The microwave dinged and I took out the roast and carved him a couple of slices and spooned the browned vegetables onto his plate. He took a big mouthful and smiled appreciatively around it.
“Estelle never forgets, does she?” he said.
“Never.” I smiled back. “I don’t, either. I made crème caramel. We can eat it in bed.”
“Well, you hussy,” he said, grinning a little. It was the grin I loved most. I had not seen it in some time. “Can’t you even let a man get his nourishment first?”
“Be quick about it,” I said.
An hour later we lay tangled together in the big bed in our “real” bedroom, the one that faced the sea. The drapes were closed against the darkness, and they muffled the sound of the waves. The palms still scratched and rattled, though, and banged against the wrought-iron railing of the balcony that lay beyond the French doors. I burrowed my ear deep into the hollow of Clay’s naked shoulder and heard, instead of the palms, the roar of my own diminishing blood and the pulse of his. If I moved my head slightly I could taste the sweet salt sweat on his neck. I did that, tasted the essence of Clay after love, and hugged him hard with the other arm that was flung over his chest. He hugged back.
“Not bad for an old bag,” he said drowsily into my hair. His breath tickled.
“Or for an old crock,” I said. “The only trouble is, I know all your tricks. Why don’t you get some new tricks to amaze and delight me?”
“And just where do you suggest I get them? Shawna? Some daughter of joy from the mean streets of Atlanta?”
“You could get a book,” I said. “Or we could rent a video. I bet Hayes knows some good ones.”
He laughed and shifted me slightly in his arms. We lay still for a while, I listening to the regular cadence of his breathing. I kept thinking that I would get up and bring the comforter and spread it over us, but I did not move, and before long I began to think that he had fallen asleep. But he had not.
“So what do you think of him? My new guy?” he said, when I was just thinking that I would disengage myself and get up. My stomach gave a small squeeze of anxiety. I did not want to speak of this. I was done with this.
“Oh, who cares?” I said. “Go to sleep. It’s almost three.”
“I’m not sleepy,” he said into the dark. “No kidding, what did you think of him? His credentials are good, but I don’t know…there’s something about him. I realized after I hired him that I really don’t know anything about him.”
For some reason, I felt a stab of perversely proprietary protectiveness toward Lou Cassells. I said, “He seemed fine. Like I said, he had his little granddaughter with him and he’s certainly crazy about her. He’s apparently had a pretty rough life; he just lost his wife, and his daughter…died…having a baby, back in Cuba. He takes care of the child now. You’ve got to admire that.”
“I suppose,” Clay said. “I just don’t much like the idea of him hanging around the house over there, or knowing when you’re there and when you’re not. I’m going to have to make that clear, I think.”
“No, don’t. He wouldn’t have been there if the little girl hadn’t come there. He told Lottie he didn’t plan to bother me.”
“Lottie…oh, terrific. I guess he’s shagging Lottie Funderburke like half of the rest of my staff, huh?”
“Well, you don’t have any rules about that, do you? Let him be. He was…nice. And apparently he’s highly educated. He was telling me a little about himself.”
Clay lay in the darkness for a while, and then he said, “What else did you talk about?”
“Oh…nothing. Everything. About Dayclear. He’s staying over there, and you know who with? Ezra Upchurch. Isn’t that something? Ezra, back in Dayclear?”
“There goes the neighborhood,” Clay said neutrally. “So…did he say what he was doing over there? Ezra, I mean? Him, too, for that matter. I thought he lived on John’s Island. I thought they both did.”
“He’s visiting his old aunt, apparently. She’s the only one he’s got left, Lou said. Ezra, I mean. As for Lou, he’s there because he knew Ezra somehow or other on John’s Island and I guess this is a lot closer to his work. He didn’t say.”
“Lou, huh?”
“It’s what he said his name was, Clay.”
“He told me Luis.”
“Well, what’s the difference?”
“It’s just…familiar, that’s all. I don’t like the idea of him being familiar with you. I want you to tell me if you see him over there again. As a matter of fact, it might be a good idea if you gave the island a rest for a while.”
“Why, for pity’s sake?” I could not keep the exasperation out of my voice. This was not at all like Clay. Not at all.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Caro, because I said so, okay?” he snapped. “Is it a terrible great lot to ask, just for a little while?”
I raised myself up on one elbow and stared at him.
“I think you’re jealous, and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” I said.
He raised himself up, too, and glared at me.
“Jealous of you and a…Cuban Jew gardener? Not hardly,” he said, and there was something cold in his voice.
I was stung.
“Well, maybe you ought to be concerned, though not for the reason you think,” I said, trying to match his coldness with my own. “He seems to know an awful lot about your business. He seems to think you’re about to put a resort over there in Dayclear. In fact, he’s awfully sure about that. If he’s telling me about it, who knows who else he’s telling? If you have to make anything clear to him, that’s what you ought to clear up. It made my hair stand on end.”
The cold sickness did not start until the silence had spun out so long that it was obvious that he was not going to answer me. Then it flooded me and took me deep under, so that I could not move or get my breath to speak. Over it, very gradually, came not anger, or fear, but a terrible desolation that was the sum of every bad thing I have ever known was waiting ahead for me. It was not anxiety or even terror; that presupposes a catastrophic event still ahead of you. This event was here. I knew as certainly as I knew it was I who sat here in the dark with Clay that what Luis Cassells had said was true, and that my husband lay beside me pregnant with a great betrayal.
Presently I said, wondering that my voice was not cracked and choked, leaking life, “So it’s true. I thought he was a liar and a fool. I guess the fool was me.”
And the liar was you, I did not say. But it lay between us.
After another long moment of silence, he sighed, a thin, tired sigh, and said, “There’s a lot I have to tell you, Caro. None of it’s good. I didn’t want to do it yet, and I didn’t think I had to, until after Christmas maybe. And I guess I thought there was just a chance that I wouldn’t have to tell you at all. But Cassells has put the kibosh on that. Maybe it’s just as well. I just wish it had been me and not him.”
“I wish so, too, Clay,” I said, feeling the pain inside so deep and viscous that it felt like blood pooled in my chest. “You just don’t know how much I wish it had been. So. You’re going to tell me now, right?”
“I…Caro, Christ, I’m so tired I think I could die from it. Couldn’t we just…sleep? Get some sleep, and talk about it in the morning? It won’t seem so bad then. It’s not so bad, come to think of it. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed. But I’m so tired.…”
“I don’t care,” I said, and found that I didn’t. “I don’t care how tired you are, Clay. I hear it now, whatever it is, or I’m getting up from here and going back to the island and I don’t know when I’m coming back. Or if. You can’t just…Listen, you tell me. Sit up and tell me.”
And so he did. He turned on the bedside lamp and pulled on a T-shirt and sat up in our bed, half turned away from me toward the hidden sea, and he told me that things were so bad financially with the company that unless he got an infusion of cash very quickly, he ultimately stood to lose it all. All of it. The scattered island prop
erties, even Peacock Island Plantation, the flagship of the line, the mother church, the first and still best thing he had ever created. He would lose it all. Everything.
I could not understand. I could not comprehend what he was saying. My head felt as empty as if my brain had atrophied. I simply sat in the lamplight, still naked and not noticing at all, and looked at him. Or rather, at the side of his face.
Finally I said, “You mean…we wouldn’t have a place to live? We wouldn’t have any money?”
“Well, it’s not that bad,” he said dully. “We could keep this house, of course. We own it. I’d keep some company stock. We have a few other personal investments. Carter’s almost through school. We could live. It’s just…that all this wouldn’t be mine anymore. Ours, rather. I…Caro, I can’t let that happen. I can’t. This is everything, all this…” He gestured, his hand taking in the sweep of beach and sea and land that spread out from the epicenter that was our bed.
“Oh, Clay…is it really?” I said, feeling the pain flare up until I thought I would die from it. This will be mortal, I thought. Those five words are what will kill me now.
He turned and looked at me wordlessly. His face was flayed, burned, scoured. I did not know this face.
“After you, it is,” he said, eyes closed. “After you and Carter, it’s everything. There isn’t anything else. Not for me, anyway.”
I lay back against my pillows, knowing that in some vital, visceral way I would never sit up whole again.
“I need to know about it,” I whispered. “I need to know.”
A great, indrawn breath. Then he said, “Remember Jeremy? Jeremy Fowler, at Calista Key?”
I nodded. Who could forget Jeremy? The golden boy, the chosen one, the flaming comet that had come streaking out of Texas when he was only twenty-two, just out of the University of Texas Business School, shining with youth and charm and intelligence and energy and Texas oil money, begging Clay to hire him, to let him do anything for the company, let him tend bar at one of the plantation clubs, let him trim shrubbery, let him answer the telephone or sort the mail. I’ll make you glad you did, Jeremy Fowler said, and his voice held all the promise of the new millennium in it.
Of course, Clay hired him. And Jeremy did what he said he would. Within a year he was second in command at one of Clay’s oldest resort communities, an established mountain family resort in Tennessee. In two years he was back on Peacock’s, heading up the elite forward planning team. A year later Clay sent him down to Puerto Rico, to head up the just-borning Calista Key Plantation. He was by far the youngest project manager Clay had ever had, and his trajectory took him and Calista straight into the Caribbean sun. The first two years’ reports out of Puerto Rico were stunning. Advance sales were unprecedented. Jeremy didn’t come back to the States often; he made it a point to be a hands-on manager. But when he did, with his fey, beautiful, haunted wife, Lila, he trailed a kind of glittering aura that was nearly palpable, and he received a hero’s welcome.
“He…Calista’s bankrupt, Caro,” Clay said. “The figures that came in were…not true. There’s hardly any occupancy. The project is way behind construction schedule; he hasn’t paid any of his suppliers in months. Nobody’s been working since summer. Whoever went down there from the home office got shown a great bustle of activity and dozers and workmen, but they were freelances he hired for the day. The photos he sent…Christ, I think they were the same few units, in the various stages of construction, with different paint and plantings. From what I hear, morale is so bad that half our kids down there are drunk most of the time, and the other half are on drugs. Seven marriages have broken up. Lila Fowler has left and gone back to her folks in Philadelphia. The construction engineer split for Arkansas last month. Hayes says Jeremy is living in a broken-down hotel in Humacao with a Puerto Rican woman, drinking like a fish. He says there are chickens walking around in the courtyard.”
He stopped and scrubbed at his eyes with his hands, as if the chickens were the worst of it.
“How could that happen?” I said. “How could that be?”
“I don’t blame Hayes,” he said. “I should have gone down there myself. Hayes is new to this kind of stuff. He’s never overseen a project before. Jeremy always did have Hayes in his back pocket. He’s not the only one, either. Hayes had no reason to doubt the figures or what he saw with his own eyes. And I didn’t butt in because I wanted…I thought it was time for Hayes to have something of his own. And I thought Jeremy could handle it. I didn’t go down there on purpose. I didn’t want to hover.…”
“Hayes,” I said leadenly. “Of course. It would be Hayes, wouldn’t it? I thought Hayes didn’t have a project of his own. I thought he was a, quote, perfect second banana, unquote.”
“He didn’t want anybody to know until he got the hang of it,” Clay said.
“Well,” I said, “so we lose Calista Key. Why does that mean that everything else…what does that have to do with the island? With Dayclear?”
“Because,” Clay said, “I’ve…we’ve…things have not been so good for resorts in the last few years, Caro. I’ve kept expanding because I didn’t think I had any choice. I could pay the Alabama Gulf investors, for instance, with the money we made when we opened up Biloxi. And we paid the Biloxi guys when we opened up Georgia. And so on. But Calista…we owed a ton of money on that one. That one was a money pit from the beginning. There’s not enough cash in all the others put together for me to pay off the Calista folks unless I sell Peacock’s. And when that goes…it all will. Eventually, it all will. Or…”
He fell silent. I waited. Then I said, “Or you could open up a new property, right? Get some more joint venture money. But you don’t have enough cash to buy one, so you’d have to use land you already had. Like the island. My friend Mr. Cassells says it’s a natural, that site. The only thing is, Clay, it’s not your land, is it? It’s mine. Did you forget that?”
“No,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t forget that.”
“Clay, isn’t all this a pyramid scam or something? Isn’t all this illegal? Who knows about this?”
“Not strictly, no,” he said. “It’s done often, and done quite successfully, if you can keep all the balls in the air at once. I thought I could. There was nothing to make me think I couldn’t. Nobody said anything; none of the company money people ever said a word. Hayes has always been a wizard at finding properties and investors. He’s the one who just might save us now. And to answer your question…nobody knows about it, I don’t think. Not outside the Plantation family, anyway. I mean…they know about Dayclear coming on line, but not the reason for it. Yet. I don’t think too many of our people know about Calista…yet.”
He lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. He might have died, he was so still, so white, his face so emptied of everything that had ever meant Clay to me. I waited for my heart to twist with pain, but it did not. My heart felt as cold and hard as a cinder, dead for eons.
“Remember how my grandfather felt about that land?” I said finally, feeling as if I were going to collapse from the effort to talk. “Remember what he said about the Gullahs in Dayclear always having their homes, about the wild things, the birds, the fish, the things that bloom and grow there that don’t anywhere else? Remember the panther? Would you really…could you really just doze all that down and put up a…a…what? A golf course? A lagoon community? A marina? What? Cluster housing, condos where the old houses are now?”
“It can be done well, Caro,” he said in the new, dull voice. “You know it can. I’ve got studies, a master plan, that leaves so much of the land and marsh in place that it almost looks as if it hasn’t been touched. There’s plenty of wild habitat still provided for, over where your grandfather’s house is. I wouldn’t…we wouldn’t disturb that. This looks like an award winner; the joint venture people are crazy about it.…”
“I gather that’s what you were doing in Atlanta,” I said. “Peddling it. Who is it this time, Clay? Texas money? Los A
ngeles? Arab?”
“Local Atlanta,” he said. “Fellow Southerners who know land like this. A long track record, lots of experience, solvent as all get-out, plenty of cash. I’ll tell you about them later. They’d respect that land, I think. They’ve been crazy to get down here for a long time, but nothing’s really pleased them till they saw the marsh property. If it’s got to be done, I’m glad Hayes knew these guys.”
“Clay. Listen to me. I’m sorry about…everything. But that land…that land is mine, Clay! Weren’t you even going to ask me? Couldn’t you at least have leveled with me before…before it got this far? Don’t I matter? Doesn’t my grandfather? Were you ever going to talk to me?”
“I haven’t been able to talk to you for a long time, Caro,” he said. It was almost a whisper. I opened my mouth to protest, and then did not. It was true. He had tried. Maybe not about Dayclear, but about other things that were important to the two of us. I had not refused to discuss them, but I had not talked back. My very silence had been his answer.
“What were you going to tell the people in Dayclear?” I said. “What were you going to do about clear titles and all that stuff? Providing that I agreed, which I cannot imagine doing?”
“Well, we’d do a substantial cash buyout. It would be more than enough for them to relocate, and we’d do that for them, too; find them homes, or maybe build some for them off-island. They’d be better off financially than they’ve ever been in their lives.…”
“Except that they wouldn’t have their homes. Can’t you understand what that means? It seems to me you should, if you’re about to lose yours.…”
“There are other things we can do. Hayes thinks we might leave the settlement as is, maybe make a sort of cultural attraction of it. You know, a preservation center for the Gullah culture, with the Dayclear people doing the things their people have always done, planting and harvesting rice and cotton, spinning, dyeing, growing vegetables, making sweet-grass baskets, telling the old stories and doing the old dances, teaching visitors the songs and legends.…”
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