Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Oh, so just south of here! Inland, or by the coast?”

“Coast.”

“Do you like it?”

Turtle doesn’t answer.

They cross the Noyo and go through Fort Bragg, the town ten miles north of Mendocino. They go on past MacKerricher State Park and across the Ten Mile River and they turn off the highway. They are a long day’s walk from Buckhorn Hill. Jacob’s house is a contemporary redwood structure at the end of a long, winding black drive. It overlooks the north bank of the river and is surrounded by coastal prairie.

“You live in a mansion ?” Turtle says.

“It’s not a mansion,” Imogen says.

“Hey!” Brett says. “Hey, Turtle. I live in a double-wide trailer. So check your privilege, homeslice.”

“My what?”

“It’s, like, five bedrooms, guys.”

“What did you call me?”

“Shut up, Jacob. It’s a mansion.”

“Did you just call me homeslice?”

Brett says, “We looked you up, missy. Several years ago, a property adjoining yours with a third of an acre sold for one-point-eight-million dollars. You own sixty acres of ocean-view property in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the U.S.”

“It’s not technically one of the most expensive—” Jacob says.

“But it’s the best!” Brett says. “The best!”

“But—” Turtle says.

“Shut up!”

“ Yeah ,” Jacob says. “Yeah. And this is not a mansion.”

“Shut up, Jacob.”

They pull into a large, clean, empty four-car garage.

“Okay,” Imogen says, getting out, “you kids have fun with . . . whatever this is.”

Jacob shows Turtle the house. It is nothing to him. It is all familiar. To Turtle, it is incredible. In every room, floor-to-ceiling windows look out on windswept bluffs and the Ten Mile estuary. In the kitchen, there are black-granite counters and a black-granite kitchen island, ceiling racks hung with stainless-steel cookware, maple butcher blocks. It is all very clean. Turtle wants all of it.

“Where are your tools and things?”

There had been none in the garage.

“Tools?”

“You know—tools,” she says.

“Oh, there’s a whole bunch of tools in Mom’s workshop. Acetylene torches and things.”

She says, “So what do you do when something breaks?”

Jacob looks at her smiling, as if waiting for the rest of that sentence. Then he says, “You mean, like—are you asking, like, which plumber do we call? I could ask Dad.”

Turtle stands looking at him.

They go through a hallway with a floor-to-ceiling glass case of Pomo baskets.

Turtle stands looking at the small, tightly woven brindled baskets until Brett and Jacob reach the end of the hallway and turn and wait for her. In the living room, a huge spiral staircase with oak treads bolted directly to a varnished pine trunk leads to Jacob’s and Imogen’s rooms. A bookshelf takes up an entire wall of his room, with a ladder for reaching the top shelves. More books are stacked against the walls and heaped on the end tables, some of them open, dog-eared, and heavily annotated. The beige carpet shows the pattern of light-and-dark nap from being vacuumed that morning.

Turtle sits on the bed looking around.

“I know, right?” Brett says.

“Yeah,” Turtle says.

“What?” Jacob says.

“Yeah,” Turtle says meaningfully.

“His dad patented a process of detecting errors in silicon microchips.”

“What are silicon microchips?”

“You know—your phone.” Jacob holds up his phone.

“Oh.”

“His mom makes naked chicks.”

“What?”

Jacob says, “She casts nudes. They’re reminiscent of Rodin in their pronounced corporality and in the exaggeration of their human idiosyncrasies. In some, she has replaced the vascular system with clematis.”

“They’re gone all the time. Brandon to Utah, where they make the silicon wafers—I don’t know why, because no one gives a shit about Utah, I guess—and Isobel to artsy places all over the world.”

“They’re not gone all the time.”

“They think Imogen looks after him.”

“Imogen does look after me.”

“She doesn’t. She lets him drive to school. He doesn’t have a license. He has to cook for himself. Weak gruel and porridge. He’s basically Oliver Twist.”

“She drives me sometimes.”

“They go to the same school and she won’t even take him.”

“Well, her classes start later than mine on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“It’s child abuse.”

“Lies. All lies.”

“Imogen makes him sit at intersections with a cardboard sign that says, ‘Abandoned Child. Anything Helps.’ Then at night, she takes all the money and buys lip gloss and music.”

Jacob rolls his eyes.

Later they eat dinner with his parents around a claw-footed mahogany table. Windows look out on the beach, where a circle of gulls rises and collapses and bull kelp tangles in the surf. Brett sits with one leg folded under the other, about half out of his seat, looking ready to get up and wander off in search of something. Turtle keeps looking at Brandon and Isobel Learner and then down at her food. Brandon is a thin, quiet man wearing a white dress shirt and slacks. At the beginning of dinner, he carefully rolls up his sleeves. Turtle puts her hair up, draws the firing pin out of her mouth, and skewers it in her ponytail. Isobel Learner is looking critically into her glass of red wine, wearing a robe belted around her jeans and T-shirt. She has black hair streaked with gray and wears small silver earrings with blue stones.

“So, Turtle,” Isobel says. “How are you liking your summer?”

They are eating ahi on a bed of wild rice with grilled broccolini.

“It’s okay,” Turtle says.

Isobel has a gentle, wine-drinking, leaning-back curiosity, with all the work and all the thinking done for the day. Her hands are stained black as if with gunpowder residue, but it’s something else.

“What is it your father does?”

“What?” Turtle leans forward to hear.

“Your dad—does he have a profession?”

“Say that again?”

“Mom,” Jacob says, “you’re mumbling and hiding your mouth with your glass.”

“Ah”—setting her glass down—“what does your father do, Turtle?”

“He, uh—” Turtle says. “He works as a carpenter. But he reads a lot.”

Isobel tilts the wineglass forward, comparing the red wine to the white of her napkin. “Look at this,” she says. “Turtle, honey,” she says. “Come here. You see that? The meniscus? The meniscus is— Have you done physics? Well, do you see the thinnest ring where the wine clings to the glass?”

The wine is a deep dark red. Along the edge, a razor-thin oval slivers out across the glass, like the thinnest, sandy edge of a pond, and where it attenuates, the ring is tea-colored. Turtle is looking at Isobel carefully to see what she is saying.

“You see how it’s just sort of off-brown the way that white apple flesh turns brown when you leave it out?”

“Yes,” Turtle says.

“That’s the oxidation. It’s a product of the age of the wine.”

“It’s rust?”

“Like rust, yes.”

Isobel sets the wine down, abruptly rises, and returns from the kitchen with more wineglasses, the stems slotted through her fingers. She sets them out and pours into each.

“Honey,” Brandon says, “is this a good idea?”

“Yes.” Isobel pushes a glass to Brett, then to Turtle, Jacob, and Imogen. Turtle lifts hers, compares it to the white tablecloth. She looks over at Isobel and Isobel demonstrates swirling and then putting her nose to the wine. “What do you think?” she asks.