The Beach Club (31 page)

Jem didn’t have the heart to drink much, and neither did Neil. He smoked his joint. It turned his pain into background music. Without the dope, he said, the pain was like someone banging on the front door with a brick.

They ordered lobsters for dinner, and baked potatoes and corn and coleslaw and biscuits. It was Jem’s first—and probably only—lobster of the summer, but he couldn’t help thinking of death row and how a prisoner chose his last meal. They ate on Neil’s deck and watched the sun go down. It was so nice out and so delicious, it seemed like just that, an ending.

“Tomorrow I get back into the suit,” Neil said. “I’ll get married, set up a trust fund for my daughter, fly to Nepal and die.”

“Fly to Nepal?”

“Once things get really bad, I’m going to Pangboche. I’m going to stay in one of the teahouses until the end. The Nepalese will cremate me right away and scatter me in the mountains.”

Jem tore the claws off his lobster. “You know what pisses me off?”

“What?” Neil poked a fork into his baked potato. “They didn’t give us any sour cream.”

“You’re giving up. And that sucks. You don’t care about anyone else, do you? You don’t care about your daughter, or Desirée, or me. If you cared, you wouldn’t give in.”

Neil didn’t look up from his dinner, but his voice was low and serious. “I have cancer, Jem. It’s all through me. I don’t have a choice here, buddy boy.”

Jem stood suddenly, and drawn butter dripped down his leg. “You’re not upset enough. You’ve accepted the fact that you’re going to die and that’s fine with you. But what if it’s not fine with the rest of us?”

“Sit down and enjoy your lobster,” Neil said. “And let’s have another drink. I am getting married, you know. Let’s have a toast.”

Jem stormed into Neil’s room. The garment bag had been opened and Neil’s suit was laid neatly out on the bed. It was spooky almost, prescient, the empty suit. Jem picked up the bottle of vodka and drank from it straight. He gasped for air. Horrible burning, a big fat mistake.
I’m not giving up
, Jem thought.
I will fight for Maribel until the end
. He slumped in the leather chair.

After a while, Neil came in, pushed the suit aside, and sat on the bed. He removed his glasses, breathed on them, wiped them on his shirt, and put them back on. His face had changed; it was stripped of all confidence. It was a human face, a scared face.

“What would you have me do?” Neil asked.

“Stay alive,” Jem said.

“Stay alive,” Neil said, as though he had never considered it before. “Stay alive.”

Jem almost called in sick the next day. He woke up with his hand on his erection, thinking of Maribel. Then he remembered Neil, and his insides filled with a heavy sadness. He could barely get out of bed. Neil’s flight left at nine, and Jem knew he had to get down to the hotel on time to say good-bye.

Jem put on his red shorts, his last clean white shirt, his messed-up shoes, and left the house. Normally he liked the walk down North Liberty Street—it was shady, the houses were kept-after, he passed blackberry bushes, and now that the berries were finally ripe, he picked a handful and ate them. He started down Cobblestone Road. Usually, this was where he considered his day: would anything interesting happen? What would be left after breakfast? Would he see Maribel? Today he thought about Neil, and how after only three days, Neil had become his friend.

Just before Jem turned onto North Beach Road and walked the last hundred yards to the Beach Club, he heard a car horn. Jem saw Neil, wearing a suit, sticking his whole torso out the window of a cab, but the cab didn’t slow down. Neil was leaving.

“Hold on!” Jem said. “Wait!”

Neil cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “I’m on my way, buddy!” Neil’s tie waved good-bye in the breeze, and the cab disappeared around the bend. Just like that.

Jem stopped. He listened to the gulls. North Beach Road was sunny and still.
Okay
, Jem thought,
so it’s over. He’s gone
. Jem expected the devastation to hit him any second; he took tiny steps forward, waiting for it. He thought about taking a cab out to the airport, or even asking Mack if he could borrow the Jeep and drive out there himself to say good-bye. But the road was still and sunny, the gulls cried out. Neil was gone, and for a second, Jem felt something he thought might be peace.

There was an envelope at the front desk with his name on it.

“That man was
so
handsome,” Love said. “Especially in his suit. He was single, right?”

“Engaged,” Jem said. He held the envelope up to the light of the window. Definitely not cash in there. It was probably a letter. Jem thought of Neil dressed in his suit, heading back to New York to get married and settle matters for his daughter—it made Jem happy. He didn’t want to read any letter that might ruin this feeling.

Jem ate two mixed-berry muffins and a chocolate doughnut and then he threw the envelope into the trash and covered it with dirty napkins and banana peels and half-eaten pieces of wheat toast, just to be sure he wasn’t tempted to pull it back out. It was a very manly thing to do, he decided, throwing the letter away. A woman would never throw away an envelope unopened.

Jem saw Maribel right before quitting time. She was in her yellow bikini top and her jean shorts—the exact outfit she wore on their first date to Miacomet Beach. Jem watered Therese’s plants on the lobby porch and Maribel slogged up the three steps in her flip-flops, her damp beach towel slung over her shoulder.

“Too much of a good thing today,” she said. “The sun in August. How was your lunch date yesterday?”

Jem was on the verge of saying, “I didn’t go. It was all made-up.” But he didn’t want to be disloyal to Neil. “It was fun,” he said.

“Yeah?” Maribel said. Jem studied her. Did she seem jealous? “Mr. Rosenblum was so nice. Is he still around?”

“Left today.”

“He really seemed to like you,” Maribel said. “He seemed to believe in you.”

Jem stopped watering and looked at Maribel. “He did like me. He did believe in me.”

“Jem, what’s wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look strange,” she said. “You look upset. Are you all right?”

“Now that you mention it,” he said, “I’m not sure.” He put down the watering can, walked past Maribel, through the lobby and into the galley kitchen. He held his breath and dug around in the trash until he pulled out the envelope. It was stained with coffee, smeared with strawberry jam.

Inside was a check for fifteen thousand dollars and two one-way tickets from Nantucket to Los Angeles, courtesy of Rosenblum Travel. The note attached said: “Get her. NR.”

In the middle of August, a heat wave hit Nantucket like none Lacey Gardner could remember, and she had been on the island for close to a century of summers. In general, Nantucket was a place to escape the heat because of the sea breeze. It could be in the nineties in Boston and New York, and Nantucket would be a comfortable seventy-seven. Lacey had only noticed the heat once before—in 1975, on the day islanders called Hot Saturday, when the thermometer hit one hundred degrees. Lacey and Maximilian had stayed inside, running the fans at full blast, playing cards in the guest bedroom of their house on Cliff Road, because that room stayed dark most of the day. They drank three pitchers of lemonade and at four o’clock started with Mount Gay and tonics, heavy on the ice. Lacey felt as though she were on vacation—staying in the one room of the house she never used, sliding aces and queens across the quilted company bedspread. When it grew dark, she and Maximilian slipped into their bathing suits and walked to Steps Beach for an evening swim. They felt like teenagers, sneaking around in the night, although even in 1975, they were senior citizens, and had to grip the railing tightly as they descended the stairs to the sand.

When they arrived at the beach, it was as crowded as midday. A patchwork of towels and blankets covered the beach, citronella candles flickered, and in the moonlight, Lacey saw men with sideburns holding hands with topless girls. A radio played the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” Some of the kids brought picnics—summer sausages, cheese, chicken salad, and cold beer. Max and Lacey ate and drank and splashed around in the water as though they were forty years younger. Lacey watched Maximilian smoke marijuana for the first time with a man named Cedar. She studied all the young people as their lean bodies floated through the hot night, and she wished again for children. She decided to say something to Max walking home. It was almost midnight, Hot Saturday turning into Sultry Sunday. She said, “Maximilian do you ever wish we’d had children?”

Max didn’t answer. Maybe it was the marijuana getting to his brain, or maybe it was his same old stubbornness on the topic. His determination never to admit he might have been wrong.

This August was the worst heat of all. In the sun it was broiling, in the shade it was difficult to breathe. The flag out in front of the Beach Club drooped like an old nylon stocking. The first hot night, Lacey tossed in bed, kicked off the sheets, flipped her pillow. Finally she struggled for the lamp and made her way over to the air-conditioner and turned it up as high as it would go. That sufficed for the night, but when morning came and Lacey ventured into the hallway, she nearly gagged. The air was thick, syrupy, a steaming Turkish bath. She opened all of her windows and switched on her two ancient fans. She kept her bedroom door closed and cranked the air-conditioning, thinking that if worse came to worst, she could lie in bed and read her mystery novel all day, refusing to step out.

Mack appeared as usual. Instead of coffee, he brought her an icy Coca-Cola.

“Bless you, Mack Petersen,” she said. It was eight-thirty, and already Mack’s sandy hair was wet around his ears and he had the smell of a man who’d worked all day.

“It’s eighty-two degrees right now,” he said. “Radio said it would top ninety by ten o’clock.”

Lacey took a sip of her cola. It was so cold and crisp, it stung the back of her throat and her eyes watered. She coughed.

“Be careful in this heat,” Mack said. “I want you to promise me you won’t exert yourself.”

“Because this kind of weather kills old ladies, is that what you mean?” Lacey said. “Well, it won’t kill me. I’ve lived through worse than this. But just to be safe, I’m going back to the bedroom where it’s cool. Knock at the end of the day to see if I’m okay, would you, dear? But just knock. I have half a mind to sit in there naked.”

Mack laughed. “You got it, Lacey.”

He left with a wave, and Lacey took another swallow of cola and let out a healthy belch.

“What am I going to do when you’re gone?” she said out loud. “Who will take care of me?” She sounded more plaintive than she meant to, but it was a fair question. What would she do when the handsome messenger that Maximilian sent, left her? She guessed either another boy would come, or her time with substitutes would finally be over, and she would join Maximilian in whatever came next. Dying wasn’t quite as scary when she thought of it this way—as the place where Maximilian was waiting.

It was so hot that Mack and Maribel slept nude under one thin sheet. Maribel made cool things for dinner—chilled cucumber soup, Caesar salad, melon balls. She recited cool words: silver, glass, mint, shade, green, blue, drink, flute, ice, a bed of ice, a world of ice. She pulled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace” off the shelf at the library, and then “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ann Beattie’s
Chilly Scenes of Winter
, David Guterson’s
Snow Falling on Cedars
, and even Richard Russo’s
The Risk Pool
. She stacked the books on her desk, looking at them every so often to repeat their cool titles in her head.

Maribel and Mack fought almost every night. Because of the heat, and the crazy things it did to the hotel staff and guests, Mack shut down. He came home, took off his clothes, ate what Maribel put in front of him, and sat in a sweaty heap in front of the TV until bedtime. If he and Maribel talked at all, they snapped at one another.

Mack never mentioned getting married anymore. They didn’t talk about a wedding, they made no plans. Now Maribel feared she might end up one of these women who were engaged for fifteen years. One night, she asked Mack about it.

“Are we going to get married on the island this fall? Because if we are, we need to make plans.”

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes glued to the baseball scores. “I can’t think.”

“You can’t think?” she said. “I’m asking you about our
wedding
and you can’t think?”

“It’s hot, Maribel,” he said. “All day at work I have people complaining. The beach is hot, the sand is hot, the water is too warm. We had a beach boy get sunstroke today and off he goes to the hospital. I check on Lacey every two hours because I’m afraid she’s going to wilt. I caught Jem with his ass in the ice machine. He was
sitting
in the ice machine. I don’t have time to think about a wedding.”

“Fine,” Maribel said. “Maybe we won’t get married then.”

“Don’t play games with me, Maribel,” Mack said. “Because right now nothing is funny. Including that comment.”

Maribel felt tears rising and she went into the bedroom where at least the fan was on. She lay across the bed and swept every strand of hair from her neck, tucked them into a bun. She moved so that the air from the fan hit her bare neck. She had never been able to enjoy happiness because she always wondered,
When will it end? When will something bad happen?
She wanted to call her mother, but the phone was in the other room. Besides, what would she tell Tina? That right now she hated Mack? That right now the thought of a whole life with him was dreary and depressing? That maybe, just maybe, she wanted to get married so badly that she made certain compromises. Compromises like the fact that she agreed to marry Mack when only weeks before he confessed he loved another woman. Maribel tried to forget about that, she decided to believe that when Andrea Krane left the island, Mack’s feelings for her vanished as well. And since Mack planned on leaving his job at the hotel there was no danger of him seeing Andrea again. But did he still have feelings for her? Maribel was so thrilled, first with the proposal and then with the ring, that she hadn’t allowed this question into her thoughts. But now, Maribel realized that of course Mack loved Andrea. You didn’t stop loving someone in a matter of weeks. Mack had probably proposed to Andrea first, and when she said no, he came to Maribel. She was his second choice. No
wonder
Mack couldn’t think about the wedding. He didn’t want to marry her at all. That scene a few weeks ago with him all sincerity and sweet promises had been a lie.

Maribel marched out to the living room. Moths threw themselves against the screen door with reckless abandon.

“Do you still love Andrea?” Maribel asked.

“What?” Mack said. He wore only his boxer shorts. Twelve years ago he had left Iowa, but he still looked like a farmer: tan neck and arms, pasty white torso. “What did you just ask me?”

“Do you still love Andrea Krane? I want to know.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Mack said. “I just spent a small fortune putting a diamond on your finger and you have the nerve to ask me that. What’s gotten into you?”

“You’re not answering my question,” Maribel said.

“Your question is obnoxious,” Mack said. “I asked you to marry me and you said yes. I gave you a ring. Now, why would I do that if I still loved Andrea?”

Maribel winced at the word “Still” because it admitted one fact: he had loved her. “That sounds like an answer to my question, but it’s not. You’re not telling me you don’t love her.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Mack was yelling now, standing up. Sweat dripped down his face. The temperature in the room rose; the room was boiling over. Maribel took a deep breath, trying to remember the stack of books on her desk, the chilly titles. What were they? All she could think of was
The Risk Pool
. A pool of risk, that’s where she was right now, swimming in it. The moths batted themselves against the screen. If it weren’t so abusively hot Maribel would have shut the door, to block out the horrible sound.

“Do you want to marry Andrea?” Maribel asked.

Mack’s blue eyes were on fire. “I don’t want to marry anybody,” he said.

There was a split second of silence, enough time for only a single thought.
Oh, God
.

Mack said, “But you.”

Except by then it was too late because in that speck of silence, Mack had told the truth. A silence so short, so small, an infinitesimal silence, exposed him.
I don’t want to marry anybody
.

He came toward Maribel, cooling off, ticking like a car engine, and he put his arms around her gently so as not to smother her. “I don’t want to marry anybody but you.”

He could say whatever he wanted now, she supposed, because he’d told her the truth. For one glimmering instant, the truth was free, and Maribel recognized it. She had known it all along: Mack didn’t want to marry anybody.

She bent her chin to her chest, and Mack kissed her forehead.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She pulled away. “I’m just hot,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She retreated into the bedroom, threw herself on the bed face down and cried. She didn’t have the genius for love—if that was what love required—genius, like one had for painting, or the piano. Genius for love didn’t run in her family. And so Maribel had relied on persistence, she gritted her teeth and dug in her heels and butted her head against the brick wall until it surrendered. Her tears cooled on her cheeks. Sore head, she thought, sore heart.

Cecily was in the office with her father when he discovered his big mistake. It was too hot for her to be out on the beach; walking on the sand would have blistered the soles of her feet. The heat freed her from chatting and schmoozing, thank God, but her father insisted she join him in the office so she could better understand how he ran the hotel. Because he wouldn’t live forever, he said, and she might be in charge sooner than she thought.

Bill swiveled in his chair. “I can’t believe it,” he said. He shuffled some papers, ran his fingertips over one page, then another. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “It must be this heat,” he said. “In twenty years, I have never done this. Never!”

“Done what?” Cecily said. The mercury routinely rose to ninety-seven degrees in Rio. Soon, Cecily would be sweating next to Gabriel in bed. She only needed five hundred more dollars before she could escape. Her father had called UVA trying to reverse her deferral, but ha!—it was too late. Now her parents wanted her to come to Aspen, where they would ski with her, and teach her about the hotel. It was as if they were blind, deaf, stupid. “What’d you do?” she asked.

“I can’t believe it,” Bill repeated. He flipped through his book of Robert Frost poems. He did it again and again until Cecily realized he was having some kind of panic attack.

She sat up straight in her chair; in this heat, even that took effort. “Dad, what’d you do?”

“I double-booked a room,” he said. “I have a confirmation letter here for a family of four, the Reeses, for room fourteen, August twenty-four through August twenty-seven. And I have a confirmation letter for a Mrs. Jane Hassiter for that same room for the same dates.”