The Red Book (20 page)

Chapter 6
Afternoon

“Where the fuck have you been?” says Addison, not unloudly, when Gunner saunters into the family picnic, clutching Belmont Public Library’s sole copy of
Moby Dick
, which he will neglect to return, an hour late. She’s so used to hiding their marital discord from the outside world that the question, a tossed dagger, feels both shameful and liberating.

She and her children (
his
children, too, she thinks) are seated under the Class of ’89 tent near the edge of the Soldiers Field athletic complex at a large round table with Bennie, Bennie’s partner Katrina, and their sons Lucien and Dante, who are quietly sketching one another’s faces on Lenox rag paper with charcoal. (“To express the soul on paper is for our sons we try to encourage,” Katrina explained, both her heavy accent and her subject/verb placement often indecipherably Teutonic.) Blue-eyed Lucien, born to half-Japanese/half-American Bennie, absorbed, ironically, more of Katrina’s family’s Aryan genes, while brown-eyed Dante, born to fair-skinned Katrina, is darker, more Asian-looking; but it is undeniable that their mothers’ experiment in genetic engineering—one egg from each woman, a cup of sperm from each of their brothers—has been a rousing success: The boys definitely look like blood brothers. In fact, from certain angles, and if you overlook the differences in coloring, they could be twins.

Throughout the previous hour, as Addison fruitlessly texted Gunner (“where r u?” leading to “picnics @ soldiers field, we r here” to “hi its ur wife. just out of jail. perhaps u would like to come see me?”), she studied, with a mixture of veneration and melancholy, the generosity of spirit of Bennie’s family, its partner/parents acting so seamlessly in concert as to render the complicated footwork of the tango invisible: Bennie fetching the food while Katrina set up the boys at the table with their art supplies; Katrina accompanying Dante to the Jiffy John while Bennie stayed back at the table with Lucien; Bennie running off to fetch a new lemonade for Lucien while Katrina helped him mop up the one he spilled all over his lap. All this while Addison sat alone with her kids. Not that at this age they need help finding the bathroom or carrying their plates of food, but still, she feels Gunner’s absence, as usual, deeply. How could Bennie have had such faith in her own convictions, back in the mid-1980s, when the whole idea of a same-sex partnership seemed not only an absurd, even utopian, aspiration but also one destined to plunge said family, especially its children, into a life of endless ostracism and grief ?

And yet here are Bennie’s polite, sunny kids, creating lovely charcoal drawings, while her goth daughter sits sullenly, irritably, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else, and her sons stare down, glassy-eyed, at whatever nonsense flits across a two-by-three-inch screen.

“I was at the library,” says Gunner, with an unapologetic shrug. Not understanding that his wife’s question was more of a cri du coeur than a simple request for his whereabouts: Where. The. FUCK. Have. You.
Been
?

Trilby, clutching a half-eaten chicken leg, knowing how these things usually go down behind closed doors, slouches in her plastic chair, trying to will herself into invisibility. These days, it doesn’t seem to matter how much black she dons; on the self-eraser front, the cloak fails.

She doubts her parents are even having sex anymore. She used to hear them, when she was younger, through her bedroom wall, and while the idea of her parents getting it on grossed her out, it also usually meant that the rest of the apartment would be peaceful for a few hours afterward, or sometimes even for a day or two. Now, for a longer period of time than she would have ever thought possible, there has been only silence on the other side of her wall, while the rest of their home has been filled with more recrimination and misery than a child should ever have to endure. Boarding school, she thinks (not knowing, yet, of her grandparents’ inability to foot that bill), cannot come soon enough. She’s done with those two. Forever.

Houghton and Thatcher, the former wearing a Dead Kennedys T-shirt, the latter wearing a dark blue number with a green Gumby on it, both purchased by their mother and packed into their suitcases as public signifiers of the Hunt/Griswold family’s refusal to buy into the usual signs of their tribe—though, truth be told, two polo shirts would have probably cost less—are hiding under their calculatedly messy mops of dirty blond hair and sharing a pair of earbuds. They are pretending to be playing yet another game on Addison’s iPhone, but they are actually knee-deep into another youporn video, this one showing a black man inserting his freakishly large penis into a white woman’s vagina at the request of said woman’s husband, who makes strange little cuckoldy sighing noises behind the camera as his proxy, simultaneously copulating and staring straight into the lens, says stuff like, “That is some badass pussy you got there, brother,” while the lady in question periodically emits her own passionate
pensées
in a thick Long Island accent. “Oh my God, honey, oh my God, did you see his cock, Frank? It is
so fucking big
,” she says, followed by “Fuck me harder!” and, “Are you getting this, Frank? Is the camera turned on?” Thatcher is on the verge of giggling until Houghton kicks him under the table. This one’s too good to risk getting caught.

“The library,” repeats Addison. Her tone instantly transforms Gunner’s words from a place into an accusation.

Bennie’s and Katrina’s eyes meet and relay a telepathic message, after which Katrina whispers something to their sons, which makes them gather up their art supplies and quietly leave with a polite but distinctive
nice-to-meet-you
from each boy. “Ice cream, then, to fetch?” says Katrina to the boys, taking her leave. Addison chides herself for bickering in public. Despite Katrina’s difficult-to-unravel verbal skills, Addison was enjoying talking to her about her latest installation at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, a ten-foot-tall Medusa of giant clitorises stretching skyward, as well as about the public school system in Berkeley where (she was surprised to learn, considering the family’s means) Lucien and Dante have been happily ensconced since kindergarten.

“Jesus, Ad, what’s the big deal?”

She considers, for a brief second, keeping her mouth shut, but it suddenly feels too late for her usual silent brooding. “What’s the big deal? What’s the
big deal
?” Bennie, in whom she’s just confided, not three hours earlier, the width of her marital rift, silently urges Addison on with tiny isometric movements of the sinew in her neck and eyebrows. (“If you’re that miserable, Ad,” she’d said, “you need to be explicit with him about what it is he’s not providing in the way of emotional support.”) “The big deal, Gunner, is that, Jesus Christ, I just spent the night in jail! Jail, okay? As in one of the worst fucking places in the greater metropolitan Boston area where I might have spent an evening, even if they hadn’t put me on suicide watch, which, by the way, they did, which meant I slept in shackles, yes, shackles! Not that you even thought to ask how my night was. And when I texted you at the library—where I was more than a bit shocked to hear you’d escaped, considering your wife was
in jail
when you chose to go, leaving our kids with poor Jane, who already had a house full of people and let’s not forget a
dead mother
to mourn—to tell you that Bennie here”—she motions to Bennie, and Bennie raises her hand slightly, in a noncommittal greeting of hello—“had paid my fine—
my one-hundred-thousand-dollar fine
—you replied, and I quote, ‘cool.’ That’s it. Just
c
-
o
-
o
-
l
, as if I’d just texted you, I don’t know, that I was bringing burritos home for dinner. Tasty Mexican food for dinner, now that deserves a one-word response. Wife’s outrageous fines paid by old friend who
sprung her from jail
, where she was chained and deprived of even her tampons—although God knows how one would actually hang oneself with a tampon—that deserves something a little more sweeping, don’t you think? I mean, I’m not the writer, and far be it from me to put words in your mouth, but maybe a ‘holy shit, Ad, that’s amazing, can’t wait to see you!’ or, who knows, maybe you could have gone all out and written ‘I love you. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.’ Or maybe, just maybe, you could have
picked up the fucking phone
and called me!”

“But I was in the library.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t use a cell phone in a library.”

Bennie’s face is unable to contain its shock at what she assumes is Gunner’s willful ignorance. Or is it actual ignorance?

Addison doesn’t even focus on such questions anymore. She stopped trying to figure out the motivations behind Gunner’s lack of a gray scale years ago. “Well, here’s an idea,
honey
.” The acidity of the sweet word on her tongue spews forth like snake venom. “Next time you happen to be in the library? And your wife texts you to say her old friend sprang her from jail? Why don’t you try
WALKING OUTSIDE TO GIVE HER A FUCKING CALL, huh
?”

Houghton and Thatcher have pressed “pause” on their iPhone sex video. Trilby cannot take it a minute longer. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, where, overcome by the uric stink and piles of Jiffy John turds, she adds slimy chunks of her regurgitated chicken into the bounteous hole.

“I’m out of here,” Gunner says. And with that, he turns to leave.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Addison calls after him.

“That’s okay, Ad. Let him go,” says Bennie.

Luckily, the noise of idle chatter in the tent has drowned out most of this angry exchange. Only a few of the people seated at surrounding tables have stopped gnawing on their chicken bones long enough to have borne witness to the short spectacle of marital combustion.

Gunner hears his wife’s question, but he pretends not to, and anyway he is too furious at her for withholding sex from him for over a year now to answer.

•  •  •

Jane and Clover
are standing on the perimeter of the moon bounce, watching Sophie careen from wall to wall, her pigtails contrails. “She’s having more fun than a girl should ever be allowed to have,” Clover shouts over the din of the compressor, wondering how all those children manage to avoid knocking out one another’s teeth. Moon bounces were not a part of her childhood. Neither were school picnics, Girl Scout cookies, ballet lessons, or curfews. She wonders whether raising a child will be as easy to learn on the fly as trading mortgage-backed securities, or will parenthood be more of a continual stumbling around in the dark without ever locating the light switch, like arriving at Harvard after having been homeschooled on a commune? Probably the latter, she thinks, with the hindsight of having seen so many of her friends—even those with proper wellsprings of exposure to decent parenting upon which to draw—plunge into that moonless pond only to emerge several hundred dawns later on the opposite bank, shell-shocked, muddy, and panting.

“I know,” says Jane, “it’s almost criminal that level of happiness.” She recalls, with the type of vividness triggered by life-changing events, the thump and torque of the jump rope Harold gave her in Saigon; the joy of jumping in a safe place. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a moon bounce for grown-ups?”

Clover laughs. “It’s called sex, Jane.” The words burst out of her before her internal scold can contain them. She’s dying to tell someone about last night’s adventure, but if her ruse is to work, not a soul other than herself can know. She vows to take the information to her grave. But maybe, she reconsiders, she should tell
someone
, in case she should die of a brain aneurysm or in a tragic car accident, and then one day her kid gets a compound tibia fracture on a moon bounce and needs a transfusion of O-negative blood, or, wait, what type of blood does she have anyway? It’s one of those things she knows she should know, but doesn’t. Pediatrician appointments weren’t a part of her childhood either, nor were vaccinations or dentists, and if she ever had a birth certificate, which she sincerely doubts (having been born at home in her parents’ bed), it most likely was burned in the commune’s last fire. What about Danny? She must have a copy of the results of their marital blood test somewhere in her files. She should ask Bucky if he knows his blood type. She wonders how one goes about asking an old boyfriend from whom one secretly stole sperm to reveal that kind of information in an offhand manner. It’s not like you can easily segue from “What’s your sign?” to “So, are you Rh-negative or -positive?”

“Ah yes, sex,” Jane says, mock-wistfully. “Remind me. What’s that again?” It’s been months since the errant e-mail, since she’s allowed Bruno to touch her. In her most honest moments, she misses it and him—or at least what they used to have, before her mother’s illness, before he succumbed to his baser desires—profoundly.

Her sexual history has been plagued with regret: not doing it when she should have, doing it when she shouldn’t, missing key opportunities for bliss when they arose. Anders, her college boyfriend, waited patiently for her to step off the precipice of virginity, until he could wait no longer. She was so angry at herself for sticking to some moral code she could no longer defend, she wound up losing it two weeks later in the Spee Club bathroom, to some jerk named Lars she’d met at the pajama party and never spoke to again.

Even the night before Hervé left for Afghanistan was tarnished with regret. She’d hired a babysitter for Sophie, and the two of them had gone out for dinner at their favorite restaurant on the rue Vieille du Temple, but the wait for a table had lasted well over an hour, despite the hostess insisting they’d be seated toute de suite. So they wound up downing three kirs each before sitting down, and then it took another hour for her
canard au raisin
to arrive, during which she and Hervé consumed an entire bottle of pinot noir and began to argue, in their agitated, famished state, about the relative merits and safety of his trip. “You’re a father now!” Jane had said. “You have to think about these things.” Afterward, they stumbled home down the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, too angry, tired, and soused to get it on. It was the echo of this failure that first pierced her, with vivid intensity, when she heard he’d been killed, how she’d neglected to give her husband a proper, loving send-off.