The High Season

by Judy Blundell

  “And get him to take off the hood.”

  Her first rule was No alcohol, and her second rule was Never attract too much attention. But she’d get inside the house. She could get a shot of Daniel Mantis, another one, or maybe a guest in the inner circle, intimate enough to be in the house instead of on the lawn. She didn’t believe for one second that this girl would ever follow through on a lunch date.

  Lark grinned and grabbed her hand. She felt a jolt of dangerous attraction at the feel of Lark’s fingers. She allowed herself to be tugged to the side of the house.

  What Doe had thought was a floor-to-ceiling window was actually a door. Lark flipped a chrome panel and punched in a number.

  “The white door on the right. Go, Doe.”

  Doe heard the hard g and the imprint of tongue on palate on the d. An erotic charge distracted her. For a moment, only a moment, only a flash, she pictured them in bed, Lark whispering.

  Go, Doe.

  She went.

  14

  RUTHIE SAT ON the ferry line for forty-five minutes, much of it facing a house that looked like a face with a tongue. She thought of Adeline and Mike and Jem on the launch. Who called a boat a launch? It seemed such a 1920s notion, something that Scott and Zelda would do, take a launch to a party.

  She had left Spork as soon as she could, and she knew there would be a ferry line, but it had been a long time (never?) since she’d tried to get to the South Fork on a holiday weekend. There was no way, however, she would miss a Daniel Mantis party. It had been worth it just for the look on Catha’s face when she’d told her she was leaving to go there. Catha had almost swallowed her wineglass.

  She knew that the chances of meeting anyone she could woo to the museum were slight. Hamptons were Hamptons, and Daniel Mantis was a shark too big for her net. But she’d parlay this as far as she could, and she would beat back Mindy and her lieutenant Gloria. The problem was, what to do about Catha, who was clearly conspiring for her job? She’d watched Catha work the party, seen her scurry and smile. She had actually scampered to keep up with the interior designer who had that cable show. Usually at events they were partners, making sure things went smoothly. They would meet up, exchange information or a joke, move on.

  This afternoon Catha had never caught her eye. Not once. Her avoidance had been striking. If she was the nail in Ruthie’s coffin, Ruthie wasn’t going to hand her the hammer.

  They’d worked closely together for years, their skills congruent. She couldn’t conceive of a person who would put ambition over decency, which meant she’d learned absolutely nothing from working for Peter Clay.

  * * *

  —

  THE PARTY WAS crowded. She couldn’t find Mike and Jem. Ruthie grabbed a drink and wandered over to the pool, where enormous hot-pink pool toys floated, three swans with surprisingly evil faces.

  “I’m having fun with it.”

  She turned. Dodge was standing, smiling at her. He waved his glass at the pool toys. “The Whitney is interested. We’re stalled, though. I want them to put a pool on one of the outdoor spaces. Liability is a bitch.”

  Oh, they were his. “I hadn’t seen your new work. It’s fun. Scary.”

  “Yeah, basically my favorite combo,” he said. “Kitsch plus aggression. Listen, Ruthie, I just want you to know I’m with you.”

  “With me?”

  “I get your vision. You turned on the gas over there. They’re lucky to have you.”

  Once again, people were talking to her as if she’d been accused of something. “Um. Thank you.”

  “Hey, have you seen Joe? He’s here somewhere,” Dodge said, waving his glass. “You two must know each other. He was Peter’s dealer, you worked for Peter…same time, right?”

  “Joe?”

  “Joe Bloom.”

  “Joe Bloom?”

  Stop repeating his name, she told herself as the word bloom unfurled inside her. More than twenty years ago. Her summer fling that flung her straight into a wall.

  She’d heard years ago that Joe Bloom had left the art world and moved out west. She had stuck a stupid cowboy hat on his head whenever he popped into her memory, and turned him into a cartoon.

  “Yeah, he moved out here. He owns a restaurant in Greenport.”

  Penny and Elena. The oyster place. Joe Somebody. She could not reconcile Joseph Bloom, slim in his Hugo Boss suits, with a guy opening oysters at an old bait shack.

  “Hang on. Joe!” Dodge yelled, and Ruthie closed her eyes, glad she had this instant, at least, to collect herself.

  She turned. He was slightly heavier, dressed in khakis, bare feet in sneakers. He was older. So was she. He looked better. Men.

  He smiled and walked toward her. “Ruthie?”

  “Joe!” She managed to release the word, but it sounded like an accusation.

  He leaned over to kiss her cheek. Impression of stubble and soap and underneath it the scent she remembered, an instant hit. “It’s been so long. You look…different.”

  “You’re not supposed to say that to a woman,” Ruthie said. “You’re supposed to say, You look exactly the same.”

  “I meant it as a compliment, actually.”

  “Oh, because I used to look so much worse than this?”

  “Can we start over?”

  “Hi, Joe,” Ruthie said. “So great to see you again after all these long years. You look exactly the same!”

  “You too!” He stepped back, and she felt herself scrutinized, the better version of her, the Carole version.

  “Seriously, though,” Joe said. “I remember you in a ponytail, some old T-shirt, splattered with paint. Overalls, even.”

  Maybe Ruthie should have worn her own clothes after all; Joe was used to seeing her stained. “I hear you have a restaurant in Greenport.”

  “It’s fantastic,” Dodge said. “Best oysters around.”

  “Not a restaurant. I can’t handle a restaurant, but a shack with two items, I can do. It’s sort of an early retirement.” He tilted his head, and she saw the gray in his hair. He had a way of lowering his eyelids, as though he was thinking of either sex or a nap. She’d forgotten that.

  “I’ll let you two catch up,” Dodge said. “I’m party-hopping today.”

  Dodge wandered off, and they just looked at each other for a moment.

  “So,” Joe said.

  “So,” she answered, the way people who had hurt each other a long time ago do.

  He had been Peter’s dealer, so they’d been on the phone often, since she ran the studio. Details of images to be sent, exhibitions to prepare for. They’d sat at the same expensive restaurant tables celebrating openings, only she would be at the far, far end, or else at the separate table with the nobodies.

  Then she’d run into him outside Peter’s studio one hot July afternoon. Peter was out in Sag Harbor; everyone in New York, it seemed, was away.

  It’s so hot. Shall we have a beer? Sure. Maybe it was his use of that slightly formal “shall” that had been the first seduction. She had walked into that bar not knowing what would happen, just feeling the current of sudden interest between them. An art dealer, a rich man, a slightly older man, way out of her league.

  After the beers she’d brought him to her place to show him what she was working on. At the time she’d had an illegal sublet in Tribeca, five hundred square feet of loft carved out of a larger one in front. She had her own entrance, reaching it by a back staircase down an alley with an active rat population. She’d had to stamp her way down, making them scatter and dive. Sometimes she turned it into a dance. She was an artist with a loft in New York. Just that fact alone kept her level.

  Joe had looked at everything, her books, her bedspread, her sketches pinned to the wall. He’d twirled a mobile made of fishing line and painted paper fish. At last he’d stood in front of the
painting. He had pointed to an area where color met color.

  “There,” he said. “That’s why you’re good.”

  Edges were something that artists knew, how they were a test to resolving a painting. When Joe had turned around he’d reached for her, and even now when Ruthie thought of this she knew it had been some sort of peak in her life, Joe’s approval and desire, all in the same moment.

  Was he thinking of it now, that summer evening? That first kiss? Or was he thinking of the breakup, when she dumped her glass of wine in his lap, then reached over the table, grabbed his glass, and repeated the gesture? She’d almost forgotten that, how there had been a time in her life when she had acknowledged her anger. The Italian waiter had hurried over to bring her another glass and wipe down the table, ignoring Joe completely. Joe had sat, looking down, not even attempting to blot his pants. She had downed the glass the waiter had replenished in two long swallows and walked out. It was the last time she’d seen him except for Google. He’d married the woman he’d left her for.

  A tall, pretty girl suddenly floated out of the background. “Hello! Joe, I didn’t see you!”

  “Lark.” An exchange of cheek kisses, and Joe turned to Ruthie. “Ruthie, do you know Lark Mantis? Lark, Ruthie Beamish. Ruthie is the director of the Belfry Museum in Orient.”

  “The North Fork! I love it. So chill.”

  “Ruthie and I knew each other long ago and far away in a land called SoHo,” Joe said. “Back when there were still artists there. Ruthie managed Peter’s studio. We are the survivors of the great war. Peter Clay’s ego against the world.”

  “Wow, every time I hear you talk about Peter Clay, I go all fangirl spazzy,” Lark said. “I can’t really ask Adeline about him. Tell me one thing I don’t know.”

  Ruthie exchanged a glance with Joe. What could they say? He liked figs and cheese? He never spoke to his assistants before noon? He sank her grant applications for years without her knowing? He would agree to be her reference, and then tell the foundation or the gallery or whoever it was that her work wasn’t up to their standards.

  Furious, she had confronted him. He had said that she needed to face her mediocrity. Her paintings were good but would never be great. However, she was the best studio assistant because she was a magpie, a mimic. To ask for genius was folly. He was doing her a favor.

  His words were cruel, but better than when he was drunk and yelled across the studio, “Cunts can’t paint!” While she was painting his canvases.

  “Hmm,” Joe said. “When he left my gallery, he let me find out by reading it in the art trades. Then he sent me a basket of fruit.”

  “Seriously?” Ruthie asked.

  Joe laughed. “Apples from some orchard upstate. Clearly a re-gift. I took them down to his studio and just started throwing them at the windows. I learned that you can’t break a window with an apple, you just look like an idiot. And that was the end of me and Peter.”

  “He couldn’t handle guilt, so he gave parting gifts,” Ruthie said. “They always missed the mark. A few months after I left and he screamed that he’d get revenge, I got a delivery. A whole shipment of art supplies, some of them used. It was like he’d just dumped the contents of a corner of the studio into a box. I think there was a half sandwich in there. Random CDs. Paints half squeezed. A pencil.” She decided not to mention the blank canvases, one with C U N T scrawled on it in Peter’s signature blue.

  “A Peter Clay apology,” Joe said.

  “Or a taunt,” she said. “I was never sure.”

  “Wow, this is awesome,” Lark said. “I feel all insidery. Ruthie, Daddy has a killer Peter Clay. You should take a look at it. Just walk in the front door.” She drifted off.

  Joe smiled at Ruthie. “Now here we are again. Two insidery people, out here in the bucolic country.”

  “I never understood that word,” Ruthie said. “It isn’t nearly pretty enough to describe a landscape. It sounds like a stomach condition, or one of those old-fashioned medicines, like castor oil.”

  “Dress the wound with bucolic and call me in the morning?”

  “Tums neutralize bucolic acid three times faster than milk.”

  “So tell me,” Joe said. “Are you married now?”

  “Separated. Divorced, really. We just haven’t made it legal.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Ruthie assured him. “We’re still good friends. We parted amicably, as they say.”

  “How does one manage that, exactly?”

  “Carefully.”

  “Wow,” Joe said. “I had to move to Brooklyn when I broke up with my ex. We could barely share Manhattan. Now I’m as far east as I can go, in Orient. But don’t go thinking I’m bitter. In my better moments, I know that it wasn’t meant to work out for us, and I wish her well.”

  “How many better moments do you have?”

  “I’m having one right now,” Joe said, tilting his head back. “As a matter of fact I’m going all fangirl spazzy just seeing you again.”

  Ah, so this was why Cupid had a bow and arrow. Thwack. “How are you liking Orient?”

  “Love it. It’s beachy yet verdant.”

  “Now, there’s a word that sounds like what it means. Verdant.”

  “Not like that nasty upstart, bucolic.”

  He smiled again, and Ruthie decided it was time to go. She was out of practice at repartee, and she felt winded. “This is nice. But I’m sorry, I have to find my daughter,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

  “That’s what small towns are for, I hear. Seeing people around.”

  Ruthie turned and walked away, profoundly grateful that she now had an ass.

  15

  THE HOUSE ARRANGED itself around Doe as she walked in, the way perfect houses do. She’d been in a few in Miami where the space unfolded, the sight lines planned for the view. Floor, blue slate. An enormous freestanding gray stone fireplace in the middle of the room. The visual shock of just blue—ocean and sky—through enormous windows that were walls. She could happily move in here tomorrow and discover she had a soul.

  Through an open archway (though it was square of course, no round forms in this house) she could glimpse the formal dining room. A long, long table she wouldn’t want to have to polish. Uncomfortable-looking chairs. Her ass wouldn’t last through the soup course. A scratchy abstract on the wall.

  Facing her, an amazing Rothko, floating color, blue and that deep sad black. One of her art teachers had loved Rothko and talked about the depth of that black, of how spiritual Rothko was. He paints the abyss, he would say, but he gives us hope. Doe still felt impatient, remembering. Rothko was a master, sure, but spiritual? Overreach. His paintings were physical, color and form. Art wasn’t about feelings. If you want feelings, go to the movies. If you want God, go to a church.

  On the opposite wall the predictable big Ed Ruscha. Every great house in Miami had one. Just yellow letters against blue. HAPPY MESS. Did it refer to Lark? That would require a sense of humor. Doe had yet to meet a super-wealthy person who would make fun of themselves.

  It could be the most beautiful room she’d ever been in or it could be designed to make her feel flimsy.

  What the fuck was she doing?

  Doe turned away from her rumpled reflection in a mirrored sculpture that looked like a Louise Bourgeois. With a jolting heartbeat, she heard footsteps approaching. Nowhere to hide in a minimalist house, that was the trouble. Doe backed up, flattening herself next to the gray wall of the fireplace.

  Footsteps clattered into the space. A woman in heels. How the hell did Adeline Clay get here so fast?

  Adeline was too angry to see Doe. She went right to the door of the room where Daniel Mantis sat meditating and crashed it open.

  “For God’s sake, Daniel. Take off the hood.”

  Too good to miss. Doe sl
ipped out of her sandals and tiptoed across the floor. By tilting her head toward the sculpture she could see the fractured reflected image of Adeline standing in the room, Daniel sitting cross-legged facing her. “I’ve been here for twenty minutes.”

  No answer.

  “This is ridiculous, Daniel! Take off the hood!”

  “I don’t like scenes.”

  “This isn’t a scene, this is me talking to you. You are being rude.”

  “This isn’t ego-driven. Isn’t everyone enjoying themselves?”

  “We can all see you in here! I realize that’s the point, but it’s comical.”

  “Comical is this event that Lark talked me into. More farms on the South Fork? As if these people are going to knock down their houses.”

  “Do we have to talk about this right here?”

  “What is it with this girl and farms? She grew up on Park Avenue. I’m seriously worried. She just keeps…flitting. People ask about her and I have to lie. I don’t enjoy that.”

  “She needs your attention.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars to throw a party isn’t enough? Adeline, you’re my hostess. You can greet the guests for a few minutes.”

  “I’m not the hostess. These people aren’t my guests.”

  “Apparently one is. The guy in the Gap pants.”

  “It’s Michael Dutton, he owns the house I’m staying in. I invited him with his family. It seemed like the nice thing to do. Am I not allowed to invite guests?”

  “Is it just Lark who needs more of my attention?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Just so we’re clear. This was your choice. We had an agreement. You were to live here this summer. You were the one who went ahead and rented a house without telling me. In a place I can’t get to.”

  “There’s this thing called a ferry.”

  “I had to send you a launch. A launch and a car. Now who is being manipulative? It’s a journey to get there. You removed yourself from our plans. Without telling me beforehand, I recall. Didn’t we say from the beginning, Let’s have honesty between us.”