‘Her again? So what did you tell them?’
‘Same thing I told you. They need to do the test again because that result isn’t right.’
‘But …’
‘They didn’t want to believe me either. But that’s all there is to it,’ he says, and stands and leaves the room without ever looking you in the eye.
Long time coming
There are days in your life when what you do or say is very important, and when not doing or saying the right thing will also have a serious consequence. And there are days when it becomes right to speak some words that have been stored inside you for a long time.
I found Jed standing in the aisle of one of the glasshouses, just staring at nothing in particular. He looked exhausted.
‘It didn’t matter what I said, Evie, they wouldn’t believe me. Or they didn’t want to believe me. Her mad mother had handed them their piece of proof, and it was like the most fun they’d had in ages, rushing around here.’
‘Have they charged you?’
‘No, not yet. I guess they’ll go and talk to the girl. But she knows as well as I do that nothing happened. The lab must have fucked up somehow.’
This wasn’t something that could be skittered over.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I said. ‘Can we sit?’
As we walked towards our usual seat, I wondered for a moment if this might be the last time I would ever be welcomed into this garden. Versions of the explanation I was about to make had been played over in my head a million times, but the nature of his response was always the great unknown. I was acutely aware that as soon as it was said, as soon as Jed was made aware of the secret I’d kept from him for seventeen years, I risked a range of reactions that went all the way from understanding to angry rejection.
‘The thing is …’ I said, but already I was losing courage. I looked wildly around me, at this place I’d been spending all my mornings, taking everything in, like a sight-impaired person trying to absorb all the available colours of world before undergoing an operation with a low chance of success.
When I did finally manage the whole sentence it felt long overdue, the words definitely the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever spoken: ‘The thing is … do you remember that night of my nineteenth birthday … ?’
My voice quavered as I tried to explain, but once I got it all out – about the possibility Dylan was his son, about Dylan knowing the girl, and about the plausible reason for the DNA mix-up – Jed was quiet for a long, long time, his eyes fixed on a spot in front of him, and the skin on his jaw moving in and out, like he was sucking on his words and didn’t trust himself to say the right thing. Angry? Shocked? I couldn’t tell. The silence was unbearable, and as every second passed as if it were an hour, I felt like parts of me were dissolving and disappearing.
‘You’re like this mellow steadiness at the centre of everything,’ he once said to me when we were young. ‘If we’re ever doing anything dicey, we only have to glance at your face to know if it’s truly wrong or not.’ That was the kind of statement that could set a person’s self-image up for life. If I didn’t have that anymore, I was no longer sure about what I did have.
When he finally spoke, he said exactly the right thing: ‘When can I meet him?’
These were the only words I needed to hear. Of course there was much more we would have to talk about. One day he would want to know why I never told him before. So far I had only been able to say there was somebody else, but one day I would tell him the whole story about Vince. And one day soon we would talk about the girl and decide what should be done. There would be work there, something to overcome. The girl had gone to great lengths not to admit it was Dylan’s child. There’s more to know about what went on. More to figure out.
We hadn’t yet talked about any of these things, but we had time …
I got up from the seat and went through the gate to fetch my son, still in the green vinyl chair, still palely hunched in anticipation.
‘Ready?’ I said, and he nodded briefly, too wired and nervous to do anything else.
As we came back, Jed stood and put his hand out to shake Dylan’s, but as soon as their palms connected he pulled him into a big generous hug. The boy who would no longer let me touch him fell awkwardly into that embrace. He was completely undone, and more than a little shaky. He’d barely had time to take the situation in, yet it almost felt like he had known all along.
They stood apart again and looked at each other as if they were searching for reflection in flesh and tone. They couldn’t help smiling, and were as shy and speechless as newly introduced lovers. Already I could see that something deeply withheld in Dylan was working its way out, and that Jed was prepared to receive whatever that was as a bonus he could never have anticipated.
As I melted back through the gate, leaving them to it, I had the sense that all I had been really doing these last few months was warming a place on that wooden bench seat for my son.
Part Three
When a gun would be handy
Just when you think it is over, it begins again. So … the wife of Jed Jordan? the text reads.
Today’s newspaper has a teaser on the front page, alongside a photo of Jed. The Perils … Martin Scollard writes about Jed Jordan. ‘Sometimes, like a rhino bursting out at you from the brush, fame (or perhaps we’ll call it infamy here) has its little way of ambushing intention.’
Inside there are more photos, including one of you and Jed, taken backstage at some gig quite a long time ago. You’ve only briefly skimmed the story, unable to completely take in the surface facts translated into some sort of publicly consumable discourse, as if your life, or Jed’s life anyway, is a canvas that people feel entitled to appraise and remark upon. Here is the reality of fame, sought or otherwise: it forces you to place a foot outside your own existence. Nobody really understands, until it becomes part of their life, that this is something that must be borne.
The deeper personal anguish sits off the page, for now, but it will only take one gossipy lawyer, one angry mother, one imprudent policeman, one vengeful phlebotomist, one ambitious reporter or some loose neighbourhood talk for the whole thing to emerge – the complicated story about the girl and the baby and the false-positive, and the longlost son who was conceived in a coat closet.
It had been hard enough to try to explain it to the police. At first they’d been sceptical, but when they finally accepted that a DNA mix-up was plausible they gave off a palpable sense of disappointment that they wouldn’t get to prosecute a high-profile name after all. This seemed to obscure the offence itself, because even though the boy and Evie went with Jed to the station, the police didn’t bother to question Dylan about any underage sex he’d had with the girl.
You’d accepted the news about Jed’s son in a hot rush of relief that there was an explanation for the DNA result, but you couldn’t bring yourself to be around the boy yet.
‘It happened long before I met you,’ Jed had said, as if that made it acceptable.
‘And she kept this from you the whole time? Befriended you. Sat at our dinner table with us. And nothing was even hinted at?’
‘Well, she didn’t know for sure. It was only when the test came back like it did that she figured it out.’
‘But …’
‘I know. It is a bit weird.’
‘And what am I supposed to be in all this?’
He squinted at you. ‘Step-mommy?’
‘You’re making jokes now?’
‘Too soon? Of course, sorry. I don’t know, we’ll have to work it out.’
Everything about this conversation felt highly uncertain, like you were balancing on the cliff’s edge and too sharp a movement, or too strong a word, could flip you both over to the ultimate messy demise. But all the same, things needed to be discussed.
‘Are you even sorry? You’ve dumped all this on me. And Jaspar. It’s a big thing you’re doing to us.’
‘Of course I’m sorry, but you know
… he exists … and we didn’t know before, and now we do … and it’s up to us how we choose to deal with it. And Jaspar, well … maybe he could do with a big brother.’
‘A big brother? Is he even a nice kid? A good influence?’
‘I guess. Why wouldn’t he be? Turns out he’s got the Jordan genes.’
‘Don’t be such an idiot. Are you forgetting a pregnant teenage girl?’
‘Oh shit, yeah, I guess I did for a second.’
‘And when that baby comes, are you going to be its granddaddy?’
‘Fuck. I never thought about that.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’
It’s been a lot. And now, like a hand grenade thrown into the kitchen, this text arrives.
For a moment your blood pumps so quickly you have trouble thinking. The man you know only as Brando has something new on you. And he is not a nice man, or a gallant man, rather a man who appears to like power, and he is a man with whom a person might need something to barter for her reputation with.
After sitting in a chair for some long, lost moments, you text him back a time and place to meet – the coffee bar at the cinema, across the road from his place, in half an hour.
Before you leave you find Jed standing at the bench in the shed, cleaning some of his tools. The plants will need to be pulled out soon; there’s already been one big unseasonal frost. Slinging an arm across his back and onto his shoulder is a move that once would have felt completely natural to both of you but is now something of a test.
His response to your gesture is generous. Turning and placing his hands on either side of your face, he kisses your forehead. His arms go around you and you hug tightly, and some of the things that need forgiving are squashed into a more approachable shape within that embrace. He has a lot to ask of you too.
‘Have you seen it?’
‘I looked at the photos,’ he says. ‘Is it bad?’
‘I … don’t know. Yes and no, I think.’
Driving towards the cinema, you begin to think of turning the car onto the motorway and heading south, letting the road fall away in front of you. This pressure of attention, this seventeen-year-old interloper, this sense that humiliation is near – it’s all too hard. You’d like to take a detour to some faraway location, a place of goodness and relief, or at least some place where nothing is looming so menacingly on the horizon. You and Jed did that once, or something like it, when you jumped in the car and took the motorway south together, meandering onwards for no other purpose than to get away for a different kind of weekend, some fresh non-city faces. You stopped the car just outside Rotorua, took a gondola up the side of a hill and decided to take the luge back down. The teenage boy at the ticket counter recognised Jed and became stupidly excited. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he said. ‘I can’t believe such a big star is right here at my counter.’ He got Jed to sign his cap, and gave the one thing he had in his power to give – a free ride on the luge. You’d both laughed all the way down. A big star!
You noticed other things that weekend too, though nothing quite so overt. Some double-takes, discreet nods in your direction, a sudden clumsiness in the girl at the coffee counter. Smalltown New Zealand loved a little fame coming its way. It had all given some fizz to your weekend. ’I can’t believe such a big star drives his own car,’ you’d said to Jed on the way to the motor lodge. ‘I can’t believe such a big star wears such grody old undies,’ you’d said, taking them off him. And later – ‘I can’t believe such a big star would do that!’ And Jed had said, ‘You’d be surprised what a big star can do,’ before rolling onto you a second time.
That shyly and sometimes effusively expressed admiration from strangers is, you suppose, a conditionally rewarding side of fame, if that’s what you could call it. Not such a big star that he could garner the best table in a fancy restaurant in New York, but definitely a big enough star to get a free luge ride in Rotorua.
The unrewarding side of fame is the part you don’t own. Somebody takes a photo of Jed Jordan and his partner backstage at some concert and years later that photo is used alongside an intrusive story. Yours is only fame by association, but this portrays you badly, hanging off your rock-star husband as if you’re a possessive queen. You can’t remember it being taken, or the reason you’d had that odd look on your face, but the use of that particular photo must have been an editorial choice – adding a vague implication to the story that you have always had trouble trusting him. Nobody asks permission for your image to be used, and you have no control over the timing of its use. Or who it lands in front of.
He is already there in a booth near the back. He has a glass of red wine in front of him and there is a second on the table. Sliding onto the vinyl bench opposite is like slipping sideways into his lair.
‘So those texts you’d been sending,’ you say, determined to be the one to start this off. ‘It’s a line from the film, right?’
He sips his wine, puts the glass back on the table, sucks briefly and deliberately on his thick bottom lip. ‘When something is over, it starts again, Lauren.’ He says your name very emphatically.
‘Do you remember what happened in the film? He says it to her, Brando’s character, and the girl doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want him in her life anymore. It was always just about the anonymity of the liaison.’ In real life she found him repulsive, you think of saying, but that is too strong just yet. You need to see where this will go first.
‘Ahh, the anonymity,’ he says, with a spidery playfulness. ‘But now I know about you. Lauren, wife of Jed Jordan. Theatre director, who after a successful opening night in you father-in-law’s newly built complex said, “My hope is that the body of work that comes through this theatre helps form a legacy for the city.” Such a big call!’
‘You know as much about me as anyone with access to Google does,’ you say strongly. ‘And that’s it.’
He leans back in his seat. ‘Ah, but that’s not quite it, is it?’
With great effort you look him straight in the eye. ‘I deny that ever happened.’
‘Do you now?’ He has a look of amused belligerence on his face. He takes another sip of his wine. ‘Do you believe your husband? The girl in the forest? It seems there should be some doubt.’
Is he hinting at the power he believes he has? Has he figured out that any revelation of your misdeeds would detonate the truce around Jed, making you seem the doubly disreputable pair, capable of much?
‘Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. But I am not going to discuss my husband with you.’
‘What if I want to?’
There is a loud clatter from behind the counter, and for a second you both look over. The girl there has knocked some cups off the top of the coffee machine, and she drops down out of sight to collect up the broken bits.
‘No names, no outside life, no talk of work?’
‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘Touché!’
Perhaps his mind still has you tied to a chair. There’s something of the addict’s greed in his expression, a look that suggests he will say whatever is required to get what he wants. Gloria might have called him a total pants man. He will try a touch of charm. Touché! He hasn’t yet connected with the required act of the day. He could be apologising to you. He could be saying, I’m sorry I was drunk that day, I’m sorry I tried to wound you. Does he even remember? Or does his untiring appetite just go chomping onwards, without ever any backward regard?
‘Do you recall what actually happened in the film?’
He shrugs.
‘Don’t you remember what happened when he kept pursuing her? When he wouldn’t leave her alone? She shot him. Dead.’
He laughs. ‘Dead! And do you remember what happened before that?’ He reaches under the table to find your hand and pulls it across to his crotch.
He seems to intend this as some kind of playful extension of that first encounter, but you recoil. ‘I’m not going to do that. You’re disgusting.’
‘Oh, disgusting now, am
I?’ An expression of pure darkness descends. ‘Well, fuck you.’
‘Fuck you too.’ You won’t stop there. You’ll invoke all the insults in the world, if that’s what you have to do. You will become fearless in the tussle for the one thing that has proven itself to be of the most consequence to you – your marriage. But you can also see that you have already wounded him. He has proved before that while he will test limits, he doesn’t really have the heart to force anything.
He drains the last of his wine, starts moving sideways out of the booth. As a parting shot he says, ‘You’ll never know what I am going to do. Maybe nothing, maybe something.’
A spiral of confused thoughts follows him out, and for a brief moment the speed of his departure feels like a victory. But then you realise that he has managed to leave you forever loitering in the prelude to exposure. Mother, and a word that starts with F.
Seeking to tranquillise your thoughts, you hold up your glass to the girl behind the counter to indicate you need a refill. When she comes over with the bottle she says, ‘You look familiar, do we … oh, actually, sorry, I know what it is now …’
‘You read the paper today?’
‘No, should I have? I will now. No, it’s just that I’m an actor – well, trying to be – and you came to our end-of-year performance. Somebody pointed you out, so … so … we knew who you were, you know, a VIP.’ She fills the glass, spilling a little on the table. ‘Sorry, I mean for the … just you know, being all intrusive … and …’ She wipes up the spilled drops with a tissue from her pocket, and rushes back behind the counter where she begins to make an even more awkward effort not to look your way anymore.
Sipping the pungent house red, you begin to think about those closing scenes of Last Tango. That gunshot ending had always seemed improbable, a convenient shock finale ramping up the pathos, but you understand it better now, you think, the reason the girl shot him. You know now that to live with a debasement in your past is to live a fractional inch away from an unveiling.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 21