The Inseparables (5 page)

In the living room, Juliet stood expectantly, adjusting her white gloves. Juliet's preliminary ballpark figure had come in at $10,000, which, Henrietta knew, would not change her life. But then again, $10,000 was ten thousand she did not have.

“Before we do the exchange,” Henrietta said, “I have a few other things I was hoping you might look at.”

Juliet said nothing. Impatiently, she stretched her neck, and then her gloved fingers.

“See, I've been packing the place up,” Henrietta said, already feeling a queasy sense of humiliation and dread. “And I've found some things I think might also be worth something.”

Juliet shrugged. “Well, I'm certainly happy to look,” she said, although she did not seem it.

Henrietta moved toward the table, waving her hand across everything she'd gathered as if she were a game show host. Juliet paused a moment to regard the table and everything on it. There may never have been a more uninterested moment. And this, Henrietta thought, this was the best stuff she could find in her house.

Juliet took a pair of eyeglasses from her purse. They were thick and outfitted with magnifying lenses. First, she took the cedar box, inspecting it, shining a flashlight onto it.

Henrietta had tried to have someone do this in her parents' apartment. She'd brought in a man from one of the neighborhood antique shops, and he'd spent all of five minutes perusing her mother's gold jewelry, her furniture, her collection of Russian poetry, before deeming it all worthless. “The gold is fake,” the man had told her. “The furniture is junk. Also, nobody cares about Russian poetry.”

Henrietta fared only slightly better this time. Juliet turned the pistol over in her hand and then moved on to the cedar box. This was all that was left of Henrietta's grandfather's house, the story went. The village had burned, children were killed, but this box remained. Juliet put it down.

She inspected the jewelry impassively, glanced at the picture of Sinatra, and then held the teapot in her hand for an incurious moment before she turned away from everything and smiled blankly at Henrietta.

“Maybe it's best if I just see the weathervane,” Juliet said.

“Nothing?” Henrietta asked. “You don't want any of it?”

Juliet took off her eyeglasses slowly. “I'm more interested in the weathervane, is all.”

Henrietta picked up the box. She told the story of her grandfather returning to his house after the village was stormed and burned by men on horseback. Juliet listened politely. Henrietta emphasized once more the village storming and the horses and the fire.

“It's a very nice box,” Juliet said.

“It's a relic!” Henrietta said. “It's history!”

Juliet nodded.

“What about the gun?” Henrietta picked it up clumsily and pointed it at the floor. “John Dillinger owned this gun. Dillinger the gangster.”

“I can give you the name of someone who—”

“Or this? This is Frank Sinatra.”

“I know that's Frank Sinatra,” Juliet said.

“Frank's not worth anything?”

“I'm sure he is,” Juliet said. “But you contacted me about the weathervane, which is potentially worth far more than Frank Sinatra.”

Henrietta put the picture down beside the gun and the teapot. On the counter, only steps away, was the new box full of
The Inseparables.
She could, she knew, pick up the teapot and a copy of the book, and try, at least for a moment, to curry some favor with her own odd, shameful celebrity. Instead, she took Juliet into the formal dining room. This was one of the few rooms in the house not yet totally overwhelmed by boxes, which was why, after discovering that the statue might be worth something, she had stored it here, cocooned in protective Bubble Wrap and placed inside a shoe box for safekeeping. But when she went there now to retrieve it, she couldn't find it. The box was gone.

Henrietta stood, confused, turning. “It's not here,” she said.

Juliet took a deep breath.

“I put it in a box,” Henrietta said, her voice rising. “A blue box. All month it's been here, stored away and safe.”

Juliet turned in a circle. “The whole house is full of boxes. You sure you didn't pack it up?”

“You told me it was worth ten thousand dollars. I'm sure I'd remember.”

“Maybe you forgot.”

Henrietta closed her eyes. She had turned seventy this year and was growing used to these kinds of conversations. It had started with her last birthday. The doubting, the yelling, the endless repetition of easy questions, the slow speaking, the here-let-me-help-you-with-this. Seventy was, she knew, unmistakably unyoung, but out in town, at the store, people had begun to talk to her as if she were an infant.
This is a computer. This is a cell phone. Have you heard of email?

Juliet sat down. “Let's think,” she said, suddenly friendly. “Have you had a lot of people in the house?”

All this month Henrietta had had so many real estate agents coming and going from her house. The very notion of having to surrender a key to someone other than Oona or Harold terrified her. As had the indignity of so many people trampling in and out, casting their quiet but unmistakable pity onto her old house and, worse, onto all the last things Harold had touched, which were, by the transitive logic of death, the most sacred objects in her world. It was not a stretch to say that the place, set back against acres of lush dogwood and sumac and uncut switchgrass, was failing. Buyers today wanted something that looked old but felt new. Henrietta's house looked old and felt older. Her real estate firm tried to find a positive angle for the sale. They cut the price lower than she wanted. They brought in fashion-forward furniture for “staging.” Everything was low-slung. Couches so low you practically needed a crane to lower yourself into place, or else you had to trust-fall into the cushions. Furniture like this reinforced the idea that you, as the human, were powerful and huge and could accomplish anything. Someone had told her this. The tinier the sofas, the bigger the cash. Someone had said this also. Everything would need to be white, because whiteness in the world of buying and selling was synonymous with optimism, and optimism here was necessary, because this place, this big old spooky place, had something about it that reeked of darkness. Someone, incredibly, had said this, too.

They moved into the kitchen, where Henrietta opened random boxes, looking for the weathervane. Juliet took a seat and waited. It was a big and open room, Harold's favorite, with three windows that looked out to the field and the river. They had eaten Sunday dinners here, every week, right from the very beginning, a secular tradition that went unbroken until his death. It was the one night Harold did not work, but still he would spend most of the day preparing the meal—rolling fresh pasta, or spit-roasting meat, or waiting for dough to rise in the hottest corner, by the sunlit glass. The very first night they were in this house together, they had slept here because their beds had not yet arrived, and she could remember waking that first morning, her husband asleep on the floor, warm light in through the windows, the sky clear, the river fast and dark.

Juliet stood up and began to walk. “When you find it,” she said, “just call me. I'll come back.”

“But it's here,” Henrietta said, standing up, the box cutter in her hand. “It's here somewhere.”

Juliet found Harold's suitcase. “Maybe you put it in here,” she said, crouching, her hand on the zipper.

Henrietta felt herself lunging before she could open her mouth to speak. “No! Please! Don't!”

At first Lydia met with an Internet specialist. She did not know such a person existed on campus. He was a young man, maybe twenty-two, with rimless eyeglasses. Did she understand that as she aged her notions of privacy and the privacy of her body would shift? She assured him that she did. He repeated the question, word for word, this time slowly, as if some not-so-subtle condescension might help her understand better. This picture, he told her, would exist on the Internet for all eternity. Did she understand exactly what that meant? Did she realize that the Internet forgot nothing? She had thought the question was open-ended and at first did not say anything. The man opened up the calendar on his desktop and started scrolling through the years: 2017, 2057, 2117. “This is the future going by,” the man explained. Did she understand that this picture would still be floating around in the year 2117?

Next she met with the head of discipline. Evidently Hartwell employed a three-strikes policy when it came to matters like this. This was news to Lydia.
Distribution of forbidden imagery,
they called it, which was a perfect summation of Hartwell's approach to difficult problems. Needlessly arcane, bureaucratically heartless, and institutionally reluctant to call it what it was. She could, it turned out, have sex with a classmate if she so chose, but she could not send a picture of herself to that same classmate. A stern woman with a local accent, the head of discipline told Lydia that Charlie was gone for good and that because this was her first infraction she would be suspended for only a week. In her opinion, Lydia had gotten off lightly.
I give up with kids like you. This isn't a video game. You don't get to reset and erase your mistakes.

Lydia sat up at this. “He had two other strikes before this?” she asked, her voice rising. “He's done this before? With other girls? And you let him stay?”

The woman closed her notebook. “I can't discuss the disciplinary files of other students. There are privacy issues involved.”

“What about the privacy of my body?” she asked.

The woman nodded eagerly. “Exactly.”

Then Abernathy took her to the therapist's office. Cinnamon candles sat flickering on the windowsill. On the side of a writing desk, there was a bust of someone who might have been Carl Jung or who might simply have been a younger version of the therapist himself. He said nothing at first, and Lydia felt a gnawing, queasy sense of unease. A pair of paper folders sat on the table between them. One was the pink folder, which had in it, she assumed, her disciplinary sentence. The other was black. Staring at it, she felt convinced that it held a copy of her picture. She felt ill again. Had this man—in tweed, caramel loafers, and a soul patch—seen what everyone else had seen?

“We can talk,” the therapist said, finally.

Lydia folded her arms across her chest.

“About anything,” he told her.

Down below, on campus, the school bell rang. She kept eyeing the black folder.

“But you don't need to talk,” he said. “We can sit here.”

She felt her phone buzzing.

“You know, it's a violation,” he said, and for a moment she thought he was talking about the phone. “We recognize that. An alarming violation. It's a humiliation. An invasion.”

A minute passed.

“Maybe we can talk about why you took the picture in the first place.”

“I thought I didn't need to talk,” she said.

He wrote down this sentence in a notebook. Then he picked up the black folder.

“You know,” she said, looking around, “is there another therapist I can talk to? Maybe a woman?”

Now she waited.

She'd begun to think of it as a storm. Monday to Monday. A week, basically, of public nudity. On the walkway between buildings, she was nude. In chapel, beneath the looming stained glass image of the risen Christ, she was nude. During discussions on Napoleon's foray into Russia, or on the family structure of beluga whales, or on differential equations: nude. So often she had awoken at night having had a dream that she was naked in class and everyone could see. What did it mean when something like this actually came true?

The general socially accepted rule about nude selfies was that you were not supposed to keep them on your phone. If they were just on your phone, saved like any other picture, like a particularly adorable picture of a golden retriever, or like a picture of a really delicious plate of cinnamon pancakes you ate two weekends ago in Manhattan, then anyone could steal those pictures and distribute them wholesale to anyone interested in naked bodies. Which was what had happened to Lydia. If you wanted to send a picture of yourself topless, or topless and bottomless, to someone you were interested in, as a way to flirt, or simply as an innocent substitute for actual, genuine sex, then you did it in such a way that the pictures vanished the moment someone got them. This made the picture temporary and ephemeral, and most of all, it made it thrilling. “I can't believe you were this stupid. It's like you're the only one who doesn't know how to do this,” one of her roommates had said. Everyone pretended that her having kept this picture was a sign of some burgeoning sexual dysfunction, when instead it was simply a result of how deeply she wanted to see herself the way some fucking idiot boy did, or a symptom of her own curiosity. Or maybe just an illustration of how deep her own vanity ran. She had no idea anymore.

Abernathy left her in a long corridor lined with photographs of the graduated students who had gone on to become things like Navy SEALs or television hosts. Electric fragrance fountains dispensed fake spruce into the air, and the whole place smelled like a shopping mall at Christmas. The tiny leather chair she occupied was clearly meant for a small child. Hartwell took students as young as six, taught them Mandarin, Shakespeare, and computer coding, and spat them back out into the world as currency traders or diplomats or white-collar criminals. Lydia was the rare thing here: a recent exile from a normal public education.

She snuck her phone from her back pocket, expecting the usual torrent of misery. This was how it had been this last week. They came every hour at least, a few dozen in total, all from anonymous addresses, nearly everyone with an obnoxious retort.
Fuck girl, why aren't you in my shower?
Or:
Please let me fuck you.
Or else photos of their dicks. In the outside world this wouldn't have been a blip. Pictures like this multiplied every hour, she knew, but at Hartwell, even the most timid prurience earned the biggest scandal. Some of the messages were surprisingly earnest.
I think you're really pretty.
Or:
I love natural breasts.
She had tried, in those first panicked hours, to stanch the bleeding, writing every single person back.
Please stop
sharing this. Please delete this.
The moment she realized that there wasn't a soul at Hartwell who had not seen her topless, she was sick all over her bed.

At the end of the corridor a set of doors swung open, and Lydia saw her mother coming down the hallway. Beside her was the headmistress. Lydia's first instinct was to run to her mother. It surprised her to feel this. Boarding school was supposed to inculcate independence. Accelerate her becoming an adult. Separate her from her mother as painlessly as possible. She had pleaded to be allowed to come here. In Crestview, sending your child to boarding school was tantamount to admitting that you had stopped loving her enough to keep her around. It was not something you could readily confess at a dinner party. Lydia had lobbied hard, bombarded her mother with brochures. Look! The happy-looking people! The cavernous library! The grand-looking buildings! Appealing to her mother's vanity, Lydia had shown off the statistic claiming that Hartwell produced an inordinate number of physicians. I could be just like you! As her mother got closer, Lydia fought to keep herself from crying. She had her phone hidden against the waistline of her pants. She worried about it buzzing, because every buzz, she knew, corresponded with another message from someone here. She began to shake.
Mom,
she managed.
Mommy.

The headmistress went directly past Lydia and toward her office without making eye contact. For a brief moment they were in the hallway together, Lydia and her mother, looking at each other, waiting for the office door at the end of the hall to close so that they could hug. The last time they'd seen each other was a month ago, on a visitors' weekend. Lydia had taken the bus to Aveline and they'd eaten takeout Korean food by the fireplace. For the first time, Lydia had a vision of her future—a future in which she and her mother were adults together, something almost close to friends. After dinner her mother had tried to explain the status of her marriage, speaking in euphemisms about the difficulty of marital togetherness and about spousal cooperation and about the myth of matrimonial compromise and about Gwyneth Paltrow. Before Lydia left for school, they'd agreed to talk every night. Then, when that hadn't worked out, they agreed on every third day, and then every weekend. She wasn't sure why they had stopped talking. She wondered sometimes whether a daughter's innate desire to admire her mother was like a kind of addiction you needed to break eventually. Or whether you got to a certain age and began simply to replace your mother with a regrettable string of people like Charlie Perlmutter, people who were readily willing to say that they loved you, or at least steal a picture of your nude body and deliver it to every inbox they could find.

When they were finally alone, her mother grabbed hold of her so tightly that Lydia let out a small gasp.

“Are you all right?” her mother said.

Lydia took a breath. “You just squeezed me hard, is all.”

“That's not what I meant, Lydia.”

Lydia looked up. “I don't know what to say. No. Clearly, I'm not fucking okay.”

Her mother held her at arm's length, as if inspecting her for visible wounds.

“Did you send it?” her mother asked her.

“No,” Lydia managed.

“People here seem fairly sure that you sent it.”

“Because Charlie said I did. And because there's a picture of me floating around. So obviously they'd believe him over me,” she said. “And do you really think I'd do that?”

“I didn't think you'd take a picture of yourself like that in the first place.”

“Wait,” Lydia said. “They
showed
you?”

Her mother let go of Lydia. “No, of course they didn't show us. They're not criminals.”

She let out a long breath. She had assumed everyone had seen it. Her mother, realizing this, hugged her to her chest and held on, as if Lydia were about to fall off the edge of a building.

“Everyone's very worried about this,” her mother said. “I'm worried about this.”

“If they're so worried, why are they suspending me? Like
I'm
the one who did something wrong. Someone did something to me. This is fucked. Everyone's seen it. Every person here.”

“Relax,” her mother said. “Breathe.”

“Impossible,” Lydia said.

In her ear, her mother whispered, “And who the hell is this Charlie person? You never said anything about him.”

Lydia closed her eyes. “He's nobody,” she said.

“Your father will probably want to kill him,” her mother said. “I want to kill him.”

“Where is Dad?”

“He's downstairs. Fighting with the dean. Or one of the deans. There's too many deans at this weird school.”

“Fighting?”

“He's a lawyer. He fights.” Her mother reached out and put her hand in Lydia's hand. “He's good at fighting.”

“Fighting about what?”

“I don't know. He started yelling. I got up and left. It's a reflex of mine at this point.”

The headmistress came out into the hall, holding both the pink and the black folders. She was Gerta Schiller from Berlin, a supposed expert in educational theory. A celebrated author on the biological tendencies for risk-taking in the teenage brain. Readily armed with statistics about adolescent dopamine levels. So far Lydia had had exactly one interaction with Schiller prior to this, and it was about her grandmother's novel. Did she know about it? Had she read it? Did she have an opinion on the fact that some Hartwell parents were trying to ban it? Had she been deluded, because of this book, with any outmoded ideas about sex and smut and vice and the human female body? All were questions that seemed at the moment to be especially prescient.

“I want to go home,” Lydia said. “I don't want to go in there.”

Her mother nodded. “I'll go see what I can do.”

“Instead of listening to why she should suspend me, maybe you should show her this.” She held up her phone. “Look. Show her what people are writing. Look at the pictures people are sending me.”

Her mother took the phone and allowed herself the first few messages in Lydia's inbox. Lydia stood, watching. Her mother's finger touched the screen gingerly, and then, with every comment or attached picture, her expression fell. Outside, the sky dimmed. Through a small window Lydia could see the roads leading in and out of campus, and far off, beyond that, the thrilling gray snake of the freeway, which signaled escape and freedom and anonymity.

She heard her mother, beside her, suck for air, out of shock or maybe out of disgust. She'd shut off the phone.

Again, she reached out for Lydia, clutching her by the arms, not letting go.