Her flickering smile had ignited into a glow by the time he was done with this rant. No big surprise. Published writers are Spanish fly to coeds, oldest story in the book. And she’d just played a part in naming the thing. This could easily become a big part of her identity in the coming months—certainly if she did coke.
At twenty-two, one can tell the difference between a nineteen-and a twenty-one-year-old, but Tenpenny was at an age where he could only break it down to decades. Eighteen to twenty-eight, he guessed. Twenty-three, it turned out—he’d been right on the nose. They hung out for a few days—a couple coffees in her apartment, a few wines in his—as she filled him in on her life. For financial reasons, she’d been forced to drop out after freshman year to work, and was just now, four years later, returning. Though pleased to be back, she was having a hard time relating to the younger students. He liked her burlap voice and she his patience and authoritative air. They’d flirt and he’d cut it off. As a young man Roger had been swayed by beauty, but experience had left him cold toward it. He could take it or leave it, and that was his advantage. Quickly, she let down her guard. One morning a card game got her down to her bra and panties while they watched cartoons. Not so he could make a run at her, but to show that he wouldn’t. This flipped the tables, clarified who was calling the shots, made it all inevitable.
One Saturday Tenpenny packed crustless cucumber-and-pimento-cheese sandwiches and drove them to Newport in his orange Saab. He showed her the church where JFK had wed, and Purgatory Chasm, then took her along the Cliff Walk, past the gilded-age mansions, a neighborhood Tenpenny knew well. He slid them through a row of privet and helped her over a fence and they set up a picnic on the expanse of lawn behind the Breakers. He poured them each a Dark ’n’ Stormy—the correct way—Barritt’s ginger beer, short glass, stiff, the Gosling’s floating on top. This had been his drink of choice back in his St. Croix days and the whiff of ginger beer and sweet rum brought back memories of making money in the sun.
He’d moved to the islands in ’81 with Wife #2, running from Wife #1, and he’d fled four years later with #3, running from #2. Despite the drama, those had been mostly good years for him, and the one time in his life that he’d managed to come out ahead financially. This had not come without hurt feelings from some associates he’d entered into a land deal with, but that’s the way business worked. There were winners and losers and this time his name had ended up on the correct legal documents and he’d been the winner. When one of his ex-partners (a former prep school pal and sometime cokehead named Wellsy) eight-balled out of control and died, Tenpenny was called all kinds of libelous names in the Caribbean press. He chalked this up to small-town pettiness and, rather than suing their asses, returned to Newport with Wife #3, where, as destiny would have it, he was soon to meet #4.
Of course, Tenpenny had been divorced-four-times long enough to read a crowd, so he kept most of these details from Ellie.
“How old are you?” she asked as he was mixing the second round. It was low tide and he could smell the rocks that had risen from the water.
“Thirty-eight,” he said, though he was thirty-nine. He made a mental note to stop lying like that. One fucking year—what was the point? He should’ve said thirty-four. Or twenty-nine. Thirty-eight was like breaking into Fort Knox and stealing a hundred bucks.
Tenpenny feared he’d just messed things up, but before they’d finished a fifth of the fifth, they were screwing.
Sort of.
She might’ve overreacted to sinking her fingers into relatively old ass-cheeks for the first time, or maybe it was his disappointment at finding large, depleted breasts on a college kid, but it was unmemorable for both.
This cooled their friendship and they didn’t see much of each other after that, except in passing, where, to his annoyance, Tenpenny had to maintain the book lie. “How’s your book?” “Who’s publishing your book?” “When’s your book coming out?” “Next fall,” he would say, or, “Leaning toward St. Martin’s,” or he’d mumble something about “publishing seasons.” Doubly annoying was that he detected a trace of skepticism in her tone. A good part of him wanted to just tell her the truth: She’d fucked a guy because she thought he was a writer. Deal with it.
But Tenpenny wasn’t raised that way. Ellie was a sophomore and would be doing her junior year abroad—certainly he’d be long gone before she returned—so he resolved to be the bigger man and play out the lie for a couple months, rather than throw her shallowness in her face. Thankfully, time kept to its schedule and when school ended Ellie went back to whatever part of Connecticut or Virginia she’d come from. Though they’d ended on less than stellar terms, Roger recognized the growth in being able to have a relationship with a beginning, middle, and an end that didn’t involve lawyers, and he took heart in this.