Little Known Facts: A Novel (31 page)

A convenient way to see things, certainly.

And not Anna’s usual way of going about her business either. How much she had learned about herself in the past several months, how many previously held assumptions about her character now had to be revised! Before she had met Tom Glass, affairs had always sounded to her like puerile self-indulgence, the most common adult cliché. There were plenty of single men and women to go around, weren’t there? Who really needed to get involved with someone who was married? She could not imagine falling for a man who lied to his wife on a regular basis, especially if the lie was told so that he could go off and have sex with another woman. How could she love a liar? How would she ever be able to trust him not to do the same thing to her? And if he had kids, wasn’t it just the most lowlife, selfish thing in the world to be risking their well-being and happiness by keeping a mistress? How could it possibly be worth it?

Ah, self-knowledge. She really had had no idea what lay beneath the veneer of her good intentions and good opinion of herself before she had started her internship. In more ways than one, Tom Glass was educating her.

The next morning around nine, when she was already two hours into her workday at the hospital, her father called her back. She could feel her phone vibrating in her lab coat’s pocket, and knew that it was him. As soon as she could get away from her group with the excuse that she needed to use the bathroom, she went into a visitors’ bathroom and called him back.

“Is everything all right, Anna?” her father asked. “I would have called you back last night, but I was out so late that I didn’t want to wake you up.”

Hearing the concern in his voice, she nearly lost her nerve. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m sorry if you were worried about me.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said, pausing. “I was just wondering about something. A couple of days ago Danielle Dixon called me, Billy’s ex-girlfriend. You remember her, I’m sure.”

There was a distinct pause before he said, “Yes, I remember her.”

Other than the pause, there was nothing telltale in his voice. She had to keep in mind that he was an actor, that he was probably capable of bluffing his way out of anything. “Have you seen her lately?”

“No,” he said. “Not since that night at Sylvia’s more than a year ago.”

“Really? She said you ran into each other at the Griffith Observatory not long ago.”

He was silent for a moment. “I haven’t seen her at Griffith. Why would she say that?”

“I don’t know. Is there any reason that you think she would?”

“Why was she calling you?”

“She said it was because she missed me.” Anna paused. “She had a number of questions about you too.”

“Anna, that’s strange. I have no idea why she’d be calling to ask you about me.”

“Don’t you want to know what her questions were?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She wanted to know where you were and how long you’d be gone. She asked if you and Elise were happy, which you can imagine I found rather odd. She also said that you had a friend who might be interested in hiring her. I guess she’s still doing that job where she organizes people’s homes.”

“I don’t remember telling her that I had a friend interested in hiring her. Maybe it’s something we talked about that night at Sylvia’s.”

He was not convincing her. She could hear something in his tone now—vagueness or guilt, maybe both—that made her feel almost certain he was lying to her.

“Dad, it sounded to me like she’s seen you recently and that she wants to see you again. It was like she expected you to call her on Valentine’s Day or something, but you didn’t.”

He laughed. “That’s absurd. I hardly know her. Why would I call her on Valentine’s Day?”

She was getting irritated with the way that he kept turning her questions back on her, and she needed to rejoin the other interns, who were probably wondering what had happened to her. She asked him one more question: “Is something going on between you two?”

“Anna, you can’t be serious,” he said, laughing again. “You know that I’m with Elise. I just asked her to marry me.”

“You did?” said Anna, taken aback. A third marriage? It seemed a foolish move on her father’s part. Elise was bound to get restless, if he didn’t first. “Did she say yes?”

“Not quite. She wants to stay with the status quo for now, but I think we’ll probably get engaged and wait a couple of years to marry.”

“Well, congratulations, Dad. I have to get back to work, but maybe we can talk tonight if you’re free.”

“That could work, but I might fly down to New Orleans later to check on a few things for the foundation. Janice wants to move us into the rest of the building where our offices are because the other tenant is about to move out. I’m not sure it’s necessary, but she’s convinced it is. Our rent would nearly double, and I think for now that it’s best to stay where we are.”

Janice was the woman, a longtime heavyweight in nonprofit development, whom her father had hired to oversee his fledgling foundation. Anna had met her once the previous fall when she was first hired and thought that Janice seemed nice enough, if not also a little sycophantic around her father. It was nothing that she hadn’t seen dozens of times before, but it still made her uncomfortable, as if someone she had just met was walking around, unaware that his pants were unzipped.

“You could just tell her no. You’ve raised most of the money so far, haven’t you?”

“I have, but I feel like I should go down there so that at least she knows I considered it.”

This seemed a little ridiculous, but Anna didn’t say anything. If he didn’t want to rent the whole building, he need only say no and Janice would of course have to demur. She had not known her father to be hesitant about such things before. Was he having an affair with Janice too? It wasn’t likely, but it also wasn’t impossible.

When had she become such a paranoid, as Tom had said yesterday? Her own transgression had to be responsible for this new and troubling desire to police her father, which was a preposterous undertaking. And it was not her place to police him anyway. Elise could do it, if she even had those tendencies, which she probably did. Anna could not think of any woman she knew who would have felt comfortable sharing her husband or lover. It was the same with her lesbian friends. Jealousy was a universal human weakness, though maybe it was sometimes a strength, in that it was supposed to help you hold on to what or who was important to you.

“Well, if you do go down there, Dad, I hope you won’t let her rope you into anything. You’re the boss.”

“Yes, I know. Don’t worry about me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

When she rejoined the other interns in her group in the neurology wing, Jim Lewin raised his eyebrows and said, “Everything okay, Dr. Ivins?”

“Yes,” she said, glancing at her watch. She had been gone for almost ten minutes. But their attending physician was missing now too.

“Dr. Gutierrez excused himself a minute or two after you left us. You’re off the hook,” said Jim. He paused. “Do you know if Jill likes Beethoven? I was thinking of getting tickets for the symphony. There’s a matinee on Sunday, and they’re doing
Eroica.
I’d really like to go if you think she’d like it too.”

“She’d love it,” said Anna. “That’s sweet of you.” The symphony was one of the many things that she and Tom could not do. Too public, he had told her apologetically, as most things were. People knew him—his patients, other doctors, his and his wife’s friends, some of whom seemed to hold season tickets to every sporting and cultural event within a hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles. Even if they could have escaped up the coast to San Francisco or Napa, Tom would have still worried that he might run into someone who knew him and his wife. His wife was a realtor and knew as many people as he did, possibly even more.

When Anna had told Celestine about how narrow the possibilities for their dates were, her friend had said, “Just make sure the next guy you have an affair with doesn’t have any friends.” She laughed. “But isn’t the whole point of an affair the sex? I’ve always thought that it was.”

Unlike Jill, Celestine had not asked to be set up with one of Anna’s doctor friends. She preferred to date athletes and actors, and working as a media escort for a PR firm with dozens of clients, she met quite a few. Celestine was pretty, charming, and fit, though she had suffered on and off since age fourteen from bulimia, and had never been very confident about her looks or intelligence (despite having graduated cum laude from Loyola Marymount), even after the athletes and actors she was attracted to had started noticing her.

Celestine’s comment about affairs, flippant as it was meant to be, had made Anna wince inwardly. Despite the ring pendant and the hypotheticals about moving in with her and having his sons visit, she wondered sometimes what Tom was really doing with her. Maybe it was just the sex that he wanted. And the cachet of having met Renn Ivins in person, of having successfully romanced his daughter, a competent new physician and very easy, as it turned out, to seduce.

If she were to talk with her mother about Tom and admit that he wasn’t exactly a boyfriend, nor was he truly available in any traditional sense, she knew that her mother would be gravely disappointed. If only Billy had kept his mouth shut! He thought that she was stupid for seeing a married man, but he was hardly one to judge. Aside from her mother, no one in her nuclear family had any right to pass judgment on anyone else’s love life. Billy with his futile crush on Elise while he pretended to want to move in with Danielle; her father with his long, storied history of philandering; herself with her married lover. In the sixteen years since her parents’ divorce, it wouldn’t have been inconceivable if her mother had dated a married man. Or else had wanted to date a married man, but had chosen not to. Her mother had been single for the past two years, as far as Anna knew, and although she probably had the occasional offer, she seemed to prefer to remain alone. It sometimes bothered Anna that Lucy had not remarried or at least found someone with whom she wanted to live, while at the same time their father went from wife to girlfriend to wife as easily as if he were changing his socks.

Since Billy had slipped up the previous week, their mother had called her three times and left messages, saying in a wounded voice in the last one that she knew how busy interns were, but couldn’t Anna find two or three minutes to call her back? Or was she too occupied with her new boyfriend in the off hours to talk to her mother?

After this third pitiful message, Anna returned her call. It was almost nine thirty, and her mother didn’t like her nonwork phone to ring after nine p.m. because she said that it made her think that someone was calling with bad news, but Anna called then anyway. Tom had come home with her at seven thirty and had stayed until nine fifteen, a rare event because when he visited her on a work night, he usually couldn’t stay for more than forty-five minutes to an hour. Tonight they had had sex, as they always did, and then eaten dinner, a pizza that Tom had ordered before they took off their clothes, requesting that the delivery person not arrive for forty minutes. He beamed at her after he had made the call and said, “See how organized I am?”

“You’re great,” she said, not really meaning it, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was looking at her breasts, which were still encased in her bra, a lacy white one that she had bought several months earlier and taken care to keep from turning a dingy gray, which she could only do by hand-washing it.

“I try,” he said, snaking his arms around her back, unclasping the bra. He pressed his face to her breasts and kissed one, then the other. She wished that she could resist him. When he was in her bed, this was the only time her fear that he would leave her ever fully dissipated.

He was a strong man of average height, with silver hair on his chest to go with the sprinkle of silver on his head. He had hair on his back too, but none of it was gray. Tonight his back was smooth when she put her arms around him, and she liked that he had gone to the trouble to shave it off. His chin and cheeks were rough though, the day’s whiskers chafing her breasts. She shivered and pulled at the curls on his head, whispering that she wanted him to enter her right away, but he rarely ever would. He liked to make her wait, to plead with him a little. It was something he was very good at.

“When do I get to meet him?” her mother asked. “What’s his name?”

Anna sighed inwardly. What if her mother knew him and knew that he was married? “Tom,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t ask for his last name.

“Is he a doctor too?”

“Yes”

“Is he one of your classmates?”

There was no point in lying. She knew that Lucy would find out the truth one way or another. “No, he’s one of the attendings.”

Her mother faltered. “Really? Anna, I hope he’s not one of your attendings.”

“He is.”

“Oh, God. You should not, under any circumstances, be dating him.”

Anna said nothing.

“Anna, really, it’s a terrible idea. You’ve worked so hard to get where you are. If something happened to you because of him, I’d have to report him. Or kill him.”

“Mom, nothing’s going to happen.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know,” she lied.

“Oh, Jesus. You are.”

“I said that I don’t know.”

“At least tell me that’s he’s not married.”

She felt the pressure of anxiety in her chest. But was it really any of her mother’s business? “He’s not.”

“Good,” said her mother. “I guess it’s not as bad as it could be.” She paused. “You’re sure he’s not married?”

“Mom, please, let’s talk about something else. How are you?”

“Isn’t there someone else you could date?”

“I’m sure there is, but I’m dating him. Are you thinking of going to see Billy? He said that you said something about it when you talked to him the other day.”

“I might. I haven’t been to Paris in about five years, and I’d like to see how he’s doing. He sounds happy on the phone. I think it was probably a smart idea for him to go over there for a while, but I do wonder what he’ll do next.”