Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Stonehaven changed everything for me. It gave me something to long for, and also something to resent. It demonstrated for me the size of the abyss between my life and that of the people who ran the world. It awoke an interest in beauty that still stays with me; it was why, when I had to choose a college major, I checked the box next to art history rather than something more practical like economics or engineering. It awakened in me a rage that I haven’t quite managed to rid myself of, all these years later.

  Nothing about the interior has changed since I was last here. Apparently no one has attempted to update the décor in the intervening years, and the mansion feels frozen in time. The same polished sideboard sits in the foyer, displaying a pair of Delft baluster vases; the same hand-painted rose-print wallpaper hangs in the sitting room, now slightly yellow with age; the same moon-faced grandfather clock ticks away the minutes on the landing. Portraits of the Liebling ancestors still gaze sternly down from the walls.

  In my memories, Stonehaven is enormous, like a castle from a fairy tale; and yet as I stand in the foyer for the first time in twelve years, I realize that it isn’t nearly as big as I’ve remembered it being. It’s impressive, certainly, but the past few years in Los Angeles’s mansions have spoiled me. The rich these days prefer glass, unimpeded views, a bare minimum of confining walls, the vast empty acreage itself being the real luxury. Stonehaven is from another era. It is warren-like, its rooms built to conceal the scurrying of servants and polishing of silver and smoking of cigars. The house has a dark, claustrophobic quality; the rooms are cluttered with more than a century’s worth of furniture and objets d’art, the remnants of five generations of Lieblings with divergent tastes. Other than the bones of the great house itself, everything feels mismatched, unconsidered.

  And yet. The house is imposing in a way that no modernist goliath could ever be. It feels alive, like it has a heartbeat of its own, secrets mortared in with the stones.

  As I stand there in the foyer for the first time in twelve years, I feel like I am fifteen again. A nobody, from nowhere, with nothing. I am stunned silent. Vanessa is babbling on about the history of the house while Lachlan circles the edges of the room, peeking through the doorways to scrutinize the sitting room and the formal parlor. I know what he’s doing: Looking for a likely spot for a hidden safe. Behind a painting, probably, or inside a closet, maybe set into the floor under a rug.

  As for me, I gaze at the beautiful things around us, ones that I recall from all those years ago, and make a mental inventory. Those Delft chinoiserie jars, gaudy objects that I remember studying as a kid while listening to Benny’s tirade about robber barons—the pair would go for $25,000. I hadn’t known that back then, but I certainly know it now. That grandfather clock? I’ll need to look closer, but I suspect it is an eighteenth-century French piece, and worth at least a hundred thousand.

  Lachlan is standing in front of a painting of some stuffy old matron with fussy dogs. “You know what, Ash? This house reminds me a bit of the castle,” he begins, just like we practiced in the car on the way up the mountain. This is where I’m supposed to casually let it drop that “Michael” is “Irish aristocracy”; but before I’ve even gotten my line out, Vanessa has already seized on Lachlan’s words.

  “Which castle?” She is suddenly alert and straining with excitement, like a trout thrashing at the line.

  Lachlan offers his vague enough answer. (We’ve done our research: There are, in fact, a dozen or so castles owned by O’Briens.) Vanessa’s entire body seems to relax as she leans toward him, relief naked on her face: “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?” Lachlan’s eyes flick over to me, a smug little smile on his face: This is going to be easy.

  “Oh yes, exactly,” she sighs, and I want to smack her. A curse? To be given all this, with zero effort of your own; to own all these glorious treasures that no one else gets to see—and call it a curse? She is privilege, and only privilege. How dare she.

  “Is it really that awful to live here?” I prod. I want to hear her whine some more, to bolster my hatred of her. It will make this so much easier. But something about the expression on my face gives her pause. She blinks, her face stuttering with alarm.

  “Oh really, it’s not so bad,” she murmurs.

  Lachlan is giving me a look of death over Vanessa’s shoulder. I realize that I am coming off as unsympathetic, even judgmental, not exactly Ashley-like. I soften my tone, blink hard so that my eyes mist over with something approaching empathy. “And you’re living all alone? You don’t get lonely?”

  “Well, a little, yes. A lot, sometimes. But hopefully not anymore now that you’re here!” Vanessa laughs a little too hard, a frantic high note that vibrates the vases on the table. She glances over to see if I’ve noticed this, with a look of neediness so obvious that it’s like she’s just flipped the switch on a neon sign. She hates being here by herself, I suddenly understand. She’s lonely, yes, but that’s only part of it. Is it possible that she loathes this place? Are Lachlan and I here to frighten off the ghosts of her past?

  Despite myself, I wonder what they might be.

  * * *

  —

  The kitchen stretches along the left rear of the house, a sprawling room designed during the era of cooks and kitchen maids and mistresses who never entered the kitchen. The years have clearly seen some attempt to turn it into a more modern kitchen—the cooking fireplace now houses a decorative arrangement of white birch logs and a Viking stove has been installed against one wall. A kitchen island the size of a boat anchors the room, its wooden top appealingly nicked and stained with age. Gleaming copper pots hang from a rack over the center island, polished to a shine. But all the counter surfaces are bare, as if emptied and staged for a real estate showing, and it’s hard to imagine anyone cooking in that enormous space, let alone whipping up meals for one on that eight-burner stove.

  A long breakfast table has been pushed along the wall below a row of picture windows that overlook the lake. This is set with an elaborate spread: plates of pastries and cookies, a cluster of bone china teacups, an embossed tea service in polished silver, a crystal carafe of wine, freshly cut flowers. It’s all so pretentious, so ludicrously over-the-top, that it almost feels like a weapon, intended to make us feel small before her.

  Lachlan catches my eye and raises an eyebrow. La-di-da.

  “I know, I went a little overboard, but I couldn’t help myself, but it makes no sense to just let this stuff get dusty,” Vanessa says as she herds us toward the table. She laughs nervously, and picks up a teacup, turning it in her hands. The porcelain is so thin it’s nearly translucent, painted around the edges with a decorative motif of a bird. A warbler or a sparrow or a starling— Who am I kidding, I know nothing about birds. “This was my mother’s favorite china, she always insisted that we use it every day instead of saving it for special occasions.” Her eyebrows shoot upward in sudden alarm. “Oh, but I don’t mean to give you the impression that you’re not a special occasion! Anyway, half of it is gone at this point because we broke it. I have wine, too, I wasn’t sure if you drink, so just let me know which you’d prefer.”

  She is twittering like a bird on speed and I just want to tell her to stop it. I am starting to wonder if she isn’t a little bit…unhinged.

  “I’ll have wine,” I say.

  She is visibly relieved. “Oh good, me, too.”

  Lachlan is standing at the table, just staring out the windows because he can finally see it properly: the lake, spreading out before us. The rain clouds are clearing and the last of the setting sun is leaking through them, with shafts of pale light illuminating the surface of the lake below. The water is steel gray and jagged—not the serene dark blue you find on the postcards for sale in Tahoe City, but something darker and more ominous. I know the lake
well so I am prepared for its cold, imposing beauty, but Lachlan is momentarily riveted by the sight. I wonder whether he had been expecting something smaller, something rinky-dink and benign: pleasure boats and fishing docks and lifeguards playing reggae.

  “Have you ever been to Tahoe before?” Vanessa is still cradling the teacup in her palm, as if it’s a small pet.

  I sit down at the table and reach for a scone, to avoid meeting her eyes. “Never.”

  “Oh, really? Well, I guess it’s not very convenient to Seattle. That’s where you’re from, right?”

  “Portland, actually.”

  She shakes her head, as if Portland and Seattle might as well be the same place for the amount of appeal each holds for her. “So the thing about Tahoe…” she continues. “Most people come in the summer. Or for ski holidays. This time of year, it’s pretty quiet. I have to warn you that there’s not a whole lot to do, really, unless you’re into hiking and mountain biking.” She seems to be relaxing a little, and her voice starts to develop a patrician little drawl, her words growing more arch. “I hope you weren’t expecting something a little more lively. And as for the restaurant situation—this is the land of burgers and zucchini fries.” The expression of revulsion on her face makes me wonder how she is surviving without her usual diet of caviar and bone broth garnished with twenty-four-carat gold leaf. Maybe this explains why she is so thin.

  “We came especially for the quiet,” Lachlan says as he sits down next to me. “I’m on sabbatical from my teaching job so I can work on a book. So my idea of heaven is a little room with a beautiful view and no one around to bother me while I write.” He laughs. “Except for Ashley, of course. Because she never bothers me. And besides, Ash is a beautiful view.”

  I am surprised the treacle in his voice isn’t sending Vanessa into diabetic shock. “He says that now, but ask him again in the morning before I’ve had my coffee.”

  Lachlan reaches for my hand and I stroke his forearm with my fingers. Such a happy couple, such a well-adjusted couple, so supportive of each other. We’ve inhabited similar roles, on previous jobs, and I can’t say I mind it, my arm’s-length lover suddenly behaving like a model boyfriend. A thread of comforting conventionality in this bizarrely unconventional life I’ve come to lead. I look at Lachlan and see the mirth in his face and match it with my own, and for a moment, in the midst of our grift, I feel a lift of elation that we are in this together, the heady frisson that comes with precision teamwork. Maybe this is a strange kind of attachment, but it’s something we both understand. Vanessa is watching us smile at each other, and I wonder what she sees.

  “So, Michael, you’re a writer!” She perches on a chair across from us. “I love to read. I just finished Anna Karenina! What do you write?”

  Lachlan and I have gone around and around on this one for a long time. It was important, I thought, to actually have a portfolio of pages ready; but ones that sound off-putting and obscure, so that she won’t ask to read them. Lachlan scoffed at my efforts. “The woman doesn’t read anything other than the labels on her clothes. Do you really think she’s going to ask to see pages of my manuscript?”

  Now he fiddles with his napkin, frowns. “Oh, a little poetry here and there. And I’m working on a novel. Kind of an experimental thing, you know, visceral realism, in the vein of Bolaño.” He delivers this convincingly enough, although I know he’d never heard of Roberto Bolaño before I fed the name to him two days earlier.

  Her smile tightens. “Oh. Wow. I don’t even know what those words mean.” She begins to worry the edge of her cuff again, picking threads loose with her fingernails. I wonder if the pretension was a mistake. I’ve learned over the past few years that rich people believe that their wealth is the result of some intellectual or moral superiority; when you pop that bubble and suggest that they might not be so smart or special after all, you’re headed for trouble. Better to reassure them of their position at the top of the chain by showing the proper deference.

  I lean across the table toward her. “Want to know a secret? I don’t either, and I’ve been listening to him talk about this book all year.” It hurts a little, to pretend that I’m so dim.

  She laughs. Equilibrium settles across her face again. “And you’re a yoga instructor? I mean, I can tell. You look so…fit.”

  I am not particularly fit, actually; it’s amazing what the power of suggestion will do. “Well, yes. But I believe that yoga is really more about the balance of the mind, not just the balance of the body.”

  If she realizes that I’m just regurgitating clichés skimmed from self-help websites, she doesn’t show it. “I love that,” she gushes. “Maybe you can give me a private lesson while you’re here. I’d pay you, of course. What do you charge?”

  How like the rich to assume that everyone around them is for sale. I wave away the suggestion. “Oh, please. It would be my pleasure. Really, I’m grateful for any opportunity to share my practice.” I lean in conspiratorially. “That’s how Michael and I met, actually. He came in for one of my classes.”

  “It turns out I wasn’t that into yoga after all. But I was very into the teacher.” Another line that Lachlan workshopped with me on the drive up.

  Vanessa laughs as Lachlan picks up the wine and waves it in her general direction. She looks around and murmurs, “Oh damn, I forgot wineglasses.”

  “Your mother said to use the teacups, right?”

  She hesitates for just a second, and holds her teacup out. He pours in a splash of red wine, and then another, and another, until the cup is perilously close to brimming over and spilling onto her jeans. She waits, patiently, for him to stop, the saucer quivering in her hand, her eyes fixed on the rising liquid. A neat turning of the tables by my Lachlan. He stops a millimeter shy of the brim and smiles at her.

  “Do you take sugar?”

  She stares at him for a minute and then laughs, a startling, coquettish trill; tosses her hair just so, as if a camera might be trained on her. “Do I look like a two-lumps kind of girl?” Her chest rises a bit, her eyes open theatrically wide, as if preparing herself for a photo. This is the Vanessa from V-Life, I think: performative, moving from moment to moment without much consideration of the space in between.

  Lachlan glances at me and then back at her. It is obvious to both of us what she is looking for; she wants a like right about now, and even if there is no convenient heart emoji to click on, there are other ways to give her the approval she seeks. “Two lumps at the least,” Lachlan says, his eyes narrowing, the faintest hint of a dimple visible at the edge of his smile. “At the very least.”

  She blushes then, a pink flush that rises up her neck in a manner so familiar that I am stopped cold. Maybe it is this sweetly childish reaction, or maybe it’s the wolfish expression on Lachlan’s face, but I am suddenly ill at ease. He is so cool, Lachlan is; why do I feel so hot? This woman is my enemy, not his. I’m the one who should be stiffened with the steel of righteous conviction. But her flush, it reminds me so much of Benny—of the way he flushed when he looked at me, puppy love written in pink across his chest.

  But the woman before me is not Benny. She’s not in love with me, just herself. She’s a privileged brat, a Liebling, a member of the family that filled my pockets with poison and set me along the path that led me here. It’s her fault, really, that I’m here at all.

  And so I smile innocently, lift the cup of wine to my lips, and drain it in one gulp.

  17.

  THE CARETAKER’S COTTAGE STILL nestles in the pines on the edge of the property, on a bluff over the lake, surrounded by ferns. We follow Vanessa, now tipsy, down the dark path (although, of course, I could have walked this way blindfolded) and then watch politely as she turns on the lights and shows us how to operate the heater. That done, she remains standing in the cottage’s living room for an awkward minute, as if waiting for an invitation.

  “We
ll,” she says finally. “I’ll let you get settled.”

  Once she is gone, Lachlan turns to survey the room. “Well,” he says, “pretty posh accommodations for the caretaker.”

  The cottage is cramped, and smells slightly like must, but this is mitigated by the fire that someone (Vanessa’s housekeeper, presumably) has set in the stone fireplace. There is a bottle of wine sitting alongside a bowl of waxed apples on a table in the dining nook, and fresh flowers on the mantel above the fireplace. Personal touches designed to disguise the fact that the cottage is clearly a depository for furniture that has been ejected from the main house over the years. The cottage, I now see, is a glorified storage facility for five generations of antiques collectors. In the living room, an embroidered silk couch from the 1980s is paired with Craftsman Stickley chairs, and framed by a Pennsylvania Dutch sideboard and an Art Deco secretary. In the dining nook sits a mahogany table with claw feet that is far too large for the space; its chairs bump up against the walls. Dusty paintings hang on the walls, a collection of crystal bowls are piled on the bookshelves, and two giant porcelain urns (yet more chinoiserie) flank the fireplace. And yet something about this ad hoc collection makes me smile: Nothing is contrived, just lost objects seeking attention and love.

  I walk through the cottage, examining furniture, registering the memories that rise as I do. There is the sofa where Benny and I used to lie on opposite ends with our bare feet pressed up against each other as we drew and studied. There is the kitchen stove, an old Wedgewood, where we would roast marshmallows over the burners using monogrammed silver forks, and then shove the scalding sugar into our mouths. There is the garnet-colored crystal bowl that we used as an ashtray, still black with pot residue.