by Karin Tanabe
“Can I ask who the buyer is?” she said, still holding on to her faint smile, her upbeat attitude.
“I’m afraid he’d like to stay anonymous,” I replied.
“I could be interested,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants. “It’s always flattering to get commissions. If you bring the picture in later this week, I’d be happy to look at it. To consider it.”
“I’ll definitely do that then,” I said, smiling. “If you have any questions before that, you can call me at this number.”
I pulled out the small white card that I’d bought at the craft store the day before. It was one of those that was meant to be put through the printer to make a place card for a wedding. It had scalloped edges and looked very feminine.
I took out a pen and wrote the name Katie, and under it the ten-digit number where she could reach me. I hadn’t decided to do it until my pen had written the area code, but I was glad I had. I put it in her hand and when she looked down at it, I knew it had registered with her. She’d immediately recognized Tyler Ford’s number.
Hannah looked up at me and smiled. “Be sure to find me soon,” she said.
I promised her I would.
CHAPTER 11
I spent the night with Tyler on Monday and if Hannah had called him, he didn’t show any sign that anything was wrong. He made love to me three times. He said all the things he’d said before. He was falling in love with me. He didn’t say he was in love with me, but he kept saying that he was falling. If nothing went wrong, I knew he’d say it soon. Despite meeting Hannah and seeing her face when she saw Tyler’s number, I could have said I love you to him that night and meant it.
The next morning, I woke up to my phone flashing and grabbed it before it woke up Tyler. It was Alex and I knew he had spoken to the Dalbys. Or maybe just to Carter.
Alex’s voice was so filled with anger it almost shook the phone. I turned and looked at Tyler in bed next to me. He was still asleep, his blue eyes hidden. I’d picked up the phone so fast he must not have heard the ringer.
I moved quickly to the living room, slipped on my boots and a coat, and walked outside.
“You won’t come home to me because of this guy, Carolyn? Who is he? Just some loser without an education who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow? You’re the smartest person I know. What do you even talk about?”
“A college education does not make a person smart, Alex,” I said.
“Oh really?” he said, laughing haughtily at my statement. “I remember you saying that if you didn’t get into Princeton you were going to be labeled a ‘failure and ignoramus’ by your peers. You said your mother was going to ‘bronze you a dunce cap and force you to live with competitive mathematicians until you were reformed and sipping champagne at an Ivy.’ ” Did I say that? That seemed like an awfully complicated way to phrase a fear of failure.
“And now you’ve fallen in love with some undereducated marine who probably eats raccoon. That’s awesome. Congratulations.”
“Who said I’m in love with him? I just met him.”
“You are in love with him. I’ve known you for fifteen years. It’s obvious. You refused to come back to New York and you gushed about him to Jane and Brittan.”
“They called you?”
“Carter called me. He said they’re worried about you. According to Carter this guy is some sex fiend piece of shit who spends his time punching girls in the face. You think the Dalbys are just going to let you shack up with him? You know them. They care about you. But that’s more than I can say for me. Good luck. Let me know what it feels like to get beat up by your boyfriend.”
I heard the phone go dead and I opened the door and went back inside. Tyler was standing in the living room in his boxers.
“Everything okay?” he asked, picking up the blanket off the couch and wrapping me in it.
“Everything is more than okay,” I said. And I wasn’t lying.
“Don’t go back to New York,” he said, kissing the top of my head. I rested it against his chest, his skin warm against me.
“I’m not going yet. But I can’t stay forever and you’re not going to, either. How many years do you have left in Newport?”
“Two, probably. I could stay longer.”
“And if not, where are you going to go next?” I asked, turning around. I realized that I’d never asked Tyler how much longer he was staying in Newport. I knew he had been on base for four years, but I didn’t know how much time he had left.
“I used to want to go back to the Middle East. I don’t know now,” he said, locking his eyes on mine. “There are guys over there as contractors,” he said, then wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Maybe it’s time for me to try to make some money.”
I stood on my toes, kissed his perfect face, and told him I was late for work. When Tyler was in the shower, I’d looked at his phone, which he didn’t lock with a code. There were no calls from a Hartford number. He could have deleted it. But Hannah looked like a girl who thought things through. I didn’t think she had called yet. She would wait until I came back to see her.
I was going to go back to see her. I didn’t know when, but since Blair had told me the bowl wasn’t worth testing for age and I’d learned about Hannah, I no longer thought I owned something that could make me and William five figures. I thought I owned a very convincing fake.
To keep life interesting, Hook had changed his auctions to Tuesday and Wednesday, since the population around the area was starting to swell with tourists. “You’ll go to both,” William had told me when I’d informed him of the change. “I heard he’s going to shut everything down after this summer. The county sold the space again, so he must be itching to get everything gone. He’s got a big storage unit in a more rural area, but I think he counts on the turnover, too. He sells some big things, all that furniture and those neon signs.”
When I got to Narragansett, I parked my car in the small lot near the firehouse and saw Hook walking nearby.
“Hi, Hook. Looking for heiresses?” I said as he watched me get out of my little car.
“Yeah, where do you think Jane Dalby’s hiding? I love that girl. She looks expensive.”
“You know exactly where she lives. Everyone does. But you’re not going to find her here.”
“Who needs her when I have you?” he said, reaching for my hand. He kissed it and let out a laugh.
“You ever find out about that bowl?” he asked.
“Yeah, I did actually. Went to Goodwill a few weeks back. It’s not so bad there. I bought a chessboard made of teeth.”
“So what about that bowl? Worth anything?”
“Still not quite sure. I only half looked into it. Maybe a thousand,” I lied.
“That’s still a good return. I should have sold it for more. See, you come to Hook’s, you get a deal.”
“Sometimes you do. And sometimes you steal from drunk people.”
Hook frowned at me and gave me a little shove toward the building.
“All right, enough yapping. Go inside, sit down on the bleachers, and buy something from me. Something expensive.”
“I’ll try,” I said, heading inside. I took a seat on the cold metal bleachers. Every time I came back to Hook’s I sat one row farther down, so I was getting closer and closer to the front, the rows where Hook yelled at you and the women swigged booze out of red Solo cups.
A few of the women who recognized me from the last couple of weeks smiled and said hello. There were more men in the room today, but the median age was still sixty-five. That was the thing with auctions. Even the small-time ones required some sort of disposable income.
I didn’t buy anything that day. I bid on a small coffee table that had strong claw-and-ball feet, but I was outbid quickly and didn’t think it was worth the $2,200 it went up to.
“Maybe you are a bit of a cr
ook after all,” I said to Hook as I walked out of there.
“Not my fault, darling. I started the bidding at two hundred. You can control certain things, but demand is not one of them.”
“Lucky guy.”
“You coming back next week? I’m getting used to seeing that pretty face of yours now. Gives me a real zip as I shout out those numbers.”
“You’re despicable,” I said, walking out, but he knew I would be back the following week.
“Nothing today?” asked William when I walked into the store empty-handed that afternoon. “I don’t want to rob you,” I said, putting my bag down. “Everything went too high today; we would barely have broken even.”
“There are days like that,” said William, as he adjusted his bow tie. It had gardenias on it.
“For spring,” he said when he caught me looking at him. “The season of innocence.”
“I thought spring was for sex and bad judgment calls,” I said, breaking his Victorian dream.
“And speaking of. Are you still seeing that good-looking marine who came in the other day? He was pretty dashing.”
“I certainly am,” I said with a grin.
“Then for you it is definitely not your age of innocence.”
“William, that’s what the first twenty-nine years of my life were. It’s about time I shed that uptight person you used to know.”
“I kind of liked her,” said William, smiling at me as two women walked into the store.
I saw Tyler again that evening. It had become something of an unsaid rule that we spent every night together. A few days before, he had put his strong arms around me in the shower and whispered, “It’s just you.” That was the moment that I fully gave in.
When we were in bed, a few minutes before 1 A.M., Tyler looked around my apartment, void of all personal touches, pushed the sheets down so that his tan torso was totally uncovered, pointed toward the bookshelf, and said, “You should give that bowl back to me. I kind of miss it.” Every tiny hair on my body stood straight up. I pulled the covers over me so he couldn’t see my goose bumps. Hannah had called him. He wanted to take the bowl so that I couldn’t bring it to her. He looked at it on the shelf, got up in his black boxers, and picked it up.
“You should regift it to me.”
“No way,” I said coolly. He had to know I went to see Hannah and that I suspected she had something to do with the bowl. That it was their bowl, not our bowl. Tyler was acting too relaxed, too deliberately calm. I tried to match it.
“I bought it. And now it reminds me of how I found you.”
“How you found me?” he asked.
“My witch hunt for you. It was more like an information hunt but memorable all the same.”
“Your mind fascinates me. I bet you’re good at making cash.”
“I’m good at making it for other people.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“I’ve always been more interested in everything that surrounds money than the actual money. I like the process.”
“The people, the houses, the rooms full of furniture and gardens, cars, and boats and all that?”
“You’re forgetting the art.” I paused for a few seconds but he didn’t say anything. “And the intellect and the big horrible personalities coupled with the few good ones. It always seemed more fun than a middle-of-the-road life. Plus I was used to it from growing up here. At arm’s length, anyway.”
“You’ll give this back to me eventually,” he said, putting it down and looking at it on the shelf.
I didn’t say anything else, he didn’t say anything, and a few minutes later I was letting him take off my clothes again, for the third time that night. When Alex and I had sex, it had been sex. It was good sex, but it was pretty much what I expected good sex to be. Tyler and I had amazing sex. I worried about my heart not being able to handle it, physically and emotionally. Every one of my senses teetered on the edge, in overload, in a pleasure spiral that I never wanted to end but could only handle for so many minutes. When Tyler was inside me, when his tongue was, his hands, I just gripped the sheets and everything I did, said, or thought seemed completely out of my control.
Tyler looked at my face as I glowed, always slightly embarrassed by what we had done, and kissed my forehead. “Why did you agree to go out with me?”
“Because everyone told me not to.”
“Good reason. I think that’s why a lot of girls say yes, unfortunately. Or fortunately. That statement really depends on how much I like the girl.”
“I thought you never really liked any of the girls except for Hannah.” I wanted to say her name as much as possible. If he had a reason to be rattled, I wanted to see him try to hide it. “You just liked that they were pretty girls.”
“But every man likes pretty girls,” he replied, not reacting when I said her name.
“Right. ‘Girls in Their Summer Dresses’ and all that.”
“Girls in their summer dresses. I like that expression. Is it an expression?”
“Sort of.”
I had always hated that Irwin Shaw story. Was every guy really just a gorilla in heat waiting for girls to wear tiny swatches of thin fabric with straps in the summer? Tyler had been. Or maybe he still was. But this time, it was with me.
•••
I had spent every single day with Tyler for six weeks and I hadn’t gone back to see Hannah. I wanted to see if she would react without seeing the bowl, not even a picture. And even if she didn’t react, I took an almost sick pleasure in thinking about how uncomfortable she was. I pictured her looking at that name, right above Tyler’s number. She had to know that I knew. When I looked at the bowl now, I imagined her hands forming it. Maybe there had been others, sold for five figures to people who knew less about these things than me and Blair Bari.
I had my apartment on Fifty-Ninth Street rented out again. I had put two months more on my apartment in Newport. It was April and no one wanted it until June. That’s when summer officially came to town, when the kites started to fly.
The last Saturday in April was a day you prayed would last well past the confines of twenty-four hours. A wisp of humidity had broken through the air, and suddenly everything smelled like life lived outside. When I woke up, with Tyler next to me, I had a text from Jane with a picture of her sailboat. I woke up Tyler and put the phone in his face.
“Jane’s taking her boat out for the first time this spring. Brittan is up from New York and they want us to go sailing with them. You must sail; you’ve been in Newport for four years. We have to go. She has the most beautiful boat. It’s a custom Sparkman and Stephens with a navy blue hull and it’s basically just paradise on water. I haven’t been on it in years.”
“A day on a boat with you and the Dalbys,” Tyler muttered in his sleepy voice. “Are you sure they don’t want me to serve drinks or something?”
“Don’t be an ass. They’re nice. Even Carter can be. He’s a little pompous since he married Jane, but he’s just mad because she’s still a Dalby and he’s not.”
“What’s he?”
“Carter Lehmann.”
“What’s a Lehmann?”
“Not a Dalby.”
“So Carter Not-a-Dalby is going to be there, too.”
“We don’t have to go. I just thought it could be fun. You might enjoy it. Seriously, her boat was on the cover of the Robb Report. It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll enjoy it, because you’ll enjoy it.”
“Well then, let’s try it. If it’s terrible we can just swan-dive right off the side and swim home.”
“All right. Tyler Ford boating with the Dalbys. I should send a letter to my mother.”
I leaned over and kissed him. “I’ll take lots of photos,” I whispered, kissing him again.
We got in his car and drove toward the Goat Island M
arina, where all the Dalby boats were kept.
“Why does Jane keep her boat out here?” Tyler asked as we drove straight over the water on Bolhouse Road.
“Deepwater facility. You should see their father’s boat. It’s not a dinghy.”
“The charm of a dinghy is really underestimated.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Let’s go on Jane’s boat today and a dinghy next weekend and then we can compare.”
“What?” said Tyler, seeing my smirk.
“The only problem is, I don’t know anyone who owns a dinghy!”
“I’ll steal one.”
Not only did Hannah have to know that I knew; Tyler had to know, too.
“Oh good,” I said. “That solves everything.”
I rolled down the window and put my arm straight out, the wind keeping it cold and taut. I wasn’t going to say anything until he did. Or until Hannah did. I imagined their conversations, Hannah calling him, telling him what I’d done, a card with his number and his dead sister’s name on it. She’d ask why I’d scribbled those things down, come to see her in the first place, and maybe he’d have an answer for her. I imagined him saying in his deep, even voice, “I think she knows.” But what was it that I knew? That the bowl wasn’t an antique, but looked alarmingly close? Tyler knew more about it than he was telling me, and it had to be because of Hannah. He was in my apartment all the time. He could have taken it, could have demanded it back, but it just continued to sit there, untouched, on my cheap shelf.
I looked out at the rows of beautiful white sails giving a little in the breeze. “We used to sail all the time growing up,” I said, raising my voice so he could hear me over the wind. “Even our school had this monthlong sailing program. That’s really what I missed the most when I was in New York. The Hudson looks like toilet water compared to the Rhode Island Sound.”
I looked at him in his thin white T-shirt. The back was so sheer that you could see the outline of his tattoos through it.
