18. Gus
Gus
The Foundation’s holiday dinner is the small one — forty people, board and families, a private room downtown with candles and a jazz trio that knows better than to play loudly.
No auction, no speeches over four minutes, no press.
It’s the one night of the Foundation calendar I’ve historically enjoyed, and I spend this one coming apart quietly by a window, one polite conversation at a time.
Because June is here, in a dark green dress, doing absolutely nothing wrong.
That’s the problem. She’s not flirting with me.
She’s not even near me. Across the room she’s making herself unremarkable — one step outside every photograph, the way she stands at these things — keeping Teddy’s shirt tucked in and Margot supplied with punch.
I know where she is the entire night without once deciding to.
A man asks the board treasurer who she is, and the treasurer says “the Vaughn nanny.” Something in me sits very still and hates the sentence.
Margot wears the crown braid. She asked June to do it before we left — stood at the bottom of the stairs with the brush and the elastics like it’s routine now, because it is. I watched from the kitchen doorway and made myself useful with cufflinks.
The trouble starts in the coat line, and it starts with my tie.
“It’s crooked,” June says — quietly, in passing, both kids in tow — and then her hands are up and doing it before either of us thinks.
Four seconds, the same four seconds as the gala in the fall, except we are not who we were in the fall.
She realizes mid-knot. I watch her realize.
She finishes anyway, because stopping would be worse.
She pats the knot flat once and moves off with the kids toward the coat check as if nothing happened at all.
Mitch is standing six feet away with two coats over his arm, keeping an eye on the whole room, as usual.
He doesn’t say anything until an hour later. Then he collects me at the quiet end of the bar with two glasses of the good scotch, which is how Mitch schedules meetings.
“Good party,” he says. “Kids look great. Margot’s smiling this year.” He hands me my glass and looks out at the room instead of at me. “You looked one direction all night, Gus.”
“Mitch—”
“I’m not asking.” He says it with the finality of a man closing a folder.
“Thirty years, Gus. You think I don’t know your tells.
Tonight you’ve barely looked anywhere in this room except wherever June was standing.
” He takes a slow drink. “Back at the gala I told you to protect whatever was helping you sleep. I didn’t know I was giving you romance advice. That’s on me.”
“It’s not—”
“Don’t finish that sentence, it’s beneath both of us.
” Still not unkind. That’s the thing about Mitch — he can tell you the hardest thing you’ll hear all year in a perfectly friendly voice.
“Here’s my whole speech. People notice where a man looks.
Tonight it’s me noticing, and I’m your friend.
Next month it’s a board member’s wife, and the month after that it’s a gossip account with a screenshot.
So decide what this is, Gus. Decide it yourself, before somebody out there decides it for you, in public, in the worst possible words. ”
He clinks his glass against mine, says, “Great scotch,” and walks back into the party, leaving me holding the truth at a holiday dinner.
Carol finds me twenty minutes later.
She arrives beside me at the window with a club soda and stands there without saying anything, comfortable, in no hurry at all.
Across the floor, June is crouched to Teddy’s height, retying a shoe he could tie himself, letting him narrate.
Margot stands beside them, close, unforced, in her velvet dress.
“That’s Nora’s braid,” Carol says.
Everything in me goes very still. “Margot asked her to learn it. There was a photograph.”
“I know the photograph. I was holding the camera.” She watches her granddaughter a while.
The trio plays something with bells in it.
“Nora practiced that braid on my head for a month. Complained about my hair the entire time. I have never told anyone how much I liked it.” Her glass turns, one slow rotation, and I catch myself in the habit and put my own glass down.
“The girl did it well. The back’s crooked. ”
“Margot won’t let her fix the back.”
“No,” Carol says. “She wouldn’t.” And then she turns and looks at me — all the way at me.
It’s the look she’s been not giving me all year, the one that measured casseroles and calendars and is now measuring my face.
Whatever is there, I’m too slow to put it away. I know it the second her mouth changes.
“Be careful, Augustus,” she says, with no color in it at all, and pats my sleeve once, and goes to say goodnight to her grandchildren.
* * *
The drive home is quiet. Kids asleep by the second bridge — Teddy folded sideways, Margot upright with her braid untouched against the seat back, protecting it even unconscious.
June watches the city go by from the passenger seat with her hands still in her lap.
Neither of us mentions Mitch, and neither of us mentions Carol, and the silence about both of them fills the whole car.
We carry the kids up. We’re good at it now, a two-person system, doors and blankets and the night-light, Margot’s door to the width of a book.
June comes out of Teddy’s room easing the latch silent.
In the hallway dark we stand for a second, listening to the house settle.
This is the spot where, every night for a month, I have made myself say goodnight and walk away.
“Gus,” she starts, whisper-level, “tonight, with the tie — I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. If anybody—”
“Somebody did,” I say. “Two somebodies.”
Her face goes still while she starts working the problem. “Okay. Then we should—”
“June.” I take her hand. Not a brush of it, not the dark-of-the-theater version. I hold her hand in my own hallway like it’s mine to hold. We go to the stairs, and at the bottom I do the thing I’ve been not doing for a month.
I step on the fourth stair — the loud one, the one I’ve spent a month carefully stepping over — and let it creak through the entire house.
The sound is enormous in the quiet, and nothing happens. No doors. No feet. Just the furnace, and her staring at me halfway between horror and laughing.
“You’re insane,” she whispers.
“I’m done tiptoeing in my own house. That’s different.
” At her door I stop and turn her to face me, both her hands now.
I say the rest of it plainly, because everyone else read the truth off my face tonight.
She should get to hear it in words. “I performed for forty people tonight. Shook every hand, remembered every name. And the entire time, the one real thing in that room was standing by the coat check fixing my son’s collar.
I’m not sorry about the tie. I’m sorry I stepped back after. That’s the last time I do that.”
“Gus—”
“Tell me to say goodnight,” I say, quiet, against her ear, “and I’ll say goodnight.”
What she says is my name, in the voice that isn’t for anyone else. Then we’re through her door, and I turn the lock. The click sounds final. Good.
I’m not in a rush tonight. That surprises us both, I think — after a night like that, there should be fumbling.
Instead I back her against the door, take her face in my hands, and kiss her slow enough to make a point of it.
I find the zipper at the back of the green dress and lower it one tooth at a time while I talk into her neck.
Quietly, because with the kids home, quiet is the only way we get to have this, and tonight I’ve stopped resenting that.
“All night,” I tell her, as the dress comes off her shoulders, “you laughed at something the treasurer’s wife said, and I wanted to cross the whole room to you.
I stared at a centerpiece instead.” The dress pools.
She’s in very little, and the lamplight loves her, and I keep my hands moving slow, collarbone, waist, hip.
“You took Teddy’s punch cup so he could tie his shoe, and I lost the entire thread of what the man in front of me was saying. ”
“You hid it well.” Her hands are working my shirt buttons, steadier than mine deserve. “I checked. Every few minutes. You were very impressive over there.”
“I know you checked.” I catch her chin and make her look at me. “That’s the only thing that got me through the trio’s second set.”
I lay her down on the narrow bed and take my time, mouth over every inch I uncover.
I keep talking while I go. All night I couldn’t say one true thing about her in that room.
Now I get to say all of them. What I noticed.
What I wanted. Where. She pulls my shirt off and drags her palms down my chest. “Less inventory, more—” She loses the end of the sentence, because my mouth arrives where she wanted it.
I work her slowly with lips and tongue and two fingers, her thigh over my shoulder, her fist pressed against her own mouth. When she gets close I stop, climb her body, and start again at her throat. She calls me something truly unprintable in a whisper.
“Patience,” I say, into her sternum.
“I will end you.”
“After.” Back down. This time I don’t stop. I stay with her through the wind-up and over the top, her heel pressing into my back, her whole body bowing off the quilt. The break rolls through her in dead silence, one long shaking breath at the end of it.
She comes down breathing like a sprinter and immediately starts plotting.
I can see it happen — the eyes opening, the focus arriving.
She pushes at my shoulder, and I let her turn us, and then she’s over me with her hair down and lamplight all over her.
The look on her face is the one from the coat line.
The fixing look. Aimed considerably lower.
“You said after,” she whispers. “It’s after.”
She starts at my throat and works down, taking her time at every place I named tonight — the chest, the ribs, the soft of my stomach, lower.
When her mouth closes over my cock I say something to the ceiling that isn’t a word.
She’s unhurried about it, thorough, wicked.
One hand flat on my stomach to feel it jump.
Eyes up the whole time, watching me the way I’ve been watching her all night, and that’s the part that wrecks me — being the one who’s seen.
I last about two minutes before it stops being a thing I can survive quietly.
“Enough.” I haul her up the bed, and she comes up grinning, delighted with herself.
“Noted,” she says, in my voice.
When I slide into her at last we both go still for a second, forehead to forehead, her hands framing my face like she’s reading it in the dark.
Then we move, slow and deep and deliberate, her leg hooked over my arm, the old bedframe silent under us.
She’s soft and soaked around me, and every long stroke lands somewhere new.
I can tell by her face. I have gotten very good at her face.
When I shift her knee higher she bites down on nothing and her nails find my back.
I do it again. I watch her the entire time.
That’s the point tonight — I want her watched.
I want her to feel what it’s like to be the one thing in the room a man can’t look away from, when he’s finally allowed to look.
“There you are,” I say, when her eyes come back to mine.
“Here I am,” she whispers, and tightens around me, and after that there are no more sentences.
Just her name and mine, traded back and forth at zero volume, until she breaks a second time and takes me with her.
My face buried in her hair. Her hand gripping the back of my neck like the world is trying to take one of us somewhere.
After, she lies on my chest doing the thing where she draws on my sternum with one finger. Words, I think, though she’s never once admitted it. The furnace hums, and somewhere below us Brenda drops a fresh round of ice, fully reformed, showing off.
“Mitch figured us out tonight,” I say, to the ceiling. “And Carol recognized the braid.”
Her finger stops. “Gus.”
“I know.” I catch her hand and hold it flat over my heart. “I’m not asking you for anything tonight. I’m just reporting the day, the way you taught me. All fine. Margot ate seconds. Two people are onto us.”
Her laugh comes out shaky. She props her chin on my chest and looks at me in the dark. I watch her line up a sentence and set it back down — twice. I let her keep it, whatever it is, because I have a few of my own I’m not saying yet.
Carol told me to be careful. Mitch told me to decide.
Lying in a narrow bed with June’s heart going against my ribs, I have news for both of them: it’s decided.
It’s been decided for longer than I’ve admitted to anyone in this room, including me.
And I’m done being careful. That ended tonight, when I stepped on the loud stair and let the whole house hear me coming to her.
Sooner or later, somebody outside this house is going to find out. The only question left is what it takes from us when they do.