by Cathy Holton
He wasn’t looking.
She floated on her back, then stuck one shapely leg straight up into the air, holding it there. It was a good leg, long and lean. Seriously, what man could resist a leg like that?
From the beach, Sara shouted suddenly with laughter. “What are you doing? Are you doing synchronized swimming? Look everyone, Mel’s doing synchronized swimming!” He was looking now, but there was a grin on his face—not the effect Mel was going for.
Sara jumped up, slapping the sand off her bottom. “Come on, kids,” she shouted, flailing her arms like a goofy schoolgirl, like one of those kooky girls from Beach Blanket Bingo or How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. “Let’s go synchronized swimming!”
Lola and Annie, catching on, jumped up and ran into the water, giggling and squealing. Captain Mike grinned and turned the volume up on “Mother’s Little Helper.” The three of them lined up in the water and then swam on their backs in a straight line, lifting their legs into the air and twirling in unison. They swam back the other way, keeping time with the music.
Annie said, “Look at me, I’m Annette Funicello.”
Lola said, “I’m Gidget. Hey, Moondoggie, go get me a beer.”
Captain Mike grinned and tapped the side of his head with his palm. “Sorry, girls,” he said. “The beer’s on the boat.”
Annie said, “Cramp!”
Sara said, “Ballet Leg! Fishtail! Catalina Rotation!”
Mel watched them glumly, refusing to join in their fun. She turned her back to them and stared out at the sea. Either she got laid soon, or someone was going to get hurt.
Chapter 30
el was flying to a book festival in Savannah when she decided to leave her first husband. She was twenty-nine, her fifth novel, Cold Steal, had just come out in hardcover, and she had accepted an invitation to speak at the Dolphin Beach Book Festival as a last-minute fill-in author, against her agent’s wishes. Gabe seemed to think that her reading audience was located primarily in the Northeast, and that she was wasting her time attending book festivals south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mel was of the opinion that an audience was an audience, regardless of the location. A well-known author had developed a case of nerves and canceled at the last minute, and Mel had received an e-mail from a desperate festival coordinator looking for a “replacement author of equal or greater literary standing” (i.e, an author with no advance publicity willing to prostitute herself for a few paltry book sales).
“I’m your girl!” Mel e-mailed her back.
It was November (Hurricane season, Gabe noted archly), and Mel had been just as eager to get out of cold and dreary New York as the Dolphin Beach Book Festival Replacement Committee had been to have her. Besides, it would give her some time to decide what to do about Richard.
Her marriage, which had effectively ended not long after the oceanside ceremony in Barbados, had limped along painfully for the last five years before reaching a state of total and irretrievable impairment. Richard, a masochist, had begun to hint desperately that children might be just the thing to get them going in the right direction and Mel, a realist, had just as vehemently refused to consider it. She knew firsthand the results of bringing children into an unhappy union, and she had no intention of making the same mistake her own parents had made. The sins of the father and all that.
In moments of quiet reflection she had to ask herself why she had stayed in the marriage as long as she had. Her answers were at first evasive, and later disturbing. She had stayed because she needed a quiet place to write. A place where she could work without constant daily distractions and worry over money.
It was pathetic, really. She was no more than a kept woman.
But now that she was making enough of an income on her own, she no longer needed to be kept. Poor Richard must find someone else. Someone with young ovaries and little imagination who could bear his Anglo-Saxon offspring like a dutiful wife should. The truth was, she’d been a wretched wife, and he would be better off without her. She was selfish and spoiled. She didn’t want to give up her quiet, productive life in exchange for a life of dirty diapers, au pair girls, and burned dinners. She didn’t want chaos. She had met other writers who tried to “have it all,” women with distracted expressions and clothes that smelled of sour milk and Vicks VapoRub. Women who attended conferences with cell phones strapped to their heads (Sophia has a runny nose? Did you take her to the doctor? What color is the discharge? Is it clear or is it green?) or who walked up and down bookstore aisles trying to calm frantic spouses (MacKenzie has diarrhea? Did you take him to the doctor? Is the poopie brown or is it green?). She had attended a conference recently with a dapper white-haired novelist in a tweed jacket, a professor at some prestigious back-east college, who had sat through a panel discussion called “The Angel and the Whore: Transcending Archetypal Symbolism in Dystopian Literature” with what appeared to be baby vomit on his lapel. He confessed to Mel later, over a double scotch and soda, that he’d been married before, a thirty-year union that had produced no children and ten novels. He had recently remarried a much younger woman who dropped three children in rapid succession, the result being that he, at sixty-five, now had three children under the age of four! And life was grand! (He hadn’t written a word in five years but life was grand.) He stared pensively at a spot just beyond Mel’s right shoulder, and she tried not to notice the vomit on his lapel. “I just had to know what I was missing,” he said tenderly.
Premature death, she thought dismally. A stroke at sixty-six. A coronary at sixty-seven.
By the time she got off the plane in Savannah, Mel had decided. When she got back to New York, she’d start looking for an attorney.
The author of note she was replacing had been put up in style in a two-bedroom condo on Tybee Island. So this is how they treat you when you sell eight million books, Mel thought, walking through the luxurious place. The condo overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and was so grand that for a moment Mel contemplated calling Booker to come down and join her. But he was on a shoot in Chicago, interviewing students at Northwestern University for a documentary he was making on video game addicts.
“Is there such a thing as a video game addict?” she’d asked in surprise.
“Of course. It’s quite common among the young.” He was sitting on the sofa playing Mortal Kombat at the time, in a loft in Tribeca outfitted with pinball machines, a basketball hoop, and a video game collection that would surely qualify as every fifteen-year-old male’s best wet dream.
Booker Ogar. Six feet four and blond as a Viking. In fact, he was a Viking; his parents had come from Naestved or some other ridiculous-sounding place. Mel had taken one look at him and fallen hard. She had met him five months before at a party she’d attended with Richard, one of those dreary West Village affairs popular with trendy young novelists, artists, and assorted hangers-on trying desperately to outdo one another in sheer outrageousness. At this particular party, one of the writers, a frail, disheveled young woman wearing a tutu, had done splits on a Porada coffee table while reciting the opening lines of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Not to be outdone, a performance artist named Tool simulated defecating on a Chinese flag to protest Tiananmen Square, and afterward smeared his seminaked body with chocolate, inviting the spectators to “lick it off.” Mel hated these parties. She hated the writers she met there, pretentious snobs who, when they found out she had a contract with a major publishing house, said things like, “Oh, really? So what exactly is it that you write about, dear?” As if being from the South and looking the way she looked, not to mention actually making a living as a writer, was somehow beneath them (when they were really just jealous). They were all graduates of the Columbia writing school, and they were like a high school clique, always discussing their latest “projects” in a breezy, affected manner (although it would seem that the New York City literary scene in 1989 was less about work and more about partying). They were always talking about the good old days of the Mudd Club and dear old (dead) Andy Warhol. They pretend
ed to support one another but in actuality they were like terriers fighting over a bone, always gossiping about who was publishing (and who wasn’t) and what kind of advances they were getting, watching jealously to see who was going “mainstream” and who wasn’t. Mel had sickened of their company long ago, but it seemed that you couldn’t go to a party in New York City without bumping into them.
On this particular evening in the West Village, Mel stationed herself behind a potted plant in the corner and proceeded to get very drunk. She was halfway there when Booker walked in. He was hard to miss; he stood head and shoulders above the crowd and he was wearing a gray cable-knit sweater and a pair of jeans, while most of the men were dressed in sport coats. Mel stared at him, all the while repeating to herself, Look at me, look at me, look at me. It was a game she liked to play with attractive men. She sent them telepathic messages and then waited for them to find her.
It took Booker about two minutes. A new record.
Later, he said to her, “Let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My husband wouldn’t like it.”
“We don’t have to tell him.”
She grinned. She was very drunk. She could see Richard across the room talking with some of his prep school buddies. They were talking stocks and bonds and the president’s proposed cut on the capital gains tax. The older he got, the preppier Richard got. He was slowly metamorphosing into the perfect WASP. Not a cockroach, a wasp. She giggled, wondering what the Columbia crowd would make of that, what literary conclusions they would draw.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go.”
• • •
Richard, of course, did not find it funny. When she finally managed to make it home the following day, he was waiting for her like an avenging prophet from the Old Testament. As their own relationship was predicated on infidelity, it did no good to deny that she’d slept with Booker. She didn’t even try. She did promise, though, to attempt not to see him again, a promise that ultimately proved too difficult for her to keep. He was, after all, Booker. Sex with Richard, by comparison, was bland and uninspired. Booker was like no one else she’d ever fallen for. He didn’t want to control her. He didn’t want to be in charge. He was only three years younger than she but he had the temperament of a boy. An eternal golden boy, a Nordic Peter Pan. He pouted, he had temper tantrums, he watched cartoons on television and ate Captain Crunch for breakfast out of a plastic bowl decorated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was irresistible.
She and Richard moved into separate bedrooms in the brownstone and tried to work it out, but Mel was just going through the motions; her heart wasn’t really in it. By the time she left New York for Savannah, she had already made up her mind.
Still, she wished she had done it differently. She had never been unfaithful to J.T., at least not while they were together, but she had been unfaithful to Phil and now Richard. She hoped she wasn’t developing a pattern; cheat, love, cheat, leave. As she packed her suitcase for Savannah, she told herself this wouldn’t happen again. She’d learned her lesson, and this time would be different.
Besides, Booker was the man of her dreams.
The Dolphin Beach Book Festival was held in an old cotton warehouse along the Savannah River. It was located in the Factors Walk, an area of tall brick warehouses crowding a cobblestoned quay, now a park, along the river. The area had once been a breeding ground for eighteenth-century pirates, prostitutes, stevedores, and stowaways, but in the urban renewal of the 1970s had been reborn as quaint shops, restaurants, and art galleries catering to the tourist crowd. The festival itself was held in an old brick warehouse that had been transformed by the local council into a regional arts center.
Mel gave a morning reading in one of the downstairs rooms to a shifting crowd of approximately thirty-five people, and afterward walked across Bay Street to the Pirates’ House for lunch, returning to the arts center around two o’clock. She was scheduled for an afternoon panel session with a novelist who wrote crime thrillers and a woman who wrote, of all things, children’s books about a magical rabbit named Pierre.
With any luck at all, she’d be able to make it through to happy hour.
She survived the panel session and then went back to the condo to lie down and rest. She was scheduled that evening for a cocktail party at a local country club, the last event of the festival, where the writers would be exhibited like a group of exotic beasts, and expected to mingle with the paying guests.
She called Booker at the number he’d left and got no answer. That was not unusual when he was working, but it left her feeling forlorn and anxious. She went to the kitchen, opened the bottle of red wine the festival people had so thoughtfully left, and poured herself a glass, taking it and the bottle out onto the balcony. She sat with her feet up on the railing, slowly drinking her wine and watching the dying rays of the sun turn the sea to gold. All along the distant horizon, the sky was washed in shades of rose and gray, and clouds stood in ridges like rows of grazing sheep.
Mel sipped her wine and tried not to worry about Booker. She didn’t like leaving him alone for too long. He was a lightning rod for women; he couldn’t help it, they flocked to him like cats around a milk bowl, even when she was with him. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like when she wasn’t there. Not that she blamed him, of course. He couldn’t help it. He was just—Booker.
They sent a driver to pick her up, which was a good thing, considering that Mel was already pleasantly buzzed. The cocktail parties were always her least favorite events. It wasn’t that she minded making conversation with a room full of strangers. It was just that she felt that they expected her to say something intelligent and witty, and after a while it just got to be too much of a burden, especially after a few cocktails (and after all, wasn’t that the point of a cocktail party?). She found that after a few drinks she usually reverted to a Southern accent, which of course made people look at her as if she were stupid (especially New Yorkers), and she had a dry sense of humor that, when mixed with alcohol, became nearly combustible. Some people got her, and some didn’t. Some people laughed, and some were deeply offended. The whole point of these affairs, of course, was to win new readers, not alienate old ones, so she was always a little nervous about saying the wrong thing.
The Dolphin Beach Book Festival cocktail party was being held at the Regatta Club on beautiful Skidaway Island. It was the usual setup, a room with expansive views overlooking a large body of water, long buffet tables laden with exotic food, an open bar (thank God), and waiters and waitresses in faux evening attire circulating to pick up empty glasses and discreetly supply full ones. The crowd at this affair was somewhat older, more the retirement set, an interesting mix of males and females and Old South aristocracy and Yankee transplants.
Mel set herself up at her favorite station (the bar). “Hello,” she said, leaning over to read the bartender’s nametag, “Todd.”
He gave her a lazy smile. “What would you like, Pretty Lady?”
Nice. Todd had apparently missed the employee training film on sexual harassment in the workplace. “Let’s start with a cactus banger, shall we, and then see what we work up to.”
“I like your style.”
“That means a lot to me, Todd.”
“Tequila?”
“Patron Silver.”
He smiled, setting a glass down on the bar. “So what’s a pretty girl like you doing at one of these parties for old people?”
“I’m one of the writers.”
“Oh.” The smarmy look on his face disappeared and in its place slipped an expression of vacant professionalism. “Sorry. No offense, ma’am.”
“None taken, Todd.”
Just then the woman in charge, a tall, officious woman with an aristocratic accent, hurried up to Mel. “We’re asking all the owthas to sit at the assigned tables, Miss Bah-clay.” She lifted her hands to indicate thre
e long tables set up like barricades around the perimeter of the room.
It was the worst possible setup. The writers were herded behind tables, while the bibliophiles wandered up and down the interior of the room staring at them like they were mutants in a freak show. Mel was glad she had started drinking early.
She picked up her cactus banger, gazing morosely around the crowded room and letting her eyes wander over the captive writers, wondering if she would see anyone she knew. You could always tell the fiction writers from the nonfiction writers. The nonfiction writers were the extroverts, standing like barkers in a circus sideshow and calling to the large crowd that invariably thronged their table. The fiction writers, on the other hand, were the introverts. They sat mute, glumly staring into space as if imagining themselves anywhere but here.
Mel quickly spotted the fiction table. Three women sat in varying attitudes of repose. One was talking on a cell phone, one was staring at a spot on the tablecloth in front of her, and one appeared to be sleeping. Mel sighed and pointed with her glass. “I suppose I’m with them,” she said.
The festival official looked aghast. “Oh, no, Miss Bah-clay, you took the owtha of note’s place on the program. You’re seated at the Poets’ Table.” Mel looked to where she was pointing, at a slightly raised dais at one end of the room where a man and two women sat gazing down at the crowd. Dear God, the poets were even worse than the fiction writers. They looked like the outcast table from high school, the one where all the suicides and visionaries sat, the kids who dressed in black and read Nietzsche during free period. One of the women looked like she might rise at any moment and open a vein, the other glared menacingly out at the crowd gathered in front of the nonfiction writers, and the man was reading aloud, to no one in particular, a rather depressing poem about dead leaves (from his own book, of course). Mel ordered another drink, and went to join them.