Yet since that first awful discovery the children had done little to which she could reasonably object. Unprompted, they began to spend Sunday afternoons doing homework together at the dining table. Gwen developed academic aspirations, in direct contravention of her previously asserted philosophies. Julia more than once overheard Nathan meticulously explaining a concept—once subtracting vectors, another time the factors that limit photosynthesis. He introduced Gwen to the programs he watched, the podcasts he downloaded, and the two of them spent hours glued to the screen of a shared laptop or listening together with a headphone splitter, deaf to the other members of the household. What could Julia say? How could she stop them listening to a podcast? Once indolent, Gwen was now industrious; once furious with James, she was now sunny and acquiescent. Beneath the heat of Nathan’s attention she flourished like a hothouse plant, and after the third weekend during which Julia had exhausted herself lying rigid, listening for forbidden nighttime visits and had heard nothing, she had been forced to admit defeat. Not aloud—she could never give the children the satisfaction. But the truth was that forbidding feelings had got them nowhere. They could forbid only their public expression.
Since James had moved in Julia had suffered her daughter’s resentment and unhappiness. Now, seeing Gwen’s small, private smile as she hunched over her laptop typing messages made her heart hurt in a way that was harder to define. There was a new hauteur in Gwen’s address; a new, polite formality that stung, even though it was almost certainly intended to sting. Blog readers were treated to a dramatic sequence of scenes in which Gwen and Nathan stood firm against the family’s disapproval and finally won them over by making pancakes, and Gwen reported that the online community was thrilled by her new love, that several fans had only expected as much and had long been rooting for the cohabiting teenagers to find one another. Julia felt far away from her daughter, excluded for the first time from her confidence, punished for daring to betray that she was a woman, and not simply a mother. Yet only six weeks had passed—six exhausting weekends—and in that short time Gwen had unfurled, had stopped scowling, had started laughing at James’s jokes, and once again helped to clear the table after dinner, even if James had cooked. And so Julia began to hold her tongue. She missed her child. She missed being needed, even when that need was expressed in baleful stares and tantrums. As a parent it was impossible to foresee anything but snares and brambles along this path, and almost certainly she ought to protect Gwen from her own foolishness by continuing to forbid, by creating obstacles, by allowing herself to be the enemy. But she needed James, and wanted him, and when Gwen was occupied and contented then he and she were granted space for one another. Harmony was hard to resist, however distasteful the price.
19.
To overhear Julia arguing with her daughter was an exercise in restraint and took James back to the bad old days of early cohabitation. Only now did he realize how acquiescent Gwen had been of late and remembered, with an unpleasant jolt, how unappealing he found her when she wasn’t getting her own way. Her wheedling, which veered from pleading to explosive rage and back to infantile beseeching again, wore on his nerves like tinnitus. And stamina was her secret weapon, for Julia would be exhausted and would run out of arguments, and seemed never to wise to this tactic. Instead, she followed her daughter down any conversational avenue she led, negotiating and reasoning and never drawing an end with a firm and final stand. “You don’t need to make a case for the defense, you can just put your foot down,” James would advise in their fraught postmortems, but could say nothing when she explained that with Gwen it was more complicated. From this he was to infer that a dead parent was a trump card, and his hands were tied. Rarely sober, his own father had worked selling used trucks at a lot in Dorchester. His sporadic commission had kept the Fullers narrowly solvent and when he died James had won for it no special treatment, except the further reduction of the already minuscule possibility of his going to college. His mother, a pediatrician’s receptionist, had adored and cherished her only child with an intensity he recognized, but she would not for one moment have stood for the kind of backtalk Julia endured. It had all been long ago and in a land far over the sea, however, and would not, he knew, lend sufficient weight to his argument. He would have to pretend that he considered her judgments reasonable. Julia felt she owed reparations for allowing her daughter’s father to die, and so Gwen continued behaving like a despot, and James had to watch as guilty Julia humbled and abased herself before her implacable little household goddess. They had their dance long choreographed; his past forays between them in an argument had ended, predictably, in both of them rounding on him, united and enflamed. Today, with Gwen deep into one of her campaigns, he hid behind his newspaper and did his best not to listen. He could not bear to hear his gentle Julia beleaguered.
“Please. Julia, please. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand and I’m sad, too, it’s just bad timing. If it was any other night, of course we’d go but James booked these Rossini tickets months ago. We’ve got flights. I’m so sorry, darling.” Julia reached to tuck a disobedient curl behind Gwen’s ear but Gwen twitched away violently. She was frustrated, and increasingly desperate. This was not the first iteration of this exchange, not even the second or third, and preliminary attempts to reason with her mother had devolved to this—whining. It was fun for nobody, but it had won her bigger victories in the past. Across the room, James stifled the urge to stuff his fist into his mouth.
“But he’s only here this one night! For the first time in years. It’s Art Garfunkel, do you even understand?” Gwen flung herself down on the sofa. She glared across the room at the armchair in which James sat hidden behind his paper, and then hissed, “If it was a weekend with me in Milan and James asked you to, you’d cancel.”
Julia felt a stab of pity at her daughter’s wounded face and wondered, for a moment, whether this was true. She said, sotto voce, “That’s not the case at all. You can’t possibly believe that.”
“It is. You put him first in everything. You guys go to boring classical music stuff all the time, you’re going to that Verbier festival thing, and this is one single night. He’s so old! You know he’ll retire and this will literally be the last chance ever. I’ll pay for it! And I’ll pay you back for the other tickets, and the flights. I’ll use my bat mitzvah money.”
The celebrated bat mitzvah fund—one hundred and twenty-five pounds deposited three years ago in a Post Office account—was always Gwen’s last resort, the straw at which she clutched for independence. It had been “used” to pay for hosting her web domain and for a great deal of the expensive art supplies she needed for the early stages of her blog; it had been drawn upon again when she had so longed for a pair of white Converse that she claimed she could not survive another day. Julia fought a momentary smile, but her resolve was buoyed by the utter impossibility of what Gwen asked. James had booked the La Scala tickets almost six months ago—in the last days of August they were to spend the weekend in Milan to see Otello, which had not been staged there since 1870, perhaps because it needed not one but three spectacular lead tenors. The Otello seats made it easy to defend her choice. To be alone in Italy with James would be a dream—long private hours, Prosecco, the heat, and the music. She would not yield it for anything. Of all the nights for Art Garfunkel to come to London this was the only one, all summer, that was out of the question.
Gwen was looking hopefully at her mother. “I’ll pay you back; I promise. And you can go to the thingy thing concert another night.”