Been There, Married That, page 26
I guess Peter didn’t flinch when Fin demanded that figure, based on her research.
“He only flinched when I told him I’d worked for the Mexican Mafia,” Fin said. “Good times.”
* * *
Before our next court hearing, Trevor and I had to set a meeting with a child psychologist. “I thought we were going to parenting classes with a bunch of normal inadequate parents like us,” I said to Anne. “I was looking forward to delving into social media supervision, sleep times, and swear jars.”
“Ulger told me Trevor would feel more comfortable in a private setting,” she said. “My stipulation is that you do it together. We want an even playing field.”
“A therapist’s office is an uneven playing field,” I said. “Trevor loves therapy. He’s a master at therapy. He goes five days a week!”
Trevor, like the rest of Hollywood, had spent some of the best years of his life on a therapist’s couch. The narcissist capital of the world (sorry, D.C. and NYC) loved being listened to, even if they had to pay for it. And the therapists in LA were easily corruptible; most pitched pilots and movies and reality shows on the side.
Trevor hadn’t learned anything about himself but that he liked therapy.
“I’ve never been to therapy,” Anne said.
“That’s why I like you,” I said. “Okay, where do I go?”
“By the way,” she said, “I hate to bring this up, but we’re going back and forth on the fees. There’s a chance you’ll have to pay your own.”
“Oh no,” I said. “What are the fees again?”
I was thinking, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty grand at this point. I could sell my jewelry, go on a payment plan.
“We’re at $75,000,” Anne said. “Not counting this phone call.”
“’kay, bye!” I said and hung up.
* * *
Legal fees are like ordering a chopped salad at a restaurant. No matter how much you eat, how much you chip away at that bounty of lettuce and cheese and whatnot, there’s always more. Always. In high school, they should teach kids just to stay away from lawyers if they want to keep their money. Stay away from the court system. Makes so much more sense than teaching them algebra.
* * *
Speaking of chopped salad.
The best chopped salad is at La Scala Presto in Brentwood—order it with turkey, garbanzos, cheese, tomatoes, and an Italian dressing that is just the right amount of piquant. A Hollywood ex-wife I know orders it without turkey, without garbanzos, without cheese, and without dressing. Her action director husband still divorced her skinny ass, dyed his hair blond, and dates teenagers.
She should’ve just had the fucking cheese.
* * *
I tracked Fin to the side of the house, where she sat with her knees screwed into the dirt, pulling up weeds with Pep in our vegetable garden. I hadn’t seen the gardeners in a couple of weeks. I wondered if Esteban had been fired or, maybe, his Mexican wife who lived in Calexico—as opposed to his Mexican wife who lived in Whittier—had snapped. Every once in a while, he came to work with a black eye and a sheepish smile. Anyway, the hillside was going to seed. Vines stretched their limbs, threatening to strangle rosebushes. The fruit trees were losing their budding offspring to birds and vermin and deer.
Pep’s arms were glazed with sunscreen, her head covered by one of Fin’s myriad minor-league baseball caps that she’d managed to collect from all over the country. There were pieces that were missing from my mental puzzle of Fin’s life. A year, here and there in her twenties, early thirties. Many months that I hadn’t spoken to her. Days I thought she must be dead, and I’d braced against the news that would arrive at any moment, a rock thrown from the sky at my heart.
Of course, she was always fine; I was the sister losing years of my life worrying.
“You won’t believe the numbers,” I said, struggling to stay balanced in my sensible heels, the perfect height for a therapy session being about two inches, give or take. “Legal fees. It’s insanity.”
“Divorce is a rich man’s game,” Fin said while she clawed at the dirt, her skull rings glinting in the sun.
“Well, that works for Trevor,” I said. “How do I look?”
“Old?” Pep said, looking up from her work.
“Maternal,” Fin said. “Pep, can you go fetch my pack from the kitchen? You know where it is.”
“Please don’t smoke,” I said.
“All this fresh air,” Fin said, “makes me miss that Riverside sludge.”
“Give me a hug first,” I said to Pep, and she wrapped her arms around me, warm and slippery as eels.
She climbed up the hillside, holding on to her Albuquerque Isotopes cap.
“That’s what I was going for,” I said. “Maternal. Does my daughter all of a sudden smell like BO?”
“She’s growing up,” Fin said. “Fast. You know, maybe you and Trevor should just get back together.”
I picked my lower jaw up from the dirt. “What did you just … we hate each other.”
“I know,” Fin said, shielding her eyes as she gazed up at me. “You hate Trevor. Trevor hates you. That kind of passion is hard to come by.”
She pulled out another carrot and brushed it off. “Me, I don’t hate any of my exes.”
“Who are you talking to?” I said. “Your hate knows no bounds. Your exes know no bounds, either, which is why you have those restraining orders.”
“Nope. I’m annoyed by them. Occasionally, I’d slash a tire and they’d put fists through drywall. That’s different.”
“I give up.”
“I’m just saying, if you knew what’s out there, maybe you’d make nice for the next thirty or so years.”
I stared at her.
“Fin, I’d stay if I could. I stayed for a long time. I can’t anymore. It’s not even personal to Trevor. It’s the world he inhabits. The world he loves. I don’t fit in anymore. I don’t think I ever really did.”
I crouched down next to her.
“I was at dinner in Malibu, and a director said, straight-faced, ‘It’s not enough that I succeed, it’s that my friends fail.’ Everyone laughed.”
“Because it’s funny,” Fin said. “You take this shit too seriously.”
“I don’t want to raise Pep to be like them,” I said. “I want her to be normal.”
“Normal? What’s normal?” Fin asked. “Me? Dad? The way you and I were raised, to never depend on anyone, never trust anyone, and know that no matter where you go, bad luck will follow you. Everything is stacked against the Murphys! That’s how we like it!”
I took a deep breath. The air smelled like ocean and manure; the wind was picking up the neighbors’ stables below.
“Normal is a state of mind,” I said. “It’s like the famous line about porn. I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.”
Beat.
“What kind of idiot can’t describe porn?” Fin asked.
* * *
“Daddy,” the icy blonde with breasts as large and firm as the tires on her (educated guess) ten-year-old white Range Rover said as she swung her bare feet toward Trevor, having slipped off her heels. Her toenails were purple, embellished at the tips with rhinestones. “Daddy, what do you like doing with me?”
Trevor ran his hands through his hair.
“I, uh, like to…” He looked at me, sitting on the other end of yet another therapy couch. This one was light gray and too soft and too low. The air conditioner blasted the arctic front down our backs, and the blonde’s cold nipples pointed toward the SoulCycle across the street.
“You like to watch your old movies with her,” I said, prompting him. I had already run through, in my head, I like to watch her games, I like to put her to sleep, I like to take her to Rosie’s ice-cream shop after school. None of those worked.
“Yes!” Trevor turned toward the therapist. “She—”
“Talk to me like I’m Pep,” she said and winked.
“Is this normal?” Trevor asked me, alarmed.
I sighed. Our Pep didn’t use therapy as a personal Match.com. But on the other hand, what better place to get to know someone?
* * *
“We need a new therapist,” I said to Anne, who’d called me after the session. I’d taken to talking extra fast on legal calls, like Audible 3x. I sounded like a human chipmunk.
“Why? What’s wrong with this one?”
“Who, Angelyne?”
“She comes highly recommended.”
“I’m getting very mixed signals,” I said. “I’m not well versed in child psychology, but should family therapists look like they’re auditioning for Real Housewives of Equinox?”
“In this town, the answer is yes,” Anne said. “I called because I have news.”
“I hope it’s fake news,” I said. “It’s the only kind of news I can stomach.”
“We lost Morris.”
“Who?”
“Our judge. He had a surfing accident.”
“I knew it,” I said. “Surfing in LA shows poor judgment, pardon the pun. Who surfs in those syphilis-coated waters? Who do we have now?”
“Fezel,” she said. She didn’t sound happy.
“Is he tough?”
“She,” Anne said.
“So that’s good, right? A she? Sisterhood and all that, fight the power, fight the man, mansplaining and man-spreading and Manhattans, right?”
“No.” Anne sighed. “Adorna Fezel. She’s basically our worst nightmare. A childless judge. In fact, I’m not sure she ever was a child.”
21
Disorder in the Court
Juliette overdosed on a girls’ trip to Cabo, but it wasn’t like it was a big deal or anything, as she told it. In terms of overdoses or overdoing-it doses (as she called them), this one was mild. Her heart hadn’t even stopped.
She’d been floating in the hotel infinity pool and one of the waiters had bought her a few drinks, then offered her a few pills, then offered her his dick, and then a few more pills, and before she knew it, she was helicoptered out to an emergency room somewhere on the Baja Peninsula.
Now, she was happily ensconced in her tidy room at New Hope Malibu. (Promises was booked; a bridal shower in the Colony had taken a wrong turn on the Percocet highway.)
“Guys, I’m starting to trace all my issues to my mom,” Juliette said. “I think she overloved me and gave me too much attention, and honestly, it just made me hate myself. Who deserves that much unconditional love?’
“I love Pep unconditionally,” I said. “I hope she doesn’t hate me so much she has to drug herself.”
“She already hates you; all girls hate their moms,” Liz said. “It comes and goes like a wave. Are you familiar with the self-loathing wave?”
“I surf the self-loathing pipeline every morning,” I said. “I just realized something. My mothering is based on TV shows. All I know about mothering is from Clair Huxtable. I’ll never measure up.”
“My mom touchstone is Carol Brady,” Liz said.
“Morticia Addams,” Juliette said, raising her hand.
We had a moment of silence.
“Okay. Enough about your semi-overdose,” I said. “My legal bills are mounting. I may have to sell Pep.”
“I’ll buy her,” Liz said, “then you could still see her. I mean, you could cook for us and take her to the movies on occasion.”
“You’re a perfect co-parent already,” I said. “I seriously don’t know what I’m going to do if I have to pay for my attorneys.”
“Why don’t you have your jewelry ‘stolen’?” Liz said in air quotes. “My mom has hers stolen when she gets tired of it. I know the guy in Beverly Hills.”
“Insurance pays top dollar,” Juliette said.
“Rich people know things,” I said. “I’ll have awful famous couple visit the house and leave my jewelry draped over the chopping block.”
“Sign over that Venice house to your dad, by the way,” Liz said.
“I would, but I worry,” I said. “He dates women he’s met off the internet.”
“Start a GoFundMe page,” Juliette said. “I did. Half the people here have GoFundMe pages. They raise money for rehab, get out, and spend the rest on drugs.”
“It’s like the Krebs cycle for sober living,” I said.
“I set mine up for my assault,” Juliette said.
“Oh my God. Juliette. Why didn’t you tell me? You were assaulted? The hotel in Mexico!”
“Oh no. This guy grabbed my ass at a nightclub,” she said. “It was like thirteen years ago.”
“Are you out of money, too?” I asked.
“She needs to pay off her plastic surgeon,” Liz said.
“Times are tough. I just leased a brown BMW,” Juliette said with a shudder. “Anyone who drives a brown car is poor.”
* * *
I looked up Juliette’s GoFundMe page as soon as I got in the car. There was a big picture of Juliette with the tight, shiny skin of a mango, playing with a kitten.
There were updates. A few pictures down, it showed her with a bright red face—the result, she claimed, of a sun allergy. Which looked suspiciously like a CO2 laser allergy.
She’d raised $15,000.
I scanned other GoFundMe posts—a disabled veteran bordering on homelessness in Seattle, a young family burying a toddler raising money for funeral expenses. Both parties were asking for three grand.
I took out a secret card I only used for dire emergencies—one that Trevor had forgotten but I’d felt too guilty to use. I donated money I didn’t have while sitting in my car in the hot Malibu sun. I couldn’t pay my own bills, but somewhere in Seattle, a veteran would sleep with a roof over his head, and in Omaha, a toddler would be buried.
Perspective is everything, I told myself.
Except cash. Perspective isn’t cash.
* * *
Trevor and I were hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains on a hazy, damp morning, and I twisted my ankle running down a hillside. So. There’s childbirth pain, then there’s sprained ankle pain a mile in on a hike. At least in childbirth, you’re handed a baby afterward.
Trevor had picked me up and carried me all the way down the mountain to our car. I’d gazed at him, my heart filled with love. He’d kissed me and set me down gently in the passenger seat.
He’d kept kissing me, and we made out in the car, my ankle throbbing, until the windows fogged up. I remember someone’s car alarm going off in the distance. To this day, the right car alarm tugs at my heart.
The car alarm in my dream never stopped. I opened my eyes. I’d slept through my iPhone alarm.
I looked at the time—7:10. I had to be in court by 8:00.
* * *
Fin borrowed Esteban’s hedge clippers and snipped off ankle monitor #3 (we’d named him Ted) to drive me even though I knew I could drive myself even though I was freaking out and finding it hard to see. Google Maps was telling me I was late. Waze was telling me I’d blown it. That’s when you knew you were in trouble. Google Maps was the spinster of traffic directions, sending you the safest, longest way to your destination; Waze was your dissolute, alcoholic cousin, guaranteeing a head-on with a trailer truck on a left turn onto a four-lane highway, but you’d arrive three minutes earlier.
Fin flew down streets and alleyways and I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, she was pushing me out the door in front of the looming courthouse on Figueroa.
“Are you coming in?” I asked.
“I just cut off my ankle monitor, so I should call N’Chelle and head out there.”
“Sure,” I said.
She looked at me. “I’ll go find a parking spot.”
* * *
Anne had cornered Ulger at their monthly history book club (this month’s selection: Warren G. Harding: The Presidential Diaries) and forced him to streamline the process by not allowing him his Pappy Van Winkle, straight, until he agreed we’d shoot for one court hearing for both custody and support. One. Not eight.
Court was already in session. I sneaked in, searching for a familiar face in a sea of marital despair. The atmosphere was so poisonous I hesitated to inhale.
Sitting on the bench in front of the courtroom, before the great seal of California, was a large woman, her pudgy mitt, encircled with gold bangles, serving as a hammock for her chins as she eyed a lawyer in a suit that should’ve been buried in the ’80s. Adorna Fezel clicked her long, red nails, painted with the blood of children. The lawyer’s client sat forward, shoulders hunched.
There are places you’d like to live and not visit and places you’d like to visit but not live. This was neither.
“Your Honor, my client is concerned about his Star Wars collectibles. His ex-wife hasn’t handed over Princess Leia, despite a court order.”
The judge replied, then her heavily lined sapphire eyes flicked my way as I tiptoed toward a row of gold watches and pinkie rings.
“Can I sit with you guys?” I asked Ulger. His young, yet-to-be-disfigured henchmen shook their heads and growled.
“Sit with your attorney,” Ulger said, scowling.
“Anne isn’t here yet.”
“Agnes,” Ulger said.
“Ulger,” I said, mimicking his baritone. “Okay, okay, I’ll be back there if you need me. Nice jacket, by the way. Did you wear that for me?”
Who needs drugs when you have nerves? I squeezed into a seat where I could watch Ulger whisper sweet, expensive nothings to his underlings. He glanced back at me. I winked. Anne, just in time to stand in front of my humiliation train, slid in next to me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was just down the hall, another case.”
“Business is booming,” I said.
“It’s certainly not the dry season,” she said. “I have good news for you.”
“Good news?” It felt like I hadn’t heard that phrase in so long. I repeated it to see how it felt, rolling around my tongue like a caramel. “Good news?”
