She studied Luke’s technique, approving of the pyramid of kindling and split logs on the grate, beneath which he was stuffing balls of newsprint, pleased to discover he was a man who knew how to build a fire, surprised to realize it was a quality she valued. She stroked his hair as he poked another wad of paper under the grate. He pressed himself to her and kissed her hip.
Her father had constructed his fires almost as meticulously as the model boats he made in the basement, as if they were meant to be permanent structures, cabins of birch and elm—the old elms succumbing in those years to a foreign parasite—on a foundation of perfect spheres of the Boston Globe. She’d often suspected that her dad would have preferred not to touch a match to his creation, and her mother would always complain he’d rolled the newspaper too tightly. A cold man—her mother’s refrain; anal retentive. Russell, quite the opposite, was too impatient; he tended to skimp on kindling and paper, too eager to get to the stage of combustion. Come to think of it, that’s how he did a lot of things.
She picked out an old edition of Plato she hadn’t noticed before, an anomaly among the mid-century bestsellers and Reader’s Digest condensed books, the almost forgotten names of former best-selling authors: J. P. Marquand and James Gould Cozzens, the Irvings—Stone and Wallace. One of the great pleasures in borrowed vacation homes—and she and Russell had borrowed plenty over the years—was the mad serendipity of the bookshelves… picking out old volumes, reading the flap copy and the fading inscriptions.
She flipped to the table of contents and saw listed there the dialogues she’d studied so earnestly at Brown.
“Have you read the Symposium? You know, I always thought Russell and I were made for each other. I believed there was one person who was meant for each of us, and that Russell was it for me. I always thought of that speech Plato gives to Aristophanes—”
“About the hermaphrodites.”
“Exactly!” she said, inordinately pleased that he got the reference, which seemed to confirm her guilty hypothesis—was it possible? was this crazy?—that he, rather than Russell, might be her long-lost twin. “Where he proposes that the earth was once populated by hermaphrodites, and that Zeus sliced the hermaphrodites in half, creating a race of males and females. And these sundered twins walk the earth searching for each other, for their lost half. That’s how I always thought of us.” She paused, not wishing to go too far. “Did you ever feel that way?”
“I do now. I had a glimmer of that feeling the first time I saw you. Walking out of the smoking ruins. And there you were.” He looked up at her with an expression that was just playful enough to ease the awkwardness of the moment, then turned back to the fire and struck a kitchen match against the blue-and-red box in his hand, touched the match to the paper, and watched the flame flare and expand beneath the split logs.
He stood and took her in his arms, clutching her from behind as she replaced the Plato in the bookshelf.
“Books are the most amazing objects, aren’t they?”
He looked puzzled, she realized, by the banality of this observation.
“I mean, because they’re lumpish objects, they have a physical existence, like we do. But any single book is the instantiation of a kind of Platonic form—the ideal, the creation of an author, which exists independent of the physical object. And here they sit on the shelf: The ideal’s latent until we pick it up and connect ourselves with the mind of a man or a woman who may be long dead. And, in the case of a novel, with a world that never actually existed.”
“Well, yes,” he said, hovering between bafflement and amusement.
“All these books, randomly accumulated over a hundred summers,” she said. “Look at this, it’s like a history of escapist literature. Don’t Stop the Carnival, by Herman Wouk. Back to Mandalay, by Lowell Thomas. Night in Bombay, by Louis Bromfeld. One Way to Eldorado, by Hollister Noble. I like that—authors don’t have names like Hollister anymore. Here’s Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku; Freedom Road, by Howard Fast; The Treasure of Pleasant Valley, by Frank Yerby; and, of course, The Shining Trail, by Iola Fuller.”
“And The Delectable Country,” he said, pulling out a faded volume. “Who wouldn’t want to go there?”
“And Beyond Sing the Woods, by somebody called Trygve Gulbranssen. The Far Country and Round the Bend, by Nevil Shute.” She opened this last and read from the flap. “‘An inspired storyteller writes of the joy that a man gets out of the day’s work when he has faith that God is on his side. You will find a ringing note of affirmation throughout this extraordinary novel.’”
“They certainly don’t write those anymore,” Luke said.
“I think about going away with you.” She loosened his arms and turned around to face him, replacing his hands on her back. “I think about us sweating in the sheets under a ceiling fan in Indochina, too hot and exhausted to move after making love.”
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
It occurred to her that this was one of the nicest phrases in the language: Me too. And that the dream of new love, untethered by history or habit, was to go far away, together. A dream that was entirely unrealistic in this case. She extracted herself from his arms. “Tell me something terrible about yourself,” she said, moving over to the couch. “Something that will let me go back to my old life.”
“I’m a bad father,” he said, taking a seat beside her and looking into the flames. “My daughter grew up in the care of nannies. I was too busy to give her the time and attention she deserved and I let my wife do a careless job as a mother. By the time I finally went home to check up on my family, it was too late.”
“I’m sure it’s not too late.”
“My daughter’s in rehab, Corrine.”
“Which is short for rehabilitation. She’s young. She still has lots of chances to shape her life.” Which, she realized, might not be true of them, of Luke and herself. Maybe they were too old, too far down the road.
“I haven’t even told you the worst of it,” he said. “A few weeks ago, I went home and found her in her bedroom….” He faltered, shaking his head.
She picked up his hand and stroked it.
“In her bedroom… with some boy. She was blowing him.”
“Oh fuck.”
“I’ve wondered since if it would’ve been better to find her fucking. At least the image wouldn’t have been, I don’t know, so graphic. What’s this shit about blow jobs not really being sex? This is apparently the wisdom not only of our last president but of the Manhattan private schools. If anything, it seems, I don’t know, more intimate, more perverse, having your face in someone’s crotch.”
She tried to stifle the image that flashed into her mind—of taking him in her mouth.
“I can’t get the image out of my head. And I know I should probably blame her mother and myself as much as I blame her, but right now I can’t quite bear to see her.”
She moved closer and put her arm over his chest, pulling him to her. “I wish I could meet her, get to know her. I’d like to look for you, my favorite parts of you, in her.”
“Tell me something terrible about you. No, actually, I don’t want to hear anything terrible about you.”
She looked into the flames. “Sometimes, I think I’m guilty of terrible… overreaching, the way I wrestled my children into existence. It was hubris. Refusing to accept the limits of nature, my own biological limitations. I was tempting fate. Whenever they get sick, I think it’s my fault, that I’m being punished because they were premature. And they were premature because I couldn’t hold them long enough and because maybe it was crazy and selfish to stretch reproductive technology to its limits. And there’s something else. Sometimes when I see a certain expression on Storey’s face, I’m afraid for her, afraid that I’m seeing my sister, some quality I hate in Hilary. And I feel so ungrateful, so unnatural, that even for a moment I could fail to love any little part of my daughter.”
“I feel the same thing, sometimes. Seeing my wife in my daughter, this lit
tle smirk they both have. Kind of like, Fuck you.”
The look he gave her then prompted her to lean forward and kiss him, made her want him yet again. My God, she thought, where has all this desire come from, and where has it been hiding all these years? She reached under the folds of his bathrobe and took his dick, pulling him toward her even as she launched her body toward his, her excitement compounded by the guilty memory of having made love to Russell on this couch one long-ago summer afternoon.
Ultimately, they had to answer other, more mundane imperatives. They needed groceries, but it seemed imprudent to go into town together. And they both needed, she realized, to check in on their other lives, although to acknowledge this awkward fact would break the romantic spell of their idyll.
“I hate this sneaking around,” she said. “I want to flaunt you. I want to walk down Main Street, down West Broadway, with your arm around me.”
But she agreed to let him go into town alone, and eventually became almost impatient for him to be gone as he inventoried the pots and pans in the kitchen and laced up the leather tops of his rubber-bottomed L.L.Bean boots in the hallway. She urgently needed to speak to her children, something she couldn’t comfortably do with him in the house. She watched from the front door till the car turned in to the road; then she went inside to call, immensely grateful when her mother told her that Russell was himself out on a grocery run.
“What’s going on with you two?” her mother asked, to the tinkling accompaniment of the ice cubes in her glass. “Russell’s walking around here like a whipped dog.”
“Nothing’s going on,” Corrine said, determined not to enlist in her mother’s sorority of wronged women. Her husband’s decampment with her best friend twenty-five years before had remained the defining event of her life, the creation myth of a bitter and wrathful Amazonian cult. Corrine, newly pledged to Aphrodite, had never been less sympathetic. As much as Jessie liked her son-in-law, she would have taken a certain morbid pleasure in learning that he’d confirmed her low opinion of his sex, and that her daughter had been betrayed just as she had. And even though Corrine was betraying her husband in the flesh—or maybe precisely because she was—she had no desire to rat Russell out to her mother. “I just needed a little time to myself, Mom.”
“Speaking of marriages, how’s Casey? Did I tell you that Mary Greyson spotted her husband with a floozy at the Ritz-Carlton last month?”
“That was a client, Mom.” Jessie still lived in a world that had only one Ritz-Carlton, in which grown women in hotel bars were either wives or whores.
“Is that what they’re calling them now? I think we know who’s the client of whom in this case.”
Finally, she persuaded her mother to summon the children.
“Nana’s house smells funny,” Jeremy said. “Storey got carsick and threw up on me and then Nana’s cat scratched me and it was bleeding like crazy. Dad put on a Band-Aid, but it was just a plain one. Where are you?”
“I’m on Nantucket,” she said. “You remember we talked about how Mommy was going to take a girl’s vacation with Aunt Casey? You remember Nantucket, don’t you?”
“I got a whale’s tooth.”
“That’s right.”
“Why can’t we come?”
“Well, sometimes parents need their own little time-out.”
“A time-out?” he said. “Why, did you do something bad?”
Corrine checked her face in the hall mirror when she heard the car on the gravel drive, hoping he wouldn’t notice she’d been crying. In fact, her maternal guilt receded far more rapidly than she could have imagined as she watched Luke striding up the flagstone walk in his Barbour coat, his arms loaded with provisions. At the door, she embraced him as if he’d been gone for days.
“Is that just hunger,” he said, “or are you happy to see me?”
She followed him into the kitchen where he displayed the provender—lobsters and soft-shell clams, as she’d requested, a pound of butter, a bag of mixed greens, two expensive-looking bottles of chardonnay. “Too late for corn,” he said.
“This will be a streamlined indoor version of the traditional clambake,” she said. “We used to take a big pot down to the beach, dig a hole, and build a fire. Onions and potatoes went in first, then kielbasa, clams, mussels, and finally lobsters. My dad would pile kelp on top of the whole thing and Hilary and I would run up and down the dunes while we waited. I can’t believe I remember all that.”
She’d become more interested in eating since she’d started sleeping with Luke, as if all of her appetites were connected, as if her taste buds had been awakened along with her libido. Perhaps it was just the delight of having another sensual pleasure to share, a ritual communion after they’d briefly sated their lust, but she could swear she felt hungrier lately; and she took an unaccustomed enjoyment in the taste of food. She hadn’t been able to eat a lobster in years—the idea of them going live into the boiling water making her too sad—but she was eager to share with him this traditional delicacy of her tribe, which, as it turned out, was also his own, at least on his mother’s side.
“Are you very close to your mother?” she asked as she rinsed the clams.
“In a sense.”
“That sounds… clinical.”
“We were almost unnaturally close,” he said. “Everybody teased her about my being her favorite, about my little brother, Matthew, being an orphan. I used to fake being sick to stay home with her, and she’d pretend to believe me, even though she didn’t really believe in illness. Toward noon, I’d miraculously recover and we’d go walking or riding together. Do you ride?”
She sensed a changing of the subject. “I used to, hunters and jumpers. I was on the circuit for a couple years. So what happened to make you less close?” Thinking about the story he’d told her in the first days of their acquaintance, the one about his mother’s infidelity.
“Sex, I suppose.” He shook his head, squinting out the window at the dark ocean, as if this had just occurred to him. “When I hit adolescence, it was all I could think about, so, naturally, she couldn’t be my best friend and confidante after that. That and her own midlife sexual adventure.”
“The affair you told me about. With—what was his name? Goose?”
“Duck Cheatham.”
“But surely you forgave her for that?” she said, holding an angry lobster in midair. “Eventually, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A year later, I went off to Deerfield and then Williams.”
“You never talked about it?”
He shook his head.
“Oh my God, your poor mother.”
Looking at the flailing lobster, she felt pierced by an intimation of his mother’s remorse and suffering over the years—the rejection by her beloved firstborn son. She glanced at Luke and spun away, unable to bear the thought of him causing such pain. She eased the lobster into the sink and took off, walking toward the French doors.
“Corrine!”
Unbolting the door, she almost relented, hearing the bewilderment in his voice, but she was too upset, and confused, to stop herself. She ran down the dune to the beach, turning once to see him outlined in the doorway.
How could she have been so wrong about him? A man so cruel and selfish. Not one word in all those years? She pictured Luke’s mother in her own image, her face succumbing to gravity and sadness, half a lifetime punctuated by moments of regret and yearning. Finally, she stopped running, her bare feet turning numb in the cold sand, and tried to find comfort in the rhythmic susurration of the waves.
Why was she so upset? Why hadn’t she stopped to consider Luke’s feelings, his pain? Was it because it was herself she was feeling sorry for, as much as for Luke’s mother? Casting herself in that same role of the scarlet mother… imagining her own son eventually and inevitably turning his heart against her? Seeing her as a whore. She didn’t think she could bear that. It wasn’t fair. She wanted to tell Jeremy—the beautiful little boy who would grow up t
o judge her and resent her—that it wasn’t fair, that she needed them both. She didn’t want to choose between Jeremy and Luke, her son and her lover. She wanted to tell Luke that his mother must have felt the same way, even as she wanted to comfort him, the little boy hiding in the closet.
Suddenly, his face in the moonlight reinforced this image—boyishly pained and bewildered.
“I’m sorry,” she said, burying her face in his shoulder. “You must think I’m crazy.”
He shook his head as he squeezed her fiercely. “No. I think you’re right.”
“I don’t even know why I got so upset.”
“And I didn’t realize how much you remind me of her,” he said.
“Maybe she loved him the way I love you.”
“That’s what I was thinking when you were gone just now,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose this. Please, don’t run away from me.”
As they lay in bed that night, she imagined the waves outside to be saying, Hush… hush… hush, absolving them and stilling their mea culpas, their mutual confessions of inadequacy and weakness and guilt. It was as if the innermost battlements of their fortressed souls had been breached and the final intimacy lay in revealing the secrets they’d previously hidden from the world for fear of appearing unlovable. She wanted to strip herself naked before him, even as the ravening desire she felt for him was superseded by a tenderness that was almost maternal. She lay in his arms in the darkness, listening to him talk about his own mother as if for the first time in years.
She must have fallen asleep at some point, because he was talking about something else now and she could see the grid of the windowpanes hovering in the darkness beyond the foot of the bed, and then she realized what he was telling her about.
“Paper’s fluttering down from the sky, paper and ash. It’s hard to see—visibility is maybe thirty feet—but still I started shaking at what I could see. The front of the Winter Garden is destroyed, a big smoking space, like this ruined cathedral. There’s no glass, just debris and dust everywhere. It’s like a fucking moonscape. I was with some other guy in a suit. We decided to follow a fire hose into the debris.