The View Was Exhausting

by Mikaella Clements

  He was worried Win would spark up again, but she was grinning reluctantly.

  “Shut up,” she said, and touched his wrist, like a counterargument: No, don’t. It had been easier to touch her earlier, shoving past her as they ran or wrestling with her in the sea, when the adrenaline and the biting cold could distract him. They were being so careful with each other now. It was breaking Leo’s heart a little, the way they tried out their gibes as gently as they could, talking like it was a boardroom negotiation. He knew things couldn’t go back to normal, but suddenly he wanted Win as she used to be, the daring, laughing way she ran through his life, the fierce determination of her gaze when she came up against him.

  After a moment Win said, “My dad would have convinced her to retire. She doesn’t listen to me.” She was mostly talking to herself, and Leo watched her without responding. She was staring into space, entirely separate from him, like a stranger in a dream. Then she shook her head, and refilled their drinks.

  “I wish there were more people around,” she said. “For her to talk to when I’m not here. She was never very good at making friends.”

  “That big falling-out didn’t help, either,” Leo said.

  “What?” Win’s gaze jerked up.

  “You know,” Leo said uneasily, aware he was treading delicate ground, “if she could still call your dad’s family, sometimes—”

  “What big falling-out?”

  Leo stared at her. “You didn’t know?”

  “Leo,” Win began, her voice rising.

  “You didn’t know,” Leo repeated, affirming this time, and recounted the story as concisely as he could. He almost felt a thrill—finally, something useful to tell her—until her face went ashy and shocked as though he’d slapped her. He said, voice thin, “I thought you knew.”

  “No. She never told me that.” Win was still staring at him. “Did she want to go back to India?”

  “She just said she thought it was better to stay. Because of your friends, and school.” Leo cleared his throat. “And the acting, maybe.”

  “I don’t understand,” Win said. “How did you find out? Why did she tell you?”

  “Well,” Leo said, uncomfortable, “I asked.”

  Win barked a laugh, harsh and uncompromising. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.” Leo hesitated, then said, “Did you ever ask?”

  When Win’s expression didn’t budge, jaw clenched and eyes dark with shock and fury, Leo began, despite himself, to laugh. These two stubborn women, and everything was so obvious. “Win, come on, just ask her.” Something occurred to him. “Did you ever actually invite her to any of your premieres?”

  Win’s jaw worked. After a moment she said, “She came to a few but she didn’t seem to enjoy them, so I just…I assumed she didn’t like them…”

  “I am begging you,” Leo said, half-laughing and half-sincere, leaning over the counter to catch Win’s hand, “I am begging you to talk to her. Just ask some, like, some basic questions—”

  Win was shaking her head, although she didn’t pull away. “We don’t understand each other at all, we’re different people—”

  “How do you expect to understand her if you never talk?” Leo demanded. “Win, I’m on your side, but your mum is not exactly a closed book. She’s just a grumpy old lady, it won’t kill you to talk to her a little bit about your life.”

  Win was still scowling at him. “You’re on my side, are you?”

  Leo swallowed. “I’m always on your side. You just forget sometimes.”

  “Sometimes you don’t particularly act like it,” Win said.

  Her jaw was tilted up for a challenge, and they glared at each other, the weeks of ugly fighting rising, the afternoon’s peacemaking slipping back like a weird blip that could be ignored. It would be easy to fight with Win. It had always been easy.

  “Sometimes I fuck up,” Leo said. Her hand was still in his, he realized, and then he was hyperaware of it, her long fingers, knuckles still pink from the cold. “But I’m still on your side.”

  The air felt thick, the way it had on the beach this afternoon, the way it had in Saint-Tropez before everything shuddered apart. Leo didn’t leave. Neither did Win.

  * * *

  A few days later Marie sent them to an art gallery. There was hardly any press about, just an in-house photographer for the gallery’s website, and an exhibition by Lian Shen, who painted huge watercolors of siblings and was famously averse to showings. Leo had wanted to go to one of her exhibitions for years.

  The gallery opened tall windows so clear autumn light trailed through cloister-like rooms, old stone and the sound of waves cresting beyond. “I like these,” Win said. “Why doesn’t she do more exhibitions?”

  Leo shrugged. “I’ve never met her, but I read an interview where she said the work is what’s important. Everything else is vanity, apparently.”

  They paused in front of a painting of three sisters on a stoop, the palest colors and sweeps of a brush, their heads bent together and glowing in a faint, radiant light. Thea had painted Leo with his siblings once, as a Christmas present for Gabrysia when Leo was fourteen. She had posed them sitting on a red velvet couch, holding whichever object was most important to them. Seventeen-year-old Hannah had her Super 8 camera in her lap, an act of pretension she had long since regretted. Sixteen-year-old Gum brandished a leather-bound copy of The Complete Works of Cato the Elder. Leo had spent hours sifting through various sketchbooks, postcards, and prints before he finally scooped up the family cat, and Thea painted it curled up asleep in his lap. Gabrysia had the portrait hung in her study, and it was still Gum’s phone screen background.

  “I think that’s why I never started on the studio,” Leo said, trying to make it sound like it was just occurring to him now. “It feels too much like a vanity project.”

  “I mean, obviously,” Win said. “You can do anything you want. Anything you choose is going to be a vanity project.”

  Leo felt something seize in his throat, a cold hit of embarrassment and indignation.

  “Just covering up how empty my life is?” he said. He couldn’t look at her. He wondered if she’d forgotten saying it.

  “No. But you’re going to have to get over people calling you privileged. I think you use that as an excuse to do nothing.”

  Leo kept his gaze straight ahead. “That’s a weird-sounding apology.”

  “It wasn’t an apology,” Win said. She paused. “But I am sorry, for what it’s worth. For being rude. I was…angry.”

  “Yes,” Leo said. “That I’d screwed up your narrative.”

  “Yes,” Win echoed. “Well, you made things a lot harder for me.”

  They moved into the next room, smaller and suffused with light. The gallery’s publicist had been hovering about them for a while, but now she hung back, and they were alone.

  “I’m not trying to start a fight,” Win said. When he didn’t say anything, she shook her head, started again. “Really, I’m not. But you don’t see things the way I do, you don’t live the way I do. I’m one of the only Indian women to make it in Hollywood, really make it and not just be a bit part, and if I fuck up, that’s it. This industry isn’t meant to give second chances to people who look like me.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Leo argued.

  “I think you don’t know that,” Win countered. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t have kept Lila a secret.”

  Leo swallowed. “Not telling you about Lila was a mistake. The whole thing was—”

  Win’s face shut down. “Don’t apologize to me about your marriage,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like I’m a—a Machiavellian monster.”

  “Okay,” Leo said. “But I didn’t mean to make things difficult for you.”

  Win drew in a breath. “It’s not just about me. Look, I know you don’t really read my press, but it’s significant when I get cast for a role, and it’s significant when some director takes a chance on me, be
cause that doesn’t happen often. So it’s significant when I fuck up as well—it makes them think that maybe it wasn’t worth the risk. So maybe they won’t do it again.”

  And if she pointed that out, how heavily the scales were weighed against her, in the same quiet, tired way she was doing for him now, people got angry at her, too. Leo thought about Pritha’s story about the director, or he himself urging her to lash out against Nathan. It’s bullshit, Leo wanted to say, but Win already knew it was bullshit.

  “I should have told you,” Leo said. “I wasn’t thinking about any of that.”

  “You don’t have to,” Win said.

  “No,” Leo agreed. He hesitated. “I guess I’ve always thought of it as something you could win one day. If you made the right move, or said the right thing, or…made out with me in the right exotic location.”

  “I thought that for a while, too,” Win said.

  They looked at each other, quiet and serious. Leo almost wanted to apologize, but that felt like another thing he would be putting on her shoulders, making her solve. He said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You do help.” Win sounded surprised. “You’re here right now and you…you are helping a lot. I’m grateful. I know Marie forced you, but I appreciate that you came anyway.”

  Something hot and anxious fluttered in his chest.

  “Marie didn’t force me,” he said.

  Win blinked. “What?”

  “Marie didn’t send me.” Leo wasn’t sure where to look. “I saw all the tabloid stuff and I called her and told her I was going to come out.”

  Win’s face was wiped clean with shock. “But you were angry.”

  “Yeah, I was furious,” Leo said, and laughed awkwardly. “But…I don’t know, everything looked awful, and I knew how it was with your mum the last time she was sick. I thought maybe I could help and I wanted—I wanted to see you.”

  “Marie didn’t say—”

  “I asked her not to tell you,” Leo said.

  “Well,” Win said, still with that odd, unreadable voice, her eyes wide. “I’m…surprised.”

  “Yeah.” Leo cleared his throat. “I just wanted you to know.”

  As they were leaving, a group of fans had amassed outside to greet them. Win paused to say hello to a few of them, and Leo hung back, watching her. The cold sun seemed almost harsh, streaming over her dark hair and her high cheekbones. It was barely autumn anymore, and the orange-red leaves littering the car park were already turning brown.

  “You’re such a sweetheart,” Win was saying, as she stooped down for a photo with a young girl. In the afternoon light Win’s face looked softer, dreamier, some of the hard exhaustion and worry of the last few weeks dissipating. It was as though she was backlit, the spotlight never leaving her, even out here in the middle of the day.

  In the car on the way home, she dozed off leaning back against her seat, and then drifted to his shoulder. He stayed perfectly still, not daring to touch her, not even to keep her head from slipping off when they hit a bump. She jerked awake and stared at him, dazed, before she said, “Sorry,” and Leo shook his head. She scooted to the far side, out of his reach.

  He wondered if Win was ever not tired. It tired him out just thinking about her, the days without end, the exhausting and never-ending professional activity of being Whitman Tagore. While their car wound through country roads, he realized he had been thinking about this—him and her, her and Pritha, all of it—as an essentially personal issue, with some demands from the outside. But Win wasn’t allowed to have purely personal issues; everything was outside, everything was on show. It was all high stakes all the time. Win fell asleep again with her face pressed against the window, and Leo thought that there would never be a moment when Win was done, when she didn’t have to care about these things anymore. It was never going to stop.

  That was when he thought of it, the first quiet solid plan slotting in. He needed to call Lila.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Leo woke with a jerk to Win shouting below. He couldn’t hear what was being said, but every so often she would pause, and a quieter, harsher voice that belonged to Pritha would respond. Leo stared at the ceiling, scratching his chest. He wondered what his chances were of getting yelled at if he went downstairs.

  The need for coffee eclipsed everything else. In the kitchen Win was standing by the sink, gripping the silver rim, back stiff. Pritha sat at the counter sipping tea.

  “Morning,” Leo said.

  Win mumbled something in acknowledgment, but Pritha turned to him, looking him up and down.

  “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

  He shrugged. “I just woke up.”

  “It’s almost midday.”

  “I wanted some coffee—”

  “Perfect, you can go fetch some. We also need more of the little biscuits.”

  “You’re not supposed to eat those all the time, Ma,” Win said, still turned to the window.

  “I will eat what I like.”

  “I’m not trying to upset you,” Win said. “This isn’t about me, your doctors said—”

  “Whitman,” Pritha said. “Please let me get rid of Leo before we continue this conversation.”

  Win glanced over her shoulder finally to look at him. She’d been for her run already, her hair curling and stuck to the sides of her face, dark hollows beneath her eyes. “Fine.”

  Pritha nodded to Leo pointedly.

  “Right,” Leo said. “I’ll go get—biscuits, then.”

  He saluted her, which made Pritha squint in suspicion, but she let him leave without further comment. He dressed quickly and carelessly, and flung himself out of the door and into the car without saying goodbye. He could hear them starting up again behind him as he left, Win’s voice rising: “How can you call me selfish, after everything that’s happened?”

  He stayed out all day, driving up and down the coast, eating Pritha’s biscuits and killing time. There were only a couple of paparazzi on his trail. Leo thought he saw one of them yawning while they waited for him to leave a coffee shop with his third latte. He’d downloaded an audiobook of Wolf Hall, on Pritha’s suggestion, and he let it expand through the car and settle around him, the fraught tapestry of British history, feet in the mud, solitary fishing boats moored on the beaches at Dungeness.

  Around four his phone buzzed, and he picked up without looking at the screen, expecting Pritha summoning him back with a longer shopping list. Instead Gum’s nasal, caffeine-laced voice chirped out, “Please god tell me your self-imposed exile is over soon.”

  Leo laughed. “Who said it was self-imposed?”

  “Come to New York,” Gum persisted. “Dad’s given me the junior suite of the Kenmare until next week. I’d prefer the penthouse, of course, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Leo grinned. He could picture Gum sitting by the window in his huge, empty suite, a crumpled collar, methodically running through his phone’s contact list—Leo, Charlie, Hannah—as though he were running a tragic telethon.

  Right now Gum was making a crunching noise into the receiver, as if he was snacking on peanuts. “Charlie’s arriving on Tuesday, we’re going to pick his suit colors and get them fitted. Poor guy’s not used to choosing his own clothes, and apparently the selection in Montreal is dismal. Did you know he’s sold his New York apartment? He says they’ve decided to live there permanently. What is that going to do for Charlie’s career? Did you ever hear of anyone successful living in Montreal?”

  He said Montreal as if it were the name of a field hospital or a maximum-security prison. Leo pinched the bridge of his nose. Sometimes Gum reminded him so much of Bernard. While Leo had spent most of his charmed childhood swanning around Europe with his mums, Gum had spent most of his trailing hopefully after their father. Hannah seemed independent of all of them, and fonder of everyone for it.

  “I’m sure they have a plan, Gum.”

  “Well, he’s got plenty of plans for the wedding, at least. I’
ve snagged him a tasting session next week, at some couture cake maker the moms know in the Village. I told him they’re all booked up and he’d have to settle for donuts, so it’s a total surprise. He’ll probably cry,” Gum added with satisfaction. “I’ll send you a video.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” Leo said. Gum could get it right sometimes, and Leo imagined he’d have a great time shepherding Charlie from the bespoke tailor to the artisan florist, offering to pay for all sorts of extravagant extras, one arm thrown jovially around Charlie’s shoulders.

  “I assume I’ll see you both at the wedding, in any case,” Gum said. “You and your beloved prima donna.” Gum’s voice was friendly enough, but he sounded slightly disapproving. Leo wondered what sorts of conversations were churning through the family rumor mill, Hannah and Gum syncing up across time zones to theorize about Leo’s motivations.

  “I don’t know if I’m going with her,” Leo said. “We haven’t discussed it.” His invitation had arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, and he had slipped it into the bottom of his bag. He had been afraid Win would see it and tell him not to come.

  “Honestly, Leo,” Gum said, in the same exasperated voice he’d used as a child when Leo asked for help tying his shoelaces. “I’m drowning in commitments, but I still have the grace to send an RSVP. You know he’s got a Vogue profiler coming, plus a photographer? He might make the cover. It’s ridiculous, I’ve been vying for them to profile me for years, but apparently I’m outside their focus. He does one Burberry photo shoot and then it’s ‘Chazzy Chazzy Chaz: The Chaz Story.’”

  “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  “Anyway, you need to be there. It’s a big deal and I haven’t seen you in forever.” Gum sighed. “It’s hard not to feel abandoned. Hannah’s still filming in Cambodia. The moms seem to think you might bail on the wedding. They said you’ve been quote-unquote unavailable for the last two months, they think you’re avoiding them.”

  “Why do they always jump to me avoiding them?” Leo demanded. “Can’t I just be a good old-fashioned negligent son?”