Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  “No,” Hector said. “I’ve heard of Sacramento.”

  I remembered Eli’s hand on my back when he told me he was in love with my mother. Did he sneak his ex-wife and kid to Pasadena for a visit without telling us? But why? I was still wondering that when Hector’s dad picked him up. He told us about collaborations in Shakespeare. “A guy would say, I’ll do acts one and three. Why don’t you do two and four?” There was one guy, he said, who just wrote clowns. Philip taught at extension, but he didn’t get benefits and earned less than two thousand dollars a class. “I asked the students, If Juliet was your friend, what would you advise?” he said. “And they all shouted, Go for the Other Guy! Go for Paris!”

  Then, after they left and I was alone, I thought our life was over, though I couldn’t have said why. I took out the garbage without being asked and just stood in the alley. It was a tender evening sky, blue with gray clouds, the way skies were supposed to look but didn’t most of the time here. Something I’d believed in more than I knew was over. My mother’s hope. Our good future. The happy ending, but to what? I’d thought Eli would help us afford our life. He’d said he would. Now what? So much we’d imagined and counted on …

  All of a sudden, it seemed our family had been lying. We’d been trying to be this great divorced family when really our lives, like the lives of any kids who were the products of failure, were coming out worse. Like being illegitimate. Or adopted. We’d been churning fast, trying to convince people. Probably nobody believed us anyway. That’s why the Boops were so obviously disturbed. Everyone knew it was better not to be a divorce kid or a bastard or adopted. Schools like Cottonwoods existed for us. People like our parents sent kids there to be educated in the art of pity. IS IT TRUE? IS IT KIND? IS IT NECESSARY?

  I tried to conjure my dad as an antidote. Sare had once called him my mother’s Prozac. Maybe he would get remarried, I thought, and have a whole nother family. An unbroken one. His way of dealing with divorce had been comedy.

  You can see my progress on my Amazon bills, he’d said. In October, when I moved out, the bill listed eleven self-help books. By April, the statement had no books at all.

  Only a 52-inch plasma television.

  Still, as starkly as night lurched, morning rang back morning in our house: the scrape of the whisk against the bowl; the Mims calling, Come on, slugabeds; Boop Two’s eager-to-please I AM up, Mommy.

  We’d received a Belgian waffle maker from Marge, and my mom stood pouring batter, the glass jar of maple syrup knocking against the pot of boiling water.

  I tried again what I’d tried before: to forget. I thought, Even if this Jean Lee is Eli’s ex-wife, what does that prove?

  I left it all in California: my sister’s reading, our funny, abrupt father, our potentially dismal future, and, unfortunately, the thing plugged into the jack downstairs. I’d meant to dismantle the machine but I forgot. I thought of those wires a few times on the way to camp. I considered drawing a diagram for Boop Two to take it apart but that seemed risky. The Mims could intercept the letter.

  She talked on the phone with Eli as we drove through New England. He directed us to a place that had great caramel ice cream, saying, Turn right, now right again. He stayed on the phone until we found it.

  I thought of things. “Do we invite Eli’s brother for Christmas?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But Hugo won’t travel.”

  “They put us in separate cabins,” Hector said when I finally saw him at camp, sitting on a top bunk, his legs swinging. He jumped down. We were the only ones there. From under clothes in a cubby, he pulled out the book. We flipped through to find sex scenes. There weren’t many. Raoul “entered his wife tenderly.” He “made love wildly.” That was to the mistress who, in a hilarious touch, admired the wife. Everyone admired the wife.

  “Artistic license!” Hector said. “But the mistress has a misshapen head. Your mom’s head’s normal.”

  “Anyway, this was probably about the affair he had. Not my mom,” I said. It seemed to be about a woman the husband worked with. That was like Eli’s affair.

  I wished then that we were in the same cabin. Hector seemed disappointed. He assumed the camp had just separated us. I didn’t tell him I’d asked. And he didn’t make friends, really, with the guys in his cabin. I saw him alone, walking around or sitting against a tree trunk, reading. Maine camp wasn’t really his thing. That was the only time he went.*3

  The Other Woman was a strange story. The husband loved the wife but he was in an affair, like a drug addiction. He wanted to quit. He tried. Then one day he and his mistress got attacked by a gang. He handed over his wallet and she gave her purse, but she wouldn’t take off her grandmother’s necklace. He tried to defend her, and they both ended up injured. On the pavement, in pain, he wanted his wife. Only his wife.

  Malc sent us a package of fifteen big Milky Way bars. We sat on Hector’s bunk, eating them. Fifteen was enough for one cabin, not quite for two, so we kept them for ourselves, hiding them under Hector’s clothes.

  “What are we going to do when we go home?” Hector said. It seemed like a big question. I told him we had to get through my mom’s birthday. Sare had planned a party.

  On our last day of camp, Hector wanted to wash his clothes. I helped him sort stuff. We had the whole laundry room to ourselves, and we used all four machines. We folded and hunted down every sock’s wife. He was probably the only kid in the camp who was going home with a duffel full of clean clothes.

  Mine stank so much my dad had the camp UPS it.

  * * *

  *1 I never suspected.

  *2 You say that even fat, you would have still rather been you. Well, I would have rather been you, too. That was one of my problems then. I wanted your house and your mom who cooked and plenty of money.

  *3 I didn’t know until I read this thing that you were why we didn’t end up in the same cabin. That was pretty sucky. And you got away with it. But you didn’t have to feel sorry for me for not making friends with those thugs. I didn’t mind being alone. I liked reading.

  50 • Wiretapping

  I was home two days before I remembered the device. When I did, I shot up from the table and skidded to the basement, where I found the thing making a ticking noise. I shoved it into the old file cabinet where my mom kept extra school supplies, like muffling an about-to-detonate bomb.

  “Miles?” she called from the kitchen. “Come back. We’re starting!”

  I carried it up late at night after everyone was asleep and hid it under my bed. But I couldn’t keep Hector off of it for long. He played it and turned the volume up when he heard Eli’s voice.

  I never thought I’d have a fifteen-year-old stepson.

  Eli made that sound like an important responsibility.

  We heard the Mims sigh. A jewel in her hand. A great hope for her, a correction.

  Maybe he meant it. I wanted to forget the whole business, I thought wildly, and throw the machine out.

  Eli complained that Sare had assigned him to bring a cheese platter to the party. He kept saying expensive cheese platter, with spin on the word cheese. But it was her forty-fifth birthday. Shouldn’t he be bringing at least a cheese platter? It was a joke, I supposed, but also mean, something my mom accused a lot of my jokes of being.

  Sentences got cut off on the machine, as if we were listening to bits of conversations.

  Eli said, Call me back.

  Is this better? she asked. I’ve got to get somebody out from the phone company.

  The phone company! I mouthed to Hector, forgetting that this was a recording and that they couldn’t hear us.

  Are you really moving here?

  Yes, he said. You know that.

  Every night I fall asleep imagining my head on your shoulder. Could you please hurry?

  I’m trying to, he said.

  Another time, she asked, How much can you contribute?

  He paused, then his voice sounded squeezed. Between five and seven thousand a mo
nth, he choked out. Between five and seven thousand dollars! More than all the I love yous, that convinced me. The thing about the cheese platter must have been a joke. Even though he kept saying it. We could stop, I decided. No more spying. Eli turned out all right in the end. Relief coursed through my body. Then, as if there was a God, the Mims said, I can barely hear you. I made an appointment with AT&T.

  “We can’t use this anymore!” I said to Hector. “The phone guy’s coming. For all we know, our machine caused the static.”

  That night I thought more about The Other Woman. It seemed like the truth was that Eli had cheated on his wife, and then, eventually, he’d left her. She was probably sad. She’d written her book how she wanted it all to have turned out. I felt sorry for her. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it that he was with us now but that first he’d hurt someone else.

  The next morning Hector talked to my mom in the kitchen while I took a shower. When I emerged, he had a strange face. He’d found out the divorce state. The Mims had asked how his mom was doing and he told her okay, except his parents were having the longest divorce in American history and that they blamed it on the state of California. Then he asked her if she knew people who’d gotten divorces in other states, and she told him Eli was divorced in Wisconsin. Hector had IM’d Ben Orion from my computer.

  I groaned. “No! I’m done with this. Eli’s okay.”

  But Ben Orion IM’d back: Glad to hear it. I ran Virginia and came up dry.

  I didn’t let myself think too far. When Philip picked up Hector, he told me that in Shakespeare’s time, tennis balls were stuffed with beard hair.

  I want to be married again someday.

  Now she was forty-five.

  Sare had sent out a group calendar; they’d scheduled the party around Eli, delaying because of his cat’s grave condition.

  “Maybe he’ll propose the night of the party,” I said to Hector.

  I had my first full headache; my brain alive and throbbing, a thousand worms growing inside, pushing through one another.

  The party would be easy to crash. We planned a sleepover at Charlie’s. But then, at the last minute, he called to say that we had to do it at my house; his mom decided we’d be in the way. We couldn’t wheedle Sare. And I didn’t want to tell Charlie much. He was the prime suspect for ratting about soup selling. And without explaining, we couldn’t make a big case for his house, except for sisters.

  “They’re pretty harmless, aren’t they? I mean, what do they even do these days?” Charlie only had an older brother.

  “They make shows,” Hector said. “With feather boas. That shed.”

  Charlie didn’t really hang out with us anymore. He attracted girls just standing still without doing anything. His chest and arms showed actual muscles. He reminded us his mom liked my sisters—they were her goddaughters—but maybe we could sleep at his house if we found someplace else to go before, say, ten. It ended up that Charlie’s brother, Reed, was driving to Westwood and could give us a lift.

  I opened the front door and saw Eli’s two shoes, parallel, the way I had a hundred times. Maybe a bad person was entering our house, the thought flickered momentarily. He had his same grin as always, seeing me, with the ears sticking out. But bad people didn’t think they were bad, probably. I remembered Eli’s voice choking out that he’d give us seven thousand dollars a month. That made my mind close, like the first taste of sweet. I was aware of keeping my thoughts between blinders.

  Charlie’s father, Dale, had given Sare a necklace for her forty-fifth birthday. Dylan Land’s mom had surprised his stepfather with a convertible for his fiftieth. Most of my friends had families like my dad’s: everybody dressed up to celebrate big birthdays and anniversaries in the banquet rooms of hotels. My mom had one brother who still lived in Michigan. They talked on the phone sometimes, but he would never be here for something like this. He didn’t know her friends. Marge was coming to the party at least. My mom’s voice belled, listing the names. She still thought she was happy.

  She and Eli disappeared into her closet. She came out looking better than she ever had, wearing the dress Eli had picked out for her in the Pasadena thrift store and big clear earrings. My dad had bought her a coat once that he showed us in a magazine, but now it seemed he’d been ordering clothes for a standard-issue store dummy. If Eli was a monster, he was a monster who understood my mother’s body. He found a beauty the rest of us hadn’t seen. I shivered, thinking why.

  I have known you, Irene Adler, he’d written on that scrap in her drawer.

  My father had been enamored; maybe he still was, but not that way. There may be other people better-looking, he’d once complimented her, but no one smarter. He’d meant that, and it was true. But she knew she was smart, so his saying so was just adding another penny to a pile of coins. Maybe she’d always wished to be beautiful and didn’t quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn’t say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there’d been a mistake and she was after all. That was why, from years of living on intelligence alone, when Eli told her she already had what she hadn’t been able even to admit she dreamed of—that must have acted like a drug, flooding her with irresistible relief. Boop Two wished she was prettier, too; she’d never say it, but I could tell. Maybe every single female, smart or not, couldn’t help wanting that.

  “Personal shopper,” Eli kept saying, as if he’d found his true designation.

  “Sometime before school starts we should take Timmy and the girls to Disneyland,” she said. “I have those fast passes I won at the auction.”

  “Sounds great,” he said, like a period.

  I thought tonight he really might propose.

  We squished into the back of Reed’s car. I’d never been to Westwood without a parent before. I thought maybe we’d see a movie, but we ended up just following Reed and his friends into stores that sold candles and stuffed toys and electronic games and T-shirts with patented characters on them. The point seemed to be to run into people they knew but to pretend these collisions were a complete and not particularly desired surprise. They walked ahead of us, but when they stopped to talk to other kids we caught up. They acknowledged us with minimal shoulder dips. Reed bought us each a burrito. Near an alley, two girls stood in dresses and platform heels, one of them bending over, her hair almost touching the ground. She seemed to be barfing. Then I saw that it was Ella. “Hey, Ella,” I said, and started toward her, my hands in my pockets, but one of the older guys reached around from behind and put his hand on her belly. That made me sick. She gave a little wave to me, her hand by her side. She didn’t look happy or even okay. On the way back from Westwood I worried about her.

  At Charlie’s, we hung out in the TV room. I set my sleeping bag close to the door, so I could watch and still hear the adults. Reed put on The Godfather, which my dad continued to say I couldn’t see yet.

  “What if he proposes?” I whispered to Hector.

  Reed’s phone kept ringing. He finally answered. “What? I don’t know. Call ya later.” He had a girlfriend Sare hated, I knew from the wiretap, but now it seemed that Reed hated her, too.

  From under the door, I heard Marge’s long, rambling toast. I felt protective of Marge with Eli here. She thought they were friends. She started to tell a math joke. What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber? When she said the answer—You can’t cross a vector with a scalar—there was a little wave of polite awkward laughter because I’m sure nobody but my mom understood what she was talking about, but even that emboldened her. How many number theorists does it take to change a lightbulb? Oh, no, not a lightbulb joke! I wished she’d asked me. This is not known, but it’s conjectured to be an elegant prime.

  The joke wasn’t funny. I loved Marge, but her timing was off. Even though she’d given me a one-hundred-dollar Amazon card for my birthday. She started another one. It was excruciating.

  Two mathematicians are in a bar. Th
e first one says that the average person knows very little basic math. The second claims that most people do. The first goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the blonde waitress.

  Okay, a dumb-blonde joke. A lightbulb joke and a dumb-blonde joke. All we need is a chicken crossing the road, I whispered to Hector.

  He tells her that in a few minutes, he’ll call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “One-third x cubed.” She says, “One thir-dex cue?” He repeats, “One-third x cubed.” She asks, “One thir dex cubed?” He tells her yes, that’s right. The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet. He says he’ll ask the blonde waitress an integral. He calls over the waitress and asks, “What is the integral of x squared?” The waitress says, “One-third x cubed,” and, while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder, “Plus a constant!”

  The Mims couldn’t have liked this. She would have wanted Marge to be sincere and say she admired her mind or something. The Mims had said that a lot of times about her.

  Philip stood up and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. These toasts depressed me. I wanted them to honor her. I guess every kid thinks his mother is better than other people. I wanted her friends to think so, too.

  I was lying on my stomach, feeling the concrete floor through my sleeping bag, allegedly watching The Godfather, when Eli scraped his chair back and stood up. I heard the popcorn sound of gunfire from the TV. Just now they were shooting people in the back of a restaurant. I peeked under the door and saw Eli’s feet in those hard shoes. “All of you love Reen for many reasons,” he said. “But I, I love her, I love her because I, I can’t help loving her. No matter what ever happens, I am and I will always be in love with Irene Adler.”

  “Sounds like a funeral,” Hector whispered.

  “I mean, of course he’ll always love her. Isn’t that what you’d expect?”

  I tipped the door open a wedge. He’d sat down again, and the Mims looked up at him dreamily, her hand picking at his jacket sleeve.