Then Came You (5 page)

Once the meal was finished and my father and India—quote-unquote—had adjourned to the living room (India in her heels and fancy jeans and the fringed tweed Chanel jacket that she’d worn to pick at a meal of hamburgers and Carvel ice-cream cake), my brothers and I excused ourselves, then snuck through the butler’s pantry and out onto the back porch. Tommy pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and gave one to me and one to Trey. My classmates would have howled to see me smoking—to them, I was Bettina the straitlaced, Bettina the pure. The truth was, I only smoked with my brothers, and I only did it because it was one of the rare times they’d let me into their circle and talk to me like a person.

“Now, I ain’t saying she a gold digger,” Tommy sang. Trey shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a hooting laugh. I rolled my cigarette between my fingers and announced, “If any of those parts are original, then I am the queen of Romania.”

“Dorothy Parker,” said Tommy, tipping the bottle of beer he’d snagged from the refrigerator toward me in a toast. “Nice.”

Tommy flicked his lighter and shielded the flame with his hand until my cigarette was lit. I inhaled, blew a plume of smoke
into the starry night sky, and delivered my one-word assessment of our father’s new ladyfriend: “Bitch.”

“C’mon, Bets,” said Tommy. “Maybe she’s not that bad.”

“Oh, she’s that bad,” I assured him. I knew her type. India—not that I believed for a second that India could actually be her name—had made an effort during the meal, asking Tommy about his band, Dirty Birdy, and Trey about his daughter and me about my internship appraising European paintings for Christie’s. She let us know that she knew things about us, where we lived and what we liked and what our hobbies were: that Tommy played the bass and guitar, that I collected things—seashells and bottlecaps when I was little; antique compacts and cigarette cases now. She was polite; she was—or at least acted—interested. She’d laughed (“ha . . . ha . . . ha”) when she’d gotten ketchup on the sleeve of her blouse, and hopped up from the table to clear the dishes. All of this should have eased my mind, but there was a hardness about her, something calculated, flinty and unkind. I could see scars behind her ears, beneath her chin. The skin of her cheeks was too taut and her breasts were too big for her frame. Her hair was dyed, her nose was done, and I suspected tinted lenses were responsible for the luminous indigo of her eyes.
Who are you, really,
I wondered as she rinsed and dried plates and kept up her expert, cheerful chatter.
Who are you? And what do you want with my dad?

“I bet her name’s really something like Tammy,” I told my brothers. Trey just shrugged, and Tommy said, in the calm way that made me crazy, “Trying to make something of yourself isn’t a crime.”

“Making something of yourself is fine,” I replied. “Getting a boob job, dying your hair, getting your nose done, changing your name, whatever. That’s all fine. I don’t object. But she should make her own money, instead of going after his.”

“Dad’s a big boy,” said Trey, thumbing his BlackBerry, probably to see if his wife had called or texted or sent pictures of the most recent adorable thing that nine-month-old Violet had done during the three minutes since he’d last checked.

“And he’s lonely,” said Tommy.

I exhaled. This was the truly infuriating part. If our father had serially discarded his wives, trading up for younger, hotter models, we’d have rolled our eyes and agreed that he was getting what he deserved with the world’s Indias. But our mother had left him. After all her time in Manhattan, her years as a stay-at-home mom, a PTA volunteer, a fund-raiser for cancer research and the preservation of historic churches, she’d fallen under the sway of her yoga instructor, one Michael Essensen of Brick, New Jersey, who, after a six-week sojourn in Mumbai, had renamed himself Baba Mahatma and opened a yoga center and spiritual retreat five blocks from our apartment. The Baba, as my brothers and I called him, started popping up in passing in my mother’s conversation:
The Baba says Americans should eat a more plant-based diet. The Baba says colonics changed his life.
A few months after she’d started taking classes, we would come home from school and find the Baba himself in the kitchen, in all his ponytailed, tattooed, yoga-panted splendor, dispensing wisdom over a pot of green tea. “Oh, hi, guys,” my mother would say, blinking like she was trying to remember our names. The Baba, who had a chiseled chin and an artificial tan and flowing locks inspired by Fabio, would give us an indulgent nod, pour more tea for both of them (never offering me or my brothers a cup), and continue talking about whatever cleanse or fast or ritual he was endorsing that week. At fourteen, I’d been able to identify his spiel as incense-scented nonsense, but my mother had believed every word of it, swearing to her friends (and, eventually, to the strangers she’d corner in the schoolyard or the dentist’s office or
the fish counter at Russ & Daughters) that the Baba was magical, and that his ministrations had helped her survive the mood swings and hot flashes of menopause when the hormone therapy prescribed by the top doctors in Manhattan had failed.

My mother had been born Arlene Sandusky in a suburb of Detroit in 1958. She’d married my father at twenty-three, then moved to New York, where she’d had three children and become an enthusiastic baker of cookies and trimmer of Christmas trees, a woman who liked nothing better than taking on some elaborate holiday-related project—assembling and frosting a gingerbread house, or running the schoolwide Easter egg hunt. In the wake of her association with the Baba, she’d ditched her traditions and her Martha Stewart cookbooks. She’d grown her hair long and let it go gray. She’d swapped her designer suits and high heels for embroidered tunics and thick-strapped leather sandals, and traded her Bulgari perfume for a mixture of essential oils that made her smell like the backseat of a particularly malodorous taxicab, sandalwood and curry with hints of vomit. She’d gotten a belly piercing that I’d seen and a tattoo that I hadn’t—I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to ask
where
or
of what
—and, eventually, she began slipping the Baba tens of thousands of dollars. When my father’s accountants finally started to ask questions about what the Order of New Light was and whether it was, in fact, a tax-free C corporation, she’d announced her intentions to get a divorce and follow the Baba to Taos, where he was building a retreat offering intensive yoga training, raw cuisine, and a clothing-optional sweat lodge.

I came home from school one afternoon and found luggage lined up in the hall and my mother in her bedroom, packing. “I am renouncing the meaninglessness of the material,” she said, sitting on top of her Louis Vuitton suitcase to get the zipper closed. I pointed out that the meaninglessness of the material
did not seem to cover the great quantity of Tory Burch tunics and Juicy Couture sweat suits that she had packed.

“Oh, Bettina,” she said, in a tone that mixed scorn and, unbelievably, pity. “Don’t be so rigid.” She kissed me, taking me into her arms for an unwelcome and musky embrace.

“Be good to your father,” she said, smoothing my hair as I tried not to wriggle away. “He’s a good man, but he’s just not very
evolved.
”

After that, my mother communicated by letters and postcards, while my father became Topic A in the gossip columns and, when he started dating again, prey for single ladies of a certain age. There was the magazine editor famous enough to have been skewered in a movie, played by an actress who, in my opinion, was ten years too young and significantly too pretty to be a plausible stand-in. She was followed by a real-estate mogul with a face permanently frozen into a look of startled puzzlement, then a newspaper columnist, similarly Botoxed, who’d made a career out of being bitchy on the Sunday-morning political chat shows. In that realm of gray-suited, gray-faced men, it turned out that even a not-terribly-attractive fifty-two-year-old could pass herself off as a babe if she wore pencil skirts, kept her hair dyed, and made the occasional reference to oral sex.

Even when my father was technically attached, it didn’t stop other women from trying. There would be a hand that lingered on his forearm, a cheek kiss that ended up grazing his lips, a business card with a cell phone number scribbled on it, pressed into his palm at the end of a night. My father had resisted them all, the waitresses and the young divorcees and the actress-slash-models ... which was why it made no sense that he’d fall for this hard-edged, new-nosed, fake-named “India,” who was no more in her thirties than I was the winner of
America’s Next Top Model.

“Are you worried she’s going to spend our inheritance?” Tommy asked, spinning the wheel of his lighter.

“It’s not about the money,” I said, ignoring the twinge I felt at the thought of this stranger squandering what should have been mine. I had a trust fund, worth ten million dollars, that I’d be able to access on my twenty-first birthday, which was coming in two months. My father had already told me he’d buy me an apartment after I graduated, in whatever city I ended up working. Needless to say, I had no student loans. I’d most likely get a job that offered health insurance, and I’d inherited all the clothes, shoes, furs, and jewelry that my mother hadn’t sold before decamping to New Mexico. Even if my father married some grasping bitch (unlikely) and didn’t sign a prenup (even more unlikely), my brothers and I would be fine. I knew, for example, that my dad had already set up a trust for Trey’s daughter, Violet, and that he’d bought new amps for Dirty Birdy, which specialized in thrash-metal covers of female singer-songwriter ballads.

I ground my cigarette under my heel. “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing. This woman just thinks she can waltz on in here and have . . .” I waved my hands out at the lawn, which rolled, lush and green, down a gentle slope to the ocean. “... all of this, and she didn’t earn any of it.”

“Well, when you think about it,” Tommy said, “we didn’t exactly earn any of it, either.”

“We survived Mom and Dad,” I reminded him. I’d given the matter of what we were and were not owed considerable thought . . . sometimes while I was walking into what passed for downtown Poughkeepsie so my roommates wouldn’t see me being picked up by a driver.

“I think we need to give her a chance,” said Tommy.

“Do we have a choice?” I inquired, and Trey, who’d been looking at his BlackBerry again, shook his head and said, “We do not.”

I sighed. Tommy finished his cigarette. Trey put his telephone back in his pocket. “Dad knows enough to be careful.”

I didn’t answer. My brothers had both been away at school when my mom had left. I’d been the only one home. What happened to my dad hadn’t been dramatic . . . he’d just gotten quieter and quieter, more and more pale. Prior to my mother’s departure, he was rarely home before eight o’clock at night, but, after she left, he started returning at five, then four, then three in the afternoon, locking the bedroom door behind him, saying that he needed a nap. My mother had left in September. By Christmas he’d stopped sleeping. He’d take his naps, then sit up all night by the windows, not eating, not drinking, not talking. I’d ask him, over and over, if he was all right, if he wanted anything. He’d shake his head, trying for a smile, unable to manage more than a few words. I’d talked about therapists; I’d mentioned antidepressants—half the kids I knew had been on some kind of medication for something at some point in their lives. I’d called my brothers, who’d told me—brusquely, in Trey’s case, kindly, in Tommy’s—that Dad would be fine, that this was just something he had to get through. Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones who saw him frozen in an armchair, underneath a de Kooning on one wall and a Picasso etching on another, not noticing the art, or the sunsets over the park. They didn’t see the way his pants sagged around his shrinking waistline and flapped around his diminished legs, or the silvery stubble glinting on his chin.

One dark day in February, I came home from choir practice and found every dish in the kitchen smashed and my father shin-deep in the shards of china and porcelain. My parents had had half a dozen sets of dishes, and the mess was considerable. My father stood there, blinking, a dish with a blue bunny painted in its center in his hand. When I ran to him, I could feel the jagged edges of shattered bowls and plates and coffee cups biting at my ankles, ripping at my tights. “Daddy?”

He gave me a wavering smile. “I . . . well. That felt better.
That felt pretty good.” Together, we swept up the mess, filling a dozen garbage bags with the wreckage. Things improved after that. By spring, he was, as he put it, “stepping out,” whistling as I attached cuff links to the starched cuffs of his shirt, taking women to the benefits and balls my mother used to dread.

I picked up my cigarette butt and slipped it in my pocket, a thief removing the evidence, while I wondered about India’s strategy: whether she could get my dad to marry her, whether she was young enough to seal the deal by getting pregnant. I would watch. I would wait. I would do what I could to keep my father safe. India struck me as a formidable enemy and the money meant that the stakes were high . . . but I was my father’s daughter, and I loved him very much.

Y
ou’ve been spotting, hon?” the nurse asked.

I nodded mutely.
Spotting
was what I’d told my obstetrician on the telephone that morning,
spotting
was what I’d written on the forms in the office that afternoon, but I was actually bleeding, not spotting. After three failed in vitro attempts, I knew the difference.

“Let’s take a look. Lean back, now. Deep breath.” I shut my eyes as she pushed the ultrasound probe inside me. Marcus squeezed my hand, and I thought how this office was the one place, maybe one of only a few in the world, where it didn’t matter what he was, that he’d sold his first business at twenty-five and started his own hedge fund at the age of thirty-one and now, twenty-six years later, had hundreds of millions of dollars and clients all over the world. Here, we were just another infertile couple, a little desperate, no longer young, flipping through limp magazines in the waiting room, hoping that we’d win the prize.