They have been so careful. She will be careful her whole life if that’s what it takes. Now that she has something to lose, she has become consumed by the fear of losing it. How many ways the world might snatch him away from her! Distortion or demonization or death. The only purpose she feels is this: being with him, loving him. She is lost in it.
After, she sends a photograph of the living room to Niamh, who responds instantly.
Niamh
Fuck off
Slowly, she is coming to understand Orson’s wealth, or at least the implications of it. It moves with subtlety, fluidity. It has no interest in putting its name on buildings. Rather, it is a vehicle of freedom. If herfather painted wealth as a pattern of behavior (summers in the Vineyard, winters in Maine), for Orson it is limitless horizons. Innumerable are his sun-drenched islands, his private white sand beaches.
We’re going to your neck of the woods, he said.Show me your natural habitat.
He has been itchy recently, she can tell. He keeps talking about wanting a break from performing, the endlessness of it, threatening to start a charity or buy a pub. She can feel him casting for something solid, a new project to throw himself into, something tangible and real. She knows he is hoping it is her.
Well, what do you want to see?she’d asked.
Niamh responds with a photograph of a giant wart on the bottom of a foot, which apparently belongs to her new on-again off-again boyfriend, a Swedish DJ named Matthias.Thank God for Niamh.Some people are getting so serious these days.
In the bathroom now, she pauses to examine her dead ends, runs a mascara brush over her lashes. On the back porch, Orson is singing to himself in the sweet, tuneful way he does when he thinks no one is listening. She steps out, barefoot, and he cracks open the bottle of airport Talisker, peers out onto the forest of locust trees and kettle ponds. There is a perfection in nature, in life that doesn’t need to question itself; the abundance its own justification. Cicadas cry impenetrably loud. She had forgotten that sound, nature like the roar of a jet.
“So,” he says. “I have a surprise for you.”
“You do?”
He nods, pushes up his sunglasses onto his forehead, his eyes dancing. “Go look in the closet in the living room.”
“Is it a dead body?”
“Yep.”
She smiles, moving nervously across the threshold. What could be in a closet?A dress? A person? My brother?
A cello. Beautiful curves, long, golden-brown neck, a waist that calls out to be held. The bow resting beside it.
“Oh my God.”
“You’re always saying you miss it. I thought it could be fun.”
“I—”
She carries it forward into the living room, the familiar weight, the comfort of it between her legs. Presses her fingers over the strings, feeling for their tension.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s… wow.”
“Play me a tune.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Always, she has talked about her cello playing as a magical thing, a secret skill, her mode of artistic expression. Clumsily, she fits her fingers into G major, runs the bow over a slow arpeggio. She is aware of her desire to impress him, of his eyes and expectations.
“It’s been a while.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
Come on, remember, any song.The Bach: is it G? Then B or B minor? She fingers a few chords, isolated from each other, amounting to nothing.When did this become a phantom register, a forgotten language?Her loss would be agitating enough if he weren’t witnessing it. He’s going to think she has misrepresented herself, that he has gone to all this trouble only for her to disappoint him.
“I need music,” she says.
