“You’d even look like a hero,” said Paul, so calmly he might have been dreaming. “Saving your little brother like that. It’s a pity there was nothing you could do to help the rest of them.”
He would have done anything, anything at all, if it meant Julian would look at him this way a moment longer. The green of his eyes, like white winter light vectored through the crest of a wave; the ravenous grasping for evidence that Paul loved him, and the relief and terror at finding it. Anything, so long as Julian yearned for something Paul could give him. He would never hesitate.
“Aren’t you clever,” said Julian. He wasn’t smiling. “Talk me through it. I can’t wait to hear.”
7.
It was as real as a dream. They tended to it with careful hands, letting every detail blossom in place and take root as if it had been there all along. With every question they answered, it grew more alive. How easily could it be an accident? A low flame, easily forgotten, the corner of an open cookbook just barely touching it. Careless, giddy on cocktails, anyone might make the same mistake. How to trap them in their rooms? A thick wedge of folded paper behind the hinges, another at the foot of the door—the sort of evidence that burned away, if the flames raged too long. How long? Hours. The nearest neighbors separated by sprawling lawns, jewelry-box houses guarded by high fences. They couldn’t knock on doors and plead to use the phone, not here; wealthy people paid handsomely for the privilege of ignoring cries for help. And what about Henry? Indeed, what about him? It was up to him and his own drunken luck whether he would live or die. He knew enough that he might suspect them. It suited them just fine if they had to kill him too.
Saving the youngest boy was an attractive flourish. Paul hadn’t caught a clear glimpse of his face, so he imagined trailing behind the two brothers as they hurried to the water’s edge, the child visible only as golden hair and nightclothes. Julian would be in his element, the perfect embodiment of fear and frantic concern. One arm around his brother’s shoulders; a quick backward glance, a silent gesture for Paul to hurry up.
I’m sorry, Oliver, he said. I’m so sorry, but we can’t go back for them.
They retreated to the sailboat for safety, pushed out into the bay and stayed there, watching as the house burned. But why didn’t we sail to the neighbors’ docks and try to find help? One disoriented child; two slight teenagers, one with weak lungs and another who didn’t know how to sail. No one could expect much of them, except perhaps to try (in vain, always in vain) to draw the attention of a bystander on the shore.
Perhaps Henry stayed the night at a friend’s house, and returned in the morning to find police tape stretched between the gate pillars. Or perhaps he came home, drove back and forth in search of help until someone finally gave it. They had no way of knowing either way; it was impossible to see his car through the trees. Who else might raise the alarm? Perhaps the smell of smoke disturbed the neighbors.
And the police? Julian handled them as beautifully as he handled everyone—brave for the sake of the others, face ash-streaked and solemn, while Paul was so shaken that he and his too-honest tongue could scarcely speak.
They were above suspicion. They were above everything. Julian was free of the walls his family had built around him; Paul, courageous at last, was free of the ones he’d built around himself. It was a masterpiece they would carry forever between them, an undying flame.
What next?
Paul wanted to live somewhere wild, somewhere the air was clean. Julian needed people—an audience, a hum of activity to keep him from getting bored. But that was all right. We’ll be able to compromise. They went north, found a college town where one or both of them could teach. They gave away most of the inheritance once Julian no longer needed to cover his expenses with it, because the money wasn’t the point. They had each other now, and the clouded windows of old thread mills, and a house with a long white wall where Paul’s butterfly collection could shine in the sunlight. Of course Julian wanted that future for them too. You believe me, don’t you, Pablo?—and of course he did. Look what they’d made together. Look what they’d done to break free.
The temperature dropped. The fan still whispered, facing the floor where they had been. It was real. They kissed each other breathless between each promise. All around them the flames peeled the wallpaper back from blackened beams.
8.
There was cool soft rain and the crush of the tide. There was the shadow of Julian’s shoulder blades beneath his shirt as he shut the window, and then there was quiet. The director’s chair was folded to a fasces and propped against the bookcase. It was half past eight; only the way Paul’s memory had folded forward four hours told him he’d slept at all.
“We’re still here.” It was the blue wallpaper that made him realize it, with its etched ship’s wheels and twists of sailing rope. Of course it hadn’t been real. It couldn’t be. With their fever broken, all that was left was this grand cruel house, and everything inside it that Julian needed and didn’t want to need.
Julian was already dressed, in a polo shirt and pressed plaid trousers that made him look painfully like his parents’ son. His calm would have looked like indifference if not for how ashen he was.
“Not for much longer,” he said. “I’ve got us packed already. I want to get this over with.”
Paul sat up too fast, though his head was swimming even before he did.
“Wait,” he said. “We haven’t figured out a plan, we need more time, you don’t have anywhere to go—”
“I’ve got a couch I can crash on for a few days.” Julian’s face was blank as a mask. “The orchid guy’s house. I know the girl who got the job, I called her yesterday, she’s expecting me.”
Paul sat very straight, trying to stave off the panic. Beside his own suitcase on the other bed, Julian’s satchel sat open; it was so thick with books that its seams buckled, but Julian grabbed another few paperbacks from the shelf and bent them smaller to fit them into the gaps.
“Just like that?” Paul couldn’t admit outright that it was a bad idea, so he left it unsaid for Julian to discover on his own.
“Just like.” Julian didn’t look at him. With great effort he forced the satchel shut, then stalked across the room to wrench his dresser open.
“What are you going to do about the—I mean, the money thing, how—”
“I’ll get by,” said Julian acidly, “like everybody else does.”
Paul wanted to let the silence lie, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“There’s got to be a better way to do it. You deserve better, you deserve a chance.”
Julian looked at him at last, holding a neat stack of clothes to his chest. From the edge in his voice Paul had expected him to be angry, but he only looked exhausted.
“It’s decided,” he said. “Stop complaining. You know damn well this is what you want.”
It was the truth, but Paul didn’t like to be confronted with the selfishness of it. They didn’t speak again. Julian arranged his belongings carefully in his suitcase, precision and efficiency honed by a lifetime of boarding schools and family vacations. By the time Paul returned from his shower, Julian had left; their bags sat by the door beneath the shroud of his navy-blue raincoat.
Paul sat on Julian’s bed and tried to ignore the voices, which shivered through the floor under the soles of his shoes until he crossed his legs to escape them. The summer rain had thickened to a gray mist.
There was a sharp knock, and the door swung open before Paul could speak. Henry’s lips pursed when he saw him. He was dressed impeccably, black hair towel-dried and combed straight, but he looked as if he’d been sick all night.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” said Henry.
“I haven’t done anything,” Paul replied, and told Henry silently that he was luckier for it.
Henry made an impatient, miserable sound and dragged one hand irritably through his hair. The gesture was another uncanny likeness to Julian, and Paul quickly focused his gaze
on Henry’s wrist to avoid dwelling on it. He’d never known before that it was all right, in some circles, for a man to wear any kind of bracelet; it was reasonably masculine, a loop of plaited leather fastened with a brass anchor, but it was still strange enough that it helped Paul forget all the ways Henry was familiar.
“He has a future.” The words were his father’s, not his own, and the uncertainty in how Henry mimicked them made him seem very young. “Surely you understand that—surely you know what you’re doing by standing in the way. He could achieve great things, if only he weren’t too stubborn to accept the guidance.”
“Julian doesn’t need ‘guidance.’” Paul smiled; he couldn’t help but pity Henry, all the more because Henry would never understand why. “He’ll be great no matter what, because he’ll do it for his own sake. The best they can offer him is the opportunity to engrave a few letters of your father’s name. He can do better than that.”
Henry looked at him with blank horror.
“Christ,” he said. “I can’t tell whether he’s done a number on you or if it’s the other way around.”
The voices downstairs were no louder, but the tone of the conversation abruptly shifted. Henry appeared to forget Paul was there. He went alert as a deer; when he hurried into the hallway, he moved like one, with the same sudden and sharp-angled urgency.
Paul tried to follow, but by the time he reached the foyer, Henry was out of sight. He could no longer hear the voices. They’d been coming from below the bedroom, but when he tried to find a path toward the back left corner of the house he kept running into dead ends. It was a maze of a house, too-large and inscrutable, like the elderly buildings on campus that hid his classrooms where he could never naturally find them.
One door opened onto a library with tall mahogany shelves, stark and neat and cold. When Paul moved on to the next door, a lacrosse stick clattered to the floor; beyond it he saw the empty bedroom of one of the younger boys, one wall adorned with a familiar string of signal flags. Eventually he gave up and doubled back. He remembered, or imagined in desperation, that there may have been a doorway in the living room—it might have a hallway beyond it, toward an out-of-the-way corner where an irritable man could retreat to his office and avoid his children. Paul didn’t know what he would do when he found it, but it was just as well. He might need to tell a good story afterward, even if only to himself. It was better not to premeditate.
His memory hadn’t failed him. There was a doorway just where he’d thought there was, half hidden by a thick tress of ivy from a hanging iron planter. And there was Mrs. Fromme, leaning against the frame of the open French doors, lit from behind by the gray light and the rain.
She wasn’t surprised to see him. She was in weekend clothes, no makeup but a sheen of powder-pink lipstick, though she’d still dressed with care. White slacks, navy cardigan, pinstriped blue blouse. She held her cigarette the way Julian did—the same careless, graceful angle at the wrist.
When he met her eyes, she smiled, and it wasn’t even an unkind smile. No warmth, but no malice. It was worse than if she had brought a knife to his throat.
“You poor boy,” she said. “You really believe this will help you keep him.”
The weight of his stammer was so heavy on his tongue that he couldn’t speak. He drew a breath of the cool humid air and forced himself not to avoid her eyes. She didn’t seem to expect an answer. She gave him a long, dispassionate look and flicked her cigarette to let the ash fall.
“You know, Adam can’t make sense of you,” she said indifferently. “He is too venal a man to understand anything but venality. But I’ve seen your letters—I know what has been done to you. You aren’t the problem. You are only the weapon of choice.”
Her candor was a lie, sold beautifully; so was her tone of weary resignation. But Paul couldn’t stop himself from listening—even if he knew she was a liar, even if he refused to speak. It was like watching Julian put on one of his masks. The lie was fascinating for how near it was to the truth.
When he tried to brush past her, she caught him by the shoulder. She turned his face toward hers, lifted his chin so he would have to meet her eyes. Without makeup her lashes were straw-blond, cheekbones dappled amber with freckles.
“You are just as I always knew you would be,” she said. “Curly hair, sad eyes. Quite striking, in your way. His sweethearts always are.”
She didn’t belabor it. She waited until it reached his face, then smiled as if with great pity and turned her gaze toward the rain.
“You are how he spites us, because he thinks that makes him free.” Mrs. Fromme took a leisurely pull from her cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke into the mist. “Your mistake is in believing he has any further use for you. You have fallen for the same lie he always uses—that you’re the only thing in the world he will still love once its novelty has worn off.”
He couldn’t pretend there was no part of him that believed it, because he’d believed it since the beginning. All she had really done was bring the belief forward from its clumsy hiding place and show it to him. She took it from the hysterical reality inside his own head and placed it in the one outside. It was a familiar trick—Julian could only have learned it at her knee.
Mrs. Fromme looked out over the garden, silent and calm. She didn’t watch for Paul’s reaction. She knew that giving him a single questioning glance would betray all the uncertainty Paul needed from her.
A door burst open at the end of the corridor. Julian swept out, electric with fury; Henry followed close after and reached for his shoulder, but Julian shrugged off the touch without looking back. When he saw Paul, he tried to look certain and unafraid, but he couldn’t settle on a persona that would make it true. He threw his mother a look of wary disgust and hurried to take hold of Paul’s arm.
What did she do? his lips asked silently, but Paul swallowed his nausea and shook his head.
“We’ll bring our things down,” said Julian, “then we’ll go. All right?”
“Julian.”
At the end of the hall his father was a shadow in shirtsleeves and squared shoulders. His face, just visible in the dim light, wore a thin jeering smile that made Paul’s hands itch to break his teeth.
“When you come back—and you will—you’ll have to beg us to let you in the door.” His voice strained for cold authority, but it achieved only spite. “Whatever pride you think you have, enjoy it. You won’t keep it for long.”
Julian’s face was blank; he didn’t look at his father so much as look through him. After a moment he closed his eyes, then held Paul’s arm tighter and turned away.
“I’ll drive them,” Paul heard Henry say while they were leaving. “I’ll try to get rid of the friend, I can still talk some sense into him . . .”
“You want to say goodbye,” answered Mrs. Fromme, as if she were merely correcting him rather than accusing him of a lie.
They were bringing only a few things with them, just their suitcases and the director’s chair and Julian’s school satchel full of books. Henry’s dark blue Chrysler waited in the drive with its doors open. One of the younger children watched from the window above the front door, small face and blond hair blurred by glass.
Henry made no move to help them pack up the car. He waited in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel with both hands. Paul thought he heard the clack of a deadbolt at the front door, but when he turned to look, there was no movement behind the glass.
The child’s face had vanished from the window, and all the lights were dark. At either side of the walkway, the white magnolias shivered in the rain.
Julian joined Paul in the back seat and slammed the door. Henry’s blue eyes watched them in the rearview mirror. “They only want what’s best for us,” he said, though he’d clearly given up hope. “You’ll see that someday.”
Julian drew his first shaking pull from a cigarette and brushed his thumb along his lower lip.
“Just drive, Henry.”
No one sp
oke. The parvenu mansions beyond the woods quickly segued back into farmland, and the countryside bled across the windows like splashes of verdant watercolor. Julian finished his cigarette and slid to a slouch, bracing one boot against the back of the passenger seat. He didn’t look at either of them; it was only by the insistent pressure of his shoulder against Paul’s side that he knew Julian noticed him at all.
The car turned off the highway, onto a slim stretch of road with no lane markings. It didn’t look familiar, but Paul didn’t expect familiarity; he didn’t think anything of it until Julian sat up, suddenly alert.
“Why are we going this way?”
“Just making a pit stop. Won’t take long.”
Julian made a peevish face. “You should’ve gone before we left, Henry.” It was the same singsong tone Laurie used when Paul was annoying her.
“This day is already a nightmare,” said Henry wearily. “You don’t have to be childish on top of it.”
Past the haze of loblolly pines, a driveway branched off toward what purported to be a riding school. The paddocks were sodden and empty, horses apparently confined to the barn. The white clapboard office looked filthy, though it would have been handsome in better light; the carport alongside it was almost vacant, home only to a pickup truck and a red two-door Chevrolet. Paul could picture the brothers coming here as children, their mother watching with her arms folded over the fence as they rode in cautious circles. Henry’s detour might be an act of nostalgia, part of a final burst of affection in the wake of loss.
The love had been what shattered Paul after his father died—betrayal came later, willed into being to save him from the agony of loving something he couldn’t reach. He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked. How he hated it; how desperately he had tried to keep it burning. He didn’t have to like Henry, or even understand him, to know he was capable of that same grief. He felt sick for not noticing it before.
These Violent Delights Page 18