“Usually, it helps to get back to the basics. You’ve taken her to the UK, a gala in Manhattan, and Cleveland. You got her that pretty bracelet. You’ve already done the grand gestures. Just be around for each other. Take it slow. See what happens.”
Back to basics.
I tried getting back to my basics, and Olivia didn’t like it.
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“You both have such demanding careers—I think it would be nice if you have each other for the quiet times.”
“The quiet times.” I can do that. “I just wish I understood her.”
“Why?” Mrs. Montgomery cocks her head. She really doesn’t understand why I’d want to understand her daughter.
“Don’tyou?”
She smiles and touches my hand. “You’re a good boy, Johnny. But you don’t have to understand everything intellectually. When we try to understand something like that, it’s because we want to feel like we have control over it.”
Is that true?
It is.
“There are softer ways of understanding people. You know, I always thought you and Olivia had more in common than you and Nathan.”
I almost start choking again.
“You don’t see that? You both have the same issues. You just deal with them differently. You both like rules. You both think you need the certainty of repetition and patterns and mastery. Olivia escaped to her body, and you escaped to your brain.” She reaches for a napkin and slides it across the table to me. “But you’ve both been running from your own hearts.”
That almost makes me smile because I’m picturing Olivia running, not from a zombie apocalypse but from her own heart.And I drive up alongside her in my rented sedan and remind her that if she had a driver’s license… Then she’d flip me the bird, climb into the car, and dry hump me. But I can’t think about that right now. “This soup is good, Mrs. Montgomery. Thank you.”
“Oh, it’s just Campbell’s.” She waves her hand dismissively. “I’m sorry I don’t have all the ingredients for my magic soup. Remember I made it for you when you had the flu?”
“I remember everything you ever did for me. But I definitely don’t have the flu.”
“I know, honey. I know.”
“I don’t like not knowing what to do,” I admit.
She takes a sip from her own coffee mug and then says, “What was it you said in your TED Talk? About your Brainy business? Turn your weaknesses into strengths?”
I swallow and wipe my mouth with the napkin. “That’s it. I have toshowher that she’s my weakness.”
She smiles. Such a lovely, warm smile. “Maybe then she won’t be so scared knowing that you’re hers.”
This woman.She’sthe genius. I would give anything for her to be my mother-in-law. Even—possibly—my dignity.
CHAPTER 31
OLIVIA
Last night, I watchedThe Red Shoesfor the millionth time with Callie. There was a small amount of wine and a medium amount of ice cream. It was Callie’s first time watching it, and she was impressed by the aesthetics but bored out of her mind, and she found the whole thing creepy. She also asked, quite rightly,“Why doesn’t she just take off those fucking shoes?”
I ugly cried. I always cry at the end when Vicky Page dies. That film is inspiration porn for dancers. The dedication. The artistry. The validation that ballet demands complete and total sacrifice. I used to get so dramatic and weepy because she was forced to choose between art and life, but now I’m like—who the fuck says she has to pick one or the other? Nobody was really letting her choose at all! Nobody was actually supportingher.
Johnny, at least now—or at least up until yesterday—was being supportive of my goals.
And it made me think aboutGiselle. Not the choreography or the music. Not the plot, but what it means. I don’t think I ever came close to understanding it beyond an artistic level, but now I think I do.
After an intense ballet-conditioning class at Bay Area Ballet, I’m sad to say that the familiar ache of quad, hamstring, and abdominal muscles did not erase this unfamiliar ache that has been consuming me.
