Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,19
still rudderless, and he worries me much more than his sister does. Anna is one semester away from graduating with her MD, and I couldn’t be more proud of her if she had won the Boston marathon or the Nobel Prize. Her decision to go into family medicine rather than specialize in pediatrics or obstetrics or something a little more glamorous than country doctorhood was a bit surprising, but I’m flattered that she has chosen the same profession as mine. Thank God, in any case, that she didn’t choose her father’s. For a while, I thought for sure that she or Billy would.
“What happened?” I asked, ninety percent certain that it was my son’s fault.
She hesitated. “I think he has a crush on the lead actress in Dad’s movie. This girl named Elise Connor. You probably know who she is. Danielle found out, and what a surprise, she was upset and broke up with him. He had just asked her to move in with him too.”
I know who Elise Connor is. Of course I do. In more than one flimsy, flashy magazine that I shouldn’t notice, let alone pick up, I have seen her name linked with my ex-husband’s. “Mrs. Ivins III,” one columnist has dared to call her. “I see stars in these stars’ eyes whenever they look at each other,” the so-called journalist crowed. “Are those wedding bells I hear in the distance?”
Reading words like these, I don’t feel the same acid surge of jealousy that I did up until four or five years ago, but I’d be lying if I said that they didn’t bother me. She is a very young girl. Renn is not a young man. He is a fool, but actors usually are, their egos so fragile and enormous. How does Elise Connor feel about his egotism? Perhaps she doesn’t care, accepting it as a hazard of the trade, or else she is still blind to it. She is less than half his age, and I feel a little sorry for him about this May-December cliché. Especially because it is hardly the first time.
None of the gossip columnists ever mention me in connection with Renn anymore, in part because I’m not famous, nor are our children, and of what interest am I, except to the fans who have researched him so thoroughly that they know more about him than most of his close friends do? Those people are out there, a dishearteningly large army of fanatics. I have met some of them, before and after the divorce. How do you live with the fact, peaceably or no, that your husband is an institution, a movement, a cult with numerous irrational adherents? I never quite figured out how. That we stayed married for almost fifteen years was, I have to admit, a miracle.
“Poor Billy,” I finally managed to say. “I wish he knew how to be happier.” Yet who really does? I wonder. I’m not sure if it’s a skill that can be cultivated or a talent a person is born with. I often think it’s the latter, having seen so many people who should be happy but aren’t, and so many who should be miserable but are decisively the opposite.
“I know. I told him to start seeing his therapist again, but I don’t know if he will.”
“I wish he’d never gone to New Orleans to work with your father.”
“Well, he did.”
“Yes, he did.”
In October, he was with Renn for too long on the set of Bourbon Street, or whatever he’s calling it. A Shot of Bourbon, maybe? Bourbon in Winter? Some earnestly poetic name. My son is a grown man, free to come and go as he pleases, but sometimes I wish that Renn hadn’t set up those trusts for our kids after the divorce. So much money, an unconscionable amount, really. Anna has been smart with hers, and although Will hasn’t been a spendthrift, not that I can tell, he hasn’t been able to find a career postcollege that he wants to pursue. Renn’s guilt-stricken generosity has succeeded in robbing our son of any desire he might have had to establish himself in one field or another. But Anna, I have no doubt, will excel at medicine. Her patients, her staff, her community, will adore her. Eventually she will fall in love, marry, and probably have a child or two. She will be happy and will continue to be a source of joy for her father and me until we die. Regarding these