Royal Pain (18 page)

“Fabulous. This is going to be quite a treat.”

“I don’t expect you to be best friends with my mother, Bron. Let’s just enjoy dinner with your mother and leave mine out of it for the time being.”

“That’s all well and good for the next three hours.” Bronte strode across the sidewalk and into the waiting Lincoln Town Car, then resumed her train of thought. “But what happens when you decide to bring the little lady home to meet the masses?”

“Devon and Abigail are stupendous. The four of us will form a majority, as it were, leaving Claire and her idiot husband to mop up after Mother.”

“Oh, Max, it can’t be as Gothic as all that. Really.”

“It’s hardly Gothic, Bronte, it’s just my mother. Her father raised her to believe she was entitled to everything the world had to offer, with no particular effort on her part. She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, except as it relates to buying the most expensive clothes for her to wear in the
happy
family
photos that are then immaculately arranged in sterling silver frames on the shelves of the library. Her role, and I have to reluctantly admit she performed it admirably, was to love, honor, and cherish my father. Anything beyond that was, well, just beyond her purview. Children, logistics, details of any kind really were just annoyances that, were she to ignore them long enough, simply went away. While my father was alive, that was all well and good, I suppose. It’s not the marriage I want”—he put an extra pressure on Bronte’s hand that rested in his—“but I guess she gave him some sort of emotional ballast, since he did everything that might have naturally fallen to any other woman in her position. He ran the estates, ran the businesses, ran our education, ran, ran, ran… and she just stood by and looked beautiful and, as she often reminded us, went to the gargantuan trouble of birthing four children as part of the bargain.”

Max paused for a long while, staring out the window as they made the approach to the George Washington Bridge, the Palisades looming in the early evening shadows, hazy copper light dancing on the Hudson River.

Bronte stared lovingly at his profile, recalling the moment earlier that day when he was above her, and reached out her hand to caress his cheek.

He turned and looked at her, then smiled shyly. “What?”

“I don’t think I’ve really told you how much I love you. I do. Really love you, that is.” She brought her lips to his in a tender, delicate sweep, then pulled back slightly to look into his eyes. “You know that, right?”

“Yes, but I certainly like hearing it. A lot.” He brought his hand up to her cheek and kissed her solidly, gently pushing her head back against the seat of the car. She began to groan, then pushed him away.

“Mmmm. You are so good… but now is not the time. We’re only about fifteen minutes from Mom’s and, as much as I’d love to see that kiss through to its natural conclusion, I don’t think now is the time. Did I just say that? So anyway, continue with your mom. Where does she spend most of her time now that your father is… gone?”

“London, mostly. She left Dunlear a few weeks after my father’s funeral and I don’t think she’s even been back once. I do truly believe that she loved him—always true to him
in
her
fashion
, as Cole Porter would say—but now that he’s gone, I give her two years, three at the most, until she’s found another man to look after her. She just doesn’t
do
alone. She’s got her house in London, her dower house on the grounds at Dunlear, and another property in Lincolnshire that her father left her, so not to worry about the duchess. She’ll probably resent you most of all on the basis of semantics. After we’re married, you will be the duchess while she will technically be the dowager duchess. That said, even then I wouldn’t recommend referring to her as the dowager. Ever.” Max turned to Bronte and smiled again, but with a bit more tightness around his mouth.

The car started to slow down as it entered the tree-lined streets of Englewood Cliffs, coming to a stop in front of a 1970s ranch house. The home Bronte grew up in was straight-down-the-line, middle-class fare: set back about thirty feet from the curb, one-car garage to the right, six steps up to the front door approached by a curving path from the driveway. Freshly cut lawn, mature shrubs running neatly along the home’s perimeter, a single shady tree in the front yard.

Bronte took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let her head slip back to rest on the fake leather headrest. She wanted to cry. Or at least not get out of the car.

She adored her mother, she really did. Cathy Talbott was just… needy. As a friend had once pointed out, “She loves you…
to
death
!”

“What is it, Bron?” Max’s voice was much closer to her than she had expected, and intimately low. She turned her head toward him, still resting on the headrest, and opened her eyes slowly to look into his.

“It sounds so mean… then I just add guilt to my original feelings… but I’m just tired of how much my mom loves me. Isn’t that ridiculous? Even saying it out loud sounds so ungrateful. I love her—you will love her…”

Max squeezed her hand and smiled, encouraging her to go on.

“She is truly lovable, and supportive, and smart and every good thing, but she really wants
in
on my life… does that make any sense? And I don’t really… I’m not a really good sharer… and now with you and our
big
news
, everything just feels sort of crowded.”

“Shhhh. Bron. Let’s go have dinner with your mom. It’s just dinner. We are not getting married.” Her eyes widened at the words. “I mean we are not getting married this minute, so let’s take it a little at a time.”

One of his fingers circled the center of her palm in the most calming way. Normally, she would have snapped back with an angry, are-you-shushing-me barb, but instead all she wanted to do was curl up like a cat onto his lap. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Capitulation or comfort? Was she being paranoid or rational?

Her eyes were starting to drift closed, enjoying the rhythm of his gentle touch, when there was a smart rap on the window behind Max, her mother’s beaming smile coming through the tinted glass.

“Game on, m’lord,” she muttered so only Max could hear. He kissed the palm of her hand where he had been touching her and opened the door with his best smile for Cathy Talbott.

“And you must be Maxwell Heyworth!” Cathy gushed before he was even fully out of the car. Max smiled again, about to speak, when Cathy plowed on, “And here comes Bronny!”

Bronte just looked at Max with a slight widening of her eyes, as if to say, “Don’t even think of
ever
calling me Bronny!”

“And you must be Mrs. Talbott. Please call me Max; only my grandfather called me Maxwell, and only that when he was utterly incensed.”

“Oh, Bron, isn’t he charming?”

“Mm-hmm,” Bronte agreed as she made her way up the front path.

“‘Utterly incensed,’” her mother chimed. “That British accent is wonderful.”

Max was smiling one of those smiles that made a little crystal
ting
sound accompanied by a little comic-strip star when depicted on a toothpaste commercial.
How
did
he
do
it
without
seeming
like
a
complete
ass?
Bronte wondered idly as she opened the front door into her mother’s living room.

Bronte tried to see her childhood home through Max’s eyes, tried to see it as a perfectly normal suburban house: neat, modest, unremarkable in a pleasant sort of way. Cathy Talbott had always kept an immaculate home—the ferocious cleaning worked as some sort of martial perimeter against the constant unpredictability of her husband’s mood swings.

At the time, Bronte had thought it a colossal waste of time: because her father had not been able to get mad about the decrepit state of their home, that just led him to seek out new indignities and sociopolitical affronts further afield. Maybe if Cathy
had
let the house fall into a state of inconsistent carelessness, Lionel could have focused on the ring left by a water glass on the antique coffee table, instead of having to cast about for new frustrations on which to cut his teeth.

Bronte felt the pressure of Max’s hand as he gently reached for her lower back.

“Relax,” he whispered warmly through her hair. And, miraculously, she did. Her shoulders settled down, her feet felt firmly planted on the living room carpet, and she closed her eyes momentarily. Her mother had gone into the kitchen to get them something to drink, and Bronte began to wonder if it was really possible that Max was right.

That they were right. Together.

That “relax” spoke volumes.

Throughout her relationship with Mr. Texas, she had forced herself to swallow all the bitterness that had welled up whenever
he
had told her to relax. Whenever
he
had told her to relax, it really meant calm down and shut up. He always denied it, but Bronte never really gave up on that deep-down conviction that she knew the difference between relax (fuck off) and relax (lean on me).

On the contrary, the same small word from Max was a salve. He wasn’t trying to shut her up; he was trying to soothe her, to assuage her worries. The hand on her lower back wasn’t a patronizing pat-pat; instead, it was like a conduit that alleviated her worry, a physical draining away.

How?
she wondered.

“What did I do to deserve you?” Bronte smiled as she turned to look in his eyes and felt a jolt—first of joy, almost immediately overshadowed by doubt that was fueled by years of skepticism and fear.

Before he could answer, Cathy was coming into the living room with three glasses of iced tea on an antique silver tray.

“So tell me about yourself, Max. Where did you grow up? Brothers and sisters? Favorite color?” Cathy set down the tray and handed Max a tall cool glass with a little embroidered linen coaster underneath.

Bronte had a momentary glimpse of her mother as a person: here was a woman who had always loved small, beautiful, seemingly insignificant things. Who even used linen cocktail napkins anymore, for goodness’ sake? Who washed them, ironed them, stored them in layers of white tissue paper, and then, on top of all that, remembered to retrieve them when the rare occasion actually presented itself to use them?

Cathy Talbott always had a proper linen handkerchief in her purse. She ate off of French china. These weren’t expensive habits, she used to say in her own defense when Bronte would accuse her of being a totally antiquated woman. These were moments—opportunities really—to be civilized.

“…Yorkshire, until I was ten, then my parents moved to Hertfordshire. My father died about a year ago and my mother has moved to London for the most part, so I guess Bronte and I will have to decide where we want to stake out our home base.” His glance to Bronte was a visual caress. “And my favorite color is definitely green—exactly the green of Bronte’s eyes, as fate would have it.”

His wink was quick, just for Bronte.

“Mom, I think you may have just gotten more information out of him in five minutes than I got in months of close contact in Chicago last year.”

“You never were very good at asking questions
and
waiting long enough for people to answer, Bronny.”

“That is so untrue!” Bronte’s eyes darted quickly to Max, and then back to her mother. “Max and I had a mutual agreement when we first met, right Max?”

“Well, it was more of… Bronte’s idea than mutual, but of course I was willing to go along with it, in the interest of fostering our—what exactly, Bron?—relationship, I suppose, in Chicago.”

“In any case”—Bronte squinted briefly at Max then brought her attention back to her mother—“we were trying to really get to know each other without all of the peripheral who-what-where-when type of white noise. All that do-you-know stuff becomes sort of tiresome. On the other hand, had I known that the 411 on Max was more like Gibbon’s
Decline
and
Fall
of
the
Roman
Empire
, and less like my-mom’s-a-retired-schoolteacher-and-I-grew-up-in-New-Jersey, I might have been a tad more… penetrating.”

“I have parents!” Max said in mock defense. “I grew up… somewhere. And I take exception to that decline-and-fall part.”

“Mm-hmm,” Bronte agreed skeptically while taking a sip of her iced tea.

“No need to squabble, Bron,” her mother added lightly.

“Yes, Bron, no need to squabble,” Max concurred through a delicious smile that should have been illegal (for how indecent it made Bronte feel), but that her mother found perfectly amenable.

“Moving on,” Cathy continued with renewed cheer, “Bronte, you will be delighted to hear that I have finally gone through your father’s things.”

Bronte’s face clouded. “After ten years, it’s about time you got rid of all of Lionel’s junk.”

“Well, first of all, I still dislike the fact that you refer to your father by his first name—even all these years later it still sounds disrespectful—and second of all, yes, as a matter of fact, I actually began to go through some of his papers and journals after Christmas last year and I have a few I’d like you to read.”

Bronte had been shaking her head in the negative before her mother even completed the sentence. “No interest.”

“Bronte,” Max blurted out before he thought better of it. He had been trying to stay out of it, but he hated to see Bronte so embittered.

“Yes, Max?” she replied archly, wishing more than ever that she could raise only one of her damn eyebrows.

“Nothing, darling,” he replied, all ease and accompanied by that menacing, perfect-son-in-law-to-be smile again.

“Mom, I have nothing whatsoever to say about ‘Dad’ and his ‘work,’” Bronte said, using her index fingers to make mocking quotation marks around her words.

“I am not going to give in on this, Bronte.”

No longer Bronny, she noticed, as her mother continued in her best schoolteacher voice: kind but utterly unyielding. “I have come upon something that is quite remarkable and I would very much like your opinion. If you must, simply ignore the fact that your father wrote it and give me your unbiased opinion. I am of a mind to pass it on to an editor friend of mine for possible publication.”

“Sincerely, Mom, I am not trying to be a churlish adolescent, but you are delusional. His ‘writing’”—again with the mock air quotation marks—“was acerbically dry and painfully self-important. It’s hard enough to get people to read something well-written and cheerful, much less something pedantic and bitter.”

“It’s a satire, dear.” Cathy might as well have said Lionel had also worked part-time running pony rides at preschool birthday parties for all Bronte was able to process the idea of him having a satirical bone in his body.

“I would love to read it,” Max lobbed casually.

“I already feel ganged up on, and we haven’t even been here an hour!”

“No one’s ganging up on you, Bronny, and Max, thank you, I certainly appreciate the offer.”

“My pleasure.”

“I am not sure if Bronte has told you much about her father, but I am afraid he did not age well.”

“That’s an understatement, Mom. He was not a bottle of wine for chrissake.”

“Now you
are
sounding like a churlish adolescent, Bronte,” her mother sniped. “As I was saying, he did not age well because from a very young age, he had been led to believe that he was a gifted thinker and writer. Unfortunately, the prizes and accolades of adolescence and young adulthood rarely prepare anyone for the realities of rejection, both in the world of publishing and in the world of tenured professorships. The more he read that was substandard and pedestrian, the more arrogant he became. And the more he read that was truly intelligent and inspiring, the more quickly he would be beset by immature fits of dark professional jealousy.”

“Mom, I can’t believe you are still defending him. He was an ass.”

“Bronte tries to upset me with her colorful language, Max, but I chose long ago to ignore it completely. Perhaps you will be able to cure her of the lazy habit.”

“I find it quite adorable, actually.” Max smiled.

“Well, that’s only fitting, I suppose. In any case”—Cathy slipped a strand of her hair behind her ear in exactly the same way Bronte always did when she was attempting to steer the conversation back on course—“I don’t think I am being unduly defensive, if you will, when I say this is a wonderful read. It’s an incisive look at the contemporary American family, sort of
A
Confederacy
of
Dunces
meets
Anna
Karenina
in North Dakota.”

“It’s been done, Mom. Jonathan Franzen wrote it already; it’s called
The
Corrections
. American readers have had it up to here with dysfunctional families and the misunderstood academics who are torn from their fabric.”

“I’ve read
The
Corrections
, Bronte, and this is not it. I think if you can tear yourself away from the familiar comfort of your filial disdain, you might be pleasantly surprised.” Cathy stared at Bronte a few seconds longer than necessary, then turned her attention to Max.

Bronte sat quietly for several minutes, looking out the front bay window as the early evening light came through the branches of the big sycamore in the front yard. Her mother and Max were talking pleasantly about England and the latest Booker Prize kerfuffle—both of them chuckling at the irony of all those Oxford and Cambridge types being accused of producing nothing but inconsequential boredom.

Was
Bronte frozen in a state of adolescent malaise where her father was concerned? It wasn’t as if the mere memory of him smacked of bitterness; it just felt like a betrayal—to herself, to her mother—to simply toss aside a lifetime of protecting oneself from all that petty meanness.
Was
it
a
familiar
comfort or a familiar bitterness?
she wondered sadly. What a waste if that was all it was. So he was a pompous jerk; so what?