The Word Exchange Read Free

been coveting. And I tried, for about two minutes, to read a book, until my mind collapsed in boredom.
    I also started to feel a tiny twinge of unease, like an invisible hair tickling my cheek. To brush away the feeling, I fetched water for my father’s pet bromeliads and soothed myself with the rich, nutty scent of damp earth. Then I felt the delicious frisson of transgression creep over me.
    For as long as I could remember, I’d been curious about what Doug kept in his desk. Siphoning off some of my attention to listen for the sound of his tread, I sat and tried all the drawers. Most were filled with work chaff: loose papers, crumpled notes, broken pencil leads. But then I tried the top drawer on the left. Tugged it. And tugged. Shimmied, a little crazily. Finally it came loose with a crack—a pen wedged at the back, I soon learned, had snapped in half—and the drawer released with a rattle.
    To say I was surprised by what Doug had hidden there wouldn’t be quite true. But it did disappoint me. It was a cluttered (and newly ink-smattered) cache—probably the largest private collection in the world—of photographs 3 of Vera Doran. My mother. Douglas Johnson’s soon-to-be ex-wife. And I felt very bad for splashing them with ink. But I also felt a tiny, unfair burst of reprisal. As Max would have said, there are no accidents. She was my mother, and I loved her, but sometimes I wished Doug didn’t anymore. Watching him suffer had been agony.
    Looking back on our whole family life through a new dark lens also hadn’t been easy for me. Had my mother really been so unhappy? It hadn’t seemed that way. My parents had never been one of those gloomy couples like some of my friends’. They’d hugged and touched and said “I love you,” to each other and to me, and it had seemed so obviously true that the words were almost a superfluity. Doug would belt
Don Giovanni
to Vera in the kitchen as she laughingly roasted a chicken, trying not to spill her wine. He’d write love notes and scrawl funny drawings on grocery lists and receipts. Vera would mambo through the living room for Doug and me, or pretend the hallway was a catwalk. It’s true that when they’d fought, it had been fulminous—things sometimes went flying—but I’d always taken that as a good sign. And maybe itwas, in a way. Over the past few years those fights had slowly come to an end.
    Regardless, there was no denying that Doug’s photos of Vera were gorgeous. There was Vera Doran as Blanche DuBois in her high school’s all-girl production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Vera wearing beautiful bell-bottom flares, hair to there, and in huge orange platform sandals, relaxing near a stage (at Woodstock), joking with some shaggy-haired men (Creedence Clearwater Revival) who were about to perform. Vera in nothing but painted-on jeans bordered by the blocky phrase THE JORDACHE LOOK , in an outtake of an ad, ca. 1978, when she and my father had been married just a few years and she was still modeling to augment their income. Vera on her sixth birthday, a formal princess fantasia at the Dorans’ on East Sixty-eighth Street, comporting herself in a tiara encrusted with real diamonds. And my favorite—now tragically dappled with thick black splots—their wedding photo: Vera at twenty-one, a recent Bryn Mawr grad, bedecked in a curtain of blowsy dark-brown hair and a silver lamé minidress. (On seeing it, Mrs. Doran told the bride that it was lucky there was something silver at the ceremony, as she wouldn’t be inheriting any.) In it, Vera’s being fed a glistening bite of pineapple upside-down cake by her groom, a ruddy, pleased-looking man who was nearly twice her size, hairy, 4 smiling, in enormous thick-lensed glasses, and sporting a wide pineapple-print tie.
    I held that picture for a long time, trying to dab it clean. In it, Vera is arch and easy, laughing out loud as Doug forks cake into her perfectly plump-lipped, large, smiling mouth. She’s lolling