Chapter 33 2012 #2
“Do you want to do something for it?” she suggests. “Maybe for the kids?”
Yes? Maybe. What could it be? He hums, noncommittal.
He knows he is guilty of simplification, that Susan, in the ocean of his mind, has lost any sharp edges, is pearl-round and gleaming. That she has become unlike herself. But how can he let go of the ways in which she was, truly, perfect?
“I wish I could have spent more time with her,” Tillie says.
The day that Susan and Tillie met at Dan’s engagement was a painful day.
Not that he remembers the specifics. Rod said something horrible, Susan was late.
They came home to a mutilated mouse. None of that matters.
The only thing that matters is Tillie’s kindness.
That for a brief moment, they brushed against each other, laughed about some nothing. That her presence made a difference.
“I felt sorry for her. She was never really comfortable around us. Not that I was always comfortable either, it’s just. I was a native.”
“Susan was comfortable anywhere,” he asserts.
“Well, it just seemed to me that she felt she had to try quite hard. Almost like we expected her to perform.”
He’d never thought about it that way. His wife’s charisma had always seemed—to him—effortless. At least before she was sick. It was only then that he could recognize the cost.
“You know, for a while, we all kept expecting you to move to the West Coast.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Given she was in California so much.”
Dumplings arrive. Tillie stabs into them, slices open their slick skins.
Al can’t find his appetite. It was strange, the phrase “a year to live,” when really, they meant “a year to die.” It’s hard to make the most of time that is running out.
In the mornings, Al felt a sense of having cheated death if he could breathe in the hazy smell of her, half-lidded, for ten, fifteen sweet minutes before waking fully to the hourglass.
“So, do you want to talk to the kids about doing something?” Tillie asks. “Some kind of memorial?”
Even though he has been speaking with his children more, he knows them less; who they are and what they want.
They text him undescriptive and largely functional messages, asking for a particular recipe or the name of somebody they might have seen on the street.
They have lost interest in him. And why not?
Children all become disillusioned with their parents.
“Could you do anything with Sebastian’s old piece?” Tillie asks.
Over the last several years, Tillie has been excavating Viola’s room with the delicacy of an archaeologist. She has been converting it, tactfully, into a small study.
A place to do her watercolors and sudoku puzzles.
It’s a benign intent and has his blessing.
A few months ago, she uncovered Sebastian’s early collage under Viola’s bed and they laughed about her first visit to the house.
He had marveled at her, unfazed by the haunting.
He was obviously talented even then, she said. Your daughter must have seen it.
Leave it to Viola to save the work. As if she knew he might need it at a later date. Tillie reapplied glue to pieces that were dried and peeling. Superior restoration work. All of it made him feel idiotic for ever having feared her reaction.
It has taken Tillie to show him how to see his son.
He knows, now, how to talk about what Sebastian is doing.
Tillie has given him language: inventive, exploratory, composite.
He is beginning to see his similarities with Sebastian: a love of sifting through ancient things, clarifying their purpose, rescuing them from obscurity.
Is it too late to rescue something between them?
When she gets up to use the bathroom, he takes out his new phone, his fingers still clumsy against the screen, the too-small letters.
Al
How are you doing Seb?
Having dinner in Boston
Nice sunset tonight.
For a flickering moment, after he threw the tapes into the ravine that night, he had considered jumping after them. Perhaps his children had been the only thing standing between himself and that great doorway. I should thank them, he thinks, for needing me then.
Dawn is a thin red strip slicing through the leafy North London skyline, waking Viola from the space between Orson’s shoulder blades, the back of her hand arching toward a headboard that he selected years ago with the Armenian supermodel.
Orson is breathing gently. It’s when he’s sleeping that she notices his age the most, the soft folds of his face beginning to betray him, his slack jaw and wrinkled elbows.
It is early enough that nothing else exists beyond the carpeted south-facing bedroom.
She is not thinking about the shoot that Orson is leaving for later, nor the maddening coursework that she is ignoring, nor her brother arriving that afternoon.
Not the paparazzi who may or may not be camped outside.
Not the unknown, inaccessible layers of Orson’s past, or the person he is when he is not with her.
You’re a prisoner to your own success, she tells him sometimes.
It’s true, he says. That’s the problem, when you belong to everybody.
His hand drifts back to catch her thigh, and he breathes: “Don’t be awake.”
“I can’t help it,” she says. “I’m savoring this.”
“Okay fine,” he says, turning and wrapping himself around her ribs, brushing under her rumpled silk top, his eyes still shut with sleep and his hot breath—somehow both pleasant and unbearable—in her face. “I’ll let you be awake. But you are making scran.”
“You are the worst,” she says, by which she means, I love you. “What is in there?”
“Sausages, eggs. Half of a tomato—no, a full tomato.”
“As much as a full tomato.”
“Times are hard around here, Viola,” he mumbles, pressing his nose into her stomach, and she thinks unpleasantly that it will be hard to make time for the gym this week, with her brother here.
“Bread?”
For a minute she thinks he may have fallen back asleep. “No bread,” he says.
“I’ll get delivered.”
“Faster if we just run out.”
“Please.”
Sebastian
Bawt tickets
he had texted, and her heart burst alive. The fact is rushing in—My God, he’s coming. Here. To see me. To see her life, the truth of it, with all his brotherness and stubbornness and conspiracy.
“You have that face,” he says.
“What face?”
“Your worried face. I’m only gone a few days.”
“It’s not that.”
“Your brother?”
“It’s going to be fine.”
“I thought you were excited.”
“I am,” she says, which is a part of the truth, and slips away, calling back. “Order the bread!”
The stainless-steel refrigerator opens with a satisfying pop, offering its insides.
She loves cooking in his house, making use of Orson’s otherwise neglected kitchen, knowing that every few days Marina will scrub all the mess away.
Sometimes the house feels like the set of a sitcom, where everything gets reset at the start of each episode. Too easy to be real.
Sweet, meaty aromas twist from the oven, oily vegetables caramelizing, wafting (she hopes) to the bedroom, an incantation to stay, to let this moment—this Before—stretch forever.
Sizzle, flip, taste, salt. Search: what to do with visitors in London.
Bookmark a few results. Mozart is playing on Radio 3, a chamber piece she could once name.
Eggs crack onto a pan, hands behind her, lips on the back of her ear.
“Scran.”
“Two seconds!” She can feel him watching her hungrily as she plates, cracks pepper, and tosses fat sea salt flakes on top. “Greedy,” she says, grinning.
He shovels and groans with pleasure. She cooks almost as well as her father now. Maybe as well as her mother too.
“What does today entail?” he asks.
“Home.” Real life, as she thinks of the flat she shares with Niamh south of the river.
A world where she doesn’t need to check if anyone is following her or listening in to her conversations.
Where she disappears into her research, a mind without a body.
Where Orson doesn’t exist. The dissonance is making her insane.
“How is Niamh?”
“Busy.” In the winter Niamh is going back to Dublin to teach. The obvious solution, under any other circumstance, would be to come here. But to be obvious is to be in danger.
It can’t go on.
“And your brother?”
“We’ll see, won’t we.”
A hum of traffic rises from the street. On the countertop, a speckled ladybug flicks to the granite surface. Orson cups a hand around it, lets it crawl onto his thumb.
Yes. This is worth all the excruciation of asking the difficult question. If he can be this, for her, forever. He blows lightly on the beetle’s wings, and it takes flight.
“I remember your mom said, when your brother was little, he would always ask her where she was going, and she would start lying to him and saying things like the moon or a pirate ship.”
The bell rings and Viola lingers in the safety of the kitchen, allowing Orson to cross to the door, peek through the spyhole, and then, plausibly alone, retrieve a loaf of fresh bread.
“I can’t wait for you to meet him.”
When the door to Lola’s flat opens, she looks like a photograph of herself that has been washed out by years of sunlight.
Sebastian is shocked to find the color dyed out of her hair, skin luminous pale, wafer-thin and manicured in stiff, fashionable jeans.
She crosses the threshold and throws her arms around him, the familiar smell of her sweat mingling with something new: floral and expensive.
“Did you find it okay?”
“More or less.” It had taken several long, branching tunnels to get here from the plane. He imagines himself for a moment as she must see him: towering and lanky with long hair tied up in a dark, greasy bun. Travel itches his skin.