Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Like all four of the Vaughns’ hotels, this one gave off an air of solid luxury. Everything was solid, hushed, each piece fitting puzzle-like, neatly in its place. The glass walls of the pool room were trimmed in cedar, the corners softened with topiary and small pines, draped in frosted white fairy lights Kate’s mother had found in France and converted to use with American electrical outlets.

  Celia often wondered what Kate thought of the Blackbird. In all the months of work, she’d never offered more than generic enthusiasm, an admiration for their efforts and vision but little in the way of specific encouragement. Celia was careful not to ask for more. Coming from money like this, Kate surely saw the Blackbird as a joke, an oddity, with its eight small rooms and secondhand furnishings and awkward stance at the edge of the ridge. She’d never said so. She’d never said much at all. But the absence of her opinion spoke for itself, and led Celia’s mind back to the remarks Kate would sometimes make while they were out shopping. She’d pick up a piece of jewelry or a pair of boots, inspecting it inside and out.

  “You can tell the quality of a piece by the parts that aren’t supposed to show. These jeans are overpriced. See the way the seams are finished? Total junk.”

  There was an unconscious arrogance in her voice, a teacherish way of picking things apart—often within earshot of the salesperson, which never failed to send Celia into a hot and agonized embarrassment.

  No unfinished seams in a Vaughn hotel. Though rugged and unostentatious, a guest only had to open a door or pick up a downy pillow to get a sense of the craftsmanship and money behind it.

  They peeled off their clothes down to their swimsuits and padded over to the hot tub. Kate turned on the jets to set the water churning. Celia descended the steps and let the warmth engulf her, all the way to the top of her head, the bubbles rolling over her body with a rumble that filled her ears. She came up smiling, rubbing the water from her face.

  “Put your head in,” she said. “The bubbles sound like thunder.”

  Kate settled against the side of the tub. “I can’t. I’d lose my eyelashes.”

  “I’m about to lose my bathing suit,” Celia said. “I should give it back to you. It needs some stuffing on top.” She plucked at the triangles of blue-black fabric over her breasts.

  “If only we could do a body meld,” she said. “We’d be perfect. What I wouldn’t give for your legs.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for your teeth.”

  “All your stuff can be bought, though,” Kate said. “Tits and teeth. Two minor corrections, and you’re a supermodel. I can’t think why you never wore braces, Cee.”

  Celia hesitated. It seemed disloyal to explain that there hadn’t been the money for braces when she was a kid. In Kate’s world, if you needed something, you bought it. It was a form of innocence to believe life was as simple as that.

  “I’m cultivating a look,” she said.

  “Russian immigrant? You’ve got the cheekbones and the wardrobe. Work on the accent, and we can sell you off as a mail-order bride.”

  Celia put on a voice. “Hey, beeg daddy. You vant I should keep you varm?”

  “Good lord, that was like the bride of Dracula.”

  “Target market—bloodsucking Wall Street executives.”

  Kate laughed and settled deeper into the water, lifting her hair over the edge of the hot tub to keep it dry.

  “So what was up with Eric tonight?” she said. “I thought he’d be falling all over himself with stories.”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said. “Did Julian say anything to you about the trip?”

  “He hasn’t shut up about it. He said it was amazing, talked a lot about his friends—who seem fairly uninspiring, if you ask me, but they go way back, so I guess they like to sit around and talk about the old days or whatever. He said the avies were running a bit and they lost some days to the weather, but other than that it was good.”

  “Anything about Eric?”

  “Not really. Julian talks about Julian. You know how he is.”

  “Sort of. He’s more Rory and Eric’s friend.”

  “Or they’re his...”

  Kate’s eyes were half-closed. Her voice had dimmed and gone sleepy, but Celia could see a bright crescent gleaming between her lashes.

  “You don’t think it goes both ways?” Celia said.

  “Mmm...”

  “He’s given us a lot of money.”

  “Not that much. It only seems...”

  She didn’t finish, but Celia understood: it only seemed like a lot to her and Rory. To Kate and Julian and maybe even Eric, the money was nothing at all.

  “I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something,” Celia said.

  “Hey, you brought it up.”

  “But you like him, though? He’s good to you?”

  “Sure he is.”

  “Does he ever talk about the future? Getting married, anything like that?”

  Kate suddenly sat up and opened her eyes.

  “Why all these questions about Julian? You want him, too, I suppose?”

  Celia stared at her friend. “What? No, I’m just trying to figure him out. It’s not like that at all. Wait, where are you going?”

  Kate was getting out of the hot tub, flipping the water from her hair.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I need to get up early tomorrow.”

  She toweled off and pulled on her sweater and jeans.

  “We just got here.”

  “Well, I’m done.”

  “Katie—”

  “It’s fine, Cee. Forget it. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  She zipped up her boots and disappeared through the double doors to the hotel lobby, leaving her towel in a damp heap on the chair.

  The door shut behind her. Celia subsided into the water, shaking her head. Strange the way two people could be in the same conversation following separate lines of thought altogether.

  She pulled herself from the hot tub and stepped into the pool. The underwater lamp was covered by a rotating filter that turned the water from blue to green, to violet, pink and finally a thin bloody red. The temperature was a shock after the sultry heat of the hot tub. She dived off the steps into the chilling pink light, arms outstretched, a chain of bubbles drifting down her stomach, braid dragging along behind her like a rope, tugging at the back of her head. She reached the end of the pool, flipped around and pushed off again, now through a sea-green light, her legs pulsing up and down like a mermaid’s tail.

  At the far end of the pool, she paused to catch her breath, holding the edge of the deck as she dipped her head backward into the water. Ears covered, her breath was amplified by the underwater silence, sweeping in and out of her lungs like the surf on an empty beach. As she was about to push off again, she noticed a dark shape in the doorway across the room.

  Rory, she thought. Her spirit lifted. He’d come for a swim after all.

  She pulled herself upright and propped her elbow on the pool deck. Though the man’s face was in shadow, she was almost sure it was him. She called his name and beckoned with one hand. Her voice echoed in the empty room, but the man across the pool didn’t move. Something in his stillness unnerved her. She wondered how long he’d been standing there, watching.

  “Rory?”

  The man rocked back on his heels as if considering whether to come farther into the room. Then he stepped forward, into a circle of canned overhead light.

  Julian.

  Celia subsided into the water.

  “Kate just left,” she said. “You can probably catch her if you hurry.”

  He smiled, strolling to the edge of the pool. He turned her chair and sat down, leaning into the cushions with his legs stretched out.

  The seconds ticked by. She waited for h
im to speak. Possibly he expected her to start the conversation. If so, he’d be waiting a long while.

  She dove into the water and swam to the other side of the pool. Then turned and went the other way. Back and forth, glancing up through the water as she passed to see whether he was still there. And he always was, every time she checked, a dark unmoving blur at the side of the pool.

  Go away. Go away, go away, go away.

  She kept swimming. Back and forth, again and again, waiting for him to take the hint and leave. It began to feel like some sort of test, a message being communicated between them with every lap. He had the advantage, sitting comfortably by the side of the pool, while Celia grew more exhausted with every stroke. She began to struggle through the water, as though she were dragging the whole day behind her: Eric and Rory, the never-ending walls of the Blackbird, the fight with Kate—and now this. Julian. Fatigue began to consume her. Her arms grew too heavy to lift, and the angry strength in her legs had ebbed away.

  Finally she stopped, gasping for breath, her back to Julian and one hand clutching weakly at the lip of the pool.

  He hadn’t budged. He was still there beside her clothes, with her towel draped across his knees as if to receive a small wet child.

  “Tired yet?” he said.

  She couldn’t answer. Her eyes burned and itched—she rubbed at them with the heel of her hand.

  “What are you doing here?” she said without turning around.

  “I came looking for Kate,” he said.

  But he made it sound like a joke. Another double-edged comment, saying one thing and meaning another. She wished she could keep swimming, retreat again into the cool, silent water. But her limbs were trembling with fatigue. She would have to wait a minute before she could even let go of the side of the pool.

  “I came looking for Kate,” he said again. “But here you are.”

  “I don’t think she’s coming back. She’s probably at home by now. You could call her...”

  “I could,” he said, still with the smile in his voice. “Or you could. She’s your ride home, isn’t she?”

  “She—she had to go. I was planning to call Eric.”

  “No need. I’ll bring you home.”

  In spite of the hard exercise, Celia was very cold. She thought of the fireplace at the heart of the Blackbird, and Rory beside it where she’d left him. He would be poking at the embers with a long stick, the firelight dancing in his eyes. He would be so warm.

  “Come on out,” Julian said. “I can hear your teeth chattering.”

  Celia snapped her jaws shut. But the tremors traveled down her body and sent a ripple across the surface of the pool—now violet, shifting to red, casting an eerie glow around the room.

  She didn’t want to get out of the water. Walk up the steps with Kate’s cast-off bikini drooping around her breasts, the bones of her hips and shoulders jutting against her skin. Just walk up to Julian and get her towel. A simple thing, but she didn’t want to do it. Could not make herself do it. She gripped the edge of the pool as the cold locked in around her.

  “Come on out, Celia,” Julian said. His voice had deepened and gone quiet. A hypnotic, movie-star voice.

  “You’re afraid,” he said. “And I think you have to ask yourself why that might be. If you really don’t want me, you shouldn’t be worried right now. You should be hoping I’ll look at your body and see everything you think is wrong with it. You should be praying for that. Because if I lose that attraction, it’s all much easier for you. You go on with your life. I go on with Kate—or without her, far away, which is even better if what you really want is to get rid of me.

  “But that’s not how it is. You’re nervous. You feel shy. You don’t want to get out of the pool and walk over here. And we both know it’s not because you think I’ll get sprung at the sight of you—you don’t have that kind of confidence. It’s because you think I won’t.”

  Her mouth slipped below the surface.

  “Arrogant prick,” she said into the water.

  “I’m not in a hurry,” he went on, in a voice so deep it was barely audible. “I can wait. In fact, I can wait for a lot of things. I can wait for you to get tired. For that boy to get tired of you. Young men do, you know. But I’m older than you, old enough to see that you’re an unusual girl. An inadvertent femme fatale, the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ll tell you this—because I get the feeling you haven’t figured it out—that you have never in your life met a man who didn’t want to fuck you. Every girl’s got some of that mojo, it’s true, but not like this. Not like whatever black magic you have conjured up.”

  From the corner of her eye, she could see him shift in the chair so that he was sitting forward, elbows on his knees.

  “I’m a competitive guy, but I know when it’s time to give up. We’re not there yet, you and me. Not even close.”

  Celia closed her eyes. The light show was making her giddy and nauseous.

  “You’ve got a stubborn streak. That’s okay. Eventually you’ll have to get out of the water and walk over here and get your towel. And when you do, you’ll be thinking about what I said. Noticing how it feels to let me look at you. Maybe you’ll realize it’s what you want.”

  Just get the goddamned towel. Show him it doesn’t matter. Get up, you coward. Jesus Christ almighty, just go and get your towel—put your clothes on. Fuck him. Fuck his almighty ego.

  But the image of herself lingered in her mind. The sagging bikini, the jut of her hips.

  It wasn’t true. None of what he said was the least bit true. She liked to be covered. Where was the crime in that? She didn’t like Rory or Eric to see her in a bathing suit, either. What did that prove?

  “You’re cold, honey. Come on out of there now. I can all but guarantee the sight of you will turn me on. Everything still fully functional in the old man, believe me.”

  The laughter was back in his voice. The longer you stay in the pool, Celia, the more my opinion means to you. It was a joke, some kind of game for the rich and famous. Slumming it, notching his bedpost, destroying her peace of mind to feed his self-esteem.

  Celia damned her original decision to swim away and avoid him. It was cowardice again, always, and now he’d trapped her here. Whether she got out or stayed in the water, he would believe he had proved his point.

  “And I thought I was competitive,” he said. “You’ve got me—”

  She dipped her head under the water and swam to the steps. She walked up and out, shuddering with cold, her skin drawn up tight and covered with goose bumps. But she didn’t raise her hands to warm herself or even squeeze the water from her braid. She walked right up to the chair and stood in front of Julian, streaming water over his boots, her hands balled up at her sides.

  “Atta girl,” he said softly.

  He held out the towel.

  But Celia wouldn’t take it. She stood looking down into his face, the patterns of light swaying across his features in shades of rose and violet.

  Slowly he raised the towel, took her by the wrist and began to dry her. Shoulder to fingertips, one arm and then the other. Slowly, slowly, while she stood trembling at his feet. He dried her legs, her neck, her face and chest and hips and stomach. He turned her around and wrung the water from her hair. The towel was thick and soft, warm from being held against his body.

  When he was finished, she turned to face him. He set the towel aside and reached for her. But Celia stepped back so that the tips of his fingers only brushed her hip.

  She picked up her sweater and pulled it on, flipped her braid out from under.

  “I thought I was competitive,” he said again.

  She pulled on her jeans.

  “I’m sorry for you if that’s true,” she said. “The bronze must be quite a disappointment.”

  Julian stared
at her for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “Goddamn, you’re a bitch.”

  He got to his feet and held out her coat.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  December 24, 2008

  RORY’S MOTHER HAD moved to Montrose when Rory was twenty. She had remarried, finally, to a Wyoming cowboy she’d met through an online dating service Celia had convinced her to try. Her new husband was decent sort, Rory thought. Slow and steady, with a smoker’s croak and a perpetual limp slightly aided by an orthopedic shoe. Darlene had arranged a small ceremony in a chapel in downtown Montrose, followed by lunch at the Cracker Barrel with all their friends and a homemade lemon cake served on thick plates with scoops of ice cream sliding around the rims. Afterward she waved like a child through the dusty back window of Chuck Farrell’s old Chevy pickup truck, trailing a dozen cans from the bumper that clanged against the blacktop as they drove away.

  It gave Rory a pang to see her grinning that way, waving so hard. Celia had bought her a bouquet of white roses to carry, and boutonnieres for Chuck and Rory, and she’d found an antique silver-plated pitcher that she polished to a luster and wrapped in satiny paper with a big blue bow—paid for with her own money but signed, “With all our love, Rory and Celia.”

  They were a lot alike, his mom and Celia. When Celia was small, she used to follow Darlene all around the house, gravely accepting any small task, happy to be near and, more than that, to be useful. Celia was never happier than when someone needed her help.

  My little shadow, his mother used to call her. A real little person.

  Rory, apparently, was not yet a person, more of a wrecking ball.

  His mom used to dress Celia in ruffled outfits, to which Celia would add or subtract in sometimes bizarre combinations. A skirt over jeans, leg warmers on her arms, costume angel wings sometimes, even to school, or a headband with purple bunny ears on top. His mother’s friends would shake their heads, but Darlene was charmed.

  “Stripes and polka dots!” Grinning, her strong, rough fingers stroking Celia’s cheek. “Now, I wouldn’t have thought of such a thing. Don’t you look pretty with all those colors, like a wrapped-up birthday present.”