“Hmm,” Annabelle said. She threw her cigarette butt to the pavement on the opposite side of her car from the busy child, who had squatted and was marching Barbie along the yellow parking line.
“It’s like he’s arranging flowers,” the young man continued. “P. P., I mean.”
“Okay, so which is he? A chef, a painter, or a florist?”
The young man smiled; his patience had been for Annabelle. “He’s a magician.”
“Fay-Fay-Fay!” The little boy had picked up his doll and was banging it into the door of Annabelle’s car.
“Hey!” she yelled, and slid to her feet. She almost stepped on the child. His shortness surprised her. She wanted to grab his arm, but couldn’t remember ever touching a toddler and didn’t know how to go about it. One of her legs trembled. The child paused in mid-blow, Barbie suspended like an ax, and his gaze boiled at Annabelle. Two teeth from his thrust jaw bit into his upper lip. His sudden ugliness froze Annabelle. When the young man whisked the toddler from the pavement and settled him upon his narrow shoulders, the child’s mouth dilated into a cavernous O. He wrapped one arm around the balding head and drummed his heels against the man’s concave chest while clenching Barbie around her thighs and whipping her long hair in circles as if she were a pole dancer. The young man eyed the car door.
“I’m sorry. He hasn’t had his nap.” He held the boy’s ankles firmly with one hand while he ran the other over the glossy red finish. “You better take a look. Wray-Wray, say you’re sorry to Ms. Hadley. I like your hair short, by the way.”
“Thank you.” She smoothed a hand over the door. “Nothing here.”
The child squeezed his knees against the young man’s neck and continued to whip his doll in circles. “Fay-Fay-Fay—”
“Probably has to pee. Do you have to pee, Wray? You might not get an apology. I’m not sure I ever taught him ‘sorry.’ Hey up there—have you got a ‘sorry’ for the nice lady?”
What did Annabelle know about children? Didn’t they all have syndromes these days? Aspberger’s or ADD or something. What had she heard about babies on the news? Mothers had six or seven or even eight at a time; toddlers tumbled from windows or into tiger pits at the zoo. Sometimes they were found, alive or dead, in dumpsters. Annabelle’s thoughts spun as if she were the doll the little boy—Ray-Ray?—continued to whip in circles, and she tried to spot a focal point like a ballet dancer. The child rested his chin on the fringe of the young man’s disappearing curls, and their heads, one atop the other, reminded her of a totem pole.
“You’re Carl Walchuk—” she blurted. She supposed she’d known all along: Carl Walchuk, screenwriter of Doctor Moreau, erstwhile child star, and the son of Raymond Walchuk. Why hadn’t they met decades ago on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream? Had he seen her wearing all that makeup? “—and this is your little brother.” Not his son. She’d seen it on E News a couple of years ago: how, after Raymond Walchuk had been dead for years, his ex-wife used his defrosted sperm, over which she still held custody, for the in vitro fertilization of her eggs. After seeing a zygote implanted in a surrogate’s womb, she’d died of cancer before her second child’s birth. Which left Carl to inherit the infant—a surprise little brother, a quarter of a century his junior.
Carl Walchuk smiled like someone accustomed to deferred recognition. “This is Wray.” He dipped the boy toward Annabelle. “—with a W. He’s named after his father, homophonetically. His initials are W. W. People usually use initials to make their names easier to say. Like P. P. Frederico—his real name’s unpronounceable. But ‘W. W.’ is six syllables. Remember vets referring to ‘double-ya-double-ya-two’? The abbreviation takes twice as long to say as ‘World War Two’—it made the war shorter and longer at the same time—a love-hate relationship for the greatest generation. My grandfather spent that war on a Pacific island—the same one that P. P. is from. I’ve been there, but I forget its name. My dad made Son of Kong there. Oh—and the doll is Fay. Her name is Fay. I don’t know how she identifies herself sexually; I don’t believe lesbians use ‘fey,’ but I’m no expert.”
“Wray and Fay.”
“Embarrassing, I know. Really, on his birth certificate it’s Raymond. After our father, like I said. You and I could have met a long time ago, but we never did, even though I told my friends for years that we were thick as thieves. I even told them you kissed me. On the cheek. Under mistletoe—on the movie set. They say we dig ourselves in deeper when we elaborate lies, but I think a good lie is in the details.” He shifted the child on his shoulders. The boy made a V of Barbie’s legs and wedged them around his throat, aiming the prone figure at Annabelle like a divining rod. “He really loves this doll. I tried a GI Joe, but he didn’t take to it. He didn’t like his stuffed Kiko either—remember the white monkey they marketed with Son of Kong? We’ve still got dozens of them at home spilling out of closets. You want one? Mint condition, wrapped in plastic, probably worth something on eBay. I don’t know at what age Wray will identify himself as a particular sex, or if it’s happened already. The W will help if he’s transgendered, though, don’t you think? ‘Wray’— that could be male or female.” If Carl was joking, his expression didn’t belie it.
“I had a Kiko. The little white ape.” Annabelle hadn’t thought of Kiko in years, but suddenly she could almost feel his soft weight in her cradling arms.
“Sure you did. Every kid had one after Son of Kong. That doll kept my dad out of the poorhouse.”
Annabelle looked at the toddler perched on his brother’s shoulders. “You’re raising your little brother.”
“Mom’s dying gift to her soon-to-be-orphaned elder son,” he said. “The beauty of an indestructible egg, a surrogate’s wholesome womb, and Daddy’s frozen sperm. Whenever I think of little Wray’s origins, I picture a strawberry daiquiri.” He jostled the little boy. “How’s Fay, Wray?”
“Fay-Fay-Fay,” the boy muttered, then began to chew Barbie’s foot.
“We’re quite a novelty act,” Carl said. “Little guy’s the Ninth Wonder of the World. I pretend I’m the Empire State Building. We’re on constant lookout for biplanes. I suppose one day he’ll find out Kong’s son never made it off Skull Island. We should all know our personal histories, right? You ready to go back to recording? Trust P. P. and fey it up. It may seem simplistic and offensive, but he’s got amazing instincts—or incredible luck. I told you your hair looks good short, right?”
Usually a man would compliment Annabelle’s eyes, and then his gaze would melt over her breasts like sculpting hands. She patted her head, felt its contour under the bristles and, when her palm passed over her face, sniffed her breath—tobacco scented, but not foul. “You did,” she said. “Thanks again.”
The lilting sibilance she gave M’ling’s growl struck the right chord, and P. P. Frederico approved Annabelle’s delivery of her first line on the twentieth take.
“Your breakfast, sir,” she recited next, to P. P.’s immediate satisfaction. Though M’ling was present in most scenes, he spoke rarely. Most of Annabelle’s contribution consisted not of words, but of background gutturals that P. P. Frederico insisted be precisely matched to a setting that existed only in his mind’s eye. Annabelle locked her gaze on her character’s featureless blob as if it were her reflection and listened to P. P.’s directions (“try a long ‘grrr,’ almost a whimper, here—”) while her thoughts wandered. She fancied a pair of lips on the blank face whispering “Kiko.” She’d loved The Son of Kong. She’d made her parents take her to see it in the theatre three times, and the video and doll had been birthday gifts. The giant juvenile ape was so cute, and heroic, too. She agreed with her parents—it would be fun to meet the man who’d made her favorite movie. She’d brought Kiko along to the first day of filming on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, coddling him like a nursing infant, as if Mr. Raymond Walchuk himself were to confer a personal blessing on the a
pe-doll. But Kiko had been left with her mother on the other side of the lights, while Annabelle’s child face had disappeared beneath the brush strokes of Raymond Walchuk’s makeup experts.
“He’s thinking fucky-fucky,” Raymond Walchuk explained to Annabelle, who was waiting beneath her transformed features. She hadn’t understood. “You’re the dream Svidrigaylov can’t help from happening.”Annabelle had cuddled in the bed Raymond Walchuk lay her in before the cameras, the first bed she’d occupied without her Kiko in months. She’d smiled with her made-up face the way he told her to, purred a laugh, and licked her lips as directed—she had never forgotten their sweet, slick taste, remembered it with each of ten thousand adult applications. From time to time she heard rumors that rough cuts of her scene from the unfinished Svidrigaylov’s Dream survived, but Annabelle knew the dream belonged only to her.
Annabelle wondered how much of Svidrigaylov’s Dream lay between them during her first night in bed with Carl. He’d been an attentive, even fastidious lover. She couldn’t recall fucking on cleaner sheets.
At the end of her week as the voice of M’ling, Carl had invited her to share a meal with “les frères Walchuk,” and she’d accepted, although she might have begged off if she’d known how trying the last recording session would be. The script finished, P. P. Frederico requested “a treasury of utterances” so calling back Annabelle wouldn’t be necessary if a particular effect were required. For half a day she fulfilled his demands for snarls, snorts, barks, whimpers, and an array of howls in different pitches. Most harrowing was the last vocalization P. P. solicited: a long wail broken by a string of sobs and ending with a strangled cough.
She left the studio drained, responding with a grim smile to the director’s observation, “Now that was cathartic, wasn’t it?”
But a meal with the Walchuk boys had been salubrious. The three of them had shared a spaghetti dinner around the kitchen table of Carl’s Studio City home. The toddler ate with his fingers the strands his big brother had cut into bite-sized pieces, and soon his cheeks, T-shirt, and overalls were sauce-stained. “Submersion-emersion!” Carl announced, which Annabelle discovered meant a raucous, splash-filled, pre-bedtime bath that included the vigorous scrubbing not only of Wray, but also his ubiquitous Barbie. “Pity,” Wray-Wray said about the plastic figurine at one point, quieting down amid his bubbles and inserting Barbie’s head into his mouth. “He means ‘Pretty,’ I think,” Carl said. The doll’s wet hair must have been soapy, because Wray-Wray jerked her out and spat, then held her at arm’s length and gazed at her. “Fay,” he’d sighed with such exaggerated rue that he might have been acting.
Carl’s baby, Annabelle thought as she held the wriggling child out for him to towel dry. Then Wray, freshly pajama-ed, had curled between them on his over-sized bed. He lay facing Carl, who read The Cat in the Hat with excessive passion, both brothers lost in the destructive hijinks of Thing One and Thing Two. Wray had drawn up his knees fetally and planted the soles of his small feet on Annabelle’s breasts as if he were preparing to spring off them toward his brother. But he wasn’t exactly Carl’s baby, was he? Had Carl been such a disappointment to his mother that she’d felt the need to try again with a test-tube pregnancy? Yet she’d chosen to duplicate her first child’s genetic code with Raymond Walchuk’s dangerous sperm.
With a formality Annabelle found charming, Carl granted her permission to smoke in his bed. It was a sentiment she knew she’d never before applied to a sex-partner.
“So what the hell are Thing One and Thing Two?” he asked. Annabelle lay with a wineglass-ashtray, its stem sticky with diet Coke, perched on her belly. She’d spilled her cigarettes over the sheets, and Carl played with them as if they were Leggos he’d just discovered at the bottom of a toy chest. He sighted her down the line of one of them and waited for her to reply.
“What do you mean? They’re ‘Things.’”
“Well—where’d the Cat get them from? Who are their parents and why didn’t they give their children better names? Maybe they came from Doctor Moreau’s pet shop.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think I’m screwing up my brother?”
Annabelle hesitated. He’d baited the nature vs. nurture trap, and it was a discussion she wasn’t eager to have with the son of Raymond Walchuk. “I don’t think so,” she said, “But I don’t know anything about kids.”
“Who does?” Carl put a cigarette between his lips, then a second and a third. “We’re all novices,” he mumbled.
“I’m not a novice,” Annabelle said. “I’m just not in the game. I don’t qualify at all.”
Carl spit out the cigarettes. One clung to his lower lip, and he left it there. Annabelle watched it bounce on his chin while he spoke until it finally dropped to the bed: “How do I know if there’s something wrong with the kid? What if he’s autistic. Or maybe he’s got infantile Tourette syndrome. Is there such a thing? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Ecolalia? You see him with that doll. How do I even know if he’s a boy or a girl inside—or something else entirely. You have to admit, he lacks coherence.”
“He’s a baby, Carl. It seems to me you’re doing a wonderful job.”
“But you’ve declared yourself unqualified. And I will brook no platitudes.”
“He seems happy. I think he’s happy—at least not unhappy.”
“I’m remarkable, I know. Heroic. Maybe I’ll get nominated for bro-dad of the year. I like to make it awkward for people not to compliment me. But I’ve got a bigger question.” He was playing with the cigarettes again, throwing them like darts at Annabelle’s hip—no, at her ass, and she imagined him impossibly lodging one between her cheeks and grinning over his achievement. Given the indulgences she’d allowed her flesh in the past, Annabelle’s modesty surprised her. She shifted the target out of Carl’s range, careful not to spill the soggy ashes from her wineglass. But Carl’s big question. It would have something to do with Raymond Walchuk—the conversation was inevitable. Annabelle was startled by her sudden certainty that while she and Carl had been fucking, he’d been envisioning her as that leering child-whore his father had turned her into so long ago. Sex under the shadow of Papa Ray’s tombstone. He was the pimp of her history. Maybe she had screwed the son to make his father’s ghost jealous. Demanding the Bic lighter, lost somewhere in the sheets, Annabelle ran the hand holding a fresh cigarette through her brush cut and felt the shape of her skull. During the one month of public middle school she’d tried before retreating permanently to on-set tutors, someone had slipped an envelope with her name on it into her locker. She’d torn it open excitedly—maybe it was a secret admirer’s note, like the one she’d gotten in her last movie, Poppy Starlight, Girl Astronaut. Instead she found a photocopied picture captioned “Parisian prostitutes shaved bald for associating with Nazi officers.” “WHORE!! had been printed across the picture in red marker, obscuring the women’s faces.
“You had it last, M’ling. M’ling One,” Carl said. He was watching her closely, and she saw his father’s eyes in his; Raymond Walchuk was in Wray-Wray’s eyes, too, and she heard the three Walchuk men whispering in chorus, “He’s thinking fucky-fucky.” Carl stretched his leg beneath the sheet and found Annabelle’s thigh with his foot. She remembered the feel of his baby brother’s soles on her breasts. “My question is,” he said, “who was afraid of women, Moreau or H. G. Wells? There are barely any in the novel. For the first movie they invented Lota, the Panther Woman. Jesus—she might have been my first love! I remember getting nauseous when they showed she had claw-hands, and you figured out she wasn’t human. I’m pretty sure the Panther Woman was the whole point for my father. But P. P. insisted I strip the screenplay down to the original male-fest.”
Annabelle sucked sharply on her cigarette, and her eyes watered.
Carl made a show of checking his arms and shoulders and craned his neck to get a look at his back. “You didn’t leave scratches, did you?
Am I bleeding? It’s okay if I am. I don’t mind.”
Not Lota—Kiko, Annabelle wanted to say, but the name of the little white monkey stuck in her throat. She exhaled gruffly, beginning to believe that Carl would dare to embrace her again. “You’re ‘M’ling Two,’” she said.
Wray-Wray Walchuk nearly died on a Saturday evening West Coast time while Annabelle was on her way back from New York, where she’d flown to discuss a theatrical role: Boo Boo Tannenbaum, a young mother, in an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s short story, “Down at the Dinghy.”
“Really, the play’s about the entire Glass family: Seymour, Franny, Zooey, Buddy—Buddy Glass narrates like the Stage Manager in Our Town,” she’d told Carl before leaving her hotel for the airport. She read the script this time, and had accepted the part after a second lunch with the director. “They didn’t even ask me to read. P. P. apparently said some pretty nice things about my work ethic. Wray-Wray was napping, Carl said, and would be sorry that he missed her call. “Tell him, ‘It wasn’t the planes—it was Beauty killed the Beast,’” Annabelle said. Maybe, she fantasized, the Walchuk boys could relocate to New York City for the run of “Dinghy,” and she could show Wray the real Empire State Building.
At JFK, conscious of heads turning toward her, Annabelle waited for her return flight and thumbed a message to Carl: “I love you.” She’d hardly the time to marvel at the words she’d texted before a young woman in military fatigues asked for an autograph and echoed them. “I loved you!” she gushed. A small fever sore cracked over her upper lip. “Back when you played those triplets in Switcheroo. For years I thought there were really three of you.”
“Just me,” Annabelle said, as she signed what looked like the back of an official military communication.
Minutes later, settled into her seat on the plane, Annabelle caught her breath when her phone revealed a new voicemail from Carl. She cupped it to her ear, anticipating anything but what she heard.
Women of Consequence Page 5
