by Mandy Berman
Robert looked dubious. “Since when do you like scotch?”
She shrugged.
He poured her one finger’s worth. “Try a small amount first.”
The glass felt heavy in her hands, substantial. The four of them sat in the parlor now, Liv and Brandon on the couch, and Kimiko and Robert in chairs on the opposite side of the mahogany coffee table. Kimiko was attentive to Brandon, and asked him about his family, his fraternity, and how the law school applications were going.
“Pretty well.” He put his glass down on a coaster. “I’m trying to get the applications in a few weeks before the deadline so I won’t have to worry about them over winter break. A lot of the decisions are rolling, so the earlier you get the applications in, the better.”
Robert nodded in what seemed to be approval.
“And what schools will you apply to?”
He listed them off: all of the Ivies, plus NYU, Duke, Georgetown.
“Georgetown.” Kimiko smiled at the proximity to their own house, already assuming that Liv would follow Brandon wherever he ended up.
“That’s his safety,” Liv said.
“Georgetown’s your safety?” Robert said.
“Well, with the way the market is now, I don’t see the point in applying to schools that aren’t in the top tier.”
“What if you don’t get in to any?” Robert said.
“Dad. He’ll get in.”
“It’s a fair question.” Brandon patted Liv a few times on her leg. It felt like he was trying to mollify her with that pat, unlike the affectionate squeeze in the car. “I feel confident in my LSAT scores and my GPA, but it’s true, you never do know. I suppose I would apply for jobs then. And maybe try again the following year.”
“It won’t come to that,” Kimiko assured him.
“There’s a lot to be said for security,” Robert said. He stood to refill his glass, not offering the option to anyone else. Liv was beginning to feel the first blushes of shame; she worried. She should have known he was going to feel more wound up around her first serious adult boyfriend. She should have prepared more adequately for this.
“Well, what would be your first choice?” Kimiko asked sunnily, trying to gently move the focus away from Robert’s naysaying.
Brandon seemed nervous to answer, though. Liv knew the feeling well: too afraid to express what you actually wanted, because it often got shot down by Robert.
“It would be hard to say no to Harvard, Mrs. Langley,” Brandon finally said.
Robert hiccupped.
“What if Liv is in New York?” Kimiko said.
That was where Liv was always planning to go after college. It annoyed her, this assumption that they would stay in the same city no matter what.
“There are some small presses in Boston,” Brandon said, a point he’d made to Liv more than once.
“That’s true,” Kimiko said, seeming pleased.
Liv didn’t want to go to Boston, and Brandon knew that, but she didn’t say so now; she knew that if she expressed her wishes in front of her father, she’d be shut down. You’re an English major, for Christ’s sake, he would say. It wasn’t the Victorian age—she was, of course, going to work, but she was never going to make the kind of money that Brandon eventually would. She would simply get a job in whatever city Brandon’s top-ten law school was in.
This was how it went: Langley women had jobs—important jobs, at that—but they were secondary to their husbands’ more lucrative careers. Liv’s parents had met at the American embassy in Osaka, where her mother was serving as a translator and her father as a Foreign Service officer; they moved back to the States when they learned they were pregnant, because Robert, ever the patriot, wanted their child to be born in America. Her mother worked at the Japanese embassy now; her father was in the private sector, working for a powerful Japanese business lobby, making far more money than he ever could have in the Foreign Service. Kimiko didn’t start work in the U.S. until Liv was three, and only returned to working full-time when Liv entered middle school. When Liv was little, Kimiko was always around to take her to playdates, soccer practice, and Girl Scouts. But when Liv was in school, her mother was working. Kimiko was a model of the kind of woman who could do both.
The catch there, Liv realized as she got older, was that her father didn’t have to do both. He was never asked to make a choice between his daughter and his job, and then judged for whatever he decided. Meanwhile, Kimiko was forever struggling to balance the scales, trying her best to be equally a professional woman and a nurturing caretaker.
Liv wanted to work: she knew this. And she didn’t mind the idea of whomever she ended up with making more money than she did, so that she would be free to pursue a career in publishing, which didn’t pay quite enough for the quality of life she wanted.
Ostensibly, the idea of marriage was nice, but it seemed so far in the future. She had only been dating Brandon for six months, and the thought of living with him—let alone marrying him—could not have been further from her mind. It wasn’t until Brandon started including her in his discussions about law school locations that she’d considered that trajectory in any immediate way. She liked the idea of having Brandon’s support and comfort as a constant in her life, and she liked that she never had to experience loneliness as long as he was around. But the realities of marriage were far from ideal. Thinking about sleeping with the same person for the rest of her life, being held accountable by him, and having to deal with all of his humanness—his insecurities, his snoring, his smells—made her mourn her singleness before she’d even truly lost it.
* * *
—
For dinner, they were each on their own side of the table: Robert and Kimiko at the head and the foot, Liv and Brandon across from each other. Brandon was cutting and eating the turkey the European way, fork in his left hand the entire time, turned with a delicate flick of the wrist when he took a bite, which was a performance for her mother.
“This is delicious, Rosa,” Brandon said to their housekeeper when she came out to refill their champagne glasses, and Liv swore she saw Rosa blush. Kimiko made approving eye contact with Liv, a nod to his politeness.
Robert was at that point in the night when he had stopped talking altogether. Instead, he alternated between champagne and scotch, and chewed his turkey loudly.
Liv was not hungry. She pushed the turkey around on her plate. She took a generous swallow of champagne, the bubbles sharp going down her throat. Robert, after draining his most recent glass of champagne, let out a belch.
Liv looked up at her mother, who was looking daggers at her father.
“It’s my fucking house,” Liv heard him say, in response to Kimiko’s warning glances. He had not spoken for maybe an hour, Liv realized, and now he was slurring his words. If Brandon heard the comment, or the quality of Robert’s speech, he pretended not to. Kimiko asked Liv some questions about her roommates, her classes, and both women did their best to maintain the bright and breezy level of conversation, diverting attention from the storm cloud that they knew was building at the head of the table.
When they were done eating, and Rosa came out to collect the plates, Liv could see that she was afraid as she rounded the table toward Robert. She gathered his plate and his silverware, as well as the empty champagne flute, knowing quite well to leave the crystal rocks glass with a few sips of scotch left.
“Don’t take that,” he said, grabbing the empty flute from her.
“Mr. Langley, there’s no—”
As he stood and snatched the glass from her with great force, it flew from his hand and against the wall behind him. Rosa let out a shriek, startled, and dropped the silverware and the china plate, which smashed onto the floor into dozens of porcelain-white pieces.
“Goddammit, Rosa,” he boomed, grabbing her by the wrist. She shrieked again. T
here were tears in her eyes; she cowered toward the floor in a position of defense, her free hand covering the top of her head.
“Robert!” Kimiko yelled from across the table. “Let go.”
He looked down at the hand holding Rosa’s wrist, as if it had been acting independently. He loosed his grip; Rosa, now breathing with great effort, rubbed her wrist with her free hand. Liv could see that it was red, the white imprints from her father’s fingers slowly fading.
“Clean this up.” He waved toward the dining room, to no one in particular, and swayed out of the swinging door into the parlor, still carrying his crystal glass with the remnants of scotch in it.
Kimiko went over to shush Rosa and calm her down.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Langley.”
“It’s okay, Rosa.”
“It’s the good china.”
“It’s okay.” She rubbed Rosa’s back. “Go sit down. I’ll get the dustpan.”
They disappeared through the opposite swinging door to the kitchen, leaving Liv alone with Brandon at the table, in the room fixed between her parents. It felt awfully symbolic, remaining paralyzed in the middle. It had never been easy, that choice: siding with her mother after an incident was always a gamble, because her father’s moods were so unpredictable, his propensities toward violence so inconsistent. She had never quite learned when to stand up to him and when to let his storm pass over them and subside, because it was impossible to know in advance when he would let an issue go and when he would retaliate. His behaviors were not constant or methodical, much as Liv had tried, her entire life, to chart them, to unearth their causes and to modify her own actions as a way to thwart his. She remembered, in middle school, when she first recognized that his abuses weren’t normal, keeping a journal in which she recorded variables such as type and units of alcohol consumed, time of day, and the inciting incident, hoping to find a pattern in order to be able to change it herself.
She found no pattern. His outbursts did not often correlate in scope with the thing that set them off: a sentence Kimiko said out of turn, a rare B-plus that Liv received on a test. Alcohol was often involved, but how much and what kind didn’t seem to matter. Sometimes, in fact, the drunker the better, because his violence would be lazy and inexact, and he would forget the incident the next day.
She’d learned that the best thing to do was behave. Be as good as she could. Only, she’d never had a Brandon in the room with her. Robert tended to reserve these moments for only the nuclear family, and for the people who worked for their family. She had never learned how to account for an outsider.
She could not look at him. She still held her fork, and stared at her plate, all the turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing that she had pushed around it now inedible. She wanted desperately to be able to say to him, This has never happened before. She almost did, almost told the lie, in order to be done with it.
“Hey,” he said.
She had been so foolish to think that maybe, with a new boyfriend present, he might have behaved. She had thought there was a chance. At least for a little while longer. Of course, the presence of a new boyfriend only stirred him up more, made him more upset. Changes, as her mother had once told her, were hard for Robert. Changes were to be avoided at all costs.
“Hey.”
She heard his chair scrape against the floor, and his footsteps as he walked around the table. She felt his arms on her shoulders, and then she felt him kneeling to her level. Without a word, he took her into his arms, and without moving any limbs, she sank into him, feeling, for the first time, her body relax into his.
11.
UPON HER RETURN from Thanksgiving break, Fiona bought Oliver Ash’s second book at the college bookstore: Dispatches from a Half-Breed. Though she was meant to be finishing her Lewinsky and modern lit papers, along with studying for her French final and polishing her poetry portfolio, the fact that he had not responded to her email had only fueled her obsession. She checked the bookstore to make sure she didn’t recognize anyone before she purchased the book (though, she imagined, she couldn’t have been the first young woman for whom the cashier had rung up this paperback). She secreted the book inside the paper bag as if it were a handgun or several ounces of cocaine.
She had come to the point where she assumed Oliver wasn’t going to respond to her email, but she had not stopped thinking about him. Her brain seemed entirely too unoccupied without a fantasy of a man to busy it. And how rich her fantasies were about Oliver! Without seeing him in person again, Fiona had begun to construct a great imaginary life around him. The fantasy life began at the dive bar where they’d met, but then stemmed off in a different direction: a night on which Fiona had not drunk too much but had, instead, kept her cool, inching her knees slowly toward Oliver’s throughout the course of the night. When he put his hand on the bar and overlaid his pinky finger on hers, she had not flinched.
He would close their tab—paying for her drinks, too—and lead her, with his large hand on the small of her back, to his car. She would ask if he was okay to drive and he would say yes and she would believe him; he would be, in fact, quite capable of driving, and it would make her think of the boys whom she did not trust to drive after a few, and how much Oliver’s adultness and competency contrasted with their lack thereof. The air in the car would be laden with the sort of sexual tension that makes one feel jumpy and alive. They wouldn’t speak, except for him to offer her a cigarette, which she would decline, preferring instead to look out the window at this city she’d spent nearly four years in and think about how different it looked from this vantage point—from the passenger seat of the car of a married professor, in all of its secretive glory. And what would happen if she caught the eye of someone she knew? She imagined she’d attempt to hide, feigning shame or embarrassment, but in truth, she would have felt proud. She would wonder how many other people they were passing, on the sidewalk or in their cars, who were doing private, illicit things. It would make her feel as if she were entering an aspect of adult life which she’d previously not been privy to.
They would go to his house—she imagined he lived in one of those Victorians on the other side of campus—and from here the fantasies diverged in detail, though they always followed the same rough blueprint: more drinks, kissing, falling on a bed. The greatest thrill came when they saw each other for the first time; for her, it would be almost too much to bear, to square this image of the man she’d built up in her head for months with the flesh version now in front of her. And so, too, would be the tactility of it all—how would she know how to touch him? This was where things got blurry, when Fiona—in her bedroom, often before falling asleep—became not in control of her own thoughts and, afterward, felt somewhat embarrassed by the images she’d conjured seconds earlier.
When the desire was satisfied, the fantasies turned to postcoital bliss, to the things they might talk about: his favorite novelists (she pegged him as a fan of the Russians) and composers (he only listened to classical music, surely). Her own tastes would feel lowbrow in comparison. Maybe, at some point, she would ask about his family, his son. She was not so naïve as to think that he might develop feelings for her or she him, but she imagined, with Oliver, that things would be different than they had been with college boys. More substantial. That he would satisfy her and talk to her afterward, instead of leaving right away. This, she imagined, was what real men did.
Now, Fiona walked down the steps of the bookstore. It was the Monday everyone returned from Thanksgiving weekend, and campus buzzed with the anxiety of exams. It was dark already, even though it was only five o’clock, and students were getting out of their last classes of the day and headed en masse to the library. Every year, Fiona seemed to have temporary forgetfulness when it came to daylight savings, and she felt a pang of sadness when she thought of the sun being out at this time mere weeks earlier. The trees lining the pathways, bare now, were circled with brigh
t lights, which made the campus glow with forced holiday cheer.
She moved against the stream of library-bound students, making her way out of campus and toward her home. The house was dark and silent; they were all at the library, studying for exams and writing final papers. She turned the lights on as she climbed upstairs to her room. She could have sat and read on the couch downstairs or in the kitchen, but she didn’t want anyone to suddenly come home and walk in on her. This book, and the fact that she was reading it, felt private. She opened to the first page, and began reading.
She was standing in her underwear at the foot of my bed, all sinew and limbs, like the baby fat had just been shed. A black thong and a black lacy bra. She wore them like a costume, like a girl playing dress-up, the way she stood there, asking to be appraised by me. What was I to say? That the underwear looked brand-new, purchased for this occasion?
My father had hanged himself that morning. She told me she was eighteen. I had chosen to believe her.
This was supposed to be a novel, but it was impossible not to equate the man with the narrator. It was based on a true story, after all.
She fished her laptop from her bag and opened it. The first hit was his Wikipedia page.
Oliver Ash (born Levi Abraham Asch, May 7, 1967) is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Adolf (1993) and Dispatches of a Half-Breed (2000). Adolf was adapted into a film by Gus Van Sant in 1996.
The page was fairly sparse, with only basic information about his education and the books he had published. The most information came under the subheading “Controversy,” which she now studied with greater interest than the last time she’d looked at this page.
In 1998, Ash was accused of sexual misconduct by a former student at Columbia University, Maggie McIntyre. In a civil lawsuit against Ash, McIntyre alleged that Ash had abused his position as her professor to coerce her into a nonconsensual sexual relationship. Ash denied this allegation and mantained that, while there was a sexual relationship, it was consensual. The court found insufficient evidence of coercion, and the case was dismissed.