Roulette

by Megan Mulry

  “I’m moving to Russia to run Voyanovski Industries. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  I watch both of their jaws drop before I turn and walk out of the office. I pack up my desk in under an hour. I make loose plans to meet up with three of my colleagues with whom I have developed real friendships. It is otherworldly how simple it is to wave and smile at the remaining fourteen people in the department, with whom I have never developed the slightest rapport whatsoever.

  I throw my cardboard box in the backseat, then get behind the wheel and simply breathe.

  Oddly, I want my mother.

  I take out my cell phone and dial her number before I turn on the car. She picks up right away. “Simone,” she answers, identifying herself by her single name.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s me.”

  “Darling! Are you here in LA?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I’m here! Come to the house right this instant. I want to see you. Come!”

  “Okay.” I’m fine; thanks for asking. “I’m just leaving USC.” Forever. “Let me drive over to your place, and I’ll see you soon. It’s probably going to take me a good hour at this point.”

  “An hour? That’s too long.”

  This is one of my mother’s favorite tactics: accuse the world of being round, then act affronted.

  “Look, Mom, if the 10 is backed up, it could be longer. Do you want me to come or not?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course I want you to come! I’ll see you when you get here.” I think I hear voices in the background just before she disconnects the call.

  I slip my phone back into my purse and try to prepare myself for Friday-afternoon traffic. And my mother. And probably Jamie What’s-His-Name.

  An hour and twenty minutes later, I pull into the vast courtyard that spreads out before the front door of The Monstrosity. Mom comes gliding out, dressed in something totally age-inappropriate. It is sheer and sexy, and she has a bikini on underneath. Maybe I am becoming a prude, but I’m sorry, I just don’t need to see my mother nearly naked. Luckily, Jamie is noticeably absent.

  “Darling!” She holds my cheeks in her palms and stares into my eyes. Her blond hair is cut in her signature short style, and her near-black eyes are piercing. She always tells this silly tale about her gypsy ancestors and loves to pretend that her Romany blood gives her deep, accurate insights into the hearts and souls of others.

  I shake her hands off. God forbid any of that insight stuff is true. The last thing I want is her looking into the present state of my discombobulated soul. I switch my computer bag to my other shoulder to put some additional distance between us. We walk up the wide front steps and cross into the marble foyer.

  God, how I hate this house. It is worse than a mausoleum. Worse than a football stadium. And, as if the total lack of human scale weren’t bad enough, Simone has gone to the expense and inconvenience of covering every inch of the vast halls with loads of crap. Mementos. Awards. Black-and-white photographs of her in various states of undress.

  As usual, my mother ignores it all and heads into her cramped study. I have attempted more than once to point out the fact that she spends all her waking hours in the smallest room in the house, so selling it might be a good idea.

  “When are you going to sell this place?” I ask. As usual.

  That does not go over well. At all. “This is a movie-star house, and I am a movie star.”

  Whatever. I am in too good a mood to argue. “Why did you want me to come over so quickly?”

  “Well . . .” She stops and stares at me. “Are you okay? You look different. What’s gotten into you?”

  Damn her and her fake Romany blood. “Nothing. Well, I broke up with Landon. And I quit my job today, but other than that, nothing much has been going on.” I’m not about to tell her I’m moving to Russia to head up her despised baby-daddy’s company. And the crazy part of how ridiculous that sounds—about those things being nothing—is that they are nothing compared to the fact that I finally know what I want to be when I grow up, and I am pretty sure I fell in love with Rome de Villiers after spending a day and a night with him in Russia. And damn if she doesn’t see that—just glides right past all the abandoned boyfriends and tenure-track positions and right into emotional territory.

  “What else?” she asks, more serious than I’ve seen her in years.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “There’s something else. You don’t sound upset about either of those supposed devastations. Your job? Pffft.” She practically hisses. “The bland decoration in your office alone would have made me quit. And I never liked Landon.”

  I widen my eyes. “What? I thought you told me just a few weeks ago it was the life you always thought I wanted.”

  “It certainly wasn’t the life I wanted for you! But”—she shrugs—“I thought you were in love.”

  “Mom! You’re the worst. You’ve spent the past year telling me to settle down and . . . ugh. I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation. I should go.”

  “Look, sweetheart, we both know you always do the opposite of what everyone says. Do you really think I would want that for you?” She brings her hand to her neck and reenacts a choking motion, eyes bulging, tongue lolling from her mouth. It is over a split second later and she is beaming her famous smile at me. “Kill me now!”

  I laugh. I haven’t laughed with my mom in ages. Years, probably. She isn’t reliable at all. She might be all insightful and clever with me for the next few minutes or hours, or even days, but then she’ll be on to the next thing with no warning.

  On the other hand, I am no longer an eight-year-old who’s been left at a movie theater. Maybe this is the little bit that she can give.

  “I met someone else,” I say, looking down at my hands clasped in my lap. I am sitting across from her in the small office.

  That gets her attention. She loves love stories. She collapses farther back into her big desk chair, a swiveling leather number from the 1960s. She got it at a yard sale in the late ’80s from some washed-up producer in Bel Air, and she loves every crack and tear in the leather. She says sitting in it makes her feel like Louis B. Mayer.

  “I knew it!” She also loves being right, so I let her enjoy it. “You’ve fallen in love!”

  “Yeah. Well, lust, at least. And don’t get too excited. Nothing will ever come of it.”

  Simone sweeps the papers (probably important financial documents that needed her immediate attention four months ago) to one side of the large mahogany desk, puts her elbows down, and rests her chin in her hands. “Tell me all about him,” she beams. “Or her!” she adds with equal enthusiasm.

  I can only imagine how much more thrilling it would be for my mother if I’d broken up with Landon for a woman. She will have to make do with an already-spoken-for French pirate.

  My mother may not be the most dependable person in some respects, but she’s never betrayed a secret in her life, and when she’s actually able to pay attention for more than five minutes at a stretch, she’s got some pretty amazing life experience to share, especially when it comes to sordid love affairs. I decide to tell her all about Rome and my fling in Saint Petersburg.

  I leave out the intimate details but tell her all about the Matisse, and the romantic dinner, and the kiss on the bridge, and how handsome he is, and how his voice kind of makes me weak just thinking about it.

  “Oh. He sounds positively delicious . . . and he smokes? How horrible.” But she winks and probably adds that to her mental list of things to adore about Rome de Villiers. “So, when are you going to go after him?”

  “What? Never.” Looking out the window behind Mom’s desk, I stare at the oversize pool in the backyard. The audacity of the man who built this place never ceases to amaze me. An Olympic pool? In the middle of Bel Air? I shake my head and meet her eyes. “He’s engaged. Didn’t you hear m
e?”

  She shrugs her shoulders and purses her lips, just like Rome. Just like every arrogant Gaul since the beginning of time. “Engaged is not married. You were thinking of moving in with someone only last week, remember? And you’re not anymore. And married is not always unavailable, either.”

  “You’re horrible. I’m not going to break up his relationship. His fiancée looks like a wonderful person. She’s a humanitarian, for goodness’ sake. And forgetting all that . . . Why am I even defending myself to you? Just because I fell for him . . .” I pause, and then I sigh.

  “Yeeeessss . . .” My mom loves every minute of my ignominy and is encouraging my descent into blind passion.

  “Well, just because I fell for him doesn’t mean he fell for me. It was probably just lots of rolling in the sack, as far as he was concerned.” And that is all I am going to say about that. My mother has never had a proper understanding of boundaries when it comes to my sexuality, or her own, for that matter. She was always asking me about my period and who I liked during high school and if he was a good kisser, despite my often-repeated opinion that it was gross—gross!—and she needed to cut it out. I think Vivian’s mom finally intervened and told her she was going to scar me if she didn’t back off. That put an end to it.

  “Was he—”

  I hold up my hand. “Don’t you dare ask me anything about his lovemaking. I swear, I will walk out of this room right this instant.”

  She clenches her teeth. “Oh, fine! But you are such a spoilsport. He sounds dreamy.”

  I am momentarily disgusted as I realize that Rome is probably around the same age as my mother’s latest boy toy and that if my mother ever met him, she would probably flirt with him. Hard.

  “Seriously, Mom, this is getting into Freudian-wing-nut territory. Cut it out.”

  “Oh, okay, okay. Sex. Off-limits.” She pretends to seal her lips and throw away the key.

  I smile and I’m actually glad—for the first time in forever—that I have a crazy, loving mother. I know in that moment that whatever other goofy mayhem she might get up to, she really, really loves me in her wonderfully nonjudgmental way.

  “So what will you do now?” she asks gently. “Are you going to move to Russia?” The way she asks makes it sound like maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible after all.

  “I might. I haven’t decided yet. Everything’s been happening so fast. I want to go to France for a couple of weeks. The time zone is much better for my work in Russia—instead of waiting until late at night for their workday to start, like I do here, in Paris I’ll be only two hours earlier—and I can go to my friend Margot’s wedding and just sort of regroup for a while. Alexei will be thrilled to have me that much closer, and besides, I should get out of LA for a while.”

  “Oh, that Alexei. He got his hooks into you after all, didn’t he?” The words are harsh, but she sounds almost sweet on him.

  “He kind of did. It’s not all bad, you know, Saint Petersburg is—”

  She swipes her hand to stop me from talking about Russia, as if the mere mention of it will put her over the edge.

  “Enough about that. I have big news.” She looks excited; then her eyes cloud slightly. “Jamie and I broke up, by the way—”

  “Oh, Mom. I really am sorry. I know I made fun of him forever, but I know you cared for him.”

  She clenches her jaw for a few seconds, the way she does when she is changing scenes and needs to let go of whatever emotion it is that came before. Her face clears. “It’s over now. And that’s not my big news.”

  “Okay. I won’t dwell on it.”

  She plows ahead. “I’ve been offered a wonderful part. Filming begins next week. In Cairo.”

  “Cairo?”

  “I know! Isn’t it incredible?”

  For a second, the child in me relives that hint of being abandoned; then I’m genuinely happy for her. “It’s wonderful, Mom. Congratulations.”

  “Oh. We’ll be on location in Egypt for only a few months, but I just can’t wait. They’re finally going to make an English film based on one of Naguib Mahfouz’s books.”

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  “Oh, probably. Who cares? Like that ever stopped me from doing anything.” The sun is starting to set, and Simone turns to look behind her, toward the pool. “Do you want to go for a swim?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, good. Why don’t you stay for the night, and we can eat popcorn and watch movies in my bed?”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “And we’ll buy tickets to Paris and spend a few days together there. Then I’ll go to Cairo and you can go to your friend’s wedding and everything will fall into place. You’ll see.”

  I roll my eyes and follow her out to the pool. The odd thing is, she’s managed to live her entire life this way, hopping from one lily pad of excitement to the next. I realize I may not want to be a mousy academic married to a cardiologist, but I also know I don’t want what she has, either, living in a constant state of upheaval like this.

  Despite everything, I have to hand it to her. She is in amazing shape. She slips out of her sheer whatever-it-is and dives into the pool. She does a few laps at a rapid clip while I change into my suit in the pool house.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Later, we have a delicious dinner that her French chef has left on the counter and then eat microwave popcorn and watch old Cary Grant movies in her enormous bed with the pillows and all the scents and textures that remind me of my strange childhood. These wonderful times of maternal intimacy are so bittersweet, because they are always punctuated by such long separations.

  When I wake up the next morning, my mom is already in a flurry of packing.

  “Where’s the fire?” I ask with my throaty morning voice.

  She turns to look at me. “Oh, good! You’re awake. Let’s go to Paris today! It will be so much fun. Tori was able to get us two seats in first class on the 9:35 p.m. flight. I thought you’d need the day to get everything in order.”

  I sit up straighter and plump the pillows behind me. “A whole day?”

  She has the good sense to laugh. “Well, she could have put us on the 3:45, but I figured that would be too hectic for you.”

  “Mom, I can’t just up and fly to Paris tonight.”

  “Why not? You’re such a fuddy-duddy. This is the perfect time to up and fly to Paris! You already said you wanted to go to your friend’s wedding . . .”

  “But that’s not for another ten days. I was going to take some time to—”

  “Oh, come on!” she interrupts excitedly. “We’ll go to your house and make sure everything is okay. You’ll get packed and everything. The whole point of having a small beach house is that it’s turnkey. Come on! Be spontaneous with me!”

  I hesitate because it actually sounds like fun and I can mix a bit of fun into my life now if I feel like it. It’s my life! There’s no academic review board or stuffy doctor boyfriend making me worry about what kind of impression I’ll make. Voyanovski has offices in Paris, and I can easily have Alexei meet me there. He’ll probably be thrilled at the idea.

  “You know what?”

  She stops shoving a completely impractical taffeta ball gown into her huge bag and turns to face me. “What?”

  “I think it sounds like fun. Let’s do it!”

  “Oh, how wonderful!” She actually clasps her hands together and twirls around like a girl. “We are going to have so much fun! We’ll go shopping and dancing and—”

  “Let’s just start with going to Paris on the spur of the moment and work our way up to shopping and dancing, okay?”

  She comes over to the bed and hugs me when I stand up. “Okay! One spontaneous thing at a time.”

  I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. When I come back into her room, she’s sitting on the side of her bed, near her bedside table. �
�What are you doing? We need to hurry.”

  She looks up quickly from a snapshot in her hand and then stares at me in that damnable gypsy way of hers. “Come here for a minute, chérie.”

  When my mother chérie-s me, it’s usually bad. I cross the room slowly and sit beside her on the bed.

  “There’s more to your father and me than either of us ever told you.”

  The air stills around us.

  She gets up nervously and tries to busy herself with more packing, attempting to shove some sunscreen into the side pocket of her suitcase.

  I get up. “Mom. We are going to Paris, not the Riviera.” I take the sunscreen from her unsteady hand. “You don’t need sunscreen. Let’s deal with one thing at a time.” I take her shoulders in my hands and turn her to face me. “Tell me about you and Mikhail.”

  She sits down on the edge of her bed again with a defeated sigh. “I never stopped loving him. I guess I hated him for making me move back to the United States, when I would have died to stay with him.”

  I sit down with a thud on the bed next to her.

  She continues slowly. “It was still Soviet Russia, Miki. You can’t imagine what it was like for us. We were simply mad for each other. I was willing to give up my career—what little it was at that point—for both of us to live in Russia, and he wouldn’t hear of it. But I was getting close to convincing him. I still had my French passport; I hadn’t received my American citizenship yet. I told him I wanted to be with him and that I didn’t care if we lived in some horrible Soviet shoebox. I’d almost convinced him . . .” She looks away for a couple of seconds, then continues. “He knew changes were afoot; he was probably the agent of a lot of that change, truth be told. But when I learned I was pregnant . . . it was misery.”

  I put my face in my hands and shake my head.

  “Oh, goodness!” she cries, reaching her arm around my hunched shoulders to pull me in close. “Not like that! We were both so happy. He was older and he never thought he’d have a family. He had devoted his life until then to his political work and his business ideals, building that damn company with Alexei. But when he realized there was now a new life to consider, he absolutely forbade me to return to Russia with him. He would not be swayed. He was so autocratic and . . .” I can practically feel her gritting her teeth and reliving all the anger she obviously still feels toward him beyond the grave.