Desmond and Kimber

The thermostat in the Vance mansion lived inside a locked plexiglass box in the front hall, and the only key hung on a gold chain around Gregory Vance's neck, nestled in his white chest hair like a pearl in a very hairy oyster. The dial was set to sixty-two degrees. It had been set to sixty-two degrees since 1994, when Gregory discovered that there was a temperature at which a household stopped complaining and started wearing sweaters, and that sweaters were cheaper than heat.

The house itself did not look like it belonged to a man who rationed warmth. It looked like it belonged to a man who wished to be admired from the road. There were forty acres of manicured lawn, a gatehouse nobody staffed, a fountain of a marble nymph that had been turned off to save water, and a front hall with a chandelier imported from a bankrupt Austrian palace. The chandelier was lit twice a year, on Christmas Eve and on the day the tax photographer came. The rest of the time the whole glittering place sat in the dark and the cold, gilded and expensive and dead, like a very large and very rich corpse.

Desmond Vance woke up in it every morning at ten past seven, under three blankets, with his breath smoking faintly above his face.

He was twenty-six years old and six foot three, and he had been apologizing for the second number since he was thirteen. He slouched in doorways, in chairs, in photographs, and, as far as anyone could tell, in his thoughts. His dark hair hung in his eyes like a curtain on a stage he didn't want anyone looking at, and behind it he was, objectively, a decent-looking man: good cheekbones, a nice mouth, the soft, pale look of someone who had spent his whole life indoors. Then the eye slid downward and met the jaw. It was a weak jaw, a retreating jaw, a jaw that seemed to be backing slowly out of the room. It was his father's jaw. Of everything Gregory Vance had ever given his son, it was the only thing Dez could neither return nor hide, and he studied it each morning in the bathroom mirror with the particular loathing of a man forced to wear his enemy's face.

The bathroom was a marble cathedral with a heated floor that had been disconnected sometime during the Clinton administration. Beside the toilet hung a small brass plaque, engraved at Gregory's expense. FOUR SQUARES, PLEASE, it read. THE ESTATE IS WATCHING. The estate, in practice, was Gregory, who kept a ledger. Rolls were issued on Monday and counted on Sunday, and any discrepancy was raised at dinner, in front of everyone, over the soup. Dez had once been fined for what his father called "a pattern of seven."

He was the heir to all of it. That was the joke, and it had been told so many times that nobody laughed anymore. Dez was the only son of Vance Fastener & Bolt, the third largest maker of industrial hardware on the Eastern seaboard, and someday the stocks, the forty acres, the yacht nobody was allowed to board, and the cars nobody was allowed to drive would all be his. He just had to wait for his father to die, which Gregory seemed determined to avoid out of pure spite. In the meantime Dez lived on a monthly allowance that would have embarrassed a nun, and endured a will that his father brandished like a riding crop. I could leave it all to a lighthouse, boy. Don't think I won't.

His mother would have stopped that. Eleanor Vance had died when Dez was eleven, of pneumonia, in a bedroom kept at sixty-two degrees. The doctor said it was pneumonia. Gregory said it was drama. Dez, who was eleven and had held her hand through the last of it, held the unfashionable opinion that it was the house.

After that there was nobody left to stand between a boy and his father, and Gregory, who hated waste, did not waste the opening. He criticized the way Dez walked, the way he chewed, the way he breathed through his mouth, and the unforgivable crime of having his mother's eyes. He used the back of his hand when words failed him and words when his hand was tired. Dez had learned, early and thoroughly, to sit very still and make himself small, which was an impressive trick for a man his size.

So yes, he had been the victim. Everybody agreed. He had agreed himself, loudly and often, mostly in his own head, where nobody could argue. What nobody had ever pointed out, least of all Dez, was that being the victim and doing something about it were two entirely different skills, and that he had been practicing only the first one for fifteen years.

* * *

Dinner was at eight. It was always at eight, and arriving at 8:01 cost you a course.

At 7:55 Dez came down the grand staircase, one hand trailing on a banister that was real mahogany and cold as a tombstone, and stopped on the third step from the bottom. His father was standing in the front hall, and he was not alone.

Gregory Vance was seventy-four years old and shaped like a bag of coat hangers with a bowling ball tied to the middle. He had skinny, sun-spotted limbs, a gut he wore like a trophy, and a comb-over lacquered so firmly across his scalp that it had not moved in a hurricane. His teeth were the yellow of old piano keys and were fixed in a permanent smirk. His eyes were small and wet and could not stay on one thing for long, which was fine, because they were generally busy with something else. Tonight he wore the monogrammed velvet smoking jacket, burgundy, open to the sternum to show off the gold chain and the thick white thatch of hair beneath it. He smelled of cologne and cheap cigars, two scents that had been fighting for forty years and had never once declared a winner.

His hand was on a maid.

Her name was Marisol, and she had been with the household for nineteen days, which made her the longest-serving maid of the past two years. She was holding a silver tray with a stoic, practiced blankness, the face of a woman who had already sent out her résumés and was now only counting down. Gregory's hand squeezed. Marisol didn't move. The tray didn't tremble. It was an impressive performance and Dez, as always, couldn't look away from it, or do one single thing about it.

"Firm," Gregory said, to nobody, in the tone of a man inspecting fruit. "Good. Firm is good."

Dez found something very interesting to look at on the floor. It was a spot of marble about eight inches to the left of his shoe, and he studied it with the focus of a man defusing a bomb.

"Stand up straight, boy," Gregory said, without turning around. He had eyes in the back of his head for exactly one purpose. "You look like a question mark with a trust fund you don't have."

"Sorry, Dad."

"Don't be sorry. Be taller. No, don't be taller, you're already too tall, it's unseemly. Just be less." He released Marisol with a pat, the way you'd release a horse, and she fled toward the kitchen. Then Gregory produced a small gold case from his pocket, clicked it open, and tipped four little blue pills into his palm.

Four. That was a number that would have alarmed a veterinarian. He tossed them back dry, the way a man feeds peanuts to himself at a ballgame, and then, with an eye-roll, he fished a single small white tablet from a different bottle and swallowed that one too. This was his heart pill. The cardiologist had told him to take it every morning. Gregory took it when he remembered, and with the open contempt he reserved for anything he had paid for and couldn't see the point of.

"Tonight's the night," he said, and winked at his son, the wet, horrible, conspiratorial wink of an uncle at a funeral. "I'm feeling spry."

Dez wanted to die. He didn't, because that would have required an effort.

Then there was a sound on the landing above, a soft, deliberate tick, tick, tick of heels on marble, and both men looked up.

Kimber Vance did not walk down a staircase. She descended it, one long, sculpted leg at a time, like there was a runway at the bottom and a photographer behind every pillar. She was twenty-five and statuesque, with sun-kissed skin that looked airbrushed even in person, a fortune in platinum blonde extensions that fell to the small of her back, and lips that had cost more than a used car and looked it. Her silk robe was emerald and cut so low it was more of a rumor than a garment. Diamonds hung at her throat and her ears and her wrists, a small ransom's worth, every stone registered, insured, and forbidden to sell. Her face was flawless and perfectly blank, the calm, smooth, pretty expression of a very beautiful lake with nothing living in it.

She had modeled lingerie for six years, until she realized there was a richer way to be looked at. She had met Gregory at a charity gala, where he had looked at her for forty minutes without blinking. She'd mistaken it for love, or at least for a wallet.

"There she is," Gregory breathed, and the smirk went slack and greedy. "There's my girl. Come on, sweetheart. Walk for Daddy."

She walked. She did the last six steps with a little more hip than the staircase strictly needed, because after six years of lingerie runways the hips ran on their own, and Gregory watched her come the way a hungry man watches a steak arrive. Dez, three steps up, tried very hard to watch the marble instead, and failed. He couldn't help it. He felt a hot flush crawl up his neck, and a sour, shameful flash of understanding that he'd had a dozen times and tried never to look at directly. Whatever else his father was, he wasn't an idiot about this. Dez couldn't exactly blame him. If the old man was going to swallow four blue pills a night, at least he had somewhere to point them.

The worst part, the part he had never told a soul, was that he had seen her face before. Two years ago, at twenty-four, he had ordered a lingerie catalog entirely for his own private use, and she had been on page forty-two, in black lace, looking bored. Now she lived down the hall and belonged to the man who had taught him that wanting things was a character flaw.

He remembered the wedding. Everyone remembered the wedding, though most of the guests had tried hard not to. When the minister got to the part about kissing the bride, Gregory had seized her, bent her backward like a dancer in an old movie, and kissed her for ninety seconds by the best man's watch. Dez had been the best man. Gregory had insisted, because he liked an audience and because it was cheaper than hiring someone. There had been tongue, visible from the third pew. There had been one liver-spotted hand sliding down the white lace to a destination the photographer was paid not to photograph. Forty-nine years stood at that altar, and one of them was applauding, and its wife had made him stop. When it was finally over, Gregory had wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked straight at his son holding the ring box, and said, loud enough for the first six rows, "Take notes, boy."

Gregory caught him looking. He always caught Dez at exactly the moments it would hurt.

"Enjoy the view, boy?" He didn't even turn his head. "Go on, look. Looking is what you're good for." He ran one hand slowly down Kimber's bare arm, for the benefit of the audience. "Twenty-five years old and every inch of it mine. Younger than you, isn't she? Think about that tonight, when you're up there with a wall between us. I'll make sure the headboard knocks."

Dez said nothing. His face burned from the collar to the hairline, and the marble floor, which he had been studying so faithfully, offered no help at all.

Kimber stopped in front of her husband. Her expression did not change, and for the first time Dez noticed that her eyes, deep in all that blankness, were doing arithmetic.

"The emerald needs cleaning," she said. It was the longest sentence she'd said all week.

"It's in the estate budget. Next quarter."

"I want to wear it to the Hartwells'. Then I could just take it in, and get it appraised, and..." She paused. Dez watched her think it through, slowly, like a woman pushing a refrigerator uphill. "And sell it."

Gregory laughed. It was a wet, delighted wheeze, and it was the most dangerous sound in the house. "Oh, my darling. That emerald has a serial number registered with every pawnbroker in three states. You can wear it, you can polish it, you can sleep in it. You can't sell it." He patted her cheek, twice, the way you'd pat a good dog. "And don't look so sad. You knew the arrangement. Page nine, paragraph four. Ninety-one thousand dollars and a one-way plane ticket to wherever you came from. You signed it."

"I read it," Kimber said.

"You read the number."

She said nothing, because it was true. She had read the number, and had signed in the right places because a nice young attorney with an expensive watch had told her to, and she had been so thrilled by the how much that the if had gone straight past her. Ninety-one thousand dollars was what she'd get for walking away. It was what a year of Gregory Vance was worth. She had worked it out in her head, to the dollar, forty times, and every time it came out to the same obscene little number, a hundredth of what she'd been promised in her own mind, and an insult.

She was furious about it. It was the only emotion her face had ever learned how to hide.

"Dinner," Gregory announced, and offered his elbow like a man who had never been refused anything in his life. "Marisol! Tell Mrs. Pruitt the soup had better be hot, or somebody's getting a week's wages docked. Come, my dear. Boy, don't dawdle."

He swept into the dining room with Kimber on his arm. Dez followed, three paces behind, the way a dog follows a funeral.

* * *

The dining table seated twenty-four and was set for three, all of them crowded at one end like survivors on a raft. Gregory sat at the head, naturally, under a portrait of himself. Kimber sat on his right, where he could reach her. Dez sat on his left, where he could be seen, which was the worse seat by far. Two candles burned in the middle of the table. A third had been there at the start of the month and had been confiscated for waste.

Marisol came in with the tureen. Gregory's hand drifted toward the back of her thigh as she passed and she ladled his soup with the stillness of a monk. A very small, very hot drop of it leapt from the spoon and landed on his knuckle.

"Ah! Careful, girl!"

"So sorry, Mr. Vance," Marisol said, with perfect serenity and no apology whatsoever. Dez watched her go with something like awe. It was possible to fight back, then. It was possible, apparently, with soup.

He did not try it himself. He picked up his spoon.

"Do you know," Gregory said, blowing across his bowl with a long wet whistle, "that there were eleven squares unaccounted for in the east bathroom this week? Eleven. I counted. Twice."

"I don't use the east bathroom, Dad."

"Then who does? The ghosts?" Gregory smiled, pleased with himself. "No. It's you. It's always you. You have a pattern, Desmond. You always have. Your mother had the same weakness. She was soft with the paper, soft with the heat, soft with everything. Look where it got her."

Dez's spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Dead," Gregory finished, in case anyone had missed the point, and slurped. "Dead of softness. And you've got her eyes, God help you, so I'm not surprised. Look at him, Kimber. Look at that face. It's like being stared at by a sad cow. I keep telling him, the Vance men are made of something. His grandfather was made of something. I'm made of something." He thumped his chest, which made the gold chain bounce, and a small clatter of pills rattled in his pocket like maracas. "And then there's this one. All jaw and no spine, and not even much jaw."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't yes sir me. Say something. Defend yourself. No? Of course not." He turned his whole body toward Kimber, leaving Dez to stare at the side of his head. "You see? I could leave the whole business to a lighthouse and it would take better care of it. I tell him that. I tell him every month. Every single month, and he sits there."

Dez sat there. He was good at it. It was, if he was honest, his best skill.

His father returned to the soup, and then to Kimber, and then to nothing at all but Kimber. He had a way of looking at her that made the room feel smaller. He looked at her over his bowl, one wet little eye and then the other, working slowly down from her face to the diamonds to the emerald silk, the way a man looks at a steak he plans to finish in four minutes and then complain about. His tongue moved behind his yellow teeth. He had put on his heavy cologne. He took off his jacket, which was already open, a little farther.

"Eat up, darling," Gregory told his wife. "You'll need your strength. I've taken four, and I'm feeling twenty-five." He winked at her. Then he turned the wink on his son, slow and wet. "You hear that, Desmond? Four. I'll go all night. Every room, every position. I'll make her scream the house down, and you, you'll lie up there staring at the ceiling and listening to your old man do what you can't."

"Dad. Please. We're eating."

"Oh, don't be a prude. You're a man. Or you will be, someday, if you work at it." Gregory dropped his voice to a stage whisper that carried into the kitchen. "I know what you get up to behind that locked door, you know. The bedsprings. I can hear them from the end of the hall. Pathetic. At your age I was having it with women who had a pulse."

Dez gripped his spoon until the metal bent a little.

"Tonight I'm going to take her the way I took her last night," Gregory went on, unbothered, "and the way I'll take her again, from behind, until she forgets her own name. Then I'm going to fold her up like a deck chair and put her under me, knees to her ears, and do it properly. Mating press, boy. Look it up. Pin her down and keep going until it takes." He patted Kimber's hand, which lay in her lap like a dead bird. "I'm going to knock her up. At seventy-four. A real son this time. One with a spine, one who stands up straight. One who won't be a disappointment, like the last one."

Dez stared into his bowl. The thought of a little half brother with his father's jaw and his father's smirk was so ugly that his stomach turned over once and went still.

"And do you know what I like best about her?" Gregory tilted his head at Kimber, the way a man presents a bottle of wine. "She has a mouth on her. Kimber sucks cock better than your mother ever did, God rest her. And your mother tried, I'll give her that. She tried very hard. It just wasn't in her."

The room went very quiet. Marisol, in the doorway, found something to fix in the sideboard. Gregory turned toward his son with a look of bright, hungry expectancy, like a man holding a treat just out of reach of a dog. Go on, boy. Say something. Do something. The forty acres, the yacht, the stocks, the lighthouse, they all hung in the air between them like a price tag.

"Nothing?" Gregory said, delighted. "Good boy."

That was the thing about being rich on paper. Every insult came with a price, and Dez couldn't afford a single one. He picked up his spoon and swallowed the soup, and the sentence, and the rage, all three at once, and all three tasted lukewarm.

Kimber did not say a word. She lifted her spoon with perfect posture, a woman holding a rose through a tank, and she swallowed her soup, and her expression did not change by even a single eyelash. But under the table, in the quiet, Dez heard something very small and very precise: the rapid tick tick tick of one expensive heel against the marble, drumming a rhythm that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with ninety-one thousand dollars.

He looked up.

She was already looking at him.

She had lifted her face from the soup and turned it, just slightly, down the length of the table, and for the first time since she'd come to the house she wasn't looking through Dez, or past him, or at the wall behind his head. She was looking at him, directly, with those flat blue eyes, and something was moving behind them like a fish under ice. He understood it instantly. It was the look of someone who has just realized that the person across the table is suffering from the same man.

He should have looked away. That was the correct move, the careful move, the only move. He held it instead. So did she. One second went by, and then two, and then a third, long enough that a candle flame bent between them, long enough that the whole thing stopped being a glance and became something closer to a contract. Dez felt his heart go off like a firecracker. Kimber's lips, those lips, parted a quarter of an inch.

It was not a subtle look. It was about as subtle as two people trying to flag down a ship. Mrs. Pruitt, the cook, who was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel and the unshockable calm of a woman who had been in service since the Reagan years, lifted one eyebrow very slowly and then lowered it again. In the end it didn't matter. Neither of them was smart enough to be careful, and neither of them was brave enough to be caught.

At the head of the table, Gregory Vance leaned back and burped, a long, rich, satisfied burp, and noticed none of it. He hadn't noticed a single thing that didn't concern himself since 1987, and he wasn't about to start now.

In the front hall, behind its plexiglass, the thermostat ticked and held at sixty-two.