by North, Will
At this, Pete couldn’t resist a fit of the giggles.
“Pete!”
“I’m sorry, Peggy, but Alex’s right; that’s one hell of a rock you’ve got. I’m surprised your arm hasn’t stretched from the weight.”
It was true; her engagement ring was a massive stone that grew from her finger like a carbuncle and was guarded by a stockade of smaller stones.
“Just a measure of how much Rob loves me,” Peggy said. She didn’t give a damn that the ring was ostentatious; the moment he’d given it to her, she knew she’d left the commune behind forever.
Alex ignored this exchange, pulled a large Mexican green glass bowl from a Thriftway shopping bag, and began pouring out Tupperware containers of cannellini, garbanzo, and red kidney beans; thinly sliced red onion; finely chopped English cucumber; olive oil; crushed garlic; salt; pepper; a pinch of chili pepper flakes; cilantro; and balsamic vinegar.
“I can’t wait,” Peggy said, rolling her eyes.
“You’ll just have to,” Alex chirped. “I have to change.”
“I think it will be splendid,” Pete said as Alex jogged out of the kitchen. Pete was in peacemaker mode now. “I bet it will be yummy and good for us, all at once.”
“Like sex,” Peggy added.
Heads rose as if lifted by the same wire.
“Yes,” Lucia said with enthusiasm. “It’s what keeps us alive!”
“If that’s the case, then I must be dead,” Pete cracked.
Jemma descended from her imaginary observation post. “With respect,” she said, nodding toward Lucia whose naive candor she found refreshing, “I don’t think that’s what keeps us alive. I think what keeps us alive is intimacy, which is something else altogether… it’s to do with companionship, and trust. Sex is a product of that, not the source.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” Pete said to the salad she was preparing.
Peggy stepped over to where Pete was working and gave her a hug, “Shit, Pete, you’ve got Little Adam, and Justine, and Tyler; that’s like the Trifecta!”
“I don’t have Two,” Pete said into the salad.
Peggy let her go.
Lucia interjected. “Pete…Mrs. Strong…how long has it been now?”
“Nine years.”
“Nine. Almost a decade,” Lucia mused. “How long before you let him go?”
‘Never. I will never let him go!”
“Then your life is over.”
“What?” Peggy snapped on behalf of her friend.
Lucia smiled and looked across the room and out through the multi-paned windows, as if reading a message on the waves beyond.
“Pete, forgive me, but is it not the case that today you have two children who need you and one who no longer does?” she asked. “Where do you focus your love and your life, Pete? On behalf of whom?”
“What do you know about loss?!” Pete snapped.
Lucia walked across the kitchen and kissed Pete lightly on the cheek.
“I lost both my father and mother. They were socialists who were assassinated during Operation Condor in Brazil. Many people were. I was a child. I raised my little brother alone. We begged along the beaches.”
There was a moment of perfect silence, broken only by the distant voices of happy children eating at the picnic tables outside. Pete stepped away from the counter and put her arms around Lucia.
“Thank you, Luce. I did not know that. I am so sorry.”
“As am I for your loss,” Lucia said. “So, right now, here is our mutual task, eh? First, we finish the salads. Then we all change. Then dinner. Then tomorrow. Then the next day, until forever, yes? We must live.”
Jemma slipped out the side door to the porch and gulped air like a swimmer struggling to the surface from a great depth, as if the weight of tragedy carried by these women threatened to crush her chest. She was a therapist. She should understand this pain. But somehow its immediacy was stifling.
twenty
ALEX WAS THE FIRST of the women to emerge dressed for the evening. As the men readied their grills to prepare the main courses, she swept down the steps to the cooking patio, wearing a body-hugging, calf-length crinkle rayon dress in the green of an unripe pear, a color that echoed her eyes and contrasted with her hair. She wore coral-orange fake snakeskin kitten-heel sandals, the short spikes of which were already stained from the clay that underlay the damp sod. Something about this besmirching only served to make her look sexier. As she approached the men and their grills, she bowed and presented Tyler with a martini, the chilled glass frosted like a winter window. A plastic skewer held three olives.
“Three!” Tyler noted with theatrical surprise. “That seems excessive.”
Laughter all around.
“Excess is good,” she purred.
Silence from the admiring men.
Rob March noticed Alex placed her palm on Tyler’s hip for balance a moment longer than was absolutely necessary as she put down the drink beside his gleaming stainless steel gas grill.
After she’d picked her way back up the steps again, ever so slowly, and entered the house, Rob poked Tyler with his long-handled spatula.
“Goodness, old boy, how will you ever survive the winter without Miss Step-and-Fetch-It?”
“Cut it out; she’s my cousin-in-law or something.”
“No law against that,” Rob countered.
“You should know.”
“Hey, family and divorce law is an honorable profession.”
“Like the oldest one?”
“Gimme a break.”
“Not a chance. And anyway, how do you ever know who’s telling the truth?”
“What, in a divorce proceeding?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“I don’t. I’m not sure there’s ever a ‘truth.’ The client presents his or her own take on reality; that’s a given. The other spouse does the same. They seldom agree. You should know that; it’s not all that different from any legal case.”
“Truth. Lies. Reality. Fantasy.” Tyler was staring off toward the house. “It’s all like a hologram shimmering in space, all image and no substance. Hard to get your arms around…”
Rob squinted at his friend.
“Earth to Tyler?”
“What?”
“The thing is,” Rob continued, “I’m not looking for absolute truth in a domestic case, and I don’t think the judge is, either; we’re looking for fairness in a situation that’s fraught. Especially if there are kids.”
Tyler was staring again. “Fraught. Yeah. Things get fraught… with kids.”
This was getting weird, Rob thought. He looked back at the door through which Alex had disappeared and lowered his voice. “You thinking about a divorce, Tyler?”
Tyler came back from wherever he was. “Don’t be an idiot,” he snapped, “I just wondered.”
“And I’m wondering about you and that cousin-in-law or something… body like that? You lucky dog.”
“Shut up, asshole. There’s nothing going on there.”
“Okay, okay; no need to get nasty. Just teasing.”
“Teasing or jealous? You’re not exactly a chick magnet anymore, counselor…”
This was true, if cruel. Over the years, Rob March had morphed from husky to corpulent. Tennis matches with Tyler were a distant memory. His only advantage over his former court rival now was recent, secret, and formidable: Rob had just been made partner in their families’ firm and Tyler, as yet, had not…and, as Rob now knew, never would.
That had been decided by the partners at Strong, Penfield & March during a management meeting on Thursday—a meeting to which Rob was invited and from which Old Adam had abstained. The verdict had yet to be communicated; the senior partners decided that would be their newest partner’s job. There would be a formal letter, of course, but they had asked Rob to pass the message on, gently and informally, since they knew he’d be seeing Tyler on the weekend. Rob suspected it was some kind of loyalty test. Whatever it was, it sucked. He
’d put it off all weekend.
He’d put it off, in part, because he’d voted with the majority.
The discussion had been long, but polite. Rob had said little. Then the oldest partner present, Spencer Penfield, turned to him and asked, “So, Rob March, our newest member, how do you vote?”
Rob had assumed the vote would be silent. The question stunned him. For personal reasons, of course, he hadn’t wanted to vote against a friend of so many years. But he didn’t want to appear weak before the older partners. The plain truth was that while Tyler wasn’t an incompetent lawyer, he could agree with the others that he wasn’t a good enough one, either. As effortlessly skilled as Tyler had always been on the beachside tennis court and, for that matter, on the squash court at the Washington Athletic Club in town, as a lawyer he was erratic, even slipshod. Rob had worked with Tyler on cases only rarely—their specialties seldom overlapped—but when he did the experience left him irritated. In strategy meetings, tall, handsome Tyler would lean back on the rear legs of his chair and stare at the wall opposite, spinning out dreamy what-ifs: what if plaintiff’s counsel takes this approach, or has this information, or brings that witness to the stand? This would have been helpful, had he known what he was talking about, but often he did not. “We need someone to look into that,” he’d conclude with an airy wave. Tyler had no stomach for the grunt work of lawyering—the research, the case-building, the examination of possible cross-arguments, the rebuttals. He acted as if that were all somehow beneath him. The more likely truth, Rob suspected, was that Tyler couldn’t find his way through the detritus of the problem, much less develop a strategy.
In court, he tried to charm juries and judges with his warm voice and patrician bearing, even as he skated on the thin ice of whatever argument he’d managed to piece together. Tyler used a certain animal cleverness to challenge juries. Or just confuse them. He was good at that. He’d make them as fuzzy about the facts as he was. He tied them in knots.
What galled Rob, and others as well, was that Tyler exuded a superiority that was entirely unearned. The senior partners noticed these sorts of things. So did the clients. You got to be partner by winning cases (Rob was very good at this, a bulldog; Tyler wasn’t), by bringing in new clients (another of Rob’s strengths), and by keeping the clients happy. His innate charm notwithstanding, the fact was Tyler’s case record was mixed and his diffidence struck some clients as disinterest or, worse, a fundamental lack of gravitas. And in this, their instincts were accurate: he was a lightweight. Tyler rested upon his uncle’s prominence as senior partner and son of a founder of the firm. Instead of growing into the job, gaining experience and skill, though, Tyler had become an embarrassment.
Rob knew failure to make partner was effectively an open invitation for Tyler to leave the firm. And he knew Tyler had nowhere else to go.
He looked squarely at Spencer Penfield and said, “I am opposed to Tyler Strong’s elevation to partner, sir.”
A nod from the old man.
Rob felt sick.
***
COLIN HAD JUST sat down after cooking burgers for the kids when Jemma Keating slid into an Adirondack chair next to him.
“Mmm,” she said, “You smell yummy.”
Colin laughed. “That’s my aftershave. It’s called Eau de Briquet. Comes in classic charcoal and mesquite.”
“Oh, I’m all about classic.”
She was, indeed, a classic beauty, but even in the late afternoon light, Jemma looked pale, and he asked her if she was okay.
“Women can be brutal,” she said after a moment.
“To you?”
She shook her head. “No, no; to each other, to their oldest friends.”
“Ah, you’ve been in the kitchen, then.”
“Are they always like that? All claws and kisses?”
Colin laughed. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s because it’s the end of the season. Maybe there are scores to settle, or they’re sorting out the pecking order for next year. You’re the therapist; I’m just the vet.”
“What, you didn’t study animal behavior?” she countered, and now they both were laughing and the weight had lifted from her chest, only to be replaced by hiccups. She asked Colin for a glass of water and, when he returned, drank down the entire contents, holding her breath as she did so, and the spasms subsided.
When Tyler saw Jemma’s empty glass, he bounded up the stairs to make her another Cosmo from the bar on the porch. This chivalry, however, was undercut rather severely when he stared, unabashedly, down the front of her sundress as he bent to deliver the drink. As Tyler returned to his grill, Jemma rolled her eyes at Colin. Colin shook his head.
“Animal behavior,” he repeated.
She smiled.
He gestured toward the men at their grills. “It’s the same down there; I’ve been watching.”
Tyler and Rob were arguing now about local politics. Suddenly, their jibes began to seem like the script of some play. The topic of the moment was the state’s proposed premium-priced option for a reserved car slot on the otherwise first-come-first-boarded car ferry from the mainland.
Rob: “It’s anti-democratic and anti-American: why should rich people get to go to the front of the line?”
Tyler: “Oh Christ, March! Since when are you the proletariat? You’d be the first in line!”
Rob, raising his hands, unwilling to do battle: “I’m sorry, it’s just wrong.”
Tyler, viciously, if sotto voce: “You’re sorry, all right…”
Rob: “I suppose you’re also opposed to the increase in the island school levy?”
Tyler slamming the spatula on his grill: “Are you joking? You’d be a fool not to be! Shit, we’re already paying a fortune in property taxes for this place and my kid doesn’t even go to school here!”
Rob, annoyed: “Whose fault is that? While you’re paying another fortune to send your son to that private school in the city, half the kids in West Seattle take the ferry over here because the island’s public schools are so good!”
Tyler: “We don’t live in West Seattle, smartass.”
Rob laughing: “You could send Young Adam over here in a limo and still save money!”
Tyler: “Fuck off, March.”
Rob, finally losing his patience: “Ah yes, the illiterate’s inevitable resort to profanity. What the hell is it with you tonight?”
Tyler ignored him.
What intrigued Jemma was that this entire conversation was for Tyler apparently all about dominance, as if the man could not leave any declarative statement unchallenged. It spoke to her of a cavernous insecurity…and an underlying emotional volatility she found unsettling, even dangerous.
Finally, like rain refreshing a cracked desert floor, she heard Todd’s voice.
“Okay, guys, I’ll confess that I went to private school, too—one of the best: Lakeside. I was one of their charity cases, though they called it a scholarship. The thing was, my mother knew the public schools were failing and she wanted something better for her kid. Don’t we all? Anyway, in the last couple of years, my company’s been trying to strengthen the public schools. We’ve invested in them. Don’t you think that’s the way to go? Build them up?”
There was a guilty pause. From Tyler, a smirk; from Rob, a thoughtful nod. It was one of the reasons Jemma was so proud of her husband: he didn’t need to win; he’d rather get warring parties to find agreement among themselves.
“You gonna cook those shrimp or just fondle them?” Tyler snapped at Rob, who was basting his skewers with marinade. The truce, apparently, was over. At his own stainless steel grilling temple, Tyler was slathering dill mayonnaise on wild Alaskan King salmon fillets as long and thick as hand-split cedar shingles.
Rob straightened to his full height, which wasn’t much, smiled at Tyler like a lord to a subject, and said, “Stand back, amateur, and watch a master in action!” He laid the olive oil and garlic-infused shrimp, lemon, onion, and cherry tomato skewers across the grate
above the charcoal in his modest Weber. The sizzle was like hail on a metal roof.
“While you embalm that beautiful fish in your customary—and may I add, utterly boring—supermarket coating,” Rob taunted, “I have been preparing the precursor to tonight’s fireworks.”
“Behold, the chef…” Tyler said, ignoring Rob and focusing on his salmon.
Rob turned the seared shrimp skewers, reached for a squeeze bottle on the ground by his grill, brandished it grandly, and shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages: stand back! The performance is about to begin!”
There was a pause for effect, as if Rob had been about to stun a jury with some case-closing revelation about his client, and then, with a flourish, he squirted a stream of undiluted Greek ouzo on the shrimp skewers that lay on the grill above the hot charcoal. With an explosive whoosh, a four-foot column of anise-tinged alcohol vapor flamed into the darkening sky and instantly vanished, garnering a chorus of “Ooohs” from the kids on the lawn and, “Holy shit, Rob!” from Tyler.
Rob turned toward Tyler, grinning, his arms in the air, index and middle fingers of both hands splayed in a victory sign. The fat man did a little lumbering dance in a circle, then returned to his skewers.
Tyler shook his head. He shifted his overcooked, mayonnaise-slathered salmon filets to a large aluminum baking sheet and headed toward the kitchen.
twenty-one
HE COULD HAVE HAD ALEX, of course. Tyler had known it not long after the families arrived in July. He always did know. His mix of diffidence and solicitousness, of engagement and distancing, disturbed the air around him and the women he met wanted to know more. They liked the way he unsettled them.
Tyler’s greatest attraction for women, though, was unconscious and unaffected: he listened to them. He paid attention. Women shared secrets with him they wouldn’t have dreamed of sharing with even their best girlfriends. He did not offer them advice, though he might ask questions. There was a profound grandiosity in this solicitude, of course, as if his attention were a gift he was bestowing upon them. But since no one had ever given them such focused and caring attention before, they didn’t notice. Nor did they notice his mercurial mood shifts—there for them one day, absent the next. They gave themselves to him freely…and were baffled when, eventually and inevitably, he drifted away, as if bored.
