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Knocking at the door of the Sudden Valley model home to pick up his son, George Michael, for their weekly lunch, Michael Bluth was greeted by his son’s longtime friend and — it was a long story — former cousin, Maeby Fünke.
“Hey, Maeby! What are you doing here?”
“Hey, Michael,” she said cheerfully, ignoring his question. “You looking for George Michael? He’s in our— his room. Probably changing his khakis or something.” She opened the door wider and wandered into the kitchen without looking back at him; he decided that was the best cue he’d get to follow her inside. “Want a soda?”
As he was accepting a can of soda from her, Michael caught a glimmer of gold on his not-exactly-niece’s left ring finger. He stared at it for a moment, then drew out the words: “Are you engaged to my son?”
“Uh, no?” She looked at him with masterful perplexity. “I thought left-handed people wore their engagement rings on their right hand. Didn’t you do that when you were married to your ex-wife?”
“My late wife, and no, I did not do that. Also, men don’t wear engagement rings.”
“Your wedding ring, then.” Maeby glanced at Michael’s hands but found them both bare. Michael no longer wore his wedding ring, though he sometimes felt the hollow ghost of it on his left ring finger. Still he was grateful that he’d ever felt that kind of love, long ago as it was. Love was generally a stranger to the Bluth family, or so he’d always thought. But he was beginning to suspect that it had found its way again through the broken windows of the model home.
Just then, George Michael appeared in a freshly pressed pair of khakis and a striped polo shirt. He greeted his father with an awkward but sincere hug, and Michael could almost swear that Maeby was rushing them both out the door, just as if she lived there.
***
Maeby was lying on the couch that night, her feet on his lap, scanning a film script. “I almost got caught today,” she remarked.
He looked up from his laptop, which was resting on her legs. “Your dad saw my ring.”
Their days of furtive kisses and sickly secrecy were long past, as were their illegal and inadvisable business schemes. He let them keep this one secret, though, if only temporarily, because he suspected she missed the thrill.
“Did he recognize it?” George Michael looked up with a sense of alarm that was both disproportionate and slightly misplaced. “I told you you shouldn’t have stolen it from Lindsay.”
“I didn’t steal it from Lindsay. I got it off Buster’s hook. He had stolen it from Lindsay, I think.”
“I could have bought you one, you know. I wanted to buy you one.”
“You can’t afford it, babe.” She brushed her finger against his own left hand, as if in anticipation that it would not be bare for long. “Besides, stealing is a time-honored Bluth family tradition.”
“Yeah, I thought we were trying to dispose of those. You know, to be as un-Bluth-like as possible. With the stealing and the lying, and the fraud, and the embezzlement.”
For so long, wanting him had been the biggest risk she could take, the greatest thrill she could pursue. But now that she could be with him freely, he was so safe, so comfortable, that she turned outward, reignited her life, set the world on fire and gave him her hand as they watched it all aglow.
“Oh, George Michael,” she sighed facetiously. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
“No, Mae, I do.” He picked up her jest delicately, like glass in his hands, as if it had been as earnest as his own reply. Oh, did he know her! He’d known her, wanted to know her, known that he wanted her, since they were thirteen. He knew her laugh, her coffee order, her criminal record, every one of her freckles. He knew her at times better than he knew himself. The problem, actually, had been that he’d known her too well. He had tried to get over her — experiments with older women and double lives and matador pants — but he was not suited for duplicity of his own, only for hers. Pretending that they wanted anyone besides each other was a tragicomic exercise in futility, one that they had finally decided bore no more repeating. All these things he’d already told her many times, but he said them again, just to be sure.
***
Michael, of course, was not easily fooled, but he did not say anything the next week, nor the week after, not until a month later, when George Michael and Maeby had gathered the Bluths and Fünkes around in their model home.
“I knew it!” Gloating, Michael always thought, was beneath him, but he had had a hard week at work and felt he deserved it. “I saw the ring.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?” Maeby asked innocently.
“I very much did. You made up something about left-handed people wearing their rings on the opposite hand. Which I disputed.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“Wait, Maeby’s a leftie?” Lindsay asked. “How did I not know that?”
“I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t,” Maeby commented, “or else you might’ve seen the ring.”
“What ring?” For the first time in her life, Lindsay looked attentively at her daughter’s left hand. “Hey, you stole my ring!” Indignant, Lindsay turned to her youngest brother. “Did you know this?”
“Yeah, actually, I’m pretty sure she stole the ring from me first,” said Buster meekly. “GOB left it with me after a magic trick.”
“An illusion, Buster,” said GOB, who was dozing off on the couch, “and leave me out of this.”
Lindsay turned among her siblings as if looking for an ally. “Did any of you know about this?”
“I noticed the first day I met her,” said George Michael softly. “She was kind of tapping her fingers, waiting for me to make her a frozen banana. And she always makes sure to sit on the leftmost seat at the dining room table,” he remarked. “It’s really cute.”
“I do that too,” Michael said. “Though I don’t think it’s particularly cute.”
Lindsay was shocked again. “Wait, Michael, you’re left-handed too?”
“I think we’re getting off track,” Michael intervened. “Lindsay, do you want your ring back? George Michael, do you need any help buying a new one?”
“Why does everyone keep implying I’m financially insolvent?” George Michael asked with mild indignation.
“Actually, Maeby, I think you should keep the ring.”
“Thanks, Mom. That’s very magnetic of you.” It was indeed one of the most magnanimous acts of Lindsay’s life.
“So, Maeby, are you going to move in with George Michael, then?” At his father’s words, George Michael smiled at Maeby; clearly Michael was not as omniscient in the family as he thought.
“Oh, yeah, soon enough.” George Michael winked at his fiancée. Now it was his turn to pick up a little secrecy, just enough to keep things exciting, not that they could ever be dull with her around.
The Bluths soon dispersed, leaving only the remnants of their inherent chaos in the home of their young progeny. But somehow, George Michael and Maeby both thought, it was a pleasant chaos, more or less.
***
Now it was evening again, and he was looking into her eyes, and kissing her face, and saying things to her like “whatever you want, Buttons,” and gently touching the cool metal on her left hand. And even more incredibly, she was smiling at him, and kissing him back, and twisting her ring in disbelief. She could have thought it overly sentimental — had thought so, in fact, in her teenage years — but it was not so. On the contrary: to love was an act of rebellion, for there was no love in her family, in her past.
She had told him once that love was a lightswitch that she could click on and off. He had looked at her strangely, called it sociopathy, and known, she supposed, that it couldn’t have been entirely true. And now the switch was stuck, so she guessed she would just have to go on loving him. Lying with him in a broken model home, after a visit from her broken family, she thought that there was one thing, at least, that she never wanted repaired.