Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Academia is full of crooks,” he continued, still typing, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Metaphysical, economical. I know of what I speak.”

  So Quimby had gone to grad school. Of course, he had. And, of course, he’d dropped out, like me. I wondered how I had ever felt overawed by this man who deserved nothing but pity. “Film school?”

  “Philosophy. My grand amour,” he said, with supreme dignity. “Film was just a sidepiece.”

  “What happened?”

  “Touché,” he said drily. “It was all fake, as you’ve surely discovered. A bunch of careerists grubbing with filthy paws at the truth’s petticoats. Truth herself long gone, sunbathing on a nude beach somewhere, I hope. We’ll never see her.”

  “I guess you’re better off, then.”

  “Infinitely.” He gestured around the store. “At least these light shows know they’re fake. Therein lies their beauty. No truth but in lies, my friend.”

  It sounded like Bethany. “You remind me of someone I know.”

  “Don’t sweat grad school, Jennifer. There are more honest ways to make a dishonest buck.” He punched the last key with a flourish. “Viridiana is now officially available to rent.”

  “Money is just a placeholder anyway,” I said, quoting Bethany.

  “That’s bullshit.” He slapped the DVD case shut and looked at me. “Everything’s about money, Jennifer. Except sex, which is also usually about money. Those are the rules of the game.” He dropped La Règle du jeu into a bin and pushed Viridiana across the counter at me.

  “I said I’ve seen it.”

  “Watch it again. You’ll get more out of it this time.”

  I started to reach for it, but he jabbed his finger at the list of rental policies on the counter. I dug out my driver’s license and credit card and handed them over.

  While he entered my information into the computer, I said, “Ever see Trace around?”

  “That trench-coat avenger? You think he’s in here renting videos from his old dealer?”

  “What about the Kevins?”

  Quimby nodded wisely. “What about them, indeed.”

  It seemed best not to follow up. He printed out a receipt and laid it on top of the DVD. “Due back Wednesday.”

  “Thanks. I’ll make sure this one gets back to you on time.”

  “I think you will, now that I have your credit card on file.”

  I flinched involuntarily thinking of the balance and turned to go.

  “Mac.”

  I stopped. It was the first time he had ever called me by my name.

  “If you’re looking for work, I’m always hiring.”

  I looked around the empty store at the dusty shelves. I’d never seen a single customer in here. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Quimby might have his own ways of making a dishonest buck.

  “No, thanks.” The bell jingled as I left. I wasn’t that desperate.

  There was something poetic about stepping out of Quimby’s place, where I’d first watched The Earrings of Madame de . . . , and into a pawnshop to hock my cherished diamond earrings. But the pawnbroker barely glanced at them.

  “Moissanite,” he said. “You didn’t know? I’m not surprised. They’re pretty good, better than zirconia.” He pinched one between two fingers and squinted at it. “The settings are nice. I tell you what, I can give you fifty bucks for them.”

  I walked out, the earrings crushed deep in the pocket of my jeans.

  * * *

  “Identity theft?”

  The Social Security customer service representative nodded, competent and expressionless. I had woken up late Monday morning and rushed to my appointment, and I was still waking up when the officer explained that there appeared to be assets in excess of $2 million in offshore accounts opened using Lily’s Social Security number. The rep did not seem particularly fazed when I assured her that Lily lived at home, had never been to the Caymans, and did not hold assets in excess of two hundred dollars, much less two million. She merely opened one of her many file drawers and selected a packet from a hanging file.

  “This is the form to report fraudulent activity on your account. Please allow up to eight weeks for processing. We also strongly urge you to report this matter to the police.”

  “So it wasn’t her diagnosis? Or . . . anything else?” I hedged anxiously.

  “No, ma’am. The problem with her eligibility was initially triggered by the account. This form will correct that mistake.”

  “And no one has stolen or misused her checks.”

  “So far, all that’s been stolen is a number. It’s even possible—​not likely, mind you—​that it could be a mistake. A data entry glitch somewhere.”

  “A mistake?” I repeated stupidly. It had to be. Who had $2 million and needed to steal a Social Security number to hide it?

  “Watch out for any other fraudulent activity, of course, and report everything to the police.”

  “Will that help catch them?”

  “Probably not.” She sighed. “I’m going to level with you. It’s extremely rare to catch an identity thief, especially one operating abroad. The solve rate is about one in seven hundred.” She slid the papers across the desk to me. “Your best chance at fixing things is to file the paperwork, change all your passwords, and get on with your life.”

  I walked out in a state of shock. Somewhere, $2 million sat in an account with Lily’s name on it. And I’d probably never know who put it there.

  But I knew one thing. It sure as hell wasn’t my mother.

  Mom looked pleased when I came home and told her everything was straightened out, or would be soon. But when I added, tentatively, that I was probably going to be staying for a while to make sure they were okay, she just rolled her eyes and said, “Sure, Mac.”

  We avoided each other for the rest of the week. It was a quiet week, not without small pleasures. I watched horse TV with Lily during the days and whatever was playing at the local cineplex every night, sometimes strolling the Riverwalk afterward. When I got home, Mom would always be sitting at the kitchen table, no matter how late it was, drinking a glass of wine and smoking a cigarette. Sometimes she worked a crossword puzzle.

  One night, after coming home from a particularly bad movie, I started to walk past her to my room. Then I felt the earring backs pricking at my thigh in the bottom of my pocket and turned around. She hadn’t done anything wrong, after all. I was only avoiding her out of habit.

  “Mom, why did Dad leave?”

  She looked up and ashed her cigarette. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I’ve just always wanted to know.” After a moment’s hesitation, I pulled out a chair and sat down, scooting the chair a little closer. “I remember you guys fighting a lot, and I guess I always wondered if you were fighting about Lily and me.” My eyes darted to hers.

  “It wasn’t you girls,” she said gruffly.

  I sat with it for a second. “I still miss him, you know.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said, disgusted. “You don’t know the first goddam thing about your father.”

  “Because you never talked about him!”

  “What is there to say?”

  “Anything. Anything at all.” Mentally, I ran through the possible explanations I’d come up with over the years. “Did he hit you?”

  “That would have been too much effort,” she said wryly. “Some men can ruin your life without even trying.”

  “It’s not only men.”

  I was thinking about Bethany, but my mom jerked her thumb toward her chest, spilling flecks of ash onto her shirt. “You may not like me, Mac, but I’m the one who stayed. That counts for something.”

  My temper flared. To sit there across from me, crowing about what a good mother she’d been, when I’d spent my childhood covering for her addiction and my adulthood waiting in terror for her next relapse—​it was sick. I’d sat down intending to have an adult conver
sation with her, but when I opened my mouth, what came out was the sarcasm of a sullen teenager. “Yeah, thanks a lot.”

  Her hand darted out, quick, and my cheek stung.

  “You damn well better thank me. It wasn’t easy, raising you and Lily. If it was easy, he would have done it. He never worked an honest day in his life, just took and took, and then when there was nothing left, he took off. You’re just like him. Coming home, cleaning the house, promising you’ll stay. So noble. When really you can’t wait to shake our dust off your shoes.”

  I stood up, trembling. It wasn’t the slap. It was her words. No drug could blunt that perfect aim. She was mean and nasty and never did anything right, but she wasn’t wrong.

  Wanting to hurt her back with something true, I took the earrings out of my pocket and set them on the table.

  At the sight of the sparkling stones, her eyes went wide and glassed over with easy tears. “Where did you—? I thought I’d done something with them, during one of my—” Her head whipped back up, and she shot me an evil look. “You took them.”

  “They’re fake,” I said. “I guess you weren’t worth the real thing.”

  It did seem to hurt her for a moment. But she was tougher than me. She laughed harshly. “I always wondered why he didn’t bother taking them when he left.” She picked up her wine and cigarette and walked out of the room. “Keep them. They’re all yours.”

  * * *

  Alone in my room, I pulled out my laptop.

  I hadn’t stalked Bethany online since Bird died. Now, as I reeled from the conversation with my mother, my fingers found her name on the keyboard and started typing them into the browser on autopilot, the way you reach for a comforting snack.

  Then I thought of something Quimby had said and stopped myself.

  Instead, I searched Joyner Foundation and savings and loan.

  The first link that came up was a 2003 New York Magazine article titled “Will a New Foundation Save Joyner’s Tarnished Legacy?” I’d spent enough time on the Joyner Foundation website to recognize philanthropist Robert Joyner’s bland septuagenarian visage in the lead photo.

  Quimby was right. It was the same Joyner. According to the article, Joyner had been the primary investor in a hedge fund that collapsed in the ’80s in the savings and loan scandal. Hedge funds, as the article explained, were considered peripheral to the central crisis at the time, but the main reason Joyner dodged the wave of indictments that took down Charles Keating and the like was that the hedge fund CEO, Peter Armstrong, had absconded, taking with him proof of Joyner’s involvement in the scam. While Armstrong was eventually apprehended in the late ’90s and sent to prison for securities fraud, Joyner walked away from multiple investor lawsuits with his billions intact. The article reported that Joyner was “ready to forget his unsavory past and start investing in the future.”

  After 2003 there wasn’t much else on Joyner Foundation and savings and loan. The story had been briefly revived during the financial meltdown in 2008, Peter Armstrong’s name showing up next to Bernie Madoff’s in a few listicles about pyramid schemes, but by then Joyner’s name had been dropped. A footnote to a footnote.

  So. The Joyner Foundation was a wholesale attempt to clean up some rich louse’s image—​and what’s more, it had worked. It wasn’t exactly shocking. Weren’t most charitable institutions high-minded tax shelters at best, cleansers for stained souls at worst? Universities, too, for that matter. I thought of the black-lunged immigrants who had toiled in Dwight Handler’s coal mines to fund his university and the freedmen who had built it for rock-bottom wages only to be barred from entering its classrooms. All my life, since that stoned hallucination in Quimby’s basement, I’d been trying to escape the gravitational pull of money. But the closer I got to transcendent beauty, the dingier and crueler it all looked. What a lesson to draw from The Earrings of Madame de . . . , a film that was about love being bought and sold at every turn until it could no longer survive a single additional transaction. What if at the bottom of every story was a pile of cash, passing from hand to hand under circumstances as seedy as the ones in which Bethany handed me those folded twenties?

  Bethany, again. No matter how I tried to get free of her, my thoughts drifted back at every turn.

  And then suddenly, there she was.

  The photo appeared in the middle of an article I had abandoned halfway through about the trial of Peter Armstrong, the hedge fund CEO. It was a picture from his ’80s heyday: young, charismatic, wolfish, his arm thrown around a celebrity Democrat, the frame crowded with champagne-sloshing admirers. In the corner, just outside the circle of exuberant motion, nearly unrecognizable—​no, fully unrecognizable, to anyone who hadn’t spent as much time as I had studying her every feature—​was a petite woman with a Princess Di haircut in a strappy black cocktail dress. Her heavily lined eyes stared dully at the camera over a champagne flute.

  According to the caption, this was Elizabeth Armstrong, Peter’s wife.

  According to the nights I had spent in her arms, it was Bethany Ladd.

  Elizabeth Armstrong. The name was a common one. Elizabeth Armstrongs were podiatrists, marathon runners, lawyers, mommy bloggers. Narrowing the search with Peter’s name only turned up a few articles noting that she’d cooperated with prosecutors to bring him to justice when he finally turned up in Milwaukee. Nothing that I could find linked Bethany Ladd to Elizabeth Armstrong.

  Nothing except the Joyner.

  Bethany’s ex-husband had gone to prison. Joyner, his business partner, hadn’t. Suddenly, the fact that Bethany happened to get a job at Joyner’s alma mater a few years before he established the most prestigious award in her field seemed more than coincidental.

  It was nearly midnight, but my brain was buzzing so loudly I knew I couldn’t sleep. I popped Viridiana into my laptop’s disc drive and watched Buñuel’s mocking portrait of the cruelty of human nature in its entirety. Quimby was right; I did get more out of it this time. When the credits rolled, I opened a new file and began to write. I wrote and wrote, long, tumbling sentences at first, commas and semicolons swarming like gnats on half-finished clauses. And then, after half an hour or so, whole sentences. Thoughts. Ideas.

  I fell asleep thinking, Bethany Ladd is a fake. Bethany Ladd is a fake. Bethany Ladd is a fake.

  * * *

  I woke up late the next morning to the sound of my phone. Gwen was calling again. This time, I answered.

  “Mac, thank god! I’ve been trying to reach you all week. Where’ve you been?”

  I had decided last night to tell her what I’d found out about Bethany. No doubt Rocky was mixed up in whatever his wife was up to, and Gwen deserved to know. But now, with Gwen on the line, I found myself reluctant. The silence had grown so thick between us when it came to those two. She hadn’t even told me about Rocky yet. I remembered Bethany saying at the dinner party that if Gwen didn’t say anything, it was more than just a fling. If Rocky was implicated in something illegal, would Gwen take his side?

  “I just went home for a visit,” I said, stalling.

  “Without telling anyone? Connor’s been frantic. Me, too. Is there something wrong?”

  How many times had she asked me that, and how many times had I blown her off? But then, I had always shielded Gwen from my problems. She knew about Lily, of course, and my mom’s addiction issues, and that we didn’t have much money. But she didn’t know what those things meant, not really. And I didn’t want her to. It was easy when we were communicating via emails and postcards—​after all, we had only lived in the same town for a few years—​to pretend that we occupied the same world. And getting into the Program together had seemed to confirm our essential sameness. I’d wanted it to make everything better. But what I had truly hoped for, when I envisioned us sipping coffee together and discussing art house films in some bohemian flat, wasn’t that she’d care about my problems. It was that my problems would simply disappear, absorbed into the circle of grace and mercy that was Gw
en’s soft life. Maybe the distance I had felt in our friendship had been sheer disappointment. It hadn’t worked.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Yes, there was something wrong. Maybe still is. Lily’s Social Security benefits stopped for a while, and I’ve been sending all my money home, and finally I ran out of money and I had to go home to sort it out. I thought maybe my mom was using again and stealing her checks.”

  “Oh god, that’s awful, Mac.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s not. At least, she definitely didn’t steal the checks, and I think she’s clean. But honestly with my mom, you never really know.”

  “You should have told me,” Gwen chided.

  “What would be the point? It’s just my life. There’s always going to be some crisis or other back home. The fact is, I can’t afford to spend six years in school. I need money—​not just a loan, but a steady income—​and I need it now.” I tried to make the next line sound logical, normal. “I’m thinking of dropping out and getting a job.”

  She gasped. “Mac, you can’t drop out. I can cover rent for a while if you need it.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “I can do more. You know I can afford to help. Just come back, we’ll figure something out.”

  I blinked away tears. It was what I had always known would happen. “I—​I can’t accept your help, Gwen. You said you don’t pity me, but you would eventually. I can’t let you give me money out of pity.”

  “Then do it for me, damn it!” she said forcefully. “Mac, please don’t leave. I really, really need you right now.” She started crying, too. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that I’ve been calling so much because I’m having a hard time?”

  I was silent. Truthfully, it hadn’t.

  “I’ve been seeing . . . someone . . .”

  This was it. I had been right to level with Gwen, because now she was going to tell me about Rocky at last, proving to me that he was only a passing phase. Once she’d gotten the secret off her chest, she would ask for help getting over him. And then I’d tell her that Bethany and Rocky were mixed up in something we didn’t want any part of. Maybe I’d even tell her about my relationship with Bethany. Maybe.