The Golden Hour

by T. Greenwood

  “I just read the profile the Times did on her. I am dying to get my hands on one of her early pieces.”

  Her “early pieces.” This made me almost laugh out loud.

  And I recalled being in the studio at school, smoking weed and squeezing out tubes of paint onto the canvases. Those paintings, to me, represented a time of false prosperity. Because as soon as we graduated, it was gone.

  “Do you know if she’s interested in selling?” the little weasel of a man asked me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Though who knew? It seemed like Pilar was selling almost everything she was making lately. But somehow it didn’t seem nearly as icky as my commissions. She simply painted whatever she wanted to paint, and people emptied their pockets for whatever was at the other end of the paintbrush. That felt inspired to me, while my own commissions (especially during the times when my trees were in the highest demand) made me think of the line curling around the HoneyBaked Ham shop at Easter. People lined up like robots, buying the thing they were supposed to love.

  “Well, when she returns, I would love to talk to her. I’m sure I could make a tempting offer.”

  I’m sure.

  I really, really wished Pilar were here. These were the types of phonies we poked fun at. But then again, this was her world now. Perhaps she wouldn’t poke fun at all. It was people like these who were funding her entire life (and, peripherally, my own, if I were being honest with myself). Maybe it was good she wasn’t here. I didn’t think I could bear to see her suck up.

  Seamus introduced me to several more people, most of whom were primarily interested in Pilar. Then finally, we were alone for a moment.

  “Listen,” I said. “I was wondering if I could pick your brain a little bit about the house next door, Pilar’s house?”

  His mouth twitched. “Oh, sure,” he said.

  “Did you know the woman who lived in the house? I think she was a photographer? You mentioned something about photos?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course, but she didn’t live there very long. I think she moved back to the mainland after a couple of years.”

  “With her baby,” I nodded.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t recall she had any children.”

  “Yes,” I said, confused. “She had a daughter.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “As I mentioned, we’re only here a few times a year. I really didn’t know her.”

  Suddenly, Fiona approached us. Or rather floated toward us. She was wearing a pale yellow evening gown. It looked like melted butter, pooling on the floor behind her.

  “Ms. Davies,” she said so formally it made me straighten my posture. She caused what I thought of as the principal effect, that hot, liquid feeling of being a kid and having been caught doing something bad. She’d only said my name, and I already felt scolded. She may have been wearing melted butter, but she was cold. Practically congealed.

  “Hi!” I said, as cheerfully as I could.

  “So pleased you could make it. Your dress is stunning.”

  I looked down, having practically forgotten what I was wearing. I noticed some of the fringes had knotted. I felt like Avery playing dress-up.

  “Yours too,” I said, nodding. She, on the other hand, clearly remembered exactly what she was wearing, as her gaze never left my eyes.

  “How is the house coming along?” she asked, as if I’d been sent in to renovate rather than caretake. “I told Seamus they should have burned it down years ago.”

  Wow, this lady was ballsy. What on earth did she have against Pilar’s house?

  “Actually, it’s been really nice staying there,” I said, feeling defensive. “The light in the dining room is gorgeous. Even now that winter’s come.”

  She threw her head back in laughter. “This, my dear, is not winter. Come talk to me in February.”

  Again, I felt like I was being accused of some sort of wrongdoing.

  She continued, “The only reason why I agree to come here is because Seamus has an attachment to this place. It’s practically umbilical.”

  Seamus bristled just a bit, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it was she was trying to get at. Everything she said seemed to have an undercurrent. She was a walking riptide, this woman.

  “Well, do let us know if you need anything over . . . there,” she said, and then she slipped away.

  Seamus smiled apologetically.

  “What did she mean?” I asked softly, leaning in and speaking almost conspiratorially. “About your attachment to the island.”

  He looked at me intently, like he was trying to figure out if he could trust me. I gave him no reason not to. I had this effect on people. People opened up around me.

  “I was born here,” he said.

  “You were born here?” I said in disbelief. I thought I’d sensed something faintly European in his accent. How could I have possibly mistaken New England for England?

  “Yes,” he said. “My father was a fisherman.”

  “Where did you go to school?” As far as I could tell there wasn’t even a one-room schoolhouse on the island.

  “My mother homeschooled me until I was thirteen, then I got a scholarship to a boarding school in New Hampshire. I wound up at college in Cambridge, and that’s where I met Fiona. She was an undergrad and I was at law school.”

  Cambridge must be code for Harvard.

  “We got married, and I started my career. But I missed it here. Clearly, we could never live here because of my work, but I didn’t want to lose my connection to this place. I thought when we had children . . .” He trailed off here.

  “Oh, do you have children?” I asked, imagining his children would likely be my age.

  He looked at me as if forgetting what I’d asked. He shook his head and said, “No. No children.”

  “Well, it must be nice to have such a beautiful home on the island where you grew up,” I offered, feeling like he too had slipped away, though he was still standing here.

  “Fiona despises Bluffs Island,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shook his head again. It was his turn now to lean in conspiratorially. When he did, I could smell the booze on his breath. Now I wasn’t sure if it was me or the liquor that was having the truth serum effect.

  “Fiona despises anything that makes me happy.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable.

  People have always told me their secrets, since I was a kid. I should have become a chaplain or a therapist. Once, a little boy told me he’d accidentally killed his new kitten when it had slipped under the rocking chair where he was sitting, but he’d told his mother the dog snapped its neck. In high school, a girl I barely knew took me into the bathroom at a school dance and showed me the cuts she’d made with a key, like hash marks across her skin. In art school, a guy in my art history class told me he was gay, but he hadn’t told anyone yet. That he might never. Even Gus seemed incapable of keeping secrets from me, at least until now. It’s a strange burden to carry, this weight of trust. Maybe people simply sensed my mastery at concealment.

  “But never mind. We’re here to send off the year and welcome in the next one,” Seamus said, clapping his hands together as if he were snapping himself out of some sort of hypnotic haze. “Only five minutes to go.”

  I grabbed a glass of champagne from a tray that floated past me like a lily pad in water. A plump, drunken raspberry sat at the bottom of the glass.

  I stood surrounded by these strangers, smelling the scents of their aftershave and perfume, feeling dizzy from the alcohol and lights and glittery glow of the gowns.

  Fiona appeared at the top of the stairs, seemed to hover there, and began the countdown.

  Three . . . two . . . one. And then it was snowing. At least it appeared to be snow, though as it landed on my bare arms, I realized it was only confetti, a million miniature snowflakes. They landed in my hair, in my champagne. The string quartet broke into “Auld Lang Syn
e” and the same wonky-eyed guy I’d met earlier, Harry, goosed me before leaning in and giving me a sloppy kiss on my cheek.

  What a way to start the year.

  I wanted to go home, but I had to pee really badly, and I wasn’t sure I could hold it for the trek back home. I had no idea where the restroom was, but I suspected it was at the beginning of the long line of people near the stairwell in the great room. There was no way I was going to be able to wait that long. I spotted Seamus and walked over to him, divulging my own little secret in exchange for his. “I need to pee. And I don’t think I can hold it,” I said quietly, gesturing to the line.

  “Come with me,” he said, and led me toward the front of the house again. The double stairwells looked like something out of Gone With the Wind. “Upstairs, to the right. Third door. Or fifth, if that one’s taken.”

  “Thanks,” I said and sped up the stairs. I would have taken two at a time if I weren’t so worried about peeing myself.

  I got to the top of the stairs, found the door, and shut it behind me, locking it, yanking my dress up, and peeling my tights down as quickly as I possibly could. The toilet seat was cold, and I must have peed for a full minute.

  I sighed. Phew.

  The bathroom was immaculate. Pale gray walls and white fixtures. The counter seemed to be made of marble, and the sink was just a glass bowl hovering above the counter. There was a bathtub in here as well, freestanding, a claw-foot tub with fancy chrome fixtures.

  My heart stopped.

  I walked over to the tub, and, glancing at the door to make sure I had locked it, hiked my dress up and climbed in. I sat in the cold depths of the tub and stared at the faucet. At the wall behind it.

  This was the tub in the photo. I was sure of it.

  But what would she have been doing here? In Seamus and Fiona’s tub?

  Oh, shit. No wonder Fiona had her panties in such a twist about me and Pilar and the house!

  I reached for my clutch and grabbed my phone, snapping a quick picture.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Hello?” the woman’s voice said.

  “Just a minute,” I said, my voice echoing off the porcelain. Damn it.

  I had a hard time getting out of the tub, and even after I’d managed to get myself out, I realized I’d left a half dozen paper snowflakes behind.

  I bent over at the waist to pluck them out of the tub, and realized quickly this was a futile task. I thought about running the water and letting them slip down the drain, but I didn’t want anyone to wonder what I was doing in here.

  Knock, knock.

  “Coming!” I said, and scurried to the door, leaving a trail of paper snow behind me.

  Fiona stood in the doorway. In this light, she looked older somehow, as if the chandeliers had had some sort of magical effect on her. A trick of the eye.

  “The guest powder room is downstairs,” she said coldly.

  But rather than stick around to defend myself or explain, I simply nodded, muttering my apologies and slipping past her, down the stairs, and out into the night. I was in such a hurry to get home, I didn’t even realize until I was walking down the stone steps to the beach that I’d left my coat with the butler. And by then, all I wanted to do was get back to the house to find the negative to see if it matched the photo I’d taken on my phone.

  Beautiful Fools

  The next morning, my head was aching from the champagne and the effort of straining my eyes to see the tiny images on the contact sheets. I was convinced now the woman who owned the house not only knew Seamus, but knew him well.

  It was a holiday, but I called the drugstore in town, and they said they’d be open and their photo kiosk did, indeed, make enlargements from the negatives. Pilar also left a message during the party that she’d made it to my parents’ house and would leave at the crack of dawn to drive to Portland. I told her I’d meet her at the dock on the island; we could get lunch then drive back to the house.

  I wanted to tell her about the photos. Show her what I’d discovered. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt afraid for the woman in the pictures. And I couldn’t understand why on earth Seamus would deny there was a baby.

  “I have some super exciting news for you,” Pilar said in the message.

  This was becoming a refrain lately with Pilar. And while I was certainly happy for her, I admit I sometimes wondered if this would be the trajectory of the rest of her career, just one bit of super exciting news after the next.

  I had no idea how much the prints would cost, but I figured I could afford to at least do some of them. The important ones now were probably the ones taken inside Seamus and Fiona’s house. But I figured while I was at it, I could also enlarge some of the girlie show pictures, and the one of her holding the baby.

  I gathered the negatives into an envelope and tried to think if there was anything else I needed in town. I couldn’t imagine anything was open, certainly not the post office. We might not even be able to find a place to have lunch.

  As I went to the hallway closet to get my coat, I suddenly remembered in my hurry to escape Fiona the night before, I’d completely forgotten to grab my parka. I went to the kitchen and checked the thermometer hanging just outside the window. Twenty-two degrees. Yeah, the thin polar fleece or my denim jacket wasn’t going to cut it.

  I glanced at my watch and figured somebody would be up next door. I wondered if the butler actually lived there or if he had a house somewhere else on the island. Or maybe he traveled with them back and forth between houses. Some sort of traveling butler? Was there such a thing? I knew nannies sometimes traveled with the families whose children they cared for. I’d had a friend in college who spent every summer on Cape Cod caring for a pair of bratty twins while the parents drank and sailed and sunbathed.

  I threw on one of Gus’s fisherman’s sweaters I’d adopted as my own, a pair of boots, and a hat and mittens and made my way as quickly as possible. To call it cold outside would be the grandest of all understatements. It was bitter, in every sense of the word, the air itself feeling hostile. There was violence to this type of cold. Fury.

  I rang the doorbell and waited.

  Shivering.

  The house was massive. Cavernous. I had no idea how long it would take someone to get from one end of it to the next. I’d never lived anywhere where two people couldn’t hold a conversation from opposite ends of the house. Even in the duplex, if we’d wanted to, we could have had a conversation with the wall between us.

  I gave it about a minute then tried again. Nothing. Shit. Was it possible they’d already left? I thought about the parties Gus and I threw, the ones we had gone to over the years. There’s a certain amount of time it takes for a house to recover after something like that, though I suspected the Fergusons had people for that.

  I gave it three more minutes and realized I could no longer feel my own face. “Shit, shit, shit,” I cussed and grumbled, looking around as if there were some way I could just break into the house and grab my coat from whatever massive coatroom it was hiding in.

  Finally, I gave up and started back down the steps, thinking I’d have to just layer my clothes. At least the heater in the Honda still worked. For now. I just needed to get from the car to the drugstore, which I assumed also had heat. It would be okay.

  I was heading back across the frosty lawn when I heard Seamus call out.

  “Wyn! Wait!”

  I turned around. Seamus was standing in the doorway, motioning for me to come back. And fast. He was barefoot, wearing pajamas and a robe.

  I ran back to the house, the air slicing at my lungs.

  “Come in,” he said. “What are you doing out there without a coat on?”

  “My coat is here,” I said. “I left it last night. By accident.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You forgot your coat?”

  “I had an . . . encounter,” I said, still feeling the chill of Fiona’s gaze, “with your wife. I don’t think she was very happy to have me here.”

 
; Seamus took a deep breath.

  “Come in,” he said, and when I hesitated, he said, “She’s not here. She flew out this morning. She had a charity event in Atlanta.”

  He must have been referring to the small plane I’d heard about an hour ago.

  I followed him into the immaculate foyer, through the room that just last night had been filled with guests, and back to the kitchen. There wasn’t a shred of evidence anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

  The kitchen was spotless. Cold. But it smelled of coffee, and when he offered me a cup, I knew I’d need it if I had any plans of thawing out. He motioned for me to sit down on a barstool at the marble-topped island. I could practically see my reflection in it.

  “I can only stay a minute,” I said. “I’m picking up Pilar in town when the ferry comes in.”

  “Of course,” he said, and grabbed his own mug, standing on the other side of the island from me.

  “Thank you for inviting me last night,” I said. “It was a really nice party. I wish Pilar could have been here.”

  “I apologize for Fiona,” he said. “She tends to be a bit, um, abrasive?”

  Yes, that was exactly it. Like sandpaper. There was a grit to her, her words leaving a raw burn.

  “She hates it here,” he said. “She only humors me because that’s what we do, no?”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Marriage. So much of it is about tolerance. Over time, you stop complaining and simply put up with things because it’s easier than the alternative.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “I suppose it depends on what it is that’s being tolerated. For some, it’s little nuisances: socks on the floor, the way somebody chews or sips or interrupts. Then, there are the bigger things: the way your husband or wife treats other people, or the way they handle money, or if they are unfaithful. If you choose not to tolerate the small things, you bicker. You nag. You complain and gripe. Every moment becomes a little struggle. But if you choose not to tolerate the larger things, then you argue.”

  I thought of the grievances I had with Gus, all those small, petty nuisances: he left empty cereal boxes in the cupboard, he never hung up his towels, he often thought for too long before he said what he was thinking. But I could enumerate the bigger issues with one finger. Or maybe my thumb. He didn’t respect me. He thought I was selling out. It was one big, fat complaint, but it sort of trumped everything else. How do you stay with someone who thinks you have sold your soul?