All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (52 page)

Clunk.
The plate takes a hard landing, the peach slices rocking back and forth on the white china as they sweat sugar syrup. “I want to give you the money,” Janice says, and the words erupt from her with a vehemence that surprises Margaret. “Even if I don’t win the lawsuit. I’ll liquidate some assets.”

Margaret looks down at the summons and then up at the granite expression on her mother’s face. She can see now that saying yes to her mother would be, in fact, a kind of gift—not for her, but for Janice. Yet she still can’t do it. “No,” she says.
Don’t say it,
her mind tells her, too late. She forges ahead nonetheless. “No. I don’t want you to do that.”

“It’ll be a loan, Margaret. You’ll pay me back.”

“Thanks, Mom,” she says, feeling her tentative conviction gathering force, the hazy decision that’s been germinating in the back of her mind hatching itself as fully formed words for the first time. “But I’ve decided that I’m going to declare bankruptcy. It’s the cleanest way.” Her mother’s eyebrows spring toward the ceiling, and Margaret hurries to explain herself. “It’s not going to hurt that much, really. I don’t really have anything for them to take, except maybe my car, and somehow I doubt they’ll want that.”

Janice purses her lips, and Margaret can tell this was the wrong thing to say. “You’d rather declare bankruptcy than let your mother—let
me
—help you? Is that what this is about?”

“This is
not
about you. I just…I just want to feel like I’m starting fresh, not beholden to anyone, not riding on anyone else’s coattails. Does that make sense? If I take your money I’ll feel even smaller than I already do, and I don’t need that pressure. Honestly, Mom, you handed me my life on a silver platter and I really appreciate it, but you don’t have to give me this, too. It’s my fault, not yours.”

Janice touches the summons with a thumb, rotating it so that she can read it more easily. “I understand that, Margaret, I do. But I’m your
mother.
I wish you’d reconsider. It will destroy your credit rating—it will be on your
permanent record.
I don’t know how you’ll ever buy a house!”

Margaret laughs, a sharp, bitter bark. “Somehow I really don’t think that’s my biggest problem right now.”

“You’ll need a lawyer.”

“I know.”

Janice sighs and shakes her head. “Sometimes I just don’t understand you,” she says. “Really, I don’t.”

by the time margaret wakes up the following morning, the story has made the local newspapers. On the cover of the business section of the
San Jose Mercury News
is a photograph of Paul—from the day Applied Pharmaceuticals went public—and a far more satisfying inch-high cover line:
“NASDAQ DARLING IN DIVORCE SCANDAL.”
The
San Francisco Chronicle
skips the picture but adds a graph depicting the declining value of Applied Pharmaceuticals stock, a jagged line that finishes in an arrow that points ominously downward.

By ten
A.M.,
the stock is at 119.

The online and television news journals chime in as the day passes, and Margaret is surprised to discover that her father’s life is, in fact, a story of national interest. MSNBC quotes an “unnamed member of the board of directors of Applied Pharmaceuticals who has registered his disappointment that the personal life of the CEO is ‘tarnishing the good name of Coifex.’” CNN mentions “concerns from Applied Pharmaceuticals investors that the details of executive compensation and company finances will be dragged through the press.” Only Fox News has aligned itself firmly with Paul Miller’s side of the case: A pundit describes Janice Miller as “a greedy Silicon Valley housewife who hasn’t earned a buck in her life and expects everything given to her gratis.” There is much conjecture about Coifex’s delayed arrival on store shelves: Is the FDA withdrawing approval? Are side effects being suppressed? Margaret wonders if this speculation is somehow Kelly’s doing.

That afternoon, there’s a defensive press release from Applied Pharmaceuticals itself: “Coifex is on track to arrive in pharmacies this fall. Any delays are strictly procedural.” Media gossip Web sites publish the news that Paul Miller has hired bulldog New York publicist David Farikow, a specialist in PR disasters. From Paul himself, however, there are no statements, no denials; there is no public blustering whatsoever. Her father does not call. The stock dips further: 112, and then 110, before the market closes.

The trial date looms just three days away: ten
A.M.
on Friday. The answering machine fills with messages from reporters, lawyers, neighbors, talent wranglers for network news shows, even a few strangers (women, always) calling to “offer support.” Janice considers accepting an interview with Larry King, but Kelly advises against it. “I have a feeler out to Oprah,” she says. “Let’s wait for her. It’s a better match.”

“Oprah?” Janice says. “Oh! I love Oprah.” And Margaret notices a hard new gleam in her mother’s eye—tempered with a twitch of shame, still, but steely with vengeance and self-righteousness. Against her will, she realizes, her mother is capable of enjoying this.

Margaret herself makes only one call, to Los Angeles. Josephine answers her cell phone with a wheezy “Hello?” She pants into the receiver, taking great winded gulps of air, as if she’s running. Margaret can hear dogs barking in the background, the faint plaintive wail of a fire engine.

“What are you doing?” Margaret asks.

“Hiking in Runyon Canyon. Where are you? Where have you been? It’s like you vanished off the face of the earth.”

“At my parents’ house,” Margaret says. “You hike with your cell phone now?”

“I
know,
it’s awful, but I’m expecting a phone call from my agent.” Josephine gasps for breath. “Okay, I’m stopping. I just read the news this morning about what’s going on with your family. Oh my God. Are you okay? No wonder you took off.”

“Well, that wasn’t the only reason.
Snatch
went under—Stuart Gelkind didn’t buy it after all.”

There’s a hesitation on the other end. “Yeah, I kind of figured that out. There was a big feature about him in the
L.A. Times
last week and
Snatch
wasn’t even mentioned, and everyone put two and two together.”

“Oh,” says Margaret, feeling queasy. “The jerk put me into bankruptcy.”

“I am
so sorry,
Margaret,” Josephine says. “
Snatch
was great, and he was stupid if he didn’t see that.”

Margaret indulges in a moment of self-pity. She swallows. “It’s been a pretty lousy summer, Josie,” she says.

“Oh! Honey!” Josephine’s voice grows throaty with emotion. “Well, maybe this will make you feel a
little
better: Ysabelle van Lumis dumped Bart. Apparently she was cheating on him with Bobby Masterston the whole time.”

“Oh,” Margaret says, surprised. She sends out feelers along her body—to the tips of her toes, the back of her neck, the thumping muscle in her chest—trying to sense some residual anger, some pain, some hope. Something. But there’s nothing, just a pinch—but only a pinch—of sadness. Perhaps a smidgen of schadenfreude. Did she ever love him in the first place? she wonders. Or was she just seduced by an aura of ambition? It doesn’t really matter now. “I still owe him twelve thousand dollars,” she tells Josephine. “Did I ever mention that? Another thing I need to sort out.”

“He doesn’t need it,” sniffs Josephine. “You’re coming back soon, right? I know
Snatch
is done, but you could take a screenwriting class or something—I bet you’d be great at it. You shouldn’t just stop writing; that would be such a waste. And you’re totally welcome to live in my guesthouse. I insist. It would be so much fun to have you around.”

“Thanks, but I think I’m going to stay here for a while, until I figure out what I want to do next. It’s a marginally less poisonous environment, you know?”

“You think we’re poisonous?”

“That’s not really what I meant. But do you really want me lurking around your house, all sour with envy? Besides, I can’t even afford to come back right now.”

“Well, if you need quick money I could hire you to help me with some things. I really need an assistant. I got a pilot and I’m totally overwhelmed.”

Margaret laughs, despite herself. “Josephine, you’re really missing the point.”

Josephine sighs. “I just miss you, you know?”

“I miss you too,” Margaret says. She looks out into the manicured garden, thinking of the hard bright light of Los Angeles, of the wild Santa Ana winds making the palm trees bend over in obeisance, of the nighttime helicopters hovering with their spotlights trained down on the wide boulevards below. For a moment, she thinks she should go back now, as soon as possible, before she loses her momentum entirely. And then she pours herself a glass of lemonade and goes upstairs to watch a DVD with Lizzie.

things take a turn for the worse on wednesday, when Applied Pharmaceuticals announces that it has a release date for Coifex. The drug is being rushed to market and will be available within two weeks. Oprah declines the interview with Janice, and the commentators, distracted by a new product announcement by Apple, start to abandon the story. What press coverage remains is tainted by backlash. “The media furor over Paul Miller is pointless,” says one middle-aged (and balding, Margaret notes) pundit on
Hannity & Colmes,
his livery mouth snapping at a sour young blonde who has been weakly defending Janice with an arsenal of feminist tropes. “The personal lives of executives have no bearing on their ability to run a company. If anything, Paul Miller’s financial ruthlessness proves that he has the makings of a great CEO.”

By the end of the day, Coifex stock has risen again, all the way to 125, and Janice stalks through the house with her mouth pressed into a grim horizontal line. The feeling of defeat in the air is palpable, thick like pea soup. The phone has stopped ringing, and even when Lizzie and Margaret and Janice are all in the same room together they are mostly silent. Around dusk, the Groupers walk slowly by, taking an evening constitutional with their dog. Margaret watches them through the kitchen window as they stare blatantly at the house. The Bellstroms follow them a few minutes later, and yet no one comes up the drive to ring the bell and offer words of support. Margaret wonders if they are afraid that failure is contagious; she senses the neighborhood shrinking back, in fear of an infection. She can see that she has, unintentionally, raised the stakes: If they don’t win this lawsuit, the fallout for her mother will be hideous, and not just financially. She imagines Janice in the supermarket, people whispering behind her back even as they smile to her face, offering sympathy and yet secretly wondering whether Janice somehow deserved what she got. She’ll be ostracized, inevitably, and it will be Margaret’s fault.

The unexpected coup de grâce comes on Thursday, the day before the trial begins, when an anonymous e-mail ping-pongs around the Internet, linking to a Web site that purports to have “Paul Miller’s Secret Sex Tapes.” Kelly is one of the first to see it, and she calls early in the morning to warn them.

“It’s about to get ugly,” she tells Margaret. “I’m looking into it. In the meantime, don’t answer your phone. They’re sharks, and they’ve smelled blood. Journalists live for these moments.”

Margaret hangs up and looks over at Janice, who’s been standing at the kitchen island with a magazine in her hand, pretending not to listen. She feels as if she’s just been asked to hit her mother with a baseball bat. “Mom,” she says slowly. “There’s a sex tape.”

“What?” Janice blinks rapidly.

“A sex tape, Mom. Of Dad. And Beverly.”

“Oh God.” Janice presses her hands into the granite countertop, shoulders locked tight. “This is more than I signed up for,” she says. She picks at an invisible spot of food with her fingernail.

“I’ll watch the video and tell you anything you need to know,” Margaret says, knowing that this unpleasant task is small penance for the humiliation she has unwittingly brought down upon her mother.

“Do you think it’s too early for a drink?” Janice asks. She lowers herself into a kitchen chair and sits there, staring unenthusiastically at the cover of
Bon Appétit.

margaret pours herself some scotch from her father’s neglected wet bar (ten
A.M.
is not too early for a drink at all, she decides) and draws the blinds in the study. The computer whines to life, the dust on the screen sizzling as the monitor warms up. She pauses before hitting “Play” on the video file, remembering something that happened when she was in grammar school. She woke up in the middle of the night thirsty for a glass of water and, passing by the partly open door of the master bedroom, glimpsed her mother and father mid-coitus. She watched in silence for a minute, frozen in terror by what looked to her like a violent wrestling match taking place on the bed, and then, even as it dawned on her what was going on, she was struck by a curiosity about which of her parents would win. She couldn’t decide who she wanted to lose. The fear of getting caught eventually compelled her to move away from the door and go back to bed, where she stayed awake all night, replaying the scene in her mind with growing horror.