Hale's Point

by Patricia Ryan

  “Doug? Not likely. No, he turned it into a club. Folk rock, mainly, but there’s a jazz saxophonist who plays there on Monday nights.”

  “Hale’s Point has a night-spot?” Tucker said. Harley dropped a letter and bent to pick it up. As she did so, the front of her robe gapped slightly, revealing the pale, rounded tops of her breasts. That she was naked under the robe came as a surprise; Tucker had assumed she still wore her swimsuit.

  Phil said, “Yes, believe it or not, Hale’s Point has a nightspot. It’s a good one, too.”

  “And the point of all this…” Tucker prompted. Harley pulled out one of the magazines and smiled at the cover. Tucker ached with curiosity to know what had made her smile. He shook his head. Who cared? What was the matter with him?

  “The point,” Phil answered, “is that tonight’s band has canceled, and seeing as how it’s Friday, and the place will be packed, that’s not a good thing. Luckily, he’s got backup entertainment on reserve at all times. Bet you can’t guess who that is.”

  After a moment’s thought. Tucker said, “You’re not serious. Not Rob and Jim and those guys? They can’t still have that awful band after twenty years.”

  “Well, not Jim. He’s doing entertainment law in L. A. But Rob and Larry are still here. Rob does environmental law and Larry teaches history at Stony Brook. They play together every chance they get. They’re not awful anymore, either. Pretty good, in fact. Folk and blues. They even write some of their own stuff now. Why don’t you come check them out tonight? Say, around nine? It’d be like a reunion. And ask Harley if she wants to come.”

  She was close now, on the front walk, her nose buried in the mail, completely unaware that he had been watching her. “Harley!” he called. He held the phone away from his mouth, but resisted the impulse to cover the mouthpiece; he wanted Phil to hear this.

  She looked around briefly before squinting at the screened window. “Tucker?”

  “Do you want to go to a folk-rock club with me tonight? As my date?”

  “Damn it, Tucker!” came Phil’s tinny voice over the line. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  After a pause, she shrugged. “Sure. That sounds like fun.”

  “Great.” said Tucker. “I’ll drive us there—” he held the phone close to his mouth and enunciated very clearly “—in my new Jag.”

  Harley, looking puzzled, walked away, while Phil said, “You think you’re so smart. You may have your new Jag, but I’ve got something better. I’ve got a medical degree. I am a doctor! A genuine, six-figure M.D. Ain’t no car in the world can compete with that, even yours. Which is not to say I don’t still want it. I definitely am still willing to trade you my house for it. I just want you to know it takes more than a great car

  to win over a girl like that.”

  “What does it take, Phil?”

  “It takes a stack of credit cards so fat you could wrap both hands around them and your fingers won’t touch. It takes Lord & Taylor, Bloomie’s, Saks, Bergdorf’s, and about a zillion more. Oh, but I forgot! You don’t believe in credit!” He laughed maniacally. “You lose!”

  “Tell you what,” Tucker said. “I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to find you a date. Matter of fact, I’ve already got someone in mind. You’ll love her.”

  “Who? Not Mimi. She’s cute, but she’s not my type.”

  “Let me decide what your type is. I’m an excellent judge of these things.”

  “Tucker, don’t go inviting some—”

  “I’ve got to go now. Harley needs some help with the sun-tan oil.”

  “Tucker—”

  “See you tonight.”

  After hanging up on Phil, Tucker looked up the Tiltons’ number in R.H.’s massive black leather address book, the same one he’d had when Tucker was a boy.

  “Mimi? Tucker Hale. Listen, some friends of mine are going to be playing at the club in the village tonight. Harley and I are going, and we wondered if you’d like to join us. And there’s someone else I’d like you to bring….”

  Around one o’clock, Tucker left for the afternoon, saying he had to finish his business with the Jaguar dealer and run a couple of other errands. While he was gone, Harley attended to the pool maintenance and briefly exercised R.H.’s eight sports cars, which he had asked her to do twice a week. Then she took her afternoon run, but her energy had been sapped by the heatstroke, and she ended up exhausted.

  When she climbed up from the beach, his Jag was in the driveway. On the kitchen table she found a Vidalia onion, a head of garlic, a bottle of Tabasco, a bag of yellow corn-meal, and various other spices and canned goods. Passing by his room, she saw on his bed a scattering of bags and boxes.

  Upstairs, the door to R.H.’s suite was ajar and she could hear a repetitive metallic scraping accompanied by labored breathing and an occasional grunt of effort. She closed the door to her room, stripped, slipped between the cool cotton sheets, and fell asleep.

  ***

  A hand gently kneaded her bare back. She opened her eyes to find Tucker sitting on the bed, murmuring, “Wake up. Chili’s ready.”

  The sheet covered her only to her waist, but thankfully she was lying on her stomach. Even if she weren’t, he’d seen it all before, she reminded herself. She had the sense of having slept deeply.

  “Come on, honey,” he said, smoothing her hair off her face. “Up and at ‘em.”

  “You leave and I’ll get up and at ‘em.” she mumbled. She twisted her head to look at him. “And don’t call me hon—” The rebuke stuck in her throat, and all she could do was stare dumbly. He looked completely different. He looked like a stranger. “You cut your hair,” she finally said.

  “There’s a barber in the village.” He ran a hand over it. It was very short all over; almost, but not quite, a buzz cut. Most men looked awful in such an unforgiving cut, but Tucker wasn’t one of them. The absence of hair showed off the pleasing shape of his head and the sharply carved bones of his face. He looked both aristocratic and military, like a young Roman emperor.

  Standing, he draped her white robe over her inert form and headed toward the door. “Wake ‘em and shake ‘em, babe. Cold chili’s a bummer.”

  Finding her voice as he closed the door behind him, she yelled, “And don’t call me babe, either!”

  The chili and corn bread were ridiculously good, and Harley surprised herself by having seconds of both. She offered to clean since he had cooked. Tucker consulted the kitchen clock and said, “Okay. That’ll give me some time to do a few laps before we swim. Then we should still make it to the club by nine. Can I, uh… can I borrow your… stopwatch?”

  Harley allowed her stunned expression to metamorphose into a self-satisfied grin. “Of course,” she said with mock graciousness, unbuckling the watch and handing it to him.

  He accepted it with a sheepish grin and disappeared into his room. A few minutes later she heard the French doors open and close. When she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him standing in the dusk at the edge of the brightly lit pool, clad in a minimal black racing suit, which he must have bought that day. He had his back to her as he fiddled with the stopwatch, so she felt free to stare.

  He stood with careless grace, his weight resting on his good leg. His shoulders were well muscled, squaring off a broad back that scooped down to narrow hips and a compact rear. His short hair and long, powerful limbs completed the image: injuries aside, he looked not so much like a Roman emperor as a Roman god, carved in marble at the edge of a temple’s reflecting pool.

  He moved to the edge of the deep end, crouched in proper starting position, clicked the stopwatch, and sprang into the water. As he did so, she saw his grimace of pain, and winced.

  She left him—swimming slow, laborious laps—to change into her white maillot, then joined him in the pool. For about forty minutes he continued his laps, checking the stopwatch periodically, while she lazily backstroked from one end to the other.

  Now he’s the driven one and I’m just hangi
ng out, she thought as the stars drifted past overhead.

  His voice interrupted her reverie. “Ready to try this again?”

  They took their positions. “One… two… three… go!”

  He made it a little farther into the deep end before she touched the deck, but not much. Nevertheless, he seemed exhilarated, which she knew owed less to endorphins than to anticipation, the prospect of catching her and collecting his prize. Shivering, she ran upstairs to shower and change for the club.

  ***

  Harley hated not knowing the right thing to wear. She had never been to a folk-rock club, or any other kind of club, for that matter. Did women wear jeans and T-shirts or nice dresses?

  Scanning the half-dozen outfits carefully laid out on her bed, she chastised herself for her lack of self-confidence. Wear whatever you want, for God’s sake! Why should you knock yourself out, anyway? Imagine how Tucker will look. The idea of walking into a public place on the arm of a man in faded army surplus only added to her distress, so she put it out of her mind.

  In the end, she chose a white cotton peasant blouse and tucked it into what she thought of as her gypsy skirt. She had bought the skirt on impulse, having fallen instantly in love with its sheer, gold-flecked layers of teal, eggplant, and midnight blue. But she had never worn it, having had no place to wear it to—until now.

  One of the advantages of being small on top was having the option of going braless if the spirit moved her. She exercised that option now, so that she could loosen the drawstring of her blouse and push the neckline down off her shoulders, as she had seen it displayed on the mannequin in the store. There. Now she didn’t look like little Miss Republican M.B. A.

  She rarely wore makeup, but tonight she thoughtfully applied some mascara, brushed on a light dusting of powder, and painted her lips shell pink. After brushing her hair out loosely, she put on her best silver-and-onyx earrings, then appraised the results in the mirror and smiled. She tossed a few things into her smallest handbag and went downstairs.

  The door to Tucker’s room stood open, and she saw that some of the bags and boxes that littered the bed had been opened. She didn’t see Tucker himself until she stepped into the room, and the sight of him drew an astonished gasp from her.

  He stood in front of the full-length, freestanding mirror, holding two linen ties up to his chest and frowning. One was floral, the other a pattern of free-form brushstrokes, both in shades of brown, gray, and a pale, muted green that exactly matched the green of his crisp, button-down shirt. He wore khaki trousers, and his belt and shoes were of soft, brown kid. A putty-colored summer blazer hung over the back of the chair in the corner. When he looked her way, all she could say was, “Wow.”

  His unblinking eyes took her in, head to toe, and then he smiled a smile of immense satisfaction. “That’s my line. You look… Wow, you look outrageous.”

  Harley bit her lip, not wanting to look too pleased with herself. “So do you,” she said. “You look so… different.”

  “I didn’t want you to feel embarrassed to be seen with me.”

  “I—I wouldn’t have.”

  He grinned skeptically. “Ooh, you’re a ba-a-ad liar.”

  “I am not! I mean—”

  “It’s good to be a bad liar. It means you have an honest heart.” He held the ties up for her inspection. “Which one?”

  She considered for a moment, then picked the brushstroke one. He tossed the other one on the bed and, turning back to the mirror, threaded it through his collar and swiftly tied it. When he was done, he loosened it and unbuttoned the shirt’s top button, saying, “Mustn’t get too carried away.” He paused and reached a hand out to stroke her cheek. “You really look incredible.” Tucking her hair behind one ear, he said, “Those are nice earrings, but with your coloring, you should really wear gold.”

  She shrugged. “I like silver. Besides, I can’t afford gold.”

  His hand trailed down to her mouth, and he patted her lower lip gently with his index finger, then examined the little smudge of shell pink on his fingertip. “Do you ever wear red lipstick?”

  “Ugh, no.”

  He took his jacket from the chairback and tunneled his long arms into it. “That’s probably for the best. If you did, I think you’d send me completely over the edge.”

  Chapter 9

  HARLEY SPENT THE SHORT TRIP to the village holding her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck to keep the wind from whipping it into a rat’s nest. Most of the trip from the house to the village was along one-lane roads that twisted up and plunged down. Whenever Harley had to make this drive, she found the experience harrowing, especially in the dark, but Tucker seemed completely unperturbed. With one hand on the wheel and the other on the stick shift, he maneuvered the convertible smoothly up sharp inclines and around hairpin curves as if he were a part of the machine itself.

  Harley found the antiquated buildings of Hale’s Point very charming in a peculiar, off-kilter kind of way. Once a haven for sailors and smugglers, it was now peopled exclusively by the descendants of some of Long Island’s oldest and wealthiest families.

  Tucker drove up to a warmly lit ivory gingerbread Victorian built into a cliff overgrown with flowering vines. From the lamppost dangled a small wooden plaque with an infinity sign painted on it. He parked on the narrow street at an acute downhill angle and raised the roof, then came around and opened the car door for her. Another “absurd” souvenir from his Hale’s Point upbringing? For a nonconformist wild card, Tucker Hale could be quite the gentleman.

  No sooner had they entered the club than a deep male voice boomed, “Tucker Hale, you son of a bitch, where’s my Grateful Dead album?” A bearded, red-haired giant threaded his way toward them through the milling patrons.

  “I don’t have your Grateful Dead album, Doug, I told you that!” Tucker bellowed back.

  “Then who does?” Doug demanded, looming over them.

  “Ask Rob.”

  Harley’s head spun. This man probably hadn’t set eyes on Tucker for decades. As near as she could tell, the two men had just slid back into a twenty-year-old argument.

  “Let’s do that,” the giant thundered, turning and motioning them to follow him to a large back room. She could tell it had once been a formal dining room, since a crystal chandelier still hung from its ceiling.

  In the corner, on a small stage set up with a piano, two men, one blond, one dark, were testing microphones. “Rob,” Doug roared, and the blond man looked up, grinning broadly when he saw Tucker. “Do you have my Dead album?”

  Rob blinked. “Yeah. I thought you knew that.”

  Doug stopped in his tracks. “You’ve had my Dead album for twenty years, and you thought I knew?”

  “It’s a good album,” Rob said, as he and the dark-haired man descended from the stage. “I was going to give it back.”

  Tucker punched Doug in the shoulder. “Don’t you think you owe me an apology?”

  Doug reared up like a bear. “Hell no! You don’t call for twenty years, I don’t owe you nothin’!” He and Tucker faced off for a moment, presently breaking into huge grins and wrapping their arms around each other. “I missed you, you bastard!” Doug said.

  Phil appeared as Tucker exchanged hugs and backslaps with the other two men. When he saw Phil, Tucker drew Harley toward him with an arm around her shoulder. “Harley Sayers, this is Doug, Rob, and Larry. Dr. Zelin, you already know.”

  Now they think I’m his girlfriend, she thought, and she tried the idea on for size. Tucker’s girlfriend… Her heart started rattling in her chest.

  Phil took in Tucker from head to toe. “Trying to depunk your image? That’s a military-school haircut if ever I saw one.”

  Tucker said, “I’m swimming again, and short hair helps to cut down on the resistance. I want to get fast.” With a glance at Harley, he added, “Really fast.”

  Harley wondered if anyone noticed her blush as Rob and Larry went back to their onstage preparations and Doug led them to
a large table near the stage. Harley ordered iced tea, Tucker beer, and Phil a Bloody Mary. The club filled up quickly, and before long the chandelier dimmed and stage lights snapped on, illuminating the little platform in the corner. Rob and Larry performed a set of mellow folk tunes, Rob on guitar, Larry on piano. They were pretty good, but she and Phil and Tucker seemed to be the only guests who had actually stopped talking to listen. The drone of conversation never let up, and it was fairly loud; the place was packed with people. Rob and Larry didn’t seem to mind, and she figured that must be a drawback that club musicians just come to accept.

  When it was time for their break, the two musicians joined the party at the table. Tucker sat on one side of Harley, a long arm draped over the back of her chair, Phil on the other, ignoring his friend’s proprietary gesture by leaning toward her and touching her arm frequently as he talked. Maybe Tucker was right, Harley thought. Maybe Phil is interested, after all.

  Grinning, Tucker announced, “Look who’s here!” Mimi, Jamie, Brenna, and a blond woman came up to the table. Abruptly, as if she were suddenly hot to the touch, Phil’s hand recoiled from her arm. What was that about?

  Like Harley, Mimi and the blonde wore skirts and blouses; Brenna had on a stretch lace minidress. Introductions were begun, but no one seemed quite sure who knew whom, and the identity of the blond woman remained a mystery to Harley. The men stood and pulled chairs out for the women— another remnant of chivalry quite foreign to Harley—and Tucker embraced the blonde, saying, “It’s so great to see you.”

  “You, too,” said the woman. “I’m glad you asked Mimi to bring me.”

  He asked Mimi to bring her? thought Harley, feeling a hard squeeze of jealousy. The blonde looked to be around Tucker’s age, and was nothing short of striking. She exchanged greetings with Rob and Larry, but ignored Phil—rather pointedly, Harley thought.