The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  “Nothing. You remind me of someone, that’s all.”

  He threw the stone—a decent toss, four or five skips—and picked up another one. “Now you tell me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did you come back? And don’t tell me you were bored or between films or anything like that.”

  “I was bored,” I said. “I was between films.”

  He threw the stone, but it didn’t take. Sank without a trace at the second bounce. Hugh swore and shook his head, staring at the black, lapping sea, hands on hips. When he turned back to me, he was grinning from one side of his mouth. “So maybe you’ve come back to save us, have you? Stir up the pot? Get Mom and Isobel to put on their glad rags and have dinner at the Club? Hire a few builders to patch up Greyfriars and throw a great big party?”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “But it’s not the real reason, is it?”

  “Maybe I just wanted to see you. Maybe I wanted to visit my mother and sister and brother, after all these years. Heal the wounds.”

  “That’s a nice story,” he said, “but I’m not buying it. Why this summer, of all summers? Was it Vargas?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It’s true. I didn’t find out about—I didn’t know he’d escaped until after I’d—after I’d decided to leave England.”

  “So what was it? What’s the tale, nightingale?”

  I opened my mouth to make some snappy remark, some denial of the obvious, but his face was absolutely earnest as he looked down at me, like the face of a thirty year old, and I remembered he had no father. He was a boy with no father who stood on the edge of manhood, and this was something we shared. The two of us, we knew how that void in your heart, that father-shaped hole, might lead you down paths of terrible sorrow, in search of something to fill it.

  “Okay, I know it’s not the Winthrop way,” he said. “We don’t ask questions. We pretend everything’s just fine and then drink ourselves to death. Or get murdered by the son of the lighthouse keeper, for some reason nobody on this damned Island is ever going to talk about.”

  I put my arms around my brother’s back and drew him close, and I felt the comfort of his own arms around my waist, holding me there. The beat of his enormous heart. He smelled of cigarettes and soap and green youth, of everything lost. When I opened my eyes again, the sea lay before me, over the crest of his shoulder. I thought, if I tried, I could peer across the tip of Long Island and see all the way to England.

  “I came because I lost a baby,” I said.

  The jolt of shock went right through his middle. I had to clamp my arms to keep him from jumping apart.

  “Oh, sis. Oh my God. When?”

  “In the accident. I was about six months along. They couldn’t save her.”

  “Her,” said Hugh. “It was a girl. Jeez, my niece.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what about your husband? Why isn’t he here with you?” Hugh loosened his arms and pulled away to look down at me, and this time I let him. “My God, he does know about it, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he knows about it,” I said. “He was driving the car.”

  10.

  Naturally I didn’t tell him the whole story. How could I tell him everything, a boy like that? I mean, there were no words anyway, no possible means to express the details of that awful night, the quantity of vodka Carroll had drunk, the vile things he had said to me. Besides, why should Hugh believe me? As far as anyone else knew, Carroll was a man of urbanity, of sophisticated reserve, a gentleman, a genius. Certainly not a man given to fits of rage and jealousy, given to consuming, on an almost nightly basis, a favored, potent mixture of barbiturates and vodka to keep what he was pleased to call his demons at bay. His demons. As if they were something outside himself, something that did not belong to him, but instead tormented the poor, suffering genius and made him do things, Miranda, made him do things he would not ordinarily do. Terrible things, of course, but not things he had himself committed. It was the demons, Miranda.

  Oh, those demons. Those demons who flew from the netherworld in such power and strength, who assumed control of Carroll Goring’s body back in April, for example, when we went for drinks to the Mayfair flat of his dear friend Victor. Victor, you see, was celebrating the Academy Award he’d just won for Carroll’s film The Paradox—Best Actor, as you might recall—for which Carroll had also been nominated for Best Director and lost. (Carroll Goring, as you might also recall—the press certainly makes hay of it, in every article and interview—has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and never taken home the statuette.) Now, Carroll himself was deeply happy for Victor—they share a long and complicated history, Carroll and Victor, having once been lovers—but the demons, I understand, were not pleased at all. The demons saw me sitting on the sofa with Victor toward the end of the evening, enjoying a laugh, and decided that Victor must be the father of my unborn child, not Carroll. After all, Carroll had undergone a vasectomy ten years ago, just before we were married, and therefore there was no possibility whatsoever that he had fathered my child, was there? It must be Victor.

  There was a terrible fight. A row, as Englishmen call it. Victor went to call the police, and Carroll locked the door to the library and forced me on the sofa and pulled up my dress. I told him no and pushed him off and ran for the door, but he caught me and slammed me on my stomach over the sofa arm. The violence of it shocked me. He had never struck me before; his weapons of choice had, until that moment, been words.

  He didn’t actually penetrate me. I don’t think he could manage any sort of erection, any genuine sexual arousal, because he’d had too much to drink, too many pills. But his powerlessness only made him more determined to hurt me. I knew at once that something was wrong, that the brutality with which he rammed and rammed, pounding me against the sofa arm in a fruitless pantomime, had done some irreparable damage. I remember trying not to scream, though he seemed to go on forever in a paroxysm of frustration, though the tears ran down my face and onto the dark, stained leather of Victor’s sofa. Even now, the smell of leather starts a panic inside me.

  At last he gave up and hauled me downstairs to the empty lobby and out through the service entrance. I didn’t make a fuss because of the police, you see, the newspapers and their vicious columns, and because I was so shocked and so battered, so utterly without strength after a difficult pregnancy. I thought I’d let him take me home and then when he was asleep at last, knocked out by his pills and his vodka and his demons, I would actually leave him this time. He had crossed a final, uncrossable line, and I would pack my things and go before he woke up.

  The car was parked on the corner of Curzon Street. The air was damp and full of fine drizzle that choked me as I tried to hold back my sobs. Carroll made sure no one was looking—it was two o’clock in the morning—before he threw me in the car and told me more vile things, what a cheap whore I was, how I owed him everything, how I was a fraud, a bimbo with no talent, how he was going to tell the world what I’d done. I kept silent as we swerved around the empty London streets, because I was in terrible pain by now, my insides cramped and cramped, I simply thought I was going to die, there was no point in arguing.

  Instead of driving to our flat in Kensington, Carroll headed straight out of London toward Bath, where we had a country house, keeping up a manic simmering of bile. He described every film we had made together and each specific instance in which I had disappointed him, each scene I had ruined, so that his failure to win those Academy Awards was really my fault, the sacrifice he had made for my sake, and look how I had repaid him. I knew he hadn’t wanted a child—he’d made that clear from the beginning—and I had gone out anyway and slept with Victor, hadn’t I, gotten myself pregnant by Victor, admit it, Miranda, just admit it, for God’s sake! GOD DAMN IT, MIRANDA! ADMIT THAT YOU FUCKED MY FRIEND! ADMIT YOU’RE CARRYING HIS CHILD, YOU BLOODY TART, YOU FUCKING WHORE!

&nb
sp; By then, I think I was almost delirious with pain. I would have said anything to make him stop.

  All right, I screamed back. I admit it. I slept with Victor, I was pregnant by Victor. We started an affair right under your nose during the filming of The Paradox, we carried on right through the premiere and the promotion and the week in Los Angeles for the Oscars, we fucked two or three times a day, he was insatiable, he was magnificent, he was a god.

  Carroll jerked the wheel once, and we careened right off the Bath Road and into a tree. When I woke up, I was in hospital, in a white, dreary room in the middle of Wiltshire, and the baby was dead. Carroll, of course, was unharmed and full of remorse. The demons had done it, he said, weeping in my lap. It was the demons.

  11.

  So you see what I mean, how I couldn’t tell my green seventeen-year-old brother about these things. Instead we lay on the beach, side by side, and stared up at the dainty stars without speaking. The tide came and went. At one point I rose and clasped my knees, and I thought I saw the white flash of a sail on the horizon. But when I stood up and ran to the edge of the water, it was gone.

  The house was dark by the time we returned, and as I crept up the back stairs I couldn’t see the shabbiness, the peeling paint and missing bulbs, and I realized that without these signs of decay, Greyfriars felt just the same as it had before, smelled exactly the same. I had the sudden, unnerving conviction that I had traveled through time, that I was creeping up those same stairs as a guilty seventeen-year-old virgin, afraid of being found out for my transgressions. Then I heard the creak of Hugh’s footsteps behind me, and the present world returned, my husband, my dead child, the weight of every year that had passed since I first saw Joseph Vargas dive into the water from his lobster boat and save a man from drowning.

  We whispered good night on the landing and I slipped into my old bedroom, the one I shared with Brigitte, who snored quietly from her bed. On the window seat was a bowl of roses, the same June roses I had found on my lounge chair that morning, and I went on my knees and stared at them, and the lighthouse that grew between the small, pink buds.

  July

  1930 (Bianca Medeiro)

  1.

  On the Fourth of July, in the middle of a tremendous display of fireworks on the lawn, old Mr. Fisher dies.

  Bianca hears the story over breakfast the next morning from her cousin Manuelo, who heard it from one of the Fisher housemaids, who’s sweet on him. He collapsed with some kind of heart attack, apparently, and because of the darkness, nobody even noticed until after the fireworks were exhausted and the party began to file inside. His wife found him first and began to scream for a doctor, and luckily there was a doctor among that crowd of people, but he came too late. Old Mr. Fisher was already gone.

  Nobody sees Bianca’s face as Manuelo relates this information, between bites of Tia Maria’s good sweet bread. Nobody notices how the blood falls away from her cheeks, and her lips part in agony. When she rises from the table and begins to clear the plates, hastily and without sound, nobody bothers to thank her.

  And nobody pays any attention when she slips out the back door afterward and runs along the warm, empty streets toward West Cliff Road.

  2.

  She finds him in the swimming pool, slicing up and down the clear blue rectangle in a businesslike way, like Johnny Weissmuller. She calls his name several times before he interrupts his movements and spins, startled, searching for the source of her voice.

  “Here,” she says. “In the boxwoods.”

  “Well, come on out.”

  “Won’t they see me?”

  “Mama’s had enough pills to knock out a racehorse. And the housemaids won’t tell, believe me.”

  Bianca steps free of the bush and stands, quivering a little, on the terrace that surrounds the pool. The sun’s already met the surface, paved in genteel Connecticut bluestone, and its warmth seeps through the soles of her shoes.

  Hugh holds out his arms. “Come swimming with me.”

  She shakes her head. “Can’t swim.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  She steps closer. “I’m awfully sorry about your father. I only just heard.”

  He turns and launches himself back down the length of the pool, but this time he finds the ladder at the end and hoists himself out. He’s wearing the latest style of bathing suit, snug and brief, and his chest runs with water. Bianca spins away and starts to cross herself, but before she even touches her right shoulder, her hand falls away to her side.

  “Drink?” says Hugh.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on. There’s plenty. Why are you standing like that?”

  Bianca feels like a fool and turns. On the other side of the pool, Hugh stands next to a table topped with glass, pouring a drink from a pitcher. No—two drinks, clear as water, into which he drops a pair of lemon slices from a small bowl of cut glass. The sun strikes his shoulders, making them glisten. His hair is sleek and disordered from the water. A small breeze wanders in from the south, smelling of brine, which Bianca inhales in shallow, cautious breaths, as if the air itself contains the raw ingredients of this new mood that shimmers between them. Something is coming to her, some momentous fate. She can feel its approach like a giant wave, like a thunderstorm tearing across the sky to engulf her.

  “Well, come here, then.” Hugh straightens from the table. “I’m not going to bite you, am I?”

  Strange that he tacked on that question at the end of his declaration, she thinks, but she walks obediently around the end of the pool anyway, conscious of her thin, cheap dress and worn sandals. She stops a couple of yards away, just out of reach, relying on her rigid spine to keep her upright in the face of all that impossible glamour.

  He holds out one of the glasses. “Here you are. My special recipe.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I shouldn’t.”

  “Yes you should.” He waggles the glass, making the ice clink. “I’m in grief, little one. You’ve got to go along with my whims.”

  Bianca reaches out and snatches the glass. In her haste, she spills the contents over her fingers. She lifts her hand and sucks the drops from her skin, and while of course she’s not exactly expecting water—she’s not that innocent—the pungency of it, the sharpness, still stuns her.

  Hugh observes her actions with a steady, attentive expression. He holds up his own glass. “To the old man, may he rot in Hades.”

  “Oh no!” exclaims Bianca.

  “What’s this? Shocked you, have I? Sweet little one. Sweet Bianca. She knows no evil, does she? God protect her darling heart.” He raises the glass again, a little higher this time. “Let’s try again. To my dear, departed pater. May his soul—now, let me think—may his soul find the eternal reward it so richly deserves. Amen.”

  His beautiful blue eyes are a little wild, a little pink, and Bianca hesitates.

  “Little one,” he says, more softly, “it’s just gin. It’s not going to hurt you, you know. Nothing could hurt you.”

  She steps forward and gently meets his glass with her own, and she waits until he drinks before she lifts the rim to her lips and sips. The earlier taste has acclimatized her tongue, however, and it’s not quite so powerful as she fears. She tries again, more deeply, and this time notices the flavor, and the peculiar fragrance of the fumes, the scent of juniper berries, and the way the gin burns down her throat and numbs the contours of her brain.

  Hugh holds himself still, watching her. “What a beauty you are, Bianca. A fresh, marvelous, hypnotic beauty. Your face amazes me every time I see you. Have I ever told you that?”

  “Many times.”

  “Many times, Hugh. Say my name.”

  “Many times, Hugh.”

  “That’s better. You say it so well.” He drinks again and takes her hand. “Let’s sit down together.”

  He leads her to the edge of the pool and kneels to remove her sandals, one by one. His t
ouch is so cool and so delicate, Bianca shivers in pleasure. When he’s done, he sits, dangling his legs into the water, and tugs her down beside him, not quite close enough to touch, though he keeps her hand in his.

  “How old were you when you lost your parents, little one?” he asks.

  “I was three. I don’t even remember them.”

  “It was a plague of some kind, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, the typhoid. I had it too, but I survived. So they sent me to live with Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo, and a year later we came to America, and—” She shrugs her shoulders, because that’s all there is to tell, really. She has scarcely any memories of Portugal, just heat and dryness and pungent, spicy air, of a wide, blue ocean and people of tremendous size. Of course, their great size was only relative to her own childlike frame, but still she has this idea of Portugal as a land of giants.

  “Maybe you’re lucky,” says Hugh. “Maybe you never had the chance to learn that your parents were human beings instead of gods.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about them. Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo are like mother and father to me.”

  “They’re good to you?”

  “Very good,” she says swiftly, firmly.

  He lifts her hand and kisses it. “I’m glad to hear that. I won’t have my little one mistreated by anybody.”

  Bianca keeps absolutely still. She knows she ought to be saying something comforting just now, but she can’t imagine what. He’s lost his father, in sudden and terrible circumstances, but Hugh and his father did not share some simple, uncomplicated filial love of the kind she understands. Underneath his skin, he’s teeming with the desire to tell her all about it—she can feel this desire, she can sense the awful words roiling in his throat—and she doesn’t want to hear them. But she must. If Hugh bears any burden, however grotesque, she must share it with him. It’s the only way, when you love someone. You must find whatever ugliness there exists within him and have the courage to extract it, like a bad tooth, or if it cannot be extracted to actually journey inside him and gather this ugliness in your arms for metamorphosis, by the strength and the purity of your love to make him beautiful again. This she believes with all her heart.