ONE
The only time I get to be close to my father is when he is betraying his life.
When my father is not betraying his life, I hardly hear from him.
So, whenever my father, Paul, texts to say that he needs me, and can we get together, it’s urgent, my husband will caution, Are you sure that’s a good idea?
And leaving the apartment, I answer, But he is my father.
* * *
At night, I try to make sense of what I have lost.
I dream about my younger sister, Eva.
After Paul’s affair with Lee, Eva estranged herself from me. Eva is my father’s only daughter with my stepmother, Cherry. Eva’s letter announcing her estrangement arrived in the mail shortly before my first play opened. I was on my way to the theatre for the final dress rehearsal when her letter came. The envelope was thin, the return address Eva’s liberal arts college, where she was in her freshman year, studying philosophy. I read the letter standing in the foyer of my apartment building. Above me, black wires hung loose from the ceiling like entrails. The exposed wires had been there when I moved into the building. Then, they alarmed me. Now, they were fact. Eva’s letter was tightly handwritten in blue ink, three-quarters of a page long. Eva was cutting off contact. She told me she kept only good and trustworthy people in her life. My recent behaviour as Paul’s confidante throughout his affair with Lee demonstrated I was neither good nor trustworthy. Eva broke down what it was to be good and what it was to be trustworthy, as it was clear I had no grasp of their meaning. Being good and trustworthy were conditions to remain in Eva’s life. I did not meet the conditions to remain in Eva’s life. As a result of failing to meet these conditions, I was no longer Eva’s sister. Her decision was irreversible. She had no interest in hearing my side of the story. Don’t bother trying to present it to me, she wrote. Eva was relieved to be free of my self-dramatizing. She was sure I’d turn her pain into a play, and call it art. This only underscored my nature which was lazy and deceitful. Our father said she had a dangerous remove when I was the one with the dangerous remove. I was sick and sly and I had stolen her every happiness. She had thought of us as bonded for life. She had taken to heart the way I rejected the term “half-sister.” I refuse to make a fraction out of a relationship I feel is more than whole. Your words, not mine, Eva wrote. Well, she wrote, like everything you do, your love has been a performance. You do not hold yourself to any sort of standard. Because of that, you will always be lost and reckless. She felt sorry for anyone who got close to me. I would only destroy them. Don’t ever try to defend yourself to me, Eva wrote. My mind is made up. You are no longer my sister—she restated the purpose of her letter, and at its end, signed her name in the same careful hand. Evangeline.
I do not know who was the parasite, who was the host. By then Paul and I were indistinguishable, locked by mutual need. The night he confessed his affair with Lee to Cherry was the night everything came apart for my father and me. Earlier that day, I met Paul for coffee. He told me of his plan to confess to Cherry that night. Paul had a dejected look to him, he said he felt beaten down by his situation. I reached for Paul’s hand, but he flinched and withheld it. He read my expression, and told me with some annoyance not to feel sorry for him, his situation was of his own doing. Paul did not know what outcome he wanted in confessing to Cherry, only that he could not go on lying. He had hit his breaking point. He had been with Cherry for eighteen years. What kind of man was he? He was a coward. He could not live this double life. He did not know himself anymore. He did not know his own heart. He was a writer for God’s sake, and he no longer had a view into himself. It was the loneliest feeling. Maybe he would never write again. His eyes skipped over me like I was a pretty stranger. He was risking everything and for what. Was he in love with Lee? Who knows. Was he in love with Cherry? It did not seem likely given the fact that he had cheated on her, not just cheated, but felt deeply for another woman for over two years. But was it love? How could he not know? Maybe he was incapable of love? Paul asked this last question in an exasperated tone, he had built to this last question, and I felt the way I did when I listened to Paul read from his novel Daughter, that listening to my father was like listening to a piece of music. Then his brow furrowed, his focus narrowed and he drove his eyes deep into mine. If he left Cherry, Paul said, Eva would never speak to him again. There is this to consider, Paul said. There’s Eva.
As Paul was confessing to Cherry, I was on the other side of the city in my apartment. I looked around the rooms and did not know where to place my body. I lay on the floor of the living room, and then sat on the ancient kitchen counter. I kept my phone in my dress pocket, I waited for Paul to call me from a hotel or text from his study, for Paul to call me from a stoplight near our place, what’s the address again, he was on his way. Paul could take our bed. Wes could sleep on the couch. I would be fine on the floor. I kept checking my phone, nothing changed. I found a pack of cigarettes in the freezer, I raised our front window, leaned out and smoked. Below me, a boy rode by on his bicycle. He was momentarily blindfolded by his hair, his friends rode past him. The cigarette was stale, I had been trying to quit. I stubbed out the cigarette and flushed it down the toilet. I sometimes got takeout from the bar around the corner, and when the chef saw me smoking, he told me I was too beautiful to smoke, if I smoked, I would wreck my face. Now I stood before the bathroom mirror, trying to see what the chef had seen. The chef felt I needed protection. Throughout Paul’s affair with Lee, my father and I spoke constantly. We talked on the phone at odd hours, met for dinner every chance we could. Paul wanted my view on love. When he listened, he was not just attentive but acquisitive. He used my feelings to clarify his own, internalizing them so totally, he believed he was their author. Paul took for himself all that I saw and felt. I gave freely because I could. I conjured new insight, my insight multiplied. I could not be diminished. I was the light source upon which Paul drew, the inverse was just as true, and like that, we fed each other. For Lee, we shopped for gold. I delivered gifts to her apartment building. With every secret act, we increased our closeness until we fused. I could not stand the prospect of slipping back into that angry grey world of before with no hidden current of electricity between us. When Paul was with Lee, I was loved by my father. Without Paul’s love, I was powerless. I had no gravitational pull.
It was evening when Paul and Cherry sat down together in their kitchen. The sun was low and distant, but still shone faintly in the room, as if trying to get a hold of it. There was something desperate about the sun. The kitchen was a modern space, glassed in. It overlooked a large backyard which gave way to the ravine that ran through the west end of the city. The boundary between Paul and Cherry’s yard and the ravine was fenced off. Vines covered the fence, lacing together like fingers. At the centre of the fence was a gate with a combination lock. The gate opened onto a rugged stone path that led steeply down to a pond. To Cherry’s eye, the pond was green and polluted. The pond would sulk for months then grow vengeful. It would rise against its shoreline, and when it did, Cherry blamed the pond for chilling the house. She pulled on a sweater, turned her face to the glass. Outside it was spring, and her garden was in bloom. Cherry called the daffodils flamboyant. Despite the tension he felt, Paul laughed and agreed. Cherry had a way with words. He and Cherry had a comfortable life made possible by beautiful objects. Upstairs, Eva was in her bedroom, at her desk, studying diligently for her final exams. She was in her last month of high school. She had already been accepted to a prestigious private women’s college for the following year, but was determined to get the highest grades in her class. Earlier, Eva had masked her face in white cold cream. She had put the jar of cold cream in the freezer, and then she had coated her delicate face in the freezing cream to make herself that much more alert. Paul felt their daughter’s presence in the house would force him and Cherry to be civil with each other. He did not want a scene. Paul poured two glasses of wine and slid one toward Cherry. His stomach twisted as he heard himself say to Cherry, Listen, there’s something I need to tell you.
When Paul first got together with Cherry, he took my older sister, Juliet, and me to Spain for a vacation with Cherry and Cherry’s two sons. The idea was to get acquainted, we were a blended family now. Cherry knew the area, she rented a house close to her brother’s, the house was a short drive to the beach. In the rental house, Cherry and Paul took the master bedroom, and Cherry’s sons were given the second, smaller bedroom. Juliet and I slept in the main room of the rental house on a pull-out couch. Every morning, we woke up pushed together, having rolled into the couch’s soft centre, and Juliet would say, Back the fuck up, loser. Juliet was shaped like a Corvette, her hair in a braid like an extra spine, her tan lines stark and perfect like a ghost bikini. In the main room, we turned our backs to each other, pulled off our thin nightgowns, and rushed to get dressed before anyone came in. We were infected by loneliness. Walking the beach alone with my father one afternoon I asked him why he had left our mother. Women kept turning to get a second look at him. My father was about to become famous with his novel Daughter, and it was as if the women of Spain could feel his fame approaching. My father wore a bandana tied around his neck and sun-faded swim trunks. His skin refused to burn. He glimmered under the sun, a slightly mangled hunk of dark gold, and women touched him in passing with their eyes. Your mother just didn’t excite me anymore, my father said to me that afternoon on the beach in Spain, and I felt exhausted by his answer the way I do now listening to poets read their poetry.
As Paul confessed to Cherry, and time passed without any word from him, the sky went a saturated blue, and it lowered itself, pushing downward against me. I got into bed. I tried to read the internet. Wes was at his studio. I was alone with my guilt. I did an image search of Eva. Eva at a regatta with her rowing team. Eva running in a garbage bag, trying to qualify for the lightweight boat. Eva and me at Paul’s film premiere, her athletic body trapped in an expensive dress. I am adjusting something at her neckline, Eva’s hands rest on my shoulders. We ignore the camera, eyes set on each other. There is this to consider. There’s Eva. Eva and I were close. We were not held back by the fact that we lived in separate realities, by our age gap of twelve years. If anything, it was these differences that bound us. Eva was relieved by my presence. With me, there was nothing to prove or to win. I made art. I was a deadbeat. My hair was a mess. I had no real plan. But if Eva found out what I had known and concealed, she would feel duped, stung. Paul had given me a special role. To hide a cheat was to be a cheat. I was a liar. I was an actress which meant I was a con. She had fallen for a con. Cherry’s sons would side with Eva. They had grown up with her, slept in the bedroom next to hers in Paul and Cherry’s big house, Eva was their sister in a concrete way. It would be fine with me to lose them, we weren’t close, they were bloodless and weird, I felt like a contamination in their presence. Cherry’s sons wore pressed shirts and were always damp from the shower, they were serious and clean, their eyes hard as pills, a pharmaceutical blue, they had the same stare, the same driving need to win, I avoided them whenever possible. But Eva mattered to me. I knew how she would retaliate. Eva would stoke whatever relationship she had with our father to prove that she was the chosen daughter. Then she would enlist her steely mental discipline to turn her love for me in on itself. She would replace her love with a feeling equal in size and just as formidable. It would not be something so basic as hate, it would be something emptier, lighter, easier to live with, more practical and final. It would be neutrality.
I closed my laptop. I felt hypersensitive to the weight of the bedcovers, the crawl of my skin. My first play, Margot, had just been programmed for the upcoming fall season at the theatre where I was artist-in-residence, and I should have been celebrating. I should have been drunk with Ani. Instead, I thought only of Paul, I thought nervously about Paul. My nerves were like curtains of rain sweeping through my body. What had he said? Was Cherry kicking him out? Had he gone to Lee’s? A motorcycle roared by. The wind kicked up, and the front window slammed shut. I could hear my neighbours next door, they were arguing, they never argued. I got out of bed, and went to the kitchen where I could hear them better. Maybe they weren’t arguing. They were talking about me, making the case for what a desperate daughter I was, what a two-faced sister. I had a sordid contract with my father. I was obsessed with my childhood. I had never gotten over my childhood. Cherry had been cruel to me as a child, and I wanted to get back at Cherry, and so I guarded my father’s secrets like a stash of weapons, waiting for the moment I could strike. Eva was collateral. I found a bit of wine in the fridge and despite the sourness, I stood in the fridge’s rectangle of yellow light and I drank it. I held the neck of the empty bottle. I pressed my ear to the wall and listened. My neighbours’ voices overlapped too much to pry apart. I would get what I deserved. The sky turned black, the moon was a skull. I checked my phone, nothing changed.
At the kitchen table, Paul told Cherry the affair began two years ago during his European tour for the film adaptation of Daughter. Lee was Paul’s publicist and she travelled with him, took care of everything, his plane tickets, hotel rooms, dry cleaning, directions, currencies, media appearances, readings, signings, everything. She was a very caring person. In fact, Paul felt Lee lived for him, Paul was Lee’s reason to live, she did not have much else in her life, her mother died when she was thirteen and her father died soon after, a brain aneurysm at the margarine factory where he worked, she had been sent to live with an aunt, but it had been a sterile environment for Lee, she had moved to the city, got her degree, landed an internship which became her job, her modest, low-paying job, but she was so good at it, she was assigned to Paul, and with Paul, she travelled the world, without Paul, she leased her furniture, and Paul worried that if he broke off with Lee, Lee might take her own life. Paul shocked himself with this last point. He heard his voice waver and cleared the swamp of acid from his throat. Sweat darkened the back of his dress shirt. Paul hated himself for this show of vulnerability. He glanced over at Cherry. The stern line of her mouth, the slope of her neck, she was still as a drawing. Cherry did not move. Paul was the one shifting in his seat, holding his head in his hands. Paul felt drilled into by Cherry’s gaze. That detonating look. Cherry had radiant brown eyes, and she held Paul there like a toy. When his daughters from his first marriage visited, Cherry hid her copper pots in the trunk of her car and boxed her good linens. She did not want his daughters touching her fine things. She stuffed her jewellery into the toes of her old tennis shoes. When his daughters visited, they had to list any foods they consumed. Cherry defended herself and said the ledger was so she could properly replenish. Didn’t Paul like the stocked fridge? The full pantry? Eventually, his teenage daughters brought their own meals. Eventually, his adult daughters stopped visiting altogether. Cherry’s father had invented Styrofoam. Cherry was a Styrofoam heiress. She could fill their house with money. She could stack money from floor to ceiling in every room of their big house. Paul had never seen Cherry cry, not even after she gave birth to Eva. She fascinated Paul and disturbed him. Cherry knew very well who Lee was. She had met Lee a number of times, and felt Lee was not exactly a sophisticated machine. Cherry was tall with a striking, angular face. She was like a spire: erect, proud, lean. Lee was, in every way, her physical opposite. Like shined meat, Lee was pink and soft-edged, a supplicant. Cherry was an observant person, especially when it came to any interest in Paul. She had antennae for this sort of thing. She had completely overlooked Lee, and was surprised Paul had fallen for his publicist, and not one of the stars of the film. The stars were so sultry, so worshipful, it was almost embarrassing to watch them fawn over Paul. She could see why Paul felt worried that, without him, Lee might decide her life had no meaning. Paul was like the sun. Lee lived alone in public housing, watered the tomato plants on her windowsill, was about thirty years younger than Paul. She was suburban, awed by city life, had a basic education. It was not as if she were on her way to some grand thing. She was simple, a simple woman. Lee was an administrator. That was the sum total of Lee. Lee had no hold over the universe. The universe would discard her, starting with Paul.
Recently, Cherry had inherited an island four hours northeast of the city. Laid out on the table before Cherry and Paul, throughout their conversation about Paul’s affair, was the blueprint for their island home. It would be built that summer. Cherry was working closely with the architect. She was overseeing every decision. The fate of the island had been deadlocked for years as Cherry’s brother had contested the terms of their father’s estate. Cherry’s brother was petty, insecure. He had never learned to hide his hunger. Throughout the dispute, Cherry’s mother had kept silent, which Cherry felt was the most spineless way to side against her. Cherry never looked at her mother again. Instead she penetrated the eyes of the arbiter and led him through the sure and efficient structures of her mind. She told him that one either honoured or betrayed the will of a man who no longer had a say in the matter. Cherry took on a widow’s countenance and a widow’s tone for she was the widow, her grief was a wife’s grief, Cherry was the daughter and the wife, Cherry had been everything to her father. When Cherry was old enough she was the one to accompany her father to society events. Her mother walked just behind them outside of the photographers’ frames. Cherry had a model’s body though not a model’s face. About Cherry’s face, people used descriptors for a beauty they did not understand. This was Cherry’s preference. Cherry did not want to be understood. As a woman, to be understood was to be possessed and conquered. Like Lee. Without commenting on the affair, without any acknowledgement of what Paul had just confessed to, Cherry updated Paul on the island home. She traced over the drawing with her long, elegant fingers. She told him that at every corner of the main house, she and Paul would have a view of open water. She told Paul to always look forward, never look back, and Paul was overwhelmed with gratitude, he felt his eyes sting, mistaking Cherry’s comment to mean he’d been forgiven.
Paul told me about his affair with Lee when he was already deep into it, his every thought pervaded by her. I had moved back to the city and was newly living with Wes. I was trying to write my first play, but feeling beneath the endeavour. There was already a writer in the family and he was a titan. I took extra shifts at the bar, I was a minor character in my own minor life. I had met Lee. In my final year of theatre school, at the end of a dinner with Paul, Lee walked into the restaurant and Paul introduced us. I was in a bad frame of mind then, an anaesthetic state. I remember shaking Lee’s hand, and not much more. Six months later, Paul told me his secret. We had not had a real conversation in years. Normally, we argued and misunderstood each other, and I saw myself through my father’s eyes as volatile, emotionally disorganized, repellent. Until Lee, whenever Paul and I arranged to meet, I was late. It took me horrible amounts of time, horrible amounts of life to decide what to wear. Everything I put on looked cheap and dirty and ill-fitting. My apartment would be overturned when I left it, got on my bicycle and rode into a richer part of the city to meet my father who would have already ordered his meal, hungry and irritated by my lateness. My heart would beat violently in my chest, and I would feel self-conscious locking up my bicycle and making my way to his table. He would comment on my dress and my hair, my bag, which, to his eyes, would appear overpacked. He would make a joke at my expense and our tense visit would begin. This time, when I sat down and caught my breath, Paul said, I’m in love, I’m just so in love, and I don’t know who else I can talk to. I need your help. And I listened to Paul like my life depended on it, I listened absorbingly, and with his every word, I felt myself expand. Cherry, Paul said, had become impossible to live with. Living with her, Paul said, was deadening. It was like life between novels. It was flat, dimensionless. There was no enchantment. She was so controlling. He could not take a shit without her leaving a memo about it. At that, we laughed like allies. My body pulsed with energy. The scales had fallen from Paul’s eyes. To be loved by your father is to be loved by God. The first line of my play came to me. It was hard not to clap the air. Go on, I told Paul. There were notes taped all over the house, Paul went on. Cherry didn’t have a bank account. She distrusted everyone. She had gotten into a fight with the neighbours over their backyard fence so now Paul had to skulk whenever he went outside to smoke. She wanted to sue her hairdresser. She was obsessed with Eva, and blamed Paul for Eva’s eating disorder. Cherry said Eva deprived herself because Eva felt Paul favoured me and Juliet. Cherry said Eva had been born into an uneven love. Cherry said even though Paul denied it, one of us was obviously the inspiration for Daughter, and because of that, Eva could not begin to compete with us as we had been immortalized. You made your choice of favourite daughter in your work, Cherry said, now you must do so in your life. Jesus, Paul said, and then he laughed to himself. Anyway, it was so unpleasant, so stressful. He could not stand to be home so he made excuses to be on the road. With Lee, he was doing his best writing. She made him feel vital again. I’m in love, Paul said. The sex, Paul said. Then his face clouded over. Paul reminded me that Cherry had estranged herself from her mother. Cherry’s mother had just died, and Cherry didn’t go to her mother’s funeral. She was a drinker, Paul said. Her pancreas. Soon after, a Rothko showed up on their front porch. Cherry felt her mother had given her the Rothko because she knew Cherry disliked Rothko. Cherry said people saw depth in Rothko but it was only searching. Searching does not make you great, Cherry said. Searching makes you the same as everyone else. People use the word genius for Rothko not to elevate his art but to elevate their own tastes. Cherry said Rothko killed himself because he knew he had reached his peak as a painter. That must have been hell, Cherry said, and she had the painting hung in their living room. Paul could hardly think about it, about who Cherry was. All these years after that disastrous trip to Spain, and Cherry still had not spoken to her brother. She still had not forgiven him for taking in me and Juliet after the incident with the garden hose, after we’d been forced to flee the rental house. Paul felt there was something wrong with Cherry, something cold and calculated he wanted neither to see nor understand. He was scared. He was scared to leave Cherry for the fallout. She would make his life a misery. She would sabotage his reputation, his work. She would turn Eva against him. As much as he had grown to care about them, or maybe it was tolerance, it was probably tolerance, Paul would be fine living without her sons. They accepted Paul because he was with Cherry, they were soldiers to Cherry, and upon her command, they would scrap him. But Eva was his daughter, and he could not stand to cause her any pain. I love Eva, Paul said. Twenty years ago, Paul said, when he left our mother, Natasha, when he left us, he was so young and selfish, he didn’t know a thing. My reality was the only one I could see, Paul said. Lee has taught me so much. She has opened my eyes. She is tender. I feel such remorse for the pain I caused you. Paul stopped there, and he reached across the table for my hand which was warm and sure. Then, Paul told me that early into his relationship with Cherry, he had real misgivings. He was about to end it when Cherry told him she was pregnant, when Cherry got pregnant with Eva.
The day after Paul confessed his affair with Lee to Cherry, he called me and asked to meet for dinner. I can’t get into it, Paul said over the phone, but it’s important we talk. Things have escalated. I had waited up for his call the night before. It was late when Wes came through the apartment door. I got out of bed to greet him. Wes had been at his studio, he was under deadline. He told me I was shivering. I guess I’m cold, I said. Wes took off his jacket, hung it from my shoulders, got a glass of water. I followed him around. He asked me why I was gripping my phone like a grenade. Ha. I must have fallen asleep with it, I lied. I could not tell Wes about Paul. My father’s presence in our relationship was already outsized. I didn’t want to fight with Wes. He would tell me what I already knew. Focus on your work and not your father’s psychodrama. I could not tell Wes that Paul’s affair with Lee had filled me with an aggressive energy, I wrote my play during the course of his affair, as if one depended on the other, one powered the other, as if I did not write my play, but Paul’s confidante did. Whoever she was. I kissed Wes’s neck, his cheekbone, his mouth. I watched him undress, made a show of my tiredness, felt only my nothingness, and with Wes beside me, fell into a fitful sleep.
I met Paul for dinner at his favourite restaurant, and even though it was a cool spring night, we sat outside. A couple stopped by the table to say hello to Paul, and Paul motioned to me and said, This is my daughter Mona, Mona Dean, Mona is a playwright and an actress, she graduated from theatre school a couple of years ago, look for her name, she has a show on in the fall called Margot, and I stood and shook their hands, and the couple appeared amused and asked whether it was Margot as in Hemingway and I said yes, and they said well that seems fitting, and then they asked me which spelling I would use of her name, and I said the one on her gravestone. And then the couple told Paul we looked exactly alike. They could really see the resemblance. Once the couple had left the table, Paul told me that Cherry was very hurt. She’d hidden it at the time, but she’d been blindsided by his confession. He didn’t know if she was gathering her troops or what, but Cherry had told Eva about his affair with Lee. Oh no, I said. Then Paul said he was worried he had made an error in judgment. I asked what, what error in judgment. And fear entered my mind like a crow. Paul said when he was confessing to Cherry, he did not know if he was overcome with relief after so much lying or if he wanted Cherry to understand that the affair with Lee had arisen out of a larger problem, the problem of their broken family, the problem of their brokenness, it was not just the result of his self-centredness or vanity or greed or duplicity or lust or id or death complex or whatever you wanted to call it, his fatal flaw. In any event, Paul told Cherry some of the things I had confided to him during our period of extreme closeness. It became a larger conversation, Paul said, and you were pretty central to it. Go on, I said, you’d better tell me everything. Paul told Cherry every complaint, every slight I had divulged to him, every accumulated hurt. Paul told Cherry that I felt she toyed with love, by giving love and withholding love, and that only sick people manipulated others in this way. Paul told Cherry that I said she arranged their life in order to exclude me and Juliet from it, that excluding me and Juliet was her primary goal. She had never worked, so she could measure her worth only through her children. She had made Eva a star in Paul’s eyes while poisoning his view of me and Juliet, we were jealous, disturbed, and played the victim the way our mother had, and because of Cherry’s hateful campaign, he, Paul, my father, had missed everything, he had missed my entire life. All that had happened to me, all that I had done. Paul told Cherry that on the rare occasion I was invited into their home, for a birthday or a holiday, I was made to feel like vermin. Cherry belittled me. She insulted me. Juliet had an instinct for self-preservation. Juliet had moved to the other side of the world. I had told Paul in my litany of grievances that he was with Cherry out of fear, their marriage was intact only because of an implied threat, the implied threat being if he ever left her, Cherry would make his life a living hell. Paul relayed these things to Cherry who then went upstairs and relayed them to Eva.
Eva was fast asleep when her mother shook her awake and told her what had happened. Eva sat up, and cleared her eyes. She was upset for her mother, she could see Cherry felt humiliated by Paul’s affair, it was difficult to watch her mother in pain. She had never seen her mother in pain before, but it was the fact that I had been Paul’s confidante throughout his affair with Lee that Eva kept turning over and over in her mind. In meticulous detail, Cherry described my role as secret accomplice to Paul. Whatever unbearable blanks Paul had left Cherry to imagine, she filled in for Eva, embellishing ugly fact with uglier fiction, pegging me as the traitor not Paul. Cherry had to keep her household together. She had to aim the sharpened arrow of Eva’s spite at me. Eventually, Eva told Cherry that because Paul teased her for being so unlike him, he called her a secluded person with a secluded heart, then by contrast lit up at the briefest mention of our names, she always felt that Paul preferred me and Juliet to her, and this betrayal only confirmed it. He lived with Eva but pined for us. No matter what she did, she was an afterthought to Paul. She was last born, last loved. Cherry was silent, and Eva took her mother’s silence to be agreement. Eva felt a surge inside herself, it was the surge of recognition that came whenever her mother agreed with her. But she also felt in this moment the lonely pain of her observation about Paul. She was not his favourite. She was less than me, and she was less than Juliet. She was lowest in Paul’s hierarchy. Eva wanted her father’s love as much as she wanted her mother’s love, and it was an open, hungry mouth on her open, hungry face. It was pathetic. Cherry was sitting on the side of Eva’s single bed. It was late, and after too much wine, Paul had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs under the Rothko. Cherry had woken her daughter to tell her what had happened. She had crept upstairs in her stocking feet. Eva had an exam in the morning. Cherry could not stop herself. She needed the comfort only her daughter could provide. Her sons did not comfort her. She respected her sons, she admired their accomplishments, but they did not comfort her. She could not see into them the way she could see into Eva. Eva was like an open piano, she could see the steel cables, the other side of the keys. Until Eva was born, Cherry felt like an alien pretending to be a mother. Now she understood. She would kill for her daughter. There was some moonlight in the bedroom, and Eva looked at her mother’s outline, she was like an apparition in the moonlight, Eva could feel her mother’s intense stare. She loved her mother and it was her mother’s love for her that was her source of energy. Even when Eva would become a mother herself, her love for Cherry would be her dominant and guiding feeling, it would propel her forward. Eva played a reel across her mind of the times we had spent together. The reel was too much like those sentimental movies where one of the sisters dies at the end. Eva would not be the sister to die at the end. When the reel finished, Eva’s heart hardened against me. She told Cherry that despite my endearments, I had never been a true sister to her because, fundamentally, I had always wanted her parents’ marriage to fail. Cherry agreed with her daughter. Eva felt the surge. Then Cherry pushed it one step further.
Your father told me that Mona said she loathes me. Loathe—Cherry drew out the word.
Loathe. That is such a murderous word.
Exactly, Cherry said to her daughter, exactly.
Our meals arrived. Sitting outside with my father at his favourite restaurant, after he had replayed the night, his confession to Cherry and Cherry’s recruitment of Eva, I looked down at my plate. It was steaming. I felt cold and pulled my jacket on. It was a leather jacket, and in it, I felt like a cliché. The cliché of the wild daughter. My role as confidante to my father had given my life discernible shape, and now that shape was dissolving. Paul was pulling away. Something was actively converting inside him. Paul was switching course, going from one state to another, one side to the other. I could feel it as keenly as I could feel my own dissolution. I couldn’t eat. Paul’s eyes were blank as hardware. There was nothing in me he wanted or needed to see. I represented only his entanglements, his weak and lustful heart. I asked Paul how Lee was. He said he had no clue. He wasn’t answering her calls because he didn’t have anything to tell her. He said Lee was needier than he’d thought, and that was too bad. She’s young, her entire life is ahead of her, Paul said impatiently, she can do whatever she wants. In silence, we both tried to stomach this lie. Paul ate mechanically. His body was stiff, it was the same stiffness that followed our arguments from before. He had gone from liquid to metal. I told Paul that Eva would never speak to me again, she would cut contact. I felt a tightness in my throat, the stinging pressure of rising tears. Paul did not respond. Rather he sat rigid in his chair then edged it away. I touched my face to be sure it was still there. His green eyes ignored mine. Deliberately, Paul studied the restaurant, the sidewalk, the street beyond. He behaved as if I were bothering him, as if I were a woman he didn’t know lingering at his table while he was trying to have a quiet evening.
During our period of extreme closeness, I told Paul about the abortion I’d had at fifteen. He said I could have come to him for help at the time. He would have helped me. He looked wounded when he said that, and I knew he felt his comment to be true. I told Paul that I’d been raped by a guest director at theatre school, I didn’t tell anyone when it happened, I was full of self-loathing, I was ashamed, I still hadn’t told anyone, I’d told Ani about it and Wes knew, but not Natasha, not Juliet, and now the guy was a hotshot in LA, he was always in the tabloids shirtless and jogging like Shia LaBeouf. And Paul said angrily, who’s Shia LaBeouf? I told Paul how at theatre school Wes had been Ani’s boyfriend before me—until me, really. And to my betrayal of Ani, to this new information that I was also a cheat, Paul responded, we are more alike than we thought, Mona. Everyone aligns me with Juliet, but it’s you and I who are closer in character. This was at the apex of our period of extreme closeness. We lifted our glasses and we hit them together, and Paul said, To you, my redeemer.
* * *
Now, at Paul’s favourite restaurant, I wanted to tell him that his fatal flaw was that he triangulated his relationships. He always needed someone to be left out, to be kept in the dark. Paul would tell me something and make me promise not to tell anyone, not even Juliet. A few months into my role as confidante to Paul, I told him he had to tell Juliet about his relationship with Lee. I hated having a secret from Juliet, it felt wrong, I was constantly lying to her by omission. Across from me that cool spring night, Paul was finishing his dinner. He said harshly, Aren’t you going to eat? Paul was shunning me. He did not want me there. My sadness depleted him. And then Paul said, Juliet was right. The second I told Juliet about the affair, she said, End it. I had a family, and despite how badly you and Juliet had been treated by that family, I needed to be a responsible husband and father. I needed to man up. Paul said to me, I’m lucky. I’m so lucky to have a level-headed daughter like Juliet. The server cleared our plates. Now there was nothing to do but be alone together. Paul checked his watch. He pushed his hands into his pockets, felt for his keys, he was readying to go. He flagged the server and paid. Paul told me he was going to try to work things out with Cherry, she was a good person, and he wanted her forgiveness. Looking back on it, he and Cherry had had a good life together. He told me I needed to work things out with Cherry too. If I didn’t, I would be making a big mistake.
That sounds like blackmail, I told Paul, don’t blackmail me.
Don’t get emotional, Paul said, the last thing I need is another outburst. When was I put in charge of everyone’s feelings?
Then Paul said he probably would have found Lee boring in the long run. She was simple, a simple woman. And Eva, Paul said, Eva is so fragile. She has so much going for her, but she’s always bursting into tears.
* * *
Two months after the dinner, Wes called Paul. I didn’t know about the call. Wes called Paul from his studio where he had more privacy than in our one-bedroom apartment. He still needed to whisper into the phone as it was a shared studio, and there were a few artists around that afternoon. Paul picked up. He was surprised and happy to hear from Wes, he liked Wes, and Wes told Paul he didn’t know what to do with me. How so, Paul said. Wes explained that I was in the final revisions of my play, Margot, maybe Paul had forgotten about Margot, my professional debut, the theatre had made me artist-in-residence which was a big deal, they had given me an office to write in, but after my dinner with Paul, the night Paul decided to break off with Lee and mend things with Cherry, I had stopped showing up. There was a reading of Margot next week, and everyone was waiting on the latest draft of the script. The show was supposed to open the fall season. My face was painted on the side of the building, my face covered the entire side of that downtown building. Now the theatre was considering pulling the show. It was a one-woman show, and I was the one woman, and I was spending entire weeks in our bed. Wes told Paul he didn’t know how to help me. He was really worried. He had been raised in a normal family in a normal house by normal parents. Paul’s life was like some vicious wilderness program in which everyone was a lion, but I had to be a gazelle. Paul did not understand his power over me and my love for him. Or maybe he did understand it, and he just wasn’t careful with it, and that was so much worse. Paul deserted me when I was eleven, and I had modelled my view of myself in response to that desertion. And Paul kept leaving me over and over again. He kept breaking my heart, and that was really ruining things for me, and for us. Paul interrupted to ask Wes whether he was done yet with his guilt trip, and Wes said, No, no, I’m not done. Then Wes told Paul he was going to propose to me, and he was not going to ask Paul for his permission, even though he knew Paul would expect it. Then he told Paul not to contact me unless it was with an apology. Paul said he didn’t like to be threatened. Paul said, Don’t ever threaten me again or you’ll be sorry, and then he slammed down the phone on Wes.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Claudia Dey
