The Summer Wives_A Novel Page 22

  I stared down at the glass on the floor, half empty or half full or whatever it was. Both at once. I picked it up and said, “He will be. I thought it was best to give him some time to himself. I’ll speak to him in the morning.” And I finished off the rest of my Buzz Aldrin in one gulp.

  “Don’t tell Isobel,” Clay said. “She thinks the sun rises and sets on that boy.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “She’d never forgive me.”

  “Wouldn’t she? You’ve done everything for Hugh, and it’s all for Isobel’s sake, isn’t it? It was all for her.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You know Isobel. It’s all or nothing. The way she changed after that night—the way everything changed.”

  “Oh, Clay. Things change anyway. You try to keep everything the same around here, fixed in amber, but it’s no use. You can’t stop the tide.”

  “The world,” Clay said. “The fucking world. Spinning out of control. Everything—everything changes—even the Island—and you try to grab something, and it just—it just—it disappears in your hand.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t know what to believe in anymore.”

  “There’s plenty to believe in.”

  “We’re irrelevant. Fishers and Monks and Dumonts, we used to be kings, we built the country, we fought a goddamned war, and now—and now—I don’t even know who the kings are anymore. Not us.” He nodded at the television. “Fellows who can put a man on the moon, I guess.”

  I stood up. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

  Clay checked his watch. “You want to stay here a little longer? You’re a little the worse for wear to be out driving.”

  “No, I should get back.”

  “Then I’ll drive you.”

  “You’re as loaded as I am, brother.”

  “Then stay, Miranda. Don’t be stupid. Those cliffs—”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll drive slowly.”

  Clay set down his empty glass and walked toward me. The television flickered behind him, some reporter on scene in Houston, filled with joy. “Don’t leave,” he said.

  “Clay, I’m married.”

  “I’d say you were about as married as I am. Isn’t that right?”

  “Maybe. More or less.”

  He put his hands on my back. I saw the kiss coming, felt the weight of his vodka breath falling on my vodka breath, and I thought, I don’t want this, I should put a stop to this. But I didn’t. It just seemed easier to kiss him.

  10.

  I first met my husband at a party in Paris, where the Countess—la chère Comtesse, as they called her there—kept an apartment. It was spring, and we had been living there together for a year. The Countess said Europe was the place for me, that I was wasted on those Puritans back home—she was referring, I think, to Mount Holyoke, which had delicately required me to resign my place in its freshman class, on the grounds of my having displayed both the immoral character and the bad taste to admit publicly to spending the night with a boy, a confessed murderer—and she immediately set about broadening my mind, as she called it, and refining my style. I allowed her to do this; it was something, after all. Something to give shape to the days, to give occupation to my thoughts. For that terrible year, I was happy to be the Countess’s new toy, her doll, to be dressed and educated and placed about Paris according to her desire. At Christmas, struck by the impulse to become someone else entirely, rehearsing over and over the events of that August day on Winthrop Island, I asked her if I could take acting lessons. The idea entranced her.

  So it was not by accident, I think, that Carroll turned up at one of the Countess’s parties that April, when I had just turned nineteen and begun to grow out of my girlish roundness into a more sophisticated silhouette, elegantly draped by the Countess’s favorite couturier. Carroll was then in his middle forties, handsome and well-groomed, fresh off the success of his brilliant adaptation of the Robert Langford spy novel Night Train to Berlin and lionized everywhere. He had at least two lovers, who also attended the party that evening, spitting barbs at each other. I could hardly bring myself to speak to him, but of course he was used to stuttering starlets, and with kind condescension offered me a small part in his next film. On set, he took a tremendous interest in me one day—I still can’t determine what particular thing intrigued him, what particular spark set off his obsession—and began to develop me, as he called it. To teach me not only how to act, but how to be. (They were quite the same thing, after all, he said.) For hours and hours he coached me, sometimes late into the night. Pygmalion could not have been more devoted. My voice, my expressions, my movement, my posture; the various unconscious details of human behavior, the enormous mental concentration required to slip without friction inside the skin of another human being—all these things he coaxed lovingly to life inside me, and for that, for this career I might never have experienced without him, for this extraordinary mineral he discovered and extracted from my soul to give brilliance to my days, I shall always be grateful to Carroll Goring.

  But for all the intimacy of our friendship, for all his charisma and his genius and his famous libido, we did not so much as kiss for nearly six years. It was not until the Countess’s sudden death on New Year’s Day of 1959—a heart attack on the stairway of the Ritz Paris, sending her tumbling down to the bottom with a broken neck—left me so altogether bereft that he offered me a temporary home in the guest room of his Kensington flat. For a week, he treated me with the utmost compassion. He brought me breakfast, he presented me with small, thoughtful gifts. (Carroll Goring was far too subtle to offer jewels.) On the sixth evening, he said it would do me good to go out, to have a lovely dinner somewhere and get drunk. We went to Scott’s, of course—where else?—and left at two o’clock in the morning, having accounted for at least three bottles of vintage champagne, although I may have lost track. In the taxi, as we rounded Hyde Park Corner, Carroll leaned over and kissed me for the first time, and because I had drunk so deeply after such a long abstinence, this came as no surprise. I put my hand around the back of his neck and kissed him back.

  Upon our arrival, he led me directly into his bedroom and said he had been waiting for years to make love to me, only I hadn’t been ready until now. He asked me to take off my clothes, and by God, I was so used to taking physical direction from him, I simply obeyed. Isn’t that shameful? For a long time, he stared at me, the way he stared at a set, at a scene, deciding precisely how he was going to film it. I remember how the pupils dilated inside his blue eyes. I remember wanting to cover my breasts, my stomach, and yet at the same time I wanted him to see them, to touch them, to approve of them. I wanted desperately to belong to him, this man who had taught me how to act, how to be, who had nurtured me so carefully for so long, lest he should walk away and leave me too. When he asked me to turn around slowly, so he could inspect the curve of my back and my arse, I did. When he asked me to sit on the edge of the bed and spread my legs apart, I did. When he reached into the drawer of his bedside table, produced a condom, and asked me to unzip his trousers, I did. After that, he stopped asking. He pushed me gently back on the bed and told me to relax, told me I would enjoy intercourse very much, told me he knew from the beginning he was going to teach me how to make love, like everything else. And all this seemed, after six years acting under his masterful direction, after the death of the Countess, after three shared bottles of champagne, the most natural thing in the world.

  The next morning, as I said, I woke before Carroll and stared through the arms of a throbbing headache at his thin, straight, shining hair on the pillow, and panicked. I thought, What the hell have I done?, and the question was genuine. I did not quite remember everything that happened, just the hazy beginning when he first penetrated me, and so I was surprised, when I swung my legs out of bed and stared at the white carpet, to find two foil wrappers lying on the floor, two limp rubbers, a smear of blood disfiguring the creamy wool. I ran to the toilet and vomited. When I return
ed to the bedroom, Carroll was awake, smoking a cigarette, his thin arms crossed behind his back. His face was soft and tired. He gazed at me warmly, with genuine love, and asked how I was feeling. He said he was going to ring for a hot bath and a pot of strong, black coffee to set me right.

  And then, he said, he supposed we should get married.

  11.

  So perhaps it was inevitable that I followed Clay into the bedroom of his guesthouse overlooking the sea. They say human beings are creatures of habit, that we are wont to follow the scripts already written in our heads, the stories we have learned to believe, over and over again in the same implacable, brutal cycle, however much we long to write our own, original verses. I only replaced one lead actor with another, Carroll with Clay, but the story remained the same, the performers hit their marks. In despair, our heroine swallows poison, and reaches for some older, sturdier fellow to heal her, only to discover that she cannot absorb sturdiness through her skin, she cannot replace one person with another. She cannot actually make love by making love.

  We took off our clothes. The drizzle fell against the windows. Clay’s hands moved awkwardly against my skin, the kind of man who didn’t really understand how to touch a woman, just wanted to rub her breasts until she caught fire like a pair of sticks. I took his fingers and tried to show him, but he was too drunk to learn, and I was too drunk to have any patience, so we tumbled onto the bedspread and he climbed on top of me, lifted himself on the palms of his hands. We met for an instant, my blurry eyes and his blurry eyes, poised on some brink, and his face held the same grief it wore on that long-ago golf course, when Isobel had broken his heart. Maybe he was thinking along the same lines. “Oh God, you feel so good,” he said, and he started to weep. He rolled off, and I stared for a moment at his shuddering shoulders, the back of his head. I sat up against the pillow and laid my hand on the back of his neck, and I believe I wept, too, only without any sound or movement, just the tears.

  12.

  I drove home some time later at about five miles an hour, following the beam of the headlights. There were no other cars, thank God, everybody was home or at the Club, celebrating the genius and the daring of American manhood. I’d hardly eaten anything all day, had only picked at that courageous buffet in the Greyfriars dining room, and now the hollowness inside seemed to swallow me. The pitiless road just curved and curved, without end. To the left, I saw a familiar field, and I pulled over. Or maybe the car pulled over all on its own; it was Hugh’s Ford, after all. It knew where to go.

  Now that I think about it, I may have left the door open and the keys in the ignition. I’m pretty sure I turned off the engine. I walked slowly so I wouldn’t fall. The grass had recovered since the June mowing, and the long stalks itched my bare shins. In the darkness, I ran straight into a bush that covered my arms in scratches. If it hadn’t been for the booze, I’d have screamed in pain, but I think I hardly felt it. I don’t remember hurting, at least on the outside. When I reached the edge, where the meadow met the wet rocks that tumbled down the twelve or fifteen feet to the beach below, I stopped and went into a safe, sensible crab position. Made my way along the rocks with tremendous precision while the drizzle ran down my hair and my face. When I reached the sand, I just collapsed. Crawled forward a few paces. Rose to my feet and stumbled into the surf, which was frisky tonight, invisible under the heavy clouds and the rain, and let the cold waves wash me to the chest.

  I don’t remember thinking I should step back a little. I didn’t want to leave, even though the water chilled me, the rain choked me. I realized I was sobbing. I was thinking about the baby, and everything that had left me when my child slipped from my womb, and how I had hoped to see my father’s eyes again and now would not. I was thirty-six, I had left my husband. How could a woman start again at thirty-six? Say to herself, I want to go back to the beginning, I want to do things over, I want to have that new, shining chance back in my hands again, and this time not to break it.

  The tide, I think, was coming in. The waves were starting to overwhelm me, and I wasn’t backing down. For some reason I wasn’t backing down. I don’t know why. The instinct for self-preservation had fled. The hollowness had swallowed me. I lifted my hands above my head and closed my eyes, reaching for the moon maybe, even though that moon had set long ago, silent and invisible behind the clouds, population two. My feet left the ground. I think—I hope—I was going to swim. I think I would have swum, but I never did find out for certain, because at that moment a pair of arms enclosed me from behind.

  I didn’t resist. I allowed my body to be dragged gently from the water, floating, until we reached the sand and the arms lifted me, carried me, settled me in some hollow above the high tide, where we sat together, shivering.

  13.

  For some time, I thought it was a dream. It was the kind of thing that happened inside your head, and anyway I had stupidly drunk two glasses of Clay Monk’s secret recipe, which was mostly vodka, and I had that feeling you sometimes get when you’re drunk, which is that everything happening to you is happening to someone else, some drunk person, and you are experiencing all these sensations, the wetness of your skin, the chill of the wind, the salt in your nose, the warm slab of human flesh at your back, the arms enclosing your arms, at some remove. Like a dream.

  Also, in dreams as in drunkenness, the impossible becomes possible, becomes even ordinary, matter of course, like turkey on Thanksgiving Day. You hear the deep, familiar sound of someone’s breath in your ear, and you smell his smell, and you think, Oh, it’s you, without considering how he got there, or why, or whether it’s really him. Of course it’s him. Who else?

  For some time, I continued to shake. I sobbed and shivered together, I was a mess. The drizzle came down upon us. So great was my shuddering, I couldn’t tell if he shivered too, or whether he had grown impervious to such trifling discomforts as the cold after seventeen years in the state penitentiary, which I understood was not the kind of place you went for recreational purposes. I became aware that I sat between his knees, that he was possibly kissing the top of my head, and there seemed nothing untoward or unexpected about these facts. He said nothing, and neither did I. He didn’t ask me why I was sobbing, or what I was doing on this beach, floating on this perilous sea at midnight. He didn’t ask about my sorrow, and I didn’t ask about his.

  14.

  I woke in my own bed, sometime past nine o’clock the next morning, with a pounding headache and no memory of having arrived there. I wore a nightgown, and my hair was brushed and dry. A bowl of fresh roses sat on the nightstand. When I looked outside the front window, Hugh’s car was parked in its usual place, absorbing the sunshine.

  I went downstairs and asked Brigitte if she remembered my coming in last night and going to bed, but she said she didn’t hear a thing. Of course, she was nearly deaf.

  August

  1930 (Bianca Medeiro)

  1.

  Francisca and Tia Maria have been away all week on the mainland, shopping for Francisca’s trousseau and for the furnishing of her new home with Pascoal Vargas in the Fleet Rock lighthouse, so Bianca has indulged herself in a perilous habit. Each night, when Tio Manuelo and Laura and cousin Manuelo have gone to bed, she slips out the garden door and steals up Hemlock Street to the dark corner of West Cliff Road, where Hugh Fisher waits to lead her to Greyfriars and the small cottage built for guests.

  This cottage has lain empty most of the summer, because once the Fishers returned to the Island from the funeral and interment on Long Island, they lived quietly, in mourning, without visitors. Except Bianca. Bianca has stolen over to Greyfriars whenever she can to comfort Hugh Fisher, to ease his filial grief by the solace of her embrace, in the pool and the boathouse and summerhouse, even once in the rose garden surrounded by perfume—really, wherever they can find space and privacy, as a good wife should. She understands the strength of a man’s needs, and she loves him so much and so wholly, she wants always to give him this thing that only a wi
fe can give him, this rapture he craves so desperately. And there is rapture for her too, salve for the clamor in her young blood, in ways she has never dreamed of. Hugh has shown her how. First he showed her certain ways she might please him, and then he showed the ways in which she could be pleased by him, and since God has created man in his image, and ordained that man and woman should marry and be fruitful together, these acts of consummation are surely sacred, are they not? They are holy sacraments. This she believes with all her heart.

  And now, for this precious week, they have a real house and a real bedroom, just like any other husband and wife, and Bianca lies snug in Hugh’s arms and feels the beat of his heart enter through her back and across her bone and muscle and lungs to invade her own heart. It is four o’clock in the morning and they have made love twice already, twice he has poured his sperm into the vessel of her womb, and if history serves he will likely want to repeat this ritual a third time before she steals back down West Cliff Road to Tio Manuelo’s general store, which is not her home anymore but simply a place where she boards until Hugh can claim her as his own, as his wife before God, mistress of Greyfriars and of his own heart. It will have to be soon.

  Now Bianca’s exhausted and wants to sleep, but her nerves are too wrought. Her mind spins round and round, trying to grasp an idea that lies just outside her comprehension. Another portent, she thinks. Something new occurred between them tonight, some heightened frenzy that delighted her at first. The very moment she arrived in her best blue dress, scrubbed and curled and perfumed, Hugh swept her through the doorway, actually lifted her into the air and laid her on the edge of the bed, lifted away her dress and made love to her right there. He finished so quickly, with such shattering energy, that he lay senseless afterward, and she slipped from beneath his tranquilized limbs and went into the kitchen to make him tea, flavored with gin the way he likes it. Thus revived, he reached for her once more, and now he took his sweet time, he went on for ages, all around the cottage, the floor and sofa and window seat, the kitchen table and against the wall, every position, every which way you could fit two bodies together, perspiring freely from the vigor and the August heat, and all the bones in Bianca’s body are now flaccid, dissolving into the mattress, dissolving into Hugh and the hot, still night that surrounds them.