Page 19 of Gifted & Talented

15

We pause here to bring you the same Tuesday morning as experienced by Gillian Wren, a habitual early riser and woman of general emotional dexterity.

Gillian had actually had an extremely unremarkable relationship with her father-in-law, Thayer Wren, something that could not be said by anyone else thus far introduced to the narrative. As you already know, all three of the Wren children had experienced their father very differently, with each of them believing him to be a projection of some smaller fraction of what he really was, like widening the frame on the Mona Lisa and revealing her background to be something vastly different in each case (riding a centaur, for example).

For Meredith, Thayer was a source of inspiration: a driving, motivating force for everything she would later accomplish, his approval dangling like the proverbial carrot she could reasonably—even imminently—earn.

For Arthur, Thayer was a benchmark: a yardstick against which he would forever be measured and perennially fall short.

For Eilidh, Thayer was a kindred spirit: someone who shared her personal grief and sense of having been torn into fractions, equally split as she was into parts of before and after—multiple people living irreconcilably in one body, one mind, one everlasting taste of regret.

But who a person is to one’s children can bear little resemblance to who they really are.

To Gillian, Arthur’s wife and the hero of this story, assuming it is narrated by Gillian (it isn’t, it is narrated by me, you’re welcome), Thayer Wren had always been a relatively ordinary person. Meaning that he was a human being and therefore beholden to many strengths and, equally, many flaws. For example, he was a little bit racist and also quite a bit sexist, although no more so than other men his age, which was not an excuse so much as a bland generalization—a scale by which to judge the severity of his sociopolitical crimes. Thayer was very smart and quite contrarian, such that conversation over dinner was often a competition as to who could be the most incisive about a piece of media, usually one that was not designed to be torn apart so much as tasted, enjoyed, consumed. The lower the stakes, the more enthusiastic Thayer could become. He had a way of shifting the atmosphere of a room, resetting the perception of normalcy. Thayer could make concerns for a comic book franchise seem dire while determining a piece of critical legislation to have the merest, fleeting impact on the ordinary person’s daily life, which on some occasions was a stance that felt both worldly and not inaccurate and on others could be almost breathtakingly self-absorbed.

That being said, Thayer could be a very entertaining dinner guest, and although he was not especially well-read, his intellectual curiosity was endless. He was not easily bored, nor did he seem to find most people boring. He had actually taken quite an interest in Gillian’s research, to such a degree that she had developed a sort of liking for him—not quite fondness, nothing especially filial, but something that allowed for a neutrality she could use as a shield, because even when he was driving Arthur to madness, Gillian could recall that from time to time, Thayer Wren had not really been so bad.

That morning, she awoke as she usually did, her eyes opening as she lay on her back and wondered what had woken her. She determined that it was the degree of light filling the room, the shade that signaled a few minutes before six and was more of a suggestion, a bluish hint that did not say morning had broken but implied that morning would, at some point, break. She got out of bed quietly, in the way Arthur never could. Arthur was a very noisy person, almost as a personality flaw, although Gillian did not consider it to be one. To her, Arthur’s noise was more an extension of Arthur himself. The way he seemed to hit upon every creaky floorboard in their mostly restored craftsman; the way every object he picked up or set down seemed to have its own auditory fingerprint. It wasn’t that his voice was loud, or that he was disruptive, or really anything that was easy to explain. She supposed Arthur’s noise was probably just what happened naturally when a person was not afraid to make noise, which is a very long-winded way of saying that Arthur wasn’t especially considerate and that Gillian was, unusually so.

She made her way to the bathroom down the hall, her bag of travel-sized toiletries already unpacked and neatly spread across the bathroom counter. Gillian, like two of the three Wren children, had had some exposure to one of the more folkloric forms of magic as a child—via her mother, who had a great fear of demons and demon-resembling powers the way many immigrants did, in what was more commonly viewed as pro forma superstition. To combat the possibility of interception by demon, jinn, rakshasa, or otherwise ill-intending calamity, Gillian developed a highly ritualistic nature, something she wouldn’t have thought of as real magic but absolutely was. From experience, Gillian had learned that any disruption of a ritual would result in bad luck (though in truth bad luck simply exists with little in the way to stop it).

Gillian’s devotion to ritual was a kind of wrangling in its way, a methodology for rightness. She wasn’t as dedicated as Meredith to the many steps of skincare because Gillian wasn’t as vain as Meredith, another thing the universe found worth rewarding. Comparatively, she had a threadbare three steps—wash, moisturize, protect. She did so that morning, then patted her face dry and took a deep, meditative breath, clearing her mind for a moment. Then she exhaled and put everything back.

She decided to put her dark hair in a simpler version of its usual elegant twist, then chose to tuck a black-trimmed navy blouse demurely into a pair of black trousers. It was cleverly done, Gillian’s mourning, in that it was neither showy nor absent meaning. Nothing Gillian did was ever absent meaning, which would be exceedingly stressful to another human being. Actually, it was very stressful to Gillian, too, though nobody had taught Gillian about stress, so she didn’t call it that, or even consider stress to be an actual possibility, much less an ailment. To Gillian, stress was something she lived beside, one of the demons she kept casually at bay with more rational tools like tactics and forethought. She would not be beset by darkness if she simply addressed problems as they arose.

For example: “Good morning!” said Gillian’s husband’s lover, or rather, one of her husband’s lovers. The other, Gillian thought with an unhelpful twist in her stomach, was still due to arrive.

Yves Reza was sitting on the most formal sofa in the entirety of the Wren family home, which was saying something, as most of the house was unoccupied and therefore it was all excessively formal. This one was a stiff white leather, and the very last place Gillian would have sat for both fear of disturbance and because it looked extremely uncomfortable.

Of Arthur’s paramours, Yves had always been especially mysterious to her, given that his personal behaviors were Gillian’s opposite in nearly every way. Yves seemed, for one thing, thoroughly uninterested in ritual. He did not do anything (aside from her husband) routinely or even consistently. He didn’t think about what anyone needed and yet still seemed to know it, offering it instinctively rather than with any sort of practiced hand. He was a natural at it, whatever it was. Existing, Gillian supposed. Loving and being loved. She thought the same thing of Arthur at times, though she knew Arthur too well to think of him as unburdened.

Yves seemed, to Gillian, very brave and quite wonderful. She didn’t know him, of course, and couldn’t be sure whether any of that was true, but she had never had to wonder why Arthur might love Yves, which was probably meaningful in its way. Yves made her ache with something she tried not to interrogate, much less name.

“Good morning,” said Gillian. Her voice seemed suddenly very silly and formal and too deep and maybe too stiff and perhaps it sounded like she didn’t want him there even though she didn’t mind him, not at all. It was maybe a bit strange for him to be staying in the house—she’d already had to chase off a number of reporters, not to mention the many people contacting Arthur’s political office wanting an official statement on his father’s death—but the house was large, and anyway, it seemed unlikely that anyone would ask questions.

Well, it seemed unlikely that anyone would specifically ask the question “Is Arthur Wren having an affair with famous racecar driver Yves Reza in a situation that is known to both his wife and his other girlfriend?” and therefore Gillian simply did not think about it. Part of her concern at the moment was keeping Arthur relatively happy under the circumstances, which outweighed her need to protect his reputation from baseless (or in this case, true but barely believable) rumors.

Which was not to say the optics had not occurred to her, because optics occurred to her with a frequency that would give a more ordinary person a constant, irremediable headache, which funnily enough was a condition Gillian had lived with for so long that she did not technically know what it was to be without pain.

“May I ask you,” Gillian broached to Yves, “if you have… well, a plan?”

“For what?” asked Yves, smiling peaceably.

For the day. For the week. For the funeral. For his life. Did a person who drove around a track for a living technically need a plan? Gillian had never met anyone so aimless, and now could not decide if that was true of all men who drove fast cars for money or if it was just this one, who never really seemed to be going anywhere or doing anything specific whenever she bumped into him.

Even now, Yves was sitting languidly on the sofa with no apparent goal in mind for his personal entertainment, nor any obvious intention to move. But surely he wouldn’t be sitting there all day, would he? So did he have a plan for the arrival of Lady Philippa Villiers-DeMagnon, which could be, as far as Gillian knew, any given moment? Did he have a plan for avoiding the questions of the press? Had he given any thought to climate change, or the possibility of his eternal soul? Did he have a plan for whatever might happen if Arthur ever left him, and if so, would he mind sharing, just between casual friends?

“For… for breakfast,” said Gillian finally.

“Well, I find this morning I would be very amenable to something smoky,” said Yves, as if just now testing the waters of his appetite. “Either a very thick scotch or some salmon, depending on what is more readily available.”

“Could you be convinced to begin the day with something more conventional?” asked Gillian. “Like coffee, perhaps?”

“There isn’t any,” came the voice of Meredith Wren, prompting Gillian to—well, not jump. Gillian was not especially jumpy and she never allowed herself to become so comfortable in any situation that she could lose her reflexive awareness of all nearby access points. But Gillian did betray a small blink of surprise at the presence of Meredith, who despite being a very immovable force in terms of personality had entered the room very deftly, like a tiger on the hunt. “I’ve gone through every cupboard in the house and there’s nothing. It’s like he didn’t even live here.”

Privately, Gillian had thought the same thing. Meredith was saying it spitefully, more a comment of insouciance than anything else, but Gillian had thought hm, it doesn’t seem as if the owner of the house has been here for at least a week, based on her personal deduction. There was a pile of untouched mail, nothing perishable in the fridge, no open bottles of gin sitting on Thayer’s personal bar as there usually were, and while there was no evidence of dust or the typical signifiers of absence—Thayer had a household staff, so everything was neat as a pin and criminally orderly—Gillian felt sure that if they turned on the TV, they would find that Thayer was behind in whatever prestige drama he was watching for the purposes of later informing a cast of obsequious Silicon Valley props was a damn waste of a hundred million dollars. She wondered, too, why Thayer had been at the office late on a Sunday night when by all accounts Thayer did not make a habit of stopping by the Wrenfare offices much at all. But of course these were not matters with which to burden the Wren children, who were either occupying different stages of grief or sampling different flavors of denial.

Meredith—whom Gillian liked because Arthur liked her, but also because Gillian did not wish to lose painfully in a battle of wills, undertaking something so profligate a waste of time as a grudge against (or even a low tolerance for) the human cyborg that was Meredith Wren—looked desperately in need of caffeine. Meredith was an extremely beautiful woman, almost painfully attractive for the first few minutes until she began to speak, at which point she remained beautiful but you were able to forget about it in favor of some other quality, like whatever Meredith thought or felt. Meredith had long black hair with one or two threads of silver beginning to invade her narrative of enviable volume and general high-quality maintenance. As mentioned, Meredith could be quite finicky when it came to her appearance, which Gillian deduced meant that the streaks of age were probably new. The fact that they had slipped Meredith’s notice meant that Meredith had been distracted by something that wasn’t her father’s death—if Gillian had to guess, it was likely something to do with her company. Like Thayer, Meredith did not assign much value to anything that wasn’t an extension of her work. She would consider it a waste of brainpower to dedicate even a few spare moments of anxiety to something trivial, such as emotional turbulence or a friend.

As Gillian was quietly wondering what was going on with Meredith, Yves had begun shifting the furniture around. He cleared a space in the middle of the sitting room, then sat down and began to breathe deeply, closing his eyes.

“There’s a gym, you know,” said Meredith loudly, before looking at Gillian as if only a wild animal would attempt a sun salutation in a formal sitting room. (Again, Gillian was inclined to agree, though she could just tell she was experiencing this thought in a different tone of voice.)

“This is the man my brother is sleeping with? One of them, I assume,” Meredith added privately to Gillian, looking in no way perturbed by this information.

“This is the only man,” said Gillian mildly, “to my knowledge.”

Meredith stood beside Gillian, tilting her head as they both watched Yves transition from standing to a low lunge, then proceeding to enter child’s pose. “As far as men go, this is a good one,” Meredith admitted in an undertone, albeit not as quietly as Gillian would have liked. “What about you? Are you having any fun these days?”

“Within reason,” said Gillian, which was either a lie or very true depending on how literally one translated the question. She was actually having a marvelous time with her dissertation, largely because she had always known from the moment she began that it was futile in a way, more like a hobby than anything else. There had been too many stakes in her previous job as a legal associate; a paralyzing sense that things going right or going wrong would have an impact on her future self, on her likelihood of making partner, on her ability to get through the day. Gillian liked her day to be filled with insignificant tedium that she could control—academic journals with readership in the scant dozens, papers authored by undergraduates who were taking her Napoleonic history course pass/fail. It was predictable and relaxing to Gillian, a ritual for self-care, and therefore a version of fun. It was not, however, sex parties or devoted polyamory, which was ostensibly the fun that Meredith had meant.

“Just know,” cautioned Meredith as they both tilted their heads the opposite way, this time watching Yves step through from downward dog to an upright lunge, “that if you’re ever not having fun, my brother will throw himself off a cliff. Which isn’t to worry you or anything, that’s just how he is.” Just then Meredith’s phone rang, and she glanced down at it with an obvious expression of loathing. “Fuck,” she said, and answered it. “Ward, you had better not be calling with a stupid question. I’m busy grieving, for fuck’s sake.”

At that precise moment, Gillian became aware of a low pain at the base of her abdomen as well as an ache in her neck. It was, she knew instantly, her period. She operated with an extreme sensitivity to her own subtle shifts, like a meteorologist for the very, very niche. It wouldn’t be an especially emotional one or she would have noticed that already, and her skin was no worse than usual, which meant it was either going to be a bloated one or a painful one. Physical, then, thank god. The worst of it was when Gillian’s moods were subject to the shifts of her internal clockwork, leaving her to wonder for a week whether everything in her life was falling apart or if perhaps she just needed iron.

In this case, she could know that her general sense of dread was real and not a mirage of femininity. How wonderful for her. Perhaps she would feel better with some chocolate.

“Edward, please, you’re being hysterical.” Meredith had turned as if to take her phone call somewhere else, probably her father’s office, but before she left she held one hand to her phone, vestigial to a prior era of technology. “Could you find a way to get some coffee?” she said to Gillian. “I’d send Jenny to go get some, but presumably the death of my father means I no longer have the means to direct his staff.”

It was unclear to Gillian whether Meredith was trying to be funny or if she was genuinely disappointed. Also, the assistant’s name was Dzhuliya, not that it mattered, aside from the fact that Dzhuliya had been very strange on the phone when she’d called to tell Gillian about Thayer’s death, despite a very utilitarian approach to her job up to that point. Also, Dzhuliya had been the one to make the 911 call from the Wrenfare offices, which nobody had questioned given her position of employment there but was, in Gillian’s mind, quite odd. Thayer was known to be eccentric, but would he have called his assistant into work on a Sunday night?

“Not a problem,” said Gillian, who would also need to get Tylenol, and a hot water bottle, and some chocolate. “I’ve got a few errands to run. The lawyer is coming at nine,” she added as Meredith nodded and flapped a hand that said something like I know but that information is beneath me, then disappeared down the corridor barking something about journalistic integrity.

From a distance, it was again possible to remember how pretty Meredith was, and Gillian took it in for a spell before turning to Yves, who lay on his back either asleep or in a deeply transportive savasana.

“Yves,” said Gillian. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join me to get some coffee?”

She wasn’t sure what had come over her, really. Gillian didn’t require company and she did not know what she was expected to say to Yves, who had seen her husband naked.

Of course, Gillian had also seen her husband naked. She had stripped him of his clothes and helped him into the bath when he’d gotten so sick during his first campaign that he’d nearly died of pneumonia. She’d been there many times to watch him strip carelessly down whenever she asked if there was anything he’d particularly like washed. She’d seen him in the minutes before he showered, the minutes after he showered, the conversations they sometimes had while he was in the shower, when she perched on the lid of the toilet and pulled at the skin of her elbow and laughed at his stories about his day, because Arthur was very funny, actually. She was there beside him every night, the quiet and unremarkable ones, the drunk and maudlin ones, the ones where Arthur said things like “The trouble with being young, generally speaking, is that you can’t afford to do anything nice, and when you’re old, you’re too old to be bothered with any of it,” and Gillian would say, “What if there was some kind of system where an auditor told you how much you were worth and they gave you that money as a loan while you’re young, so you can spend your older years just paying it back in some kind of complex accountancy dystopia,” and Arthur would chuckle and say “do you ever think about having children?” to which Gillian would softly reply, “I always assumed it would happen, you know, someday,” and regret that her tone of voice made the whole endeavor sound distant because she didn’t see it happening with him instead of sounding distant because she thought she’d eventually become comfortable with the process of child-making but it was taking an awfully long time to settle in.

So yes, she had seen Arthur naked, but not the same way Yves had done it, and Gillian supposed that what she really wanted was to absorb some of whatever Yves naturally possessed and see if it might work that way—if she could catch it like a virus. Or some benign bacterial infection that would make her suddenly long to be touched.

“I would be most honored to join you for an outing,” said Yves, and Gillian wondered if she was remarkable to him at all, or if all the wives were like this, or if he looked at her and thought, Oh yes I see, I understand perfectly why Arthur needed more, or if maybe none of that had ever crossed Yves’s mind because he was not in the habit of exploring the emotional depths of any given moment. She felt disgusted with herself for tipping into generalities again, and the low stabbing in her uterus was back. Everything would be fine so long as Gillian did not in any way lose control.

“Chocolate?” asked Yves, producing some from a small, zippered pouch he wore slung around his hips. Gillian blinked, wondering idly if Yves had read her mind, which, actually, he had in a way. Although that is not really relevant to the story now, unless you devote any substantial thought to the question of why Gillian did not simply voice her needs aloud, to which I would point out that most people aren’t usually carrying chocolate around with them. Yves did as a habit, although the things Yves carried around were usually laced with something.

Which, of course, this one also was.