The Island (50 page)
By the time India made it to the water’s edge, the glasses had warmed in her hand.
Try?
she thought.
Try?
She cranked her arm back in a classic windup (she had pitched so many balls to the boys through endless seasons of Little League. She had been a good mother and she had been a good wife. She had been a good wife, damn it!) and wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee… she let the glasses fly.
She heard them plunk in the water and hoped they had landed far enough out for the tide to carry them away. If they washed up on shore, she decided, she would bury them.
She headed back up the stairs lethargically. Her eyelids were drooping. The alarm had been shut off; the room in her head was dark and hushed. She was ready for bed.
S
he awoke in the morning in Barrett’s bed, with Barrett holding her.
Perfect happiness, she thought.
The kids were asleep in their rooms. When Tate walked in last night, they jumped into her arms, they cheered and made happy noises, and Tate felt like Bruce Springsteen. She felt loved. It was intoxicating.
Barrett wanted to tell her exactly what had happened. He was talking quickly, and Tate had to tell him to slow down.
Slooooooooow down.
He had promised himself, no matter what happened, that he would work for Anita for three days. It started out oddly, he said, with Anita leading him up to her bedroom, flinging open the doors to Roman’s closet, and telling Barrett he could wear whatever he wanted. There was, he said, a Jay Gatsby collection of beautiful shirts handmade in London. There were cashmere sweaters, golf pants, Italian loafers.
Barrett said to Anita, “I don’t need clothes. I have clothes.”
She implored him to wear a pink shirt of Roman’s, a simple polo shirt, but still, it was Roman’s. Barrett felt uneasy. What was Roman going to do when he saw Barrett wearing his shirt?
Anita said, “Oh, don’t worry. Roman isn’t coming back.”
She then explained that she and Roman had separated. They were going to test it out; he hated Nantucket anyway. That was one of the reasons Anita had hired Barrett full-time. She was on her own now.
Barrett wore the shirt. He hung a new painting for Anita, then cleaned her Hinckley picnic boat bow-to-stern and took Anita and her girlfriends on a cruise around the harbor. There was a catered lunch on the cruise, but the women ate nothing except for the stray lettuce leaf and a few grapes, so Jeannie, the cook, offered the entire gorgeous lunch to Barrett. He stuffed his face and would take the rest home.
“It wasn’t bad,” he said to Tate. “That part.”
At five o’clock, when he had to go pick the kids up from his parents’ house, Anita didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and have a glass of wine. She wanted him to give her a massage.
“A
massage?
” Tate said.
Anita had a masseuse come to the house every day, but the masseuse had been canceling a lot lately, he had canceled that day, and Anita’s neck and shoulders were sore. Wouldn’t Barrett just rub them a little? All she needed was a pair of strong hands.
No, Barrett said. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t stay for wine either. He had to pick up his kids.
She pouted but seemed to accept this answer.
The next day, he said, there was another shirt. Blue, with white stripes.
He said, “Is there something wrong with what I have on?”
She said, “Please wear it.”
He considered it a uniform of sorts. A uniform to make him look like her husband. It didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t find anything blatantly
wrong
with it. She sent him to the post office to mail a box to her sister in California; he drove her to the Galley, where she had lunch with the same friends from the day before. He offered to wash the windows of the house, and she said, “I’ll hire someone to do that.”
He said, “You did hire someone to do that. Me.”
She said, “Don’t you dare wash the windows. I’ll call someone.”
He said, “Let me do it, Anita. There’s no reason to pay someone else.”
She said, “Are you the boss here or am I?”
While she was at lunch, he started washing the windows. The windows that faced the harbor were coated with a salty grime. When Anita got home, she found him on a ladder with a squeegee. He had changed into his own shirt.
She stood at the bottom of the ladder with her hands on her hips. From the look on her face, he could tell that she had had wine with lunch.
She said, “What are you doing?”
He said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”
She stormed into the house.
On the third day, she stayed out of his way. There was a list of mundane things on the counter—take the recycling to the dump, order the flowers, run to Bartlett Farm for lobster salad and broccoli slaw. (She liked to have these things in the fridge, though she never ate.) At the bottom of the list, it said,
Dinner 7 P.M
.
She stayed on the deck off her bedroom for most of the day, and to interrupt her would be like waking a sleeping lion. As he wrapped things up at five o’clock, she came down the stairs in a white waffled robe. She was holding a navy blazer. He got a bad feeling.
She said, “Where are you going?”
He made a show of checking his watch. “Home to get my kids.”
“But you’ll be back at quarter to seven?” she said. “We’re expected at seven.”
“Expected where?”
“Dinner at the Straight Wharf. The Jamiesons and Grahams invited me and I can’t go alone.”
“Well, I can’t go with you.”
He thought she might pull a power play. He thought she would remind him how much she was paying him. (He reminded himself of that constantly. It was a lot of money.) Instead, she said, “You can’t?”
He said, “The kids.”
She said, “Can’t you get a sitter? This is important to me.”
He relented.
“Why?” Tate asked him. “Couldn’t you tell she was using you?”
He felt bad for her. She was deeply unhappy. He called a sitter for the boys. He wore his own navy blazer. He met Anita at the restaurant. She kissed him on the lips in greeting. She touched his leg under the table. He moved away. He talked to the other men at the table about fishing. He was the resident expert; the other two men listened intently. Barrett had thought he would be outclassed at this dinner, but he ended up feeling good about himself. These people wanted the real Nantucket; he was the real Nantucket.
Anita had been hitting the red wine pretty hard throughout dinner, and then with dessert, she had a glass of champagne. She was drunk, blurry-slurry, sloppily affectionate. Barrett drove her home. She tried to persuade him to come inside; he declined. She asked him to walk her to the door. Okay, he would walk her to the door. She lunged for him.
He said, “Good night, Anita.”
“So those were the three days,” Barrett said to Tate.
“And then what happened?” Tate said. “You just decided to quit?”
“No,” he said. “Then your father called.”
Grant Cousins called Barrett at eleven o’clock at night, as Barrett was driving back home to Tom Nevers. Mr. Cousins was going to surprise the ladies on Tuckernuck. He would land at five o’clock the following afternoon and needed to be picked up at the airport and transported to the island.
Barrett said, “I’ll send Trey. He’s the kid who works for me now.”
Grant said, “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like
you
to come, Barrett.”
Barrett was about to say that he no longer ran the caretaking business day-to-day. He was about to say it would have to be Trey or nobody. But Barrett found he
wanted
to be the one to deliver Mr. Cousins to Tuckernuck. He said, “Okay, yes, I’ll see you at five.”
In the morning, Barrett told Anita he had to leave fifteen minutes early. He explained why.
Anita said, “But you don’t work for that family anymore.”
Barrett said, “Right, I know. This is a personal favor.”
Anita said, “Well, you’re not leaving here one minute early to do a personal favor
for that family.
”
Her tone bothered him. He said, “What did they ever do to you?”
Anita sniffed. She said, “Will you change the paper towel roll in the kitchen, please? We’re out.”
Change the paper towel roll? He had become the butt of his own joke.
“That was it?” Tate said.
“That was it,” Barrett said. “I left. Anita made her phone calls starting at 12:05, just like she promised she would, and by two o’clock in the afternoon, five people had called and hired me as caretaker.”
“You’re kidding,” Tate said.
“Including Whit Vargas, who has a huge estate in Shawkemo, and who said he will pay me double what Anita was paying me just
because
I left Anita. He said he’s very good friends with Roman Fullin and he’s a client of your father’s as well. He asked if we were still dating.”
“And what did you say?” Tate asked.
“I said yes.”
Tate felt both elated and panicked. She had Barrett back! But she was going to lose him.
She said, “I leave tomorrow.”
He said, “I know.”
She thought,
Ask me to stay! Ask me to move in! I can help you pay Anita back! I can help you with the kids! I can fit right into your life here! I can, I can, I can!
Slowly!
she thought.
She said, “I start a job in Reading, Pennsylvania, for Bachman pretzels on Monday.”
He squeezed her. “How long will that take?”
She said, “It depends on how bad it is. Five or six days?”
“And then you’ll come back?”
“Back…?”
“Back here?” he said. “Will you come back here when you’re done with that job? I know it’s expensive, but…”
“Oh, my God!” Tate said. “Expensive? I don’t care if it’s expensive. I don’t care if I have to fly back and forth a dozen times. Being with you is worth it. You, Barrett Lee, are
worth it!
”
He shushed her and pulled her close. He didn’t want her to wake the children just yet.
S
he had heard of couples who divorced and then remarried each other. Everyone had heard of such couples. The story had a romantic ring to it, especially for the couples’ children, who had the singular experience of watching their parents get married. But in the case of her and Grant, Birdie wasn’t going to be such a sucker. She wasn’t going to be a pushover or a Pollyanna. She had divorced Grant for a reason: after thirty years of emotional wasteland, she was moving on. She would either live alone and have a full and stimulating life, or she would find someone new who enjoyed the same things that she did.
Birdie allowed herself one last, long, wistful thought about Hank.
Hank!
Grant Cousins was a known quantity to her. Lawyer, strategist, financial wizard, expert in accounting loopholes, golfer, aficionado of scotch, aged beef, cigars, and high-end automobiles. He had been an adequate father, she supposed, though only with Birdie’s direction. He was a generous provider, she would give him that.
How likely was it that, at the age of sixty-five, Grant Cousins was going to change? Not likely. It was more likely that a mountain would change, or a glacier. And yet the Grant Cousins who had shown up on Tuckernuck was a different man from the man Birdie had been married to.
The mere fact that he had shown up at all! Spontaneously!
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Really.”
“I told you,” he said.
“What about work?” she said.
“What
about
work?” he said. “I’m due about five years of vacation and I’m going to take it.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. She sounded like a sullen teenager, but could anyone blame her?
Later, after dinner, after an hour of reminiscing on the screened-in porch with India (Birdie noticed how kind Grant was with India, telling all those funny stories about Bill), they faced the awkward decision about where Grant would sleep. His suitcase remained in the living room.
Birdie said, “You can take the other bed in my room.”
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure.”
He had changed, Birdie thought. Either that or she was being duped. He had mellowed; he had loosened and lightened. And his hair! It was so long.
They climbed the stairs together. Birdie had consumed her usual glasses of wine, but because of Grant’s presence, she drank more—or because of his presence, it affected her differently. She felt tipsy, giddy, girlishly nervous like she hadn’t since those long-ago weekends in the Poconos when Grant used to visit her room in the middle of the night.
In the bedroom, she changed into her white cotton nightgown. She gave thought to changing behind the closed door of the bathroom, but that seemed ridiculous. Grant had been her husband for thirty years. He had seen her naked thousands upon thousands of times. And still, she felt self-conscious and shy, especially since she heard the rustlings of him changing on the other side of the room. When she was in her nightgown (it wasn’t exactly lingerie, but it was new that summer—bought for nights with Hank—and pretty and feminine) and he was in his pajamas (ones she had bought him at Brooks Brothers years earlier), they looked at each other and smiled. She was nervous!
“Here,” he said, beckoning. “Come sit with me on the bed.”
She obeyed, grateful for the directive. She sat on the bed and Grant sat next to her and the bed groaned and Birdie thought they might snap it in half. They had made love in these very same beds. Birdie remembered those occasions as ones of fulfilling a spousal duty; she remembered being worried that the children would hear or Bill and India would hear (because Birdie and Grant could certainly hear them) or her parents would hear. She remembered the acrobatics and flexibility required to copulate in these narrow beds. She wanted Grant to speak before she embarrassed herself.
He said, “I meant what I said about taking a five-year vacation. I’m retiring, Bird.”
She gasped. Men like Grant didn’t retire. They worked and worked until they had a massive coronary sitting at their desks. “When?”