Outtakes from a Marriage (10 page)

I wandered a little closer to the climbing equipment and saw that the little girl playing with Katie belonged to Nancy Grickis, another Multi mom, who was, herself, trying to read a section of the
Times
but had positioned herself almost underneath the apparatus.

“Hi, Julia!” Nancy said. “Annie, that’s high enough.” The girls had started to climb up the jungle gym. Each wanted to be higher than the other. Nancy’s daughter Annie stopped climbing but Katie continued her determined ascent.

“What’s Katie’s dad’s name again?” whispered Nancy.

“Adam. Adam Heller.”

“Right. I only really know the wife,” Nancy mumbled. Then she called out, “Adam?”

Adam looked up from his paper.

“Look where Katie is!” Nancy was forcing a smile.

Adam looked up from his paper at Katie, who was now almost at the summit. He nodded and smiled. “She’s a good little climber all right,” he said, and then returned to his paper.

“Oh my God,”
Nancy angrily mouthed to me. Then she whispered, “Elizabeth would be pissed, and I would be, too, if I was working my butt off at a big law firm and my stay-at-home husband couldn’t be bothered to watch out for his own daughter.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She actually is a good little climber. It’s supposed to give them confidence to let them try things like climbing up high.”

“It also gives them spinal cord injuries if they fall,” Nancy snapped. She stared at Adam, then she shook her head in disgust.

“Mommy, Katie’s at the top. Why can’t I go up?” Annie whined.

“Because Mommy wants you to be safe!” Another angry look at Adam.

Annie moved herself up a rung.

“That’s it! No higher!”

“But Katie gets to go higher!” Annie’s whine had turned into a shrill, fake cry.

“I’m not responsible for Katie. I’m responsible for you. And I want you to be safe!” Nancy fully glared at Adam. He read on, oblivious.

Annie moved herself up another rung.

“Okay, Annie. That’s it. You’re not listening to what I say, so I want you to come down. Now.”

I knew where this was going, so I turned around to look for Sammy. He was playing king of the hill on the slide with a group of little boys. Sammy was climbing back up the slide like a monkey. Another little boy followed him.

“One!” Nancy called out sternly. I looked back at the jungle gym. Annie clung to her perch defiantly.

“Two!”

Annie moved one hand up to the next rung.

“Three! Okay, that’s it. Time-out! A three-minute time-out, Annie. Do you want to make it six minutes?”

I’m certainly no expert, but I had learned through bitter experience with Ruby and Sammy that one must never start counting if one can’t snatch up the child immediately upon the arrival at three to drag his or her screaming little body away. Nancy couldn’t reach Annie. Annie knew this. Nancy could count all day, but she and Annie both knew she was screwed.

I glanced at Adam to see if he was purposely trying to antagonize Nancy with his indifference, but it was clear that he had no idea she was furious at him. He was placidly reading the newspaper, his daughter was playing with a little girl, and two women whom he vaguely knew were watching their children. This was the extent of his awareness, and I have to admit I was a little envious of his casual oblivion. I had witnessed it on other occasions as well. Adam would drop Katie off at birthday parties that were clearly meant to be attended by children
and
their parents, and then he would be late picking her up. He threw a birthday party for Katie last year, invited only half the girls in the class, and held the party right after school! The mothers of the girls who weren’t invited harped about this for months. And, according to Liz Kelleher, whose daughter was invited, he gave out fistfuls of gum and candy instead of the usual beautifully prepared party bags.
Why couldn’t I be more like Adam Heller?
I wondered.
Why did I have to succumb to the unspoken tyranny of the playground Nazis and Montessori Mumsies?
I was constantly apologizing for Sammy, forcing him to share when he didn’t want to, smiling over a glass of wine at a group of dull parents at a spoiled child’s birthday party. Why didn’t I just act like Adam Heller? Like it was all beyond my own comprehension?

“One more time, Annie! I’m going to give you one more chance!” Nancy keened. Just then Adam glanced up from his paper. He grinned naughtily at me, rolled his eyes at Nancy, and then he said, “Hey, Katie, let’s go.”

Okay, so he was doing it for his own amusement in this instance. I still wanted to be like him.

Katie climbed down two rungs to where Annie perched and then she launched herself into the air, landing slightly wobbly on her feet just a few feet away from Nancy.

“Taa-daa!” Katie declared.

“Annie…don’t you dare…”

Of course, Annie jumped, too, but she was obviously less experienced and rolled forward onto her knees upon landing, scuffing them sharply on the hard rubberized mat. There was a pause. Then a shriek.

Every mother in close proximity offered wipes and tissues and Band-Aids. Somebody ran over to the soda vendor for ice. Adam simply tucked his papers under his arm and headed home, his daughter happily skipping by his side.

The afternoon was so mild that Sammy and I stayed in the playground until the sun had begun to settle across the river, and then we began the long trek back to Broadway and Eighty-fifth Street. Waiting for the light on West End Avenue, I wished, once again, that we lived closer to a park.

Joe and I had actually started looking at apartments the previous fall. We were looking primarily on Central Park West and across the park on the East Side. The apartment we currently lived in was large enough, but the location wasn’t great. Too far from Ruby’s school and Sammy’s playgrounds, and it was on Broadway, which was noisy and crowded. We had bought the apartment six years earlier, using the income from Joe’s first two movies as a down payment. It was a co-op and our “financials” were a disaster, according to our real-estate broker. We had no credit history, except for some long-overdue student loans that had been hastily paid off just months before, and when we met with the co-op board, the president had voiced his concerns.

“What if you can’t keep up with your maintenance payments? What if you don’t get any work next year and you have to fore-close?” But Joe had charmed him. He showed him a recent article in
Variety
that listed Joe Ferraro as one of Hollywood’s hottest up-and-comers, and the contract that he had just signed for the Ralph Fiennes movie. Then he gave all the board members tickets to an off-Broadway show he was going to be starring in the following month, and the board was enchanted. “This kid’s gonna be a star,” the president told our broker when he called to announce the board’s approval. “I can feel it!”

The evening after we closed on the apartment, Ruby, Joe, and I took the subway uptown from the East Village, where we had been living, and we had a picnic on the broom-clean floor of our new home. Now that the former owner’s furnishings had been removed, the space seemed grand and cavernous, and when we entered the foyer, our footsteps and voices echoed off the high plaster ceilings and walls. “It sounds like school in here,” Ruby had said.

It was a classic prewar apartment, a bigger one than we had thought we could afford. We had gotten a deal on the place because the kitchen and bathrooms sorely needed updating. There was a formal entryway, with a door leading to an old kitchen with matching Kenmore appliances in avocado green, circa 1975, then a central hall with a living room on one side and a formal dining room on the other, and at the end, a master bedroom on the left and two other bedrooms on the right. The hardwood floors were dull and scratched and the original wooden trim around the doors and windows had years ago lost their edge, swathed as they were in decades’ worth of hasty paint jobs. The place needed work—even the broker had conceded that it was a little “shabby”—but after years of loft living, there was something enduring and solid about the thick walls and the carefully considered floor plan of apartment 6B, an old-world warmth and vitality that had been lacking in the modern high-rise apartments that we had been seeing.

We ate takeout on the floor of our new dining room that first night, and through the windows we could see the rosy twilit sky above the neighboring buildings, the western light so foreign and strange to us. Ruby ran in and out of the rooms singing a song about whales, and from somewhere in the building came the do-re-mi-faso-la-ti-do of a child’s piano scales, careful and precise. I wondered how many first meals new tenants had enjoyed in that very room. How many Thanksgiving dinners, seders, Christmas breakfasts, New Year’s brunches? Joe had run down to the corner for a bottle of champagne, and we toasted our new lives in the pale light of that late-June evening, just me and Ruby and Joe, and it seemed then that the kindly ghosts of the former families of apartment 6B toasted our cozy future along with us.

“There’s a thing about you two on Gawker today,” Ruby said that night over dinner. We were having take-out Chinese, as we did most Saturdays when Catalina took the night off.

“On what?” asked Joe.

“On Gawker dot-com.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Somebody was just telling me something about that Web site last night.”

“Well, according to Gawker, it’s surprising you remember. It sounds like you two had yourselves quite the time at…where was it? The Dublin House?”

“Wait, you read Gawker? I thought you hated everything to do with celebrity and show business,” said Joe. Then he said, “I don’t want you reading that crap.”

“Is the Dublin House that place on Seventy-second Street?” Ruby continued. “That place looks like a dump. Why were you there?”

“Why aren’t we monitoring where she goes on the Web?” Joe said to me. “I thought you were doing that.”

“Monitoring?” I said. “You know I don’t know anything about computers. I trust Ruby not to go places she shouldn’t….”

“Don’t you read the fucking papers?!” Joe shouted at me. A piece of moo shoo pork was stuck to his lower lip. “There are
predators
on it looking for kids to—”

“Jesus Christ, Joe!” I exclaimed. Then, carefully lowering my voice, I said, “You don’t have to shout.”

“Yeah, don’t you read fucking papers?!” shouted Sammy, sending Ruby into fits of giggles.

“Don’t laugh at him, Ruby!” I yelled. Then I took a breath. “Sammy, that’s a grown-up word,” I said.

“I’m not the one who said it,” said Ruby.

“Fuck!” said Sammy. Then he looked devilishly at Ruby.

“Great,” I said to Joe. “Just great.”

“Sammy. Quit it now,” said Joe. His face and neck were red, and I could see by the bulging vein in his forehead that he was furious but was trying to remain calm. He turned to Ruby. “I thought you were on some kind of a kids’ limited-access Internet plan. How could you get onto Gawker?”

“Dad, I was on that kiddie plan when I was like six. You can’t use the computer for research when you have those blocks.”

“So you can go anywhere you damn well please on the Internet. That’s nice,” said Joe, looking accusingly at me “I mean, what kind of research are you doing on a sleazy site like Gawker, Ruby?”

Ruby visibly bristled at the sound of the word
sleazy
in the same sentence as her name.

“I Googled you! I wanted to read about you! And I’m just reading about people on the sleazy Web site. I’m not one of the sleazy people in it,” she said quietly. Then she jumped up and ran to her room.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Joe. He slammed his fork down on the table and stood up. “I just want to know where she goes on the Internet,” he said to me. “That’s all!” Then he walked to the back of the apartment and could be heard knocking on Ruby’s door. “Ruby?” he said quietly. “Ruby, kitten, open the door.”

“All done,” said Sammy, climbing out of his seat.

“Okay,” I said. “Fifteen minutes of Nickelodeon and then bath time.”

Sammy trotted happily into the living room and I started to clear our plates. I finished off the wine in my glass, the blessed, merciful hair of the dog that had buoyed me through dinner. I was tired when dinner had arrived, but now I was waking up a little bit. Joe’s tirade had provoked me, to say the least. I had been lulled that day into a hangover-induced state of forgiveness and compassion. I honestly hadn’t checked Joe’s voice mail once. The unbidden flashbacks to last night’s intimate romp had softened me a little and made me wonder if all my doubts were unfounded. “I love you, baby,” he had whispered into my ear last night. Walking back from the playground, I thought about that and about how all the messages could easily have been from some chummy wardrobe girl who liked to joke around with Joe. I had almost decided that I would take Beth’s suggestion and at least ask Joe about the messages, even though doing so would bring an end to my access to them. It is wrong to spy on another person, I had thought, chasing Sammy down our block that afternoon. It’s just wrong. Now, dumping out a half-eaten plate of broccoli with garlic sauce, I thought,
It’s also wrong to cheat on your wife.