The View Was Exhausting

by Mikaella Clements

  “The eternal question,” Gum said. “They should have given up on you years ago.”

  “I’ll have dinner with them next week,” Leo said.

  Gum clucked his approval. “Take the movie star with you, they’d love that. Either way, Leonard, you are coming to this wedding. I won’t ask you to swear it, but I’m counting on your sense of fraternal duty. All right, I have a meeting with Mimi. I’m going to take her a box of truffles. See if it makes her sweeter. Ciao.”

  “Hey, wait, Gum—can you ask Miriam to call me?”

  There was a pause. “My Mimi?”

  “She isn’t your Mimi,” Leo said. “She’s been Dad’s lawyer for years.”

  “But she always tells me I’m the best client she’s ever had.”

  “I bet she can buy a new house every time you pick up the phone.”

  “Don’t you go turning her against me, Leonard,” Gum said. “What Mimi and I have is the only functional relationship I’ve ever had with a woman.”

  “Because you’re paying her?”

  Gum sighed wearily. “Yes, I’ll tell her to call you, and to expect something scandalous. See you at the wedding. Text me your measurements and I’ll order your suit.”

  “I just want her advice on something,” Leo said, but Gum had already hung up.

  It had been dark for a while by the time he got back. There was music playing from the kitchen. He kicked his shoes off noisily and jangled his keys a little for good measure. It was a surprise to find Win waiting, rather than disappearing back up the stairs at the sound of his return. Their newfound peace felt fragile.

  She was up at the counter in an oversized fisherman’s jumper and leggings. There was a glass and a bottle of wine next to her, both empty.

  “You’re back,” she said. Her voice was implacable, her posture very straight. She was in a dangerous mood. Leo paused in the doorway, taking her in.

  “I am,” he agreed. He tossed his keys onto the counter, and they both watched as they hit marble and then skittered loudly over the other side and onto the floor. Win snorted.

  “We’re out of wine,” she said. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes,” Leo said. Win pulled herself up and went for the closest cupboard, rummaging through it.

  “I think there’s some old stuff in here—aha,” she said, pleased, fishing out a tall green bottle from the back of the shelf. She shook it at him.

  Leo stuck his hands in his pockets, looked her up and down. “You’re drunk.”

  “Yeah,” Win said. “Do you want some or not?”

  “Sure.”

  She dug out two more glasses and filled them with ice from the machine on the fridge, jumping as the cubes clinked together like it startled her. She poured them both tall glasses topped up with a finger of water. The drink was yellow and sweet, reeking of aniseed. The bottle was labeled in Deco script: Pastis Henri Bardouin. A note had been added underneath: With compliments from La Réserve, Saint-Tropez.

  “It’s like we’re in France again,” Leo said.

  Win glanced up at him. “Not really.”

  Leo couldn’t disagree with her, so he changed the subject. “Is your mum okay?”

  “Oh, yes,” Win said, as though she’d been waiting for him to bring it up. “Thank you for that. Why don’t you just talk to her?” Win waved her glass around, sending the liquid sloshing up against the sides and putting on a high, gormless voice that Leo hoped sounded nothing like him. “I’m begging you, Whitman, ask her a question. Nice one, thanks.”

  “She didn’t react well?” Leo said, a little amused.

  “No,” Win said, and knocked back a good portion of her drink. “I told her that she shouldn’t have kept the family stuff from me—”

  “So you started by telling her off.”

  “Not everyone is a Pritha Tagore whisperer,” Win snapped. “It’s not as easy for me to talk to her. There’s a lot of history there.”

  “I— Sorry,” Leo said. He paused. “My family talk all the time. About everything, even when we’re fighting. Especially when we’re fighting. I think I…don’t completely get this.”

  “No,” Win said. “You don’t.”

  “Sorry,” Leo repeated. “No more advice.”

  “Really?” Win said sardonically. “Not about my mother, or about which directors I should blow off, or how to get Nathan Spencer canceled? No brain waves about race relations you want to share with me?”

  Leo’s face was hot. “No.”

  Win surveyed him intently, narrow-eyed. The kitchen was close with tension, and then she shrugged sharply, like she was throwing all of that away, and slumped, turning her face down. “I should have asked her to the premieres. God. I really thought she thought they were stupid. That my whole career was just—frivolous.”

  “But?”

  “She thinks I’m embarrassed to be seen with her,” Win mumbled. She still wasn’t making eye contact. “She thinks I only see her as a burden.” She palmed her hand over her face. “It would be easier if my dad was still alive.”

  Leo went quiet. Win almost never talked about her dad. It was as though she’d given any confidences she might share with him to the talk show host instead, all those years ago, when Leo needed her and Win had saved him. When she began to speak, the words came slow and rough, as though she were excavating them from somewhere deeply buried: hard, heavy work.

  “It was always my dad who was interested in film,” she said. “When I was little we used to watch classic comedies together—his favorite was Some Like It Hot, I think. And then Bollywood, too, stuff he watched when he was a kid that he thought I’d like. I got obsessed with Waheeda Rehman. Every December he took me to all the different Christmas shows in London, and afterward we reenacted them for Ma. And it was his idea for me to audition at this local theater, for Oliver! I got stuck in the chorus. Ma said if she heard ‘Consider Yourself’ one more time, she’d move out. But Dad loved it. He found me an after-school acting troupe.”

  “So it was just your and his thing?” Leo asked, something slotting into place: the way Win was inclined to think of her mum and dad as opposites, constantly at odds, Pritha the stubborn misanthrope versus Jotish the bright optimist. But Win was shaking her head.

  “Maybe a little, but Ma was always— She indulged him. She loved it. She came with us to shows, every so often. She still loves the Globe. I think she liked how happy it made him when she joined in. She used to sing along off-key when we were blasting musicals in the kitchen, and when we performed stuff for her, she always gave us a standing ovation. I mean, she let him name me after a dead poet—an American, too. Dad dragged her out into the world, he took her to all the family gatherings and evenings out she would have avoided, and then, you know, he’d rub her feet when they got home.”

  Leo laughed without meaning to, picturing it, and Win smiled absently back at him.

  “After he got sick, Ma took over all the driving me around and watching rehearsals, fixing my stage makeup. She didn’t quite get it, but she didn’t complain.” Win went quiet for a moment. She touched her mouth. “It was…a pretty horrible time. Just a lot of hanging around in hospitals. Dad used to make faces at me behind the doctor’s back and hold my hand like everything was normal, even though he was getting thinner and thinner and he looked—he looked old. Then, you know. He died.”

  She reached for the bottle of pastis. Leo watched her without speaking, his mouth thick.

  “I stopped going to the theater group,” Win said. Her gaze was far away, a little clouded over. Leo wanted to touch her, and didn’t dare. “I don’t know. I stopped doing everything. But after a few months, Ma was like, Come on, after-school theater, and I just got up and followed her. It distracted me. It made me feel like I could control something. And then an agent called us.

  “Ma said if I was going to do something, I might as well do it properly,” Win said, a little amused twitch at the corner of her mouth. Leo could hear Pritha’s businesslike tone. Ma
ybe you could be a graphic designer. “Then the agent lined up all these auditions for theater and then some movies and TV shows. You know the rest.”

  “But you were fifteen,” Leo said. “It must’ve been terrifying.”

  “Yeah, well,” Win said, something lonely and still about the slope of her shoulders. “I spent the year before that with doctors giving us terrible news, so it didn’t really compare.” She looked up and met Leo’s gaze, her mouth a grim, satisfied line. “Plus I kept getting the parts.”

  “You were a prodigy,” Leo agreed.

  “Finally, some recognition,” Win said, but she was still distracted. She topped up their glasses again. “Anyway. I think if Dad was still alive, he would have come to all the premieres, and he would have dragged Ma out, like he dragged her to everything, and then it wouldn’t be so hard, there wouldn’t be this…”

  She swept her hand through the air, like she was mapping out treacherous territory. Leo thought of Pritha and Win, yelling at each other in the kitchen this morning. They looked more alike when they were angry. They’d been standing separately, opposite sides of the room, as though the space between them was too charged to chance.

  “Well,” Leo said. “Isn’t it…isn’t it easier to know that at least the problem isn’t that she thinks you’re an idiot? This is the kind of problem you can work on.”

  “Yeah. If I have time.”

  Leo’s gut twisted. “But the doctors said—”

  “God, no,” Win said, blanching. “Not—not that. I just mean…” She glanced up at him, quick, and Leo suddenly knew what was coming. He picked up his glass so he was drinking when Win said, “I need to leave soon, get back to work.”

  The pastis was sharp, almost bitter taken in one hit like that. He set the glass down and smiled. “Right, of course.”

  “Leo—”

  “You were about to start working on that Hemingway film, right?”

  Win paused, watching him closely. “Right. So when Ma got sick we had to push that back. They’ve been…quite understanding.” Leo took the tiny hesitation to mean that they had been talked into understanding by Patrick and the rest of Win’s team. “We’re going to start with the winter scenes in France and then move back to Spain in the spring.” She rubbed her hand over her face. “But the All Rivers Run press tour has to fit in as well, so now I’m going to have to film the first part of The Sun Also Rises and then go straight to that. And then somehow get to Montreal for the wedding, as well.”

  “That’s going to be crazy.”

  “It was always going to be tight. I guess that will probably be the end of this.” She flung one hand out between them and made a face. She looked almost regretful, like she was telling a dog when it would be put down.

  “Right.” Leo nodded. He was aware that he was letting her take the lead, in a way that had caused trouble in the past. He never stopped to read the small print before signing his name beneath hers, but he worried that any hesitation would turn her against him, like she was doubting his commitment. “Makes sense.”

  “I want to wait until at least a few weeks after she’s been given the all clear,” Win said. “But Ma thinks I should go back now.”

  “Oh,” Leo said. He wondered for the first time where he would go after Win had left. Maybe Pritha would let him stay.

  Win was playing idly with the ice in her glass, swirling it around. “I’m not being selfish. I’m trying to…find a compromise with her.”

  “I know.”

  Win sighed and looked up at him. “She likes you, you know.” He raised his eyebrows, and she added, “Not a compliment.”

  “Makes me feel special, though,” Leo said. He ran a hand back through his shorn hair, ruffling it.

  Win didn’t smile. “I hate that she likes you.”

  Leo paused, trying to think of a safer subject. “Emil will be happy you’re back at work. He must miss you.”

  “Oh, he’s been keeping busy. Last I heard he was in…Milan? I think he’s running three different fashion weeks at once. He said to tell you to cut your hair.”

  “I knew he liked the buzz cut,” Leo said. He ran his hand through it again, the first longer tufts of curls soft like lamb’s wool. “I could shave it again. Maybe I’ll go to London next week.”

  “You don’t need to go all the way to London for a buzz cut,” Win said.

  “People pay good money to see pictures of my scalp,” he said. “I owe it to them to do it right. It’s a duty.”

  “A cross only you could bear,” Win agreed. Her expression was unreadable; she was still eyeing his head critically. “I could fix it. I probably have a razor somewhere.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  She glared at him. “Yes. I could do it.” She looked up at him properly, setting her glass down. “I could do it right now.”

  He didn’t like where this was going. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “I want to do it now,” she said. “I think it would make me feel better.”

  “I really think we should stop and think about this,” Leo began, but the idea had seized her, and she was already lurching up out of her chair and darting out of the room. He could track the sounds of her journey through the house, thuds and grunts and the rattle of drawers, and finally an aha! that made him wince. She came back toting an electric razor and a smug expression.

  “You found it.”

  “Here,” she said, draping a towel around his shoulders. “I’m so excited.”

  “I’m very happy for you.” Leo took a final sip of his drink, wishing they had something stronger. At least Win seemed happier, stirred out of the dreamy, awful recitation of her father’s death. He let her tilt his head forward, cool fingers behind his ear and on his brow.

  “Gross,” Win said as she shaved the first line. “This is going to go everywhere.”

  “You can’t stop now,” Leo said. “I don’t want half a shaved head.” The buzzing was right next to his ear, and he could feel the little metal teeth against his scalp. Win had gone quiet. He held himself very still for her.

  It didn’t take her long to do the back of his head, and then she ducked around, buzzing in wide, loose lines along his ears all the way down to his jawline. She thumbed over his ear, tucked her knuckles under his jaw, tilting his head to the side and examining him.

  “Here,” she said, “I need to get the front,” and she pulled him down onto the stool so his back was to the counter, and stood between his legs.

  “Whitman,” Leo murmured.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Almost there.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She spent another five minutes on him, veering dangerously close to his eyebrows at one point so Leo had to duck back and say, “Whoa, hey.” Then she switched the razor off and set it down beside her, reaching up to stroke across Leo’s temple the way she had in the lobby of La Réserve, months ago.

  “Feels nice.”

  “Win.” His voice was low. His thighs were pressing against her hips. He could not stop looking at her mouth.

  The cat yowled, twisting around Win’s legs and swiping a paw at Leo. Win startled backward, hitting her side against the counter and cursing. Leo’s hair was all over the floor, and now the cat was pawing through it.

  “I hate that cat,” Leo said. Win paused from where she’d been rubbing her side.

  “It’s my cat,” she said. “I’ve had her for years.”

  “It hates me and I don’t know why,” Leo said. He poked it with a toe, and the cat spat at him. “Bad cat. Bad, bad cat.”

  And for the first time since he’d trapped himself here, since they’d last been together, since that final night in Saint-Tropez, Leo made Win laugh. She had one hand pressed to the side of her face like she wanted to stop, but she was laughing, clear and golden in the cool, dark house.

  The next day they had to make an appearance away from the house so that one of Pritha’s colleagues could visit in peace. They drove to another art gallery farther
down the coast, and Leo took a selfie of his new haircut in the bathroom and posted it online. Back to business, he wrote.

  “Nice hair, Leo,” one of the photographers called as they were leaving.

  “Hey, thanks, man,” he said. Win stroked her hand over the top of his skull, pleased.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The thought that Win might leave at any minute gave the days a solidity they’d lacked before; they fell past Leo with an urgent sort of weight. The house was shifting, the jagged shadows of autumn giving way to the clear, gray light of winter. Win seemed half-in and half-out of the world, sitting beside her mum with a strained, frightened look about her, like she was fighting hard against the current. He had to resist the urge to grab at her, hold her to him. Sometimes she caught lightly at his shoulder as she drifted past, like she was anchoring herself.

  Pritha was getting stronger, and she and Win circled each other like boxers, but the tension didn’t flare into anger. Instead they eyed each other up, tried out conversations as though for the first time. He’d always been the peacemaker with his siblings, but this was something new, a not-quite conflict he didn’t know how to defuse. Pritha kept him busy with a litany of tasks, helping reorganize the bookshelves in her room and bringing flowerpots from the garden inside for the winter, rehanging some pictures in the hallway that she insisted were off center. He enjoyed it for the most part, but it struck him one evening that maybe she, too, had realized that soon he wouldn’t be there anymore, a thought that left him cold and tired.

  They’d started eating dinner together, all three of them grouped around the kitchen island or in the lounge with food that Win’s people had sent over, or takeout, or—rarely—their own cooking. (“What is this?” Win asked. Leo poked at the dish and said, “Casserole, maybe?” and Win propped her elbows against the counter and laughed helplessly, her head falling forward, hair tumbling down. They ate it with spoons straight from the dish, poking through for what was edible and fighting over the unscorched vegetables.) They never used the dining room; Pritha said it was too big and Leo thought it was too formal and Win didn’t care.