Summerland: A Novel (19 page)

He had intended this as a playful poke—though sure, maybe he was a little angry that she was leaving, maybe he was a little jealous that even though he’d played the male lead, Danny, the only performer whom anyone had cared about hearing was Penny. She had received rousing standing ovations all four nights. Maybe he was a little annoyed that she treated her vocal cords like the Hope Diamond. Penny hissed at him, then stormed up the stairs. Jake looked after her and thought, Should I follow her? But his beer was cold and his favorite song was playing and Winnie Potts called out, “Jake Randolph, get over here!” And so he watched Penny go.

One o’clock in the morning found him still there, the last party guest. He was too drunk to drive home, which was okay because he had twenty bucks for cab fare; all he had to do was call for a ride. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Coach’s Cab, but Coach said it would be twenty minutes.

“Twenty minutes,” Jake told Winnie.

“ ’Kay,” Winnie said. She was lying across the sofa, wearing a pair of cutoff shorts and a white tank top that barely contained her enormous breasts. Winnie Potts’s breasts were a legend at
Nantucket High School and probably accounted in no small part for her being cast as Rizzo. Jake knew she hadn’t been dressed in that outfit earlier, but when exactly had she changed? And where had everyone else gone? They’d left, but had they driven, or had some of their parents come down to the Pottses’ basement? Jake lived in fear of his classmates’ parents seeing him drunk. He had a sterling reputation among the faculty and the administrators at school and in the community as a whole, and he wanted to keep it that way.

Winnie said, “Come here.”

“I am here,” Jake said. He was lounging sideways in a club chair.

“To the sofa,” Winnie said. She scooted over a fraction of an inch as if to make room for him, and her breasts bounced a little. Penny’s breasts were like a child’s, almost nonexistent. She complained about this sometimes, but Jake reassured her that he liked her just the way she was. Now, though, he was finding something arousing about the sight of Winnie’s breasts under the skimpy tank top. He could see the outline of her nipples, dark and as big as quarters. Winnie wasn’t as pretty as Penny, nor half as talented, but she had something—a gravelly voice, a sense of humor, a sense of lawlessness—that Jake had always been attracted to. He was attracted to it now. Should he go over to the sofa? If he went to the sofa, he knew what would happen.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m too drunk to move.”

The next thing he knew, Winnie was rising. She was kneeling down in front of his chair. Her breasts were right there in front of him, they were buoyant. She kissed him on the mouth, then there was tongue, then his hands found her breasts. They were soft. He wasn’t sure what to do with them. He felt Winnie’s hand on his fly, and he was instantly hard, harder than he could remember ever having been before, which he attributed to how wrong this was, how derelict. He pushed Winnie away, he got to his feet and
adjusted himself—his dick was throbbing—and he stumbled to the basement stairs. Up and out into the night air, just as the cab pulled in to the driveway. Thank God.

He told no one about this. He played it cool with Winnie, he thought, acting completely normal. She was distant and pissy; he pretended not to notice. Every time he saw her, he was with Penny. At Patrick Loom’s graduation party, she came up to them and said, “So how’s the perfect couple?” in a way that was utterly mocking, but Penny treated this as a compliment and said sweetly, “We’re fine.” Winnie was also at the party at Steps Beach. She was hanging on to Anders Peashway; she was always hanging on to one guy or another, and probably always would be. Jake could hardly have been the first guy to blow her off, yet at Steps Beach she kept giving him a look—which was meant to say
what?
he wondered. He wanted to know if she’d told anybody about what had happened between them. He was desperately praying that she’d written it off, as he had, as a drunken fiasco best forgotten. But he suspected that Winnie Potts wasn’t the kind of girl who could keep her mouth shut.

Now, sitting across from his father, Jake took a deep breath. “I don’t know what Demeter said.”

“Well, did you ask her?”

Yes, he had asked her. It had taken him eleven attempts to get her to talk to him—she’d ignored his calls to her cell phone and his texts, and pretended to be asleep when he showed up at her house. It was only two nights before he and his parents were to leave that his cell phone finally lit up with Demeter’s number.

“Hey,” he said, as kindly as he could. Demeter was touchy, but he knew she could be won over. “How are you doing? I’ve been worried about you.”

“Me?” Demeter said.

“Yeah. Are you okay?”

“Not really,” she said. She either laughed or hiccupped, and
Jake realized she was drunk. He didn’t like to be judgmental about people, and especially not about Demeter, because he knew her life was difficult, but he did think that she was probably an alcoholic. Already, at seventeen.

“Me either,” he said. “I keep thinking about the accident.”

“I’ve blocked it out,” Demeter said. “They tell me I was in shock.”

“But you remember stuff from before the accident, right?” Jake said. “You remember being at the party?”

“I remember working the tap,” Demeter said. “After that it all gets blurry.”

“Really?” Jake said. “Because…”

“Really,” Demeter said.

“Do you remember going into the dunes with Penny? I think you guys were going to pee?”

“That’s where I sort of blank out,” Demeter said.

Convenient, Jake thought. “You didn’t say anything to Penny in the dunes?”

“We must have talked a little bit,” Demeter said. “But I don’t remember what about.”

“Really?” Jake said. “Because she was pretty upset when she got back to the car.”

“Was she?” Demeter said. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember Penny being
upset?
” he asked. “You don’t remember Penny ripping the keys out of my hand, you don’t remember her screaming, you don’t remember her leaving burnt rubber on Cliff Road?”

“No,” Demeter said. “I mean, I remember the speed. I remember going fast and being excited about it at first. I remember being scared. She could have killed us, you know.”

Jake swallowed. He said, “By any chance, was Winnie Potts in the dunes with you guys? Do you remember?”

There was a long pause. Then Demeter said, “Yes, actually I think she was.”

“I asked her,” Jake said to his father now. He threw back his short black all at once, like John Wayne with a shot of whiskey. “But she couldn’t help me.”

I
t was embarrassing for her now to think about how
blessed
her life had been before. The things she had taken for granted mocked her. She had known hardship, certainly—Hobson senior had dropped dead, she had been left to raise the twins alone—but for the most part Zoe considered herself lucky.

She had grown up the only child of older parents. Zoe had been an accident, born after her mother believed herself to be beyond conceiving. Her parents were professional, urbane, and erudite: her father had worked on Wall Street for years before opening his own brokerage firm in Stamford, Connecticut, and her mother was a vice president at Mount Sinai Hospital, a job she was unwilling to give up after her daughter was born.

Zoe had been raised by a string of beautiful blond au pairs who lived on the third floor of their stone mansion in Old Greenwich and who accompanied the family on vacations so that Zoe’s parents could dance the night away in the ballrooms of cruise ships. Their names remained with Zoe—Elsa, Pleune, Dagmar—though the girls themselves were interchangeable. Zoe had learned about nearly everything from these girls, including how to ride a two-wheeler, how to swim the backstroke, how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano, how to apply mascara to her lower lashes, and, later, how to roll her own cigarettes and tie the stem of a maraschino cherry into a knot with her tongue.

At fourteen Zoe had been sent out into the world—to Miss Porter’s, where her natural abilities got her decent grades but where she couldn’t summon the ambition to battle it out for the top ranks. She was happier being known as mellow and laid-back, a bohemian, a connoisseur of the Grateful Dead and CSNY and the Band. She wore long silk broomstick skirts or the batik sarong that her parents had sent back to her from their holiday in Bali. Zoe let her hairstyle get dangerously close to dreadlocks, inviting a firm talking-to by school administrators. She had her left ear pierced three times and got a tattoo of a dancing bear on her hip bone. While her mother never learned about the tattoo, the words of Zoe’s roommate Julia Lavelle, a straitlaced girl who wouldn’t even deign to watch
Life of Brian
in the commons room on a Saturday night, would later come back to haunt her: “That tattoo is going to be with you for the rest of your life, you know, and it might not seem so cool in thirty years.” Julia Lavelle had been correct: the rainbow-colored bear still graced her hip, and though the men she had been with—Jordan being the most vocal among them—claimed to find it cute, to Zoe herself it now seemed sorely ridiculous.

The summer between her junior and senior years of high school, Zoe’s parents took her to Italy for a month. Zoe had thought about declining this invitation, asking for the money instead, and following the Dead through the American Southwest and California. But the idea of actually spending time with her parents was novel enough to be intriguing.

And sure enough, that month in Italy had changed Zoe’s life. Her parents treated her like an adult. Her mother, using the lightest touch, suggested a haircut in Rome, and the result was a layered style that, unlike the tattoo, had weathered the test of time. Zoe selected an Italian perfume to replace her patchouli; she bought suede Fratelli Rosetti boots and retired her Birkenstocks. Her new look got immediate results. One night at a trattoria in
Trastevere, Zoe met an American graduate student in art history named Alex, who invited her to share a bottle of wine and a plate of fried artichokes with him. Zoe lied and told him she was a sophomore at Vassar. She lost her virginity to Alex (last name unknown, a source of minor embarrassment now) in a studio apartment in the shadow of the Vatican. She walked past Saint Peter’s Square and back to her hotel at two o’clock in the morning, feeling as if she had just conquered the free world. Alex’s body had been as smooth as the surface of a Bernini sculpture.

The only thing that would have made it better, she thought, was if Alex had been Italian.

Next time.

But for Zoe, the most important aspect of Italy was this: it was there that she discovered food. This happened in a tiny restaurant in Ravenna, where she and her parents had traveled to see the Basilica of San Francesco, the site of Dante’s funeral. One of Zoe’s father’s impossibly sophisticated friends had recommended a restaurant to them, a place with just fourteen seats, where the wife cooked and the husband waited on tables. Zoe ate squid ink ravioli stuffed with fresh ricotta in a truffled cream sauce, grilled langostini, and crema calda with wild strawberries. Her parents poured her wine on the implicit understanding that she was to drink it not to get drunk but to enhance the pleasure of the food.

God, yes! Zoe thought with each mouthful. Ecstasy! Better than the sex she had so recently been introduced to by Alex Last-name-unknown. The meal was transcendent. Her parents enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the epiphany for them that it was for their daughter. They had tasted food like this before. For Zoe, it was like the sun’s coming up. Before they left the restaurant, Zoe peered into the kitchen at the wife/chef. Her hair was in a tight bun like a ballerina’s; her eyes were narrowed in concentration as she flipped mushrooms in a sauté pan. Zoe could hear opera playing in the
kitchen, and she saw that the woman’s lips were moving. Yes! Zoe thought. Yes!

Zoe’s parents had no qualms about sending her to the Culinary Institute. True, it wasn’t Vassar (where her mother had gone) or Penn (where Julia Lavelle was headed); around Miss Porter’s, it had the whiff of a vocational school. But her parents recognized Zoe’s passion for food, and to their minds, her becoming a chef was preferable to her joining a nudist colony or moving to Haight-Ashbury to volunteer for some left-wing cause they’d never even heard of.

The CIA had led Zoe not only to her career as a chef but also, of course, to Hobson senior, who had in short order made her a mother. She had endured some dark, dark times: Hobson’s death, the deaths of both her parents, the harrowing challenge of raising two children by herself. But at some point—when the kids were seven or eight—Zoe began to feel as if she had emerged from a tunnel. She thought, The hard stuff is behind me now. She thought, I have a good job, a house on the beach, a group of close friends to do fun things with, and two exceptional kids. She didn’t have love, but that seemed okay, maybe even preferable. The kids were her love life. And she maintained her freedom.

And so, how how
how
could she explain Jordan?

They had been friends for years and years, and yet now Zoe found it hard to recall a time when they were just friends.

She had spent her first years on Nantucket living in a bubble. She had taken the job with the Allencast family and enrolled the kids at Island Day Care. Zoe met a few other working parents while picking up and dropping off Penny and Hobby, but they were all of them so busy that their interactions remained superficial. Zoe frequently worked weekends, when she hired a babysitter. She always had Mondays off, but on Mondays the rest of the world worked; it wasn’t easy to forge a social life on Mondays
alone. Zoe tried to get out. Her first year on-island, she attended Town Meeting and marveled at how everyone in the high school auditorium knew everyone else, friendships that clearly spanned centuries. This was one of those times when Zoe wished she’d moved to a less insular community, maybe a city, someplace with single mothers in abundance. But it was at this very Town Meeting that Zoe first laid eyes on Jordan Randolph. He was presenting an article, wearing suit pants and a crisp striped shirt and an elegant leather-banded watch—all of which screamed
lawyer
to Zoe, though she liked his curly black hair that grew past his collar, and also his rimless glasses. She asked the woman sitting next to her, “Who is that?” Zoe could still remember the look of wariness that came over the woman’s face. Zoe had revealed herself as an interloper, from Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps, or beyond.