A few weeks of frostiness followed and then reconciliation and then Dominique visited Princeton and did not love all the activities and people that Daphne loved, and then there was a fight caused by Dominique wondering out loud how on earth Piper had been accepted at a supposedly selective school, a fight that included more references to zombies (“entitled zombie brats”) and some harsh words from Daphne about how Dominique was always judging, always thought she was better, thought she was so special, like some kind of fucking pharaoh even though she wasn’t, and sometimes people just liked to go out and have fun with people who were nice and fun.
Distance and time had been good for their friendship. Dominique had come to realize Daphne’s life was not her responsibility, and now, in return, almost a decade later, Daphne seemed to value her precisely because she was less fun than Piper or Agatha, because she was not tiny and blond, because she preferred quiet bars to lounges crowded with bankers, because she tried to be honest. And Dominique liked Greyson—she did, genuinely. She did not love him, but that was fine. She would see him only rarely. Of her friends who were married, none had chosen mates who matched her aspirations for them. Usually the spouses were steady, kind people who wanted to get married, not the thrilling, elevating, inspiring matches Dominique had dreamed up. She had been accused by her own mother, who was always trying to set her up with eligible expat Coptic doctors, of having unrealistic expectations, both for herself and others, but Dominique thought the disjunction was not between herself and reality but between her desires for her own life and her friends’ desires for theirs.
Yet Daphne had accused her of aiming too low. Dominique’s boyfriend, Sebastiaan, was a Belgian chef who would brook no shortening of his name. All four syllables must be pronounced, creating a conversational speed bump, a navigational hazard. His name dragged at her tongue and always made her anxious she was talking about him too much even though she rarely mentioned him at all. He was a devotee of traditional, master-sauce French cooking and was moved to actual rage when her North African spices or Thai herbs invaded his boeuf bourguignon or homard à la Normande. “What is this?” he would say, shaking a duck leg at her that bore traces of baharat. “If you want to experiment, then use someone else’s goddamn duck!”
“He has a sort of culinary xenophobia,” she had told Daphne their first night on the island, before Agatha and Piper had arrived, when the two of them were sitting alone on the widow’s walk. “But I think he’s fascinated by the exoticism, too. Once he came home smelling like Ethiopian food, absolutely reeking of turmeric, and I asked him where he’d been, and he said, ‘Oh, just to have a beer.’ ”
“Better he cheats with food than with another woman,” Daphne said.
“I’m not sure the difference is so big. I think he likes me because I’m dark and spicy and forbidden. I’m the other. He gets to feel like he’s breaking a taboo. I can tell from the way he is in bed.”
“How can you be serious about someone like that?”
“I’m not. Not really.”
“Then why date him at all?”
“I like him. He suits me for now.”
“Greyson and I were just talking about how you aim too low.”
“Really?” Dominique was equal parts insulted and intrigued. “I don’t know if that’s true. I like to think of myself as making do with what’s interested and available.”
“No.” Daphne shook her head and pursed her lips in a way that reminded Dominique of Sebastiaan sampling one of her soups: the distaste, the sureness of opinion. “You’re not choosy enough.”
How, Dominique wondered, had she come to be embroiled in the Van Meters’ lives again? To care about their opinions? Before she had come over for her first year at Deerfield, she had packed her suitcases full of European club-rat clothes and scarves and jewelry from the souks so she could show everyone she was Egyptian and exotic and different. But when she got to her dorm and opened her bags, they were full of clothes she’d never seen before. In her jet-lagged delirium, she had experienced a terrified nausea at finding her things inexplicably swapped out for corduroys, kilts, oxford shirts, and puffy down vests as though her life had been swallowed by someone else’s. The old Dominique was gone, left like a vapor trail over the Atlantic.
Eventually she figured out that her mother had spent months plotting and stockpiling and ordering new things from catalogs. Biddy Van Meter had been her accomplice; the school had given Dominique’s mother the Van Meters’ telephone number when she asked for someone she might call for advice. After she became friends with Daphne and Daphne invited her home for Thanksgiving, Dominique had felt, upon meeting Biddy, that she was meeting her creator, the one who had custom designed her for a prolonged but tangential role in their family life.
The Van Meters were so charming at first. Daphne was sweet and serene. Livia was just a kid then and worshipped Dominique. Biddy was practical, brisk, kind. Winn wore bow ties and pocket squares and attacked all parts of his life with a certainty and precision that Dominique found reassuring. There were no weeds in the Van Meter garden, no unmatched socks in their laundry room. A tennis ball hung from a string in the garage to mark the exact location where the car must be parked. The milk was thrown out the day before it expired. Yet everything they did—playing tennis, cooking dinner, making friends, getting dressed—seemed effortless. Years had to pass before Dominique could see the strain they placed on themselves or, rather, what their grand goal was. They wanted to be aristocrats in a country that was not supposed to have an aristocracy, that was, in fact, founded partly as a protest against hereditary power. That was what Dominique could not understand: why devote so much energy to imitating a system that was supposed to be defunct? Any hereditary aristocracy was stupid, and Americans didn’t even have rules for theirs, not really. Lots of the kids Dominique knew at Deerfield came from families dedicated to perpetuating some moldy, half-understood code of conduct passed along by generations of impostors. But, she supposed, people who believe themselves to be well bred wouldn’t want to give up their invented castes because then they might be left with nothing, no one to appreciate their special clubs, their family trees, their tricky manners, their threadbare wealth.
She couldn’t explain her lingering interest in these people, her patience with them. As a member of an unpopular minority in her home country, secular though she and her parents were, she thought she should be outraged by WASPy illusions of grandeur and birthright, their smugness, the nepotistic power they wielded. But the worst she could summon was a bleak, mild pity, and more often, she felt a bleak, mild amusement. Her sense was that the Van Meters had to throw more elbows than some to keep their status, and at times she caught herself feeling sorry for them. They lived a bit on the fringe—she wasn’t sure why and would have been hard pressed to explain the sense of inferiority that she caught wafting through their house every once in a while like a foul wind. Thank God for Belgium, Dominique thought. For Sebastiaan. Thank God she had given up the corduroy and kilts in college and gone back to her tunics and scarves.
A Jeep blew past on the road, then braked with a squeal, veering onto the shoulder. She slowed, wondering if she should speed on by. An unfamiliar head popped out of the passenger window. “Dominique?” he said as she came alongside. “Hey. Dominique?”
“Yes?” She stopped and stood straddling the bike, peering in. Greyson was behind the wheel. “Oh, hey!” she said.
“I thought that was you,” he said, leaning across his passenger. “How’s it going?”
“You could pick out my butt at five hundred meters?”
“Not your butt, your determination. From a mile away. This is my brother, Francis.”
“Hey,” said the passenger.
“Why do you guys have the top up on such a beautiful day?” Dominique said. “Are you worried about your hair?”
“I don’t like convertibles,” said Francis. He wore old man spectacles and had a vague, placid air about him. “They give me a headac
he. I think it’s the wind.”
Greyson smiled in his gracious way, acknowledging the oddness of his brother’s statement while also indulging it.
“Well,” said Dominique, “carpe diem.”
“We’re going to squeeze in a few sets before we have to get ready for dinner,” Greyson said. “Do you want to throw the bike in the back and come along?”
She noticed they were both dressed all in white. She was wearing orange soccer shorts and a gray T-shirt from a quiche cook-off she had entered on a dare in culinary school and won. “No thanks,” she said, even though she had no doubt Greyson would be able to scrounge some whites for her. He probably carried them around with him the same way Sebastiaan, a sometime mountaineer, carried a silver emergency blanket. “You’d have to put the top down to make room for the bike, and I don’t think I know poor Francis well enough to risk causing him a headache.”
Francis fixed her with a yogic stare. “I don’t mind. Really.”
“No, it’s cool. I’m going to ride out to the lighthouse.”
They drove away, Greyson tapping the horn twice in salute, and she rode on, again catching the yellow-shirted cyclist, who had passed her while she stood talking. Sweat rolled down her back as she pushed up the final hill to the lighthouse, and she relished it. Dropping her bike on the grass, she walked a slow circle, kicking out her legs and craning up at the light. Up close, the tower was less than perfect. The broad red stripe around its middle had faded to a dull, pinky red. The sun had worn all the shine from the black paint on the dome and balcony, and the glass panes of the lantern room were clouded with salt and streaked with bird shit. Paint flaked from the bricks lay scattered in the grass like red and white confetti. Beyond, behind a discolored chain-link fence and perilously close to the disintegrating bluffs, the rusted skeleton of an ancient swing set stood on a patch of scrubby grass, a relic of the days when there had been a lighthouse keeper and a house for him and playthings for his children. A split-rail fence ran back toward the parking area to keep people away from the edge of the bluffs. “3,048 MILES TO SPAIN” read one of the cautionary signs. She looked out over the water and wondered how many miles to Egypt. How many to her parents’ house in Lyon? How many to Belgium? What was Sebastiaan doing? Was he rolling around in an orgy of garam masala and ras al hanout? Everything that mattered, that was real, was somewhere across that sheet of ocean, not here in this half-imagined place, this nesting colony for bustling, puff-chested Americans where she, the dark seabird, happened to be breaking a long and uncertain journey.
The yellow-shirted cyclist reached the end of the road, paused, and then reversed course, heading back the way he had come. A propeller plane buzzed overhead, and she shaded her eyes and followed its descent across the island toward the little airport, calculating how much of a head start she would need to give the yellow shirt before catching him would be a challenge.
WINN WAS STRIPPING the kernels from the ears of corn. He would give them a quick boil and then toss them with the tomatoes and a simple vinaigrette. Two batches, of which this was the first. Ten ears per batch. His favorite striped apron was cinched firmly around his waist, and he was humming to himself. He stood a cob on end and ran his very sharp German knife down its side, watching the satisfying curtain of yellow crumble after the blade. Turning the cob, he repeated the exercise until he was left with a reticulated peg. The mindless repetition was soothing, even delicious. He descended into the rhythm of falling knife and sweeping hand, pushing the sweet-smelling kernels into a red metal bowl while a pot of water steamed on the stove.
Piper appeared in a bathrobe. “Oh!” she said. “Hi.” Her wet hair hung down her back in uncombed clumps, and her face, robbed of its shaggy headdress and devoid of makeup, looked gaunt and beaky. She hesitated, drawing her hands up against her chest and twisting her bony fingers together.
“Looking for something?”
“Daphne wanted a cucumber.”
“A cucumber?”
“We’re putting slices on our eyes. To make them less puffy.”
“Does that work?”
“We don’t know.” She emitted the high, tickled hee hee hee laugh of a cartoon mouse. The bathrobe—an old one of Daphne’s, pink terry cloth—dwarfed her. Something about her thin neck and angular face made her look strangely old, like an aged monk, pale from living in a cave. “That’s part of why we’re doing it. Daphne says it’s an old wives’ tale, and Agatha swears by it. We’re taking before and after pictures.” Again the squeaking giggle.
“There’s one in the crisper, but I was going to use it in the salad.”
“Oh. Okay.” She pulled her damp hair around her head and picked at the tangles. He turned back to the corn, and when he next glanced over his shoulder, she was gone. Resuming his humming, he tipped the cutting board over the red bowl, adding more kernels to his tall heap of corn, a perfect cone like sand from an hourglass.
Agatha said, “I hear you’re withholding our cucumber.”
Winn whipped around. She was standing where Piper had been, her hair also damp but combed away from her face, and she was back in the gauzy white dress from earlier. “I’m what?” he said.
“We just need to borrow a little bit.”
She dug in the refrigerator and emerged with a green, warty phallus, neatly edging him aside so that she could take over his cutting board and his knife and lop three inches off the unfortunate vegetable. Then she pared the stub into eight thin slices. “Voila! Instant beauty.” She waved the maimed cucumber at him. “Should I leave this out for you?”
“I’ll take it.” When he went to take it from her hand, she held on to it, making him pull. He snorted.
“Your ears must have been burning earlier,” she said.
He set the cucumber aside and ran his knife down the last corncob. “Why is that?”
“I can’t remember how it came up—we were out on the grass with Celeste, and somehow we got speculating about what you were like in college. And Celeste said you were exactly the same.”
“Hmm,” he said, unnerved.
“So were you?”
“Celeste would know better than I would.”
“Do you want to know what Daphne said?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“She said Biddy told her you had a bad rep.” She waited. He was silent, and she went on, “Supposedly, you were a bit of a player.”
Winn picked up the bowl of corn and dumped it into the boiling water. He set a massive colander in the sink, then wiped his hands on his apron and turned to face her, folding his arms over his chest. “A player?”
She aligned the cucumber slices into a neat stack, holding them loosely in her fingers like poker chips. “We were just curious because you’re one of those people who seems to have been born an adult, with a house and a marriage and everything. I can imagine Biddy when she was young but not you.”
“Hmm,” he said again.
“Well?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t think I was dramatically different. I had girlfriends, but nothing out of the ordinary. I wasn’t some kind of Casanova.” He turned, pulled the pot from the stove, and poured its contents into the colander. His glasses steamed up.
“That’s what Celeste said. She said you were a born monogamist.”
He pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and looked at her over them. “I’m sorry you girls don’t have anything more interesting to talk about.”
She reached up and grasped his glasses by the earpieces, tugging them from his face. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was wiping the steam away on the hem of her dress.
ON THE DAY in 1966 when Winn left for Harvard, his father presented him with a gold wristwatch and an absolution. “Youth is the best excuse you’ll ever have,” Tipton Van Meter said, giving his son’s hand a valedictory shake on the sidewalk of a leafy Boston avenue, not far from the Public Garden, in the shadow of their white stone house. He spoke slowly, with deliberate we
ight. That he had been planning this moment for some time was clear. Winn opted for manful silence. No response would measure up to whatever line had already been scripted for him in his father’s imagination, and so he returned the handshake with a fervor he hoped would express strength, vigor, and gratitude. Tony the driver sat waiting behind the wheel to convey him the not quite four miles to the gates of the Yard.
“Well, good-bye, Dad. See you for dinner Sunday.”
Tipton only nodded.
Until Tony turned a corner, Winn looked out the back window, at his father standing in the street in his gray suit, hands behind his back.
Winn had crossed the Charles countless times before, but he could not help feeling that the splendor of this particular September afternoon was a benediction meant just for him and that the familiar green water, gilded by the same sun that skipped dazzling prisms off his new wristwatch, was an important threshold. He was crossing into a new era, and his father’s parting words were carved above the gates. Tipton Van Meter was a great believer in youth, and Winn believed in Tipton. Most fathers would have asked their sons to do the family proud or to stay out of trouble or to find their place in the world. That his own father had given him permission to do none of those things was a tremendous relief to Winn. He resolved to allow himself a great deal of freedom on the condition that someday he would take up the right kind of adulthood. For now he would be carefree, unencumbered, full of mischief and frivolity, and then, later, he would be an honorable man, a true citizen, a man whose portrait might hang on a wall: someone like his grandfather Frederick, whose countenance supervised the billiards room of the Vespasian Club, or like his father, whose painted image regarded its living twin from across the dining room in the white stone house.
As a child, Winn’s favorite spot was the carpet beside Tipton’s chair, where he sat and watched his sire drink gin from a cut crystal glass and listen to the radio. Now that Winn had entered into what Tipton predicted would be the most glorious years of his life, he perceived the dawning of a perfect symbiosis of father-son esteem. Tipton was a Harvard man himself, and in the years since his graduation, he had fashioned in his own mind and that of his son a tanned and tousled vision of the ideal collegian. This young man was a dedicated sportsman, an unostentatious student, a giver of witty toasts, and a debonair wanderer through the candyland of female companionship. While some boys dreamt of being the president or an astronaut, Winn passed through boyhood aspiring only to grow into the broad shoulders and brass buttons of his father’s half-remembered, half-imagined Harvard man. In the stories Tipton chose for the after-dinner hour, he himself was that man, the cocksure ringleader of a band of high-spirited rascals. Always he recounted every detail, projecting the glimmering past onto the soiled tablecloth, the faces of his listeners, and his own portrait in its elaborate, gilded frame high on the wall. A few weeks before Winn left for Harvard, his fifth-form English master and his wife had come to dinner, and Tipton told a classic.
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