As promised, Alex has given notice on his flat in Cow Hollow and the countdown to our cohabitation experiment has begun. Only two more Friday journeys to San Francisco remain before he and I slot and rearrange our lives together in Berkeley. Since Alex came to America with only a couple of suitcases, and the apartment was mostly furnished (with the exception of the much-derided sofa), his belongings are mercifully few: mostly clothes, video games, books and magazines. An unbelievable number of magazines, really. “There’s something about a newsagent I can’t resist,” he tells me by way of explanation. “I feel like Julian when I’m around magazines — I want to sniff them. I want to own them.” (So weird.)

I spent Labor Day weekend clearing out old periodicals — mostly the Economist and the New Statesman, which I will read when I’m over, but also an entire year’s worth of Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, which I will not. (I was prevented from tossing that collection — “There’s some very interesting stuff in there!” he huffed as he snatched the pile out of the recycling box and stormed out of the bedroom, cradling the precious cargo in his arms.) We weeded through his clothing and cut down on the number of nearly identical blue cotton buttondowns he has, and Caitlin recommended a self-storage place in Berkeley to stash the sofa and some of the boxes until we find a suitable home. It’s been tedious work, but given how stressful the past few weeks have been, the banality is welcome. No Fenn, no tears, no shouting, no Louboutins, no Julian, with the exception of the agreement which I approved and signed, and the first $2,000 wired into my account.

Instead, I have Jen. Or more accurately, Jenn’s worries about Jen. Jenn called me last week from outside the Santa Monica courthouse, where she’d been shepherding a young man through another hearing in his nasty divorce. The poor guy was, by Jenn’s account, falling hard for her and she’d had to take a very firm line with him about ethics. “I wish you could see this guy. Jesus, it’s hard to stay ethical when your client is 26, loaded and looks like an off-duty K-pop boy band member. I keep wishing he’d say something a little racist, or even a little too fetishistically woke, like ‘I always wanted to date a sister’ so I could dismiss him.

“Jen’s missed our standing dinner date three times in the past four weeks,” she told me. “Three! She’s missed one in the past six years and now three? Something is NOT right.”

Jen wasn’t just missing dinners, as it turned out. Jenn had casually dropped by Jen’s parents’ house the evening before, on the pretext that her own parents had been asking again about a casserole dish they had left at the Fujimas’ about five years earlier. While Hank Fujima rooted around in the kitchen cabinets, Jenn turned her attention to Jen’s mom, Addy. Addy was always the “cool mom” growing up — the freezer was full of Bagel Bites and Hot Pockets, she took us to see R-rated movies like American Pie, and could be relied on for an alibi whenever needed (“We were back at Jen’s by 10pm, just ask Mrs. Fujima, mom!”). As it turns out, it is still easy to manipulate her even though we’re all now adults.

After a few minutes of praising Addy for looking hardly older than her daughter, Jenn went in for the kill: had Addy enjoyed the family trip to Yosemite as much as Jen did? “Jen’s mom looked at me like I was deranged. ‘Why would I go to Yosemite? Hank and I were in Florence and Sardinia for two weeks,’ she told me. I knew it! So where was Jen when she said she had no phone service? Addy said Jen was in the Valley the entire summer, as far as she knew.

“So I asked her, did she think Jen’s been acting a little… distant? Strange? Stranger than normal? And she told me that come to think of it, there was something a little weird she’d found when she was over at Jen’s. Mel, listen to this. She found a pregnancy test in the bathroom trash. I swear to God if I were a vinyl record I would have scratched. And Addy didn’t even ask her about it! What kind of mother doesn’t ask about a used pregnancy test in her daughter’s trash?”

“Ummmm, Addy wouldn’t.” Jen and Addy have operated on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis for years now when it comes to Jen’s sexual activity; it tends to remind Addy she’s old enough to have a child capable of bearing children of her own.

“I concede the point. Now, Addy did fish it out of the trash with a tissue to look at it and apparently Jen is not pregnant. I guess that was end of the investigation for her — no baby, no freak out. Right when I was going to ask if she knew who Jen might be seeing, Hank walked in and handed me a casserole dish. I am 100% certain it’s not my parents’ but I took it anyway because he looked like he didn’t want to be sent back in there to hunt for the right one. That was sort of my cue to leave but… I have SO many questions. Who is Jen fucking? Why is she lying to me? Is she cutting out on dinner to go schtup this mystery man? Why can’t she make dates with him around what is OUR time? Why isn’t she telling me what she’s doing?”

Jen is understated, cool, controlled. She’s a technical writer, paid to explain difficult concepts with clarity and precision, but prefers to keep her personal life murky. Jenn and I can always count on Jen to listen to our problems patiently and provide us with solid, practical advice. While she’s a bit of a weeper when it comes to movies and music, in her own life? No. When she found out Mack was cheating on her, had been sleeping with Kayla for almost a year, she didn’t cry, or at least not around me. She explained this away by saying my life was more of a mess than hers, and I needed her to be strong and supportive. Bullshit. She just didn’t want to deal with the disaster of her own marriage — the high drama of my split from Julian was a fantastic distraction from her own quiet despair.

“Well, I don’t know anything about it. Last time I spoke with her, she didn’t mention anyone new,” I said. “I kind of figured we’d only find out she was dating again when we got invitations to her wedding to whatever guy she’d been secretly seeing for a year.”

This was not too far away from what had happened with Mack. He’d been pestering her to give him a chance for years, and she had been politely rejecting him since high school. She eventually relented at Sean’s 28th birthday party, not that any of us knew for over six months. At her request, they did not speak of it to others. “It would have made you all too weird around us,” she explained lamely when Jenn eventually ferreted out the truth. “You would have thought it was cute and made a big deal out of it. It’s not that cute and it’s not a big deal. We’re just private people, okay?” That was probably the only time in my life I saw Jen flounce out of a room.

The Sunday before last, Jenn called me back with what she called “a terrific plan.” I know Jenn’s terrific plans. While she is an excellent, disciplined, ferocious attorney, she’s got a knack for bulldozing through her personal life, including her friendships. But Jenn is always so logical when she’s browbeating us into submission, even when her terrific plans are poorly planned and self-serving, that we nearly always give up and give in.

“Hey, I’m bringing Caitlin on the other line. We have an idea.” Before I could reply, Jenn was back on. “Mel, Caitlin’s here. Cait?”

Caitlin practically cackled. “Has she told you about our Scooby plan?”

Oh dear lord. “No. I don’t think I want to know.”

Jenn butted in. “You suck. How can you pass judgment on something you don’t even know the details of yet? It’s kind of awesome.”

“I don’t know the details about a lot of things to know they aren’t good, like the chemistry behind curdled milk. ‘Scooby plan’ sounds half-baked, and since I assume this is about Jen –“

Cait snapped at me. “Jenn and I are worried about her. Which you might be too if you weren’t still so hung up about your ex-husband and all the free real estate he’s taking up in your head.”

Ouch. “I’ll ignore that,” I mumbled. “Fine, tell me your plan.”

Frequently interrupting each other to clarify and expand on each other’s riffs, Caitlin and Jenn laid out their scheme. Since Jen was unlikely to explain why she’d made herself unavailable recently, or why she’d lied about Yosemite, or why there was a pregnancy test in her trash, we needed to spy on her. This was how Jenn had figured out Mack and Jen were an item all those years ago — she’d followed Jen’s car as it made its way from the Fujimas’ home to a restaurant in La Crescenta. She’d hung out in the parking lot for an hour, reading the news on her phone, when she saw Jen emerge on Mack’s arm and then push him into the back seat of her car. “They stayed inside her Mini for half an hour, and when Mack walked out, his T-shirt was on backwards,” Jenn explained at the time.

“So basically, you want to do a redux of the Great Stakeout of 2013.” I didn’t think this was a fantastic idea, not least because I think Jen is entitled to her privacy, and I explained that I didn’t want to push Jen even farther away if we found out something she had reason to keep from us.

“Like what could she possibly want to keep from us? I think Jenn’s idea is perfect, worked before, it can work again.” Cait sounded ready to pack her bags and jump in the Mystery Machine with Jenn.

“It’s just rude. Jen has her reasons, I’m sure.” Part of me wished either one of them had been as interested in what was happening between Julian and me when I was furtively dismissing all their concerns about the state of my marriage. Apparently I’m even more opaque than Jen.

Jenn was indignant. “And what if that reason is she’s the other woman to a married man? Sorry, I know you have a different attitude about cheating than I do, but –“

Oh, that was a low blow. “For the thousandth time, Alex and I did NOT have an affair!”

Alex walked in from the garden at that very moment, ducking his head as he slipped through the low doorframe. He was clutching a bag from 4th Street Bagels. “Who is it?” he mouthed, tiptoeing past me to prepare breakfast in the kitchenette. The word “affair” stings him far less than it does me. It doesn’t sting him at all — he has told me that it’s not a mischaracterization of what happened between us, but I strongly disagree.

I made the “blah blah blah” hand movement and mouthed “Jenn and Caitlin.” He nodded and set about slicing bagels and taking a tub of cream cheese out of the bag. Ever since the sandwich lesson, he’s been trying to help more in the kitchen. I assured him buying bagels, slicing them and putting them in the toaster counted as cooking.

“WhatEVER, Mel. Cait’s coming down next Saturday and we want you with us.” Jenn sounded like she was 16, which is exactly the age of the person I think could cook up this plan and think it sounded workable. “And I happen to know you’re not working on Saturday, so you have no excuse.”

“Yeah, you really should tell Ben it isn’t safe for him to just give out your work schedule to randos like me over the phone. All I did was say I was Caitlin and he told me you were off. I mean, what if I were Julian’s assistant trying to figure out where you were so he could… I don’t know, whatever he’s doing to fuck with your head these days.” (I so wasn’t going to explain that.)

“Well, first of all, Ben knows you, Caitlin, and I’m pretty sure he can recognize your voice by now. And second, even he knows Julian’s assistant is always a man, ever since the Vicki fiasco.” Alex rolled his eyes at the mention of Vicki.

The “Vicki fiasco” was an incident that occurred after Julian joined his father’s company. Vicki had been Jules’ first personal assistant in the London office. A year older than we were, she’d worked her way up from an office junior to being the PA to the chief exec’s son, quite a feat for a girl who left school with only a handful of GCSE’s. But she was smarter than her educational pedigree, and quite nakedly ambitious. Her plan was to rise as high as she could in the company, up to the boardroom if possible. Nobody doubted her. Julian had recommended her for promotion to a junior analyst on his team within six months of him joining the company, and Ed bumped her up accordingly, though she still kept on as Julian’s assistant as she transitioned fully into her new role. I liked her and most importantly trusted her with Julian.

It started with her giving Julian unsolicited backrubs, which he didn’t object to enough, he claimed. “I found them relaxing,” he told me. “So I started to return the favor. It was a stressful time for the company; my father was trying to land that big deal in Australia, and Vicki and I were physically exhausted. It was nothing sexual,” he explained, and I believed him. Julian’s no fool when it comes to mixing business and carnal pursuits, never has been. It was one of the better lessons he learned from his shrewd and pitiless father. “We were always sitting up, always clothed, always in view of other people. It helped us — to get through the work, and to make us gel even more as a team.” I felt a little uneasy at the time about it, but the safeguards around the massages allayed my concerns for the most part.

However innocent the backrubs might have been in reality, someone on his team didn’t quite see it that way. Who that someone was, Julian never was quite sure, but a report to HR was made about how inappropriate their conduct was, and how their behavior made other women feel “unsafe” around Jules, especially because he was the boss’s son. It was a delicate matter — Ed was angry at the person who made the report, Vicki for abusing the trust he’d placed in her, and Julian most of all for making Ed look like he’d made a foolish error in hiring his own son into a senior position fresh out of university. He lashed out at Julian in the boardroom, in front of the other directors. “You make this company look like a knocking shop when you get up to antics like this. This is work, boy, not a Soho brothel. If you want a massage, bloody well pay for it somewhere else. I don’t care if you’re shagging women other than Melissa, just don’t do it here in my fucking office.”

Julian was suitably chastened; Vicki was moved off of his team immediately and she left a few months later for another company. Ed installed a new assistant for Julian, a young man named Tom who’d just graduated from Exeter, and Jules never had another female assistant. “Safer that way, Jules,” Ed explained. “You never know how many of these young harpies in their tight skirts want to trap you in a compromising position. And Mel will be happier knowing that there’s no chance of it.”

Jenn clicked her tongue at me. “Fine, fine. What we’re trying to say is you have no excuse. And don’t say Alex because I know he won’t object. He’s there right? Put me on speakerphone.” I complied, mostly because it’s so much easier not to try to wheedle my way out of Jenn’s demands. She’ll always logic her way into whatever she wants from me. “Alex, Jenn 2 and Caitlin here.” (Al calls them “Jen 1” and “Jenn 2” to keep them straight, but amongst our crowd we can understand the very slight difference in pronunciation of their names, with the second “n” in Jenn’s name dragged out just the tiniest bit.) “Tell Melissa that she is coming down to the Valley on the 14th. You can still see her on the Friday and fuck her brains out, Cait and I just need her on the Saturday.”

“JENN!” I was mortified. I feel like sometimes in the eyes of our friends, all Al and I do is have sex because we were denied the opportunity for so long.

“Al, Cait here. Get her down. Mrs. Fujima found a used pregnancy test in Jen 1’s bathroom trash and now Jen 1’s acting super weird and shifty. We need Mel with us to stage an honesty intervention. She knows a thing or two about lying to friends. We could use her expertise.”

“CAITLIN!” This was going from bad to worse, and Alex was of no assistance, suggesting that my parents might like to see us for a brief visit. And when I protested that SFO currently had a runway shut down, making a journey to really anywhere impossible, Alex helpfully reminded me that there are direct flights from Oakland to Burbank.

And this is how I ended up on a Saturday afternoon flight on Southwest smooshed between Caitlin and Alex, bound for an extremely low-rent pastiche of Harriet the Spy by way of Hanna-Barbera.

***

My impending short return home, in the meantime, was causing some commotion chez de Mornay. Mom and Dad still live in the same house we moved to when I was five, up in the foothills above Burbank. I can barely remember the two bedroom apartment in North Hollywood we lived in before then, just glimpses in my mind: a courtyard with a large fountain in the center featuring a sculpture of the Venus de Milo, and having to share a room with Rachel, who was still resentful I had even been born and regularly stole my hair ribbons. The new house — still “the new house” nearly 30 years later — has four bedrooms, a large eat-in kitchen, a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a massive back garden with a treehouse. We had, in my dad’s words at the time, finally made it.

It was the house where I learned to ride a two-wheeled bike and drive a car (Rachel’s much-hated Volvo 240), where I studied French and biology and geography and longed for a life beyond Burbank already at the age of 11. It was where I snuck my first beer with Sean and Jenn. I stuck pictures of the Dawson’s Creek cast on my walls there and listened to the Backstreet Boys unironically. From that house I set out for kindergarten and high school and college and my first apartment on my own, and it was to there I retreated when Julian shut the door on our Pasadena home and our marriage. And while my bedroom has been repurposed as a home office for my dad, Rachel’s lilac-and-cream bedroom with the four poster bed remains a shrine to her 16-year-old self, even though she lived in it on and off until she was 28. No one stays in there except Rachel, and she only sleeps there when she’s come over for dinner with my parents and tied on a few too many with my dad.

After Alex had forced the point with me about a trip south by going ahead and purchasing us tickets, I called my mom to let her know we would be briefly in town to see Jen and Jenn. “Just a quick stop, Jenn wanted us to come down,” I explained. “And of course we’d love to see you and Dad, especially now that Al and I are sort of engaged.”

“Of course I’m happy to have you both, but I’ll have to prepare your father for Alex’s arrival.” Mom sounded exasperated. “You know what your father thinks about all of this.”

“All of this” means Alex. More specifically, why Alex is back in my life. To be clear, my mother adores Alex: handsome, funny, a family man, progressive, respectful, intelligent, accomplished, in love with her daughter. She never liked Julian very much, which I was aware of from the very first time he came to visit me in California, the summer before my senior year at Brown. Julian had already commenced his drift from devoted boyfriend, astonished that he’d managed to win me back from Alex with so little effort, to the detached suitor who was so cavalier with my emotions that I might as well have been a beautiful cipher, any girl, any Melissa.

Mom didn’t like how he told her what I thought about my experience in Bristol (since these were my own thoughts to share, not his), or that he asked me to change into a skirt for dinner at the Tam (“Wouldn’t it be lovely if you dressed up a bit, Melissa?”), or that he assumed that my plans post-graduation necessarily involved him. Privately, she told me he was good for a fling but not a long-term relationship — “You will never be what he wants. He has an ideal of what a woman should be, and how a relationship should work, that does not match the way I raised you to be. Better to accept it now than 25 years down the road with two children to raise.” (I always wondered if she was speaking of herself when she said this.)

For his part, my father has always enjoyed Julian’s company in spite of himself. I always knew my dad to be a committed Democrat (though we have been sparring recently about my support of Elizabeth Warren, whom he cannot stand); Julian is (as my mom says) “slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.” Dad installed solar panels on my family home years ago, and when he suggested we do the same on our Pasadena home, Julian nearly choked on the feta and beet salad I had served for lunch. And of course Dad has been driving the same Mercedes biodiesel for 20 years, while Julian’s own Mercedes is invariably new and top of the line every three.

As the first (and for some time only) man he knew in America, Julian sought out my dad’s companionship in spite of their political differences. Dad appreciated Julian’s taste in single malts and Cohibas (Julian always managed to bring a few boxes of actual Cubans in with him every time he’d return from London, somehow regularly eluding customs), and Julian learned from my father the subtleties of male etiquette for professionals in Southern California. My dad also initiated Julian into the cult of the Dodgers, after some initial resistance. “It’s like bastardized cricket, or spiffed up rounders. Why the hell would I watch something which has the worst of both of those sports and takes place in a ghastly stadium practically in the barrio?”

But when Julian got a business gift of a club suite at a Dodgers-Giants game, he thought it would be bad form and wasteful not to use it, and asked my dad to come along. Julian didn’t have any real friends in LA at that point (he barely does now, from what I am aware of) so it was just the two of them, getting loaded on Dom Perignon and shots of reposado. Dad even managed to get Julian to eat a couple of Dodger Dogs. They also occasionally watched the game. And while Julian balked at the idea of buying a premium box for the season, he found he could get over his fear of the general public (and Dodger Dogs) and has purchased two season tickets for himself and Dad (preferred field box, nothing too fancy) every year since the 2012 season down at Chavez Ravine.

Despite my divorce, my father still attends nearly every game with Julian as if there had never been any trouble in my marriage. “What am I supposed to say, ‘Hey Julian, I know you’re not married to my daughter anymore, so I don’t want that season ticket to my favorite team and you can stick it up your ass’?” he asked my mom when the pass showed up in 2017 as if Jules hadn’t moved out. (“YES!” my mom yelled back at him.)

When Julian and I were married, their friendship was a balm to me — clearly I had chosen well if my own father enjoyed Julian’s company, too. My mother was wary of their closeness though, finding that my father invariably returned from a “boy’s night out” with Julian not only slightly worse for wear but also floating ideas and viewpoints before my mother that were not his own. Like, “Don’t you think, Trish, that if Mel really wants to have a baby as she always said she did, she might think about leaving her job?” or “You know, I may have been wrong about Reagan.” My mom didn’t trust my dad around Julian, which only drove my dad closer to Jules — contrariness is a trait my dad and I share in spades.

And when Julian walked out on me that February night, and checked himself into the Ace Hotel downtown, his first call was to my father, not his own. “I had to go to him, baby,” my dad explained to me the next day. “He sounded so destroyed by what he’d found out about you and Alexander. Annihilated, just empty. He doesn’t have any family out here besides us. What was I supposed to do?” Go to your daughter, I thought, but didn’t dare let that thought venture out into the world.

To his credit, Julian rarely speaks poorly of me, according to my dad. However, my father has let himself be open to nearly every lie Julian has passed to him about Alex. Many of them are the same that he’s floated to others: Alex stole his wife with some very pretty and very sad stories; Alex mooches off the money Julian gives me and can barely provide for himself; Alex makes me unhappy but I don’t want anyone to know because I’d be so embarrassed; Alex is a borderline alcoholic; no one can be safe around Alex when he’s angry. No matter how much I protest, how my mother accuses my father of being gullible and bought and sold by Julian, my dad’s sympathies often lie with Jules. My own father is Julian’s man in my family.

The newest lie is that Alex is marrying me only for the admittedly rather large lump sum that was part of the settlement. It wasn’t originally supposed to be quite so large. When we negotiated the prenup, Julian and I had to make full and frank financial disclosures to each other. I was honest — mine was almost entirely debt, mostly student loans. I had the ’97 Nissan Sentra, a laptop, my clothes and a checking account. Julian had… let’s just say he had considerably more. Bank accounts in London and Geneva, a terraced house in Bloomsbury, a flat in the Barbican, and a Land Rover he kept out in the country. There was also a long row of terraced houses in Liverpool, the same row his father had lived in when he was a child. Ed Cranford bought it as a gift for the infant Julian, sensing that the neighborhood was susceptible to gentrification and he was not wrong. Tarted up, that row was now worth millions of pounds in an area popular with Scouse hipsters, a nice little earner for Jules. And of course there were all the trusts set up for his and Annabelle’s benefit. Julian was rich, and would continue to make money hand over fist for years, according to the disclosures, even without a job.

But full and frank those disclosures were not. Squirreled away in the Caymans and the Seychelles were tens of millions more that Ed — who took a keen interest in the prenup — thought were just not necessary to list. What had been listed for Julian were those assets Ed deemed expendable. The bulk of Julian’s separate wealth was unknown to anyone not named Cranford, or at least that was Ed’s idea at the time. When my forensic accountant traced assets to offshore accounts, the judge handling my divorce was not pleased, and sanctioned Julian personally. In order to make the problem just go away without further fuss, Ed agreed with Julian to release something much bigger than the $1 million lump sum I’d agreed to in 2010. I won’t spell out the exact number; it is enough to know that if I truly wished, I’d never need to work again and could keep myself in comfort for many years.

It is this sum that Al supposedly has designs on, and this sum that is the sole reason for marrying me, according to Julian (as filtered through my various correspondents — Miranda, Will and my father). Now, Alex doesn’t exactly have the best track record in this regard, by his own admission. Keeping that blasted house standing is a family obsession, a passion that stretches across generations. John Carr, Alex and Fenn’s father, married Cora because she was beautiful and young and had a few pounds to rub together. After their wedding, the roof was fixed, the bathrooms modernized and the remaining unlit rooms finally had electricity. By the time Alex and Fenn were old enough to consider marriage, Alex was the child put up as the first sacrifice.

Cora had summoned Alex up to Scotland under the pretense that there were some “estate matters” to tend to that required his presence. (It wasn’t strictly untrue, I suppose.) He knew something was up when it was Uncle B who met him at the railway station, not Fenn in the family’s 1988 Austin Montego.

“Good to see you, boy.” Uncle B pointed to the leather passenger seat of his late model Jaguar XJ. “Better get in, family business to attend to, unfortunately. You know how it is.” Uncle B looked almost ashamed, which was notable for a jaded old reprobate like himself. Alex was on guard, prepared for some new low in the household’s fortunes. Fenn’s conspicuous absence on a weekend trip to Edinburgh only compounded his suspicion that something particularly uncomfortable was afoot — she would not have stood for her brother being conscripted into matrimony, even for the sake of the house. (She only found out years later, in the aftermath of Minty’s flight to Dorset.)

Over a dinner of porridge and sausages later that evening, the sad reality of the family finances was laid out in an Excel spreadsheet Uncle B had prepared for this meeting. Cora stated flatly that while Alex’s money from his job at Goldmans was helpful, the house was in danger of falling apart, again. “Darling,” she explained, “it’s time for you to do what your father did. It’s not so bad, really.”

Al was made to list all of his female friends, former lovers and eligible prospects anywhere in his orbit. Amanda was out — on her sole visit to Pitlochry, she had dismissed the Carr home as “filthy, barely more than an oversized, manky crofter’s cottage.” The likelihood of her coughing up a single quid to pay for a new leak in the roof was unlikely. Miranda didn’t make the cut either. While she’s certainly got plenty of family money to live on, Cora suspected that Miranda was too canny to fleece for the amounts needed. Sasha was lovely and loaded and not terribly bright, but she had recently announced that she was “almost certainly a lesbian now.” Annabelle Cranford was briefly considered and ruled out by Al — “too much like fucking my own sister, or fucking Julian, both of which are foul thoughts to entertain.”

Casting the net wider did not dredge up any more suitable candidate. Besides Amanda, there had been no other women in Alex’s post-university life except for the solidly middle class Kate Vickers, a co-worker at Goldmans, and coincidentally Alex’s then-current girlfriend at the time of this matchmaking conversation. “She’ll have to go, you know,” Uncle B explained, “if we find someone more… appropriate.” When Al later recounted this sad tableau to me, I was shocked to hear how complacently he accepted this directive. (“I thought I had no choice, and it seemed a fair trade at the time.”)

Having run out of potential wives who were up to snuff, conversation between Uncle B and Cora drifted to horse racing and their recent bad run of luck betting on the ponies. Alex opened his laptop, ostensibly to catch up on some work, but ended up scrolling through his Facebook feed instead. He was so absorbed in looking at some old pictures from Bristol I’d just posted — a bunch I’d recently uploaded from an old SD card I’d found tucked inside a suitcase — he didn’t even notice Uncle B peering over his shoulder.

“Still got it bad for that American, I see. Well, boat’s sailed on that one, boy. Not that she has any money of her own, your mother told me.” Uncle B pulled up a chair and commandeered Alex’s laptop to continue the wife hunt: “I tried to tell him to fuck off,” Alex told me, “but, well, you know the old cunt. Whenever he scents an opportunity for money, he’s a man possessed.”

The very next picture was one of Alex, Minty and me from before I was kicked out of the Palace on the Hill. I was sitting in Alex’s lap, my head tipped back a little while Minty poured scrumpy from a teapot directly in my mouth. Alex was rolling his eyeballs and everyone looked highly inebriated. (Julian made me take it down a few days later, claiming the lighting was unflattering to me, but I knew it was because I was clutching Alex’s thigh a little too high up his trouser leg.)

“Who’s that one? Not the American. The spotty one in the grey jumper. Single?” Uncle B thrust a finger at the screen.

“Minty Bosworth? God, I have no idea. I think I saw her at a party at Will’s two years ago. Completely forgot about her. She was Miranda’s best friend.” I had tagged Minty in the picture, and Uncle B clicked through to her profile.

“Single!” Uncle B jabbed a finger towards the water stain on the kitchen ceiling. Cora scuttled around from the other side of the kitchen table. “Well fuck me, she improved with age. What’s her family like?”

Alex’s recollection of this moment is one of panic and resignation. Minty fit the bill Uncle B and Cora had drawn up, and then some: single (for quite some time), pleasantly mannered, and from considerable family wealth. A course of Roaccutane had cleared up her acne and she’d lost most of the puppy fat she’d tried to hide at university underneath grey jumpers and jogger bottoms. She was now a glowing English rose with a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, her formerly mousy brown hair ever so slightly blonder. Alex also knew her to be easily pleased, domestically inclined and submissive to personalities bigger than her own. If someone were unkind, they might say she knew her place. She was never going to be a great beauty like Sasha or a great brain like Miranda or even a great grasper like Amanda, but she was kind. Alex could imagine a life of comfort with someone like Minty, where there was no shouting (like with Amanda) or simmering loathing (like with Miranda) or low-level competitiveness (like with Kate). He could have a home with a mild and friendly woman who baked biscuits and enjoyed riding. That her people were flush made her that much more suitable.

Unfortunately my father knew this disgraceful story, or most of it, filtered through Julian’s lips. What’s worse is that it was completely true. Alex married Minty for her money, though he did genuinely like her when he proposed. As time went by, he even grew to love her, to be in love with her, as Cora promised he would. Losing her steady companionship and even-tempered support after four years of marriage set Alex adrift on a sea of regret, shame and alcohol.

Julian made sure to play up the money-grubbing and alcohol for my father. Apparently, leopards don’t change their spots, according to my dad who’d called me at the end of last month after a disappointing loss to the Yankees at Dodger Stadium. “According to Julian, Alex only wanted his first wife to keep his scruffy home vertical and get an heir. Now that pile needs more cash and he still needs a son. Jules said you’re an easy mark for him with all of that Cranford money sloshing around in your accounts now. And who knows you both better than Julian? He’s just worried about you, baby.” (That’s my money, Dad, not Julian’s.)

But I am, if anything, an optimist. Alex was going to join our family, and I thought a very brief visit, controlled in time and on my father’s ground, might be the thing to help my father cut through the thicket of misstatements and untruths Julian had led him into. Dad hadn’t even seen Al since late last year, when we’d shared dinner at La Marcha here in Berkeley with Steve along for the ride. Alex can be a little sensitive to nightshades, and when my father offered to share his albondigas, Al overlooked the tomato sauce the meatballs were sitting in.

An hour later, the four of us sat around Steve’s kitchen table for coffee and biscotti, discussing Alex’s experiences as an immigrant in the era of Trump. As seems to be frequently the case these days, my father parroted Julian’s stance that only illegal immigrants had anything to be worried about, and rightly so. Steve, for his part, was aghast — “Phil, who are you? You used to hang out with the La Raza crew at UCLA, for fuck’s sake!” Alex listened thoughtfully to their disagreements and explained that as a white — very white — native English speaker in the Bay Area, he had encountered only fascination with his accent (he sounds resolutely English to Americans, when he assures me it’s just “posh Scots”) and something like obsequiousness in his dealings with the natives (his grumpiness often resembles an air of earned authority).

As he was turning to his burgeoning awareness of his white privilege, the tomatoes attacked in the form of unabating belches. Full-throated chains of belches, reeking of the rabbit and snail paella we’d shared earlier. After twenty minutes had passed with no relief, only a gathering crescendo of gas, Al and I gave our hasty good nights and repaired to my studio, where a further three hours of belching awaited me. Activated charcoal was no help — we had to ride it out to its natural conclusion when Alex fell into a deep, snore-heavy sleep. I was disgusted with him for embarrassing me, and disgusted with myself for my lack of sympathy. Since that evening, my father rarely passes up an opportunity to refer to Alex as “Gas-X,” a nickname he has shared with Julian to their mutual delight.

I told my mother I was certain Dad could be civil for one dinner at home. “You haven’t been around your father much these days,” my mother warned. “He’s… well, he’s not the same. He can be his charming self still, like when we were in Santa Barbara in June with Rachel and Matt. But he’s watching Fox News, and not in the ‘I need to know what the enemy is up to’ way he used to. I make him have breakfast in his study because I don’t want Fox & Friends playing while I’m trying to eat my muesli.”

“How does he square watching Fox with hanging out with an immigrant like Julian?” I joked.

“Oh, your ex-husband’s an American now, don’t you know, so none of this applies to him. Come home, just be prepared for your father to be an asshole.” My mom crunched into what sounded like an apple. “Also, heads up. He may not be a Christian any longer, but he definitely has ideas about unmarried men and women sharing a bedroom, let alone an apartment. And he’d like to share these ideas with you.”

“Are you serious? Where’s Alex going to sleep if not with me?”

Mom laughed. “Oh, Melissa. Who do you think actually runs things around here? Come home and bring Alex with you. If he has a problem with that, your father knows where he is always welcome.”

I didn’t ask where, but I had a feeling it was around the corner from Bottega Louie.

***

I’m breaking this here — I don’t mean to delay the denouement. It shouldn’t disappoint, even if we’re all disappointed in Jen.