Los Angeles (33 page)

Melanie pulled herself out of the water and sat across from me on the black marble. Her skin had gone bright pink against
her bathing suit. “What about your screenplay?”

“What about it?”

“Are you finished?”

I laughed.

She looked over at Gabriel, who smashed his body against the gray mesh webbing of his pen and held a red ball in his fist,
muttering to himself in his secret, incomprehensible language.

“I wonder what he’ll want to do with his life,” she asked.

“It all depends,” I said, “on how he’s raised, on what he sees his parents doing.”

We spoke as if he were normal, as if Gabriel’s problem, autism, retardation, whatever it was, would eventually be overcome.
This is the faith our mothers have in us, I thought. My mother had that kind of faith in me once, too.

“Do you think it’s hereditary?”

For a moment I thought she meant his condition. Then I asked, “You mean what you do in life?”

She nodded.

I shook my head. “Look at me. I’m a disaster.” I thought for a moment longer, watching a puffy cloud roll over the sea’s distant
horizon. Then I chuckled. “Maybe it
is
hereditary. I’m a disaster, and my father makes disaster movies.”

“I don’t know very much about his biological parents.”

“I’m surprised you know anything at all.”

“Sometimes they seal the information,” Melanie went on, “but now, you know, they can release it in case there’s a medical
problem.” A servant had placed a stack of those waffled, cream-colored towels by the pool’s edge. Melanie reached for one.
“I don’t know anything about Gabriel’s biological father at all, I don’t think anyone does, but I requested his medical information
in case there was something that may have influenced …” She threw a glance over to her little boy.

“Did you meet her?”

“We saw her the day he was born,” Melanie said. “It wasn’t on purpose. We were there, you know, in the hospital. The whole
thing had been prearranged. They had to move her because there was some unanticipated internal situation, bleeding or something,
nothing to do with Gabriel, thank goodness, but they wheeled her past me in the hallway.”

“Does he look like her?”

“I didn’t get a very good look at her face.” She shook her head slightly. “She was black.”

I laughed, looking at this little kid, his dark skin, my brother. For some reason, I had always imagined that his mother was
white and his father was black — my own racist scripting, I guess.

Melanie got up, wrapping herself in a towel, and walked over to him. She leaned over the playpen and kissed his face a dozen
times, saying, “My baby, my baby, my baby.”

“Was that weird?” This question suddenly occurred to me. “Seeing Gabriel’s mother wheel past you like that?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen.” She leaned down and took him into her arms. “Frank seemed more shaken up about it than anyone
else.”

“Frank was there?”

“Yeah, you know … he arranged the whole thing. Your father wasn’t around, as usual. As usual, he was on his way.”

“Frank was in the hospital with you?” I don’t know why, but this irritated me, the idea of Frank insinuating himself so deeply
into every aspect of our private lives. I wondered if he was going to threaten Gabriel the way he had threatened me and planned
to make sure he didn’t.

Melanie put Gabriel down and came back to the hot tub. “Frank set up everything.” She shrugged. “Frank arranges everything
for Milos. You know that.”

“Did Frank arrange the adoption?”

“Of course.” Melanie laughed. “He even pays the phone bill.”

“Too much Frank.” I splashed my feet.

“He takes care of your dad.” Melanie frowned, weighing Frank’s and my father’s affection for one another. “Your dad takes
care of him.”

“Symbiosis,” I said. “Frank is like one of those eels that eat the dead flesh out of a shark’s mouth.”

“Whatever it is,” Melanie said, “he seemed kind of weirded out.”

“What do you mean,
weirded out?
”

“When he saw her, Gabriel’s birth mother, Frank” — Melanie bit her lip — “I don’t know. He seemed upset.”

“Why?”

“He had met her already, I think, when she was pregnant. He knew her somehow.”

My face started to burn. “What did she look like?”

“I told you, I didn’t really get a good look at her face.”

“What about her hair?”

Melanie looked at me, a little surprised. “Yeah. Her hair was really strange. It was blond, really unnatural, like it had
been dyed a million times.”

I looked at Gabriel and saw everything, it was all there in his eyes.

They were her eyes.

Angela’s eyes.

“Do you remember her name?”

“Angel, what’s wrong?”

“Do you remember it?”

“No, I —”

“Do you have it written on a piece of paper? A document? A form or something?”

“It’s in her medical file,” she said fearfully. “I have a copy upstairs.”

I couldn’t stop staring at Gabriel now, because I was staring at Angela. “Where?” I asked. “Exactly where is it?” I pulled
my foot out of the water and stood up.

“In a drawer, in the closet.” Melanie got out, too.

“Which closet?” I started walking into the house.

Melanie lifted Gabriel and followed, holding him against her hip. They were behind me, but I could tell from the soft whimpering
noises he was making inside his throat that he was about to cry.

“Hold on, Angel,” Melanie said, “and I’ll show you.”

I was bounding up the glass-and-wire stairs toward Melanie’s room. I walked down the hall, slipped through her door, found
her closet, and began opening the built-in drawers, flinging their contents, underwear, socks, costume jewelry, onto the floor.

Finally, Melanie caught up with me. “It’s the second one from the bottom,” she said, “on the far left. All you had to do was
ask.”

“I did ask.” I went to that drawer and slid it open. There were neat stacks of papers and envelopes inside it.

“It should be somewhere near the top. A blue folder.”

Gabriel was crying, a high-pitched, open moan.

I found a cornflower-blue folder with a private hospital logo on it. There were a series of official documents inside, the
kind of papers you keep in a drawer forever but never find any reason to use, the kind of documents you put away for safekeeping,
with information that will never be relevant to anyone.

But it was relevant now.

Gabriel was crying full-out, almost screaming.

I flipped through the pages, scanning the typed-in words until I found the ones I was looking for.

Biological Mother: Jessica Teagarden.

There followed her blood type, medical history, social security number, everything I would need to find her.

“Angel, what’s wrong? What is it?”

Have you ever seen magnesium burning?

Have you ever stared into the heart of a bright white sun?

Gabriel was screaming, and a string of spit connected his mouth to Melanie’s shoulder.

“Everything,” I said. “My whole life.”

______

“Where is he?” I asked. “Where the hell is Frank?”

“Mr. Heile is upstairs.” Flustered, the receptionist started to rise. “But I have to —”

I bounded up a set of thickly carpeted steps, holding Jessica Teagarden’s crumpled medical files in my angry pink fist. I
walked past bewildered young Hollywood lawyers and paralegals, past men and women in distinctive eyewear and dark, expensive
suits, all of whom turned their handsome faces to follow me down the hushed corridor, racing like a fire consuming the building.
Outside, it was a modern structure, a typical Wilshire Boulevard glass-and-granite office building, but the interior of Heile
Associates was an explosion of pinks, blues, and golds, with heavy antique furniture upholstered in multicolored jacquard
sateens. Frank’s offices were like the chambers of a secret museum, I thought, with minor Impressionist pieces on the wood-paneled
walls and ornate oriental carpets covering the marble floors. I passed his stately old secretary and pushed my way through
an enormous brass-and-wooden door that could only be Frank’s.

“I found out,” I said, practically crashing into the room.

There was a gigantic desk, elaborately carved, with a red leather swivel chair. Frank was in it, of course, surrounded by
his onionskin papers in multiple pastel hues. His ancient briefcase lay open at his feet, and the detritus of a thousand legal
documents cluttered every surface.

“Angel,” he said, “what are you —”

I had the adoption papers in my hand. I held them up so he could see, brandishing them like the evidence in a courtroom drama.

His secretary, a grand woman with one squinting eye, came in behind me.

“It’s all right, Felicia.” Frank waved her away, using my father’s characteristic gesture.

“I want a fucking explanation,” I yelled. “I need to know what happened, Frank, what really —”

His hands asked me to lower the volume.

“I need to know where she is,” I said. “I need to know the truth.”

He smiled. “No more bullshit?”

I couldn’t even respond.

Slowly, he got up from behind the desk and went to the dark leather couch along the wall, sitting down.

“Okay.” His green eyes fixed on me. “Jessica Teagarden is Gabriel’s birth mother,” he began. “I paid … paid an enormous amount
of money to help her, all of her medical expenses, the delivery.” He inhaled. “But then she found out … well, she already
knew who your father was … and who you were … who you are, Angel, and she … she decided she wanted something more than what
I had given her.” His eyes narrowed. His face said he was leveling with me. “She moved into the place next door to you, thinking
she would …” He waved his hands in the air like a conductor in front of a silent orchestra. “She wanted to insinuate herself
into your life,” he said. “She wanted to —”

“Get close to her son,”
I said, completing the thought.

He shook his head. “I wish it were that easy.” He brought a hand to his mouth and wiped the corners of his lips. “She wanted
to blackmail me.”

“Blackmail
you?
” This made no sense at all. “For what?”

“Angel, you have to understand. Your father doesn’t —” He hesitated.

“Doesn’t what?”

“He doesn’t
know.
” He got up from the couch and started pacing back and forth in front of the window, eyeing the traffic outside.

“I don’t get why Dad would give a shit about Gabriel’s birth mother.” I shook my head. “And why didn’t she just go through
legal channels? Couldn’t she have hired a lawyer herself? Couldn’t she have —”

He sighed. “She doesn’t operate that way, Angel. She’s a fucking —”

“But why
you?
” There had to be more to this, I thought. “What is this really about?”

Frank threw his eyes around the room. “Can’t you just let it go?” Once again, he sank heavily onto the leather couch. He rubbed
his cheeks with the backs of his age-spotted hands.

“I’m not letting anything go. Sorry.”

He sighed. “I told her … things. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was about her, but I guess I just wanted to tell somebody
… I needed to tell someone … things I had been carrying around for years. There was … something about Jessica that made me
tell her …”

“What?” I shook my head. “What did you tell her?”

Frank offered me the strangest look.

The afternoon was crystal bright through the window. I glanced out at the street. It was still early, and sunlight fell in
yellow sheets over the mounting Santa Monica-bound traffic.

“When I was younger,” Frank began, “I drank. In the mornings I would wake up and have vodka with my breakfast cereal. Sounds
funny, right? Your father remembers what I was like in those days. The problem was, it never interfered with my functioning.
If it had, I’m sure I would have stopped a lot sooner. What ultimately made me quit, though, were the blackouts. I’d wake
up in hotel rooms, not knowing how I got there. I’d find myself with women I didn’t even remember meeting.” He shook his head.
“It all sounds hysterical, doesn’t it?” He thought for a moment. “You asked me why I don’t drive. That’s because my license
was revoked, years ago.”

“What are you telling me, Frank?”

“I’m telling you what I told Jessica.” He sighed. “Just listen. There was a particular woman, a woman not my wife, with whom
I had a … relationship.” He looked up at me. “I loved her more than anything … more than anyone. I would have done anything
for her.” He touched his hands to his eyes, pressing down on the lids. “But she decided to break it off, probably because
of the drinking, but there were other reasons, too. She told me one morning that it was over. You have to understand that
I had spent years with her, Angel — years. Anyway, I had already been drinking, of course, but that day I really let everything
go.” Softly, he cleared his throat. “The next day —” Frank’s voice broke. Jesus Christ, he was actually revealing an emotion.

“What?” I asked softly. “What happened the next day?”

“The next day, I woke up in my car in a parking lot somewhere, and the woman … and she was in the hospital.” Frank made the
smallest sound, something between a laugh and a cry. “I had … done things to her. I broke her nose, shattered her cheekbone,
snapped her wrist. I had done some pretty terrible things already in my life at that point but never anything like that.”
He looked directly at me.

My whole body drained of its heat. I could hear my own insides, the liquid squish of organs. “The monster,” I said. The monster
that came into our house at night when I was a little kid. Those violent, shadowy images … I had imagined a horrible animal
thrashing at my mother’s throat, slashing her apart. “That was you.”

“I won’t tell you I’m sorry, Angel. I know it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“Why didn’t she —” I didn’t even know what I was asking. “Why wouldn’t she —”

“Go to the police? Tell your father? Have me thrown in jail? Because she loved me. Can you believe that?” He smiled ironically.
“A person loving
me?
It also would have meant revealing the affair to your father, to the world. Your mother” — Frank breathed in, then out —
“such a private person.” His voice became small. “Like you, Angel.”