B008J4PNHE EBOK (51 page)

Allie was impressed by how much of Sandra’s craziness Tom had retained. She didn’t hate Booth’s second wife the way Sam did—in fact, Allie thought she had a terrific sense of personal style, not to mention a fascinating imagination—but it was obvious that the woman needed medication.

“I read about that guy, the panic room guy. Didn’t the door mechanism malfunction because of Y2K?”

“I’m pretty sure Sandra thinks that’s a cover story, but if you’re interested, I’m sure she’d be delighted to fill you in,” said Tom. “I’m probably leaving some important stuff out. She kept saying it was all ‘bread and circuses.’ I guess that’s the bottom line. Frankly, I don’t see the proof. Talked to Mina, though. She seems peachy. She’s got an invisible friend named Inchy. Inchy’s good, too.”

“I like that kid.”

Mina was cool. Allie had gone to the city with Sam, and they had taken the little girl for ice cream. The meeting had made Allie anxious; there was a special feeling of displacement—of familiar furniture in an unfamiliar place—that came with the sibling of your child who was not your child. But it turned out fine, natural, even.

“You play the piano?” the four-year-old asked, peering blue-eyed over a scoop of pistachio ice cream. Allie said she did, and Mina said, “You won’t when you’re dead, you know.” Allie burst out laughing, and Mina, too. Sam propped his feet on a nearby chair and seemed to relax for a change.

They were going to be great friends someday, Allie thought, she and Mina.

“But listen,” said Allie, and told Tom what she had thought, how kids were the ultimate special effect. “
Jaws
is horseshit compared to kids!”

“Yeah. That’s true,” said Tom. “Okay. I’ll buy that.”

When he didn’t add anything more, Allie poked him. “That all you’ve got, Ritts?”

“What else do you want?” asked Tom.

There was still a whole Sunday afternoon spread out in front of her.

Allie went for a walk to the Huguenot graveyard.

There had been a few other men over the years—several of them better, if you got right down to it, than Booth.

Her old friend Paul Grandpierre had been one of them. Paul worked as a printer and lived in Woodstock and was the coach for a youth soccer team he sponsored, the Fightin’ Fonts. He was so easygoing and self-effacing, Allie decided that she couldn’t possibly add anything to his life. “You’re already perfect,” Allie said, and Paul said, “If you say so, sister,” and she thought that he was at least partly relieved. But they still got together every once in a while, smoked dope and listened to records, talked about things that happened when they were kids.

She casually dated an amusing, sack-bellied electrician and bar-band drummer named Diarmid off and on for two years, until he abruptly announced that he’d met his true love. “At the Staples in Kingston, of all places,” marveled Diarmid. “Just laminating, she was.”

Allie punched Diarmid in his fat shoulder. “I thought you were talking about me!”

“Heavens, no!” he said, making a face as if she’d traded his drum kit for some magic beans. Allie punched him again, much harder this time, and they’d had a final go, tickling each other the whole time. It was less than a year later that she played the piano at his wedding to the woman from Staples, and he sat in with a bongo for a few songs.

The best had been Rick Savini, an old actor friend of Booth’s. She’d run into him at the movie theater in Hyde Park one afternoon. They were both there alone to see an animated movie about a pharaoh cat in the time of Moses, and they ended up sitting together. Rick had voiced the cat’s chief adviser, an ornery but wise mouse in gold parachute pants, Qasim.

“The thing is, someone has to be the cranky mouse sidekick, you know? Not everyone can be the brave cat,” Rick said to her as they strolled back to their cars in the humid dusk. His explanation of the supporting player’s lot had struck Allie as profoundly incisive, and she nearly grabbed him right there.

The younger actor was, in every way, the antithesis of Booth. It was no accident, for instance, that professionally, Rick Savini specialized in reaction shots. He was a listener. If there was something he wasn’t, it was avid. While she talked, Rick watched her with those damp saurian eyes of his and never seemed to blink. Rick could sip ginger ale and listen to her play rags for hours. He was patient and curious and sad.

She enjoyed his quirks:

He held a grudge against the summer, hated the heat and the length of the days, and associated the season with serial killers: “People get sweaty and rashy, and the next thing you know, bodies are turning up in parks with their livers cut out and somebody’s writing letters to the police saying, ‘I won’t stop killing until the government stops pouring absinthe into the water supply.’ ” To identify his cookie-cutter Westchester McMansion, he kept potholes in the driveway. The actor’s great hobby was to shop from airplane catalogs, and he had a large room filled with the gadgets, toys, and decorations that he bought from them: a miniature solar-charged windmill, a LEGO Empire State Building, a row of scuffed plastic seats from a demolished baseball stadium, several metal detectors, leather-covered editions of famous books, fancy movie replicas, a knee-high robot that could perform a range of rigid dances, and a plethora of other marvelous ephemera.

Rick wanted Allie to fly around the world with him. They could drink champagne at forty thousand feet and order things from airplane catalogs. The two black-and-white cats who lived with him cycled quietly in and out of the McMansion’s rooms like maître d’s, checking to make sure the service was adequate.

But Rick was too sweet, somehow too giving, too much a reflector. She didn’t want to be the complicated one in a relationship, to play the Booth part.

“I’m used to loud, difficult people,” Allie said.

“I can be loud and difficult,” he replied, but she didn’t want that. She liked who he was.

“Booth’s more fun, isn’t he?” Rick asked.

A little bit, she admitted, and Rick, with a thin smile, conceded that he agreed.

Even Booth had been crestfallen by this last breakup. “Goddammit, Allie, what are you looking for? You can’t do better than Rick. He’s a nice man. He’s interesting. He’s wealthy. He gets cast in everything, the bastard. Is it all the gadgets and crap? I’ve warned him about that.”

“No, it’s not his toys.”

“Well. What possible excuse do you have, then?”

The café had been Booth’s idea. He wanted her to have something, and he wanted to hang on to the movie theater, and it came together very simply. What was apparent later—almost twenty years and a divorce later—was that Allie never cared about coffee or pastries or business, but she cared about Booth a lot, and wanted to make him happy, so she spent years working at something she didn’t care about. She still wanted Booth to be happy, but other priorities came first: Sam, always—and herself.

“I don’t need an excuse,” said Allie.

 ■ ■ ■ 

A gang of children, six blondes scattered between the ages of four and twelve, were yelling and chasing one another around the graveyard. Allie sat on the retaining wall beside their mother, a woman in her early fifties whose long gray hair was frizzy and uncombed.

“So today I took my kids to play in a graveyard,” said the mother.

Allie laughed. She told the woman that her son loved to play here when he was young.

“Did it make him eccentric?” asked the weary woman.

“No,” Allie reassured her, “I think that’s something we did to him ourselves. Can I share a theory with you?” Allie asked her, and the woman said, “Please do.” Allie explained how kids were the most incredible special effect of all. “They just go and go and go,” she finished.

The mother agreed that she might be on to something. “But have you seen that
Titanic
? Seriously, I’m not sure if it’s more incredible than kids, but it’s definitely close.”

It was almost hot in the sun that fell in an unbroken stream onto the wall. Allie closed her eyes and tipped her head back. She couldn’t get enough of the air. It burned the insides of her nostrils, and she loved it.

The woman put a hand on the small of her back; Allie was about to slip off the back of the wall. “Careful,” she said.

“Aw. Do I have to be?” asked Allie. The mother said yes.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Booth was more fun. Booth was the most fun. Booth was a monster of fun.

She recalled the visits she used to make to see him in California.

One time they drove to Sonora and drank too much and rode donkeys around a weedy field. Booth looked so funny sitting on a little donkey that she pissed herself at the sight, pissed all over her own poor donkey, and then cried because she felt so bad about what she’d done to the animal. Booth paid the donkey man extra, though.

On another trip, they went fishing and caught nothing but had memorable, sunburned sex on a boat.

Booth had a deranged landlady at the place he rented in Tarzana. She was obsessed with lemons. By the end of any trip to California, the mere mention of the word “lemon” was enough to send them into hysterics.

Allie went to sets with him a few times. The soundstages smelled like pot and ozone, and there were tentacles of ropy black cord everywhere, like some kind of alien infestation. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of Booth. They treated him like a star. He had his own little camp chair, the canvas backing labeled simply
BOOTH
.

If only, she thought, Sam could catch his father just right, trap him between the four walls of his camera. If only he could see Booth the way she saw him, from his good side.

At the end of their marriage, it had been, perversely, up to her to comfort him. Booth cried, and she soothed him. It wasn’t fair that it should be that way—he was the cheat—but that was how it was between them. She had made her peace.

Allie came to the sharp curve at the far end of their street; this was where she usually turned around. In the middle of the curve there was a turtle. The turtle was about the size of her largest mixing bowl; indeed, the animal looked like nothing so much as a dusty green mixing bowl with legs. It was a snapping turtle, and to judge by the pissed-off expression on its wrinkled bulb of a head, not a nice one. “Get off the road,” Allie said, and made sweeping gestures at the side of the street that the animal was facing.

The snapping turtle spat at her a couple of times and withdrew into its shell.

“You’re going to get squished,” she told the turtle.

There was an echoing hiss from inside the shell.

“Fine. Be that way.” Allie turned around, scattering pebbles of pavement as she scuffed along.

As she passed the graveyard, the gray-haired mother spotted her. “Can’t get enough of us?”

“No! I’m on the way home now!” Allie yelled, and comically threw up her hands. “There’s a suicidal turtle over there!”

“Oh, those are the worst kind!” the mother hollered back.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Sam had used the camera that Tom gave him to make a stop-motion film,
The Unhappy Future of Mankind
. It starred these creepy, maimed plastic figurines he collected—Nukies, they were called—and Sam spent weeks and weeks meticulously inching them around on his bedroom floor.

The final product had astonished Allie. The tiny people were so urgently striving and heroic and doomed. Sam’s bookshelves towered over them in otherworldly promontories, like the cliff faces in cowboy movies.

“Do you think you’ll make one with real people next?” she asked him.

Sam lifted his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug.

“I’d act for you,” Allie said. “If you wanted.”

“I don’t want to be disappointed in you,” he said, making it sound inevitable—which it was.

Disappointment was the real common cold. Allie’s students disappointed her when they didn’t practice. Her cooking disappointed her. People she didn’t know—politicians, especially—disappointed her terribly. Award-winning films weren’t interesting. Surveys put you in the minority. Long-settled plans fell apart at the last second. Beloved sports teams were defeated in impossible ways. You forgot things that you cared about, and when you remembered them, they were gone. Machines couldn’t be relied on. Service was slapdash. Mostly, your friends came through, but there were those times when they didn’t. Parents never ceased to be your parents, which was both disappointing and frustrating. Sex was mostly just okay. It rained.

Disappointment was predictable and disappointing.

Allie could hear her semi-adult son’s response to this declaration. “Which means what? I should wallow in my dissatisfaction?” he’d ask. “Make friends with it? Feed it chicken?”

“No,” she’d reply, “it just means you should be less—
you know
—that thing you are sometimes.” At this, Sam would probably hurl himself onto the floor and lie there, six feet one of him in bare feet, as if her wisdom had literally bowled him over, the little shit—her little shit.

This was a person she had birthed. She had tended his shitty ass. He had bitten her and passed her hideous childhood sicknesses and kept her awake. Allie’s money had bought him books, tickets, sports equipment, trendy clothes, and disturbing figurines.

But Sam had had a propensity toward dourness for about as long as he’d had agency. For his second birthday, they visited a petting zoo. Sam frowned and pointed at a baby goat. “Our food,” he said. Sam didn’t look on the bright side. She had wanted a child and she had gotten one, and she was the furthest thing from sorry, but he wasn’t easy.

One afternoon, though, he had touched her cheek with his fingers.

No blockbuster’s fleet of spaceships, their thousand seamless gunmetal prows blotting the western sky, collective silhouette transforming the desert into an ocean floor, could have amazed her more than that—more than Sam’s fingers at her face that afternoon. The piano was wretchedly out of tune. Cars whipped past behind them. There was a char stink in the air and on everything. And her son comforted her. They turned into people, your kids. It wasn’t better than science fiction. It was science fiction.