After the Moment

by Garret Freymann-Weyr

  "I do not have girl trouble," Leigh said again. "Everything is fine with Astra. She's in Vermont, visiting her father. She swims in a lake every day. It's as happy as Astra gets."

  It wasn't, in fact, true. Leigh recalled how, before she insisted on e-mail only, her voice on the phone sounded strained, as if her vocal cords were exhausted. Astra wasn't happy, and he didn't think they should still be dating, but Leigh didn't think any of this fell under the description of girl trouble.

  "I don't think it's Astra," Pete said. "Astra has always struck me as the kind of girl who would dump any guy who caused her a problem."

  Leigh laughed for the first time in what felt like months.

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "I'm thinking it's that girl I met," Pete said. "The friend of Millie's. What was her name—Myra? Maria?"

  "Maia," Leigh said, looking at Pete with newfound respect while feeling something like dread.

  "Right," Pete said. "Right."

  They both looked out at the river where the tide was starting to go out. The ducks and seagulls were making their last forays underwater for food.

  "How'd you know?" Leigh asked.

  Because, yes, it was Maia. Of course it was. He had girl trouble and she was it.

  "I've got eyes," Pete said. "That's a beautiful girl. A beautiful girl screaming trouble. I doubt there's a man alive who could resist that at seventeen."

  It made Leigh feel that what was waiting for him, should he ever reach Pete's age of fifty-two, was membership in a club. One full of men who understood how often danger and desire were the same but who had figured out how to make them diverge. Pete made it sound like Leigh's "girl trouble" with Maia wasn't crazy but was instead nothing less than an unavoidable part in the process of becoming a club member.

  "I really like her," Leigh said, amazed at how hard it was to say aloud.

  "Yeah," Pete said. "Of course you do."

  "She's got a few problems," Leigh said, not sure where to start.

  The contract? That seemed so beside the point. He didn't need to sleep with her. He needed to keep things away from her. No. He needed to keep Maia away from what she could do to herself with food or germs. Not to mention cigarettes.

  "Her father's in prison," Pete said. "A few problems are to be expected."

  "Stepfather," Leigh said, thinking of Ned Morland's postcards.

  "Well, then, all the more reason," Pete said. "But, look, I don't think there's a person worth knowing who doesn't come with problems."

  "I haven't broken up with Astra," Leigh said, when what he meant was I have no reason to break up with Astra. Astra has done nothing to deserve that. What kind of moron breaks up with Astra Grein for Maia Morland?

  Pete didn't say anything for a little bit, as if he were listening hard, waiting for Leigh's silent question to become audible.

  "I'm not going to give you unsolicited advice, although, when it comes to women," Pete said, finally, "I've made many more mistakes than you have, so my advice is probably not worthless."

  No advice is worthless, Leigh thought. Especially about women. Who didn't need advice when it came to coping with them?

  "You could just take it or leave it," Pete said. "Up to you."

  Leigh pictured Pete's wife packing up and Pete coming home, not noticing that his wife was gone. Okay, so maybe he had this huge house and a Jeep, but that would never ever happen to Leigh. If nothing else, wouldn't the closet tip you off? He realized that Pete was waiting for his permission before giving this advice, and so Leigh nodded, saying, "Yeah, of course."

  "Always break up in person. The phone might feel easier, but you never live it down."

  Leigh was relieved to have already figured this out.

  "Your mother worries that she made a lot of mistakes," Pete said. "She thinks you sell yourself short. That she was never able to give you the kind of confidence a father would have."

  Leigh thought about the boys he knew—from the soccer team to math class—and their fathers. He thought about how Marcus Fields had taught him how to throw a punch. How the only thing Clayton had taught him was how not to be when someone is crying.

  "How much confidence did your father give you?" Leigh asked.

  "None, a fact that I've mentioned to your mother," Pete said.

  "So maybe Mom shouldn't worry," Leigh said. "She normally doesn't. Not about me, at least. She worries more about plots and titles. What did I do?"

  "Nothing, which is why she worries," Pete said. "She thinks that you work too hard at being good."

  "Would she feel better if I flunked out of school?" Leigh asked, still not at all sure what this had to do with fathers.

  Or confidence. Or girl trouble, which was how Pete had started this already too long conversation.

  "No, she'd feel better if she thought you did what you wanted."

  "Well, tell her I want not to flunk out of school," Leigh said. "Jesus, what does she think? No one wants to screw up."

  "She just doesn't want your life to be about what others want," Pete said. "Or what you think others want."

  "I have no idea what others want," Leigh said, stopping himself just before adding, I barely know what I want.

  Such a statement would simply prove his mother's point. But who knew what they wanted? Lillian had not grown up wanting to write romance novels. Before the divorce, she'd been a freelance journalist. She'd fallen into writing romances because she needed the money. Clayton had wanted to be a fireman until he was fifteen and realized he hated fire. Surely desire grew from a combination of things. Not from what you decided you wanted.

  Leigh suspected that his mother's concerns about him were of a different nature, partly to do with him, partly to do with her. All mothers panic, and all sons give them cause. He wasn't going to argue her out of any worry, so he let himself sit next to Pete with neither of them saying anything, as the river drained and the sun started to fade.

  "Maia know you like her?" Pete asked, after a while.

  "I can't see how she'd miss it," Leigh said, guessing that he would never have seen the scars on her arms if she weren't afraid of how much he liked her.

  No doubt, every guy she'd slept with had told her he liked her. And had meant it, too, but not in a way that did her any good.

  "Yeah," Pete said. "Can't see how."

  chapter fifteen

  the duke's dark son

  On the night she'd walked to the tennis club, Maia had said Leigh liked her as much as he could. But the truth was that Maia wasn't a girl he simply liked. Neither was she a girl he wanted only to kiss. When he was near Maia, Leigh wanted to touch her, make her laugh, help her to eat, or ask her questions. It was often enough to just sit quietly beside her. Leigh always knew he had Maia's complete attention. She simply gave it, without his having to work for it.

  Pete had asked if Maia knew he liked her, but that had been the wrong question. Did Maia know he loved her? How could she, when he himself had just figured it out?

  ~~~

  That night, much against Lillian's advice, Leigh took the last bus to Boston and, once there, waited around the train station for the first train back to New York. When finally in New York, he bought his first ever cup of necessary coffee, and something about its thick bitterness was comforting. He thought of Maia's telling Millie that she needed physical comfort, and he guessed coffee when you craved sleep was as good as the sheets she had brought over in that heavy suitcase. In any event, he was more than awake when he got his car across the George Washington Bridge, just as the sun was announcing itself.

  Feeling that his life depended on getting back to her, he drove down route 95 with all the desperation that a new driver's caution and an obeyed speed limit would allow. He drove as if every mile between him and Maia Morland were a cut upon her heart that only he could make vanish.

  When he turned into Calvert Park, past the stone wall and huge oak trees, he drove without stopping at Clayton's house, finally parking in Esme Green and Charles Rh
oem's driveway.

  Esme opened the door, and for a moment Leigh stood, slightly stunned. It would take him years to understand that it was not Esme's drop-dead perfect beauty that had left him speechless but the realization that no girl with this mother was going to be safe. No matter how hard he loved her.

  "Leigh Hunter, ma'am," he said, grabbing Esme's French-manicured hand in his and shaking it hello. "Is Maia in her room?"

  If she said yes, he didn't hear, and was up the stairs without a thought, knocking on Maia's door.

  "Go away," Maia called, and, having heard that before when he had dropped by unexpectedly, he said It's me and went in.

  She was lying on the bed, reading Lord Jim, which he still hadn't finished, and either he walked over to her or she flew off the bed toward him, but before the door was shut, he had his arms around her, with hers around him, her voice whispering, "I missed you, oh, I missed you."

  He kissed the top of her head, the side of her head, her neck, her shoulder, her neck again; he put his hands on either side of her head and the black hair spilled out of its clips, and her brown eyes grew gold for him and maybe she said his name, he wasn't sure, and he said an obviously besides the point thing like I love you or her name or maybe, even, You're here, he never could remember, but the kiss made everything right and clear and vivid.

  He did love her. And she did know it.

  He was dizzy with what he knew. The war in Iraq was wrong. It didn't matter that the whole country disagreed with him. This time, the French were right. He'd been an unbelievable bastard to Astra, who deserved better. Lillian should marry Pete. Janet should make Clayton spend more time at home. Leigh himself was going to become a man who knew exactly what he wanted.

  His body pounded in all the ways to be expected, but it was the certainty and rightness flooding through his veins that made it all so perfect.

  ~~~

  As anyone who has grown up surrounded by romance novels could tell you, they all end on moments that are certain and right. In these stories, the hero and heroine, even before their moment arrives, are full of qualities that can only be described as right. As good.

  The heroine will be pure of heart, if not always of body. She will never, once love is declared, betray it. The hero will have more experience in matters of the body, in order to deserve her heart. But he will never have betrayed a woman's honor while getting this experience. If there is a war to be fought, he will fight it, no matter how he hates war, because that is what men do. Once love is declared, he will never put his interests above hers. No matter the circumstances.

  As anyone who has survived one could tell you, love affairs, and the people who have them, tend to be a little bit less right than romances. The moments are more uncertain, and the people having a love affair are not required to be good.

  For a while Leigh's romance, full as it was of clarity, conviction, and love declared, held its ground.

  He built his universe on Maia's smile when she saw him, and the way her skin smelled. They did all the things they had done before, but now he could hold her hand, without it having to mean anything. In the week before school started he finished Lord Jim because she wanted to know what he thought. He drove to the nursery and bought her orange, purple, and white pansies that would bloom until the ground froze, and then again in the spring.

  "But they need sun," he said. "So you might have to break up your color scheme."

  "If you dig the holes, I'll keep them alive," she told him.

  They both sat down with Millie, prepared to tie her up and make her finish the books on her list, but she listened to their descriptions, asked a lot of questions, and said she promised to finish both A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Bridge of San Luis Rey before the month was out.

  "Are you dating?" she asked them.

  "Well," Maia said. "We're kind of see—"

  "Yes," Leigh said. "We're dating."

  Millie nodded. "I thought so," she said.

  They looked at her, embarrassed at how their good fortune had come from her father's death. But if Millie thought that, it didn't seem to upset her, because she went over to her computer and said, "I've been working on it."

  Millie, it turned out, had not just spent the summer playing tennis and reading romance novels. She'd been writing one.

  "I used you guys," she said, "but I made Maia an American heiress and you—you an English guy."

  Leigh rolled his eyes. "What am I, a duke? Or a pirate?"

  "You're the bastard son of an evil duke and a parlor maid, whom he took advantage of," Millie said. "You rescue Maia from marrying an earl who only wants her money."

  "You've changed my name, though, right?" Maia asked, apparently not interested in the doings of Leigh's evil father, the duke.

  "Oh, yes," Millie said. "He rescues Merry"—she spelled out the name for them—"from the earl. It's you, but not you."

  "Merry?" Maia asked. "You're calling me Merry? You know I'm on two different antidepressants, right?"

  Two? Leigh hadn't known you could be on two.

  "Her name's really Meredith Franck," Millie said, sounding sweetly important. "Merry's her nickname. Only her twin brother and the bastard son call her that."

  "Got a title?" Leigh asked, since this was always his mother's hardest part.

  "What's the bastard's name?" Maia asked.

  "The duke's dark son," Millie said to her brother, and to Maia, "Dexter Clayton. Everyone calls him Dex. He's the dark son."

  Leigh let this sink in. He'd been about to tell her that Franck was a terrible last name for an American heiress, but the one she'd assigned to him gave him real pause. Putting aside that Dex was already a hackneyed, overused name in romance novels (Lillian had it on her too-absurd-to-use list, along with Fynn, Carlos, Jane, and Vivienne), his sister had cast him as a Clayton bastard. As illegitimate. It was oddly upsetting, just as it oddly fit. He was, in many ways, his father's son from outside of Clayton's current, legitimate family.

  "Are you going to let us read it?" Maia asked.

  "Well, I still haven't finished part one," she said. "I've been working hard on all the ways that Merry's fiancé is evil."

  "What's his name?" Leigh asked. "He's an earl, right?"

  He wondered if he should bother telling Millie about how many names the members of English royalty had. One for each title, as well as their family name. Leigh had been about twelve when Lillian switched from writing contemporary romances to historicals. The money was better and the imprint guaranteed her more work, and so suddenly the apartment was filled with books on Victorian clothing, furniture, plumbing, carriages, and several volumes on the history of British peerage.

  "Earl of what?" Maia asked about her alter ego's evil fiancé.

  "Oliver Kimber, the Earl of Lexham," Millie said, displaying that she didn't need Leigh to pass on any of the ridiculous things he'd absorbed from his mother.

  Maia started to laugh, which set Millie off, and when they looked at Leigh's perplexed expression, they laughed some more.

  "Oliver Lexham is the biggest jerk in school," Maia said. "He made my life a living hell last year."

  "Yours and Franklin's," Millie said. To Leigh, she said, "Oliver Lexham is super popular."

  "He plays lacrosse," Maia said, as if this explained everything.

  "Why is making him evil so hard?" Leigh asked.

  "It's not only that," Millie said. "Part one should end when Dex finally kisses Merry, and I haven't figured out a way to do that."

  Leigh kissed the inside of Maia's wrist. "It could not be easier," he said.

  "Not in front of your sister," Maia said, snatching her hand away from him. "How gross for her."

  "No," Millie said. "It's not."

  "Well, just make it happen," Leigh said. "You know, Dex kissing Meredith."

  "But Merry is engaged," Millie said. "In order for her to kiss another man or for Dex to kiss a woman betrothed to an earl, the earl has to be horrible."

  "That's
how romances work," Maia said, and Leigh laughed, having heard that quoted many times while he was interning at Lillian's publishing house.

  That's how romances work. As if love had a governing principle, as reliable as the equation for gravity, that everyone knew existed, even if few could easily calculate it. It was taken for granted that love, like gravity, existed, but good luck remembering the proof.

  "Also, I thought it was rude," Millie said, explaining her problems with writing about kissing. "I couldn't make you kiss in the book just because I wanted you to in real life."

  "Well, now you have our permission," Maia said. "But only if we can read it."

  "Okay," Millie said. "I promise."

  ~~~

  During his last shift at the tennis club, Leigh asked Preston if he knew Oliver Kimber.

  "I know Jonathan Kimber and Oliver Lexham," Preston said.

  Right. In Millie's book, it had been Oliver Kimber, Earl of Lexham. She had gotten all of her last names from the senior class.

  "They're guys at school," Preston said. "Is Millie giving them bad press?"

  "It's more that she doesn't like them," Leigh said. "And Millie's usually pretty forgiving. You know, she loves people. Her father used to say she looked for reasons to love people."

  "Oliver can be a jerk, but he's been my best friend since fifth grade," Preston said, sounding as if he had to explain this a lot. "Jonathan's a good guy. He and Oliver are tight. They both play lacrosse."

  Leigh decided he was going to have to ask Maia how Oliver Lexham had made her life a living hell. Preston, as if knowing where Leigh's thoughts had gone, said, "So you and Maia are dating."

  Leigh kept sorting the forks he was going through to make up napkin and silverware sets, but he nodded, trying not to smile. Yes, they were. They were dating. Apparently the only person who did not know this was Astra. Leigh noted this unacceptable fact and vowed he would tell her soon.