Chapter Fourteen: “The Retreat”
Chapter Fourteen
“The Retreat”
THE FIRST THING SEWANEE SAW WHEN SHE WALKED INTO THE PENSIONE
her mother had arranged for her was Marilyn and Stu sitting in two overstuffed club chairs in the lobby. In unison, they beamed and raised their hands in the air as if she’d scored a touchdown.
“There she is!” her mother exclaimed, standing.
“Nice of you to stop by. Come to borrow a cup of sugar?” Stu joked, groaning as he, too, stood.
Sewanee felt the back of her eye tighten with tears. Marilyn looked so good. So happy. Her silver-streaked brown curls fell just below her chin, her face was bronzed, and her blue eyes bright. She’d always been a trim woman, but now she was fit. Strong from walking over cobblestones, hiking through castle ruins, and scaling mountains to get to breathtaking views. She was sixty-five and she’d never been more beautiful.
As they hugged, Marilyn asked in Sewanee’s ear, “To what do we owe the pleasure?” She pushed back, looked deep into her daughter’s eye. “Working too hard again?”
Sewanee shrugged away from her mother, mumbling, “Always,” and reached for Stu. She’d only met him twice before, but within five minutes of the first meeting she’d loved him.
She stepped back and saw that Marilyn was peering at her. “But there’s something else?”
“There are a few somethings else.”
Her mother raised an eyebrow.
Sewanee took a breath. “Dad.”
“Well, when is he not–”
“And Adaku.”
“
Ada?
Why–”
“And Blah.”
“Oh, no.”
“And acting. And robots. And Mark is selling his place. And there’s a boy. Who’s two boys, actually. Who’re the same boy.” Sewanee took another deep breath.
Marilyn handed Stu one of the key cards to Sewanee’s room. “My love, would you–”
“Yup,” Stu said, took Sewanee’s duffel bag, and smilingly walked away. Easygoing, uncomplicated, generous Stu.
Marilyn tucked her hand into the crook of her daughter’s elbow, leading her onto the hotel’s patio. She ordered them two Aperol Spritzes in half-decent tourist Italian and thanked the server for the bowl of olives and basket of breadsticks he placed on the table.
“Let’s start with the boy,” she said, decisively, placing a palm flat on the wooden table. As Sewanee told her the whole sordid tale, Marilyn’s face progressed from slight surprise to damp-eyed sweetness to shock to, finally–much to Sewanee’s consternation–uncontrollable laughter.
Sewanee paused the retelling and glared. “Mom.”
Marilyn waved her napkin in front of her face, a surrender. She tried, valiantly, to say, “I’m sorry,” but the words tumbled around in her laughter like sneakers in a dryer.
“Why does everyone find this so funny?” Sewanee groused, reaching for her drink, waiting for her mom to get it all out.
“Because it’s like a movie!” Marilyn cried, wiping her face, pushing her glasses up to the crown of her head. “It’s just so . . .” and she lost it again, bent at the waist.
“All right, you know what . . .” But there was nothing to say, no empty threat to level. Her mother’s reaction–so like Nick’s, so like Adaku’s–simultaneously annoyed and humbled her. It forced her to consider everything anew. It still stung. But. There was another side to it. Marilyn saw it. Nick saw it. Adaku saw it. And maybe, if you looked at it from a certain direction, maybe, in certain ways, it was, maybe, a little bit funny. Maybe.
Marilyn regained control of herself, patted her eyes with her napkin. “I’m sorry, Swanling. Truly.” They sat in silence for a moment, each taking a sip of their Spritz. Then Marilyn continued with a gentle voice, “And what’s going on with your grandmother?”
Sewanee explained all of it. Blah’s current state, the necessary move, the exorbitant amount of money she was prepared to spend, and why Sewanee felt it was important to keep Blah in a familiar place with familiar people, whatever it cost.
“Of course,” Marilyn interjected quickly at the end, like it was an obvious conclusion, which validated something inside Sewanee she hadn’t known needed validation. “Surely, Henry’s on the same page?”
Sewanee leaned across the table. “He’s not even in the same book, Mom. He resents Blah for going to Seasons in the first place. Resents her for using up her savings to stay there. Resents her for never listening to him, about anything. And worst of all, I thought he would be thrilled when I told him I was paying for it! That it would relieve him of any burden he felt, free him from
all the resentments, give him the opportunity to appreciate his daughter, maybe even, I don’t know,
love
his daughter?!”
Marilyn chuckled sadly. “Oh, honey. That was never going to work.” She took a sip of Spritz and fished the orange slice out, eating it with relish.
“I don’t understand him. I try, but . . . It’s like he’s jealous of me or something. Which is crazy, but that’s how it feels.”
“Well. They say jealousy is nothing more than admiration turned inside out.”
“Mom . . .”
“He probably is jealous. He’s definitely resentful. But it has nothing to do with you being his daughter, or me being his wife, or Blah being his mother, or even little Coed Kelly being whatever.” The orange rind was poised like a cynical cigarette between her fingers. “We are all one big ball of women. And sorry to say, but that’s your father’s real problem.”
“How so?”
Marilyn sat forward, dropped the rind on her plate. She put her chin in her hands and paused, thinking. “Your father did love something once. Not someone, something: New York City. And when his father died, he left his ‘love’ to be with his mother, to help his mother. To be loved by his mother? To do the right thing? I don’t know. He just wanted to feel useful and ended up feeling useless. Not on purpose, but . . . Barbara was Barbara.” Marilyn shrugged. “Henry felt rejected, unappreciated for everything he had given up to help her. He was hurt. He’s
still
hurt.”
Marilyn was quiet for a while. Sewanee could see her tongue working at her teeth inside her closed mouth, trying to dislodge orange pith. “It all boils down to this, I think: Your father has never felt
appreciated
. The male code word for feeling loved. And sadly, Henry is a man who always found love to be a question,
never an answer. It started with Barbara and metastasized in every woman who ever crossed his path. So unhealthy. Not that he would ever
say
that, not that he would ever
ask
for that, God forbid. As far as your father is concerned, women are supposed to intuit this.”
Marilyn leaned back, sighed. “So you take all of that hurt and resentment, suffered in silence, and you let it simmer for decades and it distills down into anger.” She looked out at the canal next to them, the water close enough to throw late-afternoon ripples onto her face. “That’s what I found so hard, Swan. I didn’t know how to love an angry man who pretended to be fine.” To stave off Sewanee’s response, Marilyn held up a hand, her left one, ringless. “We had a good life together. Life is never one thing. But I think I was his consolation prize. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, Swanling: never be a consolation prize.”
How could Sewanee not think of Nick when Marilyn said this? Didn’t this justify her feelings? And then Marilyn added, “Especially your own,” which spun Sewanee’s head around.
A heavy silence fell over them, and she took an olive, washed it down with a sip of Spritz. The salt and oil and the alcohol and the bitterness and the prosecco’s fizz hit her and seemed to immediately restore her equilibrium. The Italians have it all figured out, she thought abstractly. She considered her words as she chewed. “Everything feels fake, Mom. Like this is not my life. Like I’m
acting
my life. Like I’m playing out someone else’s, waiting to get mine back.” She swallowed. “And then I tried to get it back because”–she rolled her eye–“Adaku thought I could and it turns out I can’t.”
Marilyn squinted, trying to put this puzzle together. “What did Ada do–”
“She just . . . she
pushes
. She’s so relentlessly optimistic and she doesn’t . . . she doesn’t understand why I haven’t–” She
snapped her fingers. “–gotten over everything. Moved on. Forgotten about it. But I have! In my own way.”
The last came out more defensively than she’d intended. Sewanee waited to hear that her mother agreed with her, while Marilyn took another sip of her Spritz and said, “Well, these things do take time.”
“Exactly.” Relieved, Sewanee picked up her drink again.
“But is it possible,” Marilyn began, and Sewanee set the glass back down, “that you may have
gotten
in your own way and mistaken that for
doing
it your own way?”
“Are you agreeing with A?”
“I don’t think so. I’m just saying to check in with yourself.”
“You don’t think I have? I do?”
Seeing her mother’s unvoiced answer, the desire not to hurt warring with Marilyn’s compulsive need to tell the truth, instantly brought tears. Sewanee surreptitiously wiped her cheek, pivoting away from the rest of the crowd on the patio. “I wanted my life and it wanted me. And now it doesn’t and I still do.”
Marilyn leaned forward, took her hand. “Of course you do. And your best friend wants it for you. And so do I. And so does anyone who cares about you. But if I’m being honest, I think we all want that only because you haven’t given us an alternative. I think everyone around you is waiting for you to accept yourself as you are now, so we can as well. And the bitch of it is you’re waiting for everyone to accept you as you are now so you can accept yourself and, sorry, but love, it’s your move. You’ve gotta go first.”
Sewanee’s head bowed, as if physically unable to stay upright under the weight of her mother’s words. She knew it was her turn to say something. But she was saved by Marilyn leaning toward her daughter’s head and repositioning her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “You have a gray hair!”
Sewanee’s head popped up. “What? Where?!”
“Right in the part.”
“Well, yank it out!”
Marilyn chortled and pulled away. “Ohhhh, no! Nope.” She stood. “You’re going to leave it be. You’re a tiger and you earned that stripe.” She bent over, kissed the top of Sewanee’s head, right where that stripe had sprouted. “I think you should rest. Take a few hours, we’ll come back at seven to take you to dinner.” Marilyn’s eyes flicked toward the lobby and Sewanee now saw Stu had stationed himself in a chair there, reading a book. “A delightful little trattoria. And tomorrow night, there’s a place Stu is trying to get us a reservation at but it’s one of those six-month-out situations.” She shrugged. “If he can’t, well, we’ll be forced to wander the canals eating gelato.”
“
Quelle horreur
,” Sewanee murmured.
Her mother affected a perfect Italian hand, fingertips up and together, a garlic bulb. “
Che orrore
,” she enunciated. She winked and settled her pashmina more securely over her shoulders.
“Ciao, bella!”
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK
, after a nap as solid as if she’d been anesthetized for surgery, Sewanee met her mother and Stu in the lobby and they left the pensione, the night air warm for March. They walked to a picture-perfect restaurant and slipped into a tight corner table. The scent of garlic and wine cork captured her, the feel of white linen under her fingertips comforted her, the taste of Barolo calmed her. She leaned her shoulder against the wood plank wall and watched the candlelight play in her mother’s eyes and over Stu’s capable hand as he dished up side-plates of the house’s special fish risotto. The pleasures of other patrons wafted through the restaurant and combined with the ambient hum of conversation. When their plates had been cleared and
they’d shared an affogato, they squeezed themselves past the other diners and slipped back out into the now-chilly night.
Marilyn and Stu insisted on walking her back to the pensione. Getting lost in Venice wasn’t difficult, it was a given. She had no idea where they were, might as well have been in a maze. They turned left, made a sharp right, walked down a street that was narrower than a hallway, down a flight of tiny steps, under some arbitrary and beautiful wood beams, and there they were: back at the pensione’s garden gate.
She was even more surprised by the figure standing in the shadows about ten feet in front of them.
She stopped walking. Stared. “What are you doing here?”
Nick’s hands went out to his sides. “This is the grovel.”
He looked wrecked. He carried a single backpack, his hair stuck up in a few different directions, and he clearly hadn’t shaved in days. He wore black sweatpants, a gray Trinity College Dublin hoodie, and glasses. She didn’t know he wore glasses. He’d never looked worse and she couldn’t believe how attracted she was to him. This is how he would be on a Sunday morning when he was long past trying to impress a woman. He was alluring in a suit, he was devastating in a tux, but he was dangerous like this.
“How did you find me?”
“Mark. After you e-mailed Jason, he called me and said, ‘what did you do?’ You weren’t answering your texts, so Jason told me to try Mark. I drove to the studio and, once I explained who I was, Mark, too, said, ‘what did you do?’ He grilled me for an hour before telling me where you were.”
She pulled her sweater tighter around her body.
“Can we talk?”
Sewanee turned slightly and his eyes darted to the two people
standing behind her. She was about to introduce them, but her mom jumped ahead of her. “Hi, I’m Marilyn, the mother.” She looked entirely too pleased for Sewanee’s taste. “And this is my partner, Stu Hart.”
Nick straightened up, quickly took Stu’s outstretched hand. “Pleasure.” He then took Marilyn’s hand and said, “Ma’am, I’m Nicholas Sullivan and I had a wee misunderstanding with your daughter so I’m here to get it sorted.”
Marilyn held on. “Well! Welcome to Venice, Nick. Or should I say, Brock?”
“Mom.”
“She told me everything. I’ve never laughed so hard–”
“Mom!”
“Where are you staying?” She didn’t look at her daughter when she said, “Swanling, why don’t you see if they have availability here?”
“I actually found a place over there.” Nick waved a hand to the right, considered, and waved again to the left. “Or possibly there. Thank you, though.”
“We’re staying on the ship, but I wanted Swan to be able to immerse herself in the city, so we put her up here. Her first time in Venice and all.”
Nick’s eyes turned to Sewanee. “First time in Venice?”
She met his eyes. “The real one.”
“You’ve been here before, Nick?” Stu asked.
“Not since I was a lad. We’d holiday in Lombardy occasionally and my aunt had a thing for Vivaldi.”
“Oh,” Marilyn breathed and Sewanee watched it happen, watched the Nick Spell settle itself over her mother. Dammit. “Nick, you should join us for dinner tomorrow night. Stu, can we make the reservation for four?”
“Mom!” Sewanee’s voice was overloud in the quiet garden. She course-corrected. “That’s very thoughtful, but Nick just got here and I’m sure Stu–”
“Leave it to me, Swanners.” Stu turned to Nick. “Rest up, buddy boy, this isn’t a dinner, it’s an experience. We went there the last time the ship came through Venice and–”
“Let them go in blind, Stu,” Marilyn interrupted, “the way we did the first time.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” Stu nodded, but had to add, “I’ll just say this: wunderkind chef, twenty-eight. Michelin star. On an island. And the entire place . . . at a Marriott. A Marriott! Can you believe it?” He turned to Marilyn. “Okay, I’m done.”
Nick glanced sheepishly at Sewanee. “That’s so kind, really, thank you so much, but I’m not sure–”
Marilyn patted his hand. “The boat leaves at seven from the St. Mark’s dock. We’ll meet you there.” She brooked no argument. She turned to her daughter and kissed her cheek. “It’ll be fun! Ciao!” And she and Stu hurried away down the path.
Nick and Sewanee stood in silence for a moment. When she finally opened her mouth, Nick handed her his phone. “Press record.”
“What?”
“Frame me up.” He stepped away, turned back around, faced her. “Is it recording?”
No idea what was happening, Sewanee pressed the big red button on his phone’s screen and said, “Uh, yeah?”
Nick dropped to his knees and, after a moment, bent over. He laid fully out, arms forward, in child’s pose.
“What the hell–”
“I’m not worthy!” he yelled into the pavers. “Have mercy!”
“Oh my God, Nick!”
He began crawling forward. “I will kiss your feet now!”
Sewanee jumped backward. “You most certainly will not, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry!” Still yelling. “Do you accept my apology?!”
“Get. Up.”
He explained, at normal volume, “I can’t get up until you accept my apology.”
“What?”
“I promised Mark,” he mumbled into the ground. “He needs video proof.”
In spite of herself, Sewanee laughed. She flipped the phone around and said into the camera, “I forgive him. Okay? You sadist. Jesus.” She turned the camera off. “He’s such an asshole. Please, just get up.”
Nick sat back on his knees, but he didn’t stand. He gazed up at her. “I am sorry. I should have seen how upset you were. I should have seen that side of it. But in the moment, I found it funny as all hell, and now I see it’s not funny, not funny at all, you were right–”
“No, you were right,” Sewanee shrugged, “it is funny as all hell.”
Nick dropped his head back, closed his eyes, groaned, “Oh, thank Jaysus, I haven’t been able to stop laughing.” He met her gaze again. “Still. Please understand, I never meant to–”
She held up a hand. “Can we just . . . this is such an unnecessarily elaborate way to get me to finish the series.”
Nick’s voice was strong, tight, all joking gone. “Feck the series. I’m not here because of the series. You’ll finish it or you won’t. I couldn’t care less.”
She would finish the series. She was a professional. That was never in question, even if she’d given Jason the opposite
impression. She’d only needed time. But the fact he hadn’t come for business softened her a bit and compelled her to say, “Of course I’ll finish the series.”
“Well. I guess I’ll be going, then.” But he didn’t move.
She huffed a small laugh. “What are you doing here? And will you please get up?”
He stood, brushed off his knees. “We never had our date.”
“You flew to Italy for a date?”
He grinned. “Well, I’m the ’round-the-bend guy.”
“Are you?”
His grin wavered. “No, not really. I used to be. I want to be again.” He swallowed. “I don’t want to be afraid of oysters anymore, so I got on a plane.”
At his honesty, Sewanee looked at her feet. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I left. The other night, but also the country. I was just . . . you know.” She brought a flat hand up parallel to her jaw. At capacity.
“Yeah, well, it was a lot. For all four of us.” His attempt at levity made her smile and he matched it. “So you’re not angry?” He sounded hopeful.
She had to think about that. Was she? She was a lot of things, but was she mad? “No. Not at you. Not anymore.”
The Italian moon was full in his eyes when his tone shifted and he said, “You’re so beautiful.”
“Nick–”
He cringed. “Sorry. Right, we have to talk first. I’ll throw myself at your feet later.”
She held up a hand again. “No. No feet-throwing. Please.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Let’s go sit in the lobby, it’s chilly.”
“You sure? I don’t want to pressure you–”
“Oh, now you’re worried about boundaries? Go.” It felt so good
to tease him, to remember that, all the confusion and convolution aside, they actually enjoyed each other. They always had, each iteration, each interaction.
They commandeered a table in the empty lobby and the bored desk manager was more than happy to set them up with a pot of peppermint tea and some biscotti. Nick excused himself to the bathroom and arrived back just as the tea did, looking like he’d splashed water on his face and run his hands through his hair.
She poured them both a cup and they sipped in silence while Sewanee embedded herself in the moment. The buttercup glow from the deco floor lamps, streaks of moonlight limning the ripples of the canal out the window behind Nick’s chair, the occasional creak of a floorboard from a hallway above them. Eventually, Sewanee felt warm enough, inside and out, to ask, “So, what would you like to talk about?”
Nick took a sip of tea. “My aunt.”
Not what she’d expected. She’d thought they’d immediately start exhuming their relationship, sorting what was truth from what was fiction. To go back to the beginning and dig themselves out. But, really, what was more formative than family?
NICK’S MOTHER HAD
been pregnant at twenty-one and dead from an overdose at twenty-five. He had no memory of her. Which he knew sounded sadder than it actually was. He hadn’t known who his father was until a 23andMe test five years ago, which led him to a middle-aged finance guy living in New Jersey with two kids in college and no honest-to-God memory of Nick’s mother, either. But he’d been nice and apologetic and had wanted to hear Nick’s story and this is what Nick had told him:
His aunt, Deborah June Sullivan, had been older than his mother by about a decade. She’d been a radical feminist (at least by Prescott, Arizona, circa 1994 standards) doing graduate work
in Ireland. She hadn’t wanted a toddler; she was, after all, intentionally husband- and child-less. But Nick was the only family she had left and June could be sentimental when she wasn’t being contrarian. They lived in Dublin for twelve years, but when June broke up with Tom, the closest thing Nick had to a father, she moved them back to the place she swore she’d never return: Prescott. Why? Nick didn’t know. Except that June liked a good fight.
Once he’d covered high school in Arizona, summers in Dublin at Tom’s pub hanging around musicians, best-friending Jason sophomore year, and the teasing he endured because of his funny accent and the fact his aunt wrote “smut,” he summed it all up by saying, “You know, typical dysfunctional family when you get down to it.”
He told Sewanee his aunt had issues, generally, with men, present company included. He never felt he could live up to her expectations. She wrote fantasy men and measured real ones against them. He wasn’t academically motivated, he didn’t care about his appearance, he answered her questions with monosyllabic answers, he would rather play guitar than spend time with her . . . in short, he was a typical teenage boy. But to June, he was becoming just another poor excuse for a man.
He went back to Dublin for university, but only lasted a year. He came home, a college dropout who wanted to play music. A whole lot of nothing looking for something. One thing he was sure of: he would never become one of those men June lionized.
The night manager, alone in the hotel with nothing to do, brought them two small glasses of grappa, just because, and Sewanee and Nick thanked him. As they sipped, Nick said, “Do you think people sometimes know they’re dying, the way elephants do? Because June had started working on this project based on what she wished had happened between her and the guy she’d
loved before she went to Ireland and met Tom. Of course, in her fictional version, Tom died a horrible death and the one-that-got-away was a legendary lover.”
Sewanee smiled. “Of course.”
Nick smiled back. But it quickly faded. “She called last October and said we had to talk. In person. I went. Her premonition or intuition or elephant-sense or whatever was spot-on. She attempted to make everything right between us. The struggles, the past, the conflicts . . . you know, as one tends to do at death’s door. Then, she laid out the
Casanova
project she was writing and made me promise to do it and that I would also promise to have you do it. She was adamant. To the degree that it was not to be done unless we did it together. She had to have things her way right up until the end. I actually admired that about her.” He stared off. “Three weeks later the writing was done and so was she.”
Sewanee winced. “When was this?”
“Right before Thanksgiving.”
“So, in Las Vegas . . .”
He nodded. “I was very much in it.” He gazed at his shoes. “I’m still in it.” He slunk down in his seat, stretched his legs out, crossed the ankles, rested the teacup on his chest. Sighed. “And when I plunked down next to you in the bar, I’d just come from sitting at a signing table for six hours. And being completely honest? I was livid at her then. Livid she waited too long to go to a doctor. That it took her dying to tell me how she felt. She left me with everything we could have had if only . . . it was a lot.” He fell quiet.
Then he finished the grappa and stood. “You look as knackered as I feel. I’m going to go.”
Sewanee stood, too, glancing at the clock above the reception desk and startled to see it was 2:15. “I’m a little insulted you
didn’t try to pull off Just One Room. You could have run out the clock here and then been like, ‘oh, wow, look at the time, wherever shall I lay my weary head tonight?’”
“I considered it. But I thought it was a wee repetitive so I went with The Perfect Gentleman Who Knows He Should Give a Woman Space.”
“Ah, that old chestnut.”
Nick considered her. The way he looked at her: Would she ever tire of it?
“Do you have plans tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “Mom and Stu aren’t going to come into the city until dinner, so I’m on my own. Just walking around, alone. Exploring Venice. Alone.” She couldn’t help smiling after the last one.
Nick smiled back. “Well, since you’ll be alone and all, how about I meet your alone self at the train station. Ten o’clock?”
Sewanee blinked. “The train station? Are we going somewhere?”
“Depends if they have trains at the train station.”
They were both tired enough that this made them laugh.
“Where?” she asked.
He quirked an eyebrow. “Trust me?”
She did. God help her, she did. She didn’t know why, exactly, but if he was even a fraction of the man she’d corresponded with, a fragment of the man she’d spent a glorious night in Las Vegas with, then the sum of those parts was enough. She nodded. He flashed her a grin, picked up his knapsack, and left her standing in the lobby.