by M. J. Rose
Raul hadn’t taken back the card, still extended toward me. So quickly that I wasn’t prepared for it, Dulcie was up and out of her chair, and she’d grabbed it.
“I’m completely excited,” she said. “It would be amazing. To do a whole season of a TV show!” All this had been directed more to Raul than to me.
I watched my thirteen-year-old daughter as she casually tucked away the small white paper rectangle, without letting on that she might as well have been pocketing a bomb.
We got into the town car that the theater provided for us every night. It wasn’t a limo, nothing that fancy, just a black four-door sedan that waited at the theater exit to take Dulcie and me home—or Dulcie and her father, depending on which of us she was staying with.
“Mom, this is something that matters to me.”
The car moved away from the curb and headed east. I had no intention of having a serious conversation until we were home. Not the feedback she wanted, Dulcie turned away from me and stared out the window. Her overly dramatic response would have made me laugh if we’d been talking about something else. But this was where we clashed and what all our battles were fought over.
We were catching all the lights and making good time, and the closer we got to the apartment, the more my resolve increased. Beside me, I knew Dulcie’s did, too. My kinetic connection with my daughter was in rare form and I was picking up on what she was feeling. No one has ever meant as much to me as Dulcie. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her, and I would happily sacrifice whatever it took to ensure her happiness.
But I was not, under any circumstances, going to allow my baby to audition for a TV series. She knew that. Yet she had taken the card anyway.
My daughter was thirteen.
As a therapist, I knew what the teenage years were going to be like in today’s society, but there is a difference between knowing it professionally and living it as a mother. And the reality was testing me. Daily, it seemed.
As soon as we stepped into the foyer, before I had a chance to speak, Dulcie turned on me, and in a more adult voice than I’d heard from her before said: “You’re not going to say no to this because of something that happened to my grandmother fifty years ago. I gave in over the other part because it was no big deal. But this is a big deal. I want to do it, Mom, and it would be grossly unfair of you to try and stop me again. If you do, I’ll do it anyway.”
Nineteen
Dulcie had gone to sleep, or at least had said that was what she was going to do. I’d poured myself a glass of merlot and sat on the couch in the den channel-surfing, trying to find something on TV to distract me, but there was nothing. Leaving the television on mute, I perused the bookshelves. I kept one shelf of new novels that I hadn’t yet read, but nothing tempted me. All I wanted was to go into my daughter’s bedroom, sit by her side, rub her back, and have her smile up at me, totally trusting and loving, the way she’d done all her life.
Until now.
I finally took a book out—one I knew by feel, even before seeing the worn leather binding.
I sat down on the couch and opened it gingerly. The upper-right edge was frayed and the bottom left corner was torn. In the middle the first page was a single photograph. A black-and-white studio shot of a two-month-old baby girl. Beneath it was a date, written in ink that had faded just enough to make it look as if it were slowly disappearing.
May 16, 1944
I turned to the next page. There were rows of pictures, all of the same child, month after month, as she began to get older, each one dated in the same flowery handwriting.
My grandmother had been meticulous about this album of her only daughter. When I was a little girl, I’d been fascinated by it, and used to love to stare at the pictures of my mother and try to find her face, the beautiful face that I knew by heart, in the photographs of the child.
By the time she was six months old, her eyebrows were strong and perfectly arched, the same shape they would be for the rest of her life. And the blue eyes were already as round and brilliant as they were when they looked at me years later. The proof that this baby was actually my mother had somehow been important to me. That she had been small and now was grown reassured me.
It wasn’t until she was ten that my mother’s lips began to resemble those that had kissed me every night. At twelve, her cheekbones started to show. By the time she was sixteen the resemblance was locked in.
That was the year my mother became one of The Lost Girls—a television series about the misadventures of two orphaned teenagers, taken in by a schoolteacher couple.
The show was an instant hit, and my mother became a star at an age when she was too young to cope. It both made her and destroyed her because the show went off the air when she was nineteen and she hadn’t been successful at anything thereafter. Her acting never graduated to the next level; her marriage to my father, a few years later, didn’t work; eventually she became addicted to pills and alcohol. My father tried to get her help, but she bolted, taking me with her, hiding out in a miserable apartment on the Lower East Side.
We only lasted a year.
A few times she stopped drinking. For five or six days, she’d quit bringing home the men who scared me, start to smile more and even cook dinner. Those days were the best. But she never stayed sober long. Finally one night she took too many pills, washed them down with too much vodka and fell into a coma. At eight years old, I was the one who found her and called my father and asked him to come and save her.
He couldn’t. But he took me home with him and tried to save me. His second wife tried to help him, but it was Nina Butterfield, my mother’s oldest friend, who truly rescued me, who gave me the sheltering arms and unconditional love that kept me going.
I ran my finger over my mother’s long, wavy hair in a photograph taken when she was eighteen. She was lovely, with soft curls and those electric-blue eyes that looked so much like my daughter’s that sometimes I am still overwhelmed by missing my mother when gazing into my daughter’s face.
In that picture, at the height of her success, my mother looked like a real Hollywood actress. I wish I had known her then, at her happiest, when the bell-toned laugh that I had heard only infrequently was the sound she made the most often.
What was I looking for that night in the den? Something that would help me explain to Dulcie why, out of everything in the world, I could not allow her to follow in my own mother’s footsteps.
When the phone rang, I was almost relieved to put the album down and return to the present.
“Morgan?”
The voice was low and the syllables pulled like taffy. It was Noah Jordain.
“What are you doing?” he asked in that slow, southern drawl that brought to mind his fingers on my skin.
“Sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”
“Ruin another meal?”
“Very nice, very nice. No. I had some take-out soup. I bet you had something exotic you just whipped up for yourself in a minute and a half.”
“No, darling, not me, not tonight. I just got home. This is one crazy case. But I don’t want to talk about that now. I miss you.”
The words chilled and warmed me at the same time. He did this to me all the time. Affected me in a way that no one—not even my ex-husband—ever had.
“Morgan?”
“I’m here.”
“You got awfully quiet there. What were you thinking?”
“What awful things you see and I hear every day.”
“By hearing, by listening, you help people.”
“I know.”
“You sound too sad. What’s wrong?”
I told him about Dulcie’s invitation to audition for the TV series. I knew he’d understand. He’d watched us go through this the last time.
“I don’t like to automatically take your side, but she’s definitely too young to go off to Hollywood.”
“Thanks. The problem is how do I convince her of that?”
“Not sure you can.�
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“So how long do I have to suffer her stony silence and nasty looks this time? You know how bad it was last time. I want her to fight it out with me, but she’s so stubborn. So much like my mother. She just freezes me out.”
“Need help thawing?” Noah asked.
I laughed.
“You know, it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve laid eyes on you.”
Something about the way his voice moved over the words “laid eyes on you” made me tremble. I felt a pull so strong it was almost painful, and then the sharp stab of fear followed. It always did. The red flag. The alarm. The warning. I wasn’t used to wanting someone. Or opening up. It made me vulnerable in a way I didn’t like.
I pushed myself to respond. “I miss you, too, Noah.” I heard the words louder in my ears than I’d uttered them.
“That’s good to hear, darling. That means you’ll say yes to what I’m going to ask you.”
“Yes.”
“You surprise me, Morgan, you know that? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“No, but I wanted to see what it would feel like to do that. Just take a chance. So, what did I agree to?”
“Spending this weekend with me if Dulcie is going to be at her father’s.”
“Well, you’re in luck. Or I am. Mitch is picking her up from the theater on Friday night and she’s not coming home until Monday. What are we doing?”
“You surprised me, I’ll surprise you. I’ll tell you on Friday night. But it’s still two days till then. What am I going to do in the meantime?” His voice was playful. “What if we just stay on the phone for the next three hours. Talk until we fall asleep, and then sleep with the phones by our faces,” he said.
“Men do not say things like that. You are entirely too romantic. It makes me suspicious.”
“It does not. It makes you giddy. I can tell from your voice. And men do say things like that. At least this one does.”
I was about to respond when I heard his cell phone ringing in the background. “Damn it, hold on.”
A call on his cell phone was almost always bad news, since he didn’t use it personally.
“That’s Perez. I’m sorry, Morgan, but I have to go. If I can, I’ll call you back later.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said, not quite sure he heard me as he hung up his phone.
Twenty
Dearest,
I miss you the most at night. Sometimes missing you is a
soft ache, but tonight it is like sharp spikes pushed into every joint of my body. Except now I have a goal that keeps me going—knowing that I am doing what has to be done. All five of them will be punished by your birthday. Sixteen days left. Sixteen. Sweet sixteen days. That allows me no room for mistakes, which is why I have to be invisible everywhere I go, in everything I do, even while I’m on the Internet. Invisible me. Visible women. Too visible. Too visible with all of themselves. There were other terrors, other weaknesses, other gross abuses and influences before the Internet, I know there was porn in magazines and X-rated movies and live theaters where women stripped down and danced naked while men sat behind glass walls in little booths and jerked off to prostitutes who cost money.
But these women are not limited to time and place: they fly, they spread their wings and more than their wings, and they are in front of ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand eyes at once, in living rooms and bedrooms and offices, all at the same time, talking, seducing, acting out, safe with their distance and yet dangerous with their reality.
Sometimes I sit in front of your computer and watch them and try to figure out exactly what it is about these others, these women, that makes them so addictive. I sit at your desk, fingers on the keys of your computer, and try to understand, and eventually the effort leads me back to you.
I miss you and I love you. How could you ever wonder about that? You. You. All I had and all that mattered—that ever mattered—was you. Did I tell you that? Did I tell you that I recorded Penny getting sick but have not watched it again? I don’t have the nerve. I have watched enough of her on that screen, playing with herself, the pain kicking in, taking her by surprise. Taking her by surprise the way you took me by surprise, and with pain that kicked in and kicks in. That is why she lost her place in her crude sex play, why she was naked and her body glistened with the perspiration that dripped down her neck like tears, down her breasts and her stomach until it reached her pubic hair, where it disappeared, why she was dizzy and her eyes couldn’t focus. She didn’t even know what to do to help herself by the time she doubled over and her skin had turned chalk white. Her nipples were erect and they stayed erect, by the way, the whole time she was sick, so that it even seemed like the drug had turned her on.
After it was over, I sat there for a long time and felt as if everything that separates us had disappeared and we were together again. Only then, only when she was dying, did I feel alive and know that you know that I love you, and that I am proving it—that Penny died for our love and so will the next woman. This I do for you.
Friday
Fourteen days remaining
Twenty-One
I had gone to talk to Nina at my ten forty-five break only to find out she was attending a funeral. So it wasn’t until that afternoon that I caught her in her office, pouring herself a cup of hot, steaming ginger-and-honey tea, a concoction she made at home every day and brought with her in a big thermos. She offered me some, which I took, and then I sat down on her camel-colored leather couch and asked her who’d died.
“Didn’t I tell you yesterday?”
I shook my head.
“I must have been in denial. Nobody does denial better than a shrink.”
We laughed. It was true, even if it was a cliché.
Josh Cohen, a professor at Columbia Law School, who had been sick with Alzheimer’s for years, had passed away. For his friends and family, it had been like losing him twice: first when his mind faded away and he didn’t know them anymore, again when his body had given out. Nina was very close friends with Josh’s wife, Claire, who was also a therapist. She commented on the size of the crowd.
“All the important legal minds in the city, along with all the shrinks. There’s a joke in there somewhere but I can’t think of it now. Strange bedfellows, that’s it. Stacey O’Connell and I were sitting right behind a couple she’s been counseling for two years. I saw three lawyers I’ve worked with. Two of them saw me but went out of their way to avoid me. Kira Rushkoff wound up sitting behind Stella Dobson, and Stacey and I were worried Stella was going to notice.”
“Why?”
“Kira Rushkoff was the lawyer who won the privacy invasion lawsuit against Stella.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I forgot that. Do you know about Stella’s new book?”
“No, I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. How do you know about it?”
“Small city. Small world. She’s approached Blythe. She wants to interview her.”
Nina gave me a very confused look. “She wants to interview a sex therapist? Surely she would have called me. We’ve known each other for years.”
“No, she doesn’t want to interview her as a sex therapist. I don’t think she has any idea that Blythe works here. She wants to interview her about her Web-cam work. She probably doesn’t even know Blythe’s name. Online she’s called Psyche, after the Greek goddess.”
“I hope her past doesn’t wind up being a problem for her with patients one day,” Nina mused.
“It shouldn’t,” I said, thinking of the mask, certain I was right.
Saturday
Thirteen days remaining
Twenty-Two
The ride in from the airport led me to expect far more hurricane devastation than I found in the French Quarter. “It’s enchanting,” I said as the taxi drove down the tree-lined street, past the row of ornate town houses with their iron balustrades and architecture that belonged to another era. My window was down, and the warm air blowing in felt
exotic after the freezing temperatures in New York. “It’s not like any other city, is it?”
Noah smiled. “No, it isn’t. It’s crazy and lazy and has a rhythm, taste and texture all its own. But I don’t want to tell you what it’s like. That’s why you’re here. To find out for yourself.” He squeezed my hand.
Noah had picked me up that morning after calling the night before and telling me to be ready at seven-thirty and to pack for two days in mid-seventy-degree weather. It wasn’t until we got to the airport that I found out we were going to New Orleans. He was due in court there on Monday and thought we’d spend the weekend together; I’d go back Sunday evening, and he’d stay on.
We got out of the taxi on a small side street, which looked as if nothing had changed there for more than a hundred years, and walked into the Saint Dennis hotel.
We’d stepped into what, to my untrained eye, looked like a perfectly restored mansion from the late 1800s. The lobby had tall potted palms, velvet settees and high windows with organza curtains that pooled onto the polished parquet floors. The scent of lush flowers perfumed the air. I stood still and breathed in for a few seconds.
“It’s magnolia,” Noah told me. I smiled because he knew what I was doing.
The concierge rang for a bellman, who took us in a mirrored elevator up to the third floor. Our room was decorated as authentically as the lobby, and while Noah tipped the bellman, I took a quick inventory. The king-size bed was covered with a heavy lavender damask spread, an antique writing desk stood in the corner and lovely prints of belle epoque New Orleans street scenes hung on the walls. A huge bouquet of freesia, roses and iris rested on the fireplace, gracing the room with its perfume. But it was the small balcony—with its wrought-iron railing, wicker chairs, ivy-covered trellis, pots of geraniums and enchanting view—that charmed me.
