Work Text:
It’s nearly impossible to tell when Lestat is nervous, but here is a sign: she takes a week to pick a restaurant. Peppering the “let’s all have dinner, okay, but where” group thread Claudia’s father’s initiated with questions: who likes seafood? Everyone, it’s New Orleans. Is sharing okay, or do we like entrees? Whatever. How do we feel about ethnic food?
“Ahahaha, ethnic???” Claudia writes back, wondering what this portends.
“You know,” Lestat writes, “not American/cajun/French/pizza/Italian/fast food/chipotle.”
“There was no way she was picking Chipotle,” Claudia says, on the way up the road east to a Viet place in a strip mall. “What makes Chipotle not ethnic, is Mexican not an ethnicity?”
“He’s French,” her dad says from behind the steering wheel, “and, no, it’s a nationality.”
“But you know what I mean,” she argues.
Claudia is beginning to suspect that “French” is her dad’s code for something, perhaps something unflattering. The first time she came home crying about Madeleine doing something or other, that was French. Lestat doesn’t mind the whole Armand thing, and this is supposedly French, too. Claudia knows they are Creole going way back, and her dad has taken her to Paris on a little jaunt once, but other than that he pronounces their last name like he’s ordering it off a wine list, she’s not sure what gives him the authority. Claudia is fulfilling her language requirement with German just to be pedantic.
“You sound like a goose,” Madeleine tells her, when Claudia is doing her flashcards. What’s so bad about that? Claudia likes a nice torchon of foie gras. And she can probably get away with it, too, so long as she doesn’t bring any into the co-op when she moves off-campus next year.
Lestat is waiting for them at the host stand, less a stand than a harried man in a stained apron flipping through names on a legal pad by a folding table with takeout menus and toothpicks in the front of the restaurant. She — or, well, this is Claudia’s first surprise, that Lestat is wearing, well. Okay, “normal” is the wrong word, and perhaps “men’s” would be, also, but this is the first time she has seen Lestat out of the basement bar, under normal clear-white LEDs, and in a pair of black jeans that are probably $300 but, also, from the men’s section. Yes, okay, he — he? Turns around briefly to talk to the host, and, yes, Rag & Bone. Slim fit, obviously; they are cut a little close. Docs, 14 eyelet, with the jeans folded up to graze the tops; it makes Lestat look a little like a pirate, or it would, if not for the oversized button-up billowing open, a boring maroon color, and a Prada backpack he holds by the loop. But, those nails, though — bi my ass, Claudia thinks. The idea that this bitch is getting anywhere with ten full fingers of all that is laughable.
“How long have you been here?” Dad asks, fumbling a little as he goes in for a kiss, realizes Claudia is there, halts, stammers, “Hi,” and then gets yanked in for one anyway, both hands, stupid nails curling around the back of his neck. That’s one thing about Armand, he’s got the right attitude toward PDA.
Lestat only glares at her a little, when they pull apart. It’s so embarrassing, her dad, touching his lips like he can’t believe a person or a boy or a man (or whoever!) would actually kiss him in public. Kissing in public is for teenagers, people who probably aren’t teenagers but look like they could be, or the very very old. Her dad, her other dad, and the drag queen her first dad is looking at like he lays golden eggs are not the first thing, not the second, and not quite yet the last thing — although one consequence of the setting (badly lit restaurant) and the circumstance (what Claudia would call a “regular” amount of makeup, as opposed to Lestat being effectively gessoed) is that Claudia can see that, although Lestat’s forehead scarcely moves with his oft-expressive eyebrows, the rest of his face is actually creased beautifully, in the way a forty-year-old man’s face might be beautiful. There is the creasing of age and less-expected scarring, in a way that is interesting, the way a fashion model will be interesting. Claudia certainly finds it interesting.
“Not long,” Lestat is saying, to the question about when he arrived. He is never not doing something: swinging the backpack, sweeping his hair back with a shoulder toss, whatever. “Claudia, it’s nice to see you,” he finally says, half-smile, looking a little delighted that she’s there. “I hope you like Viet? This is a very good restaurant.”
“It’s fine,” she says, not focusing on him so much as on her father, who has maybe for the first time since Claudia’s high school graduation managed to put his phone in his pocket and leave it there.
Dad says, “We like Vietnamese, we used to get the summer rolls at International Bistro.”
“That’s — interesting,” Lestat says slowly, tilting his chin. “Well, that’s pan-Asian, mostly Thai, and really anyone can make a summer roll.”
“Can you make them?” Claudia asks, thinking of the nails.
Lestat laughs, but it’s short: “I don’t cook,” he gets out, before a server comes to retrieve them, from around the crowd of two or three waiting parties.
“Did you call ahead?” Dad asks, when they are seated at a corner table, under a poster with about thirty different bubble tea concoctions on it, and one split-open coconut with an umbrella and straw.
Lestat says, “I think they know me, I’m here often,” although he doesn’t say it to their faces because he’s trying to decide where to lay his backpack on the sticky floor. Finally, with a sigh, he slides it onto the window ledge. “Nice place for a group, don’t you think? Everyone likes it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“The chef came from Cambodia as a refugee in the 1980s, I don’t know why she cooks Vietnamese but the influence comes through in this section.” He starts tapping on the menu with the flat end of a nail. “See, these fish pastes.”
Claudia’s father says, “Maybe we oughta get one.”
“Yes, they come with a real assortment of vegetables for dipping — do you like heat, Claudia?”
She just gapes at him.
“I suppose everyone here does,” Lestat says, barely bothering to read the menu.
Thinking of Madeleine, Claudia says, “Not everyone.”
“French,” her dad scoffs, studying his own menu like a book, or more appropriately, the Gmail app on his phone.
When they put a water glass in front of him, Lestat sneers at it. “Yes, French,” he agrees, putting his arm across the empty chair beside him, rubbing his thumb and fingers together nervously. The sleeve is a little long but Claudia counts, oh, at least three or four rings, if they’re thick; more, perhaps, if stacked. “This is a waste of perfectly good water that I am not going to drink.”
“You can use it to blot it off when you get fish dip on your pants,” Claudia suggests
“Yes. Well, a Shout wipe would be more effective. And I try not to spill on myself.” Again, he wiggles his eyebrows, as if implying something. “Sometimes it can’t be helped,” he adds, when neither Claudia nor her father react.
In a sullen attempt to turn the conversation away from innuendo, Dad asks, “How’d you find this place?”
Now Lestat takes his arm away from the chair, and fully leans in. “Oh, I take girls here sometimes,” he says, really excited to tell them. “Like I said, it’s good for a group.”
“Don’t think you said that,” says Claudia’s father.
“Girls, you mean, who work for you?”
“Yes, some.” Lestat shrugs. “My daughters, you know.”
Claudia says, “No?”
“Girls I’m mentoring.” Another shrug. “Where is the waiter? I would love a real drink.” He begins a little pantomime of looking around the room for their server; trying to make eye contact with the server; straining toward the server as if sheer will would pull her toward their corner; and then, finally, waving at the server until, after ninety seconds, she nods at him and comes over so that Claudia can have a Vietnamese coffee and her dad can say he’s fine with water.
Lestat, however, orders the stupid coconut.
That Claudia finds merely inhabiting the restaurant unwieldy is an interesting contrast to how comfortable Lestat seems. Not with the situation, necessarily; she can tell he’s unnerved by Claudia, probably not sure what to do with the soft brown eyes of the man he’s fucking staring back at him from the face of a little girl, or perhaps just a girl in general, a real one, no mentorship needed. What would he have to teach her, anyway? While they wait for the drinks he pries with questions about her school, how she liked living in Dubai, and what she thinks of his club.
“Drafty,” she says. “How’s your HVAC?”
“The stage lights are punishing. Literally, of course, I mean the heat they give off is oppressive, and the climate naturally helps very little. It’s a kindness to the performers to keep the room a little underheated.”
“I thought the customer was always right, though?”
“And have you ever paid a cover?”
“She not paying?” her father asks. “I promise you she can afford it.”
“I’m not going to charge her. She is permanently on the list.” Shrugging — Claudia’s counted, what, three? “I don’t need the money.”
“Awful business plan.”
“That’s Armand speaking,” Claudia tells her dad.
“He can pay the cover,” Lestat says, “if he ever bothers to show his face.”
“Not his scene,” says her dad, right as the drinks arrive, and Claudia sees how he has tensed a little, probably at the mention of Armand.
So Claudia spins back to, “So if you don’t want to make money, this is what, a vanity project?”
“Oh, thank you. Merci.” Lestat puts his hands around the frothing coconut, rings and acrylics and all. “It’s my art,” he says, bending toward the long straw.
“So, vanity project,” Claudia sniffs, stirring up her coffee.
“Baby, that’s not fair,” her dad says, doing nothing because he has no drink. “It’s not vain to pour yourself into your practice. Isn’t that what Madeleine does?”
“It’s different,” says Claudia. “She’s an artist. With a studio.”
“Yes,” Lestat agrees. “I think drag is a curatorial practice. It’s performance, yes, but it’s a very wide skill set. It’s working with many different artisans, wigmakers and dressmakers and shoemakers, and lighting people and choreographers and so on. There is a creativity to pulling these elements together, to being the person who embodies them all at once, is there not? To knowing who to go to for which, for the collaborative parts of it?” He sighs. “Nobody does it for fun.”
“Seems fun to me?”
“Well, you can have fun doing it, obviously,” Lestat says, “but that is different from doing it for fun.”
So Claudia asks, “Then what do you do it for, money?”
“Yes, very funny.”
Setting down his water glass, her father says, “Not all art is for money, miss,” which is very funny, coming from him, the man whose will has a codicil listing, among other things: a bust of Plautia Urgulanilla; seventeen preparatory sketches for a Whistler nocturne; a different nocturne; two Elizabeth Catletts; six Reiss portraits; and a Soundsuit. The way he’s been talking, Claudia doubts the Soundsuit will ever make it to her, but she hopes it sticks around long enough to show off to Madeleine. He must be thinking about this, because he adds, “Just, a lot of it is, but just because something’s not fungible don’t make it a vanity project.”
“Well, it is, a little, but yes, it’s a performing art,” Lestat says. By two fingers, he pushes the coconut toward Claudia. “Would you like to try it?”
“What is it, like, a pina colada?”
He shrugs again. “Basically.” Obviously this shrugging is like some kind of tic. Claudia hasn’t noticed this in watching him perform, or striding around the floor in very obscene shoes. To put it in their terms: the kind of person you want to study like a still life, a collection of details rendered very carefully and specifically when one crouches in toward the image, most of which are lost in the bigger picture when stepping away. That’s how her father taught her to look at art, anyway, dragging her to look at long corridors of canvases home and abroad, shuffling her in front of grizzly images of the savior or eerie ones of the mother and child.
“This one sold for thirty million,” her father would offer against her ear, “because it shines like little jewels.” And sure enough Claudia would reach for the juicy pomegranate kernels, or the half-sheathed segments of bursting citrus, his hand cupping hers to keep it on the right side of the invisible alarm. Later, older, before Dubai but after Armand moved in, they sent her to kids’ programs, the spring break camps put on by the education department to serve as de facto day care. She always impressed those dopey educators, middle-aged women in silk scarves and khakis and asymmetrical haircuts, with how often her hand shot up to signal yes, she’d seen this painting before.
Bag of tics is an awfully insulting way to assess someone, Claudia thinks. Lestat has fine little lines around his mouth when he smiles. Probably smokes. And it would make sense if he did: oral fixation, pretty fucking French.
“I’ll try it,” her dad says, although she’s never seen him order anything sweeter than a moscato with a Thai curry.
When Lestat lifts up the stupid coconut — and it’s so stupid, Claudia thinks; where are they, an all-inclusive resort? — there’s a shiny mark of something tinted on the straw. A kind of blackberry sheen to it. And her dad just beams while he leans in, like maybe almost licking it? And then his lips as he makes a sour face, like, no thanks, not great.
“Not for you?” Lestat is stroking the hairy skin of the hollow coconut with the side of his thumb.
“Like I want there to be rum in it,” Dad says.
Of course Lestat shrugs. “We could go out after and get some funny tiki drinks, let our spit mingle at the bottom of the scorpion bowl.”
“No,” says Dad, “that’s too much rum.”
“I’ll do it,” Claudia offers.
Lestat licks his lips. “You don’t want to taste my spit.”
“Yeah, it probably tastes like my dad’s with a top note of coconut.”
“Claudia,” her father cautions, but it’s now time to order food.
Without so much as a shrug, or even looking at the menu, Lestat rattles off dishes to the server: that fish paste, “naturally.” A noodle bowl to share with shrimp and egg roll. Something called “shaking beef,” and so instantly Claudia wonders how it got that name, because according to the menu it’s just flank steak. Probably some racist bullshit, she thinks. A rice dish with pork. Summer rolls.
This is where her father touches Lestat’s hand, gently, and says, “I think that’s probably enough, Les.”
“Well, she is a college student, I presume it’s important to have leftovers.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Claudia says, hating his presumption if not the basic idea. “Les,” well, Claudia chooses to overlook that.
“She’s on the dining plan, she’s got plenty of money,” her father says airily. “Got a girlfriend who cooks for her, even.”
“Not all the time,” Claudia says, although whenever she’s over at Madeleine’s, really.
Anyway, this is the problem with adults: their getting-to-know-you questions are grueling and perfunctory. Another sign Lestat is actually quite nervous, that Claudia can’t quite imagine him wanting to know, for example, what she plans to major in, or which classes she is taking. What is her daily schedule like? If Claudia’s phone weren’t in the pocket of her little leather jacket, which is slung over the back of her banquet hall chair, she’d be texting Madeleine right now, something like, “Is he for fucking real?” Mostly he nods along, peppering her answers with “oh?” or “yes, of course,” until Claudia can’t believe he says “yes, of course” to her comment about meeting Madeleine on Lex.
“I’m pretty sure this is not new information about me, like, how long has she been making your costumes? Since last year? I imagine you talk during the fittings—”
“All right, yes, she has told me this,” Lestat says. “But it’s very nice to hear it now from you.”
“Why? We’re not friends?”
“Well, we could be.”
“Yeah, but, we don’t have to be. Maddie can make your costumes, and you can do, I dunno, whatever with my dad — we don’t have to also make small talk, it’s fine.”
Her father, who has himself this entire dinner been relatively quiet, has clasped his hands on the table. “I think...” he says slowly, the plain sign that he is in fact thinking, and even deliberating, on how to say what he means. Which is: “I think it’s important to me.”
It’s too bad Claudia is sitting across from Lestat, and not her own father. Instead of tilting her head at him and sliding into a high-key “Of course, Daddy Lou” agreement just to placate him, she sees Lestat open his mouth and hold up an iridescent amethyst claw—
But that is when the food arrives. And so the server starts piling plastic bowls onto their table, a small one for each of them with a big soup spoon inside of it, despite the fact they didn’t order any soup. Lestat’s mouth tightens into a straight line, the artificial plushness of her lips a bit greasy with one of those not-lipsticks that were big in the nineties and had a resurgence at some point. This one’s a berry color, but only faintly, as it would be. Not bad with the nails. Half the magic of drag, Claudia thinks, is the Schrödinger’s puzzle of who could possibly be under all of that. Well, here is who, a man nearing middle age with the courage to start serving portions of bun into Claudia’s bowl just because he picked the restaurant. Without the big makeup all of his expressions strike Claudia as, well, a bit Muppety, like there’s a hand clasping his mouth shut not because the mouth shuts naturally but because the gesture of closing his mouth needs to be performed now.
“Pour vous,” he says, gesturing at the neat arrangement he’s assembled in her bowl of noodles with two prawns, the egg roll, the culantro, the cabbage. “Louis?”
“Yeah, I’ll have some,” he says, scratching at a stain on the laminate table where someone probably spilled chili sauce and no one bothered to wipe it up quickly.
Dutifully, as if he’s done this with parties much larger than three, Lestat starts gathering rice noodles into Claudia’s father’s bowl.
“This smells good,” she says, and she means it.
“Yes, I do like this place, and I think it has the right spirit for a somewhat rowdy group meal.” Lestat licks her lips. “Maybe an intimate meeting with a paramour’s actual daughter, less so.”
“Or that can also be a rowdy group meal,” Claudia suggests.
“Well, you tell me, do you feel the, hm — vibe is very upbeat? You barely seem like you want to be here.”
“Because, whatever,” she says, plunging a fat disc of cucumber into the fish paste. “Do you?”
“I do everything for Louis,” Lestat says. Which, to Claudia, begs the question of what he’s doing for her father, beyond the obvious. And, for that matter, what her father is doing for Lestat to earn it, like, he is married to Armand? As far as Claudia is aware, in three weeks he’s going to the Istanbul biennial with Armand. They always stay at the Mandarin Oriental.
Beside her, Dad is contemplating, not eating, with that look of dissociated consternation he gets when something’s escaped his control. She’s seen it before. She only breaks away because the fish stuff is so awful, gulping iced coffee to flush it out of her mouth.
“An acquired taste?” Lestat asks, across the table. There’s something shameless about the way he eats: licking sauce off his thumb, and sighing around bites of food like he had no idea food could be enjoyed until this bite — but he does it on practically every bite, mostly talking through these bites in a way that is honestly hard to reconcile with the grace and poise Claudia’s seen him exude elsewhere. He wipes his rice-paper rolls through the fish paste. “The first time I had a boudin, after I came here, I thought, oh, this will be like something from home, a boudin blanc, you know, the basic white sausage. But this thing I ordered, it was fried, it wasn’t a sausage, it was this little ball, like what the British call a faggot — and you know I could make a joke about this, but I won’t.” And he pauses.
She waits a breath or two, and then asks, “And?”
“And what?”
“And what’s the point of telling me you hate boudin?”
“I don’t hate boudin.”
Claudia cannot. What the fuck? “What is the point of this thing you just said if you don’t have some stupid moral about how you came to like boudin?”
“Oh, I still don’t like how they prepare it here,” he says. “The face you made, it just reminds me of — intensely disliking something new, I suppose. You thought I was this glamazon with sex jokes? Am I disappointing you?”
“Of course not,” Claudia’s father starts to say—
“I don’t really need any more men disappointing me. The last one I opened up to shoved himself in uninvited and wouldn’t get out, if you know what I mean. And I got enough fathers already.”
The one sitting next to her says, “Claudia,” quite brittle.
But, oh, Lestat brightens somewhat: “Oh yes? How long was he in there for? After the first week or so do you find you can’t remember if you invited him in or not?”
Claudia’s father, bless him, just leaves. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” he stammers, nearly jumping out of his chair. He tries to slide it back under the table; it doesn’t easily slide. He gives up, crossing his arms, walking away. For a moment, Claudia watches, turned around in her own seat as he weaves around other diners. Eventually, what feels like minutes but has been a second or two, she turns back around to the thing she doesn’t really want to see: Lestat, sipping directly from his little soup bowl, peering at her over its top.
“Use a spoon,” she spits, disgusted by how many things on their table have the dull smudge of his stupid lip product on them: the straw in the coconut, his water glass, the crumpled napkin, the soup bowl’s plastic lip.
“Well, you certainly are polite,” he says, pushing the bowl away — again, two fingers. Like this bitch doesn’t need his entire hand to do anything.
“Don’t tell me about impolite.”
“Claudia,” he says, and she hates how he stuffs so many syllables into it, clauw-dee-yuh, like each one tastes better than the last. Same way he chews his food. He bites his lip and shakes his head, maybe to punish himself for having her name in his mouth, she doesn’t know. For a moment she stops wondering why she is here, and starts thinking that maybe she should get her phone out, call a car, just leave.
“I’m sure Louis will need a moment to reapply his lipstick,” but it sounds nervous? Of course her father would never wear lipstick. Lestat crosses his arms. Is looking everywhere.
And finally Claudia says, “You weren’t serious.”
He laughs a little. Wipes his eyes a little. Crosses his arms again. And he says, “Why would I not be?”
And, well, that’s — hm. Well, that is a good question, Claudia thinks. Why doesn’t she think he’s serious? Because she’s seen him grind his entire crotch into a six-thousand-dollar Yamaha? Or because he’s got fish sauce in his hair? Either way, Claudia’s father has fled the scene, typical honestly, why wouldn’t he, he couldn’t even look Claudia in the eye on the worst week of her life. Armand maybe held her gaze for twelve seconds, at least, before he started making calls.
But this man — she should ask, like, is he a man? That would be the polite thing to do, probably — is looking, stupid blue-gray eyes that are only revealing their color now that she is really seeing him, outside of his own dimly lit club where his pupils are like big black nothings, and painted practically shut. Intense, his gaze, as he uncrosses his arms and clasps his hands in his lap.
“Who was he?” Lestat asks.
“Some motherfucker,” she says.
“Oh?”
“You’re probably going to tell me some shit like I shouldn’t keep it in, but that’s what he was, some stupid motherfucker.”
“Yes,” Lestat agrees.
“Well I’m not going to tell you all the details,” she says. “Like did my dad set this up because you’re also a trauma therapist?”
“No.” He rolls his eyes. “I really do not think he is happy this came up. I do not think he is hiding in the toilet because this was a plan of his. And no, I am not going to try to make you tell me anything. I think yes, this man must have been a motherfucker. That’s what I meant.”
“He’s never really talked to me about it.” Then she clarifies, “My dad.”
“Oh,” he says again. “Well.” He swallows, and when he swallows his entire neck moves, the prominence at its center coming into focus and receding as his spit, or whatever, goes down. “Do you want him to?”
It has been years, Claudia thinks, of seeing the world in these categories: women (“good” would be a blanket overstatement, but, there’s an appeal there, obviously); fathers (no relationship to value judgement, it just is or it isn’t); and an inconvenient third category into which Claudia sweeps everyone else for lack of wanting to understand them. That Lestat should obviously go into this latter group is confounding, because he certainly can’t be in the first two, but then, to put him in the third makes her feel like she needs a fourth category. He’s still looking at her, but without a glance down he picks a section of egg roll from the nest of noodles in front of him, and puts it in his mouth.
“Not especially,” she says, watching him chew.
With some food still in his mouth he says, “I can understand it’s not so easy to talk about.”
“And I don’t want to.”
Lestat wipes his lips with a napkin that is already soiled with his faintly violet gloss and the fish sauce he earlier had in the corners of his mouth “Well, that’s fine, so it seems the two of you are in agreement.”
“I don’t want to talk about it with you, either,” she says.
He nods. “That’s also fine. But I am sorry this happened to you, it is horrible.” And then he shrugs: “If you wanted to, I would listen, of course. But like you suggest, who am I to you? I empathize, naturally, but maybe that’s all I should say.”
This, of everything, strikes Claudia as bizarre. “I mean, you can tell me what you want to tell me,” she says. “I dunno, do you want to talk? Because it seems like you always want to talk.”
“We haven’t talked a lot, so this ‘always’ may not extend very far,” says Lestat.
“We’ve talked like twenty times at your damn bar,” she says.
“Yes. Briefly. But I was at work, in drag besides.”
“How is that different from here?”
She’s lost count of his shrugs now. “I don’t think there is a transitive property whereby my fucking your father makes us intimates. A few passing niceties don’t constitute a conversation, for all I’m a little chatterbox. And besides, I can barely hear anything under all of that makeup.”
She does cough out a laugh at this.
“I can’t take it for granted,” he says, “is all. I’ll tell you anything you want to ask me. Or nothing, and we can ask to see the dessert menu. Actually, there’s a Korean French bakery about a half-mile up the street, they sell these kind of pain perdu with butter stuffed inside of it—”
“Didn’t you just drink a pina colada?”
“It’s more like an exotic fruit juice with coconut milk in it. And, crucially, I drank it, I didn’t eat it.”
Claudia doesn’t bother telling him she can’t stand to get back in the car and go to an entire second location with him. It just feels so pointless. “It really just seems like you’re trying to get me to talk to you,” she insists
“No, I am not trying to do that. I merely would if you wanted. It’s for you to do something with or not.”
“You don’t think that talking openly about my rape is gonna fix me?”
“It might. But then again, it might not. I don’t know you very well, Claudia. I don’t know what you need. I know Louis cares about you very much, I know Madeleine does since as you’ve surmised she gossips a good amount during fittings. Maybe there isn’t one thing that’s gonna fix you? Or maybe nothing would. Or maybe you’re fine and you don’t need anything, I don’t know. But as an older sister who’s gone before you in this matter, here is what I think: you are in control of this, you are in control of your entire life, actually, what this means for you is for you to decide, and it can be as much as you want it to be or nothing at all.”
“But I wasn’t in control, that’s the point,” she says.
“So why give up on the opportunity to be in control now?”
It’s pretty rich of him to suggest, Claudia thinks. Control may be a spectrum, but he probably has no idea what it’s like to be down on her end of it.
“Who hurt you?” she asks.
“Hurt me, hm.” He licks his lips, repeating, “Who hurt me? His name was Magnus. My old man. It was really a long time ago, in Paris. I presume that’s who you mean? But you know how life is, a lot of people have hurt me. Him, Feefee when she vomited on my beloved booties with the heel wrapped in pony hair, it’s hard to say which was worse.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “So you’re just gonna keep being flip about it?”
“Well, yes,” says Lestat, “but that’s my choice. I am in control.” He crosses his arms. “I should go get him,” he says, rising. Brushing the crumbs from the egg rolls out of his lap. “I do think it’s cute he is hiding in the bathroom, or do you think that is meant to be flip?” Again, he reaches into a dish in the middle of the table. “Also, what did you think of the shaking beef? I found it a little dry tonight,” but apparently this won’t stop him from eating it.
Claudia says, “I don’t think I tried any.”
He shrugs a final time, and heads for the bathroom with yet another mouthful of food.
Her dad, at least, doesn’t waste anyone’s time acting embarrassed. Instead, he signals for the check, pulling out his wallet and, quickly, his platinum Amex, which the server regrets to inform him they don’t take. He then tosses out the World Elite Mastercard, as if he needs the miles.
“The noodles were excellent,” Dad says, adding a tip on the tablet he’s handed.
“The bun, yes,” Lestat agrees, rubbing fitfully at his own middle finger with the other hand.
“I still like the summer rolls at our place.”
Lestat concedes, “They’re okay,” and begins to rise slowly, grasping for his bag and for the plastic sack of leftovers. Claudia is relieved no one’s offering them to her. She couldn’t stand that fish paste. And no need to remember this meal every time she opens the fridge this week. Time to get the fuck out of here.
After her father gets up, Claudia does, too. “Come on,” he says, softly, a hand to her lower back to push her along out of the restaurant. Around them, mostly what seems like college students and a few tables of older diners, maybe Vietnamese themselves, are poking into their own bowls of bun, or poring over the drinks menu.
Claudia wishes she’d thought to use the bathroom before they left, but. No use now. If she’d been thinking about it, she could have asked if they had a Vietnamese iced coffee in a to-go cup, to bring one back to Madeleine. At this point, she simply isn’t thinking of anything but escape.
“I’m going home,” she says, the minute they’re back out in the placid nighttime scene of the strip mall parking lot, although it’s not where she is planning to go.
“Need a ride?” her dad asks. “Lemme drive you.”
“No.” She’s surprised at how brusque. “I’ll take an Uber.”
“You came together,” says Lestat. “I drove, too,” gesturing somewhat in a way that probably suggests where he’s parked, because her father probably knows what his car is. Claudia studies him: guarded, somehow, arms crossed practically since he got up and went to call her dad back from the bathroom. He keeps nearly shaking his long hair back behind his shoulder, but it keeps getting stuck on his shoulder, and clearly he’d need to put more thrust behind this motion to really get it all the way off his shoulder, but, he won’t. For the first time, Claudia realizes that this isn’t a wig, it’s his hair, and like, of course? Duh? But also, he has nice silky hair, less textured than Madeleine’s; some wavy bounce in it.
She's still admiring the hair when her dad hands her the fob and says, "Why don't you take the car?"
Her father drives an electric BMW that Claudia is not especially fond of. For one thing, finding places to plug the stupid thing in is not her idea of luxury. For another thing, German cars feel very stiff and plodding to her, like tanks. Her dad buying this thing last year is not her first meaningful encounter with the make, just unexpected, because she can’t quite sort out what she should have expected. Once, in Munich, he took her to the BMW tourist attraction; they lived in Dubai then, and neither her father nor Armand owned a BMW at the time. It just seemed like a nice respite from the Pinakotheks and operas of it all. They had lunch with some Brandhorst at the fancy restaurant inside Dallmayr, and on the way out her father bought her a shiny chocolate petit four to eat on the walk back to the hotel. This was a very twelve-year-old thing to be impressed with, but then, at the time she had been twelve. All her memories of this time in her life, six short years ago, have a hazy quality to them, as if they may never have happened, or happened to a different person. But, she supposes, as she accepts his key fob and slides it into her front pocket, that there is a precedent for everything that's happened tonight: show off his pretty daughter, and send her home with a little treat. She thinks she had fun on this trip, at the time, but the cloud around it means she just can't know. Of tonight, she's more sure. Devastating.
“I think we’ll go to the bakery,” says Lestat, taking her dad by the bicep, “if you’re amenable, mon cher? Now I’m thinking about the honey butter toast.”
“I dunno what that is?”
“Oh, it’s this delightful thing, like a big crispy toast, but soaked with honey and butter.” Resting his head against Claudia’s father’s shoulder. “Clow-dee-uh, you don’t want to come?”
“I’m tired,” she says. “I’m going home.”
Good night, good bye. “Drive safe,” from her dad. He pulls out a cigarette. He’ll come get the car from her tomorrow. Two cigarettes. Actually, can she use the car tomorrow to go to Target? Sure, no problem. Lestat pulls out a lighter. Her dad tells her they’ll text. Maybe Claudia will drop it off after class on Thursday. Through a mouthful of smoke: Love you, drive safe (a second time).
Claudia is walking back to the car when she realizes she didn’t thank him for dinner.