The Ramblers

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  “I do. I like a little mystery, too. Well, I can’t to meet this little guy or gal. And the awesome thing is that you already have a hot New York City baby photographer raring to go.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Tater. Go for it, okay? I don’t even know what that means, but look, you’ve been hurt and you’ve stumbled through that and if that’s the worst that can happen, that you get hurt again, then so be it. Be smart, but do what you want to do. You are finally on your own. And, no, I will not tell Mom. My lips are sealed.”

  He hangs up but can’t stop smiling. In the kitchen, he makes coffee. He doesn’t use his Keurig, the easy pop-it-in-and-press-a-button machine, but instead tries something new, a pour-over coffee. He read about this somewhere and thought it sounded pretty cool. He grinds his own beans, measures them out, puts the paper filter into a brew basket, adds the grounds and takes his time pouring water over it. Slowly, the coffee drips through. It takes forever, but his coffee tastes richer at the end.

  He drinks it. Lingers quietly in the threshold between the kitchen and his living room. He notices things. Things he doesn’t normally take the time to see. The crooked stacks of photography books he’s been collecting and neglecting, the strewn piles of unopened mail, the plastic bags full of new cameras and lenses, the orchid his mother sent him that died more than a week ago, the settlement papers from Olivia. Sun streams in from the big window, blasting the dusty, espresso-hued floors with brilliant stripes of light. He walks to his desk and sits, places his mug beside him. He taps the keyboard and the screen lights up.

  8:56AM

  “Tell me more, Professor Pennington.”

  The door is propped open. Tate walks through and pulls his boots off, places them by the door. He hasn’t seen the place in daylight before this.

  “Hello?” he calls out.

  “In here!” she says. He follows her voice and finds her in the living room.

  Smith sits in the bay window, surrounded by piles. “I’m making the hotel welcome bags for the out-of-towners. Can’t believe everyone arrives tomorrow.”

  “Can I help?” he asks, perching beside her.

  “Sure,” she says. “Each bag needs one of these welcome letters from Sally and Briggs, one of these lists of local sights and restaurants, a prefilled MetroCard, packets of frozen hot chocolate mix from Serendipity, one of these little boxes of miniature black-and-white cookies, a little thing of jelly beans—oh, and Advil. People will need the Advil. Oh, and we should look out in a minute. The parade should go by soon. It starts up on Seventy-Seventh at nine and doesn’t take all that long to get down this way.”

  “Good thing Mother Nature cooperated,” he says. “There was a lot of chatter about canceling the floats because of the wind. Apparently, they have wind gauges set up along the route.”

  “Ah, I had a feeling it would work out,” she says casually, optimistically.

  He gets to work, steals glances out the window. Soon enough, the Thanksgiving Day Parade inches by, the titanic floats coming within yards of her window. He doesn’t recognize all of them, but some are familiar, and he trains his lens out the window and snaps away, capturing the big balloons that almost press against the glass. Spider-Man. Hello Kitty. Ronald McDonald. Buzz Lightyear. SpongeBob.

  She joins him to watch, seems completely unimpressed.

  “This is so old news to you, huh?” he says. “You know, most of us have only seen this on television. Wait, what’s this? An elf?”

  She laughs. “You haven’t heard of the Elf on the Shelf?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “It’s this elf doll that shows up on the first of December and hides in a new spot each day of the month leading up to Christmas. The kids need to find it each morning and the gist is that the elf is watching on behalf of Santa to ensure some solid holiday-time behavior.”

  “That’s really kind of creepy . . . and genius,” he says. “I’ll have to get my sister one at some point. She’s having a baby this summer.”

  “You looking forward to being Uncle Tate?” she says.

  “I am,” he says. “I really am. I’m going to spoil that kid.”

  She smiles. Her hair is still damp and tied back off her face. She wears a loose sweatshirt without a bra and leggings. Her feet are bare and he studies her toes. Her second toe is crooked, bigger than the big one.

  “Looking forward to tonight?” he asks, watching her. He can’t peel his eyes from her. He prefers her this way, unpolished, slightly disheveled.

  She rolls her eyes. “I’ve never really liked Thanksgiving. Too much room for drama. My mom gets worked into a froth about making the perfect meal and then ends up catering it all anyway, and my father always sees it as an occasion to drink too much and be obnoxious. And then there’s the pie. I have a small pie problem and I always end up eating way too much of it. And last Thanksgiving was crappy. Asad came out to the house and my parents were on their best behavior and it was fine, but then he couldn’t sleep and felt sick and I worried he’d gotten food poisoning. When we got back to the city, something was off. I told him he was acting strange. We broke up a week later. Anyway,” she says. “What about you? You stoked?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “I’ve only been to the Hamptons once and it was many years ago.”

  He and Olivia went for a weekend the summer after college, to stay with one of her friends’ families. It was a big, fancy home in East Hampton and Tate was put off by the conspicuous displays of wealth everywhere. The tennis whites and fast cars and glittering pools. It was a different world, for sure.

  “It’s kind of an abhorrent place,” she says, looking at him, eyes softening. “So much money. So much privilege. So much posturing. But it’s also really pretty and peaceful. I kind of have this love-hate thing going with the Hamptons and I’m probably not alone in that.”

  “I did a little research last night on the literary history of the Hamptons. Learned some pretty cool things. Apparently, there’s this plaque dedicated to Truman Capote in Sagaponack? He’s one of my favorites. Maybe we can make a little detour on the way back tomorrow? I’d love to see it and get some photographs of the pond.”

  She stops what she’s doing. “You know what? Help me finish these last few and then let’s go. I can’t believe I’m saying this because I’m the last person in the world to do an impromptu excursion, but let’s go today, to find your little literary plaque and hang in Sagaponack. I’ll call down and have them pull the car around. It’ll be a little adventure. You said you need adventure, eh?”

  “Really?” Tate says, feeling a charge.

  “Sure,” Smith says, hopping up. “Give me a few minutes to freshen up.”

  As she disappears into her bedroom, Tate looks around. The place is sparingly decorated in soft, safe colors. A few candles and photographs, but not much else. He ducks into the kitchen, peeks in the fridge. It’s full of glass Tupperware containers, all carefully labeled. Kale. Green apple. Grapes. Fennel.

  “Ready?” she says, reappearing in the kitchen door. Her eyes are beguilingly wide.

  He carries their bags, follows her down the hall. They wait for the elevator.

  She’s an atrocious driver. Her foot is fidgety on the gas pedal. The car is not what he expects. A beat-up, dusty white Prius, plenty old. She turns on some music. Mumford and Sons.

  “I have a confession,” he says as she brakes to a stop at a red light.

  She turns toward him, fear in her eyes. “Is this something I want to know?”

  “I Googled your father,” he says, and waits for a reaction.

  A few efficient clicks and Tate learned that Thatcher was named one of the top ten wealthiest real estate investors on CNNMoney. One thing was clear: this man is a force to be reckoned with.

  “Oh dear,” she says, laughing. “That must have been fun for you. Rest assured, only ninety-five percent of it’s true. And the other five percent is basically true.”

  They continue on. The traffic isn’t
as bad as he imagined it would be. They drive along at a good clip, talking, but also enduring stretches of intimate silence. He watches her most of the time, how her thin fingers curl around the steering wheel, how her legs bounce to the beat of the music, how she bites her lip at stoplights.

  At a red light, Smith gets a text. “Sally. Wondering when we’re arriving. She’s been all over me since our fight. I think she gets how wrong it was not to tell me about Asad.”

  “Did you forgive her?” Tate says.

  “Yeah,” Smith says, smiling. “It’s hard to stay mad at her, but I’m making her think she needs to work for it.”

  “She’s younger?” he asks.

  “Yeah, but not by much. My parents had a hard time having me. They tried for years. My mother had several miscarriages but then got pregnant with me when she was almost forty. And after me, she was convinced she’d never get pregnant again, and what happens? Sally. Not much more than a year later.”

  “If this is too personal, just tell me to stop, but do you think that’s why you didn’t tell your parents about the abortion? Because of what your parents went through fertility-wise?”

  She nods. Considers this. “I’ve never thought about that, but yeah, it probably had something to do with it. But it’s mainly their politics. Thatcher is a pretty rabid Republican. A daughter having an abortion wouldn’t work for him. My mom would have handled it better, but she wouldn’t have been able to keep it from Thatch and she would’ve probably encouraged me to keep it and would have probably offered to raise the baby while I finished school. I think about that sometimes, you know? What if? What if I had an almost seventeen-year-old? I can’t even wrap my mind around it, but things would be so wildly different. I probably wouldn’t be meeting brooding artistic types at tailgates or taking Thanksgiving detours to check out literary plaques.”

  “Butterfly effect for you, eh?” he says.

  She nods.

  “You ever regret it?”

  That question again.

  “No,” she says automatically, but then she pauses. “Maybe. Shit, I swore I was over it, but now I’m not sure. What if I made the wrong call? What if that was my chance to be a mom? It makes me a little bit sad. And now my sister will have a kid soon and I hate that I’m always comparing myself to her, but I can’t help it. I’m the slightly older, less decisive, highly neurotic sister. Alas. Sally has always been the trailblazer, the one who knows what she wants and how to get it. Career? ‘I’ve always gotten a kick out of math and science. I’ll be a doctor!’ Men? ‘I like that handsome investment banker from Texas over there at the keg. I think I’ll say hello and introduce myself.’ Done and done.”

  “They meet in school? Sally and Briggs?”

  “No,” Smith says. “They reconnected at their ten-year reunion a few years back and I should warn you that this wedding will practically be one big ode to Princeton, which tickles old Thatcher big-time. He’s a Princeton man through and through. His father was a Princeton man. My going to Yale was this big rebellion. They’re naming the wedding tables after Princeton landmarks. I’m half expecting a Tiger to bust out on the dance floor as they’re cutting the cake. Our Bulldog pride might surge uncontrollably.” She laughs. “Where did you say this Capote plaque was? We’re approaching Sag now.”

  Tate checks the GPS on his phone. “We’re not too far. And I think we’re like a mile from Peter Matthiessen’s place.”

  “The Paris Review guy?” she says.

  “The one. I read this piece in Vanity Fair this summer and apparently, he bought like six acres around here in 1959 and this was all a farm community with small, unassuming wood-frame houses and fields, and it was all writers and artists and musicians. Peter would come out here with Coast Guard buddies and he’d write on bad-weather days and then work as a scalloper and a fisherman. He kicked it with artists like Jackson Pollock and did his share of duck hunting and drinking. And what I love is that the dude is, what, eighty-six, and he just published a novel, and his best buddy, James Salter, just published his first book in thirty years and he’s eighty-eight. How fucking cool is that? That’s what I want, you know? To chill with interesting people, to be doing something I love when I’m old as dirt.”

  Smith smiles. “You’re pretty jazzed about all of this. Maybe you can become a Hamptons historian on the side. You seem to know everything. And I’ve been coming here my whole life and I’m totally ignorant. I appreciate the education though. Tell me more, Professor Pennington.”

  He is getting jazzed. This is all fucking cool, to be out here in this land that has such amazing history, where so many of the artists he admired spent time. And it’s fun to share this stuff with her; she seems to actually be interested.

  “I might be getting this wrong, but I think Steinbeck was the original and then Peter and then a bunch of others—Doctorow, Plimpton, Vonnegut. The houses were cheap and the isolation was the appeal. The place was practically deserted from Labor Day to Memorial Day. I read that Capote came to escape the social enticements of the city.”

  “And now look at this place: Norman Jaffe monstrosities and McMansions galore,” Smith says. “It’s kind of tragic if you ask me. Jaffe’s son Miles is quite the card. Has this insane website called Nuke the Hamptons or something where he goes on these indignant Holden Caulfield–style rants about the lack of values here. It’s kind of disturbing but also kind of right on.”

  Smith parks and they walk together down an unassuming path off Widow Gavits Road into a broad clearing with a straight-on view of Crooked Pond.

  Only now does it occur to Tate that this has all been something of an unconscious test, this little detour they’re taking on Thanksgiving Day. He didn’t think of it this way when he mentioned the plaque, it was just a detail, a conversational snippet, but now he realizes, in part, his intentions. He wants to suss her out, discern out how flexible Smith is, how married she is to routine, because this was one of the things that doomed his relationship with Olivia. She always had a meticulous plan, an unwavering sense of how things should go, and Tate was more interested in winging it sometimes, in having impromptu adventures. She felt this was immature and juvenile, this taste for spontaneity, and incommensurate with a responsible adult existence, but Tate wasn’t wholly interested in a responsible adult existence. He wanted to go surfing on a whim or make a late-night grocery run to gather ingredients for a spur-of-the-moment picnic or have sex in the parking lot of the movie theater.

  “What do you know about this spot?” she says, eyes twinkling. “I’m sure you have a pint-sized lecture prepared given your lively performance in the car.”

  “There should be a bench right up here and a granite marker with the plaque. It was all put here in 1992 to honor Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy. I think their ashes were scattered over the water. I might be getting this wrong, but before he died, Capote stipulated that the proceeds from the sale of his estate around here should go to the Nature Conservancy and that the charity would use the funds to buy and protect this land, the Long Pond Greenbelt, which has a ton of biological diversity. I guess they did this ‘Black and White’ hike here in the fall in honor of Capote’s birthday a couple years back and the walk was named after the 1966 Black and White Ball in Manhattan. The walk ended with a reception that includes a reading of some of his work, a display of memorabilia and samplings of Cousin Sook’s fruitcake from his famous short story ‘A Christmas Memory.’”

  Smith walks ahead on the path and Tate trails her, takes a few photographs of her from behind. She doesn’t seem to notice. The bench comes into view and she bends down and squints. When he is in earshot, she begins to read.

  “‘The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.’ Oh my, I love that,” she says. “Maybe I should rustle up some Capote. I read In Cold Blood and it haunted the hell out of me.”

  “It’s one of my favorite books of all time,” Tate says. “The original true crime. The idea of life b
eing one way, leading this life of a farmer with your family, and then enter these devils and everything changes. What about this, from Dunphy? This is good too . . . ‘I was grieving the way the earth seems to grieve for spring in the dead of winter, but I wasn’t afraid, because nothing, I told myself, can take our halcyon days away.’ I read somewhere that halcyon is the Latin name for belted kingfishers. Legend has it that on that day, as Capote’s ashes were being scattered, this belted kingfisher came flying around from the end of the pond.”

  “Pretty incredible,” Smith says, looking around.

  Tate stands, lifts his camera to his eye, starts snapping the pond, the sky, the bench, the plaque. He trains his lens on her and waits for permission. It comes, and swiftly too, in the form of a shy smile. She’s incredibly photogenic, but this doesn’t surprise him.

  “Fuck, it feels good to be out here, doesn’t it? I’ve been slaving away on these precious MFA applications, writing up these quaint little statements of interest, explaining myself, justifying my absence from the academic world, but I’m standing here and feel suddenly convinced the idea of school is all wrong. I need to be out here, doing it, you know? Just wear these babies around the world and figure it out myself,” he says, fingering the straps of his two cameras, a Leica M3 and a Leica M9, both of which he bought the afternoon the acquisition money came in. The purchases cost a fortune and made him feel sick to his stomach, but he’s been putting them to good use.

  “You going to wear your cameras for Thanksgiving dinner? You’ll be poised to capture the robust dysfunction,” Smith says.

  He laughs. Feels thankful for her timely humor, for the fact that she didn’t challenge his statement about not going to school. Olivia would have brandished her prosecutorial skills and argued for the practicality of obtaining a degree. Maybe it’s not fair comparing them; he’s just met Smith. But he can’t help himself.

  “So, what did you tell your folks about me?” he asks.

  “Not a ton,” she says, smiling. “I’ve kind of learned my lesson to keep it simple until there’s a reason to provide details. They’re so wrapped up in the wedding hoopla anyway. They barely have time for me.”