What was that supposed to mean?
The way they had now both embraced the convention of acting as though he wasn’t there suggested there was something they were trying to tell him. Or Rosemary was trying to tell him.
Or maybe she was just filling space with sound. She hadn’t expected him to come to the store at all, so she had to be improvising. She’d had a plan to have a private conversation, which Andrew had frustrated. So now they were playing an impromptu game of talking about Andrew and pretending he wasn’t there. They were teasing him.
Andrew was playing along because...well, perhaps the best explanation is that he did so automatically. In twenty years as an investment banker he had trained himself to shut up and listen when a chief executive started to talk, to hear especially the messages the speaker wasn’t conscious of sending. Not everyone in his profession had acquired that skill, which was remarkable. If you could learn what the man across from you thought or wanted, you could tailor your pitch accordingly and improve your chances of being hired.
Sitting there in silence, the message Andrew thought he heard being inadvertently conveyed by his companions was that their understanding with each other was superior to anything Andrew might think he had with Rosemary. George and Rosemary had sex appeal beyond what an ordinary mortal like Andrew could offer or withstand. The Governor quote had to get Janis off the island unquote, so he and Rosemary could have Olympian sex.
Pretending to care about Judy was a clever improvisation. It was a natural subject for Rosemary to raise with the girl’s father. And it was something that would be awkward to talk about in proximity to either Judy or Shiva, so it was a plausible reason for her to have wanted to be alone with George. But she couldn’t really care about Judy.
“You believe in dreams,” said Rosemary. “Joe believes in reality. Shiva believes in his own divinity…”
“And Andrew?”
“He’s been through a lot in the past few days,” said Rosemary. “He may not know where his head is. But if he does, I wish he’d tell me.”
“Andrew believes in work,” said the Governor. “Always has.”
“Worse than that,” said Rosemary. “He believes in virtue.”
“But look,” said George, having nearly exhausted his capacity for thinking about anyone else’s problems. “It is quite unlikely I can deter Judy from going to India. She’s a very determined person. You should have seen her in the study.”
“I have no intention of going into that study,” said Rosemary. “What happens there is men’s business, even if your daughter and her friend choose to involve themselves.
“What you must do about your daughter,” Rosemary continued, “is to show concern. If she’s unhappy a year from now, she’ll like it that you paid attention. She’ll talk to you. Look at poor Andrew. He doesn’t seem to have paid sufficient attention to his daughters and now one of them hates him.”
“I thought that was supposed to be a phase,” said George.
“One other suggestion,” said Rosemary, abandoning the matter of Eleanor, “and then I’m done. Ask Janis’s advice.” The Governor didn’t respond. Rosemary offered no explanation. “You stay here,” said Rosemary, opening the car door.
Maybe he and George were supposed to talk. George must have thought so because he kept clearing his throat.
“You realise what’s going on here?” George asked him.
“Probably not,” said Andrew.
“She’s feeling guilty about leaving her husband.”
“But her husband is having an affair with Judy – which she herself encouraged.”
“Maybe I should have said she’s feeling nervous about leaving Shiva. She’ll go back to New York with him,” said George. “You watch. And she’s persuading herself that she’s doing it out of concern for Judy.”
Andrew didn’t like what George was saying, but George had always known more about women than he did. Or at least he went out with prettier girls. Frighteningly beautiful girls, in fact. Like Rosemary. Andrew didn’t really believe George and Rosemary were plotting to jump into bed together, but something was going on.
They sat in silence. Andrew was reminded of the scene in The Godfather, where a thug in the back seat strangles the thug in the front seat with a piano wire. A hand grenade of anger exploded in Andrew’s brain. “You know a lot about women, don’t you George?”
“No. I’ve just slept with a lot of them.”
“But you think Rosemary is going back to Shiva?”
“I do, but it doesn’t prove anything that I think that. And Andrew, I should have said this long ago: do not envy me my quote success with women. It is as much a burden as a blessing. I have never had a successful relationship that lasted more than a few months, and I don’t expect I ever will. Once I possess a woman, her fascination has a half-life. But these lovely girls keep presenting themselves, and when one does it makes me irrationally hopeful.”
“You get manic.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t feel stupid every time?
“You know, I married Lydia because she didn’t fascinate me. I’d finally learned how to work hard – in law school – and I said to myself, what I needed, as a future politician, was not a dream marriage but a workmanlike marriage. That was the word I used. Be like those clever Indians. Marry someone suitable and don’t ask for too much. My marriage to Lydia was an arranged marriage, only I arranged it myself.”
“It didn’t work.”
“Obviously. I’m stupid about love even when I am not in love.”
More silence. Finally, Andrew asked the question he had been avoiding: “Are you planning to sleep with Rosemary?”
“Of course not,” said George. “I never plan anything. Sex is something that happens to me. But Andrew, in thirty years of friendship, have I ever stolen a girl from you?”
“No.”
Rosemary got into the car and George drove the three of them back in silence. Andrew had had a dream, the previous night, he now remembered. In parts of the dream he knew he was dreaming and in parts he thought he was awake. Like most dreams, it was confusing, though no doubt there was insight to be extracted from it, provided you had the energy. The fact that something made no sense didn’t prove it wasn’t valid. Dreams are a category of reality.
One of the ways Andrew had succeeded on Wall Street
– this was clear in the dream but also true – was by not taking himself too seriously. This was one of the reasons his technical boss so pissed him off. The man pretended. First of all he pretended to be smart and in charge and important. The fact that he was all these things only made it worse. Second, he pretended to know what was going on – or as black Americans in the movies sometimes put it, what was going down. Which he didn’t. The reason Andrew hadn’t grown up with a house on the Jersey shore, only an understanding that they could rent the same one every July, was that his father worked for the government, which of course didn’t pay much. And about the only satisfactory thing about his relationship with his closed-up father was that when he was sixteen he had realised that his father did something secret and important, and he’d never asked his father any questions, and his father had appreciated it. If your father’s an intelligence officer, not asking questions is a way of showing him respect.
When it occurred to Andrew, in his dream, that something of a spy nature was going down, he could only laugh at himself for thinking that. He was a middle-aged investment banker. His father had been dead for ten years. There could not be shadows in his garden.
But there were. Andrew knew a lot about shadows. Shadows in the market were what made deals possible.
In the dream, he’d been asleep, and had been awakened by an absence of sound. One of the reasons he knew he was not making up the threat was that when he whispered in Rosemary’s ear that there were unexplained people in the house she put her hand on his mouth, very gently.
“Do you have a knife?” he’d asked her.
&n
bsp; “I’m not Rosemary,” said Janis. “Remember?”
“Sorry,” he’d said.
She didn’t go on about his forgetting who he was in bed with, which was just another example of her excellence. It would not have been a good moment for a lot of arm-waving. Also, he didn’t think he’d spoken either name.
“There’s a wine glass,” said Janis, “if that’s helpful.”
“Umm,” said Andrew.
Improvise a weapon, Andrew’s father had told him, in a rare unguarded moment. So he got out of bed, delicately broke off pieces of the rim of the glass, and went into the hall, where some people he didn’t know had just finished dealing with an individual who probably wasn’t a Unitarian.
Perhaps the lesson of the dream was that you just had to deal with things. “Wine glass,” said someone whose face he never saw. “Good thinking.”
Andrew went back into the bedroom he seemed to be sharing with Janis and let her hold him until he stopped shaking. “Who were they after?” she said finally. “And well done, by the way.”
“Shiva, I suppose,” he said. “I think there was only one of them.”
“There is never only one,” said Janis. “And George is also an obvious target.”
They lay in each other’s arms for a bit. It had not previously occurred to Andrew that she was the Governor’s protection detail. This did raise a question though: why had she let Andrew go into the hall? Perhaps to help him maintain the edge Wall Street required.
“Do I need to do anything else?” said Andrew.
“Given that you’re still alive, no.”
When he woke up, it took Andrew a minute to remember that none of what he thought he remembered had happened. It was a dream. Dreams were poems, according to Rosemary. When they pulled up at his house, he forgot his dream for the second time.
George said he needed to talk to Janis and went up to the study. Presumably he intended to consult her about Judy, as Rosemary had “suggested.” Rosemary said she needed to find “Cynthia Jane.” She told Andrew he was in charge of lunch and walked away. Another command. Sally said she’d help but Andrew ignored her offer and immersed himself in hamburger cookery, which he was actually pretty good at.
Shiva materialised in the kitchen. He’d been lying on his bed, wide awake, not having died but having slept for no more than twenty minutes. “Where’s Judy?” he asked.
“Out in the garden, talking to Joe,” said Sally. She continued to hang around.
“And Cathy?” said Shiva.
“Back in her room,” said Sally.
“I suppose at some stage you’ll be wanting to get your clothes,” said Andrew. Knowing she was a prostitute made him want to be polite to her, but he feared it kept sounding like he was telling her to leave.
“Mostly I’ve been wearing Cathy’s,” she said. “My own things are in the servant’s room – so let me know when it would be convenient for me to go in there.
“But no hurry,” she added. “I assume I’ll be here until tomorrow or Tuesday. There will be a lot of clean-up. It won’t be hard to get a mid-week plane ticket, will it Andrew? Or if you and Cathy are flying to New York, I could drive your car to the ferry and take it back there for you later.”
Andrew found this speech remarkable. Joe was sitting in a far corner of the garden, trying to figure out how to make Sally both rich and happy, while Sally reassumed the role of domestic servant. And like a good domestic servant, she was ignoring the fact that Cathy and Andrew were in the process of separating. She was ignoring everything that had happened in the past two days, if you thought about it. “Maybe you should set the table,” he told her.
Minutes passed. Andrew made a tossed salad, made hamburger patties, thought about his daughters. One was angry and one was not. Florence had always been accommodating, even when she was three years old. If you told the two of them, “Change of plans. We’re not going to the circus today after all,” Florence would look up at you like an angel and say, “Next week?” Eleanor would turn bright red and break a lamp.
In a corner of his consciousness, he saw Sally go out onto the porch, stare at the ocean for a while, sit down in one of the wicker chairs. The thought floated past that she was probably exhausted from the burden of pretending to be Cathy, and now that Cathy had returned, from the burden of pretending everything was fine. Was he supposed to do something about that – and if so, what?
On Friday, Sally had had control of him. “Suffering instructs,” she had blithely told him, and it was clear who would be doing the suffering. Now he had control of her. She was a supplicant, asking to be given a chore to do so she wouldn’t feel awkward. “Control” was a word, and a concept, that sometimes had erotic content, but just now it didn’t seem to. Just now it had to do with the accidents that control our lives. Andrew had married Cathy because he thought he ought to, even though abortions could be legally obtained. Cathy had seemed to be keen on the idea. Neither of them had had a clue about the other – and they chose to regard their foolishness as romantic.
Cathy had turned out to have both of their daughters’ temperaments at once. She went along, and then was angry that she had, which produced in Andrew an endless cycle of hope and disappointment. Shiva was right – was it Shiva or someone else? – right that we have several natures, which “manifest” at different times. He might have added that we have alternative fates, which take control at different times. Andrew didn’t know much about Indian philosophy. Perhaps he should look into it. It occurred to him in a languorous way that perhaps everyone at the house party was part of one collective consciousness. This was succeeded by the less peaceful thought that in a collective consciousness, everyone would share everyone else’s happiness but also everyone else’s pain.
15
As if to demonstrate this proposition, everything then happened at once.
George reappeared. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Can’t someone else worry about the hamburgers?”
“They’ll be ready in a couple of minutes,” said Andrew.
“No one but you will be ready for lunch in a couple of minutes,” said George.
“What am I supposed to do, then – take them off the grill half cooked and finish them later? That works with steak but not with hamburgers.” He might have added that George’s co-conspirator Rosemary had insisted he start making lunch, but just then Rosemary came in.
“You realise that young woman is sitting on the porch weeping?” she said.
“Sally?” said Andrew.
“Of course,” said Rosemary.
“I need to talk to you, old friend,” said the Governor in that famously persuasive voice he had. He wasn’t interested in Sally’s problems.
Cathy burst into the kitchen. “Andrew,” she said without preliminaries, “Florence is engaged. She just called. I said you’d call her back right away.” She was radiant.
“His name is Richard, right?” said Andrew.
“Of course it is, you silly man,” said Cathy. She was ten years younger.
Rosemary turned away and went outside again. She wouldn’t have liked that flashback to a happy marriage.
“I’d better call,” said Andrew. He handed the Governor the hamburger turner.
“I left my phone in our bedroom,” said Cathy. “Just hit ‘recent calls.’” Our bedroom.
“I am not a hamburger chef,” said George to the retreating Andrew.
As he went up the stairs, he thought he heard Cathy saying, “Be a good sport, George,” which would have made him laugh if he hadn’t been so full of uncertainty. No one had ever gotten George to do anything.
At the top of the stairs he heard quiet sobbing. It was coming from the tiny study. He could hear it through the door. His good angel told him he couldn’t ignore it. Janis – he assumed it was Janis – was in the tiny study in service of the deal, in service of his fees. She was in Nantucket serving the Governor. Whatever had just passed between them had made George need to talk to Andrew. Flore
nce was presumably happy. She could wait five minutes. He opened the study door.
Janis looked up. “I’ll be all right in a bit,” she said. “I do apologise. No, come in. It’s your house.” She wiped her eyes. Andrew closed the door. He sat down across the desk from her. “The Concert of Nantucket has hit a speed bump,” she said, attempting a laugh.
“Go on,” said Andrew.
“I guess I thought I would be part of the deal,” she said, “after Lydia’s dramatic appearance.”
“Do you want a hug?” said Andrew impulsively. He probably knew what she was going to tell him.
“Yes, but I’m not entitled to one,” said Janis. She’d almost recovered her competent professional tone. “Let me explain.”
“Not required,” said Andrew. He felt foolish having offered to hug her, but she didn’t seem to hold it against him.
“If I tell you what happened, I can put it behind me. And you’re easier to talk to than anyone else.” She gathered herself together. “I mistakenly assumed, based on Lydia’s professed readiness to let the Governor divorce her – rather than the other way round – that what happened last night could be the start of something. The Governor and I would gradually ‘come out’ as…good friends. At the appropriate moment, we would become more than that. Publicly, that is. Sounds silly when I say it, but girls have dreams.
“I was startled when he and Rosemary went to the store the minute Lydia left. He should have wanted to talk to me.”
“You and George did sleep together last night, right?” said Andrew, remembering his dream.
“As did you and Lady Rosemary,” said Janis.
“Doesn’t sex trump talking?”
“Yes and no,” said Janis.
Andrew knew it was absurd to let doubts about Rosemary creep into his own brain.
“I knew it was absurd to worry about the Governor going off with Rosemary,” said Janis. “And I am very good at not worrying about things I can’t do anything about. So I sat up here drafting.”
“You didn’t share your worries with Judy?”
“Of course not,” said Janis. “She was glowing with happiness. I sent her to quiz Joe about pre-nups. But then the Governor reappeared and began explaining why Judy shouldn’t go away with Shiva. Like he was Judy’s father or something.”
Nantucket Page 18
