Numbers: Rational, Irrational, and Accidental Read online



  Numbers: Rational, Irrational, and Accidental

  Mary Kitt-Neel

  Copyright 2011 Mary Kitt-Neel

  License Notes

  Cover Photograph © 2006 Mary Hiers

  Amelie Wexler, who everyone called Email, had been chattering at her mother Martine for at least half an hour when Martine got a phone call from the lawyer of her former grandmother-in-law. Mimi had died two weeks prior, and had specified that no memorial service was to take place. She had donated her body to the medical school at UCLA, and all that was left was sorting out her estate among her children, grandchildren, and Martine.

  Mimi bucked the rest of her family in continuing her relationship with Martine after Martine divorced her grandson. “Face it, Brock. You had it coming,” she had told him at the time. Mimi had been a newspaper editor at a tiny, but prestigious weekly before marrying and having seven children, the oldest of whom was Brock’s father.

  She had never stopped writing, and never attempted to publish anything. But she had left all of her papers to Martine, and the lawyer told her that she needed to come out to Santa Barbara because Mimi had specified that before the rest of her belongings could be divvied up and sold, Martine had to collect the papers in person and go through the house to select a keepsake before her descendents could get their hands on anything.

  Quite naturally, they all hated Martine. But Mimi was the type of person you didn’t defy, even after she was dead.

  Martine sat with the phone next to her ear for a good three minutes after the lawyer had hung up. Email continued her animated description of the new college newspaper she had founded with her friend Alex, called The Weekly Scrote.

  “Mom?” she said after a moment.

  “Yes? The Daily What? When do you go to press?”

  “No, Mom. What just happened?”

  “That was Mimi’s lawyer. I have to go to Santa Barbara tomorrow.”

  ***

  Martine’s intermittent boyfriend, a studio and touring musician called Francis, phoned her that evening as she was figuring out what to pack and whether to take a northern or southern route to California. Getting on a plane wasn’t an option for Martine. She had lost both a coworker and a cousin in plane crashes, and even though she had a remarkable head for statistics, Martine could not be persuaded that flying was safe.

  Francis was describing the astonishing roundness of the ass of a dark-skinned backup singer he had worked with that day while finishing up some tracks for a new album, but none of it registered. It was bad enough that Mimi was gone. Though the lawyer was sending an associate to go with her to Mimi’s house, two of her daughters would be at the house, and Martine was scared.

  “Can you go with me to California tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Sorry, what?” said Francis.

  Martine could feel her voice threaten to break. “I have to go to California to pick up Mimi’s papers, and I have to leave tomorrow. She was Brock’s grandmother, and she died recently. Could you go with me?”

  “Um, shit Martine. Why can’t they send that stuff to you?”

  “Never mind. I’ll be fine. Mimi’s will specified that I had to go out there. She wants me to pick out something from the house to bring home with me. Rita and Linda will be there, and they scare me. But it’s OK. Mimi’s lawyer is sending someone to meet me at the house.”

  The line went silent for a moment.

  “Let me make a phone call and call you back,” he said.

  “No, Francis. I was just talking without thinking. Actually, I probably should go alone. I may not be fit for human interaction till this is over.”

  “I’m going too,” said Francis.

  “Don’t. I’m not thinking straight. I’ll call you from the road.”

  “I’ll be there at six tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “Francis?” said Martine.

  “What, baby?”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I know.”

  ***

  Martine told her card runner Jarrett that she would talk to him as soon as the baseball All Star break was over, and she called her editorial director and told her that she needed some time off. With the help of half an Ambien, she managed to drop off to sleep around ten. Francis was sitting on her front porch when she got up the next morning at 5:30. She guessed correctly that he hadn’t been to bed yet.

  She had decided to take the southern route out there. She would figure out later which route to take coming back. She had placed a couple of pillows and a blanket in the car the previous night so that she and Francis could take turns driving and sleeping. That way they could spend one, or at most two nights in a hotel and get to California in three to four days.

  Francis had a duffel bag and a guitar. Martine put all their bags in the back seat, went back inside to kiss her son Tingo on the forehead as he slept, left a note for Email (who tended to wake up screaming when startled), locked up the house, and pointed the car west.

  Francis was out cold by the time they hit the interstate, his long, blonde hair falling haphazardly over his face. Martine had been in love with him since the very first time they met, but she wasn’t about to let him know it. He was a decade younger, had an amazing job, and most importantly, came into regular contact with famous people and attractive women. She glanced over at him, hating herself for being stupid enough to fall in love with him. He woke up briefly and gave her a brilliant smile before closing his eyes again.

  Martine had been there. She knew what happened when you loved someone. You knew that their eyes were the exact color that blue was meant to be. You hoped that you’d have babies whose faces would crinkle up precisely that way. You could identify them by the way their hair smelled. You knew the exact territory their body hair mapped out. You wanted more than anything to wake up to their face, every single day.

  Until that morning that you Just. Fucking. Didn’t.

  She had too much affection for him to want that to ever happen.

  Six hours later they were approaching Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Martine pulled into an IHOP parking lot. Francis stretched and woke up. He was only a few inches taller than Martine, and though he insisted he weighed a good 50 lbs. more than she did, she was convinced they were within 25 lbs. of each other. He was the only partner she’d ever had who didn’t make her feel too small. Email liked him. She called him “Pixie Meat.”

  Tingo was a bit suspicious of him, however. To Tingo, 22 with a head still full of idealism, being a working musician was impure. When Tingo was at work, he was a cook. He was all about the eggs and the steak and the cheese melts.

  But when he was writing songs or performing them with his band, the Plot Holes, he was 100% unadulterated musician. Or so he thought. The fact that the band’s set list was strategically sprinkled with numbers that got girls dancing with other girls conveniently escaped him when he was busy being suspicious of Francis.

  Martine bought a newspaper and they went inside to eat. Francis didn’t have an easy time of it at places like IHOP because he tried to only eat fresh fruit and vegetables, preferably raw. Martine, on the other hand, ate as if she had a solemn obligation to feed her arteries as much cholesterol as her diet could provide, and this made Francis sad.

  They didn’t talk much. Martine worked the newspaper crossword while Francis ate his salad and fiddled with his phone and thought aimlessly. Roughly two years earlier, Martine had called him at precisely the moment that he had a needle full of what he hoped would be a lethal amount of heroin ready to go into his arm.

  “I made cookies. Can I bring you some?” was what she had said at the time. No “hello” or any
thing.

  Francis had access to every kind of drug out there due to his connections in the music business, and he’d been around long enough to know that musicians and heroin had a very close relationship. He’d also personally known two drummers who had OD’d on it, so he knew that if he ever wanted to kill himself, exactly how to do it.

  On that day, he had not really been sure why he wanted to die, other than that life was too damn hard. He was working steadily, yet always short of money. There were women in his life, but none he loved. Except for Martine. But Martine had a wall around her. And she didn’t just have a wall around her in toto, but she had walls around all the compartments that made up her life.

  Her own children didn’t know that she ran a bookmaking operation. Not that it was something to advertise openly, but they had absolutely no clue. The only reason Francis knew was that they had got drunk at his house one afternoon and she told him. Her editors certainly didn’t know about her sideline operation, and her bookmaking clients didn’t know who they were making bets with.

  Martine had a card runner named Jarrett who was the interface between her and her clients, and Jarrett was fiercely secretive and protective about Martine. It kind of pissed off Francis, because it was as if Jarrett owned a little chunk of Martine while he owned nothing of her.

  Martine had no idea that she had saved Francis’s life that day when she offered to bring over cookies, and he had no intention of ever telling her. She was the type of person who would feel a sense of obligation to him, and he’d be damned if he’d ever have to wonder whether this woman that he loved was with him out of a sense of obligation.

  “So, what do you think you’ll take back from Mimi’s house?” he asked.

  Martine arrested her fork halfway to her mouth.

  “I don’t have the first fucking clue,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I have this image in my head of reaching out for something – I don’t even know what – and either Rita or Linda clucking their tongue at me or otherwise giving me the evil eye and me putting whatever it is back. I can see myself taking her telephone pencil, just so I can feel like I technically did what Mimi wanted and not worry about her coming back to haunt me. Which she would totally do.”

  Just then Martine’s phone rang. “It’s Email,” she said. “I better take it.”

  Email and her friend Alex had created a website for The Weekly Scrote a couple of weeks prior, and someone had contacted them asking to buy it and continue to have them provide content. Email was elated, but Martine was more skeptical.

  “Sweetie, you have to understand, even if they love what you’ve done, once they own it, the site won’t really be yours anymore. You will have people to answer to, and no matter how much latitude they promise to give you creatively, you’ll be hemmed in. You and Alex need to really give this some thought. And you need to talk to a lawyer before you sign anything at all. They know you’re young and they’ll probably try to take advantage of that. I’m not trying to rain on you, sweetheart, but you have to look out for yourself.”

  Francis listened to Martine’s end of the conversation while he played with his salad. She had suffered some seriously hard knocks in her career, including a book publisher who went out of business while her first novel was in galleys, and a second and third novel that received so little support from the publisher that it might as well have remained in manuscript form in her desk drawer.

  He had read her third novel shortly after they met, and he made the mistake of thinking that he knew Martine by having read it. Sure, there were writers who were willing to put the cards right there on the table, but there were plenty more who didn’t, and Martine was one of them. He had once quoted her a line from her own book, and she looked at him as if he had stepped in a dog turd and deliberately ground it into her new carpet.

  “With any luck we’ll be there day after tomorrow. Probably late. But who knows? Rita and Linda are in a hurry to get me there so they can be done with me. I may take more time coming home.” She paused.

  “Well, I would tell you to tell Tingo to stop being a douchebag, but you know that won’t work. Please don’t forget to feed the cat, OK?”

  After a moment she said, “I love you too, sweetheart. We’ll talk again tonight or tomorrow. All right. Bye.”

  She put the phone back in her purse and picked up what was left of a piece of bacon. “That was Email,” she said.

  “You told me,” said Francis.

  “How much farther do you think we should go today?”

  “I say we just go and we’ll know when it’s time to stop. I’m awake now if you want me to drive,” he said.

  “I would like that.”

  She smiled and closed her eyes. Francis had always loved how Martine’s eyelashes looked when she had her eyes closed. He had noticed how when people cry, their eyelashes tended to taper together at the tips, and Martine’s always did this, even if she wasn’t crying. It made him think of how children draw the sun: with a series of pointy triangles outlining it, indicating the light radiating outward.

  When they got up to pay the check, she surprised him by extending her arms out to him. For a moment they held each other in the aisle next to their table at the IHOP in Fort Smith, Arkansas, blocking the wait staff and not caring.

  ***

  The next morning, having folded down the back seats of Martine’s car and having slept entwined on an air mattress while parked outside a 24-hour mega-store, Francis and Martine awoke to thundery showers outside. Within a few minutes of Martine opening her eyes, she felt Francis begin to stir. She could feel his morning erection against her left leg, and smiled in spite of herself.

  “How’s my girl?” Francis said when he woke up.

  “I’m good. Let’s stay at a hotel tonight. I know I’ll need a shower. You want some coffee? I can go get some if you can get all our stuff situated so we can leave.”

  “Yeah. That would be good. Why don’t I drive you up to the door? It looks like it’s going to start raining again.”

  “No, sweetie. It’s fine. I think it will feel good with the wind blowing. Do you want anything else? Something to eat?”

  “I got a couple of energy bars in my bag. That’ll be enough for now.”

  She smiled and picked up her handbag. “OK. I’m going to duck into the ladies room to brush my teeth, so it might take a minute or two, but I’ll be right back.”

  He waited for her to be out of earshot before he said, “I love you.”

  ***

  By the time they arrived in Santa Barbara it was nightfall two days later. Martine called Mimi’s lawyer and confirmed that they would meet at the house at 9:30 the next day. They went over the driving directions, because it had been so many years since Martine had been to Mimi’s house. The whole city looked completely unfamiliar.

  She and Francis sat on the tiny balcony of their hotel room and drank wine out of hotel room glasses and let the breeze whoosh into their room to get the stale smell of air conditioning out. On the next balcony were two rocket propulsion engineers who were visiting a nearby test facility. They were drunk off their asses on Southern Comfort, talking nonstop about the prop bets they wanted to set up for the baseball All Star Game. Martine suddenly wished she were taking bets on the game. Clearly those two guys were idiots, and she could very easily pocket some of their engineers’ salaries.

  When they finally went in around eleven, which felt like 1 a.m. with their Central Time body clocks, Francis wanted sex, and Martine was just drunk enough not to protest. In fact, she loved it. She loved him. She didn’t want to grow old, but if she had to, she thought it might be bearable if she were with Francis.

  Mimi’s house looked smaller, almost stooped over. But it was beautiful and lushly landscaped just like she remembered. Mimi didn’t have a lawn at all. She hated mowing, and so she simply filled every square foot of the little yard around her house with either hardscaping or container plantings, and they had all thrived on her love. Martine wasn
’t quite sure what would become of the house, but she suspected that Brock’s father and his sisters would probably sell it, and that made her sad.

  Rosa, Mimi’s lawyer, arrived in a little black Mercedes and greeted both Martine and Francis with hugs, despite the fact that they had never met before. As they embraced, Martine noticed a small tattoo of a thin and elegant black cat on the back of Rosa’s neck, where it would be covered by her hair if it were down.

  Rita opened the door before they had a chance to knock, and Rosa, thankfully, took care of all the necessary small talk. She coaxed the sisters into taking their coffee out back so she could show Martine the boxes she needed to take.

  Martine expected a certain amount of ceremony, but there was none. Rosa walked them to a spare bedroom and opened the closet, indicating three locked metal boxes that were labeled with Martine’s name and a number written in Sharpie on masking tape. She handed Martine a small key ring with numbered keys on them.

  “And, besides this, she has asked that you take something of your choice with you, as you know. The only stipulation is that you not take any family photographs. I believe she enclosed a couple of photos in one of the boxes, and if not, I could probably have copies made if you wanted one of her,” said Rosa.

  Martine nodded.

  “I don’t quite know where to start,” said Martine, as Francis took the boxes out to the car.

  “It’s fine, dear. They’ll have three or four cups of coffee apiece before they come back in. I bought them a pound of Ethopian Yirga Cheffe last week, and they go on and on about how good it is. I thought it might buy you a little extra time,” she said, winking. “Plus, they’ll probably spike it with a little whisky,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “I know that Mimi had several beautiful pieces of crystal, if you’d like me to show them to you.”

  “Maybe in a minute,” said Martine. “Is it OK if I look in here?” she said, continuing to peer into the closet.

  “Suit yourself, my dear. I’ll be in the living room.”

  Martine knelt in front of the closet, which was full of what most people would classify as junk. There were a few ugly lamps, disassembled for easier storage, an old rotary dial telephone, and a milk crate full of odds and ends.