28 Summers

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Hello?” Mallory says. Her voice sounds like pea gravel in a blender.

  “Mallory, it’s Bayer. Feel like a sail?”

  How bizarre, how bizarre—Leland and Fifi’s disastrous visit leads Mallory right into a romance with Bayer Burkhart.

  Bayer takes Mallory sailing that first Sunday and she falls in love—not with Bayer but with life on the water. His sailboat is a seventy-foot racer-cruiser called Dee Dee. Mallory asks if Dee Dee is an ex-girlfriend, the one who got away, and he says no, he named the boat after Dee Dee Ramone. Does Mallory approve? She answers in the affirmative, even though she knows only three songs by the Ramones. Dee Dee has a finely appointed cabin. There’s a galley kitchen with an espresso machine, a sitting area with satellite TV, a round dining table, a master suite in the bow with a low, wide bed and a head that has a hot shower, and a second, smaller suite that Bayer uses as an office. All of the doors are heavily varnished and have hook-and-eye closures so they don’t fly open in rough seas.

  They sail every day the wind is good—to Tuckernuck and then farther on to tiny Muskeget. They sail past Martha’s Vineyard to Cuttyhunk. They sail around Monomoy up to Chatham.

  For the first few trips, Mallory lies on the foredeck in her bikini, reading, but after a while she starts to take note of what Bayer is doing—when he trims the headsail and lets out the mainsail, how he tacks, how he handles the ropes. She loves the focus on Bayer’s face when he’s sailing. He seems interested only in getting them from one place to another in this most ancient and storied of ways.

  When they’re lying in the low, wide bed looking out the open hatch above them at the towering mast and the stars, Bayer is very, very interested in Mallory’s body. He’s such a skilled lover that she finds herself counting the hours until night falls, when Dee Dee is secure in its slip and they make it rock.

  Bayer says he wants to turn Mallory into a proper mate. He shows her how to tie up the boat; turns out, she’s a natural with knots. She loves standing on the bow in bare feet and tossing the rope over the bollards like she’s a cowgirl lassoing a calf. She misses every once in a while but Bayer is patient. There hasn’t been one cross word between them. Why would there be? Their days are filled with sunshine, water, wind. They swim, Mallory reads, Bayer casts a few lines and nearly always catches something big enough to keep, a striper or a bluefish. He grills the striper on his hibachi; he soaks the bluefish in milk.

  They spend a week like this, two weeks. She calls him Skipper; he calls her Mary Ann. On days when there’s no wind, Bayer works on the boat and Mallory returns to her cottage, goes running or biking, and waits for him to call her. She never appears at the dock without being invited, though she wants to surprise him, just once, because at some point, she gets the feeling he’s hiding something. She can’t say what it is or even what makes her feel that way. Kitty calls and, as usual, asks Mallory about her love life. Finally, Mallory has something to tell her mother—she’s found a wealthy man with a yacht!—but when Mallory thinks about it, she realizes she barely knows the first thing about Bayer.

  She makes a list: He invented the bar-code scanner. He lives in Newport, where he keeps a boat even bigger than Dee Dee. His favorite book is October 1964, and recently she has seen him reading something called The Perfect Storm. He likes the Ramones as well as the Violent Femmes, the Clash, AC/DC, and INXS; he has encyclopedic knowledge of the band members’ names. He talks about Joe Strummer and Michael Hutchence like they’re his friends. Maybe they are his friends?

  Mallory once asked him what he did with his time when it wasn’t summer and he wasn’t sailing.

  He said, “I dabble in politics.”

  Mallory pressed him. What did that mean? “Do you go door to door handing out flyers for your favorite candidates?” she asked. “Do you work the phone banks?”

  He laughed. “I pull the puppet strings.”

  Bayer is a master artisan when it comes to crafting vague comments like this one. He’d told her just enough that first afternoon to make her think he was opening up. But now, weeks later, he remains a mystery.

  Sometimes, Bayer will tell Mallory stories of the high jinks of his past—his buddy Icarus, his buddy Dennis; Havana, Islamorada, Hamilton, Nassau; sailfish, storms, sharks; this guy who owned a boat called Beautiful Day, great boat; another boat, Silver Girl, that Bayer tried to buy but the guy refused and then, months later, he went bankrupt. Did you buy the boat then? Mallory asked. No. Turns out I wanted it only when I couldn’t have it, Bayer said. Mallory wonders if this is a hint that she should try to play hard to get. But why would she do that when they’re so happy and the summer is so short?

  Bayer gives her hundreds of dollars when he sends her to the grocery store or the liquor store. He hates running errands himself so she’s doing him a favor, he says. He protests when she tries to give him the change. Keep it, he says. It’s just money. What’s mine is yours.

  He smokes one cigarette at the end of each day and if Mallory has been drinking, she’ll take a drag, though most times she just watches Bayer’s figure against the darkening sky, the ember glowing, the smoke releasing from his mouth.

  “Will you take me to Newport?” she asks one night. It dawns on her that they rarely spend any time ashore—in Chatham, it rained, so they’d gone for lunch at the Squire, and they had spent a blissful afternoon on the beach on Cuttyhunk, but they hadn’t seen another soul.

  “I left Newport this summer because I wanted to get away,” Bayer says.

  “Let’s go out to dinner here, then,” Mallory says. “We haven’t been anywhere since that day at the Summer House.” Bayer hasn’t even been to Mallory’s cottage. When she invited him, he said, Trying to make a landlubber out of me? She understands his point: her cottage isn’t a boat, and life is just flat-out superior on the water. “How about dinner tomorrow night? My friends work at the Blue Bistro.” She swallows because she’s afraid he’s going to say no. She’s breaking a rule of some sort, or she’s revealing herself to be the kind of person who needs society to be happy, whereas Bayer is quite obviously content with her company alone. “I’ll pay.”

  He laughs. It’s a real laugh; she at least knows him well enough to tell that. “You will not pay. I’ll pay. Do I have to wear shoes?”

  Mallory wears a Janet Russo sundress and Bayer wears shorts, flip-flops, and a button-down shirt in peach gingham, and he wets his hair and trims his beard and looks more than presentable when they walk into the Blue Bistro, which is beachfront fine dining, tucked between Jetties and Cliffside. The restaurant smells delicious and it’s buzzing with conversation and laughter, and there’s a piano player doing an easy-listening version of “I Fought the Law,” which actually elicits a smile from Bayer. Isolde has set them up at a two-top out in the sand, so close to the lapping waves of Nantucket Sound that it’s almost as if they’re eating on the boat. Isolde brings menus and the wine list but Bayer waves them both away and orders a bottle of Sancerre and the seafood fondue for two.

  “Very good,” Isolde says, and she awards Bayer one of her rare smiles. “How did Mallory get so lucky?”

  Bayer takes Mallory’s hand across the table. “I’m the lucky one.”

  Oh my God, Isolde mouths to Mallory over Bayer’s shoulder.

  The wine comes; they drink. The kitchen sends out a basket of savory rosemary-and-onion-flecked yeast doughnuts. These doughnuts are famous across the island, but Mallory had assumed they would fall short of expectations. But…wow…they are, without doubt, the most delicious thing she has ever tasted. To Bayer, she knows, the most delicious thing is something far more simple—a cold, ripe plum—but she sees his eyes pop.

  “God damn,” he says.

  He’s happy. The date is going well, then? She’s not sure why but she feels there’s something at stake here.

  They take their glasses of wine to the water’s edge and get their feet wet. The sun is setting; there are stripes of magenta flaring across the sky. A gull soars low, just
skimming the surface of the water; the ferry glides across the horizon, heading for the mainland. Mallory has lived on Nantucket for four years and still she finds the summertime here so beautiful that it hurts. Probably because the summer is fleeting, evanescent. It always ends. Mallory doesn’t want it to end. She yearns for something that will stay, something permanent. Is she talking about Bayer? Is she talking about Jake?

  She’s getting drunk. She leads Bayer back to the table.

  A second bottle of wine. The seafood fondue appears. Mallory spears a shrimp with her fondue fork, plunges it into the hot oil, and then, when it’s plump and pink, she dunks it into one of the three delectable sauces.

  This dinner is perfect; this restaurant, the entire evening, couldn’t be any better. Right?

  Before dessert, Oliver sends over shots of sambuca in tiny frosted glasses. Mallory holds hers aloft. “To you, Skipper,” she says.

  Bayer grins. “To you, Mary Ann.”

  A woman materializes out of nowhere. She’s in a red floral wrap dress with a matching headscarf. She has dark hair and wears red lipstick. She’s pretty enough. Older. Bayer’s age.

  “Bayer?” she says. “Is that you?”

  Bayer stands up. “Caroline, hello, yes.” Air kiss, hand on Caroline’s back, and a sweeping arm to introduce Mallory. “Please meet my friend Mary Ann.”

  Mallory has been raised by Kitty; she knows to stand up when meeting someone. But she doesn’t account for the sand or the proximity of her chair behind her or her drunkenness or her confusion because Bayer has chosen not to use her real name. Mallory’s chair falls backward at the same time that she lurches forward, and she practically watches herself fall face-first into all the glassware and the candle’s flame, but at the last minute, she catches herself and nothing breaks or spills.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Caroline.” Mallory’s words, while not slurred, are not exactly crisp either.

  Caroline’s hand is smooth, her grip firm, her eyes assessing. She takes Mallory in and must draw the conclusion that further conversation is unnecessary because she turns back to Bayer. “I heard you were here,” Caroline says. “From Dee Dee.”

  From Dee Dee. Mallory reaches for her wineglass and, finding it empty, picks up Bayer’s and throws back what’s left. Is this rude? She doesn’t care.

  Bayer says nothing. His face is still; his eyes are those of a man facing his own execution.

  “How are the children?” Caroline asks. “Enjoying camp?”

  “Not if you believe their letters,” Bayer says. His lips turn up ever so slightly at the corners. “Good to see you, Caroline.”

  “Oh,” Caroline says. “Well, okay, then. Good to see you too.” She nods at Mallory. “Enjoy your evening.”

  Caroline’s visit brings the evening to a premature end. Mallory says she doesn’t want dessert. She goes to the ladies’ room, trying to tell herself that there’s an explanation, that the only lie is who he named the boat for, which is minor. Dee Dee Ramone. He was making a joke and she didn’t know any better. When she returns to the table, Bayer is leaving a pile of hundreds for the check, and it’s this that lets Mallory know he’s guilty. Just throw money at the people you’re wronging and their friends, and they’ll forgive you. Isolde sees the pile of bills as she brings a to-go box with complimentary desserts from the kitchen and she murmurs in Mallory’s ear, “Everything okay?”

  “Yes, yes,” Mallory says—though actually, she has no idea.

  Back on the boat, Bayer lights a cigarette, sits in the stern, and pats the cushion next to him.

  Mallory shakes her head. She feels she should remain standing. Where does she even start? “You have children?” she says.

  “Guinevere, age ten. Gus, age nine. They’re at camp in Maine this summer.”

  Guinevere, ten. Gus, nine. Why is this the first she’s heard of his children? Well, there can be only one reason, right? “And Dee Dee?”

  He clears his throat. “My wife.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Yes,” Bayer says. “When I told you I had a bigger boat at home, with a crew, and I needed time away from them…”

  “You meant you had a family.”

  “It was a euphemism.”

  “It was a lie. A lie, Bayer.”

  “I do have a second boat,” he says.

  “I don’t care about your second boat,” Mallory says. “I care about your wife. By not telling me, you made me complicit. What must Caroline think?”

  “Who cares what she thinks? Do you care? You don’t even know her.”

  “Well, then, what about what I think? You lied to me. Now, of course, all the things that have been bothering me about our relationship make perfect sense.”

  He turns on her. “Are there things about our relationship that bother you? Because, frankly, you’ve seemed pretty damn content.”

  Well, she was content—when she’d thought that she had landed a rich, eligible bachelor with time and money to lavish on her. She supposes now that it was no accident she got involved with Bayer directly after hearing Leland say all those unkind things about her. Leland was right; Mallory is suggestible. And she’s gullible. A more clever person would have realized she was being duped.

  “This whole thing was a sham. I feel so…stupid. So used. I’m a nice person, Bayer! I’m a good person.”

  (Bayer stubs out his cigarette. He considers Mallory. She looks beautiful tonight, but then, she always looks beautiful. She’s young, maybe too young to understand. She told him during their first meeting at the Summer House that she wondered if he was a serial killer. No, he’s not a serial killer, and honestly, he’s not even a garden-variety philanderer, though he’s aware it must appear otherwise to Mallory. He and Dee Dee agreed to spend the summer apart. The kids were at camp; it seemed like the right time.

  Do what you want, Dee Dee said. But go elsewhere. I don’t want to hear about it.

  Where Dee Dee is concerned, all is fair—though she’ll likely be hearing from Caroline Stengel in the morning, if not tonight. But Bayer admits to himself that all this probably hasn’t been fair to Mallory. He should have come right out and told her he was married. He’s curious why she never asked. This has made him wonder about her as well. There were times when he would have described her as not-there. Meaning somewhere else, with someone else.)

  “You are a nice person and a good person, Mary Ann. Yes, you are. But even nice, good people aren’t perfect. Everybody has weaknesses. I suspect there’s a secret you’re keeping as well. Maybe even something big?”

  Mallory feels like she’s in a hot-air balloon that’s about to crash into a cornfield. Either she’ll be killed in a fiery wreck or she’ll walk away unscathed.

  The latter, she thinks. It’s her choice and she chooses the latter.

  And Bayer is right. She is keeping a secret. Something big.

  “I’m in love,” she says.

  He looks genuinely surprised. “With me?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m in love with Jake McCloud.”

  (Ah, he thinks. His instincts were correct.) “Is Jake McCloud the boyfriend who got married the day we met?”

  “He’s the one who got married,” Mallory says. She hesitates and thinks, How bizarre, how bizarre, that Bayer Burkhart is the person I finally tell. “But he was never my boyfriend. He’s my…my Same Time Next Year. Like in that movie. He comes to Nantucket to see me every summer for one weekend, no matter what.”

  Bayer nods. “Interesting arrangement.” (He can’t believe it, but he feels jealous. It’s something about Mallory’s expression. Jake McCloud is one lucky bastard. Frankly, Bayer would like to strangle him.) “That sounds nice.”

  She shrugs. “It has its ups and downs.”

  Summer #6: 1998

  What are we talking about in 1998? Monica Lewinsky, the blue dress, Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”; El Niño; Nagano; Linda McCartney; MMR vaccines; Mark McGwire; the Elliptica
l; Hurricane Mitch; Babbo; Phil Hartman; Windows 98; Viagra; Matthew Shepard; There’s Something About Mary; Jesse Ventura; “Chickity China, the Chinese chicken”; Eric, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny.

  Mallory spends Thanksgiving with Apple and ten members of Apple’s family—her parents, her two brothers and two sisters, and their significant others—who are visiting Nantucket from all across the country. They reserve one of the private, tucked-away rooms at the Woodbox Inn, a place that feels like it’s been around since the original Thanksgiving. The Woodbox has low ceilings and creaky, wide-plank wood floors and a fireplace in every room. It’s the first Thanksgiving of Mallory’s life that feels relaxing. At home in Baltimore, Kitty frets if she can’t find the twelfth Tiffany dessert fork or if Senior doesn’t carve the turkey at the correct angle or if Cooper comes home drunk from the Gilman–Calvert Hall alumni touch-football game, which he always does.

  This year, Mallory doesn’t even eat turkey. She orders the beef Wellington, because she can.

  Skipping Thanksgiving means that Mallory must go home to Baltimore for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, the Blessings normally go over to the Gladstones’ house to drink Steve Gladstone’s wassail and eat Geri’s famous hot crab dip, then they all dance in the living room to songs like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” On Christmas morning, Kitty will wonder just what Steve Gladstone puts in the wassail.

  For the second year in a row, there will be no Christmas Eve frivolity at the Gladstone house. The year before, the Blessings had tried to take over the tradition but it felt stiff and forced and Geri had spent most of the evening crying on the couch. This year, Leland and Fifi have whisked Geri away to Jackson Hole to ski, leaving the Blessings to fend for themselves. Kitty suggests the party at the country club but that involves Santa and screaming children so both Mallory and Cooper veto it. They want to get pizza from Angelo’s and watch The Year Without a Santa Claus.