She hopes he showed a little strength: that’s what she’s been thinking all morning. When Mark dumped him, she hopes Paul showed a little strength, and told that prick to fuck off. She knows, though, that’s likely far from what actually happened; probably, Paul had caused a scene. Something’s happened to her brother recently, though she can’t quite articulate what. To put it vaguely, he’s become curiously unhinged since his father’s death (she closes her eyes as she remembers the funeral and the awful secret her mother told her); it’s as if Bill’s passing robbed Paul of whatever necessary fiction he’d been using to keep his life together. The fact that he endured dating Mark for so long is evidence enough to convince Eloise that something crucial has shifted, but there are other signs, as well. In the few times she’s seen him over the past three years, she can’t help but sense that he’s blindly groping for something—an explanation, someone to blame, a metaphorical or literal lifesaver. Just—something.
He’s so quick to anger now, she considers as she pulls her knees closer to her chest. Take the other night at Dean Street Townhouse, when he’d chastised Donna for harmlessly referring to Mark as his friend. The old Paul would’ve never reacted like that; the old Paul would’ve made an offhand comment, would’ve laughed at himself; the old Paul had a sense of humor. Now, though, it’s suddenly become impossible to say or do anything without offending his sensibilities in some convoluted way. He’s subscribed, she’d argue, to a policy of unabashed and unapologetic victimhood. She does her best to convince herself that the old Paul is still in there, somewhere; that, beneath the layers of shit and shame that have accumulated, her little brother’s hiding, waiting to emerge. She thinks back to how fun, how easy he was in high school, when Bill was still alive. For better or worse, she hadn’t been around much then—she was living her own life in New Haven—but she’s still keenly aware of the mythologies that emerged from those years. The family stories that Alice and Paul continue to tell and retell. The same stories that leave Eloise feeling like she’s destined to forever be on the outside looking in.
Paul’s taxi pulls up in front of the apartment, and she sets her coffee down and gets up, wiping dust from her shorts.
“Hi, Paul,” she says, once they’re both out of the car.
He glances up at her, but doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns to Mark with an expectant look. She wants to run down to him and tell him to stop, to save himself the humiliation of having to beg. She doesn’t, though, for as awful as Mark is, she knows that running to Paul’s rescue would only compound his humiliation. And so she stays where she is at the top of the stoop and looks on as they lock heads in some hushed, private conversation. What draws Paul to Mark? Or, perhaps more appropriately: What drew him? While she knows she’s predisposed to be a little biased (Paul is, of course, her brother), she can’t help but think that he is, objectively, a better person: better looking, better intentioned, better behaving (mostly). And yet, still there’s something that prevents him from recognizing his own worth, or from seeing himself in the same light in which Eloise (and presumably others) see him. Still there’s something that makes him believe he doesn’t deserve better.
Mark tries to reach down and grab her brother’s bag, but Paul won’t let him; he hauls it over his shoulder and climbs up the stoop. Once he reaches Eloise he tries to wordlessly slip past her, but she stops him.
She kisses his cheek and squeezes his arm and says, “The couch is all made up,” before allowing him to retreat inside.
A moment later, she hears her front door open and close.
From where he’s standing on the sidewalk, Mark clears his throat. “Well.”
“Well,” Eloise says, looking down at him. She folds her arms across her chest; the A in YALE gets pinched between her breasts. “I guess we won’t be seeing you at the wedding, then.”
“That’s not looking likely, no.”
He stares at her intently, as if he’s expecting her to say something else. As if he’s been fantasizing about confronting her since she humiliated him at the restaurant the other night. She’s above this, she tells herself; she’s above granting him that satisfaction. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though, resisting the very real urge to say something so crippling as to leave him second-guessing himself for months to come. And God, could she do it. Looking back at his smug, shit-eating grin; at the tacky summer scarf he’s got looped loosely around his neck—God, could she destroy him.
“Right then,” she says. “Can I help you get a cab back to wherever it is you’re staying?”
He searches her face. That’s it?
“No,” he says. “It’s just that—no, I don’t need help getting a cab. Thank you, though.”
Disappointed, he turns and steps out into the street and shoves his fists in his pockets.
Fuck it, she suddenly thinks. She waits for him to wave down a cab and duck inside of it before she calls out, “Mark.”
He leans forward to say something to the driver, and then rolls down the window.
“Yes?”
“I hope you’re better off,” she says, thrilled for a few glorious moments that she still knows how to be a bitch. “I know Paul will be.”
She tries not to smile. She’s unsuccessful.
*
Paul lies on a love seat in the living room, with his feet dangling over one of the armrests and his head and neck bent at a painful angle against the other. His eyes are closed, and when he hears Eloise close the front door he pulls his left arm across his face.
“You can move to the couch, you know,” she says. “It’s longer. You don’t really fit on that thing.”
Paul doesn’t say anything—he just buries his nose deeper into the cushions.
“Oh, come on, Paul. Get up.”
She reaches down to stroke his head, but he bats her hand away.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he says.
“Have you eaten anything?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“How about something to drink, then?”
He buries his nose in the pillow again, which she takes as a yes, so she pushes herself off the love seat and goes to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice.
As she opens the refrigerator, she hears him yell, “Where’s Mom?”
“She’s at the National Gallery,” Eloise says as she fills a glass. “She wanted to see the Turners, so I had Alice take her.”
“You sent her away, is what you mean.”
Eloise thinks for a moment, then opens the freezer, where there’s half a bottle of Grey Goose. Uncorking the top, she pours about a shot glass’s worth of vodka into Paul’s juice.
She calls back, “What, you’re telling me you wanted her around when you got here?”
“No,” Paul says. She returns to the living room and, as he sits up, she hands him the glass. “I guess not.”
“Don’t worry about it. She understood.”
This isn’t the whole truth. Earlier this morning, when Eloise had told Donna that Mark and Paul had broken up and that Paul was coming to stay at the flat, she’d insisted on canceling her plans for the day.
“He’ll need me,” she’d said. “He’ll need his mother.”
Gently, over the course of poached eggs and a pot of coffee, Eloise convinced her otherwise. Or, if not entirely otherwise, she at least convinced her to leave. She stopped short of explicitly explaining to Donna that she was the last person Paul needed; that, after waging a cold war with his mother for close to three years, falling into her arms after failing at love would be the cruelest kind of defeat. Instead, Eloise told her that Paul needed space. He needed to cry without someone hovering over him, and surely that was something she understood.
Paul takes a sip of his orange juice. He swallows it, and shivers. “You put vodka in this.”
Eloise sits on the love seat next to him. Their knees touch.