The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “No. You don’t get to use this woo-woo bullshit anymore. You’re twenty-seven years old,” Alice said, over Margaret’s cries and continued pleas that they not tell Mac what they’d seen.

  The tears on her face did make her look like a teenager, and the other three felt as helpless and enraged as children looking at her, bickering about whether or not to tattle.

  “Slow down, calm down,” Ji Sun said, and, to Alice, “I’m worried she’s going to hyperventilate.”

  “If you’re not even going to listen to me—”

  “We are listening to you, what—”

  There was a knock on the door, and Mac entered before they answered.

  “Margaret, my God, what’s happened? What’s going on?” He cast a look of accusation at each one of them, save Margaret, in turn.

  “You should sit down,” Alice said.

  “Alice, no!” Margaret yelped, tears streaming.

  Alice didn’t look at Margaret, but something passed over her face. “Actually, we’re fine, we’re handling this,” Alice said to Mac. “We’re just, we’re having an intense talk. It’s heated. But we’re fine.”

  Margaret nodded, rubbed her nose on her bare arm.

  “Oh, sweetness, what is it? Margaret, what happened?” Mac took Margaret in his arms.

  Alice had decided for them, then, that they would not say. Lainey and Ji Sun looked at one another, each one testing whether the other agreed to this.

  But Margaret burst out with it before they could decide.

  “Mac, he kissed me! It just happened, he was just, I probably led him on, I’m so sorry.” She let herself fall onto the bed, and Mac sat with her.

  “What? Kissed who? What are you talking about?”

  “Laurent. Your teenaged cousin,” Alice said, and to his credit, she thought Mac’s face displayed a proper horror then, though it passed quickly, as his wife shook and wept on his shoulder.

  “What? Laurent? Oh, no. Oh, God, no! He kissed you?”

  “It was an accident. It didn’t mean anything, he didn’t mean it, I mean.” Margaret wiped her eyes and looked at Mac. “Of course it didn’t mean anything, it just, it just happened!” She wailed again, and by now they heard rustling from other rooms, Colette stirring, maybe, or Adam and Kushi wondering where everyone had gone.

  “Jesus,” Mac said. “What a mess. Where is he? Laurent? Should I talk to him? That is kind of messed up. He shouldn’t be kissing you!”

  Alice opened her mouth to speak, raised one pointed finger toward Margaret. But she didn’t say a thing. She turned on her heels and left the room, and Lainey and Ji Sun followed. They left Margaret to Mac and they crept back to their bedrooms. Unsure of what to say to one another, they said nothing.

  Chapter 31

  Laurent’s parents would never engage in anything as tasteless as a police report, but still, Margaret and Mac were cast out of the house after breakfast, and the others went to their respective rooms and packed as well.

  Lainey folded the eyelet negligee she’d purchased for this trip, her stupid Connecticut sex costume, and scowled at Adam.

  “Can you even believe this? Margaret! What the fuck. Jesus.” She’d woken with a brick of a hangover, new to her in the second half of her twenties, and only when she mixed too much wine with pot. Part of her wondered whether she’d hallucinated what had happened. She wanted to talk to Ji Sun and Alice about what they had seen, but she wanted also to believe that she had dreamed it.

  “And on top of this we have to leave now, too?”

  Adam touched the hem of the nightie as she tucked it away in her bag.

  “Well, it’s not as though we have to leave this minute.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Are you kidding me? You cannot be serious right now.”

  “I just meant that we have a bit. Alice needs to change her flight.” He pulled his duffel bag out of the closet. He looked at ease in this, their own wing, even sullied by association, as he did anywhere, hair in its foppish swoop, his lean, athletic body making even his T.J. Maxx chinos look tailored. She looked at his ass, how adult it looked, how much of a man he was, and felt a pang of remorse for Margaret, that something was so curdled inside her that she could look at a child and feel it was okay to reach for him, kiss him.

  She thought, too, of Laurent’s older sister, Colette, svelte and seventeen, coltish, she’d thought right away when she learned her name, saw her legs, and everyone on the property thought of sex when then they looked at her in her tennis whites, Lainey knew.

  “It’s so fucked up. So fucked up!”

  “Laurent will be okay. They’re French! They don’t even register this in the way of their Connecticut cousins.”

  French mouths were different, Lainey would allow. Mouths were how you knew someone was French, she had learned that on the train in Paris the summer after her sophomore year—the shapes their lips made. Even out of earshot it was clear who spoke French, though Lainey couldn’t tell, when she saw other foreigners, what languages they spoke, not even English. There was just something to a French mouth, she reasoned, and wrote so in a postcard that she never sent home. She’d thought she would spend the whole summer drunk and kissing artists along the Seine, but instead she smoked and read feminist theory, fumbled through a tormented, jealous relationship with an older British woman with whom she still exchanged recipes over email.

  “How can you say that?” She looked at Adam. “How do you know how this will affect him, down the road?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I think what happened was deeply messed up, but I don’t know that it’s going to do lasting damage to Laurent. I mean, I hope it won’t.”

  “What, so teen boys can’t be . . .” Lainey looked for the word she wanted. “Assaulted?”

  “Assaulted? She said he kissed her, and she just didn’t pull away fast enough!”

  Lainey crossed her arms over her chest.

  “What, you don’t believe her?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t know. It just, it didn’t look quite like that,” she said, and tried to call up the scene in her head. Where had their hands been? Why had they looked so enmeshed, for a kiss that wasn’t meant to happen at all? What was she forgetting, what was she inventing already? What exactly had she seen?

  “Something about it just didn’t seem like that.” She shook involuntarily, a full body blech.

  This was Margaret, then, always doing whatever she felt moved to do, and always, by her beauty, getting away with it. Lainey felt no desire to kiss Laurent, but she wondered, if she kissed Colette, would she be forgiven so easily? Lainey knew herself to be pretty, fit, desirable, sexy, Adam told her, so fucking sexy, sometimes said with a growl and a look that suggested he was getting away with something, a look that aroused her more than the words. But her looks didn’t put her in this category where she would be given soft landing wherever she crashed; she didn’t have the sort of face that, even crinkled into guilty sobs, everyone in the house had been conditioned since birth to want to rescue. Would Lainey never get used to this? Now, no longer living with Margaret, seeing her face stunned and stung Lainey anew each time. Oh, yes, she really is this remarkable to look at; I’d hoped I misremembered somehow.

  Had she imagined then, that Laurent’s father looked jealous when he’d learned what Margaret had done? Lainey, hurrying back to her own room after filching a Diet Coke from the kitchen, heard Clémence explain in French what happened, the hard edge of indignation weaponizing even the amorous word bisou. Lainey stopped and watched as Bart lifted his espresso cup, and first said Margaret’s name, alone, in that dreamy indolent way that better suited her, Mahgahreeht, so unlike the way Lainey and her friends did, Margruht, the name a toad might say if it could speak.

  Lainey watched Bart place his cup down on its saucer, thought she could see him working up an appropriate outrage. But that moment, cup a
loft, eyebrows raised, seemed to last forever, his expression of surprise, yes, but also curiosity, jealousy, pride. All these things he thought were private, Lainey could see them on his face, feel them radiating off him in that way she’d always been able to read people. It drew them to her, she knew, as people wanted more than anything to be seen, have themselves mirrored back. It was part of what was such a relief about being with Adam, the way he didn’t demand this of her, but let her be herself in all her messiness and transition, loved her whatever her mood or hair color, whatever she decided she desired that day: to have, to be.

  She looked at Adam now, his duffel bag already zipped on the end of the bed, and she decided she would fuck him one more time before they left this warren after all. It had felt perverse, when Adam first suggested it, but now it seemed like the only way to clean the bad taste from her mouth, shake loose the cloud of what had happened. To not have sex was to sit in the disgust and confusion she felt, controlled by Margaret, forced into feeling whatever shame it was Margaret lacked. Lainey peeled off her top and her pants and kissed Adam, guided him to his knees and did give more thought than usual to the stubble on his face, his man-size hands on her thighs, before his work between her legs made her forget to think of anything.

  Chapter 32

  Alice wasn’t thinking of Margaret as she boarded the plane to fly to her conference, but instead, of her own ovaries, organs to which she’d become attuned to a degree she would have previously considered psychotic. She was sure she could feel the right one open, bloom like a flower and send one perfect egg aloft. She knew there was something close to a three-day window in which she could conceive; she was trained as a biologist, for chrissakes, had nearly chosen ob-gyn as her specialty a year earlier, before deciding on family medicine. But trying to conceive, or TTC, as the message boards put it, had shaken loose all sorts of magical and demented thinking, and she found herself looking around the plane for someone who looked remotely like Kushi to invite into the tiny bathroom and knock her up, anything not to miss this vanishingly small window of fertility that she knew would close as quickly as it had opened.

  An older white man, fat and frail, approached her aisle. She ruled him out as a candidate to impregnate her, laughed to herself, but because she was so serious, not because she was kidding. She might laugh later at how crazed she had become, but it was hard to imagine that now, and she was shocked by how profoundly hormones had already colonized her body and mind, even as she only tried—and failed—to conceive. The man’s crotch was at Alice’s eye level as he shoved his bags overhead, and she wondered whether there was still sperm enough inside her to fertilize the egg she could feel floating down now. She’d planned to insert a menstrual cup after morning sex, but after the shit show with Margaret, they hadn’t had sex at all.

  The night before, after returning to her room, she’d navigated to Margaret’s Facebook page, looked through her posts as though there might be some answers there to what happened in that room, to what was wrong with her friend. She scrolled through an album of wedding photos and stopped, stunned to see one of Margaret and Laurent, Margaret bent low to get her face right next to Laurent’s, both of them making peace signs and goofy grins. In the photograph, Laurent is maybe eight or nine, wearing a navy tuxedo with a bow tie, missing one of his canine teeth. She’d been so upset by the photograph that she decided to wake Kushi, tell him what had happened.

  Alice was relieved he was appalled and concerned, not even a little dismissive. She squeezed him so hard that he asked whether she was okay. She couldn’t explain why she’d worried that he would think she was making too big of a deal of it. Maybe she wanted to be making too big a deal of it, wanted to be told there was nothing to worry about.

  “Yikes, what is wrong with her?” Kushi shook his head.

  “She didn’t, but, well, she didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “Yeah, but she can’t be kissing thirteen-year-olds, what the fuck.”

  “No, I know. Of course not! It’s just, it’s like your family—you can say whatever you like about them, but when someone else does, even if it’s true, you get defensive, you know?”

  “Right, but that’s the case when it’s like your uncle is maybe a little bit racist. Not when someone kisses a kid.”

  He was a kid, Kushi was right. He was a child.

  They called themselves children, sometimes, still, when they meant they wanted someone to do their laundry and figure out how to organize the piles of paperwork that came addressed to them now, more every year after college. Enough of their classmates had moved back in with their parents after graduating that Op-Eds regularly lamented the endless postadolescence of their generation. But they weren’t children, even if they lived off their parents or their partners’ parents, even if they felt like children now, waiting for someone to tell them how to deal with what Margaret had done. The same way a new baby makes a toddler a giant, Margaret kissing Laurent showed what an adult Margaret was, even if she didn’t behave as one.

  They hadn’t even taken off and already Alice felt she might vomit, but had the irrational idea that doing so would put a potential pregnancy at risk, as though she had to keep all fluids in her body, even the noxious ones. If she could have physically removed the memory of what she’d seen, she would have. In a split second, no question. To not have to recast what she knew about Margaret, the whole story she told about her friend. Maybe leaving the room when she had was a version of this anyway, letting Margaret tell Mac what she liked, letting the shape the story took come from a person who—whatever the rest of them had seen in their shock and haze—they could all agree should not be the one to tell it.

  “That’s me,” a lean, tan man said. “You’re me.” He waggled his boarding pass in her face.

  “Oh, sure. I’m sorry. I was standby—I thought this was me.” Alice felt woozy as she stood.

  “Nope. It’s all me, honey,” he said.

  Alice had the urge to sock him in the face, but didn’t even say “Don’t honey me.” She felt too tender and weirdly frightened to make her usual stink, to sass and swear, to put this self-important businessman in his place. She had been rearranged by what she’d seen the night before, and she resented the creeping worry, didn’t want to give in to the bad feelings swirling in her, convinced as she was that a positive attitude was also essential for egg fertilization.

  Before they began TTC, Alice said having a child was something she wanted to do with Kushi rather than just do for its own sake, and she could remember saying so, moony and pleased with herself, cupping her cappuccino with two hands, sunlight on what felt then like fat, fertile cheeks, telling her friends this, borrowing it from Margaret, really, who’d sat with Alice in the same corner booth and talked about how having children was a “life project” she wanted to share with Mac. Alice had done her same dance of dismissing the notion as goofy before realizing how right and romantic it was, count on Margaret to say aloud things that might embarrass the rest of them, the things they all needed someone else to articulate about their own hearts’ truest desires. Of course that was the way one should enter into the work of bringing a baby into the world! Even from a medical standpoint this idea of a life project reflected the sort of environment in which a baby would thrive, cared for by parents who loved one another and yearned for the work of raising a child.

  But each month that she got her period rather than the two blue lines, she moved further away from this notion, from anything fuzzy and sentimental, felt the hunger of an animal, reproductive organs voracious, activating areas of her brain that had never lit up before, such as the part that thought it was a wise idea to fuck anyone on this plane who bore a passing resemblance to her husband.

  The window in which it would be less of an impediment to her career to have a baby was quickly closing, had already closed, really, once you factored in that any baby not conceived on this flight would be born months into her potential fell
owship year, might derail her chances of getting a fellowship, would certainly derail her advancement. If she wasn’t pregnant by October, they would get an official diagnosis of “unexplained infertility,” and even though she knew this was only for insurance purposes, and so they could try IUI, or explore IVF, it was demoralizing to stare down the official label, the failure implicit in that “unexplained.” Wasn’t anything “unexplained” her fault? Kushi was so careful to say each month that they couldn’t blame themselves, nor each other. And she believed that he wasn’t blaming her, not consciously. But she was the vessel. It was her womb that came up short each month; it felt like her mystery.

  The tan man beside her was barking into his phone now, though they’d already been asked to put their electronic devices away. Alice could taste his aftershave, astringent and aquatic, like the body sprays marketed to middle-schoolers. She had a sudden, throbbing headache, wondered if anyone in another middle seat would be willing to trade before takeoff. Turning her head made it worse. She closed her eyes.

  Where had Margaret’s hand been? On Laurent’s knee? On her own hip? Behind him on the bed? Nearer to his groin or touching it? His penis? None of them had wanted to ask or wonder. They had seen them kissing, this was bad enough. If it was worse, they were worse still, because they learned in not asking that they were the sort of people to look away.

  As a child, Alice had once seen a woman strike a small girl in a grocery store, and she’d tugged at her mother’s arm, asked her what they should do. It isn’t ours to intervene, her mother sniffed, and they hurried out to their car. This was something her mother said often enough that it had been a joke between Alice and her siblings—a box of cereal snatched away, It isn’t yours to intervene! a report card swiped from the desk, It isn’t ours to intervene! But there, in public, with the howls of the child still filling her ears, Alice had understood it in a way that would become useful to her later, how decorum and abdication were wed, how willful the former was in rejecting any acknowledgment of the ruinous mess of life, how essential this was not only to her mother’s worldview, but to her family’s survival. It was a year before what happened with her brother, but she remembers it now as part of the same summer somehow, when she realized no one was ever going to see her brother’s cruelty the way she did, when it became clear to Alice that she was on her own. She thought sometimes that though the price was too high, she’d gotten out just in time, before they’d worn her down, before she relented, accepted her family’s philosophy that to look away was the only way. But here she was now, looking away with the rest of them from what Margaret did. It was more complicated than she’d believed as a girl. Or maybe it wasn’t. How could she tell which parts of becoming an adult served some greater good, and which were just good worn down, convenience?