“I was too shy.”
Separate arrivals at the airport, separate seats. He paid, obviously, for the ticket, business class and all. But he was whisked away to the private lounge, didn’t see her till touchdown. She suggested that the secrecy of it all might be sexy, but it just made him feel like an ass. This summer she has hardly left his bed.
“Poor Niamh. Is she going to mourn your absence this week?”
“She already complains I’m never there.”
He purses his lips. “I do want to meet her. And see your girly little flat.”
“There is nothing to see. When you’re gone, I live in squalor.”
And when he’s not? Her life has attached to his. Everything else—the projects and paychecks and gossip and bullshit—disappears when he closes the door behind the familiar sound of her laugh, the strength of her embrace. It was jarring, to realize how lonely he had been before, consumed with the project of himself. So many relationships had only ever felt incidental, part of the endless pursuit of the next thing. So many exes craved the publicity, in a way that alienated real feeling. He’d begun to think it was just his nature, that isolation. But God, how good it feels to throw himself into caring for something—someone else.
Please God, let it last, he thinks.
On the radio, a program is playing about the upcoming elections, the heightening rhetoric. “I swear, you people are going to have a civil war,” he says.
“Good,” Viola laughs. “I’ve always wanted to invest in a bunker.”
“I think we’d thrive in a bunker.”
“You wouldn’t. No limelight in a bunker.”
“I’m sure we could get some installed.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Shit—”
The traffic slows abruptly and the nose of his car almost kisses the ass of the truck in front of him. For a moment they are face-to-face with two bumper stickers:Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!andWhere’s the Birth Certificate?
“Some people are just stupid,” she says.
“No,” he says. “They’re just experts in seeing what they want to see.”
He can feel it simmering in this country, a willful ignorance. You can hear it in the laugh track, in everything the dream factory promises. There’s always something darker on the other side of the curtain.
“Enough politics,” she says. “Dinner. I’m thinking mussels. White wine. Garlic. Butter.”
“Talk dirty to me.”
Viola twists the radio to a familiar channel, hums mindlessly to a song he doesn’t know. How easy she seems here! How… herself! At times he worries whether in the momentum of the two of them, she is alienating herself from her own desires. Constantly, she anticipates his arrivals, his moods, will cancel plans without a thought if he suggests she come around.She’s so young, he reminds himself, drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Maybe it’s okay. Or maybe he’s making it worse. The master’s thing, for example—it’s only a bid to extend their time together, just another thing to achieve. It doesn’t animate her. By hiding herself away with him, is she leaving herself unresolved?
It’s why he chose this place: a refuge only a few hours from her childhood home. Here, she can have the upper hand. Show him, maybe, what and who she loves. He feels compelled to give her everything Susie would have wanted her to have. Confidence. Beauty. Love. Hasn’t she given him these things? It feels like carrying through with something.
“Do you want to see anybody while we’re here?”
“Not particularly,” she says. “Thank you.”
The way Susie used to talk about Al, Orson always imagined him as tough: stubborn and old-fashioned, set in his ways. But at the funeral, he’d been surprised by how disoriented he seemed, a man without a mooring. He must have pulled it together, done all right to producesomebody like Viola. She speaks about him fondly, and it makes him feel guilty for taking her away from him. For encouraging Susan to do the same.
“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
“I don’t need to turn our sexy getaway into a family reunion, do you?”
She reaches a hand across to his thigh, recalling the completeness of the two of them, and in a world where everybody wants something from him, God, it’s good to know she requires nothing but himself. When they get to the house, the first thing they will need to test is the bed.
Tucked deep into Wellfleet pine forest the refuge reveals itself: svelte, modernist. Its long windows expose Cape Cod in the way that it was intended to be exposed—rustic and wild. Were it not so hidden, you would inevitably peer inside and wonder:Who lives there?In the open-plan heart, there is nowhere to hide. As Orson peels off her dress and kisses the tender skin of her stomach and clutches at her hair in needy fistfuls, she never loses awareness of this exposure. The potential to be seen. When he stands to unbutton his jeans, she pulls down the wide, translucent window shade.
