by Cecilia Tan
She shrugged. “Did you ever think maybe it would be better to just … not care?”
“Do you seriously want to be splashed all over like Paris Hilton?”
“Well, I don’t mean make a sex tape or do anything insanely stupid, but you know, when I have a boyfriend and I go out for a drink why should I care if some housewife in Phoenix, Arizona, sees it on the cover of a tabloid magazine?”
“Gwen, you should care more than me, probably, if you’re trying to get acting gigs.”
“Be serious, Ricki. They don’t care if I can act. All most of them care about is whether I’m skinny enough and blond enough, and the more famous my name is, the better in that regard.”
“There’s a difference between famous and infamous.”
“I’d be infamous for being seen in public holding hands with a guy? I think that would just prove my name value. If it’ll sell magazines, it’ll sell tickets.”
I frowned. “Have you forgotten that we actually have something that will make us instantly infamous forever? The dungeon in the basement?”
“Or maybe it will make us infamous for five minutes and then everyone will get over it because BDSM is so mainstream now?” she suggested.
“Dream on. People are more uptight about sex than ever. That’s why TTT made such a big deal about Mom’s death. Not because they care about her. Because she might have died in a sensationalist way, because of the kinky sex implication.”
“Okay, but let’s approach this rationally. What are we afraid of? We’re afraid of our private lives being exposed. Why? Because we’re afraid of being judged? Okay, but who cares what the people who would judge us think?”
“The people who would be paying you for your marketability and the people who would be paying me not to be a PR liability.” I sat up straight suddenly, as I put two and two together. That was what my boss had told me today, basically. Don’t be a PR liability. Was it a coincidence that this talk came right after I’d taken a day off work to hide at home because of the article about Mom’s death? I was sure that wasn’t a coincidence. For that matter, was the way Gwen was dismissed today because of that? I couldn’t tell, but I couldn’t rule it out, either. “The media doesn’t care if it ruins your life or even if what they say is true. They especially don’t care about ruining your life if they’ve lied.”
“Yes, but what if they’re not even lying? What if it’s the truth? There is a dungeon in our basement.”
“And that’s why the dungeon has to remain a secret.”
Gwen sighed. “I suppose.”
* * *
The locksmith came in the morning, and I hovered around while he changed the lock to the office and gave me two copies of the key, and he changed the combination on the safe. I hoped Schmitt was trustworthy and that I was just being paranoid, but better safe than sorry.
I kept waiting for Dad to show up while Paul and I took the opportunity to look through what was in that safe. I’d given it all a cursory look right after the will had been read, but this was the first time in the two months since then that I had a chance to look in greater depth. Deeds, the titles to various vehicles, other official papers, bonds, the annual reports of the winery … most of it wasn’t terribly surprising.
Then I came to the folder that had the clippings about Mom’s death. I thought I’d had it in my desk upstairs but I guess Grandpa Cy must have taken it back at some point.
Under that was another manila folder with a carbon copy of an old typescript that at first glance looked like papers of incorporation. But I realized, aha, these were The Governor’s Club bylaws. I kept them where they were. That reminded me again about Dad.
“Paul, do you know what the arrangements are for getting Dad home today?”
“Your sister sent Riggs in the car to pick him up,” he said from somewhere above me.
I looked up to find him standing on a chair, dusting the top of the eagle’s head. “What are you doing? You don’t have to do that.”
“Housekeeping never does this thing,” he said, as if it bothered him. “You can see the dust in the carved grooves of the feathers.”
“Paul, seriously, don’t bother. Just leave Rachel a note about it.”
He climbed down looking chastised. He was the same age as me but somehow always seemed younger, maybe because he had a clean-shaven, boyish look to him, his hair cut short but with a little cowlick aided by gel at the front, and skinny jeans that showed his sometimes colorful socks. “Why did you keep it, anyway?”
“The eagle? I don’t know if you noticed but it’s bolted to a steel support column.”
He ducked around one curving wing to look. “So it is. That’s odd.”
“Maybe that makes it earthquake-safe?” The office was the only upstairs room where a steel beam was exposed. “Otherwise it could topple and kill someone.”
Paul made a non-committal noise at that.
“Hey, why are you here on a Saturday, anyway?”
“Because the locksmith was coming today?”
“Yes, but I could’ve handled that without you.”
“And your father,” he went on, coming over to help me sort through the folders I’d moved from the safe to the top of my desk. He took one to the other side of the desk and stood there, starting to page through. “I didn’t think you should be on your own today.”
“You are sweet, but you are an assistant, not a babysitter.”
“A personal assistant,” he said with a little emphasis as he turned over a page. “Ricki. You know this job has nothing like regular hours.”
“Maybe for Grandpa Cy it didn’t, but, you know, you could have weekends off if you wanted to see your family. Or a boyfriend.”
He clucked his tongue. “The last thing you need is to be worrying that some gossipy queen is in my pants trying to find out everything about the Hamilton clan.” Then his breath caught and I looked to see what he’d found.
The folder had photographs in it. Although it was upside down to me, I could see the top one was a black and white shot of the eagle statue, clearly taken in a bar or nightclub, with a naked man. His wrists were locked in the claws of the statue and there was something blurry crossing his figure. I came around to Paul’s side and from there I could see it was a man in black leather swinging a flogger. The blur was the flogger’s tails.
Paul looked over his shoulder at the statue. “Well. I never realized.”
“Realized what?”
“ ‘Eagle’ is historically a name given to gay leather bars,” he said. “I’ve never been in one but, you know. You hear stories.”
I picked up the folder and looked through the other photos there. Several of them were of Grandpa Cy with various people, posing like they were on vacation. In one or two he and the woman with him looked startled and annoyed. I recognized that expression: the “paparazzi got me” look. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the photos. None of them were my grandmother.
And not all of them were women. “Paul?”
“Yes?” He was standing by, very pointedly not craning his neck to look at the photos.
“Did my grandfather—how does the expression go—swing both ways?”
Paul waited a moment before giving his answer. “By the time he hired me, Ricki, he didn’t swing at all, you know.”
“Does that mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to speculate?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll speculate that your grandfather was enough of a sexual explorer that a little thing like his partner’s gender would probably not have stopped him from having a good time.”
I flipped back to the picture of the two gay men and the eagle. “Wait a second …” I showed him the picture. “Do you think that’s him?”
“That guy doesn’t look anything like him.”
“Not the one with the flogger. The guy being flogged.”
“Oh! You know, it’s really hard to tell from the back.” He shrugged. “And I’m not just saying that. Ricki, I have n
o idea who that is. But I do wonder if there are other historical photos of the statue. It looks like a public place. I wonder if it was at the New York Eagle or Chicago or what?”
He sat down at the computer to start an image search while I continued looking through the folder of photos, hoping to find another one from that same session, maybe one that showed the face of the man being flogged.
“Oh,” Paul said, and then I saw him quickly blank the screen and then turn toward me with his hands on his knees.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Should I move these items back into the safe now?”
“Paul, that was the worst job you could do of convincing me not to look at whatever you just saw. What was it, animal cruelty photos?”
“Um.” He looked a little crushed. “Just tabloid … stuff.”
My heart sank. More? I wondered if there were photos of Dad coming out of the rehab clinic or what. Well, I could look now or I could wait until later. Either way it would still be there.
I shooed him aside and brought the screen back to life.
And found myself staring at a full-color photo of Axel—his shoulder tattoo starkly obvious in his shirtless state—bending a woman back with one fist in her hair, one hand hitching her leg up on his hip so he could kiss her neck or collarbone. The headline blared: POP STARS AXEL HAWKE AND SUN-LEE CAUGHT IN THE ACT!
For half a second my breath caught and I wondered if they had made a sex tape or something crazy like that. But I could see the dateline and first sentence of the article: it was from a movie premiere in London. I turned away from the screen. “Sensationalist clickbait,” I said, but my voice was shaking a little. Hadn’t Sun-Lee been flirting with him at the Grammy after-party? I tried to remember. Was the photo from today, or was it from some earlier event?
Stop it, Ricki, just stop, I told myself. The news sites pick sensationalistic stuff on purpose. Maybe it has zero basis in reality.
“I’ll check it out,” Paul said, rolling back into place in the computer chair. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
He didn’t sound sure, though.
He was kissing her on the neck! I shook my head to clear it. It’s just a photo, I told myself. Photos can lie. It doesn’t prove anything.
But that was the thing. Photos could have a kind of truth of their own. That’s why the paparazzi existed.
I tried to put it out of my mind and go back to looking through the photos that my grandfather, or someone, had found worthy of locking away in a safe. I remained standing at the edge of my desk, flipping the photos over, one after the other, as if as soon as I got to the end of the collection, I would walk back over to the safe and put them back. There weren’t that many more. Most of them would have seemed completely innocent if you only saw one of them, but piled together like this, all these ones of my grandfather with different people, it made you wonder.
And then my breath caught. An artful photo, done with dramatic lighting from underneath, showed a woman in complicated ropes suspended from the eagle statue, some of the ropes leading through the eagle’s beak, some through the ring on its chest, and some around the claws. Ropes crisscrossed her torso and the thigh of her bent leg.
My mother. I could see more rope wound around her neck.
I wasn’t sure when I sat down. I had a vague memory of Paul helping me, but maybe I made that up later when I realized I was in the chair, the photo in my hand. I’d stared at it so long the image had started to burn into my eyes, so even when I closed them a purple and red negative swam behind my eyelids. Paul was nowhere to be seen. The safe was closed and everything else that we’d removed from it must have been back inside. The office door was closed.
My mother looked radiant in the photo. She wasn’t even naked: she was wearing what could have been a dark bathing suit or body suit, making the light-colored ropes crisscrossing it stand out. She had a wide smile on the face, her arms outstretched and palms up like a dancer or circus acrobat. She looked like she was flying.
There was a knock on the door. I went to open it, assuming it was Paul coming back, and found myself completely unprepared to see the basset-hound face of my father. I froze and so did he. It was too late for me to put on a chipper mask for myself, or even to hide the photograph I was carrying. The combination of seeing Axel and then my mother captured on film like that had been a one-two punch that left me reeling. I looked at the picture in my hand, then at him, a cresting wave of painful emotion filling my eyes with tears and making them sting.
“Oh, baby. I’m so sorry,” he said, which meant nothing really but it was enough to send that wave crashing down to drown me. I fell into his arms, rage-crying with helplessness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WINDOWPANE
RICKI
My tears didn’t last long. I forced myself to stop, thinking don’t be so weak! I didn’t even know why I was crying, exactly. Which made me think of something Axel had said about it being okay to just feel. Have a feeling, Ricki. It’s okay.
The next feeling I had, though, was a fresh wave of upset over the Sun-Lee photo.
The camera is the worst torture device ever invented, I thought. Dad patted me on the shoulder. “There, there.”
Whenever he came back from rehab he felt like a stranger at first. I shrugged away, trying to get myself together, trying to remember how to do this. Ask a polite but neutral question, right? “How was the drive?”
“Perfectly fine as always, Ricki.” He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and I could see he’d dripped coffee right where the bulge of his belly made it wrinkle. “I didn’t realize any of those photographs had survived.”
I turned it to face him, almost afraid to hear the answers to the questions I wanted to ask. But I had to ask. “When was this taken? Where?”
“The eagle used to be downstairs in the main room. These curtains on either side—they look black in the photo? Those are the red ones we still have.”
Thank goodness. This wasn’t a photo from the movie set. My mother apparently enjoyed rope bondage at other times, too. “This was at a party?”
“No, no, a camera would have been a scandal unto itself.” He plucked the picture out of my fingers and examined it.
“Who tied the ropes?”
He sighed. “Ricki, if you want to hear the whole story of this photograph I would be happy to tell it to you. But can we have a little food and some coffee? I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in over a month.”
He’d be happy to tell me? That was not what I’d been expecting. Dad had always been evasive about both my mother and about bondage before. But maybe rehab had helped. Maybe knowing his father had put me in charge of the club helped, too. “I’ll have the staff bring us something.”
“Why don’t we go to the kitchen?”
Okay, maybe he hadn’t changed very much. “Dad, sit.” I pointed to the chair where Schmitt had sat when we’d met.
He sat. When I was done talking to the staff I took the chair Gwen had been in, leaving us both facing the eagle statue. I waited expectantly while he turned the photo this way and that, catching the light. The eagle loomed.
He eventually spoke. “This was shortly after we got back from our honeymoon. The photographer had some renown in the fashion and art world, but he did fetish photography on the side, under a fake name.”
It was certainly an artful photo. The only thing pornographic about it was the fact that it was a woman tied up and that implied something. “She looks so happy.”
“She was happy. Roesel, the photographer, was a rigger. Tied all the ropes himself, and then suspended her. If you look here—” His finger traced a faint line toward the top of the image. “You can see the support ropes that are anchored off to the side.”
“And she liked that?”
“She said it was like flying.” He put the photo down and looked around, as if hoping that would make Mina and a sandwich magically materialize.
“Please tel
l me you didn’t take this eagle with you to Italy,” I said, needing to be sure.
“What? Oh no, dear. The farthest this eagle has flown since this photo is to this office. God, no.” He put his hand over his eyes and I knew he was thinking what I had thought: that this was the piece of equipment my mother had died on. Thankfully not.
“Okay, but why is there a rope around her neck?”
He looked at the photo again. “Purely symbolic. You can see it’s slack.”
“You sound very defensive.”
“And you sound very accusatory.” He crossed his arms.
No one could make me angrier than my father. Not assholes at work, not Axel, nobody. “Well maybe the story you should be telling me isn’t about this photo but about how my mother died.”
“You told me you didn’t remember her!” he said, as if that absolved him of saying anything—as if it were my fault that he hadn’t already told me.
“I was a child who wanted her daddy to cry less and to pay more attention to her, so she told you what you wanted to hear.” I wanted to smack him. “It’s Gwen who doesn’t remember her. And why does that matter, anyway? If I don’t remember her I’m not allowed to know how she died?”
“What else did you find with that photo?”
“What else did you tell that Tinseltown Tab reporter that you never told me?” If he could answer a question with a question, so could I.
“What reporter?”
There was a knock at the door: the coffee and food. I got up to let them in and picked up the copy of TTT from my desk at the same time. I wheeled the cart over and handed the magazine to him.
He looked longingly at the coffeepot.
“You can have some coffee after you read this and explain it.”
“Goodness me, when did you grow up to be so bossy?”
Crown on my fucking head. I looked down my nose at him. “Read.”
He stopped arguing and started reading.
Once he had been reading for a little while, I decided to pour the coffee. I poured for both of us and added a drop of milk the way he liked it. And a spoonful of vanilla sugar. The spoon clinked against the mug.
