Trouble (9 page)

I laughed.

“I heard that,” Anthony called from his study.

“You’re not denying it, Daddy,” Wendy called back.

“I deny it!” Anthony said.

“Anyway,” said Wendy, “I think it’s lame for people to stay together just for the kids.”

“You do?” I said.

“Parents have needs. Kids shouldn’t run the universe.”

I shook my head. “Where did you get this?”

“My own independent thought.”

I burst out laughing. She looked hurt. I stopped laughing and said, “Wendy, you’re allowed to be upset about this. You’re not required to be mature and accepting. You can get mad at me and tell me I’m a selfish bitch, if you want to. I can take it, I promise.”

“Well, thanks,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m just saying, I think it’s probably for the best that you and Daddy are splitting up, Mom. I think it will benefit you both to be independent of each other if the marriage isn’t really working for you.”

“She was a sage in her past life,” Anthony called.

“Shut up, Daddy,” said Wendy, looking pleased.

“With a Fu Manchu beard and yellow teeth,” he added.

“Shut up, Daddy,” Wendy said again. “Anyway, Ariel’s parents got divorced three years ago, and she says they’re both much happier, and she and her little brother are, too. It means everyone is nicer to them and they get more stuff. Dad, can we get cable after Mom moves out? I’ll bother you so much less if we get it. Think about it.”

I heard Anthony laughing. Now that we were coming apart, Anthony and Wendy were suddenly bantering like one of those 1970s TV families I’d grown up envying. All it took to turn us into Sonny and Cher and Chastity was for me to decide to leave.

Wendy picked up her glass of juice. “Maybe you should go call Raquel, Mom. I want to know the story from her point of view, so I can tell Ariel tomorrow.”

“You can’t gossip about Raquel. This is private. Anyway, you’re too young to know about this, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” said Wendy. “But—”

“Right,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you a thing. But I am going to go and call her now. I’ve been planning to call her all day.”

I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She accepted this without flinching, which under any other circumstances might have made me wonder whether she had been taken over by an alien. I got up and went into Anthony’s and my bedroom and closed the door. I sat on the bed, fished my cell phone out of my bag, and punched in the speed-dial number for Raquel’s cell phone.

“Jo,” she said in my ear before the phone even rang. Her low, husky, very slightly Spanish-accented voice was loud in my ear. “I was about to call you.”

“Wendy just told me she read something about you on the Internet gossip—”

“Yeah,” she said. “Goddamn it. They were lying in wait. He tipped them off, the little bastard.”

“Who did?” I slid my legs under the covers. With one hand, I arranged all the pillows behind me and leaned against them.

“Jimmy Black,” she said. “He wanted to get away from that girl. He told me he hates her, and he’s freaked-out about the kid. I see it all now. He used me. Now he gets off scot-free, gets rid of both of us, and she’s up shit creek and I’m collateral damage.”

“Raq,” I said, “so what? You slept with a guy half your age. That’s good, if anything, right? I mean, all publicity is good publicity, first of all, and second, it means you’re hot.”

“It means I’m an evil bitch stealing a father away from a pregnant woman,” she said. “He’s a spineless asshole who didn’t have the nerve to just end it with her; he had to drag me down with him. And now I’m the one who’s painted with the tarred brush. This country is full of puritans, and nothing makes them more puritanical than pregnancy, and nothing makes them more vengeful than a home wrecker. ‘Home wrecker’—that’s what they’re calling me! In addition to some other horrible things. All publicity is not good publicity. Some publicity can screw up your entire life forever. I’m being burned at the stake, metaphorically. Sorry, do I sound overdramatic? Sorry. I know. It sounds absurd.”

“It’ll blow over in five minutes, won’t it?”

“No,” she said. “My name has hardly been in the news much lately, so now this is all they’ll think about when they think about me, if they do. So this is basically the end of the world for me. In a manner of speaking. I’m at the airport right now. My flight boards in about ten minutes. Anyway, I was going to call you just now to beg you to come down to meet me.”

My cell phone was getting hot against my ear. I always wondered whether it was cooking my brains when it did that. “Meet you where?”

“I’m going down to Mexico City for a while. I speak the language and it’s a quick flight, but it’s far away from all this. My publicist, which is a word that I still can’t say with a straight face, told me to get out of town and say nothing and that she’ll handle the press. I said, okay, whatever, so I’m getting on this plane and leaving. I got to the airport without being followed.”

“I just can’t believe this is really all that bad,” I said.

“I’m going to stay in the Centro in a cheap backpackers’ hotel. It’s nothing fancy, to put it mildly, but no one will look for me there, and it’s where I used to stay in the old days, so it has good memories, and I really need the good memories right now. And Josie, I also really need you to come down and hold my hand and cheer me up and have fun with me. I’m begging you. Please? When have I ever begged you for anything before?”

“You haven’t,” I said. “And I will seriously think about coming. I promise. But I know you’ll be all right. Something like this can’t hurt you. Think how brilliant your new album is. It’ll speak for itself. That’s all that matters. By tomorrow, everyone will have moved on to the next scandal.”

“You’re speaking logically,” she said. “And I’m sure you have a point. It’s just that I’m freaking out. I’m a complete irrational mess. So you’re on vacation now, right?”

“Right,” I said, thinking fast. Raquel was one of the few people in the world I would drop everything for, do anything for, anytime. Could I go? I wondered.

“So come down! Come the day after Christmas. I can get you a ticket, my treat. You can have your own room, also my treat, but I really want you to stay in my room; there’re two beds and it’s more fun that way. Don’t you need a trip somewhere warm right now?”

“Mexico City is not warm right now.”

“Warmer than New York!”

“Actually,” I said, “I have some news for you, too.”

“What?”

“I’m leaving Anthony,” I said. “We’re separating. I was planning to spend my vacation finding a place to live. We just decided tonight; we just told Wendy.”

“Holy shit,” said Raquel. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, sort of. I guess. I will be.”

“You sure?”

“I have to admit that I’m relieved,” I said, “and, yes, a little sad, but also excited.”

“Well then,” said Raquel, “I have to admit that I’m not all that surprised.”

“Really? Indrani was.”

“Indrani would be.”

“I’m kind of upset with her, Raq. She was a little hard on me.”

“She would be. She takes everything very personally. Never mind that your whole life is in upheaval. I’m sure she made it all about herself, right? I love the girl, but she is a bit of a narcissist.”

This was funny, actually, coming from Raquel, who was amazingly self-involved, albeit charmingly, self-deprecatingly so, but I chose not to point this out. Anyway, I was happy to hear Raquel bad-mouth Indrani, because for the first time, I agreed with her. Now that Indrani had judged me, I was free to judge her right back. The floodgates were open. She could be a bit of a narcissist, come to think of it.

“She told me she thought I was pathetic,” I said.

“Please,” said Raquel. “I think you know exactly what you need; you’ve always been that way. But I think you need to get away. Come down! We’ll drink tequila and go dancing and breathe pollution. And eat chorizo tacos. They’re so good, you’ll die; they’re like crack. Come down, Jo, please? We’ll be Thelmita and Luisa!”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“That means no. Don’t say no. Come on, Luisa!”

“I get to be Thelmita,” I said.

“No way. I’m shorter than you. You’re the tall sexy one; I’m the short crazy one.”

“Thelma was the
tall
crazy one. Anyway, they were both sexy. Whatever; the point is, I can’t come down; I need to do battle with Manhattan real estate.”

“Shit, they’re calling my flight. I’m going to call you again tomorrow night, and you’ll tell me what time your flight lands on December twenty-sixth and I’ll tell you how to get to the Hotel Isabel.
¿Comprendes, chica?
It’s on me, my treat. Wish me a safe flight. I love you, Jo. You’re gonna be okay, I promise.” She made kissing noises into the receiver, and then the line went dead.

I sat alone in the darkened bedroom for a while, thinking. The apartment had gone quiet again. Anthony had sunk back into his little fiefdom; no doubt Wendy was listening to her CD player on headphones and figuring out what to wear to the birthday party she had been invited to the following night. I had nothing to do. I figured I could go into the kitchen and clean up the remnants of dinner, then take a shower, then check on Wendy and make sure she wasn’t on her laptop, being lured to a Burger King by a predatory middle-aged man posing as Zac Efron, and then I could come back to bed and read
The New Yorker
until I fell asleep. I was so sick of
The New Yorker
, I couldn’t bear it. I had read just about every issue for the past twenty years, and for a long time now, I had suspected that they recycled their articles and stories and cartoons in five-year loops; the poems were all just rearranged jumbles of the same words over and over:
land, sky, light, death, love, cabin, hand, deer, cedar, lake, face, dark, kitchen table, skin, you
. It made me want to try my hand at a
New Yorker
poem myself. How hard could it be?

My fight with Indrani still rankled; my stomach was in knots from everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, but somehow this unexpected schism with my old, close friend was foremost in my tangle of thoughts. I looked over at the phone, tempted to call her. I was surprised, in fact, that she hadn’t called me to apologize and ask how I was doing. That she hadn’t implied that she felt justified in acting the way she had, which was unforgivable. An apology, now, would have made everything better; merely to feel understood, that she had listened to me, would have made all the difference.

I lay back against the pillows and looked up at the dim ceiling and ran my hands over my body—hips, breasts, waist, thighs, neck, face—then crossed my arms over my chest and closed my eyes and lay there like a dead person. I would be dead soon enough. But I felt sparks of light shooting through my veins, electric sparks, hot white light that meant I needed to do exactly what I had just set in motion. I knew that of course I would be hit soon enough by terrible pain and sadness about the end of my marriage, but right then I felt nothing but curiosity about what would happen next. It had been so simple, really, to extricate myself from my cage. Indrani had been right about one thing: Wendy would suffer because of our split. But I would do everything I could to help her through it. Including, I decided, getting cable so she could watch Raquel’s erstwhile boyfriend’s show and talk about it with all her friends.

Thank God for Raquel.

It was Friday night. Christmas was on Tuesday. If I left Wednesday morning, I thought, I’d have time to set things in motion with Realtors that weekend.

Of course I couldn’t go to Mexico. What was I thinking? I had to take care of Wendy. I had to deal with my impending move.

I got out of bed and went to the little desk in the corner where my computer was. As it booted up, I stuck my head out of my bedroom door. “Wendy,” I called to her closed bedroom door.

Her door opened. “Yeah?”

“What was that Web site called?”

“Mina Boriqua dot com,” she said. “Mina with an
i
and Boriqua, like Puerto Rican Day Parade signs. Are you going on? Can I look?”

I hesitated. “You already looked at it today.”

“But she might have added new stuff since then.”

“All right,” I said.

I sat at my desk; she stood looking over my shoulder, breathing into my ear. I typed in the address and hit the return key, and there it was, a picture of Raquel looking uncharacteristically haggard, her dark red hair up in a messy ponytail, her skin white and parchmentlike in the harsh California sun and dry air.
HAS SHE SKIPPED TOWN?
said the headline.

“She always does that,” said Wendy. “Puts up really ugly pictures of stars she’s mad at and then makes fun of them. She is so, so mean. But sometimes really funny, and she makes fun of herself just as much.”

“How does she know Raquel left?” I said. “I talked to her just now and she said no one saw her leave.”

“Mina has spies everywhere,” said Wendy. “So where did she go?”

“I’m not telling,” I said. “Come on, Mom!”

“If I tell you, you’ll tell Ariel,” I said. “Then Ariel will send this Mina Boriqua person an E-mail, tipping her off, and then the whole world will know.”

“I promise. She would never do that.”

“I was a thirteen-year-old girl once, don’t forget, Wendy, hard as it may be to believe. It would be too much of a burden for you and Ariel to keep such juicy information to yourselves. And Raquel doesn’t want anyone but me to know.” I paused, then added skeptically, “She also wants me to meet her there.”

“You have to go!” Wendy said immediately.

“I can’t go, Wendy.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, I have to find an apartment. For another, I want to spend time with you while we adjust to this whole idea of the separation.”

“I don’t need you to do that,” she said. “Really, I’m totally okay about this. Parents split up. It happens to everyone. It’s, like, part of life. Anyway, you’re not really going anywhere. I know you. You’ll be over here all the time to keep an eye on me because you don’t think Daddy will be strict enough. It’ll be like you never even moved out.”