I shake my head, my heavy eyes at my white Converse. “No, I didn’t have much trouble. Your driver was nice. I wish I’d brought something to tip him.” I swallow, looking to his curled, meaty hands. His wedding band had a curious habit of going missing. Not today. “But of course it’s hard to get a hold of me, like a flame toyed with by the wind. You know Rudy won’t take responsibility for me—God knows where he is—and Mama’s family isn’t keen on me,” I say before he can interject. “They’re happy to be rid of me. They sent me home a couple hours before your car. Alone.”
Lowering his bushy, marginally gray brows in halted censure, he said in a less even shade, “Did you sleep well?” He has a roundabout way of getting to (or avoiding) unpleasant topics. He’s a politician after all.
“What is well?” I laugh like a maniac, feeling how tight the tendons in my shoulders pull. Even though the Prices had enough beds open, they made me sleep on the couch. They hold a hatred for Daddy that fails to transcend me.
My new caretaker ignored that as well; his expressive eyes, edged with age and sympathy, fill with biting urgency. His arm quickly rises, pinpointing me, a meter away. “I missed you, darling,” he blurts, padding as elegantly as a Japanese hostess under the small chandelier between the dining room and kitchen.
I think he’ll kiss me, but he just takes the wooly, blue coat from my arms.
As he walks to the rack in the room abreast me, I see he’s slimmer than I recall; he was never fat, but he had some solid weight on him like most healthy men his age. This weight loss coupled with his pure black suit jacket made him seem taller, a good 6’3.
“I missed you too, Harold,” I say reticently, as if wary of a hidden microphone. “Just not in the same way. Obviously, I wish we were together for a merrier occasion.”
He comes back, frowning, and swipes his cool fingers under my chin, inadvertently coloring my cheeks. “I hope you don’t sound as sad in a few months,” he whispers seriously. “I’ll make you happy, darling. We’ll make you happy,” he alleges, gesturing to the six or so family portraits in a golden case off to the side. “I won’t let you feel let down or hurt. Don’t you know that?”
I feel chilly and like I might already humiliate myself, weeping for his kindness and my former life. Wrapping my fingers around his, chipped by D.C. breezes, I pull down on them and step closer. “I know you’ll do that,” I assure, glassy-eyed, my shoes mingling with his.
He plucks a peck off my forehead and pulls me to his chest, rubbing my cashmere shoulder. “You’ll know you’re home soon enough,” he coos into my hair jostled and stiffened by the outside wind. “You’ll know all this darkness is just a precursor to the light, Ellie Anne. I love you.”
~***~
Harold’s firm grip around my hips as we walk up the steep steps to my room, I recover my poise.
If I knew the owner any poorer, I would’ve thought the small tower I was to lodge in was a gratuitous and masturbatory display of wealth, but sweet, inattentive Harold probably never even noticed. (In his days as a freshman Congressman, it took him an adorable time just to learn elementary parliamentary procedure FFA students routinely master before they hit puberty.)
He gets the door for me and keeps just the storybook theme he said we’d never achieve: “A queen bed for my princess,” he kids, rubbing my cheek a bit too hard, trying to enhance my mood. “Should be enough for you and all your plush pals to thrash about.”
I follow him in and admire the clothed bed twice the dimensions of mine at home. (Even though Daddy undoubtedly financially bested Harold, he was averse to flaunting it where unneeded.)
Harold ambles over to the closet and parts the doors. “And let’s not even pretend there’s enough space in here—or the garage—for your monstrous shoe collection. But we can put your skirts in here, your favorite jackets, and purses.” He bites his lip. “As for your dresses, you have dressers to your right, and that ottoman before the bed doubles as a trunk. What you cannot store can go in my wife’s closet. There’s a little bathroom through that door with generous cabinetry.” He points left before touching his chin. “Um, and—” He looks around my room and person. “Where is your stuff, darling?”
I grow timid again, strumming my fingers, tilting my chin forward.
“You didn’t bring anything?” he says in short surprise. “That’s alright,” he starts to say with stumped eyebrows. “I can send for your things right—”
“I didn’t want anything to remind me of Daddy,” I defend myself in a sheepish peep.
“Oh,” reverberates sadly around the circular walls like an organ’s final notes. “Well … Well, we’ll just have to replace all your items and memories with cheerier ones. Better ones,” he promises.
I hold my face in chagrin and confess, “I’m a difficult child, Harold. I don’t mean to be. I don’t mean to complicate everything in your life, honestly. I’m scared you signed up for a thankless, menial job. I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Hush,” Harold beseeches, already seemingly uninterested in my plight. “The only thing difficult here is your kneejerk self-criticism.” He stills and gazes at me, the cerise bridging my cheekbones. “Do you want to end up like your mother, killed by her own sword or heart she hid?” he wonders clearly and rhetorically.
“No,” I sniffle, untangling one of my daffodil yellow locks to avoid meeting his eyes.
“Would you like to stay with her wretched family? Or your father’s?”
“No,” I say with more assertion, pale eyes darting between him and the eggplant-colored rug.
“Do you still keep true to your reply to me last month? You love me and wish to honor your parents, give up the indulgences of self-hate and drinking?”
“Of course. Of course I want to do all of that,” I retrace my voice, my pinky tracing my bottom lip to see if there’s any gloss left. There’s not. “Just like you wrote you wish to take care of me and harbor me like a little criminal. A little lark.”
He smirks and extends his hand. “I never said criminal.”
“You’re always careful not to,” I affirm, doused in a memory, the visual mist of Mama bedridden three months ago washing over. When I’d watch over her like an owl watches over the shrew on the forest floor at night, vigilant and ineffectual until the strike of famine. But I was already gorged enough on my own appendages to last a fortnight, not that that’s what Mama paid attention to. She averred I was the cause of her deteriorating health.
To her, my existence was a crime, a bacterium.
Never mind how I scarcely entered the house after Daddy’s death; afraid of her profanity, and then, her deathly profile. How I was spending all my time with Harold and friends to take away the steady sting my parents left.
She assumed as much. She was never above reading my mail or eavesdropping on my phone conversations. Because of that, perhaps she reviled Harold as much as she had me. Because he brought joy where she planted hatred.
“Little tramp,” she wheezed over an unseen glob of mucous, quivering in her sallow sheets, “like Lolita and her mother, you’ll be the end of me. The end of me so you can run off with your pervert, Harold,” she bleated like a cat. “I hear what he says to you, the dirty, old liar.” She inhaled with a shudder. “He calls you his baby so he can unbutton your dresses and kiss your face. So he can fondle you and take prestige from a stupid, silly girl … What would your ‘Daddy’ think of that if he were still around, I wonder,” she incited, her face never in such a glower, with such a harrowing affect.
Clamping my teeth, I hid my weakness. My sad and easy blush. “No, Mama,” I said calmly, dabbing her balmy forehead with an old rag. “It’s not like that; you’ll get better. You’re not like Daddy at all,” I guaranteed with an undertone.
The memory is sponged away in a matter of seconds.
I take Harold’s warm, supple hand and patch out the vision like a bricklayer. “You’re always so careful not to be incriminated. Not to upset or castigate me,” I assure.
Just to tell me what I need or have to hear.
Sick and brave with the tumult of change, I advance on tiptoe and kiss his cheek as thanks, leaving no trace.
Our faces brighten.
“Humbert,” I laugh desolately and shake my head, temples beating with fatigue and familiarity.
Other Obstacles
“I told you not to call me that,” he says calmly, leaving to descend the staircase.
“What?” I ask, my mind jumbled like a pair of dice today. “Oh, Humbert,” I remember, three steps out of sync, my right hand sliding down the narrow banister. “It’s just a tease. It’s better than, say, Bundy.”
Harold rolls his eyes. “It’s not any better a love story.”
“We’re not a love story. We’re too dull and dark for that. Like one of those Chopin songs. Like Lo and Hum,” I justify.
“We’re not doomed to death or jail,” he points out, staring at me from half-open, sand-crusted eyes.
“We don’t know that,” I remind, smiling puckishly.
“You’re not easy to please, darling,” Harold yawns, outstretching an arm and covering his mouth with his right fist.
My brows droop sympathetically. “When’s the last time you went to bed—and I don’t mean that rectangular rock in your cramped Congressional quarters?”
Head turned a fourth back, he grants a clever grin. “What month is it?”
“You’re going to complicate your immune system that way,” I warn, clipped to his elbow, sliding my thumb across the crease.
“I work with a variety of vermin, vultures, and leeches on a daily basis. I’m not worried.”
As we reach the bend of the staircase, our ears are rapt by the persistent hollow of footsteps. The fashionable footsteps of a lady.
My fingers slip from Harold’s arm, finding comfort in the uniformity of my other hand, the rest of me parched for similar refuge. So not to be strung with jealousy when she enters the room, I still my mind and body. The intensity of her gait increases, her slender shadow creeping up the pine floorboards.
Past the archway framed by intricate, beige tapestry, in forest green pumps and a matching dress, she stands as tall and straight as a stalk of corn. She has the body of a pop star without the tacky need for a forward reveal. It’s pronounced well enough in creaseless polyester that hugs her like Congress embraces a pay raise. Her quarter-size eyes flare up in cosmetic smoke, and her maroon lips gleam like a limousine. Curved around her flawless face is shiny black, African hair.
Biting my tongue, I try to hold any envy at bay, but all I can do is compare trivialities. How do my pale, rippled lips, jaunty joints, and stalemate hips stack up? My hair is longer and less oily, but her legs are longer and more womanly. Her makeup technique is astounding, but, in my youth, I have nothing to conceal. I can easily be picked up and carried to bed, but she has plump breasts, crescent hips, and a respectably round bottom.
She has experience working for her in perception and action, while I only have the ephemeral mark and quality of a virgin. I am vanilla in skin, in looks, and she is a rich, reliable Hershey kiss.
Yet Harold only mutters irritably to himself, pouching his hands in his pockets. He’d fallen out of love as quickly as I stumble into regret—so he claims. Feeling territorial, I suddenly want to wrap my arms around Harold, perch my arrogance on his shoulder, sway side-to-side, and gauge her reaction.
I do not. I cannot. As fate would have it, I’m a guest in my mate’s home, a lawful relative to the woman I’m supposed to be in competition—bet—against.
She smiles at me, her gums and teeth of equal length. “The little Moss girl,” she recognizes me as. “Harold has so much to say about you.”
I throw a curious glance to Harold. He serves it back.
“It’s as though you’re already part of the family even though I’ve only seen you twice at the RNC. You’ll be able to feel at home in no time, I’m sure,” she says naively.
“I’m sure too,” I say evenly, drumming my fingers on the end of the banister, unsure what to feel for her.
~***~
Though Harold’s wife, Lela, treats him nor good nor bad, just invisible, she was quick to pounce on the task of mollifying me. Her amicable mood was contagious; bordering on poisonous. She was genial, talkative, and careful not to mention my parents. She spoke with a silvery voice, lively eyes, and gentle hand movements while I tugged on my collar and sleeves to alleviate the rash of embarrassment.
Inadvertently, she was twice as effective—and completely oblivious—in guilt-tripping me.
But you don’t love him kept playing in my head, twirling like a macabre ballerina. You don’t love him so what does it matter what I do with him? Besides, it’s not like I’m sleeping with him … yet.
She giggles and I follow suit despite having missed the punch line, tracing my mug of hot cocoa with a pinky.
Spines gone soft, we are startled by the careless slam of a door.
“That would be Thomas,” Lela sighs on the embers of merriment.
“Oh,” I peep awkwardly, twitching a brow, scanning my internal database for such a moniker.
Thomas walks into the dining area where we’ve been conversing (well, she’s been chatting; I’ve been nodding and faltering) for nearly two hours. His hair is like Harold’s was before he cut it and more of an autumn brown. Behind his heavy glasses are squinty, dark orbs, and, below that, are the thick, white teeth of a mouth-breather. He has Harold’s pouty lips and nothing better.
“Say hello to your new sister,” Lela greets poignantly as Thomas comes to hang his backpack off one of the skinny dining room chairs.
Their son. I knew that, but was too preoccupied with other things, important things.
“Yeah, hi,” he dismisses with a feeble finger flick, looking opposite of me. At about age 15, kidding himself he has too much of a social life and homework to tend to, he couldn’t care less. “Where’s Dad?” he asks, appearing scatterbrained in his restless shuffling beside the spotless glass table.
“In his study. On the phone with Rep. Connors again. Ugh,” Lela sneers, Reese’s eyes bloated and rolling bombastically. She takes a swig of her foamy drink and says, “That guy can talk your ear off, am I right, Ellie? You’d think he didn’t have a district to serve or something.”
Swallowing my grief like an acrid pill, I push my history with Connors and his young lover back before it bites me. They were both so vicious and that’s as far as I want to remember. “The broken English he employs makes the suffering last longer,” I assure bloodlessly.
Lela’s gawky son shakes his head and sits down a few inches from my left.
I put my hands in my lap, playing with the bow pinned to my hip, and count the freckles on Thomas’s hooked nose, wondering if he was adopted as well. Too ungainly for this top-shelf family, too dumb to be named after founding father Jefferson.
“Do you still want to be a politician?” Thomas abruptly inquires after his mother leaves to take care of dinner, proving he was worth forgetting. “You know, since that trouble with your pa.” He takes his mother’s cup as though it was meant for him and downs it like he just got back from the Sahara, waiting for me to react.
I don’t think Thomas ever means to be rude, but that doesn’t mean everything he says isn’t. When we were younger and our fathers had to take care of Congressional assignments, we were often paired together. I was quick to develop a dislike for his crude questions and requests to play vulgar “games.”
Like then, I shrug him off and belittle him for his behavior: “I don’t know. Do you still want to be a reporter? You’ve still got the face for print or radio,” I retort, flicking his big nose. “‘Trouble,’” I scoff in a short pout, crossing my little arms. “Is that what you call it?”
Rubbing his beak with dirty fingernails, he sarcastically replies, “Nice to see you haven’t changed.”
“You neither, Tom,” I say when his mother returns with a bowl of salad and a pitcher of sweet tea
. Our shtick subsides once she tells him to let his father know it’s time to eat. Well, after I whisper the closing statement, “Jerk,” after him.
When he returns, Harold lagging behind, I try not to stare too much, walking the social wire like a trapeze artist.
Thomas makes himself harder to ignore when he sits directly in front of me, our knees knocking every now and again.
Harold takes to the seat beside me.
I bury my pink mouth and cheek in my hand, sure to keep my elbows off the glass, and aim for coy.
Once everyone is seated and dished a portion of lettuce, Lela initiates grace, which I find unusual, but, then again, my family never ate meals together. Not only did my parents not share a meal, they didn’t share a room at night, so unless it was mumbled complaining or outright shouting, there was little conversation in-between.
Stifling another yawn, it seems more like Harold was sleeping in his study rather than talking to the GOP’s freshest face this side of Houston.
As his wife boasts about her homemade dressing that, in actuality, has the scrumptious quality of peroxide, I angle my hand so it’s covered by the silk runner and grip Harold’s knee.
He’s more receptive than I thought, but less than I asked. Leer as faint as a pencil mark, he slowly glides his hand under the table to meet mine.
He retracts it whenever his wife looms too near, and we reestablish our caress whenever she’s invested in interrogating Thomas or congratulating herself.
Halfway through the meal and its vacuous small talk, I realize just how poor of a cook Lela is. I lay down my fork with no clank, silently swishing the weak tea around my palate to rinse away the tang of old onion and charred meat.
For a minute, I focus on the smooth, reedy fabric of my lover’s pants as I stroke in small circles, the skeleton of little hairs I feel dust the barrier. How gratifying it is to have someone long for your caress, and how insatiable it is to have the mutual desire. How cruel and caustic it is to have a blistering, unthinkable romance and have it impeded by a null one as cold as Communism.
Imperative Fate Page 7
