by Jean Stone
Rita put her hand out and rested it on Jill’s. “Shit,” she said. “They’re all shit.”
Jill nodded as if she’d known that all along.
“Who is it?” Rita asked. “How’d you find out?”
“He told me,” Jill answered. “Only because she showed up at our door.”
“Who?” Rita repeated, louder now, as if she were ready to tear the woman’s eyes out, doing battle for her friend.
“Fern Ashenbach. She’s blond. She wears boots with spike heels. And she’s younger than us. Thirtysomething, maybe.”
“Is she related to Dave Ashenbach? From Menemsha? He just died, you know.”
“She was married to Ashenbach’s son. He’s dead, too.”
“So now she has nothing better to do than screw around with your husband.”
For the first time, Jill allowed herself to cringe. The words evoked an unwanted image of Ben, naked, hard, and wanting, mounting the long-legged, lusty being, kissing her mouth, sucking at her …
She squeezed her eyes shut and let out a moan. Now she knew why adultery seemed worse: it was because she could not imagine him doing that other thing, that other twisted, criminal thing. But she could imagine him with another woman; she could visualize the act.
Denial is the shock absorber of the soul, she’d once read.
If he was capable of one thing, could he not be capable of the other?
Do we ever really know anyone well enough to entrust them with our hearts, our souls, our lives?
“Honey,” Rita’s quiet voice said, as she patted Jill’s hand, “he’s not the first to do this. I know it’s hard to hear, but it probably has more to do with his age and his ego and all that shit than with you.”
Jill blinked. Rita had misunderstood. “Oh, it didn’t happen now. Not while we’ve been married. It was when he was married before. To Louise.”
Rita dropped her head. “Jesus Christ,” she said, then lifted her eyes, grabbed a fistful of crackers, and crushed them into her chowder. “You had me worried for a minute. So he screwed around on his first wife. What’s that got to do with you?”
“Louise was sick, Rita. She was dying.”
Rita picked up her spoon and dove into her bowl. “Well, okay, so it was wrong. But at the risk of sounding ignorant, what does it have to do with you? How long ago was it?”
“Six years. Maybe seven.”
“Jesus, Jill. So now what? She came to your front door looking for more? If that’s the case, then you might have a right to be upset. No, cancel that. You only have a right to be upset if Ben said yes and he jumped into the sack with her.”
Jill opened her mouth to say the rest, but the words took too long getting out. Rita spoke again.
“The trouble with you is you’ve had everything too easy all your life. I know it hasn’t seemed that way to you, but God, Jill, you haven’t had a whole lot of heartache, you know?”
She did not want to argue with that. Her first husband, Richard, had had countless affairs, but Jill had looked the other way because once she’d stopped denying it, she was convinced he’d outgrow it, which of course he had not. But she could not explain this because she was far too tired, and because Rita might not understand, because Rita had never had a husband—her life had been more difficult than that.
And she could not explain that the second man she’d almost married had turned out to be a cad, willing to sell his soul—or hers—for ratings. And he still was.
And she could not explain the whole story about Ben.
Rita, after all, did not know what it meant to be committed to another, she had not been able to succumb to that, not one time in her life, not even with the man who loved her, Charlie Rollins.
Slowly she lifted her spoon and tried to smile. “You know something, Rita? You’re right. I am an incorrigible brat.”
Rita laughed. “I never said you were a brat. It’s just that you’ve been luckier than most of us. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Chapter 23
Ben took the long way back from Gay Head, through Chilmark to Vineyard Haven, then around the harbor to Oak Bluffs.
He knew he was procrastinating. But driving on a snowy day seemed preferable to going home, more appealing than facing Jill again and seeing the huge hurt in her eyes. Besides, the roads were mostly deserted because of the holiday.
Under “normal” circumstances, he’d have been at Carol Ann’s. He’d be sitting at the table, drinking her strong coffee, watching her prepare Christmas dinner. He’d be listening to his grandkids, maybe helping them string popcorn or clumsily wrap presents. He’d be savoring their exuberance that Christmas Eve was finally there.
But he was not welcome at his daughter’s—John had made that clear. And now, if Carol Ann had ever known that when her mother was alive …
He no longer wondered why men committed suicide, when the things they had done to the world, or the world had done to them, had squeezed around their airway and made it impossible to continue breathing the same air as those they’d loved and cheated on or hurt.
He could not believe Fern had come back.
At first, he’d been dumb enough to think that maybe it would help. Maybe she’d remember that Ben was not the sort of man who would do what Mindy claimed. Maybe she would tell that to the district attorney. Maybe that would get the charges dropped.
But she intended to do nothing of the sort.
Maybe he should simply knuckle under and pay her off. How much would she take once she learned that half a million was out of the question? He was wondering this as he automatically pulled into the driveway of his old house in Oak Bluffs—his house, Louise’s house, the house where they’d raised Carol Ann.
He put the car in park and sat there, face to face with his workshop, where he’d built his plans for Menemsha House long into the wee hours of many nights. He saw the kitchen window where Louise had stood so many predictable years, making dinner, washing dishes, keeping their lives uncomplicated. As much as she’d loved their home, she’d loved her work as a teacher and the challenge of the classroom, too. She often shared the pride she’d felt when her students had responded to something they had learned.
She must have been a great teacher, Ben thought now, because she’d loved it so, because it seemed that every single child she’d ever taught had shown up at her funeral. They’d had to hold it in the open tabernacle because there hadn’t been enough room in the church.
As the wipers streaked a path across his snowy windshield, he rested his face against the steering wheel and wondered if he’d been wrong to marry Jill. Maybe it hadn’t been true love but merely another salve for his male ego, another Fern Ashenbach, this time with class, with grace, with smarts.
Who did he think he was, anyway? He certainly was no Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood. He was simply a small-town architect and builder who’d once tried to live a moral life, who’d once put together a successful business, then thrown it all away on dreams and his libido, not necessarily in that order.
And now he had little money and even less of his business. If he had to start again, he wasn’t sure he’d make it. Or if he’d know where to start.
He looked back to the house and wished he’d never renovated it into a studio for Jill. He wished it was still the cozy place where he’d lived for years. He wished Louise were still there at the kitchen sink, when everything had been predictable and nothing ever hurt.
He sat there for an hour, before he put the pieces of his heart back into place, before he was able to face up to what he had to do.
“Jill?” Ben called up from the bottom of the stairs in the house on North Water Street. She wasn’t in the sitting room or the kitchen, in the sewing room or the music room. He looked up the long staircase, now wrapped in pine boughs fastened with big red velvet bows. Was she taking a nap? Perhaps the night and day and the gloom of snow had helped her succumb to sleep. “Honey?”
She emerged from the doorway of their bedroom an
d stood at the top of the steep stairs, looking down. She was fully dressed; she did not say hello.
He pulled off his cap and smoothed his hair. “Honey, we need to talk,” he said, and began to climb the stairs.
“No,” she said, “I’m tired of talking.”
He stopped on stair number five or six and held on to the mahogany banister. Okay, he thought. He couldn’t say he blamed her.
“I want to make this easier on you,” he said.
She shrugged and folded her arms. “Ben, you cannot make this easier on me. It is not easy. It will not get easy until all of this is way behind us. If it ever is.”
He looked down at his caramel-colored construction boots, which had seen little work of late. He wondered if she’d be more forgiving if she knew he’d been thinking about suicide. He moved two steps closer to his bride.
“Maybe you were right,” he said. “Maybe we should tell the kids. If this were more out in the open …”
She did not respond. God, he wished that she’d respond.
He climbed two, then three more steps. He was almost to the top, yet still she hadn’t moved. He wondered if this was some kind of psychological game in which she needed him to be the one to reach out, while she remained steadfast in her position. “I’ve been out to Gay Head,” he said. “I’ve always done my best thinking there.”
Jill stood up straighter. “Did you see your friend Fern?”
He took a breath, then let it out. “No, Jill. I did not see Fern. I went to the cliffs, and then I took the long way home.” In the past, he had not had to explain himself or his every movement to her. He did not like the feeling.
“I went to Rita’s,” Jill said.
Something in her tone warned Ben that he was in trouble here, that whenever two women got together, the men ended up the losers. “Was she happy with the party?” he asked. “Did you tell her we enjoyed it?”
“Yes,” she replied, but said it only once, so he guessed that was supposed to answer both his questions.
He now stood three steps below his wife, at eye level with her waist, the slender waist he loved to hold within his large, work-toughened hands.
“You and Rita talked about me,” he said.
Her arms stayed folded. “I didn’t tell her about Mindy. I can’t bring myself to do that.”
He needed to feel her arms around him, to feel her forgiveness, to feel her warmth. “Thank you,” he said, but remained standing on the third step down.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. There was a time when that had felt comfortable, when Ben had known that he and Jill had passed the point where they needed to be always animated with one another, when quiet time between them still was filled with love. This, however, was not one of those times.
“What do we do next, Jill?” he said in the space and the air that hung between them. “I was thinking that maybe you’d want me to move back to the Oak Bluffs house. I can fix up a room upstairs. My workshop is still there. I can be out of the house when you need to be in the studio.” He wished that she would jump right in and say, “No. No, Ben, that’s not what I want.”
Instead of saying anything, Jill turned and went into the bedroom. Ben climbed those last three stairs and followed. “It’s not that I want to leave the house, Jill. It’s not that I want to leave you …” Inside their bedroom, he noticed open suitcases on the bed.
If he’d eaten anything at all that day, it would have risen into his esophagus. Instead, only a thin, acidic bile came. “I’m going to England,” Jill said. “I decided to go see my son.”
Rita was thinking of how, just once, she’d love to meet a man who didn’t turn out to be a bum. Then again, she supposed that that was an oxymoron, given the fact that most men had a penis and there must be some genetic link between stupidity and dicks.
It was Christmas morning, and though the snow had stopped and the sun was straining through the still-thick clouds, Rita was in the dumps. It could have been because she hadn’t slept well, or because baby what’s-his-or-her-name was grinding against her innards most of the night, as if it already knew Santa was coming. Then again, maybe it was because from down the hall, Hazel’s snores had been exceptionally loud.
It could have been a lot of things that kept Rita awake and troubled her now, as she stood at her kitchen window, gazing at a plump red cardinal that waited expectantly at the bird feeder that she hadn’t yet filled.
But Rita knew that only one thing had sent her to the dumps. It was Ben Niles, and the grim reality that he’d turned out to be no better than the rest.
Though she’d tried to play it down to Jill to make her believe that it was no big deal, Rita knew differently. She knew that once illusions fell away, it was a long way to go back. She supposed it had some abstract thing to do with trust.
Above Hazel’s snoring, the telephone suddenly rang. She glanced at it warily, as if a man were calling, as if it were one of them.
Then she decided it wouldn’t be a man who mattered because she’d made damn sure none of them did.
It was not a man, it was a woman who wanted to list her house.
Rita perked up.
“I’m sorry to bother you on Christmas,” the woman said. “But I’ve only just made the decision, and I don’t want to change my mind. It’s an old house, but it has a few acres.”
Rita was not about to quibble with anyone about business, especially when the word acres was included. Acres on the Vineyard were like gold mines in them thar hills, whose commission could make a real estate person rich. And keep her from ever being dependent on a man.
“I’d like to put it on the market right away. How long do you think it will take to sell?”
“If you’d done this in September, it wouldn’t take long at all. If you wait until June, the price will automatically be higher.”
The woman sighed. “It wasn’t mine to sell in September, and I’m not going to wait until June. Do you want to list it or not?”
Rita recognized exasperation when she heard it. “Of course. When can I look at it?”
“Today.”
She did not remind the woman that it was Christmas. “One o’clock?”
“Fine.”
“Where are you?”
“Menemsha,” the woman replied. “My name is Fern Ashenbach. The house is right next to the Menemsha House museum. Do you know the place?”
Hazel wanted to go with Rita, because Rita had made the mistake of telling her of Ben’s “indiscretion,” and now Hazel said she wanted to see for herself what kind of woman had lured the great Ben Niles away from his dying wife.
Besides, Hazel was intrigued that this woman had the audacity (a big word for her mother, reflective of crossword puzzles in the paper), the nerve, to expect that Rita would come out on Christmas Day.
Hazel had however packed a basket of leftover party treats—mini-quiches and Amy’s chicken things and the chocolate mint squares that Hattie Phillips had baked. Might as well be neighborly on this most neighborly of days.
Rita supposed that what Hazel really wanted was to ogle the woman, perhaps not without some envy, because perhaps she was not much more than Hazel—or for that matter, Rita—had been back in their days when they were young and sexy and went after any man, many men, single, married, widowed, divorced, or anything, as long as they breathed, as long as they had one of those godforsaken, guaranteed-to-break-your-heart things dangling from their loins.
Rita shivered as she steered the car toward Menemsha. Hazel sat forward on the seat next to her, about to burst from the excitement. When at last they arrived at the house, Rita recalled the little girl she’d seen out there, the sad child who’d found her grandfather dead. But she stopped short of telling Hazel that she’d seen the girl: such news might encourage Hazel to open her big mouth and ask questions that were not her business. Hopefully, her mother—with her basket of Red Riding Hood goodies on her lap—would remember this adventure was, indeed, for work, and not idle island gossip
.
There was no doubt that Fern Ashenbach could lure a man and lure him quickly.
She had the kind of legs Rita had prayed for when she’d been a short chubby kid. She had curves that Rita wished she still had beneath her blossoming belly. But more than that, she had a presence, a confidence that seductively suggested, “Hey, man, come to me, and I will be your slave,” which really meant that he would be hers, not the other way around.
Plus she was a blonde, and everyone knew that they had way more fun.
“I’m Rita Blair,” Rita said. “This is my mother, Hazel.”
Fern’s “pleased to meet you” sounded sincere enough. But it was hard to picture Ben with her, laden as she was with cheap gold jewelry and decorated with black mascara and bright green eye shadow. She was such a contrast to elegant, sophisticated Jill: she was much more like Rita, with no smoothness on her edge.
Hazel handed her the basket, and the woman seemed impressed.
Then she escorted them through the rooms, which were quite old and needed fresh wallpaper and a few hundred gallons of paint. But Rita knew the place would sell in a heartbeat. The location was spectacular, and out-of-towners would quickly snap it up. Maybe some burned-out yuppies would convert it to a bed and breakfast, as if the island needed another one.
After the tour, Fern offered tea. “You’re pregnant, huh?” she asked Rita. “When are you due?”
“April. Spring.”
“Boy or girl?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve been too busy for the ultrasound.”
“Did you know my father-in-law?” Fern asked, as if she’d tired of baby talk. She took three cups down from the cabinet and wiped them with a paper towel.
Rita shot a glance to Hazel, a warning not to mention that they were friends with Ben, Ashenbach’s longtime adversary. “I don’t think we ever met,” Rita said. “But of course, I knew his name. By the way, with all the real estaters on the island, why’d you call me?”
