Chapter 27 2012
Orson is driving far on the arm of the Cape, past the shingled settlements that cluster around penny-candy shops, the sunny habitat of an endangered species.
He’s hardly touched this coast since that night, Susie’s funeral.
Mostly he remembers a great distance between himself and everyone else.
He remembers thinking about leaving America entirely, going home and working on an oil rig or God knows what, anything not to be around those people, their unbearable conversations about the next series, the next big thing.
But then came this serious little version of Susie like a sign, telling him to get on with it.
And here she is now, sitting next to him, bare feet up on the dashboard, eyes hidden behind big sunglasses. He still can’t get over it.
“So how does it feel?” he asks. “Being here.”
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s strange.”
“Has it changed?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe just me.”
I love you. When she said it the first time, it fucking terrified him.
If the world found out, if they ruined her, he would never be able to forgive himself.
The age gap, Susie, how many vile headlines have tormented his imagination?
“Like Mother Like Daughter; He’s Got a Type!
” How could it be worth it? Happily, they have burrowed into their private world. But it cannot last forever.
“Was the flight okay?” he asks.
“Dreamy. Thanks. Yours?”
“Well, there was this very cute girl two rows behind me.”
“Did you get her number?”
“I was too shy.”
Separate arrivals at the airport, separate seats.
He paid, obviously, for the ticket, business class and all.
But he was whisked away to the private lounge, didn’t see her till touchdown.
She suggested that the secrecy of it all might be sexy, but it just made him feel like an ass.
This summer she has hardly left his bed.
“Poor Niamh. Is she going to mourn your absence this week?”
“She already complains I’m never there.”
He purses his lips. “I do want to meet her. And see your girly little flat.”
“There is nothing to see. When you’re gone, I live in squalor.”
And when he’s not? Her life has attached to his.
Everything else—the projects and paychecks and gossip and bullshit—disappears when he closes the door behind the familiar sound of her laugh, the strength of her embrace.
It was jarring, to realize how lonely he had been before, consumed with the project of himself.
So many relationships had only ever felt incidental, part of the endless pursuit of the next thing.
So many exes craved the publicity, in a way that alienated real feeling.
He’d begun to think it was just his nature, that isolation.
But God, how good it feels to throw himself into caring for something—someone else.
Please God, let it last, he thinks.
On the radio, a program is playing about the upcoming elections, the heightening rhetoric. “I swear, you people are going to have a civil war,” he says.
“Good,” Viola laughs. “I’ve always wanted to invest in a bunker.”
“I think we’d thrive in a bunker.”
“You wouldn’t. No limelight in a bunker.”
“I’m sure we could get some installed.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Shit—”
The traffic slows abruptly and the nose of his car almost kisses the ass of the truck in front of him. For a moment they are face-to-face with two bumper stickers: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life! and Where’s the Birth Certificate?
“Some people are just stupid,” she says.
“No,” he says. “They’re just experts in seeing what they want to see.”
He can feel it simmering in this country, a willful ignorance. You can hear it in the laugh track, in everything the dream factory promises. There’s always something darker on the other side of the curtain.
“Enough politics,” she says. “Dinner. I’m thinking mussels. White wine. Garlic. Butter.”
“Talk dirty to me.”
Viola twists the radio to a familiar channel, hums mindlessly to a song he doesn’t know.
How easy she seems here! How… herself! At times he worries whether in the momentum of the two of them, she is alienating herself from her own desires.
Constantly, she anticipates his arrivals, his moods, will cancel plans without a thought if he suggests she come around.
She’s so young, he reminds himself, drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
Maybe it’s okay. Or maybe he’s making it worse.
The master’s thing, for example—it’s only a bid to extend their time together, just another thing to achieve.
It doesn’t animate her. By hiding herself away with him, is she leaving herself unresolved?
It’s why he chose this place: a refuge only a few hours from her childhood home.
Here, she can have the upper hand. Show him, maybe, what and who she loves.
He feels compelled to give her everything Susie would have wanted her to have.
Confidence. Beauty. Love. Hasn’t she given him these things?
It feels like carrying through with something.
“Do you want to see anybody while we’re here?”
“Not particularly,” she says. “Thank you.”
The way Susie used to talk about Al, Orson always imagined him as tough: stubborn and old-fashioned, set in his ways.
But at the funeral, he’d been surprised by how disoriented he seemed, a man without a mooring.
He must have pulled it together, done all right to produce somebody like Viola.
She speaks about him fondly, and it makes him feel guilty for taking her away from him. For encouraging Susan to do the same.
“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
“I don’t need to turn our sexy getaway into a family reunion, do you?”
She reaches a hand across to his thigh, recalling the completeness of the two of them, and in a world where everybody wants something from him, God, it’s good to know she requires nothing but himself. When they get to the house, the first thing they will need to test is the bed.
Tucked deep into Wellfleet pine forest the refuge reveals itself: svelte, modernist. Its long windows expose Cape Cod in the way that it was intended to be exposed—rustic and wild.
Were it not so hidden, you would inevitably peer inside and wonder: Who lives there?
In the open-plan heart, there is nowhere to hide.
As Orson peels off her dress and kisses the tender skin of her stomach and clutches at her hair in needy fistfuls, she never loses awareness of this exposure.
The potential to be seen. When he stands to unbutton his jeans, she pulls down the wide, translucent window shade.
They have been so careful. She will be careful her whole life if that’s what it takes.
Now that she has something to lose, she has become consumed by the fear of losing it.
How many ways the world might snatch him away from her!
Distortion or demonization or death. The only purpose she feels is this: being with him, loving him. She is lost in it.
After, she sends a photograph of the living room to Niamh, who responds instantly.
Niamh
Fuck off
Slowly, she is coming to understand Orson’s wealth, or at least the implications of it.
It moves with subtlety, fluidity. It has no interest in putting its name on buildings.
Rather, it is a vehicle of freedom. If her father painted wealth as a pattern of behavior (summers in the Vineyard, winters in Maine), for Orson it is limitless horizons.
Innumerable are his sun-drenched islands, his private white sand beaches.
We’re going to your neck of the woods, he said. Show me your natural habitat.
He has been itchy recently, she can tell.
He keeps talking about wanting a break from performing, the endlessness of it, threatening to start a charity or buy a pub.
She can feel him casting for something solid, a new project to throw himself into, something tangible and real. She knows he is hoping it is her.
Well, what do you want to see? she’d asked.
Niamh responds with a photograph of a giant wart on the bottom of a foot, which apparently belongs to her new on-again off-again boyfriend, a Swedish DJ named Matthias. Thank God for Niamh. Some people are getting so serious these days.
In the bathroom now, she pauses to examine her dead ends, runs a mascara brush over her lashes.
On the back porch, Orson is singing to himself in the sweet, tuneful way he does when he thinks no one is listening.
She steps out, barefoot, and he cracks open the bottle of airport Talisker, peers out onto the forest of locust trees and kettle ponds.
There is a perfection in nature, in life that doesn’t need to question itself; the abundance its own justification.
Cicadas cry impenetrably loud. She had forgotten that sound, nature like the roar of a jet.
“So,” he says. “I have a surprise for you.”
“You do?”
He nods, pushes up his sunglasses onto his forehead, his eyes dancing. “Go look in the closet in the living room.”
“Is it a dead body?”
“Yep.”
She smiles, moving nervously across the threshold. What could be in a closet? A dress? A person? My brother?
A cello. Beautiful curves, long, golden-brown neck, a waist that calls out to be held. The bow resting beside it.
“Oh my God.”
“You’re always saying you miss it. I thought it could be fun.”
“I—”
She carries it forward into the living room, the familiar weight, the comfort of it between her legs. Presses her fingers over the strings, feeling for their tension.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s… wow.”
“Play me a tune.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Always, she has talked about her cello playing as a magical thing, a secret skill, her mode of artistic expression. Clumsily, she fits her fingers into G major, runs the bow over a slow arpeggio. She is aware of her desire to impress him, of his eyes and expectations.
“It’s been a while.”
“That’s okay,” he says.