But today my cell phone started ringing, and only my closest friends know that number. Someone has betrayed me. I turn it off and go into the garden. To weed is to close my mind to anything else. Kneeling in the dirt among the lavender, surrounded by the twelve-foot fence that safeguarded our privacy, I’m safe. I sit back on my heels and breathe in deeply, the way I’ve learned in my relaxation tapes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Again. Again. After an hour of alternately doing my breathing exercises and pulling out the crabgrass that has been accumulating, my heartbeat has slowed and I can think clearly again.
I go back into the house to get a drink of water. I’m worried about the state of my Hummingbird Coyote Mint plants (Monardella macrantha), they are showing brown spots on their leaves and the bright red blossoms are drooping. I wash the dirt from my hands in the kitchen sink, and without thinking, move to the front door upon hearing a knock. I open it (stupidly).
Pandemonium. People leaping from cars and running toward me, camera lights flashing, yelling for statements. When did you know, MJ? And, How are you taking it? I slam the door quickly. Still, they keep coming. At first it’s just the local channels. KGO, KTVU. Then CNN and the national news teams from CBS and NBC. I go to the AT&T store and change my cell phone number, but they somehow sniff that out. The story apparently has legs. Every entertainment and gossip rag runs with it, keeps publishing follow-up articles, digs up all sorts of things I wouldn’t have thought anyone would remember. My sneaking out on the rent of the apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco back in the 1980s when the boys were small and I needed a clean slate to start over. Which I did, in Santa Cruz, living in a tiny box of a house that had obviously once been someone’s summer vacation home scraped together using two-by-fours and plywood. The reporters find that part of my life, too, including getting busted for growing and selling weed in the early nineties, for which I had to do community service. Well, shit, I say out loud when I hear that on the radio. I was just trying to make a living.
Naturally the reporters find out where I work, and interview my co-workers who anonymously and predictably comment on my clothing and hair and general state of disarray. No one disparages the quality of my accounting work, that’s the one good thing. The bad thing is seeing John, and by extension, myself, made the butt of jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Do you know the punishment for three wives? Three mothers-in-law! And, I take care of all my wives. Isn’t that big of me (bigamy)? And, Why did the polygamist cross the road? To get to the other bride. DJs speculate on John’s sex life on crude radio shows. One newspaper prints that John had to eat three turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is nonsense. Or is it? John always worked Christmas, or so he told me, so we had our dinner early—at 1 PM, so he could go into the hospital. But now that I think about it, a plastic surgeon needing to go into the hospital on a holiday? What, just in case someone needs an emergency face-lift? The obviousness of his lies is the truly shameful part. Thinking of him in Deborah’s house with relatives and friends eating his second turkey dinner makes me turn a hot and painful red. The third turkey dinner must have been a fantasy of a reporter or neighbor, as he would hardly have flown down to LA for dinner on the same day.
Call me na?ve, but I didn’t realize my neighbors were that interested in us. How else do they know so much? Did our gardeners, our housecleaners, gossip? The plots in our neighborhood are large, the trees and foliage mature, you can’t see other houses from ours, the garden is protected by a fence. John liked his privacy. Yet someone knew that we spent most of our hours back there, gardening or sitting under the sun umbrella drinking sweet tea, even in winter. They somehow knew the price we’d paid for the house; they knew the color of bougainvillea we’d planted. One especially alert neighbor even heard John’s car leave every morning right after five. Even on weekends. How could she not have known?
Which is, of course, the million-dollar question.
14
Helen