When It Happens to You (8 page)

 

Most nondeciduous plants can survive without light for a few days. But after a week of halted photosynthesis, the chlorophyll dwindles to a disastrous level, the plant's leaves brown and fall off, and soon the plant withers and dies.

Upon finding his world stripped of every trace of femininity, Oliver initially responded with incredulity and outrage. He railed against his once true ally with a frightening furor, only to be met again and again by Marina's steely resolve. He cried, cajoled, and negotiated. He threatened with sustained bouts of holding his breath until he swooned. And then, like the maple leaves that burn the brightest before they lose their color and fall to the earth, so did Oliver languish.

It was following a particularly ragged battle over a shell-pink angora sweater with an embellished rhinestone collar that Oliver had obviously stolen from a classmate and then hidden behind his headboard that Marina lost it. Overwhelmed by frustration when Oliver refused to return the sweater and apologize, she used the last vestige of power she felt she wielded over him. She threatened to cut his hair.

Oliver stared at her, disbelief mingling with fear.

“Please don't, Mommy,” he pleaded. “I'll give it back. I'll say I'm sorry. And I won't fight anymore. I promise.”

He was true to his word. He stopped fighting—but he also stopped
being
. He became complacent and absent. Marina felt as if her child had been taken from her, replaced by this mild, compliant ghost. And though Marina was a woman who had spent the greater part of her life resolutely single, for the first time she felt the ache of being truly alone.

 

“It's your turn!” Charlotte called out after swinging herself across the rings. She had finally grasped the concept of momentum and how it carried her from ring to ring like a bird in flight, and her face glowed with the rush of triumph. Oliver sat a few feet away, pointedly ignoring her as he traced random shapes in the sand with a stick. He wore khaki shorts and a solid gray T-shirt like a wrongly convicted prisoner facing a life of incarceration. Regardless of the fact that Marina had purchased an entire new wardrobe for him full of interesting graphic shirts in vibrant colors, Oliver deliberately sought out the same shorts and gray T-shirt every day, even taking them out of the laundry hamper before they had gone through the wash, as if to announce his resignation and reproach to Marina.

“Come on, Ollie!” Charlotte stood in front of him with her bare feet planted in the sand.

Marina knelt down and rubbed her son's back through his gray T-shirt. He swatted her hand away and went back to his shapes.

“I think you should maybe just go again, sweetie,” Marina told the girl who was now impatiently hopping on one foot in front of Oliver. “He's going to sit this one out.” Charlotte glanced from Marina to her father, who stood a slight distance away.

“Go on, Charlotte,” Phillip said. “Oliver is taking a break.”

Marina had been avoiding Phillip for weeks, but she had been caught by a phone number that she didn't recognize and mistakenly thought was her pharmacy. In her hurry to get off the phone, she agreed to a playdate with Charlotte but insisted that they meet at another park, without explanation. It was clear that Phillip intuited her reluctance to engage; Marina just let him assume that it was due to the kiss, which now seemed to her embarrassingly inconsequential.

Phillip walked over to Marina and sat down in the sand next to her.

“Hey,” he said. “Why don't we let them play together and we can go catch up?”

“They
are
playing together,” she replied without looking at him. “If you want to sit down somewhere and make phone calls, go ahead. I can watch the two of them.”

Phillip leaned back in an unconscious protective move. “No, I'm fine. I don't have . . . I just meant . . .”

“I'm staying here,” she said.

“Daddy!” Charlotte hopped up, trying unsuccessfully to reach the rings on her own. “Help me up!” Phillip stood and lingered for a moment beside Marina, who was hunched over Oliver like a shell.

“Daddy!” Charlotte whined.

He shook his head slightly and walked over to give his daughter a boost. She swung across the rings again, grinning; when she reached the end, he held up his arms and she fell into them.

“Oliver doesn't want to play with me anymore,” Charlotte said, ostensibly as a secret but loud enough for her friend to hear.

Phillip glanced over at Oliver, who kept his head down. If he heard, he gave no indication.

It was Marina who spoke up. “That's not true, is it, Ollie? You want to play with your friend, don't you?” Oliver shrugged. He reached out his hand, erasing the shapes he made in the sand, and then began drawing them again.

“Ollie,” Marina urged, “if you don't play with Charlotte, she's going to think that you don't want to be friends.”

Oliver shrugged again, remaining silent.

In the weeks since his surrender, it felt to Marina as though she were watching him die. In a way, she was. She had effectively killed Olivia by excising her from their lives, though the husk of the living, breathing body of Oliver remained. She was reminded of attending her great-grandmother's open-casket funeral as a child. Marina had stared in bewilderment, transfixed by the immobile body of the woman who had been teaching her how to crochet just days before. She waited for her great-grandmother to move and break the spell, until at last her parents nudged her along, embarrassed by her behavior.

“I was waiting for Nana to move,” she had explained in a voice a little too loud.

“Don't be silly,” her mother had whispered. “Nana isn't there. It's only her body. Nana's gone to heaven.”

Now Marina stared at her son with the same equivocal hope, willing him to return to her, fearing that in her resolve to save his life, she had effectively extinguished it. Where had her son gone to, she wondered, and how could she call him back?

 

On a Saturday morning in August, she left Oliver at home with the neighbor girl, a sweet-natured teenager whom Marina had known since she was a girl, and took the opportunity to run errands. She was waiting at the coffeehouse counter after having placed her order when her eye happened upon a dress in the shop window next door. It was a children's clothing store named Bees and Buttercups. A broad gilded sign hung above the entrance featuring a plump bumblebee grasping a flower in his anthropomorphic hand. With the school year beginning, all of the clothes on display were imbued with the hopefulness of the new and unknown. The dress was light cotton, with petal sleeves, a pin-tucked bodice, and a silk ribbon tied at the waist. A pair of red leather Mary-Janes were set on the vintage suitcase display next to the dress, delicately crossed at the toes as though in an expression of girlish flirtation.

Marina stepped back into the coffeehouse and took a section of a newspaper that had been left on a table by the door. As she maneuvered her way through the crowd of people, she happened to see Phillip hunched over a too-small table with a woman who, even from the back, Marina could tell was his wife.

Before she could find a suitable hiding place, Phillip's eyes met hers. He blinked and raised his arm in a half wave. His wife spun around and looked to see where he was waving.

Marina took a deep breath and stopped by the table. She deliberately looked at his wife first.

“Hi. How are you?”

Phillip's wife ran her hand through her hair, and Marina could tell that she couldn't recall her name. She waited a second to see if Phillip would introduce her. He didn't.

“I'm Marina. Oliver's mom. Charlotte's friend?”

Phillip's wife smiled and nodded. “Yes. Charlotte talks about Oliver all the time,” she said. “I'm Greta. I know we've met, but . . . nice to meet you again.”

Marina glanced over at Phillip who stared down dully at his empty coffee cup.

“Large Americano for Marina!” the young man behind the counter called out. “Marina!”

“That's me,” Marina said, turning to leave. “Have a good weekend, you two.”

Phillip looked up at her then. “Thank you,” he said.

 

She walked out with her coffee in hand and straight into the shop next door. Up and down the aisles she strode, trying to find something that might please Oliver. She held up a little T-shirt with the Ramones on it, hoodies with
PRAY FOR SURF
hand-embroidered on the sleeves, small porkpie hats for parents who, she supposed, wanted to fashion their male offspring to look like the Rat Pack in miniature.

A mother stood at the back of the store outside the fitting room while the elderly saleswoman folded a brightly hued sweater. They chatted about when the new collection was expected and if it was worth waiting for everything to go on sale. After a moment, the mother poked her head behind the plum velvet curtain.

“Do you need any help in there, honey?”

“No. I can do it myself!” came the insistent reply from behind the curtain.

The mother laughed and retreated. She picked up a catalogue and thumbed through it. “She's always been so independent,” she said. “From the time she could speak, I swear to God!”

The curtain parted and out stepped the little girl. She shyly tucked her dark hair behind one ear and modeled the white eyelet dress, turning this way and that while the women sighed and ahhed as though they were seeing the girl in her wedding dress for the first time.

The mother clapped her hands together. “That will be just
perfect
at Mom-Mom's party, won't it?”

The girl beamed. “I love it, Mommy. I
love
it!”

While her mother handed over her credit card, the girl happily examined the charm bracelets and other trinkets, holding them up to the light and then putting them back.

“I didn't think we would find the perfect one so fast!” the mother told the saleswoman. “I just hope she doesn't grow out of it before the party!”

Marina approached the saleswoman as the pair exited the store hand in hand.

“May I help you?” the saleswoman asked Marina.

“Yes,” Marina said. “I'd like to buy the dress in the window.

“Of course,” the saleswoman said. She walked to the display and stepped up on the platform to retrieve the dress.

While the saleswoman removed the dress from the mannequin, Marina glanced around the shop, marveling at the striking combinations of color, cut, and cloth. Look at all this prettiness, Marina thought. Look at all this light.

“I knew this wouldn't last up there long,” the saleswoman said as she smoothed out the fabric of the dress. “It's just darling. Would you like it gift wrapped?”

She brought the dress to Marina, who touched the soft silk of the ribbon between her thumb and finger.

“Yes, please,” Marina said. “It's for my daughter.”

URSA MINOR

FOR THE GREATER PART OF
his twenties and half of his thirties, Peter Layton's longest-standing relationship was with a young male polar bear named Pooka. Pooka was not a real polar bear but an animated one, and though Peter's life was inextricably linked with Pooka's, Peter and Pooka never actually met. Theirs was an intimate relationship consummated in postproduction by a team of highly skilled computer animators. Peter worked with a script in front of a “green screen” while a director and skeleton crew guided Peter from gaffer-taped mark to mark on the concrete sound stage in Queens, New York. But to all the children of the world the places that Peter and Pooka visited were legion.

Of course, when Peter first arrived in New York City upon graduating from Yale Drama, the last thing he had on his mind was children's television. His turn as Trigorin in
The Seagull
had been hailed as “superlative” (according to the college newspaper), matched only by his interpretation of Richard Roma in
Glengarry Glen Ross
, in which local reviewers found in Peter that intangible fusion of intensity and irresistible insouciance—in short, the elusive charisma that is the golden ticket for any young actor. He moved into a Williamsburg loft with a couple of his former classmates and gave himself a year to concentrate on his indisputably promising acting career before even considering a day job.

At first, everything seemed to go as planned. He landed a respectable off-off Broadway job within a month of living in New York. It was an original play written by a young playwright (and former Yalie), produced by a theater company comprised of moonlighting Hollywood actors with serious theater pretensions. The play was middling at best, but Peter was extremely well received and clearly shone above the other considerably more experienced thespians. Though the play was not financially lucrative, it managed to secure him representation with a small boutique agency specializing in theater, and
New York
magazine chose his picture to front a featured article showcasing young talent.

And then nothing.

He got plenty of auditions and a respectable amount of callbacks, but the feedback was always frustratingly difficult to decipher. “Too intense.” “Uncommitted.” “Distracted.” “Too good-looking.” “Not good-looking enough.” Among the most maddening was when a ginger-haired, pockmarked casting director, pressed by Peter's agent as to why he hadn't called his client back for a bit part in an independent movie, confided, “He just didn't
sparkle
.”

The agent passed this on to Peter as an accusation.

“What am I? Fucking Christmas-tree tinsel?” Peter vented to his roommate Ben as they walked to the L train. Ben worked at a juice bar in the East Village and commuted daily.

Ben shrugged. “I'm a Jew. We don't know from tinsel.”

“I was good. I know I was. The way the writer looked at me when I was shaking their hands—”

“You shake their hands?” Ben asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Of course I do. Don't you?”

Ben shook his head. “No.”

“Wait! What, you just leave?” Peter wasn't through venting, but he was intrigued. “You just wave or something?”

“I don't want them to think I'm kissing their ass,” Ben said. “Even though I would gladly kiss their ass if it would get me in someone's movie. I'd put my tongue right in there—”

“All right, all right.” Peter laughed. “I don't think that's Kosher.”

“I would kiss the ass of a pig on the Sabbath if it would get me hired,” Ben went on. Commiserating about auditions and rejections was one of the best things about being friends with someone who struggled with the same ridiculous career. Peter was alternately amused and relieved whenever Ben would rant about losing out on a part. And while it shamed Peter to admit it, he was occasionally consoled by the fact that Ben had experienced even less success upon leaving Yale than Peter had. Over the years, Ben had booked fewer than a handful of parts in tiny productions, and the week before, Peter had come across an application for the LSAT on the kitchen counter while picking up his mail. Before too long, Peter figured, his friend and confidant would formally abandon his stalled acting career and head back to school to learn the family profession.

When they arrived at the dingy staircase that led down into the subway station, Peter stopped and began rummaging through his backpack.

“You go on,” he told Ben. “I got a meeting here.”

“No shit?” Ben turned around. “And here I was feeling sorry for you.”

Peter retrieved a Chinese-food menu with an address scrawled across it. “You can still feel sorry for me. It's for a children's television show.”

Ben laughed. “You're about as kid-friendly as an unsupervised wading pool.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence” Peter said, and headed west. He turned and yelled, “Yo! Bring home some wheatgrass!”

Ben waved his hand over his shoulder as he descended underground.

That night, Peter's agent left a message on his answering machine. He was being called back.

A week later, he was hired.

 

The flight to Los Angeles was packed and seemed more full of babies and children than usual. Peter wore his sunglasses and Yankees cap and made sure to speak as little as possible so as to attract the least amount of attention. It was over two years since he had left
Peter & Pooka
in disgrace, though according to the press release, Peter had left after fifteen years to “pursue other ventures.” The network vehemently denied that there were drugs involved so as not to sully the magnificently successful brand that was
Peter & Pooka
, and except for the
New York Post
staff photographer who had snapped Peter leaving Beth Israel Hospital—where he had been treated for “exhaustion”—and printed it with the crushingly emasculating headline
IS PETER POOPED?
his reputation as the squeaky-clean companion of Pooka remained intact.

The scandal surrounding Peter's departure was quickly and willfully forgotten by the program's loyal following, a forgiving group of fans primarily under the age of five. Their mothers forgave Peter, too, and perhaps were even titillated by his transgression. For years these same mothers watched Peter frolic in foreign countries, nibbling food they would never try, learning about exotic cultures they would never visit, and they were charmed by the seeming guilelessness and enthusiasm that Peter projected. Just when their lives had begun to be weighed down by the exhausting pressures of motherhood, and as their husbands retreated into earning for a family that they would rarely see, Peter offered them a fantasy. He was as much of a companion to the mothers as to their preschool-aged children. He embodied a collective emotional fantasy—a lovable man-child who, unlike their husbands, never got angry, never withdrew or neglected them. He was always there to distract and charm, clearly intelligent and reassuringly familiar. But he wasn't real. Until that picture surfaced in the
Post
, Peter was indistinguishable from his funny, sunny counterpart, and then overnight he became a real man who had become intimately reacquainted with his shadow. The network fired him, but the mothers secretly loved him for it.

Squeezing past the legs of a businessman on the aisle and an acne-afflicted teenager with headphones in the center seat, Peter sat by the window and stared out at the rain-soaked tarmac. It had been raining for days in New York, and he felt a twinge of hope as he visualized the mild weather in California. He was planning to stay with his twin sister, Lindsay, who had moved to Los Angeles years ago and had since found considerable success as a landscape artist for the affluent beach set. Lindsay had little formal training, but she had the gift of an intuitive eye inherited from their mother—a seemingly effortless way of creating an atmosphere of style and ease. Lindsay showed her clients a lifestyle as much as where to plant the perennials.

She had been dogging her brother for weeks to visit, knowing how difficult life had become for him in New York. And although Peter had no want of money after fifteen years on the television show and could easily have paid for a hotel, his sister insisted that he stay with her. So he took her up on her offer, comforted by the thought of spending time with the one person to whom he felt he never had to explain anything.

“Excuse me? Sir? Mr. Layton?”

Peter turned to see a flight attendant kneeling in the aisle next to the businessman. She was a trim woman with bright-pink lipstick and streaked blond hair pulled back in a severe twist.

“Would you mind coming with me?” When she smiled, Peter noticed a smear of pink lipstick smudged against her white teeth.

Peter was startled. “Is there something wrong?”

His two flying companions looked at him with vague interest. The teenager took the headphones out of his ears and squinted at him.

“Dude, I know you,” he said.

The flight attendant stood up and smoothed out her skirt. “I can carry your bag if it's in the overhead.”

“No,” Peter said. “I have my bag here.” He grabbed the magazines that he had stashed in the seat pocket and squeezed his way back out, apologizing as he tripped over the businessman's legs.

“You're that polar-bear guy!” the teenager said. A few heads turned in his direction. “Trippy,” he heard the boy say as he hurried down the aisle after the flight attendant.

There was a group of four other flight attendants waiting for him in the galley closest to the front, and they squealed when Peter entered, concerned and confused.

“I'm Marcie,” the first attendant said. “We have an extra seat for you in first class, but we didn't want to say anything in front of the other passengers.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “That's nice.” He smiled at the grinning women.

One of the flight attendants, who stood at least two inches taller than him in flat shoes, grasped his hand. “But it's on condition that you sign this for my son.” She giggled and thrust out a ticket printout and a green Sharpie, wrapping Peter's fingers around it. “He loves you.
Loves
you. He sleeps with Pooka and dressed like you for Halloween two years in a row. I'm not kidding!”

Peter obediently began to sign his name on the ticket. Another of the women, short and stout with a frizzy mop of hair dyed a burgundy color that never would have occurred in nature, took a steady stream of pictures with her cell phone.

“He looked so cute in his striped purple turtleneck,” the flight-attendant mother for whom Peter was signing the ticket told her coworkers.

Peter handed the ticket back and looked to the other women. A brunette with eyes that seemed far too large for her face handed him a ticket of her own.

“Can you make it out to Sailor? She's my niece.”

“Sailor? That's an interesting name,” Peter said. He was overtired from not having slept the night before and for a moment could not remember how to spell “Sailor.”

“I know, it had to grow on me,” the woman confessed. “Her daddy is a Marine.”

“
I
didn't know that,” Marcie said. “That's just precious!”

An Asian man poked his head in the galley and asked for a glass of water by motioning with his hands, pantomiming taking a drink. The burgundy-haired flight attendant who clearly had seniority shooed him away with her hands. “You need to take your seat now.”

The man pointed to his seat, where his wife sat with a baby in her lap. He made the motion again for water.

“Sir, you really need to take your seat.
Now,
” the woman said. She put her hand on his back and another on his shoulder and pushed him in the direction of his seat. “Go. Move. Sit.”

The man walked back to his seat and sat down.

“Sorry about that,” she said to Peter, laughing. “Some people just can't follow rules.”

Peter looked at the man, who was being questioned by his wife in Korean. As the husband unleashed his frustration on his wife, their baby began to wail. The passengers nearby rolled their eyes and covered their ears.

“I think the water was for the baby,” Peter said.

“They always say that,” the woman told him.

The captain came on the loudspeaker, announcing in a friendly Texan drawl the plane's position in line for takeoff. Peter felt a surge of relief knowing that soon he would be released from the women's clutches. He posed for a picture with each flight attendant individually, then for a group picture snapped on self-timer with a point-and-shoot camera precariously perched on top of the galley cart. At their urging he acted out the show's stock phrase—“Pep up, Pooka! Peter's here!”—and then was shown by Marcie to first class, collapsing into his seat, hot and flushed, his hair sticking in ribbons to the perspiration on his forehead.

He felt as though he had never before paid so much for a ticket in his life.

 

Upon exiting the terminal at baggage claim, Peter was smacked in the face with a gust of hot, tobacco-scented air. All of the smokers stood huddled in groups, sucking on the cigarettes as if they were oxygen. Peter, a casual smoker back when he was at Yale and later when he was a promising actor in New York—and then secretly for the past fifteen years because of clause number 34b in his contract that stated that he would be fined in increasing increments if a picture of him smoking was ever published—walked over to what looked to be a sixtysomething career smoker and asked to bum a cigarette. When the end was ignited and Peter got a good pull, he thanked her and walked to the curb, watching the police officers in bright-green safety vests harass the drivers and arbitrarily ticket them if they failed to move along with sufficient haste. Peter counted at least three teary reunions interrupted by one of these stocky, ill-tempered oafs. One longhaired young man in a surfing hoodie, who had clearly been looking forward to his reunion with his girlfriend, cocked his head and wrinkled his brow.