“What are you doing?”
“Looking for bruises.”
“Let’s live dangerously.” He took a handful and dumped them in the bag. “Are we allowed to cheat?” He held one out to her, ready to slip it into her mouth.
“I have an in, so yeah,” she said. “That’s my daughter at the counter.”
“She’s beautiful,” Joe said. “She looks like you.”
Oh, shit, she thought, that tumbling sensation, as though she were falling, somersaulting into Joe. In the middle of all this muddle, here she was. Maybe pain could make you reckless. It was a new feeling; she’d never been reckless in her life. Except, maybe, years ago, with him.
The moment was there; all she had to do was seize it. Open her mouth, let him slide the fruit past her teeth. Let him yank the stem. Not drop her gaze. Do that, and then follow her body along. It’s hot. Shall we get a beer? Sure.
She took the cherry and popped it into her mouth.
“Cheater. I knew it.” He held out his hand, and she spit the pit in his palm.
“I feel so close to you right now,” he said.
“It’s those fleeting moments that mean so much.”
“Maybe we should share a cigarette. Or go to dinner.”
There was a pause while he just stood, and she just stood, and he cocked his head.
“Well?” he asked.
“What?”
“I just asked you to dinner.”
“No, you didn’t. You suggested it as a possibility.”
He shook his head and looked up. “I forgot what a pain in the ass you were,” he said to the sky.
“Actually, I lied,” she said. “I am turning into a rude bitch. So you see, I can’t have dinner like a normal person.”
“How about a crazy person, then?” He took the bag of cherries. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a woman who parses my sentences. Have dinner with me, Ruthie. You parser, you.”
32
JEM’S PHONE
From: Lucas Clay
To: Jemma Dutton
It’s so hot your beaches suck
From: Jemma Dutton
To: Lucas Clay
So go back to the Hamptons rich guy
From: Lucas
To: Jem
Too much traffic doesn’t anybody have a pool
From: Jem
To: Lucas
I do but I’m working
From: Lucas
To: Jem
Invite me over after work for a dip
From: Jem
To: Lucas
My mom will be out, having dinner w an old friend I don’t think she’d like it
From: Lucas
To: Jem
I’ll be a good boy promise
Who are those girls by the tomatoes they keep checking me out
From: Jem
To: Lucas
Girls from school ignore them
From: Lucas
To: Jem
Introduce me we’ll have a party
33
RUTHIE ARRIVED AT the restaurant in a state of internal clamor so loud it was a wonder Joe couldn’t hear it. They sat at the smallest table at a noisy place in Greenport. Ruthie had to shrink into her chair so that her knees wouldn’t brush his.
“Let’s not talk about our ex-spouses,” Joe suggested as they looked at their menus.
“Or the past,” she said.
They sat, silent. Ruthie had felt like a new, more interesting person in Carole’s fitted dress with a silver zipper down the front. She’d been sure it meant she’d be able to have brilliant, brittle conversation. She would skim through the evening on raw clams and fast talk.
“This is not a good start,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I just think it’s smart not to talk about the past, since you dumped me,” she said.
Joe moved his fork, then his spoon. “Dumped is a terrible word. I thought I was too old for you.”
Their affair had lasted less than a summer. Joe had left near the end of August for Italy, a long-planned trip. When he returned he was involved with an artist named Sami LaGuerre, a rococo beauty with hair to her waist who had been born Samantha Bernstein in Montclair, New Jersey, and had never looked back.
It was fair to say that he’d broken her heart.
“I didn’t feel that comfortable with you, I guess,” Ruthie admitted. “I mean, the kind of places you brought me, in your fancy suits. I was always scrounging for the right clothes. You seemed so sophisticated.”
Joe grinned. “It was a pose, I promise you. We never really talked about our pasts, did we?”
No, they hadn’t. They had never progressed to that level of intimacy. They had never told their stories.
“I grew up in Brooklyn. Before it was cool. My father was a Jewish public defender, my mother was a Puerto Rican social worker. Then I fell for art. The way you do. For what it was, sure, but also for what it can do.”
“It took me a while to fall for what it can do,” she said. “Peter sort of messed that up for me. I thought I was learning about genius but after a while I realized I was learning about commerce. Then I got into museum work. I saw that regional museums are this giant bulwark against, I don’t know, non-culture? A place of ideas and beauty right smack in the middle of a town. Like a cathedral. But I mean the way it really was, with people crowding in and hay on the floor. Every day I walked into that building I thought, Okay, one more for the good guys. Things get more barbarous every day. We need some…exaltation. Connection.” She looked down at her plate. “God, I’m sorry. That sounds so stupid.”
“Do you know something? I think you’ve said ‘I’m sorry’ to me at least fifteen times in only three conversations.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and they laughed. “It feels so stupid to have lost what I had to such idiots. Idiots with action plans.”
Joe sighed. He pushed his wineglass around. “Museum boards can either do the good work or turn it into some sort of Ionesco farce.”
“There you go again with the sophisticated references.”
“You always get my references, so shut up.”
“Let’s talk about you. So, there you were, a boy from Brooklyn with his own gallery.”
“I always felt outclassed. I used to read Louis Auchincloss novels in this pathetic attempt to pick up tips. Trying to learn Park Avenue syntax. I was an extremely careful person.”
“I remember when you told me about Sami, you kept saying what a brilliant artist she was. I think that’s why I dumped the wine on you.”
“I deserved it. Yeah. I got a little tired of the posing, though. You know what my son’s middle name is? Pocket. She wanted something elemental, she said.”
“A pocket is elemental?”
“It’s better than Ravine.”
“Not really.”
“We were not a good mix. We broke up, got back together for Henry’s sake. Moved to LA for a few years. Moved back. Now Henry’s in college.”
“So why did you move out here?”
“To be near my dad. He lives in Southold. And I got interested in restaurants. Food, not art. I’m not really a chef, I just cook, so a fancy place was out. But, man, I can open an oyster. I’m thinking in winter I could do chili. Not sure. Big decision.” Joe grinned. “I arranged my life so that the decisions are as simple as I can make them. You?”
“Oh, I make decisions as hard as I can.” Ruthie laughed, but Joe didn’t. “But at work, it’s different. Was different. A hundred decisions a day.”
“You look sad,” Joe said.
She looked down at her wine. “I loved my job.”
“This might be a get off my lawn thing to say, but the world is getting meaner,” Joe said. “Yo
u could be the only person I know who bothers to apologize.” He poured more wine. “Anyway, that sounded glib. I’m sorry about what happened. I’ll help if I can.”
Ruthie waited until the server had checked in and Joe had waved her away again. “You could do something for me, maybe. If I had something to sell—a luxury item, say—would you know the right way to go about it?”
“That’s pretty vague, but probably.”
“I’m not ready to do anything yet, I just wanted to know.”
“Letting go of things can be great,” Joe said. “Change is good.”
She impatiently shook her head. “That’s what the changers say. I mean, if you choose change, it’s good. If it’s thrust upon you, it sucks.” She picked up her menu, suddenly annoyed. “Should we order?”
“You do look exactly the same as I remember, by the way,” Joe said, picking up his menu. “Change looks good on you.”
“You just contradicted yourself.”
“What I mean to say is, you haven’t changed. Not the you you.”
“It’s the dress.”
“I didn’t notice the dress. Except for the zipper. It’s rather provocatively placed, if that sort of thing is in one’s head.”
“Oh fuck, don’t flirt with me, my heart will just explode,” Ruthie said. “Just buy me dinner and stay on that side of the table.”
“It’s a very small table.”
She felt his hand on her knee.
“You’re very handsy,” she said.
“I had to do something. I made you mad about the change thing.”
“I’m over it.”
“It’s because I threw my life up in the air to see where it would land, and I know what that’s like. I left out the anguish part. And it’s because I kept looking for you, planning how I’d ask you to dinner. You’re very hard to run into.”
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
“When the last time you saw a woman you were such an asshole that she dumped half a bottle of wine on you, you tend to be skittish. I wanted it to be casual, so that rejection would be easier to take. I heard the words ‘gorgeous Sancerre’ come out of my mouth and I wanted to knock myself out with the bottle. When I saw you at the farm stand, I practically pounced. I had to grab you when I could.”
“Under the table.”
“There was always something with the way we talk,” Joe said. “I always felt…”
“Randy?”
He grinned. “Understood. And now I have you in my grasp—”
“Literally—” His fingers on her leg, just resting.
“I am shamelessly flirting with you so that you will like me again,” Joe said. “But I’m rusty. Help.”
She wanted to put down her wineglass and run. That would be the sensible thing.
“Let’s eat first,” she suggested.
“First. That sounds hopeful,” Joe said. “Or maybe it’s the zipper.”
34
DANIEL MANTIS FUSSED over Doe, insisting she sit to his right and ordering glasses of rosé champagne “for the beautiful girls” and a martini for himself.
Doe concentrated on Daniel so completely she could barely acknowledge Lark. His head was shaved close, his face tan and smooth, his beautiful white shirt open and pressed sharp. He wasn’t a good-looking man, but he was a billionaire, so everyone and everything was available to him, and everything about him said that he knew it.
For the ultra-rich the world moved at superhero speed. Valets and maître d’s and waiters and bartenders were there a second or two before you wanted them. Then they disappeared and came back again with whatever you asked for, plus things you didn’t, treats from the chef and fresh napkins and forks. Disappearance, reappearance, disappearance, until you had everything you could possibly need except for a catheter. You still had to get up if you wanted to pee.
Daniel focused his gaze on the waiter as he recited the specials. He clasped his hands together and leaned forward a bit. “Last summer I had the most exquisitely simple pasta,” he said. “Olive oil, pecorino, fava beans. Can I have that?”
“I’m not sure if we have fava beans, sir. I’ll check in the kitchen.”
“Fantastic.”
No fava beans, but Daniel bravely withstood the disappointment and ordered fish. He decided on four appetizers “so we can all have a taste, the crudo is amazing.” They sent over six. It was something Doe had always wondered, why those who could afford it were the only ones who got stuff for free.
Doe was careful with the wine. She knew better than to get even the slightest bit tipsy. Lark, however, had finished her champagne in two swallows and started in on the white Daniel had ordered. The meal would cost double Doe’s month’s rent.
Doe kept her face on alert. She was alive to everything Daniel was saying, even if it was pass the salt. Not that he’d salt his food, that was for the middle class. She had to be Daniel-worthy, a wealthy Florida prep kid with style, not the sneaky low-rent paparazzo who’d grown up in a concrete block house with cockroaches in the kitchen, geckos on the wall, and a mother who was a masseuse who occasionally threw in a hand job if the rent was due. The mother who was sending her increasingly desperate texts because she wanted to move to the Hamptons and Doe needed to get her a job, “as a concierge, I think I’d be really good at it.” She ate her sea bass and it tasted like nothing spiked with lemon.
“So when did you two meet?” Daniel asked.
“At the Memorial Day party,” Lark said. She giggled. Under the influence of champagne and wine drunk too fast, she’d turned into a teenager, half sullen, half giddy.
“I gave Doe a dare.” Then she laughed again. “Doe, a dare, a female dare!”
“It was such a great party,” Doe said. “This fish is superb.” Once she’d been at a gallery dinner in Miami and someone had said that. She’d practiced saying it later, when she was alone. This fish is superb.
“A dare?” Daniel asked.
“To get you to take off the hoodie,” Lark said. “I let her in the house to interrupt you.”
“The house is so exquisite,” Doe said. Exquisite was another word she used to slip into conversations when she felt outclassed.
“Thank you. I always say it’s like heaven, if God had taste,” Daniel said.
“I never heard you say that,” Lark said. “It’s a little self-serving, don’t you think?”
Doe rushed in to fill the silence as Daniel shot Lark a cool look. “Anyway, I never got to you,” she said. “But she took me to lunch anyway.” She put on her brightest smile, hoping Daniel would be deflected. “Such a good cause, protecting the farms.”
Daniel passed this off with a short chopping gesture. “Doomed. And yet another big check I wrote for my daughter whose career seems to be spending my money on plants.”
“Oh, no, let’s not go there,” Lark said. “I refuse to have the career conversation now. Why can’t I just enjoy my summer?”
“Because I gave you a deadline of September first last September first. Which means you had a year to find your path.”
“I don’t see why you get to give me deadlines.”
“Because I’ve given you three years to plant flowers at that so-called farm of yours.”
“It’s not So-Called Farm, it’s Larkspur Farm—”
“It’s called fifty million dollars, that’s what it’s called.”
“It’s not like you gave me fifty million dollars, Daddy.”
“I’m on the hook for it, and that’s the same thing. You have an MFA. You had about fifteen lunches—with Aggie and Larry and Amy and everyone I could possibly line up—”
“I did the MoMA thing, I had a job at a gallery. It’s not for me, okay? All I did was make copies and file things.”
“You worked on that exhibition.”
�
�Like I said, I made copies and filed things. Then I stood around in a little black dress at the opening.” Lark ate a forkful of spinach. “That gallery was bullshit. They came up with busywork for me. It was obvious they just wanted me for decoration.”
“You’re going to be twenty-seven in September and you don’t have a career.”
“So who would hire such a loser old crone anyway, Daddy?”
“Forgive me for thinking my intelligent and talented daughter should have a career.” Daniel swiveled his attention back to Doe. “Doe, tell me about your museum. How long have you worked there?”
“Two years,” Doe said. “Technically I’m part of the membership department, but I also handle all the social media. That’s my real interest.”
“Do you enjoy that?”
“Visibility is a commodity, just like everything else. So, yes. I like to get coverage for things I believe in.”
“Excellent. And what’s your big ambition?”
“World domination, of course.”
“Ambition, I love it. Did you hear that, Lark?”
“Sitting right here, Pop.”
“Tell me about the Belfry. What’s the collection like?”
“We don’t have an art collection. We have historical artifacts. Like Benedict Arnold’s buttons.”
“Buttons?” Daniel’s fork stayed in the air.
“A small historical collection. Kids love it. We also do contemporary art. There’s a project space in the barn for special exhibitions.”
“Contemporary art—that’s Lark’s big interest.”
Lark rolled her eyes and took another gulp of wine.
Before the waiter could glide in, Doe refilled her own glass with wine she would not drink, just so she could place the bottle closer to Daniel. Lark would have to reach past him to get it. “Ruthie and Tobie have done some great exhibitions. When we get a review in the Times, Ruthie bakes a cake.”
“Is it that much of an occasion?”
“They don’t cover much regionally,” Doe said. “So, yes. We also run educational programming, classes, lectures. During the year we bus in schoolkids from all over. Ruthie started this pilot program to get underserved schools through the doors.”
The High Season Page 18