Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,64

his wife got angry when he left town for more than a few days, not trusting him to keep it zipped up or who knows what.

5. He spent it on staying (or at least looking) young—personal trainers, nutritionists, collagen injections, facials, Botox, dietary supplements, very expensive hair and skin products, hair and eyebrow stylists, massage therapists, private yoga and Feldenkrais classes, acupuncturists, aromatherapists, fashion consultants, karate and capoeira instructors, mud spas, mineral baths, protein powders, spirulina, manicures, and yes, pedicures.

6. He spent it on real estate. He owns vacation homes in Palm Springs and on Sanibel Island in Florida. He also owns a huge house in L.A. (where I lived with him after Lucy moved out with their two kids), a three-bedroom condo in New York City (with a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar monthly assessment, which he pays whether he’s there or not), and a two-bedroom apartment in Rome.

7. He spent it on clothes. He likes Armani, as cliched as it is for a movie star to like this designer. He also likes Ralph Lauren for casual clothes, and someone named Manfred G, who is a designer in New York who “creates” silk neckties and socks, charging something like five hundred dollars for his boring, monochromatic ties and two hundred for a pair of silk-and-wool socks.

8. He didn’t spend it on drugs, nor did he spend it on strippers, as far as I know. He did give some of his money to charity every year, and he was generous with friends and family. I think he has probably “loaned” his brother Phil at least a million dollars by now. Renn put his nephew Tyler through college, and gave him money for a car, clothes, books, and spring-break trips, all of the same things he gave to Billy and Anna.

9. He spent it on reserving a seat on a Space Shuttle trip to the moon. (Just kidding.)

10. He spent it on an astrologer. (Not kidding—at least once a month, either in person or over the phone, depending on where he was working. It cost five hundred an hour or something exorbitant like this. Renn might not be a drunk or a druggie like my first ex-husband, but he certainly has his expensive addictions.)

MISCELLANEOUS BITS, BUTS, & MAYBES*

Some things Renn said:

1. On 9/11, which is about the same time our marriage collapsed: “How could this not have happened to us? We barge around the world with our guns loaded and our dicks in our hands and expect people to offer us their virginal daughters and oil reserves, but not everyone wants to do what we tell them to.”

He also said, after the bombs started to fall on Afghanistan: “If I were a younger man, I’d go to Kabul and teach drama classes for a year.”

I told him that they needed volunteers to rebuild their hospitals and sewer lines and restore their power grid more than they needed someone to teach Shakespeare or David Mamet or whoever he would have taught. He was offended by this and told me that I was a philistine, a word I had to look up later. But I still thought my comment made sense—before opening their copies of Romeo and Juliet, the Afghanis would need functioning toilets and lights to read by, wouldn’t they?

I also didn’t see why he had to be a young man to teach in Afghanistan. He could go at forty-three as easily as someone who was twenty-three. It’s not like I wanted him to go, but by that time, I was so tired of his lame excuses for not doing the things he bragged he might do that I wouldn’t let him coast by with this whopper.

2. “I understand why people want to be vegetarians, but who do they think they’re fooling? We’re carnivores, and most of us have the pointy canines to prove it.”

He said this during a discussion he was having with his daughter about her decision to become a vegetarian during her freshman year of high school. She didn’t stick for very long with her no-meat diet, and when she returned to her old ways, Renn gave her a twenty-pound box of Omaha steaks, which she wouldn’t accept, furious with what she perceived as his gloating. “I told you that I’m only eating chicken and fish, not red meat. Ever,” she fumed. I’m sure she meant it, but I’m also pretty sure she did go back to eating red meat again. By that time Renn and I were divorced, so I don’t know