“I’m sure the feeling’s transferable,” he said. “Tonight Cole Perelle, tomorrow the entire male population at Blair.”
“That’s an exhausting thought,” she said, marveling at how safe it felt to talk to him.
She woke in the middle of the night on the verge of an orgasm. She was so close that she came just by rolling onto her stomach and pressing into the mattress. She tried to piece together the dream that had brought her to that pitch, but it was evasive, and she fell back to sleep with the hope of recapturing it.
4.
Cole moved back into the Chapel House that Saturday. He made his decision the night he came to dinner. On the beach, under the stars, he felt himself surrender. He didn’t ever want to feel like a guest in the house again.
How he’d hated waking alone in the condominium. He woke chilled every morning even though it was June. He raced through showering and dressing to get to work, to get out of those empty white rooms as quickly as he could. His inability to stay away from the house embarrassed him; his weakness must be so evident to the others. But they welcomed him without taunting, as though his return had been entirely expected.
He was relieved to be back in his room, surrounded by the homey rich smell of his own furniture. He had collected a lot of it over the years. It spilled out of his room into the den next door and down into the living room. His was not one of the larger bedrooms, and it had no ocean view. Yet he had chosen it himself because of the balcony and the view of the bay, two blocks to the west. The colors of the sunset warmed his room every evening and made size and a view of the ocean unimportant.
The hardest part of moving back in had been the phone call to Estelle. He heard the trembling in her voice over the crackling line. The silences when he knew she was swallowing hard, trying not to cry. He could see her eyes, the darkest blue imaginable, filling with tears she despised. She loathed any loss of control.
“You’re being selfish,” she said.
“I’m not denying that.”
Silence.
“Is it the condo?” she asked. “We could find a place of our own.”
“We could never find one on the ocean that we could afford.”
That made her snappish. “Why don’t you just admit it, Cole? It’s not the ocean. The problem is that you can’t break away from your precious friends.”
“Maybe you’re right.” What was the point of arguing when he had no defense? He told her he was sorry. He was wrong, unspeakably selfish. But there were no tears, no words of reasoning that could make him change his mind.
“What if we took the whole south wing of the house?” he asked.
“How many times have we been through this?”
At least once a month for the last five years, he thought. “I guess we’ll have to keep things the way they’ve been,” he said.
“That’s what you’ve wanted to say all along, isn’t it?”
He knew, of course, that she was right.
In the mornings he felt the presence of other people in the house even before he opened his eyes. Before any of the floorboards in the long hallway creaked or the aroma of coffee floated up the stairs, he knew they were there. If he wanted to, he could knock on Jay and Janni’s door, sit on the edge of their bed, and tell them his plans for the day while they smiled and yawned, still dusty with sleep. He half expected Maris to come into his room like she used to, to tell him one of her nightmares. Fiery dreams, full of smoke and flames. Did she still have them? He doubted it. She didn’t seem to need his comforting as much as before.
By the time he’d been back in the house for two weeks he’d worked out a morning routine. He’d rise before the sun and pull on a T-shirt and shorts and go out to the beach where he knew Kit would be running. She ran four miles south of the house and four miles back. He’d run about a mile and wait for her to come back to that point, and then they’d walk the final mile back to the house together.
She liked to walk along the chain of shells left behind by the night tides. She said it was her reward for the run. She’d pick out perfect conches when she could find them or fragments of orange periwinkles, admire them, and then toss them far into the surf. She had quite an arm. Occasionally she spotted colored glass smoothed by the sea, and she grew as excited as a child plucking the piece out of the shells and dropping it into the pocket of her shorts.
Sometimes he’d cup her elbow in his hand as they walked. He could tell that she liked to be touched by the way her flesh seemed to melt under his fingers. But he was careful. He could never tell her that he felt drawn in by her smoky eyes or that when he watched her in the Chapel House gym, her face tense with effort, he wanted to run his hand over the shimmery fabric of her tank top. It would be unfair to tell her any of it. She might begin to expect things from him that he couldn’t deliver.
He liked the way she dressed, everything in layers. She’d wear a tank top under a soft, boxy shirt with lots of pockets, then drape a sweater over her shoulders. It made him want to touch her, just to see where the clothes ended and her body began.
She was enigmatic. She had interviewed him for an article for the hospital newsletter. She sat in his office in a white linen suit, her legs crossed at the knee and a pad and pen in her lap, asking him questions with a directness that stunned him. She was pure business, and she was very, very good at it. She wanted to combine the article on his research with the announcement of his promotion, but Elliot had said no, it wasn’t time yet. So she went to see Elliot, in that same suit with that sane candor.
“Very persuasive woman,” Elliot had told Cole after he’d given her the go-ahead. “She made sense.”
And then there was that fragility that came out of nowhere. On the beach in the morning, her skin was so pale that it looked translucent; her gray eyes were wide and rimmed by feathery amber lashes. She had the most enticing lips he’d ever seen—full and velvety. She ignored the dampness that wove itself into her hair. Estelle would never walk on the beach in the morning for that very reason. When Estelle came home, these early morning outings would come to an end. That made them assume greater importance; he didn’t want to miss a single one.
One morning, when it was barely light enough to see the row of shells on the sand, she told him there was a man in the respiratory department who seemed interested in her.
“Oh yeah?” he said, hoping he sounded nonchalant. He was startled by jealousy, unreasonable and unnerving.
“His name’s Sandy Cates. I think he’s kind of nice-looking. Tall and skinny with dark hair and big eyes and sunken cheeks.” She sucked in her cheeks in a way that made him laugh.
“So what do you plan to do about it?”
“I don’t know. I get nervous when I talk to him. It’s been a while.”
“Pretend you’re talking to me,” he offered.
Kit laughed. “I could never tell him the things I tell you.”
“Sure you can. Just say, ‘Gee, Sandy, I haven’t even masturbated in a year.’”
“But that would be a lie.” She was still laughing.
He skirted a clump of mussels and seaweed. “Why don’t you ask him out to dinner?”
She shuddered. “I don’t know if I can. I’ll have to think about it.” She sat down on the damp sand as though she were going to think about it right then. “I want to watch the sunrise,” she said.
The water and sky, the sand and the shells, were all the color of ripe peaches. A gull dipped into the wave rolling toward them and soared into the sky, carrying breakfast in its beak.
He sat down too, but not so close that he’d be tempted to put an arm around her. It worried him that he wanted to lift the damp tendrils of amber-colored hair off her neck and set his lips on the skin below. He missed Estelle, he told himself. That was all.
5.
He tried to see the house of his childhood through Kit’s eyes as they traveled up the long driveway in his old white Mustang. Was it obvious to her that his family had money, that he had never
wanted for anything? He no longer felt guilty about that. The first time he’d visited Jay’s family—seven people in a steamy frame house that smelled of tomato sauce in every corner of every room—he had wanted to apologize for his past. But no longer. Background was unimportant. They had all been equalized by time.
“This is beautiful, Cole.” Kit was taking in the vast green lawn, the towering oak trees, and the little pond that he and Corinne used to skate across in two long strides when it froze over in the winter.
The house itself was set far back from the street, stark white against the lush green of the grass and shrubs. He thought, as he always did, that it looked like a museum with its two-storied, pillared portico. He hoped Kit wasn’t put off by it.
He’d had a hard time convincing her to come. “My parents know my friends as well as they know me,” he’d told her. “They want to meet you.”
On the patio, his parents settled them into lounge chairs with glasses of iced Perrier. Both his parents were dressed in white as if they’d just played a few sets of tennis, but that was a ridiculous thought.
His father had made the potato salad and wrapped chicken breasts in foil to put on the grill. He’d even made the salad dressing from the fresh herbs in his garden. Since his retirement from the airline, he did most of the cooking. It was a good arrangement; Virginia had never been comfortable in the kitchen.
Kit complimented Phillip on the dressing and juiciness of the chicken and the dill in the potato salad. Phillip beamed like a shy little boy trapped in a body that was growing very old. He was ten years older than Virginia, nearly seventy now, and Cole was struck again by how white and sparse his hair was. His father seemed more withdrawn than ever, a fading shadow in Virginia’s presence.
“Corinne was going to come, but at the last minute she called to say she wasn’t feeling well,” said Virginia, pushing the potato salad in Cole’s direction. They were sitting at the glass-topped patio table, eating off black stoneware plates.
He guessed that Corinne had backed out after learning that a stranger would be present.
“She’s planning on starting therapy again,” his mother said.
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” Cole passed the potato salad on to Kit. He thought his father had overdone it on the dill.
Virginia turned to Kit. “I don’t know how I raised two children so different from one another. Corinne’s just as intelligent as Cole, I really believe that, but she’s always been held back by her fears. As a psychologist, it’s been frustrating for me not to have been able to help my own daughter.”
Kit nodded in sympathy.
“I just hope she can pull out of it with this new therapist.”
“She doesn’t want to pull herself out of it,” said Cole.
“Of course she does. Look how she came to the airport to meet you. And she’s gone grocery shopping by herself several times lately.”
He was relieved when his mother changed the subject.
“How’s Maris?” she asked.
“She seems better,” he said. “I don’t think she has the nightmares anymore.”
“She’s had just one since I moved in,” said Kit. “She woke up screaming. I thought she was being murdered.”
“She never worked any of those losses through,” Virginia said, shaking her head.
Cole remembered the old Maris, the Maris they’d hired to remodel the house. He’d admired her, the way she’d seemed to have overcome the tragedies in her life. Her mother had died when she was fourteen; her brothers were killed in a fire a few years later. And she’d had miscarriage after miscarriage. Still, she’d been full of sparkling energy when she started on the house, busting out walls for bay windows, overseeing the work on the long back porch. He remembered her sitting day after day at the kitchen table, painting the tiles for the backsplash above the counters. She’d been pregnant again, optimistic because this time she’d made it to her sixth month. But then Chuck was killed, hit head-on on the Parkway, and Maris lost her baby the same night. She didn’t want to go back to the house she and Chuck had been working on. And there was so much room in the Chapel House.
“She always looks so tough,” said Kit.
“It’s a facade,” said Virginia. “Some day it’ll catch up with her.”
“How do you know her so well?” Kit asked.
Cole laughed. “You can’t spend an evening with my mother without her learning all your secrets.”
“Now, Cole, that’s not true.” Virginia looked at him sternly. “You’ll make Kit nervous about being here.”
But it was true. By the time dessert was finished, Virginia knew about Kit’s marriage and divorce, her career change, her longing for independence, as well as her increasing desire for a relationship with a man with no strings attached. Virginia had a knack for getting information from people, and Kit poured it out.
“Why don’t you come up here on Saturday mornings so you have some hills to run on?” There was a light in his mother’s eyes that Cole hadn’t seen for a while. “We can have lunch afterward.”
“I’d love to.” Kit smiled, a look of delight on her face.
Cole and his father were quiet, not wanting to tread on the electricity between the two women. Yet Cole couldn’t help but be annoyed with his mother. Why hadn’t she ever taken to Estelle that way? He wished he could introduce Estelle to her again and have them start over. As if that would make any difference.
“When does Estelle get back?” Virginia asked as they walked across the thick lawn to his car. It was the first time his parents had mentioned Estelle all evening.
“The end of next week.”
Phillip put his arm around Virginia. “Give her our love,” he said, as though he were speaking for them both.
Kit sat in one of the wicker chairs on the balcony of his room the following evening. She had on a pair of blue shorts and a white T-shirt, with one of her soft shirts—this one dark blue—unbuttoned over it. The circular driveway of the Chapel House was beneath them, along with the tiny circle of lawn they took turns cutting in the warm months. It was the only grass on the Chapel House property, and it was easy to forget it was there.
Barnegat Bay stretched across the horizon, above the rooftops of Mantoloking. An enormous red sun was falling toward the water, staining everything on Cole’s balcony a metallic pink.
Kit’s bare feet were propped up on the white railing, and on her knees she held a picture of Estelle, framed in silver. Cole felt jittery, as if she were holding something priceless too casually on her knees. Something she might at any minute abuse.
The black-and-white picture was his favorite. It was actually an advertisement cut out of a magazine from the days when Estelle had had to “sell her body,” as she called it, to make ends meet. She stood against a background of black and gray foliage in lacy panties and a bra that seemed too diaphanous to hold her breasts. Her huge eyes looked past the camera, focusing on something that caused her to part her lips expectantly.
Kit ran her fingers lightly over the glass, over Estelle’s body. He wished he could read her thoughts.
She finally spoke.
“If you’re a man, and Estelle’s a woman, I must be a third sex,” she said, a wry smile on her lips.
She tended to do this—put herself down. He thought of telling her how attractive he found her, how hard it was to sit next to her without touching her, but thought better of it. “No one would mistake you for anything other than a woman, Kit.”
“You must miss her.”
He hesitated, squinting out at the bay. He could just make out the pier they rented and the tail end of the Sweetwater. He loved that boat. It was nothing special and had barely enough power to pull a skier, but he and Jay were taking it to work these days. He could think of no better way to begin the day than with that cool glide across the bay, up through the canal to the river, where the hospital clung to the water’s edge.
He hadn’t told Kit about the problems with Estelle
. He hadn’t wanted to damage the chance of a friendship between them. But right now he wanted to tell her more.
“She’s angry about my moving back in here,” he said, frowning at the dusky sky. “And things were rocky between us when I left France. She’s changed during the past few years. It’s been gradual, but it came to a head in Paris. She was so possessive of me. She criticized anyone I wanted to spend time with.”
Kit turned in her chair to face him. “But she was in a strange country and probably felt very dependent on you.”
He smiled. She was defending Estelle, the way one woman would shield another from the callous reasoning of a male. But she was wrong; it was more complex than she could imagine. How odd it felt, though, to have someone take Estelle’s side. That was usually his task.
“She speaks French better than I do, and she loves it there, so I really doubt that’s the problem.”
He decided to say no more. He wanted Kit to like Estelle. Estelle had never had a friend, never a confidante. Women pulled away from her. He’d seen them stare at her, absorb her from head to toe. He’d seen the spiteful look come into their eyes before she’d even said a word.
With Kit it would be different. He’d watched her with Janni and Maris. In the hospital he’d seen her laughing with other women, touching their arms lightly with affection. He’d seen her with his own mother, not an easy woman to elicit warmth from. Kit had some kind of magnetic attraction that drew women to her. He hoped Estelle would allow herself to be touched by it.
6.
Every time she pressed on the clutch or the brake, pain shot through her legs. Bona fide pain. It had been a long time since she’d pushed herself so far. Nothing could feel as good as the fire in her legs.
When Virginia Perelle had seen her hobble in the back door after her run, she’d steered her in the direction of the master bathroom. “Forget the shower,” she’d said. “You need a long soak.”
Kit had settled into the sunken tub, navy blue to match the print of the wallpaper, and shut her eyes. She had nearly fallen asleep when Virginia called her down to lunch. They ate chicken salad on china plates while Virginia asked her about her divorce and how she liked living in the Chapel House and all sorts of questions that might have been considered prying if they hadn’t been so compassionately delivered.
Secrets at the Beach House Page 5