Work Text:
One October Shiv had gotten titteringly drunk at a benefit for amputee reporters and killer whales. She'd smelled like Rouge 540 by Baccarat and Campari when she elbowed into his side. “You,” she slurred, “should not be here.”
“I think you mean you shouldn’t be here.” On Tom's phone the car blinked, a little blue dot. Six minutes away.
“I mean what I meant.”
“What you said, you mean.”
“That, too.”
Under his suit jacket, her left arm clung life-saving flotation device style. Her right hand held her phone and her keys and some sunglasses and a Cartier original — a wedding present — she had taken off when they made it onto the sidewalk because she said it felt like it was choking her. Inside, she had asked a CNN anchor in a wheelchair where she’d gotten her tits done. And if they were by the same doctor who had done her legs. And if he was blind. Weeks ago, her father had totally blanked her at family brunch. You didn’t have to be close enough to smell her to know that she was spoiling.
“Where the fuck is the car.”
“It’ll just be a minute.” His phone now said seven. With his Shiv-less arm he thumbed: ET fucking A? Marvin?
Shiv frowned. “It’s cold.”
It wasn’t, really. New York was crouching through an extended hurricane season. Last week, it had been Biblical rain for two days, and the streets were still letting off a humid, eggy swamp gas that filled the air with subway-taker sweat. On the first day of bad weather, Shiv had texted to say she was stuck at a luncheon on the roof of Saga. A night later she had come home very dry.
Tom pocketed his phone and tried to shimmy a shoulder out of his jacket without dislodging his vertiginous wife.
“Fuck are you doing?” said said wife.
“Giving you my jacket.”
Shiv snorted. “Prince fucking Pandora charm bracelet.”
He peeled her hand from his waist and held it aloft like she was coming down ballroom stairs instead of swaying in her Diors on a midtown sidewalk. She was no help threading her arms through the sleeves. Somehow he ended up holding her necklace and her keys. The sunglasses she took and put on. Jacketed, bug-eyed, dress-up swimming in Armani, Shiv looked as terribly young as he knew her to believe she was.
“Better?”
She rolled her eyes or he thought she did. The ghost of her brows went up. Then she tower of Pisa’d down into his shoulder. It seemed less like she couldn’t stand straight and more like she just didn’t feel like it. He brought the hand with his phone, her necklace, and her keys, around behind her head to look at the slug creep of the little blue dot that was their moron driver.
Tom typed: Are yiou looking for new john, Marlene?
“Fuck,” he muttered. Shiv’s keys were stabbing into the web between his thumb and pointer.
Tom typed: **you
Tom typed: ***a new job
Tom typed: ****MARVIN
Shiv said, “Do you remember what I said to Carole O’Nassas in there?”
“Um.” She had said: Carole! I didn’t expect to see you here. I didn’t know psychosexual infatuations with big game poaching cleared up so fast. “Something about her dress, I think.” It had been leopard print.
“Liar,” Shiv sniped. “You’re lying. You’re being nice to me.” She pushed away from him, using his own shoulders to do it.
“I don’t remember what you said.”
“You’re being nice to me,” Shiv said again. “You’re being really nice.” He couldn’t parse her tone. If he had to guess, he’d say finger-pointy. I saw Goody Wambsgans being really nice with the devil. Or whatever. It didn't matter so much. He was aware of the smell of bacon, and occasionally of being burned alive.
There was a time when Shiv had needed him to be nice to her. When she had brought him out to Greenwich bars with her Columbia Law friends just to curl up a corner booth with her knees to her chest and his arm across her knees and her long hair over all of it and say, I feel like such a freak around them. When they look at me, it’s like I’m in the fucking Smithsonian, you know? Like I’m all pinned and stuffed and fucked up on formaldehyde and shit. Like they’re seeing me, but only so they can study how I moved or died, or like, what other animals I ate. And they want to wear plastic versions of my teeth as souvenirs.
Sometimes, when other people looked at Shiv, Tom remembered this. But when they were alone, almost never.
I don’t want to wear your teeth, he’d said then. She’d grinned with the white of them. I know.
Now he said, “What should I be?”
Shiv slanted her eyes away from him. “Tom,” she said, in that blistering way that he only knew meant: You stupid fucking idiot.
"I'm serious, Shiv. What should I be if not nice to my wife?"
Shiv patted dismissively at his shoulder. "Quiet," she suggested. "I have a cluster headache."
The car growled up. He handed Shiv easy into the back seat, then spread his palm against the sticky window and slammed the door. The Escalade was too stolid to shake, so it rattled.
When he slid in, Marvin looked coolly at him in the rearview mirror. Shiv didn’t look at him at all. Tom said, to whoever, “Sorry.”
Twenty blocks later and Shiv was passed out on the couch with her shoes and his jacket still on. Tom took the shoes but left the jacket. He was raised in a sock-foot household. When he reminded her of this, Shiv called him the mudroom man.
On the squat end of the sectional, he put TLC on silent and called Greg to leave a message reminding him he was a rabies-infested little mole rat freak whose hydrophobia was fucking with his ability to anticipate when Tom required an Evian. What the fuck was he good for if he was going to allow Tom to expire on the ATN floor like he was crawling one-hundred burning miles through the Sahara? What the fuck was he good for if he didn't know what he needed exactly when he needed it?
When Shiv woke up pale and wincing, he held her hair back so she could puke.
—
In the car out of Teterboro, Tom says, “Sorry. I’m very sorry, Siobhan.”
Shiv shakes her head. The short hairs coming out of her ponytail tsk-tsk at him over her collar. Once Shiv’s hair had been very long, and he had found strands of it red on Oxford shirts and clogged in shower drains and twice choking grossly down his own throat. She won’t turn around. “For what?” she says. “Did you kill my fucking dad? Did you offer him a thanks-for-firing-Cyd fucking salutary blow-job and that’s why he fucking croaked?”
“Shiv.” Her voice is awful. He says, “That’s awful.”
“Yeah,” Shiv says, "it is.”
Outside, Teterboro is the same bumfuck flat nothing as every single part of Minnesota. It makes him feel claustrophobic. Logan had taken up the whole plane bathroom, after he fell. The hollow sound they’d heard was his head against the door. But when they opened it he’d lain quite neatly between the toilet bowl and the threshold. That is what seventy-eight years and three, four!, children and thirteen-billion dollars looks like, Tom thought. That’s where it all fit: between the toilet bowl and the bathroom door.
When they hit the turnpike it sounds like landing gear.
“You gonna tell me about it?” Shiv asks.
“Uh, I’m not — “
“What?” Shiv turns away from the window then. Her eyes are pink like a rabbit’s. “I can’t get the play-by-play on my own dad’s death? You get to be there at curtains, I don’t even get the fucking digest?”
“Shiv. It was — “ Horrible. Hilarious. Logan's ribs had popped, all of them, while Roman peppered questions over the phone. “A privilege. To have been there, but I don’t — “
“Oh, fuck you. Oh, shut the fuck up. A privilege. Fuck off.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I don’t know, Tom. Something that’s not bullshit? All day, bullshit. You call, and it’s bullshit. And I talk to him — “ Her voice shivers in her throat, cold like she’d been under his coat after that party last year “— and it’s fucking bullshit, because he’s not even listening. And Rome thinks he’s not even — even though he is. Obviously, he fucking is. But we don’t know, because we’re in the fucking harbor so Connor can marry his four-hundred thousand dollar sex doll. Because it’s all. Bullshit. From the beginning it’s just, fucking bullshit.”
She bites out this last. On the seat between them, her nails are scratching into the leather, and she’s wearing her wedding ring. He covers her hand so he doesn’t have to look at it. When he had called his mother last month about how to file for divorce, fault or no-fault, she had recommended the latter. Irretrievable breakdown, she’d said over the phone. Why not irreconcilable differences? What was the difference? Nothing, really. It just sounded nicer, his mother thought. He thought it sounded like they were something faulty in the sunken belly of the fucking Titanic.
“I don’t think it was a very easy death, Shiv,” he admits. Before the hollow sound, there had been a kind of animal shout, a long vowel. It reminded him of when he was fourteen, and his grandma had gone from cancer, and he had stood politely outside her bedroom with his cousins in shoes that pinched trying to pretend they couldn’t hear what she was saying, and that it wasn’t, It hurts! It hurts!
Shiv’s hand twitches under his. “Fuck,” she says. “Fuck. Tom. Fuck.”
“I know.” He does know, she doesn’t. It’s fine for it to be this way. What had she said last week in their apartment? When he'd tried to haul the ship up and get it into the open? I don't think it's good for me to hear all that. But now.
“What else?” Shiv asks. “Did he say anything?”
Lugging Logan out of the bathroom between the two of them, Frank had stumbled into a table corner under his weight. Frank had said, Oof. Tom had said, Ope. Logan had said nothing. It had been crowded in the cabin after that but mostly quiet.
“I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think so. I tried to call you.”
“I wasn’t looking at my phone. I didn't have it.”
The first time he called, it had rung twice before hitting voicemail. The second time, only once.
“That’s okay. I don’t think it would have made a difference, Shiv. I think — I think it was just his time, you know? I mean, your dad, he was a titan, but — “
“He was a fucking apex predator."
“A total fucking killer whale,” Tom agrees. “But they die, right? It’s just the way things are in the ocean, or in the airplane bathroom, or the hospital, or anywhere. It doesn’t matter where they are or who they’re with or how much we -- or how much we love them. They still die, killer whales and your dad.”
“But,” Shiv is his wife under his hand and a child across the backseat, “I didn’t want him to.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I wish I could — “
“You can’t.”
“I know.”
"So don't say it. I'm sick of people saying shit like we're not in fucking New Jersey, and it means anything."
Silence again. Shiv leaves her hand where it is but turns her face back to the window. He can feel the tremor that runs up through her body. It’s the same as when she is angry. And her eyes, narrowed through the grey reflection of the middle of Mall of America New Balance nowhere in the window, too, the same. Furious, with her nose and mascara running.
“I think it was quick,” he offers, because this is what his father had told his mother after his grandma had moaned and bitched her way into death. Shiv tenses.
“I think it was quick,” he says, “but — but I think he could hear you, though.”
Shiv rips her hand from his to fist against her mouth, her ring scraping across his open palm. “You’re being nice.”
Tom thinks of the files on his ATN desktop, of the whiny note of go-along incomprehension in Greg’s voice when he’d given him instructions, of the divorce lawyers, all six of them, across their six lacquered desks, of how heavy Logan had been and how hard he’d had to drop him to the floor. “No,” he says, “I’m not.”
When they get home, Shiv says, “I shouldn’t be here.” She doesn't take her shoes off. She curls up sideways on the good end of the couch.
Her hair is too short to hold back, so he holds her whole head while she cries.