Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  S was sitting on the living-room couch with her hands folded across her lap. She had on the dress she wore when we’d met, her black bikini dark beneath it.

  “Twiddling your thumbs in the Cottage?” I said.

  “My toes too. Actually, I fell asleep outside and now look.” She stood and showed me the backs of her thighs, which were pig-pink.

  “Ouch! I have some aloe upstairs. Or, better yet, let me get you a drink.”

  In the kitchen we toasted to sunburns and drank the rest of the sparkling wine. At least Kit had the decency to put in the Champagne bottle stopper.

  We’d only each had a glass when S said, “Can I ask you something?” Her voice had the manic quality of all tipsy women everywhere.

  “Drunk already?” I asked.

  She shrugged and cocked an eyebrow mischievously. We were still standing at the counter.

  “My question is…”

  In that pause it seemed like she had a billion questions to choose from. But then she grabbed the bottle and poured the rest into her glass. “Why did you ask Karl to move out?”

  I considered my empty glass and walked to the fridge, where a new, unopened bottle waited. I would need to drink fast or S would lap me.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You think he’s such a great guy.”

  “And you don’t?”

  I popped the cork with my bare hands and a curl of smoke snaked out of the bottle’s mouth.

  “I do. Karl is a good guy. But does someone have to be a bad person to want to leave him? Men leave women for all kinds of reasons.” I stopped. “Look, we did have a fight, but the fight wasn’t why I told him I needed space. Not the only reason anyway.”

  “My mom asked for a divorce because she liked this skateboarder who was always outside of Erewhon. She wanted to see where it could go. He was, like, nineteen.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were together for almost a year.”

  “My mother never had any boyfriends.”

  “What about the high school principal?”

  I tipped the bottle into my glass. The foam threatened to overflow and then receded, and the glass wasn’t even half full. “Surprisingly, things with Mr. Hall didn’t really work out. The nurse left him, but he didn’t date my mom or anything.” We were both watching the foam spit and twinkle in my glass. “My mom pours sparkling wine perfectly.” I topped my glass off.

  “So does my dad. But only recently, after going to Napa. I think he and his wife literally took a class on how to pour wine.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and aimed it at our flutes sparkling pink on the marble countertop.

  “Instagram?” I asked as her phone clicked.

  “I’m texting it to my dad.” She smiled and pressed a few buttons. “He’s sort of like Karl, I think. Really dorky.”

  “That makes me your mother.”

  She looked startled. I could tell she’d been deep in her drunk-mind, momentarily unaware of me. “I guess, yeah, it does.” Then she laughed. “Crazy. She’s everywhere.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I didn’t want to ask.

  “Let’s go outside,” I said, and she said okay without looking up from her phone.

  —

  The sky was still bright, but there was a loneliness to the air that said dusk. It would be cool as soon as the sun went down; according to Karl, this was one of the reasons people come to California and never leave.

  I lowered myself onto one of the chaise lounges, careful not to spill my drink. I could feel the Cottage behind me, radiating ugliness, and I turned. The bougainvillea we’d planted along the front wall looked garish in its bright-pink finery; what should have improved the flat, putty-colored exterior only made it worse. There was something off, something wrong, about the place.

  “Is the Cottage…okay?” I asked.

  “It’s great,” S said. “Except for the vibes.”

  “The vibes?” But I knew what she was talking about. Karl never wanted to discuss what had happened, but maybe S would.

  “It feels like someone died in there,” she said.

  I laughed even though it wasn’t funny.

  “It’s haunted,” I said, “but not by a dead person.”

  S took a sip of her wine; she was surprisingly sanguine. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Ha—don’t put this on me. You obviously want to tell me.”

  Was that true? I sighed, as if cheerfully dismayed. Usually my mannerisms felt natural, or if not natural, then at least comfortable, but now the wine was starting to do its work and I sensed a deliberateness to everything I did: the way I held my glass, the way I smiled at the pool, as if it were part of the conversation. It all required effort. It was all affectation.

  “Seth was fifteen when we moved in here,” I said. “That’s not really a great age for anyone. He was having some…troubles.”

  “Troubles? Sounds sort of 1950s.”

  “That’s what Karl called them. Seth missed the apartment he and I had lived in for almost his whole life, the commute to school was longer than ever, and we had this new family dynamic to get used to. It was a difficult time.”

  S had her eyes on the Cottage door. “Was he really bad? A rebel?”

  “Until then, no, not at all. Karl and I thought he was mature enough to have his room in there. Let’s just say we were wrong.”

  “Did he get into drugs or something?”

  “No”—I remembered the cloudy bong—“or, yeah, but that wasn’t the real problem.”

  S picked up the bottle and refilled my glass.

  “He kind of disappeared,” I said. “Into the Cottage. Days would go by and I’d realize I’d hardly seen him. He was eating his meals in there, even. Don’t ask me why I let him. First I was hugely pregnant, overseeing the renovations inside, and then I had Devin. Plus I really wanted Seth to be independent—I was happy to see how far he’d come.” I thought of Seth as a kid in our tiny apartment, creeping into the living room and onto my futon, scared from a nightmare or some raccoon chortling outside the bedroom window. Sometimes I’d wake in the morning with our backs touching, and feign sleep until he stirred and moved away from me with a jolt. Seth was sleeping in my bed pretty regularly until Karl came around. It ended after that. I didn’t tell this to S; I knew it would sound worse than its reality, which had been comforting and close, his gentle snore a song I’d always hum along to.

  “Finally I went into the Cottage when Seth wasn’t home. I was horrified. It was full of all kinds of crazy shit he’d picked up off the street, like traffic cones and even a broken shopping basket from a supermarket. There were dirty plates and laundry everywhere. He’d been brushing his teeth with a tree branch, I’m not kidding.”

  “Honestly, it doesn’t sound so terrible.”

  “I wish it ended there. A mother from Seth’s school showed up not long after that, said her daughter Tanya had stayed at our place the night before—and they didn’t just sleep, apparently. She wanted to know who the fuck I was to let that happen. The truth was, I’d had no idea. Karl did though. He met Tanya in the morning and offered to drive her home. They stopped at the Coffee Bean on the way. I’d slept through everything, I was totally clueless.”

  “Did the mother scratch your eyes out?”

  “Just about. The girl has a sensory sensitivity, doesn’t like to be touched, that kind of thing. I think the mom was jealous of Seth for getting to feel her.”

  “That must have been hard,” S said.

  “Really?”

  “What if you’d found out Seth had talked to someone?”

  The sun had sunk lower, the sky turning gray and smoke-colored. S looked pretty in this light, and I could see how someone might fall in love with her. Plus she was funny, which Karl had once told me was what good men looked for in a wife.

  “If Seth talked to someone else…” I said, my voice wobbly. “I can’t even go there. It hur
ts too much.”

  “Totally,” S said. If she noticed the emotion in my voice, she didn’t let on. “If it was me, like if my daughter wouldn’t let me touch her and then I found out she’d spent all night in some guy’s arms, I’d want to…I don’t know. I’d probably go postal. Or bring it inward—get a little suicidal.”

  I downed the rest of the wine, a metallic taste at the back of my throat.

  “You should probably go call your mother,” I said. “She’s probably really missing you.”

  “Maybe.” She stood up. “Thanks for talking to me.”

  “Anytime.” Before she turned away, I said, “That’s what the fight was about, by the way. It was about Seth and that girl. Tanya.”

  “The fight with Karl, you mean? But I thought you said Seth wasn’t even sixteen when he lived in the Cottage—that was, like, three years ago.”

  “It was. But I didn’t know Karl had driven Tanya home. I found that out recently.”

  “And it still bothered you? After all this time?”

  “Karl told me in passing, as if I wouldn’t get mad. But there’s more to it….” I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the details, tired of thinking about Karl. And I didn’t want to talk about Seth and the Cottage any more than I had to. “It’s boring,” I said. “Never mind.”

  S didn’t ask me to elaborate. She shrugged and called out good night as she headed for the Cottage. Her ass was flat and wide at this angle, and I looked away.

  —

  I wondered whether I should have told her more. Not about the stupid fight, but about how, those years ago, I moved Seth back into the house on my own. Karl was filming in the desert, it was his first production since Devin’s birth, and when he returned, the Cottage was empty of furniture, any proof of my son’s transgressions eradicated first by the housekeeper, and then by the men I hired to repaint the walls and hang new window shades. I required Seth to eat ten meals a week with me, which I tallied on a dry-erase board in the kitchen. I would have taken away his iPhone, but since that was his main way of communicating, it seemed inhumane.

  I should have told S that Karl had been upset by what I’d done. It wasn’t my decision that rankled him, but that I didn’t seek his input first.

  His protests struck me as preposterous. He didn’t get it. He didn’t realize how worried I’d been. What did Seth do when he had a nightmare?

  “We need to teach him independence,” Karl said during one of our arguments. He thought the dining quota was a little much, but it took me six months to budge from that rule.

  I knew Karl wasn’t trying to come between me and Seth; he was respectful of our relationship, and often encouraged us to do “bonding activities” like hiking and baking. Once, he sent us to Color Me Mine to paint plates and then had them displayed in his office.

  “You’re such a good mom,” he’d sometimes say.

  But he had opinions. He had the money. Ways of doing things. And, as I found out later, he had Tanya’s phone number, and her mother’s too. He encouraged that relationship.

  17.

  The first time I went to work without Seth, I called home only once; the phone rang seven times and with each trill I pictured worse and worse fates, all of them ending with Seth dead. When Marco finally answered I asked brightly, “Everything okay?” I was in the sitting room, at the mahogany secretary, and the Actress had just entered, her index finger up, which meant she had a new task for me.

  “Where are the diapers?” Marco asked. I could hear Seth in the background, whimpering.

  “Should be a new box in the linen closet.” I’d been gone for four hours, and Marco still hadn’t changed his diaper? Seth was very regular, which meant he’d been sitting in shit for—I checked my watch—two hours. His rash would be red and painful.

  I smiled at the Actress and rolled my eyes, pointing at the phone.

  “Thanks.” Marco hung up.

  The Actress smiled. “Everything okay with Papa and Baby?”

  “I think so! They’re going to check out the story time at the library.”

  I had pointed to the flyer on the fridge on my way out that morning. I was pretty sure Marco wouldn’t bother, but still I’d urged him to go. “Activities,” I said. “They’ll rescue you.”

  I wonder, if Marco had taken Seth for a few outings then maybe he wouldn’t have given up so easily. But he hated the stroller, said the wheels got stuck on every sidewalk crack, and the car seat eluded him—he said he couldn’t get it to lock into place. That first night, he admitted to being afraid to drive with Seth.

  “Why? Have you been drinking?”

  He smiled sheepishly. I must have looked so aghast that he gave me a pitying glance. “That’s a joke, Lady. It’s called a sense of humor.”

  The truth is, Marco lasted only two days alone with Seth before he told me he couldn’t do it.

  “I’m miserable, he’s miserable,” he confessed. “I’d rather get my old job back. I love the kid, but I’m not cut out for this.”

  Because I didn’t want to ask him what this meant, I said, “You know I can’t bring him to work anymore. And until we’ve saved some money we can’t afford a nanny…or even day care.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want me doing this. If I could get a job that pays okay you could quit yours and stay home with Seth. Too bad that old woman throws so much money at you. It’d be a shame to give that up.”

  “It would.” Marco was under the impression that I didn’t do anything for the Actress but keep her company. To him, it was free money.

  “I did have one idea,” he said.

  That’s how I began speaking to my mother again. I called her that evening and the next morning, per our agreement, I drove Seth to her place in Beverlywood. My childhood home: ranch-style and unassuming, the pool in the back drained because my mother couldn’t swim, the front door as black and as lacquered as a jewelry box. I hadn’t set foot in it since our argument about Marco. The time before that, there’d been an argument about something else, I couldn’t remember what. It seemed every time I went to visit her, we fought so bitterly that we didn’t speak again until the next fight.

  But now I had Seth, and I needed her to watch him. There would not be an argument. She could be horrible to me, but Seth was a baby, and I knew she would take good care of him—to spite me, or to prove me wrong, or make me jealous. Or maybe, simply, because her love for him was still uncomplicated, without reservations. I could tell she already loved him, and fiercely. If she didn’t, she would have made me beg her to babysit. On the phone she’d been quick to offer help. “I’d love to,” she’d said, and it was pure.

  Seth had still only said that one word, there.

  I carried Seth toward the door, so dark it made me feel woozy, and my mother answered before I could ring the bell. She wore a long navy-colored dress, cinched at the waist with a thin white belt. She was barefoot, as she always was at home, even on cold days, her hair pulled into an elegant yet practical chignon. She looked as if she had stepped off the deck of her private yacht.

  “Seth!” she said.

  He was immediately interested in her, specifically her necklace, which looked like a thick bicycle chain, but white as porcelain.

  “Simone,” I said.

  “Simone? Do you want me to call you Pearl?” She was smiling, though, and so I smiled too.

  “Thank you for agreeing to this,” I said.

  “Thank you for asking me.” She reached out for Seth, saying, “I’m your nana! Nana Simone!”

  He went to her willingly and I followed them into the house.

  The foyer was dark and hushed as always, a low vase of pink roses on the end table like always. No matter how little money she had, my mother never went without flowers. When funds were low, she put them on her credit card; the day I turned nine, she’d handed me the kitchen shears and told me to find something in the neighborhood: no stingy buds, she instructed, but nothing that had completely bloomed yet either. After that, she successf
ully volleyed for more money from my father, who funded much of our life even though he wasn’t in it.

  Now that the house was paid for, my mother needed only a modest income. For as long as I could remember, she made her living by selling antiques and paintings to a network of wealthy people across Los Angeles. Some, she said, were old contacts from her modeling days, another had been a colleague of my father’s, years ago. One client begot another and another.

  I asked her how sales were going.

  “Fantastic—just sold this armoire for…well, to mention the figure aloud would be almost uncouth. And I’ve also started doing voiceover work.” Seth was squirming out of her arms. “Shall I put him down to crawl?” she asked.

  “He walks,” I said.

  “No!” she cried in disbelief, and we both watched as Seth wandered across the foyer and into the living room. He was headed straight for the remotes on the coffee table.

  “Sethy,” I warned, and he pretended not to hear me.

  “It’s fine. Don’t worry, I won’t let him watch TV. Today we’re going to walk all over the neighborhood. And we’ll go to the park!”

  Seth grinned at her.

  “He’s smart,” she said.

  “He’s just starting to talk, so listen out for any first words.”

  My mother nodded, and then turned to me. “You’re looking a little haggard.”

  “He still doesn’t sleep through the night.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “You’re so thin.”

  “Thank you.”

  I thought that would shut her up, but she said, “You’re on the unhappiness diet.”

  I inhaled, exhaled. Marco had coached me on this. I was not to take the bait. We needed my mother to watch Seth, at least until Marco found lucrative work and we could hire someone. I could stomach a few months of this. I had to.