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Every room had a candle in it, including this one, and they all had names like Tidefast, Hush Body, and Mother Fog. I had my own names for them though: Gaslighting and Linen, Yankee Candle if it Went to Therapy, Toxic Positivity and Sea Moss, and my favorite: The Manipulation is Coming from Inside the House.
I placed the supplements on a ceramic dish and poured her a glass of what was probably Norwegian tap water from a bottle with the words Snøbäck Fjell-Dråpe arrogantly printed on it, as if we could all pronounce that shit.
I walked in, tray in hand.
“Can you take a photo of me existing by the window?”
“Sure,” I said. Half my camera roll was photos of her looking thoughtfully at eucalyptus leaves. It was part of her “rewilding feminine energy” rebranding, which had started exactly when she discovered her ex-husband was dating a twenty-six-year-old Instagram model.
I snapped the photo. She looked exhaustingly incredible. Her lithe, yoga-tempered body wore everything well, and her skin was suspiciously radiant this morning.
“So how was it?” she said, suddenly remembering I was a person. She eyed me over the glass of water.
“Wonderful,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
She smiled, setting her glass down on a book titled Yoni Wisdom, satisfied. “Is Aurora as magnificent as she looks? I’ve heard incredible things.”
“She really is.”
“Wonderful. Now, I need your help with deliveries. I needed some renewal,” she said. “Sofia left them all in the bedroom. I told her not to do that. I don’t want that industrial, delivery-boy energy in my sleeping space. But it’s too late now. I have Caspian in twenty minutes. Please work your magic, Marlowe. You know where everything goes.”
Caspian was a cranio-sacral massage therapist…with benefits. He had a strict “no phones” policy during his visits, the door was always locked, and his assistant, Ashleigh, made lots of videos about him “channeling divine masculine energy.”
“Right into her,” Sofia had said last week, and I’d nearly spat out my coffee.
Vivienne’s bedroom, which overlooked the bay, was cluttered with boxes and what looked like half of Saks Fifth Avenue’s spring collection strewn across her linen comforter.
I spent two hours hanging up silk and organic cotton in her two-thousand-square-foot closet and added lavender pouches to wooden hangers. There would, under no circumstances, be any wire hangers in Vivienne’s closet. Then I tackled the boxes, wearily. First, a pair of cashmere bed socks direct from a Scottish woolen mill, which needed to be placed in a cedar drawer sachet, and a diffuser that required an app and looked like it belonged in the MoMA. The app required a firmware update. The firmware update required a password that she had texted me six months ago and I now had to find in the endless cascade of messages she had sent me, some of which had arrived at four in the morning, or when she was sitting on the toilet and needed more sustainably sourced bamboo toilet paper.
I didn’t even know how exhausted I was by her. I just knew I was drained enough to sit on her floor for four minutes, pitifully, and almost cry. I thought about Damian, closing the distance to hold me at the roadside, and that nearly destroyed me, so I aggressively folded the last of Vivienne’s new silk underwear.
My near meltdown was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of Vivienne catastrophizing from the kitchen.
I got to my feet, putting on therapist face. That specific howl was a summons I knew well.
“Vivienne, are you okay?” I called, dutifully, because that was the first phase of catastrophe service.
“No! No, I’m not okay! Nothing is okay!”
She was propped up against the marble island, alpaca askew. Her hair was still disheveled from “massage.” Her face was doing something controlled and terrible. She had stopped herself mid-cry, but her cheeks were still flaring red.
She handed me her phone. An Instagram photo was on the screen. Her ex-husband, Marco, posing with the twenty-six-year-old on a yacht, his meaty fingers clasping her bikini-clad hip.
I really wanted to laugh, partly from nervous energy, and partly from exhausted spite that didn’t want to hide anymore.
“They’re in fucking Croatia,” she hissed. “Our special place, where we held our new-moon commitment ceremony. And read the comments.”
I tapped on the speech bubble icon. The comments were emotional chainsaws. Now I just felt sorry for her.
Guess he got sick of candles LOL
Maybe the Bay didn’t teach us surrender, bestie
TIDEFAST more like husband GONEFAST
Which one of these candles smells like divorce papers
She was trembling, her face now straining with a tension I knew was dangerous to her nervous system and mine.
