by Ann Packer
On Sunday my brothers and I arranged to meet at a café in Palo Alto to discuss selling the house. By then James had told Robert and Ryan about Celia, and when Robert wasn’t there at the appointed time I wondered if he was registering a protest about James’s relationship. He was outraged and had told me so at length on the phone the night before.
Ryan, on the other hand, was overjoyed. “I’m so happy for you,” he said to James. “So happy. I know there are things to work out, but it’s amazing that you finally found her. I mean, I don’t believe in the right person, but I knew you’d find a right person. And she sounds so good for you.”
James looked around and lowered his voice. “It may be weird of me to say this, but the sex is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It’s astounding.”
“One of the best kinds,” Ryan said with a smile.
“I’d have thought the best.”
“Well, there’s also sacred.”
“Yeah, I guess. Which is proof enough—I’d never have let you get away with that in the past. Believe it or not, I was about to say ‘she completes me.’ ”
“Do you have a picture?”
James opened his wallet and pulled out a photo that appeared to have been edited hastily with a pair of dull scissors. Celia was in a brightly lit outdoor place, smiling. She looked, in comparison to the video image, peaceful. On her right, a child’s hand reached up and grasped the hem of her shirt. On her left was the outer eighth of a man’s body. Both had been cut out of the picture. Her hair was much shorter than it was now, a no-nonsense crop with bangs that covered her forehead, which in my memory had been furrowed.
“She’s pretty,” Ryan said. “I like her shoulders.”
“Right?” James exclaimed.
At that moment, Robert rapped on the outside of the café window as he hurried by.
“Here we go,” James muttered.
The bell over the door jingled, and Robert squeezed between the crowded tables to reach us. He plunked into the chair next to mine and said, “Halloween errands, sorry.”
“Such a busy bee,” James said.
“What?” Robert said with a glare. “Better change your tune if you’re going to shack up with someone who has kids. This is the kind of thing you have to do all the time.”
“Maybe it’s the kind of thing I like to do.”
“Yeah, trying to find a giant remote-control spider two days before Halloween is so much fun.”
“We’re glad you’re here,” Ryan said, reaching over and giving Robert’s arm a pat. “It’s totally hectic out there today. I passed a costume place and it was jammed. What are the boys going as?”
Robert rolled his eyes. “Jen had this great plan to get empty ice cream tubs at Baskin-Robbins and decorate them to look like jars of peanut butter and jelly. Which the boys would then wear. But I’m sorry to say they’re going in store-bought X-Men costumes.”
“Guys,” I said, leaning forward. “Should we get started? I think we’ve all had individual conversations with James and each other, but it would be good to talk it through as a group. As a foursome instead of several twosomes.”
We all looked at James, and he shrugged. “I’m not sure there’s anything to talk about. I need the dough. I’m sorry.”
Robert looked incredulous. “Wait, now it’s definite?”
“Yeah.”
James had not told me this. Obviously he hadn’t told Robert, either.
“Jeez, spring it on us why don’t you,” Robert said.
“Let’s ask Rebecca if she thinks you’re upset about how I told you.”
“I’ll make you a loan if you’re so broke! Or I’ll just buy your share. Obviously I can’t buy the whole house at this point or I’d do that.”
“We’re talking probably three million,” James said. “Which is close to four hundred thousand for each of us. Do you have four hundred thousand dollars?”
“I don’t think three million.”
“The land alone is worth almost that much.”
“It would have to be, the house is a teardown.”
The waitress was coming our way, and I caught her eye and shook my head slightly. The café was new but stood on the site of an old-fashioned coffee shop our father had liked. On weekend mornings he often took one or two of us out to do an errand, and as often as not we’d end up swinging by afterward and sitting at the counter for grilled cheese sandwiches. I wondered if the boys thought of this every time they came here, as I did.
Robert leaned toward James and said, “I can’t believe you’d do this.”
“Whatever, I’m a home-wrecker, I’m a terrible person.”
Robert rolled his eyes. “That’s a whole other issue. Which— Don’t get me started. You’re being, at the very least, incredibly reckless. What I meant was I can’t believe you’d do something that benefits Penny.”
“I’m not that small-minded.”
“You’re exactly that small-minded. ‘I don’t really care, but I’ll stick with you guys just to fuck her up.’ ”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did. On January 16, 2004. At the kitchen table at Dad’s, after the ashes.”
“What’d you do, take notes?”
“In fact, yes.”
“Unbelievable.” James looked at Ryan and me. “Can’t you just see him? Sitting in his car afterward, writing it all down?”
“Let’s order,” Ryan said. “Can we order? I’m really hungry.”
“When,” Robert said, “are you going to call her?”
James looked astonished. “Me?”
“Who else?”
“I don’t want to call her.”
“Minor stumbling block!” Robert said with a triumphant smile, but his face fell when he saw that neither Ryan nor I was with him. “She has to be told,” he said. “Technically, she has to be asked.”
With a questioning look on his face, James turned to me.
“The terms of the trust,” I explained.
“When was the last time you talked to her?” Robert asked him.
“None of your business.”
“I can’t figure out if that means it’s longer ago than I’d have thought or shorter.”
“Guys,” I said, leaning forward. “It’s a complicated situation with a lot of history. Maybe we should—”
James waved me off and looked at Robert. “It was your wedding if you really care so much.”
Robert’s eyes widened, and Ryan and I exchanged a look: Robert and Jen had gotten married in 1995, eleven years earlier.
“That’s ridiculous,” Robert said.
Ryan reached over and touched James’s elbow. “It’s actually impossible, J. You saw her at our wedding, and that was way after Robert and Jen’s.”
“Doesn’t mean I talked to her.”
Robert rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, you talked to her.”
“I didn’t. And I haven’t seen her since then.”
“What about when we cleared out the house?” Robert said. “Remember she found all those horrible ceramic platters in the garage from the summer parties? And she wanted us each to take one?”
“And we had that whole conversation,” I said, “about whether the last party was in ’80 or ’81.”
“It was ’80,” Robert said.
“It was ’81. It was the summer after my senior year of high school.”
“It couldn’t have been ’81, that was my first summer in Michigan.”
“You came home in August—we waited and had it then. We went through this exact conversation in the garage with Penny. Anyway, James didn’t come down when we did the clearing out.” I’d offered to buy him a ticket, but he said no, he was just getting settled in Eugene, and in any case he didn’t particularly want to hang with Penny. I said something ab
out how if we took away the word “with” maybe he’d be interested, and he said, amiably enough, “Fuck you, Rebecca.”
“Bottom line,” Ryan said, “it’s been a long time.” He caught the waitress’s eye, and she came over and took our order, and for a little while we talked about other things. Then, during a lull, Robert turned to James and said, “I guess the only hope for the house is you decide it would look too much like forgiveness.”
“Please,” James said. “It’s not like I’m walking around feeling like my mother abused me.”
“As long as it wasn’t”—Robert lifted his hands and made quick curling motions with his index and middle fingers—“abuse.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“Well, how about your little dog for one?”
James broke into a laugh. “Are you kidding? Do you really think I’m losing sleep over that? If that’s how you operate, maybe you should see someone. Rebecca, don’t you think he should see someone?”
Robert smirked. “You’re the one who hasn’t spoken to his mother in eleven years.”
“Hey,” James said. “Time got away from me.”
• • •
The view from the house had changed over the decades, from a green and brown valley to “a bowl of mansions,” as Sammy once said. Our closest neighbors had sold their three acres in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, and had, according to rumor, used the proceeds to buy both a house in the French countryside and an apartment in San Francisco, an expensive Russian Hill penthouse. The new owners had torn the old place down and built a blinding white cube of a house that flashed at us through the trees. “But look at this,” our father had said when it became clear the new structure had permanently altered our view. “Sit on the lowest step here and lean back, and you can pretend they aren’t even there.”
That’s what Ryan and James wanted to do. After lunch James and I had given Ryan a ride home, and now, as we walked up the driveway, the boys were insisting that the Vincents might not even notice us and wouldn’t mind if they did.
The silver car wasn’t there, only Lewis’s Ferrari. The house was decorated for Halloween, with a skeleton tacked to the front door, six pumpkins of varying sizes arranged on the steps, and stretchy spiderweb stuff covering the bushes. As one we sat on the lowest step, me between the boys. Leaning back, all we could see was green and gold, the trees and the hills, and the giant blue dome overhead.
“Here we are,” Ryan said. He had so much to lose, the only one among us who’d never really lived anywhere else. He felt me looking at him and smiled.
A car engine became audible, and a moment later the silver car came into view with Lewis driving. He lowered the window. “Great to see you,” he called.
I got to my feet, and Ryan and James stood, too. Lisa was next to Lewis, and I wondered if she’d told him about coming to my office. I hoped it wouldn’t be awkward for her to see me.
There were two girls in back, and I turned to Ryan. “What are their names?”
“Susanna and Daphne. They’re very sweet kids.”
Grinning broadly, Lewis joined us. As we took turns shaking hands with him, I saw that Lisa was still in the car, staring straight ahead.
The girls had run to Ryan. He put an arm around each of them and smoothed their hair. Susanna appeared to be about thirteen, while Daphne, I remembered from my conversation with Lewis, was eight.
The passenger door flew open and Lisa burst out of the car, a flurry of hair and arms and shopping bags. “Daphne,” she called, “come get your things,” and she held up a Neiman Marcus shopping bag until the younger girl pulled away from Ryan and returned to the far side of the car.
“Daphne got things?” Ryan said to Susanna in a quiet voice.
“It’s totally ridiculous. She’s in third grade and she got two cashmere sweaters.”
“Life is so unfair,” Ryan said, and the two of them exchanged a smile that suggested the statement had gotten a fair amount of play between them in the past.
“Is Katya at her playdate?” Susanna said.
“Probably on the way home by now.”
“I got her a cupcake. With a candy pumpkin on top. Is that okay?”
“For sure. I hope you got one, too.”
Susanna smiled. She had the watchful, cautious look of certain firstborns. She held her shoulders high, and the space between the bottoms of her jeans and the tops of her shoes suggested a recent growth spurt.
Lewis was telling James that if we were serious it would take him no time at all to have his Realtor draw up an offer. Lisa was still on the far side of the car, and I began to think she might stay there until we left, to avoid me. I was about to make an excuse when she mobilized, gathering the shopping bags and striding purposefully in our direction.
“You’re Ryan’s sister, aren’t you?” she said, handing her bags to Susanna so she could shake my hand. “I can’t believe we’ve never met. It’s Rebecca, right? I’m Lisa.”
So she hadn’t told Lewis . . . and she wanted me to pretend we hadn’t met.
“Honey,” she said to Lewis, “why aren’t you inviting them in for something to drink? I think we could even sit outside. I can’t believe it’s almost November—global warming, right? Girls, if it’s locked, set the bags down and come get the keys!” This last she shouted at the girls, who’d taken the bags up to the door. She dropped her voice and said, “I feel like I have to explain everything. The other day we stopped for gas and they wanted Life Savers, so I sent them inside with some money and they came back out and said, ‘There’s no one there, what do we do?’ So I go back in with them, and the cashier is right there stocking a shelf! I tell them, ‘You say, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy this.” ’ Didn’t occur to them!”
“And it doesn’t occur to us how much we’re going to have to teach them,” Ryan said, but she didn’t seem to take this in.
I said we needed to leave, and as we walked away James said, “Maybe it’s the house,” and Ryan said, “She’s not that bad,” and James said, “You knew what I meant, which kind of proves she is. Don’t you think, Rebecca?” He was saying he thought Lisa was like Penny, but to me she seemed less a beleaguered mother than an actress playing a beleaguered mother and trying to enlist her children to play opposite her. Penny was truly beleaguered—a woman not cut out for the job of raising four children.
At home, James and I sat at the kitchen table and read the Sunday paper, but soon we were talking about Celia again, James brightening and obviously happy that his secret was out. He made another reference to their sexual compatibility, and I thought of the moment in the café when he used the word “astounding.” I kept thinking about it through the afternoon and evening, and by bedtime I was feeling stirred up. I imagined Walt would be surprised; we’d had sex the night before and usually went a few days in between. I must have communicated something to him, though, because as soon as we got into bed, he reached for me. Our hands and mouths moved. We sped up. We took turns coaxing each other to the brink and backing off. At last I pulled him on top of me and brought him over the line, and for a little while he rested and nearly slept. Then: “Your turn,” he murmured, and he reached again. There was pure sensation for a while, but then I realized I was picturing an old stone house at dusk, set far back in a snowy field, a two-story house with light shining from the windows. What was this place? The closer I got, the closer I got. But then I was so far along that there was no more thinking, and the image dissolved as I came.
• • •
Tuesday was Halloween, and my practice was full of masked and costumed children, along with a fifty-four-year-old man who arrived in plaid Bermuda shorts and a garishly flowered Hawaiian shirt and began weeping about twenty minutes into the session because he’d meant the outfit as a Halloween joke and, by not commenting on it, I’d implied I thought it was something he might actually wear
. The session took an interesting turn after that, and we arrived at some rich material, but he was a fairly new patient and I was a bit flummoxed, and afterward I spent some extra time on my notes so I could bring the case to a class I was taking on analytic beginnings. Late in the afternoon I made a trip to the hospital to see my eleven-year-old leukemia patient, who’d been asleep when I got to his room last time. He was sitting up in bed with his mother at his side, and I sat with them for a while, the mother wearing a different kind of mask, one I saw too often: the forced smile below the hollow eyes.
Sammy and Luke had begged James to go trick-or-treating with them and spend the night, so Walt and I had the house to ourselves for the first time in almost two weeks. We set a basket of candy outside the front door and settled on the couch in the living room. I’d had special lights installed before hanging the picture of the land, and at night, when it was dark out and the lamps were off, the painting had a dreamlike quality.
“It’s funny,” Walt said, “that it was your father’s painting when your mother was the artist.”
“He commissioned it. Before they even broke ground on the house. Before she was an artist.”
“What was she before she was an artist?”
“A wife and mother. To her dismay. I was thinking about this the other day. Maybe she liked it at first, but it wasn’t enough for her.”
“It wasn’t enough or she got sick of it?”
“It’s probably not either/or. When I was four or five we sometimes played hide-and-seek with her, and she laughed and laughed. But she could also be really grumpy and put upon. She would say, ‘The house isn’t going to clean itself!’ which for some reason Robert and I found very funny. One time he said, ‘Maybe the kitchen can clean the living room since it has running water,’ and she got really angry at him. I guess she thought he was making fun of her. My father loved the house, which somehow made it worse. God, he loved it.”
Walt took my hand. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine. Ryan seems fine. Robert seems to be carrying the upset for all of us.”
