Royal Pain

by Megan Mulry

  Chapter 11

  The car started to slow down as it entered the tree-lined streets of Englewood Cliffs, coming to a stop in front of a 1970s ranch house. The home Bronte grew up in was straight-down-the-line, middle-class fare: set back about thirty feet from the curb, one-car garage to the right, six steps up to the front door approached by a curving path from the driveway. Freshly cut lawn, mature shrubs running neatly along the home’s perimeter, a single shady tree in the front yard.

  Bronte took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let her head slip back to rest on the fake leather headrest. She wanted to cry. Or at least not get out of the car.

  She adored her mother, she really did. Cathy Talbott was just… needy. As a friend had once pointed out, “She loves you… to death!”

  “What is it, Bron?” Max’s voice was much closer to her than she had expected, and intimately low. She turned her head toward him, still resting on the headrest, and opened her eyes slowly to look into his.

  “It sounds so mean… then I just add guilt to my original feelings… but I’m just tired of how much my mom loves me. Isn’t that ridiculous? Even saying it out loud sounds so ungrateful. I love her—you will love her…”

  Max squeezed her hand and smiled, encouraging her to go on.

  “She is truly lovable, and supportive, and smart and every good thing, but she really wants in on my life… does that make any sense? And I don’t really… I’m not a really good sharer… and now with you and our big news, everything just feels sort of crowded.”

  “Shhhh. Bron. Let’s go have dinner with your mom. It’s just dinner. We are not getting married.” Her eyes widened at the words. “I mean we are not getting married this minute, so let’s take it a little at a time.”

  One of his fingers circled the center of her palm in the most calming way. Normally, she would have snapped back with an angry, are-you-shushing-me barb, but instead all she wanted to do was curl up like a cat onto his lap. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Capitulation or comfort? Was she being paranoid or rational?

  Her eyes were starting to drift closed, enjoying the rhythm of his gentle touch, when there was a smart rap on the window behind Max, her mother’s beaming smile coming through the tinted glass.

  “Game on, m’lord,” she muttered so only Max could hear. He kissed the palm of her hand where he had been touching her and opened the door with his best smile for Cathy Talbott.

  “And you must be Maxwell Heyworth!” Cathy gushed before he was even fully out of the car. Max smiled again, about to speak, when Cathy plowed on, “And here comes Bronny!”

  Bronte just looked at Max with a slight widening of her eyes, as if to say, “Don’t even think of ever calling me Bronny!”

  “And you must be Mrs. Talbott. Please call me Max; only my grandfather called me Maxwell, and only that when he was utterly incensed.”

  “Oh, Bron, isn’t he charming?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Bronte agreed as she made her way up the front path.

  “‘Utterly incensed,’” her mother chimed. “That British accent is wonderful.”

  Max was smiling one of those smiles that made a little crystal ting sound accompanied by a little comic-strip star when depicted on a toothpaste commercial. How did he do it without seeming like a complete ass? Bronte wondered idly as she opened the front door into her mother’s living room.

  Bronte tried to see her childhood home through Max’s eyes, tried to see it as a perfectly normal suburban house: neat, modest, unremarkable in a pleasant sort of way. Cathy Talbott had always kept an immaculate home—the ferocious cleaning worked as some sort of martial perimeter against the constant unpredictability of her husband’s mood swings.

  At the time, Bronte had thought it a colossal waste of time: because her father had not been able to get mad about the decrepit state of their home, that just led him to seek out new indignities and sociopolitical affronts further afield. Maybe if Cathy had let the house fall into a state of inconsistent carelessness, Lionel could have focused on the ring left by a water glass on the antique coffee table, instead of having to cast about for new frustrations on which to cut his teeth.

  Bronte felt the pressure of Max’s hand as he gently reached for her lower back.

  “Relax,” he whispered warmly through her hair. And, miraculously, she did. Her shoulders settled down, her feet felt firmly planted on the living room carpet, and she closed her eyes momentarily. Her mother had gone into the kitchen to get them something to drink, and Bronte began to wonder if it was really possible that Max was right.

  That they were right. Together.

  That “relax” spoke volumes.

  Throughout her relationship with Mr. Texas, she had forced herself to swallow all the bitterness that had welled up whenever he had told her to relax. Whenever he had told her to relax, it really meant calm down and shut up. He always denied it, but Bronte never really gave up on that deep-down conviction that she knew the difference between relax (fuck off) and relax (lean on me).

  On the contrary, the same small word from Max was a salve. He wasn’t trying to shut her up; he was trying to soothe her, to assuage her worries. The hand on her lower back wasn’t a patronizing pat-pat; instead, it was like a conduit that alleviated her worry, a physical draining away.

  How? she wondered.

  “What did I do to deserve you?” Bronte smiled as she turned to look in his eyes and felt a jolt—first of joy, almost immediately overshadowed by doubt that was fueled by years of skepticism and fear.

  Before he could answer, Cathy was coming into the living room with three glasses of iced tea on an antique silver tray.

  “So tell me about yourself, Max. Where did you grow up? Brothers and sisters? Favorite color?” Cathy set down the tray and handed Max a tall cool glass with a little embroidered linen coaster underneath.

  Bronte had a momentary glimpse of her mother as a person: here was a woman who had always loved small, beautiful, seemingly insignificant things. Who even used linen cocktail napkins anymore, for goodness’ sake? Who washed them, ironed them, stored them in layers of white tissue paper, and then, on top of all that, remembered to retrieve them when the rare occasion actually presented itself to use them?

  Cathy Talbott always had a proper linen handkerchief in her purse. She ate off of French china. These weren’t expensive habits, she used to say in her own defense when Bronte would accuse her of being a totally antiquated woman. These were moments—opportunities really—to be civilized.

  “…Yorkshire, until I was ten, then my parents moved to Hertfordshire. My father died about a year ago and my mother has moved to London for the most part, so I guess Bronte and I will have to decide where we want to stake out our home base.” His glance to Bronte was a visual caress. “And my favorite color is definitely green—exactly the green of Bronte’s eyes, as fate would have it.”

  His wink was quick, just for Bronte.

  “Mom, I think you may have just gotten more information out of him in five minutes than I got in months of close contact in Chicago last year.”

  “You never were very good at asking questions and waiting long enough for people to answer, Bronny.”

  “That is so untrue!” Bronte’s eyes darted quickly to Max, and then back to her mother. “Max and I had a mutual agreement when we first met, right Max?”

  “Well, it was more of… Bronte’s idea than mutual, but of course I was willing to go along with it, in the interest of fostering our—what exactly, Bron?—relationship, I suppose, in Chicago.”

  “In any case”—Bronte squinted briefly at Max then brought her attention back to her mother—“we were trying to really get to know each other without all of the peripheral who-what-where-when type of white noise. All that do-you-know stuff becomes sort of tiresome. On the other hand, had I known that the 411 on Max was more like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and less like my-mom’s-a-retired-schoolteacher-and-I-grew-up-in-New-Jersey, I might have been a tad more�
�� penetrating.”

  “I have parents!” Max said in mock defense. “I grew up… somewhere. And I take exception to that decline-and-fall part.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Bronte agreed skeptically while taking a sip of her iced tea.

  “No need to squabble, Bron,” her mother added lightly.

  “Yes, Bron, no need to squabble,” Max concurred through a delicious smile that should have been illegal (for how indecent it made Bronte feel), but that her mother found perfectly amenable.

  “Moving on,” Cathy continued with renewed cheer, “Bronte, you will be delighted to hear that I have finally gone through your father’s things.”

  Bronte’s face clouded. “After ten years, it’s about time you got rid of all of Lionel’s junk.”

  “Well, first of all, I still dislike the fact that you refer to your father by his first name—even all these years later it still sounds disrespectful—and second of all, yes, as a matter of fact, I actually began to go through some of his papers and journals after Christmas last year and I have a few I’d like you to read.”

  Bronte had been shaking her head in the negative before her mother even completed the sentence. “No interest.”

  “Bronte,” Max blurted out before he thought better of it. He had been trying to stay out of it, but he hated to see Bronte so embittered.

  “Yes, Max?” she replied archly, wishing more than ever that she could raise only one of her damn eyebrows.

  “Nothing, darling,” he replied, all ease and accompanied by that menacing, perfect-son-in-law-to-be smile again.

  “Mom, I have nothing whatsoever to say about ‘Dad’ and his ‘work,’” Bronte said, using her index fingers to make mocking quotation marks around her words.

  “I am not going to give in on this, Bronte.”

  No longer Bronny, she noticed, as her mother continued in her best schoolteacher voice: kind but utterly unyielding. “I have come upon something that is quite remarkable and I would very much like your opinion. If you must, simply ignore the fact that your father wrote it and give me your unbiased opinion. I am of a mind to pass it on to an editor friend of mine for possible publication.”

  “Sincerely, Mom, I am not trying to be a churlish adolescent, but you are delusional. His ‘writing’”—again with the mock air quotation marks—“was acerbically dry and painfully self-important. It’s hard enough to get people to read something well-written and cheerful, much less something pedantic and bitter.”

  “It’s a satire, dear.” Cathy might as well have said Lionel had also worked part-time running pony rides at preschool birthday parties for all Bronte was able to process the idea of him having a satirical bone in his body.

  “I would love to read it,” Max lobbed casually.

  “I already feel ganged up on, and we haven’t even been here an hour!”

  “No one’s ganging up on you, Bronny, and Max, thank you, I certainly appreciate the offer.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I am not sure if Bronte has told you much about her father, but I am afraid he did not age well.”

  “That’s an understatement, Mom. He was not a bottle of wine for chrissake.”

  “Now you are sounding like a churlish adolescent, Bronte,” her mother sniped. “As I was saying, he did not age well because from a very young age, he had been led to believe that he was a gifted thinker and writer. Unfortunately, the prizes and accolades of adolescence and young adulthood rarely prepare anyone for the realities of rejection, both in the world of publishing and in the world of tenured professorships. The more he read that was substandard and pedestrian, the more arrogant he became. And the more he read that was truly intelligent and inspiring, the more quickly he would be beset by immature fits of dark professional jealousy.”

  “Mom, I can’t believe you are still defending him. He was an ass.”

  “Bronte tries to upset me with her colorful language, Max, but I chose long ago to ignore it completely. Perhaps you will be able to cure her of the lazy habit.”

  “I find it quite adorable, actually.” Max smiled.

  “Well, that’s only fitting, I suppose. In any case”—Cathy slipped a strand of her hair behind her ear in exactly the same way Bronte always did when she was attempting to steer the conversation back on course—“I don’t think I am being unduly defensive, if you will, when I say this is a wonderful read. It’s an incisive look at the contemporary American family, sort of A Confederacy of Dunces meets Anna Karenina in North Dakota.”

  “It’s been done, Mom. Jonathan Franzen wrote it already; it’s called The Corrections. American readers have had it up to here with dysfunctional families and the misunderstood academics who are torn from their fabric.”

  “I’ve read The Corrections, Bronte, and this is not it. I think if you can tear yourself away from the familiar comfort of your filial disdain, you might be pleasantly surprised.” Cathy stared at Bronte a few seconds longer than necessary, then turned her attention to Max.

  Bronte sat quietly for several minutes, looking out the front bay window as the early evening light came through the branches of the big sycamore in the front yard. Her mother and Max were talking pleasantly about England and the latest Booker Prize kerfuffle—both of them chuckling at the irony of all those Oxford and Cambridge types being accused of producing nothing but inconsequential boredom.

  Was Bronte frozen in a state of adolescent malaise where her father was concerned? It wasn’t as if the mere memory of him smacked of bitterness; it just felt like a betrayal—to herself, to her mother—to simply toss aside a lifetime of protecting oneself from all that petty meanness. Was it a familiar comfort or a familiar bitterness? she wondered sadly. What a waste if that was all it was. So he was a pompous jerk; so what?

  She glanced away from the window and back at Max; her stomach lurched—love? terror? He was gesturing wildly with his hands as he was describing how his younger brother, Devon, used to run up behind the horse that Max was riding and jump up on its bare back, the two of them whooping and screeching and looking like nothing so much as the itinerant Romany gypsies that still came to Dunlear to trade horses.

  Max proceeded to do a wonderful impersonation of his mother—or what Bronte assumed was a wonderful impersonation, because she had never encountered the original—his voice raised to a feminine octave, strained and clipped with lofty disdain.

  “Please refrain from your carnival antics when we have company, children,” he crowed. When Max and Devon were twelve and ten, he explained, they were ill equipped to deal with the subtle nuances of their mother’s idea of what constituted “company.” More or less throwing his mother under the proverbial bus, he continued apace.

  “How were we supposed to know the difference between Reggie, the Duke of Wellington, and Reggie, the nice man who trained the horses between indiscretions with the local physician’s assistant? Our father never seemed to differentiate, and we were simply young and eager to show off our grand skills!”

  Cathy was wiping at the tears of mirth that had formed at the corners of her eyes as her laughter subsided. “Max, you really shouldn’t mock your mother, even though you are quite good at it; it’s very cruel,” she said, but she smiled good-naturedly, and Bronte was glad. “Parents everywhere suffer, you know, trying to appear supremely consistent and reliable; meanwhile, their children lie in wait, gleefully anticipating their missteps: ‘You said—’ or ‘You promised—’ It is an endless, and necessarily losing, battle”—she turned meaningfully to Bronte—“to live up to your own child’s infinite trust.”

  Bronte looked down into her now-empty iced tea glass, rattled the remaining ice for a second, then returned the glass carefully to the lovely round serving tray. “Point taken, Mom. Where is Dad’s manuscript?”

  “Come along, Max. I am sure Bronte will want you to see her childhood room, where she dreamed of her escape from this painfully mundane existence.”

  Her mother’s complete absence of malice would never ce
ase to amaze her. Coming from anyone else, that comment would have struck Bronte as petty or spiteful, whereas Cathy Talbott was simply stating a fact: Bronte had spent hours, years really, planning her escape from this mundane existence.

  ***

  Max and Bronte were on their way back into the city after a festive dinner at the little Lebanese restaurant in Hoboken. Cathy and Max had split a bottle of white wine as Bronte meditated on the completely unfamiliar (yet comforting) joy of watching two of her favorite people genuinely enjoying one another’s company. Mr. Texas had always found Cathy a bit grating.

  “Whenever we go to visit her house, I feel like I am about to break something,” he’d remarked defensively after one particularly chafing visit.

  Bronte smiled sardonically to herself at the now-glaring irony, seeing that she was the one who ended up broken and she would have been wise to heed her mother’s barely concealed skepticism of Mr. Texas, the good old boy.

  “What are you not really smiling about?” Max’s arm was loosely resting across Bronte’s back, his middle finger grazing her upper arm.

  “Just remembering other maternal visits with other men.”

  “Good, as long as that bitter grin is never the result of one of my visits. Your mother is an angel, by the way.”

  “Well, if she likes you, of course, that is certainly the case. If you happen to, shall we say, question her authority, she’s somewhat demonic in her affect.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I think you would have to grow horns and a spiked tail and carry a red pitchfork for her to even begin to contemplate your less-than-perfectness.”

  “It’s nice to know I have someone firmly in my camp.”

  “What do you mean by ‘someone in your camp’?”