by North, Will
There was an uneasy moment when the only sound was the clink of silverware on china, a moment when, tortoise-like, the diners withdrew to their armored shells to check on the safety of their secrets.
Pete broke the silence. “So, Jemma, how’s that house you’ve bought coming along?”
Her husband laughed and answered for her. “It’s in the Mies Van der Rohe tradition, or perhaps I should say ‘condition.’”
Everyone at the table turned.
“You know, the great Modernist architect, a minimalist who once said, ‘Less is more.’ The house is less than we thought it would be and needs more work and money than we ever dreamed it would. Maybe it’s a Modernist masterpiece!”
Laughter all around, just a bit too loud, as if from a tension bubble bursting.
“That’s the problem with many of the houses on this island,” Pete said, relaxing into a favorite topic of island discourse: real estate. “They were built originally as summer cottages, little more than campsites, by people like my grandfather. Now we ask of them more than they were ever designed to be.”
“And retrofitting is so much more expensive than new construction,” Peggy added. “Who are you considering to do the work?”
“We talked to Randy Josephson. Friend of our real estate agent.”
“There’s a well-named chap,” Tyler snorted, like an animal emerging from a hole.
“Excuse me?” Jemma said.
“Randy. English term.”
“He doesn’t have an accent…”
“Tyler,” Pete piped up. “Stop.”
Jemma looked around the table for clarity.
“Tyler’s being mean,” Peggy said.
“Word is,” Tyler said, leaning again toward Jemma, “he has a way with his female clients.”
“A way, or his way?” Lucia demanded, her question meant to expose not Randy but Tyler. “What are you suggesting?” This night, Lucia wore diaphanous olive harem pants tied at the ankle, gold sandals, and a lacy, spaghetti strap camisole in black that only a Brazilian would have thought appropriate in public. Her smile as she looked at Tyler was as wide and dazzling as a beach in Rio, as if to blind him to the sharpness of her challenge.
“Yes, Tyler,” Peggy added. “What harm has Randy ever caused you? He did a brilliant job rebuilding the fronts of my cabinets.”
She’s confusing him with her plastic surgeon, Pete thought to herself. She didn’t know exactly what had got into her; Peggy had been her friend for years. A defensive cattiness crawled beneath her skin tonight like poison oak.
“Ignore my colleague and neighbor,” Rob said, waving his empty wine glass so someone would pass the chardonnay. The wine was dragging him out of his funk. “Everything Josephson makes, no matter how utilitarian, comes out looking like fine furniture. The guy’s a genius—and with metalwork as well as wood.”
“Then…?” Jemma asked.
“He’s pricey,” Tyler announced.
“The hell he is,” Rob countered, “but he ought to be. Charges no more than any of the other carpenters on this island and none of them can hold a candle to him. Damned shame, actually.”
“Slow, too,” Tyler goaded.
“Look, there are three goals in any renovation job. I figured this out when Peggy and I fixed up the old Rutherford place. They’re price, quality, and speed. The deal is, you can only ever get two of the three. You can get price and speed, but you won’t get quality. You can get quality and speed, but you won’t get a good price. Or you can get price and quality, but not speed. I’d go with that one every time. Randy’ll give you a fair price and terrific quality. It’ll just take a little longer to finish, because he cares more.”
“Plus, that way he gets to spend more time with the lady of the house,” Tyler sniped.
Jemma turned to the man beside her. “Is this reality or fantasy for you?”
“You go, girl!” Lucia called across the table, pumping her fist in the air.
“It’s projection,” Rob said.
“Bullshit! The guy’s a letch,” Tyler persisted.
“Projection,” Rob said again.
Pete stood abruptly. “Dessert, everyone? We’ve got end of season blackberry pie with organic vanilla ice cream, thanks to Lucia…”
Lucia rose as well. “My specialty,” she announced. “I trust there will be no one declining?”
“No one is that brave, Luce,” her husband, Joe, said, laughing.
The mood around the table changed as if they had all released a collective sigh of relief.
“I have some lovely Prosecco from Conegliano, near Venice, already chilled,” Tyler announced. “I propose we adjourn to the patio, where it’s cooler, there to enjoy the death throes of the day.”
The rest of the guests rose and headed, somewhat unsteadily, for the French doors leading outside.
“You’re such a romantic, Tyler,” Peggy whispered as she passed him.
twenty-three
ROB MARCH HAD PUT IT OFF too long and he knew it. Part of it was anger. He was angry with the other, older members of the firm for ordering him to tell Tyler he would not be made partner. He was angry at himself for voting against Tyler, even though it was right. And he was angry with Tyler for making the decision inevitable. The truth was that he was amazed Tyler had lasted even this long; probably Old Adam’s doing. Tyler wasn’t a functioning attorney; he was more like a remittance man who hadn’t the good sense to disappear to some distant tropical locale and live off his sinecure.
“Tyler, old man, let’s us take a walk on the beach and leave the dishes to the ladies,” Rob said after dinner and the beachside fireworks were over. They were on the Petersens’ wide porch, waiting for their ears to recover. Tyler had amassed an arsenal for Labor Day weekend that had shattered the air and fired the darkness for more than half an hour. He’d raced around pyromaniacally, setting flame to wick, to keep the children gasping and the adults covering their ears. Dogs throughout the neighborhood howled. Rob thought him nuts. Colin and the Keatings had had the good sense to leave beforehand.
“Why would anyone in his right mind leave the ladies?” Tyler said, his long arm describing a wide, embracing arc as if encompassing all womanhood. “Only thing worth living for...”
Rob knew Tyler was drunk. Tyler always became effusive about women when he was inebriated, expressively grandiose. Rob wasn’t sober either; what had started as girding his loins for this talk with a few stiff drinks had slipped seamlessly into overindulgence. He kept having to shake himself mentally to attend to the task at hand.
Rob lowered his voice. “Look, you and I need to talk.”
Red flags went up at the primitive core of Tyler’s brain: Rob knew about him and Peggy. Or she’d told him. Either way, it was trouble. Adultery is fine with strangers, he reasoned, using a calculus all his own, but with friends, lifelong friends, it was trouble. He’d known that from the get-go, but he had taken what was offered anyway and he and Peggy hadn’t missed an opportunity all summer. He glanced back to the safety of the cottages, then turned to Rob.
“Okay. Lead on, old friend.”
On the way across the porch Tyler grabbed another beer.
The tide had just begun retreating, and there wasn’t much beach yet exposed. They headed west where the strand was broadest.
After a while, Rob said, “I’ve just been made privy to some information…”
“Privileged information, counselor?” Tyler joked. “Should you be sharing it with me?
“It’s not privileged, Tyler. It’s personal.”
He knows, Tyler thought. He fucking knows.
“Well what is it, then? A matter of honor or something?”
Rob looked at Tyler’s face in the reflected light from the beach houses, momentarily puzzled.
“Yes, I suppose that’s what it is; a matter of honor.”
“Look, friend; it’s nothing. I promise you.”
Rob was even more puzzled. “Nothing? You know already?”
“Know what?”
“That you won’t be made partner in the firm.”
Tyler stopped dead in the sand, his feet planted like pilings.
“What the fuck?!”
“The partners decided. On Thursday. They’ll be communicating with you formally on Tuesday, but they asked me, as your friend, to tell you this weekend.”
“As my friend? Or as my Judas?! You bastard! Did you vote against me?”
It was Rob’s moment of truth and he didn’t flinch. “I voted with the other partners; it was unanimous.”
“You fat shit!” Tyler threw his half empty bottle of Red Hook at Rob, and the bottle grazed the side of the big man’s head. The blow stunned him and he staggered.
Tyler seized the moment, charged his friend, and took him down so hard it knocked the wind out of Rob’s chest. Tyler grabbed Rob’s head and smashed it into the damp sand repeatedly.
“You son of a bitch; you fat, phony, fucking son of a bitch!”
Rob March found it in himself to throw the whole of his weight into a roundhouse punch to Tyler’s left temple and it knocked the man atop him almost senseless. Rob scrambled out of Tyler’s grip and stood. Tyler stayed down, a hand against his head. Rob was suddenly concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Judas! Fucking Judas!” Tyler rose to his knees, swayed, then fell to one side.
“Projection,” Rob mumbled at the shape in the dark. Then he turned and trudged back up the beach and over the driftwood. He headed, automatically, toward the Petersen house, then changed direction and stumbled home. His head throbbed and his neck muscles were on fire from Tyler’s thrashing.
When Tyler finally found his feet, he went after Rob, gave up, and stalked the dark beach too angry to understand how drunk he was; too drunk to comprehend how injured he was. He flung chunks of driftwood into the water so furiously he threw himself off balance, fell, got up, and did it all over again. He was ruined. Rob had betrayed him. The firm had abandoned him. How was he supposed to face Pete now, especially given the condition of Pacific Pioneer? Worse still, how could he face Amanda? His mother would never let him forget this, never let him live it down, never fail to hold him up against Richie and Jamie.
Rage seized him now like a tropical disease. He welcomed it. He gathered it into himself and nourished it. It was his armor. It would be his weapon.
***
JUST AFTER TWO, on the bluff beneath the Madrona trees, Tyler took it out on Peggy. She was waiting for him, leaning against one of the smooth-barked trees, looking seaward, and acting the part of the dreamy innocent, when he grabbed her from behind. She let out a feigned, “Oh!” and then giggled. Tyler yanked up her short striped dress and pulled her hips toward him. She’d already removed the lacy tap pants she’d had on earlier. She loved coming to him with nothing on beneath her skirt; it made her feel wild.
“You fucking slut,” he growled. It was the kind of talk that always got her juices flowing. It thrilled her at some deeply primitive level; it went to an animal place within her that her husband, a good and gentle lover, never reached: a place that was her secret, a secret she’d discovered and shared only with Tyler. It was going to be the perfect ending to a magically erotic summer.
She tried to turn to embrace her lover, but he grabbed her shoulders and forced her head down against the tree. She heard him unzip and then he plunged into her, without a caress, without even a word. She was clinging to the trunk of one of the Madronas, stroking its cool, smooth russet bark with her hands and thrilling to Tyler’s furious passion, pushing back hard against his thrusts. She felt flushed with both desire and desperation, because this was their last night together, her last chance for the validation that she, well past forty and a mother of two, was the woman who turned on Tyler Strong.
Then things went crazy.
“Lover, you’re hurting me!”
“Shut up, bitch!”
“Tyler!”
“Shut up! You’re getting what you’ve wanted all summer, what you beg me for, the down and dirty, right? Right?!”
“Yes! Yes, of course! But more gently, sweetheart, you’re tearing me up!”
“Am I? Good. Because this is to make you remember me forever, and forget that fat-assed, pork-bellied, Judas husband of yours, the coward, the betrayer. You…will…remember!”
“Yes! Remember!” She cried. Her shoulder was being hammered into the tree trunk to which she clung. She felt as if some diabolical machine was bent on ripping her apart. This wasn’t passion. This wasn’t even sex. This was punishment. This was rape. She tried to twist away, but Tyler had her hair in his left fist. His right hand was clamped on her hip bone as he jerked her toward him.
Finally, Strong pulled out and flung her to the grass, face up. Her eyes were wide with panic and wet with tears. Then, like an animal marking territory, he ejaculated over her.
“A goodbye present just for you, my dear, my sweet. Take it back to that overweight eunuch bastard husband of yours and show him what a real ‘partner’ can do.”
She curled to her right because she thought he was going to kick her, but instead, without another word, Tyler stalked into the woods and disappeared. She lay in the grass sobbing, as much from confusion as terror. Why was this ending this way? For weeks, she’d given herself to him with an abandon, with a fierceness she hadn’t even known was in her. How could that not have been enough? Why was he punishing her?
And then it hit her like a belly punch: she was nothing to Tyler. Just as she was nothing to her father, who disappeared, or to her mother, who’d treated her as just another celestial being in the airy-fairy commune where she’d been raised. She’d hungered for Tyler for years, even before she’d married Rob. Tyler was her romantic ideal, right into middle age, her dazzling desire: tall, handsome, alternately aloof and boyishly playful. And finally, this summer she’d got him. She’d feasted on him; they’d feasted on each other. She hadn’t expected it to go anywhere, of course, to continue beyond the season. She wasn’t that self-deluded.
But she hadn’t expected rejection either, and now here she was, her body brutalized and left behind as if a scatter of trash. That’s all she was to him. Trash. To be disposed of. It was beyond comprehending.
What she did understand, with humiliated certainty, was that though she mattered not at all to Tyler, she mattered to Rob—the man who treated her as if she were composed of spun gold and silk and who, as a consequence of her own sense of inadequacy, she’d come to dismiss. She sat up, gathered the broken pieces of herself, and stood. Then she stumbled down the slope to the cluster of darkened cottages below, illumined by the moon-licked beach that once had been her haven, and to the husband who’d never stopped loving her.
***
SHE FOUND HIM passed out on their bed, still in his clothes, which were caked with sand. He must have been very drunk. In the morning, she would tell him everything, and beg his forgiveness. In the morning, she would start over and, if he would still have her, she would love him unreservedly. Because he was genuine. Because she knew, absolutely, that he would never abuse or betray her.
And because she’d risked losing it all.
She also knew she would never return to Madrona Beach.
twenty-four
TYLER STRONG PACED THE PORCH and slugged back his fourth tall glass of orange juice and vodka. He’d changed into shorts and a black T-shirt. He wasn’t sure when. Why hadn’t somebody found Pete yet? Clearly the police hadn’t found her or that cop would have called.
Maybe Two got sick during the night. Or Justine. Maybe that was it. She’s gone to the clinic.
He padded into the kitchen, picked up the tiny island phone book, fumbled and dropped it, retrieved it again, thumbed through it and punched in the number for the Vashon medical center. He got a recorded message: closed for Labor Day. He cursed and slammed his phone shut. He looked at the phone for another moment, then snapped it open and hit redial, listened to the recording again, and followed the instru
ctions to connect to the on-call nurse.
“This is the consulting nurse; how may I help you?” a live voice said.
“Um, hello.” Tyler said, trying to frame words into sentences. “Has Martha Strong come to the health center this morning?”
“The center is closed today, sir; it’s Labor Day.
“I know that, dammit, but you have a doctor on call, right?!”
“Of course. Are you all right, sir?”
“So has Mrs. Strong called him?”
“The doctor is a she.’”
“Whatever. Did she?”
“We’re not at liberty to release that sort of information, sir.”
“I know, I know; Privacy Act bullshit. I’m a lawyer. Also her husband.”
“Let me just check her record and see if she has you on her list of people to whom information can be released.”
“We’re only here summers.”
“Oh, the Strongs on Madrona Beach? I didn’t recognize the name at first; I thought she went by ‘Pete.’ Just one moment, please, I’m checking…”
That was the problem with islands; everyone knew you and rumors about people and events flashed around at speeds that rivaled the Internet.
“No, she’s just been here on occasion for little emergencies—sports injuries, kids’ fevers, that sort of thing. But I don’t have you on her permission list. In fact, she doesn’t have a permission list in her record. That’s probably because we’re not her regular health services provider.”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“Of course you did. Well, Mr. Strong, I don’t think I’d be breaking any laws if I told you I’ve been the on-call consulting nurse all night and you’re my first Strong. But are you, sir, you yourself okay…?”
Tyler had already hung up. He poured another vodka and orange, and went back out to the porch.
Nothing was making sense. It was time to be leaving, but the house was empty.
***
THE MORNING WAS still fresh as Young Adam pedaled back from the rowing club at Jensen Point. A car he recognized as Old Adam’s spare pickup approached and he saw his sister Justine behind the wheel. The windows were open.
