Always

by Nicola Griffith

  “I thought you were talking about design nonsense, about feng shui.”

  “No.”

  We were quiet for a while. I mused some more on the Wiram chair.

  A man with a bad hairpiece came in, stood in line for thirty seconds, saw it wasn’t moving, and left.

  “Jonie wouldn’t have let that happen.”

  “No.” Jonie, his favorite barista, was always watching. I had seen her bring him a fresh Americano, just as the thought was forming in his mind.

  “I wonder how she’s managing.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I’m having to pay her more,” he said.

  “She deserves it.” I didn’t know why she stayed. We were quiet a minute, watching the young Tully’s barista begin to slowly fall apart. Dornan stirred; I could tell he wanted to go help.

  But the Seattle customers remained unfazed. Someone said something that made everyone smile, even the barista, and Dornan relaxed. I wished I could. My mother might be in Seattle by now.

  “Feng shui does, in fact, mention solid walls,” I said. “Good design is good for a reason. Did I tell you about the chair I saw in Atlanta just before we left? It was an art furniture exhibit at the Lowe Museum . . .”

  The first item in the exhibit had been a two-drawered nightstand. From a distance its dark red wood looked top-heavy and unstable, as improbable as the skeleton of a T. rex. The catalogue told me it was a cubist-constructivist side table, and talked about its construction of sixty perpendicularly aligned rods, two hundred forty sides, and seventy-eight joints, all perfectly machined to within three one-thousandths of an inch—aerospace tolerances. It talked about Wiram’s early modern influences, about Fibonacci numbers, negative space, and Euclid’s harmonic proportions. It did not tell me what kind of tree the wood was cut from.

  “. . . I looked at this furniture, and I thought what a cold life the maker had led, and how I could have ended up like that.”

  “If you hadn’t met, well . . .”

  “Julia. Yes. And it made me think about Luz.”

  “I don’t know anyone else who thinks of a ten-year-old girl when she sees furniture.”

  “She’s happy with the Carpenters—”

  “Carpenters, ha, I get it.”

  I stopped. Carpenters. Luz’s stepfamily. Their name had never really registered before. “Not that,” I said. “She’s happy there, or she was a few weeks ago, and they love her. But they’ve got no money, and they don’t know how to fight the kinds of things she’ll have to deal with. It would be easy to say, Oh, I don’t know anything about kids, here’s a big fat check every month, but I’m responsible. I should legally adopt her. I intend to legally adopt her. But what does that mean? Adoption is like marriage, it should mean something, it shouldn’t just be a piece of paper.”

  “Okay.”

  “But there’s no order in a child’s life, no clear goal. You can’t orchestrate the experience, things just happen. And when I was looking at this furniture, I knew, as clearly as I know this tea is disgusting, that no child ever ran into that man’s workshop at a critical juncture and made his chisel slip a hair and cut the ball of his thumb, spill the blood in a Rorschach spatter that pissed him off, but then made him go, Oh!, and gave him an idea. No. Here was a man who might notice a bloody and magnificent sunset over the city but not really see it, because he couldn’t see something like that unless he was on vacation, wearing shorts and sandals and with a glass of pinot noir in his hand. Am I making sense?”

  “Well, no, not really.”

  “It’s the difference between cold-blooded and taken-on-the-volley decisions. If you get your arm caught in a bear trap and then you see a hungry grizzly thundering down the trail, you have a choice: cut off your arm or die, right there. No time to think. Boom, you do it. But if you get caught in a trap and then nothing happens for a day you have to deliberately consider what it means to cut your own arm off. You have to worry about whether or not you’ve made the right decision. Even when you pick up your Swiss Army knife you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. When you lay the blade against your skin you wonder. Even when you’ve cut through the skin and fat and muscle, severed the first tendon, are unfolding the saw for the bone, you think, It’s not too late to stop.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t talk about things like that.” His head had pulled back, the way a cat’s does when you peel an orange. “And I don’t understand how adopting a child is like . . .” He flapped his hand squeamishly.

  “It’s not about having kids. It’s about everything. It’s about the fact that with rescuing Luz, it was the bear trap and the bear, but with my mother, with adoption, it’s a deliberate choice.”

  “Ah. Your mother.”

  I moved my tea to one side.

  “Love isn’t like losing an arm,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. Except it’s your autonomy, not your arm.”

  “It’s not the same. Look”—he tapped the table until I did, literally, look at him—“you talk about control and order and structure, but that’s not really who you are. No, let me finish. You do plan and prepare and practice, and you do like your life to be orderly, but—Okay. Think of it this way. You’re standing on a deserted road in Arkansas with a small child and suddenly a woman pulls a gun. You’re in someone’s house and the intruder turns out to have a knife. You’re driving down the street and the car in front of you hits black ice. What do you do?”

  “Whatever it takes.” Fast and free and fluid.

  “You improvise. Exactly. That’s what life is, one big improv session.”

  “Improvisation is not . . . reliable.”

  “No. But that’s the way it is—”

  Shoulds don’t matter.

  “—life is about doing the best you can. Living with ambiguity. Risking failure. Letting go of the notion of perfection.”

  We reflected on our shoes for a while.

  “So tell me more about this furniture you hated so much.”

  “I didn’t hate it,” I said, surprised. “It was fascinating. Some of the pieces looked as impossible as the flight of a jumbo jet.” Yet they had cried out to be touched. For the drawer to be pulled in and out, sliding with the extravagant precision of a luxury handgun. For flesh and bone to trace the intersection of one plane with another, follow the distribution of tension across space, weigh the amazement of an empty fulcrum—a false one, a joke, if you like—until you figure out the real center. Yet it had all felt like lies. “You know what it was? It wouldn’t just stand there and be. It tried to hide behind its own cleverness. It wasn’t brave.”

  “Furniture as philosophy?”

  “You’d think so, from the catalogue.” I related snippets of the catalogue blurb, quoting liberally from the artists’ statements.

  “They said it was what?” he said.

  “A chair taken seriously as such,” I repeated. “A chair truly interrogated, a chair raised to the level of a question.”

  “Is that right,” he said, and shook his head, and we both laughed.

  ON THE drive to the Tully’s in Ballard, the sun came out and stayed out, and the car began to smell comfortably of Dornan’s new leather jacket and the bag of unground beans he’d bought on Capitol Hill. The red brick of the side streets glowed and for a moment the city looked almost European.

  I’d let him pick the radio station. He chose jazz. I listened and tried to understand why people liked it. It reminded me of the Wiram furniture: afraid to stand still and be known.

  “About my mother,” I said. “She sent e-mail from the plane last night. She’s arriving this afternoon and will call my room at the Edgewater.” Only Dornan, Luz, and Bette had my cell phone number. “They’ll be jet-lagged, so I’ll meet her for an early cocktail in her suite, their suite, and spend more time with her tomorrow—which is when you can meet her, if you like.”

  He nodded. “We’re still on for visiting your film set this evening?”

  “Yes.” I slowed
behind a pickup truck that seemed to think twenty-five miles an hour was degenerate and risky. “After lunch, do you want to go to the museum?”

  “Shouldn’t you be getting back in case your mum calls?”

  “I spent too many years as a child sitting and waiting for a phone call.” I accelerated past the truck.

  “I think we could slow down a little.”

  “Sorry.” I eased back on the accelerator.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you considered taking her a gift of something, a present? Flowers, maybe.”

  “Flowers?”

  “I always take my mum flowers.”

  He liked his mother.

  AFTER LUNCH I went to the Pike Place market and bought calla lilies, and then walked along Western to buy a Loetz glass vase—art nouveau, in iridescent blue-green and silver—to put them in. When I got back to my dim hotel room, I filled the vase and trimmed the flowers and wondered how I would get the full vase and loose flowers to the Fairmont. So I put the stems in two tooth mugs—I had to prop the flowers against the bathroom mirror— poured the water out of the vase, and dried it with a towel, which left lint all over it. And then the lilies, which were too long to stay in the tooth mugs, fell out and smeared the mirror with pollen, which, when I wiped it away with a hand towel, stained the white cotton deep orange. I started to feel the way I had when I was five and had tried, for Mother’s Day—which in England is in March—to make a collage of spring flowers poking through the snow from sugar paper and glue and Rice Crispies, and ended up ruining the granite counter in the kitchen. The smell of the lilies was thick and cloying, and the center of the flowers, with their deep, speckled pink throats and thrusting yellow stamen tongues, looked diseased. I threw them in the bin.

  The room was too hot and smelled heavy and sweet, like rotting jungle. My scalp itched with sweat. My heart rate was high, close to ninety, my breathing shallow, my muscles trembling very slightly. Dornan and his stupid caffeine.

  I called room service and ordered chamomile tea, and then opened the armoire, sat on the bed, and surveyed my wardrobe.

  My mother was used to the high fashion of London, and if we had been meeting in a chic restaurant in, say, Atlanta, the occasion would have demanded the Vera Wang dress or the Armani or Max Mara suit, but this was Seattle, and I was her daughter, and the meeting would be private.

  The first time I remembered my mother talking about clothes was when I was ten years old and we went shopping together. Normally, I would go with my father, when he was in town, or one of my mother’s smooth-faced assistants. I picked whatever I liked, without consultation, and they paid. Sometimes, if I was in Yorkshire, I went with my friend, Christie Horley, the Honourable Miss Christie, whose purse was held by her nanny, or, on rare occasions, her older sister. At those times Christie and I picked things for each other, commented rudely on each other’s choices, laughed, tried on something else. On the day I went with my mother to the designer boutique of a London department store to find a jacket, I wasn’t sure who was supposed to choose. I would lift a hanger from the rail, hold the jacket against myself, and look at my mother. She would nod in her noncommittal diplomat’s way: I acknowledge the jacket. I got more and more restless; I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what, or what to do about it. Looking back, she probably had no more idea of how to go mother-daughter shopping than I did, and neither of us was capable of simply asking the other for opinions or suggestions: asking made one vulnerable. Eventually, after about fifteen jackets, clumsy with self-consciousness and embarrassment, I tried to jam the hanger back on the wrong rail, which was full, and the jacket fell on the floor. I wanted her to hold out her arms, I wanted to run away and cry, I wanted to kill something. “This is a stupid shop and I don’t want a stupid jacket!” She nodded, picked up her purse, and said, With clothes, err on the side of elegance: rich but simple, in color, cut, and cloth. I nodded as though I understood, and she stood, and we left. We went to a tea shop and drank coffee. What we wear sends a message, she said, as though we’d been having a continuous discussion on the matter. It broadcasts our confidence, our means, our taste. You can insult a host by underdressing, and hurt a friend by overdressing. If in doubt, choose simple style and top-quality cloth. Casual elegance.

  It was useful advice, but I had gone home that day without a jacket, and I never went shopping with my mother again.

  I wondered, as I pulled on a sleek, forest green silk-and-cashmere turtleneck, beautifully cut lamb’s wool skirt, and four-hundred-dollar boots, if my mother had any friends. It was difficult to picture her at a party other than a polished diplomatic function. No nightclubs, or walking tours of the Mediterranean, or weekends in wine country. I couldn’t imagine where she had met Eric. I remembered the photo of her, laughing. Perhaps a charity hacking event. Did they shop together? For what kind of clothes?

  I popped loose a button taking off the skirt. She’d married a man who liked fast cars and Gilbert and Sullivan; the suede trousers would be more suitable.

  On the way out, I put the lily-laden wastebasket in the corridor to be emptied. The smell made me want to retch. I put the Loetz vase on the backseat of the car where I would see it tomorrow and remember to return it. I opened all four windows.

  Halfway down Second Avenue, I changed my mind, and instead of continuing to University Street, turned right on Stewart and drove to Pike Place. The market was closing and stank of fish-slimed tile and discarded ice. All the flower stalls but one were shut tight, and that was in the process of closing.

  “Wait,” I said, “I need some flowers.”

  “Not much left, but take pick,” the tiny Korean woman said.

  There were no roses or orchids, no lilies or carnations, nothing left but the kind of raggedy garden flowers that were one step up from weeds: snapdragons and gerbera daisies and freesias. They smelled light and lovely, and their colors were bright and cheerful. The exact opposite of elegance. I bought a handful of each, and gave her an extra twenty dollars for the plastic bucket of water to stand them in until I got to the hotel.

  BETWEEN THE valet parking station and the reception desk in the lobby of the Fairmont, two bellboys offered to carry my sloshing bucket and little vase. When I gave my name at the desk, the receptionist summoned the special elevator, then asked if I’d need any help getting to the Presidential Suite. If she had said, Ma’am, that bucket is ugly, please let one of the staff take it up via the service elevator so our guests won’t have to see it, I might have accepted. Instead I took a perverse delight in pretending to misunderstand. “Oh, it’s not heavy, but thank you.” She nodded in that You are of course crazy, but you’re the customer and, hey, it takes all kinds Seattle way, and appeared unperturbed when I changed my mind and told her I’d take the flowers and leave the bucket with her, and did she have any spare tissue paper to wrap the vase?

  THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE had double doors and a bell push. My first surprise was that my mother answered the door herself. The second was that her hair was almost wholly grey. I was still staring at it when she plucked the vase and flowers from me, put them on a table, and took both my hands in hers. They felt smaller than they should have, and very cool.

  “Aud,” she said, and we stood there without speaking, and then she ran her thumbs over the backs of my knuckles. It had been twenty-five years since she’d done that, but my body remembered, and it was telling me I should be half my mother’s height, while my eyes told me I was, in fact, an inch taller. She smiled, squeezed, and let go. My hands sank to my sides, though in some alternate reality they reached out. “Aud, I would like you to meet my husband, Eric Loedessoel. Eric, this is my daughter, Aud.”

  A man stepped forward from nowhere, and the world snapped back to its proper dimensions. I held out my hand, he grasped it in his, and shook vigorously.

  “Aud, I am so very, very pleased to meet you.” A mid-Atlantic accent. We were spea
king English, then. I looked at his hand, and he let go. He smiled. The dental work was not visible. “My apologies,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve wanted to meet you for so long.”

  “The flowers,” I said. “They need to be in water.” I looked around for the usual efficient assistant.

  “Come and sit,” my mother said, and picked up the vase and flowers and moved through the double doors to the sitting room. She even moved differently, as though she had been unbound in some way. Eric and I followed.

  There were flowers everywhere, huge formal arrangements in stately vases. A purple petal fell off one of the snapdragons and settled forlornly on the red carpet. She pointed to a sofa upholstered in cream-striped beige silk.

  “I won’t be a moment.” She stepped into the guest bathroom and ran water. Now that I couldn’t see her I realized I had no idea what she was wearing. Something green?

  “Aud?” I looked up. Eric gestured at a wet bar, and a row of bottles and glasses. “Something to drink?”

  “A kamikaze,” I said, just to see how he’d handle it.

  “Ah. Well, a kamikaze just happens to be one of the hundreds of cocktails I have no idea how to make.” His shoulders were loose and relaxed. “If you have your heart set on one, we could figure it out between us. Failing that, we can get the bar to send one up, or I could promise you I’ll learn how to make it for next time, and meanwhile make you something I’m more familiar with.”

  I said nothing.

  His pause was very brief. “I understand gin and French pretty well, but admittedly only straight up and on the dry side. I understand a good malt whiskey and fine bourbon. Your mother made sure we have akevit— though I tell you frankly I don’t know good from bad—and of course we have a variety of beer. Or we could simply try the wine the hotel sommelier recommended to match the food.”

  On the table, not at all hidden by the flowers, were three beading bottles of white wine, two decanters of red, and an ice bucket with champagne. In the center was an artful arrangement of silver salvers: seafood, antipasti, salad, and glistening caviar with the old-fashioned accompaniments of toast points and minced onion and chopped egg.