The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Sophy." I looked up to see Mavis gazing at me with a glimmer of the care I needed. "What a nightmare for you. You must be devastated."

  "I'm not sure what I am."

  "It's shock. Thank God for it. And for Klonopin. Are you sure you don't want half a milligram? I don't suppose you know yet about the funeral. Did you talk to your stepdaughter about it?"

  "No, but Will told me last summer he wanted to be cremated. We had one of those conversations that feels unnecessarily morbid, but turns out not to be after all."

  "Speaking of people dying," Mavis said, "did you ever finish that novel about Nadia Boulanger's sister?"

  "As a matter of fact, I was working on it today. But it's not going too well." I remembered that I hadn't called Daniel, and now it was too late.

  "A toast to Will," Evan said and held up his glass. "To our memories of Will, Sophy's memories of Will. He was a good man."

  Our glasses clinked. Mavis said, "He was indeed," and her voice cracked. A quick torrent of tears slid down my face, though I didn't sob or convulse; only this water over my cheeks and chin like a sudden summer shower. I brushed it away and saw Evan and Mavis with their eyes on me in exactly the kindly way I needed. Mavis reached over and covered my hand with hers. I was sure that what I was identifying as pain in their eyes was aching empathy with me.

  It was later that I learned both of them had received devastating news in the past few hours, reiterated in the phone calls they had been taking since my arrival. My itinerant pain, I would soon discover, was only one cause of the stricken looks on their elegant, affluent faces.

  But all I knew at that moment was that I needed to talk and felt the need fiercely, like a great hunger, like lust. I told them the story of the day I met Will when I was hitchhiking on Honeysuckle Road. They told gracious stories about Will too, and I knew what good hosts they were, despite what happened later, because the truth was that they were both as lost in their own secret suffering—secret not only from me but, for the time being, from each other—as I was lost in mine.

  I stayed up until four in the morning, writing Will's obituary on a computer in Evan's study. When I woke up, I faxed it to the island newspaper and to Daniel's office, with Evans phone number and a brief note— Found an old friend en route to island. With him until further notice —which I wanted to be as ambiguous as possible.

  5. Island Marxism

  I felt the road curve and dip sharply as it ran alongside the Lawson's sheep farm, and then began to climb the hill that passed the old cemetery, studded with headstones from the island's earliest European settlers. A moment later the landscape changed, as it does on the island so suddenly, and we were on the same sweet two-lane road now swathed in leafy trees, dense as a rain forest, the trees seeming to bow across the road to one another, like fingertips touching. None of the sweet narrow roads on Swansea leads anywhere except to other narrow roads or to the ocean or one of the harbors. When you come to the edge of the land here—but wherever you are, really, on the island—you feel you are in a place quite apart from every other you know: the colors, the light, the proportions of things, a sense that this was the world before the world was made.

  I FOUND THIS the other day in an old issue of the Swansea Sentinel; it's from an essay I wrote four years ago, soon after Will and I moved here to live year round. We had left New York after a series of violent crimes that came too close to our lives: a friend was murdered when a man followed her into her building, several blocks from ours, forced her into the elevator, and onto the roof. You would know her name if I mentioned it; it was news for weeks. She was the third friend in six months who'd had a gun pointed at her, though the others came to no harm.

  And there was also my wanting a child. In the city, we had a cramped, expensive one-bedroom apartment, and on Swansea, a rundown Cape Cod bungalow Will had inherited from an eccentric relative twenty-five years before. It had no heat, the original windows, an ancient kitchen, "a lot of potential," as realtors say, and "needs TLC." We were not the first people to flee the perils of the city for Arcadia, but that accounts, you understand, for the idealized view of the place I expressed in my essay. We winterized the house and tried to settle into the pastoral life the island seemed to promise. I tried to become a mother, a gardener, a short-story writer, because I was always just about to get pregnant and didn't want to start something I wouldn't be able to finish before the kid came. The short stories turned out to be the only souffles in the bunch that rose. Motherhood eluded me. So did a green thumb. And, of course, I had to revise my dreamy picture of the island.

  Among year-rounders, one of the quips about Swansea is that half the people here are in AA and the other half ought to be. Another is that in winter it is a floating mental hospital. My first winter, I became good friends with a woman photographer, until I found out that her boyfriend had a collection of automatic weapons and a restraining order against him from the mother of his children, and that what he and my friend did for kicks was break into locked summer houses and videotape themselves in strange beds. The guns made me nervous.

  But mostly what I discovered in the years I lived here is that winter people keep to themselves. They are not summer people—organizing dinner parties and power picnics and whale watchings—transported to another season. They keep appointments, as Thoreau did, with beech trees and yellow birches; they live on the island because, like Bartleby, they would prefer not to. Not to hustle and hassle with life on the other side of the sound. Quite a few of them call the mainland "America." Small is still beautiful, and the world is too much with them late and soon. I don't know; maybe they're shy, or maybe they're more clear-headed than the rest of us about what's important: natural beauty, safe streets, clean air, the wild wood, not the wide world beyond it.

  I called my lawyer, the morning after I arrived on Swansea, to find out what my marital status was. A machine answered. I called my stepdaughter. A machine answered. When I called to get the messages on my machine in New York, my mother had called to ask when I was coming to visit her, and I realized I had to tell her about Will. Then Evan and I took a ride to the other side of the island, to the village of Cummington, the house where I used to live, to look for Henry and for my husband's will.

  I thought of going to the house as I did of getting on the eight-seater airplane the night before: if there were any other way to do what I had to do, I would have done it. Evan insisted I not do it myself.

  The street we lived on was modest, its shingled houses an assortment of saltboxes, old Cape Cod bungalows with dormer sheds and front porches, and a few hodgepodge two- and three-bedroom places of no precise architectural nomenclature, almost all of the shingles unpainted and in various stages of weathering. These were not beach-front properties, and most of us were year-round residents, which meant we had more in common with the cab driver from the night before than we did with Evan. The street and its surroundings were quaint, well-tended, and probably looked the way they had forty years before. Everyone, except Will and me, had a garden. And because I failed so miserably at making things grow in the ground, I had bought an assortment of colorful nylon flags to hang on the front porch. I don't mean countries; I mean long windsock-style decorations. A rainbow, an engorged tulip, a puffy bright yellow sun with four-foot streamers that twirled wildly in the wind but hung like a wet sock on a clothesline when the air was still.

  As Evan turned the corner, I dreaded seeing the flags as much as anything else. Evidence of my folly, my sentimentality, my walking out on Will. Evan must have seen something on my face—a darkness, a twitch—because he reached across the gear shift, squeezed my hand, and said, "How are you doing?"

  "Let's talk about something else." I kept my eyes down, afraid to look at the house, like a kid trying not to step on cracks in the sidewalk, but when I glanced up, it wasn't my house I saw, but Ben in his driveway, about to get into a car. "Slow down," I said to Evan and called out the window to Ben. He was startled to see me; he looked pale, not well
. Evan pulled into his driveway and I got out of the car. It was difficult for both of us, because Ben was Will's friend, because Ben had found him, because Ben and his wife, Emily, had been witnesses to the last four years of our marriage, to the quotidian reality of it, the easy affection, Will's pain when I left. They had never puttered in their driveway and heard us shriek at each other. They had never gone out to empty their trash and heard Will holler, "I'd rather eat glass than have a relationship with you." We did not often quarrel. Our style was to withdraw, suffer silently; and to the neighbors, Ben and Emily right next door, I suppose everything looked fine. We had a sunburst flag on our front porch. Of course we were happy.

  One day last summer, when I caught a glimpse of Ben coming home from work in his greasy mechanic's jumpsuit, I was startled to realize that this man who owned a service station and had never lived anywhere but Swansea was a much happier man than my husband would ever be.

  He and I had never so much as brushed pinkies, but standing now on the pea gravel of his driveway, we threw our arms around each other and cried together.

  A minute later, when we disengaged and I told him I was going into the house to look for Will's will, he shook his head and reached for my hand. "You can't."

  "What do you mean, I can't?"

  "I'll show you what I mean." He walked to his car, opened the door, took something from the Seat, and showed me two black video-cassette boxes. "Here."

  While I looked at the labels, two movies I'd never heard of, Evan introduced himself to Ben. "I don't get it," I said.

  "He rented them on May thirty-first. You know he was obsessed with getting them back the next day, because he hated paying extra. I found them in his bedroom. June twenty-second."

  "Did you take them before the police came or after?" Evan said.

  "I came back here and called the police."

  "Do the police know you have them?"

  "I knew that the date he took them out would tell me—"

  "Why don't you walk me through what you did, step by step?" Evan said.

  "I don't need to walk through it; I lived through it, eighteen hours ago."

  "What you did might turn out to be tampering with evidence at the scene of a crime. It's removing evidence that could—"

  "No one's thinking it was a crime."

  "I haven't spoken to the police myself."

  "You don't understand what I'm saying, do you?"

  "Unfortunately, I think I do," Evan said.

  "He's a lawyer," I said to Ben. "That's why he's—"

  "I know who Evan Lambert is, for Christ's sake. I see him on TV all the time defending the Nazi baby-killer. I've changed the oil in your cars a few times, but I wouldn't expect you to remember that." Then Ben turned to me. "I called a cleaning company to come in."

  "That was sweet, to think of a maid at a time like—"

  "It's not a maid, Sophy."

  "What he's saying—" Evan began, before Ben interrupted.

  "You think I have trouble expressing myself? Is that it? And who the hell's been talking to you? What was I about to tell her, since you're so goddam smart?"

  "It's a restoration company," Evan said, uncannily, "not a maid service. Am I close?"

  "I think it would be easier if Ben and I could have a few minutes to ourselves," I managed to say, and Evan, visibly relieved, went back to his car.

  "I'm sorry," I said softly. "I had no idea this would become—"

  "I found him on the floor," Ben said as softly, "next to the bed."

  "But the police said he died in his sleep."

  "If you have a heart attack, they say you can get jolted out of the bed. I don't know what happened. He was naked, not far from the bed. They're going to replace part of the floor. And fumigate. They should be here soon."

  "Didn't you realize when you opened the front door, from the odor—"

  "Emily and I hadn't seen him for weeks. We were starting to get worried. He always let us know when he was leaving on a trip and when he came back. Yeah, I guess I knew when I opened the door. I went upstairs anyway."

  "Was the dog there? Is he with you?"

  "I thought you had him. Will kept talking about taking him to you. When I didn't see Will for a few days—must've been the first week of June—I thought he'd either gone sailing, one of those yacht deliveries he did with Craig down at the shipyards, or that he'd taken Henry to New York."

  When I got into Evan's car a few minutes later, I was too stunned by the details of the death to say anything, and too angry with Evan to want his sympathy. He started the ignition, backed out into the street, and headed down Longfellow Lane toward the village. "Sophy, I'm not looking to be an accomplice in an investigation of tampering with evidence on my summer vacation. He could have called the video store and asked when Will took them out. He didn't have to remove them from the house."

  "It wasn't fair of you to pull rank."

  "That was not pulling rank."

  "You'd never talk down to that Patrick guy I met at your house last summer."

  "He'd never do something so stupid."

  "Because he's a Harvard professor, right? Ben happens to make an honest living. Which is more than I can say for either of us."

  "Sophy, don't get started with island Marxism. People talked like that around here in the seventies, but there isn't much of an audience for it anymore, except for what's-her-name who grows biodynamic turnips out at Lavender Point and thinks she's Che Guevara. Do you need anything in Cummington, or should we—"

  "That's three weeks. May thirty-first to June twenty-second. I kept calling and leaving messages about money he owed me. I thought it was odd that he didn't call back. I knew he was pissed off, but I never imagined—"

  "Of course you didn't."

  "Poor baby. Poor darling. I hope he didn't kill himself."

  "I do too."

  "Because I hate to think he was so unhappy that he'd given up every hope of being happier. It hurts me to think of him in that much pain."

  "I know it does."

  "He used to say, 'When the time comes, put me on a rickety old sailboat with a carton of Scotch and a case of cigarettes and push.' It always made me cry. About a year ago it stopped making me cry. He knew. That I wasn't devastated anymore by the idea of losing him. He hated that everyone thought he was such a nice guy. Hated it. It would have done him good to be more of an S.O.B. now and then. Like you."

  "Thanks. Thanks a lot."

  "I hope he didn't know he was going to die. I hope he didn't have time to be afraid." Tears had been rolling down my face and into my mouth, and Evan handed me his handkerchief. His hand had slid over into my lap, and he was squeezing my fingers and stroking my wrists, and I was trying to take deep breaths because no air was moving through my nose. "Evan?"

  "Yes, dear?"

  "We have to go to the post office, because there's three weeks of mail that hasn't been picked up. Then we have to go to the video store and read the descriptions of the movies Will took out, on the chance that he meant them as suicide notes."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "He was a spy. He was clever."

  "Sophy, you'll drive yourself nuts with amateur sleuthing."

  "I lived with this man for ten years. I know the way he thinks."

  "Aren't you speaking to the coroner later? He may have the results of the autopsy."

  "I still want to look at the videos. Then we have to find Henry."

  "Henry who?"

  "The dog. Nobody knows this yet, but Henry's the one with the answers, because if Will planned for some time to kill himself, he might have given the dog away, to protect him, and whoever he gave him to, they could tell us what he'd said and when it happened and—"

  "Of course, Sophy, of course."

  Evan told me, some time later, that he thought I'd gone off half-cocked, between my pursuit of the missing dog and the secret messages in the videos, but he indulged me that day without further commentary. I was the grieving wid
ow after all, and entitled to a touch of madness.

  When we returned to Evan's house, with three tall bundles of mail, there was a message for me from Ginny. She would be arriving on a four o'clock plane from Portland, Maine. Evan, Mavis, and their two young sons invited me sailing for the rest of the afternoon, but I declined, because I'd have to go to the airport in a few hours. They gave me the keys to the Saab Evan had driven earlier, invited Ginny and me to stay at their house until Sunday, and said we were welcome to join them that evening at a clambake down the beach with their friends the Winstons.

  "You know Sue and Bob Winston, don't you?" Mavis said. "She's been writing a biography of Louisa May Alcott for a zillion years that's finally being published, and he's a colleague of mine at Harvard."

  I did not remember meeting them before, but my appearance that night at their clambake would linger long in all of our memories.

  6. Clare's Funeral

  THE NEXT SCENE could have passed for an ordinary summer afternoon at the Swansea Island Airport. The sky bluer than robins' eggs. The praying mantis-like private planes and sleek corporate jets all parked in a row down the side of the tarmac. A cluster of us in khakis and T's and jeans—this was Swansea wealth, after all, not Palm Beach—behind a chain-link fence that defined one edge of the outdoor waiting pen, some of us waving even before the tiny Cessna came to a stop on the runway and made its sharp right turn and parked in a spot beside three or four other Island Air runabouts. I wasn't one of the ones waving. Otherwise, Ginny and I could have passed for ordinary summer people, which is to say monied and carefree, accustomed to coming and going in high style. Ordinary summer people, and even what looked like tears as she crossed the tarmac, shoulder slung with a colorful Guatemalan bag, could have been explained away. She is a high-strung, emotional type who weeps almost as an affectation on arrivals and departures. How touching; that must be it. Or: she is suffering from a broken heart and has come to Swansea, to Mom and Dad, to mend.