Page 13 of Gifted & Talented

Arthur, Five Years Ago

Not a church wedding for them, they said at first. They were hip, cool, outdoorsy! Not a priest, but an old friend of Gillian’s! Not a stodgy old cake that no one would eat, but something unconventional and different! Donuts, a sign of the times!

But in the end, of course, they caved to expectations.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride!”

Light streamed in overhead through the stained glass, temporarily blinding Arthur as he leaned forward, one hand carefully angled alongside Gillian’s slender hip. They had practiced this several times—Gillian was meticulous about camera angles—but still, he caught a flicker of revulsion in the mahogany of her eyes, registering that not even frequent rehearsal or a nine-month engagement had done anything to make the moment more palatable for her.

Her lips were cool and soft, a little of the sacramental wine on her breath. Arthur closed his eyes and tried to be present in the moment, to live inside the moment, to curl up in it, to take up all its space, to force it into a different shape, to beg the moment to transform, to be something different. They parted and Arthur saw his father’s unsmiling face out of the corner of his eye.

“She’s a good choice, you know.” The conversation between Thayer and Arthur on the evening of his and Gillian’s engagement had been almost laughably civilized, although it carried with it the usual undertone of cruelty, detectable only when Arthur’s father spoke to him in private. “Possibly too good a choice,” Thayer added, with a sense of impending bomb. “It’s—” The elder Wren waved an unflappable hand. “Transparent.”

He meant that Gillian was well educated but without the whiff of excess that Arthur couldn’t escape. She was, like Arthur, a first generation American on one side with some family lineage dating back to the traders of New Amsterdam on the other. Unlike Arthur, though, Gillian was a bootstrap person—as in, she had pulled herself up. Thayer, too, had been a bootstrap person. Arthur was not. Arthur was soft and spoiled. Arthur got the yips. Gillian was beautiful, but not too beautiful—more like architecturally well-made in an understated way. A feminist, whose politics were politely left-leaning but mostly unknown, because she did not say anything on social media. It was Arthur who was the radical, or who could afford to be one, anyway, because rich people recognized him as one of their own and trusted him to cave at some point, to be a capitalist in woke clothing the way people were so fashionably capable of being these days. Arthur was, of course, more sincere in his politics than that, and people knew it. Or so he believed at the time.

“Maybe we’re just exceptionally well matched,” suggested Arthur, in a tone that had won over the stricter teachers at boarding school and also, notably, Lou, but had never once worked on his father. As predicted, Arthur again struck out.

“What is she, Egyptian?” asked his father, who was not racist, or wasn’t racist in the way white men were usually not racist, which was that they did not see color . They simply did not care for the person individually —nothing that could be reasonably attributed to race, because they were frankly too evolved!

“French-Moroccan,” corrected Arthur. Gillian was technically multiracial—as was Arthur himself—but he knew which part specifically his father was asking about. “And Indian.”

“Not fully, though,” commented his father, presumably reflecting on Gillian’s father’s surname, which was Hayes. (Gillian’s was Yadav.)

“No, her father is from the far more exotic Kansas City.”

“She’s what, a lawyer?”

“She is.” Though she didn’t want to be. That was the appeal, she’d said on the first date. Gillian had always wanted to be a singer, actually. But she’d never make it, she wasn’t actually good enough, just mediocre, really. She loved it but wasn’t especially talented at it, which was the usual kind of personal tragedy befalling constituents of the world. She needed health insurance but hated the culture at her firm, wanted out of the rat race altogether. She was fairly confident they’d fire her in favor of some fresh, eager, newly ripened (the word “succulent” came to mind, or “luscious,” “sumptuous,” “ young ”) law school graduate over the option of promoting her to partner and, thus, paying her what she was worth. She’d gone to law school only because her father had insisted that she do something, quote, sustainable. Her father was in manufacturing, her mother was a retired catalog model, neither career path was exceptionally fitting. She could have been a doctor, that was technically on the table, and with Gillian’s disarming directness and blazing, otherworldly competence, she did have a ring of neurosurgeon to her. She was never very good at science—she felt she could have been better at it had she really applied herself, but she just loved Shakespeare too much and there was really only so much time in the day—so then law school it was. But god, wasn’t it awful doing something just because your father wants you to?

(At which point Arthur said, “I think, at this moment, that if you came out of the ladies’ room with some sort of Sermon on the Mount, I’d seriously consider devoting myself to you body and soul,” to which Gillian correctly replied, “Arthur, my goodness, rein it in.”)

Anyway, Gillian had ambitions of pursuing a PhD, though she felt she could make time for a congressional campaign if it didn’t interfere with her studies.

“Well, she looks nice on your arm, if you can get past the fact that she seems thoroughly uninterested in fucking you,” commented the ever-paternal Thayer Wren. “Though I suppose what politician actually fucks his wife?”

“I’m going to,” said Arthur heatedly, before checking himself. “I mean, it’s none of your business,” he muttered, “and the point is I like her.”

“You like her. Wow.” Thayer mimicked an explosion beside his head. “Groundbreaking.”

“I love her. Of course I love her.” And Arthur did love her. Though, how meaningful was that love, exactly? Seeing as Arthur could love almost anything if he thought about it long enough. Whether Arthur was actually aware of this remains critically unstudied, despite it being pointed out to him many times. Candidly, between you and me, that was just Arthur’s way, in some ways his fundamental flaw, and the reason he was actually quite fond of his sister Meredith. Arthur was just one of those people who could feel something for anyone, which many people in his life would mistake for a sort of saintly quality, but of course wasn’t. Because in his own way, Arthur was an asshole, too, and worse, he was an idiot. But obviously we’ll get to that.

Three years from the date of their marriage, Gillian Wren would be well on her way to a doctorate in Napoleonic military tactics with an emphasis on the flexible use of artillery (which at one point during her initial dissertation proposal Gillian had compared quite brilliantly to the triangle offense of Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls, before Wrenfare’s experimental technomantic program made human coaching largely irrelevant) and Arthur would perform multiple congressional duties with his boxers on inside out due to the ministrations of Yves Reza from the bathroom of Philippa’s hotel.

But before any of that happened, there was just one moment of significance, of utter, ringing clarity, which would define all the days of Arthur’s life right up until the moment he learned of his father’s passing.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said to Gillian as they parted from their first official kiss as husband and wife, though he wasn’t quite sure why he’d said it, as he hadn’t technically done anything wrong. He’d performed just as they’d rehearsed, and at the time, pre–Philippa and Yves, he’d been perfectly behaved. Gillian had wanted to wait for any physical intimacy until their wedding day, and Arthur had been delighted to oblige. It seemed romantic to him, and pleasantly—almost cozily—old-fashioned, and he’d assumed that his attraction to her mind would ultimately reveal itself insatiably in the bedroom.

At the moment of avowal, though, Arthur understood the truth, which was that he was a lifeline of some sort for Gillian, and now that the rings were exchanged, she could relax, set down the weight she’d been carrying around—presumably that of any woman in her late twenties—and stop worrying about the whole thing, because everything would be fine. Because Arthur would never leave her—a divorce would be ugly for his political ambitions, and anyway, he had obvious attachment issues—and they would almost certainly receive a pastel stand mixer that would look lovely in her dream kitchen, and she would never want for anything again, and there was only one small catch, which was that she did not, at all, want him to touch her.

Which was how Arthur Wren came to understand that he had tied himself to a woman who did not love him, which was an almost unbearable irony, because as we have already established, Arthur Wren wanted nothing so much as he wanted to be loved.

“Don’t cry,” whispered Gillian kindly, and Arthur was grateful to her for that, because he understood that she would keep it secret. Him, that is. His heart and his heartbreak, everything he would one day do, everything he could already do—that is, Arthur’s magic, which was then an eccentric ity too ridiculous to be worth sharing, something he thought was buried deeply in the past, like Lou—and Gillian would keep all of that a secret on his behalf. She had bound her life to his and so their marriage was a vault, a fact driven by either genuine fondness or the artillery-driven tactic at which Gillian was already so adept. In the end, asked a voice that Arthur felt morbidly certain was his sister Meredith’s, does it really matter which?

And it was at that very moment that Arthur Wren started to die.