55
It’s Sunday when Tennyson and I find ourselves—once again—on that admittedly magnificent porch on Seventh Street, and we don’t even have to knock this time because Alexis Beauchêne is sitting on the porch swing, holding a cup of coffee to his chest when we arrive.
He gives us a strained, tender smile—but I think that’s okay. What more could I ask this man to give us?
“We have some questions,” Tennyson says to him.
“I hope for you that I have some answers.” Alexis stands and motions toward the door. “Please, come in.”
I walk in first, my brother after me, and for the first time in our lives, my brother feels timid to me. It’s funny how people present themselves in your mind’s eye. Tennyson in my mind is always tall, always sure, always proud, always confident, and he’s just…none of those things right now. Right now he looks lost.
He follows me wordlessly into Alexis’s sitting room—it’s the room where I became sure of what we now know to be true—and objectively, it is a really nice room. His collection of books, both poetry and fiction, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more)—so many first editions.
Alexis gestures for us to sit, so we do, Tennyson and I each taking an armchair and him taking a small chaise opposite us—and I find myself wondering, how many times has my father been in this room?
If you asked me two days ago if my father was a stranger to me, for all intents and purposes, I’d have said yes—but then, what does that make him now?
“So.” Alexis gives me a tight, uncomfortable smile. “When did you figure it out?”
“The painting— Lord Byron’s Dream —was my first warning sign…” Then I reconsider. “Actually, the first warning sign, really, if I had my best foot forward at the time—which I didn’t—was that you showed confusion when you first saw Sam.”
I glance between them, but Tennyson looks confused, so I keep going.
“Sam specifically,” I say to my brother. “As though the rest of us weren’t total strangers to him.”
I think I see the smallest smile dance around the man’s mouth.
“Is he your boyfriend?” he asks, and it’s asked in this way that no one else has asked about Sam and me. For everyone else around us, Sam and I came preloaded, but to this man, it’s just a simple question. It feels different. It feels nice…
I nod. “But he wasn’t yesterday in a public way.”
Alexis considers this. “He watches you.”
I give him an exasperated look. “I know, right!”
“Gige—” Tennyson elbows me.
“Sorry.” I shake my head, then look at Alexis again, more focused now. “It was the names, really. Our names. And Maya’s.” Then I roll my eyes at myself. “So really, Maya should have been the very first-first clue.”
I huff a frustrated breath at myself—how the fuck did I miss that? I really am off my game.
Alexis presses his index finger into his mouth, almost as though he’s forbidding a smile to arrive on his face.
Tennyson looks between us, confused. “So…it wasn’t just a one-time thing then?” Tennyson asks, almost grimacing, like that’s what he was hoping for. Like that might have made it better.
“I’m sorry, no,” Alexis says in a way that sounds like he means it, and I wonder what it might cost a person to spend their whole lives apologizing for loving who they love.
“They were in love,” I tell my brother while watching Alexis’s face—he doesn’t look away.
“How do you know?” Tennyson asks me. Me, not the man.
The man and I are still staring at one another.
“Because,” I say carefully. “They were as much as a family as they could be, without being one.”
“What are you talking about?” Tennyson sounds impatient now, so I turn to look at him.
“Our names, dumbass. No one else in our family has our names—”
“So?”
“We were all named after poets,” I tell him a second time.
Tens’s eyes flick between Alexis and me. “So?” he asks again.
“So—” I point to the doctorate on the wall. “He was a poetry major.”
“Oh,” my brother says quietly, and his shoulders slump—I don’t know why they slump, but there’s something so sad about it. I trust him enough at this point to truly believe that it’s not a homophobic shoulder-slump as much as it is a his-life-is-crumbling slump.
“So, wait.” Tennyson shakes his head, processing. “You met in college?”
Alexis nods, and my brother’s face falls to a frown. “Before or after he was with our mom?”
And it’s maybe now—at this specific question—I see a tiny bit of discomfort flicker over Alexis’s face.
Which, actually—that makes sense to me.
I think if you’ve had to resort to having an affair for decades to just (barely) be with the person you love, then a huge part of your rationalization process has to be compartmentalization. Alexis has probably lived his day-to-day adulterer life having placed the mere idea of my mother inside a very airtight, very far away box.
“Does she know anything?” I ask.
Alexis shakes his head. “Nothing.”
I purse my lips, because I’m not sure that could be true—how could it be?
“And this started at Cornell?”
“Oui.” He nods. “We met at a—how do you say?” His face strains, thinking of the word.
“Mixer?” Tennyson offers.
“Yes!” Alexis nods, grateful. “Mixer. And for me, it was love at first sight. For him, it was…” He trails, choosing his words. “More confusing.”
“How?” Tennyson asks, unceremoniously.
“Well,” he starts. “We connected over art… Your father loved beautiful things, sculptures, paintings, architecture—”
Tennyson and I catch each other’s eye, and our faces mirror one another’s. Who he’s describing does not remotely sound like the man we knew. He loved art? The only art in their house is that painting of the Boeing in the dining room, which is a fine painting—good even!—but it doesn’t exactly scream “I love art.” That’s all there is. And the one in his office.
And then it clicks.
“You’re from Saint-émilion,” I tell Alexis.
He nods. “How did you know?”
“Our dad came home one day with this really pretty white rowboat that Oliver and I called the SS Avoidance . Whenever we wanted to get away from…whatever—” I shrug. “We were the only ones who ever used it, we thought… But then, there were a couple of mornings I woke up early when I’d see Dad out on the water, sitting by himself.”
“Doing what?” Tennyson asks.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “One time I got binoculars—” I glance at Alexis.
“I’m nosy,” I tell him at the same time Tennyson says, “She’s nosy.”
Alexis quietly chuckles.
I shake my head again. “He wasn’t doing anything. But—” I look back at Alexis. “The name on the side of it is Saint-émilion .”
Tennyson’s head pulls back, like some pieces are falling into place.
“The painting in his office,” Tens says, looking at me, eyes wide.
“?a alors.” Alexis gives both of us an impressed look.
“So you moved from Saint-émilion to…Ithaca?” I ask him, eyebrows up.
“Oui.” He laughs then stands up and moves over to one of those magnificent shelves he has. He opens up a book and pulls something out of, then walks back over to us.
He hands Tennyson a photograph.
It’s of our father. He’s young—like twenty-three, maybe?—next to an also-young Alexis. They’re standing in front of Michelangelo’s Bacchus .
I look up at him, surprised. “You went to Florence together.”
He smiles, and the edges of it feel tender. “William wanted to be an art major, not an econ major.”
That’s the first time he’s called him by his name, and it’s strange—there’s something in him calling him that, referring to him by his name and not “your father” like he has up until now, that makes their relationship come a bit more into focus for me. There’s a gentle possessiveness to it, I think? Like, no one calls him William. Dad never liked it if someone did—I wonder if this is why. It was his name to one person and one person alone.
Tennyson looks confused again. “But he loved his econ professor.”
“He did,” Alexis concedes. “But really, he wanted to transfer to art history, but his father—your grandfather—forbade it.”
“Why?” Tennyson asks, even though I don’t feel like that’s a necessary question. A mere twenty-five-second conversation with Brick Carter would have surely filled in any and all blanks.
Alexis presses his lips together. AU24—he’s restraining himself regarding my grandfather. I can tell you this much: he has lots to say.
“I believe he was quoted to have said to William, ‘that’s’”—and then he proceeds to spells out the F word that isn’t fuck —“‘learning.’”
He flashes us a tight, uncomfortable smile, and I grimace, “That sounds about right…”
Alexis flicks me a look, and I feel like we’d have so many things to talk about, if we had the time and the space (which we definitely don’t).
We ask him a few more questions about our dad in college, trying to piece together when it actually began, but he says that to him, to our father, they consider the night they met to be the night it began. Alexis says his life took on a different trajectory when he met our dad at that mixer. That he saw our parents fighting at this party on a balcony, and she said to him something how she was tired of waiting for him to marry her—they were already engaged at that point—but apparently, he kept pushing the wedding further and further back. Apparently she was crying, like really, truly hysterical, asking what was wrong with her, and apparently Dad just kept saying to her, “There’s nothing wrong with you,” over and over, but it didn’t placate her. (“She was very drunk.” Alexis gives us a small smile, and it’s wild to me to imagine them all in the same place.) After that, she left in a huff with some girlfriends of hers. Alexis said he watched the whole thing at a distance, but there was something about how our dad’s face looked every time he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you,” that there was almost an invisible and unintentional emphasis on the “you,” because she wasn’t the problem, he was.
Alexis walked over to him, kind of just to see if he was okay, and then they spent the whole night talking—until sunup, he said.
Apparently Mom heard from Dad’s dorm roommate he hadn’t come home that night and completely flipped out. He made up some lie about getting drunk and falling asleep at a friend’s house, but Alexis said they went to a dock and started talking, and then they just never stopped.
“Hold on.” I pause, thinking. “So when did it end between you?”
“Seventeen days ago.” And I watch how this man’s face twitches and twinges, completely full of pain, wanting to crumble but trying his hardest to not—I think on our account.
Tennyson looks from me to Alexis, then back to me.
“Fuck,” Tens says, under his breath, and finally a tear slips from Alexis’s eye.
My hands are on my face now, and for some reason, my heart is surging in agony for this near-perfect stranger.
“Oh my God.” I stare at the broken man across from me. “Did you not know until—”
And then it cracks over his face, like a dam of grief. These huge, unconsolable sobs, not just his shoulders shaking, but his whole body.
Neither Tennyson or I know what to do, but him less so than me, I suppose. I get up and move next to the man, place my hand on his shoulder, because what else am I going to do? I don’t know what to do other than try to comfort him.
It goes on for a couple of minutes, this unbridled grief that he’s been holding in since he found out.
Eventually, he goes quiet. He gives me a tired, almost-apologetic, somewhat-grateful, barely-there smile.
I stare at him a few moments, trying to figure it out myself so I don’t have to ask, but fuck it, I’m going to ask anyway: Sorry if this is insensitive to ask—but like, did you have a plan for this? How were you going to know if something happened to the other?”
Alexis says nothing.
“You’d just check the obituaries sporadically, hoping for the best?” I ask, eyebrows up.
Alexis gives me a look. “Mon fille, we are not that old.” His faces pulls, and he corrects himself. “I thought.”
“I am…” I grab Alexis’s eye and say this sincerely and mean it truly. “So sorry for your loss.”
He flashes me another weak smile.
“How did you spend time together?” I ask.
Tennyson sighs. “Dad takes a lot of trips.”
I look between Tenny and Alexis. “Like, how many?”
Tennyson shrugs. “Two a month? Maybe three?”
I look at Alexis for confirmation. “Were any of them real?”
“Most, actually.” He nods. “Sometimes I would meet him places, sometimes he’d come here, but really, all we would plan for is one week together once a year.”
I stare at him, feel my heart break for some reason, feel my whole body slump with the news—there’s something specifically crushing about that revelation, not for me or for us, but for them…
One week a year when they allowed themselves to be themselves, in love and free?
“Where?” I ask, but I wonder if I know the answer already. I wonder if we all do.
“Your father’s lake house in—”
“—Center Harbor,” I cut in.
He looks from me to Tennyson, brows knitted together. “How did you—?”
“Your lake house, actually,” Tennyson says, face a bit strained. “He left it to you.”
Alexis’s head pulls back. He looks surprised. “Quoi?”
“That’s how we found you,” I tell him. “You were in the will.”
He sits there quietly, wrestling with thoughts I can’t even comprehend.
And then a thought pops into my mind, and I wonder if Alexis might know the answer. “What is at 42 Adams Shore Drive, do you know?”
Alexis’s brown bends in confusion. “It was an empty plot.”
I sigh, accidentally. I don’t like sighing out loud. It gives away too much.
“But William always talked about buying it maybe, one day,” he offers. “When we would imagine a different version of how life could be.”
“He bought it,” I tell him.
“Why?” His confusion deepens, and I mirror it.
“I don’t know.”
We keep asking him a billion questions, wading further into the tallgrass marshes that we can’t see over the top of and that maybe we’re all sinking in; that’s how our father feels now. And I don’t know how long we stay with Alexis for—for hours, for sure, and I don’t know if anything we’re asking makes anything better or worse, but once the sun starts to go down, Tennyson says we need to leave to make it halfway home before it’s too late.
“Will you tell your mother?” Alexis asks as we’re walking out toward our car. His brow is low, but his face doesn’t look distraught.
Tennyson’s face strains, and Alexis keeps going. “This information is yours now. I’m not ashamed of who I am—I will not ask you to do one thing or the other. I’d just like be prepared if—”
“We don’t—” Tennyson shakes his head. “I don’t—”
My brother is completely rattled at the thought, so I jump in. “We’re not sure yet,” I say, firmly.
Alexis nods as though he gets it.
“Who does know?” I ask out of genuine curiosity.
“Maya, my—”
“—daughter.” I nod.
“She knows. She knew your father quite well, actually. She was very fond of him, and he her.” He gives us a sad smile.
“We figured,” I say, and Alexis looks confused.
“He was paying her rent,” Tennyson tells him.
“Ah.” Alexis nods again, understanding. “When she fell on hard times, yes, and she didn’t tell me because I am her father and children hide things from their parents…” His eyes look faraway and tender, like he’s recalling something and has forgotten we’re right here—then he remembers, flashing us a quick smile.
“He didn’t tell me he was doing that—how did you—?”
“We found the papers.” Tennyson says.
He sniffs, amused flicking his eyes between us. “You are…thorough.”
“Does Violet know?”
He nods once. “I know she knows of me, but we’ve not met.”
That feels strange to me. “Why not?”
Alexis shrugs. “Your father desperately tried not to complicate things—”
And then I get the giggles. And I shouldn’t, and I’m probably coming off so rude—but, really?
Tennyson tries to suppress a laugh himself; he does so by whacking me in the arm.
I shake my head, apologize without words as I put my smile away.
Alexis does a terrible job at concealing the small smile that appears on his own lips. “I said he tried, not that he succeeded.”
Then his face, I don’t know, it does something funny—his head tilts, almost as though he’s fond of me, but adults are never fond of me.
“He was very proud of you,” he tells me. He’s trying to be kind, but I don’t need platitudes of kindness.
I restrain the sigh that’s trying to escape me, and instead, replace it with the most patient smile I can muster. “I know you love him, and you just lost him, so I’m trying to be respectful, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, I do,” he says, very sure. “He was very proud but afraid of you.”
I pull a face. “Why afraid?”
Alexis gives me an amused, almost paternal look. “You spot lies for a living, and he was living a big one. At least much of the time.”
And then this horrible question bubbles up inside of me, one that’s haunted me for years and years, and I’ve never asked it out loud, but I wonder inside all the time, and I don’t like that I do—I think it’s weak of me—but wounds are persistent with the pain they bring us until they’re healed, and this wound isn’t.
“Do you know why he let Mom send me away?” I ask quietly.
Alexis goes quiet, pausing on the bottom of his front steps as he thinks.
“I think he was afraid you were like him—like us. Affairs are a painful business, even if you love the—”
“She wasn’t cheating with Maryanne’s boyfriend,” Tennyson says quickly, protectively. “He was raping her.” …Perhaps oversharingly.
At that, I hear a quick inhale of breath—shock. Discomfort, maybe? People don’t like the R word. “Your father didn’t kn—”
Tennyson shakes his head. “None of us knew.”
Alexis goes quiet again and thinks—truly thinks, actually—searching for an answer, almost like he’s trying to channel our dad. It’s the most conscious form of parenting I’ve ever seen pointed in my general direction.
“I always felt he allowed you to be sent away because he wanted more for you than what was on offer for you here,” he says eventually, but I glance away because that feels like a cop-out. “He thought you were cheating, remember,” he continues, as though I could forget. “I think that was a constant reminder for him of our own pain that he didn’t want to see.”
I go to speak and Alexis cuts me off.
“He struggled with this. We had many discussions over it. But you thrived in England, no? You became—” He gestures to me. “Had you stayed, you would not have been—and then, the older you grew and the more you actualized into this force you are now, you became a different kind of threat.”
I feel my brows bend as I blink a couple of times. A threat?
“Before, you were a mirror where he saw something painful in and of himself, and then eventually, you became someone who could see him in a way he did not want to be seen.”
I purse my lips. “That is a lot of no-win scenarios for me, isn’t it?”
“For you both,” he says.
I shrug, trying to look indifferent about one of my deepest agonies. “If you say so.”
“I recognize your pain,” Alexis says, putting his hand on my shoulder kindly, and I flick through the pages in my mind’s memory, trying to remember when either of my parents have ever done this to me. “And I do not pretend to understand it, and you are entitled to it, Georgia.” He says my name to make sure I’m listening, but I already am, because truthfully he’s quite compelling. “But for whatever it is worth to you, and I hope it’s worth something—I know he wanted more for you. He just didn’t know how to give it or be it.”
I don’t know how to respond to that, so I resort to my go-to: mildly petulant.
“Lucky me,” I say, and Tennyson—I don’t know why—apologizes on my behalf, says I can be like that sometimes. Alexis dismisses it, saying he has a daughter too.
As he walks us back to the car, Alexis gives me—both of us, I guess, but perhaps arguably me specifically—his number and his email.
“Call, anytime,” he says, looking at Tennyson. “If you have more questions.” Then he looks at me. “Or you just want to talk—I would be very happy to hear from you. And Oliver.” He pauses, briefly. “Is he okay?”
I purse my lips. “I’m not sure.”
He nods, looking solemn again. “If I can be of any help…”
Neither Tennyson nor I know what to say, so I just nod and get into the car. Tennyson shakes his hand because he’s good like that.
And then we drive away.