“Because of you.” I take a sip of my wine and watch as she frowns.
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
She swallows and looks around, fiddles with her napkin. “Before them. Before her. I’m not whatever you thought I was anymore.”
“You’re still exactly what you were, Alice. You were stripping me like I’d strip some inanimate object down. No real thought or consideration. Just simple and straightforward. Honest. And now you’re not. I was enjoying it. Mostly. It was clarifying to someone who has too much money and thinks the way I do.”
“From what I’ve seen of you working now, you seem to have plenty of purpose. Too much actually. It’s freaky the amount of time you spend in that office staring at numbers and money.”
The shame of it is, the money I’ve amassed, the same money that helped to create this building, this city in fact, just continues to fund the narcissistic culture I reside in.
I could do something about that if I chose to, change the way the world revolved.
Like my grandfather did.
“But that’s the game I’ve been taught, Alice. If I make sure a broken pipeline occurs here, or a rig explosion happens there, then oil prices rise. Banking crashes. Shares lose value. People lose their homes. The rich become poor, as they try to navigate the situation, and then the governing bodies, the ones who think they rule this life the people live, turn their attention where it needs to be rather than concerning themselves with strategy that they don’t understand anyway.”
“Jesus. Okay. That’s a lot of information I didn’t need to know about.”
“Ah, but you do. Everything rebuilds under tragedy, Alice. It strives, perhaps trying to give what’s needed to survive and grow rather than take. The game changes. The pieces move. The cause and its effect becomes relevant in different ways, producing a changed base to work from.” She chews her food, listens intently. “That’s like me now. And you. Altered, or at least fluctuating.”
“Like you?”
“Yes.”
She pushes her plate away, having finished and picks up her wine. “So to carry on with whatever this is, how, exactly, are you fluctuating? And that’s a stupid fucking word anyway. Fluctuating? How does a human fluctuate?” I smile again, happy to hear her talking more like her old self. “Is this what you’re like when you’re clean? I thought the kind and caring was odd enough, but this is becoming freaky as hell now. I could almost see you as normal if I didn’t know better.”
“I’m thinking about how best to navigate.”
“Sounds like you do a lot of that already. Must be exhausting.”
“I do, but never with my heart involved in the process.”
Her drink hovers by her lips. “Your heart?” She stares, as if waiting for me to give her something more to help her understand that. I won’t.
She should have heard all of that loud and clear.
The plates are taken away in the silence. I sip, enjoying the company and the atmosphere around us other than the fucking abysmal pianist. She’s everything my wife wasn’t to look at. Arresting. Terse. Dismissive in a way that defies logic considering who I am and what she already knows. “Was that enough for you to understand your worth to me, Alice?”
Her wine gets put down on the table, back straightening as she turns to gaze out at the skyline. No answer, though. She just keeps gazing, thinking, or perhaps not thinking. I stand and leave her with her thoughts, picking up my wine to head over to the pianist. He moves at my request and gives me the piano so I can start finding our song again. It flows over me as easily as she does, wrapping itself around my fingers and relieving me of the monotony before her.
People clap and filter out of the restaurant slowly, most of them acknowledging me playing by way of smiling and nodding their appreciation. I don’t care about any of them. I’m doing this for her, so that she can find something we had before they took her from me.
She eventually makes her way over to me. “I know my worth,” she says, leaning on the side of the piano and watching my hands. “I always have. Being raped doesn’t change that other than dealing with it. Being here in a room full of things nothing to do with me doesn’t change anything either. What I don’t know is how much of a game you’re still playing. I’m not a tool for your fun, Malachi. Not out here in the real world. Thank you, though. For being kind and protecting us.”
“You’re welcome.” I look at the keys, still trying to navigate my own feelings for her. “But dismissing us won’t work now, Alice. Whether you like it or not, you’ve become one of us because you changed my own personal economics. No one’s done that for a long time.”
“Me? How?”
“You rid me of something that denied me life.” She frowns, as her shoulders slump in on themselves. “Don’t do that. Own it, Alice. I want you to. Assuming you did it for the right reasons. Fucked as it might be, you’ve become my match.” She looks around the room, probably concerned about the others listening. She shouldn’t be. “I bury her tomorrow. Would you like to come?”
“What? No. That’s wrong.”
“Why? You put her there.” Everything about the posture she was holding disintegrates, as if she might just crumble under that pressure. “I won’t let you dismiss that or us.” Can’t actually. Not now I’ve found her and this feeling that consumes my mundanity. I keep playing, now watching her as she takes that information in. “Perhaps fucking will bring you back to who you are and where we were. Lose the underwear.”
Her head shoots up. “Really?”
