Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
brUNO
Adrian makes a big show of removing his sunglasses.
He scans the aft deck methodically, eyes moving from the garlands of hearts to the fairy lights to the teddy bear he passed on his way down, clutching its plush red heart.
It’s mounted on a pole, or more like impaled on a pole. What was Kelsey thinking?
Adrian’s eyes twinkle. “A teddy bear, Bruno?”
“It’s an inside joke,” I say.
He squints at me. “You? An inside joke?”
Kelsey hands the gift off to a crew member and slides her arm through mine with a naturalness that almost startles me.
I become acutely aware of the warmth of her skin, the brush of her body against my sleeve, the faint sage scent that always seems to cling to her.
My arm wants to tighten around her waist. I keep it exactly where it is.
“Bruno is so hilarious. Most people don’t get to see that side of him.”
“Most people definitely don’t.” Adrian’s tone conveys he has not seen that side of me. Because it does not exist.
Kelsey says, “We were just sitting down to hors d’oeuvres. I hope you can join us for a toast.”
“I suppose I could stay a few minutes,” Adrian says coolly.
Of course he can.
Kelsey gives him a happy smile, and then she turns to me, and her smile changes to a look of such affection, I don’t know what to do with it.
“And I plan to get at least one embarrassing childhood anecdote out of him, I hope you know.” She urges me toward the table at the back of the space, sheltered from the wind and sun but still out in the open air.
She’s making it look so natural, setting a tempo, creating an atmosphere.
It’s what she does. She’s choreographing this.
I sit at the end of the table. Adrian sits to my right, Kelsey to my left. He lifts his glass for a crew member to fill. “So I have to ask. Chumpywumpy?”
“That’s just a little thing we have,” Kelsey says.
“Another inside joke?” Adrian’s eyes are locked on to my face.
“Exactly,” Kelsey says, pretending to be oblivious to his skepticism.
“I used to say that when he was a little bit in trouble like, did you stay in your workshop from sunup to sundown again, Chumpywumpy? And it annoyed him so much, I couldn’t stop saying it.
He’s so adorable when he’s annoyed. Then he started saying it to me. ”
“It’s only fair.”
Adrian lifts his glass. “Congratulations.”
I drink a generous gulp.
“So,” Adrian says, settling his napkin into his lap. “One year.”
Kelsey pops a candied nut into her mouth. “Time flies.”
“It does indeed,” Adrian says. “And nobody knew. Even your own brothers.”
There it is. The first probe, delivered with a half-smile.
I shrug, thinking what to say. Adrian is the one person on earth who can get past my stonewalling techniques.
Kelsey dives in. “We kept it quiet because Bruno wanted it that way. We didn’t want to do anything that would spur more publicity like that article did. And we just kind of got into flying under the radar. The secrecy kind of made it more fun, and you know how he is about privacy.”
“I do know how he is about privacy,” Adrian says. “And he’s usually quite the loner.”
“Oh, he still is,” Kelsey says. “We do aloning well together, don’t you think?”
Good God, did she just make alone into a verb? “Amazingly.”
Adrian sips his champagne. “And how did you meet?”
Of course he’s heard the story already, from Russell.
I have no doubt they’ve discussed this extensively.
Maybe Kelsey has figured this out, or maybe she hasn’t, but she’s laughing and launching into the version of the story we established at the wedding—me waiting at the back entrance of her Broadway show, desperate to meet her.
She adds just enough new detail that it sounds natural.
Me carrying her case. Something about me being abrupt to a waiter and her calling me out on it, and I find myself joining in, saying, “I wasn’t rude. I was specific.”
“You were rude,” she says. “You sent back a martini because the glass was the wrong shape.”
“It was the wrong shape.”
“It was a martini glass, Chumps.”
Ah. So we’re shortening it, now.
She turns to Adrian. “No comment.”
Adrian’s face is unreadable.
“What possessed you to go out to a Broadway show, Bruno? Did somebody tie you up and drag you there?”
I can’t think of anything that would induce me to go to a Broadway show.
Kelsey puts her hand over mine. “You don’t have to tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Adrian says.
Kelsey looks at me. Then at Adrian.
What? Does she expect me to work this out?
I look at the banner. Why did I think we could do this?
She takes a small breath, as though deciding how much to share. “He needed to get out of his head, that’s all,” she says quietly.
She says it like she’s protecting a secret.
Like this is a private chapter of my life that she’s been entrusted with, and I suddenly grasp her vision—me as a man alone in his workshop, overwhelmed by silence, and I walk into a theater full of music and color and movement to get out of my head, “...and you said you didn’t know that this was what you were looking for. ”
“I didn’t know.” My voice sounds bewildered to my ears. Well, it seems like that would be the right emotion; Kelsey certainly seems to like it. Her eyes sparkle. The dress turns when she moves, all soft lines and bare skin. I can barely take my eyes off of her.
Adrian is quiet for a moment. Then, “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, brother?”
Kelsey turns back to him with her bright, warm smile, and asks about the vineyard.
Suddenly, I think of a way to contribute something to the rather amazing fiction she’s creating.
I take an apple slice and concentrate on building a Kelsey everything concoction, spreading a bit of goat cheese onto it and then pushing a couple candied nuts into the cheese, just to see if she notices.
I press a few capers in and finally catch her eye.
She looks down at what I’m holding in my fingers, then back up.
Does she think I’m going to eat it? I add another candied nut, keeping my eyes on her. My gaze is saying, how do you like that?
I set it on the little plate in front of her.
She widens her eyes at it. “A prince among men,” she whispers.
Adrian watches closely. Does he see what a good sense of humor she has? Who the hell ever told her that she’s too much? That she’s extra?
“And you’re a Broadway dancer full-time?” Adrian asks.
“And a dance teacher. That’s really my bread and butter. I run a studio in the city with a friend. And another studio with another friend that is more ballet, and we do some ensemble work.”
“A dance teacher.” Adrian glances at me with a curious tilt of his head.
“She’s great at it. Kids love her. She knows how to interact with them on their level.
Absolutely compelling. On stage and off.
” I take a sip of champagne. “She does these things she calls embodiments.” I don’t know why I’m starting here.
“She’ll strike a pose and announce that she’s embodying the concept of ennui, or her feelings on artichokes.
The first time she did it, I wasn’t sure what was happening. ”
Kelsey laughs. “You did look genuinely concerned.”
“It took me several more before I understood that it’s—” I pause. “That it’s her way of being, of communicating. Of marking a moment.”
Kelsey looks surprised. “You never told me that’s how you see them.”
“You’ve never asked.”
“Would you have told me?”
“Probably not.”
She tilts her head. “Why not?”
“Because then I’d have had to admit...” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Since when do I start sentences that I don’t know how to finish?
“Admit what?”
We are close enough now that I can see the exact point where the brown in her eyes radiates out into greens and golds. Her lashes look impossibly thick. And she really is beautiful. I’ve spent this whole time cataloguing facts about Kelsey, but somehow this one is only now sinking in.
“Do one,” Adrian says, breaking into our corner of the table; we’d turned toward each other at some point without my noticing.
It’s not a warm request. It’s a test. The impulse to punch my brother in the face is nearly irresistible. My voice comes out sounding dangerous. “Adrian.”
Kelsey snorts. “I can’t just do one on demand. I have to feel it.” She eats the thing I just built for her. God, how much longer is Adrian going to stay?
“And what do you like about him?” Adrian asks her.
“What’s up with the interrogation?” I ask him. “I thought you were coming here to congratulate us. If you’re going to act like this, you can turn around and leave.”
“No, I’m happy to answer.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Let her answer,” Adrian says.
I’m about to say more…I don’t want her forced to answer a question like this, to make anything up—but she puts her hand on mine and squeezes.
“Bruno is absolutely the most singular, the most idiosyncratic, and honestly the most impossible man I’ve ever met. He’s rigid and he’s controlling and he eats the same chicken every Monday and he thinks joy is useless.”
Adrian’s gaze is assessing.
She couldn’t have invented something better than that?
She picks up a maraschino cherry, seems to contemplate it.
“My sister and I used to collect these geodes as children. All of this gray rock on the outside, but if you manage to crack them open or if they crack open for you, there’s so much going on inside.
That’s my favorite thing about Bruno. The hidden warmth and depth of passion that he doesn’t show to just anybody. ”
I listen, stunned. She really is quite the storyteller. The inventor. The geodes feel almost real.
I take a sip of champagne, trying not to grip my glass too tightly.
“It’s everything that he picked me to show all that to. Well, you know. You’re his brother.”
The water laps against the hull. A seabird cries somewhere.
“Bruno has never been...well, let’s just say he’s never been a people person,” Adrian says, “but you—”
“Enough,” I say.
Kelsey grins. “Uh-oh, I’ve hit Bruno’s sappiness limit.”
“We hit that long ago.”
“I want to propose a toast,” Kelsey says, raising her glass. “To our first year. And to finally meeting you, Adrian. I have heard quite a bit about you.”
I raise my glass.
“I can’t believe he’s been keeping you a secret all this time.” He turns to me. “Tell me that you’re not planning on bringing her out to Switzerland next.”
“Hell no,” I hear myself rumble.
Adrian raises his glass. “Here’s to our father in a golden cage. May he never escape it.”
“He’s not trapped,” I say. “He wants to be there.”
Kelsey looks confused. She doesn’t need to know.
Annie appears just then. “Would anybody like cake?”
“Not until later!” Kelsey says.
I give Kelsey a look. Something’s up with the cake. I don’t want to know.
Adrian stands. He goes and gets his present and puts it at the center of the table. “I don’t want to crash your party, but I got you this.”
“Thank you,” I say.
Is he buying all this? I can’t tell for sure, but something in the way he’s looking at me seems to have shifted. His gaze seems softer, almost. “I really am happy for you.” He shakes my hand and keeps it a beat too long. “I never thought...I’m just very happy for you.”
Kelsey, ever the operator, has us take pictures under the banner, and then herds the three of us to the stairs to pose with the bear, and the blonde crew woman takes our picture. Kelsey promises to send it along to Adrian so he can show Russell.
Adrian climbs back up to the helipad. The helicopter lifts off. We watch it shrink against the sky, growing smaller and smaller until it’s just a sound, and then nothing.
I look over the aft deck, really taking it all in for the first time—the jubilance of it.
The enormity of the transformation. Hearts and fairy lights cover every surface.
Garlands hang from protrusions I didn’t know existed.
She didn’t do it alone; she pulled my crew along with her.
I didn’t know they were capable of such things.
The weird banner was a miscommunication, but she committed to it, and she even showed me how to commit to it.
I watch the wind shuffle her hair, and I imagine running my hands through it. And then I catch myself, because Adrian is gone. There’s no one to perform for.
“Do you think he bought it?” she asks finally.
“Shockingly, I think he did. He seemed surprised. Even a bit moved.”
“I think so, too.” Her voice contains just a hint of wonder.
Is it so shocking that we’d be together? Does Kelsey think it’s strange? Did she enjoy it as much as I did? But all I say is, “It all went so much better than I would’ve imagined. You really pulled it out.”
She smiles brightly. “We were a good team.”
“My brother’s face when he was looking at that banner?”
She turns to me, eyes soft in the late evening sun. “Forget about your brother’s face; you should have seen your face when you saw that banner.”
“I was pretty surprised.”
“Priceless!” She laughs and flops dramatically onto one of the loungers. “We deserve an award.”
Yes. A flawless performance. So why did it sting?