Page 74 of Gifted & Talented

“Okay,” said Dzhuliya, and Eilidh felt exuberance, felt guilt, felt the lossof her father in a new way, for the first time in a way that felt less like emptiness than like relief. A different kind of vacancy, more exhalation than loss. Eilidh held out her hand and Dzhuliya looked around for a second but took it, like a schoolgirl passing a note.

How long had she been holding her breath like this, and when had she started, and what might shatter if she stopped?

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A few months ago, public opinion polls showed Arthur struggling for the first time against his right-wing opponent. A couple of months later, it became steadily clearer that Arthur’s momentum was slowing down, that he was starting to—might very likely—lose. After his campaign team broke down the poll results from August, Gillian had set a cool hand on his arm, wordless (disappointment? pity? regret?), and out of a sudden desperation for escape, Arthur had called Philippa and Yves and asked them to meet him in the Hamptons. Arthur had conveniently been invited to a fundraising gala thrown by the one percent, which was part of the problem. If he didn’t go, he snubbed his donors. If he went, he snubbed his base. Election costs were climbing, spiking, his septuagenarian opponent driving PAC contributions left and right, solidifying Arthur’s many, many enemies. He wanted to cry on someone’s shoulder. He wanted someone to draw him a long bath and lie in it with him. To sink into the depths of his misery beside him, hip to hip.

Yves had been sympathetic, soft with him. Yves stroked Arthur’s cheek, kissed the edge of his jaw, spoke sweetly to him. Philippa, meanwhile, seemed agitated, fidgety, irritated with him, with both of them. She sat them down when Arthur was halfway through a bottle of champagne, his cheek slicked to the bare skin of Yves’s waist, his lips traveling aimlessly, gratefully. He felt drowsy with relief, with the impending catharsis of quitting, giving up; capitulation like a distant orgasm that might finally revive him, bring him back to life. He could be done with it. He could run away with his lovers, disappear into this bed.

“I’m pregnant,” Philippa announced, jarring Arthur from his syrupy contentment, his postcoital haze. She wore the sheets around her body, her hair floating around her shoulders. She looked like Aphrodite rising from the foam, and Arthur loved her. When she said it, bracing herself for something,Arthur didn’t feel fear. He seized her face in his hands and kissed her, and reached out one hand for Yves and kissed him, and felt a moment of blissful certainty, of having found his family, of holding his whole world in the crooks of his arms.

“Yes,” said Arthur dizzily, overjoyed, suffering the kind of happiness that felt unearned and undeserved, like maybe in another life he’d had to fight for this; like maybe it had taken countless tries to get it right. Like this was always the answer he’d been waiting for, the words he’d been wanting for so long to hear, as if they could meanWelcome homeandAt last, I found youandI’m finally done searching, it’s here, it’s always been here. He remembered the feeling, as if from a dream, of “Yes, yes, yes—”

“Oh Arthur, don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Philippa now, from the shadowed cavern of his adolescent bedroom. Moments before, over Gillian’s finely crafted cheeseboard, Arthur and Philippa had exchanged glances in wordless, telegraphed argument until Arthur had finally led her up the stairs to calmly chat.

Philippa sighed at him with impatience as if he were some little frivolity—a shoe that didn’t match, a fraying cuff. “Is there something so terrible about accepting a glass of wine when it is offered? We don’t have this silly fixation with alcohol like the rest of you American puritans. One glass is harmless. I barely had a sip!”

Later, when Arthur asked me for my seasoned postpartum opinion, I confirmed that this was, by technical constraints, true. Obstetricians, especially if they are old-school, are generally less strict about wine than they are about caffeine, although I was allowed one precious cup of coffee a day to contend with the lifelong wrestle of my own brain trying to kill me (migraines).

Of course, just because something is true doesn’t mean it answers every question. The problem was that after Gillian had been so certain—and Gillian was never wrong—that Philippa couldn’t be pregnant, objective perinatal clarification wasn’t what Arthur was hoping to hear.

Which was, admittedly, an Arthur problem.

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I suppose you might be wondering at this point how I know all this. It’s not complicated: They told me. Everyone wants to tell you their story if you just, you know, ask. And I asked pretty much everyone important in this story, aside from Thayer Wren. Though he did meet with me about a month before his sudden demise.

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Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Arthur was arguing with Philippa.

“Arthur, be reasonable. I’m not the host for your holy sperm,” Philippa continued on, after pointing out that a glass of wine was not such a sin, “and by the way, it’s still my body. I’m not just some vessel destined to incubate a future possession of yours. Or do you think you should have a right to control everything I do, ad nauseum?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” said Arthur, seeing only flashes of things, colors behind his eyes, mainly red but occasionally white. Had Meredith been there, she might have pointed out by virtue of her A− in university rhetoric that the device Philippa had just employed is called a “straw man logical fallacy,” which is when a person distorts the original point (in this case: Why are you drinking wine if you’re having a baby, which you are definitely having, correct?) to make it easy to refute. But Meredith wasn’t there, and Arthur was finding it difficult to blink, and then there was a little burst of light from his periphery, and he thoughtOh fuck no, not again.

And then when he woke up, he was on the floor and Philippa was bending over him.

“Oh, Arthur,” she sighed when he opened his eyes, speaking before he could fully break the rigor mortis. “Dying just to manipulate a woman is highly frowned upon, just so you know. Very gaslight-y behavior.”

Then she straightened, gave him an admonishing look, and sauntered out of the room.

Arthur closed his eyes and opened them. He thought about magic, the way it seemed to be ruining his life, more so with every passing minute. And hadn’t it always been an inconvenience? Why, then, had he ever wanted to do it? Why had he even learned?

Because of me, of course. Because I had loved it; because it was taughtto me by my grandmothers, who had loved me. Because when I taught it to Meredith and Arthur, he’d felt something like love, too. Like the joy a person could feel making art, or preparing for their loved ones an elaborate, painstaking meal.

“Meredith’s scope of interest leans too pragmatic,” I once told Arthur, probably fifteen years earlier, in what Arthur had then felt was a disapproving, semi-bored tone. “I want to have a little fun with it.”

“I like fun,” was what Teenage Arthur told me then, although he would have told me almost anything at the time.

Guiltily, Adult Arthur thought now of the way he could make the lights dance if he wanted, the surge of electricity he could conjure in his fingers—the things he occasionally did just to do them, like loving just because it felt nice to love. He thought of the times he and I used to sit shoulder to shoulder researching obscure spells on the internet, looking up anything that seemed even remotely like it could work.

He thought, as he had been doing almost obsessively lately, of me.

He reached for his phone as soon as motion returned to his fingers, returning to his messages.

Specifically, to mine.

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