Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
I follow him into the restaurant, because, yeah, I’m hungry too. Harriet and Aiden are not in this one, either. It doesn’t take a genius to know this, because there is literally no one here besides us. Frank orders two rakemelo, which the waiter tells us is a grape-based spirit heated with honey and a cinnamon stick ‘to warm you up,’ as the guy says.
When he sets two menus down then leaves, Frank says, ‘I’ll tell you, if you want. But prepare to go off me in a big way.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘I was never on you, so it shouldn’t be a problem.’ And then I repeat what he once said to me. ‘Begin at the beginning. The place where the least challenging fiction starts.’
And so he does.
‘Meet young Frank…’ He slides the cutlery to the side to stop himself from playing with it. ‘Twenty-three. First year as a high school English teacher. Small town. Young wife. Baby on the way. Kid’s born. We call him Aiden after Rachel’s Irish grandfather. It’s not always easy. There’s young couple struggles. Not much money. Grown-up responsibilities on inexperienced shoulders. Frank works long days teaching, then coaching hockey, and on the side, he’s writing a novel.’ He upturns the palms of his hands. ‘Flash forward two years. Book’s published. They move to a bigger house in a better neighbourhood. Get a part-time nanny so Rachel can go to graduate school. Frank could afford to give up teaching but the job’s a part of him now. Plus, by keeping this aspect of his old life, he gets to keep it real.’
I can’t look away from the picture he’s painting, rather enchanted by how he’s talking about himself in the third person.
‘Movie rights get sold. There’s talk of him writing it. Then it isn’t just talk. He suddenly has agents, managers, and he’s taking three months away from his family to write in a log cabin in Tahoe that the studio leases for him. Next his kid is three-and-a-half. They’ve moved to an even bigger house. His wife finished graduate school. And then…’
I am hanging on his every word.
‘A seventeen-year-old student makes an accusation against me.’
‘Accusation?’ I’m sure he must see my head almost fly back in surprise.
‘Sexual harassment.’
‘Oh.’ My eyes drop to the untouched basket of bread between us. ‘Wow.’ Those words write themselves out in my mind.
When I look up again, he is studying me closely. ‘You want to ask me if it’s true.’
I flounder at first. ‘I don’t know, Frank… I suppose it’s the natural question.’
He nods, like he’s absorbing this. ‘She was a just a flirty kid. Hangs back after class, asks thoughtful questions, blushes a lot.’ He smiles almost tragically. ‘I was her high school English teacher. I wasn’t that much older than she was, and yet I’d written this book and movie and it was a love story. ’
I search his face, my mind buzzing in all corners.
‘I was headed into a bar for a buddy’s thirtieth. It was a Saturday night and I rarely went out without Rachel in those days. We were in line to get in, and, next thing I knew, she was there – this kid – with her friend. She was all Hello, Mr Lewis… She’d clearly been drinking. They were wearing provocative clothing and a lot of make-up. I barely recognised her at first. Then she asked if I could get them in.’ He looks almost bewildered; the past has become present again and the dilemma has closed back in on him. ‘I said no, you’re underage, and even if you weren’t, I’m not that guy who has pull with doormen. So they left. About a week later, I got called into the head’s office. Two police officers were waiting to speak to me.’
My heart flares. ‘What happened?’
‘I was suspended, had to retain a lawyer. Publisher dropped me. I was still contractually committed to being on the promotion circuit for the movie studio, but then somehow this got out and, naturally, all these questions started to come up.’
A woman walks by the window with a three-legged mutt struggling behind her. ‘Had you actually been charged at this point?’
‘No. And nor was I. But it was the whole “no smoke without fire” thing, wasn’t it? At the merest hint of scandal, people were prepared to believe it was true. Because, as we well know, in ninety-nine per cent of these situations it is true. The guy has done what the woman is accusing him of.’
I search for outrage or anger, but his face has lost all expression.
‘The parents lawyered up. There was the very real possibility that, even if they couldn’t charge me with anything criminally, there might be a civil case and I could stand to lose everything financially.’ He drags a hand across his mouth. ‘It was rough. It made the local media. My wife could barely leave home without comments and glances. People painted crude messages on the side of the house. I even got a death threat in the mail.’
The waiter comes by, takes our haphazard order because we haven’t paid the menu much attention.
‘Anyway,’ he says, when the guy leaves, ‘the kid’s best friend ended up coming forward. Apparently, it was common knowledge that she’d had a crush on me. After I didn’t help them get into the bar, she’d told this friend, I’m going to make him pay . So the investigation was dropped, and it all went away. From a legal standpoint, anyway.’
‘She wanted you to pay? But you hadn’t done anything!’
‘I guess that was why.’
I try to get my head around all that he’s saying. I wonder how I missed this online. I suppose if I’d googled him more extensively, and not got side-tracked by one or two fascinating articles… ‘So, was there an apology? Did your publishers take you back?’
‘Apology? No. Like I said, it all just blew up then died a death.’
‘What happened to your teaching?’
‘I never went back to teaching. The whole thing… it was a very bad experience for me. I should have come out of it stronger, looked upon the whole thing as character-building, but I felt wronged, and it changed me on some level.’
I think of that younger man being interviewed by Darcy Delaney. The guy who had the world at his feet. Who’d wanted to keep teaching because it kept him humble. And then it all comes crashing down.
‘I wrote a few other novels, but they weren’t my best work – as you correctly observed. After all that shit had gone down, well, I had some problems writing the sort of story that came naturally to me.’
‘And your marriage?’
‘It was the end of us.’
‘She left you because of the scandal?’
‘No. I left her.’
I must look confused.
‘She asked me the one question you were about to ask. She said, “Did you do it?”’
‘Wow,’ I say. I realise I’m saying a lot of wows. ‘You left her because she doubted you? That seems a little extreme, surely?’
‘Maybe to some. And maybe it was. Like you just said, it’s the natural question. And it is, of course – from strangers, but not from your wife. Not from anyone who knows you. Really knows your integrity, your moral code.’
I stare at the plate of grilled sardines glistening in greenish olive oil that the guy popped down in front of us.
‘I tried to get past it. Told myself I was just being hard on her because I was angry at the situation in general. But I just kept seeing her face when she asked me. That mix of accusation and dread. She feared I was that guy.’
I try to imagine people saying that your husband is the monster in the room, and you longing to discredit it, to take him at his word – but fearing being that woman who lets the whole of womankind down by taking the side of a dangerous predator. I don’t know what to say.
‘I stayed a couple more years. But in my heart, I couldn’t think of her in the same way any more. I just kept coming back to the same thing. She’d been prepared to believe the worst of me.’
‘Good grief. This is so sad!’
He scoops up a sardine on a hunk of bread, but the bread doesn’t make it to his mouth; he sets it down on his plate. ‘I did my best to be a stable part of Aiden’s life, but the reality was he grew up in a broken family and there was a lot of bitterness in the subtext of everything. His mother never quite forgave me.’
‘She stayed in love with you?’
‘I can’t get inside her head,’ he says, a little too quickly. ‘She met someone else. They were together eleven years – almost up until she became ill. But Rich wasn’t the best stepfather to Aiden. I think he resented him because he was the product of this first relationship that cast such a big shadow.’
‘Because the book was based on Rachel. You were the love of each other’s life.’ I had suspected it. Mainly because Ford felt so real to me. I felt he was writing something he knew.
‘Yes,’ he finally says, almost like he hasn’t said it at all.
He has turned pale. When I think we’re leaving it there, he says, ‘Part of me thought that if I’d never written a book about a young woman who dies, then maybe Rachel might still be alive. She didn’t die in her twenties like Lara, but she still died young. Forty-one.’
‘But that’s crazy! It’s not like it was some self-fulfilling prophecy.’
‘But life did imitate art in a way.’
‘I thought you said it never does.’
‘Maybe I was just hoping.’
There is a lull now and I find myself trying to digest all this. Is this why there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in his life? Because he couldn’t get over his scar?
‘Years later, I mean we’re talking over a decade, I received a letter through the publisher of Love for Lara . It was from a Joanne Levarre. The name meant nothing. Turns out Levarre was my old student’s married name. She apologised for making a false allegation against me. She said, if it was any consolation, her life had been ruined by it too. She said she’d thought we shared a special friendship and that she was in love with me. She said she’d had therapy for years to try to work out why she’d done it. She said she was a maladaptive dreamer.’ He raises a wry eyebrow. ‘You’ll have to look that one up. Anyway, she had two kids and a divorce behind her, and she said it was actually her therapist’s idea that she should write me a letter of apology, in an effort to finally move on.’
‘That’s amazing!’ I feel so exonerated on his behalf. ‘Did you write back? Did she leave an address?’
‘She did. But I didn’t.’
I think about what I would have done. The possible downside of triggering further communication. And, besides, what was he going to say? Thanks?
‘How did reading it make you feel?’ I ask.
He huffs, mirthlessly. ‘Surprised, obviously. I think there were times over the years when I’d managed to doubt myself. Had I unwittingly encouraged her feelings? What could I have done differently? In a way I felt like I’d been vindicated. I wanted to hold it up and say, see, I wasn’t that guy you all so quickly assumed me to be. I wasn’t the entitled asshole, the sexual predator that seems to be everywhere we look these days… Of course, no one would have cared at that point. Probably no one ever did care. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small story that came and went and made no impact on anyone’s life – except mine.’ Then he adds, ‘And Rachel’s and Aiden’s, and my parents’ of course. And anyone else who went to bed with a ball of puke sitting in the back of their throat wondering if I really was that guy.’ He looks at me as though he’s properly seeing me again. ‘Then I felt bad for her. She was a kid. It had haunted her for a decade. It took some guts to say she was sorry. I had no desire to trigger any sort of communication with her, but I didn’t really hold it against her. Not when I thought about it.’
‘I doubt I’d have felt as charitable.’
He cocks his head. ‘You know what, I bet you would have. We all make mistakes, have some wrong we’d like to make right.’
‘Not one that damaged someone else’s marriage and career.’
He looks at me with that note of tenderness back in his expression again. ‘A maladaptive dreamer, if you want to know, is someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time engaged in elaborate daydreams that impact their ability to live their daily life. Often those daydreams are of a romantic nature.’
I stare at his patient mouth, the twelve o’clock shadow that disappears beneath the collar of his white shirt, his kind eyes. I try to put myself in the shoes of a young girl confronted with a young Frank, and I think, yes, I could see how someone could become maladaptive over you.
‘So, if you could live it all over again, would you have stayed with Rachel?’ It’s a bold question but it’s out now, like the new intimacy between us.
He tilts his head back, gazes at the ceiling. ‘Oh man, if I could live the years over, I think I’d have liked to have reacted differently, maybe not be so led by my principles. When you’re in your twenties you hold yourself and the world to a higher standard. It’s the perspective that comes with time that makes you re-see things… But no. I don’t think staying with Rachel would have been the right choice because, ultimately, we are who we are, and we can’t change our values. Not the fundamental things. Not what makes you tick as a human being.’ A brighter look crosses his face. ‘Besides, I’m a fuck-up, and it’s probably best that no one else had to be exposed to that on a daily basis.’
‘I disagree. I don’t think you’re a fuck-up. Not at all.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Go on… You’re thinking, that’s because you, yourself, are a fuck-up, so you’re hardly one to judge .’
He laughs, not quite a proper laugh, but I’m glad I managed to make him do it. ‘You may need to get a higher opinion of yourself,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘But I like that you said that. I like it very much, Moira Fitzgerald.’
We eat. We leave. We head back down the hill in the direction of our hotel. I find myself in a state of extreme reflection. We are walking closer after all those intimate revelations. His left hand is so near to my right one, like a body part has just decided to put itself there on the off chance that someone might want to take a hold of it. I have never been more conscious of a hand.
‘You married young, Frank. I married young. And look where that got both of us,’ I say, quite out of the blue. ‘Do you think if our marriages had been spectacular successes, we’d have been so against Harriet and Aiden?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘They’re not us.’
‘But maybe we thought we weren’t us when we were their age.’
‘Don’t let your experience turn you into a cynic.’
‘That’s rich,’ I say, ‘coming from you.’
He turns his head and I see the edges of his smile. ‘I’m rooting for one of us. I’m a lost cause, so it’s all on you.’
We’ve arrived back at the hotel. I’m anticipating he’s going to say goodnight, but instead he raises an eyebrow and says, ‘Hot tub?’