The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  2011

  They had a few days before Margo and her husband came up from New York and Alice returned from Santa Fe. The weather was good and since Aisha’s studio was not a place you could hang out for long—and the bedroom she had in the mansion felt off-limits—they took to riding the Indian around southern Rhode Island in the late afternoons when Sandy was done at the Casino. They’d meet as inconspicuously as they could and then head out over the Newport Bridge to Conanicut Island or Narragansett Pier, or once as far west as Mystic, where there was a clam shack famous for its whole-belly fried clams. They tried their hand at windsurfing, drove up to Wickford Harbor to check out the fishing boats, had steamers and a couple of lobsters. Afterwards, in bed, he pretended to have Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning, one of the symptoms of which was a stiffening of the extremities, ha-ha.

  He had hoped that when Margo came back she might just let the thing they’d had drop, smile at him on the tennis courts, say “Hey, champ!” and that would be that. But her first day back at the Casino she’d invited him and the others from her doubles group up onto the Horseshoe Piazza, where they’d all had gin and tonics and the women had flirted with him, teased him about his retirement, about having to find a wife and kids for him, maybe a rich widow. Afterwards she’d come by the place he was renting—a vacation condo overlooking the Newport Shipyard that the rental agent had said was a hot potato in a divorce settlement and so only available week to week—and then, sheesh! It all came back to him. Being in bed with Margo was like being in a close-order drill. Stand fast! Column movement! Sound off! She took down his cell phone number, conspicuously neglected to give him hers. The next day he’d felt some sort of obligation to tell Aisha what had happened, but she’d only smiled, patted him on the stomach, said that these things had to run their course.

  He got used to seeing Alice in the afternoons. She was doing research—writing a book or something, Aisha said—at the Redwood Library just a couple of blocks down Bellevue, and she would come down to the Casino in the late afternoon, and sit and watch the play, the lessons, waiting to catch a ride with Margo. She wore these funky clothes—big-brimmed hats, loud sundresses, scarves you’d expect Isadora Duncan to wear. As for her cerebral palsy, there was the one hand bent in on itself, the one laggard leg, and this strained intensity to her face, but, as cerebral palsy went, all pretty minor, he supposed. Really, he found himself telling Aisha once when they were talking things over, she was kind of pretty in this nervy, brainy, hopeless sort of way. She’d sit at a little iron café table just in front of the pro shop with a thermos of coffee, book or notebook or laptop open, scrunchie holding her long hair back. He thought he could feel her eyes on him, watching him in his shorts and T-shirt as he fed balls, or as he paced alongside calling out coaching stuff, but whenever he turned—casually, nonchalantly—she was always looking away, watching one of the other courts, or turning her face up to the sun or down to her laptop.

  The couple of times she caught him looking at her, she’d said: “And what do you see, Mr. Winterbourne?”

  Which he totally didn’t get.

  And then there was Margo’s husband, Alice’s brother, Tom. Sandy had met him a couple of times the previous summer. A big guy, he’d been a second-string safety for Stanford. But since then—what, he was maybe thirty-five now?—since college he’d put on a bit of weight. Tried to keep it off with racquetball, he said, Sandy ever play racquetball? He seemed an okay kind of guy, maybe with a little of the arrogance you could have if you were rich, had gone to Stanford, had a nice-looking wife and an unassailable job, even in the recession—Credit Suisse in Tom’s case—but he was okay. The few times Sandy’d talked to him the previous summer they’d talked sports, guy stuff, including Tom’s story about how Roger Federer—who had a major deal with Credit Suisse, Sandy knew that, right?—had come by the New York offices that past August and given some face time to top management. Federer seemed like a good guy, Tom said, had Sandy ever met him? (Indian Wells, 2006, Sandy was thinking, 6–1, 6–1.) But okay, he wasn’t trying to make Sandy feel bad, rub it in that he wasn’t Roger Federer—who was?—he was just making talk the way a life of Newport and Stanford and Wall Street had taught him to do. Smooth, confident, a smiling slap on the back any minute now.

  So what was the proper deportment toward a guy whose wife you were screwing, not to put too fine a point on it? It wasn’t the sort of thing Sandy was used to. He kind of wished there was somebody he could talk to about it, someone he could sound out on just how much of this was he responsible for? Morally speaking, he meant. But he didn’t feel right talking to Aisha about it. And it was definitely off-limits with Margo, who seemed to want to pretend she didn’t have a husband. And who knew, maybe she and Tom had some kind of understanding, an arrangement. Sandy had heard of such things. But still he didn’t like it. Sleeping with someone’s wife was a dickish kind of thing to do, and he prided himself on not being a dick. It wasn’t who he was. You could ask anyone.

  There was this one day toward the end of May when Tom was up from New York with two clients for the Memorial Day weekend and he’d shown up at the Casino with Aisha and Alice because it was the first truly hot day and they’d had an idea to round everyone up and go out to Bailey’s Beach. Sandy was invited too—hey, why not? said Tom. But Sandy had had another class to teach—he was a working man, he’d said with a smile—and he’d gone off to his Intermediate Doubles over on Courts 5 and 6. But instead of heading out to the beach, the group had settled onto Crowley’s deck where it overlooked Court 1 and started in on the gin and tonics. When the hour was up, Sandy went to join them, found them a little drunk and animated on the subject of Clarendon Court, the place—Alice was explaining to them—where Claus and Sunny von Bülow had lived until Claus sort of accidentally injected Sunny with an overdose of insulin. Which brought up the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who had killed her chauffeur/lover back in the sixties, drove her car right into him (“Silly me!” said Alice. “Is that the accelerator?”), and whose estate, Rough Point, where it’d all happened, was just a few houses south of the du Ponts’ Windermere. And hey—back to Clarendon Court—did they know that it had been the set for the movie High Society? Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly? Had Sandy never seen the place? Had the two friends from Credit Suisse?

  So they dropped the idea of going to the beach and instead headed off to their cars to descend on Clarendon Court, and then maybe over to Windermere for some more drinks, or maybe the beach after all. At the sight of the red Indian parked at the rear entrance of the Casino, Alice had said hey, she’d never been on a motorcycle. At which Sandy had shot a look at Aisha, then had the presence of mind to say he didn’t have an extra helmet.

  “That’s all right,” the girl had said, handing her laptop and stuff to Margo. “I’m already brain-damaged.” And she hobbled over to the bike and swung her good leg up over the seat. “Last one there’s a murdered heiress!”

  And for the rest of the day, while they stood outside the gates to Clarendon Court, and then later out at Bailey’s Beach wading in the surf with their pant legs rolled up, she called him Mr. Winterbourne. (“Oh! Mr. Winterbourne!” she said when he helped her off the bike. “I never dreamed a mere physical experience could be so exhilarating!” That kind of thing.) Back at Windermere drinking cocktails and playing croquet on the front lawn with the sun going down and the Atlantic out there like it was the du Ponts’ private ocean, he smiled and asked her what was with the Mr. Winterbourne stuff?

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said with this look. Which pissed him off because he had been trying to be nice. He’d said it like okay, you got me, so what’s the joke? And it seemed to him the proper response to that was to clue somebody in, not to continue to keep them on the outside. Keeping them on the outside was like what you did in high school when you really wanted them on the outside, when you wanted some loser to know that hey, you are so not one of us.
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  So a couple of days later at the Casino, when she asked in this coy sort of way when was he taking her on his motorcycle again, he told her not until he found out who Mr. Winterbourne was. Which he hoped communicated to her that he didn’t need to be made to feel out of it by suicidal manic-depressive heiresses. And to punctuate that, he did this thing he could do, which was to bounce a tennis ball off his biceps, back and forth—bump-bump-bump—like his biceps were playing catch with each other.

  “Oh, Mr. Winterbourne!” she said, as though she were overcome with sexual arousal.

  In your dreams, he said. Or would have said. If he was a dick. Which he wasn’t.

  To get away he went up to Brown on his day off and hit with their top singles player. The guy was not quite good enough but it was nice at least to be hitting the ball with some pace, kicking his serve, keeping the ball deep. And his knee didn’t feel too bad. Afterwards he went out for hamburgers and a beer with the guy and his girlfriend and it felt nice, almost like he was back at Duke and things were still in the future. On the drive home he resolved to take up his old training regimen. Not that he’d ever play competitively again, but he was an athlete all the same, he needed to stay in shape. Weights, shuttle sprints, ladder drills. As long as he took it easy on his knee. No long-distance running.

  Back at the condo there was a package from Amazon but he was used to getting stuff that wasn’t for him, was in fact filling a cardboard box that one of these days he’d haul off to the rental agent so that she could pass it on to the divorcing/reuniting couple, whoever they were. He was about to throw the thing from Amazon in the box—just another reminder of his interloper status—when he noticed the package was addressed to Mister Winterbourne. “Mister” like a first name, then “Winterbourne,” then the condo address and number. He pulled the zipper thingie and inside found a book. Daisy Miller. Henry James.

  What? he wanted to say. He turned the thing this way and that, and then chucked it into the box anyway. Whatever the game was, let the divorced couple wonder.

  But half an hour later he couldn’t help himself. He opened the book and sure enough the main character was a guy named Winterbourne, an American living in Europe whose chief occupation seemed to be watching Daisy Miller—the pretty American flirt, as one character called her—to see if she was socially acceptable or if she was—as another character called her—“a horror.” It was short and he read it through in one evening, puzzled at just what the correspondence was supposed to be. Okay, he and Winterbourne were about the same age. The story took place at Vevey, which he took to be a kind of European version of Newport. And the two girls were both heiresses—rich, young, marriageable. And he, he supposed, had been looking at her the last couple of weeks, watching her if you would. But that was because—what could he say?—she had cerebral palsy and she dressed like she was hitching a ride to Woodstock. He had been curious about her, is all. When he finished the story proper he read the afterword, which made a point of their names—Daisy fresh and flowerlike, Winterbourne cool and blighting—and that it was Winterbourne’s watching her, evaluating her, the blindness of his moral insight, his inability to see the worth of Daisy’s true self, that caused her death at the end of the book. He figuratively freezes her to death, the afterword said, like a September frost on a summer flower. The afterword also mentioned that James had lived in Newport.

  “Lots of murdered heiresses in my neck of the wood,” he remembered Alice saying when they were standing outside the gates to Clarendon Court.

  Back at the Casino he wondered whether he was supposed to mention the book or not. Was it just a game, a joke? Or did she mean something by it, some warning not to misunderstand or manhandle her, not to be morally blind around her? And did it matter? Why should he have to concern himself with her?

  So he didn’t say anything.

  What he did do—when she went to the bathroom and he had the chance—was sneak a look at what she was writing. Aisha had said it was some sort of Newport history thing, and that’s why she spent her days at the Redwood Library. The part he’d read was about somebody marrying a Dollar Princess—which was a weird coincidence because that’s what the afterword had called Daisy Miller. He asked Margo about it, but she just shrugged, said it kept Alice occupied, kept her from Googling how to make a noose.

  “Slow reader, are we?” Alice asked a couple days later, pulling these Lolita sunglasses down and looking over the tops of them. “That’s a hint, son.”

  Which he didn’t take.

  It was around this time that he pieced together from Margo and Aisha the story of the night Alice had slit her wrists. It had been Aisha who had found her. She had woken up in the middle of the night and had come out of her bedroom, following the sound of opera down the hall to this semicircular alcove with a big bay window that looked out onto the ocean. And there was Alice unconscious in the moonlight, blood all over the couch, and Tristan und Isolde on the CD player. (“Leave it to Alice to cast herself as Isolde,” Margo had said. Sandy nodded, like he knew who Isolde was.) The ambulance had come and they had pumped her full of blood and she had lived, depressed for a long while after, lying around the house with these big bandages on her wrists. Tom had asked her for the umpteenth time to go back to having professional help, begged her really, get professional help, to which Alice had said okay, she’d make an appointment with her dentist.

  At the Casino Alice wanted to know when she was going to get her motorcycle ride, now that he’d found out.

  “What did I find out?” Sandy asked.

  “You know,” she said.

  He kept his gaze on her steady and not-to-be-tricked. If she saw things that weren’t there—Sandy Alison as the handsome but shallow Mr. Winterbourne—made up things in her squirrely head, was he responsible for that?

  “Look,” he said like he was going to level with her, like he meant to tell her she had the wrong guy, “I’m just a tennis player. All this—” and he made a gesture at the stuff in front of her, at an invisible Daisy Miller, at her own weird self—“this is all beyond me.”

  She picked up her notebook and laptop and her papers and held them to her chest like a schoolgirl. “No, it’s not,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  She smiled like she knew something he didn’t. “Let’s go anyway,” she said, and when he shook his head: “Mr. Winterbourne! We’re young and alive!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got something on.”

  But he felt like a creep saying it. Maybe she wasn’t making fun of him. Maybe all this—what his mother would have called being a smart aleck—was just long-ingrained self-defense.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said and tried to smile. “If the weather’s good.”

  She let her face light up. “I’ll be sure to wear my biker-babe outfit.”

  Which turned out to be jeans with these metal studs on them and a fringe leather jacket, outrageous mascara, and no helmet. They stowed her laptop in Sandy’s locker and when he was finished with his lessons took off together down Wellington Avenue, past the yacht clubs and Fort Adams, past the turnoffs to Eisenhower’s house and the Castle Hill lighthouse, and then out onto Ocean Drive as it made its long curve around the point. All the way they kept the water on their right, the sun slipping behind as they went eastward. The girl had her hands clasped around his waist as she’d had that first time, but now he thought he could feel in her, in her body pressed against him, the thrill she felt, the sting of speed and wind and the danger of it all. When once the road curved he caught sight of their shadows on the tar, the Indian long and low, his own arms cowboyed out in that motorcycle posture and the girl hugging him with her good hand locked onto her bad wrist and her long hair streaming behind. They must’ve looked like a video for Youth and Freedom, he thought. And Sex, he supposed. Well, maybe it was all right: life was made up of moments when you almost made it, when you almost got a third game o
ff Roger Federer, when you almost were with a guy who had a bright red motorcycle. It didn’t hurt to come close, did it? In the long run? Surely she understood what was what.

  When the parking lot for Brenton Point came into view he pulled the Indian over, not into the parking lot but onto the strip of turf between the road and the ocean. He helped her off. In the park behind them there were dozens of kites flying—box kites, parafoils, Felix the Cat. They watched for a while and then made their way along the rocky edge of the land toward the breakwater. She seemed uncertain of the uneven ground, held on to his arm as they walked, the fringe on her jacket swaying between them. There was a sailboat some distance out on the water, and way out on the horizon what looked like a container ship. When they got to the stone stairway that led down to the breakwater, they stopped and just watched the people in the distance navigating their way over the huge black boulders jutting into the ocean.

  “Can you make it out there?” Sandy found himself asking.

  She let her eyes sweep along the length of the breakwater. “No,” she said.

  Closer in, in the embrace of the little bay that curved toward the Castle Hill lighthouse, there were half a dozen smaller sailboats tacking and coming about in the wind, and on the rocks that lay like black rags along the shore, fishermen with their poles and tackle boxes. On the breakwater two high school girls in shorts and tank tops were holding hands and letting out mock-terrified screams each time they reached a new rock, and out at the very tip a man and a woman were sitting with their legs hanging over the edge of the last stone. Above them the seagulls squawked and swooped. It was all so bright and beautiful.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on.” And he took her hand, stepped onto the first of the stones that made a rough stairway down to the water. She held back and he was aware suddenly of the differential between the brashness of her mind and the timidity of her body. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you. We’ll see how far we can get.”