The Island (31 page)
“I want to,” she said. “But I can’t. I have to stay with my family. They need me.”
“I need you.”
“They need me more.”
“More than me?”
“I think so.”
I
ndia was sleeping at night.
It was a miracle. The first night she had been exhausted from traveling, but then she slept just as soundly the second night, then the third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth. She lay down on her gelatinous mattress, surrounded herself with the new, firm pillows Birdie had ordered from a catalog, and let the angels carry her away, just as she had when she was a child in this house, then a teenager (she’d slept until noon in those days), then a young wife and mother alongside Bill. She slept for long, luxurious, uninterrupted hours and awoke with the sun streaming in the windows and dust motes dancing in the air and the smell of bacon and the sound of Birdie downstairs humming Linda Ronstadt. And India felt triumphant, as proud of herself as if she’d run a sub-four-hour marathon.
Was I wrong about you?
The letter from Lula hadn’t disrupted India’s sleep. She had feared it might; she feared she would toss and turn, rolling the stupid question around in her mind like an obsidian marble, black and impenetrable. But India lay down, prepared for the worst, and was escorted to the twilight blue waiting room where she loitered in half consciousness until she was whisked to the inner chamber of sleep.
During the day, however, India was restless. She picked at the meaning of the question, she composed possible responses, she revisited the events of the spring until she feared for their veracity. Had all that really happened, or was India embellishing it? She was preoccupied; she couldn’t relax.
Which left her on an equal footing with everybody else.
India took a walk, not to the northwest, where Birdie and Tate liked to go, but to the northeast, past East Pond. This was India’s first venture off the property since they’d been here; she was lazy when it came to exercise, always had been, and the cigarettes punished her lungs with a creeping burn. But India used to be fond of this walk—it was sweet with lilac and honeysuckle. She passed the house owned by the pilot, who kept a Cessna parked in his yard like a car. There was a woman of a certain age in the yard, deadheading daylilies. She waved to India and said, “Life is good!”
“Life is good!” India called back, cringing internally. She and Birdie had been taught as children to always use the proper Tuckernuck greeting, but it made India feel like a dipshit. India picked up her pace so as not to get caught up in an unexpected visit.
She was on a mission, of sorts.
She passed the old schoolhouse, with its white clapboard siding. India could almost hear the schoolmarm slapping her ruler down on the desks. It had been refurbished as a private home, but for a long while it had stood abandoned, and once, years earlier, India and Bill had broken in and made love in the classroom. The room had smelled like chalk dust.
Bill had said, “I’m going to teach you a thing or two.”
Then, India had been an eager student. She and Bill had had a rousing sex life—every night for days at a stretch, replete with moaning, heavy breathing, and whispering dirty, lascivious things in each other’s ear. Birdie had caught them once, buck naked, in the back of the Scout.
Now, India thought,
Bill, will you please leave me alone?
Over the past few days, India had watched Tate and Barrett together, and she had seen that spark of raw sexual energy. It was present in the way he looked at her, the way she touched him. It was electrifying. Just the night before, India had had a dream in which she was lying on the beach, facedown in the sand with the sun on her back. She knew someone was watching her, but when she checked to the left and the right, there was no one. Then she realized there was a man gazing down at her from the lighthouse. (This was odd and dreamlike; Tuckernuck didn’t have a lighthouse.) This man appeared on the bluff. It was Bill. No, it wasn’t Bill. It was Barrett Lee. India didn’t move; she pretended to be asleep. She heard Barrett approaching. His feet crunched in the sand. She felt something icy drag along her spine. She shivered and raised her head. It wasn’t Barrett Lee at all—it was Chuck Lee, with two bottles of beer dangling from his fingers.
In the dream, Chuck Lee was gruff and sexy, as he had been when India, who was way underage, had a terrible crush on him.
India said to him,
I met your son.
He took a drag off his cigarette.
My son?
India had woken up at that point, on fire. Turned on by her ancient memories of Chuck Lee? She was confused.
Was I wrong about you?
India approached East Pond. It was surrounded by thick
Rosa rugosa
bushes, but she found a narrow path that led to the water. Her boys used to come out here to sail the simple boats that Bill made for them—long, flat pieces of wood, they may even have been paint stirrers, with a hole drilled in one end and a piece of string attached. Today, there were canvasback ducks on the pond, which made India feel less alone. She had witnesses.
She took Lula’s letter out of the pocket of her beach cover-up and tore it into even strips, and then she tore the strips into squares. She threw the squares into the air like confetti, and they fluttered to the surface of the pond. The ducks swam right over, thinking it was bread. But when they discovered it was paper, they paddled away.
Such ceremony was unnecessary, even silly, India knew; she could just have crumpled the note and left it in the kitchen trash. But allowing the note to float away seemed like the proper thing. India didn’t need drama or romance; she had seen her share and survived. She was beyond all that now. She was, after all, practically a grandmother.
D
ay twelve.
A few days after my solo exodus from Irving Plaza, Nick called me at work.
He said, “You were upset about Rhonda?”
I didn’t respond.
He said, “You were upset about Rhonda.”
I said, “You deserve someone. And Rhonda is hot. I can see why you like her.”
He said, “She is hot. But she’s not you.”
I said, “Do you love me?”
He said, “I don’t even allow myself to think in those terms. You’re my brother’s girlfriend. But since you’re asking, I will say that I have feelings for you that seem to own me. I’m not sure if it’s love, but it’s something big and I can’t shake it.”
I said, “I feel the same way.”
There was a long pause. Finally, I said, “So we tell him.”
“We can’t,” Nick said. “It won’t work. It will be ugly and you’ll be miserable. We’ll both be miserable. I am not Michael, Chess. Michael is the legit brother. I am not legit. I am a musician with a halfway-decent band. I don’t make any money. Michael’s out climbing the corporate ladder, and I’m out climbing the face of a mountain.” He paused. “And I’m a gambler.”
“That’s what I like about you,” I said. “Free spirit.”
“You’re romanticizing the situation. The fact is I live in a hovel, and if I hit a bad streak at cards, I’m going to be back in Bergen County living with Cy and Evelyn. You deserve more, Chess—that’s what I tell myself when I’m thinking about stealing you away. You deserve Michael.”
“But I want you,” I said.
“Well, the feeling’s mutual,” Nick said. “I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my life.”
We sat with that awhile. I said, “I keep wishing that Michael would fall in love with someone else.”
Nick said, “I keep wishing Michael would die.”
He might have expected me to be shocked, but I wasn’t.
He said, “Will you meet me in thirty minutes? At the tree?”
I said I would.
Summer came, and Michael and I took a trip to Bar Harbor. It was so perfectly us: the lobsters, the blueberries, the pine trees and clear, cold water. We rode our bikes around Acadia National Park. We got up early in the morning to run; we saw deer. We got along perfectly; we didn’t argue. Everything that I wanted to do, he wanted to do, and vice versa. We sat in Adirondack chairs and read our books in the sun, and although that was pleasant, I couldn’t help the sinking feeling that we might as well have been eighty years old.
We took a hike to the summit of Champlain Mountain. It was a strenuous hike and I was in a bad mood. The night before, we’d met a Princeton friend of Michael’s and his fiancée for dinner at the Bayview Hotel. Their names were Carter and Kate. Kate was lovely, but she was dull; she talked only about her wedding, which was to be held that fall at the Pierre Hotel. Carter talked about the house they were buying in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He talked about mortgages and closing costs, and how good the public schools were. He looked right at me and said, “Because, you know, in the not-too-distant future, all our Saturdays are going to be spent watching our kids play soccer.”
I smiled at Carter, but my heart faltered. Was he right? My life, certainly, had unfolded in a certain way, but was I automatically destined for a life in the wealthy suburbs with a husband and kids and a Range Rover and a seat on the board of a worthy charity to keep my mind occupied? That was the life Michael wanted, but I wasn’t ready to surrender. I wanted something less
prescribed,
something edgier, deeper, more meaningful. I wanted to travel through India, I wanted to write a novel, I wanted true love, the kind of love that left me agitated and breathless.
When we reached the top of Champlain Mountain and looked out over the misty, blue green trees below us, I wanted to call out Nick’s name. I wanted to shout it. I wanted to tell Michael then and there.
He would have to understand that I couldn’t help how I felt.
But, also, I couldn’t help who I was. I wasn’t a rebel. I didn’t rock the boat.
I said nothing.
It killed Chess to watch Tate and Barrett. And yet they were on Tuckernuck; there was nothing to do
but
watch.
Barrett brought Tate flowers. He took her for rides in the boat. They went to the remote beaches of Tuckernuck, and they went to Muskeget. They made love either on the boat itself or on the beach. Chess didn’t ask about this and Tate didn’t tell, but Chess noticed the way that Tate glowed.
Barrett and Tate surf cast on the beach. There was a joke between them—an old joke about the time their father had paid Barrett to take Tate fishing (
He had to pay you to spend time with me alone!
) and she’d cast her line out all by herself (
She was a natural!
) and she caught the biggest fish he’d ever seen without a lick of help from him (
A forty-two-inch striper!
) Chess didn’t want to be party to the inside jokes of their past or their present. She buried her face in her arms and wished that their beach was just a little bit bigger.
Tate called over to Chess, “Come on! Do you want to try?”
“No,” Chess said.
After two or three dozen casts, Tate got a bite, and she reeled the line in. She had a bluefish; its steely scales glistened in the sun. The fish flopped and struggled, fighting to be free, and Tate said, “Look!”
When Chess looked at the fish, she saw herself.
Barrett took over, cutting the line, pulling the hook, carefully, from the fish’s mouth with pliers. The fish flailed desperately on the sand; Chess couldn’t stand to watch. She thought,
Oh, God, please throw it back.
Barrett and Tate started kissing. She was thrilled at her accomplishment and he was proud of her, but really, it was just an excuse for them to be all over each other.
Birdie walked over to inspect the fish. “Do you want me to cook it tonight for dinner?”
Tate said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Barrett threw the fish back into the ocean. Chess closed her eyes.
Tate went to Nantucket to spend another night with Barrett. Barrett was taking Tate to the Company of the Cauldron for dinner; he had booked the private table in the back garden. Chess bristled at this kind of information. She was, childishly, writing down the phrases that bothered her in her journal.
Private table in the back garden.
Chess reminded herself that she had been romanced in this same way. Michael used to send Chess flowers at work. The delivery man would walk into the magazine’s offices with an armload of sunflowers or long-stemmed roses and everyone would say, “They’re for Chess.” Michael used to take her out for romantic dinners all the time, for the heck of it. Babbo because she’d put an issue to bed; Café des Artistes because it was a Wednesday and raining.
Tate didn’t get home until late the following afternoon. Again, Chess missed her keenly and found herself waiting around for Tate to return—but then, when Tate did return, Chess was sullen and resentful.
Tate said, “Tomorrow, the kids are coming.”
Birdie and India were over the moon about this prospect. Kids! Birdie asked Barrett to bring the fixings for a clambake. They would eat lobsters on the beach and have a bonfire—with marshmallows to roast for Cameron and Tucker. Birdie and India wanted to relive the days when they were young mothers. Tate wanted to be with Barrett. Chess wanted only to survive.
Barrett dug a hole in the sand, and Tate collected driftwood for the fire. Barrett brought sticks for the marshmallow roast, and fishing poles so that he and Tate and Cameron could surf cast. Birdie went crazy chilling wine, mixing up potato salad, melting butter over the camp stove. There was a sense of anticipation. It would be a party. Chess wanted to hole up in the attic and cry.
Tate left with Barrett to go get the kids. Chess got roped into helping India haul the coolers and the bags of food down to the beach. Chess laid down the blankets and stuffed wadded-up newspaper under the driftwood. This clambake-bonfire was taking an enormous amount of effort, Chess thought, from matches to trash bags to little dishes for the melted butter and silver claw crackers for the lobsters.