Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  The reasons I gave for my presence there were never challenged—​certainly not by Bethany, who corroborated my story in a state of shock, knowing I could turn on her at any minute. Connor had quit his research assistantship in front of dozens of witnesses, and everyone knew I had been gunning for the job. Probably the only person who was surprised I took it was Connor, though he never spoke to me again, so I don’t know for sure. Nobody seemed to find it at all out of the ordinary that Bethany would call me out to the isolated farmhouse after dark to help her go through her manuscript, or that she had received me in her bathrobe, or that she and Rocky would come to blows in front of a student. Everyone who’d worked with her knew what Bethany was like, and those who hadn’t, had their own Bethanys and Rockys to deal with.

  Bethany, it was rumored, took a job at a small liberal arts college in rural Florida, only to leave after a year for parts unknown. Perhaps she was ashamed of her fall from academic glory and had gone into hiding to plot her next step. Or else she had become a born-again Christian and gotten a job on an alligator farm. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I kept my recordings, those reckless words from her office hours, in a safe deposit box, along with the evidence that she was blackmailing Joyner. Only an idiot keeps that sort of thing under the bed.

  I was out from under Bethany’s thumb for good. And with Gwen gone, there was nothing to impede my rise to the top.

  From time to time, I missed them both.

  * * *

  I did my two years at Lyon, which was every bit as beautiful as promised, but I didn’t see much of it. I was too busy writing. I finished the Program at breakneck speed, landed my current job, and revised my Joyner project into a well-received manuscript that achieved a minor crossover success. I was written up in the London Review of Books. The Very Important University came calling.

  All good things. But nothing came close to the feeling of depositing that first Joyner check and registering Lily for twice-weekly therapy sessions at the Healing Power of Horses Ranch. Maybe nothing ever will. By living frugally, I managed to pay for weekly housecleaning for my mom and Lily, along with a meal delivery service and regular maintenance to the house. I still avoided visits home, and they halted altogether for the two years I was in Lyon. But as long as the checks kept coming, my mom never complained.

  Besides, Lily and I video-chatted regularly now. The horses relaxed her, and although she still avoided eye contact, she’d grown much more talkative. She spent all her extra time volunteering at the ranch and wanted to get a real job working with horses someday. I told her we couldn’t afford to upset the Social Security situation again right now by giving her an income, but once my situation stabilized a little more, we could think about it.

  About the Social Security fraud: we never learned who did it, though the police investigator blamed the online horse forums Lily had been active on for years. I had trouble believing Lily would be so careless with her personal information online, but it didn’t matter in the long run because there were no further problems with the account and no fraudulent charges to dispute. Eventually my fear of phone calls from angry creditors abated, the fraud report went through, and the Social Security payments started up again.

  As far as I ever found out, my mother had been clean the whole time. We avoided each other when I was home, but she did not harass me further about my snobby friends or my books, and she never brought up my father again. She knew that whatever I had done in that mysterious Program, it had worked.

  * * *

  And it kept working for ten years.

  December 29, 2021, 3:45 a.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  I stand up.

  It occurs to me, briefly, to get down the way the ring did, but curiosity gets the better of me before I can make any rash decisions. There’s more than one way to get down from a rooftop. Gwen’s not perfect, but she’s not—​well, me.

  It doesn’t take long to find the ladder that leads to the fire escape, but the descent is not a pleasant prospect. Even for a nearly hundred-year-old structure, the zigzag of steeply tilted ladders and minuscule landings seems precarious.

  The first metal rung, slippery and freezing cold in the fine, driving rain, sends a blaze of pain through my cut palm. I squeeze harder and concentrate on moving one foot after the next. Foot, foot, hand, hand. I look at each limb before I move it, terrified I’m going to miss. That means looking down. The swimming pool is a tiny lit-up rectangle of turquoise surrounded by palm trees the size and shape of starfish. I make out the spikes of a black wrought-iron fence poking up from a bed of cacti a hundred feet below. At some point, dead vines scratch at my ankles, and I try to remember how far up the side of the building they grow. Five stories, maybe four.

  Slowly but surely, Los Angeles rises to meet me. When I step off the ladder onto the ground, my legs are shaking.

  I walk into the empty lobby and limp past the startled night concierge to the elevators, leaving puddles on the shiny black floor. There’s never just a button for the real penthouse. You have to use a key. I slide mine into the slot next to PH-12, and the elevator ascends rapidly, releasing me into the hallway with a ding. I follow the scarlet strip of carpet to the door at the end of the hall. Unlocking it, I turn the door handle and push it open.

  “Hello, Mac,” says Bethany. “You look awful.”

  * * *

  I step inside and let the heavy door close behind me.

  “So do I, of course,” she says as I continue to stand in the entry. “But it wouldn’t be polite of you to say so.”

  Bethany sits on one of three sofas arranged around the square sides of a large glass coffee table with an orchid centerpiece. She wears loose layers of mauve silk, a gypsyish scarf tied around her head, and plain black rubber-soled flats. She looks completely different than the Bethany I knew. She looks twenty years older instead of ten. She looks every bit as beautiful as when I saw her last.

  “Bethany.” In a dream, I walk to the closest sofa and sit across the glass table from her, noting with detachment that the orchids in her room are real. My eyes travel to a cane leaning against the sofa: industrial-strength aluminum with a four-point base and rubber feet.

  She sees me looking. “Ugly, isn’t it? I like it that way. You have no idea how long it took me to find one without a snazzy pattern or a red chrome finish.” Peering down at the cane curiously, she rolls it back and forth a few times on its feet, making the dimples in the aluminum wink. “People are frightfully occluded about death, aren’t they?”

  “Not everybody with a cane is going to die,” I say carefully.

  “I beg to differ.”

  Let her chuckle at her grim joke. I don’t need to hear the word cancer. With my family history, I can spot used Fentanyl patches in a trash can from twenty yards. I play up my impatience to hide the instinctive surge of fear and pity.

  “You slid a key under my door, so I assume you have something to say to me.”

  She stands the cane upright and rests her hand on the crook, like a seated monarch with a scepter. “I’m so proud of you, Mac.”

  I roll my eyes. “Cut it, Bethany.”

  “Why should I? You’ve done so well for yourself. I’ve been watching your progress. Research I, tenure track. So young for a keynote. Brava.”

  “Thank you,” I say stiffly.

  “Up for tenure soon, aren’t you? How’s that second book coming along?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “It’s the important one, you know. Easy to make a splash your first time out, but people are watching now. You have to stick the landing.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” I say drily. “I’m finding it much easier than the first.”

  “Good, good,” she says approvingly, skipping over my implication. “I’m not surprised, after tonight. You were magnificent down there. Confident, authoritative. I found myself believing every word.”

  I stare in disbelief. “You were at my keynote?”

 
; “Of course!” She smiles. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”

  I rack my brain trying to re-create the scene, but the talk at the beginning of the night feels like it happened a million years ago: all that comes through is a packed ballroom, my nerves jangling, eyes darting from the paper in front of me to the hiring committee in the back row. I can’t imagine having missed Bethany Ladd in the audience.

  She raises an eyebrow. “It’s no wonder you already have groupies.”

  Groupies. Harvard.

  “We held the elevator door for you,” I say.

  “Your friend held the door,” she says, in a tone of gleeful reproach. “You walked right past me.”

  It’s true. That moment in the elevator, unlike the talk, is perfectly intact in my memory and as minutely detailed as a diorama: Harvard’s finger on the hold button in my peripheral vision, Gwen sitting at the bar across the lobby, and between them, crossing the polished black floor toward me, a mother and son, two professors, and, yes, Bethany. Head-scarfed, with a cane.

  A crystal-clear memory from well before the blackout. Yet the most important detail completely escaped me.

  What else am I missing?

  She watches me carefully. “Don’t take it so hard. I’m an old woman now, with the gift of invisibility. It’s wonderful how the moment you turn sixty you cease to exist.” She hoists her cane. “Add the barest hint of mortality, and people will cross the street to avoid looking at you.”

  “I was distracted by—”

  “Gwen, I know.” She rearranges her dress over her knees. “She didn’t recognize me either. Too busy chatting up that Rocky type at the bar.” She laughs mirthlessly. “Now men, they don’t disappear with age. They become silver foxes. If they live.”

  I flinch, but she only heaves a sigh and goes on.

  “She’s an odd girl. Do you know she came all the way out here just to forgive me for killing my husband and apologize to me for screwing him? Or not screwing him. Which probably screwed him, and me, even worse.” She laughs again, bitterly this time. “She went on and on about closing the chapter, learning to trust herself again, being worthy of her fiancé. Blah, blah, blah. Gwen stuff.”

  Being worthy. I can hear Gwen saying it, believing it, needing to believe it. So, that’s why she kept taking off her ring—​not to hide her upcoming marriage, but because it reminded her of the part she had played in destroying someone else’s.

  “You told Gwen I killed Rocky.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I don’t say anything, just look at her.

  “Your silence speaks volumes, dear. Anyway, I only did it to wipe the noble expression off her face. How was I to know she’d believe me?” She snorts. “Maybe I was feeling the smallest bit peevish toward Claire, as you call yourself these days. What a pathetic farce. How cowardly you’ve become, Beauty Queen.”

  She’s right. Standing here in my ripped, sodden clothes, I can admit to myself that Claire Woods is a fiction, a veneer of taste and privilege over a bottomless pit of yearning. Claire buys her scarves at museum shops and her tote bags at independent bookstores. She owns a co-op apartment with age-softened hardwood floors, the rough spots covered with Berber rugs, and nods sympathetically when her colleagues at the state school agonize over whether to hang on to their Manhattan studios while they’re stuck in this backwater town. Claire knows how to spend money so that it shows, but it doesn’t show that it shows, and what she can’t afford, she politely appreciates in others.

  But shake Claire, and you can hear Mac rattling around inside her like a dirty penny.

  Bethany is still staring at me amusedly, waiting for me to recover. I think of what Gwen said on the roof. She messed with your head.“Don’t call me that.”

  She pretends to be wounded. “Not even once, for old times’ sake?”

  “You were my mentor, my adviser.” The betrayal feels fresh, after tonight. “You let me try so hard.”

  She grins wickedly. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it.”

  Hot tears of humiliation burn my eyes. “Of course, I liked it. Do you understand what you were to us?” I see Harvard heading up a parade of students I’ve toyed with, psychologically if not always sexually. I see myself emailing them late at night to rave over their papers, initiating flirty exchanges, trying to get into their heads. I hear myself making vague promises of recommendations, jobs, fellowships, over drinks and dinner. Testing my power over them, running hot and cold. We’re all so cozy with each other’s insides, it’s easy to get access to someone’s dreams—​both the ones that academia squashes and the ones that it deforms into grandiose delusions. And once you have access to someone’s dreams, controlling them is easy. “Yes, I liked it. But you should have stopped it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were in a position to hurt me more than I could hurt you.”

  Bethany bursts out laughing. “Do you really think so?” She holds up her cane and gives it a savage shake.

  “You’re not blaming me for that, are you?”

  “You would be surprised just how much I can blame you for, Mac. You took away my job—​which, by the way, came with health insurance—​and ruined my reputation. But most of all, you took Rocky.”

  “He tried to kill you. You should thank me.”

  “It wasn’t your choice!” Her eyes go harsh. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but afterward, it all came back. The fear. The panic. I used to wish he would haunt me, just so I would be less alone. I woke up every night shivering, fear gnawing my guts. Who’s to say my stomach cancer didn’t start there?”

  I feel myself shrinking under her stare, unable to look away.

  After a long moment, she recedes with a chuckle. “Then again, it got my mother, too. It’s probably genetic. Still, it would’ve been goddamn nice to have someone to tuck me in at night.”

  I stiffen. “I hope you’re not here looking for volunteers.”

  With surprising fondness, she says, “No, dear. Of course, I’m happy to see you. You’ll always be the one that got away.” Then she shifts to a businesslike tone. “But it’s Peter I came here to meet.”

  The name takes half a beat to register, it’s so out of context. “Peter, your ex-husband?”

  She just looks at me, waiting for me to figure something out. Evidently this whole conversation has been a distraction, and she has something else in store for me entirely, some revelation waiting in the wings. For the first time it occurs to me to wonder whether the real purpose of those incomprehensible lectures in her office was to spin me in circles, throw me off-balance, make me vulnerable.

  It worked then. It’s working now. She learned from the best, says a voice in my head. I should listen to it, not to Bethany. But I can’t stop myself from asking all the wrong questions. “You’re not scared of him anymore?”

  “Maybe a little,” she admits. “But not as much as I am of dying penniless and in pain. I came to ask him for money.”

  “I thought money was just a placeholder.”

  “It’s a placeholder I fucking well need, thanks to you,” she snaps. “I’m unemployable. I can’t afford my insurance premiums, I can’t afford my treatments. I’m running out of meds. With Joyner dead, Peter’s the richest person I know. He has a couple million stashed away somewhere, payoffs from Joyner for not flipping on him. I threw myself on his mercy. Unpleasant as that was.” She shrugs. “He wasn’t pleased to see me. I’m afraid he took it as a nasty surprise.”

  “You did put him in a federal prison.”

  “Barely!” she scoffs. “People like that never experience real consequences for their behavior.”

  Neither do you, I think at her, with all the hate in my hateful little heart. Something is needling me again, a piece still missing. Everyone at the same hotel, Gwen here to see Bethany, Bethany here to see Peter. It reminds me of our grim little quartet in the Program—​Rocky and Gwen and Bethany and me. But Rocky’s gone now. Who’s the missing piece?


  “But if it was a surprise, that means he was here to see someone else,” I say slowly. “Who was Peter here to see?”

  “Haven’t you guessed?”

  I see another snapshot from the hotel lobby, before the blackout. Gwen’s admirer, or so I thought. The silver fox.

  “You always were a little slow.”

  I was, wasn’t I? Always catching up with the car that drove away when I was a child. You don’t know the first goddam thing about your father. The missing piece, cut out of family pictures, erased from our lives, leaving nothing real behind—​not the earrings, not even his name. My memories of him, all from under the age of eight, and all wrong, so wrong that I’ve stared straight at actual photographs without recognizing him. Just like in grad school, I’ve been looking in the wrong place my whole life, missing the big argument, hung up on irrelevant details.

  “No.”

  She nods.

  “It’s not true.”

  “It is true.”

  I put my face in my hands.

  “Peter Armstrong is your father.”

  After he left, my mother never spoke of him again. I remembered him the way I wanted to: calling me princess. Saying, You don’t belong here any more than I do. We were made for better things. Remember that.

  But if I was made for better things, why didn’t he take me with him?

  It’s the right question at last. The tears well up out of the hollow place inside me, pour out of me.

  Bethany sits there, watching in fascination. Savoring.

  “How did you—?” No. Wrong question. I swallow hard. “When did you know?”

  She flashes me a death’s-head grin, and I know before she says it. I feel sick.

  “ ‘I was born Mackenzie Claire Woods in Wheatsville, Illinois,’ ” she quotes.