Search Heartache

Carla Malden

Description

Carla Malden is the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Karl Malden

She is on the board of the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles

She has a close relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as her father was the president for many years

This is Carla Malden's first novel

When I got home, I did what I had stopped myself from doing earlier. I Googled the name: Aimee Laroche. I wondered what I would have done if I had found myself embroiled in this scenario fifteen, even ten years ago. Would I have hired a private detective to track this woman down? Would I have passed sleepless nights waiting for him to hand over a manila envelope containing long lens black-and-whites of a femme fatale smoking Gauloises at a sidewalk café? Probably not. But Googling was irresistible. Like everything on screen, it required no effort. It was so easy.

Maura Fielder looks like she has the perfect life: every expectation fulfilled. But under the illusory surface of perfection, Maura finds herself blindsided by what she discovers on her husband’s computer. She has no emotional cubby hole into which she can shove this ghost from her husband’s past, so instead, Maura upends her life—thrashing her marriage, alienating her daughter, and eroding her own moral center. On the verge of sacrificing everything she holds dear to her own obsession, how does Maura manage to regain her equilibrium and reclaim her life?

In this post-privacy new world, any woman can find heartache if she searches hard enough.

Sujets

• Coming of Age
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Bird Books
• Date de parution: 10 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644281246
• Langue: English

Extrait

This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book
Rare Bird 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302 Los Angeles, CA 90013 rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2019 by Carla Malden
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address: Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302 Los Angeles, CA 90013
Set in Dante
epub isbn : 9781644281246
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Malden, Carla, author. Title: Search Heartache: A Novel / by Carla Malden. Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019. Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280591 Subjects: LCSH Marriage—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Divorce—Fiction. | Women—Fiction. | BISAC / Fiction / General Classification: LCC PS3613.A4335 S43 2019| DDC 813.6—dc23


Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



PROLOGUE
I must have been twelve years old when I first heard the joke.
I know I was in the seventh grade, because at the Ridgepoint School for Girls, the seventh graders were entrusted with carrying out the flag salute ceremony every Friday in all its pomp and patriotism. The entire Lower School, kindergarten through grade seven, lined up in our crisp white cotton uniforms. Monday through Thursday, the bucolic campus swarmed with girls in pink, yellow, and powder blue, as though scattered with prepubescent Easter eggs. But white on Friday. Always white on Friday. These traditions had kept the crème de la crème of Los Angeles young womanhood on the straight and narrow for nearly a century. And you never broke the rules. At least Maura Locke didn’t. Not me.
I was standing in the flag salute line, staring down at my saddle shoes. They were so caked with white polish that it looked like the creases across the instep were smiling up at me. I was glad it wasn’t my week to perform the actual raising of th e flag. That was nerve-wracking. The unfolding, the clipping of the hooks through the brass rings, the hand-over-hand on the rope. I hated the pressure. No, this week all I had to do was march out, stand there, and slap my hand over my heart.
I would keep an eye on Miss Zipser, my teacher, a study in adamant spinsterhood (even then an old-fashioned word, but so excruciatingly appropriate). Miss Zipser had a thing for patriotism, especially now that her dream-come-true was in the White House—a wavy-haired movie star pledged to safeguard the conservative values she held so dear. On flag-salute Friday, Miss Zipser conducted the proceedings. She stood ramrod straight, as though steel encased the fibers of her every nerve, if indeed nerve fiber existed at all in this woman who passed her years, one after the other, holding court in front of a roomful of girls on the brink of life. She would place her hand on her heart—right on her anatomical heart, between her conical breasts, beneath her pearls. Sometimes we bet on whether Miss Zipser would manage to squeeze out a few tears as we pledged our allegiance. She loved her country that much.
On this particular Friday, Betsy Nagle stood behind me. She leaned in close to my ear, breaching the mandated nine inches of air space between Ridgepoint girls standing in line. I could smell the sickly sweetness of the pomade Betsy used to slick back her ponytail, a ponytail so tight it gave me a headache just to look at her. I never would have thought I’d hear a dirty joke from Betsy Nagle. It wasn’t dirty really. I knew that. But still, it was about sex. Or something like it anyway.
“These groupies are hanging around backstage at a concert,” breathed Betsy. “One of them says, ‘I slept with Jon Bon Jovi last night.’ And another one asks, ‘How was he?’ ‘He’s good,’ she says, ‘but he’s no Mick Jagger.’”
“The next day, the first one says, ‘Last night I slept with Bruce Springsteen.’ ‘How was he?’”
(That was the part that struck me. The notion that a girl would actually ask another girl that question. How was he? So matter-of-fact. It punched a hole in my romantic notion of an out-of-body, swept-away experience. It sounded more like comparing hamburgers.)
“He was good, but he’s no Mick Jagger.” (Not enough ketchup.)
“Then they run into each other a few days later. The girl says, ‘You’ll never believe who I slept with last night! Mick Jagger.’”
“‘Well? How was he?’”
“‘He’s good. But he’s no Mick Jagger.’”
Betsy Nagle’s joke made no sense. How could Mick Jagger not be Mick Jagger?
We had recently finished reading Alice in Wonderland . While Miss Zipser highlighted figures of speech, and the hipper girls mined the text for hidden, drug-related meaning, I liked the story precisely as it read, even if parts of it confused me. This Jagger joke reminded me of the line: “I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Weren ’ t you always yourself? Wasn ’ t Mick Jagger, by definition, as good as Mick Jagger? If Mick Jagger didn ’ t define Mick Jagger-ness, then who did?
I suspected there was some sort of irony at play. We had recently completed a unit on irony in English—verbal, dramatic, and situational. I had aced the end-of-unit test, but I was glad this joke had not been one of the questions. I would have had a hard time categorizing which type of irony applied and would have had to go with “All of the Above,” an option that always made me feel uneasy, if not outright defeated.
I nodded a silent “that’s a good one” to Betsy as I noticed a tiny splotch of white polish on the navy saddle of my right shoe. I hoped the line monitor wouldn’t give me a demerit. Demerits were so humiliating, not that I had ever gotten one.
At lunch, my best friend, Gwen Kadison, told me the same joke. It was going around. Gwen substituted The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Marty Balin of Jefferson Starship. So that was it. Not really a joke so much as a game. A game where you slipped in different names.
Carrot stick half-chomped, I proposed, “He’s good but he’s no Weird Al.” Gwen laughed so hard that her Tab came out of her nose.
Gwen countered, “He’s good but he’s no Captain.”
“Huh?”
“And Tennille.” Good one.
We went on like that through lunch.
The game would run all the way through our high school years. The game where you could talk about having sex with the pantheon of rock stars, swapping one for the other willy nilly. Eventually I realized that the joke wasn’t about rock stars. It wasn’t even about sex.
It was about promise and hope. It was about greener grass. Mostly, it was about disillusionment.


CHAPTER ONE
“I’m going to have to start wearing my glasses on one of those chains,” I said. I was sitting on the bed, propped against four pillows, filing the rough spot on a fingernail I had been fidgeting with all day. I stretched my arm out straight, willing my fingers six inches farther away. “You know,” I said to Adam, “those chains you wear around your neck?”
“Like an old lady?”
He was slouched on the foot of the bed in his underwear, remote control in hand, adding the latest channels to the box. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO. Behind these icons, neatly arranged on the screen, was a new generation of media tycoons, flush with cash and buying shows like drunken sailors. My husband was an agent in the motion picture/television department of a major talent agency—his father’s. It was part of his job to make sure the agency was selling what the “entertainment providers” were buying, though entertainment value often seemed the least of the transaction.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. Old lady?
“Nothing,” he said as he added the CarChase Channel to the lineup.
But I knew perfectly well what he had said. Old lady. Old. Lady. Old.
I thought about filing the rest of my nails to match the newly shortened one, but that seemed several fingers too many to cope with right now. Especially since I couldn’t see.
“Would you turn down the air?” I asked. It was barely early spring, but the temperatures had been late-summer-high the last several days—calm and still, what people in LA sometimes call earthquake weather. I had turned on the AC for the first time since last summer.
Adam didn ’ t answer. He was watching a promo for the new Ken Burns documentary. This time out: the Dust Bowl. They were hyping it as the worst manmade ecological disaster in history. “I wonder if that ’ s true,” Adam said.
“What?”
“About the Dust Bowl.”
“People thought it meant the end of the world,” I said, uninterested.
“Maura, people always think everything means the end of the world.”
“It ’ s blowing right on me,” I said. “Would you turn off the air?”
Adam got up from the edge of the bed and studied the thermostat. The AC shut off with a troublesome click. “That doesn ’ t sound good,”