The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Me either.”

  “It was the whisky. I’m so sorry. I don’t usually—well, I shouldn’t’ve—aw, damn. Are you all right?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “I’m sorry. Geez, Miranda. I’m sorry, I was so low, and you—you do look sensational—that dress—oh, Jesus Christ, what have I done? What am I thinking?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Aw, geez. Geez. Livy, of all people. I could just—God, what a heel I am. The damned whisky. I’m so sorry. I’ll walk you back, all right? I’ll find Livy and make sure she understands.”

  Understood what, exactly, he didn’t say. He didn’t say anything at all, in fact, and neither did I. He snatched up his jacket and we walked back swiftly, hot-faced, not touching, not speaking, and parted on the lawn, just outside the spill of light from the clubhouse. I think we were both shaking. Certainly I was shaking. I thought I felt the vibration of Clay’s nerves alongside mine.

  “I’ll find Isobel,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  That was all. We had kissed, my first kiss, and he had pulled down my dress and put his hand on my breast, and that was all we had to say to each other about that. I guess the groundskeepers must’ve found the whisky bottle on the sixth-hole green the next morning, but they probably found a lot of things that day. Like I said, it was a hell of a luau, a legendary party.

  8.

  I found Isobel alone, sitting on a bench in the rose garden. She stood up when she saw me, lean and disheveled, and I thought, I have just been kissing Clay Monk. I clasped my shivering hands behind my back and tried to speak.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “Home? Now?”

  “God, yes. I can’t stand it any longer. Can you?”

  “I’ll go find your mother. You’re in no condition to drive.”

  “No, don’t. I can’t face her. We’ll walk.”

  “Walk? It’s four miles!”

  “Four miles is nothing, Peaches. We could use the exercise after all that lousy suckling pig. And pineapple, Jesus. I never want to see another pineapple.”

  Well, what was I going to say? I had no more desire to face the interested gazes in the clubhouse than she did. We crossed the lawn and the flowerbeds to Winthrop Road, gray in the hazy moonlight. The air was still warm, but the breeze from the sea made me shiver. Or maybe it was my conscience that made me shiver, my conscience that woke and trembled as the shock of kissing wore away. I wrapped my arms around each other and followed the silvery bob of Isobel’s shoulder. In my mind I saw Clay Monk’s face leaning toward mine, eyes closed, and I felt sick. Our feet crunched in the gravel at the side of the road.

  “You aren’t cold, are you?” Isobel asked. “In this heat?”

  “Maybe a little. It’s the breeze.”

  “Really? I love it. I’m hot as blazes.”

  We walked another half mile or so, and Isobel stopped. “My feet are killing me,” she said.

  “Mine too.”

  “Damned sandals.” She reached down and took one off, balancing miraculously on the other foot, and then she removed the other one with a deep sigh. “Go ahead, Peaches. I won’t tell.”

  “But the gravel.”

  “We’ll walk on the grass. Come on.”

  So I took off my sandals and discovered the ecstasy of the crisp grass beneath the soles of my feet, and my skin began to warm again, and I didn’t feel quite as sick, just dizzy and tired from all those fruit-tasting rum cocktails in coconut halves. I saw Clay’s face again, but this time, just before he kissed me, he turned into Joseph. Isobel and I were walking Indian file now, and I stared at the back of her neck and thought, She’s kissed them both, she kisses them both, back and forth. How do they stand it? Do they know? Joseph knew, but did Clay? Probably he did. Probably that was why he had kissed me at the sixth hole, because of some subconscious need for revenge on Isobel. That was what the shrinks would say, wouldn’t they? Oh, a shrink would have his hands full with all of us. Me with my dead, beloved father, and Isobel with all these men who adored her, worshipped her, forgave her—

  She turned suddenly. “Let’s sit down. I’m pooped.”

  “You? Pooped?”

  “It’s been a long night, sister.”

  She threw herself on the grass and grabbed my hand to pull me with her, so we lay staring at the charcoal sky, the pale patch surrounding the moon, listening to the shrieks of a thousand crickets. A few stars glimmered through the blur. The grass still smelled of sunshine, of hay and gold.

  “Have I made a stupid mistake, Peaches?”

  “Well,” I said, “he loves you, you know. He adores you more than anything in the world.”

  “Does he love me? Or just some ideal of me? Some woman he’s made up in his imagination who happens to look like me.”

  I picked at the grass next to my leg. “No, it’s you, all right. He knows who you are. But he needs to settle down, because of the war and because of his brother—”

  “Poor Bingo.”

  “His name was Bingo?”

  “No, it was Benjamin. But everyone called him Bingo. He landed all right, but a sniper got him on one of those narrow Dutch roads. Mrs. Monk got the telegram and still went to dinner that night. Isn’t that awful? Not because she wasn’t upset, but because she was.”

  “My mother didn’t even come out of the bedroom for weeks after Daddy died.”

  “There’s the difference, you see. The difference between us and everybody else.” Her hand found mine in the grass. I felt her chest shudder through the bones of her arm and fingers. “Daddy’s going to be so upset.”

  “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m so drunk, you know.”

  “Everybody’s drunk tonight,” I said. “A real swell party.”

  “I want something, Miranda, and I don’t know what it is—I don’t know how to get it—I just know that I can’t live like them, like corpses. I haven’t even lived yet—”

  “I’d say you were doing a pretty good job of it.”

  “This? This? Oh, this is nothing. Petty rebellion.”

  “You have it in you, though.”

  “You know what my trouble is? I was born for the wrong age, Peaches. That’s it, that’s the problem. I should have been a flapper or something, and instead I happened along after they had all the fun, after they had all the adventure, and now everybody wants to settle down in nice, dull families, everybody wants to be a square, everybody but me—poor, sweet Clay—”

  “Then just go off and do something. Live. Nobody’s dragging you to the Island every summer, nobody’s forcing you to marry Clay. You can do whatever you want—”

  “But then I’d be poor. I’d be nobody.” She rolled on her side. “Don’t you see? They’ve got us trapped. We can’t live without this, it’s what makes us special. What makes us better than everybody else. We don’t like to admit it, it’s un-American to admit it, but it’s true. When you have money and prestige—especially prestige—you think you deserve it, somehow, and everybody else is just—ordinary. Nobody else matters. Why do you think Daddy married Abigail? To be one of them, to be part of their little club. He’ll be so crushed that I—”

  A noise rumbled faintly from the road, the sound of an engine. In the two miles we’d walked from the Club, we hadn’t heard or seen a single car. Most of the Families lived in the other direction; only the Fishers had bought their land and built their house so close to the business end of the Island, apart from everybody else.

  “It’s Clay,” Isobel said dully.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s Clay.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Lie still.”

  We breathed quietly against each other. I closed my eyes, as if by not seeing anything, I could not myself be seen. I whispered, “We should have worn those grass skirts after all.”

  “Why?” she whispered back.

&nb
sp; “Camouflage.”

  Isobel started to giggle. The engine roared closer, drowning out the sound of the crickets, and I thought I could smell gasoline, could smell the sultry automobile exhaust, the rubber burning against the pavement. Isobel snatched my hand and held it tight. The ground vibrated softly beneath my back. The noise grew and grew, intolerable, and the air whooshed as the great beast flew past us and slammed on its brakes in a tremendous squeal.

  “Damn,” said Isobel.

  Clay came running. “Izzy! Izzy! Oh God! God, no!”

  She sat up suddenly. “I’m just fine, darling. Just lying here with Peaches, soaking up the moonlight.”

  In the next instant, he had reached us, he had snatched up Isobel with a cry of incoherent relief.

  “I thought—I thought—saw you lying there by the road—what the hell, Izzy, what the devil were you—”

  “Hush, hush,” she said, laughing, clinging to him. “I’m all right.”

  “I’d have killed myself, Izzy, killed myself if anything happened to you.”

  “I know, darling, I know. You’re such a dear, faithful boy, and I’m so mean to you.”

  “I don’t care. I only care that you’re safe, Izzy. You can’t scare me like that, you don’t know what I thought just now—lying there by the road—if it hadn’t been for the crazy color of your dress—”

  Clay kissed her forehead and her cheeks, everywhere but her lips, and Isobel tilted back her head and just drank it in, his idolization of her, the cinematic quality of his adoration. She was smiling still, absolutely delighted with herself and with the way things had turned out, and I thought, amazed, Maybe she did it all on purpose. All of this, the whole day, the whole evening, just to amuse herself, to wake herself up, to make her feel alive.

  Without so much as a glance at me, Clay picked her up and started for the car. I don’t think he even saw me, I don’t think I made the slightest impression on his conscious mind, even though an hour earlier he had kissed me and fondled my breast and said I looked sensational. Isobel peeped over his arm and met my gaze and winked, before she slapped his chest and said, “Darling, what about Peaches?”

  He spun back, still holding her, and searched for me in the grassy moonlight. I was sitting up by now, arms clasped around my knees. “Miranda! I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

  I rose from the grass and dusted off my dress, what there was of it. “Think nothing of it,” I said.

  9.

  Clayton Monk drove a four-seater Lincoln with a hardtop roof, plain black, the kind that could go fast if the driver wanted, only the driver never did. I climbed in the back without being told and lay down promptly on the plush cloth seat that smelled of dog. Isobel nestled in front under the protection of Clay’s arm. I stared at his shoulder, bent to accommodate her, and at his worried face in the rearview mirror, which kept trying to capture my gaze and ask me, without asking, what I’d said to Isobel.

  Let him wonder.

  The rumble of the car lulled me. A minute later, my eyes turned heavy and dark, and I guess I must have fallen asleep, because I became conscious of the car having stopped, the engine having cut; of the rhythmic squeak of the seat springs, counterpointed by small, suppressed grunts. I kept my eyes closed, even though there was nothing to see. The car was dark. The squeaking came faster, faster, faster; Isobel shrieked once like a bobcat; squeaking squeaking squeaking et cetera and then nothing, just a moan from Clay that lasted only a second before it seemed to choke off in his throat, followed by an absolute, heavy silence that was thick enough to draw your name in. I waited and waited for somebody to move, somebody to say something, but they had done each other to death, it seemed.

  After what felt like a decent interval, I found the door handle with my fingers and crept out as quietly as I could, leaving the door open so they could get some fresh air, at least. When I looked up, I saw I was in the Greyfriars driveway, parked neatly by a rhododendron. The moon was still out, and instead of walking straight through the front door I went around the side, past the kitchen entrance, down the long, dark lawn toward the Greyfriars dock. Two hundred yards away, the moonlight touched the squat top of the Fleet Rock lighthouse, and the light made its lazy revolution around the sea. I made out the foam striking the rocks at the base, and the dock with its shelter for the two boats, the sailboat and the dinghy. A few lamps were lit inside, small golden specks at the bottom of the tower, and I wondered which one belonged to Joseph. Whether he was inside, and what he was doing. What his bedroom looked like. What color was his bedspread, how many pillows, what books inhabited his nightstand and his bookshelf.

  The crickets clamored around me. There was no sound from the driveway, no sign that Clay and Isobel had roused from their stupor. I thought maybe I was the only person awake on the Island. My lips felt strange and swollen from Clay’s kiss, my first kiss, and yet when I put my fingers to the seam of my mouth, there was no difference. The same old lips as always. Maybe it hadn’t happened after all; maybe I had dreamt it, maybe it was all mixed up in my half-drunk memory. I turned and found my way inside the darkened boathouse, felt the shelves with my hands until I found the flashlight. I walked back outside into the moonlight and down onto the end of the dock, where the water slapped against the pilings. I sat down at the end, exactly where Isobel and I had sat on the evening after our parents’ wedding, and held the flashlight in my lap, secured by my two hands, while my legs dangled above the water.

  1969 (Miranda Thomas)

  1.

  Most mornings, there were roses of various colors, whites and pinks and yellows and occasionally even red. I remember they were not always fragrant—each variety of rose has its own personality, you know, and some are bred for looks alone—but occasionally, like the day of the moon landing, the twentieth of July, their perfume so saturated the air, sultry and delicate all at once, I thought I was drunk. I buried my face in the middle of the bouquet, disregarding the possibility of thorns, and—as I did every morning—I looked around for some sign of my clandestine admirer. An article of clothing left behind, maybe, or a footprint or a scent left hanging in the air, or the movement of some swift body in the boxwoods.

  But I discovered no trace of another human being, except the Burbridge sisters on the lawn with their easels and oil paints, capturing the intrusion of dawn on the lighthouse.

  2.

  After swimming, I crossed the grass to the kitchen door, intending to head upstairs for a shower. Already I could hear the hammering of Donnelly’s men as they repaired the French doors from the terrace to the dining room, as they installed the new bathrooms upstairs. The landscapers were due to dig up the lawn for resodding next week, but for now the grass was still in terrible shape, choked with weeds. I picked a careful path between the pricklier sorts, and when I was about halfway to the house, I stopped and turned to the sea, where Miss Felicity and Miss Patricia still sat on their camp stools, stabbing away with their brushes. I tucked my towel a little more firmly around my head and went to them.

  “What lovely work,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Miss Felicity. Miss Patty ignored me; she was concentrating too fiercely on her art. They both wore headscarves in violent gemstone colors; to keep their hair in check, they said, when the sea breeze kicked up.

  “How long have you been painting this morning?” I asked.

  “Before dawn,” said Miss Felicity.

  “Really? How energetic of you.” I pretended to examine the canvasses, which were curiously opposite—Miss Felicity an Impressionist who favored timid pastels, and Miss Patty a hard, unforgiving realist. “I don’t suppose you happened to see anyone on the lawn this morning?” I asked. “Near the swimming pool?”

  “No, dear,” said Miss Felicity.

  “No,” snapped Miss Patty.

  I turned to leave. On the grass before me, Brigitte had just laid out her blanket to sunbathe in the nude, which she liked to do for an hour each morning after breakfast, before the sun grew too hot.r />
  “But I did see a fellow rowing away on his boat, while I set up my easel,” Miss Patty added grudgingly.

  “Did you?” said her sister. “I didn’t see any such thing.”

  “That’s because you won’t wear your spectacles. Look at that rot you’ve painted.” Miss Patty pointed a condescending brush at Miss Felicity’s efforts. “There isn’t a single line anywhere. It’s not a painting, it’s a blur.”

  “The boat,” I said. “Where did it go? Which direction?”

  “Couldn’t tell. Facing east. Lost him in the sun. Anyway . . .” Miss Patty leaned closer to her easel, drew back, leaned close again. She looked down and examined her palette.

  “Anyway what?”

  “Hmm? What?”

  “The man,” I said. “The man in the boat. You said you couldn’t tell which direction he was headed, but there was something else.”

  “Oh, nothing else. Just had the feeling he didn’t want to be seen.” She daubed her palette and resumed stabbing at the canvas, which depicted the lighthouse in a strange, harsh glow, each line appearing as if refracted in a prism.

  The towel around my head became loose. I pulled it free from my hair and stood there, staring at the dock, thinking that I must have a glass of water, I was feeling dizzy.

  “Unless it wasn’t a man,” said Miss Felicity. “Are you sure it was a man? We only have Otto here at Greyfriars. Otto and Hugh. And Leonard, but he’s a queer.”

  “Of course it wasn’t Otto. I would have said if it was Otto.”

  “What about little Hugh?”

  “It wasn’t Hugh, either. Will you be quiet, Felicity? I’m rendering the light.”

  “Rendering the light,” Miss Felicity muttered. “Rendering the light, if you will.”

  “Although now that I think of it, it might have been a woman,” said Miss Patty. “A woman in trousers. As I said, I was facing the sun.”

  3.

  When I arrived at the general store at a quarter past nine, Miss Laura was keeping the counter. She was so surprised to see me, she went so far as to raise her eyebrows a millimeter or two. She asked if I wanted a cup of coffee, and I said no, I wanted a pair of binoculars. After an instant’s consideration, I said I’d take the coffee, too.