The High Season

  “Sounds worthy, that’s great. Giving back. I heard your director—Ruth, did you say?—might be leaving.”

  Doe frowned. “I don’t know. I mean, Ruthie is fantastic.” Had Mindy and Catha’s plot gone this far, that gossip had flown all the way over Peconic Bay? And since when would someone like Daniel Mantis care about someplace like the Belfry? “Anyway, it’s a terrific museum,” she said.

  Lark picked up her phone, but at Daniel’s look she put it down on the banquette. “Orient’s cool.”

  “I never heard of it before Adeline decided to discover it.” Daniel chewed on a bite of fish. “A little less lemon next time, I think. Balance is everything. What’s your endowment?”

  Luckily Doe knew this. “A million and a half.”

  “Seat of the pants, is it?”

  “Pretty much. But we do a lot.”

  “Can we order a bottle of red?” Lark asked. “Daddy, stop quizzing poor Doe.”

  Daniel signaled the waiter. “Art is a mind-opener, isn’t it? We don’t get enough arts education in this country. I’m thinking of starting a foundation.”

  “What?” Lark rose out of her sulk. “You never said anything.” She put her fork down. Doe knew from experience that Lark only ate half her food.

  She put her fork down, too. She knew the rules of this game. You always left food on your plate. And no one, ever, asked to bring something home. Not even dessert. Once out to dinner in Miami she’d asked for the rest of her crab cake meal to go, and the man she was with, an art dealer who taught her so much and then ghosted her texts, said, “No. This isn’t the Cheesecake Factory.” She never did it again.

  “Why not, everyone’s getting one. It’s the newest accessory. That’s a joke, Lark.”

  Daniel said this without looking at his daughter. He was looking at Doe. She felt suddenly buzzed and very awake.

  “I think it’s time I supported more local causes,” he said.

  Doe tried to hold his eye but couldn’t. Was she imagining how intensely he was looking at her? She couldn’t read this glance. She didn’t know whether he was thinking about exposing her or thinking about fucking her. Either way she could be as doomed as a bag of kittens.

  35

  RUTHIE WOKE UP to the sound of crockery in the kitchen, always a sign that meant coffee was on the way. She hoped Joe hadn’t turned into a tea drinker. Sunlight was pouring through the window and she was nestled in a soft bed and she was filled with something close to happiness if she didn’t think too hard or too long.

  “I just can’t help believing!” Joe sang from the kitchen.

  She was only a block away from her own house, and she felt as though she were in a secret clubhouse, hidden away in a dumpy rental. Jem was with Mike, and no one knew where she was.

  They had danced in the living room last night. They had sipped ice-cold limoncello. Their kisses had tasted of lemon and sugar. They had wound up on the bed, tilting onto it together, hanging on hard because they didn’t want to break the embrace. She touched her mouth. The night had felt like one continuous deep kiss.

  Joe stood in the doorway, holding two mugs. “Don’t start regretting it yet,” he said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Liar. I have a radical suggestion. Let’s tell the truth. Right from the start.”

  “Toss me a T-shirt. There’s truth, and then there’s truth at eight in the morning.”

  Joe put down the coffees and tossed her a T-shirt. She slipped it on. She ran past him while he chuckled. She thought this was over in life, wearing a man’s T-shirt and examining his bathroom items while she used (this, a mark of their maturity) a new toothbrush he’d left for her on the sink.

  When she came out, hair arranged, breath minted, and after a delighted dazed look at herself in the mirror—who was this woman having fun?—he was sitting up in bed, waiting with her mug, in boxers and another T-shirt just as faded and soft as the one she was wearing.

  “I want you to know that I regret nothing,” he said. “I’ll even sing it. In French.”

  She took the coffee. Last night was hazy, not from wine, but from a certain rushed urgency to the proceedings. Dinner and then he invited her over for a nightcap, an invitation so ridiculously transparent that they giggled. The end of the evening had been inevitable since the moment he put his hand on her knee. Or when she sat down at the table. Or when she saw him again. The truth was simple. When she was with him she felt alive.

  They sipped, watching each other. Ruthie spilled a little coffee on his shirt.

  “I like this house. It’s nicer inside,” she said. “Outside it’s a dump.”

  “Consider it a metaphor. I painted the floors and the walls before I moved in. The kitchen was chartreuse, and not in a good way.”

  “The thing is, you don’t have much. It’s very bachelor.”

  “Part of my reinvention.”

  He didn’t even have a dresser. There was a nautical map on the wall and a single ceramic vessel with sharpened pencils on a table. A stack of books—cookbooks! How promising!—served as a night table for her coffee.

  “No art,” she said.

  “We argued so long about the collection that one day I just said, Take it all. Halfway thinking she wouldn’t. She did. A shocking thing happened. I didn’t care. I ended up giving away mostly everything in the apartment. I know that sounds monkish but it’s not that elevated. I didn’t want it, it was from another life. The apartment with the vases and the plates and the books and the trays and the lamps…now I’ve got one set of sheets and towels, three pairs of pants, and seven T-shirts. When things get dirty I wash them.”

  “You have six T-shirts. I just stained one.”

  “When I knew my marriage was over, I talked to my dad about it. I was back here—my parents moved out to Southold when they retired, have I mentioned that? Anyway, my mom was dying. We were at the hospital and Mom was asleep. I said it was a tough decision, to leave—Henry was still in high school. And I asked him how he did it, how he always seemed to know what to do. And he thought for a minute. And then he said, ‘I never made a decision in my life.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I never really got it. I was kind of pissed, actually, because it wasn’t helpful. But last night…I got it.”

  Wasn’t that just what she’d been contemplating? The whole unthinking rush of it? The lack of decision when she walked through the door? Could that still happen, in the middle of your life?

  “I’m sorry to say this, but I have to go to work soon,” he said.

  “I’ll find my dress.”

  “I will always remember that dress,” Joe said. “It is the pinnacle of summer dresses.”

  Only it wasn’t her dress, it belonged to Carole. Sooner or later he’d see her in her own wardrobe, the untailored, unsilked her.

  He gently pulled the neck of the T-shirt down and kissed her shoulder. “Of course,” he said, his mouth against her skin, “I don’t have to leave immediately.”

  He leaned in, and she leaned back, resisting the pull, the kiss, the feeling that she was not at all able to control this. “Look,” she said.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t say look in that fashion.”

  “In what fashion?”

  “In that We’re adults let’s talk about this fashion.”

  “But Joe—”

  “And don’t say but Joe.”

  “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Let’s get ahead of ourselves,” Joe said, scrambling to sit up straight and spilling more coffee on the sheets. The man was going to have laundry to do. “Let’s flirtatiously text each other during our days, and then at the end of it let’s have you come to my bar and let me pour you a chilled glass of Muscadet and lovingly shuck my best oysters and let me make you dinner and let us do all th
is over again, tonight and all summer, for God’s fucking sake.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa as in stop, or whoa as in, that sounded really great?”

  “Whoa as in, I’m not in a good place right now.”

  “What would make it a good place?” Joe leaned back again.

  “To have what I used to have,” she blurted. She meant her house, her job, her peace, her place, so that she would feel grounded enough to try this. She saw immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.

  “I guess that brings me to a question,” Joe said, looking down into his mug. “Are you still in love with Michael? Do I have competition here?”

  It was the name “Michael” that snagged her. She could hear it in Adeline’s cool, cultured voice. It brought her back to what was waiting for her outside the door.

  She heard how much he didn’t want to ask that question. So much banter between them and it had all fallen away last night. They had knelt, naked, and touched palms. They had not been afraid. It had been a night so filled with charged touch, with lust and tenderness, that it would make a poet stand up on a chair and cheer.

  Her thoughts moved so fast. In the time it took for him to look down in his mug and look up again she knew she would have to give him up.

  She knew this: He was the most honest man she’d ever known. Whatever story she came up with about the watch—a street purchase in the city, a family heirloom—it would be a lie. She would have to pile lie on lie in order to keep her house, and while she had talked herself into the fact that these lies harmed no one, she still had to tell them.

  She could tell them, she was almost sure. But she could not tell them to Joe.

  “I can’t let go,” she said, and saw his heart fall. He thought she meant Mike, of course, when she meant everything but Mike. To have Joe believe she loved her ex-husband was a lie, but at least she hadn’t had to tell it.

  Oh, Ruthie. You parser, you.

  36

  THE NEXT MORNING at Lark’s, Doe took the side door of the house to the driveway, the family door. The one that looked like a window. She received a blast of panic when she saw Daniel standing in the driveway by the garage—oops, vehicle barn—drinking an espresso. Waiting. He knew she’d stayed over, of course, she had followed Lark up the stairs last night.

  “Thank God,” Lark had said when they were alone in the bedroom. “It’s always easier when he knows things.”

  “So it’s okay that I’m here?” Doe had hovered by the door, almost ready to go back down the stairs, even though wanting to be with Lark was lighting her up.

  Lark had kicked off her mules, sending them crashing into the closet. “He approves of you.” She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “That was awful.”

  Then she had folded herself up in the bed, tucking her knees under her chin, covering her head with her arms, her hands in tight fists.

  Doe had kissed each finger until the hands uncurled.

  Now Doe watched Daniel as he smiled and raised his cup. Did he approve? Or did he want something? His gaze…she couldn’t figure it out, the way he looked at her. Not the dry slithering gaze of Ron back in Florida, but not without assessment.

  “Beautiful morning,” he said. “You’re up early.”

  Doe nodded. “Summers are busy.”

  “I admire industry. My daughter will stumble down at eleven,” he said. “She’s worthless. Don’t give me that look, I know, I sound harsh. That’s the trouble with honesty.” Daniel leaned against Doe’s car. “She doesn’t try.”

  “Is that it? That she doesn’t try? That’s her problem?”

  “You’ll understand the whole continuum one day. Her mother is worthless, too, with her pretend job. Medicated and nuts and married to an asshole. I had to take over. Look, I financed Lark’s business for three years and watched her drive it into the ground. Do you know what they called her in the press? ‘Flower girl Lark Mantis.’ Flower girl! My assistant showed me some Instagram feed, it’s full of her just standing at parties. Now they call her Luminous Lark. Jesus. She has a hashtag. It’s embarrassing.”

  Doe leaned against the car because her legs felt weak. This conversation was now straying into her territory. He was talking about seekrit-hamptons. She did what she usually did when forced into an uncomfortable conversation, repeated back what Daniel said. “She’s embarrassing you.”

  “She’s embarrassing herself, and she doesn’t seem to care.”

  “She doesn’t seem to.”

  “Stop repeating what I say, I’m on to that trick,” Daniel said. “So what is this thing with you and my daughter? A fling or a thing? Okay, don’t answer. I could see it last night, you two are in deep, even if you don’t know it. Your generation with your fluid sexuality, you don’t need my approval or not, she’s an adult, you too, I get that. But I also think you might be good for her. I noticed the wine trick last night, by the way.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Certainly an improvement on Lucas. He encouraged her faults. So work with me here.”

  “Okay,” Doe said. “You want me to help you. Am I right?”

  “What’s it like on the North Fork? Nobody stays here in the fall and winter.”

  “Yeah, the locals only come alive when you’re here to crank the keys in our backs. When you leave we just slump over until Memorial Day.”

  “I don’t feel bad about being wealthy, all right? What am I if I can’t use those things for my kid? She went to Brown, she went to Yale. She’s had every opportunity to rise. But every time I set up a meeting, she drifts away.”

  “She doesn’t want to work for anybody,” Doe said.

  “What is she, a five-year-old who wants to be an astronaut? You’ve got to work for somebody,” he said. “Even I work for somebody. I work for the deal. And who said she was good at being a boss? She was a terrible boss.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Doe said.

  Daniel squinted at her. “And you know this because?”

  “The way she talks about the farm,” Doe said. “She had their loyalty. They’re still in touch with her, you know that? Not because they want something, either. They’re still trying to make a go of it.”

  “I know, she talked me into giving them seed money to take it over,” Daniel said. “Seed money for a farm.” He snorted.

  “She needed a financial manager,” Doe said. “She needed someone who knows how to run things. What she’s good at is being a figurehead. That’s not nothing.”

  “That is nothing.”

  She waved her phone at him. “She’s Insta-famous. Those pictures your assistant showed you? She’s in all those photos not just because she’s photogenic. She’s an influencer. People look to her for trends. They’re not just looking at her. That dress she wore last night will sell out at Net-a-Porter by the end of the day. They weren’t taking a picture of you outside the restaurant. It was her.”

  “That’s not an achievement.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s a profession!”

  “It’s a con, I promise you.”

  “I’m just saying, she could be a change agent.”

  “I’m not even sure what that is. Why do I feel there’s something wrong with it?”

  “Because you’re old.”

  His eyes went flat. That was it, that was his weakness. She’d found it, and it turned out to be something so boring! Irrelevancy! The fear of every white man in his sixties with money and power. He almost disappointed her.

  “I’m just saying she needs a platform,” she mumbled.

  “Oh, Jesus, you kids. She doesn’t need a platform, she needs a job.” Daniel looked at her carefully. “You seem to have a lot of confidence. What did your father do? Where did you go to school?”

  “Reed.”

  “You grew up o
ut there?”

  “Florida. Miami.”

  “Nobody grows up in Florida. Or if they do, they stay there.”

  “Are you interviewing me now?”

  “Where are your people from?”

  “My people? I have a cousin in Boca, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You look mixed, that’s all. Miami is a cosmopolitan city. South American? Don’t look at me that way, I’m just asking. Come on, help me out here. You’ve got an exotic look. It’s a compliment, okay?”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “No judgment here,” Daniel said. “Where you’re from has nothing to do with anything. America is about the now. The past is just a path. That’s all.” He drained his cup. “And I need another espresso.” He looked down at his bare feet. “Tell you what. I’ll drive you to work if you’ll hold the espresso cups.”

  “My car is here.”

  “Don’t worry about your car. I want to see it.”

  “You want to see the Belfry.”

  He dinged her nose, lightly, with an index finger. “I asked you to stop repeating everything I say.”

  She wanted to smack his hand away. He knew it, and only grinned. “You can tell me about platforms.” He turned and walked away, knowing she’d wait.

  Fuck this, she thought. I don’t have to wait.

  She waited. He reemerged with two espresso cups. She climbed into his car, a hybrid Porsche (selling at somewhere near one hundred grand, she looked it up, “Daddy brings all the toy cars to the Hamptons,” Lark had said), and balanced the two cups. He would shift, hold out his hand for the cup, as though she were a waitress. Doe retaliated by kicking off her flats and crossing her legs. Her goal was to make him look. He did. So maybe it was sex, then. She did not want to sleep with Lark’s father. There would have been a time when she would have done it, but that time had passed. She liked to think she was getting smarter.

  “If I drive up to the Belfry with you in this car people will talk,” she said.

  “And do you care?”