Scandalous

Chapter 31

He was awake at five.

This was not unusual for Thanksgiving — he had been the one who cooked it for the past seven years, which had begun as a choice and calcified, in the way of things that happen repeatedly, into an arrangement that no longer required discussion. He rose without waking Maryanne, dressed in the dark, and went downstairs to the kitchen where the turkey had been brining since Tuesday night.

By seven he had the turkey in the oven and the ham prepped and waiting its turn. By seven thirty he had the stock on for the gravy, the sweet potato casserole assembled and covered, the green beans cleaned and ready for their bacon and shallots, the bread rolls set out to proof in their pan by the warm edge of the stove. He worked through it with the methodical, focused competence he brought to things he'd done enough times to do from muscle memory — the kitchen a different space when it was just him in it before the city woke, the radio on low, the early Pasadena dark still pressed against the kitchen windows.

He did not find it meditative, exactly. He found it useful. The alternative was lying in the dark waiting for a morning he wasn't particularly looking forward to, and cooking was at least productive and kept his hands busy and his mind on specific, solvable problems.

At half past eight he heard movement upstairs. The particular sound of Maryanne navigating the morning — the bathroom, the bedroom, eventually the stairs. She appeared in the kitchen doorway in her robe with her hair half-done, looked at the controlled orchestration of the stove and counter and the smell of everything that had been happening since five, and said: "It smells incredible."

He handed her a coffee.

She had been out until past midnight with David — her editor, the one whose opinion she valued in the specific way she valued the opinions of people who had tangibly advanced her career, which was a different category from all other opinions and got different treatment. The new manuscript's deadline was pressing. She had come in quietly and he had been aware of it in the half-sleep way of a man who does not sleep deeply since his early thirties and had noted the time and the sound of her undressing in the dark before going back under.

She took the coffee and leaned against the counter and watched him work and they did not have an argument and did not have a notable conversation and the morning passed in the functional, parallel way that their mornings had been passing lately — not hostile, not warm, just present.

Her parents arrived at quarter past ten.

He heard the car in the driveway from the kitchen. He heard Maryanne's voice change the moment she heard it — the register that existed only for her parents, the specific brightness of it, the slightly accelerated quality of a woman who has returned, by proximity, to the version of herself that was her parents' daughter. He heard the door, the greeting, the voices of Gerald and Patricia Sherman deployed at full warmth in the direction of their daughter.

Oh, sweetheart. Patricia first, the embrace audible in the pause in the voices. You look absolutely stunning. How long has it been? Let me look at you — no, let me really look at you.

Gerald: There she is. There's my girl.

Nathan dried his hands. He walked from the kitchen to the foyer with the composed, hospitable expression of a man who has done this enough times to do it on autopilot.

Gerald Sherman was sixty-three with the bearing of a man who had inherited money and grown more money from it and believed that both of these facts were fundamentally about his character. He was not loud about this. He was simply comfortable in it — the specific, settled ease of someone for whom the hierarchy of a room was never in question. Patricia was sixty-one, expensively maintained, and had the social delivery of a woman who had spent four decades in rooms where impression management was a primary skill and had become very good at it.

They saw Nathan.

Gerald: "Nathan." A nod. Brief, the particular efficiency of a greeting that has decided not to invest.

Patricia: "Nathan, hello." The social warmth applied at the minimum required percentage. The cheek that offered itself for a greeting that was not quite a kiss.

"Gerald, Patricia," Nathan said. "Good to have you. Flight was alright?"

"Fine, fine," Gerald said, already turning back to Maryanne. "Sweetheart, the house looks wonderful. Is that the turkey I can smell?"

Nathan went back to the kitchen.

They settled in the sitting room — Maryanne and her parents in the configuration they naturally fell into, the one that had existed before Nathan and had simply accommodated him as a peripheral element. He moved between the kitchen and the dining room, finishing the table, bringing out the appetizers, checking the turkey. He caught pieces of the conversation in the sitting room in passing — the fragmented content of three people conducting the particular, concentrated pleasures of a reunion between people who speak the same language.

Maryanne's next book. The manuscript David was working through with her. The publishing timeline. Patricia asking with the specific, fluent enthusiasm of a woman who had built her identity substantially around her daughter's success.

"The cover concept is extraordinary," Maryanne was saying. "David fought for it against the sales team and he was right to. It's dark but it's exactly the tone of the book."

Gerald: "The Times piece last month called it your most anticipated work since Under The Stars. Which — I mean, for the Times to say that—"

"I know," Maryanne said.

"Your mother read the excerpt they published and called me at eight in the morning."

"It was seven forty-five," Patricia said. "I couldn't wait."

Nathan brought the cheese board in. Set it on the coffee table. Made the appropriate small movements of a host. Patricia acknowledged this with the brief, distracted nod she gave to service.

Gerald looked up. "Nathan. You still at the school?"

"Yes," Nathan said.

"Making progress with the writing, or are you still—" Gerald turned one hand over in the ambiguous gesture that had stood in for the end of that sentence for several years.

Nathan felt his jaw tighten in the particular, controlled way of a man choosing his response carefully. "Making progress," he said. Level. Final.

Patricia smiled. The specific smile of a woman communicating something she has chosen not to say aloud. "Well, that's good. It's good to have something to work toward." She reached for a piece of cheese. "We were reading that a colleague of yours — that woman from the Pacific Northwest, what's her name — was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Small press, wasn't she? You must know how these things work better than most."

Nathan looked at her.

He took a slow, even breath through his nose. He thought about the rest of the afternoon still ahead of them. He thought about the bottle of Jameson in the top left cabinet of the kitchen behind the spice rack — the one he called the emergency reserve in his head, though he had never said this aloud, because the occasion for it was implied.

"Excuse me," he said pleasantly. "I need to check the turkey."

The kitchen had the warm, organized smell of a Thanksgiving that was proceeding correctly. He went to the cabinet. He retrieved the Jameson. He poured a measure that was strictly speaking more than necessary for ten fifteen in the morning and held it in his hand and thought about the roughly six hours of this that remained.

His phone chimed.

He looked at the counter where it was sitting.

Shae.

He thought about the staff meeting. About Caldwell's voice. About Ms. Pryce reading the list with her clipboard and her careful, unambiguous delivery. He thought about what it meant that he was standing in his kitchen at ten fifteen on Thanksgiving and his first response to a notification had been to think about whether he should open it.

He opened it.

Happy Thanksgiving Mr. Kingston 🦃

He stood there for a moment.

He looked at it. He felt the thing in his chest that he had been naming and renaming since September — the quality of warmth and complication that arrived reliably with her name on a screen or her voice in a room or her handwriting in the margin of eleven pages of story — and he held the Jameson in one hand and the phone in the other and thought about Happy Thanksgiving Miss Madison, period, and nothing else.

He typed: Happy Thanksgiving Shae — and then, before the oversight mechanism fully engaged, he had typed — you doing anything special?

He sent it.

He was aware that he had crossed a small, specific line. The professional response was four words and her last name. What he'd sent was her first name and a question. He was aware of this and he had sent it anyway and the phone buzzed almost immediately.

Not really my uncle couldn't make it out so it's just me vibing with a new book eating a turkey sandwich and some coffee. You?

He typed: Maryanne's parents are over.

Really? does the apple fall far from the tree?

He looked at the doorway to the sitting room. He could hear Patricia's voice. He could hear the particular, satisfied quality of it.

He typed: the apple would have to fall off the tree first.

Three dots. Then: 😂

He heard himself exhale quietly. He was looking at the phone with the expression a man wears when he has said something that landed and is aware of the specific warmth of that.

Then: Do you need saving?

He furrowed his brow. Saving how.

Like this

The phone rang.

He looked at it. Her name on the screen. He stood in his kitchen on Thanksgiving at ten-twenty in the morning with Maryanne's parents in the next room and his phone ringing in his hand.

He answered.

"Hello."

"Are they nearby?" Her voice, low, slightly conspiratorial, was a specific thing in his ear that required a physical response to manage.

He glanced toward the sitting room door. Gerald's profile visible in the doorway. "Kind of."

"Okay. Tell them one of your colleagues is calling asking how to cook a turkey. Tell them it's Mr. Holt."

He almost laughed. He covered it. It was, in fact, completely plausible — Daniel was functionally incapable in a kitchen and Nathan had received variations of this phone call before.

"Who's calling you?" Maryanne appeared in the kitchen doorway.

He turned. His hand tightened very slightly around the phone. He thought about wrong number. He thought about I'll explain later. He thought about Maryanne's specific ability — the one she'd had for eleven years — to read the thing behind whatever he presented her.

"Daniel," he said. "He's attempting a turkey. Going to walk him through it — I'll be in my study, back soon." He was already moving. He did not wait for the expression she was composing to complete itself.

He made it to the study. He closed the door. He stood with his back to it for a moment breathing at a rate that was not quite normal.

"That was very smooth," she said on the other end. He could hear the smile in it. "Not suspicious at all."

He let out the breath. "I am not good at lying."

"What, not even as a kid?"

He moved to the desk. He didn't sit. He started a slow circuit of the room that was more about having something to do with his body than about going anywhere. "Especially as a kid." He paused. "Actually, I'll revise that — I was completely hopeless."

"Bullshit."

"It's true." And he was smiling — not the composed, managed expression of a man doing an impression of ease, but the actual thing, the one that didn't require monitoring. "My mother could tell from the other room. She didn't even need to look at me."

There was a quality to the brief quiet that followed that told him she was listening in the specific way she listened — not waiting for the end of what he was saying but genuinely attending to all of it.

"She sounds like she was good," Shae said.

"She was." He stopped his circuit. He stood by the bookshelf. "She was — she was very bright. Kind in the way that was genuine rather than performed. She didn't require lying, is the thing — you could just tell her things. So I never got the practice." He looked at the spines on the shelf without really seeing them. "She died when I was twelve."

Shae said nothing for a moment. Then: "I know the feeling. The before and the after."

He had not meant to say it, necessarily. Or rather — he had said it the way things came out in conversations that had a specific quality, the ones where the usual editing mechanism was not fully engaged because the conversation itself had outpaced it.

"My father was around after," he said. "More or less. Mostly less." He paused. "He was not particularly sober, and he was not particularly interested, and there wasn't much point in lying to someone who wasn't paying enough attention to notice." He said this without weight, in the tone of a man describing a fact. "So. No. I never really learned."

Shae was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "I'm not crazy about it either. Lying. At least not to people I actually—" A small pause. "It's a short list. People I'd bother telling the truth to."

He said: "Is that so."

"Yeah." He heard the slight smile in it. "I can literally count them on one hand."

"Really."

"You don't believe me." Not a question. "Okay — Claire. Gwendolyn. Terry the Uber driver."

He smiled. "Your Uber driver."

"I've known him since I was fourteen, he's not weird about it, and most people are weird about it, so yes, Terry makes the list." She paused. "Then—" a beat that had a specific, fractional quality to it "—there's you."

The flutter.

He stood in his study on Thanksgiving afternoon and felt it land in his chest with the precision of a thing aimed correctly. He was silent for a moment.

"I made the list," he said. He heard how it came out — quieter than intended.

"You made the list," she said, and he could hear the smirk in it, the specific warmth of someone who has said a true thing and knows it and is watching the other person receive it, and he felt the heat moving up the back of his neck and he was aware of the expression on his face and was grateful, quite suddenly, that this was a phone call.

He cleared his throat. The deliberate, audible mechanism of a man changing the subject before the subject became something he couldn't manage. "You mentioned a new book. What are you reading?"

"Catcher in the Rye."

He raised an eyebrow. "First time?"

"First time. I know, I know."

"What do you think of it? How far are you?"

"Four chapters." A pause in which he could tell she was settling into the question, the way she settled into questions. "I think Holden is either the most honest narrator I've ever read or the least reliable one. Maybe both."

"Go on."

"He says everyone's a phony," she said. "Constantly. That's his whole operating thesis — phoniness everywhere, in everyone. But he is absolutely performing for the reader the entire time. Like the red hunting hat. He tells us he doesn't care what people think and then he spends two paragraphs on the hat."

"So he's a phony himself."

"I didn't say that." And here was the thing about her that had been true since the first week of term — she pushed back. Naturally, without performance, the way someone does when they are actually thinking rather than defending a position. "I said he's unreliable. There's a difference. I think he genuinely believes what he's saying. The phoniness charge is real to him. He's not lying. He just can't see that the hat is evidence."

"Evidence of what?"

"That he wants to be seen." A pause. "He's performing authenticity. Which is — I mean that's not nothing. That's a specific kind of tragedy."

He sat on the edge of the desk. "And Salinger intends you to see that."

"I think Salinger knows exactly what he's doing. The whole thing is first person — Holden controls everything the reader knows. And Salinger makes him tell on himself constantly anyway. In the details. The hat. The way he talks about his sister. The way he talks about Jane." She paused. "He doesn't want connection and he wants nothing else."

Nathan looked at the study wall.

He thought: you are seventeen years old.

He thought: you've read four chapters.

"What do you think happens?" he asked. "When you get to the end."

"I don't know yet. I'm trying not to decide in advance."

He felt something move in his chest at this — the specific, small echo of his own words in her mouth, the feedback loop of a thought returned. He opened his mouth.

The knock at the study door. Maryanne's voice, flat and firm: "Nathan. The turkey is nearly done."

He looked at his watch.

Two forty-seven.

He had been in this room for four hours and twenty-two minutes. He sat with this fact for a moment — the way the afternoon had moved without the usual duration of afternoons, the specific quality of time spent in a conversation that is actually going somewhere.

"I have to go," he said.

"Okay." A beat. "If you need rescuing again, just text."

He almost smiled. "Noted. Have a good evening, Shae."

"You too." And then, in a quieter register — not performed, not decorated, just the word set down with the particular softness of something genuine: "Goodnight, Nathan."

The way she said his name.

He was not prepared for it — not the word, not the specific sound of it in her voice, the particular, unguarded quality of it. He stood in his study and felt his body respond to it with the complete, involuntary specificity of a physical reaction that had nothing to do with his intentions and everything to do with the fact that his name in her voice at the end of a four-hour conversation was not something his composure had budgeted for.

He stood very still.

"Goodnight," he said.

He ended the call.

He set the phone on the desk and stood in the quiet of the study for a moment, aware of his own heartbeat and the specific quality of what had just moved through him and the considerable amount of information this constituted.

He picked up his Jameson. He finished it.

He straightened his shirt. He arranged his face. He opened the study door and walked back toward the dining room where Maryanne and her parents were waiting, and the turkey was ready, and the afternoon still had several hours left in it.

He walked through them with the composed, functional bearing of a man managing his interior weather.

He was very, very good at this by now.