The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  A day or two later he was wandering down Thames Street with the skateboarders and the teenage girls in their summer tops and he had entered All That Glitters, the chic shop that carried Aisha’s jewelry. He had stood in front of the display case that held her stuff—Goldwork Variations by Aisha DuMaurier—as if interrogating the mermaids and serpents would tell him something about her. But what it told him (DuMaurier was not her real last name), he already knew.

  So he had turned away, browsed through the other stuff—bird’s-eye puzzle boxes, ceramics, Japanese tea servings—and then picked up this beautiful leather briefcase with the sudden bright idea—hey!—that he would buy it for Alice. For about fifteen minutes—while he survived the shock of the price, got out his credit card, let the shopgirl compliment his taste—it seemed perfect, just the way to say he was sorry. But as he walked back toward his room it began to eat at him, what he’d just done. With each street he felt stupider and stupider. Surely the girl already had a briefcase! Maybe she hated briefcases! When he got back to his room he threw the leather thing onto a chair and lay down on his bed, closed his eyes. In a day or two he would see if the shop would take it back.

  He was avoiding Aisha and yet he knew he had to see her. More than that, he had to call her out. So he texted her, told her he’d be playing basketball in Storer Park the way he did some nights. Their secret meeting place, ha! When she showed up, he looked for signs that Alice had told her of the trolley stop. How would she maneuver, how would she explain? But she seemed as always—the bare summer ankles, the sheen of her brown skin, the self-possession with which she handled herself. If this was how she always looked, he wondered—now, when he knew she was hiding something—had she been hiding something all along?

  The black guys messed with her in the way they had, called her “sister,” called her “bitch.” She should try a brother, enough of this Larry shit! None of it fazed her.

  They went out onto Da Silva’s Wharf. The Terrace was full but they were able to get seated inside the main house in a room that had four carved cherubs in the overmantel, one of them missing its nose. The windows were open to the wharf and there was a nice breeze. Aisha ordered a bottle of wine, said it was her treat.

  He had been trying the last couple of days to think himself into a place that was cool and disengaged, some place where he might make use of the fact that he knew something about her that she didn’t know he knew. There was a kind of power in that, wasn’t there? But now that the moment had come, he found he no longer cared. What would the power be for? he wondered, except more falseness, duplicity, deception. More moral infirmity. Out the window he could see the terrace where he and Alice had sat the evening of the breakwater. He could see their table, could almost—like he was watching a film—see the two of them, Alice in her biker-babe outfit telling him about Jacqueline Bouvier, about getting drunk and walking through the town at night and imagining stuff. And he remembered something from Daisy Miller, a moment at the end of the story when the Italian count guy says to Winterbourne after Daisy has died: “She is the one whose esteem one would have liked to have had.” It was a moment he was literate enough to know turned the whole story on its head. And it made him—sitting there looking down at a phantom Alice while Aisha poured him some more wine—it made him detest himself for the falseness he’d let come into his life.

  They were halfway through the bottle when he heard himself saying—with no prelude, no excuse, no telltale expression—just his voice calm and disengaged: “Alice knows about me and Margo.”

  She cocked her head, managed not to give herself away. He watched her try to read him: did he know?

  “She says you told her.”

  Her lips thinned. “When did you see her?”

  “A couple of days ago.” He wasn’t going to say more. She took a stagy breath, tried to let a softness come over her, then peered at him as if to ask could he take this?

  “I had to tell her.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a tactical move.”

  At which he raised his brow. “A tactical move,” he repeated.

  “To help her fall out of love with you.”

  He was used to her confounding his expectations. She was always more sanguine, more on top of things, more—he didn’t know what—more prepared than he thought she would be. But each time his expectations were overturned he was surprised all the same.

  “Tactical,” he repeated.

  “To protect her,” Aisha pursued. “She was hurting. I was worried about her. I told her so she’d be able to begin to—” She paused as if waiting for him to finish the thought, but he was still ungiving. “So that she’d see you as someone she shouldn’t—” and she searched for the words—“someone she shouldn’t care for.”

  “Someone not worthy of her affections.” Hadn’t Alice said that herself? “Is that it?”

  “Something like that.” And then with a soft, girlfriend look, reaching out and touching his hand: “I’m sorry.”

  It all sounded sensible, the kind of thing a friend might do. But—and here he didn’t know if he wasn’t simply burned by too much secrecy and double-dealing—but he didn’t believe her.

  “Is that how you think of things?” he found himself saying. “Tactics? Strategy? We talk about this stuff all the time in tennis, but in real life?”

  “It was just a way of saying it.”

  “Of saying what?” he asked with a pointed look, but she didn’t respond. “What’s the difference anyway?”

  “What?” she said like he’d lost her.

  “Between tactics and strategy,” he said.

  She had her tongue between her teeth, her face dark with trying to figure him out. “Okay,” she said—as if whatever he was after, whatever the game was, she would acquiesce, she was not his enemy. “Isn’t it that strategy is an overall plan and tactics are the individual parts of the plan?”

  “Ah,” he intoned, smiling as if so that’s it. “So, the one time I played Federer my strategy was not to get bageled. My tactics were—” he spread his hands in a gesture of surrender—“well, there were no tactics. He was Federer.”

  She laughed, smiled as if maybe things were okay between them. He smiled too, but the smile felt cold on his face.

  “So what’s the strategy?” he said.

  She drew back as if he’d ambushed her.

  “Strategy for what?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer: “Whose strategy?” And when he still didn’t answer: “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Sandy. I don’t have anything to gain in this. I was just trying to help her. She was in a state.”

  “Didn’t you think telling her might make her even worse off? If she was in love with me, as you say, telling her I was a cheat? Telling her I was cheating with her sister-in-law?”

  She pulled back. “I didn’t tell her you were a cheat.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  She turned her hands palm out as if to say, okay if that’s how you want to see it.

  “And that night after I picked you up in Providence. You let me go on about it. Me and Alice, the whole story. And you already knew all about it.”

  She kept her lips pressed together.

  “You knew all about that night in the cemetery. She came to get you after it happened. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  She had a look now of injured merit. “You don’t understand that I have divided loyalties. She was so distraught. That night. I was afraid for her.”

  “But afterwards—you could have let me know.”

  She shook her head. “I’d promised Alice not to tell anyone. Not promised—it was understood. These things are understood between us.” And when that didn’t seem enough: “If I’d told you, and she’d found out . . . it would have been a further—�
� and again she searched for the right word—“a further flaying. She’s so naked. I couldn’t.”

  He was making and unmaking a fist. It was an old nervous locker room habit. “And if she ever found out about us?”

  She closed her eyes, shook her head.

  “If she ever found out that all this time while you were being her best friend, and I was being . . . if she were to find out we’d been sleeping together? Lovers? And keeping it from her? What would that do to her?”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  And there seemed suddenly between them a palpable sense of what had brought them together in the first place. They were each in this world by someone else’s sufferance, issued a kind of backstage pass that could be revoked at any moment. In those first weeks they had been mates that way, comrades-in-arms, the need for secrecy—the assignations, the retreats into motel rooms, even the Storer Park basketball court—casting over them a delicious confederacy. (“Larry, your chick’s here!” the guy he’d been guarding had said. His chick!) But now he saw—surely he had known all along—that Aisha was not going to choose him over even a tenuous hold on Windermere. Her loyalties were not really all that divided.

  “She can’t ever find out,” Aisha was saying now, pulling her face out from behind her hands. They looked at each other, and there was, he thought, an acknowledgment between them: whatever it was they’d had, it was over. “You’re with me on this, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because if she ever found out—” And then as if she were trying to pledge him to something: “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said. She lifted her wineglass, reached across the table, and clinked his where it sat. “To us,” she said with a wry look, with a sorry look, with an ironic look, but with no sadness or regret that he could detect.

  It was only afterwards as he walked back to his room and ran the whole thing through his mind that he wondered how it was that—if she’d been so concerned for Alice that awful night—how it was that Aisha had felt free to leave for Brooklyn the next day. He counted back the days and, yes, it had been the very day after the Champions Ball. Alice had come to her at six in the morning in a state, enough of a state that Aisha had felt compelled to tell her that the man she loved had been sleeping with her sister-in-law, and then had up and left. It made him stop walking—half a bottle of wine in him and no food—stop walking and stare at the gaslight above his head. Everything he’d ever heard from Aisha about Alice—and he’d heard a lot: college, Venice, the suicide attempts, Alice coming into her bed in the middle of the night just to be near her—everything had always cast her, Aisha, as a kind of savior, the one person who could talk Alice down off the ledge of her own personality. But here was this instance, the only one Sandy had direct experience of, where if ever the girl was going to need a friend’s bed to crawl into this was it, and yet the friend had up and left, stayed away for a week. He gazed at the gaslight above him, then at the recession of gaslights down the narrow street. What did he think it gained Aisha by leaving Alice that morning? And what would Aisha have gained if Alice had harmed herself? Wouldn’t that merely have revoked her backstage pass? And yet he couldn’t escape the feeling that he had caught her out. That he had seen something she hadn’t meant him to see.

  On impulse he stopped in the library and took out a copy of Daisy Miller and back in his room made himself three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and read the last few pages looking for the part where Giovanelli tells Winterbourne that he would have liked to have had Daisy’s esteem. He had determined that he would give the briefcase to Alice after all—that that would be the first step in cleansing himself—and that he would copy out the passage about Daisy’s esteem and put it inside by way of apology. Only it turned out he had misremembered and it wasn’t Giovanelli who said that of Daisy, but rather Daisy of Winterbourne. He had to read the passage several times—mouth stuck together with peanut butter—to get it: Daisy, it’s reported after her death, would have appreciated Winterbourne’s esteem. He blinked over the ill-lit page. It somehow made everything worse.

  1896

  The prattle in TOWN TOPICS was all of the Masked Ball to be held at Berger’s Open Air Pavilion the coming week. It was a most unusual event, the editors opined (Mrs. Auld was reading the article aloud to them), for the regular habitués of the Pavilion were the vacationing masses who stayed in the lesser hotels and not the names engraved in the Register with their ocean houses and their mansions up and down Bellevue Avenue. But this one night of the season the beau monde descended in their carriages upon the “slums” of Newport. Ah! What a majestic diversion to witness the Charge of the Four Hundred into the Valley of Death! Had they not the previous year had the affliction of having to dance on rose petals strewn across the pavilion floor! Surely it would only be their masks that would keep them from dying of shame, the noble Four Hundred!

  “Ours not to reason why,” said Franklin Drexel, playing a jack of spades. “Ours but to dance and die!”

  They were in the gallery at the Dovecote, Mrs. Auld’s brownstone pile out on Ochre Point, and the conversation—prior to Mrs. Auld’s attempted diversion—had been of the scandal sheets and could not something be done? For that morning it had been rumored one of their number (there were knowing looks) had had anonymously delivered upon the butler’s silver server a note that demanded that some activity or other (again, the looks) must cease or it would be bruited about in the sheets. There were backstairs spies, everyone knew. And poison-pen letters flying about. And there were those of the papers who offered bribes for information, for salacious tidbits, for who was visiting whom and at what hours. And there was most heinously the rumor that the sheets had taken to blackmailing those unfortunate enough to find themselves under scrutiny. For there was more to be made, it turned out, from not publishing a story than from publishing it.

  And all during this discomfiting topic—just how competent were the hairless imps of his fate?—Franklin had felt, from two tables over, the eyes of Mr. Ryckman upon him.

  They had met earlier that day. Mrs. Newcombe had sent him a note (would he not stop by? she needed his opinion on some plantings) and he had been coming up Bellevue on his (that is, on the deceased Mr. Newcombe’s) bicycle when he was passed by Mrs. Newcombe’s carriage going the other way (sans Mrs. Newcombe). He recognized its cranberry-colored sides, and its driver, and surmised who it was the equipage was being sent to fetch. An hour later he was outside with Mrs. Newcombe when a man—evidently freshly changed—appeared on the broad front porch, gave a “halloo” to the children, and made his way across the sloping lawn.

  He was short, and getting old, and inside his trousers Franklin suspected him of having spindly legs. But there was a bluff of a chest, and one of those noses that gets bigger and more ugly with age, and whiskers dating from the seventies, and a history of making men knuckle under in the manufactory of—well, Franklin didn’t know what, of mercerized thread, he believed. Mrs. Newcombe and he had been standing (of all places!) in the maze when Mr. Ryckman had come down, and the children had squealed and charged at the sight of him. Franklin and Mrs. Newcombe had begun making their way out of the labyrinth (only two years in the ground), but Mr. Ryckman had leapt the Lilliputian walls as if he meant to show them—show this upstart Drexel!—that if there were paths in the moral waste that needed to be blazed, by God he was the man to blaze them!

  Now as they played cards at Mrs. Auld’s with that morning’s scandal like a dark undertow in the room, the talk turned to the Masked Ball: what would everyone be wearing? what would be the great success? had they sent to New York for their costumes? Someone asked Mr. Ryckman if he had heard about the mysterious Blue Domino from the previous year—no? did he not read the society pages?—and what did everyone think: would there be any such game this year? The Blue Domino, various voices explained to Mr. Ryckman (who sat amongst them, Franklin thought, as th
ough he were Odysseus tied to his mast), had been the outrage of the previous year: a beautiful woman dressed in a blue gown and a blue mask, with a black-and-white die embroidered upon her bosom as if she were the very symbol of a treacherous fate, or at least an invitation to gamble your heart away. She had been a beautiful, bewitching enigma—“La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” one of the papers had said—and there wasn’t a man there that night who hadn’t fallen under her spell. Oh, the rumors that followed! She was the illegitimate daughter of the Comte de Vichy, she was an actress hired by Coddington, she was the Thayers’ French governess (who the next day had disappeared)!

  “If it’s men’s hearts she bewitched,” said Franklin (even while some voice in his head told him: Don’t say it, dear boy. Too much, too much!), “then I believe the Blue Domino must have been Mrs. Newcombe.”

  At which the room tittered, smiled at the gallantry, for they knew, they knew! And some shot a look at Mr. Ryckman, still tied to his mast and not looking at all bewitched.

  That evening back at Windermere there had been the manly after-dinner cigar smoking scene, obligatory (Franklin knew) to all melodramas of the drawing-room caste. Mrs. Thorpe and Mrs. Thayer—it being a weeknight, their husbands were still in New York—had withdrawn with Mrs. Newcombe, leaving Franklin and Mr. Ryckman alone at the dining table. Hobbes had brought cigars, and while the humidor was held open for Franklin, Ryckman—like a tomcat marking his territory—let it be known that he always kept a supply at his daughter’s house, had that very morning had his tobacconist send up a box.

  “A good Havana,” he said, taking one of the obscene things himself and admiring it at arm’s length. “Eh, Drexel?”

  “Indeed, sir,” said Franklin, inclining his head so that Hobbes could light him. Under ordinary circumstances he might have declined the pleasure—the damned things tended to make him ill—but he was getting to know the lay of the land, as he’d told Mrs. Belmont, and acquiescence in such matters—he was wearing unimpeachable evening clothes—seemed a tactical prerequisite.