L
ouisa, you asshole, how could you?
That’s what Luey wished her mother had said, along with
Didn’t you use protection? Have you never heard of contraception? This is going to ruin your life. I’m only glad your dad isn’t here to witness your latest dumbass stunt.
Instead, Luey could see thought bubbles effervescing above her mother’s head. “Honey bunny, you aren’t the first girl this has happened to. I will support you in this decision. If you want an abortion, I will find a clinic. If you want to keep the baby, I will feed you chicken soup and vitamins. I’d have the baby myself if I could. In fact, let me look into that. I read an article in
Good Housekeeping
when I was at the doctor’s office . . .”
Luey stared at her phone, willing him to call. From his Web site, she knew he was in Sydney.
The thought that within her was human life the size of a sesame seed left her feeling as if she were living in a sci-fi movie.
A living thing
. Part of her wanted to say,
Ew, get it out,
yet the rest of her was curious. An online test said her IQ score was 135, not genius but pretty high. What if this child would go on to cure cancer? Invent a new kind of music? Be God’s way of bringing back Daddy? What if?
Luey clutched her stomach, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.
“S
orry for calling this early, but I’m selling the house,” I say.
“But you love that place.” Daniel’s voice is still tamped with sleep.
This used to be true. The house at the beach is not fashionably old, fashionably new, or fashionably located. What it has going for it is a sweep of bay view from a broad roof deck where Ben would read a thriller each weekend. There is also a widow’s walk, his idea. What the hell was he thinking?
From this perch I adored the endless tent of blue sky and the faraway fireworks we watched with the girls and their friends every Fourth of July. But I’m no longer seeing lazy meringue clouds or jeweled bursts against an inky sky. I’m reliving every grain of sand that followed me from the beach into my butt crack and kitchen, every mildewed towel, every gridlocked mile as my car crept to the village to buy a forgotten quart of overpriced milk, every artificially serene face at yoga, and every disturbing freckle on my chest from hours sprawled under the pounding sun. Mostly, however, I’m seeing every mortgage payment coming at me like a breaking wave.
I can live without this house, which Ben always felt more affection for than I did.
“Get your tenses right, my friend,” I tell Daniel as I sip lukewarm coffee. “I
loved
that house.” It is seven-thirty, though I have been up for hours. “But now that I’m done with it, the place may not necessarily be easy to sell.”
“Weren’t you going to try and rent?”
“That was last week.”
“I hope you’ve slept on this decision.”
I did. It was the backache with which I woke up that convinced me there was no reason to be a halfhearted homeowner whose problem will boomerang the first weekend after Labor Day when renters departed, leaving behind their worn-thin flip-flops and cheap, crusty grill.
“I’m good with the decision. Except I don’t know a broker.”
“I can make some calls,” Daniel says, as I hoped he would.
That was last week.
Today he and I are on the Long Island Expressway. It’s not a scenic drive, unless you count the car itself, Stephan’s Jaguar. I am dressed in layers of silk underwear topped by wool and puffy down. I look round as a Botero and don’t care.
The last trip I made here was in October, when Ben ran fifteen miles on the beach and I grilled veal chops with Swiss chard and ridiculously expensive Italian ricotta. That evening I pushed aside the photography books—Annie Leibovitz’s nudes, Bruce Weber’s Newfoundlands—and set two places on the coffee table in front of the hearth. Ben built a fire. I lit my fattest white candles. He poured Prosecco. I wore a moth-eaten Shetland turtleneck and my most sacred, broken-in jeans. After dinner we ate coffee ice cream dripping with hot fudge and had each other as an after-dinner delicacy.
This is the kind of memory I try to bat away as if I’m taking a broomstick to a spider web. I am entangled in it until, as we slow down and turn onto Route 27, Daniel’s voice erupts with, “What sayeth Fleigelman?”
“Want a direct quote?” I offer up in my most dulcet Brooklyn-meets-Great-Neck tone, “‘Bubkus, my dear.’” I smile at Daniel. “He promises he’s looking ‘with all due haste,’ but I need to start living as if nothing will come from his efforts.”
Daniel and I already know that so far Stephan hasn’t found any sign of the storied emerald-and-diamond ring, though he has sent out an all-points bulletin to jewelers to alert him if the ring surfaces. He assured me that if the ring isn’t on someone’s hand, he will find it.
Daniel turns up the country and western station that Stephan forbids and warbles along with the radio. Stephan’s patron saint is Bach; Daniel’s is Johnny Cash. “I can’t believe that’s true, darlin’,” he says, and when I don’t respond, he adds, “Come on, y’all. Sing it, sister.”
“If you promise not to sing, I won’t either.” Ben, who searched for karaoke bars wherever we vacationed, could carry a tune. My repertoire is limited to the blessings over the Hanukkah candles, which the whole class learned at my private Quaker elementary school.
“In that case, get out the directions, will you please? We’re getting close. I can smell money.”
I put on my glasses and call out street names until we arrive at an East Hampton realty office in a Hansel and Gretel clapboard cottage. “‘Chip Sharkey’ sounds like a bookie. How do you know this broker?” I ask, as Daniel gently slows and parks Stephan’s Jag like the elderly, pampered child it is.
“Like I find everyone. He’s Pedro’s ex and registered in the official gay underground.”
“Why is it when men break up, they turn one another into friends? I don’t see that happening with women.”
“Because men are bigger people, inherently kinder and more beneficent?”
I think of Ben. “Nah, that can’t be it.”
We’ve been in the car for two hours. I am glad to stretch. Like a good husband, Daniel puts his arm around my shoulder as we maneuver the icy path to the realtor’s door. Inside, where the temperature is barely warmer than outside, a noisy electric heater glows like a menacing jack-o’-lantern. A receptionist instructs us to wait on a hard bench. Daniel makes phone calls while I page through an oversized magazine from last September.
I’m wondering why Chip Sharkey, he of the flawless reputation, is late for an appointment on a slow Friday morning. This gives me time to consider if I’ve made a mistake. The house I want to heartlessly off-load is rife with Silver-Waltz history. Clam bakes, post-prom parties, barbecues for Ben and Luey’s August birthdays—our family has taken its measure here in corn on the cob, fresh basil, and ripe tomatoes; in bottles of chardonnay and tiny bikinis; in guests who’ve arrived for the night and stayed a week. This is where I learned to roll out pie crusts and parse the difference between UVA and UVB. I’m time-traveling back to the summer when Nicola lost her virginity to a riding instructor with a Holden Caulfield-ish name—Montgomery Ward? Ward Montgomery?—when a man who looks to be in his forties, with buttery, meticulously parted hair and round tortoise-shell eyeglasses, who seems to have walked out of a J.Crew catalog, comes through the door. Despite the frost, he wears only a navy blue blazer and a spiffily striped scarf.
“Chip Sharkey,” he says, extending a hand gloved in tobacco-colored leather. His jeans are pristine but not ironed, his boots too fine for this weather. Under his other arm, he carries a cardboard tray. “Sorry I’m late—made a coffee run.”
We exchange introductions and follow the broker to a small office in the back fitted with a desk faced by Windsor chairs. Vintage maps of the island cover the walls.
“I did a drive-by,” he begins. “Your landscaping is excellent. Enough greenery so the house should show well even in this season. Good that the walks are shoveled and the driveway plowed.”
While I tally how much this required service continues to cost, Chip Sharkey swivels his chair to retrieve a folder, which he opens and places carefully on his desk, then reaches for a fountain pen. He leads me through a checklist. How many bedrooms?
four
; kitchen?
renovated six years ago, soapstone counters, white wood cabinets, Sub-Zero fridge, Viking stove
; bathrooms?
three and a half
; security system?
of course
. . . ; and on and on.
Chip lifts his key. “So, two cars or one?”
No way is Daniel going to abandon the Jag. “We’ll follow,” he answers. We wander out and I take my seat. Before we can gossip—
What man that old has hair as yellow as Tweety?
—Daniel says, “You don’t have to go through with this, George,” concern creasing his forehead. “We can go home and forget we were here.”
I reach over and pat his hand. “You’re more worried about me than I am,” I lie. “Let’s at least see what kind of price Chip Sharkey”—I try not to snicker when I say the name—“comes up with after he cases the place.”
We drive past the sites of out-of-season farm stands and follow along the back roads where next summer another round of inebriated celebrities and teenagers will most assuredly collide with trees. I think that unless Chip suggests that I give away my house for a bargain-basement price, I need to finish this chapter of my autobiography. As soon as I unlock the back door of the house, however, I feel that
E*A*S*Y
is a password my life no longer accepts. This place is so damn Ben. Hanging on pegs are his faded baseball caps with logos from every resort where he’s ever parasailed or golfed. Against the wall are a row of size-eleven men’s sneakers. On the kitchen counter is an empty bowl. I see it filled with ripe peaches and Ben grabbing the most succulent one, as he took everything and anything he wanted.
Chip follows me, with Daniel behind, as I open appliance and pantry doors, grateful for the absence of mice, and then lead the men into the open room furnished with overstuffed parchment-pale couches that circle a tall fieldstone fireplace. (“Why are there only three?” Luey wanted to know when they arrived, as if my choice in seating was intended to exclude her.) There are back-to-back hearths, the flip side facing a dining room furnished with a rough, round table and ten mismatched wooden chairs acquired at auctions and flea markets. Each has been lacquered a different color, the only touch that’s strictly my own.
Chip sizes up the nothing-special view while I stare at the birch logs in the fireplace. I move closer. These are the remains of the logs I kept in place all summer but never burned, the East Hampton equivalent of plastic slipcovers. Now, charred like five babies in an apocalypse, they are the calling card of someone who wasn’t me.
I was cold. Now I am colder. I have to remind myself to smile when Chip praises the putty-white of the walls, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the rugs walked to silkiness.
“Would you sell it furnished?” he asks.
“Why not?” I answer, as I pass a mirror and instead of my own reflection, see Ben. I would like to gauge out his eyes, but I find myself leading two men upstairs. We enter Luey’s bedroom, then Nicola’s, one electric green, the other carnation pink. A guest bedroom, two bathrooms. Nothing is garish or amiss.
Chip nods. “And where’s the master?” he asks.
The master is in hell. And then another channel of my bifurcated inner workings wakes up to hush me, saying, Georgia, you have no proof that Ben did anything wrong—his loss of money might be an idiot blunder he was trying like hell to reverse.
“The master bedroom?” the broker repeats.
Daniel senses that I am out to sea. “C’mon, buddy,” he says, guiding Chip down the hall. “You’re going to love it.”
I did, once. A stark four-poster faces the window with its lulling, watery vista. Four pillows lean against the headboard, and a pale gray mohair blanket awaits over a thick comforter. It is folded precisely, but its form is not my folding, which I have taught my weekly summer housecleaner to duplicate. I stare at the mohair throw and see an origami of deception.
Chip is opening closet doors and pacing off square footage. “Aren’t I lucky?” he asks. “Each of my feet is exactly twelve inches long!”
Anxiety snakes from my gut to my gullet. I expect it to stick out its tongue. We wander here and there, to the small attic with camp trunks, to the basement where lawn furniture waits out winter, to the patio with its empty stone planters, to the laundry room, and to the garage. Chip scribbles while I tell myself that everything can be explained; any chicanery is purely in my imagination. Maybe Nicola or Luey made a secret trip out here. Or the cleaning woman’s sister and her boyfriend might have had a fling. Burnt birch logs and an oddly folded mohair throw—neither are evidence on which to build even a screenplay, much less a legal argument. Yet it’s as if I can smell Ben, though when I breathe I inhale only the cold, the damp, and the loneliness of a summer house in winter.
“That about does it,” Chip says. “Very marketable. Though of course we’d need to stage the place”—remove family pictures—“except for one of a dog—people like dogs in the country” and paint the girls’ bedrooms Decorator White. I zone out as he continues, ending with, “An orchid delivered every Friday.”
Daniel takes over, because evidently it’s polite to answer a question. “I’m sure Georgia will think about the staging, won’t you?” I can tell from his face that mine has all the intelligence of a grapefruit. “Thank you very much. This is good to know.”
“I’ll get back to you later with a suggested listing price,” Chip Sharkey says. “I need to check the comps. Traffic may be slow in the winter, but it should pick up by March. Buyers want to make a deal by late spring and settle in before the summer.”
Settle
. Imagine. A gracious impersonator of the Widow Waltz thanks Chip Sharkey for his time and trouble.
We’ll be in touch. We’ll talk. We’ll see
. He leaves and it is only Daniel and me, standing across from each other with a kitchen island between us.
“What do you think?” he asks.
My urge to discuss Chip’s grooming habits has vanished. “He seems thoroughly competent.”
“About selling?”
Without hesitation, I reply, “No problem there. Get rid of the place.”
“I don’t want you to rush and regret this. I’m sure I can find some friends who’d rent for a season, maybe even long term.”
“Daniel,” I say, skipping over kindness. “I’ve got to do it. Nothing will ever make me feel Ben’s not going to race through that door, throw down his tennis racket, and go for a Corona.”
He narrows his eyelids slightly, sending a message that asks,
You
think you’re fooling me?,
zips his jacket higher, and says, “In that case, I refuse to return to the city without a lobster roll.”
“Sorry, Danny, out of season.”
“Ah, then other sustenance will have to do. Lunch, George?”
Twenty minutes later we’re watching seagulls strut outside the window and listening to the Atlantic slap against the shore. A fire is blazing in the seaside bar where we’re tucked into a booth, letting chowder steam warm our faces. Daniel tells a story about an artist he’s signed; twenty-seven years old, a prodigy. Which reminds me. “What does Stephan say about Cola?” It’s been one full week since Nicola reported for duty, leaving every morning promptly at eight-fifteen. I have been impressed.