mother would care about this, and further, would do something about it.
Charles opens the back door and deposits Katya’s Louis Vuitton bag next to the couch where Darius sits with Irina. Only his arm actually makes it through the door, just enough distance to drop her bag and disappear outside again.
The grinding of gravel under the Escalade’s tires is the only good-bye she gets.
An hour later, Katya sucks down more wine in a lawn chair on the back lawn, which overlooks the harbor. With Charles and the kids absent, and the fuzzy warmth of wine wrapped around her, she feels liquid in the chair. Virtually mellow.
She holds the goblet of Pinot Grigio up and peers through it at the sailboats. They look wavery and yellowed. The sun has fallen below the buildings across the harbor, leaving behind a vapor trail of bright orange clouds and a halo of pink that brushes everything with a pastel glow. A mosquito lands on her linen pants and stabs through to suck at her. What’s one more parasite, Katya thinks. Go ahead, suck me dry along with everyone else. The reflexive shame kicks in at thinking of her family this way.
So Charles is imperious and high-handed. She knew that when she married him; in fact, she considered it one of his charms.
Katya tips her head back in her chair and closes her eyes to the dusk, remembering when she met Charles at a fraternity party. She’d just rushed Gamma Phi Beta. In those days, the girls took to calling her Kitty Z. He never was physically imposing; it was his personality that made people abandon their own wills to him. He had his hair rakishly long and wore neatly ironed shirts in a sea of frat boys with their T-shirts with vulgar slogans. There was a guy at the Sigma Nu house causing trouble, the loudest lout of the bunch, who was groping the wrong girls too often. The girls stayed away from him in ever-wider orbit, but he never got the hint—more likely, didn’t care—and he was nearly chasing themaround the room in the space of an hour. Katya herself had been tit-squeezed near the keg.
The other frat guys had been cracking their knuckles and exchanging glances, but thus far no one had done a thing about it. Perhaps it was the lovely furnishings in the room that no one wanted to bust up, maybe they were waiting to build up their liquid courage, or maybe the knuckle-cracking was just a show, and they never intended to do a thing about it. They were probably cheering him on, silently.
Charles, who as far as Katya knew was not attached to any one particular girl at that party and thus had no real stake in anything, suddenly slapped his arm around that guy and started talking to him loudly and forcefully, like a tourist in a foreign country wanting to be understood. Katya couldn’t hear what he was saying from the kitchen, where she was hiding out with her sloe gin fizz. But she could see the man’s face turn red, then pale, then he was out the door and down the steps and into a cab. It was either a stroke of incredible luck, or Charles had thought ahead long enough to call him a taxi, whether to see him home safely or just make sure he wouldn’t stumble back in, was anyone’s guess. As the door closed behind the drunken loser, applause erupted around Charles, who smiled in a satisfied, feline way. Katya wouldn’t formally meet him for another two weeks, but right then she was awestruck by the force of his personality.
She watched him through their courtship build his reputation on campus and in the fraternity as a smart young man with a future in power. She watched him maneuver his way into the best internships by befriending the professors with the best connections. She witnessed that same finagling into a job, and by the time they were married, stood in awe of his wooing venture capitalists to start his firm, wooing them again to start her designbusiness, then that relentless push forward led him to take his company public at a tidy profit.
Barring some unimaginable
Charles opens the back door and deposits Katya’s Louis Vuitton bag next to the couch where Darius sits with Irina. Only his arm actually makes it through the door, just enough distance to drop her bag and disappear outside again.
The grinding of gravel under the Escalade’s tires is the only good-bye she gets.
An hour later, Katya sucks down more wine in a lawn chair on the back lawn, which overlooks the harbor. With Charles and the kids absent, and the fuzzy warmth of wine wrapped around her, she feels liquid in the chair. Virtually mellow.
She holds the goblet of Pinot Grigio up and peers through it at the sailboats. They look wavery and yellowed. The sun has fallen below the buildings across the harbor, leaving behind a vapor trail of bright orange clouds and a halo of pink that brushes everything with a pastel glow. A mosquito lands on her linen pants and stabs through to suck at her. What’s one more parasite, Katya thinks. Go ahead, suck me dry along with everyone else. The reflexive shame kicks in at thinking of her family this way.
So Charles is imperious and high-handed. She knew that when she married him; in fact, she considered it one of his charms.
Katya tips her head back in her chair and closes her eyes to the dusk, remembering when she met Charles at a fraternity party. She’d just rushed Gamma Phi Beta. In those days, the girls took to calling her Kitty Z. He never was physically imposing; it was his personality that made people abandon their own wills to him. He had his hair rakishly long and wore neatly ironed shirts in a sea of frat boys with their T-shirts with vulgar slogans. There was a guy at the Sigma Nu house causing trouble, the loudest lout of the bunch, who was groping the wrong girls too often. The girls stayed away from him in ever-wider orbit, but he never got the hint—more likely, didn’t care—and he was nearly chasing themaround the room in the space of an hour. Katya herself had been tit-squeezed near the keg.
The other frat guys had been cracking their knuckles and exchanging glances, but thus far no one had done a thing about it. Perhaps it was the lovely furnishings in the room that no one wanted to bust up, maybe they were waiting to build up their liquid courage, or maybe the knuckle-cracking was just a show, and they never intended to do a thing about it. They were probably cheering him on, silently.
Charles, who as far as Katya knew was not attached to any one particular girl at that party and thus had no real stake in anything, suddenly slapped his arm around that guy and started talking to him loudly and forcefully, like a tourist in a foreign country wanting to be understood. Katya couldn’t hear what he was saying from the kitchen, where she was hiding out with her sloe gin fizz. But she could see the man’s face turn red, then pale, then he was out the door and down the steps and into a cab. It was either a stroke of incredible luck, or Charles had thought ahead long enough to call him a taxi, whether to see him home safely or just make sure he wouldn’t stumble back in, was anyone’s guess. As the door closed behind the drunken loser, applause erupted around Charles, who smiled in a satisfied, feline way. Katya wouldn’t formally meet him for another two weeks, but right then she was awestruck by the force of his personality.
She watched him through their courtship build his reputation on campus and in the fraternity as a smart young man with a future in power. She watched him maneuver his way into the best internships by befriending the professors with the best connections. She witnessed that same finagling into a job, and by the time they were married, stood in awe of his wooing venture capitalists to start his firm, wooing them again to start her designbusiness, then that relentless push forward led him to take his company public at a tidy profit.
Barring some unimaginable
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