40. Cassian
CASSIAN
Iam on the upper terrace at six on Sunday morning with a coffee I have, in fact, poured myself.
This is a new thing. On the morning of the chef’s table seven months ago, I had never — in seven years — poured my own coffee in this house.
Sebastian’s kitchen team is, at six on a Sunday, still asleep.
The coffeemaker in the staff kitchen is perfectly ordinary.
And this morning, on a small impulse, I went downstairs barefoot, in pajama pants, hair uncombed, and made the pot myself, exactly the way the staff does.
The pot came out fine. The coffee is hot.
I am on the upper terrace because the upper terrace, at six on a Sunday morning in late March, has the small soft cliff wind coming in off the water that I have, in seven years, not sat on this terrace at this hour to register.
The cliff wind is excellent. It is the small clean cold of a thing I have, for seven years, paid four hundred staff members to keep going for me without thanking them.
On the small teak table at my elbow there is a folder.
The folder is the small operations folder Sebastian leaves out for me on Sunday mornings when there is a small administrative thing he wants me to see before the week begins.
He has, since the side letter, been doing this differently.
The folder used to be the thing he set on my desk on Monday at seven, in which the decisions of the week were queued up for my approval.
The folder is, now, the thing he sets on the terrace on Sunday at six, in which the decisions of the last week are reported to me, after they have already been made.
I open it.
The top sheet is the lower-property staffing report.
Davies signed it. DM, in the blue ink he refuses to switch off.
Three new hires at the lower spa wing, two at the upper concierge desk, one apprentice at the property kitchen.
He didn't run it past me. He sent me an email on Thursday that said, in his entirety, Cassian, FYI, hiring six this week, you do not need to do anything, and I wrote back, Thanks, Mark, and that was, in fact, the small administrative miracle of my year.
The second sheet is the accounting note from Inês.
Inês Pereira, who, on the third of February, signed the COO offer, has, in the seven weeks since she came in, restructured the morning Tuesday review so that I am no longer on the call.
The call is now between her, Sebastian, and Davies.
The note is a two-line summary of the call I did not, on Tuesday, attend. I read it. The numbers are clean.
The third sheet is the small printed photograph Sebastian has, on his own initiative, in the last three weeks, started including in the folder.
The photograph is of a thing on the property that has, in the previous week, been done well.
This week it is the new front-desk arrangement of the lower spa wing — the ceramic dish in a different spot, the small painted map under the lacquer replaced — that Inês has just signed off on Maren's redesign of.
The redesign is good.
The redesign is also, currently, the only photograph in this folder that has, in seven years, been of a thing I had nothing to do with.
I sit with the small dry awareness of that just long enough to drink half the cup of coffee.
I am on the seventh year of owning a building, and the building is, currently, being run by people who are not me, and I am on the upper terrace at six on a Sunday morning, fine about it.
That is the new thing.
She comes out at six twenty-two.
She is in the soft cream slip and a small unbuttoned chambray shirt over it, and her hair is loose, and she is barefoot on the cool flagstones, and she is carrying her own cup of coffee in her own hands. She must have gone through the staff kitchen on the same trip I did.
"You beat me down there," she says, sitting across from me. "I was very smug about being the first one awake, and then I came around the counter and the pot was already on the burner."
"I was up at five thirty. I think I'm becoming the kind of man who wakes up at five thirty. It's not a personality I asked for."
"You made it the way the kitchen makes it."
"Henri showed me. Three years ago. I had, evidently, been listening more carefully than I knew."
She folds her bare feet under her in the chair and pulls the chambray shirt around her shoulders, and she looks at me with a small, steady focus—the kind someone settles into on the walk down a corridor, on the way to the staff kitchen, in the soft clean morning of the third day at the villa—when they’ve decided it’s time to have a conversation.
"Cassian."
"Maren."
"I want to talk about something, and I want you to know in advance that I'm not talking about a contract, and I'm not talking about a date, and I'm not talking about a ring. None of those things. So you can stop, currently, whatever calibration thing your face just did."
"My face didn't do a thing."
"Your face did a whole thing. The temple thing. I saw it."
"All right. Tell me what you want to talk about, and I'll keep the temple still."
"Next year. Just — the year. Tuesdays, Saturdays.
The studio. The villa. The bakery. The lower-property staff.
The shape of it. I want to know what you actually want out of the next twelve months, and I don't want the considered version.
I don't want the version you'd give me if you'd had a meeting about it.
I want the version you'd give me on this terrace, in this wind, half-asleep, in those, frankly, terrible pajamas. "
"The pajamas are perfectly fine."
"They are not, Cassian, perfectly fine. We will revisit the pajamas in a separate conversation. The year."
I take her in as she is, soft and unguarded on the couch, and for once I let the words come without rehearsing them in the quiet room behind my thoughts.
"I want Saturdays at the bakery. I want them to keep being ordinary.
Inez has stopped asking me about my morning and I would, frankly, like to never go back to a Saturday where the woman at the counter feels she has to.
I want Tuesdays at the small Italian place even though their wine list is, objectively, a disaster.
I want you in the studio at the bend in the coast road for as long as you want to be in it, and me at the inn for as long as that arrangement keeps making sense, and I want the small distance between the studio and the inn to not, in the next year, close because someone put a date on a calendar.
I want it to close on a Wednesday in May, in a kitchen, because we, on the Wednesday in May, are done with the distance, and we agreed about it over the toast."
"Cassian."
"Let me finish, before I lose it. I want a wedding in some hour of some year, on the lower terrace at this house, that we do not call Marguerite.
I want the heron in the marsh to be tricolored, and I want, in the next forty years, to never tell Davies.
And I want you to be the person who, when I fail at a thing — and I will fail, Maren, I will fail at this on at least a Wednesday a quarter, by my conservative estimate — tells me, at the table we are sitting at, that I failed.
Not at the next table. Not after a meeting about it.
The table. And I want, on the morning after the Wednesday I fail, to try again, with you in the kitchen, the way the kitchen makes it. "
She sits with the cup.
She sits with it for the count. It takes the cliff wind to do one full pass through the cypresses, and then she sets the cup down, uncurls her feet from under her, stands, and crosses the two steps around the small teak table.
She sits, sideways, on the arm of my chair, with her bare feet on the flagstones, and her shoulder, in the chambray shirt, against mine.
"That was a much better answer than the one you would have given me a year ago."
"I know."
"You're not even arguing."
"I am, in fact, exhausted from a year of arguing."
"Cassian."
"Yes."
"I want all of that. Bakery, Italian place, distance, Wednesday in May, the heron we never name.
All of it. And — I want one more thing on top of it, and I would like you to hear me out before you say anything, because I am, currently, doing a thing I did not, until about ninety seconds ago, plan to do. "
"Maren."
"I want to be, in some hour of some year, engaged to you.
Not the way we were. Not on a calendar belonging to Becca Lin.
Not because Mom called a florist. Not because a man named Roland likes a settled house.
I want it small. Boring. Ridiculous. The kind of thing two people decide at a table in a kitchen because, on a particular Tuesday, they realize they have, in fact, been doing the rest of the years for a while now, and it would be a shame not to name it. "
"Maren."
"Yes."
"Are you asking me."
"I am asking you. On the upper terrace. With my feet on the flagstones.
Without a ring, without a calendar, without your assistant in the room — although, to be clear, Cassian, your assistant is, currently, on the lower terrace pretending not to be watching, and he is holding a folded napkin, and we are both going to have to address that with him later. "
I look. Sebastian is, in fact, on the lower terrace, pretending not to be watching.
He is holding a small folded napkin. He lifts it a quarter inch toward me in a small private salute, the way a ma?tre d' acknowledges a regular without breaking service.
He has been employed by me for nine years and has never been more obviously enjoying himself.
I will, in some hour of some week, give him a raise.
I look at Maren.
I lift her hand. The small gold chain at her wrist catches in the soft light of six twenty-six. I bring her hand to my mouth, and I press it, light, to the inside of her wrist where, in September, I once held my thumb to her pulse on a kitchen counter and told myself a lie about what I was doing.
"Yes, Maren. Of course yes. There is no other answer that's been available to me in seven months, and frankly, sweetheart, you've made me wait long enough to be asked."
"You are not allowed to be smug about this."
"I am, currently, allowed sweetheart in this moment. I will give up the smugness in exchange."
"All right, Cassian."
"All right."
She kisses, then, the corner of my mouth, in the green chambray, with the cliff wind in her hair, on the upper terrace of the villa I, in September, took her to under false pretenses.
She does not ask me to call Marguerite.
I do not call her.
The small heron comes off the marsh at six twenty-eight and crosses the upper field with the small wide patience of a thing that has, for seven years, not been correctly named.
Maren, on the arm of my chair, watches it.
Her shoulder, against mine, does not move.
Sebastian, on the lower terrace, finally pockets the napkin and goes back inside to, I assume, wake the kitchen.
The small ridiculous boring chosen thing of the rest of the years begins.