by Karen Karbo
“Those are what I call colorful careers,” said Lyle after Dot and Martin had left.
“No more colorful than mine or anybody else’s in FF. Are you done with that other spring roll?”
FF stood for Formerly Famous, the informal support group that Dicky belonged to, composed of people who had all managed to grab the gold ring of fame and had either dropped it or had it wrenched from their hands by the world’s need for new celebrity.
“What do you do?” I said. “All sit around and complain about not being invited to be on The New Hollywood Squares?”
“Do they even still have The New Hollywood Squares?” asked Lyle.
“Did they ever have The New Hollywood Squares?” I said. “Maybe we made it up.”
“Formerly Famous is a support group,” said Dicky, irritated. “We’re trying to get our lives back together. I really feel for a lot of them, you know? They have no options. I’m in a little better position. I’m not just anybody. R— played me in a movie. I’ve got a track record. I’ve had a movie made. Brooke, I’m sure it’s the same with you—even though you’re doing the mom thing, you still get calls. It’s harder to get out of the business than get into it. ‘Who do I sleep with to get off this picture?’ Remember when you used to say that on the set? Brooke? You were hilarious before you had a kid. I guess motherhood kind of takes the sheen off the brain or something, huh? Anyway, I’ve got a few things I’m pitching around, a few things. Brooke, you might be interested in this one: revisiting the people of Romeo’s Dagger ten years later. It could be called As I Lay Down the Dagger. I think there could be real interest in that, in what happened to me since Jen’s death. It’s a truly American story, a story for the zeros, don’t you think? I tried to call Oprah. Remember, Brooke, when I did Oprah? You know, to give her production company first shot at it. It’s just common courtesy. Or maybe it would be better to write the book of ten years later, and have Oprah feature it in her book club. What do you think?”
I concentrated on chasing a few soy-soaked bean sprouts around my plate. Lyle listened. He sat forward, nodding his head, folding and unfolding the thin paper sleeve from his chopsticks. “Could be interesting, Dick, could be. What have you been doing the last ten years?”
“Living at home,” said Dicky.
“Well, just off the top of my head, I think you might need more of a plot. But that’s Brooke’s department.” Lyle nudged my toe with his beneath the table, a prompt that I should be participating in this ridiculous conversation. I ignored him, ate my sprouts.
“But how does it appeal to you as a guy?” said Dicky. “I mean, does it speak to you? It’ll be the new Clerks, remember Clerks? The movie about the two losers who work in a convenience store? It’ll be like, see how women are taking over the planet? Women are taking over, forcing guys like me—guys who would be winning World War II if it wasn’t for all these ball busters out there—to mooch off his parents.”
In the Volvo, driving to pick up Stella at the baby-sitter’s (a single mother and assistant D.A. who lived two doors down, and whose eighteen-month-old son I would watch on occasion), Lyle said, “Dicky’s kind of an interesting character, huh?”
It was raining hard; in the headlights it looked as if nickels were falling from the sky. The windshield wipers madly whopp-whopp-whopped. My stomach hurt, indigestion. I was irritated, then irritated at my irritation, an emotional Escher. This was Lyle’s finest quality: giving other human beings the benefit of the doubt. He was kind! He was tolerant! He was all those other things that appear in the hokey prayers of kitchen samplers the world over. Still, he should have more sense.
“Emphasis on the word character,” I said. I thought I was being good, leaving it at that.
“Yeah, he’s a bit odd, but he may really have something there,” said Lyle.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“I mean, a movie about a guy stuck living at home. It sounds boring, but it could be kind of cool.”
This was more than I could stand. “Are you out of your mind? As I Lay Down the Dagger?”
“It has nice Faulknerian ring to it.”
“Faulknerian ring! FAULKNERIAN RING!” I was panting. “And what was all that crap about how he’d be fighting in World War II if women weren’t ball busters? Don’t you see anything wrong with that logic? Dicky is an insufferable idiot. Dicky has always been an insufferable idiot. Two hours of Dicky sitting at home being an insufferable idiot is not a movie.”
Lyle took his eyes off the road. “Maybe you should think about getting back to work.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“This seems to have struck a nerve.”
“No, Lyle, you’ve struck a nerve. How can you think Dicky is interesting? He’s about as interesting as those morons you play with online.”
Lyle pursed his lips, said nothing. I could tell I’d hurt his feelings. Well, so what? I wrapped my arms around myself. I couldn’t wait to get my arms around Stella, to bury my nose in the folds of her neck. Stella, I could talk to. She was easily the wisest person in this family. She would never marry someone like her father.
5.
IT WAS DRIZZLING WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE BARONS’ FOR lunch, the clouds so low it felt as if I could reach up and bury my hand in one. It was the day after Lyle and I had run into Dicky. Audra had called me that morning and asked me for that day. At first I thought it was odd, this sudden urgency, but I was always happy to have an outing for Stella in the afternoon, especially now that the weather had gotten dreary, so I went. I suppose that is just an excuse.
The house was situated so that you weren’t sure which was the proper door to knock on. Either way you felt ridiculous. The front door, the proper door for someone who had been there as infrequently as I had, was around the back, facing the city and the wooded slope where Ward and Mary Rose had frolicked and fallen in love. The back door was right off the carport, but had no number on it and looked suited only for family and service people.
I extricated Stella from her seat, hoisted her diaper bag onto my shoulder, and slogged through the wet grass to the front door. I knocked until my knuckles hurt. No one answered.
I then slogged back to the back door. My flats were soaked. No answer there, either. I wondered if maybe Audra hadn’t asked me for today after all, then I heard someone cry, “Damn you!” It came from behind the garage. I minced down the gravel drive, my feet freezing in my cheap wet shoes. I had unearthed the black leather flats from beneath a jumble of high-top cross-trainers and a pair of brown leather work Oxfords with lug soles. The Oxfords are the type that look stunning on twenty-year-old waifs with thin ankles and no responsibilities, but made me look like a Russian street sweeper.
I found Audra kneeling on the patio, which was tiled with imported Spanish pavers.
She was stricken, staring down at a pile of brown twigs as if it was a beloved pet that had been clipped by a passing car and lay whimpering and panting in its final moments of life. The twigs had apparently been pulled from a hole beside the pergola that spanned the back of the garage, the only place on the property that got enough sun for such an intrepid horticultural enterprise as Paraiso Mexicano.
She stood up, bits of moss clinging to the knees of her cashmere pants. “My bougainvillea,” she said. “It didn’t look very firmly anchored and so I was just trying to pat it …” The twigs were in fact the roots, parts of which were blackened with rot.
“Maybe you should try some wisteria. That’s supposed to be hardy.”
“Oh!” She flung the dead plant onto the stucco bench. “I just hate all those frilly plants. Big Hank was right. As usual. Money can’t buy a micro-climate. It’s cold out here.” She pulled her sweater across her middle and reached for Stella. “Come to Aunt Audra, you precious person. Well, I’m off to PV on Thursday anyway. I’ll get plenty of bougainvillea there.”
“PV?”
“Puerto Vallarta. I’ve gone every January since before Dicky was born. I call i
t my month of madness!”
Audra served leftover take-out spinach fettuccini. We ate off dessert plates in the formal dining room, stiff paper towels for napkins. Audra clearly hadn’t given this lunch much thought. She sat sideways in her chair with her legs crossed, watching me eat.
“I need to ask a favor of you,” said Audra.
“Okay.” I cut a noodle into half-inch bits and fed a few to Stella. Her eyebrows leapt up and her little red-lipped mouth went O. I laughed. The shock of the new, her first fettuccini. Audra, who I thought would have also been delighted, waited, twisting her rings.
“I’m worried about Dicky. He said he ran into you after his meeting last night. I was just wondering, are you going back to work soon, and if you are, do you have anything for Dicky to do? Or is anyone else you know in need of someone like Dicky?”
Someone like Dicky. There was no one like Dicky. Thank God in His infinite mercy. “Well, what would he like to do?”
“That’s just it. I don’t think he knows. But since the movie, well, he’s never been able to land anywhere, you know? And it’s been how long? He’s getting a little peculiar. Entre nous, he can’t bear to look at the Sunday Times anymore. He can’t even be in the same room with it. Especially the Arts & Leisure section.”
“What’s wrong with the Arts & Leisure section?”
“He says it reminds him that he’s a nobody. He had me call our local Times distributor and see if I couldn’t get someone to remove the section before the paper is delivered. Now he wants the Book Review taken out too—says it reminds him of all the books being made into movies. This isn’t normal, is it?”
She sniffed, dabbed at her eyes with the tips of her fingers.
I dug in Stella’s bag for a jar of carrots so Audra wouldn’t see me see her cry. Is this what happened to children eventually? They grew up and got weird, and your no-win position was either to try and relieve their distress without really helping them, or tell them to get over it, thereby causing further anguish. This was probably part of the reason Audra was desperate for a grandchild. You got to love them when they were still perfect like Stella, and if you were lucky you’d be dead by the time they grew up and eloped with someone with a prison record.
Audra asked how many ear infections Stella had had. What was her eyesight like? How many diapers did she have a day? And did I give her fluoride? And wasn’t it difficult to clip her nails? They were so tiny. And was I simply suffocating with love for her?
I said, “You of all people should know how it is. You’ve had three.”
“Believe me, you forget.”
“I thought that was labor and delivery.”
Audra tried to smile, but her orange lipsticked lips kept crumpling.
“I could try to make a few phone calls, for Dicky, I mean, to see if anyone needs someone on the set or something. Other than that, I’m not sure …”
“Oh, Dicky is the least of my worries.”
Wait, wasn’t Dicky the one she was really worried about? Wasn’t that why I was here?
“Ward …” She started to cry in earnest. Stella stopped eating and stared. Oh no. All I could think was that Ward was sick. He was HIV positive, had leukemia, something.
“What’s wrong with Ward?”
“Oh, nothing. I mean nothing terrible. Well, actually, it’s awful. Lynne won’t give him a divorce.”
“Whoa. I thought they were divorced. I know Mary Rose thinks they’re divorced.”
“Ward is my favorite child. I expect this to go no further than this table. Ward is my favorite child. But he has no sense of the consequences of his actions. He’s feckless. They started divorce proceedings when he was dating someone else, then they—Hank and I think her name was … could it have been Bryn?—broke up and he lost interest. In proceeding with the divorce, I mean. Mary Rose is like a daughter to us. This will crush her, I expect. It will ruin her life. Ward, despite his lack of follow-through, is still quite a catch.”
I wiped Stella’s mouth with the comer of my paper towel napkin: a mistake. It left a faint red dash beneath her lip, and her face folded into the warm-up for a shriek. I admit: In a moment of self-pity I’d thought this too, that Ward would be a guy worth having around. Now I bristled. Here Audra was weeping because Ward was such an irresponsible lout, then saying that he was still a “catch”—suddenly I hated that whole concept, too—and that Mary Rose would be ruined, ruined!—when she found out.
Mary Rose was made of tougher stuff than that. Indeed, as if to prove it to myself, I called her from the car to see if I might stop by. I said I had a Sports Illustrated article on the Blazers to give her. My excuse, although considering what I had to tell her, I don’t think I really needed one.
When I got there she was standing in front of the hallway mirror in a periwinkle-and-green-striped tank suit. The vertical stripes became paler as the fabric stretched thin over her abdomen. Dr. Vertamini had suggested Mary Rose take a prenatal water aerobics class in order to stay in shape during her pregnancy. I had pointed out that staying in shape made labor and delivery easier, as do pennies found beneath sofa cushions help pay the mortgage.
“You know me, a dedicated penny pincher.” Then she struck a Virgin Mary pose, hands folded discreetly over her belly. “I felt the He-bean move. Three days ago. Me and Fleabo were raking leaves and suddenly it was like somebody opened a bottle of champagne in there. That’s it, isn’t it?”
She told me how it went: Fleabo got one look at her face, dropped his rake, and urged her to sit down. When she assured him that she was fine, he rushed into the house and returned with a glass of water, that universal non-remedy that gives those untrained in first aid an opportunity to leave the side of the stricken without appearing cowardly.
Mary Rose was too shy to tell Fleabo it was only the first stirrings of the He-bean. No reason to worry; reason, in fact, to rejoice. She was only fifteen weeks along. According to one of her articles, fetal movement was rarely felt until week twenty in a first pregnancy, conventional medical wisdom assuming that a woman who had never before been pregnant might mistake this startling effervescence for the humdrum gurgling of indigestion. But Mary Rose was not mistaken. She recognized the He-bean’s flailings instantly. Her spirits made the space shuttle look like one of those Wilbur and Orville Wright contraptions that only made it four feet off the ground.
The He-bean squirms! The He-bean lives! He was alive and healthy, a prodigy of gestation.
And Mary Rose, proud of having felt the champagne bubbles earlier than most, came to see herself as a prodigy of motherhood. Her insomnia ceased. She slept ten long, dreamless hours a night, awakened only briefly at 3:00 a.m. by the coffee grinder of Frick and Frack.
“They’re moving out, did I tell you? Mr. D’Addio sold the place, finally. Frick found a fixer-upper on Pettygrove Street and Frack is putting the money down. Or the other way around. Gorgeous fig trees out front.”
“I’ve got some news that I don’t think you’re going to like to hear. But someone’s got to tell you, and tell you soon. Ward is still legally married to Lynne the dog lady.”
Mary Rose rolled her lips inside her mouth, tucked her hair behind her ears, but otherwise didn’t respond. “You mean he doesn’t have a decree,” she said finally.
“I mean, from what I understand, the papers were filed, and then no one followed through. Before Ward met you there was apparently no real urgency.”
“How’d you get wind of this?”
I told her about my lunch with Audra.
“You know what frustrates me? We’re talking about life in general here. You try to be optimistic, but then your worst suspicions—the ones you tried to chase from your head because you were sure you were being a pessimist—turn out to have been right all along.”
That was all she said.
Until this: Three days later Mary Rose picked Ward up from the airport. He was returning from a shoot, a kind-to-your-dental-work chewing-gum spot in Florida. According to what
Audra would later tell me, he was surprised to see her. Lynne and Bryn and all the others whose names did not rhyme apparently liked to appear independent, the better to entice her son. They made him take a cab.
As Ward waded through the crowd, garment bag slung over his bony shoulder, his thoughts fastened on the phrase “carrying my child,” which he associated with hotel porters and Sherpas. It was fitting, then, that Mary Rose should be there.
Mary Rose looked younger than he remembered. It was her shiny dark blond hair, which she wore long around her shoulders. Her skin, which shone like old pearls, the famous glow of pregnancy. Or her clothes, which at first Ward mistook for a parochial school uniform. She wore a navy-blue suit, white dress shirt, a blue knit tie, a cap.
Only when he saw the hand-lettered sign Mr. Barren, did Ward realize this was some sort of practical joke. She had come to pick him up dressed up as, what? A chauffeur?
Ward tended his reputation carefully. He never allowed anyone to throw him a surprise party, never played charades or sang the national anthem at ball games. He eschewed silly hats. That anyone who knew him would subject him to this sort of dumb prank was bad enough. That Mary Rose would do this …
Ward worked hard at feminism, as befit a hip director of high-profile television commercials. He had convinced his peers and family that he believed women were more than creatures born to enliven cocktail parties and buy Christmas presents on his behalf. But a pregnant woman. That was something else. She was womanhood off the charts, a fever too hot to register. The Barons weren’t Catholic, but Ward, during a particularly impressionable junior year abroad, had absorbed Botticelli to a dangerous degree. He had come to believe that pregnancy mysteriously and automatically conferred upon Woman a virginal grace and piety.
Yet here was Mary Rose. The woman carrying his child. Standing before him in a polyester chauffeur suit, her belly jutting out round over her waistband. She was grinning with her large lovely teeth and flapping her homemade sign.