The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  I shook my head against his collarbone and explained what I could.

  Once on the ground, he insisted I spend the night at his house; he would call his wife from the airport to let her know. "I don't think we have house guests until Saturday," he said, "but if I'm mistaken, the couch is extremely comfortable. Certainly better than the Harborside Motel." When the line was busy at the pay phone in the one-room terminal, Evan shrugged and said, "Let's find a cab and take our chances." Remembering these banalities a day or two later, I could see hints of what I came to learn, but that night I was not looking hard, except to notice Evan's aging. When we were young, he had a male model's raging good looks; he could have been a Kennedy Now he had the black bags under his eyes and the modified middle-age spread of all those important men on TV news shows, but he still had a young man's energy, a full head of auburn hair barely flecked with gray, clear blue eyes, full lips I remembered kissing.

  He took my bag and drew an arm around my shoulder with avuncular concern. I was grateful for his tenderness on the plane, the offer of a place to stay on the remote West End of the island, the view I knew I would wake up to if I slept on their couch, if I managed to sleep at all: the sliding glass doors overlooking the redwood deck and the ponds beyond it and the ridge of sand dunes beyond them, and the roar of the ocean from over the ridge.

  But what I remember most vividly now, looking back on my arrival, stepping out of the terminal, was the shock of the island air against my skin, in my nostrils; how soft it was after the molten lava of the city, as soft as dusting powder, the coat of a puppy. The sky was sapphire blue and strewn with stars, a shower of gold dust. Across the sidewalk, to the curb and the waiting taxi, I felt myself choke at the memory of my first visit here, the summer I met Will, when I was convinced that no harm could ever come to anyone on this island, that the pristine beauty of the place was a gorgeous vaccine against death. But I had left Swansea in another season, in mid-March, when it seemed to me a metaphor for my marriage: cold, windswept, uninhabitable.

  "We're going to the West End," Evan told the cab driver, "to the end of Heron Road."

  It would be a long ride, fifteen miles of winding country roads, a sudden change in the landscape, opening up to meadows and ponds, views of the ocean, the tip of the island, Evan's secluded compound. I braced myself for the ride, because I knew it would be beautiful, because I had left Will here, because I still had not told his daughters that he was dead, because it had been so much a part of Will's and my life together, even though we lived on the East End, ten miles in the other direction. A mile down the airport road was a tiny village, Twin Oaks, with a library, a bed-and-breakfast, a bakery, a one-room schoolhouse, a church surrounded by a white picket fence, and across the street from it, on the lawn of the bed-and-breakfast, the only weeping willow on the island, which makes frequent appearances in photo books about Swansea. Every Saturday morning, the driveway of the school became a farmers' market, where I used to buy tomatoes, corn, bunches of cilantro, potatoes the size of my little toe. For long stretches, our taxi was. the only car on the road. For long stretches, I remembered how thoroughly I had forgotten that this was once my life. I used to cook dinners, run a reading series at the public library, write the occasional article for the island newspaper, "Coping with Summer Visitors," "A City Girl Moves to the Country," "Why I Love My Solitude," but I did not love it nearly so well as I imagined I would.

  "I haven't been back since the day I left in March," I said to Evan.

  "Why didn't you call me?"

  "When?"

  "Anytime. To let me know you'd left Will. You'd left the island."

  "You're always busy. I'm always reading about you being on TV. 'Evan Lambert, talking to Ted Koppel last night on "Nightline," and the night before that, to Dan Rather, and the night before that to Larry King—' Don't wince, Evan. You love the controversy that swirls around you. You're almost as happy on TV as you are—" I noticed the cab driver, an older man with curly white hair as thick as Harpo Marx's, swerve his eyes to the rearview mirror to get a gander at this man so much in the news, but he got me instead.

  "I'm wincing," Evan said, "because I don't understand why you read about me being on TV."

  "You'll laugh."

  "I could use a laugh."

  "When I was packing the car to leave the island, I packed the VCR and forgot the TV, and when I did remember it, there was no room left. I actually keep the VCR plugged in to remind me to buy another TV, but so far I—"

  "The settlement was so bad you cant afford it?"

  "There is no settlement."

  "What does that mean?"

  "If you walk away with nothing, there's no settlement."

  "I hope you didn't pay someone a lot of money for that legal advice."

  "This is not what I want to be thinking about at the moment."

  "Goddammit, you should have called me."

  "So you could represent me? I can't afford you, Evan. And I didn't kill anyone."

  "That's hardly what I—"

  "Unless I did," I whispered. I told him what Diane thought, although I didn't mention Daniel and me, or that Will had seen us together. Evan was quiet, but not for too long. "People get divorced all the time. Most of them don't kill themselves. And you don't know if he did."

  "He was bereft," I said quietly.

  "You know what?" He was speaking softly, too.

  "What?"

  "So was I, when you left me."

  "Jesus, Evan, don't flatter me."

  I was.

  "You noticed that I was gone, but I left because you were so distracted by your own ambition, you barely knew I was there."

  Neither of us said anything, lost in the whorls of our history. Or so I imagined, until Evan spoke again. "I find it hard to believe your lawyer let you leave the marriage with nothing."

  "Before I left the island Will said to me, 'If you want out, you leave with what you came with. Otherwise you can sue me, and I promise I will be a real S.O.B.'"

  "That doesn't sound like Will."

  "It wasn't, usually."

  "That's why the law is there, Sophy, so that a vindictive husband can't—"

  "I know why it's there. And I know I didn't want to drag my life and his through the mud."

  "Sophy, there's a house on Swansea. That alone ... How much is it worth?"

  Again I noticed the cabbie's gaze on me in the rearview mirror. This was not New York or Boston, where there are a few more degrees of separation between lives; there was a good chance this guy knew people who knew Will or me.

  "I'm not going to talk about money tonight."

  "Are you legally separated?"

  "Or about legal matters."

  "Just tell me whether the separation's gone through."

  "I signed the agreement a few days ago and sent it back to my lawyer."

  "Who's that?"

  "A simple island lawyer who does wills and divorces."

  "That's not like you, Sophy."

  "I wanted out. That's all."

  "If the papers aren't filed with the court yet, your separation agreement may be moot. You may be entitled to half of his estate."

  He saw me turn away and look out the window. "The body is still warm, Evan." I was pretty sure that wasn't true, but I hoped it would tilt the conversation in another direction. Or badger him into silence for what was left of the ride. We were almost at the end of the island, almost there. The sharp scents of salt and lilac through the open windows. A smattering of weathered gray-shingled houses, a grove of tall trees hugging the road, a break in the trees and the vast pond in the clearing back-lit by the moon. The proportions of things on Swansea are different, scaled down, miniature, like the world described in The Wind in the Willows, a place for water rats, toads, badgers, and moles.

  "Aside from all of this, Mrs. Lincoln," Evan finally said, "how do you like being single again?" It surprised me that I could laugh. "Fun, isn't it?"

  "How would you know about the p
henomenon of being single again?"

  "I have a good imagination."

  "What about you and Mavis?"

  "What about us?"

  "Are you happy these days?"

  "Sure, we're happy. Driver, you're going to make a left immediately after the next telephone pole. She's been doing extremely well the last year or so. The dean picked her to chair the university's committee on sexual harassment. She's filled with purpose and authority and occasional righteousness that does wonders for her complexion. Her entire spirit. She leads three distinct lives: the queen of cultural studies in Harvard's English department; the hearty PTA mom and occasional Beacon Hill hostess; and now a political bulldog in bed with the PC police. She comes down here for the summer and collapses with a stack of novels by a bunch of very un-PC dead white men."

  We turned onto dirt, and the cab wobbled and lurched over ruts in the narrow, woodsy road, and I was surprised at the gust of envy I felt for the fullness and certainties of Mavis's life. Or maybe surprised simply that I could feel anything besides grief. Suddenly, stupidly, I envied all those lives she got to live, with titles that could be smartly rattled off like military medals: star professor, wife, mother, hostess, member in good standing of the Swansea summer set. But how could I not envy her, living the way I was—homeless, childless, bookless, staging an elaborate show for Daniel that I was perfectly content? Even Mavis's intellectual hypocrisy struck me as a great luxury, deconstructing Lassie Come Home for a living and taking Anna Karenina to bed.

  "At the fork, bear right," Evan said to the driver, reminding me of the time Will and I came here after a week of rain and took a left at the fork instead. We got stuck in a gully of mud a mile down the deserted dirt road and tromped to Evan's house to get him to rescue our car with a rope. Will was angry because I'd insisted that he bear left at the fork, his anger the public face of his humiliation at getting stuck in what he called "Evan's mud." Translation: I have the peevish right to envy your rich, famous ex-boyfriend, and the righteous right to despise him, because he defends famous killers for a living and makes millions.

  I never defended what Evan did for a living—how could I? All I could defend to Will was our history and his and Mavis's easy generosity toward us. Evan was something of a parlor game to me, a study in a kind of shameless ambition laced with enough charm to succeed in making his way into Boston society from his working-class Irish-Catholic roots. He was Jack Kennedy marrying Jacqueline Bouvier, and because the name Lambert straddled the fence between Ireland and England, he often passed for a Wasp, which is precisely what he wanted. He was abhorred by liberal, left-leaning pundits, exploited by talk-show hosts, admired by his peers—of whom there were only a handful in the entire country—and envied, grudgingly, by my husband, another poor Irishman with quite a different sense of his own destiny.

  Coming down the dirt road through the dense woods, I always forgot there was a clearing, a lawn big enough for croquet, an immense Queen Anne-style shingled house with a front porch larger than my apartment in Manhattan, a circular driveway that could be a running track.

  "Evan, is that you? My God, I was about to call the Coast Guard. Weren't you supposed to be on the six o'clock?" I heard Mavis's marvelous throaty voice before I saw her outline in the doorway—unless that was a house guest, a long-necked, tall young man? A large black shape low to the ground bounded down the steps, swished past me, and began to bark.

  "I've got Sophy Chase with me," Evan called out. "I found her on the plane from Logan. Didn't I, Flossie? Yes, I surely did, as surely as you are a good dog." I thought of poor hideous, hybrid Henry, mangy, funny-looking, and suddenly homeless. It was much too late to call Ben Gibbs to make sure he'd been taken in. I could see now that the shadowy figure holding open the screen door was Mavis, with a close-cropped, Jean Seberg haircut.

  "Sophy, welcome. You're our first visitor of the season." She leaned down to hold her cheek against mine for the briefest instant, stopping short of a kiss. When she stepped back, I saw her shorn head anew in the light and wondered if Evan might have neglected to tell me that she'd had chemo and her hair was just growing back. She had lovely green eyes, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a long neck that always reminded me of Audrey Hepburn's. "We drove past your house the other morning, and I reminded the boys of that sail we took when—"

  "I'm afraid I'm not here under very festive circumstances."

  "What's happened?"

  "It's about Will," I heard Evan say behind me, and hoped he would explain so that I would not have to.

  They had gutted the first two floors of the house, so although it looked from the outside like an enormous Queen Anne, an ornate summer house, circa 1880, its interior was bold and spacious, more like an artist's loft in SoHo than a Swansea getaway. Even in the state I was in, I was startled, as I always was, by the wide-open living and dining room, by the dramatic, comfortable splendor of their surroundings. The high, sloped ceiling, the bleached wood staircase leading up to the second-floor balcony hung with antique Amish quilts, the deep blues and greens of the couch and love seats, the pair of Rauschenberg prints over the fireplace. What I'd remembered as sliding glass doors overlooking the deck was actually an entire wall of glass, including two sets of sliding doors, the length of it now—with the darkness outside and all the light within—like a blackened mirror, like a still pond in moonlight, in which the contents of the entire room were reflected. On the long oak dining room table was a tall vase of wildflowers, fluorescent in their brightness. On end tables and a coffee table were little piles of books, scattered around the museum-like room, the way people used to set out ashtrays. Jane Austen, Vasari, C. S. Lewis for the children, Lewis Thomas for the grown-ups, Thoreau's Cape Cod, and an array of books about the island—picture books, histories, a cookbook—a most self-congratulatory collection.

  They offered me food, drink, company, and for fifteen or twenty minutes I luxuriated in their affection, their concern, their sympathy. Mavis fixed us plates of leftovers, grilled bluefish, sliced tomatoes, cornbread. Then telephones started to ring, different lines in different rooms, and both Evan and Mavis became utterly preoccupied, separately, privately, in some complex choreography that I had stumbled into, though they returned to the living-dining room to check up on me between calls. It was, by then, well after eleven. It was also, by then, clear that I was on my own here, so I moved to a couch with a pad and pencil and was writing the obituary Daniel had told me to write when Mavis came out of the kitchen and said, "There's a phone call for you."

  "Who is it? Who could it be?" There wasn't a soul who knew I was here.

  "I didn't ask."

  It was one of my twin stepdaughters, who began crying the instant she said, "It's me, Ginny." When she was calmer, she said, "How could his heart have given out? He was in such good shape. He sailed, he didn't smoke, he—"

  "Where are you?"

  "In Maine, where I always am."

  "Who told you all of this?"

  "Remember my friend Melanie? She called from the island. She thought she was making a condolence call. She said, 'I'm so sorry, I just heard.' I thought she meant your divorce, so I said, 'Well, it's sad but it's not the end of the world.' She said, 'Ginny, I know you had issues with your father, but this is a little cold for my taste.' 'My father? What are you talking about?' Then she told me." Ginny cried some more, and I was as comforting as I could be in this medium, at this distance, given that I was still trying to determine how she had found out where I was. It had to have been the cab driver, who must have recognized Evan and known someone who knows Ginny's friend. But we had been talking in the cab about the possibility of Will's having killed himself. How had Ginny come to the conclusion that he had suffered a heart attack—unless the cab driver passed that on, wanting, perhaps, to soften the blow?

  Ginny said she would track down her sister in northern California, and we agreed to talk tomorrow about what to do next. Before I hung up, I said, "I'm sorry I haven't called you si
nce your dad and I split up. I wanted to. I thought about you, but it was awkward."

  "I understand."

  Evan and Mavis were at the dining room table when I returned to the big room; it looked as if I'd interrupted them. Evan leaped up, and Flossie followed him to the bar, her claws clacking like castanets across the wood floor. She was an enormous, mostly black, Newfoundland, except for the dramatic white rings around her deep brown eyes and four white paws. She stood glued to Evan's side and nuzzled the bottle of Tanqueray at the edge of the liquor cabinet. "You know you can't mix, Flossie," he said. '"Never mix, never worry.' Isn't that a line from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sophy, can I get you anything?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Darling, a brandy?"

  "I'm happy with my wine," Mavis said, "and I just took a Klonopin. Don't want to overdo it. Do you want something to help you sleep tonight, Sophy? I've got a stash."

  "Of?"

  "Mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, antidepressants, the usual."

  "It's part of Mavis's cultural studies program. The culture makes us mad and the culture then allows us to regulate and reinvent our madness. Isn't that the way it works, darling? R. D. Laing plus Timothy Leary? Or are they passé?" An old-fashioned seltzer spritzer, the glass cylinder a lovely aquamarine, appeared in Evan's hands, and he squirted a noisy shot into his glass of Scotch. Flossie, sitting at his feet, barked a staccato, seal-like yelp. Evan squirted another shot. Flossie barked again.

  "Evan, you'll wake the boys."

  "Sorry, Flossie, your mother says no nightcap tonight. But maybe she'll give you a Klonopin. Which goes very well with California Merlot." Squirt, squirt. Bark, bark. "Because you're such a good dog." Yelp, yelp.

  I looked from Evan, smiling down at the dog, to Mavis and saw her eyes close and her mouth tighten in a gesture of squelched anger that I could tell went very deep. The dog barked, unprovoked, a few more times. Evan squirted seltzer a few more times. I reached for a pear from the fruit bowl in the center of the table and felt stupidly sorry for myself, piteously sorry, because all I wanted was for them to sit down and let me talk about Will and Ginny and the cab driver reporting everything he'd heard, but there were stronger currents at work in this water. Evan's allusion to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was turning out to be apt. The soothing, selfless company I craved had evaporated—if it had ever existed.