The Red Book (16 page)

She thinks back to the start of their relationship, meeting up again at that taverna in Eressos, how the very rightness of their union—same background, same prep school, same well-scrubbed, flinty good looks, plus they’d deflowered each other at seventeen, so it made for a good story—had tipped them over into an ideation of couplehood. They had mythologized their origin story from its inception (high school sweethearts, the chance meeting, rekindled love) to the point where now, two decades later, it only made for compelling fiction, if barely.

She suddenly feels a strange wave of compassion for Gunner’s writer’s block: how impossible it must be to write the truth when both your own life and your sole published novel have been constructed on a scaffolding of half-truths and self-deception. From the small bits she’s managed to gather, his new novel is supposed to be a modern meditation on the new frontiers of fatherhood and marriage in a post-feminist world. At least that’s what he’s told his editor, who gave up years ago on asking to see a manuscript, even a partial one. Gunner keeps claiming he has a good chunk of it done, but Addison wonders how he’s managed to bang out a single word. Because when you outsource all of your parenting responsibilities to your wife and the household help, how much can you really know about fatherhood? And without sex, what’s left of marriage?

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she tells Bennie, a single tear leaving its streak on her cheekbone. “I suddenly feel like I’m disintegrating.” For this is as close to the truth, for now, on this glorious June morning, as she is able to verbalize.

•  •  •

Trilby wakes up
uncharacteristically early and slips into the home office in Jane’s dead mother’s house to log on to Facebook and check out what her friends are saying about last night’s show at Pete’s Candy Store. She opens Firefox, types
f-a-c-e
and sees that someone else in the house has been checking his page without logging out: Jonathan, Mia’s husband, that old guy with the young sneakers. “Jonathan Zane is Cambridge bound” his update reads, underneath which runs a list of equally boring, old people chatter:
Lauren Green is yanking out the weeds and thinking about baking a rhubarb pie; Zach Frankel’s four-year-old, after being apprised of the Big Dipper’s existence, wanted to know where God keeps his forks and knives; Elaine Cutbill is OMG, Madmen marathon!; David Zelnick pulled out his back again, reaching for the Advil.

Jesus, she thinks. If that’s the kind of boring crap she has to look forward to as an adult, then no thank you. She wonders if there is an exact moment in life when they make you stop having fun or whether it’s a more gradual slide into pie crusts, toddlers, TV, and Ibuprofen. She clicks on the message folder and quickly skims through a bunch of boring exchanges: people congratulating Jonathan on Zoe’s birth; a fan, who grew up in Brooklyn, writing to say how much she loved
Jack and Jill in Clinton Hill
; a two-sentence missive from Max, saying,
You know I love you, Dad, but please stop commenting on my photos. It’s kind of a buzzkill.
To shake things up, Trilby types
loves me some underage poontang
into Jonathan’s status update, hits “return,” and logs on to her own newsfeed.

Seven—seven!—of her friends had been to the show she missed.
Dismembered Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeetussssss!,
wrote her friend Maya.
epicccccc
, wrote Isadora.
Yo, I’m five feet from mad drummer Max Mattis, hit me up
, wrote her best friend, Jackson, under which his friend Christopher had commented
behind you, bro, ten o’clock.

Trilby feels a new rush of fury and indignation. What right did her mother have to keep her from the most important event of her entire life? Dismembered Fetus! At an intimate venue
around the corner from her fucking apartment
. And she, fourteen years old and the proud owner of a new pair of breasts, which finally emerged from their excruciatingly long hibernation like slow-cooked Jiffy Pop to the point where they could now be expertly encased and cantilevered at a ninety-degree angle from the rest of her, thanks to the new Victoria’s Secret push-up bra (black, lace) she bought with the money her mother gave her for a school trip to the tenement museum. Never again, she thinks, will the stars align so perfectly: Dismembered Fetus, Pete’s Candy Store, the end of eighth grade, new tits. It would have been so easy for her to have stayed behind in Brooklyn at Maya’s, instead of coming here to this boring fucking Harvard crapola memory-lane bullshit festival of oldsters with their moobs and back fat, trying to recapture what was once theirs but now, rightfully, hers. Or at least it should have been hers if her lame-ass mother hadn’t insisted on dragging the whole frigging family here with her.

Trilby suddenly remembers that Addison spent the night in jail and feels a slight tinge of remorse. Her father had woken her up when he and Mia came home from the police station to promise he’d get her mother out this morning. But she knows her dad’s promises. They’re always loose interpretations of the word, like the time he promised her they’d go skiing at Mohonk, just the two of them on a special father/daughter bonding trip, but then he suddenly had an epiphany about his male protagonist, whom he realized would never take his daughter skiing, so for verisimilitude’s sake, they stayed home. That being said, Mia is in on this one, and Mia (or so her mother once told her, in so many less-than-flattering words) is the official, responsible den mother of the group, so there’s hope.

Trilby harbors more than passing jealousy of the Zane boys for growing up in a home with real adults as parents, the kind who always get the school medical forms in on time and don’t sneak off to smoke pot on the balcony when they think their kids are already asleep. She wonders how different her life could have been with mandatory family meals, limits on television viewing, ironed underwear, organic smoothies, Christmas soup kitchen duties, chore charts, hot breakfasts. The Zane boys are definitely on the nerdier side of the people she calls friends, but they also don’t seem as plagued with the same bouts of nihilism and depression into which she and many of these friends have recently found themselves plunging, like quicksand or tar.

Last night, for example, she nearly cried watching a seventeen-year-old Max Zane reading
Le Petit Prince
to Jane’s seven-year-old, Sophie. She could see, as if in time-lapse photography, the entire arc of his fatherhood stretching before him, just in the comic inflection of his “Draw me a sheep!” Those lucky kids, she thought, hearing Sophie’s giggles, choking back a surprising burst of tears. They’ll never have to wonder whether their father’s attention is motivated less by love than by a need to experience a situation—the reading of Saint-Exupéry to a child, Daddies ’n’ Donuts Day at a child’s kindergarten (during which her own father took notes—notes!—in his Moleskine instead of scarfing down the crappy donut holes like everyone else)—in order to write about it.

Hopefully, she thinks, imagining the kind of woman Max might one day marry, his children will also never have to watch their mother get taken away in handcuffs. She briefly considers writing something like,
OMG my mother spent the night in jailllllll!!!!
in her status update but then realizes that’ll take too much explaining, and really, who has time? It’s pretty punk, she has to admit, but it’s also totally embarrassing.

anyone in cambridge hit me up
, she types into the status rectangle instead, fairly certain she’ll get no response. But then, miracle of miracles, her friend Linus Angstrom from sailing camp in Maine writes,
nooooo waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!
underneath it, and her chat window pops open.

u here in cambridge?

yep. mom’s 20th reunion. fml

harvard lesley mit or tufts?

harvard

omg went to my dad’s 25th last year.
so fucking boring

ikr

except for the moon bounce

lolz

moon bounces rock
u around tonight?

idk y?

cuz some friends and me r going
to the vaginal discharge show at
the roxy

omg i love vaginal discharge!!!!!!!

who doesn’t?

hahahaha
i was supposed to see dismembered
fetus last night in brooklyn but obviously
i couldn’t :(

omg, that sucks . . . come tonight tho

what about tix?

no problem, we can scalp

oh shit
wait
i said i’d help babysit . . . fuckkkkkkkk!!!!

the show’s not til 10
just sneak out my brother can drive us

rly? he got his license?

yup

omg i want to go so bad

so come!

ok i will. so where shud we meet?
what time?

um, wait, lemme ask

kk

9, in front of the coop

where’s that?

harvard square

im in belmont. is that far?

kind of
wait lemme ask my bro
if we can pick u up
he says if u r hot yes

ummmmmm . . . .

hahahaha jk whats the address?

idk ill find out and inbox u

cool

wait
how much are tix?

$65 i think, but maybe more for scalped ones
bring $100 to be safe

ok

c ya tonight!!!!!!

Trilby feels an intense internal quickening at the thought of the evening’s plan, her lack of funds, and Finn Angstrom, Linus’s older brother, whom she’d heard had gone all the way with Allison, their twenty-year-old sailing instructor, but that could have just been a rumor, you never know, although everything about the story when she heard it sounded completely plausible except for the part about the boat wax. Her planned escape seems relatively foolproof—the few times she ever babysat, not one of her young charges had ever woken up after she put them to bed—but how will she find $100 in cash to buy tickets? Trilby doesn’t need to check her purse to know she has only a five-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill crumpled up in the bottom. And obviously she can’t ask her parents.

Just then, like manna from heaven, she spots a thick wallet on the desk next to the computer. She opens it and pulls out the driver’s license. Jonathan Zane. Ha! she thinks. He was probably shopping online or purchasing porn or something and needed his credit card number and forgot he left it here. She counts the bills, all of them—with the exception of three twenty-dollar bills and four singles—bearing the likeness of Benjamin Franklin. Twelve hundred-dollar bills? Who the fuck carries around $1,200 in cash? Then she remembers Jonathan and Mia’s house in Antibes, where her family stayed two summers ago, and realizes people like Jonathan and Mia must carry around $1,200 cash without even blinking. Which means, in all likelihood, they won’t miss a bill here or there. The mother of one of her friends from St. Ann’s was bilked of nearly $47,000 before realizing that the nanny, who had access to the family bank card and pass code, had an overly generous interpretation of “take out whatever you need for groceries, cleaning supplies, and taxis.” She can’t imagine the Zanes would be any different.

She snatches a single Ben Franklin and slips it into the pocket of her pajamas. Then, reconsidering, she steals one more Ben and an Andrew Jackson, just to be safe.

•  •  •

Clover lies in
a tangle of Egyptian cotton sheets and sticky thighs, staring at a zit that has come to a head on Bucky Gardner’s back, which rises and falls with his exhalations. If it were Danny’s, she’d just pop it.

At the unintentional conjuring of her beloved, she’s pierced by a small but sharp stab of guilt and remorse, until she reminds herself that what happened last night with Bucky must be psychically processed, forever, within the context of fertility, not fidelity. Yes, technically she broke one of the more central marital vows, but she consoles herself with the thought that she did not do so in pursuit of carnal pleasure or out of boredom or with malicious intent but rather with the most lofty intentions possible. Danny has always said he’d be perfectly willing to adopt a baby, or even an older kid who was already fully formed but in need of a home, while Clover feels (admittedly selfishly, but one has to be honest with oneself) that she can only marshal the patience required to parent a child born of her own seed and womb. She wants to experience pregnancy, birth, the whole nine yards and months. Is that too much to ask?

No, she answers herself, it is not, Danny’s feelings on the matter—yes to adoption, no to donated sperm, because what kind of freak donates sperm, he asks, huh?—notwithstanding.

In a sense, if it works, her plan will embody, literally, the perfect compromise between her desires and her husband’s: The baby will be formed from her egg; it will look like a close-enough fusion of her and Danny—Bucky’s doppelganger, everyone says so—that no one will ever question its paternity; she and Danny just had sex two days earlier, so she’s covered on the temporal front; Bucky’s sperm cannot technically be considered “donated”; and yet, should the truth of the child’s genetic makeup ever come to light (she imagines bone marrow transplants, car accidents requiring blood transfusions, oh my God so many things can go wrong with a child, how do people bear it?), it shouldn’t theoretically bother a vehemently proadoption Danny that he’d been unwittingly lavishing his time and resources toward the raising of a child that did not share a single nucleic thread of his DNA.

Wasn’t that what marriage was all about anyway? Compromise? Yes, okay, so usually both parties are privy to the compromises being made, and extramarital sex, generally speaking, doesn’t exactly fall under the umbrella of reasonable give-and-take, but in this instance, she decides, ignorance is not only bliss, it’s a necessary element for the plan to succeed.

Plus, she rationalizes, in the way all people engaging in morally ambiguous activities must do—her former colleagues at Lehman (“We’re bolstering the economy . . .”); prostitutes (“My kids have to eat . . .”)—should the previous night’s carefully calculated coupling result in an actual human, it would symbolically redress the uncalculated carelessness of Clover and Bucky’s past: the almost child who was nearly theirs. Who would have today been twenty-four and most likely fucked-up in some profound, intractable way, just by virtue of illegitimate birth into the Gardner clan.