Of course, Casey was delighted to become part of the conspiracy, the more so when she learned it was Luke, whom she’d known for years and thoroughly approved of. “He was a star in that world,” she said. “They used to call him ‘Lucky Luke.’”
Casey had never really believed that Russell was good enough for Corrine, whereas she considered Luke a member of her own plutocratic tribe. Corrine knew her friend wouldn’t have been so excited if she’d hooked up with a starving poet or a landscape architect, and also that Casey’s professed friendship with Sasha McGavock was not so profound, or untinged with feminine envy, as to prevent her from casting her lot with the lovers. “It would be one thing if she hadn’t been cheating on him for years,” she said. What was less clear was the status of Sasha’s romance with Melman, who’d been sighted several times in recent weeks in the company of his lawful wife. But Corrine would have been ashamed to admit that this was another reason for confiding in Casey—to have a spy in Sasha’s camp.
Casey had immediately offered the use of her family’s house on Nantucket, where they were unlikely to see anyone they knew in November. The island had the additional appeal of being the site of some of Corrine’s fonder childhood memories, before her parents’ marriage had disintegrated. Casey’s only condition was that Corrine tell her all about the sex. She’d been disappointed so far in her quest for details, incredulous when her friend claimed she wasn’t sure whose cock was bigger, Luke’s or Russell’s. Of course she knew, but she couldn’t bring herself to be that disloyal. “They’re different,” Corrine said. “I didn’t have my ruler out.” Casey just shook her head. “You’ve got a much better instrument than a ruler for measuring.”
The consummation of her desire for Luke, far from sating her appetite, had served to sharpen it. She rediscovered her hunger for the body of another. It seemed like a strange time to experience this rebirth, but suddenly in the fourth decade of her life, she was crazed with lust. She thought about it all the time. She wanted it. She wanted Luke. And she didn’t believe she’d ever wanted anyone so much. This experience of an almost overwhelming physical desire had, on the one hand, seemed to render anything else irrelevant, even as it gave her an increased affection for the physical realm that her luxuriously stimulated and craving body occupied, as well as a new sense of wonder and curiosity about the inner lives of all the bodies she passed on the street. Suddenly, one understood that there was a hidden order, a grid beneath the surface. A powerful current of desire ran like an underground river beneath the surface of all human activity. This understanding extended even to her husband. She could comprehend his lust for that trampy girl, if only because she felt the very same thing, albeit on a higher plane. Since she’d started sleeping with Luke, she found herself, to her own amazement, assessing the sexual vitality of men on the street, in elevators, and at the soup kitchen. It wasn’t really that she wanted to sleep with any of them—she was devoted to Luke. But she could—and did—imagine it. She now believed she understood men, why they so often behaved so foolishly. Her love for Luke McGavock, her thirst for his male body, had made her newly sympathetic to, and appreciative of, his entire sex.
Though she knew what it was like to be desired, she had almost forgotten what it was like to desire… the cannibalistic hunger of wanting another’s flesh, the smell and taste of him. The Buddhists were right: Desire was what tethered us to the earth, trapping us in this life. But more than ever, she wanted to be here, to enjoy it while she could. She wanted to live at this high pitch of awareness, feeling the life in her body, a brimming vitality that connected her with the couple debouched from the cab in front of the building next door as she’d emerged from her door with her luggage this morning into the cool pink dawn—the woman a tawny gazelle in a kind of shiny gold bikini, and her shaven-headed paramour in black leather, leaning against each other out of exhaustion or affection as they crossed the sidewalk to the door, the man fishing in his pocket for keys, the woman casting a wan, makeup-smeared smile at Corrine. She’d wanted to ask if they were in love, feeling a speculative kinship with them as she prepared to meet her own lover, as well as a paradoxical sense of superiority that one who is at the beginning of an adventure feels for the exhausted, sunburned, bug-bitten travelers stumbling down the gangplank at the end of their cruise. Three months ago, she would have envied this young, louche couple. Now she didn’t envy anyone.
She wanted desperately to believe that everyone around her could only benefit, since she felt a new sense of affection for all living creatures, even—in fact, especially—for her husband. She would have liked to be able to say that she felt this way after the birth of the children, though in fact she’d been terrified and alienated when they finally came home from the hospital after two months in incubators. After two months of viewing them through Plexiglas, she’d been afraid to touch them, terrified of damaging them. She hadn’t felt capable of taking care of them. And if the truth be told, she hadn’t felt any sense of maternal connection at first. It had been months before she really believed they belonged to her. Whereas she’d felt that way about Luke in a matter of days.
These considerations could alternately excite her and send her spiraling into a miasma of guilt and despair. How could what she felt for Luke accommodate her love for her children?
Feeling in urgent need of reassurance, she looked for him now. There he was, pacing again with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, adorably collegiate in his polo coat. Tawny and leonine, restlessly prowling the cage of the cramped waiting area. To her relief, her passion flared at the sight of him—it hadn’t faded in the minutes since she’d last looked at him, although this thought led her to wonder if it was inevitable that it would, that she would someday fail to be thrilled by the mere sight of him, or he with her.
She made an inventory of the other men around her, deeply satisfied with the favorable contrast he presented, not only in terms of comeliness but also, so she imagined, in masculine authority and vitality. In the event of a crisis—a bomb, another attack—possibilities that hovered at the back of all their minds now—she was confident that he would be the one to whom they looked to lead them out of danger, exhorting them to action, with no thought of his personal safety.
Finally, the preboarding announcement. She gathered her carry-ons and dawdled toward the gate, falling into line several passengers behind him, staring at the broad expanse of his back, making a note to tell him she loved him in camel and, whatever happened, wanted him to think of her whenever he wore that coat.
“Hello,” she said after stowing her bags in the overhead bin and allowing herself to look down at him, seated on the aisle.
“Are you sitting here?” he asked.
“Eleven B. I have the window.”
He stood, brushing against her, letting her feel the warmth of his body, and squeezing her thigh before stepping back to allow her to pass.
She hadn’t seen any familiar faces in the boarding area, and the seats directly across from them were empty, but she hoped he would stay in character a little longer, so that she might, too. The married woman who flirted with strange men on the plane. Who allowed them to squeeze her thigh. Who might even think about sleeping with them.
“Corrine Makepeace,” she said.
“Luke McGavock.”
Shortly after takeoff, he invited her to join him for dinner that night. She said she didn’t really think of herself as the kind of girl who accepted dinner invitations from strange men. Nor, she whispered in his ear as they circled the island forty minutes later, the kind who gave blow jobs on airplanes, under the tent of a polo coat, but she couldn’t say that she wasn’t excited by this new version of herself. She would have to tell Casey.
He rented a car at the airport and they drove out through the scrubby dunes to Dionis, her desire to show him around the town overridden by her desire to get him into bed. She contented herself with pointing out historic houses en route, noting the widow’s walks that crowned several of them.
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“I used to ask my mother why they were called widow’s walks,” she said, “if the husbands were actually returning from sea. And she always said it was just a figure of speech. But then my father told me that late at night you could sometimes see the wives of the husbands who didn’t make it, pacing back and forth up there in the dark.”
Brooding against a wan sky atop the highest dune, surrounded by a sickly apron of lawn that seemed to retain only a dim memory of photosynthesis, the gray-shingled house with its unadorned facade conveyed a sense of stoic isolation and Yankee taciturnity. You would probably have to come from New England, and have lived through its winters, to have a taste for this kind of austere beauty. Or so Corrine imagined, trying to see it through Luke’s eyes, suddenly afraid that his southerner’s heart would find it bleak and unwelcoming, that he would have preferred a softer and more conventionally luxurious love nest. Even though it wasn’t hers, she wanted him to like it, to see why she’d chosen it for them—not just because it was offered but because it and the dour, windswept landscape of this little island said something about her taste and her heritage and her vision of the good life.
“My mother would love this house,” he said, leaning forward to peer at it through the windshield.
Corrine remembered that his mother had been raised in Marblehead and had summered on the Cape. “It’s a little stark,” she said.
“No, it’s perfect. I love it.”
“It was built by a retired whaling captain in the eighteenth century,” she explained. “Been in Casey’s family for years. I don’t often find myself envying my wealthy friends. But I sometimes wish I could own a house like this.”
As soon as she said this, she remembered that, in fact, he was wealthy and almost certainly could afford almost any house he wanted; she worried that he’d think her mercenary—imagine that his wealth might be a factor in her attraction.
“Think of it this way,” he said. “You can’t really own a house like this. A hundred years from now, Casey and her children will be dead and gone, and this house will still be standing on this dune, and we’ll be a part of its history. And as long as one of us is alive, it will be part of ours. And afterward, we’ll wander its halls as wraiths, calling out to each other and making ghostly love, scaring the hell out of the people who think they own it with our unearthly moaning and yelping. A house like this needs a great love story.”
“You say all the right things,” she said, leaning across the seat and kissing him.
“Then why do you look so sad?” he asked.
She shook her head, shaping a smile, though in fact she’d had a sudden vision of the future, one in which Luke would be only a memory, when she would look back at this moment with a fond, bittersweet regret. It was as if her mind was too practical and literal to ignore the obstacles that stood between them, to imagine a life they could lead together.
“Hey, don’t cry,” he said.
“I just had this terrible premonition,” she said. “When you talked about how the house would survive, I thought of myself, years from now, mourning you.”
She didn’t say how she imagined herself reading about his death in the paper, or hearing about it in passing, Casey saying some afternoon, while they watched their grandchildren play on the beach, “Remember Luke McGavock, your great love?”
“I’ve still got a few good years ahead of me. And we have three whole days in front of us.”
“Two and a half.”
“Well then, we’d better not waste any time,” he said, pulling her toward him and putting the car in gear.
He carried her up the center stairway and followed her directions to the guest room, where he gently pushed her down on the quilt of the four-poster, which, she informed him, was made of tiger maple, now extinct.
“I really don’t fucking care,” he said, smiling as he unfastened her belt. And she found that she was able to ignore the future and its inevitable extinctions as he drew her back to the present and to the pressing demands of her own vivid flesh.
“I must be morally defective,” Corrine said later, lying in the twisted quilt and playing with his penis as if it were her own new toy, even as she found herself weighing her guilt. “Here I am, wanting you to fuck me again, when bombs are raining down on some poor villagers on the other side of the world. I’ve been reading about how we’re all supposed to be ennobled by this terrible thing that’s happened, but in the last two months I’ve started cheating on my husband, lying and scheming in pursuit of my own selfish pleasure. Sending my children away. Running down to Bowling Green every night, supposedly to perform works of charity but actually exploiting someone else’s tragedy.”
“Your charity, sweetheart, is genuine. Nothing that’s happened between us can negate that.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
She rolled over and put her arm around him. If only she didn’t love his scent and the feel of his sweat on her cheek; if only his eyes weren’t so beguiling, so boyishly innocent. “No,” she said. “That’s what’s so terrible. I don’t want you to go away. I want to be with you. And I feel so guilty about it.”
“I don’t feel that guilty, honestly. You only do because you still love Russell.”
“I suppose that’s right. But then why do I dream about going away with you? Disappearing. I keep imagining that there must be somebody who walked away from those towers and just decided to keep walking. Start a new life. Sometimes I wish it were me.”
“You couldn’t leave your children.”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t. And I don’t know if I can bear to break their world apart by leaving Russell. But I think about it. Keep trying to figure out a way that it would be possible.”
“I think about it, too.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
Now a new fear seized her. “You realize I couldn’t give you another child?”
“I know that.”
“You’d be better off with some twenty-five-year-old.”
“No way, thank you very much. If nothing else, the idea of lusting after anyone that close to my daughter’s age fills me with horror.”
“How do you feel about being a stepfather?” she asked, shocking herself.
“I find the idea strangely appealing.”
“My God,” she said. This nudged the door on her fantasy wide open. The children had always seemed to be the insurmountable impediment; though she had spoken of them often in the beginning and showed him pictures, this had happened less and less as their intimacy progressed.
Down on the beach, the wind raising whitecaps on the graphite expanse of the ocean, leaning into the salt spray, she trudged forward in the sand with her arm laced in his, picturing them as if from the dune, arm in arm against the eternal backdrop of the Atlantic, shuddering involuntarily when she imagined Russell as the hypothetical observer of this elemental scene.
She stooped to pick up a quahog shell sticking up from the sand, running a fingertip over the shiny purple half-moon on the concave inner surface. “We used to collect these when we were kids. We rented a little house on the other side of the island, over in Sconset. My dad would always go out into the surf, swim way out—I remember I used to be afraid he wouldn’t come back, that he’d get sucked under. He’d disappear under the surface—it seemed like forever—and my sister and I would start to scream. Of course, then we’d see his head breaking the surface, and he’d swim in with his pockets full of the biggest, most perfect quahog shells and divide them between us.”
Luke smiled impishly and started to undo his belt. In a single motion, he slipped out of his chinos and his boxer shorts and then doffed his shirt, sprinting white and naked toward the water.
“Are you crazy?” she called. “It’s November.”
He ran out into the surf and dived into a shoulder-high breaker. She followed to the edge of the shore and watched as he thrashed out into the water, hug
ging herself as she felt the frigid salt spray. He went under three times before finally turning back and swimming in, emerging slick and dripping, his shrunken thing sprouting from its dark thicket like a blue mushroom, and then he presented her with a white-and-purple shell on his outstretched palm.
She browsed the bookshelves in the big family room while he crouched in front of the fireplace in his mad paisley bathrobe, laying out logs for the fire. He’d brought Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel CD; songs of heartbreak and illicit love wafted through the house.
We know it’s wrong to let this fire burn between us
We’ve got to stop this wild desire in you and in me
Not having had any opportunity to judge them before, she was pleased that his musical tastes were, so far at least, in accord with her own and she admired how they nodded to his southern roots. She kept replaying “Love Hurts,” imagining herself as Emmylou Harris singing alongside Luke as the doomed Gram Parsons.
She loved this room, the warm center of a house she’d spent so many hours in since prep school, its fragrant pine paneling impregnated with sea air and stained with centuries of wood smoke. It was an orphanage for odd and broken pieces of furniture from year-round homes, a family museum of accidental and intimate objects stitched together by an underlying nautical theme: the seashells and whale teeth, the lobster-buoy lamps, the iron harpoon tips that served as fire tools; the childish, crudely framed seascapes and the mournful striped bass over the fireplace with its glaze of browning varnish, mounted on a lozenge of pine. It reminded her in many respects of her old house on the North Shore, but without the terrible associations of domestic strife and loss.