Ben, Lily, and I were used to the Malabar Show, but I could tell that Jack was impressed. And why wouldn’t he be? He’d just been served sublime appetizers made from creatures plucked from the ocean’s floor hours earlier. Our drinks had been blended with fresh pineapple and lime juice. My mother had even made potato chips.
It occurs to me now that Jack might have noticed the chemistry between my mother and his father that very night had we not become engaged in a serious flirtation of our own. Ripping a page from Malabar’s book, I wore a turquoise-batik bandeau top and matching sarong, not my typical cutoffs and T-shirt. I wasn’t so much competing with my mother as racing alongside her; I wanted to have some of the fun that she always seemed to be having. Ditzy with rum, I felt Jack’s eyes scan my bare midriff and, with his gaze, the tug of some invisible current.
Jack’s voice was sonorous and low, in every way the opposite of his mother’s little scratch. As the evening wore on, Jack became aware of his mother’s frailty. He witnessed her several times having to tug at Ben’s arm to get his attention, and he seemed struck by the change in their dynamic. His father had been hard of hearing for as long as Jack could remember, likely the result of Ben’s love of hunting and consequent lifetime exposure to the concussive energy of gunshots near his ears. Jack hadn’t been home in a couple of years, so he hadn’t observed the progressive toll that these failing body systems—Lily’s voice, Ben’s hearing—were taking on his parents’ ability to communicate.
“Exactly how does this work for you two?” Jack asked.
We had moved on to wine and were now assembled on sofas and chairs in the living room. Malabar was in the kitchen, separated only by a counter, preparing dinner. The pungent fragrance of Cajun spices and sautéed garlic had started to infuse the room.
“It’s not a big problem,” Ben assured him.
“How’s that?” Jack asked.
“Well, for one thing, I took a lip-reading class,” Ben said.
“Seriously?” Jack asked.
“He actually did,” Lily said, though she rolled her eyes. “Your father took a single lip-reading class and when the instructor told him he had natural talent, he understood that to mean he didn’t have to come back.”
Jack shook his head and laughed, a chuckle tinged with cynicism. “Pally, you know you can’t lip-read, right?” he said to his father. “You’ve missed nearly everything Mom’s said tonight.”
The room got strangely congested, quiet.
My mother lifted her cocktail napkin and seemed to wipe the smile off her face. She was pulsating with displeasure at Jack’s interference. I could not lip-read either but I could practically see her thought bubble: Ben hears me just fine.
In an effort to lighten what was becoming a tense moment, I proposed an on-the-spot lip-reading test.
“You’re on,” Ben responded gamely. “I told you she was a peach,” he said to Jack.
I blushed and looked at Jack.
“You were right about that,” Jack replied and winked at me, causing that inner current to pull again, every molecule in my body shifting toward him.
Ben and I rearranged our chairs to face each other while the rest of the group assembled behind him so that they, too, could read my lips.
“Ready?” I asked.
Ben nodded.
How. Are. You? I mouthed with prominent exaggeration.
Jack, Lily, and my mother nodded in unison, indicating they understood my simple sentence.
Ben, however, looked momentarily confused.
Then he grinned wolfishly. “You want me?”
After dinner, I asked if anyone wanted to go on a constitutional. The question was reflexive at this point in my life; there was never a meal with the Southers that didn’t end with my proposing a walk. Tonight, relaxed and a little drunk, I found myself eager to take one, which wasn’t always the case. I wanted to go to the beach and listen to the waves.
“I’m in,” Jack said.
My mother and I looked at each other with surprise. We didn’t have a contingency plan for interlopers. No one had ever wanted to tag along.
“You kids have fun,” Ben said. “Us old fogies will go to bed.”
As soon as we went through the gate, I took Jack’s hand and led him across the island to the ocean-side beach, where a warm breeze, a sky full of stars, and the mesmerizing sound of waves lapping against the shore conspired to create the perfect mood.
My boyfriend, Hank, did not enter my mind as I took this walk with Jack. No, the only thing I was able to focus on was how right everything felt—the warm night, Jack’s hand wrapped around mine, soft sand underfoot. The necklace of torches strung along the curve of the beach. That tingly feeling of anticipation, constellated desire. It was as if I’d been waiting for this exact moment with this exact man.
Was this what people meant when they spoke of fate and destiny? When they described the feeling of some omniscient being operating all the puppet strings and orchestrating everything? No, I thought, and I quieted the voice in my head that suggested that this situation was not of my own making. Sure, it was a coincidence to be falling for Ben’s son, but so what?
Then I kissed Jack and pushed him onto the sand.
* * *
It is impossible for me to revisit this thirty-year-old beach scene without questioning my motives. I do not doubt my attraction to Jack, who was magnetic and smart. But for the balance of my romantic life, I’d never once been the one to make the first move. I’d always responded to suggestion, however subtle—a look, a flirt, a touch—before pursuing a man. But with Jack it was different. From the moment I saw him in the airport, from the moment our hands touched in greeting, I felt myself careering toward him. Jack welcomed my exuberance and reciprocated quickly, but I was the initiator, not him. I fired the first shot across the bow at the airport bar when I put the shrimp into his mouth and felt his lips on my fingertips. Jack didn’t happen to me; I happened to Jack.
* * *
Jack and I would have just two short days together before Hank arrived, and we wasted no time. In a mere forty-eight hours, Jack and I poured the foundation of our relationship, unaware of how an architectural miscalculation in the basement would go on to affect every floor in the years to come. We took runs in the morning, explored the island’s coral reefs by day, and lay on the beach at night, canopied by stars. We added a new dimension to our parents’ love triangle, enmeshing our families further. And although I’m sure I would have insisted otherwise at the time, I knew this was exactly what Malabar wanted.
As the rest of our group arrived in Harbour Island—my step-grandmother, Julia; Charles’s sister and niece; Hannah; Peter and Peter’s girlfriend; and Hank, of course—I came to understand that Malabar was right about yet one more thing: clandestine love was electrifying. Sneaking around upped the pleasure quotient. I’d find myself restrained against a wall one moment, Jack’s warm breath on my neck, his body pressed against mine. Then, at the sound of footsteps—that sweet chance of getting caught—we’d let go of each other, turn in opposite directions, and casually rejoin the group as nonchalantly as if we’d merely been getting something, lip balm or a novel, in our rooms, confident that no one had noticed our absence. We’d sneak touches at every opportunity—knees pressing under the table, fingers caressing in the passing of plates. Like our parents before us, we spoke in a language rich in innuendo. All of it thrilling. Not only was I deceiving Hank, I was outmaneuvering my mother. Truly, I believed I’d out-Malabared Malabar.
Once again, I was wrong.
Fifteen
After the vacation in the Bahamas, I jettisoned Hank, and Jack and I became a couple. We decided to keep our relationship a secret; neither of us wanted to involve our parents until we were surer of how we felt about it ourselves. But that wasn’t the only secret I was keeping. I hadn’t told my new boyfriend that our parents were in love and had been having an affair for years. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tell him.
I wa
s a junior in college and still had a year and a half of school remaining, so Jack and I long-distanced; I took furtive trips to San Diego and he flew to New York City. On Jack’s second visit to Manhattan, we spent the weekend at my father’s West Village apartment while he was out of town doing research for a story.
With Malabar as my role model growing up, perhaps it is not surprising that I’d given a great deal of thought to the first home-cooked meal that I would make for Jack. It would be linguine con vongole, an easy dish rich with flavors that I knew was one of his favorites. Its success depended on the freshness of the ingredients, the quality of the olive oil, and not overcooking the clams. But I also had an ace in the hole, an idea for how to make the meal special.
In the kitchen, Jack opened a bottle of wine, poured two glasses, and sat on a stool, expecting me to begin to chop the garlic and parsley that were already on the counter. Instead, I pulled out an enormous cutting board and dumped onto it a mountain of flour. With two fingers, I created a well in the dome and into that hollow dropped three eggs and a tablespoonful of olive oil. I used my fingers to blend the mixture until what started as shaggy and sticky gathered into an uneven lump.
Jack watched, lighting up when he realized what I had in mind. “Wait,” he said. “We’re making the pasta?”
“Of course,” I said nonchalantly. “Come on. This isn’t a spectator sport.”
I divided the mass into two even chunks and placed them in tandem on the board. Jack picked one up, took a quick sniff, and then squeezed it as if it were Play-Doh until it oozed between his fingers.
“Not like that,” I said, and I put my hands over his and showed him how to knead properly: press down on the dough with the heel of the palm, fold the flattened mass, turn it, and press again. I took my place beside him and we massaged the dough, shoulder to shoulder in the galley kitchen, until it became pliant.
When he was done, he wrapped his arms around me and kissed my neck.
“Not so fast,” I said, retrieving an old-style hand-cranked pasta machine and clamping it to the counter. “There’s still work to do.” I positioned Jack at the machine’s arm and told him to crank as I fed the first ball through the stainless-steel rollers. We fumbled a bit initially but then got into a rhythm, turning the knob one notch tighter after every two passes, which brought the rollers a millimeter closer together. In a matter of minutes, the dough was transformed into pasta, becoming long and thin, glossy and supple. When the sheet was about five feet long, I wrangled it through the cutting rollers with Jack at the other end to catch the snaking ribbons of linguine as they emerged. When they were gathered in his arms like drapery, we walked around the dining room and laid the pasta out to dry, a few strands at a time, over the backs of chairs, across the metal arm of a standing lamp, flat on the dining-room table. After we repeated the process with the second ball of dough, my father’s dining room looked like a set for a romantic comedy.
Covered in flour, giddy with wine, Jack led me into the bedroom, away from the mess of drying pasta. We were in there for a while, glad to be together after another long separation. Jack started to say something but stopped midway. He moved on top of me, propped himself up on his elbows directly over me, and tried to speak again. His eyes filled.
“What?” I said, reaching up to touch his face.
“I’m in love with you is what,” he said, and his tears overflowed and spilled into my eyes.
* * *
It didn’t take long for our parents to figure things out. After Jack disclosed to a family friend that he was seeing someone in New York, Ben put two and two together. The news spread quickly to Malabar, who was utterly unsurprised and could not have been more delighted. From her perspective, it was as if our having fallen in love confirmed the deep rightness of her love for Ben. From mine, I was just happy that Jack and I’d managed to keep our romance under wraps for the few months that we did. Falling in love with Jack without Malabar knowing allowed me to believe that I was steering the ship and somehow reassured me that my mother’s being pleased had nothing to do with my trying to please her.
I was twenty-one years old, old enough to feather my nest as I wished. So why was I trying to simulate my mother’s desired roost? This was not, of course, a question I asked myself at the time. After all, Jack was so self-assured and steady. There was nothing strange about a young woman falling in love with her mother’s lover’s son; it was normal to prioritize your mother’s secret over your boyfriend’s trust. I told myself this lie so often, I believed it completely.
* * *
I moved to San Diego to live with Jack just weeks after receiving my BA from Columbia. I had done well in college, graduating with honors as I had in high school, but my real learning years, it would turn out, were ahead of me.
I had yet to become a person who devoured books, reflected deeply, or considered the kind of life I wanted to lead. I was a hard worker and capable, but I had chosen the path of least resistance to my diploma, opting for a multidisciplinary major, Urban Studies—a mix of political science, history, sociology, and anthropology—that allowed me to build on credits already accumulated and didn’t require much academic rigor. My decision to move to San Diego was made in the same way. I had no plan. I chose California because I’d fallen in love with Jack. No part of me stopped to wonder: Why Jack? Why San Diego? I still believed that no decision was irrevocable.
I arrived in Pacific Beach with a large duffle bag and my elderly cat, a long-haired calico with an extra toe on each front paw. Like most cats, she was affectionate and aloof by turns. Jack’s condo was a tidy rectangle of a bachelor pad decorated in unassuming neutral tones—light wood tables, an off-white sofa and chairs, beige wall-to-wall carpeting. The sofa faced an enormous television. Upstairs were two bedroom suites, a master and guest, both of which featured walls of mirrored sliding doors that concealed ample closet space. Downstairs was a living/dining area, a kitchen, a half bath, and a back room with a StairMaster and a huge barbell with weights that was part gym and part office.
I hadn’t been in my new home for thirty minutes when my cat hacked up a mustard-brown hairball on the light carpet. Jack’s exhale was loud and long and rumbled with apprehension. This was not surprising. Jack was not a cat person and had agreed to let me bring mine only grudgingly. He hadn’t had a pet since he’d left home to attend college fifteen years earlier. He had grown up with dogs. Throughout Jack’s childhood in Plymouth, his family had had one retriever and one setter: Tor and Tap.
I had met Tor and Tap on several occasions and assumed Jack had misspoken, accidentally using the current dogs’ names instead of his childhood dogs’ names. But no, the mistake was mine. Jack explained that every Souther retriever was named Tor and at least two Souther setters were named Tap.
“That’s . . . weird,” I said. “And kind of awful.”
“There have been many Tors and Taps,” Jack said, exaggerating, amused by my horror. “There might have even been a set or two before Hannah and I arrived on the scene.”
“I don’t understand. Why not give the dogs their own names?”
Jack shrugged. He’d never thought about it.
“Seriously,” I said. “Why?”
“Don’t know,” Jack said. “Tor and Tap were first and foremost my dad’s hunting dogs.” Jack explained his father’s theory about one-syllable names for animals. “He says dogs understand them better.”
We’d had two small terriers at 100 Essex when I was growing up. “Yap hounds,” my father said with disdain when they charged his car, barking at his ankles.
“In my dad’s opinion, dogs needed to be skilled and obedient,” Jack continued. “The Tors and Taps were work animals. They stayed outside and slept in the garage.”
“Even now?” Surely age had softened Ben’s stance on this. “Even in the winter?”
Jack nodded. “You know my dad.”
I wondered if I did.
* * *
My first real job was as a
legislative aide to a locally elected official in which my purported area of expertise was land use and the environment. As I moved up the political career ladder in San Diego, my father began building a life there too. Around the same time I fell in love with Jack, Paul Brodeur had fallen in love with a woman from La Jolla named Margot. Aside from a brief rebound marriage to my first stepmother, my charming father had been a bachelor for twenty years with a steady string of interesting and attractive girlfriends. That he was settling down now surprised me. At first glance, Margot seemed lovely but unremarkable, a sprightly and bespectacled blonde about a decade his junior. But beneath her bookish exterior was an unconventional and sharp-witted woman, a seismologist when it came to emotional tectonics. Margot had an eye for art and small treasures, rivaled my mother in the kitchen, and owned a beautiful independent bookstore in Del Mar, a tony community known for its horseracing track.
She became a great friend to me and, over time, my confidante—an older, wise woman who was maternal in ways that Malabar was not. She asked probing questions and listened fully to my answers, a first for me.
Margot and my father threw dinner parties with their eclectic friends—writers, artists, and other intellectuals—and I never once left their home without Margot pressing a book into my hand, usually a novel. Somehow Margot divined that despite being the daughter of a New Yorker writer, I hadn’t had a proper literary education. It was as if she knew that I had not been one of those kids who sneaked flashlights under the covers to read at night. At 100 Essex, I’d had a television within arm’s reach of my bed and fell asleep every night to the ghostly sound of static.
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