On the other hand, Joanna does very poorly in English, and she cannot boil an egg properly, and I have never caught her knitting or tatting or playing the harpsichord or doing any of the little feminine curtseying things that used to be considered the mark of a domesticated American female back when Abraham Lincoln was president.
Joanna wants to be a brain surgeon.
She read somewhere that a famous surgeon in Indianapolis used to practice tying one-handed knots inside a matchbox. Whenever Joanna and I dine out together, she prays that the matches on the table will not be of the book type, but rather of the box type. Often, she sits by the pool at the house I am renting, and ties knots inside a matchbox while simultaneously reading Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. She finds Freud “neat.”
The next thing you should know about Joanna is that she absolutely adores Dale. Her sudden infatuation came as a total surprise to me; before Dale, Joanna had been known to demolish in her tracks any lady I had the audacity to introduce. Her sotto voce nicknames for these hapless unsuspecting beauties were in themselves devastating: she secretly labeled one woman “Bubbles La Tour,” merely because she was as magnificently endowed as a burlesque queen; she privately called another “Houdini the Great” only because she had a not-unsurprising habit of vanishing whenever Joanna put in a surly appearance; she dubbed yet another “El Dopo,” because her name was Eleanor Daniels and she made the mistake one bleak October afternoon of wearing a sweater monogrammed with the initials E.D. (In all fairness to my daughter, Eleanor really wasn’t too terribly bright.) Joanna’s smoldering gaze could reduce to steaming ashes the strongest of suitors for her cherished father’s attention; she once grew extravagantly jealous of a twice-weekly cleaning woman who was in her sixties, and about whom I made an unfortunate and idle comment to the effect that she was “a nice person.” Electra had nothing on my daughter Joanna. But all that was before Dale; Joanna would walk through fire for Dale O’Brien.
So now she was telling me that my beloved former wife would not allow her to go to Mexico if Dale would be accompanying us.
“Why not?” I asked.
“She says she has custody.”
“I know she does. What’s that got to do—”
“She says she’s responsible for my moral rectitude.”
“That’s redundant.”
“Huh?”
“Rectitude means ‘moral uprightness.’ Is your mother saying she’s responsible for your moral moral uprightness?”
“Whatever. She won’t let me go, Dad.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been planning on this for months!”
“So have I. I’d better call her.”
“I think she’s already left for Tampa,” Joanna said.
“I’ll try her, anyway.”
She had not already left for Tampa. She was, in fact, still packing when I phoned her at the house I used to share with her.
“What is it?” she said. Her tone of voice was the one a mother might have used on a wayward child who’d just stamped into the kitchen while a soufflé was in the oven.
“You tell me,” I said.
“Oh, it’s riddle time, right?”
“No, it’s Q and A time. What’s this about Joanna?”
“What’s what about Joanna?”
“Did you tell her she can’t go to Mexico with me?”
“Oh, so that’s it.”
“Yes, that’s it, Susan.”
“If you have any questions about custody, I suggest you call my lawyer. I’m busy right now, and I—”
“I have no intention of calling that mealymouthed shyster you—”
“I’m sure Eliot McLaughlin would enjoy knowing you think of him as a mealymouthed shyster.”
“He already knows it. This has nothing to do with custody, Susan. You had Joanna for Easter, and you’ll have her again for Christmas. I get her for Thanksgiving. And I’m taking her to Mexico with me, period.”
“Not if the redhead goes with you.”
“If by the redhead—”
“You know exactly who I mean.”
“Are you referring to Dale O’Brien?”
“Oh, is that her name? And here I thought Dale was a man’s name.”
“Susan, cut it out.”
“Cut what out?”
“This bullshit about Dale.”
“I certainly hope you don’t use that kind of language in Joanna’s presence. It’s bad enough—”
“I’m trying to tell you there’s no legal way you can prevent me from taking her any damn place I want to take her!”
“No? How about corrupting the morals of a minor?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Taking a fourteen-year-old to Mexico, where you’ll be living in sin with—”
“Living in sin? Come on, Susan, this isn’t the Middle—”
“What do you call it, Matthew? You’ll be in the same house with Joanna and whatever her name is—”
“Her name is Dale O’Brien.”
“For four days, isn’t that what Joanna told me? Four days in Sam Thorn’s cozy little villa, with you in one bedroom screwing your brains out with the redhead while across the hall Joanna—”
“What I do in private has nothing to—”
“Public is more like it.”
“There are four bedrooms in the villa. Joanna will have her own—”
“How kind of Sam to provide such luxurious surroundings for you and your little bimbo.”
“This must be the Middle Ages! I haven’t heard the word bimbo since—”
“What would you prefer calling her, Matthew?”
“What do you call Arthur Butler?”
“Whatever I call Arthur is between—”
“Where will you be sleeping with him this weekend?”
“Wherever we’ll be sleeping is none of your business. And besides, Joanna won’t be with us.”
“Who says?”
“What?”
“I said who says Joanna won’t be with you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean I’m taking her home to you right this minute. Back to your custody, darling. So you can protect her rectitude.”
“What?”
“I said—”
“You told me she could stay with you this weekend.”
“That was before you started pulling all this stuff about Mexico. Will you be there for the next ten minutes or so? I wouldn’t want Joanna coming home to an empty house. Might not look too good when I challenge your custody.”
“What?”
“Let me spell it out for you, Susan. One, we’re divorced. I don’t like being dragged into your personal life, and I wish to hell you’d keep out of mine. Two, I don’t enjoy these screaming contests on the telephone. Anger is a form of intimacy, and I don’t want to be intimate with you. And lastly, you’ve got a choice. Either Joanna goes with me to Mexico next week, just as she’s supposed to, or else I take her back to you as soon as I hang up, and you can decide then whether you want to stay home this weekend or take her to Tampa with you, where you’ll be ‘living in sin,’ as you choose to call it, with a man named Arthur Butler, an act the courts might consider unfit behavior for a woman who has custody of a fourteen-year-old.”