by Maile Meloy
“Come home with me,” he said.
“I can’t. I should go.” She felt dizzy.
“Then I’ll walk you home.”
They got outside in the cool air, beneath the concrete legs that held up the top-heavy library, and Abby wanted to sit down on the steps. She kept walking, with Peter beside her, and tried to think the dizziness down. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. She smelled the eucalyptus trees overhead, and tasted his come in the back of her throat, and she couldn’t stop shivering. Outside her building, she said, “This is me.”
“Is your roommate home?”
“Probably.”
“Are you all right? You seem cold.”
“I’m okay.”
“I don’t like leaving you here.”
“It’s where I live,” she said lightly.
“Can I see you tomorrow?”
She gave some vague answer and escaped up the stairs and into the empty room, where she dropped her bag and lay down. She thought of meditation classes with her mother and tried to breathe evenly, but thinking of her mother didn’t help. Some of the girls on her hallway talked about how horrified their mothers would be to know they were having sex. Abby thought her problem was the opposite: her mother would understand sex, especially wrongheaded sex, because it was exactly what Clarissa would do.
When she knew she could stand up safely, she started to move around the room packing up her clothes and books. She couldn’t look too closely at the decision, but she had already made it. She called her academic adviser, knowing she would get the machine, and explained that she was needed at home. There was a problem with her father’s estate, and solving it would help her gain closure. She thought the word closure would help, with the adviser. In the morning she left a note for Miranda and started the long drive home.
21
MARGOT’S YOUNGER SON, Danny, had been working in El Salvador with a Jesuit volunteer group. Neither of her sons was devout—they were boys of their generation—but Danny wanted to travel and help people, so he had been digging latrines ad majorem Dei gloriam . Owen was meeting him at the airport, and Margot had just put the sheets on Danny’s bed and was washing the breakfast dishes when her mother called.
“I’m worried about Jamie,” Yvette said.
Margot squeezed out the sponge in the sink. “What is it now?”
“He just seems so lost. I think we didn’t pay him enough attention when he was little. Or I didn’t.”
“You paid him all your attention. Everyone did. He was the darling.”
“But he’s had so much trouble getting started,” Yvette said.
Margot put a glass in the sink. “That’s because he’s used to being the darling,” she said. “When the world didn’t adore him as much as we did, he got confused.”
“Do you really think that’s it?”
“Yes,” Margot said. She wiped down the kitchen counter with a sponge. Owen had left the tiny white grains from an English muffin scattered around the toaster. Some of the grains caught in the grout between the smooth tiles. Sometimes, in dark moments, Margot thought: This is what my life amounts to. I wipe up English muffin debris from tile grout, I sort laundry, I tidy before the housekeeper comes. I cook dinner, raise funds, host parties. I reassure my mother on the phone.
“I think about it all the time, about how he seems to have lost his way,” Yvette said. “It makes me so sad.”
Margot rinsed the sponge and watched the grains fall into the sink, and wrestled with the usual feelings of guilt and impatience she felt about Jamie. “He’ll find his way,” she said. “He has an indestructible ego, and that will help.”
“He does?”
“We gave it to him,” she said. “He had three adoring females instead of one.”
“I guess.” Her mother sounded unconvinced.
“You can’t blame yourself, Mom. Why not take credit for the good things? He’s fun. People like him. He grew up with teenagers so he was a teenager early, and now he’s a teenager late. That’s his character. It’s not the end of the world.”
“I blame myself for Clarissa,” her mother said sadly.
Margot felt another stab of guilt. She hadn’t tried to draw attention from her sister—she had been good because there was pleasure in being approved of. But maybe she had, unconsciously, wanted all the approval for herself. She put the clean glasses away in the cupboard. “Clarissa got a little lost in the middle,” she said.
“I wish she’d found a man like Owen.”
Margot laughed. “She would have lasted two minutes with Owen.”
“Clarissa loves him.”
“She loves him as a brother-in-law and an idea,” Margot said.
“You know she could never have married him. I’m surprised she lasted so long with Henry.”
“So what kind of man did she need?”
Margot paused. “Maybe no man,” she said finally.
“Oh, that,” Yvette said. “You don’t think that’s just a reaction to Henry?”
“Well,” Margot said carefully, “I think we have to take her at her word.”
Yvette said, “I guess so. I still haven’t told your father. I find it so hard to believe. If you met that Del—”
But the door had opened, and Owen walked in with a shaggy young man.
“Danny’s here, Mom,” Margot said. “He has a beard!”
Danny stroked his face, self-conscious. “It’s hard to shave where I’m living.”
“It’s your grandma Yvette,” she said. “Say hello.”
He did, and then they said good-bye, and Margot kissed her son, feeling the strange roughness of the beard against her cheek. She felt a rush of gratitude that she was secure in the family she had made, and not beholden to the one she had come from.
“I’ll shave it off,” Danny said.
“I don’t care!”
She felt instantly, in her son’s presence, that her life did have importance. She was glad she had never been tempted away by something wilder. She would sort laundry and cook meals for the rest of her life, to keep these boys clothed and fed, to keep feeling this overpowering love for the adults they had become.
22
ABBY HAD BEEN INher father’s house a week, without doing anything about his estate except spend it on eight-dollar sandwiches, when she came in to the phone ringing. She answered because it could be Peter, but it was Jamie.
“Where are you?” she asked. It was dark in the kitchen, and she turned on the light and checked the lock on the door.
“I guessed you might be there,” Jamie said. “I wasn’t going to call.”
“I hear you’ve taken up with Holly Golightly.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Is it true?”
“Just talk to me a little,” Jamie said. “Say nice things.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You can talk about this girl,” she said. “I won’t be jealous.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you writing?”
“Sort of.”
“What are you wearing?”
Abby laughed. “Don’t start that.”
“I’m sort of kidding.”
“You sound so sad,” she said. “What has she done to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the problem, I’m not sure. It might be fine. I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t sound fine.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll find out, and then I’ll know.”
23
JAMIE WOKE UPin the blue room from a dream he had already forgotten. It was dark and he was alone. Saffron and Martin had been playing War, and the cards were still on the rug. It was four a.m. in the blue light on his watch, and he got up from the couch and made his way to the stairs. He climbed to the second floor quietly, avoiding the creaking step at the top, and went down the hall to Martin’s room. The door
was closed, and he stood outside, listening. He didn’t hear anything, but they might be asleep by now. He couldn’t explain himself if he opened the door and woke Martin alone, so he moved down the hall to the room he shared with Saffron. That door was closed, too, and he stood outside it, thinking through the possibilities:
If he opened it and found Saffron alone, he would be happy. It wouldn’t mean nothing had happened, but it might mean nothing had happened.
If he opened it and found no one, it would mean they were together in Martin’s room, and he would have to go open that door.
If he opened it and found Saffron and Martin together—But at the thought, a door in his brain slammed shut before he could see what they might look like. What would he do? Stab them in their sleep? Demand that Saffron take off the ring that was already hers? Stand there and fume and sputter like the humiliated fool he was?
He put his hand on the knob, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn it. He went back down the hall, past Martin’s silent door, stepped over the creaking stair, and returned to the couch where he had made the mistake of falling asleep early. He lay there listening to the house, and fell asleep again sometime before morning.
He woke up to Saffron putting a coffee cup on the side table. Her hair had been piled up on her head in the way she kept it out of the shower. The loose hairs at the back of her neck were damp, and she smelled like soap.
“Good morning,” she said. “Did you sleep well?”
“You were going to wake me up,” he said.
“You looked so comfortable.”
“Why,” he asked, “when I fall asleep before you, do you take a shower in the morning?”
She looked puzzled. “I do?”
“Twice now.”
“Sometimes I take a shower and sometimes I don’t.”
“You never used to take a shower. You’re going to swim later anyway.”
“What is it you think?”
“What do you think I think?”
“You say it.”
But Martin Russell came downstairs then. He wore a blue bathrobe and didn’t look like he’d been in the shower.
“You look disgustingly rested,” he said to Jamie. “I need to start sacking out early, too.”
He passed by the couch, and Jamie breathed in, to see if he could smell Saffron on him, but all he could smell was the coffee she had left for him on the side table.
That night on the porch, after dinner, Saffron sat on the wide arm of Jamie’s Adirondack chair, her feet tucked up and her back against his shoulder. Martin yawned and stretched. “I’m beat,” he said. “Good night, you two. Be good.”
Jamie had felt like he had the upper hand, with Saffron sitting so close to him. But Martin’s elaborate show of going to bed made the use of Saffron seem like a gift, something Martin could easily afford. The light was starting to fade, and the blue twilight made Jamie feel thwarted and old.
“Why are you so sulky?” Saffron asked, still perched on his chair.
“I’m not,” he said.
“You are, too,” she said. “You’ve been pouting all day, for no reason. It’s très mal élevé .”
“When I fall asleep—” he said.
She waited, watching him.
“When you stay up,” he said.
“Yes?”
“What do you do?”
Saffron said nothing for a minute. “Do you really want to know?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Would it bother you if I were doing this?” She leaned over to kiss him, her hair brushing his chest.
“Yes,” he said hoarsely.
“Why do you care, as long as I’m here now?”
“I care,” he said, and he slid a hand up under her dress. “Do you let him touch you like this?”
“Maybe.”
“ Doyou?”
“Yes,” she said.
He picked her up, clumsily, and carried her inside to the couch in the blue room. Ten minutes passed in which she was his alone, and then something about the expert way she helped his cock inside her filled him with jealousy again.
“Does he fuck you like this?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“Does he fuck your mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Does he fuck your ass?”
“Yes.”
“He does ?”
“No!” she said. “Jesus. I’m just saying that. Don’t stop.”
When they finished, they said nothing for a while.
“Are you going to tell me the real answers?” he finally asked.
She sighed.
“You’re engaged to me,” he said. “You’re supposed to become my wife. Do you want that?”
“I think so,” she said. “But I never know what I want until it comes up.”
“That could be a problem.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you really fucking him?” he asked. “Because I swear I’ll kill him.”
“Then no, ” she said. “I’m really not.”
“Okay, I didn’t mean that. Just tell me the truth.”
She propped herself on an elbow and studied him. “I’m not,” she said. “I thought you wanted me to say those things. I thought it was a game. You kept asking.”
She could have passed a lie detector test; her eyes and her breathing were that steady. He almost believed her.
“There’s no one else,” she said. “I swear. I’m yours alone.”
24
IN THE MORNING, when Saffron woke up on the blue room couch, Jamie wasn’t there. She made coffee and took it upstairs to him, but he wasn’t in bed.
She went to the bathroom, and his razor and toothbrush were missing. His duffel bag and clothes weren’t in the closet. Downstairs, she sat at the kitchen counter where she had done some of the things with Martin that she had been foolish enough to tell Jamie about, and drank Jamie’s coffee.
“Morning, sweetheart,” Martin said, when he came into the kitchen. He poured himself a cup. “Jamie up?”
Saffron shook her head.
“Fancy a little morning entertainment?”
She shook her head again. “Jamie’s gone.”
The morning light through the kitchen windows lit up the left side of Martin’s hair. “Oh, Saffron, you didn’t tell him,” he said.
“Not really,” she said. “Well, sort of.”
Martin shook his head. “You silly girl. You had everything you wanted.”
“It wasn’t fair to him.”
“Nothing’s ever fair, you know that.”
“Maybe some things should be.”
Martin looked at her. “You mean if he came back, you would be faithful?”
“Sure.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Poor wanton Saffron.”
“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m an adult.”
Martin finished his coffee in a contemplative way and rinsed the cup in the sink.
“I have to leave today, too,” he said.
A feeling of panic rose up in her, which she associated with her parents’ suitcases suddenly in the hall, and the nanny having no explanations. “Are you afraid you’ll get stuck here with me?”
Martin laughed. “I just have to go to New York.”
“Are you coming back?”
“I don’t think you’ll stay in this house alone,” he said. “So there won’t be anything for me to come back to.”
“What will I do?” she asked, and her voice sounded small to her.
“This is the question we all wake up one day and have to answer,” he said. “You just put it off awhile. It will be interesting, to see what you do. I hope it’s something good.”
“Can I go with you to New York?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “That doesn’t count as doing something.”
“I could do something in New York.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “You could carry on with one of my friends, and keep me as your ne
w primary shareholder and cuckold.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” she said, though she guessed he was right.
“I know all your tricks.”
“I could design clothes.”
“I hear there’s a dire need for that,” he said. “More coffee?”
She shook her head, and he poured out the pot in the sink and turned off the coffeemaker.
“Now I’m going to get packed,” he said.
By lunchtime Martin, too, was gone.
Saffron was sitting alone on the porch feeling sorry for herself when the housekeeper brought a letter on her mother’s stationery, with the Argentina address engraved across the envelope flap. It was the first letter she’d had from her mother in months, and it was a measure of her misery that she was almost happy to get it.
25
ADOPTING THEROMANIANchild had seemed like a good idea to Josephine, especially when the newspapers were full of the fall of Ceausescu and the plight of the orphans. And she had been lonely, on her estancia in the unfashionable direction from Buenos Aires.
It wouldn’t have been unfashionable if Josephine had kept her social power, but life had conspired against her, and she hadn’t been able to draw the best people. Some of her investments failed, and she had overspent, and no longer had the money for grand parties. She had a fight with a woman who had loyal friends, and it was in the gossip columns. Even Taki picked it up. The woman had an old name, and some of her friends stopped coming to Josephine’s.
So the idea of a child to love her, the way her own daughter did not, seemed a beautiful consolation in her old age. The child would be grateful for its rescue from violence and poverty. Josephine would be putting to virtuous use the beautiful empty rooms—empty because houseguests came rarely now, one or two at a time, and left after a day or two. They might have stayed longer if Josephine hadn’t resented them so much. She had to think about menus when there were guests, and her confusion sent her running to the kitchen to intrude on the servants’ privacy, only to find that she had already discussed dinner with Gautier that morning.
