Something to pretend belongs to you: "An Amount of Discretion" by Lauren Alwan

Seline was a good choice to be the executor of the estate for her recently deceased artist husband, Jonathan. Not only is she an artist herself (Jonathan's former student and about thirty years younger than he was), she's fastidious, she notices small details, and she pays attention to the rules. Since  Jonathan had achieved some renown before shuffling off this mortal coil, it was a comfort to him while dying to know his work would be cared for and appreciated. Seline's carrying out his wishes to the letter was part of that consolation.

What Seline's personality doesn't make her well suited for is caring for Jonathan's surviving son and her step-son, Finn. She did okay as a part-time mother to Finn when Finn was a kid, although she had no real maternal instincts herself. It helped that Finn had been an "even-tempered, pleasant child," and it helped even more that she only had him on weekends and for a couple of weeks in the summer. After that, they could send him back to his mother's house, Jonathan's former wife, and it "was always a relief when the visits were done, and, released from having to care for a child not her own, she could return to her life with Jonathan and her work in the studio." 

Nonetheless, here after her husband's death, Seline finds herself wishing she'd gotten closer to Finn. They've had a few conversations just between them that have gone well, now that Jonathan isn't there to mediate everything between them, and it's got Seline thinking she's longing for a closer relationship with him. When she finds eight of Jonathan's notebooks, she decides to offer them to Finn so he has something to remember his father by. Because she doesn't feel confident explaining her need to be close to him outright, she hopes the gesture might express "what she could not--her regret at the distance she'd put between them when Finn was young."

Finn's on his way to visit her, and this presents an opportunity for her to give him the notebooks and have that conversation she's been wanting to have, but it's obvious right away it's not going to go well. Finn is dating someone at San Francisco State University, and she'd got a kid. Finn's bringing both to meet Seline, because he was going to be in the area anyway for his mother's birthday. So already, her private moment she was hoping to have with him will be interrupted.

Much more than that, though, as Seline prepares for her guests, anyone who has ever spent five minutes with a four-year-old can see disaster looming. There is a lot of time given to the description of Seline's house and the things in it. She sets the table with a blue madras cloth, pottery carried back from a trip to Portugal, heavy goblets bought secondhand in North Hollywood. She purchases a complicated cake called a sacripantina from an Italian bakery. She has heavy linen drapes lined with cotton duck. She spends a lot of time dressing and thinking about her accessories, especially one piece of jewelry she feels sentimental attachment to, but cannot put on because she needs help with it. And then, there's Seline's studio, with all the tools of an artist along with her art she'd been working on laid out carefully.

I foresee nothing going wrong with this visit. 

From the moment Finn's girlfriend Anna arrives, Seline finds fault with her, thinking her "close-cut dark blond hair gave her a severe, unforgiving look." Seline tries to be lenient with Chole, the four-year-old, ignoring the first several transgressions of the child. When Chloe insists on holding a nutcracker at the table herself, then drops it and breaks a plate (not one of the good ones), Seline actually "felt relief--as though the inevitable had finally occurred." The reader is tempted to share this relief, but more tension is about to be piled on.

It turns out Finn has something he wants. He's come to ask about a particular painting his father made, one that, unlike the usual aesthetic his father employed, was very personal. It includes a rabbit Finn and Jonathan had seen while out walking together--a fact that even Seline was not aware of. She takes Finn to her studio to see the painting, and is considering using the discretion afforded her as executor to perhaps find a way to let Finn keep it, when Chloe comes into the studio. She draws by herself for a while, but then drop the pencil and spills brushes while trying to pick it up, lightly damaging Seline's works-in-progress along the way. Seline reacts just a touch harshly, grabbing the girl's arm and telling her that "things break if you're not careful" in one of those really over-the-top double-meaning lines.

From then on, it's obvious Finn and Anna are angry at Seline for the way she treated Chloe in the studio. One could read this as standard old generation vs. new generation stuff, the old generation insisting children need boundaries and rules while the new refuses to discipline their kids, but there's something going on that makes the reader think that even while Seline has a point, she's wrong.

In the moment Chloe dumps the brushes, Seline has rethought giving not just the painting, but even the notebooks to Finn. She sees her near-decision to give the work to him as a "...lapse in judgment. She knew better know. She knew sentiment could not influence her. She would follow Jonathan's wishes and keep the collection together. There was no room for discretion, not even hers." 

In fact, Seline is so closed off, she is wired against the sentimental. She tried to open up that day, even symbolically opening her drapes to let in the sun she typically kept out, but it was too much for her. Ultimately, she likes her ordered life. When Finn tells Seline that Anna is pregnant, she knows he means it as good news, but "she kept thinking of the irreversibility, the obligation it would mean." Finn, speaking only for himself, offers that "a little discomfort keeps you in check," but Seline immediately writes this thinking off as "one of those odd theories" young people come up with that "explain nothing."

This emotional reserve seems to even pervade Seline's work, which is "solemn and enigmatic, and none of it...ready to be seen." Seline spends her days in a studio she has made to be exactly like the gallery that shows her work, meaning she is always in the artificial world, never creating art meant to be experienced by full-blooded people. Even Seline herself doesn't "know what to make of" her own paintings, because it has never occurred to her to connect with them in that way. She is not capable, perhaps, of making a personal piece of art like the one Finn covets.

In the end, Chloe wanders off. As Finn's new family is checking the house to be sure they didn't leave anything, Seline realizes that Chloe has stolen her treasured bracelet. She tries to come up with a way to get it back without accusing the girl, but can't come up with one. Because Anna and Finn are already angry with her, she allows the girl to leave with it. She understands the impulse, having been a hell-raiser herself as a girl. "How irresistible it must have seemed. How unexpected. The child must have marveled at her luck, that she had found something she could pretend belonged to her."

Seline likely feels she deserves this treatment, to lose something of sentimental value to her at the hands of someone pretending it belongs to her, because she is doing the same thing to Finn by pretending her duty as executor means the painting cannot be his.

A masterpiece...that I can't stand

Every once in a while, there is a movie or a story that I can recognize is artistically nearly flawless, but which I still don't like. That's this story. I hated Seline. I know it's considered facile to complain that you don't like a character and use that as a reason to dismiss a story--the "correct" attitude is supposed to be to ask not whether the character is likable, but whether the character seems lifelike. And Seline is very real--this is a type of person I know. Know and don't like. Even while Alwan was brilliantly building tension with olives perched just-so on the table and the cake in the refrigerator, I kept thinking it would be fine with me if a fire just burned all of Seline's things, art and all, to the ground. Seline is a stick-in-the-mud who cares about stupid belongings being kept in a certain way and creates art I can't imagine wanting to look at. She cares about her stupid things--even though in the end, we're all going to die, so we're all just pretending things belong to us--more than the people around her. It's hard for me to get past a story being about a silly person whose life has been one big waste just because I recognize how well the portrait is drawn and how convincingly the tale of her final failure to open up is.