Bread Alone (32 page)

By the time I’m through, it’s almost five, and I ask him if he wants to get a pizza or some Thai food, my treat.

“I’d really like to,” he says, “but I have something I have to do tonight, so I’ll take a rain check.”

Men. Why the hell can’t he just say he has a date? And what do I care? I was only offering because he baby-sat me all afternoon.

As soon as I get home, I sit down and call CM. When a man’s voice says, “Hello,” I think I dialed the wrong number. Then remembrance and
recognition collide in my brain. It’s Neal. This is the weekend of his seminar.

“Oh hi, Wyn,” he says cheerfully. “She’s right here. Hold on a minute. She’s drying her hands.” She probably cooked dinner and did the dishes while he sat on his skinny ass reading some esoteric treatise on the sociopsychological implications of hangnails.

“I forgot this was the big weekend,” I say when she picks up the phone.

“No problem.” Her voice is elaborately casual. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. I just called to apologize for being so weird the other night, but—”

“It’s not a problem,” she insists. “I’ll call you later and we’ll talk.”

This has to be the shortest conversation she and I have ever had.

It’s there when I pick up my mail Monday afternoon, the plain white envelope with the return address of a law firm in Beverly Hills. “There you are,” I say to it. “I’ve been expecting you.” One of the big advantages of living alone. You can talk to inanimate objects without getting a lot of weird looks.

I rip open the envelope and skim several pages of legal war chant. Looks like the way it works is, if one person says the marriage is broken, it is. Never mind what the other person says. It doesn’t seem quite fair. We both had to say “I do” to get married but only he has to say “I don’t.”

The faceless gray army of legislators and judges and lawyers and clerks who, in their infinite wisdom, created our legal system apparently have decided that you wouldn’t want to bind someone to you who didn’t wish to be bound. So it’s no longer necessary to prove insanity or substance abuse or infidelity or nonsupport or abandonment. All you have to do is say “I don’t” and start dividing up the stuff. Sort of takes all the fun out of it. No more corespondents, no more alienation of affection, no more medical records or expert testimony from prominent psychiatrists. Just “I don’t.”

I fold up the papers and slip them back in the envelope.

Every afternoon when I wake up, I think about calling Elizabeth. But I know that once I do, it’s the cannon shot that sets off the avalanche. My whole world becomes a rumbling mass of debris, irreversible in its slide to the bottom. I don’t know how long I would have procrastinated, but while I’m still floundering, she calls me.

“Wynter, it’s Elizabeth Gooden.”

I can’t help it. My first thought is my father telling me how sharks pick up the minute vibrations of an injured fish flopping around erratically in the water. Then I’m ashamed of myself. She’s trying to help me.

Before I can tell her I’ve been served with papers, she says, “Our information specialist has come up with registrations from some rather pricey hotels in Cancun, in Scottsdale, and in San Francisco. I’ll give you the dates, and you tell me if you accompanied your husband on any of these trips.”

“I can tell you right now I haven’t been to Mexico in at least three years.”

“Interesting. Cancun’s the oldest one.”

I bite my lip. “When?”

“Let’s see, that one was … last December. December fifteenth to twentieth.”

It’s like being smacked in the face with a wet towel. My birthday. The important client meeting he had to attend. “And the registration was for … two people?”

“Mr. and Mrs. David Franklin.”

The ache inside me transmutes to a molten rage, expanding to fill every crevice in my body. I’m certain it’s going to flood out of me, like a pregnant woman’s water breaking.

“Wynter? Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

It’s not just that he lied, repeatedly and across a span of months, it’s
that I believed him. Long past the point where I should have started questioning. I was willfully ignorant. I was stupid.

I remember reading a few years ago about a woman in Malibu who solved her sticky divorce situation by pumping her husband and his girlfriend full of .38 slugs as they slept. I’ve always wondered what led her to the moment of decision. What was the last straw, the final humiliation? Or was it just an impulse?
Ya know what, Jack? I’m not going to put up with your bullshit one more minute.
And out the door with her Saturday-night special.

I’m especially curious at this moment because, while my own intent becomes instantly clear, I don’t recall having given the matter any previous thought. No internal debate, no dividing a piece of paper into two columns labeled “Pros” and “Cons.” It doesn’t feel as if there’s any other recourse open to me. When you’re forced to fight, you use whatever weapons come to hand.

I tell Elizabeth that I’ve received papers from David’s attorney, and she asks if I’m coming back to L.A.

“I hadn’t planned to. Is that a problem?”

“It makes things slightly more complicated, but we can work around it. What is it you like so much up there?”

“My best friend lives here. And my mother doesn’t.”

This is the first time I’ve heard her laugh outright. “I thought maybe it was the weather.”

I must be starting to think like a native Northwesterner, because it irritates me the way people are always ragging on about our weather. When I don’t respond, she becomes all business again.

“All right, Wynter, here’s what I want you to do. Read over the papers, sign them where it’s indicated. It’s pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions, call me. If I’m not here, Charlene can help you. Make photocopies of everything and start a file for yourself. Then overnight the originals to me and I’ll send you a response form to fill out. And just remember, the sooner you get things back to me, the sooner I can—”

“How long could the whole process take? Worst-case scenario.”

“Everything depends on how cooperative your husband and his lawyer want to be. My hope is that we can put it to bed by this time next year, but it could take two or three years. Longer if we have to go to trial.”

“Elizabeth, I want to drag this thing out as long as we possibly can.”

She barely hesitates. “You know, I think we can have it over fairly quickly, and still mop up the floor with him—financially speaking. But the longer it takes, the less money there will be for you as well as for him.”

“Its not about the money. I want him to understand very clearly what it’s going to take to marry her. I want him to have a good, long time to decide if she was worth it.”

“There’s a saying, Wynter: ‘She who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for her victim and one for herself.’ “

“I’m willing to accept that possibility.”

“This isn’t the way I usually work.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you up front. I’d like to work with you, and I’d rather give the money to you than to someone else. But if you don’t want to handle it, I’ll respect your decision.”

An audible sigh. “Very well. But there are limits to what I can do.”

I was so preoccupied in rehashing my conversation with Elizabeth when I left for work last night that I forgot to take my pillowcase full of dirty clothes to work with me, so now I have to visit Launderland in the afternoon. Kids running around like it’s a big, sudsy theme park, screaming, slopping Cokes on the floor. Mothers deep into paperback romance novels or balancing the checkbook or sketching their next tattoo.

And Mac, bent over his notebook, oblivious to the pandemonium in progress all around him.

I divide my clothes into three piles, carefully measure detergent, and feed in my quarters. Then I flop down in the orange molded plastic chair next to him.

He immediately closes his notebook.

“Nuclear secrets?”

“Just stuff.”

My face heats up. Maybe he has no interest whatsoever in conversation with me. What if I’m presuming too much? We had dinner once, spent an afternoon on the water. What does that mean?

I pull out my copy of Mark Twain’s
Letters from the Earth.

“Great book,” he says.

“You’ve read it?” I don’t mean to sound astonished.

He laughs. “Yeah. Right after I finished
Vampire Lesbian Cheerleaders.”

“I didn’t mean …” My voice sounds stiffer than cardboard. I open the book, shuffle past the introduction to the first page, where God sits on his throne, thinking.

“I’ve never been to California,” he says. “What’s it like?”

I look at him, first from the corner of my eye, then straight on. “It’s not like anyplace else.”

“No place is like anyplace else,” he says. “Even the most boring, dusty hole in the middle of the prairie is different from all the other boring, dusty holes.”

I close the book. “It’s big. A lot of it I’ve never seen.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Mostly L.A. The central coast. The High Sierra.”

He turns a little bit in his chair. “Actually, I’ve been in southern California once, the L.A. airport. It looked pretty brown. What’s the central coast like?”

I settle down, letting the chair cup my body. Memory kicks in. “It smells so good, the fog, the eucalyptus. The hills are golden all summer, green in the winter, when it rains. That’s where William Randolph Hearst built his castle …” I look at the book in my lap. “You’ll probably go there sometime. Everyone goes to California eventually.”

“Mostly San Francisco and L.A.”

“And that’s a good thing. Keeps them away from my spot.”

“Where’s your spot?”

“Pismo Beach.”

“What’s there?”

“Dunes. Huge sand dunes. My father used to tell me how Cecil B. DeMille had thousands of workers build an Egyptian city there for the 1923 version of
The Ten Commandments.
Hundred-foot walls, even a boulevard lined with statues of sphinxes and pharoahs. Then, after they finished filming, they just left it there, and now the whole thing’s buried somewhere under the sand. I always used to think I’d be walking along the ridge someday and I’d drop down and disappear into another world.”

“Like standing on top of the ocean,” he says softly.

He gets to his feet and starts yanking laundry out of a washer, blue jeans, flannel shirts, and dark socks in with the towels and white clothes. Typical guy. Throwing it into the nearest dryer without turning around, he says, “No, I don’t care if my underwear’s gray or if the towels get lint on my socks.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You didn’t have to.”

I open my book again.

When the dryers stop, he hauls his stuff out, jams it into a green army duffel, and watches with obvious amusement while I fold everything and pack it carefully in the pillowcase. I turn to say good-bye, but he says, “You want a ride? I’ll try not to emit too many fluorocarbons between here and your place.”

“Hydrocarbons.”

He throws the duffel into the truck bed, my bag into the front seat. After two false starts, the truck grumbles to life, and we roll heavily down Queen in the afternoon gloom, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the radio.

He turns up the volume. My breath makes a little circle of fog on the window. It reminds me of some movie where they hold a mirror in front of a guy’s mouth to see if he’s still alive. I guess I pass the test. Mac’s talking to me.

“Sorry, I zoned out.”

“Coming to Bailey’s tonight?”

“I’m kind of tired.”

“Is that a no?”

When he turns on Fourth, a string of blinking lights draws my eye. “I can’t believe they still have their Christmas lights up.”

He follows my gaze. “Some people have a hard time letting go of things.”

I fold my arms. “Pure laziness.”

“Sometimes it’s one and the same.”

We pull up in front of the gray Victorian. He puts it in park, but doesn’t turn the engine off.

“Been inside that place yet?” he asks.

“It’s all locked up. I’m sure they don’t want anybody wandering around—”

He laughs. “Somebody did a great job of socializing you.”

My left hand tightens around the pillowcase while my right fumbles for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Wyn …” His eyes change color constantly, like the ocean on a cloudy day. Right now the pale irises are amber-flecked. “Listen, I know things are kind of weird for you …” Fingers drum the gearshift knob. “If you need a friend, I’m around.”