Four Wives

by Wendy Walker

  She pulled up to the valet, got out, and handed him the keys. From the corner of her eye, she saw her father sitting on a stone bench, looking out for her at the entrance. She took her time as the valet handed her a ticket, then she placed it in her purse. Her mind was working hard to process the image of the man she had just captured. His hair had gone mostly white, and she had to remind herself that he was in his mid-seventies now, that she was close to forty. He was dressed in a loose-fitting, white button-down shirt, faded blue jeans, and sandals that befitted his pretentious, bohemian image.

  She looked down as the car was driven away. You can do this, she told herself. It was a few moments. Anyone could get through a few moments. But when she looked up, her heart nearly stopped.

  “Love?” He was at her side, reaching out to embrace her. She felt his arms pull tight around her back, but she could not return the gesture. Everything in that moment’from the mere sight of him to the smell of his cologne’was overwhelming. She hadn’t seen her father in twenty-two years, but those years might as well have never happened.

  When he let go and stepped back, his cheeks were flushed. He cupped her face in his hands the way he used to do years ago, and took in the sight of his daughter.

  “Let me look at you!”

  Love smiled at him, then looked away. But he held on until her eyes met his again, and he could reassure her. “You look wonderful,” he said, and Love could see that he wanted her to believe in his sincerity. “Come on inside.”

  They walked through the front door, talking of small things. The plane ride, the weather on the other side of the country. And as they walked, Love tried to settle her nerves as the memories rushed in. He was playing inside her like an old song, the kind that provokes images of the past so vivid they cannot be suppressed’emotional images that demand to be relived as long as the song is playing, and for some time after. It was upon her now in her father’s presence’the unhindered ambition, the invincibility of her youth. The time when she was the golden girl.

  “Let’s go out by the pool,” he said.

  They walked through the lobby to the terrace where he ordered her a lemonade.

  “Ahh… good memory,” she said. It had been her favorite, and she found it both endearing and presumptuous that he had chosen it for her now. The waiter seemed to know what he was having.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said, hanging his head in a somewhat regretful fashion. “I’m sorry for that.”

  Love smiled and looked away. His guilt was awkward, her shame unbearable. They had a history that should never have been scripted for a father and daughter.

  “It was a lifetime ago,” she answered, shifting in her chair, determined not to show her pain.

  The waiter returned with a lemonade and a glass of scotch. They were silent as he placed the drinks before them, and Love allowed her eyes to study her father’s face as he swirled the ice in his drink. It was then that she saw it’the childhood memories bending through the prism of her adult life, exposing the source of emptiness she’d felt as a child. She knew now what a parent’s love should be. Fierce and unconditional. Selfless. Sitting with her father again after all these years, she could see that Alexander Rice had never felt that kind of love for her’even before she’d given him reason.

  “You seem happy. Motherhood suits you,” Rice said, breaking the silence.

  Love forced a smile. “Thank you.” That was all she was going to say about her life. “I got ahold of the book. I read it on the plane.”

  Rice took a long sip of his scotch, then gently placed the glass back into the water rings that had formed on the table. His initial surprise quickly turned to resignation. “So … I guess you know why I wanted to see you.”

  Love shrugged and held her palms to the sky. “I don’t, actually.”

  He smiled then, seemingly pleased that his daughter was being strategic.

  “There are a lot of reasons I didn’t go into your life.”

  “You mean reasons why you left me out completely. And Yvonne as well.”

  Rice nodded. “Yes. I left both of you out entirely.”

  “Let me guess. Your editor made you do it? “

  “No’no. Not at all. Nothing like that.”

  “Then what?”

  Rice sighed and looked at his folded hands resting on the table. “I didn’t want everything to be rehashed.” Then his face grew concerned. “The drugs, the … the other things. Right up to the incident in the hospital. What I’m saying is that there might have been a renewed curiosity in those years of your life’renewed interest in a young person who had everything and then just …”

  “Just threw it away.” Love finished his thought, nodding with the acknowledgment of what was in his head’what was in the head of every person who knew her, or knew of her, so many years ago. Nothing was as it seemed, and no one had ever attempted to find the truth. It had been so easy to believe in the deviant character of Love Welsh.

  The anger was beginning to choke her. “Nothingjust happens. People don’t just fall apart without reason.”

  Now he was on the defensive. “Of course not, Love. There was a lot of pressure on you’and I was the worst offender. You were a child. I’m not judging you.”

  “Everyone judged me. Everyone assumed that I just fell in with the wrong crowd, got too full of myself, lacked discipline.”

  “I only knew what I heard. I pleaded with your mother to get you some help when she moved you here. Maybe I could have done more, but I didn’t know what to do. I was three thousand miles away. Part of me thought you would grow out of it.” His eyes were concerned now, but she could not let herself believe in his self-deprecation. It was just not in the man. Still, watching his face, the pieces of her past came before her. One by one she could see them, and for the first time since those dark years, she spoke of that night.

  “Didn’t you notice that it happened in an instant? And even more to the point’that it happened after a particular night?”

  Rice nodded, then hung his head as though this were the last place he wanted to go with her. Still, he followed. “The night of my fiftieth birthday.”

  “Yes. The party at your club. Do you remember what happened? “

  “Yes. Love, please …”

  “And that was?”

  Rice paused for a moment as though he were incapable of speaking the words. Still, he managed to give her an answer. “That you slept with Pierre Versande. Your teacher. My friend.”

  “The thirty-five-year-old professor. I was thirteen.”

  Again, Rice paused. “Yes.”

  “And you thought what, exactly, about that?” Love’s tone was angry now, and with every word she knew that any chance for a warm reconciliation was being cast aside for a confrontation that was long overdue.

  “That you went a little crazy. Drank too much. You were old beyond your years, Love, growing up the way you did, and I accept full responsibility for that. I never spoke to Versande again after that night. It was reprehensible. But I never thought that was the reason for everything that followed.”

  Love nodded as she took it in, relieved that someone had finally spoken of that night to her face. Now her own perceptions could be confirmed. No one had understood that night, or the reasons she went on to degrade herself so badly. Why she devoted so many years to her own destruction, just to quiet the shame’shame that she herself had brought to bear. Her father had made it perfectly clear that no one knew the truth. And how could she blame them? It was only now, immersed in her past, that she was able to see it. Now, without the protection of substances and well-rehearsed denial, she was exposed, naked before the truth.

  When the words came, they were soft but clear.

  “It was not consensual.” The sentence was formal, lacking even a trace of melodrama. Still, they cut deeply.

  “What are you saying, Love? That Pierre Versande raped you that night?”

  She was distant as she spoke, trapped behind some invi
sible shield that kept the truth from sneaking back inside her. “He gave me a glass of champagne. I had a few sips, maybe half of the glass because he was sitting next to me and I wanted to be grown up. I started to feel sick. Dizzy. Pierre said he would take me to lie down.”

  His voice was still in her head. The room, with its art-deco furnishings and modern paintings was now before her. Then the walk to the back room, the eyes that were upon them, people drinking, smoking pot, snorting coke. There was so much laughter, the music was loud. He closed the door behind them, dimmed the light. She crawled onto a leather couch, relieved to lie down, thinking she would sleep off the champagne and never drink again. Her body was so tired, listless. Her mouth unable to form the words, to tell him to stop when his hands fell upon her.

  Her father reached across the table, touching her arm as it rested on the table. “That’s enough. I understand,” he said. Then, after catching her eye, “I am filled with regret. I should have known. I should have known you enough to realize it was all wrong.”

  Love searched his face for shock, anguish, rage. Anything that would be appropriate under the circumstances. But instead he held only a distant sympathy.

  “Everything is so clear to me now. You were a different person after that night.”

  She thought back to the morning after, going for her lessons at his house. Versande was conspicuously absent, but the house was filled with her father’s colleagues and staff. And from them she’d felt the invisible brand upon her. Within days her few friends stopped calling, their mothers forbidding it. Her reputation had been forged at warp speed and it was self-fulfilling. Within a year she was into everything’alcohol, coke, the pill of the day’until she finally jumped off the cliff with her mother’s Valium. And for the first time since those years, she could draw a line to the trigger. She was not the wayward girl who was seduced by an older man. She was at her father’s club where she should have been safe. And there’d been more than champagne in that glass.

  After a moment, when the air cleared, Love got up from the table. “I should go.”

  “No, I … ,” Rice started to say, rising from his chair.

  “I want to go.”

  Her father gave her a sad smile, his face replete with understanding. This was too much for her.

  “OK,” he said.

  She started to walk away, but his words stopped her.

  “It all turned out in the end. That’s what matters.”

  But that was a lie. The great Alexander Rice didn’t believe in the mundane. She could have been one of the great ones’as great as he, perhaps greater. Still, the weight of his disappointment had somehow been lifted. She had failed at many things, destroyed her own potential. But he was a man who didn’t know how to love, and that, to her mind, rendered him incapable of passing judgment on anyone.

  She turned to face him again, this time unleashing the anger upon words that soared from her heart.

  “You have written your books. You have been admired by many. And I know you have been loved.”

  The strength of her voice rendered him still as she reached into her purse, grabbing a handful of papers that she tossed on the table between them.

  “And you have loved no one but yourself.”

  The tears came then, flooding her face. Her father had no breath as he looked at the papers. They were photos of her children’his grandchildren. His legacy.

  When his eyes returned to his daughter, she was drying her face. She gathered the pictures and carefully slid them back in her purse. She looked at her father one last time, but for the first time as a grown woman. A woman with conviction.

  “You tell me who’s had the extraordinary life.”

  FIFTY

  OTHER DEMONS

  HER MIND WAS ON fire as she drove through the Hills, her back in agony as she tore around the twisting corners, slowed by sightseers with their Hollywood Star maps. She reached her mother’s house, pulled into the driveway, and rushed inside.

  The memories were relentless. Every moment, every detail of that night at the club was coming back now. The striped pink dress, high-heeled sandals with ankle straps. The makeup and hair her mother had done for her, the manicure from the nail salon. She was Alexander Rice’s brilliant child and being present at one of his parties was an enviable state of affairs. There were actors, writers, producers, and editors’and, of course, a broad sampling from the intellectual community. The great thinkers of the day who were always in need of a platform to expound their theories and thoughts. This is your moment, her mother had told her when she dropped her at the door.

  It was the early eighties and times were good. Her father’s new book had been well received, bolstered by the buzz of his young daughter’s progress. The decor of the dinner club was dated’a seventies modern glass structure, it was white carpets, shiny chrome, and strange, colorful artwork from wall to wall. Love had felt invisible as she walked in. She was still a child at thirteen, and to many in the room, a hindrance. Barry White was blasting from the massive sound system brought in by the D.J. as guests huddled in small groups, mixing drinks and engaging in the eccentric rituals of drug intake. There were giant bongs, hash pipes, mirrored panels for the cocaine. Her father had rented the club out and hired his own staff to allow the indulgence, and none of it was new to Love.

  “She’s old beyond her years,” her father said when she walked through the door. The sight of her, the out-of-place girl trying too hard to seem grown up, had hushed the conversation. Still, it took only a moment for her presence to be forgotten.

  He gave her a quick, inebriated shoulder hug and made a few introductions. But he was quickly pulled away by a young woman with thin legs and fake breasts’still somewhat of a novelty back then. They talked in the corner while Love sipped a Diet Coke. She tried not to stare as her father expounded his brilliance to a woman whose sole concern was with the hand she was sliding down his pants. Thinking back, it was the reason she hadn’t moved away when Pierre Versande sat too close to her. Though still a child in many ways, she could feel the flirtation of her teacher. Then came the drink, which she held right up in the air as she took those sips. She did it again and again until her father’looking through the big brunette hair’ caught her eye. Watching her father watch her, she took a gulp of the champagne as Pierre fixed the strap on her dress, which had fallen off her shoulder. She was expecting an annoyed frown, some look of disapproval that would make her get up and find a TV to watch. But instead her father smiled, oblivious to anyone in the room but himself. And the woman with the hand in his pants. Not exactly the image he gave the public on all those interview shows. Love carried on in a futile protest, until she could no longer hold the glass. She felt Pierre take her arm and help her stand. Her vision was blurred as they walked to one of the back rooms. But even now, so many years later, she could still see her father smiling at her as the door closed behind them.

  “Yvonne!” Love yelled as she burst through the door. The house was small, and she could see through the living area to the pool, where her mother was lounging off the flight. With three long strides, she was at the sliding glass doors.

  “You’re back so soon,” her mother said, turning around when she heard Love’s pounding steps. It only took one look for Yvonne to know. Still, she asked the question.

  “What happened?” Yvonne was standing now and tried to take Love’s arm. But her daughter pulled away.

  “No one knew. No one ever knew the truth, did they? Not even Dad.”

  Yvonne sighed hard, then sat back down. She’d known this day would come. Somewhere inside her, she had even hoped for it. Still, she was somehow unprepared.

  “We had to make a decision, darling. You were a celebrity. There was no getting around that.”

  “And you thought it was better for the world to believe I was a child whore than a rape victim?”

  “It wasn’t like that. There were rumors about you and that son-of-a-bitch Versande. But it never hit the press. N
ever,” she said, almost proud that they had outsmarted the media vultures. “The truth would have made the headlines for months. Think about it. There would have been a police inquiry, maybe even a trial,” Yvonne continued explaining. “It needed to go away.”

  Love looked at her with disdain. “For your sake, or mine?”

  “For yours, of course, for yours!”

  “And it never crossed your mind that it would look bad for you. A mother who allowed her teenage daughter to go to a party of lecherous drug addicts?”

  Yvonne was indignant. “No! You were my daughter, Love. You were’ you are’everything to me. I was trying to protect you. I thought I could.”

  Love exhaled deeply, trying to put the anger back in its place. There was so much blame to assign, starting with Pierre Versande, her father, her mother, and ending with herself for staying on that couch, sipping champagne, and letting him touch her that way. He had been her teacher, and she’d trusted him. She pictured her father’s face, the look of indifference as she walked away and into a back room that would change her life.

  “That’s it,” she said, putting the pieces into place.

  “What?”

  “It was Dad. You called him on it, didn’t you? You told him what happened, what I said happened when I got home that night, when you had to carry me out of the club to the cab. You threatened to go public, didn’t you?

  “Love, what does it matter now?”

  “And he told you he would deny everything, say I got drunk and came on to Versande.”

  Yvonne didn’t answer.

  “That was why Versande lost his book deal. You had Daddy derail his career in exchange for your silence.” Love paced the small patio as she spoke, the words flowing as the thoughts came together. “Then you both pretended it never happened. God forbid the public found out.”

  “Oh, Love,” Yvonne said. “It was more complicated than that.”

  “What was complicated? The man drugged me. Then he raped me. You could have brought me to the hospital, done a tox screen. At the very least, they could have nailed him on statutory rape charges.”