Femme Fatale and other stories (14 page)

Sean ran across the road and grabbed his brother by the arm, shaking him violently, angrily.

“Don't ever do that again.”

“But Mickey said—”

“Mickey's not the boss of you.”

“No one's the boss of me,” he countered, pushing out his lower lip.

Without a ball, kickball was over. We couldn't get a new ball unless we told a grown-up what had happened, and no one thought that was a good idea. And, although it was hard to envision on such a cold, gray April day, summer was coming, and not even our odd brand of kickball/dodgeball/rugby could fill those longer, emptier days. We needed a new game. Mickey suggested an explorer's club. Sean and Tim said it was babyish, yet the next day we all ended up following her deeper and deeper into the woods, marveling at the things we found. Abandoned campsites, downed trees. Beer cans, garbage. “Teenagers did this,” Go-Go would say solemnly, as if Tim and Sean were not already teenagers, Mickey and Gwen both about to turn thirteen that autumn. Teenagers were fearsome creatures to Go-Go.

And then we met the man who lived in the woods.

“What's the point of this charade?” Karl asks Gwen the morning after
Go-Go's funeral as she arrives with only minutes to spare before Annabelle awakens and comes down to breakfast.

The question catches her short, her mind snagging on his choice of word,
charade
. What, exactly, is a charade? Where is the pretense? She puzzles through this as she sets breakfast in motion. She isn't pretending to Annabelle that she spends the nights here. Her daughter knows that Gwen is staying at her grandfather's house while he heals, but that she still wants to be here for meals, bedtime, and off-to-school. The charade, to use Karl's word, is pretending that the household will return to normal after her father's situation has been normalized.

Charade
.
The mothers had played charades that night, first with their husbands, then alone after the men left. How innocent they had seemed in the candlelit living room, making the familiar, exaggerated gestures. Paging through a book, running a movie camera, flipping channels. She and Sean had watched them from the steps, feeling more akin to them than they did to the others by that point. They—well, she—honestly believed that they would get married, that they would one day be a couple among other couples, laughing and clowning. They—again, maybe just she—had been preternaturally attracted to adulthood, eager for it, in a way that Tim, Mickey, and Go-Go weren't. They were the normal ones, trying to grow up, be typical teenagers.

“I'm not sure what you mean,” she says, trying to be careful with Karl's feelings but also her words. She doesn't want to be drawn into making promises she can't keep. But his eyes are sad and hurt. He clearly wants to ask other, softer, more vulnerable questions.
Why did she leave? Doesn't she love him? Doesn't she want to be with him?
But these are not the kind of questions that Karl will ask out loud because Karl does not know the answers and Karl never admits he doesn't have answers. “That's a surgeon's personality,” her father, Karl's onetime professor, told Gwen early in their courtship. “He's used to being in charge, having authority.” Like most people in love, she ignored any observation that didn't serve her vision of her romance.

“Aren't you running late? Go save lives,” she says now, not meaning to be cruel, only factual. But Karl takes offense.

“It's not—” he begins, then stops because Annabelle has entered the kitchen, frowning at the morning, slow and cranky, quite unlike both of them. Gwen is a morning person, while Karl, like many hyperachievers, permits himself no more than four or five hours of sleep.

Annabelle, by contrast, is a night owl who fights bedtime and treats morning as a personal offense. Another reason for Gwen to be here for bedtime every night. Karl would never have the patience to cajole Annabelle through her nighttime routine. There are circles under Annabelle's eyes, bigger and darker than usual. Gwen wonders if Karl knows that Annabelle sometimes creeps down to the kitchen with the earbuds from her little MP3 player and then watches the television on the counter, standing all the while. Once Gwen found her with her chin resting on the counter, asleep on her feet, while an infomercial touted the miracle of mineral makeup. She wonders at the secrets of her daughter's DNA. Were her parents night owls? How had they coped? Given the remote orphanage where Annabelle spent the first eleven months of her life, her parents were almost certainly farmers. Did they frown at sunrise, did they stay up late, despite knowing the price they would pay come morning? Did they abandon their daughter to strike out for the city, find a life that suited them better?

“Good morning, sweet pea.”

“Peas are not sweet,” she says. Then: “Can I have pancakes?”

“We're a little pressed for time. But we can have them this weekend. I thought you could come over to Poppa's, have a sleepover?”

“You should check with me—” Karl begins, but Annabelle is already lighting up. “Can I have the princess room?”

“Of course,” Gwen says. The princess room is nothing more than Gwen's childhood room, virtually untouched since she left for college. If her mother had lived—but her mother did not live.

“You didn't ask me,” Karl says in a low voice after she sends Annabelle back upstairs to put on real pants. She was trying to coast by with her pajama bottoms. Plaid, they would have fooled her father. This is another reason why Gwen has to come by every morning; Annabelle gets too much by Karl. Their daughter is the one person impervious to his surgical authority and expectations.

But for all the reasons Gwen can list for being here every morning and evening, none really matters. She's here because she cannot bear being away from her daughter. Yet she has chosen to be away from her daughter. No, she doesn't understand it herself.

“I know we have no formal arrangement—” Karl continues.

“Yet.”

“But you didn't ask me if you could have Annabelle this weekend.”

“I don't have to,” Gwen says, putting bread in the toaster, getting out the cinnamon sugar that Annabelle likes. It comes in a plastic yellow sifter shaped like a bear, a relic of Gwen's childhood. Her own did not survive, but she bought this one at an antique store, laughing at herself for paying seven dollars for a piece of plastic that used to cost less than two—and was filled with cinnamon sugar.

“If you are serious about this—”

“I am serious. Serious as a heart attack, as they say in your world. But then, my world doesn't have metaphors or similes about what matters because, as you so often remind me, nothing matters in my world.”

“I never—”

“Always,” she says. She is aware that she is interrupting him, aware that she is enjoying it a little too much. “You
always
let me know how trivial my life is. Not in words. Through your lack of words, your lack of questions, your inability to feign interest. By your silence, you let me know every day that what I do and who I am is of absolutely no interest to you.”

Annabelle has returned and is standing in the doorway, regarding them. She is bright, exceptionally bright, although no child could be expected to compete with the brainiac powers of Karl Flores. Still, she is probably aware of more than they want her to be. Gwen hopes those dark circles aren't from lying awake, worrying. When she first started out testing the idea of leaving Karl, trying it on in front of her friends, as she might have asked them about a particularly bold fashion choice or luxury purchase, the litany of questions had been consistent:
Did he cheat? Is he abusive? Is he an addict? Has he lied to you about important things?
When Gwen said no, everyone said: “You should stay together for Annabelle's sake.” Karl said the same thing. No one understands that she could leave for Annabelle's sake. She likes to think her mother would have, if she had lived. But if her mother had lived, would Gwen have chosen the men she has chosen? Certainly, she never would have married Stephen. Ironically, her mother's death probably drove her into that doomed, ridiculous marriage.

“You'll be late, Daddy,” Annabelle says. Ah, she wants to defuse the bomb, ticking away, separate them now so they might choose to be together later. So that Gwen might choose. Karl has made it clear that he has no desire to divorce her. But not because he loves her, only because he can't stand to lose at anything.

“Will the film crew be there today?” Gwen asks, taking in her husband's suit, one of his nicest, and the bright blue shirt that flatters his dark complexion.

“Only for—I'm not sure what you call them. No interviews, but walking, sitting in meetings. Establishing shots? Something like that. I wish I hadn't said yes.”

Under her breath: “But you always do.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She turns back to the task of fixing Annabelle's breakfast, as if it requires great concentration to butter toast and sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, pour a glass of juice. But it works. When she looks up, he's gone.

Friends have pointed out to Gwen that it is hypocritical of her to complain about the constant media demands on her husband, given that she was a journalist who met him on assignment. She knew of him, of course. Dr. Karl Flores had been famous for a long time, more than fifteen years, when they met. He became famous for performing heart surgery on infants, working with tiny instruments of his own design, precious things that appeared to be plundered from a doll's hospital.

Plenty of surgeons do what Karl does, with just as good results. But few have Karl's charisma, and no matter how the world changes, some aspect of his life always seems to be in sync with the zeitgeist. Gwen met him when he was in handsome-surgeon mode. Never married, he was the subject of much gossip. But the ordinary truth was that he worked too much and had no taste for a playboy lifestyle because it would have undercut his good-guy image, which he enjoyed mightily. His self-knowledge on this topic was his saving grace. “I like the attention,” he told Gwen on their third interview, which somehow mutated into their first date, upending her professional life when she failed to reveal this fact to her bosses before her article ran. “Not because I'm egotistical but because I can use it.”

“Oh, you use your powers for good,” she said, laughing.

“Yes,” he said, laughing yet earnest. On the first night they spent together—which happened to be the next night—they watched a movie on cable, a wonderfully campy affair in which a doctor, asked during a deposition if he had a god complex, replied: “I am God.” Oh, how they laughed.

Oh, how true it was.

Karl is a surgeon. Karl is handsome. Karl goes to third world countries on his “vacations” and makes miracles. Five years ago, as the subject of immigration heated up, Karl revealed that he had entered the country illegally as a child, obtaining citizenship status under the Reagan-sanctioned amnesty of 1986. He testified before Congress. He wrote op-eds for the
New York Times,
although with considerable help from Gwen, who made his language less pedantic and high-handed. Karl may not have a god complex, exactly, but he has a touch of Zeus in him, flinging his words like thunderbolts. He wrote a memoir, this time with the help of a not-so-ghostly ghost. The memoir led to a cable television show, and while it wasn't a huge hit, it scored solidly in the ratings, renewed year after year. Every journalist who wrote about the show seemed obligated to include the detail that it was the rare case where a Hollywood actor wasn't quite as good-looking as the real person he portrayed.

Seven years ago, when they started the process that would bring Annabelle into their household, Gwen thought, hoped, prayed that a child would change the balance in their lives, that their professional selves would recede somewhat. She was right, and yet she was wrong. Karl adores Annabelle, despite initially resisting Gwen's choice of China. Why not his native Guatemala? (Gwen claimed she feared that country's bureaucracy, but the truth was she couldn't bear to have a daughter who would be like Karl, but not her.) What about Zimbabwe, where he had performed yet another surgery? He wanted to find the child that needed them most, he wanted to save someone. But Gwen understood that a child would save her. If they had a child, at least one person would find her essential.

“How was the freel?” Annabelle asks, mouth full of toast.

“The what?”

“You said you were going”—she swallows—“to a funeral yesterday. For your friend.”

“Oh. It was very sad. It's always sad when people die. But I saw some old friends.”

“Your best friends?” Annabelle is entranced with the idea of best friends. Since entering kindergarten this year, she has had no fewer than five. She tries them on like hats. She has a heartless quality. Nature or nuture? Gwen or Karl?

“Yes, I guess so.” Does Gwen really want to affirm Annabelle's belief that best friends are interchangeable, disposable, that they come and go like trends? “We were best friends until high school, when we went to different schools.” True, but a lie. She was suggesting to Annabelle that the different schools changed the nature of their relationship. But Gwen and Mickey had never attended the same school, and their friendship was irrevocably broken before they started high school.

“Who's your best friend now?” Annabelle asks her mother.

“Miss Margery, I suppose,” Gwen says, although she considers all her female friends equally close. Which is to say—not very. But Margery is the one she would call if there were major trouble. She's the one she called the night she decided she wanted a trial separation from Karl.

“Did he cheat on you?” Margery asked. Everyone starts there. Everyone expects it. He's too damn handsome. Gwen's looks are holding up well, and Karl is ten years older, yet it's clear that everyone thinks she's competing above her weight class.