His Last Wife Page 26

  “That’s what I’m wondering. About you.”

  Nora stifled her eye roll. “What do you mean—about me? What about me?” She lifted herself all the way off of his legs.

  “Easy,” Fisher said, tilting his head and raising his palm. “All I’m saying is, this is the third or fourth time I’ve found you in here—drinking, upset, sad. Look, I know my mother can be a bit much and . . . old school—”

  “Lady Eleanor? Why would you think anything’s wrong there?”

  “I don’t know. I keep thinking I should have never told you that whole story with Rock’s first girlfriend . . . her being Asian and my mother’s completely wrongheaded reaction to that and—”

  “Your mother has been perfectly lovely. Has been since day one.”

  “Right, but you’re white, so that ugliness isn’t an issue here.” Fisher shook his head. “Anyway, I just don’t like seeing you so uneasy and not knowing what I can do to fix it for you. Is the wedding planning getting to be too much?”

  “The wedding planning is tied up in a bow handcrafted by Grace and Co. It’s all completely handled.” Nora shrugged. “There’s really nothing for me to even do.”

  “So, it’s the wedding itself?” He placed his hand on Nora’s foot. “Are these flawless things feeling a bit of a chill?”

  Nora looked at Fisher, at his beautiful, soft face set with sharp edges—his nose, his chin, his jaw. She let her eyes rest on his sweet grin and the laugh lines gently etched into his creamy complexion, taking in all the majesty of him, and she decided right then to open a gate, just a hair, and let a slip of truth spill out. “No, I want to marry you,” Nora said. “It’s just that it doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like it’s me marrying you and you me. It’s this bigger, grander thing set on a bigger, grander stage with the photographers trailing everywhere, the online stories, and all the speculation and talking about every little detail. Jesus, this town always needs to know everything about you, your family. It’s just so public. I’m not into being public. You know that.”

  Fisher reached out to calm Nora’s teetering head with a gentle stroke of her cheek. “Mack, I get it. I get it. It’s a lot. But,” he said with an easy shrug, “I’m a Beaumont. It’s always going to be a lot. And I don’t want to come across like an asshole here, but you’re going to be a Beaumont, too, love; you need better skin. Like my father told me and his told him, and back and back centuries all the way to France: We can’t show cracks. We can’t have them seeing any cracks on us.”

  Nora’s chuckle came out like a sneeze. She felt the snot edging out of her nose, but did nothing about it. She instantly regretted starting down this line with Fisher. Showing cracks and better skin and France—she didn’t want to hear any more about it and was desperate to end the whole interaction. You don’t get it, that’s what she wanted to say, because he didn’t. Instead, Nora nodded and smiled brightly at her fiancé. He squeezed the top of her arm, kissing her face and stepping out of the tub in one smooth movement.

  “Come back to bed,” he said, and tipped his head toward the door. He was standing with his hands resting on his trim middle and his body squared, the only thing missing, a red cape flapping behind him.

  “In a bit. I want to just clean up,” Nora said, nodding and smiling once more. “I smell like subway homeless.” She paused, off his look. “The subway . . . it’s this mode of transpo, kind of like a train, only underground . . . totally out of your scope.”

  “You’d be surprised by the kind of underground things in my scope,” he said, smirking and shaking his head. “Just come to bed, smartass. I’ll wait up—for a bit. But word to the wise: Leave the champers out here.” Fisher turned and glided out of the room. The minute he cleared the door and his footsteps were at a proper distance, Nora popped out of the tub and made her swift way to the closet just outside the bathroom. She slid the door open as quiet as possible and stooped down to ease a flat box partway out from the lowest shelf. Nora peeled back the dusty quilt draped over it and slowly cracked open the topside of the box wide enough to slip her hand in. She still knew exactly where to go, how to navigate blindly through the clutter and grab it by its dog-eared corner. Nora went back to the bathroom, a photograph clutched close to her chest. She looked behind her, listening for any stirring from Fisher.

  Silence.

  Nora went straight to the farthest corner of the whistle-clean bathroom with all its white and height and steely, modern edges, and she squeezed her body tight into the space where the glass and wall met, her forehead pressed against the cool of it while she angled her face to look out the window and steady her mind. Nora only dragged this photo out when she was at the lowest point on her rope, deciding whether to let go or pull herself up again.

  The picture was from that long-ago Christmas, one of the first in the Westmount mansion. In it, posed by the lavish, heavily decorated tree, stood a smiling young Nora, her mother, and the Bourdains. It was the photo Nora used to love, the one she had pinned to the corkboard above her frilly, pink-and-white-everything bed in her pink-andwhite-everything bedroom in the Bourdains’ basement. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a cozy nook off the side of the small, basic kitchen down there. It was the basement, Nora knew, but no one in the house ever called it that. It was the flat according to the Bourdains, and our place to hear Nora’s mother tell it. Warm and reasonably bright, it was a considerable step up from where Nora and her mother came. Although Nora’s memory of their cramped, crappy beginnings was limited—they moved in with the Bourdains when she turned six—she could still recall, with a woeful precision, the moldy, dank stench soaked into the walls of their old fall-apart-ment.

  Three years after that photograph was taken, it was folded into a tight square and shoved into the toe box of an ugly shoe Nora had long outgrown. The picture needed to be out of her sight, its specialness completely destroyed, after that one vile summer evening when Nora went to Dr. Bourdain’s fourth-floor study with a message from her mother: “Will your company tomorrow require something more substantial than the trimmed sandwiches with the tea?”

  Nora, then a freshly turned nine-year-old who rarely paid close attention to her mother’s directives, jumbled it. She skipped over the longer words, boiling it down to what she felt was the crux: “Do you desire more for your company tomorrow?”

  Dr. Bourdain, a man of great intellect and refinement, knew what the girl meant, but he didn’t reply. Not right away. Instead, he let his eyes linger on Nora, on her lanky body, for too long. Instead, he asked Nora to go into the alcove off to his left and fetch a book shelved low on the built-ins. Instead, he sidled up behind her as she stooped, and brushed then pressed his pelvis on Nora’s shoulder, on her head, sweeping her thick, wavy hair from one side to the next. She felt the sick twitching in his dress pants against her ear, her jaw. Nora froze, unable to process anything beyond the books’ titles on their spines. She kept her eyes locked on them. And as the speed of his repulsive rubbing increased, Nora could only recite the titles in her mind on a slow loop.

  The Flowers of Evil. In Search of Lost Time. The Red and the Black. Notre-Dame de Paris. Remembrance of Things Past.

  Looking down at the photograph now, the creases dingy, worn, and cracked, Nora could still make out the top part of Dr. Bourdain’s face behind the black ink splotch. She shook her head, disgusted at herself anew, thinking about the countless times she nearly tore the picture to crumbs or burned it or threw it down a sewer grate. But it was always nearly, almost, not all the way, because she knew that obliterating the picture did nothing to erase what happened. All of it—the scrape of his calloused palms along her inner thighs; the set-in stench of tobacco on his clothes; the low, persistent rumble in his heaving chest as he twitched and trembled behind her—it was never going away.

  Nora swallowed hard and reached for her phone still balancing on the narrow edge of the tub. She stared at the web page for a moment before squeezing her eyes shut and swallowing once more.
She scrolled down to the bottom of the short post, the same one that had haunted her for the past eighteen hours, and quietly—barely moving her lips—read the last lines again: Dr. Bourdain is survived by his loving wife, Elise, and adopted daughter, Nora (estranged). He was preceded in death by his parents, Jacques P. Bourdain and Odette V. Bourdain, as well as his brother, Anton J. Bourdain. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to the Montreal Heart Institute.

  Nora’s stomach lurched into her throat as she clutched the phone and photograph in each hand. After a long breath, she grabbed the champagne from the floor—the picture wrapped around the bottle’s neck—as she stepped into the tub, took a long swig, and collapsed back into the sunken middle.