Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  Grabbing up the phone, she dialed Tory’s number.

  Tory and Joanna had met at a dinner party two years before when they’d been forced to talk with each other by virtue of their placement at the table. Tory was happily married; her life centered on her family. Joanna had just returned from a skiing trip to Vail with a man twelve years younger than she; she was working hard, climbing the ladder of her career. The two women lived very different lives, but their friendship blossomed in spite of that.

  At the dinner party, Tory confessed that she’d seen the first few segments of Fabulous Homes and thought it was wonderful. Homes were so important, she’d said, and impassionedly she’d told Joanna about the old Victorian house they’d just bought on a bluff in Nantucket. Tory was obsessed with its furnishing and decoration. Joanna asked Tory if she could do a series about decorating the perfect summer house for her new show. Tory agreed; and over the weeks that followed, whenever Tory went to Nantucket, Joanna joined her, taking notes and pictures. Joanna admired Tory’s sense of style and her commitment to her family’s comfort and pleasure. Tory was fascinated by the way Joanna’s mind worked and she respected Joanna’s professional achievements. They became close friends.

  It was Tory, pleading for the sanctity of the family, who kept Joanna from asking Carter to leave his wife. Joanna should drop Carter, that was Tory’s view. Carter was married, and he had a son, and did Joanna really want to be responsible for breaking up a home? But he doesn’t love his wife, he loves me, Joanna insisted, and often she wept, and Tory wept in sympathy, and they had gone on arguing that way every time they talked.

  The Randalls’ housekeeper answered their phone. “No, Ms. Jones,” she said, “the Randalls are not here, remember? They’re in Nantucket.”

  “Of course, Lei, thank you.”

  Joanna hung up the phone, despondent. Of course, the Randalls were on vacation, too. On a family vacation.

  Fool! she berated herself. You should have made plans! Stalking into her living room, she flipped through her address book, looking for—what? An acquaintance she could spend the evening with? Irritated, she tossed the book aside. She would read one of the many novels she had stacked in wait. She’d answer some of the letters she’d brought home from her office. She’d—the phone rang. Joanna raced to the bedroom. Was it Carter, calling from the airport to say he already missed her?

  “Hi, hon.” Tory’s warm voice filled the silence.

  “Tory! I just called you. Lei answered. I’d forgotten you were in Nantucket. How are you?”

  “We’re in heaven. It’s so beautiful here. It’s so luscious, it’s paradise. I want you to come to Nantucket.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet, Tory, but I’ve got so much—”

  “Nonsense. It can all wait. It’s August, remember? Look, everyone needs a break. Just a little tiny break?”

  Joanna considered. In her office, tacked to the huge appointment calendar, was an invitation to an island cocktail party from some people she’d met months before, while taping a show in Austin. Nantucket parties were always good for discovering more potential FH hosts, so she could justify the expense of a flight and a rental car on the network’s account …

  “All right, I’ll come!” Joanna decided, and found herself smiling as she said the words.

  “Oh, Joanna, what fun!”

  “I’ve got to tie up some loose ends at work tomorrow. Give me a day or two—”

  “No. Absolutely not. You’ll always find some reason to keep working. I want you to come tomorrow.”

  “Thursday.”

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “All right. I’ll call Cape and Island Airlines and make the reservation for you.”

  “Tory, I can—”

  “If I do it, I’ll know it’s done. I’ll call you back with the time. Bring a bikini and shorts. No briefcase allowed.”

  “No briefcase! Tory!”

  Tory’s response was a throaty, delighted laugh. “Oh, Joanna, it’s going to be such fun having you here!”

  “I’ll be a wreck without my briefcase,” Joanna sulked, but secretly she was pleased.

  The next day Joanna spent in a frenzy of organization at her office, then hurried home and packed a bag with summer clothes. The glossy art books on houses that Carter had given her were too heavy to cart to the island; she grabbed up some paperback novels.

  She slipped a new tape into her answering machine. Shut the windows. Locked her door. At last she was in a taxi to La Guardia. Halfway there, the old cab’s air-conditioning broke, causing the squat driver to mutter ceaselessly during the rest of the ride in low, maniacal, rather ominous tones. On the Triboro Bridge, they were held up by a gridlock around a car stopped by an overheated radiator. Finally they arrived at the terminal, where she was immediately ushered onto a plane the size and strength of a toothpaste tube.

  Darkness fell as they flew northeast, and coins of light gleamed from the black sky and from the land and occasionally from the water below them. Her fellow passengers chatted about wind surfing and weddings and sunshine and sangria, and Joanna felt her heart lighten.

  The moment she stepped off the plane she could tell that it was cooler on this island than the one she’d just left. Above her the sky rose in a starry vault. The air smelled of the sea and roses. Friends and relatives greeted each other with laughter and kisses, and a handsome man wearing white flannels smiled invitingly at Joanna as he ushered his toddling mother from the arrival lounge. Joanna smiled back and pleasure raced through her blood. She felt better already.

  “Do you have a convertible?” she asked the clerk at the Hertz counter.

  “We surely do. A red Mustang with a white top. How’s that?”

  “Perfection.”

  The top was already down on the little car, as if it had been waiting for her. She tossed her bags in the back, settled in, and headed down the long straight road to ’Sconset. She didn’t own a car, didn’t need to in the city, but she loved driving, and was almost disappointed when finally she pulled up at the Randalls’ wide Victorian high on the ’Sconset bluff.

  Tory came running out. “You’re here! You’re really here!”

  “God, the air smells like nectar!” Joanna just stood, inhaling great drafts.

  “Come in. Get out of those city clothes. I can’t believe you’re wearing high heels.”

  “I always wear high heels. I didn’t even think—” Joanna followed her friend up the wide steps and into the house.

  Tory’s husband, John, hugged Joanna warmly. “It’s great to have you here.”

  “Where are Jeremy and Vicki?”

  “At the Casino, seeing a movie with some other kids. Is that all the luggage you brought?”

  “It’s all I need.”

  “Well, let me show you your room, and you can change into some shorts. Are you hungry?”

  Joanna hesitated. She’d never been one for regular meals. “You know, I think I am. I guess I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “You need a keeper.” Tory shook her head in disgust. “Lucky for you we saved some dinner.”

  So that night Joanna dined on a meal of swordfish and fresh butter and corn on the cob. She ate in shorts and a white T-shirt, her hair tied back, her feet bare. Later, she and Tory strolled along the peaceful village roads, chatting, luxuriating in the fragrance of honeysuckle and wild roses and salt air. After a languorous bath, Joanna slipped between crisp white sheets in the wide comfortable guest room bed. For a while she watched as a capricious ocean breeze made the hems of the starched white curtains lift and dance. She was so full and content and cool that she fell asleep immediately, only slightly missing Carter.

  The next morning she didn’t awaken until noon. Her room was full of light; striding to a window, she tossed back a curtain and saw the sparkling expanse of the blue Atlantic. She took a deep breath of fresh air. Then she pulled on shorts and a sports bra and a white T-shirt, brushed her teeth and rub
bed sunblock on her fair skin, yanked her long honey-blond hair up into a ponytail, found her sunglasses, and ran barefoot down the stairs.

  The air in the kitchen shimmered with sunlight. On the long trestle table, in the great white ironstone bowl of fruit, lay a pink piece of paper covered with Tory’s fat, looping handwriting.

  Joanna,

  We’re all off bluefishing. We’ll be home sometime in the late afternoon. The fridge is loaded, help yourself. The Latherns called to remind you of their cocktail party tonight. Take it easy—that’s an order!

  Love, T.

  Joanna smiled, and choosing a fat purple plum, sank her teeth into it. Sweetness filled her mouth and juice drooled down her chin. Grabbing up a paper towel, she stalked across the kitchen, out through the back porch, and down the long wooden staircase to the beach. The sun-heated unpainted boards warmed the soles of her feet. Heat fell across her shoulders and light flashed against her face. At the bottom of the steps, she turned and struck out for the north. At her left the ocean surged and sang. The world was fresh and cool and gold and blue. She strode along.

  She was perhaps twenty yards from the Randalls’ property when she realized how fast she was walking—as if she were late for an appointment. “Stop it!” she yelled at herself, right out loud, right there—the group of children playing farther down the beach didn’t hear her over the sound of the waves. She sank down onto the sand, stretching her legs, letting as much of her skin as possible make contact with the soothing gritty heat. Wiping her mouth and stuffing the paper towel in her shorts pocket so she wouldn’t litter the beach, she ordered herself to relax. She stared out at the vast gleaming, surging water. She rolled the hard plum pit in her hand.

  Where was Carter now? Somewhere in Europe. It would be evening. He and Blair would be sipping white wine and looking out at what … the Seine? the Rhine? the Grand Canal? For the first time in two years she could not reach her lover if she needed to. She had no idea where he was right now. Would absence make his heart grow fonder? Or would he, during this coming month, find himself getting to know his wife again, and to like her, admire her … desire her?

  Of course they would make love.

  Once Joanna had asked Carter if he and Blair made love often.

  He had answered simply, “No.”

  “Does she mind?”

  “I don’t think she even realizes, Joanna. She’s happy, in her way. She’s successful at what she wants to do.”

  “What is that?”

  “Raise a happy child. Keep a beautiful home. Blair’s a perfectionist. She needs things to be calm. And all this”—Carter swept his hand over Joanna’s body—“this desire … it’s the antithesis of calm.”

  But away from her house and its continual demands, living in luxurious hotel rooms in romantic cities, Blair might very well find old habits of desire reviving. Of course she and Carter would make love. And her body would be exciting to him, would be newer, in a way, to Carter than Joanna’s was. Husband and wife, their old passion would rekindle, and they would find a new heat and passion between them …

  Joanna jumped to her feet. Perhaps she’d been wrong to come here. It was true, she was exhausted and overworked; but at least in New York she wasn’t stranded in the midst of a perfect family, forced to behold up close and in detail everything she could never have. In New York she could lose herself in work, or office gossip or a new movie or ballet. Tossing her plum pit so far out into the water she couldn’t hear its splash, she stormed on down the beach.

  About two hours later she returned to the house, slightly dizzy from so much sudden sun and heat. The phone was ringing. She ran the last few steps and dashed across the wide porch and into the cool kitchen to snatch it up. It was her assistant, Gloria, with a problem only Joanna could solve. The Chandlers, who’d been scheduled for filming in October, needed to change the date because of a health problem; could Fabulous Homes tape them in the spring? This wasn’t a great idea, Joanna told Gloria; the Chandlers lived in a renovated mill on a roaring river in upstate New York; spring was mud season there, which would show murky brown in any window shots; ask them about January, Joanna said. The mill would look picturesque in the snow. And get out their possibles list; whom could they substitute?

  Joanna spent most of the afternoon on the phone, cradling it against her shoulder as she and her assistant worked. At some point Joanna pulled a bowl of curried chicken salad from the refrigerator and ate a late lunch. When she finally got off the phone, she had a crick in her neck, so she went to her room and washed her hair and took a long bath, and just as she was wrapping her terry-cloth bathrobe around her, she heard the Randalls come home. She padded down the stairs, leaving wet footprints on the bare wood, to greet them and admire their catch.

  All four Randalls were radiant with sunburn, and they smelled of sun and salt and fish. Jeremy displayed a gash he’d put in his thumb while trying to get a fish off the hook.

  “Come on, son, I’ll show you how to dress these. You, too, Vick.” John led his kids to the kitchen and Tory hurried upstairs to shower.

  “You’re not going to the party?” Joanna asked.

  “No. John and I are taking the kids into town for pizza and a movie.”

  “Which one?”

  “Total Recall.”

  “Better you than me.”

  “The kids will love it.”

  “You are such a good mother.”

  “Damn right.”

  Joanna went back to her room to dress for the cocktail party, secretly glad it wouldn’t be a family affair. She wriggled into a scoop-necked magenta silk dress with a hammered-gold collar that set off her tan and the sun-gilded honey of her hair. Perhaps some elegant eligible man would be there, someone so amazing and sexy that he’d make her forget Carter. Fat chance.

  All the windows were open in the large house, letting sounds drift into Joanna’s room: The Indigo Girls whining from Vicki’s CD player. The phone ringing. Laughter. Jeremy yelling, “Hey, Dad! Where’d you put the charcoal?” John’s gruff response. That kid doesn’t have a clue, Joanna thought, how his father, a prominent lawyer who makes men in three-piece suits tremble, loves him. The only time she ever saw John Randall completely content was when he was here on Nantucket, in this house, with his family. It was as if everything else was stripped away, revealing the essential man.

  Was that how it was for Carter? No, it couldn’t be. She knew she satisfied something essential in Carter; she knew he needed her. If she wasn’t sure of that, she wasn’t sure of anything.

  Joanna found she was standing in her room, just staring at a span of blank blue sky framed by white curtains. Looking at her watch, she saw that she was late, and she hurried down the stairs, yelled her goodbyes to the Randalls, and rushed outside to her little rented red convertible. After switching on the ignition, she backed the car out onto the street, then roared off, hurtling left and right like a race car driver along the village byways, past the Sankaty golf course, and finally down along the narrow Polpis Road.

  Now the lazy sinuous path made speeding impossible; she had to slow down. She changed the angle of her foot, pulling it back from the accelerator, and accordingly her entire body shifted. She settled more comfortably into the bucket seat. The convertible top was down and the humid evening air drifted around her shoulders like a shawl of mist. The borders of the winding road were thick with wild grasses, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, day lilies. Her shoulders loosened, her thoughts slowed. All the voices cluttering up her head melted and evaporated, and she heard instead the mellow, golden notes of a James Taylor song floating up from the car radio. The sun sent opal streamers across the pale blue sky. It was not yet twilight.

  She passed Sesachacha Pond, turned right onto the Quidnet Road, followed it to the crossroad with Squam Road, turned left. This dirt road was deeply rutted and pocked, and she slowed to a crawl between bushes and saplings growing in such lush abundance their branches grazed the car. She could hear birds calling. R
abbits zigzagged foolishly across her path. Braking to a complete halt for a moment, she gazed out at Squam Pond, a watercolorist’s dream of thousands of pink mallow roses against blue water and a heavenly green grass. Smiling, she drove on. Her hosts had told her their house was on the ocean side of the road, and had no signpost. She was to turn onto a white gravel road. Coming to one, she did, and went along a driveway so overgrown it was like a green tunnel. Then the view opened up, and there sat the house.

  Not her hosts’ house. This house was empty. No lights, no cars. Just the house, simple and calm, against the evening sky.

  It was a perfectly proportioned two-and-a-half-story gray-shingled house, with five windows on the second floor and two on either side of the blue front door, which was framed by a rose-covered trellis. Two chimneys. A brick walk curving up from the gravel parking area. It was as complete and perfect as a child’s drawing of home.

  It was not her hosts’ home, and she was trespassing, but she had no sense of wrongdoing as she turned off the car’s engine and sat in the silence, studying the house. At one end a screened-in porch extended, blanketed in ivy and rose vines. A green wall of privet, untrimmed and shaggy, straggled from the porch to a small garage, providing a shelter from the ocean winds for a weedy, sadly neglected bed of drooping mums and brave rudbeckia daisies.

  Joanna got out of the car, closing the door carefully, quietly, and walked across the unkempt lawn and around the side of the house. The lawn extended perhaps twenty feet, then surrendered to the wild thorny tangle of moorland which in turn gave way to the sandy beach that rimmed the placidly rolling Atlantic. The tide was going out, and the sand glistened wetly in the sinking sun.

  Joanna looked back at the house. The windows on this side were boarded up; so the house was deserted. What a shame, on such a lovely summer day.

  She wanted to linger, but knew she shouldn’t, and so she crossed back to the driveway, the slender heels of her shoes sinking into the turf. As she slid back into her car, she had the oddest desire to—oh, it was odd!—say something to the house. To connect with that house. So, feeling strangely very much like herself and not like herself at all, she said, aloud, “I promise I’ll be back.”