The High Season

by Judy Blundell

  Dodge had flashed his handsome grin, but Doe could see the relief underneath it. You really didn’t want to screw with the daughter of Daniel Mantis. But if you surprised her…it was magic. While he explained the process of transport, installation, inflation, weather regulations, electrical needs, she watched Lark bounce on her knees, delight on her face. Doe had been intensely jealous of Dodge at that moment, and that had been something she’d been chewing on for days, that flare of sadness at wondering if she would ever be able to provoke that much delight in her girlfriend. There was no birthday gift she could bring Lark that was special enough. Doe was close to terrified. She had four hundred dollars in her checking account, money she saved for emergencies and escape. Even if she drained it, what could she afford that would be special enough for Lark?

  Keeping up with Lark was exhausting. Doe had to invest in pedicures and waxings and invent fictions like she never used a wallet (too much of a tell) and she liked cheap keychains because she was always losing her keys. She’d carried the Marni purse too often and had to retire it. She told Lark that her perfect idea of a summer dress was one with pockets.

  Conversations were like picking your way through potholes in heels. Any moment she could wrench an ankle and get flung into the cement. Lark’s friends talked about travel and museums and restaurants and SoulCycle and paddleboarding. Doe didn’t get it, really—they all went to the same places and mostly had the same things to say—but she still had to fake her way through with smiles and comments that didn’t mean anything. She pretended to know things, like where Lyford Cay was (Anguilla) and whether Sorrento would be perfect for a destination wedding. She agreed with the consensus that the Seychelles had been “totally ruined.” One night she studied streets and shops in Paris, memorizing names and places she had never been and listening to pronunciations, just so she could toss off Saint-Ouen without stumbling.

  People would feel sorrier for liars if they knew how much work it took.

  “You should eat something,” Shari said.

  “What?”

  There was coffee, so she went to the table. Mr. Coffee had produced a brew. Her waffle smiled at her with a blueberry-dotted grin and banana coins for eyes. Shari peered over her mug, hoping for a reaction. Doe grabbed the mug and poured in milk. The milk was cold and cooled the coffee, which tasted burnt.

  “So you have this fancy girlfriend, who I haven’t met, okay, but don’t you think she’d have some contacts over there in the Hamptons?” Shari asked.

  “So go back to Florida. You have contacts. Of the non-criminal variety, I hope.” Doe took another sip. “Or maybe it’s time for Phoenix.”

  Phoenix had once been a joke between them. Shari’s sister Belinda lived there, a woman so odious Shari kept her name written on a piece of paper in her freezer. Things are bad, they used to say, but at least it’s not time for Phoenix.

  Shari pushed her plate away. She was quiet for a few minutes.

  “You blame me for that girl,” she said.

  The girl had been sitting at the kitchen table when Doe had come over to see Shari one afternoon back in Florida. She wore an oversized Miami Dolphins T-shirt and did not look up when Doe said hello. By now Doe was a gallery girl in a tight black dress and Shari and Ron had been together for two years. Shari hadn’t looked as happy during the last six months or so but kept saying she was, because any relationship took work, said Dr. Phil.

  Ron muscled Doe just a little bit into the living room and said the girl couldn’t speak English, that she was a cousin of a friend, she just needed a place to hang for a day. Doe said it had nothing to do with her.

  Doe knew a few words of Spanish. After they’d eaten and Ron had left, Doe asked the girl in Spanish if she could help. The girl said nothing, just gave a slight, terrified shake of her head.

  Doe canceled her evening plans. She sat in her car and followed Ron when he came back and picked up the girl. He drove to Trevor’s motel. A woman was waiting, a woman whom Doe knew without knowing her, a woman she’d cross the street to avoid, or, back when she’d waitressed, would make sure to bring her what she wanted quickly and efficiently. The woman took the girl by the elbow and led her inside.

  Shari had wrapped up leftovers for Doe and the bag was sitting on the seat next to her, fried shrimp and plantains. She threw them out on the street. The smell was making her sick.

  Doe figured that if she waited too long, she’d start thinking of reasons not to, so she drove west to the turnpike and north to the Pompano rest stop, because they still had phones there. She placed a call to 911, spoke briefly, and drove away.

  She lived like a cat for the next two days, spooking at every sound, until Shari finally called at midnight. She drove to the house, which was dark. No one answered her knock and it wasn’t until she saw the glow of a cigarette out back that she found her mother.

  Shari sat smoking. “He said he didn’t know,” Shari said.

  Doe stood, barely breathing. “You believe that?”

  “He was hoodwinked by that guy Trevor. Running a prostitution ring out of the motel.”

  “It was sex slavery, Mom.”

  “It wasn’t him, it was Trevor. He’s going to beat it, he said. He’s got a lawyer. Did you do it? Did you make the call?”

  “Does he think I did?”

  Now she could see Shari’s face, puffed and bruised, all along the left side. Her nostril was caked with dark blood. Doe sank to her knees. “Mom—”

  “He thought I did it. He was mad, said I should have told him what I thought. He could have steered me straight.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. My life’s blown apart.”

  “He was trafficking in underaged girls, Ma!”

  “That girl. Elena, Maria, whatever her name is. Don’t look at me, it wasn’t her real name anyway. She got hurt.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. She’s in the hospital. The police came and she ran, and I guess she got hit by a car? Run get me some aspirin, baby doll, will you? My head hurts.”

  “Your head hurts because your boyfriend beat you up!”

  “He thought I turned him in. It was all Trevor, the motel was just an investment for Ron, he was never there. I never liked Trevor’s eyes. Stop looking at me like that. Like I’m stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Doe said. “That’s the trouble. Then you’d have an excuse for this shit.” She went to get aspirin and ice.

  That night she drove back to her apartment in North Miami and packed. Ron would know that she did it. Somehow she hadn’t bargained on him being that smart. She was afraid of him but she was more afraid of Trevor and that woman.

  She sold her car to her roommate. She talked her surfer boyfriend into leaving that night. He’d been talking about Montauk all June, about how easy it was to get jobs. It was so hot in Miami. They left as the sun was coming up.

  Doe put sugar in the coffee, but it didn’t help. “I don’t blame you for the girl,” she said. “I blame you for staying with Ron.”

  “I left him!”

  “You gave him another chance.”

  “I believed him. That was enough to go on. Everybody deserves a second chance. I didn’t give him a third, okay?”

  Doe put her earbud back in.

  “Do you remember that time I came to your class? Kindergarten, I think. That teacher with the frosted lipstick.”

  Miss Karen.

  Shari leaned over and yanked out one of Doe’s earbuds. In one ear, Drake. In the other, Shari. “You met me at the principal’s office and led me to the classroom. You were so proud of me. I wore that dress you liked, and you said, ‘I hoped you were going to wear that.’ I read that book you liked, Outside Over There. I sat on a chair, with all of you on the floor, and you sat right at my feet. You kept your hand on my foot the whole time I read
.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “All I’m saying is? You really, really loved me once, okay?”

  Doe sipped her coffee. “I remember a picnic,” she said. “I was maybe ten? You were still with Steve then. I got a nosebleed. We didn’t have any tissues, so you stuck a tampon up my nostril to stop the blood. I started to cry. You and Steve just about pissed yourselves laughing. You made me walk all the way to the car with a tampon up my nose. Past all my friends.”

  “You always remember things wrong.”

  “You were the one operating on a six-pack that day.”

  Shari picked up Doe’s plate and scraped the happy face and the waffle into the trash. She poured herself more coffee and stood at the window, looking out into the yard. Doe picked up her earbud and put it back in. She muted the volume.

  “You got it wrong. You weren’t ten, you were eleven. It was after Shane. Here’s what you forget about that day. That’s when I was drinking, really drinking. And Steve was an asshole. Admitted. But when I was alone I wanted to kill myself. I took you to the park that day because Steve the asshole told me I was unfair when I told you Shane was your fault, he said that could really fuck up a kid. So he wasn’t an asshole all the time, okay? I made your favorite sandwiches. Tuna with crushed potato chips. So, okay, we got a little drunk.”

  Shari gave a wave to Shannon and Shawn, standing on the lawn cradling two zucchinis the size of newborns.

  “That’s the thing you should focus on, the picnic,” she said. “You dwell on the negative constantly, that’s your problem. I don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

  “What?” Doe asked.

  47

  RUTHIE WASN’T A sailor, but you couldn’t live in Orient without knowing one. Once she had asked her neighbor Josh about the worst trouble he’d ever been in at sea, and he described a squall that had blown up so quickly it had overtaken him in minutes. “In weather, everything is hard,” he’d said. “Sometimes you have to work to separate water from air. You’ve got to be comfortable with losing the horizon.”

  Classic sailor understatement. Turning “storm” into “weather.” Would that work for her? Could she turn “crazy” into “temporary derangement”?

  She’d lost her horizon line. It had been like this since Lucas had come to dinner at the playhouse that very night (typical of him to invite her to dinner and then assume she would cook it) and they’d mapped out the only way it could work. A picture painted at the same time she’d worked in Peter’s studio, a portrait: one of the Dowagers, Lucas had said.

  Ruthie remembered the painting in Daniel’s house. The Dowager Series was Peter’s winking nod to misogyny, as though Peter had been in on the joke. Of course he had, but the ultimate joke was that he actually was a misogynist. He delighted in punishing women; Ruthie was well versed in his methods, as were all his female assistants.

  She transported the brushes, paints, and canvas to the pool house. Told Jem she was looking for work and turning back to painting as a stress reliever. She bought canvas and painted again, terrible paintings since she was just repeating what she used to do. When she wasn’t painting, she was on the computer, scrolling for work. Applying to jobs within a two-hour commute. Calling old friends to nose around and find out what was coming up. Maybe she could freelance. There was a job in New Mexico, a job in Texas. She wasn’t ready to apply yet. She was hanging on to her turf.

  Lucas had thought twenty million would be under the radar as a sale target. She would take what she would need and no more, enough to write the check to Mike and then buy another watch for Carole. Any more than what she needed would be too much. She was already having trouble sleeping at night. She dropped into dreamless, deep naps in the middle of the day.

  There was an “Important Watches” auction coming up in November, including one with the same make and model as the one she’d lost. She would have to confess, but at least she’d be able to hand Carole a watch.

  She kept her own painting on the easel in case Jem walked in. Peter’s was kept in the closet.

  First the primer, an individual mix, a little glue mixed in. Painting the blue background had been easy; she’d mixed it a thousand times. A wash of color, laid on with a thin brush. A critic had called the blue “severe clear,” a kind of blue sky that pilots knew. The blue sky they’d seen on 9/11. Clarity and depth all at once, what infinity must be like. Now it was just known as Clay blue. Just as everybody knew an Yves Klein blue, they knew a Clay blue.

  It was his secret sauce, his glop, he called it, a precise mixture of paint and medium. She painted for him when he had the shakes, when he’d had a bad night, when he didn’t feel like painting. She went from mastering the color to capturing the line.

  He had his own line. Almost illustrative, so irony was there, as well as freedom. He laid down a grid and projected the photo. In his portraits the skin color of white people had been compared to a newly born piglet, though the critic who coined this had most likely never seen a piglet unless on a plate.

  When the Upper East Side ladies, with their Altoid breath and their beautiful shoes, came to have their Polaroids taken, the assistants would fetch espressos and springwater, and often disappear if the vibe sometimes changed to seduction. Many would tumble, hoping his brush would be kinder to them than he was. It never was.

  As Ruthie painted, she told herself it didn’t matter. Artists used projections, used assistants, and nobody cared, they just wanted the work. It was still Peter’s eye, his mockery, his line, his color, his wit. She could easily have painted this twenty years ago.

  She found several photos of a younger Adeline online, scanned and studied them. He had painted her only once, but there was also a beautiful suite of drawings that had made up a small, gorgeous exhibition at MoMA a few years ago.

  Adeline’s face was the same, her penchant for turning a quarter to the left, tilting her chin for a photograph in that way that beautiful women know their best angle. It wouldn’t be a nude, the canvas was too small, so it would just expose bare shoulders. Besides, if she had to paint Adeline’s nipples she would go crazy. Ruthie stared so long into the serene gaze of her nemesis that she began to feel as though she knew the woman Adeline had been, knew what the expression in her eyes meant. I found my chance and I am taking it, even if it farts in bed.

  She had three canvases, one with the word C U N T scrawled on it. She saved that one for last. She practiced on the first two. The first was not good. The second, close. Loose, precise. Good but not quite there. She covered the last canvas with primer, whiting out the word. Making invisible how he’d made her feel, how he’d whittled down her confidence. While she worked she remembered things she’d wanted to forget. Once he’d admonished her to be sure and always “wash down there” before she was with a man, because he’d been with a woman the night before who had “stunk like an afterbirth.” He’d told her that her breasts were too small, he’d told her that she would have been prettier if her eyes weren’t brown. He’d told her that he hoped she knew how to give a decent blow job.

  The female assistants had talked about him over beers, but the guys had laughed at them, called them pussies. That word was allowed because Peter said it all the time. The girls knew this job would get them places, and so they’d just gone back to work.

  How strange, twenty years later, her hands would shake when she thought of it.

  She pictured Peter shouting into the phone on the other side of the studio. She listened to Eat a Peach and Dark Side of the Moon. She thought of him saying that she was only a magpie.

  The magpie is back, motherfucker.

  So why did she come here, down the alley, toward the pier, finding the tiny place with the whitewashed sign OYSTERS. The night they’d spent together still thrummed inside her. Sometimes it filled her up with such urgency she’d dash outside and keep running until she came back to herself and s
aw she was standing on the beach, or on the road.

  Inside she could see him at work, shucking with a sharp knife, wearing a blue rubber glove. Placing the oysters on shaved ice, the lemon just so. Smiling at the customer, saying something as he delivered the platter and the beers.

  She watched without the nerve to go in.

  If she hadn’t had so much to hide now, she would push through the door and ask him. How did you learn how to do this, whittle the complex down to simple?

  Outside the picnic tables were full. It was a roaring Friday happy hour, a perfect summer evening. Giddy people, drinking beer, eating cold oysters, looking forward to picnics and pools, beaches and cocktails.

  He saw her through the window and stopped, then lifted his hand in a half wave. He leaned over to speak to the waitress, and walked outside.

  “Did you come for that Muscadet? I promise not to call it gorgeous.”

  “I came to apologize for my atrocious behavior.”

  “Okay.”

  “And my cowardice. Ducking your calls.”

  “Only two.”

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Doesn’t matter now.”

  “How did you do it? How did you throw your life up in the air to see where it landed?”

  Joe thought about this. What she loved about him was his attention to questions. “I really do believe we can choose to be happy,” he said. “I made a list.”

  This was a disappointing answer, somehow. “Oysters make you happy?”

  “They’re a simple food. They filter out a ton of crap.”

  “That’s a useful skill.”

  “Exactly.”

  The server popped her head out. “Joe?”

  He half turned to her, then back to Ruthie. He reached for her hand, and her pulse jumped. He only pointed to a mark on her third finger. “You’re painting again.”