Live a Little

by Kim Green

  Saskia Waxman phones. My upcoming show has gotten too much editorial coverage for her to handle. She has hired a publicist. Can I send her a bio? Do I have a professional head shot? “No,” I say, for once telling the truth. “But I’ll get one. Tell me, does it have to be my own head?” “You kill me,” she says before hanging up on me, a habitual move I used to find uncharming—before I, too, joined the ranks of high-velocity people who don’t have time to say good-bye.

  Annunciata Milk phones. She is organizing a benefit to raise money for the impoverished gang children of East Palo Alto. To buy them a new play structure at the playground. She needs me. I am irreplaceable. I have credibility. Moxie. Edge. Edgy moxie. And can I please get Laurie to mention it on her show? Oh, and by the way, my post-mastectomy reconstruction looks amazing. Gorgeous rack. Doesn’t even look like implants. May she ask who did the work? C’mon, I can tell her. Was it my brother-in-law? Was it the guy up in Mill Valley, the one who did Mimi? Sure it was, Annunciata. Sure it was.

  Ma phones. I saw your picture in San Francisco magazine, she says. In the party section, next to a photo of San Francisco’s handsome young mayor riding a dirt bike along the Embarcadero, his sweep of shellacked hair holding fast against the wind. You were with that Getty woman at some museum opening. Tell me something, kiddo: All the money that woman has, and she can’t do something about those yellow horse teeth? And that shmatte she’s wearing? And while I have you on the line, why don’t you get rid of the beanie and get yourself a nice printed scarf? The hat makes you look like a hoodlum.

  Ross Trimble phones. I am cleaning Taylor’s room when the cordless rings. I’m sorting through piles of tank tops and unnervingly sexy panties and the sort of pajama bottoms mothers actually approve of—floppy and chastity-promoting and covered with monkey faces. We have an arrangement, Taylor and I: Anything incriminating must be removed from her room prior to Thursday morning, when I clean up for the maid service so the maid will not think I am derelict and call Child Protective Services.

  “Hello?” I say, scraping a crusted bowl of something rust-colored out from under the bed.

  “Raquel? This is Ross.” Like Madonna, my husband’s boss does not deign to use a last name.

  “Hi.”

  We exchange pleasantries. All in all, the conversation is meaningless and agreeable, which sends stalactites of anxiety through my body. For a black second I imagine he is calling to warn me that he’s going to fire Phil.

  “I’m actually calling to see if you’re free a week from Saturday,” Ross says.

  “Well, uh”—I rack my brain, trying to recollect soccer parties and school plays and the Desperate Housewives schedule—“I think so.”

  “I’m hosting a little dinner at. . .” He names a swanky restaurant in Burlingame, the sort of place where the servers dress better than you do and everything is bathed in a reduction. “Just getting a few of our artist friends together.” In quick succession, he names an architect of some renown; a painter who’s recently become quite successful with her studies of the Stinson Beach snack bar; someone whose name I recognize from the SFMOMA board; an Academy of Art college professor; and a transsexual found-object artist living in a squat, whom he refers to as “subversively brilliant.”

  “Well, let me talk to Phil, and I’ll let you know,” I say.

  “Oh, I doubt Phil would be interested, though he’s very welcome,” Ross says smoothly. “Tate’s not even coming. I was really hoping to talk art with serious artists. I have some ideas I want to bounce off you.”

  I lug Taylor’s laundry hamper into the hallway. Something mushy squishes up between my toes, tangled with grass. I peer at it, sniffing. Fuck. Dog barf.

  “I’m sure I can make it,” I hear myself say.

  That night, driving home from the studio down the 280 freeway, enjoying the gentle hug of low green hills to my right and sparkling bay to my left, I find myself swinging the Sienna toward the Millbrae exit. I pick up my cell to tell Phil I’ll be late, but the small window says NO SERVICE.

  Just as well.

  I steer the car into the cemetery. Dad’s grave is on a nub of hill a half mile or so in. I remember feeling relieved at the burial that he was on the edge, away from the crowds, the way he liked it. In my addled state, I hadn’t thought about the people who would die after him, keeling over in bedrooms and hospitals and convalescent homes, swarming the morgues, filling the open green space with their crass spirits.

  Ruining the neighborhood, as it were.

  I park and get out, inhaling clean, green-smelling air. Stumbling a little in the moonlight, I grab a smooth stone from the ground.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s Rachel.” I place the stone on his tombstone. When Dad used my real name, it sounded strong and ancient, not plain and boring. He was the only one I hadn’t made call me Raquel, and when he died, he took any affection I harbored for my real name with him.

  “I miss you so much, Dad,” I announce to the speckled marble. It’s so quiet; even the birds have retired for the night.

  I tell him about Ma’s birthday party, about Ren asking me for an adoption character reference because things were too weird between me and Laurie for her to ask me herself. I tell him how much money we raised on Laurie’s show. I tell him that things are not good between Phil and me, that I resent my husband for things that are technically not completely his fault. Things like the fact that until recently, I had no career to speak of, we live in a glorified Stepford subdivision, and I feel about as attractive as Mrs. Doubtfire. That I feel bad about it, but I cannot seem to stop, because something in the thin thread of anger I cling to makes me feel anticipatory, human, alive. I tell him that I bought a slinky black negligee at Victoria’s Secret but can’t bring myself to wear it, for fear of not seeing the answering spark of interest in Phil’s green eyes, and because it seals my fate as a middle-aged cliché. I tell Dad about Micah’s soccer victories, about my son’s acceptance letters from UCLA and Michigan and Princeton, the last of which is so viscerally thrilling yet constitutes a monetary problem I don’t even want to think about. I tell him about Taylor’s supposedly secret late-night calls with a boy who goes by the unnerving name of Biter. I tell him Micah knew what Tamoxifen was and hasn’t wrecked the car since last year’s incident. I speculate that some random nugget of mothering instinct is telling me that Micah is lying about something of consequence, but I don’t know what. I describe my upcoming art show at Saskia Waxman’s gallery in detail, from the intriguing lives of the women I’m casting to the exhilarating results of my efforts to the sweet rediscovery of a San Francisco I thought I’d lost. I tell him about my latest appearance on Laurie’s show, how fan e-mail came in such record numbers that the show’s server went down. I tell him that a book editor approached me about writing a self-help memoir. I tell him how Sue’s restaurant is thriving, as is her relationship with Arlo, and that Arlo finally got my friend on a motorcycle. (Sue declared the ride exhilarating and promptly destroyed the girlie-pink helmet Arlo had purchased with a hammer, so she wouldn’t be tempted to do something so dangerous again.)

  What I don’t tell Dad: that I think a little too often about surfer boy Duke’s salty brown hand on my thigh. That I’m pretty sure Taylor is having sex with somebody (my mind halts and spins at whether the perpetrator is indeed Biter, or some other crudely designated creature). That I asked Eliot for an increase in our monthly stipend to finance Taylor’s language classes. That I begged Eliot not to tell Ma. Or, God forbid, Phil. That I have never told Phil about the stipend but, rather, allowed my husband to think the gap between our income— Phil’s income—and our financial outlay is filled by a trust fund from him (Dad), a gift that has about it all the beneficence of a father’s love and none of the smug control of a domineering stepfather. I don’t tell him that I suspect I’m enjoying my fifteen minutes of fame a little too much, that the return of the sidelong male glance to my life has done more for me than five years of therapy ever did, that the idea of “She Who
Has Everything and if She Doesn’t Buys It” Laurie yearning after my weary forty-three-year-old eggs gives me a creamy jolt of pride (followed speedily by guilt, but I don’t tell him that, either).

  I tell him none of these things. Although I’m fairly sure our hereafter privileges don’t extend to bilateral conversations with loved ones, the mere idea of imagining Dad’s kind, concerned face crumpling if confronted with the vagaries of my family’s—my— moral decrepitude holds me back.

  I redeem myself somewhat by leaking the whopper. “Dad, I did something really, really shitty, and I don’t know how to make it right.”

  Stern silence from the cold marble.

  “I found a lump in my breast three months ago, and I went to the doctor, and he told me I had cancer, and I was sure I was going to, you know, die, and then it turned out they were wrong, and instead of being over the moon, I was”—an image of Babyface Meissner chastising me for being an ingrate pops into my mind—“I was sort of. . . stunned, I guess. What I’m trying to say is. . .”—another image, of Ma’s small, pert nose quivering as she held back tears when I delivered my bad news—“I let everybody think I still had it. Have it, I mean. Cancer,” I whisper, for, not surprisingly, the word has assumed the incantatory power of a witch’s curse for me. “Except Sue. I told her the truth from the beginning. She tried to help me, but”—a vision of my newfound life swirls before my eyes, a kaleidoscope of adventure, accomplishment, promise— “I was so happy, Dad. I felt like I had a chance to do something worthwhile, something the kids and Ma would be proud of, to do some of the things you always encouraged me at. I just didn’t know how to start, but now I do, you see? I know I have to tell them, I do, it’s just now, I . . . It has to be the right time.” I try the concept on for size. “I’m going to tell my family I don’t have cancer as soon as the show’s over,” I say out loud. “I promise, Dad. I’ll make it right just as soon as I have a chance to—”

  The menacing clank of metal on metal sends my denial-perpetuating speech to a shrieking halt.

  I spin toward the sound in a kind of exquisite terror, conscious that I fulfill every characteristic of a stereotypical slasher-movie victim: dumb, white, female, arrogant, morally reprehensible—

  In front of me, looming in the darkness, is a very old, very bent man of indiscriminate origin. I register four things simultaneously: His fly is undone, he is going commando, and not only can I take him in hand-to-hand combat, he will likely die of a heart attack before I can get him to a hospital.

  “You pretending you got the cancer, girl? That really sick.

  Lie like that is always bad idea.” The wizened man shakes his woolly head despairingly, as if he is Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and I am a bottom-heavy intern caught under the head of state’s desk yet again. “You make it up, it might to come true,” he says, already shooing me toward my car with his jangling keys in hand.

  CHAPTER 12

  What to Expect When You’re Defecting

  This is so much fun. So perfectly, thrillingly, uncomplicatedly fun.

  I take a dainty sip of wine, something red and rich and flutter-inducing that Ross and Rae, the transsexual found-object artist— who has quite refined tastes for someone so poverty-stricken and subversive—labored over for at least fifteen minutes.

  “Kelly, what do you think?” The frizzy-haired Academy of Art professor leans toward me, almost falling into my entrée, as if my response is weighty and precious, a veritable gold Incan mask of insight. The fact that she gets my name wrong— indeed, has gotten it wrong since the evening commenced—doesn’t detract from her respect for me or my opinions in the slightest.

  I pretend to ponder, sipping my wine. A man in a navy overcoat with a broad, sunburned face and a shock of strawberry-blond hair pushes past us toward the bathroom. He looks remarkably like Connor Welch—poor, cuckolded, gazillionaire Connor Welch—but it couldn’t be, because Connor Welch doesn’t go out now that his wife has left him for young, unintimidated Dr. Sam Meissner, and now that the latest in a string of bedraggled nannies has, according to Rochelle Schitzfelder, up and quit.

  “I find his work very compelling,” I say gravely, as if reluctant to offer such high praise. I have never heard of the artist we are discussing, let alone seen his floating Scotch-tape matrices, but like everything else about this airy evening, the question does not require a serious response.

  “Really? I thought it was sort of. . . derivative,” the Stinson Beach snack-bar painter mumbles. I glance at her sharply. She disappears back into her Scotch, obviously no stranger to the bottle. We both know that Ross is sorry he invited her, apparently not aware that extreme lactose, gluten, and perfume intolerances would make eating out with the woman akin to being rolfed on a bed of flaming nails.

  “Excuse me,” I say, careful not to knock over my chair as I head for the bathroom. As I leave, it seems that Ross Trimble smiles at me slyly, confidingly, the secretive sort of smile that burns like summer sunshine, as if this whole shindig is a ruse so we can be together. Then again, it could be a trick of light.

  Or I could just be drunk.

  When I get back to the table, fortunately without mishap, the bill has been paid—by Ross—and everyone is getting ready to leave. Suddenly, that urge toward home—you know, the one that makes every second between you and your rattiest gray sweatpants seem like a travesty—shoots through me, and I thank my husband’s boss almost abruptly and head out to the parking lot.

  The asphalt tilts, and I recall the countless times I have counseled—begged—Taylor and Micah to call me if they need a ride home from a party. The situation in which I currently find myself, unfortunately, was not covered in The Minds of Boys, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Out-of-Sync Child, Revised Edition, or any of the other parenting tomes I’ve scoured over the years in a futile attempt to achieve parental competence. I suppose I could call Phil, but then I’d have to talk to Phil, which, lately, has not produced the desired outcome, in this case surviving the ride home.

  I decide to drive myself home. I’ll go slowly, no more than ten miles an hour. It will be okay. (At this point my rationalizations are becoming so robust they could drive me home themselves.)

  I turn the key.

  Dead battery.

  I wonder if Ross Trimble arranged this—perhaps his earlier potty break wasn’t really nature calling but a quick undercarriage journey into my van’s innards—and just as quickly, I dismiss the thought. The idea of such treachery—both the cynical sordidness of it and the paranoia/self-aggrandizement that must be present to produce the absurd suggestion— immediately cause the sea bass and sake tiramisu in my stomach to tussle. Ross Trimble has not crawled under my car and detached the battery cables in order to trap me into a ride home on which he’ll issue a smooth pass because, well, he is Ross Trimble and I am—updated Social Security records to the contrary— Rachel Schultz.

  “Car trouble?” With perfect paranoia-validating timing, Ross’s face appears at my window. In spite of the rich food and the lateness of the hour, he looks as clean and sleek as he did three hours ago—his smooth tanned skin has a reptilian quality that suggests the absence of sweat glands entirely.

  “Um, yeah,” I say, mirroring his impassive tone. “Battery, I think.”

  He glances at his watch. “Let me give you a lift. You don’t want to be out here waiting for Triple A, this time of night.”

  I lock the minivan and wander toward his car as if drugged, trying to decide if my incipient ravishment is a foregone conclusion, a delightful assignation, or a Big Mistake. Am I already lying on some figurative casting couch, Phil’s career—and possibly my own—riding on my acquiescence, or is this some sort of weird test of my virtue as both a woman and a Serious Artist? The idea that Ross Trimble, he of the defense budget– sized trust fund and Hilary Swank–bootied wife, would want to sleep with me due to mad lust enters my mind briefly and flies out again, soundly rejected. There is clearly more—or less—going on here th
an meets the eye.

  Before I know it, I am enveloped in Ross Trimble’s bullet-colored BMW, a low-slung sports car that seems to float above the potholed streets like something from Star Wars. I fight the urge to stare at his hand caressing the succulent leather-swaddled gearshift, for fear Ross will interpret my interest as permission to migrate the hand to my thigh. Having inhabited the automatic-transmission minivan world for so many years, I try to remember if it is really necessary to fondle the stick shift that way.

  “Good Lord, that woman was tiresome,” Ross says, smoothly navigating the tree-lined residential streets between the restaurant and my house.

  “I’m sure she enjoyed her soup.” Near to implosion, the waiter had offered to bring Stinson Beach Lady a bowl of plain chicken broth.

  Ross laughs, glances at me. “The Miró came. It’s been framed and hung. You want to see it?”

  “Oh . . .” But is it well hung? “Okay,” I finally say.

  Ross veers off toward his Hillsborough estate. It actually has gates. And a guard booth. Tonight there is nobody there—to take my photo and sell it to the National Enquirer?—just an alarm touch pad that scans in Ross’s palm print as if we are entering Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  As soon as we enter the mammoth house, Ross goes to the bar to prepare drinks. Apparently, I am such a good judge of fine art, I can even do it shitfaced. I excuse myself and stagger into the bathroom, a gallery of marble and soundless, weighty fixtures. With great relief, I release a hot stream of wine/pee into the commode. Since the children, bladder control has been something like a recalcitrant handyman, reasonably talented but never exactly there when you need him.