Life Sentences (7 page)

Annie was beautiful, yes, the mild flaws of her face—the space between the front teeth, the apple roundness, the heavy brows that she never tended—balancing out the cartoonish perfection of her body. Sweet, too. Not unintelligent. But not sharp. This, more than anything, had bothered Cassandra, then and now. If her father, for all his snobbery, could choose a woman of ordinary intelligence, then what were the implications for his daughter? After an exceedingly awkward adolescence, Cassandra had grown into a reasonably attractive woman. Not necessarily pretty but sexy and appealing. Yet whenever she visited her father, she was reminded that the qualities that her father had taught her to value—intelligence, quickness—had nothing to do with the woman he declared the love of his life. The test of a first-rate mind, her father often said, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, was to hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously without going insane. Cassandra looked at herself, she looked at Annie, and she concluded that her father had a first-rate mind.

“Time for dinner,” her father said. Although his apartment had a kitchen, he took his meals in the community dining room, but he always insisted on a cocktail before dinner. He seemed a little shaky getting out of his chair, and Cassandra reached a hand out to him.

“I'm fine,” he snapped. “Just a little light-headed from that expensive gin you insist on giving me. It has a much higher alcohol content.”

He had used his own gin and made his drink to his exacting specifications, but never mind.

“Come on, Dad,” Cassandra said. “We'll climb the hill together.”

He smiled, pleased by the allusion to one of his favorite poems. “But I'll beat you down.”

DICKEY HILL ELEMENTARY, SCHOOL NUMBER 201,
new in the fall of 1966, opened in utter chaos. I stood in the hallway near the principal's office, willing myself not to reach for my father's hand. Just five minutes ago, I had shaken his hand off as he walked me to school, a rare treat. We had been climbing the hill past the Wakefield Apartments, prompting, inevitably, a recitation of “John Anderson, My Jo.” In a Scottish accent, no less.

It was the first time I felt a twinge of embarrassment at my father's behavior. Fleeting, to be sure—I was still years away from the moment when everything about one's parents becomes unbearable, when the simple act of my mother speaking, in the car, with no one else there to hear,
could make me cringe—but I remember speeding up a little so the students arriving by car and bus might not associate me with this odd man.

“Do you know what
brent
means, Cassandra?” my father quizzed me, referring to another line in the poem:
His bonny brow was brent.

I pretended great interest in the Wakefield Apartments, and the pretense quickly became authentic. Apartments were glamorous to me, in general, and although these did not conform to my penthouse fantasies, the terraced units had that kind of compactness that often appeals to small children. I wanted to make friends with people who lived in those apartments, see what was behind their doors and windows. It was a frequent impulse, one that would later lead to my dismal attempt to support myself as a freelance journalist for shelter magazines. Wherever I went—the sidewalks of the Wakefield Apartments, the long avenues of rowhouses that led to various downtown destinations—I wanted to know the interiors of people's homes, their lives, their minds.

Because I was encouraged to tell my parents whatever passed through my quicksilver little brain, I told my father what I was thinking.

“I hope there are kids who live in those apartments and they're in my class and they become my friends and I get to go to their houses after school and play there.” It was lonely on Hillhouse Road, where I was the only child in the five houses. There were teenagers, but they had no use for me. We had so little in common that they might as well have been bears or Martians or salamanders.

“Your mother won't like that,” my father said.

“Why?”

“Because your mother's a snob.”

I pondered that. A snob considered herself better than other people. This did not fit my sense of my mother, who seemed forever…
sorry
about things. She was always apologizing, mainly to my father. For dinner—its arrival time, its contents. For letting me sneak television shows like
Peyton Place
and, a few years hence,
Love, American Style,
which my father found so appalling that he couldn't stop watching it. Television,
which my father despised, would become a regular feature of my weekend visits with him, a reliable way of “entertaining” me. On Friday nights, I would sit rapt in front of the television, tuned unerringly to ABC, where I progressed from fantasy to fantasy—the blended world of
The Brady Bunch,
the domestic magic of
Nanny and the Professor,
the harmonious life of
The Partridge Family. That Girl
(my personal idol),
Love, American Style.
It was fun, or would have been if not for my father's running commentary. (“So this is what farce has become…forget Sheridan, forget Wilde…bug-eyed virgins, bugger them all.”) By the time I was eleven, I knew about Sheridan and Mrs. Malaprop, and Oscar Wilde, who said anyone could be good in the country, and even virgins, who were people who had yet to try to make babies. My father managed to avoid giving me
bugger,
however, and I was left to assume it was what happened to the bug-eyed. To be bug-eyed was to become a bug, and, therefore, buggered. I was twenty-one before I knew what it actually meant.

On the first day of third grade,
bugger
was not part of my vocabulary yet, although I had other odd words.
Souse,
for example, my father's preferred term for drunks.
Delaine,
a fine fabric for which my mother pined as she decorated our house on the mingiest of budgets.
Antidisestablishmentarianism,
then reputed to be the longest word in the dictionary. I knew not only how to spell it, but—at my father's insistence—what it meant, vaguely. And, yes, I did know
brent,
if only from context—smooth, handsome. Entering third grade, it was my plan to use these words, super-casually, and establish myself as an intellect with which to be reckoned.

My classroom assignment unearthed, I said good-bye to my father, trying not to display any panic, and walked upstairs to Mrs. Klein's room. Mrs. Klein was young and pretty, the two best things a teacher could be. The class filled up quickly and I looked around, trying to decide who would be my best friend. I recognized a shy blond girl, someone I had seen around the neighborhood, but dismissed her. She had a strange
look about the eyes, which were underscored with dark circles. I drifted toward the group that seemed the most confident, three girls in all. The desks had been arranged in configurations of four and they had seized a desirable quartet, alongside the windows, in the middle.

“May I sit here?” I asked the smallest of the three girls.

She cast a quick glance at the other two. One was tall and a little pudgy, but I could see in an instant that no one would ever dare tease her about her weight. The other was pretty but too shy to make eye contact. All three were Negroes, the word I would have used then, and felt quite proud of using. The class was equally split between white and black children, a change from Thomas Jefferson, where there had been only two African-American girls. I did not choose the group for this fact, nor was I especially conscious of it at the time. Later, my parents would make me conscious, even self-conscious. My father would praise my friends far too much, and my mother would practically congratulate herself on how
nice
she found their mothers, how polite. Except Fatima's.

My father was particularly fond of Donna, whom he called doe-eyed Donna—always in those words, doe-eyed Donna—but he liked Tisha and Fatima, too. They would not be my only friends at Dickey Hill. I would, over time, find girls who lived in the Wakefield Apartments, go to their homes, and find it almost as interesting as I had hoped, the rooms so small and cunning, like something a mouse might build. But during the school day, this was my group. We were the smart girls, the leaders, each with a clearly defined role. I got good grades. (As did the others, but I got the best grades.) Donna was the artist. Fatima was the adventurer, destined to do everything first. And Tisha was the boss, looking out for all of us. We thought we were the future.

“GOOD MORNING, DARLING.”

Cassandra slept heavily and those who truly knew her well—her parents, two ex-husbands—understood that she was capable of answering the phone while still asleep and even managing several seemingly coherent sentences. She was particularly disoriented this morning, confused about her whereabouts—
Baltimore, right, the leased apartment
—confused about who might be calling her. She had been dreaming, and it had been pleasant, but that was all she could remember.

“Bernard,” she murmured after exchanging a few sleep-fogged sentences. Then: “What day is it?”

He laughed, as if she were being droll, but it was a legitimate question. More than a decade into her life as a full-time writer, Cassandra
had yet to become accustomed to how self-employment dulled the days, blurring all distinctions. Monday, Monday? She not only trusted that day, she rather liked it. As the workweek progressed, she could observe but not really share the rising tide of high spirits she saw in the people around her, at cafés and coffee shops. She especially missed the giddy high of Friday afternoons, the luxurious emptiness of Saturdays, but not so much that she would want to experience the lows of the working week. It was a bit like being on medication, she supposed, each day more or less the same as the one before.

Not that she had ever been on medication. Her father's daughter, indeed. Ric Fallows bragged about how he never took so much as an aspirin or an antihistamine, and while Cassandra knew her father's stance was a kind of bigotry, born of serendipitous good health, she couldn't help absorbing his views. It amused her, a little, when he had to start taking Lipitor.

There was a period, just before her first marriage broke up, when she was given a prescription, but she never filled it, although she lied and told the doctor she did. He had gotten in touch with her after she revealed that detail in her second memoir, outraged. Outraged! By telling the world—well, about 800,000 readers, give or take—that she had ignored her psychiatrist's advice, he argued, she had branded him incompetent, unworthy. And never mind that she hadn't named him, his e-mail continued, anticipating her defense.

“As I will remind you,” his e-mail huffed, “libel law requires only that a person be identifiable to some, not all. Your ex-husband, for example, would know that this passage refers to me, so it's inferences may, in fact, be libelous.”

She had written back, “It's hard for my ex-husband to have a lower opinion of you than the one he has long harbored, given some of the ‘advice' you provided at the time. In the end, I am happy with how things worked out, so I don't really care that you were unethical and boneheaded and not a particularly good listener. But if you're worried
about your professional rep, be advised that the possessive ‘its' takes no apostrophe and that only the listener may infer, so the word you want is ‘implications,' not inferences. Cheers, your former patient, now quite sane, no thanks to you.”

She wouldn't write such an e-mail today, fearful that it would be posted on the Internet. But it felt good at the time. She had been wise, rejecting whatever drug the doctor had been pushing on her.
Not
feeling wasn't the secret to happiness.

Neither was Bernard.

“It's Saturday,” Bernard said, “and Tilda decided to go up to Connecticut to visit her sister for the weekend. Can I come over?”

“You could, if I were in Brooklyn,” she said. “But I'm in Baltimore, working on the new project. I told you.” She was awake now, hearing everything, even the things that weren't actually said.

“I thought you might come back, on weekends.”

“Some weekends. Although it never occurred to me that you would be free on a Saturday.”

“Me either,” he said. “But you were the first person I thought of.”

“You're sweet,” she said, stifling a yawn. Bernard
was
sweet. And considerate—not only of her but of his wife. Granted, he was cheating on his wife, but he was conducting the affair in the kindest, most thoughtful way possible. Cassandra had been able to rationalize the relationship because it was truly about sex—sex and a little companionship. She had no interest in marrying again and the men she dated eventually found this intolerable. Bernard, who really did love his wife, had seemed the perfect solution, because he could be
scheduled,
usually weeks in advance.

But he had become clingy of late, demanding. He wasn't in love with Cassandra, but he couldn't bear the fact that she wasn't in love with him. They were on their last legs. She hoped the end wouldn't be ugly. In fact, she had calculated that he would fall out of the habit of her while she was in Baltimore, smoothing the way for a painless breakup.

“Maybe I could come down there,” he said. “On a weekend, it's an easy drive.”

“I'm working,” she lied reflexively.

“On a Saturday?”

“I've scheduled some interviews.”

“How are things going?”

“Okay,” she said, hoping that was the truth. She really couldn't tell. But Bernard, whom she had met at a lecture a year ago, needed to believe she was never in doubt when it came to her work. He had read the novel, while it was still in manuscript, and pronounced it brilliant. Bernard worked on Wall Street, and his prognostications on money were much more sound than his opinions on literature. If only he had brought the same conservative, the-bubble-must-burst mentality to her last book. All commodities crash, Bernard had told her recently, speaking of oil, but Cassandra couldn't help wondering if it applied to her, too.

“I miss you,” he said in a tone that suggested he was trying to cram much meaning into those three words. At least it wasn't “I love you.” That would be disastrous.

“I miss you, too,” she assured him. In some ways, she did. She would be happy to have him in bed with her right now. He was a thoughtful lover and excited by the fact of the affair, which he claimed was his first. Cassandra didn't quite believe him, but she understood that he had convinced himself of this fact. Her hunch was that Bernard was a serial monogamist on parallel tracks—he was faithful to Tilda, he was faithful to his lovers. Sort of like a subway line with an express track and a local track. On the local, he trod through life with Tilda, a sweet-faced blonde who sometimes got her picture in the Sunday Styles section of the
Times,
an old-fashioned New York wife with a conscience and lots of dutiful charity work. Then, on the express, he sped through affairs with women with whom he could never form a bond. Cassandra was his first creative type, and he probably would have tired of her by now if she had the good sense to pretend to be in love with him. She simply didn't have the energy.

“I—” he began, and she rushed to interrupt, to block the verb she could not afford to hear.

“I'll come back week after next, on Monday or Tuesday, to meet with my editor. You can usually get free in the evenings, right?”

“With notice, yes.”

“I'll give you plenty of notice.”
And cancel at the last minute.
Which, in the short run, would not achieve anything. If she continued to be this aloof, he might decide to leave Tilda. “Good-bye, my love,” she added, hoping the use of the word as a noun would be sufficient.

Only now she was awake, on what looked to be a bright if chilly March day. It really was strange how much the weather affected mood. Gray sky or blue, her circumstances were the same day to day. Was she happy? She knew she should be. She had money and health and even health care. She lived as she wanted. She didn't have children or a husband, but those things were overrated. She had Bernard, although he represented a regression. Her second book had ended with the claim that she had moved beyond meaningless affairs, that she was content on her own.

Was she happy? Was she even content? She had to think that a truly happy, content person wouldn't battle her aging body with such intensity, would let the gray hairs grow in, forgo facials, and, most of all, fuck the gym, that Sisyphean battle against gravity. But Cassandra also worried that her life was too soft, that small things became magnified in the midst of all this comfort, and the gym was the only place where she encountered active opposition. Or had been, until the publication of her novel.

Hadn't someone written a poem about how it was the small things, the fraying of a shoelace, that broke a man's spirit? She walked over to her laptop and typed
the fraying of a shoelace
into Google and got back nine entries, and half of those were about the Nicholson Baker book
The Mezzanine.
But there was some blog crediting it to Charles Bukowski, so she started over, with just
Bukowski
and
shoelace.
And here was the poem,
called, in fact, “The Shoelace.” Ah, it was
snapping,
not fraying, and it sends a man (or a woman, as Bukowski adds in a moment of preternatural political correctness) to the madhouse.

She read on, impressed by a poet she had never much considered. Her father, for all his progressiveness, hated the “new” voices, as he called them—Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Anyone who announced himself as a revolutionary could not be one, said Ric Fallows, and, in that way, managed to announce that
he
was a revolutionary because he was not announcing himself. Cassandra, a contrarian in so many ways, did not defy her father on this. She was too busy reading Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz and this one really shocking book—
Laurel Canyon
?—in which a girl with a pronounced masochistic streak volunteered for a gang rape that another man witnessed for sexual pleasure. What teenage girl had time for Bukowski when there were books like that in the world?

But now she read on, interested in Bukowski's list of things that led to insanity. Car troubles, dental problems, a fifty-cent avocado. (
How quaint,
she thought.) These were, for the most part, the very things she had dreaded in her twenties and thirties. Car repairs, dental work—never adequately covered, no matter how good the health care plan. Add to the list Bulgarian wine, which she and her first husband had started drinking because it cost only five dollars a bottle; stealing toilet paper from the Burger King, which she had done several times while trying to survive as an assistant in publishing; chipping the new pedicure you couldn't actually afford or justify. Of course, Bukowski had his political litany, too, but she didn't really see world events driving anyone crazy. Not directly.

Which was the problem, she supposed. The burnt-out lightbulb in the hall might send you into screaming fits at the end of a long, frustrating day, but would your concern over global warming lead you to consider replacing it with a fluorescent bulb? She hated the coinage “blank nation,” but if she were to permit herself such a title, she would rant
about how resigned people seemed, inured to their own powerlessness. Inert nation. Nowadays, your shoelace snapped, so you sat down at your computer and read about the latest insane starlet, then zipped over to Zappos and ordered new shoes, because who had time to find
shoelaces.

She clicked back to Google's rectangular robot mouth, always ready to be filled. So what if it was Saturday morning? She was in Baltimore, she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. She could work, after all, make the lie true. She started with
Leticia Barr.
Nothing. She tried
Tisha,
but that came up empty, too.
Donna Howard.
Too much came up; the name was shared by a Texas state representative and a psychic. Fatima, larger-than-life Fatima. Certainly she had made a mark on the world. Again, nothing. Had they all married, taken their husbands' names? Many women did, even good feminists, especially once there were children. Cassandra realized she knew one name that would kick back results: Reginald “Candy” Barr, although without the nickname. Immediately, she had the official page for his law firm, Howard, Howard & Barr.

Wow—he was gorgeous. That hadn't been apparent in the newspaper photo. Perhaps this one had been sweetened in some way? Photoshop covered a multitude of sins, as her own author photo would attest.

She started to hit the contact button, but—no. E-mail was too businesslike. The form would be shunted off to some administrative assistant, and its very existence would indicate that she wanted something, would cement her status as a supplicant. Phone? Who would be in the office on a Saturday? She checked the address, a downtown tower with multiple offices, a place where a chance encounter would be credible. Yes, that's how she would begin.

Would he recognize her? People often did, claiming her face was remarkably like the one they remembered from ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. Cassandra was never sure how to feel about that, if it was a compliment or a lie or an insult. A face
should
change over the years, and she thought hers somewhat improved from her childhood days of chipmunk roundness. More important—was it plausible that she would
recognize him, was there any trace of the little Candy Barr she had known? Yes, the dimples still glinted, even in this professional portrait meant to convey seriousness, accomplishment, I-will-get-you-what-you-deserve.

Her plan was plausible, just. The only downside was that she would have to wait until Monday. Sighing, she checked the schedule for the movie theater in the neighborhood, wondered if there was something ambitious to cook, wished she had someone for whom to cook. If the fraying—snapping—of a shoelace led to the madhouse, what was the destination for those who never had to worry about shoelaces and fifty-cent avocados? Here, nine floors above a city that had once been her home, Cassandra felt wrapped in cotton, too far removed from everyday concerns. The gym could keep her body hard, but what would keep her
spirit
tough? She knew how she didn't want to define her life—through a man, or even by her work—but had no idea what else could define a person. She would never yearn to be twenty-three again, broke and scraping by. But she missed the adventure of unearthing Bulgarian wine from the bargain bins at the local liquor store, laughing at its label, its price. Laughing at herself, a skill that was at risk of atrophying.