A 'SUB' REQUEST (Cate Blanchett x OC)

Chapter 18: A foreseeable crisis

We spent the early half of the summer in lockdown together, drinking wine, picnicking in broad daylight on her front lawn, and making love for hours on end at night. I even made her rewatch Carol with me. When the infamous New Year's eve love scene came on, Cate remarked: "Andrew didn't speak to me for days after filming this scene." 

"Didn't he know it was going to happen? I thought he was one of the producers." 

"Yes, but it's a whole other ball game to watch it with your own eyes." 

"You seemed to be very much in love with Rooney, and that was hard to fake even for the best actors." 

She just smiled.

"Well, were you?" I ventured. 

A silence. Then she changed the subject. "So...your assistant. The one with you at the Oscars. Isn't her name also Therese?" 

"Yes, Thérèse, with the French accents though. She's French." 

"She's very pretty. Does she accompany you to every award show, on your arms?"

"Pretty much. She's just 22, you know. Would be good for her to get accustomed to these things." 

As my mind flashed back to that fateful night again, I couldn't help but unburden myself of the secret that I held on to for too long. "This is none of my business, but...did you know that Andrew is sleeping with a man? And that man happens to be my boss." 

There was barely a hint of surprise on Cate's face as she sipped rosé from a stemless wine glass. "I didn't know that." 

"Are you not shocked that he's..."

"Darling, we married each other so we could be each other's beards. That's what I meant when I told you about the dangers of marrying a friend back in London. The shocking part was actually that he fell in love with me two months into our marriage, and I didn't reciprocate his feelings."

This was a bombshell to me.

"And I felt so awful and guilty, the way a twentysomething young woman with a very small sense of self was prone to feel. He was so lonely and despondent, and told me that he'd feel better about us if we had children together. So I gave him 4 children, hoping that he would forgive me for not returning his affections. But by the time I started falling for my makeup artist, he became all the more controlling and wanted me all to himself while he had affairs with men on the side. He also became insanely jealous of all the close friendships I had with my female costars. That's when I filed for divorce." 

"That's a lot to carry with you - why didn't you tell me before?" 

"Because of my children - my angels. I love them with all my heart, but every time I look at them they remind me of this very dark past and makes me even more guilty that there'll always be this shadow on my relationships with them. And I swore to myself that I'd never let anyone know the pain and desperation out of which they were born." 

"I totally understand."

"I knew you would," she looked at me, her face fragile with weariness, "which is exactly why I'm so thrilled for you to meet them. Be a part of their lives. They must be so bored in lockdown. I want to fly them in from London next week because there are no flights going to Europe anymore. My shoot for Tár is also suspended to later this fall until this wave of covid blows over, so I'll get to spend a few weeks with them. What do you say?"

"If it makes you happy, love." 

-----

Despite my complete lack of maternal instincts, I got on swimmingly with Dashiell, Roman, Ignatius, and Edith. They flew in the next weekend as planned, and commandeered the guest bedroom and couch area and added life and color to our serene existence. Compared to other kids, who I usually took a while to warm up to, they all seemed to fall into my world so smoothly, each carrying a snippet of the woman I loved. 

I spent most mornings making breakfast with Cate in the kitchen while the kids woke up one by one. And then there was piano time with Dashiell and Roman, who despite their mother's insistence that they had zero interest in the arts whatsoever, respected me enough to pick my brain about the craft of music. Then I would work for a couple of hours while they read with their mother. 

The sun would come out in the afternoons, which were spent playing chase with Edith on the front lawn. My touchy-feely side came out as I frolicked with the kids, while Cate always kept her distance, gazing at us from afar adoringly. Very few people walked by in our quiet neighborhood, and time slowed down, the golden halo of dusk washing over every minute and hour. 

Then it all happened at once, our lives began cascading like an avalanche - Edith woke up with a fever and a sneeze one day, and one by one we started falling sick to covid. We got out all the camping gear and partitioned the house into different quarantine zones, and neither of us had contact with one another except during the mealtimes. My symptoms were less severe than the others', so I took on the bulk of cooking responsibilities. The music and laughter stopped. A silent malaise prevailed. 

The kids, who were all frisky, of robust health, and vaccinated up to their eyeballs, recovered in no time. I had a hellish cough and fever for three days, which depleted every last one of my cells, but by day 4 even I saw some shimmer of hope that my usual vigor would soon be restored. However, Cate's fever and symptoms persisted with an ominous tenacity that left her extremely frail, and all of us panicked. 

One day, when I was frantically combing through her health insurance, she said placidly, "you know, this is not a bad way to go, with you and the kids by my side." 

"Stop it," I mustered all my energy to suppress the worry in my voice, "you're going to get over this - you're too young. Now please eat your soup." 

But I knew her too well at this point to know that she had a penchant for the morbid, and prone to dry humor when under duress and a 103-degree fever. "Stephen Colbert once made me do a questionnaire of sorts on his show, and he asked me what'd happen once we all die. I said that we'd turn into a human soup, and he was not too happy with the answer." 

She'd had a fever for a week now, so I said, "Cate, let me take you to the hospital. No one knows anything about this virus and we need to monitor all progress as early as possible." 

"I don't want people recognizing me at the hospital like this," she grabbed on to my hands, "I want this, I don't want this to end..."

After several rounds of battle and negotiation, she finally relented. As I began calling an Uber, she started dialing on her phone as well. "The kids, honey, someone's got to watch them." 

Within 15 minutes, the doorbell rang. Ignatius, the youngest boy, went to get it. 

"Daddy's here!" 

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