“You sure you don’t want to trade tonight?” he offers, patting the couch. “You’ll sleep better.”
She shakes her head and smiles. “I’m enjoying my weird dreams.”
“Gross.”
Lola laughs. “Had one about Mom.”
“Yeah?”
“In the dream, she kept knocking on my door, like she was trying to tell me a secret.” Lola smiles, as though she thinks it’s ridiculous, as though it’s unimportant what their mother might want. “Psychoanalyze that.”
They are dancing on the lip of something.
“Do you ever think about going to California?” he asks.
She tilts her head back to meet his gaze, eyes sparkling. “All the time,” she says softly.
His eyes drift back to the television screen, watch the talking heads react to a loud, incessant buzzer.
“I’m seeing someone,” she says. “I want you to meet him.”
The next night, they are taking a train to the north of the city, hustling out at a busy station and pushing past Turkish greengrocers and hairdressers and espresso bars that slip down familiar side streets. She sets a fast pace, afraid of herself. Afraid of her changing mind.
“Tell me about him,” he asks. “What do I need to know.”
“You know him.”
“I do?” Sebastian folds up at the thought, as though she has presented him with a riddle. “I don’t know anyone here.”
Hurriedly, she leads him closer, organizing her own execution. Is it too late to turn around now? To go back to the flat, to make a cup of tea with Niamh and watch something mindless on TV, or to go to the library and disappear into a world without consequence? When they open the door and Sebastian sees what she has done in the face of all of his evidence, will it be the end of her?
“Hugh Grant?” he laughs, looking at the houses that are growing taller and whiter as the road inclines sharply. “Winston Churchill?”
She is doing this for both of them.
“It’s Orson Grey.”
The door opens on Sebastian’s shocked face, and there he is, the love of her life, ushering them in and offering them drinks.Tea or something stronger?
“I can’t tell you how great it is to meet you,” Orson is saying. His hand sweeps tenderly through her hair. She extracts herself briskly. Her brother is moving through the room, unreadable. He is examining the dusty record player in the living room, his eyes trained on the black disc going around and around, playing an upbeat jazz trumpet.Say something.Orson is behind her, lighting candles, bending to lift something out of the oven, some kind of puff pastry hors d’oeuvres.Say something, Sebastian.But he says nothing, looking only at the record, imprinted with a sound from the distant past, and Viola feels her breath quickening, applies desperate focus to the back of a discarded packet, pronouncing with great emphasis: “Mini-gougères au fromage, fantastique!”
Sebastian turns and she braces. A smashed glass? A piece of his mind? She has envisioned a thousand permutations of his anger.
But no. For an instant, his face is crumpled. He looks at her without recognition, and she feels a vanishing of herself. How bizarre she must appear to him: the foreign world she has placed herself in, the firmness of Orson’s life, his age, the majesty of his presence, all of it surrounds her like a fortress.God, I’m still your Lola, she thinks. But in an instanthe has gathered himself and approaches Orson, taking his hand, pulling his left arm around his shoulder.
“Make us a drink, Joe, why don’t ya?” he says.
Orson beams as though he is twenty years old, as though he has been given another chance to play his favorite part. From inside a lesser-touched cabinet, he retrieves an old silver cocktail shaker.
Sebastian asks: “Is that from the show?” He handles it like a holy relic and applauds when Orson shakes it, launching into a thousand questions that Viola never thought to ask.
“How did you film that scene…”
“When my mom went to rehab, was that when…”
“What was it like with the guy who played…”
His eyes are wide and lit up with a genuine curiosity, not a flicker of anger. Viola is unmoored. She reaches for the merlot.
