Page 66 of Gifted & Talented

Meredith didn’t reply. She crossed her legs, jiggling one foot and thinking about the existential itch she’d felt while looking at my house; at the extra weight I now carried around my hips. At the life Meredith had been sure I’d wanted desperately to get away from—wasting my brilliant mind on the same tragedy that had befallen my mother and grandmothers. The curse of domesticity, underemployment to make ends meet.

“How could Lou even have a baby at this age?” Meredith demanded. An absurd question, but she was suddenly furious with me; with the choices I must have made to throw my whole future away. (Meredith’s brain, with a shriek:What happened to Eden?) “It’s demented.”

“You’re both, like, thirty,” said Arthur, pronouncing the word “thirty” as if it were “geriatric” or “dead.” “It’s really not out of the question.”

“But Lou’s only thirty-one,” said Meredith instantly, wanting to express that I, like her, had not yet crossed the finish line into obscurity, was not yet completely irrelevant. Was still, if you squinted, a prodigy. She rubbed her eye, capable only of the single thought STYE STYE STYE. “How could she have a full-grown toddler? Was she some kind of child bride?”

“That kid was basically just a baby,” Eilidh pointed out from the back seat. “He couldn’t have been more than two years old.”

“So?” said Meredith, turning in the passenger seat to glare at her sister. “Now you’re an expert in child development?”

“She’s saying it’s not exactly a teen pregnancy,” Arthur pointed out. “And don’t be mad at Eilidh just because she’s the one who convinced Lou to help.”

Meredith reeled backward, stung. “Wow,” she said to Arthur in a snarling, hollow voice.

(“I don’t understand,” Jamie said later that evening, when Meredith methim for a drink at the bar downtown that had an atrocious greenhouse effect, leaving Meredith sweating profusely and ultimately twice as drunk as she’d set out to be. “You’re angry because you think Arthur took Eilidh’s side? But it sounds like he was just trying to be diplomatic.”

“You weren’t there,” insisted Meredith, who didn’t want to express in words that Arthur chastising her unexpectedly when it came to Eilidh was the equivalent of shooting her while her back was turned. Their alliance relied on a pact—an unspoken one—that Meredith was always more right than Eilidh, even when she was mostly wrong. “You didn’t hear the way he said it.”)

Eventually they made it back to the house, despite some rerouted traffic in downtown Mill Valley. They parked the car and ascended the stairs in silence.

“How was it?” asked Cass, who was in the kitchen making a frittata. The fridge, Meredith realized when she opened it, had been fully stocked. Instead of gratitude, she felt a deep, inexplicable pulse of loathing, mostly toward herself. Arthur wandered away, probably to find his circle of sexual deviants. Eilidh stretched out on the sofa and closed her eyes.

Meredith looked up at Cass, imagining for a moment that they were married. The wedding would probably be a small affair, an elopement. He had been married before and she had a number of other things to do. They’d probably do it in the morning at the Beverly Hills courthouse on a Wednesday and then go for lunch after, maybe get a little bit drunk just for fun. They had the same taste in movies. They both liked to read before bed to unwind. He never suggested she should finish her college degree; he always told her he was proud of her. He did not hold her to invisible metrics that she could neither identify nor parse. Their sex life was routine but not unsatisfying. If she told him the truth about Chirp, he would help her. He would help her. She could accept his help.

He would remember it forever, though. The score. They both would. Maybe it wouldn’t come between them—maybe it would make them stronger? But it would always mean she defaulted to his competency. That she couldn’t be trusted. That she was a fuckup, actually, and maybe it would never be discussed, maybe it wouldn’t even matter, but someday, maybe twenty years from now, maybe a few months, maybe tomorrow, he would look at her and she would know that he was thinking about how he had saved her. She might have been a genius, but he would be a hero. She might be a star, but he was still a man.

“What?” he said.

She leaned over the fridge door and kissed him soundly. She put both hands on his face, then pulled him close until only the butter, the jangling of the glass-jarred condiments stood between them. He shifted, breaking away to come around the door, to press her back into the cold, cold fridge, one hand hovering over the goose bumps on her midriff. She traced the shape of his neck, deepening the kiss, pressing herself against him until the only natural follow-up was sex. She took his hand, led him to her bedroom, and pushed him down on the mattress.

“Thank you for the groceries,” she said, and unbuttoned his trousers.

(“I see,” said Jamie, after Meredith told him how she and Cass had spent the afternoon. “And how did he take it when you told him about the article?”)

“You seem like you’re trying to prove something to yourself,” Cass remarked when they were finished.

“Do I?” asked Meredith, staring at the ceiling.

(“I still haven’t told him the details,” she admitted.

“I see,” Jamie said again.)

Cass rolled over to look at her. “I was married before,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been here before.”

She looked at him.

“The thing is,” Cass said, “I like you a lot, Meredith. And I love you. I think life with you is something I could easily do forever.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” She wondered if she wanted him to. If that would ease something for her. If she’d finally become safe, impenetrable—successful enough, valid enough. Something that a little casual rejection could no longer destroy.

No, she realized. No, it would still hurt. Everything would always hurt.You’re perfect,Cass had said to her once, and she knew that what he’d meant was that she fit perfectly into his life, because she was independently wealthy and she was smart and a riveting conversationalist and she would not hurt him because she wasn’t really capable of hurting him, because they didn’t love each other like that. They loved each other like you loved a really good electric toothbrush. The way you loved the perfect cashmere sweater. Because it kept you warm when you were cold.

But she wanted to be perfect; that was the kind of love that, in her better moments, she thought she might deserve. That maybe love was somethingshe could be good at, that she could conceivably do correctly, that she could earn, that she could win. From the beginning she had understood that success amounted simply to mind over matter—that if she could put aside the pain, she could do anything. She could do anything.

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