Chapter Twelve
It’s not often these days that Michael has a night to himself, he realizes. Most of his time has been taken up with Jordana, and the nights he isn’t with Jordana he’s usually with friends—drinks, a quiet dinner in a neighborhood restaurant: the typical New York life.
Tonight Jordana went back to Long Island—she and Jackson had a benefit of some kind, but Michael didn’t ask much. He tries not to think about Jackson, about how he would feel, about what kind of a person he must be, sleeping with Jackson’s wife. It’s the only way he can do it.
She has been his drug, his obsession, but slowly he is starting to feel as if he’s awakening from a dream. Slowly he’s starting to wonder what the hell he’s been doing.
Just two weeks ago he thought she was possibly the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. He had always found her attractive, but once they got involved he thought she was beautiful, more than beautiful. Mesmerizing.
And now, overnight, he has started to notice that she has bad posture, her shoulders slumping forward when she walks. Her voice is high-pitched and nasal, which he used to find cute, and now finds ever so slightly irritating. He found it endearing, initially, that she was trying to change to please him, swapping her heels for flats, her hairspray for hairclips to pull her hair back into the natural ponytail he loves, but now he finds it odd that a woman would have so little sense of self-worth she would change herself entirely to suit whichever man she was with.
The rose-tinted spectacles, it seems, are falling away from his eyes, and suddenly he realizes he doesn’t know how to get out. He’s been in this job for twenty years—it is more than his job, it is his life, his family, and although from time to time he has thought of leaving and going somewhere else, he never thought it would be because of a situation like this.
And Jordana, who can sense him pulling away, seems to be keener still, more desperate, more in love than ever before.
He needed tonight, a night off, a night to himself, more than he could have dreamed. A night of freedom, interrupted only by the numerous text messages flying in from Jordana.
v. boring here. Miss you LOTS! J xxx
where r u? want to phone! Love u!
Can u call me?
Tried to call. No answer. Am worried . . . xxxx
He pocketed his phone in the bar and left his jacket draped over the back of the chair, trying to ignore the buzzing.
“Looks like someone’s trying to get hold of you, mate,” said the English man sitting next to him, gesturing at his vibrating jacket pocket with a grin.
Michael raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “I’m trying to go AWOL tonight.”
“Ah, the missus giving you a hard time?”
"Sort of. Not the missus. The mistress.” He snorted at his own joke.
The English guy gave a knowing grin and a wink. “Big girl trouble, then. Husband found out?”
“Oh God,” groaned Michael. “I damn well hope not.”
“Friend of yours, is he?”
“You could say that.” Michael ordered another beer, and one for his new friend. “He’s my boss.”
“Wife of the boss? That takes brass balls, mate.” He shook his head. “We’ve got an expression at home: don’t dump on your own doorstep.”
“Yes, well,” Michael said. “I wish I’d heard that a few weeks ago.”
“Cheers.” The man lifted his glass. “Here’s to secrets and lies.”
Secrets and lies? Michael knew that this wasn’t who he wanted to be, wasn’t how he ever wanted to live.
“No,” he said, pausing. “Here’s to fresh starts and new beginnings. ” And he drank the rest of the bottle down in one.
He is asleep when he hears the ringing. Over and over. At first he hears it in his dream, and swimming up to consciousness he understands it isn’t in his dream, it’s real. He reaches for the phone only to hear the dialing tone, at which point he realizes it isn’t the phone, it’s the doorbell.
He glances at the clock as he stumbles through the darkness to the buzzer. 2:37 a.m. Who in the hell is ringing his doorbell at 2:37 a.m.?
“Yup?” His voice is fuzzy with sleep.
“Michael? It’s me. Jordana.”
“Jordana? It’s 2:37 in the morning. What are you doing here?”
“Michael, will you just buzz me in?” she says. “It’s dangerous out here.”
Moments later she appears at Michael’s front door.
“I’ve left him,” she announces, rolling a large Louis Vuitton suitcase into his tiny apartment.
“What?” Michael is almost speechless, but manages to splutter out this one word.
“I’ve done it,” she says, looking at Michael, tears in her eyes, but whether they are of sadness or happiness he’s not altogether sure.
“What do you mean, you’ve left him?” Michael feels as if the wind has been knocked out of him; he has no idea what to say.
“We had a huge row tonight,” Jordana says, wheeling her case into the bedroom as if she belongs there. “I’m not proud of myself but I told him he didn’t make me happy and that our marriage was over.”
“He doesn’t . . .” Michael feels sick. He looks up at Jordana, incredulous at what she has done—and Jesus, if she’s done this, who’s to say she hasn’t told him everything. “He doesn’t know about . . . us?”
“No!” Jordana laughs. “Are you nuts? He’d kill me. God, he’d probably kill you too. There’s no way I was going to tell him about you, although he asked me if there was someone else.”
“What did you say?” Michael is still struggling to wake up from what is feeling increasingly like the worst nightmare he has ever had.
“I said why do men always assume there’s someone else, why couldn’t it just be that I’m unhappy and I don’t want him anymore?”
“Oh God, Jordana,” Michael says. “I just . . . I didn’t expect you to do this. We could have talked about this, you could have prepared me. Where are you going to go?” He looks up just in time to see her face fall.
“What do you mean? I thought I could stay here. With you. Jesus, Michael. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I . . .” He sighs. “I’m just shocked, Jordana. Of course you can stay here. Tonight. But you can’t stay here after tonight. If Jackson found out it would kill him.”
“Jackson’s not going to find out.”
“It’s not a chance I’m willing to take.”
“Fine,” Jordana says. “I’ll get a hotel around the corner or something so we can sneak back and forth. Hey! Sounds kind of romantic!”
She walks over to where Michael is sitting on the bed and stands in front of him with a seductive smile on her face, a smile that Michael used to find so sexy, but now finds downright terrifying.
“Tell me you’re pleased,” she coos, reaching down with her small, cool fingers, stroking him gently in just the way he likes. “Tell me you’re happy to see me.” She pouts like a little girl. “I thought Mikey was going to be happy to have his girl all to himself.”
“I am happy,” Michael lies as Jordana pushes him back on the bed and climbs on top of him, and then he stops thinking about anything at all.
“I feel so nervous,” Nan says with a laugh, pulling off the gardening gloves and sitting down on the bench in the kitchen garden, taking a packet of cigarettes from the trug at her feet. Sarah has finally managed to rid the house of the smell of smoke and is refusing to let Nan smoke anywhere other than outside.
“Why?” Sarah looks up from where she is helping Nan plant out the rest of the garden, a handful of seeds in her hand.
“I know it’s ridiculous—how could he not love Windermere? But I feel like I’m being interviewed, and what if he doesn’t like us?”
“You said you liked him on the phone, so that’s a good start, isn’t it?”
“That’s true. He sounds terribly sweet. Unhappy but sensitive. A good first tenant, I should think.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“He said his wife and children were spending their holiday up on Quidnet, and he wanted something small and inexpensive on the island so he could be close.”
“He wants it for the rest of the summer? That’s a good start.”
“He said he’d be back and forth a bit, but he’d love a room for the whole of August, and obviously he’ll pay for everything in advance.”
“So when does he get here?”
“Around three. Oh I do so hope he likes us.” Nan stubs out her cigarette with her foot and pulls her gardening gloves back on. “Now, where do you suppose is the best place for me to stake these tomatoes? They’re so overgrown, I wish I’d cut them back earlier.”
If it is possible to gain a new lease on life after three weeks of scrubbing, painting, plastering, hammering, staining and sewing, then a new lease on life is exactly what Nan has got.
She has had no time to swim in neighbors’ pools, although the summer crowd is now firmly ensconced and Nan knows better than to risk getting caught, and she has had little time to cycle around town on her bike.
Other women might be exhausted at her age, having worked the way she has worked to get the house in shape, but Nan feels alive again. She knew as soon as Daniel phoned that he would be perfect for the house, and hopes the house is perfect for him.
For the first time in years, Nan feels like giving parties again. She is well aware of her reputation as something of a recluse, for even though she is out and about in town all the time, it is rare for people to come up to the house, and the truth is she hasn’t felt like entertaining these past few years.
But now, walking around her house that is so fresh and clean it feels almost new, cycling up her driveway that she and Sarah tackled with gallons of Roundup so the crushed white clam shells are no longer hidden by the copious weeds, she wants to show it off.
She wants Windermere to be the house she remembers of old.
“Sarah!” she shouts, gazing at the big old maple tree in the garden. “Do you think it’s possible to get fairy lights this time of year?”
Sarah puts her trowel down and walks over to where Nan is standing. “I think anything is possible in the age of the computer. Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m remembering the parties we used to have. Lydia, my mother-in-law, used to string little white fairy lights through the branches of this maple tree. We’d string lanterns overhead and it was like dancing under a thousand moons.”
Sarah starts laughing. “Good heavens, Nan. Are you planning a party already?”
“I don’t know,” Nan says. “But I was remembering how beautiful it used to be. I’d like to see it look like that again. I’d like to see this place come alive.”
Michael looks up wearily as the door to his workshop opens. It used to be that he was left on his own in here for days at a time. He loved the solitude, loved the silence. Creating jewelry was like a meditation for him—he didn’t have to think, he just felt his mind settle into a peace that enabled him to tap into his deepest creative well.
These last few weeks Jordana has changed that. She is in and out all day long, and while he welcomed the activity in the beginning—it was exciting, invigorating, energizing—now he longs for the peace and quiet of old.
But it’s not Jordana. It’s Jackson, and as soon as he sees Jackson, Michael feels a terrible guilt.
He has managed to avoid him—easy since Jackson has been spending so much time on Long Island—and on the rare occasions Jackson did come into the city Michael found it easy to act, easy to be easy, to simulate the same friendly banter they have had for years.
How can he do that today? How can he do that knowing that Jordana left Jackson last night, and came to his apartment and spent the night? How can he pretend, when he is f*cking his wife, and in doing so seems to have f*cked up Jackson’s life?
Jackson looks terrible. He walks in like an old man, bags under red-rimmed eyes, exhausted, having aged ten years overnight.
“Are you okay?” Michael says, not knowing what else to say.
“Not really.” Jackson pulls up a stool and sits down with a deep sigh. “Jordana left me.”
“What?” Michael feigns shock, but with it comes genuine upset. He never meant for this to happen, never meant to hurt anyone, least of all Jackson, who has been nothing but kind to him all these years. Jackson, to whom he owes everything. “Jackson, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“I just can’t believe it.” Jackson shakes his head. “She said she was unhappy, I wasn’t giving her what she needed. Michael, I’ve given that woman everything!”
“I know.” Michael shifts uncomfortably in his seat, feeling sick, and sorry, and scared, wishing there were some way to turn the clock back, wishing he hadn’t been quite so impulsive, wishing he wasn’t the cause of all this pain.
“What more could anyone want? And I love her. I love that woman. She means everything to me.” And with horror Michael watches as Jackson starts to cry.
“Jess! Breakfast!” Daff calls up the stairs, then goes back to the kitchen, sliding fried eggs onto pancakes.
Daff had always wanted to be the kind of mother who made breakfast for her child every day. She wanted to be the sort of woman who made her own granola, who watched Martha Stewart and proceeded to copy some, if not all, of the crafts, who had a beautiful little vegetable plot out back where tomatoes climbed over wire obelisks and clematis tumbled over a white picket fence.
Daff knows women like this. There are hundreds of mothers in school who do precisely this, who have immaculate crafts cupboards at home, who bring in beautiful doll’s houses for show and tell that they’ve just thrown together using shoeboxes and leftover scraps of wallpaper.
Daff has been feeling inadequate around these women since kindergarten. Hell, even before that—since pre-school. They are the mothers who fight to be room mother, who organize coffee mornings with home-baked scones and fresh lemonade, who float around school hallways with beatific smiles on their faces, never getting stressed, never getting overwhelmed, and never— God forbid—shouting at their children.
Sometimes Daff wonders if Jess would treat her better, be nicer, if Daff were a better mother. If she made macaroni and cheese from scratch instead of using Kraft’s best. If she and not Mrs. Entenmann made the chocolate-chip cookies she brought in for the school fair. If she, in short, were like those other mothers—Supermother, she thinks wryly.
Supermother does not have a daughter who sneers every time she tries to talk to her. Supermother does not have piles of papers and bills taking up almost all the counter space in her kitchen, and Supermother does not give her daughter Cheerios for breakfast, day after day after day after day.
So today Daff is going to be Supermother. It’s Saturday, her weekend with Jess, and she is determined to have a good weekend. She is taking Jess up to see their friends, Barb and Gary, who have a beautiful old horse farm in Roxbury, Connecticut.
They have four kids, and when they were all young, when Barb and Gary were neighbors, Jess and the oldest girl were best friends. They haven’t got together in a while, and Jess has always loved horse riding, so it will be, she hopes, a lovely surprise, to take Jess up there for the weekend.
The weekends are a struggle now that she is a single mother. She feels a need to be present for Jess in a way she never used to, to think of wonderful things for her and Jess to do, to keep Jess happy, whereas when she was married she and Richard would just do whatever needed to be done on weekends—running errands, seeing friends, gardening—and Jess would just slot herself in.
But nothing seems to be keeping Jess happy these days. At least this weekend will be fun, and Jess is always better when she’s around other kids her own age.
“Jess!” Daff goes back to the stairs and calls again, finally walking upstairs and knocking on the bedroom door in exasperation. “Breakfast is on the table,” she says, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice, for that is not how she wants to start this weekend. “I’ve been calling you.”
Silence.
Daff tentatively pushes open the door, and there is no Jess.
“Jess?” A question. She checks the bathroom. Nothing. Her own bathroom, for Jess has now decided that what’s hers is hers and what’s Daff’s is also hers—Daff’s hairbrushes, conditioner, bubble bath and makeup all go missing on a regular basis—but Jess is not upstairs.
"Jess?” Daff’s voice is louder now as she shouts downstairs. She’s not in the family room, the living room, the library. She is nowhere to be found.
Daff finds herself tearing around the house shouting Jess’s name, panic rising in her throat when the phone rings. She picks it up, breathless, feeling the tears start to come.
“It’s Richard. Jess is here. I think you’d better come over.”
Daniel hasn’t been anywhere by himself, for anything other than work, for a very long time. It is a very odd feeling, to be sitting on this ferry, surrounded by families going on vacation, going on vacation himself but without his family.
He had wanted to travel there together, wanted still to spend as much time as possible with the girls, but Bee had disagreed.
“You left,” she’d hissed, anger finally starting to take the place of devastation. “You don’t get to pretend you’re still part of this family.”
“But I am,” he’d said, hurt and dismayed. “I’m their father. That’s never going to change. I’m always going to be part of their family.”
“Yes, but you’re no longer part of mine,” Bee had said, putting down the phone.
Some days were better than others. Some days were fine, some found Bee in tears, some found her pleading and others, particularly these last few days, found her in a fury.
Then the vacation was upon them, and Daniel refused to let Bee take the girls for a whole month to Nantucket. He insisted on being there too, wanted to come with them, to pretend for the sake of the girls, but Bee refused.
“If you want to be on the island at the same time I can’t stop you,” she’d said, adding reluctantly, “and the girls would be pleased. But don’t expect me to pretend that everything is fine between us. This isn’t my choice. This isn’t ever what I would have chosen.”
He had Googled rentals, wanting something cheap, easy. Something that he could leave, to come back to Westport for work, traveling back to Massachussetts on weekends.
Cheap and easy doesn’t come cheap, or easy, on Nantucket. He didn’t need much. A whole house seemed extravagant. He assumed there would be a condo, but there was nothing that was suitable, and nothing in his price range. Not that he had ever had to think about money before, but he had no idea what he would be paying in child support, in alimony, and now was not the time for extravagance.
He had found a room in an old house. It looked clean. Nice views. The landlady said she adored children, there’d be more than enough room if the girls wanted to come and have a sleepover.
As soon as she’d said that, his decision was made.