Abbott flinched, flashing the squint-eyed shiftiness that preceded a meltdown.
“Jesus, Rey, what the F! Mom, I’m sorry, I gotta go. I’ll call you to check on Dad, but please just let me know if anything happens.”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t realize you were in a rush. Yes, of course, sweetie. Talk to you soon.”
Charlie put the phone on the counter. “Rey, stop yelling at him.”
“What?”
“Stop yelling at him. He doesn’t understand. He needs positive examples.”
“Oh, is that from one of the books? This has to stop. How much money are we going to blow before something changes? How many schools? How many therapists?”
“Maybe we should go back to see the psychologist. The one the school recommended.”
“That’s your answer to everything. Take him to this person! Have another evolution—”
“—evaluation—”
“Change his diet! Don’t yell at him when he breaks another kid’s arm!”
Rey waved his hands around again and did some kind of weird hopping thing, perhaps, Charlie thought, to indicate how silly he thought it all was. Charlie slumped against the counter. She looked down at her sneakers. How easy it would be to bolt out the back door and down the hill and through the neighbor’s yard and onto Sunset and just keep going. But it was Rey she wanted to escape, not Abbott. She thought she might call the parents of the child Abbott had pushed to find out if he was okay. She realized, though, that she didn’t have a number to reach them. She couldn’t even remember their names. Rey didn’t believe in being part of the school community, so he threw out the parent directory, and she didn’t want to call Melinda McCarthy or anyone else at the Horizon School of Echo Park ever again.
She went to the table and knelt at Abbott’s side. He chomped the top of his pop off and chewed. His lips were purple.
“Cold?” she asked him.
He stuck out his purple tongue. “Cold.”
She rubbed his head. The torn backpack was on the floor. “Should we take a trip? Get a new backpack?”
“Ponies.”
“Of course.”
He tried to put his pop on the table but managed only to smush what was left of it against the side. The rest fell onto the floor. She scooped it into the garbage.
“That’s great,” Rey said. “Let’s buy him a reward for being a vampire, getting kicked out of school, and maiming another child. I love it. Perfect. Very American.”
“Give me a break with the ‘very American’ s-h-i-t. It’s old. And he’s had a rough day.”
“So have I!”
Charlie stood up. She went to where Rey stood and put her hand on top of his. “Come on. Lighten up. Let’s go for a drive.”
She was in the grip of an inexplicable and demanding urge to salvage something positive. One tiny thing. One shred of normalcy from an otherwise awful twenty-four hours. If she did that, she might be okay. She couldn’t shake the image of the little boy flying off the climber and Abbot’s gloating face behind him. A family trip of some kind might help. Or so she hoped.
“Let’s all go!” She clapped her hands together. “A family trip. I have some time before I have to go back to the studio.”
“I have class at three,” Rey said.
“Plenty of time!” Charlie said.
“Plenty of time!” Abbott said, clapping.
Rey shook his head and made the face he made when he was disappointed with her. She almost asked him point-blank about the panties. She’d been keeping them in a Ziploc bag in her purse, which felt like an irrational, crazy thing to do, but she didn’t want to somehow lose them or forget about them or, worse, for Rey to find them. She wanted a constant reminder of whatever his transgression had been. She wanted proof.
“Whatever,” Rey said.
* * *
“Last week you mentioned something about an encounter you had with a woman you referred to as”—Dr. Hammerstein consulted her notes—“the Panty Lady.”
“It’s true,” Josef said.
“I’d like to revisit that. Tell me about that experience.”
“Well, sure, yeah. The Panty Lady. Her name was . . . Rachel.”
“That’s her real name?”
“As far as I know.”
“And what happened?”
“Well. I bought underwear from her and then I convinced her to get a drink with me.”
“Is this something you do frequently? Purchase used, I would imagine, lingerie from strangers?”
“Ah . . . no . . . not really. That was the first time. I’ve done it since, though, especially after Natalie and I split. I’m afraid I’ve developed a teeny fetish for it.”
“That bothers you?”
“I don’t like losing control! This is what I’ve been saying. I’m obsessed with sex. All this weird shit. It’s all I think about. I’ve expressed to you the idea that I’m an addict. I know I’ve stressed this idea to you.”
“Indeed you have. I’m not sure I’m convinced of it just yet. I don’t necessarily believe one can be ‘addicted’ to sex.”
“My urges are hindering my life.”
“I think in your case we may be looking at other triggers and motivations.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s continue.”
“Okay.”
“So this Panty Lady. This happened when you and Natalie were together?”
“It did. And after.”
“It excited you?”
“Oh yeah. The idea of possessing something so personal, so . . . specific. Plus, well, Rachel smelled very good.”
“This is important to you? That a woman smell good?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“What did you do with these panties?”
“I didn’t wear them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“And this provided you pleasure in a way that your wife did not?”
“In a different way. It’s hard to articulate.”
“Try.”
He’d stumbled on the craigslist ad during one of his late-night trolls through the “casual encounters” section on the computer in his office, accomplished while Natalie and the girls slept peacefully in their beds. The postings always offered more spam than real people, but nonetheless he scratched a curious itch perusing them. Once in a while, if he was diligent and used all his powers to weed out the bullshit, he found something legitimate. Some salacious nugget. Some equally misguided and depraved (Natalie’s favorite word for him) bottom feeder who resorted to posting anonymous sex ads on the Internet. Some of these people he met in the real world.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” he told Dr. Hammerstein. “I like it. I meet enough women ‘legitimately’ to balance it out, and the online thing is something totally different. It isn’t about the sex. If that makes any sense. It’s about these random encounters with strangers.”
“And do you ever worry these online people might be misrepresenting themselves?”
“It’s possible. But it’s not like it’s hard to figure out who’s real and who’s not. It’s pretty obvious.”
“And so you came to Rachel this way? Via craigslist?”
The title of the post was College Girl Selling Juicy Delicious Underthings. They exchanged a few emails. All of this began with his salutation, “Dear Panty Lady,” which he found funny, and she caught on rather early and began signing all of her responses “XOXO, Panty Lady.” He always kept the fresh panties in a Ziploc bag in the back of his sock drawer. Maybe he’d been asking for her to find them. Maybe it had been intentional. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. His marriage to Natalie Karzhov had suffered from far bigger problems than a pair of panties he frequently sniffed. She later uncovered other, considerably more egregious, transgressions.
And of course Rachel was Nora, and the party he “met” her at had been a prearranged thing he convinced her to attend after taking her to Per Se for dinner. He didn’t see what relevance t
he inclusion of these details would lend to his sessions with Dr. Hammerstein, so he left them out.
A small gilded lamp on Dr. Hammerstein’s desk gave off an orange sphere of illumination at the edge of which Josef sat. The leather chair felt firm and reassuring beneath him.
“And so you met this Rachel?”
“Well, she mailed the panties at first. We met a few times after that.”
“And how did you find the experience?”
“Wonderful. As I said, they smelled amazing.”
“I meant meeting her, talking to her. In the ‘real world,’ as you put it. Meeting the actual person at the other end. Were you disappointed?”
“It’s different in the real world. Usually things don’t live up to the fantasy. But with Rachel, she exceeded expectations in a big way.”
“You slept with her?”
“Ha!”
“You find it humorous?”
“I do. I mean, I did sleep with her.”
“And these impulses were present during your marriage?”
“Yeah. Yes. In the past, throughout my marriage, and I guess every relationship I’ve had, I looked outside the borders. I admit this. Natalie and I had sex. Just so we’re clear. We had sex a lot. And it was great. It was amazing. But then, afterward, quickly afterward, or when we weren’t together, when I was off at work, or at the gym, or in a bar, at a restaurant, or away on business—wherever—I see women, so many women, and I imagine sleeping with all of them. I scrutinize their bodies to the point of being a creep.”
“A lot of men do this. It’s natural to have a strong libido.”
The lights dimmed, flickered, returned.
“I know, but I think this goes beyond that. It gets in the way of my life. Of my productivity. I don’t just fantasize. I have to act on these urges. I know in the back of my mind what I want to be doing, what I should be doing—as a husband, as a father, a professional, or whatever—but I don’t do those things. I didn’t do those things. I did other things. Often I did the opposite. And always the regret followed. Or even the regret happened as I went to do the things.”
“So you have regrets?”
“Who doesn’t? I regret that I don’t know how to be free of it. That’s the problem. I think my libido has enslaved me. It’s not normal. It’s not healthy. It gets in the way. It’s getting in the way right now with this BellWeather deal, I think. How long have I been finessing this thing? So much time. So much money. So many hours. And now it might not even happen. It’s like my penis led me astray.”
“By your own admission, it ruined your marriage.”
“Yes, but if my penis ruins the BellWeather deal? If it ruins One-PASS? What then?”
“So your priorities are that this business venture is worth more than your marriage?”
“My marriage is over.”
“But you prioritize the business?”
“Business is what pays for this.”
And it was not cheap. Forty-five minutes in Linda Hammerstein’s office passed just as quickly during a hurricane as it did on a sunny day, and the weather didn’t dictate the $550 price tag.
In the vestibule he donned his wet overcoat and boots and tried to call Crawford but got voice mail again. He called Natalie and got voice mail. He apologized for his absenteeism re: storm prep. He blamed it on work. He figured he would stop by her (his old) apartment but neglected to mention on the message that he planned to stop by. She hated his unscheduled drop-ins. Every one resulted in a call from her lawyer re: his visitation schedule and reminding him it wasn’t a great idea to keep showing up unannounced. His logic was this: if Natalie didn’t want him popping in, she’d have changed the locks or escalated the threats. Underneath it all she liked him coming by. She missed him. He was sure of it. It didn’t matter that she was now carrying on with a man who wrote poetry. A man who, when you asked him what he did, responded, I’m a poet. This much was clear: she loved him.
He decided he would walk down there. It was fifty blocks.
* * *
They got the Coronado Terrace house two years before Abbott was born. The previous owner, an elderly widow, was moving back east to be closer to her daughter. The house had a big wooden porch overlooking the hills. Charlie sat out there some nights, drinking wine and watching the sunset. They bought it with money borrowed from both sets of parents, when Charlie still didn’t know whether she wanted to have children. Reynaldo Perrin had always been positive on that point. She was pretty sure he talked about his desire to start a family on their first date, which should have sent up giant warning flares in her brain. Not Altogether Balanced was what her mother would have text-surmised instead of what Charlie concluded, which was, “Wow! He’s really mature!”
He took her to Lucques and splurged on $100 Champagne and duck confit. He’d just gotten his first class at UCLA teaching a course on documentaries called Morality and the Lens of Truth. He enthralled her. He explained his ideas for the course and the syllabus and how he hoped it might play a crucial role in sculpting young cinematic minds. “I just want to challenge what they think they know about film,” he said. She loved it. She loved him. He knew so much about movies. She’d been working at P.Le.A.Se. for a few months. The two of them bonded over their passion for cinema, their ideas for the future, what they hoped to accomplish. A year later, after they hiked the Santa Ynez Falls Trail, right there beside the waterfall, he asked her to marry him.
That was then.
She tried not to rely on the Enabletal her psychiatrist prescribed her as a mood stabilizer. Enabletal was manufactured by a tongue-twister of a company called PlaxoBurnsPine Inc., which itself was a conglomerate formed by the merger of Plaxo Gellcomb (that company formed when Gellcomb Inc. acquired Plaxo Inc.) and BurnsPine Beckman (formed from the merger of Beckman PLC and the BurnsPines Corporation, which itself was formed when the Burns Italia S.p.A and Pines PLC companies became one). Why did she know all of this? Because she had been doing a lot of reading on the Internet about Enabletal and its makers and its side effects and also because her older brother owned stock in PlaxoBurnsPine Inc. He got in on the ground level; made a lot of money. He found it amusing that she took one of the drugs the company made. Never missed a chance to bring it up in front of her or anyone else on the rare occasions they were in each other’s company, which was never. Her younger brother had experienced and was still recovering from a significantly less profitable union with PlaxoBurnsPine Inc.
She’d been taking three pills a day until she became convinced the Enabletal was slow-murdering her libido. It was also, she suspected, applying hard-core dampers on her emotional input/output factory. She didn’t care so much about the sex because, frankly, when it came to Rey, her loins weren’t throbbing with desire, but the “feelings” component made her worry. She wanted to feel things. So she enacted a self-weaning program, with the long-term goal of getting off Enabletal entirely. Hiding the fact that she’d stopped taking (as much of) the medication from her doctor (not a good thing to be lying about, she knew), she reduced her daily intake to two and a half pills, then two, then one and half, and was currently in the one-to-zero range. But now, in the car, after the morning she’d had, she felt she needed several.
Rey drove. Abbott sat in his car seat, calling out the signs along Beverly Boulevard. He knew the streets of LA County as if he’d memorized the GPS. On more than one occasion he’d given her general directions when she was lost. Charlie had been amazed, but there he was, telling her to turn left and right and straight and left and presto! They were back on course. He surprised her like this, her little cowboy, from time to time. For every ten insane things he did, he did one brilliant thing.
* * *
Isobel sat at the kitchen island on one of the stools, watching something on her iPad. She looked up at him as he stomped his feet on the welcome mat. With the power out, the apartment was dim and gray.
“I had to take the stairs!” he said.
“You’re soaki
ng,” she told him.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Uh, like, no? I’m streaming NY1 right now. It’s really bad! Half the city lost power.”
“Crybabies.”
“I’m being smart and conserving battery power,” Florence chimed in from the living room, where she was sprawled across one of the couches, reading. “And Isobel shouldn’t even dream of using my iPad when hers is dead.”
“I’m assuming no school?”
“Sometimes you are so ridiculous.” Isobel shook her head.
“We won’t have school all week, I bet!” Florence said.
He saw his younger daughter was reading one of the Thornglow books. “Not you, too.”
“They’re Mom’s faves,” Isobel said. “So of course loser over there has to read them.”
“Mom says they’re salacious,” Florence said.
“Do you even know what that means?” Josef asked.
“I’m almost twelve!”
“You know she doesn’t like when you come by like this, Jo-Jo,” Isobel said.
“Don’t call me that. Where is she?”
“In the shower,” Isobel said.
He went to the island and leaned his elbows on it. Rainwater dripped onto the countertop. “Admit it, grumpy, you like to see me.”
Isobel made a face like she smelled something bad.
“Daddy, you are so wet!” Florence said, looking up from her book.
“How did you get here, anyway?” Isobel asked. “They closed the subway, like, forever.”
“I walked.”
“You couldn’t be any wetter,” Florence said.
“Are you girls excited about our getaway? Just the three of us!”
“None of your girlfriends will be joining us?” Isobel asked.
“I don’t have any girlfriends.”
“Sure you don’t.” Florence made kissing sounds from the couch.
“Come on,” Josef said. “Tell me you’re looking forward to it. I need some good news today.”
“I doubt your day has been as hard as some people’s,” Isobel said. “Like people who are losing everything because of this stupid storm. What happened to you? Was your shrink not in?”
The Antiques Page 7
