Little Known Facts: A Novel (30 page)

“But if you were talking about me in your sleep, wouldn’t she say something? How could she not?” she asked.

Tom gave her an almost pitying look. “You have no idea what isn’t said in a marriage, especially ones that have dragged on for years.”

This seemed to her a bleak view of couplehood, and so much in step with the many marital clichès that comedians had made their reputations on for years. But a small, mean part of her liked it when he talked so unflatteringly about his marriage. What was keeping them together? Laziness over the upheaval and tedium a divorce would doubtless entail? Worry over how their children would respond? Surely their marriage would give out soon if things were as dull and pointless as he said.

But that’s what every woman who falls for a married man thinks! Her common sense was usually awake and ready to spout off if she let herself hear it. Surely you’re not so stupid/naive/deluded to believe . . .

She did know better, but it didn’t matter. A person would believe anything if she wanted to badly enough. She had seen it in her patients, the wan, ailing souls—inveterate smokers, sweets-addicted diabetics—who did not believe that they were going to die. Every person, no matter how bright, seemed to think that he would be the exception to the rule. “This is the human condition,” one of her other attending physicians had said, Dr. Fitch, who normally she found to be a grouch but on this day had been warmer than usual to her and her classmates. “What you see will break your hearts,” he had said. “But hope is also what saves some of them. We doctors aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s true. Drugs and surgery don’t cure everything.”

Some mornings when she woke before her alarm went off in the predawn hours, it startled her to realize that she had done it—she had become a doctor. All of those years of studying and worrying that she should study even more had at last come to fruition—the innumerable hours spent poring over textbooks, memorizing every muscle and bone in the body, every abstruse biochemistry formula. She had lost so many hours of sleep before her biggest exams, certain that she would forget everything when the test paper was in front of her, but this had never happened. She had done well in her classes and was now doing well in her rotations, tacitly vying with Jim Lewin over who was the quickest to make the most feasible diagnosis (him, usually), who had the most winning bedside manner (her always, though Jim tried), and who told the best jokes to put their patients at ease (neither—it was usually only the attending physician who made the patients laugh, but Anna was getting more confident, knowing that she had made a favorable impression on the attendings with her compassion but also with her brains).

Jim and she were pals anyway, more so than they had been during med school, in part because she had set him up with her friend Jill the previous fall, who seemed to like him for real and apparently was not cheating on him, which was unusual for her. According to Jill, Jim was hot in the sack and was well hung and what more could a girl reasonably ask for? Anna had almost shrieked when Jill told her this; she did not want to know what lived behind Jim’s fly, but now, of course, whenever she saw him, she thought about Jill’s words and wondered if maybe she had been wrong to dismiss his earlier crush on her without giving him a try first.

The thought of having sex with Jim was a little ridiculous though—he was such an earnest dork, and she could only picture him in his doctor’s smock with a stethoscope around his neck, not naked and passion-inflated. Jill claimed that he had done some kinky things to her with this same stethoscope, another disclosure that Anna did not want to consider, but it did make her laugh. She was glad that Jill seemed to have fallen for him and hoped it continued to go well. (If not, poor Jim would be crushed—she could see it clearly.) They both deserved to be happy.

Her own happiness, however, was elusive—when she knew that Tom was coming over because he was in the car and on his way (though even this was sometimes no guarantee), she felt as if she would never again ask for anything else. Even if he wouldn’t be able to see her again for a month or more, it would be all right, as long as she could see him that night for an hour, even a half hour. When he gave her a tiny platinum ring on a fine silver chain for Christmas, saying that she had his heart (but his wife had his balls, Jill and Celestine had later joked), she had thought that she might burst from happiness, and that this happiness would last because he had given her tangible proof of his feelings. Whenever he stashed a note beneath her pillow saying that he already missed her, his initials enclosed in a penciled heart, she believed that she needed only to bide her time and he would leave his wife and move in with her. She knew that this was how Melinda, his father’s second wife, must have felt when she was living through the suspenseful year before he had left Anna’s mother for her. Her father, she had come to suspect, was probably never going to be satisfied, unlike herself, she hoped, even though he was with the extraordinary Elise, who was so young, but Anna liked her and hoped that her father had finally met the woman he would settle down with for good. Why she wished this, she didn’t know, only that it seemed that she would feel better about him if he did.

Because there was something a little strange, possibly sordid, going on with him right now, something she did not want to think about because if her hunch was correct, it would mean that he was having an affair with someone she knew and had previously liked quite a bit. If he was seeing Danielle, her brother’s ex-girlfriend, on the sly, she did not want to get mixed up in it because she knew that she would have to decide whether to tell Billy, and if she did tell him, the two men, their relationship already strained, would probably argue ferociously and maybe not talk to each other again for a long time, if ever. Billy would probably wonder if the affair had started before their breakup and also feel wronged because their father had Elise and he did not.

Danielle had called Anna the day after Valentine’s Day, just to say hello, she claimed, because they hadn’t talked in so long and Danielle missed her. When Anna told her that Billy had moved to Paris, she did not seem surprised to hear this, though she pretended to be, and this, Anna realized in retrospect, was the first red flag, because from what Billy had told her, he and Danielle were not in contact. The second red flag, a much bigger one, was the sudden barrage of questions about Billy and Anna’s father—where was he now? and if he was out of town, how long would he be gone? Danielle had recently crossed paths with him at the Griffith Observatory, where they had both gone for an early-morning hike, and she wanted to send him something in the mail, information about her business for someone that he said might be interested in hiring her to reorganize his home.

Her story sounded as if she were reciting it from a script.

Didn’t she have a website? Anna asked. And couldn’t the potential client contact her himself?

Well, yes, of course, but Renn had asked her to send the brochure directly to him, and she wanted to oblige him.

Then another question, a complete non sequitur: What did Anna think of Elise? Were she and Renn happy?

Anna had hesitated before answering, suspecting that Danielle’s interest wasn’t innocent. “They seem very happy whenever I’ve seen them together,” she said warily.

“That’s great,” said Danielle. “Elise seems like she’s a nice person.”

“She is.”

Her brother’s ex wavered, taking, what sounded to Anna’s ears, a long and shaky breath. “How serious do you think they are?”

Anna faltered. “I’m not sure. Pretty serious, probably. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Just curious. In that interview in
Time
last week about Life After the Storm, your dad didn’t say anything about their relationship.” She laughed self-consciously.

“He doesn’t like to talk about his personal life. I’m sure Billy told you that when you guys were dating.” Anna paused. “Look, Danielle, is everything okay? Why are you asking me about Elise and my dad?”

“I’m sorry.” Danielle laughed again. “I guess I’m just in a nosy mood. I’m sure you’re busy. Congratulations on being a doctor now too. I bet you’re great at it.”

“Thanks. I do like it.”

“I’d better let you go. Sorry to bother you with my questions. It’s nice to hear your voice.”

“Yes, you too.”

“Good-bye, Anna. Sorry again,” said Danielle, hanging up abruptly, leaving Anna to hold on to the phone for a few seconds, wondering what was going on.

The next morning Anna called Tom to tell him about the disquieting conversation with Danielle. She managed to catch him while they were both still driving to the hospital, she from Silver Lake, he from Marina del Rey, but he didn’t take her distress over Danielle’s call as seriously as Anna thought that he should have. “Your father can pretty much do whatever he likes and probably has for years,” he said.

“So you’re saying that it’s okay if he’s sleeping with my brother’s ex?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, I don’t think that either of us is in much of a position to judge him right now.”

“. . . no, but I still don’t think—”

“I bet your father would say the same thing, sweetheart.”

Normally she loved it when he used endearments, but this one sounded patronizing. “I suppose he would,” she said dryly.

Tom laughed. “Don’t worry so much. Your father’s a big boy, and I assume that this girl your brother used to date is old enough to take care of herself too. I’d do my best to stay out of it if I were you. You don’t have proof of anything, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea to go looking for any either.”

“Sorry to bother you with this, Tom.” She was irritated but tried to keep her voice even.

“It’s not a bother. I’m intrigued. You must have known that I would be.”

Tom had asked her to introduce him to her father a month after they had started seeing each other, but she had waited a few months more before inviting her father over for dinner, during which time she tried to decide if she was more nervous about Renn guessing that Tom was something other than a friend, or about whether Tom was having an affair with her mostly because he wanted to get to her father. She had talked it over with Jill and Celestine, the only two people who knew that she was seeing Tom, and they had both thought she was being paranoid. “I think it’s pretty ballsy of him to want to meet any of your family members, whether your dad’s a movie star or not,” said Celestine. “I also doubt that he’d spend all this time wooing you and risking his marriage just to get to your dad. It’s not like he wants to be an actor, right?”

Jill said, “Unless you think Tom is bisexual and wants to get your dad in the sack, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It’s probably just a mancrush. No big deal.”

Tom had told her that he been a fan of her father’s films for about twenty years, and after
Bourbon at Dusk
was released and so generously reviewed, and there was the attendant publicity about the foundation for Katrina survivors that he had started, it was almost like Tom thought that her father deserved to be canonized. But she too loved that he had started Life After the Storm and thought that at some point she and Tom might be able to get involved by volunteering for a week or more in the clinic Renn planned to open in or just outside of New Orleans in the next several months.

Her father, no surprise, had figured out almost immediately after he and Elise had arrived at her house that Tom was Anna’s lover, and he was more upset by this fact than she had imagined he would be. He told her bluntly that she was wasting her time getting involved with a married man, that he would likely disappoint her, that she could do a whole lot better, didn’t she understand what a tremendous catch she was? Beautiful, incredibly intelligent, and also such a decent, down-to-earth young woman? And of course she had money, but her father didn’t mention that. He had to believe that Tom had it too, though probably not as much as Anna did. Why in the hell was she selling herself short by hanging around with this guy who was also so much older than she was?

She had looked at her father, an aging man who was dating a woman almost thirty years his junior. Compared to that, the nineteen-year age difference between her and Tom felt much less egregious. Anna had smiled and said, “Dad, you can’t be serious about the age gap. Come on.”

It had taken a few seconds for this to sink in, but then, to her amused surprised, he had blushed. “I suppose you’re right, but really, Anna, I don’t recommend it. I wish there was only a few years’ difference between Elise and me, but obviously, that’s not the way it worked out.”

And now, despite his prized young girlfriend, it seemed that he was stepping out on her, with his own son’s ex-girlfriend. Danielle had sounded anxious, even a little desperate, when she called. It wouldn’t have taken an experienced psychologist to figure out that there was a subtext to the phone call that could not have been innocent. When Anna called her father after her shift at Reagan ended for the day, he did not pick up. She didn’t say why she was calling, only that he should call her back. By ten thirty that night, he hadn’t yet called back. She tried him again, but he still didn’t pick up, and she resigned herself to brooding until she could question him about Danielle, though she would try to do it in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, she could not see him giving her a straight answer no matter how she phrased her question.

Tom was right that she should not get involved, and that given enough time, it would all blow over, if anything was going on in the first place. Her father would eventually tire of Danielle, and provided that she didn’t do anything drastic and brainless, the affair would simply end and neither Elise nor Billy would have to find out about it. Anna didn’t really understand why it bothered her so much, but she thought it might be because she was involved in something dishonest herself, though as Jill had said not long before Anna had started seeing Tom, it was he who had to answer to his wife and children, not Anna.