Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

I wanted to ask her what John Paul had said about us. I wanted to ask why Drew had told her about Skye and if they had broken up. I hated myself for liking this last idea, the commiseration that might overcome Susannah’s anger. And I kept quiet one more minute, knowing she wouldn’t be able to stand the silence and would offer me something just to end it.

  For once, I had the lounge to myself. The air felt close and moldy, thick with overbrewed coffee and damp tea bags. The clock jumped again. Twelve minutes till dinner—the warning bells would chime any minute. I longed for the comfort of their tremolos echo.

  “Listen, Catherine,” Susannah said quietly. “I’m not some guy you’ve known a year. I’d never break up with you. But you should have told me about Drew and Skye. If it had been reversed, I would have told you. That’s what friends do. They tell each other things.”

  This last, a scathing indictment. I wrapped the phone cord around my finger and pulled it tightly enough to cut off circulation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t care about Drew,” she said. “Boys will be boys, right? But I do care about you choosing Skye over me.”

  “That would never happen,” I said, not sure this was true. Feeling, as Susannah did, that in ways I had already chosen Skye, and would do it again. Not understanding myself why Skye persistently proved so irresistible a force, only doubting my own ability to not succumb to her.

  Susannah laughed, the same derisive snort when talking about her dad. I unwound the telephone cord, seizing on something I could offer her.

  “Maybe I can still go to Venezuela with you,” I said, “if you don’t want Drew. I’d really like to go.”

  “Never mind,” Susannah said. “He’s coming. It’s probably safer, with a guy. Even an asshole like Drew.”

  I nodded into the phone. A deep, red mark circled my index finger.

  “Don’t just nod,” Susannah said. “You have to speak, Catherine.”

  I nodded again, this time accompanied by a little sob. For the loss of John Paul and the forgiveness of Susannah—evident in the exasperation in her smoky voice, the same tones I’d been listening to all of my short, protected life. Susannah would understand that my inability to speak was only that, and not a refusal. But I could sense her patience finally running low and couldn’t think of a way to help her replenish it.

  “I’ll talk to you later?” I said, my voice sounding husky as hers.

  “Sure,” she said, crisp but not without compassion. “Later.”

  And we hung up, both of us leaving our hands on the receiver a moment, as if we could will the unfinished strands of our conversation resolved.

  THAT NIGHT AS I nursed my wounds alone in my room, Eleanor and Skye drank together, less than two glasses before Eleanor dissolved into tears and then passed out. Which left Skye with two more smuggled bottles and a buzz that had just barely begun to work its lightening, exhilarating magic.

  She sat on her narrow bed, watching Eleanor sleep, feeling lonesome and melancholy. “I wanted to come to you,” she said, the next evening. “But you needed to rest, for the horse show.”

  She said this matter-of-factly, even respectfully. I had just returned from Dover with three blue ribbons, which I stacked on top of my dresser.

  “You should hang these up,” Skye said, leafing through them.

  I shook my head. At home my room was filled with photographs and prizes and Breyer horses. But displaying the ribbons in my dorm room would have felt not only boastful but too revealing.

  Skye shrugged her shoulders and went on with her story. In the face of sleeping Eleanor and sequestered me, Skye had sought out the only other person at Esther Percy she felt close to, Mr. November.

  “Mr. November?”

  “Sure,” Skye said, with flat irony. “He’s my faculty adviser.”

  He didn’t even live on campus. She had put on my woodsman coat—her wrists freezing in the too-short sleeves. After a while the blood left her hands and she could no longer carry the wine. She stashed the bottles behind a tree. When we went back for them the next day, they’d frozen to burst—the red wine laced with white frost, the green glass shattered across the snow.

  Skye told me she’d trudged two miles into town, arriving at his door well past midnight.

  “But you hate him!” I said. “I thought you hated him.”

  “I do, kind of.” She shrugged again. “The truth is, I’d respect him more if he’d put me in his car and driven me to Mrs. Chilton’s. But of course he didn’t.”

  Mr. November had opened his front door, the look on his face shifting from groggy irritation to palpable delight. The unexpected boon of her: beautiful, shivering, and shimmering girl.

  Skye walked into the warm, messy house—dishes piled high in the sink. Dirty laundry draped over chairs. He picked up a flannel shirt from the couch and put it on over his T-shirt.

  “Are you cold?” he asked. “Do you want me to turn up the heat?”

  “Sure,” Skye said. She let her eyes fall on the ash-filled fireplace. “Or a fire might be nice.”

  He immediately began stacking kindling in the shape of a teepee. Pulled newspaper off the coffee table and shredded it into strips. While he worked, Skye walked around the house, looking for remnants of his escaped wife. She searched the bookshelves and mantel for photographs. She peered into the bedroom closet for clothes, searched the bathroom sink for scented soap. The only remains were empty hangers and the art deco rings, which she found in a small ceramic dish—possibly one of Ms. Latham’s creations—on the cluttered bureau. She slipped the rings onto her finger and walked back into the living room. Mrs. November had strong, wide hands. The diamonds slid around to Skye’s palm.

  “So,” Skye said. “You’re alone.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” He carefully placed a log on the modest blaze. They both stared a while as the flames lapped upward and then caught. “I’m always alone these days.”

  Skye ignored the plea for sympathy. “My dad says fires are the original television,” she said. “You can’t help but stare at them, zoning out. Mesmerized.”

  “It’s true,” said Mr. November. “I haven’t built one for a while. It seems like too much work, I guess, for one person.”

  He had fine, sandy hair that probably turned blond in summer. Skye wished there were a wedding photograph. She wanted to see his hair streaked with gold. She wanted to see Mrs. November’s fierce, handsome face smiling out from behind a veil.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asked. “Cocoa? Tea? Glass of wine?” A change of tone on this last item, the offer of alcohol confirming the unspoken nature of her appearance. Confirming his willingness to be complicit.

  “Sure. Wine would be good.”

  He banged around the kitchen for a minute, returned with two juice glasses filled with red wine.

  “Jane took all the wineglasses,” he said.

  Skye sat down on the couch, still wearing her coat. He sat in an easy chair across from her.

  “Jane,” Skye said, testing the first name. “Jane November.”

  “Used to be Jane Sniegowski. Sometimes I think she married me just for the name. Apparently it’s the only thing she’s keeping.”

  “That and the wineglasses,” Skye said.

  Mr. November smiled, wry and bitter. “When you put it that way, I guess she’s keeping quite a few things.”

  Skye noted the edge in his voice, a hard sound that hadn’t been there in the early months of fall. It made him seem older. More appealing. As if the loss of Jane Sniegowski had changed him irrevocably. Skye reached out her hand. He paused for a moment, then took it. He squeezed, and felt the diamonds on the inside of her palm. Turned her hand over and frowned at them.

  “I’m sorry,” Skye said. “I wasn’t stealing them. I just saw them in your room and wanted to try them on.”

  He ran his fingers across the setting, back and forth, like scratching an itch. “She gave them back to me,” he said, “when I went to f
ind her. She was at her grandparents’ cabin in Maine, on Sabego Lake. She seemed surprised to see me. Like she didn’t think I would come looking for her.”

  “Why did she leave?” Skye asked.

  He dropped her hand and grimaced, a condescending and bitter expression.

  “Why did she leave?” he repeated. “Why did you come here? Why are you wearing her rings? My rings. Why does anybody do the things they do?”

  “Usually for a reason,” Skye said. “Some sort of reason. Like, why did you let me in?”

  “Because I don’t care anymore,” he said. And then—knowing she was seventeen and would only kiss him if he said it out loud—“Because you’re beautiful.”

  Skye smiled. He leaned forward to kiss her and she pulled away. Reclining into the sofa and drinking the wine—which tasted like sour grape juice, after the Château Margaux. Mr. November leaned back in his chair, watching her, satisfied, understanding that her refusal to kiss him tonight meant there would be other nights.

  He held his hand out, palm up, and she handed over the rings. He put them on the cluttered table behind him, and as they talked through the night Skye worried the delicate jewelry would be lost among papers and coffee cups, eventually rolling to the floor and consumed by the vacuum cleaner. When they finished their wine, Skye stood up and plunked the rings into an empty shot glass on the mantel. By now strands of light cut through the gray outside his window.

  “I better drive you back,” he said.

  He dropped her off at the end of the school’s long driveway. Gave her his gloves for the walk back to JR, but didn’t try to kiss her again.

  I tried to imagine next English class, how I’d be able to look from one to the other. I wondered if Mr. November would be able to contain his attentions toward her or if they would just seem like his usual favoritism.

  “I’m going back there tonight,” Skye said.

  “Really.” I wondered what else would happen between them. I wondered what I would do, how I would distract myself, if night after night Skye crept out to Mr. November instead of to me. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “He doesn’t seem like an honorable person.”

  “Honorable,” Skye said, finding the word ridiculous. “Like John Paul is honorable?”

  I stared back at her, flummoxed. To me John Paul’s honor shone bright and inarguable as the blue of his eyes. That Skye should be blind to this astounded me. If she were willing to insinuate otherwise while believing us still together, what would she say if she knew we’d broken up? I couldn’t bear to grant her that license.

  “He is honorable,” I said, never managing to tell her anything else about John Paul and me.

  WHEN I WENT TO take my predinner shower, Amanda and Amanda were in one of the stalls together. I heard a giggle and then a moan, and I turned on the hot water with an intentionally loud creak. The dark-haired Amanda poked her head from behind the curtain.

  “It’s just Catherine,” she said, and they returned unabashedly to their affections. I closed my eyes under the cascade of water, wishing for earplugs and wondering if It’s just Catherine referred to my trustworthiness or my insignificance.

  On the way to the dining hall I stopped in the student lounge to call Susannah. Her voice sounded breezy and not quite right—a poor mimicry of our usual rapport.

  “Hey,” she said. “I never got a chance to ask you about Skye and what happened after the protest.”

  I paused, not only because of personal loyalties and inclinations (hearing the edge in Susannah’s voice, her hunger for dirt on Skye) but because of the half-dozen girls, who over vacation had seen the news reports and boasted about knowing Skye (inflating, of course, their connection to her). Girls who whispered whenever Skye strode past, once she was safely out of hearing range, but who would never dare ask her for particulars. I was their only chance.

  “Forget it,” Susannah said. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said. “There are just . . . you know. People.”

  “Whatever,” Susannah said. “Aren’t you going to ask about John Paul? Because I haven’t really seen him much.”

  How could that be? When the four of us had lived every minute, every meal, together.

  “He’s been studying a lot,” she said. “It’s an important term for him.”

  “Do other people know?” I said. I glanced back at the other girls, their pricked ears. “About me?” That last word, the barest whisper. Susannah couldn’t possibly have heard it.

  She paused on the other line, understanding her witness to the thing I feared most—the sudden rush of girls, the silky ponytails and tanned limbs. Matching Fair Isle sweaters and turtlenecks. All the girls who had been just waiting for this moment, to pounce with their superior charms.

  “I think they might,” she said. I imagined, unkindly, a vindictive pleasure in her voice—at hurting me with disclosure the way I’d hurt her with silence. “But try not to worry.”

  Walking across the lawn from the old part of campus to the new, my legs felt leaden. My heart a bitter, shriveled acorn. And I felt a barely contained rage at Susannah. How easy it would have been for her—to tell me nobody knew and let me rest a little lighter.

  I GAVE SKYE my stiletto, to protect herself on her nightly forays down the road to Mr. November’s. I could no longer stand the sight of him, his scrawny neck and hardened voice, his inexpert shave and chalk-stained fingers. The undeserved confidence in his stride, and the wry, canary-eating smile. A perpetual look of vindication, as if he relished contrasting his estranged wife with his teenage mistress.

  In real life, Mr. November never could have come near a woman like Skye, certainly not one his own age. Only the circumstance of being one young man among two hundred girls allowed him access to someone so beautiful and illustrious. He could give himself no personal credit beyond a willingness to exploit his status as teacher, and I found his new outlaw swagger distasteful and pathetic.

  In my mind, there were three worlds. The world outside—lofty and compelling, the whisper of destruction and glamour. The world inside—where rules were made for us to follow, a comforting but cumbersome straitjacket. And the world in between: a no-man’s-land where my friends and I could build camp and call our own. It had no past, no future, and no consequences. Mr. November was past the age for access to that no-man’s-land. Out of college, and gainfully employed, he should not only have been following the rules but upholding them. It sickened me, the way he looked away from Skye in class, a barely suppressed smile that dangerously resembled smugness.

  “You okay, Catherine?” he asked one morning after class, as I sidled past him.

  “Fine,” I said, narrowing my eyes and then casting them aside. I hoped he realized I knew everything.

  Because of course I did. Skye dogged me at meals and in between classes. She rode her BMX in circles around me as I walked to the barn in the afternoon. She told me every article of clothing, every tongue, every finger. Every compliment and glass of wine. Every last, most minute detail: like she were preparing me to testify against them at trial. Toward Mr. November she expressed mostly contempt. But the adventure itself exhilarated her, and she pursued it with amazed and electric fervor.

  “He’s dying to have sex,” she said, and I wondered if she considered this unexpected.

  “You should just do it,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

  We stared at each other, wordless. Me daring her, to take this experiment to its irrevocable conclusion. Her silent refusal tipping her hand, that my ways were too sullied and sordid for the likes of her.

  It infuriated me. I loved John Paul. Having sex with him was more noble, more honest, than any of her illicit acrobatics with Mr. November. At the same time I felt sickeningly jealous of Skye, for having such a seamy and absorbing escape, and of Mr. November, for stealing Skye away from me.

  SO I DID WHAT I should have done, when I first came to Esther Percy and needed a way to
occupy myself in the absence of John Paul. I rode my horse.

  Zarghami did his best to set up different jumping courses, working with picket planks and cavalletti. He would stand in the middle of the ring, calling out formations while I practiced dressage. Sometimes he would offer to just send me off by myself, on a quiet trail ride. But I always declined. Working in the saddle—making myself one with Pippin, the two of us sailing over jumps or perfecting figure eights—was the only thing that quelled the jammering of my brain. The icy disappointment of the winter that would turn to spring, when college acceptances and rejections would arrive.

  If I could collect enough points at the shows, I could forget about everything else. I could forget about John Paul, and Skye and Mr. November. I could forget about Susannah, transferring the plane ticket she’d bought for me into Drew’s name with barely a word of apology or regret. I could forget about graduation—the first leap toward the real world. There would only be a summer of riding and horse shows, a stack of blue and championship ribbons too big for my dresser drawer. And next fall the National Horse Show.

  And if I won there. For the rest of my life, whenever I walked by, they would whisper behind me everything I had accomplished.

  MEANWHILE, AT MR. NOVEMBER’S, pictures of his wife began to reappear. Not the wedding photo Skye had originally searched for but a snapshot taped to the refrigerator door of Mrs. November playing guitar at an assembly. A framed picture on his dresser, of the two of them on a mountaintop picnic.

  “Why did you put pictures of your wife back up?” Skye asked. She lay on the bed with him, both of them naked from the waist up. On his bedside table was a small hand mirror with a few lines of coke he’d bought from a friend.

  “I didn’t put pictures back up,” he said. “I never took them down.”

  Impossible: they would never have escaped Skye’s careful rummaging. She gazed over his shoulder at his wife, who smiled back at her from happier times. Clearly, the reappearance of these pictures had something to do with Skye. Perhaps his relationship with her had made him nostalgic for his wife. Or else she had restored his confidence enough that the photos no longer brought him grief.