First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot #8
“Me too.” She wanted to touch him. She wanted to turn his face back to her and hold it against her shoulder.
She didn’t know what dragon tears tasted like, but she knew the flavor of her own well enough.
She brushed them away, dashing one hand, then the other, across her cheeks.
“I understand why you did it. A part of me, Arthur, cares about you too much to hold it against you. But I am not your girl. I am never going to be your girl again. I can be your friend, but not your lover. I am not going to solve half the crossword for you anymore. Whatever we almost had is going to remain an almost.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I know. But I don’t love you.”
There. It was done.
Or it should’ve been.
He frowned. “This stinks. None of this smells right. This isn’t how you deal with things, Gwen.”
He turned his head suddenly and examined her with such a searching curiosity, it was almost alarming.
“What?” she said. “You expected me to be a doormat? Or did you think I wouldn’t care, because Tana’s trash?”
“Tana isn’t trash. I’m pretty sure you know I don’t think she is. I mean—” He struggled with a thought in silence, then shook
his head. “I don’t know what I mean. Just . . . this doesn’t feel like you.”
“I guess it’s going around. Because fucking a girl who can’t say no doesn’t feel like you.”
He nodded. A wind, cutting across the bay, raised towers of snow and let them collapse.
“Okay,” he said. “I get it. I feel what I feel for you, Gwen. I can’t help that. But I understand that you don’t. I was wrong
to take advantage of Tana. And I’ll tell her that. She needs to hear it even more than you. I’ll speak to her before I go
home tomorrow.”
She had never heard him call the UK home before, and in that instant she knew he wasn’t coming back after he graduated. He
would stay there, make a place in the world for himself there. Maybe Arthur didn’t know that himself yet . . . but he was
giving up America as well as her. The thought made her heartsick but was also a relief. A few thousand miles of ocean between
them might make the next few months—the next few years—easier to stomach.
“Don’t bother,” Gwen said. “Tana doesn’t want to talk to you.”
And wasn’t that a laugh—that Gwen had expected Arthur to lie, but instead she was the one who didn’t dare the truth. She didn’t want him talking to Tana. Tana would tell him she hadn’t said anything to Gwen, and then Arthur would naturally wonder who did.
He nodded. “If that’s what you recommend.”
“It is.”
Arthur stood with his hands in his pockets, watching a couple of seagulls struggle over the wreckage of a dead, frozen fish,
out on the ice. Gwen decided maybe he wanted to be alone. She wanted to be alone herself, somewhere she could have a good
cry without being bothered.
She was walking away when he called out to her.
“Have you decided who you’re going to give to him?” he asked her. “To the King?”
“Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t so hard.”
He gave her a grin. “Let me know if it’s me? I’ve got six courses hanging over me next semester—I don’t want to do all that
homework if I don’t have to.”
17.
Things took a turn for the worse in the early spring, and Llewellyn had a three-week stay in Eastern Maine Medical. But he
rallied after his doctors eliminated one prescription and added two others, and at the end of March they sent him home. He
had lost weight, and most of his teeth. By then he was 108 pounds. He turned seventy-two in the middle of March, and Colin
had spent the money to get him the right birthday present. After the cake, Llewellyn unwrapped a bottle of 1912 Heidsieck
& Co. Metropole Gout Americain, the same champagne that had been on the menu on the Titanic.
“Thought it would be fitting,” Colin said. “The Titanic wasn’t the only thing to go down in 1912. Isn’t that when you discovered the Yale glee club?”
“I had them all singing falsetto by the time I was done,” Llewellyn cried, chortling, and never mind he hadn’t been born until
1919. “They never sounded better.”
They didn’t drink it, though. Llewellyn wasn’t allowed. It went into the Cabinet of Curiosities, between a videotape exploring
the red room in the haunted Amityville house and a megalodon’s tooth.
But there was whiskey waiting when Gwen wheeled Llewellyn out onto the flagstone patio two weeks later, into the warm, almost
damp air, perfumed with the smell of the sea and the pines. When she closed her eyes she smelled those firs and thought of
Christmas, thought of carrying the tree across the snowy yard with Arthur, her heart thudding too quickly in her chest.
Llewellyn didn’t see the decanter of Scotch, didn’t know it was there. His sight was entirely gone by then. The tide was coming
in and Gwen could hear the gentle, reassuring crash of it, thudding into the stones, and the satisfied hiss as it drew away.
The old man had a blanket across his legs. He got cold so easily, even though it was almost T-shirt weather. Gwen stopped
him by the metal table and put the brake on his wheelchair. She sat down with him and gently opened the wooden humidor next
to the cut-crystal decanter.
His nearly toothless mouth gaped. He looked starved. He seemed only vaguely aware of where he was. Gwen thought he looked
like one of those photos of the men rescued from the concentration camps at the end of the war. Llewellyn had not been in
Europe to do the rescuing, although he had helped refugees relocate lost family members, as part of his role with the army
in the postwar reconstruction. Gwen had gone looking for his records weeks before, in his meticulously kept files in the study.
It was something to do when she wasn’t reading his unpublished novel, the manuscript pages yellowing and so dry the pages
flaked at the edges. It turned out he had enlisted just two months before Hiroshima. So much for knifing boys in Italy.
“I suppose you intend to ruin a perfectly delightful afternoon by forcing me to take my medicine,” he said.
“I came with just what the doctor ordered,” Gwen said. “Want to start with a few chips of ice?”
“Yes, please. My mouth. Ugh. I lost another tooth yesterday and the socket is all dry throb. If I had saved all the teeth
that have fallen out in the last six months, I could make a savage necklace out of them. You could wear it! A trophy taken
from your suffering victim.”
She poured a trickle of Scotch into a glass of crushed ice and passed it to him. “Can you handle that?”
“I suppose,” he said, and lifted it to his lips . . . and then paused, raising one shaggy eyebrow. He swirled the glass, inhaling
the scent. A slow sly smile touched the corners of his thin-lipped mouth.
“This is whiskey,” he said. “Glen Garioch, the ’78. That smell! Like burnt moss and sin. What manner of sadism is this, Underfoot?
I never took you for cruel tricks.”
“Colin says it’s your favorite.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Colin said, from the doorway, his voice coming from the dark of the study behind them. “It’s the best of
them?”
Llewellyn cocked his head. He hadn’t heard his grandson approaching. The smile remained—that knowing, ironic smile that so
made him look like Jeremy Brett.
“You know it is. What are you both about? What is this?”
Colin didn’t speak. He couldn’t, Gwen thought. It was hard enough for him just to breathe, to swallow one gulp of air after
another. She had never seen him struggle with an emotion before.
Gwen clipped the fragrant end off one of Llewellyn’s cigars and was a while lighting it, rolling it slowly between her fingers
while she held the flame of a brass lighter to the tip. The lighter was from the Cabinet of Curiosities. It had been in Charles
Whitman’s pocket when he was killed in 1966.
“I promised you this,” she said at last, “if you stuck around. Do you remember?” Handing him his cigar. “Go easy with that.
You don’t want to set off a coughing fit.”
He took it and held it in one hand, his whiskey in the other, smiling in a way that seemed both unbelieving and indecently grateful at the same time. His milky eyes shifted sightlessly in her direction.
“You’ll drink too?”
“Yes, I will,” she said, and poured a quarter inch for herself and a bit more for Colin. Colin didn’t take it, though. He
couldn’t seem to move from the study. He was leaning against the doorframe, his breath hitching now and then.
Llewellyn inhaled, gently, and shut his eyes in pleasure.
“I often felt a great tenderness for someone,” the old man said, the words coming out in a gush of sweet smoke. “After I broke
them for information. I drank with many of them, after I had forced them to betray their countries, their oaths, their lovers.”
“No,” Gwen said, “you didn’t.”
His eyes opened.
“You didn’t drown children in ice water,” Gwen said, “except in your unpublished fiction. When you told me the story about
knife-fighting in Italy, I thought I had come across it somewhere before. I had—that’s in your novel too. The one you wrote
but never published. And it wasn’t based on personal experience either. The fighting in Italy was over by the time you enlisted.
You taught at Rackham for most of the Vietnam War. The CIA did employ you as a consultant, beginning in 1967, and you did write a widely distributed manual on interrogation—including an examination of methods you condemned as immoral and warned
would inspire the enemy. But you never left the States. You never tortured anyone in the Mekong Delta. You pretended to have
dementia and told us a lot of make-believe.”
“Pretended?” he asked, his mouth agape, but his face had a humorous cast.
“If you were suffering from dementia, you’d be taking medication for it. You think I didn’t take the time to research what
your medications are for?”
“Why would I pretend?”