Chapter 5 #2
Anyway, I returned to public life once my body recovered from the accident and my alcoholism was, according to them, under control.
I don’t remember the binges they swear started in my late teens.
There’s no record of them either. They—mostly my stepmother—tell me my record is clean because they paid for it.
We have enough money to buy the press. So, every article, every photograph, and every ugly little detail that might have proved whether I was a monster or only convenient is gone.
My stepmother says I came back better than ever. She makes it sound as if I took a sabbatical from myself. As if I chose absence.
As if I woke one morning and decided to misplace my past.
Some days, I almost believe it. Maybe I did become more assertive. Less problematic. Easier to manage in public. Maybe this is what reform looks like when people with excellent lawyers and no interest in the truth have rebuilt a man.
Maybe none of that is true at all.
Who the fuck knows?
Son, a voice says inside me. That’s Cornelius’s voice.
My grandfather’s voice appears usually when I doubt myself.
I don’t know why he’s in my head more than any other thoughts when I get anxious—and in our secret language.
That’s how I learned to speak it. I was his favorite grandchild.
Probably why he left everything settled in his estate so they would take care of me.
He died of sadness because I was destroying myself and had almost killed somebody.
He probably didn’t trust that I could be more than . . . whoever I was before he died.
Do not sign anything, not today.
I don't know when he said it.
I don't know if he ever said it.
I’ll write it down anyway, later, when I am alone. I will write it down in the same notebook as the other fragments, the page in the locked drawer in my bedroom.
“I want the complete Florence file on my desk tomorrow by five,” I say.
Everett’s expression hardens for half a breath. Anyone else might miss it.
I don't.
“Of course,” he says.
He will not send it.
Or he will send a version that serves him.
The meeting continues around me. Numbers. Grants. Youth arts partnerships. Preservation commitments. Ethical stewardship. Each phrase crosses the table dressed in clean clothes, with blood beneath the cuffs.
Nothing gets signed.
That is new enough for them to notice.
Their attention is on me each time a document passes me and remains untouched.
My pen rests beside my folder, useless and perfectly placed.
Everett’s gaze drops to it twice. Margaret’s once.
My stepmother’s attorney, who has no reason to be present except that he is always present when someone wants a knife in the room without admitting to a weapon, writes something on his legal pad.
Let him.
I have been treated like the fragile one in this family long enough.
Today, I can be fragile and inconvenient.
When the meeting adjourns, chairs glide back. Phones appear. Folders close. The room fills with the soft sounds of powerful people preparing to leave without ever having arrived anywhere honest.
Everett starts toward me.
Margaret beats him to it.
“You seem tired,” she says.
The thing about my family is that they have a vocabulary for sending me away again, and tired is the front door of it. Tiredness leads to concern, which leads to: We just want what’s best for you.
Listen, I have been clean for ten years. Ten fucking years. No painkillers. No drink. Not even the codeine they keep offering after dental work, because the road back to the man they say I was is not a road I will walk willingly, even if the man they say I was is a man I am no longer sure existed.
I sweep it off and almost smile. “It was a long meeting after a long day at work.”
Her smile is small. “You’ve made remarkable progress,” she says, ignoring what I just said. “Everyone is proud of how far you’ve come.”
Progress.
There is that word again. So civilized. I slide my folder under my arm and stand.
“I'm not a quarterly report, Margaret.”
Her smile disappears, but only for a second. Then it returns, corrected. Sometimes I believe her job is to babysit me and make sure I’m content.
“No one suggested you were, Halston.”
They imply. They document. They recommend. They place a hand on your shoulder and call it support while steering you away from the door.
I leave before Everett can intercept me.
The hallway outside the boardroom is all cream walls, muted brass, and framed photographs of Saint Claire’s generosity.
Ribbon cuttings. Scholarship receptions.
Restored chapels. My grandfather shook hands with artists who likely hated him and cashed the checks anyway.
My stepmother appears in three photographs. My father in two.
I am in one.
The caption reads: Halston W. Saint Claire Returns to Foundation Leadership.
This is from six years ago. My face is thinner. My suit is immaculate. My smile is . . . just right. But my eyes are so empty that looking at them feels indecent.
I might not remember who I was, but this man is nothing like the one before the accident. If only I could find him. If only there’s a way to dig the truth of who I was and how to get myself out of this hellhole. Who’s my family?
I walk past the elevators.
My driver is waiting downstairs. He will take me to the apartment my family prefers I use in the city, where the furniture is tasteful, and nothing has ever been misplaced.
Or if I decide I’m done for the week, to the compound in Connecticut, where everyone calls the rooms by family names and no one admits they are cells if you can’t leave them without a report.
I do neither.
I take the stairs.
Thirty-one floors is excessive. Twelve is what gets done before the leg aches from the old injury, and common sense returns. By the time the elevator picks me up on the twentieth floor, I am sweating under my dress shirt, irritated by my body, and bizarrely pleased.
No one approved this.
It is fucking ridiculous that a thirty-six-year-old man rebels by taking the stairs and ignoring his driver. But this is where we are in my pathetic story.
Outside, Manhattan receives me with traffic, exhaust, and indifference. Rain threatens but has not yet committed. People move around me with umbrellas tucked under arms, phones at their ears, coffee in their hands, whole private disasters carried in well-made coats.
I start walking.
At first, there is the lie of walking to clear the head.
It is a socially acceptable lie, so it gets to live for six blocks.
It makes no difference to live another lie, does it? I can play along, I always do. I don’t know my destination, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll just never go back to the Saint Claires and lose myself in a city where nobody gives two shits.