My Hollywood (34 page)

Claire
THE TWO BOXES

“You don’t seem pregnant to me,” Helen said.

“I don’t
feel
pregnant. I just haven’t had a period for a while.” But I didn’t keep good track. “With Will, I threw up.”

“So you’re not, then,” she said with authority. Up close, there was something plain about her face. “Do you even
want
a second child?” Once in a while I remembered: people found me odd. “It’s a lot of work,” she said, holding her belly.

She sighed. They all thought we couldn’t manage Will as it was.
I
couldn’t.

I bought the little thing you peed on.

Two lines came. Bright pink.

I’d wanted a divorce. Now I’d have a baby instead. I tipped, leaned my forehead on the cool bathroom wall. That size 2 dress in the closet.

When I told him, late that night, Paul started shaking his head. “I love children. I would have liked more, if I’d married a different kind of woman. But given both of our work …” He sat and rubbed the arch of a foot. “Claire, I don’t think our marriage can withstand another child.”

He stared at me as if I were new. “That was the one time we’ve had sex all year.”

“What does
that
have to do with it?”

He started pacing. “He’s already in school. Next year, he’ll start kindergarten. It’ll be easier from here on out.” His voice calmed, telling me we were near the end. If I could hold up, steady my nerves, we’d pay people a little longer, and then we’d be out of the woods. But I’d waited, was waiting still, for us to enter together, one on either side of Will, and come out, a long time later, somewhere else.

“Why is it so hard for us to manage?” I said. “Other people manage.”

“I don’t see that many people who both have major careers.”

“I don’t have a major career.”

“You’re one symphony away. And having another child won’t help.”

“I told you before we got married that I couldn’t have an abortion.”

“I know you said that, Claire. We had a fight about that then, too, if you recall.”

We’d never settled that fight, as we didn’t settle most of our fights. We left them on the floor and turned back to daily cares. When I’d had the amnio, he’d said, “You’d abort before you’d chose to carry to term a baby with a terrible disability, wouldn’t you?”

I’d been softer then, bridelike. I put a hand on his arm. When I think of our young marriage, that’s what I see: his dark arm and my wrist, a musician’s hand, with clipped nails. “Just wait,” I’d said. “We’ll get the results in a week.”

Now he stood with the same strange smile Will got when he was going to be stubborn. “I’d choose the marriage over a child we don’t have.”

Would I? I didn’t think I’d choose the marriage over anything, though I no longer seemed to have a choice.

But it turned out to be a false positive.

It started in the smallest way. One day in April, Paul came to the kitchen as he did every morning, baseball cap backward, carrying his briefcase, but this time holding his tuxedo. He looked around, then hung it on the door. Before, he’d always given his dry cleaning to Lola. Now there was only me. Still, he hesitated. I suppose dry cleaning fell into the housekeeper column. His mother had raised him to know the difference.

But Will had dressed himself in a T-shirt I liked; his long hair curled up in the back. I’d made barley bread for the first time and Will was eating it, with honey. “Do you want me to take that in?”

“Could you? Thanks.” Paul sighed. “I should get a new shirt. I let the salesman talk me into that one. Mistake.”

“We can go look,” I said. “The Emmys aren’t till the end of the summer, right?”

“I have to have it to take to Alfie’s wedding. Didn’t I tell you? It’s black tie. That’s so like him. The human comedy.”

“Who’s Alfie?” Will asked.

“Alfie’s daddy’s cousin, who lives in Baltimore.” In the nine years we’d been married, I’d spoken to Alfie exactly twice, when he’d called after each of Paul’s episodes aired. Apparently, he was now marrying. Paul said he’d leave on a Thursday, getting off early to go to the airport. He’d return Monday morning and drive straight to work.

“You’ve never taken four days off to spend with us,” I whispered.

“They’re not inviting kids. Otherwise, I’d bring him and you could come if you wanted or stay home and work.”

A race started in me. “No,” I said. “This isn’t fair.”

“It’s done. Molly already booked my flight.”

“You don’t even
know
this guy.”

“His mother would be very hurt and offended if I didn’t go.”

“I’m hurt and offended.” All for a cousin we hadn’t seen since our wedding. A cousin Will had never even met. My outrage spun a web.

“I’d like to talk to him,” Lil’s husband said, when I called that afternoon. “She’s got me trained. I mean, if you want to work the kind of hours he works, with that focus and that commitment, then your free time isn’t yours. That belongs to your wife, and she can do what she wants with it.”

Lil said, “It just sounds like he doesn’t listen to you.”

This was what his mother earned, I thought, those times she waited with her glass of wine and just got me. Absolute obedience. But there wasn’t enough of him to share.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said, as he stood packing, the suitcase open on the bed.

“Claire, I have to.”

“If you go,” I said—but what? I had nothing he wanted that I could deny. I kept asking, it came to me in a rush, for time. And the answer was no.

But the days he was gone felt like vacation.

We took a long walk with my mother and Tom, who’d come from lunch at Twin Dragons. They brought their fortune cookies for Will.

As we strolled, my mother looked down. She told us the plumber had stolen her rings.

“Maybe you misplaced them,” I said. “Remember the time we found your money order.”

“No, he took them, I’m sure. I know it.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re gone. We looked everywhere.”

“We looked everywhere,” Tom echoed. “I called him and said, I have your name and your insurance number. I said in twenty-four hours we’re going to file a police report. He said he didn’t do it, but I don’t believe him.”

I turned to Tom, sharp. Didn’t he remember, she’d once accused
him
of stealing from her.

I didn’t like William hearing this. Wind gusted eucalyptus buttons, and Will kicked them with the round fronts of his sneakers. Leaves rattled above.

“The eucalyptus smell good,” I said.

“There are six hundred different kinds of eucalyptus in Santa Monica,” Tom said. “All from Australia.”

He took the bag from Twin Dragons away from my mother. “No, don’t do that, don’t. People don’t like that. They don’t like it.”

“Well, some
one
does.”

“She thinks she’s feeding the animals,” he told us. He bent down to pick up a wet lump of mu shu pork from a lawn.

Friday night we went to a Buster Keaton festival, with pizza and good ice cream. Will stood up on his seat and the men behind didn’t mind. After Will fell asleep, Paul called. “This rehearsal dinner. Everyone made a toast. And the bride’s father …” As he talked, I moved around my office. There was a box in my closet. I’d brought my things in it to California years ago. I put in a bent pinecone and a picture of Will.

The next day I stood at the bank depositing a check from an orchestra in Arkansas. There was another one from the radio station affiliate that aired
Saint Paul Sunday
. I filled out the deposit slip to put the money in our joint checking account. The total was twenty-three hundred dollars. I deposited those checks, and then took out cash. We had a four-hundred-a-day limit. I did it Sunday, too, dropping the envelope of money in my box. On a whim I called my mother. “We found the rings,” she said.

Paul returned Monday night after I was asleep. For once, the next morning, I woke first. On the table, right inside the door, was a hexagonal box, made of dark pebbled red leather. A gift. I thought of my two boxes. I tried to imagine this one inside the other. Even though the hexagon was so much smaller, it didn’t seem to fit.

My friends had stood at our wedding by the chuppah; they’d promised the rabbi to help keep us together.

“Well, you know what Beethoven’s mother said about marriage,” Harv told me. “‘A little joy and then a chain of sorrows.’ He overheard this—no wonder the guy never found love.”

“Even if he does just a tiny bit you like,” Lil said, “you may miss that tiny bit.”

She suggested a vacation.

“With
him?”
I couldn’t really imagine it.

For a long time, I’d had a separation alone. I’d had a whole love affair with Jeff, without his complicity. It was about time I started having relationships with people who knew about them.

Still, I’d married late, and I had a schoolboy.

Nothing could turn out anymore.

Paul didn’t attend the end-of-the-year conference. The teachers told me Will had trouble with impulse control. He talked too much. We’d let our nanny go, as they’d said to, I told them. And he was improving, they said, but when I pressed them, they couldn’t tell me what had actually improved. And we’d lost Lola. Or I had.

I went to Dr. Lark.

“What is it you’re afraid of?”

“Worst case? Worst case might be that he can’t make friends. That he has to go to a special school.”

“He has a sweet connection to you. He’ll find friends.”

“He just doesn’t behave well enough.”

“I’d put my bets on you,” she said.

“Well, I can’t leave Paul now,” I said. “When Will’s having trouble.”

“It’s hard to know how these things play out,” she said.

When I was leaving, I turned back. “Do you have children?”

I expected her to have two or three. Her research concerned mothers with infants.

“No, I don’t.” She paused. “I married late.”

I began to imagine being alone.

Money was going to be a problem.

I always knew the name of the place. The redhead had once tried to get Elissa in. I didn’t call her, though. I just looked up the number and then got flustered when the woman at the switchboard asked my name. Michelle Berend, I said. Paul’s sister in Boston. I didn’t want my name on their books. I’d had a so-so conference with Will’s teachers. That was all. I just wanted to see.

Special needs.

Maybe we all have special needs.

On the tour, the classrooms looked normal enough. Papers hanging on bulletin boards. Lockers in the hall. Rows of new white Apples in the computer room. A small library lined with posters of Einstein, Tommy Hilfiger, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Cruz. Jay Leno. Richard Ford. John Irving. Hans Christian Andersen. Walt Disney. Then, in the music room, a guy with long hair, wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt, lifted the needle of a portable record player onto an old Piatagorski recording of Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto. Kids sat in a circle on the floor, each holding a baton. He walked around behind them, moving an arm, in rhythm.

When the piece ended, he stopped in back of one kid and touched her head. He went to the piano, banged out a chord, and asked for identification. She got it right, and then she tapped another head. He trilled a shivery high E.

I noticed men’s arms. Paul had a yeshiva boy’s arms, the kind I’d always liked. This guy had muscles, but they weren’t ugly. Then the bell rang, and the kids’ shoulders bumped one another.

“Okay, five minutes of Duck Duck Goose,” he said.

The tour guide herded the six other parents and me toward the new gym. But I lagged back. A boy now skidded around, tapping heads. I’d never noticed before how hard it was to run in a circle. His sneakers squeaked. I sat on the floor with them and closed my eyes. I wanted the teacher’s hand to hover over my head; I wanted to be Goose.

Then a second bell rang and the kids shouldered their backpacks and thudded out. I was the only one left on the floor.

“Was that a conducting class?”

“I’m just a dad. My kid’s in fourth grade.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re a musician.”

“A chemist, actually, in real life. But I play with the Glendale Chamber Orchestra.”

I looked at his hands. No rings. But hadn’t I read that married men went bare-fingered and married women didn’t?
I
was married, I remembered, but I’d spun my ring on the floor one night, and it fell down a heating grate.

Still, musicians look at hands.

“You’re not a Park Century parent?” he asked.

I shoved myself up. “No.” Willie didn’t go to school here and I hoped he never would, Tom Cruz notwithstanding. And Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard.

The guy gave me his e-mail address to get the orchestra’s schedule. Just then, another group entered, its guide pointing out violins in the cupboards. “Lola!” I hadn’t wanted anyone to know I was here. And seeing her now made me trill.

“I am looking for the grandson of Lita. He is an autistic.”

I kept the slip of paper with the guy’s e-mail in my case, in the compartment with the rosin. That smell came up to my face every time I opened it. But I never e-mailed for the schedule of the Glendale Chamber Orchestra.

Call lawyer
, I kept putting on my list.

I asked him again to move out. He said he wouldn’t, not now. He’d sleep in the den. We could talk about it after the pilot season.

When was that?
I asked.

Summer
, he said.

He left the room then, the bedroom that was now mine. The bed made, a lawn mower going somewhere outdoors.

Jeff had introduced a motif, a fugitive melody, nothing real. I understood he’d never felt what I had, but he’d made me hope for something. Slowly, I thought, I’d become the person I’d been before, fragile and eager.

We finally agreed he’d move out August 1.

Now what I talked to Harv about was money.

“You think they’d go back to me? I was late. And they’ve commissioned Annabel Grass twice.”

“Yeah, and she writes music as tight-assed as she is.”

One afternoon in July Will was at camp, and I heard Paul thud in. We both roamed through our paths in the house. He’d been sleeping in the den since March.