Little Known Facts: A Novel by Christine Sneed

amusement, or else he will be distracted, the previous night’s problems and controversies returning with the force of a blow. Like her ex-husband, he is unlikely ever to be happy. At least not as he is currently living, measuring his life against his father’s, a man to whom only a tiny percentage of the population can reasonably compare themselves. The kind of fame Renn has achieved, Danielle realizes, is more or less a novelty. Before the camera’s invention, before movies and TV, certainly before the Internet, fame was more local, less colossal. But Will’s misery, she knows, would still be powerful, no matter which century he might have been born into. His father’s life is an aberration; his gifts, his privileges, all of the possibilities to which he has access, also aberrant. In that moment, an hour after midnight, when she can hear some restless soul down on the street gunning a motorcycle, she does not know how either man can stand it.

Chapter 3
Meaningful Experience
    Sometimes I don’t know what to say when I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I find myself no better equipped to handle it than the last time someone pointed out an error to me. The child was allergic to wheat, not milk. The prescription should have been a hundred milligrams, not eighty-five. I married the wrong man. I married the right man at the wrong time. I shouldn’t have gotten married at all. One thing I do know, something I realized a year or so after the divorce, is that I should have gone back to my maiden name. I didn’t do it at the time because I wanted the same name as my children. Perhaps I also wanted to inspire curiosity or jealousy, anything that might have required me to air my many virulent grievances, to offer my story as a cautionary tale.
    For three years Renn, my ex-husband, kept trying to talk to me as if we were friends, to relieve his guilty conscience and prove to himself that I was doing fine, that Anna and Billy were fine too and one day we would all forgive him, but of course we wouldn’t forget him. Renn and I are almost exactly the same age. His birthday is two weeks before mine; he was born in Evanston, Illinois, and I was born a few miles up the road in Lake Bluff. We met during our junior year at USC, and when a year and a half later I was accepted into UCLA’s medical school and was about to finish that first caffeine-fueled semester with high marks, we decided to get married, which we did in downtown L.A. at the city hall, one of Renn’s fraternity brothers and his girlfriend our witnesses. Renn was starting to get roles by then, ones that paid. He was twenty-two and very handsome and so naturally charming that if I had been a little smarter, I would have seen how impossible it would be to keep him from attracting the kind of friends, both male and female, with money and foreign cars and sailboats and, in one case, a private plane, who would tell him not to limit himself, to experience all that he could of life because who knew? Tomorrow he might die. Or even later that same day. What did anyone really know of fate? Carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds, etc. etc.
    I hated fate, I told him more than once, barely able to tolerate these new, fashionably blasé friends who couldn’t stand me, the inconvenient wife, either—capable medical student or no, I was heavy baggage. Fate was a con, a fool’s game. There was only life, one day after the other. Then death, of course. Things happened, and no one could predict them. By then, I had seen hematomas in three-month-old babies. I had seen two-year-olds dying of leukemia while their mothers almost managed to overdose on barbiturates in the parking lot outside the hospital. We had an earthquake or two, gas shortages, bad air, wildfires, whales beaching themselves and dying three hundred miles up the coast. We also eventually had two perfectly healthy children, miraculous creatures that I couldn’t and sometimes still can’t believe Renn and I