by Jean Stone
Yes, he said to himself, he was a professional. And he would start with the boat trip. It was, after all, an ideal chance for “Real Women” research: the city sophisticate, Jo, embarking in a rowboat because some guy had said she didn’t have enough adventure in her life.
Andrew got up, threw on his denim jacket, and decided he’d show her some adventure, if he didn’t drown first.
Martha Holland must have spent too much time hanging out with the ghost of Lady Aitken and her otherworld powers. How else could she have picked up on Andrew’s interest in Jo?
“You two have a good time,” she’d said as she untied the small boat and pushed it from the dock. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Then she winked at Andrew.
When they were out of earshot, Jo laughed. “She thinks we’re lovers,” she said. “Isn’t that cute?”
Yeah, real cute. The truth was, Andrew was so focused on staying alive he could barely think about Jo, who now sat in the rowing position because she (thank God) had begged Andrew to let her row for a while. She wore jeans today, yellow rubber boots, and a thick fisherman sweater. They both wore the predictable god-awful orange life vests, courtesy of Martha Holland. Andrew wasn’t convinced, however, that if the boat capsized, a hunk of canvas-covered foam would hold up his six feet, one hundred and eighty-five pounds.
He sat at the back of the boat (or was it the front?) facing Jo. He gripped the sides of rough, raw wood, and tried to act as if this was fun.
“We must have a barge here on the lake,” Jo said as she stroked the water with the flat wood oars.
“‘A barge’?” He leaned first to the right, then to the left, trying to adapt to the gentle sway of the vessel.
“For fireworks. For the Bensons. It will look incredible from the castle.”
“Oh,” Andrew said. “Yes. Good idea, matey.” He attempted to laugh, but that didn’t work. He picked up a small stick that floated on the water. He dragged it over the surface, studying the small ripples, trying not to think about how deep Laurel Lake was.
A short time passed, then Jo quietly said, “I guess you haven’t done much of this.”
Had the fact that he’d seemed paralyzed been her first clue? “I’m a city kid,” he admitted with a smile. No sense in adding that the only time he’d been on a boat was the Staten Island Ferry with his fifth-grade class, and then he’d stayed inside because of that swimming thing. No sense in adding that the closest he’d been to this much water was when Patty had the hot tub installed on the terrace of their high-rise apartment.
“I can’t imagine what that was like,” Jo said. “I grew up here, playing with snakes and frogs and eating fresh strawberries in June and blueberries in August.”
He grinned and loosened his grip just a little. “We had fresh fruit in the city,” he said. “It was called the Produce Department.” He watched her now, with the sun on her face. She wore no makeup that day, none that was detectable. She didn’t need any. Her skin was creamy and smooth and lightly bronzed from the leftover summer. He dropped his gaze back to the water.
“You know so much about our lives,” Jo said, “but you’ve said so little about yours.”
“Mine?” he asked. Was that a squeak in his voice? “Ha,” he said, trying to mask his sudden discomfort, hustling his brain cells to come up with an answer. “There’s little to tell.” Little he could tell, was more like it.
He thought of the many times that, as a journalist, Andrew had reported that it wasn’t the lies that ruined a career/appalled a nation/sent someone to jail; it wasn’t the lies, it was the cover-up.
Nixon.
Clinton.
Martha Stewart.
Andrew David Kennedy?
He closed his eyes and tried to sync with the rocking motion. “Let’s see,” he said slowly. “I was born in Manhattan, an only child of two doctors who’d had me too late.” Yes, that sounded good.
“‘Too late’?” Jo asked.
“Well, too late to be real parents. I often thought I was a hurry-up baby. You know, ‘Hurry up and get pregnant before the clock runs out and we’re old and wish we’d had at least one.’ ”
He thought he sounded rather amusing, but Jo stopped rowing and said, “Andrew, that’s terrible.”
He opened his eyes. “It wasn’t so bad. They both worked long hours taking care of the poor. But we had a great doorman who looked after me. And there was a young couple on our floor who didn’t have kids but claimed they liked being surrogate parents to me.” He didn’t mention that the young couple had been John and Irene Benson, or that John had become his mentor, often taking Andrew with him to whatever studio or newsroom or magazine he was working with, a media mogul even at a young age. It was then that Andrew found journalism, then that he’d been told he had the good looks to do network.
Of course, he couldn’t tell her those parts.
“So that’s it?” Jo asked. “What about college? When did you decide to become a journalism professor?”
He sucked in his lip because he—the man who led two lives—hated to lie. “I worked in the city at first,” he said as evasively as he dared. “Then Cassie came into my life and I decided she might have a better upbringing out here in the country. Winston College had an opening . . . and here we are.” It was sort of the truth.
“You have no family? Your parents are . . . gone?”
“They both lived past eighty. But it was pretty amazing. They’d been married sixty years, then they died less than six weeks apart.”
“How sad,” Jo said.
“Sad? I thought it was neat to have been that devoted.”
She shook her head. “Sad that you have no one.”
She meant, of course, that she thought it was sad that he had no partner, no man in his life. “I have Cassie,” he said, “and now I have the four of you. What more could a guy want?”
She smiled a half smile. “Maybe he wants to row. My arms are getting tired.”
Before Andrew knew what had happened, Jo had set down the oars, stood up and stretched, and tiptoed toward him with the grace of a gymnast.
Oh, shit.
He stood up on one leg, then on the other. He wobbled. He laughed. “I’m not sure about this sudden transfer of power,” he tried to joke. The boat jiggled beneath him. Beneath them.
“Stay to my right,” she said, taking him by the arms and looking into his eyes. “Steady now.”
He tried to be steady, really he did. But before Andrew knew it, either he or the boat had wobbled too far, and Jo toppled to the bottom and he toppled, too, and he fully expected that next would come a mouthful of water and the scenes of his life flashing before him.
He heard a loud crack, followed by a series of splinters beneath him.
And then he landed on her, half on, half off her, really, their bodies separated only by their orange-covered foam vests, their faces separated only by a kiss.
12
She laughed.
Between that spark of a second when their faces touched and when Andrew had the chance to say a few words; between that flicker of an instant when his thoughts caught up with what had happened and when he knew this was the time, this was the moment, the one God-given opportunity for him to lay his lips on hers and taste her mouth and her tongue and her sweet breath and to disclose his true colors and his heterosexualness, Jo laughed.
“Well,” he said, then awkwardly maneuvered from his post-sex-like position, rolling from her body so the poor woman could breathe.
“Well, indeed,” Jo said, still laughing. She managed to rise to a seated position; she managed to not look disheveled, but beautiful still. “Let that be a lesson to those of us who’ve forgotten we’re no longer kids and that it’s been a while since we’ve rowed a boat.”
Andrew just smiled. “Are you all right?” he asked. “God, I’m so sorry.”
Jo nodded and half crawled back to the place where she’d been sitting. She pulled herself onto the plank, looked around, then back at Andrew. “W
ell, I’m all right except for one minor problem.”
“Which is? . . .”
She reached down and presented him with one of the oars. Or at least with two halves of one oar. “We seem to be impaired,” she said, then nodded toward the water. “And our other one went overboard.”
His eyes moved from the broken oar—the obvious culprit that accounted for the splintering crack beneath his weight—out to the water, where the matching oar, though still intact, drifted in the opposite direction.
“Well,” he said. He was stalling for time. She probably expected him to come up with a solution, because, gay or not, he was the man, wasn’t he?
“Well, how are you at paddling with your hands?” she asked.
“All the way to the spa?”
Jo shielded her eyes against the Indian summer sun that didn’t feel as nice as it had only moments ago. “It’s closer than going back to the castle. Our only other choice is to sit here and wait for another ship to pass.”
It took him a second to realize that was a joke, that Jo wasn’t angry with him. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “It was my fault.”
“Just a little maritime accident,” she said. She appeared to be studying the shoreline, where tall, looming pines crept up out of the water.
“We’re close enough to shore,” she said, “that one of us could swim for help.”
Well, he supposed he should have expected that, what with the way this day, this life, seemed to be going for him. He sighed. “I guess the swimmer would have to be you,” he said, his eyes closing, waiting for his humiliation to surface.
“No!” Jo said. “I’m not going to leave you alone in the boat. You’re a city kid, remember?”
Oh, God, he thought. She actually thought it would be easier to be the swimmer than the one left behind. “Not to worry,” he said. “I have plenty of water.” He tapped the edge of the cooler that Cassie had reminded him to bring. “Besides,” he added, nodding toward land, “I’ll hardly be welcome at the spa. That man-thing, remember? Imagine if I wander into a Pilates class dripping wet and covered with seaweed.”
Jo laughed. “It’s a lake. There’s no seaweed. A little algae, maybe. No seaweed.”
But he shook his head. “It’s settled,” he said. “You swim. I’ll go down with the ship.”
She smiled and asked, “Are you sure?” as if she had the better end of the algae-covered stick.
“Quite,” Andrew replied, folding his arms, staking the old wooden boat as his turf.
She unbuckled her life vest, then slipped her arms through it. She leaned down and tugged off her yellow boots. “Well, then, I won’t want these weighing me down,” she said with a laugh. Then Jo stood up, set her feet slightly apart, reached down and quickly pulled her sweater up over her head. She shook out her hair while Andrew tried to breathe.
The white cotton knit shell clung to her breasts the way he would have liked to. Then, with another small smile, she unbuttoned the top of her jeans, unzipped the fly, and slid the denim down to her ankles.
He flinched. He forced himself to look away, but not before he saw the long, lean, tanned legs and the clean whiteness of bikini panties looking back at him.
And then Jo turned sideways and plunged into the water.
The water was cool, cold, actually. Maybe the chill would help her come to her senses.
But as Jo sliced the surface and headed toward the shoreline, she couldn’t push the questions from her mind: Had Andrew almost kissed her?
And what was worse, had she wanted him to?
She turned her head to one side, took another breath, and kept swimming.
They were learning to make Spinach-Mango Insalata—a fancy Italian name for “salad.” Elaine was certain they’d served one like it at McNulty’s in Saratoga: baby spinach leaves, crisp arugula, toasted pecans, and mandarin sections, all laced with a parsley vinaigrette.
Presentation is everything, her father often said. She wondered if Lily learned that from him.
She chuckled again, amused by the unexpected humor emerging from her. Which was why, when a familiar voice called out her name, interrupting her enjoyable task, Elaine was first annoyed, then quickly alarmed, when she saw the intruder was Jo. In a Laurel Lake bathrobe. With soaking wet hair that was glued to her scalp like Liza Minnelli’s in Cabaret.
Elaine dropped the colander. “Jo! What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” She maneuvered through the counters where half a dozen other women were busy with their insalatas. She wiped her hands on her Laurel Lake apron as she went.
Jo was shaking her head. “Nothing’s wrong. Andrew and I came for a surprise visit. We got a little sidetracked.” She laughed. She said she’d asked the first person she saw if she knew Lily or Elaine: She’d been given a robe then directed to the kitchen. She opened the robe, revealing wet underwear. “It turned out to be a surprise all right. Poor Andrew is stuck in the boat.”
Elaine shook her head with a laugh, and knew that domestic diva-ness would just have to wait.
If his laptop were in the rowboat, Andrew could have worked on his column. If his cell phone were there, he could have called John, or at least Irene. If he had learned how to swim, he could have been on land.
He was glad he’d made sure that Cassie had swimming lessons back in the city, though it had meant giving up Tuesdays and Thursdays from seven-thirty to nine. It was no sacrifice—at least, not for him. Patty had never once taken her, claiming a late booking or an early call, depending on which was more convenient. It took Andrew a while to figure out that while he sat on a damp, wooden bench in the chlorine-scented, tile room, munching Doritos for dinner and cheering for Cassie, his wife’s off-hours appointments primarily happened when Lonnie Mack was in town.
Lonnie Mack, the playboy, cowboy son of one of Australia’s largest sheep breeders (“The finest Merino,” Patty had told him); Lonnie Mack, current husband of Patty, father of Gilbert.
Gilbert the Grape, as Cassie had called him.
“Andrew!”
His body twitched. He half expected to see Patty.
Holding his hand to shield the sun, he was glad it was Jo nestled in a shadowy cove, clutching a robe around her. On her left stood someone who looked like Elaine; on her right was Lily, no mistaking the tiny, excited sprite. All three women waved.
He waved back.
“Sit tight,” Jo shouted. “Help’s on the way.”
He heard a putt-putt and saw an aluminum craft head toward him, then swing around, as the driver—a burly man—slowed the engine, dipped over the edge, and scooped the rowboat’s lost oar out of the water.
The boat arced a U-turn, then came alongside Andrew. The man cut the motor and drifted close. He tossed Andrew a rope. “I work up at the spa,” he said with a thick accent. “Name is Gunter, without the ‘H’.”
He looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger on the early side of forty. “Andrew,” Andrew replied, picked up the rope, and wondered if he should tie it somewhere. He glanced toward the women. Was the new man in Jo’s life as rugged—as muscled—as Gunter? And was that what women—real women—wanted?
“Tie it to the bow,” Gunter said, pointing to the small end of the boat.
Andrew was grateful for the direction, but dismayed that the bow was at the opposite end of him, about ten feet away.
He got up slowly, gingerly. He stepped on one foot, hoping, praying that this time his balance would hold. He knew that the women were watching.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, then took another step. The boat rocked slowly beneath his sneakers. He clutched the rope more tightly.
And then Andrew lost his balance. Both arms flew up; the rope dropped from his fingers. But the gods were on his side: He managed to stay upright. He dared another glance toward shore. Jo’s hands covered her mouth.
Andrew laughed. He signaled for the women not to worry, that he had everything under control. Then he looked down and saw that the rope had fallen into the water.
Gunter pulled it out, then tossed it over again. “Maybe you should sit down,” he said. “Just hang on to the rope. Don’t bother to tie up.”
Not to worry, Andrew thought. He knew when it wasn’t his day.
Of all the people who could have rescued Andrew, Lily had dragged Gunter from the massage room where she’d been scheduled for a full-body rubdown.
Elaine didn’t want to know more.
What she did know was that, as she stood on the shore watching the boats drawing closer, she couldn’t be sure if the warmth in her cheeks was from the sun or from mortification.
She did not know what to say.
She did not know what to do.
So she did what she expected every woman in her Laurel Lake flip-flops would do: She kept her eyes totally fixed on Andrew, kept a smile on her face, and pretended Gunter did not exist.
In the morning, before they left, she’d leave a big tip in an envelope for him. No sense having him think she was ungrateful, in addition to being a fool.
13
Andrew didn’t get home until suppertime. As he pulled into the driveway he noticed the kitchen light was on: Daylight savings time would soon be over and darkness would hurry the end of the day. The night somehow seemed sinister out in the country without high-rises glowing and headlights defining the streets.
He turned off the ignition and looked through the window. Cassie sat at the table. Her head was bent; she was no doubt doing homework.
She’d be eager to hear about his adventure with Jo. He wished he could tell her that it had been fine, but Cassie knew him too well. He’d have to tell her the humiliating parts: including when he trudged up the hill behind Jo and the muscle man, when he waited in the staff quarters until Jo had changed back into her clothes. He’d have to say he watched while Gunter hoisted the rowboat (“No tanks,” he’d said, without the “H,” to Andrew, when Andrew offered to help), then tied it into the back of the pickup truck, to return it to the Hollands’.
The closest Andrew had come to the experience of Laurel Lake Spa was drinking warm tea that Gunter said was loaded with good herbs, which he oddly pronounced “Herbs” as if they were named after men.
