Daniel’s voice thickens. His pipe is cold and he empties the bowl angrily, banging it against the bench, and reaches for his tobacco pouch. Simon lights a match, holds it out to him and sees, in the weak flicker of its flame, that although his friend’s head is tilted skyward, his eyes are closed. He puffs at his pipe and exhales a soft cloud of gray smoke that drifts off into the inky darkness.
‘Anyway,’ Daniel continues, ‘I was pretty good at fooling myself. Mostly because I was so crazy about her. From the minute I met her it was as though I’d been blinded by fairy dust. I’d sit in the audience and watch her perform and I’d shiver with wonder to think that that gorgeous creature gliding across the stage was coming home with me, that she was my wife, my own. She was my miracle even when our age of miracles had passed. It had vanished maybe two, three years into our marriage.’
‘Two, three years,’ Simon repeats. ‘But Daniel, you’ve been married for twelve years.’
He knows the exact date because they had celebrated Paul’s fifth birthday at the wedding and Laura, her bridal dress a white dancer’s skirt and long-sleeved white leotard, had danced with Paul. The bride and the birthday child had been surrounded by applauding friends until the music stopped and Laura curtsied and gave Paul a white iris plucked from the coronet that crowned her dark dancer’s knot.
‘Twelve years,’ Daniel acknowledges. ‘I fooled myself for a long time. I kept writing new chapters for us. We’d grow. We’d work it out. We’d develop. We made do. We compromised. At least I compromised. Laura hated coming to Mount Haven so we gave that up and went to the shore. She hated the writers’ conferences so I went alone but I tagged along to her dance workshops and wrote or tried to write while she was at rehearsals. When I took a teaching gig I told myself that it didn’t matter that she didn’t come with me. She had rehearsals for a performance, she was teaching a master class, she was working with a new choreographer. She had her career and I had mine. It was not always easy, but it was the bargain we had made with each other. We each had our freedom. No kids. An unspoken pact. Pregnancy does terrible things to a dancer’s body. Kids screw up a writer’s schedule. We had agreed to that from the beginning. So we were in sync. That’s what I told myself. I repeated it so often that I began to believe it.’
Daniel stood and walked to the edge of the lake, bent to pick up a smooth stone, sent it skidding across the calm waters and then returned to the bench, biting down hard on his pipe.
‘And that’s what you told me,’ Simon said, remembering the night Daniel had told him that he and Laura would marry, stating, with grave certitude, that they had worked out the kinks, that they wouldn’t fall into any of the sand traps that had wrecked the marriages of so many of their friends.
‘It turns out that Laura thought that the bargain we had made with each other went beyond our careers,’ Daniel continues. ‘She wanted freedom in all things. Financial freedom. She had her own bank account, her own checking account. I had no problem with that. Freedom of time. No need to tell me where she was going, how long she’d be away, what she’d be doing. OK. I dealt with that. But her agenda for sexual freedom was a shock, a big shock, a deal-breaker shock. I don’t even know how to tell you this.’ His voice quivered.
‘Just tell it,’ Simon said. ‘Take your time.’ He speaks in the tone he uses to encourage nervous graduate students before they begin an oral presentation.
Daniel breathes deeply. ‘OK. Here goes. A couple of weeks ago, we go out to the Hamptons. There’s a dance festival going on and she’s involved in the programming. A lot of big names. Dancers, choreographers, impresarios, donors. Some I recognized. Some I didn’t. I wasn’t really interested but I said I’d go. She took the car and went a day or so ahead of me and I rode my bike down. I took the proofs of my novel and told her I’d work on them while she went to her meetings. Two nights later there was a big cocktail party at one of the mansions out there, a fundraiser, the kind of thing I hate. Lance something, one of these young millionaires who combines culture and philanthropy, was hosting it. I hate guys named Lance and I guess now I’ll hate them even more. So anyway, we agree that she’ll go alone and when she gets back we’ll go out to dinner. So I work, I get caught up in making some edits in the manuscript and when I look at my watch it’s almost nine – way past dinner time even for the Hamptons. I call her cell phone and there’s no answer, not even voice mail. I get worried, really worried, because she has the car and she’s a lousy driver.’
He pauses, breathes deeply and continues.
‘But I knew where the party was, so I put on my running shoes and jogged over to the house. There were no cars except hers in the driveway and the house was dark but the door was open so I went in. You can guess the rest. It’s kind of classic, I suppose. There, on the living room floor, on the goddamn oriental carpet, were my wife and Lance, both of them naked and flushed, Laura’s skin kind of gilded, the way it gets after love making. And they look at me, the two of them, as though I’m the one who should be explaining, and apologizing. Lance kind of smirking and Laura with that aggrieved expression I know so well, the look she gets if another dancer gets a role she thought was hers or if I bring home pistachio ice cream when she had specifically asked for almond chip. I kind of lost it then. I yelled, I knocked over a lamp, I grabbed Laura’s clothes from the couch and tossed them at her and while she was still buttoning and snapping, before she could even put her sandals on, I pulled her out of the house. We screamed at each other all the way back to our motel. She wanted to know what I thought I was doing. We had an agreement, didn’t we? Freedom. Sexual freedom. She thought I understood that, that I had understood it for years. I looked at her as though she was crazy, as though she was someone I had never known, this woman who had been my wife for a dozen years, the center of my life, the center of my dreams.
‘“How many Lances have there been?” I asked her. “Lots,” she screamed. She shouted names, men I knew, men I’d never heard of. There had, after all, been weeks and weeks over the years when our work separated us, when she was traveling with repertory dance groups and I was doing book tours. She was still screeching, spewing out names, places, when we got out of the car and I slapped her. Slapped her hard, across the face. She threw her sandals at me and began kicking my bike. A dancer’s kicks, high and then low, dancing legs and flying sand, the sound of gravel against the bike’s metal frame, the sound of our marriage crumbling. I picked her up and carried her into our room. By this time both of us were crying. I put her on the bed, grabbed my stuff and rode the bike back to the city. She drove back two, maybe three days later, and moved her things out of the house. A week later we had dinner, a restaurant in the city, neutral territory. We talked, cried, both of us, again, but it was over. We knew that. Probably it had been over for a long time only I had been too dumb to realize it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. You know I’m the kind of novelist who never wants to write an ending.’
Daniel’s voice grows hoarse and he coughs harshly as though his words had injured his throat.
‘Sometimes endings write themselves,’ Simon says quietly. ‘Sometimes marriages just end. But lives don’t end. Lives go on. My marriage with Charlotte ended. Two kids, a six-year slice of my life, and then it was over. As it should have been. We were veering off in different directions. The magazine had become the center of her life, the glitzy parties photographed for her glossy pages, the junkets here, there and everywhere while I lectured, conferred with my grad students, went to meetings and got home in time to pay the nannies and baby sitters. It wasn’t working. We didn’t like each other’s lives and we were beginning not to like each other. We parted before that could happen and that was best for the kids, for Tracy and Richie. It wasn’t easy, not for me. I lost about twenty pounds that first year and it was months before I could sleep through the night. Dreams scared me. Loneliness scared me. And it was pretty hard for Charlotte too. She’s not a bad woman, you know. Just a bad wife. Or at least she was a bad wife for me.
So the Charlotte and Simon chapter ended but it was only a chapter. What followed was a year of lousy sleeping, lousy blind dates, TV dinners or no dinners. Then I met my Nessa, messy, nutsy, wonderful Nessa.’
‘How did you meet? I forget,’ Daniel asks. He is relieved that the conversation has veered away from Laura, exhausted by his own revelations.
‘Nessa was Tracy’s nursery schoolteacher and I was supposed to confer with her about Tracy’s small motor skills. She had play dough under her fingernails, a streak of carmine magic marker on her cheek and flakes of silver in her hair the first time I saw her.
‘“We’re making costumes for a play,” she told me, and I reached up and brushed the tinsel away.
‘Two weeks later we were concentrating on our own large motor skills and there was a new chapter in my life. The Nessa and Simon chapter. Just like there’ll be a new chapter in your life.’
He puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder and Daniel reaches for his fingers – the awkward gestures of men who are wary of touch.
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I know I’m right. Just watch out for Louise Abbot. She still has a thing for you, you know.’
They laugh, remembering their adolescent Augusts when Louise had evoked their reluctant sympathy and Evan had earned their casual contempt.
Even after her marriage to Evan, Louise had somehow managed to trail after Simon and Daniel, darting up at them as they hiked through the woods, sitting beside Daniel on the lawn, bobbing up between them when they swam in the lake. They became skilled at evading her, laughed as she plunged into a thicket chasing after them, but still, at dinner she brought Daniel extra desserts, at breakfast she offered him the small pitcher of whole cream. If he sat on the lawn she pulled a chair over and sat beside him. Daniel was always kind to her, and he and Simon agreed that she should have divorced Evan after that first year of accidental marriage. The guy was a creep, a self-absorbed bastard who hid in the stacks of the university libraries when he should have been pulling his weight at the inn. Louise was just a kid and she worked her ass off.
Even when his parents died, Evan did not step up to the plate. Instead it was Louise who ran the place, the summer waitress become the innkeeper, her ear to the phone, her eye on the books. Her face was drawn, her forehead furrowed. There was now neither the time nor the inclination to follow Daniel into the woods, to sit beside him on the lawn. She was a busy woman burdened with responsibility.
Daniel would always be grateful to Louise for coming to New York for his parents’ funerals. Her decision, he knew. Evan could not have cared less. He knew that Louise worried when there were too many guests and worried when there were too few. She framed the cards guests sent at Christmas and in June she sent cheery notes to the guests of August reminding them to make reservations. The note she sent to Daniel was addressed to him alone even after he and Laura had been married for years.
His novels, duly inscribed, were prominently displayed at the inn’s reception desk, the jackets laminated.
‘I’m not afraid of Louise.’ Daniel grins. ‘I’ll say this for her – she never liked Laura.’
‘What a surprise,’ Simon mutters and Daniel realizes that his friend had also disliked his wife. Soon to be ex-wife, he corrects himself. There must be another way to think of her. He is a writer. He will find the words.
Together they stride back to the inn. Simon looks up and sees that the light in his room is on. He hopes that Nessa is still awake. There is a contagion in Daniel’s loneliness that infects him with the febrile memory of his own desolation when he and Charlotte separated. He is overcome by a need to lie close to his wife, to pass his fingers through the fiery folds of her thick, irrepressible hair and assure himself that he has reached the safe harbor of happy endings.
In the rec room of the inn, the dart game expands. Liane urges Helene to play but her darts land far off the mark. Wendy and Nessa laughingly take turns and fare even worse than Helene. The teenagers, Paul, Jeremy and Annette, line up to test their skill. Greg advises them on their stance, the proper distance to be maintained from the dart board, the correct thrust of wrist. Paul catches on immediately and coaches Annette. He lifts her arm, arranges her fingers, thrilled at the touch of her skin on his hand, at the smooth softness of her flesh. Jeff Edwards looks at them and turns away. He realizes, not for the first time, that Annette is no longer a child. His daughter has drifted into the far side of adolescence.
Jeff wants to stand between her and Paul Epstein, to protect his child although he knows that she has no need for his protection. He recognizes the absurdity of his impulse. Instead he goes upstairs to share his irrational urge with Susan, to invite her laughter and her indulgence.
Their room is dark except for the small desk lamp. Susan is asleep, her head resting in the golden cone of light. Her open laptop lies next to a neat pile of manuscript pages but her battered Cassell’s French dictionary, the first gift he had ever bought her, is closed. He understands that the fatigue of the day defeated her, that she fell asleep at her work, as she so often did during the early years of their marriage.
A grim anger steals over him like a gossamer veil. She was not supposed to weary herself with work. This is their vacation, sacred to leisure. They had agreed that these August weeks would not be shadowed by the demands of their careers, neither his nor hers. He stands in the doorway feeling oddly betrayed and then that foolish sense of betrayal curdles into disappointment. He leaves the room, closing the door very softly behind him and returns to the lounge.
It is newly quiet. Everyone has left. He guesses that most of the guests are in the kitchen where Louise Abbot leaves a carafe of decaf coffee and a tray of sticky buns. But across the room Polly is still seated at the bridge table, her textbook open, her pink highlighter, which almost exactly matches her sweater, sliding across an illustration of molecular linkage.
‘Shit,’ she says, and he laughs and moves toward her.
‘Having trouble, Polly?’ he asks.
‘I’ll never understand this,’ she says, and pushes the heavy book away.
‘Let me help you.’
He pulls up a chair, sits beside her, glances down at the text and slowly, softly, explains the mystery of molecular morphology to her, all the while inhaling the strangely familiar scent of her bath powder, some of which clings in infinitesimal granules to her very graceful neck. Of course. It is Jean Nate, Susan’s favorite during the distant days of their courtship and now used too lavishly by Annette. The young girl’s aroma of choice, he supposes. He takes the highlighter from Polly’s hand and underlines the key points of the text. She leans closer to him and her breath is soft upon his arm as he moves it slowly across the closely printed page.
FIVE
Morning comes slowly to the foothills of the White Mountains. The milky light of dawn is slowly gilded by trembling shafts of sunlight that expand with an exquisite slowness. Finally, a golden radiance hovers over wild woodland, across cultivated lawn and beams down on the quietly flowing waters of lake and brook. It penetrates the sheer white curtains that hang in every bedroom of Mount Haven Inn and sends rhomboids of light dancing across the pale wood floors. Gently, that first light brushes the faces of the sleeping guests, some of whom waken at once while others squeeze their eyes shut and seek the refuge of a few more moments of precious sleep, of sheltering darkness.
Louise Abbot, of course, springs to wakefulness in the pre-dawn darkness. Still in her high-necked white nightgown, thin slippers shielding her bare feet, she wanders into the dining room and checks that the tables were properly set the previous evening. She plugs in the percolator and ignites the oven so that it will be hot when the chef arrives. She pulls in the cartons of bread left by the bakery truck, shivering against the chill. Only then does she return to bed, her face turned to Evan who smiles in his sleep, briefly resembling the youth who had pillowed her head against his body in the high sweet meadow grass.
Sadness threatens but she do
es not weep. She is a careful woman who rations her moments of sorrow.
Simon Epstein, always an early riser, rests his head against his wife’s bare shoulder, envying Nessa her ability to sleep so deeply and delighting in the musical rhythm of her dream-bound breath. He knows that Paul is awake. He hears his son moving through the adjoining room singing softly to himself, an old Steven Foster ballad laced with sadness that Nessa often sings as she cooks. Suffused with pity for Daniel, he tries to think of how he might divert him from his sadness. Perhaps a hike into the mountains or an afternoon of fishing. He weighs the possibilities and dismisses them. He has no talent for compassion. Nessa will know what to do, what to say. He relies on her instinctive wisdom, on her generous warmth and marvels at his luck, at the urban miracle of their coming together, an unlikely couple, a fortunate match. He curls a strand of her hair about his finger and kisses her eyelids, coaxing her into tender response.
Jeff Edwards, still drowsy after a fitful sleep, is unsurprised to find Susan already gone. Her laptop, French dictionary and manuscript have disappeared from the tabletop, cleared away the previous evening before his return to the room after the hour spent with Polly. Susan had been in bed then, wearing a new nightgown of periwinkle blue silk, her freshly shampooed hair capping her head in a sleek golden helmet. She sat up and held her arms out to him, but he shook his head wearily.
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