All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  Normally, I’d have been pleased that Teddy was a no-show. But that was before my father had made him my de facto second-in-command on the Murray Hill project. Teddy was supposed to shadow me when he graduated in May. My father had already cleared out an office for him. Apparently, Teddy was getting a seat at the table whether he fucking showed up or not.

  “I’ll call him,” I said. “I’ll be right back.

  “Rosie,” I called as I passed her desk on my way to my office, “get me Teddy on the phone.”

  It was no surprise that Teddy was late. He and Grace were staying at my apartment on the Upper East Side and they spent their days traipsing around the city, taking in the sights. I’d avoided them as much as possible, leaving for the office early every morning before they woke up. I’d even stayed two nights at Margot’s, but her apartment was small and uncomfortable—a third-story walk-up that she shared with two other med students in Brooklyn. So, the other night, I’d slept at my place. I heard them come home late in the evening as I was lying in bed. Grace’s laughter floated down the hall, and then I heard their bedroom door creaking closed. I put a pillow over my head and tried not to picture them together in the dark.

  “I have Teddy on line one for you,” Rosie called from the doorway.

  I picked up my phone.

  “Where the hell are you?” I asked. “You were supposed to be here to go over plans for the new rental property half an hour ago.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Teddy said. His voice became muffled. “Yeah, medium rare, please. And a glass of Chardonnay when you get the chance.” I heard static and then my brother’s voice again. “Sorry, I’m back. What’s up?”

  “Tell me you’re not literally out to fucking lunch right now,” I said.

  “Well, the early showing of the movie was sold out, so we had to go to the later one. And that pushed lunch back, and then there was a wait to get a table so we’re just now ordering,” Teddy said.

  “Get your ass in a cab and get down here,” I said. “Now.”

  “Listen, you don’t really need me there,” Teddy said. “Can’t you just fill me in later on what I missed? I mean, I’m on vacation.”

  “Please,” I said. “Your whole life has been a fucking vacation. The fun’s over.”

  “All right, Dad,” Teddy said.

  “I’m serious, Teddy,” I said. “Enough with your pranks. If Father and Eugenia want to hand you consolation prizes your whole life just for existing, that’s their choice. But this is my project, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you fuck it up.”

  “You sound a little shrill,” Teddy said. “Maybe it’s just the connection. Anyway, my appetizers are here.”

  “Listen here, you little shit,” I said, “don’t you even think about—”

  But before I could finish, Teddy hung up.

  My phone rang. I fumbled for the light on my bedside table.

  “Mother of Christ,” Margot muttered next to me. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the lamp.

  “Sorry. Go back to sleep,” I said, squinting at the clock.

  2:18 a.m. Who the hell would be calling at this hour? I grabbed for my phone. The number on the screen was Teddy’s. Fuck him.

  I turned off the light and rolled over, tucking my arm around Margot’s warm body and pulling her to me. She ran her fingertips along my forearm and settled her body against mine.

  A few seconds later, my phone rang again.

  Margot groaned and pulled a pillow over her head to muffle the sound.

  I grabbed for my phone again and answered it.

  “You better be dying in a ditch somewhere right now,” I said.

  Only, it wasn’t Teddy’s voice that answered me. It was Grace’s.

  “Alistair?” she said.

  I sat up.

  “Alistair, I’m sorry to be calling,” she said. She sounded slightly breathless. “I know it’s late,” she said, “but I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s Teddy,” she said. “He’s fine—he just, he had a lot to drink, and then he got sick in the cab, and so the driver pulled over and made us get out, and nobody else will take us when they see the state he’s in. He’s a mess, and I don’t think I can get him down to the subway by myself—he’s too heavy, and he keeps falling.”

  “Where are you now?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  “The West Village,” she said. “Seventh and Greenwich.”

  “Stay there,” I said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  Half an hour later, I’d driven to Lower Manhattan. I spotted them almost immediately, Teddy huddled on the sidewalk and Grace standing in her winter peacoat, breathing a fog of warm air into the cold March night, looking lost and uncertain. I pulled over.

  Grace called my name when she saw me. “I’ve never seen him like this before,” she said. “I tried to get him to go home hours ago, but he wouldn’t leave the bar.”

  Her lips were blue and she was shivering. I wanted to hurt my brother for making her stand out in the cold in the middle of the night like this.

  “I’ll help you get him in the car,” was all I said.

  I could smell my brother before I reached him. He had the remnants of vomit down the front of his coat and he smelled like sour Chinese food and wine. Grace took Teddy gently by one arm, and I took him by the other, perhaps a little roughly, and shuffled him toward the idling car.

  “I know it’s spring break,” I said to Teddy. “But this isn’t fucking Cancún.”

  Teddy crawled in and crumpled in the backseat. Grace got in after him, and I went around front to get in the driver’s seat. As I put the car into drive, I looked at Teddy in the rearview mirror.

  “What was the occasion?” I asked dryly.

  Teddy just kept his eyes closed and hugged himself, groaning in discomfort.

  “It was your father,” Grace said. “He called Teddy about missing that meeting, and I don’t know, it didn’t go well.”

  “He’s a prick,” Teddy moaned, leaning his head against the window. “I don’t feel good.”

  “Then stick your head out the window,” I said. “I’m not paying to have the car detailed because you can’t hold your liquor.”

  Grace leaned over and rolled Teddy’s window down for him. The icy spring air filled the car.

  “It’s too cold,” Teddy whined, his words sloppy and running together.

  “The cold air might do you good,” Grace said, rubbing Teddy’s knee. “Your dad did seem like he was being a little hard on him,” Grace said to me.

  “Don’t let Teddy’s sad act fool you,” I said. “He deserved a lot more than a few harsh words.”

  Teddy leaned toward Grace and put his head in her lap. His eyes drooped closed. Grace ran her fingers through his hair and hummed a gentle tune I couldn’t place.

  I’d never envied my brother anything. But I envied him this.

  Teddy mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “Something about a rosebush?” Grace said.

  “It’s just like the rosebush,” Teddy said sloppily. After a few minutes, he went still and silent; I think he had fallen asleep.

  “What does he mean about the rosebush?” Grace asked me quietly.

  My eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. Then I looked away.

  “When we were kids, my father told me to go cut down Eugenia’s prized rosebush,” I said. It was Eugenia’s favorite, the one that had won the Hartford Flower and Garden Show three years running. I remembered that day—how hot it was, sweat dripping into my eyes, and the way the thorns bit at my palms as I hacked at the base of the rosebush with the gardener’s shears.

  “As I was cutting it down, I looked up, and there was Teddy,” I said, “running toward me, screaming at me to stop. I didn’t, of course—Father had given me a job to do, and I was going to do it. Anyway, we fought.”

  I remembered
that fight, the two of us rolling around in the dirt, answering a kick to the shin with a swift, hard punch to the gut.

  “I cut the rosebush down, and that night at dinner, Teddy wasn’t allowed at the table.”

  “Because of the fight?” Grace asked.

  “No,” I said. “Because my father had told him to save the rosebush, and he’d failed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Grace said. “I thought your father told you to cut it down.”

  “He did,” I said. “He told me to cut it down and he told Teddy to save it.”

  “But why?”

  “I guess he wanted to see which one of us would prevail.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  I shrugged. I knew Teddy saw it that way, too, but I didn’t.

  My great-grandfather had come to this country a penniless tailor. He’d saved his money and bought a factory in the Meatpacking District and built up a sizable fortune. My grandfather, the youngest of his six brothers, had outwitted his brothers to take their inheritance, and with it he had started the Calloway Group. My father had taken that company and built it into one of the largest real estate companies in New York City. He didn’t want Teddy and me to just sit on our asses and carry on what he had done; he wanted us to make more of what we were given, the way his father had, the way he had. To carve out our own legacies.

  “Father’s a Darwinist,” I said. “He believes only the strongest survive and the rest will be wiped out.”

  “And is that what you believe, too?” Grace asked.

  I met her gaze in the rearview mirror again. When I was a child, I looked up to my father. I wanted to be exactly like him. He taught me to be selfish, to go after the things I wanted with a stubborn, unrelenting tenacity. That was the only way to win, to get ahead, to accomplish something close to what he had accomplished. I thought about all the things I’d sacrificed on the altar of that belief. Things I could never undo. Who was I—what was I—if I no longer believed in that?

  “He’s not wrong,” was all I said.

  Grace’s reflection held my gaze. She looked thoughtful, almost sad.

  “Maybe,” she said after a moment. “But it seems like an awfully lonely way to live.”

  Nineteen

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  I woke to a blindingly bright light. I glanced over at the door and saw that Drew had flipped on the light switch. Panicking for a second, thinking that I had slept through my alarm, I looked at the clock on my nightstand. It read six thirty a.m. I threw up a hand to shield my eyes.

  “Jeez, Drew, kill the light, will you?” I asked, my voice scratchy.

  I heard two bounding leaps and then felt Drew jump onto my bed.

  “I’m so proud of you!” Drew chirped. “My very own Edward R. Murrow.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, sitting up.

  “You,” she said. “Your article.”

  Drew was dressed in her workout shorts and a T-shirt, her hair thrown up in a messy bun from her morning run. Her cheeks were still flushed. She handed me the newspaper she was holding.

  “I saw it this morning when I was getting my coffee,” she said. “It’s soooo good, Charlie. Really. I read it twice.”

  I took the paper from her and read.

  In the Eye of the Beholder

  By Finn McIntire and Charlie Calloway

  Finn had included me in the byline. But why?

  “I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said. “And then let’s grab breakfast, ’kay?”

  “Sure,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  Drew grabbed her towel from the hook on the back of our door and picked up her shower caddy. She hummed as she left the room. I waited until she left and then I started to read.

  “Charlie, why don’t you go next?” Harper said, pen poised over her notebook.

  The Features team was sitting around the coffee table in the Chronicle’s room. I sat on the patched-up couch again. Finn was on the other side of the table, sitting in a swivel chair he had pulled over from one of the desks. He hadn’t looked at me all meeting. I knew because I had been staring at him practically the entire time, trying to catch his eye.

  “Sure,” I said. “I want to do a piece on Knollwood’s urban legends. You know, unpacking the mythologies around campus. Where did they come from? What might they reveal about us? Why do these particular stories persist?”

  “Interesting,” Harper said. “Do you have an example?”

  “Everyone knows about the Knollwood ghost,” I said. “But no one really knows if a student actually died on campus, or when these stories started.”

  Ever since I’d seen the “In Memoriam” page in my dad’s old yearbook, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kid who had passed away, Jake Griffin. What had happened to him exactly? Could the Knollwood ghost—the specter that haunted campus—be him?

  “I like it,” Harper said. “Well, I think you just got your first solo byline, Charlie.”

  “Actually,” I said, “since this piece involves a bit of research, I was wondering if I could work with Finn again.”

  I glanced at Finn. His eyes flickered toward me and then away again immediately when we made eye contact. His ears turned red.

  “We made a pretty good team last time,” I said.

  “Sure,” Harper said. “Sounds good.”

  When the meeting was over, I stuffed my notebook into my bag and then made my way over to Finn, who was still putting his things away.

  “The byline,” I said quietly so that no one else would hear. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  Finn shrugged. “Your free-association idea was good. I used it. And I just didn’t feel right not giving you any credit.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Finn looked at me.

  “You don’t have to share this byline with me,” he said.

  “I want to,” I said. “It’s called recompense. You know, making amends when you mess up. Unless . . . unless you don’t like the story and you want to work on something else?”

  “No,” Finn said. “I like it. I think it could be really good. Besides, who doesn’t like a good ghost story?”

  The next afternoon, after Introduction to Photography, I lingered as everyone filtered out of the classroom. Mr. Andrews was always the last one out because he had to shut down his PowerPoint and put away his equipment. As I slowly tucked my laptop into my shoulder bag, I glanced at the clock that hung above the door. It read 4:15. Leo had promised he would be in position outside in the courtyard by 4:25, ready with his iPhone to catch my steamy embrace with Mr. Andrews through the classroom window.

  “Do you mind taking a look at some of the stills I shot last weekend?” I asked, standing at one of the tall lab tables, the stills in front of me on the tabletop. I made sure to keep my back to the window. I didn’t want my face to be distinguishable in any of Leo’s shots.

  “Sure,” Mr. Andrews said, coming over to stand next to me. He leaned over to study them. His arm brushed mine and I didn’t move it. I just stood there, pressing my arm to his.

  In that moment, I felt powerful. Was this how guys felt when they were going after a girl? Like they were the hunter, and the girl was the prey?

  “I tried to incorporate the rule of threes you were telling us about in framing,” I said. I took a step closer to him, and when he stood up all the way, he was between me and the lab table, facing the window.

  “I can see that,” he said. “You did a nice job.”

  “Thanks,” I said, looking up at him through my eyelashes. “I learned from the best.”

  I lifted myself onto my toes and kissed him, reaching my arms around his neck. He didn’t move.

  “Charlie—” Mr. Andrews said when I drew back; he removed my arms from around his neck. “I think you’ve gotten the wrong idea here. I’m your teacher.”

  “I know,” I said. I leaned into him, fingered the top button of his shirt, and gave him one of th
ose crooked, flirtatious smiles I had seen Drew give Crosby a hundred times. “And I feel like you have a lot to teach me.”

  When I looked into his eyes, I expected to see that look that Cedric Roth had always given me last summer when I was squeezed into the seam of the couch in the study and he was on top of me. That eyes-half-closed, mouth-half-open, I-want-you look. But it wasn’t there. Instead, Mr. Andrews looked disappointed.

  “Don’t do that, Charlie,” Mr. Andrews said. “Don’t sell yourself so short. You’re a whole lot more than—than this.”

  Slowly, he separated himself from me. And as I turned to glance at the window, where the eye of Leo’s iPhone camera gaped at me through the glass, I didn’t feel powerful anymore. Instead, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

  Shame.

  In the dining hall that evening, I sat at a table with just the girls and pushed my food around my plate. After that afternoon’s events, I’d lost my appetite. I couldn’t figure out how a little harmless flirting had somehow turned into something that made me feel like the lowest of the low. Suddenly, I realized that both Stevie and Yael were looking at me expectantly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Told you she wasn’t listening,” Stevie said.

  “You know, just because your male counterparts aren’t present doesn’t mean the two of you can check out of the conversation,” Yael chided.

  I glanced across the table at Drew, who also seemed to be doing a lot of food rearranging on her plate without much fork-to-mouth movement.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  “Relax, we’re just giving you a hard time,” Yael said. “Anyone down for fro yo?”

  “Me!” Stevie said, shooting her hand in the air.

  “No thanks,” Drew said.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  I waited until Stevie and Yael left before I nudged Drew under the table.

  “Hey, so Dalton needs our lists,” I said, my voice low.

  “What list?”

  “For preferred registration,” I said. “I sent you my list last week but I never got yours.”