Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,42

. . how did I manage it all and still produce a weekly column?

Each of these friends would likely have the same thought: Who but poised and elegant Malabar could handle this disastrous situation with such grace and humor? I imagined they all wanted to be her closest friend, but that coveted position was already mine.

Twelve

With Hazel vanquished and Lily none the wiser about her husband’s affair, the chaotic storm that had been kicked up quickly dissipated, and Ben and my mother’s relationship slipped back into a state of quasi-equilibrium.

This was not the case with me.

If previously I’d had a supporting role in my mother’s extramarital activities, by masterminding this false-letter-writing campaign, I’d put myself in the director’s chair, presiding over the players. The experience had been heady, for sure, risky and thrilling, and it had resulted in raves from the small audience of my mother and Ben, who were floored by my plan and exhilarated by its perfect outcome.

“You were brilliant,” my mother told me over drinks at the InterContinental.

“Yes,” Ben agreed, toasting the success of my scheme. “A chip off the old block!”

Initially, each dollop of praise chemically rewarded my adolescent brain like a hit of dopamine, but I came down from the high quickly. This lie pressed on my conscience differently than the others. I wrote long diatribes full of self-loathing in my journal and took to staring at my reflection in the mirror until I stopped recognizing myself, like when you say a one-syllable word over and over again and it gradually morphs into a meaningless sound. Lying had become a reflex.

I wondered about what might have resulted from all of our false infidelity accusations. Even though the families involved had responded as we’d hoped—sympathetic to Malabar’s unenviable situation with a vindictive employee—we’d thrown no small dash of poison into those marital wells. And this latest falsehood was more than merely slanderous; it expanded and complicated the already complex web of people who were tangled in my mother’s affair, forcing me to be even more spider-like in my vigilance as I attempted to detect vibrations and disturbances. I had always felt complicit in my mother and Ben’s transgression, but now I was an accessory to a more serious crime.

Plus, I had the uneasy feeling that I didn’t know the whole story. Could Hazel’s motivation really have been as simple as greed? I wanted to know what had happened to her, how it had all gone down, but my mother refused to tell me. I had no idea if the woman had simply slunk off, tail between her legs, and gotten on with her life. I felt sure my mother had exacted some kind of revenge.

When I pressed my mother for details, she refused. “All you need to know is that Hazel is gone from our lives, Rennie. I don’t ever want to think about that miserable woman again,” she said. “Trust me, it’s best that you don’t know. Curiosity killed the cat, my curious girl.”

I knew all about curiosity’s dangers—Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box, Eve and her lust for knowledge. I hated that Malabar was withholding facts and that she had suddenly chosen to exercise her parental authority to protect me now that I was almost twenty. She’d given up that right long ago. We were friends, equals. I had earned my place at the table and deserved to know everything that happened. I had solved this enormous problem for her, after all. But the more insistent and demanding I became, the more adamant Malabar was in her refusal. She wouldn’t budge, and, ironically, the biggest fallout from Hazel’s extortion attempt turned out to be a yawning rift between us.

A few days went by, followed by a week, then two. The weeks stacked up to form a month, with another close on its heels, and we found ourselves careering toward the brick wall of the holidays. She rarely called me and I rarely called her. When we did speak, our conversations—exceedingly polite and formal—were more painful than our silences.

I opted to stay in New York City for Christmas, a gauntlet I threw down and immediately wished to retrieve but did not. Early into the new year, my mother’s friend Brenda invited me over for tea and a catch-up, telling me she had important news from Malabar. Now that Brenda and I lived in the same city, we’d formed a friendship independent of my mother, and I found myself wondering what Brenda thought of my involvement