Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “It’s a little unusual, but I don’t think he knows that. I think he’s so rich he’s used to hanging out with anyone he wants. You should think of it as a friendly thing. He seems like an okay guy.” He’s the money, her tone said.

  Redwood’s house was only two miles west of mine as the crow flies, though crow flight is a less than useless measurement in the hills, where the streets are as kinked and looped as Silly String. I left M.G. behind and drove myself, thinking it might be offensive to bring a bodyguard to lunch. I was twenty minutes late by the time I pressed the buzzer on Redwood’s security box and followed the driveway’s nautilus curve to a hunkered-down house that was all sharp edges and raw concrete, like the bunker of an impossibly chic warlord. Redwood was waiting on his Brutalist doorstep in Adidas sneakers and a rumpled tan linen suit over a T-shirt with the jacket sleeves rolled up.

  “Buenos días!” he said as I walked toward him. “Wow, I like your haircut. Très Marian.” Confidently, he opened his arms for a hug. “What’s the good word?” Just a moment too late, he saw my hesitation, my slight affront at his presumption, and switched smoothly to handshake mode.

  “I never know how to answer that,” I said, shaking hands. “Do you say fine? Like, the good word is fine?”

  “Now that you mention it, I don’t actually know. Maybe you just say a word you like.” He was leading me into a gigantic room that was fully open to the outdoors on one side. I’d seen houses like this before. They’re suspicious slit-eye pillboxes on one side and, on the other, nothing but openness and innocence, letting in the whole city-encrusted valley, the whole sky. Enormous sliding glass doors were recessed back into the walls so Redwood didn’t have to deal with anything as gauche and disruptive as windows.

  “Tart,” I said. “That can be my good word.” Augustina had used it that morning to describe a certain PR person’s tone, and I’d felt a little trill of pleasure.

  “But which meaning?”

  “All of them. That’s why it’s a good word. The meanings speak to each other.”

  “Ah! Yes. I get it. The tempting dessert, the seductive woman, the sharp, sour taste. Very nice.”

  “What’s yours?”

  He considered. “I’ll go with perchance.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s funny, and it expresses ambivalence, which is my go-to emotion. Either that or mayhaps.”

  We walked through a room with low couches and a huge flat-screen, past a gleaming black grand piano, and out onto the patio. There were four chaises lined up next to a pool, and, beyond, the big flat circuit board of Los Angeles planing off into pale haze.

  “Cool house,” I said.

  “Thanks. It’s a rental while I decide if I want to move here. None of this stuff is mine.” He gazed off at the indistinct horizon. “I know this is a really obvious observation, but I feel the need to make it anyway—the sprawl of this place is legit mind-blowing. Especially when you fly in. Do you look out the window on planes?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You can see the most amazing things. Like, once I was on a flight to Europe, and the pilot came on and said the northern lights were going off out the left side, and basically no one bothered to lift up their shade! There’s something damning about that, how people didn’t look.”

  “I’ve never seen them.”

  “But wouldn’t you look? They’re wild. Sheets of green, like you’d expect, but it’s the scale that blew my mind, how they’re moving crazy fast but somehow you can’t even really see them moving. I read a poem once that described the aurora as the moon hanging up her silken laundry. And another that called it glowworm light. I like that.”

  His earnestness had me off-balance. Who talks about poems? I said, “I went in a glowworm cave once.”

  “What’s a glowworm cave?”

  “What it sounds like. A cave with glowworms living on the ceiling. It’s pitch-dark, and the worms really look like stars, even though they’re just larvae. The one I went in had water—maybe there has to be water, I’m not sure—and the worms were reflected, so you felt surrounded by all these little points of white light.”

  What even is this? Alexei had said while we floated through the cave. Could we be dead? Would we even know?

  I don’t think we’d know anything, I’d said. In general.

  Yeah, he’d said, it’s just wishful thinking that life and death would be interchangeable. This is nice, though. It’s very nice.

  The whole thing had been impossible from the beginning, of course, but I still felt a stupid sense of loss whenever I thought about him. Other people get to have infatuations that last long enough to become real love and then disappointment and boredom. I only got the cold, extraterrestrial luminescence of an afternoon and evening spent staring into someone’s face and saying, Yes, exactly, I know exactly what you mean.

  “I’d like to see that someday,” Redwood said about the glowworms. “Here—come into the kitchen. I have a couple more things to do and then we can eat.”

  “You cooked?”

  “It’s a salad. I assembled.”

  The kitchen’s big sliding doors were open to the patio, and he’d set two places at a table under a pergola grown over with wisteria. While he whisked vinaigrette, he said, “Sorry, I’m realizing now that I didn’t really think through how much like a date this would feel. I hope it’s not awkward for you. I just wanted a chance to talk without any minders around.”

  “Will it feel more or less like a date if we have a glass of wine?” I said.

  “Who cares?” He opened the refrigerator, its stainless steel door as large and heavy as a bank vault’s, and retrieved a bottle, poured two glasses. His hands were unexpectedly elegant, his fingers long and deft. We clinked. “Cheers. You read Marian’s book, right? Don’t break my heart and tell me you only read the script.”

  “Of course I read it,” I said, as though I would ever think of not reading the book, as though I’d read all the Archangel books and not, as was the truth, only the first one. “I’d actually read it before, as a kid, basically by accident.” I realized I was wading into a conversation about my parents, so I said, “I read your mom’s book, too.”

  “What’d you think?” Before I could answer with some vague flattery, he said, “I know it’s not the best thing ever written. I thought I should say that. I didn’t want you to think I thought it was some masterpiece.”

  “It’s good,” I said.

  “So noncommittal. But what?”

  I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “But nothing.”

  “Come on. Say it. I’m not defensive about her book. She is, fair warning, but I’m not.”

  I suspected he was setting a trap, but I still answered. I said I thought the voice of the book, Marian’s voice, the I his mother had given her, didn’t line up with the voice in the actual book Marian had written, as herself, for real.

  All I knew, Carol Feiffer had written, as Marian, all I’d ever known, was that I belonged to the sky.

  All I knew, she’d written in the next chapter, all I’d ever known, was that no man would ever own me.

  In her journal, in what’s now Namibia, Marian had written: I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.

  I told Redwood I thought Carol had missed the point of Marian a little bit. I said the book felt wishful, like it was trying to force Marian to be something—someone—more familiar and reassuring than she actually was.

  Redwood nodded almost sorro
wfully and said, yes, he knew what I meant. “It’s trying to bend Marian to make her more—I hate this word—relatable, but in the end it distorts her.”

  “Exactly,” I said. More than once, while reading Carol’s book, I’d thought of the fan fiction Oliver and I had read about ourselves, the dollhouse feeling of it, the author gripping us so tightly we might have snapped in half. I live you so much.

  Redwood blew out a long breath. “My mother has strong impulses toward tidiness. She’s not religious, but she still thinks everything happens for a reason. In the middle of a nuclear war, she’d be the one saying everything was going to be fine, and it’s nice she’s an optimist but annoying she’s not more of a realist. I’m not sure she actually remembers anymore what parts of the book she invented. Anyway, I made a decision to be purely supportive. Grab the wine, would you?” He picked up the salad. I followed him outside.

  “It sounds like you guys are close.”

  “She’s my non-evil parent. She and my dad got divorced when I was six, and we were always kind of a team. He’s dead now.”

  “I’m sorry.” We sat. He’d put out cloth napkins, a bowl of flaky salt with a little spoon in it, a carafe of ice water.

  “It’s okay. I hated him, insofar as anyone actually manages to hate a parent.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “Thanks. I hate him less now that I don’t have to interact with him.”

  “That sounds complicated.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes things are simple.” Redwood told me that his father had been chief counsel for a chemical company that was an offshoot of Liberty Oil and had spent his days fighting lawsuits brought by tumor-ridden plant workers, towns with contaminated groundwater, chemists whose discoveries had been stolen, environmental groups concerned about air and water and frogs and birds. Then, in one of those instances of random, abrupt mortality that create the illusion of cosmic justice, he’d dropped dead of a brain aneurysm at sixty-four.

  “My parents died when I was two,” I said. “Small-plane crash.”

  “I know. Google.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “It’s okay. I didn’t know them.”

  “That’s what I’m sorry for.”

  “We’re getting right into the dead-parents convo. Wow.”

  He smiled, chewing, a little squinty, and there was something about the way he was looking at me, something skeptical and amused, that made me think he might not be as much of a dupe as we all thought. He said, “By dessert we’ll have worked around to small talk. Hey, was it hard cutting off all your hair?”

  I’d stared into the mirror at the salon like an arsonist watching a house burn down. I ran a hand over my head. “It was a relief. I feel lighter.”

  “Maybe I should cut mine.”

  I tilted my head and studied him. “Not yet,” I said. He smiled. I said, “So, if you’re—perchance—sort of ambivalent about your mom’s book, why didn’t you just commission the Day brothers to adapt Marian’s?”

  He made a face. “I mean, all things being equal, I would have, but I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings.” Marian was a shared obsession of theirs, he said. Carol had read Marian’s book aloud to him when he was a child. His father had given her the book when they were dating, and Redwood thought she might have married him partly because of it, because she fell in love with the idea of Matilda Feiffer and the family connection, the family legend. “I think she wanted to be part of the story,” he said. “Like of the Josephina Eterna and Marian and all the titans-of-industry stuff. But that story’s over, so she just ended up in a really different, really not great one.”

  He said the Day brothers had surprised him by being unexpectedly fired up about his mother’s book. All the overwrought conjecture gave them something to work with, tonally. Redwood said he’d imagined a more conceptual film, something about the ambiguity of disappearance, maybe like a spiritual/metaphysical Terrence Malick take (of course he had), but what the Days had written would be cool and high-concept in a different way. Like a tiny bit camp.

  “Right,” I said. “Hundred percent.” And I needed to believe him, even though what he was describing wasn’t quite what I’d imagined.

  We worked on our salads.

  He said, “How does the process work, figuring out how to play a part?”

  I wanted to say that I just put the plastic pony in the plastic stable and smiled the way they told me to. But I said, “I imagine myself as someone else. That’s pretty much it.”

  “I asked Sir Hugo the same question, and he talked for an hour.”

  Fucking Hugo, so sure people would want to listen to him talk. Of course, people did want to listen to him talk, to that voice, all smoke and whiskey and the north wind. Just try to find a nature documentary Hugo hasn’t narrated. Just try to find an animated villain he hasn’t voiced.

  “I’ll sound ridiculous if I try to explain it,” I said.

  “Like me with the northern lights.”

  “Like me with the stupid glowworms.”

  He pinged his glass lightly against mine. “To mystery. May we not ruin it.”

  Twelve

  After lunch, Redwood and I moved to the chaises by his pool, kept going with the wine, gossiped about people in Hollywood, trotted out our best anecdotes, ventured small confidences. The pool tiles were tiny and square and cobalt blue, and the water was perfectly smooth, dense-looking like gelatin.

  I didn’t feel the way with Redwood I’d felt with Alexei, but I felt something, some zing or zip. Was the lack of wormlight reason enough not to embark on something? What if I never had the wormlight ever again? I didn’t think the answer was becoming a nun, married to the memory of a brief affair with a married dude. Was it stupid to sleep with The Money? Was it stupid not to?

  Maybe I wanted him to kiss me just so I could confirm he wanted to. Maybe I wanted him to fall in love with me so I could decide whether or not I wanted to be in love with him. You get used to people falling in love with the idea of being with you. You think you should always have their feelings in hand like a down payment.

  “How are things with Oliver?” he asked from behind his sunglasses.

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nada.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “I guess I’m surprised he could walk away without needing to yell at me. Most people want you to witness how much you’ve hurt them, but not him, apparently. I don’t know if that means I didn’t really hurt him or that he has more dignity than I thought.” I made my face a study in neutrality. “And you? Anyone special?”

  “No one at all.”

  When I’d googled Redwood, I’d clicked through watermarked society shots of him with an array of beautiful, serious-seeming women. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  A pause. I said, “I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why do you have a grand piano?”

  “It came with the house, but I do play. The piano is part of the reason I picked this place.”

  “Will you play for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most people at least pretend to be reluctant.”

  “I like to show off. But stay out here.”

  I don’t know what he played. It was slow and sad. The notes drifted out the open mouth of his bunker house, settled on my skin. I looked over the valley through the sound as though through mist. Then he stopped, and I was myself again.

  “Could have been worse,” I told him, but he heard what I was really saying.

  “It’s my party trick.”

  I thought of Jones Cohen removing my earring with his tongue, diamonds hanging from
his lips.

  * * *

  —

  In the evening, pink light submerged the city. I said I wanted to swim, thinking of skinny-dipping, but Redwood went into the house and came back with a one-piece bathing suit for me that smelled faintly of chlorine. I didn’t ask whose it was. The cool water felt sharp and shivery on my sunburned skin. I leaned back against the infinity edge, and Redwood waded toward me, rosy light reflected in the droplets on his beard. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he just leaned against the edge, too, facing the other way, looking out.

  After dark, when the city was lit up orange as a flat field of poppies and we were back on the chaises, wrapped in towels, he asked if I felt like eating some ’shrooms.

  I said sure.

  He went inside and came out with a foil-wrapped bar of chocolate.

  “Sir Hugo’s boyfriend gave this to me. I have no idea how strong it is.”

  “If it’s from Rudy, probably really strong.”

  We each ate a square.

  Redwood got to his feet. “I’m going to turn off those lights.”

  He went inside. The lights in the pool went off, and then the indoor lights. Piano music emanated from the house again, something dissonant and tattered-sounding, full of holes and gaps. I didn’t know if it was supposed to sound that way or if this was now a song in the key of ’shroom. The mauve light of the city pulsed in the sky and on the pool’s surface. The music started to draw together, to become something that made sense, and I felt like I could pull it toward me, shape it into a mass I would hurl out over the valley like a storm.

  Marian had written: The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

  Listening to Redwood play, I thought about how the medium of music is time, how if time stopped, a painting would exist unchanged but music would vanish, like a wave without an ocean. I wanted to tell him this, but when he came back, I got distracted by how his aura was gray and wispy like smoke. “I can see your aura,” I said.