“The boy’s mother’s going to sue us, I’m sure.”
“I suppose she will.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry that you and Tristan aren’t getting along. Maybe you should cut the week short and go home on Tuesday or Wednesday if things don’t get better.”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.” She told him about the girl, the dinner invitation, the argument over the sandals. Steven murmured that he was sorry, that he wished he could be there to help. Before they hung up, she said, “I don’t know how to talk to him anymore. He’s so rude to me all the time.”
“I really think that’ll pass, sweetheart.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I think it will.”
“He’s not a good person, Steven. He just isn’t. I feel sick to my stomach saying it, but it’s true.”
He exhaled heavily. “He’s not that bad, Jan. Come on. I’m not in the best frame of mind to talk about this right now.”
“No, I guess not.”
“I’m sorry, but everything’s such a mess here and I can barely put a coherent thought together about anything, especially you and Tristan.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll let you go. You’re tired and I’m bothering you. We’ll talk tomorrow then, okay?” She said good-bye and hung up, cutting off his own good-bye, not giving him a chance to say he loved her.
She gazed listlessly at the TV, listening for Tristan’s return. He came in from the beach a half an hour later, took a fast shower, and before he went out again, opened the adjoining door and said good-bye. He was wearing khaki shorts, his irritating Tevas, a navy blue linen shirt. His face and arms were already turning brown. “Please be back by ten,” she said.
He patted his pockets, found what he wanted and stopped. “Yeah, okay.”
“Three hours should be enough, don’t you think?”
“I’ll have to see,” he said. “I can’t rush them back here if they want to hang out for a while.”
“I’d like you to tell them that your curfew is ten o’clock. Please do that, Tristan.”
He was silent.
“Please.”
He nodded, not meeting her eyes, and shut the door.
She knew that it would have been stupid to insist that he stay and have dinner with her. It would have been an ugly, public joke: him glowering at her all night and refusing to talk, their waiter and the other diners noticing. They might have pitied her, guessed that it wasn’t her fault, but no one had any reason to pity her. She had a home, a husband, a healthy son who hadn’t been killed prematurely by cancer or a drunk driver or a warehouse fire. She had two college degrees, neither of which she used anymore because she no longer worked at St. Luke’s, the hospital where she had been a nutritionist for eleven years. Now she worked part-time at the library and helped a caterer friend with her biggest parties; Steven earned most of the money. The nutritionist’s job had absorbed too much of her time and energy, as was the case now with Steven and his job. She had missed most of Tristan’s childhood, and it seemed to her a malicious irony that her current freedom was more of a burden to her son than a boon.
She ate dinner in a seafood restaurant outside the gates of the resort and watched young parents chastise their tired, impatient children when they overturned a water glass or got up and ran around the table for no reason other than unruly excitement. Some of the other vacationers had red faces with a sunglass shape of ghostly skin around their eyes. No one seemed to notice her, but she didn’t mind very much. She brooded over Steven and how impatient she had been with him on the phone. It was difficult sometimes to picture them together for the rest of their lives, but she did not know where she would be if not with him. The prospect of losing him to another woman filled her with a dull horror. She knew that it could happen, that it would happen if she did not learn how to be happier. Still, it was easier for him—he had a sense of purpose, despite his job’s current unpleasant demands, and Tristan at least respected him. It was she who bore the brunt of their son’s bad moods. Steven saw this sometimes and responded with a rebuke, but he continued to believe that their son would grow up to be a charming, charismatic man.
After dinner she took a walk on the beach, the sun already having dropped below the horizon. Several couples and a few families still ambled along the beach, some greeting or smiling at her. No one else looked remotely miserable. She wished that she could enjoy herself. If she didn’t feel better in the morning, she might change their tickets and leave early, as Steven had suggested, but if Tristan threatened to stay behind, she could imagine a screaming match. It was absurd that she could feel so bad in such a beautiful place. She could not imagine ever wanting to return.
By ten, her son had not yet come back from dinner. At ten thirty, she called his cell phone, but he didn’t answer. At ten fifty, she called again, so furious that her voice shook as she left a second message.
He finally called her at eleven twenty, from a hospital in Fort Myers. The girl was not well. She’d had a reaction to something at dinner—the oysters or the shrimp, they suspected, though no one else was sick. She wouldn’t stop throwing up and they had to put her on an IV. The doctor wanted her to spend the night in the hospital and her parents would probably take her back to Chicago early if she were well enough to travel. When Jan arrived at the emergency room entrance to take Tristan back to the island, he was very surly, refusing to meet her eyes when she opened the car door and said hello. The girl’s parents were staying overnight with her and did not come outside with Tristan to say good-bye.
“This place sucks,” he said as he got into the car. “Why did we come here?”
She looked at him, smelling on his breath what she thought might be alcohol but was too tired and demoralized to ask him if it was. “Is Patty going to be all right?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
His hands gripped his knees. He still wouldn’t look at her. “I said she would, didn’t I?”
“I know you’re upset, but treating me rudely isn’t going to help things.”
“I’m really fucking tired, Mom. I’ve been sitting—”
“Don’t swear at me, Tristan.”
“I’ve been sitting in the hospital for three hours. I can’t be the perfect son all the time.”
“No, but some of the time would be nice.”
She could feel his furious eyes on her as they drove away from the hospital with its boxy windows and sick girlfriends and foiled teenage hopes. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“I wish you would have called when you got to the hospital so that I didn’t have to spend an hour and a half worrying about why you weren’t back yet.”
“I forgot,” he said flatly. “With everything that was going on, I forgot that I was supposed to be home by ten.”
“I called you twice and you didn’t pick up.”
“I didn’t have a strong signal in the hospital. It kept fading in and out.”
He would have an excuse for everything. He would lie and never admit that he had done something wrong. She could not bear the thought of it and started to cry. She stared at the road and let her eyes turn blurry and blinked back as many of the tears as she could but soon her cheeks were wet and neither of them said a word. They drove the whole way back to the resort without speaking, Tristan sulking and playing with the radio, trying to find a station that he liked for more than one song. She could have yelled at him but was too tired, too disappointed, and still not sure whether she should change their tickets and insist that they leave early, which now Tristan would probably have welcomed. For this reason alone she thought they should stay but knew the impulse to be a juvenile one, and with neither of them happy and Steven off in Louisiana dealing with a dead child and the loss of millions of dollars in goods and property, the vacation was an unequivocal disaster.
When they got back to the resort, Tristan mumbled “Goodnight,” and disappeared into his room, and within a few se
conds, she heard his television droning. It was now after one A.M., and they’d left Chicago only eighteen hours earlier, but she felt as if she’d been shoved into someone else’s life, her own passable life in Illinois now unreachable, as if a malevolent trickster had spirited her away from it with the promise of sunshine and renewed youth.
She fell asleep in her clothes and dreamt of a forest fire, awakening just before seven with a start, her face hot, as if she had stood too close to the dream fire. Her head felt hollow and achy. She made herself stay in bed until eight, knowing that Tristan wasn’t likely to be up until ten or eleven. After pulling on her swimsuit, she went down to the beach to try to walk off her headache and search for a few shells worth keeping. The morning air was cool and the sky clear; on the sand she saw that some people had already staked out their places for the day. Beach chairs and towels were arranged in neat rows but almost no one reclined on them yet.
Despite the ordeal of the previous night, she realized that she did not want to leave the island yet. It seemed best to stay, to refuse failure. With the girl sick, Jan hoped that she and Tristan might now be able to spend some time together, that they might have a conversation that didn’t devolve into a hostile argument. She walked a mile down the beach, toward Sanibel and the mainland, before turning back, feeling more hopeful as she watched the sandpipers on their twig legs scurry against the tide and the pelicans hover just above the water, scouting for whitefish. She did not slow down until she’d returned to their rooms and knocked on Tristan’s door, asking if he wanted to go out for breakfast. He didn’t respond, and when she entered his room through the adjoining door, he wasn’t there. The bed was unmade and his clothes from the night before were in a heap next to the dresser, a pair of blue underwear in a wad on top.
The keys to the rental car were still in her dresser drawer, as was her purse, all her money and traveler’s checks inside of it. She went out to the balcony and looked down at the pool. Her son was there, sprawled across a chaise longue, a suntanned woman in a yellow bikini sitting in the chair next to him, her head close to his, her slender back to the balcony where Jan stood. This bikini-clad woman wasn’t Patty. She seemed older, though Jan couldn’t tell for sure. She hurriedly checked her hair in the mirror, put on some lipstick, and went down to the pool.
Up close, the woman in the yellow bikini didn’t look much younger than Jan was. Too old to be talking so conspiratorially to a boy who couldn’t have been mistaken for someone much older than eighteen, despite his broad shoulders and the hair that had started to grow on his chest. As Jan approached, Tristan leaned closer to the stranger and said something that Jan couldn’t hear. The woman looked up and smiled at her as if to say they were all friends, everything was fine, and wouldn’t she like to join them?
“I’m Liz,” said the woman, offering her hand.
Jan hesitated, long enough to make it clear that she wasn’t pleased. “Jan Wright,” she said.
Tristan’s face was unreadable. “Liz is down here because she just got divorced.”
The woman shook her head and laughed. “No, no. I just filed for divorce. It hasn’t come through yet.”
“But you’re still down here celebrating,” he said.
She laughed again. “That’s exactly right.”
Both the woman and Tristan looked up at her, expectant. She had to keep herself from blurting, “Why do you think you can say things like that to my son? Don’t you realize he’s still in high school?” Or, “Will this be your first divorce?”
But all she said was “Oh.”
The woman shaded her eyes and squinted up at Jan. “I know how that must sound, but my husband isn’t a good person. I never should have married him.”
Jan nodded. She did not want to act the killjoy her son expected her to be. She was close enough to smell the coconut lotion the woman had applied to her slender body, her beauty undoubtedly having been noticed by Tristan too. When had it happened? she wondered. When had he become a boy who felt that his mother did nothing but limit him, that she lived only to hold him back, to keep him from experiencing the things adults claimed as their inalienable right? He wanted sex, possibly love, and he was determined to have them, whether she wanted him to or not.
“If you don’t mind,” Jan murmured, “I’d like to take my son to breakfast.”
“I already ate,” he said.
“But I haven’t, and I’d like you to go with me. I’m sure you can still find room for juice or a piece of toast.”
“You should go with your mom,” said the woman.
He didn’t move.
“Tristan,” said Jan. “I’d like to go now. I’m hungry.”
He stood up, yanking his towel from the chair. “I’ll see you later,” he said, glancing at the woman.
She smiled. “It was very nice to meet you and your mother, Tristan. I hope to see you both later.”
“I don’t know if it’s appropriate for you to talk to someone like her,” Jan said as they walked toward the restaurant near the resort’s entrance.
Tristan rolled his eyes. “Someone like her? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She must be at least twenty years older than you.”
“She’s thirty-one.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“It’s not like we were fucking by the side of the pool. We were just talking.”
Jan stopped, her breath coming in a single panting gasp. “You are never to talk to me like that again. Do you understand? I should slap your face right now.”
He made a harsh, ugly sound. “Why don’t you? What’s stopping you?”
They stood glaring at each other under the morning sun, beside the brilliant oleander bushes where bees drifted from blossom to blossom, she standing on the balls of her feet, looking up at him, one hand in a fist at her side, and in the next second she was opening it and raising it to his face. Her palm met his stubbled cheek hard and then it was over and he didn’t jump back or touch his face in injured surprise. He only stared at her while she panted and dropped her eyes, her body trembling with fury and shame. A few people were close enough to see what she had done, their conversations temporarily stalled before they resumed with a note of false brightness. Soon she and Tristan were moving again, as if nothing had happened, but she knew that something irrevocable had. They would not be able to forget it. She had hit him, for the first time in his life, and she was certain he had no doubt now that some part of her hated him too.
THE FIRST WIFE
1.
The famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics—refinements or corporeal variations—that allow their projected images, if not their bodies themselves, to dominate the rest of us.
If you are married to a man whom thousands, possibly millions, of women believe themselves to be in love with, some of them, inevitably, more beautiful and charming than you are, it is not a question of if but of when. When will he be unfaithful, if he hasn’t been already? It isn’t easy, nor is it as romantic as the magazine photographers make it look, to be the wife of a very famous, memorably handsome man. There are very few nights, even when you are together, when you don’t wonder what secrets he is keeping from you, or how long he will be at home before he leaves for another shoot or another meeting in a glamorous city across one ocean or the other with some director or producer who rarely remembers your name. Marriage is a liability in the movie business, despite the public’s stubborn, contradictory desire to believe that this particular marriage is different, in that it will endure, even prosper, with children and house-beautiful photo essays in Vogue.
There were always so many others lurking about, hoping to take my place, if only for a few days or hours. It was like being married to the president of an enormous country where nearly everyone was offering him sexual favors, ones he really wasn’t scorned by anyone but me for accepting.
2.
He married me in part
because I wasn’t famous, not as famous as he was, in any case. He was the beauty in our household, and I was not the beast but the brains. I wasn’t ugly or plain, and I remain neither ugly nor plain, but in college, when for a while I fantasized strenuously about becoming an actress, it soon became clear to me that I liked making up the characters more than playing them. I also realized early on that men age much better in Hollywood than women do. My husband will never be old in the same way that I will be. Even if my fame were as great as his, I would be called an old woman much sooner than he an old man. But I will never be as famous as he is, and although he can be blamed for many things, this isn’t one of them.
How did it end? Before I say what it was like to be courted by him, to fall in love, however briefly or genuinely, I prefer to talk about the end because it is rarely ever given its due. It is the filmmaker’s and the writer’s most reliable trick to seduce us with the details of a marvelous and improbable coupling while hinting darkly that things did not end well, that some tragedy or tragic character flaw in one or both of the principals brought on a heartbreaking collapse. And when the collapse comes, it is seldom given more than a few pages, a few sodden minutes at the end of the film.
My husband was Antony Grégoire; this is the name he was born with, not a stage name chosen for him by an agent. It is regal-sounding, I suppose, a name that demands our attention or at least a moment’s pause. His father was French, his mother Swedish, he their only son, the one masculine bloom raised in a garden of sisters. He and his sisters got along well enough most of the time, but he was the favorite—a fact their parents did little to disguise, despite the three daughters’ spectacular scholastic and athletic achievements. Antony was bookish, quiet, and sheltered during early adolescence, but then he became handsome and, eventually, the best-looking man in the room. He attracted the heated attention of his sisters’ friends, and in time, one of their fathers who was a film producer.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 2
