Finny and Judith were left to make the salad in the kitchen while Prince and the other men worked the grill and Prince’s sister took Homer for his walk. Judith’s kitchen would have been plain—white cabinets and a white tiled floor—except for the view of the water through the glass doors that were one wall of the room. Through the glass, Finny could also see the corner of the deck where the boys were working on the barbecue, though she couldn’t hear them. Prince was getting the coals ready, Sylvan was nodding approvingly, and Carter was squirting little streams of lighter fluid onto the coals from a large plastic bottle.
“This is so nice,” Judith said. “Having you here. I feel like we’re back at Thorndon.”
“Then I’d have to think of a dare,” Finny said. “I think yours was the last one. When I stuck that note under Poplan’s door.” She glanced at Judith after she said this, to see the effect of her words.
Judith laughed. “I felt so bad about that. Telling on you. I had a guilt complex for years.”
The news struck Finny like a blow from behind. “And here I thought you were my friend,” she said. Then she laughed at her own joke just to make sure Judith knew she was kidding. Finny could see how much effort Judith was putting into this weekend, how much she wanted to be friends again, and Finny didn’t want to spoil that. So she tried to ask Judith her next question as casually as she could. “But why’d you do it? We were getting along so well.”
Judith shrugged. “I saw how close you were to Poplan. I guess it bothered me.”
Finny remembered the story Poplan had told about catching Judith and Jesse with the alcohol. How angry Judith had been at Poplan. And Judith could see how close Finny and Poplan were getting. She must have realized that for Poplan, not knowing who had written the note wouldn’t be half as bad as knowing Finny had betrayed her.
“Anyway, it was a long time ago, Finny,” Judith said, and opened the refrigerator. It was like Judith to diminish any topic that didn’t cast her in a flattering light. Finny wanted to say more, but she held back. They had the whole weekend in front of them.
A minute later, while Judith was washing the lettuce, she asked Finny, “How’s your sex life?”
Finny was slicing some pears into long strips. “It’s more of an afterlife,” Finny said. “I don’t have that much time since I’m heading the after-school program, too.”
“I take it you don’t see Earl anymore, then?”
“No,” Finny said. For some reason she didn’t feel comfortable getting into it with Judith. She hoped her friend wouldn’t ask any more questions.
Judith seemed to take a moment to absorb the information. Then she said, “Prince and I tried anal sex for the first time recently.”
Finny wasn’t sure how they’d arrived at this topic, or whether she really needed the inevitable mental pictures it would inspire. “That’s funny,” she said, “I just had calamari for the first time.”
Judith looked puzzled. “I’d always been afraid of it,” she went on. “I just thought of it as somehow dirty. Like something they’d do in a porno. We’d tried it once, about five years ago, but Prince couldn’t even get in me. This is going to be gross, but I have to tell you: it felt like I was taking a shit backward. I know, I know, it’s disgusting.”
“I felt the same way with calamari,” Finny said. She finished with her pears. “What else?” she said to Judith.
“There’s a nice aged Gouda in the fridge,” Judith said. “You can take that out and chop it up.”
Finny opened the heavy door of the refrigerator, hoping that the previous topic had passed, but as soon as Finny had the cheese on the counter, Judith started up again. “I realized the trick,” Judith said as Finny saw the grill light up outside in a whoosh of flames, the guys all leaping back for cover. “The trick is to get really lubed up. And then you bring your knees way up, like, almost to your chest. He needed to work his finger around in there for a while to get me to relax. But then he slipped right in. I can’t even tell you how amazing it was. I came three times.”
Now Judith was spinning the salad dry, and she looked at Finny. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can see I’m making you uncomfortable.”
Finny waved her off. “I love Gouda.”
“It’s just that I don’t have girlfriends to tell this stuff to. I’m not even really sure what other women’s sex lives are like. I mean, we do it all the time. Prince says he needs it every day to go out there and sell his funds or whatever. So I give it to him.”
“It’s okay. I’d tell you my stories if I had any.”
“By the way,” Judith said, “your brother looks really cute with his head shaved.”
“I’ve been telling him to do it for years,” Finny said.
“I think Prince is cheating on me,” Judith said. “In fact, I know it.”
They were joined at dinner by a friend of Prince’s named Bradley Miller. Brad had gone to Columbia with Judith and Prince, and he now worked with Prince in finance. He was probably a couple of classes ahead of Judith and Prince, because he looked older, maybe his late thirties. Not unattractive, though. He was nicely built, with strong shoulders, his shirt opened a couple buttons at the neck so Finny could see his bristly chest hair. He was paler than Prince and Judith, with dark hair that was just beginning to make a widow’s peak, and he had silvery half-moons under his eyes. Finny guessed he spent a lot of time at the office. He seemed to know about wine and food. He’d brought the bottles of Brunello they were drinking with dinner, and he explained about his travels to the town in Italy where the wine was made, how the long hot summers and mild winters made it the perfect climate for the Sangiovese grapes.
“Is this real silver?” Brad said, touching his knife.
“Yeah,” Prince said. “We got it for our wedding.”
Brad nodded. “It’s nice,” he said.
They were eating at the large round table in the living/dining room, in front of the glass doors that led to the deck. It was dark now, and constellations of lights speckled the inlet. You could hear crickets, waves pawing the shore, boats knocking the dock. There was a lazy Susan in the middle of the table, where Judith had laid out all the platters of grilled meats and buns and salad and potatoes, and people spun the wheel back and forth to get what they wanted. Homer ate his burger off the same china the other guests did, lying on the floor next to Korinne, and Prince’s sister frequently stopped the conversation to point out something about Homer’s tastes—such as that he liked onions but abhorred pickles—and everyone had to agree how interesting it was before the conversation moved on. Brad had traveled a lot in Europe, and he and Finny had a long exchange about their favorite things to do in Paris. When Brad mentioned a restaurant Finny hadn’t tried—it sounded very expensive—he said, “Well, I’ll have to take you sometime.” Judith grinned at Finny when he said that, and Finny said she’d have to check her calendar.
“What the hell do you people do here on the weekends?” Carter said, amidst the clacking of knives and forks. Finny could tell he’d been fighting the urge to sip from the glass of wine set before him. His abstinence must have been making him cranky.
“Mostly quiet stuff,” Judith said. “We can go to the beach tomorrow. Take a walk in town.”
“Or maybe do some knitting,” Carter suggested.
Sylvan laughed, but Prince didn’t seem to find it funny. “When you have a long hard week of work,” he told Carter, emphasizing this last word as if it were a foreign term, “it’s nice to have a little peace and quiet at the end of it. Judith and I take a long bike ride most mornings, then go for a swim in the bay and have a big breakfast.”
“I’d actually love to check out the town,” Sylvan said, and Finny recognized the therapist’s instinct in her brother to defuse the tension. “I’m curious to see some of the shops.”
“I’ll show you around,” Judith said quickly, and flashed a smile at Sylvan. Judith pushed a strand of hair behind one of her ears—a gesture Prince couldn’t have n
oticed because he was seated next to her—and Finny once again got the distinct impression that Judith was flirting. She was wearing another low-cut shirt, made of a loose gold netted fabric, and a diamond necklace that dropped into the shadows between her breasts.
“That would be great,” Sylvan said, and smiled back at Judith.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, is this real?” Brad Miller said, brushing his hand along the marble top of a cabinet behind him. But before anyone answered, he said, “It’s beautiful.”
Finny excused herself to use the bathroom.
“You can use ours,” Judith said. “It’s right behind you.”
Finny went into the master bedroom and closed the door. The room was more disheveled than Finny had expected, clothes on the bed and floor, and only a small window, now shielded with blinds, above the large mahogany bed frame. The carpet was a faded pastel blue, and felt damp under Finny’s toes from the sea air. The bathroom was to Finny’s right, and she was just about to step in when she remembered something. What she remembered was the day she’d arrived at Thorndon and looked into Judith’s dresser before Judith had gotten there, seeing all of Judith’s black clothes. Now Finny looked at the large armoire next to the bed, made of the same mahogany as the bed frame, with a matching ornamented trim. Of course Judith and Prince would have a bedroom set in their vacation home. But what interested Finny more was what Judith had inside her closet now. She felt an almost unbearable urge to open the mahogany armoire.
So she did. She wasn’t normally a snoop. But Judith seemed to bring it out in her. Finny needed to get to the bottom of her friend’s mystery. She wanted to know who Judith Turngate actually was, behind the smiling and the makeup and the sex talk. What was the reason for all of it?
Most of the clothes on the hangers were standard beach stuff—sundresses, and cute little tops, shorts, and some skirts and dresses for the evenings. Tucked in between were some racier samples of lingerie: lots of lace and silk. Finny went on to the drawers. Here were G-strings and push-up bras. They weren’t things that Finny would have ever worn herself, but still, somehow she’d expected more.
She was careful to keep everything in the exact place and folded in the exact way she’d found them. Finny was about to close the armoire, resigned to the impenetrableness of Judith, when she saw on the top shelf of the dresser, in precisely the spot where she’d found Judith’s black lipstick twenty years before, a small stack of photographs. Finny lifted the stack, making sure not to smudge the photographs, and began to thumb through them.
The first few were standard couple photos of Judith and Prince, arms around each other, smiling at the camera. But as she went through the stack, the photos changed. There was one of Judith naked, taken from below. She was straddling a man who must have been Prince, cupping her breasts in her manicured fingers. Another photo showed Judith in one of her lingerie outfits—a black and pink one—bending over to display the pink rim of her anus to the camera, smiling shyly, almost timidly, over her shoulder, like she’d been cajoled into taking the picture. There was a photo that must have been taken in the mirror, of Prince mounting Judith from behind, flexing his biceps. What the hell is this? Finny thought. And yet she couldn’t stop. Not until she got to the final photo—of Judith wearing dark lipstick, her mouth shaped like an O, ready to accept Prince’s penis (which Carter had correctly identified as tiny).
Just as Finny was stacking the photos back up, a small slip of paper fluttered out of the top of the pile, which Finny had only skimmed through. The paper sailed to the floor like a feather in a breeze. Finny picked it up. A note was written on it: You shouldn’t be looking at these. It was in Judith’s handwriting—the same writing that had been slipped under Poplan’s door at Thorndon. Finny turned around. She had the uncanny sensation that Judith was in the room with her. Yet no one was there. Finny remembered Judith’s comment at Thorndon that “no one stops at the top of the dresser,” and now Finny saw the wisdom of it, of what Judith had known at such a young age: once you’ve opened the door, you’ve already crossed over. Finny wondered if the note was intended for her.
Finny gathered everything as well as it could be gathered. She knew that eventually Judith would probably figure out what Finny had done. The certainty was in the note. A beautiful woman like Judith knows people will want to go through her stuff. It’s probably why Judith had told Finny to use the master bathroom in the first place.
Finny put the photos back on the shelf and went to the bathroom.
Back at the table, Judith asked Finny, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Finny said. “Just more to drink than I’m used to.”
Brad looked concerned. “Drink a lot of water,” he said. “In London, since the bars close so early, we used to pound a dozen beers, then drink a gallon jug of water so we could walk home.”
“If Homer’s stomach is upset,” Korinne offered, “I crush up Pepto-Bismol tablets in his food. It’s funny: he’s very picky. He’ll only eat Pepto, not Tums or Mylanta.”
“He would have gotten along with Dad,” Sylvan joked to Finny.
She smiled at everyone. She had the feeling the room was spinning, or rocking, as in a large boat. “Really, I’m fine,” she said.
And Judith grinned in the knowing way she had earlier, when Sylvan had looked at her breasts.
After dinner they turned on a movie. They sat on the enormous wraparound couch—enough room for fifteen people, like the couch Judith’s parents had at the Beresford—which was behind the dining table. The movie was some silly action story that Finny couldn’t put the effort in to follow, and besides, she was distracted by the fact that every time there was a sex scene, Korinne let out a little shriek and placed her hand over Homer’s eyes, claiming, “He’s very sensitive. He’s offended by gratuitous nudity.” Carter was asleep. Prince and Brad were talking about investments. Judith was in the kitchen, washing dishes. She’d insisted that no one could help her.
“You want to go for a walk?” Sylvan asked Finny.
“I can’t tell you how badly,” Finny said.
They walked down to the belt of beach around the inlet. It was quiet here, with just the sounds of the water and the boats. Finny could see into the houses of some of the other people who lived on the water—warmly lit kitchens and living rooms, the flicker of television sets.
“So, what’s your surprise?” she said to her brother. They were walking barefoot, and the sand and seaweed were cold on Finny’s feet.
Sylvan laughed. “I was just going to tell you,” he said.
“So?”
“I’m engaged,” he told Finny.
She stopped and punched him on the arm. “Hey,” she said. “Congratulations!” She hugged him. She was thrilled for her brother. With only one reservation: for some reason she couldn’t get the image of him looking down Judith’s dress out of her head.
“Thanks,” he said, in his awkward way. “I know, it’s weird.”
“Are you happy?”
“I think so,” Sylvan said. “She’s great.” And then he added, “Mari, I mean.”
Back inside, Carter had gone to bed. He was going to be sharing a room with Finny that had two twin beds in it. Sylvan had the room across the hall, which had a double bed, since Judith hadn’t been sure if he was going to bring Mari. Korinne was sleeping on the couch, since she said that Homer liked to get up at four-thirty for his walk, and Prince said that no one else would want to hear that.
Brad was ready to go. He kissed Judith goodbye and shook hands with Sylvan and Prince. Then he said to Finny, “Walk me to the door?”
They walked outside and stood on the front porch together. A few cars sped past on Dune Road, their headlights briefly lighting the pine trees in front of the house.
“I waited for you to get back before I left,” Brad said to Finny. Finny could see now that he was swaying a little from the Brunello. His eyes moved up and down Finny’s body in the appraising way he looked at Prince’s expensive th
ings, and Finny half-expected him to ask if she was real.
She was about to make a joke, when Brad leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. He then put his hands around her waist and drew her to him. Normally Finny would have pulled back, or kicked him, or screamed, but something about the suddenness of it, the confident—even forceful—way he drew her in, it surprised her. She felt a hot spark of lust, a familiar spreading warmth, and she found she liked kissing him.
In a few minutes, after some hasty examinations of each other’s bodies, Brad said, “You know, I’m in Boston all the time for business. I’d love to take you out for dinner.” He pulled a card from his pocket with his number on it. “I really enjoyed, uh, talking to you.”
He squeezed her hand, then got in his car—a purple Audi—and drove off.
Inside the house, Judith said, “I guess you guys hit it off.”
“I think so,” Finny said, still a little dizzy from the wine and the sexual charge of Brad’s embrace.
“I had a feeling,” Judith said.
Carter was snoring when Finny came into their room. He was passed out, an episode of The Golden Girls playing on the little TV in front of the bed. “I should always meet men lying down,” the Southern character said. Then the sassy old woman said, “I thought you did.” Canned laughter spilled into the room. Finny flipped channels on the TV for a few minutes; she didn’t feel like sleeping. She washed up in the bathroom and came back out in her pajamas. It was after midnight. She assumed everyone was asleep.
Then she heard a door click open in the hall. It was Sylvan’s door, and Finny rushed to the door of her own room to catch him. She didn’t know what she’d say, but she wanted to talk to him.
She opened her door, and was on the point of speaking, when she saw that it wasn’t Sylvan coming out of his room. It was Judith, wearing a silky Asian-printed nightgown that barely covered her backside. The nightgown was only loosely knotted around Judith’s waist, as if she’d put it on in a hurry.
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