He expected to find the door to her room shut, that she would be within in some state or other, but as he went down the hall he saw that her door was open. He called “Alice” quietly, gently, that he might not startle her. But there was no answer. He looked into the room, waited, listened, then stepped inside. She wasn’t there. It took a moment to register—he had so often pictured her wasting away in bed—but she was quite simply not there.
He went back out, stood in the hall for a moment thinking what to do, then checked the bathroom, the other bathroom, the TV room. He looked into Aisha’s room, then went back into Alice’s, opened the closet, opened her drawers. They were filled with clothes still, her things—her pedal pushers, her biker-babe outfit, and over on her nightstand her Marian the Librarian reading glasses. He picked up a sweater, a cashmere thing with butterflies on the front, lifted it to his face, tried to smell her in it.
Back in the hall he went down to the solarium with its semicircle of leaded windows. The place with its limed wicker furniture where she had put Tristan und Isolde on the stereo and slit her wrists. He looked out at the lawn below, at the striped tent and the people. There was a croquet game set up but no one was playing.
Was she out there somewhere? Smiling and thanking everyone for coming? Or was she in New York? Santa Fe? In a hospital somewhere?
Back outside he gave up trying not to be seen. He zigzagged from group to group, stepped into the big, open-sided tent pitched on the croquet lawn, then—of course!—went into the maze. But when he reached the center, there was just some lawyerly looking couple raising their glasses to him in congratulations. Coming back out, he passed within ten feet of Margo, didn’t return her look, headed instead toward the Orangery. If Aisha was there, damn it, he’d demand to know what was up, enough pussyfooting around. But the closer he got to the glassed-in building, the more he sensed that it looked different, wrong. He tried the door but it was locked, and when he looked in through the dirty panes, he saw the inside was empty. All Aisha’s stuff, even the acetylene tanks, packed up, gone.
“Hey, champ,” he heard behind him. He turned to see Tom in his white dinner jacket bearing down on him. Fifty yards behind, Margo was coming too.
“Where is she?” Sandy said.
“Aisha?” Tom said with a look at the Orangery. “It’s Labor Day weekend. The end of summer. She always heads back to Brooklyn about now.”
“Alice.”
“Ah, Alice!” he said, like silly me. He let a little smile settle on his face, paused to wait for a group of tourists to pass, then: “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“I want to hear her say that.”
“She has been saying it. You’re just not listening.”
“Where is she?” he asked again, and then, when Margo drew up, said it to her: “Where is she?”
“Hello, Sandy,” said Margo.
“Sandy was just leaving.”
“Where is she?” he said again. Tom made this gesture, like can you believe this guy?
“Newport, New York, Santa Fe, Planet Alice,” he said. “Wherever she is, she doesn’t want to see you.”
“Why don’t you let me handle this?” Margo said to him.
“Nothing to handle. Sandy was just leaving.”
She gave her husband a little pat on the stomach. “Why don’t you go back to the guests and let me handle this. Send a security guard our way if you like.”
He hung fire a moment, gave Sandy a look of something like contempt, and then shook his head. “Bad form, champ,” he said, and he turned and started back up the lawn. Margo watched him go for a minute and then leaned her back against the side of the Orangery. Sandy swung around to face her.
“You’re not going to get anything out of me,” she said, holding her hand up like a traffic cop. “So don’t even start.”
“I just want to know where she is. Is she all right? Why can’t I just talk to her?”
She did the traffic cop thing again. “But here’s a lesson you might take away from all this. When laying traps for heiresses, it’s better not to sleep with the heiress’s best friend.”
“That was all before.”
“If you say so,” she said.
“And I wasn’t laying any traps.”
“If you say so.”
He closed the distance between them, leaned in to her. He remembered Alice telling him that Margo would be lying in wait for him. “Was it you who told her?” he asked.
“Me?” And she shot him a look, crossed her arms pointedly: how could she have known about Aisha? “Not me,” she said. “One of the college girls took it upon herself. She must have—” and again she gave him a look, made a to-hell-with-you gesture—“she would have seen the two of you together. I think she thought she was protecting Alice. She thought Alice ought to know what kind of guy you are.”
“What kind of guy am I?”
“Evidently the kind who fucks the best friend while he’s also fucking the sister-in-law,” she said with her eyes glowing in a way he’d never seen.
“That was all before,” he said again.
“Whatever,” she said, and for a full minute they just stood looking at each other. A trio of guests came toward them, champagne flutes in hand, looked in the windows of the Orangery, and then veered off toward the water.
“Look,” Margo said finally. She let out her breath so her shoulders dropped, looked away, turned back. “Sandy,” she said as if appealing to some residue of their time together. “It’s not going to happen for you. You need to see that. You need to accept that. And you need to leave. I don’t mean just here, now, but Newport.” And she peered up at him like did he get that? He just stood there, hard, ungiving. “You said you were looking to sell the Indian,” she tried. “Is that right? Haven’t sold it yet? Because I’d be interested in buying it. Add to my image around town,” she said with this smile, and when he didn’t smile back, dropping the pretense: “We’ll give you fifty thousand.” She let the extravagance of the offer sink in; and then, even more extravagantly: “Fifty thousand if you’ll get on it and—” And she made a gesture of him riding into the sunset.
“Too late,” he said. “It’s no longer for sale.”
At which she closed her eyes, seemed in the instant to regret having had anything to do with him.
“As you wish,” she said after a minute, opening her eyes and looking up the lawn. “There’s the security guard coming.” Sandy kept himself from turning to look. “He’s overweight and out of shape. I’m sure you can take him.” And she pushed off the Orangery, began walking back up the hill. “Please don’t come around again,” she called over her shoulder.
He watched her go. And then he looked up at the facade of the house, at the windows of the third floor. Immured. Lost to the world. He started up the lawn, obliquely, away from the house so he’d skirt the security guard.
When he reached the gate onto Bellevue, Mitten was still there, though the guests were mostly done arriving.
“So it was you,” he said to her. She looked blankly at him.
“What?”
“It was you who told Alice about Aisha and me.”
“Not me!” she protested. “Rachel—it was Rachel.”
“Margo said it was you,” he had the wits to say.
“No,” the girl answered. “Honest! It was Rachel. Aisha tried to get me first, but I wouldn’t. So she got Rachel.”
He blinked. What had he just heard? “Aisha tried to get you?” he repeated.
“She thought Alice ought to know. But she couldn’t tell her herself. So she tried to get me to do it, to tell Alice that I’d seen you guys together this summer, but I wouldn’t. So she got Rachel.”
He closed his eyes, looked at the blackness behind his lids. He had to ask again. “It was Aisha’s idea?”
The girl bit her lip and nodded. �
��She thought Alice ought to know.”
~I have had a note from Miss Taylor. It reads simply, most exquisitely: I am so very sorry! Please forgive us.
She leaves Newport soon.
I must somehow have her understand.
July 7
Do I mean to do it?
What Madness!
I toy, I toy! I can turn back at any moment, or rather not turn back but simply not go on! For I may make all Provision for going yet is it all done under the Guise of my directing the Eastward party. At any instant I can choose to not continue and I will but appear to have been doing nothing save my Duty. I can accompany the Foray up past the rebel Redoubts and across the Bay. I can interview & devise, plan & instruct, and I will have done nothing out of the ordinary of my Charge, have taken no step that obliges a further step. All such further steps are but in my Thoughts, unreal to the World. Only at the instant of Return will I need to decide. ’Tis only then that the Phantoms I work up must be brought to Life or quietly killed.
Yet I must make all necessary Preparations as tho’ I have already decided. Yea, when the time comes to Plunge, I may instead step back from this Verge and render my Preparations for Naught, yet I cannot be heedless in the making of them. I must plan as if I mean to do.
And what is it I mean to do? Aye, there lies the Question and the Rub all in one! For I have let fly the fullest Fancies! Do I trifle? Do I flirt with myself? These Phantoms of my Brain: do they have the joints and wires of Marionettes, or do they breathe with Life?
I have played upon my Reputation (that I extemporize upon Danger and enjoy going about with my spies in their Colonial garb) and have convinced the Staff that I must needs accompany Flanders & Southwick on the planned foray to Rehoboth. That the state of these modern Revolutioners changes daily now that they are heartened by the news from France, and that it is a necessary Risk that I be upon the spot to direct and alter Matters as they develop &c. And so it is that we make Preparations to accompany a Patrol up the Island until we reach the Rebel fortifications from whence we may be ferried further Northward and across to the Massachusetts shore. Once at Rehoboth I must ensure that I am Quartered by myself, in the local inn if needs be, while Flanders & Southwick are housed by our agent. Perhaps a Ruse of not calling attention to ourselves by our number may be employed. Then we may go about our Business, yet at some opportune moment I must plausibly vacate my Quarters, leaving behind some Note upon which I will write my Intentions of pursuing some secret Charge, that I will be for some three days at the Wayside Inn of a nearby Village, and that they are to continue with their local business and await my return. I might leave some of my things in my room that they may provide Evidence that I am only transiently absent. I must beforehand engage a horse. Then I must make it the eight miles to Taunton.
It is then the Chess-player’s plan ends and the game steps off onto Squares beyond the Sixty-four. For I know not (nay, not even yet! so hard upon!) what exactly I mean to do when I have gained this taunting town. Lying abed at night the most theatrical Fancies populate my Brain. Sometimes I am my old self and the Campaign is still the one I began back in the Winter, namely to checkmate Da Silva and have his Daughter. I will have her in the fields about Taunton and then, promising her some Fidelity or Future, I will return to Newport with her Virginity like a Scalp in my waistband. In this near Fancy I cook a story of how I was taken by the Rebels and held and questioned for some days (however long it takes me to lay Siege to the Jewess’s Maidenhead) and that I escaped and am returned among them only to swagger the more. On Squares further from the board I remain in Taunton and have her over and over, still with the Prospect that I may return, only with a more harrowing story of Capture and Escape. And still further: that we swear to one another that we are as Man & Wife, and flee her Step-Mother’s and go to some likely town along the Post road, perhaps even to Boston, where we may endure the War together and from where I might dispatch a Letter to one of our Agents, requesting that he endeavor to deliver it into the hands of Genl Pigot’s staff, and by which I might plausibly story how I was captured and am escaped and am in Boston incognito and Fate having washed me up here might I not serve as a Spy in the very Nest of the Rebels? Thereby might I have both the Cake of my Desertion and the eating of it.
These are my thoughts at Night, when the world Dissolves and there are only the Planets of the Brain.
In all of this there plays the Accompanyment of her dark eyes, of her pale skin, of her unbound Bosom, her falling hair.
If I am taken by the Colonials, I will be shot. If I am discovered by my own, I will be hanged.
I have heard no more from Genl Waring. Am I quit of this damnable business? Or will I return from Rehoboth (scalp or no scalp) to find myself undergoing a Court-martial?
All the more reason to take the girl and fly with her to Boston or Salem or Halifax, not to stay but rather to sail from thence to Kingston or San Juan and then on to France, Italy, Arabia—I care not! For that is what my furthest Fancy so impossibly dreams of!
6th Day
How things fall apace! For this morning Miriam Pettibone came to me and in a Secrecy told me that John had sent her and that he wish’d to see me. I question’d her on this, ask’d had her Father spoken to John, but it seems he had not. Rather she herself had told John of my visit to the Wharf, and that there had been some talk between their Father and their Mother, and there was Confusion about the house, and they had guess’d it was a great ado over me. And so he had sent her as his Messenger that we might meet.
What strange freedom I feel! For having trespass’d once, it is easier to trespass a second time. Once the Boundary walls of life as they are given us are broken, then perhaps we may find our way from without the walls. So it is that I am become my own Ariadne. So may I lead not just myself, but Dorcas, and Ashes and Spearmint, out of this Maze our lives!
I have told Miriam I will meet her brother tomorrow at sunrise out on the Harbour breakwater where we did play as children.
The day after Labor Day Sandy took the train from Providence to New York. He had two addresses with him—the du Ponts’ apartment on the Upper East Side and Aisha’s place in Brooklyn. What exactly he was doing, he wasn’t sure, but it was all he had, the only way forward.
He went uptown first into the East Nineties, but Miss du Pont, the doorman informed him, was still away at Newport. And no, he had had no word when she might be returning, or whether she might be going straight to Santa Fe, but he would be pleased to take a message.
So it was off to the Ninety-Sixth Street station and the 6 train down to Union Square, and then the L line over to Bushwick. Aisha had led him to believe that she lived in some cutting-edge neighborhood, just ahead of the gentrification curve, but when he got there he was struck by how ugly and dirty and noisy the area was. He didn’t know what he had expected—some SoHo-y, East Village vibe, he supposed—but what he found was a grim industrial street, graffiti everywhere, and along the curb groups of Spanish-speaking kids who didn’t bother to look at him.
Next to her buzzer was a handwritten Aisha (Brown) DuMaurier—Goldwork Variations. “Brown” was her real name.
He steadied himself and rang the buzzer. When the door opened, it was not Aisha but a college-aged girl who gave him a look from behind her bangs and then led him down a concrete-floored hall and through a fire door into the studio. There was another girl there, and Aisha, both of them bent over their stations, pliers and files and carousels of miniature grinding wheels surrounding them. They were all three of them thin, under their aprons barely clothed.
Again he didn’t know what he had expected. Some look of surprise, dismay, guilt. What he got was a barely raised brow, a wry Well, well, and then her back turned to him while she finished whatever it was she had been doing. Neither of the assistants gave him a second look.
When she was done she said, “Time for a break,” to the girls, and then, “
Coffee?” to Sandy. He waited while she took off her apron, and then the tam she wore to keep her dreads out of the way, and then followed her back out into the hallway and onto the street.
“Strange to see you here,” she said as they walked; and when he didn’t answer, almost to herself: “Two different worlds.”
He weighed what to say. He had rehearsed it on the train all the way from Providence, but what he was about to accuse her of: how did you start?
“You left without saying good-bye,” he said finally.
“I thought we were done saying good-bye,” she answered in a toneless voice.
“Still,” he said, “you left unexpectedly.”
She didn’t respond.
“Hastily,” he added.
She stopped walking so that he had to turn around, take a step back to her. She peered directly up into his face.
“What’s with you?” she said.
“Killer instinct,” he answered.
She grimaced, shook her head. “Sandy, if this is some ex-lover’s reproach scene—”
“No scene,” he said. “I just want to know a few things.”
She crossed her arms, kept her eyes on him. There were cars going past, people on the sidewalk. They’d come only a hundred yards from her building. They were not going for coffee. “What things?” she said.
“How was Alice when you left?”
“Why ask me? You’ve been seeing her more than I have.”
“As I think you know, I have not been seeing her more than you have. I haven’t been seeing her at all.”
The Maze at Windermere Page 34