Gabriel Reed (matchesmade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-24 14:57:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | jane foster, remus lupin |
Who: Gabriel and Eloise
What: More sads.
Where: Tomes
When: Recently
Warnings: Implied adult themes
Tomes was quiet. Restful on a weekday, too early for students from the local university to come hide amid its dusty shelves. Too early for the homeless and the street urchins to come in for a reprieve from Las Vegas' endless heat. Too early, yet, for the girl who worked the register downstairs to show up with her ill-slept eyes and her skirts that smelled of long evenings in strange beds. Too early for anyone save Eloise, who walked the four-flights of stairs on bare feet with tiny pebbles denting the bottoms from walking outside throughout the evening. Quiet, it almost felt like the world was nothing save books and shelves and her.
She'd no true and clear notion if she liked the mornings. Once, when there had been pristine walls and children rising too early for the likes of her headache, she'd hated the sunrises that came too soon for beauty rest. Night, the dark moon with her kinder light, had always been her muse. The sun was cruelty and aging, reality in the form of heat and bright, and Eloise had no interest in her illumination, not any longer. Young, she'd twirled beneath that brightness, and she'd reasoned that the sun's rays existed to bring out the spun gold that lived in her blonde little girl's curls. But those years had gone, as years did, and now she was lines beneath the sun, and ever more of them with each day that passed.
She unlocked the front door, and she propped it upon a book, and she retreated from the oppressively dry heat that demanded entrance to the little shop that tried to emulate something it would never truly be. But that was the entire point of this city she so abhorred. Pretend towers, pretend statues, pretend churches, and a pretend diva past her years.
Tea, jasmine, and she intentionally left it cool, and she set it upon the shelf in the room with the old piano. She sipped, the shadow of a woman in a dress the 1920s had discarded, bare arms and bare knees and only the dirty soles of her feet betraying anything of color. Her pale hair was loose about her face, and her makeup was stage perfect. She looked like a thing prone to crumbling; she looked like a thing made of the shop, not human in any facet. She'd lost weight in the prior months, before madness and doctors and papers that said she'd gone nervous. Her cheeks were gaunt, age upon them in their thinness, and she reached a narrow wrist for her teacup between refrains of Lacrimosa, from Mozart's Requim.
He did not look as if he pretended much of anything. The cane in his hand was worn now, scraped from catching on things, the polish had dulled down to something utilitarian and useful and the limp was almost entirely unnoticeable by now. Gabriel had not chosen the early morning because it suited him, because he thought anything of sunshine and the thin-washed look of the sky before the heat truly worked itself into Vegas summer. He was much lined, that man in his soft collared shirt with a package of papers beneath his arm, much lined and the look in his eyes was not soft nor questing, he did not seek Tomes for paperbacks and losing oneself beneath lines of dusty print. He was straight, despite the list to his shoulders that took account of the stick at his side, he was tall. He looked like sleep was something that had been put aside with the freshness of papering over the cracks; coffee and a shower so cold it felt like awake should feel and an hour of the kind of paperwork that was both dry and onerous, that felt like a pendulum swinging in an empty space.
Preston - HQ, he thought of him with the contrived distance of code names and the hiss of static that were communicators, co-workers in a clockwork machine should not, could not, observe the humanity in one another for the moment in which that humanity must be compressed and set aside, the inevitable understanding that betrayal happened, that humanity could not distract - had been invaluable. The nanny was installed, a quiet woman thoroughly over-qualified for two children under-ten, both of whom were called ‘precocious’ in a murmur that was not particularly approving. Routine had swept into the quiet, white house, packets of lurid-colored cereal and the detritus of school prospectuses, ballet class programs, soccer balls rebounded around the overgrown back garden. It had been a vacation in his children’s eyes, bright with anticipation of the end of the holiday - until it had become clear that there was no home to go to, that this (the house with the bedrooms that still smelled like fresh paint, where things could not be ordered as they had been as long as memory began because the rooms were not those that they had been) was now home. He would have preferred crying. He would have preferred the tantrums that had become an understood byproduct of two over-tired and largely confused children, neither of whom he knew particularly well.
Instead, he had watched them set themselves adrift.
Personal leave had gone to hang. He had used resources without a thought for protocol, he had combed the databases for the registries, for the properties, for death and life in equal measure, blank-eyed as to what he might find. And he had located an address, one beyond the lost home and the no-longer-there store of playbills and folios, the place he had known.
The piano music trickled past him like water running over and around stone. He filled the doorway briefly, the sunlight stoppered by shoulders and height and then allowed to spill through into air that smelled of dust, of paper thin and fragile as onion skin. There was no one else; there would be no one else at an hour like this but the woman who owned it, who had written her name on a lease as she had boxed up her children’s lives like they meant nothing. Gabriel was a tight column of curdled fury, boiled down to cold flatness, fastened behind his teeth. “Did you decide this before or after you left?”
She heard the footfalls as uneven percussion to the piano's song. The cane predictable in its unevenness, and she slowed her fingers upon the keys to mate with the uneven gait. Slow, fast, slow. Light, press, light. And she didn't turn when he entered the room, though she knew he was there. Though she knew who was there. She wondered how it would be upon the stage, briefly, in that moment before he spoke. Behind her closed eyes, she saw the lights and the faceless crowd that was nothing but reflected bulbs of adoring white. Her feet pressed the piano's pedals, and they sounded nothing like the boards, and she knew the stage had left her behind once more. Here, amid dust and books of lives that were not real, she was left with only herself. It was jarring, and it was unpleasant.
When he spoke, she did not turn. She could imagine his face. She could imagine the way his tongue pressed against angry, straight teeth. She could imagine lines and displeasure. She could remember a decade of these things; she did not need to see.
"I decided nothing," she said, her voice strangely sibilant with requiem, a verbal elegy. "I made no decisions while I was away." And she had not. She had not decided to eat, nor sleep, nor wake, nor drink. She had not decided to rise up again, after those things had left her an empty husk. She had written, but that was not choice. That was an unraveling; it was not choice. She knew he would not like her answer. It was not founded in heavy footsteps and realities. It came not with bruises upon skin after being gone for months. It was somewhere high above their heads, and he had never been terribly good at reaching there. "Decisions are no longer my purview, Gabriel, darling."
The music had changed, slid from something effortless and ambiguous as elevators and the prelude as the audience filed in to something sensitive, reactive. Gabriel did not know the details of adante and presto, he could not have named the notes that prickled across the stave, treble nor bass but he knew the hands on the keys, he could picture long-delicate fingers, thin wrists and narrow palms. He was used to the cane now, he did not need to consider the particular dangers of threadbare rugs thrown across hardwood floors (Tomes was not Playbill, even if he was struck by the same sensation of intrusion, of being present without invitation in a space that held Eloise in it as obviously as scent hanging in air) but the progression was slow. Anger compressed and held out of the way until convenience was cool only in the impossibilty to feel incandescence. Gabriel had years of sliding in and out of himself; it was the only way how.
He had imagined nothing. His imagination was empty, it provided him only with memory, twisted and shadowed and tattered to illustrate anything that could be prompted, nudged forward. The footfall, distinct and heavy and the shuffle of the cane, stopped just beyond the piano, the woman in vestigial white who sat behind it, a composition of milk and cream and sunshine. The manila folder slapped down against the polished surface of the piano, spilling paper. Paper could sop up blood, dry tears, paper was dry as bone no matter what was printed upon it. Paper was fact, and his signature had dried on it, in the same ink pen with which he had written awkward-stilted notes that had not been (but their shadows were, the intent sketched out beneath them) love letters.
He looked at her now, quietly and Tomes did not envelop him in quiet, it did not swallow him in calm. Gabriel was separate and apart and the music was cool as milky tea.
“Really.” It was pebbles tumbled into water, it was the calm of fear and anger coalesced into something that could not pass above heads, spiral like dust motes. “You sold the house.”
She turned her attention back to the keys, ivory and faded and as old as the bird's bones in her wrists felt. She thought them an extension, one of the other, and she knew not which one began and which one ended.
That slap of manila, before, would have made her jump. It would have brought fire to her blue eyes in a way that heated the pallor that perpetually surrounded her. Warming the ice, and it would have managed. But she didn't move now. The melody did not shift or switch. It was a slide of blue eyes and nothing more, then forward again. She'd not seen the papers, of course. She'd never seen the papers, but she knew what they were. She longed for her tea, cold and familiar, and she longed for tar and ash in her lungs, but they were there and there, elsewhere and past him, and she did not move.
"The solicitor sold the house," she corrected. She'd sold nothing. How tawdry a thought, and mama had always said talk of income of income unrefined. "It no longer had purpose," she explained of the home she'd shared with the children. The home where she had waited for word that never came. That home, which had been shucked off like an ill-fitting dress after rehearsal.
And she could hear his anger. She knew that anger. It was an old friend, a beloved companion, and she was glad of it now. Years she had suffered, and now she enjoyed the grief she brought him. It was unintentional, but he would not realize that. Gabriel, always so kind upon the surface and so selfish beneath the skin.
She turned to look at him, then, all bird's bones and so much gauntness that the dress barely remained upon her shoulders. "Do you even think to ask? No, no, not Gabriel. Gabriel is always in the right. Gabriel, with his secrets and his cruelty and the smile that purports itself kind. Do you even think to ask, with your cane and your anger dripping from your skin like sweat in the desert sun? Do you even think to ask? You think yourself righteous. I say you are pretense, Gabriel Reed. I say you have always been pretense, and I only never noticed until now."
He had looked at her as she scattered distance between her and action, the lawyer (a cipher; email addresses and silkily polite replies, Gabriel imagined pale gray suits and sleek hair, the pallor of living in corner offices with wide windows glassing out sunlight) and his eyes slid over her. Computer files that picked out book records, authorship eliding with the signature on a lease lapsing into records he knew like memory, hospital certificates and newspaper reports that spanned back a decade and more, they did not tell him that she looked thin, like the footlight-bright flame of her was slowly but steadily being smudged into charcoal and ash. She had always been thin (he had always felt that he was trying desperately with hands too big and too clumsy for the job, to hold something china-cup brittle that would snap before he dropped it) and her heartbeat had drummed like a star against her rib-cage, audibly and awfully bright. She was sharply thin now, like the spindles of calligraphy, like the staves of her music, like a character whittled down to nothing by the third act. She did not look ill, not traditionally so but he imagined the way illness was in books, the kinds of books turned into plays.
He heard ‘it no longer had a purpose’ and he thought of Ernest’s bleak white face and Phee’s tears - the ones that came after the tantrums, the drummed heels and the clenched fists. The tears that snaked down her chin until her cheek was salt beneath his lips, until she cried so quietly it was as if she’d already given up. “It had purpose,” whether he was speaking to her or to himself or to Tomes itself, it was not immediately clear. Gabriel rarely spoke without purpose, but Gabriel was rarely fury and confusion, Gabriel had the clarity of chess-boards, pieces moved in advancement of the prior move. It had held purpose. It had held childhood, it had held memory. He thought that they had lost something quite precious, quite apparent in the boxing up, the taking apart, something Gabriel did not know well enough himself to put words too. She turned, the sunshine stroked along the plane of a too-sharp cheek and the anger, the flame of it, flared down to nothing. It was quiet.
She declaimed like she was on-stage, the sunlight willing spotlight. Gabriel stood with the cane leaned against his knee and the papers spilled across the polish of the piano. Pretense; he did not smile, he did not glower, his face did not flicker. Gabriel could pretend even as pretense undid itself, hollows and ashes. He considered it now, a span of years, a shuffle of cards. There had been a great deal, of both. “What did you expect me to ask?” he said. Calmly. Conversation. The politeness of distance, of time. He shut out hotels, of truths told. Eloise declaimed and he thought strongly and willingly of all the things he had never been, words on paper in files, in background checks.
"It had no purpose," she repeated, because she would not give in this. He knew nothing of the purpose of such a house, this man who was never home. And he raged now because he needed to be. Responsibility cast upon his shoulders, and she laughed a broken little laugh. It was a teacup laugh, a thing made of hairline fractures and crafted too small to hold anything of substance. "You lament the looks upon their faces," she said knowingly, because she knew those looks, oh, she knew those looks. "I lived them for years upon years, those looks and trembling lips. You bear no crown of thorns, Gabriel Reed. There is no stigmata upon you. You are no martyr. Alone, I did it for years, while you didn't walk through the door with any regularity. Now, it is your turn." And so it had turned, all without her expecting it. "It had no purpose," she said, because a house was useless if it was not a home. She had never known a home, but only walls, and even her illusory dream house was illusion.
"I expected nothing. I have come to expect nothing," she admitted, and she turned her attentions to the keys once more. "Nothing was my companion this summer, and she suited me well." No words. No food. No drink. Nothing, save what was forced, and here she was, keys and the piano, and she did not care for his polite distance. It was an axe. It was a severing. It made her narrow shoulders shudder, and she rose without warning and brushed past him.
She was almost immaterial as she climbed the stairs to the topmost room in the dusty crowding. It was her room, a typewriter, a view, a small bed that she wouldn't have wished on a servant. There, the cold tea sat upon a side table. There, it smelled of cigarettes and stale. Papers. It was papers he liked, was it? And very well. Papers it should be.
When she returned, she held out her own papers. Medical papers, all stamped as they ought, from the best (and most discreet) doctors the Murphys could find. Medically unfit and mental break and best if the father. "Take you bile and vitriol and spill it on another woman, Gabriel, for I've done with everything, and your acid will no longer burn its way through my skin." She paused, that nothing wrist still outstretched. "I loved you so," she admitted, and there was hate there, hate in the declaration, and hate in the vulnerability, and hate in every syllable that fell. And equal parts love, and that was the hell of it. "Perhaps you will serve them better than you served me."
Cane passed from both hands into the left. The right stretched out for the paperwork and if he had - if he could, without the illusion of balance lost, the weight spread over both feet instead of the one, he would have taken the wrist along with it, the snowflake-fragility of it grotesque and pathetic at once. She had suited thinness, she had suited her own pallidity even if he’d laughed, ordered for five instead of two, sat with dishes congealing around them, taken pleasure in color, in fullness, in the alteration of Eloise from a creature made from too-bright lights and shadow into living flesh. He read, carefully.
There was no hurry, no flicker of alacrity required by dramatics and sunshine, accusation shiny-bitter as poison. Gabriel was not a doctor, he knew very little of medicine beyond the fundamentals of the field, of how blood flowed and how quick death might be if it did not. There was nothing of blood, in the paperwork and nothing of bones. There was no bodily injury but the intangibility of a mind. He had avoided psychiatrists (didn’t they all? The almost-civilians who classified and clarified, who observed the individuals who ran headlong toward danger as if they themselves were dangerous, a heartbeat-different and to be ticked off, de-classified, made redundant and in themselves dangerous by their obsoletion) but he read a psychiatrist’s statement now, bland and dry as sand.
He let that paper file drop, too, beside the other, the signatures in different inks above black print. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Not angry. Bewildered, lost without a map. Gabriel knew nothing of his children beyond what he learned presently, a linguist without language. The nanny knew more than he did, swept in comfortably capable in herself but it was the end of the evening (evenings he would have to give back, to work, to assignments, to locked connections) when small bodies wedged themselves close enough for heartbeats to match up, slow to sync. “I’m no damn saint, Eloise, but I’m not the damn devil.” He let the paper drop and his fingers caught on her wrist, the rough rasp of finger and thumb circled not-touching but above slither of skin stretched too-tightly over bone.
“They miss you,” he said, instead of you hurt them, and if his voice had softened it was sunshine, it was the bleed of light over china-pale skin, the spidery-thinness of the wrist in the circle of his finger and thumb. “Why didn’t you say anything?” Instead of I love you. He knew then, Gabriel who had pretended, lied long enough that it didn’t matter if he did it longer, that he would not tell her. It would be, he thought as the bitterness bled like ink in water, cruel, with the spilled paperwork and the doctor’s ink. Selfish.
And she expected him to believe it all an act. Another performance and her upon the stage, and she wondered if he knew the difference between lack and artifice. Perhaps not. They had been passionate once, when things were good and new, but they had never crawled below skin in that way that made breathing something shared. She wasn't sure if he was meant for it. She wasn't sure if she was meant for it. Once, she'd thought the answer a resounding yes, applause and certainty and a deep bow with roses at the end. But she hadn't realized that there was not enough of her to adore that was real. And she'd not realized that he was tangible things, and not whimsy and meaning in a ray of sunlight.
Why didn't she tell him? And she scoffed then, lighting a cigarette from her sallow hand and forgetting about the piano and its keys. "I tried. You didn't listen." And he hadn't. They'd spoken, hadn't they? Hadn't she said? She sucked on the cigarette, and she let the smoke fill her hollow lungs. "You didn't know how, perhaps," she admitted. And did anyone, truly? Did anyone understand any of the Murphy children with their grown up dysfunctions and textbook neglect that turned bitter-bite cruel? No, perhaps not. He was a man of words, of directness, and maybe he hadn't known that she'd been dying on the inside. The divorce, the divorce had been the first cry, but he'd slept through it as he'd slept through Phee's difficult first nights.
"They miss their lives. They don't miss me, darling." Because she was no mother, and she had never been. It had all been the act. It had all been the performance, and it had never been truth. And now, more than ever, they did not miss her. This her? This her would forget their lunches, just as she forgot her own, and she would wander lost and shoeless when time came for dinner.
His fingers were memories around her wrist, and yet she could not remember. And why hadn't she said anything? "I said everything," she informed him. "I have nothing left to say, Gabriel." She didn't mean just to him, and the faraway look in her eyes when she tugged her wrist free was indicative of that. The cigarette found her lips again, trembling fingers and shoulders that rattled under the weight of her bones. "I said it, but like the audience, I am not what you what wanted. Return to your Lauren, with her strong jaw and substantial arms. I am made of air and nothingness, and there is nothing left to me but fractured things and a desire to make others feel the ache that lives within my bones."
It did not occur to Gabriel not to believe paperwork and scrawling signatures, it did not occur to him to find reasons not to believe. He had dealt long enough in absolutes, things were provided or they were not. He watched the smoke curl from the end of her cigarette, as insubstantial as she, and he thought now perhaps, there had been abstracts he had not seen. She was declaiming (he had always hated declamation, he had stood rocky-absolute and resisted words that sounded as if they were written, arguments like paper flames and painted lips, as artificial as stage make-believe; Gabriel liked constancy and he liked the physical, he liked the truth that could be pinned down long after its wings had ceased to flutter) but he said nothing of that. He thought, with the phantom of her bird-bones in his fingertips, that perhaps she had been tatters long before. He did not know. He did not know what to look for. He did not know what to see. She was the first woman he had learned how to love and he thought she might be the last.
She had learned to forget, there in that country of thinly cut sandwiches and watered-down tea, she had learned to forget as she had learned once to begin. That was, Gabriel considered now, as it ought to be somehow. He said nothing of Laura, he did not correct a name. He smiled; it was quiet. It was small. It was a thing all corners of the mouth and stilled hands folded into his pocket and somehow weighted like pebbles beneath water - sad. He did not think the children missed their lives. The boys he’d grown up with, their breath mingling in sleep until they were one organism that dreamed in misery, they had not held on to paper-thin memory of things they had owned, rooms they had lived in but of feel. He had treasured, long after it had become so thin as to have never existed, the memory of a face, sweeter in distance.
“They miss you,” he said now, and the anger had slid away, embers unkindled, ash soft-scattered. “I signed,” the paperwork spread beneath the doctor’s looping writing, it didn’t matter so much; Gabriel thought fleetingly of the sister, the brother that had been elegant shadows in the corners of his own graceless presence in their home at Christmas, at the awkward celebration with cold wound into his bones, “But they’re your kids, Lu.” He had not told her, of loss. He had told her what she had asked for, there were lines in government records that he had learned to read off as blankly as if they were truth. There had been few enough times that she had not been angry or hurt or joy, pure as flame in emotion bright enough to be seen in the back row - few enough when she had been undone behind them. He supposed it was what people saw. What people shared. When they loved off-stage as well as on.
“They’ll love you until they grow up, if you’re gone. Don’t make them stop.” He did not reach for her, but his fingers twitched at his side. Gabriel was government trained but he was readable, then. “I don’t give a damn what doctors say,” Doctors said all kinds of things. They stood up in court behind them, they lied, doctors, Gabriel was certain, were not gods, “You’re more than nothing.”
"There was nothing to do but sign," she pointed out. And perhaps that cruelty, but it was what it was. There had been the option of her parents, which he would have found intenable. There had been the option of adoption, which even said parents would not have permitted. He had lived his life as though a co-signer, as though she had purchased the children, as though he was merely there if she missed a payment. It was a reality that he was not, in fact, a co-signer. "No law says it is me and not you that raises. Society, Gabriel, perhaps, but no law." And she did not feel sorry. Maybe she was beyond feeling sorry. Perhaps that emotion was as dead to her as the happiness she had once felt in his arms, when she'd believed he could cherish her as something more than a token.
"Your time has come to parent, Gabriel." No guilt in the words. No concern for his desires in this. The responsibility had been cast off with all the others. Perhaps, had the children remained with her as intended, it would not have happened. But the long summer had found her broken and alone, no one to cling to and no one to call. She would never have reached out to him, not after their interactions before her departure. She would not have done, and her parents had not been an option, and she had cracked as untended for things did. It was late, and the damage was done, and being here among books was just becoming her own form of tome. A story, the mad woman who walked the streets without shoes at twilight. She never sleeps, they would whisper. And people would come and see, and it would not be for her talent or her beauty, for those things were dead and gone.
She shook her head at his insistence they would love. "You cannot predict love, Gabriel. I know that now, better than any. They hate you as much as they love you. Always gone, never there when they scraped a knee or fell off a chair. You're the stranger they longed for, always at windows with their little hands pressed to glass. You will thank me, in the end, when you are old, surrounded by grandchildren, and I am bones."
She laughed at his comment about doctors, a girl mad as birds, and yet no longer a girl at all. "You may tell the hospital attendants that," she told him. "You may tell them you don't give a damn. They will tell you I refuse to eat or drink. You may tell them." And it would do nothing, because he was a man carved in stone, and he didn't understand giving up. That, she knew, was something Gabriel Reed was incapable of.
He did not know that she cast away feeling as if it had never been. He could have told her, there with the cane wedged firm against the floor like an anchor come to rest (Gabriel forever felt adrift when Eloise was close, the tempests she drew with her were a tumult he rarely sailed easily, small boat without the old ballast of hands and touch) of how what it was he had felt lodged itself beneath the broad bone of his collarbone and breast. How he felt it breathing in and out and that it had remained even when that bone had been broken. He did not. He did had never put into words exactly what it was she had meant, that she meant still (if one could believe the remnants and tatters, the shadows that danced as if they were still whole of dreams and of desires). He did not try now. He didn’t argue about raising his children, either. It was truth, blankly squared off. It was law; Preston in emails and then the lawyer afterwards once again and Gabriel remembered sitting across at a long table in which Eloise was quiet, cream-poured-into-tea calm beside the torrent of fury of a hired dog that had been the lawyer, the lawyer who demanded he sign over his children in full, as if it were a dream.
He did not argue. He did not tell her of truths that had never been told, of the simple fastness of feeling. She had borrowed words and he had none, gestures and touch had been a language once. Gabe would have denied a history re-written, cherishing that had been bright and livid as living itself but he did not know enough to deny.
He had not dreamed of grandchildren and he leaned on the cane now, his hip rolling forward with the easy motion of the undamaged leg an unthinking lean toward the twist of paper and the bitter smoke, “May I?” It was a question, brief - for the packet of cigarettes that lay along the piano and he pulled one free and drew a lungful of something he associated strongly with being someone other than himself, a reflexive ease to the action that said it was not the first time. It would likely not be the last. It tasted like smoke, like insubstence.
“Why, Lou?” It sounded like disbelief, from a man who believed the world could be understood, the spectrum of things that could not were never meant to be far-reaching, to things like life and death. “Why would you stop eating? Drinking? What happened over there?”
Back in the days when they sat across tables with solicitors at each elbow and the anger between them spilled out on the table, she had not known it would stick. She had believed, then, truly, that he would realize what his absences had caused. That, like a rogue on the stage, he would have learned he could not live without. That life, without her, was no life at all and, unlike Dickinson, would be unwilling to leave life upon that shelf. But that had not come to pass, and she had been left in darkness with the children, and that darkness had been a thing with teeth and claws. She had never liked the darkness. As a child, she had imagined it a gaping maw beneath her bed, and she had turned on all the lights and screwed her eyes shut until morning. But she was no child, and the divorce had been a severing. It had been harder after, and she had not thought it could be so. She had thought the pain would ebb with papers signed and distance between.
But it had not, and then the final curtain had fallen. After much fighting - and she'd only fought for the reconcilliations - there had been nothing but the hiss of the audience, the boredom from the crowd, and even his intolerance. The children, small faces and learned displeasure, could not coax away that nothing. And then they were gone entirely, and life returned to something without any of them, and she found she could wilt there. She found she wanted to wilt there.
She nodded when he asked after the cigarette, because what was it to her if he closed his lips round a fag and sucked in death? Nothing, and it would serve him right. It would serve everyone with a chance at happiness right. Why should she be the only to feel this ache? And she wanted the world to share it with her. She wanted to share the selfish emptiness she was certain no one but her understood.
She didn't answer his question. There was no answer to his question, not in a language he spoke and understood. She turned her back, and began toward the stair.
Once, when Gabriel was young, he had learned to read.
He had been a boy amongst many other boys all of whom there was no time for and all of whom required time for forms to be completed, for entries in databases to be made, for records to be completed. He had had attention when very small; he had come from the kind of mother who was considered to be lacking and there were words like ‘developmentally challenged’ and ‘in danger of not meeting goals’ written up in official ink and filed away in cabinets. He had been expected to, at the prescribed time, to sit in a very hard plastic chair with his legs dangling a foot clear of the floor and read from a book, a number of sentences to show that he could do it. Every other boy had done so, Gabriel Reed was to be no different. But he did not. He did not open his mouth and he did not read along. A flurry of paperwork flew into his file like birds flocking for winter. Had there been budget, psychologists or psychiatrists would doubtless have been incurred. (There were budget cuts, staffing change-over. He was moved from one facility to another; he was small, he was lost.)
He was capable of reading. He learned to read. He read. He read what he liked and he read how he liked and he read silently, like all small boys who learn that silence is safety. They had not known. He did not perform as they demanded, as they encouraged with their pens above their paperwork ready to check the box. They thought him incapable. They thought it a problem, that he did not learn as they thought he should, that he did not demonstrate it as he ought.
Gabriel loved the way he had once read. He loved with an unwillingness to lose and a sparsity of understanding how the paperwork might be completed, what the perception might be. He loved privately, with the sanctity of a small boy set upon the only things that were his; himself. He knew what she expected in fighting. He knew the lines, he’d read the script. He’d thrilled to it, once.
He was a small boy once again, with his weight heavy on a cane that reminded him he would never move the way he had once done, with the freedom to do as he liked, to thrill to a fight that ended roughly, the scrape of plaster over skin or the shattered china scattered across the floor and his lips hot on her skin. She did not look like the woman he would leave, when recalled, mussed hair a spill of sunshine on white cotton, a smile that the back-rows could see, feline and the rasp of his own skin raspberry-pink on her throat, on her cheek. She looked like a china doll, one that had been left behind, one that was leaving him behind with the children he loved as desperately as he loved her, who demanded thoughtlessly with arms around his neck or with their sleep-warm weight heavy against his at the end of the day.
“Please,” there was something, perhaps, of the small boy there in the man who uncleaved himself from the security of where he stood, who rocked forward, reached as a man might chase a shadow into corners. Something of the man who had never been told exactly what was on the form, what was the expectation, what was needed of love that had come as simply and painfully as breathing. “Lu. What can I do?” And - faltering, boy who learns of files, of their existence, even if he knows nothing of what they hold, “Was there something I should have done?”
She had never considered him a boy, not this man with his rough voice and his big hands. And perhaps she ought have done when Earnest was born. Perhaps she ought to have seen the man in the child, but she did not, as she did not see Phee as any extension of herself. And this was the way with the Murphys. The division between parents and children too wide, the gap too insurmountable to look for sameness. Little people, the Murphy children were, born to a purpose they had all, to the last, failed to accomplish. And so he was Gabriel, Gabriel and always Gabriel. And Gabriel, always, would he be.
The please was an unexpected turning, and yet it did not change her mind about anything at all. The man she had left her stage behind for, that man had not been prone to pleases. This man, the one with the question on his tongue, he was a result of her appearance now. He was not real, and this was no place for him. Just as she had known, when she left the desert on that fateful trip to disillusionment, that his hatred for her had eclipsed whatever he believed to be love, she knew that this was a moment, and moments weren't real. Moments were scenes, enacted for the benefit of someone, and then they were gone. The audience always filed out of the theater and returned to the lives that suited them. The actors were left alone, once the applause had quieted.
And yet, standing there, she could not bring herself to heap the truth upon his shoulders. Was there something he should have done? A million somethings, and yet saying it would not turn back the clock and fix what had shattered. "You should go, Gabriel." And that was all. She moved to the steps, her hand shaky instability on the stair that would lead up to her sanctuary, where she would replay all of this until she died a little more inside from it. "That is all that is left for you to do. We are too old, too ill-suited, too unkind for anything more. Go, you selfish man, and I will wrap myself in my own selfishness, and the world will continue turning until I am gone, but a mad memory for you to share with someone who is, hopefully, better suited to demand your love."
Her back to him, she continued upward.
Gabriel had never been an actor. He knew the lights the way an audience knew them, artificial sunshine that shone across the shoulders of the pieces that moved across the stage like parts of clockwork. He did not know how warm they were, how bright, how blinding. He had never been an actor. There were no words written that he had learned formally, to stand upon a mark on the stage and speak a part. He had learned lines as she had, with a script folded into his hands and a cup of coffee to his left as her tea-cup sat to his right at a distance. He had read everything that was un-highlighted obligingly and he had learned them, with the government-issue mind honed and sharpened for acquiring detail but they did not fit cleanly into his mouth.
He could hear the rhythms, when Eloise spoke words other people had written, the way they patterned. Fresh. New. He could hear them but he could not speak them. He was not an actor now. The words in his mouth fitted across his tongue, it occurred to him then as he watched the viola curve of her spine, her back retreat in ivory-colored stuff that floated like a reminder of how painfully they had failed at marriage, that hers sounded too perfect to be real. Too pared to their bones, to the exhausting truth seen sharply and starkly without the clutter of language. They were too clean, a scalpel-blade and yet - Gabriel did not retreat, he did not stand down from battle-lines; he did not know he could.
He would have denied none of it. Had it been his to declaim, to set aside, had it harmed neither of them. But from here he could see the way had it harmed neither of them to do so, made it easier. thin cracks in her he could see, like fine porcelain broken and shattered and reclaimed once again.
“You’re not a damn memory.” His voice was rough, he’d learned, in the late stages, to stand calm, rock as her tempest raged around. To stand true through the arguments and let them sputter to nothing. He was not calm presently, “you’re not going to be stages," to stand rock as her tempest raged. To avoid the arguments even as they sputtered to nothing. He was not calm now. “You’re not going to be a damn memory for a long time.”
She stopped once upon the stairs, that rough voice sounding old and familiar, something she remembered from mornings in bed, warm and between sheets of white, the sun shining in. Those days, when she counted them out in memories, felt slight. They weighed less than air, and yet they were false-brilliant bright. She knew now that they had been lies. She knew they'd never been, and she'd only wanted them to be. She had lied to herself, an actress to her own mind, playing a part that was not true, and it was only now that she saw it. She was a skeleton upon those stairs, unmoving, and she thought herself dead then. And whyever not? Whyever not, when it was all she wanted, that rest from false memories and rejection. With eyes closed, the truth was not as it was, and she did not mind being lost in the daydreams, the eveningdreams, the wandering until everything hurt and she felt nothing at all.
She moved.
She did not reply. She did not answer. She climbed the staircase, and she closed the door at the top. Below, the girl had arrived, a jingle of bell and the store was open to any and all. They would be sleeping on the worn couches soon, the homeless. They would be kissing in dusty corners soon, the teenagers skipping classes and knowing no one would seek out their groping here, in this place. And the elderly. The elderly with no one left, and she understood them best.
She locked the door. It would not open again that day.
He waited until he heard the rasp of metal in the lock, a small sound to the chime of bells. Gabriel did not know much of madnesses that weren’t trauma, weren’t blood and practicality, men who were used to being ciphers who lost a little of that which they had to keep hold of to know themselves again. But he believed, that paperwork - his palm slid over the sheets, spread the papers, learned the names of doctors written there. She was not the woman he’d come looking for, hard and glittering and an inability to yield behind the patina of stage lacquer and manners. She was not Eloise as he remembered, a summer had undone her and Gabriel (who knew, always, what protocol dictated, what was next) knew nothing with a flood of uncertainty and near-panic that was seeing her unravelled and the thread hanging loose like a threat of more.
He picked up the paperwork - both the doctors and the children, gathered it back up and the cane clipped a path to the door. Eloise had been the slow but certain rise of effervescence in a glass, the certainty by which his own career was guided. Gabe took things apart, he didn’t put them together - but even as he turned his back on a room upstairs and a woman within it that was totem as much as she was the re-established bone-deep surety of what she meant - it was without destruction in mind.