Page 29 of Love All
It does not sit down.
And I think, with all the rest of me, in a voice I don’t recognize and can’t shut up:but who’s going to demonstrate the part where I’m the one who can’t step away?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Benedict
HERE IS WHAT Charlotte Astor does the morning after she nearly kisses me in a stranger’s kitchen and then shoves me off like a man returning a library book: she texts me, at 6:48 a.m., a single line.
Last exhibition tonight. Warm up at five. Don’t be weird.
Don’t be weird.As though I’m the variable. As though I’m the one who fisted a hand in the other one’s shirt, pulled him to within a centimeter of a decision, and then smiled the coldest smile on the Eastern Seaboard and saidsee, easy.I’ve been replaying it on a loop for nine hours. I have not slept. I’ve lain here reconstructing the exact pressure of her hand flat on my chest, the push, not the pull, thepush,God, the woman can weaponize a shove — and I’ve arrived at exactly one conclusion, which is that I am in significantly more trouble than I’ve been keeping track of.
So I text back ‘who’s weird, I’m a delight’and get, forty minutes later, ‘5:00. wear the white. it photographs.’
That’s the whole conversation. That’s the problem in miniature. She has already rebuilt the wall, brick by brick, overnight, and posted me on the far side of it with a call time and a dress code.
I know the move, because I invented the move. Rebuild overnight. Issue the dress code. Run the next day like the last one never happened. That is the Hawthorne house special, it’s how I’ve handled every feeling that ever threatened to cost me something. Watching her do it to me, expertly, in real time, is like watching a stranger pick my own front door. I should be impressed. I am, a little.
Mostly I’m furious, with no right to be, at finding myself on the receiving end of my oldest trick.
She wants to pretend it didn’t happen. Fine. I am, professionally, the best pretender either of us knows. I can pretend a thing didn’t happen so convincingly I start believing it myself, that’s how I’ve survived being me. I’ll give her the pretending. I’ll give her anything she asks for; that’s the whole sick shape of it now. Except I’ve also learned, somewhere in two weeks of bad library light, that there is exactly one room in the world where Charlotte Astor cannot pretend. One place where the wall has no bricks. Where she’s forced to be honest with me whether she likes it or not.
A tennis court. Doubles. Same side of the line.
So I wear the white. And I wait for the one place she can’t lie.
***
She’s already on the court when I arrive at five, of course she is, because being early is how Charlotte holds shut a door she’s afraid might open. Her hair is puled back into a tight ponytail, and she doesn’t look up when I come through the gate.
“You’re here,” she tells her strings.
“I’m a delight and I’m punctual. Two of my four good qualities.”
“What are the other two?”
“I’ll demonstrate them later.”
It’s out before I’ve cleared it with the department in charge of not setting fields on fire, and the worddemonstrategoes into her like a splinter. I watch her decide, with visible effort, to feel nothing about it.
“We’re not talking about it,” she says.
“About what? Warming up? I’m fully prepared to discuss warming up. It’s a passion of—”
“Hawthorne.” She looks at me then, finally, and under the wall there’s something I’ve never seen on her — something that looks almost like fear, which on Charlotte Astor is rare enough to stop a heart. “There’s a court full of people coming in an hour, and a number we have to put on a board for some sick kids, and I need you to be my partner for two more hours and not — notthis.Can you give me two hours?”
And the thing is, I’d give her the two hours. I’d give her two thousand. That’s the entire catastrophe.
“Feed me serves,” I say, gently, letting her have it. “I’ll be good.”
She exhales like I’ve snipped a wire on something, and feeds me serves, and for forty minutes we’re two athletes and nothing else, and it’s the kindest lie I’ve ever told her.
The last exhibition draws the biggest gate of the run, because the department has finally understood what it’s got, not two athletes, astory,the kind boosters open wallets for — and for the finale they’ve matched us against the meanest draw in the alumni pool. A man named Hargrove: a genuine former touring pro who cracked the world top hundred for one shining season in the nineties and has spent the thirty years since teaching rich men’s backhands and getting bitter about it, paired with a younger alum who mostly stays out of his way. He’s good. He’s also exactly the brand of self-made and permanently aggrieved that looks at a kid like me and sees everything he had to claw for,handed over gift-wrapped. Within two games, he’s decided the way to beat the college kids is to take me apart at the seams.
He picks me. They always pick me. I have a face that saysthis one won’t mind,and most days it’s right.
“You float those volleys, Hawthorne,” he calls, after I miss one. Friendly. Lethal. “All that talent. Never had to work a day for a lick of it, did you?”
