd gets up reluctantly and we go on. He’s sad about the bird, I know, and he’s likely blaming me for being so callous and cruel and unfeeling.
But maybe someday he’ll know enough to do the same for his own son—and for himself.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Lou Peddicord
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2483-9
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But When She Was Bad Page 18
