Only Begotten Daughter (19 page)

He made her happy. Perhaps some variation on general relativity was at work here, his bulk capturing anyone passing within his field. More probably his appeal lay in his sheer acceptance of her. Whereas Howard had ended up demanding Julie’s assent to his worldview and Roger had ended up worshiping her, she could not imagine Bix doing either. Around him she felt
safe,
and with each passing day his swarthiness seemed sexier, his girth narrower, his pessimism more courageous.

Ever upward. The top level of Dante’s was a posh conglomeration of saunas, pools, and gymnastic equipment servicing a community of penthouses intended for high rollers and mobsters. The weekend Julie and Bix spent there—they’d saved up their salaries for months—was also the weekend Bix revealed the latest circulation figures.

“I got the news this morning,” he said, French-kissing her. “We leveled off in May.”

Julie bit both their tongues. “And …?”

“And we dropped two-point-one percent in June,” Bix confessed. “I’m afraid Tony’s talking about pulling your plug.”

Dropped two-point-one. Julie felt as if something vital—her plug, her soul—had just been yanked out. “Can you appease him?”

“If we don’t pick up fifty thousand new readers by Labor Day, well …”

“Fifty thousand? How likely is that to happen?”

“How likely is hell to go condo?”

“Fifty thousand?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fight for me, sweetheart.”

“Fight? With what? What ammunition are you giving me?”

“Just fight. I need this column, Bix. Fight.”

That the lighthouse was witnessing an endless parade of Phoebe and Georgina’s girlfriends both Sapphic and Platonic, that it was becoming a kind of exclusive club—
WELCOME TO ANGEL’S EYE, NO BOYS ALLOWED
—did not bother Julie. Wholly feminine worlds had many virtues. You never wanted for a tampon. Copies of Ms. and bottles of hand lotion appeared as if by magic. The Super Bowl came and went unwatched, with some Angel’s Eye residents not even certain which particular sport it consecrated.

Predominant among the live-in guests was Phoebe’s lover Melanie Markson, an unpublished writer of children’s books and the only woman Julie knew to whom the word
portly
applied: Phoebe and Melanie, the Laurel and Hardy of Atlantic City, tootling around the casinos like retired veterans of a hundred lesbian two-reelers.

“I’ve been going over your father’s book,” Melanie told Julie the morning after Bix had disclosed the disheartening truth about the
Moon’s
circulation, “that
Hermeneutics of the Ordinary
thing. Brilliant stuff. I no longer see snapshots just on the surface.”

Julie had recently read one of Melanie’s own manuscripts, a fable about a puppy who committed justifiable patricide. Julie was impressed, though she understood why it hadn’t sold. “Wish Pop could hear you say that.”

“Too bad he never finished it. It might have been publishable.”

“He wasn’t good at finishing things. Maybe you’ve noticed only half the rooms around here have doors.”

“You never talk about your mother,” said Melanie.

“Neither do you.”

“My mother died right after I was born.”

“And mine,” said Julie, “died right after I was conceived.”

“Huh?”

“A long story, Melanie. Some other time.”

And then one day Melanie hit the jackpot, selling a series of five children’s books for a thirty-thousand-dollar advance, with a movie option from the Disney empire for twice that much. She celebrated by getting herself a fancy new computer and her beloved Phoebe a portable video rig. Bad choice, that camcorder. No child banging on a toy drum had ever been as irritating as Phoebe running around the cottage like a muckraking stringer for Cable News Network.

“Shut that thing off!”

But Phoebe always kept the tape running, the lens gawking. “This’ll be hot stuff someday, Katz. The Dead Sea Cassettes!”

“Leave me alone!” Julie tried elbowing Phoebe out of the kitchen.

“Take it easy—I’m getting the practice I need.” Phoebe squinted into the viewfinder. “You think I plan to spend the rest of my life selling saltwater taffy and whoopie cushions? Bullshit. Soon I’ll be starting my own company. I’ve got this amazingly brilliant idea—nonpornographic adult videos. Cinéma-vérité love, how sex
really
looks. A sure winner.”

“Don’t count on it.” Julie slapped a tunafish sandwich together.

“You know your problem, Katz? You don’t have enough faith in people.” Phoebe zoomed in. “And now we have—taa-daa—our resident deity eating tuna on rye!” The camera lurched closer, breathing down Julie’s neck as she drank milk. “
Milk,
great, very symbolic. Take another swallow. Next comes—could it be? Yes, she’s actually placing the glass in the dishwasher; she’s not leaving it on the table for her friend Phoebe to deal with. We’ve seen a real miracle today, folks. Next she’ll be feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and booting the devil’s butt.”

At least Phoebe’s obnoxious hobby was keeping her busy. At least she wasn’t spending all her time drinking.

Julie had broached the issue subtly, or so she thought, taping her column on substance abuse to the temple door with a 3x5 card saying, “If you ever want to talk about this, I’d be open to it.” The next day the clipping reappeared on Julie’s computer. “If you ever want to mind your own business,” ran Phoebe’s note, “I’d be open to it.”

Every Friday afternoon, Julie and Melanie would attempt to cleanse the cottage completely. A morbid game, this business of searching out Phoebe’s little liquor bottles and flushing away their contents, a kind of perverse and mandatory Easter egg hunt conducted for the rabbit’s feces. At Angel’s Eye the damn things might turn up anywhere—the washing machine, the toilet tank, a hollowed-out dictionary. Once, when Melanie was checking the oil in her Honda, her eye wandered to the plastic container of windshield cleaning fluid. On intuition she uncapped it, dipping in her finger. Rum. A few days later, while commemorating the wreck of
Lucy II,
Julie noticed a curious purple cast to the flame. The beacon was running on gin.

Intervene? wondered Julie. Kick her habit? The obvious option, of course: a half-hour of pressing her fingers against Phoebe’s forehead, driving out the desire. But that way Phoebe would never learn to stand on her own two feet. That way Phoebe would never grow up. As with the rest of Phoebe’s species, Julie must not let her become dependent upon supernatural solutions, trading one addiction for another.

Baby bank aborted.

Blown to bits.

She had a thousand enemies, each waiting for her to start acting like God.

For all of Julie’s valiant efforts, for all the rum and gin she poured down the sink, Aunt Georgina remained dissatisfied. Georgina the whiner, the worrier. She called Julie selfish and solipsistic. She accused her of cowardice and denial, of treating symptoms instead of causes—of failing her best friend. How long, Julie wondered, before Georgina’s misplaced resentment came boiling over? How long before a major showdown?

It happened at breakfast. Sunday, 11:05
A.M.

“Cure her,” snapped her aunt. “You understand, Julie? I can’t take this anymore.” She nodded toward the bathroom, where Phoebe was loudly purging herself of the previous night’s binge. “Maybe your father didn’t want any interventions, but
I
do.”

Julie whipped up the French toast batter. Cure her. Intervene. It sounded so simple, so righteous, but Georgina couldn’t begin to grasp the historical and cosmological implications. “Humanity—and this includes Phoebe—will never learn self-reliance if it’s got me to bail it out.”

“Come off it.”

Phoebe’s retching reverberated through the cottage, a sound like a canvas tent being torn in half.

“Know what we should do?” said Julie. “We should go to some Al-Anon meetings, you and me.” She set a slice of bread afloat on the batter; a raft of whole wheat. “They’re for people whose kids and spouses drink too much.”

“I don’t want a meeting, Julie, I want a miracle.”

Julie laid the sopping bread on the griddle. “Look, she functions, doesn’t she? Keeps the books straight as an arrow, doesn’t bawl out the customers, never smashes up the car …”

“Fix her.” Georgina pushed a slice of bread into the batter like a sadist drowning a kitten. “Just fucking fix her.”

“You think it’s easy for me to say no? I
love
Phoebe, damn it—but we must consider the greater good.”

“What greater good? Phoebe’s killing herself.”

“If you can’t see my logic, Georgina, there’s no point in our talking.”

“Even
you
can’t see your logic, shithead.”

“I don’t think name-calling is necessary.”

“Shithead. Asshole. Turd.”

Sliding the spatula along the griddle, Julie pried up the half-cooked bread and flung it across the kitchen as if firing a catapult. “I have
enemies,
Georgina! They’re out to get me!” She backed away from the stove. “Eat this crap yourself—I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Same here, you little snake, which is exactly what you are, Julie Katz, a slimy, selfish snake.”

Gills gasping with frustration, ears hot with Georgina’s anger, Julie ran from the kitchen, dashed across the jetty, and dove into the soft and understanding bay.

Bix said, “I’m sorry.” His face resembled a meteor, ashen, craggy, cold.

“Sorry?” said Julie. Now what? He was dropping her for some pert little Princeton philosophy major?

“We’re twenty thousand readers shy, and that’s that. Tony wants a pet-care column instead. Mike Alonzo will write it.”

“Pet care? You’re not serious.” A hundred-degree tear rolled from Julie’s right eye. She pressed a crisp Gluttony Forgiven napkin to her nose and blew. “You should’ve fought for me. Pet care?”

“I did fight for you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I did.”

So it was over. The Covenant of Uncertainty had become fish wrap and hamster litter, there was nothing left for her but confusion and guilt, nothing but Georgina’s misguided anger and God’s malicious indifference. “Be honest, Bix, you never believed in my ministry.” The tear reached her lips, and she licked. Battery acid. “You pretended to care because you had the hots for me.”

Bix crushed a roll in his fist, the crumbs spurting between his fingers. “Dammit, Julie, I’ve been running interference for you ever since you walked into my office. The entire staff thinks you’re crazy, you know.”

“What about you? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Sometimes. Yes. This whole God’s daughter mystique—why do you push it so hard? You don’t have to pretend around
me.
I’m not one of your stupid readers.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“
Prove
that you’re God’s daughter. My standards aren’t high—take the wart off my ass, fly, anything.”

“I don’t do proofs, sweetheart. Not for traitors.”

Bix pulverized another roll. “You little fraud.”

One word,
fraud,
that was all it took, and Julie was on her feet, sprinting out of the restaurant and down the stairs to the casino floor. Traitor, traitor.
I did fight for you:
oh, sure, Bix. Sure. Traitorous bastard.

Such clockless worlds, these casinos. It always seemed like the same hour at Dante’s, Caesar’s, or the Nugget, always the same day—three-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, Julie decided.

Her ministry mattered. Why couldn’t Tony Biacco see that? “Heaven Help You” had forestalled dozens of suicides, divorces, wife batterings, and child beatings. Last week, a compulsive gambler had written to say that, thanks to Sheila, he’d finally kicked the blackjack habit.

Blackjack: a fine game, Julie mused, sidling toward a remote and unpatronized table. She put on her sunglasses—the dealer might be a Sheila fan—and bought a hundred dollars in chips. At least she wouldn’t have to disguise herself much longer; soon Sheila’s photo would fade from the communal memory. The dealer, a grim, slender woman who handled the cards with the professional ennui of a whore unzipping flies, glanced nervously toward the Wheel of Wealth, as if being watched, tested.

Ah, sweet mammon. Luck, or God, was with Julie, tripling her investment in ten minutes. No matter what she did—splits, doubles, insurance bets—she came out on top. She might have a failed ministry, a traitorous lover, an hysterical aunt, and a rummy friend, but tonight she’d get rich.

Darkness slid across the table, human in shape, thick and palpable as spilled ink. “Vanish,” a man said. The grim woman departed, the shadow stayed. “You picked the right table—this is where the big winners play.” The dealer’s voice conjured a vanished elegance, European aristocrats listening to Mozart. Julie didn’t look up. A dealer was a dealer.

She placed four ten-dollar chips on the table, twice her usual bet. Slap, an ace of hearts for the player, slap, a ten of spades for the dealer. Tony wanted pet advice. Dear Dr. Doolittle: My canary has stopped singing. Why?—Worried In Milwaukee.

Dear Worried: Because it can’t stand you.

“I’ve been thinking about your question,” said the dealer.

Julie fixed on her ace. The pip, a large red heart, seemed to move. To vibrate. Throb. Lub-dub. She blinked. Lub-dub. A beating heart? Was her mind becoming unhinged?

She faced the dealer. On neither of his previous visitations had she appreciated how handsome Andrew Wyvern was. High cheeks, obsidian eyes, strong sculpted lips. His beard, gray and soft, seemed a thing more of fur than whiskers: a werewolf in bloom, shaved everywhere but his jaw. “What question?” she asked as the scent of honeyed oranges drifted into her nostrils.

“About God.” Slap, slap. A three of diamonds for the player, a down card for Wyvern. “You wanted to know why she allows evil.” His tuxedo gleamed like black marble. Julie beckoned: hit me. Slap, a ten of clubs, making her ace count low. She beckoned. Slap, a jack of diamonds, twenty-four, bust. The devil collected her bet. “I noted that power corrupts,” he said, whisking away her cards, “but there’s more to it.” Julie bet fifty dollars. Slap, slap. A king of clubs for her, a nine of spades for Wyvern. “Everybody thinks if he were God, he would do a better job. Such vanity. The math alone would defeat most of us.”