Little Children

  “Please,” he said, turning his gaze to the ceiling, in the direction of a God he considered his mother a fool for believing in. “Don’t you fucking let her die.”

  The cab driver was a senior citizen who had something wrong with his nose, these multiple lumpy growths sprouting out of it, like a flesh-colored cauliflower had taken root in the middle of his face. Ronnie felt for the guy. It couldn’t have been easy going through your golden years like that.

  “Where to?” he grunted.

  “Presbyterian Hospital. My mother’s in the ICU.” The driver didn’t respond, didn’t say Too bad, or I’m sorry, or any of the crap people usually spouted when you told them something like this, but Ronnie kept talking anyway. “She had a stroke last week. Bad one. We don’t know if she’s gonna make it.”

  He directed these remarks not so much to the driver himself as to his hack license, which was affixed by rubber bands to the flipped-down sun visor on the passenger side. WENDELL DEGRAW, it said, next to an ID photo showing the poor guy’s face in a highly unflattering profile that looked like it could have been ripped out of a medical textbook.

  Wendell himself was listening to talk radio, a familiar voice that Ronnie couldn’t quite identify, one of those professional know-it-alls with a smart-ass comeback for everything. Ronnie used to listen to a lot of that stuff before he went to prison, used to fantasize about going to broadcasting school, getting a radio show of his own. Smart Talk with Ron McGorvey. Two hours a day to speak his mind and humiliate the uninformed idiots who called in, barely able to form a grammatical sentence. Pardon my asking, Frank, but do you have shit for brains or what?

  “They had to put her on a ventilator,” he continued. “She can’t talk or anything. Just lies there all day, staring up at the ceiling.”

  Fuckface Wendell turned up the radio, as if purposely trying to drown out Ronnie’s voice. The talk-show guy was ranting about Gary Condit, how if he had a shred of decency he’d resign from Congress and tell everybody what he’d done with his girlfriend. Ronnie spoke up even louder.

  “She’s a good woman. Raised two kids all by herself, not a mean bone in her body. You couldn’t find a nicer lady.”

  The bastard didn’t even grunt. He cranked down his window, hawked up a loogie from deep in his throat, and spat it onto the pavement.

  Nice, Wendell. Real classy.

  “What about you?” Ronnie inquired, while they waited at an endless red light. “Your mother still alive?”

  Wendell whirled around in the driver’s seat. Full on, he looked even more hideous than he did in profile.

  “You think I don’t know who you are?” he demanded. “You’re lucky I don’t toss you out on your ass.”

  “Sorry,” Ronnie muttered. “I was just making conversation. You don’t have to be so goddam sensitive.”

  Wendell turned off the radio, and they rode in silence the rest of the way to the hospital. When they pulled up in front of the main entrance, Ronnie gave the guy a twenty for a fourteen-dollar fare.

  “Keep the change,” he said. “Buy yourself a new nose, okay?”

  Sarah should have known there would be a hitch. There was always a hitch. As soon as kids were involved, the simplest plan had a way of turning complicated on you. She hadn’t been home from the pool for fifteen minutes when she got the call from Richard. He made small talk about the California weather for a minute or two before abruptly shifting gears.

  “So listen,” he said. “I don’t think I’m coming home.”

  “Why? Is your flight delayed?”

  “It’s not about the flight. It’s about us.”

  He said he was going to spend the rest of his vacation in San Diego, give some thought to moving there permanently. He’d been thinking about making a change for a long time now, and had always wanted to give a California a shot.

  “We never should have gotten married.” His voice was sad when he said this, and the sadness made her remember how much she’d liked him before everything turned awful. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said suddenly. “Damn it.”

  “Are you upset? I thought you’d be relieved.”

  She was; she was more than relieved. On any other day she would have broken out the champagne and tap-danced on the kitchen table. But right then, all she could think about was her honeymoon on the beach, how the whole plan depended on his being home to take care of Lucy.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “The timing’s just a little inconvenient.”

  “There’s never a good time for something like this. But we’ve both been miserable for too long.”

  “What am I supposed to do with Lucy?” she asked, thinking out loud.

  “Please,” he told her. “Don’t worry about that. I’m going to take good care of her. Of both of you. You can keep the car and the house. All I want is a fresh start.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Fine. Whatever. We don’t need to hash this out over the phone. I guess I’ll have to hire a lawyer or something.”

  “Absolutely. Sure. That would be the smartest thing.” He hesitated. “Sarah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I came out here to meet a woman. Someone I’ve been in touch with on the Internet. I just wanted you to know.”

  She took a moment to absorb this information, wondering if she’d feel even the smallest flicker of jealousy or betrayal. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

  “Okay,” she said finally.

  “Okay?” He seemed almost hurt. “Is that all you can say?”

  Jesus, she thought. What does he want from me? Was she supposed to tell him the truth, that she felt sorry for the woman, who wouldn’t find out until it was too late that Richard was not as nice a guy as he seemed? And besides, who could tell with these things? Maybe a new woman would turn Richard into a new man.

  “You do what you have to do,” she said.

  Lucy entered the kitchen, still in her damp bathing suit, the toy stethoscope hanging around her neck, her hair sun-bleached and matted. She was watching her mother with ominous intensity, as if she’d been listening to the conversation on another line.

  “Daddy?” she inquired.

  Sarah nodded. “Your daughter’s here,” she informed Richard. “You want to say hi?”

  “Not right now,” he said. “I gotta run. Just tell her I love her, okay? I’ll be home in a couple of weeks, and we can break the news to her then. You know, do it as a family.”

  “Sure,” she murmured, her head buzzing with a swarm of conflicting emotions. Something wonderful had happened at the worst possible time. Everything was all messed up, but she was free. Richard was leaving. She could keep the house. “That’s a good idea. We’ll do it as a family.”

  “Do what?” Lucy asked, after Sarah clicked off the phone. “What we do?”

  “Nothing,” said Sarah, averting her gaze from her daughter’s watchful face. “Nothing you need to worry about, sweetheart.”

  Richard hadn’t expected her to take the news so calmly. He had no doubt that they’d reach an accommodation over time, but he’d braced himself for a lot more anger and recrimination in the short run, the kind of abuse that comes with the territory when you take a hike on your wife and kid. At least that was how it worked with his first marriage; Peggy had made him suffer for years before she found it in her heart to forgive him. But Sarah belonged to a different generation. Women her age were more independent, less freaked-out by the idea of divorce or single parenthood. She’d reacted so agreeably, in fact, that he was almost sorry that he’d offered her the house and car without running it by his lawyer. He’d just blurted it out, no strategic thinking whatsoever, the kind of impulsive, self-defeating behavior he never would have permitted himself in a business situation.

  Oh well, he thought, no sense getting all stressed out about it. He closed his cell phone and took a moment to savor the mellow touch of the Southern California sunshine on his skin, so much less antagonistic than the midday
glare back home. It was a cliché, but it struck him with the force of transcendent truth: Things are easier out here. His lungs expanded as he drew in a deep breath of eucalyptus-tinged air. An exhilarating sense of lightness spread through his body, as if he’d just stepped out of a lead-lined suit. Maybe this is what life feels like for happy people, he thought, the obstacles falling down in front of you before you even get close enough to give them a push.

  It was weird, but Ronnie actually liked going to the hospital. People were friendly there. They smiled at him in the elevators and corridors, and treated him as if he had as much right to be there as they did, an attitude he didn’t often encounter in public places.

  He understood that they weren’t smiling because of the warm feelings they harbored in their hearts for Ronald James McGorvey, Registered Sex Offender. They were smiling because his right arm was encased in a fiberglass cast, suspended in a cloth sling. That was all they saw when they looked at him—a man with a broken bone, a medical problem that was obvious and eminently fixable. He wasn’t one of those mystery patients who looked fine on the outside but must have had some terrible disease gnawing at their innards. In the hospital, those were the scary ones, the ones who made you wonder what kind of time bomb was ticking away in your own apparently healthy body. Ronnie was dreading the day when the cast came off his arm, when he’d no longer have that one small claim on people’s sympathy. He was thinking about doing a little research, finding out if he couldn’t get some sort of fake cast he could wear to the supermarket or public library, maybe even a waterproof one for the Town Pool. If not, maybe he could just get that asshole to throw him down the steps again.

  He walked more and more slowly as he approached the ICU, as if his legs were filling gradually with cement. The waiting room seemed quieter than usual; the extended Puerto Rican family who’d been camping out around the TV for the past week had disappeared. They’d been taking turns visiting this comatose guy in his midtwenties—supposedly he’d fallen off a scaffold at a construction site—standing around his bed in pairs and weeping so melodramatically Ronnie couldn’t help shooting them dirty looks when they started to get on his nerves. He sat down in an armchair and watched a couple of minutes of CNN, wondering if the Puerto Ricans had relocated their moaning and hair-tearing to a private room or a funeral home, then got up and announced himself over the intercom. One of the nurses told him to come in.

  You’d think a moment like that would be unbearable, but it wasn’t as hard as he expected. You just do that thing, that thing where you kind of shut off your mind for a little while. You see what’s in front of you—your sister and her husband, the priest in black, the doctor in his white coat, Bertha, the nice Jamaican nurse, every last one of them ringing your dead mother’s bed, shaking their heads in unison, as if you’ve asked a question, when really you’re just standing there taking it all in with a blank expression, not feeling a thing.

  Richard had to fight off a persistent sense of unreality as he and Carla made small talk while looking over their menus. It hardly seemed possible that this was actually happening, that he was having lunch with the woman who had presided over his fantasy life for more than a year, a woman whose thong he’d been carrying around in his briefcase for most of the summer. And yet here she was, sitting right across from him, cursing softly to herself as she tried to wipe a salsa stain off her silk blouse with a damp napkin.

  “I’m such a slob,” she said. “I should wear one of those yellow rain slickers when I eat in public.”

  “I’m the same way,” said Richard. “I find these spots on my ties sometimes, I don’t have a goddam clue how they got there.”

  She gave up and tossed the napkin on the table.

  “My dry cleaner’s gonna yell at me. He’s this old Chinese guy, always giving me a hard time when I bring him something with a stain on it. Why you do that? You not careful! Why you so messy? He’s worse than my mother.”

  Richard felt a foolish smile spreading across his face.

  “What?” she said, a bit defensively. “I got something in my teeth?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you how weird this is for me. Like I’m out with the queen of England.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of the queen. I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment.”

  “You’re a lot prettier,” he assured her.

  “I know, I know,” she said, as if she’d had this conversation a hundred times, “but she gives better head.”

  Richard let out a guffaw that drew the attention of his fellow diners.

  “You’re too much,” he told her.

  Carla shrugged, her open hands held at shoulder level as if to say, I can’t help myself. But then her face turned serious, as if she’d suddenly remembered why they were here.

  “So you have a business proposition for me?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a proposition at this point,” he said. “I just want to brainstorm a little. About the mail-order panties.”

  “Oh, wait,” she said. “Hold that thought. Before I forget.”

  Carla lifted a bulky tote bag onto the table, dirty white canvas with a blue PBS logo on the side. The sight of it surprised him.

  “You give money to public television?”

  She shook her head, an expression of distaste flickering across her face.

  “It’s a freebie. My ex-husband used to work at the station. I must have a dozen of these things.”

  “Your first husband?”

  “My only.”

  “But the web site says you’re married.”

  “It’s easier that way. Keeps some of the weirdos away.” Carla smiled sadly. “Dave tried to be supportive when I started the business, but it got to him after a while. He didn’t want to share me.”

  Richard nodded thoughtfully.

  “You’d have to be a pretty evolved human being,” he said.

  Carla seemed pleased by this insight. She withdrew a pale yellow folder from her bag and passed it across the table.

  “This is for you. A little memento.”

  The folder was made of stiff, high-quality paper. On the front cover, a decent amateur calligrapher had printed the words, Beachfest 2001: “Thanks” for the Memories. Richard opened it to find a five-by-seven print of the team picture taken on Saturday afternoon, along with the inscription, To Richard, One of my biggest fans. With love and kisses, Carla (aka., “Slutty Kay”).

  In the picture, everyone was naked, but Richard thought that was a bit misleading. For most of the day, the Beachfest was just innocent fun, no more scandalous than your average company picnic. Carla and her seven fans wore bathing suits and T-shirts as they whiled away the afternoon drinking beer, playing beach volleyball, tossing a Frisbee, and even engaging in a hilarious round of three-legged races. Richard took some time to get acquainted with his colleagues, most of whom he recognized from photos on the web site. Aside from himself, the only newbie was Claude, a French-Canadian schoolteacher with a thick accent and a scar from open-heart surgery running down the center of his chest.

  “They’re a nice bunch of guys,” Richard commented.

  “I know,” said Carla. “I feel really lucky to know them.”

  The other part of the festivities didn’t begin until much later in the day, after Walter fired up the grill for the evening barbecue. Carla went for a quick dip in the ocean—they were on a beautiful crescent of beach, a secluded cove north of La Jolla that Richard wouldn’t have been able to find on his own in a million years—and when she came back to shore she unsnapped her bikini top without fanfare and tossed it to Marcus, the twenty-eight-year-old software designer who was the youngest member of her entourage. As if that were the agreed-upon signal, the men of the Fan Club began pulling their shirts over their heads and stepping out of their swim trunks. Richard didn’t hesitate to join them. This was why he had come, after all. To be a part of this community, a tiny vanguard who had moved beyond shame and hypocrisy, at least for one day of the ye
ar.

  For a long time after the clothes came off, nothing else happened. Walter kept watching the grill; Richard kept tossing the Frisbee in a triangular formation with Claude and Roberto, the only black man among them (he was a retired army master sergeant); and Marcus continued debating theology with Fred, a middle-aged Lutheran minister whose wife believed he was on some sort of spiritual retreat.

  “And I am!” Fred had insisted, when reporting this fact to Richard. “Just not according to my wife’s cramped definition of the phrase.”

  At some point, though, the Frisbee floated over Richard’s head, and when he turned to chase it he saw Carla kneeling by the grill, her head bobbing back and forth against Walter’s crotch. As if he’d been taken by surprise, Walter was still clutching the spatula, pressing the flat part of it against the top of Carla’s shoulder. Marcus was squatting nearby, recording the action with his high-resolution digital camera, the many impressive features of which he had explained to Richard in great detail earlier in the afternoon, almost like he was making a sales pitch.

  “Don’t let the burgers burn!” shouted Earl—he was the old guy, a retired trucker from Nebraska—inspiring widespread laughter from the onlookers.

  When Carla was finished with Walter, she took care of Claude, Earl, and Fred in short order. And then it was Richard’s turn. It felt like a dream as she knelt before him, the Pacific glinting a majestic purple and gold in front of him, the tantalizing smell of grilled meat mixing with the salty ocean air. It was almost as if he’d stepped inside his computer, into one of those images that had burned themselves into his brain, making him permanently unfit for normal life.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, after she had planted a friendly kiss on his knee.