“Oh,” Margaret says, surprised. She sends out feelers along her body—to the tips of her toes, the back of her neck, the thumping muscle in her chest—trying to sense some residual anger, some pain, some hope. Something. But there’s nothing, just a pinch—but only a pinch—of sadness. Perhaps a smidgen of schadenfreude. Did she ever love him in the first place? she wonders. Or was she just seduced by an aura of ambition? It doesn’t really matter now. “I still owe him twelve thousand dollars,” she tells Josephine. “Did I ever mention that? Another thing I need to sort out.”
“He doesn’t need it,” sniffs Josephine. “You’re coming back soon, right? I know Snatch is done, but you could take a screenwriting class or something—I bet you’d be great at it. You shouldn’t just stop writing; that would be such a waste. And you’re totally welcome to live in my guesthouse. I insist. It would be so much fun to have you around.”
“Thanks, but I think I’m going to stay here for a while, until I figure out what I want to do next. It’s a marginally less poisonous environment, you know?”
“You think we’re poisonous?”
“That’s not really what I meant. But do you really want me lurking around your house, all sour with envy? Besides, I can’t even afford to come back right now.”
“Well, if you need quick money I could hire you to help me with some things. I really need an assistant. I got a pilot and I’m totally overwhelmed.”
Margaret laughs, despite herself. “Josephine, you’re really missing the point.”
Josephine sighs. “I just miss you, you know?”
“I miss you too,” Margaret says. She looks out into the manicured garden, thinking of the hard bright light of Los Angeles, of the wild Santa Ana winds making the palm trees bend over in obeisance, of the nighttime helicopters hovering with their spotlights trained down on the wide boulevards below. For a moment, she thinks she should go back now, as soon as possible, before she loses her momentum entirely. And then she pours herself a glass of lemonade and goes upstairs to watch a DVD with Lizzie.
things take a turn for the worse on wednesday, when Applied Pharmaceuticals announces that it has a release date for Coifex. The drug is being rushed to market and will be available within two weeks. Oprah declines the interview with Janice, and the commentators, distracted by a new product announcement by Apple, start to abandon the story. What press coverage remains is tainted by backlash. “The media furor over Paul Miller is pointless,” says one middle-aged (and balding, Margaret notes) pundit on Hannity & Colmes, his livery mouth snapping at a sour young blonde who has been weakly defending Janice with an arsenal of feminist tropes. “The personal lives of executives have no bearing on their ability to run a company. If anything, Paul Miller’s financial ruthlessness proves that he has the makings of a great CEO.”
By the end of the day, Coifex stock has risen again, all the way to 125, and Janice stalks through the house with her mouth pressed into a grim horizontal line. The feeling of defeat in the air is palpable, thick like pea soup. The phone has stopped ringing, and even when Lizzie and Margaret and Janice are all in the same room together they are mostly silent. Around dusk, the Groupers walk slowly by, taking an evening constitutional with their dog. Margaret watches them through the kitchen window as they stare blatantly at the house. The Bellstroms follow them a few minutes later, and yet no one comes up the drive to ring the bell and offer words of support. Margaret wonders if they are afraid that failure is contagious; she senses the neighborhood shrinking back, in fear of an infection. She can see that she has, unintentionally, raised the stakes: If they don’t win this lawsuit, the fallout for her mother will be hideous, and not just financially. She imagines Janice in the supermarket, people whispering behind her back even as they smile to her face, offering sympathy and yet secretly wondering whether Janice somehow deserved what she got. She’ll be ostracized, inevitably, and it will be Margaret’s fault.
The unexpected coup de grâce comes on Thursday, the day before the trial begins, when an anonymous e-mail ping-pongs around the Internet, linking to a Web site that purports to have “Paul Miller’s Secret Sex Tapes.” Kelly is one of the first to see it, and she calls early in the morning to warn them.
“It’s about to get ugly,” she tells Margaret. “I’m looking into it. In the meantime, don’t answer your phone. They’re sharks, and they’ve smelled blood. Journalists live for these moments.”
Margaret hangs up and looks over at Janice, who’s been standing at the kitchen island with a magazine in her hand, pretending not to listen. She feels as if she’s just been asked to hit her mother with a baseball bat. “Mom,” she says slowly. “There’s a sex tape.”
“What?” Janice blinks rapidly.
“A sex tape, Mom. Of Dad. And Beverly.”
“Oh God.” Janice presses her hands into the granite countertop, shoulders locked tight. “This is more than I signed up for,” she says. She picks at an invisible spot of food with her fingernail.
“I’ll watch the video and tell you anything you need to know,” Margaret says, knowing that this unpleasant task is small penance for the humiliation she has unwittingly brought down upon her mother.
“Do you think it’s too early for a drink?” Janice asks. She lowers herself into a kitchen chair and sits there, staring unenthusiastically at the cover of Bon Appétit.
margaret pours herself some scotch from her father’s neglected wet bar (ten A.M. is not too early for a drink at all, she decides) and draws the blinds in the study. The computer whines to life, the dust on the screen sizzling as the monitor warms up. She pauses before hitting “Play” on the video file, remembering something that happened when she was in grammar school. She woke up in the middle of the night thirsty for a glass of water and, passing by the partly open door of the master bedroom, glimpsed her mother and father mid-coitus. She watched in silence for a minute, frozen in terror by what looked to her like a violent wrestling match taking place on the bed, and then, even as it dawned on her what was going on, she was struck by a curiosity about which of her parents would win. She couldn’t decide who she wanted to lose. The fear of getting caught eventually compelled her to move away from the door and go back to bed, where she stayed awake all night, replaying the scene in her mind with growing horror.
She will need a hot bath when she is done with this, she thinks, her hand hovering reluctantly over the mouse.
The grainy video is the size of a thumbprint and just as incriminating. A blurry white blob bobs up and down and then comes into focus. It is a naked rear end, bouncing in and out of frame. There is another smear of movement as the camera is shifted. The new angle is strange, and for a few seconds Margaret can’t quite identify the body part she’s looking at, until she realizes that Paul has picked up the camera and is now pointing it straight down his torso in order to capture, for posterity, his erection.
Margaret looks away, nauseated, and when she looks back the camera has been deposited on what must be a bedside table. Now the two bodies are clear, their heads visible: Paul and Beverly on a well-appointed king-sized bed, their naked lengths stretching away behind them. Margaret can practically count the hairs on her father’s head. It is not an attractive view.
Their sex is strictly missionary-style—nothing kinky, nothing weird, Paul on top, Beverly below. Their bodies, squashed flat by gravity, have the middle-aged consistency of old custard. Beverly appears to have breast implants; they are the only part of her body that doesn’t droop. For a while, Margaret thinks the video has no sound, and then she hears their quiet breathing and realizes that they are just having unexciting sex. The only audible noise comes toward the end—after a brief, and rather dull, four minutes—when Beverly squeaks a few times. Paul wheezes out a word that sounds like “Urg!” before he collapses. And that’s it.
She watches the video clinically, trying to think of the figure on-screen not as her father but as an anthropological subject to be analyzed, only it’s not that easy. She is repu
lsed but, even more, ineffably sad. She had made the assumption that Paul had left her mother for something more exciting, something wild and abandoned—a lure she could understand. The truth, it seems, is more mundane, and therefore less comprehensible. He threw us away for that?
And yet, at the same time, she feels an unexpected sympathy for her father with his dreary little sex tape. If it wasn’t excitement that drew him away, what was it? Maybe it was love, and for that, she could possibly, someday, forgive him.
As Margaret sits there, sipping at her scotch in the glow from the computer screen, Lizzie wanders into the study, wearing sweats. She sits in the club chair gingerly, as if she’s settling down on a very delicate egg. Margaret switches the computer off, but Lizzie already has a strange look on her face.
“Is it the video?” she asks.
“What video?”
Lizzie rolls her eyes. “Puhleeze. I’m not dumb, Margaret.”
“Seriously,” says Margaret. “How did you know about it? Did Mom tell you?”
And only now, observing the expression on Lizzie’s face, does Margaret stop to wonder where the video has come from. The corners of Lizzie’s lips vibrate slightly, and her eyes bulge as if from some hidden pressure. It dawns on Margaret that her sister knows something that Margaret does not. “Did you have something to do with this?” Margaret asks.
“No!” says Lizzie, drawing her legs up below her. “Not really. I didn’t do it.”
“What does that mean?” asks Margaret.
“Mark found the tape in a shoe box in his mom’s closet,” Lizzie says. Margaret is taken aback, envisioning Mark trying on his mother’s shoes and lingerie, an aspiring drag queen in the first throes of self-discovery. And then she realizes what he was more likely to have been doing: sniffing his mother’s shoes to catch the familiar earthy aroma, a lonely kid in an abandoned closet. It is too depressing to dwell upon.
“And he told you about it?”
“He showed it to me.”
“Wow, Lizzie, that’s really twisted.” She recalls, now, the two kids in the family room, their guilty shrieks. “Is that what you were watching last week? The day that…?” She can’t quite finish the sentence: you caught me having sex with James.
Lizzie picks at a scab on her toe and nods. “And then Mark sent it to a lady from some Web site who called their house looking for his mom.” She pauses as the scab flakes off to examine the bead of blood that wells up in its place. “Pretty dumb, but I think he has, you know, abandonment issues? I told him that it wasn’t going to make anything better and it certainly wasn’t gonna make his mom change her mind, but he said that wasn’t the point. I guess he has to work his anger out. His mom doesn’t live at home anymore, and he’s pretty pissed off. You know.”
“Oh,” says Margaret, somewhat floored by this speech.
“I think she lives with Dad now, at the hotel,” Lizzie continues. The sisters are silent for a minute, mulling this over. “I went with Mark to the post office. I thought maybe I’d talk him out of it, but honestly? I didn’t try that hard. I guess I must have abandonment issues, too. Do you think Dad will find out, Margaret? You’re not going to tell Mom, are you?”
“Don’t worry,” she says, thinking that despite the damp ink on the treaty between her and her mother, there are still certain things Janice just doesn’t need to know. Then again, maybe Janice would have the number of a good psychiatrist. She imagines the two kids tipping a brown paper package into the post office mail bin and is reminded of those stories about children who, brainwashed by anti-drug advertising campaigns, turn their parents in to the police for growing a pot plant in the basement and end up in foster homes while their parents rot in jail. Someday when they are slouching toward middle age, Margaret thinks, Mark and Lizzie will spend a fortune on therapy trying to process what they did. The sooner Lizzie starts working through her baggage, the better.
“Are you okay about all this?” Margaret asks. “What with all the stories in the paper, all the attention to Mom and Dad.”
Lizzie lifts her hand in front of her face and examines the chipped pink nail polish on her thumb. “I dunno. It’s weird. I guess I’ve had a lot of other things to worry about, too,” she says. She slumps down in her chair until she’s nearly horizontal. “Do you think the newspapers will write about what happened last week? I mean, the…thing…in the hospital?”
Margaret shakes her head. “They couldn’t know.”
Lizzie picks a flake of nail polish from her pinkie finger and lets it drop on the floor. “I’m going to get Mom to transfer me to St. Gertrude’s for my sophomore year,” she says. “She said I could, if I really wanted to.”
“The Catholic school? With the nuns? And catechism classes?”
“They have a really good swim team,” says Lizzie. She sits up again. “Do you think they care if you’re not really Catholic? I mean, you only have to believe in God to get in, right? Do you think God cares?”
“You’re weird,” says Margaret.
“Maybe I’ll get Mark to transfer, too,” Lizzie says. “He hates Fillmore High.”
“Is he your boyfriend now?”
Lizzie shrugs, but pulls the edge of her sweatshirt up over her mouth to conceal a smirk. There is something incestuous about that coupling, Margaret thinks. But seeing Lizzie’s smile, she says nothing.
Lizzie lets the sweatshirt drop. “Anyway, I’m never going to be able to go back to Fillmore again,” she says. “I’ll be, like, a total outcast. I already am.”
Margaret pushes the scotch aside. “This is going to be of no consolation whatsoever, I know, but just so you’re aware, a lot of the popular kids in your class are actually peaking right now. In ten years you’ll go to your reunion and they’ll have three snot-nosed kids apiece and live in trailer parks. And when you get to college you’ll find out that geeks and weirdos are the ones who end up really running the world.”
“Is that what happened to you?” asks Lizzie. She hoists a skeptical eyebrow, plucked within an inch of its life. “Are you running the world?”
“Not exactly,” Margaret says, wishing now that she had said nothing at all. “But I’m an exception to the rule.”
Lizzie snorts, rolls her eyes, and leaves. Margaret watches her thump out of the room and thinks that when her sister is just a little bit older, she is going to be a force to contend with. Maybe she already is.
despite kelly’s warnings, no one calls immediately, and Thursday morning passes at a glacial pace. The sex tape isn’t mentioned in the day’s papers, and the only story about Paul at all is a small squib on the back page of the New York Times business section about the upcoming ad campaign for Coifex, a story that only briefly mentions the trial. Margaret watches the morning news but has to turn to CNBC before she finds anyone talking about Coifex, and then it’s only to relay the fact that Applied Pharmaceuticals stock has stabilized back at 134.
It’s impossible to concentrate on anything. With each minute that ticks by, it seems more likely that the gamble isn’t going to pay off. The media has lost interest in the lawsuit, no one is going to pay attention to the sex tape, and her father won’t budge from his position. They will go to court tomorrow, and her mother will lose. Margaret walks out to the pool to stare at her reflection. The water is still—no one has gone near the pool since Lizzie had her miscarriage there—and a thin layer of brown sediment has settled on the bottom of the deep end. Margaret thinks of James, somewhere on the beach in Mexico, and wishes that she’d thought to get a joint from him before he left.
She flops down on the lawn and stares blankly up at the blue sky, where the last wisps of the overcast morning are being burned off by the heat of the midday sun. Her back itches from the freshly mowed grass, and she thinks she can feel the faint curvature of the earth beneath her spine. A plane flies by, and she watches the ghostly vapor trail it leaves until it has vanished completely and the sky is once again empty and clear. Inside the house, the phone rings for the fir
st time that day, like an alarm bell shattering the silence. The answering machine clicks on, but the message is too muffled for Margaret to hear it from out here. A few minutes later, it rings again. Margaret remains motionless, as if sudden movement might break a spell. Eventually she falls asleep.
In the early afternoon, Janice comes out and stands above her, blocking out the sun. “Your sister and I are going to play a board game,” she says. “Would you like to join us?”
“Sure,” says Margaret, and stands up. The backs of her legs are imprinted with blades of grass.
“Your father’s charming video is all over the news,” Janice adds. She rubs an eye with the palm of one hand and closes her eyes against the sun. “The telephone has been ringing off the hook. Everyone wants to know how I feel. How do they think I feel?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” says Margaret. She reaches out and impulsively rubs her mother’s shoulder through the thin fabric of her poplin shirt. Janice’s muscles are tight and knotted. “Really.”
Janice shakes her head. “It’s not your fault. I’ll make us some iced tea. Want to pick out a game? We were thinking Monopoly.”
Margaret can’t remember exactly where the games are kept—when was the last time she played a board game with her family? It must have been years. In the family room she opens one cupboard, then another, each exposed shelf a little window into her mother’s world. Cupboards of family albums, going back all the way to the discolored Instamatics of Janice’s youth. Hardback best-sellers with the corners folded over as placeholders. Home videos labeled in Magic Marker: MARGARET RIDING 1ST BIKE and PAUL TEACHES LIZZIE TO SWIM and HAWAII 2003. An entire history in these cabinets, and as she runs her hands over the dusty tops of the videotapes she feels the loss of those memories acutely. Janice will never be able to look at these again without the specter of the future darkening them. None of them will. She wonders when her mother will start purging the house of Paul’s belongings.
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