Domestic Violets (26 page)

Chapter 36

I
t’s a little
after 10 p.m., and I’m walking through my dad’s neighborhood by myself. West Twenty-ninth at this time of night is eerily quiet, and I keep looking over my shoulder like a tourist. I’d wanted to live here so badly when I was younger—anywhere in Manhattan—but I never made it. It’s one of those cities that work so much better in the abstract. The romantic house of cards crumbles quickly when you start to do the math.

A half hour ago, an officer who none of us had seen yet opened the door, pointed at the four of us, and said, “You turkeys, outta here.” On our way out, we passed a few rough-looking guys cuffed to a wooden bench. One of them wore a T-shirt covered completely in blood. Apparently those in charge didn’t think we’d all get along very well. Outside, I was astonished to see Brandon and Alistair climbing into the same cab. When they closed the car door, they were talking about that story that Brandon was trying to sell. Turns out Alistair
had
read it, but wasn’t completely on board yet. Brandon was listing off other publications that he was sure would be thrilled to publish such a “kick-ass story.”

“I don’t have what it takes to be an agent,” said Curtis.

Up at the corner, stopped at a light, there was an open cab and I held my hand up. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

Curtis shuffled his feet, toeing a crack in the sidewalk. “Well, actually, you think you could make it back to my place on your own? I sort of owe someone a nightcap.”

“A nightcap? What are you talking about? Dad, we just got out of jail.”

“Detox, Tommy. Not jail. Legally speaking, there’s a pretty big difference.”

“But you’re—”

“Alive,” he said. He turned his cell phone back on, which had been kept in a plastic bag while we were detained, and began dialing a number. My cab pulled up to the curb, reggae music blaring through the windows. “You take this one,” he told me. “I’ve never been a fan of Bob Marley.”

The overnight doorman in my father’s building gives me a sleepy nod, and the entryway smells like the same mildew and dust and curry that it did when I was a kid. In the elevator, along the wood paneling below the numbers, I find my own name, carved with a twisted paper clip, when I was maybe twelve. Upstairs, I flip on some lights and the loft comes into bright, minimalist focus. He bought the place before he was rich, and even though it’s now worth millions, it doesn’t look a lot different than it did in 1984. The fact that it has survived Curtis’s many terminated unions is a feat worthy of a feature article in
Divorce Lawyer
magazine.

My travel bag is on the couch where’d I’d left it, and our dishes from breakfast are in the sink. Something seems different though, rearranged somehow. But how could it not look different? The last time I stood in this apartment, thirteen hours ago, the world was a different place and Curtis was healthy and finishing his novel.

When I call Anna again, she answers quietly.

“Were you sleeping?” I ask.

“Yes, but I didn’t mean to be. I was reading. What’s up?”

“It’s been a strange night, Anna.”

“Good strange or bad strange?” she asks.

Anna waits for me to respond, but I don’t know if I can. I’m tired and all I want to do is wash the detox from my face and go to bed on this lumpy couch. If I begin talking, I’ll start crying, and I’m not up for that now.

It started where it always starts for men, in his prostate. Amazingly, it was his penis that had alerted him first. After years and years of steadily balling almost anything in his path, things had become problematic and tricky down there. But by the time he thought to actually see a doctor, to accept that his own shriveled manhood might be a metaphor for things more serious, the illness had begun its slow, steady migration elsewhere. Writing had been difficult for a while by then. Nothing seemed to be taking hold, and his men upstairs were, for the first time ever, unsure of themselves. But since this, the idea that whatever it was he was trying to say might be the last thing he says made the blank screen insurmountable.

“Just strange,” I say. “That’s all.”

“You weren’t arrested, were you?” she asks, making a joke.

“No, not . . . technically.”

There will be time to tell her everything later, and I will.

“Gary called earlier,” she says. “He forgot you were up in New York. Looks like everything’s going to be OK with your mom.”

“Seriously? What’d he say?”

“Not much. He said he’d explain later. Said something about a big gesture and started quoting one of your dad’s stories, the one with the skywriter. He sounded happy though. So, I guess that’s good news.”

After I say good night, I get a drink of water from the sink and inspect the loft. I step out of my pants and take my dress shirt off, leaving them there on the kitchen floor in a ball. In my boxers, undershirt, and black socks, I could be a businessman, home from another stressful day at the office.

In the bathroom, the light is already on. When I look up into the mirror, the first thing I see is my stinging, split lip. The second thing I see is a hand hanging limply over the side of the tub behind me. There are crimson droplets on the floor and one red footprint against the stark white bathmat. And then I see my stepmother, Ashley, floating naked in red water.

I clutch the sink to keep myself from tumbling to the ground. Then, in one painful heave, I throw up. Her eyes are closed. A delicate red trail beads up along her wrist and another drop of red falls to the floor. “Oh fuck,” I say. “Fuck.”

I have no idea what to do. I’m shaking so hard my vision is blurring. The police will come, and our names will be in the paper. My God, Ashley is dead in the tub. I throw up in the sink again, everything I’ve eaten for days. And then—

“Oh shit. Tom, it’s just you.” Back in the mirror, she’s looking at me, and she’s annoyed. “You were supposed to be Curtis.”

“Ashley? What the fuck?”

“I’m not dead, Tom, don’t worry. I’m just trying to make a point. Now, unless you need to barf again, would you mind handing me that towel?”

I’m sitting on the couch, and my hands won’t stop shaking. Back in my wrinkled suit pants, waiting for this lunatic to come out of the bathroom, I’m all jittery and wired from the adrenaline surge. My mouth tastes like vomit. Better men would have sprung into action, scooped naked Ashley from the tub and gone about the business of bringing her back to life. But not me, I puked in the sink.

“Thanks a lot for spoiling my little show.” She’s wearing a pair of oversize pajama bottoms and a tank top. I look away from her nipples, which press against the thin fabric like things trying to get out.

“Sorry. I should have seen it coming. The situation had ‘fake suicide attempt’ written all over it.”

“What the hell happened to your mouth?”

“It’s a rough city,” I say.

She strolls into the kitchen and starts making a drink. It’s a safe bet that she’s already had a few this evening, but you can’t fault her manners, as I can see that she’s making two. “I know you think I’m crazy,” she says.

“What? Not at all.”

“I need to show Curtis exactly what he’s done to me. I need him to feel what it’d be like if I was gone.
Really
gone—not just
divorced
gone.” She hands me a drink, which tastes like it’s about 90 percent vodka. Either that or gasoline. “Here, this will settle your stomach,” she says.

“When I was little, my mother always gave me vodka when I had a stomachache.”

She settles next to me on the other side of the couch, pulling her long legs beneath her, resting her drink on her knee. In detox, my dad told me he hadn’t said anything to Ashley about being sick. He said he didn’t think she could handle it, and I believe him. There’s still some pink around her wrist where she’s gone heavy with the food coloring. “He would have looked at me, and he would have realized how big of a mistake he’d made. Right there in that bathroom, it would have hit him like a ton of bricks.”

“But then what?” I ask. “You wouldn’t have been dead, Ashley. Eventually he would have figured that out.”

“That’s not the point,” she says. “It’s the first five seconds that would have mattered—the five seconds that made
you
sick. A lot can go through a person’s mind in five seconds. But you had to go and ruin it, and now you’re gonna rat me out, aren’t you?”

This emaciated thing in her nightclothes is like a schoolyard bully, daring me to tattle. She throws an arm over the couch cushion and glares at me, her eyes set above two gray half circles. Nothing I say now to her or later to my dad is going to keep this beautiful maniac out of his hair. If she’s not lurking outside his home with spy equipment or floating fake-dead in his bathtub, she’ll be doing something else. Probably something worse.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I say.

She takes a sip of her drink, swallowing like Kool-Aid. “So, where is he anyway?”

I say nothing.

“You’re such a pussy, you know that? Don’t worry, Tom, I know where he is. He’s screwing that old hag. Grosses me out to even think about it. I don’t know how he does it.”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t patronize me.”

“Ashley, I don’t know what you’re talking about. He didn’t tell me where he was going. He just . . . left.”

“He left you behind, huh? Well, now you know what it feels like. That’s what he does, you know. That’s what he’s always gonna do—he’s gonna leave people like us behind, because he’s awful. But little old you and me are too stupid to do anything about it.”

I begin to tune her out as she goes on and on, and as I sink further into the couch, a fog lifts. It’s the fog I’ve put around this new woman in my head, the newest woman in Curtis’s life. Before being flung across the bar, my dad made a snide comment about Veronica Stewart’s mouth that had made Sonya literally cry out. It had hurt her that badly. “Sonya?” I say.

Ashley studies my face. “Hmmm. Well, so you see what I’m talking about then. But I’m not worried. When he’s done rediscovering his old age, he’ll come back. She’s just a passing phase. An identity crisis.”

“You know that’s funny,” I say. “My last stepmother said the same thing about you.”

The room is as silent as deep space, and I feel like a dick as a tremor of hurt travels the length of her pristine face. She sips her drink some more and looks at me, this woman I’ve seen in magazines and once on the side of a bus in D.C. while I was buying a hot dog. “
I
am the woman men leave women for, Tom. Not the other way around.” She shifts her weight to free one leg, which she stretches the length of the couch until the arch of her foot is resting on my thigh. She’s watching me as I look down at her long, ornate toes. “Ever since I was thirteen years old, every man I know has wanted to fuck me. All of my teachers. All of my dad’s friends. Every photographer. Every director and producer and agent. Curtis is no different. None of you are.”

“But what if he loves her, Ash? Does that even matter?”

She cocks her head as if talking to a small boy or a dog. “Do you love your wife, Tom? Sweet, brainy Anna with her split ends and clunky shoes?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you love your wife so much, then why did you want to fuck me at my house when you came to collect Curtis’s underwear? And why do you want to fuck me right now?” Her toes, like fingers, grasp my thigh, and little fireflies of what can only be desire flutter in my groin. “Curtis can love anyone he wants—just like you can love your smarty-pants wife. But at the end of the day, all of you follow your dicks over your hearts, and Curtis is always going to want to fuck me. That’s going to lead him right back here, whether he likes it or not.”

I grab her foot and hold it, feeling its weight and texture in my hand. She breathes in, watching me from across the couch, waiting to see if I’m going to prove her right. She doesn’t know what I know, that Curtis, wherever he is now, is no longer the man she thinks he is, the man we all thought he was this morning. And I guess I’m not, either.

I set her foot on the cushion. “I think you should go,” I say.

Her laughter is loud and jarring. “
I
should go? You moron, I live here.”

She has a point.

For a fleeting moment, I consider simply taking the keys off the hook by the door and going across the street to the parking garage and sleeping in the Porsche. That would be poetic, and I make a mental note of it for later—for some book that I may someday write. But my back hurts from the bench in detox and I’m too old to be sleeping in German sports cars from the 1980s.

She laughs again, and I freeze as she climbs onto all fours. I watch her crawling toward me, and I try to pull away but there’s nowhere to go. “Relax,
son
,” she whispers. Her breath on my face is hot and boozy. With a quick snap of her head, she licks my scabbed-over lower lip and smiles. “Enjoy the couch.”

Her bedroom door closes and the loft is bright and silent, and I’m all alone. The next morning when the sun from the uncovered windows wakes me up, she’s gone.

Chapter 37

M
y dad’s Pulitzer
is in the backseat along with a few shopping bags from some of his favorite stores on Fifth Avenue. It’s Monday afternoon, and after fighting through some traffic getting out of the city, and the usual mess on the Jersey Turnpike, we’re humming our way south down I-95. There’s this phantom pull of anxiety in my gut. I wonder how long it’ll take my brain to fully embrace the fact that I don’t have to be anywhere other than wherever I am.

I keep glancing at myself in the mirror on the sun visor. My lip has turned surprisingly ghastly. It’s like
Fight Club
all over my face, which makes me proud. I’m so antiestablishment and dangerous. Curtis’s black eye is similarly impressive. Maybe we’re not two helpless book people after all. We’re real men who occasionally tear up posh Cuban restaurants just for the hell of it. Kerouac would be thrilled.

Curtis has assured me that he’s perfectly capable of driving. In fact, his doctor has told him he can do anything. It could be six months. It could be a year. It could be two years. But I keep looking over at him anyway. He looks like himself, like Curtis, but then the light will hit him a certain way and he’ll look like a sick person.

Near Delaware now, he shifts in his seat and takes a sip of a soda he bought about fifty miles ago. “So,” he says. “I’m moving back to D.C. permanently.”

“Really?”

“I’ve liked being near you guys very much. Allie in particular. When you were her age, I missed some things that I shouldn’t have missed. And even when I was there, well, I was often not really there. And even though you’re thirty-six, you could still use a father, right? Everyone needs a dad.”

There’s sentiment and finality in his voice, and so I don’t remind him that I’m actually thirty-five. “Maybe once you get settled in, you’ll be able to—”

“No,” he says. “I’ve been trying to write one last book for years. I’m done with that. I just wish my last one had been better. It would have been nice to go out on a crescendo. But, so be it.”

“You can stay with us, if you want. I’m sure we can work out a reasonable agreement on rent.”

He smiles at the steering wheel. “That’s nice, but I think it’s best I get out of the way. I’m giving Ashley the loft. She actually deserves it, and she hates D.C. anyway. There aren’t enough people there to tell her how beautiful she is.”

Somewhere in the Lincoln Tunnel about an hour and a half ago, I gave Curtis the
Reader’s Digest
version of Ashley’s performance in the tub. He just shook his head and apologized, completely and utterly unsurprised.

“What about Sonya?” I say. “What’s she gonna think of D.C.?”

He looks at me and then back at the road. It’s very telling that in this narrative, so many of my father’s secrets have been revealed not by him but by the women in his life. His confidantes.

“You could have told me, you know. I could have handled it.”

“If I had, you’d have lumped her in with the others, and you wouldn’t have taken it seriously. Who could blame you? I haven’t exactly given you much to take seriously over the years.”

“True.”

“But Sonya’s a real person, like your mother. Thirty years ago, that was your mother’s biggest flaw in my eyes, and now that’s the thing I love most about Sonya. It’s funny how things end, isn’t it?”

He’s talking about his life the way he would one of his books, something that has drawn to a slow, inevitable conclusion.

“Sonya and I are both ready for a change. It’ll be easier in D.C. Easier to just be normal and together.”

I consider Sonya, dressed in black, sitting at Johnny Rockets with my family, and it’s ridiculous. If ever there was a woman who belongs in New York, it’s Sonya Ross. Her moving south will be like disassembling the Chrysler Building and putting it up in Georgetown. The fact that she’s agreed to this must mean she’s got a lot of faith in my father, faith that I’m not sure he’s earned.

“I just thought of something,” I say. “If you guys ever got married, Brandon would be my brother.”

The New Jersey station we’ve been listening to finally turns completely to fuzz, and I fiddle with the knob, settling on a classic rock station. There’s a song on that I used to love, and now it’s an oldie.

“Red states, be damned,” says Curtis. “We’re the modern American family.”

For the first time in a long time, I’m dreaming about my wife. It’s a husband’s dream. We’re on the couch together and Allie is on the floor between us, her crayons scattered at random. Hank is there, too, beneath the coffee table, making sure we don’t go anywhere without him. It’s our house, but a little different—an idealized version of home without dust or cobwebs or those little scratches on the wood floors.

The terrain beneath the Porsche is changing. My dad is driving over gravel maybe, turning around or stopping, and I’m half asleep and half not. He speeds up and then slows down and then stops all together. My body is used to motion, and now, totally still, I open my eyes. Outside my window, there are trees and a mile marker and an empty fast food bag skittering along the overgrown grass. I’m looking at the side of the highway. Next to me, my dad has taken off his seat belt, but we’re still idling. He’s quietly smoking a joint. Over his shoulder, cars are whooshing by at a million miles an hour.

“Dad?” I say.

He laughs. “I don’t believe it.”

I have a horrible taste in my mouth from sleeping in the car. “What’s the deal?”

He nods ahead and I follow his gaze, but I don’t know what I’m looking at. There’s an exit ramp, and over a hill there’s a McDonald’s sign, and we’re maybe twenty-five yards from a billboard. I’m about to ask him what in the hell I’m supposed to be reacting to when I notice that the billboard is one of Gary’s. There he is, giant and smiling next to the Ford logo. “It’s Gary,” I say. “He’s got them all over the place. It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, but look what he’s saying.”

I rub the crusty things from the corners of my eyes, and then I laugh, too. In the place where there’s usually an advertising message about low financing or a new model of some Ford vehicle, there’s something else entirely. In big, bold letters, it reads:
MARYANNE, PLEASE TAKE ME BACK. I LOVE YOU
!

“Holy shit.”

Curtis exhales through three open inches of window. “It’s very subtle. Not sure if the exclamation mark is necessary though.”

“Now
that
is a big fucking gesture.”

“What?”

“Remember your story, ‘The Skywriter’?”

“Yes.”

I take a breath, breathing in secondhand pot, and I’m not even sure where to begin. “Never mind. Where are we anyway?”

“Maryland. About twenty miles from home.”

An eighteen-wheeler rockets past and the car shakes hard and then settles. “The man is a freaking idiot,” says Curtis.

“What, are you out of your mind?” I say. “The man’s a genius.”