Chapter 33 2012 #4
The sun has set, and it’s dark inside the third-floor apartment.
Sebastian finds the small, shitty portable speaker and sticks his phone into it and out comes the soulful, acoustic album that he’s had on repeat for the last week.
He opens the wine and pours some glasses, which they clink, and then the girls return to their preparations—handing and washing and swaying slightly as Niamh sings the high harmonies despite not knowing the words, and the smell of softening, buttery onions fills the room.
He listens to the swinging female rhythm of the two of them chattering, gossiping about people they knew at university, moaning about the mundane passage of their days, and wonders whether this was something she had needed.
Whether his boyishness had taken up too much space.
He has an urge to ask the kind of question you would ask a stranger: Was it hard for you, being the only girl?
Was it hard we never saw it? But it isn’t worth complicating the happiness of a night like this.
“How’s Dad?” she asks. They are on the couch watching a British panel show, faces that she finds familiar now. They have drunk the samurai ale.
“The same.”
“Have you decided to stop hating Tillie yet?”
“She’s not so bad,” he admits.
“I never thought she was bad,” Lola says.
“You were around more.”
“Well, you’re around more now.”
“Only technically.”
“What, like in body rather than spirit?”
“Yes, I’m a zombie. I’m patient zero.” She laughs at this. “No, I just mean, I don’t see them much.”
“Well, you should fix that.”
“It would help if you were around. I’m too argumentative.”
On the panel show, one of the comedians is doing an impression of the Queen.
“Would you ever move here?” Lola asks. “I mean, obviously, I’d need to buy a bigger couch.”
He smiles. It’s the kind of thing he was hoping she would ask. “I don’t know. I’d need to find a British wife or something.”
“Niamh could help. Though I guess she isn’t technically British. European.”
Lola places a pillow on her lap, kicks a foot out against his thigh, loose tonight, happy. Her phone buzzes and she glances at it quickly before shoving it under her leg. She ate a lot of dinner, which he takes as a good sign, even if it was only soup.
“You sure you don’t want to trade tonight?” he offers, patting the couch. “You’ll sleep better.”
She shakes her head and smiles. “I’m enjoying my weird dreams.”
“Gross.”
Lola laughs. “Had one about Mom.”
“Yeah?”
“In the dream, she kept knocking on my door, like she was trying to tell me a secret.” Lola smiles, as though she thinks it’s ridiculous, as though it’s unimportant what their mother might want. “Psychoanalyze that.”
They are dancing on the lip of something.
“Do you ever think about going to California?” he asks.
She tilts her head back to meet his gaze, eyes sparkling. “All the time,” she says softly.
His eyes drift back to the television screen, watch the talking heads react to a loud, incessant buzzer.
“I’m seeing someone,” she says. “I want you to meet him.”
The next night, they are taking a train to the north of the city, hustling out at a busy station and pushing past Turkish greengrocers and hairdressers and espresso bars that slip down familiar side streets. She sets a fast pace, afraid of herself. Afraid of her changing mind.
“Tell me about him,” he asks. “What do I need to know.”
“You know him.”
“I do?” Sebastian folds up at the thought, as though she has presented him with a riddle. “I don’t know anyone here.”
Hurriedly, she leads him closer, organizing her own execution.
Is it too late to turn around now? To go back to the flat, to make a cup of tea with Niamh and watch something mindless on TV, or to go to the library and disappear into a world without consequence?
When they open the door and Sebastian sees what she has done in the face of all of his evidence, will it be the end of her?
“Hugh Grant?” he laughs, looking at the houses that are growing taller and whiter as the road inclines sharply. “Winston Churchill?”
She is doing this for both of them.
“It’s Orson Grey.”
The door opens on Sebastian’s shocked face, and there he is, the love of her life, ushering them in and offering them drinks. Tea or something stronger?
“I can’t tell you how great it is to meet you,” Orson is saying.
His hand sweeps tenderly through her hair.
She extracts herself briskly. Her brother is moving through the room, unreadable.
He is examining the dusty record player in the living room, his eyes trained on the black disc going around and around, playing an upbeat jazz trumpet.
Say something. Orson is behind her, lighting candles, bending to lift something out of the oven, some kind of puff pastry hors d’oeuvres.
Say something, Sebastian. But he says nothing, looking only at the record, imprinted with a sound from the distant past, and Viola feels her breath quickening, applies desperate focus to the back of a discarded packet, pronouncing with great emphasis: “Mini-gougères au fromage, fantastique!”
Sebastian turns and she braces. A smashed glass? A piece of his mind? She has envisioned a thousand permutations of his anger.
But no. For an instant, his face is crumpled.
He looks at her without recognition, and she feels a vanishing of herself.
How bizarre she must appear to him: the foreign world she has placed herself in, the firmness of Orson’s life, his age, the majesty of his presence, all of it surrounds her like a fortress.
God, I’m still your Lola, she thinks. But in an instant he has gathered himself and approaches Orson, taking his hand, pulling his left arm around his shoulder.
“Make us a drink, Joe, why don’t ya?” he says.
Orson beams as though he is twenty years old, as though he has been given another chance to play his favorite part. From inside a lesser-touched cabinet, he retrieves an old silver cocktail shaker.
Sebastian asks: “Is that from the show?” He handles it like a holy relic and applauds when Orson shakes it, launching into a thousand questions that Viola never thought to ask.
“How did you film that scene…”
“When my mom went to rehab, was that when…”
“What was it like with the guy who played…”
His eyes are wide and lit up with a genuine curiosity, not a flicker of anger. Viola is unmoored. She reaches for the merlot.
I had mistaken you, she thinks, for a fixed point.
She gulps quickly. The room is slipping into a merry nostalgia: Orson is animated, jumping around the kitchen at the excitement of reliving it all, the simpler time, before fame and secrecy and expectation.
Everything she expected to feel—all the relief of her life coming together—is absent. What she feels is an old, petty envy.
Her mother has always belonged to her brother.
“Here, Viola, you be Susan,” Orson says, taking the trash bag out of the bin and cheating her away from Sebastian to cover up her stomach.
“And that was you both in there, imagine it!” Orson rubs his chin and they do imagine it, the thought expanding in the room, and Viola wonders what she is lacking, that she has never been able to give him this kind of lightness.
“You’ve been holding out on me, Lola,” Sebastian says. He is smiling, but his eyes are full of lost time.
“Well, you know. I wasn’t sure what you’d think.” Ask. Say it out loud.
“How long has this—have you…?”
“A little while.”
“Since you told me you met? What, three years?”
“Not quite. Two and a bit.”
“It’s been hard, you know,” Orson says, “I’m away…”
“And I was studying…”
“Right.” Sebastian examines them. Her fingers find Orson’s. “And you haven’t told anybody else?”
“Well, Niamh.”
“Ah, okay. Wow. Didn’t pick her for a secret keeper.” He grins, cheeky. “Bet I could make loads of money if I were to rat you guys out.”
“Only if we go halves,” says Orson.
“Don’t,” says Viola.
“No? Okay. She’s the boss around here.” Orson’s eyes are dancing, clicking with Sebastian’s. He’s enjoying it, this new dynamic, someone else who knows her. When Sebastian excuses himself to go to the bathroom, he looks at her and smiles.
“What?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay—”
“You don’t need to be nervous, I like him.”
“That’s what makes me nervous.”
How much longer can it last, this happy charade?
Surely none of them can sit in it much longer.
Maybe even now, her brother is scouring the house for evidence, preparing his great reveal.
Orson is glowing at her, fitting his fingers against hers.
Was it worth it, allowing him this sparkling, unsustainable moment?
“You’ve wanted this for a while, haven’t you,” she says, trying to keep the sadness from infecting her voice. “You’ve been tired of just me.”
“Not tired of it. Just. This is a really good step, Viola. I’m proud of you.”
She feels sick. When Sebastian reemerges, Orson brightens toward him, begins to ask about his art, and Sebastian is digging out his phone and the two of them are looking over it.
She can’t really see and is trying to gather what it is from across the table.
Her brother is using his fingers like a pincer, moving in and out of something, explaining: “I actually found these photographs of her in Lola’s room—just another thing she was hiding from me, I guess—but Mom’s face in them was wonderful, so I used that as a base… ”
The photographs. The nude photographs. The smoking gun—is this the test?
Does Orson recognize, does he remember? Here is her mother’s body, that ancient horror, is no one else mortified at the sight of it?
Oh God, what has she invited! But no, not a beat of knowing.
The actor gives nothing away. Orson is only complimenting Sebastian’s eye and his instinct, and Sebastian is moving forward to other artworks.
“It’s like a stained-glass technique,” Orson says. “So clever. Saint Susie. Tell me what you remember.”
Slowly, Viola takes a bite of a mini-gougère and feels sick to her stomach. It occurs to her with deep, horrible certainty: her brother is not going to ask.
“Small things,” Sebastian is saying. “I remember her coming home. Bath time. She used to let us brush out her hair. Sometimes we would pray before bed.”
“Really? She was always going on about how your father didn’t like that sort of thing.”
“Well, I remember it anyway.”
“He’s got a better memory than me, Orson, it’s really not very fair.”
She can hear the boldness in her voice. A moment is arriving that she will not be able to return from. My God, if she can just know, then it will be over, the doubting. She can move on. One way or the other.
“We used to talk about you at home, Orson,” she says. She pours herself another, fuller glass of wine. “Growing up.”
“Really. Good things, I hope.”
“You know, Sebastian has this theory that you slept with my mom.” She leans on it like a punch line, like it’s absurd. No one is laughing.
“Right.”
“Or at least he used to be obsessed with it.”
“And where did this come from?”
“Some tabloid.”
A long moment. She never expected it to sound so ridiculous out loud. She looks to her brother: Well?
But Orson is looking only at her. “And is that something you think?”
“Obviously not.”
“But you were putting off telling me about it.”
“I was just a teenager,” Sebastian says quickly. “You know. It was all a part of trying to imagine her life. Just. Abstract.”
Orson nods solemnly, his eyes unmoving.
“Well, lest there be any doubt, that never happened.” He pauses for her response, but she cannot speak. “Capiche?” he says.
Embarrassment flares through her body, her cheeks, and when at last he looks away, he does not look at her again.
Conversation meanders loosely through the end of their drinks, and then Orson suggests he should be getting to bed, that he is off again in the early morning.
When they leave, he stiffens against the brush of her hand.