Chapter 31 2012
When Viola slides open the porch door again, Orson slips off to the bathroom. Mark Flowers—evidently sloshed—looks at her now with frank concern.
“You’re sweet together,” he says, “the two of you.”
“Well, that’s kind,” she says, though she knows it has not been true tonight.
“He was sweet with your mom.”
Hot, heat, tongue fattening. Don’t respond. Don’t bring her into this.
“You had a brother, yes?”
Dissonant, the phantom Sebastian conjured into this room where he could never be. Sebastian is so close. She feels unsteady.
“That’s right.”
“How is he?”
“Oh. He’s well, thank you,” she mumbles. “He’s an artist now.”
“Any good?” Mark asks. Is this a trap? Why should she be the arbiter of goodness?
A good person would have called him sooner, perhaps after he won the magazine award last year.
Or the thousand times she thought of him, wondered what he was doing, whether he would find something funny. When she felt lonely.
“It’s hard to be objective,” she admits.
Mark sits up as straight as he can now, rests his elbows on his knees and his pudgy face in his hands.
“Orson ever tell you he was so sick after your mom died?”
“No.”
“Fever for weeks. Meningitis.”
“He never said.”
When did she become so unsure about so many things? Who her mother was or wasn’t, or what she did, or what it makes her.
Don’t ask a question you don’t want an answer to.
Mark slumps back into his seat, gazes out at the endless darkness through the window. “Orson really loved her, you know.”
No. Mark Flowers is not the person she wants to hear this from. If the horrible twilight fact is to emerge, to destroy her world, it should come from Orson.
Fuck Mark Flowers.
Orson comes back in and places a hand on the small of her back. “Bedtime, I think.”
As Orson bundles Mark off, she spreads herself across the bed and closes her eyes. The click of the door. Heat, weight, a nose burrowing into her ribs, wet, forgiving lips.
“I hate that guy,” Orson says.
“Well, you could have fooled me.”
“We all had to fake it. We needed him.”
The click of a bulb, pink eyelids turn black, crickets loud outside the window. Is she imagining his breathing, heavier, tortured by something he cannot say?
He really loved her.
“Hey,” comes his voice. “So, I’ve been debating if I should tell you this.”
Breath stiff in her throat. “Yeah?”
He sighs for a long moment. “What you said the other day. Or thought you remembered. I don’t want you to think she didn’t care about you. She would hate for you to think that.”
“Please just say it.”
“She was going to leave him. Your dad. She wanted to bring you with her. I don’t know if that’s something you knew already, but I thought you might not, so I thought I should say it.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. If that’s weird.”
In the half-light of the moon sliding under the shade, she wonders at the human capacity for blindness, at her own weak will for the truth.
How could he possibly know that?
If. If he was trying to tell her that early night, with the photograph of her laughing in his apartment.
Horrible, hideous, intrusive if, buzzing like a gnat.
If, then. If Sebastian was right all along.
If it all fit into place, the tabloid article, Orson’s embarrassment.
The nude photographs. Do they have his gaze?
Could she recognize it? If Orson slept with her mother, then what would that make her?
Has she made a mistake, trusting an actor for all of these years?
This is the way it might have happened: her mother (drunk?
borrow, here, the memory of red wine and raised voices) arriving at Orson’s apartment.
He, bewildered, but easily flattered. Maybe they regretted it.
But maybe it happened again and again. They would have buried it, tried to keep it from permeating her other life.
Her father may never have known. Was it a fling? Or was it love?
Maybe someone else can ask.
Viola
Do you want to come visit?
If she could just hear him say: That never happened. She’d believe him, wouldn’t she? It would be enough. It would make it all bearable, anything the tabloids threw at them, she would be ready.
And if it did happen?
Well, it’s a risk she’s willing to take.