Alex was very proud of himself, proud enough of himself to break his two-year self-imposed Instagram embargo. I had talked him into it, to be fair — not the posting, he did that completely by his own choice, but the task I set him that he accomplished, mostly without whingeing about how hard it was. “It’s about time,” I told him. “You’re doing the trick of being bad at something so you’re not expected to pitch in. It’s not difficult, Al. We can do it together.”
And so, last Saturday afternoon, right before I left for my shift back in Berkeley, I talked him patiently through the proper assembly of a ham and cheese sandwich. What a simple task! Well, not for Al, who had convinced himself over the years that he was utterly hopeless at cooking anything, so there was no point of even trying to do anything more than use a fork to poke holes in the cellophane covering whatever that evening’s microwaveable dinner happened to be. He’s the man who will say, “It counts as cooking!” when he hands me a potholder I’ve asked for in order to pull a roast out of the oven. I’m kind of over it, now that the future of being his wife is beginning to pull into focus.
His entire family has an attitude of affected helplessness when it comes to the kitchen, like somehow it’s a charming Carr family quirk. It really isn’t, and it speaks more to how that family sees itself than anything else — a well-heeled clan brought low by the injustices of the world. (That assessment is only partially true; as Julian has said on more than one occasion, so many of the Carr Calamities come through impetuous shortsightedness and overconfidence in their judgment.) Until the twins were about 12, there was money enough in the family coffers to afford a housekeeper to take care of them all. I’m not talking about a Downton Abbey Mrs. Hughes/Carson, or even an Alice from the Brady Bunch. By Alex and Fenn’s telling, Abby Mitchell was never “Mrs. Mitchell” or “Abby” — she was “Mitch,” terrifyingly efficient, and just plain terrifying at times. Mitch handled cooking and maintenance of the house; acted as a sometime-companion to Cora after John’s death whenever Alex’s mum got bored or restless with the lack of adult conversation; managed the ever-dwindling bank accounts; and could quell Fenn’s tears or Alex’s rages with a swift, cold glare. “A sub-arctic, pale blue gaze, like frost on a robin’s egg,” Fenn described it to me once, “if that robin’s egg contained a dragon.”
Mitch was an indifferent to middling cook, but she did manage to turn out dinner — mostly tatties and mince, meat pies or those foul, nasty rollmops (can’t even link, so gross) — every night. Sometimes she’d make a curry, but mostly it was what passes for cuisine up there. (I have choked down haggis to be polite on a visit to Uncle B’s once with Julian as we passed through Edinburgh, and it’s not an experience I care to repeat.) And even though Alex and Fenn occasionally showed interest in learning how to prepare such delicacies, Cora would not permit any cookery lessons. Alex’s attention was better spent on schoolwork — while he was a little swot at maths and physics, his mastery did not extend to the French or British history or English or religious studies she expected him to learn (the last of these was particularly galling for Al, whose disbelief in any almighty power was fostered by very early exposure to the works of Ambrose Bierce). Fenn was dissuaded from learning any kitchen skills as Cora thought kitchen work to be a device of the patriarchy developed to keep women down. When Fenn asked why it was different for Mitch, Cora explained, “Well, darling, it’s different when you’re paying a woman to cook, rather than expect it for free” and left it at that. (Really, it was probably because Cora didn’t want Fenn to outshine her anywhere — their fierce, close, smothering competition and love is so perplexing to me.)
And when Mitch saw there might soon not be enough money coming in to pay her wages, she left the Carrs to their own devices after a respectable month’s notice. It was nearly enough time to teach Cora how to boil water for pasta (served with a jar of Dolmio marinara sauce), and to show the twins how to keep the solid-fuel Aga burning so that at least the kitchen was a sanctuary of some warmth. (Cora was okay with this, as Mr. Hardy was able to teach them both about thermodynamics in a tag team with Mitch.) Cora’s sister Prim brought a microwave to the house about a month after Mitch left, and introduced the family to ready meals from the Co-Op in town. Fenn grew carrots and turnips in the garden, and doused them in instant Bisto gravy. Occasionally Alex bought a tin of corned beef, one of the ones with a tiny key to aid in the opening, for himself as a treat. They were self-sufficient as a family, if full of sodium.
So Alex moved through life without the satisfaction of a scrumptious meal sweated over in the kitchen, or even an unpretentious supper cooked for oneself with simple care. In his Chelsea bachelor pad, he subsisted on takeaways and ready meals he had delivered weekly from Waitrose. And when he moved in with Minty, she didn’t even bother to ask for assistance — she’d stayed enough nights at his place to know it was pointless to expect Al to do much of anything culinary. (“The only thing he knows about food is the part where it goes into his mouth and he chews it,” she told me once.)
While Julian rarely assisted me in the kitchen once we were married, when we were still just dating he was a cheerful and often eager assistant, helping to chop onions or wash spinach or even carefully slice open pork chops so I could stuff them with a herbed, bready dressing. When he lived on his own, Jules regularly had friends around for light meals of Welsh rarebit or gazpacho or risotto con funghi, all made under his own steam, and generally quite delicious. “No reason to starve myself of good food, and I don’t fancy going out every night,” he said. Alex ate well the two years he lived with Julian, but never expressed any interest in doing much more than eating and (occasionally) the washing up. (“I think he bought kitchen towel a few times, too, which he said also counted as cooking,” according to Jules.)
I didn’t want more of the same resistance, once again, this time with a smile. If I couldn’t expect Alex to suddenly become Gordon Ramsey after years of feckless indifference to the cooking — not the eating — of food, I could more realistically request a husband-to-be who could occasionally prepare me a snack or a simple repast. And I am no longer (mostly) that young woman who believed it was not proper to ask her husband to assist in the kitchen, even if he happened to work long hours.
During one of our nightly two-hour phone calls — which mostly involve us reading each other articles we’ve found online during the day and discussing them, or me telling Al about any particularly notable weirdos who floated over the shop’s threshold during my shift — I raised the topic of home cuisine. After he’d talked me through why he was starting to feel nervous about the inverted yield curve in the bond market (I did pay attention, mostly), I proposed an experiment: if he really wanted to exorcise the demons of my past marriage, why not show some interest in an area that Julian dismissed as solely my purview? That put some fire in his belly — the chance to demonstrate how he could outstrip Julian in yet another domain. “Well, where do we begin with the lessons?” he responded.
I thought we’d start with a sandwich, the punchline of so many a lame joke about a woman’s worth in a relationship. To be fair, Alex had tried once to assemble something resembling a sandwich for me: he got the bread (Home Pride white — he lives in San Francisco and it never occurred to him that sourdough might be appropriate as a base) and acquired a packet of ham from a corner market (grim, watery, pink). Insert slice of ham between two of bread, et voila! No mustard, no mayo, no lettuce or anything. Ham, bread, sandwich. It was foul, but I did praise him for trying. He looked so proud to have tried, all toothy grin and soppy, shy brown gaze, so I really had to eat it. I passed on a second, though.
So last Saturday morning, after his call with Lucy, we got to work. I’d stocked up the evening before at the Epicurean Trader on my way over — a country loaf from Tartine, rosemary ham, Swiss cheese, and a lovely whole-grain German mustard. I brought a head of butter lettuce and a red onion with me from home, extras from Ben’s CSA box, and a stick of butter. Happily I’d needled Alex into buying a set of Wüsthof Classics from Williams-Sonoma last year, so there was no need for me to bring my own bread knife. I spread the ingredients before us on the granite countertop and pulled out a maple cutting board.
“Are you ready?” I asked, wiping my hands on the denim apron I keep at his apartment for Friday night cooking.
Al nodded seriously, a little wrinkle forming between his black brows. “I’m all yours, as always.” He flashed a tiny cognac-brown Moleskine notebook at me. “Ready to take notes, captain.”
“Then let’s begin.” I sliced the loaf in half, explaining the alchemy of sourdough, the chemistry of the starter, which I knew would appeal to him. I cut off the heel and slathered it with the butter, which was just soft enough to spread evenly without melting completely, and asked him to compare it to the Home Pride he’d served me the other month.
“Like your beef Wellington compared to Jack in the Box,” he garbled out through a mouth full of sourdough. “Can we eat just this? I’m happy with just this.”
“Nope. We need to press on.” I passed the knife through the loaf and cut two fairly even slices. “Now you copy what I did — they don’t need to be perfect.” Alex’s attempt to copy my effort ended up with a sliver and a wedge, but I assured him all it took was practice to get them a little more even. Taking up the knife again, and with greater concentration, he cut two more planks off the bread, more closely matched in size.
I showed him how to wash lettuce in the sink and pat it dry, tearing off enough leaves for both sandwiches, and slice the red onion (I cut enough for both, too, since I wasn’t going to let him put thick chunks of the stuff in either sarnie). Mustard, thinly spread, on both tranches of bread, stacking one side with the lettuce, the onion and three thin slices of the ham, topped with one perfect rectangle of the Swiss. Before I finished assembly, I turned to him: “Now you do it.”
Alex’s chin wobbled a little, and he cast a worried glance at my sandwich, still lacking its top slice of bread. “What if I get it wrong?” he responded in a small voice, spreading his large hands on the granite before him.
“Oh, Al.” It was so preposterous. “There’s no getting it wrong. It will still taste lovely.” I paused, then hatched a plan. “If you get it really right, though, let’s do something special tonight. Let’s stay at the Mark Hopkins tonight and have brunch at the Top of the Mark tomorrow. My treat.”
“Julian’s treat,” he grumbled. (He’s not wrong.) “I’ll pass. How about… if I get it really right, paella at La Marcha and a nice glass of sherry? It can still be your treat, if you insist.” He tweaked my nose between his thumb and forefinger.
I stuck out my tongue. “Deal. Now do it right, boy, or there will be no carnal embrace for, oh, at least 24 hours.”
That really focused his mind. He mimicked my steps, the light application of mustard, the leaves of lettuce and rounds of onion (“my notes say you used three, but they were small in circumference, so I’ll try two”), topping his creation with the slightly fatty ham and the slice of Swiss, the eyes of the cheese revealing the meat below. “And now?” He wiped his hands on his jeans (must remind him to wash those ones) and reached for the remaining slice of bread, slick with a gleam of mustard. “On top, right?” he teased, and winked at me.
“Yes. On three, let’s do it together. One, two, three.” As one, we slapped down the top pieces and lightly pressed them down.
“Mel,” he breathed. “I made a sandwich that looks like… a sandwich.” He knelt down to look at the sandwich from counter height. “This moment should be memorialized.” Snapping pictures of the sandwich from multiple angles, he told me, “Now, this counts as cooking.”
“It’s perfect, Al. Trade ya,” I coaxed lightly, nudging him in the ribs with my right elbow.
And that’s how I ate Alex’s first ham and cheese sandwich. While the proportions of the bread were a little wonky, I really didn’t care. It was, that morning, the most delectable sandwich I’d ever eaten. I knew our future would have more sandwiches from his hands, maybe a little less ramshackle, a little more… composed. But this one? Forever, the best.
***
Talking to Alex this past Sunday night about my sister’s impromptu drinks at SUR with Julian was surprisingly not another occasion for him to slam cupboards and hurl invective at my ex-husband. Jenn’s right; now that I’m (probably) going to marry Alex, I need to tell him without fear about any interactions with Julian I have, even if they are ones at some distance, as was the case with Rachel the other day on Melrose. Given the circumstances, I have no reason to believe that it was anything but dumb luck that Rachel walked into John Varvatos as Julian was perusing the racks there. I know he prefers to shop for his own clothes, and he had several pieces from the designer in his closet when we were together. Even in a city the size of LA, people bump into each other if they move in the same stratum of society.
Alex was particularly amused by the image of Julian, um, sniffing jacket linings. “Such an odd duck, sometimes,” he chuckled. “I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with his fixation on smells.”
Oh yes, I certainly was. “I’m a super-smeller,” he told me early on in our relationship, as he trailed a line of kisses from my collarbone up to the very most sensitive spot behind my ear. “And you smell delicious.” But it was a lie — Julian’s nose wasn’t more sensitive than mine or most anyone else’s. It’s just that he was more interested in the aromas of life — delicious and disgusting alike — than most people. “Scents say something to me that the person or the object or the place may not even know they’re communicating. It’s subtext, and a chance to look under the bonnet.”
When he caught a whiff of Alex that first day the two met at school, it wasn’t that Jules could detect an odor that was hardly noticeable to others. “I stank, Mel,” Alex told me. “Mum left me to my own devices after I announced my intention to leave for school, and since no one was forcing me to bathe, I was particularly rank by the time I got to Somerset. I think I showered once a month. God knows how Mr. Hardy — Robert — got through the drive with me, though I recall the windows being open much of the way, and he insisted on us having separate rooms at the Travelodge we stayed at off the M6 outside of Crewe.”
While Julian was certainly repulsed by Alex’s adolescent stench, it said something to him Alex wasn’t even aware he was broadcasting: I’m an untamed, wild boy who answers to no one. To Julian, tightly controlled and precise even at 16, Alex was exotic — messy, uncultured, undisciplined; sulky, loud, questioning. Even after a shower, Alex reeked of unruliness. Julian observed how others — particularly girls — were attracted to Alex’s lack of polish and guile, how he was petted on and praised for simply… being himself. And after learning of Alex’s pedigree (a complete surprise — Julian took Alex for a scholarship boy, which he was in a way), Julian saw Alex as a way out of the middle of the social pack at school. Jules spread a rumor — completely untrue — that Al’s family were direct descendants of Robert the Bruce (“the only Scot he could think of,” Al scoffed) and after a while Alex got tired of denying it, so a distant royal past only increased his allure.
As Alex’s roommate and eventual best friend, the glamour rubbed off on Julian, pushing him into the upper ranks of popularity as he had so long desired. With popularity came girls, even though the ones Julian dated only wanted to get closer to Alexander Carr. Julian pretended not to care that Louisa Bridges only slept with him — his very first, fumbling time — because she thought it might broadcast her sexual availability to Alex. (Al was unaware such signals were being sent, remaining generally more focused on A-level coursework than heaving bosoms.) Alex was an engine for Julian’s social machinations, and letting unnecessary feelings get in the way of success was a sure way to fail, as his father reminded him. “Keep cool, boy,” Ed Cranford told his son. “Girls may be drawn to Alexander’s fire, but remember: fire destroys, and the chill preserves.”
I shivered just thinking about it, and asked Alex if I could — should — call Julian, if only to make a few extra dollars out of it. “It’s not like we can’t use a little more, especially if we’re going to eventually pay for a wedding one of these days. And what is he going to tell me that can really hurt me? He just wants to vent, to tell me what a fool I am for marrying you. And if I walk out with another few hundred or a thousand dollars, isn’t he the greater loser?”
We’d been sitting on the loveseat, me reading Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine, thank you) and Al flipping through the New York Times on his iPad. Stashing the device between our touching thighs, Alex leaned away from me, and pretended that he needed to get something out of the canvas satchel he’d propped against the ottoman. “It’s not a good idea, Mel. I can’t forbid you, but all he’s trying to do is control you — and me — by throwing money around. It’s all he knows how to do. Fucker.”
“Al –“
“Sweetest, it’s up to you. But remember he knows you almost as well as I do, and there’s no free lunch with Julian. You will pay in kind for whatever he may stuff in your account.” Alex reclined once more against the loveseat, stretching out his legs on the ottoman, sighing as I tilted my head on his shoulder. “You need to let him go. He’s far too present in your life for an ex-husband, and you let him control your emotions still. You don’t need to jump every time he demands — that life is over.”
I tried to release the hold of the mysteries that flickered like unfocused, transparent shadows in my mind — how much is my conversation worth to Julian? Do certain topics pay more? What if I agreed to meet him again — what might he pay for that? Why is any of this worth anything to him? I turned to the twin dark thoughts that have troubled me lately: that Julian not only wishes Alex gone from my life, but also wishes himself back in it. (“It only ever has been you, Melissa, and it never will be anyone but you” — these words echo over the years — are they still true?) I certainly don’t want to lose Alex, the one I never should have let escape. But am I like Amanda was so many years ago — not wanting Julian back, but not wanting him to be with anyone else?
I didn’t say any of this to Alex. “You’re right, just like you’re almost always right,” I grumbled instead. I set my book on the floor and nestled myself closer, draping an arm across his warm chest.
“Ahhhhhh Mel, there’s nothing a man likes to hear more,” he jested, picking up his iPad. “Now let me read this Krugman op-ed on China while you stroke my ego a little more.”
***
Much of the rest of this past week was remarkable only for how hot it was up here on Wednesday and Thursday — the return of the 90-something temperatures we’d last suffered in June. My portable, rolling AC unit for the studio wasn’t much help during the day, but the evenings were blessedly cool. Wednesday was the hotter of the two days, but Thursday remained viciously hot, so I volunteered to make the run out to Cool Prof’s Elmwood home to pick up another lot of books to be sold on consignment because I recalled he had central air. This time there were no spirulina cookies (yes!) but instead vegan lemon loaf, which in theory should have been delicious but was rather sad and soggy in the middle. Cool Prof assured me that it was supposed to be that way, but I had my doubts.
In any event, I nibbled my way through two slices and an extended monologue by Cool Prof about his never-ending struggles in the department to have both cow and almond milk available in the faculty kitchen, just so I could chill myself sufficiently. Under normal circumstances, I would have worried I’d overstayed my welcome, but I kind of felt sorry for Cool Prof — I mean, Daniel. He was pretty insufferable: conceited, frozen in the glory of his past successes at UCLA some 25 years ago, the kind of man who considers himself a feminist but still talks to your chest and whose eyes you can feel follow your ass out of a room. His loneliness fairly glowed in the darkened living room (curtains drawn to keep out the sun, good thinking) though, and as Julian frequently reminded me, I have a special care for the broken things in life. Being here with him for an hour, an hour in which I drank his lemonade (nice sweet/tart balance, served in Baccarat highballs, of all things) and ate his disgusting cake and soaked in his sub-arctic AC (68°F — how fantastically indulgent) was so very little for me. This time, when he offered further discussion (“it doesn’t have to be Žižek, you know”), I took his card and promised to drop by next week. “I’ll bring the baked goods next time; you’ve been too generous,” I insisted.
On my way back, I stopped in at Sack’s Coffee House for a blueberry scone and an iced tea in lieu of actual lunch. I look back at my old blog and my obsession with being a size 0 at the time is embarrassing now — I don’t think I’ll ever wear smaller than a 4 again in my life, which is hardly gargantuan. Jocasta regularly mocked my “growing” size as the years ground on, and blamed our infertility on my weight. “You do know that it’s just so much harder for an obese woman to bring a pregnancy to term, Amanda,” (“Melissa,” I’d interjected, to no success) “so you might try losing the weight you’ve gained. Julian married you as a certain size, it must be a shock for him to see you this… large.” She poked at my ribs, and clucked in disgust. I weighed 110 lbs at the time. I weigh 112 now and feel even better than I did back then. Fuck you, Jocasta — I’ll eat a scone for lunch if I want.
After bringing the two boxes (this time, a collection of Mary Ellen Mark and Diane Arbus photography books) in through the back entrance, I left them with Molly for inventory and ran up the stairs to tell Ben about the disgusting lemon cake. I met him at the register, where he was pointedly looking down at a copy of the New Yorker he had spread open before him on the desk.
“Melissa,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth at me, never raising his glance from an article about Stacy Abrams, “I think that woman sitting in the blue wingback may be one of your people.”
“My people?” I looked over to one of the two wingback chairs on the shop floor, where a pale, dark-haired woman of about my age sat cross-legged, leafing through one of the books on tractors we’d never been able to sell. She wore a vintage pink floral Laura Ashley sundress, tied at the shoulders in square knots, and a pair of white Dr. Scholl’s sandals. I knew immediately who she was, even with a pair of oversized red sunglasses obscuring half her face.
“FENN!” I shrieked, tearing over to her and stumbling over my feet in haste.
She looked up at me, pushing her glasses to the top of her head and blowing back a stray black curl. “Oh, hullo, Mel. I was hoping you’d be here.”
I grabbed her out of the chair and raised her to her full height — not nearly as tall as Alex, but she easily has six inches on me, probably more. Fenn shot me the same crooked grin as Alex before I grabbed her around the middle and squeezed a small “eek” of protest from her.
“Fenn, what are you doing here?” I asked after I broke the hug and let her settle back into the chair. She looked exhausted, her eyes rimmed with the blue of jet lag.
“Mmmmmm,” she murmured, tucking her feet underneath her once more before sighing dramatically. “Mummy’s getting too insufferable. It’s like fucking Grey Gardens back there, so claustrophobic, dank and ugggggghhhh. She’s sticking her nose into everything I do. I can barely take a shit without her asking me all about it. So I’m giving myself a holiday. I’ve bloody well earned one.”
I’d known Fennella Carr since I was 21, when Julian and I went to visit Al up in Scotland right before I flew back to the States. I’d been made to share a room with Fenn because Cora didn’t approve of unmarried couples sharing a bed, and learned several things from that sleeping arrangement. First, Fenn snored, even worse than Alex. Second, Fenn’s snores were aggravated by drinking red wine, which she’d had a lot of the second evening we were there. Third, she could keep pace with Alex in terms of effusive swearing. And last, Fenn did not like me very much, even less than (I thought at the time) Alex did. The last of these stemmed from her thwarted crush on Julian, the very first boy whose eye she’d caught.
Fenn remained suspicious of and sometimes blatantly hostile towards me, even after Alex explained to her that Julian was not good boyfriend material anyway. “I wouldn’t wish that hell on you, pet,” he’d told her, explaining how his best friend belittled me behind my back, despite claiming that I was his “forever love.” But Fenn would not be dissuaded, and when I gave Julian the boot for posting my selfie, she reached out to him immediately. “Come to Scotland,” she’d written in an email Alex found on an old desktop he’d been asked to fix later that year. “You must be so sad. You can forget all about that horrid girl if you come up here.”
As I mentioned before, Julian and I never spoke of the month he spent in the old house outside of Pitlochry, and I certainly never wanted to hear about it from Fenn or anyone else. If Alex knew anything, he had probably tried to suppress it. There was something vaguely… incestuous about a tryst between his best friend and his twin sister. Best not to think about it, push it down, down, down into the Perthshire earth and never consider it again.
Eventually Fenn came around to the truth that I might not be a villain, the enchantress who lured her Julian to a life where he’d dashed himself the rocks of our marriage, and even then only after Julian had announced that he was done with me at last. It was easier for her to accept that I was her twin’s partner than Julian’s, which has never failed to surprise me. Grudgingly, Fenn began to open up to me through her brother’s intercession, and I have now become if not a friend exactly, at least a confessor of sorts. “I can’t tell Al how awful it is being stuck there with Mummy without him getting frustrated with me, for not being grateful enough to have the space to make my art, or with himself, for not being there.” I keep Fenn’s secrets, or at least those that she’ll tell me.
I perched next to her on the chair’s arm. “Does Alex know you’re here?” I asked, knowing full well the response.
She pushed her sunglasses back on her face. “Feh, no. If I’d mentioned I was coming, he would have fretted about how I was spending my time, planned my days for me, set me up with ‘play dates'” — she made little air quotes — “with your friends and his. I’m not here for him, anyway.” She stretched her long legs before her and arched her back, looking so much like her brother as she moved her body it was uncanny. “I’m here for me.”
I had so many questions, but I knew better than to ask them all at once. “Fenn, how did you get here? I mean, by plane, obviously, but how did you pay for this?”
Alex’s sister rose from the chair and started poking at some of the paperback fiction titles. Fenn was as slender as I’d remembered her, artlessly poised, unstudied and unconsciously elegant. She drew her tangle of black curls over her shoulder and started combing through them distractedly with one hand. “Oh, I’ve been saving some money. You know I started giving drawing lessons last year.” I did, and this was one of the secrets I’d kept from Alex. From my own bitter experience, I had learned the importance of a woman earning some of her own money, and had encouraged her to earn a little of her own.
“And I, uh, got some help. From a friend,” she continued as she trailed a long finger over the selection of Agatha Christies for sale. This sounded ominous to me, my ears ringing with what I feared was the source of her funds. “Someone I knew when I was at art school. Charles.” (Charles? Never heard of him before.) “He lives in LA now, and he asked me to come out to see him, maybe meet some gallery owners. Saw my website and thought I wasn’t doing enough to be seen, you know? He’s been putting out feelers for me. I’m flying down on Saturday night.”
I walked up next to her, looped an arm around her waist. “So you’re only here until Saturday — do you need a place to stay? I’m sure Alex –“
She recoiled a little from me and pulled her sunglasses away from her face rapidly. “Of course I want to see Al, but I don’t want to stay there. He’ll be able to figure it all out immediately and he can be worse than Mummy in trying to… protect me.” Her shoulders sagged a little. “I’m so done with everyone treating me like I’m going to break.”
“Figure what out?” I couldn’t argue with the rest of what she said — in my opinion, everyone treated Fenn like she was a child or made of bone china, ready to snap at any time. After a third visit to the Priory nearly a decade ago, her depressions had been significantly milder. She took her medication without complaint, and her artistic output had only increased. Yet her mother, abetted by Alex, had found every excuse to keep her at home. She hadn’t lived away from home — apart from her visits to the Priory — since the year she spent in Glasgow when she was 18; at 34, she was overdue for her own life to begin.
Fenn whipped away from me. I could see Ben watching/not watching all of this unfold from his vantage point behind the register. “Oh, nothing,” she mumbled. “Just that I’m… unhappy at home. And then he’ll worry and get angry that our lives are as shit as they are and I can’t, don’t want to handle all that noise.”
I pulled at her arm so that she faced me again, and reached up to cup her cheek. “So you’ll stay with me and you’ll see your brother when he comes over. Right?”
Fenn exhaled and smiled. “I knew you’d understand, Mel. It’s just Friday night — I’ve a room at the Nash tonight, but I cocked up the reservation and didn’t book Friday. You’ll barely notice me.” (Fat chance, I knew — only a curtain gave privacy to the sleeping nook, and I’d be able to hear every snore echo around the high ceilings of the A-frame studio.)
What happened on those nights… I have been typing for far too long, and the events of Friday and Saturday — only yesterday? — are still unwinding. I’ll write more in the next couple of days, but it’s all been so much, and so exhausting after having to step between Alex and his sister on Friday night. If I’d ever wondered what the twinnies were like as children, I saw it in action that evening — Alex ranting so loud Ms. Bob pounded on the wall to can it, and Fenn’s face pulsing red from passion, dropping tears so fat I could practically hear them splash on the granite countertop in Alex’s kitchen.
Fenn is indeed down in Los Angeles now, meeting this afternoon with an agent, refusing to speak to Alex but texting me occasionally with updates. Alex is still in my bed, talking to Will and trying to figure out how he can stave off yet another Carr Calamity. I’m about to make yet more tea for us, because I genuinely don’t know what else to do when life is ploughing ahead with no steady hand on the rudder.
And Julian? In that meeting with Fenn, down in the Arts District. Oh, I think you knew he’d be involved.
meandering again 