Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  Unexpectedly, Meredith felt the hot sting of tears behind her eyes. “It feels,” she said, “pretty nice.”

  “Do you think we could be roommates?”

  Meredith nodded, her face beginning to shine.

  Several yards away, a group of girls who were eating their lunches together looked up and stared: Lisa Pontini—the new girl in school—and Meredith Bancroft—the weirdest girl in school—had suddenly stood up, and they were crying and laughing and hugging each other, jumping up and down.

  6

  The room Meredith had shared with Lisa at Bensonhurst for four years was cluttered with packing boxes and half-filled suitcases. Hanging on the closet door were the blue caps and gowns they’d worn at the commencement ceremony the previous night along with the gold tassels that indicated they’d both graduated with highest honors. In the closet, Lisa was putting sweaters into a box; beyond the open door of their room, the hall was filled with the unfamiliar sound of male conversation as fathers, brothers, and boyfriends of departing students carried suitcases and boxes downstairs. Meredith’s father had spent the night at a local inn and was due in an hour, but Meredith had lost track of time. Overcome with nostalgia, she was flipping through a thick stack of photographs she’d taken from her desk, smiling at the memories each one evoked.

  The years Lisa and she had spent in Vermont had been wonderful ones for both of them. Contrary to Lisa’s original fear that she would be an outcast at Bensonhurst, she’d soon established herself as a trendsetter among the other girls, who regarded her as daring and unique. In their freshman year, it was Lisa who organized and led a successful raid on the boys at Litchfield Prep in retaliation for their attempted panty raid on Bensonhurst. In their sophomore year, Lisa designed a stage setting for Bensonhurst’s annual school play that was so spectacular, pictures of it made the newspapers in several cities. In their junior year, it was Lisa who Bill Fletcher asked to Litchfield’s spring dance. Besides being the captain of Litchfield’s soccer team, Bill Fletcher was also fantastically good-looking and very smart. On the day before the dance, he scored twice on the field and once again in a nearby motel, where Lisa gave him her virginity. After that momentous event, Lisa returned to the room she shared with Meredith and cheerfully revealed the news to the four girls who had gathered there. Flopping onto her bed, she had grinned and announced, “I am no longer a virgin. You may feel completely free to ask me for advice and information from now on!”

  The other girls obviously regarded that as yet another example of Lisa’s intrepid independence and sophistication, because they laughed and cheered, but Meredith had been worried and even a little appalled. That night, when their friends left, Meredith and Lisa had their first real quarrel since coming to Bensonhurst. “I can’t believe you did that!” Meredith had exploded. “What if you got pregnant? What if the other girls spread it around? What if your parents find out?”

  Lisa had reacted with matching force. “You’re not my keeper and you’re not responsible for me, so stop acting like my mother! If you want to wait around for Parker Reynolds or some other mythical white knight to sweep you off your feet and into bed, then do it, but don’t expect everyone else to be like you! I didn’t buy all that purity crap the nuns fed us at St. Stephen’s,” Lisa continued, flinging her blazer into the closet. “If you were stupid enough to swallow it, then be the eternal virgin, but don’t expect me to be one too! And I’m not careless enough to get pregnant—Bill used a condom. Furthermore, the other girls aren’t going to say a word about what I did, because they’ve already done it! The only shocked little virgin in our room tonight was you!”

  “That’s enough,” Meredith interrupted stonily, starting over to her desk. Despite the surface calm in her voice, she was squirming with guilt and embarrassment. She did feel responsible for Lisa because she was the one who’d brought her to Bensonhurst. Moreover, Meredith already knew she was morally archaic, and that she had no right to inflict restrictions on Lisa simply because they’d somehow been inflicted on herself. “I didn’t mean to judge you, Lisa, I was worried about you, that’s all.”

  After a moment of tense silence, Lisa turned to her and said, “Mer, I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” Meredith replied. “You were right.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” she said, looking at Meredith with pleading and desperation. “It’s just that I’m not like you, and I can’t be. Not that I haven’t tried now and then.”

  That admission wrung a grim laugh from Meredith. “Why would you want to be like me?”

  “Because,” Lisa said with a wry smile, then she mimicked Humphrey Bogart and said, “you’ve got class, baby. Class with a capital K.”

  Their first real confrontation ended with a truce that was declared that same night over a milk shake at Paulson’s Ice Cream Shoppe.

  Meredith thought about that night as she looked through the photographs, but her reminiscences came to an abrupt halt as Lynn McLaughlin poked her head into the room and said, “Nick Tierney called on the pay phone out in the hall early this morning. He said your phone in here is already disconnected, and that he’s going to stop by in a little while.”

  “Which one of us did he call to talk to?” Lisa said. Lynn replied that he’d called for Meredith, and when she left, Lisa plunked her hands on her hips and turned to Meredith with a mock glower. “I knew it! He couldn’t take his eyes off you last night even though I practically stood on my head to make him notice me. I should never have taught you how to wear makeup and pick out your clothes!”

  “There you go again,” Meredith shot back, grinning, “taking all the credit for my meager popularity with a few boys.” Nick Tierney was a junior at Yale who’d dutifully come here to watch his sister graduate yesterday, and had dazzled all the girls with his handsome face and great build. Within minutes of setting eyes on Meredith, he’d become the one who was dazzled, and he made no secret of it.

  “Meager popularity with a few boys?” Lisa repeated, looking fantastic even with her red hair pinned into a haphazard knot atop her head. “If you went out with half the guys who’ve asked you in the last two years, you’d break my own record for dedicated dating!”

  She was about to say more, when Nick Tierney’s sister tapped on the open door. “Meredith,” she said with a helpless smile, “Nick is downstairs with a couple of his friends who drove up from New Haven this morning. He says he’s determined to help you pack, proposition you, or propose to you—whichever you prefer.”

  “Send the poor, lovesick man and his friends up here,” Lisa said, laughing. When Trish Tierney left, Lisa and Meredith regarded each other in silent amusement, opposites in every way. Completely in accord.

  The past four years had wrought many changes in them, but it was in Meredith that those changes had been the most dramatic. Lisa had always been striking; she’d never been hampered with the need for eyeglasses or cursed with baby fat. The contact lenses Meredith bought with her allowance two years before had eliminated her need for glasses and allowed her eyes to come into prominence. Nature and time had taken care of all the rest by giving an emphasis to her delicately carved features, thickening her pale blond hair, and rounding and narrowing her figure in all the right places.

  Lisa, with her flaming curly hair and flamboyant attitude, was earthy and glamorous at eighteen. Meredith, in contrast, was quietly poised and serenely beautiful. Lisa’s vivaciousness beckoned to men; Meredith’s smiling reserve challenged them. Whenever the two girls went places together, males turned to stare. Lisa enjoyed the attention; she loved the thrill of dating and the excitement of a new romance. Meredith found her recent popularity with the opposite sex curiously flat. Although she enjoyed being with the boys who took her skiing and dancing and to their parties, once the newness of being sought after wore off, dating boys for whom she felt no more than friendship was pleasant, but not as wildly exciting as she’d expected it to be. She felt that way about being kissed too. Lisa attributed all that to the fact that
Meredith had wrongly idealized Parker and now continued to compare every male she met to him. That undoubtedly accounted for part of Meredith’s lack of enthusiasm, but the majority of it was probably caused by the simple fact that she had been raised in an adult household which was, moreover, dominated by a forceful, dynamic businessman. And although the boys she dated from Litchfield Prep were nice to be with, she invariably felt much older than they.

  Meredith had known since childhood that she wanted to get her college degree and take her rightful place at Bancroft & Company someday. The Litchfield boys, and even their older college-age brothers whom she’d met, didn’t seem to have any goals or interests other than sex, sports, and drinking. To Meredith, the idea of surrendering her virginity to some boy whose primary aim was to add her name to the list of Bensonhurst virgins deflowered by Litchfield men—a list that purportedly hung in Crown Hall at Litchfield—was not only nonsensical, it was humiliating and sordid.

  When she did become intimate with someone, she wanted it to be someone she admired and trusted; she wanted tenderness and understanding, and she wanted romance too. Whenever she thought of having a sexual relationship, she envisioned more than making love; she envisioned long walks on the beach, holding hands and talking; long nights in front of a fireplace, watching the flames—and talking. After trying unsuccessfully for years to truly communicate with, and be close to, her father, Meredith was determined that her eventual lover would be someone she could talk to and who would share his thoughts with her. And whenever she envisioned that ideal lover, he was always Parker.

  During the years she’d been at Bensonhurst, Meredith had managed to see Parker fairly often when she was home on vacations—an endeavor that was made easier by the fact that both Parker’s family and hers belonged to the Glenmoor Country Club. At Glenmoor, it was traditional for the membership to appear en masse at the club’s major dances and sports events. Until a few months before, when she’d turned eighteen, Meredith had been prohibited from attending the club’s adult functions, but she’d managed to avail herself of those opportunities Glenmoor did offer. Each summer she’d invited Parker to be her partner in the junior-senior tennis matches. His acceptance had always been gracious; their matches had always been dismal defeats, owing mostly to Meredith’s extreme nervousness at playing with him.

  She’d used other ruses too, over the years, like convincing her father to give several dinner parties each summer, one of which always included Parker and his family. Since Parker’s family owned the bank in which all of Bancroft & Company’s funds were deposited, and since Parker was already an officer of that bank, he was practically obliged to come to dinner both for business reasons and to act as Meredith’s dinner partner.

  At Christmastime, Meredith had twice managed to be standing under the mistletoe, which she’d hung in the foyer, when Parker and his family came to pay their annual holiday call on the Bancrofts, and she always went with her father when it was time to return the visit to the Reynoldses.

  As a result of the mistletoe trick during her freshman year, Parker was the one who gave Meredith her first kiss; she’d lived on the memory of that until the next Christmas, dreamed about the way he felt and smelled and smiled at her before he kissed her.

  Whenever he came to dinner, she loved listening to him talk about business at the bank, and she especially loved the walks they began taking afterward, while their parents lingered over brandy. It was during their walk last summer that Meredith made the mortifying discovery that Parker had always known she had a crush on him. He’d begun by asking her how the skiing had been the past winter in Vermont, and Meredith had regaled him with a funny story about going skiing with the captain of Litchfield’s ski team. When Parker stopped laughing at the fact that her date had to chase her ski down the face of the mountain, which he’d done with style and flair, he said with smiling solemnity, “Every time I see you, you’re more beautiful than the time before. I guess I’ve always known that someone was going to eventually take my place in your heart, but I never thought it would be usurped by some jock who rescued your ski. Actually,” he teased, “I was getting used to being your favorite romantic hero.”

  Pride and common sense kept Meredith from blurting out that he’d misunderstood and that no one had taken his place; maturity stopped her from pretending he’d never had a place in her heart. Since he obviously wasn’t destroyed by her imagined defection, she did the only thing she could do, which was to try to salvage their friendship and simultaneously treat her crush on him as if she, too, regarded it as an amusing thing of her youthful past. “You knew how I felt?” she asked, managing to smile.

  “I knew,” he averred, returning her smile. “I used to wonder if your father would notice and come looking for me with a gun. He’s very protective of you.”

  “I’ve noticed that too,” Meredith joked, although that particular issue was far from a laughing matter then or now.

  Parker had chuckled at her quip, and then he’d sobered and said, “Even though your heart belongs to a skier, I hope this doesn’t mean our walks and dinners and tennis games are over. I’ve always enjoyed them, I mean that.”

  They’d ended up talking about Meredith’s college plans and her intention to follow in her ancestors’ footsteps, all the way to the president’s office at Bancroft & Company. He alone seemed to understand how she felt about taking her rightful place at Bancroft’s, and he sincerely believed she could do it if she wanted it badly enough.

  Now, as Meredith stood in the dorm room, thinking about seeing him again after an entire year had passed, she was already trying to prepare herself for the possibility that all Parker would ever be was a friend. The prospect was disheartening, but she felt certain of his friendship, and that meant a great deal to her too.

  Behind Meredith, Lisa walked out of the closet with her last armload of clothes and dumped them on the bed beside an open suitcase. “You’re thinking of Parker,” she teased. “You always get that dreamy look on your—” She broke off as Nick Tierney arrived in the doorway, his two friends blocked from view behind him.

  “I’ve told both these guys,” he announced, tipping his head toward his unseen friends, “that they’re about to see more beauty in one room than they’ve seen in the entire state of Connecticut, but that since I was here first, I have first choice, and my choice is Meredith.” Winking at Lisa, he stepped aside. “Gentlemen,” he said with a sweeping gesture of his hand, “allow me to introduce you to my ‘second choice.’ ” The other two walked in looking bored, cocky, and collegiate, a matched pair of Ivy League models. They took one look at Lisa and stopped dead.

  The muscular blond in the lead recovered first. “You must be Meredith,” he said to Lisa, his wry expression making it clear that he thought Nick had stolen the best for himself. “I’m Craig Huxford and this is Chase Vauthier.” He nodded to the dark-haired twenty-one-year-old beside him who was looking Lisa over like a man who has finally beheld perfection.

  Lisa folded her arms across her chest and regarded them both with amusement. “I’m not Meredith.”

  Their heads turned in unison to the opposite corner of the room, where Meredith was standing.

  “God—” Craig Huxford whispered reverently.

  “God—” Chase Vauthier echoed as they looked from one girl to the other and back again.

  Meredith bit her lip to keep from laughing at their absurd reaction. Lisa raised her brows and dryly said, “Whenever you boys are through with your prayers, we’ll offer you a Coke in return for your help stacking these packing boxes for the movers.”

  They started forward, grinning. Behind them, Philip Bancroft walked in a half hour early and came to a halt, his face darkening with fury as he looked at the three young men. “What the hell is going on in here?”

  The five occupants of the room froze, then Meredith stepped in and tried to smooth matters over by hastily introducing the boys to her father. Ignoring her effort, he jerked his head at the door. “Out!�
� he snapped, and when they’d left, he turned on the girls. “I thought the rules of this school prohibited men other than fathers from entering this goddamned building.”

  He didn’t “think” that, he knew it. Two years ago, he’d paid a surprise visit on Meredith, and when he arrived at the dorm at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, he’d seen boys sitting around downstairs in the dorm’s lounge area, just inside the main doors. Before that weekend, male visitors had been allowed into the lounge on weekend afternoons. After that day, males were banned from entering the building at all times. Philip had gotten the rules changed himself by storming into the administrator’s office and accusing her of everything from gross negligence to contributing to the delinquency of minors, then he threatened to notify all the parents of those facts and to cancel the large annual endowment the Bancroft family gave to Bensonhurst.

  Now Meredith fought down her fury and humiliation over his behavior to the three boys who’d done nothing to warrant his wrath. “In the first place,” she said, “the school year ended yesterday, so the rules don’t apply. Secondly, they were only trying to help us stack these boxes for shipping so we can leave—”

  “I was under the impression,” he interrupted, “that I was coming here this morning to do all that. I believe that was why I got out of bed at—” He broke off his tirade at the sound of the administrator’s voice.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Bancroft,” she said. “You have an urgent phone call downstairs.”

  When he left to take his call, Meredith sank down on the bed and Lisa slammed her Coke onto the desk. “I cannot understand that man!” she said furiously. “He’s impossible! He won’t let you date anyone he hasn’t known since babyhood, and he scares off everyone else who tries. He gave you a car for your sixteenth birthday, and he won’t let you drive it. I have four brothers who are Italian, dammit, and combined they’re not as overbearingly protective as your father is!” Unaware that she was only adding to Meredith’s angry frustration, she walked over and sat down beside her. “Mer, you have to do something about him, or this summer is going to be worse than the last one for you. I’m going to be gone for half of it, so you won’t even have me to hang around with.” The staff at Bensonhurst had been so impressed with Lisa’s grades and her artistic talent that they’d gotten her a six-week European scholarship, where the chosen student was allowed to select whatever city best suited her future career plans. Lisa had decided on Rome and enrolled in a course on interior design there.