All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (42 page)

“I am calm,” she says, lying. In fact, she feels quite panicky, and she’s finding it increasingly hard to string words together in a way that makes any sense. “But why should I be? It’s everything we have. You are taking. It all.”

Paul sighs. “You’re exaggerating,” he says. “The only thing I’m not giving you is Applied Pharmaceuticals, which I built without any input from you anyway.”

“You never could have done it without me,” she spits at him. “You think I enjoyed making small talk with the dull wives of your Japanese investors? You think I enjoyed playing the gracious hostess to boors like”—she glances around the room, picks out a venture capitalist who once told her a filthy joke at her own cocktail party, and points a furious finger—“like Mitch Villardi? No. My entire life was about supporting. Supporting yours. Who do you think packed your bags? Bags for your travels? And picked up your passport and did your laundry and coordinated your social calendar? And shopping and cleaning and the house and kids? All me.”

“You
wanted
to do that,” he says. “You
wanted
to be a wife and mother—you chose this life for us from the start. I never asked you to do anything.”

“Like hell you didn’t,” she says. “That’s just an excuse. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Look, let’s not retread the past,” he says, pressing his temples with one hand as if trying to press away a headache. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it that things changed for us. Finding someone else wasn’t intentional on my part. But you’re resourceful, Janice. You’re going to be fine. Really, you are. It will probably be better for you in the long run.”

She sees Beverly appear in the doorway of the Club Room, pause, then walk intently toward them. Her ankles threaten to give out altogether, and out of the blue she feels very cold. She clutches at her cocktail and tries to focus on the liquid in the glass. It changes colors as she stares at it, from green to blue to lavender. When she looks up at the people standing around her, the faces distort, like a blurry photograph. She slips to one side as one heel gives out under her foot.

“Are you okay?” Paul asks, looking concerned. He grabs her arm to pull her upright.

“You hypocrite,” she slurs, wrenching herself away. In the electric space that opens up between them, for one fleeting instant, she sees her passage out toward a different world, one that is cruel and furious in its liberation. She pauses, struggling to come up with words that might express this feeling, but her mouth is numb and void.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” Paul says, and reaches for the glass in her hand.

“I’ve had enough of everything,” she says, and lifts her nearly empty glass to her lips. She tilts her head back to get the last drop and then, inexplicably, her head seems to keep tipping, and her torso follows it backward and then she’s falling slowly through space. She seems to fall forever, long enough to feel the blot of numbness spreading like spilled paint through her head and body and limbs (
nevernevernever
) and to wonder where the black came from, before she feels the pile of the rug scratching her bare neck and she passes out.

later, janice will remember only static moments, like video postcards.

Dr. Brunschild, kneeling over her, peeling her eyelid back. His fingers are cold and damp from his cocktail. “Passed out,” she hears him say, as fragments of his sentences bounce in and out. “Dehydrated, with a wild pulse…” She feels his hand cradling the back of her head, cold water being poured down her throat, and she chokes.

Paul and Beverly stand behind him, their faces blending together into one; an audience of familiar faces behind theirs, standing, gawking, mouths agape in wide O’s. Their faces swirl, wildly, as if painted by van Gogh. They whisper words, the Greek chorus narrating her fate: “…spectacle of herself…” whispers Noreen Gossett, a delighted look of concern on her face; “…erratic behavior…” says Joannie Cientela, clutching the pearls around her neck; “…drank at least
four…
maybe
five…”
says Jim Rittenberg, brushing away the broken martini glass with a toe; “…totally incoherent…” says Beverly Weatherlove, hanging on to Paul. Who says nothing. His brow forked with fissures, his eyes fixed on some point just beyond her body.

“…needs help,” says Barbara Bint, veering into view. She bends over, takes Janice’s hand. Janice feels the soft unexpected weight of Barbara’s palm in hers, unbearably intimate. “Someone help her. Poor Janice.”

Dr. Brunschild waves them back with an impatient arm, and they inch out of her periphery. Barbara’s hand slips away, leaving behind an impression of warm flesh.

It is easier to pass out again than to bear this pain.

when she awakens next, she is on her back in a shower in the women’s locker room, cold water raining down on her from the adjustable-pressure showerhead. Needle-sharp water hits her face. Someone is dumping a bucket of ice on her chest, which causes her to shudder in shock. She is still in her silk dress, which is drenched through, and the wrap has come half open, exposing her bra.

Dr. Brunschild’s bearded face zooms into her field of vision and she hears his voice, bouncing off the white tile of the shower and hitting her from a thousand directions. “Janice, can you hear me? Are you awake? Can you speak?”

Her purse is open beside her, the silk lining stained by water drops. Dr. Brunschild holds up the nearly empty baggie, white powder clinging to the plastic. “I found this in your purse, Janice,” he says. “You need to tell me what it is, so I can help you. What is it?”

She can’t make the words come out right. “It,” she says, strangely relieved by the confession. “It’s It.”

“What is it? Is it cocaine? Heroin? Methamphetamine?”

Blinking from the water in her eyes, her dress pooled around her hips, she can’t think of anything to say in response except “It, It,” before rolling over and vomiting down the shower drain.

social discretion is all that saves her from a trip to the hospital and the requisite visit from a policeman. The value of a club membership might be adversely affected if the weekly police reports—printed every Wednesday in the
Santa Rita Crier
—revealed that someone had overdosed on Schedule II drugs in the Club Room. But it is difficult for her to see the providence in this as she arrives home near midnight, bloated from drinking a gallon of water, still dizzy, still cold, still damp, in the passenger seat of Dr. Brunschild’s Mercedes.

The wagons have circled round, yes, but she knows that they are not around her.

Janice and Dr. Brunschild don’t speak until he pulls into her driveway and comes to a halt. He turns the ignition off and they listen to the ticking of the engine as it cools. She looks up at the dark facade of her home. The tall double doors are shadowed by the pilasters; they look like they might swallow her whole. She imagines herself entering, and the ivy that grows up the front of the house creeping in the night to cover the doors and windows, sewing her up inside its twisted green vines.

Upstairs, a light is still on in Lizzie’s room, and through the living room windows downstairs she can see the flickering blue of the television set. The girls are still up. What will she tell them?

Dr. Brunschild fingers his beard. “Why don’t you call me at my office tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll talk about how best to deal with this.” She can feel him watching her, hoping to catch her eye. Janice stares resolutely ahead at the house.

“Thank you, but I’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s not really a problem. Just too many drinks on an empty stomach.”

He clears his throat. “I’m a doctor, Janice. I can tell the dif ference between alcohol and stimulants. You’re taking metham phetamine—am I right?” He examines Janice’s face intently for a sign, but Janice stares out the windshield, even though his gaze feels like tiny needles pricking her cheek. “Look, I know the last few weeks have probably been horrible, and I certainly don’t judge you for whatever you might turn to as a coping mechanism. God knows where you’re getting it, Janice, but in case you aren’t aware, this stuff is very,
very
addictive.” She says nothing, considering his words. He continues, gently: “You need to get professional help. Check in to a clinic.”

Janice jerks upright in her seat. “No!” she blurts, imagining herself incarcerated in some horrible clinic in the desert for weeks on end and what that would mean. Everybody would know. The lawyers would have a field day with it. They would take away Lizzie. “That’s not a possibility. I’m in the middle of a lawsuit.”

Dr. Brunschild sit silently for a minute, contemplating this as he stares out into the midnight gloom. “I see. It doesn’t necessarily have to get out, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He turns to her reassuringly. “You could deal with a local clinic. But you really shouldn’t try to deal with this alone.”

The house sits twenty feet away. In the dark it is an oasis. And her daughters. They are hers. If nothing else, if Paul takes everything else away, if she has crashed and burned and lost everything she once believed she had, she at least has the girls who sleep inside the sturdy walls of her home. They alone are worth giving It up for. Because if she doesn’t, she sees now, she will surely lose them, more than she already has. She will drift away until she is totally gone, so lost in It that she can’t find her way back. And then the lawyers will expose her, and IPO money will be the least of her concerns. Paul will get custody of Lizzie, Margaret will hate her, and then where will she be? It will all have been for nothing, all of it. It might already be too late, she worries, thinking of Paul’s and Beverly’s faces, of the new “we” that has aligned against her and is just waiting for her to slip up. The wolves are on the prowl.

She puts a weak hand on the door handle and struggles to push it open. “I won’t,” she says. “I can do this on my own.” And with her pumps in hand, her bare feet pierced by the gravel, she is able to stay upright during the long march toward home.

when margaret was in third grade, her teacher jotted a note in the margin of her report card. “Margaret shows exceptional promise,” she wrote, in a perfect cursive hand. “She can be a bit of a know-it-all, but that is, of course, the hallmark of a bright mind and a strong leader. Have you considered having her skip a grade?” Margaret rereads this line in the dim light of the upstairs attic. The authoritative red ink has faded to an anemic pink, the tissue-thin paper nearly disintegrates in her hands. She marvels that even at eight years old, her personality had already so clearly formed—
know-it-all!
—which raises the question of whether she had actually sprung from Janice’s womb already convinced that she had nothing left to learn. And yet, how wrong her teacher had been.
Strong leader!
she snorts. She’d had them all fooled, even before she’d outgrown her Barbies.

She tosses the report card at her feet, where it comes to rest on top of a growing pile of yellowing papers: report cards from thirteen years of grammar, grade, and high school; marked-up essays, each emblazoned with a capital A (often, an A+) on the title page; her high school transcript, with its implausible 4.3 GPA; her high school graduation cap, its flattened rayon top enthusiastically inked with the name of her upcoming alma mater,
CORNELL;
her twin senior theses, one for each college major, two forty-page tomes that she had composed during marathon sessions in the campus library; her admittance letter to grad school and a pixilated photo of her in the local paper for having made Phi Beta Kappa. The archive ends there, abruptly, at age twenty-four, when she left for Los Angeles, as if she’d fallen off the map and been written off for dead.

She rifles farther back in the file cabinet that her mother has carefully marked, on labels decorated with an ivy motif,
MARGARET.
(The file cabinet next to it is
LIZZIE,
with a daisy motif; another one, next to it, is curiously labeled
ARCHIVE: FRANCE TRIP).
Her entire childhood is here, carefully organized in color-coded files:
PAPERS (ENGLISH);
a whole series of
ARTWORK
folders organized by medium
(CRAYON
and
PENCIL
and
WATERCOLOR); ARTICLES: FILLMORE BUGLE; SANTA WISH LISTS;
and
CORRESPONDENCE: SENT.
At age twelve, Margaret had written the president a letter, addressing her concern about ocean pollution: “Our earth’s heritage lies in the depths of the ocean—home to the humbling humpback, the dancing dolphins, the tenacious tortoises—and we must strive to preserve that habitat for them and for ourselves,” she had written. “Mr. President, I appreciate you taking the time to consider my proposed legislation.” The president—or, rather, some White House mailroom intern—had sent back only a form letter with a rubber-stamped signature, thanking her for her support. She remembers throwing the letter away in disgust, but now here it is, saved by her mother, the wrinkles smoothed out with an iron, and filed away under
CORRESPONDENCE: RECEIVED.
She crumples it and tosses it into the pile, too, with only the slightest twinge of guilt about undoing her mother’s careful work.