Scott put a shirt on and scanned the waves for Will. Will was seventeen, but the protective urges of parenthood didn’t change. He then walked through the sand to the wooden steps that led up to the pools and the bars.
The Breakers, a towering structure in the heart of the island, was a place Scott had aspired to be able to afford, and now they could. He could recite from memory the passage from Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy,” which began: “Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at anchor, and the great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge bulks of the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches from the bright level of the sand, and around them clustered the Dancing Glade, Bradley’s House of Chance, and a dozen modistes and milliners with goods at triple prices from New York.”
The Royal Poinciana had been an even grander hotel, the largest wooden structure in the world for a time, built in 1894 by Henry Flagler, a Rockefeller colleague who had run a railroad down to this palmy, narrow island. But the Royal Poinciana had been razed during the Depression, so Scott pretended that the Biltmore Hotel was the Royal Poinciana as he thought of that passage from Fitzgerald’s story, as they’d flown over the island into Palm Beach International Airport.
And here he was, at the kind of resort where handsome young men in pink shirts and navy shorts hauled beach chairs for you to your own plot, planted an umbrella, sheathed the chairs in fitted towels, and left more fluffy white towels than a family could possibly need.
He took a circuitous route to the bar, looking. Surely the Delouvriers, and Cat in particular, kept their spring break routine after all these years. He hadn’t asked her this by email. He’d simply mentioned that he would be in town. She’d written enthusiastically that she and family would indeed be in Palm Beach at some point when Scott was there. But he hadn’t emailed again. He wanted to bump into her, he didn’t want her to think he needed to see her. If it could be a more random encounter, that would have more of an impact. And really, he didn’t need to see her, but he did want to see her.
She’d have a sea-blue wrap around her narrow hips and a hot-pink bikini top, he imagined. She might be wearing a large and expensive straw hat, to keep the sun off her fair skin. She loved hats. She might be getting ice creams for her boys, ages nine and twelve, she’d written. He guessed she’d scarcely changed. That if any gray had appeared in her hair, she would have colored it black. He guessed he’d notice a slight sagging in the flesh of her arms, but that she’d be otherwise unchanged. He’d seen her photograph in the Style pages of the Times a while back at some gathering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so he knew she’d kept her shape, about which she was always concerned. And he guessed the girlish laugh that never failed to melt his heart would likewise remain unchanged. She was always so much fun.
“What took so long?” Martha asked, accepting the planter’s punch Scott handed to her.
“There was a wait at the bar.”
Martha took a sip through the straw, then removed the wedge of pineapple from the rim of the plastic cup and dropped it into the drink. She scanned for Will, then sat back and closed her eyes in the sun.
“Did you see Susan?”
“Yes, the sun goddess is still by the pool.”
Scott took a deep sip of his planter’s punch and sat back in the chair, shirtless now, the sun warm and comforting on his skin. His old-man skin. He hadn’t paid attention to it until Susan had remarked on his hairy shoulders. When did his barber start trimming his ear hair, he wondered. He patted his soft belly. Ten pounds he could stand to lose. Twenty pounds, if he were to be honest. Ten was a more reasonable expectation. But not on vacation.
“Wake me if I fall asleep, will you?” Martha said. “I don’t want to burn.”
“Yes,” he said. He could never fall asleep in the sun, and today memories of Cat had returned, intensely vivid. He had loved her so. He twisted his cup into the sand beside him, lay back, closed his eyes.
*
Their final trip together had been the worst of his life. He would never forget. It didn’t hurt anymore; the pain had been absorbed into his bones and had calcified. It had ended in Rome, but even when he’d returned to Princeton for his senior year, and Cat for her junior year, it hurt. The hurt faded quickly, though, as Cat made it clear that she was eager to put their relationship behind her and he had no alternative but to move on.
Even that fall, after what had happened in Rome, he’d held out hope. But Cat would remain with the guy she’d met while Scott was away all that year, a townie four years her senior (who was nice enough, Scott admitted). The voice he’d heard from all the way across the ocean. Scott knew finally to give up when he and Cat strolled the campus stone walkways, on a lovely leafy September afternoon, talking, Scott still making pathetic stabs at forgiveness and reunion.
“Why did you even come to Paris, then?” he’d asked her.
“I don’t know, Scott,” she said in a pleading tone, because she knew how much she’d hurt him. “We’d planned it for so long. And I felt guilty. You’re such a sweetheart. I cared about you. And I didn’t know how I was going to feel.”
“Well, that’s something,” he said. Silence. Walking. He asked, “When did you know?”
“I knew the instant I saw you, once I got through customs.”
“Really?” Scott said.
“Really,” Cat said with genuine sadness. “I knew the second I saw you that I’d made a mistake.”
“Wow,” Scott said.
*
He’d taken an expensive taxi to Charles de Gaulle and managed to find the customs exit to wait. And there she emerged, her Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder, wearing the same Deadhead skirt she’d been wearing when they met, a huge brimmed straw hat, black hair cascading down, aviator Ray Bans, two hours late. “Customs, ugh!” were her first words. But then, “Hi!” and threw her arms around him, kissed him. Those lips he’d so missed, so plump and red and soft.
“Where do we get my bags?”
“Bag-zuh? How many do you have?”
“Two.”
“Why two?”
“One for shoes.”
“Ah.”
How could this be? Scott wondered from thirty years in the future, on a beach he now felt petty for aspiring to, drinking a silly rum drink. Customs must have been different back then, with 9/11 seventeen years away. But he did remember because of what he’d done, standing behind her as she scanned the conveyor for her bags. He’d squeezed her ass. Because he missed it. Because it was so petite and cute, and in the diaphanous skirt, so eminently squeezable. And he was flirting. And he used to do it. And she used to laugh and say, “Stop” but not really mean it.
But this time she jumped as if she’d been stuck with a needle. She turned and looked at him, shocked. He knew now that that had been the moment when he should have known.
Cat’s parents had paid for an expensive room in Paris, at the Plaza Athénée. Scott had never seen such luxury, especially vivid after grimy Pigalle, which had become even more miserable for those last two solitary nights. A bottle of champagne waited for them, on ice, and there was a gigantic American-style bathroom, complete with a bidet (Cat had to explain to him what it was). On the bed were huge pillows and such luxurious sheets that he could tell from Cat’s expression that his shorts and T-shirt, appropriate enough in Pigalle, were too shabby for them. She changed into a nightgown, and he immediately engaged her in what he’d longed for, but she said, “Scott, not now. I can’t. All the travel. I’m jet-lagged.”
And of course he said, “Of course. I understand.”
But the next night was the same.
“Scott, please, I’m just not ready.” She stroked his face and apologized.
They bickered at the Louvre—which she had to see—because of the crowds and the heat. They couldn’t even get near the Mona Lisa. And when they sat at an outdoor table at a brasserie that had a view of th
e Eiffel Tower, she said, “God, why doesn’t that waiter come here? The service is terrible. Is he ignoring us?”
“Brasseries are like this, which is why I didn’t want to sit here in the first place. Sometimes they’re even slower when they suspect you’re American.”
Paris was so unfun for Cat (and Scott—she kept apologizing at night) that they took a train a day early to Monaco, where she so wanted to go. She spoke with her mother daily by phone and “Mommy” took care of the accommodations change. And still, he found the diminutive for her mother sweet and endearing. A child still, this one. So sweet. So petite and beautiful. By the time they’d reached Rome, though, Scott grew more vocal.
“Seriously, Cat? We cannot have sex?”
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling,” he said softly.
And so it was that the following morning, as they sat in the hot sun on a terrace overlooking Rome, drinking strong coffee and pear juice—“Really, pear juice?” Scott thought—and eating the most flavorless bread Scott had ever tasted, that he’d noticed there wasn’t the usual morning silence that there had been. He scanned the front page of the International Herald Tribune.
“Scott?”
“Yes?” he looked up from the paper to see not the clear blue eyes that he adored but rather eyes that were full of tears.
He waited. And waited.
“I’m three weeks late.” She looked down and rubbed her eyes.
Memories were few from this point on. Three, in fact. First, sitting in an Italian hospital and watching the Italian nurse, a nun, no less—could that memory be right? a nun-nurse?—approach and beam at Cat, and at Scott, and to Cat she said, “Sì! Positiva!” Cat sat stunned, as if she couldn’t translate that. The beaming nun said, “Positiva! You are.”
And this is when Cat put her face in her hands and wept and kept them there as she bolted the hospital, with Scott right behind her.
“It’ll be okay, Cat,” he repeated. “Everything will be okay.” All the way back to the hotel.
Memory number two, walking alone along the Tiber River while Cat called home. He told her he’d leave her so she could have some privacy, and he’d walked. He leaned on the wall overlooking the river. He removed his wallet from his front pocket. He looked through it. Saw the last of his ten-franc notes and the many thousands of lira. He remembered having the urge to throw his wallet in the water. He almost did. What did it matter? What did anything matter?
Three: returning to the room. Cat sat on the beautifully made bed, her back to him, still crying. He’d entered quietly and heard her say into the phone, “Why do you keep saying, ‘Poor Scott’?” She would now have reached her beloved half-sister, Diane, seven years her senior and her confidante, whom Scott adored as well. It was the only moment he felt a small amount of comfort that whole awful trip. It lasted to this day. Scott was still grateful to Diane for saying that. Mrs. Delouvrier made the arrangements for the flight home the following day out of Rome.
*
Scott felt around beside him in the sand for his drink. He’d been thinking so long that all the ice had melted and nothing but fruit floated in the pink liquid. He drank it all down in one go, not wanting to waste the overpriced rum.
Will appeared at the foot of his beach chair. His dark curly hair dripping, chest hair matted all the way down to his flat stomach, his broad, smooth shoulders. “Dad, come back in. The waves are getting huge.”
Scott shielded his eyes to see his son—seventeen years old, a young man with whisker stubble on cheeks and chin, hairy legs, and taut, muscular arms. Could Will possibly know how lucky he was? Scott wondered. He himself felt impossibly lucky now to be beside his wonderful wife and with his strong, healthy children.
“You bet,” Scott said. He shook Martha’s shoulder, said, “Roll over, sweetie.” She did, and he covered her legs with a towel and walked into the ocean beside his son.
*
The following summer, after he and Martha had met Sally and heard the story of her broken marriage, Scott found that he had no interest whatsoever in seeing Cat. He had before leaving for New York. They’d exchanged emails, made the plan. But he felt so terrible for Sally and what she’d been through, he didn’t think he could bear to see a perfect wealthy life on the Upper East Side. On Seventy-Fifth and Park, Jesus. He liked Cat and wanted to stay in touch—she, and her family, had been enormously important, for an admittedly brief but nevertheless powerful time in his life—but not on this day, having heard how Sally’s life had been upended.
Leaving Sally to see Cat? No. He’d done that already.
Had he thought to change his plans in Rome way back then, to fly to Sally in Greece? No, he hadn’t even thought it. Just wanted to get out of Europe altogether, to the security of his home and his parents; he’d been cut to the core. He wouldn’t have remembered the name of the island she’d gone to, so he wouldn’t have been able to find her even if he’d had the wherewithal and spontaneity and life—her kind of life—to try to find her. He didn’t think of her. He pitied himself. That had been all. He wouldn’t reconnect with Sally till after graduating and beginning work as a reporter. While working on a story in New York, he called a friend who’d also been with his group at the University of Bristol; she knew someone who could find Sally’s contact information. But by then, when he’d reconnected with Sally in Manhattan for the first time since Paris, he had met his fellow reporter, Martha Wallace.
*
Two months after he and Martha saw Sally, he asked to meet with his editor to discuss a new book project. Really, he simply wanted to be in New York, especially in September when the city comes back to life after summer, to relish his pied-à-terre and New York City life. But he also wanted to find out how Sally was doing.
He now had Sally’s email and her cell. He hadn’t been in touch in the interim, but he texted her from the gate before boarding the flight to LaGuardia at 9 a.m. He delighted when he saw the dots appear on his iPhone—how he loved those dots that let you know the other person was typing. It was as if she’d been waiting for him.
Yes, I’m around, she wrote.
Yay! When?
Dinner tomorrow?
Yes!
He waited. No dots. He typed.
How are you?
Dots. He waited impatiently. Then the dots disappeared. Then reappeared. Then disappeared.
OK? he typed. When she didn’t respond, he typed, We’ll talk. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.
*
He watched Sally walk toward him across the cobblestones that paved the end of Ninth Avenue, wearing a sheer black ankle-length dress. Her long dark gold hair curled down, crossing onto her shoulders and beyond, front and back; he loved her hair long like that. She still had a great body—long with full, strong hips and athletic arms.
Scott needed another charging cord for his phone, so he’d planned to get that at the Apple Store and meet her nearby. But he didn’t want to stand waiting outside the store (he was chronically early) on busy Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue near where they’d reconnected nine years earlier. A few blocks below it, though, there was little traffic, and café tables sat out on the cobblestones at the corner of Gansevoort and Ninth. We’ll walk to the restaurant together, he’d said.
“Hi, you!” she said.
He beamed at her and hugged her.
“Well, you look great,” he said.
She looked down at her dress, low cut. She pressed her breasts together so that they pushed out of her black bra, as if to make them kiss. “Whaddaya think, enough décolletage?”
“Works for me,” he said.
She grinned at him and smiled with sparkly eyes. She slugged him gently on the shoulder and said, “How are you?”
“Never better.”
“I’m glad for you,” she said. “So, where are you taking me?”
Scott put his arm ov
er her shoulder and led her south down Greenwich Street.
“A cute little restaurant called Le Gigot.”
“Aww! A French bistro! I love that place.”
“You know it?”
“Of course.”
“I was hoping to surprise you.”
“I live here full time, remember?”
She looked at him. She looked back to the sidewalk.
He said, “Are you able to date?”
“Able, yes. Interested? No.”
She pushed her shoulder into his as they walked. The evening was warm and windless.
“So, what’s the news?”
“Well, Edward is finally moving out. I don’t know if we’re going to keep the apartment or if we’ll have to leave.”
“When?”
“End of this week.”
“Where’s he going?”
“He’s moving in with her!”
“The barista?”
“Yes!” After a few more steps she said, “Says he loves her.”
He couldn’t imagine how anyone, having fallen in love with Sally, could fall out of love with her. He put his arm over her shoulder and she put her arm around his waist. They’d by now crossed over to Hudson Street. They didn’t speak, just walked connected by arms until they hit Morton Street and turned left toward the restaurant. As they reached Cornelia Street they let their arms fall away.
“You,” she said, “taking me to a French bistro. Did you plan that?”
“A little. But really, I just wanted some place I knew you’d like, and I know you like this food.”
“Absolute favorite!” she said.
He held the door for her.
Sally ordered leeks vinaigrette and sole meunière, he the brandade de morue and steak tartare. Sally chose a hearty zinfandel and she and Scott fell into talking as if no time had passed, about his work, her classes, her wonderful Arthur, who had started seventh grade, how Arthur was handling the divorce.
“Edward adores him, of course, but Arthur’s angry. He’s a tough cookie, that one, he’ll be a real New Yorker.”
“So you’re talking at least.”
“Oh, yeah, we talk. We go through our motions. For Arthur. My hope is a fresh start once he moves out.”
In Short Measures Page 33
