by Luanne Rice
For me, going home was to be avoided. I would browse, then buy something and take it to the Gran Caff'e Degli Artisti, where I would sit on the upper level by the wide window, holding the cool glass of iced espresso in my hands and gazing onto Greenwich Avenue with my book open on the scarred wood table. When the ice melted, I would order another glass, no matter how much coffee I had left. Gold lantern light blazed overhead and from the streetlamps outside. People sitting at other tables talked quietly. About: Their weekends in Quogue, East Hampton, Wellfleet. This awful heat. The murder on Bank Street. Falling in love with someone married. The terrible movies around. Have you noticed: the new vegetable stand; the way it seems to thunder every day at three; how fast the ice in this drink melts. I would eavesdrop without seeming to. They were my compatriots, stranded in this hot city while everyone else breathed fresh salt air.
Having drunk much iced coffee, I would feel too caffeinated to go home to bed. So I would sit in the window and watch people pass below. One night I saw Joe with a woman. She had a shag haircut, the likes of which I hadn’t seen for ten years, and she wore a sleeveless pastel jersey that accentuated her bountiful curves. They walked slowly along Greenwich Avenue, their arms around each other in an easy embrace. Joe’s red curls glinted in the yellow streetlight. The couple paused, as if they might climb the stairs to the café, but instead they walked on. I turned in my seat to watch them disappear down Perry Street.
Hardly anyone recognized me on those walks; since Susan’s success in Hester’s Sister, I had noticed fewer people recognizing me at all. I enjoyed that—I was able to move without scrutiny. Yet I also wondered, wasn’t recognition supposed to be one of the rewards for acting on soap operas? Other times, usually after signing an autograph, I would feel as popular as ever and see my delusion of obscurity as the paranoia it truly was.
Toward the end of August the hot air lifted. Certain nights were chilly enough to require a sweater. Canadian air masses shifted south; I took that as a sign to mean that I could soon leave for Watch Hill. As an inducement, I bought my train tickets through a travel agent around the corner from Soundstage 3. My predictions had come true: Beck had aided Delilah in her escape just as the corrupt prison officials and inmates were setting their hostage plan in gear. Delilah’s cellmate had cooperated with Beck in diverting attention; she had faked a choking spell by inhaling a generous amount of talc supplied by Beck. Now she was in the hospital, and Beck and Delilah were on the run, pursued by vengeful prison officials and the real lawmen. Would they survive? First they had to hide out for three weeks, casting doubts in the viewers’ minds, providing Jason Mordant and Una Cavan with the perfect covers to take vacations.
The morning I was to leave New York for Watch Hill, my telephone rang at seven. It was Chance’s secretary, asking what time my train left, saying that Mr. Schutz would send his car to drive me to the station. I glowed with pleasure. I felt like a celebrity! At nine-fifteen I waited in the lobby of my building with two canvas duffel bags, a suitcase, a tennis racket, and a satchel of new books to read on the beach. The cool black limo glided to the curb, on schedule, with Chance in the back seat. I had not expected him to come along with the car.
My first thought: I am about to be fired.
My second: one of my sisters is dead, and they have sent Chance to break the news.
“You don’t look well,” he said when I climbed in.
“Is everything all right?”
He covered my hand with his and smiled. “Yes, everything is fine. Don’t worry.” He directed the driver to Pennsylvania Station, then pushed a button that raised the smoky glass partition between the front and back seats. “I have been meaning to talk to you, but the summer has been hectic.”
“I know.” Chatter about beaches, parties, summer’s quick passing. Soon we were under the canopy between Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.
“Are you happy on the show, Una?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Very happy.” At that instant, about to leave for three weeks, I was.
“Still, perhaps it is time to move on, to follow your natural cycle. Perhaps you would like a new challenge?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t get over the idea that I was getting sacked.
“Would you like to audition for a movie?” he asked.
This was Billy’s work, I knew. Chance and Billy Schutz, my fairy godparents, were offering me a movie audition. Chance sat beside me, his wolf eyes devouring my wordless ecstasy. I nodded. Then I hugged him.
“I shall call your agent about this. My friend is casting an important new movie in France, and I mentioned your name. He was very interested.”
“This is wonderful, Chance. I’ve been thinking about a movie or a play, you know. I love the show of course, and I would always want to come back to it, but I would like to try something new. Just to try—just to see if I could do it. But then return to the show.”
Chance laughed at the way I was chattering. He checked his watch, slim as shirt cardboard. “We don’t want you to miss your train. I’ll arrange an audition for you, through Miss Atwood.”
“Thank you, Chance. Thank you for the ride and the…movie thing.” We both laughed at my awkwardness. “Who is your friend, by the way? Just out of curiosity?”
“Emile Balfour.”
Emile Balfour. So simple—I had an audition with Emile Balfour, indisputably the wildest director working in movies today. He was French and owed as much to Rimbaud and Jung as he did to Truffaut and Fellini. He used vivid imagery, dream sequences, the sea, brilliant color, and unknown actors who became known very quickly. Of the dozen or so directors Chance could have mentioned, Balfour was by far the most exciting.
Finally I was on a train bound for Westerly, Rhode Island, a town just a few miles from Watch Hill. I rode alone until Stamford, when a woman my age sat in the seat beside me. I fought the urge to tell her what had just happened to me: I have an audition with Emile Balfour!
I had seen all his movies. Many were love stories set on the shores of various oceans. In Tripoli, Corfu, Christmas Cove, Labrador, Portillo. An interview I had once read said that he was born in Montreal to French parents, then moved before he turned one to Arcachon, a small town on France’s southwest coast. He loved sailing, and he needed the sea for renewal. It inspired his best pictures. I recalled the wind sequence in The Listener, which had been shot in Canada. A woman walked alone along a snowy path bordering cliffs over the Bay of Fundy. Her husband had not returned home from a solitary hunting trip. Was he dead? Had he deserted her? At first her expression was calm, but then she began to howl; the camera recorded the desolation on her face, but the screams were drowned out by the February wind. No sound emerged. It was one of the most chilling scenes I had ever seen.
The train chuffed eastward through Connecticut, passing the factory cities west of New Haven, then the seaside colonies beyond the Connecticut River. I tried to think of Margo, of our vacation, but Emile Balfour stayed in my mind. I flipped to the arts section in my paper to see whether any of his movies were advertised. I leaned forward in my seat, straining for glimpses of Long Island Sound, as if they could renew me, inspire me to do a good audition for Emile Balfour. I was so absorbed, I nearly missed the peninsula where my mother lived alone, painting watercolors to her heart’s content. I thought of her rarely; all through my childhood she had seemed to wish she were elsewhere. At an easel, on a moor, in the library. We shared something secret and important that we never spoke about: our trips to fetch my father from his haunts. She would have preferred to smooth all wrinkles out of the past’s fabric. If my father had been an imperfect man in life, he had become the perfect husband in death. At holidays and over the phone my mother would grow weepy at the mention of his name. “He was a good man,” she might say. Or, “Oh, what a fine husband he was.” My sisters and I would snicker, and our mother would leave the room in a huff. It was much easier for her to maintain illusions when she was alone, so we obliged and rarely visited.
Some nights, alone in my apartment, I would think of my mother at my age. She seemed to long for my sort of life: artistic and alone. Yet she had married and borne three girls, all the while wishing for solitude. And watercolors. Now that she was alone, able to paint as much as she wanted, she could imagine a past that lived up to her hopes and expectations. The train rushed into a tunnel cut into a rocky hillside, and the bay was lost to my view.
Chapter 9
I stepped off the train at Westerly into a brilliant, blustery September afternoon and Margo’s arms—all at once. We stood hugging on the splintery wood platform for a long time. Her hair, after a summer of sun and swimming in salt water, was a white halo. It hung loose to her slim shoulders, rippling in gentle waves. “Back together again,” she said into my neck. I am five inches taller than she is. The short hairs along her part fizzed up my nose.
“Where’s Matt?” I asked, looking around, scratching my itchy nose with the back of my hand.
She stepped away from me and hoisted my heaviest bag. I fought her for it. We both have streaks of machismo, but mine is more finely developed. I won the bag.
“Back at the inn. He was dying to come, but I wanted to see you alone, with my own two eyes, first.”
“That was a good idea.” I followed her to a rusty blue Land Rover. It had bright plastic decals on the window: the Audubon Society, a four-wheel-drive permit to go on some beach, a Brown University seal, and a long sticker saying “Let’s Go, Bruno!” I leaned back against the cracked leather seat, and we drove along the shore road.
“Don’t get your hopes up, but I’m trying to arrange a family reunion. I’ve asked Mom, Lily, and Henk to come for a long weekend.”
“When?”
“Anytime they can make it. They all seem to have previous commitments.”
The tone in Margo’s voice invited me to complain about my mother’s permanent isolation and Lily’s since marrying Henk, but I felt too blissful. I wanted to watch the road spin along the salt marshes and inlets and take deep breaths of salt air. In New York I used only the top third of my lungs, taking shallow, sooty breaths. Instead I asked Margo about her upcoming year.
“I’m going to live with Matt and do independent study. It’s an easy drive to Providence from here, for days when I have conferences with Professor Allen. Plus, there’s a lady with a Rodin collection.”
“Where?”
“In Watch Hill. She has a huge house with a glassed-in sculpture court. I’ve visited her a couple of times. She and her husband always have dinner at the inn now, and she tells everyone I’m doing my ‘report’ on Rodin. I’m getting my doctorate, and people still think I’m twelve.”
I smiled over at Margo, but fortunately she didn’t see me. Although she was twenty-five, you’d never know it. Her small stature, her pretty blond hair, her shaky way of doing things all make you think she’s quite young. She never used to drive. Lily always had. And now, watching Margo maneuver a four-wheel-drive vehicle along the road, I sensed trepidation disguised by bravado. Or perhaps I was just unwilling to believe in my youngest sister’s competence.
The turreted Ninigret Inn crowned the crest of a hill that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the town of Watch Hill on the other. Its silver shingles had been bleached by the east wind and salt spray; I imagined gales roaring up the bluff, along the promontory between the inn and the lighthouse. Nor’easters to rock its foundations. The inn could once have been a sea captain’s house. In the eighteenth century. The captain’s wife would wait here while her husband plied the coasts of Brazil, Jamaica, and Florida. She would wear rustling white garments and climb daily to the turret where she would scan the horizon for sails; although she would see many rising out of the waves, she would recognize her husband’s instantly. Then she would run (I see her: the sun on her pink face, her fizzy blond hair blowing in waves behind her, her rustling white dress held daintily above her bloomers by small pale hands) down to the dock. Her husband would step off his packet laden with palm fronds, copper, sperm oil, and pineapples. Then they would rush (now she is in his arms, her glowing face pressed into his blue coat) back up the hill to their house. I told this to Margo when she parked the Rover in the inn’s yard.
“I’ve thought that exact thing myself,” Margo said, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the turret’s pointed roof. “Her name is Letitia and his is Nathaniel. She fixes him pancakes for his first meal back because he is so sick of fish.”
Inn guests sat in white slatted chairs spread around the grassy lawn. A hedge of wild roses ran along the property lines. The only trees were a few scrubby oaks and pines. Margo led me to the steps, then proceeded through a wide screen door into a shadowy foyer. The inn’s main public room contained some couches, a fireplace, and windows separated from each other by bookshelves. Shabby Persian rugs covered the tile floor. I loved the place on sight.
Ten seconds after the door slammed shut, Matt hurried down the steep staircase from the second floor. I knew instantly that it was he. Short and compact, he had a fuzzy brown-gold beard and friendly blue eyes. He wore a faded flannel shirt over jeans. His handshake was firm and earnest, and I judged him to be about twenty-six.
“Took you long enough to get here,” he said, continuing to shake my hand. The more I stared at his smile, the more intense it seemed.
“You can let go now,” Margo said dryly.
“No, these first meetings are the most important—they’re when the bonds crop up. Una and I have to have a good, solid bond.”
“I can tell this is an excellent bond,” I said, pulling my hand away; it hurt a little around the knuckles. Then I kissed Matt’s cheek.
“How was your trip?”
“Great. Relaxing. It’s nice to be here.”
“Wait till you see your room. You’re sleeping in the turret,” he said.
Margo looked lovestruck and proud as hell at his generosity. She grinned at me. “The turret room is great.”
“It’s also haunted,” Matt said.
Margo’s expression slid from pleasure to panic; I knew she was remembering that time, one year before, when I had told her about our father’s ghost in Newport. She shook her head and covered Matt’s hand with hers, as if he had just committed a really disastrous faux pas and she was taking hasty steps to correct it. “No, that’s just what we tell the tourists. For effect. There’s no ghost.”
“Margaret, just because we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” He smiled at me. “The previous owner swears the place is haunted.”
“Oh, when did you buy it?” I asked, changing the subject to convince Margo that I wasn’t hooked on the supernatural. That I wouldn’t hold a séance in the turret when my travel alarm struck midnight. The Witching Hour.
“Last year. This is my second summer here.”
“Matt spent a year at the Cornell Hotel School.”
“And then my grandmother died and left me a little money, and I foolishly squandered it on this tinderbox,” he said.
Margo rolled her eyes. “Matt’s father is a broker.”
“Real estate?” I asked eagerly.
“No—stocks and bonds. Solid stuff. The brawn of American profit making,” Matt said. Then he to
ok the bag from Margo and started to lead me upstairs. What a letdown! I thought how nice it would have been if his father was in real estate, just as our father had been. It would have been a great thing for Matt and Margo. They could talk about their childhoods together and understand without explaining what their fathers’ business lives had been like. Knowing Margo and Lily for so long had taught me the value of being understood without having to explain.
Flanked by Matt and Margo, each laden down with my luggage like Sherpas on a Himalayan trek, we climbed four of the steepest flights I have ever encountered. The steps rose at nearly vertical pitch, like stepladders. I grasped the wood railing to haul myself up; dance class had not prepared me for such dizzying feats. By the time we reached the top, I was panting and trying not to show it.
“Prepare for the vista of your dreams,” Margo said.
“You ready for the notorious turret room?” Matt asked.
“She can handle it,” Margo said.
Then Matt flung open the door. The turret room was truly splendid. Circular, its ceiling was a cone, like a silo’s. Miraculously curved windows faced the glistening Atlantic.
“We put diamonds on the water for you,” Margo said, nodding toward the sunlight flashing on the waves.
“How divine,” I said, kissing her. The room was sparely furnished, with no pictures on the walls to detract from the view. A bed with a white chenille spread, a scarred wood bureau, two faded chintz armchairs, and a rickety table filled the round space. There was no rug on the painted wood floor, no curtains at the white frame windows. Of course, the room was the highest point on the promontory, and no one could see in.
