Chapter 15 #2
He refocuses on the road. “I mean when you have some downtime, you know? Maybe take a vacation? Take a trek back to the old country.” He tries to soften it with a joke. She wouldn’t be visiting him per se.
“I . . . don’t think I’m going to have a vacation for a while. You know, between getting settled and how busy it’ll be, I just . . .”
“I know, boss. I was kidding. It’s just gonna be weird to be halfway around the world from you.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. He looks over again and she’s twisting her ring around her finger and he can’t help it, he reaches across and takes her hand in his, squeezing gently and then feeling the tension in his shoulders relax when she twines their fingers together and rests their joined hands on the sun-warmed skin of her thigh.
The silence spreads and settles between them, not exactly uncomfortable, but a little bit heavy, full of words unspoken, and whatever she’s thinking – and he’s not sure he actually wants to know – stays in her head, even while her thumb makes soothing strokes against his.
He wishes he was strong enough to pull away.
He’s not.
“Whoa,” he says, pulling up where his phone has told him the destination is on the right.
“I know, right?”
“She’s a stylist?”
“And he’s a venture capitalist.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, probably should have warned you.”
“Nah, it’s just . . . wow.”
The house is massive, set behind one of those gates that always seemed reserved for the rich and famous, which . . . Isobel and Matt are apparently the former.
“Being rich doesn’t make someone a bad person,” Bianca says, “but it hasn’t stopped Matt from really living up to the stereotype. His parents had money. He has money. I guess I shouldn’t throw stones after the check my parents just wrote me.”
“That’s . . . way different than this ,” he says, wondering why anyone needs one turret on their home, let alone two. “Besides, all that money hasn’t bought them taste.”
“Oh God, yeah, he bought it before he proposed to her and she lost her mind. She loved it so much I didn’t have the heart to tell her how ugly I thought it was.”
He goes to get out of the car, but Bianca stops him with a touch of her hand to his wrist.
“Fun fact?” she says, her eyes still trained on the house.
“Hit me.”
“When we were in college, Izzy and Matt broke up for a hot minute freshman year.”
“So high school sweethearts with . . . a break in the middle?”
“Yeah, a couple of them actually – that was just the first, and a week later, he asked me out.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“You told Izzy?”
“Yeah, she dismissed it, said he was just trying to make her mad, which was probably true, but . . .”
“But she wants a family and the house probably helps,” he ventures a guess.
Bianca nods and rolls her eyes. “The house and the cars and vacations, and listen, I’m not saying money isn’t important.
It is. We need it, and pretending like we don’t is just stupid, but it all just seems very empty .
. . I shouldn’t talk about her like this, Izzy’s my friend and I do love her.
I just don’t really agree with her choices. ”
“You’ve talked to her about it?”
“Oh, we had an entire blowout over it.”
“When?”
“Four years ago, right before her wedding . . . Do you remember when I handed in all my final papers early because . . .”
“You had to go to the Bahamas.”
“That was for her bachelorette party.”
“Wait, wait . . .” His memory of that time cleared a bit. “Didn’t she also get married . . .”
“In Italy. Yep. I told her I wasn’t going to be able to come at all, let alone be in the wedding, and she lost her mind over it, but I just didn’t have the money. Matt paid for me to go.”
“And you accepted?”
“She was so relieved I was going to be able to come that I couldn’t turn it down. And honestly, what do I care what Matt spends his money on? I’m sure he’s dropped way more on things that make Izzy way less happy.”
“So, you ready?” he asks, surer than ever that he doesn’t want to go to this party.
“Yeah, let’s get this over with.”
Matt Channing isn’t someone he’d ever choose to spend time with.
That’s what Xavier has figured out in the ten minutes he’s spent in this guy’s proximity.
All he seems to do is joke about how much his wife nags him, and while Xavier’s not an expert on marriage, it seems kind of shitty considering the woman is pregnant with his kid.
“So, Xavier, what do you do?”
“I work in repatriation.”
“Repatriation?”
Bianca responds before he can. “He helps countries and their museums get back stolen artifacts.”
“Stolen? So you’re a . . . sort of artifact cop?”
Xavier’s eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Uh, no, stolen as in, taken during occupations or during a period of colonization, usually under the guise of legitimacy.”
“So it was legal?”
“It was legal because the people making the laws decided to make it so. There are countless times throughout history when what was legal wasn’t what was right. In fact, you can even make that argument now.”
“How so?”
Xavier tries not to roll his eyes. Is the guy being deliberately obtuse? “Well, take immigration, for example. How many people talk about how their ancestors came to the States ‘legally’, but legally back then was just getting on a boat and showing up, the same way so many asylum seekers do now?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“Well, back then, if it was illegal they just wouldn’t have come.”
Isobel puts a hand under the table, probably giving Matt’s thigh a gentle squeeze, but it goes ignored.
“So you’re saying people literally starving to death or fleeing fascism, just . . . would have lain down and died instead of breaking an unjust law?”
That has Matt furrowing his brow in confusion. “Who gets to decide what’s unjust?”
“We all know. We all know where the line is. Governments and people choose to ignore it because they want power or money, or they’ve decided that their wants supersede the will of the people they’re subjugating.”
“Well, this conversation is a little heavy for a party like this,” Isobel interrupts and Bianca takes that as her cue.
“I think I see some of the Gammas over there, we’re gonna go say hi,” Bianca says, extricating him and leading him toward a group of women near the bar.
“You were in a sorority?”
“No. They’re nice girls, but that wasn’t really my thing, it was Izzy’s. We had very different friends after freshman year. She always jokes that I’m her ‘voice of reason’ friend, the one she goes to if she needs someone to tell her the truth.”
“And have you?”
“Told her that marrying Matt would be a mistake and that she’s gorgeous and talented and smart and amazing and that she could do so much better than someone who thinks Elon Musk is a genius?
Yeah, we had that conversation senior year before I left for New York.
They broke up for a little while once we graduated, but a couple of months later, they were back together, engaged and setting the date. ”
“If you’d been in LA, do you think you could have talked her out of it?”
“She knew how I felt. It’s not my job to direct her life.”
“So when you said some of your friends are divorced or should be . . .”
“Yeah, Izzy . . . But she doesn’t want to be.
She chose this and keeps choosing it. I’ll never really understand it, but it’s what she wants and despite,” she gestures vaguely at their surroundings, “all this, I think she’ll be a good mom.
At the very least, she’ll love her kids with everything she has. ”
“It’s a damn good place to start.”
Bianca leaves it at that, doesn’t bring up what they talked about before, about how parents should really want their kids.
He almost wants her to, wants to have that conversation again, because maybe then this will all come to an end.
He’ll scare her off with his fantasies about them, about how if he was ever going to have kids, he’d want them with her, about how he wasn’t just not going to get married, but actively despised the institution, but now he can see it, laid out in front of him, the life they could build together if they both were stupid enough to give up everything else.
Then she’d run screaming, and the most exquisite form of torture he’s ever experienced will be over and he can go back to his life before her, before he knew what he was missing.
“Okay, everyone, gather around!” Isobel calls from the massive archway of balloons set up in front of a wooden backdrop with Boy or Girl stenciled in blue and pink script across it, little blue and pink question marks dotted around the words.
It looks a little silly dwarfed by the back of their house, but he acknowledges it makes for a nice picture.
A couple of the waitstaff that had been passing out drinks and appetizers just minutes before roll out a large white box with a crank coming out of the side of it.
Izzy and Matt walk over to it and each grasp the metal handle, cranking it slowly while laughing, and a tinny version of “Pop Goes the Weasel” plays while they do.
The crowd starts to clap along and when it gets to the final line .
. . POP! The top bursts open, confetti explodes into the air and up rises a bushel of balloons anchored inside the box by .
. . what looks like an animatronic stork?
There are pink balloons and . . . blue balloons too? Did Isobel suddenly have a change of heart and decide that the gender of her baby doesn’t matter? Because that feels wildly out of character for what Xavier now knows about her and her husband.
“We’re having twins!”
Ah. Not so much then.
“A boy and a girl!” Matt chimes in, as if that’s not incredibly obvious.
The gathering lets out a collective sound, half aww and half scream, all of it joyful, and Xavier can’t quite help the smile that spreads across his face.
And with that, lights shine on to the wooden backdrop, blurring out the Boy or Girl and revealing two names, Elijah in blue and Emma in pink.
“To Elijah and Emma!” Isobel says, lifting her glass of what he assumes is sparkling cider and not champagne considering she’s carrying twins.
“To Elijah and Emma,” the crowd echoes and everyone clinks glasses and takes a sip.
Bianca presses his arm with hers and mouths, I’ll be right back . He watches as she approaches the happy couple to give Isobel a hug and Matt a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, and then one more squeeze for Isobel, before she makes her way back to him.
“You ready to go?” she asks, downing the last of her champagne.
“You don’t want to stay longer?” He can’t imagine what there is to stay for, really, since the gender has been . . . revealed.
“Nope, I’m very done. Let’s get out of here.”
They slip out the side gate, winding their way through a maze of catering tables that have been exiled to the other side of the fence so the partygoers can’t see them, before coming out to the front of the house, away from a life neither of them wants.