Pedestrians seem to be looking at me strangely, as does a woman sitting on her front porch beneath another Obama sign. Everyone knows that I’m up to something. I might as well be wearing a ski mask. It dawns on me though that it probably doesn’t count as breaking and entering if you’ve got keys. Or if the chickenshit owner of the house has given you permission to enter. Or if you ring the doorbell first.
Maybe I
do
hate Curtis. Lots of people hate their fathers now. It’s very in fashion. It doesn’t have the social stigma that it used to. I’m in my midthirties anyway. I doubt if I even need a strong male figure in my life.
There’s no answer at the door. I ring the bell a few more times and clank the knocker like a fool, but there’s nothing still. I put my ear to the door. I don’t know what I’m expecting to hear, but it sounds like the ocean. Ashley’s Mercedes is parked in the street, but this doesn’t mean much. She rarely drives it, opting instead for a wildly expensive executive car service.
“Fuck it,” I say.
When I step into the house, I’m greeted by cool, comforting silence. “Hello?” I say. “Ashley?”
This house has endured three of my dad’s four wives, and so over the last few decades it’s been a home-size mood ring, changing to the styles and temperaments of its female inhabitants. Ashley’s tastes are very New York minimal, with open spaces and bold, white walls. Above the fireplace, there’s a black-and-white photograph of a younger version of Ashley from a shoot sometime in the nineties. She’s heroin-thin and angry, sitting on a wooden chair in a dark, ill-fitting dress. I remember seeing that picture before, back when she was just a sort-of-famous chick who showed up occasionally in tabloids, and not my stepmother. She met Curtis on the set of a movie based on one of his books. She played a beautiful girl at a cocktail party.
“Ashley?” I say again.
Along the walls there are more pictures of her. Some from her old job as a frowning model, and others from her new job as a cause-celeb. She’s arm-in-arm with Melissa Etheridge at something, and posing with Sean Penn at something else. In another picture she’s got her arm around Al Gore, who looks a little frightened. Quietly, still, I head upstairs. Ashley has reserved the wall space leading up the narrow stairwell for my dad’s most noteworthy literary accomplishments: two National Book Awards, two from the PEN/Faulkner, and three from the National Book Critics Circle. I stop, straightening one of the plaques, running my finger along a film of dust. If these were mine, I’d have them bronzed and mounted outside my house like the memorials in left field at Yankee Stadium. I’d force my neighbors and people passing by to stop and behold them on a daily basis.
Upstairs, the door to my dad’s office is open, and the room looks exactly like it’s always looked—dim, cluttered, and written in. The rest of the house smells like nothing I can identify, but this room smells like my dad. There are some plaques on the walls—some of his lesser awards—and a few framed book jackets. One of Allie’s pictures has made the wall as well. It’s from perhaps a few years ago, smiling stick people, before she’d started really putting in effort. There’s an old, yellowed Polaroid of my dad at a writers’ conference somewhere. He’s smiling in a parka, standing in front of an old brick building with some other smiling people I don’t know. If I’m not mistaken, one of them is a younger Nicholas Zuckerman. It must have been before my dad declared them to be rivals. Next to that, there’s another Polaroid. It takes me a minute to figure it out—the familiar woman in a long, black sweater. It’s Sonya, smiling shyly. It must be twenty years old. I’d forgotten how lovely she was.
Of the four walls in the room, one has been made into a giant bookcase that houses copies of all of Curtis’s publications. There’s a picture of Anna, Allie, and me, unframed, propped up against a row of books. I hold it close to my face, examining these people, a little surprised that it’s here. It’s as if this were a prop, something my dad planted here knowing that I’d see it when I was pissed at him.
A full row of the shelf is dedicated to
The Bridge That Wasn’t There
. Among the copies are three duplicate versions of one I’ve never noticed until now. Leafing through the first few pages, I see that it’s a first hardcover edition of the British printing. I think of Ian Barksdale in his plush office, arrogant in his appreciation of Curtis, and I make a note to take the book with me.
My dad’s desk is a mess. There are papers strewn about, a few tattered notebooks, and a copy of a very old book about the birds of the Northeastern United States. A few years ago he told me that the title of his new book was something about birds. There’s an old bronze marijuana pipe, and bottle of Jack Daniel’s is serving as a paperweight, empty aside from maybe a finger of brown liquid. I’m looking for a manuscript, which is usually in the top right-hand corner of this old desk. This is where whatever it is that he’s working on goes. But today there’s nothing, and I wonder if he’s smuggled it into our house. Maybe he’s hiding it from Ashley. I probably would, too.
I open one of his notebooks to a random page in the middle. Curtis’s handwriting is all but illegible, but I’m able to make out something:
He arrived to find that she’d left, discovering then that he was all alone. Even the birds had gone. They’d abandoned their nest on the windowsill, and he was somehow certain that they’d never come back.
“Wow,” I whisper in the quiet room, sad suddenly. These words seem worthy of more than scrawled ink in the middle of a notebook that looks recently pulled from the garbage. Another notebook is about half empty, the other half filled entirely with drawings of violets. Slung across his writing chair, the green bag, as he said, is small, like a mini-duffel, and it rattles when I pick it up. It sounds like a tin of vitamins or Tic Tacs. I unzip it and—
“Looking for something, Tom?”
I scream, literally scream, like a woman, dropping the bag on the floor, stumbling, and nearly upending myself. My stepmother is standing in the doorway, laughing, and I’m clutching my chest. Apparently, when startled, I become a Southern woman from the 1950s.
“Ashley . . . you scared the shit out of me.”
“I saw you coming from a block away. You are, without question, the worst burglar in America.”
Breathing, unclutching, I recover, which allows me to fully grasp the awkwardness of what I’m looking at. “OK then,” I say. “Maybe you should go put on some clothes.”
Most women, especially with a full block’s warning, would think to get dressed before terrifying a visitor—even an uninvited one. But not Ashley. She’s standing before me smoking a cigarette in nothing but a white towel. I can feel my face turning red. Her hair is heavy and wet, and her long, narrow feet have left damp indentations in the carpet. Ashley is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but that beauty is as frightening as it is impressive, like looking at a tiger at the zoo pacing behind a thin shield of glass.
There’s a big, scratchy laugh, and she flicks ashes onto the floor. “Oh, don’t be such a prude,
son
. We’re family, remember? Plus, this is
my
house. I’ll wear whatever I want. You think you can handle it?” She sounds drunk and, for some reason, vaguely foreign. She’s not at all foreign though—she’s from a suburb of Cleveland. My wife is convinced that Ashley stays so thin by doing cocaine, and so I look for signs of this. I really don’t know what I’m looking for, though, because, for me, cocaine only exists in movies like
Scarface
. Perhaps the bags and bags of cocaine are kept next to the machine guns, wherever those are.
I give up the looking-away routine and shrug. I’ve never been particularly cool in the face of barely clothed women, but I should be able to fake it for a few minutes. My reward to myself will be punching my dad in the face when I finally make it back out onto the street.
“So, what?” she says. “The fucker’s too scared to show up himself? He had to send a henchman.”
“Well, I’m not really a henchman, Ash. I mean, he’s my dad. I’m just here to pick up some clothes.”
She inhales deeply and crosses her arms. This pushes her breasts together and lifts them up and half out of the top of her towel. She sees me look, but has very little reaction. She bites her lip, shifting her weight like a sullen teenager. “I can’t believe it. He hasn’t even had the decency to return my messages. Does he really not even want to see me? Where is he anyway?”
The truth here would send her screaming down the street barefoot in her towel. As much as I’d like Curtis to have to deal with that, Allie would be there to witness all of it. And so I lie. “He’s back at our house.”
“Well, isn’t that sweet? One big, happy family.”
She takes another drag of her cigarette, and, thankfully, cinches her towel a little tighter. I wonder how this is going to play out. She could chase me off like a rodent, of course. But there’s also the chance that she’ll behave like an adult and we’ll get through this. After all, maybe she does like me. Last year she threw up behind my house at Curtis’s birthday dinner. I told her it would be our little secret, which she seemed to appreciate. That’s gotta be worth something, right?
“Take it easy, Tommy. I don’t bite. I’ll get you his stupid suitcase.”
In a short, white robe now, Ashley is sitting in a small reading chair at the corner of the bedroom. Her crossed legs look like a marvel of nature as she watches me fold my dad’s boxer shorts. I’m packing like a blind person, randomly pulling things from drawers and folding them. At Ashley’s insistence, we’re drinking glasses of very expensive-tasting bourbon.
People always drink bourbon with their robed stepmothers in the bedroom on Saturday afternoons, right? Why not? I might as well, considering there’s a framed photograph of a naked Ashley over the dresser. She’s stretched out in a hammock near a beach, looking directly at the camera through wisps of windswept hair.
“That picture never made it into the U.S. version of
GQ
,” she says. “It’s embarrassing how uptight Americans are about the female anatomy, isn’t it?”
I take a look. One arm is draped across her stomach, the other back over her head. Her breasts, subtle and marvelous, are placed at the photo’s optical center, impossible not to see. “I think it’s very tasteful,” I say.
“It’s his favorite picture of me, you know, his dumb, naked little showpiece. He surprised me with it last year for Christmas. You believe that? The man bought me a naked picture of myself for Christmas. Like I need an oak frame to see my own tits.”
If I had a week alone in a room with nothing to do but think, I doubt if I could come up with an appropriate response to this, and so I concentrate on a green pair of my dad’s underwear as if it holds the secrets to the JFK assassination.
“You know what, now that I think about it, the old fucker really should have it.”
Ashley leaps from the chair and pulls the photo down and then disappears from the room. I hear her rustling around my dad’s office, making a noisy spectacle of herself. When she returns, she drops the photo on the bed and smiles. “I’ve left him a little message.”
Not bothering to take the frame apart, Ashley has written directly on the glass with a black marker.
Good luck with the new book, asshole! Love Ashley.
“Nice. I think he’ll like it.”
I fill the rest of the suitcase in silence as Ashley finishes another cigarette and her glass of bourbon. I’m about to make my getaway when she tells me, as if her inscription wasn’t clear enough, that my father is a fucking bastard. “I’ve never met a more selfish, more ridiculous man in my life. That’s right,
ridiculous
. The
brilliant
American writer. Oh, give me a fucking break. And that
stupid
little car. All those adoring, talentless little wannabes he calls his students, constantly kissing his ass. You ever notice how none of his little protégés are ever men? He’s a fucking cliché. And he can go to hell for all I care.”
Is it odd that the only thing about all of that I found offensive was that she called the Porsche stupid?
“I bought into it at first, you know. Jesus, we all do. Who wouldn’t? That’s his little trick, Tom. He lures us in. We think we’re marrying the guy on the back of all those books, you know, the man behind the words. But there’s really nothing there. Just a desperate little boy who’s so insecure he can hardly get out of bed in the morning without someone telling him how fucking talented and brilliant he is. Gag me.”
Tears now are making her eyes shiny. The arc that is Ashley Martin’s range of emotions swings from outright nastiness to vulnerability in nanoseconds, and I feel myself take two steps backwards. She’s a complex bomb in a movie about terrorists, ticking steadily toward zero in a crowded train station full of children and nuns.
“Do you know what he told me once?” she asks. “He told me that I’m a silly person—that I’m not serious enough for him.” She drops the empty tumbler onto the floor, which rolls under the bed. “How could he say that? Do you know how much money I’ve raised for AIDS? For Africa? For fucking Al Gore’s fucking polar bears?”
“A lot?” I say.
“Yeah, a lot! A fucking ton! Still, he talks down to me because I haven’t read every boring book ever published, like I’m just a stupid piece of ass for him to fuck and toss away when he’s done.”
“Well, Ashley, if it makes you feel better, he doesn’t take me all that seriously, either. I don’t think he takes anyone seriously.”
She diffuses in front of me, her face falling from frightening sneers to calm, angular beauty again. This entire event would make a good scene in a trashy tell-all. Brandon would love it. I wouldn’t even need to sensationalize it. I mean, seriously, she’s almost naked.
“You know what makes it all worse?” she asks, conspiratorial now. “You look exactly like him.”
“What?”
She pulls a copy of
The Stories of Curtis Violet
from an end table. “Look at him. He looks like you if you were pretending to be a college professor. I don’t know if I wanna kill you or fuck you.”