Trouble (8 page)

He watched me, half-smiling skeptically, waiting for me to go on. His book lay on the table, ignored.

“And then we could start to talk about the reasons why we’ve both shut down over the past ten or so years. You know, clean up the marital ecosystem. Try to get everyone thinking more collectively, with more foresight.”

He reached across the table to take my hand. “Optimist,” he said with a small smile.

“You know, fatalism isn’t the answer to everything,” I said. I paused, remembering. “Oh God, I had a horrible fight with Indrani today.”

“About what?” he said.

Just in time, I realized that the subject of my fight with Indrani wasn’t necessarily germane or appropriate to reveal to Anthony just now. “You know I love her,” I said. “But she can be a little judgmental and myopic sometimes.”

We were still holding hands, but the meaning had gone out of the contact, and now our hands were inert and disconnected in each other’s grasp. I pulled mine away and picked up my wineglass.

“Sometimes,” Anthony said, his eyebrows raised.

“Well,” I said, “no one’s perfect.”

“Except for you,” he said.

“Sure,” I replied.

“You are,” he said. “You’re perfect. I have never had the slightest complaint about you.”

I laughed bitterly. “Ecch, shut up. That’s of no use to me at all. You say that, but you won’t do one goddamned thing to help me stay with you. That’s manipulative and cruel.”

He inhaled sharply through his nose. His nostrils flared a little; his eyes bulged. He blinked.

“Are you crying?” I asked him.

Instead of answering, he took my hand again and led me into our bedroom, where he stripped off my pajamas. I helped him off with his clothes, and then we lay in our bed naked together and held each other. His body still felt so good against mine.

“I forgot about this,” he said. “You feel so good.”

He put his face in my neck and breathed.

“You do, too,” I said. I kissed his head, the smooth part high on his forehead where he was losing his hair. It smelled of him.

 
nthony and I were wearing our pajamas and robes, sitting in the living room with glasses of wine, by the time Wendy got home at 9:27. Her curfew was nine o’clock, but we were prepared to overlook her lateness, given the news we were about to spring on her.

“Hello, Wendy,” I called when I heard her in the entryway. “We’re in here.”

She took her time taking off her coat, hanging it in the closet, going into the kitchen, going to her room to leave her backpack. Anthony and I waited for her, occasionally exchanging a look but not speaking. I heard her cooing to her hamster, Melvin, as she fed him.

I could smell the musk of sex wafting up from my pajama shirt, the smell of Anthony’s skin and semen, and my own smells. It had been a short and emotional fuck just now, possibly, but not necessarily, our last. Immediately afterward, he had sat up. “Well,” he had said, “I think we needed that.”

Wendy sidled into the living room, not looking at either of us, holding a glass of cranberry juice. “Hey,” she said, perching as far as she could get from me on the far end of the couch, tucking a leg under her, putting her juice down on the table next to the couch. She looked like a stork poised for flight, bony and awkward, contained. She was formidably pretty. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold night air and what had, no doubt, been a mad dash to get home as close to her curfew as possible. Her shiny black hair, which she wore long and layered, so she looked, unfortunately and totally misleadingly, like an Asian call girl, was as perfectly in place as ever. She wore a pair of narrow-legged jeans and a rather elegant rose-pink cardigan sweater with appliquéd sequins that I hadn’t seen before; where had she gotten it? It made her tiny breasts look rounded and bigger, or maybe they had grown recently when I wasn’t looking.

“How was Indrani’s, Mom?” she asked.

Wendy worshipped Indrani’s taste in clothes and furniture, her apartment, her blondeness, her composure and sweetness. She allowed Indrani to take her shopping; maybe Indrani had bought her that sweater. I had never been jealous at all of Indrani’s sway over my daughter. In fact, I had bestowed on her the unofficial title of godmother and written into my will her official legal guardianship of Wendy if Anthony and I were both killed in a freak bus accident. But now, I felt a new, unaccustomed sharpness when Wendy said her name.

“She was hungover and tired,” I said disloyally. “I didn’t stay long.”

Wendy sniffed and rubbed her nose. “Was the party fun?”

“It was okay,” I said. “How was it at Ariel’s?”

“Okay. We sang karaoke with this new program her mom got her. Mostly Shakira and Christina Aguilera, and also some Rihanna songs. The only problem is that Ariel seriously thinks Ashley Tisdale is, like, really talented and she always wants to do
High School Musical
stuff. Anyway, we recorded me and I sounded really good.”

Wendy planned to go to the High School of Music and Art to study acting and singing in hopes, of course, of becoming a star as soon as possible, which also explained her interest in UCLA. She had an unfortunate passion, currently, for what Anthony called “tuneless ghetto singing,” the highly ornamented, emotionally overwrought style called “melisma,” which allowed today’s kids to drive today’s parents up the same wall their own parents—that is, mine—had been driven up by the likes of Blondie, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. Lately, Wendy had been adopting the nasal, loud, vibrato-y, equally emotionally overwrought Broadway-musical style, which was, in my opinion, worse than melisma, whereas Anthony thought nothing was worse than melisma. In any case, Wendy affected a blithe, serene indifference to her parents’ unspoken but barely hidden loathing of the activity she felt most passionately about.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” I said.

“Sorry I was late! I lost track of time. I practically ran the whole way home.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “There’s something serious your dad and I need to discuss with you.”

Her karaoke-inspired animation faded and her face went blank and closed off. “What is it?” she asked cautiously.

“Dad and I have been having a lot of problems in recent years,” I said.

“I haven’t noticed anything,” said Wendy too quickly.

“I’m so sorry that this is coming out of the blue for you,” I said. “But your father and I don’t feel that this marriage is working for either one of us anymore, and we agree that these are issues that can’t be resolved.”

“So you’re getting divorced?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “We’re separating for now. But we want you to know that this has nothing to do with you at all. We both love you so much. This is totally and completely between Dad and me; it’s our failure.”

She was silent for a moment, watching me expressionlessly, as if she was waiting for me to say more. I was ready for tears, a tantrum, something dramatic and out of character. I would have welcomed a display of emotion from her, I realized. It would have been a relief.

“Um, Mom?” “Yeah.”

“You don’t have to do the whole shrink thing. I know it’s not my fault. How could it be? It’s your marriage, and I’m just a kid.”

I smiled at her. “Maybe it’s obvious to you, but I really wanted you to know that.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I guess I sort of figured that.”

“You never fail to impress me,” I said.

“So where am I going to live? Can I stay here? Are you moving out, or is Dad? I think I want to stay here.”

“Dad is staying here,” I said. “I’ll move somewhere nearby for now. If you want to stay here with Dad, that is absolutely your decision and fine with both of us.”

“Are you sure, Dad?” she asked Anthony.

“Of course!” said Anthony, but I could tell he was slightly faking his jovial delight at the thought of single-handedly having to keep a close, first-line-of-defense monitoring parental eye on an adolescent girl. Still, it might do him good to have to try, and meanwhile, although I didn’t necessarily want to bring this up just then, I already knew I would be doing a lot of cell-phone mothering during the day; Wendy could get herself to school just fine, but maybe, especially at the beginning, I would come home most evenings, cook dinner, and be there for anything she needed. Then we would see how to separate our lives in the best way for her. We’d play it by ear, as a family, until she went to college.

“For now, then, that’s what we’ll do,” I said. “You can always change your mind and come live with me, Wendy.”

“Okay,” she said formally. “Thanks, Mom.”

“And Dad and I will always be friends,” I added.

“I figured,” she said. “You never even, like, fight or anything.”

“Sometimes that can be as much of an indication of trouble as anything,” I said.

A strange silence fell among the three of us. We all sat there, looking and feeling a little forlorn. For nearly thirteen years, since Wendy had come home with us from China, we had been a disconnected, odd family unit, but we were all we had, and now I was busting us up. It would be awkward at first for my husband and daughter, just the two of them there, without me.

With some effort, I forced myself to wait for one of them to break the silence, unwilling to be the workhorse for another minute. Let Anthony say something sensitive and loving to his daughter, who had just received what any normal kid would consider rather shattering, life-changing, possibly traumatic news. Wendy rarely revealed much of anything, but of course that didn’t mean she had no feelings; it just indicated a deeply reserved nature that might hide latent or delayed reactions to things that would later come around and bite her in the ass in the form of adult-onset mental disorders of varying degrees of severity, from garden-variety neuroses to full-blown suicidal depression. Or maybe, I thought, Wendy sensed my probing motherly and psychological inquiries into her personality and withdrew all evidence from my appropriating, hypothesizing, curious grasp, and who could blame her? Having a shrink for a mother was, no doubt, a great motivator for trying to fly under the radar. When she got her first period, she had hidden all traces of it from me; I had learned she was menstruating when her friend Ariel had referred casually to the fact that the two of them always got their periods on the same day.

Anthony rested his ankle on his knee and waggled his suspended foot. He was dying to get back to his book now that the domestic crisis had hit and we’d all survived, but he knew he had to put in at least another ten minutes with us before he could get away without appearing cold-blooded.

“So guess what,” Wendy said, hunching her skinny shoulders and hugging herself. “I heard this stuff today about Raquel.”

“What stuff?” I asked.

“Okay, like, so Ariel’s mother lets her go on all those sites, so I was just watching over her shoulder. I didn’t go on them myself.”

Wendy was not permitted to read gossip Web logs.

“And?” I said, my expression conveying that I just wanted to know the story about Raquel; Wendy wasn’t going to get in trouble, at least not this time.

“So today there was this story everywhere. Mina Boriqua was the worst. She’s this big fat dyke with blue hair who lives in L.A. and does nothing all day but write gossip on her blog. Ariel and I usually think she’s funny, but this was really, really mean and awful.”

“‘Dyke’?” I said pointedly.

“Whatever, lesbian,” she said. “Anyway, she hates most rock-star girls except for Madonna, Amy Winehouse, and Posh Spice, and most of the Latina ones because she’s Puerto Rican. So you would think she would like Raquel, because she’s Mexican, right? But today she called her ‘a horny senior citizen on the prowl’ and ‘a cougar gone wild’ and drew wrinkles on the face of her photo and droopy boobs on her front. She draws on people’s pictures. She’s such a three-year-old.”

Anthony snorted gently.

“Dad,” said Wendy patiently, “a cougar means a sexy older woman. She didn’t literally mean a large wildcat.”

“I know what
cougar
means,” said Anthony. “I was just envisioning Raquel’s reaction to being called ‘a horny senior citizen.’”

“Oh God,” I said. “That’ll mean five more Botox appointments and a week at a spa on a detox fast, with three colonics and five hours of yoga a day.”

Anthony shook his head. “What did she do to deserve this treatment?” he asked.

“She supposedly had an affair with Jimmy Black,” said Wendy.

“Well,” said Anthony dryly. “Serves her right, then.”

“The actor?” Wendy said with patient condescention. “From
Endless Pool?
That new show on HBO? That
very popular and famous
new show on HBO, which I’m not allowed to watch but all of my friends get to?”

We did not have cable in our family, a sore topic for Wendy.

“He’s a big TV star,” I said. “Indrani was telling me earlier.”

“A big TV star with a pregnant girlfriend!” said Wendy. “The paparazzi caught Raquel coming out of the Four Seasons with him at four in the morning! He’s, like, twenty-three, and she’s …” She looked at me. “Your age,” she said.

“A senior citizen,” I said.

Wendy said sheepishly, “Okay, not
that
old. But a lot older than he is.”

“Maybe they were just sitting in the hotel bar, having a meeting,” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Wendy. “It said Raquel can’t be reached for comment. Anyway, his girlfriend is about to have a baby.”

“I believe I’ll get back to work now,” said Anthony.

He got up and left the room. We heard him in his little study off the kitchen, giving a little groan of relief as he sank into his armchair. Wendy giggled softly. I didn’t make a move to get up, and neither did she. We sat at either end of the couch, looking at each other.

“I hope you’re going to be okay, Mom,” said Wendy.

“This won’t be easy for any of us,” I said. “But just so you know, I’ll still be around. You might wish I would be around less, but that’s okay; that’s better than not enough.”

She hesitated, seeming to be about to say something joking and deflecting, and then she said, “I’m glad. At least at first.”

“It’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this. Daddy and I both love you so much.”

She looked away, smiling slyly. “Daddy loves reading so much.”