by Luanne Rice
I gave her a look. “Meteors burn up when they hit our atmosphere.”
“Not these. I swear, we heard them hiss. Right?” She turned to Matt, who nodded solemnly.
“You don’t see many meteors in New York,” Sam said.
“Oh, I’m from New York!” I said.
“Oh yeah?” he glanced at me casually. Everything about him seemed casual: his messy dark hair, his billowing white shirt, his khaki trousers. He had bare feet.
“What do you do in New York?” Margo asked.
“I’m an oceanographer.”
“An oceanographer in New York City?” Margo asked.
“Yeah. I work at Columbia.”
That struck everyone, even Sam, as being hilarious. Although Manhattan is an island, edging toward the Atlantic at its southern tip and Long Island Sound at its northern tip, it was unthinkable that an oceanographer would spend time there instead of, say, Woods Hole or La Jolla. Where was the sea life? The rock formations? The silt? The water column? The food chain? In Manhattan there were only dark laboratories and offices and libraries, places where an oceanographer could study the sea secondhand.
“I’m there on a grant,” Sam said. “But I’ll eventually work my way back to Woods Hole.”
“Ah, Woods Hole,” Margo said, the way I could imagine her saying of Henk when she had first met him, “ah, New York Hospital,” ticking off the impeccable credentials of her sisters’ potential suitors. She smiled across the small patch of sand at me.
“What do you do in New York?” Sam asked me.
“I’m an actress.”
“I have season’s tickets to the Ensemble Studio Theater that I never get to use. Seems every time I’m supposed to see a play, someone I’m trying to get grant money from throws a cocktail party.”
“I’m a soap opera actress.”
“Oh.” Deadpan.
Margo chuckled. I looked at her as though I would like to kill her, because I knew what she was going to say. “Una always says ‘soap opera actress’ as if she’s announcing a contagious disease. She is a fantastic actress.”
“I think I heard a fan talking about you on the porch this afternoon—she said some celebrity was staying at the inn. Must’ve been you.”
“No doubt.”
“Not to mention, she has an audition coming up with Emile Balfour.” Margo’s eyebrows cocked expressively.
“What’s that going to be like?” Sam asked. His tone was straightforward; he was asking me about my acting job the way he might ask someone about their teaching job or mechanic’s job. Without awe or envy.
“It will be marvelous,” I said airily. “He makes great films.”
“Films.” Sam snorted. “When people say ‘film,’ they generally mean a movie that’s either foreign or doesn’t have a plot.”
“It is foreign,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know. I had been so thrilled by the idea of a movie, any movie, I hadn’t bothered to wonder. “I’m really not supposed to talk about it,” I said.
“No, Emile Balfour always veils his projects with secrecy,” Margo said, letting me know she was onto me.
Sam leaned back, sinking his hands into the sand. His arms looked extremely long, but, then, he was a tall man. “Wow, what a night,” he said, gazing at the white stars. “I miss this in New York. Closest I feel to the shore is the foghorns you hear on the Hudson River.”
I nodded; I had noticed the foghorns. They seemed incongruous, penetrating the roar of traffic, subway trains, and planes en route to Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark, or Teterboro. But I listened for them every foggy night.
Margo and Matt stacked our dirty plates and stood. “Empties?” Margo asked, fitting four empty beer bottles on the fingers of one hand. Then they walked around to the other groups, collecting garbage and asking people if they were having fun.
“What kind of an oceanographer are you?” I asked Sam after a while.
“Marine biologist.”
“Did you grow up on the shore?”
“Yes, in Padanaram. On Buzzards Bay. I generally keep migrating back to southeastern Massachusetts—I went to college in New Hampshire, and graduate school in New York, and now I’m back in New York. But usually I’ve worked in Woods Hole.
“Both my parents are geologists,” Sam said. “They go off on lecture tours and digs all the time. Recently, in fact, they were studying a vein of something in Colorado, and they discovered an Indian village. So now they’re going nuts, reading up on archaeology. My mother’s decided to go back to school and study it. They’re in their sixties, and my mother’s starting a brand-new career.” He spoke ruefully, with some amusement, as if his parents were a pair of difficult kids.
“Do you have sisters or brothers?” My perennial question.
“No, I’m an only child.”
An only child! Now that was a novelty, a situation to ponder, something to approach with care. I stared at his face, which was lean and angular. He had a rather long nose, like my own. “What’s your research on?” I asked.
“I study Chondrus crispus, mainly.”
“What is—”
“Seaweed. That crinkly brown stuff you see in tidal pools.”
“Oh, that stuff,” I said.
“There’s a lot going on in tidal pools.”
“I know.” I did. Margo, Lily, and I had loved to gaze into tidal pools along the rocks in Connecticut. When we were young we would stare at the periwinkles in their coiled shells, the thicket of mossy seaweed, the bottle-green rock crabs, brittle stars, shimmery pebbles, and play a game: what new things can you see? We tried the same game with a patch of grass, but acorns, leaf mulch, and ants were less wonderful than the contents of a tidal pool.
“Want to take a look?” he asked. Sounding like a small boy enticing me to come along to the fire station. A field trip!
“Sure.” Leaping up, I followed him along the high-tide line toward the rocky headland. The sea was at midtide, neither high nor low. “Tidal pools are much better at low tide,” I said, not mentioning the fact that it was too dark to see anything anyway. The lighthouse beam swung across our path.
“Sure, they’re better at low tide, but I have something in mind. Wait till you see.”
We scuttled over smooth rocks that had been underwater when the tide was full. Bits of damp seaweed clung to them; I felt it with my bare feet. When the lighthouse’s beam blinked toward us, it was possible to choose our steps, but then it would swing away and make the darkness total. Thus, we would advance, stop and wait, then advance again. It was a slow progression. Suddenly Sam stopped short, and I crashed into his back. I grabbed for him, but my left foot slipped on a weedy rock, plunging me to the knee into a pool. I felt the barnacles gouge my calf.
“Shit,” Sam said, struggling to pull me out. “Oh, shit,” he said again when the lighthouse’s beam revealed blood seeping from a hundred scrapes. He tore a handkerchief out of his pocket and soaked it in salt water. Then he pressed it again and again to my bleeding leg. It didn’t even sting.
“What was it you wanted to show me?” I asked.
He peered at my leg. “Christ, that looks terrible. We shouldn’t be out here in the dark. What a couple of crazy—”
“Well, here we are. So show me.” I touched his upper arm, to let him know I didn’t hold my injury against him.
“Okay,” he said, remembering the point of our mission. “Stare at the light.”
I did, for five long seconds. When I looked away I saw squiggles of light in the blackness, and the blackness was complete. “Now shade your eyes and look into the tidal pool.”
Cupping our hands around our eyes, Sam and I squatted on rocks and peered into the black pool. Tiny waves rippled the surface; the tide was coming in. We looked below them, to the bottom where purplish spangles flashed like neon. “What is that?” I asked.
Sam reached into the water and pulled up a handful of kinky se
aweed. It was reddish and made me think of Joe Finnegan’s hair. “No, what is that sparkly stuff?”
“It’s this—Chondrus crispus. Irish moss. It’s covered with bioluminescence. Tiny organisms that give off a phosphorescent glow.” His voice was awestruck.
It was glorious. I cupped my hands around my eyes and watched the purple weed glimmer and dance in the intertidal current. I pulled a bit of it out, but like Sam’s handful, it lost its magic when it left the water.
“Unaaa!” I heard Margo calling my name. Bracing myself on Sam’s shoulder, I stood and waved.
“We’re out here!” I called. Margo stood still until she could fix my position, and then she waved back and walked away. With my white pants and Sam’s white shirt, we must have looked like two bright rocks jutting into the sea.
Sam touched my calf. “That’s a nasty scrape you’ve got. But at least you got it in the salt water. It’ll heal fast.”
It was already starting to feel sore.
The next morning, I wakened to sunrise in the turret room. My calf throbbed with pain under the weight of the covers. I lay in bed watching the light turn from deep red to pink to sparkling blue.
“You awake?” I heard Margo whisper through the door after a while. She knows I’m an early riser.
“I’m awake,” I said, and she entered bearing a tray with two cups and a porcelain coffeepot.
“I wasn’t absolutely sure you’d be alone,” she said. “I know what a romantic night on the beach can do.”
I nodded, sipping coffee. I pulled off the gauze bandage to shock her with the sight of my scraped leg.
“What happened?” she asked, leaning closer, a horrified look in her blue eyes. Her mouth looked like a parody of someone staring into a bloody car crash.
“I slipped on the rocks. Like a goon. Made a big fool of myself.”
“That looks awful. It’ll probably get infected.”
“No, it happened in salt water.”
“Well…even so. Good thing you found the bandages—Matt and I went straight to bed. We were whooped. Did you see the Karsky sunrise? The colors get more magnificent as the weather gets cooler.”
“It was extremely Karsky,” I agreed, happy that Margo had remembered the old color school.
“You and Sam Chamberlain seemed to hit it off.”
“Mmmmm.” I felt uneasy, sensing that Margo wanted to propel me into a romance. Maybe with the idea of saying “And to think it all started at our inn” years later, after we fell in love and married. I drank my coffee. Outside my aerie, fair-weather clouds tumbled through the blue sky. I thought of my father and wondered when he would make his appearance.
“I have a lot of research to do this week,” Margo said. “It’s just as well that you’ve found someone to keep you occupied.”
“I don’t need to be occupied. I brought books to read, and I plan to swim a lot.”
“Also, Matt wants to begin to batten down the hatches for winter. Check the shutters. Throw some shingles on the roof, put insulation in the attic. So you’ll be alone a lot. I’m not trying to push you into anything, though. But I thought if you’re free, and if Sam’s free…” she smiled and pulled her yellow hair into a ponytail behind her head. “But meanwhile, I thought maybe we’d take a jaunt downtown later this morning.”
I laughed because she was flustered and because Watch Hill’s downtown consists of one street running the length of the harbor, lined with a block of pretty shingled stores with geranium-filled window boxes.
“I have to buy a bathing suit for next year,” Margo said.
“Aren’t you a little early?”
“Post–Labor Day sales are on. Plus, I have to buy someone a birthday present.” She tickled my knee. Margo loves birthdays, and my thirtieth birthday was the next week.
At ten o’clock, we left the inn to walk down the hill to town. Warmth radiated up from the tar, but even so, we were chilly in our summer things. I wore white sharkskin pants and a big blue shirt, and Margo wore a fluttery sundress with a skirt in pieces, like petals. We walked the inland route, which was more direct and took us down a street of smallish summer cottages instead of the one that bordered the sea and went past the carousel. Some of the stores had already closed for the season; the others had just opened for the day’s business. Margo thought we should try the Mayan Shop first.
While Margo tried on bathing suits, I sat in a wicker chair behind a rack of tawny fall things and thought about Sam.
Can you will attraction away? If so, why would you want to? The year that had just passed had been lonely and rather desperate for me. I thought of Alastair, of Joe, of the nights spent with them and the lonely nights in between. I had been starting to think that love would elude me forever. Weren’t there women who were better off alone? Who were happier by themselves than sharing life with a man? I thought of my mother; she cried whenever she heard my father’s name, but she seemed more peaceful, more fulfilled, living alone than she ever had surrounded by a family. Then I thought of my sisters, one married, one engaged, each secure in a niche for which I felt too bony, too angular, too jutting to ever fit into myself. Always a sister-in-law, never a bride.
Besides, I was about to get my big break as an actress. My first movie audition! All of the envy I had felt toward Susan would start to disappear after I became Emile Balfour’s new star. I had never met the man, but magazine photos made him look glamorous. He wore wraparound shades, smoked constantly, had a handsome, down-turned mouth and an endearing cowlick. His romances with leading ladies were famous; photos would show him with his arm draped proprietarily across the slim, lovely shoulders of his star actresses. In Cannes, Paris, Hollywood, New York, Tokyo. At premieres, openings, society bashes, nightclubs. I had been nurturing a fantasy in which he fell madly, irreparably, in love with me. He would be ruined as a playboy. We would marry, I would star in the rest of his movies, and I would be his artistic consultant. I had been thinking along those lines when I met Sam Chamberlain, and I had already closed my mind to the possibility of attraction to the odd oceanographer from New York.
How different would that sort of romance be from ones with an Australian sailor, a young actor, a sporting goods executive? It would invite another visit from Father Conscience, while I was hoping my father’s next visit would be a friendly one. But an affair with a French movie director would be different. It was exciting and pragmatic. It could take me where I wanted to go. (And was that approach so different from Lily’s? Whose romance with Henk had taken her to East End Avenue?)
Margo called my name. I walked into the dressing room where she stood wearing a tiny pink bikini.
“You knockout, you,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I thought. Do you think I have too many hips to wear it?”
Margo’s hips were delicately flared, like hips drawn in fashion magazines. “No, you look great.”
“Matt will die. He is a true sucker for things like this. You should see what he bought me to wear in bed.”
“What?”
“A little black confection with lace and rosebuds. For a woodsy-looking guy with a beard, Matt has very sex-crazed tastes.”
“So, you’re taking the bikini.”
“Yes,” she said, gathering up two other bathing suits, both sleek one-pieces. “Plus these. You can’t swim in a bikini. The parts feel like they’re about to slide off. So I need a couple tanks.”
“Then why bother with the bikini?”
“Tanning purposes. I like a tan back and stomach, but I don’t like lying out nude at the inn.”
I held my words of warning; for years I had preached shade and sunscreen to my sisters, but they refused to listen. They did not freckle, they said, and it was a well-known fact (they also said) that only frecklefaces got skin cancer from the sun. They called it “sun cancer.”
Margo paid for the suits. Outside, the sun beat down on the green awnings and made the sidewalk scalding hot. Like the middle of summer. We walked down the
block, across the street from the tiny yacht club, to the Olympia Tearoom.
“Want an orangeade?” Margo asked.
“Sure,” I said, and we pushed open the wide screen door. Overhead ceiling fans turned, circulating cool air through the dark room. A row of huge windows faced the water, but the sun hadn’t come around enough to shine inside. Margo and I crossed the black-and-white marble floor and sat at a dark wood booth. A waitress brought menus.
“God, bluefish salad sandwiches,” Margo said, reading with a scowl on her face. “At this time of summer you’re so laden down with bluefish and zucchini, you’ll try anything.”
I laughed at the image of anyone laden down with bluefish and zucchini, but it made sense. At the seashore everyone had gardens and went surfcasting, and they liked to share the largesse with their neighbors, most of whom also had gardens and went surfcasting. The young waitress brought tall glasses of icy orangeade, and Margo and I sipped through straws. I saw the waitress notice that I was Delilah, then whisper to another waitress. I smiled at them.
“‘Oh, Delilah, won’t you please sign your napkin,’” Margo mimicked. She lit a cigarette and smoked it like a glamour girl.
“Fewer people will recognize me if I do a movie.”
“Oh, everyone will always know you as Delilah. No matter what else you do. People will be so disappointed if you quit the show.”
“I’m sure they’ll get over it. It’s not like we’re close personal friends or anything. It’s not like losing a sister.” Modesty, however false, made me play down my confidence. “Besides, I probably won’t even get the part. Balfour was probably just doing Chance Schutz a favor, offering me a screen test.”
“Chance Schutz!” Margo said, nearly choking on her smoke. “Remember when he cornered you after the Juilliard play? And he really pissed Dad off?”
We giggled at the memory. “Dad never felt very happy about my acting on Beyond.” I stated it as a fact, hoping Margo would contradict me.
“No, he always hoped you’d become Ethel Barrymore or some other stage great. He’d love to see you in movies, though.”
“I guess that’s one of my big regrets—that he never will.”
