Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “I mean it’s not there.” I put the tea down and it splashes across my wrist, leaving a red welt. I press my lips against it, suck the pain away. “I’m house rich and cash poor. My father was near bankruptcy when he died. My trust is down to nothing. My Liebling Group stock is underwater. Everything I have is going into the upkeep of Stonehaven right now. Do you even know how much it costs to maintain an estate this size? Hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Didn’t you ever think about why your family sold their castle?”

  He is staring at me. “You’re kidding. Haha, right? Funny joke, getting a rise out of me, right?”

  “Not kidding. I should have told you before, but the moment was never quite right. I’m sorry.”

  “Well that explains…” His voice dwindles off, leaving me wondering what it explains. He dances the end of the poker on the floor as he thinks, little jabs that leave divots in the wood. Every time it lands, I flinch. “OK. But the house. And all the stuff in this house. It’s got to be worth, what, millions? Tens of millions?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then sell it.”

  Is he really suggesting that I sell the house to pay for a vendetta against Nina Ross? “Maybe someday. But not yet. Not for this.” I hesitate, thinking, and then—oh, it feels devious, but I can’t help myself—I hold out my hand. “I could sell the ring,” I say carefully. “How much do you think it’s worth? Six figures, surely?”

  I watch his face, but if he knows, he’s hiding it well. Instead, he scowls. “We’re not selling my grandmother’s ring. It’s an heirloom.”

  “Well, we’re not selling my great-great-grandfather’s house, either. Also an heirloom.”

  “You don’t even like this place!”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  He weighs the heavy poker in his hand and I feel a familiar little ping of fear. I wonder what’s running through his mind. “Well, we’re going to need to get cash somewhere, Vanessa. Now or later.”

  “I thought you had all that money in a trust in Ireland,” I say pointedly. “Now would be the time to retrieve it, it seems.”

  He drops the poker on the hearth and walks to the doorway. “I need to get out of this fucking house. I’m going for a drive,” he says darkly. He stalks out of the room and, in a minute, I hear the front door slam. I wonder if he’ll bother to bring me back chicken noodle soup from the market. I have a feeling he won’t.

  I pick up the tea and take another sip. My stomach twists when the liquid hits it, and I feel the bile rising. I have just enough time to lurch to the garbage can on the other side of the room before my body starts ejecting the tea. The trash can is made from embossed leather, and the thin brown liquid that I regurgitate immediately sinks into the calfskin and ruins it. I’ll have to throw the can away, I think feverishly, before I vomit again.

  I lie there on the floor, my face pressed against the cold boards. Pull it together, that familiar voice whispers to me. I find myself thinking again of the Visine that I squeezed into Nina’s martini, of how helpless and confused she must have felt when she was throwing up in the bushes; and it’s no longer satisfying. Instead I wonder if what goes around comes around; if Nina and I have somehow been caught in an endless cycle, chasing each other in circles, snapping at each other’s tails.

  I can’t help but wonder if we’ve both been chasing the wrong person.

  * * *

  —

  A day passes, and then two, and the subject of money doesn’t come up again. I hope that Michael’s just given up the vendetta against Nina and moved on. But I find myself watching him more, noticing the way he walks around the house, touching objects with a casual possessiveness. He studies the furnishings with an attentiveness that I once ascribed to curiosity; now I wonder if he’s doing inventory.

  Once, I come across him standing in front of a Louis XIV commode in the parlor with his cellphone in his hand and I could swear that he had just snapped a photo of it. And when I open the armoire one day to look in the box where I keep the last of my mother’s jewels (nothing particularly valuable, just the baubles with sentimental value, like her favorite diamond eardrops and a tennis bracelet that’s missing a stone): Am I paranoid, or did it move three inches to the left?

  And yet, after our fight, he’s been all sweetness. He brings me tea in bed (which, after my vomiting the other day, I can’t help but regard with suspicion, letting the first sip linger on my tongue while I check for the bitter taste of Visine; but of course, there’s none). He cleans the kitchen unasked. He massages my back when I complain of stiffness. And I have to recognize that he’s right: We do need money, whether for kidnapping schemes or just to pay the bills, so why am I so defensive about selling off a few antiques? Maybe I’m looking for reasons to be angry with him, because we had our first real argument and I’m scared that I’m the one in the wrong.

  As I listen to him snore next to me in bed—unable to sleep because of the voices in my head—another horrible thought occurs to me. Did I only ever want Michael because Nina had him, and now that he’s mine I’m losing interest? Or maybe love sparkles the most when it’s elusive, a diamond hanging just out of reach. Once you have it firmly in your grip, the glimmer fades and it’s just a cold rock tucked in the palm of your hand.

  * * *

  —

  No, I love him, I do! I have to, because what is all this for if I don’t?

  * * *

  —

  Still. A wall has fallen between us, and we are going about our lives together but separately. I go to bed before he does now, and when I wake up in the mornings, it’s a relief when I open my eyes and discover that he’s not there. He locks himself in the study most of the day, coming out only for meals and the occasional walk. What’s he doing in there?

  Because I’m fairly certain it’s not writing.

  This morning, following a hunch, I typed a few lines from his book into Google.

  When I look at her, her green eyes stirring in that feline face, the words (worlds) whirl within me.

  I closed my eyes while the search engine churned, praying to myself. Please please please let me be wrong. But I wasn’t. There it was, on the second page of results: a lesbian love story by an MFA student named Chetna Chisolm, published in an anthology called Experimental Fiction for Lovers. He’d changed a few details—a name here, a verb there—to make it sound more masculine and muscular. But it is unquestionably the same story.

  Stupid me, I know, but I still feel compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t want to show you his writing; he said he was private about it. Maybe you badgered him so much that he felt obliged to show you something—anything—just to get you off his back. Perhaps (optimistically) maybe what he’s really written is better? And then I remember another fragment that he’d claimed to have written—lines from a poem, the ones he recited to me in bed the first day we were married, the writing I’d actually liked:

  We shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life.

  That one is even easier to find: “Always,” by Pablo Neruda. Quite a famous poem, actually. I probably read it in high school or college, and the fact that I didn’t recognize it makes me feel like a fool.

  At dinner, over steak and roast potatoes, I ask him how his writing has been going.

  “Oh great,” he says, vigorously salting his meat. “I’m really on a roll.”

  “When do you think you’ll be done with the book?”

  “Could be years. Creativity isn’t something you can rush. It took Salinger ten years to write Catcher in the Rye. Not that I’m saying I’m Salinger. Except that maybe I am, who knows, right?” He laughs as he lifts a piece of steak to his mouth. He’s pulled his hair back into a tiny ponytail, which reveals the receding hairline at his temples.

  I push my own meat around my plate, wa
tching the fat congeal into glassy little bubbles. “You know, I was remembering that poem you recited to me, the day after we got married. We shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life.”

  He smiles, pleased. “Nice line, that. Guy who wrote it must be a genius.”

  “Neruda, right? It was Neruda who wrote it, right? Not you?”

  Something flickers across his face, like he’s rifling through mental file cards, trying to pull the correct one. “Neruda? No,” he says. “Like I said, I wrote that. I never much cared for Neruda.”

  “Because I think I read it in college.”

  He bites into the steak and the juices run down his chin. He lifts a napkin to his face and speaks from behind it. “I think you’re remembering wrong.”

  “It’s OK if you didn’t write the poem. Just…tell me the truth.”

  He puts down the napkin and looks at me with those piercing, pale eyes. How did I ever think that they were clear and open? Because right now they might as well be a wall, concealing everything going on in his head. “Baby, what’s wrong?” He says it softly. “I hate to say this, but…you’re kind of starting to worry me, with all this weird paranoia. First Nina, and then the car thing, and now this. Do you think you need, maybe, some help? Should we call a psychiatrist?”

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “Well.” He sounds like a cowboy, gentling a horse. “You do have that family history. Your brother’s schizophrenia. And your mom was mentally ill, too, yeah? I mean, think about it. It’s worth considering.”

  I stare at him, and can’t decide whether I should laugh or cry. Because how do I know? What if I am being paranoid, a symptom of the same disease of the mind that took down half my family? How do I know if I’m going insane?

  “No,” I insist. “I’m fine.”

  * * *

  —

  I hide in the bathroom of my bedroom and make a phone call to the police station in Tahoe City. The front desk connects me with a weary-sounding detective, who asks me what my trouble is.

  “I think my husband might be a fraud,” I say.

  He laughs. “I know a lot of women who say that about their husbands. Can you be more specific?”

  “I don’t think he is who he said he is. He said he’s a writer but it turns out he’s just a plagiarist. And he gave me a ring that he said is an heirloom but is actually a fake.” I think I hear footsteps on the stairs, and lower my voice to a whisper. “He lies. About everything. I think.”

  “Does he have government identification?”

  I think about this. I haven’t looked at his driver’s license; but he must have had it when we got married, right? And our marriage license, the one we got from the late-night county clerk in Reno—it definitely says Michael O’Brien. I think back to that night, wade through the memories left behind after the haze of tequila faded, and yes, I remember him handing over a driver’s license, along with mine. “Yes,” I say. “But a driver’s license, it could be fake, right?”

  I know how I must sound. And so when the detective speaks again and his voice is louder and brighter, as if he’s speaking to someone in the room with him, my heart sinks. “Look. Have you considered divorce?”

  “But can’t you investigate him? And tell me if I’m right or not? Isn’t that what the police are here for?”

  He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t sound like he’s broken any laws. If he’s a problem, kick him out.” I can hear him writing on paper. “Look, give me your name? I’ll make a record of our conversation, in case anything escalates and you want to file a restraining order.”

  I almost say Vanessa Liebling but then I imagine the awkward silence on the other end—or worse, the suppressed laughter. Another Liebling bites the dust, that family sure is a mess. Instead, I hang up.

  * * *

  —

  I call Benny at the Orson Institute. He sounds a little better than he did when I saw him two weeks back, as if he’s surfaced above the scrim of the drugs that dull him. It’s possible he’s been boycotting his meds again.

  “How’s married life?” he asks. “Actually, I don’t want to know. Talk to me about something nice.”

  “OK,” I say. “I have a serious question for you, and it’s not actually that nice.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How did you know that you were, well, mentally ill?”

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “You were the one who knew. They had to drag me off to an insane asylum and even then I was convinced that they were the crazy ones and not me.”

  “So I could be schizophrenic, too, and have no idea.”

  He’s quiet for a long time, and when he speaks again, he sounds more emphatic and clear than I’ve heard him in years. “You’re not crazy, sis. Maybe you’re a moron sometimes, but you’re not crazy.”

  “But I have these wild swings, Benny. And it’s been getting worse, the older I get. Like, I’m careening around a racetrack at high speed, just barely in control, my mind a tangle of thoughts, for days or weeks or months; and then out of the blue, I crash and burn, and then I can barely stand to look at myself in the mirror.”

  He’s quiet. “Like Mom.”

  “Like Mom.”

  There’s another long moment. “Mom was manic-depressive, you know, bipolar. Not schizophrenic. I know schizophrenia, and you’re anything but. You’re not hearing voices, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Look, go see a psychiatrist and get yourself some decent drugs and you’ll be fine. Just for God’s sake, don’t go out on any boats, OK? For my sake?”

  “I love you, Benny. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “OK, forget it, maybe you are crazy.”

  * * *

  —

  The nausea is back, a tightness at the back of my throat that threatens to choke me, from morning to night.

  It’s growing clear to me that I don’t know this man, my husband, at all. I feel like a hostage in my own house: Do I continue tiptoeing around him, in fear of provoking him and watching my life tumble back into lonely uncertainty? Or do I confront him, and risk angering him and making everything worse, when I don’t have any real proof of anything?

  Because he has an answer for everything, I’m learning. He will gaslight me until I question my sanity, rather than his.

  All I want to do is climb into bed and stay there forever. But it feels too dangerous; it feels like giving up; and that voice (her voice) keeps telling me to pull myself together. So instead I get up each morning, and I smile, and I laugh at his stories about Ireland. I cook him elaborate French dinners (ones that I have no appetite to eat myself), and I rub his shoulders when he sits at the kitchen table. I walk with him down to the pier at dusk and sit with him on our bench near the boathouse, holding hands and not talking. And when he reaches for me in bed I close my eyes and let myself give in to the physical sensations and try to suppress the doubt that numbs my nerves. If I pretend everything is still OK, maybe it will magically be OK.

  Except that I already know that this won’t work. Magical thinking didn’t save my mother, or my brother, or even my father. Why would I think that it might save me?

  * * *

  —

  And there is something else, something on the periphery of my consciousness that’s been nagging at me, something I can’t quite put my finger on. The day after I talk to Benny, I find myself looking at the calendar, and a cold understanding spreads through me. Why I’ve been so nauseous, the mysterious exhaustion and the unexplainable tenderness in my breasts.

  I am pregnant.

  * * *

  —

  I could have an abortion, of course. This would be the rational move of someone in my current position: Make an excuse, slip out of town, have it finished within a day. But then I
imagine the butter-soft gaze of a baby, looking up at me adoringly, and something fiercely protective rises in me. I know I won’t be able to do it.

  I can’t sleep. I lie awake as Michael snores soundly beside me, thinking I can hear the spiders weaving their webs in the bed’s velvet swags, the limbs of the trees tap-tap-tapping at the windows. I am having a child with this man; he will be the father of my child, in my life forever. I know less about him every day; as if the person I thought I loved has been vanishing, and soon all that will remain will be the outline of a man with a void at the center.

  I lie there thinking: I should kick him out, right? This is my home, not his. But why am I so afraid to confront him? Why do I find myself curling my hand protectively over my belly, as if anticipating a blow?

  Who is he?

  I didn’t get a prenup. We have a child coming. He could take me for all I have. He could take Stonehaven!

  I am so alone in this.

  And then I realize: There is one person who could answer my question.

  I want to laugh out loud in the dark room, because I can’t believe what I’m thinking. Desperation drives you to do unlikely things; what was once unthinkable becomes the one hope that sustains you.

  This might be a wild-goose chase. She might really be in Paris, or anywhere, it’s true. But deep inside, I know. There’s a reason I memorized that address in Los Angeles, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Something about the house, with the scarlet vines out front—I knew who lived there, from the very start. I know where I need to go now.

  I’m going to go find Nina Ross.

  33.

  I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a sound sleeper, at rest in my convictions, but jail turns me into an insomniac. The need for constant vigilance, plus an unsettling awareness of my own culpability, conspire to keep me in an endless twilight state: never asleep, but also never quite awake, either. I float here, in limbo.