Chapter 3
Meaningful Experience
Sometimes I don’t know what to say when I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I find myself no better equipped to handle it than the last time someone pointed out an error to me. The child was allergic to wheat, not milk. The prescription should have been a hundred milligrams, not eighty-five. I married the wrong man. I married the right man at the wrong time. I shouldn’t have gotten married at all. One thing I do know, something I realized a year or so after the divorce, is that I should have gone back to my maiden name. I didn’t do it at the time because I wanted the same name as my children. Perhaps I also wanted to inspire curiosity or jealousy, anything that might have required me to air my many virulent grievances, to offer my story as a cautionary tale.
For three years Renn, my ex-husband, kept trying to talk to me as if we were friends, to relieve his guilty conscience and prove to himself that I was doing fine, that Anna and Billy were fine too and one day we would all forgive him, but of course we wouldn’t forget him. Renn and I are almost exactly the same age. His birthday is two weeks before mine; he was born in Evanston, Illinois, and I was born a few miles up the road in Lake Bluff. We met during our junior year at USC, and when a year and a half later I was accepted into UCLA’s medical school and was about to finish that first caffeine-fueled semester with high marks, we decided to get married, which we did in downtown L.A. at the city hall, one of Renn’s fraternity brothers and his girlfriend our witnesses. Renn was starting to get roles by then, ones that paid. He was twenty-two and very handsome and so naturally charming that if I had been a little smarter, I would have seen how impossible it would be to keep him from attracting the kind of friends, both male and female, with money and foreign cars and sailboats and, in one case, a private plane, who would tell him not to limit himself, to experience all that he could of life because who knew? Tomorrow he might die. Or even later that same day. What did anyone really know of fate? Carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds, etc. etc.
I hated fate, I told him more than once, barely able to tolerate these new, fashionably blasé friends who couldn’t stand me, the inconvenient wife, either—capable medical student or no, I was heavy baggage. Fate was a con, a fool’s game. There was only life, one day after the other. Then death, of course. Things happened, and no one could predict them. By then, I had seen hematomas in three-month-old babies. I had seen two-year-olds dying of leukemia while their mothers almost managed to overdose on barbiturates in the parking lot outside the hospital. We had an earthquake or two, gas shortages, bad air, wildfires, whales beaching themselves and dying three hundred miles up the coast. We also eventually had two perfectly healthy children, miraculous creatures that I couldn’t and sometimes still can’t believe Renn and I created out of nothing but two fifteen-minute acts in a darkened bedroom, an act repeated millions of times over throughout the country on any given day. We were hardly original in anything we did, but for a while it all felt so fraught and urgent and specific.
Today, December twelfth, would have been our thirtieth wedding anniversary. My daughter called this morning, sweetly apologetic but unable to resist saying that she had noticed this would-be milestone too. My son has not called, nor do I expect him to. He doesn’t always remember my birthday, or his sister’s, or his own, from what I can tell. Am I embarrassed or irritated with myself for continuing to observe, so to speak, the anniversary of my failed marriage? Not really. It is simply a fact of my life, like the myopia I have lived with since junior high, the knobby knees, the forgetful son.
“Dad’s back in New Orleans,” Anna informed me, even though I hadn’t asked if she knew where he was. “He had to reshoot a couple of scenes for Bourbon at Dusk.”
“I bet he’s just thrilled about that. Have you seen him recently?”
“A few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought I told you that he was in town for a couple of days before he went up to Seattle to visit the guy who’s doing the sound track.”
“Why didn’t he hire a musician in New Orleans?”
“This guy is from Louisiana, I guess, but after Katrina, he moved to Seattle. I think he still has a place down there though.” She paused. “When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“I don’t know. Over the summer, I suppose.” I could hear strangers’ voices in the background and wind hurling itself against Anna’s phone. She was probably on break outside the hospital where she and her classmates are doing clinicals.
“Have you talked to Billy this week?” she asked.
“I called him a couple of days ago, but he hasn’t called me back yet.”
“He and Danielle broke up.” She sounded embarrassed, as if she had something to do with it. Since childhood, she has had the unfortunate tendency of taking deeply to heart other people’s mistakes or bad luck, but I suppose it is also this impulse that influenced her decision to become a doctor.
“Oh, no. Why? Was it his decision or hers?”
“Hers. He’s such a bonehead.”
I was very disappointed to hear this. From the beginning, I liked Danielle; she has always seemed honest and kind and not the type of person who wanted Billy only because of his money or his connection to his father’s celebrity. At twenty-six, my son is still rudderless, and he worries me much more than his sister does. Anna is one semester away from graduating with her MD, and I couldn’t be more proud of her if she had won the Boston marathon or the Nobel Prize. Her decision to go into family medicine rather than specialize in pediatrics or obstetrics or something a little more glamorous than country doctorhood was a bit surprising, but I’m flattered that she has chosen the same profession as mine. Thank God, in any case, that she didn’t choose her father’s. For a while, I thought for sure that she or Billy would.
“What happened?” I asked, ninety percent certain that it was my son’s fault.
She hesitated. “I think he has a crush on the lead actress in Dad’s movie. This girl named Elise Connor. You probably know who she is. Danielle found out, and what a surprise, she was upset and broke up with him. He had just asked her to move in with him too.”
I know who Elise Connor is. Of course I do. In more than one flimsy, flashy magazine that I shouldn’t notice, let alone pick up, I have seen her name linked with my ex-husband’s. “Mrs. Ivins III,” one columnist has dared to call her. “I see stars in these stars’ eyes whenever they look at each other,” the so-called journalist crowed. “Are those wedding bells I hear in the distance?”
Reading words like these, I don’t feel the same acid surge of jealousy that I did up until four or five years ago, but I’d be lying if I said that they didn’t bother me. She is a very young girl. Renn is not a young man. He is a fool, but actors usually are, their egos so fragile and enormous. How does Elise Connor feel about his egotism? Perhaps she doesn’t care, accepting it as a hazard of the trade, or else she is still blind to it. She is less than half his age, and I feel a little sorry for him about this May-December cliché. Especially because it is hardly the first time.
None of the gossip columnists ever mention me in connection with Renn anymore, in part because I’m not famous, nor are our children, and of what interest am I, except to the fans who have researched him so thoroughly that they know more about him than most of his close friends do? Those people are out there, a dishearteningly large army of fanatics. I have met some of them, before and after the divorce. How do you live with the fact, peaceably or no, that your husband is an institution, a movement, a cult with numerous irrational adherents? I never quite figured out how. That we stayed married for almost fifteen years was, I have to admit, a miracle.
“Poor Billy,” I finally managed to say. “I wish he knew how to be happier.” Yet who really does? I wonder. I’m not sure if it’s a skill that can be cultivated or a talent a person is born with. I often think it’s the latter, having seen so many people who should be happy but aren’t, and so many who should be miserable but are decisively the opposite.
“I know. I told him to start seeing his therapist again, but I don’t know if he will.”
“I wish he’d never gone to New Orleans to work with your father.”
“Well, he did.”
“Yes, he did.”
In October, he was with Renn for too long on the set of Bourbon Street, or whatever he’s calling it. A Shot of Bourbon, maybe? Bourbon in Winter? Some earnestly poetic name. My son is a grown man, free to come and go as he pleases, but sometimes I wish that Renn hadn’t set up those trusts for our kids after the divorce. So much money, an unconscionable amount, really. Anna has been smart with hers, and although Will hasn’t been a spendthrift, not that I can tell, he hasn’t been able to find a career postcollege that he wants to pursue. Renn’s guilt-stricken generosity has succeeded in robbing our son of any desire he might have had to establish himself in one field or another. But Anna, I have no doubt, will excel at medicine. Her patients, her staff, her community, will adore her. Eventually she will fall in love, marry, and probably have a child or two. She will be happy and will continue to be a source of joy for her father and me until we die. Regarding these predictions, I don’t think anyone will ever turn to me, pretending sympathy, and tell me that I’m wrong.
“I’ve been thinking about where I want to do my residency,” Anna said. “I think it should be at a hospital with an underserved population. I’ve thought about going down to New Orleans or Biloxi, but there are so many people in L.A. that need help too.”
“Yes, that’s true, but if the hospital doesn’t have a lot of resources, you’re not going to learn as much as you would in a place that’s well funded.”
“Actually, I think I could learn more.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. Don’t decide on anything until you talk to me first. You have the medical centers at UCLA to choose from, and they’re both excellent. Or you could apply to work at Cedars-Sinai with me.”
“I know, Mom.”
“If you really want to work with the poor, you should do it in L.A. Your friends and family are here.”
“I’d make other friends.”
“I have no doubt that you would.”
“I want to live somewhere else at some point. I’m not going to stay here forever.”
I hesitated. “No, I suppose you won’t.”
She has already traveled to so many places, so many different countries. Her father and I have both made sure of that. She has never been deprived of anything, which, I realize, some would say is a different kind of deprivation. What’s life without the struggle? Without the hunger to accomplish the right things, those that will bring you the respect and admiration (and envy) of your peers? But I wonder this—if you don’t have to struggle, why would you? I don’t think too many of us would choose to take the harder route. We simply take it because that’s the only one open to us. I realize the irony here—my own children serve as examples of people who haven’t had to struggle in any kind of traditional sense. The one seems to be quite happy, but the other not so much.
I don’t know what to say about Billy’s inertia, which isn’t a recent development—it has been with him since early adolescence. Since before Renn and I divorced, I suppose. Billy saw the divorce coming too. It’s clear to me, having worked as a pediatrician for so many years, that most children are very perceptive, more so than their parents are. But I don’t think the problems Renn and I had caused Billy’s inertia. For one, Renn was often only home for two- and three-week stints, and even when he was with us, he came and went constantly. Scheduling a family dinner was akin to arranging for an audience with the pope, something I said once to Renn, which he thought was funny, even though I hadn’t intended it to be. Our children didn’t see us fighting very often because toward the end, they didn’t see us together very much at all.
After Anna and I said good-bye, I called Billy. He didn’t answer. I tried him a second time an hour later. My call went into voice mail again. Now, at five thirty, when I’m done with appointments for the day (twenty-six patients, all crammed into seven hours, along with several phone calls), I take the 10 to the 405 and make it to Billy’s place faster than I expect to during rush hour. I want to take him out for dinner. We haven’t had a face-to-face conversation in several weeks, in part because he didn’t come over for Thanksgiving this year. He told me that he had been invited to Danielle’s mother’s house and said that I could go with them, but I was hurt that he hadn’t first asked me if I wanted them to come to my house before he agreed to go to Danielle’s mother’s. I told him that I had already bought a turkey and ordered two pumpkin pies. He apologized perfunctorily but didn’t budge, and part of this intransigence, I realize now, was likely caused by his desire to appease Danielle, but then she broke up with him anyway. Anna and I celebrated without him, and she brought along Jill, whose parents were traveling in Europe, but it was still a subdued, almost somber, occasion without Billy, even though he isn’t known for cracking jokes or playing the family clown. Anna and Billy’s father was in Rome or maybe it was New York, both cities where he keeps apartments, but Anna couldn’t take any days off from the hospital to spend the holiday with him, and Billy doesn’t spend as much time with Renn as he used to. I hope this will change, but I’m not sure how or when it will.
The building where my son lives is all gleaming steel and mirrored glass, and it reminds me of a monstrous robot. Sometimes, to get a rise out of me, he calls his home Robotland. “If I live here long enough, maybe I’ll turn into one too,” he once said.
“That’s not funny,” I said, but laughed anyway.
The doorman, a young guy named Carlo (“Not Carlos,” he said with a shy smile when he introduced himself to me last year) who is maybe twenty-one but already has two daughters whose pictures he has bashfully shown me more than once, calls upstairs when I get to the lobby because my plan is to ambush my son. If I called Billy again from my cell and told him that I’m downstairs, he wouldn’t answer and he’d know not to answer the doorman’s page either.
It still takes him several rings to respond to Carlo’s call. “Good evening, Mr. Ivins,” Carlo says when Billy finally picks up. “You have a visitor. Would you like me to send her up?”
I can’t take a normal breath while my son responds.
“Your mother,” says Carlo, nonchalant. “Is it all right for me to send her up?” He is a professional, graceful and charming, despite his young age.
Carlo says thank you and hangs up. He gives me a look of apology; his unlined face, almost hairless too, is very kind. His wife, I hope, adores him. “Mr. Ivins asked if you’d give him ten minutes.”
“All right,” I say gloomily. A son should not keep his mother waiting in the lobby. It both worries and annoys me—what is it that he wants to hide? If he needs a shower, I could sit in his living room and wait for him there. If empty beer or wine bottles are all over the place, or take-out containers, or cigarette butts, I could probably do a better job cleaning up than he would. If he has a woman up there who is not Danielle, so be it. He could at least introduce us. I know he wasn’t expecting me, but I don’t drop in on him unannounced very often.
Despite how pleasant Carlo is, I don’t feel like making any more small talk. I go outside into the traffic noise and late-afternoon sun and make a phone call to a patient’s father who left a message at my office earlier in the day. One of the reasons I love my profession, despite its occasional sorrows and nuisances, is that I like knowing things. I like being an expert on something in our crowded, chaotic world.
This man’s child has asthma, one of several dozen cases that I have diagnosed in the last year. The air quality here is as bad as advertised and is particularly hard on new and old pairs of lungs. When this father asks what more he and his wife can do, I repeat the prescription from their recent office visit—the inhaler as needed, a healthy diet, enough sleep, moderate exercise. The child should, as much as possible, be allowed a normal life, with games and friends and horseplay, and parents can also consider moving somewhere with better air quality, which they won’t or can’t often do.
It is almost fifteen minutes before I can end the call and take the elevator up to Billy’s apartment. Carlo smiles as I walk by. He is on the phone and buzzes me through the glass door that leads to the elevator bank. There are three elevators for this twenty-story building, and a freight elevator that goes down to the garage, one filled with Mercedes and Jaguars and BMWs. My son drives an Audi; Anna a Prius, though her first car was a white Corvette, one her father gave her when she turned sixteen. I asked Renn if he was kidding. Offended, he said, Why the hell do you think that? Anna is not a Corvette type of girl at all, I told him, but out of politeness mixed with embarrassed pride she drove this car for a year before trading it for a Sebring convertible, which lasted until the Prius. On Billy’s sixteenth birthday, he was given a 1968 powder-blue Mustang. It really was beautiful, but I didn’t tell Renn that I thought so. Billy drove it until he wrecked it during his sophomore year of college. Or rather, until his roommate wrecked it by driving into a row of parked cars while trying to send a text message or change the radio station or I’m not sure what—Billy never would give me a straight answer.
When I knock on his door, the hallway light tastefully muted, the walls vanilla-colored with their big abstract paintings by artists I don’t know, it takes Billy several long seconds to answer. To my relief, he is dressed neatly—clean blue jeans and a red Polo shirt—but there are dark circles under his eyes and he needs a haircut, and if I’m being honest, he doesn’t look very happy to see me. He seems barely capable of forcing a smile, and I feel both heartsick and angry.
“Come in, Mom. Sorry to make you wait,” he mumbles. “I was on the phone.” He looks thin, too thin, and in the foyer right by the door, I notice four pairs of running shoes lined up along the wall, all new. Billy ran track in high school, but he wasn’t one of the team’s stars. In college he didn’t play any sports, except intramural soccer and pickup basketball.
His place is tidy, more or less, though it looks like the cleaning lady is due for a visit soon—from the light of a nearby lamp, I can see dust on the window ledges in the living room where I sit on one end of the sofa and Billy on the other. The sofa is brown leather and not particularly comfortable, but it looks stylish and expensive, which it is. All of his furniture is from a Danish design showroom, one where he worked for a few months as a salesperson before growing bored. Sofas aren’t my thing, he claimed. What is your thing? I wanted to know. I’ll tell you when I find it, was his response, his look both defiant and sad.
“So Anna told you?” he says quietly.
I study his face for a second or two. He really does look exhausted. He must not be sleeping very well. I could write him a prescription for Valium, two or three milligrams, nothing too serious, but I am not in the habit of offering my children or friends drugs, even if some of the latter have asked for them over the years. Los Angeles is a city filled with highly and creatively medicated people. Though I suppose most cities are. I suppose this is how city dwellers keep pace or set the pace or set the traps that catch the biggest monsters.
I decide not to take his gloomy mood head-on. “Told me about—?”
“Danielle. We broke up last weekend.”
“She did mention it, and I was very sorry to hear this.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Why do you say that?”
He shakes his head. “Not many relationships work out. Why should this one?”
“Billy, that’s not a good attitude.”
“You should talk,” he says.
I stare at him. “Why? Because your father and I got a divorce? We were together for fifteen years, remember.”
“Barely.”
“We were together until the divorce.”
He turns his head away, and in this mulish slant, I can see Renn in him very clearly, his old attitude of surly silence, his conviction that he had been wronged, despite the fact that he was the one who was always going off somewhere interesting while I stayed home with our children and my patients and hospital protocols and myriad resentments. Renn was making so much money by the time both of our kids were out of diapers that some of my friends thought that I should have been able to live with his absences, because weren’t we set for life? I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to, right? Renn had paid off my med school loans by writing two separate checks, and what, realistically, did I have to complain about? What a gorgeous home we had, what healthy, pretty children, what nice clothes/cars/ crystal/linens/curtains/pool furniture. Not to mention, I had a movie-star husband. And after a few years, didn’t all married couples lose interest in each other sexually anyway? Just why was I in such a rotten mood all the time?
“Okay. You were together,” he says, still not looking at me.
“Let me take you to dinner,” I say, suddenly very tired and feeling as if I might start crying. An oppressive malaise hovers around us like smoke. It doesn’t help that almost no lights are on. His unhappiness makes me feel both lonely and worried for him. No mother, no matter her children’s ages, ever stops fearing that they will somehow come to harm.
He shakes his head. “No thanks. I already ate.”
It’s only six thirty, and I’m certain that he’s lying. “Come out with me anyway. There’s a Thai place a few blocks from here that I like.”
He doesn’t reply.
I hesitate, but then I say it. “Come on. Today’s a special occasion.”
He regards me, only slightly interested. “What is it?”
“Your father and I have now been divorced for as long as we were married,” I say. “It was thirty years ago today that we said ‘I do.’ ” I know that I’m being ridiculous, that Billy will find this fact and the occasion I have made of it ironic and possibly perverse, but nothing’s right with him tonight.
“Wow. Alert the media.”
“Oh, Billy.”
“What? Congratulations to you and Dad. Many happy returns.”
“Can we talk a little about what happened with you and Danielle?”
He shakes his head. “No. I’d rather not.”
“Maybe you’ll feel better if you do.”
“I feel fine.”
“Let’s go to dinner,” I say. When I stand up, the sofa groans in a voice that sounds almost human.
Billy exhales. “Mom, I don’t want to go out.”
“Should we order in?”
“I told you that I already ate.”
“It doesn’t look like it. How much weight have you lost since I saw you at Halloween?”
“I don’t know. A couple of pounds maybe.”
“Are you doing a lot of running? I saw several pairs of shoes on my way in.”
“I’m training for a marathon.”
I look at him, wondering if he really means this, if he will see this project through to some favorable outcome. “Good, but you need to eat if you’re going for long runs.”
“Jesus. You sound like Danielle.”
I don’t say anything. I know that I should leave him alone, that my visit hasn’t done anything but upset him. But I go ahead and make it worse. “I’m going to order you a subscription to Gourmet and Bon Appétit,” I say. “Why don’t you learn how to cook? You have the time.”
He stares at me, and then he laughs. “Why don’t I learn how to cook? Why don’t I learn how to fly too while I’m at it? And why don’t I learn how to drag race? When I’m done with that, I’ll find the cure for cancer and bring you to the White House with me when the president throws a banquet in my honor.”
I can feel my face burning. “I’m not sure about those other things, but cooking can sometimes be a meaningful experience.”
“How do you know? You don’t cook.”
“Yes, I do. A lot more than I used to.”
“Then why didn’t you go home after work and cook yourself an anniversary dinner instead of coming over here?”
“All right,” I say. “I’ll leave. You can starve yourself some more if you don’t want to have dinner with me. Try running a marathon on an empty stomach and see how that goes.”
“God, Mom, don’t be so f*cking melodramatic.” He says these words with such derision that I almost slap him, something I haven’t done in at least ten years. He knows I’m angry too. He gives me a look that I remember well from his adolescence, one somewhere between condescension and defiance. How pathetic you are, his eyes would say. How above all of this I am. You and Dad are the ones acting like children, not me.
At the door, we make only glancing eye contact and don’t embrace. Before I have taken more than a step into the corridor, he shuts the door firmly behind me.
By the time I get into the elevator, furious and chagrined, all of the old resentments that used to plague me have resurfaced. Most of them, I eventually realized, were directed more toward Renn than at our children, no matter how badly Anna and Billy were frustrating or infuriating me. For at least a year after Renn left, I hated him. It was a corrosive, implacable hatred, the kind that leads tyrants to burn down enemies’ villages, to maim and destroy. I said some very stupid things about him in front of our children, things that I’m pretty sure they remember. One of the ironies of the whole ugly show, however, was that by the time he left me to marry Melinda Byers, a woman whose life, as far as I can tell, has amounted to very little, I didn’t want to be married to him anymore, but I also knew that not being married to him was likely to feel worse.
In the empty elevator, I let out a small scream. Then I let out a second that leads to a third, and when the door opens on the first floor, the three people waiting to step on all give me strange looks. I lower my eyes and walk past them quickly, my face a garish red by now, I’m sure. In the lobby, Carlo is listening to a radio that he abruptly turns down when I push open the glass door, but I hear enough to know that the song is an old one by the Rolling Stones, Jagger’s lascivious wail recognizable in the few notes that reach me before Carlo lowers the volume.
“You don’t have to turn it down,” I say, though I can’t bear to meet his eyes, knowing he will see how upset I am. When he starts talking, I keep moving toward the front doors. “I have to go,” I say softly, embarrassed. “Sorry to be in such a rush, Carlo. Have a good night.”
“Don’t apologize. You’re a doctor,” he calls after me, as if delighted by this fact. “I know you’re busy!”
When I think about it later, after I eat a peanut butter sandwich at home for dinner and drink two glasses of white wine so fast I get the hiccups, I realize that I don’t remember the drive back from Billy’s very well. Did I listen to the radio? I don’t think I did. Was there a lot of traffic between his place and mine? There must have been, but this I don’t really remember either. I do know that my phone didn’t ring, but I kept hoping that it would. I wanted my son to call and apologize. I wanted him to tell me what happened with Danielle, and if it’s true that he has a crush on Elise Connor, and whether or not his father really is serious about this girl. I could call Renn myself and ask him, but I don’t. Even if he is likely to pick up my call and would tell me whatever I want to know. I don’t think he’s ever considered me an enemy, though he must have known that I once considered him to be the worst of my life.
One thing that helped me get past most of my jealousy and rage over our divorce is that his marriage to Melinda (whom he met on the set—but she was a caterer, not a costar) also failed. This does not make me look particularly noble, I know, but being left for another woman isn’t something most wives can forget. Our marriage began to exhaust me once people started to recognize him everywhere we went, after he became famous enough that paparazzi sometimes lurked outside the gate at the end of our driveway, but I was not ready to give up. Still, it was clear that a marriage that lasts does not have the rest of the world pressing in on it; it does not have fanatics or floozies feverishly hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the principals, to touch his hand or whatever other part of him they can reach. A marriage that lasts does not feature one of the principals being paid to simulate sex on camera with someone young and very attractive, which is impossible for the other principal to get used to because this movie sex looks real and therefore it must feel real to the couple being filmed. A marriage that lasts does not have the aura of a siege, of a boat being rocked so hard I felt almost permanently ill. I knew I would lose him; I think I knew this very early on, but it wasn’t something I let myself say to anyone, and I tried never to say it to myself either.
After my sandwich, after the news and an unsuccessful attempt to read a book by a surgeon who is also a skillful writer, I call my son. He doesn’t answer. I call him ten minutes later and still no response. After another twenty minutes, I call again and this time he picks up.
“What now,” he says.
For a half second, I think about hanging up, but it is such a desperately childish move that I manage to quell the impulse. In any case, I don’t hang up on people anymore. I don’t want him to be mad at me for the rest of the night either. He was angry enough with me while growing up, even though his father was the one who left. “I’m sorry that I stopped by unexpectedly today,” I say.
I can hear him exhale. “You don’t have to apologize, Mom.”
“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot about Danielle.”
“It’s understandable that you’d want to know what happened.”
I don’t answer, waiting for him to say more.
“What did you call for, Lucy?” he says.
I bristle. I don’t like it when he uses my first name because it sometimes sounds like he’s spitting it out. “To apologize,” I say.
“Okay, thanks. Apology accepted.”
“Maybe you could apologize to me too.”
He laughs in a short, caustic burst. “Are you serious?”
I’m botching this now as badly as I botched the visit. It’s almost as if I’m observing someone who looks exactly like me, and I want to shake her and tell her to stop. But I’m also so angry that my head is aching, something I’ve been ignoring since leaving his place three hours earlier. “Never mind. Forget I said that.”
“I have to go now,” he says, flatly. “I have someone on the other line.”
Before I have a chance to respond, he hangs up. In the few seconds of silence before the beeping begins, I pretend he’s still there. “I know you’re unhappy,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean you have the right to treat other people like trash.”
It has always been a little disorienting that my personal and professional lives are defined by serious disparities. At the hospital or in the clinic where I take appointments, I am the brisk, competent Dr. Ivins who almost always commands other people’s respect. Outside of work, of course, it’s very different—I am only another driver on the car-choked highways, another impatient person in line at the grocery store; I am someone’s mother, tolerable to my children most of the time but still a cross to bear. I am also a famous man’s ex-wife, the one he left for someone younger and less educated. I have a bad temper; I have fears and grave insecurities. I want always to be right, to have the last word, to be respected and obeyed without question. Some days it takes all of my self-discipline to force myself out of the house. Some days I am almost speechless from regret or loneliness or anger over nothing that I can clearly articulate. Some days I eat nothing but cookies for breakfast and potato chips for lunch. Too often, I get more satisfaction than I should from other people’s disappointments. It is hard to dispute the evidence that we are a race defined to a significant degree by our pettiness, by how vicious our desire is to keep track, to compare, to win.
My phone doesn’t ring for the rest of the night, and although there are people I could call, I don’t. Thirty years ago, my children hadn’t yet been born, nor did I know for sure that I would become a mother. Renn and I were twenty-two, in love, talented in our different ways. A movie star had just become our president. We assumed that we were bound for greatness too, and one of us, I guess, really was. Our children, we assumed—still assume—might also be bound for greatness. It is possible that Billy’s unhappiness will end tomorrow. That he will find something to do with his life that fills him with joyful suspense. I’m still going to order him those cooking magazines. He will probably throw them away, but maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll look through one of them and decide that he wants to open a restaurant or wait tables or chop vegetables for a while, maybe long enough for it to become a career. If he wants to run marathons, he can. If he wants to brood and resent me and the rest of the world, I can put up with this for a little while longer, but after a point, it will have to stop, or else these feelings will define his life, and the thought of this bothers me greatly.
Because his life is extraordinary. He has already had so many experiences most of us will never have. He has met some of the most interesting people in the world, and on more than one occasion he has shaken the hands of the leaders of foreign countries, those who invited his father to dine in their mansions while he was in their countries promoting his movies. Billy has seen the Nile, the Alps, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Himalayas, most of the major cities in the U.S. and many elsewhere too. For a while I was jealous of all that his father could offer him and Anna—such remarkable experiences that I would never have been able to produce for them, let alone participate in. I have assumed since they were very small children that their lives would both be better, more momentous, than my own. I don’t know if all parents want this for their children. Many seem to. I’m not sure if I’m one of them, though. I want my own life to be as momentous as theirs, maybe even more so. I don’t think this is wrong—I am simply being honest. If we work hard enough, we should all be able to achieve lasting contentment. Billy’s bitterness and lingering inertia in the face of his astounding good fortune aren’t really surprising. But they are disappointing. Even when he acts graceless and unkind, however, I don’t wish him ill. What kind of mother would wish that on her child?