“You were so terrific, Jane. So smooth, so funny. But you must be used to public speaking by now,” Guy said.
“Used to it? I never do it.”
“You could never have guessed,” Tad said. “You were awesome.” There was that word again—a word more appropriate to a sunset or the birth of a baby than to Jane Fortune standing on a stage at Wellesley College.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” Bentley said. “I was always the public guy—because you didn’t want to be. But you are far more entertaining than I ever was. Even when I was flirting with my students, I couldn’t hold their attention like that.” Melody punched him on the arm. “Of course, that was in the past,” he added.
By the time we were finished eating, I was tipsy. Guy picked up the check for all of us and I thought this gallant of him, especially since this was a legitimate foundation expense and I would have been happy to pay for dinner. No one, though, not Bentley, Melody, or even Tad, was willing to have me pay on my special night.
Bentley, Guy, and Tad all offered to drive me home. There were two problems with that—one was that I didn’t have a home, and the second was that I was staying at the Wellesley Inn right down the street.
“I don’t have a home,” I said. Everyone but Guy, who didn’t really understand the import of the statement, looked at me as if I were the saddest case in the world. Even Tad had a home, even if it was a dorm room at Harvard. “Oh, stop with the doleful looks,” I said. They all looked like Basil Funk. “I am treating myself to a room at the Wellesley Inn. That way I can walk over and pick up my car in the morning. Now, if someone would be so kind as to drive me that short distance, I would be most appreciative.” I was proud of my drunken aplomb.
Guy insisted on being the one to take me.
Guy found a parking spot on the street outside the inn, then turned to me and leaned in close. I knew what was coming and I didn’t think I could avoid it: I didn’t really want to avoid it. He snaked his hand behind my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. It wasn’t unpleasant. I hadn’t been kissed in so long. The only thing I really found wrong with it was that it looked like, if I wasn’t careful, he might swallow my head. He was that kind of kisser, the type that acts as if they are trying to ingest you. I pictured myself disappearing headfirst into the winding tracts of Guy’s large intestine. It wasn’t a pretty picture and didn’t help me feel sexy. Still, I was drunk, and he was warm, and it was cold outside. I tried to leave the car, but that wasn’t his plan. He pulled and tugged at me and kissed and kissed at me, my neck, my fingertips, my earlobe, my elbow—my elbow? It was his constantly taking an unnecessary and unwelcome last step—the tonsillectomy when a gentle probe is sufficient, the elbow when most men would stop at the earlobe—pushing the envelope of love, that kept me in my head, even though I was drunk, and lonely and inclined to be amorous.
Guy asked if he could come in, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. The Wellesley Inn wasn’t that sort of place. That’s what I was thinking, conveniently forgetting that the two of us weren’t teenagers sneaking around; we were adults old enough to have teenage children of our own. It was highly unlikely that the night clerk would even look at us as we walked through the lobby.
I stopped Guy with a hand on his sternum and looked into his eyes.
“Let’s just catch our breath for a minute,” I said. His eyes were shining with the look of a man whose little brain has already taken over. Even with my dearth of experience, I’d seen the little brain take over before.
“Please, Jane,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to be with you ever since the first moment I saw you on the mountain.”
I found that hard to believe. People don’t look their best in goggles. His enthusiasm eventually swayed me and I told him he could come in if he behaved himself in the lobby so we wouldn’t look suspicious.
Inside, Guy kept his hands at his sides as we walked toward the stairs. For all anyone could tell, we were a tired married couple ready to go upstairs to twin beds.
I thought about my sister Miranda and whether I should be doing this at all. She claimed to be over Guy and I believed her, but I felt that people who are really in love never do get over it, not completely.
I unlocked the door of my room and turned on the light.
“Were you in love with Miranda?” I asked Guy.
Guy sat on the four-poster bed.
“You sure know how to deflate a guy,” he said.
I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically or mentally. Either way, it probably wasn’t a good thing.
“No, I was never in love with her,” he said.
“But you acted like you were.”
“You weren’t there. She read too much into it.”
I went into the bathroom and got us both a glass of tepid water from the tap. We sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at Guy’s profile. As beautiful as Guy was, there was something about him that did not appeal to me and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Who knows what makes people attractive to each other? It could be something as simple as smell. Guy’s cologne was strong and sickly sweet.
He put his glass down on a side table, then took mine from my hand and put it down beside his. He pushed my shoulder until I was half lying, half sitting, and he started to unbutton my blouse. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he was someone else, someone I liked more. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them, he was scrambling out of his pants as if his feet were on fire. He wore jockey shorts and I think men in briefs look a little vulnerable, more boy than man.
His penis was purplish and rather enormous. Max wasn’t what you’d call diminutive, but Guy was the stuff of which porn stars are made, not that I’ve seen many porn stars, or any really—but I could imagine. Then I thought of Miranda again, and if I’d had a penis myself it would have collapsed like an empty balloon. I think maybe it was Guy’s unbridled delight in the whole process that made me wince. He was like the character Peter Sellers played in the Pink Panther movies. There was something so ridiculous in the poses he struck, something so creepy in the amorous glances he threw my way.
Still, I didn’t stop him. It was as if I was fascinated into shock, and it wasn’t until he was on top of me and his penis was knocking about in an attempt to find the right door that I decided I’d had enough.
I pushed him away. This, at first, had no impact. The mini-brain is so far from the large one that the ears can’t easily send it signals. I understood this with a sort of clinical patience.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was husky, almost a second voice, like a science fiction character with an alien living inside him.
“I want to stop,” I said. We learned this at Wellesley in our Health and Feminism class. “I want to stop” were magic words, known the world over to mean that if you continue, you do so at the peril of a criminal record.
Guy stalked into the bathroom, closed the door, and in a minute came out with a towel wrapped around his waist. He hadn’t lost his tumescence and his penis entered the room before he did.
I had put on my bathrobe, a new one, not the pink terry cloth. This one was black silk, and I don’t know why I bought it if not for a moment like this—whatever this moment was. This wasn’t going to be a moment of passion. It was more like a moment of passion denied, and you hardly needed black silk for that.
“I’m embarrassed,” I said. “Completely embarrassed.” And I was, partly because I was ridiculous enough to let this begin and then stop it—what thirty-eight-year-old did that? And the other more compelling reason for my shame was that he had seen me naked. Except for a few extra pounds, I wasn’t any more or less lumpy than your average thirty-eight-year-old. It wasn’t my body I was ashamed of, it was that I’d allowed him to come so close. The problem was that I didn’t want anyone, any man at all, to get that close to me unless I loved him. That was the embarrassing thing. I was a complete failure at promiscuity. It didn’t matter how drunk I was or how attractive Guy was. At that
moment, I was constitutionally incapable of having sex with someone I didn’t love. Only hours ago I hadn’t even wanted him to hug me, and now here we were.
I tried to explain it to him—to somehow paint myself out of the picture of prude extraordinaire and into something more along the lines of a woman of great discrimination and dignity. This was made harder by the fact that we had already rubbed around naked.
“You think it’s too fast?” he asked. He sat beside me on the bed and massaged my neck. It felt so good I almost reconsidered, but then I thought about the next morning—waking up with him, drinking coffee with him, trying to pretend we were more to each other than we were just because we’d performed a biological function in the night. It was better to stop now. What I didn’t know then was that Guy’s plans were long term, and his desires, as far as I was concerned, weren’t going to be satisfied by a hasty night of sex. “I like you, Jane. I think you’re smart, attractive, talented…and tonight I found out you were funny.”
“You think this is funny?” I asked. He laughed as if I’d just delivered a punch line.
“Not this. Not us, right now. You were funny at the college. You’re full of all kinds of wonderful things, and the problem is, you don’t seem to know it.”
That was a problem, and because I knew he had read me correctly, my heart flipped over. There is something enticing about a man who professes to know you better than you know yourself.
I had to get away.
When I told Priscilla that I’d be leaving for the Vineyard the next day, she tried to talk me out of it.
“Why would you do that? The Vineyard is horrible in winter. I thought you’d stay here until at least May. I was looking forward to it.”
She seemed to have forgotten that in the five nights I had been staying with her, she’d been occupied with Jason for four of them.
Still, it’s hard to remain angry with someone who likes you well enough to want you to stay with them for four months. Someone who is willing to provide you with a safe haven is as good as family (and in the case of mine, better).
“It’s silly. You don’t need to go to the Vineyard so early. Let me show you my new outfit,” Priscilla said. She was trying to distract me, but she knew me well enough to know that clothes were a bad way to get my attention.
I used to like how Priscilla dressed, but I saw her now with a different eye. Her obsession with Talbots looked less like good taste and more like a lack of imagination.
“Very nice,” I said about the outfit, “but I’m still going to the Vineyard.”
“I’ll see less of Jason. Would that work?”
“I need my own home, even if it’s a little box in the wind.”
“You’ll be very alone there, Greta Garbo, that’s for sure.”
“There’s my friend Isabelle. I’ve already called her.”
“Who?”
“Isabelle from college. The one with the long wavy hair.”
“Didn’t she leave before graduation?”
“Yes.”
“Because she was pregnant.”
“You do remember,” I said. Priscilla’s lack of memory was a ruse. Everyone remembered Isabelle. It was because she had been so promising. She came from a first-generation Portuguese family in Bridgewater. Her father had a bakery and made the best sourdough bread in Massachusetts, but they didn’t have much money. Still, Isabelle had won a full scholarship to Wellesley, then, right before graduation, she got pregnant, left school, moved to the Vineyard, and opened her own bakery.
Jimmy, Isabelle’s son, was almost seventeen now. He was looking at colleges himself. I saw them often when I was on the island and I suppose you could say that next to Priscilla, Isabelle was my closest friend. I often wished I’d asked Isabelle, instead of Priscilla, what I should have done that summer with Max. Isabelle wouldn’t have wanted me to move to California, but she never would have tried to keep me here. In the end, I never told her anything about it. It was silly to be so closemouthed. Maybe if I had talked to a friend about it, I would have gotten it out of my system—or maybe I would have had the courage to track Max down and tell him I had changed my mind.
I kept Priscilla and the rest of the family separate from Isabelle. She was the type of person who would be of no consequence to the Fortunes, and they would end up treating her that way even if they weren’t aware of it. I didn’t want Isabelle to have to deal with that. They knew about her, but they never asked me to invite her over, and I thought that was reason enough not to.
“I don’t know why you’d want to go down and shiver in the cold when you could stay here. We can go to museums, lectures, concerts. We can have a wonderful winter,” Priscilla said.
Of course Boston would be cold, too, but in Priscilla’s world the winter was one warm fire after another in many different venues. Whether she was visiting a friend, drinking at the Ritz, or rolling with Jason under a down comforter, her winters were sedentary and comfortable. Besides, winter is a wonderful season for a knitter. Wool feels so much better between your fingers when it’s cold outside.
All the things Pris offered, the things I had enjoyed all my life, no longer appealed to me. I wanted a windswept shore and my own company. Besides, I needed to get out of town before Guy tracked me down. I didn’t want to get into another weird situation. A woman my age should know her own mind, and until I did, I thought it best to stay away from him.
Chapter 27
Jane makes her escape to the island
Seeing Max again had opened up old wounds, and like a sick dog who hides under the porch, I wanted to go someplace I could nurse my injuries.
I drove off the ferry into a blustering island wind. My friend Isabelle had faxed me directions to the cottage. It all happened quickly, because the owners of the house were as desperate for the rent as I was to disappear.
Even on a cold gray day, the gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs make you think of fairy tales. If your life were a toy, this is where you’d live. The small houses are multicolored—lavender, white, green, orange, yellow, and purple. I drove past one with heart-shaped cutouts around the trim and another with intricate scrollwork. My house was blue with cathedral windows—a sanctuary. I parked the car, went to the door, and, as instructed, pulled the key out from under a ceramic garden gnome. The house was miniature but complete. I walked through the front room, decorated in wicker and white denim, and into the kitchen at the back. Someone had turned on the heat and filled the refrigerator with groceries. Isabelle.
I spent the afternoon unpacking. Instead of acting with my usual efficiency, I took it slow. I put my clothes into closets and drawers with a dreamy disregard for time. I listened to the radio for company. A commentator was reviewing Max’s new book. It wasn’t the first review I’d heard, but it was the nastiest. He called the book a “puerile puddle of palaver.” Obviously the critic was in love with the sound of words in his own mouth.
Max had been widely reproached for Post because, though Max was known for his humor and social satire, this time he had attacked a serious subject. They said he was obviously trying to write his “important” novel. Thirty-nine is a good age to try to write your “important” novel. This one was about a family on Long Island in the aftermath of 9/11. I could have told him this was a subject that should be avoided, if only because of the slew of stories I received that tried to say something about it and failed. Only time would make that subject somewhat manageable, and there hadn’t been enough of it. Maybe there never would be.
The book was selling well, based on Max’s reputation alone. There was also some talk of awards, so not everyone agreed that he’d reached over his head.
I took my copy of Post from the pile of books I’d brought to the island and put it on my night table.
That evening I met Isabelle and her son Jimmy at the Black Dog for dinner. Isabelle’s thick curly hair was tied back with a silver clasp. She didn’t look much older than she had on the day she left Wellesley. She had an innocence a
nd an energy about her. Though her life had not been easy, she always put a positive spin on it. Being bright and resourceful, she had known just what to do with the bakery to attract the wealthy islanders and tourists. Isabelle had been serving cappuccino and espresso long before expensive coffee chains became a blight on the landscape.
“I can’t believe you filled the refrigerator,” I said before even saying hello.
“Why not?”
I gave Jimmy a peck on the cheek. Last year when I saw him, he was a boy, but now he had the look of a man. He even held out my chair. I smiled at Isabelle. She gave me a proud-parent smile in return.
“No one in my own family would ever think to do anything like that for me.”
“No offense, Jane, but your family brings new levels of meaning to the term self-centered.”
I laughed. Jimmy looked at me like he didn’t know how having your family insulted could be so funny.
“How are they anyway?” Isabelle asked.
“Teddy and Miranda are in Palm Beach for the winter. Or, as they put it—they are wintering in Palm Beach. The truth is, they spent so much money we had to rent out our house to rebuild our capital.”
“The only reason I’m surprised,” Isabelle said, “is that I was under the impression that there was so much money to begin with, to go through it all would take a real effort.”
“That may be the only real effort they ever made,” I said. “Let’s just say that they had few frugal habits.”
We ordered hamburgers and clam chowder.
“We should keep that between ourselves,” I said. “They think they’re putting one over on everyone.” I felt foolish even as I said it, but Isabelle knew everything about everyone on the island, and although she never had bad intentions, she could sometimes be indiscreet.
The Family Fortune Page 18
