“Honestly, I don’t care that much about my own room, either,” I told him. “It’s just a place to sleep and do homework.”
It was true. I had never felt especially attached to the room; I’d surely never considered it an extension of my personality. It was fairly austere, now that I thought about it. That it happened to be also quite lovely was all my mother’s doing. The room was planted in the middle of rather a lot of grandeur, but that was more accident than anything else. My father had told me that when he bought the house, he’d simply snapped up the first one that came along that had a place for my mother’s studio; the fact of its fanciness was purely incidental. Still, I didn’t mention the grandeur to Mr. Insley.
I thought perhaps we were stopping in the kitchen, which was bright compared to the rest of the house, but, instead, Mr. Insley opened the back door and we went out onto a small wooden deck. To my relief, the yard was nicer than the house. There was a black metal mesh table and chairs on the deck, some blue ceramic pots of yellow mums, and out in the yard, two more chairs, a low wooden bench, and a copper fire pit full of new logs. Most of the yard was taken up by the shed he had told me about, which wasn’t so much a building as a sort of arched, metal tunnel, like a very rickety covered bridge, open at both ends. Inside the shed, it was dark, but I could see the outlines of what I knew must be the boat Mr. Insley was building.
“This is nice,” I said.
Mr. Insley’s face in the watery sunlight was lean and fair, his eyes the same color as the sky. His hair looked smooth, like he had just brushed it, and I liked the idea of his getting ready for me to arrive. Then, a cloud covered the sun, and I shivered. I wore running clothes, black tights, and a fitted red Gore-Tex jacket, exceedingly unromantic clothing, but I hadn’t had the energy to come up with a pretext for being dropped off near Mr. Insley’s neighborhood. I wasn’t even sure where I would have had someone drop me, since, apart from a gas station and a supermarket, there didn’t seem to be much around his neighborhood except more neighborhoods. Mr. Insley lived just five miles from my house, but right at the place where both the country and the city gave way to suburb.
“Are you cold, my dear? Let me light the fire, and then, I’ll get you something to put on.”
It seemed that we would be staying outside for now, which was a relief to me, despite the chilly air. It seemed also that Mr. Insley was not, at least immediately, going to reprise the rush of physical passion that had thrown me so off balance, literally and figuratively, the last time I’d seen him, and this was also a relief. Still, while he was inside the house, I had the mad impulse to just run away, but how would I face him Monday morning? Of course, the deeper question was: If all I wanted to do was run away, then why had I come in the first place? But I put that one aside to think about later.
When Mr. Insley came out with a loaded tea tray and a hefty brown sweater, I thought, Maybe this is going to be okay. Yes, I was completely inexperienced, but I had to think that a rose-sprigged tea set and a plate of petits fours were incompatible with unfettered lust. I pulled the sweater over my head. Even through my layers of running wear, it itched.
We sat in the chairs near the fire, with the tea tray on the wooden bench before us. Mr. Insley talked about his hero Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Rossetti’s muse, a woman named Elizabeth Siddal, which led to a general contemplation of muses and of how being the inspiration for great art was just as important as making great art yourself. I was just so glad to hear him talk the way he had in the old days, the days before he put his finger in my mouth (I had begun to view this as a dividing point, like the birth of Christ: BF and AF) that I didn’t pay that much attention to what he was saying. In the moments when I tuned in, I found myself vaguely disagreeing with him, but I didn’t care enough to argue, and I didn’t want to rock the boat, especially when it was drifting upon such flat and translucent waters. We sipped our tea; I smiled; Mr. Insley looked dashing and fiery-eyed, as he always did when he discussed the Pre-Raphaelites; and from time to time, he got up to poke the fire in the fire pit. It was so easy to love him right then, to feel dazzled and proud to be with him and only a little nervous.
But the mood of the day shifted before I even realized it, and those petits fours—white with tiny rosebuds like the tea set—turned out to be not so innocuous after all. Mr. Insley had been being so careful, circling me so tentatively, that I was lulled into relaxing and failed to notice when the circles began to get smaller.
Then, he broke off in the middle of a sentence having something to do with Elizabeth Siddal’s long, white, inspiring neck, and said, in an alarmingly low and husky voice, “Willow, my girl, you haven’t tried a petit four.” Before I could say that I didn’t want one (I loathed fondant, although I would not have told him that for all the world), he had picked one up, bitten it in half, and then, licking his upper lip, stretched his hand out in the direction of my face. At first, I thought he merely wanted me to see the inside of the petit four, and then as his hand went lower, I thought perhaps he wanted me to smell it, and I thought, Oh, I hope it doesn’t have marzipan. I loathe the smell of marzipan, and all this happened so fast that before I knew it, he had pressed the cake to my lips.
He was feeding me. Feeding me! Like a mother might feed a child, except the look in his eyes was not maternal. Not at all. Automatically, I opened my mouth. And after I had closed my lips around the thing, Mr. Insley rested his finger against them for one second, two, three, rising from his seat, moving to kneel in front of my chair, his finger on my mouth like it was stapled there, and then his face got close, closer, and he moved the finger away, and was kissing me. His mouth wasn’t rough. It was as soft as a butterfly, covering mine with flutters and tiny tugs, and it wasn’t scary. But maybe it was the suddenness or because I was worried about what to do with the lump of cake on my tongue (Chew—unobtrusively? Swallow—whole?), but I found I was too distracted to like it, and this made me sad. It was my first kiss, and I wasn’t even paying attention.
Which is maybe why, when he finished and pulled his face back, I gulped the petit four, leaned forward, and kissed him again. This time, I made sure to concentrate. This kiss lasted longer and became more complex, our mouths slightly open, clinging and unclinging, his tongue flicking around a bit. What interested me is how isolated an event it was, involving only our two mouths. There had been times in the past, mostly when we were driving, when I’d feel his eyes on me, and his mere gaze was enough to make the hairs on my neck stand on end. But now, this kiss felt dreamlike, a pleasant grappling between two sets of lips, two tongues, four rows of teeth. Mr. Insley might have been anyone. The rest of my body might have been anywhere.
When we finished, Mr. Insley smiled at me and said, “Now, you have to come look at my boat.”
As we were walking to the shed, I noticed that the grass under our feet was mostly green, but there were some places where it was dead and brown, not patches, though, as you’d expect, but lines and curves. Oh, I was an odd bird! I’d just had my first kiss—my first two, but I had decided to only count the second—and was walking hand in hand with my beloved, and I was noticing dead grass.
“What are you looking at, my love?” asked Mr. Insley.
“The grass,” I blurted out. “It seems to be dead in places.”
My psyche writhed with mortification.
Mr. Insley gave me a sidelong, quizzical glance and then looked at the grass.
“You’re right. Looks like weed killer gone amok, but I never use the stuff. A couple of my neighbors have complained about the state of my yard; perhaps this is retribution. Ah, the obsessions of the bourgeoisie!”
I did not mention the team of gardeners who showed up at my house every two weeks.
I am not really a boat person, and this boat was not really a boat, more of a ribbed wooden husk propped up on sawhorses, but Mr. Insley’s pride in it was touching. His eyes grew misty; he ran a hand along its side, fondly. The shed was really quite horrible, cobwebby with some
messily stacked firewood, a lawnmower that was evidently seldom used since it was wreathed in ratty webs, and a can of gasoline. Nearer to the boat, there were some tools lying around, along with a couple large containers of wood varnish, but even so, the boat seemed to not have been worked on in some time. There were cobwebs strung across it, dead leaves scattered around inside it, and what had every appearance of being a nest tucked into what was perhaps the stern, unless it was the bow.
Suddenly, it struck me that the boat had the distinct look of a project that would never, ever come to fruition, and here was poor Mr. Insley, loving it so dearly. I looked at him, with his doting expression, his tweed overcoat and old brown wingtips and felt that, at the center of Mr. Insley’s life, there was a great empty space. No one should live that way. Pity swelled my heart. Impulsively, I hugged him, the first embrace between us I had ever initiated. He said, “Oh!,” and hugged back.
“Isn’t it marvelous?” he said.
“Yes,” I lied. “Very.”
We stood, arms around each other, staring at the boat.
“When it’s finished,” he said, gleefully, “you and I will sail away, and the wind will send that hair of yours streaming!”
That’s when I heard what sounded like a cough or a laugh coming from just outside the fence at the other end of the shed, followed by a crackle of leaves and twigs, what could have been the sound of someone running away, someone who had been standing there. Watching us. Mr. Insley rushed over to the fence, but there was no one in sight.
“Damned neighborhood kids,” he said, returning with a reassuring smile. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Of course not,” I said, but my hands were shaking. I pulled the long sleeves of the sweater down over them so Mr. Insley wouldn’t see.
He wrapped me in his arms and then let go.
“This damn sweater,” he said, with a mischievous grin. “I can’t even feel that you’re there.”
And, in one quick motion, he took it by the bottom hem and pulled it over my head and off.
“That’s better,” he said.
He wrapped me in his arms again and then, again, let go. He patted my lower back.
“What’s this?” he asked.
My cell phone, zipped into the back pocket of my running jacket. I took it out.
“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” he said, his smile turning slightly wooden.
“Oh, I didn’t,” I said, hurriedly. “It’s new. I brought it with me so that I could ask you for your number.”
His face relaxed.
“Ah. And you must give me yours.”
I swallowed hard. The only numbers I had were Taisy’s, my home number, and Luka’s, which I got when we were doing the project. I wasn’t even sure why I had stored Luka’s number, except that it was the only other cell-phone number I had in my possession. But no one but Taisy had mine. For some reason, I didn’t want to give it to Mr. Insley, but there he was, taking out his phone. I gave him the number, and he called my phone from his, which evidently meant that his number was now on mine, imprinted, maybe irrevocably. It was strange how I felt more bound to him by this than I had by the kiss, which seemed to dissolve into the ether as soon as it ended. I understood very little about such things, but I imagined our relationship riding radio waves, bouncing off towers. I imagined satellites spreading the fact of us through the blackness of space and all over the earth. Wearily, I wondered if there were a way to undo it, an app to erase it all.
“I should go home now,” I said.
His arms went around me again.
“All right,” he said, smiling. “I’ll drive you home on one condition.”
“Oh. What’s that?”
“That you promise to come again, soon. Come in the evening, and I will make you dinner.”
“Well, that might be hard.”
He squeezed me tighter, smiled wider.
“Oh, well, then I’m afraid you’ll have to stay,” he teased. He lifted my chin with his fingers. “Now, promise.”
Neither fear nor lust nor joy coursed through me. Instead, unaccountably, I thought about the unfinished boat, the NO SOLICITING sign, the dark house with its threadbare floor runner. The wingtips. The fence. For God’s sake, the fence. I rested my hand against his cheek.
“I promise.”
I HAD HIM DROP me off a mile from my house, and I ran home, fast, to remind myself that I was I and that all of it was mine, legs, arms, rib cage, streaming hair. I pulled the sweet fall air into my chest and let it scrub my face clean.
Before I could open the front door of my house, Taisy did, which is how I knew, right away, that something was terribly wrong. I froze, clamped a hand over my mouth. Taisy touched my shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t look like that. It’s okay.”
“Did he die?” I asked, bleakly.
Her eyes widened. “No! No, no, no, no, no, of course not. He had some chest pains, and your mom thought it best to call an ambulance, but it’s probably nothing. She’s at the hospital with him.”
Then, heaven help me, I burst into tears, long, clawing sobs that burned my chest.
“It’s all my fault! I should have been here,” I almost shrieked. “I should have been here.”
Taisy led me into the house and sat me down on the living room sofa, keeping her arms around me. I could not help it: I leaned my face against her sweater and cried my heart out.
“Hey, hey,” Taisy said, soothingly. “None of this is your fault. How could it be?”
“I-I lost focus. Like with the door, when Muddy went out into the rain. I let things distract me.”
“Oh, Willow, honey,” she said. “You’ve been bombarded with so much change in the past few months. You’re handling it beautifully, beyond what anyone could expect.”
I shook my head. “No, you don’t know!” I wailed. “You don’t know how I have let him down.”
“You have to stop that,” said Taisy. “You are a sixteen-year-old. You’re supposed to focus on your own life. And you’re supposed to make mistakes. Don’t you know that?”
“No one is ever supposed to make mistakes,” I said, gasping.
“Now, I’m sorry,” she said, firmly, “but that is just wrong.”
I didn’t really believe her, but being held felt so nice. Taisy and I sat like that for a long time, so long that, outside, the sun set; darkness filled the windows. I may even have slept a little. When the phone rang, I sprang up and ran for the kitchen. It was Muddy.
“It’s fine, darling girl,” she told me. “It wasn’t another heart attack, just some inflammation around his heart that sometimes happens after surgery. He’s taking medicine and will come home tomorrow.”
I dropped into a kitchen chair, relief pouring through me. I gave Taisy the thumbs-up. She smiled, and I smiled back, and weirdly, this wasn’t weird at all.
After Taisy had gone back to the pool house, I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and felt steady, more like I was home, truly home, all of me right here, than I had in a long time. Then, I took out my phone, and quickly, before I could stop myself or analyze why, I called Luka.
“Hello?” he said.
“This is Willow,” I said. “You are the official recipient of my first cell-phone call.”
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Cleary. How does it feel?”
There was a laugh in his voice. Satellites and cell-phone towers catapulted that voice across the sky, bouncing it from star to star to star. Luka’s voice—and mine, answering.
“Wonderful,” I said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Taisy
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER IT was because I’d seen the extraordinarily ordinary house she’d grown up in or because I expected someone Wilson had rejected to seem more, well, rejected (and, yes, I know how ironic that is, coming from me), but, whatever the reason, Wilson’s sister, Barbara, was a shock. A chic shock. A long, black licorice whip of a woman with c
at’s-eye glasses, blood-red lips, and a steel-gray, mathematically precise bob. Even her house was intimidating, a Society Hill row house, early-eighteenth-century Georgian on the outside, midcentury Modern on the inside, with that indefinable something that even people who don’t have any of their own recognize as style. The kind of place that makes you glad you wore mascara and the Trillium boots and even gladder that you brought a friend, especially one who flung open his (pretty black) eyes and bit his knuckle in faux terror as soon as Barbara turned her back to lead us into the house.
As soon as she got us inside, she turned and said, severely, one elegant finger elegantly raised, “I have not been waiting for this moment. I want to be clear on that point. I stopped giving a damn about Wilson over fifty years ago. But since this moment has arrived anyway, I am extremely happy to see you,” and she encased me in a genial, if angular, hug.
“Thank you,” I said, “for letting me come.”
I had contacted her through her website “B. Ravenel Volkman Interior Architecture,” a stark, black-and-white, bare-bones page with just an e-mail address and a phone number, an insider sort of website, one for a business that doesn’t sell itself because it assumes you are already sold. I e-mailed, briefly describing who I was and asking if I might meet with her, and she’d sent back one word—“Fine”—a date and time, and her home address.
Now, she said, “First I feed you; then we talk, but only if you agree not to put anything I say into a book.”
I must have looked taken aback because she said, “I looked you up, naturally. I know you’re a not-so-ghostly ghostwriter. If you are doing a book on Wilson, I cannot in conscience be part of it. Are you?”
“No,” I said.
Ben gave me a sharp look, but I wasn’t lying. For some time now, I had been toying with the idea of telling Wilson he would be better off with another writer, but right then, sitting in his sister’s house, I decided for sure.
“He hired me to write one, but I realize now that I can’t write the book he wants me to write. Frankly, all I’ve done is research the parts of his life he’s expressly ordered me to steer clear of.”
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