Whitney gazed into his face, guileless and sincere, and felt love commingled with sadness. “But what kind of life? We’re still the miniature bride and groom on the wedding cake my parents bought, with no idea of what to do except follow an example we know to be a lie. All I’m sure of now is that I don’t want to be my mother.”
A hint of desperation stole into his eyes. “You wouldn’t be.”
Whitney struggled to believe this. But she could not even envision herself the day after tomorrow. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said softly, a mist in her eyes. “For the longest time, I thought I wasn’t worthy of you. Now I think we’re not worthy of getting married. How can we be, when all we know is to imitate our parents?” She paused, then said in a clearer voice, “I can’t marry you, Peter. At least not in three weeks, marching toward the altar like windup dolls, oblivious to everything but what other people expect from us.”
He slumped, hurt graven on his face. “Because I didn’t tell your dad to stuff it?”
Still dazed at what she had said, Whitney slowly shook her head. “It’s because we’re all tangled up with him, and I’ve got no idea of who we are anymore. Or who I am . . .”
“Is this about that guy?” he said accusingly.
She owed him the truth, Whitney thought miserably—whatever that was. But knowing the truth was beyond her. “It’s so much more,” she answered. “It’s true that I started feeling something for him—a kind of fascination, I guess. I didn’t know what it meant, and never would have let myself find out . . .”
His face hardened. “And now you will.”
“This really isn’t about that. But I’ve watched Ben tell my father to ‘stuff it,’ as you put it. After yesterday, I have to admire him for it.”
Pride made Peter remove his hand. “You’ll never see me the same, will you?”
Amidst her own sadness, Whitney searched for an honest answer. “You’re a wonderful person, Peter—in so many ways. But however desperately I want to erase everything’s that’s happened, I can’t.”
Peter stood at once. “I think I’d better leave,” he said stiffly. “I need to clear out the apartment, find a place of my own.”
At once, Whitney felt a terrible loss—once they had been innocent, two young people in love, with a life ahead untainted by her family. Now all that was gone. “I guess that’s best,” she told him softly. “There’s a lot for me to face here.”
“Then don’t bother to drive me,” he snapped. “I’ll take a cab.”
Despite everything, his sudden withdrawal deepened her misery. With a fixed expression, Peter took his grandmother’s ring off her finger and put it in his pocket. To Whitney, the act had a strange formality, a ritual of relinquishment and loss.
Seeing the tears in her eyes, his face softened. “I’m sorry, Whit.”
“Me, too,” she answered in a husky voice. “For both of us.”
She did not trust herself to say anything else. Standing, she kissed him on the cheek, then walked quickly to the door before yielding to her impulse to look back at him. He held his head higher, trying to smile as she left, like a proud athlete facing defeat.
When Whitney returned to the house, Janine was closeted with their parents.
For a long time she lay in the window seat, her thoughts jumbled. She heard, rather than saw, the taxi stopping in the driveway. As the car door opened and shut, tears stung her eyes again, she could not bear to look out the window.
At last her mother came downstairs, ashen beneath the perfect hair and makeup, her last defense against events she could not control.
“How’s Janine doing?” Whitney asked.
“Not well. Your father insists on taking her to a clinic near Boston that supposedly exists to help people involved with drugs and alcohol.”
Whitney felt relief overwhelm her sense of tact. “Good. She needs that.”
“She’s my daughter,” Anne said tightly. “Or was. It seems that you and your father have taken over.”
It was sadly predictable, Whitney supposed, that Anne perceived a conspiracy to wrest away her striking and confident daughter, the one people always remembered. She could not help but hear a subtext—I hope you’re happy now. “I’m sorry, Mom. But if you’d seen her yesterday, you’d know how much she needs this.”
For a time her mother said nothing. Seemingly bewildered, she looked around her, as though in search of reassurance. “Where’s Peter?”
“Gone. I’ve broken our engagement.”
Anne’s face froze, accenting the hurt in her eyes. “Now? With all that’s happening, how can you do this?”
“To Peter? Or to you?”
“To yourself, Whitney. To all of us.”
“All of you aren’t involved in this.”
“Are we not?” her mother cried out. “The wedding is less than three weeks away. What will your father and I say about this?”
A strange calm came over Whitney. “Anything you like. I really don’t care, as long as it’s not embarrassing to Peter.”
“How can it not be,” her mother said grimly. “I suppose this is about that boy.”
“Ben, you mean? Funny that you can’t speak his name aloud.” Whitney’s voice softened. “I wish it were that simple, Mom. Then I’d know what I’m doing tomorrow, and the day after that.”
A sense of Whitney’s disorientation seemed to penetrate her mother’s outrage. Shaking her head, Anne said in a broken voice, “I’m sorry, Whitney. It just feels like everything is falling apart.”
“I know, Mom. For me, too.”
Anne sat down beside her, gazing out at nothing. “I’ve tried so hard. All I ever wanted for my daughters is that you have the life that I’ve had.”
Whitney felt a kind of chill. “I guess we’ll have to find our own way,” she replied. “But there’s something else I need you to accept. About Clarice.”
“Clarice?”
“We’ve had a falling out, Mom. She won’t be coming here anymore.”
“But she’s like a member of our family,” Anne protested. “Why are you turning all of our lives upside down?”
“This is about my life,” Whitney insisted. “What happened with Clarice is personal. So please try to focus on Janine. She is a member of our family, and she needs for all of us to help her.”
Mute, Anne shook her head. Instinctively, Whitney took her in her arms, conscious of how fragile her mother felt.
“We’ll be all right,” the new keeper of her father’s secrets murmured, doubting this would ever be so.
That afternoon, Whitney fell into a deep sleep, her roiled mind shutting down from sheer exhaustion. When she awoke, it was morning again, and her parents were preparing to drive with Janine to the ferry, he first leg of their journey to McLean.
No one asked her to come, and she did not want to. In the driveway, Janine stiffly kissed Whitney goodbye, her face still pale, her manner remote and a little resentful. Then she got in the backseat with her mother.
Alone with Charles, Whitney said, “I may not be here when you get back.”
Her father’s lips compressed. “For God’s sake, why? Your mother is going to need you more than ever.”
“I’ve done what I can for her, Dad. Now it’s your turn.” She paused, then told him firmly, “It’s time for me to deal with my own life. I’m going to see Ben, to tell him the truth. I owe him that, don’t you think?”
“No,” her father snapped, “I don’t.” But for once there was nothing he could do.
Eight
In early evening, filled with doubt, Whitney knocked on Ben’s door.
He opened it, seemingly surprised, then mustered a smile that did not conceal his wariness. “I thought you’d run away.”
“I had to,” she said simply.
“So what are you doing here?”
Where to start, she wondered. But all she could think to say was, “I’ve broken my engagement.”
His expression changed, doubt and curiosity war
ring in his eyes. “That can’t have gone over very well.”
“It didn’t. Can I come in?”
He held the door open. As she entered, she saw some official-looking papers on his kitchen table. Following her gaze, he said, “Not a good weekend for me, either. I got them the day after you took off.”
She went to the table, and picked them up. The first document was headed, “Order to Report for Induction.” Whitney stared at it, the small print swimming in front of her, then saw the date and time of his induction: September 21, 1968, at 7 a.m. “Seems like they’re in a hurry,” Ben remarked. “I must be very desirable.”
Whitney sat down at the table, feeling queasy, though she made herself look up at him. “My father did this, Ben.”
His expression darkened. “How?”
“He used his influence to move you up the list, so you couldn’t get back to Yale.” She bit her lip, then added baldly, “To make sure nothing happened with us.”
Ben’s face closed. “I should have guessed. Truth to tell, I wondered once or twice. He’s the kind of man who safeguards his possessions.”
Whitney shook her head. “He doesn’t own me anymore. No one does.”
He sat across from her. Staring at the draft notice, he said softly, “All this because we spent time together. What a mistake it was to meet him.”
“That was my fault. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel.”
“Oh, I can—and then some. Amazing how easy it is for him to play with other peoples’ lives. Whether I live or die is less important than some waiter screwing up his drink order.” His voice quickened with repressed anger. “It’s not even callousness—that takes too much thought. It’s the carelessness of privilege. Lesser humans like me are stick figures on the periphery of your lives.”
“I know how you feel about my father. But that’s not fair to me.”
The cast of his face became a shade less adamantine. “Maybe not. But some days it’s hard to make these fine distinctions.”
Whitney did not answer. “Is there anything you can do now?” she asked.
“My draft advisor doesn’t think so. If I were married, he tells me, maybe I’d have a chance. But I’m single, healthy, poor, and dropped out of college to campaign for a liberal. Perfect raw material for the American Imperium.” His voice took on a sarcastic fatalism. “During the Civil War, the sons of wealth paid boys with no prospects to join the army in their place. Now men like your father can arrange for pawns like me to substitute for guys like Peter Brooks. He didn’t even need to open his wallet.”
There was nothing Whitney could say to this. For a painfully long time, Ben watched her, his hatred for her father replaced by a neutral curiosity. “So now you’ve explained my fate, Whitney. Is there anything else?”
To her surprise, she found his dispassion more devastating than anger. “It doesn’t matter now. I just came to tell you the truth, and to say goodbye.”
He cocked his head. “Are you going somewhere? Or am I the only one?”
Whitney hesitated. “Actually, I don’t know where I’m going.”
“Literally? Or figuratively?”
“Both,” she said, and realized how much she wanted his understanding. “How can I know where I’m going, Ben, when I don’t know who I am?”
“But you do know. You’re Whitney Dane, daughter of a wealthy family, with all the resources and time in the world to find out what you want, and a swarm of people—your parents’ friends—to help you on the way. All you have to do is tell them what you’ve decided to become.”
“You really don’t get it. Everything has changed for me—especially how I see my parents. I may not know who I am, but I know who I never want to be.”
His puzzled smile was not unkind. “Poor little rich girl. You really are lost, aren’t you?”
She did not need to answer this, and to try would only seem foolish. “That night, why did you kiss me?”
The grin he shot her contained a dose of real amusement. “You’re kidding, right?”
Whitney felt belittled. “Because I was there, I guess. Sort of like Mt. Everest.”
He shook his head, the grin becoming a smile that played across his lips. “With all respect, I’m hardly Sir Edmund Hillary, and even you’re not voluptuous enough for comparison to Mt. Everest. Climbing you would not require heroism.”
Whitney flushed. “I guess you hadn’t been with anyone for awhile.”
His face closed again. “With all that’s gone on with me lately, I haven’t been counting the weeks. But if the mood struck me, why not go for Clarice? She’s not engaged to anyone.”
The startling image of Clarice naked before her father left Whitney speechless. There was so much she wanted to tell him; so little, for her mother’s sake, that she could say—especially to someone so filled with hatred for her family. “This is hopeless,” she said. “I should have stopped with an apology.”
“Talk about hopeless,” Ben retorted with quiet vehemence. “For such a smart woman, you’re a complete idiot. I spent hours and days talking with you—a girl who’s engaged to be married and out of my reach even if she weren’t, telling you things I don’t tell anyone, and all you can do with that is wonder why I kissed you. Maybe you should ask Clarice. She might actually be able to tell you.”
Whitney stared at him. For once his eyes seemed naked, his desire for her so startling that she looked away. “I didn’t know,” she said softly.
“You didn’t want to. So now you do, and there’s not Peter anymore. Or is there?”
Thinking of Peter, she felt a renewed sadness. “No. There’s not.”
“So what do you want with me, Whitney Dane?”
Her next words, whatever they were, felt so consequential that the answer caught in her throat. The doubt in her eyes made him reach across the table, gripping her arm in a way that felt proprietary. “At least I know what I want,” he told her. “And who.”
He drew her up, face close to his. Whitney found herself unable to move, or turn from him. Ben’s mouth met hers, kissing her hard. Reflexively, her lips opened to receive his tongue as she pressed against him, not asking herself why or what she should do. Drawing back, he started kissing her neck with surprising tenderness. “God,” he murmured. “I want you.”
An answering murmur came from deep within her throat, the sound of assent. He began unbuttoning her blouse.
It was dusk now, and the unlit room was shadowy and dim, a mercy to Whitney in her shyness. Unsure of what to do, she let Ben undress her, lingering on each part of her with his hands and mouth, now on her nipples, then her stomach, then the lushness of the fur between her legs. Then he was standing again, gently kissing her as he undressed, leading her to the bed, her heart beating, skin tingling with uncertainty and anticipation, knowing only that she wished to be swept through this moment to another not governed by her conscious mind. She lay back, and felt his lips repeating the downward journey until his tongue was inside her with an avidity so unlike Peter that, writhing against him, Whitney prayed he wanted this as much as she. She moaned her pleasure, worried that he might pull away. But the insistent probing of his tongue, an end in itself, kept on until the blood rushed to the center of her, and her shuddering cry of anguish and rapture muffled his quiet laugh of pleasure in her release. And then, kissing her tenderly on the mouth, he slid on top of her.
Whitney opened her legs to receive him. Slowly, he slipped inside her, filling her with his hardness, moving slowly and gently as he spoke her name. She felt herself again swelling with desire, whispering “more,” wrapping her legs around him as if to pull him in deeper, their movements losing all sense of reason except their need for each other. The world turned black. Whitney cried out with pleasure, nipping at his neck as she felt him quake with his own release, becoming for this moment hers. And then he was lying beside her, fingers tangled in the tendrils of her thick brown hair. But the ebbing of desire, she discovered, left her feeling lost.
; “Let me turn on the light,” he told her. “I want to see you.”
She writhed with embarrassment. With shaky humor she said, “Don’t you think that’s pushing things a little, Mr. Blaine? I barely know you.”
“If it helps, Whitney, you can close your eyes.”
He moved away, flicking on the bedside lamp. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the light, and saw Ben smiling as he gazed at her. “You’re beautiful . . .”
“Please, stop . . .”
“I’ve never heard a more halfhearted protest. You look as good as you feel—full and generous in all the ways I imagined. And I imagined you quite a lot.”
Whitney covered her face. “I can’t believe this.”
“You should, Whitney You remind me of Tim Hardin’s song: You look like love forever—too good to last, too lovely not to try. You still don’t grasp your power as a woman. Just like I’m guessing you sell your abilities as a writer way too short.”
She felt a mix of pleasure and confusion. “That’s very nice of you, Ben. Now please turn off the lights.”
He kissed her. “Only if you’ll stay the night.”
For a moment, she was quiet. “Yes,” she answered. “Where else would I go, after all?”
Nine
That night a thunderstorm struck the island, awakening Whitney with a start.
Outside, the wind whistled and moaned, rattling windows and branches, driving pellets of rain like bullets as streaks of lightning illuminated the pitch-black night, pursued by explosions of thunder so close that they felt like the judgment of an angry god. Sitting up, Ben turned on the bedside light. A bolt of yellow struck near the guesthouse, knocking out the electricity and causing the lamp to sizzle before it went out in a flash. The sheer violence of the storm had an awesome grandeur, making Whitney feel smaller, unmoored from all she had known. Ben held her until the storm passed, and she fell into a fitful, broken sleep.
At dawn, Whitney stirred awake, fleetingly startled by her surroundings before remembering where she was. Ben was making coffee at the gas stove, dressed only in cutoff jeans. The look he gave her combined humor and uncertainty.
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