“No worries. But here’s what’s going on.” He took a breath. “Since the thing… with the baby—… I’ve been really thinking. A lot—you know, that I’d like to try again, try to be a dad. So I’ve been talking to a surrogate.”
“A surrogate. Really.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to do it with you—‘do it’ sounds funny — but I–I didn’t know where you were at, in your head.”
“It’s fine, Jeremy.”
“Maybe I should have talked to you about it but I was pretty sure it was something you wouldn’t be into, at least not this soon.”
“You’re probably right.”
He read it all on her face: the relief and the hurt. Yet by her tone, he knew the worst was over. She’d become luminous, filled with grace.
“I can’t explain it, Lego, but I just felt this urgency.”
“So did you find someone?” she said warmly.
“I did. She had twins for my old A.A. sponsor.”
“Okay,” she said, in forlorn approval.
“And I just — it came together much faster than I thought. I mean, everything just… fell into place.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Can we talk a minute about ‘Children of God’?”
“Sure.”
As they spoke, he saw that he was losing her; Dusty was swallowing her up, like that YouTube clip of the anaconda digesting a cow.
“I think Kristen Stewart would be amazing as the mom — she’s a friend, and she’ll read it right away. My first choice for a director would be Lisa — Cholodenko — but she takes forever. I’d still like to get it to Sean, Sean Durkin. You know—Martha Marcy May Marlene. But I really want to get it to Kelly — Reichardt. Kelly would be so genius. She did Night Moves? With Jesse? Eisenberg? Have you seen it? Oh my God, Lego, you haven’t seen Night Moves? You will love it. Dakota’s in it? It’s totally the best thing Dakota’s ever done, she’s as good as Liz Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene, she’s better than Elizabeth. Kelly is the fuckin’ shit, and Night Moves is totally about a cult! Or culty behavior, but not like so dead-on, like Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s much, much subtler. But I’m really surprised you don’t know about Kelly. You have to see it: Night Moves. Kelly’s totally great.”
—
In the morning, Dusty texted where are you? It jolted Allegra’s heart and she struggled against texting back. She almost answered fucking your girlfriend but didn’t. An hour later, after the violence of emotions settled, she got another: u there, leg? She went to SoulCycle and shut off her phone. After, she saw that Dusty had called three times and left a voicemail. She just sat in her car, her whole body vibrating.
She put the message on speaker.
“Hi, honey. I’m back around four and wanted to know if you’d be home. Can you be, to talk? Sorry I’ve been so unreachable. Hope you’re good and let me know if this afternoon or tonight works.”
—
Dusty spent her last few hours at the desert hotel Skyping with her shrink — part pep talk, part general rehearsal of what was to come.
“This is your daughter,” said Ginevra. “Not your wife, not your lover. Those are nametags describing someone you don’t know anymore, someone you can’t place. Someone who no longer exists.” She sounded like a hypnotist. “You’ll find that in time you will never miss that person, not for a minute. Even the memory of those nametags will cease to exist.”
“Tell me why I have to tell her again, Ginevra?” Her courage kept flagging. “What if she can’t handle it? I can barely handle it! Why can’t I just ‘break it off’? That’s what Livia thinks I should do… she’ll be hurt but at least she’ll be able to move on—how can she move on from this? At least if I tell her I’m seeing someone… she’ll be devastated but she might be able to fall in love again. ‘Again’—!” She spat the word, turning her face to the sky in delirious contempt of the cosmos. “I keep thinking of the last scene in Stella Dallas where Barbara Stanwyck’s standing in the rain, watching her daughter through the window as she gets married…”
“She will move on,” said Ginevra, stone-faced. “You both will. But that cannot happen, Dusty, if you lie. You have got to live in your truth and create that space. You have to allow it… we’ve talked about all this. To deceive Allegra would be cruel. And remember, there’s no shame in what happened—zero. None. And it isn’t a movie, Dusty, you can’t just shout ‘I don’t love you anymore!’ and ride off into the sunset. You can’t wound her like that and expect either one of you to come out unscathed. It may work in the movies but not in real life.”
“Real life!” snarled Dusty — for reality had betrayed her; she lay vanquished. She sighed and grew melancholy. “I know, I know. You’re right. It’s just so hard.”
“It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do, bar none. And I would never minimize that, not for a moment. Wouldn’t even try. Reina wouldn’t have been able to do it, if you’ll pardon the godawful analogy — what I’m trying to say is that Reina would have lied, like she lied about everything in her life, lied to you. Dusty, you’ve always talked about breaking the cycle and now you can. Not to tell Allegra — not to tell Aurora—who you are — who she is — isn’t very loving. That isn’t love. I don’t know what it is but something tells me it isn’t love.”
On the way back to L.A. she distracted herself with practical matters.
There was so much to be undone…
Obviously, they needed to divorce. Irreconcilable differences—just like Joni and Kilauren! It would have been funny if it weren’t so savagely, utterly grotesque. A backdoor revelation of “extraordinary circumstances” would allow for an annulment but what was the point? Anyway, delineating those circumstances, even with the highest degree of confidentiality, would only heighten the risk of a leak. No, divorce was the only way.
But something else was bothering her; a troubling flaw in her therapist’s design…
The plan was that as soon as Allegra had been told, she would begin therapy with Ginevra tout de suite, an “emergency,” stopgap measure, concomitant with the search for a “specialized outside practitioner.” The shrink was convinced that her daughter’s reaction to the unsettling news would be gradations of shock and anger followed by a “transition toward joyful integration.” But Dusty thought there was something condescending and almost laughably glib about the presumption that Allegra would be even temporarily amenable to baring her rage, confusion, and fear with her mother’s shrink. The projected outcome was a little too tidy in an Oprah kind of way, and Dusty had the feeling it wouldn’t go down like that. Maybe Ginevra was in some kind of denial and needed professional help herself; her colleagues no doubt would find the whole case one for the books. Even more controversial was her proposed injunction, shared with Dusty (overshared, as far as the actress was concerned), that Allegra not disclose the nature of her relationship with her mother to anyone outside the therapeutic bubble — at least in the initial weeks or months of however the fuck many years of counseling might be required to bring joyful integration closer at hand. (It was Ginevra’s opinion that healing could not take place if her client was buffeted by powerful and unpredictable outside forces. A “safe house” was required.) To Dusty, this seemed quixotic on a number of levels. What if Allegra was rebellious, combative, and unwilling? What if she went a little (or a lot) crazy behind the revelation and was compelled to confide in her besties — Jeremy, or some drunken Zoosk hookup, or whomever? And wouldn’t that be her right? Even if she found herself joyfully integrated at the very instant she was given the news, wouldn’t it be her prerogative to tell anyone she damn pleased? To shout it from the rooftops or take it door-to-door if she so chose? Wouldn’t that be the healthy, human response — to cleanse and renew, to transform oneself by reaching out to the tribe, to the family of man? Wasn’t it fallacious, hypocritical, and controlling of Ginevra to believe — to rule—that the truth be kept hidden under the rubric of therapeutic expedience? And what about the bugaboo that “secrets kill,” what happened to that? Wouldn’t a second conspiracy of silence be everyone’s undoing?