Page 22 of Gifted & Talented

“Don’t make it sound so remarkable, Art, I’ll hate to think I’ve lost touch with my proletarian roots,” she said in something that was possibly a joke, possibly deadly serious. “Where is Yves?”

“IHOP, I think?” Arthur looked around for him but he had vanished. “I didn’t even get a chance to give him the address of where we’re going. Wherearewe going, by the way?” he asked, hoping she’d say almost anything else aside from what she’d inevitably say.

Just then, Arthur caught a glimpse of a phone camera flashing from his periphery and realized why Gillian had driven herself, and why she had disembarked from the driver’s seat to greet him. He had forgotten for a moment that he was still a widely recognizable politician; that someone wouldalmost certainly write derogatorily about him; that if he was trending anywhere it was never good news; that he was not yet Riot’s father. Well, he was that, but not to anyone else’s knowledge. That was a warm little secret he carried around in the center of his chest, a little bubble of molten gold for only him.

I love you,whispered the old ghost. Was it Arthur himself, speaking to Riot? Was that the love he’d been meant for all along?

“Darling?” Gillian prompted him. She had opened the trunk of the rental car, or what Arthur assumed was a rental car, though it was possible she had already gone to his father’s house and picked out a vehicle of his. Thayer had liked Gillian, actually.She has bigger balls than youhad been one of Thayer’s favorite jokes. “We’ve got to get back. Meredith should be arriving any minute, and Eilidh’s on her way.”

“Where?” But he knew, of course. Where else did you go when your parents died but backward? Back to childhood. Back to the place he hadn’t called home for a decade, and arguably had not considered home before that.

Briefly, he felt a set of thin, uncertain arms wrapping around his waist and realized he’d been staring blankly into nothing. “Iamsorry,” said Gillian softly. “I know it’s not as simple a sadness as you’d like it to be, but it is sad, and I am sad with you.”

Arthur looked down at the top of his wife’s braided head with a little sense of shock before recalling her expertise in curating moments like this. He was grateful to her, could not do his job without her, would miss her to massive, constitution-riddling extent when the dust was finally settled. Maybe she wouldn’t mind staying in his life, being someone of importance to Riot? Maybe when you built your own family the titles were rendered unimportant, the traditional roles null and void.

Arthur leaned down to bury his nose in the familiar scent of her sensitive skin shampoo, the coconut oil that was essentially Gillian-scented. Elsewhere, the phone camera flashed again.

“Thank you,” Arthur managed roughly, and it was dignified, at least.

“You’re welcome,” replied Gillian, exhaling with visible relief once he disentangled himself and slid into the passenger side.

Arthur, Five Years Ago

Not a church wedding for them, they said at first. They were hip, cool, outdoorsy! Not a priest, but an old friend of Gillian’s! Not a stodgy old cake that no one would eat, but something unconventional and different! Donuts, a sign of the times!

But in the end, of course, they caved to expectations.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride!”

Light streamed in overhead through the stained glass, temporarily blinding Arthur as he leaned forward, one hand carefully angled alongside Gillian’s slender hip. They had practiced this several times—Gillian was meticulous about camera angles—but still, he caught a flicker of revulsion in the mahogany of her eyes, registering that not even frequent rehearsal or a nine-month engagement had done anything to make the moment more palatable for her.

Her lips were cool and soft, a little of the sacramental wine on her breath. Arthur closed his eyes and tried to be present in the moment, to liveinsidethe moment, to curl up in it, to take up all its space, to force it into a different shape, to beg the moment to transform, to be something different. They parted and Arthur saw his father’s unsmiling face out of the corner of his eye.

“She’s a good choice, you know.” The conversation between Thayer and Arthur on the evening of his and Gillian’s engagement had been almost laughably civilized, although it carried with it the usual undertone of cruelty, detectable only when Arthur’s father spoke to him in private. “Possibly too good a choice,” Thayer added, with a sense of impending bomb. “It’s—” The elder Wren waved an unflappable hand. “Transparent.”

He meant that Gillian was well educated but without the whiff of excess that Arthur couldn’t escape. She was, like Arthur, a first generation American on one side with some family lineage dating back to the traders of NewAmsterdam on the other. Unlike Arthur, though, Gillian was a bootstrap person—as in,shehad pulled herself up. Thayer, too, had been a bootstrap person. Arthur was not. Arthur was soft and spoiled. Arthur got the yips. Gillian was beautiful, but nottoobeautiful—more like architecturally well-made in an understated way. A feminist, whose politics were politely left-leaning but mostly unknown, because she did not say anything on social media. It was Arthur who was the radical, or who could afford to be one, anyway, because rich people recognized him as one of their own and trusted him to cave at some point, to be a capitalist in woke clothing the way people were so fashionably capable of being these days. Arthur was, of course, more sincere in his politics than that, and people knew it. Or so he believed at the time.

“Maybe we’re just exceptionally well matched,” suggested Arthur, in a tone that had won over the stricter teachers at boarding school and also, notably, Lou, but had never once worked on his father. As predicted, Arthur again struck out.

“What is she, Egyptian?” asked his father, who was not racist, or wasn’t racist in the way white men were usually not racist, which was that they did notsee color. They simply did not care for the personindividually—nothing that could be reasonably attributed to race, because they were frankly too evolved!

“French-Moroccan,” corrected Arthur. Gillian was technically multiracial—as was Arthur himself—but he knew which part specifically his father was asking about. “And Indian.”

“Not fully, though,” commented his father, presumably reflecting on Gillian’s father’s surname, which was Hayes. (Gillian’s was Yadav.)

“No, her father is from the far more exotic Kansas City.”

“She’s what, a lawyer?”

“She is.” Though she didn’t want to be. That was the appeal, she’d said on the first date. Gillian had always wanted to be a singer, actually. But she’d never make it, she wasn’t actually good enough, just mediocre, really. She loved it but wasn’t especially talented at it, which was the usual kind of personal tragedy befalling constituents of the world. She needed health insurance but hated the culture at her firm, wanted out of the rat race altogether. She was fairly confident they’d fire her in favor of some fresh, eager, newly ripened (the word “succulent” came to mind, or “luscious,” “sumptuous,” “young”) law school graduate over the option of promoting her to partnerand, thus, paying her what she was worth. She’d gone to law school only because her father had insisted that she do something, quote, sustainable. Her father was in manufacturing, her mother was a retired catalog model, neither career path was exceptionally fitting. She could have been a doctor, that was technically on the table, and with Gillian’s disarming directness and blazing, otherworldly competence, she did have a ring of neurosurgeon to her. She was never very good at science—she felt she could have been better at it had she really applied herself, but she just loved Shakespeare too much and there was really only so much time in the day—so then law school it was. But god, wasn’t it awful doing something just because your father wants you to?

(At which point Arthur said, “I think, at this moment, that if you came out of the ladies’ room with some sort of Sermon on the Mount, I’d seriously consider devoting myself to you body and soul,” to which Gillian correctly replied, “Arthur, my goodness, rein it in.”)

Anyway, Gillian had ambitions of pursuing a PhD, though she felt she could make time for a congressional campaign if it didn’t interfere with her studies.

“Well, she looks nice on your arm, if you can get past the fact that she seems thoroughly uninterested in fucking you,” commented the ever-paternal Thayer Wren. “Though I suppose what politician actually fucks his wife?”

“I’m going to,” said Arthur heatedly, before checking himself. “I mean, it’s none of your business,” he muttered, “and the point is I like her.”

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