Belle Pearl (14 page)

Maman had a choice and she chose
him
. After everything, she betrayed us. I sat there now in the rental car, my head slumped on the steering wheel and choked back the lump in my throat.
I will not be broken. I will not be broken.
Finally, I had my chance at happiness with Pearl but I was jeopardizing it all for a woman who had not protected me, who had not put me before her own desires. I couldn’t shoulder her weight any longer. I needed to be honest with Pearl. Or I would lose her. I
had
lost her. But maybe, just maybe, I could win her back. If.

If I told her the whole story.

She needed to know who and what my mother really was.

I slipped into Pearl’s rental apartment—I still hadn’t handed over my set of keys. Daisy and Amy and Pearl would probably, I deduced, be asleep by now, and I didn’t want to wake anyone. But Pearl was wide-awake, a tub of ice cream in one hand and one of Amy’s toy cowboy pistols in the other. I fell in love with her all over again. It was proof that we had to be together; that we were soul mates. Both wielding toy guns in the same night?

It was a
fait accompli.

She was standing there in her pajama bottoms, her tits voluptuous, her nipples erect in her little tank. But sex was no longer on my mind. I was too broken up that night.

“Why are you doing this Alexandre? Why are you here? Back to torture me?”

“Love the toy gun,” I said with a faint smile. “You and I have more in common than you think, baby.” But it wasn’t funny anymore. I crumpled to the ground, my resilience in fragments, my barriers gone. A tear plopped onto the floor, landing on the slush of snow pooled next to my big black boots. “I can’t stand this anymore, Pearl. I really can’t.” I looked up at her like a puppy waiting for a clue from his mistress. I had no answers. I needed help.

This was the moment in time when everything froze like a snowflake floating in midair; unique and perfect. I gave in to Pearl. Completely. I threw myself into the arms of Fate. If God gave a fuck, he’d sort this Laura shit out for us, but nothing was now going to stand in the way of the goddamn truth, my mother included.

I took Pearl home, just as she was, in her pajamas. We didn’t make love but we did make promises. I told her everything—each tiny, gruesome detail, leaving nothing unsaid. She embraced my truth, swore she’d stand by my side, no matter what. We were a team, she said, and nothing could break that.

Recounting how my mom murdered my father in the bathtub, by throwing a live electric heater into the water, somehow alleviated me of the black weight I had been heaving over my shoulder for so many years. Just saying the words made me a free man.

I kissed Pearl’s knuckles on her ringed hand and said—the diamond glittering in my eyes as I spoke—“Pearl, I know you and I know myself. If we don’t spend the rest of our days together we won’t be truly happy. We’ll go around half dead. Without you, my flame is snuffed out. Without you, I am only half a man. Without you, my life will be running on empty.” Maybe I sounded like a cliché—an actor speaking his lines—but it was unrehearsed and how I truly felt.

I came clean with Pearl that night. I revealed all to her. My past. My mother. The lot. And then Pearl told me
her
big secret. The best damn secret known to man.

She was pregnant with my child.

13

I
won’t go into detail about all the trials and tribulations that Pearl and I endured over the next month or so because of Laura. Suffice it to say that there was enough madness and intrigue to make a long movie (that would have seemed too far-fetched for most intelligent beings)
and
a TV spin-off of several seasons, to boot. Laura had us running around in circles, doing cartwheels, backward walkovers, and nosedives, suffering several near coronaries and many sleepless nights. But the difference now, was that Pearl and I weathered the storm
together.
And knowing that she was pregnant made our family unit stronger, all the more invincible. A tiny voice inside my head assured me that we would pull thorough.

We had to.

We had a thousand nutty plans to out-fox Laura. Her latest scheme was to use me as a sperm donor for her brainchild baby-to-be, generously letting Pearl ‘keep’ me for herself, Laura having finally given up on actually marrying me. It was bordering on laughable her plan was so outlandish.

Our last ‘encounter’ was at Laura’s house in Chelsea. She was threatening my mother again and I found myself on a plane to London to put an end to her blackmail, once and for all. However, in an unexpected twist, Fate and Irony got their first.

Laura had an accident—another fall, this time tumbling downstairs in her own house, her head cracking open, and her heart—which had erroneously believed it loved me—finally stopped beating.

Her husband James (emerging like a dormouse from a long winter) had been in rehab for several months—all this I found out during the bizarre scene that followed.

Pearl had been imagining all that time that Laura had topped him off. James was one of those high-class heroin addicts (able to afford the best) and had spent time at The Priory—a sort of British Betty Ford equivalent—to kick his habit. Although, I didn’t find all this out until we were both embedded in a drama that made us both look like murderers.

James and I found ourselves in an almost comical situation—murder suspects as we were—as we both observed Laura lying, dead as a smashed mosquito, at the bottom of the staircase in their London house. We arrived at the scene of the ‘crime’ simultaneously.

She had a serene smile on her lipsticked lips as if the accident really had taken her unawares. I still remember the color red, vivid and dramatic—the pool of blood, the crimson of her silky negligee, her shiny, vermillion-painted lips. Both James and I looked guilty as dogs who had raided the trash—I had just come in through the back, via the garage door (with my own set of keys), and James suddenly emerged from the front door. Which one of us was a victim of circumstance, and which one a murderer? We fixed our gaze, first on Laura, and then one another.

“She must have careened down the stairs like a sled,” I said to James as we continued to size each other up. We then looked back down at Laura’s corpse, each silently accusing the other. “Her feet must have slipped forward, and her body slanting backwards, bashing her head on the bottom step.”
Jesus, it sounds as if I know too much.

James cast his glance at one dainty-heeled slipper on Laura’s left foot and then looked about to find its pair. It was lying a few feet away. He bent down and touched her pale cheek and I thought, “Fuck it’s
him
;
he
did it.” Laura looked all tarted-up; make-up, a sexy, skimpy little outfit—for my benefit? James obviously thought so, and by the look on his face he suspected his wife and I were having an affair.
He killed her out of jealousy and rage
, I thought.

I locked my eyes with his.

“You fucking cunt,” James shrieked at me. “You sneaky fucking bastard.” He laid his palm across his wife’s breast to double-check if she was as dead as she looked. “You bloody well killed my wife!”

“James, no! What are you saying? That’s
crazy.
I just
got
here, at the same time you were coming through the front door. I swear. This is just as much a surprise for me as it is for you.”

James looked up at me with his odd, angular face, a sneer etched on his thin lips. He raked his bony hand through his blond hair and said in his British, upper-class voice:

“What I don’t understand, is why.
Why,
Alexandre? Did you try to kill her last time, too? When she had that supposed ‘accident’ and she ended up in a bloody wheelchair? I mean, it’s obvious she fell down the stairs. One push, that’s all it must have taken. You fucking bastard!” Spittle sprayed as he spoke.

I knew he wasn’t the type to lay a punch. English aristocratic men are usually pretty cowardly (too polite for their own good), but I flinched all the same, and wiped his spray of angry spittle from my face. My stomach churned with sick dread as I thought of my father’s teeth and hip bits—evidence in that safety deposit box. Laura dead was all I fucking needed.

I shouted out, “Okay, James…this is just great. You accusing me of murder? How about I accuse
you
? Where the fuck have you been for the last couple of months? Eh? Suddenly appearing like this. Perhaps you
knew
that I was coming over. Laura knew. I called her. Maybe it was really bloody convenient for you to bump her off and then blame me.”

“I’m going to call the police,” James spluttered, his eyes wet with emotion. Real emotion? Fake?

The word ‘police’ sent a hammer to my heart. I thought of the evidence. Laura’s note stowed with her lawyer revealing everything if she ever had an accident. My mother rotting in a jail somewhere. And I’d be accused of her murder, on top of it all. Fuck!

James traced his finger along Laura’s once-determined jaw. “Laura wouldn’t just fall down her own stairs in her own house now, would she?”

“It is possible, she had those heeled slippers on,” I answered.

“How the fuck did you get in, anyway?”

“Through the back, from the garden,” I said. “I still have your garage keys.”

James nodded. “That’s right—your Aston Martin. I’d forgotten about that.”

Now I looked even guiltier. My Aston Martin excuse wouldn’t wash because it wasn’t fucking there anymore! Suresh, my driver, had moved it to France. I had no reason,
whatsoever
, for coming through the back door. I quickly added, “Actually, I moved my car a while ago. I knocked on the front door but there was no answer, and Laura didn’t pick up the phone. She was expecting me. So I came through the back.”

“Nice excuse, Alex. Tell that to Scotland bloody Yard.”

That
particular TV episode was a long and complicated one—the finale to an outrageously elaborate plot, peppered with an element of black humor. I must have had ‘killer’ written all over my face, because I could not deny the onslaught of fatalistic fantasies I’d had in the run-up to Laura’s death. I do think I willed it to happen. I really do. The power of imagination is awesome. And when I say ‘awesome’ I mean it in the true sense of the word.

In my mind I had killed Laura. Perhaps James had too; who knew the anger that had been building inside him. Here we were, staring at each other open-mouthed, dumbstruck that she really was gone for good—each accusing the other of murder. It was as if the screenwriters in our TV serial spin-off had Agatha Christie in mind, because what ensued, after we had both been arrested on suspicion of murder, was that Laura and James’s housekeeper, Mrs. Blake, came forward.

As I sat at the local police station, wondering how I would burrow my way out of my Alice-In-Wonderland rabbit hole, Mrs. Blake—my fairy godmother—waved her magic wand: waxy polish on the stairs, coupled with Laura’s kitten-heeled slippers, were both the murder weapons and the murderers rolled into one. It was confirmed by forensics that there was polish all over the soles of Laura’s shoes.

Finally, Pearl and I were free.

Or so I thought.

Because Laura—even from her
chaise longue
in Hell (she was probably having cocktails and flirting with the Devil himself)—had other plans for our future.

14