The Beach Club (12 page)

On Monday afternoon, Love and Arthur confirmed their plans. They would meet in front of the lobby at 7:45 the following morning and start their run.

“We’ll go where the day takes us,” Arthur said with a wink.

Go where the day takes us
. That seemed like a good way of looking at it. Love always operated with a plan, but why? Why not go with the flow, follow their noses, fly by the seats of their pants? No reason why Love had to decide in advance about having sex with Arthur Beebe. She needed to take it easy. Relax. At five o’clock, after work, Love walked home past the Hadwen House. The Hadwen House with its ballroom under the stars. Its dreams of romance.

Tuesday morning, a taxi dropped Love off at the Beach Club at 7:35. She liked being early. It gave her a few minutes to stretch her legs and look at the ocean. The 6:30 ferry was a white speck on the horizon. Love watched the seagulls drop hermit crab shells onto the parking lot. She glanced at Bill and Therese’s house and figured they were probably in bed making love, but today Love didn’t feel jealous. Today she would just be one of many lovers on Nantucket. That was all she wanted—to be another person’s focus, if only for a day, if only for a few hours. Love was honest enough with herself to realize that unless a baby was conceived, this would be the best part of the whole affair: the sweet, exquisite anticipation.

But after another ten, twelve minutes, her anticipation became tinged with nerves. Her multipurpose sports watch said 7:48. Then 7:50, and then 7:53. Love jogged back and forth in front of the hotel; she peeked in the windows of the lobby, thinking perhaps Arthur was waiting for her inside. But the inside of the lobby was dark, deserted.

At 8:00, Mack pulled into the parking lot. He was early! She hid around the corner of the lobby and waited until he unloaded the cartons of that day’s breakfast and carried them into the lobby. Then she sneaked behind the pavilion, and down the side deck rooms to the water. She jogged past the Gold Coast. A few of the guests were out on their decks reading, a woman sat on a mat doing yoga. Love ran by room 10, room 9, room 8. The door to room 8 was closed, the deck uninhabited. Love ran all the way down to room 1 and then cut behind the Gold Coast rooms. The back door to room 8 was also closed. Love returned to the front of the lobby in case she had missed Arthur somehow. She consulted her watch. It was 8:06. She shielded her eyes and peered into the lobby. Jem and Mack set up the breakfast, the coffee loiterers loitered. Tiny stood behind the front desk. But no Arthur Beebe.

A minute later, the front doors of the lobby opened. Mack lugged Therese’s plants out onto the front porch. There was no time to hide again; Mack saw her.

“Hey, Love, what are you doing here?” he said.

“I was just…running,” she said. Although she wanted to, there was no way she could ask Mack if he’d seen Arthur Beebe.

“Nice day for it,” Mack said. He was in client mode: chipper, chatty, ready to skate across any topic of conversation. She could be in tears and he wouldn’t notice.

“I’m off,” she said.

Love ran home as fast as she could. She pushed herself to go faster, faster, faster than her fastest mile split (a 5:49 in the Boulder 10k, 1988). She arrived at home winded and sweaty, her heart pounding in her throat and her face. At first she was glad Randy and Alison were away, because she certainly didn’t want anyone to witness her humiliation. But the empty house was awful too—the way the wind blew right through it—and she wished for some company.

Love waited until ten o’clock, the usual time for her first conversation with Arthur Beebe, and then she called the front desk.

Tiny answered. “Good morning, Nantucket Beach Club.”

Love cleared her throat. “Yes, is Arthur Beebe in, please?”

“I’m sorry,” Tiny said. “The Beebes are no longer staying with us.”

“No, no,” Love said. “Tiny, it’s me, Love. I think you’ve got the wrong room. The Beebes are in room eight. They’re not checking out until tomorrow.”

“Oh, Love,” Tiny said. “The chambermaids went in to clean about forty minutes ago and noticed all the Beebes’ stuff was gone. So I called the airport. The Beebes’ jet left at five o’clock this morning. They skipped out on their bill—two grand.” She gave an amused little laugh. “Happens every year. I’m always suspicious of people who don’t use a credit card, but you figure someone with his own plane is going to be able to foot the bill. But not these folks—they snuck out of here in the middle of the night, like they were on the lam or something. What’s the deal? Did you know these people? What did you want with them anyway?”

Antarctica, Love thought. Would he have been so cruel as to dash his wife off to Antarctica? She hoped not, despite the fact that right now she wanted Arthur Beebe as far away from her as possible. At five o’clock this morning, Love had been lying in bed, listening to the birds, thinking about Arthur Beebe. Had she heard a plane flying overhead? No, just the birds.

“Oh, nothing,” Love said. “I didn’t want them for anything.”

By the next morning, Love had convinced herself that she was the reason Arthur Beebe had left the hotel in the predawn hours. Perhaps his feelings for her escalated, perhaps he was frightened by their intensity. Perhaps last night at dinner (Straight Wharf), he told Mrs. Beebe about his running date with Love—and maybe she was the one responsible for their early departure. There were many excuses Love could make for the man, but it didn’t change the fact that Arthur had disappeared, literally, into thin air, taking her hopes for a child with him.

Love was folding hotel brochures, thinking of how she might surprise Arthur Beebe someday in New York when Vance poked his head out from Mack’s office.

“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

The lobby was empty and so she slipped back into Mack’s office. Mack was in the laundry room fixing a dryer.

“What?” she said.

“You know the people in room eight, the druggies? The ones who skipped their bill?” Vance said.

“The Beebes?” Love said. The name tasted funny on her tongue.

“I stripped their room yesterday and look what I found,” he said. “This ain’t no BB.” He brought his hands out from behind his back and showed Love a gun.

“You found it in their room?” Love asked. It was a handgun, shiny and silver. She tried to picture it in Arthur Beebe’s hand; she tried to picture him pointing it at someone.

“I told you they were drug dealers. Their own plane? Taking off in the middle of the night? And then I find this baby tucked in between the mattress and box spring? Come on, Love, we’re not stupid here.”

A little of this, a little of that
. “What should we do?” Love asked. “Should we call them?” A part of Love wanted to speak to Arthur Beebe again. He’d left her feeling empty. Angry and humiliated, yes, but mostly empty.

“They never left a
phone number
. Tiny searched for it yesterday, but when Bill made the reservation, all he wrote down was a fax,” Vance said. “And guess what? We can’t fax a gun.”

“We could send a fax telling them we have the gun,” Love suggested. She wanted to fax herself to Arthur Beebe.

“Tiny faxed them about their bill, and we haven’t heard back. If we had the address, we could send the gun through the mail, although you can’t send the clip and the gun together,” Vance said. Love didn’t ask how he knew this. Vance pointed the gun out the window. “Pow,” he said softly. “Listen, I’ll take care of the gun. Let me know if Beebe calls asking for it.”

“Okay,” she said. It was scary watching Vance point the gun.
Pow!

Love went back to the desk. The gun created possibilities Love hadn’t even considered. If Arthur Beebe were a drug dealer, if he did use his plane to fly back and forth between countries transporting illegal substances, then she should be glad nothing had happened between them. She should be
relieved
Arthur left. But she wasn’t.

Jem Crandall was making mistakes. He supposed his mistakes were standard, run-of-the-mill mistakes that any freshman on the job would make. What he couldn’t figure out was how to stop them from happening before he got fired. If he got fired, he might not be able to find another job. It was June already and the college students had arrived in force. If Jem couldn’t find another job, he would have to return to Virginia and work at his father’s bar, the Locked Tower, and deal with his nutty sister, Gwennie, and her bulimia. He wrote himself a note—soap on the bathroom mirror—No More Mistakes! When he shaved, it was tattooed across his forehead.

Jem’s first mistake was also the most embarrassing: Mrs. Worley. The Worleys were a heavy-set couple from Atlanta. He noticed them each morning hovering around the breakfast buffet while he tried to clear it. Once, mister followed Jem into the galley kitchen when Jem left with the platter of muffins. Mr. Worley selected the last two mixed-berry muffins, and Jem, who understood unreasonable hunger, said, “Yeah, those are my favorite, too.”

Several days later, when mister was paying his bill, Love said, “Jem, room ten is ready to be stripped. The Worleys are checking out.”

Jem licked his fingers clean of powdered sugar (he was allowed to eat the leftovers from breakfast), and said, “Okay, I’m going.”

Stripping the rooms was Jem’s least favorite part of the job. The chambermaids cracked jokes about “love stains” when they made the beds, and although Jem laughed at the term, it didn’t make him feel any better about having to gather the sheets up in his arms. And love stains weren’t as offensive as some of the things people left in the sheets. He’d seen blood, urine, used condoms, and food—globs of guacamole, a lobster claw. He was responsible for taking out the trash, and he tried not to look at what the guests threw away. One horrifying day, he found a Styrofoam head covered with a stringy brown toupee sitting on a dresser. He also collected the soiled towels, bathmat, and bathrobes from the bathroom. Another lovely task, but at least it was better than swabbing nests of hair out of the bottom of the shower.

Jem went to work on the Worleys’ room. The TV was on—ESPN SportsCenter—and Jem watched the highlights, waiting for a score on the Orioles’ game as he did his work. He threw the quilt and the blanket off the bed and stripped the sheets, trying not to think of the rotund Worleys rolling around in them. He removed the plastic bag from the trash can, twisted it and tied it. The TV announcer finally showed a clip of the Orioles’ game—and Jem thought of his father, who had a collection of Orioles memorabilia hanging behind the bar at the Tower.

Jem checked the closets for items left behind. He checked the drawers. He’d heard Vance whispering about some great thing he found in one of the rooms. Jem guessed it was lingerie, or a dirty magazine. These closets and drawers were empty, thank God.

Jem swung open the door to the bathroom and heard a loud gasp. Mrs. Worley was sitting on the toilet, reading the TV Guide. She looked at him with wide brown eyes, her mouth agape. All Jem could think at that moment was
Please don’t stand up
. But it was too late. Mrs. Worley stood, and Jem couldn’t help but look. His eyes were drawn to her lower half: her shorts drooping around her ankles, her stomach hanging like so much bread dough over her…

“Get…get!” Mrs. Worley stuttered. Her face was bright pink.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Jem said. “They said you were checking—” Mrs. Worley lunged, slammed the door in his face. A second later, he heard Mrs. Worley crying. Jem hurried out the door, leaving the trash and the pile of dirty sheets behind. He stumbled into the sunshine, feeling exposed and ashamed. He wanted to run for the safety of his rented room, lock the door, jump into his bed and hide under the covers. Instead, he sought refuge in the coolness of the laundry room, which had the soothing, clean smell of detergent. He stayed there for nearly half an hour, wondering if Mrs. Worley would report him. Jem buried his face in a pile of green fluffy towels and tried to think of other things, pleasant things—going to the Muse and drinking a cold beer, talking to a pretty girl in a sundress—but he couldn’t shake the image of Mrs. Worley, her thighs, white and dimpled like cottage cheese. It was far, far worse than even the Styrofoam head and toupee. Jem felt sick to his stomach. Then the phone rang in the laundry room. It was Mack.

When Jem walked into Mack’s office, he was still shaking. “Are they gone?” he asked.

Mack nodded, his face grim. “You’re lucky she wasn’t thinking sexual harassment, or attempted rape.”

The picture of Mrs. Worley standing up from the toilet presented itself again in Jem’s mind, as he feared it would for the rest of his life. “No way,” he said, “not in a million years.”

“A smart thing to do when you see a closed door is to
knock
,” Mack said. “Otherwise we leave ourselves open to those kinds of allegations. You don’t want that, do you?”

Jem shook his head. Mack’s face twisted, and then he burst out laughing. “You poor kid,” Mack said. “You should see yourself.”

“It was so embarrassing,” Jem said. He watched Mack laugh, and wished for some laughter from himself, a warm release, but none came. It
was
funny, in a way, wasn’t it? Jem waltzed into the bathroom with every intention of collecting the towels until—whammo! Mrs. Worley, front and center. Of course, Mack hadn’t heard Mrs. Worley scream, and he hadn’t heard her crying.

Mack sobered up and wiped his eyes. “I’m not angry,” he said. “But I am serious. Always knock before you strip the rooms. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Jem said.

“You’ll have to write Mrs. Worley a note of apology. It was your mistake.”

Jem wondered what he could possibly say to Mrs. Worley—
I’m sorry for the very awkward moment? I’m sorry to have barged in on you in the John?
He almost smiled until he heard Mack use the word “mistake.” It was then the train of thought first materialized: getting fired, working at the Locked Tower, his sister, Gwennie.

“Okay,” Jem said. “I will.”

Three days later, a very famous man checked into room 6. The man was so famous that when Jem saw him at the front desk he had a hard time keeping a straight face. Why didn’t Mack warn them people like this were coming? Jem might have worn a cleaner shirt. But the Beach Club showed no one favoritism, and so Jem led this famous man, a major player, a mogul (for if anyone in the world could be called a mogul this man was it) to room 6, as though he were anyone else. Jem could only think of the man as Mr. G. This was what he was called in the media, the same way that Donald Trump was called “the Donald.” Mr. G had brought a briefcase, and a small black Samsonite suitcase. Jem took the Samsonite. It was so light that Jem wondered if it were empty. He walked just in front of Mr. G, reciting his spiel about the chambermaids, the ice machine, the Continental breakfast from eight-thirty to ten.