The Ashford Affair (26 page)

That had been another fight with Dan. He’d wanted a house, eventually. She couldn’t imagine living not surrounded by floor upon floor of miscellaneous strangers. The goal wasn’t to get out of the box but to be able to afford a larger, grander one.

Clemmie trailed after Jon into the bedroom. “Hey, at least you have a rectangle. Mine’s a square. A very small square.”

The bedroom was decorated in a style that could best be described as early cardboard box. A reading lamp stood on one cardboard box, Jon’s alarm clock, a novel, and a spare pair of glasses on another. A few pairs of pants and dress shirts hung in the closet, but the rest of Jon’s belongings appeared to be living in boxes still, all bearing the same, nondescript label:
BEDROOM
.

Jon rummaged in one of the boxes. “T-shirt and boxers okay?”

“Perfect,” said Clemmie.

There were no shades on the windows. It was a back apartment looking out onto the narrow shaft between buildings. The people on the other side of the street had their shades drawn, little slivers of light showing between the slats. The apartment had that strange, dusty empty-apartment smell, the smell of open floor and exposed woodwork. The light reflected strangely off the bare walls and empty floors, making the room seem dimmer, rather than brighter.

“They’re clean,” said Jon, and Clemmie realized he’d been holding the clothes out to her, waiting for her to take them. “I just don’t have a dresser yet.”

Clemmie blinked. “Sorry. Just had a moment of total phaseout.” She bundled the clothes clumsily into her arms. “Thanks, really. Even if they weren’t clean, they have to be better than what I have on.”

Jon made a deprecatory gesture. “Sorry I don’t have a washing machine.…”

“No, really, it’s fine, great.” She backed away, feeling strangely shy. “Shower through here, right? Thanks.”

The shower curtain was stiffly new, clear, with a pattern of slightly dyspectic rubber ducks. It smelled strongly of plastic. Clemmie showered quickly, rubbing his two-in-one Head & Shoulders into her strange, short hair, turning up the heat as high as she could stand. She felt as though she were fumigating herself, purging away the last few days, London, the hospital, everything.

The T-shirt and shorts Jon had left her were clearly his and not Caitlin’s leftovers. Jon wasn’t much taller, but he was broader. Clemmie had to hitch his old gym shorts to keep them from falling down. The shirt clung damply to Clemmie’s chest, faded from multiple washings. She could put her bra back on—but it was as grimy as the rest of her clothes. And Jon had certainly seen her in less. She dropped it back onto the bundle of discarded clothes.

Combing her damp hair with her fingers, Clemmie wandered into the living room. “Jon?”

There were built-in bookcases along one wall, with a fireplace in the middle, but the books were currently all still in boxes, with hand-scrawled labels saying things like
TUDOR-STUART
or
19TH C. POLIT. HIST.
or
WAR POETS
.
There was a television on the floor next to the fireplace, not plugged in, and one of the chairs that, in college, Clemmie had heard vulgarly referred to as a “flip and fuck.” That was the sum total of the furnishings.

The ancient radiator clanged, filling the room with steamy warmth and a slightly sulfurous smell.

“In here.” From the kitchen, a kettle whistled. The sound abruptly stopped and Jon poked his head around the partition. “Tea? Or something stronger?”

“Stronger.”

“Good. I hate drinking alone.” Jon’s head disappeared back into the kitchen. There were miscellaneous rumbles and thumps.

Clemmie hovered in the opening. “Can I help?’

“There’s nothing to help with.” Jon was cracking ice out of a battered tray into a surprisingly elegant ice bucket, with a ring on either side held in the mouth of a stylized lion.

“Nice ice bucket,” Clemmie commented.

“Wedding loot,” he said tersely, and Clemmie looked away, flustered.

She toyed with the dishcloth hanging from the fridge door. It was printed with faded images of Big Ben and bright red phone booths. “I have a friend who only gives edible gifts for weddings—fudge, Cake of the Month Club, that kind of thing. She says it saves the divvying up later on.”

“Smart woman,” said Jon shortly. He dumped pretzels into a bowl. “Take these into the study?”

Clemmie took them. The bowl was so new it still had a sticker on the bottom:
CRATE & BARREL, $3.95.
Jon had gotten the ice bucket, but Caitlin must have gotten the dishes. Why had she had to comment on the stupid ice bucket? She should have realized— But how was one supposed to deal with these things? Make a joke out of it? Pretend it had never happened? There was no easy way to deal with a divorce.

She should count herself grateful, she supposed, that she and Dan had never been married. Their dissolution had been pitifully easy in contrast, odds and ends of clothing and assorted toiletries, hardly enough to fill a tote bag. There had been nothing that had been theirs; it was still his and hers.

Clemmie set the bowl of pretzels down on Jon’s desk, next to his computer and a stack of manila file folders. Unlike the living room, the study already looked lived in. It was a nook of a room, just large enough for Jon’s desk, a file cabinet, and a squishy red love seat with red plaid cushions and a battered old afghan draped across the top. Shelves had been bolted above the desk, already half-filled with books, most of them about England and the English.

Folders littered the side of the desk, each labeled in Jon’s angular printing.
DIVORCE
was scrawled across the front of the folder on top.

“That’s for the book.” Jon set down a tray with a bowl, a bottle, and two glasses, nudging the pretzels out of the way.

Clemmie started, clamping a hand down on the folder before it could fall off the desk. She hadn’t intended … Anyway.

“The book you’re working on now?” she said brightly.

Jon raised a brow at her. Damn him. He knew exactly what she’d thought. “There’s a chapter on the rise of divorce post-war, as another example of the fragmentation of the pre-war codes that maintained the cohesion and power of the Edwardian ruling class.” Jon slopped scotch into a glass and held it out to her. “Cheers.”

“Thanks.” Clemmie took her glass and sank down on the sofa. It was surprisingly comfortable. At the desk, Jon poured himself a slug of scotch. While she was showering, he’d changed from button-down and khakis into T-shirt and jeans. “You’re being really decent,” she said.

“Are you going soft on me?” The sofa creaked as he lowered himself down next to her, settling back against the battered plaid cushions. More gently he said, “I know this is a tough time for you. We can resume our usual hostilities later.”

Clemmie looked at him sideways, at the purple smudges underneath his eyes, the new complex of lines around his lips. He wasn’t, she realized with some surprise, the arrogant boy she’d known, always faster, taller, just a few steps ahead. That boy was gone, and in his place was a man who looked as bone weary as she did.

“Not just a tough time for me,” she said. “How are you holding up?”

Jon gave her a look of mingled surprise and gratification. “It’s … tough.”

Clemmie nodded meaningfully, indicating that, yes, she got it. And she sort of did. Almost. Insomuch as a broken engagement could be compared to a divorce.

Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch. “Addie—she did a lot for me. She meant a lot to me.”

Huh? Clemmie had meant the divorce, not Granny. She caught herself just before she blurted that out, confining herself to another nod, repressing the urge to point out that that wasn’t what she’d meant, that it wasn’t his grandmother.

Which meant what? That he had no right to mourn?

Jon propped himself up on one elbow. “Do you know she’s the reason I went to grad school?”

Clemmie shook her head over her glass. “No.”

Jon stared at the brace of the bookshelf, a reminiscent expression on his face. “I was right out of Yale. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. I took that consulting job, remember?”

“Yeah.” That, she remembered. “That was why you were in Rome.”

She wasn’t sure where that had come from. They never talked about Rome. It was one of those unwritten rules.

Jon glanced at her searchingly. Clemmie looked hastily down, locking her fingers around her glass. “Anyway”—the couch cushions shifted, rocking her closer to him—“I’d been planning to apply to either law school or business school after, just because everyone else was. I told Addie, and she said, ‘What do
you
want to do?’ Just like that.”

Clemmie kept her eyes on her drink. “That sounds like her.”

“She told me there was no point in making myself miserable just because I thought the world thought I should, that values and mores changed over time and I should do something that genuinely intrigued me, because, in the end, any job has its downsides and you have a better shot sticking it out if you like it in the first place.”

“I wish she’d told that to me,” murmured Clemmie.

She’d never doubted Granny had been proud that she’d gone to law school. Granny was very open in deploring her own lack of formal education, less open, although no less obvious, in her disapproval of Clemmie’s mother having gone straight from school to marriage. It had been taken for granted that Clemmie would make good on the opportunities her grandmother had never had and that her mother had passed up; she had taken her success as one for the team. But there had never been anything about making oneself happy or thumbing one’s nose in the teeth of the world to do so.

Of course, as Jon was so fond of saying, maybe it was just because she had never asked.

Jon smiled faintly, lost in memory. “She gave me that lecture—you know the one—”

“The ‘when the crops were failing in Kenya’ lecture?”

“That’s the one.” They shared a look of mutual amusement. “‘If we had let ourselves be discouraged…’ You know the rest.”

It was Granny’s equivalent of the traditional “when I was your age, I had to milk the cows and walk fifteen miles to school,” only it involved the farm nearly failing and everyone having to pitch in to bring it back. They’d both heard that lecture far too many times, usually when whining about work they didn’t want to do. It basically boiled down to “pick what you want and then stick with it,” something that, so far, none of them other than Granny Addie had had any particular success at doing.

Jon stretched out his legs and balanced his glass on his stomach. “You know, she made that up? There wasn’t a coffee-bean blight in 1935. I looked it up a few years ago.”

“She was probably conflating events. People do that.” Clemmie snuggled down into the couch, curling her legs up underneath her. “I’d always thought of it less as history and more as a fairy tale. You know, one of the ones with a moral lesson, like the one where the girl who takes all the apples off the tree and the cakes out of the oven is rewarded and the one who doesn’t is sentenced to spit toads every time she speaks, or something like that.”

“I don’t think I read that one,” said Jon. “But I’ll take your word for it.” He joggled his drink, watching the amber liquid make patterns on the inside of the glass. “What was your Grandpa Frederick like?”

“Didn’t you—? I forgot. You only met him towards the end.”

Jon smiled crookedly. “That’s right. I came around late.”

“But you stuck.” Clemmie held out her glass for a refill.

“Like a bad penny.” Jon hoisted the bottle up from its resting place on the floor next to the couch and obligingly poured another tot.

“Aren’t pennies by their very nature good?” It was less of a tot and more of a jigger. “That’s good. Thanks.”

Jon topped off his own glass somewhat more sparingly than hers. “I got the sense you didn’t exactly feel that way at the time,” he said carefully, setting the bottle back down next to the couch. He didn’t meet her eyes. “About my being around.”

The scotch made Clemmie’s lips feel numb. Not just her lips, all of her. She looked down into her glass. “I was jealous.”

Jon choked on his scotch. “You were jealous of
me
? Why? They were your family. I would have given my eyeteeth to fit it. If I knew what eyeteeth were,” he added as an afterthought.

“Yes, but…” Clemmie shifted in her seat, navigating around a lump in the cushion. “I was a responsibility. They had to deal with me. You were there because they liked you.”

“I was there because my father married your aunt,” corrected Jon. “It’s not the same thing.”

“I thought you were so lucky.” Clemmie twisted the fringe of the afghan through her fingers. “Aunt Anna was so much
fun.
Mother was always working all the time, and when she wasn’t I wished she was. And there you were, with Aunt Anna and Uncle Leonard in that cool apartment on the West Side with the twisty staircase—”

“Listening to them throw crockery and wondering how long it was going to be before it was all over.”

Clemmie stared at him.

Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch, staring dreamily up at the ceiling. “They fought. All the time. Why do you think I spent so much time at Addie’s? It was the only place I could get my homework done without risking accidental concussion.”

Clemmie swiped her wet hair out of her face. Jon’s father had been a famous—and famously temperamental—playwright. Clemmie didn’t remember much of him. He wasn’t the sort who showed up for family occasions. “I didn’t— I had no idea.…”

“Whoa, Clem! Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t that bad.” For a moment he looked like the supercilious prep-school boy she remembered, smirking at the world. “You were right. Anna was fun,” he said judiciously. “When she was around. She was like that. I’d be her favorite hobby for about three days, and then she’d be off again, doing something else. Correction: doing
someone
else. She was sleeping around on my dad.”

Clemmie stared at him.

“Of course, odds were Dad was sleeping with someone else first.” Jon sampled his scotch. “It was … messy.”