The View Was Exhausting

by Mikaella Clements

  The fizzing energy of his anger started to change shape, shifting into a gray lead that lined his bones. It sank into him and made him gloomy and exhausted. When the biscuits didn’t hit the spot, he went back into the spotless kitchen to warm up a pizza. There was no sign of Win. Pritha managed a slice and a half of the pizza before she looked wan and worn out, pushing the plate away. Leo removed it without commenting. He brought her a bottle of soda water and she sipped slowly at it, eyes glazed.

  “How were the doctors today?”

  Pritha shrugged.

  He wondered if she was frightened, if she was thinking about her husband, who had died of the same malignant cells, only an inch or two lower. Mostly she looked annoyed.

  “Give me the last biscuit,” Pritha said. Leo handed it over. When she switched the channel to an old MasterChef rerun, he didn’t say anything, didn’t make any move to get up. There was plenty of time for leaving.

  He woke up to the bleary white light of the television screen saver, a logo bouncing around. His mouth was dry and fuzzy. He wasn’t sure what time it was. On the other end of the couch Pritha was asleep, too, head hanging back against the cushion, mouth open.

  Win was standing over them, her expression inscrutable. She was in the same clothes from earlier, and she looked perfect and untouchable.

  “I asked Gus to give you security clearance,” she said.

  Leo, thick mouthed, licked his cracked lips and tried to speak, but his first attempt came out grinding and hoarse, and he had to clear his throat and try again. “What?”

  “So you can come and go how you like,” Whitman said, gaze cool and assessing. “It’s late. You should go to bed.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They were unfailingly polite to one another for several days after that.

  They shared the house like distant roommates. Win wasn’t icy when he saw her, just absent, treating him with the same diffident civility as she did journalists.

  Most of his time was spent with Pritha, as she was the only real living thing in the house for him to interact with. The cat was no good. Leo didn’t mind cats, but this one had decided to hate him since he interrupted its nap, and now it hissed and put its back up whenever he came near it. He got Win’s first actual smile when he walked past it sitting on one of the kitchen barstools. As he put his hand out to pet it, the cat turned its head, lightning fast, and nipped at his fingers.

  “Ow, Jesus!”

  “Ha!” Win said, so unexpected and genuine that he stared at her. She rubbed her nose. “She’s shy.”

  “Is she,” Leo said, and Win drifted out of the room again.

  Leo’s days took on a new routine. He would go out in the morning, taking a car with the windows down and drawing the paparazzi away so that Win and Pritha could slip out an hour later for hospital appointments. Sometimes Win would come with him, and they would sit in a cleared-out restaurant, ignoring each other in favor of their phones.

  He went back to the house after lunch, where if she hadn’t come with him, Win would be waiting out by the gates as though to welcome him home, nestling in against his side and then breaking apart the moment they were through the door. Sometimes she said, “Thank you,” and Leo ran his hand over the back of his neck, and they slipped away into separate rooms. Once she said, “Marie said I should put something online,” so Leo pretended to cook, scraping onions into a cold cast-iron pot, and Win posted it with the caption what’s cookin good lookin. Comments flooded through, endless heart-eye emojis and #relationshipgoals.

  He spent the afternoons crashed on the couch with Pritha watching Indian soap operas or cooking shows or interminable BBC period dramas that Pritha scoffed at to hide her clear devotion. Pritha complained for a few days about the pain in her lower back—she was too weak to exercise and her muscles were aching—until Leo spent an afternoon clicking through online shops and reading reviews out loud. Pritha pursed her lips and seemed unconvinced, but she allowed him to order her an ergonomic pillow. “Not bad,” she said when it arrived, and nothing else, but after a few days Leo noticed her carrying it from room to room, propping herself up on the couch or slipping it behind her on the kitchen chairs.

  He knew he and Pritha weren’t friends—she didn’t like him enough for that—but she was entertaining. On the days she was perkier, when there was good news from the doctor and the chemo was showing results, she interrogated him relentlessly about the fact that he’d never had a job, or what he wanted to do with his life. Leo surprised himself by enjoying it; it didn’t feel vicious and pointed, like Win’s accusations. Instead Pritha was utterly bemused by him, and wondered aloud what unfortunate combination of breeding and indolence and global economic forces ever led to people like Leo, strong and intelligent people who never worked and did not suffer for it.

  “Your parents must be so ashamed,” she said to him one day. “All that time spent raising and educating you. All those expensive schools.”

  “Well, sometimes I help my dad. He runs a hotel chain and I pick out art for some of the more upmarket ones.”

  Pritha looked incredibly unimpressed. “So you buy things for a living.”

  “It’s not really a living,” Leo said. “I mean, uh, I don’t need to do it. And I’ve always been into art, it was my best subject in school.”

  “In school?” Pritha pulled herself up from the sofa, scowling at Leo when he motioned as if to help her. She shuffled over to the cupboard and then returned with a pen and notepad. “Show me something, then. Draw…” She cast about for inspiration. “Draw Whitman.”

  Her expression was blank, but he could see disapproval lurking. Something caught in Leo’s chest; she reminded him of Win in her iciest moods, already sure of her disappointment and just waiting to be proved right. He didn’t need Win in front of him to draw her. She was burned into his brain now, as if her dark, furious gaze followed him even when she wasn’t there. But without really meaning to, he sketched her like he’d seen her in France, leaning on the balcony of her suite, one hand leafing through her hair, her mouth half caught in a smile as she turned and spotted him.

  Pritha took the sketch and looked at it in silence. Leo’s face went hot; he could feel himself getting angry again without knowing why.

  “Not bad,” Pritha said at last. “There are careers that involve art. Maybe you could be a graphic designer.”

  Leo laughed and relaxed back into the couch. “Maybe,” he said, and turned the volume up.

  Most of the time she was too exhausted to push him further, and they sat in silence on the couch, taking turns channel surfing. Once they hit on a Western, sweeping panoramic shots of red canyons and grassland, a slight, dark figure limping away on a horse. The camera swung around to the hero’s face. Somehow it took Leo almost twenty seconds to realize it was Win.

  “Oh,” Pritha said, and they sat frozen in front of the screen. Leo’s heart was thumping in his chest like he was doing something illegal. It didn’t make sense; he’d seen this one. He’d seen all of Win’s movies, either as her date to the premiere or just so he could call her afterward. But watching her now, while the real Win was so determined to avoid him, felt strange and invasive for no real reason. He was almost ill with anxiety. The moment when he’d finally realized it was her on-screen kept replaying in his head.

  The cowgirl had a low, Texan drawl and a way of holding her mouth like she was ready to spit out teeth. Her laugh was low and wheezing, a chortle that was nothing like Win’s own laugh, which was full-bodied and startled and pleased. But even as Leo listed the differences, there was still something else he couldn’t touch, like Win’s very energy changed when she was playing a role. It was like a stranger was wearing Win’s face, or like Win had stepped aside and revealed herself to have been the stranger all along.

  “She should have won the Oscar for this,” Leo said. His voice sounded strange, like it was coming from far away. He was worried Win was going to walk in on them and catch them, but he didn’t move, and
Pritha didn’t change the channel. “She got the nomination. I can’t remember who won instead.”

  Pritha’s mouth was close and tight. She was silent, watching Win. After a moment she said, “Yes. She was always like that. Of course, she has got better. But when Jotish and I went to see her first play, it was this little group of schoolchildren doing their best and…her.” She paused. “We didn’t know. Jotish thought it would be a good after-school activity, especially because she was a little shy, she had trouble making friends, we thought it would break her out of her shell. We didn’t know it would be like this.”

  Leo turned toward her. “Were you pleased?”

  “I don’t know,” Pritha said. “I can’t remember. I know we were very proud. Jotish thought everyone had one thing they were meant to be. He believed in vocations. He always thought he was meant to teach. I enjoy my work but I don’t think it defines me. I didn’t want Whitman to feel that there was only one choice for her. But it’s hard to argue with…”

  She gestured loosely at the screen, the raw slide of a fiddle, the way Win leaned down over her horse and murmured something in its ear and then shot across the plains.

  “And of course,” Pritha said, “Whitman did not become famous until after Jotish…It was always the thing they did together. I wonder sometimes what he would have thought of all this. I didn’t want to interfere in something that had been so important to the two of them.”

  “That makes sense,” Leo said, but if it did it was in a kaleidoscopic way, blurring images he couldn’t entirely comprehend yet. He remembered attending one of Win’s London premieres and asking why her mother hadn’t come. Oh, she doesn’t really get acting, Win had said, she thinks I picked a weird career, and changed the subject. Another premiere, years later: She doesn’t like crowds. After that he stopped asking.

  Pritha looked annoyed with herself. “Anyway,” she said, searching for an out.

  Leo gave it to her. “I’m actually pretty sure I visited her when she filmed this. She had an afternoon off, we went riding. It was a nice set.”

  Leo hadn’t been riding since school, but he’d settled into it pretty well, and Win laughed at him, called him a rich kid, and raced him across the scrappy ground. Despite her skill on horseback she’d been taught only recently, and when they stopped for lunch, she slung her legs up over his lap and groaned with relief as he dug his fingers into her hamstrings. They stayed up late drinking bourbon on the steps of her trailer. Win had a scene the next day where she lassoed an escaping oil tycoon, and Leo had stood patiently in the moonlight while she practiced tossing the rope over and over, slinging it over his head until it caught around his waist.

  “Was it a nice set?” Pritha asked, giving him a strange look. “I thought the director was rude. She got in all that trouble after.”

  Leo blinked. “What trouble?”

  “When they didn’t win the Oscar,” Pritha said. “There were some other nominations, too, but it didn’t win anything. And the director was very angry and said the film was too anachronistic for audiences to accept and he’d been forced to water his story down for…” She waved her hand vaguely. “Political reasons. Representation.”

  “She didn’t tell me any of this,” Leo said, shocked. “What an asshole. She shouldn’t work with him again.”

  “Well, she says he wouldn’t cast her again after she responded, in any case. Everyone was very cross with her when she said she didn’t know why her involvement automatically ruined a film. They said she was deliberately ignoring the point.”

  “What?” Leo stared. “Why didn’t she tell me any of this?”

  Pritha gave him a puzzled look. “She said it wasn’t a big deal. These things happen all the time. I think she and Marie fixed it.”

  “Right,” Leo said. He had a faint, fleeting memory of being involved in a burst of publicity not long after those Oscars. He vaguely remembered the old bubbling spring of rumors starting up again that Win was too difficult, that she had a victim complex and a problem with men. He’d flown out to LA and they’d gone to a series of industry parties together, Win laughing and happy on his arm, Leo chummy with the other guys there. Just be your friendly self, Marie had said wryly.

  Asshole, he’d always said when he heard these stories, what an asshole, what a jerk, and he wondered suddenly what you did when so many people you met and worked with were assholes: whether it still felt like just a few bad guys, or if instead it felt huge and all-encompassing, impossible to stop.

  Echoing through the house, the front door opened. Leo and Pritha both jumped, and Pritha switched the channel to a game show. They exchanged wide-eyed, guilty looks, like small children in trouble.

  * * *

  At night he left Pritha and Win to their weird, uneasy dinners and ate in his room. After he’d been in the house for three weeks, he called Lila.

  “My absent husband,” she said when she picked up, her voice dry. “Baby, it’s like you went to war.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” Leo said. “It’s kind of intense here, I haven’t had a lot of time.”

  “I know, I saw on Twitter.” She sounded sour under the cheer, like she knew he was lying. “Everyone thinks you’ve saved her life.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Well, the internet.”

  “Yeah. I know it’s weird.”

  “It’s only as weird as when you were flitting around the Mediterranean with her,” Lila said. “And at least now you don’t look like such a dick. You can have your mopey English holiday, no judgment. Are you at least having fun?”

  “It’s pretty much the exact opposite of fun,” Leo said. He didn’t like lying, and he spent all his time pretending with Win. “She’s still pissed. We don’t really speak.”

  Lila cackled with laughter. “You dick.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Leo said, grinning. It was nice to hear her laughter, to turn this awful month into a sly anecdote. “I’ve told her about my secret wife. I don’t know what she’s mad about now.”

  “She should get over it,” Lila agreed. “She kind of comes across like a control freak.”

  “No, because she doesn’t think about it as control. She thinks it’s just pragmatic. Like if she just follows all the right steps she won’t have to really confront anything. She does it to her mum, too, like you can cure cancer with scheduling.”

  Lila squawked. “You’re such a dick,” she said. “That is a dick thing to say.”

  Leo could hear the warm affection in her voice. He and Lila had always understood each other; it had been part of the pleasure of her company, that they worked and thought in the same way, had the same easy, uncomplicated approach to life and fun and relationships. The only thing Lila had never fully understood was Win. For a minute he was back with Lila in LA, forgetting to rub the sleep from his eyes, chilled with a guilt he couldn’t name.

  He hung up an hour later and wandered around the house, stir-crazy. None of the clocks had been wound back for daylight savings, so he hunted them through the rooms, fixing the wall clock in the entranceway and the digital timer on the fridge. He followed the noise of the television into the lounge room, but it wasn’t Pritha watching shitty game shows; it was Win, a glass of wine in her hand and a bottle to her right.

  “Oh,” Leo said, startled and nervous, like she might have heard everything he was saying, like she knew he’d been talking to Lila. “Sorry, I thought you were—your mum.”

  Win looked over at him, and Leo had an odd shock: in the blue light of the television, she looked awful, with deep shadows under her eyes that must have been there for days but only properly stood out now. He didn’t think she was wearing any makeup. Her hair was scraped back, and she was wearing an old, soft shirt with a neckline that hung low over her collarbone. He stretched out his hands, let them curl in again.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” she said. “I know you’re great pals.”

  Leo set his jaw. “I just meant—”

  “I know,” she s
aid, tired, and then repeated, “no, I’m sorry. Whatever. She’s gone to bed.”

  “Okay,” Leo said, and had the ghost of an old instinct to cross the floor to her. He wanted to touch her hair. She looked so weightless, like he could scoop her up with one arm and heft her off to bed. He looked at the ceiling instead. “Everything okay?”

  “Just fine,” Win said. Her eyes went back to the TV, worn. She took another sip of her wine. Leo let her be.

  He’d never seen her like this. He wondered how many people ever had. Win had played vulnerable for the cameras once before in her life, and even that had been for him, giving that interview about her father. When Leo had watched it, sick with relief and gratitude, he’d thought that it would be obvious to everyone how much she hated it, her whole body rigid with tension. But everyone just talked about how sad and lovely she was, like a drooping, delicate flower that had to be nurtured back to health.

  The show’s host had asked her how she’d managed after her father’s death. “My mum is a very strong woman,” Win said. “I followed her example. I looked ahead.”

  At the time he’d admired the idea without being able to picture it. Now, looking around the bleak, impersonal house, Leo realized that he’d been looking for loving memorials to Win’s father, imprints of his life, traces of grief. He’d thought he couldn’t find it, but it was here; it was all around him. Pritha and Win were still swamped in it. They could barely see each other through the fog.

  * * *

  Win announced coldly that Leo had not proved himself to be the right kind of distraction at the last Chanel shoot, and she took Emil to the next one instead. Emil flew in on a red-eye and made a brief, bleary appearance at the house to drop off a box of files and scripts and a jar of sea urchin roe from Palermo. Leo and Pritha gamely tried it, dipping in their pinky fingers and bringing them, flinching, up to taste. Emil and Win had a brief, whispered conversation before they left, which made Emil cast disappointed looks at Leo, like Leo was a racehorse who had let him down at the last hurdle. He wished Emil would laugh in the next room, that it would be the familiar dynamic of Win and Emil fondly rolling their eyes at him, but instead Emil was serious and professional, and he and Win left without looking back.