I don’t think anything in this house is beautiful. Valuable yes, but most of it is hideous. Sometimes I dream of living in a minimalist white box with floor-to-ceiling windows and nothing to dust. I try to muster up the proper enthusiasm. “Oh, it’s so true! I don’t even know what half of this stuff is, but I’m afraid to sit on most of it.”
Michael is hanging back, studying everything with anthropological curiosity. He stops in front of an oil of one of my distant great-aunts, a grande dame in tennis whites, posed with her greyhounds. “You know what, Ash? This house reminds me a bit of the castle. This one in the painting here, she even looks like my great-grandmother Siobhan.”
This stops me. “Which castle?”
Ashley and Michael exchange a glance. “Oh, Michael comes from old Irish aristocracy,” Ashley offers. “His family used to have a castle. He hates to talk about it.”
I turn to him. “Really? Where? Would I know it?”
“Not unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Ireland’s thirty thousand castles. It’s some moldering old heap in the north. My family sold it when I was a child because it cost too much to keep up.”
This explains it then; the strange tug that I felt earlier, as if there was some kind of invisible cord tightening between us. He’s from even older money than me! It’s a relief to hear, as if I’ve been wearing a formal dress and might now shrug it off and put on cashmere sweatpants. “Well, then, you must understand what it’s like to live in a place like this.”
“I certainly do. A curse and a privilege, right?” He’s torn the thoughts straight out of my mind. I feel light-headed. We look at each other, faint smiles of mutual understanding on our faces.
“Oh, yes, exactly,” I breathe.
And then Ashley puts a hand on my arm, in that oddly intimate way. Is this what yoga teachers do? Touch a lot? It’s presumptuous, but I think I like it. Her fingers are warm through the velvet of my jacket. She frowns. “Is it really that awful to live here?”
“Oh really, it’s not so bad.” I don’t want to come off as unappreciative, not to a yoga teacher, for God’s sake; not to a woman whose Facebook photo is captioned Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. (I thought about cribbing this for my own Instagram feed, but what if she looked me up and saw it and knew that I stole it from her? So I used a Helen Keller quote instead.)
“And you’re living all alone? You don’t get lonely?” Her eyes are dark pools of sympathy; they peel away at the veneer of happiness I thought I was projecting.
“Well, a little, yes. A lot, sometimes,” I say. “But hopefully not anymore now that you’re here!” I laugh lightly, but this is perhaps a little too close to honesty for comfort. I need to shut myself up, but the words just keep bubbling out of me like water out of a faucet that I can’t quite control.
I shouldn’t have drunk that wine.
My eyes keep sliding over to Michael, each time noting another tidbit to add to the portrait I am assembling in my mind. The way his hair curls darkly around his neck, overgrown in a manner that suggests that he has more important things to think about than haircuts. The dry skin of his lips, which hover languorously in a wry curl of a smile. The soft burr of his accent, which wraps itself like a snake around the consonants that drop off his tongue. I could swear he’s making a conscious effort not to look at me, and I tear my own focus back to Ashley instead.
Ashley doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She runs her finger along the marble edge of a credenza. “All I can think of is the cleaning,” she says. “It must be a full-time job. For three people. You don’t have a live-in staff? Aren’t those servants’ quarters that I saw out there?”