All of Us and Everything (17 page)

Once the clouds broke, Liv walked out the back door, pulled a beach chair from the thickly webbed shed, carried it upstairs, and shoved it out the window overlooking the flat roof of the back porch. Then she put on a bikini, oiled herself up, grabbed all of the engagement pages she'd stolen from her mother's newspapers, took Atty's iPad sitting on the bottom of the girl's unmade bed, and set herself up in the beach chair to catch some sun.

She'd thought her luck would last a lifetime. Fathers, on the other hand, die. She was shaken, in all manners. She had to pull herself together and this was how she'd always done it—cherry-picking. To ensure some measure of calm, she also popped a Xanax, only vaguely aware that she was taking too many and should probably pace herself or she'd run dry.

She sorted through her options quickly. There weren't many really viable men to choose from, and when she decided to look up Clifford Wells, she told herself she was doing Ru a favor. “I'm not Gong Gong,” she said aloud. Something was up with Ru and Cliff. Things hadn't been good for a year. Who would take off to Vietnam, post-engagement, and then choose open-ended quality time with family? Why hadn't he picked Ru up at the airport?

She watched Ingmar who bounded out onto the back lawn and squatted to pee-pee, like a girl. Had he too lacked male role models? she wondered.

“What are you doing out here?” Atty asked, popping her head out the window.

“Catching up on world affairs.” Liv was wearing oversized sunglasses. She put the iPad down and picked up one of the newspapers, a fine-point Sharpie in hand. “How was Ru's reading?”

“Weird.”

“Good weird or bad weird?”

“No-judgment weird,” Atty said. “Mind if I join you?”

“Free country,” Liv said.

Holding a Nancy Drew mystery and her smartphone, Atty climbed out the window and sat on the shingles, still wet from the rain. The sun was warm and blinding.

It was quiet for a moment and then Atty asked, “Are you lonely not being married?”

“I'm most lonely when I'm married.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Atty said.

“It doesn't have to.” Liv tilted her face to the sky. “I do miss Icho some. He was my first husband and very attentive. I was pretty coked out during the second marriage—and so was Sven—so I don't remember much, but Owen was pretty charming. You know, he had a sense of humor at least.”

“How do you feel when you're dating someone?”

Liv folded up
The
New York Times.
“I had a torrid thing with a fellow resident last month. I think it felt…good.”

“By
fellow resident,
do you mean a drug addict?” Atty asked.

“Actually he was in for something else,” Liv said. “And I'm not a drug addict. I abused prescription drugs. It's an important distinction. It's the equivalent of insider trading, a white-collar crime.” She went back to the engagement photos of the men. None of them seemed to wear
that
smile: the kind that seemed to grip his face like a claw.

“Do you have some goals?” Atty asked like some shitty prep school college counselor.

“Well, I was very good at my old job—I was a marriage-profiteer—but I'm supposed to stop doing that.”

Atty nodded and it was clear that Esme had told her daughter something about Liv's marriages;
gold digger
was a term Liv found offensive. Still, Liv was supposed to try to be more honest with herself and others so she chose not to equivocate.

“Are you going to stop?” Atty asked.

“I don't think so.” She took a deep breath, opening her ribs and imagining the breath moving through her. She was supposed to do this too, think about breathing.

“What about the fellow resident?”

“It was amazing really. All this dirty talk.”

“I don't understood dirty talk,” Atty said. “I think it'd be hard to do without laughing.”

“Men can take laughter personally, I've found.”

“But talking dirty seems
complicated.
”

“It's not. You know, like baseball announcers—how one's supposed to do a play-by-play and the other is supposed to add colorful commentary?”

“I guess,” Atty said.

“Well, really a play-by-play is fine,” Liv said. “Men with hard-ons are very basic creatures. A plain voice-over narration of what's happening will do—you know, like a flight attendant explaining how to work a seat belt.”

“Are you going to see him again?” Atty asked.

“Who?”

“The fellow resident.”

“I don't know. We did have the safest sex in history, a fresh condom for every orifice. It was like waking up in the Bois de Boulogne, condoms everywhere.”

“What's the Bois de Boulogne?” Atty asked.

Liv opened her eyes and blinked at Atty as if realizing for the first time that she was talking to a minor and should probably keep this clean. “It's a park in Paris.”

“Oh,” Atty said. “France is kind of a sour subject for me, what with my father's indiscretion.”

Liv closed her eyes again. “Sorry about that, by the way.”

“That's okay.”

“Normally, I'd one-up you by saying that I never had a father at all, but that's no longer a weapon in my arsenal.”

“I'd like an arsenal one day.”

“I heard about the musket incident.” Liv had endured her own pheasant-hunting gun incident. She knew how wildly people could overreact to such things.

“I meant that I want a
figurative
arsenal—of comebacks to one-up people with.”

“You have to work up to an arsenal, gun by gun,” Liv said. “And it's not just about comebacks. It's much deeper than that.”

“What did my mom tell you about the musket incident?”

“I think she said it was
regrettable.
”

“She's lying.”

“You don't regret it?”

“I regret it, but she doesn't.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“It must be nice to be so sure of things.”

“It's one of the few things I have going for me. I'm very decisive,” Atty said. “My mother says I'm an oak and I should be more of a willow.”

“Where has being a willow ever gotten your mother?” She dipped her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and stared at Atty. “And she's not a willow anyway.” She pushed the sunglasses back into place and added, “You should be a carnivorous plant, if anything.”

“Like a Venus flytrap?”

“Or whatever.”

“What did you write your college entrance essay about?” Atty asked.

“Profiteering,” Liv said. “I was in favor of it. I might have also mentioned that I thought being a productive member of society, by society's standards, was overrated. What will you write about?”

“It might not matter because I think I'm pretty screwed, collegiately, what with my personal history.”

“My second husband, Sven, didn't go to college. He's an inventor. He holds tons of patents. College is kind of contrived.” Liv pressed her eyebrows flat with a thumb and index finger and then said, “I should take you under my wing, Atty.”

“I don't know what that would be like.”

“No, of course you don't.”

Atty seemed to think about it. She pulled her knees to her chest. “A man's coming to dinner.”

“We're too competitive to handle a man coming to dinner. It's like musical chairs being played out by your prep school pals, all gunning for valedictorian—only one can win enough attention.”

“Like in a game of Spoons.” Atty picked up the tanning oil. “Are we going to play Spoons?”

“I think we banned parlor games, wisely. The last time we played Spoons was when your mother brought home Darwin Webber from college.”

“Who
is
Darwin Webber? She won't tell me.” Atty popped the oil's lid, dribbled some on her arm, and started rubbing it in.

“He was her boyfriend,” Liv said. “I think he might have been good.”

“What do you mean
good
?” She stared at her shiny arms.

“I mean it in the most basic way. Good. What do you mean what do I mean?”

“So was he an African German American or a German African American?”

“I don't know. He was one of those people who looked like almost every nationality. A globalized face.”

“Oh.”

“What kind of man is Ru bringing here?” Liv asked. “Did he seem rich?”

“How can you tell?”

“It takes an eye,” Liv said. “Why's he coming here?”

“Ru promised to help him win back this woman he's in love with. She invited him over to meet everyone. I think she knew him when she was younger.”

“A man in love?” Liv laughed.

Atty nodded.

“Easy pickin's.”

Atty laid back, propped the Nancy Drew behind her head as a stiff pillow, and closed her eyes. She'd been planning on reading more of her Nancy Drew mystery. She hated Nancy, to be honest. Her lawyer-daddy buying her a car, her blond hair and blue eyes, her earnest soul. Wasn't there some regret pawing just beneath her cardigan sweater? That was the real fucking mystery. “If you take me under your wing, will you teach me how to have an arsenal, a deep one.”

Liv nodded. “Gun by gun, my dear. Gun by gun.”

Atty flipped to her side, facing her aunt. “Give me my first gun.”

Liv said, “Never ask for favors.”

“Sorry,” Atty said, hurt. “I thought you'd offered.”

“No,” Liv said, “that's the first gun. The point of an arsenal is that it's not just some pawnshop pistol you wave at an intruder. The arsenal speaks for itself. It looms. The point of an arsenal is that you seem so heavily armed, no one messes with you to begin with.”

“Got it.” She wanted to tweet all of this, very badly, but she knew that if she pulled out her iPhone, it would scare Liv off.

“You make people think they thought of the thing you want them to do for you all on their own. If they think of it, you don't owe them. It's best to walk through this life debt-free, emotionally speaking.”

“Debt-free,” Atty said, trying to memorize it for future tweets. “Emotionally. I like that.”

“In rehab, I gained a lot of wisdom. I'm glad I can pass that on.” Liv glanced at Atty. “Sometimes you remind me of a young me. You know that?”

Atty looked teary-eyed suddenly. She reached up and pinched her nose. “Would you have stolen a musket and lost it in front of your whole school at parents' weekend?”

Liv wanted to ask her why she'd done it. She was afraid that the story was scarier and darker than Esme had let on. Had Atty stolen it with an intention to hurt herself? Rehab had been full of suicidal types. Even Liv had been pegged as one and, for a time, she'd been in group therapy for it—as if someone had reported that she might have been planning on turning her ex-husband's pheasant-hunting gun on herself. She remembered how the therapist requested they steer away from what could be “trigger words”—
crazy, nuts, insane.
Liv wanted to say,
What if
trigger
is your trigger word?
—I mean, her supposed incident had involved a gun after all. She refrained and instead talked her way out of more sessions.

“You know,” Liv said, “under the right circumstances, I might have reacted the same way you did. Sometimes it's the world that's crazy, not us.”

Liv's own life felt tremendously fragile right now. She had the sudden urge to eat too much birthday cake and cry too hard. In fact, she felt like she was crashing back through her life and landing—emotionally speaking—in her tumultuous teen years. She kept all of this tightly wound inside of her.

And so she gave Atty what she'd asked for, her arsenal. “Don't be vulnerable,” Liv said, “unless you're using your vulnerability to get what you want. Learn to cry on a dime, but never let someone see you cry for real.”