Slow Satisfaction Read online

  “Oh, I’m sure I will be fine very soon, honey. Don’t worry about that. London, you say? You mean England?”

  “Um, yeah. At one of the big art museums. It was only an internship, though.”

  “Oh, when are you going back to Oberlin, dear?”

  Oberlin? I had graduated from Oberlin five years ago. I tried to laugh it off. “Oh, Mom, I think you forgot. I’m in grad school now. In New York.”

  “Oh, oh, that’s right. I have so much on my mind these days,” she said, patting me on my arm with her free hand, but frowning. “There’s so much to worry about with your brother being in trouble.”

  She went on to describe what Troy had been up to around the time I was graduating from college. I let her go on for a while, nodding and agreeing that he was really a pain in the rear.

  Then she looked from me to Jill. “But, Karina, you’re being so rude. Who’s your friend?”

  At that point Jill stormed out of the room. I couldn’t say I blamed her. I didn’t know what to say, either. I made up an excuse. “Um, I think I hear the nurses calling us! I’ll go check, okay, Mom?”

  “Okay, darling.”

  I hurried out into the hall and found Jill sitting in her chair against the wall, her forehead resting in the palm of her hand. The nurse we’d spoken to before swept past us into the room.

  Jill looked up. “That was hard.”

  “Well, she’s kind of out of it, but…”

  “She doesn’t recognize me, Kar.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Jill, seriously. She’s on painkillers and doesn’t have her glasses…”

  “So why did she recognize you right away?”

  “Well, she mistook me for a younger version of myself. Five or six years ago? All that stuff about Oberlin?”

  Jill sighed. “I don’t know. She sounded more coherent than last time she was awake, but… wow.”

  I remembered something then. “Remember how you cut your hair for my graduation?”

  “What?”

  “It was just like it is now, super short and butch. Mom hated it.”

  “You think she doesn’t recognize me because of my hair?”

  “That or it’s that thing she always does where she pretends something isn’t the way it is, just because she doesn’t like it. You know, like she still orders things in restaurants that they took off the menu ten years before, as if she doesn’t know perfectly well they don’t make it anymore.”

  “You’re right. That is exactly what she does. It’s a particularly annoying form of denial.” Jill shook her head the way she did at aggravating customers in the restaurant when she knew they couldn’t see her.

  I didn’t like feeling stuck between her and Mom, but there wasn’t much of a choice at the moment. “I know it hurts being denied you’re you, sis, but maybe that’s all it is. Between the blow to the head, the medications, and being disoriented, she falls back to being that way.”

  Jill rubbed her forehead again. “Maybe. Thanks for saying it to make me feel better even if it’s wacked, KayKay.”

  She hadn’t used that nickname for me since back when we’d both lived here. For a second she looked worried I was offended by it. I gave her a hug. This was tough enough without me being a prima donna. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  The nurse came out of the room then. “I gave her her pain meds. She’s going right back to sleep now, girls. Why don’t you two go down to the hospital cafeteria for a while?”

  “Or we could grab a bite down the street,” Jill suggested.

  “All right. If we’re going to drive, though, would it be too much trouble to drop my bags off at the house?”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Come on.”

  We had a quick bite to eat, and Jill finally filled me in on the rest of the medical details. The surgery had been for her broken left wrist. Her ankle was sprained but not broken. And there was the blow to the head, but there was only so much they could do for that.

  I was droopy-eyed throughout the meal, so Jill suggested instead of dropping my luggage at home, she leave me there with it. When we pulled into the driveway, she opened the automatic garage door using the remote, but warned me as I got out of the car, “Be sure to lock the inside door. I’m sure Phil has the other door opener in his car.”

  “I will.” I didn’t point out that if he was Mom’s boyfriend, he probably had a key also. No reason to make her worry more than she already was.

  I dragged my bags through the back hall and then up the stairs to what had been my bedroom. In a lot of ways, it still was. My mother had redecorated after I’d gone to college, taking down my old teen idol posters and pictures, but the furniture was the same, and she’d left the bookshelf pretty much untouched. Books about horses mingled on the shelf with the ones about the magic punk girl in “Shangri-L.A.” Silly teen books, but I’d loved them and read them again and again. I perused the titles.

  A spiral-bound book was thrust in among them, its narrow white wire coil protruding from the rest of the spines. I pulled it out, wondering what it was.

  I sat down on the bed when I recognized my week-by-week calendar from junior high. Someone had given it to me as a gift for my birthday or Christmas because I’d said I liked art. Each spread had a color photo of a different piece of famous art, faced with spaces for Monday, Tuesday, et cetera. I opened it and found the expected Michelangelo and Da Vinci and Picasso in the pages. But I had forgotten the rest. Two different pages held details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I must have looked at those pictures a lot, I realized, judging by the amount of doodling on the pages opposite. The Bosches showed tiny nude figures being tortured in hell. I remembered being fascinated, but I had no memory now of what I had thought of the images at twelve years old. Was I even thinking about sex yet?

  I flipped through the book some more. Was it my imagination or was there a lot of kinky imagery? A painting of Saint Sebastian being martyred where the rope bondage looked surprisingly sophisticated. A Pompeian fresco of a woman showing her bare back to another who appeared to be raising a flogger. A very dominant Jupiter with a very submissive-looking Thetis, nude, on her knees in front of him. Was the curator who picked all this art into kink? Or was there simply so much out there that I hadn’t noticed until now? When I was twelve and poring over the details in the paintings, especially the kinky ones, I don’t think I was even aware of what fascinated me so much. The adults in my life had all approved. “Art is smart,” one of my mother’s boyfriends had said, possibly the one who gave me the calendar. And suitable for a girl to study, my mother had thought.

  I startled at the sound of the garage door going up again, and quickly stashed the book under my pillow. Had Jill forgotten something? No. Out the window I could see a Cadillac I didn’t recognize pulling into the driveway.

  I hadn’t locked the downstairs door from the garage yet. Stupid.

  I fired off a quick text to Jill: I think Phil just showed up.

  Moments later I heard a male voice call from downstairs, “Hello? Is someone here?”

  I kept my phone in my hand as I treaded lightly down the stairs. “Hello?” I called in response, trying to sound innocent and clueless.

  He was taking his Windbreaker off in the entryway to the kitchen. Except for the bags under his eyes, Phil Betancourt was a young-looking fifty-something, and I wondered if the color of his hair had come out of a bottle. He was respectably dressed, like he’d just walked out of a country club, a gold watch on his wrist and his polo shirt tucked in.

  “Hi. Can I help you?” I asked, as if he were a door-to-door salesman who had wandered into the house by accident.

  “Karina! You must be Karina, right? Your mother showed me so many photographs of you!” He hung his jacket on a peg and then moved as if he were going to hug me. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for so long.”

  “Uh, hi.” I dodged back, and he settled for patting me on the shoulder.


  “Good girl,” he said, like I was a pet poodle. “How is she?”

  “Good,” I said, still trying to think of what to say or do. Jill didn’t trust him. That much was clear. But if this guy was the love of my mom’s life, was it really fair for me to treat him like dirt without knowing more? Was it because I was having relationship issues myself that made me disinclined to cut him much slack? He’d caught me off guard. I wondered if it was a coincidence that he had come in right after Jill had dropped me off, or if he had been… What, Karina, lying in wait? That’s a pretty big conspiracy theory.

  “Did they tell you when she’ll be out? She’s gonna be okay, right?”

  I decided to stick with the safe truths like this one: “I haven’t talked to a doctor yet. I just flew in myself.”

  “Ah, good girl, come to see your mother in her time of need.” He moved to the refrigerator and took out a can of beer.

  I wanted to stop him. I wanted to say, “What the hell are you doing?” But he clearly felt at home here. Who was I to throw him out?

  “You want one?” he asked, as he cracked open the beer.

  “No, thank you.” I tried not to fidget. I desperately wanted to go to bed and get some sleep, but there was no way I was doing that with a strange man in the house. Even if he was my mother’s boyfriend. Maybe especially because he was my mother’s boyfriend. Being sleepy was making me slow-witted. “Um, what are you doing here?”

  He gave me a look like I’d spoken to him in Chinese, confused and a little offended. Then his face softened. “We better talk. Come in here.”

  He grabbed his jacket from the peg and then went into the dining room and sat down at the table. “Come here,” he said again, like I was a reluctant horse. Jill had really prejudiced me against him, but he wasn’t doing much to overcome my distrust either, talking to me like he was.

  I went and sat down in spite of myself.

  He took a deep breath and nodded approvingly. I wondered if he had daughters of his own. Would he have come across as a bossy slime-wad to me if I had met him without talking to Jill first? Or if I’d grown up with a dad to compare him to? He wasn’t the first of Mom’s boyfriends to lose my respect by putting on a patronizing, paternalistic act.

  “I have something you should see,” he said. I was ready to bolt if he reached for his belt, but no, he dug his hand into the pocket of his Windbreaker. “Are you ready?”

  What kind of question was that? “Since I don’t know what you’re about to show me, I have no way of knowing if I’m ready.”

  “Ah, ah, Charlotte said you were smart. College girl.” He clucked his tongue like he was scolding himself—or me. I couldn’t tell. “Well, here you go, college girl. What do you think of this?”

  He put a black velvet ring box on the dining room table in front of me and gave me a self-satisfied, smug look, as if daring me to open it.

  “What’s that?” I asked, as if I’d never seen anything like it.

  “That’s the proof of how serious I am about your mother,” he said. “Go on. Open it.”

  I folded my arms. I didn’t like him ordering me around. I knew why he wanted me to open the box. When I saw what was inside, my X chromosome was supposed to kick in and make me go ooh and aah, right?

  I pulled a strategy from the safety lectures my mother used to give me about talking to strangers: if you’re nervous about being alone with a person, pretend someone else is about to arrive. “Why don’t we wait until Jill gets back from the hospital?”

  He suppressed a sigh, cracking the box open himself to reveal a diamond engagement ring. “I love her,” he said. “Your mother, I mean. I’ve been working up to proposing.”

  Once upon a time, I might have been intimidated by an older man, or any man, trying to push me around. I would have at least felt the need to be polite, to come up with some way to assuage him while trying to get rid of him. But after all I had been through, with Professor Renault creeping on me, Damon George trying to get me to fall for him, and James… being James, Phil had no chance of getting me to play nice girl for him. “Am I supposed to be impressed by a big piece of glass?”

  “Piece of glass—!” You’d have thought I said “piece of crap.” His voice turned hard and his face red before he mastered himself and put his nice guy mask back on. He tried to smile at me and rouse my sympathy, but I’d seen that flare of temper and was glad I was giving him a hard time. “I saved up three months to afford this. Your mother? She’s the best. She deserves the best.”

  She deserves a hell of a lot better than you, I thought. There was no question in my mind at that point that he was a creep. “Are you planning to propose to her in the hospital?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “What if she turns out to have brain damage? Will true love conquer all?”

  He snapped the box closed. “I don’t know what happened to turn you into such a cynic, young lady. You and that sister of yours.” He shook his head.

  “Which reminds me. I should call for an update on Mom.” I pulled out my phone and dialed Jill’s number. I didn’t think I would reach her because they made her turn her phone off inside the hospital, but I needed an excuse to get away from him for a while. As it rang, I got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Phil Smarm-and-Charm followed me, tossed his now-empty beer can into the recycling bin and poured himself a glass of iced tea from the pitcher in the fridge.

  I didn’t like how at home he acted. Or the fact that he kept following me around every time I tried to add space between us. I suddenly realized I didn’t like him, period. I stepped through the sliding glass door onto the back porch and slid it closed behind me, figuring if that didn’t give him the hint to quit following me, my next move would be to tell him flat-out to leave. The night air was humid and oppressive, but a few fireflies glowed at the edge of the yard.

  Her voice mail picked up. “So I was stupid and didn’t lock the door right away. He came in while I was still taking my bags upstairs, and now he’s here and I don’t know how to get rid of him! I don’t want to be in the house alone with him, but I’m afraid to leave him unsupervised, too! Ack, call me, I guess.” As I was hanging up, though, I felt a surge of relief as the sound of the garage door going up reached my ears. Jill was home.

  When I went back into the house, Phil was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear the TV from the living room. Jill came in through the door from the garage and met me in the kitchen.

  Mr. Charm came sailing in. “Jill, dear, how are you? Can I get you anything?”

  Jill, thank goodness, was on the same page as me. She was having none of his solicitousness or his acting like he was the host and we were the guests. “Yes, you can get out and leave us alone,” she said. She crossed her beefy arms. My sister was pretty butch as these things go, but her recent extra-short cut gave her sort of a beat-cop look.

  “There’s no call for that—”

  “The hell there isn’t! Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Right now, my mother isn’t mentally fit to take care of herself. That means this house is mine until further notice, and I’d like you to leave.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, girls. We should get to know one another in times of strife—”

  “Now.”

  “The game isn’t even over. We could sit down and at least watch to the end—”

  “What are you, five years old trying to stay up past your bedtime? I’m not your mother and this is not open for bargaining. You leave now or I call the police.”

  “Jesus.” He got his Windbreaker off the back of the dining room chair where he had left it. There was no sign of the ring box. “I can see you gals aren’t going to be reasonable. There’s no reason for me to stick around if you’re going to act like that.”

  He kept muttering nonsense of that sort until he had shut the front door. Jill stood there, watching through the small, high window until he had backed his car out of the driveway and drove away. Then she banged on the door. “Can yo
u believe there’s no dead bolt on this thing?”

  “There isn’t?” I stared.

  “Unbelievable. And the door from the garage has that flimsy latch. And no crossbar on the sliding glass door, either…”

  I couldn’t help it. I giggled a little. “Listen to what a pair of New Yorkers we’ve become.”

  She shook her head and tried to smile. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Do you really think he’s going to come back and try something?”

  She sighed and turned off the TV. “No. I’d just feel safer if the house wasn’t so weakly defended. I’m calling a locksmith tomorrow and that’ll have to be enough.” She looked at me then. “I got your message. I see you agree with me.”

  “I can’t even tell you what it is exactly, but he creeps me the hell out!”

  “Sure you can, KayKay. Could it be his smarmy manner? His total lack of boundaries? His ‘come on be a good girl fetch me a beer and light my cigarette’ attitude?”

  I shivered. “Okay, yeah. I thought maybe it was my imagination because…” I decided now wasn’t the time to go into all that stuff. “Glad it wasn’t my imagination.”

  “Thing is, I think Mom likes that kind of guy.”

  “Or she doesn’t know any better and at least that’s the kind of guy she understands.” The thought was depressing. I sagged.

  “Get some sleep, Karina,” Jill said. “We’ll talk to Mom’s doctor tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  I dragged myself back upstairs. The art book was where I had left it under the pillow. I set it aside as I got ready for bed. I was almost too tired to brush my teeth, but somehow, in my mother’s house, I felt morally obligated to.

  When I climbed into bed, my phone chimed again with a text from James.

  Karina, please forgive me.

  I stared at it for a few moments. Then I turned the phone off and went to sleep.

  Two

  Believing the Strangest Things

  The hospital loomed, gray and white, as the taxi pulled up. Hospitals are kind of frightening. Maybe from watching medical dramas on TV when I was a kid, I found them scary. There are things that go on there that I don’t know or understand, and people get a lot of bad news in hospitals.