The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  “So we could give most of it back.”

  “It’ll be a hell of a tax nightmare,” Neil pointed out, “but yes.”

  “You can’t return gifts,” her mother said, outraged.

  “Aunt Lyd, think of Arden and Garry,” Neil pointed out. “People are demanding some kind of public restitution, some kind of atonement. They’re going to have to live with the fallout from this, as are their children.”

  “I am thinking of them, or at least of Arden. This is her life’s work.”

  I’m twenty-eight, Arden thought. Twenty-eight years old. I never wanted this to be my life’s work. Is my life over at twenty-eight?

  “The fact is,” Arden said, “there is no way we can make this right. Even if we turn over the foundation’s assets, we can’t even return investors’ initial investments, let alone twenty years of promised returns.”

  Neil sat back, troubled.

  “I want to make this right, Neil,” she said, hearing the words for the first time, knowing them to be true. But she had to think of her mother, too, also still standing in the wreckage left by her husband and son. “If I could, I would make everyone whole, give them what they invested, plus a reasonable return. But I don’t know how to do that, and what’s more, how do we restore trust? Four generations of MacCarren work, ruined by greed and arrogance and narcissism. No grand gesture is going to make that right.”

  Garry sat beside her, his expression remote. Arden couldn’t tell if he was back with the sheep in New Zealand or plotting something. His gaze reminded her of the look on his face when he constructed an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that would take up the entire main floor of Breakers Point, or the look he had before he disappeared out west.

  “Exactly,” her mother said with satisfaction. “Now that we’ve settled that, I want to talk about what we need to do to save Breakers Point.”

  A junior lawyer came in, tapped Neil on the shoulder, murmured in his ear. “Excuse me for a moment,” Neil said, and went into the hallway. Arden got to her feet and stretched until her spine popped, then pulled her sketchbook from her bag, hitched one hip onto the window ledge, and looked at the last of several increasingly spare sketches she’d made of the picture on Seth’s phone. It was pared down to the barest of bare bones. To remove one more line would make the drawing’s framework collapse, destroy the unity. It was completely different from her drawing for the show, and yet just as good.

  Garry wandered to examine the pictures on the wall. In her peripheral vision, Arden could see Neil and the junior associate, heads together over a cell phone. Then Neil looked up, straight at her, and for once he wasn’t wearing his impassive face. He looked astonished.

  He said something to the associate, who set off at a run down the hall.

  “What?” she said when Neil opened the door and sat down at his laptop. “What happened? Is it Dad? Charles?”

  Neil cleared his throat, the gesture so uncharacteristically nervous her heart nearly stopped. “Arden, are you seeing anyone?”

  “No, not really,” she stammered. “Not dating anyone, not exactly.”

  “Have you recently been intimate with anyone?”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it.” He cleared his throat, and Arden’s stomach heaved its way into her throat. Neil was never at a loss for words. “An individual recorded you having sex with him and sold it to one of the gossip websites.”

  “That’s not true,” Arden protested hotly. “It was on my camera. I recorded it.” She was so intent on defending Seth that the full implications didn’t hit her until after the words were out of her mouth, in the air. “Wait . . . what?”

  “I’m sorry,” Neil said. “Say that again?”

  “We made the video together,” she repeated, although less vehemently. “How do you know about it?”

  The blood drained from her face. She felt it happen, knew the sensation intimately, because the sudden drop in blood pressure was a frequent precursor to fainting. Neil didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Arden, do you remember the first meeting with the FBI, and I said you needed to treat your devices like they could be confiscated at any point in time?”

  “Yes,” she said, bewildered. “I used my camera, not my cell phone or my tablet, and I deleted the video right after we made it. It was . . . We were trying . . . What happened?”

  Neil’s eyes closed briefly. “It was uploaded to your cloud account, and your cloud account must have been hacked. We emptied it out immediately after the raid because you kept foundation records there, and we changed the password, but . . .” His voice trailed off. “The video is on Gawker right now. Social media’s gone berserk. The news outlets are starting to pick it up.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said. Her lips were numb, her entire body ringing like a fire alarm. “It was on the camera less than an hour.”

  “I don’t understand,” her mother said. “What’s happened? What video?”

  “Would it be possible for the individual in question—”

  “Seth.”

  “Seth,” Neil continued smoothly, “to join us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll call him.”

  Arden found Seth’s contact information in her phone and tapped the call button, then watched the seconds tick by on her screen as she tried to identify what she felt. She should feel something. Ever since her first panic attack she’d always felt something, low-level anxiety escalating to fear and from there, eventually, to the overwhelming sense of impending doom.

  Right now, at this very moment, she felt nothing at all.

  “ ’Lo,” he said.

  “Seth, I need you to come to my lawyer’s office. Sixty-eighth and Third.”

  “I’m in the middle of a run. Can it wait?”

  “No. The video is out.”

  “Out? What do you mean, out?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Please. Come to Neil’s office.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  The call disconnected. Arden stared at her phone. “Fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “Someone tell me right now what’s going on,” her mother said.

  “I made a sex tape, Mom. Someone stole it from my account and sold it to the media.”

  Her mother’s mouth opened, closed.

  “I’ll get you some water,” Neil said.

  Talking about the lawsuit against the foundation seemed pointless. Neil excused himself again. Garry said he was going to step out. Arden, connected to the law firm’s secure Wi-Fi, ran a search and got back results of the video on news sites and social media, all posted within the last hour. It had gone viral and apparently crashed Twitter. The news-media pages showed only what they called relevant portions, tastefully obscuring body parts, but the whole thing was on YouTube, Reddit, streaming live on news sites.

  She tapped play, and a news announcer’s voice piped into the conference room. A still of her and Seth in what she could only describe as a clinch was frozen on an enormous screen in the background.

  “What’s the explanation for the scars? They’re quite severe,” a woman wearing makeup applied with an airbrush machine asked another woman, who nodded sagely.

  “Arden MacCarren was hit by a cab when she was a teenager,” the woman said, somehow managing to sound sorrowful despite sheer glee over what would likely be massive news ratings. “According to my sources, she needed several surgeries to recover, but the accident left lasting psychological scars, too. Arden’s suffered panic attacks ever since, including one just prior to her leaving MacCarren for the family foundation . . .”

  It had taken less than an hour for someone to connect her scars with the accident, and from there to her panic attacks.

  Everything she’d wanted to hide was now all over the Internet. Forever.

  She couldn’t figure out what she felt about this. She shut down her browser and closed the computer, as if putting h
er Internet head in the ether-sand would make it all go away.

  The conference room door opened again to admit Garry, Neil, and Seth. He wore his usual messenger uniform of a jersey and cargo shorts, with running tights for warmth underneath, but his face was a total blank, hard and angular, his eyes simmering with barely leashed fury.

  “Neil, we need a minute,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” Seth said, cutting her off.

  Neil ushered Seth to the table, offered him a water. The junior associate sat down at his laptop while Neil flipped to a new page in his legal pad, got Seth’s full name, date of birth, address. “You work as a bike messenger,” he said, his gaze fixed on Seth. Never took anything for granted, did Neil.

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you been a bike messenger?”

  “About six months.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was in the Marine Corps.”

  She forgot that his tattoos weren’t common knowledge, that his devotion and loss were written on his skin but not for everyone to see. “Were you deployed?”

  “Four times.”

  Another note on the legal pad. She could see Neil’s brain branching through options, like a decision tree under construction. Sane or crazy? Manipulative or damaged? Gold digger or independent type? Clock tower shooter or suicidal? “How did you meet Arden? Deliveries?”

  “I was taking a drawing class,” Arden said. “He was the model.”

  She didn’t think it was possible for lawyers as experienced as her cousin to show shock, but Neil’s jaw literally dropped open. “You were the life model for an art class.”

  Seth didn’t even blink. “Yes.”

  Arden stepped in. “I asked him to model for me. I was in the class because I thought it might help with the panic attacks. Manage them.”

  “Was there a financial arrangement?” Neil asked delicately.

  “Of course, there was a financial arrangement,” Arden snapped. “Life modeling is a skill you pay for.”

  “And then you became . . . intimate.”

  What had they become? Intimate, yes. Entangled? Absolutely. He was as wrapped up in her, like gold threads in cloth, as she was in him. She thought about those fall days, the sunlight fading in strength as her own strength grew, Seth’s eyes, his mouth, the sheer weight and substance of his presence. “Obviously, Neil,” she said.

  Silence had never felt so absolute. Her mother, who had an appropriate response to any situation, gaped at her. Neil had found his poker face again, while the junior lawyer appeared to be running through some mental Rolodex of God only knew what. Garry, the bastard, covered his mouth with his hand, but his eyes were deeply amused.

  “Okay, so we spin this,” the junior associate said. “We downplay the paid-model thing. He’s a specialist in trauma, we play up the panic attacks, their history, longevity, the trauma that caused them.”

  Arden and Seth spoke at exactly the same time. “No.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  A pause. No one moved. “Not one word of that will be spoken,” Seth added. Thousand-yard stare. He was gone, somewhere she couldn’t follow him.

  “It’s a strategy we should consider,” Neil said tentatively.

  “It’s a pack of lies,” Seth said. He held the room entirely in his hand. “She’s not a victim who needed someone to swoop in and save her. I’m no one’s savior.” He looked across the table at Arden. “Excuse me, please.”

  “Seth, wait!” Arden shoved her chair back and hurried around the end of the table. She caught him in the hallway and drew him into an empty office. He slid his sunglasses on while she closed the door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even know the camera had wireless capabilities, let alone that it uploaded to my cloud account. I vaguely remember the clerk at J&R setting it up for me, I don’t know . . . something must have—”

  “This isn’t your fault,” he said. “One of two things happened: either some scumbag journalist or hacker got into your account, or someone leaked the password. Either way, someone invaded your privacy. Not your fault.”

  “Our privacy,” she said quietly. “Someone invaded our privacy. That’s the problem here, isn’t it?”

  The privacy invasion, or the fact that it was theirs. Their privacy. Their lovemaking. The heated intimacy bent and twisted before it could harden into steel. This should have wrecked her. Instead, her entire body rang like a clarion call, the horn raised and blown, summoning her. To what?

  To the rest of her life.

  He shrugged. “Tell your team to do whatever they think is best. Make me a trauma specialist, a rent boy, your art class fling, whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Because it’s somehow better if you’re just some rent boy I picked up for a fling? How does that make it better? It makes me the worst kind of woman I know, and makes you nothing. It’s also a lie!”

  He looked away, then back at her. She reached up and took off the blade shades, so much a part of his Marine persona that the tan lines were stark on his skin, even as fall deepened toward winter. He looked at her, and the stark pain took her breath away. He shifted his weight, looked away first. “Look, the timing’s not bad. The class is over in a couple of weeks. It’s probably best if . . .”

  “If we end this now rather than then? Sure.” Her laugh was brittle, the kind of laugh a woman made when she was past the point of caring. “An art class fling. Everyone has them. It’s de rigueur. Someone has to sleep with the model.”

  She said the words because she wanted to see him react to the way she diminished what they had. He flinched. Imperceptibly, but it was there, a flash of shock in his eyes. Yes, she thought. You don’t like this, and yet you’re doing it. Stop.

  “Why won’t you let me in?” she asked quietly. “Why won’t you let me help you like you’ve helped me?”

  His hand went to his cargo pants pocket, the one where he kept his sketchbook. “Arden, you don’t understand, and you don’t need to understand.”

  “No, you don’t want me to understand. You won’t let me inside so I can understand. I’ve touched every inch of your skin, drawn you in dozens of different poses, but you’ve never let me touch you, really touch you. I know they died, but you won’t tell me how you feel about them dying. That’s because you won’t tell yourself how you feel about them dying.”

  The silence, brittle before, now vibrated with a tension that made her gut clench. He went totally still. She’d hurt him, and she knew how. Duty and honor were just empty words without the emotion of love behind them. He knew that better than anyone she’d ever met. She’d brought her sketchbook with her, red as blood, red as life. Now she opened it, flipped hastily through the pages until she found one, then tore it free and handed it to him. “Seth, I want you like I’ve never wanted another man. I wanted you for you, for me, for what we could be together. You have to go on living because you’re alive. They aren’t. To deny that, to live only for them, is to deny yourself. One of these days, you’ll have to stop running. When you do, you’ll find you’re not as alone as you think you are.”

  He took the drawing. Without looking at it, he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he left.

  * * *

  Arden walked back into the conference room to a group of people studiously not looking at a device with playback potential. They were probably the only five people in New York City not staring at a screen right now.

  “We don’t spin this,” she said. “There will be no spin, no comment at all. My public life is fair game, but my private life is off-limits. The only official statement we make is the following: No comment. Nothing else. Not one word.”

  Even as she spoke the words, she knew something was changing inside her, growing, stretching wings, filling her from the inside out with a fierce power. Her private life, her interior world, had been on display for far too long. Everyone knew about the panic attacks, her attempts to treat them. No more.

  No more.

  “We’re done
for the day,” she said. “Mom, Derek will take us to Breakers Point. I’ll help you pack. Where are you staying, Garry?”

  “I’ll come with you to Breakers, then I’ll head out to Hollow Hill. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “What about the foundation?” Neil said.

  “Give me one more day, Neil,” she said. “Twenty-four hours, and I’ll have an answer for you.”

  Derek pulled up in front of the mauve granite building just as they exited the doors. Arden and her mother climbed into the backseat, where Arden automatically opened her sketchbook. It opened to the page she’d torn out, the page she gave Seth when he walked away.

  She couldn’t feel that right now. She flipped to a clean page and used the first pen she found to draw her mother’s hand, the tracery of blue veins, the slender fingers and perfectly shaped nails. She still wore her wedding ring.

  “I can’t even imagine what this will do to your father,” her mother said.

  Surely Dad knows I have sex sat heavy on her tongue. She swallowed it, and said instead, “It happens, Mom. I’m not the first woman to be targeted, and I won’t be the last.”

  “At least we still have the foundation,” her mother said. “Your father can be so proud of that. And Garry’s back.”

  “Garry doesn’t want anything to do with the foundation,” Arden pointed out, biting back, and Dad doesn’t give a shit about it, either. “You heard him.”

  “He’s a MacCarren. It doesn’t matter what he wants,” her mother said.

  “It does, Mom. He left once and did quite well without the foundation, or any MacCarren money. He’ll leave again. If you want him to stay, you can’t shove the foundation at him.”

  “Why doesn’t anyone want it?” her mother all but wailed.

  Because Dad treated the foundation like a halfway house for failed MacCarren investment bankers. Again, she counted to ten, swallowed bitter words. “Because we’re not you, Mom. The foundation is what you wanted. Not Garry. Not me.”

  Her mother’s eyes widened. The car trundled along, a silent pod moving with other silent pods, taking people to and from the places and spaces of their lives. She added texture to the cuff at her mother’s wrist, the band of her Cartier watch.