The Red Book (15 page)

You will always be an integral part of me, Lodge. A place apart, a secret compartment in my brain I will visit as often as my heart can handle. And I will be forever grateful for the love and time we shared.

All my love forever,

Claire

Holy shit, Jane thinks, placing the damning letter in her
TO KEEP
envelope.
Et tu
, Mama?
Is nothing sacred?

She wonders if she and Hervé, had he lived, would have been the last monogamous couple left on Earth. Hervé was gone constantly. Constantly! And when he wasn’t off covering some war or insurrection, she was off reporting on its collateral damage, all those wandering refugees with no place to sleep, to eat, to shit, to fuck, and yet she’d never once taken advantage of the surreal conditions and psychological stresses of her job, or of the frequent separations from her husband, to seek out comfort in another, as isolated and unhinged by her work as she admittedly often felt, and as easy—so easy!—as it would have been to do so. How many times had she been propositioned by those lonely male colleagues of hers, beautiful specimens of human flesh, nearly all of them, in hotel bars after-hours? Too many times to count.

She looks at her watch. 4
A.M.
Too late, too early, to contemplate her late mother’s early love life. To imagine Jonathan sticking his empathic, traumatized dick into his producer. To picture Bruno caressing the freckled breasts of that Irish whore. She settles into an armchair, clutching the
TO KEEP
envelope to her chest, and falls into a desperate, fitful sleep.

B
ENEDICTINE
R
OSE
W
ATANABE.
Home Address:
1530 Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, CA 94708 (510-865-3357).
Occupation and Office Address:
Vice president, Product Development, Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
M.B.A. Stanford ’94.
Spouse/Partner:
Katrina Zucherbrot, known professionally as Zeus (B.A., Brown ’88; M.F.A., Yale ’92).
Spouse/Partner Occupation:
Sculptor.
Children:
Lucien Artemis Watanabe-Zucherbrot, 2000; Dante Leopold Watanabe-Zucherbrot, 2000.

It’s hard to believe it will have been twenty years since we graduated college when you read this. I’ve never been much of a writer, but I have worked at Google now long enough to know a little bit about search, so what I can’t express myself, I’ll just steal. Here are a few of the things I found, typing “passage of time” into our search engine.

“Time will reveal everything. It is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.” —Euripides

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” —Andy Warhol

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.” —The Grateful Dead

I chose that first quote by Euripides because, thinking back on college, when I was just a young, newly out dyke with a crazy dream of future nuclear family normalcy but no role models to follow, I wondered how I would get there and who would join me. But now when I come home from work and see my partner at the stove, her work clothes caked in plaster of Paris, and the boys sitting at the dining room table, doing their homework and giggling, well, time has revealed everything. I have my own version of that nuclear family dream, despite all the naysayers who told me it couldn’t be done. Shouldn’t be done. And guess what? It’s better than I expected. Is it paradise? Of course not. We’ve all lived long enough now to know nothing is. But it comes close.

As for time wasted on my roses, I like to think I have several roses: my boys, my relationship with my partner, and my career. (Can you tell I’m an ace at PowerPoint?) These are the three main things I’ve been cultivating over the past two decades, and it’s only now, looking back, that I’m able to see that it’s the time spent watering these roses, the years of memories and history, that matter in the end. As I wrote in our Fifteenth Report, Katrina and I decided to get pregnant at the same time, using sperm from each other’s brothers, so we could raise our children like fraternal twins. Short term, when the boys were babies born three weeks apart, this was a lot harder than we expected, but long term, now that they’re nearly ten years old, it feels like we made the right decision. Lucien and Dante are extremely close, both as brothers (technically cousins) and as friends, and their male pair combined with our female one has felt very balanced, family-wise, for lack of a better word. The boys’ uncles/fathers are also in the picture, one of whom (my brother) is an A’s fan who enjoys taking them to the ballpark, etc., with his wife and kids, the other (Katrina’s brother) who takes them for a week every summer to help out on his farm in Oderbruch, a rural area southeast of Berlin, near the German/Polish border, where he works and lives with his wife, six kids, and God knows how many animals, we’ve lost count. We felt this was important, for them to have male role models in their lives, and very different ones at that. As for Katrina and me, well, we
feel
married, even though Proposition 8 just passed in California, meaning the wedding we had in Provincetown, back in 2004, when Massachusetts first sanctioned gay marriage, does not count in our state of residence. (Try explaining
that
to your sons, who were the ring bearers.)

Which brings me both to my third rose, my career, and Andy Warhol’s quote. As many of you know, I joined Google when it was still a tiny company with a great motto—“Don’t be evil”—hoping to change the world. For many years, I think we stuck to this core principle, and we did change the world. We did! I will always be proud of the work I did and continue to do there. But now both the company and I have matured, and there are some days I wonder if a large corporation is ever capable of adhering to utopian ideals. Plus, let’s face it, I’ve grown tired of the long commute from Berkeley to Mountain View, and I don’t want to move our family to shorten it. Berkeley, being Berkeley, has been an unbelievable home for us, a place where families like ours are not only accepted but also celebrated. Our sons’ school even has a gay pride day. All the kids come to school wearing rainbows or homemade T-shirts with things like
MY FRIEND DANTE HAS TWO MOMMIES, AND THAT’S COOL.
’Nuff said.

So last week, fueled by my disappointment (or you could call it rage) over the passage of Proposition 8, I announced to my colleagues that I’ve decided to resign from Google at the end of 2009 to focus on changing what time refuses to change on its own: namely, the right for gay Americans to get married. To that end, I’ll be starting a foundation, which I’ve decided to call Out and Out, whose mission will be twofold: (1) We will have an outreach program for teenagers, in which we will send gay families into middle and high schools to give lectures during assemblies in order to show, by direct example, that gay families are just like so-called normal families. We will also offer free counseling and college scholarships to bullied gay teens. (2) We will raise as much money as we can to lobby whomever we can, from local politicians all the way up to the White House, to create a national law granting gay couples the right to marry. We will also show our support, in the form of campaign contributions and volunteer manpower, to whichever candidates choose to run on a pro-gay-marriage platform. Suffice it to say, any of you who feel passionate about such topics and live in the Bay Area, hit me up. I’m going to need all the help I can get, and yes, a few of the positions will be salaried and include health insurance.

Which brings me to my last quote, even though I only had the pleasure of attending that one Dead show in Worcester back in 1987: It truly has been a long, strange trip. But now, with my chips cashed in, I can’t wait to keep on truckin’.

Chapter 5
Morning

Addison lies awake on the floor of her jail cell, her arms shackled, her bare back sweating against the plastic ticking of a thin foam mattress, whose sheets and bed frame were removed the previous night when it was determined that inmate #462879 needed to be placed on suicide watch. “I’m not suicidal!” she’d cried to the young female officer, fresh out of police academy, who’d made the determination, based on both the duration of Addison’s tears and on paragraph 72A in the incarceration guidelines stating that, should an inmate cry for a period of time equal to or greater than ninety minutes, a suicide watch could, at the discretion of the corrections officer, be instituted. Once instituted, such a watch required that the inmates’ arms be bound with chains and that any object with the potential to be used for auto-asphyxiation in the cell itself, or on or in the prisoner’s body—including sheets, clothing, shoelaces, and tampons—be removed.

“I’m not saying you are suicidal, ma’am,” said the officer. “I’m just following protocol.”

“Oh, come on!” said Addison. “I’m just upset! Can you please try to understand that? I’m in here because of parking tickets. Parking tickets, for Christ’s sake!” She leaves off the part about her family’s financial crisis, a turn of events—relayed to her by Gunner last night, during the five minutes she was allowed to see him—that has triggered an arrhythmia in her heart so palpable she can feel the syncopation. How the hell will they survive? “You’d cry, too, if you were thrown into jail for goddamned parking tickets!”

“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t,” the young officer replied, still young and green enough to be filled with strong ideals and good intentions, “because I would have paid my parking tickets.”

“Can I at least have one tampon? Just one!”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. You can’t. Those are the rules. And rules are meant to be followed.”

“Oh, to hell with your stupid rules!” Addison said.

Now, lying here, practically nude but for the shackles, which are digging into both her wrists and psyche in equal measure; feeling warm blood leaking between her thighs onto the government-issued paper gown she was forced to trade for her clothes, which she fashioned instead into a makeshift sanitary pad, she reconsiders this ingrained response. Perhaps a to-hell-with-your-stupid-rules attitude may not be the most prudent way to lead the second half of one’s life. Or the first.

She’d always taught her children to think independently, to question authority. When Trilby had refused to take a spelling test in sixth grade, on the grounds that spelling was becoming unnecessary in a spellcheck world, she’d secretly beamed when she and Gunner were called in for a parent-teacher conference to discuss the matter. It was decided, by all parties involved, that Trilby could do an independent study on Greek mythology while the rest of the class toiled over their
their/there/they’re
’s. But with Gunner’s parents no longer able to foot the $108,000 a year bill for her three children’s private education (and fuck those greedy fund managers, she thinks, unable to make the connection between their law-breaking and hers), this kind of creative rule-bending will become a thing of the past. New York City public schools will never put up with such nonsense. And, truth be told, Trilby’s spelling is atrocious.

How, she wonders, will she even get Trilby into a public high school at this point? The nonspecialized one in their neighborhood is deplorable. Not to mention dangerous. She wonders if she can convince St. Paul’s to cough up a dollop of emergency financial aid, even though she and Gunner own a $2.5 million apartment. Probably not. Maybe she can take out a home equity loan to pay for school. But then how will she pay it back? How do people who don’t have family help deal with this stuff ? What kind of job could she even get at this point in her life? The whole thing spins her head.

“Ma’am,” she hears. The voice has a southern twang. “Um, ma’am?”

Addison sits up, her arms crossed over her bare chest, to face a new cop who must be just starting her morning shift. “Yes?” she says.

“Ma’am, you’re free to go. This woman just came in and paid your fines.”

“You’re kidding me.” But who? she wonders. She dismisses Jane out of hand. Clover’s still out of a job and worried about cash flow, so it can’t be her. Which means it has to be Mia. Amazing, considering their somewhat rocky history. Jonathan must be doing better than she thought. She wonders how she’ll pay them back. She imagines painting some massive piece to hang over their couch in LA. Lots of bright yellows and dark greens, echoing the lemon trees in her yard; then a slightly smaller canvas with muted grape and fig tones for their house in Antibes. Canvases that large and paints to cover them will be expensive, now that they’re broke, but maybe Mia’s wealthy friends will see her paintings and want one of their own. Maybe, Addison thinks, this is just the kick in the pants she needs. Didn’t Mia once tell her that one of the mothers in her son’s school was on the board of the Getty? Her brain races with the possibilities.

“Ma’am, I don’t joke about such things.” The cop opens the door and hands Addison a robe. “Here are your personal effects. I’ve given you a Tampax as well. You can go ahead and get dressed in the ladies’.”

“But wait, wasn’t there supposed to be a bail hearing this morning?” Addison wonders how a southern girl grows up to be a northern cop. How does anyone grow up to be anything? She tries to imagine herself cruising the streets of Boston in a black and white sedan, hunting down suspects, fighting crime. That wouldn’t be so bad, as jobs go, she thinks. Except for the gun part. But the being-outside-in-the-world part? The breaking up domestic spats and arriving at the scene of the accident and busting down the drug dealer’s door and following up leads and turning on the siren while
legally
speeding through red lights, all of that sounded kind of interesting, even thrilling. Theoretically.

She wonders how long it takes to get through cop school. Couldn’t be more than two years, right? How crazy would that be, Addison Hunt, a cop? Yeah, maybe too crazy. Although she did once share a beer with that guy from Dunster House, the one a couple of years older than her who became a cop after Harvard and wrote that HBO series based on his experiences. Maybe she could become a cop for a few years and then paint a whole series of crime-inspired canvases.

Nah. Who’s she kidding?

It pains her that she has never followed through on a single one of her (often seemingly) inspired ideas. How do people live?

“The judge said that since the fines were paid, and you have no priors, you’re free to go.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Ma’am, like I said, I don’t joke about such things. You’re very lucky, I will tell you that.”

“I guess that depends on your definition of luck.”

The cop can barely contain her contempt for Addison’s apparent lack of understanding that six-figure fines don’t usually just get paid by most inmates’ friends’ AmEx Titaniums. “I guess it does.”

“Is Mia still out there?”

“Who?”

“Mia Zane? The woman who paid my fines?”

“Ma’am, the woman who paid your fines goes by the name of Bennie. With some sort of Asian last name. At least that’s what it said on the fancy piece of plastic she just gave me.”

“Watanabe?” Addison gulps. Holy shit. Bennie? How’d she even find out about this?

“Yep, that’s it. She’s out there, waiting for you. Said she’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”

“Oh my God.” She can’t decide which is more impressive: Bennie Watanabe’s sudden reappearance in her life, her payment of the fines, or the fact that a credit card exists that can swipe through a hundred grand without blinking. Maybe she should go work for Google.

Not that she knows the first thing about the tech industry.

How do people
live
?

Ten minutes later, Addison is standing in the now empty waiting room at the police station with her head buried in Bennie’s shoulder, soaking it.

“I always knew you were a bit of a rebel, babes,” says Bennie, smoothing Addison’s hair, holding her trembling body, trying to make her laugh, “but this is really taking it a step too far.” When Addison’s initial deluge finally gives way to calmer tremors, Bennie pulls back from the embrace and grasps her ex’s slender biceps with her own arms parallel to the ground, like a parent examining a fallen toddler for bruises. “Look at you. I can’t believe it.”

“That bad, huh?” Addison smiles through trembling lips. Stares into Bennie’s once-familiar brown eyes, which have survived the twenty-plus years since they were focused on Addison’s with barely a furrow and still trigger that same snippet of Van Morrison. That’s not to say her former brown-eyed girl hasn’t physically aged or that her temples have remained unlined, but that where once, at nineteen, tiny Bennie could still pass for a middle schooler, now, at forty-two, she has the still-smooth skin and slight, tight frame of a woman in her early-to-mid thirties. By comparison, thinks Addison, especially after the night she just braved, she must look like death.

“I won’t lie,” says Bennie, who esteems honesty over all other human attributes aside from a diligence in delivering food to the bereaved. “I’ve seen you look better.”

“Yeah, well, I guess a night spent shackled in the nude on suicide watch in a jail cell will do that to you,” says Addison, still trying to wrap her head around too many elements of the past twenty-four hours, none more astounding than the fact that she and Bennie are standing face-to-face: the collapsing of two decades, like a slo-mo clip of an imploding building in reverse, in the blink of a brown eye. Followed in a close second by what she can only call a chemical reawakening. As if she even needed physical proof of the feelings she’s been pushing down, willfully, for years. As if it were even possible to not feel something forever by mentally willing it from surfacing.

“You feel like talking about it?” says Bennie.

No trace of the anger Bennie hurled at her during their breakup remains. “Good lord,” says Addison. “I feel like talking about a lot of things. So many. You got time?”

“Loads of it. I told Katrina I’d be back in an hour or so, but she took the kids out to breakfast at Au Bon Pain, and then they were going to head over to the Coop to buy sweatshirts, so we’re good. I’ve got as long as you need.”

“Bennie, why are you being so nice to me? I mean, I’m not just talking about paying my
absurd
fine—which I will pay back, I promise—and coming here and—”

“Addison! Are you kidding me? I loved you once. That stuff doesn’t just go away. No matter how many years have passed.”

“But I was such a bitch to you at the end.”

“That you were.” Bennie says this as a statement of fact, without judgment. “Ads, we were practically still kids. Babies!”

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Forever. Come on. Let’s get out of this hellhole. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

“No way. At least let me buy you a coffee.” Addison wonders, once again, how she’ll ever pay Bennie back. A hundred grand. The number is staggering.

“Fine. Your treat. There’s gotta be a Starbucks around here somewhere.”

Sure enough, within minutes of leaving the police station in Bennie’s Zipcar Prius, the two spot the ubiquitous green medallion with the black and white lady—shit, thinks Addison, I had that idea to start a bunch of coffee bars in the U.S. after Gunner and I came back to the States in 1990, why didn’t I just do it?—and now Addison and Bennie are sitting at a corner table, the former nursing a lightly sweetened venti latte, with whole milk, the latter a grande shaken green tea, unsweetened. “Talk to me, Ad,” says Bennie. “What’s going on? I mean, aside from you being arrested for parking tickets.”

Addison smiles and half-laughs, but she suddenly feels nauseated. She’s jittery from the coffee on top of a sleepless night, no doubt, but also from the flash of insight she’s having at this very minute, triggered by Bennie’s presence. No, not that she wants Bennie, although it’s the wanting that has flipped on the light. It’s more that she has suddenly become brutally aware that she’s been living, on nearly every front, a twenty-year lie.

“In all honesty?” Addison pauses, trying to figure out what an honest, Bennie-worthy answer to
What’s going on?
might be. Twenty years ago, on her graduation day from a school whose very motto, Veritas, demanded truth, she would have written down, had she been asked to compose a laundry list of everything she wanted out of life, exactly what she currently has: three children; an enviably still-handsome husband; a sunlit home in a hip New York neighborhood; a community of friends who share her moral, aesthetic, and political outlook; the time and space to paint; enough money to get by. And that would have been as close to the truth as she then was able to process it, with her ignorance of adulthood’s realities. But now that the enough-money-to-get-by part has been savagely torn from the Hunt/Griswold family portrait, its absence has revealed the more profound deficiencies and fissures of the line items left off her imaginary list, for lack of any prior mature grasp of their importance: love; passion; a desire to fuck her spouse. Without these, she thinks, the externalities not only don’t matter, they are an indictment.

A short snippet from a Shakespeare sonnet she studied in English 10 flutters down from its storage branch and settles on the sidewalk of Addison’s conscious thought: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove.” If nothing else, Harvard had been good for that: for stuffing the brain full of beautiful words, apt phrases, to be plucked out of the larder and thawed, decades later, as needed.

The family portrait she carries around as her iPhone’s wallpaper suddenly turns, in her head, from vibrant color to a somber, grainy black and white. She has brought up three children, she thinks, by herself, in a mostly sexless, often-bickering household. The enviably still good-looking husband might turn others on—and she sees it, she does, whenever she and Gunner are walking down Bedford Avenue together on a Saturday afternoon, the way her husband still elicits longing stares from both the tattooed women and the slouchy men—but he does not turn her on, and maybe he never really did. Maybe only the idea of him did.