Chapter 1 | Now
‘Who’s going to be there?’ Vika asked Maud over the phone.
‘Don’t make me personally drag you out of your cave, Vika. I will smoke you out. You know I will.’ Vika could almost hear Maud grinding her teeth at her friend’s recalcitrance. But Vika didn’t have the will nor the want to be witty, drink like a fish but not to the point of throwing up in the can, and gossip bitingly about those who deserved it.
With anyone else, Vika would’ve stayed home. But this was Maud; Vika knew she owed her the courtesy. Vika sometimes came across her friend’s name in art magazines, and the occasional article in the online Style sections of national newspapers. Maud’s talent and the two years in England had widened her artistic reputation. Not that Maud ever sent her this stuff. Self promotion was only for the needy.
Vika, in bouts of exquisite self-flagellation, would search for Maud on Google images and eye her friend with a squint. Vika wondered if her friend’s stint in England with all those double-barreled names and their snobbery-disguised-as-reserve, were bashing her garrulous friend into line. Vika couldn’t decide if it was envy or relief or an uncomfortable synthesis of the two when she read about Maud’s public persona. The conundrum would fester until she was with Maud. Vika’s relief knowing her friend was not that person made her worry. Vika knew the Maud before she was Maud Eklöf-Jensen. Not that that stopped her reading the thinly disguised vitriol in blog posts to mollify her tottering self worth.
It was Maud who’d kept in touch during her time away. Maud was vigilant about friendship. Vika—sometimes to her chagrin—wished for the days of snail mail. That may have given her the excuse to keep Maud at arm’s length; allow her to catch her breath. It bugged Vika’s romantic streak that wrenching farewells and a sense of truly casting off into an undiscovered world only seemed real in Shirley Hazzard novels. Instagram, Facebook—the live feeds of my-life-is-better-curated-than-yours-could-possibly-ever-be—made the concept of longing and separateness a fetish at best and an excuse at worst.
‘I’ve got a date. Tinder,’ Vika told her now. Maud was all over her outright fabrication.
‘What a bunch of hooie; sure, bring him as well. But you’re fibbing.’
‘I really…I can’t. I don’t want to.’ There was a further moment of silence. Vika sensed Maud was debating whether to loose a further blast of righteous indignation down the phone—god knew Maud didn’t deserve such a cavalier attitude—there were limits to her patience. So Vika agreed to come. Anything to avoid an interrogation that would give the Spanish Inquisition the brevity of an emoji.
~ ~ ~
The gathering was a mix of art lovers, old friends come to welcome the family back and a smattering of venture capitalists (the beard and flannel set as Maud liked to call them). Presumably they weren’t here for statement pieces for the walls of their boardrooms or their ski homes in Beaver Creek. Maud's portraits were not scaled for fuck-off mantlepieces. Maud’s work was a compelling marriage of 18th century miniature portraits and a selfie. The intricate details a trompe l’oeil that invited the viewer to step close because only then did one realize the sitter was very much of this age. The sitter’s gaze didn’t stare out to the world so much as gaze back at themselves. The further paradox was the skill and the hours that it took to create the picture in the first place. Maud subverting the lazy gratification of a selfie to an art form. Unless you believed her critics who dismissed them as Gerard Richter ripoffs in polaroid size.
Vika picked out the spiked hairstyle of Marisol, Maud’s nanny, in the foyer. The French girl winked at Vika and jerked her head towards the kitchen. Maud and family had set up camp in her parents’ large apartment on the Upper West Side while she contemplated her next move. Vika mouthed a ‘thank you’ and slid through the crowd to the kitchen.
Gretchen was at the bench, smooching Charlie, Maud’s son. He played with Gretchen’s necklace, sucking contentedly on a bead. Vika placed gentle hands over Charlie’s eyes and put her lips to the plump skin of his neck and blew a raspberry. Charlie twisted his head, a trail of dribble stretching from his lower lip. A two-toothed, soggy grin lit up his bobbing head at the sight of Vika. Vika hardly cared that she was using an 8-month old to ease her shyness, a pathetic semaphore that she was more than a professional acquaintance with the hostess.
‘Traitor,’ Gretchen scowled and handed him over. Vika nom-nom-ed his cheek, delighting in his squirming, wriggling warmth in his white cotton onesie.
Charlie reached with a wide open mouth and gummed her wetly on her cheek. Vika squealed at the sensation, feeling the buds of his milk teeth on her chin, the two of them content in their little haze of mutual affection and spit.
She tried a sip of champagne while Charlie fought her for it. Gretchen wrestled him back. ‘Let’s get you to Marisol. She can deal with your drinking problem.’ Gretchen winked. ‘Plus I’ll get to take a look at your mother’s latest sketches.’ Gretchen’s penchant to nose around in everyone’s business knew no bounds. Vika bestowed a final smooch to Charlie’s cheek and slid out onto the balcony.
She looked over the railing and rummaged in her clutch for her Marlboro Lights. The smoking was an excuse when she ran out of polite things to say in the company of strangers. She leaned into one of the many candles burning in mason jars. She drew back, blowing a satisfying stream of smoke up into the night’s sky. The noxious elixir of tobacco and alcohol giving her brain a pleasing buzz. She took another restorative gulp of her champagne.
‘Still smoking?’ She didn’t turn but continued to gaze across the rooftops on the other side of the street. She heard a police siren a few blocks away and fought an unsettling sense of inevitability. The man came closer and leant on the rail next to her. She resisted the temptation to disappear inside. She sucked in another lungful of tobacco and blew the smoke out her nostrils.
‘Vika, Vika, Vika.’ She wanted not to care if it was admonishment or something else in his tone. ‘How long has it been?’ The man posing the question turned to face the windows of the kitchen, leaning his elbows on the balcony railing. She shifted her body, copying his pose, but not answering. The two of them side by side in a friendly slouch. A cursory glance would show two companions chatting amiably.
‘Cigarette?’ Vika said instead. She pointed her packet towards him. The man shook his head, and continued his scrutiny.
‘You’ve not got the cancer memo, then?’
She sucked another lungful of cigarette and blew a smoke ring. ‘Nope. Should I’ve?’ She’d taught herself during her father’s last months before he died. A defiant ‘fuck you’ to death, to life, to medical science. She’d got quite good at it. Even Goran sanctioned her futile dissent.
The man next to her put up a finger and poked a wraith-like ring. ‘Not bad. Gretchen’s corrupting influence?’
Vika laughed caustically. ‘Nope,’ she repeated herself. Her glass was almost empty. She pushed herself upright. ‘Smoking’s thirsty work. I need another drink.’
‘Wait.’ He took hold of her wrist. ‘Let’s take a look at you.’
Vika smiled blandly. She would manage this with glibness so she belatedly leant in and kissed his cheek. ‘Prosper. You’re right. It’s been a while.’ Vika allowed herself to take a long look. He stared back. ‘You’re well?’ she asked finally. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ Wanting but not wanting to know too much. ‘Let me guess, fly fishing.’ If she thought bringing up that topic would unsettle him, she was wrong.
Prosper smiled at her question and indulged her gentle sting for a brief moment. ‘Precisely. I’ve been standing in waders in the wilds of Scotland, freezing my arse off, waiting for the one that got away.’ Prosper pronounced it like the English, shades of his wife. She deducted marks for this affectation. He stretched his hands wide, giving his imaginary fish impressive measurements. ‘Very meditative.’
He dropped his hands and shoved them in his pockets. ‘You look great. Your usual mocking self.’
‘C’est moi.’
‘Boyfriend? Husband? Girlfriend?’
She snorted, refusing to indulge him and changed the topic. ‘I heard from Maud about the composing. Well done you. You’re one of the lucky ones, getting to do the thing you love.’ Prosper remained in his slouch but there was something watchful about it. Vika privately admitted surprise that he wasn’t at least aware about what was going on in her life but maybe that was unwanted wistfulness on her part that he should have at least enquired over the years. ‘Maud didn’t tell me you’d be here,’ she said, fatuously.
‘What, and provided you with an excuse not to come? I’m her husband. Where else would I be?’ Prosper turned and leant over the railing, observing the passersby. After a bit he said ‘don’t think I don’t know that our time away has given you breathing space.’
Vika stared at him for a long moment and then allowed herself a grim smile. ‘But now you’re back.’ She wanted to brain him. That hadn’t changed.
Prosper stood up and reached for her hand again. ‘It may surprise you but it’s good to see you Vika. Really.’ He let go of her hand. ‘I’m going to find a wine. Don’t go away. There are things—’ He looked down at his hand on her arm and then released it, before going back inside. The sense of an anticlimax that a few moments ago wasn’t anticipated confused her. She grabbed her cigarettes, stuffed them in her clutch and walked back inside. The days when she did what Prosper told her were long gone.
Later in the evening, after the run on the buffet of farm-to-table vegetables and wild salmon, Vika found herself next to Tom, Maud’s brother. Growing up, Tom was her school girl crush; his languid form lounging over the kitchen bench, joking with Assumpta, the family’s housekeeper; or mercilessly taunting his younger sister at her risible marks in anything other than art. Now Vika enjoyed his conversation without the burden of her mute adoration from her school days. Tom paid her extravagant compliments that bordered on the salacious which gave her the giggles. And he got points for the genuine start of interest on hearing she was a high school English teacher.
‘Is that a badass career choice?’ Vika asked him, amused at his arrested expression.
‘Wow, lady. Compared to this lot, you bet.’ Tom waved an amused hand at the crowd. ‘Most people here are too fixated on their startups, their angel investments, their Ted talks to realize it all ends in death anyway. We know otherwise.’ He pulled her close with an arm and kissed the top of her head, then let her go. His sensitive acknowledgment of her father’s death was a salve.
Tom had the grace to appear absorbed as Vika babbled about e.e. cummings and Ted Hughes. Literary discussions were normally a surefire way to bore people senseless but Tom asked, if not a little disbelievingly, why she wasn't championing Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop or at the very least some young thing freshly crowned from a poetry slam. Vika laughed and told him that old white guys had their place. Sometimes. They exchanged mutual smirks. The key, Vika glibly told him, was to mix the personal with the mechanics of the poetry. And since there was no end to scandal in poetry, the topic almost taught itself.
‘You mean the guy’s appalling taste in women?’
‘Please. Sylvia and Assia were difficult women. So what? You can bet that’s why he was nuts about them in the first place. There’s nothing appalling about it. It’s gloriously sexual. It’s arousing. Sylvia bites into him. Literally. They fed off each other. It was lustful. He wasn’t only about the blank page and foxes—imaginary or otherwise.’ Vika stopped, this was no one’s idea of small talk but Tom was smiling.
‘Yowsers Veek. Isn’t this a little indecent for the students?’
‘Hey. With teenagers it’s my duty to give them a gentle reminder: they didn’t invent sex, drugs and transgression. As much as they bang on about it.’ Tom laughed delightedly and clinked his glass to hers. ‘You must be a knockout in the classroom.’
Vika grinned. This was unexpected. But this was Tom so of course he’d keep up. She loosened her shoulders, conscious of her cleavage nudging her silk blouse. She was hopelessly out of practice on these matters, her time given over these past months to caring for Goran. Her father’s death unsurprisingly ramped up Vika’s desire for life, for a certainty that she existed in some grander, and more physical capacity beyond the unwanted bedfellows of death’s administrative tedium and the unmoored grief that dictated her shattered emotions as she sifted through the detritus of her father’s death.
Tom excused himself after he extracted a promise to meet for a drink later in the week. Vika looked forward to it. A proper date, not an online cul-de-sac of going nowhere fast with sex-crazed jerks. Writing her dating profile kept her up at night: unhinged and bereaved; well-educated woman wants conversation and luscious sex. Not necessarily in that order.
Maybe she should make her profile a creative writing assignment because such honesty was only guaranteed to get every creep-o within a 10-mile radius on high alert. Profiles on these sites made her despair. Perhaps being lustful wasn't a thing anymore. It had to be nailed to a five-year plan too, otherwise why bother. Vika checked her watch and glanced around the room, looking for Maud. And yelped when her elbow was taken in a firm grip and she was steered through the room. Prosper nodded at someone but kept moving with Vika back onto the terrace.
‘Why didn’t you tell me - about your father?’ Vika faced him, observing him with a squint. After a pause she said, ‘you didn’t ask. I thought you knew.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘That he’s dead? What?’
‘I knew he was sick. Maud told me.’
‘There you go.’
‘Gretchen said it was only six weeks ago.’ Vika was going to roast her alive. And slowly. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I’d known,’ Prosper said to her.
‘Why? What do you wish you’d known?’ She took a breath, her tone shrewish. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe you think I should have told you, sent you a card or something but that’s normally the job of friends and family, not the griever, or the griev-ee. Is that even a word? But I didn’t and I know you know that you don’t really believe you should have got a heads up. If that makes any sense.’ The familiar bone-deep exhaustion that came from being in company for too long fell like a cloak over her earlier happiness. It maddened her too, that even after these months when Goran’s fatal condition was first given, the grief could rise up from nowhere and, like a troll from under a bridge, thwack her smartly across the back of her head.
‘I am sorry. I am. When I think about you, your father’s death is not the first thing that comes to mind.’ The old Vika might have been beyond intrigued to get to the bottom of that particular revelation but this new person with a father barely buried and a heart as fragile as Venetian glass was careful with herself. Particularly around this man.
She pulled her hands from Prosper’s grip. ‘He had cancer. It was inevitable. You met him. He rolled his own cigarettes with Ukrainian tobacco. The stuff was noxious. But smoking was what a man did.’ Vika was crying. Tears leaked out of her these days. It pissed her off. Especially now, in front of Prosper. ‘That’s essentially it. But let me tell you, sorting through the medical insurance is a bitch. What do these people want—his corpse?’ She glared at him. ‘And now I am furious at you for making me cry.’
Then she laughed to take the sting out of her words and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. ‘How’s my mascara?’ she said flippantly, and then regretted asking. Prosper stepped closer and looked into her eyes, tilting his head and studying them with a mock frown.
‘Don’t mind me, Prosper. Grieving daughters are not known for their tact. I’m going to rustle up an Uber to take me home before I embarrass us all further and Maud shows me the door for blubbing over the guests.’
‘Ah. There you both are.’ The woman in question at last. She strolled over and took Vika’s hand in that uniquely proprietary manner that Vika both loved and resented about her. ‘I distinctly told you not to make her cry, Pros. Jesus. Getting her to come here in the first place is hard enough. I can’t leave the two of you alone for a moment.’ Vika kept her gaze on her friend and reached for her clutch. ‘I think it’s home time for this crone, Maudie. Tell Tom it was a pleasure seeing him and I’m going to hold him to the lunch date.’ She gave Maud a brief squeeze and then pulled back from her. ‘I’m glad your back. Truly. I’ll call later in the week. I want to hear how the latest sitting is going. I hear she’s a diva of the first order.’ Maud looked briefly irate and then smiled at her friend. Vika was a world class dissembler but it took one to know one. Vika stuck her hand out. ‘Prosper. I’ve been very rude and not asked a single thing about you. Perhaps next time.’
Prosper ignored her dismissal. ‘I’ll wait with you for the car,’ he told her.
On the footpath, Vika fumbled for her phone and then cursed. Dead battery. Prosper took his out of his trouser pocket and opened the app on his phone looking inquiringly at her: ‘address?’ She gave it reluctantly. He punched it in using both thumbs. The gesture reminded her of her students who wielded their phones with the aplomb of card sharps. Prosper waited for a confirmation.
‘Five minutes away.’
‘You don’t have to wait.’
Prosper shoved the phone back in his pocket. ‘Shut it Vika.’ Vika fidgeted with the belt on her jacket. After a bit, she asked if he really did still go fly fishing. He raised his head and looked at the rooftops of the buildings around him. ‘Yes but not as much as I’d like to, Charlie’d scare the fish. And don’t laugh. I composed a piece on the topic. It’s not quite Die Forelle but it’ll pay for Charlie’s college tuition. It was for an ad campaign. Wellington boots.’ Prosper looked momentarily bashful, ‘if you can believe it. Copyright’s making me a fortune.’
‘Good for you. Who said a composer should be stuck in a garret and dying from consumption anyway.’ Vika said any inane thing that popped in her head. Both of them under no illusions that his and his wife’s successes quite easily made Prosper and Maud the couple that you wanted to punch. Maud probably told her about Prosper’s accomplishments but Vika worked hard at paying as little attention as possible to details about the man beside her. She knew this bothered Maud but there were things that even now Vika was not prepared to acknowledge.
‘Quite.’ Prosper rubbed his chin. ‘Vika. Are you in touch with Owen?’
Vika stared straight ahead. ‘How far away is the car did you say?’ Prosper pulled his phone out again and took a look. ‘Still 5 minutes.’ He turned fully towards her. ‘I’d like to know. I can understand your reluctance to talk—’
Vika could feel her hands clenching involuntarily. She stared hard at the railing of an apartment across the street. Prosper stood looking at her with his hands in his pockets.
‘—I’d like to know. Nothing more.’
Vika turned to him. ‘So now you want to charge through that minefield? Your curiosity is suddenly going to be satisfied with either a yes or a no and the genie’ll be put back in its bottle.’ Vika forced herself to take a breath, beating back her distress. ‘You’re something else.’ Prosper said nothing and continued to look at her in the gloom. She glared across at him. ‘And I thought you were seeing me to my car because that’s what a close friend’s husband does.’
Her ride pulled up. She yanked open the passenger door and climbed in.
~ ~ ~
Prosper watched the car’s tail lights disappear down the street. He’d been prepared for Vika. Maud kept him up to speed if he asked about her, which he occasionally did. He was happy the Atlantic kept Maud and Vika apart. And an ocean gave Prosper and Vika no more reason to practice an obfuscation that was perfected when they all lived in relative proximity. For Prosper, he was relieved to drop the pretense of friendship while they’d been gone. Reasons he didn’t have to think about too much in England. But sometimes it nagged him, even there. Sometimes at night he’d swim up out of a dream or a deep sleep and watch the shadows of the leaves whipped by a cold wind tearing wildly and silently on the ceiling and allow his mind to drift, his wife lying oblivious at his side.
And tonight he’d enjoyed seeing Gretchen again. Delightfully outspoken as always. Her Mae West guilelessness that was her DNA at camp an untrammeled thread beneath her urbane polish. It made him a little melancholy. All the while he’d kept a close eye on the figure outside. Watched her take long drafts of her cigarette and wondered briefly at the slight slump in her posture. Her singular alchemy of moxie and insecurity that made him take note of her in the first place still had the uncanny ability to get his attention.
Prosper was conscious of an unexpected gaucheness. He was too accustomed for others to make the effort. It had been years but her vitality and its corresponding gravitas hadn’t dimmed. But this Vika was long removed from the shy, prickly and shrewd individual from those summer days. Funny that this was the first of his memories and not any other. It made him wary. Her athletic frame was lithe as ever. Vika was never a fragile girl but she had made peace with her shape and height. This self-possession was not in evidence in those early days.
Her disregard with herself still caught his attention. But there was an aloofness that put Prosper on his guard. All over again.
And Owen? Prosper scrubbed a hand over his face. Owen was a whole other story.
Owen
Such a fucker. Excuse me.
You bet I’m a whole other story. The therapist is scowling. The swearing makes him twitchy. He probably thinks it’s a precursor for a pitched fit. Quick, get the meds. And Vika? Prosper’s quite right to be cautious of that one. Interestingly, I’ve never resented her. The therapist is going to tell me that’s a sign of progress.
I tell him I can’t forgive myself for the extra-familial transgression (spend too long with these guys and I’m Oliver Sacks lite—I know all the terms to keep me at a remove). And he, of course, says what's to forgive? I get his point but I like to keep him on his toes. See if he’s paying attention.
None of this will come as any surprise. Versions of my story are told again and again and again. Maybe I can convince myself—out of utter boredom if nothing else—that it can’t be half as bad as it is. All us maimed souls sitting across from you lot, pouring out our tales of curds and whey. You can’t swing a baseball bat (OK, in honor of Christopher, let’s make it a cricket bat) and not clock someone who’s lived a version of this tale. Us whining wounded can populate a medium-sized nation. It’s a freeway pileup. And no, there’s no apology for the bottleneck of mixed metaphors.
But soft. What light from yonder window breaks? Tis Prosper!
So only now he thinks that kicking this into the long grass all those years ago was a dick move? The ego on this guy. It blocks out the sun. You think I’m kidding?