Judgement

Several years ago in the midst of some other confabulation crisis or other, things got so bad I actually phoned Ben's mother.

Now, Ben's mother has always disliked me intensely. Some kind of chemical thing. To her credit, she's always behaved very generously towards me, remembering me at Christmas and on my birthday – true, the gifts were ghastly but it's the thought that counts – and she's been kind, affectionate and generous to my two children, even the one unrelated to her by blood.

I called her because I just didn't know who else to talk to. I couldn't talk to any of my friends with whom I'd always maintained the happy fiction that Ben and I were Mr. and Mrs. Normal. His mother knew the behavior. I wouldn't have to explain it.

"Nancy, I don't know what to do! What should I do? I can't live like this anymore –"

Nancy listened to me babble and then was silent. The beats went on. Finally she said, "Get him into therapy." Good idea, though an odd idea coming from such a blunt, in-your-face, feelings-don't-matter pragmatist like Nancy.

Even Ben himself seemed excited by the idea of therapy.

He spent three weeks looking for just the right therapist. Every night when I drove home from the Silicon Valley – I was marketing for Netscape in those days – the first thing I'd ask him, even before I kissed the kids, was, "So, did you find one yet?"

Finally he did. A woman, a Dr. Melvi.

"Great. Make arrangements to have her send the bills to me," I told him. I was relieved. A new beginning!

And the therapy went swimmingly too. Every week there were new epiphanies, new maps to heretofore uncharted passages. Ben would share some of these with me in a guarded fashion. Dr. Melvi deployed a method that involved free-associating off the words spelled during endless word games, Scrabble, Boggle and Perquacky. So innovative! So Ben! Perfect match of doctor to client.

And she liked him, was supportive of him, of us. She'd heard – from him! – how hard I was struggling financially so she had decided to give us a break on his bill –

Wait a minute, I thought. I said, "Ben, nobody does that. Never mind that therapists have their own bills to pay, it's not therapeutic. You don't value what comes to you without a cost."

We were lying in bed for this conversation, watching The Sopranos. Tony was having issues with his therapist too. I glanced at the name on Tony's therapist's door and finally got it: Dr. Melfi meet Dr. Melvi.

I was embarrassed that it had taken me so long to catch on.

And it took a full 72 hours to get Ben to finally admit he'd made the whole thing up.

Sadly, the lies aren't always that funny.

***

On Friday, I dreaded taking Robin back to the empty house.

In the car he was prattling non-stop – at the party they'd played Truth or Dare, and the Dare was to kiss some girl and now he kind of liked Arianna again. Arianna had gotten into it with a parent – see, Anthony, Arianna's brother, had one of those glow-wand things only he'd put it down on a table and some girl had grabbed it so Anthony had grabbed it back and then the girl complained to her mother and the mother marched up to Anthony and said, You offended my daughter. Maybe you don't belong in this school.

And Arianna said, Your daughter is a thief. Maybe she doesn't belong in this school.

"Whoa," I said. "That's how world wars start. Can't we all just get along?"

I was relieved though. He wasn't asking about his father. He wasn't asking, "Is Daddy home yet?"

I didn't want to be the one to break it to him that Daddy wasn't coming.

Daddy had planned to come. Daddy had planned to stay.

But I hadn't planned for Daddy to stay.

Numerous times on the phone Friday Daddy and I had hashed it out. "You told me you had talked to them and negotiated a break –"

"I never told you that."

"Okay, but you implied it."

"All right, I implied it."

"So what were you really going to do?"

"I was just going to walk off."

"And, what did you think was going to happen when you got here and I said, 'It's time to go back?'"

"I thought you'd relent."

"Why did you think that?"

"Oh, I don't know. My general usefulness." He laughs dryly. "I figure that's been my chief selling point for the last few years."

My heart just about broke. I love the guy but he's deeply flawed and I just can't do it anymore. Living with a chronic liar is like living with a drug addict – over the years, you cover for them so many times that you turn into a chronic liar too. Plus I am really, really tired of toting the financial bale. If I'm gonna do it alone, then I'm gonna do it alone.

But most importantly, Robin has begun modeling the lying behavior. "How can you sit there and tell me you've walked the dogs?" I scream. "There's shit all over the floor!"

Robin starts to cry.

"Did you walk them?"

Robin shakes his head, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Well, why not?"

"I don't know, I don't know," he screams. "Leave me alone!" A Peter Quint, you devil! moment.

I've gotten him a therapist. No Dr. Melvi. A real therapist named D. Horowitz.

But back to the phone call.

"Look, Ben," I say. "I'm not the one who left. I tried to talk you out of it. I tried and tried and tried."

"I wish I'd never left," Ben says. "I've hated it since the second week. I want to come home. I miss my family."

"I'm sure you do but see, Ben, every three years it's something major. The woman in the Honduras. The circus. And in between times it's like I'm your mother, screaming at you to clean your room. I can't live like that. I've tried and tried and tried to get you to change. But you won't. Or can't. Did you even hear me when I tried to tell you that leaving was a really, really bad idea? Because you know, Ben, I did try."

"No," he mumbles. "I tuned it out."

"You tuned me out. You wanted what you wanted and it didn't matter how much it damaged me. I'm sorry, Ben, but I can't live like that anymore. I can't. I wanted you back for a month so I can organize stuff – I could do it all if it was organized – but you've got to have something to go back to because I can't live with you anymore. It can't be open-ended. I'm sorry. Talk to them. Negotiate something."

I am sorry too. Mostly for myself. Because I'm going into the Memorial Day Weekend – arguably one of the two biggest tourism weekends of the year – without any kind of backup at all and with no childcare plans for Robin who I thought would be hanging out with his father.

"I don't know what I'm going to do this weekend," I say.

"Right. I've really fucked you over, haven't I?" says Ben. There's a slightly aggrieved quality to his voice and he's in a hurry to get off the phone.

It's gonna be bad when we get home, I think, glancing over at Robin, my poor abandoned boy. And I'm exhausted from opening delivery boxes all day, playing Chili Queen, waking up at 4am to keep up with Cirque du Méprise. The house is an utter mess. Ben's stuff is all over the place, his leather jacket still slung across one of the chairs in the kitchen, so familiar to me that I never moved it – it's like a piece of furniture. And now there's no end to this in sight.

But when I walk up the stairs and open the door, there's Max, all six foot three sensible, grounded, vibrant inches of him. His RLS friends are all the offspring of successful doctors, lawyers, real estate developers, restaurant owners and his friends all judge their parents. "So, Mom!" says Max. "Can I take Robin to see X-Men?"

Max doesn't judge me. That's something.

Conversation vs Prattle

Store did brilliantly on Saturday and this was a relief and also something of a shock since half the inventory items I'd ordered for the holiday weekend still hadn't made it in by Friday. I'd had to do a lot of shucking and reshuffling in order to fill the shelves.

The customers didn't seem to notice. Retail is a lot like show biz in that way, I guess – the audience doesn't seem to notice as long as you don't break the fifth wall when you improvise.

Alligator kindly loaned me his son, Cowboy Donnie, to keep Robin company. Cowboy Donnie is only eight but he's been a member of the Musician's Union since he was three so I figured that was some kind of coolness parity.

Also Eleanor and Bill showed up at the store, down from Oakland. Eleanor's eyes go wide when I regale her with the unexpurgated version of my recent vicissitudes but then we've got history so she's not going to judge me either. It's quite interesting that I don't actually mind the drudgery, what I mind – fiercely – is the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that comes when I think: how could I have let my life come to this? It's a pride thing, I suppose. Pride is one of those mayas, of course, but still it's there. Eleanor loves me, does not judge me. Later that night she and Bill take me out to dinner and I am very careful not to go over twenty minutes in my spiel. Then we switch to politics, the fall of the American empire – it took Rome 700 years to do what America will do in 70 – and that took us through the next hour and a half. That was fun. I forget how much I love really good conversation. People in Monterey are really, really boring.

Also I called Lew, my gay cowboy brother-in-law. I figured somebody should update Nancy on what's going on and I knew that somebody wouldn't be Ben. He was noncommittal, mostly concerned about how his mother was going to take it all. "Have Ben call her," he said. But Ben seems to have turned off his phone. He didn't call Robin either. Is he okay?

Not. My. Problem.

Today I'm going to have to open the store an hour late since Robin has a therapy appointment at 10:30. It makes me sick to think of loosing revenue but Max won a ticket playing poker to a concert in Santa Cruz last night and isn't around this morning, and I hate, hate, hate the idea of making demands on his good times. Also I'm supposed to have dinner with Alfreida and Joanne tonight – a date that was set up when I thought Ben would be here to cover – but I think I'm gonna bail. I'm just not in the mood for polite prattle with strangers.