it really matter to you as much as all that? No, you know it doesn’t,” she said quickly. “Not if you have to think about it. Also—” she stopped for a moment before she plunged on—“not to put you on the spot, but I know all about your things and I don’t care.”
“Things?”
“Oh, please,” she said wearily. “Hang out with your sleazy friends, take all the drugs you want. I don’t care.”
In the background, the radiator began to bang and set up a tremendous clatter.
“Look. We’re right for each other. This marriage is absolutely the right thing for both of us. You know it and I know it. Because—I mean, look, I know. You don’t have to tell me. And, I mean too—things are better for you now since we’ve been seeing each other, aren’t they? You’ve straightened up a lot.”
“Oh yeah? ‘Straightened up’? What’s that supposed to mean.”
“Look—” she sighed in exasperation—“no point pretending, Theo. Martina—Em—Tessa Margolis, remember her?”
“Fuck.” I didn’t think anybody knew about Tessa.
“Everyone tried to tell me. ‘Stay away from him. He’s darling but he’s a drug addict.’ Tessa told Em she stopped seeing you after she caught you snorting heroin at her kitchen table.”
“It wasn’t heroin,” I said hotly. They’d been crushed morphine tablets and it had been a terrible idea to snort them, total waste of a pill. “And anyway, Tessa certainly didn’t have any scruples about blow, she used to ask me to get it for her all the time—”
“Look, that’s different and you know it. Mommy,” she said, talking over me—
“—Oh yeah? Different?” Raising my voice over hers. “How is it different? How?”
“—Mommy, I swear—listen to me, Theo—Mommy loves you so much. So much. You saved her life coming along when you did. She talks, she eats, she takes an interest, she walks in the park, she looks forward to seeing you, you can’t imagine how she was before. You’re part of the family,” she said, pressing her advantage. “Truly. Because, I mean, Andy—”
“Andy?” I laughed mirthlessly. Andy had entertained no illusions whatsoever about his sicko family.
“Look, Theo, don’t be like this.” She’d recovered now: friendly and reasonable, something of her father in her directness. “It’s the right thing to do. Marrying. We’re a good match. It makes sense for everyone involved, not least us.”
“Oh yeah? Everyone?”
“Yes.” Perfectly serene. “Don’t be like that, you know what I mean. Why should we let this spoil things? After all, we’re better people when we’re with each other, aren’t we? Both of us? And—” pale little smile; her mother, there—“we’re a good couple. We like each other. We get along.”
“Head not heart, then.”
“If that’s how you want to put it, yes,” she said, looking at me with such plain pity and affection that—quite unexpectedly—I felt my anger drop out from under me: at her cool intelligence, all her own, clear as a silver bell. “Now—” stretching up on tiptoe, to kiss me on the cheek—“let’s both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let’s be happy together and have fun always.”
xxii.
SO I SPENT THE night—we ordered in, later, and then went back to bed. But though on some level it was all easy enough pretending everything was the same (because, in some way, hadn’t we both been pretending all along?) on another I felt nearly suffocated by the weight of everything unknown, and unsaid, pressing down between us, and later when she lay curled against me asleep I lay awake and stared out the window feeling completely alone. The silences of the evening (my fault, not Kitsey’s—even in extremis Kitsey was never at a loss for words) and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us had reminded me very strongly of being sixteen and never having the faintest idea what to say or do around Julie, who though she definitely couldn’t be called a girlfriend was the first woman I’d thought of as such. We’d met outside the liquor store on Hudson when I was standing outside money in hand wanting someone to go in and buy me a bottle of something and there she came billowing around the corner, in batlike, futuristic garb incongruous with her clumping walk and farm-girl looks, her plain-but-pleasing face of a prairie wife of the 1900s. “Hey kid—” hoisting her own wine bottle out of the bag—“here’s your change. No really. Don’t mention it. Are you going to stand out here in the cold and drink that?” She was twenty-seven, nearly twelve years older than me, with