Little Girls(22)
“Mr. Ryan, my principal, lost his hair during an assembly,” Susan piped up. She had half a cheeseburger on the plate in front of her, though she had been spending most of her time cramming her mouth full of fries sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning. “He sneezed and it, like, flopped off. Did you know hair could do that?”
“It’s called a toupee, doll,” Ted told her. Then he looked back at Laurie. “I’d really like to hear from this Larosche about exactly what went on that night.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” said Laurie.
“What’s a toupee?” Susan asked through a mouthful of potato.
“Am I?” Ted said.
Laurie sighed. “I’m tired, Ted. I feel sick just being back here and at that house, and I hate dealing with all this stuff. I just want it put behind me, okay? Is that so goddamn hard to understand?”
Ted held up both hands, palms out. “Hey. I’m just giving you some food for thought, darling.”
“I don’t need anything else to think about right now.”
Susan tugged at Laurie’s arm. “Are you guys fighting?”
“We’re not fighting, Snoozin,” Ted answered. “We’re just discussing.”
“It sounds like fighting.”
“It’s not,” Laurie told her.
“Oh.” Susan pulled her hand away from her mother’s arm. To her father, she said, “Don’t call me Snoozin no more.”
“Any more,” Ted corrected her.
Frowning, Susan said, “What?”
Chapter 8
They picked up a pizza on the way home and were back at the house by six o’clock. Laurie was quiet for much of the drive back from downtown and Ted was in no mood to goad her into talking. Susan kept opening the pizza box in the backseat and plucking off slices of pepperoni which she stuffed into her mouth and then giggled to herself. The house loomed up over the incline as the Volvo approached it up the winding driveway. They had left some lights on, and the downstairs windows glowed now in the darkness like eyes. The moonlight glinting off the windows of the strange little room at the top of the house—the belvedere—made it look as though there was a soft light burning from within.
They ate at the dining room table in silence. Ted had never realized how much they relied on the TV back in Hartford for background noise until they had come to this place, where televisions, radios, and computers were things of science fiction. What kind of whack job had Laurie’s father been, anyway? Ted ate two slices of pizza, then went to the liquor cabinet in the parlor, selected one of the ancient bottles—this one a dark cognac—and poured himself a couple of fingers into a crystal rocks glass. His laptop was in the bedroom upstairs, still packed away with their luggage. It had wireless Internet, and he supposed he could attempt to harness a signal from one of the neighbors, though he did not hold out much hope for this endeavor; the other houses along Annapolis Road looked even less contemporary than this one, particularly the rundown little cottage next door. Even on the drive back from downtown, he had only spied a few houses with lights on in the windows. Was this part of the city nothing more than a graveyard waiting to happen?
He knew he should sit down at the computer and work on the Fish adaptation, but his head wasn’t in the game at the moment. It had taken him months to wend through John Fish’s bloated tome and, upon finishing it, he’d been left with a hollow dissatisfaction he knew would be nothing short of a miracle to overcome. Overcoming it was necessary to his role in adapting the work for the stage, and his inability to lose himself in Fish’s novel reflected in the ambiguous treatment and the uninspired pages he’d already written himself. Add to that the extra stress he felt in the knowledge that this could prove his biggest break to date, and he found himself reticent to make a single false move. Was he being overly careful with the pages he wrote, the outline he’d drawn up? Of course he was. His future depended on the moves he made. Yet he knew from experience that too much caution rendered him useless. Writing was easier when I was younger and none of it truly mattered.
Taking on the adaptation of John Fish’s bestselling novel The Skin of Her Teeth was his biggest compromise to date . . . but it had been five years since his play, Whippoorwill, had seen its final performance at the little Greenwich Village theater, and an equal amount of years since Ted had received a steady paycheck.
Now, carrying his cognac down the front hall and out onto the porch, Ted wondered if the death of Laurie’s estranged father hadn’t been a godsend. Over a half-million dollars for the house? Laurie was right—even if they sold it for half that amount, the money would afford him enough peace of mind to really focus on the Fish adaptation and whatever waited for him on the horizon after that. As it was, he laid awake at night worrying about money when he should be worrying about the play.
Things had been tougher since Laurie had quit teaching. Her quitting was the result of a singular episode that had occurred during the stasis of time between Whippoorwill’s off-Broadway run and the John Fish gig—what Ted eventually termed the “highway incident.” Despite the insecurity of his burgeoning profession and worry over the influx of money to the household, Ted had agreed that it might be a good idea for Laurie to take some time off and eliminate some stress from her life. What he hadn’t realized at the time was that her time off would turn into a full year of unemployment. Moreover, she still showed no desire to return to work. She used to paint from time to time, but they never saw any substantial money from the small Hartford galleries that hung her work. He couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down to paint something, let alone the last time she had sold a piece. So here he was, selling his creative soul to write an adaptation of someone else’s lousy story. Funny how life can reach out and grab you like that. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to Laurie because there was a part of him that believed he might have been the cause of what had happened to her on the highway that afternoon....