Breach of Promise (26 page)

I headed out to Club Cobalt. But it wasn’t to see Roland. He wasn’t appearing tonight.
But Milo Ayers was there. Like always.
“Hey, Markie, how are you?” He gave me a firm handshake and a slap on the shoulder. “Rolie isn’t here.”
“I know. I just came by.”
“You want a table? Sit at the bar?”
“Mr. Ayers, could I talk to you a minute?”
His eyes, rigid and warm at the same time (I imagined a hit man looking at a puppy), looked deeply into mine.
“Sure,” he said. “Come on over, I’ll get you a drink.” “Just water.”
“Bottled,” he said.
When we were settled at a table in the corner, me with my San Pellegrino and Milo Ayers with his scotch, Ayers rubbed his hands together. “Now what can I help you out with?”
“You gave me some good advice once,” I said. “About finding a lawyer. You gave me a name.”
“Gregory Arsenault.”
“I couldn’t afford him.”
Ayers shrugged and stuck out his lower lip. “Not a problem. I hope you like who you got.”
“I think she did her best.”
“But that wasn’t good enough?”
“Not when the other side got a lying witness.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“Your father lied against you?” His tone was one of complete disbelief, like that wasn’t a possibility in his world.
“The other side got to him somehow.”
“And this lie hurt in court?”
“Big time.”
Milo sat back, drumming his fingers on the table. His gold bracelet jangled. “Markie, I like you. You been a good kid, a good customer. I help you out, you keep it between us, huh? Like a favor I’m doing and you don’t want to spread it around, hey?”
“Yes. Whatever help you can give, I’ll take. I’m at the end here.”
“I’ll call you. Now what you do is, you go home. You do what you do and don’t let anything anybody does to you get you. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Mr. Ayers.”
“Then you’ll be okay.”
Sure. Okay and alone.

There was a structure to my loneliness.
Like the arc in a good play, I went through the acts, wandering through what actors call the “through line.” That’s the thing that holds the drama together, the string that penetrates through each beat of the play.
Act one began when I woke up, wishing I hadn’t, seeing the light and knowing there was a long act two to come, knowing I had to live through the day wondering if the court would let me see Maddie again.
Somehow I’d pull myself out of bed and begin the living of it. Moving forward was the hardest thing. I felt like I had on one of those lead aprons, the ones the dental assistants plop on you before they take the X-rays. It was like it was permanently attached, and that’s how my life was going to feel from now on.
So I’d go through the motions of the day. Not helpful to anyone. Hearing people talk to me like they were disembodied ghosts. Life was a haunted house. Act two seemed interminable. The minutes, as they say, seemed like hours, and the hours go so slowly. Wasn’t that from some song in
West Side Story
? I didn’t care. This was my play, and it wasn’t a musical.
Then I’d come on toward night, and act three. The curtain came down as I tried to go to sleep, sometimes crying, sometimes numb. And always in the back of my mind a little critic saying maybe we should close this show. Maybe tomorrow the theater could be dark, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
And then I’d wake up again.
For a week I was like this.
Mrs. Williams tried to pull me out of myself. She stopped me once in the laundry room, where I wasn’t doing any laundry. I was just listening to the machines.
“Don’t do any good to stew,” she said. “Come on and let me fix you a meal.”
“Thanks, but I have plans.”
“What? You gonna go down to the bus stop and listen to the traffic?”
“Passes the time.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“Wounds all heels,” I corrected. “Groucho Marx said that.”
“Never liked Groucho Marx. Now Phyllis Diller, there was a funny lady.”
Somehow, I went to church on Sunday. Maybe it was a life raft thing. I’d been having a recurring nightmare. It went like this:

I am on board a luxury liner making its way across the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean is the scarier ocean, of course. Pacific meaning “peaceful” and all. It is much too placid for a nightmare.

Also, the Atlantic seems colder. I grew up sloshing around in the Pacific on hot, Southern California days. It is the type of ocean that embraces you; the Atlantic couldn’t care less.

Anyway, it’s night on this cruise and everybody is dressed up in evening clothes, like Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in
An Affair to Remember,
and there’s a party going on. I seem to float through it, looking for someone. No one sees me.

I am like a ghost, and I am looking for my daughter. She is not here among the guests. In my dream-mind I reason that, of course, she should be in bed. It is late at night, after all. And in the way you shift locations in dreams, I find I am going through the door to my stateroom, the stateroom I share with Maddie, sure that I will find her soft, brown hair and calm face on the pillow on the bed.
She is not there.
I begin to panic. Where is she? Has she just wandered off, sleepily? Or has something more sinister taken place? Has someone, in fact, stolen into this room and taken her?
My dream takes me through the stateroom corridors, up the steps, deck by deck, until I am outside in the chill, running a complete circle around the ship.
No one pays me any mind. There is light fog on the deck, and the upper-crust people strolling around—it always seems like a 1930s black-and-white movie at this point in the dream—give me rebuking looks.
I stop to ask a man, in top hat and tails like Fred Astaire, if he’s seen a little girl tonight. He huffs, does not answer, and my panic expands.
Maybe she’s fallen off!
I try to scream for help, but only manage a low moan (I am sure that is what comes out of my throat as I dream).
I run to the stern and look over into the dark, churning ocean. Leaning over, desperate to see something, anything, I fall off.
Down into the black nothing of the sea.
Flapping my arms, I scream. And now it is full-blooded, desperate, dying.
No one hears.
I scream again. Only the sound of the wake slapping at my ears comes back in answer.
The stern of the ship is getting farther and farther away.
Please! Somebody!
And then I see her.
Maddie.
She is looking over the stern, looking for something. Or someone. Me! She is looking for me. I am lost to her, and she is looking.
Maddie!
She does not hear, and then twin shadows appear next to her. I know one of them. Her mother. The other is a man, and it is not me. I know who it is.
The two of them enfold Maddie in their arms. She falls into them with comfort and joy.
The lights of the ship become pinpricks in the death shroud of night. Farther and farther away it goes, then disappears altogether.
Now all that is left is darkness and night and me treading water, and knowing that there is nothing to be done. I am lost in the middle of the freezing ocean, not a lifeboat in sight.
There is no one to save me, no one to hear me.

I had this dream five times in one week.
So I went to church.
I saw Nikki but didn’t talk to her. I’m sure she took it as embarrassed silence. I took it as not wanting to have anything to do with anything human. The sermon that day droned on like commercials on the car radio during a long commute—you hear the noise but none of the message stays with you.

I forget who it was who said if a story starts to drag, just bring in a guy with a gun. That means a sudden change in the plot.
In my own sorry story line the sudden change was a shoe box in the back of my closet. I was looking for an old pair of boots. I found them, dusty and black, in the rear corner. As I pulled them out I saw a pink shoe box. Clearly not mine or Paula’s, because of the size.
Maddie’s.
I grabbed it. When I got it out into the light, I saw it had a rubber band around it and something written in crayon. In the unmistakable hand of my daughter, it said: DADYS BEREED TRESER.
I did everything I could to keep my heart from bursting. I removed the rubber band carefully, so it wouldn’t break, because I didn’t want anything that Maddie had touched to break. Slowly, I removed the top of the shoe box.
The first thing I saw was a little kush ball, red and yellow rubber strings together in a sphere. She loved those things, so it was no small gift. I picked it up, smelled it, and rubbed it against my cheek.
There was a nickel in the box. Treasure indeed. I decided I would tape that nickel to the refrigerator.
Last of all was a paper, a piece ripped off a yellow legal pad. I turned it over and saw the crayon drawing. Three stick people. A man, a woman, a little girl. Holding stick hands. A building in the background, roughly the shape of our apartment complex.
And above the building, where the sun would have been, a heart. With light rays coming from it, down toward the three stick people holding hands.
I lost it then. I was thankful I was alone in a closet.

Even before she said anything, I knew Alex had bad news. It was the look in her eye, like her cat had been run over by a cement truck. I was the cat.

“Sit down, Mark.” Alex looked trapped in her own office. She’d called me that morning and said I needed to come in. Try as I might I couldn’t get her to talk to me over the phone.

“Give it to me.” I made no move to sit or even move. “Please, sit. We need to talk.”
“She gets Maddie, right? All Maddie, all the time.” “Yes.”
The word hit like one of those anvils that drops on Wile E. Coyote in the cartoons. Now I sat, pushed down by the weight of it. And then I got that feeling, the one that comes with my nightmare, when I’m in the sea at night as the ship pulls farther and farther away. Gets me in the pit of the stomach and stays there, even after I wake up. “Why?” It sounded like a stupid question, considering how I’d

messed up in court.
“That’s the way the judge decided. We can appeal.” “What did it? What was the thing that did it?”
“He looked at the totality of the circumstances, which is what

he’s supposed to do. We both know it didn’t look good.” “What about the lying witness? That didn’t help.” “It was not emphasized in the decision, but certainly that hurt.” “And what if he admits he lied?”
“How is he going to do that?”
“I might convince him.”
Alex cocked her head at me. “Are you not telling me something again?”

I put my hands up. “Relax. I don’t know where he is. But I’m going to find him.”
Sighing, Alex said, “Mark, listen. You have been through an ordeal, a bad one. There is still hope. There’s still more we can do within the system. If you start doing dumb things, I won’t be able to help you. And you may not get to see Maddie at all.”
“At all?”
“If you’ll just listen. You still get monitored visits, Mark.”
“Oh yeah, and we know how great those things are.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“I don’t know if it is. I couldn’t stand it happening the same way again.” I looked at the ceiling for a moment. “I’ll take it.”
“But there’s a condition.”
I looked back at Alex as if she were Torquemada ready to twist the rack again.
She said, “You are to enroll in an anger management program before you see Maddie again.”
“Anger management?”
“That’s right. There are programs that are court approved that—”
“I have to go through some stupid program to see my daughter?”
Alex closed her eyes, then opened them again. “The sooner you start, the sooner we can set up a visit.”
Oh yeah, I was going to start all right. I was going to kick the life out of something before the night was through, and then I’d
worry about managing the old anger.
I thought if God was in front of me, say like a burning bush, I’d kick that bush, too.
“You have not responded well to setbacks,” Alex said.
“Thank you.”
“You want it straight, or do you want it namby-pamby?”
“Namby-pamby.”
“Sorry, you’re not going to get it from me. I didn’t get to this point, advising clients, by short-shrifting. You have got to get yourself together.”
Her words reminded me of that scene from
Tootsie,
when Dustin Hoffman is told by his agent that he has to get some therapy because he’s too difficult for anyone to work with. So Hoffman puts on a dress.
I considered that option, too.

Anger management. It sounded so eighties, so Richard Simmons. Get all touchy-feely and you’re a model of calm. You come out wearing a leotard and passing out flowers at the airport.

But it was what I needed to get a shot at seeing Maddie. It took me a couple of days, but I finally accepted that. So I was going to do it. In fact, I was going to be the best manager of anger the world had ever seen, because nothing was going to keep me from my daughter. I was going to become the best father the world had ever seen, the kind of guy Maddie would love again, forever.

And I knew I had an anger problem. I wasn’t anxious to dig too deep about it, but I’d take it as it came.
Turns out what came was some advice. Which hit me like a truck doing seventy.
The first class I went to met, wouldn’t you know, at a church, a Methodist in North Hollywood.
There were ten of us that first night, not counting the facilitator. His name was Stanley; he was about fifty, and looked like a commercial for mellow. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache, and his voice was calm as a pond.
We sat in a circle in metal chairs. Stanley kicked off the evening with a welcome, then said, “We have a new member tonight. This is Mark.”
Everybody said
Hi, Mark.
“We don’t make anybody talk here,” Stanley said, “if they don’t want to. If you want to share anything about yourself, Mark, we’d all be happy to hear it. What we say in here, stays here.”
Fair enough. “Well, I’m here because I’ve been told I have an anger issue—isn’t that the way you’re supposed to put it? And a judge says I need to deal with it if I want to see my daughter. Custody fight and all that.”
Several heads nodded. I was among friends.
One guy on my left, whose name I would later learn was Rick, said, “I’m trackin’ ya, bud. Been through that sweatbox myself.”
From the look on his face, it was a painful experience, but he seemed . . . resigned. Did I even want to feel resigned? Not at the moment, but I’d work my way into it. I just kept thinking about Maddie.
“The way we like to start,” Stanley explained, “is to go around the circle and see how people handled situations this week, things that might have made them angry, or did in fact make them angry, and how they handled it. Our big saying here, Mark, is ‘In your anger, do not sin.’ Anger is an emotion, it comes of its own volition. It’s what we do with the anger that counts.”
And so around they went. Each of the guys was open about their struggles and victories, and by the time it got to me I was feeling pretty good about this crowd. It was like there was nothing phony about them.
So when it came back to me I let them know the whole story. Everything. And it felt good, like letting a big sack of rocks off my back.
When it was over, we helped ourselves to some Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies and coffee from a big urn. Stanley let me know that I’d just given a very promising first session and said I’d made good progress.
It all was positive, upbeat. Until I got outside the door.
Rick stopped me. “I’ll walk to the parking lot with you.”
He was a big guy, did construction work. Looked, in fact, like he could tear a mattress in half with his hands. Or teeth.
“You’re here under court order?” he said.
“Yeah. You?”
“Oh yeah. My old lady dragged me in. Domestic violence. They let me off with a fine and community service, and this deal.” He jerked his big thumb back toward the church.
“What do you think of it?” I said. “Stanley and the whole thing?”
Rick shrugged. “Good as anything, I guess. Won’t do jack squat for your case, though.”
“What?”
“Listen, my friend, once they’ve got you going to this, it’s like admitting you’re a child molester or something. No way a judge is going to change his mind on the custody deal. They’re too afraid somebody like us is going to end up killing the kid or the spouse, and then they’re up for reelection with that hanging over their heads. Nope, we’re up a creek, pal.”
“So what’s the point?”
“There is no point, that’s the whole thing. The system’s set up to squash guys like you and me like bugs. We’re here because the court makes us, and it’s better than getting time in the cooler. But it’s all over.”
Suddenly, LA at night seemed like a giant vacuum, sucking my ribs out.
“No,” I said. “This is going to work. I’m going to get to see my daughter.”
He shrugged again.
“You believe in the God part of all this?” I said.
“Like the higher power deal? Nah.”
“Well I do. I have to. It’s got to work.”
“Just keep telling yourself that, man.”