Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“If you don’t understand something, muddle through and go on. Don’t feel stupid. It’ll make sense later. The true meaning of structure won’t crystallize until the final chapter, and only then will you be in a position to begin to appreciate its sweeping implications.” -Jon Franklin

The stone house was starting to let the winter in. If it were anywhere else in the world, it would’ve chilled him, but the man didn’t feel cold. Not in the south of France.

A contractor might say the house had good bones. The structure used to assert itself against the Mediterranean sky. It might have still, if the landscape around it didn’t carry so many reminders of the previous wildfire seasons. 

Like the man, the house was aging. It was old. A man who had made good amount of money in software had built it toward the beginning of the twenty-first century, on a hill overlooking the sea, in a town whose name sounded the same as the French word for ease. The house was meant to be a place of ease. It was for many years. It still was, but the man was in no mood for ease.

Jude had tried to talk him out of going. When that didn’t work, she’d tried to convince him to let her come with him. He waved away both possibilities. He was there to work.

He wasn’t as strong as he once was, but the years had treated him well. He’d climbed the bleached stone steps from the village to the house, the hired man following close behind with the two small pieces of luggage he’d brought. He could’ve taken them up himself, but Jude had insisted.

In his eighties, the man’s posture was still straight, his gait still steady. To be sure, he had faded over time, as if he taken on a dusting of white powder and added new shadows to his face. He didn’t mind it.

What he did mind was how his senses had dulled. He used to be able to smell thunder in the air. Lately, it hasn’t always been clear if it was a sauce or his palate that was weak.

There were the other indicators of age. Some slackening and thinning of the skin, a biochemical weakening such that when a paring knife slipped in his hand, the cut took weeks to heal.

He told Jude he didn’t want to be disturbed while he was working from the house. She negotiated with him until they agreed that she would text him to check in once a day.

He tapped out a response to her text. All is well, Sunrise. Making progress on the 2021 recordings. Love you.

The visit home was not much of a homecoming. A week of meetings and appearances in London and the home counties. Staffers coordinated Henry’s suits and ties to maximize or minimize their symbolism. In between, he shrugged on dinner jackets to eat with his grandmother, his brother, and his sister-in-law. For dinners with his mother and sister, he went without a jacket, instead pulling a sweater over his heavy hair. 

After the time away, even the blue suit he wore for traveling, the one made of surprisingly stretchy fabric, felt constricting. He had been in transit for the past eight hours, and a song about hurting each other and breaking each other’s hearts and pleading with each other not to go was playing in a loop in his head.

A black town car deposited him in front of a brownstone. In some ways, the house was interchangeable with any number of creative-class dwellings in Park Slope. In other ways, it was irreplaceable. 

“Henry, my man,” the driver said as he struggled to lift a tan rucksack from the trunk. “You sure you don’t want a hand with this?”

“Certain,” Henry said, taking the bag from him with ease. "Thanks, Marty.” 

As the car pulled away from the curb, his phone buzzed.

Please confirm Your Highness’s safe arrival.

Confirmed. Get some rest, please. Send greetings to Z.

A light was on in one of the windows. Henry smiled to himself as he trudged up the steps to the front door. It opened before he reached it.

Alex stood barefoot on the other side of the threshold, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.

“Hello,” Henry said. 

Did the charge of their gaze make them need an extra breath? Did it make Henry’s step stutter? 

“Still getting the hang of keys?” Alex said.

“I hadn’t got my keys out, actually.”

“Damn. That’s right. I opened the door before you could struggle. Your very own concierge service.” 

“Perhaps you were just eager to see me.”

The smile Henry gave Alex when he crossed the threshold would never be photographed and published. It was too private and too freighted. A heady cocktail of affection, playfulness, and always-on desire of someone young and newly, acutely in love.

They practically lunged at each other when Henry shut the front door behind him. Henry took in the scent of Alex’s ancient T-shirt before he gathered the bottom of it into his fist and pulled Alex toward him. 

They moved upstairs, nipping at each other like wolves at play, going from relaxed and amused to serious and insistent. 

There’s a myth about an Old Testament patriarch. They say that Jacob wrestled an angel all night. It sounds like something new couples do. Something Alex and Henry did. Their physical relationship had a wine-drunk, grappling quality.

They got drunk on bodies into the small hours. Afterwards, Henry stayed awake in his new bed, in the new house, in a new country. He watched Alex sleep.

Shawn Crowe-Lee: Alright, I’ve started the recording. Let’s all state our names for the record and indicate that we’re aware this is being captured on video and audio. I am Shawn Crowe-Lee, PhD, and I am aware we are being recorded on audio and video.

Alex Claremont-Diaz: I’m Alex Claremont-Diaz, and I’m aware this session is being recorded—on audio and video. 

Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor: My name is Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor. People know me as Henry.

Shawn: Is that a legally valid way to refer to you, Henry?

Henry: Yes. 

Shawn: Great. And can you give verbal confirmation that you’re aware this is being recorded, please?

Henry: I am aware and consent to this session being recorded on video and audio. 

Shawn: Thank you. I will check in with the legal team about whether we need to do this at the beginning of every session, however many sessions you decide to have. There is no expectation that you will go to any set number of sessions, or any sessions after this one. I want to make it clear that the sessions are meant to be therapeutic. But per your written request from before this meeting, we are recording this session because the Democratic National Committee might use it to to pursue legal action against Richards for America, and against Governor Jeffrey Richards personally.

Alex (broad smile): Whatever helps.

Shawn: There are a few more housekeeping items I want to get through. I want to confirm that my assistant is working with DNC staff to ensure that any and all video and audio recordings of these sessions are encrypted. 

Alex: Yep.

Shawn: Any questions about that, Henry?

Henry: Yes. I mean, no. No questions.

Shawn: Thank you. And one last thing: Do you understand that this is not a deposition, that material from these sessions may be used interchangeably with materials from any extant or future depositions?

Alex: Yes.

Henry: Understood.


Shawn: Do you understand that my consent to record these sessions does not constitute my giving my professional opinion to be used in any legal proceedings other than what may become relevant for matters of licensure in the state of New York?

Alex: I understand.

Henry: I do as well. 

Shawn: I think that covers everything. Thanks for going through that rigamarole with me. So, why are we here?

They were there on the president’s orders. A motherly suggestion. 

“The two of you have been through some truly extraordinary shit,” she’d said, little parentheses appearing at the sides of her mouth as she pressed her lips into a grim line. “I want you to get therapy. Together.”

They didn’t. Not immediately, anyway. Not until Henry’s penis appeared on gossip blogs. But let’s go back a few steps first. 

Shortly after Henry moved into the brownstone, he gave himself a free day to walk the length of Manhattan. He would make a day of it, create a beautiful memory of his new city. He did. Lolo Haiz’s band was everywhere, singing about how they belonged to all the girls in the world. The synthy, frothy confection of a song ended with a winking spoken line. “And some boys too.” The song whooshed out the windows of passing cars and from discrete speakers over bar patios. 

Henry had dressed casually, comfortably for the day, in soft gray joggers and a T-shirt. That turned out to be catnip for bloggers and social media accounts that followed everyone from megastars to the niche-famous. The online discussion quickly turned to what may or may not have been the outline of his penis.

Hello There, Big Fellow, shouted one headline, Henry’s crotch helpfully circled in red. Other tabloids went lightly antisemitic: Prince of Shvantz. 

“That one doesn’t even make sense,” Henry said. 

“Welcome to American media,” Oscar told him. “Your public-sweatpants days are over.”

“I never had public-sweatpants days.”

“Well,” Oscar said. “That sucks.” 

Shawn: How did you meet?

Henry laughs quietly.

Alex: At the Rio Olympics.

Shawn: So, in the summer of 2012?

Alex: 2016.

Shawn: Got it. I don’t follow sports. What did you notice about each other?

Henry: I think we already knew of each other. 

Alex: I knew of you. (To Shawn) He was quieter than I was expecting. 

Henry: I was in public.

Alex: So was I.

Shawn: Henry, how about you? What did you notice?

Henry: I was…Alex already knows this, but I was rather struck by him, I think.

Alex (smug): Starstruck. Lovestruck. Struck dead. Like a nail gun to the head.

Shawn: What does that mean?

Alex: He was—yep?

Shawn: Henry, I’d like to hear this from you, if you don’t mind. 

Henry: Alex was starting to say it. But I was practically struck dead. 

Shawn: And you pursued your interest in each other?

Alex and Henry both laugh.

Henry: Not exactly. 

Alex: I thought you barely remembered me.

Shawn: So how did you get together?

Henry: It was casual at first.

Alex: Bullshit.

Henry (smiling): The shape of it was meant to be casual, but we got attached. Obviously.

Alex: That’s it?

Henry: Should I say that we fell in love? 

Alex: I caught up to Henry. And of course we fell in love. 

Shawn: Henry, you’re smiling.

Henry: It’s just…sometimes hearing Alex—hearing you say it. It’s…

Alex: You’re into it.

Henry: Yes. 

The microphone picks up the sound of Shawn taking notes with a mechanical pencil.

A few facts: Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2021. You might know where his house was. It’s a brownstone number that’s now famous in some circles of royal watchers and unreformed gawkers. 

Alex Claremont-Diaz rented an apartment a few blocks away for his 1L year at NYU. The logic of American meritocracy would have placed him in upper Manhattan, near Columbia, but Alex had made choices with a shared life in mind as soon as he knew he had strong feelings about Henry, before he could name those feelings as love.

It’s dangerous to write about well-known couples, to say nothing of well-known couples with well-known love stories. The greatest threat to your project is always time. Time has an alchemizing effect. It transmutes flawed, illogical mortals into myths and avatars of humans’ shared longing for beauty, for understanding, for a kind of eternity.

This project is a fool’s errand.

I’m going to do it anyway. At least try. 

Here are a few lesser-known facts: The brownstone was the site of some of the most jarring conflicts between Alex and Henry. By comparison, the house in Austin was a peaceful home base. Austin was the site of most of Henry’s literary output. By now, you know some of the titles. Immortal Women, Eating in Cars, Odd Man Out and Other Stories. And Days of Adulation, the source material for that inexplicable—and inexplicably popular—series the streamer renamed Empire Waste. We don’t talk about Empire Waste anymore.

But we can talk about other things. Things that were widely known and loudly discussed and things that were only murmured. Things that were the mortar of their shared life.

Chapter Text

Shawn Crowe-Lee: And you began to date in secret?

Alex: It was kind of a fling.

Henry: A fling is a very American idea. A fling has an arc. Maybe Alex flung himself into it, but I don’t want to speak for you.

Alex: I do throw myself into things. Fling myself. 

He mimes casting a fishing lure. Henry rolls his eyes, but he smiles.

Henry: He’s very carefree in many ways, compared to me.

Alex: There’s not a lot of carefree-ness to Henry’s life.

Henry: I had to be more intentional.

Alex: What were your intentions?

Shawn: Good question.

Henry (shy smile): I suppose I intended…to take what I could get once it became clear that we would…have a physical relationship. 

Alex’s grin is tenderness and tempered glee.

Henry: But I had to keep the ending in mind.

Alex: You didn’t think we would become anything?

Henry: How could we have?

Neither of them had loved anyone before. Not really. You couldn’t use the word to describe Alex’s entanglements—a classed-up way to talk about hook-ups and short-term arrangements that fizzled because there was always something else, something more, something bigger. Alex flung himself into everything he put his mind to. He didn’t really put his mind to the people who wanted to touch him and have him touch them. Not until Henry. 

I don’t know how to describe Henry’s involvement with other people. Is there a word for the kind of half-relationship a person cracks open a door for? What about when that person’s baseline is mild heartbreak?

Oscar saw this heartbreak. It brought out something warm and nurturing. He had the time and space to notice things like this. His position in the Senate was secure, and he hadn’t remarried or taken up with someone new. Or maybe he just wanted to spend more time with the family. 

Whatever it was, Oscar was the one who helped Henry set up the brownstone during Congress’s summer recess. While Alex dove headfirst into preemptive reading and outlining and drinks with neurotic 1Ls, Oscar put up Henry’s art. A portrait of David the beagle. A small oil painting of Henry from his cricket days. A photo of Bea with one of her guitars in her lap, positioned in the classical way. A circa 2005 photo of Catherine, Arthur, and the three siblings. A single shot of Philip and Mary posing together in their country gear, a long-dead hound at Mary’s side. 

“They should really change the cover,” Oscar said, holding up a copy of The Mozart Season, about a twelve-year-old girl preparing for a violin concerto competition. “I thought this was going to be one of those books about a violinist during World War II.”

“Only a dad would go straight to books about World War II,” Henry said. “Bea read it when she was the main character’s age, I think. She bought me that copy. It’s quite good. It’s even set in America. Portland.” 

Oscar was there when Henry alternately sighed and fumed at shipments of furniture from Philip.

“I know what he’s doing. He’s terrified that I’m going to degrade myself and buy my own furniture.”

“I don’t know what I just heard,” Oscar said. “That some kind of old-money thing?”

“You could say so.” 

“But he put in the time and energy to ship you old-ass furniture.” Oscar ran his hand along the back of a sofa that may have been haunted by Queen Charlotte. “He cares, in his way.”

Henry snorted.

“Hey,” Oscar said. “Nothing says you can’t still buy your own furniture. Get yourself a credenza or something. You might feel better.” 

Oscar did fatherly things like finding and repairing minor faults with the inherited furniture. He reveled in the physical labor, even when a splinter found its way into a finger that hadn’t touched anything more treacherous than a long policy paper in years. 

“Well, son,” he said as Henry waited with him for the car that would take him to to JFK. “Thanks for putting me up.” 

Their embrace was warm but brief. Henry’s eyes smarted as he watched the car carry Oscar away. He blinked hard, scanned his surroundings to see if he was being photographed and recorded, and ran back up the steps of the brownstone. 

“H, stretch me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Stretch my hamstrings. The hams. My hammies.”

“Your hammies.”

“It’s good to stretch. Everyone should do it. Before you go to sleep is a good time for it.”

Henry did what was requested of him. It looked and felt ridiculously, comically sexual. 

“I think that’s what they do to warm up for rugby practice.”

“Erm, yes.” 

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What? You get cut from the rugby team or something? Is that why you had to play cricket and polo?” 

“That was actually rather good, the accent.” 

“I’ll show you what’s rather good,” Alex said, his voice lazy. 

“I highly doubt that.”

“What? Why would you doubt me?”

“Well, you say you’ve slept five hours a night for the past week, which I’ll take to mean you’ve actually been sleeping four. You couldn’t beat a small dog in a wrestling match in this state.” 

Alex tried to grapple with Henry to argue his point, but Henry was right. Henry won handily.

“Who says I didn’t lose on purpose?” Alex said, wiggling deeper into bed in spite of himself, eyelids heavy. 

“Of course, of course.”

“I didn’t say to go.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I’d have thought the legal scholar would need his rest.”

“Mmmm.” Alex let his arms fall heavy around Henry, who rested his head fall against Alex’s chest. They listened to each other breathe. 

A phone buzzed. 

Henry inhaled sharply and picked his head up. “I’ll leave you to it. Get some sleep.” 

Alex didn’t let go. 

“Yes?” Henry said after a moment. 

“I’m conflicted,” Alex said, scratching heavy, lazy circles on Henry’s scalp. 

Henry put his chin on Alex’s chest. “What about?”

“I’m so tired.”

“I know.” 

“H, this is not a kiss-on-the-forehead kind of conversation.”

“Mmm. Sorry.”

“It’s not an apology kind of conversation either.” 

Alex made an exasperated noise and thumped his head onto the pillow.

“Use your words,” Henry said.

“I really want to rest.”

“Right.”

“But I also want, like, you.”

To that, Henry said only, “Well.” 

What happened, then? In later years, they might say, tongue in cheek, that Henry performed an act of service. Alex might say that Henry gave him a blow job. A gentle one. It soothed almost as much as it relieved. Alex fell asleep almost immediately afterwards, his head listing to the side, his mouth half open. 

Henry admired his work, wiped his mouth on the back of his forearm, and went to his office, where he wrote until most of Park Slope retreated to their homes and turned off the lights.

Alex: I’m not interested in other guys you’ve had sex with. Are any of them famous? Have I met any of them?

Henry: No. No and no. 

Alex: I’m not scared that you’ll go after anyone else either. I mean, it would be hard to tear your eyes and your mind away from Alex Claremont-Diaz. 

Shawn: Henry, has Alex addressed your concern?

Henry: What I was saying was that—well, there might come a time when you see someone who gets your blood up.

Alex: So I’ll continue to be a person. So what?

Henry: Do you think you might want to pursue…anything?

Alex: I mean, everyone loves the ACD. Shawn, is there a right way to answer a hypothetical like this?

Shawn: I invite you—both of you—to consider the question behind the question. Is there another question that would get you closer to the answer you’re looking for?

Henry looks at Shawn for a long moment.

Henry: The thing is, Shawn, you resemble a prominent lawyer Alex has a crush on.

Alex: Whoa. What? Who?

Henry gives Alex a look.

Henry (to Shawn): You’re sort of his type. The women, anyway.

Alex: Okay, you’re also making me sound way dorkier than I am. I promise at least some of my celebrity crushes are like, musicians or athletes or whatever. I bet you have celebrity-slash-real-life crushes on musicians. Like, a classical musician? Have you ever met Joshua Bell? Do you have a crush on Joshua Bell? How about that one Australian violinist?

Henry: What? Who?

Alex: You were playing him the other day. The “Symphonie…” (snaps his fingers) “espagnole.” 

Henry: Ray Chen. That was Bea. 

Shawn: I’m going to pause the conversation here for a second. Alex, I notice you making jokes. That could keep you from listening and engaging deeply. 

Alex: I’m not trying to deflect anything.

Shawn: I understand. Are you feeling anything? Is there an emotion that’s making you uncomfortable? I’m asking because your ears are a little red, and you’re talking quickly. I’m going to invite you to slow down.

Henry’s question was not about who Alex wanted to be with or have sex with. They’d fallen in love young, and decisively. Of that there was no question. 

But Henry was a native of the world of duty. Nestled within his conversation with Alex was something he never brought himself to speak out loud. How should a person be? Who should a person be with? Were love and effort enough to keep the answers from changing?

Alex and Henry had no way of knowing the long arc of their relationship, their marriage. Their life. Nothing is fated when you’re young and still creating yourself. 

By comparison, their families’ origin stories were set by some celestial chisel. Because even if Ellen and Oscar did divorce, Alex never tired of the photo they took on their first date. They have the nonchalance of working-class kids who don’t have anything to lose yet. They look rough and brilliant, like they might dazzle you in one breath and cut you down in the next. Their eyes glint with the same promise and the same dare. With the benefit of retrospect, it’s easy to say they look destined for a few good bouts with the lion of history. 

Whereas Henry’s family lived in the lion’s den and paid tribute to the beast. There are at most a handful of confirmed photos of Catherine and Arthur’s early relationship in the public record, all of them from tabloid journalists. The images are blurry, the figures like apparitions of sacred deer. But once the engagement was announced—Mary did it through gritted teeth that passed for a smile, but she did the job—the eccentric, intellectual princess and the versatile actor were sanded down to Pomp and Circumstance Barbie and Ken. 

The constraints of royal life were less like manacles and more like fine steel threads that pulled on every part of a person. The sly smile that had been such an asset as Bond became a liability for the consort of the future queen, so the solution was not to smile. Arthur let himself be steered as if Alistair Davies, Mary’s trusted communications staffer, were a particularly persnickety director. Media commentators would interpret Arthur’s rare smiles in official photos as evidence of unhappiness with royal life. Maybe it was. He was dead before he could give interviews or formally share his thoughts on that era.

Alex: I pick good people. I have a good picker. Everyone in my family picks good people. I’m serious. There’s my parents. And then my mom picked Leo. That’s three good people right there. And then there’s June and Evan. Good guy. June and Nora.

Henry: I maintain that the June and Nora thing is a freudian nightmare.

Shawn: What do you think about the people you’ve picked in the past? Let’s start with you. Henry?

Henry: Oh. Er. Truth be told, it felt less like I was choosing and more…I’m not sure how to describe it.

Shawn: That’s okay.

Henry: In my position—the position I was in—you don’t exactly get many options.

Shawn: Alex?

Alex: No real complaints. Everyone was good people. Like I said, I have a good picker.

Shawn: Alex, I’m hearing from you about picking and choosing. Henry, you’re talking about options. We have a bit of a theme.

Henry: Well, one is always thinking about choice, right? Without choice, one can get trapped in unpleasant circumstances. 

Shawn: You have something specific in mind?

Henry: There's always the media. And (a breath) the thing is, there will be times when I’m cold and incomprehensible.

Shawn (quiet): Why do you say that?

Henry: Well, medication helps, but depression and all that are notorious for changing shape. (He scratches his tricep through his shirt.) I’m sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Shawn: How often are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Henry: Always.

Shawn: Would you describe the feeling as dread?

Henry: I’m not sure. (To Alex) It’s more that I don’t want to hurt you. You’re not trapped here with me.

Alex: You won’t hurt me.

Henry: Yes, I will. Maybe not the next time or the time after that. Maybe it will feel alright for a while. But eventually, I will hurt you.

Shawn: I want to explore this idea, Henry, that you don’t want to hurt Alex. Are you saying that you don’t want to hurt him ever?

Henry: Isn’t that the idea?

Shawn: Is it realistic to never hurt other people?

Henry (visible surprise): Well, I, er. I suppose I see my problems as something to keep contained.

Alex: Babe, you won’t hurt me. Your depression’s the perfect size for me.

Henry (a beat): That was horrendous.

Shawn: Alex, I’m going to turn to you because you’re making a joke. What’s the emotion under the joke?

Alex: Oh. (Looks at Henry) It’s actually not that deep. I think what it comes down to is, I chose you. I’ve chosen you the whole time.

Henry raises an eyebrow.

Alex: Okay, since that New Year’s gala.

Henry (dryly): Since the New Year’s gala.

Alex (small smile): Yeah. So why wouldn’t I keep choosing you? 

Shawn: That’s a beautiful thing to express, Alex.

They also chose Shawn. They kept choosing her even though she sent them away from that session with a list of referrals.

“It might make sense for you to work with someone who doesn’t remind you of Alex’s lawyer crush,” she said. 

But they both found Shawn good and smart and competent. They trusted her. So, they continued to choose her. 

Chapter Text

The man woke twice in the night. The second time, he downed a glass of water to settle himself. 

When day broke, he descended. Down the steep stone steps, down the spiraling footpaths in the village, and down another set of even steeper stone steps that led directly to the water. The sea was a warped old mirror in the winter light. 

When he made it back to the village a few hours later, blood was coursing through his body quickly enough to make him warm. He even felt hunger’s sharp elbow. 

Hunger was good. It was a sign of vitality.

A skinny black cat fell into step beside him on the low stone wall, its gait almost jaunty. When he offered his fist, the cat pushed its wet nose into his knuckles. When the man tentatively stroked the top of the cat’s head, it backed away and considered him before coming back and offering its chin.

The cat eventually progressed to requesting full-body strokes, but the man’s smile turned into a frown when he felt the nubs on its tail. He would have to go straight home, wash his hands, and tell the village veterinarian about the animal. 

As if it had heard his thoughts, the cat disengaged, blinked, and jumped off the wall. 

The American class system was as maddening as the British one. Class followed Henry wherever he went. 

His easy rapport with disheveled WASPs in high-quality but indifferently fitted clothes. That was class. 

The skeptical look from the essayist whose searing moral clarity was quickly becoming the voice of conscience for a falling empire. That was class. 

His dismissive, impersonal American smile when Henry shared, rather too eagerly, that they both lived in Brooklyn. The essayist’s townhouse, recently purchased with prize money he’d won by spinning blood-soaked yarns about Black and brown lives, Black and brown livelihoods, and Black and brown deaths, was just two miles away from the brownstone but of a different world. That was class.

The functions where too many people knew who he was, like the senator's funeral. That was class, too.

“Most people are going to remember him for talking about himself in the third person with his mouth full,” Oscar said. “Your legislation can fall off the books, but SNL is forever.” 

Oscar fussed with his tie in the mirror behind the closet door of his office. “Maybe I should redo this.”

“The tie looks good,” Henry said, and brought his hand to his own neck. “Should I rework mine?”

“You always look sharp,” Oscar said. “Where’re you meeting Alex?”

Alex was at the White House with June and the president, but Henry's kinship was with Oscar. Something about his solitude, even among family, reminded Henry of his own father. Or maybe Ellen’s gaze, direct and analytical and always reading your position, made Henry retreat.

Henry went to find Alex at the National Cathedral before the memorial service.

Alex emerged from a confessional, humming. Henry sidled up to him. “Earworm?”

Something about the moment, the quality of the air, made Alex see Henry the way he’d seen a different, more tentative Henry from a previous Washington winter. That Henry didn't know yet that Alex was already thinking about their bodies together. The memory made Alex want to hook his little finger around Henry’s before tracing a line up his arm. Or reach beneath his shirt cuff to stroke the warm inner side of his wrist with two fingers. 

But Alex didn’t do that. He didn’t answer the question either. Instead, he described the song that had been playing in a loop in his brain. His voice low, he told Henry about the singer who tells her lover to get on their knees when they look at her. That’s how she can wrest some control from the situation, she’s so overpowered by her desire. She positions herself as a helpless queen. She boasts uselessly about ruling with a velvet tongue. Useless because she has already made all her gods in her beloved’s image. Because it’s the beloved who is holy. 

Did Henry swallow and remind himself to breathe deeply? 

They didn’t touch in the cathedral. To do so would have invited a conflagration. 

They kept their distance later under the rotunda while the senator lay in state. 

After the ceremony and reception, they took their vibrating bodies to the East Bedroom, hung up their suits, and took turns at the altar, cupping the other’s pelvis like a chalice, the eye contact searing. They were human and overcome and holy.

Once, during their first year in New York, a very rich woman with a painful name—something vaguely botanical like Pamplemousse—propositioned Alex and Henry at an event.

She wasn’t looking for a threesome, Pamplemousse told them, giggling like she had told a knee-slapper. She was looking for a baby.

“I’m like, ‘That couple right there is from just the best stock.’ And I used to model! The baby would be a lottery winner from birth.” 

“That was harrowing,” Henry said later on the car ride home. 

“You handled her like a fuckin’ champ,” Alex said. “You have to teach me your ways. Shiv them, but make it so subtle they gaslight themselves about it.” 

“You’ve just described a sociopath.” 

“It’s just hilarious that she thinks we would give sperm to some random party donor,” Alex said. “As if we wouldn’t want to keep that gravy for ourselves.” 

“It’s insane what the workers—regular-ass people—living in those places have to do. Housing costs are insane and going higher, so even if you do find an apartment, that’s most of your household budget gone. What?”

“‘That’s most of your household budget gone?’”

“Yes, Henry. That’s most of your household budget gone.”

“Your accent remains atrocious. They could have black site inmates transcribe recordings of you reading aloud in your best RP.”

“You’re lucky I know what you look like naked, because if I didn’t, I might destroy you for insulting me to my face.”

“Hmm. Your face.”

“…”

Henry broke the silence and said, “I’ve picked up a few expressions from you too, my dude.” 

Alex took a shot at looking stern. “Maybe I could get Pamplemousse to fund a legal fellowship dedicated to labor and housing issues. It could start in the places people like her care about: Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyannis Port. Grow from there.” 

Henry: I really don’t see the need.

Shawn: Say more?

Henry: Royals have always been breeding stock. I shudder to think how much Philip buys into the “furthering the line” business. No one really talks about the generations of spotty parenting. Spotty family life overall.

Shawn: Is that necessarily the case for you and any kids you might have?

Henry: One could speculate. But is it really worth the risk?

Shawn: Alex, what about you?

Alex: I’m happy to do what Henry wants.

Shawn: Your voice wavered.

Alex: Yeah?

Shawn: What are you feeling right now?

Alex: I mean, it’s a shi—I always thought we would…I thought we would show your family what’s what.

Henry: Show them what’s what by having children?

Alex: I mean what I told your grandmother.

Henry: You spoke to her?

Alex: Well, no. Just at that meeting when the emails…

Henry closes his eyes.

Alex (to Shawn): I told her that if kids were a requirement, we could make it happen.

Henry (rubs his brow ridge so his hand covers his eyes): That was not the crux of her objection.

Alex: I just mean I’ve had it in my head as something we could do. I mean, haven’t you? I’m not trying to do it anytime soon. I just…(quieter) I didn’t even realize I assumed we would.

Shawn: Alex, what's coming up for you?

Alex: It’s fine.

Shawn: I want you to stay with us, here. How are you feeling?

Alex: I guess I’m a little sad, yeah. It’ll pass, though.

Henry: You know, there’s a line of thinking in philosophy. They say that if the goal is to minimize suffering…there’s so much suffering in a life, even in the best of circumstances. And to chance it by adding another person to the equation…

It eventually becomes clear that Henry wouldn’t continue.

Shawn: I want to acknowledge that we’re stepping into especially delicate territory. I also want to acknowledge that strong feelings are in play. Henry, what you just said was very intellectualized. Do you feel yourself pushing down emotion?


Henry (tries to laugh, fails): Like what?

Shawn: I want to try this again. You are…so capable. As a person. I know you have a lot of practice performing under pressure.

Henry (careful): Alright.

Shawn: You have so much control over yourself that your face looks pretty placid for what you’ve just said, but your ears and what I can see of the top of your chest are red. 

Henry: Oh.

Shawn waits.

Henry: I just…I think we have enough. I don’t feel the need to further the line or leave a legacy or whatever else. 

Shawn: Is there something you’re trying to avoid? Are you trying to erase yourself or—I won’t put words in your mouth.

Henry: It’s that—you know, if you think about the path of a person’s life, one’s formative experiences with hurt are—well, they’re with family. Parents, more often than not. I don’t know if I can bear to be the reason a person experiences meaningful hurt for the first time.

Shawn (softly): Mmm. You don’t want to cause hurt.

Henry: To cause harm.

They sit in silence. 

Alex (quiet): I just thought it would be fuckin’ awesome. To see your goodness in a new person. 

Henry stares at Alex.

Shawn: Henry, what’s going on for you?

Henry (to Alex): I just…I’ve always thought of you as the one who’s good. You are good. 

“I hope you’re not turning into an American already,” Philip said. “Everyone in that country seems to nurse the delusion that class has nothing to do with them. Speaking of which, promise me you won’t do that hideous all-beige, all-cream color scheme in your house. I swear half the hedge fund people have it.”

“Are you sure I’m the gay brother?”

“Come, now. A family can have more than one gay brother.”

It was one of their better conversations. 

Henry didn’t tell him about the credenza, though Philip might have liked knowing everything fit together. The pieces Philip had sent were solid wood and recently reupholstered. Oscar was right. Philip had made an effort. 

“Credenza,” Henry sometimes said softly to himself, enjoying the knowledge that he was truly alone in his home. He pronounced the word the way a Tuscan would.

That became the way he and Alex referred to the credenza. They called it Credenza as if it were its proper name. 

Alex, could you put this in Credenza for me. 

Babe, you need coasters. I saw a water stain on Credenza.

And there were the moments when Alex said ¿Qué? and Henry responded with Che?

¿Qué? Che? they said. It was all nonsense, and they knew it. That was the point of it. It was theirs. 

What was not theirs: Their images. Soon after the photos of Henry in gray joggers became targets of online gawkers, Philip called to lecture him about the lack of judgment, the vulgarity of wearing gray joggers in public. 

“Not only is it vulgar, people will find a way to make it—and you—vulgar. Literally. It’s America. You can’t threaten the royal rota with cutting off access.” 

“Thank you, Philip, for schooling me on the country I live in.”

A week later, Henry received a package of club ties and a note. A half-apologetic gesture from Philip.

Unlike Philip, Henry would never be part of the old guard, but like his brother, Henry never let go of ties. Except for the joggers episode, Henry wore shirts with forward points in public, often with ties that had belonged to his father or grandfather. Once in a while, someone would recognize one of Arthur’s and post about it. The enterprising style bloggers stretched to relate it to Bond style.

Henry amassed a small river of silk ties from Seigo during his time in New York. The shop owner’s main concern seemed to be to support the centuries-old workshops and mills that supplied him. The tenderness for craft over commerce, the sentimentality, and the romanticism of the posture were touching.

Alex, a child of a new country, was oblivious to all this. He strode around with his collar open more often than not. If Philip got heartburn from images of Alex wearing a T-shirt under a blazer, he only occasionally texted Henry a photo with little to no commentary. 

New York was the perfect introduction to America. Everyone had a different accent. Everyone in London had a different accent, too, but Henry would never be able to experience the city of his birth in that way. Beyond the accents, class in New York was comparatively fluid. Back home, Henry was part of a theme park exhibit. His face and hair and posture and his voice and his accent had set him apart.

In New York, he could pretend to be a normal person sometimes, like the day he almost agreed to a date with a woman.

“You’re spying on us,” she teased.

“Oh?”

She angled her chin at the open copy of Pride & Prejudice in his hand.

“Ah.” He chuckled cautiously. “I’m afraid I’m too thick to put away any insights about women from Austen. I reread this book every few years.”

“For the plot or the insights?”

“The insights change over time, don’t they. I find myself reading it for the dialogue.”

“You’re a fan of banter.”

“Isn’t everyone? Aren’t you?”

“True, but I read it for how much of a hater Lizzy is.”

“I’ll have to read for those moments next time.”

“They’re the best.”

“Listen,” the woman said, clutching a small stack of books to her chest. “I’m going to go pay for these. But would you want to grab coffee or food sometime? As a date, I mean.”

She said the last part quickly, as if she were pushing it out so she could see how the thought felt once it was out of her head.

“Oh,” Henry said.

“No presh, obvi.”

“So you, er. You think I’m…”

“Oh my God. Fine. Yes, you’re a good-looking guy. A really good-looking guy. How’s that?” 

“Fuck,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “It feels good to be honest. I’m going to blurt things out more.”

Henry laughed. “If only we could all be so resolute.”

The woman didn’t know who he was. She’d assumed he was a civilian. She’d assumed he was straight. She was a stranger who was attracted to another stranger. Nothing more, nothing less.

There were people who didn’t know who he was. The thought cheered him. It made him want to accept her invitation, if only to playact the fantasy of actually being anonymous. 

The idea was ludicrous. It wouldn’t survive contact with the elements. 

Henry escorted the woman to the cash register, paid for her books, and sent her on her way with assurances that he was taken but terribly flattered. 

After that, Henry made it a habit of noticing the way other people did or didn’t notice him. He practiced diagnosing whether someone startled when they saw him because they recognized him or because they simply found him interesting or attractive or something else. 

The woman was a graduate student. Years later, when she’d become the provost of a well-known liberal arts college, she published an essay about their brief encounter. The piece was a self-deprecating recollection of how blinkered the graduate school experience became if you weren’t careful. It was an oblique love letter to New York. It was a paen to serendipity.

Chapter Text

In the stone house overlooking the sea, the man pulled on dark pants, knotted a tie that had belonged to his father, pulled on a wool blazer, and laced up leather shoes with soles that would grip the wet stones. 

He tapped out a morning message to Jude and set out for the village.

‘Round and ‘round the winding steps until he reached the wedding. Most of the guests were from the couple’s Romanian immigrant community. The man greeted and let himself be greeted with kisses on the cheek and joined in the benediction. Casă de piatră, the guests said again and again. May the union be strong as a house of stone.

The day was clear and dry, but after a particularly shredding phone call with a resident’s family of origin, Henry walked home from the shelter as if his shoes were soaked. Each family’s unique flavor of rejection was like a brand that left a distinctive scar on the youth who passed through and returned for what the social workers called wraparound services. Privately, Henry thought the former residents returned to feel anchored in the city. 


He found Alex sitting on the counter, licking a paleta.

“What’re you doing here?”

“My professor broke her arm biking to class.”

“Ouch.” 

What an unexpected delight and relief to see him. Alex sitting on the counter brought back a memory of him sitting on the counter in Kensington, looking far less relaxed and happy.

Despite all the physical and psychic pain in the world, there was still Alex. There was still the two of them. There was still the golden spring afternoon light.

Henry walked over to Alex, who held out the paleta. Henry shook his head. All he wanted to do was look at Alex.

So he did. He stood between Alex’s knees, present but not insistent, until all that remained of the paleta was the stick in Alex’s hand.

“Good?”

“Very satisfying.” 

“Good,” Henry said, his nose an inch from Alex’s.

After Henry had chased the ghostly flavors of cinnamon and milk on Alex’s tongue, after a mishap in which Henry threw Alex’s shirt into the kitchen sink, after they’d lapped each other up on the kitchen floor as the afternoon light went from warm gold to a rich blue, Alex threw a leg over Henry’s and said, “Very satisfying.”

“Hmm,” Henry said. 

Thoughts of the shelter were intruding again. He would work them out.

“It sucks to feel like you’re a tiny person,” Alex said.

“Do you know what, I don’t mind it.”

“Say more.” 

“Alright, Shawn. This shelter work, it’s bracing. Even the bad parts. The hard parts. The parts where I go, ‘If only this were easier.’ And then I remember that Pez and I came here to work. And we already have so many advantages compared to every other non-profit in New York. Or anywhere.” 

“True. He could call up Jay-Z for a favor at any point.”

“That’s precisely the point. We’re not here to lean on those connections. Not without a clear and compelling reason.”

“Clear and Compelling Reason would be a good title for a legal thriller.”

“Yes.” Henry rubbed a smudge of something from Alex’s forearm. “It’s funny. Even the harder days make me feel happy. I feel like Tarzan’s parents.”

“Tarzan’s parents?”

“At the beginning of the Tarzan movie. The Disney one. His parents build a house out of the wreckage of their ship. It’s backbreaking work.” Henry is miming the action now, pretending to carry a beam on his shoulders and smiling a child’s smile. 

“Raise your head up. Lift high the load. Take strength from those that need you. All that. Performed by national treasure Phil Collins, of course.”

“Of course,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re joking!” 

That night, they watched Tarzan. Alex got excited about about the right parts. 

They bellowed “gorilla” at random for weeks afterward.

There’s something about the first—and in this case, only—long-term relationship that ratchets up your combined oddness. Maybe all long-term relationships are petri dishes of unhinged behavior. 

Like breath chicken. You lie on your sides with your mouth half open and breathe into each other’s faces. Why? Because sooner or later you’re forced to make out. Or you get slaphappy. Or you accidentally fall asleep and the person who doesn’t can make fun of you the next day. 

Henry: It would be ideal if it lasted.  

Shawn Crowe-Lee and Alex: Say more. 

They smile at each other, then at Henry

Henry: Many reasons, one of which is, it would be quite embarrassing if after all that we broke up.

Shawn: How would it feel?

Henry (long pause): It would be killing. 

Shawn: Alex, how do you feel when you hear that?

Alex: I feel…I agree. 

A go-on nod from Shawn.

Alex: It would be horrible. Like a blight on my life.

Shawn: That’s very honest and vulnerable. Thank you for sharing that. Henry, I asked about that because when you said that it would be embarrassing if this relationship didn’t last, Alex looked hurt. Actually, I want to check in—were you hurt, Alex?

Alex: Well, I guess. 

Shawn nods.

Alex: It was more about the outside and less about us. Less about how it feels inside.

Shawn: But then Henry, when I asked you how you would feel and put the focus on you, your response got us back on track.

Henry: I would never want to hurt Alex. It would be easier to hurt myself first.

Alex: How about we go with neither? 

Shawn: So we had a detour because of a temporary misunderstanding. Henry, do you have trouble saying what you mean?

Henry (half-smile): This is a question about me or about Britishness?

Shawn and Alex look at him expectantly.

Henry: Yes.

Shawn: I want to invite you to consider that saying what you mean to Alex might be the fastest way to good results. You could just think of it as a good habit. I mean, Alex lit up just now when you said what you meant.

Alex: Yeah. I live for hearing that your life would be destroyed without me, babe. 

He reaches for Henry’s hand. 

Shawn: Can you forgive yourself—both of you. Can you forgive yourselves in advance for going through difficult times? Can you be okay with yourselves for being people who sometimes have difficult reactions? I ask because Henry, it seems like you hold a lot of judgment of yourself. I actually jotted down a note earlier that you seem to almost condemn yourself sometimes.

Henry looks stricken.

Shawn: Bad things will happen. Terrible things will happen. Hopefully they don’t, but those things happen in a lot of lives. Can you tolerate despair? 

Henry: I mean, I’ve felt it. Despair. 

Shawn: How do you react to the feeling?

Henry: I suppose I…go away. My best friend tells me I do.

Shawn: Pez?

Henry: Yes.

Shawn: You described his temperament as kind of a foil to yours.

Henry (smiles): He is many things to me. 

Shawn: So you feel despair or—can I say you feel trapped sometimes? By despair or by something else?

Henry: Sure.

Shawn: And you respond by going away. 

Alex: But I don’t want to be away from you. 

Henry: That’s unrealistic. That’s going to happen from time to—

Alex: I’m not being literal. I’m saying, I don’t want to be away from you…like that. Again.

Shawn: Henry, what is he talking about? 

Henry (visibly swallows. Voice thick): Erm, there was a moment. About a week, where I…where we…

They had spent a week apart in the summer of 2020. By his own account, Henry had assumed he had to end his entanglement with Alex. And he had ended it. Successfully. He was mourning it. 

Alex saw things differently.

Their disparate interpretations of that time was emblematic of their differences. Henry held back, leaned on context. Alex, perfectly made for the American cultural and legal environment, didn’t consider anything decided until it was written down in clear, plain language, or verbally confirmed by all parties.

The scarring sent out occasional bursts of referred pain. That was the blight on their lives.

Did their first real fight land as a shock and a betrayal? The concept of a “real" fight is funny. People generally agree that a real fight is not an argument people can laugh off later. Look at us, babe. Our first fight. Proper fights hurt. You don’t see them coming until you’re mid-wallop. Did Alex and Henry ask themselves—and each other, silently—how in the fuck they allowed that to happen?

So that particular fight began innocuously enough, with Your section seems to enjoy a drink while they outline, detoured to Your life doesn’t have real deadlines, and somehow made its way to And what if I do need to figure out what’s on the other end of that?

The particulars are almost beside the point when the structure and underlying themes are consistent. What’s the substance of conflict between couples if not Who are you? Who the fuck am I? Do you love me? And if you do, why does this feel like a scar pulled too hard? Why do your words have the same effect as distant gunshots?

Glances get sharper. Eyes harden. Mouths tense and draw tight. Two young men go from sitting to standing. One of them paces. Staccato gestures. A hand slices the air. One leaves the room. The other follows. Nostrils flare. The rims of eyes get a little pink. Some compensatory blinking. Swallowing. 

On this particular day, Alex had paced into the foyer. Henry raised his voice and pointed at Alex. Henry’s arm was straight and perpendicular to his body. He was pointing the way he was trained to point, with his index and middle fingers together, so it looked friendlier in photos. Less aggressive, less critical, not at all strident. But with the blood rushing hot, Henry looked like he’d aimed a pistol. The realization stunned them both.

“This is feeling like…” Alex mopped his hand over his face. “I gotta…I’m going to take a walk. I don’t want to…”

Alex hesitated at the threshold before he stepped out. Henry flinched as the door clicked shut. 

The silence was like a cold wet coat. Henry dropped into a crouch and hung his head between his knees. He tried to take deep breaths. He shook. Shadows moved in until the streetlights turned on.

Eventually he straightened up, splashed his face in the ground-floor bathroom, and laced up his sneakers. He took his keys out of their bowl and shut the front door behind him.

When he got back two hours later, red-faced and panting, a frantic Alex was waiting for him. 

“Where were you?”

“I went for a run.”

“For like three hours?”

“I think it was two. I walked parts of it.”

“I came back and you were gone. I thought you’d…” Alex’s voice cracked. “Fuck. It’s the middle of the night. Don’t…do that.” 

Alex tried to breathe. “I thought you’d…I thought you were…” 

He raked his hair, looked away so he could blink away tears. “Shit.” 

“If I were to go, you would know it,” Henry said, his voice quiet. “You would know it because you would be pushing me out of this house, or out of your life, or out of New York. It would be because you told me you didn’t want to see me anymore and that there was no going back. Until that happens, I’m here. Or a lorry could crush me like an insect, I suppose.”

“Shit,” Alex said again. 

“Alex, I don’t want to be away from you.” 

“Shit,” Alex said. And then, “This is your house. Wouldn’t you be pushing me out of here?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Why are you standing so far away?”

“I’m drenched.”

“Don’t be stupid. Come here.”

When they came away from each other, the buttons of Alex’s henley were imprinted onto Henry’s T-shirt. 

“Christ. Now you have a sweat stain on the front of your shirt.”

“Clothes are washable,” Alex said. 

Alex took off the sweat-stained henley and walked up the stairs while he unbuttoned his jeans.

“You coming?” he said over his shoulder.

They cleansed themselves. Maybe they talked things out. Maybe they had a cathartic cry. Maybe they made use of their strong, young bodies. I can’t tell you what they did in the raw, trembling hours of repair. It should never have been for me to know these things about my grandparents. And you won’t know. Not about this.

It’s easy to see how two opinionated young men negotiating life as a couple while trying to make their bones in the world might grate against each other. 

Alex had always run hot, but Henry turned out to be the wild card. Away from the constraints and infrastructure of the crown, he buzzed with a constant agitation. He wrote feverishly. He flew through days at the shelter and surprised Pez with how critical he could be about details. That energy made its way home even when he and Alex weren’t in conflict. 

“Whoa,” Alex said one morning, the side of his face still smushed into the pillow. “You, uh, you okay, babe?”

Henry came back into the room with a damp washcloth. “Yeah. Why? Are you?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, still on his stomach. “Just a little plowed into the ground.” 

“You’re not on the ground. You’re in bed.”

Alex slowly turned his head this way and that and cracked his neck. He put a hand on the top of Henry’s thigh. “Seriously, you feeling okay? You’re giving ‘roid rage without the ball shrinkage.”

Henry took Alex’s hand and pretended to bite the knuckles. 

Other parts of their relationship shone bright, like their fundamental silliness. As silly as things got for two people with intense lives, anyway. 

The Claremont-Diaz clan was so wonkish that a major conversation at a family barbecue was about hurricane-proofing buildings: How to pay for it, who could—and should—pay for it, and whether some areas should be considered inhabitable at all. 

“Okay, who put on ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane?’” Oscar laughed. “Imagine that disaster movie.” 

Doing a voice as a character from the movie, he shouted, “Are you crazy? There’s a hurricane coming.”

Alex responded by tensing his body before he turned and glowered into an imaginary camera. 

“Hurricane, huh?” He growled. “I am the hurricane.” 

“That movie would be something I don’t ever hear about,” June said. “It’ll make either five dollars or like, two hundred and thirty million on a budget of forty. Straight guys with no inner lives would love it.”

“Hey now,” Oscar said. “Shitty movies get reassessed all the time. It could become a cult classic.”

“Yeah, if DVDs and the T. Rex came back.” 

“Ouch.” 

June made devil horns with one hand and stuffed the rest of her burger into her mouth. 

In a smaller, quieter moment, Alex and Henry stepped into the house through the back door. Alex redid the hammy turn, this time with Henry as the camera. Henry laughed and swiped his hand across Alex’s forehead and kissed his brow. 

By then, they were living in the house my mother knew. She had not yet arrived on the scene, but Alex had started to build his reputation as the Surgeon. June was about a decade from launching her imprint. Oscar had just made lifestyle changes that led to fan edits and landed him in write-ups of under-the-radar zaddies.

All of that and more awaited them. But before that, Alex and Henry had to get past the youthful feeling of failure. 

People always suspect that they’ve failed before they’ve even started. You seem to have infinite options at the beginning of things, but that yawning openness only emphasizes how paltry your accomplishments so far have been. If you haven’t had those feelings, neither have I.

Alex’s life was evidence that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. National candidates who knew about the work he had done for the Claremont 2020 campaign sought him out. He used those experiences to publish a steady stream of white papers and reports for wonkish audiences and bylined the occasional op-ed. But those things were for and about work. They said nothing about his internal life. Neither did he. He kept no notebooks. No logs. He gave no especially introspective interviews.

Henry was something else entirely. He kept journals more or less consistently. He rarely used the word, but he regularly felt like he had failed. When he and Alex fought, which happened more often in the early days, each conflict was a chip in the bedrock of the world. 

After he saw his family and sometimes after visits to London, his failure at the role for which he was born clung to him like a withered conjoined twin. But being back home with Alex and his work and Pez felt so undeniably good and right that the feeling soon dissipated. 

Shawn: Closeness doesn’t just mean you know someone better. You also see how different they are from you.

Henry (to Alex): I’ve hurt you.

Alex: Babe, it’s okay. I thought about what you said, and I had this idea—

Henry: No. 

Shawn: Guys, let’s slow this down.

Henry: I don’t need you to fix anything.

Alex: I’m not trying to fix anything. I’m just telling you that I can—

Henry: Alex.

Alex quiets.

Henry: Let me do this. I know I’ve hurt you, and it was stupid, and it was something I blurted out in the moment. Not everything I think needs to be shared with you. Not in real time. This was something I needed to work through on my own. And you—you always work so hard.

Alex: You do too.

Henry: Stop giving me credit!

Shawn: Okay, I’m going to call a brief time-out. Henry, I’m glad you’re not sitting on a thought before expressing it, though it sounds like you wish you’d spent more time thinking about how it might affect Alex first. Alex, how do you feel about it now?

Alex: Water under the bridge.

Henry: He’s not one to hold a grudge.

Alex: Unlike the DNC. Kidding. I hope they sue the shit out of Richards.

There would be other conflicts, but what did that matter in the span of a relationship, a marriage, a life? Besides, they either did most of their fighting during the Brooklyn years, or the fights they did have became less notable over time. 

“Why don’t you go for a walk, Alex.” 

Alex opened his mouth, and for a loaded moment Henry thought he would come back with a retort, but Alex nodded and said, “I’ll be back.” 

Henry stood for long minutes in the foyer. The rush of heat, adrenaline, strength, and focus that would have allowed him to verbally or physically savage someone were still there.

He could’ve given in. His body wanted to explode into movement. He was at or near his physical prime. He could have blazed across the Brooklyn Bridge, all the way up Manhattan. 

But they’d learned that Alex needed the sureness of his presence when he got back from his walk, so Henry stayed and waited. He would wait even if Alex decided to go back to his apartment that night. 

He half sat, half leaned on the old trunk he had brought from Kensington and now used as seating for visitors taking off their shoes in the foyer. He tapped out something on his phone and stalked into the kitchen. 

Consulting his phone often, Henry cracked eggs into a bowl, added baking powder—too much, he would realize later—chopped ham and cured meats, then a bell pepper. He frowned at the mixture in the bowl, cracked in a few more eggs, added more unnecessary baking powder, and swiped his finger through the gloopy mass to feel for eggshells. 

He made omelets, adding cheese and salt at the last possible moment because he had forgotten to do it earlier. 

There was enough for five omelets, but he plated them all. He could invite Pez or some neighbors over for dinner if Alex didn’t come back.

When Alex came through the door again, Henry was reading a galley at the kitchen table.

“Hey,” Alex said, taking in the omelets. 

“Hi.”

A pause before Henry said, “Good walk?”

“Yeah.”

Alex sat down at the table. “Are people coming over for omelet dinner?”

“Seems that you are.” 

“I’ll get some forks and knives.”

Ah, Henry mouthed. He’d meant to say it out loud, but they were in the fragile period after a fight, during which you weren’t sure if you were safely on speaking terms, and his voice was shy in his throat. 

They had their omelets with the lights off. Henry stopped himself from making a crack about how if he were feeling hostile, he could have left eggshells in Alex’s omelet so they cut his esophagus. That would’ve been cruel, something his great-aunt might have said to a former friend she still had to see at regattas. 

Instead he looked at Alex’s face, at the way his mouth moved as he chewed, at the darkness under his eyes from late nights of outlining and studying. He loved that face. He loved that person. 

Henry covered the leftover omelets while Alex loaded the dishwasher. Henry told himself to put his arms around Alex from behind instead of retreating into his office. He let himself lean into the feeling that broke open when Alex exhaled with relief at his touch, turned around, and clung to him. He could do this, Henry decided. They could do this. They would be alright.

Chapter Text

“Ticks,” the veterinarian said. 

“Really?” 

“You see the little black bumps? Those are ticks.”

“But there are so many.”

“Bad luck.” She shrugged. “It’s good they’re all on the tail. Easier to treat. Did you find any ticks or bites on you afterwards?”

“No.”

“Good. Keep checking.”

“What happens to the cat after this?”

“If it has a home, it will go home. I wish its people would not let it wander around outside like this, but.” A European shrug. Her accent was hard to place. It was not French. 

“What if it has no home?”

“You will take it?” She looked at the man. “It is good to take care of an animal. If you leave your information, I can let you know.”

“A mild heart attack?” Alex’s face was incredulity. 

“Dad, I thought you’ve just been wanting to get in like, amazing shape,” June said. 

“For the ladies,” Alex added.

“What, I can’t do it for myself?” Oscar pushed up a sleeve to reveal a bicep so striated that Norah let out a surprised laugh.

“Solid, right?” Oscar said. “Henry, what’s with the face? That shit was months ago. Nothing really happened. I barely felt anything. I got myself to the hospital.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us at the time.” June frowned. 

“Mi vida, your old man won’t be taken out by a busted ticker. He’ll die from falling down the stairs.”

“Christ,” Henry said. 

“Lighten up. Senate’s not in session. Y’all can sleep in. We’re on LBJ time now. Speaking of, I’ll be getting up at 5:30 to read and run.” 

“Ugh,” Norah said. “You’d have to go to bed at what, ten?”

“Nine thirty. These things need sleep more than protein,” Oscar slapped his biceps.

“Are you alright?” Henry said to June later.

“More or less, considering that I found out my dad had a heart attack and didn’t even tell me.” She pinched her bottom lip. “Now the lake house will be where I found out about it.”

“There will be other memories here," Henry said, touching her arm. “He could be covering up anxiety about his health with jokes.”

“Thanks for that, Dr. Henry.” 

However Oscar felt, his fitness routine seemed to suit him. By the time the rest of the house was up, he was back from his run, showered, and had whipped up a breakfast of eggs and fruit. He no longer had a bourbon after dinner but sat with an Arnie Palmer until around nine thirty, when, true to his word, he went to his room for the night. 

“You know, I was nervous he was going to cosplay as a meathead full-time,” Alex said one night after Oscar had turned in. “But he seems so happy with this thing he’s doing. Maybe I should try it.”

“Not you too,” June said. 

“Like, why not? Did you see him on the water? Man’s jacked.” 

“That’s definitely the most important thing,” June said. "To be jacked.”

The house on Lake LBJ is still a permanent home base, even as our other addresses changed from American ones to overseas ones, then back again. 

Henry was used to being a foreigner. His ancestors had muscled their way onto the gray island that eventually wrecked countless homes around the world. The crown’s palaces never quite felt like home. They were places of work and business. This disconnect between the self and home, work and meaning, and absurdist situations would mark his fiction.

In America, at least, he was happy to be a foreigner. It explained the newness of everything.

Like the people. The people in New York could be gruff and compulsively direct. Texas urbanites were mild-mannered by comparison, and some of them played at Southern gentility. The Californians who were Oscar’s constituents were made of quick smiles, but they could be floaty and detached. 

Everyone in this new country was nice, but they often didn’t mean what they said, however loudly they said them.

“That was so…nice," Henry might say, and he would mean it, but he found that nice was damning in American English. 

Words in other languages beckoned to him through place names. The places named for the ancient world spoke of upper-class white settlers’ aspirations. Athens. Ithaca. Syracuse. Troy. The French names murmured. Decateur. Eau Claire. Saint Louis. The Spanish ones exclaimed. El Paso. Los Alamos. San Antonio. The indigenous names whispered. Michigan. Oklahoma. Shenandoah.

Other foreigners had come and gone before him.

Shawn: Henry, it sounds like being with Alex and moving to the US has been an act of emancipation and escape. 

Henry: I’m far from where I started. It’s true.

A small silence.

Henry: There’s a German word, Heimat, that refers to home. The Windsors originally came from Prussia. Maybe that’s why I’ve long liked that word.

Alex: Nora will say things are haimish.

Henry (smiles): So does Pez. I believe the words share the same root. (Serious) I’ve felt a bit homesick, actually. 

Shawn: What do you miss?

Henry: Mostly a feeling I once had. Funny, isn’t it, how you can be homesick for a feeling.

Shawn: Some people spend their lives looking for that feeling. Alex, I’m seeing some emotion in your face.

Alex: Some thoughts.

Shawn: Yeah? Keep going.

Alex: I just…I want us to be each other’s home.

Shawn: Is there more?

Alex: I mean, yeah.

He laughs. He’s shaky. 

Shawn: It’s okay.

Alex: It’s so weird. I’m thinking about my dad right now. Why am I thinking about my dad?

Shawn: Say more. 

Alex: I’m realizing right now…that I think of love and other feelings as this very either-or thing. Like, you’re either in, a thousand percent, or you’re fucking out. 

Henry (soft): A thousand percent.

Alex nods.

Alex: So I feel…I think I feel…

He laughs again. 

Shawn: Take your time.

A: I feel, like, hurt that Henry didn’t go straight to saying that I’m his…haim. 

Shawn: Because of your either-or thinking?

Alex: Yeah.

Shawn: What does that thinking do for you?

Alex: It keeps things clear as fuck.

Shawn: And most things in life are clear?

Alex: Well, no. 

He laughs again, stops himself.

Shawn (slow nod): Let’s explore a little more. Tell us more about what you were thinking about. About your dad. Or something else. 

Alex: I’m thinking about…I was thinking about how he was there, and then he wasn’t. I knew they weren’t together anymore, but he was so efficient about moving out, but that—that was really either-or. He was suddenly not in the house. I was back and he was just gone.

A tear.

Henry: You’ve never talked about your dad this way before.

Alex: It hasn't come up.

Henry: Your dad was torn from your home.

Alex nods.

Shawn: What do you need right now, Alex?

Alex shakes his head.

Alex: He was just…gone.

Henry: But he was still in your life. He stayed in your life. He never stopped loving you. It was never in question. He loves you now. You can call him. He’d tell you. 

Alex (near-whisper): It doesn’t make any sense.

Alex swipes at his nose with the back of his hand. Shawn pushes a box of Kleenex toward him. He takes one. 

Henry puts his hand on the back of Alex’s neck and glances at Shawn. Do you mind? She nods. 

Alex sees this and plunges into H’s arms. 

Oscar was a home Alex never stopped missing.

It’s hard to see your own psychic scars, even if the tissue is dark and glossy. The residual ache from the unexpected rupture made Alex overactive in the face of any obstacle. He made himself overly useful. In retrospect, the alignment with Ellen and the whirlwind of conventional achievement were attempts to escape his yearning for the nameless feeling Henry might call home.

And Henry. Did he miss home? A worthless rhetorical question. How could he not? All the same, how could he not make his home, his life with Alex, right here in America?

America would never be the land of cottage pie, but Henry developed a loyalty to Texas barbecue. In New York, he took his pastrami thick and peppery. He bounced subtly in his seat as he watched no-nonsense chefs slice Beijing-style roast duck before him. He loaded up on fermented fish and bell pepper and rice and sauces he didn’t know at an outer-borough place that stuffed you more than full for less than eight dollars.

It feels like we’ve been here forever, but I’m not far removed from people who were formed in other countries.

When does an immigrant start to feel at home? Is it when they thrill to the specific natural beauty of their adopted country? Henry had the Adirondacks, the rivers in the eastern US, and scrubby byways in the desert.

Is it the first time their heart squeezes at kindness from a stranger, so far from their origins? The woman who casually said “of course, honey” to Henry one afternoon in 2028 could not have known he was memorizing her face. He called it up when he reached for an avatar of easygoing warmth. He described a version of that face in Immortal Women.

Or is living in a new country like geology, with environmental conditions—heat, pressure, fluids, and stress—remaking a person, making them new? Public images of Henry throughout the years captured superficial changes. Longer hair, shorter hair. His hair overshadowed by Alex’s buzz cut. By my mother’s hair. That one photo of him and my mother with their faces close together, taken soon after she got back from hiking the Grand Canyon. They had moles in some of the same places. 

Simply living in a new place. That’s how you become a new person. That new person would not be able to return to your old home. Not in any real way. 

Did Henry grieve this? It would be good and right if he did, but missing a home is not the same as wanting to go back to it. You might as well wish for time travel. This kind of change, imperceptible until it’s seismic, is a marvel and a heartbreak.

My mother once told me about a half-remembered childhood visit to London. She awoke in Alex’s arms and realized it was nighttime. The air was humid and cool and faintly vegetal. She was being carried down a gravel path. She saw over her shoulder that they were approaching a grand house, what must’ve been a back entrance. A tiny woman stood in a doorway. When they got closer, my mother saw that the woman’s hair was neat and gray. The woman smiled, spoke softly, and administered kisses, but her hands trembled, half covered by an old sweater’s overlong sleeves. 

Catherine was cheerful at breakfast the next morning. She wore the same sweater she had on the night before. She doted on my mother, but she couldn’t stop stealing chances to touch Henry. Catherine smoothed his hair as if he were a little boy, found excuses to flit her fingertips across the sides of his face as if he were a rare and wondrous bird she didn’t expect to see again. 

She wasn’t entirely wrong. That was the last time Henry saw his mother. 

Chapter Text

“You can have the cat if you want,” the vet said. “I have neutered him. When can you come?” 

“Soon,” the man said. “Can I call you in a few days to set an appointment?” 

“Suit yourself.” Her voice conveyed a shrug, even over the phone. 

He would welcome unobtrusive company in the house, but the man was tired. He gave himself a free day and stayed in bed.

In photos of them before they had kids, Ellen and Oscar are extravagantly, comically tan. They look tender and ready for anything and touchingly nineties. 

They were also in love. As far as they were concerned, their marriage would end in death. They had no reason to believe otherwise. Oscar had compared their love to wildfire. He would’ve given his life for her.

Even after Oscar moved to California, the lake house was his spiritual home after the divorce. Being there made him expansive.

“It takes guts to commit for the rest of your life,” he said in the light of the mosquito-repelling tiki torches. “You know what the biggest commitment of your life is?”

“Brunch service if you’re a pig?” June said.

“What? No,” Oscar said, lightly tugging her braid. “And that’s not how you tell that bacon joke, missy. It’s kids. It ain’t marriage. Kids are the commitment. You gotta love them for the rest of your life.”

“So it takes great big balls to have kids,” Nora said. “That works on a few levels.”

“Fuckin’ right.” Oscar said and flicked on a lighter.

“Dad, can you not?” June said. “Cigars are so gross.”

“Tell you what, we’ll save the cigars for Brooklyn—sorry, boys.” Oscar leaned over to plant a kiss on June’s temple. “Because I love you so much. Let’s go inside and shell some crabs so we’re ready for Operation Crab Cake in the morning.” 

The work, cracking shells and extracting the meat, made their hands raw. 

“That was diabolical,” Henry said.

“Seriously. No human should have to do this.” Alex flexed his fingers. 

“What are you whining about?” Oscar said. “It’s fun. Besides, restaurant workers do this shit every day.” 

“All day everyday, and for little pay,” he sang as he swept the final bits of crab shells into the trash and missed the thoughtful look Alex fixed on him.

“This society owes low-wage workers reparations,” June grumbled.

A few weeks later, a London number lit up Henry’s phone. It was Alistair Davies, calling to talk about reparations.

“Needless to say, it’s a sensitive subject, and bound up talk in some Commonwealth countries”

“About nation-specific reparations?” Henry said. 

Alistair lowered his voice. “About removing Her Majesty as their head of state. The mood at the palace is delicate. I wanted confirm that Your Highness still knew the standard practice.”

“You mean the non-response principle,” Henry said. “I remember. But I didn’t realize it applied to me now that I’ve abdicated.”

The line was silent for a few beats before Alistair said, “That is correct, sir. But I…well, Her Majesty might request that you be circumspect, just the same.” 

“I mean no offense, Alistair, but why is she not speaking to me about this?”

“Her Majesty has been at Sandringham.” 

Mary had never intended to have a real conversation with him about any of it. 

“I see. Goodbye, Alistair.” 

“Your Hi—sir.” 

The bullet was the smallest caliber on the market, a .17. People use it for target practice.

It was nothing personal. Disruption had been the point, and Ellen happened to be the biggest target at the event. 

It took almost no effort for the FBI to uncover evidence that the shooter had used the same pistol to take down small animals. He’d bragged about his exploits in a closed forum. He was gearing up for something really 100. He used the emoji.

But he’d lost his cool on the day. Oscar noticed a disturbance in the crowd and instinctively pushed Ellen away. He stepped sideways into a killing shot. 

It was a kind of luck that there had been little suffering, Ellen told Alex and June in separate phone calls minutes after it happened, her voice flat and distanced as Secret Service agents swarmed her. 

The 2030s were a bad decade for political violence. Some historians take a more expansive view and mark the twenty-year span from 2022 to 2042 the Years of Retribution. An ironic moniker. A curious number of political leaders in industrialized, relatively democratic countries were felled by isolated, armed men with vague grudges against religious institutions, against educational systems, and in one instance, against his local birding group.

It had been shaping up to be a good day. The extended Claremont-Diaz clan, minus Nora, plus a few prominent Texas Democrats, were going to gather at the house in Austin for dinner. Alex had been presenting high-level strategic recommendations to the Texas Democratic Party. The national political establishment knew him as the Surgeon because of his focus and the way he precisely unraveled opponents’ positions, arguments, and attacks.

A career highlight was ash next to a father snatched away for the second time, this time with finality.

Henry and June arrived at the morgue together. The attendant on duty looked and acted like it was his first week on the job. Any job.

“So, uh, who’re you folks here to see?”

“Oscar Diaz,” Henry said as June tried to push and pull the morgue doors open. “He was just brought in.”

“And what is your relationship to the deceased?”

“Daughter and son-in-law,” June snapped. 

“Daughter and son-in-law. Got it,” the attendant said, typing as slowly as he spoke. 

Seeing June struggling with the door, he said, “I wouldn’t worry about that, sweetheart. Dead people aren’t in a hurry, you know?” 

He scratched at his face and accidentally detached a pimple patch. He grimaced and pushed it back on with a not too clean-looking finger. 

After an eternity, he rolled his chair back from the desk. “I’ll let you and your wife in to see him. Um, sorry for your loss?”

June shot the attendant a withering look and pushed her way in as soon as he punched in the access code. Oscar lay on a stretcher under a sheet. 

The second half of June’s strangled cry died in the fabric of Henry’s jacket. He put his hand on the back of her neck and put his other arm around her shoulders to create a shield. She heaved with quick, jerky intakes of breath.

It both was and wasn’t like being in a room with his own newly dead father. Now, as it was then, Henry didn’t know where to look. The abstracted face and inert body no longer belonged to the person he knew. Henry trained his eyes on a dark-teal tile on the floor and tried to remain present, or present enough, for June’s animal suffering. 

A whoosh of air as Alex muscled into the room.

“Hey, you need to indicate—” the attendant said.

“I’m his son.”

“Uh, okay. Your sister and brother-in-law are already here.”

Henry glared at the attendant, whose pimple patch had come loose and hung off his face like dead skin.

“Dad,” Alex whispered, his eyes fixed on Oscar’s terrible, eternal face. A few strides and he was at Oscar’s side. He knelt, the motion so swift that it brought down the sheet covering Oscar’s body. 

“Alex,” Henry said, but Alex didn’t hear. 

“Papá…Papá…Papá,” Alex said as if in prayer. He murmured to Oscar in Spanish, the language soft and sanctified and secret in the stark, too-public, institutional room. 

Nothing seemed amiss with the body, really, except the bullet wound. The opening was surprisingly small, almost discreet. An indicator. Here was his heart.

The body that conceived Alex, Henry thought abstractly, horrifically. He looked away from the penis that lay soft atop Oscar’s thigh. It was lurid for anyone to see it. Any of it. The primal scene of a daughter and son before their slain father most of all.

Oscar had been gentle and ferocious, stern and silly, giving and vexing. Alex had loved him. Now the sundering of the mortal bond between father and son was absolute.

“Shouldn’t you cover him?” Henry said to the attendant, his voice sharp and too loud to his own ear.

The young, inadequate man did as he was told. 

“Do you want to…?” Henry asked June. Her face was still against his shoulder.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Let’s go, then.” 

“Hey, if you and your wife leave, your brother-in-law has to go, too. I can’t have him in here alone with the dead body.”

If Henry’s hands were free, he might have throttled the man. 

“I am his husband, you insensitive idiot," Henry said. 

“Hey, watch it, man,” the insensitive idiot said, raising his hands so his palms showed. “You and her came together, and you were all over her.”

“Talk less,” Henry said through gritted teeth. “Talk much, much less, and you may have a hope of passing by unnoticed in this job long enough to receive a pension.” 

Alex hadn’t spent much time picturing either of his parents’ funerals. He assumed Ellen, as a former president, might eventually lie in state. He’d made no assumptions about Oscar. Oscar had lived most of his life in Texas, served the state of California after the divorce, and spent large chunks of time in Washington, DC during session. An itinerant life.

By the time Alex realized he didn’t want an institutional service for Oscar, everything was already in place. Ellen had spoken to the Speaker and the whips, and it was decided. Aye, members of Congress said. Oscar would lie in state under the rotunda in a few days.

Henry remembered the careful silence that had descended on his own family home after Arthur’s death. Even in adolescence, at home in Kensington, the siblings had kept their features still.

Not so for thirty-six-year-old Alex. He let his face contort when he didn’t think Henry was watching. The grief was like abraded skin. 

Alex did put on a rigid public mask for the funeral service in Washington. Since Oscar’s mother and sisters were dead and Ellen stopped being his wife decades ago, it fell to June to take on the traditional mater dolorosa role. 

In a photo from the day, June holds hands with Henry and Nora. Her eyes are huge and dark, her mouth helpless. Alex crouched graveside, a clod of soil getting dense in his fist, his body language angular and stiff with restrained anguish.

Hulking black cars conveyed them to the wake, at the Kalorama home of a donor who played at being personal friends with Ellen. The colonial house had more bathrooms than bedrooms. It was built for holding court.

Alex observed from a remove how Henry moved around the room in a double-breasted black suit—because a single-breasted suit made him look like the frontman of a band made up of former head boys, he said. Henry smiled just enough at each guest to convey no ill will. The hint of dimples appeared and disappeared. Yes. Thank you for coming. Thanks for that. Very kind.

So many guests. To call them mourners would’ve oversold things. Professional Democrats, a few Republicans, donors, and high-level members of the media who no longer practiced journalism but appeared as talking heads and failed to get invited onto interesting podcasts milled around in formalwear. A string quartet played arrangements of Hall & Oates and Mr. Mister. A tent in the backyard held more food and drinks and people. The wake was a strange, inverted wedding.

It was all wrong. His father was dead, he was surrounded by near-strangers, his tie was choking him, and he needed to be alone. Alex pushed through the guests, ignored the ones who tried to talk to him, climbed the stairs, and slid open a dark wooden door to find a reading room. Thank God. 

“Oh, it’s you,” he heard his mother say as he slid the door shut. 

Ellen sat in an overstuffed club chair, her foot bobbing slowly in a kitten heel. He hadn’t been alone with her in months.

“I can go somewhere else,” he said, still standing by the door. “If you want to be alone.” 

She waved away the idea and took a sip from her drink.

“That a bourbon?”

“In honor of the man,” she said. A corner of her mouth curled up, but her eyes looked tired.

“How long are you going to hide from your guests?”

“My guests?” She looked startled. “I guess they are.”

“Hard not to be the main attraction when you’re the former president. Half the congressional staff is here, and half of K Street is trying to get here. It’s obscene.”

Ellen toasted him from the chair. “That’s the life, baby. This is how my funeral’s going to be. And yours. And Henry’s. June’s too, if she’s not careful.” 

“This is not the way,” Alex said. “Dad should’ve been memorialized at the lake by like, five people.”

“This is part of the work.”

“No,” Alex said, indignation making his voice tight. “Making policy that works, that’s the work. This shit here? Maybe it’s a job, but it’s a bullshit job. This is bullshit.”

“You know better than that.”

“No. He’s not like you. He wouldn’t have wanted this.”

Ellen drew up in the chair. 

“Oh yeah. Your father’s a real man of integrity. He knows what really matters.” Was that a tinge of derision in her voice?

“Didn’t you wonder why he was in Austin?” she said. “He wanted to size up a few people from the party here to see if he could crush them if he went up against them for a cabinet position next cycle. You were going to feed them all at your house. Don’t you see? It’s all about the job. You have to be. I thought you knew that.” 

Alex shook his head. “He’s not like that.”

Ellen sighed at his use of the present tense. “He wasn’t like that. But you learn to be. Ask me how I know. So much planning and counting. Counting money and counting votes. You’re touching so much shit. Nobody gets out of this with their hands clean.” 

“Is that why you haven’t you come out against him?"

“Him?”

Alex jerked his head in the direction of the White House.

“There’s complicated reasons for everything, baby.”

“No. Not always.”

“Alex, don’t start a fight with me.”

“We’re already in it. Why aren’t you doing anything about him, Mom? And while we’re on that, why didn’t you do more about the camps and the refugees?”

“The camps and the refugees,” Ellen echoed. Her drawl was thicker now, the last of her bourbon an amber disc at the bottom of her glass. 

“Why didn’t you do something when you could’ve? Dad wanted to. He had plans for logistics and funding. He had everything drafted. I saw it. He was ready to go. Why didn’t you work with him?” 

“Do you think we’re having a unique conversation right now?” Ellen said. “You can talk to every president, living or dead, about camps and refugees. You can talk about displacement. You can talk about shit that’s trying to turn into genocide. Active genocides. Those things keep happening. The president isn’t the queen of America. You know what the president is? A silverback that has to share a cage with a bunch of small apex predators. The lynx wants to scratch your balls off. The falcon wants to take strips of meat off you. You can swat ‘em and get more of the cage, but you can’t spend all your time fighting. Sometimes it’s smart to have some peace and quiet in your corner.” 

“But Dad was your ally. Why did you ice him out? You always iced him out.”

Ellen looked up at him and touched her temple. Her hand moved slowly, as if through water. 

“Don’t talk to me about Oscar,” she said. “You don’t know about us.”

“I know enough.”

“No. You. Don’t. Know. About. Us. He was—well, for a while he was everything.” At this, Ellen laughed to herself, sounding dry and sedated. 

“You don’t actually know much about politics, kiddo,” she said. “Your Surgeon shit? Good for your national profile. Great for it. People love a man who can cut. But day to day? You’ve never been in it. You want to really be in national politics? Count the votes. Count votes in back rooms. Talk people out of things and into them and back out again. Splash around in the piss and the shit and the blood. Your reward will be a nice big wake with all your closest associates who want to make sure you’re dead before they plan their next move.”

Alex had never seen his mother clearly before. 

“So that’s politics to you,” he said. “Being a corrupt accountant.”

“I didn’t say anything about being corrupt. I’m talking about getting shit done. Stay in the surgery business, you’ll see a balance sheet soon enough. You might even handle a bone saw.” 

The former president never raised her voice.

Alex found Henry talking to Raf downstairs.

“I’m ready to go.” Alex said. “Raf, you want out?”

“I do, but I gotta talk to some people.” 

“Of course you do.” To Henry he said, “Let’s go.” 

“Are you alright?” Henry said.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “It’s just that this wake sucks infected balls.” 

The string quartet played “Hip to Be Square” as they worked their way toward the door.

“Christ, what is that,” Henry said.

“I don’t know,” Alex replied. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” 

More waited for them back in Austin. The morgue attendant, the insensitive idiot, lodged a public complaint against Henry. The prince—Henry had abdicated his position in the line of succession over a decade ago, but what did it matter—had been hostile and high-handed to him, called him a name. Who did he think he was, coming to this country to verbally abuse a native son of Texas? 

The story, with all its contrasts, was irresistible. On the one hand was Henry’s public image of careful collared shirts and pressed trousers. On the other, Bradenn—the man didn’t disclose his last name on the advice of his lawyer—in ill-fitting khakis and a polo shirt in an untrue blue, his features shapeless compared to Henry’s. 

Bradenn sounded out a statement in the parking lot of the carwash his girlfriend’s family owned. His lawyer, a local character whose suit looked like it sounded like trash bags rubbing against each other when he walked, hovered to make sure his client didn’t put a foot overly wrong. 

“This is not a palace matter,” Henry said when Alistair Davies showed up at the house unannounced. 

“On the contrary, sir, this matter may affect the palace’s ability to conduct public-facing business. We must manage the risk to the crown.”

“You mean you must.” 

“You shouldn’t have reacted at all.”

“To my father-in-law being assassinated?”

“Available information says the suspect had no specific target and was acting opportunistically. And it was only your father-in-law.”

Henry bristled.

“How much does the man want?” Alistair asked.

“He hasn’t said. I expect he’ll come out with his demands soon enough.”

“You must pay,” Alistair said. “Make this go away as quickly as you can, as quietly as you can. Make him an offer.” 

“Is that an order?”

“Her Majesty wants to see it happen.”

“Is this another one of her dying wishes?” Henry said. “How long has she been issuing decrees as last wishes? Six years?”

“Sir, I strongly suggest that you do what is best for the crown. If things go sideways here, the palace will not be able to protect you.”

“I see. So I am to do what I can to protect the crown, but I am to expect no help. Of course the crown must come first. You know, Alistair, I can see, even as someone who has given up my official position, all you do for the monarchy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You do such thorough work. I know you made sure my father didn’t embarrass the family too much.”

“I did what needed to be done.”

“You tried to make me do the right thing, too. You tried to get me to bring a pretty woman to Philip’s wedding. Do you remember that? You really think of everything for the crown. You are tireless.” 

Alistair wore a confused smile. 

“It borders on rude to allude to someone’s retirement before they’ve announced it,” Henry said. “But might I suggest, as you’re surely approaching the date, that you display more care for people than for institutions. Oscar wasn’t only my father-in-law. He was a father to me.”

Alistair gave a quick shake of his head. “The monarchy is your family.”

“My family is my family,” Henry said. “My mother, Bea, Philip. The children. And my in-laws too. I don’t think you ever understood the distinction.” 

“I serve the monarchy. So do you, whether you like it or not.”

“I abdicated. Years ago.”

“That doesn’t change a thing.”

“I no longer work for the monarchy, which means a functionary of it has no reason to be in my home. I must ask you to leave.”

“Sir—Henry—think of the crown.”

“Lick an unwashed taint, you lifelong flying monkey.”

Henry didn’t make Bradenn an offer. He went directly to writing a check. 

The op-ed, which got picked up just about everywhere, explained everything.

Henry didn’t litigate what happened in the morgue where Oscar lay hours after he was shot. He didn’t explain his behavior. He didn’t dog himself either. He kept the focus on himself and Bradenn.

The first paragraph acknowledged Henry’s rudeness and abrasiveness in the moment. The rest of the piece extolled the value of public service at every level. His late father-in-law had been a son of Texas who had dedicated the majority of his working life to the public good. Public service was admirable, and so were public-sector workers like Bradenn. So were their families.

Which was why Henry had established a self-sustaining fund that would give out a $30,000 grant to one Travis County employee’s family every year, to be chosen via a nomination process laid out on the program’s site. To get things started, Henry thought it would be only right that the inaugural grant go to Bradenn’s family, specifically to his girlfriend, the mother of his two-week-old son. How beautiful, how fitting that such a sum would benefit the next generation. Henry hoped subsequent grants could defray the costs of elder care, ease the postpartum period, maybe even fund short sabbaticals for recipients. 

There was just one problem. Bradenn's longtime girlfriend wasn’t the baby’s mother. She didn’t even know about the newborn. Bradenn did. Tale as old as sleaze. 

Did Henry smile at the sideways, vinegar-flavored justice he meted out? Oh, but the fund had been set up in good faith, and the op-ed was deployed to ensure the relevant people knew to nominate their friends and colleagues for it in the future. God willing, it might put the whole unpleasant business at the morgue behind them. 

It did.

Alex’s curls came from Ellen. 

In photos from before June and Alex were born, her dark-blonde curls are springy. Ellen graduating from high school. Ellen at serving jobs. Ellen in college. Graduating from college. Graduating from law school. Ellen and Oscar with their arms around each other. Oscar’s short-lived mustache shows up here and there.

As Ellen’s public profile grew into a political career, she straightened her hair, lightened it, tamed it, made it submit by torturing it with heat. Life was easier with a more controlled, “professional” hairstyle. Hair that existed in its natural state could make someone seem less capable in the wrong people’s eyes. Ellen the white woman with straight blonde hair took on all comers. She won cases and elections. 

June wrote about hair and whiteness and inheritance in Blonde Joke. We don’t know what Alex thought. He kept no notebooks and moved quickly past most things.

Oscar’s hair was straight and black. Indian hair, his abuela might have called it if she’d seen him more than a handful of times in her life. A river can be as effective as a wall.

After Oscar died, the media ran photos and footage of his public appearances over the years. His hair was a warrior’s helmet when he breathed fire. It was a privacy screen when he dipped his head. In the end, his hair, still glossy, was a fell beacon.

Him? Alex’s father had died because of this shitbag? This person who, according to the defense, was too intellectually disabled to know what he was doing, but not so intellectually disabled that he couldn’t procure and load a small handgun, drive himself to the event, position himself close enough to the action, and shoot in the direction of the former president?

Motherfucker didn’t even have the decency to spin up an original manifesto. Everything in the thirty-thousand-word document was something everyone had heard many times before from some other social liability with a gun and a conviction that other people had to pay for his own brokenness. There was speculation that the shooter had written his manifesto with ChatGPT. Why couldn’t the dumbfuck torture animals or something? There were entire jobs at ports that involved hand-feeding hapless live animals into industrial shredders. 

A deep-purple violence rose in Alex at the sight of the defendant. The man’s father briefly met his eye. This person with the hangdog face and the posture of a middle manager at a regional bank—which was in fact his occupation—could he tell that Alex would shake his son’s spine loose if he could reach him?

Alex avoided the trial after that. He stayed home and slept. When he woke, he went on long runs, lifted weights in the garage like a suburban nightmare. He spoke little. 

And then the compulsive exercise stopped. Alex took to lying in bed on his stomach. Henry spent hours holding him every day for a month, his nose posed against the top of Alex’s head. Eventually, back aching and muscles deteriorating, Henry called June for help, but she had taken herself to a migrant camp. She was moving forward, in her way. Using service to cope. 

Zahra flew in but couldn’t get Alex to budge. 

“I’m leaving,” she said. “Say goodbye.”

No response.

She walked around the bed so he faced her. Frustration crossed her face, but instead of giving him a tongue-lashing, she leaned down and squeezed his hand before she walked out. 

Light moved across the floors every day, and Alex stayed in bed. He got up to drink water, chew and swallow something, and empty his body. But otherwise, the blinds stayed drawn.

June eventually arrived at the bedroom door. She stood there until Alex turned his head toward her. He reached for her, and she sat on the edge of the bed. She held his hand, then lay beside him for days, until her phone buzzed to notify her that her car service was there to take her back to the airport, where she would board a plane to go to a different camp. 

It was intolerable, what Alex was doing. He had checked out of life with no definite plans to return. 

Also intolerable: Whatever had lingered between Ellen and Oscar.

Most intolerable of all: love itself. Maybe it—or the residue of it—was what had made Ellen and Oscar so touchy and combative around each other. It prickled, distracted, unmanned. 

Henry had been sleeping in his office for months. He had no taste for sharing a bed with someone in a waking coma. It was intolerable, and enough was enough. 

“Are you awake?”

Alex didn’t move.

“Get up,” Henry said, less than gently, to the back of Alex’s head.

Still nothing.

“Whenever you decide to come back to the world, I want to talk to you.”

Alex took a long time to respond. 

“About what?” His voice was hoarse, his diction indistinct.

“I’ve decided.” Henry deliberated on whether to continue. “I’ve decided that if we can cope with it, we could bring a third person into this mess. After all this time.” 

Alex turned his head stiffly. He squinted at Henry.

“But like I said, it would depend on our being able to cope. We can’t cope with anything at the moment.”

“What?”

“I’ve decided I’m ready to have gigantic bollocks.”

“What?” Alex said again.

“Your dad. Years ago, he said having kids took huge balls.”

“Uh…huh.”

“I think I’m up for it now. But if you’re not anymore—and I see that you most likely are not—we don’t need to.”

Alex blinked crust out of his eyes. “What changed your mind?”

“Everything.” Henry’s mouth was a straight line. “I’m tired of historic events, aren’t you? I’m ready for a smaller life. I’m ready for minutiae.”

The next day, Alex dug a large hole in the backyard and stood over it to buzz off his hair. The day after, he went on a long run. A day later, he planted a young ash tree in the hole, and then it was time for Henry to fly to London for Mary’s funeral. 

Everyone would understand if Alex stayed home, Henry said. Back in Kensington, he finally let himself mourn the man who had casually, naturally called him son from the very beginning. Henry heaved silent, dry sobs into my great-aunt Bea’s belly, heavy with my cousin Oscar. She stroked her little brother’s hair with one hand and dismissed the footmen with the other. 

Chapter Text

The man awoke feeling like one big bruise. He hadn’t done anything particularly strenuous, but maybe the past few weeks were catching up to him. 

Another message from the vet. He would respond to it later. He would rest up, get the cat, feed it so he no longer felt its individual vertebrae when he pet it, and teach it to live indoors. 

He lowered himself onto the floor and flipped through some old notebooks. 

Shawn Crowe-Lee: What about your dad, Henry?

Henry: What about him?

Shawn: Our parents tend to loom large.

Henry: Of course.

Shawn: Alex has shared some thoughts on his father. I understand that you’ve both grown up without your fathers, in some sense. How do you think that has affected you?

Henry: Well. I think he’s fading a bit. The way he was, I mean. Alex watches his films sometimes.

Alex: The Bond ones.

Shawn: Is that something you do together?

Henry: He only watches them when I’m not there.

Alex: It’s another way of getting to know you.

Henry: But that’s not him.

Alex: I know, but I still see things about you.

Henry: Like what? 

Alex: First of all, they’re fun movies. Second of all, I like seeing what you dad was like—I know, I know. It wasn’t him. But did you know you both do this thing with your cuffs?

No one is ever fully known, but Henry had only ever known an incomplete version of his father. Arthur had just started to move out of his cloud of paternal omnipotence when the diagnosis came. The end followed soon after, and there was no more to know. 

“I need to do this.” Alex said. “I need to be alone and travel around a little. That probably sounds stupid.”

He looked almost contrite. Maybe it was an effect of his shorn head.

They faced each other at the big kitchen table Oscar had hand-tiled with azulejos during one summer recess. Alex flexed his fingers. Henry tried not to let his hands tense into fists.

“There’s so much of my dad in this house,” Alex said. “I was thinking. I need a reset. A reboot. A lobotomy.” 

His attempt at a laugh sounded more like a cough. 

“Do we want to stay in close touch while we’re apart?” Henry asked carefully, “or do we want to be relatively independent?”

“Independent.”

“How independent? So independent that if interesting people come our way…”

“I accept that smart, attractive women who aren’t chronically online will keep hitting on you,” Alex said.

“You know that’s not what I mean. Do we want to be celibate while we’re apart, or—”

“Celibate, Friar Henry. I’m not resetting my life with a fuck fest. I mean, does that work?” 

“It does,” Henry said slowly. “Are you sure you want to do this? Be completely away from everyone?”

“I am. How ‘bout you? Are you sure you want to move on from Empire Waste?”

“God, that was awful. Never again.”

“Never again with a streamer? Or never again with an adaptation?”

“I don’t know. Both, maybe.”

“I never got why they had to change the title.” 

“They said no one knows what ‘adulation’ means. The general public doesn’t know the word. Or they would find it off-putting.”

“This country needs a lot of work.”

A week later, dust covers made the furniture look like snowbanks. Henry put his arms around Alex and stepped into a cab bound for the airport. Alex waited a few hours, locked the front door, and set out for the airport with a single backpack. 

Henry haunted the great libraries, doing research, taking notes, and writing portions of what eventually became The Fanatic. Yep, you heard it here first. Henry was Frederik Sachsa. Pen names make it possible to focus on the writing and the insights without pesky biographical details getting in the way.

He made Munich his home base after the first two months. Oxford and Cambridge were too close to home, and the rest of the UK deserved to be left alone. Coimbra, with its insistence on robes and ceremony, reminded him too much of Oxford. He steered clear of France, lest Ellen and Leo insist on him going to the house in Èze. Italy or Spain would’ve been distracting and borderline obscene after the events of the past year. Ditto Kraków or Vienna. 

Besides, the Persian manuscripts at Ludwig-Maximilian bewitched him. Henry read and wrote—typed, really—with an almost unwarranted forcefulness to avoid thinking about what Alex might’ve been doing. 

Until he couldn’t resist anymore and texted Alex, Come to Munich. A brief visit would suffice.

And then, after a few minutes’ hesitation, Miss you.

When his phone dinged later, it contained only a date of arrival. 

On the day, Henry left the library early to ready his small apartment in Schwabing. He arrived to find Alex’s backpack open in a corner of the living room, two Döner on the table, and Alex himself in soft indoor clothes, fresh from the shower. 

“Guten Tag,” Alex said. 

"Abend.”

A quiet dinner. As Henry chewed his Döner, he willed himself not to ask about the small cuts on Alex’s hands. The skin looked dry, as if he’d been indifferent about himself. 

He may have been. Alex was thinner. With his hair still short and close to his skull, his features were stark in his face. He looked like a wanderer who would one day be up for canonization. Or a prisoner who had made peace with visions of his own death. 

After his own shower, Henry put a T-shirt on over his boxers and debated pulling on pajama bottoms. So many things he might’ve done naturally and matter-of-factly in the before times felt presumptuous, even though Alex—known but unfamiliar after four months apart—was sleeping in his bed. With the lights off, Henry crawled in almost silently, arranged himself in a straight line, and tried to drift off.

But like a teenager having an awkward sleepover with his crush, he was maddeningly conscious of his own body. Alex was real beside him, but this wasn’t the time for anything. So much had happened, and—

“Are you nervous?” Alex said. 

“What about?”

“Me.” 

Alex found Henry’s hand and kneaded it. 

“That’s nice,” Henry said in the sincere, non-American way. 

When Alex was done with Henry’s hand, he moved to the forearm. He moved up further after that, past the elbow. 

“You have a T-shirt on,” he said when he encountered the bottom of Henry’s sleeve. 

Henry had barely taken off the T-shirt when Alex pulled him in. The shock of skin on skin after months away made both of them gasp. All at once they were hyperreal. Real again. 

Munich with Alex there was a low-key wonderland. They bought bratwursts in chewy rolls off street vendors. They had beers beneath the tin-roofed pagoda inside the English Garden before lying on a blanket to read and watch gray-haired hippies frolic naked with colorful ribbons. 

“There was a guy who kind of looked like that in the mountains,” Alex said, pointing discreetly at one of the twirling people. “He wore clothes most of the time, though.”

“You went hiking? The Sierras?”

“Andes.”

“You went to South America?”

“I did North America too. Met some people. Took a lot of notes.”

“About what?”

“Grassroots politics. The kinds of candidates who stay close to voters and are politically successful as a result. People who get a ton of engagement.”

“You’re going to bring that to your advisory practice?”

“I don’t know.” Alex scratched his cheek. “National politics gets too far away from things. People are either cage fighting or trying to get everyone to fall in love with them.”

“Why the Andes?”

“Because that’s where the revolutionaries are.”

Henry’s alarm unfurled like a parachute. He saw with screaming clarity the green and yellow bruise on the side of Alex’s leg, a few inches below the knee. 

“it was cool to talk to everyone. Left-wingers, right-wingers, local Dems and Republicans who’re doing good work as the underdog party.”

“And,” Henry said in a controlled voice, “are any of the right-wing groups classifiable as hate groups, perchance?”

“I wasn’t there for their politics. I was there for whatever made them successful,” Alex said. “Besides, everyone has hate in them. Everyone has love in them, too. Different things activate whatever’s inside. That’s why elections swing different ways from one cycle to another.”

“So you’ve been courting kidnapping, torture, and death? Alex, that is no way to—to cope.” 

“Relax,” Alex said, his eyes still closed against the sun. “If guerrillas kidnap me and cut off my ear to show they mean business, you’ll be the first to know. Oh wait, you actually would be.” 

He threw it off nonchalantly. Beside him on the blanket, Henry was violently chalant. 

Henry struggled to sit still in the movie theatre that afternoon. The plot was stupid. The dialogue was nonsense. Alex let out the occasional chuckle. 

Afterwards, a man and three teenage girls introduced themselves to Alex as the US ambassador’s husband and daughters. They were so sorry about his loss. How was he doing? 

In the dark that night, Henry took Alex’s hand. “Did the guerrillas cut your fingers?”

“That’s from old-fashioned manual labor. In the Andes. With Maoist guerillas.” He laughed. 

“We need to talk about your physical safety,” Henry told Alex over monstrously sized Schnitzel.

“What about it?”

“Have you ever felt like you were in danger around your radical but politically successful new friends?”

“What do you think?” New crinkles appeared when he smiled. 

“Alex.” 

“Henry.” 

A standoff. Alex chewed his Schnitzel and swallowed. 

“Did you mean what you said? About kids and a smaller life and everything? Would you really do it?”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“It has everything to do with it.”

They considered each other from across the table.

“I did mean it,” Henry said. “I do mean it. But I don’t want you to change the subject.”

But Alex forked food into his mouth until his cheeks bulged like a squirrel’s. He chewed slowly, ridiculously. He wiggled his eyebrows.

“What are you doing?”

“That’s how kids eat. You want to see this kind of shit at the table every day?”

“Alex.”

He kept at it. Another mouthful. He pointed at himself with his fork. “Hmmf?”

"Why are you like this? You know, I’m reconsidering things more and more.”

Alex swallowed, wiped his mouth with his napkin, took a long drink of water, and smiled so broadly Henry wasn’t sure his face would hold together. 

“You’re not the only one who’s thought about safety,” he said. “June and Nora have been on me this whole time. They’ve been tracking me.”

“On your phone?”

“With a tracker.”

“Where? How?”

"In my underwear pocket.”

"You have a pocket in your underwear?”

“Now I do.”

Henry found the pocket later. 

“Mr. Claremont-Diaz, I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you, but you seem to have a small, hard, disc-shaped testicle.”

"Shut up.”

“And—what’s this? It’s communicating with a satellite. What’s it saying? I’m afraid I must confiscate your underwear for further examination. A matter of security.”

Alex’s next stop after Munich was Tallinn, to learn about digital government and digital campaigns. Could he swear to stop embedding himself with the types of people most civilians would find frightening or repulsive or both? He couldn’t.

Thoughts of Alex punctured Henry concentration during the day. Some of them were horrible, abstract scenarios of violence. He coped by texting June and Nora about Alex’s exact whereabouts, as indicated by the tracker. Other thoughts were more benign, like Alex’s breathless voice when he said, his face inches away, “I feel every bit of it. I feel everything.”

“Good,” Henry had replied with more self-possession than he’d felt, and the Henry working among the manuscripts older than some countries put his fist to his mouth and breathed against his knuckles.

When the library closed for the night, Henry picked up a Döner, showered, and slept in the sweet, ruined bed until he could only smell himself in the sheets. 

How did Alex stay safe during his travels? He liked to joke about his charm, but this was dead serious. The grassroots political groups that agreed to host him included two chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and at least one band of Peruvian Maoists. Something must have protected him from sharp objects, blunt instruments, and fire. 

Had his slain father made him supernaturally sympathetic to people who would’ve been dangerous to him under normal circumstances? Did his shorn head make him legible as a figure unconstrained by conventional institutions? After all, he was learning from their rinky-dink operations, far from the Democratic Party, the think tanks, and the policy wonks who had been his tribe in another life. 

Or were the extremists—ironically—cowed by him? Could they see the unconsummated vengeance behind his eyes? Did they sense that if they made the wrong move, it would rush out of him as hot tar, blinding sand, hail and locusts? 

Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe his raw humanity secured him near-universal passage. Strangers who had chosen intense lives recognized someone who’d been blown wide open. He was there to listen to them when they were not taken seriously before—or treated seriously, but only as threats to be squashed. So they told him things. Showed him. 

Some of the ideologies were heinous. Some of them were nonsensical, but Alex listened and observed, the way his mother had with her House colleagues. What he learned he took back to what Beltway types later referred to as his country doctor practice. They said it with a splash of derision at first. But after a few years, when his candidates started to win some races, then more, bigger races, the political class threw in capital letters. He focused on down-ballot progressive candidates. He built them up on their own terms before long careers and high profiles could diminish them. He sought them out and worked low bono or pro bono. If he and Henry wanted more money, he would’ve pursued Big Law or joined corporate boards. They had enough. The Surgeon turned in his scalpel and retooled as the Country Doctor. 

The death of fathers so often reset lives in this family. Arthur Fox’s premature death sent his three children on divergent trajectories. Some twenty years later, Oscar’s death clarified things for his daughter and son. June left political communications, spent a year doing service work, moved into publishing, and eventually started her imprint. It was time. 

It was time for Alex too. He had been his mother’s son his entire life, even at work. Burying his father made him his own man.

And, in a very real way, Oscar died so my mother could exist. 

In his mid-twenties, Henry had thought he wanted no suffering for his hypothetical children. It followed that there would be no children. Alex’s suffering changed his mind. He wanted someone to mourn Alex the way Alex mourned Oscar. The prospect of searing love, shapeless regret, and hopeless grief was tolerable then.

My mother was a salve for Henry too. She gripped his large hand with her small one as Catherine’s coffin went into the Royal Vault. The child's first experience with death. 

And then there were no Catherines in the family. Unless you counted my mother. Kind of. 

The name Maria Catalina both was and wasn’t serious. Even if it didn’t satisfy everyone, it was bulletproof. It acknowledged both Mary and Catherine, plus Oscar’s grandmother. It was Spanish, because don’t be an Anglo chauvinist. 

Pez maintained that my mother’s initials were secretly a tribute to Mariah Carey. He called her Lamb, after the singer’s most devoted fans. 

But Henry couldn’t enjoy the joke at first. Shortly before my mother was due to arrive, he found that his brain felt disconnected from his body. His thoughts and emotions were muted by the time they reached him, as if someone was shouting from behind thick glass. 

“It seems I’m going through a string of bad days,” he told Alex.

They were practiced at what to do when bad days happened. Alex took over the administration of their lives. When the bad days continued after a squalling infant was in the house, he was there.

It wasn’t a hardship. Alex was like a pig in shit in a low-simmering crisis. He toted my mother to appointments. He washed and folded tiny clothes as well as adult-sized ones. He fed her, rocked her, walked around with her, bounced with her, changed her, got vomited on, accidentally touched poop more times than he thought possible. He walked around the neighborhood with her in the middle of the night when she got colicky. In quiet moments, he put his domed hand over the top of her head as if to protect the softness of her skull. That intense, physical, one-on-one relationship cemented his relationship with her for life. 

But he couldn’t ignore the workaday world forever. One of his first-time candidates from out of state needed him. How did Henry feel about spending two weeks alone with lil’ MC?

Lil’ MC—they felt ridiculous calling her Maria, Catalina, or Maria Catalina—was almost four months old by then. It was getting embarrassing, Henry’s unending low moods. So he assured Alex he would be just fine. He would cope. Even with poo and nappies. Not to worry.

It was horrible. My mother’s cries were a jackhammer for the brain. Henry would tough it out. Getting out of the house should help. At the very least, it would dilute the intensity of her wailing. 

He took my mother on a long walk. She had more stamina than he did. Her tiny body was like a bomb that wouldn’t stop detonating. And it was strapped to him. His brain started to float away from his body. A honking car jolted him into the moment.

“Get out of the street, dickhead. You have a baby.” The driver’s bright red lipstick was like a warning light.

He looked down at my mother’s confused face. “So I do.” 

The baby deserved a more functional household and more functional caretakers. Henry called the most competent person he could think of. 

“Hi, Zahra, it’s Henry.”

“I know. What’s up?”

“Er, well, I hope I’ve not caught you at a bad time.”

“It’s three fifty on a Wednesday. You can do the math.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s up?”

“Well, I was hoping. I think I’m hoping—I think I’m calling you for advice.”

“You and everyone else. What’s this about? Capacity-building and technical support for the youth shelter?”

“What? Er, no. It’s about the baby.”

“Malcolm’s literally in middle school. What’re we talking about?”

“No, we’re talking about my baby.”

A silence. 

“Go on,” Zahra said.

“She’s almost four months old now, and she actually seems quite colicky. Or maybe she’s not. I admit I’ve been a bit hands-off. The thing is, Alex is away for two weeks, and I’ve not slept because of the colic. I was wondering if there was some way I could get some help or advice or—God, I really should’ve thought through my request before I called you. She’s just been very colicky, and I feel like a complete incompetent. Anyway, yes, I suppose I’m calling for help. Do you think you or Shaan could—I mean, I know Shaan is the primary parent, but Malcolm is older now, and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should’ve called Shaan for help and guidance. But you were the one I thought of, and well, here we are.”

No response.

“Z?”

Still nothing.

“Z, can you hear me?”

“‘Z, can you hear me? Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.’ Do you know how white you’re being right now? You’re calling on a woman—a family of color—to help you with your most nepo of babies. And by the way, you didn’t even have a specific ask. Meanwhile, I’m hanging on by a thread. Do you know what kinds of initiatives and how many people depend on me at the foundation? You know how many boards I have to sit on? I work all day, and after that, most nights, I have to go out and be a cheese monkey with people like your brother. I see my husband maybe thirty minutes a day, minus the part where I grope his sleeping ass—that last part was not actionable because it was a joke. You know how big my mindgasm would be if I could just click my heels and work from home and have my biggest problem be a colicky baby? Not to mention that we have Malcolm—are you still there?"

“Wha—er, yeah.”

“Not to mention that we have Malcolm—whom you’ve not asked about, by the way. What is it with you people? Having kids is just an orgasm for you. Like, do you even think beyond the orgasm itself? God, all you people do is jizz, jizz, jizz everywhere. And then you have the nerve—the gall—to ask other people to clean it up and smile while they do it. It’s a perfect metaphor. Here’s a suggestion for you: Get your shit together and hire some help. Not some white vegan who went to Swarthmore either. You get your shit together or you hire a Salvadoran woman who barely speaks English but who has eight grandbabies. Or a Balkan lady whose sons don’t want kids but who’s fucking amazing at what she does and spends all her working hours judging you and bossing you around until your brain turns into sour cream. You still there?"

“Er—”

“You go do that, because I ain’t it. I’m not one of your professional mommies. Find someone else. Better yet, get some fucking cis men involved. Make them do some shit for once.”

“Er, sorry, who’s ‘you people?’”

This brought Zahra up short.

“You don’t get to ask me that,” she sputtered. “I ask you that. You people—cis men—you people are cis men. Hello. Didn’t you hear the part where I said to get your cis men buddies involved? Jesus God.”

She hung up.

Henry stared at his phone. Zahra’s bravura performance had stunned even my mother into silence.

“Well,” he said.

The baby started screaming again. 

The doorbell rang the next day.

“Good afternoon. My name is Elder Percy, and this is my companion Elder Shaan. We’d like to share a message with you about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” 

“My God,” Henry said.

“Precisely.” Percy grinned. “You look like absolute shit.”

“I’ve not been sleeping.” 

“Zahra said,” Shaan replied. “She sent us.”

“What?”

“Are you going to let us in?” Pez said.

“Er, yes. Please.” 

Shaan toted a duffle bag. Pez brought a rolling suitcase. 

“Z couldn’t come, so you’re getting us,” Shaan said. “She’s been under some pressure at the foundation.”

“She told me.”

“Did she?”

“Highlights.” 

“I can’t say she’s become a diamond, but at this point she could be a middle layer of canyon rock. I’ll follow the screams to the baby’s room. Pez, let’s you and I wash our hands now, before we’ve touched her.”

Henry fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. When he got out of bed, shortly before dawn, he found Shaan in an Adirondack chair in the backyard, my mother dozing against his chest.

“Many colicky infants like the outdoor night air,” Shaan said as Henry settled into the chair next to his. 

“Shaan, thank you.”

“You really are in it now.”

“Was Malcolm…”

“No, no. Nothing like this. You were right to call for help. It’s a heavy weight.” Shaan looked down at my mother’s head. “You have a universe in your hands.” 

My mother was screaming again by the time Pez was up making cappuccinos.

“Right,” Shaan said. “I’m not pawning her off on you, Henry. Simply a healthy amount of paranoid that I’ll spill scalding liquid onto her head.”

The week went by that way. The three of them passed my mother around. She screamed a bit less and ate a bit more. The adults downed Pez’s chaotic but tasty cooking and took turns sleeping, a few hours at a time. 

And then Zahra came to the door.

“What’re you doing here?”

“I took a few hours off this afternoon to fly in. I thought I’d spend the weekend.”

Henry gaped.

“Don’t look so surprised. It’s normal to want to see my husband.” 

Shaan was passed out on the sectional. His eyes fluttered open as Zahra stood over him.

“Is this a dream?” he muttered. His arms were still folded as if he were cradling a baby. “Where’s—”

“Pez has taken her off you,” Henry said. 

“Z,” Shaan breathed. He sat up and touched her to make sure she was real. He palmed her back and moved a thumb back and forth along the waist of her slacks. She wore a small frown, but her voice came out soft and private.

“What’s up, Blue.” 

“You’re actually here. Is this Elysium or Valhalla?”

She rolled her eyes.

“He’s not functional for a while when he first wakes up,” she explained.

“I know.” 

Zahra shot him a look of surprise.

"Everyone shared a tent in Mongolia.”

Zahra let Shaan pull her down onto the sectional and into his side. 

“You smell like you’ve been through some shit,” she said without moving her face away from his armpit. 

“You have no idea,” Shaan said. “Pez’s silk jacket smells like saliva and tears now. Mine, mostly.” 

“These aren’t your clothes.” Zahra plucked at the T-shirt Shaan was wearing, on loan from Henry. 

Shaan turned his face away from her and puffed some breath into a couch cushion. He sniffed the spot. “God, my breath. I’m going to have a wash before I snog you hello.”

“Don’t be corny.”

“I cannot be stopped.”

Pez emerged with my mother.

“You look like shit,” Zahra said.

"Nice to see you too. Very nice.”

“Go take a shower. Hop in with Shaan.”

“You wish.” To Henry Pez said, “I’m using the main bathroom.”

To Henry’s surprise, Zahra reached out to take my mother from Pez. The baby gazed at Zahra as if she was astonished.

Zahra looked back at her. “So you’re the terrorist who’s broken all three of them.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled on the phone,” she said to Henry. “I’ve had a shit cannon aimed directly at my face. Half the time I have to thank them for the mud facial.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No.”

“You’re such an asshole right now,” she told my mother. “You’re being an asshole and a dictator. You’re torturing everyone. But one day, you’ll be the best person your parents know.”

He had never seen Zahra like this before. 

“Before that happens,” she continued. “You’ll be the biggest pervert in your house, if that’s even possible.”

“Is Malcolm—"

“Oh yeah. He’s fucking the furniture. I’m dead certain.” 

“Is that why you said that all ‘you people’ do is jizz?”

Z closed her eyes and sighed heavily. “It’s not not why I said it.”

She looked down at my mother’s tufted head. “Not that girls are any better. Girls are probably worse. More compulsive. We don’t have that post-nut fatigue.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Don’t get cute.” Back to my mother. “No matter what you do, you’ll be on your parents’ minds forever. Until they’re dead. Not even then, if ghosts are real.”

“Someone told me something like that once,” Henry said, thinking of the grandfathers my mother would never meet.

“They’re right,” Zahra said. She licked her lips and tilted her head back as she bounced my mother from the knees. “Fuck, I’m so tired.”

“Me too.” Henry said. 

“Got any tea?”

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

Zahra stayed for an extended weekend. She baked a tres leches cake from a recipe online. Shaan roasted a chicken. Pez made fanciful salads. 

When it was time to leave, Zahra waited for Pez and Shaan to get into the car.

“Hey,” she said to Henry. “Like I said, I shouldn’t have yelled.” 

“No. Thank you. Thank you for sending Shaan. You weren’t wrong about cis men. Thank you for sending your cis man. We’ll know each other for a long time. What’s a few bollockings in the course of all that? Besides, apologies to cis men should be sparing. Isn’t that something you tell the women who work for you?”

“Shaan told you that?”

Henry shrugged.

Zahra pursed her lips.

“Fuckin’ right,” she said, and high-fived him.

She got into the car. It started to roll away but jerked to a stop. 

Shaan rolled down his window and stuck his face out. 

“Why didn’t you hug?”

“Sorry?” 

“You both wanted to do it. Why did you not?” To the dark interior of the car he said, “Z, why did you resist it?”

“Srivastava,” Zahra sighed. “Oh my fucking God.”

The door slammed. Zahra stomped around the car and gave Henry the kind of hug that belonged in a prison camp. She patted him on the back, twice, too hard, and got back into the car. 

“Don’t get used to that,” she called from the open window. To the driver she said, “Sir, there’s nothing to see here. Can you drive, please?”

Chapter Text

The man called Jude.

“Sweetheart, I think I might be up for some company and light help after all,” he said. “No hurry. Are you sure? Alright. I’ll be here.” 

Alex: Do you think any of this was usable?

Shawn Crow-Lee: What do you mean?

Alex: Against Richards.

Henry: That seems like a determination for the lawyers to make.

Shawn: Henry, how do you feel about the possibility that our sessions will be processed as part of discovery?

Henry: It’s not ideal, of course. Then again, few things are. 

Alex: Have we done anything useful in here, though?

Shawn: Have we? Let’s review. We talked about your 1L year. We talked a little about Henry’s time in Brooklyn so far. We talked about your intentions for your relationship. We talked about some of your patterns.

Alex: My patterns. My question was pretty fixer-ish, wasn’t it?

Shawn (clicks tongue): You got it. 

Alex: Damn. 

Shawn: The goal is not necessarily to eliminate our patterns. Patterns can be functional and adaptive. It sounds like being a fixer often makes you efficient and effective. 

Alex: Except when I think of therapy as something to use for a lawsuit. 

Shawn: There are flip sides to everything. Have you thought any more about getting evaluated for ADHD?


Alex: I’ve thought about a lot of things. That’s an ADHD thing too, isn’t it?

Shawn: That’s a good conversation to have with the evaluator. When you’re ready. Henry, you’re still working with your therapist?

Henry: Yes. Actually, her notes might be more useful for litigation against Richards, if that does become relevant. 

Shawn: How would you feel if none of this turns out to be legally relevant?

Alex shrugs and blows air through his lips.

Henry: I would be relieved. 

Alex: We don’t have to offer the videos to the DNC. This could be just for us.

Shawn: Have you not approached these sessions as just for you?

Alex: Heh. Caught. 

Henry: He’s very caught up in the work of the thing. 

Shawn: This might be an ongoing conversation for the two of you. But Alex, I want to recognize that you offered to withhold the content of our sessions from the DNC. Why?

Alex: I mean, Henry said it would be a relief if this wasn’t usable.

Shawn: You wanted to prioritize his comfort?

Alex: I mean, yeah. What else would I do?

Shawn (smiles): That attitude will serve you both.

Oscar’s death and my mother’s birth changed the texture of time. She quickened the flow of time when Alex and Henry looked up to find that an entire month had passed in a whirl. 

She could stretch time too. Away from the compulsory rhythms of the Anglican Church, Henry stepped into his sleeping daughter’s room as if it were a shrine.

She was everything. This child-goddess made Henry weak in a way he had never been. He stood over her crib and apologized silently for his failures, particularly in the first months of her life, when he stood to the side and fought himself.

With her in the world, he could fight anything. He could lift a tank. They say that about parents, don’t they. He would rent his skull like Zeus if she needed him to. But really, his offerings were paltry. He had brought only himself. It would have to be enough.

Alex was made for parenthood. He flitted from thing to thing with my mother, shared in her enthusiasms. He showed her the things that made his childhood: pasteles de tres leches, spiced meats, Oscar’s house on Lake LBJ. 

They went to the lake when they could. My mother splashed around like a duckling. She lay face down on the dock and reached for the water each time to see how much longer her arms had gotten. She ritually dipped her fingers into the water to test it and greet it before she dove in. She dunked friends in the lake like an unhinged folk preacher. 

On the mantel at the lake house, a photo. My mother is about four years old. Henry holds her in one arm and has his other arm slung around Banksy’s shoulder. Shaan stands on the other side of his son, the lake behind them. Kensington alumni, they called themselves.

When it was just the three of them at the lake house, Henry turned off his wifi after dark so he could write without interruption after dinner. That was when Alex did things like dance his babbling daughter around the kitchen to “My Girl.” He once stopped abruptly because he realized it was the kind of thing Oscar would’ve done. He searched my mother’s face for a sign from his father, but Oscar was dead and gone. They were the world now.

The story of my mother’s name starts in a dark room.

I don’t mean the name on her pedigree papers, which feel literal but are in fact figurative.

About those pedigree papers: It was rude to ask how exactly my mother came to exist. It remains rude, though that's never stopped the speculation. Is she the result of one of Henry’s gametes colliding with one of June’s under laboratory conditions? Or Alex and Bea? Is she a wildly successful science project accessible to the privileged few? Is she a random child who happened to have been chosen by this particular couple at that particular time, who happened to have a plausible resemblance to both families and an ethnically indeterminate and—this is the part gawkers really cared about—completely snatched face? Maybe many conventionally beautiful people just look alike because physical beauty tends to follow certain rules.

In time, commentators moved to speculation that didn’t implicitly demand a response from the family. Was that moue my mother made at that family funeral an echo of one of Bea’s circa 2010? Did June and Alex have the same inky eyebrows? What about that fox-eyed intelligence? Compare the jawline to this photo of young Ellen. Did her thick hair signify anything other than good luck?

My mother didn’t get her true name until she was about three years old.

“You’re killing me,” Henry said.

“Good. Ow! What—why did you get me in the ‘nads?”

“I didn’t.”

“…babe, is MC here in the room with us right now?”

“‘Is MC in the room with us right now.’ She’s not Mariah Carey’s ghost, you kn—aaaaaggggghhhh. God—no, don’t switch on the light. What’re you doing?”

“Right, right. Shit.”

“Christ, she’s got a kick like Jude Bellingham.”

“In his prime.” 

No one developed an obsession with the Beatles or Jude the Obscure. My mother got her true name by being an athletic toddler who would climb into her parents’ bed and kick them in the nuts in her sleep.

“Saw so many pretty faces before I saw you,” Alex sang softly at her bedside, legato.

“Was that…Justin Bieber?” Henry asked after Alex had softly closed my mother’s door behind him.

“Early Biebs.”

“Right.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just hadn’t realized you were a lesbian.”

“What if I am? Look, early Bieber shows little girls everything is possible. You like boys? There he is. You like girls? There he is. Have you seen the performance he did with Selena Gomez as the one less lonely girl? They were like the lesbian American dream.”

“Those were…words.”

Alex pulled up the old footage to prove he was right. He bopped lightly. 

“Well, that happened,” Henry said when it was done.

“You know you loved it,” Alex said. “You can turn away, but you’re not invisible.”

"Empty the tin into the mixture.” Henry was irate. 

“Tone.”

“Daddy, are you mad at Daddy?”

“Yes I am,” Henry said. “We’ve had a somewhat disrespectful conversation, and now we’re cooking together to make up.”

“Sweetheart, do you know what disrespect is?”

“It’s what you do in your room.”

“What?” Henry said.

“You say, ‘I’m going to go disrespect your dad now,’ and you go to your room.”

“I may have said something like that one time.” Alex said. 

“Daddy has said it too.”

“Christ.”

“What recipe is this?” Alex said. “I’m getting pretty worried about the order of operations here.”

“It looks edible.”

“No, it doesn’t. This stuff is barely cooked. The aromatics are burnt, and I see bits of eggshell. Why are there bits of eggshell? We didn’t crack any eggs.”

Henry leaned over to see and frowned. “No. No, we haven’t cracked any eggs. God, this is inedible. God. God. I thought we’d make dinner and talk, and we’ve done neither because we’ve created some rancid thing that will blast off our esophageal lining. Then we’ll be physically incapable of speaking for months. This is a war crime.”

The recipe, whatever it was, ended up being edible. My mother could and would eat anything. She’s always had an appetite and a stomach like a mountain goat.

And then there was the Grand Canyon cookie cake. An aesthetic feat for my mother’s birthday. Picture the Grand Canyon, rendered in layers of cookies that have been baked and manipulated to mimic the hues of rock and sediment in the Grand Canyon, from browned butter to bourbon. 

"You’re saying some of the layers are burnt?” Henry worried.

“They’re technically all a little burnt. To get the look.”

"How can we in good conscience let anyone eat it, then?”

“There’s frosting between the layers. That cuts the burnt taste.”

“But we would be offering burnt cookie cake to children. They’re not here for the artistic vision.” Henry paused to take in the cookie vista. “But it is beautiful.”

“Right? Flawless execution.”

“Impeccable.”

They were both Dad. Modulations in my mother’s voice made who she was addressing clear. It was a tonal language only the three of them knew. 

When Henry was far away or distracted, she resorted to a drawn-out Father, most often with an Anglo accent. 

But Alex was the more distracted one, and my mother’s voice would ring out with “Dad. Daddy. Papi!”

“Did you call Grandpa Oscar ‘Papi?’” my mother asked the October she was twelve. She wore a boxy suit jacket over tapered Wal-Mart blue jeans and had drawn on a small mustache with eyebrow pencil. 

“Are you John Waters?” Alex asked. “Or a silent film star? Or fifteen years away from invading Poland?”

“What are you talking about? I’m Grandpa Oscar in 1992.” She took out a reference photo from her breast pocket. 

“In that case I take back the Poland thing. I love it.”

The first time my mother meaningfully looked beyond the family, she encountered loss.

From her room on the second floor, she spied the bird perching on the ash tree in the backyard, one foot drawn up like a flamingo. The stance put it off balance, and it had to extend its clawed foot now and then to keep from fully tipping over. It was hurt. 

My mother darted downstairs, ripped open a package of ground turkey from the fridge, and grabbed a handful of the pink, wormy stuff. She squinted up, looking for the bird, but there were too many leaves in the way. Was it even still there? She lay her fistful of meat at the base of the tree and went inside. 

“Sweetheart, did you do this?” Alex stood over the open package on the counter. 

“Yeah,” she said, deciding to keep the bird as a thrilling secret.

She didn’t need the subterfuge. Alex asked no follow-up questions.

After she’d washed off the feeling of cold raw turkey, my mother rushed to her window and saw the bird on a different branch, gobbling down something spaghetti-like. She could’ve soared with joy. 

They had turkey meatballs for dinner that night. 

The bird was an American kestrel. Male. Its eyes were alert and soulful. Its colors were assertive and pretty enough for a military parade. 

My mother made a few attempts at sketching it, but her skills fell far short of her vision. She wrote a few half-baked short stories about it. She felt the way the syllables of its name rolled over her tongue. Kestrel. Kestrel. Kestrel. At school, she thought about it perched in the ash tree, imagined it flying around over Austin. 

Once, it didn’t return for four days, which made my mother desperate. When it did come back, she thawed an entire chicken drumstick under running water before laying down the offering. 

Things went on like this. My mother was thirteen, already quite full on, as the Anglo branch of the family might say. She was full on about that bird.

“Do you know, there was a falconer on staff when I was growing up.” 

Henry had waited for her to get back from school. He sat in her reading chair and closed his book when he heard her steps on the stairs.

“Okay,” she said.

“Darling, have you been feeding that bird?”

“What kestrel?”

“That answers that.”

“I mean—” Caught. “Are you going to call Animal Control?” 

“Only if it’s hurting someone or if it seems diseased. How long have you been feeding it?”

“I don’t know. A week?”

“Jude.” 

“Three weeks? I don’t know.”

“Why have you kept it to yourself?”

“I haven't.” She sat down on her bed, across from Henry.

Henry looked at her. 

“I mean, haven’t you wanted something for yourself? The kestrel and I—we have something.”

“Of course,” Henry’s eyes crinkled. “It wouldn’t take food from you if that weren’t the case.”

“You know,” he said. “We could take it to an animal rehabilitation center if it were seriously injured. But it’s not. Wild animals are quite hardy. He would likely move on once he’s got his strength back.” 

“What if I want to keep him?”

Henry’s eyebrows went up. 

“What if I want to be like, a falconer?”

Henry laughed, but then he saw the seriousness in the girl’s face.

“Sweetheart.” Henry put a hand on his daughter’s knee. “Becoming a falconer takes years. Birds of prey aren’t like dogs or cats. They don’t bond with people like domestic animals.”

“They bond with falconers.”

“Not exactly.” 

“How do they do it, then?”

“Usually the birds are captured. Occasionally raised in captivity. But they’re wild animals.”

“I could train it.”

Henry had to be careful. “I believe there is a long and often painful process. It’s hard for the bird and the trainer. The bird has to starve.”

“What?” 

“Traditional falconers call it making them keen. The idea is to hold a bird in captivity and withhold food so it becomes dependent on you for what it does eat. You train it with food. But falconers still lose birds on hunts.”

“They run away?”

“Well, they’re wild animals.”

There’s nothing like the anguish of a young girl who falls in love with wildness only to discover that the wildness may call to her, but it would never accept her. Though the kestrel may have registered my mother as a benign presence, even a welcome one, she would never be part of its world. It was a temporarily humbled god of the sky.

Henry helped her gather up the stray bits of meat around the ash tree. Then, she stopped offering the kestrel food. Henry drew the blinds in her room and started scanning the air around the house with binoculars. 

When it seemed that the kestrel was gone for good, Alex and Henry watched as my mother opened her blinds, looked into the branches of the ash, and released two astonishing, feral sobs before she collected herself.

Neither of them was prepared to deal with this version of girlhood. They had talked about periods, laughed through conversations with friends about adolescent girls’ burgeoning physicality. No one can really prepare for the unaccountable directions in which a soul develops.

They hugged her, even gestured toward holding her, but she wasn’t a small child anymore. They fed her. They spoke to her about how people, things, and beings passed through life. How rare it was to find enduring attachment. It was hard to know if it helped.

Definitely helpful: Orion. The Ridgeback wasn’t explicitly a consolation for giving up the kestrel, but he did take its place. He and my mother patrolled the neighborhood as if they were on the hunt for big game, ready to fight lions. She unhooked his leash on beaches and in fields and set off running. He overtook her in less than a second.

Alex and Henry took turns going on runs with the dog so he could put his propulsive musculature to work a few times a day. Their human bodies were pathetically unathletic next to his. 

At home on movie nights, my mother put her head on a lap and lightly spooned Orion. She ran her hand from the top of his head to his back to feel the fur change from shockingly soft to coarse and almost spiky. Henry smoothed her hair and scratched her scalp the way Bea used to scratch his. At pivotal moments in the plot, Alex grabbed her ankle—or Orion’s, if he was closer. 

I’ve given you an image of my mother as a free-range private-school brat, which she was for a while. But then—

“What’s church?” my mother asked out of nowhere. 

“You’ve gone to church,” Henry said. “With Uncle Philip and Aunt Bea and the cousins.”

A blank look.

“Everyone dressed up and went into an old stone building. There was a choir.”

“You mean services?”

“That’s church.” 

“That’s church?”

“This kid needs to see a crucifix,” Alex said. 

“Where are you hearing about church?”

“One of Livvie’s public-school friends told me. She’s cool. Her brother plays steel drums.” 

My mother rattled off facts about this girl for the better part of an hour.

“What else does this girl—what’s her name?”

“Legra.”

“What else did Legra tell you about?” Henry said.

“Loads of things. She knows about cars. Science. Her parents are professors at UT.” 

“Are there no children of professors at your school?”

“Oh God,” Alex groaned. “We’re those people.”

“What people?” Henry said. 

Alex put his head in his hands.

“That fucking private school,” Alex muttered. “It’s like, too posh. Professors can’t afford it, and the cool smart kids are at the public school.”

“Legra goes to the Magnet school,” my mother said. “Who was Magnet?”

“Oh God,” Alex said. “She doesn’t know what a magnet school is. Sweetheart, a magnet school is a kind of public school. Oh God. We’re those people.”

“What’s going on?” Henry said. “Am I meant to be alarmed about something?”

Alex took off his glasses and rubbed his temples. “Maybe we should think about public school. Jude, do you just like this Legra girl or—what do you think about trying out the magnet for high school?”

“Would I be in her class?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Is she in your grade?”

“I think so? I didn’t ask.” 

“Then maybe. I bet you could test in. Want to try it?”

“Can I?”

“What do you say, H? If she tests in, Jude would be going to high school with the poors. You think Philip would survive that news?”

“Stop. I’ll tell him it’s a nice comprehensive.”

“Isn’t that exactly what would make him shit a brick? A nice comprehensive?”

"Christ, she’ll need extensive firearms training to survive a comprehensive school in Texas,” Philip fretted when he found out that my mother would in fact be attending. 

“Alright, Philip. You can take her hunting at Balmoral this summer.” 

“As if,” Philip snorted. “The family will be summering in Sandringham. Haven’t you heard?”

Chapter Text

“This is not on.” Henry said.

“What’s going on?” Alex said. 

“Our water usage has a been astronomical. Have we installed a fountain without my knowing about it? God, and with the drought going.”

He turned the screen toward Alex. 

“I’ll bet you anything it’s Jude.”

“Of course it’s Jude. But why?”

“Didn’t Bea do that when you all hit puberty?

“We were away at school. And you’re asking me about my sister’s showers? During puberty?”

“I shared a bathroom with a sister. I can tell you it’s a sign.”

“Of what?”

Alex raised his index and middle fingers together, put them a few inches below his belly button, and made a few small, jerky circles. 

Understanding cracked open on Henry’s face. He collapsed into a chair more than he sat down in it.

They assembled in Alex’s office the next evening. My mother saw that Alex’s smart whiteboard was on. 

“‘Knowledge co-production with social—’ Hey!”

“That’s for work,” Alex said. “Sit down.”

"Did I do something?”

“Your dad and I have something to show you. Sit.”

Orion sat. Slowly, my mother sat down, too. She clocked the look her parents exchanged and put her hands between her knees.

“Is something happening?”

“Families do this kind of thing all the time.” Alex sounded jumpy. 

“Are we moving?” Alarm swept across her face. “Are you separating? Is that why I’m in public school?”

"No,” Henry said.

"This is late, which is on us,” Alex said. “But sometimes we forget that everyone’s life is R-rated.”

“What?”

“There are probably things you’d rather hear from the women in the family,” Alex said. “So I’ve made a deck. Well, I put a few videos in a deck. And this is from Grandma.”

He put an overnight parcel in my mother’s lap. She opened it and took out a yellowed book.

“What…”

Alex saw the cover and reared back. “Fuck. I think that’s the copy they had on their shelf when I was growing up.”

Henry peered at it. “Is that a neanderthal on the cover? Is this from the nineteen-seventies? Was this what people found provocative?”

“Let’s move on to the deck,” Alex said, shaken.

The intro slide contained no new information. 

On the second slide, Alex tapped the play icon in the embedded video. 

June sat in her home office in a coffee-colored silk blouse.

“Hey Jude—” she chuckled. “Your dad asked me to give you a miscellaneous talk about being a girl. Other than the stuff we normally talk about. I think it’s related to you going from private to public. Good job, by the way. The magnet is really good. I think you’ll have a good time in a bigger school.”

She paused to tap around on her screen. 

“I made some notes. First of all, I just want to say, do what you can to save water, okay? There’s a drought like, a hundred percent of the time. There are so many other ways to masturbate—” my mother reacted as if a gun had gone off nearby. “—which is the most normal thing in the world. 

“Sorry to say, we have to put sustainability and masturbation in the same thought now, but.” June shrugged. “Like, do the low-flow shower heads even do anything? Anyway, not a real question. I don’t want to know.” 

She tapped something else on her screen. 

“What else. Ummm, if you find yourself thinking about someone a lot, all the time, you're probably attracted to them. But you may or may not like them. I think a lot of people think they like someone when they’re just attracted, so watch out for that. Related: If you’re dating someone, make sure they’re doing something for you. Don’t put yourself to work for them. There’s no joy in giving. It ain’t Christmas, you know what I mean? It shouldn’t be lopsided when you’re this young. I don’t see you falling into that, but I had to say it.

“If genitals get involved, make sure they wash their hands. Especially if they’re boys. If a penis gets involved, get a condom in the mix. It’s not hard to buy them. But also, if someone else is touching your genitals, a gynecologist should be too. That sounded bad, but you know what I mean. Try to see if you have dense boobs as well. That could get you later.

“That’s everything off the top of my head, but—oh! And trim your nails. We’ll keep talking, obviously. Okay. That’s it. Actually, here’s Grandma.” 

She turned the screen toward Ellen, whose hair and clothes were all silver. Her lips were plum. 

“Hi sweet pea,” Ellen said and folded her hands in front of her as if she were doing a broadcast. “I just want to say: Any and all hair is okay. You don’t have to remove any of it. Your pubes are fine. Nipple hair is fine. Whiskers are fine. Toe hairs are fine. Lower-back hair is fine.”

June turned the screen back to her. “Being a yeti is fine. Yeah, to add to that, we’re all just mammals. Mammals have hair. And another mammalian thing is—most people don’t care about hair either way now, but even if you do care, I just want you to know that the people who find you attractive will sniff you out. Literally. You’ll smell so good to them. And they’ll smell good to you. Don’t know if you’ve had that yet, but you will. Okay. Anything else from Grandma?”

A quick pan to Ellen. “No. Enjoy the book, sweetheart. I love you.”

“You sent a book?” June said offscreen. “Awwn.”

June dipped her face into the frame. “Yeah, love you.”

The next video was a screen recording of Alex FaceTiming with Bea as she walked outside, balding corduroy collar of her jacket in the frame. She had pulled her hair back. Her flyaways picked up light.

“Sorry, what is it I’m meant to talk about again?”

“What it’s like to be a girl at her age,” Alex said. 

“Right. Okay. A bit broad.”

“Okay. Let’s zero in on sexuality and the body. Tell her to use less water.”

“Use less water, Jude.”

“What advice do you have for her about exploring her body and sexuality?”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Be a gave the camera a long, serious look. “Enjoy yourself, darling. So much joy gets lost in the business of everyday life. Enjoy yourself to the hilt.”

The corner of her mouth lifted. She reset her face. “But do conserve water.”

The video ended. An enveloping silence followed.

“I put that together in the past twenty-four hours,” Alex said.

“I can tell,” my mother said, wondering if spontaneous combustion could find her quickly. She hugged the book from Ellen.

“You don’t have to keep that if you don’t want to,” Henry said. "The art seems…unsettling.” 

“It’s okay,” she said. “It looks funny.” 

She opened the front cover. “‘A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lov’—oh my God. I can’t.”

She doubled over.

“But have you got the gist of all this?” Henry said. “This all started because you seemed to be taking quite long showers, and we—” He realized how staid it all sounded as the words left his mouth. “We were worried about conserving water.”

“Okay.”

“What do you think?” Alex said.

“Okay.”

“‘Okay?’”

“Okay! My showers will be so quick.”

“What about the other stuff?” Henry said. “Are you…do you…”

My mother clawed her scalp so her hair partially covered her face.

“This was like, really cringe,” she said. “Like, so heteronormative and positions sexual desire as hegemonic and a given. It’s actually so out of touch. Like, you should assume ace-ness as the default.”

“Have you been possessed by Judith Butler?” Henry said.

“I’ve heard about the default-to-ace thing,” Alex said.

“There’s been some talk about it at the shelter,” Henry said. “But Jude, are you ace?””

“Dad, that’s not even the point.”

She clomped out clutching the circa-1972 copy of The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking. After a baleful look at the out-of-touch adults, Orion followed. 

It was not the first time they’d talked to her about sex and bodies. They’d tried to inoculate her against terrible real-life sex by watching movies with uncinematic, unlovely sex scenes in them. Maybe there was frontal nudity. Maybe there were weird and out-of-balance features. Characters had exchanges like, “Do you think it would be nice if we—” “Yes” before heavy breathing took over the audio track. 

“Mate. Mate. Mate," my mother had screamed at various volumes at ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. 

She had ways of torturing them back. Some opinions my mother aired to her parents during adolescence:

1. That using punctuation and capital letters in a text was like writing an essay. (Insincerely held.)
2. That the actor Alex thought would play him in a nonexistent biopic looked “like he had a pimply scalp.” (“What the fuck does that even mean?” Alex had wailed.)
3. That Henry looked like he’d been “inappropriately fondled” when he sat in on her short-lived band’s rehearsal. (To be fair, it was chaotic, and the songs were both incoherent and jarringly horny.)

Her solo music went further. So far that a song she’d recorded in her room—rough, using commercial equipment and blankets hung over the windows and walls to control the acoustics—became well known among a certain kind of high school student in the Southwest. 

It blew up enough to net her a meeting with the superintendent.

Superintendent Montez was a career educator who had spent her entire life in Arizona until she was recruited to the Austin Independent School District. A year into life outside her home state, she was playing it safe. This was not something that could be handled over email. Plus, the girl’s parents were supposed to be interesting.

The superintendent’s email had intimated a concern about a song that had circulated among the students at Liberal Arts and Science Academy. Alex and Henry knew my mother played and sang and even wrote music—see above about the short-lived band—but they left that part of her life to her. 

Alex and Henry had driven to pick her up from school for the meeting. She folded her bike into the trunk of the car and got in, scratching idly at the side of her neck. 

“Maybe the superintendent’s going to ask you to take your song down for being too awesome and distracting,” Alex had said. 

“Eh.”

“No one talks like that in real life, Alex.”

“But what else could it be? We’re not in Footloose here. What’s the song called, Judy Jude-Jude?”

“‘Torch Song.’”

“Classic. Wholesome. Probably too awesome.” 

“Eh,” she said again. 

Alex and Henry introduced themselves by their first names. My mother did the same and offered her hand to the two adults in the meeting she didn’t know. She was used to holding her own among strangers at Ellen’s house and with the Mountchristen-Windsors.

Superintendent Montez, Alex, my mother, Henry, and the blandly handsome man who’d introduced himself as Paul Yoon took a seat around a glass-topped circular table a few paces from the superintendent’s desk. 

“This is not necessarily serious, but Mr. Yoon is a freshman parent who has some concerns about ‘Torch Song.’” Superintendent Montez said. 

“Might as well get right into it,” Yoon said. His manner indicated that he was used to leading discussions.

“I don’t know how serious this is,” he said. “I would think the entire song would be at issue, but I’ll read you the most concerning part of it.” He took out a sheet of paper. "'Did the flaming tongues/Lick the entire sky/Are you the one guy/Who rights all my wrongs.’”

He looked around the table. “I can share a copy of the lyrics if you’d like.”

“You’ve transcribed them?” Henry asked.

“Yessir.” He sounded like Hill Country. “Now, young lady, what is ‘the entire sky?’ What is the sky?”

“‘What is the sky?’” My mother crossed her arms. She wore owlish glasses that day, and she peered at Yoon over the frames, her forehead furrowed in an are you hearing yourself? expression. She had left private school after eighth grade, but she hadn’t lost all the private-school mannerisms. In this case, a haughtiness whose subtlety gave it plausible deniability if anyone pressed the issue. Or maybe it was less from private school and more from the branch of the family that had sat atop of their local class system for a thousand years. 

“What is the sky? What does it stand for?”

She affected patience with the line of questioning. “You’re not supposed to tell the audience what things mean. The audience is supposed to think for themselves.”

“But you wrote it. You must’ve had an intent.” 

“The audience interprets the song.” She shrugged. 

“Is this what you teach at home?” Yoon looked from Alex to Henry, then back again. 

“That must be what they teach at school too,” Henry said. “Is that right, Superintendent Montez?” 

“Look, Mr.—” he glanced down at his printout and decided not to attempt to say the entire string of surnames. “Sir, I know you received an elite education.”

“I’ve been more than fortunate. And please do call me Henry.”

“That’s what I mean, Henry. Not everyone can get that same education. They could get the wrong message from the song.”

“Which is what?”

Yoon turned to face my mother, sandwiched between her parents. “What are the tongues licking?”

“I thought I heard ‘flaming tongues,’” Alex said. “‘Tongues of flame.’ Something like that.”

“But they’re licking—”

“I beg your pardon, but what are we talking about?” Henry said.

“I have to be frank. I was concerned when I heard my son listening to the song on repeat. Do you go to church? As a family?”

“It was on repeat?” my mother said.

“We’ve all received communion,” Alex said with an amused smile.

“Which church?”

"Is this necessary?” Henry said.

Alex gestured at himself with an up-down motion. “We’ve received communion at a lot of different churches, but I’m technically Catholic.”

For a split second, Yoon seemed to make a face.

“Mr. Claremont—”

“Call me Alex.”

“Alex, this is a public school. We’re Christians here in Texas. This song…I hate to say it, but it’s about…menstruation and oral sex and fire.”

Henry put a protective hand on the back of my mother’s neck. “It’s about all that?” 

“It’s all in there.” Yoon’s drawl was heavier now.

Alex leaned forward. “Can I get that printout of the lyrics?”

Yoon opened his leather folio embossed with The Crystal Church of Austin and distributed printouts to everyone at the table. 

Alex put on his glasses and read. The corner of his lip twitched a few times, but otherwise, his face stayed neutral. When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and looked at my mother.

“A dirty Porsche? That’s your getaway car?”

She shrugged. 

He turned back to the adults. 

“Where are you getting all this from, Mr. Yoon? Every other song written by a high schooler is about getting into a car and driving away.”

“Pastor Yoon. Be reasonable, Alex. The torch is a bloody tampon. The flames are the blood going into the tampon.”

“I thought you said the flames were tongues,” Henry said.

“They are that."

“So they are both things at once?”

“Yes."

“So this song is ambiguous and reasonably open to interpretation?”

Yoon’s shoulders dropped. “Yes.”

“I see.”

My mother’s foot had started to bounce. Alex put a hand on her knee to still her.

“Let me see if I'm getting this. Your son was listening to my daughter’s song on repeat. I assume he likes it. You listened to it enough times to have an interpretation of it. Then you—” Alex held up the printout. “—transcribed the lyrics and thought some more about what they could mean. You then decided that my daughter, a sixteen-year-old girl, wrote and recorded a song about menstruation, cunnilingus, and fire.”

Yoon was pink. “I didn’t say cunnilingus.”

“Excuse—oral sex.”

“Yes. Well, it’s…it’s the principle.” 

“What principle is that?”

“Look, Alex. I’m not here to tell you bad things about your daughter. She’s a beautiful young lady, but she shouldn’t be writing things like that.”

“Pastor Yoon, is this about the song or about the fact that your son likes the song?”

Instead of answering Alex, Yoon looked at my mother as if he were trying to understand something. 

“Does your son like my daughter?” Alex said. “Is this some kind of Hunchback of Notre Dame situation?”

“Excuse me?”

“Alex,” Henry said.

“Hear me out. Frollo becomes infatuated with Esmeralda and decides to oppress her and her people instead of dealing with his feelings. Are you maybe having a bad reaction to your son liking a song? Or liking a girl? Or liking a girl who wrote a song that’s a little more complex than Wheels on the Bus?”

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame?” Yoon was visibly flustered now.

Alex turned his palms up on the table. “Hey. I only know the plot of the Disney movie. I’m just an American.”

“It’s just…she can’t promote the song!” 

“But we’ve not spoken about her promoting anything,” Henry said. “You said your son likes it on his own.”

“Well, then no one else should hear it!” 

“I don’t think that’s within your control, Pastor Yoon,” Alex said.

“But it’s…it’s…it’s about forest fires!”

“I thought you said it was about menstruation and oral sex and apparently a filthy car,” Henry said. But he saw the look that came over Superintendent Montez’s face. Something had shifted.

"What’s he talking about?” Henry said. “Superintendent Montez, what about forest fires?”

“Students cannot promote theories about so-called environmental degradation in Texas public schools or on district property,” Yoon said, gaining confidence. “Same goes for depictions of signs of so-called climate change. It’s simply too sensitive and controversial.”

“Christ. What the fuck,” Henry whispered. 

Alex’s face was a mask of neutrality. 

“That’s factual,” he said. 

“Well, I guess that part’s pretty clear,” Superintendent Montez said. “Jude, can you commit to not promoting your music at school or on state property, just to be safe?”

My mother shrugged. “Fine.”

“Is that what we can expect from Texas public schools?” Henry said as they walked to the car. “Christ.”

He turned to my mother loping beside him. “I’m sorry, darling.”

Alex put an arm around her. “How do you like being a member of the general public, sweetheart?”

“It’s fine.” 

“Hey, you can be mad if you want to.”

“I’m not. It’s whatever.”

“You’ve got an admirer. Yoon’s son’s a real fan. He could become your best promoter after this.” 

“Either way,” she said too quietly for Alex to hear.

“What's that?”

“Igual.”

“Mi vida, you want to talk about it?”

“I said it’s whatever.” 

“Okay, well, if it ever becomes not whatever.”

“Okay.”

They got into the car and sat for a few moments before Henry started the engine.

“Jude,” Henry said. “Is ‘the one guy who rights all my wrongs’ Jesus?”

“God, you’re so abrahamic.”

“She took that really well,” Alex later remarked. "She’s either really chill about it, or that Yoon kid’s dead meat.”

The meeting didn’t seem to change anything. Alex and Henry still saw my mother strum her guitar on her bed, headphones plugged in. She mumbled melodically to herself and stopped to scribble things in a notebook now and then. 

One night, she cackled as she wrote, sounding wickedly satisfied. Henry knocked on her door, then waved to get her attention. She wiggled to make room for him to sit down on her bed. 

“That Yoon bloke is a loon,” Henry said. “Has his son been nice to you?”

“Charlie? She’s a girl.”

“I thought he mentioned a son.”

“She’s a girl at school.” My mother shrugged as if Henry were missing something obvious.

“In any event, let me know if she does something. You never know with American public schools. How things will turn out. Don’t be unkind to her either, alright? Don’t sic the girl squad on her.”

“You think I would start shit at school? And who says ‘girl squad?’ What year is it?” 

She put her headphones back on and strummed, setting one foot against the inside of the opposite thigh in a figure four.

“Jude.” Henry lay a hand on her ankle.

“Hmm?” She took off her headphones.

“Look me in the eye and promise me.”

My mother unplugged her headphones from the guitar. 

"Look in. To. My. Faaaather’s eyes,” she belted.

“My father’s eyes,” came Alex’s voice from downstairs. 

“Christ. Jude—”

“Look in. To. My. Faaaather’s eyes.”

"Yeaaaaah.”

"Jude.”

“What?” she said. She pronounced it whaaa-tuh.

“Promise me,” Henry said. “If that’s really Charlie’s situation, h—she might not be having an easy go of it at home.”

“Alright, alright,” she said, and shook her ankle free. “I promise I won’t be a dick to her. I’ve talked to her like twice in my life. What kind of person do you think I am?”

After Alex finished his finals at the end of his 1L year, he and Henry loaded three boxes of papers and a suitcase into a station wagon so old it had a tape deck. 

“Is that safe to drive all the way to Nantucket?” Henry asked, making sure the cargo was flush against each other in the trunk.

“It better. Even if it doesn’t, the Arguing with Massholes Fellowship will handle it.”

The name was a joke, but the fellowship was not. Alex had raised enough during the school year to fund legal aid fellowships for him and four other classmates. He was headed to Nantucket to assist a local lawyer who specialized in making sure seasonal workers received the wages and housing employers had promised. 

Alex watched Henry push the trunk closed and stored away the image of him in motion. They wouldn’t see each other until Henry could visit later in the summer. 

It really was the worst time to leave Brooklyn. The leaves overhead mellowed the early summer light, and the air had the kind of texture that made you want to gulp it. Alex climbed in and started the car. Henry reached in and pushed down the knob to lock the door and leaned in at the window to kiss Alex goodbye. 

“Show those gringos what’s right,” he said. 

“That’s the idea. Hey, come back a sec.” Alex put his hand on the back of Henry’s neck. 

The car swayed like a schooner as it pulled away. Henry was free to get to know Brooklyn—indeed, all of New York—that summer. He strode north. 

On the interstate now. Alex has put on sunglasses and turned up the volume on the mixtape he’d made for the drive. Low, dark synth and a drum machine kicked in. A singer bragged about how nothing could break him down. He was the man.

Henry walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. The energy of the city roiled his blood. He lowered his chin and breathed. The swelling in his chest was not invincibility, but it was confidence. 

Chapter Text

A friend of mine once said my mother had hottest-counselor-at-camp energy. She never went to camp. She went to Balmoral and Sandringham and Èze, but close enough. 

My mother’s story is not mine to tell. As far as I know, she doesn’t want it told, but it’s hard to disentangle some of the details of her life from Alex and Henry’s, the putative focus of this book, and the reason my editor is indulging me at all. 

Here’s something. The fourth time my mother came home drunk from a high school party, it almost killed Alex. 

The first time it happened, Henry was the one who stayed up to wait for her. When she arrived home—she always got herself to and from her adventures responsibly, in a cab, not a car from a ride-hailing app. Henry had supervised her while she drank a tall glass of water, then saw her up to bed.

When it happened again, and again, and again, Alex took up the vigil. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be torn away.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said that final time. She'd arrived home between three and four in the morning to find all the lights blazing on the ground floor and Alex receiving her with arms akimbo. 

“Look,” she said. “Nothing bad happened. We can go to bed.”

“That’s what you want,” he said. 

“What?” My mother tried to put on a quizzical face, but she mostly squinted with one eye. 

“You think this is nothing bad? Don’t go upstairs. Sit down.”

She did.

“You think you’re invincible? Ever been hungover for real?” A strange smile flickered on his face. 

Alex put a set of tumblers on the kitchen table.

“I see that you think you know what you’re doing,” he said, pouring whiskey into the tumblers. “Come and drink your old man under the table.”

It was a non-strategy born of exasperation and sleep deprivation. But Alex had seen, writhing beneath my mother’s skin, a restlessness bordering on rage. He’d had the same restlessness and more agony to hang it on. He’d also gone out drinking in the dark too young. The difference was, he’d courted erasure while she was just flirting with gravity. 

Alex was the only one who got truly wasted that night. My mother sucked down a tumbler of whiskey to prove a point. But then she watched her father put them away like—well, like a person who had lived a real life. You don’t feel that kind of horror and fascination outside the no-man’s land of pre-adulthood, when seeing a parent do human things was like watching a deer play the piano. 

Henry found Alex collapsed on the living room couch the next morning. Either because she herself was confused or because my mama wasn’t no snitch, Jude shrugged and mumbled “I don’t know” before she shuffled back to her room when Henry asked her what the hell had happened.

Her peace was short-lived. 

“Come on,” Henry said, dangling her sneakers in front of her as she sprawled in bed. “Let’s take an easy jog. Reset the system.” 

“Ugh. Why?”

“I just told you why.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I can see that. I say we go. Or are you in no condition to do something so strenuous as a jog?” Henry tilted his head. A challenge.

My mother’s pride wouldn’t let her cry uncle. She pushed herself out of bed. 

Her young, strong limbs didn’t betray her, but her stomach did. 

A mile in, a prehistoric creature revolted in her stomach. Her vision blurred. Her eyes watered. Acid and something vaguely medicinal splashed against the back of her throat. She fell behind Henry and Orion, still pushing forward at a steady pace. Her hairline prickled with heat. Sweat sprouted on her nose. 

She heard something that sounded like hurgh inside her skull and slowed to a floppy walk. She put her hands on her knees to keep from falling over.

At first, she succeeded at heaving quietly into the gutter. When it didn’t stop, she let herself release syncopated guttural sounds. Her eyes stung as if someone had thrown vinegar into them. 

She tried to get her face as close to the gutter as possible. How had she ended up on her knees? 

“Jude,” Henry said, disturbingly nearby. 

She retched loudly enough to scare off Pennywise.

“You two planned this,” she said, hiccuping into the gutter. “You wanted me to eat shit out here, so you had him tell me to drink him under the table. You know what—hicc—you win. Congratulations on beating a high school girl. I didn’t even do anything. You have no idea. People go to parties. You judgmental pricks.”

Her indignant sobs sounded like honks. 

Henry crouched behind her.

“You’re not the first person to call me a prick, sweetheart. Can you walk?”

“No,” she said, intending to make things as hard as possible for him. To her surprise, Henry lifted her as if she were a child. It was actually kind of nice, except for the scalding resentment. 

She eventually felt well enough to grumble that she could walk. She pushed Henry away when he set her down on ground, only to look up and see their house. Another dent in her pride.

She scuttled upstairs and took refuge in the bathroom. 

Alex was still motionless on the couch. He had put on opaque sunglasses.

Henry stood over him. 

“Are you awake?” 

No response.

“Alex.”

Still nothing.

“Alex Claremont-Diaz. Be sentient.” 

Alex parted his lips with some effort.

“Babe, if you could bring down the volume by maybe two, three thousand percent, that would save my life.”

“Jude told me you challenged her to a drinking contest last night,” Henry said at a normal volume.

“I think she only had one. Two, tops.” 

“Why? She was already drunk.”

“Same reason you just took her through basic training. To teach her a lesson.” His air quotes had no shape to them.

“Exercise is a cornerstone of a balanced life. What you did was—” Henry made an exasperated gesture. “She’s not some laddette. She’s our daughter. What is that face?”

“Ssshhhh. It’s just…you’re so loud.” 

“You don’t get her more drunk, you donkey.”

“Ow,” Alex whispered. “If it helps, I think I drank more than she did last night.”

“It doesn’t. You don’t do that. Look at you. You’re incapacitated. You’re still drunk. Meanwhile, you’ve given Jude a good shove down the icy road towards addiction.”

“She’s not that kind of kid.”

“Tell me, then. What kind is she?”

“Better than me at that age. I used to get sad and go to parties and drive home. Far as we know, underage drinking was the only thing she did last night. Kids experiment.”

“You experiment with weird hair, unfortunate clothes—”

“Coke?”

“…”

“Sorry.”

They sat in silence until Alex rasped, “Are you too mad to get me some water?”

Henry came back with a glass of water. 

“That’s just it,” he said, handing it to Alex. “You don’t experiment with substances in this family.”

Alex drank half the water and ran his tongue over his chapped lips. He smiled.

“What?”

“The righteous anger thing is very attractive. A tall British man talking down at me. Who knew.”

“Um, guys?” 

My mother stood at the threshold of the living room. She had brushed her teeth, taken a quick shower, and changed into an oversized T-shirt and mesh shorts. 

“Are you fighting because of me?”

“Sweetheart, we’re worried about you,” Henry said.

“Sorry.” She sniffled but wasn’t hydrated enough to cry. 

“Come here,” Alex said. “Tell your dad you’re done experimenting with binge drinking. If you don’t, you’ll be in rural Scotland for the summer, with only relatives around.”

“How’s that different from a normal summer?”

“Ssshhhh. Not so loud.”

That was the end of my mother’s foray into binge drinking. If the morning-after jog with Henry didn’t put her off the physical consequences, guilt—still an unfamiliar emotion then—at seeing her fifty-something father suffer through a hangover to make an obscure point helped. 

So she channeled her exuberance and curiosity into her friends. Alex and Henry were charmed when she decided to road trip to Corpus Christi with Orion and a good friend over spring break senior year. She and the friend captured a gray-blue crab the size of a thumbnail in a sandy parking lot. Before they could walk the crab across the lot and back onto the beach, the tiny thing panicked—could crabs feel panic?—and immediately got lost somewhere inside the car. A few weeks later, the car started to smell briny and didn’t stop. 

The friend was so pleased to be with her on the trip, to sit beside her while she drove and sang to their playlist with abandon, Orion strapped in in his harness in the backseat. That friend died young, and I’ll be keeping their name out of these pages. They’re not a public figure, but they loved my mother deeply. They loved her already in Corpus Christi. She didn’t know it yet. My grandparents had an inkling, but they kept their thoughts to themselves. 

They watched my mother have less-mundane adventures. Alex put the tracker he’d used before she was born into her things when they helped her pack for a through-hike of the Grand Canyon during her gap year after high school. They looked at her location every day. Sometimes, every hour. 

When she graduated from college, my grandparents indulged and rented out the main bar on the main street of the college town. Her friends and their families milled about and took turns at the karaoke machine. Alex, whose voice had taken on a subtle rumbling undertone, did a not-traumatizing cover of “Get Low.” 

Henry shocked with a take on “International Love.” Turns out, you can credibly swap Pit Bull’s voice for an RP one.

By all accounts, my mother lived the life of a glamorous dirtbag. She and the friend who had gone to Corpus Christi were now a couple. She kept truck-stop-diner-waitress hours as a caseworker for people who lived on the streets. Off the clock, she and her friends had the kinds of quasi-philosophical discussions that happen when you’re lavishly educated and materially safe and suddenly encounter people going through animal-adjacent suffering. 

When she began to burn out from the work, she went part-time. The magic of receiving a distribution from a fund every quarter. She allowed herself a liquid income equivalent to the local livable wage, according to MIT’s living wage calculator. She wanted to prove that she could live like a civilian. She didn’t want money to have her by the balls, or any body part. She reinvested what she didn’t spend, so she got richer. More magic, this time of economic inertia that grows your capital as you go about your life.

My mother was thirty-one and living in her childhood home again. Her first love was dead, and she was having dreams about horses even though she’d never ridden seriously. Alex didn’t want her atop “a thousand pounds of stupid muscle and panic.”

She waited for him in his office. When he came back from his run, he saw the look on her face and took a seat next to her on the narrow sofa instead of across from her in his chair.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. “But I don’t want you to—I want you to listen first.”

“Okay.” 

She had gotten into medical school, she told him. What a time to reset her life. She felt insane, but she was going to do it. 

“Why did you tell me like you had bad news?”

“Are you disappointed?”

“What? Why would I be?”

“You were just so excited about me doing lefty social work. And you were so proud and liked to talk about it.”

“You know medical school isn’t where they teach you to turn people into evil robots, right? You can still do lefty social work afterwards.”

“But I might not come out of it practicing community medicine. I could end up like, a plastic surgeon to oligarchs.”

“That doesn’t sound likely.”

“What if I do, though? Say I come out of it and I look at those nice salaries and think, ‘You know, it would be nice to make some good money and not to have my distributions be the only reason I’m not living in a tent with my clients.’ You’d be disappointed. Admit it.”

“Jude—Maria Catalina—I thought you’d know better. I have been proud of you. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you because you exist. It’s not because of your work. I can’t back this up, but I feel like I’d be proud of you even if you murdered someone.”

“Dad.”

“I’m serious. I’d get the call from your lawyer and go, ‘I bet she had a good reason.’”

“Dad.” 

“I’m just saying. It would take a fuckton to make me disappointed in you. Like, on a fundamental level. What’s going on with your face?”

“Shut up. I’m happy.”

“Okay, Dr. Snotterson.”

“How do you think Dad will react? I don’t want him to get how he gets.”

“Same or similar. How does he get?”

“Like it’s degrading to talk about money. I don’t want him to think it’s about money.”

“You sure you’re not confusing him with your uncle?”

“So you think it’ll be alright? Tell me it’s alright.”

“Excuse me, miss, but who are you? I thought you were my daughter, but she doesn’t ask questions like this.”

“It’s just been a lot.” She took a breath, her hands on her face. “Anyway, how’re you? What’s been going on around here?”

“Same old. This is probably your dad’s last year at work. A former resident showed up here to proclaim her love for him.”

“Intense. Is that why you got that security fence?” 

“Part of it.” 

“Wow,” she said. “He’s like, seventy years old.” 

“Man’s still go it. Plus, it was a couple years ago, so you can take off a few years.” 

“God, I missed it. I’ve been so far up my own ass.” 

“You’re living life. You don’t have to be obsessed with your parents. We’re fine. We had our fun with you when you were growing up.” 

She sniffled and smiled. 

“Slipping through my fingers all the time,” Alex sang. 

“Oh my God.” A gummy ball of snot came out with her wet laugh. 

“I’m joshin’ with you.” He swiped her nose with his bare hand as if she were a toddler. “You’ll be alright, Jude.”

She was. They watched her will her brain into a shape that would take her through medical school, boards, steps, and residency—in internal medicine, thank God. 

And then she left them. She left the country as soon as residency ended. She did a tour of Central Asia, wielding her barely passable Russian. When they visited her after her first six months in Kazakhstan, she hosted them in what could be generously described as a two-bedroom house. The second bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet. The building was low and squat, but the construction was solid enough, with walls of yellow brick and stone, the windows horizontal like suspicious eyes. 

Alex and Henry saw the low ceilings and chipping paint. They looked into their daughter’s tired eyes and understood. She was doing what they had done in earlier years. Afraid she would list into a dishonorable, dissipated life, my mother ran toward hard, variably painful things to guarantee an honorable life.

She took a few days off from the clinic to spend time with them. They hired a local to drive them into town so they could share bowls of spiced lamb stews with large rounds of tandyr nan. Alex trimmed her hair at home while Henry visited the local school. 

“Oh, Jude,” Henry said when it was time to go. He hugged her as if he were losing her to something.

“Tell me it’s okay,” she said. 

“You’re alright, my darling,” he said, and touched her cheek. “You are good.” 

They watched from afar as she bounced around with me to drought-stricken places, which was most places if you thought hard enough about it. The parched land seemed to want to split open in Bulgaria. In Greek villages marked by blighted former olive groves, she became a de facto gerontologist. Those places are watermarks on my brain.

We moved to the US after my mother FaceTimed her parents and found herself startled by their lined faces, then cried at her surprise. I infuriated her when I threw my violin in frustration. I didn’t want to be in New York, in our apartment in Harlem. I didn’t want to be surrounded by people speaking English, by concrete and cars. I wanted wide open spaces. So what if they were desolate.

My mother vented to her parents. Henry came to New York and took me on a whirlwind exploration of foods and neighborhoods. And: A visit with the violinist Ray Chen. He was physically wizened but still sharp and lively and could talk about the violin—but really, any music and any art—with insight that made you want to be part of that world. That was how I made peace with America and New York and the violin. That visit planted the seeds of my first career. But this isn’t about me. 

The night after the family scattered June’s ashes on Lake LBJ, Alex and Henry were the first to turn in.

“I admired her the whole time, you know,” Henry said.

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t go down the expected path, necessarily. You’ve got to respect her for not going after the well-done-you’s.”

“Ninety ain’t bad either.”

In the kitchen, I called out for my mother to help me, then repeated the request quietly after she shushed me.

“We’re the old fogeys who go to bed early. Imagine.” 

“It’s whatever,” Alex replied. “I think June said most of what she wanted to say, in the end.” 

“Well, thank God she stopped being a speechwriting monkey for politicians. Writing for other people for so long, you probably get to feeling less real.”

“Does writing for yourself make you feel more real?”

“I suppose it does. I don’t think my life felt quite real for—well, or my life has gotten more real. Meeting you—”

“‘Meeting’ me.”

“Meeting you. Moving here. Abdicating. Jude. Talus. Loving the people I’ve loved.”

“Yeah? I’ve loved your fake ass this whole time.”

“It’s alright if you didn’t always. It’s not a contest.”

“I mean it. I’ve been thinking about this off and on, but I think it actually started the first time I saw you. I was twelve. Isn’t that unhinged?”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ve always led a real life.”

“As opposed to your fake life.”

“June was always a real one.”

“Literally and figuratively.”

“You were too. I think you—and June, of course—sort of showed me what life could be. What family life could be. You’ve saved me, in a way.”

“You really think you would’ve just been walking around looking and sounding like you, being enjoyed by no one?” 

“Not no one. I saw people before you. But I think I would’ve mainly been a posh cunt. Dissolute, dissipated. Disappointed.” 

Alex smiled. “Can’t have that.”

“No. I wrote The Fanatic because of you, I think. I think I wanted you to admire me.”

“I already did, though.”

“I think…I felt like I wanted to offer you something after…your dad.” 

“Hmm.” 

A pause. 

“You know, I think I didn’t end up seriously practicing law because I wanted to focus on good work. Earn your love.” 

“You’re joking.”

“No.”

Henry laughed. “So we’ve spent our lives earning each other?”

“I’d say we worked for each other. It was pretty inevitable.”

“For me, it was.” 

History takes on the sheen of inevitability. Alex staring at Henry’s photo in J-14. Henry exchanging his cricket bat for a polo mallet. Alex in the living room of the yellow house in Austin, staring at the space where Oscar’s favorite chair used to be. Henry getting on his horse, the one that really understood him and made him feel like a centaur. Alex staggering into his car and peeling off from a high school party. 

Two boy-men meeting for the first time and stunning each other for different reasons. Circling each other for years.

Tentative friendship. Two shadows briefly merging in the snow. Tremulous understanding. Two people coming together in rooms. Unrealized history mixing with the conviction of bodies. 

Rupture and reconciliation between stone walls. Yes. He would love him. One thousand percent.

A secret that admitted more people, and then suddenly, seemingly half the world. The inviting heat and radiant peril of a new life.

Alex cutting his hands on rocks in the Andes, joking with people with balaclavas in their pockets and guns by their beds. 

Henry stopping on the staircase at Kensington to watch a footman swap a portrait of Arthur for one of Philip in uniform.

Alex talking with first-time candidates who had ideas and ideals and the right kind of stubbornness.

Henry holding a series of heartbroken teenagers who would eventually be alright. Henry puzzling over old books, notes, and drafts. Loving it. Hating it.

And: my mother. Pumping her stubby child legs, running ahead. Faster, faster, faster. My mother, older and coltish now, dashing down a beach in Corpus Christi, Orion overtaking her in a russet blur. A friend catching up to her, grabbing her by the waist, and making her laugh. My mother, testing her will by trekking the inside of the Grand Canyon and howling with that ancestral rage in the cathedral of rock, her body purple and red from bruises and hematite. My mother, a new doctor, prescribing contraception and stitching up injuries from outdoor work. At night, emailing her parents, writing in a journal I will never read, and strumming an old guitar.

They had done it all. Everything that mattered. It was enough. 

The lake house went dark as everyone went to bed. A light came on here and there and blinked off soon after. Shortly before dawn, my grandfather emerged from the backdoor and stood on the dock, facing the water until the ambulance arrived and woke the rest of the house. 

He skipped the funeral. It was too public anyway. Too much for strangers. No more choking ties. Enough was enough.

My mother did the honors at the service. She read John Donne’s words, still bracing some 450 years after his death. 

Here take my picture; though I bid farewell 
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. 
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more 
When we are shadows both, than 'twas before.

Her voice faltered at My body’a sack of bones, broken within. It stayed shaky until she took a deep breath and pushed out

That which in him was fair and delicate, 
Was but the milk which in love's childish state 
Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough 
To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough.

The guests—because they were more guests than mourners—may have been moved, or they may have been uncomprehending. Either way, it didn’t matter anymore. 

My grandfather’s plane touched down at Nice Côte d’Azur the day after the funeral.

“I’ve not been here long,” he said when my mother and Banksy threw open the front door. 

Nothing had happened. My grandfather had simply been too tired to take himself to bed the night before, so he had lay down in front of the hearth and found it easier not to get up when he woke. His chest, his side, and the rest of him felt better that way.

“Malcolm, hi,” he said when he saw Banksy. 

“Oh my God, Dad,” my mother said. “Can you get up? Actually, don’t move. We’ll call an ambulance.”

“I think everything is ready now,” he said, his voice like cotton. “The files are in my office. It’s all set up.” 

“What’re you talking about? Oh my God.” She was crying now. She recognized the signs from Bulgaria. From Greece. From Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. 

“Sorry to do this to you again so soon. First one, now the other.”

“What’re you talking about? The ambulance will be here soon,” she said. 

Banksy spoke to the dispatcher in rapid newscaster French.

My grandfather took my mother’s hand. 

“Monkey, Sunrise, there’s a cat at the village vet’s office. It’s small and black. It used to have ticks. Go pick it up.”

“What?”

“Jude. You’ve really lived up to your name. You’re so strong.”

“Dad. Stay with me. Banksy! Tell SAMU he’s…coding. Or whatever. Fuck. Dad.”

“You’ll be alright, Jude.” 

“Dad!” my mother shouted as if she could keep him with her through will alone. “Oh no. Nonono. Dad.”

But he was a lifelong athlete. He evaded them. He was gone before emergency services arrived.

Chapter Text

     Delivered on March 12, 2097 at the Oxford Union

Thank you for that introduction, Chancellor Bankston-Srivastava. He makes me sound like much more of a prize than I am, doesn’t he. He’s the real prize. Look at him. Most people would be retired now, but he’s got a general-interest book coming out about—oh, you want me to shut up? Okay, I will.

That was a shockingly unprofessional way to start. I’ll put some context around what just happened and tell you that I’m kinda-sorta allowed to talk to him that way because my mother has known Chancellor Bankston-Srivastava her entire life, which means I’ve known him my entire life. Love you, Banksy.

I see a few other familiar faces in the crowd. Hey, cousins. Hello. Professor War—God, now I’m nervous. Okay, let’s go. 

You’ve brought me here, expecting to hear me talk about my grandparents. They of the figurines and digital folk art and at least four different collections of felt dolls. Why? Felt dolls? Seriously, what’s the fascination? I took a walk through the university store this morning, and there were tchotchkes with Henry’s face on them. You can get the same goodies at the estate shops at Versailles, except those have Marie Antoinette’s face on them. 

I’m not saying it’s tacky. What’s the point of having an alum in the family if you can’t use the relationship to shill for yourself or for the university? Besides, I’m here for the tackiest reason of all: to flog the second edition of the book I wrote about my grandparents. Talk about using a relationship to shill.

How tacky to come out with a second edition so soon, but the book sold well enough—you all remember last year—that talk of business opportunities and money came my way via my publisher. 

Why involve me at all, I asked them. They could get a journalist or historian to write a new foreword if they really wanted to call it a second edition. Better yet, why not just reissue it and call it done?

The reasons were content-related. Throw in some R-rated stuff, Talus, my editor told me. It’ll move copies, Talus. Don’t you want to fund Demeter’s Children, Talus? To which I said, Rab—where are you, Rab? Why are you trying to destroy me, Rab?

The second edition of the book will have an appendix. Readers of the first edition had complained about a lack of sex scenes, to which I say this: Since when has anyone expected sex scenes from memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies? Don’t answer that. 

To the cynics, you’re right. This is a cash grab. But you’re wrong that I planned it this way, that I deliberately wrote an at-most PG-13 book about my grandparents, blue-balled readers, and came back to double-dip into people’s wallets because I was always planning to include detailed sex scenes involving my literal grandparents. Are you insane.

Truly, though. I can’t fault anyone for their interest in my grandparents. People love romance, even cynics who are convinced romance is dying, that their specific cultural conditions are killing romance, that the second edition of the book is a pure money grab. 

But long-term relationships and marriage aren’t about romance, really. To respond to the cynics, romance is dying and being made anew all the time. It’s an idea similar to the adage about the nature of love, that it must be made and remade anew every day. A common interpretation is that the adage is about work ethic, that everyone needs to work at loving and being loved. Another is about the parallels between daily bread-making and daily love—you get the idea. 

But there’s another interpretation of that idea, which is that there is no real balm for the human condition. Not power. My Anglo ancestors held huge amounts of power at various times in their lives. Not achievement. Henry tumbled into a dark spell after his pseudonymously published work won a Pulitzer after being on the bestseller lists for twenty weeks. Alex persisted in bad habits—he always drank a bit more than is ideal—despite his enviable life.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to reverse the tape. 

Henry’s image for most of his formative years was that of the youngest boy, the littlest big fellow. Philip and Beatrice were the confident older siblings. Henry was the cute little one until everyone could see that he was not little. He ended up taller and bigger than his siblings. Around the same time, he stopped being able to hide that he was not cute.

So he became an object. An object of sharp fascination and some obsession, much of it one-sided. Isn’t that the fate of all Prince Charmings, the most common objects of desire for adolescents and others for whom reality is chafing more often than not? The media actually used the term “Prince Charming.” Like any Prince Charming, Henry was unobjectionably beautiful. No one would fault you or be alarmed if you had a celebrity crush on him.

Except he was taken. Plenty of people have lost control of their data, but most people’s personal correspondence will never be of intense interest to large swaths of the public. The Waterloo Letters were shocking, seemingly every contemporary publication and podcast and commentator said. 

How shocking that Prince Charming had sex. Not the kind where he smiled kindly while he floated vaguely over some nice young woman with a similar accent and family background. Prince Charming was all at once specifically Henry, and he had musky, grippy, propulsive sex. Most obscene of all, not only did he yearn, he fantasized. He had dreams. He pushed. He took. He shoved.

And the recipient of those emails. It was too perfect, especially if you were a conservative American Christian circa 2020 who thought Ellen Claremont, by holding her office, was on the verge of dealing the heterosexual nuclear family its coup de grâce. 

In other words, if Henry was bred to be a show pony, all sheen and no force, the Waterloo papers took the pony out back, shot it in the head, took its hide, and made glue from its hooves. James Joyce’s letters to Nora about her butt and her farts could never. 

Which brings us to the—ahem—more sexually frank content my editor encouraged for the second edition. I thought about choosing snippets by flipping through Henry’s journals quickly, with a pillowcase over my head, my entire face in a squint. In the end, my fastidious personality wouldn’t let me, so I read Henry’s journals again, apologizing to my grandparents all along. 

So much angst revolves around the thwarted desire to be perceived on our own terms. God knows my grandparents struggled with it. In time, they let go of that desire, which was really a wish for control. You can’t choose how you’re perceived à la carte. The smart ones learn that pretty quickly, often the hard way. Sometimes repeatedly.

Everything about this project—including these remarks—necessarily contains a very large, very Alex-shaped hole. Henry started a regular journaling habit at Oxford, but Alex never tracked his thoughts. Most of what we have here comes from Henry’s papers and from my mother’s memories. 

It’s bizarre to read your grandfather’s journals. Some parts are torturous. Henry wrote of the flat agony of undiagnosed depression in his younger years. Some parts are life-affirming, like when he wrote about my mother. He wrote about her a lot. I’ve left 99 percent of it out of the book, but I will say this: The volume and intensity of his attention spoke of an obliterating love.

But even the most intense emotions are commonplace. The main reason they’re of any interest at all to strangers is my family’s good fortune.

Let’s admit it. Henry and Alex had a charmed life together. It was a life of ongoing miracles, large and small. There was the miracle of their beauty, separately and together. There was the advantage of the circumstances of their birth. Of course, one of them had been born a prince, but I’m mostly talking about being born at the hinge point between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, a time when their love could be institutionalized.

Speaking strictly of my branch of the family, we’ve been given so much through no particular effort. When we can more or less expect a life of material ease, human longings don’t go away. They simply shift.

Alex and Henry—and my mother—sought honorable lives. This doesn’t make them somehow better people. I mean, they had honorable values, but they could afford to be good. Money gave them security to be indignant at all the ways in which the world was lacking. Better, money—material security—freed them to do something about that lack. They made that work a central pillar of their lives. I wrote a little about that in the first edition of the book. 

As this talk approached, I decided that more than honor, my family sought deservingness. We hunger to deserve our good fortune: our material ease, our health, our physical and intellectual athleticism. For some of us, our beauty. The fact that most of us are not assailed by catastrophe. 

Once I made that connection, it all became clear. The central confrontation of Henry’s life was between privilege—unimaginable good fortune—and deservingness. It’s not nothing, considering many members of the British public justifiably think of the royal family as drains on the system. The Mountchristen-Windsors inoculated themselves against public opinion by raising their children with no particularly set convictions under than the circular, self-justifying ones, like how the monarchy was critical to British life because it was an indispensable institution. It was another way of saying the monarchy was important because it had been important. 

Alex doesn’t get off the hook. Until he was deep into adulthood, he more or less believed that the Democratic Party was important because who else would fight the good fight? As it turned out, many people. And there were many fights. 

So deservingness hovered in the background for both my grandparents, like a ghost whose presence you don’t register until you dig out an old photograph and see the the shape in the background. It haunted Henry’s writing, particularly The Fanatic. Henry took deservingness as his subject, so he ended up writing about love and money. It’s kind of funny, how people will say they won’t do something for love or money if they’re dead set against it, but Henry wrote about both things to get at the deeper, perpetually hidden nugget of deservingness.

And then there was the criticism of them and their coupling, some of it from other queer people. The takedowns were contradictory: They pushed their political agendas too hard; they were content to signify nothing at all. They oozed masc-for-masc energy, especially in how they raised my mother, who is still the most outdoorsy person I know; they tried to reinvent the limp-wristed wheel. 

So which is it? I’m not actually asking. Questions like these are basically beside the point. But maybe the contradictions in the critiques are the flip side of their enduring popularity among the people who love them and use their youthful images as avatars of their own romantic ideals. That kind of love, abstract but heartfelt, is funny and bittersweet to my family. Thanks for that. 

I want to leave us with the idea of value and investment. There’s an immense amount of privilege in this room. The resources that are invested in you all—by dint of your being at Oxford, living in the UK, in the Northern Hemisphere—is obscene by world-historical standards. My great-grandmother Ellen Claremont was right. Refugees and camps are perpetual. That knowledge should galvanize us, the kinds of people who made it into this room, into action.
 
Let me bring it back to Alex and Henry. Alex Claremont-Diaz was a Rawlsian at his core. That never changed. Actually, I think both my grandparents were embarrassed Rawlsians. They were convinced people would choose a more just world if they could, if only there could be a way to make it easier. Meanwhile, there they were, sitting on a pile of privilege, much of it begotten from literal plunder. 

But Talus, you and your mother are now sitting on that pile. You’re right, but we’ve invited a few other people to sit with us. I’ll explain.

Since 2090, Demeter’s Children has helped me and my mother keep the principal of the family trust constant. The fund has had a consistent track record of growth because she and I have always lived modestly. The people who receive the balance of the gains—equivalent to an annual livable wage in the median US county—are randomly chosen strangers. 

What if someone doesn’t need that money? Not the spirit of the project, but they get the money anyway. What if someone has a criminal record? Doesn’t matter. What if someone is a bad person or just really, really, ridiculously annoying? Doesn’t matter. 

This way of operating keeps Demeter’s Children’s overhead minimal. It also allows us to adhere to the spirit of the undertaking, which was to give unconditional support, almost like a parent. 

The parent of a nepo baby, maybe, is one critique. I’m not saying everyone should have a trust fund. That wouldn’t be realistic. But affluent societies can give everyone material safety so they can engage their humanity, to become involved with their communities, to connect with people they would not ordinarily look at twice. To fight their inner demons and to heal old wounds. Those things are the work of a life. They are what people talk about on their deathbeds.

The point is, all profits from the second edition of this cash grab of a book will go straight to Demeter’s Children, which will then funnel that money to a literal random. 

I’ve lectured you enough. Besides, if you explain this kind of thing past a certain point, it starts to sound like overcompensation or worse, something sinister. So I’ll set you loose with a brief look at two photos from Alex and Henry’s public appearances. You didn’t think I’d be showing family photos here, did you? 

First, there’s this photo of them where they look delighted with everything. Alex has my mom bundled against his chest. Henry is waving to the crowd, relaxed and happy to be stared at for once. He has just delivered an address about reducing ACEs—that’s adverse childhood events for you non-social-sciences types—with a focus on queer youth. The danger lurking in the photo, the metaphorical shark in the water, is my mother. She’s about a year old here. She’s figured out a way to reach into her tiny tuxedo pants to scratch her butt and is moments away from smearing a faint but unmistakable trail of poop onto Alex’s shirt and neck. 

And then there’s this. You’ll like this. It’s Alex and Henry at a function in Berlin in the spring of 2020. No one knows about them yet. Straight-backed, they stalk through the crowd like they’re on the hunt—even though they were themselves quarry. They had the bullish confidence of people new to something like love. They already knew to assume the stance that would blunt the absurdities and cruelties of the world—shoulder to tuxedoed shoulder—while letting in enough of life’s richness.

Chapter Text

Appendix A
They did it. I just can’t prove it
           -Multiple comments on multiple platforms, 2019-20

Appendix B
     Brooklyn, New York. 2021

The door was flung open and he was before me and he was smiling that wide-open American smile and his eyelashes were practically shimmering around those brown eyes and it was like a memory, except he was present-tense and real. 

“Hello,” I said.

“Still getting the hang of keys?”

“I hadn’t got my keys out, actually.”

“Damn. That’s right. I opened the door before you could struggle. Your very own concierge service.” 

His gentle bounce. The shadow on his cheek. The dimple that looked like it'd been scooped out with a tiny spoon. The triangle of light on the side of his neck. The fading at the shoulder of his falling-apart T-shirt. 

“Perhaps you were just eager to see me,” I said, and crossed the threshold into my house. 

My house. Mine. Alex standing in my foyer. Also mine. Strange and thrilling and foreign, this having. 

Taking what belonged to me in the house that belonged to only me. 

On our feet but seeking a horizontal surface. Gripping, grasping. I had the bottom of his T-shirt balled in my fist. It or he—but really, it was both—smelled so, so good. 

Upstairs. Him laughing that I hung my suit after I took it off. Incorrigible fastidiousness. 

“You’re in no position to take the piss,” I said, running a thumb under his T-shirt. “You’re still in your clothes.” 

“And your solution is…what?”

A soft ripping sound as I pulled the T-shirt off him. 

“Oh.” I breathed out.

The new bed with the old sheets I’d brought from Kensington. Some of the damp, cool spirit of the place still clung to the material.

His hand on the back of my neck. How long would it be before it had happened more in waking life than in dreams? Or would there always be more tick marks for the dreams. I might dream about this as long as I have him. For the rest of my life. 

Mmph, I said. He chuckled against my lips and all at once I pinned him. 

When I was maybe sixteen, I read about support groups for devoutly Christian men dealing with unwanted attraction towards other men. The euphemism of choice for the struggle against their urges was wrestling with the angel, an allusion to the story of Jacob. I’d had to push back from my desk, my head aswarm. Why would they call the source of their pain by the very act they yearned for? The question contained the answer. 

Alex was play-struggling against me. He gained the upper hand. Unlike the boys from school, who mimed smashing your skull when they won, he simply bent over me, his entire body a smile. 

“Hey,” he said.

“Hello.”

“What do you feel like doing?”

I laughed. What didn’t I. 

“The obvious answer would be ‘everything,’” I said. “But we haven’t got time.” 

“Not with that attitude.” He leaned over to open the bedside drawer. “But what if—” a palmful of lube. “We start by lubing me up.” 

“Promising.” 

“And see how long we can stay up.” 

“The word choice there is something.”

“And I can hear about your trip.”

My hand around his cock. “You want to hear about my trip…now?”

The unmistakable connection of bodies. The mouthy one had no more words until I had wiped us off with the old T-shirt.

“That might’ve been its last rodeo,” he said. 

It was not. I stayed awake after he drifted off to sleep. I watched him, then the ceiling, then him again. 

Beneath the wakefulness was jet lag, but also anticipation. In a few days, we will meet the therapist Zahra found. Another first. 

Appendix C
     Brooklyn, New York. 2022

“What do you mean?” An edge in his voice I didn’t like.

“I mean, it’s possible my attraction was ferocious and blinding and bigger than both of us. And I need to figure out what’s on the other end of that.”

“So that’s it.”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ Why be so black and white?”

“You’re the one who’s talking about being blinded by—what’re you saying?”

“I’m saying I need to make you a real person instead of some sort of pure sex object.”

“So I’ve just been a sex object until now?”

“Well, not only that, but—”

"But what? But you don’t know if you should be with me if all you want to do is fuck me?”

“Alex, you’re not listening.”

“Oh, I’m not? It sounds like I’m reading back what you’re telling me, and you don’t like how it sounds, so you’re telling me that I’m not listening to you.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“'Oh, listen, Alex.'”

”No. You listen.”

Appendix D
     "The Prince and I”

I was spending my days having heated debates in seminars about whether this or that was a penis. For anyone wondering, I was on Team Penis. 

After four suspiciously blissful years at Wellesley, my introduction to graduate school at Columbia—incidentally, the first time I was ever in a co-educational environment—was phallocentric in a way that was almost too on the nose. 

So everything was a penis. The sparrow in Gaius Valerius Catullus’s poetry is a penis. So is the snake in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” It goes without saying that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is. And little birds go tweet-tweet, goes the old Simpsons joke.

But at what point did this insistence that everything was a penis become self-defeating and circular? After all, if everything was a penis, nothing was a penis.

If this makes you think my cohort mates and I had lost touch with reality with a quickness, you’re right. But I might argue, in a flailing bid for credibility, that my classmates were more out of touch than I was. For one thing, they were rich. Even if they weren’t wealthy, they were upperclass, if only by sensibility. Sure, I’d known something of the upper class. I had attended my hometown's magnet school, where kids like me mixed with the offspring of local bank executives. But this was Columbia in the 2020s, when New York was fast becoming a city of the stratosphere. Stratospheric abilities. Stratospheric ambition. Stratospheric wealth most of all. 

Meanwhile, both of my parents were still working as nurses in St. Petersburg. Their media diet consisted of Facebook posts and reality TV. Middle-class salaries, middlebrow tastes. 

The ambitious young person from relatively humble beginnings loves to put cultural distance between themselves and their parents, so I took pride in not knowing what was going on on TikTok. I didn’t even have it. You think you like your little life? How nice. 

This isolated me further from my classmates. To make things worse, I’d fallen into a situationship with a student at the business school. I’d mistaken his love of restaurants as signs of proper courtship.

So I silently choked on impotent rage and humiliation when he told me over bagels that he’d started dating someone in his section. She wanted to work for L’Oréal after graduation. He shared this casually, as if she were a mutual friend. 

I skipped my afternoon seminar. I couldn’t play spot-the-literary-phallus. Not that day. Everyone with a penis sucked. Hard. Columbia could go fuck itself too. Ditto the guy who roamed Morningside Park in search of someone to show his penis to. That penis had no literary merit, I was sure. 

The D train was my salvation. Of course. It took me south, away from Columbia, away from my classmates. Away from the business school student. 

I had no particular place to go, so I got off in Park Slope. What a basic bitch. 

Into a bookstore that no longer exists. Those of you who are bound for graduate program in texts and histories know the comforting smells of paper and print. The soft voices. The handwritten book recommendations from staff. 

He looked familiar the way extremely attractive people look familiar even though they also look like aliens. Sometimes “have we met somewhere before?” isn’t just a line. 

Even now, I could swear that I’d never seen his photo on a blog or Instagram or the news. The images I’ve since seen of him looked like the person I met, but also not. It was the difference between sighting a leopard playing in the wild and seeing it at a zoo.

He had a hangnail that had recently bled. A trail of fine hairs rushed beneath his white shirt cuff. The fabric looked thick and heavy, but he wore it lightly, as if all his shirts were made of the same material, with the same level of craftsmanship. You pick up a lot of details about someone when you’re trying not to look at their face.

It actually was safe to look directly at him. He was reading. The way he held his weight mostly on one heel, with the other leg stuck out to steady his stance, suggested that whatever he was reading, he was either very into it or deeply puzzled. 

I did a few laps of the store and picked up some books I’d been eyeing. A Sally Rooney. Surely she had things to tell me about being a freshly spurned twentysomething. A copy of Bonfire of the Vanities, because I’d heard that a finance type gets karmic retribution in it. A few books in translation that made me feel superior to the guy who had apparently never dated me. 

He was still standing in the same spot. A lock of sandy hair had gotten separated from the pack and dangled over his forehead. 

He had rich-person skin. You probably know what it looks like. He was around my age, but his dermis looked lush and somehow thicker than the average person’s, as if it would never wrinkle no matter how hard he frowned. Then again, he probably didn’t have anything to frown about other than the relative merits of paint swatches for the walls of his brownstone in—I don’t know—Carroll Gardens or Fort Greene or wherever. He probably dabbled in job-adjacent things, like advising on philanthropic causes for his friends’ parents’ foundations. 

Being freshly jilted is a hell of a drug. I stood in the bookstore with fantasies swirling in my head. This blonde stranger and I would meet. He would find me unconscionably fascinating. He would pay for the books I cradled like a chimpanzee and invite me to go on a walk. 

“You just went through a breakup?” he would say, somehow furrowing his brow with concern without wrinkling it because again, rich-person skin. “How awful. How incomprehensible. How could anyone break up with someone like you?”

He might offer me his prep school scarf—surely he had one stuffed in his jacket pocket or tucked away in his bag. He would buy us coffee to warm our hands. He might even show me his brownstone. Or maybe he wouldn’t do it immediately, but soon. He would fall in love with me in two weeks with the certainty of people who never had to watch themselves because nothing had ever gone wrong. But he was a gentleman and a rationalist, so he would keep his love to himself until the three-month mark.

I was a delusional fangirl over a beautiful stranger. In my defense, I wasn’t wrong. He was rich, and he had gone to prep school, but Wikipedia tells me he had gone to Eton rather than Andover or Deerfield or St. Alban’s. But I didn’t know that. 

I could talk to this random rich hottie. I had gotten trophies for extemporaneous speaking in high school speech and debate. 

What a wretch.

“You’re spying on us.” It was the most natural thing in the world to say. He was reading Pride and Prejudice.

“Oh?”

I indicated his book with my chin. 

“Ah.” He chuckled. “I’m afraid I’m too thick to put away any insights about women from Austen. I reread this book every few years.”

His voice sounded like it had been trained, and trained well. Do I even need to tell you his accent was British? The most R of Ps. My little fantasy updated the brownstone with a stately country home somewhere in the British Isles, with tapestries and art and other clever solutions to mitigate the draftiness. God, he would kill the business school student dead. 

“For the plot or the insights?” I asked him.

“The insights change over time, don’t they. I find myself reading it for the dialogue.”

“You’re a fan of banter.”

“Isn’t everyone? Aren’t you?”

“True, but I read it for how much of a hater Lizzy is.”

“I’ll have to read for those moments next time.”

“They’re the best.” Reader, I might have to marry him. Imagine if I pulled someone like him mere hours after my non-breakup. It would be like Michaela Coel in Chewing Gum pulling the Jonathan Bailey character after her boyfriend dumps her. Ignore the part where he turns out to have a fetish for Black women. 

But since he hadn’t proposed yet—proposed a walk-and-talk with coffee, I mean—it was up to me.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to go pay for these. But would you want to grab coffee or food sometime? As a date, I mean.”

“Oh,” he said. 

“No presh, obvi,” I rushed to add. 

“So you, er. You think I’m…”

“Oh my God. Fine. Yes, you’re a good-looking guy. A really good-looking guy. How’s that?” It was a physical relief to say the words. 

“Fuck,” I thought. “It feels good to be honest. I’m going to blurt things out more.”

Kind laughter. “If only we could all be so resolute.”

I’d said that out loud. Fuck indeed.

Henry stopped being a prince the year after I briefly crossed paths with him.

“That’s the guy from the bookstore!” I told my friend, a menswear aficionado who followed an Instagram account that tracked ties around notable necks.

“You tried to move in on Prince Henry?” 

He laughed at me so long and so hard that if he were a baby, he would have pooped his diaper. 

This story is more than something to send you off into the summer with. I’m telling you all this because many of our graduating seniors are heading to graduate programs in the fall. The graduate school experience can be ridiculously blinkered. The desire for more leaning and the quest for it are both beautiful, but don’t forget to take in the sights, sounds, and people around you. Whether you’re in a global capital or a college town, get off campus, get out into the community among people. Let the serendipity in. It may surprise and delight you. The stories you harvest will last a lifetime.

Appendix E
     New York Times, 2034

Working in a morgue means dealing with people in various states of shock and grief. Bradenn, an attendant at the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office, got an up-close look at this within a month of starting the job. If you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly heard at least some of the details, whether you wanted to or not. I’ll save us some time and energy and say this: My manners that day were unforgivable. 

That day should never have been about something for which I need to ask forgiveness. It should’ve been wholly about Oscar Díaz. The obituaries will cover his life and works, and you should read them and remember him. He was, more than anything, a son of Texas made good. He had dedicated his life to his family and to public service. When he saw an opportunity to do good, he took it. 

Oscar and Bradenn have in common their work in public service. I hope Bradenn works for the public good for a long time. It’s worthwile, human work in a world where work is so often abstract and depersonalized. Public service is admirable. Bradenn and his colleagues are admirable. Their families are admirable. 

One of the great ironies of our world is that good work has almost never been well paid. Too many public-sector workers make financial sacrifices to do the human-centered work that keeps government services running. 

Oscar’s untimely death—and my blowup—have brought attention to people like Bradenn and their families. In honor of my late father-in-law, I have partnered with the county to establish a fund that would give out a $30,000 grant to one Travis County employee’s family every year. Each recipient will be chosen through a nomination process laid out on the program’s site. 

It feels only right that the inaugural recipient be Bradenn’s girlfriend, who is caring for their two-week-old son the day this column goes live. The grant is not designed to replace a family’s income, but it is a small gift to the next generation. I hope future grants can defray the costs of elder care, ease the transition into new parenthood, and one day, even make short sabbaticals possible. 

In the meantime, my family will busy ourselves with life without Oscar in it, even as we continue to enjoy the gifts he bestowed upon us on life.

Appendix F
     Austin, Texas, 2034

Waking alone on the daybed in my office, Alex’s hand on the back of my neck ghosting away as consciousness crept in. 

Looked in on Alex. The air in the bedroom suggested wakefulness more than sleep. So he was up, in a way. 

No specific charge to the days. Responded to a few messages about the Brooklyn shelter. Imagine the complications if the non-profit didn’t own the building. 

Thought idly of the Alex who would spring to action in the morning while I waited for the kettle. Was I wishing for that version of him to come back? A useless thing to do. 

Ate a single piece of roast chicken directly from the refrigerator before I made tea and brushed my teeth. Everything is out of order, literally and figuratively. 

Wandered back into my office to change into different boxers because the old ones were a bit wet. Felt the sheet I had slept on atop the daybed. Also a bit wet. Into the wash. 

What’s the opposite of horned up? Baggy? Where was the old me? 

Out of oil and butter. Found an ancient can of Crisco and fried some eggs with it. No eggshells. Didn’t wipe my hands afterwards. Didn’t plate the eggs either. Eating them directly from the pan was surely dangerous. 

The Crisco has an interesting texture. Shut myself in the pantry with it, the overhead light like the eye of some alert but indifferent god. 

My cock looked abstract. I tugged at it experimentally, then firmly, until it paid attention. A dip into the Crisco can. God, what was I doing. 

Everyone agrees it’s deviant and disgusting to think about your actual spouse when you’re having a wank. Doubly, triply so when he's been collapsed in the main bedroom upstairs for months. 

Think about…that one staffer who was helping Zahra with the foundation. The benefit dinner two years ago. Christ, two years ago. Assertive eyebrows. He’d run the tip of his tongue over his teeth before he spoke. If he felt particularly strongly, he’d push up his sleeves before he leaned forward to speak.

What was his name? Something surprisingly old-fashioned. Ned or Ted or Nathan. Ned or Ted or Nathan found time between writing position papers to make sure his body would look conventionally good in any position. Ned-Ted-Nathan’s fingers didn’t taper at all. Ned-Ted-Nathan’s chest was mostly smooth, I’d guess. Ned-Ted-Nathan—

Oscar laid bare as a specimen in the early hours after death. 

It wasn’t working. It would never work. 

“What are we going to do with you,” I said to my cock. It almost shrugged. 

I held it, then squeezed it until the head looked like an angry, sick children’s toy. Anger from the Inside Out films, maybe. 

Inside Out? Christ. 

Appendix G
     Austin, 2034

The air in the bedroom is close and too hot. That won’t change soon. He’s always in there.

I hauled him up to get him into the shower. He let me. 

Looked in on him after I’d changed the sheets. He was still standing in the spray without moving, so I got in. I washed him as if I were a stablehand. I raised his arms to soap under them. His eyes fluttered when I shampooed his hair and rubbed his scalp.

I detached the shower head to rinse his cock and the underside of his balls. I slid the skin around to make sure I'd gotten everything, thinking about Sam the smegma from year 10. Rumor went that he had to get an emergency circumcision because his foreskin had gotten caught on some deposit or another. A tale of gleeful horror that passed around the form. 

He leaned against me as I washed him. A posture we’d known in other times, when he was alert and on the verge of laughter and leaned against me as I pulled him off in the spray. 

His hair is getting long and unruly. I do my best with it. 

Appendix H
     Munich, Germany. 2035

Deservingness as the ultimate pursuit. Not love, not money. Not power. Deservingness.

Tension between having and deserving. The undeserving fortunate are legion.

In the ancient world: countless executions and maimings in the name of law and order. Poverty and a scrabbling for power at the bottom of the pyramid. At the top, resource hoarding.

How to show connection across time and geography? Start large, maybe with heads of empires at the height of commerce of the Silk Road, then later, the European monarchs—Henrique the Navigator, Isabel and Ferdinand, et al. Then zoom in. Sketches of people across classes? Something? 

Or maybe the other way around. Start small, like with a petty merchant who starts in modest circumstances and makes good. Follow that family line.

Try multiple ways. Ask about analysis of the Persian scrolls. See what other documents from antiquity Ludwig Maximilian have. 

Appendix I
     Munich, Germany. 2035

Two döner on the table when I got home. His traveling pack.

And him, freshly showered. He looks smaller, diminished in his at-home clothes.

“Guten Tag,” he said.

“Abend.” 

He looked like a pilgrim or a penitent or someone not yet canonized.

A quiet, quick dinner. We were polite, like work colleagues who used to sling jokes but who weren’t quite sure how to act after being reassigned to different offices. 

He gave me the highlights of his work travels so far. Local Democratic Party offices, usually in red states that outperformed their peers. Republican Party offices that would have him. Democratic Socialists and Socialists. 

They talked strategy. They talked about forming connection and community. He was position-agnostic. If anyone was getting grassroots traction, he reasoned, there had to be something behind it. He wanted to spend time with them. His voice was different. A bit of grit that threatened to become gravel.

After my shower, I put on a T-shirt over my boxers and climbed into bed in the dark. No presumption of anything.

There's something wretched about lying beside someone, the pulse in my cock like a bass drum. It could’ve been funny, like some sort of teenage memory I never actually lived. Besides, he was probably asleep. He had traveled great distances.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep.

“Are you nervous?” he said.

Yes. But to the darkness above I said, “What about?”

“Me.” 

His hand found mine. He took it and kneaded it. The skin of his stomach was warm against the back of my hand.

“Hmm. That’s nice,” I said. 

He kept kneading. His hands were rougher than I remembered, like he’d been doing manual labor. He pushed his thumb into the flesh of my palm, worked each of my fingers between his until the muscles melted and my hand became a flap. He worked his way up my forearm and made equal work of the muscles there.

“You have a shirt on,” he said when he passed my elbow. 

I took my arm back to take off my T-shirt. The fabric had scarcely left my body before he pulled me towards him. 

The feeling of bare skin was obliterating after four months apart. Really, it was longer. Who was counting. 

His mouth was open when it met mine. Immediate and delicious and brutish and alive. His head, with its short hair, was foreign to my palm. He was a familiar stranger.

His tongue was in my mouth and mine was in his and I inhaled deeply and he grunted or maybe I grunted. He certainly grunted with displeasure when his hand found the waistband of my boxers. Off they went.

Pressed up against him. God, his skin. My tongue was wide and flat as it traveled down his body. My mouth captured his cock, but he pulled me back up. The sound of his name disappeared into his mouth. 

We were a heaving mass and what did we want to do and oh, he didn’t care either way if—although he was a little tired. He turned away briefly. And then the lube was cool on my cock. He grasped my arse and pushed me into him.

I wish I hadn’t acted with the animal part of me. I wish I had smoothed his brow and spoken a few soft words into his face about how he had been through much and seen more than he should have and changed. But we used no words other than “Now?” and “Here” and “Come on.”

The sleep that followed was more of a coma. 

Appendix J
     Munich, Germany. 2035

He’s not entirely there. 

I catch him in moments, when he stares off or his mind goes elsewhere. To be expected. A person’s allowed. 

The look came over him last night. He’d put me inside him with minimal ceremony, and it was full-on until the scrim fell over his eyes. 

“Hey,” I said.

He didn’t hear me the first time.

“Alex. We should stop.”

“What?”

“We shouldn’t. There’s—” I gestured. “Distance.” 

A borderline comedic thing to say under the circumstances. I was suddenly too conscious of the absurdity of sex. Conversations during sex. The stop-and-go of it. The sweat in the small of my back. The beginnings of warm soreness in my arms. 

Alex’s hand on the back of my neck. He brought my face closer to his.

“What distance?” he said. “I feel every bit of it. I feel everything.” 

Movement.

“Good,” I said, but really I meant, How are we here and I’m sorry about everything and I want to do everything for you and I want to do nothing but this.

“I’m here,” he said. “I love you.” 

The scrim was gone. His hand was heavier on the back of my neck. It brought our mouths together so our breath intermingled.

I love you I love you Iloveyou, I mouthed against him.

Appendix K
     Brooklyn, New York. 2040

Imagine if everyone knew living in a household with a child old enough to talk would reduce most conversations to poo. 

Has everyone had a poo? Has Jude has a poo? Has Daddy had a poo? Yes. No. Irrelevant. Everyone’s had a poo? Alright. Out the door, finally. 

Meetings with the publishers done. Ditto Alex’s huddles with progressive candidates in the Bronx. Jude made the acquaintance of a man who I’m sure is a furry but who she thinks is a person who likes to dress as an off-brand Bluey. She actually used the word “off-brand” when she spoke to him. He humored her. A quick darting of eyes and embarrassed smiles among the adults when it was time to end the interaction. 

South Brooklyn. Alex and I had somehow never done the boardwalk when we lived here. Ice cream in crackly cones that somehow smelled faintly of warm chicken coops.

The day wasn’t particularly hot, but the atmosphere was sultry. Alex hummed. He ruffled my hair as he spoke-sang Sandy, the fireworks are hailin’ over Little Eden tonight.

“Sandy, Sandy, Sandy!” Jude laughed.

They walked hand in hand. Sometimes she let go to run ahead.

The man and the little girl with their sweet napes. Her hair was divided into two plaits. It was a landscape of subtle orange, burnt red, deep brown, and hints of gray-blue where the shadows reached the deepest. 

The decadence of being with them. The thrill of hanging back and watching. A delicious kind of spying, breaking off chips of experience to add to my collection. Knowing I would be nostalgic for the moment even as I lived it. My blood would hold those moments as surely as it carried oxygen.

Fireworks at night, smaller and more cautious than they used to be now that the Northeast is fire country.

And the boys from the casinos danced with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore, Alex sang to himself and bumped my hip with his. 

Jude spied a drag queen who looked like a cone of candy floss. “Daddy, look!”

“Hello, little lady.” The queen waved at her, then at us. “Hello, daddies.”

Alex held up his hand and smiled. “My dad would’ve loved today.”

Jude was whimpering, so I carried her back to the hotel. She was in a dead sleep when I laid her down.

Washed up quietly even though Nora has pointed out many times that we would only make our lives harder if we were overly accommodating of the young’un.

A friendly tug in the shower.

“Race you to the drain,” Alex said.

“What?” I shook my head gently to clear my vision.

He pointed. I looked down to see our come traveling towards the drain.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You’re just mad that you lost.”

Appendix L
     Austin, Texas. 2041

Jude inconsolable. I’m the villain. 

I’m the villain who has corrected her too sharply. Or too many times. Or at the wrong time of day. Or when she was thirsty. Or when she’s needing a poo or when she’s just had one. 

She acted the way I felt. Her grief at being disciplined was what you’d see of someone who has lost their entire family.

One day she’ll know real grief. And then.

No one asks to exist. I owe her everything, but my offerings are paltry. I have only myself, and it will have to be enough even when it falls far short.

But then, new light. A child’s love and forgiveness are infinite. It’s something like God. Because suddenly we were friends again. The best of friends. She’s here and brilliant and good. We’ll be alright because we have each other. We are good. 

Appendix M
     Austin, Texas. 2041

Alex’s style: Everything rolls off his back, even her largest storm systems. 

“There’s a difference between a fire and a firefly, sweetheart,” he said. "You’ll be alright.” 

And she calmed herself soon enough. Of course she did.

Appendix N
     Austin, Texas. 2046

“I ain’t gonna let her get on a thousand pounds of panic.”

“If she learned to ride, she’d control the thousand pounds of panic,” I said. “That’s the point of learning.”

“That’s insane. Why would she learn horseback riding? She’s not going to—what, play pölo.”

"What’s that mean?”

“What’s what mean?”

“Why did you say ‘polo’ that way?”

“What do you mean? It’s funny. It’s our thing.”

“It’s your thing to make fun of polo. You know, polo was one of my things growing up.”

“Babe, white-people sports like polo are bad for horses.”

“Says who?”

“Everyone knows that.”

“Who’s everyone? Self-styled American leftists?”

“Whoa.” 

One of the open questions in this marriage is about origins and upbringings.

Alex wants me to reassure him that life with him is the best possible outcome for me. It likely is, but what does it matter? It’s the life I chose.

There’s something about Americans who want to hear you proclaim that you are the happiest you could possibly be in your circumstances. This is the best of all possible worlds for you. Living the dream. Couldn’t be better. It’s like a country of Panglosses. 

But I do miss parts of my upbringing. Horses, for one. Their warm, wet, stinking breath. The surprise of being chosen and trusted when you reach down to find that a horse is letting you pick up its hoof. The camaraderie in the club house. How some people take on the smell of horses after they ride and others get pungent from the sweat and oils of their own bodies. The almost physical substance of your secret when when you’re standing near someone older who has no idea about you and who therefore represents both aspiration and desire. 

Schumacher and Gehlen’s study says polo horses do have more health problems compared to their control counterparts. Fine. He didn’t have to send it to me. And anyway, she hasn’t shown outsize interest in riding.

She’s a weaker rider than Oscar. Than just about all the cousins.

She will have an upbringing unlike Alex’s or mine. She will grow up with no household staff, but her material safety will be assured. Her school breaks will be split between America, Ellen and Leo’s holiday home in Èze, and the houses back home, but she will only attend the garden parties she wants to go to. She will meet the occasional dignitary, but her life won’t revolve around meeting strangers whose notability will not land until she’s older. 

Appendix O
     Torch Song

Young thing’s first blood
Driven new love
Snatch of torches
Mine all yours—uh 

Bodies on fire
Down to the wire
How far do you
Dare who? Dare you

Did the flaming tongues
Sweep the entire sky
Are you the one guy
Who rights all my wrongs

And all the torches are alight
And we’ll be alright—barely
Kissin’ in my dirty Porsche—uh, uh
(Melodic ululating)

Black-purple smoke 
My body’s yolk 
New blood, new love
Cotton to me (Cotton in me)

Take it out on me
Take it out of me
See my blood run hot
Cutting through the smog

And the flaming tongues
Lick the empire’s sky
Are you the one guy
Who rights all my wrongs

And all the branches are alight
And we’ll be alright—barely
Kissin’ in my dirty Porsche—uh, uh
(Melodic ululating)

So the fire is raging
Trees are soaking wet—uh
My Porsch’ is a get’way
Get away, get away

But how do I tell you
Only blood that I knew 
Came away on your hand
Your lips your tongue your—uh 

Did the flaming tongues
Bruise the sapphire sky
Are you the one guy
Who rights all my wrongs

And all the torches are alight
And we’ll be alright—barely
Kissin’ in my dirty Porsche—uh, uh
(Melodic ululating)

Appendix P
     2052

Littlest darling,

Well done. 

I hope it’s alright that your dad’s sent me your song. The imagery. The ah-ah-ooo-ohs. 

The sexual stuff—that is what it is, isn’t it?—stirs many things in a person. I laughed about the literally hot details. The fiery tongues bruising the sky. The juxtaposition of smoke and bruising and the implied simile. I nodded at it all. And then I shut myself in my study to listen to it a few more times with headphones on. Sometimes you’ve got to.

But then—the rheumy eyes squint. A hand that’s more of a claw pushes stringy hair out of eyes in the wee hours. Is it also about race in America? The fire, the trees? The cotton? I’m sorry, but is it about a hate crime? But then there’s the Porsche. Those didn’t appear much during Jim Crow times.

Or is it rather about the degradation of the natural world? Some sort of species-wide slow suicide? You’re going to do your aunty in.

About slow suicide: The life of a musician offers all kinds of opportunities for that sort of thing. Not all of them will be apparently damaging. There are bad people, to be sure. But most of them are not walking around with reputations as bad people. Most of them are toting their own baggage. But just because someone has gone through hard times doesn’t mean they won’t inflict hard times on others. 

Perhaps I’m reading too much into something innocuous. Art is a healthy way to explore complex emotions, even ones we’ve not experienced yet. But if you do find yourself pained by something, do speak to someone. A friend, a parent, a grandparent, some other adult you like and trust. Anyone. Nothing you could feel will mark you apart from other people. I imagine that you’re in that stage where you’re getting an apprenticeship in many if not most of the emotions a person can expect to feel in the course of a life.

I also offer myself, of course, but I don’t expect you to come to me. We long for the mercy of distance from kin when we’re creating ourselves. 

In any event, have a look at the clothes I’ve sent. Do American schools still do prom and the like, everything I’d see in films, back when dragonflies were the size of helicopters and dinosaurs snapped each other up? You could wear some of the pieces to those kinds of things if you want. I saw some girls around London trussed up in similar styles. I’ve asked the staff to pack extra material with each piece, so if you wanted to add to them, you can. If you want to chop and mix everything up, you can. It’s all yours. 

xoxo
Aunt Bea 

Appendix Q
     “Elegy V: His Picture,” John Donne

Here take my picture; though I bid farewell 
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. 
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more 
When we are shadows both, than 'twas before. 
When weather-beaten I come back, my hand 
Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann'd, 
My face and breast of haircloth, and my head 
With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread, 
My body'a sack of bones, broken within, 
And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin; 
If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man 
So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then, 
This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say, 
"Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay? 
Or do they reach his judging mind, that he 
Should now love less, what he did love to see? 
That which in him was fair and delicate, 
Was but the milk which in love's childish state 
Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough 
To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough.