Golden State: A Novel (12 page)

That night I leaned in close, feeling the buzz of Wiggins’s nervous energy. Amid the noise of the party I strained to hear bits and pieces of his raucous stories, in which my husband appeared at seventeen, skinny and out of context, downing a six-pack every night, “and no luck at all with women,” Wiggins claimed. He pulled me close, as if we, too, were the oldest of friends, and confided in my ear, “Clearly,
that
has changed.”

Wiggins seemed on the top of the world. At some point he corralled us both and said, “Don’t tell anyone, but last month I won
three point five in the lottery.” Tom thought he was fooling around, so to prove that it was real, Wiggins took us outside to see his car. It was an orange Avanti in pristine condition. “You remember how badly I always wanted one of these?” he said. The three of us went for a ride, speeding over the Golden Gate Bridge into the fog, then winding past the bay, through the Presidio, into North Beach. We ended up on Vermont Street, and as we took the twists and turns I felt an odd sense of elation. Wiggins’s joy was contagious.

That night in bed, Tom nudged me awake, eager to share his new idea. “We become so accustomed to the patterns we create for ourselves,” he said, his voice full of excitement. “We become so used to the way things are—scientifically, cosmically, personally—that we can’t imagine things being any other way. But there’s always another way. Common wisdom is, don’t buy a lottery ticket, because no one wins the lottery. But here’s the thing: someone always does win the lottery. Common wisdom is, get a real job, but there’s Barry Bonds, just a regular guy from my high school, breaking Hank Aaron’s record.”

“And you,” I reminded him. “Spinning records for a living.”

“That, too,” he said. “I want to do a new show, a show entirely devoted to the idea that what we think is out of reach is actually attainable.”

I put my arms around him and buried my face in his neck. “I can tell you something that is extremely attainable at this very moment.”

“Hmm?”

“Guess,” I said, climbing on top of him.

“I know what I’m going to call the show.” He unbuttoned the old shirt I’d worn to bed. “
Anything Is Possible.
”

The show quickly caught on locally, and that was good enough for Tom. After the first season, he was ready to call it quits and go back to doing nothing more than his late-night DJ spot, which he could practically do in his sleep, and which allowed him plenty of free time to spend on his land in Hopland, near the Russian River. I was the one who pushed him to pursue a second season. The second season was even better than the first, netting a slew of
awards. The third season topped the previous two. I convinced him to hire a publicist, who helped him create a marketing kit and DVD. Before long, his show was in syndication. By the fourth year, Tom’s voice could be heard on dozens of stations across the country.

One thing led to another, and he began doing voice-overs on the side for national television commercials. As a result, he has one of those maddeningly recognizable voices. I can’t count how many times we’ve been at a restaurant or a party and the waiter or some new acquaintance has turned to Tom and said, “Do I know you?” Sometimes I’ll be flipping channels and find myself strangely drawn to a car or a vacation destination or some brand of toothpaste, and then I’ll realize that it’s my husband’s voice I’m hearing. Every time it happens, I feel a flush of pride.

I used to think Tom was proud of it, too.

“You know, I was happy just being the Voice of Midnight,” Tom said out of the blue a few weeks before he moved out. It was a beautiful, cloudless day, and we were walking in Golden Gate Park. It was the third time in as many weeks that he’d suggested we go for a walk, and each time, he brought up some new grievance. In hindsight, I understood that those walks were a prelude to his leaving. Maybe he was trying to fix us, or maybe he was just trying to confirm for himself that we were unfixable.

“What?” I said, confused. “Your fans love
Anything Is Possible
. It’s what made you famous.”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn’t need to be famous?”

“You were on the radio when I met you. You already had a following. Can you honestly say that you didn’t want a bigger one?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you. You were ambitious.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “You had enough ambition for the both of us.”

“What’s wrong with ambition?”

“Nothing, as long as it’s your own. Your drive got you out of Mississippi—I understand that. All those certificates on your walls,
the honorary dinners, the accolades—you thrive on that stuff. It’s like you need it to feel valid somehow. You’ve always had something to prove.”

Was he right? I still felt the sting of the accusation I’d found scrawled across my Trapper Keeper in fourth grade:
poor white trash
. I’d tried to use nail polish remover to erase the insult, but it only smeared the ink.

“But I never had anything to prove,” Tom continued. “I had you. I had my audience. I had my land, my music. I was happy where I was.”

“You’re happy now,” I protested weakly, but obviously, he wasn’t.

He shook his head. “When Ethan was with us, I’d see you taking him to these music classes and Chinese lessons and Soccer and Smiles—”

“He loved Soccer and Smiles.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like when he got older, where it would end. I always felt that wherever Ethan went to college and whatever he decided to do would be fine, as long as he was happy. But I knew it wouldn’t be good enough for you. He’d have to go to Stanford, he’d have to be a doctor or a composer or the next Bill Gates for you to feel that you’d succeeded.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

7:31 a.m
.

The cable car is cresting Montgomery Street when Josh Rouse’s “Sweetie” begins to play.
We’ll sleep on rooftops, we’ll ride on bicycles
, Rouse sings. A man in a Giants jersey stands on the running board, one foot dangling over the street. I stifle an urge to caution him. Every now and then a tourist breaks a leg, or worse, mistaking our city’s most famous form of public transportation for an amusement park ride.

I want to call Tom and say, “Don’t do this.” I want to remind him that we had figured it all out. We’re going our own ways; case closed. We’ve come too far to turn back now.

“You should come by the loft,” Tom suggested a few weeks ago, over lunch at Hog Island Oysters. We sat outside, watching the ferries in the bay. A tray of beautiful oysters on the half shell gleamed between us. The beer was so cold, the day so warm, it reminded me of the South.

“I’ll make you dinner,” he said. “I’ll open an outrageously expensive bottle of wine.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It would be too weird, visiting you at your place.”

“It doesn’t have to be my place,” he said, dripping sauce onto an
oyster with a tiny spoon. “It could be yours, too—your pied-à-terre, your home away from home.”

“I like the home we have.” I realized what I’d said. I also realized that I was verging on drunk and flirting with my soon-to-be ex-husband. “The one we had,” I corrected myself. “Damn this beer. One of these days I’ll become accustomed to you in the past tense.”

He reached over and folded my hand in his. “I don’t want to be past tense.”

This was new. Unexpected.

“Isn’t it a little late to be telling me that now?”

“It all seems too permanent, Jules. It doesn’t feel right. This isn’t what I intended.”

In the old days it might have softened me—the way he held my hand, the way he looked at me, his dark eyes with their unsettling tractor beam effect. This was a man who knew how to pull me in. He always had. But when he’d walked out, he had broken the marriage, and I knew it couldn’t be repaired.

“What did you intend?” I asked, firmly pulling my hand away.

“I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to shake us up, to make you see what you’d be missing without me.”

He’d gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t wired that way. How could he not know that about me, after all these years?

The first weeks after he left, we barely talked. Two months into the separation, he called my cell from out of the blue, late at night, his voice slow and loose; he’d been drinking. “I’m confused, Jules. I thought I wanted a fresh start, but now I’m not so sure.”

It was so like him, to think he could control the conversation, that the ball would always be in his court. “You sound as if you think it’s all up to you,” I said.

“What are you saying?” he asked, startled.

“You turned my life upside down. I’m still mad as hell at you, and maybe now I’m the one who wants a fresh start. Did that ever occur to you?”

“Are you saying you don’t want to talk to me?”

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

“As long as you’re on the fence, I’m going to keep calling you,” he said.

His tone was so casual, so infuriatingly confident. I hit End Call. Then I dialed Heather.

“So now he wants you back,” she said.

“I don’t think he knows what he wants.”

Soon, we were talking several times a week, but our conversations weren’t bringing us closer. I began to feel more like his therapist than his estranged wife. One minute he wanted to move back in; the next minute he wasn’t sure. He was like a child trying to choose between the comforting stuffed animal he’s loved for years and the shiny new toy. A month ago, when I finally filed for divorce, Tom suddenly knew exactly what he wanted. But by then, it was too late.

Now, as the cable car rocks past the clots of protestors shouting slogans, I strain to hear the music from the Bakelite.
Crooked couple standing side by side
, Rouse croons.
Is that me? Is that you?

There’s something willfully blind about Tom’s song selections today. As if all that old charm will pull me back in, as if a night in his bed—or, rather, on his couch—will erase everything. As if we can go back in time.

“When I was deployed,” Dennis says, “every time someone got shot or blown up, there’d be some dumb fuck who insisted that it happened ‘for a reason.’ That always pissed me off. Like everything was supposed to be okay, because there was a reason behind every shit thing that happened.”

He’s sobbing now. Is it remorse, or is it fear?

“But I’m sitting here looking at Eleanor, and there’s blood all over the floor, and even though I can’t stand her, I’ll be damned if I can think of any divine purpose.”

I don’t know what to say, what will set him off, so I remain silent.

“I bet you never say that to the family after someone dies,” Dennis moans, sniffling. “I bet you never feed them that load of crap about how it happened for a reason.”

“You’re right,” I say cautiously. “I don’t.”

“I swear to God, I didn’t plan to do it. So here’s my question: What if I didn’t have a choice? What if it’s written in the laws of the universe?”

“Do you believe that?” I ask softly.

“Nice try,” he says snidely. “I asked you.”

What I believe is this: there is no divine flow chart, no elegant spiritual mathematics through which our lives are processed. Events
occur, we respond to them, we make choices, and our lives are shaped accordingly. But what is the right answer for Dennis at this moment? For the sake of Betty and Rajiv, I must tread carefully.

“I believe in cause and effect,” I say.

“Okay, that’s fair,” Dennis says. It’s quiet, and I can tell he’s thinking. “Let’s say you had to choose a day in your life that changed everything. What would it be?”

I don’t even have to think about it. “August nineteenth, seven years ago.”

It was ten o’clock on a cold Sunday night.

Tom was at work, and I was alone, decompressing with an old episode of
The X-Files
, when the doorbell rang. Who could be visiting at this hour? I looked through the peephole and, to my astonishment, there stood Danielle, one of my patients from the free clinic in the Tenderloin where I volunteered twice a month.

I opened the door. Danielle wore a dirty yellow sweatshirt and jeans that sagged off her bony frame. Her lipstick was bright pink, garish against her pallid skin. Seeing her on my doorstep, so out of context, was startling.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“You were in the book. Over at the Shell station.”

The phone book. Who used that anymore?

I immediately thought of her twenty-one-month-old son and had a terrible feeling. “Where’s Ethan?”

“In the car.” She pointed to a beat-up Toyota parked haphazardly by the curb.

“Is he okay?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for an answer. I moved past her, down the steps to the street, and opened the back door. There was no car seat. Ethan was propped between two pillows, swaddled in blankets. A seat belt was crossed over his small body, a diaper bag on the seat beside him. I unbuckled him and lifted him out. He didn’t stir. His skin was clammy, and through the blankets I could feel that his diaper was soggy. Instinctively, I put my ear to his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was. I grabbed the bag, carried him up the steps and into the house.

“Come in. It’s freezing.”

“I can’t,” Danielle mumbled. “My shoes are dirty.”

“It’s okay. Come inside.”

Ethan’s head rested on my shoulder, surprisingly heavy. A child so small, so light—and then this good, solid weight against my shoulder. I breathed him in; his hair smelled like peaches. My sleeve was soaked through where his small body rested against my arm. I looked at his face in the light, relieved to discover that his color was fine, his breathing normal.

Danielle kicked her shoes off and stepped across the threshold. Her feet were pale and filthy, but her toenails, like her lips, were painted a happy shade of pink.

I jostled Ethan gently. He startled but didn’t wake. “Did you give him something?” I demanded.

She looked at me, confused.

“Medication,” I clarified. “Benadryl? Cough medicine?”

“No.” She shook her head emphatically.

“Does he always sleep this hard?”