All Fall Down: A Novel (17 page)

I could remember everything from that night—the look of the theater, lit like a temple in the frosty Manhattan night, the smell of perfume and silk and fur in the air, the rustle of programs as the audience settled into the seats, the plaintive voice of the lead actor, lamenting about how paradise had once nearly been his. I remembered how women’s eyes had turned toward my father, the approving looks they gave him, how I’d felt about the way he belonged in their company, tall and smart and successful. I could name everything we’d eaten at the little French bistro on Fifty-Sixth Street, and could conjure up the taste of lobster bisque laced with sherry, profiteroles drizzled in dark chocolate, the single sip each of white wine and red wine and after-dinner port he’d let me have. Half-asleep in the taxi’s backseat as it cut through the traffic, humming the overture to myself, I had thought that I would never feel more content, more beloved, more beautiful.

Today is MONDAY,
read the sign in the dining room, where tables for four were draped in pink cloths and set at wide intervals, the better to steer wheelchairs around them. On a shelf were dozens of paperbacks by Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor. Was there some kind of law that men who wrote military thrillers had to have two-syllable names where the first and
the last sounded interchangeable? There were romances for the ladies—your Nora Roberts, your Danielle Steel—and board games in worn boxes, some with their sagging edges reinforced with duct tape, the same games I played with Ellie: Sorry! and Parcheesi and Monopoly and Battleship.
Our next meal will be DINNER,
read the whiteboard at the front of the room.
Tonight we are having CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP, LONDON BROIL, MASHED POTATOES, and GREEN BEANS. Oh, Dad,
I mourned, and wondered how my mother would survive, seeing her beloved husband in a place like this.

Kathleen interrupted my reverie, giving me a glossy “Welcome to Eastwood” folder and a big smile. “If you’re ready, we can go back to my office. There’s some preliminary paperwork you can fill out, and then, once our finance department has had a look, they’ll be in touch. Did you bring your father’s tax returns?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. The insides of my eyelids were stinging, and I was already blinking back tears. “I think I’m going to have to take care of that another time.”

“Are you all right?” Kathleen’s tone was not unsympathetic. She must have seen this dozens, if not hundreds of times—spouses and children who thought they were ready flipping out and running when it came time to sign the forms, to write the checks, to make it real. I managed a nod, and then hurried past the front desk, through the doors, out to the parking lot, and into my car.
One dream in my heart,
I heard in my head, and brushed my sleeve against my cheeks to wipe away the tears.
One love to be living for . . .
.
One love to be living for . . .
.
This nearly was mine.

“A
llison Weiss?” The girl waiting at the door was tiny, with a nose the size of a pencil eraser and feet so small I bet she had to shop in the children’s department. It was May, the weather springtime-perfect. The scents of flowers, cut grass, and freshly turned earth wafted on a warm breeze (I could see a gardener digging the beds adjacent to the parking lot), and the sky outside the television studio was a perfect turquoise, dotted with cotton-ball clouds.

I smiled at the young woman with the warmth and goodwill that only the pure of heart, or the people who’ve recently swallowed a handful of OxyContin, can muster. “I’m Allison Weiss. Are you Beatrice?” I had gotten the call the night before, from a woman who’d introduced herself as Kim Caster, a producer for
The News on Nine,
the local evening newscast. “Did you hear about that mess in Akron?” she had asked.

“I did.” The mess in Akron was the kind of story that had become depressingly familiar since every teenager in America, it seemed, had been issued an iPhone. On a fine spring weekend, a fifteen-year-old girl had gone to a party. She’d gotten drunk. Four different boys, all football teammates, had taken advantage of her. Then, just to add to the fun, they’d posted photographs
of their deeds on Instagram and video on YouTube. Within the next twenty-four hours, almost every kid who attended the town’s high school saw what had happened. The girl had tried to kill herself after a few of the most lurid shots ended up on her Facebook page. The boys had been arrested . . . but their defenders spread the word that the girl had come dressed provocatively with a vibrator in her purse and had texted her friends that she was looking for action.

“As someone who writes a lot about sex and relationships—and, of course, as a mother yourself—what are your thoughts?”

“I don’t think owning a vibrator, or even having one with you, is a standing invitation for guys to do whatever they want,” I’d said. “A girl can wear a short skirt and not be asking for it. She can even get drunk and have the right not to be raped. It’s never the victim’s fault.”

“Mmm-hmm . . . uh-huh . . . great . . . great,” said the producer. “And what about the argument that it wasn’t really a gang rape because some of it involved only digital penetration?”

I’d rolled my eyes. A columnist at no less an institution than the
Washington Post
had made that very point on the op-ed page last week, and the
Examiner
had reprinted his column. In our better days, I might have given Dave some grief about it, but these days Dave and I were barely speaking. It felt as if we were trapped in the world’s longest staring contest, neither of us willing to blink and bring up the topic of L. McIntyre, or Dave’s ever-lengthening stay in the guest room, or the pills. “There’s no ‘only’ when it comes to rape,” I said. “I don’t think it matters whether it’s a penis or a finger. Anything you don’t want inside you shouldn’t be there.”

The producer had seemed impressed enough with my answers to invite me to come on the air for the channel’s Sunday-morning
Newsmakers on Nine
show, where local folks gave
their opinions on the issues of the day. I’d spent an hour on my makeup and allotted myself fifteen minutes to just sit quietly and catch my breath after wrestling myself into many layers of compressing undergarments, and now here I was. I’d calibrated my dosage carefully; just two pills, enough to take the edge off, to let me push through the sorrow that threatened to keep me pinned to the bed in despair.

“Follow me, please,” said Beatrice, whose hair bounced as she walked. “We’ll go right to makeup.”

“That bad, huh?”

Beatrice stopped mid-stride and turned and studied me carefully.

“That was a joke! Don’t answer!” I said.

“Oh. Okay.”

Kids these days,
I thought, as Beatrice waved a plastic card at an electronic eye and glass barriers parted.

“Makeup” turned out to be a closet-sized room with two beauty-salon chairs, a mirror that covered one wall, and a table stocked with a department store’s worth of pots and tubs and containers of eye shadow and foundation and fake eyelashes arrayed like amputated spiders’ legs. One chair was empty. In the other sat a middle-aged white guy with short, sandy hair, bland features, a wedding ring on his left hand, and a class ring with a gaudy red stone on his right. The makeup artist introduced herself as Cindy, handed me a smock, and went back to patting foundation on the man’s face.

I sat down in the empty chair. “Hey, that’s my brand!” I said to the man, who did not smile. “Hi, I’m Allison Weiss. Are you on the panel, too?”

Without meeting my eyes, he gave a stiff nod. “I am.” His small brown eyes were sunk back into the flesh of his oddly rectangular
head, like raisins in dough that had risen around them. “You must be the sex worker.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Sex worker? Who do you think would hire me?” When the man didn’t answer, I realized that he wasn’t kidding. “I’m not a sex worker. I’m a blogger.” Realizing that might not sound any different to the uninitiated, I said, “I write about marriage and motherhood on a website called Ladiesroom.com.” Which, I thought with a sinking heart, also sounded vaguely pornographic. I mustered a smile. “Trust me, I’m about as far from a porn star as you could be.”

“We’re all set,” said the makeup lady, giving the man’s nose a final dusting. He stood up and unsnapped his smock, revealing the plain black shirt and white clerical collar underneath. Oops.

“Good God,” I said. The makeup lady giggled. The pills did not make me slurry or sloppy, but they did lower my inhibitions. On them, I’d say whatever was on my mind, and think it over later. Usually it wasn’t a problem. This might turn out to be an exception. I bit my lip and wondered if it had been a good idea to take anything before leaving for the studio. This, of course, led me to wonder if the shipment I was expecting that day would show up, and whether I had enough to get through the weekend if it didn’t. I wondered, as I walked down the hall, who Penny Lane’s vendors were, the druggy Oz behind the Internet’s green curtain. Were they cancer patients willing to sell their meds and suffer in order to pay off their bills and leave their kids cash? Scummy thieves who robbed cancer patients, then sold their pills for cash? Kids who worked in drugstores, sneaking out five or ten pills at a time, or people getting them from doctors without ethics, or maybe even actual doctors?

Never mind. “Did you do your own makeup?” Cindy asked,
cupping my chin in her hand and turning my face first left, then right.

“My friend helped.” Janet and Maya had come over that morning, lugging a light-up mirror and bags of makeup. Maya had actually been excited enough to speak directly to her mother while they debated brown versus black eyeliner and whether my brows required additional plucking.

“Not bad,” Cindy said.

“Just please don’t make me look too slutty,” I said, as she began filling in my lashes with a brush dipped in brown powder. “Slutty would not do.” With that in mind, I’d worn a pencil skirt and pumps with a not-too-high heel, a fuchsia cardigan with a pale-pink T-shirt underneath, and a single strand of pearls. I was going for “mildly sexy librarian,” and I’d already solemnly vowed to refrain from looking at any and all online commentary on my outfit, my figure, or what I had to say.

“Good luck,” Dave had told me as I’d gathered my car keys and my purse. He sounded friendlier than he had in weeks, and, almost without thinking, I’d turned my face up toward his for a good-luck kiss. Maybe he’d just intended to brush my lips with his, but I’d stumbled, as a result either of the heels or of the Penny Lane pills, and we’d ended up with his arms around me, the length of my body pressed against his, close enough to feel the heat of him through the cotton and denim, to smell his scent of shampoo and warm, clean skin. I’d opened my mouth and he’d settled one hand at the small of my back, tilting me against him, the better to feel his thickening erection, the other at the base of my neck so he could keep my head in place while he kissed me, lingeringly, thoroughly . . .

“EWWW!”

We sprang apart. I stumbled again—this time, it was definitely the heels—and staggered backward, praying that my skirt
wouldn’t rip. “Ellie, what’s wrong?” I’d asked. Ellie, predictably, had started to cry.

“I don’t like KISSING. It is DISGUSTING.”

“Not when mommies and daddies do it!”

“That,” my daughter proclaimed, chin lifted, “is the MOST DISGUSTING OF ALL!”

“Well all righty, then,” I’d muttered, as Dave helped me to my feet. I could still barely believe what had happened, and wondered what had prompted it. Had he realized that, deep down, he really loved me . . . or, my mind whispered, had L. turned him down, telling him to go home to his wife unless he was ready to leave her?

“Later,” he’d whispered, and I’d sailed out the door, resolved not to think too hard about it, buoyed by this unexpected show of affection, by lust, and by the confidence that only a dose of narcotics could give me. Maybe everything was going to be fine. Maybe I’d go home and we’d make love (in my fantasy, Ellie had been whisked away, possibly by the Indomitable Doreen). Dave would tell me that he loved me, that he’d always loved me, and, more than that, that he was proud of me. He would tell me he was grateful that I’d kept us going during hard times. Then he’d tell me that he’d come up with another book idea, that his agent loved it, that the publisher loved it, that they’d given him another advance even bigger than the first one, and that L. McIntyre had been transferred to Butte, Montana.

“No slutty,” said Cindy. Working quickly, she touched up my foundation, patted concealer underneath my eyes, glued a few falsies into my lashes, and ran a flat iron over my hair. “Put on more lipstick and lipgloss right before they start,” she said, handing me tubes of both. Beatrice and her clipboard were waiting in the hallway.

“I’ll take you to the greenroom. You’ve got about ten minutes.”

“Who else is on this segment?” I asked as we walked.

Her heels clipped briskly against the tiled floor. “Let’s see. It’s you, Father Ryan of the Christian League of Decency, and, um, a parenting person. She’s a child psy . . . psychologist? Psychiatrist?” She frowned at her clipboard as if she were disappointed it wasn’t volunteering the answer. “A child something.”

“Great. Can I ask you a quick question?” Without giving her time to mull it over, I said, “You guys know I’m not a sex worker, right?” The line between her eyebrows reappeared as Beatrice looked from her clipboard to my face, then down at her clipboard again. “So you’re not a sex worker.”

I shook my head.

“But you work in the sex industry?”

“No, no I don’t. Really, the most accurate thing you could say is that I work for a website that sometimes addresses women’s sexuality.”
Sarah,
I thought. Sarah was Ladiesroom’s go-to sex-positive person, but she wasn’t here because this was Philadelphia, and I was the local girl.

She scribbled something on her clipboard. “Got it.”

I was unconvinced. But I said, “Okay, great,” and followed her pointing finger into another closet-sized room. This was the greenroom—painted, I noticed, an unremarkable beige. It had a conference-style table, a big flat-screen TV set to Channel 9, and a cart with three cans of Diet Coke, a bucket full of water I assumed had once been ice, and a black plastic tray covered in crumbs and two barely ripe strawberries. Father Ryan sat at one end of the table, with his Bible open and his head bent. At the other end sat a tiny, dark-haired woman in a red suit talking into a Bluetooth headset. “Mmm-hmm. That’s right. Have Dolly pick up the sushi on her way in. The flowers come at five and the caterers start at six. Right—oh, hang on.” She jabbed at her
phone with one fingertip. “Hello, this is Dr. Carol Bendinger, how can I help you?”