by Kate Russo
She looks down at her rib eye, her eyes filling quickly and unexpectedly with tears. Wrong fucking question.
After a deep breath, she responds, “I think so,” blinking a few times and stuffing a chip in her mouth. It’s possible, given how dark it is, that he hasn’t noticed her eyes brimming over.
“That must be awful. I’m sorry.”
“My kids . . . they’re difficult. They’ve never really wanted to be close to me or their father. Sometimes I think they saw through both of us.”
He nods. “Kids are good at that.”
“I should stop calling them kids. They’re not kids anymore. All in their twenties. Full-grown cunts now!” She laughs, in the hopes of fighting back the rest of the tears.
Bennett looks shocked, though he’s quick to cover it up. “And I take it you and your ex don’t get along, either?”
“Ha! No,” she says.
“Stupid question, sorry. Has he”—here Bennett searches for the right words—“moved on?”
The questions are coming so thick and fast now that Kirstie wonders if maybe she’d like to go back to when he wasn’t asking her any questions at all.
“No idea,” she says. “I hope not.”
He stops chewing and looks at her pityingly.
“I don’t want him back! Is that what you think?”
“Maybe . . .” he admits. “I kept hoping my wife would ditch the twat she left me for and come crawling back.”
“Do you still?” she asks, turning the tables, though she doesn’t really think she needs to. It’s pretty clear he’d take his ex back in a heartbeat.
He doesn’t answer immediately. “I know she won’t. That’s the important thing. There was a fine line between hope and delusion there for a while.” He draws the last of his wine. “Jesus. If we’re going to continue this conversation, we’re going to need another bottle,” he says, trying to lighten the mood.
“We’ll get a Châteauneuf-du-Pape this time.” She smiles at him. She has the distinct feeling that he’s never told anyone what he just told her about his ex. Furthermore, she suspects Bennett is still prone to delusion. She could share with him her firm conviction that all hope is delusional, but she doesn’t want to break his spirit. He’s the first person in a long time that she wants to rebuild instead of smashing into a million tiny pieces.
Waving down Ellie, she orders the bottle even though she knows she’ll be incredibly drunk by the time they finish it. It should worry her that she has no idea where she is or how to get home. If Bennett leaves her to meet his girlfriend, she’ll have to get back to West London all by herself, blind drunk. But maybe they’ll go home together. Maybe Bennett’s not the only one who is delusional.
“It’s usually the other way around,” Bennett explains, after tasting the new bottle of wine. “Most people order the expensive bottle first and the shit bottle last.”
“No they don’t, darling. Most people start out sensible, then they get pissed.” She takes a sip for good measure. “Then they get depressed and the only cure is Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”
He laughs. “You clearly know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I do.”
He stops laughing, abruptly, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Sorry, it keeps vibrating. Just want to check it isn’t Mia.” He looks down at the screen, then holds the phone out at arm’s length, across the table, to read a text message.
“You want my glasses?”
He gives her the stink eye. “No.” He squints at the screen. “It’s Claire, not Mia. She wants to know if I am coming to the bar tonight.”
“We’ll finish up here,” she says, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. “I’ve commandeered you long enough.”
“If we finish this bottle of wine,” he says, running a hand through his hair, “I’m going to be too drunk.”
“Drink some water,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”
He picks up his glass of water and takes a big gulp. Blimey, if she told him to walk in front of traffic, would he?
When the screen lights up, Bennett again looks at his phone. “Alright, I told her I’d be in Soho in an hour.”
Kirstie nods, bravely. She’s been lucky to have his company all day. It’s time to let him go. He had a life before she stepped into his house and she needs to let him keep it. Tomorrow she’ll start thinking about how to find fulfillment in her own life. She’ll call Priya and ask the necessary questions about the Barbican flat. She’ll look into adult education classes. She’ll find a yoga group. She’ll call the kids and she’ll leave Bennett alone.
“Bollocks,” he says, looking at her with the kind of expression a father gives his teenage daughter. “You don’t know how to get back to West London.”
“I’ll head west,” she says, taking her final bite of steak. She’d swear the look he’s giving her now is pity. She doesn’t want to be pitied. “I’ll be fine.”
“Alright . . .” He’s unconvinced.
“Do you want me to send you a text when I’m home safe, Dad?”
He rolls his eyes.
She shouldn’t be this way. He’s only showing he cares. Sure, she’s disappointed he’s leaving her tonight, but she’s also annoyed that he doesn’t think she’s capable of getting back on her own. “I’m not an idiot,” she says, putting a cap on it.
“I didn’t say you were,” he responds, frustrated, putting his fork down and looking right across the table at her. “I brought you to a neighborhood you don’t recognize and now I’m abandoning you and I feel badly about it. I just want to help. I’m not as oblivious as you think I am.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She pushes her plate away.
“That was a lot of steak,” he says, staring down at an empty white plate but for one lonely bone.
“Thank you for indulging me.”
“Pleasure.”
“Let’s get the bill and get you to your pretty lady.” She waves at Ellie to get her attention.
“Please, can we split it?” Bennett asks.
“Don’t be daft. You’ve been a big help to me today. I owe you.”
“I really didn’t do anything, Kirstie.”
She’s not sure he’s called her by her name until now. Her whole body tingles. “You did!” You made me laugh, she thinks. You reminded me what it’s like to hear another person laugh. But there is no point explaining this to him. It would only sound pathetic. “Let me do a nice thing for you.”
“Okay,” he says, putting his hands up in the air in surrender as Ellie puts the bill on the table.
* * *
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On the cab ride home, she warns herself not to get too excited about her day with Bennett. Sure, he seems like a sweetheart, but she can’t let another man derail her plans. Besides, men like Bennett, they never know what they want. To them, life is like the conveyor belt at a sushi restaurant: Just take what you want as all the choices pass by. Try lots of things and then forget about all of them once you’ve moved on to the next. His poor girlfriend. Maybe he’s like this with all his guests. She did notice on the AirBed website that the majority of his reviews were written by women. All positive. His house might be nothing more than a conveyor belt of single women who come into his orbit and leave again. It’s a perfect setup, really. Amazing more single men haven’t thought of it.
* * *
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The crystals look lifeless when she walks into the master bedroom. The citrine—the keeper of her hopes and dreams—is looking particularly dull in the dark room. Under the depressive curse of red wine, all the promise they held earlier now feels like a load of bollocks. They’re all just rocks, good for nothing, except maybe propping open a door. Over the course of their marriage, Albert turned her to stone, now she’s surrounding herself with rocks. It’
s like a fucking quarry in here, she thinks. She lied to herself about Albert for thirty years, telling herself that he didn’t mean the things he did. Is she really going to lie to herself about the potential of these damn rocks for another thirty? No, she’s going to learn to live with the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. She gathers up the amethyst, the rose quartz, and the citrine and takes them all down to the kitchen and dumps them in the bin.
She heads back upstairs with a glass of water. The hangover effects of three bottles of wine have already started to kick in before she’s even fallen asleep. She takes off her clothes, but can’t be bothered with a nightgown. Hot and sweaty, she doesn’t want any fabric clinging to her. She stretches across the width of the bed in nothing but her compression underwear. Eventually she slips those off, too. Lying back down, on the bed, so that her feet hang over the side, she feels the tightly wound coils of her intestines begin to unravel in gentle ripples. She’s falling asleep before she can even turn herself the right way around on the bed. Maybe she won’t do any of the things she told herself she would tomorrow. Maybe she’ll do nothing at all, she muses, as she starts drifting off. When she wakes up in the morning, maybe she’ll just roll over and sleep through the day. She could sleep through all the days and nights until it feels like there’s a reason not to. She has no idea what that reason would be, but that’s been the problem all along, hasn’t it? Maybe if she doesn’t know what she wants to do or where she wants to do it, she should just do nothing in the place where she already is.
She wakes up when light comes cascading through the window facing the garden. Pulling herself up off the bed, she turns back the covers, preparing to climb in, when she sees Bennett is standing at the door of his studio. He’s feeling for his keys. The clock on her bedside table says one a.m. He’s looking up at her now, her breasts illuminated by the floodlight attached to the side of the house, and he doesn’t move. She turns back to the bed, offering him nothing, not a wave or a smile.
He’s not the answer, she tells herself. She has to decide what she wants, how to spend her days, and where to live them. And she has to do it alone.
Dreamy Days—Come What May
It’s mid-morning, but Bennett is still in his pants, the blackout curtain drawn. He really should give the damn thing back to Claire, but she hasn’t asked for it. Right now, it’s keeping the room cool during this improbable May heat wave that’s making him feel both lazy and irritable. It’s also creating some much needed space between him and Kirstie, who, now that the weather is hot, is spending all her time out in the garden with one of those little electric hand fans that sounds like a swarm of bees. He’s been sitting on his futon for hours, hitting Refresh on his artist’s account page on the Royal Academy website. Roots Manuva thumps quietly from the iPod dock:
Dreamy days, come what may, we feel no way
there’s gonna be fun and lots of laughter
It’s May 15. Today is the day applicants were told to expect results, when either “short-listed” or “not accepted” will turn up next to their name on the website.
Entering his small painting of Claire into the Royal Academy Summer Show feels like his last real chance at success, though there’s no particular reason to think that way. There will be another chance next year, not to mention countless other painting competitions. Still, this feels like a punctuated moment. Maybe he feels this way because of all those poor sods he’s been watching on Britain’s Got Talent, all that bollocks about “This is my last chance to make it as an operatic juggler!” This isn’t Bennett’s last chance to make a comeback as a painter, he reminds himself, hitting Refresh yet again. It just feels like it, because he wants it badly and he’s not used to wanting things badly. Until recently, he was used to having the things he wanted. He tells himself that he should feel privileged to have had one really successful career. It’s probably selfish to want more, but he does anyway and hits Refresh one more time.
Of course, he nearly didn’t apply when he realized his old art school classmate Carl Willis would be one of this year’s selectors. He hates the idea of being judged by someone with whom he was once equal, if not more successful, but he swallowed what was left of his pride. It was also a risk to enter the smaller painting of Claire. The safer bet would have been to finish and enter the larger painting—Claire seated, statuesque. The wall of fabrics behind her. A Bennett Driscoll. The small painting is bordering on voyeuristic; Claire averts her gaze, looking out the window to the street, her legs tangled up in the billowing peach duvet. He knows that she was aware of him taking the photo of this moment, but still, previous models had always been painted head-on, seemingly competing for his attention with the intricate fabrics on which they were posed. None of that exists in this painting; neither model nor fabric is jealous of the other. Instead they seem more infatuated with each other than they are with the man holding the paintbrush. Everything about this painting is different; he’s never painted entirely from a photograph before, let alone one on his phone. He zoomed in and out on the screen, but most of the painting was done from memory. Not just the memory of seeing her lying there naked on the bed, but also the memory of what she felt like, how she tasted and smelled. All the sensory cues he never had with any other models. And might not have again with this model. Not after that fight at the Claret.
Bennett Driscoll—Awaiting Status Update, the webpage says, as it has all morning and every day for the last few weeks. He can’t help but chortle to himself; this phrase applies to just about every facet of his life.
He and Claire haven’t been talking much since the enormous row they got into a couple weeks ago, when he showed up drunk at the Claret after having dinner with Kirstie. Today’s news could be a good reason to call Claire. He told her she’d be the first person to know if he’s short-listed, though he made that promise before she wanted him dead (her words, not his). Anyway, he intends to keep it, even though he hasn’t yet admitted he decided to enter a different painting of her. Plus, he misses her. That night, he assured Claire that he and Kirstie were just friends, though he wonders if that’s entirely accurate. It’s just that he and Kirstie have a lot in common and sometimes it’s nice to feel close to someone that gets you. He shouldn’t have told Claire about the Barbican or the fancy steak house and he definitely shouldn’t have told her about the expensive wine. It was the Châteauneuf-du-Pape that tipped her over the edge. Sharing such a special bottle of wine with another woman, in Claire’s mind, was akin to fucking her.
“Châteauneuf-du-Pape!” she shrieked. It was after closing and she and Bennett were the only two people in the whole place. “How dare you?!”
“It’s just wine,” he mumbled.
“Fuck you! It’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape!” she shouted, throwing a dirty rag in his face. She had her red hair down that night, which she doesn’t do very often when she’s behind the bar. It looked sleek, like she’d just been to the hairdresser. Her dress looked new, too, black and short, like she’d been expecting him to take it off.
“She ordered it, not me,” he told her in a weak attempt to defend himself.
“But you drank it,” she replied.
“Let’s you and I get a bottle, then. A better one.” He stretched his arms across the bar in exhaustion and defeat. “What’s it called? Château Margaret or something?”
“MARGAUX!”
“Okay, fine. Let’s get that.” He tried smiling.
“You can’t get that at eleven-thirty at night, Bennett. They don’t sell it at the offie!”
“Alright, tomorrow night,” he suggested, desperate to make this problem go away.
“Piss off, Bennett.”
The room was starting to spin, so he rested his head on the bar.
“Go home to your new girlfriend.”
He banged his forehead lightly on the wooden bar, thinking maybe that might stop the spinning. It didn’t.
“We should take
a break,” she said, with finality.
“Because I drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape?” he asked, giving the name a hint of sarcasm, which he immediately regretted when he realized she was about to cry.
“Because you don’t know what you want.”
That’s not true, he thought. He did know what he wanted. He wanted the argument to stop. He wanted to run his fingers through her silky hair. He wanted to sleep in her bed with the comfortable pillow-top mattress pad. And he wanted to wake up with an erection and somewhere nice to put it. He wasn’t going to get any of these things, all because he drank some stupid bottle of French wine that, if he’s honest, didn’t taste any different from the plonk they sell at Khoury’s.
Bennett and Claire: Awaiting Status Update.
The next afternoon, after the throbbing headache and the feeling of impending vomit had finally subsided, he went to the wine shop on Turnham Green Terrace and asked how much a bottle of Château Margaux would cost. “Depends on the vintage,” said the toff behind the counter, who looked like an anorexic wax statue of Prince William.
“A good vintage would be around five hundred pounds,” the man said, tapping the pocket square in his starched blue blazer, insinuating it was worth about as much.
Fuck that.
Kirstie was sitting in the garden reading a magazine when he returned sans Margaux. “How’s your head?” she asked, a self-conscious smile on her face.
“Been better,” he admitted. He ran his hand through his hair, remembering the sight of Kirstie, naked, at the bedroom window. He should have gone inside immediately, but he didn’t. He just watched her until she crawled into bed. He had no idea whether he should mention any of that.
“Want me to fry you an egg?” she asked. “Helps me when I’m hungover.”
His stomach churned, either at the thought of an egg or the thought of the awkward conversation. Or both. “No, thank you,” he said, adding, “I’m still full from that steak.” Better than admitting there was no way he’d be able to keep an egg down.