The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “Right. But specifically, how has your elder son coped with your divorce from his father?” asked the younger presenter, returning, insistent, to her theme.

  “My sons are fine!”

  (She thought of Cal, a mournful expression on his face, sitting alone in the corner of his classroom earlier today because, after a blowout crisis in the hair salon, she had been twenty minutes late to sit cross-legged in a circle with him as Steph Andrews banged a small drum.)

  Tears spouted in Liddy’s eyes. She wiped them away with a flick of her forefinger, but she felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and desperate to be alone. Her right leg was now tap-tapping so quickly that even the most severe smoothing of her skirt could not hide it. “I mean, there are always bumps in the road with teenagers, right?” she said.

  “Tell me about it!” said Jolene, conspiratorially patting Liddy on the arm. “The day my youngest turned thirteen he started walking around looking like a Marilyn Manson tribute band! I love your message, Liddy. Keep calm and put the kids first.”

  And she whooped and waved her hands in the air, causing the studio audience to whoop and wave too. Liddy stuffed her right hand into her jacket pocket, formed a fist, and pressed hard into her thigh until it hurt. She picked up a glass of water from the low table in front of her. She took a sip.

  “Yes, I hope my book puts me out of business,” she said, praying that Curtis wasn’t watching, but relieved to have gotten through the intrusive personal questions. “Honestly, I’d say to any couple contemplating separation, sit down and read it together, see if you can stay amicable and agree on what’s fair, and I mean what’s truly fair, not what you think you deserve, then download the relevant forms and fill them in. It’ll cost you forty-nine dollars.”

  There was another enthusiastic round of applause. Liddy plastered on her smile, gave a halfhearted whoop, and nodded with a self-deprecating expression into the camera. She glanced over at the clock on the wall. Two minutes until the segment ended. She resolved never to do this sort of thing again. Ever. Meanwhile, Mary Jane was not to be dissuaded. “So, Liddy, you think the adversarial court system is not in the best interests of hurt and confused couples?”

  Liddy looked at her. Duh! she thought.

  “In most circumstances, yes, I believe court should be the last resort,” she said, firmly, but not firmly enough. Jolene sensed the opportunity for a profile-increasing move-to-prime-time storm in the Twitter-sphere. “But the multimillion-dollar divorce industry is how celebrity attorneys, like you, make your fortunes. Are you saying you make things worse, not better?”

  Liddy glanced over at the clock again. Sixty seconds to go. Okay, Liddy, keep it together, she thought.

  “In the end, clients decide how . . . aggressively . . . a case will be fought. I don’t take a moral position, I take an instruction.” Liddy forgot to do her media-friendly grin. “But in dangerous waters my reflex action is always to attack.”

  Like now, she thought, squeezing her fist even harder.

  Jolene shook her head in awe. “Wow! You really are a shark!”

  The studio audience burst out laughing, and Liddy should have laughed too, and countered with a soothing sentence or two about the importance of counseling and collaborative law. But the sudden rush of adrenaline into her bloodstream was so intense, she could almost visualize it pulsing through her veins. It was fight, flight, or freeze time, and as her official script suddenly vanished, she froze. Words stopped in her throat and began to choke her until she saw bright white starlike specks in the air.

  “You know what?” she gasped. “I am not my fucking job!”

  She was overwhelmed by a paralyzing feeling of despair, and without missing a beat, she turned and looked into the audience to see the rows of people no longer laughing but staring at her, some shifting in their seats, some whispering to one another, all concerned. Quivering, she whispered to herself, “It’s all bullshit. I’m bullshit. I can’t do this anymore,” but when she heard this reverberating through her mic live to the studio, she recoiled from the anguish in her voice and leapt to her feet, trying to pull the mic off her shirt, and when she couldn’t, shouting, “Get it off me!” to the considerable discomfort of the two presenters, whose enthusiasm was instantaneously replaced by abject terror. The producer immediately went to a commercial break, during which the clip was uploaded to YouTube.

  The video promptly went viral under the heading “Top Lawyer Goes Nuts on Television” and was of particular interest to all those who had been on the receiving end of Liddy’s bite. They gleefully sent it to everyone in their address books, apart from Gloria Jane Thompson, who found she felt sorry for Liddy, although she could not resist sending it to Sebastian Stackallan. Who, as he watched, saw the real Liddy James, and noticed, at the last second, that the handkerchief she pulled out of her pocket to dry her tears was his.

  TO: Liddy James, lmjames@oatesandassociates.com

  FROM: Sebastian Stackallan, Sebastian.Stackallan@gsr.com

  DATE: June 30

  RE: HOUSE IN IRELAND

  Dear Liddy, have been thinking of how to write this for about twenty minutes, but am too busy to waste more time so will be straightforward. I am currently in my apartment, or rather my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s apartment, packing up my stuff, and reading the charming notes she has left in my sock drawer (my particular favorite is that I only married her so people wouldn’t think I was a homosexual). The point is that I am about to head to a remote island in Alaska for a few weeks, to fish and hike and lick my wounds, and my house in Ireland will be vacant for the summer months. Having just seen your funny turn on the telly, I think you need a break. Rest assured I don’t want anything from you and, anyway, I have already saved your life so there is nothing more you can owe me. It is a beautiful place on Lough Dan in Wicklow, nothing fancy, but right on the shore between the lake and the mountain. It might just be the thing to help you get a grip.

  PS Bring the kids.

  PPS My mother is currently touring South America with her latest beau so you need not expect an encounter. (Just make sure you do not disturb the sacred grove behind the woodshed!)

  PPPS You will no doubt bump into my sister Storm at some point. She’s staying at the main house while Roberta’s away. Ignore everything she says about me and do not let her drive you anywhere. Ever.

  TO: Sebastian Stackallan, Sebastian.Stackallan@gsr.com

  FROM: Liddy James, lmjames@oatesandassociates.com

  DATE: June 30

  Dear Sebastian

  THANK YOU!

  I wanted to escape but I didn’t know where to go.

  I am tired, it’s true—mentally, physically, every way I can think of.

  Mostly I’m tired of being me.

  Liddy

  THE LAND OF EXILE AND REDEMPTION

  Of course Rose had heard Peter angry with Liddy before, but when she heard him shouting on the phone there was a tone in his voice that made her want to cry. After he had hurled the receiver to the floor, however, his ire defused and he was engulfed by the violent despair she had not seen for years. “How could Matty do this to us?” he kept saying, and at first Rose thought he was referring to her in the collective pronoun, but afterward, as he pounded around the bedroom, grabbing his coat and searching for his keys, she understood he meant himself and Liddy.

  Rose soothed, “The only thing that matters is that he’s safe. He needs to come back and live here right away. We’ll manage. We know it’s difficult at Liddy’s, with her hours. Maybe he should never have been sent to camp. . . .”

  “I wish it was that simple, Rose. What if the problem isn’t Liddy. What if it’s you and me?”

  “If anyone it was that idiot manny! I hated the sound of him.”

  “He’s been looking after Matty for six weeks. We’ve had what amounts to primary custody for nearly six years!”

  “Peter!”

  Peter had never m
ade any criticism, implied or otherwise, of Rose’s relationship with Matty before and she felt shocked and upset. Rose had assumed he would continue to blame Liddy, allowing her to breathe the self-congratulatory air of the moral high ground. She soon saw, however, that she could not take credit for the prize for drama and the captainship of the soccer team without the reverse applying. She cast around to blame something else.

  “It must be the school,” she said.

  “What? Liddy put him in private school supposedly to keep him out of trouble. She coughs up thirty-five thousand dollars a year in fees for it!”

  Rose sat down on the bed, wishing he had not been so unusually specific. She had followed Peter’s lead on the fact of Liddy’s financial support, pretending it didn’t exist, in the same way that she added extras and trips and music tuition onto the school bills without even thinking about it. And she had never asked him how much money Liddy gave him every month, because she avoided any evidence that their combined salaries did not cover their expenses.

  “What did we do wrong?” Peter demanded, and this time he meant himself and Rose. “Where the hell are my keys?” He riffled through the drawer of her nightstand, in his frenzy ignoring the envelope containing the draft “Couple Cohabitation Agreement,” which so far she had ignored too.

  “Peter, please, all teenagers experiment, especially ones who live in New York City. He’s probably scared himself more than us.”

  Rose felt quite proud of the measured way she delivered this, particularly given how hysterical she had become about the two sodas a day and lack of keyboard practice, but Peter turned to look at her as if she had slapped him.

  “Rose. Matty is my flesh and blood and I cannot allow him to head further down a self-destructive path that will bring misery to all of us, including you. Do you want an out-of-control adolescent taking drugs around our small child?”

  “No,” said Rose helplessly.

  She listened as he stomped down the creaky stairs, his exit punctuated predictably by the sharp double bang. She tried to sit up, but an excruciating pulse of pelvic pain sliced between her legs. She clutched her belly tight and felt helpless. She called Doctor Barbara.

  Four hours later, however, when a call came through from Liddy’s office and a young woman named Sydney told her that Liddy had “gone fucking nuts” (Curtis’s words, not Sydney’s) live on national television, Rose decided to be helpless no more. She was glad Peter was already on his way to Vermont, and despite the sciatica and the sleeplessness and the high blood pressure, and despite Barbara’s protestations, she did what the nicest woman anyone had ever met would do. She stood up, every pain-filled step reminding her of the Little Mermaid in the original story, who gives up her tail and walks as if on knives for love, resolved to go to Liddy’s apartment herself.

  She did not get past the couch.

  So it was an exhausted Peter who arrived there in the early hours of the next morning, with a dirty and malodorous Matty, to be greeted by Sally, the new nanny, her obedience and enthusiasm considerably diminished. Sally opened the door, pointed them in the direction of Liddy’s bedroom, and promptly quit.

  “My mother says I have to leave,” she said, running into the elevator. “I’ve never seen anyone behave like this before. It’s scary. Her phone rings every five minutes. She doesn’t pick it up.”

  Peter told Rose all this when he called that afternoon. He said that he and Matty were back safe, but that Liddy was lying motionless on her bed in the stifling New York summer heat, eyes shut, body half hidden under a white lace throw (like Camille Monet in her husband’s painting). He would have to stay in Tribeca for the night.

  “Did she say anything to you?” asked Rose.

  “Only that she wanted to know how bad her . . . episode . . . was. Did you google it?”

  “Yes. It’s bad.”

  “I don’t like to see Liddy like this. She looks dreadful,” said Peter. “I hope she’s going to be okay.”

  “Should we call her parents?” said Rose, concerned.

  “No,” Peter replied. “She’s wouldn’t thank us for that.”

  “Barbara says it was probably some form of panic attack brought on by stress and she must rest. And so must you. How’s Matty?”

  “I’ve spent seven hours waiting for him to apologize and he hasn’t and now he’s in his bed and I don’t want to see him. I shouted my head off at him all the way from Albany to Grand Central, and I’ve had enough. It seemed to distress me far more than him, I might add.”

  Rose knew this before Peter said it. She told him she loved him before hanging up.

  Sleep banished for the time being, she picked up her laptop to look again at Liddy’s “episode” and see if it was better on the second viewing. She pressed play, heard a few bars of the theme music of Jaws, winced, and automatically pressed fast forward. She reached the bit where Liddy burst into tears and started shouting, “It’s all bullshit. I’m bullshit. I can’t do this anymore,” and decided she’d had enough. However, she accidentally hit pause instead of stop, and as Rose saw the image of Liddy frozen on the screen (Liddy’s face stretched wide in a savage cry, her fingers clawing at the clothes on her chest, as if a terrifying, toothy, little alien Liddy was about to burst out of her stomach), she had a vivid sense that this event was not just about the disconnect between appearance and reality in Liddy’s domestic life, but also revealed a fundamental disconnect within Liddy’s self.

  It wasn’t better the second time around (if anything it was worse), and though Rose did, of course, feel desperately concerned for Liddy and her altered mental state, her own mind raced with a series of far more ignoble preoccupations. What was the “it” that Liddy couldn’t do anymore?

  Rose wondered if she should read about nervous breakdowns, but feared what she would learn, so she did not. Barbara had assured her that what Liddy needed most was sleep—there was, after all, no imaginable universe in which Liddy would not be, in the end, a woman who coped—but she could not tell how long this would take. Rose shivered and lay on her back to rest, but the baby kicked in protest, so she tossed and turned around and let it sleep on her bladder again.

  The next day Peter had not called by lunchtime, so after Rose had finished researching psychiatric institutions in New York State that offered rest cures, she dialed the number at Liddy’s apartment. When Peter picked it up, he sounded harassed. He said he had just finished cleaning up a puddle of dog pee, after feeding the boys pizza, and was now building a LEGO starship with Cal, as the nanny had quit. You told me that yesterday, Rose was about to say, but she decided against it.

  Peter reported that the apartment phone had rung twice that morning. The first call was from Liddy’s former boss, Marisa Seldon, who had said Liddy must get in touch with her the moment she surfaced, and on no account was she to talk to Curtis Oates on her own. When Rose asked why, Peter said, “Marisa says Liddy needs a lawyer. Curtis will try and fire her.”

  “But she’s not well,” said Rose.

  “Marisa says that’s why.”

  Rose shook her head, appalled by the unpleasantness of such a working environment. Then she remembered how several of her own colleagues had waited less than forty-eight hours after her hospitalization to rush to the new dean’s door waving their peer-reviewed articles and proposals for upscaling the courses she taught.

  The second call had been from Liddy’s literary agent, on his way to a meeting, who said that Liddy must get out of bed and finish her new book, as he was already fielding offers for serialization. “She’s trending at the moment, so tell her to tweet from her bedroom!” the agent shouted as his cab went into the Holland Tunnel.

  Rose and Peter allowed themselves a shared chuckle and Rose was relieved. Even if Liddy did get fired, it seemed her earning potential had not diminished. And the dramas of the previous day had proved that she could not manage on her own. Now Liddy�
�ll see how much she needs me, Rose thought. She was aware this was not something a nice woman would think.

  She felt ashamed. Then she felt reassured.

  “Is Liddy up yet?” she said.

  “No,” said Peter. “But I heard her talking to herself, and Cal says she’s reading e-mails, so there’s definitely movement. Oh . . .” He paused for a moment. “Her shower’s on. I’ll call you later.”

  In fact, Peter did not call; he just texted the news that he was staying another night and then arrived back at the house the following morning, desperate for some peace and unwilling to face any sort of interrogation. Rose, however, desperate for information, could not control herself.

  “Where’s Matty?” she said.

  “I left him with Liddy.”

  “How long for?”

  He made the sort of soft groaning noise that so irritated Rose and took off his shoes, at that moment looking every minute of his fifty-seven years.

  “She’s going to take him and Cal to Ireland on vacation this weekend. Some friend of hers has lent her his house for a few weeks.”

  “What? What friend? A boyfriend? Will he be looking after the boys too? What about what happened with Josh?” said Rose.

  Why didn’t you discuss it with me? she thought.

  “It’ll just be her and the boys,” Peter replied slowly.

  He pulled off his clothes, on which Rose could detect the smell of Matty’s sweat and sick, and headed into the bathroom. Rose arose from her bed and followed him.

  “Liddy should be getting professional help, not leaving the country with two children,” she said, before delivering a succinct précis of possible treatment options.

  “She says she’s fine.”

  Rose looked at him. If the “fine” comment wasn’t annoying enough, she knew now she had wasted her time reading about how to get Liddy involuntarily committed, and, worse, it had lulled her into a false sense of security.