At the end of the garden, behind the shed, behind the pink Queen Elizabeth rosebushes, Avery was preparing to smoke her daily cigarette. She pulled on the oversized Barbour jacket and yellow dishwashing gloves she kept squirreled behind the gardening tools for this express purpose, along with mouthwash, air freshener, and gum. She struck a long cooking match and brought it to the tip of the Winston with a feeling caught somewhere between anticipation and resignation. Long inhale, long exhale. In the pale evening light, the first cloud of smoke floated away from her like thought. She was never more aware of her breath than while smoking, never more present. It would be a great form of meditation if it wasn’t also killing her.
The garden was in full summer bloom, violet and fuchsia geraniums turning their pert faces toward the setting sun. Avery looked up the path lined with ink-blue pansies to the house, checking again that no one was coming. Her home was a narrow Victorian just two streets from Hampstead Heath. From the outside, it was ivy covered and charmingly ramshackle, the kind of house one would imagine an artist living in, and probably once did, though few could afford the area’s real estate prices today. They’d bought the house together seven years ago with a down payment heavily padded by a surprise sum Chiti inherited from her grandfather in India around the time she and Avery first met, but even Chiti, a psychotherapist with a healthy private practice, would have struggled to pay the mortgage without Avery’s corporate lawyer income.
Hampstead was the England Americans liked to imagine, its sprawling heath a taste of country life without the inconvenience of actually having to leave London. Its high street, which boasted an organic tea shop, two bookstores (one used, one new), and an artisanal chocolatier, was a beacon of British good taste. Even its tube station, cast in red brick with handsome half-moon windows, felt sophisticated. In Hampstead it was easy for Americans to ignore the other London, the city of council flats and William Hill betting shops, of evenings spent slumped over a pint and packet of crisps at the pub and belligerent nights out ending with a kebab sloppily polished off on the night bus home. Avery loved saying she lived in Hampstead because of all it instantly communicated about her—togetherness, taste, and wealth.
Growing up, she and her sisters had everything they needed, but not what they wanted, which was space. Too close for comfort. A cliché, but it was true. They were too close to be comfortable in that home. There was one bathroom for all six of them; Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons, she always thought, but Avery measured hers in the hours she spent waiting for that bathroom to be free. At the time, she’d hated it; she and her sisters felt like lobsters packed into a murky tank, each of them jostling and bumping up against the other to reach the light above the water. All through her adolescence she had longed to leave, but she stayed living in that home until Bonnie started training, Nicky went to college, and Lucky began traveling as a model. Once her sisters were all safely out, she allowed herself to flee.
Avery exhaled smoke. For years, she had put her sisters first. By the time she left, she was already sneaking drinks in the morning, leaning out the bathroom window late at night to smoke the heroin-laced joints that she needed to sleep. It was only once she left home that she finally allowed herself to inject. She tipped herself off the high, thin ledge she’d been balancing on for years and let herself fall and fall. For a year while she was in San Francisco, even if her sisters managed to speak to her, they couldn’t really reach her. She had gone somewhere they couldn’t follow. Even after she got clean and graduated from law school, she left for London soon after, chasing her own success, her own freedom. Avery had abandoned her sisters before, but she would never do it again. It wasn’t just that they needed her; she needed them. She was at her best when she was helping them, she realized now. That was the only structure in her life, the only higher power she believed in.
After Nicky’s funeral, it was Avery who paid for time to stand still. She had covered the mortgage payments on the New York apartment for the past year, allowing it to lie empty with all of Nicky’s belongings untouched inside. But time was more powerful than money; no one knew that better than Avery. It had been a short-term arrangement, yet she still didn’t feel ready to face its conclusion. Now, knowing that it would soon be gone, she felt an unfamiliar nostalgia for that cramped apartment. For better or worse, it had been hard to feel alone in a home like that.
Avery unwillingly extinguished the cigarette in the baked beans can she kept tucked behind a spade for this purpose, then swigged mouthwash and spat it into the bush. She shrugged off the Barbour and peeled away the yellow plastic gloves. Finally, she pushed a piece of spearmint gum into her mouth. She felt like a teenager. Avery had started smoking again a few months ago after quitting ten years earlier when she was twenty-three. It wasn’t the cigarettes that made her feel young again exactly, it was the return to the hidden self, the Avery only she knew.
She walked up the garden path toward the yellow lights of the house. The French doors were flung open to reveal Chiti and her younger brother, Vish, leaning against the marble kitchen island, their faces aglow in the blue light of a computer screen. From a distance the siblings could be twins, both resting their narrow chin in a cup of their long hands, their smooth black hair reflecting the light as if lacquered. They each had strong noses and imperious, arched foreheads, features that suggested intelligence and discernment. Chiti lifted her face from her hands with a smile as Avery passed through the door.
“We’re watching a livestream of Mum’s screening,” she said. “You’re just in time for questions from the audience.”
“It’s brutal,” said Vish.
Vish and Chiti’s mother, Ganishka, was an award-winning documentary filmmaker and political activist whose scurrilous criticism of neocolonialism and U.S. foreign policy kept her regularly in the news. She had raised her children between Delhi and London, then shipped them off to boarding school as soon as Chiti turned thirteen and Vish eleven in order to return to India, and her primary love of filmmaking, full-time. Ganishka had never taken issue with Chiti’s sexuality; her only disappointment, as she reminded her regularly, was that she had chosen to be with, of all things, an American.
Avery came to stand beside them, and Chiti rested her head against her shoulder automatically. Avery stiffened. Her method of hiding the smell of her new habit only worked from a safe distance.
“Since when do you chew gum?” asked Chiti mildly. “I can hear your jaw clicking.”
“I’ll spit it out,” Avery said quickly, practically leaping away from her.
“Dude, she doesn’t drink or do drugs,” said Vish. “Let her at least have some gum.”
“You know I don’t either?” said Chiti with a light laugh.
“But that’s because you don’t like it,” he said. “Whereas Avery—”
“Loved it,” said Avery as she spat the wad into the bin. “But Chiti’s right, it’s a bad habit.”
Chiti frowned very slightly.
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“Hey, Avery, um, Chiti told me what day it is,” Vish said, rubbing the back of his neck with visible discomfort. “And I’m really sorry. About Nicky. My, uh, condolences.”
“Thanks,” said Avery, giving him a soft punch in the arm. “But I’m fine.”
Chiti gave her a knowing look.
“You know what I say about fine.”
“For therapists, fine is a four-letter word,” intoned Avery. “But I actually am.”
“I’m just saying you don’t have to be fine with us,” said Chiti, her voice soft. “Your family.”
“I know,” said Avery more forcefully than she’d meant to.
“Uh-oh,” said Vish, pointing toward the screen. “A new lamb to the slaughter.”
The camera panned through the audience to a young Indian man in glasses. A microphone on a boom was thrust in front of him and he reached to steady it, running his other hand through his hair self-consciously.
“My friends and I often zealously debate the best Oscar-winning docs.” He smiled with affected impatience. “Though we have yet to reach a satisfying consensus. I dare to think that you, too, have these kinds of pub conversations.” He cleared his throat. “So, my question is, which was your favorite from this year’s lineup, and why?”
“Oh shit,” said Vish.
The camera returned to Ganishka’s face, which was hardening with frustration.
“I don’t have these ‘pub conversations’ as you call them, because I don’t think about art in this way. It does films a great disservice to think of them hierarchically. Awards are a capitalist model for creativity; I put zero store in such accolades, though I may have won several of them.”
“Couldn’t resist slipping that in,” murmured Chiti.
“In fact,” continued Ganishka, clearly warming up to this line of thought, “I have been asked many times to sit on prize committees and it is my habit to refuse in all cases. They are bad for filmmakers, create bad politics in the industry, and represent entrenched marketing strategies that are outdated. I don’t need a committee, in most cases majority male, to micturate”—Ganishka paused with satisfaction after enunciating this word—“on my work to prove its value.” She concluded, “I strongly question any authority that presents itself as a deciding body in the arts, and I advise you and your friends to do the same.”
The squinting young man, visibly chastened, sat back down.
“Aw, man,” said Vish.
“She’s not wrong,” said Avery.
“Yeah, but these are, like, Mum’s fans. She could be a bit nicer to them.”
“I think they like it,” said Avery. “She’s like their domme.”
