The Beach Club (18 page)

“I’ve known her just as long as you have, but you don’t see me lying on her bed with my shirt off, now do you?” Vance asked. His fingertips dug into Mack’s shoulder blade. “How do you explain holding this woman’s hand and she’s not wearing very many clothes herself?”

Mack took a deep breath. He tried to shrug Vance off. “I wish you’d just forget about it, okay? It’s perfectly innocent.”

Vance’s nostrils flared. “You are so full of shit.”

Then Vance raised his hand. He was holding a gun.

Mack’s shoulders froze, except for the spot where Vance’s hand rested, that spot was very hot and bright. “What are you doing?” Mack said.

Vance poked Mack in the chest with the gun. Mack couldn’t move, his knees were locked. Mack was sweating; he felt the cold breeze coming off the water.

“You’re going to tell Maribel,” Vance said. His voice gurgled. “You’re going to tell Maribel what you’ve been doing or I’ll tell her for you.”

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” Mack said.

“I know what I saw,” Vance said. “I know what it looked like.”

“I already told you, that’s not how it is,” Mack said.

“You’re going to tell Maribel,” Vance said. He pressed the gun deeper into Mack’s chest. In the dim light, Vance’s skin looked purplish. “You are such an idiot. You have a gorgeous, perfect woman like Maribel and you screw around on her. Total fucking idiot.”

The nose of the gun stuck into Mack’s chest. He thought about the hot, sharp pain of taking a bullet to his heart. His heart would explode and bits and pieces of Maribel and Andrea would splatter everywhere. He
was
an idiot, thinking idiot thoughts.

“I could fire you,” Mack said.

“I could fire
you
,” Vance said. “No dating the guests, remember? Not only breaking the rules, but showing yourself to be the hypocrite I always knew you were.”

“But you have a gun,” Mack said.

“That’s right,” Vance said. “I have a gun. And so I have a choice. I can fire you or I can kill you. Or I can hope you act smart and go home and tell Maribel that you’ve been in another woman’s bed tonight.”

Mack’s mouth was dry. “Why are you threatening me? We work together. We’ve worked together since the beginning. We’re, I don’t know, buddies. Aren’t we?”

Vance laughed, a sharp bark. “You have no idea how much I hate you. You really have no idea. Unbelievable. You step off the boat thirty fucking seconds sooner than I do and all of a sudden you’re the white prince and you assume everyone loves you. Maribel loves you, room eighteen loves you, Bill and Therese and all the guests whose asses you kiss love you. No such luck, buddy. You push me right to the edge, Petersen, to where I can see myself doing something like this. I can see myself taking you out and saying it was an accident, saying I found the gun in a room and was fooling around and oops, it went off. So they send me to Walpole for a year or two. So what? It might be worth it, brother man.”

“You’re crazy,” Mack whispered.

“Are you going to tell Maribel?” Vance asked. “That’s all I’m really concerned about in the here and now. Are you going to tell her?”

Mack nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Vance said. He took the gun away from Mack’s chest and studied it. Mack exhaled and the muscles in his legs tingled. “This baby is fully loaded, ready to go. But if you tell a soul, I’m just going to say I was playing a joke on you.”

“For Christ’s sake, Vance.”

“Hey,” Vance said, pointing the gun in Mack’s face. “I’m serious about Maribel. Either you tell her what’s going on with you and room eighteen or I’ll tell her what I saw. Which was you lying on that woman’s bed, and the woman half-naked and you grabbing at her.”

“I wasn’t
grabbing
at her,” Mack said.

“Tell Maribel,” Vance said. He lowered the gun. “I
would
shoot you if I thought I could get away with it.”

“Why do you hate me?” Mack asked. “I apologized for taking your job back when it happened. It had nothing to do with our skin color and you know it. Besides, Vance, that was another lifetime ago.” Mack reached behind him for the doorknob to the lobby. He wanted to be in the warm, bright lobby with Tiny, although for all Mack knew she could be hiding around a corner waiting to club him with a tire iron.

Vance spat at the ground near Mack’s feet. “Get out of here,” he said.

By the time Mack pulled into the driveway, Maribel had finished drying the dishes and putting them away. She had changed out of her white shorts and soft beige half sweater and into a T-shirt and boxers. She had washed her face and her neck with Noxema. By the time Mack walked in the door at midnight—which was late even for a Lacey Gardner night—Maribel was pretty sure she had eliminated all clues that Jem Crandall had been there for dinner.

Or
sinner
, which was what she started calling it as soon as they arranged the time and the place. Her sinner with Jem. A small, intimate sinner party.

Having Jem over had been the result of two things. The first was that Maribel kept thinking back to the day she spent with Jem at the beach. It felt like they were somehow
meant
to have run into each other in the parking lot of Stop & Shop. And Maribel instinctively took Jem to the nude beach in Miacomet. Why? They could just as easily have gone to Cisco. But Maribel had
wanted
to show herself to Jem. And show herself she did—all look and no touch—but the looks Maribel was unable to forget.

Secondly was the fact that, in the past week or so, Mack had pulled out his old Iowa church-social manners. He constantly asked how she was feeling, was she okay? Then at Le Languedoc, he balked when she asked about the profit sharing. Mack had no intention of asking Bill to profit-share, and no intention of marrying her, and this kindness was just a front, just a way of letting her down easy. More than anything, Mack hated when things actually
happened
—moments like the one when the sheriff told him his parents had been killed. And so he wouldn’t ask Bill to profit-share but he wouldn’t tell Maribel that. He would just keep on saying please and thank you and I don’t know, sweetheart, I just don’t know—forever.

The combination of these two things led Maribel to call Jem and invite him over.

“For Sunday,” she said. She was in her quiet, safe, booklined office at the Atheneum, with the door locked. “Dinner at my house. Seven-thirty?”

“Sunday?” Jem said. A twinge of uncertainty in his voice. “Sunday, you mean, while Mack’s at Lacey’s?”

“That’s right,” Maribel said.

Dead air. Maribel heard the soft murmur of library patrons’ voices on the other side of her door.

“You’re putting me in a bad place,” Jem said. “You’re asking me to lie to my boss.”

“I’m asking you to dinner,” Maribel said. “Mack won’t be there. I won’t tell him you’re coming over unless you want me to. But really, Jem, it’s no big deal. I frequently have people over, friends, you know. They…drop by.”

“Yeah, well, this is more than me dropping by,” Jem said. “This is you calling in advance. And the way my luck has been going, you’ll tell Mack and I’ll end up fired.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Maribel said. “Maybe another time.”

“No,” Jem said. “Not another time. Sunday’s fine. I’ll be there Sunday.”

Maribel’s hands were sweating; she rubbed her palm on the receiver and it made a squeaking noise. “Sunday,” she said, “seven-thirty. For sinner, I mean, dinner. Dinner at seven-thirty. Do you know where I live?” It felt strange to say “I” instead of “we.” “I live at ninety-five Pheasant Road, the basement apartment around back.”

“I’ll find it,” Jem said.

When Mack came home at five on Sunday evening before going to Lacey’s, Maribel nearly confessed to her dinner plans. Mack was in the apartment for about an hour, and Maribel shadowed him from room to room. First, she lay next to him in bed while he napped. Mack was the kind of person who could fall asleep at will, like he was letting go the string of a kite, and this always amazed Maribel. Really, did he have no nagging thoughts? Was his mind such an easy friend that it just set him free? Apparently so. Maribel lay next to him, studying his sandy hair, his sunburned face and sun-cracked lips, her own eyes wide open, unblinking. Thinking,
I’ll tell him when he wakes up. I’ll tell him I’m being a good Samaritan, feeding a hungry kid. If he makes the slightest fuss, I’ll call Jem and cancel
.

When Mack was in the shower, Maribel sat on the fuzzy toilet seat cover in the steam and thought,
I’ll tell him when he gets out
. Mack turned off the water, pulled back the shower curtain and Maribel handed him a towel. He dried his face, and scruffed the towel over his head, he dried his chest, his arms, his balls, and stepped onto the bathmat, wrapped the towel around his waist. Mack never concerned himself with how he looked. He was perfectly comfortable in his own body, as though he knew he could drive Maribel absolutely mad by just existing.

Before he left the house, Mack popped open a beer, took a long swallow, kissed Maribel, and said, “Don’t wait up tonight, I might be late,” and he jogged out the door to his Jeep. It was obvious he trusted her implicity. Maribel felt guilty for a second, but then she wondered if he were suffering from plain indifference. He hadn’t asked what she was doing at all.

As soon as the rumble of the Jeep’s engine faded, Maribel called her mother. Sundays her mother slept late, puttered in her tiny vegetable garden, and then sat on the screened-in porch with her friend Rita Ramone and drank vodka gimlets. Maribel knew Rita would be languishing on the chaise longue next to her mother, listening to every word, but Maribel called anyway.

“My little girl!” Tina cried out. “What a surprise! Do you have news for your mama?”

Maribel guessed Tina was on her third or fourth gimlet. “No,” she said.

“Mack’s off at Lacey’s?” Tina asked. “Are you lonely, sweetie pie?”

“Not really,” Maribel said. “I’m having someone for dinner.”

“Well, I hope they taste good!” Tina said. She laughed with abandon and Maribel could hear Rita in the background asking, “What’s so funny?”

“It’s a guy I’m having over,” Maribel said. “A cute guy.”

Tina was still laughing. “How cute?”

“He was Mr. November in some calendar,” Maribel said.

“Not the Christian calendar,” Tina said. “Although a cute guy or two might boost sales.”

“Mack doesn’t know a thing about it, either,” Maribel said.

Tina’s voice sobered. “Oh, my.” The phone was muffled: Tina relayed this news to Rita Ramone. Then she said, “Rita thinks the only way to get a man is to play hard to get. Is that what you’re doing, sweetie? Playing hard to get?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Maribel said.

“Well, that makes three of us,” Tina said. “Here, now I’m going into the house so we can talk serious.” In the background, a door closed. “Okay, tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking Mack is a lost cause,” Maribel said.

“You’ve thought that many times before,” Tina said. “Is this time any different?”

“I suggested the profit sharing, but he hasn’t said anything to Bill.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for the right time,” Tina said.

“Maybe,” Maribel said. “Or maybe he thinks it’s okay to string me along forever. But it’s not okay. There are other men in this world who find me attractive, and I just happened to invite one of them to dinner on a night when Mack’s out. That’s not a crime, is it?”

“You know I’m terrible at figuring out men,” Tina said. “I wouldn’t exactly call myself Queen of the Successful Relationship.”

“Mama,” Maribel said. Her mother’s Sunday afternoons with Rita Ramone were half girl talk and half wallowing in self-pity. “Do you think it’s okay that I invited this person for dinner?”

“Yes,” Tina said definitively. “What’s his name?”

“Jem,” Love said. “Jem Crandall.”

“Jem Crandall,” Tina said. “God has blessed Jem Crandall. You know I love you?”

“Yes,” Maribel said.

“Have fun and we’ll talk on Wednesday. I have to get back to Rita before she burns the house down.”

“Okay, Mama.”

“Godspeed, Maribel.”

At exactly seven-thirty, Jem appeared at the door with a bottle of Chardonnay, looking as nervous as Maribel felt. His dark hair was wet and he was wearing a blue chambray shirt and navy shorts. Birkenstocks. He was so handsome. He was tall and broad-shouldered and strong and young and he had wavy dark hair and that beautiful smile and not an ounce of self-congratulation. It was perfectly normal to be attracted to people other than your partner, Maribel reasoned. She was indulging a crush. Flushing it out of her system.

“You brought wine,” Maribel said, taking the bottle from Jem carefully, as though it were a baby. “That was very thoughtful.”

“I know about wine,” Jem said. “My father owns a bar.” He put his hand on Maribel’s arm and bent over and kissed her. The kiss was brief; Maribel was still holding the wine to her chest, but it threw the whole room into disarray.

“Oh,” she said. They looked at each other. Jem had blue eyes that matched his shirt. He was ridiculously, absurdly handsome, and Maribel looked into his blue eyes until it was like too much chocolate cake, and she knew looking another second wouldn’t be good for her. She shifted her gaze.

“I can give you the nickel tour of the place from right here,” she said. “Kitchen, dining room, living room. The powder room is this door here and then the bedroom.” Maribel paused after the word “bedroom.”

“It’s nice,” Jem said. “I rent a room in some old house. I’d kill for my own kitchen.”

“I made some munchies,” Maribel said. “Let’s sit down.”

“Okay,” Jem said. He bounced on the balls of his feet and rubbed his hands together. “Want to open the wine? I could use a drink. I have to tell you, I’m a little nervous.”

“Nervous?” Maribel said. “About what?”

“Not about what you think,” Jem said.

“What do I think?”

“I’m not worried that Mack is going to come home and find me here.”

“Good,” Maribel said. She knew Mack wouldn’t show up before ten-thirty or eleven, even though right now a part of her wanted him to.