PREMONITION

“How would you define the word ‘premonition?’ Claire’s voice comes at him through the doorway and invades his solitude. She won’t be doing that much longer.

“Premonition,” he shouts toward her without looking up. “A fleeting memory of events which have yet to occur.”

Sean smiles and savors his cleverness. He needs an audience more finely tuned, better calibrated to his wit than Claire. Someone who understands him. Who appreciates him. Like a fine wine or impossibly rare delicacy, maybe hio-katsuo or skerpikjøt, weird and wonderful shit that nobody knows about.

“Premonition,” he continues. “A vague foreshadowing that the next event one is about to live through bears an uncanny similarity to one’s doctoral thesis conjectures on a miser’s repentance in Dickens.”

“Premonition,” the pages of his newspaper rustle as further proof he is the type of man for whom news is gathered, committed to paper, edited, printed, folded, and rushed to his doorstep. Not one of those for whom it scrolls incoherently on some clutched pacifier of a device. “The absolute conviction that no matter what happens next, it does not particularly matter, since something more significant is about to happen.”

Claire hears him prattle on. She knows him to be a man who is compelled to answer authoritatively any question put to him. One who would never think to follow his pontifications with a simple question, ’How do you define it?’ What other people think – she doesn’t take it personally, it is universal – is not of interest to him. One of many irritating characteristics, but only one. That they love each other may be a topic of debate among their daughters, friends, colleagues, lovers, ex-lovers. That they do not like each other is inarguable.

He sits in the deep emerald and gold brocade armchair in the library. She can see him in her mind’s eye quite as clearly as if she were in the room instead of pacing her office. The process server is coming. Today is the day. The process server is coming. Today is the day. Her steps march to that beat, back and forth along a path between desk and bookshelves. The process server is coming. Today is the day.

“What are you so nervous about,” he appears at the doorway. An apparition. “I can hear you marching from downstairs.”

“Premonition,” she tells him with a shrug. “The certainty that today will be a day unlike any other.”

“No,” he tells her. “That’s optimism. Irrational optimism. I thought we had cured each other of that. Pity if we haven’t. I think you confuse premonition with presentiment. The suspicion that one genuinely flawed and greedy character may nonetheless be salvageable. As witness your old friend Scrooge.”

“Presentiment,” she says. “the hazy inkling that one character may take six readings at different life stages and a performance by Jude Law to convince that perhaps he is not such a rigid, supercilious, didactic asshole. As witness Alexei Karenin.”

“Bzzz! And Boom! You lose. Dickens is the author of the day, not Tolstoy! We don’t care about happy families here.”

“Indeed,” Claire nods.

“Presentiment,” he tells her as he turns to go, “the dim recognition that nobody reads anything six times, and nobody wants to change their mind or change their way of thinking or change their world view. It’s more than most can do to change their underwear. As witness dear Daddy Stafford. I trust you’ve had your morning chat.”

She doesn’t look up.

They adopt this bantering, mannerly tone when they are alone together, which no matter how infrequent, can be fraught. It is preferable to arguing and less futile. They triangulate when one of the girls is home: Ask your father if…Tell your mother that… Functional but fooling no one.

The concierge buzzes to announce a visitor. They hear the housekeeper answer. Claire glances at Sean’s back as he leaves her office. The last glance, she smiles to think it. Last look while the fragile veneer remains intact. It’s about to blister, crack and undergo the kind of upheaval that once separated continents. Or is that grandiose? Of course it is. Still. This is the before. Everything else is after. Thrilling to consider. Daddy knows it’s to be today. Like everyone else he wonders what has delayed the inevitable. He’s changed the will. Copies are everywhere copies are needed. She is good to go.

Soon enough their doorbell will ring. Soon enough Sean will be summoned to sign for the document’s delivery. Soon enough the charade will end. She’ll face his fury. He’ll hate the surprise of it more than the content. He’ll smother his anger. She knows he will. Nothing will rattle that façade, no suggestion in front of servants that she’s drilled into the fault line. But honestly no hint in front of himself. This time, he faces her fury. Hers, seething under the surface, silent, steaming, swelling and only now ready to blow.

Claire’s specialty: The slow, time-released fuse burning toward denotation. Oh when will Sean recollect her premonition question? When will he recall that exact exchange? She won’t be there to savor it, but she smiles again in calm anticipation, her forté. Voilà, asshole!

Now. Today. Out in the open. Black and white, cool, crisp letters cascading into words, tumbling into sentences, gushing into paragraphs chocked with legalese versions of one clear mandate: You supercilious, amoral, lying dumbfuck, get out of my house and life.

Soon enough, but then again, nowhere near soon enough.