Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

“I’ve called you,” Leo said.

“Before today? Two years ago.”

“That’s not true.”

“Two years.”

“Christ,” Leo said. “Sorry.” He laughed a little. “If it makes you feel any better, I stopped being interesting about two years ago.”

“I didn’t feel particularly bad about it to begin with, but thanks.”

He frowned and looked at her, still unbelieving and a little pained. “Two years? Really?”

“Really,” she said.

“So come over here and tell me what else you’ve been up to,” he said, patting the place next to him on the sofa.

HOURS LATER,after they’d eaten the lamb and replenished the firewood and she filled him in on the recent publishing news and gossip, after he’d finished clearing the table and loading the dishwasher (poorly) and rinsing some pots (even worse), he opened another bottle of wine and she dished out bowls of ice cream and they moved back into the living room.

“Are you supposed to be drinking that?” she asked him, pointing to the glass of cabernet.

“Technically, I guess not,” he said. “But booze is not my issue. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything, Leo. You could be shooting heroin for all I know. In fact, I think I did hear something about heroin at some point.”

“Completely false,” he said. “Was there excess? Yes. Do I realize I should probably steer clear of speed? Yes. This ”—he raised the glass—“is not my problem.”

“So are you going to tell me what happened? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Leo said. He wasn’t sure what Stephanie had heard that she might not be telling him. George assured him everything was sealed tighter than a drum. He’d paid a fortune to keep Victoria quiet, but he didn’t trust anyone. Stephanie let the silence gather some momentum. Out the front window the snow accumulated, a pile six inches deep balanced precariously on the rail of a neighboring stoop. A lone car crept down the snowy street, fishtailing a little as it went. She could hear the kids in the house behind her out in their yard screeching and laughing. Their dad was yelling: “Don’t eat the snow! It’s dirty.”

“We don’t have to talk about it, Leo, but I’m a good secret keeper.”

He felt the images from that night starting to surface: the sound of the car’s brakes, the bite of salt air, the incongruous voice of Marvin Gaye coming from the SUV that hit them, urging him to get it on . He wondered if he should talk about it. He hadn’t even tried at fake rehab. He wondered what Stephanie would say if he just unloaded the whole story, right then and there. At one time, they’d told each other everything or — he mentally corrected himself — she told him everything and he told her what he thought she needed to hear. That hadn’t gone very well.

“Leo?”

Leo didn’t even know how to start talking about it. He stared at the carved face on the marble mantel and realized why it was familiar, the swoop of hair, the slender patrician nose, the appraising gaze. “She looks like Bea,” he said.

“Who does?”

“Lillian. Your stone companion. She looks like Bea.”

“Bea.” Stephanie groaned and covered her eyes.

“She’s not bad looking. Bea.”

“No, it’s not that. She’s called me a few times and I’ve been avoiding her. Something about new work.”

“God. Not the novel.”

“No, no, no. I told her a long time ago that I wouldn’t ever read that novel again. I told her, in fact, that she needed to find a new agent. Her message said something about a new project but — I just can’t.” Stephanie stood and started picking up their empty bowls of ice cream, the tranquil mood broken. “This is one of many reasons I’m happy to be part of a bigger operation,” she said. “I can’t stand feeling responsible for the formerly talented. It’s too upsetting. I can pass her off to someone else who won’t have any qualms about shutting her down.”

Thinking about Bea being shut down by some unnamed assistant made Leo feel unexpectedly wistful. He wasn’t surprised when her first stories ended up being some anomaly of youth and fearlessness (thanks to him ), but she had to be at the end of her rope by now. And she’d been Stephanie’s first notable client, the person who’d made editors and other new writers take a very young Stephanie very seriously. He didn’t like to think of Bea stuck working with Paul Underwood at some obscure literary journal, living in that apartment uptown by herself. It was hard to think about all his siblings for different reasons, so he didn’t. Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn’t rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

“You’re right,” Stephanie said, standing and staring at the mantel. “She does look like Bea. Shit.”

“Don’t go,” Leo said.

“I’m just going to the kitchen.”

“Stay here,” he said. He didn’t like the sound of his voice, how it wavered a little. He really didn’t like the sudden, rapid acceleration of his heartbeat, which prior to this moment he’d associated with a certain class of stimulants, not a living room in Brooklyn in front of the fire with Stephanie.

“I’ll be right back,” Stephanie said. Leo seemed to go slightly pale and for a moment he looked lost, almost frightened, which briefly alarmed her. “Leo?”

“I’m fine.” He shook his head a little and stood. “Is that your old turntable?”

“Yes,” she said. “Put something on. I’m just going to rinse these.”

In the kitchen Stephanie could hear Leo flipping through her record albums. He yelled to her from the living room. “Your taste in music still totally sucks.”

“Like everyone else in America, my music is on my computer. That’s the old stuff. I just brought the turntable up from the basement a few months ago.”

Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul ? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’”

“More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club when she was eighteen.”

Leo flinched a little hearing Columbia Records . He shook it off. “Ah, here we go,” he said.

Stephanie heard the turntable start to spin and the familiar scratch, scratch of the needle hitting the album grooves. Then the weirdly dissonant first notes of a piano and the slurry, graveled voice of Tom Waits filled the house.

The piano has been drinking

My necktie is asleep

Stephanie hadn’t heard that song in years. Probably not since she and Leo were together. The album was probably Leo’s. He would wake her up on his hungover mornings (many mornings; most mornings) singing that song. He would pull her sleeping self into his arms, his semierection pressing into her back. She would halfheartedly try to burrow farther down into the bed, clinging to sleep and the reassuring feel of Leo’s limbs holding her close.

“You stink,” she would groan, feigning more irritation than she felt, not even really minding his funky breath. “You smell like my uncle Howie after a night at the bar.”

He would sing into her ear, his voice pockmarked from whiskey:

The piano has been drinking

Not me, not me, not me

AT THE SINK,she started to rewash the roasting pan that Leo had left with a film of grease on the counter and tried to reconcile the Leo in her living room with the Leo she’d last seen almost two years ago, out one night with Victoria; they’d both seemed hammered. This Leo was slimmer and in spite of what she’d heard — and occasionally witnessed — about his recent years of late nights and marital troubles and general rabble-rousing, he somehow looked younger. He was quieter, more subdued. Still funny. Still quick. Still beautiful.