The Orphan Sister (14 page)

After a brief relationship with the RA, who, to his credit, stopped giving indiscriminate backrubs while they were going out, Lily had a crush on Cameron’s roommate, Eli. We talked about him ad nauseam, his job at Mudd, the main library, his laugh, which made people turn around all across campus. I didn’t tell Cam; I didn’t mind noticing the fellow, either, purely reconnaissance for Lily. She also had a crush on her piano teacher—she was taking lessons from a student at the conservatory. We went to concerts together and let music seep into us like oxygen. I’d never heard so much music before, and such variety, Schubert piano concertos, Bach cantatas, the visiting Swingle Singers, jazz ensembles, a microtonal opera.

In our room, when I wasn’t with Cam, Lily played guitar and we sang harmonies together; she was the kind of person who’d make a superlative friend—if only we hadn’t needed to live together. In fact, we became much closer after we lived apart, able to pick up harmonies in conversations as well as songs. We still talked on the phone two or three times a year and sent old-fashioned snail-mail letters from time to time.

But Eli and Cameron weren’t charmed by each other. It was small bickering—Eli left mean notes about Cameron’s smelly dirty laundry; Cameron accused Eli of loosening the strings on his violin. Cameron allegedly broke Eli’s coffee mug but swore he hadn’t done it. The resident junior who was supposed to advise the
freshpeople had to step in—he told them he could mediate or find them each another roommate. Cameron said mediate; Eli said mediate; but they were both too agitated, and eventually they were each reassigned to transfer students. It was an ugly side of my Cameron, but I forgave him. I didn’t understand how anyone could escalate such pettiness, but I didn’t really know Eli, so the story just lived in the mythical history of first college year.

At the beginning of sophomore year, Eli and I were in the same Indian Religion class. I watched Eli listening intently to the professor, who was passionate about the devotional poems we studied and also knew Eli’s history. She didn’t favor him in a traditional sort of way; she was much too fair for that, but we could tell, just from the way she said his name when he answered a question, that she had a little bit of a crush on him, too.

Lily reported that Eli, however, was in love with a million women, and none of them were Lily or the religion prof (who was happily married anyway). He was in love with a swanlike modern-dance student who wounded him by sleeping with other men whenever she wanted and telling him the details. He was in love with an environmental-studies major who left him notes that said things like
I am your nubile love slave. You must cook me for dinner. Be gentle but firm
and posted them on his door for all his dormmates to read. She wrote in Sharpie on bright white paper. She realized she was gay and asked Eli to have sex with her one last time before she gave up on men forever. Though he was ultimately heterosexual, Eli fell in love with his piano professor, who was so charismatic you knew when he came into the concert hall even if it
was packed with a murmuring audience getting ready to sit down. He could come into the back entrance and a wave of faces would turn toward his light like sunflowers.

One winter evening, Cameron and I sat side by side in the famous womb chairs at Mudd, studying, spinning, dreaming. At least I was dreaming. Then Cameron left his chair and climbed into mine. We were like puppies in a pile, all limbs and heat. Outside, winter had crusted everything with cold; our feet were always cold, our faces. In the womb chair, we were a bucket of warm. I couldn’t stop giggling, though, because there wasn’t enough room. A woman in another chair shushed us. The chair made an ominous cracking noise, and Cameron started to laugh outright, and just then, Eli wheeled by with a cart of books to reshelve.

“Can you ask them to relocate?” asked the shushing woman. To her credit, it was almost midterms, and we were in a library. Still, this made me laugh harder, and Cameron was weeping with folly.

Eli didn’t look inside the chair. He paused his cart and said, “Madame and monsieur, might I recommend the Days Inn in Elyria?”

This made us both laugh harder, though Cameron looked up at his former roommate and saw who it was, or maybe he knew from his voice.

“Dude,” he said, “I hear there’s a vacant room where two guys who couldn’t get along used to live.”

“Yep,” said Eli. “I use it all the time, don’t you? I believe you are the famous Clementine?”

I couldn’t stop. I was crying with the pleasure of it, and now I had to pee, and people all around us were huffing off to study elsewhere. Only Eli understood.

“I am!” I said, extricating myself from Cameron’s limbs and running off to the bathroom.

When I came back, Cameron was sitting alone at a table.

“He’s not so bad,” I whispered.

“No,” said Cam. “He never was.”

“Maybe we should have him over for cocktails,” I joked.

“Shh!” said two women in chorus.

Cameron grinned and put his fingers on my lips, a sexy
Quiet, please.

On our way out of the library we saw Eli again, manning a desk. Cameron saluted. Eli stood up and bowed. It was a relief to know Eli wasn’t a monster, to tell Cameron how Lily had a crush, how she asked me about Eli all the time, how Cam and Eli’s fighting had made him more mysterious.

Cameron was quiet and took my hand. Then, as we wrapped ourselves in scarves and hats and mittens and arctic-worthy coats, he leaned in and whispered, “Just please don’t like him. Don’t like him more than me.”

I wasn’t sure I heard him. I was sure I heard him. It was the only unreasonable thing he ever asked of me. I asked him not to look too closely at the jet-haired twin geniuses who played cello and viola in his chamber ensemble. I asked him not to go out for 3.2 beer and fries at the pub with them after rehearsal unless I
went, too; I saw the sexual current under the music, or maybe I was just threatened by anyone who might speak a different language with Cameron.

“Really?” he’d asked.

“Just invite me, too, and I won’t mind.”

“The beer is awful, anyway,” he said, agreeing.

I asked him not to take the same ethnomusicology class I did because I would be too distracted, plus I knew he’d just be so much better, I wouldn’t ever feel flush with new ideas, I’d feel as if I were catching up. Mostly, I was a trusting and reasonable girlfriend, but I had moments of insecurity, so I could give him this. He hadn’t asked me not to talk to Eli, or be in study group with him, or laugh at his jokes. He hadn’t asked me to hate the man. Maybe he saw something I didn’t, because to me, Eli seemed jovial and sharp-witted and fun and even handsome, but certainly no threat to the brilliance of Cameron Kite.

Over the summer, I visited Cameron in California, and he visited me in Princeton. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we met him at Newark Airport. My father had offered to drive us, and I’d been surprised, but too far out in the sea of my lust and longing to remember how odd this was, my father, taking time out to drive me to pick up my boyfriend.

“So,” said Dad, parking in short-term parking. “What can we expect, besides a dramatic decrease in the phone bill for the next week?”

“What can
we
expect?” I unbuckled before the car was fully
parked. I wanted to taste Cam’s mouth; I needed to feel his square fingers and the smudge on his chin from playing violin. “The royal
we?”

“Your mother and I,” said Dad, glaring at my unclipped seat belt.

“You’ve talked about it?” I opened the door, and Dad tugged the parking brake with dramatic force.

“Of course, Clementine,” he said following me as I rushed to get out. “We talk about you. It isn’t just paying your tuition, you know.” He patted his car as we shut our doors behind us. “We want to know if this young man is treating you with respect. If he’s worthy of your attentions.”

“Oh my goodness, Mr. Bennet, sir, I’m pleased to know you care about the sensibility of young Mr. Darcy,” I said, teasing him with Jane Austen. But I was pleased. I was flush with attentions—Dad’s, sudden and unexpected, and Mom’s, by proxy.

“Don’t be rude. Your mother cares a lot about the choices you make.”

He paused; I was pacing, waiting for the crosswalk sign near the entrance, deeply impatient, thinking of talking to Cameron, how much I needed to be with someone who didn’t know what I was thinking but really wanted to know.

I stopped pacing for long enough to consider my father. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it, but also meaning
Leave me alone.

I saw him first and felt as though I were riding my pony over a jump, those seconds airborne, flying, possibilities and inevitable
landing. I kissed Cameron in front of my father. I held him long and hard and he laughed because he was trying to see my face and I couldn’t let go.

“Well,” said my father. “I can see someone’s glad to see you. I’m Dr. Lord.” He held out his hand to Cameron, who shook it, looking my father in the face even while his other hand reached inside the top of my jeans waistband to press against my lower back. I felt capable of stripping him right there, of having sex at the baggage carousel, I’d wanted him so much my body felt charged, electric, lightning seeking ground.

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Lord,” said Cameron. I realized just how far the body can go in betraying propriety. It hurt, and it was exquisite to want him like this.

In the car on the way home Cameron sat in back. I twined my arm behind the seat, not minding the sharp cut of the strap, and held his hand.

“Well,” said my father, his voice an exaggerated baritone. “You two should remember there are other people present and not just the two of you in the world. I hope you’re not planning anything expensive in the near future. I have a lot of college tuitions to pay, and I’m not in the market for a wedding.”

Cameron’s hand tensed. We were twenty years old. We’d laugh about it later.

I
couldn’t find my mother. I called out through the big house, hoping she’d hear me, hoping no one else was wandering around—a cleaning person, a gardener, an organic-delivery person—usually, people stayed outside the house: the front door was the separation between grounds and sanctuary, but occasionally people came inside, invited or presumptuous.

“Mom,” I paged on the intercom, which my sisters and I had used to whisper commentary about our parents when we were teens—
she’s dressing up again, he’s coming home tonight, look at that ugly mole
! We must have kidded ourselves that they couldn’t hear us or didn’t have feelings.

“Mom? I thought I’d stop by—I, um, I got an A on my Chem final?” And Dad’s an adulterer. And Olivia wishes him dead.

“I was wondering if you want to go shopping?” I said, but I really wanted to feel her out. Somehow, I suspected she knew. Somehow, this explained everything—except that they clearly loved each other. Except that Dad, upright, uptight, don’t-you-ever-insult-your-mother Dad, had another wife.

“Mom?” I called, worrying for once about her, instead of him.

Shopping with my mother was very, very low on my list of
things to do. I preferred the dentist, the dermatologist for a mole check. And once again, Olivia wasn’t answering my calls.

My mother was always slender and elegant, and I still felt sloppy in comparison, like an adolescent. My looking-glass self was decent, given an absence of thin, put-together people in the picture, but put Mom in the image with me, and I felt like a slouch, a louse, a lout, a mess. But I knew she knew by now—I’d called Odette, and Olivia had pointed out that it was public record, that Mom might as well know. Odette called Mom. Odette’s report was that Mom was taking it in stride, which seemed dangerous to me. So I went to the big house and tried to coax out the hiding cat with a yarn ball of shopping.

“Mom?” I called into each room in turn. All the doors were shut, the chairs and tables gossiping among themselves in their privacy. I paused before my parents’ bedroom door, still embarrassed by the king-size, wrought-iron bed that stood in the middle of the room like evidence. She wasn’t in any room. I began imagining things, the way I had when Odette first told me Dad wasn’t at rounds—that my mother had drowned herself in the pool, and I’d somehow missed the weedy hair billowing in the blue green. That Mom had driven her little Audi convertible into one of the sound walls on Route 1, that she’d downed a mass of her myriad sleeping pills—her cabinet, which I checked next, revealed all the newest kinds: Sonata, Ambien, Lunesta; and pills for anxiety, Xanax, Klonopin, lorazepam, Zoloft; most of them prescribed by my father. But most of them were full. No lumpen bleeding masses behind the shower curtain. No river of blood seeping from the base of a closet door.

He loved her. He wanted her to feel good. I knew this from
observation. For all my disgust about the Accounts and Diary, I had always envied the way they defended and supported each other. They had a physical relationship—they touched, they kissed, they were embarrassing and thrilling when we were little. We used to ask them to make a circle around the three of us with their arms. “Kiss Mom!” Odette would command us all, and Dad always made it first to her lips.

“Mom?” I called up the stairs toward the third floor, my former lair.

After I graduated from Oberlin, my mother had used her wasted talents to redecorate my room. I padded up the freshly carpeted stairs, with special-order bars to hold the runner in place, the new stained-glass custom-made for the landing—a version of my mother’s Octavia rose; the knobby, white, designer bedspread and fat, mahogany leather Pottery Barn chair sat gathering dust for my mother’s next cleaning rotation.

My father’s office, I realized. Of course. In fact, as I approached the closed door to his only private space in the house, I heard a buzzing noise. Maybe she was electrocuting herself, I thought; maybe she had rigged up a fork in the socket, strapping it to her arm with duct tape so she wouldn’t chicken out. Did duct tape conduct electricity?

Perhaps she knew long ago. Perhaps they had some sort of agreement. Maybe the other wife lived in Utah, though Odette was working with her own lawyer to find out. Perhaps what I was learning, most of all, is that I would never marry, at least not until I was sure I trusted everything about my mate.