She's always been fond of (ex_roses104) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-24 17:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | emma woodhouse, rose red |
Who: Eloise and Gabriel
What: Tea and unsaid things
Where: Playbill
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: F for Feels
The sidewalk was mostly empty, this time of day. It was bright enough to bounce the sunshine right off the glass windows, to give a headache to any man stupid enough to drink the night before. It was blue, blue sky and it stretched out clear enough to make the store a beacon, to make concrete lines an imprint he remembered, stamped down deep past pain and crisp white hospital sheets, something from before. He had thought, right up until the minute Gabe stood there on the sidewalk, the dense radiation of hot pain in his leg muzzy beneath the morning dose of meds, that he might have forgotten. That the memory of the place would wear out like writing barely read, on a piece of paper folded too many times until it crumbled into fuzzy illegibility.
He knew what to expect before he crossed the threshold, the clatter of his entrance made worse by an inability to juggle handles and canes and the catch of the door all at once. Quiet, cool and unquestioning as wet winter rain greeted him, calm settling as Playbill resumed itself like an interrupted grand old dame stiffly taking her position on the stage once again. Gabe closed his eyes; he smelled paper and the faint scent of tea and the cool, nothing smell of sunlight and clean.
The books were stacked; perpendicularly and contrary (a smile, a fraction of mouth corners turned upwards, that was his wife, contrary) and it was an amusement until Beckett was stacked up beyond arm’s reach, and Shakespeare left placidly facing him. Gabe looked at Shakespeare with mild disgust, turned it backward until the book turned in and kept its histories to itself. He’d never much liked it, preferring the rhythm of absurdist theater, a knot that lent itself to being untangled, piece by piece in the warm exchange of breath, back against the headboard of the bed. Gabe stood at the foot of the ladder and he looked, up and out and across, her kingdom that she’d built. It was like china teacups and thin black tea, it was like cool white walls and the smell of jasmine. The carpet shifted beneath him as he leaned against the cane; Gabe shifted, both very tall and very large in an ode to whimsy and he tried to find a place where the carpets didn’t overlap and threaten him falling.
He was black coat and patient shoulders and the faint smell of lemon and bergamot and coffee, the scent of mornings when not on service, damp hair and shaven like it was an apology for the cane, for the brace. Gabe looked up from the spines of the books as he heard the shift in the floorboards, heard her and his voice was calm, was metered when he said “Hello, Eloise,” as if it had been days rather than months.
Eloise's mama had been to Playbill only once, and she'd deemed it modern in a way that sounded entirely disapproving. Even as a child, Eloise had appreciated the way her mama could speak entire sentences with merely one word and the proper tip of her nose; she'd been emulating the feat ever since, though she'd never openly admit to emulating anyone. But, the truth remained that Playbill was oddly modern. Eloise preferred the term eccentric, but she would not argue that the place was modern whites and tall walls that had been a second story once. The place made woefully little money, and more had been spent to turn it into Eloise's retreat than was wise. But she was still the heir apparent to a fortune, and surely certain exceptions could be made for appearances. The shoppe was, after all, her stage now, and that stage was littered with antiquities and plush places to read them. The backroom was closed, a sign upon the door that said class was not in session, but it was empty and vast; the only place within the establishment that was empty and shrine-like.
Inside, it was cool, and crossing the threshold was like stepping into another place entirely with its white chill and imported greens. On the counter, beside the antique cash register that dinged and clanged without need of any computer guiding it, there was a fine set of bone china. Four cups, and a teapot on trivet and flame. The cream was not yet set out, and it was the cream that Eloise was returning with when Gabriel heard her.
He was Gabriel to her, you see. Never anything so crass as Gabe.
She was dressed in head-to-toe black. India ink and a dress without sleeves, her arms bare and pale and still trim, despite her advancing age. The dress was as old as some of the books on the tall shelves, and it brought to mind Gatsby and his life of decadence. The dress' skirt fell to mid-knee, the fabric a flimsy-thin nothing cast over an equally delicate shift. Her hair was twisted up in something loose and effortless, and she hid her almost-forty well. There were a few lines about her eyes, but her skin remained soft and pale, and there was little makeup to hide behind. The lighting, granted, was naturally soft brightness, and it hid things well. Life on a stage had taught her to use the light in her favor, and she used it without apology.
She was expecting a customer; she was due her one or two a day.
She was not expecting her husband.
Ex, she reminded herself.
She noticed the man before the impediment. Gabriel had always commanded attention. He was nothing like the young men of her youth. He'd no place in a ballroom, and he'd no true notion of the need to change at the dressing gong. He was a bull in a china shop on the few trips they'd taken to her parents' estate, and she remembered those chapters as grand things, suited for the stage. Her mama and papa had disapproved, and she had shone in those moments, before life became quiet and there was no spotlight for her.
But, yes, he commanded attention, as he always had done.
The cane was noted next, and her step skipped a moment. It was nothing, truly, intangible almost. But any misstep was significant when it came to her; she did not make a habit of being moved by emotion, and she did not make a habit of misstepping.
When she moved again, it was smooth and refined; calm. She set the cream beside the teacups. "You're come in time for tea."
Eloise had had a habit long before he had discovered her - he had found out, he had asked the right questions and he had asked them of the right, laughingly-drunk and talkative sorts at the kinds of parties Eloise shone at and he found the nearest quiet place and examined the host’s taste in books - of setting scenes. She was an actress with a good eye and an excellent hand at it, and Gabe admired it the way he admired the foreign knot of Arabic spoken by natives and French perfume on a particularly elegant woman and the line of sweat on the forehead of someone who was particularly skilled in martial arts. She had dressed her set to suit her, pale colors and the soft, enveloping calm that drew itself up to his feet, to the edges of his black coat and he could feel it in the air exactly as it had been with a key in the lock and the ache of a day left on his shoes.
Gabe looked at her in her wisps of black-nothing and he couldn’t have said when the dress was from, nor where but his eyes lingered where the gauze of it licked along the bare of her shoulders. There was a mild calm that Gabe brought in on his heels that didn’t suit the shop’s contrived quiet at all, it was solid dark gaze that was unblinking and looked a little longer than was strictly polite, as if he might - had the cane not been there, had they rolled back half a dozen years - put his hands into the artless tumble of her hair, put lips to the pale china of her throat and pulled apart the perfection until there was woman along with the actress. Gabe was polite but his eyes were not; he looked as though he had been given permission to do so once and had refused to return it. He had forgotten, in the very brilliant haze of pain, in drugged dreaming and the dogged persistence of the doctors, what it felt like to look at her and her contained self, like a lamp that can burn white but is turned down low. He looked for the lines at her eyes and at the curve of her mouth, for the pieces that made her imperfect, and he smiled. It was a slow, uncoil of a smile, warm as butter melting, as old tenderness.
“I didn’t come for tea. I don’t like tea.”
He said it with affection and he looked at the thin delicacy of the tea-cups on the side with a measured guess at whether or not it was safe to try and make it across the carpet rucks to where she had gathered together the pieces of her ritual. It was dangerous; in the places Eloise made for herself, things were old and they were frail and they had the delicate perfection of glass. Gabe always felt too big and he felt too tall and that had never mattered when he had been allowed, encouraged, to spoil the perfect, when they could laugh - but now the quiet swallowed laughter.
His foot had gone to sleep; Gabe shifted, he leaned on the cane awkwardly.
She disliked that smile immensely.
That slow uncoil was one of the things that had drawn her to him. In a room full of polite and adoring strangers, that smile had always felt more tangible than any other thing. It had felt like something true, a diamond amid fakes, and she'd always felt compelled to own it. It was like the most adoring fan in the audience, always, and still remembered the thrill she'd felt then.
Before she'd realized there was little more to it than that.
"No," she said politely, all pursed lips that somehow hinted at a hidden smile. "You never did have taste. I remain the exception."
She walked her way behind the counter, slow and unhurried steps that made ebony waft against pale skin. She took her time pouring the tea. Her mama had insisted upon etiquette classes at boarding school, and Eloise had learned those lessons quite well. She knew how to turn her wrist just so, how to turn it so nothing dripped unbecomingly. The entire process was a roll of wrists and the clink of tiny spoons against delicate china. She did not notice his awkward lean (of course she didn't), and she didn't hurry the process because he was stood there.
Once she was done, she took her cup, and she made her way back around the counter and to one of the plush, black chairs there. She set the cup on a side table, and she looked up at him. "Will you sit, while you tell me what happened, or do you prefer to stand?"
It was, perhaps, hard to imagine this particular woman throwing dishes and screaming in bed, but some things did not live upon the surface. Her reaction to that cane was a similar thing.
“Absolutely,” Gabe agreed with her, amiably, as he watched the black silky stuff shiver over her skin; taste was not handed out by Uncle Sam nor was it expected. You learned to like what was given out in gray government issue or you slid inside the skin of a man who had other tastes. Eloise was, he thought, admiring the controlled languidity of a woman who looked as though she had never broken a thing in her life, not an acquired taste but one made drugged on starry eyes and the soft slope of her neck, the slant of her smile when she tried to turn away. “No taste at all.”
The smile did not dint, it folded like worn paper blossom put carefully away. His eyes followed her, unapologetic dog watching for table scraps that might fall when not guarded. Gabe was a large man in a too-small store and despite being exceptionally uncomfortable he looked at ease, relaxed. The coat was soft wool and expensively inky black, the shirt beneath it was a dim blue. The cane was neither hospital or government issued. Very carefully, he folded both palms across the top of it as though Gabe were concerned about catching anything with those big hands of his and he stood without exception nor comment throughout the ritual.
The chink of china and silver was a Sunday afternoon stretched out with one of the absurd pillows folded in half and shoved behind his head, a book in hand and his eyes drifting from the print to the elaborate execution in front of him until fascination and focus drew him like a child breathing on glass. She had been unhurried then, curled on her knees like a geisha (she had induced him then to try it, had pursed her lips just so as she held out steaming-fragrant liquid in dainty receptacle and laughed at him as he cupped his hands around hers to receive it with the solemnity of priest saying prayer). Later, when the children were small enough for starfish, wildly-waving hands to catch on too-fragile cups, he had held one child and then another upon his knee as they observed their mother’s ritual of tea-leaves and teapots with wide-round eyes. It occurred to him, with some bleak brilliance of sadness, that they would of course now be old enough acolytes, they would drink from the same china, inducted into the rules of precise steeping that were Eloise’s particular mysteries.
He looked at the deep softness of the chair and he looked at the composition of her legs, judging the distance and angle of the chair’s seat and taking passing pleasure in that particular picture whilst he could. Sitting was not difficult; standing was ambitious. It would be an embarrassment, the calculation of precise placement, the very fact that the arrangement of chairs was just so for the way the light fell within the room (oh, he knew her, he knew her well) and not drawn close to a wall or any particular point that might be useful. None of this, of course, drew itself across the surface of Gabe’s face.
“I’ll sit.”
The slow spread of pain had a charted course, from heel to hip. Progress was not to be encouraged. Gabe took one painful step and then the next and he put a determined swing into each, the heavy lean on the cane camouflaged by the too-unstinting smile sent her way. He sat, fire burst along his leg and his knuckles on the cane went faintly white. Gabe smiled. He said nothing.
Eloise would have argued that any grace she possessed was hers, and hers alone. She would have claimed she’d been born with it, that the turn of wrist and swivel of elbow was with her from the womb. She would have suggested these things made her special, spun glass from the time she wore her hair in bright ribbons that ended in pig’s tails. She would have claimed these things, but they wouldn’t be true. It was, like everything else, affectation. Here, in the shoppe, it was easiest to be what she wished. It was harder at home, with the children screaming and the walls echoing her loneliness. Here the books absorbed it; they were her audience.
But, for now, he served the purpose. It was bittersweet, because it was the role he was always meant to play in the production of her life. But he’d left during intermission, and she suspected he’d simply purchased tickets to the wrong show.
You see, she had seen him burn. She knew he had it in him to burn.
She did not intend the offer to sit as a challenge, but she realized he had taken it as one; the pain he was so poor at hiding told her as much. “Men are so much less,” she said, a stage whisper, something from her mama, who had always said as much. And, admittedly, men did not do pain well; women were born for it, as archaic as the thought was. She did not fear archaic thoughts. Her feminism did not suffer at the hands of spun-soft black fabric or such acknowledgements.
His silence was noted, and her expression lost its stage perfection a moment. “Of course,” she said. He wouldn’t tell. He never did share his secrets, and it had been a problem in the end. “Shall I tell you of all the people I’ve met during your absence instead?”
It was a deliberate jab, one delivered with perfectly calm indifference. She sipped at her tea.
She’d always had a knife. Armed with something sharper, prone to sinking home more dangerously than anything in the field. Gabe’s expression flickered, a light going dull for a single second, something raw passing through brown eyes until it was adroitly shut off, a screen slamming down. He accepted it for what it was, the small and quiet stab that meant he had for some reason or another, hurt or angered her. The quiet, sad smile said he knew, but he did not quite know why. He had spent hours trying to read her, fingertips dragging along her spine as though he could shiver her open, absorb what was on her pages but Eloise was substantive, more than the books stacked up to the ceiling and far more than her own artifice, a foreign language he had struggled to learn.
The pain plied itself to his leg, to all the shattered bone reknit with doctor’s skill - with time, he had been reassured, eighty percent capacity would return but this had not yet communicated to the nerves. He’d woken, the sheets soaked through, at four and sat until it was a hospitable enough hour to call the front desk and request new ones. He watched the china teacup raised to her lips instead, tracked its path with the assembled calm of pieces put together anew.
“Of course,” he said, blandly. All the people. He’d been away months; that accounted for all, surely? Another thought to tuck away. Softer, gently. “I’d like to hear.”
That moment before the screen slammed down was like a curtain rising. It was a second ovation, a standing one, roses and applause. She had always hated to see that screen go down. She had, for quite awhile, pushed to keep the screen raised. Perhaps it wasn't always a thinking, intentional thing, but the outcome had been the same. She fed off it, you see, that rawness - good or bad, loving or hating - it brought her own passion to a head. It was fuel, and she hated the emptiness that came with its departure. And, in subsequent years, the screen had been down more often than up. Or, worse yet, there had been no screen at all, as he'd been away. Work, you see, very important, terribly secret.
She knew, too, that he could not read her. He'd never been able to read silence. He was a man that touched instead of thought, and she always forgot thinking when his fingers found her skin. But he was at a safe distance now, and unable to move quickly enough to change it, even if he became bold enough to do so. He wouldn't, she knew, become bold enough.
It would have been harder to leave, had he been there, rough hands upon her skin.
"Chloe is here," she explained. Her sister had never been kind, but she'd offered Eloise a modicum of freedom in her early years of marriage. Dealing with Chloe's cult, hiding that terrible embarrassment, had made her mama and papa less concerned with Eloise's own actions. The fallout of her inappropriate marriage had only come after, once it was too late to remedy without calling more attention to the Murphy name. "I suspect she's causing trouble." It wasn't a new person, but it was someone he would be familiar with. "I've also met a man named Daniel. He thinks he's terribly clever. Aiden owns the dreadful little shoppe across the way. There's a man called Adam, who is selfish enough for a Tennessee Williams character; Stella in the masculine." She did not mention Connor. She was not so cruel as that.
Gabe had not a thought for fingers on skin now, no matter how the black silky stuff floated over her arm, milky-white beneath the ghosting fabric. Eloise sat in her chair with her teacup in her fingertips and she was bone china and polished silver, impossible and breakable - untouchable. He watched the surface calm rise like cream, and the cool steadiness of her eyes. Eloise stabbed and Eloise took in increments. It was, he thought, with his head turned just slightly to the side and the look of a man reading words in sand, difficult to believe it had memory not sufficed. He let Lu’s knife slide home and bite and took it gratefully; the buzz of his leg subsided a little as he absorbed the familiar aggravation.
“How’s Chloe doing?” Gabe’s voice swung into polite concern; hand him a tea-cup, he would have done fine in her parents’ drawing-room, the air somehow stuffy and cool at the same time, and his socks on show above his shoes. His voice held the mild interest deemed suitable; he thought of American-green bills folded over, crisp and clean, buying back a girl dulled by a cult’s foggy hands. Her parents still believed in their law-firm, in their handlers. Gabe did not smile at the memory.
“Met anyone you do like?” A beat. “I’ll have tea.” It couldn’t be worse than watching her.
She was patient and quiet while he sought those words in the sand. She took in his features, the new stress and pain lines that lined his face. Her gaze fell to the cane in a silent question of the wood and metal that it could not answer. She knew her teeth were bared, though they weren't visible, and she wondered that he could still eek that reaction from her. She was, these days, a quiet stage. The curtain had not gone up in months, and no audience lined the seats. There were small performances, certainly, but nothing like him.
She would never say as much.
"Chloe is attempting to recapture the Donovan boy." Neil Donovan had always been a boy in her estimation, even when he was fully grown. Gabriel had never, in their entire relationship, been a boy. "Mama is pleased. I suspect she'll pay us a visit soon, Neil's mama in tow. She'll want to see you," she added, a hint of a smile. Divorce wasn't done in families like theirs, and she knew her mama was quite looking forward to having a chat with Gabriel. Eloise would not mind being a fly on the wall for that exchange. "She's as heartless and machinating as ever, my sister. But that is a thing to be lauded in the Murphy clan, I fear."
She didn't comment on his acceptance of the tea. She simply set about preparing it for him. She stood, and she returned to her pot and her trivet. She made it sweet. "I would have steeped it longer, had I known you were coming," she acknowledged, clink of cup and turn of wrist. She returned a moment later, violet water on the air with the movement of the black nothing-fabric as she leaned over to hand him the cup.
"I don't like people, Gabriel. You know that as well as anyone," she said. Most people would believe her; Gabriel had known better once.
He didn’t like sweet, thin tea, the color was watery as paint-water. Gabe liked strong black coffee, served in thick mugs that he could wrap his hands around and he liked the sweetness to smooth over its bitter and roll it richly across his tongue. He took the cup - awkward, his thumb and forefinger not sliding inside the delicate loop of the cup but dwarfing it in his entire palm, and he breathed in violets and calm and the clean-soap smell of her skin beneath it all, her surprising warmth bleeding across the store’s chill air that close.
He didn’t care about Chloe and her machinations and Gabe didn’t want to meet Eloise’s mama; her mother was as calculating and cold as any agent he’d met at work and he had not-fond memories of standing at attention and feeling her eyes slide across him and calculating everything he’d ever done or not done that made him unworthy. It had slid off him like water over oil but it had bothered Eloise; he’d seen the color flare along her cheekbones, pallid-pretty and her mouth set and it was a waste of time he didn’t feel like indulging in. He preferred the soft-dark drift of her scent and the silky drag of her skirt as it caught up against the chair, and he made a calculated risk and closed a hand - the back of it dark with a fading tan - across her wrist, lightly as she parted. His fingers caught against the heel of her palm and curled there. Gabe had always been warm; her skin was cool as petals.
“You like people just fine,” he said, his voice firm but not ungentle. He smiled up at her, lit-candle warm and the tea ignored in his other palm. “Am I supposed to pretend along with you?”
She knew his feelings about the tea. She knew so many things about him that she was quite certain she could write a play and portray him precisely right. It was a sentimental thought, and she brushed it away with the back of her hand to her forehead, an errant strand falling against alabaster and breaking all the rules set forth that morning at the dressing table.
She knew, too, that he had no fondness for her family. As she had no fondness of her own for them, she could hardly blame him. There had been a time, when she'd learned of Chloe's plight, that she believed her sister had softened. Then, she'd realized Chloe's issues with the cult revolved around being replaced in the spotlight, and Eloise had very little sympathy for people like herself. She was not, in that way, vain. She simply liked the sunlight on her face; she missed it, and that was all. She did not think herself a martyr or a victim; she only yearned for what she no longer had.
Perhaps the distance had lulled her, the cane, the fact that he'd become injured badly enough to require one, and all without her knowing. That was distance, if anything was. She had made the choice to leave him, and she knew that. But it made it no easier, becoming someone who would not know if he fell victim to the mysterious job that was his center stage. Yes, the distance had lulled her, even with him near, and she did not expect the hand against her palm.
She would never say it aloud, though it had been evident enough in the marriage bed and during moments of screaming and crashing china, but the callouses on his fingers defined what made her fall in love with him.
Her breath caught, and she did not rush to correct the reaction. He had always been observant, and there would be little point in it. She left her hand there a moment longer than absolutely necessary, and then she tugged it back, unhurried and the pulse beneath his slipping fingertips quickening. "Yes, well, no one will believe you, should you decide to tell them."
She put her teacup aside; a dismissal. "Next time you almost die, please ensure your lawyer informs my lawyer."
Where Eloise was silver-sharp, stabbing in the dark until she found a way to slide home and true, Gabe was blunted grasping in the dark. He knew his wife; he knew her like a book read over and over in a language that had come halting and been foreign but whose words he’d learned the shape of - even if he didn’t know their meaning. He knew that for all the sugar-sweet words about her parents, they worried her and that the little lines at the side of her mouth snapped taut when they circled in, threatening visits and he knew Chloe, dark hair like her sister and the same bone-china threat of fragility that made the air pregnant with temper when Chloe circled too closely toward Eloise’s light. He did not know her now; he did not know serenity surrounded by the dust-and-paper smell, the faintest edge of greasepaint and he held her wrist and her pulse beat beneath his fingertips until she slipped his grasp as easily as a boat leaving go an anchor.
“I don’t have a lawyer.” Sad but whole smile, tilted at her over the tea-cup. “I signed the papers yours drew up.” Remember?, it seemed to say. Remember sitting in a lawyer’s office, throwing demands against a wall that sagged and bent willingly for them? He drank a mouthful of lukewarm tea that clung sweetly to his teeth, and his mouth pulled unwillingly, Gable licking off his teeth with distaste.
Her pulse had caught; he had been right, at least a little. The dying embers of a fire could still be stirred to glint, mockingly. A pause. Long enough to breathe in cool air, the violet scent had long since drifted.
“There’s paperwork if I die.” Factual. Calm. “Why do you want people to believe so badly of you?”
That serenity he did not know, it came of this life. It was a return to things, to the girl she had been before theater and marriage, before pregnancy and love that she trusted in. It was waking to existence, to calm instead of to maelstrom. The children were old enough to be gone all day at school now, and they were no longer the small people that screamed and clung to her legs. They had homework, and the internet, and their friends. Earnest, especially, felt himself too old for mothering. She had never been born for it, and losing the pace was something that happened in spurts, without her notice until they found themselves with nothing to say over morning tea. Ophelia was still small enough to bring home drawings of ducks that looked nothing like ducks, but she had always been her father's daughter, and she could not allow her father to shoulder the blame for his many absences over the years. There were brief moments for them, a reminder of the way things had been, made all the more bittersweet by the player missing from the scene.
"That was always troubling. People like us do not get divorced, but there is certainly counsel on both sides when we do," she said, hands folding over themselves on her lap now the tea prop was gone. She smiled at that teeth-lick of distaste; she couldn't help it. "You'll never be dignified if you don't learn to appreciate the subtlety of it," she said of the tea, though she knew fully well it had never been the subtlety he approved of in her.
There's paperwork if I die. "Don't sound so cold, Gabriel." It was sharply said. Hard and harsh, and it came without warning and, unfortunately for her, without planning. She hated things to be said that she had not planned to say. She sighed, giving away the fact that it had been a slip. Her recovery was quick, but then it always had been. "The children would be devastated." The children.
It would have been, she decided, easier to leave the man entirely had she not still loved him.
"This is the world I live in now," she added, her response to his question of the thoughts of others enigmatic, like a closing line meant to leave the audience talking it over the entire way home.
People like us. Eloise had persisted doggedly - he had admired the enthusiasm and the persistence and then he had tired of the refusal to acknowledge reality and refused himself to put on the costume and learn the lines he was prompted to speak - in trying to engulf Gabe in the world in which her parents oscillated. A world of cold houses and ‘the staff’, of dining tables bristling with silver until you didn’t know which fork to pick up first (oh, Gabe had known; the CIA training kicked in until he could tell his fish fork from his pate knife, but Gabe Reed would not have known otherwise and like any other cover he’d smiled blankly at her and shown ignorance) and of growing up without certainty that the people whose own trajectory brushed past your own ever truly felt other than lukewarm. Gabe had been in dormitories from the age of two, he had lived sharing his t-shirts and his jeans with a collection of other boys, he’d worn sneakers that had the shape of other people’s feet.
He had, in all deliberate stubbornness, pulled some of the Chicago back into his voice in those arguments, he had smiled broadly and often and when he’d stirred her to tempest, when she was electric in her anger, pulled her into his hands and kissed her until her spine went pliant, until he could divert all of that insistence into the safe harbor of their bedroom. (That he had done it with slow deliberation had not gone unnoticed, that he had continued even in the damp and chilly place of her parents had been, he supposed, like improv theater for Lu, sat with her teacup and the quiet modulation she slid into at that place and not knowing what part he was playing. Certainly not the one scripted for him.)
“I don’t want to be dignified,” he said it simply, and he said it with a smile, broad and sweet as melted butter. The shop persisted, it pressed in coolly against his back but Gabe had always managed; he had acquiesced to being put where he was asked to be but refused to be unacknowledged. “And I don’t want the kids dignified, either.”
The smile blew out like a candle, in ashy distress. An agent did not think of home, of the unfolding of his own funeral arrangements other than in the cold calculation of all those elements required to leave a material comfort. Gabe had been closeted with a lawyer precisely once; it had taken a long meeting and he had left it with his hands gone cold and a determined need for a drink. The lines of his face drew themselves into new grooves, new lines; they mapped over the pain and they blotted out the physical. Like any man who had had childhood irrevocably altered by the absence of parents, Gabe held the impractical dream of his children’s own childhood being perfect and unspoiled. It meant, in large part, holding himself out of it.
“I’m being practical, Eloise,” his voice was marked by tiredness, by the dampened sound of sorrow kept neatly out of the way. “You asked about lawyers. The paperwork’s already there. That’s all.” She had never wanted to be reached for, when she had sparked like that, when her own discomfort had surfaced like foam on a wave. She had never wanted it, but he had done it, pulled her close and passed that prickly coolness until he could undo it as well as he could the buttons on the backs of her ridiculous dresses. He did not turn his head but Gabe imagined that the wafting black thing she was wearing probably had the same, tiny, run of buttons. There was no reaching for her now, no buttons. Just the cooling teacup in his palm.
“Was that a line from a new show?” His voice carried with it the faintest acerbic note; he’d never liked being pulled up from audience to on-stage.
She had been born and bred into that world that he refused to fit into. His costumes were her tea dress and play jumper. His world was something messy and prone to fits. It was nothing like the quiet industry of her childhood, books and hiding herself away on window seats behind heavy drapes that only let the sun shine on her and the pages she turned. She had been nothing like the other children; she had been nothing like a child. The eldest, she had been alone before anyone else came. Being the first, a novelty, had not made her parents more prone to bounce her on their knee. They liked her much better once she learned to be a very small adult. She had a good relationship with her and mama and papa, truly. Better than any of the others did, for she was better at being small and grown than they were. It came naturally to her. His messy world did not.
He did not.
He was not emotions on his sleeve. It was nothing like that. But he was rough throughout, instead of simply just around the edges. She did not like baring herself. She bared the roles she filled with ample passion, but not herself. He was the same in that way, and yet so very different beneath the surface. He was a contradiction that turned her own blankness into something visceral and tangible.
And now that was gone. She wondered if he understood it at all.
Perhaps age would change things. Perhaps now she was her own Miss. Havisham, far away from mama and papa, far away from anything that truly quickened her, perhaps things would change for her. She loved the children, but they were not hers truly. Children could not be possessed. They would grow and leave, and come on holiday, awkward faces and distant smiles.
"No, you never did," she said of his desire to avoid being dignified. A smile lingered there, against her will. She had liked that about him, however improper it was. "The children will be whatever they wish to be. That is the way with children."
She made a sound at his claim of practicality. It was not intended, but she could not hold it back. It was so much easier to be calm waters when he was not there, looking as he did and bringing back memories of feeling. "You're being cruel," she corrected. She knew cruelty, and she knew it was more effective with words than fists. Her hand disappeared behind her neck, a tension habit, her long fingers rubbing just above where the imagined row of tiny black buttons began. "Are we not old enough now to leave the secrets behind us? Surely, Gabriel, we are old enough for that."
And, oh, dear, his question about a line from a new show made her laugh. Just like that, and without warning. Such severity in response to her dramatics. "This is rather an old show, Gabriel. Or don't you recall it?"
He’d read every single play-script before it had gone up. She’d strewn them - a concession to mess, as she called it (pursed lips and wrinkled nose at his empty coffee cup, at the book thrown down where he’d last been reading it, at the unironed state of his shirt; he’d laughed, he’d kissed the end of her nose, he’d called it ‘living, Lu’ with dry affection and exulting in his own ability to sprawl out as Gabriel and not a list of socially engineered interests in his head) whenever she was readying for an audition, sharp and taut as steel wire plucked - he’d picked them up. Read them, quietly and with a hand curled into her hair as she slept, warm and giving in drowsy unconsciousness (Eloise could be relaxed, she could) and he’d memorized the lines along with her until he sat in countless audiences and recited them along with the spotlit stage actress. Then he’d begun to learn the parts she took up off-stage as well, and the fourth wall splintered and then it cracked.
“I thought we were old enough for you to learn a new one,” Gabe said quietly, and he set down the teacup gingerly with the caution of a man prone to breaking things that small and none of the old casual anger that had had him tossing tea-sets at the living room wall. He looked at the old habit resurfacing in her, the slide of her fingers beneath that silky stuff as though she might pull apart her own character, wondered when it was you forgot those pieces that came unbidden, surfacing through the murky sea of forgotten fights, of unbroken misery and the smashed sense of certainty, of self. “Do you think maybe you could call off the production, Lu?” The old name, the disappointment smudging the edges of his voice.
For a moment, Gabriel thought of what exactly Eloise would do if he began, as she had once exhorted him to do, to talk. ‘Today, work told me I will be in Serbia for the next two months; I will probably kill more than one person a week. I will hear someone beg with no intention of mercy, and then write it up in a typed report before I come home and kiss the children’. They would never be old enough for the secrets to end; the thought was a flicker, a ripple in mild, rational calm Gabe pulled about him. He knew this argument, he knew his lines. He refused to speak them.
“How can I be less cruel?” He said it with patience, with care; with love.
"Our last production closed to poor reviews," she said, and there was sadness in her voice. She'd never been romantic enough to believe love could conquer. No, that wasn't like her people. Her parents liked each other well enough, and that sufficed. If she'd only liked him, and not loved him, then she suspected they would have done well enough themselves. It was the addition of a third act, one that involved enough caring to cause jealousy and anger, that was the problem. "And you haven't changed what the critics lambasted you for, have you?" Her gaze dropped to his leg. Still with the secrets, still with the absences and the distance and the things that had made her want to smash his head against a wall when he returned home after a long disappearance, smelling of other women and smoke that she attributed to fireplaces and romance, not to guns or trouble.
But enough of that, and what good would calling off the production do?
She rose to her feet, collecting her cup, removing her prop from the scene and setting it back beside the pot. She turned then, back against the counter and hands propped there, against that old wood. She was not to the woman to cross her arms across her middle when she decided to be blunt; there was no need for protection of her underbelly.
"Gabriel, the production is my life, and it will continue when you limp out that door and disappear to wherever it is you go," she said, too calmly. Usually the growing calm led to screaming; he would know that. "You must take me as you find me, because I refuse to yearn for your touch again, not when it will only end the same way it did the last time."
She shook her head at his question about the cruelty. "You're not capable of it."
The calm had a nervous fragility that bordered on histrionic. It tasted like too-sweet tea and violets, like cold meals eaten standing up out of the fridge from the prettily-proportioned plates that had been neatly saran-wrapped long after the appointed time and the glasses of wine. Gabe felt it skitter through the shop, for all the induced white calm and the green things and the books and it tore apart some of the hush. The cold tea was abandoned; trying for civility had been too saccharine for his own taste. Gabe reached for the cane; the care he took with one broad palm set against the chair’s side and the short pause as weight transferred between the chair and the cane and with determination, not on the leg, took time. He did not look up and he did not make eye-contact with his wife; perhaps it was because it took entirely too much concentration to get himself out of the ill-conceived sitting place and perhaps it was because there was no way at all to make it look easy.
Once standing, a little of the unruffled easiness came back; the coat fell back into severe black lines that largely obscured the leg. Gabe was careful; one hand was very steady on the top of the cane but standing, he was of a height to smile at her. He did; it was a fond, tired thing, well worn and slightly shabby and it made much of the lines it found on his face to emphasize. “I’m glad you’re well, Lu,” he said, as simply and politely and blandly as any time she’d encouraged him to say such things to strangers, and he leaned, a swaying forward, to put just the edge of his lips to her cheek and no more, back and upright in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it. Enough time to inhale violets and sadness, old books and clean soap.
“I’m not going anywhere for a while,” he said carefully. “So I’ll be trying to get the kids in a routine again. See them more often.” The smile reached his eyes that time. “I’ll call first.” It went. He turned with slow difficulty, and he made the best of the black coat and the distribution of weight for the limping out of the store to be minimal.
She remained admirably calm through all of it. His difficult rising, that approach that brought him close enough for her to remember precisely what it was like to close the distance. She did not close her eyes when he leaned to kiss her cheek, though she wanted to. She looked polite, unbothered by all of it, except the calm did not quite settle in the brown of her eyes as it should. She took the information that he would remain in the area for a while without argument. She knew what that meant; she'd lived it often through the years. And then a call would come, and the holiday would be over. The jealousy and loneliness would settle. She had not forgotten.
"Do," she managed to say of him calling first. She considered telling him not to disappoint them, the children, but he'd learn that lesson himself. It had been months this time, and they were like injured things left behind to lick their own wounds. They would not make it easy for him, and she thought it right, even as she worried about the foreign pain in his eyes and the awkwardness of his gait. And more than anything, she hated that he made her want to reach out for him before he left.
But the Murphys were made of strong stuff, and she counted herself among the strongest.
Once the door closed, the curtain fell, and she was once again alone on the stage, she walked to the door and calmly turned the sign to indicate that Playbill was, alas, dark. She sat herself down on one of the chairs between front and rear of the shoppe, obscured by foliage and backed by Tennessee Williams, and there she bent over herself, face in her hand, a sob breaking the silence.