It’s as if I slapped her. She raises her hands in the air, gesturing wildly as her tirade comes tumbling down.
“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve gone through. After the way your father left me. After all I’ve done to expose this kind of horridness. There are girls all over the world who are forced, coerced, raped and brutalized to become prostitutes.” Her crispness falls away and her voice begins to break. But the tears that start flowing are tears of her own self-righteousness. Because I have made a hypocrite of the great Barb Coleman. “And I have fought and searched and investigated and done everything to expose that kind of crime. And to learn you willingly walked into it? You chose this life. You enjoyed it. You wanted it. You rolled around in it like a pig in shit.”
With that, she might as well have slammed a fist inside me, jamming hard on my guts.
The pain spills through every corner of my body. I am punched, beaten and torn into a million pieces with those awful words. I am shaking and sobbing as tears rain down my cheeks. I cover my face with my hands so she can’t see me. My whole body is wracked, and my heart, my lungs, my stomach, my spleen, every single part of me is quivering and twisting in on itself. Weeds are crawling up inside me, pulling, tugging, ripping, and turning my body into the dark shameful thing it is.
I feel her hand on me. Angrily peeling my fingers away from my face. She is so much stronger than me. She always has been.
“You have no right to cry,” she tells me, practically smearing the words on me through her own sanctimonious, superior tears. “What you did was disgusting.” She grips my chin, forces me to look at her. “And I don’t know how to ever forgive you.”
Another blow to the chest.
“Forgive me? You have to forgive me? I did it for you,” I shout.
“Oh! Don’t even go there. I’ve heard every backpedaling cover-up there ever was. There is nothing you can tell me that will make what you did okay. I’d be damn curious though how you were caught. Which one of your clients had something on you?”
“That’s what you think happened?”
She crosses her arms over her chest and nods, her eyes narrowed to slits. I can feel the fury building inside her. The storm clouds are growing darker, swirling closer. “That’s always how it happens.” Then like a hiss, she adds, “Layla.”
As if it burns her tongue.
Oh fine. She wants to play it like this, then I will roll up my pig-in-shit sleeves and fight harder. “You want to know?” I spit back at her. “You really want to know?”
“Sure. Try me.”
“Here’s your tip, The Cleaner,” I say, holding my hands out wide, taunting her. “Miranda is my editor too. That make things a bit clearer?”
She raises her eyebrows. She’s not putting two and two together yet. “Miranda? My Miranda? My editor? The woman who edits my articles and publishes my books? How is that even possible?”
“Yes. Mom. Your editor. Your Miranda. And what else do you share with Miranda?” I toss out, wagging my fingers in a come-and-get-it gesture. “It’s not that difficult. See if you can connect the dots.”
She clasps her hand over her mouth. “No,” she croaks. “Please tell me this has nothing to do with Phil.”
I nod, clenching my teeth. Then the tables are turned and I deliver the punishing blow. “It has everything to do with her husband, Phil. The man you were fucking. The man you had an affair with. The affair you told me every dirty, sordid detail like you thought I wanted to know how he liked it with you. That he liked to take you rough. That he’d bend you over the kitchen table. That he pulled your hair. You screwed your editor’s husband, and you thought you were smarter than her. You thought she’d never know because you were in love with him and because you knew how to cover your tracks. But guess what? She found out. And I saved your ass from her.”
My mom’s affair with Phil began last summer. I pegged it instantly.
Phil and Miranda were over for dinner along with a big group of publishing types. My mom’s agent, her agent’s assistant, publicists from the house and on and on.
The living room was abuzz with music, James Taylor or some other seventies singer type that all the adults loved. So much wine was in the air you practically smell the grapes. Drained bottles of reds and whites lined the dining room table and kitchen counter. Miranda was drunk already. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to keep them open, slumping down in a chair at the dining room table.
As I checked to see if I had any texts from Cam about a job, my mother sailed into the kitchen to open another bottle.
A Syrrah, she proclaimed.
“Let me help you, Barb,” Phil said. He stood up from the table and joined her, reaching for the bottle, placing both his hands on top of my mother’s.
“Why thank you, Phil,” she purred and they locked eyes.
She leaned in close to him, her shoulder brushing up against his as he opened the Syrrah. “You have such strong hands,” she said.
I watched as he raised an eyebrow. No one else was paying attention. They were too drunk. Then he said, “I can do a lot with these hands.”
“I bet you can.”
A few weeks later she told me she’d fallen for him. She grabbed my hands at dinner, like she had something incredibly important to say, and admitted she was in love with her editor’s husband. “I feel terrible. So terrible. But yet, he’s the first man I’ve truly fallen in love with since your father so long ago.”
“That’s great, Barb. But he’s married, you know. Maybe you want to look elsewhere?”
She didn’t look elsewhere and their affair continued into the fall. Every time I saw her, she’d drop a new detail. The necklace he bought for her in Soho, the dirty text message he sent the night before, the multiple orgasms he gave her while pounding her on the table. You know, the usual details any daughter wants to hear from her mom.
As they became more entwined, they grew increasingly careless, and soon Miranda started to become suspicious.
One morning while my mom was still fast asleep I dropped by to grab a book I’d left behind. I heard Phil pad out of the bedroom to make a call. He rarely spent the night, but Miranda was in London for business so he was free to come and go. Or so he thought.
“Hi darling,” he said quietly into the phone.
Pause.
“Oh, I’m just getting up and making some coffee.”
Pause.
“I didn’t hear the home phone ring.”
Pause.
“Five times? You called five times. I took a really long shower.”
Pause.
“Sometimes I shower before I make coffee. You know that’s true, darling. Anyway, how are you? How is London? I miss you so very much,” he said.
Idiot, I thought.
He was trying to nip it in the bud, allay her fears. But women are smart and Miranda is one of the smartest of all. Her hackles were raised and she wasn’t going to lower them on account of a shower-before-I-make-coffee cover-up from her philandering husband.
I tried to warn my mom. I tried to let her know she might want to cool it with him. But she would hear none of it. She was madly in love and nothing was going to stop her. Not even the private detective I spotted outside her building the next morning, leaning ever so casually against the building across the street. He held a blue cardboard coffee cup from the bodega around the corner and the New York Daily News, which he pretended to read. He had a mustache, naturally. I even nodded at him. He pretended not to notice and looked away.
As I walked to the subway that November morning, crunching on the last fallen leaves of the season, I counted off the things I knew for sure about the situation.