The Precious One (21 page)

Ben wasn’t looking out the window anymore. As I told him this, he looked at me, nodding, his face sharp with attention. He’d always liked anything about how minds work. And sure enough, he said, “That’s really cool. You always did have an interesting brain.” It was better than if he’d called me beautiful.

“Okay, how about if I try it out on you,” I said, challengingly.

He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

“Let me think.” I peered at him through narrowed eyes. He peered back.

“Got it,” I said. “Are you ready?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you break off your engagement?”

Ben tipped his head back and laughed.

“What?” I said.

“Trillium gets the best gift question, and I get this?”

“I don’t choose the question,” I explained, serenely. “The question chooses me.”

“Uh-huh.”

I waited.

Finally, Ben said, “She kept expecting me to use plant metaphors in conversation.”

“What?”

“She was one of those women who have a highly romanticized view of botanists.”

“There are women like that?”

Ben’s eyes were twinkling like the entire Milky Way. “Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? The plant thing makes a certain kind of woman crazy.”

“So—what? She expected you to say things like ‘Your eyes are the color of a baobab tree. Your lips are the color of a pokeberry’?”

“Pokeberries are black. And poisonous,” Ben pointed out.

“Well, it’s a good thing you broke up with her then, isn’t it?”

Ben shook his head, his smile filling the car. It occurred to me that I could actually do this friendship thing. It wasn’t my first choice, but if friendship meant riding next to Ben, bantering back and forth, making him smile, I could do it. For a while anyway.

“That’s not the real reason, is it?” I said.

“No. Well, that was annoying, but the real reason, I guess, is that, when Bobbie got sick, I had to come home, and there was nothing really keeping her there because she travels for work, but she wouldn’t leave.”

“She wouldn’t leave Wisconsin for you?”

“Nope.”

“I mean, no offense to Wisconsin, but it isn’t exactly Paris, is it?”

“It is not. She wouldn’t leave, and I wouldn’t beg her to—it didn’t really occur to me at the time, to be honest—but also, I wouldn’t stay. Or promise to come back. And I think that tells you something. If you can leave so easily, maybe it means you should.”

And after he said this, I heard Willow’s voice from last night inside
my head:
If you didn’t love Ben enough to stay married to him no matter what, then you didn’t love him enough, period
.

“Can I tell you something that Willow said to me last night, after I told her the story of us, back when we were eighteen?”

I heard Ben breathe in. “You told her about that? I didn’t realize you guys had heart-to-hearts.”

“It’s a recent development,” I said. “Can I tell you what she said?”

“I—guess?”

I told him. When I glanced at him, he was staring out the windshield again, his cheeks reddening.

“Well,” he said. “This conversation has taken an unexpected turn.”

“It must be my interesting brain at work again.”

He didn’t smile.

“Here’s the thing, though. She was right,” I said, quietly. “I would never have admitted that before, not up until last night. I blamed Wilson. I blamed my mother for making us move away. I blamed myself, for a thousand things, but never for not loving you enough. It’s true, though. I loved you so much. I’m pretty sure I loved you enough to jump in front of a train for you, but not enough to tell my father to go to hell. And I am so sorry for that.”

He looked at me and scrubbed at his hair with his fingers, thoughtfully.

“It means a lot that you said that to me,” he said. “Thanks.”

I nodded and then added, “I’m much better at telling him to go to hell now. Just, you know, for the record.”

A ghost of a grin. “So noted,” he said.

WILSON
’
S CHILDHOOD HOME WAS
a brick Cape Cod with two peaked dormer windows, a screen door, and a front stoop. It was perched at the top of a gently sloped front yard, was neither large nor tiny, shabby nor fine, a plain, sturdy, ordinary house in a plain, sturdy, ordinary neighborhood. There was an orange pumpkin on the stoop and, hanging on the front door, a decorative fall wreath
that Wilson would have loathed with every bone in his body.

“It’s so—ordinary,” I said. “So middle-class American.”

“Yeah, no wonder Wilson tried to erase it from his permanent record,” said Ben. “I’m amazed he didn’t have the place bulldozed.”

I bristled. “Well, there’s also the fact that both his parents were killed while they lived in that house.”

Ben’s face hardened a little. I groaned.

“I’m defending him,” I said, wearily.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I gave his arm a tug. “No! You should say what you want to me. And of course, you’re right. Wilson would rather have been raised anywhere, a Bangladeshi slum, the heart of the Amazon rain forest,
anywhere
but in that perfectly pleasant house.”

Ben didn’t answer.

I said, “Slavish devotion is a hard habit to break. But I swear I’m working on it.”

“Okay,” said Ben, but he didn’t look convinced.

“I
am
,” I said. “You don’t get it. How could you? Your dad is the best man I know.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that, but . . .”

“You grew up with that dad and a great mom
and
a great stepfather, all of whom thought you were the sun and moon. I spent my life trying to get my father to think there was one thing special about me, and you were adored without lifting a finger. Good grief, listen to me. No, don’t. Shut up, Taisy, you jealous brat. Ugh.”

“Not ugh,” said Ben.

“I don’t really mean the part about lifting a finger. You were thoughtful and smart and hardworking and loving. God, you were Super Son. I just mean—oh, shut
up
, Taisy, you big, fat whiner.”

“Hey, you’re definitely not big. Or fat. And I see your point about me and my dad versus you and yours.”

“That’s not my real point. My real point is that I’m trying to change, to get free of him.”

“Maybe,” Ben said, “but look where we are. I want what you’re saying to be true as much as you do, but what about this project? What about your being here because Wilson called you? The only reason we’re together now is because of that phone call.”

“Would you really describe us as together?” I said, perking up.

“Taisy.”

“You’re right; we’re only together because Wilson called me. But does that matter? I mean, not to be a jerk, but you didn’t exactly call me, either. Ever. In seventeen years.”

“No, I didn’t.” I waited for him to explain why or to tell me about all the times he’d wanted to over the years, but he didn’t say anything else. His silence stung, but I plunged ahead.

“But listen, today? What we’re doing? It’s not about Wilson. It’s for me. I can’t explain why, exactly, but I need to understand how he became the man he turned out to be.”

Ben said, slowly, “Maybe he was just born that way, Taize. Some people are.”

I nodded. “Trust me. I have seriously considered that he might be a sociopath. I’ve taken a lot of comfort in that possibility, actually. Marcus thinks he is. But you should see that man with Willow. He loves her. So what went so wrong that he had to turn into an old man before he figured out how to love someone?”

“You’ve got me there.”

“Would you really describe me as having got you?”

Ben smiled and shook his head at me.

“As I friend, I meant,” I said.

“You’re relentless,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

THERE WAS ONLY ONE
funeral home in town, Philpott’s, a grand, Georgian affair with white pillars and a circular drive.

“Now, this is the kind of place Wilson wishes he’d been raised in,” I said. “Minus the dead bodies. Or not.”

“To the funeral home born,” said Ben.

I wanted to find out where my grandparents were buried. I’d brought two bouquets of orange dahlias to place on their graves.

A man named Robert Philpott took us into his somber high-ceilinged, oak-paneled office, where we sat in somber black chairs. Even the desktop computer was black; I wondered if they’d had it specially made. The only bright thing in the place was Robert Philpott’s hair, which was so riotously red it seemed to shed light, like a bonfire. It struck me as a good idea, that hair; I imagined it would make even the recently bereaved feel a little happier.

“We’ve computerized all our records,” said Robert Philpott, in a low, velvety voice, his manicured fingers hitting the computer keys almost soundlessly, as if hush had become second nature to him. “Walter Wilson Ravenel, January 1979. Helen Kittle Ravenel, 1999.”

I stared at Robert Philpott, blankly.

“Wait, that can’t be right. They died in an accident on the same day. It must have been around 1958.”

Robert Philpott’s velvety voice got a little less velvety. “I’m quite sure that our records are correct. We treat the deceased with the utmost care, their records included.”

“But this means that they were alive during my lifetime,” I said.

For some reason, the thought made me shiver. Ben slipped his arm around the back of my chair. I remembered the office at Banfield Academy, Edwina Cook’s fancy nails clicking away at the keys, calling up surprises from Wilson’s past. It was so strange, all these hard drives out there, harboring facts about my father’s life, facts he’d sawed off like dead wood and thrown away.

“Is there maybe another way you could check?” Ben asked. “Do you have the original records?”

Robert Philpott’s face went cold under his fiery hair.

“We kept them, naturally, but in a separate storage facility to which I do not have immediate access. But I can check the obituaries. My mother clips them from the paper and keeps them.”

“How nice of her,” I said.

“Our work is human work, Ms. Cleary,” said Robert Philpott, softening. “We remind ourselves as often as we can that the deceased aren’t just names. They had lives just as we do.”

“That’s lovely,” I said because it was.

“Excuse me; I will get my assistant to locate the right album.”

He disappeared out the heavy oak door, which resealed itself behind him as soundlessly as an envelope.

“You okay?” asked Ben.

“Who lies about their parents’ tragic deaths?”

“There must be a reason for it,” he said. “I mean, I can’t imagine what it is, but there must be.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

Robert Philpott made his silent return, bearing a thick leather photo album.

“Jacob is still locating your grandfather’s obituary, but here is Helen Ravenel’s.”

She had died after a brief illness fourteen years ago. Even Willow was alive fourteen years ago. I wondered if Helen Kittle Ravenel knew, as she went about her daily life in her brick Cape Cod, that she had three grandchildren, one of them not three hours away.

The obituary was a blur; I would need to make a copy of it to take with me and read later. But one sentence jumped out: “Helen Ravenel is survived by a son and a daughter, Barbara Ravenel Volkman, of Philadelphia, son-in-law George Volkman, and their three children, Walter, Samuel, and Thomas.”

Correction: Helen had six grandchildren.

And Wilson had a sister.

O
N THE DAY WE
showed our
Middlemarch
video to the class, even Luka was nervous. I could tell by the way he kept adjusting the knot of his tie. We had agreed to dress up, and I’ll tell you that Luka walking down the halls in a coat and tie was the Webley equivalent of a victory parade. People, male and female alike, applauded, wolf whistled, catcalled, pretended to swoon, reached out to touch him and then acted like their fingers were burned.

“God,” I growled at him under my breath, “it’s like you’re Henry V and you just won the damn Battle of Agincourt when all you did was put on a blue jacket.”

“Come on, Cleary,” he said, with a grin. “Don’t you think I look even a little dapper?”

“I think you look dapper,” I said, coolly. “I don’t think you just beat the stuffing out of the entire French army.”

“‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’” he intoned, pumping his fist in the air.

If Luka thought he could impress me by quoting Shakespeare, well, he was right, the infuriating boy. I sniffed and rolled my eyes.

“You look great, by the way,” he said, giving me one of his walking-down-the-hall nudges. I had eschewed my usual high school student disguise in favor of an emerald-green knit dress, black tights, and black ankle boots. My legs looked like pipe cleaners, but the color was unquestionably good on me.

I said, “Thank you. I can tell our peers agree with you, given all the wolf whistles my appearance is eliciting.”

Luka tucked in his lips and pretended to put his pinkies in his mouth.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Not all of us need our egos stroked by such obvious and pedestrian public displays.”

When we got to class, I was nervous, too. I know because I caught myself fidgeting with my hair, what my father called my “tell.” I used to do it only when I played chess or took a test. In recent months, I did it maddeningly often, particularly in the presence of Mr. Insley. Luka and I were nervous not because we didn’t think our project was good. It’s that we thought it was tremendous, brilliant even, and we really wanted everyone to agree.

The evening before, in the same study room in the public library where we’d shot the video, we had sat side by side and watched it. It was the first time I’d seen it since Luka had done the editing, and afterward, what can only be called euphoria abounded. We high-fived each other. We clapped our water bottles together. Luka had even engaged me in a victory dance, a kind of jitterbug pas de deux that was happily short-lived but made me laugh until I was out of breath.

The film was composed of interviews, characters talking against a backdrop, although since Luka had seen the light at last regarding the disembodied interviewer’s voice, you never actually heard the questions; they were merely (brilliantly!) implied in the answers. We stuck mostly to using dialogue from the novel itself, with tweaks here and there, although, at times, we took the poetic license of putting the novel’s narrative voice into the mouths of the characters. Luka and I played all the characters, he the males, I the females. We didn’t wear
costumes, just black shirts, and we put signs around our necks with the name of whomever we were portraying: Dorothea’s uncle, her sister, the strapping Sir James Chettam, the busybody Mrs. Cadwallader, Casaubon, Dorothea’s true love Will Ladislaw, Dorothea herself. Luka was wonderful, a really good actor even though he said he liked all the other parts of the project better.

“I want to make movies,” he’d told me. “My parents want me to be a brain surgeon. Literally. But they’ll get over it.”

Luka told me that I was wonderful in the film, too. Actually, what he said was, “You’re, like, made for this. Check out your face, which first of all, looks incredible, but also see how you totally turn into each character just by making the smallest adjustments? So cool.”

And if you’ll forgive the immodesty, it
was
cool. I watched myself in a state of wonderment, if you want to know the truth. I hadn’t known I was doing all those things. For instance, when I was Mrs. Cadwallader, I hadn’t decided to let a smile play around the edges of my lips, to raise my eyebrows, to turn my voice razor edged; I’d just
been
Mrs. Cadwallader as she said the line, “It’s true what Sir James says, Casaubon has no good red blood in his body. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses. Oh, he dreams of footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.”

“See?” Luka had said. “You’re even good at being that old bat, which is interesting. I mean, of course you were good at Dorothea, since you basically
are
Dorothea. But how the hell did you pull off Mrs. Cadwallader? Amazing.”

“What do you mean I
am
Dorothea?” I asked. “Because I believe I recall your describing her as—what was it—‘insanely annoying’?”

Luka smiled. “Well, I’ve revised my position since then. But she’s, you know, this beautiful misfit, kind of misguided in some ways, okay, many ways, a ton of ways, but always well-meaning. And she can seem kind of, uh, distant, but she also has this effect on people.”

He dropped his eyes. It was a rare thing to see Luka shy. Even though I would not have unheard what he’d said for all the tea in China,
even as I was cradling “beautiful” in the palm of my brain like a jewel, I also could not bear his embarrassment. I had to end it.

“The effect of causing people to make vomit faces? Is that the effect to which you refer?” And then, for good measure, I made one. It took some effort. If I had ever made a vomit face before, when I wasn’t actually vomiting, I could not recall it.

“Ha!” said Luka, with a laugh. “You are shockingly good at that. Look at you, Cleary, full of hidden talents.”

“That’s the effect you meant, correct?”

Luka’s face went river-rock seamless the way it did when he was giving something his full attention. Most people, when they are concentrating, bunch up, wrinkle, but Luka smoothed. Smooth forehead, smooth arched cheekbones, smooth, smooth jawline. I was hard-pressed not to reach out and run a finger down that face; I imagined it would feel like glass, but warm.

“Nah. I meant that she makes the people around her want to be better, like you do.”

I closed my eyes briefly, absorbing this, giving that sentence its full due because here was a historical marker moment if ever I’d had one:
LUKA BAILEY
-
SONG PAYS WILLOW CLEARY THE COMPLIMENT OF A LIFETIME
.

“Oh,” I managed to say. “Well, thanks.”

For a fleeting instant I considered trying for cool-headed irony or casual insouciance, but my joyful smile would not be conquered; I may as well have been trying to stop a speeding train. I sat there, stared at my face-as-Mrs. Cadwallader’s-face frozen on the computer screen, and grinned like a damned fool—or a blessed one. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luka steal a glance at me. A flash of white, a dip of his head. Oh, we were ridiculous! Behaving as though unrestrained happiness were a crime against humanity.

“No problem,” said Luka, quickly. “Hey, you want to watch the film again?”

It was even better the second time.

But it is one thing to sit in a tiny room and watch a film you made
with just the person with whom you made it and another altogether to watch it on a big screen in a darkened classroom with twenty other people, one whose approval you value so much it makes your stomach burn. But once the film got rolling, I sat riveted. This time, for the first time, I watched it as a regular viewer, not as the person who made it, paying less attention to all the tiny pieces and more to the story we were telling. It was the story of Dorothea’s growth, her transformation from ambitious idealist who held herself above her fellow human beings, to an ordinary happy woman, and we used the narrative arc of her romantic life to demonstrate this. It wasn’t a story that wrapped itself up with a bow in the end, not entirely. Yes, Dorothea found true love with Will (“We are bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it”), but she also resigned herself to a life of helping her husband (“I like nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that my husband should struggle against them, and that I should give him wifely help”) instead of being a hero in her own right.

The funny parts came mostly at the beginning, with all the characters weighing in on Dorothea’s engagement and marriage to the old, ugly Casaubon. (“Good God, it is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!” “He has one foot in the grave!” “Look at his legs!”), and the film got more serious as it went on. The only thing Luka was better at than the comedic parts was being Will Ladislaw. When he said, with shadowed eyes, a rasp in his voice, and sudden hollows in his cheeks, “I never had a
preference
for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her,” I think it’s fair to say that the classroom engaged in a collective swoon.

The clapping started before the lights went back on. There were whistles, a war whoop. We were a hit! In the midst of the clamor, Luka and I turned to each other and gravely fist-bumped (a first for yours truly), and then both of us, at the same time, forgot the rule against unrestrained happiness and smiled.

“Ready?” asked Luka.

“Ready,” I said, and we stood up and walked to the front of the room
to give our presentation. That’s when I saw Mr. Insley’s face and gasped as though I’d been struck. To say there was no joy in his expression would be the understatement of the century. His face, that face I had studied with every ounce of my attention, the face I had cherished from its wide brow to its prominent blue eyes to its narrow chin, was a white-lipped mask of rage. And I swear that it wasn’t until that second, in a flashbulb pop of understanding, that I considered how our film might look to him.

The older, scholarly first husband of whom no one approved. The naive young girl desperate to please him. Phrases fizzed through my mind: “white moles,” “beautiful lips kissing holy skulls,” “I think when a girl is so young as Miss Brooke is, her friends ought to interfere a little to hinder her doing anything foolish.” It was all I could do not to cry out, “But it’s got nothing to do with us! It all started with my and Luka’s argument about Dorothea and grew from there!” And there was also—I am sorry to say it—a small part of me that felt just plain irritated with him. Here I was, at long last, after months of being scorned and reviled and ignored, standing tall and triumphant, my ears ringing with the approval of my peers, and he was the only one in the room—well, except for Bec—who wasn’t cheering me on.

As I was standing there, jostled by conflicting emotions, Luka reached out and put a steadying hand on my shoulder.

“Willow,” he whispered. “Are you ready?”

And, just like that, I was.

But before we could start, just as we were clearing our throats and straightening our notecards, Mr. Insley said, in an ice-pick voice, “Unfortunately, your film ran over the allotted time limit, so we will not be able to hear your presentation today. I will attempt to squeeze it into a future class, but I certainly can’t promise. Please retake your seats.”

The classroom went dead quiet, and I felt tears fill my eyes. Luka looked so mad, he almost shimmered with it, and he was opening his mouth to say something to Mr. Insley, when a voice came gliding across
the room from the direction of the door: “Oh, it would be a terrible shame, Mr. Insley, to leave such a gorgeous project unfinished. I believe I’ve never seen a student film nearly so accomplished. And there are ten minutes left in the class.”

Janine Shay, one hand on her hip, her lipsticked smile curving like a scimitar. Until she spoke, I hadn’t realized she was there. Mr. Insley must not have realized it, either, because his eyes nearly popped from his head. Later, when I remembered his face, I would feel compassion for him having been shown up by an intruder in his classroom, his personal kingdom, but right then, all I felt was relief.

“Wouldn’t you agree, class?” asked Ms. Shay.

Nods. One low-key war whoop. We did the presentation.

On the way out, tremulously, I attempted to smile at Mr. Insley, my beloved, but he stared down at the papers on his desk as though he were trying to set them on fire with his eyes.

“I’ll see you at lunch,” I said, softly, so that only he could hear. A muscle in his cheek twitched. Otherwise, nothing. Panic began to roar in my ears, but I beat it back with the certainty that he loved me. He loved me, and I would explain everything. Right then, I realized—with guilt and rue—that, in the past week or so, I had been thinking less about Mr. Insley when I was away from him, maybe because I was getting used to the idea of him, maybe because I had been so busy. But all it took was the prospect of losing him for my love to rise up and seize me by the throat. Now that I stopped to consider, I saw it was usually in my moments of deepest anxiety regarding our relationship that I loved him the most. Odd, but then love was odd, wasn’t it?

At lunch, his classroom was empty as a tomb.

As I was walking away from it, I spotted Luka, his jacket off and slung over his arm, his lunch bag in his hand.

“Luka!”

We ate outside, under our tree. Careless of the cold, as always, Luka threw his jacket to the ground and sat in the gray, autumnal weather
in his shirtsleeves. I tucked my knees under my chin and fiddled with my food. We discussed our success, of course, but I found that my heart wasn’t quite in it.

“Good thing Ms. Shay showed up,” said Luka. “Now, Zany Blainey won’t be able to give us a shit grade just to punish us.”

I flushed. “Oh, I don’t think he’d do that,” I said, hastily. “All we did was go over the time limit, right?”

“We didn’t. We hit the limit exactly. But so what if we’d gone over? Max Bolton’s violin piece inspired by the Rosamond character went on for ten minutes longer than ours, and Insley ate it up, even though he obviously doesn’t know crap about music.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because for starters, seventy-five percent of that piece was ripped straight out of Mozart’s ‘Violin Concerto Number Five.’”