by Karen Karbo
I managed to successfully transfer a sleeping Stella from her car seat to her crib without waking her, then tromped down to the basement stairs to Lyle’s Lair. A previous owner had had a Space Odyssey decor in mind: The basement walls and unfinished ceiling were spray-painted silver. Lyle had his computer set up against one of the silver walls, on a big square of old dog-brown shag. Next to the computer was a futon, one that has been passed from soon-to-be-married friend to soon-to-be-married friend, until it wound up in Lyle’s Lair. Itchy Sister, our thirteen-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, sleeps on the futon, where she snores and silently, endlessly farts. On top of the computer Lyle always burns an aromatherapy candle, Seduction, to combat the odor.
“You won’t believe this one,” I said to the back of Lyle’s head. “Mary Rose and Ward are an item. Not just an item, but an expectant item.”
I am an expert on the back of my husband’s head. Like a character in an experimental play, I talk to it all the time. Lyle’s hair is cut by an envious, straight-haired stylist to emphasize his cherubic curls. His best ones—shiny, self-assured—are just to the right of the crown. To the left, they can’t decide if they want to be curls or waves. There are four gray hairs, and a black mole on the back of his neck I will one day have to pester him to have checked, if our marriage survives his passion for Realm of the Elf.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“We can talk about this later,” I said, and started to walk away.
“I’m listening. I’m always listening to you. Uh-oh, now I’m really not feeling well.” He sat forward, attacked the keyboard. Mozart on a particularly frenzied day.
“Do you have a headache? Have you eaten anything?”
“I just got my arm cut off.”
I stared over his shoulder, feigning interest. Realm of the Elf was one of those online role-playing games where you create the persona of some magical Hobbit-like creature, then go around getting mortally wounded in imaginary sword fights and finding precious gems in the virtual bushes. I will never understand the appeal of this or any other text-file computer game. White letters scrolling up a black screen, a cyber ticker tape.
I read, “A marauding troll has just malevolently and with vim chopped off your arm! Your hand is being eaten by deadly acid. Otherwise your soul is full of life. He takes a misshapen trunk from your dove gray pack. Your neck wounds look better.”
“And people say screenplays are poorly written.” I wanted to say, I’m worried about you! Can’t you be into bondage or something more normally deviant?
He said nothing. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “I’m just … about” Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
“I don’t know how you can read this stuff hour after hour.”
I sighed, went over and petted Itchy Sister behind an ear. Her black lips turn up at the corners when she gets some attention, even in her sleep.
“Mary Rose and Ward are going to have a baby!” I told the back of his head.
“Let me just see if I can find someone to get my arm on, and I’ll be right with you. There’s a healer in the next village who owes me a favor.”
I went upstairs to check on Stella, then went to bed.
A WEEK AFTER Thanksgiving, when I arrived at Mary Rose’s house with Stella to watch the Knicks versus the Blazers, Mary Rose wasn’t home. Like many people in our city, Mary Rose and I never missed a basketball game. Our city endured drippy falls, drenched winters, drizzly springs, and no major professional sports teams save basketball, which made for a civic fanaticism rivaling that of the rampaging hordes who follow soccer in Europe. Mary Rose and I pitched in for a special cable package—not cheap—that broadcasted all home games that weren’t carried on network television. When a game was carried only on radio, we huddled around Mary Rose’s boom box, set in the middle of her coffee table, like would-be war widows listening for news from the front. Mary Rose would undercook a frozen pizza. Sometimes I brought an aluminum tray of take-out nachos.
Mary Rose lived in a bile-green bungalow that had been converted into a triplex, in a part of the city where the streets were lined with old Victorians groaning on tiny lots. It was the homeliest house on the block, but Mary Rose had a deal with the landlord. Mr. D’Addio gave her a break in the rent in exchange for her mowing the lawn and keeping the sidewalk free of the smashed plums that fell from the three ornamental trees that grew on the parking strip. The plums, while beautiful, were a nuisance. They stained the pavement a bloody maroon, as well as attracted a ferocious species of wasp that could sting you through your shoe.
I stood in the entryway of the triplex, talking to apricot haired Mrs. Wanamaker, who lived in the unit downstairs. The entryway smelled of wet dog and the perfume inserts of magazines. Mrs. Wanamaker was fascinated to hear about Stella’s affection for avocados and taking off her own diaper. She also admired Stella’s black-and-red Blazer jump suit. The true mates of this world are not husbands and wives, but lonely old women and exhausted young mothers.
Mary Rose bounded up the front steps, apologized for being late. First, there was Mrs. Marsh, wanting all her dahlia bulbs dug up for the winter, then Hotlips Pizza lost her order.
“Pepperoni double cheese,” she said, flying the cardboard box over my head as she jogged past me up the stairs. So much energy for someone newly pregnant, I thought.
I dragged myself upstairs behind her, Stella’s car seat banging against my shins, the strap of her diaper bag cutting into my shoulder. My knees ached. Once inside, I dropped the bag—twice as heavy as the Perfect Wonderment herself—stuffed to the gills with powders, ointments and sunscreens, Q-Tips and mittens, a change of clothes, rattles and teething toys, books for several different age levels (in the event she started to read while away from home and proved to be a genius), and a half-dozen empty plastic bottles, designed in Denmark according to some enlightened Scandinavian feeding principle, lint stuck to the milk-encrusted nipple.
“If I have one piece of advice for the woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon,” I said. “It’s amazing to me how everyone always wants to help a pregnant woman, when the baby is all nice and tucked away in utero, but then once the kid is born, and your life as a schlepper begins in earnest, no one thinks to lend you a hand.”
“Was I supposed to help you?” said Mary Rose. “I didn’t know I was supposed to help you. You always seem like you’ve got everything under control.” Mary Rose set the pizza in the middle of the coffee table, then glanced around the living room to make sure there was nothing Stella could get into. Stella wasn’t crawling yet. She sat where you put her. Nevertheless, Mary Rose was under the impression that a baby, once freed from the confines of the womb, was biologically programmed to seek disaster, compelled to stick her fingers into sockets, choke on a dusty bead found beneath the couch.
Even if this were true, a baby would be completely safe at Mary Rose’s. The only time Ward had ever ventured upstairs, according to Mary Rose, he’d said that if Mowers and Rakers didn’t work out, Mary Rose could always get a job doing interior design for a monastery. The living room was tiny, the walls toffee-colored with three windows on one side. Opposite the windows were two doors, one that gave off onto the front hallway, the other to the back hallway that led to the kitchen and the huge bathroom which, due to the architectural gymnastics involved in the conversion from charming house to funky triplex, was bigger than the living room. There was nothing on the walls.
Acquisitive Ward, he of the Arts and Crafts-style living room set, collection of vintage neon beer signs, and three complete sets of Fiesta Ware, jokingly (or maybe not, Ward had a way of saying things that were more hurtful than funny, then trying to pass the insult off as a joke when you got annoyed) said her spare quarters were an affectation.
“He accused me of being self-consciously minimalist,” said Mary Rose. “I told him it was called “the less you had, the less you had to clean.” I’m not a minimalist, I’m practical.” Like everyone newly in love, she reported this humdrum exchange
with pride and astonishment, as if to say, See how we know each other? See how we tease each other? Already, it’s come to that.
I felt a prick of irritation. Before I could trace it to its roots I said, “Practical, unless you count having a baby with a man you hardly know.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to. I backpedaled. “I mean, not that knowing the man you have your baby with makes any difference. Actually, maybe knowing the father is worse. Then you don’t have any excuse for perpetuating his genes.” I was starting to go off. I laughed too loud, startling Stella.
Mary Rose retrieved her backpack from where it hung on the hall-closet doorknob, then fished around inside. “Look at this.”
It was a handout given her by Dr. Vertamini, her OB/GYN. A list of symptoms that signal impending miscarriage: pain or burning on urination; vaginal spotting or bleeding; leaking or gushing fluid from vagina; uterine contractions; severe nausea; severe vomiting; abdominal pain; dizziness or light-headedness; severe headache; swelling of face, eyes, fingers, or toes; blurred eyesight; reduced fetal movement; absence of fetal movement for twenty-four hours (from the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy on).
“What do you think it means by pain, exactly?” asked Mary Rose.
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
“No. I figured it has to do with malpractice laws or something. Dr. Vertamini probably gives one of these to everyone, don’t you think? She just didn’t print it up for me.”
“Oh, no, I think she printed it up just for you.”
“So I shouldn’t worry, is what you’re saying.” Mary Rose manufactured a smile. Her teeth looked like bathroom tile installed by a perfectionist.
“Get used to worrying is more like it. You’ll get past the first trimester, then there’s the second, then the third, then the birth. No sooner is the baby born then you start worrying about can she hear all right? Is she retarded? And this new thing I read in the paper. Children who don’t go to day care have a higher rate of leukemia. Children who do go to day care wind up sociopaths. It’s a prison sentence of worry. No parole.”
Mary Rose dropped the handout on the table, dragged a slice of pizza from the box, pinching off swags of cheese with her long, nail-bitten fingers. I got the feeling she didn’t like my answer. Or maybe just my sermonizing. I do have a tendency to go on a bit. But she knows this about me, so why did she bother asking?
“What was all that business at Thanksgiving with Dicky?” she asked abruptly. “I asked Ward, and he just rolled his eyes.”
“Poor old Dicky. It would kill him that you didn’t know all about it.”
I was happy to get off the subject of motherhood and told Mary Rose probably more than she wanted to know about poor Jennifer Allen, whom Dicky had fallen in love with when he was at U.S.C. They became acquainted because they were both from our city, had gone to rival private high schools. She had a head of sunny curls that compensated for all of her shortcomings. Jennifer and Dicky loved each other in the dedicated, impractical way of the well-off. He bought her a yellow Vespa for her birthday. She convinced her parents to allow Dicky to accompany them on their annual two-week Christmas pilgrimage to St. Croix.
After two terms at school, Jennifer got sick. Or it was presumed she was sick. She began falling asleep in class. She was pale as a mushroom. It was all those weekend ski trips to Mammoth, those late nights with Dicky, the midterms, beer bongs, glee clubs. It was the anemia typical of the earnest, nutritionally ignorant vegan whose idea of saving the planet involves subsisting on a diet of Coke Classic and Cool Ranch Doritos. All Jennifer Allen really needed was a vacation from being a nineteen-year-old college student with no worries, but because all this collegiate carrying-on is presumed to be a normal upper-middle-class child’s birthright, nobody thought anything of it.
When Jennifer came home for the summer, her mother took her to one of our city’s most well-respected specialists, where she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer: leukemic reticuloendotheliosis, also known as hairy cell leukemia. It had already invaded her marrow, spleen, and blood.
The shock felt by Dicky Baron and Jennifer Allen almost stopped their young hearts there and then. Who had ever heard of such a thing? Hairy cell leukemia. How could something so ridiculous-sounding be fatal? If she chose to accept treatment, there would be useless operations, followed by a round of expensive, nausea-producing chemotherapy that would not, in the end, postpone a death both painful and tedious. In the meantime, it would spell the end of the sunny curls. It would mean a life of valiant hat wearing.
Jennifer wept. There was not much hope. There was, however, the romance of dying while you were still young and pretty, featuring the interesting delusion that you can somehow experience the benefits of death without actually ceasing to exist. One day, while Dicky and Jennifer were alone in the house, Dicky found Big Hank’s .45 semi-automatic while he was going through Father’s bedside table, looking for something interesting to pinch. Dicky and Jennifer believed it was fate.
Dicky gave the gun to Jennifer, clicking off the safety and turning his back, as if she were a stranger about to get undressed.
Dicky’s comment, when he was arraigned on charges of manslaughter, was, “I thought there would be more noise and less blood.” The detective in charge of the investigation wore rubbers over his tasseled loafers and was glad of it. Even the ceiling needed to be repainted.
In Romeo’s Dagger, the first of the three movies I’ve managed to get off the ground, I insisted that Jennifer shoot herself off screen. We have all seen enough, I said. We have proved to ourselves and the world that the American people are unflinching. All has been told; all has been shown. I made an impassioned plea to the studio for the power of restraint. When that didn’t work, I cited the shower sequence in the original Psycho. I got my way. Now that I have Stella, I am relieved on behalf of Jennifer Allen’s mother.
Dicky maintained throughout the trial that if he and Jennifer had done anything wrong, it was in telling her parents. If Jennifer had been less conscientious, she never would have complained to her mother, and no doctors would have been involved. No medical clerks would have been involved, medical clerks who make clerical errors.
For Jennifer Allen, his Jennifer Allen, did not have hairy cell leukemia. Her chart had been confused with that of another Jennifer Allen by Corrine Clingenpeel, a medical receptionist trying to hold down two jobs, raise her young son, and get through nursing school. It was a single-mother mistake, as the papers were fond of reporting, the mistake of a woman overwhelmed. For this Jennifer Allen, Dicky’s Jennifer Allen, was the healthiest person on which an autopsy had ever been performed in the state, according to our city’s chief coroner.
It made the national news, and the nation was duly outraged. An investigation into hospital filing systems was opened up. Briefly, the blame was laid at the smelly feet of a cadre of sixteen-year-old computer hackers. For several weeks the nightly news ran stories about people who had gone in for knee surgery and had their gall bladders removed instead. Dicky (“looking not unlike the young Nick Nolte”—Associated Press) wept on all three networks, plus CNN. He was tried, acquitted, and signed by William Morris.
I’d been rattling around the film industry for six years when Audra brought me the rights to Dicky’s side of the story. In Hollywood there are always several sides for sale. I was in the art department on a feature at the time. For twelve hours a day I moved furniture on, off, and around the set. The movie was set in Victorian times and all the highboys, chiffonniers, and sideboards were made of solid oak and cherry. I wore a kidney belt and a look of perpetual self-pity. I liked movies. If I liked moving furniture I would have gotten a job with Bekins. At this time Dicky’s case came to trial, and an article about Jennifer Allen’s death appeared as a Newsweek cover story.
When Jennifer Allen’s parents changed their phone number, the better to discourage all interest in their daughter’s unfortunate death, Audra was besieged. For several weeks it seemed every
one who had ever entertained the notion of producing a movie wanted to buy the rights to Dicky’s version of events.
But Audra Baron comes from a long line of implacable Vermont dairy farmers on one side and crafty Polish petit bourgeois politicians on the other. She also was a devotee of Entertainment Tonight. In other words, she was not impressed with their urgings and entreaties, with the videotapes they overnight expressed to her as samples of their work, the trouble, time, and money they took to fly up and visit her in person.
She trusted none of them and called me, bi-weekly becoming daily becoming hourly, to make sure she was doing the right thing. I do not remember exactly how it happened, but suddenly Audra began referring people to me. “Talk to my niece Brooke. She is handling the rights.” That my only credentials for pulling off this task were my stint in the art department as a beast of burden seemed not to bother Audra. I was better than a stranger, although I practically was one. She insisted I call her Aunt.
It was a time in Hollywood when the edgy, Italian-suited, business-school-educated studio clone was on the way out, and no one knew what was on the way in. All anyone could be sure of was that the creative elite had stopped washing their hair. A-list directors began showing up for meetings looking like earnest philosophy majors. They wore sweaters with holes in the elbows and smelled.
I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know enough to call myself a producer. I returned all my phone calls at the first opportunity, ate lunch at home—peanut butter and jelly on whole-wheat toast with half an apple. I was on time for my meetings, wore job-interview clothes, and never offered anything I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t negotiate. I said: “I’ve got the story of Jennifer Allen’s death, from the point of view of her boyfriend. Take it or leave it.”