“Why now?” A fair question. “I thought you said you’d signed a treaty with Darley’s office? I thought there was a truce?”
“There was.” I shrugged. “I’ll break it.”
“You’ll break it.” He paused, seemingly taking this in. Then, with sudden haste, he rounded the island and swooped me into his arms.
I returned his hug, smelling him, feeling his heart under his T-shirt, feeling safe.
When he released me, he asked if I was sure.
“Yes,” I said, combing my fingers through my hair, checking to make sure it wasn’t standing on end. “It’s the right thing to do. It feels necessary. But, Atlas, listen. I don’t want you to take it easy on me. I don’t want you to write this to encourage people to feel sorry for me. Because they shouldn’t. You shouldn’t.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I won’t.”
“I will talk about everything my father did. I will acknowledge and try to reckon with it, out, in fresh air. Done with hiding.”
His next question: “When?”
“Tomorrow?” In the old romantic comedies, those of our childhoods, there was always the running scene, was there not? Through the crowd. Dashing, not a moment to spare. To the choice that should’ve been clear as day. To destiny. When you know how the rest of your life should be lived, you want to start the rest of your life as soon as possible.
My destination, though—not a man, but my true and best self.
“All right, tomorrow.” He lay his elbows on the island. I saw his mind beginning to plan, to map out routes.
“Thank you,” I said. “I continue to ask things from you. And you keep saying yes, no matter how difficult I’m being.”
“You may ask things that are difficult, Daisy,” he said softly. “But that’s not the same as being difficult. You know?” I did now, and smiled with relief. “That’s why, when I think about you, I—”
Whatever he was about to say was cut off; the sound of a key in the door made us both jolt. “I’m here!” Ari said, joining us in the kitchen, a small carton in her hand. She hugged me. “I had to walk ten blocks up,” she said, “to find organic cream.” She wiggled out of her jacket, surveyed the half-assembled charcuterie board. “You left the rind on the Gouda.” She pointed to the cheese, then to Atlas, before sailing off and disappearing behind a door.
He looked at me. “Told you.”
* * *
Dinner was fettuccine with homemade Alfredo, an odd choice for June, but rather good nonetheless. As soon as we sat at her square glass dining table, Ari brought up Melinda Darley. “Seems like the minute she got confirmed, she’s set her mind to make my migraines flare up,” Ari said, piqued. “She’s too fit to expect something like a heart attack. If only she didn’t eat so many salads. I bet she’s one of those women who goes to the gym at four in the morning.”
“You go to the gym at four in the morning,” Atlas said.
“I’m doing good in this town,” responded Ari. “You want to keep me around. Melinda Darley I need gone.”
“Do we really wish for the death,” Atlas said, using his knife to scoot salad onto the back of his fork, “of people who antagonize us?”
“She never said anything about death,” I said. Ari had lit tea lights and asked her home assistant to play classical music. We were bantering in a friendly way, the tension of our previous meeting a distant memory. Maybe, in someone else’s story, the girlfriend of the love interest would be a heinous monster. In mine, I was realizing, she was just a woman with both redeemable qualities and obvious flaws.
“Thank you, Daisy.” She swirled her wine in her glass. “Not death. Just unconsciousness. Or career-wrecking scandal.”
“I know a little something about those,” I said. “I’m about to wreck my own career shortly.” I looked to Atlas. As he did the work of explaining to Ari what I meant, I scrutinized her face for signs of disgust. Out of all the reactions I predicted people might feel once reading Atlas’s article, this would be the one I’d have the most trouble accepting.
Once Atlas was done, though, Ari’s only words were of consolation. She had her own story, it seemed, a familiar one—her father, money, a younger woman, divorce, scandal. There had been secret credit cards, a club named Whipped and Cream. This had happened in Atlanta, when she was in high school. She rarely discussed it, she said. Last time she talked to her father was New Year’s Eve 2008.
“That must’ve been truly awful,” I said. There must be many more stories like ours out there.
“It was.” She gazed over my shoulder. “Then—I just didn’t let it be awful anymore. I stopped letting it affect me.”
“How?” I asked, genuinely curious. I would need to work on this in the upcoming weeks.
“You just don’t think about it. Pass the salad?”
“I get that part,” I said, handing over the bowl of arugula and shaved parm. “But how do you stop?”
“I know it sounds, like, mysterious. But I promise you, it works. Every time you start thinking about the pain, and the unfairness of it all, just—don’t.”
“Easy enough,” said Atlas, smiling. “I’m familiar with the stiff upper lip.”
“This is going to be the best advice anyone has ever given you,” she told me. “When you start thinking about your dad, or when someone calls you a name, or you begin to dip a toe into the self-pity pool, just pinch yourself, or scream a little bit. Go for runs, organize closets and drawers, buy fresh flowers.”
“That’s why your clothes are so perfectly folded,” said Atlas. “Now I see.”
“You’re going to be fine, Daisy,” Ari went on, ignoring him. “It’s clear to me you’re brilliant and smart and sweet and everyone loves you. People like us don’t suffer forever. We just don’t.”
Imagine, this whole time, that all I had to do was not think. It was no accident Ari lobbied for the likes of Big Pharma. That was practically their slogan. Bless her heart, as Bo would say. Still, she was so earnest in her attempt to be helpful, I managed not to laugh at how overly simple she made it all sound. I could only hope there was some truth in it. “Thank you for sharing this secret.” I raised my glass. “A toast, to the end of suffering.”
We touched the rims of our delicate glasses together and drank.
* * *
After a dessert of strawberries and ice cream, which was unfussy and—I had to admit—pretty chic, Atlas, ever the gentleman, escorted me out. “You know,” he said when we were on the elevator, descending, “once I found out the extent of it, part of me was relieved you’d told me to kill the article.”
“How big a part?” I asked, surprised. I’d thought my choice had disappointed him and he’d just done a great job at hiding it.
“A big part,” he confessed. The doors opened to the lobby. We crossed toward the front exit, but stopped halfway below the massive light fixture, which resembled a galactic spiral. “That part of me is still resistant to the idea of making this information public, knowing how it might affect you. You realize what will happen once I publish this?”
“Exactly what happened before,” I said. I appreciated his protective instincts, but nothing he’d say would change my mind. “Maybe worse.”
“Pitchforks,” he said, miming it.
“Literal.” The doorman, from the lobby’s control center, gave us nonresidents the once-over. “And metaphorical.”
“You sound like you’ve made up your mind, done and dusted.”
“I have.” I focused on Atlas, ignoring, for the moment, the vigilante at his desk. “I can’t go on like everything is normal, like what he did was okay. It’s not right or fair. Think about Ari, and her dad. How many more of us are out there, going through similar situations?” I paused. “You’re right about how the article will affect me. It will act as a sledgehammer to my life as I know it. I’ll have to resign—”
I stilled him. “It’s okay. Like I said, things are going to get broken. And that’s the way it should be.”
“This is wild, Daisy,” Atlas said. Then he lowered his head and smiled. “Courageous, reckless—maybe both. It’s certainly not something I imagine the Daisy of last year would do.”
I felt myself blushing. His was the only attention I didn’t mind in the least. “Ari,” I said, “is a great cook and a gracious host. Please thank her again for me.”
He rocked back on his heels. “You know, she asked me to move in with her.”
I had to accept that I’d be ever the friend, the confidante. Which is to say, I’d just have to make do, because I loved him too much to say goodbye. “And?” I prompted.
“I know she wants me to marry her, too.”
“And?” I gestured with my hand, scrolling him forward.
“And, I don’t know. It’s hard to know. I am consistently unsure. I wonder if that is me lacking confidence generally, or if it has something to do with the relationship.”
My breath caught. I became aware of the other people strolling through the lobby, checking their mailboxes, and the surly doorman, who’d definitely overheard. I wished Atlas and I were in private. I wanted to get us both into sweatpants, pour a nightcap, put music on, and chat for hours more. “Wallis used to think that when you know, you know.”
“Used to?” He tucked a winged lock of hair behind his ear.
“With what’s happened with Blake, I can’t say she believes like she did, before.” When she’d met Blake, there had been a small bit of me that had judged her for falling so hard, so fast, thinking she’d misplaced her trust in love, rather than in caution and good sense. But I didn’t like the possibility that it might be gone, or that Blake had taken it from her. The world would be much grimmer without Wallis truly as herself.
“Do you—do you ever find yourself wishing that there were aspects of your life you could just coast through? That there was just one thing you could put on autopilot?”
“Yes, of course. It means something, though,” I added, hesitant, not wanting him to feel like I was pressing him one way or the other, “that you wish your autopilot could control this.” I motioned to the elevator and up, toward Ari’s apartment, with the nice view and hand-hewn dinner plates, the bed and its linen sheets, the bathroom with the lavender candle. A bad relationship was bad for both of them. I looked him straight in the eye. “I think that she wants to love you very much, Atlas. But I could be wrong. Or not. In any event, I wish you nothing but happiness.”
“You’re no help at all,” he said, laughing, though his heart wasn’t in it. “Everything is an honest-to-God wreck right now, Daisy. My father is declining. I think he may have to sell the London house. Can’t work the stairs anymore. Last week he was stuck in the bathtub all night.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, giving his side a squeeze. Atlas and his father weren’t always on the same page—there had been trouble, after his mother had left for the States, and hurt on both sides—but they loved each other, in spite of it. Yet illness has a way of magnifying fissures in even the strongest relationships, and I sensed the pain in Atlas’s face, in the slight twist of his mouth. “Nothing happens for a very long time, then everything comes at once. That’s the law.”
Under the constellation of lights in the lobby, we talked growing up and getting old, living and dying. Ari—not mentioned again. Just us, old friends who knew each other well, who loved each other despite the centrifugal forces of adult life continually trying to rip us apart. Not the kind of love I’d hoped for, but love nonetheless. And there was beauty and meaning in that, just being there for each other, laughing at the pain of it all.
Thirty-Five
Wallis was making gazpacho. I disliked cold soup, but hadn’t the inclination to remind her; I was glad she was feeling like cooking again. She’d also mixed sangria, which we were drinking out of mismatched wineglasses. Cricket was puttering around the kitchen, seeming to stand in front of whatever drawer Wallis needed to get into. I, nervous, having promised myself one glass, was silently rehearsing some of what I wanted to say on the record.
I was picking at an orange slice in my drink, wondering if using the word puissant to describe my father would be overdoing it, when Atlas knocked a tune on the door. We called for him to Come on in. Wearing trim jeans and a relaxed polo, he arrived in the kitchen with a bottle of pinot gris for Cricket and a hug and a kind word for Wallis. For me, the same. I stepped away, gave him space, wishing that it wasn’t necessary to do so. It did, however, give me some distance to watch him. I hadn’t wanted him to wake up this morning uncomfortable with what he’d shared with me the night previous. But there were no signs in his body language and smile that he felt anything but ease in our company. Cricket poured him sangria from the pitcher, mostly ice and sliced stone fruit, but he didn’t complain.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, leaning against the countertop. Did he see it on my face—my worry about the interview? He placed himself next to me, drink in hand.
“You’ve been hunting down Gregory’s crimes,” Cricket said, ignoring my protestations and topping up my drink. “Daisy has told me.”
“I have,” Atlas said, swirling the ice in his glass.
“But this is the right thing to do,” said Cricket, “telling the story.”
“All of it,” agreed Wallis, transferring her vegetable concoction into a blender. “And Daisy is the right person to do it.” I began to quibble this point, for surely there were more intelligent women out there, braver ones, women who hadn’t screwed up so badly or obfuscated the truth, who could share their stories instead, but Wallis insisted, tapping the counter with her wooden spoon. “You are a human being; you’re not perfect. And, sure, you’re risking criticism, but that’s the only way to get things to change.”
I noticed her looking over my shoulder, perhaps imagining storms in the distance. The night before, we’d discussed, as a family, my choice to do the interview and, as Wallis referenced, the risks inherent therein. We all knew it would restart the clock on the scandal. Whatever friendships we’d been able to rebuild, scant in number as they were, would be jeopardized. The hate mail might multiply; our financial liability, too. The bricks. Very possible.
We’d weathered it once. We could do it again.
It didn’t mean we couldn’t still be scared.
* * *
“State your name for the record.” Atlas, recorder on, pulling my leg.
Dinner was done, bowls had been cleared. The soup hadn’t been terrible. Cricket had bought a baguette, of which I ate most, slathered in butter. Good bread can soothe the nerves. And I didn’t want my voice to shake. I’d been thinking so much about the sentences, the individual words I would use. I didn’t want a single one to tremble. The people reading wouldn’t hear my voice, but Atlas would. I would.
Wallis and Cricket had gone out to a movie—animated, family, they wanted something light—and now I sat on Cricket’s couch, Atlas in the chair across from me. He’d drawn it forward, moving the coffee table aside, and our knees almost touched.
“Daisy Catherine Richardson,” I said.
“Catherine?” He tilted his head. Had I really never told him?
“Cricket,” I said.
“Of course. Duh.”
I laughed. I’d never heard him use that word. “You even managed the valley girl accent. A true Renaissance man.”
“And your astrological sign, please?” He continued to scrawl in his spiral notebook, acting the proper reporter.
“Cancer.” I gestured to my body—the hard, external shell of the crab. “Obviously.”
“That’s right. June 25. Coming up in a couple weeks. We’ll have to celebrate,” he said. “Next. If heaven
existed, who would you want to meet first and what question would you ask them?”
I bit back a grin. He was disarming me, making me comfortable, and I loved him for it. “So much for the easy questions.”
“An answer, please.” He flipped some notebook pages back and forth industriously. “We’re all business here.”
I considered. “Eleanor Roosevelt. I’d ask, well, I’d ask if I could be her friend.”
Then Atlas was himself again, kind and studious, and I knew the game was over. “And your father? What would you say to him in heaven?”
“If it existed.” This was a throwback to one of the early conversations we’d had, more than a decade ago, about religion and God and our separate dabblings with Buddhism in college, in a shabby hotel bar—somewhere outside Norfolk, after a visit to a peanut farm—drinking bad cabernet until the bartender started mopping under our stools.
“Purely hypothetical,” Atlas agreed. His gaze drifted from his notebook to me, his eyes seeming to melt, and I knew he was also remembering.
“How much time do we have?” I asked.
* * *
When we were done, it was almost midnight. Cricket and Wallis had returned, yawning and droopy-eyed, to wish us a brief good-night. I’d gone through two bottles of sparkling water; we’d had to pause midway for snacks—more bread, honey-roasted peanuts, rosemary-flecked crackers, dredged out from the back of Cricket’s pantry, saved from some holiday gift basket of yesteryear. Atlas had filled up one notebook, and most of a second. Although I’d emptied myself of the story I’d prepared, I felt as full as I’d ever been. I was tired but content, my voice scratchy from hours of talking.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said as he swung his bag onto his shoulder. He didn’t seem sleepy at all; I had the sense he was going to write for the rest of the night. “But, you’re going to be—I mean, I think we have something here, Daisy. I really do.”
Then he was gone. And I, back to my own apartment and to my bed, Atlas and his article never far from my mind.
Ladies of the House Page 26