The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Dramatic for whom?"

  "In one day he drove from Swansea to New York and from New York to here, on a motorcycle. He collapsed in my foyer, spent the night here, and left for Swansea first thing the next morning. I spoke to him that night. That was the last time. I've been leaving messages for weeks."

  I had too, about the money he owed me, but hadn't it been only a week or ten days? Had I been leaving messages for a dead man? Angry messages? What had I said? I looked at Daniel, who put on his watch and stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him, retreating from the mounting mess. Could I go with him tonight and pretend all the things I'd need to pretend during dinner with the children?

  "Have you talked to Will's daughters?" Diane asked.

  "You're the first person I called. I'll call them next." It seemed the most graceful way to get out of this, although I knew I could not call them yet, not with the grim news that I may have precipitated his death. That his death may have been a suicide. "I'll call you back if I learn anything more."

  Daniel emerged from the bathroom as soon as I hung up. "She thinks he killed himself?"

  I nodded. "I was afraid he might when we split up."

  "You never told me that."

  "There's a lot I haven't told you. Did I ever tell you that a few months after Will's son died, a year before we met, he bought a handgun to kill himself with?"

  "Actually, you did. That's how he landed in the bug house, where he did the art-therapy drawings that ended up in the gallery on Swansea, the afternoon you met."

  It was more than ten percent of his attention, after all. But not so much that he would easily bear the burden of having had a role in Will's suicide, if that's what it was. "Did I tell you he's been calling me in the middle of the night to say he wants me back?"

  "No."

  "He thought I'd change my mind once the divorce came through. Thought I'd understand what I'd wrought, come to see the error of my ways. A few weeks ago he woke me at four in the morning and said he was coming to New York to talk to me. I convinced him not to. But it turns out I didn't." I touched Daniel's sleeve as I passed him and stepped into the walk-in closet where my dresser was, and my suitcase. "What are the seven deadly sins?"

  "Hang on a minute. I have to ring Toinette and tell her I'm running late. I was supposed to pick up the cake at Jon Vie by six. Christ, I think they close early in the summer."

  "Daniel, what are they?" I was dressing and packing at the same time. In a basket on my dresser I found the key to the safe deposit box at our bank on Swansea. My will was there, and his was too. Or it used to be. "There's lechery, pride, avarice, sloth—"

  "You want Unitarian sins? What about missing an issue of The Nation? Forgive my levity. Shit, the line is busy.... Shit, they're both busy. Sophy, where are you?"

  "In here."

  He was halfway across the room, dialing and redialing, unaware of what I was doing in the closet. I opened my little wooden jewelry box for a pair of earrings and was surprised to see my wedding band. I slipped it on my finger.

  "I don't imagine you're keen for a party with the kids, but you shouldn't be alone now. Good, it's ringing."

  "I'm going to Swansea."

  "Toinette, hi. Sorry, terribly sorry, Sophy's had a problem. Her husband, her ex-husband—Yes, quite serious, but she's fine, though he's—I'll tell you when I get home. Good, you got the cake; I was worried. How are the children? I'll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. Sophy will be with me, yes. I'll tell her, but I don't know if she's up to Dorothy and the red shoes tonight."

  "Daniel, I'm going." I appeared in front of him, staidly attired, clutching a small canvas suitcase, an earnest girl in a thirties movie announcing to Mother and Father that she is leaving home, headed for the big city.

  "Going where?"

  "Swansea."

  "The police said there was no urgency. He's going to the coroner tomorrow. These things often take days. Sometimes weeks. You can plan a funeral from here."

  "We're not going to have a regular funeral. Will would never have—"

  "Who's Tom?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The chap you mentioned to Will's friend on the phone just now."

  "He saw us together on the street."

  "Tom who saw us?"

  "Will saw us. He told Diane he saw me with a man who looked like Tom Wolfe, but she couldn't remember whether he'd said Tom or Thomas."

  "Old CIA agents don't die," he said with a sharpness verging on vehemence. "They just tail other subjects."

  For a short, shocked moment I said nothing. Then I answered him with an edge of my own. "This one just died. And he hasn't been in the CIA for ten years."

  "Most of the men you know are gay, and Will knows it. Why would he assume that because you're with a man, the two of you are—"

  "He must have seen something in our demeanor. He's very astute that way. He was."

  "We weren't fucking, for God's sake."

  "You don't need to be to look as if you are."

  "You're thinking that seeing us on a street corner led him to take his life?"

  "Isn't that why you're in such a snit, because you feel guilty that it could be true?"

  He was quiet for a long moment, fully dressed, his hair combed, and looking me over, a visual frisk, taking inventory. I'd changed into sandals with low heels, a khaki skirt and navy linen jacket, something for a Swansea summer funeral. Christ, she's gone starchy New England spinster on me; she's gone Emily Dickinson on me, when I had this arrangement all worked out with Fanny Hill.

  "There's quite a lot to take in," he said in a kindly, hushed voice that startled me after my accusation and my flip fantasy of what he'd been thinking. "The police said it looked awfully much as if he died in his sleep. I hope he did. Are you sure you can get to Swansea at this hour? What if you're stranded at La Guardia or Logan?"

  "If I make the eight o'clock shuttle to Boston, I'll be okay. In summer the small planes run from Logan to Swansea until ten."

  "Have you enough cash for a cab?"

  "I'm fine. Why don't we head out?"

  "Sophy, do you really need to go to Swansea tonight?"

  "Of course I do."

  "But you're always so cool-headed, so distant when you talk about Will and your marriage. Now that this has happened, it's as if you'd never left him. I must say, I'm rather confused."

  "Cool-headed and distant?"

  Daniel nodded.

  I was surprised at first to hear I came off that way, that I seemed to have had so little feeling for him, when the truth was that he had been the center of my life for ten years. But I'd had to steel myself in order to leave. I'd had to harden my heart to cause the pain I know I inflicted, and I suppose I'd continued to carry some of that hardness with me, until the police called.

  "I can understand your confusion," I said to Daniel. "But I'd like to go tonight. I want to be with people who knew him."

  "Let me take your bag."

  We were silent in the hallway, but it was an eerie silence, or maybe it was the start of everything familiar becoming eerie and surreal: a state of hyper-awareness, when you notice the weight of your eyelids blinking. I had not had much experience of this kind, but I imagined the presence of such fresh grief would smooth out rough edges, would make us embodiments of gentleness. I suppose it already had, briefly, when I cried in bed and Daniel held me and the word "darling" slipped accidentally from his lips.

  In the elevator he said, "The children will miss you tonight. I'm not sure yet what to tell them about why you're not there. The truth seems rather an excessive—"

  "Tell them my dog is sick," I said without thinking. "Did the police say anything to you about Henry?"

  "Who?"

  "The dog."

  "Not a word."

  "Ben must have taken him in. The neighbor who found Will."

  "I suppose it's that kind of place, Swansea. Small-town America, everyone full of the milk of human kindness. Ro
usseau's natural man, uncorrupted by society."

  "In fact, it's not, though it may look that way"

  Daniel smiled and said, "That's something else you never told me."

  "It's been quite a day for revelations, hasn't it?" And for withholding them. I was thinking about Vicki's visit, Jesus's marriage proposal, and my confrontation with Lili, now all fused in my mind under the heading Today, Before. The elevator door opened, and with the suddenness of a movie clapper-board being snapped and released, my thoughts lurched to the other heading, Today, After, and that was all of this. As we crossed the lobby, I said to Daniel, "He died alone, even if the dog was there."

  "I'm afraid so."

  The doorman opened the door, tipping his head to me. "I'll be away for the next few days, if you could hold my packages."

  The thick heat of the early evening landed on us like a gigantic fishnet. The city rose and shrieked in every direction. "Jesus," Daniel muttered to all of it and began walking toward Broadway, where it was easier to catch a cab.

  "He sat with two different people when they died," I said. "He was afraid of a lot of things, but he wasn't afraid of people dying. I suppose I never told you that either." I knew I had passed into some realm of neediness and self-absorption, where, rather than making conversation, I was free-associating, drifting, and there wouldn't be much to say back. So I was surprised when Daniel perched on the curb and raised his arm to flag a cab, his eyes darting between the oncoming traffic and me, and said, with a psychological acumen he had never exhibited before, "You don't know it, but you're in shock now. It will last a few days, and when it wears off, everything will be much more difficult. When you're with your stepchildren and Will's other relatives—when the shock wears off—old resentments will surface. With a vengeance."

  A cab pulled up, and Daniel reached out to open the door for me, but I wasn't ready to go. I wanted what I always wanted from him: a more tender parting. "One other thing, if I may," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Tomorrow morning, you must get in touch with your divorce lawyer, get a copy of your husband's will, and write his obituary. Get it to the island paper, and if you'd like me to, I'll fax it to a friend at the Times. Ring me later, would you, and let me know you made it?"

  That was evidence of shock too, leaving New York that way, with no thought of plane or hotel reservations, of arriving on the island when everyone I knew there would be asleep. Taking off without calling Will's daughters or Ben Gibbs, who'd found Will, or Annabelle, or the medical examiner, who must have been summoned to the house to sign a piece of paper that said Will was dead.

  In the commuter terminal was a bank of telephones, and after I bought my ticket, I began frantically making calls. I called my mother, whose line was busy. I called Annabelle, whose phone rang and rang, which meant she was on-line. I called the last number I had for my stepdaughter Ginny, and got a phone company message that the number had been disconnected. I knew she worked at a TV station in Maine, but I couldn't remember its call letters. I phoned Western Union, which said they did not have telegram service in the tiny California town closest to the cabin on the mountain where Ginny's sister, Susanna, lived, with no telephone and her new baby, Rose, whom Will had never gone to see.

  Henderson must already have left for Switzerland, but I was so agitated by then that I called him anyway and started talking to his machine. "I'll bet you can't tell from my voice that I'm a widow. Or can you? I hadn't really thought of it that way, the W word, until this minute. I'm at La Guardia, and you're probably at Kennedy or in the air. I'm going to Swansea. I'm going to Boston on a big plane and then to the island on a little plane. You know how terrified I am of those little planes, eight-seaters with no co-pilots. Did I say already that Will is dead? The police told me it looked as if he died in his sleep, but his friend Diane thinks he killed himself. The weird thing is that I'm fine. I mean, I can walk and talk and sign my name and remember my calling-card number. Tonight I'll probably stay in the awful motel by the harbor where Will used to keep his boat. I'm sure they'll have a room; it's not the height of the season. I know you're going to be fasting, but I hope you won't be too weak to call me. I'll leave a number on your machine when I know where I'm staying. Hug, hug, kiss, kiss."

  I kept talking to myself, although I wasn't sure my lips were moving. I went through the security gate, and my house keys set off the alarm. I walked to the end of Gate C in a trance and said to myself, "I'm fine, I'm fine."

  But I could not sit still, could not sit down, so I circled the area, up and down the rows of chairs, past the newsstand, the bar, the clusters of commuters with their cell phones and laptops and summery seersucker jackets's lung over a shoulder, the men and women both. I am not really a widow. A glance toward the window, the parking lot of planes, the giant birds with their logos, their mechanics, tiny trucks like golf carts hovering around their talons.

  Call me the widow that almost was; that's what I should have said to Henderson. Then speak to me as if from a pulpit, as if I were a supplicant, a congregant, a believer. And let this grief pass over me, as the angel of death passed over the houses of the Jews and their firstborn sons one night in Egypt. But I have no blood of a lamb to sprinkle on my doorpost to let the angel know to spare me. Only this sudden wetness trickling down the inside of my thigh, and the faint bleachy scent of it. Excuse me, I would like to make an announcement here at Gate C-3, with nonstop service to Boston's Logan Airport, and lots of luck getting to Swansea at this ridiculous hour, ten days before the Fourth of July. Will you turn off your cell phones and laptops and Palm Pilots long enough to listen? I want it stamped on my boarding pass, too. That I am not really a widow. That I forgot in my shock to bathe, so you can smell it on me, what I was doing when the police rang. That's a Britishism, a Danielism. Ring me later. Ring me as soon as you get there. And call me the widow manqué, the semi, demi, quasi, ersatz, crypto, mini-widow, and tell me, if you have any idea, what it is I am supposed to do now.

  The Island

  "Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all."

  —Kenneth Grahame,

  The Wind in the Willows

  4. The Wild Wood

  THE LAST PERSON to board the Island Air's eight-seat Cessna on the ten P.M. to Swansea squeezed in beside me in the back row, a large man in a short-sleeved knit shirt whose bare forearm brushed against mine as he belted himself in. It was dark and humid on the tarmac, even darker and more humid inside the cramped, shrunken cabin, but Evan Lambert and I said each other's names simultaneously. "Small world," he said.

  "Small plane."

  So small, it was like being in an elevator, and I didn't know how to tell Evan why I was here without announcing it to all assembled. So small, there was no easy way I could acknowledge his latest high-profile client, the German nanny baby-killer, without causing a collective stir in this almost airborne soup can. "I've been following your moves," I said softly.

  "Is that so?"

  "You're always on my radar."

  "Same here, kiddo." We had been lovers twenty years before and friends for the last nineteen, but could go long periods without speaking. He didn't even know Will and I had separated, that I no longer lived on the island. Evan and his family were summer people; for the last four years, Will and I had been year-rounders. "You coming back from somewhere exciting?"

  "New York," I said. The pilot flipped on the ignition, and the propellers flared. It was cozy and small scale, as if we were in the backseat of a car and the driver had just switched on the windshield wipers. "Are you down for a long weekend?"

  "Yeah. Mavis and the kids went down last week for the season. I had a meeting late today that went on longer than I expected. I missed my reservation on the six o'clock flight. You're obviously the reason why."

  "Hold my hand," I said. "I hate these take-offs a
nd landings. And everything in between." Against the flimsy armrest between us, he turned over his forearm and opened his palm. I covered it with mine and held on tight, too tight, but he would understand soon enough. What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we all have. Was this something Evan used to quote to me in that distant summer we traveled together?

  "How's Will? I think the last time we saw you guys he took the boys and me sailing. The outboard conked out, and we had to paddle into the harbor. The ferry almost ran us down. Were you there, or was it Mavis?"

  The twin engines were noisy, cranking harder the faster we taxied down the runway. I got a whiff of diesel fuel and said a prayer and leaned my head against Evan's shoulder, which I had not done in twenty years, but I needed my mouth close to his ear so that I could speak into it softly, which I also had not done in twenty years. He smelled faintly of Irish Spring, and for an instant that rumbling speck of a plane about to lift off and take us on the thirty-minute trip down the peninsula and across the sound might have been the mobbed over-night ferry we took from Athens to the coast of Turkey the summer we were twenty-five, joking about sailing to Byzantium, no country for old men, the young in one another's arms, Evans young arms smelling of Irish Spring; he carried around a supply of it in his knapsack. I used to kid him that if we ever got separated I could get a bloodhound to go after that smell, and I wondered now if he could identify the familiar scents rising from my skin. We were off the ground, shot into the air as if from a cannon, bumping and rattling in this tin box over the suburbs south of Boston. His hand must have hurt, I was squeezing it so hard. I remembered it was Camus who said somewhere that fear gives value to travel, but I wasn't sure he meant a short hop over the water to the place where you used to live. That wasn't travel; that was just going home.

  It surprised me to feel Evan's hand on my cheek, his other hand, the hand not holding mine. He had reached around as if we were lovers and pressed his palm to the side of my face, holding me tighter against his shoulder, because he could tell I was uncommonly afraid and suspected it was of something beyond the obvious. "Sophy, what is it? Is everything all right?"