Then he showed me a picture of Dani, who looked much older than fifteen, and posed in such a knowing way that I struggled (and failed) to find something to comment on beside her looks.
“She’s very beautiful,” I said. She was beautiful, the house was beautiful. Jesus.
“She’s a number of other things, too, including expensive,” he said, putting his phone away. “Now I sound like one of those assholes from the club.”
“Hardly,” I said. I could have listened to more, but the gap in the conversation prompted him to check his watch.
“Time flies fast in your lovely company. You could do me a great favor by dropping me in town. I have a meeting in less than an hour. I’ll cab back.”
The only thing I minded was that we were closer to George Town than the club, which meant less time in his company. I pulled up anchor and turned the boat around. At the city dock, he didn’t say goodbye, he said, “See you tomorrow,” to which I replied, “Okay,” and waved, not asking when or how I would see him, so long as I did.
* * *
• • •
I sped back to the club, feeling depleted by his absence, the motor kicking up walls of water behind me. My mind retraced our morning, how he lit up talking about Dani, dimmed with Rebekah. I thought about the laughter, the food, the conversation, how it flowed easily from subject to subject, and how we each seemed to intuit when to press and when to back off, a dance whose steps we already knew.
I docked the boat sloppily, deciding to clean it at the end of my shift to take advantage of the empty office. John-John was probably still out with the wedding party. I fired up the computer to satisfy my awakened appetite for more about Asherley, about Max and Dani, but mostly Rebekah. When I entered her name and clicked “Images,” the screen flooded with her face.
I knew she’d be beautiful, but she demanded more attention than I was prepared to give. Her wide eyes meant your own had to travel back and forth between them to take them in, their vaguely blue-green color varying from picture to picture. And her hair seemed undamaged by the chemicals required to achieve that blond hue. She had about her a carnality that was hard to ignore, especially the way her lips (often wearing the same shade of brick red) remained slightly parted whether she was smiling or not. The slight variations of her expression, that mouth, the white-blond hair, the flashing eyes, the pale shoulders and long, lean arms, duplicated over and over again with every click, gave the impression that there was a virtual Rebekah factory out there somewhere, still churning out perfect models even after her death.
At first I couldn’t bring myself to open the news links about her death or look at photos of the blackened car wreck and the flattened acres. But they were the first stories that popped up, her death covered numerous times by the New York Post, the stories detailing how Rebekah’s car had careened into an ancient oak on a particularly treacherous part of the road that led to the causeway connecting Winter’s Island to Long Island. It had been an unusually hot summer. The ensuing fire took out several acres of old-growth forest before smoke was spotted from the mainland, the sirens rousing Max from his sleep. By then the car was engulfed, Rebekah’s body so badly burned they could only be certain it was her by the diamonds from her melted wedding ring. Days later another story featured a picture of Max and Dani, both wearing dark glasses, entering an old church outside Sag Harbor. Then another story about how Max almost dropped out of the senate race, but even a break from campaigning didn’t prevent his landslide victory that November.
I was fascinated by Dani’s Instagram account, which boasted thirty-one thousand followers, an epic number, it seemed to me, for a fifteen-year-old girl. It looked as though she enjoyed free rein to post whatever she wanted, the recent ones from Paris an unsettling collage of girlish antics, moody tourist pictures, and sexy poses, all pursed lips, arched back, and airbrushed skin. Sometimes she was alone and sometimes she posed with a friend, with whom she seemed to imply a coyly sexual relationship. Even in her photos with Max there was a flirty, possessive quality to her embraces. Scanning much farther down her feed, I hit the mother lode, dozens and dozens of pictures of Rebekah with Dani, their likeness jarring. They had identical hair, similar style, their closeness unmistakable. With their arms draped around each other in loving ownership, they implied that theirs was an exclusive club, no other members allowed, not even Max, it seemed.
How often does Max find himself doing this, looking at pictures of his dead wife? When his pain became too much did he have a laptop resting open nearby? Had he bookmarked the tragic stories, or does he look for his favorite photos, hoping to be reminded of happier times? Perhaps his favorite was the one of Rebekah in that red-checked sundress from Town & Country. Or maybe he revisited the Vanity Fair spread of them together over the years, Max handsome in forgettable tuxedos, Rebekah in various gowns, the most striking a harsh chartreuse that would look ugly on anyone else. Or were his favorites the ones in The New York Times Magazine, taken by a famous photographer when Max launched his state senate campaign, the caption “Our Future First Lady?” There was a snarky reference to her Russian roots, and how in her twenties she contemplated anglicizing the spelling of her name “to better fit into her adopted country.” The story described the Winters as being “low-profile for such a high-powered couple.” Rebekah said if Max won she would use her role to highlight causes close to her heart, like land stewardship and conservation, having fallen in love with the island’s untouched forest and Asherley itself. The family hoped to keep the island pristine and undeveloped, despite its being worth more than a hundred million dollars. Rebekah described her biggest accomplishment, besides her daughter, as restoring Asherley to its former glory, a project that took her the better part of a decade.
I scanned through more pictures of the ten bedrooms, guessing theirs was the one described as “the most ethereal perch on Long Island.” There was the great hall, with its gleaming paneled walls, the second-floor gallery lined with famous oil paintings of Max’s ancestors, the prominence of the portrait artists growing along with the Winters’ wealth. Though the kitchen looked more rustic than I had expected, with its pale green painted cupboards and black-and-white-checkered floor, it highlighted Rebekah’s talent for updating the house while preserving its original aesthetic. The barn looked old, but was, in fact, a state-of-the-art facility for prized Thoroughbred horses, one of Rebekah’s passions. But the home’s centerpiece was a star-shaped greenhouse, its spires asymmetrical and dramatic, designed by a famous architect whom Rebekah persuaded to come out of retirement. Its jagged modernity clashed with the traditional design of Asherley and generated equal parts praise and criticism, one Times article calling it “utterly monstrous,” which prompted Rebekah to scold him in an op-ed titled “Why Some Monsters Are Beautiful.”
My trance was broken by the loud music coming from John-John’s yacht chugging by, the passengers already drunk by dusk. After giving him a blithe wave, I sped up my search, scanning an Architectural Digest piece about the renovations. There she was posing in a gown in front of old kitchen appliances that were actually clever modern replicas. Whatever seemed old about Asherley was usually, in fact, a modern reproduction. The last picture in this spread was of Max and Dani, her looking too grown-up in a sky-blue minidress, Max with his arm around his daughter’s tiny waist, their heads touching in the way of couples, her long blond hair a golden drape between them.
I slumped into the chair feeling sick, as if I’d rocketed back from another continent whose language and customs were entirely unfamiliar to me. This was followed by an overwhelming sense of shame, not from the snooping but from allowing myself the fantasy, however brief, that Max Winter might have found me attractive company today, me, a nobody from nothing, going nowhere. I laughed out loud at my own idiocy, at the notion that this wealthy, attractive man, this widowed senator, once married to a woman like Rebekah, who produced a child like Dani, who grew up on his own islan
d in a castle with a name, might think of me as anything more than the hired pilot of his rented boat. He brought me that food out of courtesy. He took that (one) picture of me not to treasure it later but to fill an awkward gap in our conversation. This is what Laureen had meant when she said only another larger-than-life woman could fill Rebekah’s shoes, could occupy the space she had taken up in their lives, in the world even. I was not only jealous of her, I was furious with myself for harboring, even for a day, such naive ideas about what Max Winter was doing with me. Images of Rebekah were now seared into my retinas. I could no longer see him without seeing her with him.
But I had done this to myself. I had invited her in. In my darkest days, I sometimes had to remind myself that it started here, in that moment, and that it wasn’t Rebekah who came after me. I was the one who went looking for her.
SIX
During that strange and potent month, it did not take long for us to become easy, constant companions, something Max seemed utterly blasé about, but I attributed my own comfort to putting an abrupt end to my investigations into his and Rebekah’s life. I had to. It was making me sick. I was like a potential addict who, after sampling heroin once, realized its easy, deadly appeal and vowed never to do it again. I decided to simply enjoy “it” while “it” lasted, whatever “it” was. I knew I was incomparable to Rebekah Winter in every way, and I decided jealousy was arrogance in disguise. As if I could compete with her. Even dead she was more fascinating than my own living presence. And Max, he was so “other” to me that my place in his life could only be fleeting, even while I was standing next to him at the helm of a boat or enjoying a furtive meal on the other side of the island. (In my defense we had not so much as kissed by that point, so I had no idea how much sex would irrevocably shift my understanding of what was, indeed, growing between us.) Also absent in those early days was any significant time spent around other people, which meant our courtship grew inside a vacuum. With no witnesses to comment on its existence, I was left uncertain sometimes whether any of it was real. One day Max was not in my life, the next he was with me almost daily, never at the club, only at the dock if he was taking out a boat that needed a captain (me, of course), which he’d done a dozen more times since our first trip, often enough to arouse John-John’s concern, not necessarily regarding any impropriety on my part but rather with my seeming inability to help Max catch any good fish.
Much of what I had to do for Laureen involved nightly visits to her “palazzo,” as she called her house, to take in mail and water plants. Max insisted on accompanying me. Our initial visit happened the very night after our first cruise. At the end of my long shift I was heading to the staff parking lot on the other side of the highway to use the company truck. Max spotted me from his rental car and rolled down his window, slowing his speed to match my pace.
“You need a ride somewhere, lady?”
That was after my deep dive into his and Rebekah’s life, so it was jarring to see him in person. But there he was, real, and right beside me, talking to me, asking to be in my company. Again.
“I don’t get into cars with strangers,” I said. “Besides, I’m just going to the parking lot.”
“I’ll drive you there.”
“It would take you longer to drive me than for me to just cross the highway.”
A line of frustrated drivers began honking behind him.
“I have candy.”
“Oh well, in that case . . .”
I got in. He smelled nice, like clean water. He asked me where I was taking the truck and I told him I had an errand on the other side of the island.
“Let me take you. I won’t charge you much. Mileage at most.”
“It’s actually pretty far.”
“Even better.”
Instead of making the U-turn into the parking lot, he continued down Esterly Tibbetts. The trip to Laureen’s on Sea View Road could sometimes take forty-five minutes, depending on traffic. Warning him of that didn’t deter him, and so the white marble of Laureen’s gaudy house became the backdrop against which we would conduct the majority of our heady affair.
* * *
• • •
That became our near-daily routine. I texted him when I was off work and about to trek to the staff parking lot. I’d meet him next to Laureen’s truck, which never left the lot. Any night we weren’t enjoying takeout on the iron bistro table in her sunroom, we ate at the same small fish shack on the other side of George Town, where no one from the touristic part of the island was likely to spot us.
That’s where we found ourselves nearing the end of our second week together. I remember the sunset was particularly pretty that night. My eyes were drawn to an armada of small cruise ships, like a dark ellipsis along the horizon.
“You went away just now,” he said, following my gaze. “What are you thinking? That you’d like to be on one of those boats?”
“No. Not at all. I am happy right here. Happier, I think, than I have a right to be.” My face flushed. I worried I would say too much, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. “In fact, I wish there was a way you could press rewind, not to change the past, but to experience a moment exactly as it was—just once more—even if it meant it could never become a memory.”
“What would be among your reruns?”
I wanted to say This moment, right now, with you. “Oh, I don’t know. Swimming with my mother. The day before the last one I spent with my father. I suppose a day or two this week.” I shrugged. “It’s been quite fun. For me anyway.”
He smiled, reached across the table, and placed a warm hand on my slightly colder one. It was the first time we’d touched.
“Thank you for saying that. Very few young people have craved my company lately. I’d forgotten what it’s like to even be mildly popular.”
He was talking about Dani, who had called a few times while we were together. Their chats were warm but short. She seemed to be checking in rather than initiating meaningful conversation. He’d startled me the other day on the boat when he replied to a question of hers that included casual mention of me. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m with her now,” he had said, practically yelling over the noise of the sea.
The waiter arrived. Max ordered our usual: two fish specials, two glasses of white wine. Feeling unqualified to elaborate on the trials and tribulations of raising a truculent teenager, I asked him instead what memories he’d relive once more then never remember again.
He thought for a moment. “I would like to mirror your lovely sentiment and say the time we brought Dani home. But I want to remember that day again and again. So I would game the system. What I might do is choose to relive my very worst moments, if only to be allowed to erase them forever. A small price to pay, in my experience.”
“Which ones?”
He turned to face me fully, his mood shifting. “Well, for starters, the day Rebekah died. And quite honestly, almost every day after that.” He took a final gulp of wine and signaled for another. I regretted guiding the conversation here. What did I think a widower would choose as his worst memories? He seemed to sense my embarrassment, and rather than pull back, he closed in on his statement, sealing it off with a taunt.
“You’re looking at me all doe-eyed and surprised. You think it’s cruel to want to rebury my wife so I never have to think about it again. Selfish, even. But it’s true. I wish I could forget it all.”
The subject of Rebekah’s death had dented his voice and shifted his features. This is what it does to him to think about her. I hated the way he looked at me in that moment, as though I were to blame for reviving her memory. She might as well have been sitting at the table with us, slowly drumming her fingers until I took a hint and left them alone.
“I think I understand—”
He snorted. “What do you understand? You’re just a child who’s lived on a pretty little island all her life.”
/> I began to tear up, confirming that I liked him too much already, and that in the face of potential rejection or humiliation, I would choose to be unkind. I couldn’t lash out at his grief over Rebekah, but fewer things angered me more than the assumption that I lacked depth because I was young, or that I couldn’t possibly struggle in a place that was, to him, a paradise. So I snapped back, not caring what it might do to the mood of the evening, or us. I will wreck this before it wrecks me.
“I understand a lot more than you give me credit for, Max. You don’t have a monopoly on grief, or strife,” I said. “And if I’m such a child, why are you spending all this time with me? Why do you pick me up every night to go on these stupid errands, and then bring me here for a meal when you could be doing so many other more interesting things with much more important people, older people, older women, with better clothes and lives and money, who don’t have to sneak around like I do? And Lord knows it can’t be for the sex, because you don’t seem to even want to touch me.”
A middle-aged woman at a nearby table glanced in our direction, rolling her eyes after she assessed the scene. Of course I was overreacting. How else to disguise my shame at how much I already knew about Rebekah and his love for her? How could I not compare myself to her? How could I not think: Why are you with someone like me when you were once married to someone like her? If this is how it ends, with me in a petulant snit and him driving off in a rage, so be it.
We said nothing to each other for a moment. I felt the tiny vessel that contained our burgeoning relationship crack open and spill out. Nothing this new or fragile, built on furtiveness and lies, could survive fights such as these. I pulled at my napkin to cover my blotchy face, sending my silverware clanging to the ground and Max after it. Now I am one of those clumsy baby-women, I thought, who reverts to little-girl antics when they feel angry or scared. How often had I seen these displays at the club?
The Winters Page 4