Little Known Facts: A Novel (32 page)

“Maybe he’ll be a boulevardier for the rest of his life. There are worse things.”

Her mother laughed. “What a word, sweetie. Did you learn that in college?”

“I don’t know. Probably,” she said. “Mom, I’m sure Dad would tell you this himself, but I know you don’t talk to him that often and it might leak into the papers. He told me a couple of days ago that he asked Elise to marry him.”

There was a long pause in which Anna could hear a bird singing; several mockingbirds lived in her mother’s neighborhood, and a few of them sang day and night. Finally she said, “He did?”

“Yes,” said Anna.

“Did she say yes?”

“No. But he thinks he’ll get her to agree to a long engagement.”

“God, that man will never learn. Why can’t he see that the girl doesn’t want to marry him?”

“Because he doesn’t want to believe she’s rejected him. No one rejects him.”

“Oh, Anna.” Her mother sighed.

“What? You’ve said it yourself about a thousand times.”

“I know, but it’s different when I say it.”

“It is?”

“Yes, you know it is.”

Before they hung up, her mother said, “I want to meet Tom. Would you bring him over for dinner next Sunday? That’s your day off, isn’t it?”

“He’s going out of town for a few days. It’ll have to wait.” Another lie.

“Then the Sunday after next.”

“I’ll ask him, but I don’t know if he’d feel comfortable. He already thinks that you wouldn’t approve because we work together.”

“You’ve talked about me with him?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I want to meet him. If I have to come to the hospital when you’re both working, I will.”

“That would not be a good idea.”

“Then bring him over to meet me.”

“I will when he feels more ready.”

“Has your father met him?”

“Mom.”

“Has he?”

She exhaled. “Yes, he has.”

“Oh, Anna, and you haven’t brought him over to meet me yet? He wanted to meet the movie star but not me?”

“No, that’s not it at all.” Though it was, and her mother knew it. Anna had only been willing to introduce Tom to her father because she hoped that her father’s glow would burnish her too, and the two men had gotten along well, Renn saying when she spoke to him a few days later that even though he hated to admit it, he thought that she and Tom seemed happy together. But of course they hadn’t been seeing each other very long and affairs were different from other relationships and Tom had a wife and kids and if Anna could walk away now, she should. The conversation had ended shortly thereafter, Anna feeling like her father had jinxed her. But she felt that way about so many things that happened now: the affair was turning her into an obsessive-compulsive.

“You’re breaking my heart,” her mother said. “Both you and Billy. He has a girlfriend in Paris now, but he won’t tell me much about her other than that she’s an American too.”

“If you go to visit him, I’m sure you’ll meet her.”

“Maybe. But he might not want to introduce me to her either.”

“He will.” She hesitated. “Mom, Dad met Tom because he stopped by to see me one night when Tom was over for dinner.”

Her mother was silent for a moment. “Really?”

“Yes.” There were many ways that her mother could find out that this wasn’t true, but it was a mercy lie and they were sometimes necessary. This, at least, was what Anna told herself.

“Oh. Well, okay,” said Lucy, the relief in her voice obvious.

“I’d better go, Mom. Another busy day tomorrow.”

“They’ll be like that for as long as you keep working.”

“Yes, I’m sure they will.”

She could not sleep that night and lay awake for two hours before she got up to take an Ambien. She was lying to her mother because of Tom. Her father was lying to her because he was having an affair with Danielle—Anna could not help but feel convinced of it. She was making a muddle of her life right now, and her father was doing the same with his. Yet she wondered if her mother was any better off, sitting alone in her big house, worrying too much about her and Billy and the ex-husband who had cheated on her and left her for someone else after fifteen years of marriage.

When she was finally feeling the sleeping pill’s effects, Mr. Greenbaum and his question about how much time people wasted worrying drifted into her consciousness. He reminded her of a friend she had had in college who had since disappeared from her life. He was someone she had briefly dated, but he had turned out to be very religious, and after a month, she knew that they would probably always be incompatible. Nonetheless, he had made one vaguely religious comment that she still thought about from time to time. They had gone to a birthday party for a mutual friend, and on the walk home, he had said, “Don’t you wish that you could go into a room and see every gift you’ve ever given set out on a table? If you’ve given a lot of presents in your life, think of how cool that would look. All of those gift-wrapped packages, the bows and the cards too. I’d love to see that. Maybe that’s what heaven is, a place where you get to see all of the nice things you’ve done for other people. You’d get all of the thank-yous that you should have gotten when you were still alive too. That has to be what heaven’s like. Forget the angels playing harps and the white robes and hushed voices. I want to see a lot of colors. I want to relive the best parts of my life.”

Anna wondered where he was now, this boy who had considered joining the Catholic priesthood. Maybe he had become a priest; maybe he was living an honorable life, one without much private tension or disorder and few lies or dark secrets. Maybe he was happy wherever he was now, but she doubted it. Other than Jim Lewin and Jill (though how could she be sure?), she couldn’t think of anyone she knew who was happy, not for more than an hour or two at a time.

If my son felt that he had to run away from home, I suppose there are worse places to run to than Paris. I’m relieved that he didn’t choose some remote region in China or an Alaskan outpost where modern conveniences and medical clinics are scarce. One of my fears, ever since I saw that movie about the boy who moves to Alaska and dies a wretched, lonely death because he accidentally ingests a poisonous plant, is that Billy will somehow come to a similar end. This is wholly irrational, I know—Billy doesn’t even like to camp—but one’s fears are hardly ever rational.

Despite Paris’s much admired charms, it’s hard for me to believe that my son will stay there for very long. My hunch (and hope) is that he will miss Los Angeles and his sister and friends here, his spacious condo and the energy of our sprawling dreamscape, if not also his father and me. I’m hurt that he wanted to leave and did so without any kind of warning—one day he was here, the next he wasn’t, and he left no note with any sort of hint about where he had gone and why. I realize that children leave behind their parents and childhood homes all the time, but both of my kids have lived in southern California their entire lives, having chosen to go to college here too. And usually when people leave, they give you a forwarding address or allow you the chance to say good-bye.

About Billy’s big move, my friends say, “It’s about time, isn’t it? Wasn’t it bound to happen sooner or later?” I know they’re right, but the comparison I make (only to myself) is this: his departure is like a cancer diagnosis. Despite the fact most of us have heard the sobering statistics—one in two people will suffer from some form of cancer before they die—when the diagnosis comes, it’s still a shock.

The irony is, my son and I seem to have grown closer across the distance of one entire continent and the Atlantic Ocean. He calls me every week now, or I call him and he calls back within a day or two. There are no more unreturned phone calls, no more plaintive or frustrated or angry pleas for him to call me back before I contact his building’s doorman and ask him to confirm that Billy is still alive. In the three months that he has lived in France, his attitude appears to have changed from bad to mostly good. He has told me twice that he loves me without me saying it first. He has started writing a screenplay (though he told me not to tell his father if I talked to him, because he did not want Renn to know anything about it until after he had finished it). He has a new girlfriend, a woman named Jorie who apparently is also taking time off from her regular life in the States to study art and learn French and finally make a real attempt at appreciating beauty. That’s how Billy has phrased it, at any rate. “There’s beauty to appreciate in California,” I told him after he said this.

His reply: “I knew you’d say that. But in France it’s different. The French practically invented beauty, at least in its modern conception.”

“You sound like a philosopher now,” I said. “I guess Paris is working for you.”

“It’s not just working,” he said quietly. “It’s saving me. I was going crazy in L.A. Things are a lot better now, but I had to get out of there to realize just how depressed I was.”

“Are you still running too many miles?” I asked him another time.

“No,” he said, “but I do run almost every day, and compared to what some people run, fifteen or twenty miles isn’t that much.”

“You don’t need to run more than a few miles at a time to stay in good shape if you’re already eating healthy.”

“I don’t do it just to stay in shape. I do it because I love it. I’m not changing my running regimen, Mom. We don’t need to keep discussing this.”

This is a little hard for me to accept, considering that it wasn’t very long ago that I got a phone call from Anna telling me that her brother was in the hospital because of what he had done to his body on his morning run. It has since been pointed out to me repeatedly that he is a grown man, that his collapse was a fluke, he can make his own decisions, he can take care of himself, etc. etc. As a doctor, I’ve heard this sort of petulant defense more times than most people probably have. I know that in Billy’s case, I’m not dealing with a fool, nor do I think he has a death wish, but it’s hard not to worry about him, and if something were to happen to him, it would be a little more difficult to get to Paris quickly than down the road to Huntington Memorial.

Billy’s original plan was to return home to run the marathon in March, but he has now decided not to, probably because of Jorie, though he said it was because he wants his first official marathon to be the one in Paris, which is only a couple of weeks away. I have my plane ticket and will be there for those 26.2 grueling miles through this most historic city’s winding streets. I don’t really understand why people think it’s a good idea to run so far all at once. The concrete and blacktop we have covered so much of the earth with are two of the worst possible surfaces for the human body to spend time bouncing up and down on. Whose idea was it that people should compete in races like this? When what we now call the marathon was first run in ancient Greece, it was out of necessity, not because people needed something to amuse themselves with.

I understand Billy’s desire to escape his California life, if only because he wants to look upon another vista for a while, another view of what a life can be. It’s not that the French have lives so much more healthy and mindful than our own, but I know that many of them do still take their time when it comes to some of the more important daily rituals—they buy their food from small local grocers and bakers and butchers, they take their time at the dinner table too, and they often dress themselves with an artistic flair (they are not known for wearing sweatpants and gym shoes to restaurants and movie theaters and doctor’s appointments, among other obligations that require them to appear in public). Something else: they read poetry. The last time I was in Paris, I was stunned to discover how large the poetry section was in one of the bookstores I browsed—as big as or bigger than the self-help sections in most American bookstores. Truly, this was a revelatory moment, and unaccountably, I felt my eyes well with tears.

That said, they do have race riots and poverty and plenty of criminals who rape and steal and destroy. They are subject to the same human failings that we are, but I do think that Billy is right to say that he is learning about beauty during his time in Paris. There is the Seine and its many bridges, structures that look like they were stolen from a fairy tale; its enormous but unbelievably intricate municipal buildings; its dozens of museums (a whole museum devoted just to Picasso, another to Rodin, a third to Dali, and each of them so very good)—all of this available whenever he walks out his front door. Paris has been here since the days when Christ allegedly walked the earth, its marketplaces thriving long before the Crusades began, before Saint Augustine wrote his
Confessions,
a time when America did not exist, not in the incarnation that the European invaders began to create after their arrival on its alien shores.

Paris, needless to say, is quite different from L.A., which in comparison is a newborn city, though they are similar in one crucial way—both are places where people believe they will be able, with a little good luck, to step into the lives they are destined for.

Something has happened since Billy moved overseas that was as unexpected as his sudden disappearance: I met someone. Or, I should say, I re-met someone. This man went to USC for his undergraduate degree too, and Renn and I were friends with him for a year or so, but then we lost touch because I think Michael had a bit of a crush on me. Renn thought so, in any case, and eventually stopped inviting him out with us. It’s a bit surreal to remember that there was a time when Renn worried about losing me to some other man. But he did worry, and this era lasted for several years, until a little while after Billy was born, when Renn became so busy and sought-after that people like Harrison Ford (gorgeous
and
funny) and Warren Beatty (gorgeous too, but his much-publicized playboy ways alarmed me) were regularly dropping by to hang out at our dinner table.

Now, three decades later, Michael appeared before me one morning a few weeks ago when I was at a bagel place on Colorado Boulevard where I sometimes buy a cup of coffee on my way to work. “Lucy?” he said. “Lucy Wilkins?”