Lunar Park (9 page)

“Why, Bret? Why were you so exhausted?” she asked, her voice now clenched.

I sipped my drink. “Well, that dog’s been doing its big barking routine and begging for attention the entire week. You know, honey, this happened to coincide with me starting my novel and so it’s extremely distracting and suspicious.”

“Yes, I know, Victor doesn’t want you to write another book,” Jayne said, turning the stove off and moving toward the sink. “I’m so with you on that one.”

“I never see that dog frolic,” I muttered. “He’s been depressed ever since I moved in and I never see him frolic.”

“Well, when you kicked him the other night—”

“Hey, he was trying to eat a stick of butter,” I exclaimed, sitting up. “He was going after that loaf of cornbread on the counter.”

“Why are we talking about the dog?” she snapped, finally facing me.

After a contained silence I sipped my juice again and cleared my throat.

“So, you wanna read me my rights?” I sighed.

“Why bother?” she said tightly, turning away. “You’re still in a coma.”

“I suppose we’ll be discussing this in couples counseling.”

She said nothing.

I decided to change the topic, hoping for a softer reaction. “So who was the guy who came as Patrick Bateman last night?” I asked. “The guy in the Armani suit with all the fake blood on it?”

“I have no idea. A student of yours? One of your legions of fans? Why do you care?”

“I . . . didn’t recognize him,” I murmured. “I thought—”

“You thought what? That I knew him?”

“Never mind.” I shut up and thought about things for a moment or two. “And did you ever figure out what happened in Sarah’s room?” I asked gently. “Because, Jayne, I think maybe she did it.” I paused for emphasis. “But she told me her doll did it—that bird thing, you know, the Terby I bought last summer—and, y’know, that’s pretty worrisome. And by the way, where was Marta when this so-called attack happened? I think that’s pretty—”

Jayne whirled toward me. “Why are you avoiding the fact that maybe one of your drunk, fucked-up students did it?”

“My students had better things to do last night than ransack our daughter’s—”

“Yeah, like fuck in our shower—I have no idea who they were—and snort coke off the countertop in the kitchen.” She was still glaring at me, hands on her hips.

A long pause in which I built to an outraged “People were in the kitchen last night?!?”

“Yeah. People were doing drugs in the kitchen, Bret.” She recited this line in her hip-wary mode.

“Honey, look, drugs may have been done, but I’m sure they were consumed quietly and with discretion.” I paused helplessly.

“And I know you were doing them too.” Something caught in her throat, the sarcasm evaporated and she turned away from me again. She bowed her head. I noticed one hand was curled tightly into a fist. I could hear the erratic breathing that comes before tears.

“You mean I used to be doing them,” I said softly. “That sentence should be in the past tense.” I paused. “I’m up, aren’t I?”

“Barely,” she muttered. “You’re a wreck.”

“Look.” I made a useless gesture. “I’m sipping juice and scanning the papers.”

She suddenly composed herself. “Oh, forget it, forget it, forget it.”

“And why are you calling up Jay’s wife and asking—”

“I wouldn’t have to call Helen if you weren’t using again,” she said in a loud, anguished voice. She stopped and took a series of deep breaths to calm herself down. “I can’t do this now. Let’s just forget it.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I murmured gently, turning back to the papers. I attempted a long gulp from my glass but juice sloshed over the rim so I gave up and put it down on the table with a shaking hand.

Outraged by my casual tone, Jayne whirled around again. “It is illegal, Bret. Just because it was consumed in our house—”

“A private residence!” I shouted back.

“—doesn’t make it any more legal.”

“Well, it isn’t technically legal, but . . .”

She waited for me to finish the sentence. I chose not to.

“I didn’t do drugs last night, Jayne.”

“That’s a lie.” She broke down. “You’re lying to me, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

With great effort the ghost stood up and shuffled over to her. The ghost wrapped itself around her, and she let him. She was shaking, and between sobs was the trembling intake of uneven breaths.

“How about you believe me . . . and . . .”—I turned her around so we were facing each other and I stared at her pleadingly, my eyes sad and wistful—“just love me?”

There was a new silence in the kitchen. I glanced over at the dog as Jayne collapsed into me, hugging so tightly that I started to wheeze. Victor was staring at me.
You bore me,
it was thinking.
You are a jerk,
it was thinking. I glared until he lost interest, licked a paw and then turned away. He couldn’t stand the sight of me, and he knew that I knew it. And he liked that I knew. That’s what drove me crazy: the dog knew that
I
knew it hated me and
liked
it. When I looked back at Jayne, she was staring at me so hopefully that her expression almost bordered on madness and I wanted to let go first.

But then Jayne gently pushed me away and simply said, “We’re having dinner at the Allens’ on Sunday. I couldn’t get out of it.”

“That sounds like . . .” I gulped. “Fun. Really fun.”

After she left to get Robby my stomach erupted, and leaving my cocktail on the table I hurriedly ran into the closest bathroom and sat down on the toilet just as an explosive torrent of diarrhea hit the water. Gasping, I reached for the latest issue of
Wallpaper
and flipped through it while my stomach kept emptying itself. I stared at another sunken tub and then out the small bay window as Elsinore Lane began waking up, and I saw the boy who spent the night walk from our house—the pumpkins still dotting the path—to the house next to ours and realized it was Ashton Allen; he was momentarily so close to the window that I could read his T-shirt—
KEEP STARING, I MIGHT DO A TRICK
—and then a sparrow landed on the sill and I turned away. The bathroom was soon enveloped in an odor particular to the remnants of a drunken night—the smell of excrement and alcohol commingled in a rancid stench that forced me out of the room almost as quickly as I had rushed in.

When I hobbled back into the kitchen, Jayne was pouring hot water into ceramic bowls and Robby was standing at the table drinking from my glass, grimacing. “Mom, this orange juice tastes funny. Is there any Tropicana left?”

“Robby, hon, I don’t want you drinking Tropicana,” Jayne said. “Marta squeezed some fresh juice for you. It’s by the sink.”

“This
is
fresh juice,” he muttered.

I stood in the doorway until Robby put the glass down and moved over to the juicer. (Nonfresh juice was largely prohibited because it caused cavities and obesity.) As I made my way to the table Robby turned around and saw me and did the subtlest double take before casually moving over to his backpack, which he was in the process of rearranging. Robby still didn’t seem used to my presence, but I wasn’t used to his either. We were both scared and wary of each other, and I was the one who needed to make a connection, to mend us, but his reluctance—as loud and insistent as an anthem—seemed impossible to overcome. There was no way of winning him over. I had failed him utterly—his downward gaze whenever I entered a room reminded me of this. And yet I still resented the fact that he—not myself—lacked the courage to make that first move.

“Hey, kid,” I said, sitting down at the table and chugging the rest of the screwdriver. It went down sourly, and I shut my eyes until the alcohol’s warmth began coursing through my system, causing my eyelids to flutter open. Robby mumbled a response. It was enough. School lasted from 8:15 until 3:15, and various after-school programs often pushed their return to 5:15, so there was usually nine hours of peace. But then I realized tonight was trick-or-treating and that I had to be at the college by noon (a counseling day, but mostly an excuse to see Aimee Light) and then I had an appointment with my shrink, Dr. Kim, and somewhere during this ordeal a lot of Xanax was going to have to be ingested and a nap taken. The housekeeper walked in and said something to Jayne in Spanish. They had a little conversation I couldn’t possibly follow until Rosa nodded intensely and moved out of the kitchen.

Since it was Halloween and a free-dress day at school Robby was wearing a
WHAT? ME WORRY?
T-shirt and oversized cargo pants—his clothes were always too big, too baggy, and everything had a label on it. A pair of Rollerblades were slung over his shoulder, and he let Jayne know that he’d just downloaded something from a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Web site and he was wondering how to fit a soccer ball into a new Targus RakGear Kickflip backpack, which weighed an “acceptable” twenty-five pounds (the Nike BioKNX had caused “spinal aching” according to his physician). He was holding a magazine,
GamePro,
to read on the car ride to school, and was anxious about an oral quiz on the formation of waterfalls. As I flipped through the papers Robby complained about noises last night, after the party was over. But he was unsure where they were coming from—the attic, or maybe on the roof, but also definitely on the sides of the house. There were scratching sounds at his door, he said, and when he woke up this morning, his furniture had been rearranged, and he found three or four deep grooves on the bottom of his door (which he insisted he didn’t make), and when he touched the doorknob it was wet. “Someone slimed it,” he said, shuddering.

I looked up from the paper and saw Jayne glaring at me while she asked, “What do you mean, hon?”

But, as usual when Robby was asked for specifics, he drooped and went silent.

I reanimated myself and tried to think of a question to ask him that would not require any elaboration, but then Sarah and Marta wandered in. Sarah was wearing a frilly T-shirt with the word
lingerie
in spangly silver letters. And then Victor bounded up to her, relieved and wiggling with happiness, before moving to the glass wall and staring intently into the backyard while barking like mad, causing my head to explode.

“Sit, Victor! Heel. Heel!” I demanded. “Jeez, can’t somebody get that dog to mellow out?” I turned back to the papers but Sarah was leaning into me with the Christmas list she’d already made, a Pokémon stadium leading a long computerized column. I reminded her it was October (this didn’t register) and then started going down the list with her until I looked to Jayne for help, but she was on her cell phone and bagging the kids’ lunches (the sugar-free graham crackers, the bottles of Diet Snapple) while saying things like “No—the kids are booked solid.”

Sarah kept explaining to me what each item on the list meant to her until I casually interrupted. “How’s everything with Terby, honey?” I asked. (Had I really been so afraid of it last night? Everything seemed different now in the light of morning: bright, clean, sane.)

“Terby’s okay” is all she said, but it worked: she forgot about the Christmas list and moved over to finger paintings she’d made yesterday for show-and-tell and carefully started sliding them into a manila envelope. Robby was checking his palm pilot while swaggering around the kitchen—his way of acting tough.

I suddenly noticed a paperback of
Lord of the Flies
in the mass of school gear on the table and picked it up. Opening the cover I was shocked to find Sarah’s name handwritten on the first page. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I can’t believe they’re letting first-graders read this.”

Everyone—except Sarah—glanced at me.

“I don’t even understand this book
now
. Jeez, why don’t they just assign her
Moby Dick
? This is absurd. This is
crazy
!” I was waving the book at Jayne when I noticed Sarah staring at me with a confused expression. I bent toward her and said, in a calm, soothing, rational tone, “Honey, you don’t need to read this.”

Sarah glanced fearfully at her mother. “It’s on our reading list,” she said quietly.

Exasperated, I asked Robby to show me his curriculum.

“My what?” he asked, standing rigidly still.

“Your schedule, dummy.”

Robby tentatively rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a crumpled computerized list: Art History, Algebra 1, Science, Basic Probability, Phys Ed, Statistics, Nonfiction Literature, Social Studies and Conversational Spanish. I stared at the list dully until he sat down at the table and I handed it back to him. “This is insane,” I muttered. “It’s outrageous. Where are we sending them?”

Robby suddenly concentrated on his bowl of muesli—having pushed aside the oatmeal Marta had placed in front of him—and reached for a carton of soy milk. Jayne kept forgetting that Robby couldn’t stand oatmeal, but it was something I always remembered since I couldn’t stand oatmeal either.

He finally shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“The school counselor said that getting a child into an Ivy League school starts in first grade,” Jayne said casually, as if not to alarm the children, who I assumed weren’t listening anyway.

“Actually earlier,” Marta reminded her.

“She’s hyping you, baby,” I sighed. “Don’t play dat game, sistah.”

Robby suddenly giggled, much to my gratification.

Jayne scowled. “Don’t use fake rap talk around the kids. I hate it.”

“And I hated that counselor,” I said. “You know why? Because she was feeding off your anxiety, baby.”

“Let’s not have this conversation now,” Jayne said, washing her hands in the sink, her neck muscles taut. “Are we almost ready, kids?”

I was still dumbfounded by Robby’s schedule and I wanted to say something consoling to him but he had finished the muesli and was reloading his backpack. He studied a computer game, Quake III, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then pulled out his cell phone to make sure it was charged.

“Hey, buddy, what are you doing taking a cell phone to school?”

He looked nervously over at Jayne, who was now drying her hands with a paper towel. “All the kids have them,” she said simply.