49
The address that Maya girl gave Tennyson is in the Garden District. I don’t know much about Louisiana real estate, but I know that’s a really nice place to live.
Tens tried to call her, but she didn’t answer. That made me immediately suspicious. Not in a way where I feel like we’re going to this address and we’re going to be mugged or trafficked or anything, but something’s amiss…
An entirely different address than the one we found? Maya’s address was the one in Dad’s office—does this mean he’s been paying for this house too?
When we get there, the four of us just stand in front of it and stare up. It’s not huge from the outside, but there are plenty of stairs up to the porch that wraps around the front of the house.
“Well, it doesn’t look like the house of a whore,” Oliver declares to no one in particular.
I glance at him. “What does a whore’s house look like?”
“I don’t know.” he shrugs. “A second-floor condo on the corner of Ocean and Alta?”
Sam pauses. “That’s where you live.”
Oliver gives him a wink.
“Well, come on then.” Tennyson leads the way up the stairs to the porch, and we all trail after him.
“Are you nervous?” I ask him, quiet enough that Sam and Oliver can’t hear him.
“No,” he says automatically.
“Liar,” I whisper.
Tennyson looks back at me. “Can you”—he gives me a long-suffering look—“not?”
I nod quickly. “Sorry,” I say, and I mean it.
My big brother shakes his head. “I just have this feeling like Dad’s about to get tackled off of the pedestal I’ve had him up on for years.”
I nod again, and I have nothing to say because I suspect he’s probably right, but saying as much will bring my brother no comfort at all.
We’re both just standing on the doorstep of this random woman’s house now, Sam and Oliver in tow, none of us moving.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. “Me knock, or you?”
Tenny blinks twice, then takes a deep breath. “Me,” he says, and then he knock-knock-knocks on the door.
And then the door opens. Too quickly, I’ll recall in retrospect. But I’m not paying my best attention even though I am trying to. If I was, I’d have noted that the door opened too quickly. Almost as though while we were watching the house, the house was watching us.
Per the plan, the boys were meant to immediately barrage the woman with questions. But now that the door’s been opened… Well, all our practicing in the car ride over—poof!—out the window. And in their defense, I get it. I mean, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been the one tasked with asking the questions, but to be fair to them, we’re face-to-face right now with a massive curveball.
It is, in fact, a man standing in front of us.
“Hello,” says the man. An accent? What is that? Hard to tell from only one word. God, this poor man. I can’t help but think his day is about to become considerably worse.
Tennyson’s mouth falls open as though he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t; he says nothing. Actually, no one says anything.
“Where’s Alexis?” I ask.
The man swallows. Now, swallowing is interesting because it’s something we do naturally all the time. It’s a mechanical function of the body that happens mindlessly, constantly, without our consent or awareness. Its biomechanical function is to aid digestion and oral hygiene…you know, wash away bacteria and gross mouth stuff. However, when we’re nervous, the autonomic nervous system tightens the muscles in our throat, and then, in this hyperaware state, we become overly sensitive to the automatic bodily functions that are normally controlled by the autonomic nervous system. How do we know whether he’s nervous-swallowing or regular-swallowing? Frequency, mostly.
He gives me a tight smile. “Why do you ask?” he says in that accent again—European, definitely—and then he swallows again.
“Are you her husband?” I ask.
“Brother,” he says, and something’s off. Lots of things, actually… It all feels off and weird, and I don’t know why, nor am I personally saddled with the patience to find out, which is why I bust out of the gate with: “We suspect she may have been having an affair with our father.”
He blinks three times. Blink, blink—blink.
“Who is your father?” he asks, and I don’t know why, because I know he must know. That Maya person gave us his address; he must know who we’re here about.
“Will Carter,” I say anyway.
He swallows again, then nods once—definitely not surprised to hear our father’s name—and I’m about to ask where Alexis is when he sort of vaguely gestures for us to come inside. It’s not even an all-the-way invitation—more like he steps out of the doorway and says, “Won’t you?”—but it’s not really authoritative either… He doesn’t want us here—that’s fine, I can’t fault him for that. He’s uncomfortable with our presence, but judging by the way he tilts his head as we trail in one-by-one, he is in the very least, perhaps, a bit fascinated by us?
His eyes do snag on Sam, I notice—and it’s just for a second and frankly, nearly barely there—but I do notice it. AU44 and AU20—an eye squint and a lip stretch. He’s confused Sam’s here.
But why would the presence of Sam be confusing to him at all?
We sit down in the living room, and it’s—I’ve got to say—exquisitely decorated. Whoever’s house this is—and I’m not entirely sure whose house it is—has impeccable taste.
Crazy high ceilings, like fourteen feet high. Restored crown moldings, cool-toned dark, reclaimed hardwood floors, giant windows that flood the room with light, and eggshell blue accents scattered about, like that nineteenth-century French giltwood wingback armchair in the corner. Some art too, in those ornate gold baroque frames—mostly landscapes, a portrait too. I wonder whether the kitchen has one of those “still life” vegetable paintings that Europeans seem to love for some reason.
This man is handsome though, I’ll give him that. He couldn’t be Alexis’s husband; no way would you pick Dad over him. Our dad’s fine, not unattractive at all. But it’d be like, Colin Firth and Brad Pitt—both attractive, sure, but one is more overtly attractive, right?
Not that this man looks like Brad Pitt at all. Like, yeah, he’s gorgeous, but for one, he’s Black. He’s really tall, broad shoulders, in good shape, with these warm eyes that I’d on another day quite like—but on this day, I suspect he’s covering for that sister of his when he asks, “Why do you think they’re having an affair?”
“Because they’re having an affair,” I say to him, my voice unwavering.
He says nothing, just holds my gaze.
“So how did they meet?” Tennyson asks, puncturing my strange little reverie.
“Who?” the man says, and that strikes me as odd.
“Alexis and our dad…” Oliver says, giving the brother a funny look.
“Oh.” The man laughs. It’s a funny laugh though—forced, maybe?—no genuine emotion attached to it, no genuine movement on his face either. I squint at him, and I can feel Sam watching me, because he’s always watching me nowadays even though it’s completely inappropriate in this present moment. I can’t think about him watching me, even though it makes me so embarrassingly happy, and every time Sam looks at me, it’s an undeniable feather in my cap, and I don’t have time to put a feather in my cap right now; I’m trying to work out if Alexis’s brother has had Botox or not. Could be why his face isn’t moving like a face otherwise should.
“Through me, actually,” he says, and it’s on that actually that I finally hear it. He’s French.
“How did you meet?” I ask.
“Work.” He gives me a closed-mouth smile, and that combined with the one-word answer raises a red flag for me. He doesn’t want to talk about how they met. It’s uncomfortable for him.
My eyes pinch. “You work in civilian aircrafts?”
“Oui,” he says, swallows again.
“Doing what?” Tennyson asks, leaning forward.
The man breathes in through his nose. “I fly them.”
I stare at him for a few seconds, let the silence thicken between us enough for him to feel a little uneasy.
“You’re a pilot, you mean?” I eventually say.
“Mon dieu!” He sort of exhales a funny laugh, then shakes his head. “Thirty years I’ve been in America and I still forget the words! Yes. A pilot.”
I nod along as though I believe him, which I definitely don’t. “When did you get your pilot’s license?” I ask breezily.
“What?” The man’s face pulls at that one. All the boys look confused at that one, actually.
“When?” I repeat, shrugging lightly like it’s just a question.
“Uh—” He swallows, blinks twice in quick succession, and his eyes flicker ever so slightly toward the left before he says, “1993.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was a lie. Why would he lie about that? Even if he forgot, you’d just say you forgot—and besides, I don’t think a pilot would forget. They’re like Horse Girls, but men. They don’t fucking shut up about their planes and their flight times and their craziest landings. Flying is like a bug people catch; it gets under their skin, melds into their essence—they don’t forget things like when they got their pilot’s license. Most of them have waited their whole lives up until that moment to get it.
I glance around his house, and my eye snags on the art again. One in particular, one of the landscapes… There are some people, a camel, some Grecian pillars back in the distance, some guy in front of a rock, and something tugs on my brain— God, it’s familiar . I squint at it, but I can’t place it, and I get this annoying buzzy feeling under my skin that I get sometimes where there’s something in front of me waiting to be realized, but my consciousness hasn’t figured it out yet, and my subconscious doesn’t know how to communicate it to me either.
This French guy’s still banging on about how he met my dad, and the boys are all nodding along, but I’m not. I should be paying attention, I know I should—but God, there’s a loose thread in my mind and I need to tie it off. And this room—there’s something about this room that’s throwing me.
There’s another room through a doorway—lots of books—that’s all I can see of it from here. I wish I was closer, but I’m not, so I give this room another glance—tilt my head, because that helps sometimes. And upon second glance, nothing about his home suggests that what he’s saying—admittedly, he’s not said all that much—is actually true. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, there’s also nothing in his home that implicitly implies he’s beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt lying either, but the truth is we leave the clues of us everywhere, in ways we know and in ways we don’t.
Take my home, for example. My fridge doesn’t sport birthday cards from my family or photos from vacations we shared together. It does, however, have the menu for the Greek restaurant a block away, a Lisa Frank poster that has a kitten with rainbow angel wings, and a photo of me vomiting in the bathroom of Buckingham Palace with Hattie kneeling beside me, both thumbs up. Bianca took the photo. It makes me laugh every time I see it. And it could just be a menu, posters, and a photo, but it isn’t. It’s the place we order from when we’ve had hard days, our emergency safe-food restaurant. It’s the poster that Hattie hung in her room for years as a child when she knew she was bi before she was ready to tell anyone. It’s a photo of Hattie in a four-thousand-pound dress on a bathroom floor with me as I throw up because Hattie is more my family than my family. So yeah, it’s just a fridge, but actually, my fridge, my home, spread throughout it, there are the clues of me everywhere. We’re always leaving clues.
And then—my brain reaches up and grabs one of those threads that’s flailing in the wind of all this.
“You’re French,” I say a bit suddenly.
“I am.” The man nods.
I put my chin in my hand. “From where?”
Oliver flicks me in the arm and tosses me a look like I’m an idiot. “France?” he says.
I roll my eyes at him, then look back at the man. “Which part of France?”
“Oh—” He waves his hand dismissively. “A small town outside of Bordeaux.”
“I love Bordeaux,” I say, but I don’t think I necessarily say it with the proper emotions that should accompany a declaration of love—there’s no tenderness on my face, no joy, no longing—my brain’s too busy now. I do love Bordeaux—that wasn’t a lie—but I think the first domino has fallen.
He swallows again, then flashes me a quick smile. “The wine or the place?” he asks, trying to keep it light.
“Both,” I tell him with a curt smile and a nod. I turn to my brothers. “Have you been?”
Tennyson shakes his head. “No…”
I glance at Oliver and Sam. They both shake their heads too.
“Oh—you really should.” I give them a bit of a rueful look, then pause, glancing between Ol and Penny. “Maybe you two shouldn’t. Alcoholics,” I tell the man, and he doesn’t react beyond his eyes flicking between the two briefly, and that’s weird—it should probably surprise him, two young men under thirty, already alcoholics. But not even an inner brow raise.
“Well, technically, he’s an alcoholic”—I gesture to Oliver, before motioning to Sam—“and he’s an addict.”
Sam’s eyes tighten—he’s not sure what I’m doing, but he knows I’m doing something.
“So, a small town near Bordeaux?” I stare over at the French man, nodding gently, trying my best to smile and not look like an interrogator.
He nods, but swallows as he does, before he smiles back at me. It’s strained now though.
“East?” I flick my eyebrows up.
His face falters. “Quoi?”
I rephrase the question. “An hour east of Bordeaux?”
He nods again, cautious now. “Oui.”
Saint-émilion! It drops into my head like a present down a chimney, and I feel my brain sigh because this whole time my mind’s been on a side-quest, trying to remember the name of the place in Dad’s office painting. And that’s it. Saint-émilion.
“Sorry,” Tennyson jumps in. “What is your name?”
And it’s the strangest thing… The man stares at me for two full seconds before he turns to my brother and answers him.
“Henri,” he replies.
“Henri, that girl we met yesterday—” I try not to squint at him even though my brain is definitely squinting at him.
“That was my daughter,” he tells us with a proud smile. The first genuine emotion I’ve seen from this man. “Maya.”
“Maya. That’s…” My voice trails because that loose thread is ringing like a motherfucking bell in my mind. I shake my head at myself. Tell myself to pull it together. “That’s…not a French name…”
He nods, thinking to himself. “No, I believe it’s Sanskrit.”
“So.” Tennyson adjusts himself in the armchair he’s sitting in, and I can tell by the way his body’s squaring up that he’s going to try to take this over. He thinks I’m doing a bad job, that I’m not learning anything. “Where is your sister, Henri?”
“Cancún,” he replies, and Oliver says, “God, I love Mexico,” and then Oli asks him a few pleasant questions—like, a totally normal-person questions—like where’s she staying, how long she’s there for—boring shit like that.
And the whole time, Sam’s watching me—admittedly more than he should, but it’s good, I think. It centers me, grounds me or something. His eyebrows dip, and even though he says nothing aloud, he asks if I’m okay, and I give him a barely perceptible nod, except I know he can perceive it because our connection is intimate and we’re acutely attuned to each other at this point, so he knows it’s a lie. He knows I’m not okay; he can tell there’s something amiss because he can feel it in me, which, on a separate note, is completely incredible, and fuck, I really need to tell Oliver, don’t I? It’s just—
I snap my head suddenly in the direction of that painting on the wall. The landscape with the man in front of the rocks.
Wait.
I interrupt—I don’t even know who I interrupt—someone was talking who isn’t me, and it doesn’t matter who, because I talk over them anyway. “That painting”—I point at it—“is by who?”
Henri’s face lights up a little, pleased to talk about it. “Charles Lock Eastlake. It’s—”
I stare over at him, and if I was watching me, I’d say I wasn’t concealing a single thing. I’m AU1 and AU26 (inner brow raise and a little jaw drop)—that’s surprise, and arguably, maybe fear—plain as day all over my face.
I shake my head slowly as I watch Henri. “No, I know what it is.” I glance over at my oldest brother. “I need the room.”
Tennyson pulls a face. “What?”
I’m louder now, bossier. “Give me the room.”
“Gige, shut up.” Oliver rolls his eyes. “You’re so dramatic, just—”
“Tennyson.” I stare at my biggest brother, ignoring the other one. “I need the room.”
Tennyson is starting to look annoyed now. “Not yet.”
And then I turn to Penny and give him a look.
“Sam,” is all I say—and I’ve never done that before, and I shouldn’t have done it now either, invoking that “intimate” trump card. I haven’t used it till now, even though I’ve wanted to a million times, and there were a hundred moments before this one that would have benefited me more to invoke it then, but I really need the fucking room.
And in truth, the fact that I’ve not invoked it till this moment—Sam’s surprised, but now he’s on a mission.
He looks at my brothers, nods toward the front door. “Let’s give her a min—”
“Oh, come on—” Now Tennyson rolls his eyes.
“Why are we listening to her?” Oliver shakes his head. “She’s—”
“The only reason we’re here,” Sam cuts in as he gives my brothers a look, standing to his feet. “Let’s just give her a minute.”
Tennyson grumbles as he walks out, and Oliver looks irritated that Sam’s doing my bidding, but he doesn’t look clued in, which is good—that’s not what I wanted—I just need to get this man alone for a few minutes.
Sam’s the last one out, and our eyes catch.
“If you need anything,” he says, even though he shouldn’t, because Oliver could have heard him, and the data about Sam and me that Oli’s subconscious is compiling might find these compounding occurrences overt enough to finally offer the knowledge to his consciousness—but I can’t focus on that right now.
I nod at Sam, flash him a quick, grateful smile, and then he closes the door.
Henri gives me a smile. I think it might be forced. “You run a tight ship.”
I give him a little shrug. “Someone has to.”
He sniffs a laugh, like he finds me pleasant. Like, genuinely, almost. “You never told me your name.”
I wonder if he already knows it. “Georgia,” I tell him anyway as I offer him my hand.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Georgia.”
“You too.” I flash him a smile, try to make it look sincere, but I’m not committed to placating him enough to do my “thinking of puppies” trick. “How long have you been getting Botox for?” I ask.
Henri laughs again, incredulous this time. “I like how straight you are, it’s very European…”
And that’s not an answer, by the way, it’s a deflection—so I say nothing and wait for him to answer my question.
After a few seconds, he clears his throat. “A man my age? For the last fifteen years.” He gives me a suspicious look. “Is it that obvious?”
I nod, and he laughs again.
“To me,” I clarify. “I study faces for a living.”
“Do you?” he says, but he says it without any surprise in his voice. I don’t think I’ve ever told someone what my job is before without it raising some questions or fascination from their end, but he’s exhibiting none of that.
“Yeah, I do. So I notice the way faces move—or don’t move, in your case. Otherwise the work is very well done.”
He laughs again. “Would you like a drink, Georgia?”
“I’d love an iced tea,” I tell him. I wouldn’t, actually. I just want him to leave me alone for a second.
“Sure.”
“Is that a sitting room?” I peer past him into the room I want to get into. “Can I—?”
“Oh.” He nods emphatically. “Please.”
And you know, I’ll preface all this: I have a feeling. And I suspect that I’m going to find what I think I’m going to find, but I want to be sure before I draw any definitive conclusions, so I make my way in there, and I can hear him clattering around in the kitchen, putting ice in glasses; I can hear the pouring of the tea—all of that, it’s just white noise to the sitting room though, because now that I’m in there, God, it’s immaculate. Floor-to-ceiling white, ornate bookshelves, taller than even the tallest man could reach, so there’s one of those sliding ladders like Belle has in Beauty and the Beast . And all the books, they’re bound so they look the same…and all of them…they are what I think they’ll be. A million copies, volumes, and editions of names we all know. Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, e. e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. You know, really famous names, like Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maya Angelou…
Then there’s Alfred Tennyson, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, and George Gordon Byron.
My eyes fall on a framed degree. Poetry. Cornell.
He walks back into the room, and it’s like he realizes in that moment what me staring at his degree means, and his face is immediately drenched with concern—AU2 and AU20—
“Georgia—”
“Oh my God.”
“Georgia…”
I shake my head. “You…”
“Mon c?ur, please, if you’ll just—”
He moves toward me, but I push past him, barreling through his house, through the living room where there are no clues of him flying planes because he doesn’t fly planes. I bust through the front door and sort of tumble down the stairs, and it’s bad—it’s all bad, because the urgency on my face, how distraught I look, it’s enough to send Sam into a rightful state of concern—concerned enough that he forgets that I’m only his in private, not in public. He’s forgotten that I am, in the eyes of the only person on the whole fucking planet who matters right now, nothing more than that person’s sister, who he—Sam—technically, barely knows and has little-to-no connection with.
But as I barely make it down the stairs and into the front yard of my father’s lover, where I sort of willfully fall into a little bush of common purslanes that I then throw up in, it’s Sam who gets to me the fastest. He basically throws himself at me, falling to my side—his hands on my body in ways they shouldn’t be, like the small of my back, my waist—
“What happened?” he asks.
I throw up again, and Sam keeps his hand on my back. He shouldn’t have his hand on my back.
Tennyson looks from me vomiting in the garden and back up to the man on the porch, who’s staring at me all horrified and mortified and heartbroken, but fuck him, and same.
Sam touches my face—my face!—so stupid in the scheme of things, but I think there’s such a violence to the act of vomiting, and I think both my brothers are in such an intense and confused spiral of emotions that as Oliver runs to my other side, I don’t think he barely even registers it as the overt display of Sam’s feelings for me that it is.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I shake my head as I stare into the garden I just threw up in.
“Georgia,” Sam says loudly, clearly, trying to gain control of the situation, still holding my face in his hand. “What happened?”
I look past Sam back up at the man—our eyes lock.
“Gige, what the fuck is going on?” Tennyson looks scared now—flashes of AU1 and AU25—but he’s masking that fear with anger, because it’s easier to be angry than it is to be afraid. Anger is ours to wield against our attackers; fear is the lack of control we feel when we’re under siege, and believe me—Tennyson’s reality is now under siege.
I stare at the man one more time—AU1 from him also—he’s afraid as well. I suppose he should be, all things considered.
Tennyson lifts an impatient eyebrow, waiting for my answer, and then I look over at Oliver, who’s very quiet now. He looks afraid too. I cover my face with my hands for a second, try to compose myself as best I can. I take a breath.
“He’s gay,” I tell them.
Oliver looks confused. “Who’s gay?”
“He is.” I point to the man, then gesture vaguely to the universe around us. “They are.”
Tennyson takes a measured breath—holds it. “Who’s they?”
I glance at him briefly, and I know he knows before I even say it.
“We were right,” I tell Tennyson. “Alexis Beauchêne and Dad were having an affair.” I look back at Oliver as I point to our father’s lover on the porch. “And that man is Alexis Beauchêne.”