Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Do I care?

  “You’re awfully quiet, yeah?” He pulls back to study my face. “Look, I know what we did is kind of crazy, but I don’t regret it. Do you?”

  I shake my head, suddenly shy. “Of course not. But shouldn’t we maybe talk? About what it all means.”

  “It means what we want it to mean. We figure it out as we go.” His eyes are such a clear blue, so translucent, there is nothing to hide behind as he gazes down at me with an expression that strips me bare. He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers lines of his poetry, with that Irish burr that vibrates something deep in my bones: “We shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life.”

  And I think to myself: Does it matter, really, who asked who? The outcome is the same: That I won’t ever be alone again. I am thirty-two years old and I have a husband. I am about to build a whole new family again; and it didn’t happen at all in the way I imagined, but here I am, regardless. Loved, for better or worse. Something wild flutters inside me, like doves set suddenly free, until I think I might burst.

  And I think of my friends back in New York City and wonder what they’ll say when they discover that I married a scholar and a writer, a poet, and from an old aristocratic Irish family to boot. A man I’ve known only eighteen—no, nineteen!—days. How surprised they’ll be! (Oh, Saskia: Take that for an unexpected narrative line.) Most of all, I think of Victor, with a pleasant throb of vindictiveness. You thought I was shallow and predictable; well, look at me now.

  Outside, the snow is falling again, veiling the pines that I can see through the bedroom windows. Stonehaven is cold and silent, except for us in our velvet-lined room on the second floor. Just a few weeks ago, this place was a tomb. Now, with Michael in bed beside me, it feels like the beginning of a new life. I think that maybe I can be happy here, after all. I’m happy already!

  Michael’s arms slide around me and he pulls me into his furred chest and I settle there, waiting until the throbbing in my brain matches the slow, calm beat of his heart. His lips on my forehead, his hands in my hair, as if all of me now belongs to him. Which—I do, I do, I do.

  “I love you,” I say, and I mean it.

  * * *

  —

  I wake up a wife, and I practically overflow with joy.

  * * *

  —

  There’s something foreign and heavy weighing down my left ring finger. When I lift my hand to look, I see an antique engagement ring, diamond baguettes surrounding a plush emerald. Five carats, maybe; a Deco design; overly ornate in the way of antiques. The ring droops on my finger and I use the tip of my pinkie to push it back and forth so that the stones catch the light. It’s pretty, even if it’s fussier than something I would have picked out myself. Another memory that rises up from the murk of the previous evening: The two of us stumbling into my father’s study with a bottle of Don Julio in hand, Michael weaving slightly behind me as I open the safe and pull out a ring that I’d stashed there in the dark. Michael kneeling in front of me and slipping it on my finger. Or maybe he didn’t kneel at all; maybe he just slipped it on while gazing deeply into my eyes.

  Or maybe I put it on myself, without even asking his permission. It’s possible.

  Michael closes his hand over mine. “When I have a chance, I’ll get you a new ring, one without any baggage. We’ll go down to San Francisco and find a jeweler and get one made. As big as you like. Ten carats, twenty.”

  And I remember first seeing this ring in her hand, the way she clutched at it as if it were a rope that was going to tow her up and out of her seedy little life. It clearly meant so much to her, and now it’s mine. So even though, by Liebling family standards, it’s a fairly modest ring, I know that this is the ring that I want. Maman would’ve approved of what it symbolizes.

  “It’s your family heirloom and I love it. It doesn’t matter to me if she had it first.” Then I catch on the word that he just used—baggage—and reconsider. “As long as it doesn’t remind you too much of…her?” I can’t make myself say her name. I’m not even sure which name I would use.

  I study Michael’s face for grief or regret, but what’s there is inscrutable. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe it’s resignation. Maybe it’s just love. He leans in and kisses me, so hard it’s almost painful.

  “Not a bit,” he murmurs.

  * * *

  —

  I wake up a wife, and I think: I won.

  25.

  ASHLEY FELT SO REAL to me, for a moment there. That morning when we sat in the library, I believed in the empathy in her eyes, the way she held my hand while I cried, how she teared up about her own father’s death. When I clutched at her on the couch—Tell me what it’s like to be a healer!—she looked me straight in the eyes and said she slept well at night. She hugged me! She assured me that we were friends.

  What a fake. What a liar.

  And oh! The irony that I felt so intimidated by her. Her cool detachment; her serene poise; the way she seemed to float around Stonehaven, above it all, occasionally gracing me with that knowing smile. That morning, after I wept on her shoulder about Daddy and Maman, I actually felt embarrassed! I stood at the window and watched her meander back down to the caretaker’s cottage, her yoga mat tucked under her arm, and convinced myself that I’d somehow screwed it all up. Because I’d noticed the way she hesitated to embrace me in the hall. And so, as she walked away, I convinced myself that she was repulsed by my messiness, my neediness, by the way I’d bragged about my Instagram fame.

  I let myself believe she was better than me.

  What a fool.

  * * *

  —

  For a few days after our conversation in the library, I slunk around Stonehaven, acutely conscious of Michael and Ashley down the hill in the cottage, too self-conscious to go knock on their door. Certain that I’d screwed everything up. Barely climbing out of bed, the black funk having once again descended with its curtain of self-loathing. Occasionally, I’d spy Ashley doing her yoga out on the lawn, or the pair of them walking the grounds—bundled up in their parkas, bumping up against each other as they walked—and I’d long to go out to them.

  I forced myself to stay inside, my skin breaking out in anxious hives that I scratched at until they were bloody and raw.

  You’ll know they genuinely like you if they come to you, I told myself.

  But they didn’t.

  On their fourth day in the cottage—two days since Ashley and I had talked—I lay in bed for most of the morning, watching the shadows move across the room as the sun crossed overhead. I could see myself reflected in the mirror on the front of the giant armoire that hulked on the other side of the room and the sight of myself (a greasy-haired wraith, so pale and weak that I might as well just disappear) made me want to break something; so eventually I got up and threw open the armoire doors just to make the damn mirrors go away.

  And oh! My mother’s sweaters. I’d forgotten they were still there, beautiful pastel stacks of cashmere folded into neat rectangles. (Lourdes had a way with laundry; we did love her so.) My father had never cleaned out the closets in Stonehaven and I hadn’t ever bothered to unpack myself and so there they still were, the last vestiges of Maman, filling the ancient armoire. I touched one: thin and soft, the very essence of her.

  I pulled a pale pink angora cardigan down from a shelf and pressed it hopefully to my nose; but it didn’t smell like her perfume anymore. It smelled of must. And when I unfolded it there were moth holes on the front and a stain around the neck, which Maman would never have tolerated. A pang of frustration: It was just a shabby bit of cashmere after all. I tossed the first sweater to the floor and grabbed another—this one a faded blue, and in no better shape—and then another, and then when I reached for the next one something hard and square came flying out with it.

  I leaned down and picked it up:
It was a journal, bound in red leather, edged in gold.

  A diary. How did I never know that my mother kept a diary? I opened it to the first page, my heart kicking to life at the sight of my mother’s finishing-school cursive, so neat and symmetrical. (“You can tell an educated woman by the beauty of her hand,” she used to tell me. But of course, that was before computers made handwriting irrelevant.) The first diary entry was dated August 12, just after they’d moved into Stonehaven for Benny’s junior year.

  This estate is my albatross. William wants me to see it as an opportunity but dear God, all I see is work. But we’re here for Benny and honestly I couldn’t bear how everyone in San Francisco was starting to look at us anyway—everyone speculating about his problems behind our back, practically gleeful to see us suffering. So I will smile and behave like a good little wife even though inside I’m screaming that this place is going to be the death of me.

  I flipped quickly through the pages. Some entries were short and dutiful, and others were rambling and long, and yet more seemed to end mid-thought, as if she was still unsure about committing them to paper. Benny’s grades are improving at the Academy but he is still so uninterested in anything but those ghoulish comic books and I keep wondering if—. Or: I left three messages with William’s new secretary and he hasn’t called me back so either he’s screwing the secretary and she’s trying to pull a power move on me or else he’s avoiding me for other reasons which means—.

  I sank, wobbly, to the floor, coming to rest in a nest of abandoned sweaters, my dead mother’s presence all around me. I knew I shouldn’t be reading her diary. Wasn’t this a violation of her trust, her privacy? But of course, I couldn’t stop myself. I flipped through the pages, my eyes occasionally seizing on my own name. Vanessa seems to be doing well at Princeton, but of course we knew she would (I liked this!) and Vanessa is home for the holidays, which is wonderful, but I can’t help noticing that she’s so insecure and desperate for validation—from me and her father and also the world at large (this I liked less) and I wish Vanessa would visit us more often but I guess that’s what happens when they go off to college; they eventually forget you. (Oh, the spasm of guilt at this!)

  Mostly, though, the diary was about Benny and my father and herself.

  Benny has started sneaking around with this girl, her name is Nina Ross and she’s polite enough but strange and not quality. Single mother (a cocktail waitress in the casinos, for God’s sake) and no father in sight. (I think he might be Mexican?) She dresses like one of those kids who shot up that school in Colorado and honestly I am worried. We didn’t uproot our lives and move up here so that Benny could fall in with a bad influence. I do not understand why he is drawn to her of all people, but I can’t help feeling like it’s a rebuke of me, like he wants to thumb his nose at my concern for him. So he sits out in that cottage with her for hours every afternoon and I’m honestly afraid to go knock on the door and see what they’re doing because I don’t think I could bear to have to tell William if it’s something bad, because he’ll blame me for everything. Benny’s failures are my failures, never his. It’s terribly unfair but of course I’m used to it because my whole marriage is that way.

  A few pages later:

  The doctor prescribed me Depakote for my mood swings but I took it and I gained three pounds in two weeks so I’m throwing the rest in the trash. Anyways most days I am fine except for the ones when I just want to erase myself from the world. So maybe I should be taking the pills on those days, or as an example to Benny—to be a good mother to him!—but I’m afraid getting fat might also make me feel depressed; so what’s the point? Anyway William thinks I’m taking them and I just keep telling him that I’m fine because that’s what he wants to believe and God knows we are used to pretending.

  And later:

  I thought I smelled pot on Benny’s clothes the other day and so I looked in his room when he was at school and there was a baggie of marijuana under his bed and I don’t know what to do because the drugs are so bad for his condition, that’s what the doctors say, and I want to absolutely kill that Nina girl for feeding drugs to him (because God knows that must be where he got it). This is not what he needs, not right now when he seemed to finally be doing so much better. I told Benny he is not allowed to see Nina anymore and he told me he hates me and now he’s not talking to me, which hurts so much but I can bear it because it’s for his own health even if he doesn’t see that now.

  After that, a gap of three months—when she was at the spa in Malibu, presumably—and then just two more entries. First, a short, terrible one:

  Benny is back from Italy and he is not well and I think it might be too late to fix it.

  And finally (oh, I knew I shouldn’t read it, not this entry, but I couldn’t stop myself) an even more terrible long one:

  As if life couldn’t get any more unbearable it turns out that William has been having an affair. An envelope arrived at Stonehaven addressed to him and when I saw that it was a woman’s handwriting I knew. It’s not the first time, of course. So I opened it and it’s a blackmail letter from some woman saying if we don’t pay her a half-million dollars she will expose him (us!) to the tabloids. And she’s included some ghastly photos of the two of them, naked, doing things—I ran to the sink and vomited as soon as I saw them. The worst of it is I figured out who the woman is—it’s the horrible mother of that horrible girl who Benny was palling around with last spring. Lily Ross, a cocktail waitress at one of the casinos where William has been frittering away our fortune. How could William be so stupid to get involved with a scam artist like that?? Meanwhile Benny is still in a downward spiral because of the druggie daughter and I want to kill them both, mother and daughter. The two of them are singlehandedly RUINING US and I don’t understand why they have it in for the Lieblings. William isn’t even here to clean up the mess so it’s all on me, and anyway there’s nothing I can do because we don’t have that kind of cash sitting around to pay the blackmail because William’s been so reckless. I am so humiliated. What has been the point of all this? Coming up here and pretending things can be fixed when in fact it’s all so broken, more broken now than ever. If those photos end up in the papers—it will kill me, I’ll be the laughingstock of the West Coast, of the whole country. I might as well end it all before Lily Ross does it for me because God knows I am not doing any good here and even Vanessa and Benny are better off without me.

  And then—nothing.

  I couldn’t breathe. I closed the diary and threw it away from me, hands shaking. Lily Ross. Not some San Francisco trophy wife after all, but a local cocktail waitress—a con woman? The mother of Benny’s amour fou? And—my God, blackmail. No wonder my mother had been so distraught. Public exposure was one thing my mother could not handle: the whole world knowing how messy her marriage really was, how cheap the tart was who took her husband away. Yes, she’d been unstable—but this, this, would of course have sent her over the edge. Lily Ross might as well have pushed her right off the Judybird.

  I thought of my father’s words: We’re Lieblings. No one gets to see what’s in our basement and no one ever should; there are wolves out there, waiting to drag us down at the first sign of weakness. Apparently he’d already met the wolves by then, and they were named Lily and Nina Ross.

  I tried to remember the faces of the mother and daughter that I’d met in the café that day but they’d already blurred out of focus; I remembered only the dark dour smear of the daughter, the cheap blond tart that was her mom. Them? How could my father and brother have been so taken in by them? How could those two nobodies so quickly and effectively destroy my entire family?

  I rose and retrieved the diary from where it had landed, near the bed, and then turned back to the last page of the diary. I read and reread the entry. Twelve years of questions and finally I had answers. I had a scapegoat (a pair of them!) on whom to heap blame for all my family’s problems. They were the force that had
knocked my world off its axis. (My mother’s suicide, my brother’s schizophrenia—not my fault at all! Their fault!)

  Lily and Nina Ross. Something violent rose inside me at the sight of their names in my mother’s elegant handwriting. It was too much to bear. I grabbed a pen and scrawled over the names with furious black scratches, but their presence in my mother’s diary still felt like a violation. So I tore out the last entry and crumpled the paper up into a ball, then retrieved a shoe from the closet and hammered the ball of paper as hard as I could until the paper shredded and the heel of my shoe began to splinter. Then I gathered the scraps and marched them down to the library and threw them in the fireplace.

  Rage had gripped me and I did not want to let it go. I moved through Stonehaven for the rest of the day in a hot, destructive fury, throwing books to the floor, smashing wineglasses in the sink, each unsatisfying crack a surrogate for the two women whose faces I really wanted to break. I stalked through the house in a circle, around and around, as if by doing enough circuits through the rooms I might somehow rewind all of our lives back twelve years.

  And then I collapsed. Because, of course, there are good emotions and bad emotions and anger falls in the latter category. I knew that. Wasn’t there a quote about just that on Ashley’s home page? I pulled up her website and—oh yes, there it was. Buddha says: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. I felt abashed, ashamed, then—as if Ashley could see me from down there in the cottage, and she knew I’d fallen short.