The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  “Not me.” He turned his head back to me, and his expression—which a moment ago, gazing at me gazing at him, had been animated with something like hope, or longing, anyway life—had turned dull. “My mother. She’s dying, Miranda.”

  “Oh! Oh.”

  “It’s cancer, I think. She won’t see a doctor, she won’t leave Fleet Rock.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she won’t, that’s all. It doesn’t matter why. She just won’t. When Pops died, there was no one left to take care of her.”

  “What about her family? The Medeiros, don’t they care?”

  Joseph moved a few feet away, around the side of the light, and turned his back on me to gaze at the black water outside, the same tiny lights of Long Island I had observed a moment ago. “They care, in their way. But she won’t speak to them.”

  There was a hoarseness to his voice that hadn’t existed before. I wondered if he’d started smoking—a natural thing to do, one presumed, in the state penitentiary—but I couldn’t smell cigarettes, fresh or stale. So this additional timbre, this low, ragged edge must constitute some natural evolution that occurred in the years we lived apart, the way my own voice had been shaped and sculpted by Carroll and by various professional dialect specialists. The glow of the light passed across his face, and for the first time I noticed a bump on the bridge of his nose. A scar along his jaw. And yet his hand, pressed against the glass, was so gentle.

  “That was why you escaped, wasn’t it?” I said. “For her.”

  “Two more years before I went up for parole. I couldn’t wait that long. She’d be dead by then.”

  “Oh, Joseph.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t pity me. I made a choice, that’s all.” His hand loosened and dropped. “Anyway, I figured if there was one place in the world I could hide in plain sight, it was Winthrop Island.”

  “To the eternal frustration of Frank and Johnny.”

  “Frank and Johnny?”

  “The two marshals trying to catch you all summer. You do know they were watching the party, don’t you? They might have seen us.”

  “No, they didn’t. I made sure to moor outside their line of sight.”

  “You saw them?”

  Joseph glanced over his shoulder with an expression that suggested my question wasn’t worthy of an answer. “Frank and Johnny,” he said. “Nice names.”

  “If they don’t catch you tonight, they’ll catch you in the autumn,” I said. “Once the summer’s over, they can send as many agents as they want. The Coast Guard. You can’t just live here forever.”

  “I’ll be gone by autumn.”

  “Where?”

  Joseph turned and leaned back against the window, crossing his arms. “Mama can’t last much longer. Not even a week or two. Can’t get out of bed anymore, won’t eat anything. Not even soup. Wants to starve herself, I think. She just wants to die.”

  I bent my head and tried to say I was sorry. But how could you say such an inadequate thing? I wasn’t sorry. I was something else, I was so full of pity and rage I could hardly breathe.

  “What will you do?” I asked instead, leaving out the unnecessary end of the question: When she dies.

  “I’ll turn myself back in. Finish my sentence.”

  There was nowhere to sit except the bed. I crept there and sank on the ancient patchwork quilt. “But they’ll extend your sentence. They won’t let you out for parole. You might be in for life.”

  “What else was I supposed to do? She’s my mother. She hasn’t got anyone else.”

  “By her own choice!”

  “It doesn’t matter. How doesn’t matter. It’s just the way it is, Miranda. Some things you have to accept as they are.”

  I sprang back up. “No! No you don’t. You do the opposite. You fight, Joseph, for God’s sake! Don’t let them win. Isn’t that what you told me, once? Don’t let the bastards keep you down.”

  “I was a kid, Miranda. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean? Was that only about me? Because I’m Miranda Schuyler and you’re just some fisherman? Because I’ve got a right to fight and you don’t?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “I fought and I fought, Joseph. Every time I got knocked down, I rose again and I kept fighting. And now I’m here, and you’re here, and I don’t understand . . .”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why you won’t fight, too. Why you never fought for me the way I fought for you. When I loved you so—I love you—”

  Joseph turned his back on the sob that escaped me. He braced his hands on the window frame and said, “Because I loved you more.”

  “You didn’t answer a single one of my letters, not one.”

  “I kept them, though. I read them a million times. For years, the only thing that kept me sane was you.”

  Because of the grinding gears, I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him. I stood there next to the bed, staring at the back of his head, his broad back in its dark shirt. Camouflage, I guessed. For a man who moved about only in darkness.

  “And then?” I said.

  “And then I had to stop. Turned the corner and started to go crazy, thinking about you. There are just some things you can’t accept, I guess, and one of them is when the woman you love gets married to somebody else.”

  “Carroll.”

  “Don’t say his name.”

  “You have no right,” I said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “I know I’ve got no right, believe me. I wanted you to live. That was the point. But it still ripped my guts out.”

  I felt sick. I actually shook as I stood there, trying to inhale in slow, deep breaths, the way Carroll had shown me to calm my nerves. I said, “Well, it ripped my guts out, too, being married to him. If that’s any consolation.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I left him. I left him in April. That’s why I came here, so he couldn’t find me.”

  Now Joseph straightened and turned. “Why? What did he do to you?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him about the baby, about Victor’s sofa, about the tree on the Bath Road. His raw expression stopped me. “He didn’t treat me as I deserved,” I said instead. “I think it’s because he knew I didn’t really love him. Not the way he wanted to be loved.”

  It was the right answer, I thought, and also a true one. Joseph relaxed back against the window. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Because it was my fault. If it weren’t for all this, you’d never have met the bastard.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. But then I wouldn’t have made all those films, either. I wouldn’t have become what I am.”

  “Yes, you would. You’d have found a way. Anyway, if you ask me, those films weren’t worthy of you.”

  “You saw them?”

  He nodded. “Some of them. They show flicks in prison, you know. I saw Four Roads to Paradise and The Fox.”

  “Those weren’t my best.”

  “Maybe not, but I also saw Shrew.”

  “That wasn’t Carroll’s film.”

  “I noticed. I noticed you were a different woman in that one.”

  “He was so furious. He told me I was selling out, making a film for Americans, for Hollywood, but I wanted . . . it wasn’t just the script, which was wonderful . . .”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to make a movie you might see. Some way I could speak with you. That was the reason I started acting to begin with.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Yes, for you. What else? I made you a promise, didn’t I? Don’t you remember?”

  The gears ground and ground. Joseph’s face, illuminated in vast pulses by the light, was stricken. “I remember,” he said.

  “And you kept yours. Those roses—there were more than five dozen, I counted.”

  He turned his head and stared out the window. “It was a dumb thing to do, I guess.”
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br />   “You might’ve been caught.”

  “No, not that. There was no point, that’s all.”

  “They made me happy. Isn’t that enough?”

  He made a noise in his throat and leaned his palm on the window ledge. The light sent odd shadows streaking across the side of his face. For a moment, we kept vigil, waiting for something to return to us. I remember wondering what he was looking at, wondering what he was thinking, wishing he would turn his head back to me and say something, say something, before the tide went slack and the minutes ran out. But he didn’t move, and finally I opened my own mouth.

  “Joseph, can’t we just—”

  He turned then. “So promise me something else.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to promise me, if they happen to catch me before Mama dies—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But if they do. She’s got nobody else. You’re the only one I can trust. Everyone else . . .”

  He let the sentence fall. My breath came easier now, my hands steadied against my sides. The duskiness of his skin entranced me. I said, “I promise.”

  Joseph leaned back against the window frame. His head bowed. I started forward, and though the sound of my footsteps was swallowed by the noise of the mechanism, Joseph must have felt my approach. Just before I reached him, he looked up. “Don’t touch me,” he said.

  My hand, which had just risen to find his shoulder, fell back. “Why not?”

  He made a dry, sad little laugh and stepped away. “I’ll bet you can figure that out yourself.”

  “You touched me on the beach,” I said. “Last month, you held me in your arms.”

  “That was different.”

  He was staring out the window again, but I knew he wasn’t looking at anything. I felt the scintillation of his nerves, and the scintillation of mine. I moved forward without fear and laid my hand on his back. He flinched and went still.

  “Just give me one thing in return,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Not that.” I slid my hand along his shoulder and came to prop myself on the edge of the window frame, exactly to his left. I took his hand and held it in my lap. “Remember what you told me that night? Sailing off around the world?”

  “That was the old dream, Miranda.”

  “Promise me you won’t turn yourself in. Promise me you’ll take a boat—my boat, Hugh’s boat, the one I just bought from the Huxleys—and you’ll sail away from Winthrop and never come back. You’ll find some island or some village somewhere—”

  He pulled his hand away. “It’s a fantasy.”

  “Promise me.”

  “It’s not a promise I can keep, is it?”

  “Yes you can. It’s simple. If they don’t catch you before your mother dies, you won’t turn yourself in. You’ll sail off this island and never come back.”

  “Miranda—”

  “You’ve served your time! Whatever debt there is, you’ve paid it. You’ve suffered, my God.” He started to pull away, and I rose and caught him by the shoulders. I said fiercely, “Whatever happened that night, I don’t care what it was, you don’t deserve to suffer for it anymore. You deserve to live.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I deserve or don’t deserve.”

  “Damn it all! Don’t you care? Don’t you want to live?”

  Joseph pulled my fingers from his chest, where they had made fists in his shirt. “I wish I could make you a promise, Miranda. But I can’t. I’ve got nothing to give you. I’m asking you for something, and I can’t give anything back.”

  For some time, we didn’t move. We stood there absorbing the points of contact between us—my hands in his hands, our gazes laid upon each other. The heat of the room was like a crucible, was like a forge, and just as noisy. I wanted to ask if he could open a window or something, but I couldn’t seem to move my lips.

  “I’ll row you back to Greyfriars,” he said at last.

  I roused myself. “You can’t. The tide.”

  “What do you know about tides?”

  “I learned how to sail for The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” I told him.

  He started to smile. I thought about tides, how you might say that everything in life moved according to an eternal ebb and flood, ebb and flood. How famine turned to feast and back again, and dark returned to light returned to dark. I thought my own tide was turning. I thought, We are in flood again at last, we are bathed in light for this one hour. I lifted one hand and touched his cheek. He flinched and drew away, but I pulled him back. “What are you afraid of?” I said. “It’s only me.”

  “I’ve got nothing. I don’t have anything left to give you.”

  “Yourself.”

  “It’s gone. That’s all gone.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s still there. You’re still there, and I want it—I want you—”

  “Miranda—”

  “Joseph, listen to me. I didn’t have any letters, I didn’t have a photo or one thing from you. All I had was the thought of you. I had the knowledge of you. That you were there, just that you existed.”

  He leaned his face into my hand and closed his eyes. I thought how pale he must be, hiding from the sun. He had been so tanned that summer, almost brown. How I had adored the nut color of his skin, the smooth, young texture of him. All that had changed, too, but this skin was still Joseph’s skin, and Joseph lay underneath.

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “I don’t know how to touch you anymore.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Eighteen years. Eighteen years in the fucking pen. You don’t know. Things I can’t tell you.”

  “Maybe there’s things I can’t tell you, either.”

  We stood without moving. I thought, Maybe this is enough. Just to touch him. To have his waist under my hands. His heart beating a couple of inches away. In the ordinary course of things, I was supposed to forget him, this first love of mine, but I had not, and he had not. Whatever it was that connected us, it still existed. Between my chest and his chest ran some force of understanding, some kind of magnetic current that could not exist without its opposite pole.

  Joseph said my name. His hands, having left mine, had found their way to my back to rest along my spine.

  I drew his shirt from his trousers.

  He pulled the zipper of my dress.

  The bed was narrow and the room was hot. It was a relief to take off our clothes, a relief to touch Joseph’s bare skin. He was lean, my God, too lean. There was a hungry concavity to his belly, and the muscles of his chest and shoulders were hard and compact and useful, not like those of actors, just for show, the muscles I was used to. He shied from my touch, but I made him bear me anyway. I laid my fingers and my lips upon his skin until he got used to the sensation of being felt. What he really wanted was to touch me, but he didn’t dare, he stood there trembling until I actually took his hands and brought them to my belly and my breasts. I sat on the edge of the bed and he knelt to face me. The passing light lit his shoulders and shadowed his face.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he said hoarsely.

  I put my arms around his neck. “Yes, you do.”

  9.

  We lay together afterward in a damp, naked knot upon the sheets. The quilt had long since slipped to the floor. I was thirsty, and Joseph rose to bring water from the sink downstairs. I asked what was the source, and he gave me a strange look and said it was Greyfriars. A well on Greyfriars land, piped along the sea floor to Fleet Rock, because the water table was too low out here, the rock too deep and solid.

  The water gave me life. I set down the empty glass and wandered about the room, picking up books and inspecting the lamp, while Joseph lay on the bed and watched me. I loved his avid gaze, his silence. Eventually he called out to me and I returned to settle myself against him, my back to his front.

  “What if I go with you?” I said. “What if we sail off together?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?�
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  “Because you have a life. You have your films. You can’t go back to being nobody. You have to keep going.”

  I stared at the mechanism of the lamp before me. “The trouble with acting,” I said, “is that the scripts are all written by men.”

  “So what?”

  “So characters only say things, they only do things that the writers think they would do. A woman in a film, she only thinks and speaks and acts the way a man imagines she thinks and speaks and acts.”

  The light swept above us. The metallic noise of the gears rose and fell and rose again. I smelled the woolen blanket, the heat, the human perspiration. The familiar scent of Joseph’s skin, only more intimate now, more thorough.

  “Yeah,” Joseph said. “I see what you mean. Like in Four Roads to Paradise. He was posing you like a doll, it was like you weren’t even a woman. You were some man’s fantasy.”

  “I know.”

  “And Deep Blue Sea. Don’t get me wrong, you made them live and breathe. Only you could have made those girls human. But the only movie that—I don’t know, the only role that I really loved you in was Shrew.”

  “Carroll was furious with me, taking that role,” I said. “Not just because it was a big Hollywood movie. He hates that director, he hated that he took Shakespeare and made it something new. And he especially hates Kate. He hated the way I played her.”

  “Subversive. You had this rage.”

  “Yes. I had that rage.”

  “But wouldn’t the same thing happen, the other way around? Women writing scripts and directing films? You’d just have men doing things that women think they would do.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, for a change.”

  “So do it. Make your own flicks.”

  I laughed. “Oh sure. It’s that easy.”

  “None of this was easy, but you did it anyway.” He drew the hair from my temple and laid his fingers along the side of my face. “One thing’s for sure, though. You can’t do anything from a sailboat off the coast of Argentina.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Your face. Everybody knows that face. And maybe nobody’s going to rat you out on Winthrop Island, but everywhere else . . .”

  “Then I’d wear a disguise.”