Life Sentences Read online

  I may spend the rest of my life trying to come to terms with how and why my father stopped loving my mother. But I can pinpoint when. I mark the moment as the day he stopped calling her Lenore in favor of the more gender-ambiguous Lennie that everyone else used. My father had always despised the nickname, for both its casualness and masculinity. “If you’re Lennie, I suppose I’m George,” he would say. “Do you want me to tell you about the rabbits, Lennie?” My mother laughed, delighted that my father believed she deserved her full, feminine name.

  Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, he didn’t.

  “Lennie,” he said to my mother over the breakfast table, “did you see this piece in the New York Review of Books?” My mother, harried, as mothers often are in the morning, dropped my jellied toast on the floor. She cleaned it up and started breakfast again, eye on the clock. I was in first grade, still taking the bus to Thomas Jefferson, and she had to hustle me down the hill and wait with me at the bus stop, then head off to her teaching job at the Gordon School.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t had time.”

  Even an oblivious six-year-old, pretending to read Mr. Tweedy on the comics page, could catch the danger in my mother’s voice. But my father either didn’t, or didn’t care.

  “Don’t let your mind go, Lennie, whatever else you might neglect.” Hitting the name hard, making sure she heard it.

  The air in the kitchen turned dry and quiet, the lull that comes before a particularly severe thunderstorm, the kind of storm that sweeps across a city even as the sun continues to shine. (Here, too, I can imagine my father writing—cliché, cliché, cliché. Don’t be lazy, Cassandra. A storm to describe a marital spat? You can do better. He actually did re-grade all my papers, often knocking the school’s As down to Bs or even Cs.)

  My mother stopped, considering her reply.

  “Fuck the New York Review of Books,” she said. “I don’t have time for that bullshit.”

  I could tell from my father’s reaction that my mother’s words stunned him. These were words that could rend the universe, a warning shot across his bow. (Don’t mix your metaphors, Cassandra, he would write here.)

  “Joan Didion—” he began, as if my mother had not spoken.

  “Fuck Joan Didion,” my mother said. “And her little dog, too.”

  Finally, something I understood. My mind dredged up the terrifying image of striped socks beneath the house in The Wizard of Oz, the way they curled and disappeared like cheap firecrackers.

  It is only now, writing this, that I understand what happened in the kitchen the day that my father stopped calling my mother “Lenore.” He was saying, I see you as others see you now. Smart, yes. Capable, always. A good mother. Even a good companion. But I can’t be romantic about you anymore, fixer of jelly toast, cleaner of kitchen floors. You are no longer sexual to me.

  My mother replied, I see you, too. I see that you’re rationalizing your infidelity, that you have slipped or are about to slip, and you need an excuse, flimsy as it is. You’re probably sleeping with a woman who reads the New York Review of Books, but I don’t have time to do that anymore because I am working, taking care of a child and this monstrosity of a house, this house that you wanted and insisted on, although it needs so much work and is so remote that I am virtually alone when I come home. Even when you’re here, I’m alone.

  THE BRIER PATCH

  March 3–5

  CHAPTER

  11

  THERE WAS A COFFEE SHOP, an old-fashioned relic, in the otherwise glossy lobby of the building where Howard, Howard & Barr was housed. Cassandra nursed a scorched-tasting coffee at a table that afforded a view of the street and the lobby. She had a newspaper in front of her, but she wasn’t really looking at it, just using it as a prop. She felt at once silly and adventurous, somewhere in between Nancy Drew and Mata Hari. Generally, she considered herself a forthright, honest person, not counting her occasional forays into infidelity, most of which had been retaliatory acts.

  She had cheated on her second husband only because he cheated on her. Although she had seen her second marriage as a prime example of Hegelian synthesis, it ultimately made her see that her first marriage, for all its problems, was the one she should have fought to save. God, she and her first husband had been like children, throwing sand in each other’s eyes. But they had loved each other as best they could. With the wisdom of hindsight, Cassandra had decided that getting married at twenty-two was going to be one of those things that turned out well or ended in disaster, no in-between. It was like running a marathon: You either finish, an achievement in itself no matter the pace, or you drop dead along the way. They had pulled up lame before the thirteen-mile mark.

  Her second marriage? She could not think of a racing metaphor for that, unless it was an old-fashioned three-legged race, in which she and her husband were yoked to the people they really loved but couldn’t be with. They hadn’t even made much of a pretense, just kept testing each other to see who would get sick of whom first. The second time, it had been her turn to walk out, and she had discovered that it wasn’t any more fun than being left. Had found, in fact, that the end of even the most beastly marriage was still more painful than anyone could guess.

  Ah well, she could do this. She had been in public enough over the past decade to develop the social liar’s smooth façade. It was more a defensive position than anything else; a certain amount of skilled feinting became essential once people decided that you had something they needed. She had learned quickly how to bob and weave—gracefully, she hoped—deflecting not only the endless requests for money and time, but also the more intrusive demands for friendship. She had made a point of writing about her life with as much candor as possible, and people thought they knew her.

  They did—and they didn’t. The life on display in her two memoirs had been presented through a scrim. A mainly transparent scrim, but a scrim nonetheless. She was truthful, but there was much she didn’t reveal. Example: She would never write about her current lover, even if she could successfully shield his identity. Her readers forgave the mistakes from which she had learned, the errors of youth and even middle age. She had been forty when she made that absolute botch of a second marriage, but that had been a lesson in humility, the affairs a way of admitting that to herself. Her readers would not approve of Bernard. Cassandra really didn’t approve of Bernard. She would have to figure out a way to let him go with his pride intact, to make him feel it was his idea. After all, he thought the affair was his idea, and Cassandra had orchestrated the whole thing.

  Still, was she disingenuous enough to pull off this fake coincidental encounter with Reggie Barr? If she nudged the conversation toward Calliope too quickly, wouldn’t he suspect something was up? So what? she decided. He was a lawyer. He had his own tricks. He might be charmed by the sheer transparency of her actions.

  Assuming he ever showed up. As her coffee cooled, she was beginning to feel ridiculous. Not to mention overheated and, by Baltimore’s standards, overdressed in her fur coat, fake of course, and Dr. Zhivago–style hat. Still, she looked pretty, and—she hoped—not just pretty-for-her-age. She wondered why she was thinking about her looks. Reginald Barr was still just Tisha’s little brother, Candy, lurking at the edges, trying to crash the party, doing his silly dance.

  And coming off the elevator, striding out in the bright, cold day, full of purpose.

  She gathered her things and slid out the street entrance of the coffee shop, hoping—almost praying, in fact—that Candy would turn east, not west, as that would put them on a more credible collision course. He did. She caught his eye, and for one fleeting second, her resolve wavered. What was she doing? This was not how she worked. She was used to being alone, in a room, debating her own memory. But this hesitation, this falter, only made it more credible when she said, “Candy Barr? I’d know you anywhere.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, smiling. It was a public smile, warm yet generic. She had one, too.

  �
�There’s no reason you would remember me. I’m Cassandra Fallows. I went to school with your older sister, back in the day.”

  “At Western High?”

  “Yes.” No need to complicate things by admitting she was at Western only a year. “But also at Dickey Hill Elementary, old number two oh one. Tisha and I started there in the third grade together, the year it opened. You would have been in the first grade that year, right?”

  The mention of Dickey Hill did the trick. “It’s hard to believe,” he said with a much more genuine smile, “that you were in school with my older sister.” The charm was automatic, effortless. “But—yes, of course. The writer. I remember when your book came out, Tisha talking about it.”

  She willed herself not to correct the singular, book. It was a common mistake. It happened to her friends with five, ten, fifteen books to their credit. Even they were asked about The Book, as if there were only one. How’s The Book? What’s going on with The Book? It was a social nicety, a slightly more specific version of How are you. We are what we do, so we ask mothers about The Kids and fathers about The Job or The Office, and writers are asked about The Book. But Cassandra found it particularly grating, this suggestion that she had written only one. Because, in a sense, she had.

  “She’s in there. But you are, too. At the graduation party. You danced for us. Remember? You had a special dance, very silly, that you would do to get attention.”

  “Not to mention cake.” To her amazement and delight, Reggie “Candy” Barr briefly slithered from side to side, his arms moving spastically. Cassandra burst out laughing. She couldn’t help herself. The childish dance was even more incongruous when performed by a handsome man in a camel’s hair coat, a briefcase in his hand.

  “I’m running late,” he said, “but I’ll tell Tisha I saw you, that you want her to get in touch. Do you have a card?”

  She had it at the ready. The meeting had gone eerily according to her plan, almost as if he were privy to her internal script. A chance encounter that he would never doubt, him offering to put her in touch with Tisha, the request for her card, getting his card in return.

  What happened next, however, wasn’t part of the plan.

  “I’m in town for a few months, working on my next project.” She was taking time getting her card, letting him note the lushness of the things she carried—the Prada bag, the Chanel wallet, the leather gloves she had to remove to extract the simple but beautiful card she carried in a silver case, the heavy ring on her right hand, and the lack of any rings on the left. “My cell is on the card, but let me write down my local phone, too.” She glanced at him through her lashes, the low-hanging fur of her hat. “And why don’t you take one, too? There’s no law that says I can’t have dinner with an old friend’s little brother, is there? The fact is, you might be able to help me with what I’m working on.”

  He took her card with his right hand, shifted it to his left, watched her note his wedding ring, then meet his eyes. “Really? A book, and I could help you? I’d be interested in hearing more about that.”

  “Well, I hope I get a chance,” she said. “Meanwhile, you tell Tisha to call me, hear? I really want to catch up with her.”

  She strode away, cheeks burning. She should not have said the part about his ability to help her with a project. That had almost certainly tipped her hand. The idea had been to get him to offer up Tisha, then have Tisha disclose her brother’s old connection to Calliope when Cassandra played whatever-happened-to with all their classmates. He would see through her, if he hadn’t already. Why had she undermined herself this way?

  Because when Candy Barr had danced for her on Baltimore Street, she had felt that solar plexus hit of chemistry, the kind of desire that she had assumed was over for her. Not out of any biological or chronological imperative, but simply because she knew too much now about how the brain worked. Head-over-heels love was for people who didn’t know any better. Bernard—Bernard was simply another thing she did to keep herself youthful, not that much different from the spa or the gym, although she visited those places much more often than she saw her lover. But Bernard knew only her current self, not her history. Reggie Barr understood where she was from, in every sense, and there was something about knowing the little boy inside that handsome man that hit her hard.

  Was he married? Yes, there had been a ring. Men like that were almost always married. It would be better if he were married, less complicated. Better for The Book.

  REGINALD BARR WALKED EAST, toward the courthouse. The business card, tucked in his briefcase, seemed to beep every minute, like a smoke alarm alerting one to a dying battery. Only this was a warning that something was coming to life. He wasn’t fooled by Cassandra’s acting, such as it was. She had set up that little run-in. Why? True, Tisha lived and worked under her married name, which made her tricky to find. But if all Cassandra wanted was Tisha, why not call his office and explain the situation to a secretary? Had she set up that elaborate ruse to meet him? She wouldn’t be the first woman to do that.

  Reg, as he preferred to be known now, was vain and aware of this fact, although he considered his an earned vanity. Women approached him all the time. He was a good husband and a respectful one, which to his mind meant that the ruthless compartmentalization of his occasional affairs was done with great consideration for his wife, whom he adored beyond all reason. By the rules of that system, written and designed by him, no one could be more off-limits than a friend of his sister’s. Because if she knew Tisha, she also knew Donna, his wife. Donna had read that book, too, although she had been bemused where Tisha had been pissed. He remembered the two of them drinking wine in the kitchen, Tisha’s voice rising with agitation about errors and omissions, Donna saying it didn’t matter, it would never matter. An old classmate of Tisha and Donna’s. Forbidden with a capital F.

  The fact that she was white—worse still. And older. Who wanted older? He had a fifty-year-old wife at home, one who had kept herself up just as well as Cassandra Fallows, better actually, and he bought Donna things every bit as expensive as the ones that Cassandra had just flaunted in front of him. He had that. He didn’t need to go looking for it.

  Yet the fact that she could buy herself those things, the confidence that came with age—now that was interesting to him, novel. The young women whose companionship he sought out on occasion, they were not fully formed. They attached too much importance to sleeping with Reginald Barr and when it ended, they could be a little…volatile. Still, he had managed his affairs to date without too much fuss. He chose women of honor and when they threatened to squawk—to call his wife or the papers, not that the Beacon-Light would care about a private citizen’s life, and he had no political aspirations—he reminded them that he had been honest from the first. He never promised love, only fun. Then he bought them something magnificent. A woman such as Cassandra Fallows was clearly more worldly, more relaxed. She wouldn’t even begin to think she could snake him away from his wife. But she also wouldn’t be susceptible to gifts when the end came.

  What did she really want? Tisha, yes, but then she had mentioned he might be of help to her on a project. Bullshit? It was as good a line as any to get to someone you wanted to flirt with. He knew, he had used it himself. No, in this case, it seemed to be a blurted truth, something that she didn’t mean to say, the kind of thing on which he pounced in a deposition or interview. What did she do exactly? He thought she wrote books about her life, not that he had read them. Reg used his recreational reading for real history, not the narrow stories of individuals. Her notorious father, then something else? He remembered Tisha’s central complaint: “Cassandra thought everything was about her. She’s incapable of telling a story where she’s not at the center.” Donna had told Tisha that meant Cassandra was human.

  She must be mining the past again, looking for another nugget that could be turned into something. How many pages could one fifty-year life produce if you weren’t a head of state or a general? She had done her father, she ha
d done—her husbands, that was it, which was an extension of the daddy thing, although maybe Reg was projecting there. The whole Oedipal drama. No, that was mothers and sons. They called the father-daughter drama something else, also Greek. Electra? He was pretty sure it was Electra, but maybe not.

  Another Greek name of sorts went off like a steam whistle in his brain. Calliope. If Cassandra had gone to school with Tisha and Donna, she also knew Callie Jenkins. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to speak to Calliope now, even with the New Orleans case in the news. But the real story was down there, another Katrina-related tragedy, a child lost in the system for almost four years. No one cared about Callie anymore.

  He stopped and pulled out his cell phone. He didn’t have Gloria Bustamante’s number stored, but it came back to him readily, as if his brain had saved it all these years, knowing he would need it one day. He had to bully the dim-witted secretary to get through, but when Gloria finally picked up, he said without preamble, “What do you know about Cassandra Fallows?”

  “Enough to duck her,” Gloria said.

  “Easy for you. But she’s an old friend of my sister’s, from back in the day, and she just buttonholed me outside my office. I can’t avoid her.”

  “Ask your father-in-law what to do. Or his brother. They always had all the answers.”

  There was something dangerous in Gloria’s voice, a challenge Reg decided to ignore.

  “Andre retired last year. Julius is as good as.”

  “Right, I saw that in the Daily Record. So you’re the managing partner now, and Howard & Howard is Howard, Howard and Barr. Well done, Reggie.”

  Hard to say who hung up first, him or Gloria. Had they really been best friends once upon a time? His office spouse, as his young associates said now, a curious term to Reg’s ear. Who wanted another spouse? He had noticed two of the new crop, a boy and a girl, who were always laughing together, going to lunch, and he risked teasing the girl about her romance. “Oh, he’s just my office spouse,” she said dismissively. “I have a fiancé, and Dwayne has a live-in girlfriend.” Office spouse. So that’s what he and Gloria had been to each other, all those years ago. They had made a good team—plain, overachieving Gloria, dashing, just-getting-by Reggie. I didn’t backstab you over Callie Jenkins, he wanted to say to her. I didn’t know, either, not for the longest time, and when I did put it together, it was just guesswork, same as you, Gloria. But then, you were always smarter than me.