Page 35 of Gifted & Talented

30

“You could have been nicer,” said Arthur. “We did need her help.”

Meredith didn’t reply. She crossed her legs, jiggling one foot and thinking about the existential itch she’d felt while looking at my house; at the extra weight I now carried around my hips. At the life Meredith had been sure I’d wanted desperately to get away from—wasting my brilliant mind on the same tragedy that had befallen my mother and grandmothers. The curse of domesticity, underemployment to make ends meet.

“How could Lou even have a baby at this age?” Meredith demanded. An absurd question, but she was suddenly furious with me; with the choices I must have made to throw my whole future away. (Meredith’s brain, with a shriek: What happened to Eden? ) “It’s demented.”

“You’re both, like, thirty,” said Arthur, pronouncing the word “thirty” as if it were “geriatric” or “dead.” “It’s really not out of the question.”

“But Lou’s only thirty-one,” said Meredith instantly, wanting to express that I, like her, had not yet crossed the finish line into obscurity, was not yet completely irrelevant. Was still, if you squinted, a prodigy. She rubbed her eye, capable only of the single thought STYE STYE STYE. “How could she have a full-grown toddler? Was she some kind of child bride?”

“That kid was basically just a baby,” Eilidh pointed out from the back seat. “He couldn’t have been more than two years old.”

“So?” said Meredith, turning in the passenger seat to glare at her sister. “Now you’re an expert in child development?”

“She’s saying it’s not exactly a teen pregnancy,” Arthur pointed out. “And don’t be mad at Eilidh just because she’s the one who convinced Lou to help.”

Meredith reeled backward, stung. “Wow,” she said to Arthur in a snarling, hollow voice.

(“I don’t understand,” Jamie said later that evening, when Meredith met him for a drink at the bar downtown that had an atrocious greenhouse effect, leaving Meredith sweating profusely and ultimately twice as drunk as she’d set out to be. “You’re angry because you think Arthur took Eilidh’s side? But it sounds like he was just trying to be diplomatic.”

“You weren’t there,” insisted Meredith, who didn’t want to express in words that Arthur chastising her unexpectedly when it came to Eilidh was the equivalent of shooting her while her back was turned. Their alliance relied on a pact—an unspoken one—that Meredith was always more right than Eilidh, even when she was mostly wrong. “You didn’t hear the way he said it.”)

Eventually they made it back to the house, despite some rerouted traffic in downtown Mill Valley. They parked the car and ascended the stairs in silence.

“How was it?” asked Cass, who was in the kitchen making a frittata. The fridge, Meredith realized when she opened it, had been fully stocked. Instead of gratitude, she felt a deep, inexplicable pulse of loathing, mostly toward herself. Arthur wandered away, probably to find his circle of sexual deviants. Eilidh stretched out on the sofa and closed her eyes.

Meredith looked up at Cass, imagining for a moment that they were married. The wedding would probably be a small affair, an elopement. He had been married before and she had a number of other things to do. They’d probably do it in the morning at the Beverly Hills courthouse on a Wednesday and then go for lunch after, maybe get a little bit drunk just for fun. They had the same taste in movies. They both liked to read before bed to unwind. He never suggested she should finish her college degree; he always told her he was proud of her. He did not hold her to invisible metrics that she could neither identify nor parse. Their sex life was routine but not unsatisfying. If she told him the truth about Chirp, he would help her. He would help her. She could accept his help.

He would remember it forever, though. The score. They both would. Maybe it wouldn’t come between them—maybe it would make them stronger? But it would always mean she defaulted to his competency. That she couldn’t be trusted. That she was a fuckup, actually, and maybe it would never be discussed, maybe it wouldn’t even matter, but someday, maybe twenty years from now, maybe a few months, maybe tomorrow, he would look at her and she would know that he was thinking about how he had saved her. She might have been a genius, but he would be a hero. She might be a star, but he was still a man.

“What?” he said.

She leaned over the fridge door and kissed him soundly. She put both hands on his face, then pulled him close until only the butter, the jangling of the glass-jarred condiments stood between them. He shifted, breaking away to come around the door, to press her back into the cold, cold fridge, one hand hovering over the goose bumps on her midriff. She traced the shape of his neck, deepening the kiss, pressing herself against him until the only natural follow-up was sex. She took his hand, led him to her bedroom, and pushed him down on the mattress.

“Thank you for the groceries,” she said, and unbuttoned his trousers.

(“I see,” said Jamie, after Meredith told him how she and Cass had spent the afternoon. “And how did he take it when you told him about the article?”)

“You seem like you’re trying to prove something to yourself,” Cass remarked when they were finished.

“Do I?” asked Meredith, staring at the ceiling.

(“I still haven’t told him the details,” she admitted.

“I see,” Jamie said again.)

Cass rolled over to look at her. “I was married before,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been here before.”

She looked at him.

“The thing is,” Cass said, “I like you a lot, Meredith. And I love you. I think life with you is something I could easily do forever.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” She wondered if she wanted him to. If that would ease something for her. If she’d finally become safe, impenetrable—successful enough, valid enough. Something that a little casual rejection could no longer destroy.

No, she realized. No, it would still hurt. Everything would always hurt. You’re perfect, Cass had said to her once, and she knew that what he’d meant was that she fit perfectly into his life, because she was independently wealthy and she was smart and a riveting conversationalist and she would not hurt him because she wasn’t really capable of hurting him, because they didn’t love each other like that. They loved each other like you loved a really good electric toothbrush. The way you loved the perfect cashmere sweater. Because it kept you warm when you were cold.

But she wanted to be perfect; that was the kind of love that, in her better moments, she thought she might deserve. That maybe love was something she could be good at, that she could conceivably do correctly, that she could earn, that she could win. From the beginning she had understood that success amounted simply to mind over matter—that if she could put aside the pain, she could do anything. She could do anything.

(“Why are you here?” asked Jamie.

“Please don’t run that article,” said Meredith. “Please don’t be the one to ruin me. Please, I can survive it. Just let it be anyone else but you.”

Jamie looked at her for a long time.

“You almost had me,” he said after a moment, and clinked his cocktail glass against hers.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Well, it was worth a try.”)

“No, I’m not breaking up with you,” said Cass. “Actually, I’m proposing to you.”

“Oh,” said Meredith. “Really?”

“We’ll sign a prenup,” he promised her. “You keep your money, I’ll keep mine.”

“That’s not really my concern.” Well, not completely. She couldn’t honestly say the idea of money hadn’t crossed her mind, but there was something both unromantic and yet deeply sexy about him bringing it up right away, as if he was promising to uphold her agency, her personhood. As if to say what’s yours is yours, which wasn’t wholly unwelcome even if it lacked the wholesome shine of what’s ours is ours .

“I figured not, but I wanted to be up-front.” Cass shrugged. “I told you, I’ve done this before.”

“When you proposed before, what was it like?” asked Meredith. She leaned over to run her fingers over his chest, over the tattoo of SPQR , like a Roman gladiator. He said he’d gotten it when he was twenty, in Italy, too busy being romantic about being a battler, about his willingness to fight to the death.

“Well, we were in Paris,” said Cass. “I brought fresh bread and a bottle of champagne and I got down on one knee while the lights were twinkling on the Eiffel Tower. And afterward we went to have dinner at this beautiful place. Had the best steak of my life.”

“Best sex of your life?” asked Meredith, like shoving her finger in a bruise.

“No, that was a threesome in Bali.” Cass smiled vacantly at nothing.

“Stop reliving it.” She jammed a nail into his rib cage. “I’m right here.”

“I like sex with you. Hence the offer to do it forever.” He rolled to face her again. “But you’re younger than I am. Hungrier. You still have a little romance left in you.”

“No, I don’t,” said Meredith. “I’m old, really. Very crone-like.”

He reached over. Eased a thumb over one bare nipple. “I beg to differ.”

(“We should really have sex,” Meredith told Jamie. “Just to get it out of our systems. Then we can fight, which we’re obviously going to do, and you can send the article to your editor in a fit of rage, and I can call up my personal contract killer and have you taken out.”

“I already turned in the article,” Jamie said.

Meredith rolled her eyes. “You’re bluffing.”

“I’m not bluffing. I sent it over today. Why else would I have been proofreading it this morning?”

“You don’t honestly want to destroy me.”

“No, I don’t, but this is my job. And I keep waiting for you to tell me the truth, but you won’t do it. So yes, I’m publishing the article as a matter of public interest. It’s not just about you, Meredith, it’s about Tyche. About corporate ethics.”

“But it’s my name you’ll be printing.”

He took a long pull from his glass. “Yes.”

“But you love me,” said Meredith, stung.

Jamie looked her pointedly in the eye.

“So?” he said.)

“Do you really want to be married to me?” Meredith asked Cass. “I have a feeling I’m only going to get worse as I get older.”

“Do you really want to be married to me ?” Cass countered. “There’s a nonzero number of women in the world whose answer to life with me was absolutely fuck that.”

“Did you not think I deserved Paris?” asked Meredith.

“I’ll take you to Paris if you want,” said Cass. “Honestly, you deserve Bali.”

“I don’t actually care,” she admitted. “About the ring or the steak.”

“You should. The steak was the best part.”

“The sex must have been terrible.”

“The sex was great. I just happen to really love steak.”

“The sex couldn’t have been great.”

“It was great, I remember it.”

“Really?”

Cass paused. “Fine, I don’t.”

“I told you.”

“But the steak,” Cass repeated, “was sensational.” He picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles, giving her a look that she understood was safer and better than passion because it wouldn’t fade. Because it was honest and self-aware, and could be trusted. “And I will love you forever if that’s what you want.”

“And forget me forever if that’s what I ask?”

She wasn’t sure why she’d said it.

“Yes.” Cass looked at her with a trace of a smile on his mouth. “Which is kind of better in its way, don’t you think?”

(“I’m not going to let you destroy me,” Meredith said to Jamie.

“I keep telling you, I know that,” said Jamie. “You’re going to save yourself, Meredith, because you can, because you always do. And don’t you understand, I really do love you for that? You’re a phoenix, you’re a fucking… I don’t know, a fire-breathing dragon. You’re Meredith Wren and you will save yourself. And you’ll do it in a way I can admire but not respect.” He drained his glass. “So I will love you, but not choose you.”

“Christ,” said Meredith, after a minute or so had passed. “I really, really want to have sex with you.”

“I know. I’m pretty sure I’ve been hard for the last forty-five minutes.” Jamie glanced at her with half a tipsy smile on his face. “Meredith Wren,” he said.

“James Ammar,” she replied. “Are we done now?”

He shrugged. “Unless you do something else I have to investigate.”

“So we can meet up for drinks again, after I take someone else’s money?”

“Speaking of,” he said, “how’d things go with your dad’s lawyers?”

Meredith scoffed. “Why do you care?”

“No reason.” He gestured to the bartender to close his tab. “I’ve just heard some things about Wrenfare.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Investigative things.” He winked at her. By then he was definitely drunk. They both were, not that Meredith cared to interrogate her state of mind at the moment. “Look, take it with a grain of salt,” Jamie said, and looked genuinely pitying. “I know how badly you wanted Wrenfare. And you deserve it more than anyone, but he’s doing you a favor in the end. Whoever takes over at this point is fucked, full stop. Wrenfare’s in a downturn and has been for years—ever since your father replaced Merritt Foster with a revolving door of Harvard’s finest ass-kissers.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Face it, Meredith, nobody’s steering that ship to safety.”

Meredith fiddled with her glass, telling herself the pang in her chest was a normal one, a melancholic heart-pluck of wine rather than pride. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“You sure?” He gave her a look, which she chose not to respond to.

“So then what’s your advice?”

“My advice?” He leaned closer, brushing her hair over one shoulder. “Take Thayer’s money and run. Use it to deal with your own legal battles if Tyche makes you take the fall. You’re Meredith fucking Wren.” He rested his forehead against the side of her head, like a nuzzle between two cartoon lions or the drunk lean of a man who felt guilty, morose. “Meredith,” he murmured, “you deserve more than your father will ever give you. He wasn’t a good man, he was barely even a smart one, and you don’t need his approval in death any more than you did in life. You turned out the way you are in spite of him, not because of him.”

“Don’t,” whispered Meredith in a mortifying, wobbly voice.

“Okay,” said Jamie. Then he kissed her forehead, and then he left.)

“So?” said Cass. “What do you think?”

Meredith’s watch buzzed with a message from Jamie. She glanced at the screen. Drinks at 8?

K , she typed back.

“Sorry, Ward again. Yeah, okay,” said Meredith. “After the funeral. Maybe next—oh, no, never mind, I’ve got that thing,” she said, skimming her calendar. “The week after?”

“Sure. I’ll schedule something at City Hall and get it in your calendar,” said Cass.

She smiled gratefully at him. Groceries. Calendar invitations. Assuming she didn’t go to prison, life would be so easy. So sweet.

Then there was a knock at her door.

“Ah,” said Meredith, blown over by a tide of inexplicable relief. “The lawyers must be here.”