Willow

  "Well? Compares with what you have at The Breakers, doesn't it?"

  "That isn't a worry of mine, Bunny. As I told you, I'm here to work on my--"

  "Oh, please," she said, throwing up her hands and fanning the air between us as if she were waving away smoke. "don't start talking like a Ms. instead of a Miss and drown me in boredom with all that work you want to do."

  I started to laugh,

  "Come along." she said. "I'll show you our bedroom. We just had it redone by this new interior decorator who is the rage of Palm Beach. Thatcher's roam is down there," she said, flipping her hand to my right as we left the bedroom. "He has his own entrance to the house. Sometimes, we don't see him for a week. I swear. I wonder if he is deliberately avoiding us sometimes."

  She smiled at me.

  "Maybe that will soon change. As long as you're here, at least."

  I shook my head and followed after her as she rattled on and on about each and every curtain, artifact, and piece of furniture along the way. not failing to attach the cost of each as well. Just after the tour was completed and we returned to the rear loggia, Thatcher appeared.

  "Well," Bunny pounced, was it worth it for you to rush off to that dreary courthouse and interrupt your parents' wonderful brunch?"

  "Yes, Mother," he said. "I settled the case in less than half an hour."

  "I'm sure you could have done it over the phone," she insisted, refusing to relent.

  He shook his head and laughed.

  "What have you been doing since I left?" he asked me with some trepidation in his eyes.

  "Gossiping," Bunny answered for me. "And enjoying it." she added firmly.

  "I'll bet."

  "I'd better return to the hotel. I'm expecting some messages." I said. even though I wasn't.

  "Just go back and pack up," Bunny told me. "Why spend another night there?"

  "I'll see," I said.

  "There's nothing to see about." she wheedled. "You'll be far more comfortable here. and you will be able to accomplish a great deal more in a shorter time."

  "Mother, will you let the woman make up her own mind?" Thatcher said.

  "I'm just trying to point out the obvious advantages, Thatcher."

  "If they're obvious, they don't have to be pointed out." he countered.

  She thought for a moment. "Sometimes, we don't see the most obvious things." she replied, sounding as if it were something she had drawn out of her well of memorable sayings.

  Thatcher shook his head.

  "Here," Bunny said, handing me a pink card with gold trim. "Our phone number. Call me if you need any help with anything, anything at all."

  "She's not planning on moving furniture here. Mother."

  "Nevertheless, there it is." she said, nodding at the card.

  "My mother is just impossible," Thatcher told me as we started for the door.

  "Thank you for inviting me. Bunny. Please tell Mr. Eaton I said thank you. too."

  "You had better start calling him Asher. If you don't, he'll complain about how old you make him feel." she warned.

  I promised I would.

  "How old you'll make him feel," Thatcher mimicked as we made our way to his car. "Everyone clings to his or her illusions here as if they were holding on for dear life."

  "Present company excluded?" I asked.

  He smiled back at me, and we act into the car.

  "Why is it I suspect I was the main topic of conversation?"

  Thatcher asked.

  "She worries about you," I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows skeptically. "Bunny? Worries? People in Palm Beach don't worry. They just find out what the solution to the problem will cost and then buy it Didn't you see the sign on entering the island?"

  "What sign?"

  'There's one that reads. 'Check your worries at the gate. Smile or turn right around and leave.' Do you know there is no cemetery or hospital in Palm Beach? Death and sickness are not tolerated."

  We both laughed.

  I studied him for a moment. I wanted to return to the house and stay, of course. What a wonderful opportunity it presented to me. I could approach my mother again but in a quieter, softer, gradual manner. However. I didn't want my motives misunderstood. I was certainly not here to play any Palm Beach romance games,

  "Do you feel like telling me about Mai Stone?" I asked him.

  "I knew it! I knew she brought all that up. Did she tell you her parents sold her to an Arab billionaire for his son?"

  "Yes. It's not true?"

  "Of course not. Mai was always unpredictable. It was what I liked and didn't like about her." he said.

  "How can you be so contradictory about that, especially with someone you supposedly loved?"

  He looked at me, those beautiful eyes turning darker as his face became serious.

  "There's a little contradiction in every romance, and especially in every marriage. Each person has to give up something he or she wants. That's

  compromise. For Mai, it would have had to have been sacrificing some of her impetuosity, her

  unpredictability. She hated being tied down by any set of rules, and she took great pleasure in being outrageous, whether by defying style or etiquette or her lover's wishes."

  He laughed.

  "She drove around in her new sports car without putting on her license plates for the longest time. She was stopped three times by the Palm Beach police. She kept getting tickets. and I kept settling them. The fourth time, the patrolman was prepared and had a screwdriver. He put them on himself. I loved her for her carefree, wild ways, but I grew annoyed and tired of it as well."

  "But you gave her an engagement ring, didn't you?"

  "I gave it to her, but she didn't wear it. She took it and promised she would eventually. Sometimes, she put it on before we went out, but before the evening ended, she usually had it off."

  "She was teasing you."

  "I think she was teasing herself. maybe challenging herself." he said. "At times. I felt like a bystander, observing, waiting on the sidelines.' He looked at me. "Talk about your split personalities. I never knew which Mai Stone I was picking up, and sometimes didn't know until the evening was nearly ended. She made surprise into a career."

  "You must have been very much in love with her to put up with all that."

  "I thought so, but now I'm not so sure I wasn't simply putting myself through some form of torture." "Why would you do that?" I asked.

  To cleanse my soul of all my previous romantic sins." he said without a beat of hesitation. his eyes back to twinkling impishly.

  "I'll bet." I said. "That's the first thing you said that I believe." He roared and drove on.

  "You should take Bunny up on her offer. There's a computer you can use in my home office. I don't really use it much. The office is adjacent to my bedroom in what I like to call the Far Eastern wing of the estate. Besides it being on the east end. the furniture is all Oriental in style.-

  "Talk about surprises. The house is full of them," I said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Bunny told me Grace Montgomery was seduced in the room I would have."

  "That's the legend."

  "You don't believe it?"

  "I don't know," he said. shaking his head. "Exaggerations are like an indigenous crop here. People harvest and spread them like jam and pass them around... like that campfire game, what's it called? You know, where someone begins by whispering a secret, and it gets passed along, exaggerated. changed, until it arrives at the end, almost entirely different from what it was at the beginning."

  "I don't know that game," I said.

  He raised those skeptical eyebrows again. "Oh? How come?"

  "My father taught me how to hold onto the truth." I said softly.

  He gazed at me a moment and then looked ahead and said in a soft tone of voice. "Before you leave, please teach me how that's done."

  We were both strangely quiet for nearly the remainder of the trip back to The Breake
rs.

  I shouldn't feel so different, so peculiar about myself and life, I thought. Everyone, no matter how well-to-do, how successful in life. carries the burden of some heavy secret or secrets.

  Everyone is a little bit haunted. There are ghosts within us all, truths we keep bouncing away like bubbles we are afraid to let settle inside because we're afraid they will burst and poison us with the reality we can't face or with which we can't live.

  I was beginning to understand why the wealthiest people clung to their illusions here. Thatcher wasn't wrong. They used their money to escape from themselves. My mother and my halfbrother. Linden. had lost their wealth. They couldn't afford illusions. They could do nothing but look into the mirror and see themselves as they really were, including their pasts, their memories, their pains and defeats.

  Maybe I could change that. Maybe, somehow, I could change it for them.

  And in doing so, change it for myself.

  "What are your plans for the evening?" Thatcher asked as we drove into The Breakers.

  "I have no plans," I said.

  "There's an exhibition I've been invited to attend... some artist who's supposedly doing wonderful things by hand-painting digital images. Would you like to go? It's being held at the gallery that exhibits a few of Linden's paintings."

  "Oh?"

  "They'll have some wine and cheese, but we can have a nice dinner afterward at a quieter restaurant than where we were last night, a place on the beach where the entertainment will just be the sea and the sky."

  "I'd like that," I said.

  "The exhibition begins at seven. Why don't I come by then. The gallery is only ten minutes or so away from the hotel."

  "Okay," I said as we pulled up to the front and the valet hurried to open my door.

  Thatcher reached for me. "Think about staying at the house, Seriously. Look at the gas I'll save."

  "Oh?" "I'm just trying to do my best to conserve energy," he joked. "Right," I said, and stepped out.

  As I walked into the hotel, I thought what I should really do between now and the time he returned was buy myself something nicer to wear, something a little more elegant. I'm not doing it to develop some romantic fling, here in Palm Beach, I told myself. I'm doing all this towork myself successfully into my mother's world.

  It's like a disease here, my conscience cried, a disease that builds your immune system, only it makes you immune to the truth.

  I'm not lying to myself; I thought. Am I?

  As I hurried toward the boutique, I'm sure I looked like one of Daddy's patients arguing with herself in the corridor of the Willows. I tried on a black sleeveless, fitted dress with a crew neck and a kick pleat. Perfect. To go with it. I bought a pair of high-heeled, open-toe sandals, Then I pondered over some costume jewelry and decided in the end to look simple and classic. Once that was done. I went up to my room to wash my hair. I was feeling drab, and my eyes looked tired. I called room service and had them send up an ice-cold fresh cucumber. something I had often seen my adoptive mother do. I sliced it and put the thin slices over my eyes while I rested.

  Was I being too vain?

  No matter what I was doing, there was no reason not to look my best. I thought.

  How I hated all these contradictor, feelings. When would they end? Or do they ever end? Thatcher seemed to be telling me he believed they were a part of life. and especially any relationship. Maybe I was learning more here about myself than I had ever intended.

  I was just putting the finishing touches on my hair and makeup when he knocked at my room door,

  "Hi," he said, and whistled. "You look great!" "Thank you."

  He was wearing a black silk shirt open at the collar under an aqua-blue blazer. Beneath his cuffed black slacks, I saw he wasn't wearing socks with his soft leather loafers. He looked dapper, relaxed, and elegant all at once.

  He gazed past me into my room.

  "You don't look as if you've packed your things." he remarked with disappointment.

  "I'm still undecided." I said "I'm not even sure I'm staying in Palm Beach much longer, anyway,"

  "Oh? Well, let me see what I can do to help you decide to stay," he added with that cute little smirk on his lips. "Madam," he said, offering his arm.

  I laughed and joined him. An elderly couple was already at the elevator, the man in a tuxedo and his wife so bedecked in jewelry I wondered how she could move. They glanced at us suspiciously, even a bit disapprovingly. I supposed because of our joviality, Thatcher hoisted his eyebrows and winked at me as we all stepped into the elevator.

  "So," he said, "I'd like permission to call you by your real name tonight."

  The elderly couple swung their eyes at us so quickly and so simultaneously I almost burst out laughing.

  "Is that all right with you?" Thatcher pursued.

  "Yes," I said quickly, giving him a hot look of reprimand that only widened his smirk.

  The couple exchanged looks and pulled closer to each other and farther away from us. When the doors opened. Thatcher stepped aside to let them go first, and they practically charged out through the lobby.

  "That was very sneaky of you." I said.

  "I can't help enjoying being a little outrageous, especially in front of obviously snobby people, people who take themselves too seriously."

  "Wasn't that your complaint about Mai Stone?" I countered like a courtroom attorney myself.

  He wasn't easily thrown off balance. It probably came from all his negotiating and trial experience. Without hesitation, he shook his head.

  "Mai enjoyed being outrageous in front of anybody, snobby or not. She was playing on her own stage. Besides," he said, turning at the front entrance. "let's keep to the promise we made to each other last night."

  "What?"

  "No more historical revelations. No more personal questions, remember? Let's just have a good time in the here and now. The past. like the future, will take care of itself."

  Last night. I'd thought I had more reason to want that than he did. Tonight, I wasn't so sure.

  The gallery was already quite crowded by the time we arrived. Almost everyone there knew Thatcher. He introduced me as Isabel Amou and simply told people I was visiting Palm Beach. Very few fried to find out much more about me once they heard I was from South Carolina and not from a particularly wealthy family. Thatcher said I was a former college acquaintance.

  "Ste how easy it is to create fictions here that people will willingly accept?" he whispered.

  We wandered through the gallery, sipping wine. After a while, he turned me into a side room to show me Linden's work.

  There were only three pictures, each darker and more eerie than the last. In the first, a young man, not unlike Linden. was lying on the beach, turned on his side and leaning on his elbow to talk to someone beside him, only that someone was a skeleton on its back. Everything else in the picture was realistic, almost photorealistic, but in strikingly vibrant colors. the colors you might see in a nightmare.

  "He's interesting in a way." Thatcher admitted. "Inserting some horrific or surrealistic element into the realistic setting. Don't you think?"

  "Yes." I said. moving to the next, which showed a woman walking along the beach holding the hand of a little boy who was literally sinking into the sand. Though he was half buried. the woman seemed unaware of it. The ocean had a crimson, almost bloody tint beneath a setting sun.

  In the third picture, a small gathering of happylooking young people stood at the shore. some eating, some drinking, all laughing and smiling, while in front of them, an older woman who resembled my mother was caught in a wave, her arms stretched toward them in desperation.

  "Not hard to read the meaning of this one. I suppose," Thatcher observed.

  "There's a great deal of anger in all these pictures," I said "It makes you feel sorry for him."

  "Pity is not something people here have time or an inclination to express." Thatcher said. "It won't sell the pictures." He took one look at my face a
nd added. "Let's get out of here. I'm sorry I showed you these. I didn't mean to depress you. You're looking too beautiful for that."

  I flashed him a smile and turned away so he wouldn't see the sadness in my eyes. Did my mother share this terrible agony? What was their world like, their everyday lives in that beach house? Did I really want to enter it?

  It took us nearly twenty minutes to make our way back through the crowd. So many people stopped Thatcher to ask him questions about cases he had completed or was involved with now. Some of the younger women looked for any possible excuse to get him to pause and speak with them. He was polite with everyone but clung tightly to my hand and worked relentlessly to get us through.

  When we broke out into the street, he apologized. "I'm sure you would have liked to stay and talk to more people to gather information for your project. but I'm being selfish tonight. I'm not sharing you."

  "It's all right." I said. It wasn't exactly the setting I wanted, Too many distractions. and I don't think those people would have been forthcoming."

  "Then maybe my mother is right: you would do better using Jaya del Mar and permitting her to invite people to meet you. There you could ensnare them with your questions and twist the truth out of them."

  "Yes," I said. laughing. "Maybe.-.

  We drove out of Palm Beach to a place called Singer Island, where he took me to a restaurant that had a patio facing the ocean, not more than forty feet away. Against the horizon, the stars looked as if they were falling into the sea.

  "It is beautiful here," I said, "Thank you for bringing me."

  "I knew you would like it I haven't been here in a long time."

  "Why not?"

  "Beautiful things aren't enjoyable unless you share them with someone special." he replied. "Don't you agree?"

  "I suppose." I said, trying to be cautious. Being with Thatcher in so romantic a setting. I found myself feeling as though I were teetering on the edge of some great precipice. If I let myself go. I would fall deeply into the mystery of the darkness beneath. I was both attracted to it and afraid of it.

  His good looks, his charm, and his interesting personality were enticing in and of themselves, but much more so for me sitting in the warm night with a candle flickering on his face and the mesmerizing sound of the ocean softly soothing us beneath a sky so bright with stars it looked like the beginning of all time. I felt I had stepped into a fairy-tale world where magic was as common as daylight, where every word between us seemed like poetry, every sound around us part of the symphony, music composed for us alone, as if the whole world were suddenly devoted to one purpose: ensuring our happiness above and beyond the rest of the world.