The Summerhouse

by Jude Deveraux

The kitchen was sunny and bright, the table was set with pretty green and yellow linens, and in the middle there was a platter with a heap of pancakes and strawberries. Leslie was at the stove wearing a bright yellow apron with cherries on it.

  Ellie took one look at the table, then up at Leslie. “Will you marry me?” she asked, eyes wide.

  “I’ve already asked,” Madison said as she stepped inside the house. She’d been outside, Ellie assumed for a smoke.

  Smiling, Leslie put a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of Ellie. “I can’t tell you how good it is to cook for people who like to eat,” she said, motioning toward Madison.

  “Don’t tell me,” Ellie said with a groan, as she nodded toward Madison. “She ate half a dozen of these things.”

  “Closer to a dozen,” Leslie said, then leaned closer to Ellie. “Don’t let her kid you; she’s skinny because she never eats. This weekend’s gluttony is unusual for her.”

  “I heard that,” Madison said. “I don’t eat much because I never have time and I have no idea how to cook.” As she said this, she sat down on the chair across from Ellie, and immediately, Leslie set in front of her a bowl of out-of-season strawberries piled high with freshly whipped cream.

  Ellie groaned again.

  Madison, with a smug smile, lifted a fat, red strawberry and licked the cream off it.

  “I hope you get fat,” Ellie muttered as she dug into the pancakes.

  “So why did you?” Madison asked as she crunched the berry.

  “Really, Madison!” Leslie said. “That wasn’t polite.” She sounded as though she were talking to her teenage daughter.

  Madison was unperturbed by the chastisement. “Last night I told what had happened to me to make me ugly, so now it’s her turn to tell why she’s fat.”

  Ellie had to blink a few times at Madison’s bluntness, but then she smiled. Truthfully, Madison’s question was easier to reply to than other women’s not-so-subtle hints about salads and gymnasiums and personal trainers. “It’s the most marvelous gym and he’s the best trainer in the world” had been said to her more than once, as though Ellie didn’t know that there were ways to get rid of her extra pounds.

  “I got screwed by the legal system and I got depressed,” Ellie said, her mouth full. “I am now a washout. A has-been. I haven’t written a word in three years. I don’t even hear stories in my head any longer.”

  “You were listening pretty hard to me last night,” Madison said.

  “I keep trying, but . . .” Ellie looked up. Leslie had her back to them as she washed glasses at the sink, but she was listening intently. “I don’t know . . . I think I had the heart taken out of me, and I can’t seem to find my confidence again.”

  Turning, Leslie put a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in front of Ellie. “I thought you were going to be an artist.”

  Ellie laughed. “That seems so long ago that I can hardly remember it. I met this man who—”

  At that both Leslie and Madison gave a loud groan in unison.

  “Why do all the stories of all women start with, ‘I met this man’?” Leslie asked. She at last put a plate of pancakes down on the table between Ellie and Madison and began to eat. Not until everyone else was served had Leslie taken a seat.

  Ellie smiled. “He was a musician, twice as talented as I was, and from the beginning I knew that I was in the presence of genius,” she said simply.

  “I see,” Madison said. “So you gave up your career as an artist to help him with his, but he never did anything with his prodigious talent. Instead, you found yourself supporting him, doing his laundry, cooking his meals—”

  Laughing, Ellie put up her hands in front of her face as though to protect herself. “So my life is a country-and-western song. I admit it. But he really was brilliant.”

  “Brilliant in finding someone to worship him,” Madison said, looking Ellie hard in the eyes.

  Ellie wanted to protest that she hadn’t been as stupid as Madison made it sound, but she had no defense. “How do you know so much about this?”

  “One of the women who works with me has the same story. She married a man who welded hubcaps together into these huge structures. He was going to become Someone Famous. That’s with capital letters: Someone Famous. But while he was making his way in the world, all he asked was that she ‘help’ him a bit. She now has three kids, and he hasn’t had a job in four years. She used to say that someone as talented as he is can’t just go out and get an ordinary job.”

  “Exactly,” Ellie said, pushing away her half-empty plate of pancakes. “That’s just what happened. Over these last years I’ve looked back on it all a thousand times, and I still don’t know how it all happened, just that it did happen. One minute I was in New York planning to make a name for myself, and the next I was living with this man and I was taking any job I could get to make money to give him a chance in the music world.”

  “Love,” Leslie said with a sigh as she took the plates to the sink.

  “That’s just it,” Ellie said quickly. “I’m not sure that I ever did love this guy. I’m not sure that I ever—” She looked up at Madison. “Would it make me sound stupid to say that I’m not sure that I ever had a choice?”

  “My friend told me how her husband courted her,” Madison said. “He went after her night and day. There were roses on her doorstep every morning for months. He wrote her poems and letters. There were sexy telephone calls that went on all night. He bought her gifts, talked to her endlessly, listened to her, cared about her. There was nothing about her that he didn’t want to know.”

  “So he could use it later to control her,” Ellie said as she turned her head away, not looking at either woman.

  “Exactly,” Madison said. “A master controller. He saw something in my friend that he wanted, so he went after her.”

  “Right,” Ellie said.

  “What I want to know is how you became a writer,” Leslie said, tactfully steering the conversation away from the bad to the good.

  “I wrote my way out of misery,” Ellie said. “At least that’s what my therapist, Jeanne, said. This is her house, by the way. She’s helped me to see what—”

  Halting, Ellie drew in a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to hear all this?”

  “Every word in chronological order,” Madison said with a smile.

  For a moment Ellie looked out the window over the sink. No, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone the “whole” story. Not yet.

  She looked back at the other two women.

  “Why don’t I make us some coffee?” Leslie said. “Or would anyone like some strong tea?”

  “I’ll have tea,” Ellie said, while Madison wanted coffee. And while Leslie waited on them, Ellie said, “Would anyone believe me if I said that I was working so hard that I didn’t notice what was going on in my marriage? I got up at four A.M. and hit the floor running.”

  Neither woman answered Ellie’s question, and she was glad of that. Here in this house with these women who were at once strangers and her oldest friends, she knew that she didn’t have to make excuses, didn’t have to apologize.

  “Anyway,” Ellie said, “Martin, that was—is—my ex’s name, Martin Gilmore, was brilliantly talented as a musician. He played a guitar, and he could make you weep at the sound. Or laugh. Whatever emotion he wanted from his audience, he could get.” Ellie’s head came up. “Anyway, I thought I was going to be the person who gave the world the opportunity to hear him; then, after he was internationally successful—”

  “It was going to be your turn,” Leslie said. “There’s always the promise that the woman is going to get ‘her turn.’”

  “Right,” Ellie said with a grimace. “When he asked me to leave New York and go live in a small town outside L.A., I agreed readily. Martin said that only in L.A. would he have a chance to become known. So I—” Ellie took a deep breath. “I sold my art supplies and all the work I’d done, and flew out to L.A. with him.

  “And at first
it was great. He got some wonderful jobs with some excellent bands and it was all so exciting. I was working as a receptionist in a used car office and I was bored out of my mind, but at night there was Martin with his fascinating stories about who he’d seen and what he’d done that day.”

  Ellie looked down at her hands. “But slowly, things began to go wrong. He quit one job after another, and with every job he quit, he seemed to pull back within himself more. At first he was making good money, but as the years went by, earning money didn’t seem to be something that he thought he needed to do. He said that life wasn’t giving anything to him, so he didn’t feel he needed to give anything back.”

  Smiling, Ellie looked up at the other women. “So I decided to help him. I decided to make him into a success. I began to make appointments for him with the biggest names in L.A. I must say that I had no pride at all. I begged and I cried. I made up outrageous stories to get people to listen to Martin, either on tape or in person. But—” Ellie threw up her hands in frustration. “He wouldn’t pursue the opportunities I got for him,” she said, then had to unclench her hand, as her nails were cutting into her palm. Leslie handed her a cup of tea, and for a moment Ellie sipped the tea while she worked to calm herself.

  She put the cup down. “I’ve learned that talent alone isn’t enough to make a person successful. You can write a great software program, but unless you make an effort to market it, it might as well lie in your desk unseen. That’s what happened with my ex. I don’t think he could have stood the competition or the criticism that goes with trying to make it to the top of any field, so he sabotaged himself at every opportunity. I’d get him an appointment with a DJ to hear his tape or for him to meet someone who could give him a start. Martin would be wildly excited about the opportunity, and he’d make mad, passionate love to me the night before, telling me how grateful he was and what a great wife I was, et cetera.”

  “Let me guess,” Madison said. “Then he wouldn’t show up for the appointment.”

  “Exactly!” Ellie answered. “But he always had these heavenly excuses. And I mean that literally: heavenly. Always, he didn’t take an opportunity because he was helping someone.”

  “So you couldn’t get angry with him,” Leslie said. “Not with a saint like him.”

  “Of course not. He’d say, ‘What could I do? Joe needed me. Could I have said, “Sorry, Joe, but I have to leave you in pain because I have to go play music to some rich dude who cares about nobody on earth”?’” Ellie said.

  “So how long before you gave up living for him and rediscovered your own talents?” Madison asked as she drank of her strong black coffee. So far this morning, Ellie hadn’t seen her smoke one cigarette, but now she opened a new pack and took one out. Leslie got up to open the window over the kitchen sink.

  “I don’t think that I did, actually,” Ellie said. “I think it just sort of happened. No preplanning; it just happened. Martin was away visiting one of his many friends and . . .” For a moment Ellie didn’t say anything.

  “Woman?” Madison asked.

  “I know I’m going to sound naive, but back then it never crossed my mind that his many trips to ‘help’ some old friend or play music with some guys were actually rendezvous with about a dozen . . . mistresses, I guess you’d call them.”

  “So you were alone,” Leslie said, encouraging her to continue. She’d put a bowl of strawberries in front of Ellie, but when she didn’t eat them, Leslie did. “Did you start painting again?”

  “No,” Ellie said. “I know that this is one of those stupid women-things, but I think that because I knew that the man I was married to was more talented than I was, I gave up art. After I met Martin and heard his music, I never so much as did a watercolor again.”

  Ellie’s head came up. “Jeanne, my therapist, thinks that I didn’t paint, not because of who had the most talent, but because I was deeply unhappy and I was suppressing it. I really had no life, either when Martin was home or when he was gone. When he was home, we lived in . . . How can I say this?” She looked at Madison. “You said that your marriage was hell, but mine was . . . I guess you would call it sadness. We lived in sadness because Martin was sooooo brilliantly talented, but no one would give him a chance.”

  “Does this include the people he stood up?” Madison asked as she drew on her cigarette.

  “Oh, yes,” Ellie said, smiling. “Them most of all.”

  “So you were alone and you started writing,” Leslie said as she finished the bowl of strawberries.

  “More or less, yes. While Martin was away, I began to write down the stories that were going around in my head,” Ellie said. “I had a whole imaginary life going, one about a man named Max and—”

  “And you were Jordan Neale,” Leslie said, smiling. “I’ve read every one of your books.”

  “I haven’t read any of them,” Madison said. “So tell me about them.”

  Ellie started to reply, but Leslie beat her to it. “They’re funny, sexy, complicated romantic murder mysteries about this married couple who—” She turned to Ellie with wide eyes. “In the last book you hinted that Jordan might be pregnant. Is she?”

  “Beats me,” Ellie said.

  “But you’re the writer,” Leslie said in disbelief.

  “If I knew what was going to happen, why would I bother to write the story? In fact, when I get two-thirds the way through a book and can see the ending, I’d like to stop writing it and start something new.”

  At this, Leslie opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. Like most people, she thought that the author knew everything there was to know about the characters in her books.

  “So the books were your fantasy about you and your husband,” Madison said, then looked around the kitchen.

  “More strawberries?” Leslie asked, her radar up when anyone needed something in the kitchen.

  “I’ll get them—” Madison began, but Leslie was on her feet before Madison could move.

  “I guess they were,” Ellie said. “I didn’t think about it while I was writing them. I was just filling up my evenings with something besides TV. And my weekends. They were the worst.”

  Leslie put a huge bowl of strawberries in front of Madison, then another pile of pancakes beside it.

  “So how did you get published?” Leslie asked. “I don’t know much about the business, but a friend of mine told me that to get published you have to get an agent and the better the agent, the better your contract.”

  At that Ellie said a very rude word and made an even ruder sound. “Agents put out that rumor. My editor does a hilarious skit in which she shows the training of a person becoming an agent. She picks up a piece of paper, writes ‘I am an agent’ on it, then puts the paper on her chest.”

  When neither Leslie or Madison seemed to get this, Ellie took a drink of her tea. “Let’s just say that it is not necessary to have an agent to get a book published, nor do you have to have an agent to continue to be published. I don’t have one and never will.”

  There was so much passion in Ellie’s voice that when she stopped speaking, it left the others in silence.

  “Sorry,” Ellie said. “Pet peeve of mine. Now, where was I?”

  “Too bad you didn’t use that tone with your husband,” Madison said under her breath.

  “Isn’t it?!” Ellie said. “When I look back and think of the things that I’d do differently . . . Oh, well, that won’t happen. Anyway—”

  “What did your husband think of your writing?” Leslie asked.

  “I didn’t say a word about it to him,” Ellie said. “You have to understand that there wasn’t room in our lives for much more than Martin’s sadness. We lived and breathed his suffering. Our ‘conversations’—if you can call them that—were about how rotten the world was because it didn’t give brilliantly talented men like him a chance. I couldn’t very well tell him that while he was suffering so much, I was having the best time of my life writing funny little mysteries.”

&
nbsp; “And all the while you were supporting the two of you?” Leslie snapped so sharply that the other two women looked at her. “Sorry. It’s just that I believe that you put up with a lot about a man, but he does earn money. And that money is used for family expenses.”

  “You would have been better with Martin than I was,” Ellie said. “But then, according to him, he was paying ‘family’ expenses. Now and then he’d get a job with a band and he’d fly off to some state I’d barely heard of and stay there for months at a time. The only problem was that what he earned he spent on electronic equipment. We had four speakers in our living room that you could set up house in. We had three beat-up old chairs, no coffee table because there wasn’t room, but we had speakers that the Rolling Stones would have envied. Martin said that everything he bought was an ‘investment’ in our future.”

  “I can’t stand this!” Madison said. “What is wrong with us women that we get men like these guys? Last night I told you of Roger, and now this guy . . .” She trailed off, as though she couldn’t think of a description bad enough for Martin Gilmore.

  Ellie shrugged. “When you’re out of an intolerable situation, you can never make anyone understand why you remained in that situation. I don’t understand it myself. When I was in it, I didn’t question it. It’s just the way it was.”

  “But you knew that it was bad, so you wrote yourself into a whole different life,” Leslie said.

  Ellie smiled at her warmly. “Exactly! That’s just what I did, only I didn’t know then that that’s what I was doing. I wrote just for the pleasure of doing it. Five books in all.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  Ellie smiled. “You know how your life can change in an instant?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Madison said. “Roger called and said he needed me, so I left New York and went to him. One phone call.”

  Ellie smiled. “For me it was going to the dentist and picking up a copy of a local magazine off his table. In the back was an ad about a writers’ conference that was being held in a town about sixty miles south of us. At the bottom of the ad was a sentence that said that editors would be available for conferences to talk about the writer’s work.”