Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  “You won’t see any now,” Skye said, following my gaze. “It’s too early.”

  Asserting herself on a subject where she was knowledgeable seemed to comfort her, but her skin still looked flushed from crying and her breath had a childlike catch.

  “What happened?” I said, and then added, in case she thought I wanted to talk more about last night, “To the turtle, I mean.”

  “They brought it to the aquarium in Boston. We went to visit it there. Had pictures taken with it, all that. Then when it was better, they flew it down to Florida.”

  “That must have been good press for your dad,” I said.

  “That’s not why he did it,” she said, in a tone that hovered somewhere between neutral and plaintive. “It’s why he does a lot of things. But not everything.”

  We stepped off the edge of the bluff onto a wide stretch of sandy beach. Weathered wooden staircases lined the battered, root-swelled beach wall.

  “There it is,” said Skye. The kayak huddled under a stairway, tied to a step to protect it from high tide.

  “Once,” she said, “my dad and I were kayaking and we saw a humpback whale. It breached right next to us. I thought the wake was going to lift my boat. You’ve never seen anything so big in your life as that whale. I thought I was going to die of fright. But then, after a few seconds, I realized it was just swimming by, minding its own business. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  Automatically, I looked out toward the water. Maybe I thought the whale would present itself above the waves. Skye watched me with a pitying and grateful expression.

  “He didn’t have to leave,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered.

  By the time John Paul had packed and driven away, the day was more than half gone. Now the sun had begun a startlingly rapid descent; from the slight gust of onshore wind, I could tell its dip signified not only the end of the day, but the stretch of warm weather. I tried to remember if I’d packed a sweater.

  “You’re cold.” Skye reached out to touch her fingertips to my elbow.

  I pictured her, soaking wet in the middle of the sea and night, impervious to any chill.

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  But the idea of herself as caretaker seemed to please Skye, so I let myself shiver a little. She untied the kayak, and we each picked up an end. Within twenty minutes we were making our way in the dusk, panting under our cumbersome load—tripping, laughing, and righting ourselves whenever we took a false, shaky step.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, out on the water, a few minutes after Drew had headed toward shore, Skye remembered the whale. Not the transcendence of the experience so much as the terror.

  “It was so strange,” she said, back in the enormous kitchen. She leaned on the counter while I uncorked another bottle of French wine. “I didn’t want a chance to think. I just wanted to keep moving, keep going, keep having fun. And then when Drew paddled off, and I was all alone, I got the clearest picture of everything bad or evil that could happen.”

  I carried the bottle and two glasses, following Skye across the kitchen and into the ballroom: a huge, fairy-tale place, unfurnished except for the chandelier and the enormous arched windows that looked out to the sea. We sat down in the middle of the vast parquet floor and I poured our wine. Skye picked up her glass, running her fingers around the rim until it hummed, but did not take a sip.

  Instead she told me about the night before: how she and Drew had paddled out to Sandy Neck, a spit of land that curved into the water—mirroring the tip of Cape Cod itself. They had done handstands and cartwheels on the beach, the waves that lapped their fingers so surprisingly warm that they took off their clothes to go swimming; Skye left her silver bracelet on a rock so its glint would not attract sharks. Then they raced through the frigid deep toward the first flashing buoy. But the deeper water was so cold, they barely made it a quarter of the way—Drew turning back first, then Skye following. When she met him onshore, he had already caught his breath and pulled on his pants. He put his hands on her shoulders, rubbing them to warm her up. Then pulled her close and kissed her.

  “It felt nice,” she told me. “He’s not that cute, but I was freezing from the water, and his skin was warm.”

  She kissed him back for a minute, maybe two. She could feel the fine hair along her spine stand on end from the air, the droplets of water running down toward her legs. His lips. Then she pulled away.

  “You have a girlfriend,” she reminded him.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Susannah and I have an agreement.”

  Skye laughed. “Does Susannah know that?”

  He tried to kiss her again but she pulled away, reaching into the surf and splashing him with an armful of water. She ran back to the rock, and as she collected her bracelet he appeared behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. She bent to duck out of his grasp, but he held her tight. Drew was about five inches taller than Skye, but it startled her that he should be so much stronger. Her body felt suddenly meager and tiny in its attempt to move away from him. That she was nude, pressed against his damp but fully clothed torso, emphasized her vulnerability, and so Skye drew back her fist and landed it squarely against Drew’s solar plexus.

  He doubled over with a snort and infuriating laugh, releasing his grasp but snatching Skye’s pants from the rock. She pulled on her shirt and called to him as he ran down the beach.

  “Bring that back,” she yelled, suddenly laughing again. She buttoned her shirt as she ran after him. The night air held only the vaguest chill; what cold there was pumped itself into the prickling skin along her spine, and down her legs. She shivered as she moved forward, a strange and delicious spasm—caught up short as Drew turned and stopped, so that she slammed directly into his chest.

  His fingers dug gently into her shoulders, and he kissed her again, melting the chill into irresistible warmth. Skye kept her eyes open, watching the black sea lap the shores of Sandy Neck. She envisioned the kayaks, waiting for them a few yards back on the beach. The cloth of her pants brushed her shoulders, hanging limply from Drew’s hands. From there, the usual results of manufactured closeness—the conspiracy of drugs and night and just the two of them. Skye stayed naked from the waist down, Drew kept his jeans firmly buttoned. Tongues and hardening, sinking into the sand below. Everything about this place a no-man’s-land, with its ecotone of sea and shore, cold and warm. The tide worked its deep, slow way back to England, making Drew’s traveling hands the most natural and inconsequential event in the world. Skye’s breath quickened along with his, the coke pumping through her capillaries with rhythmic exaltation.

  Afterward, she lay on the sand, staring up into the dark sand. She could hear Drew by the water, cursing and splashing.

  “What are you doing,” Skye called. Realizing with a pinch of inevitable sadness that Drew had left their limbo and returned to the world of consequences.

  “Cleaning up,” he said. Skye felt her face flush as Susannah mattered again. The trouble with any kind of climax, Skye thought, was the flatness that always followed. She sat up and pulled on her pants and wished for a way to bring the excitement back.

  “Hey,” she called to Drew. “I’ll race you back home.”

  Running along the shore to her kayak and sneakers, she listened for equally playful footsteps behind her but heard only a resolute and guilty plodding.

  She pushed off in her boat, floating out a yard or two. Drew plunged into the water, making the dampness uniform. Then he climbed into his kayak and rowed toward her. By the time he came close enough for her to see his face, he was shivering. Skye could also see that his mood had changed to grim, distant, and she instantly longed for moments ago, back on the sand, pressed together under a dark and moonless sky.

  She laughed, hoping the sound would make her feel less lonely. It echoed hollowly along the waves, and she wondered if Susannah, John Paul, and I would be able to hear it from her father’s house.

  “Let’s not go back
yet,” she said to Drew. “It’s such a perfect night.”

  But she had already lost him. He didn’t even mention the cold, or his wet clothes. He just said, “Susannah will be worried,” and paddled past her, toward the vast row of lights that marked her own stretch of shoreline. The water, Skye said, was much calmer than it looked from where John Paul and I had stood—staring out with our anxious imaginations. Offshore, the sky hung so dark and low, she thought she might reach up and lay her hands flat against it. The boat rose and fell, and she had a sudden awareness of all the creatures swimming just below, unseen to her, their movements contributing to the swaying current.

  “I called out to Drew,” she said. “But he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he was mad. Like it was my fault he cheated on Susannah.”

  The memory of this injustice—along with that of Drew distant and angry enough to abandon her to the sea—seemed to give Skye a moment of profound grief. She halted now, the wineglass suspended below her chin, and for the first time I understood why she might feel old. The sadness across her face reminded me of an expression my mother sometimes got—contemplating her sorrows and accepting there was nothing she could do to change them.

  Instead of following Drew—his diagonal route back to her house—Skye paddled straight to shore. Abandoned her boat and walked briskly over the rocks. When she got inside, none of us were there, so she went up to her room and took a hot shower, then got into bed and fell asleep.

  “Why didn’t you come out and tell us you’d gotten back safely?” John Paul had asked the next morning, when Skye appeared in the living room.

  “I guess I assumed you’d gone to sleep?” Skye said. “I couldn’t exactly search every bedroom.”

  “We were worried,” I told her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d begged. She dissolved, tears running down her face—inexplicably making her prettier, more luminous. Skye was one of those rare people who look best after personal tragedy and sleepless nights. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Please stay, John Paul. There’s a screening room downstairs, I’ll set up a movie. There’s plenty of wine. We can make popcorn.”

  He’d shuffled uncomfortably. If it had been Susannah instead of Skye, the three of us could have passed a weekend easily and naturally. But as I watched John Paul watch Skye, I knew he understood. That she only wanted him to forgive her on my account. She didn’t really care about his opinion, and she did not want him to stay.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He reached out to touch her hand, then changed his mind and grasped mine instead. “No blood shed,” he said. “I’ll see you another time.”

  From the elegant piazza, I watched him drive off—feeling furious with Skye, that her irresponsibility had first robbed us of a precious chance to make love, and then chased him away. I felt trapped at the luxurious house, longing instead to chase down the battered Buick and ride away on ratty Naugahyde, my head on John Paul’s shoulder as he steered one-handed. So it was strange that later, listening to these confessions in the ballroom, John Paul’s departure and Skye’s presence felt inevitable and correct. I would never have said it aloud, or even acknowledged the formation of the idea in my mind: how much easier being there became, once the person who didn’t belong had left.

  Skye shook her head, then finally took a drink from her glass.

  “You can’t tell Susannah about Drew,” she said. “Swear to me you won’t tell her.”

  I had already decided not to tell her. Drew couldn’t last forever, and news of his faithlessness would only confirm Susannah’s bleak worldview. Still: my allegiance stretched tenuously enough that I couldn’t bring myself to swear. Skye waited a minute, then decided to take my silence as oath.

  “I hate this feeling,” she said. “I feel so disappointed. Like such a failure. Do you know that feeling?”

  I nodded.

  “It makes me crazy,” she said. “It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.”

  It might have comforted her—made her feel less crazy and alone—if I’d talked about my own guilty conscience. I knew, after all, how it felt to disappoint people. I could have told Skye about the terrible days during my suspension from Waverly and the way I would sit in my room, cringing, while my parents argued downstairs about what to do with me. It had made me feel so hollow and ruined, the way my father would glance away when I appeared—like he couldn’t stand the sight of me. Even now a part of me shrinks, remembering his suit-coated back heading out the front door, leaving the house without so much as a wave in my direction.

  Maybe if Susannah had left some coke, I would have been more generous than usual. A surge of adrenaline might have relaxed my guard and jostled confiding words loose. Instead, I reached over and patted her arm.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  Skye stared at a point over my shoulder, frowned, and took another sip of wine. “Do you want to see the old part of the house?” she said. “I never got to show you my bedroom.”

  We carried our wineglasses through one living room and another, through serpentine halls and the old causeway with its wide redwood beams till we came to a low, wood-paneled portion of the house—with knots in the grain and black footsteps on the ceiling.

  “They modeled it after a sea captain’s house.” Skye said. “But a sailor would never build so close to shore. They always lived away from the sea, on higher ground. Out of the wind, out of the flood zones.”

  She headed up a narrow, enclosed staircase. At the top was an attic room with slanted ceilings and exposed beams. A large white bed, neatly made, tucked in the corner against an ocean-facing window. Low bookcases everywhere, crammed with picture books and thick novels. Her weekend clothes unpacked in her dresser drawers, nothing on the floor but the polished expanse of hardwood.

  “It’s fantastic, isn’t it,” Skye said.

  I nodded.

  “One time when they redid the main house, they fixed up a new room for me. We worked with an architect and an interior decorator, getting it just the way I wanted. But then when it was finished, I couldn’t bear to move. I felt like this room would miss me, like I would break its heart. ‘Rooms don’t have hearts,’ my dad said. But I just couldn’t do it.”

  Skye sat down on her bed and looked out at the ocean. I sat in the white wicker rocking chair.

  “I guess I was eight?” she said. “Maybe nine. Young enough so I thought rooms really did have hearts. It took me the longest time to grasp the concept of inanimate objects. I used to think the house would have a brain somewhere in the attic. That creaky noises at night were its internal organs gurgling.”

  I had grown up so attached to animate objects—so wrapped up in my horses—that I’d never worried much about rooms or things. When I’d abandoned Bloom for Pippin, unlike Skye’s room, she had minded. The horse had missed me, and I knew it. But I had abandoned her anyway, leaving her at home and taking Pippin with me to Esther Percy. In contrast, Skye’s irrational loyalty to these unthinking walls represented a superior moral fiber. I felt lacking in the same way I had the day before, allowing John Paul to stand by my side and make that phone call. It frightened me slightly—as if I recognized myself as capable of doing harm to the people I loved.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a choice,” Skye said, “to go backward in time instead of forward?”

  She leaned against the pillows. On her bedside table, there were two framed photographs—one of a joyfully freckled and skinny Skye, receiving a hug from her father. There was a sailboat in the background, impossibly blue seas and white sand. The two of them in matching windbreakers, looking so golden and happy that I understood Skye’s longing to return to that time. I wanted to crawl into the picture myself. She followed my gaze to the photograph and picked up the one next to it, assuming it was the one that had caught my eye. I balanced the frame in my hands and looked at Douglas Butterfield, years younger, arm in arm with JFK. On a dock somewhere—faint clouds gathering in the sky behind them. I wanted to ask Skye if she’d ever b
een to the Kennedy compound. I imagined her laughing and insouciant in a blue bikini, putting her hand on John John’s shoulder for balance as she stepped into a speedboat.

  I waited for the details to come spilling out of her, but Skye—uncharacteristically—didn’t offer any history.

  “You should see him,” she said. “You will see him. He’s the shiniest person in the world. He’s got this light around him. All you’ll want to do is let it envelop you.”

  For a moment I thought she meant John F. Kennedy, who’d died well before we were born. Then I realized with something like shock: she was talking about Douglas Butterfield. Her father.

  In a thousand years, I couldn’t imagine saying anything remotely like that about my own father. I looked back at the picture, with the kind of longing I’d only felt watching Michael Landon on Little House on the Prairie. There was a slight rash along Senator Butterfield’s jaw, like an irritation from shaving. I ran my finger over it, back and forth, as if to erase the imperfection.

  “I found him with a woman last year,” Skye said. She didn’t look at me, but out the window. “After the protest at Chanticleer, before they found me, I came here. My dad was on the phone with the Devon headmaster, pretending to be surprised I was missing. But really, he was the one who told me to go to that protest. He promised that he would fix it somehow, that I wouldn’t be expelled.”

  She watched me carefully as she spoke, gauging my reaction. I wasn’t sure what she wanted—vindicating shock, or a comforting lack of horror. I sat perfectly still, conscious of my wide, unblinking stare.

  “Anyway,” she said. “I walked into the living room, that one with the bar, and there he was in his bathrobe. With this blonde woman sitting on the couch, wearing this ancient pink robe of my mother’s, with a frayed hem and coffee stains. It seemed like the most horrible violation of privacy, letting some stranger wear that ratty old robe.”

  I thought how much more Susannah would like Skye, if she could hear this story. How much better she might understand her.