The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  One long weekend when the du Ponts were off at a wedding down in Delaware he got to watch her work. They had risked his coming out to Windermere because the caretaker and his wife had gone off on a jaunt of their own, and that left only the two Salve Regina college girls that Margo hired every summer to help with the housework—Mitten and Rachel were their names this year—who presumably didn’t know what was what. So they had hung out for the three days like regular lovers, and he got to watch her sit at her long workbench against the glass wall of the Orangery, hammers and files and jeweler’s saws arrayed in front of her. He asked her questions—he knew nothing about soldering, casting, about tripoli, rouge, all the different hammers and anvils and stuff—and she explained things to him, even let him tap away at some silver wire to see what it was like. It struck him how capable and efficient she was, how much she knew what she was doing and where she was going.

  Beautiful as it was, with its walls of glass looking out over the broad lawn at Alva Vanderbilt’s crazy teahouse perched on the distant rocks, the Orangery wasn’t really habitable. It had only a makeshift kitchen and no bathroom and no heat. So though Aisha tried to keep a low profile—tried to keep out of Tom and Margo’s hair, she said—she still had to go up to the house to shower or fix herself something to eat or go to the bathroom. She had her own room on the second floor—the third floor was the servants’ quarters, where the college girls lived—but she only slept there on occasion, on nights when it was cold, or if she’d hung out with Alice after dinner, maybe watching a movie, and it would seem odd for her to head back to the studio for the night. She kept tabs on when Tom and Margo were home—or would be home—always trying to minimize her presence. She didn’t want to wear out her welcome.

  But for that three-day weekend they had free use of the house. There were still the college girls to look out for but they had their own door in and out and used the servants’ staircase, and Margo had them pretty much trained to stay on the third floor except when they were cleaning the house or whatever. So they cooked in the big kitchen, ate at the stupendous dining table in the stupendous dining room with its shimmering wall sconces and massive fireplace, had late-night cocktails on the veranda overlooking the dark water of Doubling Point Cove, and made love, it seemed, in every room of the house. (“Six down,” Aisha said once, “twenty-two more to go.”) They stayed up all hours, drank Tom’s scotch, walked around half dressed, and when they’d had their fill of each other’s bodies, lay on whatever bed or couch or rug they found themselves on and talked.

  “Join the club,” Aisha said when he told her about the Mr. Winterbourne business. They were in the upstairs sunroom with its wicker furniture and fat pillows, naked, letting the sun warm them. “She used to call me Merton Densher. From The Wings of the Dove.”

  This had been in Italy, she said, in Venice, on that trip they’d taken after the first suicide attempt. The time Alice’s mother had paid Aisha’s way. The novel was about this guy Merton Densher, who was supposed to woo a dying heiress so that he might inherit her money when she died, and then marry the woman he was truly in love with. The whole plan being this other woman’s.

  “We were staying in a room across the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Barbaro, which is where this dying heiress is staying in the novel. I don’t remember it bothering me at the time. It was just a joke. Although I do remember pointing out to her once that she wasn’t, in fact, dying. She said she could fix that.”

  It had been over a boy, that first time. He was a senior and Alice had been a freshman. He had been her first-ever boyfriend. Aisha had never really gotten the full story of what had happened. Had the guy just wanted to break up with her? Slept with someone else? Jesus, had he done it—slept with Alice, she meant—on somebody’s dare or something? Whatever it was, the breakup came right during finals week and just as a testament to something or other, Alice had finished all the work she had to do, took her calc exam, handed in her term paper on the Symposium, packed her side of the dorm room up, left her room key on her bureau, and then did it. Horse tranquilizer. Whether she’d gotten it out at the Red Hook stables or on the street—cat valium, it was called—she never said. But it was no suicide gesture. If Aisha hadn’t found her, she would have died.

  It was there in Venice, while they were gondoliered around with The Wings of the Dove like a guidebook, that Alice and Aisha had developed the Theory of the Heiress’s Dilemma. Which was how to know someone loved you for yourself alone and not your golden bank account. The dilemma in Alice’s case being further complicated by the fact that you had to go at it with the presumption, the a priori thingie had to be that they didn’t love you. Because, as Alice put it, what normal twentysomething guy wanted a retard for a wife, eh? This was the rare variant known as the Retarded Heiress’s Dilemma, she’d said, sucking on an ice as they went under the Accademia Bridge. Perhaps one could devise a test, insist that the candidate agree to share the retarded heiress’s condition, like Isolde dying a sympathetic death with Tristan. The candidate would have to contract cerebral palsy is what he’d have to do, drink a draught, a potion or something. Instead of Tristan you could insert Romeo here, kneeling beside the poisoned Juliet in her family’s tomb, taking the poison himself to share Death’s Darkness with her, although of course once you drank the potion—this was Aisha talking now—it was Windermere you got to share.

  Because Windermere was Alice’s, she said, did Sandy know that? Windermere—the whole amazing place—was Alice’s, not Tom’s. Their mother had seen to that. Tom had inherited the apartment on the Upper East Side. Twelve rooms. Alice had gotten Windermere. Twenty-eight rooms. That way there would be no having to sell, no splitting the family legacy. Tom and Margo were there by Alice’s sufferance. And don’t think Margo wasn’t aware of that.

  “I want you to be nice to her,” she unexpectedly said, and when Sandy responded, hey, he was nice to everyone: “Especially nice. Like with the motorcycle and Da Silva’s that day.” (Ah, he’d been wondering if she knew.) “Because she’s always on the edge. For all her wiseguyness, she’s always just this far away. And I love her. Life would be a lot less fun without Alice. Okay?” she said, and she began kissing him again. “Okay?”

  He found himself after that weekend—whether as a result of the motorcycle day or because Aisha was orchestrating things, he didn’t know—but he found himself spending more time with the two of them, casually included for dinner, for an ice cream cone, rounded up for a jaunt over to Mystic Seaport, and once when a new Netflix arrived, out at Windermere eating microwaved pot stickers and watching a Cary Grant movie. Halfway through the film Margo had drifted in and he had felt weird sitting there in the dark with the three of them, Margo shushing Alice, who had to sigh theatrically every time Cary Grant did a Cary Grant thing.

  “Keep an eye on her,” Margo told him a few nights later when she’d come by his condo. He thought she had meant Alice but then realized it was Aisha she was talking about. “She has a way of wanting things,” she said. And he had to hear about how back in college Aisha had dated Tom, did Sandy know that? Sandy did know that, but it was safer to say he didn’t. “It didn’t go anywhere,” Margo resumed. “But let’s not be naive about what she was after. I know a little something about that.”

  “But I’m not rich,” he smilingly said, trying to deflect the insinuation, trying to keep back the urge to defend Aisha.

  “No,” Margo said then, starting to unbutton his shirt, “but you have other assets.”

  Which she knew a little something about as well, she added.

  At the Casino, preparations were under way for the Campbell’s Tournament, which would take place in the second week of July and which would include the induction of Andre Agassi into the Tennis Hall of Fame on the Saturday of the semifinals. It was a big deal, sold out since January. There were the courts to get into perfect shape, media requests to attend to, accommodations for the VIPs who would be attending. Sandy
did his bit, serving as docent for this or that sponsor, showing them around the grounds, taking them into the beautiful buildings of the old Casino where the Tennis Hall of Fame was now housed. He even managed to work in some of the stuff Alice had told him of the early days of the Casino—the billiard rooms, the men smoking cigars, the women in their Parisian gowns—and no, he always had to tell them, it had never been that kind of casino.

  He found himself wanting to ask Aisha what it had been like back when she was dating Tom. Being a young black woman and Tom a rich white guy, he meant. And he wanted to ask whether she and Tom had, you know, slept together, but he knew that that was one of those stupid guy things he was supposed to be curing himself of so he didn’t. When they talked once, she described it as a time of confusion for her. She had never loved Tom, nor he her as far as she knew. But maybe, yeah, she had been trying to talk herself into loving him, or at least believing that she could love him. She had been nineteen. She was on a scholarship. Her father came to the supper table each night still in his overalls. She had never experienced anything like Windermere, or that trip to Venice, or the apartment on the Upper East Side. When that kind of money was involved, that kind of privilege—Sandy should have seen the palazzo they stayed in on the Grand Canal—could anybody really be sure of their motives? How do you separate love for a person from your experience of them? And when that experience includes twelve-dollar martinis at the Waldorf-Astoria bar? And you’re this black kid with a pipe fitter for a father, helping Vassar up its diversity quotient, what then?

  (It struck him, listening to her sometimes, that he didn’t know whether she was complicated or simple—psychologically speaking, he meant. Whether this business with Tom and her account of it—the struggle, the second-guessing, the insistence on looking at things squarely—was because she was honest with herself, undeluded about the complexity of her motives, or whether it was just that, as Margo said, she wanted things.)

  One feeling he could never quite shake was the suspicion that she actually welcomed his involvement with Margo. It had something to do with the lack of jealousy, the continued insistence on secrecy. Sure, okay, he could understand how her situation might get a bit dicey if Margo knew about them (not to mention his own situation), but still, he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that it afforded her a pretext, and that what she really wanted was not to keep their affair secret from Margo, but from Alice. He couldn’t explain it, couldn’t prove it, and sure, maybe it was just him being paranoid. But once when they’d been talking about her finding out, it’d dawned on him that they were talking about two different “hers,” Sandy meaning Margo and Aisha Alice. Did she have a history of keeping her boyfriends secret out of concern for Alice? he wondered. Surely Alice didn’t begrudge her a normal romantic life.

  As it turned out, there was no ticket for him to the Hall of Fame ball. There were just too many in-house requests this year, the superintendent of the Casino told him a little sheepishly. This was at the hundred-dollar Meet and Greet at the beginning of the tournament. When Margo found out, she said she could get him one, but she said it in a way that made him think she didn’t really want to, so nah, he said, he didn’t have a tux anyway. But then Alice said hey, she needed an escort, someone to protect her from the riot of suitors.

  “How about it, sailor?”

  So on the evening of the ball, after the semifinals and the induction ceremony earlier in the day, he went out to Windermere in his rented tux so the four of them could ride to the pavilion in Tom’s car. Aisha stood with them under the porte cochere in her work overalls and took photos like they were headed to the prom. He felt a little weird. Not just being Alice’s date—if that’s what he was—but because he’d had no chance to see Agassi earlier and he dreaded some humiliating moment when Agassi didn’t quite remember him. They’d played once at the beginning of Sandy’s career, had hung out during a rain delay once playing Hearts, but while these were highlights for Sandy, they were nothing to Agassi. And Steffi Graf would barely have heard of him. Ugh.

  But as it turned out, Alice had no interest in elbowing her way into the great man’s presence. She was content instead to stand off to the side and just watch. So that’s what they did, drinking wine, snagging hors d’oeuvres, and making comments about everyone. Behind them the pavilion windows were open to the ocean and there was a lovely night breeze coming through the screens. A band was playing nineties hits, but it was so crowded you couldn’t dance. Which was okay with Alice: she only danced when she was alone, she said. Or with Aisha if she was very, very drunk.

  “Very drunk,” she emphasized.

  They went outside once, onto the deck built above the rocks and below which the surf curled and broke. It was less crowded there and a few couples were taking advantage of the elbow room and dancing. There were these two teenage boys over by the door horsing around, one of them imitating Alice’s gait and the other busting a gut laughing. Sandy managed to turn Alice away in time, guiding her toward the railing that overlooked the ocean. It was chilly, he said, and asked if she was all right—had she seen? he was wondering—but she just smiled and said yes, it was beautiful.

  Out over the water, a half mile off, there was a wall of cloud, fog. He’d heard of such things but had never seen it, not a wall like that. It was just hanging there, right above the water, not moving, like a curtain, faintly lit by the lights from the shore. They gazed at it in silence.

  “You look very handsome,” he heard beside him. She hadn’t turned to him, had her eyes still out to the fog bank. He wanted to say something in turn, to say that she looked nice in her gown. It was green—brocade, he supposed—with these thin straps that showed her shoulders nicely.

  “Are you drunk enough to dance yet?” he asked instead. She kept herself turned to the ocean, closed her eyes, lifted her face to the breeze.

  “I don’t want those boys to hurt themselves laughing,” she said.

  Ah, he thought. Yet she had said it with something like amusement—serenity, tolerance, forgiveness: he didn’t know what. It made him feel suddenly the commonplace of the experience for her. The Chemical Heiress, Aisha said she’d heard her called at Vassar. Sometimes the Plastics Princess. Who knew what else.

  When it grew too chilly, they turned to go back inside. Sandy held the door open for Alice, and then found himself leaning over the boys and telling them to smarten up. And when that didn’t seem enough: “Assholes.”

  For the rest of the evening they stood and chatted with people they knew. At some point Andre and Steffi left and the room relaxed. Sandy danced with Margo, with some older women he knew from this and that. Alice chatted with the director of the Redwood Library. Around midnight when they’d had enough the four of them got in Tom’s car and headed back to Windermere, where Alice thanked him for a lovely evening in her Scarlett O’Hara voice and Tom said: “Nice moves, big guy.” Margo merely twiddled her fingers good night. There was no invitation for a nightcap.

  Back downtown at his condo building, instead of going inside he went across to the fish pier with its stacks of lobster traps and commercial fishing gear. He could see the pier from his living room window, and the contrast it made to the Newport Shipyard next over with its million-dollar yachts in dry dock always made him think of Aisha and her father the pipe fitter. More than that: of Aisha as a black person in the midst of all this white wealth. He walked in between the coils of rope and the plastic bins and buoys, past where the commercial boats with their unlovely booms and winches were moored alongside the pier. Out beyond the harbor the fog was still there, still like a curtain someone had drawn. The Pell Bridge disappeared behind it, and the mainland lights that should have been across the way had vanished. He watched the cars rising up into the darkness and disappearing into the gray cloud. It was weirdly unnerving.

  He turned and started back down the pier. Ahead of him on the block-long face of the complex he could pick out the windows of hi
s condo. For the umpteenth time he wondered how much it was worth. It was just a one-bedroom but it faced the harbor, and the complex itself was upscale: it had that shingle-style look, and the courtyard was beautifully landscaped. Half a million? He supposed at least that, and he wondered how long it would be before he could afford such a place. Would he ever be able to afford such a place? He hadn’t used to think that way, had never been one to covet things. Was it Newport or just the age he’d reached? The fact that he had to find some way forward?

  He entered the lobby, nodded to the concierge behind his desk, and took the elevator up. Inside the condo he went and stood at the window, looked out to where he had just been, at the rusty, ungainly fishing boats, and then at the yachts in the shipyard next over. He undressed in the dark, climbed into bed. He would have to do something. It was all right to tread water in Newport for a year while he got used to his career being over, but now he needed to figure things out. Surely he would be a viable candidate for a college job. A Division I school would grab him in an instant, although he’d have to be someone’s assistant at first. Or maybe Division III. Williams, Trinity, heck, Vassar: those kinds of places would go for him, wouldn’t they? And he was personable. If he got to the interview stage, how could they not hire him? Would that be okay, he wondered, Coach Sandy? Maybe a women’s college, heh. Were there still women’s colleges? Mount Holyoke? Sweet Briar?