Nell (15 page)

Four

Sunday night Stellios insisted on taking Nell to a restaurant she knew he couldn’t really afford. When she tried to convince him she would prefer pizza or Italian food, he was offended, and she saw that it would hurt his ego more than his pocketbook for her to refuse to let him give her this treat. At the restaurant he gazed at her with great affection and constantly held her hand, so that it was difficult to eat. She silently vowed to have a discussion with him, to tell him that they should stop seeing each other, that they were getting too serious for their own good. She intended to do this. She wanted to wait until they left the restaurant—she didn’t think it would be fair to dump something like that on him in the middle of a wonderful meal.

But the ride in the car to the apartment in his aunt’s house was too brief for them to have an emotionally involving discussion. So she went into the apartment with him and turned to face him, her face stern. “Stellios,” she began, and he took her in his arms and kissed her. Her good resolutions faded. She went to bed with him. He had a beautiful body. And she knew she was making him happy—it seemed the right thing to do.

After they had finished making love, Nell lay in his arms, feeling all flushed and drowsy, completely relaxed, her good intentions forgotten, until she heard Stellios whisper in her ear, “You mean so much to me.” Then she felt a chill pass straight through her and she went all tense and miserable. She did not want to mean so much to him. And now she knew that each time she was with him she would be encouraging him to let her mean more. But she could not bring herself to speak of breaking off—not then, when they were lying so close together. She only hugged him and made a noncommittal “umm” sound into his chest.

Finally, he drove her home. She did not sleep well. She got up in the middle of the night and took a shower, as if cleansing or baptising herself, as if she would be a new, calmer, better person after the ritual. She still did not sleep well.

She was plagued by old superstitions, old patterns of guilt and fear. She had certain mental habits that were as ingrained as her ways of walking and holding a fork,
and one of these was left over from her childhood: She believed that any bad news that befell her was somehow the result of some previous bad deed she had done, and so guilt was always with her, foreshadowing even the beginning of any selfish act. She could not go out to dinner with a friend or to bed with a man or even read an enjoyable novel if her children were on a car trip with Marlow until she knew they had all arrived at their destination safely. Now, even with children as old as eight and ten, she could not leave the house for an evening at a concert, no matter how expensive the tickets, if the children were sick. She knew her superstitions were irrational, illogical, and often inconsistent, but she couldn’t shake them any more than she could change the color of her eyes. There resided within her some primitive belief that even the tiniest of sins on her part would bring about certain and disproportionate disaster.

So it did not surprise her on Monday, when after making marvelous love with Stellios on Sunday, that all sorts of strange things fell from the sky in the nature of changes and sorrows. Monday morning Jeremy awoke feverish and vomiting.

She knew a flu was going around. After the first round of vomiting, Jeremy’s stomach seemed to settle down and he was able to keep down some ginger ale. She got Hannah dressed and off to school and settled Jeremy in front of the TV. He still wore his pajamas, and she brought down his pillow and favorite blanket. She pushed a low table near the sofa and put on it a glass of ginger ale and a large bowl, in case he had to throw up again. By the time she had to leave to open the boutique, his fever had dropped. She brought the phone in and plugged it into the jack in the TV room wall; he could easily call her if he felt sick again. She had left him before, and he had been fine. He would spend the day sleeping, watching TV, feeling sick, waiting for her to come home, slightly pleased at missing school. She would spend the day worrying about him, trying to be pleasant to customers, phoning him, and wishing she could stay home and tend him the way her mother had tended her when she was ill.

When she got to the boutique, she found Elizabeth O’Leary already there.

“I didn’t know you were in town,” Nell said, hoping Elizabeth wouldn’t notice that she had come in just a few minutes late.

“Oh, I just buzzed in,” Elizabeth said, making a graceful silly gesture with her hand. Her rings flashed. “Listen, Nell, let’s leave Arlene here to take care of things. It’s
always slow in the morning. Let’s go have coffee. I want to talk to you.”

Now Nell nearly threw up. If she lost this job—she would die if she lost this job. There was no reason for her to be fired, but Nell could think of no other reason for Elizabeth to want to talk. And she was being so obsequious, holding the door open for Nell, complimenting Nell on the way she looked, when Nell knew that Elizabeth’s clever eye could guess precisely the price of Nell’s clothes and at just which unfashionable department store she had bought them.

“Listen, darling,” Elizabeth said when they were seated across from each other at Helen’s Coffee Shop. “Order anything you want. You look like you could use a good breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry,” Nell said. “I’ve already had enough breakfast. If I eat any more, Elizabeth, I won’t fit into your beautiful clothes.”

“Well, then.” Elizabeth smiled, and ordered two Swiss almond coffees for them. She turned back to Nell. “Listen, darling,” she said again. “You know we think you’ve done a divine job at the boutique here.”

Nell felt an icicle plunge into her chest. If any statement ever sounded like the preamble to a dismissal, this one did.

“So we’re going to ask you a
huge
favor,” Elizabeth went on. “The Nantucket shop is open now after being closed for the winter. And we’re planning to open a new shop in New York this fall. That means we have to be down there all summer—God, the
worst
possible time to be there, we’ll die of the heat—setting up the shop, ordering, getting things ready. One thing we’ve learned is that we just can’t trust the design and setup of a store to anyone else. It’s the same old thing: If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Anyway, dear, what I’m getting at is this: Colin and I want you to go to Nantucket for the summer and manage the shop there.”

Nell, stunned past words, looked at Elizabeth.

“Have you ever been to Nantucket?” Elizabeth asked. “No? You’ll
love
it there. It’s
divine
. We’ve just loved being there. But we can’t find anyone who’s as good-looking and sensible and reliable as you are to take over for us. People like to drift there. We need someone who will not skip out on us in the middle of the season. The summer season in Nantucket is very, very big.”

“But,” Nell began, “I can’t just go there. Where would I live?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ll give you our house to live in—and we’ll give it to you rent-free, of course. Why, in a way it’s as if we’re offering you a holiday, Nell. You can walk on the beach and in the moors, eat at fabulous restaurants, meet gorgeous people … people would
kill
to live in Nantucket for the summer. You’ll have our little house, and you can make your own hours; we know you’ll need at least three part-time girls there.”

“But you see,” Nell said, “the children—”

“Well, the children spend a lot of their summer with their father, don’t they? That was
my
understanding.”

“Yes,” Nell said. “Yes, they do spend a lot of the summer with Marlow. But not all of it. I don’t know what his plans are. And really, I wouldn’t want to be away from the kids for the entire summer—”

“That’s crazy,” Elizabeth said. “Here you have a chance for a yummy vacation, no little whiners to slow you down, and you aren’t happy. Anyone else would jump at the chance.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Nell said, bristling. “But Hannah and Jeremy aren’t little whiners in the first place, and in the second place, I enjoy having them in my life. Most of the time.”

Elizabeth was quiet awhile. “Well,” she conceded, “I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t stay in the house too. There are four bedrooms. As long as they were—well, you know how messy children can be.”

“Look,” Nell said. “I know you’re trying to do me a favor, Elizabeth, but the idea of going away from my home for the summer just doesn’t appeal to me.”

“I suppose you’re talking about men,” Elizabeth said. “Listen darling, I don’t know who you’re seeing now, but you’ll find more gorgeous men in one square yard on Nantucket than in the whole town of Arlington.”

“I’m
not
talking about men,” Nell said. “I’m talking about—everything. I work hard to keep my life organized, Elizabeth. I work hard to keep my life centered. And my house and my friends and my bedroom and my routines are all very important to my sanity.”

“We’ll give you a substantial raise in salary and a summer bonus,” Elizabeth said.

Nell looked at Elizabeth, shocked. Elizabeth must have thought that she, Nell, was negotiating for something, Nell realized with surprise. And all Nell was doing was telling the truth.

“Look,” Elizabeth went on, repeating herself. “The truth is that you really are doing a fabulous job, Nell, and there’s no one we can find anywhere who can do all you do—who can look so good and be so honest and reliable and sensible. We really need you. And believe me, you
will
love Nantucket. It’s beautiful. Everything about it is beautiful. Just ask
anyone
. I wouldn’t send you to the moon, you know.”

They drank their sweet coffee; they talked more, but Nell knew at that point that she really had no choice. She could run the store in Nantucket, or she could lose her job. Elizabeth had a beautiful smile but a heart of lead. And she had made up her mind; there was no argument Nell could make that Elizabeth couldn’t counter. Fortunately for Nell, Elizabeth countered a lot of Nell’s objections—who would take care of the house and animals while she was gone, how would she manage child care while she worked—with offers of more money. Visions of solvency began to dance in Nell’s head.

Still, Nell was more rattled and worried than pleased when she and Elizabeth finally left the coffee shop. The women parted ways. Elizabeth walked down to her white Mercedes convertible, and Nell walked back to the boutique. She would have to talk to Marlow right away, to see what he and Charlotte had planned for the summer, to see how long they could take the children. She would have to find some responsible person to live in the house and watch the animals for the summer. She would have to line up babysitters for the brief trips Elizabeth wanted Nell to make over to Nantucket in May in order for Nell to get to know the shop. Well, if nothing else, she supposed this would make it easier to break things off with Stellios. Out of sight, out of mind, and so on, she thought. She wondered how Jeremy was; she would phone him as soon as she got in the store.

But when she got to the boutique, she found the salesgirl, Arlene, standing bewildered in a pile of their most expensive clothes. No customers seemed to be in the store, only young, glossy-faced Arlene, standing there at the back by the dressing rooms. When she saw Nell, she made a gesture with her hands and an expression with her face that indicated complete helpless confusion. Then a scarlet silk jacket came flying out of
one of the dressing rooms, landed against Arlene, and slipped to the floor.

“That one, too,” a voice said.

Nell recognized the voice at once; it was Ilona Shell. Nell stalked to the back and pulled open the thick dressing room curtain.

“Ilona,” she said. “What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m getting ready for the summer!” Ilona said. “I’m getting ready for the summer of my life!”

The dressing room was spacious and marvelously lit, with mirrors angled on two walls so that the customer could see the back view as well as the front. The third wall was papered in Laura Ashley paper and studded with heavy brass hooks. There was a white wrought-iron chair in the corner and a white wrought-iron table to hold the customer’s purse, shopping bags, and so on. The rooms were beautiful—one would wish for a house so lovely—but this dressing room had become a disaster area. Clothes were everywhere, so many outfits hanging from the hooks that they were nearly bending under the weight. Some of Elizabeth O’Leary’s most expensive orders were scattered on the floor at Ilona’s feet, orange silks mixed with wheat-colored cotton mixed with black linen. Ilona stood swaying in the middle of it all, red-eyed.

“Jesus Christ,” Nell whispered. She stepped into the room and sniffed. “Ilona, are you
drunk?
” For the second time that morning, Nell almost retched. She could no more drink alcohol in the morning than wake up and take a ride on a roller coaster.

Ilona laughed. “Here I am,” she said, waving at Nell through a mirror. “That’s me, in Three-D; drunk, divorced, and delighted.”

“Divorced?” Nell said. “Ilona, what are you talking about? You’re not divorced.”

“Not yet, but I’m gonna be! I’m leaving the old prick!”

“Ilona,” Nell said, “you’re stepping on the clothes. You’re going to tear that skirt if you don’t watch out.”

“Fuck the skirt—I’ll pay for the skirt, I’m buying all this shit. Just give me a bill, you know I always pay my bills, Nell. Jesus, what kind of friend are
you
worrying about your fucking little clothes. That’s all anybody cares about—clothes.”

“Ilona—” Nell edged her way around the dressing room, began to pick up the scattered garments.

“I want those clothes!” Ilona yelled. “I’m buying all those clothes! I mean it!”

“Good, fine,” Nell said. “Now calm down.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you,” Ilona said. “Well, let me tell you something—you know what you and I have in common? All you can do in your life is
sell
clothes, and all I can do in my life is
wear
them.”

“Ilona,” Nell said. “Come on …”