and summer will not come again
Blair, Dan, some Chuck. 5305 words.
W: depression, abusive relationship, mentions of suicide and miscarriage
1950s AU.
For![]()
lookinglassgirl!!
Summary: Blair marries in June of nineteen fifty-six, right after Grace Kelly becomes a princess. She does not marry a prince.
Note: I've had the idea for this fic forever but couldn't make myself get it down until now, for whatever reason. I was never quite able to get over the image of Blair being all sad housewife in a big fluffy Betty Draper dress and Dan as her Ginsberg-reading, Buddy-Holly-glasses-wearing gardener. Very loosely inspired by Far From Heaven. Also I know I fell behind in prompts and stuff, but only because I got so distracted with this, lol. I'll catch up though!
Blair marries in June of nineteen fifty-six, right after Grace Kelly becomes a princess. She's twenty years old. Grace Kelly was twenty-seven. Blair does not marry a prince; she marries an exciting, unsuitable man with buckets of money. He puts her up in a beautiful house and calls it a castle.
The first year of their marriage is spent traveling. Blair is blissfully happy, except for all that business at the Hôtel Royal Barrière with that maid – but Blair isn't going to waste her thoughts on that, considering Chuck was really very sorry. Their time abroad is some of the most invigorating in Blair's memory, for Chuck is like no one else she knows, tempestuous and unpredictable, and he lavishes money on her like he thinks it will never run out. And she doubts it ever will.
They settle back in New York eventually, in that house he calls a castle. Chuck maintains an apartment in the city in addition to the house. He needs to, for business. Blair had been under the impression that they would both remain in the city after their marriage, but apparently she had been mistaken.
Her mother is making her look at paint swatches for the nursery when they get word that her father has been found dead in a hotel room, alone and shot in the head.
Blair is at the kitchen window looking out into the backyard, where the last gasp heat of August has already begun to leech moisture from the leaves. She has nothing to do. Blair is not the person who cooks or cleans, they have Dorota for that, and she's already decorated the entire house twice over. She has no hobbies. Her entire school career had been so focused on grades and getting ahead that she hadn't really thought to develop any. It feels childish to flip through movie star magazines and tear out the pictures she likes, and that was how she always spent most of her brief, cherished leisure time as a girl.
She watches the gardener at his work outside. He's new. Blair hadn't been the one who hired him. He's her age, or around it, and she hasn't been able to get a good look at his face yet. His back has been to her this entire time. She can tell he's slightly built, with dark hair that just barely curls. He's got on a light blue shirt, very nearly bone-white in the sunshine, and the sleeves are rolled up. It sticks to his back a little, right along his spine.
Blair drifts out into the backyard. The sun is pleasant on her cold skin, melting the cobwebs the big, dim house seems to leave on her mood. Her crinoline petticoat brushes scratchily against her legs, even with the stockings. It took her so long after the funeral to get back into her usual dresses; at the time she'd missed them but now she misses her nightgowns and housecoats, misses curling up beneath her blankets.
It's childish. The time for grief has passed, or so she keeps reminding herself.
"Alright there, Ms. Waldorf?"
Blair starts, raising her wide-with-surprise eyes to meet those of the gardener, dark behind his black-framed glasses. He has gloves on, and dirt freckles his bare forearms. She knows she ought to reprimand him, and she would have in the past, but what comes out of her mouth is, "How did you –?"
"We went to school together," he says. "Sort of. I take it you don't remember me."
Her brows draw together slightly. "You mean you were at school with my husband."
His head tilts in assent. "I was there on scholarship."
She's sure she doesn't imagine the hint of bitterness there. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I've forgotten your name…"
Definite bitterness there in the line of his mouth, his lips that press together tightly for a moment. "Dan Humphrey, Ms. Waldorf."
He pulls off a glove to shake her hand. His is very warm, damp with the perspiration that also casts a sheen on his forehead. Blair swallows. "It's Mrs. Bass," she says, more archly than she means to. "Or ma'am, if you prefer."
"Oh, I don't know," he says, moving back towards his work, away from her. "I like the old name just fine."
Blair watches him go, privately just appalled.
Chuck hires people to do everything.
The nursery had hardly been put together before it had to be taken apart, but neither of them had been the ones to do it. Someone Chuck hired packs up the baby clothes and dismantles the cradle, peels off the wallpaper and paints the room a blank off-white. It is a guest room once again, startlingly and suddenly bare of all its meaning.
Blair never liked that room.
She was supposed to get as much rest as she could following the incident, especially as it came so quick on the heels of her father's death. And though she did rest, it was always without sleep; she was simply stationary, sedentary, listless. She would catch a few minutes or hours each night, but always woke before her alarm was set to go off. Then she would lie there, counting the minutes until its shrill ring would pierce the gentle morning. Sometimes her husband was beside her, but mostly he was not; that's how it always is.
There is a crack down the ceiling of their bedroom that Blair keeps meaning to have fixed. It hangs directly over her bed, all metaphor.
The gardener takes his lunch promptly at one. Blair wouldn't mind supplying it like she does for any other worker who comes by the house, but he never asks; instead he sits in a corner of the garden and eats a sandwich he's brought with him while he reads a book. Blair doesn't mean to watch him do this, it's just that her bedroom window overlooks the spot that he favors, and Blair doesn't have much to look at generally, unless she chooses to rot her brain in front of the television.
As September becomes October, a predatory winter chill enters the air. The gardener has added a light flannel jacket over his customary work shirts, very red against the greenery going autumn gold.
She brings him out a cup of coffee one day. He looks up at her from his spot on the ground not with surprise, exactly – more a sort of confusion, threaded through with something sardonic. Blair finds herself nearly stammering for an excuse, settling on an arch, "It's just I didn't want you freezing to death in my yard."
A slight smile crosses his face then, beneath those heavy glasses and messy dark curls. "I'm not sure it's that bad out here yet, ma'am."
The way he says ma'am is mocking; it makes her bristle.
"What are you reading?" she asks.
He gets to his feet, brushing off his clothes a little before he gives her the book, a very small text with a black and white cover. As soon as she reads the title, Howl, Blair nearly drops it as though burned. He has the gall to laugh.
"It's just a book," he says. "Perhaps you'd even like it, if you read it."
"I prefer poetry that isn't filthy," she says haughtily.
"All good poetry's filthy," he answers easily. "Even the pretty kind that rhymes."
"I just can't imagine you at school with my husband," she says. "He never said."
"I suppose he thinks it's something of a joke," he remarks, but then remembers the propriety that's been lacking in him all this time, "If you'll forgive me for saying so."
Blair doesn't quite understand what he means. "Well…" she says. "I have things to attend to. Please do bring the cup in when you're finished."
Much later, after he has left for the day, Blair goes into the kitchen to find the mug sitting on the counter beside his book. Breath seeming caught in her chest, she picks up the slim volume. A note is sticking out from amongst its pages, which she removes to read.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts, Ms. Waldorf.
His penmanship is blocky and harried, and the note is scrawled on a torn-out sheet of notepaper. Blair looks at it for a long time before she crumples it in her fist and throws it out.
Blair has a college degree. Blair was always top of her class. She was a charming presence at parties, and she always threw the best ones, coordinated to the absolute last detail. She was always the most responsible person in any room and as much as that could be a curse, it was also who she was. She was in control of her world, even if now she realizes the span of her world was not very big at all.
Now she cannot even be trusted to make herself toast, or entertain her mind for longer than a few minutes.
Her friends are all in the city still, even the other married girls; they all have their apartments for a year or so as is customary until they have children. Chuck is almost always in the city too, at that job he took with his father that she never expected him to take. Blair used to go in more often herself, for shopping or lunches, but the train ride seems so exhausting now.
She calls Chuck, standing in the dim foyer with the deep red rug at her feet, both hands curled around the phone, dressed and waiting for him. "Darling, it's already half past seven, are you –"
"I have a dinner meeting tonight, you understand," he says, voice low over the phone.
"You didn't say," she says.
"I must have forgotten." Tossed off so easily. "I'll be home tomorrow."
Blair has barely said another word before she is greeted by the spiraling dial tone, which she listens to a minute too long only because she's taken aback by the brusqueness. That night she won't eat dinner and in the morning she'll have too much of her breakfast.
The gardener comes three times a week.
Blair has had to confess to herself that she hadn't entirely forgotten him from school. She hadn't known his name, of course, but there was a reason his face was so familiar to her. She had to pull out Chuck's old yearbook to really make the connection: that same angular face but without the glasses, hair much shorter and neater, expression less sarcastic. She thinks he might have gone out with Serena once or twice – but then again, who hadn't?
She has made all sorts of annotations in that book he lent her, neatly printed and in red, like how she used to make notes when she was in school. He flips through it when she hands it back, seeming amused, and then tucks it into his jacket.
"Did you come to like it?" he asks.
"I'm not sure," she says. "Appreciate it in parts, perhaps, but I found the language overly complicated and unnecessarily vulgar."
He smiles at her. "All those notes and you've still boiled it down to 'filthy,' huh?"
Blair frowns. "It's all well and good for you to read that sort of thing, but we both know you'd have no appreciation for Dickinson or Woolf or Keats –"
"Why, because of the job I do?" he asks. "Because I have a good deal less money then you do, and my name never made the society papers? I had the same education you had, even though I still ended up working for your husband."
Blair still ended up a housewife, though hadn't that been her aim all along? "What did you mean," she says, "when you told me my husband hired you as a joke?"
"We never liked each other much," he says. "I think it amused him to give me a job."
Her brow furrows. "I don't understand why you would choose to be employed here, in that case."
He shrugs a shoulder. "I said it was a joke to him. I don't feel shame over what I do."
For some reason she thinks he might be lying, but she doesn't press it. That afternoon while he's working she leaves her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover for him, with her own note.
I contend, Mr. Humphrey, that good literature can be filthy after all.
Her hand had shook a little as she wrote, but the letters look fine on the page.
Dorota is insistent about Blair getting out of the house once in a while, so she puts herself together in one of her nicest day dresses and goes to the library.
Blair was always the sort to read the books everyone said should be read, so she had, in many ways, lost track of her own taste. When she was much younger, she'd liked things that were sweeping and romantic, with lots of descriptions of dresses, but now she's after something more melancholy.
It's his jacket she sees first, the red standing out amidst the gray and brown of the little town library. She steps up beside him, pretending to read the spines of books on the shelves.
"Is reading all you do, Mr. Humphrey?"
"When I'm not working, Ms. Waldorf," he says. He betrays no surprise at seeing her, which rather puts Blair out, as she'd been hoping to catch him off guard. "Is reading all you do?"
"I suppose so." Firmly, she says, "I'm trying to keep my mind active."
"It can be a nice escape," he offers. "If life is not quite fulfilling all its promises."
It feels pointed, but she tells herself there's no way he could know so much about her. "Is that the case for you? Are you unhappy, Mr. Humphrey?"
The smile he gives her is wry. "I'm not exactly overjoyed," he says.
It almost wrestles a smile out of her, too. "Let me see what you've got there," she says, reaching for the books already in his hands. He almost starts to turn away to prevent her reaching them, but Blair gets the books before he does so. She sees almost immediately that each on is by an author she named to him the other day. He seems embarrassed, and that makes up for his earlier lack of surprise.
"I thought I might take in a movie this afternoon," she says. She does not invite him, but leaves him to follow her.
They go to see Raintree County, Blair attempting to conceal any excitement she may feel. She'd seen A Place in the Sun while she was in high school and loved it desperately in the way she always loved wild, romantic things like that – a little more than she should. Monty Clift's accident had upset her very much when it occurred and she feels trepidation at the thought of seeing his changed face.
But by the end of the film, that's the least of her worries. She hadn't liked it, had in fact been left profoundly unsettled by it, so unsettled that she doesn't wait for Mr. Humphrey in her desire to rush from the theatre. She presses a hand to her throat, freeing the scarf there, and to her cheeks, wiping away tears. Something about Liz Taylor in that film, something about that spoiled, selfish, mad girl had upset Blair to an impossible degree.
Mr. Humphrey catches up to her. She tries to hide her face from him but he appears not to judge her, merely holding out a handkerchief. "Not a fan, I take it," he says.
"I much –" Blair takes a breath. "I much preferred their other film together."
"I agree," he says. "But I imagine for different reasons."
She looks at him curiously. "Why's that?"
"I don't know, a feeling," he says, glancing at her. "I think your reaction is more personal, and mine more critical."
"Perhaps," Blair says. "Or perhaps you're just acting superior again."
He laughs. "There's nothing wrong with being personal."
Blair doesn't remark upon that, merely handing back the handkerchief. The initials on it are not his own, she notices – J.H. instead of D.H, with a little flower beside it. "Are you married, Mr. Humphrey?"
"You can call me Dan, you know," he says. "No, I'm not married."
"So you just carry ladies' handkerchiefs around in your pocket?"
He laughs again. "It's my sister's, and you're very nosy."
"I suppose I am," she says, privately pleased.
Blair has to take the train back to her rather remote house, but Dan lives here in town, so he offers to walk her to the station. "What scene did you like best?" he asks. "In the other one, their other film."
"Oh," Blair says, "I suppose when they're dancing, before everything's gone wrong. When he tells her he loves her."
"I could have guessed it'd be that," he says, but not meanly.
"Am I so obvious?"
"I don't know," he says. "It seems to me you're a romantic sort of person."
"How can you tell?"
"Well, I'm one too."
"You're also very presumptuous."
"Presumptuous as you are nosy."
They're at the entrance to the train station, and Blair is oddly reluctant to part. "Thursday, then," she says.
She fancies he looks reluctant too. "Thursday, then," he repeats.
Chuck has not been home for two days when Blair hears his key in the door, his footsteps in the hall. She knows them by sound, knows the way he walks. She knows from the dragging of his feet that he is probably drunk. He often comes home drunk, because working with his father is such a trial for him. For some reason today it makes her testy instead of sympathetic. Maybe because she finally admits to herself that he has not been at work for two days.
When he enters the bedroom, Blair does not turn from her vanity to look at him. She asks, "So what was her name?"
"What?" His voice, too, reveals his inebriation. If she were any closer, she could probably smell the liquor.
"Your girl," Blair says. "Your girl in the city. I know you've got one. I'm not stupid." She brushes her hair slowly, carefully, eyes on her own in the mirror. She wears it shorter than Chuck likes it. She needs to have it set again.
"Don't know what you're talking about," he mumbles.
"Yes you do," she says, annoyed. "I don't mean to bruise your fragile ego, but you're not as adept at hiding it as you think. I haven't forgotten about our honeymoon, you –"
But he must've come closer than she thought, because she feels his hand rough on her upper arm, jerking her around so they're facing one another. "I don't need any nagging from you," he says.
Chuck Bass is the runs in her stockings. He tore apart her perfect little life and she liked that, once.
"Let me go, Chuck," she says quietly.
But he doesn't. "Do you know what I heard?" he says. "I heard you were seen out with a man in town."
Blair freezes. Who could have seen them, in this little poky suburb?
"Apparently he saw you to the train," Chuck says, as if reading her mind. Ah, she thinks; one of the neighbors ratted on her, then. But of course it's always possible Chuck hired someone to watch her, like he hires people to do everything else.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she lies, but she knows it came too late. She used to be better on her feet. "A man asked me for directions, but it was hardly –"
"You're lying," Chuck says, and shakes her. "I know you're lying. Who was he?"
If she gives up Dan then Chuck will fire him and she won't get to see him at all anymore. "I swear, Chuck, it was just some man who asked me directions, that's all."
He releases her so roughly she knocks into the vanity table a little, but she's almost glad to have it to steady her.
He keeps her up all night. This is Chuck's way, generally, to talk and talk and talk things like this out. He punishes her with what she wants, openness and conversation, and twists it into interrogation, robs her of her sleep. He presses her with all kinds of questions, pries into her day: what isn't he doing for her? What doesn't he provide? Hasn't he given her everything she ever asked for? Hasn't he made her the happiest she's ever been? He does all that, and she treats him like this?
By the time morning comes, Blair is so exhausted it's like her skin is going to vibrate right off her body. Chuck goes to work. She sleeps a little but is too wound up to do so properly, so instead she catches up on the local charities she gets involved with sometimes, meets with other women to plan a gala, and arrives back home to find Dan packing up his truck to leave for the day. She had forgotten it was one of his days.
"Ms. Waldorf," he says brightly when he sees her, and he smiles. And for some reason that makes Blair burst into tears.
He seems startles but nevertheless moves forward to comfort her, probably reaching for that same handkerchief. But Blair steps back. "No, I'm fine," she says, "I'm just tired, I'm – thing have been difficult with my husband –"
He doesn't touch her, but he does still hold out the handkerchief, which Blair takes after a minute. "Can I suggest something?"
She dabs underneath her eyes but the sobs are still locked in her throat and she can't swallow them down. "Yes, sure."
"I'm going into the city tonight," he says. "With my sister and some of our friends. Would you like to come? It might help to take your mind off things, you know. A change of scenery… And I could drive you right home, you wouldn't be out too late."
Blair shakes her head a little. "I'm certain I wouldn't fit with your friends."
"Give it a try," he says.
Blair ought to say no, but instead she gets in the car with him.
They run by his house – his mother's house, he says, with some embarrassment – to pick up his younger sister. She's got quite short hair and a lot of eye makeup on. She looks askance at Blair as she climbs into the car, but accepts Dan's explanation of Blair as a friend of his.
Blair thought she might be out of sorts in her navy dress with its full skirt, her gloves and little yellow hat, but she hadn't realized just how out of sorts. The place Dan takes her to is a rather run-down apartment with various hip types spread out lounging or smoking, talking about art and life. They can't be very different in age than her, but she seems twenty years older than them in her sensible dress and heels.
One of the girls, Vanessa, is dressed in a peasant top and skirt, her hair loose and curly. "Bringing your work home with you?" she asks snidely.
Dan just rolls his eyes and takes Blair's coat. "Don't mind her," he says. "She's just tough at first. Not unlike yourself."
"You're not doing yourself any favors making that comparison," Blair says, and he laughs.
She does relax a little, having a drink and arguing with these insipid hipsters, and then Dan takes her out on the tiny fire escape to have a cigarette.
"Will your husband be angry that you're out?" he asks evenly.
"Oh, of course," Blair says. "But I doubt he'll know. I can't imagine he'll be home tonight."
More hesitant, "Because you had a fight?"
Blair looks at him. She takes a slow drag. "In a manner of speaking."
Dan tilts his head. "What does that mean?"
She shrugs, and her gaze slides away to the street below. The pavement is wet with earlier rain, crowded with trash. "I really loved him," she says. "I loved him so much I couldn't breathe." There is a slow pause. "It's hard to remember why."
Silence stretches between them, Blair beginning to feel she's said too much, but then Dan flicks some ash away and asks, "Are you going to leave him?"
Blair blinks at him. "Excuse me?"
He won't meet her eyes. "I thought, maybe –"
"Whatever you're thinking is completely, utterly wrong," Blair says, ignoring the note of desperation in her own voice. She leaves him out there, climbing back through the window and hardly noticing when her skirt snags and tears.
She gets a cab to Serena's apartment and spends the night there.
Blair fears Dan will give his notice, though she rationalizes that there would be no reason for him to – nothing passed between them except assumptions. Nothing more than that. However, he continues to arrive and do his work, and Blair continues to watch him from her bedroom window.
A week of silence between them passes. Then she discovers he had left her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the kitchen, with a note scrawled right on the title page. I am indeed presumptuous, it reads. Please forgive me.
Something catches in her throat at the words.
The next time he's there, she leaves her little tower and goes down to meet him, all the way across the considerable length of lawn to the edges of the property where there are mostly trees. He's raking up all the brown and yellow and red leaves, creating a large dead pile of them.
"Do you remember the scene?" she asks, "From A Place in the Sun?"
"Jesus." He starts, hand on his chest. "You're real quiet, anyone ever tell you that?" It's flippant, but the look in his eyes is worried.
"It starts with dancing," Blair reminds him. "And Elizabeth Taylor asks if he's happy."
It was on television recently, so perhaps he watched it. Blair had, thinking of him the entire time.
"He says he's got a secret, or something," Dan says, taking off his work gloves. "No; he's holding something back."
"Yes," Blair says. "And he tells her what it is."
Dan looks at her for a long moment, maybe wondering what game she's playing. But she truly isn't playing one at all, for once.
"Blair," he says.
She wants to hear him say it because she can see it on his face, ridiculous as it is for him to feel that for her, to feel anything.
"You'd better tell me," she says gently. Her hand sets lightly on his, and his first finger moves slightly to cover hers. "Dan ¬¬–"
He pulls her to him, against his chest. Blair looks up into his thin, handsome face, his features telegraphing so much confusion. "I'm not in the habit of making love to married women," he says.
"Perhaps you ought to be," Blair says, before she tilts up and kisses him on the mouth.
Anyone could see them here, anyone could tattle on her – but Blair finds she just can't find it within herself to care. She just wants, wants him, lays down in the leaves with him and hears them crunch with every move. She makes love to the gardener at the edge of her property, the stars scattered above her and bursting within her, under her skin.
She and Dan are in her marriage bed, naked among rumpled peach sheets that she bought during her second renovation of the house. It's the most obvious, dangerous place she could have him, and somehow the safest too. Her castle is a prison too, keeping everyone out as much as it keeps her in, and it's the least likely place for them to be discovered.
It is properly winter now. There is snow on the ground, frosting the windows, and she shivers a little in bed, curling closer to Dan.
"I was glad, when it happened," she's saying, her voice hushed. "I felt so ashamed, but I was. It wasn't that – I didn't want it to die, I just –" Her cheek rests on his chest and her fist clenches, unclenches against his ribs. "I just didn't want to have it either."
He's quiet, his fingers running through her hair. "I'm sorry that had to happen to you," he says.
She pushes up to look at him. "You don't think I'm awful?"
"No," he says. He kisses her cheek, her closed eye, her brow. "I know how difficult it can be, for women."
It would have been enough for her to have him listen, since no one ever does, but his understanding means a lot besides.
"Have you thought about what I asked?"
Blair sighs, turning away a little. "I've told you I can't."
His lips brush against her neck. "I know it'll be hard," he says. "And not what you're used to. I can't – I couldn't give you a house like this, or anything. But I would do everything I could to make you happy, that's all I want."
Blair has been wondering lately what that would be like – to not be given things, but to take them. She used to have no qualms about that. She thinks perhaps she was aiming too low.
"I'll think about it," she allows, voice quiet, and Dan kisses her like that's victory enough.
"Chuck," she asks, twisting her wedding ring around her finger, "Do you remember when you said you loved me?"
He glances up from his paper, looking at her warily across the breakfast table. He still expects the worst from her, she can tell; he expects this to be some act of manipulation, but she's just after the truth. "Yes. Of course."
"It was before I was going to marry Nate," she says. "Almost right before."
"Yes," he says.
"And I wondered why then," she says. "I mean, it was very nearly settled. I had been trying on dresses. I had been picking colors. It was so close, and right at the very last moment you told me, so I left all of that behind."
He gives her a curious, suspicious look. "Do you regret it?"
Yes and no, she thinks. "I was just wondering why."
"I knew I was going to lose you unless I did something," he says, a suitably romantic answer.
Except.
Except Blair has begun to think, lately, about always being in danger of being lost. She was lost when her father died. She was lost when she lost her baby, and felt such shame over her relief. She was lost each time Chuck went to other women and she was lost the first time he grabbed her so hard it left bruises.
"Thank you, dear," she says. "I was just wondering."
It's a silly thing to do – the ring is so very expensive, and beautiful too, and it would be a better metaphor to throw it off a bridge – but Blair still slides her wedding ring off and drops it into the toilet, then flushes.
Blair leaves in the middle of the afternoon. She leaves behind more than she anticipated, but as she was packing so much of it began to feel meaningless, superfluous. It's difficult to pack when you don't know quite what you're packing for. So she only takes what is absolutely necessary and leaves behind the rest for Chuck. For someone Chuck will hire to pack it away. Dan still makes fun of her for how many suitcases she makes him load into his truck.
She watches the house in the rearview mirror until it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the houses on the long block. Then she doesn't look back at all, reaching over to thread her fingers through Dan's.
Blair, Dan, some Chuck. 5305 words.
W: depression, abusive relationship, mentions of suicide and miscarriage
1950s AU.
For
lookinglassgirl!!Summary: Blair marries in June of nineteen fifty-six, right after Grace Kelly becomes a princess. She does not marry a prince.
Note: I've had the idea for this fic forever but couldn't make myself get it down until now, for whatever reason. I was never quite able to get over the image of Blair being all sad housewife in a big fluffy Betty Draper dress and Dan as her Ginsberg-reading, Buddy-Holly-glasses-wearing gardener. Very loosely inspired by Far From Heaven. Also I know I fell behind in prompts and stuff, but only because I got so distracted with this, lol. I'll catch up though!
Blair marries in June of nineteen fifty-six, right after Grace Kelly becomes a princess. She's twenty years old. Grace Kelly was twenty-seven. Blair does not marry a prince; she marries an exciting, unsuitable man with buckets of money. He puts her up in a beautiful house and calls it a castle.
The first year of their marriage is spent traveling. Blair is blissfully happy, except for all that business at the Hôtel Royal Barrière with that maid – but Blair isn't going to waste her thoughts on that, considering Chuck was really very sorry. Their time abroad is some of the most invigorating in Blair's memory, for Chuck is like no one else she knows, tempestuous and unpredictable, and he lavishes money on her like he thinks it will never run out. And she doubts it ever will.
They settle back in New York eventually, in that house he calls a castle. Chuck maintains an apartment in the city in addition to the house. He needs to, for business. Blair had been under the impression that they would both remain in the city after their marriage, but apparently she had been mistaken.
Her mother is making her look at paint swatches for the nursery when they get word that her father has been found dead in a hotel room, alone and shot in the head.
Blair is at the kitchen window looking out into the backyard, where the last gasp heat of August has already begun to leech moisture from the leaves. She has nothing to do. Blair is not the person who cooks or cleans, they have Dorota for that, and she's already decorated the entire house twice over. She has no hobbies. Her entire school career had been so focused on grades and getting ahead that she hadn't really thought to develop any. It feels childish to flip through movie star magazines and tear out the pictures she likes, and that was how she always spent most of her brief, cherished leisure time as a girl.
She watches the gardener at his work outside. He's new. Blair hadn't been the one who hired him. He's her age, or around it, and she hasn't been able to get a good look at his face yet. His back has been to her this entire time. She can tell he's slightly built, with dark hair that just barely curls. He's got on a light blue shirt, very nearly bone-white in the sunshine, and the sleeves are rolled up. It sticks to his back a little, right along his spine.
Blair drifts out into the backyard. The sun is pleasant on her cold skin, melting the cobwebs the big, dim house seems to leave on her mood. Her crinoline petticoat brushes scratchily against her legs, even with the stockings. It took her so long after the funeral to get back into her usual dresses; at the time she'd missed them but now she misses her nightgowns and housecoats, misses curling up beneath her blankets.
It's childish. The time for grief has passed, or so she keeps reminding herself.
"Alright there, Ms. Waldorf?"
Blair starts, raising her wide-with-surprise eyes to meet those of the gardener, dark behind his black-framed glasses. He has gloves on, and dirt freckles his bare forearms. She knows she ought to reprimand him, and she would have in the past, but what comes out of her mouth is, "How did you –?"
"We went to school together," he says. "Sort of. I take it you don't remember me."
Her brows draw together slightly. "You mean you were at school with my husband."
His head tilts in assent. "I was there on scholarship."
She's sure she doesn't imagine the hint of bitterness there. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I've forgotten your name…"
Definite bitterness there in the line of his mouth, his lips that press together tightly for a moment. "Dan Humphrey, Ms. Waldorf."
He pulls off a glove to shake her hand. His is very warm, damp with the perspiration that also casts a sheen on his forehead. Blair swallows. "It's Mrs. Bass," she says, more archly than she means to. "Or ma'am, if you prefer."
"Oh, I don't know," he says, moving back towards his work, away from her. "I like the old name just fine."
Blair watches him go, privately just appalled.
Chuck hires people to do everything.
The nursery had hardly been put together before it had to be taken apart, but neither of them had been the ones to do it. Someone Chuck hired packs up the baby clothes and dismantles the cradle, peels off the wallpaper and paints the room a blank off-white. It is a guest room once again, startlingly and suddenly bare of all its meaning.
Blair never liked that room.
She was supposed to get as much rest as she could following the incident, especially as it came so quick on the heels of her father's death. And though she did rest, it was always without sleep; she was simply stationary, sedentary, listless. She would catch a few minutes or hours each night, but always woke before her alarm was set to go off. Then she would lie there, counting the minutes until its shrill ring would pierce the gentle morning. Sometimes her husband was beside her, but mostly he was not; that's how it always is.
There is a crack down the ceiling of their bedroom that Blair keeps meaning to have fixed. It hangs directly over her bed, all metaphor.
The gardener takes his lunch promptly at one. Blair wouldn't mind supplying it like she does for any other worker who comes by the house, but he never asks; instead he sits in a corner of the garden and eats a sandwich he's brought with him while he reads a book. Blair doesn't mean to watch him do this, it's just that her bedroom window overlooks the spot that he favors, and Blair doesn't have much to look at generally, unless she chooses to rot her brain in front of the television.
As September becomes October, a predatory winter chill enters the air. The gardener has added a light flannel jacket over his customary work shirts, very red against the greenery going autumn gold.
She brings him out a cup of coffee one day. He looks up at her from his spot on the ground not with surprise, exactly – more a sort of confusion, threaded through with something sardonic. Blair finds herself nearly stammering for an excuse, settling on an arch, "It's just I didn't want you freezing to death in my yard."
A slight smile crosses his face then, beneath those heavy glasses and messy dark curls. "I'm not sure it's that bad out here yet, ma'am."
The way he says ma'am is mocking; it makes her bristle.
"What are you reading?" she asks.
He gets to his feet, brushing off his clothes a little before he gives her the book, a very small text with a black and white cover. As soon as she reads the title, Howl, Blair nearly drops it as though burned. He has the gall to laugh.
"It's just a book," he says. "Perhaps you'd even like it, if you read it."
"I prefer poetry that isn't filthy," she says haughtily.
"All good poetry's filthy," he answers easily. "Even the pretty kind that rhymes."
"I just can't imagine you at school with my husband," she says. "He never said."
"I suppose he thinks it's something of a joke," he remarks, but then remembers the propriety that's been lacking in him all this time, "If you'll forgive me for saying so."
Blair doesn't quite understand what he means. "Well…" she says. "I have things to attend to. Please do bring the cup in when you're finished."
Much later, after he has left for the day, Blair goes into the kitchen to find the mug sitting on the counter beside his book. Breath seeming caught in her chest, she picks up the slim volume. A note is sticking out from amongst its pages, which she removes to read.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts, Ms. Waldorf.
His penmanship is blocky and harried, and the note is scrawled on a torn-out sheet of notepaper. Blair looks at it for a long time before she crumples it in her fist and throws it out.
Blair has a college degree. Blair was always top of her class. She was a charming presence at parties, and she always threw the best ones, coordinated to the absolute last detail. She was always the most responsible person in any room and as much as that could be a curse, it was also who she was. She was in control of her world, even if now she realizes the span of her world was not very big at all.
Now she cannot even be trusted to make herself toast, or entertain her mind for longer than a few minutes.
Her friends are all in the city still, even the other married girls; they all have their apartments for a year or so as is customary until they have children. Chuck is almost always in the city too, at that job he took with his father that she never expected him to take. Blair used to go in more often herself, for shopping or lunches, but the train ride seems so exhausting now.
She calls Chuck, standing in the dim foyer with the deep red rug at her feet, both hands curled around the phone, dressed and waiting for him. "Darling, it's already half past seven, are you –"
"I have a dinner meeting tonight, you understand," he says, voice low over the phone.
"You didn't say," she says.
"I must have forgotten." Tossed off so easily. "I'll be home tomorrow."
Blair has barely said another word before she is greeted by the spiraling dial tone, which she listens to a minute too long only because she's taken aback by the brusqueness. That night she won't eat dinner and in the morning she'll have too much of her breakfast.
The gardener comes three times a week.
Blair has had to confess to herself that she hadn't entirely forgotten him from school. She hadn't known his name, of course, but there was a reason his face was so familiar to her. She had to pull out Chuck's old yearbook to really make the connection: that same angular face but without the glasses, hair much shorter and neater, expression less sarcastic. She thinks he might have gone out with Serena once or twice – but then again, who hadn't?
She has made all sorts of annotations in that book he lent her, neatly printed and in red, like how she used to make notes when she was in school. He flips through it when she hands it back, seeming amused, and then tucks it into his jacket.
"Did you come to like it?" he asks.
"I'm not sure," she says. "Appreciate it in parts, perhaps, but I found the language overly complicated and unnecessarily vulgar."
He smiles at her. "All those notes and you've still boiled it down to 'filthy,' huh?"
Blair frowns. "It's all well and good for you to read that sort of thing, but we both know you'd have no appreciation for Dickinson or Woolf or Keats –"
"Why, because of the job I do?" he asks. "Because I have a good deal less money then you do, and my name never made the society papers? I had the same education you had, even though I still ended up working for your husband."
Blair still ended up a housewife, though hadn't that been her aim all along? "What did you mean," she says, "when you told me my husband hired you as a joke?"
"We never liked each other much," he says. "I think it amused him to give me a job."
Her brow furrows. "I don't understand why you would choose to be employed here, in that case."
He shrugs a shoulder. "I said it was a joke to him. I don't feel shame over what I do."
For some reason she thinks he might be lying, but she doesn't press it. That afternoon while he's working she leaves her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover for him, with her own note.
I contend, Mr. Humphrey, that good literature can be filthy after all.
Her hand had shook a little as she wrote, but the letters look fine on the page.
Dorota is insistent about Blair getting out of the house once in a while, so she puts herself together in one of her nicest day dresses and goes to the library.
Blair was always the sort to read the books everyone said should be read, so she had, in many ways, lost track of her own taste. When she was much younger, she'd liked things that were sweeping and romantic, with lots of descriptions of dresses, but now she's after something more melancholy.
It's his jacket she sees first, the red standing out amidst the gray and brown of the little town library. She steps up beside him, pretending to read the spines of books on the shelves.
"Is reading all you do, Mr. Humphrey?"
"When I'm not working, Ms. Waldorf," he says. He betrays no surprise at seeing her, which rather puts Blair out, as she'd been hoping to catch him off guard. "Is reading all you do?"
"I suppose so." Firmly, she says, "I'm trying to keep my mind active."
"It can be a nice escape," he offers. "If life is not quite fulfilling all its promises."
It feels pointed, but she tells herself there's no way he could know so much about her. "Is that the case for you? Are you unhappy, Mr. Humphrey?"
The smile he gives her is wry. "I'm not exactly overjoyed," he says.
It almost wrestles a smile out of her, too. "Let me see what you've got there," she says, reaching for the books already in his hands. He almost starts to turn away to prevent her reaching them, but Blair gets the books before he does so. She sees almost immediately that each on is by an author she named to him the other day. He seems embarrassed, and that makes up for his earlier lack of surprise.
"I thought I might take in a movie this afternoon," she says. She does not invite him, but leaves him to follow her.
They go to see Raintree County, Blair attempting to conceal any excitement she may feel. She'd seen A Place in the Sun while she was in high school and loved it desperately in the way she always loved wild, romantic things like that – a little more than she should. Monty Clift's accident had upset her very much when it occurred and she feels trepidation at the thought of seeing his changed face.
But by the end of the film, that's the least of her worries. She hadn't liked it, had in fact been left profoundly unsettled by it, so unsettled that she doesn't wait for Mr. Humphrey in her desire to rush from the theatre. She presses a hand to her throat, freeing the scarf there, and to her cheeks, wiping away tears. Something about Liz Taylor in that film, something about that spoiled, selfish, mad girl had upset Blair to an impossible degree.
Mr. Humphrey catches up to her. She tries to hide her face from him but he appears not to judge her, merely holding out a handkerchief. "Not a fan, I take it," he says.
"I much –" Blair takes a breath. "I much preferred their other film together."
"I agree," he says. "But I imagine for different reasons."
She looks at him curiously. "Why's that?"
"I don't know, a feeling," he says, glancing at her. "I think your reaction is more personal, and mine more critical."
"Perhaps," Blair says. "Or perhaps you're just acting superior again."
He laughs. "There's nothing wrong with being personal."
Blair doesn't remark upon that, merely handing back the handkerchief. The initials on it are not his own, she notices – J.H. instead of D.H, with a little flower beside it. "Are you married, Mr. Humphrey?"
"You can call me Dan, you know," he says. "No, I'm not married."
"So you just carry ladies' handkerchiefs around in your pocket?"
He laughs again. "It's my sister's, and you're very nosy."
"I suppose I am," she says, privately pleased.
Blair has to take the train back to her rather remote house, but Dan lives here in town, so he offers to walk her to the station. "What scene did you like best?" he asks. "In the other one, their other film."
"Oh," Blair says, "I suppose when they're dancing, before everything's gone wrong. When he tells her he loves her."
"I could have guessed it'd be that," he says, but not meanly.
"Am I so obvious?"
"I don't know," he says. "It seems to me you're a romantic sort of person."
"How can you tell?"
"Well, I'm one too."
"You're also very presumptuous."
"Presumptuous as you are nosy."
They're at the entrance to the train station, and Blair is oddly reluctant to part. "Thursday, then," she says.
She fancies he looks reluctant too. "Thursday, then," he repeats.
Chuck has not been home for two days when Blair hears his key in the door, his footsteps in the hall. She knows them by sound, knows the way he walks. She knows from the dragging of his feet that he is probably drunk. He often comes home drunk, because working with his father is such a trial for him. For some reason today it makes her testy instead of sympathetic. Maybe because she finally admits to herself that he has not been at work for two days.
When he enters the bedroom, Blair does not turn from her vanity to look at him. She asks, "So what was her name?"
"What?" His voice, too, reveals his inebriation. If she were any closer, she could probably smell the liquor.
"Your girl," Blair says. "Your girl in the city. I know you've got one. I'm not stupid." She brushes her hair slowly, carefully, eyes on her own in the mirror. She wears it shorter than Chuck likes it. She needs to have it set again.
"Don't know what you're talking about," he mumbles.
"Yes you do," she says, annoyed. "I don't mean to bruise your fragile ego, but you're not as adept at hiding it as you think. I haven't forgotten about our honeymoon, you –"
But he must've come closer than she thought, because she feels his hand rough on her upper arm, jerking her around so they're facing one another. "I don't need any nagging from you," he says.
Chuck Bass is the runs in her stockings. He tore apart her perfect little life and she liked that, once.
"Let me go, Chuck," she says quietly.
But he doesn't. "Do you know what I heard?" he says. "I heard you were seen out with a man in town."
Blair freezes. Who could have seen them, in this little poky suburb?
"Apparently he saw you to the train," Chuck says, as if reading her mind. Ah, she thinks; one of the neighbors ratted on her, then. But of course it's always possible Chuck hired someone to watch her, like he hires people to do everything else.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she lies, but she knows it came too late. She used to be better on her feet. "A man asked me for directions, but it was hardly –"
"You're lying," Chuck says, and shakes her. "I know you're lying. Who was he?"
If she gives up Dan then Chuck will fire him and she won't get to see him at all anymore. "I swear, Chuck, it was just some man who asked me directions, that's all."
He releases her so roughly she knocks into the vanity table a little, but she's almost glad to have it to steady her.
He keeps her up all night. This is Chuck's way, generally, to talk and talk and talk things like this out. He punishes her with what she wants, openness and conversation, and twists it into interrogation, robs her of her sleep. He presses her with all kinds of questions, pries into her day: what isn't he doing for her? What doesn't he provide? Hasn't he given her everything she ever asked for? Hasn't he made her the happiest she's ever been? He does all that, and she treats him like this?
By the time morning comes, Blair is so exhausted it's like her skin is going to vibrate right off her body. Chuck goes to work. She sleeps a little but is too wound up to do so properly, so instead she catches up on the local charities she gets involved with sometimes, meets with other women to plan a gala, and arrives back home to find Dan packing up his truck to leave for the day. She had forgotten it was one of his days.
"Ms. Waldorf," he says brightly when he sees her, and he smiles. And for some reason that makes Blair burst into tears.
He seems startles but nevertheless moves forward to comfort her, probably reaching for that same handkerchief. But Blair steps back. "No, I'm fine," she says, "I'm just tired, I'm – thing have been difficult with my husband –"
He doesn't touch her, but he does still hold out the handkerchief, which Blair takes after a minute. "Can I suggest something?"
She dabs underneath her eyes but the sobs are still locked in her throat and she can't swallow them down. "Yes, sure."
"I'm going into the city tonight," he says. "With my sister and some of our friends. Would you like to come? It might help to take your mind off things, you know. A change of scenery… And I could drive you right home, you wouldn't be out too late."
Blair shakes her head a little. "I'm certain I wouldn't fit with your friends."
"Give it a try," he says.
Blair ought to say no, but instead she gets in the car with him.
They run by his house – his mother's house, he says, with some embarrassment – to pick up his younger sister. She's got quite short hair and a lot of eye makeup on. She looks askance at Blair as she climbs into the car, but accepts Dan's explanation of Blair as a friend of his.
Blair thought she might be out of sorts in her navy dress with its full skirt, her gloves and little yellow hat, but she hadn't realized just how out of sorts. The place Dan takes her to is a rather run-down apartment with various hip types spread out lounging or smoking, talking about art and life. They can't be very different in age than her, but she seems twenty years older than them in her sensible dress and heels.
One of the girls, Vanessa, is dressed in a peasant top and skirt, her hair loose and curly. "Bringing your work home with you?" she asks snidely.
Dan just rolls his eyes and takes Blair's coat. "Don't mind her," he says. "She's just tough at first. Not unlike yourself."
"You're not doing yourself any favors making that comparison," Blair says, and he laughs.
She does relax a little, having a drink and arguing with these insipid hipsters, and then Dan takes her out on the tiny fire escape to have a cigarette.
"Will your husband be angry that you're out?" he asks evenly.
"Oh, of course," Blair says. "But I doubt he'll know. I can't imagine he'll be home tonight."
More hesitant, "Because you had a fight?"
Blair looks at him. She takes a slow drag. "In a manner of speaking."
Dan tilts his head. "What does that mean?"
She shrugs, and her gaze slides away to the street below. The pavement is wet with earlier rain, crowded with trash. "I really loved him," she says. "I loved him so much I couldn't breathe." There is a slow pause. "It's hard to remember why."
Silence stretches between them, Blair beginning to feel she's said too much, but then Dan flicks some ash away and asks, "Are you going to leave him?"
Blair blinks at him. "Excuse me?"
He won't meet her eyes. "I thought, maybe –"
"Whatever you're thinking is completely, utterly wrong," Blair says, ignoring the note of desperation in her own voice. She leaves him out there, climbing back through the window and hardly noticing when her skirt snags and tears.
She gets a cab to Serena's apartment and spends the night there.
Blair fears Dan will give his notice, though she rationalizes that there would be no reason for him to – nothing passed between them except assumptions. Nothing more than that. However, he continues to arrive and do his work, and Blair continues to watch him from her bedroom window.
A week of silence between them passes. Then she discovers he had left her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the kitchen, with a note scrawled right on the title page. I am indeed presumptuous, it reads. Please forgive me.
Something catches in her throat at the words.
The next time he's there, she leaves her little tower and goes down to meet him, all the way across the considerable length of lawn to the edges of the property where there are mostly trees. He's raking up all the brown and yellow and red leaves, creating a large dead pile of them.
"Do you remember the scene?" she asks, "From A Place in the Sun?"
"Jesus." He starts, hand on his chest. "You're real quiet, anyone ever tell you that?" It's flippant, but the look in his eyes is worried.
"It starts with dancing," Blair reminds him. "And Elizabeth Taylor asks if he's happy."
It was on television recently, so perhaps he watched it. Blair had, thinking of him the entire time.
"He says he's got a secret, or something," Dan says, taking off his work gloves. "No; he's holding something back."
"Yes," Blair says. "And he tells her what it is."
Dan looks at her for a long moment, maybe wondering what game she's playing. But she truly isn't playing one at all, for once.
"Blair," he says.
She wants to hear him say it because she can see it on his face, ridiculous as it is for him to feel that for her, to feel anything.
"You'd better tell me," she says gently. Her hand sets lightly on his, and his first finger moves slightly to cover hers. "Dan ¬¬–"
He pulls her to him, against his chest. Blair looks up into his thin, handsome face, his features telegraphing so much confusion. "I'm not in the habit of making love to married women," he says.
"Perhaps you ought to be," Blair says, before she tilts up and kisses him on the mouth.
Anyone could see them here, anyone could tattle on her – but Blair finds she just can't find it within herself to care. She just wants, wants him, lays down in the leaves with him and hears them crunch with every move. She makes love to the gardener at the edge of her property, the stars scattered above her and bursting within her, under her skin.
She and Dan are in her marriage bed, naked among rumpled peach sheets that she bought during her second renovation of the house. It's the most obvious, dangerous place she could have him, and somehow the safest too. Her castle is a prison too, keeping everyone out as much as it keeps her in, and it's the least likely place for them to be discovered.
It is properly winter now. There is snow on the ground, frosting the windows, and she shivers a little in bed, curling closer to Dan.
"I was glad, when it happened," she's saying, her voice hushed. "I felt so ashamed, but I was. It wasn't that – I didn't want it to die, I just –" Her cheek rests on his chest and her fist clenches, unclenches against his ribs. "I just didn't want to have it either."
He's quiet, his fingers running through her hair. "I'm sorry that had to happen to you," he says.
She pushes up to look at him. "You don't think I'm awful?"
"No," he says. He kisses her cheek, her closed eye, her brow. "I know how difficult it can be, for women."
It would have been enough for her to have him listen, since no one ever does, but his understanding means a lot besides.
"Have you thought about what I asked?"
Blair sighs, turning away a little. "I've told you I can't."
His lips brush against her neck. "I know it'll be hard," he says. "And not what you're used to. I can't – I couldn't give you a house like this, or anything. But I would do everything I could to make you happy, that's all I want."
Blair has been wondering lately what that would be like – to not be given things, but to take them. She used to have no qualms about that. She thinks perhaps she was aiming too low.
"I'll think about it," she allows, voice quiet, and Dan kisses her like that's victory enough.
"Chuck," she asks, twisting her wedding ring around her finger, "Do you remember when you said you loved me?"
He glances up from his paper, looking at her warily across the breakfast table. He still expects the worst from her, she can tell; he expects this to be some act of manipulation, but she's just after the truth. "Yes. Of course."
"It was before I was going to marry Nate," she says. "Almost right before."
"Yes," he says.
"And I wondered why then," she says. "I mean, it was very nearly settled. I had been trying on dresses. I had been picking colors. It was so close, and right at the very last moment you told me, so I left all of that behind."
He gives her a curious, suspicious look. "Do you regret it?"
Yes and no, she thinks. "I was just wondering why."
"I knew I was going to lose you unless I did something," he says, a suitably romantic answer.
Except.
Except Blair has begun to think, lately, about always being in danger of being lost. She was lost when her father died. She was lost when she lost her baby, and felt such shame over her relief. She was lost each time Chuck went to other women and she was lost the first time he grabbed her so hard it left bruises.
"Thank you, dear," she says. "I was just wondering."
It's a silly thing to do – the ring is so very expensive, and beautiful too, and it would be a better metaphor to throw it off a bridge – but Blair still slides her wedding ring off and drops it into the toilet, then flushes.
Blair leaves in the middle of the afternoon. She leaves behind more than she anticipated, but as she was packing so much of it began to feel meaningless, superfluous. It's difficult to pack when you don't know quite what you're packing for. So she only takes what is absolutely necessary and leaves behind the rest for Chuck. For someone Chuck will hire to pack it away. Dan still makes fun of her for how many suitcases she makes him load into his truck.
She watches the house in the rearview mirror until it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the houses on the long block. Then she doesn't look back at all, reaching over to thread her fingers through Dan's.