The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  At that, Arden leaned back to better study her mother’s face. Her pupils were the size of dinner plates, shock submerged under a tide of pharmaceuticals. She’d made the right decision, telling her mother to stay in East Hampton rather than returning to their Fifth Avenue apartment. There weren’t enough drugs available legally to make her mother fit to cope with the city, the press, the publicity.

  “Not yet, Mrs. MacCarren,” Marla said gently. “I’m cutting the fruit. I’ll start the eggs Benedict in a few minutes. Coffee?”

  “Tea, I think. Let’s go sit by the windows, Mom,” Arden said.

  Her mother looped her arm through Arden’s and let her move them to a cluster of wingback chairs overlooking the beach. Marla brought the tea tray, and left them.

  “How are you?” Arden asked as she poured her mother a cup. Steam rose into the air, carrying a hint of chamomile.

  “I’m awful,” her mother said in a bewildered tone. “Really awful. They don’t have words for this.”

  Arden huffed out a laugh. “I know.”

  “Serena left, with the girls.”

  “Marla told me.”

  “I miss them, but I can’t leave your father right now. Serena wants me to. She wants me to cut off all contact with him, and with Charles, but I can’t abandon my husband and son. She can. She can leave her husband, my son,” she said, her voice tremulous, “take the girls, run away, but I’m not leaving my family, my home.”

  Arden made a noncommittal noise, and added cream and sugar to her mother’s tea.

  “Have you been to see your father?”

  Her father and Charles had effectively shunted everyone else to the side: her mother, Serena, Arden herself. Garry was the only one who went voluntarily, fleeing the tight father-son duo for ranches on the other side of the continent, then the other side of the world.

  Fury swarmed up her throat and down her spine. How like them, how fucking like them, to keep these secrets, then leave the second-class citizens of the family MacCarren to pick up the pieces. She swallowed hard, chased it with hot tea. “No, Mom,” she said as gently as she could. “I’m not going to go see him. Or Charles. Neil’s coming over for brunch. We’ll talk to him about it then.”

  “He is?”

  “Remember, Mom? I texted you.”

  “Oh.”

  Arden pulled out her phone to show her mother the string of texts. Her mother nodded vacantly, then looked at the red leather notebook. “That’s new?”

  “Yes,” Arden said, latching onto the familiarity of beautiful design and shopping. “I bought it earlier in the weekend,” she said, leaving out the disastrous baby shower experience. “I’m taking a drawing class with Betsy.”

  “She’s still speaking to you?”

  “Of course she is. She’s my best friend.”

  “Best friends don’t steal their friends’ fiancés.”

  The theft, such as it was, had happened five years earlier. Her mother wasn’t quite with it at the moment. “She stole a fiancé, Mom,” Arden said, trying to make light of it. “Just one. And I think he went willingly.”

  “Yours. Her best friend’s.”

  Arden didn’t say anything, just smoothed the cover of the journal with her hand. “He loves her in a way he didn’t love me. Anyone who looks at them can see that. I want them to be happy.”

  “You never did fight for what was yours,” her mother said. The drugs had loosened her tongue. Arden knew she’d thought these things but not said them. The teacup drooped, threatening to spill over the lip, onto her linen slacks. Arden took the cup and set it on the table between them.

  “It was a fight I didn’t want to win.”

  Her mother didn’t say anything else, just held out her hand for the journal. Arden gave it to her, knowing her mother wouldn’t actually see the drawings. “Very nice,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Arden replied, recognizing her mother’s standard response when something was subpar but social niceties prevented her from saying that. Her mother majored in art history and painting, a connection she shared with Serena. Arden’s scribbles wouldn’t attract her interest.

  The front gate buzzed into the kitchen. Marla answered, then called, “Mr. Neil MacCarren’s here.”

  Her mother’s head turned vacantly toward Marla. “Thank you,” Arden said.

  By the time Neil appeared on the deck, dressed in khakis, an oxford, and a blazer, his canvas briefcase in hand, Arden had the door unlocked and open. He stepped through, smoothed his hair, and gave Arden a quick kiss on the cheek. He took her mother’s hand. “Nice to see you, Aunt Lyd,” he said.

  “Any trouble at the gate?” Arden asked under her breath.

  “I’m used to ignoring press hordes,” Neil said, making light of it. “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Liar.”

  Arden looked at her mother, who’d wandered into the dining room. “I don’t know. Still in shock, maybe? I keep waiting for anger to come, but so far it’s just this weird combination of shock and disbelief,” she said, editing out her final emotion. Desire, low-level and ever-present, simmering in her temples, her stomach, her sex. She thought of Seth, of the possibility of seeing him tonight, of what might happen after class. Heat flared in her cheeks. Discomfited, she looked away, adding, “My past isn’t helping. It keeps ambushing me. Someone got hit by a car on Fifth just as I was leaving the town house today. I was in the car before the panic attack happened,” she said when Neil’s gaze sharpened.

  He ran himself a glass of water from the fridge. “Feeling numb is fairly normal,” he said. “It will pass.”

  “How do you know?”

  “In my job, your worst day is my average day. I’ve seen this before. Not this close to home, not on this scale, but I’ve seen it.”

  “Great. How do I deal with it?”

  He smiled at her, his wry, quirky grin as sharp as the rest of his angular face. “Get physical. Run. Box. Swim. After her mother died, a friend of mine used to buy plates at IKEA and break them.”

  She lifted an eyebrow at him.

  “Seriously. Hit the gym.”

  “I can’t hit the gym,” she said. “Everyone with a cell phone will take a video of me falling on my ass in kickboxing and sell it.”

  “Get a personal trainer and someone to hang a bag in your house,” he said. “Do something physical. It’ll help.”

  “Brunch is ready, Miss Arden,” Marla said.

  The eggs Benedict with salmon was delicious, the fruit cut into identical pieces and served in cut-glass dishes. Neil cleaned his plate. Arden ate enough to make Marla nod with satisfaction. Her mother, already a proponent of Wallis Simpson’s advice that you can never be too rich or too thin, picked at her food and stared out the window. When the meal was over, Marla cleared the dishes, served coffee and tea, and retreated to the kitchen.

  Neil pulled out his laptop and a sheaf of papers. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve looked through the details of the trust,” he said. “Arden, I’ll start with you. Your assets are distinct from your father’s. The town house you live in is owned by the trust your grandfather set up. Your trust fund came from your grandfather and as such is separate from the current generation’s . . . situation. As long as the investigation doesn’t turn up proof that you knew about the fraud, you’ll be fine.”

  She nodded. This was no better or worse than she’d expected. She had something, an education, a work history. She could and would work.

  “Aunt Lyd,” Neil said, then gently repeated her name, “your situation is different. Under the law, anything you owned jointly with Uncle Don is fair game to be confiscated and sold at auction to reimburse the victims. That means you’re going to lose this house, the Fifth Avenue apartment, the house in Vail, the one in Palm Beach, and most of your assets.”

  Silence. “What can she keep?” Arden said, desperately searching for something positive in all of this.

  “The truth is, not
much. The trust that came from her parents is separate and fairly well-protected. Hollow Hill Farm is also separately deeded and managed. They can’t seize it—”

  “I’ll lose everything. Cars. Jewelry. Art.”

  Her mother picked a fine time to get coherent. Neil nodded to each word. Arden reached across the table and gripped her mother’s hand.

  “The clothes off my back?”

  “Possibly,” Neil said.

  Her mother went back to staring out the window of the house she’d loved more than any other she’d lived in.

  “That leads me to the MacCarren Foundation.”

  “What about it?”

  “The government is going to go after the endowment.”

  Her mother’s eyes turned to Arden. “No,” she whispered.

  “Can they do that?” Arden demanded.

  Neil fiddled with the papers. “They can. If nothing else, it makes them look like they’re doing everything they can to get the money back for investors. They’re already talking about filing lawsuits against everyone who knew your father well and withdrew their earnings, rather than reinvesting with your father.”

  “Arden, no,” her mother whispered.

  The foundation was her mother’s pride and joy. Discovering that her life was a fraud had devastated her mother. Losing the foundation might destroy her.

  “What can we do?” Arden asked. There had to be a way to fight this, not for her father’s sake, but for her mother’s.

  “I don’t know,” Neil admitted. “All I know is that with hundreds of millions of dollars in the foundation’s accounts, it’s going to be a feeding frenzy.”

  Her mother was visibly agitated, tears trailing from her eyes. “The foundation?”

  “Mom, why don’t you go lie down for a little while? Neil and I will handle this.”

  She got her mother settled in the bedroom, tucking her in as she would tuck in one of her nieces during a sleepover treat with Aunt Arden. When she took off her mother’s glasses, her mother peered farsightedly up at her and said, “Are you the best person to represent us? Arden, you were never the strongest child, and now . . .”

  “Garry is on his way back from New Zealand,” Arden said, knowing this would reassure her mother. She patted her shoulder, felt the fragile joint under the layer of cashmere blanket. “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  She returned to the main floor. Neil had a second cup of coffee and was standing at the windows overlooking the windswept beach.

  “How bad is it?”

  “The foundation has been run with impeccable integrity since your mother started it decades ago, but the money your family donated was essentially taken from MacCarren investors. The precedents for this are few and far between. Legally, we can fight, but from a publicity standpoint . . .”

  “We’re going to look terrible.”

  “I’m thinking ahead. The case isn’t at that stage yet. Everyone’s still caught up in the criminal charges—who did what, who knew what and when. It’s my job to think about you and Garry and Aunt Lyd. You have some decisions to make, and I want you to be prepared for them before it actually becomes a point of contention.”

  “Or a news story. Thanks, Neil.”

  “Now for the worst news,” Neil said. Arden braced herself. “The special agent in charge notified us yesterday that if your mother doesn’t move out voluntarily by the end of the month, they’ll begin eviction proceedings.”

  “What happens then?”

  “It could take a while, but if she refuses to leave, she’ll be forcibly removed by the sheriff’s department. She has no ground to stand on to keep this house, Arden. If she doesn’t leave gracefully, under her own terms, it’s going to be brutal, and ugly.”

  Visions of that publicity nightmare spun up in Arden’s head. “I’ll try to get her together,” Arden said.

  Neil nodded. “I’ll let myself out.”

  She picked up her journal and crammed it back into her purse. Out on the water, the Indomitable drifted with the current. She was a beauty, a Herreshoff yacht bought eighty years ago and restored a couple of years ago. She would be sold, too, at auction.

  Outside the door, Arden rubbed her forehead. She should be a good daughter and stay. But her mother was in no condition to talk, and if Arden stayed at Breakers Point, it would only solidify her mother’s resistance to moving. And her skin felt too tight, her chest too small for her heart and lungs. Betsy had her sketchpad, an easel, pencils. Neil said to get physical.

  And Seth would be there.

  – THIRTEEN –

  Sunday afternoon found Seth stretched out on the bed in the motor home, scrolling through the text messages on his phone, at war with himself. Habits were hard to break, and right now two different habits jostled for his attention. The newer habit was to saddle up and surrender himself to the city’s ambient noise so he didn’t have to listen to the silence in his head. But the delivery-service apps were all but dead, making it not worth his time to bike into Manhattan and wait for a job to appear. Normally he’d do it anyway, but today another, older habit knocked insistently at the door of his psyche.

  He felt like drawing. His thumb chafed against the underside of his index and middle finger, the movement automatic for adjusting a pencil or pen. Details inside the motor home sharpened and faded. He recognized the signs, a pressure in his chest, a tension demanding release, and new signs as well. His skin felt too tight, like he was filling up with sketches demanding to get out. Right now his soul didn’t seem to care if his mind said drawing was something he used to do.

  Restlessly, he rolled over and plucked the new Moleskine from his cargo pants pocket, opened it to a clean page, then uncapped a Micron pen. Okay. So far so good. A quick dragon that came out a little like a chicken marching off in a huff, the lone knight fighting off the dragon he’d seen in the shop window in the West Village. Standard stuff for him. Easy.

  Not right.

  He dropped the pen into the crease in the notebook and scrubbed his hand over his face, reached for his phone again, intending to see if there was anything new in the world since he last skimmed the news websites three minutes earlier. The background screen on his phone caught his attention, the picture of the four of them; he picked out the details that made them a unit. Doug was easy, almost a caricature of a serviceman, but Seth never could quite get the set of Brian’s jaw, the way he folded in on himself, all long legs and arms and angles out of geometry class, or the way Manny’s personality flashed out of his eyes, even behind the shades and under the helmet. Despite seeing the picture dozens of times each day, despite drawing them hundreds of times over the years, he was losing their faces.

  Determined to recommit them to memory, he tapped through to the actual picture in his camera roll and picked up the pen again. But his lines were off, failing to capture impulse behind the pose, all the little nuances that drew them together. The way Manny was looking away but every other sense totally attuned to them, Brian’s Gumby-like limbs, Doug’s easy grin, the one he so rarely saw on Phil’s mouth.

  “Fuck,” he said, and tossed the pen at the sketchbook, talking to his muse as much as to himself. “What do you want from me?”

  More.

  Little zings through his arms and fingers accompanied this single word, audible through the static in his mind, drawing his eyes back to the sketch of the lone knight. It fit with his past work, except it didn’t, and deep down he knew giving in to this impulse would set him on an unfamiliar road. Only when the tension became unbearable, immense and filled with static, did he roll over and pull a larger sketchpad and his box of pastels and pencils from one of the storage drawers under the bed. When he jostled the contents of the box, the corner of the unfinished Moleskine appeared, the edges of the pages saturated with dried blood.

  Not now.

  He pushed it to the back of the box and closed the drawer. With the pillows tucked at his back, he started to draw the details of the knight, bigger, the shoulders, the lifted
chin, big eyes, a full mouth with messy pink lipstick, blond hair tumbling out from underneath the Spartan helmet. The big sketchpad braced against his knees, he lost track of time as he drew, minimal lines then filling in the color with metallic pastels. They didn’t make the right shade of wheat gold for her hair, so he layered the colors, smudged and smeared until he had the sheen just right.

  Arden. He’d drawn Arden, not a faceless knight. He could hear his own breathing, deep and even in the silence, and felt ashamed that he couldn’t get his buddies right.

  “You’ll get it back,” he said. His voice sounded strange in the motor home’s dim, close air. “You just haven’t done that for a while. She’s what you see now. You’ll get it back.”

  The muse made no comment on that. Time to head into Manhattan to model for Micah’s class. Knowing Arden wouldn’t be there left him with a layer of relief over a visceral disappointment. He was forgetting them, and he couldn’t forget them.

  Not even for her?

  Not even for her.

  He rode over the bridge into Manhattan, going a little out of his way to ride uptown along East Park Drive. The city was putting on a pretty fall show, the air cool for September. He arrived at Betsy’s apartment on time today, rolling down the path along the big Egyptian temple in the Met. When he swooped around the corner, he was surprised to see Arden claiming her bags from the back of a big black SUV. A driver in a suit and shades held the door for her.

  “Thank you, Derek,” she was saying.

  He rolled up next to the door and swung off the bike, two movements he made automatically. The driver, big enough to double for an NFL linebacker, swung around and stopped just short of shoulder-checking him into the potted evergreen in a cement pot. Hand to her throat, Arden flinched back against the rear wheel well and dropped her bag of drawing supplies.

  “Hey, easy,” Seth said, one hand raised, the other neatly twitching the bike upright and out of a dogwalker’s path. “It’s me. It’s just me.”

  Derek the linebacker looked at Arden for confirmation, but she was staring at Seth like she’d never seen him before. He wasn’t sure he’d seen this woman before. Right hair, right stubborn line of her jaw, khakis, a loose linen top in a pale blue, and sandals, but the expression on her face was scarily blank.