The Red Book (18 page)

“As a whistle. Promise.”

So Bucky enters her, for the second time in twelve hours, with the one part of him that does not seem to have aged at all, moving slowly at first, then building to a rhythmic, breathtaking crescendo. Clover grabs onto his gluteal muscles, her mind focusing on the word
procreation
, like a mantra, while her body heads in another direction altogether. No, she chides herself, stop relishing the pleasure! This is not adultery. It’s childery.

But her flesh has its own agenda.

All the books on infertility say it’s better if the female climaxes, she reminds herself, rationalizing for the umpteenth time as Bucky reaches down between her legs until she’s moaning, writhing, gasping with endorphin-soaked ecstasy. They all say the uterine contractions help guide the sperm where they need to go. They all . . . they all . . . they all say . . . But she can’t finish the thought. Her mind has been relegated to the fringes of Cloverdom, shunted aside by forces several thousand tons more potent.

Fifteen minutes later, alone in the shower and plagued with guilt over the continuing rushes of pleasure still pulsing within, she scrubs the soapy washcloth over her limbs, torso, and face with the vigor of an eraser on a chalkboard, convincing herself that by surrendering to her body’s desires, by allowing it that perfect swan dive of release, she was simply engaging in her first act as a good mother: giving her child, whom she prays now begins life’s journey inside her, its best chance at survival.

•  •  •

Mia wakes up
next to Jonathan and immediately tells him about Gunner’s outburst at the police station. “ ‘Those fucking Jews,’ ” she whispers, so as not to wake up Zoe. “Can you believe it? He said, ‘Those fucking Jews,’ even though technically he should have been cursing out his parents’ hedge fund manager for not doing due diligence on Madoff.” Her back feels stiff from sleeping on Jane’s air mattress. Their Kluft mattress at home, made with a blend of cashmere, silk, wool, horsehair, organic cotton, and all-natural latex, was an indulgence, she thinks, well worth the forty-four grand.
We spend a third of our lives sleeping
, she’d said, when Jonathan laughed at the price tag.
How ’bout if we spend one quarter of our lives sleeping and find a bed half as expensive?
he’d replied, handing over his black AmEx to the mattress vendor with a defeated smile and a what-can-you-do shrug.

“Oh, Mia,” he now says, the whisperer of reason as usual, “I mean, as far as Madoff’s concerned, he’s just saying what everyone else is thinking. Even I think
that fucking Jew
when I hear his name—more because he gives us all a bad name, but still. Cut Gunner some slack. His family just lost their entire nest egg. Or at least what they assumed was their nest egg. His wife’s in
jail
. He’s allowed a politically incorrect epithet or two.”

“He’s a dickhead.” She hears Zoe stirring in the Pack ’n Play and lowers her voice back down again. “No, worse. He’s an entitled, anti-Semitic dickhead.”

“I’m not saying he’s not an entitled, anti-Semitic dickhead. In many ways he is. In other ways he isn’t. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for him—”

“Oh, please. You have a soft spot for everyone.” Almost immediately, she regrets the tone of her voice. When did I become this angry? she wonders. This uncharitable? I used to be able to see the good in everyone.

Jonathan, hearing the same tone, raises his left eyebrow, a trick he uses often and to excellent effect both at home and on his film sets. Without uttering a word, he is able not only to point out the fallacy or incivility of the insult/tired truism/complaint one has muttered, but also to urge its mutterer toward a more Zen-like acceptance of human frailty and fallibility.

“Sorry,” Mia says, chastened, grateful, once more, for having married a mensch, as her mother always called him. “Go on.”

“No, I’m just saying, I mean, come on. Here’s a guy who’s been ‘working’ ”—Jonathan forms air quotes with his fingers—“on the same frigging novel for ten whole years, and yet not even Addison has read a page, right?”

“Right.”

“So for all we know, he hasn’t tapped out a bloody word in
years
.”

“Okay, so?”

“So on one hand, that’s the laziest fucking thing in the world. On the other, I mean, come on, that’s
got
to be painful. Soul crushing. He lost a decade of the normally most productive, satisfying years of one’s life, and now, at the age of, what is he, forty-two?”

“Forty-three, I think. He was one of those guys who had to take an extra year of prep school to get into college.”

“Is that even allowed?”

“Apparently, yes. Not only is it allowed, it happens all the time. In Gunner’s case, I think the admissions director at Yale, where there’s an entire Griswold wing of some science or physics building, I can’t remember, told his father that they’d be happy to accept him if he could just spend an extra year bringing his grades up from Cs to B+s. Half the kids I met at Harvard with both buildings named after them and unimpressive report cards had to repeat their senior year at those Grotony schools—they used to call it something else, PG, I think, anyway it doesn’t matter—in order to reserve a future slot that might have gone to a more qualified, harder-working, building-less student.”

“Okay, so fine. He’s forty-three. And he stole a spot at Yale from some poor tuba-playing math genius from Dubuque, and he’s always gotten exactly what he wanted: the hip loft in Williamsburg, the beautiful wife—”

“She’s a piece of work, too.”

“I’m not saying she isn’t.” Jonathan is growing frustrated, she can tell. Sometimes his goodwill toward mankind can be its own form of torture, if only because she ends up feeling like such a petty schmuck by comparison. People are always telling her what a great husband she has, but sometimes she wonders whether their commentary is less about his greatness than about her lack thereof. One time, at the fall cocktail party at her kids’ school, she overheard one mother say to another, both of them glancing at her still-handsome saint of a husband, “I mean, really, how the hell did
she
land
him
?,” not realizing that the “she” in question was within earshot, trying to ease her husband’s existential angst over bicycle locks. (“It just makes me so sad,” he’d said. “Every single time I lock my bike to a pole I’m thinking, why? Why must we live in a world of bicycle thievery?”) “I’m just saying Addison fits the image Gunner probably pictured for himself when he looked up
wife
in his mind’s eye’s dictionary. I’m just saying, I mean, hell, the guy’s never had to worry about working a day in his life, and now, suddenly, he has nothing. Have some pity.”

The phrase
never had to worry about working a day in his life
touches a raw nerve in Mia. “He has the loft his parents bought for them,” she says sharply. “He can sell it. I hear Williamsburg real estate is booming, even in this shitty climate.”

“Okay, fine, but then where do they live?”

“They rent.”

“And what exactly does he do to pay the rent after he uses up the proceeds from the sale of his apartment?”

“I don’t know, Jonathan. He finds a job, like everyone else. Or Addison finds a job.” What kind of job would she find, she wonders, if ever she were forced to do so? She immediately shoos the terrifying thought out of her mind.

The spike in her tone wakes the baby, whom Jonathan, being Jonathan, swoops up from the Pack ’n Play and cradles in his arms. “Oh, come on, Mia! You should know better than most that that’s easier said than done. Neither of them have ever held an actual nine-to-five job in their lives. Where are the diapers?”

“In my suitcase.”

Jonathan finds the diaper-changing supplies and gets to work, an act that, when witnessed by Mia’s girlfriends, causes either their jaws to drop or their husbands’ ribs to get surreptitiously poked.

Mia, however, is focused on Jonathan’s pre-diaper-query statements. “I should know ‘better than most’? What’s
that
supposed to mean?” She wishes she could raise a single eyebrow, but her facial muscles, like her job-seeking muscles, are not built that way.

“Nothing, forget I even said it.” He leans over to hand her the baby. “Left or right?”

Mia feels her breasts, both of them equally engorged. “It doesn’t matter. Right I guess.”

Jonathan flips the baby around in his arms and places her under the crook of Mia’s right arm. She knows she should be grateful for this, for him, for everything she has in such abundance, she
knows
. But she can’t help herself. “Are you saying I wouldn’t be able to find a job if I had to? Is that what you’re saying?” Of course that’s what he’s saying, she thinks. And she can’t really blame him, but she does.

“No, of course not.”

“Then what
are
you saying?”

“Let’s just drop it, please. I’m sorry I even brought it up. Of course you could find a job, if you had to. And I should never have implied otherwise.” Jonathan, whose mother was so quick to anger that he lived on edge for each of the eighteen years he was sentenced to her care, has such an aversion to conflict that Mia has sometimes witnessed him taking the blame for crimes he didn’t commit—a spilled soda, a minor fender bender, the submerging of their son Eli’s iPhone into the swimming pool—just to keep the peace. This has served him extraordinarily well on set. As a joke, his crew once bought him a director’s chair that said
MY BAD
, his signature phrase, in the place of his name. But it could make living with him a bit of a challenge. Sometimes, Mia once screamed at him, you just
need
a good fight. To which, maddeningly, he agreed.

“Our assets are safe, right?” Mia says, shoving her nipple into Zoe’s eager mouth. She is both embarrassed by how little she knows about their financial situation and relieved she doesn’t have to think about it: a fair trade-off, she thinks, staring down at Zoe’s beatific expression, for everything she does for the family.

“Relatively, yes,” said Jonathan, rifling through his suitcase for an item he can’t seem to find.

“Relatively?” She rubs the thumb of her right hand over the soft flesh of Zoe’s knuckles. “Relative to what? To whom?”

“Well, in case you haven’t heard,” he says with a smile, “there’s a bit of a recession going on right now. Have you seen my running shorts?” Though he’s managed, even at his age, to keep the normal midlife paunch at bay, Jonathan’s cholesterol numbers were not up to snuff at his last checkup. His doctor told him if he didn’t add a few hours a week of aerobic exercise, he was putting his arteries at risk.

“Yes, you left them on our bed when we were packing. I put them in my suitcase. Check under the T-shirts.”

“What would I do without you?” he says, finding them, slipping them on.

“You’d manage,” says Mia. The more salient question, she thinks, is what would she do without him? “So how bad have we been hit?” she asks. “By the recession, I mean.”

“You are not to even think about these things,” he says, kissing her on the forehead. “We’re fine, don’t worry. I’m this close”—he holds his thumb and forefinger up, less than an inch apart—“to getting
Remembering Richard
financed.”
Remembering Richard
, Jonathan’s latest script, takes place in New York, in the hours after 9/11, when a young artist, Franny, who’s engaged to be married, hears that her old boyfriend Richard—the inspiration for the series of paintings she is coincidentally hanging for her first big show—was on the plane that hit the North Tower. Grief stricken over this second loss of her ex (she lost him first to heroin), she falls, over the course of the next twenty-four hours, into the arms of Stefan, the happily married but painfully empathic gallery owner, whose wife and kids are stranded in the south of France until the FAA lifts its ban on incoming flights and whose older, wiser heart bleeds for the poor, distraught Franny after he overhears her talking on the phone with her normally patient fiancé, whom he can tell, without even hearing his side of the conversation, has had just about enough of Franny’s complicated feelings for Richard.

It’s a beautiful love story, his best to date, but because Franny gets married to her intended and Stefan stays with his wife, it’s also so unlike his other scripts, he’s been having a hard time finding financing, especially in the new climate of austerity. Sony said they’d do it if he could change the script to make Stefan’s wife a heartless bitch and Franny’s fiancé a cheating fool. Fox said they’d be happy to look at it again if Stefan weren’t already married, and Franny were engaged to be married to a heroin-addicted Richard instead of her fiancé. New Line said the audience would be confused by the fact that Franny’s paintings were expressions of love for her ex rather than for her husband-to-be. Miramax felt it would only work if Stefan were a widower.

But Jonathan has remained unusually adamant, for Jonathan, about keeping the plot as is: messy, loose ended, irrational. “Fuck these Prada-clad twenty-five-year-olds and their ridiculous script notes,” she heard him say to Shari, his producing partner, one night from his home office. “They haven’t lived long enough to understand that sometimes shit just
happens.
That even ‘good’ people are fallible.”

“Well, what if
Remembering Richard
doesn’t get made?” Mia now asks. Jonathan has built an entire career—hell, an entire life!—on happy endings. She admires him for wanting to knock down some fences, but perhaps a national housing crisis might not be the most judicious time in which to start taking an axe to the white picket ones.

“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” says Jonathan. “Please don’t worry, sweetheart, really. We’re fine.” He laces up his sneakers, climbs the basement stairs, and opens the door, quietly, so as not to wake the rest of the house. “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes, and I’ll pick up some chocolate chips and bananas on the way back, if I can find them, so we can make pancakes for the gang,” he whispers from the doorframe, before turning around and bumping into an exotic-looking creature clad in black pajamas. “Oh, sorry Trilby,” he says. “I didn’t see you.”