“You’d better get used to this if we’re going to pretend we’re married,” said Sally.
“Used to what?” said Andrew. He forced himself to look at her.
“Intimacy without sex,” she said, taking off Cathy’s dress. “Your wife has some very nice things, by the way.”
“What’s the boundary?”
“Get on the bed. On your front. I’ll massage your back a bit. You’re so tense I can feel it from here.”
Andrew did as he was told, discarding the towel as he got on the bed. Sally started to work on his shoulders. “You didn’t answer my question,” said Andrew into the pillow.
“Lie still. What question?”
“What’s the boundary between intimacy and sex?
“Orgasm,” she said. “Yours, that is.”
There was a brief pause in the conversation, as Sally worked her knuckles down Andrew’s spine. “Why did you put Cynthia on Shiva’s lap?” he said finally.
“To see what tension it created.”
“And the answer was?”
“Well, it didn’t seem to bother Joe at all. What did you observe? Nice ass, by the way.”
“Thanks.” That seemed the appropriate response.
“I am to some extent a connoisseur of bottoms,” said Sally cheerfully.
“Have you been in the spanking business?” said Andrew, surprising himself.
Sally paused briefly and then laughed. “No comment,” she said.
“I’m afraid I didn’t learn anything from your experiment with the seating arrangements,” he said. “I had a lot on my mind.”
“Of course you did,” said Sally. Just for a moment Andrew nearly swooned as her sympathy made his whole body relax. “But I need to ask you a few things about this weekend. Like, whose side are we on?”
“Ah,” said Andrew, spying safer ground. “Both sides. We are friends of the deal. I get a fee from both of them if it happens. My firm does, that is.”
“Is that the usual arrangement?”
“No. You normally work for one side or the other. But even then, your job can be helping your client agree to pay enough.”
“You only get paid if the deal happens?”
“Yes. That’s why it’s called a ‘success fee.’”
“So you’re giving advice but you aren’t at all disinterested?”
“Isn’t that how life works? No one’s disinterested.”
“Why so cynical?”
“Twenty years as an investment banker. You see the underside of people.”
“So how come you aren’t unfaithful?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“You’re afraid of me, that’s one way. You’re afraid of this situation.”
I’m not afraid, he wanted to say but didn’t. Just anxious. There was a lot at stake. But then, if he was to be honest, he’d been anxious his whole life.
“And Cathy told me what you’re like,” Sally continued.
“Annoying but virtuous?”
“Oh, she told me a lot more than that.”
“About what?”
“Your sex life, of course. What do you think women talk about?”
Never asked myself that question, Andrew said to himself.
“Cathy and I had a few glasses of wine after we got the house ready. I’d say she told me everything.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I think she found it quite cathartic, analysing you in a clinical way. Of course, she couldn’t have known this was going to happen.”
“No,” said Andrew, “though people often know more than they admit.”
“But in the event,” she said, “it’s useful background. For me, that is.” She said nothing for a while as she worked on the small of his back. His glutes were beginning to feel neglected. He wouldn’t mind it if she worked on them a bit – but he couldn’t think of an appropriate way to suggest it. “So when we get in bed tonight,” Sally said, “and I don’t roll over and touch you, I will know that I’m punching all your buttons.”
“Oh my,” said Andrew. “I’m paying you to torment me, am I?”
“And amuse your guests and keep your secrets.”
Somewhere in the house, the sound of showers running stopped. Sally stopped massaging him. “Think of it this way,” she said. “Suffering instructs.” She gave him a single smack on the bottom and stood up. It didn’t hurt. “Playful” would be a good description, he decided. Flirtatious?
Sally said she should probably take the first shower and thoughtfully draped his bath towel over him. He briefly considered calling Cathy’s mobile – it was, honestly, the first chance he’d had – but he hesitated. Her plane would have taken off, wouldn’t it? Not necessarily. He took refuge in the thought that Cathy had said he should concentrate on his guests – and that Sally would disapprove. No stepping out of character, she’d probably say. She’d never said she was an actress but it felt like she was. Or a director maybe. Something in show business.
She was doing a damn good job of being Cathy. Fact was, she did a better job of it than Cathy had recently. Now that he had his two billionaires under his roof he could acknowledge how worried he had been that Cathy was going to torpedo the event.
The thing was, Cathy could be totally charming when she liked the clients she was required to entertain. She’d hand out buckets and gardening trowels and announce a beachcombing contest – all treasures to be displayed at noon, extra points if you make up a good story about them – and he would get a glimpse of the girl he had met when she had a summer job as a nanny on the Jersey shore right after he graduated from college. His parents had had a house on the Jersey shore – well, they’d rented the same house every July.
Spit it out, he told himself: graduated from Harvard. Why should it have to be his fault he was proud of his accomplishments?
Sally came out of the shower, reminding Andrew briefly of the lost Venetia. “Nice breeze,” she said, standing in front of the open window without a towel. “I love the way the temperature falls as the sun goes down.”
“One of the benefits of being on an island,” said Andrew, hauling himself up and going into the bathroom to take his shower. “No man is an island” floated through his mind. Donne on death. His head was full of useless quotations the way some little boys knew baseball statistics.
“Don’t be long, sweetheart,” Sally called after him. As the door clicked shut his brain kicked up a sudden painful imagining of Cathy and Sally sitting at the kitchen table, exhausted from two cathartic days of scrubbing and cleaning, making a meal of bread and cheese and peaches, a bottle of red between them. I call him “sweetheart,” Cathy is saying. I make sure he buys new shirts when the old ones wear out – he has this belief that frayed shirts are an emblem of WASP high culture, of not needing to prove your social status – so I have to be sure he doesn’t look like an emeritus professor, which is not the path to fame and fortune in his profession – that’s if you can call it a profession rather than a branch of organised crime, as our daughter seems to feel – sorry, I’m wandering – anyway, I do what I can to make him happy, but I’m not sure it’s working any more.
The movie screen in Andrew’s head went blank before he heard Sally’s imagined response. The thought arose that perhaps Sally had murdered Cathy with the intention of taking her place. She was cool enough for it. Powerful wrists, which would be good for strangling. The idea seemed a bit clichéd, though. Andrew briefly glimpsed a Cockney policeman telling the suave detective that the heroine had been “done away with” – but that was replaced with the realisation that Cathy only called him “sweetheart” when she was unhappy.
Don’t be silly. Just think about making dinner work, he instructed himself, as he turned on the shower. What do Joe and Shiva need to discover? Or their stunning wives?
That could be tricky. He remembered Cynthia looking unhappy at the airport. Cathy got that look sometimes, when she didn’t know he was watching her – biting her lip, a million mile
s away. He hoped Cynthia wasn’t going to be Banquo’s ghost all weekend – just to weave in another of Shakespeare’s plays – the guest who wasn’t there, the product of a guilty conscience. There was nothing that could have happened yet to make Cynthia unhappy – nothing Andrew was responsible for anyway. Although on the other hand, he supposed he was responsible for Cathy’s whole unhappy life.
3
Andrew always did the placement for dinners, which could be quite an enjoyable challenge if you had a dozen guests, changed people’s seats after the main course, had to let undistinguished guest B, who might have some business for you and was dying to meet guest A, sit near enough to talk to him, had to let guest A, who was the star of the night, sit near enough to guest X, who was either beautiful or amusing, to enjoy himself and accept your invitations in the future, and mustn’t ask anyone to sit next to his own wife because that was middle-class. But with only six people at the table there was no problem to solve. The stunning wives went on either side of him, the billionaires on either side of Sally, and since everyone could talk to everyone, you didn’t need to move people. One tiny issue was that, with only four guests, one husband and wife had to sit to the right of both the host and the hostess, which raised a question of status. But Andrew thought that should be easy in this case. Joe didn’t care about status. The only thing he believed in was money and he treated his fifteen billion dollars as a happy accident. It didn’t matter to him whether Shiva was worth ten billion or twenty billion. Or at least he wanted you to think so. And Shiva’s wealth was so enshrouded with holding companies and tax structures and the claims of litigious half-brothers, that even Forbes admitted its ranking of the Indian was a guess. So Lady Rosemary would go on his right and Cynthia on his left. Done.
Andrew allowed himself to think about Rosemary for another minute, though, as he dressed slowly and Sally presumably readied dinner. He’d told Joe that Rosemary was Helen of Troy, essentially – not that Joe would have understood the reference. But Helen had been a young woman when she eloped with Paris and “launched a thousand ships,” as Marlowe put it. Rosemary was in her late thirties, just a bit younger than Cathy. Andrew had looked it up. She was becoming transcendentally beautiful in the way some fortunate women do in early middle age. He’d seen her once before, by candlelight at that dinner in London. This afternoon he had studied her in waning sunlight, as they’d all been fussing with the luggage and the expensive cheese and who should sit on whom. She stood so straight. Her features were so perfect. But there was irony in her smile. There were tiny smile lines at the corners of her eyes. She’d allowed herself to be sunburnt in her youth, and it was starting to show. Standing next to her husband, pale pink and mahogany, she reminded Andrew of a prize-winning rose surrendering its petals, scattering beauty and sorrow on the table where it has been displayed. Not in Andrew’s league, to be clear about it.
The only problem with Andrew’s seating plan was that Cynthia didn’t come down for dinner. Or not when everyone else did. “She’s doing yoga,” Joe apologised to the others, who’d stood up in response to the hostess’s announcement that dinner was served.
“She says being in that little tiny airplane we came in gave her a crick in the neck,” Joe continued. “Cyn comes from Texas and she thinks everything should be big.”
Andrew didn’t have a fix yet on what his guests would consider vulgar. He prayed silently that Sally wouldn’t say anything salacious, but she didn’t even smile. Lady Rosemary, on the other hand, laughed out loud. So much for graceful surrender. “Kick her, please, Andrew,” said Shiva. Rosemary subsided.
“Anyway,” said Joe, “Cyn insists a couple of dozen pretzel postures will be required before she’s fit company for you nice people. So I think we should start, and when she comes downstairs we just pretend she isn’t late. In my experience that’s the best strategy.”
“When did you work that strategy out and would you explain it to Shiva?” said Rosemary.
“About the third day of our honeymoon,” said Joe, “but I doubt I could teach Shiva anything about handling women.” Joe didn’t actually wink at his fellow billionaire, but it felt like he had.
“You are too kind,” said Shiva, accepting the compliment. “But to me, what makes women delightful is that I can never figure them out.”
“What he means,” said Rosemary, sitting down at the table, “is that I can beat him at chess.” She’d taken the place of honour automatically, Andrew observed.
“I’ll bet he lets you win,” said Joe.
Rosemary didn’t respond to that.
“If it would help,” said Sally, “I could give Cynthia a bit of a massage. Andrew can tell you that I do that pretty well.”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Joe, studying Sally with genuine interest. “But it would just encourage her.”
“Yoga is best,” said Shiva, as if that would settle the matter, and happily it did.
Cynthia descended before they’d finished the crab salad. She was wearing a cream-colour combination of slacks and what Andrew would have called a tee shirt except that it was obviously cashmere. Shiva stood up and pulled out her chair. “Oh, thank you,” she murmured. Her gold chain bracelet clinked on the table as she sat down. Sally went to retrieve her plate from the kitchen. Andrew reached for the champagne beside him in the ice bucket.
“Nothing to drink, please, Andrew,” said Cynthia. She’s going to play innocent to Rosemary’s sophisticated, Andrew decided.
“Another affectation, if you ask me,” said Joe.
“On the contrary,” said Shiva. “Abstinence is holiness.” Andrew noticed that Shiva hadn’t touched his wine.
“Well, I can take it or leave it,” said Joe. “I never drink when I’m doing business. But this weekend’s just fun, right Shiva?”
The Indian had already turned to Cynthia. “The right strategy, if I may suggest, is to let them fill your glass but then not touch it. Otherwise people keep offering it to you and you keep having to refuse, which seems impolite.”
Andrew guessed that Cynthia was younger than Rosemary. She was more conventionally beautiful, but less alluring. It was hard to know what you really thought of someone you saw all the time on television. Andrew suspected her late arrival had more to do with getting her hair and make-up right than it did with muscle spasms, but perhaps he was being unkind.
“So Andrew,” said Rosemary, cutting through, “who do you like in the Senate race this fall?”
“You mean in Connecticut?” A new worry blossomed in Andrew’s brain.
“No,” she said. “Massachusetts. Nantucket is part of Massachusetts, isn’t it? And there’s a Senate race, I’m told.”
“There is not. But I vote in New York. We vote in New York. That’s our primary residence.” He wanted to get away from Massachusetts. The Governor of Massachusetts, who would probably challenge for the Senate seat in two years, had been a classmate. He’d half promised, which was the most you ever got out of George, to stop by for a drink on Sunday, which Andrew had assumed would excite his guests. Some people thought the Governor would run for President eventually. The problem was that George knew Cathy. They came from the same classy suburb of Boston.
“Rosemary has been reading the newspapers,” said Shiva, as if that were an odd thing to do. “Her grandmother taught her to do that in preparation for any dinner party. You mustn’t run out of things to talk about, the old countess taught her. My grandmother, on the other hand, had no opinions regarding dinner parties. She refused to go to them. She regarded eating as obscene…”
“Was she anorexic?” said Cynthia, interrupting.
“Probably,” said Rosemary.
“She did, however,” Shiva continued, “teach me to prepare for any visit by contemplating the spirit of the place. So I have been reading about the pilgrims. Massachusetts was founded by pilgrims, which makes it a holy place.”
“Oh, I like that,” said Cynthia, looking at Shiva.
“Nantucket was founded
by Quakers, actually,” said Andrew, forgetting himself. “They didn’t get along with the Puritans.”
“Joe would have been a good Quaker,” said Cynthia quietly, keeping a straight face as Shiva laughed.
“Do you have any temples on Nantucket, Andrew?” said Rosemary. “Shiva will be happy to visit them if you have any temples.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have any temples,” said Andrew.
“The whaling museum,” ventured Shiva. “The slaughter of majestic mammals.”
“The courage of sailors,” said Rosemary.
“Well, whatever it is, people tend to visit it,” said Andrew.
“Visit what?” said Joe, turning to Sally.
“The whaling museum.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Gotta see the whaling museum. Lotta money in whaling once.”
“Joe reduces everything to money,” said Cynthia. “He turns reality into physics.”
Andrew thought that was quite a witty comment, but no one was laughing.
“Or biology,” said Joe a bit defensively.
“Or tax planning,” said Shiva, which made Joe laugh. “But you are right, Cynthia. There are many ways of apprehending reality. You must take the right arrow from your quiver, depending on what beast you pursue.”
“Do you hunt?” said Cynthia. “Joe’s not much good with guns.”
“I have shot a lot of birds,” said Shiva. “Europeans like you to do that. Also deer.” He paused, and it seemed to Andrew that he was studying Cynthia. How far a shot? What adjustment to make for the wind? There were so many ways the weekend could blow up. “In my youth,” said Shiva, “I shot a tiger. Now it is forbidden.”
“Oh, I would love to see a tiger. In the wild, I mean.”
“That could be arranged,” said Shiva. “Joe could come too. He would not need a gun.”
Cynthia looked across the table at Joe. She seemed to Andrew, if only for a moment, like a child asking to go to the circus – asking with the same innocent air that made so many Americans want to watch her on television while they had breakfast, the same innocent air that made her a dangerous interviewer. It was all an act, Andrew realised.
Nantucket Page 3
