“They have,” cried Celeste. She’d pretended so very hard for so very long and there was nobody here except the two of them. “The night before the party last year, Max got out of bed, he was standing right there at the doorway—”
“Yes OK,” said Perry.
“And there was that time in the kitchen, when you, when I—”
He put his hand out. “OK, OK.”
She stopped.
After a moment he said, “So you’ve leased an apartment?”
“Yes,” said Celeste.
“When are you leaving?”
“Next week,” she said. “I think next week.”
“With the boys?”
This is when you should feel fear, she thought. This is not the way Susi said it should be done. Scenarios. Plans. Escape routes. She was not treading carefully, but she’d tried to tread carefully for years and she knew it never made the slightest difference anyway.
“Of course with the boys.”
He took a sharp intake of breath as if he’d experienced a sudden pain. He put his face in his hands and leaned forward so that his forehead was pressed to the top of the steering wheel, and his whole body shook as if with convulsions.
Celeste stared, and for a moment she couldn’t work out what he was doing. Was he sick? Was he laughing? Her stomach tightened and she put her hand on the car door, but then he lifted his head and turned to her.
His face was streaked with tears. His Elvis wig was askew. He looked unhinged.
“I’ll get help,” he said. “I promise you I’ll get help.”
“You won’t,” she said quietly. The rain was softening. She could see other Audreys and Elvises hurrying along the street, huddled under umbrellas, and hear their shouts and laughter.
“I will.” His eyes brightened. “Last year I got a referral from Dr. Hunter to see a psychiatrist.” There was a note of triumph in his voice as he remembered this.
“You told Dr. Hunter about . . . us?” Their family GP was a kindly, courtly grandfather.
“I told him I thought I was suffering from anxiety,” said Perry.
He saw the expression on her face.
“Well, Dr. Hunter knows us!” he said defensively. “But I was going to see a psychiatrist. I was going to tell him. I just never got around to it, and then I just kept thinking I could fix it myself.”
She couldn’t think less of him for this. She knew the way your mind could go round and round in endless pointless circles.
“I think the referral is out of date now. But I’ll get another one. I just get so . . . When I get angry . . . I don’t know what happens to me. It’s like a madness. Like this unstoppable . . . and I never ever actually make the decision to . . . It just happens, and every time, I can’t believe it, and I think, I will never, ever, let that happen again, and then yesterday. Celeste, I feel sick about yesterday.”
The car windows were fogging up. Celeste ran her palm over her side window, making a porthole to see out. Perry was speaking as if he genuinely believed this was the first time he’d said this sort of thing, as if it were brand-new information.
“We can’t bring the boys up like this.”
She looked out at the rainy, dark street, which was filled with shouting, laughing, blue-hatted children each school morning.
She realized with a tiny shock that if it weren’t for Josh’s revelation tonight about Max’s behavior, she probably still wouldn’t have left. She would have convinced herself that she’d been overdramatic, that yesterday hadn’t been that bad, that any man would have been angry if they’d been humiliated the way she’d humiliated Perry in front of Madeline and Ed.
The boys had always been her reason to stay, but now for the first time they were her reason to leave. She’d allowed violence to become a normal part of their life. Over the last five years Celeste herself had developed a kind of imperviousness and acceptance of violence that allowed her to hit back and sometimes even hit first. She scratched, she kicked, she slapped. As if it were normal. She hated it, but she did it. If she stayed, that was the legacy she was giving her boys.
She turned away from the window and looked at Perry. “It’s over,” she said. “You must know it’s over.”
He flinched. She saw him prepare to fight, to strategize, to win. He never lost.
“I’ll cancel this next trip,” he said. “I’ll resign. I’ll do nothing for the next six months but work on us—not on us, on me. For the next—Jesus f**king Christ!”
He jumped back, his eyes on something, past Celeste’s shoulder. She turned and gasped. There was a face pressed gargoyle-like against the window.
Perry pressed a button and Celeste’s window slid down. It was Renata, smiling brightly as she leaned down into the car, a gauzy wrap about her shoulders clutched in one hand. Her husband stood next to her, sheltering her from the rain with a huge black umbrella.
“Sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you! Do you need to share our umbrella? You two look fabulous!”
72.
It was like watching movie stars arrive, thought Madeline. There was something about the way Perry and Celeste held themselves, as if they were walking onto a stage; their posture was too good, their faces were camera-ready. They were wearing similar outfits to many of the guests, but it was like Perry and Celeste weren’t in costume; it was as though the real Elvis and Audrey had arrived. Every woman wearing a black Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress touched a hand to her inferior pearl necklace. Every man in a white Elvis suit sucked in his stomach. The levels of pink fizzy drinks went down, down, down.
“Wow. Celeste looks so beautiful.”
Madeline turned to see Bonnie standing next to her.
Like Tom, Bonnie obviously didn’t do costumes. Her hair was in its normal single plait over one shoulder. No makeup. She looked like a homeless person on a special night out: long-sleeved top of some faded thin fabric falling off one shoulder (all her clothes fell off one shoulder in that irritating way; Madeline longed to grab her and straighten everything up), long shapeless skirt, old leather belt around her waist, lots of that weird skull-and-bones, crazy gypsy-lady jewelry, if you could call it jewelry.
If Abigail were here, she would look at her mother and her stepmother, and it would be Bonnie whose outfit she would admire, it would be Bonnie she chose to emulate. And that was fine, because no teenager wanted to look like her mother, Madeline knew that, but why couldn’t Abigail admire some random, drug-addicted celebrity? Why did it have to be bloody Bonnie?