The Island (15 page)

“What was it?” India said. “That made you leave Grant?”

“Oh, God…,” Birdie said.

“No, I mean the one thing. The moment.”

“The moment?”

“The moment when you knew. When you were spurred to action.” India was high from the nicotine and from this unusual closeness with her sister. “Because you know Bill and I had our problems, big problems, huge fucking problems. How many times did I contemplate throwing him out? Leaving him on the subway in Stockholm? Serving him with papers on the squash court? And yet, I couldn’t. I never had the guts. I didn’t want to turn our world upside down. I didn’t want to disrupt the status quo.” India exhaled. “And then, of course, he did it for me.”

Birdie nodded thoughtfully, and India felt ashamed. Here, she’d asked Birdie a question and then she’d talked about herself. She was a selfish bitch and always had been, and that, ultimately, was why Bill had shot himself.

Birdie said, “Well…”

India leaned forward. She wanted to know.

“It was a couple of things in succession. First, there was the trip we took to Charlotte to visit Tate. She had just moved to the city on her own, and I wanted to see how she was faring. We arrived on Friday night and left on Sunday, but it killed Grant, you know, because it was what he liked to call ‘forced family fun.’ He had to interact with us; he had to be present. So Friday night was fine—Tate drove us around the city a little, we saw the stadium lit up at night, that kind of thing. Saturday we met Tate at the park where she liked to run, and then we went to lunch and did a little shopping. I wanted to buy Tate some new clothes, pretty clothes… get her out of her jeans. The whole afternoon, Grant was like a huge, reluctant Saint Bernard that I was yanking on a leash. Then, that night at dinner—we were at a steak house—Grant got up from the table and I thought he’d gone to the men’s room, but he never returned. So Tate and I finished up, I paid the bill, and we went to find him. He was in the bar, of course, where there was a television. He was talking to a complete stranger about the Giants’ chance the next day against the Panthers.”

“That sounds like Grant,” India said.

“It
was
Grant,
is
Grant. But it hurt. He loved us, but he didn’t like us.”

“You know that’s not true…”

“He liked us but he didn’t want to be with us,” Birdie said. “So that was the precursor to ‘the moment.’ ‘The moment’ came a few weeks later.”

“What happened?” India asked.

“It was a beautiful autumn Sunday. Grant had golfed all day Saturday, and our agreement was, only one day of the weekend could be devoted to golf. So on Sunday, he was mine, right?”

“Right,” India said.

“So we woke up and we… made love.”

“How was that?” India asked.

“Oh, it was
fine,
” Birdie said. Here, Birdie blew a stream of smoke out the window. It was weird watching her smoke. It was like watching President Obama smoke. Or the pope smoke. “But it wasn’t like I was hearing ‘Unchained Melody’ play in my head. I’d been married to the man thirty years. I was hoping for some other kind of connection, something deeper. I wanted to
do
things with Grant. I wanted to be his friend.”

“Gotcha,” India said.

“He wouldn’t go to church with me because he said he didn’t
feel
like it… the only thing he worships, as you and I know, is money. Okay, fine, to each his own, but then I asked if he would go to brunch with me after church. I was talking about a nice brunch at the Silvermine Tavern, with mimosas and Bloody Marys. Since when has Grant ever turned down alcohol? But he said no, he didn’t want to eat a big brunch and he didn’t want to drink because he had plans to go jogging with Joe Price at two o’clock. And that was it. The moment.”

“It was?” India said.

“Grant had never jogged in his life. But on that Sunday, he was going jogging with Joe Price. Because he would accept any offer to avoid spending time with me.”

India exhaled and picked a fleck of tobacco from her tongue. What could she say? Birdie was probably right. Grant was a guy’s guy. He excelled at the manly. He wrote the handbook.

“I didn’t want to do it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Campbells and the Olivers and the Martinellis and the Alquins and all our other friends who had weathered the first storm of divorce that came through when we were all in our late thirties. We were the survivors, we thought. We had skirted stepchildren and alimony payments. We were proud of that; I was proud of that. I was proud to still be married. But the only thing I was holding on to, I realized, was my own misery. So before he could even tie up his running shoes, I asked Grant to move out. And he said, ‘Are you sure, Bird?’ As nice as can be, but in a way that let me know the marriage wasn’t something he valued enough to fight for. And I said, ‘I’m sure.’ And he was gone—not that night, but a couple of nights later.”

“Did it feel weird?” India asked. “Watching him move his stuff out?”

Birdie tapped ash into the clam shell that India was using as an ashtray. “What was weird was that he had so little to take. What was there? His suits, his toothbrush, his bathrobe and slippers. His humidor. His tennis racquets and his two sets of golf clubs. A few pictures of the kids, but these I suggested. He took the flat-screen TV and his really good scotch from the liquor cabinet. He made only one trip and all of it fit into the Jaguar. And that was it.”

“That was it,” India said. God, Bill had had so much stuff. His studio was filled with sketchbooks, clay, rolls of copper wire, copper sheeting, canvases, paints, color palettes stolen from the hardware store, and half-finished studies for sculptures. He had hundreds of CDs—from Mozart to the Beatles to the Cure. He loved music; he always wanted to know what the boys were listening to. He had the things he bought in other countries—a Tibetan prayer shawl, a flute from India, masks and blowguns and kris knives, a tea set from China. He had other artists’ sculptures and other artists’ paintings. He had his own set of chef’s knives and his special Indian spices ordered from Harrod’s. He had a library filled with books. Thousands and thousands of books. If India had asked Bill to leave, it would have taken him months to gather his shit. As it was, after he died, India kept it all. This was her attorney’s suggestion.
Do not throw away anything that personally belonged to Bill Bishop.
Someday, down the road, they could talk about donations. Or about a foundation. Or about turning the house into a museum.

“A regular person would have walked through the house and not noticed anything missing,” Birdie said. “And that spoke volumes. Grant had never been vested in our home life. His life was elsewhere—at the office, on the golf course. He was more at home at Gallagher’s than he was at our house. So when he left, what I felt was regret that I hadn’t asked him to leave earlier.”

“Really?” India said.

“Really,” Birdie said. She stubbed out her cigarette, then reached for another, and India scrambled to light it for her. “I wasted my life with him.”

“You didn’t waste your life,” India said. “You have two beautiful children.”

“And what else?”

“A lovely home.”

“Don’t you think I expected more from myself than that?” Birdie asked. “We were educated. I went to Wellesley, for God’s sake. I expected great things from myself.”

“You did great things.”

“I won the women’s member-guest in 1990,” Birdie said. “A golf tournament. Golf, which I despise, which I took up solely to spend time with Grant, who didn’t like to play with me anyway, because I wasn’t good enough. I won that tournament just to spite him. I started a book group, the first of its kind in Fairfield County, because I wanted to read really good contemporary literature and talk about it, and what happened? It devolved into being just like everybody else’s book group—drinking Kendall-Jackson chardonnay and reading
The Secret Life of Bees.
”

“You raised the girls,” India said.

“The girls are the girls,” Birdie said. “I’m not going to take credit for the girls.”

India said, “You’re a wonderful person, Birdie. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

Birdie said, “I look at Chess and I feel
so jealous.
”

“Jealous of Chess?” India said. “The girl is miserable.”

“Miserable now,” Birdie said. “But happier in the long run. She stood up for herself. She stood up for her
life.
What if I had done that? What if I had fended off Grant Cousins and all his money and focused on myself? I could have been an expert in fine carpets.”

India lit herself another cigarette. “That’s right, you always liked carpets.”

“The language in carpets is fascinating,” Birdie said. “I used to know a little about it. Now—well, it’s like trigonometry. I’ve forgotten it all.”

“You’re a wonderful gardener,” India said.

“See? I could have been a landscape architect. I could have made a fortune in New Canaan alone. I could own my own business. I could be a landscaping
mogul.
”

“You’re talking like you’re all washed up,” India said. “You can still do it.”

Birdie stood up from the bed and looked out the window. India’s window looked northwest, toward North Pond and Muskeget. “I want to go home,” she said.

“You
do?
” India said.

“Yes,” Birdie said.

When Birdie first walked into the room, India had been wondering how to tell her that she would be leaving on Wednesday. But over the course of the conversation, she realized she was enjoying herself, and she was connecting with her sister, which was far superior to dealing with the potential bullshit transpiring in the cauldron that was Center City, Philadelphia, in July. (Independence Mall on July Fourth, mobbed with tourists from Kansas and Bulgaria: India shuddered.) And now, just as India had pretty much decided to stay put, Birdie announced that
she
wanted to leave?

“Give yourself a chance to settle in,” India said. “Please?”

Birdie exhaled smoke, said nothing. Her eyes were far away.

CHESS

D
ay two.

That night, I left the Bowery Ballroom with Michael, and Rhonda left with Nick. My heart was sliced and diced like an onion, or maybe not that neatly. I liked Michael, I did. On paper, he was perfect for me. He was what I thought I’d always been looking for: an Ivy League scholar-athlete with plans to conquer the world. He would, someday, be rich and successful; he would pass on his excellent genes to our children. He was earnest and kind. But I
desired
Nick; I knew that the first night. Nick was chocolate and cigarettes and whiskey and danger, everything I should stay away from. I asked Michael about him in the taxi to my apartment. He had always been in trouble, Michael said. His life lacked a clear direction. He had barely graduated from high school, and then it took him seven years to get through Penn State. He played the guitar in bars in State College; he recorded an album with a band, then the band broke up. He currently lived in a studio on 121st Street. The apartment was paid for by their parents, but Nick didn’t have any money for furniture, or the cable bill, or food. He spent whatever he made on new guitars, on recording space, on expensive equipment for rock climbing, which was his second obsession after music. But the new band, Diplomatic Immunity, was good, it was great. Nick had to hold steady and not blow it. He drank a lot and he was temperamental. Michael worried about him.

I nodded. “Mmmmm,” I said. Nick, as expected, was not the brother I should be after.

But I wanted him.

I was distraught that Nick had left the bar with Rhonda. Rhonda was irresistible and I couldn’t stand the thought of Nick and Rhonda, together, a floor below me. But as it was, Rhonda reported that Nick had been a gentleman. He delivered her to the lobby of the building but wouldn’t escort her up. (“Which sucked!” Rhonda said. “What better way to end the evening than with some really hot rock-star sex?”) He kissed Rhonda at the elevator bank, then left without asking for her number.

“I think he was kind of into you,” Rhonda said. “He asked me a lot of questions about you.”

“Me?” I said.

I started seeing Michael. I liked Michael. We had fun together. We jogged together after work, then went out for Vietnamese food. I cooked for him in my apartment. He was a good eater, he appreciated the ingredients and the technique, he helped me in the kitchen. We liked the same movies; we started reading the same books and talking about them. He was romantic—he sent me flowers, he took me to Café des Artistes, he made coffee and brought me a cup in bed. He was a good lover, considerate, earnest, eager to please. Too eager? I thought about Nick in bed more times than I cared to admit. I wanted to smolder. There was no smoldering with Michael. With Michael, sex was clean and athletic.

Michael met my parents and it was a tremendous success. My father loved him. My father would not have loved Nick.

I met Michael’s parents. This happened in their house in New Jersey, and Nick was there. He was in jeans and a paint-splattered T-shirt; to earn some money, he was painting the upstairs bedrooms of his parents’ house. This was the first time I had seen Nick since that night at the club, but Michael had a Diplomatic Immunity poster framed and mounted on his kitchen wall, so Nick stared at me and I stared at Nick as I made Michael dinner and as I ate my eggs in the morning.

I said to Nick, “It’s nice to see you again.”

He said, “It’s nice to see
you.
” Again, the penetrating stare. He wanted me, I was sure of it, but then not sure at all. I felt lucky to be liked by Michael. I wasn’t vain or confident enough to believe that I could be attractive to Nick, too.

That dinner was tense, and it had nothing to do with Cy and Evelyn. Cy and Evelyn were easy, they were delightful, they liked me, I could tell, and I liked them. I answered all their questions correctly; I got a gold star. Nick stared at me. I would look at him and his eyes would hold me like I was in his arms.