has met Aaron Green yet, not even Simon, who checks in on Phoebe’s cat when this man whisks her away to the Outer Banks, to Santa Fe and Aspen and Nashville, to La Jolla and Catalina and Big Sur; last weekend’s trip was to the wine country up north.
From Phoebe’s descriptions, Aaron Green sounds like a paragon, but yesterday, her daughter had not been able to answer Roma’s question head-on, hemming and hawing, saying only that “Aaron’s hoping to be able to move some things around to free up his schedule.” And Roma was quickly concerned that Phoebe has again fallen in love with the wrong man, and that the qualities this Aaron Green supposedly possesses might be colored by Phoebe’s desperate desire to have a family.
Roma sighs. Oh, yes, she sees the connection now between Noelani and Phoebe. The lying the little girl is engaging in, the subterfuge Phoebe once used as a shield. Is that subterfuge, at odds with Phoebe’s otherwise straightforward nature, returning? Over a man named Aaron Green?
Fifteen years since the last time, since Simon’s high school graduation party, when Phoebe brought home a boy she insisted on calling her paramour. How irritated she had been with Phoebe’s use of that archaic word, her refusal to employ simple language to explain the facts, her preference for befuddling. All Roma had wanted to know was whether her driven daughter was having a romance that involved physical intimacies. How she had hoped for that until meeting the paramour, the boy Roma nicknamed “the prophet,” because he was actually named Elijah and seemed to have knocked Phoebe off her feet, her daughter taking Roma aside all that weekend and raising questions about the way she was living her life. She had decided to be a lawyer when she was in high school, would begin her third year of law school that fall, wanted the big firm experience after passing the bar, but, Phoebe had cried to Roma, weren’t her accomplishments meaningless, her desire for her routines, her nice apartment, her pretty things wrong and shameful, her need to have everything mapped out insane?
Roma had said, “Phoebe, we’re proud of all you’ve accomplished by this tender age of twenty-three, but if you’re not, or if you want something different, you can always explore un-mapping yourself.” By which Roma meant, Investigate other avenues that might interest you, try being spontaneous, cull your belongings and give all that bounty to charity.
Instead, some months later, Phoebe had nearly quit everything and run off with the prophet. In the end, at the last minute, she had pulled back and raced to the safety of home, had opened up to Roma completely, had told her mother that the love she had for Elijah had to be cut out of her heart or she would end up becoming someone she was not.
Roma sighs again. In a few hours either Phoebe will be here with Aaron Green, introducing him to her family, or she’ll be here on her own. And if she is here on her own, Roma will carve out time to sit alone with Phoebe, to apply her professional expertise to her own child gently, always gently, in order to expose the truth.
It is true a mother feels something more, or different, or extraspecial for her firstborn, but as a psychologist, she knows the importance of keeping things fair among siblings, and she’s lucky—that touchstone word again—because her children, uniquely different, are easy to equally love.
Camille, her social anthropologist middle child, is perfectly defined by her profession, which employs flat research language and mathematical statistics to disguise its romantic and obsessive nature, and the romantically obsessive nature of those bitten by the need to explore. She was thirteen when she decided she wanted to live with tribes she could study, and she accomplished that goal, spending two years living far away, on islands in an archipelago of coral atolls off the east coast of New Guinea.
Camille will be coming alone this weekend, as always, infrequently talking about someone named Valentine. Maybe this visit Roma will ask Camille directly who Valentine is to her, what is the nature of this unexplained relationship, why she never identifies Valentine by gender. In Roma’s experience with troubled children, those who are also gay and have not yet declared themselves often have a difficult time voicing the particulars of the person who has captured their attention. “They are so cool. They are really nice,” is what they say to her. A conundrum her daughter has solved by always referring to Valentine as Valentine or Val. If she has ever referred to Valentine as he or she, Roma somehow missed it, which strikes her as entirely unlikely.
If it’s a lesbian love relationship, it would confirm the supposition Roma’s held in her heart. With her patients, Roma doesn’t trade in suppositions, she asks them questions outright, knowing she will have to dig for the truth, but with Camille, a keeper of her own counsel since childhood, who even then averted her mother’s deliberately casual prying with a wise smile, Roma’s always had to be wary of even asking the questions, of horning in on the mental space her daughter refuses to share, of violating her fierce and innate sense of privacy. Thousands of patients and their parents have entrusted her with their secrets and fears, but not this daughter of hers.
Where Phoebe explored clothing and makeup, Camille only explored when coerced by Phoebe. Even today, her external appearance does not command much of her attention; she’s lucky in her natural beauty, somehow not tamped down by the baggy, old clothes she wears, by her refusal, most of the time, to use lipstick or mascara, a blush to brighten her cheeks.
Where Phoebe had boyfriends, Camille had friends who were boys. Roma has no idea who Camille dated in college, in graduate school, in her PhD program, or if she dated at all. Girls, boys, those who prefer the personal pronoun of them and their, or s/he and he/r, the intersex, the third gender, the transgendered—truly Roma does not care, nor would Harry, if Camille is gay, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, or asexual. What she cares about is how Camille gates her inner life with Roma outside.
When her daughter’s little-girl desire for a penis of her own did not abate, as such desire usually does, she’d wondered for the first time about Camille’s sexual orientation. And then Camille convinced another little girl to remove every stitch of clothing. When Roma found them in Camille’s bedroom, Camille’s left hand was on the girl’s flat chest, her right hand between the girl’s thin legs. Roma had seen the Band-Aids on both girls’ knees, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, because it might only have been the kind of exploratory game children play. Despite her expertise, she’s never been sure.
How old was Camille then? She was eight. Ah, the same age as Noelani.
Her youngest, Simon, worships Harry, is a lawyer like Phoebe, and somehow has become the family outlier. So young when he began college, so adaptable with intellectual heft and high emotional intelligence and the looks of a playboy—Byronic curls, soulful eyes, girls fell under his spell—Roma figured he would play the field for a long while, settle down in his forties. Instead, he is the first of her children to create his own separate family, happily married to Elena Abascal, father of her granddaughters, Lucy and Isabel. Nothing jumps out at Roma when she considers Simon in the context of Noelani, nothing ties them together, except that Simon has been on a running jag lately, putting in the miles, he says, every morning before work, either running the hills in his neighborhood, or in a foreign park across from his hotel when he’s litigating abroad. She’s never asked how many miles he runs, but given how often he’s out of town, and the way he works late into the nights, it seems unlikely he’s running seven miles at a shot.
The clock on her nightstand reads 7:20 a.m. Roma pulls open the drapes, smiles at the meditation pool, at the brightly colored desert flowers and the shrubs. Harry has his tennis this morning and then a stop at the tailor to pick up the new tuxedo he will wear tonight. He’ll be arriving back home just before the kids show up. Everyone will be hungry. She shopped yesterday, has only to put out the spread, but all that can wait. First her hour of laps in the big pool, then coffee.
In the bathroom, she stands naked, inspecting her reflected hair. Fernando did a nice job on the color this time. Last time it was much too light,
