“Sir, with all due respect, she’s passionate about what she does. You should be proud,” Tate says. The moment the words are out, his pulse quickens and he wonders what the hell he is doing testing this man.
“Is that so?” Thatcher says, blue eyes glinting, a bemused smile spreading over his face. He pours himself another drink, swallows half of it immediately. Tate can see it in his eyes, how gone he is. “How do you think this following of passion was possible in the first place? Do you think the seed money for this precious company of hers fell from the big blue sky? No, it didn’t. I wrote her a check because I love her and I want my girls to be happy, but that doesn’t mean I have to be pleased with the bullshit. I’m allowed my opinions, Trent.”
“I suppose you are, but I think you should celebrate the fact that your daughter hasn’t tethered herself to a miserable quintessentially prestigious job just for the sake of it and isn’t frittering away her days like many people in her position would do. She’s working hard at something she cares about. And she’s giving back, too. Personally, I find it inspiring. And it’s Tate.”
“Balls,” Thatcher says, chuckling.
Tate looks toward the door and startles when he sees Smith standing there, leaning against its frame. She’s barefoot and her hair is pulled back. She clutches a glass of white wine and smiles.
“I’m going to steal Tate, Daddy,” she says softly. How long has she been standing there? It’s clear from the wistful expression on her face, from the affection in her voice, that she did not overhear her father’s ugly confession. Tate feels thankful for this, a sudden urge to protect her. He will not tell her what he’s just learned. Not yet, at least. He knows how this information would destroy her. Shit, he thinks, wishing he’d gone to bed an hour ago.
9:45PM
“I’m hard.”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Smith says, walking Tate along the path to the guesthouse.
“Wow. You weren’t kidding around. He’s a piece of work,” Tate says. Thatcher’s bombshell explodes again and again in his mind. What kind of father would do this to his own daughter? No wonder she’s confused about what happened. He feels a newfound respect for Asad for not telling her how it went down. It would have poisoned her relationship with her father.
“I still love him though. I still love him even though he’s hard-nosed and doesn’t get it at all and is so unbelievably tone-deaf. I personally think he gets a kick out of giving me shit, but thank you for sticking up for me back there,” she says. “I’ve brought a few guys around here at this point and not a one has had the guts to put Thatcher in his place.”
“I’m not sure I put him in his place,” Tate says. “But I couldn’t help myself.”
“Well, I like that. Here we are,” she says. “El Guesthouse. I called it, didn’t I? I’m sure Bitsy went all out stocking the kitchen for you boys.”
“After that feast, I don’t think I’ll need to eat for weeks,” he says.
“It wasn’t torture, was it?” she says. “You survived okay?”
He nods. “It appears so. We’ll have to see if there’s any fallout tomorrow.”
Smith puts her hand on the doorknob but pauses, stands on her tiptoes and kisses his cheek. It’s all very fast and innocent, but just feeling her skin against his fires him up. She opens the door and walks inside. Another extravagant space, no expense spared. Endless furniture and books and art. The soothing hum of heat being vented through the ceilings and floors. She walks him to a bedroom past the kitchen and flicks on the light. His suitcase has been unpacked.
“Will this do?” she says with a smirk.
“Oh, I think it will.”
“Okay, I’m going to head back and deal with my wedding speech. I’ve never in my life procrastinated like this.”
“Good luck,” he says, taking her hand.
She squeezes it. Looks straight into his eyes. “Good night, Tate.”
He watches her leave, her body moving slowly toward the door, slipping through. He plops down on the bed and looks around. Just another bedroom. No big deal. He changes out of his clothes into a T-shirt and a pair of boxers and heads to the kitchen to see if he can find another beer. Briggs is there. He’s also changed out of his dinner clothes.
“Hey,” Tate says.
“Hey.”
He’s buzzed and riled. It takes every ounce of restraint not to tell Briggs what just happened with Thatcher. “Where the fuck are we?” he says, laughing, opening the fridge. “It’s three times bigger than my childhood home. I’m not sure what’s going on.”
“This, my friend, is what happens when old money meets new money,” Briggs explains. “Bitsy comes from this flush New York family, blue, blue blood in that one. Miss Porter’s, Sarah Lawrence, Colony Club. And then you get Thatch, the son of a Midwestern salesman and a nurse, who works his ass off and makes it to Princeton and then lands Bitsy and then strikes gold and can’t stop spending to save himself. An interesting combo. He can be a dick, but I’ve been around long enough to know that they’re a good family. Sally and Smith are amazing girls.”
“They look so much alike. It’s crazy. They even have the same mannerisms.”
“Yup,” Briggs says, taking a long swig of his beer. “Absolutely. Feel free to fantasize about the two of them. I do.”
Tate laughs. “You ready for this, man? This marriage thing?”
“Yeah,” Briggs says. “I’m ready. I’m pumped.”
“Good, man. Good.”
“Sally said your ex was playing around?” Briggs says, a serious look on his face.
Tate sips his beer. “Indeed,” he says, matter-of-factly, surprised that he’s feeling less and less embarrassed about admitting this detail.
“She ruin you? Or would you do it all over again?”
“I’d do it again, man. I’m an idiot. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”
Back in his bedroom, Tate grabs for his camera and starts photographing everything. Still lifes of a foreign land, he thinks. In the bathroom, he takes a piss, stares at the white wicker basket full of magazines and catalogs: Town & Country, Hamptons magazine, and Scully & Scully. He hears his phone buzz in the other room.
Smith: They like you.
Tate: Who’s they?
Smith: Bits & Sally. Thatch too.
Tate: Big thumbs up. Now I’ll actually sleep. Phew.
Smith: If B weren’t there . . .
Tate: Yes?
Smith: I’d sneak over barefoot in my nightgown and let you warm me up.
Holy shit. Where is this coming from? He certainly felt she was flirting earlier, in the car and at the pond, but it was all subtle and he wondered if it was even all in his head. This now is the opposite of subtle. This is fucking hot. A dream. His pulse picks up as he types . . .
Tate: I would warm you up. What else would you do?
Smith: I’d sit on the edge of your bed and tease you.
Tate: Tease me?
Smith: Yes. You’d try to touch me, but I wouldn’t let you.
Tate: Why?
Smith: Because it isn’t time.
Tate: FYI, I’m hard.
Smith: Did I need to know that?
Tate: Yes. You did . . .
Smith: I’m wet . . .
Tate: Fuck.
Smith: I can’t believe I just wrote that.
Tate: Believe it.
Smith: What are we doing?
Tate: ???
Smith: Happy Thanksgiving, Tate.
Tate: Happy TG, S.
Hand on his cock, he closes his eyes and imagines her. She’s in a nightgown. It’s short and sheer, a soft see-through pink. She’s barefoot even though it’s cold, running in the grass toward him. She appears at his door shivering, teeth chattering, nipples hard as hell, hair a fucking mess. She gets under the covers with him. Relax, she says, and he lies back. Her hands are frozen . . . She grabs him . . . puts him in her mouth . . .
Fuck. He hops up. Runs to the bathroom, f
inishes in the toilet. He’s not about to make a mess of those fancy sheets. He doesn’t want to do anything to fuck this up.
He likes this girl.
Friday, November 29, 2013
CLIO
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals IV A 164
Dearest Clio,
I’m thinking of your name. Clio Eloise Marsh. Clio is, as you know, the Muse of history. History is everything and it is nothing. It’s important, but it need not define you. I’m your mother. Your MOTHER and I’ve been a lousy mother and a brilliant mother maybe too but you’ve always been my bright light, my greatest LOVE. Love can be paper light, paper white, and love can be a monster, a dreaded darkness, a tempest of regret and discovery and islands, so many islands with jutting rocks and creatures and you are in the boat, sailing along and it’s up to you and it’s not up to you because you’re not the CAPTAIN, but just a passenger. I want you to go, GO, have a good life, full, crammed with passion and purpose and questions and forgiveness—so important to forgive—and curiosity and GOD and birds, you love them so and I love that you love them, and big books and the little nothing books nobody knows too, and clues and laughter. We haven’t laughed enough yet. We will. We will laugh at it all. And you will understand, it will make sense, AHA, AHA, you will say, yes, yes, you will be a mother one day, and see what it’s like to crack open with hope and worry and desire and pain and most of all love. But it’s not simple. It’s hellos and good-byes, nevers and forevers, and go away and come back, please come back, forgive me, I’m flying, I’m falling. The world is big and bad and good too, ancient riddles, chaos, phenotypes and genotypes and survival and death and life and loss and energy and voyages forward and back and inside. Remember when Charles lost his daughter Annie? Remember how sick he was, how sorrowful? I cried for him, I cry for him, because there’s nothing worse than losing that kind of love. But she was in pain, she was not well, she was not meant to linger. Poor little Annie. Poor Charles. You are loved, my muse.
Mama
8:15AM
“Why don’t we ever talk about her?”
The last time.
The three words tumble through her head, over and over, as Clio opens her eyes. She stares up at the ceiling, fixing on those plastic stars that caught Henry’s attention, those stars that have lost their glow. This is the last time she will wake up in this bed, in this room, in this part of her life.
Clio stays in bed, her body peaceful and limp, and she feels it: the mournfulness fading, draining from her pores. That she will leave these stars behind, this room behind, this house behind, is nothing but right.
It’s finally time.
Last night. Remarkably, Thanksgiving dinner was fine, far better than she expected it would be. She and her father crunched through the snow to get to Jack’s house and it was the two of them and Jack and his wife, Jessica, and their adorable girls, and Jack’s parents, whom Clio hadn’t seen since last year. She’d worried that the reunion would be awkward, but it wasn’t. It relieved her that there was no talk of Eloise. The kids took center stage. Maddy sped around wielding toys and books, and Gabby toddled about, pulling things from shelves. It was chaos, but a joyful, hopeful chaos.
When she and her father came back here, there was this moment when they stood together in the darkened hall outside the bedrooms, this swollen moment when it seemed like he might say something. He had this look on his face, this sheen in his eyes, and he put his hand on Clio’s shoulder and looked into her eyes and she felt as if she might burst. She waited for him to say something. Something meaningful. I love you maybe. Or I’m sorry. But he looked at her and then he looked down and said just two words. Good night. And with these two simple, cowardly words, a familiar pulse of disappointment shot through her and she watched him disappear into his room and close the door. She just stood in the hallway and listened to the cadence of her own breath in the silence.
Back in her bedroom, her phone rang. She hoped it was Henry. She wanted to hear his voice, but it wasn’t him. They’d agreed not to talk until she returned to the city. This was his idea; it was clear, he said, that she needed some space. But as soon as she had it, this space, all she wanted was to go back, to rewind to those moments before that baby cried in the station, to those moments when they were joking about Christmas presents. Instead of speaking, a string of texts, none of it immensely assuring.
Henry: Enjoy your time with your dad,
Clio: I will try. I miss you though. I’m sorry. All I am is sorry.
Henry: You must stop saying that word.
Clio: I know, Henry.
The phone call was instead from Smith. Clio felt a lifting as her friend spoke; the mere rumble of Smith’s voice was soothing and just what she needed. Clio could detect a different texture in this voice, a palpable lightness. Smith rambled on and on about the day she’d enjoyed with Tate, how they’d visited some magical crooked pond to find some sort of poetry plaque, how dinner was surprisingly innocuous, how Tate held his ground with Thatcher, how she thinks she might really like him.
I feel like I’ve known him forever, Smith said, a quasi-giddiness coating her words. I feel like you and I are finally getting our lives together, Clio. Isn’t that an exciting thought? Like we’ve been stumbling along, but now we’re finding our footing?
Smith didn’t ask how things were at home for Clio and this was an anomaly—Smith was typically dutiful in soliciting such information—but Clio found herself thankful for the lapse. She relished Smith’s telling.
And she stayed up late. Packing, going through old things, figuring out what was worth saving. As she tossed things into boxes and garbage bags, she remembered an old, silly television show she and her mother used to watch together from her mother’s bed. Supermarket Sweep, where a shopper had to fill her basket with the most valuable items in a limited time. In the end, they’d ring up all the contents and see what it added up to. On the show it was a sum of money. Here, now, a childhood. A life.
As Clio did it, this impossible thing that felt easier than she’d imagined it would be, this literal boxing up of her past, words Smith once said echoed in her mind, a balm. It is just a physical place. Walls and floors and a roof. They are just things. It is your past. Take with you only the parts of it that you want. Create room for your future.
She sits up now, tosses her legs over the side of the bed, buries her toes in the carpet. She lingers, looks around the small space, which is now almost entirely bare but for the boxes. Boxes for donation. Boxes to store with her father for now. And a box she’s marked “Jack’s Girls.”
She smells bacon. It’s a purely happy smell. Growing up, every Sunday morning, her father would get up and make breakfast, and it was always bacon and eggs. His eggs were good, laden with dill, but it was the bacon that was her favorite and his. The crispier, the more blackened and burned, the better. Her mother, if she felt well enough, would make something sweet. But most of the time, Eloise would just sit there, eyes vacant, and drink coffee from a mug Clio made at school for one Mother’s Day that said Best Mom in the World with a sloppy approximation of a globe.
On the way to the bathroom, Clio stops at the window, presses her palm to the glass, traces her finger around the wooden frame, the frame littered with smudged pencil notations of birds she’s seen and the dates. Baltimore Oriole 4/2/94. House Finch 5/13/95. Mourning Dove 5/27/95.
In the bathroom, she washes her face and brushes her teeth, stares into the mirror for a final time. She eyes the duct tape in the uppermost corner of the mirror, where her mother punched it. She remembers that day with haunting clarity, her mother flying into a rage with no warning, spouting paranoid thoughts, slicing her hand up, leaving blood everywhere and young Clio to pick up the pieces.
She pops open the plastic disc that contains her birth control pills, slips one from its clear cocoon, stares at the tiny white dot in the center of her palm. She tosse
s it to the back of her throat and washes it down with water from the tap. Will she stop doing this at some point? Soon? The thought excites her and scares her in equal measure.
She zips up her cosmetic kit. Scans the contents of the small white cabinet. It’s all junk—ancient deodorants and yellowing lotions—but she pauses when she sees her mother’s perfume. She lifts it to her nose and smells. The aroma brings her back. She carries the bottle with her, places it next to her book bag. Gets dressed for the day.
“Clio! Breakfast!” her father calls, his voice robust. It’s as if nothing has happened.
Downstairs, the table is set. Heaping plates of food and large cups of coffee wait. Her father sits and Clio sits across from him. The third chair, her mother’s chair, sits empty between them.
Clio tries the eggs. They taste just as they always have. Her father is particularly quiet this morning, but there’s a peaceful quality to his face. She takes a few more bites, a couple big swigs of coffee, and watches him. Silence shrouds them, as it so often does, but it feels heavier today, dense. She puts her fork down.
“My last meal here,” she hears herself say. The words come from her without her permission. They are hers but less than conscious. Her head feels lighter than it should.
He nods but says nothing. He shovels large forkfuls of food into his mouth. Clio watches his Adam’s apple bulge as he swallows. There is a speck of red by his upper lip. Blood. He has cut himself shaving, Clio deduces, and without warning, she’s hurtled back to Easter Sunday when she was eleven. She sat in this chair at this table. Eloise was manic, flying around the kitchen in a loosely tied robe. Her father played along with his wife’s elaborate breakfast orchestrations, making fried eggs into bunny faces, adding M&M’s eyes and bacon ears. Clio fixated on the crimson dot of blood on her father’s cheek, how it kept growing before he’d dab it with a square of paper towel. She ate everything they put in front of her even though it didn’t taste good and she wasn’t hungry. When her father’s face stopped actively bleeding, she felt a surprising pang of relief. Somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten that he could hurt too.
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