Chapter 35 2012
When she is sure Sebastian is asleep, Viola calls Orson. When he doesn’t pick up, she calls him again.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She feels, once again, like a child—the game of adulthood, of control, is shattered.
“Viola.” His voice is unornamented now. He is not the characters in his movies, the man inflated with the dreams of a little girl. “You don’t trust me.”
“I do,” she starts. “In fact, I really think we should do this now. Talk to a publicist. I just want everything out in the open. It was Sebastian—”
“I don’t think you understand.” She listens to him breathing for a moment, her heart in her chest. “You let yourself think the worst of me. And you went on thinking it for some time.”
“I never thought—”
“Of course you did. When you asked, wasn’t a part of you afraid of what you’d hear?”
He exhales heavily through his nose.
“Let me tell you something. You turn everything into this great soap opera drama, in spite of yourself.”
“Wait—”
“But here’s the thing: most of life, and most of what passes between real people, is just mundane.
It’s not great loves or hatreds or violence.
Your mother and I took care of each other.
It doesn’t mean we fucked. I loved her, but I can’t pretend that I understood her whole life, or even the choices she made on a day-to-day basis.
There were times when she was cowardly and times where she was phenomenally brave.
She wasn’t one thing, there was nothing absolute about her.
And I think you want to simplify her, to make her this cartoon baddie who cheated and abandoned you and lived this sinful life so that you can console yourself.
Convince yourself that you’re better than her.
More worthy of love or less susceptible to death or whatever it is for you.
Like you’re in competition with her and terrified of losing.
I think you find it easier to hate her—to write her off—than to deal with who she really was.
And I feel sorry for you. What you miss is an absence.
What I miss is a person. You’re never going to know her, not really.
Especially if you don’t know how to ask. ”
“Orson.” Her voice cracks.
“I really want what’s best for you, Viola. And I said nobody was going to get hurt.”
“Please, can I just see you?”
The walls of the room have not changed, but she is standing in a blown-up building. Her purpose is hanging like loose cable and—
“I’m going to miss you, Viola. Always.”
The phone is dead.
After a moment, breath. Sharp, gulping breath, breath taking place in a new world, a world that refuses to contain Orson Grey.
She looks around the room for evidence of him, anything solid, but all her proof is unraveling.
No one can tell her it was real, that the world was, that Orson existed for her and loved her and had terrible taste in music and looked great on a bicycle and could be kind and wrong and gentle and distant and hers?
It’s stupid, and it’s her own fault. She searches and finds the dull, useless truth; the only person she wants to speak to is the mother that she was just beginning to know.
From the living room, murmurings. It doesn’t sound good.
When Viola first mentioned Orson, Sebastian assumed it was trivial, a brush, that she had oversold it even then. What an idiot he had thought her, not to have asked him more. Why didn’t she tell him then, what it was becoming? Was she afraid of his judgment? Is that who he is?
The living room goes quiet, and then there is some shuffling and the door cracks open.
“You okay?”
“Just looking for something,” she says. But she only hovers over her darkened desk, the light on her phone barely moving.
“Couch okay?”
“I’ll be honest,” she says. “It’s not the one.”
He flops open the duvet on one side of him. “There’s room. Don’t be weird.”
In the dark, he cannot see her face, but he can hear how fraught her breath is. When she crawls in next to him, he can feel her exhaustion.
In a small voice directed mostly into the mattress, she says: “I don’t know what I am doing.”
“He loves you a lot,” Sebastian says.
“I know,” she says, high and breakable.
“He’s a good person. But he really is just a person.”
Meeting Orson was like meeting any old guy.
Like shining a bright light upon a shadowy corner that he had long presumed to be full of intrigue, and revealing it as a series of ordinary things.
Clearly Orson loved their mother in his own way.
She had been a friend to him. Clearly he loves Lola—regardless of the strangeness of tonight and whatever he said on that call.
It had been a joy to spend an evening moving through his memories.
The disappointment is hard to articulate.
There was nothing Orson knew beyond anyone else about the workings of his mother’s mind: not what she wanted or who she loved.
All he really held were a few brief moments, and the lingering sense of how she made him feel.
Sebastian places a hand on her back, chucks her a pillow.
“It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe.”
“No, it will.”