by Jean Stone
He did not try to deny it; goddammit, he did not even try. “No, I’m sure it’s not.” A hint of sarcasm heavily layered in Yankee pride crept into her voice. For once, she was glad of her Yankee pride, which helped her maintain that stiff upper lip and kept her from dissolving into sniveling girl-tears.
He stepped toward her, then stopped. He turned his face away.
“Ruiz,” she said quietly. “Just go. I am humiliated enough.”
He shuffled one foot. “What about … French Country?”
“I’ll manage.”
He did not respond.
A sick feeling rolled inside her. “What?” she asked. “Do you expect severance pay?”
He did not respond again, which she took for a yes. She wondered why she’d been so stupid that she hadn’t listened to Claire long ago. “Consider the Mercedes your severance pay. And if you try and make trouble, I will go to the immigration authorities. I will reveal your little scheme.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t forget you invested in it. I could say it was all your idea.”
“Just leave, Ruiz. Please.” She was too tired to argue, too stung to spit in his face, although she knew she’d regret not having that satisfaction.
“You don’t believe that I love you,” he said quickly, and it caught her off guard, until she realized he was simply changing his approach.
“No,” she replied. “Not for a nanosecond.”
“You think I’m a man who uses women.”
“Worse,” she said. “I think you’re an asshole.”
They stood, staring at one another, her final words hanging heavily in the air. From outside the swollen surf crashed on the beach; a rumble of distant thunder passed by. Hurricane season, BeBe thought, when anything can happen. He stood staring at her, then jangled the keys. All that was missing was the ticking of a clock.
Then, instead of a clock, the telephone rang.
She pointed to the door.
The phone rang again.
He continued to stare for a moment, then marched angrily past her as if he were the jilted lover who had done no wrong.
She stood shaking for a moment after the door slammed shut behind him. Then she slowly moved to the phone and picked up the receiver, her hand trembling, her voice ready to break.
“Aunt BeBe?” came the voice on the other end. “It’s me. Mags. Did you call?”
BeBe made herself another drink, glad she had a cordless phone so she could stand at the window and watch Ruiz pick through his belongings on the beach while she half listened to her niece. Mags busily related an ordeal at the Alamo, trials with Aunt Evelyn and with life in general as BeBe wondered how she was going to put her life back together and how quickly she could get another designer.
“So we’re coming to south Florida next,” Mags jabbered with her twenty-year-old enthusiasm. “Please, please come, Aunt BeBe. Please come and see us at the hotel.”
It started to rain, with the big raindrops so common in Florida, so common in hurricane season. “I’m not sure Evelyn would want me interfering with the campaign.” Bebe turned from the window as Ruiz scurried toward the car, his arms overstuffed with trinkets, gifts he had given her, bought with her money, gifts he could now give to his wife.
“Interfering? Don’t be silly, Aunt BeBe. You’re family, you won’t be interfering.”
She wondered if Mags would feel the same way if she knew how many men around the globe BeBe had slept with, had even once slept with the candidate himself, back in the good old days, though only two people knew about that, and maybe only one of them remembered or had chosen to remember. She swirled the warm brandy around in her mouth and let Mags ramble on.
“Anyway,” Mags continued, “I need you. You can’t believe what a pain it is out here without Mom.”
BeBe set down her glass. “Your mother isn’t there?”
“No. She’s on the Vineyard. With Danny.”
BeBe frowned. She wanted to ask what the hell Liz was doing there, but decided it might not be an appropriate question for Liz’s daughter. Not that that had ever stopped her before. But right now, other things seemed more important, like hearing the slam of a car door. She forced her thoughts back to Mags. “Well,” she said, “I’m sure your mother appreciates it that you’re filling in for her.”
“Me? Hardly, Aunt BeBe. Aunt Evelyn is in charge—and if you don’t believe it, just ask her. She orders Uncle Roger around like he’s some kind of imbecile and she treats Greg and me like we’re ten. ‘Over here, kids.’ ‘Change your shirt, Greg.’ ‘Put on new lipstick, Margaret.’ Yikes. She’s driving me crazy.”
BeBe closed her eyes, trying to focus on what Mags was saying. There was something slightly amusing about the predictability of Evelyn’s asshole-ity, but she hated that Mags was now the brunt of it. And, distracted or not, BeBe also hated that Liz was not there. Her sister—the stable one, the lucky one—must be taking Father’s death harder than BeBe had expected. She opened her eyes. “Have you talked to your mother?”
“Yes. She sounds weird. And Danny doesn’t have a clue when she’s planning to come back to the campaign.”
“A presidential campaign is hardly the place to work through grief, Mags.”
Mags sighed. “I know, Aunt BeBe. But it really sucks without her here. I hate all this smiling without her. Did you know that after every public appearance, when Dad isn’t around, Mom makes up stories about the people who were there? She’s got all us kids doing it now. It’s so funny. She makes us laugh so hard.”
BeBe laughed. It was not surprising that Liz would make up stories—it was such a “mom” thing to do, something that BeBe, the non-mom, would probably never have thought of. A car door slammed again; Ruiz must have loaded more things inside. She sucked in her cheeks. “What kind of stories?” she asked.
“Well, it started when we were little. The first time Dad ran for governor. We had to sit through this really long, really nasty rally. Mom leaned over and told us to think about the fat man with the bulging eyes. She said later she’d tell us a story about him and his rabbit.”
BeBe smiled and sipped her brandy again. This was the playful side of Liz that she had not seen for years, the side that she would have thought was buried long ago beneath Father’s saddle of decorum. “What about the fat man?” Without realizing it, she had strolled back to the window. The beach was nearly cleared now of all his belongings. He was poking through the remnants, his shirt soaked through, sticking to his back, his broad, tightly packed back.
Mags laughed. “I don’t remember. But I do know that she took our minds off the boring stuff and got us focused on the guy. When we talked about it later, we all pitched in with our own ideas. Ever since then it’s how we get through that stuff … knowing that after we’ll make up stories about people and have some laughs about it.” She paused, then giggled. “I suppose it wouldn’t help Daddy’s standing in the polls if the world knew what we do. But it helps us survive.”
And survival, BeBe knew, was what life was about. She turned back from the window, wondering if Liz had developed the game after years of having to be the perfect daughter, of having to look perfect in the spotlight. She wondered if it was a game that Father had taught Liz. Then BeBe felt a sting of jealousy—that too-familiar, Father-likes-you-better sting she’d not let herself feel in years. Quickly, she changed the subject. “I suppose Evelyn has no sense of humor,” she said.
“Yeah, well, that’s putting it mildly. Would you talk to Mom, Aunt BeBe? I know she’s upset about Gramps and everything, but …”
“I’ll call her tonight. I promise.”
“And will you come to the fund-raising dinner? It’s at The Breakers. You know where that is, don’t you? A thousand dollars a plate, but I can get you in free.”
“A thousand dollars a plate? I didn’t realize chicken was so expensive these days.”
“Uncle Roger says the campaign has to raise a hundred thousand a day just to break even.”
“I’ll be th
ere, honey,” she replied. “And don’t worry, I know how to get there.” She did not add that she knew most of the bars in this town, because at one time or another, she’d picked up a man or two there.
She hung up the receiver and listened as the Mercedes roared to life, idled a moment, then squealed its tires and tore down the road.
Chapter 19
He was glad he had seen her naked. Danny closed his eyes and pictured Anna standing before him, lovely Anna the Swiss physical therapist. She had tried to restore his sex drive, which, according to the neurologists, had a forty percent chance of returning someday, but not that day … and it did not appear as if it would be this day, either. Danny looked down at the limp penis in his hand and wondered what demented spirit inside him even made him want to still try, made him want to take the hunk of dead flesh in his hand and pretend it would rise to the occasion, would become the angry, purple, pulsating beast that had thrilled more than one girl (well, only three in total, if the truth be known).
There had been Jodie, the fourteen-year-old who had more hormones raging than Danny, which was pretty unusual considering he was fifteen and thought of little else. Jodie went to Cambridge Academy, just across the Charles River from Harkness Prep. And Danny’s mother would have killed him if she’d known that the son of the governor was banging a fourteen-year-old on the banks of the river every chance he got, which was pretty much daily, sometimes twice a day depending on their class schedules. It had lasted just a little more than four months, when Jodie’s parents got a divorce and she was sent home to the West Coast to live with her mother fulltime. Danny spent the rest of that year incredibly horny, missing their frenetic, amateur lovemaking and his daily sprints across the bridge. It was because of Jodie, however, that he’d developed a love of crew, having watched the long, flat boats skim through the water for Harvard or BU or BC. If he’d stuck to crew and forgotten about football, he wouldn’t be in the wheelchair now. Jodie, however, would probably have gotten pregnant because they didn’t always use protection, because there wasn’t always time to buy contraceptives, and Jodie said her mother would freak if she went on the pill.
After Jodie, he spent the better part of two years either going into or just coming out of the blissful, yet lonely, state of masturbation, the Commonwealth of Masturbation, the boys at Harkness Prep called it, because they, after all, were the crème de la crème of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and were relegated (for the most part) to shooting their sperm into wads of tissue or into a warm bath, where the little buggers trailed through the water like long, white streamers of egg drop soup.
Then there had been LeeAnn, the tanned, long-legged island girl, whom Danny had known along with her brother, Reggie, during Vineyard summers practically all of his life. They’d been friends—summertime pals—until Danny started college and he chartered their catamaran to Cuttyhunk Island for a day. A dozen guys from Danny’s environmental biology class had gone down to the Vineyard under the guise of studying the remains of Penikese Island—the neighbor of Cuttyhunk that had once housed the state’s, or rather, the commonwealth’s, infamous leper colony. In reality, the excursion resulted in more beer drinking than remains studying. When Danny returned to the boat the following day to clean up the mess, he’d run into LeeAnn and somehow they’d wound up in bed, or rather, in bunk, since they’d made love on the boat, safely tucked inside one of the pontoons that bobbed up and down with the rhythm of the waves and the rise and fall of their bodies.
For years they’d been friends and suddenly they were lovers.
LeeAnn was a perfect physical match for Danny; unfortunately, she was four years older and an islander. At the end of that summer, it had actually been Aunt BeBe who’d convinced him it was a match that was best left to memory. She said she’d “been there and done that” and that islanders and mainlanders simply did not mix for long. Danny was not sure if he and LeeAnn split up because they decided it would not work, or because Aunt BeBe’s words had startled him. She had not elaborated. LeeAnn must have known, too, for though they had gone their separate ways, they’d returned to being friends. She and Reggie had even come to see him in the hospital in Boston right after the accident. Right after his world had fallen apart.
So there had been Jodie and there had been LeeAnn and the third, whom he guessed he shouldn’t even count, was Anna. Anna with whom he had never consummated anything beyond manually manipulated leg lifts.
He studied his penis as it sagged in his hand and mourned the fact that he was the son of a famous man and therefore had been unable to be as sexually frivolous as most of his friends, or at least that was how Danny had perceived the responsibility to the Adams name back when he had a choice.
Now he wished to hell he had screwed everything in a skirt, long or short.
“Danny?” His mother’s voice made him jump. Quickly, Danny tried to pull up the comforter. But he could not grasp it with his leg: it clumsily slid to the floor. He sat there, genitally naked for all the world—and worse, his mother—to see.
She moved forward, then stopped. He sensed her eyes fall to his lap. “Oh,” she said. “Well. I … ah.… later. I’ll come back …”
He squeezed his eyes shut. His chest grew heavy, the ache of a thousand humiliations not greater than this. “Yes, Mom,” he replied, dropping his hands to his lap.
But his mother didn’t leave. She cleared her throat. “Danny,” she said, “it’s okay.”
The shades of his face must have shot up the scale from flesh tone to pink to beet red. Beneath his fingers he could feel the puttylike remnants and knew he was not—would never be—one of the forty percent, able to be a loving human being. “Please, Mom,” he said. “This is embarrassing.”
She nodded and, thank God, did not let her eyes drop to his lap again. She began to say something else, then stopped, and quietly backed out of his room.
When the door closed behind her, Danny put his hands to his face. “Fuck,” he mumbled into them.
She felt as if she were going to be sick. Sick for Danny, that he would live an empty, childless life, without intimacy, without loving or letting himself be loved. She felt sick for Danny, her firstborn. And she felt sick for herself, that she had walked in on his private moment, that she had witnessed his failure and that he knew it.
Liz curled her feet underneath her on the swing on the back porch and sunk her teeth into her fist. Life, it seemed, was dealing one blow after another. Until now, she had been able to handle things. Or maybe reality was that, until now, she had kept herself so busy she had not noticed the pain, not let herself stop and feel the hurt. She had leapt from one campaign stop to another, one charity breakfast to one political luncheon to one fund-raising dinner to one whatever—anything to keep the dream in focus and the goal within reach. The trouble was, her own feelings had not played into the Day-Timer. There were meetings and “To Do’s” all over the place, but no time for feelings, no time to … cry.
She wondered how often Danny cried. Did he weep every night before he went to sleep? Did he cry when he was alone in his room, when he tried to feel some sort of pleasure but instead had none? Did he sob into his pillow when he thought of his brother and sister and how healthy and whole they were and wonder why he no longer was?
The day that it happened had been the worst. The worst nightmare of a parent, the worst day of her life.
Liz and Michael were, of course, on the road. They were in Detroit, Michigan, of all places, at a governor’s conference, it said on the news, but in actuality it was a conference to highlight Michael’s state education agenda, which was being touted as a model for a national program. In short, it was just one more inch toward the White House.
She had worn a terra-cotta silk suit, trimmed in chocolate satin, which she would remember as well as she remembered the photo after photo of Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit that Liz had seen when she was only a young girl and John Kennedy had been killed.
And though Liz was not Jackie and
Danny was hardly the president (though Will might have had plans for him, too), the suit became a symbol of pain so great she did not think she would survive.
The call had come during the after-dinner speeches. A maître d’ approached Michael and whispered something Liz could not overhear from where she was sitting across the round table, in the politically correct mix-’n’-match dinner-partner style.
Michael’s face grew as white as the linen banquet tablecloth. His eyes went to Liz. His mouth dropped open. He quickly stood up, threw his napkin on the table, spun on one heel, and left the hall in the middle of the governor of California’s speech.
Liz did not have to be told something was wrong. She was right behind her husband, as if knowing that something tragic had happened. She did not want to believe it had happened to one of the children.
On the plane, he held her close. “I’ll be okay, honey,” Michael kept reassuring—her or himself, she was not clear whom.
But the words that played over and over in her mind were those she had heard at the airport: “Your father is with him. He had to sign the papers for surgery. They have to release the pressure on his spine.”
Surgery.
His spine.
“He’ll need several transfusions,” Michael continued. “I wish we were there to give blood.”
Blood.
Liz had frozen then. Gone into a seemingly semiconscious state of numbness, a place of shock, as if braced for the next bit of information that would assault her. She had clenched her hands together on the lap of the terra-cotta suit and tried to make it all the way to Boston without thinking or flinching or breathing.
“Oh, God,” she moaned now, through her teeth, into her fist.
“Mrs. Barton?” a voice asked.
She blinked. The voice belonged to Keith, the Secret Service agent. She realized she had moaned. “It’s all right,” she said, standing up. “I’m fine.” She smoothed the front of her shirt, thinking that she was glad she had thrown the terra-cotta suit in the trash.