Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Oh, of course. A lot of creeps and weirdos on the Internet,” she says, her lips twitching up into a smile.

  “I’ve encountered a lot of them,” I say. Then, realizing—“Oh, I hope you don’t think I mean you.”

  “Oh, we’re bang-on the wrong kind of people, true enough.” Michael carefully wipes his hands on his jeans, rocks back on the heels of his sneakers.

  Ashley gently squeezes his arm. “Stop it, Michael. Don’t scare her.”

  I’ve just noticed something else. “You’re English,” I say to Michael.

  “Irish, actually,” he replies. “But I’ve been in the States a long time.”

  “Oh, I love Ireland. I was in Dublin just last year.” Was I? Or was that Scotland? It’s all a blur, sometimes. “Where is your family from?”

  He makes a funny little dismissive gesture. “Small village you wouldn’t have heard of.”

  I lead the way through the grand foyer and into the formal parlor. Ashley’s gaze flicks with disinterest across the objects we pass, as if she is unconcerned about the opulence of her surroundings; but I can see something alert in her eyes. I wonder what Stonehaven looks like to her; I wonder what her own upbringing was like. Probably modest, judging by her dirty tennis shoes and her generic-brand performance fleece. Or is she one of those trustafarian types, whose bohemian appearance belies the size of their pocketbooks? She isn’t gawking, which suggests she’s comfortable with money (a relief, honestly). I can’t quite put my finger on who she might be; and yet every time I glance her way she is smiling at me, which is really the most important thing.

  She rests her fingertips gently atop an inlaid sideboard, some ancient monstrosity that my grandmother always said was the most valuable piece in the house. “So many antiques,” she murmurs.

  “I know, it’s a lot, right? I just inherited the house. Sometimes it feels like living in a museum.” I laugh, as if the house is just a quaint bauble that shouldn’t overwhelm them.

  Ashley spins to look at me. “It’s stunning. You should feel very lucky to live with such beautiful things. What a glorious privilege.” In her voice I hear a rebuke, but she’s still smiling so I’m not sure what to think of the contrast between her words and her face.

  I don’t think anything in this house is beautiful. Valuable yes, but most of it is hideous. Sometimes I dream of living in a minimalist white box with floor-to-ceiling windows and nothing to dust. I try to muster up the proper enthusiasm. “Oh, it’s so true! I don’t even know what half of this stuff is, but I’m afraid to sit on most of it.”

  Michael is hanging back, studying everything with anthropological curiosity. He stops in front of an oil of one of my distant great-aunts, a grande dame in tennis whites, posed with her greyhounds. “You know what, Ash? This house reminds me a bit of the castle. This one in the painting here, she even looks like my great-grandmother Siobhan.”

  This stops me. “Which castle?”

  Ashley and Michael exchange a glance. “Oh, Michael comes from old Irish aristocracy,” Ashley offers. “His family used to have a castle. He hates to talk about it.”

  I turn to him. “Really? Where? Would I know it?”

  “Not unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Ireland’s thirty thousand castles. It’s some moldering old heap in the north. My family sold it when I was a child because it cost too much to keep up.”

  This explains it then; the strange tug that I felt earlier, as if there was some kind of invisible cord tightening between us. He’s from even older money than me! It’s a relief to hear, as if I’ve been wearing a formal dress and might now shrug it off and put on cashmere sweatpants. “Well, then, you must understand what it’s like to live in a place like this.”

  “I certainly do. A curse and a privilege, right?” He’s torn the thoughts straight out of my mind. I feel light-headed. We look at each other, faint smiles of mutual understanding on our faces.

  “Oh, yes, exactly,” I breathe.

  And then Ashley puts a hand on my arm, in that oddly intimate way. Is this what yoga teachers do? Touch a lot? It’s presumptuous, but I think I like it. Her fingers are warm through the velvet of my jacket. She frowns. “Is it really that awful to live here?”

  “Oh really, it’s not so bad.” I don’t want to come off as unappreciative, not to a yoga teacher, for God’s sake; not to a woman whose Facebook photo is captioned Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. (I thought about cribbing this for my own Instagram feed, but what if she looked me up and saw it and knew that I stole it from her? So I used a Helen Keller quote instead.)

  “And you’re living all alone? You don’t get lonely?” Her eyes are dark pools of sympathy; they peel away at the veneer of happiness I thought I was projecting.

  “Well, a little, yes. A lot, sometimes,” I say. “But hopefully not anymore now that you’re here!” I laugh lightly, but this is perhaps a little too close to honesty for comfort. I need to shut myself up, but the words just keep bubbling out of me like water out of a faucet that I can’t quite control.

  I shouldn’t have drunk that wine.

  My eyes keep sliding over to Michael, each time noting another tidbit to add to the portrait I am assembling in my mind. The way his hair curls darkly around his neck, overgrown in a manner that suggests that he has more important things to think about than haircuts. The dry skin of his lips, which hover languorously in a wry curl of a smile. The soft burr of his accent, which wraps itself like a snake around the consonants that drop off his tongue. I could swear he’s making a conscious effort not to look at me, and I tear my own focus back to Ashley instead.

  Ashley doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She runs her finger along the marble edge of a credenza. “All I can think of is the cleaning,” she says. “It must be a full-time job. For three people. You don’t have a live-in staff? Aren’t those servants’ quarters that I saw out there?”

  “Just a housekeeper, she comes once a week. But she doesn’t clean all of it, just the rooms I’m using, for now. I’m just letting the whole third floor go, and the outbuildings—no one’s lived in them for years. Half the bedrooms are shut up, too. Honestly, why bother dusting my great-great-grandfather’s hunting trophies? Creepy old relics that no one wants, and I’m supposed to care for them forever just because a relative I never met once shot a bear.” Am I talking too much? I think I’m talking too much, but they are gaping at me as if intrigued, so I just keep going. Stonehaven is freezing and yet I’m so hot that I can feel the sweat trickling under my arms and dripping down the sides of my T-shirt. “That kind of stuff just has to go. Maybe I’ll just give it all away to charity!! Use it to feed hungry children!”

  And then we are in the kitchen, where I have pulled out one of my mother’s favorite afternoon tea services and placed it on the table by the window. It makes for a pretty tableau (in fact, I have already popped a photo of it up on Instagram: Tea for three #tradition #soelegant), and yet I wonder if it was overkill: the flowers, the fancy china, food enough for a small army. But we sit without ceremony, and then Ashley is laughing with pleasure as she bites into a scone, and Michael is turning my mother’s teacup in his hand, studying the mark on the bottom with interest. They are handsy with each other and chatty and familiar with me, and I don’t even have to think about how to keep the conversation rolling because they are doing all the work themselves.

  I can feel Stonehaven filling up with life, like the wine in my cup (which Michael has slowly, carefully filled to the brim); and as I sip at it and laugh at their jokes I feel the desperation ebbing away from me.

  I am not alone I am not alone I am not alone anymore, I think, the words thrumming along with the pulse of my racing heart.

  But then, with a clatter of luggage and a blast of cold air, they are off to get settled in at the caretaker’s cottage and suddenly I am alone again. I have failed to make a plan wi
th them. I should have invited them to dinner with me! I should have invited them to go hiking! A Tahoe tour, a movie night— Why did I just let them disappear off into the night, leaving me here by myself? Why didn’t they invite me? (So much for my light shining from within.)

  When they are gone, I spend three hours looking at photos of puppies on Instagram and weep.

  12.

  THERE ARE WINNERS AND losers in life, and not a lot of space for anything else in between. I grew up secure in the knowledge that I had been born on the right side of that equation. I was a Liebling. That meant that I had been conferred with certain advantages, and while there would always be those who would want to take that away from me, I started from a high enough perch that it felt there wasn’t any danger of tumbling all the way down.

  Right from the very beginning, right from my very inception, I was lucky, because I never should have existed. Maman had been informed by her doctor, mid-pregnancy, that she suffered from severe preeclampsia, putting both her and me at high risk of mortality. He advised my parents not to bring me to term—tossed around phrases like hemodynamic instability and ethical termination. He suggested abortion.

  My mother refused. She forged ahead, through all forty weeks, and delivered me anyway. She bled so much during delivery that they thought she was a goner. When she finally came out of her coma in the ICU, the doctor told her it was the stupidest decision he’d ever seen a woman make.

  “I would do it again, in a heartbeat,” she used to tell me, as she swept me up in a perfumed hug. “I would do it again, because you were worth dying for.”

  Maman loved me that much.

  My brother, Benny, was born via a surrogate three years later. So I was the only of her two children that came directly from my mother’s womb, and although she insisted that this meant nothing to her—that we were both “her babies”—I could always feel that she loved me more. I was her golden girl, the child that could turn her mood from darkness to light. (Your smile is my sunshine, she would say.) Benny couldn’t do that. He was always retreating to his bedroom, his emotional state as heavy and gray as the fog that hung over the Bay. I think Benny reminded my mother too much of the things she hated about herself, as if he somehow reflected and amplified all of her own flaws.

  Maman came from an old French family; one that came to the States for the Gold Rush but had lost most of its fortune in the intervening years. It was the Lieblings who had the real money, riding the real estate tide that built California. My mother met my father—the eldest of three brothers, and a man eighteen years her senior—at her own debutante ball in 1978. There’s a photo of them dancing in the ballroom of the St. Francis, my father towering over my mother, his feet swallowed up by the cotton-candy swirl of her skirts. (Pale rose Zandra Rhodes: Maman always did have exquisite taste.)

  There’s always an implicit negotiation in marriage, right? I assume, in their case, it was his riches and power in exchange for her beauty and youth—but they also loved each other, I know they did. You can tell by the way they are looking at each other in that photo, the delight on my mother’s face as she looks up to meet my father’s intensely protective gaze. Something changed along the way, though. By the time Benny and I were in high school, they’d started living separate lives: my father in a glassed-in Financial District office, alongside the brothers and cousins that made up the Liebling Group’s board; my mother in the parlor of our mansion, holding court with her socialite friends.

  I grew up in San Francisco, a place where everyone knew who the Lieblings were. My family’s name was in Fortune, we had a street named after us in the Marina District and owned one of the oldest houses in Pacific Heights (Italianate, quite stately, though not as big as Danielle Steel’s). When my last name came up in conversation I could see how everything shifted. How people tilted in toward me, suddenly that much more attentive, as if hoping that some of what I had might rub off on them. Smarts mean a lot in the world, and good looks mean even more—my mother, with her closet of couture and her endless low-carb diets, had taught me that much—but money and power are, of course, the most important of all.

  That was the lesson I took away from my father.

  I remember visiting my father on the top floor of the Liebling Group office tower, on Market Street near the Ferry Building, when I was still small. He perched me on one knee and my brother on the other, and spun in his chair so that we were facing out the wall of windows. It was a clear, windy day, and out on the chop of the Bay the sailboats flew south toward the salty flats of the Peninsula. But my father wasn’t interested in what was happening on the water. “Look at this,” he said, and gently pressed our foreheads against the glass so that we could gaze straight down the side of the building. Fifty-two stories below, I could see people scurrying along the sidewalks, clots of tiny black specks, like iron filings being drawn along by an invisible magnet.

  I was dizzy with vertigo. “It’s a long way down,” I said.

  “It is.” He sounded pleased to hear this.

  “Where is everyone going?”

  “The vast majority? Nowhere important. Just hamsters spinning on their wheels, never quite getting ahead. And that is the great tragedy of existence.” I looked up at him, puzzled and concerned. He kissed the top of my head. “Don’t worry. That will never be a problem for you, cupcake.”

  Benny squirmed and whined, more interested in my father’s fountain pens than the life lesson that was being conveyed. I felt sorry for all those little ants down there; a faint tug of guilt that circumstance had placed them there, waiting for someone to step on them like bugs. But I also knew what our father was trying to tell us. We belonged up here, Benny and I; we were safe with him in the heights.

  Oh, Daddy. I trusted him so much. His bulk was the bulwark that defended us all against life’s vicissitudes. No matter how much Benny or I lost control—no matter what self-destructive whims I might obey (Dropping out of Princeton! Financing indie movies! Modeling!)—he was the person who reeled us back inside the gates of his protectorate before it was too late. And he always did; until suddenly, at the most critical moment, he couldn’t.

  They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gifts coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four-minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just an innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.

  I am a Liebling. I inherited the very best circumstances of all.

  And yet, circumstances can change. The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you’re not quite sure if you’ll ever find your way back to the path you were on.

  For me, it’s been twelve years, and I’m still trying to find my way back.

  * * *

  —

  Growing up, I knew what was expected of me. Private school and debate club and tennis team, boyfriends whose last names graced buildings in downtown San Francisco, grades that were good enough (but—let’s be frank—boosted just a tad by Daddy’s generous donations to my schools). It’s true that I struggled occasionally with what my parents called “impulse control”—like the time I borrowed Maman’s Maserati, got drunk, and crashed it, or the time I threw my tennis racket at an unfair judge at the junior nationals. Still, for the most part, I knew how to play my role and hit those benchmarks. Nothing I did couldn’t be fixed with a dimple, a smile, and a check.

  My brother was the one who was irreparable. By the time I was in high school, it had grown clear that Benny was—as Maman delicately put it—“troubled.” When he was eleven, my mother found a notebook hidden under his bed with elaborately drawn pictures of men be
ing disemboweled by dragons and their faces melting off, so she sent him off to a psychiatrist. He flunked all his classes, scribbled on his locker, was bullied by his schoolmates. At twelve, they put him on ADHD medication, then antidepressants. At fifteen, he got kicked out of school for giving his meds to his classmates.

  I was in my senior year of high school then, a month away from graduation, already sleeping in a Princeton T-shirt. (Legacy, bien sûr.) The night that Benny got expelled for passing out his Ritalin at school, I could hear my parents shrieking at each other in the music room downstairs—a room they sometimes picked for their fights because it was supposedly soundproofed, without realizing that their voices actually carried through the mansion’s heating ducts. Lately, they’d been shrieking a lot.

  “Maybe if you were ever here he wouldn’t feel the need to do stupid, reckless things in order to get your attention….”

  “Maybe if you weren’t such a mess yourself you would have noticed that something was wrong with him before it got to this point.”

  “Don’t you dare make this about me!”

  “Of course it’s about you. He’s just like you, Judith. How do you expect him to get his shit together when you refuse to do it yourself?”

  “Oh that’s rich, coming from you….You don’t even want me to start on your shit! Your addictions are going to destroy us all. Women and cards and who knows what else you’re hiding from me.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Judith, you’ve got to stop letting your imagination get away from you. How many times do I have to tell you that it’s all in your head? You are paranoid, it’s part of your illness.”

  I crept down the hall and knocked on Benny’s door and didn’t wait for him to answer before I slipped inside. He was lying on the floor in the exact center of the area rug, arms and legs spread-eagled so that he looked like a pale, scrawny version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. My brother hadn’t slipped comfortably into adolescence; it was as if his growing body had outstripped the child that he still was, and left him rattling loose inside this strange, oversized vessel. He lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling.