A Circle of Wives (9 page)

I never would have figured that the story would get as much attention as it did. And how that would lead to other reports, to TV and radio segments about my situation, to television vans with satellite receivers on their roofs congregating outside my door. As my grandma would say,
well butter my butt and call it a biscuit.
Because the circus that followed! Reporters calling so fast and in such volume that I’d answer the phone (that was when I was still answering it) and before I could say
hello
I’d hear the beep that signaled another call trying to get through. I eventually unplugged the phone from the wall.

But today my cell phone started ringing, and only my closest friends know that number. Someone has betrayed me. I turn it off and go into the garden. To weed is to close my mind to anything else. Kneeling in the dirt among the lavender, surrounded by the twelve-foot fence that safeguarded our privacy, I’m safe. I sit back on my heels and breathe in deeply, the way I’ve learned in my relaxation tapes.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Again. Again.
After an hour of alternately doing my breathing exercises and pulling out the crabgrass that has been accumulating, my heartbeat has slowed and I can think clearly again.

I go back into the house to get a drink of water. I’m worried about the state of my Hummingbird Coyote Mint plants (Monardella macrantha), they are showing brown spots on their leaves and the bright red blossoms are drooping. I wash the dirt from my hands in the kitchen sink, and without thinking, move to the front door upon hearing a knock. I open it (stupidly).

Pandemonium. People leaping from cars and running toward me, camera lights flashing, yelling for statements.
When did you know, MJ?
And,
How are you taking it?
I slam the door quickly. Still, they keep coming. At first it’s just the local channels. KGO, KTVU. Then CNN and the national news teams from CBS and NBC. I go to the AT&T store and change my cell phone number, but they somehow sniff that out. The story apparently has legs. Every entertainment and gossip rag runs with it, keeps publishing follow-up articles, digs up all sorts of things I wouldn’t have thought anyone would remember. My sneaking out on the rent of the apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco back in the 1980s when the boys were small and I needed a clean slate to start over. Which I did, in Santa Cruz, living in a tiny box of a house that had obviously once been someone’s summer vacation home scraped together using two-by-fours and plywood. The reporters find that part of my life, too, including getting busted for growing and selling weed in the early nineties, for which I had to do community service. Well,
shit
, I say out loud when I hear that on the radio.
I was just trying to make a living.

Naturally the reporters find out where I work, and interview my co-workers who anonymously and predictably comment on my clothing and hair and general state of disarray. No one disparages the quality of my accounting work, that’s the one good thing. The bad thing is seeing John, and by extension, myself, made the butt of jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno.
Do you know the punishment for three wives? Three mothers-in-law!
And,
I take care of all my wives. Isn’t that big of me (bigamy)?
And,
Why did the polygamist cross the road? To get to the other bride.
DJs speculate on John’s sex life on crude radio shows. One newspaper prints that John had to eat three turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is nonsense. Or is it? John always worked Christmas, or so he told me, so we had our dinner early—at 1
PM
, so he could go into the hospital. But now that I think about it, a plastic surgeon needing to go into the hospital on a holiday? What, just in case someone needs an emergency face-lift? The obviousness of his lies is the truly shameful part. Thinking of him in Deborah’s house with relatives and friends eating his second turkey dinner makes me turn a hot and painful red. The third turkey dinner must have been a fantasy of a reporter or neighbor, as he would hardly have flown down to LA for dinner on the same day.

Call me naïve, but I didn’t realize my neighbors were that
interested
in us. How else do they know so much? Did our gardeners, our housecleaners, gossip? The plots in our neighborhood are large, the trees and foliage mature, you can’t see other houses from ours, the garden is protected by a fence. John liked his privacy. Yet someone knew that we spent most of our hours back there, gardening or sitting under the sun umbrella drinking sweet tea, even in winter. They somehow knew the price we’d paid for the house; they knew the color of bougainvillea we’d planted. One especially alert neighbor even heard John’s car leave every morning right after five.
Even on weekends. How could she not have known?

Which is, of course, the million-dollar question.

14
Helen

I SPECIALIZE IN THE TREATMENT
of T-cell childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The smaller the patient, the less time we have. The cells multiply and move so fast that it’s a fierce race, the opponent impossibly swift. I typically treat the children and infants with a combination of chemotherapy and targeted therapy with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor.
Inhibitor.
That’s what I am. An introverted inhibitor. My job is to prevent, to discourage, to put up walls and deterrents against the cancer cells. I was pretty good at doing that in my personal life, too. John vanquished all my defenses, though. I still don’t know how he managed that.

I’ve built a name for myself over the years. Professionally, I let my work speak for itself, and it’s gratifying in a small way that my practice calendar is full. Although distressing in a much larger sense, because it means a waiting list of sick kids, many of them hopeless cases, nevertheless hoping for a chance, any chance, I might offer. The fact that I often publish my research—my articles in the
Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology
and the
Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology
have won awards—and increasingly speak at conferences has intensified the attention on my professional life. But I’ve always kept my personal life—what little there is of it—
personal.
That is now proving impossible. For the media uproar has been frankly astounding.

I’m not sure if it’s just a slow news month, or whether the idea of a man with three wives is simply so titillating that it pushed everything else off the front page. I take some satisfaction in the fact that no one has yet managed to take a clear photo of me and no usable video. I cover my face every time I go outside. Most publications and TV shows are running my official photograph from the hospital’s website. It’s not particularly flattering, with my brown hair in a neat, sterile bob and a fake half smile plastered on my face.

The PR director of the hospital has been working with security to keep the reporters at bay at the front entrance. Still, some Judas on the hospital staff must have left a side door strategically open because a news crew managed to almost reach my office this morning. I was in there explaining to the distraught parents of a ten-year-old girl who had presented with excessive bruising on her legs and arms that it was probably not due to soccer practice. My assistant caught sight of the cameras and called the PR director, who then roused security and rooted the crew out of the building before they got to me. Even so, one particularly clever reporter bandaged her young daughter’s two kneecaps and almost managed to make it to my office before being stopped by an alert aide. Since then, a security guard has been posted at the doorway to the pediatric oncology clinic and no one is allowed into the waiting area unless they have a child with them
and
a scheduled appointment.

I give the reporters nothing, and still they have the facts. So delicious are these that even the
LA Times
has run with the story. As have
Newsweek, Time, People, inTouch,
and a score of less reputable magazines. I don’t listen to the messages on my voicemail inviting me to appear on
Good Morning America, Morning Joe,
and other radio and television shows. I think about my fellow wives, wonder if they’re talking. I haven’t seen any comment from either of them in the press after that first, disastrous,
Chronicle
piece—the hole in the dam that turned into the flood.

It’s salacious stuff. People are repeating it in the elevators, in the break room of the hospital. There are sudden silences when I walk into the cafeteria, or past the nurses’ station. One poor out-of-the-loop orderly even whispered the gossip to me. “Did you hear?”
he asked, to the amused horror of everyone around us, as I filled my coffee cup. “This doctor was married to three women! And one of them works here!”
I managed an “Imagine that!” before someone hissed the truth to him. He turned bright red, but I didn’t resent his words. Only a handful of people at the medical center understood that John and I were in a relationship. Even fewer knew we’d actually gotten married. But with the press going wild, I’m resigned that everyone is privy to the most intimate details of my life.

Then there’s the hush as I enter an examining room. The pity in the eyes of my patients’ parents. Pity—from them, who are going through so much themselves. There’s probably even a slight sense of schadenfreude there. I don’t blame them. I have to leave the hospital by a side door to avoid the reporters and photographers. I push through hordes and protect my face against the flashing bulbs when I get home to my condo in the evening. I stop seeing friends. I spend longer in the hospital every day so that all but the truly tenacious of the reporters have gone home by the time I emerge.

These reporters are damn good at their jobs. They’ve found quite a number of people willing to talk. All anonymous, of course.
Sources say. A source close to the subject.
That some of my colleagues have no qualms about discussing me, dissecting me and my habits down to the tiniest minutiae, shouldn’t be as much of a shock as it is, given human nature. The reporters have ferreted out our favorite restaurant on Broadway. The vintage of the red wine we drank. That we occasionally attended the opera. Compared to what is being printed about MJ—Wife No. 2—what’s written about me is positively flattering.
Highly respected. Quiet and hardworking. Can be a bit standoffish.
But still, I flush when I read the purple prose describing our relationship, when I see how nothing has escaped scrutiny.
Clearly deeply in love, they were often seen holding hands at the Three Roses coffee shop in the early morning before reporting for duty at the medical center.
And:
They were once caught kissing passionately in the parking lot.
And:
She drives a Prius, which was a little too small for his bulky frame, but they didn’t seem to mind being so intimately close with one another.

It hurts to find out things about John from these media reports that I hadn’t known before. I was astounded to discover he had once been a passable jazz pianist. The photo used in the obituary was from an actual professional gig. He’d played in jazz bars throughout Chicago.
Birdhouse. The Velvet Lounge. Andy’s.
The John I knew eschewed music, turned off the radio when he got into my car, shook his head when I asked him if he’d like me to put on a CD at home. I thought he was tone deaf, even teased him about it. I offered to share some of my favorite recordings with him. Classical stuff. I never acquired an ear for anything but the music my father played. Beethoven. Bach. Brahms. In retrospect, I’m ashamed at my glib assumptions about John, about my certainty that I had a grip on the situation. Clearly, I’d been had on all sorts of levels.

The day after the
New York Times
article is the worst. The biggest crowds ever are waiting at the side exit to the hospital—they’ve discovered my trick—and at the entrance to my condo. I finally reach the safety of my apartment, double lock the door, and lean against it in relief. I have half a bottle of red wine left over from John’s last visit. I pour a small amount in a water glass and open the large sliding doors onto my wraparound balcony. I had especially wanted this end unit for the views of both the hills and the city. John had loved it, too. Especially the mature palm trees that edge the street on this part of the property, leftover from an old-style 1930s apartment block that had been torn down to make way for the condo complex. I settle into a deck chair with my wine when I smell smoke. Cigarette smoke. It seems to be coming from the balcony next door, which is odd because I haven’t been troubled by that in the three years since I’d moved in. Our condominium association’s bylaws forbid smoking outside the walls of the individual apartments, especially on balconies, where secondhand smoke can drift into other units. Through the plants I’d deliberately placed upon the stucco divider for privacy between my balcony and the next, I can see a young woman sitting with her feet up. As I watch, she releases a lungful of smoke into what is essentially my face, given the direction of the breeze. Rather than simply call out, I decide to be civilized and knock on her front door.