Page 23 of Gifted & Talented

19

Somehow, shortly after the lawyers had convened to speak in private, Arthur got stuck with the job of greeter, the task of consoling the politely inconsolable, perhaps just because he was very friendly looking, such that people couldn’t bear to hold in an emotion whenever he was around. Whatever the reason, by ten thirty there had formed a sort of receiving line, which, given the state of his father’s landscaping and the height of the stairs, almost looked like a pilgrimage. Beneath the canopy of trees, Cascade Road was its usual moody tranquility, patches of sun shining for only minutes at a time on each of the supplicants who had begun their holy ascent to the home of Thayer Wren.

“Such a shock to lose him like that, no warning! I brought a casserole,” said the neighbor from down the road, handing it to Arthur before taking his face between her hands. “We were all so fond of your father. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Hell of a businessman, Thayer. People will do anything to dredge up the past, lot of envy in the industry. Thayer Wren, a real once-in-a-lifetime genius,” said one of Thayer’s previous board members, wiping a dry eye and unloading via his personal assistant a fruit basket that, in life, Thayer would never have touched. “Plenty of antioxidants in there.”

“He was so thoughtful and down to earth, given everything,” said one of Thayer’s golf buddies, a statement that would be echoed several times by Thayer’s fellow hobbyist cyclists, with whom he rode habitually on Sundays. From them, Arthur and his siblings were gifted a fascinating mix of expensive liquors and fancy mixed nuts. “We never believed the rumors, by the way. What a great guy.”

Everyone, Arthur noted, seemed eager to be witnessed. They were all very eager to receive something from Arthur as well, which Arthur was surprised to find was not a mystery and indeed, came very easily to him, probably because he understood that nothing being said was sincere or even sort of conceivable the way that rumors were, in some spiritually inaccurate but believable way, true. Thayer Wren had chosen at first chance to exempt himself almost completely from public consumption, and only seemed to participate in social rituals as a way of reminding himself what a relief it was to not be other people. It seemed to Arthur that even the fastidiously obsequious could not have genuinely enjoyed Thayer’s company any more than he himself had, which made all the ritualized compassion seem somehow—paradoxically—very real.

He patterned back their sadness, mimicked their expressions, like some kind of sentient mirror. At first he’d never felt more ridiculous in his life, but then eventually he began to actually hear himself—to genuinely hear the words coming out of his mouth—and then, as if they were being spoken by someone else entirely, to believe them. He was sad. He was devastated to lose his father. Thayer had been a great guy, in fact a genius ! What a loss it was, chanted Arthur in his head, tiny minion voices saying loss, loss, loss until he felt it, an emptiness in his stomach that he later diagnosed as hunger. Then he consumed some antioxidants and mindlessly scrolled his notifications (he caught the words “only son—” and ate a little more of Yves’s chocolate) and felt slightly better, at least until he heard himself say again how terrible it all was, such a shock, gone far too soon.

Arthur was the only sibling at home—eating a handful of premium mixed nuts, purely to maintain stamina for all the grieving and consoling—he and the visitors seemed to be passing it back and forth, hot-potato style, with no one in complete control of either for too long at the risk of seeming indecent—when the lawyers emerged unexpectedly from the cave they’d made in his father’s office. Both looked slightly haggard, which surprised Arthur. In his experience the only lawyers who looked like that were the underpaid ones, which surely neither of these two could have been.

“Should I go get my sisters?” asked Arthur, finding himself struck once again by the weaselly little face on Ryan Behrend, who deserved a quick shot put to the nuts. Arthur remembered, fleetingly and punishingly, that he and Lou had once put together a curse for Ryan, fully playacting their intent to enact it, until Arthur had hesitated because what if curses were real and then Lou had said well, good and Arthur had said but it’s less fun, though, if it actually happens. To which Lou had said this is why I prefer your sister, and Arthur had thought okay, fair enough, me too.

“I’m afraid we haven’t reached an agreement,” said John, the older lawyer who looked a bit shaken, which was probably bad news. He seemed like he had been semiretired for at least a decade, so maybe it was just the necessity of having to lawyer at all. “It appears we’re going to have to bring in a judge to arbitrate, which means it might be another day or so before we can reveal the contents of the…” John trailed off, looking briefly at Ryan, who seemed no less smug even if he did appear to have lower blood sugar. “Will.”

“I sort of thought this whole thing was very straightforward,” said Arthur, more to himself than to either of the lawyers. “How different can the two wills possibly be, if they were only revisited a month or so apart?”

A month. A month ago Arthur had been exactly the same as he’d always been, except accidentally shooting sparks and therefore far more likely to lose his reelection campaign. Well, and around that time he had first conceived of Riot—or the possibility of Riot, anyway, which changed the scope of practically everything. Suddenly Arthur had something, something that his father had always suggested that Arthur was incapable of understanding. A legacy. And not just something silly like a bloodline, but a reason to feel there was some purpose left to reach, an answer he hadn’t realized he’d been asking for all this time. Riot! Riot Revolution Wren. There should be blood, Arthur thought, then reemphasized it in his head. There should be blood. Then the words lost all meaning and Arthur felt as if something was missing, like he’d come here for something but couldn’t remember what it was. He looked between the lawyers but still couldn’t figure out what it had been.

“There are some details to sort out, some of which—” Here, John again shot a look at Ryan. “Some of which is less concerning legally than ethically.”

“We’ll have it sorted,” said Ryan, reaching out with one hand for a masculinely aggressive clasp of Arthur’s before striding out of the room.

John flashed Arthur a parting glance that was impressively both I’ve got this and help . “If you could just let me confer with the judge—”

Their voices vanished almost immediately as they left the room, swallowed up by the thickness of the walls, the acoustic dominance of the house. Again, Arthur had the sense that he was missing something, which in this moment was the presence of sound. Thayer had always been very particular about sounds.

During the brief period in which Persephone had lived here, the house was monastic, at least to Arthur’s memory, though perhaps she had just lost her zest for homemaking by then and they had simply not unpacked over the course of the single year. Arthur remembered watching the shadows shift and change, the sounds gobbling each other up just like the people inside it. He thought of Lou again, of the way she said the house was creepy, the way she’d looked at him after they slept together that first and last time when it was clear that it had all been an act of desperation, doomed to never be repeated or mentioned aloud.

“Try not to get a complex from this,” Lou had suggested.

“Why wouldn’t you get a complex?” Arthur said, feeling something he already understood to be unmanly (he didn’t always need Thayer there to point it out).

“Oh, it’s just as much a possibility for me, I just don’t have room for another one,” Lou replied.

“Darling,” interrupted Philippa, and Arthur jumped, having been lost in thought. “Do you know, is the beef in the fridge slaughtered humanely? I like to believe the cows at least had a pleasant thought before the end.”

“Christ, Pip, you scared me.” His heart was thudding in his chest, probably a result of having been temporarily transported to a much quieter, lonelier past. “Sorry, what was the question?”

Philippa stepped between his feet, gazing up at him in her disarming way. She was wearing one of his shirts, a pair of woolen trouser socks on her feet, and nothing else. “If it helps,” she said gently, “I don’t think we’re necessarily doomed to the shape that our parents make for us.”

Arthur had never really considered himself doomed so much as he had worried about the opposite. Doom felt like fate, a presence of something, a solidified prophecy. Arthur felt he was several pieces with maybe a little bit of scattered air, something to be compiled over time, though he thought he’d have figured out the entirety of the shape by the time he had to put his father in the ground.

“Oh god,” said Arthur suddenly. “Is his body just lying somewhere? Like on a slab?”

“Arthur, these are not images conducive to a healthy reality,” said Yves, who wandered into the room in the inverse of Philippa’s outfit: no shirt, a pair of thick woolen lounge pants, and for whatever reason, one of Arthur’s winter hats that he occasionally used for hiking. “By the way, Art, you neglected to tell me what a jewel your Gillian is.”

“Gillian?” said Arthur, realizing that was the missing thing—the pres ence of Gillian. He hadn’t considered that he didn’t usually have to look for her, because she was always just there, like an idea hovering at the back of his thoughts.

“She’s very chatty, isn’t she?” said Yves.

Almost never, actually, though it was hard to argue with something once Yves had absorbed it as reality. “I suppose she can be,” said Arthur in a very diplomatic lie, before asking, “Where is she, by the way?”

“Darling,” said Philippa, taking his face in her hands. “You look so tired.”

Arthur glanced distractedly at her, realizing she was finding something on his face that he didn’t think he had put there, although the likelihood that it might be true felt reasonably possible. “Do I?”

“Don’t you think he looks tired, Yves?” Philippa asked, and then Yves was there, scrutinizing Arthur with a long and medical glance.

“Well, we did come for a reason, didn’t we, love?” said Yves.

Philippa took Arthur by the hand, leading him out of the room and up the stairs, winding a perfect route to Arthur’s bedroom. It was impossible to believe she had only been there a handful of hours. The house had already begun to smell like her, woodsy and almost acidic, biting like too much freshness. “Ouch,” said Philippa, retracting her hand suddenly just as they reached the threshold of Arthur’s room.

Arthur looked down, realizing he had shocked her, and elsewhere down the corridor a light had flickered and gone out. “Oh,” he said, and the memory of Lou pressed in on him again.

“My grandmother says this kind of thing happens when someone like you doesn’t practice for a while,” the ghost of Lou was saying to him, and suddenly Arthur was seventeen again. He could practically taste the orange sports drink in his hand, the way he was sore and tired from baseball, and the way he felt instantly stupid, realizing yes, she was right, he should practice harder, practice more. That’s what his father always said, what Arthur always did whenever he got the yips. Work harder, Arthur. Work! “Not that kind of practice,” said Lou with a roll of her eyes. “Lola says if you don’t use the magic, the magic uses you.”

He felt Philippa’s hands undressing him, Yves’s mouth on the span of his shoulder, the place where his neck ended and all the weight began. Arthur closed his eyes and thought about things that weren’t Lou, which was almost everything in his life now, given that it had been over a decade since he’d last seen her. And even then, she had only really been a brevity, a little hiccup of something he hesitated to call peace, although in his mind, that was what it had been.

Because really, to Arthur, Lou was an imaginary thing, someone who had frozen in place right where he’d left her, which is what often happens when someone who is capable of moving on moves on. Add to it the hubris of believing oneself to be bigger than another person, to be living a more interesting story, and you have precisely the danger of Arthur Wren, a person who believes himself to be generally good with bad pieces here and there instead of a person who confuses goodness with inaction. I am purposely not telling you where Gillian is or what she’s doing, because it’s important to understand that at this moment, Arthur has forgotten that he ever wondered where she was. Actually, at this particular moment, Arthur is about to have sex in his dead father’s house, which is something we can get into if you really want to. I can describe Arthur’s body to you. It’s the body of an athlete, sculpted in its way to become useful, an entire musculature that has done as it was bidden for the sake of performance, to be measured for its worth based on how far it can throw a ball. In recent years, Arthur has been going to the gym routinely, almost religiously, because pain is something he considers a necessary part of being alive. He is sore almost every day, he deprives himself (in some ways) in service to nourishment, or what he thinks is nourishment because he has never known what it is to behave like a bear, to do nothing but eat and sleep rather than running in circles just to have abs that look like that. He played baseball, and has devotedly kept the glutes.

Arthur Wren is a beautiful asshole, like something Michelangelo sculpted with devoted hands. Arthur’s hair is thick and swept from his eyes in waves and there is an artfulness to him that reveals itself most noticeably in motion. It is extremely important to the story that you understand that although Yves Reza is famously one of the most handsome men in the world and Philippa Villiers-DeMagnon is lovely enough to feature prominently in all the British tabloids as well as multiple devoted fan accounts, it is Arthur who is always the most beautiful person in the room. And yet right now, absurdly, Arthur is thinking to himself how lucky he is to be in the room at all, which could strike you as very sad but should really be kind of annoying.

I mean, think of it from my perspective—you know, omnisciently. What does Arthur actually care about? Does Arthur really know? Not to say Thayer Wren was a saint by any means, but he kind of had a point.

Anyway, you can go back to being in Arthur’s head now, which is for all intents and purposes blank. Arthur did enjoy a certain amount of roughness in the boudoir, but he was finding that impossible to conjure in the moment, knowing how precious Philippa’s body now was to him, how powerful and divine she suddenly seemed. The first time they had slept together, Arthur had enjoyed taking her hair in his fists, pulling on it lightly until she made a sound, her particular sound of enjoyment that thrilled him because it was like getting an A, like a triple play, the “attaboy” he so desperately needed. His love for Philippa the woman was nothing compared to his love for Philippa the mother; Philippa the dreammaker; Philippa whom Yves could still call Babe or Mouse but whom Arthur could only call out for as he would a goddess, a god. Beseechingly, or as to Athena—someone wrathful, spiteful and envious, who could hold his entire world in one delicate hand.

She tried to pull him on top of her, and Arthur murmured back no, no, shouldn’t be on her back, he’d read it somewhere, bad for the baby. Instead he switched places and pulled her up to him, shimmying down until his lips met the curves of her thighs. He could look up at her then, properly, though when he slid his tongue along the lovely, decadent slickness of her and looked up to meet her eyes, he found them closed. Silently, he begged. Look at me.

She didn’t. The track lighting overhead sparked. Philippa moaned, and Arthur closed his eyes.