The Secret Life of Prince Charming (4 page)

Sprout went up to bed and so did Dad, but I promised Daniel I’d call him as I did every night, so I stayed downstairs because there was more privacy there. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear all the passion and desire and sexual longing in our conversation.
How was your day? Fine, great. How was yours? Oh, pretty good.

I took the phone from the cradle in the kitchen, settled into the big leather chair in the living room. Dad’s living room was as creative and patchwork as the rest of the house—the ceiling was covered in squares of tin pressed into elaborate designs, which had been taken from an old bank in New York that was about to be demolished, and the rug was a worn Oriental one covering the floor, which was made of the sort of polished, bumpy wood you’d see on an old ship. The room was full of objects he’d gotten on his travels—a music box, an ancient globe, a red tribal mask—and there was a painting above the fireplace that Sprout hated, a naked woman in cubist style, with one pointed, triangular breast, one rounded, oblong one. Dad loved these things—whenever there were
visitors, he’d show them his objects, like a hunter in his trophy room.
I got this when I was in Africa…. I got this when I met the artist in New York….
I put my feet up on the fringed, velvety footstool, got comfortable for the intelligent and stimulating conversation that was coming.
So, what’d you do today? Oh, track practice. Mowed the lawn. You? Train ride—did my homework.

I was feeling the tumbling irritation of boredom, and the need to shake myself out of the kind of bad mood that would lead to the inevitable
What’s wrong? Nothing
conversation that would be full of edges and politeness and something close to cinched-in homicidal urges. I didn’t know what my problem was. Daniel was a great guy, and everyone told me what a great guy he was. I tried to remember what I liked about him. He was nice. That’s right. He had good legs from running track. We both liked math, and not many people understood that. He was…My mind snagged. Well, he was clean. Clean in all ways. His thoughts were as clean as his freshly showered hair. Which I think I liked. I was pretty sure I liked.

I leaned my head against the high back of the chair, holding the phone in my palm, and that’s when I saw it. Something that hadn’t been in the room the last time we were here. It was a small statue on a black square, a glass statue. It was a curve of glass about ten inches tall, something that managed to look both delicate and strong. I could see that there was a brass plate on it, with some sort of writing, and I got up to see what it said. I left the phone in the soft squish of the chair, squinted at the words.
Humphrey Bogart,
I read.
Lifetime Achievement Award. Film Artists Association of America.

Okay, this was strange. Why would my father have a statue belonging to Humphrey Bogart? Why would it appear here suddenly? If he bought it somewhere recently, wouldn’t he have shown it to us or told us about it? It wouldn’t have been like purchasing a new pair of shoes or a garden tool not worth a mention.

I looked at it, and there was a part of me that did not want to touch it, did not want to do what I did next, which was to pick it up and look underneath. I think I must have already had the sense that something was wrong, that this object had no place here. That the reasons it was here were bad reasons, ugly ones. But I was curious, too. And so I held the bottom of the statue up close so that I could read the words taped on a tiny note at the bottom of the statue.
To Hugh Jenkins
, it read.
And to scotch on the rocks…Humphrey Bogart.

Humphrey Bogart!
Jenkins.
I felt something heavy and dark in my stomach, some whirling mix of questions and the dread of their answers. It was Brie’s statue. Something that had belonged to her father. So, why was it here? Maybe she had given it to Dad. A present. A going-away thing. A good-bye, something-to-remember-me-by thing. People did that, right?

But I had a stronger, whispered thought. One of those whispers that are less curtains fluttering in a breeze than lawn chairs being tossed across patios in a windstorm. I knew that Brie did not know my father had this. That Brie might never know my father had this.

I knew because I remembered another object in the room. A bust of a woman’s head that I had always found slightly eerie, made out of some kind of clay, with initials scratched
into the base.
A.R.
I knew those initials.
A.R.,
Abigail Renfrew.

Two things that belonged to women in his life. Was this a crazy thought? Was I nuts? That I thought there were maybe more things in this room that belonged to other people? Other women?

I did something else then, and I don’t even fully know why I did it. It was a hunch, if a hunch is ever just that. I lifted up other objects and looked underneath. A globe, no, nothing. A paperweight, just a paperweight. A book end shaped like an elephant. Nothing. I looked with growing unease. And then, there it was. Just like that. A name scratched in the bottom of a tall, brightly colored vase.
Jane, age six,
it said. And there, too, under the red tribal mask, the name
Olivia Thornton
. Written with blue ink on a piece of masking tape in handwriting I didn’t recognize. Under a mantel clock, its hands stopped at 3:30, one word,
Elizabeth
. I pulled the footstool to the mantel and lifted down the painting there.
I got this when I met the artist in New York….
It was large and heavy, and I struggled with it. But there, tucked into the corner of the frame was a business card.
Joelle Giofranco,
it read.
Costume design and alterations.

Inside, I felt as if something were falling and about to crash: He had taken something from every woman he’d been involved with. Isn’t that what he had done? It was too eerie and disturbing not to have an explanation, right? What was the truth here? I suddenly wanted that, no
needed
that, more than anything else. I felt my breath in my chest and my heart beat as if a thing
had
crashed and landed just there beside me.
And, too, right then as my sister and father lay sleeping and I stood on a footstool with a painting in my hands, there was a softer, quieter realization: that the truth I wanted so badly was likely as hard and faceted as one of the diamonds Dad told us about—perfectly imperfect, formed somewhere deep within and existing there, until it was brought to the surface by volcanic eruptions and simple need.

“Jesus, you scared me.” Grandma minimized the computer screen in a flash, whirled her fluffy-white-haired head around. She looked guilty. She put one veiny hand against her pink sweatshirt. “You almost gave me a heart attack. Don’t you know better than to do that to an old lady?”

Gram sat at a desk in our office/spare room, one of those spaces that collected everything that had nowhere else to go—Mom’s sewing machine, Aunt Annie’s weights, this huge “Leprechaun trap” glued to green Elmer’s-and-glitter cardboard that Sprout had made in the first grade for St. Patrick’s Day. I put my hands on Gram’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head. “I just needed to work on a paper. Film studies…‘
Phantom of the Opera
as an example of Classic Horror Cinema.’”

“eBay,” Gram said, tilting her head to the computer, which now held only the blue desktop with white clouds. “Don’t tell your mom. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like chefs. Adorable.” She looked at her wrist, but she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Ten more minutes until the bidding’s over. Can you come back?”

“Sure,” I said. She waited with her hands in her lap. Stared at me intently. “I’m going,” I said.

“It’s just I get nervous when the competition’s hot,” she said.

I tried to call Liv, but she didn’t pick up, and I left a message for Daniel to tell him I was thinking about him, because I felt guilty for not thinking about him. I went back into the office fif
teen minutes later—Gram had left, so I settled into the chair. It had been five days since I had seen the names under the objects at Dad’s house, and for those five days I had felt oddly fragmented, as if a piece of my mind was constantly at work on something else. It was that sense you get after you’ve lost something—your car keys, say, and you’ve decided to give up looking for a while. You go on with other things, you make a sandwich, pour a glass of milk, but there’s still a part of you going,
Maybe I left them in the pocket of my black jacket. Maybe I dropped them down between the couch cushions….
My mind was doing some kind of indistinct nagging that I didn’t want it to do, some off-duty work it could have been paid time and a half for.

I typed a few lines of my paper; listless, have-to lines, flat and uninspired lines. I looked up “1920 Horror Cinema” on the Web. I switched back to the mostly blank page I was working on, watched the cursor blink on-off, on-off. I swapped back to the Web. I typed “Jafarabad Brothers” into the search box. I was aware of the silver ring on the middle finger of my right hand, two arms that made a circle and held a heart, a ring my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I pushed enter and a list of results came up—newspaper articles, reviews of shows, interviews. I clicked one at random.
Anoush Hourig began the troupe just out of college, when he needed money to fund a round-the-world sailing trip with a friend. The first show, at a campus dormitory, was so financially successful that the sailing trip was cancelled.

I knew this story. This was where Dad would joke that the audience was so sloshed that they started throwing things, and he and Uncle Mike had to run for their lives, empty-handed. Financially successful? Broke, I thought he’d said. I read on:
“That the audience members were severely intoxicated helped with tips,” Hourig joked. “One guy threw his wallet at us…We walked out of there with more money than either of us had ever seen.”

This was what you did when you were a performer, I guessed. You acted out a good story. Maybe you’d change it a little, depending on who was in the audience. Dad on a sailing trip? We could barely get him on a ferry. He was afraid of boats, he said, a fear instilled in him by his mother, after his diamond-merchant father was nearly lost at sea. I guess the main thing was to give a good show. Dad could keep you right there, listening and laughing, and maybe you didn’t always think about exactly what he said until later. Maybe the details didn’t matter, because you were just so entertained. Or maybe I had just remembered the story wrong.

I looked at all the search results, all the entries. Pieces of my father known and unknown. If I put my own name, Quinn Hoffman Hunt, in there, I know what I’d get. One entry, from the time I organized the food drive for Honor Society and it got written up in the Nine Mile Falls paper. One me, hundreds of hims. I felt the huge space between those numbers, the known and the unknown; I saw that space, and it looked like it stretched for miles.

“Qui-inn,” Aunt Annie called from downstairs. “Phone for you.”

I picked up in the hall, heard the polite click of Annie hanging up. Daniel’s voice had an urgency I’d never heard before.
“Quinn, God. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Tonight, right? I’m going to see you tonight?”

I wondered what happened. Maybe he’d had a brush with death. Something extreme to remind him that life was short. Or that life was too long, maybe, when lived without some sort of passion. Maybe he’d fallen and hit his head. Maybe he dropped the hair dryer in the bathtub while he was in it. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right. I just miss you, is all. I just really want to see you.”

“Wow,” I said. I felt this little buzz inside, a hum. Something that attached itself to the word “want.” “You’re coming over after dinner?” That’s what usually happened on a Saturday night. He’d come over after dinner; we’d watch a movie. When we first started dating, we tried going out with his friends from track or my friends from volleyball, but it always felt like trying to jam together a couple of jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit. Pieces from entirely different puzzles, even, a snowy mountain cabin scene attempting to merge with an oversized image of Garfield the cat.

“Quinn, do you mind if we don’t? Can we do something
different
? It’s such a beautiful night…. School’s almost out, summer’s coming…. We can get a blanket, drive over to Greenlake or something….” He laughed a little. The kind of laugh his minister wouldn’t have approved of.

“Okay. Sure,” I said. Definitely a brush with death. Or paint fumes. Or drugs. Whatever it was, I liked it. “Yes. You, me, tonight.”

“‘Yes’ is a great word,” Daniel said.

Sprout laid out the silverware, lining it up on paper towels folded in half, as Gram reached up into the cupboard for dinner plates.

“Why do we put spoons out when no one uses a spoon?” Sprout asked.

“Good question,” Gram said.

“You always made us put out a spoon,” Aunt Annie said to her as she took the milk out of the fridge.

“Hogwash. I don’t give a rat’s ass about spoons,” Gram said.

“Mom,” Mom warned. She opened the oven door, potholders on both hands.

“Oh, they’ve heard ‘ass’ before. Or is it ‘rat’ you don’t like?” Gram said, and Sprout chuckled.

“Wait, go back to the spoon thing,” Aunt Annie said. “Because I’ve always put them out because I thought I’d get in trouble with you guys if I didn’t.”

“Me?” Mom said. “What do I care about spoons?” She took the chicken from the oven. I handed her a plate for it.

“If you’re still worried about getting in trouble with me when you’re almost thirty, you got another problem than spoons,” Gram said.

“Twenty-seven,” Aunt Annie said. “Please. I don’t need you prematurely aging me. And fine, from now on I’m doing whatever I want.”

“It’s about time,” Gram said.

“Forget the spoons,” Sprout said, and put them back in the drawer.

“Unless we’re having soup,” I said.

We sat down to dinner, passed around chicken and Mom’s
old wooden salad bowl, and Sprout dropped chicken bits down to Ivar, who sat upright beside her chair, staring without blinking.

“Is Ivar looking fat to anyone else? He looks like he’s gaining weight,” I said. It was one of those moments you wondered if he could hear and understand you, and if you were hurting his feelings. Aunt Annie leaned back in her chair to look.

“Don’t say fat, you’ll hurt his self-esteem,” Sprout said, thinking the same thing as me. “Say he’s got more square footage.”

Ivar was an old dog who until recently only laid around in the sunny spots of the house. Lately, though, he’d leave every weekday morning and we wouldn’t see him again until late afternoon, when he’d plunk down exhausted on his pillow as if he were a Boeing employee returning home after a tough day. We didn’t know where he went or what he did. Maybe he was like one of those guys you read about in
People
magazine, who have separate families in different locations who don’t know each other exist. Maybe he had his own water bowl and dish somewhere else, and people who wondered what he did all night and all morning and on the weekends.

“Well, he ate half a bag of fortune cookies, remember?” Aunt Annie said. “Fortunes and all. ‘You have an unusually magnetic personality.’”

“That was months ago, though,” I said.

“Did you get your paper done?” Gram asked me. She shook the bottle of salad dressing so that the little bits of herbs swirled up toward the top.

“What paper?” Mom asked.

“‘
Phantom of the Opera
as Example of Classic Horror Cinema,’” I said.

“Whore cinema?” Sprout said. Mom lowered her eyebrows in Sprout’s direction. “I thought that’s what she said.” Sprout kept grinning as if her joke just kept on pleasing her.

“
Phantom of the Opera
—oh, I love that play,” Aunt Annie said. “So romantic.”

“Romantic?” Mom set down her fork. “You’re kidding, right? Psycho guy obsesses over woman? Stalks and kidnaps her? Sure, you got candles and fake fog, but my God.”

“You didn’t feel sorry for him? Tormented guy, deformed face, shunned, in love with someone he thought he could never have? Come on, that cry of pain he gives didn’t make you feel
anything
?” Aunt Annie’s own fork was stuck in midair in disbelief.

“Instability isn’t romantic. Tormented guys aren’t romantic. This is exactly what gets us into trouble. Feeling
sorry
for them. Help me out here,” Mom said to Gram.

“I never liked a man in a mask,” Gram said.

“Masked—ha,” Mom said. “A metaphor. Hiding his true self. Then, surprise! Surprise, I’m a psycho!”

“He
was
a psycho,” I said. Come to think of it.

“Let’s talk about spoons,” Sprout said.

“I’m just saying, we mix up pity and love and then, boom. Trouble,” Mom said.

“I would have picked the Phantom,” Aunt Annie said. “Over the other guy. The prissy opera dude…” She looked at me for help.

“Raoul,” I said.

“Over Raoul.” She stuck her chin up at Mom, and you got a
sudden glimpse of how Aunt Annie must have looked when she was seven.