SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010
I twine through the web of roads that have woven Parkhaven and all the once-separate little towns surrounding the city into a metropolis with the prefix Greater.
Martin opens an envelope and pulls out a form. “Hey, his high school transcript.” He studies the computer printout. “Hmm. Looks like they mercy-graduated our young Mr. Moldenhauer.”
“Perfect. He’s stupid. Stupid and a criminal. This just gets better and better. How long have you and Aubrey been in touch?”
“About a year.”
“Weren’t you worried about Next finding out?”
“I used a fake name.”
“She’s been communicating with you for a year and never said one word to me?”
“I kept asking her to tell you.”
“You ‘asked’ her to tell me.”
“Cam, what was I supposed to do? I was in no position to make demands. All I wanted was to know her. Let her know me.”
I weave through a clogged intersection, then say, “It’s like bigamy.”
“Bigamy?”
“This double life my own daughter kept from me, it’s like finding out your husband has another family. A whole other double life.”
“Not that this is your favorite subject, but for the past sixteen years most of what I did every day was listen to the double, triple, quadruple lives that people, mostly famous people, live. People you would never expect.”
“Movie stars? I would expect movie stars to have multiple lives. I mean, wasn’t that really your job? Keeping the less savory ones hidden from view?”
“Not really. In my mind, not at all. But I’m not up to diving back into all that. Aubrey, all I care about now is Aubrey. All I ever should have cared about was Aubrey.”
“So what did you two talk about?”
“Her classes. Her crazy physics teacher.”
“Psycho Saunders? She told you about Psycho Saunders?”
“What else?”
“She wanted to know why I left.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Not enough. It was hard. How do you fit an answer you’ve been trying to figure out yourself for sixteen years into a chat bubble? Mostly I just wanted her to know that I was wrong. That I regretted leaving and that it wasn’t fair to her. Or to you.” He shakes his head. “God, I was an asshole.”
“ ‘Was’?” I give him the barest peek at a smile.
“Oh, no doubt, I am still an asshole. But at least now I’m an asshole who knows that he is.”
I still can’t believe how completely the Next version of Martin has disappeared, and keep poking around to find out where the cracks in this facade are. “So what did make you give up all that delicious certainty?”
He leans his head to one side and plucks at the sideburn there with his thumb and middle finger. “Like I said, disillusionments. They just kept mounting. It’s been coming on for years. Years while I told myself that the tenets were good and I just had to accept that flawed humans were carrying them out.”
“Plus it was nice driving around in a Bentley, squiring movie stars to premieres, being the crown prince or heir apparent or whatever you were. Never having anyone tell you your shit stinks.”
“You have no idea. When I first got involved, it was as if my whole life I’d been trying to sing with a choir I couldn’t get in tune with. I was always the one who was off-key, out of pitch. The one who was ruining the music. With Next it was utter harmony for the first time in my life.”
“I thought we had some pretty goddamn harmonious moments.”
“God. Yes. I met you, Cam, and life became livable. For years. And if it had just been you and me forever … Who knows? Maybe I could have limped through the entire rest of my life with you propping me up.”
I have no recollection of me propping Martin up.
“But with a child? That changed everything. I had to be worthy of being a father.”
I turn my head away so that Martin, who is truly baring his soul, will not see me roll my eyes. It’s pointless to bring up the contradiction of how one becomes worthy of being a father by not being one. I just listen as he goes on about how seductive Next was at first. How they showered him with attention, treating his every utterance as either deeply profound or uproariously hilarious.
“I think the Moonies call that ‘love bombing.’ When they lure a new recruit in, then lavish him with attention and affection.”
“Right. The Children of God had ‘Flirty Fishing’ to show God’s love and win converts. Nothing like plain old sex to put a man on the path to righteousness. Next called their version of all this The Bath. For some of us, being right is so much sexier than sex.”
So there it was. What I’d always known—and Martin had always denied—had propelled him into Next. A part of me wants to gloat and crow and kick this man while he’s down for every second that my child did not have a father. But why? Because I’ve won an argument I had sixteen years ago? How could any of this have been a surprise when the first thing Martin did after we met was read me the story of a young man searching for enlightenment?
Outside, the space between the businesses lining the road grows and goes from a scatter of strip malls to a fast-food joint here and there to isolated guys selling fruit and pottery out of the backs of their pickups.
Even the pottery guys are gone and the country has opened up by the time Martin asks, “Isn’t that the lure of all religions? Don’t they all promise to give you the answers? Let you in on the big mystery?”
“I guess,” I say. “That and control the pussy.”
“Cam, Cam, Cam. You were always a good one for keeping it real. How could I not know that that is what I needed more than anything in my life?”
The Bath. I see why Next calls it that, because a gush of warm delight floods through me at Martin’s admission. And I see why The Bath is dangerous: A person could drown in such a pool of approbation.
I dry off and crisply demand, “So what was it? What made you give up this life of getting your ass smooched?”
“One moment? You want one moment? There wasn’t one moment. There was an accumulation over years, then a tipping point. Aubrey mentioned that you showed her the …” He holds his hand out, palm up.
“Yeah, I made an album so she’d know her father existed.”
“All right. Well, the last time was with … The star doesn’t even matter. Two Oscars. Four marriages. Hair plugs like a trail on an old map. Was a great actor before he turned himself into a franchise. Anyway, it was the premiere of his latest action-hero blockbuster, Tsunami: Wave Bye-Bye, and he brought his youngest child with him, this beautiful little girl. Five at the time. As usual, the instant he appeared, the photographers were crawling all over him. I instinctively picked up his daughter. She buried her head in my shoulder. I put my hand out to shield her. Just like always. But this time I stopped and thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? I’m protecting this little girl?’ That was it. It was as clear as night and day. I could never again do for someone else’s child what I hadn’t done for my own.”
This story is genetically engineered to melt my heart. Which it does. “Plus, you saw that Next was a load of horseshit and you were an idiot for ever falling for it.”
“You really need me to say it?”
“Only if it’s true.”
“Plus, I saw that Next was a load of horseshit and I was an idiot for ever falling for it.”
The barometric pressure in the car lightens and I am almost happy. Then I remember that he wasn’t there when Aubrey needed him to protect her the most—he wasn’t there last winter on Black Ice Night.