Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (14 page)

“Did I lock my door?” she said from the passenger seat of my car, her mouth full of Pop-Tart. “Do you remember me locking my door?”

“Would it be too much trouble to ask you to drop by the Newberry Library while you're in Chicago?”

“Take La Cienega. The 405 is going to be shit.”

“I just need you to do a quick search through some of Ben Hecht's papers.”

“Wait, what?”

“Ben Hecht. He was a screenwriter. He did
His Girl Friday
, a bunch of other things. You like
His Girl Friday
, right?”

“Never saw it.”

“Of course you have. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell? Fucking Howard Hawks!”

“Jesus, Paul, I told you not to take the 405. Look at this mess. My flight is in forty minutes!”

“Didn't we rent
His Girl Friday
that night you made Greek salad? Because when I think about that line of Cary Grant's, something like, ‘Put Hitler on the funny pages,' it has this very strong association with feta and sun-dried tomatoes, so it had to have been that night. You should make Greek salad more often.”

“We watched
Bringing Up Baby
that night.”

“Are you sure? I'm pretty sure you're extremely wrong about that.”

“Take this exit here. We can take Sepulveda down.”

“As a media scholar, you really should know
His Girl Friday
. I mean, it's a movie about a newspaper. Media!”

“If I miss this flight, I'm going to slap the shit out of you.”

She did not miss the flight and so did not slap the shit out of me. The traffic on Sepulveda moved much faster—so fast, in fact, that I didn't have sufficient time to fully explain the situation I was in. By the time I was driving into the departures loop at LAX, she still hadn't admitted to seeing
His Girl Friday
, and so I still had not had a chance to explain things properly. I pulled up to a free patch of curb, got out, and helped her get her suitcase from the trunk. The wind was doing nice underwatery things to the strands of hair that had freed themselves from her bun, and she had a crumb stuck to her upper lip like a beauty mark.

“Okay, I'll see you in a couple days,” she said.

And I blurted out: “My sister wrote a book accusing our father of being the Black Dahlia murderer and now I have to set the record straight.”

She squinted at me, brushed some hair from her face, and the crumb fell away. Her mouth started to form a word, but then stopped. She must have thought of another word to say instead, because her mouth changed shape again, but then stopped again. Finally she looked at her watch. “I have to . . . um.” She pulled the telescoping handle of her rolly suitcase. “I'll call you when I get in?”

And she did. I, however, was in the attic, thumbing through old term papers, still trying to find the young bespectacled brunette student who wrote the nice review of me on the Internet, and I did
not hear the phone ring. I later saw that there was a message on the machine and hit play: “Paul. It's Julia. I'm in Chicago, in my hotel. The flight was nice. Sat next to this lovely man from Oregon who is a viticulturist. I'm just sitting on my bed now, going over my paper. I'm a little nervous about it, but I'm not sure if it's wise to make too many last-minute changes. Ummmmmm. I know you've been distant lately. I haven't really known what to do, if you're pulling away or what. I totally understand that it can be hard to let people in. I mean we've both been hurt. God, that's trite. Sorry. I'm just not sure I entirely understand what it was you were trying to say to me at the airport, but I just want to say that I appreciate your attempt to let me in. I know there's been some stuff going on with your sister, and I really want to know about it. And I want you to know that you can talk to me about it. Anyway. This message is getting long. Would you mind going by my place and just checking that I locked the front door?”

She was right, of course. I had to communicate with her about this. After all, as an expert in media law, she was a valuable resource if I were to make a case for libel and defamation against my sister and, well,
you
.

So when she got back into town, we sat down at my kitchen table and I laid it all down on the Formica: my sister's manuscript beside the pages of notes I'd taken at the library. Edie's pile of papers was taller than mine: I still had a lot of work to do. I explained the basic outline of my sister's argument, keeping my eyes on the table as I did so, the patterns that look like one of Chris's Magic Eye posters that he claims contain images I'm certain are not there. In my periphery Julia sorted through all that paper, and suddenly I felt like one of my students,
coming to office hours, asking for help with a term paper, nervously talking and watching the teacher's face and seeing a pitying look, a look that says, You have a lot more work to do.

“Well,” she said, setting down Xeroxes I'd made of some Underwood and Fowler articles. I looked up, and she looked away, thoughtfully interrogated the earthquake cracks in the drywall. She sighed, touched her lips. “Well.”

Then she looked at me, pushed a smile to the surface. “I'm glad you could share this with me. I've—” She stood up, walked over to the stove. “I've been worried about you. This definitely . . . well.”

Chris walked into the kitchen—with the speed of a water snake but the gait of a water buffalo—went straight to the fridge and started rooting around.

Julia filled the teakettle and put it over heat. “When was the last time you saw Edie? I mean, have you spoken with her about this?”

“I've been busy,” I said. “And she's been—well, this doctor of hers seems to be keeping her under close watch.”

Chris, poking his head, Whac-a-Mole-style, over the fridge door, said, “Eddie?”

“Edie,” Julia said to him, as if to thwack him back down. “Your aunt. Or stepaunt, foster aunt—whatever.”

“Eddie,” I corrected her. “Chris calls her Eddie.” I'd forgotten about Chris's little date with Edie. Apparently sometime last year, not long after she'd come back to L.A. but before she'd recovered her memories, she came to my house. I was teaching an evening class at COLA, but Chris answered the door. She smelled the cookie dough he'd been making—which he never bakes into actual cookies, just
mixes and snacks on raw—and talked her way inside. By the time I got home, she was gone, but Chris told me that they'd spent the evening watching his Black Sabbath concert video and that she'd told him all about seeing them live in the seventies. God knows what else she told him, about our family, about me, but somewhere in their conversation he started calling her Eddie, and she apparently approved, even though when I'd called her that as kids she'd shown her approval with a fierce purple nurple.

Chris now closed the fridge with enough force to rustle the glass-bottled condiments and salad dressings in the door-shelves. “What's going on with her? She's been leaving messages on the machine.”

“She has?” Julia asked me. Her teakettle was starting to whistle.

“Mostly nonsense,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Chris said, then charged out of the room.

Julia's teakettle was now screaming. She took it off the heat and said, “Sorry. A little too apt.”

“I should go talk to him,” I said. I'd meant it to be a question, but I guess it didn't come out that way.

“I'll be here,” Julia said.

I went to Chris's room, tapped lightly on his door. From the other side, he said, “What,” which I took as permission to enter.

He was at his computer. When I sat down on his unmade bed, he angled the monitor away from me and kept his eyes on it while I thought about what to say. Here's what I finally came up with: “You know, your mother and I saw Ozzy Osbourne live once.”

Chris suddenly sat at attention, his posture straighter than I knew possible, as I was beginning to think he'd slouched himself into scoliosis.

“True,” I said. “He was great, too. The man's still got it.”

Chris crossed his arms, planted his elbows on his desk and leaned forward. “Mom hated metal.”

“I know,” I said. “We saw him at the airport.”

Chris clenched his jaw, but I could see a smile fighting its way through.

“I was hoping I wouldn't have to admit that part,” I said.

He laughed, a strange sound he was not used to making, half grunt.

When I got back to the kitchen, Julia was sitting at the table.

“That was quick,” she said. “Did you explain things to him?”

I sat down across from her. “Uh-huh.”

“Good,” she said. “Let's get down to business. You have a lot of work to do.”

She tucked some loose strands of hair back into her ponytail. I crossed my arms.

“Now. Since her claims have not been reviewed in court, you need to focus on the issue of defamation—not on disproving her case.”

“I don't understand—why?”

“Because you want this to be about procedure. She's making these claims without going through the proper legal channels. So it's—at least potentially—libel. If you turn this into an issue of evidence, you run the considerable risk that at least some of her accusations are correct.”

She sipped her tea—one of those therapeutic teas she keeps at my place that claims to relax you with herbal and fruity infusions. I don't have the patience for those things. This one was called Peach Passion, should have been called Peach Placebo. Whenever she steeps herself a cup of that stuff, I can't help but think of the Weird Sisters from
Macbeth
, brewing eye of newt and toe of frog to bring about the Thane
of Cawdor's doom, when in fact it was their suggestion of his fate that paradoxically sealed his fate. Those who argue that Macbeth's fate is ordained by magic misunderstand the play's basic epistemology and fail to understand the psychological complexity therein, something I inevitably have to explain to my English 2 students every semester. Julia offered me some tea and I politely declined. Unlike Julia, I prefer my substances to work unequivocally. When I need to relax I take a hundred milligrams of Trazodone and fall the fuck asleep. I suppose I shouldn't have been annoyed by Julia's use of all these New Agey products, chamomile and valerian—hey, you can put in your body whatever you like—but as a woman trained to work from evidence, she should have at least taken notice of that little footnote on the side of the box of tea:
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration
, and realized that she was just fooling herself into relaxation, and since she was my new council in all things legal and evidence-based, I was suddenly concerned that her tea choice revealed her preference for superstition over science.

“Which is why,” she was saying, “you should be couching your own argument in monetary terms.”

“Right,” I said.

“And,” sipping wool of bat and tongue of dog from her chipped mug, “it's great that you're doing some research here, but you really need to approach it in a more organized fashion. I mean, look at this. You have a page-long quote here, handwritten, but no indication of where it's from. A newspaper article? Which newspaper? What byline? What date? You need to be keeping track of things like this.”

I grabbed the piece of paper and read it over. It appeared to be
an excerpt from Will Fowler's memoir describing his editor James Richardson. I'd had to copy the passage by hand because I'd been able to find the book only in the Pepperdine library. COLA doesn't have an interlibrary loan deal worked out with them, so I couldn't check the book out, and the photocopier in the library required a pass-code I didn't have (since Pepperdine is a religious school, I tried guesstimating some Christian numerology and chapter numbers of famous Bible passages, but the machine was having none of it), so when I found Fowler's book in the stacks I had to settle into a grad student carrel and glean everything I could. (Judging from the other books piled in that carrel, I figured it had been reserved by either a lepidopterist—
Butterflies and Moths of the Jurassic Period
—or an engineering student specializing in modern weaponry—
Infrared Homing in Ballistic Artillery
—or perhaps some kind of interdisciplinary mash-up artist; images of battle-trained pterodactyls, lasers affixed to black leathery wings, fluttered through my mind.) So that particular scrap was, I admit, a bit disorganized, but that was not representative of the rest of my research.

“Here are some more,” Julia said. “Just uncited scraps. I mean, shit, Paulie. How many years have you been teaching students how to write research papers? You should know better. You need a clearer plan of attack.”

“I've been—intuiting my way, I suppose.”

“Ohhh,” she said, smiling, “you're such an MFA.”

This is pretty typical of her, the proud academic condescending to the creative writer. She is always finding ways to remind me that she has the real degree and I have a fine arts degree, that she wears the intellectual pants in this relationship. It is, naturally, her own insecurities
that motivate these little jibes: Having spent ten years getting her PhD, she feels humiliated that the only job she can get is as an adjunct at COLA, a place, she once said, where dreams go to die (apparently, for all she learned in PhD school, she didn't learn to avoid clichés), and so she must find ways to remind me that she's just slumming it here until something more suiting her pedigree comes along. But what really bothers me is that I take her cue and just follow along. For example, when we first met, she asked me what I had done my master's work in, and I said, “Uh, myself, I suppose. I just have an MFA.” She chuckled and that set the tone for all degree-talk in our relationship. We had been standing in the faculty copy room at COLA and I had caught her admiring one of my (admittedly) passive-aggressive stunts. In the faculty copy room, there is a bulletin board where teachers had begun posting effusive notes they had received from students, notes like
Dear Mr. Hewlitt, Thank you for a wonderful semester. I learned sooo much in your class and loved it! Your the best teacher evar!
followed by a name with a heart dotting an
i
. The bulletin board had begun filling up with these ridiculous things. I hadn't yet discovered
Grade-a-Prof.com
, and this was the first time I realized that everyone else's classes were filled with adoring children, while all the angry contrarians were shuffled into my sections. I had been fretting about the fact that I did not have any illiterate displays of obsequiousness to post on the board, worried that Dean Hockney would notice the conspicuous absence of any
Dear Mr. McWeeney
notes and not give me any classes for the next semester (as an adjunct, this is a constant fear), so I'd gone home and spent hours attempting some fawning forgeries. It was harder than I expected, however. Not the content of the notes—I am a writer, after all, and can
easily imagine my way into the mind of a student who would write such a note (probably someone with an absent parent, grasping around for the first father figure she can find, in this case her teacher)—but rather the handwriting: I could not make my hand form letters in a way that looked anything other than my own, so I knocked on Chris's door. “What?” he groaned from inside. I poked my head in, saw him hunched golem-like over his precious computer, and said, “I need you to write something for me. I need to borrow your handwriting.” He said, simply, infuriatingly, “No,” and “Close the door.” That sent me into a pacing and impotent rage in the hallway for a few minutes, but I then returned to my desk with a new approach, replacing sincerity with snark. I wrote a note that said,
Dear Mr. McWeeney: You are my one true son. Sincerely, God
, and I posted that on that bulletin board the next day. A few hours later, I was between classes and photocopying a chapter from Kant's
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
for my English 1 class when I saw a woman wearing a cardigan like a straightjacket, bent slightly at the hips, squinting through horn-rimmed glasses, to read my contribution to the faculty circle-jerk, and she laughed in a way that can only be described as hooting. She hooted. (She would turn out to be the only person to see the humor in my note. All my other colleagues misunderstood it to be a rather maniacal proclamation of faith and began treating me with the conversational kid gloves one wears when talking to the delusionally devout.) “Man,” Julia said that day in the copy room, “didn't know we had the lamb of fucking God in our midst.” I extended my hand for a shake. “Hi,” I said. “I'm the son of God.” We were the only ones in the copy room and enjoyed a few bantering minutes making fun of our colleagues' pretensions, their
desperate displays of approval. “Hey,” she said, “if you're seeking validation from students at
this
school, then your compass is broken. Look at me. My students hate me and I'm a wonderful teacher.” I nodded and laughed and agreed and made a mental note not to mention that I myself had been a student here nearly two decades earlier, an omission that remains a year later, which is now less about embarrassment at having attended COLA than it is about having been so embarrassed about it that I felt the need to conceal it, and now if I admit that the version of my life that I gave her is slightly inaccurate she will—I know from experience—completely miss the point of the admission (honesty) and focus entirely on what she will surely think this ultimately reveals (dishonesty), the classic female tactic of reframing an issue to focus on what is in the past (the lie) rather than what is in the hypothetical present (the truth), forgetting that honesty about dishonesty is still honesty, which is why I cannot now come clean to her about my errant youth and why I cannot show her this very document—despite the fact that she has been eager to help me with it and, in her condescendingly MFAish words, “workshop it,” before I send it off in the mail—as I now realize that it contains the sort of honesty about my life that she would surely be jealous of, and isn't it strange how significant others get so jealous of the projects we writers embark on. It happened to Brenda when I was working on
Rarer Monsters
—she was always wondering what the hell I was doing here in my office, pecking away on my IBM Wheelwriter 1000 when I could have been paying attention to her. Julia should be different, as she is not just fully knowledgeable of my project here but understands its importance and supports it, but even she has been giving little hints lately that she's starting to see this
stack of pages as the
other woman
: “You're still working on that?” she'll say, looking at the bags under my eyes, checking their heft and hue, the same way she might investigate my shirt collar for traces of lipstick.