“Why did you stop?”
“It stopped making me feel good.” Z didn’t feel like having this conversation with an eleven-year-old. He wanted to start his run.
But Leila had sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled up her pant leg to readjust her prosthetic shin and foot. The scars on her stump looked red and angry. “How’d it make you feel?” She took a small bottle of baby powder out of her pocket and dusted her stump.
“Sick.”
“If it made you feel sick, why didn’t you stop sooner?”
It was the obvious question, the one neither Lucy nor the psychiatrist she took him to see once a week at the outpatient drug clinic in Summit had thought to ask. As long as his blood test showed no sign of the demon, they thought he was making progress. Even if they had asked him, he would have lied. Leila’s stump merited the truth. “The truth is, I didn’t realize how sick I was until I got a postcard from an old friend.”
“What was on the postcard?”
“ ‘I am worried about you.’ ” Z had stopped at his ex-agent’s office to pick up a residual check. The postcard was a tourist shot of a man and a boy in the surf. “Welcome to the Jersey Shore” was printed on it.
“That’s all it said?”
“It resonated. You know what that means?”
“Hits a note inside you that means something.” Leila was a smart girl. “Who sent it to you?”
“The man who taught me how to swim.” The postcard was signed “CG.” If Casper was worried about him, he knew he was in trouble.
Instead of taking a cab to cop in Los Feliz, Z cashed the check, hopped a bus to LAX, and called Lucy. He made no mention of the postcard, just said he needed to come home to get well.
“Did you thank your friend?”
“Not yet.” He didn’t know where Casper had gotten the postcard. It was postmarked about a week after a picture of Z getting busted had appeared in the tabloids, and was addressed care of the William Morris agency. He guessed Casper had gotten a guard to mail it. Z had written a letter to him, care of the Needmore Mental Hospital.
A few days ago, he had received a letter from the mental hospital informing him that patients committed by the court cannot receive correspondence from nonfamily members without written approval by their legal guardian or their physician. The letter he had written to Casper was returned unopened.
His niece had her leg back on now. “I’m ready, are you?”
Leila mounted her bicycle and started to pedal, pant leg rolled down, sneaker on her plastic foot. She worked the bike effortlessly. Z began to run after her. If you saw them, you would have thought them both whole.
He followed his niece down a bridle path and across a pasture. She deftly guided the knobby tires of her pink mountain bike over ruts and through puddles. Out of breath already, Z felt his fat shake and regretted having a Kit Kat and a smoke for breakfast. Pedaling standing up, absorbing the bumps with her knees, Leila built up speed as she turned up the hill. Z bellowed after her, “It’s too steep for me! Let’s stay on the flat and circle back by the house.”
“You don’t want to go there.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll see you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Aunt Fiona, Uncle Mike, Willy, Grandma . . . they’re all coming to our house this morning to talk about Grandpa’s birthday party.” His father was months away from turning seventy-five. Lucy had told him that the old man had not only made it clear he didn’t want a party, but had threatened to check into a hotel the morning of his birthday if he heard a celebration was being planned. Friedrich wasn’t always wrong when he said they didn’t listen.
“I’m not ready for that.”
“That’s what Mom and I figured.” And so Z pushed his body and began his slow assault on the hill. After all these years, he was still running after his character. When he got to the top, he held his hands up over his head in victory, and vomited.
Fiona and Lucy had been politely bickering back and forth for weeks about whether the big birthday bash they refused to believe their father did not want should be held at Fiona’s apartment in New York or Lucy’s place in the country. Fiona had argued that because she and Michael lived in the city, as did a great many of their father’s friends, it would be easier for the city people to stay late if the party were at her home on Central Park West. Lucy countered that most of their father’s drug company friends lived in New Jersey and were old and might not come if they had to go to the expense and inconvenience of booking hotel rooms in New York.
Both sisters thought, but didn’t say, If it’s at your house, you’ll get all the credit. And though, like a pair of tag-team wrestlers, they never missed an opportunity to browbeat their father with the gone but not forgotten slights, unfairnesses, and disappointments inflicted by Daddy on their childhoods, each was determined to use the occasion of his seventy-fifth to convince herself, if not Daddy, that she loved him best and therefore was entitled to feel most shortchanged of his love.
Lucy, being so much richer than her big sister, could afford to be more passively aggressive in her competition. “My house has tons of extra bedrooms. You and Michael and your kids and everybody from New York can stay over with me. I’ll get rooms for anybody who wants at the Ryland Inn.”
Fiona thought, but didn’t say, I want to show off my apartment. It was sleek and white and modern and had recently been featured in New York magazine. Michael and I had to work our asses off to get eight rooms with a view of the park. We didn’t get left seventeen million pounds. Michael had left entertainment law and was now one of the three producers of the eleventh highest rated TV show in America.
Fiona tried to put her sister in her place with a casual blow. “Lucy, it doesn’t matter to me, but we’ll get a more interesting crowd if we do it at our place in the city. You know how Dad likes talking to people who are doing things out in the world.”
Which made Lucy rise to the bait with her trump card. “We could let Mom decide, but if we have it here, I’ll pay for the whole thing.”
Fiona was furious when her husband called Lucy to say, “I think it’s a great idea to have the party out at your farm.” Lucy’s “farm” was in fact a faux Georgian manor house with formal gardens. “I’ll talk your sister into it, but I wouldn’t feel right you paying the whole thing. At least let me get the band.” Fiona was rich, but not as rich as Lucy; that was one of the crosses she had to bear. The other was the fact that Michael’s gap-toothed blond assistant, Ben, was her husband’s lover. Willy dubbed him “Ben the Bottom.”
What infuriated Fiona more than Ben was that Michael wouldn’t just get a band, he’d get somebody semifamous to play, somebody that would have cost Michael ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but because he was a hot producer, he’d get them to play for free, only Michael would make it seem to Lucy and her parents like he’d paid out-of-pocket. And most infuriating of all, she’d corroborate the deception. For Fiona, at the age of forty-eight, was still standing on tiptoes trying to cast a shadow that made her seem bigger than she felt.
As Z crested the hill, Fiona and Michael were trying to make up for lost time in the fast lane of Route 78. He still drove a BMW, only now it was a 7 Series. He was doing eighty, and the radar detector was on. Black car, black interior, black clothes. Life was shades of gray, but they, like most New Yorkers, dressed like every day was a casually chic funeral.
Michael was on the car phone to the assistant/lover for most of the ride out to the country. Fiona had not had sex with Michael since the Carter presidency. She wore her Walkman. Having forgotten her cassettes, she just pretended to be enjoying the music. She knew Ben the Bottom was not her husband’s only “friend.”
They hadn’t argued about Michael’s homosexuality (he was bisexual only regarding her) since that afternoon six months into their marriage when she had walked in on him and the interior designer he had encouraged her to hire to make his apartment feel more like it was hers. He
said all there was to say when he told her, “Nobody wants to eat the same thing every night for dinner if they’re not in prison.”
The couples therapist they had gone to said that there were no rules about marriage as long as both partners are in agreement. Fiona’s self-esteem improved after she started having an affair with the star of Michael’s TV show.
Fiona was like the boiler in their co-op. Once a year, she’d boil over and break down and demand a divorce. Then they’d meet with their accountant and decide it didn’t make sense to divide their assets until their twins, now teenagers, were in college. No question, Fiona was more sophisticated than either she or her father had imagined her to be.
Her siblings believed that the only reason she stayed with Michael was that she couldn’t bear to admit Daddy was right. Contrary to what people thought and how she acted, she still loved Michael, not because he was faithful or true, but because she believed him when he told her she was the only woman he ever wanted.
Lucy and Willy and their mother had been talking about the party for almost an hour by the time Michael and Fiona joined them in the dining room. Nora sat at the head of the table, her back supported by a petit point cushion that read “Life isn’t a rehearsal.”
The look of Lucy’s home was the then trendy Shabby Chic. Her money had come at the cost of such sadness, she delighted in encouraging her children to do their best to deconstruct the formality of the old Ortley mansion. Rollerblading, badminton, hockey in the ballroom were not only allowed, but encouraged. School projects were painted and glued and slopped on Aubusson carpets. Lucy wanted everybody to have fun—her way.
Lucy began to run through some of the ideas they’d been throwing around. Fiona cut her off with the expression she disliked most out of her own seventeen-year-old daughter’s mouth: “Whatever . . . it’s yours and Dad’s party anyway.”
Nora looked at her daughters. None of her children’s lives had turned out as she had expected, as she would have wanted. Willy had changed for the better, Zach for the worse. But the girls remained unaltered. Fiona, in her Prada suit, accessorized with calm and the numbness that passes for sophistication, was still trying to be more grown-up than she was. And Lucy, a blouse purchased in Kazakhstan, a sarong acquired in Madagascar, arms bangled from wrist to elbow with bracelets bought in the stalls and flea markets of the second and third worlds, was still playing dress-up, masquerading as a college student at the age of forty-seven.
“Fiona, if it’s going to make you miserable, we’ll have the party at your apartment.”
“It’s not my party, it’s Dad’s.”
Michael got up from the table. “I left something in the car.”
“You’re implying I’m giving this party for myself.”
Willy watched his mother nervously spinning her wedding ring with her thumb. “Why don’t you two grow up?”
The sisters turned their heads toward him. Lucy fired first. “I’m raising five children by myself. I think that qualifies me as more of a grown-up than you.”
Fiona joined in on the attack. “If you don’t like the way we’re doing it, Willy, why don’t you take over? You and your boyfriend can throw the party for Dad.”
“Henry and I have a one-bedroom apartment. If you want to have a party for twenty instead of two hundred of your friends who Dad couldn’t give a shit about, I’ll be happy to . . .”
“Stop it, the three of you, this instant, or there won’t be a party.” Nora rapped her knuckles on the table. The siblings grew silent and looked at their feet. It unnerved and charmed her to see her three middle-aged children swirl back to the family dynamic of 1952.
Lucy broke the ice. “Are you gonna pull the car over, Mom? Or send us to bed without our dinner?”
Willy joined in. “Remember that time I hit you in the head with the fishing rod and you locked us in the Whale?”
Nora started to laugh. “I never locked you in the car.”
Fiona liked this game more than the other one they’d been playing. “Yes, you did. They arrest mothers for doing that now.”
Michael came back into the room, opened his briefcase, took out copies of the guest list his assistant had drawn up, and started handing out CDs. “Now, about the band . . .”
Nora held up her hand for him to stop. “No band, no dancing.”
“Why?” Fiona protested.
“Your father doesn’t like to dance.”
“You mean he doesn’t know how.”
“I mean I have made up my mind there’ll be no dancing, and the party will be at our house. That way, no one will feel shortchanged.”
“Mom, no one feels shortchanged. We like to fight.”
“It will be a picnic lunch. I’ll leave the food to you all, but I’ll make the cake.”
Lucy was looking at the guest list Michael had handed out. “Why isn’t Zach’s name on the list?”
Everyone looked at Michael. “I didn’t have an address for him, and wasn’t sure you wanted him.”
“Of course we want him. He’s our brother.” Lucy was adamant.
“The last time he came to our apartment, he was so fucked up he spent half the time in the bathroom and the other half embarrassing our friends, pestering them for work.”
“He’s better.” Lucy tried to sound convinced.
Willy was curious. He had sent his younger brother a long letter volunteering to pay for rehab but had received no answer. “When did you see him?”
Lucy lied. “A few days ago.”
“Christ, why didn’t you tell us? Where is he?” Whenever Fiona felt low about her own life, the thought of Z cheered her up.
“He doesn’t want anybody to know where he is until he’s well.”
“That means he’s still getting high.”
“He isn’t. He’s been clean for fifty-seven days.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “Of course he’s going to say that, Zach’s an addict. Addicts are liars.”
“He’s not lying this time.” Lucy was on the edge of tears.
“Lucy, I love Zach, too, but the way he’s ruined himself is so pathetic and depressing, I just don’t want to inflict that on Dad on his birthday. I mean, Jesus, remember the Halloween party we had? He came dressed as Casper.” The table went silent. Fiona wasn’t finished. “Our children still have nightmares about it.”
“So does Zach, for Chrissake.” Willy stood up. “After the shit he went through as a kid, it’s no wonder he’s a drug addict.”
“We’ve all been fucked up by that.”
“If you don’t stop saying ‘fuck,’ I’m going home.” Nora’s voice quavered. Hearing Casper’s name said out loud had rattled her.
Fiona hammered the point. “I’m not a drug addict. You haven’t blown hundreds of thousands of dollars on cocaine.”
“I’ve taken it, and so have you, Fiona.” The sibling rivalry had slipped from Lucy versus Fiona to Willy versus Fiona.
“I’ve never taken cocaine in my life.”
“Liar.” Lucy, not wanting to feel left out, threw herself in on Willy’s side.
Tears were streaming down their mother’s face. Lucy handed her a napkin. “Congratulations, Fiona, you succeeded in making Mom cry.”
“Zach is making Mom cry, not me.”
Nora slowly shook her head no. “You like to think you did the best you could for your children. But you know that’s never true.”
“So does that mean you want Zach or not?”
Their mother said nothing. Pushing back her chair, she got up and hurried to the door. Fumbling with the lock, she cursed herself—“Damnation!”—then, slamming it behind her, walked out onto the lawn.
No one said anything until Michael’s cell phone rang—he excused himself to talk business in the library. Willy shot his sisters a reproachful look as he collected his mother’s purse and sweater and ran outside after her. The girls watched the wind swirl dead leaves up around their mother. One caught and crumbled in her white hair as their brother t
ried to button the sweater around her shoulders.
Fiona and Lucy couldn’t hear what was being said outside. All they knew was that their mother was shaking her head no to something. As Willy guided her toward the car, she looked older and smaller and frailer than she had when she first sat down at the head of the table an hour ago.
Fiona spoke first. “What do you think’s going to happen to Mom when Dad dies?”
Lucy answered solemnly, “You can’t kill the undead.” Their laughter reminded them that they were once and still friends. “Mom’s tougher than Dad, if that’s what you mean.”
“What I guess I mean is, what’s going to happen to us?” Fiona stared out the window.
“You mean after Dad dies or when we’re old?”
“We are old. I’m worried about where I’m going right now. Christ, I’m forty-eight, and I pick a fight so I can have Dad’s party at my apartment simply because I think you want it at your house?”
“I don’t want to give him a party either.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Whatever we do end up doing won’t be right with him. But if we don’t do anything, we’ll wake up depressed and tell ourselves we would have felt better if we had tried.”
“You know what’s the worst part of having our father for a father? You can’t even take antidepressants without thinking about him.”
“You, too?” Lucy slapped the table. The sisters howled with laughter, and then, after a quiet moment, began to weep.
Z woke up the next day hurting. The hill he had climbed to avoid seeing his family left his calves feeling flayed. Before opening his eyes he stretched out and absorbed the ache. His body felt the same way the last time he had made a run in search of character. Unable to find it at fourteen, it seemed unrealistic to think he’d have it in him to grab hold of at thirty-eight. But then again, no one had ever accused Zach of being realistic.
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