I’d felt bad for the racquetballs.
But there was no reason, now, that he couldn’t be back to his usual business. I was well again. Well enough, I should say. I would always be an addict, but right now, I was one in recovery. I had a plan. A good one.
It occurred to me that I should inform Watson of his role in said plan.
“Good morning,” I said to him, perched on the arm of the couch.
He blinked his eyes open. “Good morning,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Is that bacon?”
We moved to the leather armchairs by the window, and I curled up there, studying him, as he sorted through his plate with his fork. “What are you thinking?” I asked him.
He looked surprised. “That’s usually my line,” he said.
“All the same.”
With a forkful of tomato, he regarded me steadily. “I missed you,” he said. “I’m thinking about that, and how nice it was to wake up just now to you saying good morning.”
“And to breakfast,” I said.
“And that,” he laughed. “I’m thinking I’d like to hear you play your violin later, and that we could take a walk by the river. And I’m not sure exactly what I am to you, right now, but . . .” He shrugged. “I think we have lots of time to sort that out, if we want to.”
Once, this sort of emotional honesty would have sent me running to my chemistry table, needing a good loud explosion to clear my head. Today, I only curled my toes and then uncurled them, basking a little in the sun.
Watson wolfed down his breakfast and set the plate aside. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “Turnabout, fair play, et cetera.”
“Oh,” I said, stretching until my fingers brushed the curtains. “I was just refining a few points.”
“Points?”
“Of the terms and conditions of our relationship.”
“The what?” Watson coughed. “Sorry?”
“Do you need a glass of water?” I asked, concerned.
“No,” he said, “but a clarification would be nice.”
“That’s the goal.” I sat up, steepling my hands under my chin. “I spent the last few weeks drawing it up on a legal pad. It’s only about twenty-three pages long—”
“Only.”
“And I tried to keep the addendums to a minimum.” I was also attempting to keep a straight face, but I didn’t want Watson to know that. I had given this matter significant thought. I certainly hadn’t written us up contracts.
Lawyers were far too expensive.
He raked a hand through his hair. “Okay. Hit me.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s an expression,” Watson said, and poked me with his foot. He’d done that earlier. Was that something we did now? “What are these terms and conditions? What exactly am I agreeing to?”
I took a deep breath. I knew, empirically, that it was best to begin with something small. To pop the frog into the pot of water before one set it to boil. “Your nails,” I said.
Watson glanced down at his hands. “What about them?” he said, flexing his fingers.
“Quite often you have dirt under your nails,” I said. “When I first met you, I thought you might be a gardener.”
“I was living in a dorm,” he said patiently. “Where would I have been gardening? The roof? Mars? Wait, actually—don’t answer that.”
I frowned; I’d already come up with one or two sensible locations. “I’ve left a nail brush for your use in the en suite bathroom. Yours is green. Mine is black. Please don’t use mine.”
Watson bit his lip. “So this is one of your stipulations, then. Clean nails.”
I squirmed a little in my chair, then forced myself to settle. “You’ll . . . if we are dating, you’ll sometimes touch me, and it’s good for me to not have anything to focus on that I can be repulsed by.”
To Watson’s everlasting credit, he didn’t recoil at the horrible thing I had said. I hadn’t meant to use the word “repulsed”; I had meant to say “made skittish” or some phrase that reflected the fault of it back on myself. But the truth of it was that, after my assault, I struggled to stay in whatever romantic moment I was in, no matter how I was enjoying it. There was always the undertow pulling at my feet, pulling me away, away.
It was best to chip away at those things we could control, now, than to run screaming from him after he touched me.
“Jamie, I’m sorry,” I said instantly. “I am. You know this has everything to do with me.”
“With the both of us,” he said, and reached out to touch my knee. “I’m fine with it. The green nail brush, huh? My favorite color’s blue.”
It was a very sad attempt at banter, but I beamed at him as though he were both Abbott and Costello. He wasn’t hurt. I was getting better at not hurting him. “That’s point one,” I said, affecting unaffectedness. “Points two through ten have to do with that ridiculous list your father made you as to how to deal with . . . me.”
Watson had the grace to wince. His father had given him a strange little journal into which he had compiled a list of suggestions for how to handle one’s Holmes (as though I were a small-breed dog or similar), drawing not only from Dr. Watson’s own accounts but also from his own efforts with my uncle Leander back when they’d been flatmates. This was absurd on many levels. Leander was very easy to live with. He hardly ever stalked around anymore with a pistol in his bathrobe pocket.
I knew about this journal because my Watson had written about it, and we shared our accounts with each other, warts and all.
This wart was particularly large.
“For instance,” I said, running the curtain through my fingers, “I seem to remember an item along the lines of ‘Do not allow Holmes to cook your dinner unless you have a taste for cold, unseasoned broth.’”
Watson coughed delicately. “Holmes. Have you ever made . . . anything?”
“I have made you at least four cups of tea.”
“In the last two years.”
“I dislike cold, unseasoned broth, and my uncle Leander is quite a . . . foodie”—I despised that word—“and your father has quite the talent for hyperbole. I can’t believe that Leander once made him clear, tasteless soup. I will make you no broth. Verbum sap.”
“Noted,” Watson said. “I’m not proud of that journal, you know. I’m not proud of a lot of things my father has done.”
James Watson had a habit of boosting his son from class to go listen to his police scanner in the Walmart parking lot. He was a bit of a rogue, a bit of a bad influence, a bit of a silly suburban dad. The last I’d heard, he’d been fighting with Jamie’s stepmom, Abigail, over his friendship with Leander. They’d been gallivanting about together like schoolboys, leaving Abigail to take care of her and James’s kids and the minutiae of their lives.
“You’re still not answering his calls,” I ventured.
Watson sighed. “They’ve split up. For good this time, I think. He keeps leaving me messages . . . I think he’s been spending time with my mom and Shelby in London.”
“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain kind of sense. Jamie’s parents had a reasonably good relationship for a divorced couple, and Grace Watson had just gone through the harrowing, absurd experience of being duped into marriage by a Moriarty. I imagined they were both feeling somewhat fragile right now.
“Ten-year-old me would have died and gone to heaven at, like, the suggestion that my parents might get back together. But now . . .” He shrugged a bit too forcefully. “I don’t care.”
I touched his knee, and he put his hand over mine, and said, “You know, these aren’t . . . unreasonable things to ask for. The things you’re asking for.”
“Compared to your parents?” I asked.
“Compared to anyone.”
Generally speaking, I had no real basis by which to judge relationships as reasonable or unreasonable. My family was composed of a number of odd, sad adding machines who lived in a lonely house on the sea. They weren’t precisely role models. A
nd as for Watson—we’d smashed our friendship into bits and rebuilt it from the ground up. It resembled nothing, now, other than itself.
“Good,” I said, for lack of a better response. “Well, then, I also take issue with the idea that I don’t give you compliments. Your father claimed that I would give them to you every ‘two to three years.’”
Watson bit his lip again. He was going to do himself an injury.
I ticked them off on my fingers. “For someone who does not style it, you have very good hair. You are better at French than you think, though your written syntax is appalling. And you have developed an excellent right hook.”
“Thank you,” Watson said gravely.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “That should tide us over for at least the next six months.”
He leaned back in his chair with a rueful expression. “Is there anything else? I know you said that you’d put together, like, twenty-three pages of this stuff, but I was sort of hoping we could walk around the college—”
“I want to date you,” I said in a rush. “I want to, and I have no idea how to do it, even if I am behaving as myself. Whoever that is. And now I’ve picked up this case, and so often in the past we’ve played at being together to extract information that I’m not sure where that fake relationship begins and our real one ends. Or vice versa.” I fidgeted, then forced my hands to relax. “What’s worse is that pretending . . . it makes it easier. It lets me try out things that I might want to do for real, and there aren’t the same sort of stakes. Because the stakes are very high. It’s you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Watson said in a low voice. “They’d have to drag me away from you. They’d have to put a gun to my head, and even then . . .” He made a helpless sort of shrug. “I mean, Holmes, the worst has already happened, and look. We’re here. We’re together.”
I reached out to take his hands, warm and calloused and gentle. “I don’t want to pretend about anything important. But is it okay, if sometimes . . . I pretend to be a girl who would want to go dancing at a disco?”
“Is that pretend, though?” Watson asked. “Because I remember a homecoming dance when—”
“Or,” I hurried on, “if I pretended I wanted to hold hands while walking to, say, play mini golf.”
“Mini golf,” he said, like it was a delicious, awful thing that he would lord over me for months. “Mini golf.”
“That is not the point.”
“You with a little putter, whacking away to get the ball through the tilting windmill—”
“Watson. Focus. Holding hands.”
“Like we are now?”
“Yes,” I said, and he brought them up between us.
“You can pretend whenever you like. But how do I know when you’re pretending, and when it’s real?”
“We’ll need some sort of code word,” I said. “Something we wouldn’t ever say otherwise. Like ‘kumquat.’ Or ‘asymptote.’”
“I can do that.” He regarded me over our clasped hands. “Can I add one term myself?”
“Of course,” I said, though I could feel myself tense.
“Once a week, we have to do something that cannot possibly kill us.” Then he smiled, a bit wickedly. “And once a week, we have to do something that probably will.”
In that moment, I loved him more than anything else.
“And that’s all right?” I asked. “All this is all right?”
Watson considered it. “I . . . I don’t have any agenda this summer. I feel like the last year has wiped me completely clean. I’m so tired of just surviving,” he said. “And in three months everything is going to start, the whole train ride straight into adulthood, and I just . . . I want to lay around on the couch in your flat, and watch dumb television, and write stories, and I want to solve this mystery you’ve got. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have a bloody Moriarty at the other end. So it’s a chance to try out solving a crime without our necks on the line. We can try our hands at being detectives for real.”
“For real,” I echoed. There was something to that idea: the last few years had felt like fiction. “I agree to your terms. I’d like to give these terms seven to ten days, then renegotiate if needed.”
“Or call the whole thing off?” He said it lightly, a cord of uneasiness just below.
I tried my best not to hurt Watson. I also tried my best not to hurt myself. “Yes,” I said. “Should we shake on it?”
Below us, a pair of taxis went by like racehorses loosed from their gates. A tangle of pedestrians were peering into the windows of the souvenir shop, their umbrellas up against the light rain. I knew they were tourists for that; the rest of the city threw up their hoods, or a newspaper, or simply squinted their eyes and pushed on forward as the clouds gathered and the wind picked up. And above it all were the towers and turrets of the university, rain-washed, sharp-edged against the sky, some commingled promise of what was past and what was to come.
It would start, it would start soon, and if Watson was hurt, he was also happy, and that was the way it always went, with us. “Shake on it?” he asked, disentangling our hands. “I sort of think we already have.”
Three
PRECOLLEGE PROGRAM ORIENTATION WAS SCHEDULED for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.
My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.
I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.
2b. Loudly.
2c. He did this as often as he could.
2d. To wit: “A latte for my niece and her young man”; “Charlotte, wasn’t that your Jamie’s favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner’s later work—”; “Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren’t barbarians.” And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child.
By the time orientation rolled around, I was, in fact, feeling quite barbaric. Watson, true to form, was too delighted by the stack of paperbacks he’d bought and the pigeons on the corner and the raspberry cake he’d had with his tea to register any of the above as obnoxious.
It wasn’t that I was upset by the thought of Watson being my boyfriend. It was something else that bothered me. Whatever Watson and I were to each other was our business, no matter how the world leaned in and breathed against the glass, and Leander, my excellent all-knowing uncle-slash-guardian, should have known that. And not found it half as funny as he apparently did.
Even if his intentions were good (Watson was, emphatically, not “easy”; he was, however, someone who “made me happy”), I was still mad. This was a complex idea, but I was fairly certain I could convey it to Leander through a very extravagant sulk, and so I did my best.
I didn’t, of course, count on the collateral damage.
“You’re unhappy,” Watson said in the kitchen, that second evening after supper. He was pouring steaming water into a mug, avoiding my eyes. “Have I violated the terms? Or . . . if you haven’t had enough time to yourself, or something, just tell me. I’m not supposed to move into the dorms until tomorrow, but they might be able to let me in tonight—”
“Why would you do that? Don’t do that,” I said. In the other room, Leander rustled meaningfully. I cocked my head toward my bedroom, and Watson picked up his mug and followed.
After I arranged myself in my chair, legs over the armrest, he surprised me by dropping down to sit at my feet.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, shoulders tensed.
It took quite a bit to make me speak plainly about how I felt, but Watson in distress tended to provide that bit. “I’m nervous,” I admitted.
“Ner
vous?”
“Nervous. We’re starting up at a new place, and together,” I said. “We’ve never done that before.”
He sighed, considering. “Maybe I’m slow or something,” he said, “but why does that make you nervous? We have each other. We’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be fine, but we’ll be on display, a bit. We’ll be expected to do the whole Holmes-and-Watson dance, which neither of us likes doing. And on top of that, we’ll need to make new friends.”
“We will?”
“Yes,” I told him. “My therapist said so. So that we don’t go do our ‘folie à deux thing,’ as she calls it.”
“Folie à deux thing? As in . . . the shared private madness thing? You have a hyperbolic therapist.”
It had seemed fairly on the nose to me. “Still.”
“Holmes,” he said, tipping his head back to look at me. “I don’t mind it. There are worse things in the world than making new friends. Murder. Kidnapping. Scorpions.”
“I’d take scorpions over socializing any day.”
“You could take your mind off it by telling me about . . . I don’t know, this Dramatics Society situation. You still haven’t given me the details.”
“All in good time,” I said, because I was rather comfortable here, him looking up at me with his soft eyes, and the last thing I wanted to do was to bring a case into the room with us.
It was sudden, the sound of breaking glass, and before I heard the low roll of laughter that followed, I was already on my feet, Watson in a low crouch. It took a beat before we registered that the sound had come from the television in the next room.
I could hear the muffled sound of Leander cursing, the volume going down. Watson and I rearranged ourselves wordlessly, and after a moment, he laughed, dabbing at his front where he had spilled his tea. “I guess it’s either we rehash this mystery, or we go watch Friends with your uncle.”
A Question of Holmes Page 2