“Are you two okay?”
“Okay,” Anderson bobs.
“Okay,” Rory bobs, too. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
My mother’s cell phone rings, and she croons hello to Tate, wandering off to pet the horses while she talks. I can’t help but notice the massive mound of horse shit in the driveway and watch her dance around it on her way. That’s my mom. I almost laugh out loud. She can always sidestep the shit. I smile because now I can see how this might be admirable, how her optimism might have been her buoy through it all.
Anderson motions me over to a bench, casually shifting his arm around my back once we’re seated.
“So, listen, before you get started, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Paige.” We watch the camera crews finalize their lighting and map out my blocking. We’ll be solemnly strolling along the footpath between the east and west sides of the park, the better to capture both the changing seasons and our stoic expressions, the type you see on every news program when someone’s life has veered wildly into the crapper: the widower gazing out with arms crossed onto an open lake; the mother of a soldier walking through her neighborhood, her worries on display in the fine lines around her eyes, her brokenheartedness showing in her jawline.
“Paige who?” I ask.
“Paige Connor. That reporter who came by the gallery at the opening. From Page Six.”
“What reporter?” Rory has ambled over, curious about what was so private that Anderson opted not to include her.
“No one you know. And she wasn’t there for the show. Or the art,” Anderson retorts.
“Well, you don’t have to be an asshole about it,” Rory says.
“How am I being an asshole about it? What about that statement said ‘asshole’ to you?”
“I just didn’t appreciate the implicit suggestion that I’m some sort of media whore. And also, FYI, we sold every piece from the show—a new first for us.”
“What are you talking about?” he says.
“What are you both talking about?” I say, watching them, their figurative fur upended, a catfight imminent.
“Nothing,” Anderson says. “This has nothing to do with Rory.” He shoots her a look as if to say, Shut the hell up and keep your nose out of it, which she responds to by shooting him a similar look that says, Get over yours, and who invited you into our business in the first place. “But Paige. She’s a gossip reporter of the worst kind.”
“Is there any less worse kind?” I joke, but it goes nowhere.
“Actually, there is,” Anderson says. “My people won’t even talk to her.”
“Your people?”
He catches himself, then makes a retching sound. “Okay, rewind. Ignore that previous statement. The point is that Paige is vicious. She stops at nothing to break her story, even when publicists have done their best not to let her. You know: offered her better coverage in the future, or given her a scoop on someone else. She’ll run both stories. She’ll burn bridges. She wants to make a name for herself.”
“Is this about the fact that she’s run something on you at least once a week since we’ve been back?” I ask. I start to mention the latest—“Andy’s (Arm) Candy!”—but I can tell he’s serious, so I shut it.
“No, nothing about that at all”—he zips his vest up an inch—“though it goes to show how deep she’ll go. None of my friends are talking about who I’ve been with, what I’m doing. But she has sources out there on both of us, and she’s not afraid to exploit them.”
“So why was she at the gallery?” Rory says, offering a détente.
“I’m trying to figure that out. I’ve made some calls.”
“But what’s your gut telling you?” I ask, before it occurs to me that I stopped trusting my gut a long time ago, so why the hell should I trust Anderson’s?
“Unsure,” he says. “Only that wherever Paige Connor goes, a shit storm is sure to follow.”
My mother, never afraid of drama, embraces her inner actor for the cameras. There is weeping when she speaks of our childhood, there is weeping when she speaks of the crash, there is weeping—subtle, stoic weeping—when she’s not speaking, when she is simply asked to stare at the nearby tree while the camera pans away from her. I observe her from the sidelines and pang with sympathy, not because I necessarily believe all of her tears but because clearly she has suffered, and for that, I suppose, she should be allowed her due, her right to grieve, even if it’s on national television.
“The Ice Queen is thawing,” I say aloud, though Anderson doesn’t get it and Rory is too far out of earshot to hear me.
A small huddle of spectators has gathered on the traverse to watch us unspool our melodrama, and Anderson has doled out half a dozen or so autographs, mostly to twenty-something women who push their breasts forward, even in their peacoats, and toss their hair over their shoulders when he stops to chat. He swallows up the attention but for less time than I’d have expected, and soon enough he’s bored, back over to me, back by my side.
“I thought you might want to take one home for the afternoon,” I say.
“Too early,” he says back. “I have a newly implemented no-sex-before-six rule.”
“Impressive,” I say. “High bar of moral standards.”
“I try,” he says, and we both smile because we know that he does, that he is. That six months ago, he would have tucked his hand in the back pocket of one of the brunettes and hailed the nearest, fastest taxi.
My mother’s tear ducts do manage to dry up, however, when Jamie raises the subject of my father. He’d told me via e-mail last night, that they were going to have to address it. My dad was the elephant in the media room: nearly everyone who was tuning in now knew who he was. Thanks to me, he’s never been more famous. Rory confided last week that the offers she was getting on his remaining pieces were enough to fund our nonexistent children’s college funds, a comment I wholly ignored, as it spewed up a wealth of issues about my pregnancy all over again. I should have raised this with Liv, how I was stuffing these feelings down my emotional bowels, but, well, it seemed easier not to. Easier to pretend that Rory hadn’t said it, that my nonexistent children once very much existed, that life was stitching itself back up. If I opened myself up to more—the looming quagmire of the miscarriage and the pregnancy and what the hell I was going to do about both the baby and the marriage—well, it was like a row of dominoes: toss one over, and the rest were bound to falter sooner or later. And besides, now that things were mostly smoothed over, why upend them? Why stir up trouble when I’ve finally clamped the lid on it?
I lean against the cool bark of a locust tree and listen.
“Is it disappointing to you”—Jamie asks my mom, as they stop by a bench on the east side of the park and sit—“that Francis hasn’t been back in touch with the family, after all that you’ve been through?”
My mother looks shell-shocked at the question, and I’m not sure if it’s because I hadn’t prepped her on the subject matter or if it’s simply too public a forum to discuss such a topic. But then I realize that nothing is too public for my mother, for god’s sake, so it’s obviously the former. She stutters and stalls for time by blotting her mascara with a wadded-up tissue.
“I try my best not to discuss her father to the media,” she says when she finds her tongue. “But I will say that, of course, I am disappointed to my deepest core that even though he is a recluse, he couldn’t come out from wherever he may be to support Nell.”
Jamie offers a nod, the type you suspect news reporters practice in the mirror. He is in his element now, plasticized almost, an altered incarnation of whom I know him to be.
“So there has been no contact—none—since the outside world stopped hearing from him as well?” Jamie presses her. He knows this will make headlines, could land him a permanent slot on the American Profiles team. He also knows—or I hope has at least considered—that he is asking on my behalf. That was the deal: get me some answers, and I’ll get you your exclusive. So
I watch, and I hope that he is mostly doing this for me, even though my gut—my damn gut, shut up, I don’t trust you anyway!—nips at me, telling me otherwise.
“You have to understand”—my mother says—“what it was like to live with a genius like Francis. I suppose that part of me always felt that I was living on borrowed time with him. But I made those choices as an adult. Our children did not. So even if he wanted to come back into their lives, he’d hurt them too much for me to allow that once he left.”
I feel something come unhinged inside of me, torpedoing down, deep, deeper. Next to me, Rory furrows her brow and gnaws on her index finger cuticle, then glances toward me, perplexed.
“So you’re saying that, in fact, you have heard from him over the years?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no.” My mother pales and starts to stammer again. “I’m saying that if I had heard from him, I’m not sure it would have been welcome. He probably knew that.” She nods to herself, as if this is any sort of affirmation that she’s convinced us.
It wouldn’t have been welcome? What about her lecture in the hospital? What about these past few months, her nudging me back into my marriage, back to my husband, back to my old life?
I can’t help myself. My previous moments of goodwill be damned. Hello, old me, so nice to see you again!
“But what about forgiveness?” I shout off camera. Jamie turns and looks at me, alarmed, as if to say: This is not part of my plan. I give him a look back saying, Yes it is. I want my answers. You knew the deal, too. I keep going: “What about all of that crap that you fed me to forgive my own husband for his indiscretions and that everyone has to look inside themselves and find a way to heal, blah, blah, crap cakes, crap cakes!”
Jamie signals to the cameraman to cut, but then thinks better of it, and he circles his finger around in a loop: keep shooting. At the base of our instinct, we really are who we are. He’s the newsman on the hunt for his scoop.
I signal back to the cameraman—quit!—though I don’t really know the industry signal, so it mostly looks like I’m trying to slit my neck, or maybe like I want to slit my mother’s neck. Either way, the cameraman doesn’t obey, and the tape keeps rolling while my mother digs herself deeper. Quit! This is not open to a public forum. We both got what we wanted, now quit! I jerk my hand across my neck once more, but Jamie simultaneously rolls his fingers. Keep rolling.
My mother, of course, doesn’t quit. Once she’s unleashed, she can’t quit, can’t tuck back her ball of emotion if she tried.
“Nell! I have done nothing wrong!” She waves her arms. “I did forgive your father, and if he is out there watching, Francis, darling, please, come back and help your daughter.” She turns toward the camera to issue her plea, akin to a soap opera gone bad, even though she’s still speaking to me. “Everything that I imparted to you about forgiveness and healing and your own marriage came from a place of true sincerity. I have worked for years to get to that place for myself! I only wished it for you as well.”
I stare at her for a beat and then realize that, finally, she’s not crying. Dried up like a well. Does that make it more plausible or less? I chew my lip and wonder. And then something else occurs to me, too: after years of running from who she was, after all the goddamn yoga retreats in the world, my mother has been running a loop. Running right back to who she was before my dad left, still filled with the same hypocritical bullshit that probably started her on that loop in the first place.
“You don’t get it, Mom,” I say finally, that stupid goddamn cameraman adjusting his angle for a close-up. “You’re like a rat in a wheel. Running, running, running, running. And you think you’ve gotten somewhere. But that’s the illusion of the experiment. Nothing, no matter what you think, has changed.”
There, I think, triumphantly. I’ve gone and proven my theory: people can’t change. And then it occurs to me, of course, that this isn’t a triumph. This is a brick wall. And there’s no getting around it, no matter how hard I try.
24
“Let the River Run”
—Carly Simon
I n his vow to become a contributing member of society and actually attempt to use this second chance to do something with his life, Anderson has agreed to host a benefit later that evening for the Humane Society.
“You don’t even have a dog,” I point out in the limo on the way down. Along with his promise to spread the philanthropic love, he’s also staying true to his promise to curb his taste for supermodels and less than Mensa-quality actresses, and thus, with Peter still in the Berkshires, I am his date for the evening. I am wearing a wholly un-me, but entirely fabulous eggplant-hued, thigh-high cocktail dress that I bought back when I still believed that people could change. I blew my hair out, swiped a new lipstick from the makeup artists on the set, and, as Anderson noted when he met me in my lobby, cleaned up nicely. “They’ll start to write about us, you know,” he said. “If you keep this up, they’ll mistake you for one of those models I go home with.” I knew this was his form of a compliment, so I blushed and took his hand and stepped into our ride.
“But I love dogs, I do,” he says in the limo, adjusting his navy tie and popping a CD into the stereo. “So…some news. I remembered something from the plane.”
“Another nightmare?” I rest my hand on his knee.
“No, in fact, just the opposite.” He smiles. “Remember how I couldn’t remember the bands, the bands we were listing? As a distraction?” I nod because he doesn’t have to elaborate: the bands we were listing as a distraction amid the horror of the crash. “Well, I remembered. Last night when I couldn’t sleep. This was who you’d been listening to on the flight before I interrupted you.”
We both fall silent, the music filling the space.
“Carly Simon.” I grin. I know this one from my playlist. I lean back and sponge it up, her voice resonating somewhere inside, loosening things, loosening me.
“Music for your mood, for starting over. That’s what you’d said on the plane.” Anderson pours a Jack Daniel’s from the bar, while I am rapt, absorbed in the music.
“So today…that was unexpected,” he says, after a firm swallow.
It takes me a moment to come to, to pull myself from the melody. Finally, I answer: “Unexpected how? That my mother still harbors resentment for my dad or that she was able to mask it so well for all of these years instead of putting her daughters’ needs firsts?”
The truth is that I tried to call Peter at the retreat to rehash it, to make sense of it, and when I was sent to his voice mail, I tried to call Liv for an emergency session, but I haven’t heard back. So now I know damn well what he’s referring to, and it’s a relief to have a sounding board—whether the sounding board is my husband, or my therapist, or the guy whose life I may have saved who has helped me to save mine.
“I didn’t take it that way,” he says, making me a drink of my own. I shake my head no. “Take the drink,” he insists. “Trust me on this. You’ll need it. These things seem like fun, but they never are.”
I hesitate but, bolstered by the music, by the power it gives me, I do—both take the drink and trust him, and even with that first sip, I feel my insides warming, the steeliness of my anger unleashing.
“No, I took it that she was trying to protect you, like a mother bear or whatever the analogy is,” Anderson continues. “She didn’t want him coming back to wreak more havoc. Maybe she was putting your needs first.”
I take another gulp and consider this. I know that I should be more sympathetic, that these past few months should have shown me this. That there is no time in life for resentment and grudges. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I just can’t get there, the new, fabulous me be damned. My mother is that mother who wants you to think she’s putting your needs first while wholeheartedly shuffling hers to the front of the line.
“You know, she’s the entire reason I gave Peter a second chance.” It feels strange to say this aloud, this guttural admission that I wouldn’t hav
e thought to realign myself with the man who felt too big for me back when I opened my eyes in Iowa. That my honest instinct would have been to do entirely otherwise. “We sat outside the hospital and she swore to me that I’d be a better person if I learned to forgive him. Told me that I’d always been too black and white, that there were shades of gray.” I snort and drink another sip, then thrust my glass out for a refill.
“Okay, so what if that makes her a hypocrite? In the end, aren’t you glad that you listened?”
I blow out a deep bellow of breath. That part, I suppose, is true. Against all expectations, my marriage has rebuilt itself. Is it the world’s greatest love affair? Undoubtedly not. Is it doing okay considering his one-nighter and that my brain has been obliterated to the point where I have no history to lean on during our crisis? Well, for that, I’d say yes.
The limo coasts to a stop before I can articulate this. Anderson grabs my hand as I step to the curb. Around us, the flashbulbs explode, blinding me for a moment, sending my blood coursing through me, my heartbeat palpable within my chest cavity.
“Shit!” I exhale, and then I feel his hand on the small of my back, steadying me as we go.
“You okay?”
I’m not, but I shake my head yes. We can’t turn back now anyway. The lights are too bright, the screaming from the photographers too loud. And then I remember: it is like a giant macabre flashback of the crash. With Carly Simon still etched in my cerebral space—“We’re coming to the edge, running on the water, coming through the fog, your sons and daughters!”—I can intuit the horrifying squeals of the passengers around me, spiraling to their imminent peril; the searchlights from up above, dilating my pupils to the point of discomfort; the chaos and the haziness in the ensuing minutes, sifting through the smoke and the debris and the moving parts all around. My breath expands within my lungs, and for a sickening minute I can’t decipher which is real, this reality or the one from my past, the moment or the memory.
“You okay?” Anderson asks me again, and I see the genuine concern in his face, and because he literally has my back, Yes, I am okay, I say. I don’t need to ask him if this reminds him of the crash site because I already know that everything reminds him of the crash site. This is why he barely sleeps, this is why he’s had two Jack Daniel’s in the fifteen minutes on the way to the event.
The Song Remains the Same Page 20
