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  “It’ll go perfect,” Enid said. She set the tray alongside the cooler, and the man leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  Ramona put her arm around Grisha’s back and clenched his shirt tightly.

  “Yes, it will,” the man said. “Thank you, Enid.”

  “How is Robert?” Enid said, sitting on the couch and crossing her legs. She was talking to Ramona, who did not answer her. “Ramona, Ramona.” Enid’s eyes went to Grisha’s and he shrugged a little. “Well, James?” Enid’s voice was tired. A person sitting next to her, one of the four from earlier, put a hand on her knee, and gave her a brief, narrow smile.

  “Bobby’s fine,” James said. “He’s somewhere in Oregon, last I heard.”

  “Last you heard?” Enid said with a little trill. “Ramona, can you believe him? The last he heard.”

  “Robert doesn’t visit much,” Ramona said. “He isn’t like that. He does whatever he wants. He’s always been that way.”

  “Not always,” James cut in. “He wasn’t always like that. It happened after his mother died.”

  Ramona’s hand flattened against Grisha’s back. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “It’s a terrible thing to lose a mother,” Enid said, leaning forward. She rested her chin on her hand. “How awful. Poor Claudia.”

  “You didn’t know her,” Ramona said.

  “I beg your pardon. I did know her. I knew her well.”

  “You didn’t,” Ramona said. “You and Victor came here after she was already sick. She was different before.”

  “Enid did know Claudia,” James said, and he turned the cooler in a circle, admiring his fine handiwork. “She sure did.”

  “You’re just saying that,” Ramona said. “You’re just saying that to be cruel.” She drew away from Grisha, and James looked up at her because he was kneeling. His eyes were large, to the point of seeming to swell out of his head. Enid was not smiling, exactly. She looked a little sad.

  “Ramona,” James said. “This is not the time.”

  Ramona pressed her hair flat against the back of her head and then crossed her arms in front of herself.

  “There’s nothing to get bent out of shape over,” Enid said. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we? I didn’t mean any harm.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” James said. The man who had put a hand on Enid’s knee moved from his chair and sat next to her on the sofa. He put his arm along the back of the couch. He was pale and lengthy like Victor, though lacking Victor’s grace, the easiness of his range.

  “I guess I just worry about Robert. I’ve known him since he was a little boy. I just worry,” Enid said.

  “Have him, then,” James said with a brusque laugh, and he slapped the table. “Take him.” He stood up with some difficulty, and Grisha offered him a hand. James squeezed Grisha’s hand hard, and Grisha thought his palm might break. He pulled, and James came up and stood there, bobbling for a beat, for a moment, and Grisha saw a look of delicate fear thread through his face. If Grisha had let go a moment earlier, James would have fallen onto his face. Grisha knew it. James knew it. And in the span of time that they held hands standing in the living room, the secret knowledge flowed between them like a current. James let go. “We’ll take yours. Where’d you pick this orphan up from, Enid? The bus depot? They’re popping up a dozen a day. Like water bugs.”

  “He’s one of Victor’s,” Enid said dryly. Grisha rolled his eyes. James stared into Grisha’s eyes. He would not be put off until someone was ashamed of themselves. Grisha could see that.

  “They’ve just been very kind to me this summer. I’m in architecture school. At the university,” Grisha said.

  “Oh, then you wouldn’t have known Bobby,” James said, but then, seeming to catch on something, “Do you know Nate Wollend?”

  “Yes,” Grisha said. “He was my teacher.”

  “Is that so? Well, he’s a fine architect.”

  “He is,” Grisha said easily, because he believed that to be true. Nate’s architecture was conservative but very beautiful. There was a purity about his lines, and it was there even in his drafts, the clarity and precision of his lines. They drew the eye steadily and carefully into the structures he made. He liked to say that there was a quiet center of gravity in every building, the fossa around which everything else orbited. That was the trick of it. The center is not a mass but a void, and everything accrues to it, converges. It had all seemed a little soft-headed, a little tenderhearted to Grisha then, lying on Nate’s bed at the lake house, feeling Nate’s hand on his navel. It had seemed stupidly romantic. But he could understand it now. The simple elegance of it, which seemed almost beyond the point. It wasn’t exactly what Nate believed. It was more the fact of his believing in it.

  “He made this house, this very house. Years ago,” James said.

  “Oh, I had no idea,” Grisha said, genuinely shocked and looking over his shoulder front and back and to the side, as if at any moment Nate might pop up.

  “He was just getting started then. It’s a beautiful house. A little small, but beautiful. My wife wanted something personal.”

  Grisha bit his tongue. James’s eyes had softened. He had his hands in his pockets.

  “It looks like him,” Grisha said, which made James laugh.

  “I wouldn’t know. My business is in hearts, not houses.”

  Enid got up from the sofa. Ramona was handing out slices of torte on small plates. Victor was delicately massaging his neck by the sliding door. Outside, there was a wall of night. Grisha rolled his sleeves back to his elbows.

  “Do you want help, Ramona?”

  Ramona looked at him like he had slapped her. Enid paused near the chair where she had been previously sitting, across the room, near the archway. She laughed. Ramona handed him a slice of the torte.

  “Enjoy,” she said, and she turned from him.

  James took Enid’s seat on the couch, and Grisha went into the kitchen after Enid.

  * * *

  She was pouring a martini. She plopped a fat olive into it. When she saw him, she shook her head and laughed again.

  “Aren’t you just the best domestic a girl could ask for.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Grisha said hotly. He leaned back against the counter. He wanted to throw up because of how stupid he felt.

  “Victor looks awful. Did you have a lovers’ quarrel?”

  “Enid,” Grisha said.

  “He’s in love with you, you know.”

  “No one’s in love,” Grisha said, thinking of the moment in the hall, thinking of how stupid he had been to think, if for a moment, that Victor had felt something real for him, something detached from sex and want and desire, something not at all about the transaction flowing between them. It had hurt his feelings to realize the scope of his stupidity, how quickly he had let himself be fooled.

  “Victor is in love,” she said. “Victor is in love with you.” She was singing it to herself, stirring her drink.

  “Believe me, it’s not love,” Grisha said.

  “He told me,” she said, then, catching herself, “No, I guess he didn’t tell me, but I can feel it.” Enid stepped through the other side of the kitchen into the hall, where he and Victor had been speaking before. Grisha followed her into its low, dark channel. “He’s in love with you. And he’s mad at me that you’re leaving.” In the dark of the hall, she looked fragile. Her eyes were larger in the dark. Her lips were moist. She set her martini on the credenza.

  “He wanted to ask you to stay,” she said. “At the end of summer. He said, ‘What if he stays with us? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ ”

  Grisha swallowed. She handed him the martini. He drank. Too much vermouth. He chewed on the olive.

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” she said, and flung her arms out. “What do you think, Grisha? Would that be wonderful to you? Is that what you do?”

  “I don’t do anything that I’m not asked to do,” he said.

&
nbsp; “Well, Victor wants you to stay. You must be thrilled.”

  Grisha downed the martini and handed her back the empty glass with the toothpick in it. She looked down at it. She was close enough for him to put his arms around her, so he did. He held her close to his chest, and let her press her face against him. She closed her eyes. She breathed deeply. He could feel the ridged column of her spine. He could see the faded scar from the time when she was twelve and fell down a hill while hiking in Ojai. She had shown him on their first weekend together, turned around on the edge of the pool and let him see it under the strap of her top. She’d laughed. She was always laughing. He pressed his thumb there now, and she sighed. He felt love for her in that moment, and it was this love for her that let him ascertain the edge of her fear. She was afraid of being left, being discarded. Or else, she felt a fear of change sweeping toward her. A change in Victor, like a sudden outbreak of new weather.

  “Maybe I should leave,” she said sarcastically.

  “There’s no need for all of that,” Grisha said. “I’m leaving in a couple of weeks anyway.”

  “Tonight. What if it were tonight?” she said. A flutter of panic, like a flock of birds alighting suddenly inside of him.

  “Enid,” he said. “Tonight? Right this moment? Are you serious?”

  “You could just leave. You’re young. You could just go. And it won’t even matter to you,” Enid said, and her voice had gone from wild to calm. The idea was gathering solidity in her mind. A plan was growing firm. Grisha shook his head.

  “Enid, you know that’s ridiculous. No one is in love with anyone. In a couple of weeks, we’ll all hug and say goodbye, and we’ll say what a great summer we had. And we’ll pretend to keep in touch and then you will go back to your life.”

  “He wants you to stay,” she said.

  “He is being nice. I will explain—”

  “I will pay now. I will give you your money—I would never dream of not. We’ve had such a wonderful summer, Grisha. You’re beautiful. Please, I would never think of not paying you what you deserve. But I can do it now, and you can go.”

  “What about my things?”

  “I can compensate you.”

  “You want me gone that badly?” he asked. A strap of hot hurt pressed against his chest. “Why?”

  “He meant it, Grisha. I saw it in his eyes. He loves you.”

  “He loves you,” Grisha said. “With me, it’s just sex. It’s just summer stuff. Come on.”

  “He does. I know that. But he loves you enough to want to change our life for you.”

  Grisha pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. He could taste something metallic and wet. He closed his eyes. Is that what it was? Love enough to change your life. It was funny in a way, stupid more than funny maybe, that he felt, at this sudden prospect of losing Enid and Victor, losing the house with the great light, losing the tenor of their lives together, at this prospect of sudden and horrendous change, he felt himself wanting to dig his heels in and stay. A cold horror at himself: He wanted things to go on as they were. He wanted Enid and Victor to keep him. All summer, he had been waiting for the moment of escape, thinking that as long as he exercised his right to leave them, they held no power over him. The terms were clear. But now he had no power. Now the terms were in Enid’s hands, and he could not expect her to think of him and what he wanted. He could not think of asking her to be merciful, not when she was the one who feared for her life. Not her mortal life. But her life with Victor. Her right to the procession of things as she had always known them. This was the end of his time with them. He could see it as clearly as Enid could conjure another life Oh, he thought, his eyes beginning to sting. Oh. He had misplayed his hand greatly.

  “Enid.”

  “Our life is not a toy for you to play with.”

  “I have not played with your life.”

  “But if you stay, you will be. If you stay, knowing what you know now, you will be—how can you do that?”

  “This is unreasonable,” Grisha said. “I promise you no one has ever loved me. That’s not a problem you have to worry about.”

  “You are being selfish,” she said. “You could go, and it wouldn’t be anything to you. Right now. You could go, and have your money and your life, and leave my husband to me. You could go.”

  “I fucked you, too,” Grisha said. “Not just Victor. You too.”

  “I don’t love you,” she said, and he winced because it hurt him to hear that. He did not love Enid, either, but hearing it called what it was, or, rather, what it wasn’t, rang in Grisha’s ears. He nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “I get that. I do.”

  “Didn’t you have a family?” she asked. “What would your family think? Would you let someone into your family this way?”

  Grisha bit the edge of his tongue, because yes, he’d had a family. Marshall had been his family. Not his mother or his father, who had been nice enough to him in that they had mostly ignored him and directed their anger, their heat, toward each other. His mother had been a boozehound and his father a shattered, withered man with a bad back and worse eyes. But there had been Marshall until there wasn’t anymore. And there was, from the very back of his mind, a cowardly whisper: you, Enid, and Victor.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head with a smile. “Never.”

  “You are being petulant,” Enid said. “You were never petulant before.”

  “You never told me to leave before. What about my things?”

  “I will pay you for them. Mail them. Whatever you want.”

  Enid put her hand over her eyes. She sighed heavily. Grisha rested his back against the wall.

  “Okay, if that’s what you want,” he said, offering her a chance to change her mind, but he knew she wouldn’t.

  “I want you to leave.”

  Grisha took the glass from her hand. He held it for a moment, admiring its lightness, and he lifted it to the light to peer through it. He saw the world distorted, a mass of shifting shadows and passing impressions. He turned it so that the curve of the glass fell upon the mirror over the credenza, which appeared at that angle, in that moment, like a silvered full moon, so full of light and nothing else. He did not see himself looking back through the mirror and the glass. He did not see anything except a white blur.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Do it now if you’re going to do it,” she said, and Grisha thought that she might be asking for proof for the both of them—if he did not do it now, perhaps he never would or could.

  Grisha held his breath. He set the glass down again. She picked it up, pressed it to her lips, and realized too late that there was nothing left in it.

  Impact Play

  by Peter Mountford

  When Gavin told his cousin Betsy that he was thinking of asking his girlfriend, Pilar, to move in with him, she said, “Wait, is she the woman you had an affair with?”

  “Well, I was dating a lot right after the divorce,” Gavin said, and told himself it wasn’t a lie. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t. Kind of. Gavin had shared tales of bizarre Tinder dates, and how he liked Bumble, and OKCupid lived up to its name and was just okay. But what he neglected to say was that all of this dating took place just after his separation from his wife, which also happened to be when he and Pilar briefly stopped seeing each other.

  “But it is her, isn’t it?” Betsy said. She spoke with that breathy, babyish inflection on the phone. If she weren’t his cousin—and close enough to be his sister—she’d be a great candidate for a job in phone sex.

  “Pilar is—it’s hard to explain.”

  “You mean it’s unpleasant to explain?”

  He just groaned.

  “Does she have kids?”

  “A son, Iggy. He’s with her three-quarters of the time. Seventeen. I’ve met him a couple times—he’s cool. Plays guitar.”

  He heard Betsy exhale slowly into the phone. Out the window of his office, a cluster of mourners milled in front of the cathed
ral across the street, their black ties and dresses fluttering in a strong breeze. Then she said, “You’ve never lived with a kid—do you know what you’re doing? Honestly, I’d prefer she was your mistress rather than someone you don’t know.”

  Fair enough. Leading a double life had been so hard logistically, and it had been so stressful, so emotionally exhausting, but now he could see it was also much less painful than this honesty, this transparency. Melding his separate lives together was proving messy and chaotic, and he wanted to hold on to some of his secrets—if he told Betsy everything, she’d probably think he was a piece of shit.

  “Wait—” she said before he could come up with a response. “Isn’t she married?”

  “They got divorced last year. Pilar is a mature person. It’s very amicable.” He hated the sound of himself, selling Pilar’s worthiness, that whoever she was, she wasn’t as bad as him.

  Betsy wasn’t exactly a paladin of marital perfection, either, but she had checked all the boxes with both divorces: years of counseling, compulsory date nights, and mirthless vacations displayed in Instagram-worthy snapshots—rictus grins revealing the drudgery underway. Bewildered and sweating at Chichen Itza, or leaning toward each other from distant chairs on a beach. But Gavin had concocted a Molotov cocktail for his marriage—he’d come home one day and announced to his wife of fourteen years he’d been having an affair for three years.

  “Did I mention,” he said, sitting back down again, “that my boss has been muttering about retiring soon, and I’m pretty sure the board expects me to take over? They like me.”

  “Nice change of subject,” she said, and sighed. Their parents had been poor and crazed—dead, vanished, or in jail—and they’d spent five glorious summers together, a pair of only children. Their bond was by far the strongest in his life. “I’ll get the whole story when you come down to see me. When is that happening? It’s been like two years!”

  “One year, actually,” he said. “But yeah, too long—maybe this weekend?” In fact, he and Pilar were already planning to be in Portland that weekend. They’d been planning the trip for months, and the whole time Pilar had been campaigning to meet Betsy while they were there. She’d never met someone who knew him well.