Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  There had to be another choice. And so on that soft spring evening in early March, listening as Conroy droned on and on about life and art and truth, his words clanging in Mel’s head like a discordant fire alarm, she thought again, Why not? Now that she had discovered Dorothy Parker, a normal life was unthinkable.

  She’d always known she wasn’t like other girls. She’d always known she wouldn’t settle. Growing up with Leland and Juanita for parents had done that to her, had taught her that independence was the thing that mattered most, that relying on others was for suckers and losers and women with low self-esteem. Sitting in that darkened auditorium, listening to Conroy talk about being a writer was like stumbling across the Holy Grail. The spotlight illuminating him seemed like a sign from God, like the heavens parting and angels descending on golden wings. (Not that she believed in God, or at least not in a personal god; Jehovah had always seemed too much like Leland for her comfort.) But at that moment it seemed like Fate, or Providence, or the Wheel of Fortune, or whatever you wanted to call it had turned, and she suddenly felt like she was on a path that had been laid out for her since the beginning of time. The voice in her head said, You will be a writer, and she was filled with a strange, humming energy, as if she’d grabbed hold of a live wire.

  She knew then what the rest of Conroy’s audience did not, at least those who would never try to put pen to paper. Writing wasn’t about telling the truth at all; it was about rearranging truth, stretching it, and warping it to fit some safe and less-chaotic world of the writer’s own making. And Mel had been doing that, in one way or another, all her life.

  Being a writer turned out to be harder than she’d thought. Thinking up a story in your head and writing it down on paper were two very different things. Her first novel, begun soon after she moved to New York and went to work for the corporate magazine people, was a rambling, disjointed historical tale of a girl growing up on the banks of the Tennessee River during the time of the Indian removal. It was florid and sentimental, and when Mel reread what she’d written she was filled with disgust. Good prose had a certain rhythm, a beat like that found in music or poetry, but it also had a simplicity of language and style. It was this simplicity that Mel was having a hard time capturing.

  She put the unfinished novel in a box under her bed and signed up for a creative writing class at NYU. The professor was a big fan of Flannery O’Connor and Lewis Nordan, and under his careful tutelage Mel wrote her first short story, a darkly humorous tale of an estranged son who shoots his redneck father one night over a hand of poker. The story, entitled “Big Dudley Goes Down,” was good enough for her professor to suggest submission to the Tribeca Review and for her classmates to eye her henceforth with an expression of deep distrust and envy. “How in the world did you ever get the idea for that story?” one of them asked her sullenly. They thought she was a creative genius, but what they didn’t know was that she’d grown up a Barclay.

  She could do Southern Gothic in her sleep.

  It was her first husband, Richard, who suggested that she stop working for the corporate magazine publisher and devote herself full-time to novel writing. This was before they were married, not long after she left her boss, Phil, and moved in with Richard. Her job with the corporate publisher was no longer a certainty, it would seem, and she began to halfheartedly send out resumes.

  “Why don’t you stop looking for another crappy job and stay home and write?” Richard asked her. He was a film editor who worked at home, and he saw no reason she shouldn’t do the same. It helped that he was independently wealthy. Richard was from an old New York family, the kind that owned real estate all over the city. When one of the older members of the clan died, the deceased’s real estate was passed on to one of the younger members. That was how Richard and Mel came to live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side. Uncle Chappy had died and the place was empty.

  Richard came from the kind of people who owned real estate all over the city but who never had any cash in their pockets. If they needed money, they had to cash in stocks or set up a meeting with the lawyers who handled the family trust. But Richard made a good living as a film editor and they lived mortgage-free so it didn’t matter if Mel brought in any income. Letting Richard take care of her meant Mel didn’t have to work, and she didn’t have to cash the checks Leland sent her either. Being a starving artist had never appealed to Mel. She was too much of a realist to believe that living without money was anything she’d ever want to try.

  She began working on her first Flynn Mendez novel, about an obsessive-compulsive private investigator working out of an office in Spanish Harlem. She finished the novel in a little under a year and began shopping around for an agent. The manuscript was a rough draft and it needed a good agent and a good editor to help with the final polish, but Mel knew the story was sound. She had a pretty unbiased eye when it came to her own work. The novel might not be taught in American literature classes a hundred years from now, but it would be enjoyed by a respectable number of people, if she could just get it into print. There too, Richard was able to help. His family had a lot of contacts in the entertainment business, and that was how she wound up being represented by Gabe Tobler. A three-book contract with a major New York publishing house followed shortly thereafter. She would say in later interviews that her success as a novelist had involved a good bit of perseverance and luck, but she would always know otherwise. Publishing was no different from the rest of capitalist America; it was all about who you knew.

  Mel was grateful to Richard for her success, and maybe that’s why she agreed to marry him. Or maybe it was her way of getting even with J.T. Radford, of punishing him for his lack of faith and steadfastness. Whatever the reason, she said yes to Richard six months before the novel was set to launch. They were having dinner at Le Cirque and he had arranged for the dessert course, a chocolate souffle, to contain a diamond engagement ring once worn by his great-great-grandmother. His version of the King Cake that Lola’s mother used to have shipped in from New Orleans every January, only instead of the Baby Jesus it contained a perfect two-carat baguette in a platinum setting. What else could Mel say but, “Are you sure?”

  They were married on a beach in Barbados, attended by a small number of family and friends. The relationship between Mel and Sara was strained at the time (although they would later try to patch up their differences, or at least gloss over them enough to make communication possible), and she couldn’t very well invite Lola and Annie if she couldn’t invite Sara. She kept the wedding party small, only a few of Richard’s prep school buddies and their wives, and an even smaller number of Richard’s family. Three weeks after the ceremony, she sent Leland a note and a picture of them taken at St. Nicholas Abbey. It would have been different if her mother and Junior were still alive, but they weren’t, and Mel felt no familial obligation to include Leland in her plans. He wasn’t needed.

  The bride gave herself away.

  Her novel, Death Grip, came out to modest reviews and managed to sell briskly through the late spring and summer months, before sales began tapering off in the fall. Gabe Tobler took her out to lunch and explained to her that only seven percent of all the books published ever sell more than one thousand copies, and given that yardstick, her book was a resounding success. He spent a great deal of time explaining market shares and target audiences, and encouraged her to look at the big picture—future success would come through a mysterious process called building a readership. Mel, halfway through the second novel and mired in the mid-book doldrums, listened quietly and tried not to feel discouraged. Each successive book would build on the buzz generated by the preceding one, Gabe explained. He drew a diagram on a cocktail napkin, an inverted pyramid showing a long line of dollar signs at the top with little arrows meant to indicate expanding sales.

  He was a handsome, earnest young man with brown curly hair and dark eyes, and after a while Mel stopped paying attention to the little dollar signs and began instead to pay attention to Gabe To
bler. She had never noticed before how dark his eyes were. Each time he looked at her she felt a little flutter in the pit of her stomach, followed quickly by a sharp stab of remorse. She was, after all, a married woman. And he was her literary agent. Did other novelists, she wondered, sleep with their literary agents?

  Good God, what was wrong with her?

  She was bored. That’s what was wrong. Writing wasn’t as much fun as she had thought it would be; it wasn’t glamorous at all. It was being shut up alone in an office the size of a closet for six hours every day while all around her life went on merrily. It was endless revisions and rewrites and days when she sat mind-numbed and weary for hours, unable to put a single sentence down. Where was the fun in that?

  She had thought she’d be famous by now. That’s how she’d pictured it. She had imagined herself giving readings for sold-out crowds and appearing on afternoon television shows, where she would charm the audience with her Southern wit and all-American good looks. She had imagined herself making enough money to never again have to take a penny from her father or her husband, but it wasn’t like that at all. Although she was making a decent living, she couldn’t have supported herself, at least not in the style to which she’d long been accustomed.

  “How’s the second novel coming along?” Gabe asked her, motioning for the waiter to bring another gin and tonic.

  “Good,” Mel lied. “I’m two-thirds of the way through.”

  “Really?” he said. “That’s great.”

  She wondered if he was married. He didn’t wear a ring but that didn’t mean anything these days. She felt a sudden urge to yawn, and put her hand up to her mouth.

  “Do you want another drink?” Gabe said. The waiter appeared and stood with his hands resting lightly along the back of a chair.

  “Well, I really shouldn’t,” Mel said. “I’m working.”

  Gabe shrugged. “Okay,” he said.

  “Make it a vodka martini,” she told the waiter.

  She was bored in her career, and she was bored in her marriage, too. Hadn’t she always known marriage wasn’t for her? Richard was a homebody. He was happy if they went out once a month. He worked in an office on the first floor of the brownstone and she worked in an office on the second. In the evenings they ordered takeout or went around the corner to a little Burmese restaurant. Most days they stayed in their pajamas. They’d only been married two and a half years but already it felt like an eternity.

  “Are you married?” she asked Gabe.

  He looked surprised and offended at the same time. “Yes, to Carol. You met Carol—at Birdie Boykin’s cocktail party?”

  She’d been drunk at Birdie Boykin’s cocktail party. She and Richard had argued in the cab on the way over, which meant that she had shouted at him and he had turned his face stonily to the glass and refused to speak.

  “Oh, yes.” She remembered now. A mousy little woman with big teeth and a matronly bosom. Not the type she would have pictured Gabe with at all. And there were children, too. She remembered two gangly boys with huge feet skulking in a corner of the room, spying on the adults.

  “You have two sons?”

  “Yes. Michael and Sam.” He smiled fondly and she was afraid for a moment that he was going to take photos out of his wallet. Thankfully, the waiter came with their drinks instead. Gabe sipped his and said archly, “Of course, you two are still newlyweds.”

  Oh, God, were they? How depressing.

  “There’s plenty of time to think about the pitter-patter of little feet.”

  “The only pitter-patter you’ll hear coming from our house is the sound of my fingers striking a keyboard,” Mel said grimly, lifting her drink. The pitter-patter of little feet? Who said things like that? Instantly, Mel let go of her desire to sleep with him.

  “I don’t know about that,” Gabe said, shaking his head. He grinned at her playfully over the rim of his highball glass. “Richard always said he wanted a big family. He always said he wanted five children.”

  All the more reason to leave him now, Mel thought bleakly.

  Years later, after her second marriage had failed and illness had forced her to forever give up any dreams of children, she ran into J.T. Radford and his family at the Denver airport. She was coming back from a book festival in Santa Fe. It was December, the airport was crowded with Christmas travelers, and she was alone, waiting for a flight. She saw him coming toward her in the crowded terminal, and in that moment before his face registered completely and she recognized him, she thought, Now there’s an interesting face. A good face. A young girl sat on his shoulders with her tiny hands clasped under his chin. An older child, a son, pressed against his side, staring straight ahead with a kind of strange fierce concentration. J.T. didn’t see her sitting there. As he passed she could hear him singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” under his breath. The girl leaned over and looked down at her father, and he looked up at her, and there was a look of such intense happiness and devotion on his face that Mel, watching, felt as if a knife was slowly piercing her heart. A female voice called to the boy. It was the boy’s mother, J.T.’s wife, coming along behind, and Mel stirred suddenly and turned her face away so she wouldn’t be seen. The moment was too intimate, too raw. It lasted less than a minute, and yet in that instant Mel glimpsed what her life might have been, if only she’d had the courage to marry the right man.

  Chapter 25

  y the time Lola and Sara got back from their walk on the beach, Annie had abandoned her shady cabana for the sun. She lay now on a garish beach towel with her floppy hat covering her face and her pink toes pointed at the sky Mel lay beside her on her stomach, her chin nestled on one hand while the other held Janet Evanovich’s newest novel. She was a big fan, and her work was often compared to Evanovich’s, although Flynn Mendez didn’t come close to generating the sales Stephanie Plum generated. Oh well, she reminded herself. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to build a readership.

  Sara unrolled her beach towel and lay down on the other side of Mel. “Is anyone besides me hungry?” she asked.

  “I could eat,” Mel said.

  “We could go up to the house and make some sandwiches,” Lola said, unrolling her towel on the other side of Annie. She sat down, leaning back on her arms and staring pensively at the sea.

  “That sounds good,” Mel said lazily, sinking her chin on her fist. “That sounds like a plan.”

  No one moved. The heat was like a drug, soaking through their skin and filling their limbs with a strange lethargy. The steady pounding of the surf was as deep and constant as a heartbeat. After a while Mel dropped her book and dozed, her chin still resting on her fist. Beneath her floppy hat, Annie snored softly.

  “I love the ocean,” Lola said in a small voice to no one in particular. Behind her an airplane trailed across the blue sky. “I always wanted to live on the ocean.”

  Mel awoke with a start. She rolled over on her back and flung one arm over her eyes. “Why don’t you?” she said in a sleepy voice.

  “Yes, Lola, why don’t you live here?” Sara sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. She dug her toes in the warm sand until the tops of her feet were covered. “Now that Henry’s grown, why don’t you just move here?”

  Lola stared wistfully at the sea. “Briggs wouldn’t like it,” she said.

  “Oh, him,” Mel said flatly, from beneath her arm.

  Annie’s snores grew louder and Mel groaned and rolled over on her side. She leaned on one elbow and supported her head with her hand. With the other hand, she sifted sand onto the brim of Annie’s hat. Annie awoke with a snort and sat up. She took the hat off and began to beat Mel with it.

  “Why doesn’t Briggs want to live here?” Sara asked Lola. “It’s not like he has a nine-to-five office job he has to stay in Birmingham for. You all could live anywhere you wanted to live.”

  Lola cupped her hands like shovels and buried her feet up to the ankles. “He likes the golf course in Birmingham,” she said. “It’s
one of his favorite courses.”

  “Let him stay in Birmingham and you move here,” Mel said.

  Lola laughed nervously and shook her head. “It’s complicated,” she said.

  “It always is.” Mel got up on her knees and leaned over to brush the sand out of her hair. “You snore like an outboard motor,” she said to Annie. “How does Mitchell stand it?”

  “You should hear him” Annie said, putting her hat back on her head. She pressed her left thigh with her thumb to check for sunburn and then rolled over onto her stomach. “Besides, you should talk,” she said, glancing up at Mel. “You whistle in your sleep.”

  “Sleep?” Mel said. “What’s that? I don’t sleep anymore. Who can sleep with all that racket going on out in the crofter?”

  “You’re the only one who seems to hear it.”

  “Well, tonight I’ll wake you up. They usually get started around midnight.”