Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  Uck, I thought, still trying to read Edward’s face, praying he wouldn’t kiss me.

  Somewhere on a beach, Dana was crying. On the Baileys’ porch, Adele leaned in for a kiss. In another house, my mother blew smoke, lifted her drink, while my father, watching Nixon, shook his head. Edward’s breath quickened. Tearfully, Dana snapped that chain from her neck and flung her boyfriend’s ring into the lake. Edward shuddered, whimpered, became still. I could not move. On the back of my tongue, the bitterness of bile. I knew that I had brought this on myself with my prurient fantasizing. That Edward, as well as Derek, was my cousin entered my senses with latent if obvious clarity, and I felt sick. I wanted him to say something more. I could already taste the abandonment, but, unlike my sister, I had no ring to toss extravagantly away. When morning came, I would go to Derek’s studio, find those drawings, and tear them up.

  TWELVE

  My mother sent me to Harvard with three pieces of advice: wear clean underwear, take music appreciation, and look up Jamie Hester. The Hesters had been friends of my parents since before they were married, Bibi Hester being the one person my mother could count on to get even more sloshed than she did at a party. Bibi Hester was resolutely blond, her hair teased into whatever was that summer’s version of a beehive, her lips and nails ranging from coral to pink. My mother liked to tell the story of how Bibi had blackened the eye of another bridesmaid at my parents’ wedding in an attempt to catch the bouquet.

  And she was already married to Huntley! exclaimed my mother.

  Except for the underwear, I blew off my mother’s suggestions, signing up for literature courses like Love and Eroticism in Poetry and History of Politics in the Novel. I altogether ignored Jamie Hester, who was in his first year at business school, but my mother and Bibi were in cahoots, and Jamie eventually gave me a call. Up till then, Jamie had been a pale-haired boy with brown legs leaping over tennis nets or rooster tailing behind ski boats, the son of my mother’s boozy friend. When he showed up in my dorm room, he affected the cocky manner of a boy who’d avoided the draft and whose future in bags was set.

  “You’ll want to move into an apartment next year,” he said with an air of authority. “No one stays in the dorms.”

  Although I agreed with his assessment, I shot back, “It’s not so bad.”

  He took in my roommate’s side of the room—her Happy Face decals on the closet door, the fake fur throw pillows, the “I am I, and You are You, and If By Chance We Meet, It’s Beautiful” poster. Jamie’s eyes drifted back to mine, an amused eyebrow arching slightly. We both laughed and then and there, like our mothers, became co-conspirators and friends.

  Soon, he was dropping by all the time. My roommate, who was prone to promiscuity, often stayed out nights with the hockey player of the week. It was on these nights that Jamie would appear in my room with his guitar and a bottle of wine. He had a birthmark on his cheek, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect face. The more I sipped, the more gorgeous he became with his thin ponytail and single earring. Gradually, he began to take on more significance than the son of my mother’s friend. In his slow, stoned voice, I gleaned spiritual depth that needed only to be teased out by someone with a more evolved social conscience. Perhaps I could talk him into using his graduate degree for something loftier than commerce. When he played his guitar and sang Neil Young songs, something stirred in me. Old man, take a look at your life…

  “You’re not like your family,” I told him.

  “And you,” he said slowly in a wine-thickened voice, “are definitely not like yours.”

  I took a sip from his glass. “Which means?” I said, trying to decode his stare.

  Seeing the look on my face, Jamie chucked me on the chin and strummed a few more chords. “The crazy Addisons,” he said.

  One January evening, Jamie found me in the library reading Proust. It had been snowing hard all day. “You can’t even see the sidewalks,” he said, insisting that he walk me back to the dorm, helping me to navigate the snowdrifts that challenged my California sense of balance. It was a wild ocean of a storm. Snowflakes like frenzied fairies danced around the streetlamps of Cambridge. Breathless, we arrived at the dorm, icy-cheeked, our clothes powdered with snow. “If you’d grown up in the Midwest,” he said, watching me shiver in my blue jeans and insubstantial coat, “you’d know how to dress.”

  “I know how to dress,” I said, slapping snow off my skimpy jacket that was soaked clear through.

  Jamie helped me off with my coat. Outside, all of Cambridge was cloaked in white. “Do you know how to undress?” he said, nuzzling my neck.

  My first reaction was to laugh. My second was to stand perfectly still. I had never had a lover. In the minute that followed, I considered my prior yearnings. Now, as Jamie backed me up and lowered me onto the bed, I looked up into his eyes and tried to interpret what I saw.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. I knew I wasn’t. Still, I hung on his words as though they held the possibility.

  For weeks, I told no one, not even Dana. That my lover was someone I had grown up with struck me as slightly incestuous. But Boston was a different longitude, far from my family in California, farther still, in many ways, from the Aerie and Sand Isle. Meeting in cafés, going to bars, listening to his guitar in my room, I pretended that our relationship had nothing to do with our families, that it was freshly honed, that Jamie was a man who could see me for myself. Hadn’t he looked delighted when I told him about the Indian woman we once picked up?

  “The aunts will be delirious,” predicted Jamie, and I could just imagine Aunt Pat sizing up the situation. We all knew about the Hester tiara that was moldering in a safety-deposit box—a nineteenth-century crustacean that yielded up diamonds whenever one of the Hester men became betrothed. I had seen Hester-tiara diamonds mounted as solitaires, nestled between smaller diamonds, offset by colored stones on the knuckles of Jamie’s aunts and cousins’ wives. Jamie’s mother, the boiled Bibi, had a stone the size of a prune on her left hand.

  “You’re late for economics,” I said as Jamie rolled over and lit a cigarette. He looked for all the world like someone who was in love. His pupils seemed to expand when he saw me.

  The roommate had moved out permanently by April, and because it afforded more privacy than the apartment Jamie shared with four other guys, we made my dorm room into our own little world. We rarely saw anyone else. We went to our classes, hurried back. The midday sun streaked through curtains onto the Formica desk. The floor was strewn with books and clothes and empty Mateus rosé bottles. On my bedside table, an ashtray I had stolen from the Aerie, monogrammed with the initials of my grandmother, was filled with the stubs of Marlboros and Virginia Slims.

  “I could teach that class,” said Jamie, who had spent his childhood dinners talking about profit margins in the bag business.

  “So come to class with me.” I was madly in love with poetry and was trying my own hand at it to poor effect.

  He shook his head and smiled, ran his finger down my cheek as if it were the finest porcelain. Not infrequently, I compared him to Derek, searching for some scrap of the artist or poet in Jamie’s soul. And every now and then, I compared him to Edward.

  I grabbed his hand and kissed it. “I stood on the balcony dark with mourning like yesterday,” I said, “…hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love.”

  “Maddie’s sad poetry,” said Jamie, pushing my hair away.

  “Neruda,” I said.

  That our world became very small, that Jamie overtook me like the sea seemed only natural. To this day, I remember feeling his beating heart through his frayed cashmere sweater.

  When I finally told Dana, she said, Aunt Pat’s going to pop a vein.

  By June, the dewy newness of my affection was giving way to annoyance. Mannerisms that had struck me as charming eccentricities began to irritate me—Jamie’s proclivity for putting on a brocade bathrobe after sex; his aloofness toward waitresses; his fastidiousness a
bout his hands. He was constantly scrubbing his nails. And then there was his elitism. We are the American aristocracy, he said to me one night over a glass of wine. Thinking this over, I felt my ardor cooling. Jamie, I said, even if aristocracy was worth aspiring to, you shouldn’t confuse it with selling a lot of bags.

  Everything changed when we returned to Sand Isle and the adhesive presence of our families. Cornered by Aunt Pat, who advised me that Jamie was a good catch and I should be careful not to lose him, I started to squirm. He’s from a good family, Aunt Pat said.

  My mother started referring to Jamie as the Mole because of his birthmark. It was to be the first of her many disparaging nicknames for the boyfriends I brought home. As the years progressed, they would be called the Chinless Wonder and the Criminal, the latter being the pot dealer I dated senior year.

  Why was your mother so dismissive of your boyfriends? Dr. Anke asked. Did she cause you to break up with Jamie?

  But it wasn’t my mother who was behind my disenchantment. It was through Edward’s eyes that I began to perceive Jamie as just another young scion marching unquestioningly down his path. Edward would size up Jamie’s clothes and grooming. A country-club boy, Edward would pronounce him. A prepster. Good family or not, there was neither poet nor swamp in Jamie.

  “Don’t you ever feel like doing something different?” I asked him one night. We were sitting on the end of the yacht-club dock. We were both pretty drunk, and Jamie was talking about his future in the family business. After more than a couple of glasses of wine, I had become brittle and argumentative. “Don’t you ever want to break away?” Feeling expansive and intoxicated with the possibility that there could be more to life than the obvious path, I swept my hand across the panoramic view of twinkling mooring lights.

  Jamie pushed a yellow lock from his eyes, lit a Marlboro, passed it to me. Where Dana had failed in teaching me how to smoke, Jamie had succeeded. It would be years before I quit. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  And I, less secure in the happy providence of manifest destiny, suddenly realized that Jamie’s principal act of rebellion for his entire life would consist of the length of his hair and the earring he wore in college.

  The next night, Jamie tried to make love to me in the Aerie. My parents were playing bridge, and whatever cousins were around were locked in combat over Scrabble or backgammon. Jamie grabbed my hand, looking pleased by his own daring, and led me to the nursery on the top floor. It still had its geranium curtains, its solitary bed.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  “No. I mean…this is not the place.”

  “C’mon, Maddie. No one will find us.”

  A feeling of revulsion. I pushed him away with a newfound ferocity. How could I tell him that there were no secrets in this house, that someone would find us, that there were ghosts?

  Something evaporated in Jamie’s eyes that evening. The rapture gave way to the recognition that I wasn’t the girl he had perceived. There was a flaw. My sense of whimsy that he so admired betrayed potential instability. “God, Maddie,” he said, looking at me the way someone would a piece of coal they had mistaken for a diamond, “what is wrong with you?”

  For years to come, men would ask me this question in their own way. Even if I’d known, I couldn’t have answered. Besides, I had found something that could kill the pain. A glass of wine washed away that gritty feeling inside my head and stopped that impulse to scream. Two or three made it possible to feel lighthearted, to act like everything was fine. If I could just tamp down the boredom, the self-contempt, the despair, the loneliness, one of these relationships might work. The right amount of alcohol, and I would become the sunny, fair-haired girl my family had raised me to be.

  Our final argument was on the beach. Jamie had persisted in finding opportunities to have sex in the Aerie or on the beach, in someone’s boat, in someone’s car. “Goddamn it, Maddie,” he said, flinging a rock into the lake. “You’re fucking crazy.”

  I wanted to tell him that there was nothing wrong with me—nothing at all—but his assertion had taken root, and I couldn’t deny the possibility. I left him on the beach, tossing him away as Dana had once tossed her boyfriend’s ring—certain that the world held a plenitude of Jamies—lovely boys, but with deeper spirits, more soaring hearts. I walked back to the house on the boardwalk under a dusky sky. It was August, and except for the black-eyed Susans and baby’s breath, the garden was looking frayed. I passed Edward’s boat room, empty that summer, came up the back stairs, found Louisa in the kitchen making cookies. Sitting me down at the table, she felt my forehead. When I was tiny, Louisa would open cupboards, find me inside, and shriek. Miss Maddie, you know that drives me crazy! She had always maintained I had a dark nature. Still water, she said, runs deep.

  “Girl,” Louisa said now, studying me closely, “you look like you seen a ghost.” The taste of butter and sugar was comforting. I pressed my palms into my eyes and tried not to cry. Later, Aunt Pat would look both exasperated and pleased when she told me in front of my mother, You should have tried harder. But Louisa, seeing my face, pulled me into her chest and spoke to me in a voice she had used with Edward. “You are special, child. Special, special, special.”

  THIRTEEN

  After I broke up with Jamie, my heart took on a sharp edge like a nicked tooth. I dared anyone who got to know me to really see me—and if they did, to love what they saw. Dr. Anke’s theory is that I was trying to subvert my father’s virtue and my mother’s passivity by cleaving to the inappropriate man, but virtue comes in many forms. Jamie Hester had said I was crazy, and I was sure it was true. I had seen that glimmer of trepidation in my mother’s eyes when she looked at me, and had done nothing to dispel her doubts. With my subsequent lovers, I was chipped glass.

  In 1984, I moved to New York for film school. I seemed suited for it with my appraising eye, my urge toward reinterpretation. At NYU, I discovered how to burn my own reality onto film. I could choose my shots, control my angles, and run the credits in any order that I pleased. As Dr. Anke says, Beware the revenge of a child whose tongue has become her own.

  For the most part, I avoided the other students. I found it easier to sublimate my social needs by drinking a bottle of wine each evening while watching the news and Family Feud. Besides, the male students talked too much—mostly about themselves. They seemed to want reassurance about their precocity, but their puppyish need irritated me, and the women weren’t much better.

  And then I met Angus.

  Angus Farley had a well-developed eye for film, an almost Man Ray-esque vision for setting scene. Not so much for his films, which tended to be derivative, but for others in which he could perceive flair, talent, even genius. He shadowed me for weeks—sitting beside me in a class on film noir, pretending to run into me by accident, lingering in the classroom after we’d critiqued a three-minute sequence of my train film.

  “What do you think of Gruler’s work?” Angus asked one night after he’d tracked me down at a coffee shop in the Village.

  “Which one’s Gruler?” I said, resigned to having Angus, whose skin was as pale as my own, sit across from me. His eyebrows came together like an arrow pointing toward a thin but prominent nose. I noticed he wore a gold ring with an emblem on his pinkie, an ascot tucked into a worn, monogrammed shirt.

  “Of the ongoing Suppers?” Angus said in a vaguely English accent, offering me a Galoise. Angus’s gray-green eyes looked rheumy as if the life of a displaced aristocrat condemned him to literal jaundice.

  “Ah. That Gruler.” Of course, I knew exactly who Ian Gruler was, having watched a full semester of footage showing variations on Leonardo’s Last Supper ranging from a child’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese to a society dinner at “21.” Ian was one of the few students I’d looked at twice. He had a Midwestern twang and was converting to Judaism with unconvincing piety. “I think he’s brilliant,” I said to Angus. “Why?”

  Angus leaned in conspiratorially. He had combed hi
s dark hair straight back and slicked it down. In spite of myself, I leaned in, too. The smoke from our Galoises merged. “They say he’s Brando’s son.”

  “As in Marlon?”

  Angus nodded with eager satisfaction. “His mother was a junkie. He hates women.”

  I replied that as far as I could tell from the footage we’d watched all semester, everyone in the class hated women—especially the women.

  “Yeah,” said Angus, blinking rapidly, “but we’re not all Brando’s kid.” From the look on his face, I could tell he found this disappointing, as if being the progeny of someone famous would be the ultimate wild card, transcending the need for talent and work. “In my country, Brando was a god.”

  “And what country was that, Angus?” I said, knowing there was little hope in stopping him from telling me what I’d already overheard him telling everyone else.

  “Rhodesia.”

  “You mean Zimbabwe?”

  “I mean Rhodesia. Before they took the farm away.”

  Thus the accent. Again, I took in the ascot, the ring, the family crest. Angus Farley, son of Rhodesian farmers, raised to herd cattle, and educated in a British boarding school. His father had died. His mother had brought him to the States. His early promise led him to art school, then NYU.

  “And here I sit before you,” he said. “Hapless, landless, and at your mercy.”

  It took me more than a year to fully comprehend the truth of this, and by then it was too late. I was living in a loft on the East Village near Tompkins Square—enough of a hovel to be romantic, but saved from dreariness by huge, divided-light windows and a view of the Williamsburg Bridge. I scuttled to classes and screenings, and back to my own little world, where I hid out—reading, smoking, drinking alone. How Angus found me was a matter of connecting the dots. A sizable rent, no roommate, and no apparent means of support. Had I had my wits about me, I might have seen him coming, but at twenty-six, I was more or less an unenlightened inebriate, and thus a sitting duck for Angus.