Live a Little (42 page)

My spiritual life partner with a side of sandbag.

“I’m not saying Phil is perfect. I’m saying it’s time to get off your
tuchas
and fight. For. Your. Marriage!” Ma waggles her imitation Incan fertility necklace at me.

Laughter bubbles up my throat so sharply that I choke on my wine. Ma slaps me on the back and moves in for the Heimlich, forgetting, in her Red Cross–certified fervor, that there is nothing to dislodge. Phil may not be the antidote to all that ails me, but he is forever Phil, perfect in all aspects of his essential Philness. A vital part of the thing that is Raquel and Phil, the thing that seems to thrive in spite of the abuse we heap on it, a veritable cockroach of a relationship. Phil can be trusted to care about our “usness” long after most men will have frittered away their marital equity on replacement wives and youth-seeking diversions. This fact is not negated by the fact that my husband fucked Tate Trimble a couple of times five, eight, ten years ago. On the contrary: It’s proved by it. And this, I know from experience, is a beautiful thing. He has given me a gift—the gift of the impervious marriage.

All these years, I clung to my nineteen-year-old self’s notion of Ren White as a talisman against change, a doctor’s note excusing me from responsibility for fulfilling my own potential.

And then I tried to do the same with Duke Dunne.

Not that the boy isn’t great in the sack. But as Ma once said, marriages are more than great sex. I may amend that: Marriages are more than great sex, but less than a great ass massage.

“I’m going to tell Eliot to stop writing me checks,” I hear myself say.

Ma nods. “Good girl.”

CHAPTER 31

Maury Would Be Proud

“I think she should look hot but a little unkempt, like Kathleen Turner in
Body Heat
after they find out—” “—so the viewers know she’s guilty of her crimes!” Jonesie actually claps his hands.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I say. My heart is beating savagely. Perhaps I will have a heart attack onstage. Alicia will be pleased: “Raquel Rose having a heart attack and soiling herself while confessing to her crimes” performed well in focus groups.

Cleo massages my shoulders. “I heard that mail was running two to one in favor of bringing you back to explain what happened. I think people are on your side; they just need to hear it from the horse’s mouth. They need to know that you’ve suffered, then they’ll forgive you.”

“My mother loves you,” Jonesie pipes up.

“I did very well among Asian women forty-five and up,” I say dully.

Shiny Pony sticks her head in the dressing room. “Five minutes.” Shiny registers my sickly pallor, which no amount of pink foundation has been able to rectify. “Raquel, you’re doing the right thing. I think you’ll feel better afterward.”

“Can someone put a trash can beside the sofa? In case I, uh, puke?”

Shiny sucks it up. “Absolutely.” She leaves, and we hear her directing Sweet Face— who never was canned due to my ego trip, which I’m glad about now—toward an appropriate vessel.

Cleo adopts Alicia’s brusque Long Island brogue. “Onstage puking is unacceptable! Do you think Laqueta pukes onstage? Do you think Laqueta suffers from ‘nerves’? Do you think Laqueta has nerves? I’ll tell you: no. Laqueta had her nerves removed, because she wants to host the top Bay Area talk show, and she understands the meaning of personal sacrifice.”

I can’t help smiling. “You better watch it. She has spies everywhere. She told me when we were getting our salt scrubs.”

“I don’t care.” Cleo thrums her tongue piercing. “Jo, better finish her up. I’m going to need a smoke to get through this one.”

Laurie brushes Shiny away and clips the mike to my slacks herself. I interpret this as a gesture of support. Either that or she wants to verify that, indeed, I have ballooned by two pants sizes since my downfall three weeks ago.

“Are you all right?” Laurie rubs lipstick off her teeth without looking in a mirror and swings her sheet of golden hair around so it falls perfectly into place.

“With the right combination of drugs and a one-way ticket to the witness protection program, I could be.”

Laurie pats me on the knee. “You’ll feel better after this. I promise.”

Why does everybody keep saying that? It’s as if they planned it at the meeting:
Now, the only way we’re going to

get her to come on and confess is if we assure her she’ll feel better afterward. You and I both know the humiliation’s going to be excruciating, but let’s paint the picture a little brighter than that for the sake of Raquel’s sanity and Alicia’s promotion, okay?

The lights seem brighter than usual. I squint into them, trying to locate a friendly face. Instead, I spot my bust subject, lawyer Jean, looking rancorous, and Dr. Minh with his rat-nest-headed assistant/tart, Karen.

Dr. Minh is snarfing a hot dog.

First, how does he even know my shame? Did the show’s producers take out a full-page ad in
Breathivore Digest
or something? Second—and I say this with the utmost humility and compassion—Dr. Minh’s fall from dietary grace seems even more reprehensible than him fucking Karen or me pretending I had cancer. Maybe I should text-message Alicia:
Show topic: Breathivore acupressurists who resort to nitrite-laden meat consumption to offset the stress of professional mortification.

Eliot and Ma are here. Ma is reading
Mother Jones
as if the upcoming affair promises to be no more harrowing than a trip to the dentist. Eliot has chosen to bolster family pride by wearing a T-shirt that says
I BELIEVE YOU, RAQUEL
. My own husband and kids are absent. I don’t know whether to be devastated or grateful. Thankfully, the Peninsula bitch brigade has not deigned to show up for my public lashing.

The crowd warmer-upper passes out the last of the audience freebies, and Boss of Shiny Pony does the countdown. Tactics were discussed, and it was agreed that the cameramen would shoot Laurie in close-up for her intro, in recognition of the gravity of the topic.

My pulse ricochets. “Laur,” I hiss, remembering to muffle my mike for once. “I have to tell you something.”

“We’re about to start.” Her smile doesn’t waver.

“Ren is your soul mate,” I whisper furiously. “I think I had to meet him just so fate would bring him to you.”

Laurie stares at me. The countdown ends. She turns to the camera. “Hello, and welcome to
Living with Lauren!
We’re glad to have you with us today, as our show promises to be a memorable one.

“We have with us today Raquel Rose. Many of you know Raquel from her many guest appearances on this show. For those of you tuning in for the first time, some history: About a year ago, Raquel was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Unbeknownst to her, her biopsy results had been switched with another woman’s. Fortunately for her, the error was discovered within the month, and her doctor informed her of the mistake. Raquel did not have cancer at all; her cyst was benign.” Laurie shuffles to the next notecard.

“Raquel is a married mother of two teenagers. Before the incident, she was a homemaker in a Bay Area suburb. Following the misdiagnosis, she rediscovered her interest in studio art and jump-started her career as a sculptor. Some of you may recognize her as a regular guest on this show, where she has been instrumental in raising several hundred thousand dollars for breast-cancer support.”

Laurie leans forward. “Some things you should know: Raquel did not immediately inform her loved ones of the diagnostic error. She delayed telling them for a total of ten months, and did so only when forced to as a result of statements that were made by studio audience members on an earlier
Living with Lauren!
Also, evidence suggests that she benefited both professionally and personally from the charade.

“We’re here today to hear Raquel’s story from her perspective.
Why
did she allow her family and friends to believe she was sick?
How
does someone perpetrate a farce of this nature and magnitude? Does what she did qualify as a clinical problem that requires medical intervention, or are there psychological motives at work that fall under the more commonplace rubric of low self-esteem, something I’m sure many of us can relate to? These questions—and more—will be answered today as we explore the fascinating story of how and, perhaps more important,
why
a typical American housewife would pretend to be suffering from a sometimes terminal disease.”

I am not surprised to be described this way, by Laurie or anyone, but it still stings.

“In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that Raquel Rose is my sister, which makes today’s show all the more resonant for me. So, without further ado . . .” Laurie turns to me and crosses her legs. “Raquel, tell us what happened the day you received your first breast-cancer diagnosis.”

Gazing into Laurie’s eyes, I am mesmerized. To my surprise, I find that talking is not impossible. “Well, I was devastated. Panicked. All these weird thoughts were running through my head. Nothing made sense. I had so many questions later, but at that moment”—I flash to Meissner tenting his fingers over the papers on his desk and gazing at me with those puppy-dog eyes, and it’s almost like I’m back there again—“all I could think was,
No, this can’t be.
I felt like I couldn’t be, you know,
the one.
I felt too young, too healthy, too
ornery.
” At that, a handful of people in the audience laugh, and my spirits rise fractionally. Maybe I won’t be tarred and feathered on a second-rate cable network after all.

“When did you find out they’d given you the wrong test results?”

“A month later. Not a long time, but you have to understand what happens to you, to your life, in the weeks after the diagnosis. It’s like everything changes overnight. You go from taking everything for granted to wondering if you’ll survive till your next birthday, to see your daughter get married, to watch your son graduate from college. You can’t eat—or you eat too much. You can’t sleep—or you can’t stop sleeping. Everything seems surreal. The fact that everybody else is going about their lives is obscene. It changes you.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jean nodding. Hope inches further upward inside me.

“Part of me even thought,
What if they’re wrong again?
I couldn’t bear to go through the assimilation part again. It was too hard. It really fucked me up, actually.” Laurie keeps smiling, even as I realize that somebody, somewhere, has had to bleep me big-time. Oops. Still, this faux pas nets me a few more empathetic chuckles.
Things are going somewhere,
I think. “By that point I had come on your show, done the telethon . . . I don’t know how to say this, I was
invested
in it. I was still scared, but in a different way: Could I get in trouble for having raised all that money under false pretenses? Could I get
you
in trouble? Was it better to just keep the train moving and ask questions later?”

Laurie leans forward. “But the truth is, you never told them, did you?”

“I tried. First I thought,
I’ll just burst in and tell them. What’s so hard about that?
But it never . . . I could never figure out how to frame it. When that didn’t happen, I made a fancy dinner, made sure everyone was coming home early, put on my tunic shirt that hides everything nasty that my friend Sue says looks like Jaclyn Smith for Kmart”—chuckles—“and told them the truth. What happened was, they didn’t believe me. I don’t really blame them because, frankly, at that point, I didn’t believe it myself. It sounded so ridiculous, you know? It sounded a little bit crazy. After that, I kept coming up with these elaborate schemes for doing it gently, but something always got in the way.” I dredge up the memory of that night at the dinner table when,
as per usual,
kids and husband were whirring around in a world that seemed just a little bit fuller, a little bit faster, a little bit more important than my own.

“I know it sounds implausible, maybe even ridiculous, but I think the real reason I didn’t tell them spontaneously is that I didn’t know how to get them to listen to me. It is hard to say this, because I now take full responsibility for my actions, and for my own happiness, but the truth is, my husband and kids and family didn’t respect my thoughts or my time. It’s not completely their fault, you see, because I hadn’t earned that respect. I had no respect for myself, really, and I hadn’t in a long time, maybe ever.” I catch a sliver of Alicia’s pasty moon of a face through the curtain, and my heart freezes in my chest. Maybe I’ve gone too far?

“I’m oversimplifying. But that is how I felt. This is the kind of insecure and self-recriminating and self-indulgent thinking that got me into this mess. As long as I can remember, I wanted to be special. I never felt good enough. Not to my parents, not to my teachers, to men, to my sister”—I give Laurie’s hand a pat, and she nods encouragingly—“so when this happened, I began to see it as an opportunity to change, to make a difference. However, to make it that, I’d have to pretend that I was sick. I just didn’t have the courage to reinvent myself without the protective cover the breast cancer provided.”

My voice drops. “It wasn’t just the money I’d helped raise. I
liked
the attention. I liked that I’d had an idea for a new sculpture series and that a successful gallery owner thought it was promising. I liked the way my kids and husband made time for me and acted like I was a star, not just someone they tolerated. I liked the new me, and I was finding it hard to give her up, even though I knew I had to.”