The Perfect Couple

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “I’m in twelve-A,” Shooter says. “I’m going to ask them to give me Benji’s seat.”

  “I’m not a senior vice president from Prague,” Celeste says. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

  “You’ve been dating my best friend for nine months,” Shooter says. “I want to get to know you. Hard to do from eleven rows away, don’t you agree?”

  “Agreed,” Celeste concedes.

  They sit side by side in the front row of the plane. Shooter lifts Celeste’s carry-on into the overhead compartment, then asks if she would prefer the window or the aisle. She says aisle. She realizes most people who have never flown before might want to sit at the window but Celeste is terrified. Shooter waits for her to sit down and then he sits. He’s a gentleman, but then so is Benji. Benji is the ultimate gentleman. Benji stands whenever Celeste leaves the table to go to the ladies’ room and he stands when she gets back. He holds doors, he carries a handkerchief, he never interrupts.

  Shooter pulls a flask out of his back pocket and hands it to Celeste. She eyes the flask. It’s alcohol, she assumes, but what kind? She is far too cautious a person to drink without asking. But in the moment, she doesn’t feel like being cautious. She feels like being daring. She accepts the flask and takes a swig: It’s tequila. Celeste drinks tequila only when she’s with Merritt, although personally she thinks it tastes like dirt. This tequila is smoother than most, but even so it singes her throat. However, an instant later the tension in her neck disappears and her jaw loosens. She takes another slug.

  “I carry that because I hate flying,” Shooter says.

  “You?” Celeste says. “But don’t you fly all the time?”

  “Nearly every week,” he says. “The first time I flew, I was eight years old. My parents were sending me to summer camp in Vermont.” He leans his head back against the seat and stares forward. “Every time I fly I have an atavistic reaction to the memory of that day. The day I realized my parents wanted to get rid of me.”

  “Were you a very naughty child, then?” she asks. She sounds exactly like Merritt, she realizes.

  “Oh, probably,” Shooter says.

  Celeste hands Shooter back the flask. He smiles sadly and takes a slug.

  Later, Celeste will think back on the twenty hours she spent on Nantucket with Shooter alone as the kind of montage they show in movies. Here’s a shot of the airplane bouncing and shaking during turbulence and Shooter raising the window shade in time for Celeste to see bolts of lightning on the horizon. Here is Shooter taking Celeste’s hand, Celeste imagining her parents’ reaction when they are informed that Celeste has died in a plane crash. Here is the plane landing safely on Nantucket, passengers cheering, Shooter and Celeste executing a perfect high-five. Here are Shooter and Celeste climbing into a silver Jeep that Shooter has rented. The sky has cleared, the top of the Jeep is down, and Shooter takes off down the road while Celeste’s blond hair blows behind her. Here is Elida, the summer housekeeper, meeting Shooter and Celeste at the front door of the Winbury property, known as Summerland, and informing them that Mr. and Mrs. Winbury have also been detained in New York but that they should make themselves at home; she, Elida, will return in the morning.

  Here is Celeste acting nonchalant when she enters the house. It’s a palace, a summer palace, like the monarchs of Russia and Austria used to have. The ceilings are soaring, the rooms are open, bright, airy. The entire thing is white—white walls, white wainscoting, whitewashed oak floors, a kitchen tiled in white with pure white Carrara marble countertops—with stunning bursts of color here and there: paintings, pillows, fresh flowers, a wooden bowl filled with lemons and Granny Smith apples. Celeste would say she can’t believe how glorious the house is, with its six bedrooms upstairs and master suite downstairs; with its uninterrupted views of the harbor; with its glass-walled wine cellar off the casual “friends’” dining room; with its dark rectangular pool and Balinese-style pool house; with its two guest cottages, tiny and perfect, like cottages borrowed from a fairy tale; with its round rose garden in the middle of a koi pond, a garden that can be accessed only by a footbridge. Shooter gives Celeste the tour—he has been coming to Summerland since he was fourteen years old, over half his life—and hence his attitude is charmingly proprietary. He tells Celeste that he used to have a terrific crush on Greer and had near Oedipal dreams about killing Tag and marrying her.

  “Essentially becoming my best friend’s stepfather,” he says.

  Celeste shrieks. “Greer?” Celeste likes Greer, but it’s hard to imagine her as the object of teenage lust.

  “She was so beautiful,” Shooter says. “And she doted on me. She was more my mother than my own mother. I think she would probably write both of her sons out of the will and leave this place to me if I asked her nicely.”

  Celeste laughs, but she’s beginning to believe that Shooter might have the ability to disrupt primogeniture and overturn dynasties.

  Here is Shooter pouring Celeste a glass of Greer’s wine and opening one of Tag’s beers for himself. Celeste feels like they’re teenagers throwing a party while their parents are away. Here is Shooter opening a can of cocktail peanuts, then paging through the Nantucket phone book and making a call behind closed doors. Here are Celeste and Shooter clinking wine glass to beer bottle as they sit in Adirondack chairs and watch the sun go down. Here is Shooter going to the front door, paying the delivery boy, and bringing a feast into the kitchen. He has ordered two lobster dinners complete with corn, potatoes, and containers of melted butter.

  Celeste says, “I thought it was pizza.”

  Shooter says, “We’re on Nantucket, Sunshine.”

  Here are Celeste and Shooter after dinner and after several shots of Tag’s absurdly fine tequila headed to town in a taxi to the Chicken Box, which is not a fast-food restaurant but rather a dive bar with live music. Here are Celeste and Shooter dancing in the front row to a cover band called Maxxtone who play “Wagon Wheel,” followed by “Sweet Caroline.” Here are Celeste and Shooter pumping their fists in the air, chanting “Bah-bah-bah!” and “So good! So good! So good!” Here are Celeste and Shooter stumbling out of the Chicken Box and into another taxi that takes them back to the summer palace. It’s one thirty in the morning, which is later than Celeste has stayed up since she pulled all-nighters in college, but instead of going to bed, she and Shooter wander out to the beach, strip down to their underwear, and go for a swim.

  Here is Celeste saying, “I’m so drunk, I’ll probably drown.”

  “No,” Shooter says. “I would never let that happen.”

  Here is Shooter floating on his back, spouting water out of his mouth. Here is Celeste floating on her back, staring at the stars, thinking that outer space is a mystery but not as much of a mystery as the universe of human emotion.

  Here are Celeste and Shooter wandering back inside the house, wrapped in navy-and-white-striped towels that Shooter swiped from the pool house. They linger in the kitchen. Shooter opens the refrigerator. Elida has clearly provisioned for the weekend; the inside of the Winburys’ refrigerator looks like something from a magazine shoot. There are half a dozen kinds of cheese, none of which Celeste recognizes, so she picks them up to inspect: Taleggio, Armenian string cheese, Emmentaler. There are sticks of cured sausage and pepperoni. There is a small tub of truffle butter, some artisanal hummus, four containers of olives in an ombré stack, from light purple to black. There are slabs of pâté and jars of chutney that look like they were mailed directly from India. Celeste checks the labels: Harrods. Close enough.

  “Okay, can I just say?” Celeste puts a hand on Shooter’s bare back and he turns to face her. The two of them are illuminated by the fluorescent light of the fridge and for a second Celeste has the sense that she and Shooter are curious children peering into a previously undiscovered world, like the young protagonists in a C. S. Lewis novel.

  “Yes?”

  “In my house growing up, if I wanted a snack? There was a tub of Philadelphia cream
cheese. And I spread it on Triscuits. If my mother had been to the Amish farmers’ market, there was sometimes pepper jelly to put on top.” Celeste knows she must be deeply and profoundly drunk because she never, ever shares details about her life growing up. She feels like a fool.

  “You are such a breath of fresh air,” Shooter says.

  Now Celeste feels even worse. She doesn’t want to be a breath of fresh air. She wants to be devastating, alluring, irresistible.

  But wait—what about Benji?

  It’s time to go to bed, she thinks. This is what she always suspected happened when one stayed up too late; reputations were shredded, hopes and dreams destroyed. What had Mac and Betty always told her? Nothing good happens after midnight.

  “And also?” Celeste says. “If I held the refrigerator door open for this long? I would have been scolded for wasting energy.”

  “Scolded?” Shooter says.

  “Yes, scolded.” She tries to frown at him. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Absolutely not,” Shooter says. He regards the contents of the fridge, then grabs the truffle butter. A rummage through the cabinet to the left of the fridge—he does know where everything is, Celeste thinks, just like he owns the place—produces a long, slender box of… bread sticks. Rosemary bread sticks. “Come sit.”

  Celeste joins Shooter in the “casual” dining room off the kitchen, where they watch the glass cube of the wine cellar glow like a spaceship. Shooter opens the box of bread sticks and the butter.

  “Prepare yourself,” he says. “This is going to be memorable. Have you ever had truffle butter?”

  “No?” Celeste says. She knows that truffles are mushrooms—pigs dig them out of the ground in France and Italy—but she can’t get too excited about mushroom butter. Nothing about it sounds appetizing. Still, she is hungry enough to eat just about anything—the lobster dinner seems like days ago—so she accepts a reed-thin bread stick with a dollop of butter on the end.

  She bites off the bottom of the bread stick and the flavor explodes in her mouth. She whimpers with ecstasy.

  “Pretty good, huh?” Shooter says.

  Celeste closes her eyes, savoring the taste, which is unlike anything she has ever eaten. It’s rich, complex, earthy, sexy. She swallows. “I can’t believe how… good… that is.”

  Here are Shooter and Celeste eating rosemary bread sticks with truffle butter until the butter is gone and only a few bread-stick stubs rattle around in the box. It was a deceptively simple snack but Celeste will never, ever forget it.

  Here are Celeste and Shooter wandering upstairs. Celeste is sleeping in “Benji’s room,” which is decorated in white, beige, and taupe, and Shooter is sleeping at the far end of the hallway in “guest room 3,” which is done in white, navy, and taupe. Celeste checks the other guest rooms; they’re nearly identical and she wonders if people new to the house like herself ever wander into the wrong room accidentally. She gives Shooter a feeble wave.

  “I guess I’ll call it a night.”

  “You sure about that?” Shooter says.

  Celeste thinks for a second. Is she sure about that? They have pressed to the edge of a platonic relationship; there’s nothing left they can do while maintaining their innocence other than maybe go down to the game room and play Scrabble.

  “I’m sure about that,” she says.

  “Sunshine,” Shooter says.

  She looks at him. His eyes hold her hostage; she can’t look away. He’s asking her without saying anything. They are the only ones here. No one would ever know.

  Amid the battle going on in her mind—her fervent desire versus her sense of right and wrong—she thinks of the age-old philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it still make a sound? That question, Celeste realizes, isn’t about a tree at all. It’s about what’s happening right here, right now. If she sleeps with Shooter and it remains unknown to anyone but the two of them, did it even really happen?

  Yes, she thinks. She would never be the same. And she hopes that Shooter wouldn’t be the same either.

  “Good night,” she says. She kisses him on the cheek and retreats down the hall.

  Here are Shooter and Celeste the next morning riding two bikes from the Winburys’ fleet of Schwinns into town to the Petticoat Row Bakery, where they get giant iced coffees and two ham and Gruyère croissants, which ooze nutty melted cheese and butter as they pick them apart on a bench on Centre Street. Here is Shooter buying Celeste a bouquet of wildflowers from a farm truck on Main Street, a pointless, extravagant gesture because Tag and Greer’s house is set among lush gardens and the house is filled with fresh flowers. Celeste reminds him of this and he says, “Yes, but none of those flowers are from me. I want you to look at this bouquet and know just how besotted I am with you.”

  Besotted, she thinks. It’s a peculiar word, old-fashioned and British-sounding. But Benji is the British one, not Shooter. Somewhere in all the sharing of last night, Celeste learned that Shooter is from Palm Beach, Florida. Shooter was shipped off to summer camp at age eight and to boarding school a few years after that. Shooter’s father died when Shooter was a junior at St. George’s.

  “And that was when the wheels fell off the bus,” Shooter said. “My father had been married twice before and had other kids and those other Uxleys swooped in and claimed everything. My one brother, Mitch, agreed to pay my final year of tuition at St. George’s but I had no discretionary income so I started running a dice game at school. There was no money for college so I moved to DC, where I worked as a bartender. Eventually I found a high-stakes poker game where I met diplomats, lobbyists, and a bunch of foreign businessmen. Which led me to my present venture.”

  “What happened to your mother?” Celeste asked.

  “She died,” Shooter said. Then he shook his head and Celeste knew not to ask anything further.

  Besotted. What does he mean by that, exactly? There’s no time to ponder because he’s leading her down the street toward the Bartlett’s Farm truck. He buys three hothouse tomatoes and a loaf of Portuguese bread.

  “Tomatoes, mayonnaise, good white bread,” he says. “My favorite summer sandwich.”

  Celeste raises a skeptical eyebrow. She was raised on cold cuts—turkey, ham, salami, roast beef. Her parents may have struggled with money but there was always meat piled high on her sandwiches.

  Celeste changes her tune, however, when she is sitting poolside in one of her new bikinis and Shooter brings her his favorite sandwich. The bread has been toasted golden brown; the slices of tomato are thick and juicy, seasoned with sea salt and freshly ground pepper, and there is exactly the right amount of mayonnaise to make the sandwich tangy and luscious.

  “What do you think?” he asks. “Pretty good, huh?”

  She shrugs and takes another bite.

  They are lying side by side on chaises in the afternoon sun, the pool cool and dark before them. The pool has a subtle waterfall feature at one end that makes what Celeste thinks of as water music, a lullaby that threatens to put her to sleep in the middle of a very important conversation. She and Shooter are picking the best song by every classic rock performer they can think of.

  “Rolling Stones,” Shooter says. “‘Ruby Tuesday.’”

  “‘Beast of Burden,’” Celeste says.

  “Ooooooh,” Shooter says. “Good call.”

  “David Bowie,” Celeste says. “‘Changes.’”

  “I’m a ‘Modern Love’ guy,” Shooter says.

  Celeste shakes her head. “Can’t stand it.”

  “Dire Straits,” Shooter says. “‘Romeo and Juliet.’” He reaches his foot over to nudge her leg. “Wake up. Dire Straits.”

  She likes the song about roller girl. She’s making movies on location, she don’t know what it means. Celeste is sinking behind her closed eyelids. Sinking down. What is the name of that song? She can’t… remember.

  Celeste wakes up to someone calling her name.

  Cel
este! Earth to Celeste!

  She opens her eyes and looks at the chaise next to hers. Empty. She squints. Across the pool she sees a man in half a suit—pants, shirt, tie. It’s Benji. Benji is here. Celeste sits up. She straightens her bikini top.

  “Hey there,” Celeste says, but the tone of her voice has changed. Her heart isn’t in it.

  “Hey,” Benji says. He moves Shooter’s towel aside and sits on Shooter’s chaise. “How are you? How has it been?”

  “I’m fine,” Celeste says. “It’s been… fine.”

  Celeste tries to think of details she can share: lobster dinner, “Sweet Caroline,” swimming in her bra and panties under the stars way past her bedtime, truffle butter, a tree falls in the forest?

  No.

  A bike ride with the morning sun on her face, a bouquet of snapdragons, cosmos, and zinnias, tomato sandwiches?

  The name of the song comes to her.

  “‘Skateaway,’” she says.

  “Excuse me?” Benji says.

  Celeste blinks rapidly. Her field of vision is swimming with bright, amorphous blobs, as though she’s been staring at the sun.

  Friday, July 6, 2018, 11:15 p.m.

  KAREN

  She takes an oxy, brushes her teeth, and puts on a nightgown only to take the nightgown off right before she slides into bed. The sheets are Belgian, Celeste said, seven-hundred-thread-count cotton, which is the very best. The bed is dressed in a white down comforter, an ivory cashmere blanket, these white cotton sheets with a scalloped edge, and a mountain of pillows, each as soft as a dollop of whipped cream. Karen places them all around her and sinks in. It’s like sleeping on a cloud. Will heaven be like sleeping in one of Summerland’s guest beds? She can only hope.

  She drifts off, her pain at bay.

  She wakes up with a start—Celeste! Celeste! She reaches an arm out to feel for Bruce but the other side of the bed is cool and empty. Karen checks the bedside clock: 11:46. Quarter to twelve and Bruce hasn’t come to bed yet? Karen feels annoyed at first, then hurt. She realizes her naked body is no longer appealing, but she had thought maybe something would happen tonight. She wants to feel close to Bruce one more time.