The Red Book (3 page)

“Nothing?” says Gunner.

“Not a word,” says Addison.

“So did you accept or ignore?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I mean, do I really want to read, ‘Bennie Watanabe is drinking coffee’ or ‘Bennie Watanabe is taking her daughter to school’ or ‘Bennie Watanabe just cashed in the remainder of her Google stock, and now she has more money than you, Warren Buffett, and God combined, so suck it’?” She honks the horn anew, motioning wildly and fruitlessly to the driver in front of her. “Jesus, go through! Go through! We’re going to be late for the—”

“The
luau
?” Gunner laughs. He’d agreed to come this weekend, but only after Addison had pointed out that she’d attended his twentieth reunion the prior year without whimper or complaint. In fact, she’d continued, unable to stop herself, she’d even gone onto the Yale Web site herself, using Gunner’s login, and made all the reservations and purchased the tickets for him. “I do
everything
for this family,” she’d mumbled under her breath, “so just do this one fucking thing for me,” but either Gunner didn’t hear this last part, or he decided not to take the bait.

Gunner’s stance on all things domestic has remained somewhat militant since Addison broached the idea of having children with him when they were still, according to Gunner, too young to spawn. He wanted the chance to write unencumbered for a decade or so, until they were into their mid-thirties; to have the freedom to sleep late and work whenever the muse struck. Addison tried explaining to him that since her art was gynocentric, she needed to experience childbirth and motherhood in order to be fully conversant in her field. More saliently (she showed him a chart of female fertility, with its gradual downward slope between eighteen and thirty-five, after which the line made a sudden nosedive toward zero), if they were going to have children, she ideally had to fit it in before she turned thirty-five.

“Fine,” Gunner said. “You want kids now, you deal with their mess.” He was the eldest of five. He knew from whence he spoke. Addison was an only child who’d never lacked for the kind of pocket change that drives adolescent girls to babysit.

So while Gunner sat frozen in front of his computer, searching for his muse, Addison produced a series of squalling Griswolds in rapid succession, taking on the full responsibility, as preordained, for their care. She fed them, first from herself, then from a jar, then off a plate. She changed their diapers and taught them, with varying degrees of success and trauma, to use a potty. She handled the grocery shopping and the doctor visits and the straightening of toys and the baths. She did the dishes and the laundry and the bills, she read them their bedtime stories. She dealt with school forms and playdates and Halloween costumes and sneakers and Valentine’s cards and birthday parties and fingernails and snow boots and vomit. Oh the vomit! How had she never realized how much vomit three small humans could produce over the course of their childhood?

In between all this, she squeezed in time to paint, and she continued to answer the question “What do you do?” with “I’m an artist,” even though personal assistant or short-order cook would have been more accurate. Then one day, just after her thirty-fifth birthday, she was stooping to pick up her dog’s poop, another chore from which Gunner recused himself, when she spotted a flyer advertising the solo show of a girl from her childhood building who’d still been in diapers when Addison was in middle school. It suddenly struck her, like an anvil to the skull, that a whole decade had passed without so much as an exhibition or a sale or even a group show at one of the lesser homespun galleries in her neighborhood. So she pulled Gunner aside and said, “Enough.” He was now officially the age at which he’d originally said he wanted to have kids, so she expected his equal participation as a line worker in the family factory. But by then Gunner had grown so used to the status quo, his domestic muscles had atrophied.

“Outsource it,” he said. “I’m on the brink of something great.”

He was able to suggest this solution, when neither spouse was bringing in money, because both he and Addison were the beneficiaries of small trust funds left to them by their grandparents. Gunner’s parents also paid both for the children’s tuition at St. Ann’s and for their North 3rd Street loft, which was purchased in their name—in cash and in full—back in 1995 when the then-young couple decided to trade up from their one-bedroom in Alphabet City to 3,400 square feet of raw space in the then up-and-coming but still transitional neighborhood in Brooklyn when Addison was pregnant with Trilby. “A great investment,” Gunner’s father had declared, his voice echoing off the walls as he placed his hand firmly on the sturdy column supporting what would become his son and daughter-in-law’s living room, a statement that both time and the Williamsburg real estate market had proven prescient. Their $250,000 loft was now worth, well, who knew with this crazy market? But before the collapse, the apartment below theirs, which was slightly smaller and didn’t have a balcony, sold for $2.1 million.

So Addison hired more help. The housekeeper started coming in three times a week. A college kid was employed to help with after-school pickups and children’s activities. Groceries were purchased online and delivered straight into their kitchen. A tutor was located to help Trilby with her dyslexia and Houghton with his math. A therapist was hired for the many months it took to help Thatcher work through his night terrors, and a dog walker showed up every day at midday. But still Addison felt frustrated by Gunner’s lack of participation on the home front. “Gunner, please,” she said. “What about if you cook dinner, and I’ll clean the dishes? You were always a much better cook than me anyway. Or maybe you could take the kids to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Or to a birthday party now and then. Or I could deal with the pediatrician and you could do the dentist. You get the better deal there, trust me, because they only have to go to the dentist twice a year.”

But Gunner held his ground. “My parents never took me to the doctor,” he said. “The nanny did.”

“That’s not the point,” said Addison.

“Please, Ad, I’m on the verge of a significant breakthrough in my work.”

“What about my work, huh? What about my breakthroughs?”

“Nothing’s keeping you from making art but you,” said Gunner. A strange sentiment coming from a stalled writer, but also—Addison was loath to admit—partially true. Ever since Thatcher had entered kindergarten, she had five to six hours a day during which she could have chosen to ignore the ambient noise in her head, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t.

And try as she might, both alone and with the Jungian, she could not figure out why. “I’m so angry at my husband!” she’d yell from the couch. Or, “Maybe I’m too stupid to figure out what I want to say with my work. I often wonder if every branch of my family tree hadn’t all gone to Harvard whether I would have even been admitted.” Or, “Most of the artists who succeed have some sort of gimmick. Keith Haring with his cartoon babies. Matthew Barney with his Cremaster Cycle. I need a gimmick. Or a penis. Or whatever.” Or, “Fuck it. Maybe I should just throw in the towel and get a normal job like everyone else.”

This last part she added in for the benefit of her shrink, so he would think his patient was making progress—yeah, right, she thought as she said it, like anyone would ever hire me to do a regular job—but for several weeks afterward she dreamt she was a graphic designer working in a cool glass and steel office in SoHo, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and the leather jacket Bennie had picked out for her at that thrift shop just off Bow Street near Adams House. She would wake up from these dreams with intense longing.

“It’s not the luau I care about, sweetheart.” She pronounces
sweetheart
harshly, like an epithet. “It’s the
people
at the luau. My old friends from college. The ones I haven’t seen in twenty years?”

“Oh, please, Ad,” says Gunner, laughing. “Stop being such a drama queen. You see them all the time.”

“I’m not just talking about Clover and the gang.” Aside from the random dinner in the city with Clover once or twice a year, Addison, Clover, and their other two roommates, Mia and Jane, have been making a retreat, every year for the past ten, to Clover’s weekend house in East Hampton, from which Addison always comes back to the city both refreshed from the multiple massages, mani/pedis, and yoga classes Clover insists on providing gratis but also agitated, in some unnamable way, by being waited upon so overtly. At the Hunt summer house in Deer Isle, Maine, in the compound that’s been in Addison’s family for six generations, most of the help disappeared after her father’s death, and the woman who stayed on made herself scarce whenever the family was around. Gunner’s family’s retreat on Block Island, which his great-grandfather established in 1896, still employs a few caretakers and cooks, whose salaries are paid out of the family trust, but they are the kind of help who come and go undetected, save for the freshly folded towels stacked in the linen closet or the magical disappearance of the grit and sand from the bottom of the bathtub or the freshly baked blueberry muffins left to cool on a wire rack every morning at dawn. The idea of an eager fleet of young Filipinas arriving at 10
A.M.
each day to file and buff everyone’s nails, to rub oils into their skin, to wax their pubic hairs so
openly
, so
interactively
, is anathema to the way Addison was taught the help should help.

But Clover, who grew up several inches below the poverty line, could be forgiven for not understanding such nuances and for wanting to make grand shows of largesse. She’d had an image in her head of what extreme wealth looked like, she once told Addison, born of watching TV shows such as
Dallas
and
Dynasty
on the sly as a child—on sleepovers where the parents allowed TVs or, soundless, in front of the appliance store in Novato. And she’d decided she wanted every glittery drop of it, shoulder pads and all.

“There are at least thirty or forty people I was really close to, yes, including Bennie, if she decides to come,” continues Addison, “most of whom I haven’t seen since we all left Cambridge right after Bush
Senior
took office. That’s a long time ago, Guns. The Berlin Wall was still up. I’m looking forward to this weekend, so let’s drop the cynicism, okay?”

The driver in front of her hesitates, and she misses the light once more. “
Move the fuck out of the way!
” she screams.
“What is WRONG with you people?”

“Mom, Jesus, chill,” says Trilby, behind bangs she recently dyed pink. “It’s a friggin’ luau.” She’d wanted to stay back in Williamsburg to go to a horrorcore rap show on Saturday night, but Addison had insisted she come with the family. “I don’t care if Dismembered Fetus is playing at Pete’s Candy Store, you’re coming with us, and that’s final,” she’d shouted at her daughter, sounding so much like her own mother that time momentarily collapsed on itself—it had been doing that a lot lately—although really,
horrorcore
? At least the Dead shows that accompanied her own years of teenage angst and rebellion were not actually about Death with a capital
D
but rather about Peace and Love and, okay, yes, altered states of consciousness, but the good kind.

As far as she could tell, having done some primitive research online after her daughter became infatuated with the genre—her firstborn daughter! who used to cry and bury her head in her blankie whenever the Wicked Witch appeared on
The Wizard of Oz
!—horrorcore was, at its horrible core, a celebration of murder, rape, Satan, mutilation, and cannibalism, replete with loud, atonal music and a dash of crystal meth. Hence Addison’s insistence that Trilby apply to St. Paul’s, her and Gunner’s alma mater. At least there, she figures, the type of drugs she’ll ingest will expand her mind instead of rotting her teeth.

“Trilby, please. I don’t need your snarky commentary right now, okay?” She glances into the rearview mirror to catch her daughter’s kohl-outlined eyes, and the two stare at one another with mutual incredulity. In the row of seats behind Trilby’s, she notices that Thatcher has fallen asleep on Houghton’s lap, while Houghton is using his younger brother’s head to prop up Addison’s iPhone. “Houghton, don’t drain the battery too much longer, pumpkin, okay? We might need it.”

“Five more minutes?” he asks.

She and Houghton have always had an uncomplicated, easy rapport, the kind she’d always assumed she’d have with her daughters. But with Trilby playing the goth, and Thatcher’s anxiety and innate shyness requiring medication, of late, to help him sleep, stay in school, and navigate even the most banal social interactions, Addison is left with just one child who even remotely resembled the type of offspring she’d imagined pre-them. “Sure, five more minutes, my sweet. What are you playing?”

“Mayhem,” he says, shooting a Nazi zombie in the heart.

“It’s not one of those shooting games, is it?”

“It’s educational, about World War II,” says her son, not wanting to lie to his mother outright.

That’s when she spots it, just as the light turns yellow: a hole in the traffic. She guns the engine, as the light turns red—cue the siren—and plows through.

A
RCHIBALD
B
UCKNELL
G
ARDNER
IV.
Home Address:
450 Morgan Place, Oyster Bay, NY 11771 (516-672-8976).

A
RABELLA
D
EBEVOISE
G
ARDNER.
Home Address:
450 Morgan Place, Oyster Bay, NY 11771 (516-672-8976).
E-mail:
arabella [email protected].
Spouse/Partner
: Archibald Bucknell Gardner IV (B.A., Harvard ’89; M.B.A., ibid. ’92).
Spouse/Partner Occupation
: CEO, Gardner Industries, Inc.
Children:
Archibald Bucknell V, 1994; Eloise Mason, 1996; Caroline Pearce, 1999; Charles Case, 2001.

Bucky and I will be celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary this spring. We live in Oyster Bay with our four children. I serve on the board of their school.