We finished and headed for the tables.
“Fabulous lesson, darling. You’ve really improved.” Claude kissed me on the cheek as Anne Marshall ran over to us.
“Aw, what a handsome couple. I wish I had my camera. Katie, you looked great out there! You guys want to play doubles tomorrow?”
“Love to,” Claude said.
“And I’m giving you the Father of the Year award,” she said, smiling at Claude. “The way you follow little Rosie around – the patience – I wish I could get my Bobby to do that with the twins, but he’s always playing golf. See you tonight at Jane’s shindig.”
I looked around. Nate was heading toward the clubhouse. He looked back, smiled, waved and was gone.
*
We came home just after midnight from Jane’s twenty-ninth birthday bash where Claude was center stage. But he drove in silence, responding to my few questions with monosyllables, and the red warning light went on. In the bathroom, I quickly undressed and hurried to bed. Claude appeared in the bedroom doorway, saturnine and slumped. “You’re done with those tennis lessons!” he said. “Look at all you have, and what did you do to get it? Tell me that.”
“What are you—”
“Fucking waste of money. You look ridiculous. How could we possibly play doubles with Anne and Bob Marshall? You think they wouldn’t laugh at us behind our backs? You were obviously flirting with that boy. He calls you ‘Katie’.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me up off the bed.
“That’s absurd,” I said. “Ow! Stop! He’s my tennis instructor. You hired him, Claude. We became friendly, that’s all.” I tried to pull my arm away.
“No friendliness needs to occur in that context, do you understand, Katie? He’s a kid. A tennis kid, hired help, and that’s all. He’s not a gigolo. Or maybe he is, but he’s not your gigolo, understand?”
“Claude, let go, you’re hurting me!”
“What did you say?”
“Don’t you touch me!” I said, and I slapped him across the face as hard as I could. He looked at me, open-mouthed, then he smiled.
“So you want to fight back – he means that much to you,” he said. He grabbed my head between his hands and slammed it against the wall as if it was a coconut he wanted to crack open. “No more tennis lessons. You got that?” – slam – “No more tennis boys,” – slam – “You belong to me.”
He turned me around and pushed his face into mine. “You still want to fight? Good, I thought not. Discussion’s over. Now get into bed where you belong.”
I was collapsing. Claude shoved me onto the bed, and I passed out.
I awoke the next morning in pain and heard Claude on the phone in the other room talking with Anne Marshall.
“Oh, Anne, that would be lovely. Yes, I know. The courts are too wet. The weather is not cooperating. We’ll plan for next Sunday instead.”
Then I heard dialing.
“Hello, is this the tennis shop? Yes, this is Dr. Giraud. And how are you today, young lady? Well, it’s always a pleasure. I saw my wife play yesterday, and her game has gotten so good, it’s almost better than mine. I don’t think she needs to take more lessons. No, not just next week – take her off for the rest of the summer… Nate? Ah, yes, Nate, that’s right. And if there’s a balance just put it on the bill. Super! No, no, thank you. You’re terrific.”
I felt my face tighten, and tears of rage began to stream down my face. Not see Nathaniel anymore? I loved my lessons – he gave me nothing but human kindness and hope and his beautiful smile. Nothing was ever going to happen between us, even though I knew I wanted it to.
I spied Claude’s gold money clip gleaming on the bureau. I got up and pulled out four hundreds, a couple of fifties, and five twenties and shoved them into a book of poetry in the shelf above my head and the figures crawled across the bottom of a screen in my head: total, $27,435: more than $5,000 in Boston, $22,000 for “decorating” cash… and the rest from tens and twenties I syphoned from the spending allowance Claude gave me for household needs, plus whatever I could filch from his pockets. I figured I’d worked past volumes two and three, Gothic Art and Renaissance Art, and was probably up to Baroque and Rococo.
I looked at myself in the mirror at the black and blue mottled flesh of my cheeks and high up along my hairline. He knew to tilt my head forward when he slammed it into the wall so that most of the bruising would be hidden by my hair.
And the answer to his question about what you did to earn this – this pain and this money and this life – is that you have loved him.
I opened the cabinet and took out Claude’s concealer from the back shelf where I had placed it a week earlier, hoping never to use it again, and began to pat my face the way he’d shown me: just a dab, a pat or two, not too much rubbing.
There: presentable again, perfectly made up to conceal the truth from everyone I knew – even me.
9
Nantucket
August 1997
After the House and Garden Tour, Anne gave a ladies’ luncheon. It was to be “chez moi”, as she put it, to celebrate her first prize for her roses and miniature floral arrangement. Getting into the Nantucket Garden Club was by invitation only, and Claude cheerfully informed me that I should be flattered Anne had invited me to join.
“Improving your tennis game really paid off. Call her back and accept right away. It’s good for business.”
“I don’t think my game’s improved that much,” I said. “I had more to learn.”
Claude handed me the phone.
“Call.”
Wherever you looked out on the tennis court or at the dock or among the flower beds, you could spy a woman who craved a more aquiline nose or the removal of fat bags from beneath her eyes. With the lifestyle we were leading, Claude needed these women as much as they needed him. Boston was filled with them, and Nantucket, too. And above and beyond that, so was the Nantucket Garden Club, which was as hard to get into as Harvard, and for which you needed not good grades and astronomical SAT scores, but something even harder to achieve: you needed to be somebody. And the fact that Claude and I were, apparently “somebodies” meant a great deal to him.
Anne loved gardening, gossip, champagne and talk about diets that worked, help that didn’t, the latest solution for ridding one’s lawn of crabgrass, and her twins, Tina and Karen. Anne fell into two of Claude’s categories: the already-done for her eyes and the soon-to-be-done for her breasts.
She had asked me to come early so she could show me her gardens before the others arrived. Leaving Rose with a babysitter, I drove over, and as I turned in at her long, white-gravel driveway, I saw Anne waving to me from her inkberry-hedged veranda. Her trim athletic form was framed between the two white columns of her shingled mansion.
“Park in the back next to mine, and I’ll meet you there,” she called.
We walked through the arched trellis opening in the privet hedge and past the green-striped chaise lounges, stopping to look at her New Guinea impatiens edging the pool and the oversized pots of red geraniums mixed with a variety of blue flowers I didn’t recognize.
“Come on,” she said, leading me past the guesthouse covered in climbing roses. We went farther into the back of their seven-acre property. “Over there are my organic vegetables,” she said, in the voice of someone who’d given this tour and mini-lecture many times over, “and next to them is the rock garden, and here are my first-place winners,” she said proudly. “I’m the only one on Nantucket able to grow sterling silver tea roses.” She blew them a kiss through tangerine-frosted lips, and then turned and smiled. “You probably think this a little demented of me, but in a way they’re like children, you know. They need to be tended to, and held back sometimes so they don’t grow wild, and left to their own devices at other times so that they reach their full luster.”
“I’m so impressed,” I said. “I could never do this. No wonder you won first prize. These are perfection, and clearly so much work.”
&
nbsp; “Oh, you have no idea,” Anne laughed. “I don’t know if gardening is a passion or an addiction for me. Maybe I’m just OCD, but whatever it is, I just love it.”
“It shows – I mean that you love it, not the other.” We both laughed. “There’s something about being connected with the earth and nature that’s so therapeutic. I’ve been loving it myself. You do all of this without any help?”
“Good heavens, no. My gardener helps me with the shrubs and major pruning, you know, the heavy stuff, but I do just about everything else, which is more than I can say about some of the other members around here.”
“Really?”
Anne narrowed her cat’s eyes. “I don’t want to name names,” she said. “Then again, maybe I do, but I won’t. But I’ve learned from my gardener that certain women who enter the competition pay their gardeners to do everything including the floral arrangements.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“Of course it is,” said Anne, opening her eyes wide, “and I’m sure some of them have had a lot of practice doing just that, if you know what I mean.” We laughed together, and I felt myself relax more. She was an alpha female, a queen bee, and yet she liked me, or seemed to, and I liked her.
“Come on inside,” Anne said, walking ahead. “I’ve got champagne in the fridge.”
I sat at the marble-topped island in Anne’s kitchen that opened into a large square living room with French doors overlooking the ocean. She poured champagne and unwrapped an elaborate raw-vegetable plate. I was touched to see that, despite the manicure, her fingertips were stained a light green from gardening – her passion showing through.
“I’ll save the caviar until the other girls arrive,” she said. “Let’s eat in the living room. There are only six of us, and it’s so much more comfortable in there.”
“Who’s coming?” I asked.
“The usual suspects: Plain Jane, who won second place, Wild Wanda, who got third, and our newest member, Olivia, who married Roger Caldwell two months ago. Oh, and one more, but that’s a special surprise.” She smiled cryptically.
“You’re such a tease,” I said. “What’s this Plain Jane, Wild Wanda thing?”
“I absolutely adore Jane,” said Anne, “and I trust you not to tell a living soul, what with her husband and mine working together on that venture capital thing, but listen to this.” Her eyes sparkled. “Jane is sleeping with her tennis instructor.”
“No!”
But not Nathaniel, I thought, irrationally. He was too sweet for someone like Jane, wasn’t he? I had seen him from a distance with other people, heard his laughter roll across the court like a fresh fuzzy tennis ball. Once, he caught my eye, and I waved to him and he waved back, his expression smiling but quizzical. What happened, Katie?
A spreading sadness washed through me.
Anne was telling me how she’d found out about Jane and her instructor, Rob.
“It was early in the morning,” said Anne, “and I was checking on the azalea bushes over at the Club to see if they’d be good for here, when I saw her coming out of one of the tennis pro’s rooms, sneakers and racquet in hand, looking like she’d been in some sort of gale.”
“Well, you didn’t see them actually doing anything—?”
“No, but it was enough proof for me. And I’m not the only one who calls Wanda ‘wild’.”
“I thought you told me Lawrence married her to add new blood to his blue-blood gene pool.”
“I did – but a Las Vegas showgirl? He’s just asking for trouble. Speaking of tennis pros, Katie, I happened to notice you’re not signed up for private lessons anymore.”
I wondered how she had happened to notice that.
“Were you unhappy with your instructor?”
“No, not at all. He was very good, really, but, well… I just decided to take a break for a while.”
“Mmm… Nathaniel, right?” She gave me her cute-kitty smile. “He’s a good one.”
“Yep.” And goddammit, I wasn’t going to say another word.
“Well,” Anne continued, “sometimes it’s good to take a break. I’ve done that and when I go back, my game’s better.”
“I’ve never met Olivia,” I said. “Tell me something about her.”
“Oh – well, I’m curious myself,” Anne said. “You know, her father has been the minister at my church forever. They’re such a lovely family: pillars of the community type of thing. Anyway, I heard Olivia stole Mitzi’s maid, and I’m looking forward to hearing what happened after Mitzi made that pass at my Bob at the Colemans’ bash. She’s always going after other women’s husbands. Watch out, you might be next,” she said, pointing a finger at me.
She couldn’t know that I actually wished it would happen, for then maybe Claude’s mood would improve, or at least he’d leave me alone, or even better, leave, period.
“Well, that seems unlikely,” I said, trying not to look pleased at the thought.
“You never know,” she said. “Life is long. Oh, look – here’s Wanda and Jane.”
*
“These are the most delicious zucchini I think I’ve ever eaten,” Wanda said as we stood around the vegetable plate.
“I’m a caviar girl,” said Olivia. She had halved a melba round and topped it with a tiny dollop and slid it into her mouth. “But look, I’m doing portion control.”
More like portionettes, I thought, glancing at her straw-thin shape draped in a short white dress with matching headband and designer flats. Olivia and Wanda were designed to within an inch of their lives, their bodies toned and worked, chiseled like stone sculptures.
“You sure you don’t want some champagne?” Anne asked Olivia.
“I’m fine with this,” Olivia said, picking up her sixteen-ounce water bottle and, like a famished baby, taking a long drink.
“I’m looking for a new houseman,” Jane said. “Any recommendations?”
“I’ll ask my new maid. She just started,” said Olivia. “She’s a doll. Really on the ball.”
“Thank you. Where did you find her? I might need another one of those, too,” Jane said. “Every time I turn around, the place is a mess.”
“I didn’t find her, she found me, although if you asked Mitzi, she’d say I stole her. I just got lucky because Mitzi’s maid quit. She couldn’t take the abuse anymore! Working her like a slave, yelling at her for a crease in her uniform, can you believe that? I don’t know how Josie stood it for as long as she did. She’s fabulous, and oh my, how she babbles on about Mitzi, which as far as I’m concerned is better than a John Grisham novel, and I am a huge fan. I should just have her speak into a tape recorder and play it when I’m in the car.” She waggled her finger at us. “If you don’t want your help talking about you, ladies, take good care of them.”
“That is so true,” Jane said, nodding sagely.
“I agree,” said Wanda, crossing her shapely showgirl legs. “I never, never argue with Lawrence. It’s just not worth it. And I let him take care of all of that stuff. He’s so good at negotiating. He sits our help down and lays it on the line.”
“Well, at least you’re off Mitzi’s list,” Anne said to her.
“Oh, here’s another good one,” said Olivia. “Josie was told to wrap all of Mitzi’s lingerie in white tissue paper so each time she puts on a piece of lingerie, she can feel like she’s opening up a present.” Olivia leaned forward on the quilted ottoman and lowered her voice. “And guess what else she keeps between the layers of tissue?”
“Her blue diamonds?” Anne said.
Olivia shook her platinum tresses and giggled. “A big black rubber dildo. Josie said it looked like something that might have come from Black and Decker.”
We all shrieked.
“It sounds like you could club somebody with it,” I said. “What’s William’s part in all of this?”
“Josie didn’t say, except when he comes over to Mitzi’s they hardly ever have sex. Mitzi saves it for important holidays, like Chris
tmas or birthdays. She told Josie she didn’t like to mess up her hair. Whatever! Imagine if I tried to get away with that. Richard would get rid of me in a heartbeat and replace me with someone else.”
I felt like I was inside a weird film mash-up: Upstairs, Downstairs meets The Stepford Wives.
“Katie, you must have to put up with a lot of women making a beeline for your husband,” Wanda said. “Women are always falling in love with their plastic surgeons, no?”
“Yes, well I’m sure Claude has many women who are in love with him, but I trust him completely – he’s such an incredible family man… really quite extraordinary…” I ended lamely. My audience exchanged glances, but I was saved from having to continue by a light knock at the door.
“Oh, here’s our last guest,” Anne said, rising to welcome the elderly woman who’d appeared in the doorway. Elegantly dressed in a silk salmon shirt and matching pants, carrying a Nantucket basket and holding a cane, there was something about her that made me look more closely.
“Anne, darling, I’m so sorry I’m late.”
“Not at all, you’re just in time for dessert. Ladies, I’d like you all to meet my neighbor and famous movie star, Victoria Langley.”
I involuntarily said, “Oh!” I hadn’t seen Victoria Langley since she’d almost died in Claude’s office, and what I remembered most clearly from that awful day was her dark sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat, and then her bluish body lying on the operating room table in a perilous state.
“Victoria, why don’t you sit next to Katie over there on the couch,” said Anne. “She just loves old movies, and you two can bond over… Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, or, well, whomever.”
“I think it would be more like Carole Lombard and Cary Grant,” I said.
“Excellent choices,” said Victoria Langley, smiling at me.
“And you,” I added, suddenly feeling both bold and shy.
“That’s awfully kind of you to say to an old lady,” she said. She turned to our hostess and said, “Anne, your hydrangeas are magnificent. How do you get that magenta color? I’ve only seen it in Europe.” Then she turned back to me. “You look awfully familiar,” she said, “but I’m not sure from where. It must have been at one of these lunches or dinners. The social whirl all gets to be a big blur. And what were you ladies discussing when I so rudely interrupted?”
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