Reunion: A Novel (3 page)

“When you get back,” he says, taking out three twenties from the middle sleeve, “we’re going to have to figure this out.” There are more twenties in there, but he takes out only three.

I don’t say anything.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he says. “Don’t you?”

In fact, I
do
know what he’s talking about. He’s talking about our financial situation. In part, he’s talking about my school debt (close to thirty thousand dollars still). But mostly he’s talking about the forty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of credit card debt I’ve been paying off since we married and how he’s been covering everything—
everything
—while I cover the monthly installment plan he helped me set up. He’s talking about the fact that while it’s true that I am employed, it’s also true that it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to take care of myself
and
continue to make my final year’s worth of payments.

“Give me a nod,” he says. “Let me know you understand.”

“This sucks,” I say.

He takes my fist from where it’s been tucked into my armpit. We both look down at it, and I think,
How did we get here? How did we get to this exact minute in time?

He unfurls my fingers one by one, puts the twenties in my palm, then takes his hand away. So many times, on so many occasions, Peter has opened his wallet and handed me a few twenty-dollar bills. Never—not once—has it felt as dirty and loathsome as this. But the fact of the matter is, he’s right: my bank account has less than fifty dollars in it and my next paycheck won’t deposit until after the weekend, and if he actually decides to cut me off, I’ll be without income until the fall semester begins.

I tuck the money into the front pocket of my jeans.

“Peter,” I say.

I could tell him what he wants to hear. I could say it now. All I’d have to do is deliver the lines.

“Peter,” I say again. Where is my prompt? Where is my whiteboard covered in big block letters?

“Have a nice flight,” he says.

And because I can think of nothing less common, I say, “Have a nice life.”

And then he’s gone.

I
take my seat in business with a sort of flourish—economy was completely sold out—and order a gin and tonic before we even take off, my second since Peter left the airport. I have forty-five dollars of his pity left. If it’s possible, I’ll spend every penny of it on booze before I’ve even reached the baggage claim in Atlanta. My cheeks are flushed and my face is feeling genuinely smiley. I love flying. There’s at least that. Every semester, my school foots the bill for me to attend the latest conference on the latest screenwriting techniques, which I am then to bring back to all of my screenwriting students. I’m positively devoted to the flights and the hotels. It’s like being a different person. You get to board a plane by yourself and check into a hotel by yourself and you could be anybody. You could be a woman with a husband, for instance, or you could be a woman without one. Take your pick.

I check my phone. Two new messages. They’re both from Nell. I push play and cradle the phone to my ear, careful this time not to engage the speaker function. I lean against the window and close my eyes.

“Kiddo,” says Nell’s recording. “I’m in Colorado. Elliot’s here. Rita brought the girls. I had time to go through security and meet them at the drop-off. Joe’s gorgeous. It’s gross.” Elliot says something in the background. Nell muffles something back to him. There’s a pause, maybe a sniffle. “We can’t wait to see you.” Then she’s gone. The next message is just static.

By my calculation, the plane I’m on will land about an hour before Nell and Elliot’s—just enough time to negotiate the airport, order a few drinks, and be waiting at their gate as a sort of surprise. I can spend forty-five dollars in an hour. I can spend it in a heartbeat. Just watch me.

On a different night, under different circumstances, I’d be thinking about Nell and Elliot. I’d be jealous that they’re on a flight together, catching up without me—me, eternally the little sister. But tonight. Tonight I am thinking, reluctantly, of my father. “Toughen up,” he used to say when he’d catch me crying in a corner. “What’s the matter with you?” Sometimes he’d hold up his hands, turn his palms outward, and say, “Hit me. Come on. Hit me. You’ll feel better.” This started when I was five, just after our mother died. It continued until I left for college. Thirteen years of seeing those palms, of being asked to hit them, of being told feeling better was as simple as following through. But if I did hit him, it was never hard enough, which meant I wasn’t committed. And if I didn’t hit him, it was because my personality was milquetoast. That was his word.
Milquetoast.
And now Peter’s gone and said I’m just like him. Daddy issues? Absolutely not.

The one time I was brazen enough to suggest to Nell and Elliot that their commitment to our father was predicated on his having purchased their college educations, they shot me down. Elliot had just turned thirty. He was already pulling in close to two hundred thousand dollars a year. Nell was only a production manager then, but she was in the high five figures and poised to move into the realm of the sixes any minute.

What Elliot said was, “Horseshit. That’s total horseshit. If he’d offered you tuition, you’d have taken it. You’re pretending we should put you on some sort of pedestal because you turned his money down.”

“But he didn’t even offer you money,” said Nell. “It’s our fault? We should have said no? We should have guessed that he wasn’t going to give you any?”

I told them they were missing my point. I tried to explain to them that I could care less about the money—a lie, since tuition was only a taste of the massive debt I was already in the process of acquiring—it was the fact that the money had blinded them to certain realities about his character. “There were no good years—never,” I said. “That’s a lie you tell yourselves to make it okay that you took money from the Nazis.”

“Is she comparing Dad to Hitler?” said Elliot. “I think she’s comparing our father to the Fuehrer.”

“She’d have taken his money,” said Nell. “She’d have taken it in the blink of an eye if he’d offered it to her.”

I was standing right in front of them. We were in the same room. We were also drunk. All three of us.

“Are we supposed to feel sorry for you?” said Elliot. “Is that what you want?”

“I think she wants her share,” said Nell. “I think she wants us to pay her back or something.”

“I don’t feel sorry for her,” said Elliot. “Not even a little.”

The reason they didn’t feel sorry for me was that the year before—my first year out of college—I’d sold a screenplay. I’d gotten twenty thousand dollars up front. I quit my job as a waitress and moved to Berkeley. The money was gone in four months. I hadn’t paid a cent toward taxes. But everything was okay. Or it seemed like it was okay, because I had applied for and been granted this amazing little thing called a credit card. Of course, Elliot and Nell knew nothing about this. They only knew that I’d sold a screenplay and appeared, on the surface at least, to be their successful artist sister.

Of course, the film never got made. But that’s not the point. The point is that the one time I tried to illustrate to Nell and Elliot that their perception of our father might be
slightly
skewed because of his financial contributions to their educational development, they shot me down so quickly and so cruelly that I never again broached the subject. At least not with them. With Peter, yes.

By the time I met Peter, my debt—not even counting school loans—was in the low thirties. By the time we married, it was in the low forties. Wait, you say. Hold on there just one minute. Tell us about these amazing things you were purchasing with all this credit. Tell us, please, that those cash advances were to help the hungry family of four who lived below you or to support yourself while you toiled away endless hours at the shelter, or if not the shelter, then surely some do-gooder nonprofit, and if not a nonprofit, then while you advanced your burgeoning artistic career with dozens of new screenplays. But the answer is no. None of that. The answer is that I spent it on clothes. Clothes and shoes and booze and food. Debt? It’s as easy as infidelity. It’s easier.

At first it’s just a thousand dollars. And you lie awake thinking,
How did I let it get to be so much? That was so stupid. Just pay it off and be done.
But instead of paying it off, you only pay it down. And just when it feels almost manageable, they send an offer: Take a month off from payments, they say. Just one month! We’ll increase your APR, but you’ll have thirty days—thirty whole days!—during which you won’t once lie awake thinking about how to repay it all. So you say,
Yes.
You say,
Bring it on.
And then one thousand turns to two and then two turns to four and then four turns to twelve, and then you realize there’s no way out. There’s no way out, that is, until this lovely human being asks you to marry him and it dawns on you that in order to say yes, you’re going to have to come clean. And so you do. Mostly.

T
HE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
brings my gin and tonic. The man next to me orders tomato juice. I consider making small talk—perhaps offer to buy a mini bottle of vodka to go with his juice—but then I remember Frank from Wisconsin and decide against it.

Instead I dial Rita. She answers on the first ring. Goddamn I love this woman sometimes. I mean, I always love her. But sometimes I just want to swallow her whole and carry her around in my belly.

“Hi, you,” she says.

“Hi,” I say. Every once in a while, I think about telling Rita the truth. I think maybe she’s the only one out of everyone who might possibly understand. In the movie version of our lives, she’s played by a young Diane Keaton or maybe a young Katharine Hepburn. It’s the mother in her, maybe, but I truly believe that I could tell her about the affair, about Peter’s talk of divorce, about the debt and how it’s almost over, about all the million secrets I tell myself every single night as I’m falling asleep, and she wouldn’t judge me. She’d just smile and nod, refill my glass of juice. Maybe.

“How’s your brain?” she says.

“Wishing it were on drugs.”

I squeeze the dried-up lime wedge into my glass and then drop it in so that it’s floating there on top of the ice cubes.

“Where are you?”

“On a plane,” I say. “About to leave Chicago.”

“Is Peter going with you?”

I shake my head and take a sip of my drink, but then remember Rita can’t see me.

“No,” I say. “He can’t miss work.” There are a few people I don’t like lying to, and Rita’s one of them.

“That’s good,” she says. Rita can spin just about anything but her own life into something positive. “More time for you and Nell and Elliot. You guys need this. This will be good for you.”

When I told Rita about calling off the adoption—this was almost a year ago exactly—she didn’t even blink. All she said was “Listen to your heart,” an expression whose cheesiness and overuse normally make me grimace, but which, given the circumstances, sounded like the wisest advice I’d ever heard.

“How are the girls?” I say, happy for the moment not to be constructing a compare/contrast chart of me and my father in my head.

“Getting ready for camp this weekend. Pigpie wants to back out.” Pigpie is Ellie, the blond demon and their youngest. “But she also wants a dwarf pig for her birthday, so what does she know?”

“Are you going to let her?”

“Get a dwarf pig? Uh, no.”

“Skip camp,” I say.

Rita laughs. “Right. Well. We’ll play it by ear. The mom in me knows she needs this experience. But the little girl in me thinks we’d have a blast just the two of us with Joe and Mimi gone.”

“I wish you were coming to Atlanta,” I say, and I think I mean this. Because she has a point about the three of us—Nell, Elliot, and me—getting to be alone together. It’s been too long. But, again, there’s something soothing about Rita that I wouldn’t mind taking advantage of right now.

“I might,” she says. “Once the girls are off, depending on how long you’re down there. I might just come.”

We get off the phone and I realize that I haven’t even considered the return flight. Peter bought me a one-way ticket. He was probably hoping I wouldn’t be able to afford to come back. As of right this minute, there’s nothing pressing me to get back, other than my finances. I’m off for the summer. Classes don’t begin again until September, so I’m technically free for the next two and a half months. My accountant would like me to sell another screenplay. He thinks we could bring the back taxes current and pay off the last of my debt if I make one solid sale.

My school would also like me to sell a screenplay. They haven’t come right out and said it, but they’d like it if, for once, the screenplay wasn’t just optioned, but actually brought to life. When they hired me, I had four active scripts on the burner. I had AMC and HBO flying me to location shoots on a regular basis. Nothing ever materialized. But Hollywood is like a puppy on drugs. It’s got ADD. I was only interesting as long as there wasn’t a dirty tennis ball bouncing across the floor.

If Peter doesn’t cut me off completely, if he’s willing to help me out for a little while, I could go back to San Francisco with Nell when this is over and renew some old film school friendships. Or do a stop in Colorado for a few weeks with the girls, check out the documentary world, and then head west to my sister’s for August. I haven’t had time to myself like this without having to consider anyone else in years, in close to a decade. The feeling is unfamiliar. Not exactly unwanted, but not exactly longed for, either. And anyway, things with Peter might still turn around. He gets angry, then he gets over it. That’s what happens in a marriage. You say the meanest, most crippling thing possible to the person you ostensibly love more than anyone else in the world, and then you sit back and wait for it to pass.

When I was little, my dad’s form of babysitting was to plunk me down in front of the Turner Network Television channel and then leave the room. If it was a classic, then it was appropriate. That’s how his logic went. I remember sitting through the entirety of
Love Story
all by myself one night. The whole house might have been empty. I have no idea. The sex scene was confusing. I was too young to understand what they were doing under those covers, only that he was on top and she was on bottom and I was embarrassed. Then there was that line. That famous line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I remember sitting up. I’d heard it before. I’d heard people quoting it and now here it was, in front of me, the source. That night, sitting cross-legged too close to the television, I believed I understood the words of that syrupy-faced girl with the long brown hair. I was eleven and those words belonged to the girl, not to the actress, and I felt sure I understood them as they were meant to be understood. I felt sure my heart was pure, as her heart was surely pure, and from the other side of the screen she was looking at
me
and talking to
me
. And what she was telling me was that people in love are incapable of hurting each other; that if you’re in love then you can’t mess up, even if you want to, because love—which is a mystical, magical force—gets in the way.

Now, twenty-some years later, a full-fledged adult, I know I was wrong. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Being in love means you can hurt the other person all you want. Being in love means having a personal punching bag. That’s why you do it. That’s why you fall in love in the first place—to be the worst you can be and get away with it. Otherwise, what’s the point?