Outtakes from a Marriage (4 page)

“Wait, Sammy,” I called again, but the wind was blowing and Sammy had his hat pulled tight down over his ears. “Wait,” I said, my eyes inexplicably filling with tears. I watched my son run up the steps to the brick-faced schoolhouse. “Wait, Sammy,” I called, one last time, trotting after him, but I was calling into the wind and he was already gone.

[
four
]

J
ust calm down,” said Beth. “I think you might be making a big deal about nothing.”

Beth and I were sitting at a window table in Starbucks where the morning sun was streaming fierce and blinding through the grimy plate-glass window. We both wore sunglasses and sat facing out toward Broadway. I didn’t think I was making a big deal. It didn’t even look like I had been crying. Beth didn’t even know I had been crying.

Beth wore a gray wool skirt, skinny black boots, and a long black trench coat that would have looked frumpy and staid on me but made her look like she was going off to snub Humphrey Bogart someplace. I wore sweats and those hideous, shapeless tan winter boots that were trendy several years ago. “Fug Boots” Beth called them. Even when supermodels wore those boots, Beth wouldn’t have been caught dead in them. “They look like they were designed to be worn on paws, not feet,” she had scoffed the first time she saw me wearing mine. Today, though, she wasn’t looking at my clothes. She was staring out the window, shaking her head slowly, trying to sort it all out in her mind.

“Start over. Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me everything again.”

“All right, but first promise you won’t say anything to Alison.”

“I already said I wouldn’t.”

“Promise, though.”

“I promise. Now tell me everything about the message from the beginning.”

“Well, it began with the thing about her being happy. She said, ‘Of course I’m happy, you know I am,’ like he had asked her if she was happy.”

“So what do you think she could be so happy about?”

“Who knows. Maybe it’s the first time they’ve talked since his nomination. He’s been with us almost nonstop over the holidays. Maybe it’s the first time he got a chance to ask her if she was happy that he was nominated.”

“But why would he ask her if she was happy about
his
nomination?”

I peered over my sunglasses at Beth. She had known Joe for twenty years. She was always the one who felt compelled to say to him, in response to some egomaniacal statement or other, “Everything isn’t about
you,
Joe.” How could she doubt the obvious now? He had called his girlfriend, his filthy-mouthed girlfriend, to ask if she was happy that he had received the recognition he felt he so richly deserved. He hadn’t asked
me
if I was happy, but then again, I guess he knew I was happy when I bounded into bed with him after the diner that morning. Recalling the tryst now, I realized that I had behaved like a senseless but affable puppy that morning, all wagging tail and lolling tongue, while Joe had assumed something resembling the manner of a dutifully indulgent master.

“I just think we’re not leaving room for all the possibilities,” Beth said. “Maybe he was asking her if she was happy about something that was going on in her life that had nothing to do with him. What did she say next?”

“She asked him where he was—as if they had plans to meet or something.”

“Again, Julia, you’re making assumptions here. Lots of people want to know where everybody is all the time. She might just be nosy.”

“Beth…”

“Or who knows, maybe he was invited to something that she was also invited to and she expected to see him there. It doesn’t mean that they had made a plan.”

“She kept calling him babe. And baby.”

“Sometimes ‘babe’ is just an expression. You know who talks like that? My friend Liz who works for Virgin Records. She calls everybody babe.”

“Okay, well, she wanted him to know how horny she was. ‘I’m horny as a…motherfucker’ is what she said. I mean, who talks like that? She sounded like a nineteen-year-old porn star.”

Beth was nodding slowly. She was thinking. This part was hard to explain away, but I knew she was going to try. Beth considers herself the ultimate authority on just about everything, and now that I had asked her to help me with this problem, she was in her glory. Sitting with her now, I realized I hadn’t seen much of Beth since I’d had Sammy. Our lives had become at odds, as people’s lives do. Beth was a television producer. I was a mom. She booked guests for Anderson Cooper, spent her days looking for hard-hitting news stories and rarely left the studio for dinner and drinks before eleven. I tended to my children, sort of, and was usually in bed before she finished work.

“She might be just a friend from the set. She might talk to him all the time about how lonely she is.”

“Please.”

“Okay, you tell me who
you
think it is.” Beth pushed herself away from the table and turned to me, crossing her arms slowly. It’s difficult for Beth to have to listen to other people’s mediocre ideas, but she knew how upset I was, and she was indulging me.

“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she works on the show. He doesn’t have time to meet anyone else, for one thing. And…”

“And what?”

“And the show was also nominated. Best Drama Series. So it’s possible that he called her to ask if she was happy about the show being nominated, you know, because she works on the show.”

“That makes sense,” Beth said. “I didn’t know the show was also nominated. That explains everything.” She slapped her palms on the table and smiled, talking faster. “He probably called everybody in the cast and crew to congratulate them. Maybe she was just calling him back to say, ‘Yes, I’m happy.’ And then threw in the business about how horny she was as a funny aside. She might be some fat, ugly friend of Joe’s from the set who bellyaches all the time about how she never has sex.”

“Beth, you had to hear the tone of her voice. It was sex talk.”

“All I’m saying is this: You really don’t know what’s going on. Why don’t you tell Joe that you heard the message and ask him to explain it?”

“I don’t know….”

Beth turned and faced me again. “I think you don’t want to ask him because you know he’ll lie.”

This is the thing that kills me about Beth. Her own romantic life is a mess, but when it comes to analyzing other people’s problems, she’s always uncannily on the ball. This is a woman who arrived home one night last year to find her then-husband, Walt, a hedge-fund manager, passed out drunk, wearing her bra and panties, and, most egregiously, her Manolo Blahniks. Now she was suddenly Carl Jung.

“I don’t
know
he’ll lie…” I began, but the fact was that Joe, like most talented actors, was highly skilled in the art of lying. He made lying look easy. There was no fumbling over words or reddening of the skin, no visible “tell” that I could ever interpret. Joe made things true just by saying them, and this usually worked in his favor both on camera and off. Over the years, he had told many fibs to the press—just little things like why he didn’t take a particular role (fib: turned it down; fact: wasn’t offered it)—and to me (fib: the cast and crew were shooting until dawn; fact: the cast and crew were out drinking until dawn). To my knowledge he had never deceived me about being with another woman, but now I realized that the key words here were
to my knowledge.
Suddenly my scope seemed rather narrow and my gullibility quite vast, and to yield my only advantage to Joe by revealing what little I knew seemed naive at best. I knew what he wanted me to know and now I knew what he didn’t want me to know. And I wanted to know more.

“I feel like I’d be a fool to let him know I’m onto him before I get more…proof. It’d be too easy for him to cover his tracks.”

“Okay, Columbo. Do what you have to do.”

We both turned to gaze out the window. The brightness of the midwinter sun revealed broad streaks formed by a hasty window cleaner’s squeegee, and we looked out through this abstract glaze at the people rushing past.

“Have you called Dr. Boyfriend?” Beth asked.

Okay, this is a little complicated. Beth calls my former shrink Dr. Boyfriend. At one point I thought I was in love with him, but it wasn’t real. He told me so.

“I stopped going to him last summer,” I said. “You knew that.”

“I know, but you’re in a crisis now. You could call him. You really need to talk to somebody, and if you go back to him, you won’t have to do so much filling in, you know…of the gaps. He already knows your whole deal.”

“Right,” I said, unconvinced.

“Listen, Julia…I’m sorry but I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.”

“Wait, do you think my ass looks fat?” I asked as we got up to leave. I know it sounds trivial now, in the whole scheme of things, but Beth is my only friend on the East Coast who I could ask that question, and I didn’t see her very often.

“C’mon! Your ass isn’t any fatter today than it was the last time I saw you.”

This stopped me in my tracks, causing Beth to slam into me and spill the remains of her latte all over the front of her coat.

“So you mean my ass
is
fat? That it was fat the last time you saw me and is just as fat today?”

“Shit, Julia.” Beth gave me a little shove and stomped over to the counter to grab a napkin. “Your ass is not fat!” she called to me. “You just feel fat because…you know, the phone call and everything.”

It wasn’t my imagination. People seated near me actually looked at my ass. A man at the counter did a double take, and then he bounded over.

“Hey! Mrs. F!” he said, offering an outstretched hand. “Mike! Mike Giammati! We met last year at a Knicks game! My girlfriend and I were talking to you and Joey at halftime!”

“Um…” I said, my eyes fixed on Beth, who was still dabbing madly at her coat.

“Remember us? We’re from the Bronx, too, prob’ly from the same block as Joey. I think he grew up just down the street from me.”

I wanted to say, “Sure, I remember you. You and the five thousand other Italians who introduce themselves to us every year. All from the Bronx, all thinking they grew up next to Joe.” Somehow a rough Bronx
Mean Streets
persona had formed over the last several years and attached itself to Joe, leading people from the Bronx to tell their friends that they remember Joe when he was a kid, that they grew up on the same block, dated the same girls, went to the same schools. Joe’s name, his dark good looks, and his well-publicized Italian lineage (he’s played a mob guy in three different films) leads people to assume that he’s at least half Italian, when actually he has very little Italian blood left on his father’s side. His mother is Swedish/Irish. The fact that he was born in the Bronx makes people think that he grew up there, when truthfully, the Ferraro family moved out of their attractive home in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx when Joe was three years old, and Joe grew up in the artsy, liberal suburb of Nyack. When journalists asked Joe what part of the Bronx he was from, he would make vague references to Arthur Avenue and the old neighborhood where his family had come from—and it was true, his grandparents had once lived in the Bronx’s Little Italy neighborhood—but his own parents were aging, overeducated hippies, ex-teachers who were now retired in Florida.

Once we were outside, Beth hugged me and said into my ear, “Look, call Dr. Boyfriend.”

“All right,” I said. “I will.”

“Where are you going now?”

“I’m getting my hair colored.”

Beth squinted up at my roots. “Good plan. Just don’t do anything impulsive or anything. And don’t call his voice mail again.”

“Okay,” I said. I started across Eighty-sixth Street, and when I was almost on the other side, Beth yelled, “And your ass is not fat!” Then she burst out laughing and disappeared down the subway stairs. I speed-dialed her.

“Yeah?” she answered, still laughing.

“Don’t say anything to Alison!”

I hung up and started down Broadway using the fast, determined stride that I could only use at times like this, when I was without kids. When Sammy was with me, our pace was usually a mad dash down the block (me frantically chasing him) with periodic abrupt halts to stare at a dead bird or at a child eating candy, and then back into sprint mode. Ruby, on the other hand, always liked to walk slowly, daydreaming, the way I always had as a child.

Dillydallying was what my mother used to call it. Mom was a Caroline.

“Out of their friggin’ minds, all of ’em,” my dad said once, when we saw Caroline Kennedy on TV making a speech.

“The Kennedys?” I had asked.

“Carolines. Nut jobs, all of ’em.”

“Oh,” I had said, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never get anything more out of him about our Caroline, specifically. My memories of her are limited and precious in number and all from the dwarfed perspective of a child.

“No more dillydallying, now!” our Caroline used to call back to Neil and me as she strode purposefully forward, young, and usually barefoot, in her sleeveless cotton summer “shifts.”

As a New York mother, I am always trying to herd my children in front of me where I can see them, but as I recall, my mother always led the way whenever we went anywhere, and it was up to us not to lose her. I remember the backs of my mother’s bare heels more than anything else about her. She hated wearing shoes in the summer. When my dad was stationed in Annapolis teaching at the Naval Academy, she used to take us swimming in the Chesapeake Bay every afternoon when the weather was nice. She would park up the road from the beach in the warm first days of spring and then she would stride along the rough road, barefoot, carrying our towels and toys, always looking forward toward the beach. Never back.

Neil and I, anxious, foot-sore stragglers, limped along the coarse, searing-hot blacktop, watching her slim, tanned legs carry her farther and farther ahead of us, and occasionally I’d call out, “Mommy! My feet hurt. Wait up!”

“C’mon, it’s good for you kids to start walking barefoot now—you need to toughen your feet up for the summer,” she would call back, jollying us along. And our feet did toughen up. By midsummer, we could have skipped across a bed of nails, so tough were our little soles, and it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I learned that it is actually undesirable to have feet that are as impenetrable as hooves. I tried explaining all this to Ruby once, when we were sitting in a nail salon having mother-and-daughter pedicures. Ruby had asked if my mother and I ever had beauty days together.