DEDICATION
FOR MY TEACHERS AND MY STUDENTS
EPIGRAPH
“[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
—JIM HENSON, It’s Not Easy Being Green
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
—KURT VONNEGUT JR., Mother Night
The Card
Portia Kane, Official Member of the Human Race! This card entitles you to ugliness and beauty, heartache and joy—the great highs and lows of existence—and everything in between. It also guarantees you the right to strive, to reach, to dream, and to become the person you know (deep down) you are meant to be. So make daring choices, work hard, enjoy the ride, and remember—you become exactly whomever you choose to be.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
The card
Part One: Portia Kane
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: Nate Vernon
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Three: Sister Maeve Smith
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Four: Chuck Bass
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue: Portia Kane
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Matthew Quick
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
PORTIA KANE
CHAPTER 1
I’m kneeling in one of my own bedroom closets—peering E.T.-like through the white door slats—when the following epiphany hits me harder than a lawn dart to the eye: I am a disgraceful woman.
Gloria Steinem would call me whatever’s the feminist equivalent of an Uncle Tom.
An Aunt Jemima?
Why does that sound like such an awfully racist statement? It’s a mixed metaphor of some sort, certainly. But is it racist?
I’m so depressed and angry that I can’t even figure out why it might be racist, let alone think up a politically correct metaphor for being an atrocious feminist.
I once read that Gloria Steinem had worked as a Playboy Bunny in an effort to expose the sexism of the job. Regardless of her motivation she was indeed a Playboy Bunny, letting men view her as a sexual object.
Gloria probably even got off on it, if only secretly.
I mean, politics aside, we all want to be desired—even lusted after—deep down, if we’re being honest.
And maybe if Gloria Steinem let men ogle her and pinch her ass before she rose up to be the spokesperson for an entire gender, well then, maybe, just maybe, that means I too can transcend hiding in my own closet—literally—and once again become a respectable woman who young, intelligent girls will look up to and maybe even choose to emulate.
What was that old saying?
The truth will set you free.
But first it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem said that, I’m pretty sure.
I remember reading all about Ms. Steinem in my Gender and Prejudice college course, back when I was a good—albeit untested—feminist.
Being a feminist is so easy when you’re a college freshman with enough scholarship money and financial aid to cover tuition, room, and board. A woman with a clean slate. Compromises come with age.
Someone’s going to quote me someday, when I’m once again saying intelligent empowering things, like I used to a long, long time ago in a size-four body.
“That’s right, Portia Kane,” I say to myself in the closet, with a Louis Vuitton stiletto heel stabbing the meat of my left ass cheek. I lean my weight—135 pounds, which isn’t all that bad for a relatively tall forty-year-old woman—into the four-inch spike like a medieval priest punishing his lust-driven flesh. “Get pissed off! Because you’re about to see the truth. Ouch!”
I ease up on the Louis Vuitton heel.
I’m really not all that tough.
But I can change.
I can be the woman I always wanted to be.
Somehow.
Right now, I don’t even think the sluttiest teens in today’s most godforsaken high schools, girls giving it up for nothing more than, say, a meal at Burger King—onion rings and a Whopper, maybe a chocolate milkshake if they’re good negotiators—not even those Burger King hoochies would sympathize with my current position, let alone look up to yours truly.
I should probably declare that I’ve been drinking.
A lot.
Hennessy Paradis Imperial.
A $2,000-plus bottle.
Ken was saving it for a special occasion—like maybe when he finally hits a hole in one.
His “lifelong dream.” To put a ball in a hole with one swing of a club. What ambition! Ken is a caveman. The way he polishes his clubs with a fist full of terrycloth for hours—not one stroke short of masturbatory.
Tonight is my special occasion.
It’s a real bitch of a hole-in-one, what’s about to happen, let me tell you.
Earlier in the evening, I poured myself a pint of what Ken calls his Hen over ice, and then I poured the rest into Ken’s suitcase-size “heirloom” humidor full of illegal Cuban cigars—a well-aged collection acquired over a decade through dubious olive-skinned business contacts and worth untold thousands. Then I left the humidor lid open, which is “worse than raping the pope,” according to my husband, who is ironically a practicing and self-proclaimed devout Catholic. How can a pornographer be a devout Catholic? you might be asking yourself now. But let’s get real. Every religious person you know does something on a regular basis that goes against his or her professed religion. That’s just a fact.
Okay, I spit on the cigars several times too, but refrained from urinating on them, which was the original plan.
I also added a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce with mushroom chunks, just to make sure the heirloom humidor was completely unsalvageable.
Oh, how I hate listening to Ken talk about the beautiful little white spots that appear when he has aged his “sticks” for the proper time and at the prescribed temperature and humidity.
“Look how they flare up when the cherry reaches them, baby,” Ken says, holding the filthy lit cancer log in front of his nose and squinting at it, mesmerized, like his stick is the Hope Diamond. “Tiny little comets,” he says, smiling with boyish wonder, and for nine years I’ve smiled back, pretty as a lipstick idiot, an aging Barbie doll.
Ah, trophy-wife me.
It always looks like he has a cock in his mouth when he smokes.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Women shouldn’t use words like cock, right? Well, bullshit on that, because I’m an adult, this isn’t a church here, and Ken really does suck salaciously on his cigars.
“No homo,” he likes to say whenever he hugs or compliments another man or expresses anything resembling affection or kindness, because Ken is
an unabashed homophobe.
How the hell did I end up in this place and time?
How did I end up married to a cartoon?
How did I end up so seduced by money, living in a tropical palace of marble floors, twenty-foot ceilings, cathedral archways, palm trees, crystal chandeliers, lap pool, hand-carved furniture, and high-end stainless steel appliances—all of which make my childhood dwelling look like a mud hut that barnyard animals would refuse to enter?
And yet . . .
“E.T. phone home,” I say to myself in the closet—and then I take another slurp of Hen, which Ken calls “the preferred drink of the brothers,” meaning black people.
Definitely racist.
If only I had some Reese’s Pieces.
Here in the closet, I even do the freakishly long E.T. index-finger thing, pretending my nail is glowing as orange as my Hennessy when I hold it up to the bedroom light striping the inside of the closet door.
“L . . . eeee . . . it,” I say, just like the alien whenever it talks to the little boy Elliott in the film.
I hear the front door open and the alarm beep.
Every muscle in my body stiffens.
I hear her laughing as he punches in the code—our birth dates mixed up.
My month, his year.
Her voice is childlike and makes me think of Smurfette, or maybe it’s because she calls Ken “Papa.”
Seriously, she calls him that. Papa. Like he’s Ernest Hemingway.
“Disarmed,” says the robot security system.
“Angry hysterical wife in the closet,” I whisper. “Beware.”
What I haven’t told you yet is that I have Ken’s beloved Colt .45 in my hand.
He claims you can stop a speeding truck with this gun just by firing a shot into the engine, so I’m pretty sure I can cut short the impending sexcapade.
I’ve convinced myself that I’m going to shoot them both dead.
Imagine that.
Their heads exploding like wet piñatas.
He must be feeling her up, because she’s giggling now as they climb the steps toward me.
“Is that your wife, Papa?” I hear her say, and I imagine her pointing to our portrait at the top of the stairs. Ken in a gray pinstriped Armani suit. Me in my best black Carolina Herrera cocktail dress. Both of us looking like some Tony Montana–inspired version of American Gothic. She doesn’t sound all that concerned that Papa may be married.
“She’s dead,” Ken says. “Woman’s cancer.”
He’s a pragmatic man, after all—not very creative, but effective.
And for a second I actually believe him and allow myself to feel dead.
Nonexistent.
Already gone.
Nothing.
“Sad,” muses the girl, who apparently prefers one-syllable words, except for the Papa business. “Did you love her?”
“Let’s not talk about uncomfortable things,” Ken says, and then she’s screaming and laughing again.
“You’re so strong!” she says, and I vomit a little into my mouth as I imagine him carrying her toward me.
Thresholds.
Ken often boasts that he’s never cheated on me with any of the “actresses” in his movies, as if that—if it is indeed true—is an amazing accomplishment. He’s always telling his employees, “Don’t get high on your own supply,” meaning, Don’t fuck the girls we film and sell—but it’s apparently okay to fuck the rest of the female world. That’s the type of ethics Ken subscribes to. My Catholic husband.
I wonder if she’s a hooker playing a role, because she sounds too dumb to be real.
It’s funny how the possibility of her being a prostitute somehow gives me pause and definitely makes it harder to shoot her in the face, maybe because a whore would only be doing what Ken paid her to do, i.e., her job. But if I kill him, I’m going to have to kill her, as I don’t want any witnesses, and the only way I’d get a lenient sentence is if the judge is a woman who believes the murders were a crime of passion. No woman controlled by passion and with a huge gun in her hand could resist taking a pop at the girl screwing her husband.
I put two hands on the Colt .45, readying myself, preparing to burst into the room, firing away like a Quentin Tarantino character.
I try to channel my inner Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis—my inner Lynda Carter even.
Be pissed!
Take control!
Be a true feminist!
Through the slats in the closet, I see that Ken’s latest is, of course, tiny, blond, and maybe all of twenty years of age.
If she weighs one hundred pounds, I will happily eat my hand.
A size zero.
A college student who probably cannot even drink legally.
A child.
Ken is forty-six years old, but looks younger.
He’s a bit like Tom Selleck circa 1983, with his throwback moustache and his chest hair, which has suddenly made an appearance.
His tie and jacket are on the floor.
She’s got his shirt unbuttoned.
Off goes her dress—over her head.
Her pink bra and cotton panties make her look even younger.
They’re sort of dancing now, looking into each other’s eyes, swaying their hips almost like the slow part of “Stairway to Heaven” is playing and they can’t wait for the fast part.
(Ah, junior high dances, your memory haunts me even at a time like this.)
She’s sucking on her bottom lip like it’s made out of hard candy.
I tell myself to wait until he does the deed, so I have undeniable proof. I will pop out of the closet like a neglected-wife-in-the-box wielding Ken’s very own hand cannon as soon as he sticks his stubby little wang into her.
It doesn’t take long for them to slip into bed, and even though they are under the covers—my Calvin Klein Acacia duvet—I can tell he has officially committed adultery because he’s doing that little annoying there-is-a-bug-in-my-throat cough thing he does just before he is about to ejaculate.
It’s only taken about ninety seconds.
And yet I don’t spring out of the closet but just watch the blue comforter rise and fall with the final dying thrusts of Ken’s infidelity—his covered ass like an air-starved whale resurfacing spastically every other second—and all I can think about is how his girl du jour looks like the actress who plays Khaleesi on Game of Thrones.
Well, I’ll never be able to watch that show again.
Ken climaxes and then coughs some more. I don’t think Khaleesi got off, and since Ken is now on his back, panting, I don’t think she will.
Somewhere, Gloria Steinem is shaking her head—appalled. Angela Davis has revoked my woman card. Lynda Carter wants to confiscate all of my cuff bracelets and star-adorned blue panties before hanging me with her Wonder Woman lasso.
Thirty minutes ago, I was thoroughly prepared for life in jail.
It seemed heroic, even.
But if you were really going to kill Ken, why ruin the humidor and cigars?
Ah, smart reader, you know me better than I know myself.
And now it all seems like a practical joke.
My collected experiences thus far have no weight and are of no consequence whatsoever.
I start laughing and I cannot stop.
I’m powerless against the comedy of my life.
My mind flashes to the first time I met Ken, across the state in Miami. I was wearing a red sundress, a Coppertone tan, and my old knock-off Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, sitting on a veranda at a Cuban restaurant with a waitressing friend, basking in the unearned royalty of our already fading but still technically passable youth. We were eating the best black bean dip and still-warm-from-the-fryer plantains—amazing the details I recall under duress—and Ken walked right up to us and offere
d Carissa $500 for her seat.
“Will you trade places with me?” is how he put it.
Carissa and I both laughed until he fanned the money out on the table—crisp, never-been-folded hundreds that he pulled from the inside pocket of his jacket, like some Colombian drug lord.
He was dressed in a white suit and was carrying a ridiculous cane with an ivory handle, which should have been my first clue.
I mean—a cane, in 2002?
But he was knee-weakeningly handsome.
That’s how he does it.
Earnest eyes.
Confidence.
Money.
A fuck-all fashion sense, gaudy and entitled enough for a plantation owner of old.
When I gave Carissa a kick under the table, she scooped up the five hundred-dollar bills, tapped them even, and said she’d meet me at the terrible tiny, smoky cockroach-infested hotel room we had booked for a week. Then Ken sat down and said, “I’m going to marry you.”
“Are you now?” I said, oblivious to my doom.
Flattered even.
Ten years later I’m drunk in my own closet watching him fuck a teenager and I’m laughing my head off, because what is the alternative?
They call this life.
Beware, young women who may be reading.
It happens in a flash.
One day you’re a young cub roaming the forest free, without a care in the world—and then bam! Your hind leg’s bleeding in a bear trap, and before you know it, your claws and teeth have been removed, they’ve got you addicted to drugs, and you’re performing tricks in a Russian circus, being whipped by your trainer—who is always a man—as cotton-candy-sticky children point and jeer.
Again, I’ve been drinking.
“What the hell?” Ken says as he rips opens the closet. “Whoa.” He takes a step back with his palms in the air, his eyes on the mouth of his beloved Colt, which is unsteadily aimed at the sticky, mauve, spade-shaped head of his now-deflated penis.
Before an accident can occur, I toss the impossibly heavy gun into the corner of the closet.
Jail time for this joke of a man?
I think not.
“I’d never be able to hit such a small target anyway, Ken,” I say and then giggle my drunk ass off.