“Dione’s the wife?”
“And business manager, I guess you’d say. Handled all the money, of which there was a nice amount, though I shouldn’t say how much for the sake of confidentiality. Even though I’m not with the bank anymore.”
“He’s Eldridge’s brother.”
She looked at me, slightly jolted.
“No, sir. His brother?”
“So I’m told.”
“Ellington?”
“Crazy artist. Changed his name. Used to be Arthur.”
“He never said anything about a brother.”
“They weren’t close.”
“Probably embarrassed about it. Butch hated everything to do with money. Though he tried not to go on too much around me, given my job and all. Dione had me over a few times. I like her. We still talk pretty often. She looked in on me a lot after the thing with Roy happened. One of the few.”
Her voice dropped off and she created a distraction by jumping up to go pour herself another cup of coffee. When she came back she dropped into the other kitchen chair at the pine table, pulling up one leg and holding it in place with her knee tucked inside the crook of her right arm.
“How about that,” she said, “Arthur. You’d think Dione would have said something.”
“Like you say, probably embarrassed.”
“Probably.”
“I’d like to ask her.”
“Ask her?”
“About her brother-in-law. Ask her why she thinks somebody blew him up.”
“Really funny she never said anything. I probably never gave her the chance. Me being so completely focused on me.”
“No self-flagellation.”
“Another Oak Point regulation?”
I didn’t know what she wanted, or why. I didn’t know any of those things myself. I’d been sorry to see her show up at Reginas, but now that she was there, I bought her argument. We could just pick up from a point somewhere back in the past, before a lot of things had happened. I’d told her a while ago I was a big fan of avoidance and denial. Wouldn’t be much of a life strategy if I couldn’t put it into practice.
So I toasted her with my coffee mug and gave up the fight.
I
T WAS
S
ATURDAY MORNING
when I found an invitation to a fundraising event that night in Southampton Village taped to my screen door. It was actually addressed to Amanda, but she’d written a note to me on the envelope.
“Butch Ellington will be there auctioning some paintings. You’re my date. Don’t give me an argument. I’ve already bought your ticket. Amanda, your former personal banker.”
When Saturday came, I didn’t see her during the day, which made it easier to work on my addition. I’d used up some more of my pay from Frank on framing material, which the lumberyard had left stacked in my driveway. I wanted to get as much into place as possible and nailed in before the wet fir started to warp, which it does a lot easier these days than it used to. It felt good to swing at big common nails after all the finish work at Melinda McCarthy’s, shooting what amounted to galvanized needles into three-quarter-inch poplar with a pneumatic nail gun. A power nailer would have been just as effective on
my addition’s frame, but advanced construction techniques didn’t square with the cottage’s general disposition.
I filled in all the rafters and finished the framing detail on both gable ends before calling it a day. Hot, sore, sweaty and covered in sawdust, I felt justified bringing an aluminum tumbler full of ice and vodka with me into the outdoor shower. A frozen bite on the tongue, steaming water on my shoulders, dust and grit circling down the drain.
My mood adequately fortified, I was able to face the question of what to wear to the fundraiser. I still had a few clothes left over from my marriage, in which my wife Abby held full command of wardrobe selection and acquisition. Fortunately for me, she had reasonable taste, combined with an abhorrence for discount pricing, which was not so fortunate.
“Why pay less” is what I usually said looking at the price tags, though she never heard, distracted by her scrutiny of how the fabric fell, or absorbed by where the item might fit into her master sartorial strategy.
I thought I could redeploy the linen suit I’d worn to go see Appolonia Eldridge, but I’d used up my only dress shirt. I dug around some cardboard boxes I’d dumped in the closet when I moved in and came across a light blue silk T-shirt.
“Dimwitted Pretense Wear from a men’s store exclusively serving the asshole in every man,” I told Eddie, who was watching disinterestedly from the bed. It was surprising the T-shirt had made its way into the boxes; even Abby’s relentless hectoring wouldn’t have got me into that thing.
Though it wouldn’t hurt to try it on.
“Not a word,” I warned Eddie.
I wasn’t sure. I either looked like Don Johnson’s idiot goombah cousin or one of my own idiot goombah cousins trying to look like Don Johnson. Eddie was noncommittal.
I figured what the hell, I didn’t have anything else to wear and there was a chance fundraisers and benefactors would find it idiotic enough to stay clear.
I walked my indecisions over to Amanda’s house and rang the bell.
“My. Don Johnson or Al Pacino. Which is it?”
“Jesus Christ.”
Amanda, on the other hand, didn’t look like anybody but herself at her best. She was wearing what my daughter called an LBD—Little Black Dress. Made of a material that managed to define her form without giving everything away. The straps were the kind that invited a scissor snip, and helped delineate a neckline that resolved itself in distant proximity to her neck. The lower skirt part I think was simple and trim, but I was distracted by the slit feature.
“I hope you’re driving,” she said, brushing past me and walking down her driveway toward the passenger side of her Audi A4. I caught up to her, took her arm and gently led her to the Grand Prix.
“Got more leg room,” I told her.
The day had made the transition from late afternoon to evening and the air was just starting to shed some of the heat of the day. The sky over the Little Peconic was turning a shade of periwinkle above the shredded bands of magenta glowing along the horizon. Since it was late July the rangy oaks that named the peninsula were still green but had turned pale and lost much of their luster, their leaves curling brown at the edges. We drove through the Oak Point neighborhood and out to North Sea Road. I had the windows partway down to cloak the commingled residue of decaying leather, Camels and unwashed mixed-breed dogs. The artificial wind thundered in, making conversation difficult and messing up Amanda’s hair, which she didn’t seem to mind. She slipped
off her shoes, which were just a few delicate straps of black leather, a sole and high heels. She laid her head back on the seat and I put on the jazz station to provide cover for both of us.
The fundraiser was at one of the really big houses in the estate section surrounding Agawam Lake, just south of Southampton Village. The word “house” didn’t really describe it, though “mansion” seemed archaic, or overly abstract. It was more a collection of houses, aggregated into a loose assembly of forms, unified only by the capricious hand of its creator. You entered the grounds via First Neck Lane, following a driveway that seemed ten times longer than it looked from the road. The hedges in that part of the Village often had the effect of distorting perspective, disguising the trackless scale of the original estates, their acres of lawns, pools and tennis courts.
The driveway forked off a few hundred yards from the house. A young man who looked like he sang in the glee club, in white shirt, black pants and bow tie, directed us to a rise beside the lake where cars were clustering around a huge blue-and-white-striped tent.
“I think there’s room for you over there to the left,” he said. “About a square mile.”
“I think he just dissed your car,” said Amanda as we rumbled across the lawn.
“That’s just envy talking.”
“Well, this is an auction. Perhaps someone will make a bid.”
The atmosphere under the tent was humid and laden with social complexity. A jazz quartet of bored black guys already plotting their routes back to Manhattan provided a soothing undercurrent of sound for bored old white guys pretending they were actually listening. Some of the couples stood in a
glow of hearty beneficence, pleased to have survived long enough to share their good fortune, their faces open to any opportunity to bestow kindness and generosity. A few of the women wore the proud mark of cosmetic surgery, an oxymoron, unless you like sixty-year-old women with faces tighter than the head of a drum. Bony, undernourished things with an air of profound disappointment, scanning the crowd for someone to talk to who might be more advantageous to their status than the one already filling the role.
Most of the people there under forty were hawking trays of prosciutto-encased shrimp and endive slathered in cream cheese. The rest were either flush with fresh-faced excitement or standing around nervously, looking like newly minted social aspirants. Some even younger were there only through the coercion of parents or grandparents. Whippet thin, or softened by vestiges of baby fat, slack-jawed and heavy-lidded, the girls spoke to each other without making eye contact, and the boys, some looking as if they’d recently carried off a cruel practical joke, slouched in unconstructed Armanis and woven-leather slip-ons, consoled by the certainty of outliving their extortioners, but not their bank accounts.
A huge blond woman crammed into a bright red cartoon of a crinkly red dress suddenly burst out of nowhere and almost knocked us down trying to capture Amanda in an awkward embrace.
“Amanda, the black,” she said. “Just to die.”
“And look at you,” said Amanda.
Which I did until I recognized her.
“Robin. Long time no see,” I said, putting out my hand.
“Actually I saw you last, since you were unconscious at the time,” she said, holding my hand longer than I needed her to.
“I never thanked you for driving me to the hospital.”
“Laura drove. I mopped up blood. Same diff. You’d do the same, I’m sure.”
Robin and her business partner Laura sold real estate. It had been a good few years for them, proven by her being at the fundraiser, the price of entry comparable to most people’s monthly take home. She guessed I was looking around for Laura.
“She’s home. Says she always gets drunk at these things and makes a fool of herself. In reality, hardly touches a drop. I think she means I make a fool of myself. But I don’t care.”
I’d never seen her under a bright light. The thick layer of makeup on her face smoothed out what excess weight hadn’t already filled in. Her hair, rich blond in the dim light of a nightclub, looked almost green under the diffused glow beneath the tent. She had a glass of white wine in her hand that she used as a device for emphasizing the back half of every sentence, miraculously keeping most of the wine in the glass. Maybe because she’d braced herself with a tight grip on my coat sleeve. Abby would have noticed the patch of wrinkles left by her moist clenched hand.
“I bet there’s a bar here somewhere,” I said, gently pulling back from her grasp.
Amanda slid her hand under my arm and led me away.
“You know how he gets when he’s thirsty,” she called back to Robin.
“I don’t, but that’s okay. I know how I get.”
The drink table was commanded by two Asian women with platinum blond hair and silver lipstick wearing bow ties and tuxedo jackets, sans tuxedo shirts. They looked like a pair of retro Playboy bunny, Japanese punk, off-planet archetypes, fitting into the tired old money ambience of the fundraiser about as well as a team of professional wrestlers. It made me feel a little better about my stupid T-shirt.
“The Pinot for me,” said Amanda, “Absolut for him, on the rocks. A double. Keep him occupied for a few minutes.”
I was grateful for the drink. It’d been so long since I’d been around any kind of a crowd, let alone this kind.
“It’s not that bad,” said Amanda, reading my mind. “Drink up. I’ll drive.”
Abby my ex-wife, would have been intoxicated simply by the idea of the scene under the tent. It would have been her natural element, her aspiration and fulfillment, the consummation of all she held dear. If called upon, she could have parsed the whole gathering into specific social strata, the virtuous and venal alike, guided merely by the length of dangles on an earring, or the stitching on the placket of an oxford-cloth shirt.
“Which one is Butch Ellington?” I asked.
“You’ll know.”
Right then someone over in front of the jazz band called to her, and she let go of my arm and glided away. I dealt with the sudden trauma of abandonment by refilling my glass and heading toward the periphery of the event. This gave me a good perspective on the crowd, which eventually yielded results.
Even from a distance he stood out. Average height, but made taller by an unkempt ball of curly reddish brown hair, perfectly round plastic-rimmed glasses over tired eyes, decent shoulders but a tidy pot belly balled up above slender legs slid into old-fashioned boot-flared Levis. His T-shirt was bright white, and unlike mine made of regular T-shirt cotton. Like Robin, he was using his drink, something amber on the rocks, as a facilitator of conversation, but with even more animation. His target was a tall slender woman with straight, unnaturally black hair with shiny bangs cut straight across her forehead. She leaned back a little as if buffeted by his enthusiasm, but was holding her ground.
I didn’t see much of Jonathan in him, but I expected that.
Back-to-back with Butch was a large woman, almost his height, with a round face and frizzy gray hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a blousy native dress with lots of pleats and heavy embroidery that tried unsuccessfully to divert attention from her zaftig figure. She had rings on her toes and a massive necklace made of multiple strings of little wooden balls. I thought about rows of peasants turning them out on tiny little lathes. Like Butch, she was energetically engaged, in her case with a natty old guy in thin wire-rims and white patent-leather shoes.
Amanda must have caught sight of them at about the same time. I saw her working through the crowd in their direction. She got there several steps ahead of me.