Sebastian
Seriously?? Did you ask him anything?
Viola
What do you mean?
Sebastian
About mom?
Viola
It didn’t really come up.
The conversation flattened her in the same way, magic rendered cheap and two-dimensional. No: she wants Orson to be human. She wants him to be hers. It’s why she left out the details—the scotch, cigarettes, fingers running through her hair. She won’t mention London. Sebastian would have expectations. His own agenda. Discussing it wouldn’t fix anything between them. The last thing she needs is for him to entertain Niamh’s suggestion:He wants to sleep with you.
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Who wouldn’t want to sleep with you, Viola? You’re luscious.”
Someone who knew me as a child. Someone who knew my mother.Delicious, anxious, wriggling thought. Her desire is a saber cutting through the confused unknowns:What would it be like to sleep with him? What would it be like to sleep with any man?When did her virginity becomea burden? It’s not that she has anything against sex in the abstract, just that it must happen in the right way, with the right person. It must mean something.
She moans. “What do you wear in London?”
“Jesus, Viola, if you don’t sleep with him, I will. Rowan is going to die.”
Adrenaline rush, sifting through the clothes that she had stuffed into two suitcases, entirely insufficient for the occasion. She goes out and buys two dresses that look more expensive than they are: a floral print bandeau, a strappy black thing. In a fit of chaotic anticipation, she throws into a bag a stain-remover pen, breath mints, makeup bag, Kleenex, extra hair ties, bobby pins, safety pins, tampons, then takes it all out again, because there’s no romance in overengineering. In her small purse, she brings only a tube of lipstick called Rouge Noir.
“Honestly, if you wind up in theMail,” Niamh says. “You best not leave me alone with Maitland.”
“I’d fear for his life.”
The train deposits her at Liverpool Street in ninety fleeting minutes, during which she fails to absorb a single word ofThe Conquest of Happiness. London is a cacophony of bodies, noise, and discarded coffee cups. The sky feels impenetrable, an illusion created by the hemming in of the horizon, the glassy eyes of the buildings. Viola has never understood the appeal of cities, the true-crime peril and low-grade dehumanization, everyone looking at you like an obstacle. Recently, walking through the common room, she caught a segment about a serial killer who strangled women and left them in abandoned alleys, in garbage bins, on riverbanks. The images stuck with her: police tape and blue lights, the low-resolution faces of victims contained in white, square frames, their eyes already haunted by the tragedy hovering over them. As though their futures were predetermined, and it was the sadness of this knowledge—rather than the horrific uncaught perpetrator—that killed them. Still: maybe she just hasn’t figured it out. Maybe the metropolis will open up to her. People fall in love here, don’t they?
Dad
Have fun. Go find Nelson’s column.
Be careful. Love you. Dad
Just a normal trip to the city, that’s all she mentioned. You can’t tell everybody everything. She follows the line on her phone south from Liverpool Street, through coughing taxi ranks, down Threadneedle Street to the river. The Millennium Bridge spindles against the sky. Buildings she recognizes but cannot name hover to the east. A light rain spits or doesn’t against the side of her face. The world is awash with gray—gray is the sky, the glass, the metal of it all, gray is the river roiling fat beneath her, gray are the squat little boats that chug off to the west and the people’s faces bent back against too-thin hoods. A gust of wind wrenches a man’s umbrella up into the sky, and it too turns gray and disappears—into the water or the air, no one could say. Orson is standing at the end of the bridge.
Tentatively she holds up a hand. He holds up a hand. Everything peripheral—all the mess of it and the noise—disappears down a cinematic tunnel, the world closing in on the two of them, great and fated lovers: Cathy and Heathcliff, Rhett and Scarlett, Tony and Maria. As he crosses toward her, she tries to detect in his gait the same urgency that she feels.
“Hi,” she says, her heart tugging, her lips and face and hair damp in what she hopes is Austen-esque.
“Why are you soaking?” he cries, kissing her cheek. “You should have taken a taxi. I would have paid.”
“The walk was shorter, apparently. You know, normally people pick somewhere inside to meet.”
“The problem is that, inside, people try to talk to me.” He is wearing rain-fogged glasses, which he wipes on his shirt. “Well, anyway, do you want to dry off? Do you want to drop off your things?”
“It’s fine,” she says. “Where are we going?”
The thatched, reconstructed Globe Theatre crouches on the southbank, fitting neither with the looming, industrial Tate or the ballistic Gherkin.
“I thought this would be educational for you.”
