Guinevere surveyed the round table, the knights scattered around it, and she smiled her first real smile all day. By the time she’d seen the empty chair, she’d made up her mind.
“No,” she said, “no, I don’t think I’ll be marrying anyone today. But I would very much like to be a part of this.”
“But—but the politics of it!” King Arthur sputtered. “What will happen to our kingdoms if we do not marry? You can’t forget the politics, my dear.”
She looked at him, vaguely condescending.
“Haven’t you heard? The personal is political. And this is how I choose to spend my life. Squire,” she called. “Fetch me my armor.”
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
GUINEVERE, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
July 1999
Saskia was sixteen when her mother drew the line.
“Saskia, I understand that you’re a Scorpio and that you like your privacy. But you’ve been dating this boy Josh for over a year, and it’s past time that your father and I met him. Mike? Isn’t that right?”
Her father looked up from the newspaper, like they were in a 1950s sitcom.
“That’s right,” he said, though Saskia would have bet good money that he didn’t know what they were talking about.
“It’s summer, you’ve been gone way too much for a girl your age. So, before you see him again, you’re going to invite him over for dinner.”
Saskia opened her mouth, but she knew that expression on her mother’s face too well. She wasn’t grounded; she was too good for that. But her heart hammered hard. What was she supposed to do? Invite Patrick over?
“Yeah, sure,” she said lightly, and scampered up to her room.
Obviously, Patrick himself was out of the question. But staging a breakup would be more trouble than it was worth, because what was she supposed to say when she kept disappearing on Wednesdays and Sundays? It might take her mother a month or two to notice, but she eventually would.
She opened the school directory, and there he was, right on the first page. Josh Asher. One of the boys she’d imagined when she’d first lied to her parents. The boy from Lexi’s party.
She picked up her phone, started dialing. She felt stupid, this was too fucking stupid. But what did she care what he thought of her? Though the kids at school would crucify her if they found out about this. Frozen, she closed her eyes.
He wouldn’t tell. She didn’t know much about Josh, but she felt certain of this.
“Uh, hi, is Josh there? This is Saskia Kreis.”
The jostling of the receiver against a table, the hollering for him—it was so domestic, benign, that it thawed her a little. And then, his voice, mild and curious.
“Hello?”
“Josh? It’s Saskia Kreis. Look, I have a … weird situation. And I was wondering if you could help me out.”
“You had me at weird.”
And she smiled.
Somehow, for some reason, he agreed to do it. That Saturday afternoon, she snuck him in the side door and up to her tower for a debriefing. It was weird, but he was game, he was going along with it.
“So, you were in California, then Spain, then Italy—” Under the hanging bulb, his face was scrunched up like he was studying for a test. She appreciated his earnestness. It kept the potential rumor from floating around in her mind. And then she took him up to this attic …
Other than Lexi and Patrick, she’d never brought anybody up to the attic before.
“No. California, Italy, Spain. But they’re not going to test you on that, honestly. It’ll be more … what I’m like. Silly things I do. My favorite color.”
His eyebrows shot up. She sighed.
“I’m intense. I tap out music when I’m nervous. I get random nosebleeds. And blue.”
“Blue?”
“Navy blue. Like the edge of the lake in a storm.”
She offered him a hundred bucks, but he wouldn’t take it. Good karma, he said. She didn’t believe in karma, but she didn’t have much choice, then, either. And at five minutes to seven, she rustled him back down the servants’ stairs and out the back so he could walk around to ring the front bell.
He was the perfect choice, she thought as her father opened the door. Framed there between the elves’ hanging feet, his face had the perfect amount of intelligence and guilelessness. And he kept it up throughout dinner, as they made their way through the quail and the asparagus and the lemon tarts: laughing the exact right amount at Mike’s jokes, listening to Evie’s stories with an interest that bordered on—but never crossed over into—awe. And the whole time, casting looks at Saskia. Little grins, once a wink, all of them meant for her yet visible enough that her parents would catch them.
He’s done this before. For real, she realized halfway through the meal. He’s been to a girlfriend’s house.
She didn’t know what to do with the bitter tang of envy this realization produced in her.
And at the end of the evening, when she was allowed to walk him to the door on her own, she kissed his cheek, slipping a fifty into his palm.
“Sas—”
“No—” She held up her hands. “You were a wonderful actor. You earned it.” She contemplated telling him that only her parents, Patrick, and Lexi called her Sas but refrained; it seemed too mean.
His face twisted into an impish grin. “All right, then. How about I use it to take you out sometime, then? For real?”
For a moment, the possibility of that future flashed in front of her. Not unpleasant.
But … Patrick. Always Patrick.
She wished she had someone she could bring home to her parents for real.
“I don’t think so. But thank you,” she added quickly.
He nodded. She thought he was going to say something as he turned away, but he stayed silent. Just shoved his hands in his pockets and walked down the drive.
“Happy now?” Saskia called to her parents as she bolted up the stairs.
“Delighted!” Evie called back.
“Ecstatic,” said Mike.
February 2020
The text comes early in the morning, just as she awakes.
Can I come by today around 6?
Why does Patrick want to come to the house?
Kelly got in touch with him—no, she’d never. Julia, then? Far more likely. He’s heard something from Gary, or Sheila let something slip.…
But what is Saskia going to do, say no?
She descends the back staircase, where she can hear her father shuffling around in the kitchen.
“Dad?” she calls. “What are you up to today?”
“I’m going out with some old friends for a beer at five,” he replies. “We’ll probably have dinner after. You’ll be okay on your own?”
She says yes to both men.
The day passes excruciatingly until she sits at the piano, runs her hands over the keys. Enough music and she’ll get lost in the movements, lost in the notes, and this trembling will go out of her fingers. She’ll be the heroine once more, ready to face him—
What is this that she’s playing? (This used to happen to her sometimes, her hands seem to, quite literally, have a mind of their own.) It’s a symphony—yes, that’s it, she can hear the jagged sounds of an orchestra rising around her. Something slightly schmaltzy, balletic—Cinderella at the ball, transposed badly for solo piano.
And she thinks: Maybe this is an opportunity.
Forget about what Patrick wants. Forget about what his agenda is. Who is to say that she can’t achieve hers at the same time? And it’s so simple, really, what she needs. Just two sentences. The first: I lied.
He wants the house. Wants it for himself. She knows it, she knows there’s no progressive-liberal artistic haven in his plans, that there never was. But no matter what Tara says about having established disposition with the phone and the photos, she wants another way, in case she chooses not to use them.
But it’s more than that. She wants to nail him to the wall with his own words.
The second sentence she needs: You were fifteen.
She sat up all night with her yearbook photos, with pictures plucked from her mother’s archives, with her album cover, with the postcard. She was younger than sixteen in the photos, she knows it. She had to be older than fourteen, though; she’d had bangs that year. She can trace the outgrowth of her bangs from fourteen to sixteen, when they were fully integrated with the rest of her hair, but it’s impossible to tell exactly how long they were in the photos, as her hair is brushed back from her forehead.
But no bangs. Bangs would have stuck up.
I lied. You were fifteen.
That’s all.
She lifts her hands from the ivory keys and sets her voice recording app on automatic, so it’ll be triggered by their conversation. Capture it all.
Patrick in prison with a sentence longer than her life. Maybe even his money, his house, belonging to her (she has to call that lawyer Tara recommended, Christine, she really should; Monday, she resolves). His words twisted against him for the first time in his life, his silver tongue turned to clay.
By her.
But is she enough?
She can’t help thinking about one of the first times James came over to her apartment. They hadn’t slept together yet, had only danced around it with what they called a “friendship” that started after he kissed her, that first night, in the alley behind the dive bar where they’d met. But it was pretty clear to Sas what was going to happen that afternoon. Her heart clogged her throat, she couldn’t breathe; she took one of the Xanax the doctor kept prescribing just in case. And then another, and pretty soon she’d taken four.
By the time he came over, everything was a blur. But the snippets she does remember still haunt her. I’m not sure I’m even capable of love. Do you know what made me choose you? No danger.
Why, she wonders, is she thinking about this now?
And then her eyes land on the liquor cabinet.
Just a few pills, she thinks as she runs upstairs to get them. Just a few pills to get him to open up, to lower his inhibitions. A few pills, just like he used to give her. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, after all. But she finds herself mashing up ten with the kitchen mortar and pestle, because he’s a big man, and who knows how much he’ll drink? Besides, it’s not like it’s going to hurt him.
As she’s mixing the powder into the whiskey, she notices the grime on top of the cabinet. The dust on the baseboards behind. The smeared shoe scuffs left over from the memorial service. The filth of it shames her.
She goes through the kitchen to the cleaner’s closet (turns out she did know where the vacuum was; her father owes her $15). Pulls it out, as well as the mop and bucket. Soft cloths, furniture polish. One hour, two, she’s scrubbing, she’s polishing. It takes so long. It’s just so much house.
It’s 5:45 and she hops into the shower, washing everything but her hair. Fresh clothes on, back downstairs, back to the piano.
She waits.
The grandmother clock chimes quarter past six.
He’s late. For a second, hope zings through her: maybe he won’t come.
But the only thing worse than him coming is him not coming.
With her index finger, Saskia presses into the final chord of the movement she was playing earlier. It rings out, pure. Wholesome. And for a single second, she lets the notes vibrate through her; her skin seems to throb with them.
And then the doorbell rings.
Patrick takes her hand and it is like the first time, it is like every time: her perfect fourteen-year-old skin against his tanned, calloused hands, when she’d stared down at him reaching for her and in the second when he’d taken hold thought: Yes, it has finally happened. We are equal. I am a person.
“I’m so glad you could see me,” he says. His bass voice resonates through the hall, through her.
She inhales, deep, looking at the broad set of his shoulders, the cocksure tilt of his head. She can still turn back; this doesn’t have to happen, she tells herself.
But it does, and so she can’t.
She squares herself in an approximation of his posture.
And then Saskia smiles. “Come on in.”
He wipes the soles of his Timberland boots carefully on the doormat.
“Want a drink?” she says, and though he’d never balked at a drink before, she suddenly wonders how much of that was for her benefit. She had craved how the buzz of alcohol in her brain quieted it. “There’s an eighteen-year-old Johnnie Walker that we cracked open last night,” she says, casting a sly glance up at him.
He always loved it when she’d look at him like that.
She pours with steady hands, his Johnnie Walker and her Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic, explaining as she does so that she only drinks brown liquor after dinner these days. He looks bemused at this, perched in one of the winged armchairs as if it were a throne, and she feels stupid for a moment but brushes it aside. The important thing is getting his drink inside him.
He’s already taken off his coat, thrown it over the arm of the sofa. She picks it up, takes it into the hallway closet as he cradles the crystal tumbler between his large palms. A quick skim of the coat’s silhouette with her fingertips tells her the one thing she needs to know: his phone’s in there. He’s not recording her. She gives thanks to the god of Boomers for letting them separate so easily from their devices and goes back in to him.
She waits for him to say any of the things she’s imagined: I’ve heard that you’ve been digging into my past. Or: I got a call from Julia yesterday. Or even, dare she hope: I’ve been thinking over what happened between us, and I want you to know. It was wrong.
“Well,” he says, rolling his glass between his hands, “I guess you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“Of course.”
“Look. This house … it’s a lot, right? It’s huge.”
“Sure,” she says, matching his mildness.
Patrick downs the rest of his drink, holds out his glass to her for a refill. Did he use to do that? She smooths the affront away and turns back to the bar.
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation the other day. And you know, Sas, I think I was just refusing to see the truth.” She makes herself look mildly interested. “I think … well, you get to a certain age, and you look at all you’ve done, and you think: This cannot be all my life is worth. You know? And that’s why it meant something to your mother, thinking about the arts center. Well. It really meant something to me. But I just don’t think it’s going to be possible.”
She fights to keep the smile from her face. He doesn’t want the house. But—the inner smile freezes—what about the photos? Is she now just supposed to pretend that they never happened? Pretend that whatever sacrifice her mother made had just never happened?
“And this house—this huge, wonderful house. You know, I do understand how important it’s always been to you. So, I thought, well. Give them a chance to buy me out.” He’s holding his palms open to the ceiling as she turns back, and she forces herself to be gentle as she places the tumbler in his right hand. “I wouldn’t ask anything close to what it’s worth. Say—say, one-point-nine.”
She tilts her head. “Because that’s about what it’s worth once you subtract the cost of the part Dad owns, the work, and the lien?”
He nods and throws back his whiskey. “Just to be fair.” And he looks at her with expectant, bright eyes as he settles back against the red velvet cushions.
One point nine million dollars. It’s close to the total valuation of their assets that she added up the other day. The piano. The artwork. The antiques. The royalties for the next couple of years.
How many times is she going to be asked to give up everything she has, only to keep everything she’d been born with?
She wants her fresh start. She wants freedom; she wants the Elf House safe in the hands of some anonymous, rich couple with a bunch of kids and a penchant for DIY. She wants her own life, her real life, to start.
It’s funny, though; after days of thinking about $3 million, $1.9 million seems so little to her now.
So little.
But also, so wrong. She’s not going to give everything up. She can’t do it. She can’t do it again.
“That’s incredibly generous,” she makes herself say. “You’re right. This house means so much to us.” Should she have said that? But she’s not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. “Let me talk things over with Dad.”
Her honeyed voice is so curdling, she thinks for a panicked second that she’s given it all away. But he must see her as a completely different person from the one he’d loved, because he gives a quick, satisfied nod and starts to get to his feet.
For him to leave now would be intolerable.
And the words come out without a thought.
“Before you go. Will you let me show you something? I know it might not be possible, now, but I always imagined this would be the perfect studio space.” She lets her voice go as plaintive as it once did, as young and as yearning. It feels so fake, it’s as if she’s telling him that they’ll always have Paris, and yet he sets his tumbler down with a decisive thud and rises to his feet. Responding to the echo of the girl he’d known.
“Sure,” he says. And then, with barely repressed pleasure: “Sure.”
“Come on, then.”
He’s following her: through the foyer, up the stairs, around the corner, through the dark hallway with the burned-out bulb she’s been meaning to replace.
She opens the tower door and he smiles at her. “I’ve been here before,” he says, and then he’s actually climbing the stairs. She steps back to let him pass, marveling.
He’s not following her anymore. He’s leading her.
At the top of the stairs, Patrick twists his head from side to side, as though he could activate his night vision in the windowless room if he focuses hard enough. Behind him, Saskia flips the light switch and the lone bulb buzzes on.
And there she is. Her body, her body and the others, spread out over the bare mattresses, leftovers from two nights before, when she’d spread them out to choose a candidate for Tara.
His gaze dances around them. Over Saskia’s breasts, her jawline, the soft and sharp parts of her. Over the others.
“You found them,” he says with soft admiration.
Imagining him coming to the Elf House this afternoon, she had braced herself for his shock. His anger. His mockery. Anything except this—love, there’s no other word for it, and the tart jealousy that tightens her body in response. That’s me, she tries to reason with herself. I can’t be jealous of me.
But it doesn’t go away, the feeling.
She watches him looking at her, and the same sensation she experienced on 9/11 washes over her, like a spell freezing her into place: the realization that history is happening, that something so awful, so unforeseeable, has just transpired, and any illusions she once had about stepping into the role of the hero—heroine—are just that. Illusions.
But she isn’t eighteen, staring at an exploding skyline from her favorite café all the way down on Lafayette Street. Not anymore.
“Do you know how old I was in those photos?”
He looks at her with canny eyes. Shakes his head. And it ignites something in her, the rage she’s kept stoked in simmering coals flying into life.
She takes a breath.
He’s not playing by her script, but maybe it doesn’t matter.
“I was fifteen,” she says.
His eyes are lit from behind as he studies his work. “Hmm?”
She reaches into her pocket, lets her hand rest on her phone.
“I was a child. Look at these pictures, Patrick. I was a child.”
She watches as he gathers himself in, shoulders straightening as he turns, almost reluctantly, back to her. Say it, she dares him silently. Say it into the recording.
“I don’t know, Sas. Why would you even think that these are you? This one,” pointing to Julia’s torso, or what she thinks is Julia’s torso. “This one’s definitely not. And besides, come on. Do these really look like children?” he says, pointing to her black-and-white breast.
“I’m fifteen!” she explodes, grabbing a picture. She’s lying on her side, naked, staring somewhere out beyond the photographer, out into space. “In this photo, I’m fifteen. And how can you look at this and say that’s not me? How could you dare?”
Almost as if he senses the phone in her pocket, capturing his voice like the Sea Witch stealing the Little Mermaid’s, almost as if he knows, he tilts his head. Prove it, the gesture says. Instead he replies, “That’s impossible. You were eighteen, Sas. We both know that.”
She can’t stand that expression and lets the photo drop, drift slowly to the floor. “I know that you know exactly what this is. It’s child pornography. Do you not feel bad about that? Do you not feel even a little bit guilty for taking advantage of me?”
He sticks his hands in his pockets, rolls back from the balls of his feet to his heels. “Sas, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I’ve always worked to push the limits of artistic forms—”
“Bullshit, Patrick. You took pornographic photos of a child, and then you blackmailed my mother and it’s wrong. It’s wrong on every level—”
He breaks the staring contest he’s having with the photos and, almost with a cringe, turns back to Saskia.
“Your mother was a collector.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “And a dear friend.”
“And so, what? You demanded a house in exchange for a mother keeping nude photos of her teenage daughter from ever seeing the light of day?” Saskia runs to the CD player and starts the Appassionata booming at them, loud and angry. “Listen to this. Listen to her. I was fifteen when I recorded this. Listen to her and remember. You won’t tell her that what we did was wrong?”
“But all I did was take your photo,” he says. His words have slowed down. That wasn’t the intended effect. She wanted the pills to loosen his inhibitions, to yank the lever that would pull him from whatever track he’d let himself ride along for decades, force him over onto hers, where a new, terrible reality had taken hold. But all they seem to have done is make him double down into his own story, only slower.
His face tilts toward the photos. He looks almost as sad as she feels, and something in her chest cracks open, softens, in the split second before she notices something else on his face, too. Something in the slightly moistened lips, in the strange hopefulness of the eyes.
Longing. It’s longing.
“Saskia?” he says, not turning away from the picture. His voice sounds like it’s underwater. “Was there something in the whiskey? Xanax, maybe?”
He takes a step back, legs half bending, half crumpling, as he finds a seat on the damp pile of mattresses. She savors her own cleverness, even as a chill runs through her, as she wonders how he knows what Xanax in whiskey would feel like. Has he also taste-tested a concoction designed to make a visitor more pliable than they might otherwise be?
She’s suddenly struck by a visceral memory of his large, rough hand pressing a pill into her palm. This had always been a part of it.
She watches him blink up at her, now. Watches his breath come shallow, stiff.
“You’ve been bad,” she says, harsh, and she doesn’t know where the words are coming from until he looks up at her with an expression that is part baffled, part aroused, and she realizes it is a reversal of one of the games they used to play.
“I’ve been—”
“I think you need a time-out.”
“A time—”
It’s satisfying, this. Almost a litany.
“Yes,” she says. “A time-out. To think about what you’ve done. We’ll see if you feel like telling me my real age in a few hours.”
It is only after she navigates her way down the steep, uneven stairs, two feet on each one in the semidark, only after she has closed the attic door behind her and turned the key, only after that key is safe in her pocket, that her heartbeat evens again, perfect as a metronome.
It’s not what she thought she’d do.
But it’s what she’s done.
An unfamiliar ringtone sounds out from downstairs.
“Dad?” she calls. “Wolfie?” No thumping paws answer her, and she weaves through the hallway, descends the main staircase carefully, almost as carefully as she came down from the tower.
How long will it take for Patrick to crack? An hour, two? Up there with her fifteen-year-old self on the mattress, booming at him from the stereo. She pauses, holding her breath, but the soundproofers had done their job thoroughly—not a note leaks through.
The ringing has started up again, though.
As she descends the front stairs, it becomes clear that the ringing is coming from Patrick’s coat pocket, and the realization zaps through her: he’s not a doll she can just lock away. He has a life, a context, and that involves other people. People with whom he might have appointments, people he’s supposed to be meeting this evening. Tomorrow— Oh, fuck, he’s definitely going to crack before tomorrow, right?
Well, she’s done it now. She’s officially thinking like a criminal.
This is okay. This is going to be fine. She’ll let him out in a few hours, just as soon as he admits to what he did.
What he did. Fucking hell, she forgot to grill him about the house. She needs him to say that, too: needs him to say that he lied.
Saskia dips her hand into his coat pocket but yanks it out before she actually touches the telephone. She’s listened to too many true crime podcasts, she scolds herself as she fishes into her own coat for her gloves. And yet it can’t hurt.
As her father’s headlights round the drive, Saskia’s already donning her jacket and boots, already slipping Patrick’s phone into her pocket. She’ll go down the beach path to the marina, just the way he’d have walked it. And then—oops—phone in the water, phone and its geolocation skills utterly spoiled by the lake seeping through its silicone and metal innards.
She darts out the back door, letting the wind slam the screen behind her.