“She’s working for me—” Everett began but Hank galloped right over him: “It’s a working vacation! She likes to write, she does that in her spare time for fun, so she’s doing exactly what she would be doing anyhow except she’s managing to get paid for it!” He glowered at Joanna and then turned back to Everett. “As a matter of fact, Everett, there’s something you don’t know—”
“Hank!” Joanna and Helen both hissed.
“There’s a lot of things Everett doesn’t know,” said Celia with a too-boisterous laugh. “No offense, Everett.”
He shrugged. “I’m just the managing editor of the paper. Why should I be in the loop about anything?”
Hank tried again: “You think you have such a loyal little reporter here in Miss Anna Howes—”
“Ms. Anna Howes,” said Helen. “And by the way, stop talking, Hank. Have some more beer.”
“Here’s the truth you need to know about your favorite new reporter,” Hank sneered to Everett. “She’s actually writing—”
“Oh no, don’t tell him! It was supposed to be a surprise, Hank. She’s actually writing rock songs,” said Celia, roaring with laughter. At her beckoning, her quiet boyfriend Ted also began to laugh. Helen joined him, and because Helen laughed, so did Paul.
“Bullshit!” shouted Hank. “That’s not what—”
“Well, the lyrics anyhow,” said Celia, as if Hank had been correcting her. She assertively made eye contact with Everett and then moved toward the kitchen so that his attention was wrested from Hank. “When Hank was delirious with morphine, she took dictation on whatever he was talking about and now she’s trying to turn it into a soundtrack called The Morphine Variations. Hey, Hank, lemme pour you some more beer.”
“Shut up and listen to me!” Hank shouted, but he looked confused. Celia had distracted him enough that he couldn’t remember what he’d been just about to say, so he resorted to a generic complaint: “There is nothing about her life that makes her need a vacation. Jesus, you people.”
There was a long, horrible silence. Then: “Celia!” said Ted—not the quickest or wittiest one among them, or so Joanna would have said until that moment. “Weren’t you going to take Anna out to see a movie?”
“Yeah,” said Paul Javier, leaping in a little lamely. “I can help get Hank to bed. You ladies go paint the town red.”
“There is no town,” Celia said laughing, not getting it. “Or paint, for that matter.”
“That’s right, Celia,” said Helen. “I think there’s a late show for that new, um, comedy.”
“Right,” said Celia, switching gears instantly once she understood. “Of course, how could I forget. Come on, Anna, let’s go.”
“See!” shouted Hank. “It’s that simple for her! She wants to go do something, she just goes to do it! Never mind about me, oh, no!”
“Hank, I said I’d help you turn in tonight,” said Paul.
“Good, I hope you do it better than she does,” he sneered. “I can’t believe what I have to put up with here, I swear to God.”
“Come on, kiddo, we’re going to miss the previews,” said Celia, urgently shrugging herself into her coat. “The previews are the best part.” She grabbed Joanna’s warmest coat off the hook by the door and tossed it to her. “Let’s go, put it on in the car.”
THE MOON WAS clouded over and the platinum light was diffuse across the yard and the driveway. It was colder and damper outside than it would be in New York City. After nearly three months Joanna still hadn’t adjusted. The cold slithered into her all the way to her core. “Wow, is he an asshole,” Celia said. Mutely, shivering, Joanna got in the passenger side, holding her coat limp in her hands. “You know he doesn’t mean any of that, right?” Celia said. “He’s just venting, he’s ranting, he won’t remember any of it tomorrow and if he does he will feel like such a jerk. You know that, right?”
“I guess,” Joanna murmured. She couldn’t think where to go that would feel safe.
“Put your coat on, kiddo. We’re not really going to the movies,” Celia said. “You know that, right? It’s after nine on a Wednesday night in April, so nothing’s playing and nothing’s open and it’s forty degrees out. We’re going to my house to watch Star Trek on DVD and drink homemade beer, how’s that?”
So they did that.
Celia’s winter rental felt like a college dorm but it was proverbially warm and cozy. And the beer was excellent. Joanna almost told Celia she was somewhat dating the town’s enemy, but didn’t have the energy to get into it. It was not a theme that would go well with the preestablished drama of the evening.
A couple of hours later, she was finally completely calm. Ted came home in Hank’s truck, tapping mud off his shoes on the doorjamb.
“He’s asleep,” he said in a conspiratorial tone, handing her the truck keys. “And he was really drunk, if that wasn’t obvious. He might not even remember in the morning. But you don’t have to worry about him tonight, we got him tucked in and everything. You have a lot of work on your hands there, you know that?”
“Thanks,” she said. “I guess. But thanks. Especially for putting him to bed.”
Once home, and curled up in bed with a cat at her feet, she fantasized that it was summer and all of this had blown over. She tried to send Orion antilitigious energy waves, until she remembered she didn’t actually believe in things like “energy waves” (despite finding the idea of them cool and intriguing in junior high), so she was just wasting her time. She finally fell asleep and woke up the next morning feeling miserable.
Although not as miserable as Hank. His hangover—or pretense of one—was so extreme that it prevented even the slightest effort at apology or peacemaking. With a sulky silence between them, she stoked the woodstove embers and added wood, cooked some oatmeal, brewed herself a thermos of tea for the day, made a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and set up both the couch and the recliner with large glasses of water in easy reach. She went to let the chickens out into their run. Coming back inside, she picked up as many of the Scrabble tiles as she could find and put them back in what was left of the torn box. The board was too bent to ever be played on again. She placed it on the table and Hank ignored it. She left for the Journal office without either of them having said a thing to each other.
* * *
She parked by the boatyard, let the cry of the gulls and the marine smell of the saltwater and diesel fumes wash over her a moment, and then went inside, just in time for the start of the edit meeting. Everett gave her a kindly look but said nothing. After the roundtable, he issued her marching orders, which included covering the Annual Town Meeting, the only thing anyone in West Tisbury wanted to talk about.
And—as always—Lewis Worthington called as the edit meeting was wrapping up. As always, her stomach clenched when she saw his number on her screen; as always, her mind rushed through a dozen possible scenarios that would rip her from her Island livelihood; as always, she forced herself to count slowly to three before answering her phone. As always, she told herself this somehow had to stop immediately, she could not continue hiding in plain sight.
And as always, Lewis was merely pitching an idea for the following week’s “On the Same Page” that Joey Dias managed to agree to without letting anyone in the Journal offices know what Anna Howes was talking about. This week, it was a profile of the curator of the hospital’s art collection on the same page as a story from 1922 about construction of the original hospital.
EXCEPT FOR HER own duplicity, and especially the stress she put herself in because of it, Joanna liked that all this happened. She liked that every Thursday morning there was this meeting, with these people, and it was interrupted by that phone call, with that person. That she’d floundered into such baroque deceit was surreal to her. She could barely contemplate any steps to rectify it; being disingenuous was so alien to her that part of her refused to register that it was what she was doing daily now. She’d never been a furtive person—indeed she was generally too much of an o
pen book, and her childhood custody chaos had unfolded so publicly that she was accustomed to erring on the side of public disclosure. Her conditioning had taught her secrecy meant shame, and all secrets should be exposed. So she didn’t like that part. But she loved the regularity and the structure of this life she was building, and above all, she liked the people themselves. She loved that she woke up in the morning with the mission to tell these stories about these people and places. Brian had been right. She wanted a live-in monogamous relationship with Martha’s Vineyard.
Too bad her landlord was being such a ninny.
* * *
When she got home, her arms freighted with canvas grocery bags, Hank was watching CNN and contesting a business-suited woman’s claims about single-payer health insurance. He was passionate and articulate, and could no longer blame his silence toward her on his hangover.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, managing to sound ironic. And then he said nothing else. So neither did she. He eventually resumed his debate with the television. It was a Thursday evening. If she were in New York, she’d have just spent the day on household chores and errands, and would now be about to go out with Roz and Viola, her two closest friends, to dinner and then a movie, or a play, or a concert. Every week a different restaurant somewhere in the city. Every Thursday. She’d forgotten that until this instant, and wondered what it meant that she remembered it now, so soon after confessing to herself that she wanted to set anchor here.
She put the groceries away in the pantry and refrigerator, started a load of laundry in the basement, loaded the woodstove with more logs, and then, with the talking heads of cable news as soundtrack, she fed the chickens and the cats and the birds and the grumpy invalid. She begrudged Hank not one moment of her energy, but the silence—the gruff, embarrassed, cold-shouldering silence that was only made more obvious by the television’s blathering—she could not take much more of it. When Orion texted a request for another potluck the next night, she accepted at once, and did not bother to tell Hank where she would be going. It was, she realized, a throwback to teen years under his inconsistent home rule, that she even thought she needed his permission to go out.
DINNER WAS HUMBLER this go-round: clam chowder for Joanna, hamburgers for Orion (from local cows, of course). It felt positively domestic. Following dinner, a Scrabble game on the elegant wooden board. Orion, to his overweening satisfaction, won. There was less flirtatious energy, and Joanna began to wonder if they were over the potential-romance hump, and on their way to a genuinely platonic friendship. She was disappointed at that prospect, even though she’d been in no rush for anything to evolve between them. Her life had felt in limbo and she’d been enjoying limbo with Orion too. As she was leaving, and he was standing in the door to see her off, he held up his hand.
“Before you go, I need to tell you something off the record,” he said.
She felt a dull thud in her stomach. He wasn’t looking at her.
“I thought by now it was clear everything between us is off the record,” she said.
“Everything between us is irrelevant to the record,” he corrected. “This is not. But it’s still got to be off the record. For now. Until you hear it from another source.”
That meant she wouldn’t want to hear it. “Go on,” she said and stepped back inside, pulling the door closed again against the chill.
Orion shifted his weight as if he was uncomfortable, behavior that was alien to him. He continued not looking directly at her. “The ZBA will have received a notice from my lawyer today that I have formally initiated the lawsuit.”
She checked her mental calendar. “They meet on Thursdays and today’s Friday so they might not know.”
“Well, they’ll know soon, and Curmudgeon Holmes is going to be hurling abuses on my head, and I know you’re covering that beat so you’ll hear all about it then. But it felt wrong not telling you myself.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Um. I can’t pretend I don’t have an opinion about this.”
“I realize that,” he said briskly, sounding briefly like a businessman. So this was why he hadn’t put any moves on her tonight. “But hopefully this will all get resolved pretty quickly. Then it just won’t even be an issue anymore.” He gave her a thin, polite smile.
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” she said.
He shook his head and moved slightly away from her in the vestibule, his energy kinetic and ungrounded for him. “They’ll want it all resolved before summer so it doesn’t tarnish their appeal to the summer people.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that either,” she said. “Some of them don’t care about the summer people. Some of them would actually love to give the summer folks a reason not to come.”
“Not really,” he said. “That’s just Yankee bluster. Even Henry Holmes. They want the dollars.”
She shrugged, enervated by the conversation.
“Anyhow,” he said, heaving a sigh. “I thought you should know.”
“Well, thanks,” she said. “You know I’m not happy to hear it. And you know why.”
“Yes, and I appreciate that you like me despite this reminder that I am the incarnation of everything that is despoiling your beautiful nineteenth-century sensibilities. Given those sensibilities, it’s strange you write for the Journal and not the Newes. But I know you’ll stay objective when you have to write about it,” he said. “I don’t expect preferential treatment because you like me, nor do I expect excoriation because you don’t like me.”
That last bit sounded rehearsed to her, but she simply nodded. “Agreed. Goodnight, Orion,” she said, and opened the door again. “See you after the Annual Town Meeting.”
* * *
Hank finally spoke to her for real Saturday afternoon. There was no détente or apology. He simply forgot not to speak to her, and asked if she knew where the remote was. From there it was a slippery slope for him. By dinner he had asked what was for dessert, by bedtime he had inquired how much kindling she’d split for the stove, and the next morning he started chatting gruffly at breakfast as if nothing had ever happened. And she was enough of a Yankee, herself, to let it slide. It wasn’t worth getting into.
She spent the weekend cranking out a profile about the retiring Menemsha harbormaster. Then she spent Monday morning rewriting it, after she realized she had confused her newspapers, and written it as if it were for the Newes rather than the Journal.
Tuesday morning, Hank learned about Orion’s letter.
She was never clear how this happened, since Hank could not leave the house and would have had no reason to call in to the Town Hall. Unless he was bored. Terribly, oppressively bored. All right then, yes, that would have done it.
She was reading on her bed—Love in the Time of Cholera, not for the first time—and the April chill was offset by a small space heater she’d pinched from Hank’s workshop in the basement. One of the cats was curled up against her leg.
“That asshole!” she heard him shout over the dull burr of the heater. It was loud enough that even the cat startled. Hank uttered some other colorful things, so she put down García Márquez and went, with the cat, into the main part of the house. She expected to see Hank raging at Anderson Cooper, or perhaps Wolf Blitzer. But he was glaring at a piece of paper.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Orion Smith is suing,” he said in a voice chalky with bitterness.
“You got the letter already?” she said. “But didn’t it—” And then she immediately shut up before she put her foot all the way down her throat.
“What do you mean?” he demanded, looking up at her sharply. “How did you know there’s a letter?”
She opened her lips and several generations of the syllable “um” stumbled out, before she could form a coherent thought. “I just meant, you know, the inevitable letter,” she said. “You’ve all known he was planning to sue for weeks, right? Months, even? That’s all I meant.”
“But why did you say
already?” pressed Hank. “What did you know about it?”
“Did I say already?” she asked, feeling herself turn pink. “I don’t know why I said that. It was just a word that came out of my mouth.” She felt as if she were a drone moving smoothly over the person of Joanna Howes, imagining what it might be like to be her—but not quite actually being her. Just listening to her.
Hank decided to accept this. He returned his attention to the letter. “Asshole,” he grumbled again. “What does he think is going to happen?” He wasn’t talking to her. He wasn’t even talking at her. He was monologuing. He was pleased to have an audience but he’d have been just as happy to rehearse in solitude, or for the cats. She felt herself return to her body as he boomed ahead: “I mean even if he were to win this lawsuit—which isn’t going to happen, it’s an absolutely open-and-shut case—but even if he did win it, it would be meaningless because the FAA would probably shut him down. It is a gratuitous waste of taxpayer money.”
“Well, at least it gives you something to do with your spare time,” she said, hoping she sounded jovial and teasing.
He gave her an incredulous look. “No it doesn’t,” he said. “I’m not the defense attorney. I’m not on the Board of Selectmen. I’m the ZBA. I’m Exhibit A in the lawsuit. That’s all. My job is just to show up and sit in the audience and look stoic, and say no comment when the papers ask for details.”
“I promise not to ask for details,” she said quickly.
“Oh, Jesus, that’s right,” he said, with an irritated sigh. As if he’d been on the ZBA first, and she’d come along and gratuitously gotten herself assigned to write about him. “Don’t ask for details. Of me. Of anyone. He must be doing this to get attention. Don’t let him have any. Don’t give him any press.”
“Not my call,” she said.
“Of course it is. Don’t abrogate your responsibility of decent journalism. Tell Everett you refuse to write about him because there’s nothing of substance to say. The Newes has got it right this once, not the Journal—ignore the bastard. What an ignorant jerk. Why does God put people like that on the planet?”
On the Same Page Page 18