The Bona Fide Fraud - Chapter 18 Last Week Of February 2017

London

Three months before Gemma arrived in Colombia, Chance Smith-Martin was on Gemma’s couch, eating baby carrots with his straight, glossy teeth. He had been staying at her London flat for five nights.

Chance was Will’s ex-boyfriend. He always acted like he didn’t believe a word Gemma said. If she said she liked blueberries, he raised his eyebrows like he highly doubted it. If she said Will had flitted off to Paris, he questioned her about where, precisely, Will was staying. He made Gemma feel illegitimate.

Pale and slim, Chance belonged to the category of scrawny men who are uncomfortable when women are more muscular than they are. His joints seemed loosely attached, and the woven bracelet around his left wrist looked dirty. He had gone to Yale for world literature. He liked people to know he’d gone to Yale and often brought it up in conversation. He wore little spectacles, was developing a beard that never quite sprouted, and kept his long hair in a man bun on the top of his head. He was twenty-two and working on his novel.

Right now, he was reading a book translated from the French. Albert Camus. He pronounced it Camoo. He was draped on the couch, not just sitting, and wore a sweatshirt and his boxer shorts.

Chance was in the flat because of Will’s death. He said he wanted to sleep on the fold-out couch in the den, to be near Willow’s things. More than once, Gemma found him taking Will’s clothes out of the closet and smelling them. A couple of times he hung them from the window frames. He found Willow’s old booksearly editions of Vanity Fair and other Victorian novelsand piled them next to his bed, as if he needed to see them before he fell asleep. Then he left the toilet seat up.

He and Gemma had been handling Will’s death from the London end. Corey and Paulina were stuck in New York because of Corey’s health. The Blairs had managed to keep the suicide out of all the papers. They said they didn’t want publicity, and there was no question of foul play, according to the police. Even though her body hadn’t been found, no one doubted what had happened. Will had left that note in the bread box.

Everyone agreed she must have been depressed. People jumped into the Thames all the time, said the police. If a person weighted herself down before jumping, as Willow had written she planned to do, there was no telling how long it might take before a body was found.

Now Gemma sat next to Chance and flipped on the TV. It was late-night BBC programming. The two of them had spent the day going through Will’s kitchen, packing things as Paulina had requested. It had been a long and emotional project.

“That girl looks like Will,” Chance said, pointing to an actress on the screen.

Gemma shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Yes, she does,” said Chance. “To me, she does.”

“Not up close,” Gemma said. “She just has short hair. People think I look like Will, too, from a distance.”

He looked at her steadily. “You don’t look like her, Gemma,” he said. “Willow was a million times prettier than you will ever be.”

Gemma glared. “I didn’t know we were getting hostile tonight. I’m kinda tired. Can we just skip it, or are you really jonesing for an argument?”

Chance leaned toward her, shutting his Camus. “Did Willow lend you money?” he asked.

“No, she didn’t,” Gemma answered truthfully.

“Did you want to sleep with her?”

“No.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

“Did she have a new boyfriend?”

“No.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There are six hundred things I’m not telling you,” Gemma said. “Because I’m a private person. And my friend just died. I’m sad and I’m trying to deal with it. Is that all right with you?”

“No,” said Chance. “I need to understand what happened.”

“Look. The rule of you staying in this flat is, don’t ask Gemma a million questions about Will’s private life. Or about Gemma’s private life. Then we can get along. All right?”

Chance sputtered. “The rule of this flat? What are you talking about, the rule of this flat?”

“Every place has rules. What you do when you come into a new place is, you figure them out. Like when you’re a guest, you learn the codes of behavior and adapt. Yes?”

“Maybe that’s what you do.”

“That’s what everyone does. You work out how loud you can talk, how you can sit, what things are okay to say and what’s rude. It’s called being a human in society.”

“Nah.” Chance crossed his legs in a leisurely fashion. “I’m not that fake. I just do what feels right to me. And you know what? It’s never been a problem, until now.”

“Because you’re you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re a guy. You come from money, you’re white, you have really good teeth, you graduated from Yale, the list goes on.”

“So?”

“Other people adapt to you, asshole. You think there’s no adapting going on, but you’re fucking blind, Chance. It’s all around you, all the time.”

“That’s a point,” he said. “Okay, I’ll grant you that.”

“Thank you.”

“But if you’re thinking through all that lunacy every time you walk into a new situation, then there is something seriously wrong with you, Gemma.”

“My friend is dead,” she told him. “That’s what’s wrong with me.”