A Circle of Wives (30 page)

“No, I had him trained. What, did he do that to you? He knew he could get away with it, then. I made sure he understood that everything had a place.”

“Right, that’s my rule, too,” I say, and Deborah lifts her wineglass in a mock toast. “But I could never get him to follow it.” I say.

Two women, complaining about their man.

“You’ll be interested to hear that in the . . . other . . . household, John was the neat one,” Deborah says. She smiles again, but this smile has anger in it. “He told me that MJ was impossible as a housekeeper, impossible in the kitchen, leaving pots and pans and dirty saucepans in the sink. So he took over the housekeeping. Can you believe that? I wonder how that creature is doing without her personal maid service.”

“At the reception, all she could talk about was tending to her garden,” I say.

“Yes,” says Deborah, but curtly. “Well, she’ll get to keep her damn garden. And house too.”

I don’t respond. I don’t know what arrangements have been made between the two of them, and I don’t care to know. Deborah doesn’t strike me as either a generous or merciful woman. As a judge she would have been a hanging judge and would have adjudicated to the strict letter of the law. Yet MJ, that mess of a woman, apparently got something out of her. Squeezed a drop of benevolence out of that stony heart.

Deborah breaks the silence with a strange question. “Tell me, how did you meet John?” she asks. She pauses, and then says, “He never told me. He refused. Which was unusual.”

“Through the hospital,” I say. I’m pleased that John refused to share this part of our lives with her. And I’m not sure I want to, either.

“You won’t give me any more than that?” she asks, and I am surprised by the pleading in her voice. She has put her wineglass down, still half full, and there is a plaintive look on her face. Is this some sort of trick? But what advantage could she have tricking me into telling my love story?

“No one has ever asked,” I say. This is true. To my friends, “I met a guy” had sufficed, largely because the news had so astounded them that they then pestered me with questions about John himself rather than the details of our courtship. They were overjoyed, too. My dearest friends, who had never quite accepted that I was happy on my own.

I take a deep breath. “A new patient came in, a ten-year-old boy who’d been born with a lump on his forehead. They determined it was a benign mass at birth, and the family didn’t have insurance for what was considered elective surgery, so the boy just lived with it. I saw pictures. It wasn’t that noticeable when he was very young. Or when he wore his hair in bangs later on. But by the time the boy was nine, other lumps—they were tumors, to be precise—began growing all over his face. They brought him to me, to ensure these tumors really were benign. In fact they were hemangiomas,
benign tumors of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels. Since they were beginning to interfere with the boy’s functioning—his breathing and his eyesight—the insurance would now cover removing them. He had the surgery. But the poor boy was horribly disfigured due to a careless surgeon.

“I began calling around for a plastic surgeon who might do some pro bono work for this boy. I’d heard of John’s clinic, of course. It’s well known in medical circles, especially among pediatric specialists. I put in a call, got the forms, and began the tedious process of filling them out and documenting the case with photos and lab reports. Then, a colleague told me that John was actually here at UCLA on an adjunct professorship teaching a seminar on facial reconstruction after burn trauma. So I emailed him directly, and surprisingly, he got right back to me. And since he was already in the hospital, agreed to come by my office that day.”

“What was your first impression?” asks Deborah. “I’m curious.”

“He had clearly once been handsome, but I remember thinking that he was going to seed: overweight, and with a red face. I immediately thought of hypertension, or vasculitis, or perhaps alcoholism. But the redness subsided after a few minutes and I realized he had been blushing. A man of sixty, blushing to meet me!

“I had pulled the patient’s file, and we went over the photos together, and right away he said he could help this boy. No hesitation. We scheduled the surgery. The boy and his family were terribly nervous, and for some reason, so was I. There seemed to be a lot riding on the outcome of this operation. I wanted it to be successful. I
needed
it to be successful. I was invested.

“In the meantime, we exchanged a series of businesslike emails. Yet I understood it was a courtship of a kind. He called me several times to discuss the techniques he was planning to use—taking skin from the boy’s thigh and grafting it onto his face over the scars, rebuilding the shape of the face with borrowed cartilage. At one point I asked him if I could observe the procedure. He warned me it would take a long time—six to eight hours—but I was welcome to stay for as much of it as I liked. I was rapt during the whole thing. I positioned myself in the observation room above the operating theatre in such a way that I could see John’s hands.

“Whatever slovenly habits he had in civilian life, none of this passed the threshold to the OR. He was gentle and delicate. I stayed for seven and a half hours. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been until John completed the last suture, and turned to his team members and gave a triumphant thumbs-up. Then he looked up at the observation room, where I was getting ready to leave, and pointed to himself, then to me, then made a drinking motion. I nodded.

“In the waiting room I still felt tense. I was feeling . . . how can I describe it? Like I was about to see my beloved after a long absence. I remember a quotation my father recited when he saw my mother enter the room, a kind of inside joke between them. ‘Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?’
My beloved
, he’d exclaim.

“Those are the words that came to mind when he finally approached me, his hair still slick from his shower. I saw his face was crimson again. Another blush, deeper than the first. He said, and it amazed me how close our thoughts had been. ‘I had to succeed on this one. ‘I had to win the hand of the princess in her tower.’ No other explanation. We didn’t go for a drink. We went straight to my place with very little more discussion.”

Deborah doesn’t say anything. I hadn’t looked at her while I was speaking, and turning to her now, I’m surprised to see that her eyes are closed. She is leaning against the back of the chair, her hands clutching the ends of the armrests, and that’s what tells me that she isn’t asleep—the tendons showing white from stress on the backs of her hands.

59
MJ

I
’
M FEELING BAD, THAT BAD
feeling again. The very bad one. I just can’t shake it.

I haven’t felt like this in more than twenty-eight years. When I’d just given birth for the second time, and was breastfeeding and changing diapers in the middle of the night while caring for a hyperactive toddler during the day. My husband was off at the Odditorium, and doing extra shifts on construction sites whenever he could get the work. We needed the money. The suffocation of the soul. That shortness of breath. That heavy feeling, as though some beast was sitting on my chest. The urge to disappear, to get on the road and
go
was ultimately strong enough to make me move across the country.

Of course some of it was sleep deprivation. And part of it was utter, brutal boredom. Most of my friends were in similar situations, so we’d get together with our babies at the playground, or for coffee at someone’s house, and that eased the feeling somewhat. I understood back then why certain women turn on their children. The urge to smack the little whining behind, to direct a blow to the head, anything to stop the noise and the demands.

I made the mistake of telling some of this to my husband. It was after one of the night feedings, I was exhausted and murderous and could have killed them all while they slept, my small family; I had a fantasy of turning on the gas and leaving the apartment. That scared me enough to wake up my husband. What I said was, “I’m having some trouble with the kids.”

He was tired himself, spent because of his job, but he tried to listen, and heard enough to be alarmed, because in the morning he talked me into phoning one of Gatlinburg’s five therapists. The therapist’s advice—or rather, lecture—was that everyone went through this when their children were young, and how I needed to basically put up and shut up and be thankful I had healthy kids.

I nodded, but my heart was growing murderous again. I left the office and drove to the nearest gas station, bought a map of the country, and began plotting my escape. That map saved me in the months it took to steel my nerves and gather resources for the trip. I put aside a little out of the paychecks every week, in a special account in my name only. I got myself a credit card. I used a magic marker to chart my way on the map from Tennessee to LA. I envisioned freedom.

Without that map to inspire me, I’d likely be in some female penitentiary. God help me, I was so close. I was a madwoman. But once on the road, the kids strapped into car seats and the windows open and road clear before me, I became the doting mom that everyone thought I should be.

But the heavy feeling, the shortness of breath, has returned. I can’t shake it this time. And there’s no map, no guide to my future. My children are grown and largely self-sufficient, my husband gone. There’s Thomas, of course. In fact, he was the only person I told of my plans to leave Tennessee, and I’ll always remember his white face when he realized I was really going without him. But he can’t save me this time. No one can.

60
MJ’s Note to Her Brother

Dearest Thomas,

So this is it. This is how life has narrowed to one path and only one path for me to follow. The heaviness has returned and it has proven too great a weight for me to bear after all.

I know you will take this hard, after all we’ve been through, both apart and together, but mostly together. You’ve been my life’s true companion, and for this I am eternally grateful. I have no regrets. You mustn’t either. Life is what it is, that unit of existence we are allotted, and I shaped mine the best way I knew how. But I only had so much to give it. I found myself praying to St. Jude the other night. Just like Mom would in times of stress. Patron saint of lost causes. Will you implore him to intercede for me? That’s all I ask. And that my ashes are buried in my garden, which is now yours. Everything I always had was always yours. You knew that. Take care of the garden. Please.

Tell the boys I’m sorry. And I
am
sorry—sorrier than I ever could have imagined. It is wrong to take a life, no matter how much one is owed.

Love,
MJ

61
Samantha

PETER PICKED UP THE PHONE
when it started ringing at 3
AM
, then handed it wordlessly to me. The Los Gatos police had been on the scene since midnight, when MJ Taylor’s brother, Thomas, had called them. Unable to reach his sister for two days, he finally drove down from the city. He readily admitted he was drunk when he found MJ, and delayed calling the police until the alcohol wore off.

When I arrive, it’s almost over except the taking away of the body. MJ lies on her bed dressed in a kind of blue sparkling sari that dips over the edge of the bed like a brilliant blue waterfall. She has makeup on, too. And jewelry. She went out dressed as a bride.

“Was there a note?” I ask the officer in charge. He nods and hands it to me, encased in a clear plastic evidence ziplock. I read it, then approach Thomas, who is sitting in the corner of the living room, his face in his hands. When I get near him, he raises his head, and—honest to God—I’ve never seen such utter despair on a human face.

“Without her, I’d be dead, or close to it,” he says before I have a chance to open the conversation. “I would have ended up a meth addict or worse.”

“I’m sorry to have to ask you questions right now,” I say, as gently as possible. When he just looked at me, I added, “Did you read the note your sister left?”

He nods his head in the affirmative, then buries his face in his hands again.

“What does it say to you?” I ask. I consider putting a hand on his shoulder, I suppose that’s the natural instinct when you see a wounded animal—to comfort. When he didn’t answer, I said, “Much of it seems awfully abstract. Do you know what was troubling her?”

Thomas just shakes his head.

“Thomas, did she kill John Taylor? I’m asking you a direct question.”

He doesn’t reply.

“Thomas?”

He finally speaks, slowly. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore.”

“What are you saying?”

He gets to his feet. “I’m not talking to you without a lawyer,” he says.

62
Deborah

SO THAT MJ CREATURE IS
dead. And that brother of hers has practically admitted that she killed my John. For once I feel pity for that woman. She suffered. And I’m surprised to find that I’m actually glad she had six years with John. Six apparently happy years. She filled a hole in his life that I never knew existed. The thought of John as her housekeeper and chief gardener will amuse me for a long while to come.