All of Us and Everything (23 page)

As Liv got dressed that morning she thought about a sex addict named Glenn she'd met at the rehab facility. He'd told her how it all started way back for him with a girl named Pippa. He called her his point of entry. And Liv realized her own point of entry: In the summer of 1988, young Teddy Whistler was Liv's first cherry-pick. In fact, she'd found him in a newspaper.

Augusta had encouraged the girls to read the news every morning. She subscribed to
The New York Times
and
Washington Post,
as well as a few smaller local papers, which was where Teddy Whistler first appeared. The first story was of him saving an overweight woman from South Philly from drowning. Liv still remembered the woman's name, Tammy Fountaine. There'd been a picture of Tammy with her arm around Teddy's narrow shoulders, smiling broadly, thankful to be alive. In that picture, the front of Teddy's hair was a little sun-bleached and she decided she had to meet him.

Teddy Whistler needed to save people, and she needed to be saved. From what? Well, from the unbearable weight of the ordinary and a future that seemed to stretch before her with preordained ordinariness.

Now, as she brushed her teeth in the same mirror that she'd stared into while brushing her teeth in the summer of 1988, she pictured Teddy as she first saw him—in the ticket booth on the boardwalk. (One of the newspapers had mentioned his summer job.) He stood there behind the glass—as if on display. He was tan and bored, pushing up his glasses and fiddling with the cash when no one was in line, as if perpetually on the brink of stealing it all.

She cased the joint, finding out she wasn't the first to be impressed by his heroism. One girl in particular had beaten her: Amanda Cross. She had long kinky hair, tightly permed and highly sprayed. She occasionally popped up with a bunch of other girls to tap on the glass of the booth and generally harass him. Twice, she stepped inside and Frenched him for about twenty seconds.

Liv thought, for the first time in her life, of a specific upside:
Good. He's the type to have a girlfriend,
and that this would play to her advantage. Of course, she thought she was prettier than the girl and that she could take him.

One night, Liv fixed her hair, swabbed her eyes with eyeliner, and paced in front of his booth, ignoring him. She paced until she felt his eyes on her, then she glanced at him. He nodded. She nodded back but then left.

She waited ten minutes and then returned. She paced some more and, looking a little teary, she walked up to the booth.

“What is it?” Teddy spoke to her like he knew her. “What's wrong?”

“Have you seen a guy, waiting here, an hour ago, maybe more?”

“I don't know. What'd he look like?”

“Dark hair and eyes. He's Lebanese.”

“I don't know what Lebanese people look like really.”

Liv covered her mouth and started to cry.

“Wait, wait. What happened?”

She walked a few feet away and stared at the passing crowed and beyond them, out at the ocean, as if this Lebanese boy might be lost at sea.

A father walked up to the booth, asking for a bunch of tickets for his rowdy kids. Teddy rang him up and then stepped out of the booth.

Another worker shouted, “Don't leave the booth unmanned!”

Teddy told him to shut up.

Liv was windblown. The night was warm.

He said, “Did this guy stand you up or something?”

Liv told Teddy how she and the Lebanese boy had met, how she'd snuck out after curfew, staying up with him until dawn. “He was leaving today to catch a plane to go back home. I was supposed to meet him here an hour ago, but I fell asleep. We'd been up all night. And I missed it. I didn't even get to say goodbye and now I'll never see him again.”

“Jesus,” Teddy said. “I'm sorry.”

Liv started crying and he hugged her, saying, “It's okay. Don't cry. It's going to be okay.”

Eventually, she touched the gold chain that sat flat and glinting on his collarbones. She touched it with just one finger. She looked up and he kissed her. That was all it took.

Over the summer, they got naked together. They told each other secrets, some true, some false. While his parents were out, Liv wandered through his house in her bra and panties. It was a crappy little house that smelled of mildew. His dad was especially hard on him, by Teddy's account. She told him that her mother had had sex with strangers and that her sisters were only half sisters, which she was pretty sure was true. But she never brought him home to meet her own family. She wanted to keep him to herself.

Augusta was no fan of Teddy Whistler. Liv came home drunk on peach schnapps more than once. When she missed her third curfew, Augusta told Liv she could no longer see Teddy and that she was grounded. All communication was severed. Liv explained this to Teddy on the phone while her mother stood beside her.

Teddy knew something was wrong. He knew she still liked him. And there was only one line of communication still open between them. The newspaper. He saved a dog from a burning car, his way of telling Liv that he was waiting for her.

She knew that he'd done it for her the moment she saw the headline and his picture—him and the dog, Rusty, in front of the black hull of a VW Bug.

She snuck out after everyone had gone to bed. She went to his house, a ranch, and knocked on his bedroom window. They skinny-dipped in his neighbor's aboveground pool, in the dark, bobbing in the shallow end, drunk on peach schnapps.

And he told her that Tammy Fountaine faked drowning for twenty bucks—another five to call the paper. And Rusty was never in the car to begin with. Teddy talked a neighbor kid into the idea that he'd seen Teddy pull the dog out of the car. Why'd it catch fire to begin with? Well, that was what would put Teddy in juvie. Starting fires crossed a line.

She never told him the truth—that there was no Lebanese romance. Maybe she should have. But the truth was that she was falling in love with him and it scared her, especially now that she knew he was a fraud. He wasn't going to help her get out of Ocean City. He was doomed to live here forever, faking acts of desperate heroism.

She broke up with him, but she didn't tell her mother. No, she wanted her mother to think that she was going to run off with Teddy Whistler.

After the breakup, he faked his own escape from the neighbor's kinkajou. It was the third write-up in the paper. The headline read: “Local Hero Performs a Hat Trick.” Another wrote: “Teen Hero Saves Himself.” One other paper called them “A Trio of Miracles.” Liv saw them all, but she'd started to read the engagement pages. She realized she could be saved by better.

Teddy tried to call to see if she'd seen the news, but Augusta hung up on him over and over.

Eventually, he showed up on the front lawn—drunk and shouting—his glasses crooked on his face. “This time it was real, Liv!” he said. “I promise.”

She felt like her heart was being ripped from her body. She wanted to run out of the house into his arms. She wanted him to lift her up and then, when her mother started screaming from the front door, they'd tear off down the street.

But she didn't because the emotion itself—love, pounding inside of her—was too terrifying. Instead, she fought with her mother.

But she could hear him, shouting, “Liv! Don't leave me alone like this! I love you!”

Liv walked to the window now and remembered that night, how he was shouting out his love and staggering around, and her mother ran to the kitchen phone to call the cops.

And eventually, Liv told the cops the truth—that he'd faked all those feats of heroism. She didn't have to. They hadn't even pressed her on it. She did it because she knew they'd probably take him away, and if he stayed here she'd give in to him; she knew she would.

It was an ending for Liv. From then on, she would pick more wisely—men who had something tangible to give, not this endless roaring emotion—something quantifiable.

(Not that it had always worked out. She'd dated two Olympians before realizing that it was sometimes hard to monetize the status. Senators were always failed experiments. Rock stars required too much nurturing. And while dating an NBA player, she'd found the wives and girlfriends to be the most viciously competitive women she'd ever met. The hierarchy was Byzantine; it was just untenable.)

And her father showing up was an ending too. Didn't his newfound honesty mean that he wasn't going to keep giving to her?

Liv thought back over her therapists. They'd wanted her to talk about her father, of course. She'd invented bankers and corporate stiffs—the type to work hard, drink too much, and remain emotionally aloof. One time, she talked about her father the spy but touted the old party line—there was no spy. Her mother had sex with strangers. The therapist, an overly preening young woman named Cheryl, liked this very much.

They all seemed to know that she needed that love from a father. How else could they explain her marriages to wealthy men, the longing to be taken care of?

She'd always countered that she wasn't longing. She was practical. Men and their various weaknesses, what could she do? It would have been like having a superpower and refusing to use it. Her looks, her cunning, these were her gifts, and they were profitable.

But now, how many marriages could she possibly still have in her? She was getting older, and the universe that she'd always relied on when she was in a tough spot turned out not to be the universe at all. It was her father and it was very likely that he was closing up shop.

Liv sat on the bed she'd slept in as a child. She thought of the nights she'd lie here, thinking of Teddy Whistler, the little punk. What if instead of shutting down when he cried out on the front lawn, something inside her had opened up, letting in all that love?

She'd be a different person.

But no, she was the kind of person to take her niece's iPad once again, which is exactly what she did, and she used it to look up Clifford Wells, once and for all.

This was simply a coping mechanism, she told herself. She was nervous and this was how she dealt with anxiety—well, in addition to pharmacology.

No one is perfect.

Except, perhaps, Clifford Wells.

She spent a couple of hours draining the Web of all information.

His
Estimated Assets and Income
were in the tens of millions, including
Family Money,
and a house in the Hamptons that had to be worth five million at least.

He had an incredibly high
Accessibility Rating,
as calculated by Liv herself. He went to openings, showed up at film festivals, had a family that popped up in society pages. It would be easy to orchestrate a chance encounter.

What was his
Desperation Quotient
? Well, considering the fact that he hadn't seen his fiancé in a year and might not have been invited to pick her up at the airport, she figured he was feeling some desperation—either to get back in or to get out altogether.

But there was one thing that made Clifford Wells easier to pick off than any person she'd ever come across before, and that was his
Apparent Attraction in Type of Woman.
Clifford Wells had proven that he was attracted to Rockwell girls, and Ru, to be frank, wasn't the looker in the family. Liv was.

This only left her catchall
Intangibles
category. If she were to go for Clifford Wells, would her sister's engagement—the mere fact of that emotional baggage—play against Liv or would her deep understanding of Ru—and all of her deep-seated weaknesses—somehow play in Liv's favor?

Was she going to cherry-pick her sister's fiancé? Was he really her fiancé anymore anyway? She was supposed to be relying on her sisters. They were in this together now, so why did she have to rebel against it?

“What if I am Gong Gong?” she whispered. “What if it's just who I am?”

She heard the front door shut and then saw the top of her father's head as he took his little dog, Toby, and Ingmar for a walk. Toby was barking and bouncing at the passing cars. Ingmar glanced nervously at the little dog while trying to exude a regal detachment about the great outdoors. Her father seemed focused on Toby, encouraging the dog to do his business. “Make peepee, Toby. Concentrate now. Go on and drop a lily.”