And then there were the men. Every week, Valerie would bring home married men who frequented the Tosca bar while they were in the city on business. These men would arrive after Alessandra went to bed, but she heard them in the shower the next morning while Alessandra’s mother ransacked their wallets in the bedroom. Every once in a while, one of the men would stay for breakfast and listen as Valerie played her favorite CD and sang along: Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool.
Alessandra knew better than to follow in her mother’s footsteps but it was the only example she had. When Alessandra was eighteen, she seduced Dr. Andrew Beecham, the father of her best friend, Duffy. After Alessandra and Drew had been sleeping together for a few weeks, Alessandra realized she could cash in on the power she had—the power to tell Duffy and Drew’s wife, Mary Lou—and get something valuable in return. Drew was the chair of the romance languages department at Stanford. Alessandra audited a full year of classes—Italian, Spanish, French literature, art history—and then demanded a one-way plane ticket to Rome, which Drew Beecham was only too happy to buy for her.
Where did you come from, Alessandra Powell?
Alessandra answered Michael in her prettiest Italian. “Poiché la tua domanda cerca un significato profondo, risponderò con parole semplici.” She smiled; she had no intention of translating. “That’s Dante.”
Michael Bick kissed her tenderly. She was making progress. She stayed the next night and the next.
She made Michael milk-braised pork with hand-rolled gnocchi in sage and butter and a salad of bitter greens. She made coq au vin. She made scrambled eggs the way her mother used to make them for other women’s husbands—with double the yolks (double-the-yolk scrambled eggs after a night of whiskey, Valerie used to say, felt a lot like love). Alessandra beat Michael soundly in tennis. (In Ibiza, she had taken lessons with Nadal’s first coach.) When they made love, she screamed out in Italian. She didn’t complain that they never went anywhere together—not to dinner or coffee, not for walks on the beach or in the state forest, not for drives to Great Point or Sconset. When the guy came to fix the internet, she greeted him in French and told him she was the au pair.
Secretly, Alessandra secured a job at the Hotel Nantucket that would start in June, though she hoped by then Michael would have fallen so deeply in love with her that he would tell Heidi their marriage was over and Alessandra could simply slip into Heidi’s place. She would go to Surfside all day while Michael worked at home on his laptop (while he was sleeping, Alessandra had hacked into his computer and learned that he traded petroleum futures and in 2021 had reported $10,793,000 in income), and she would accompany him to Cisco Brewers to hear live music and to his standing Thursday-night reservation at Ventuno. She would become best friends with the Laytons next door; the families were so close that they had a set of keys to each other’s house. She would bewitch everyone in Michael’s life exactly the way she had bewitched him.
But this didn’t quite happen. A few days before Alessandra started work, she overheard Michael on the phone with Heidi and his kids, his voice sweet and upbeat and guileless. “How was the game, Colby, did you hit the ball, did you swing? Hey, buddy, did you see Dustin Johnson sink that putt on the ninth?…I love you, I love you, I love you more, kisses, can’t wait to see you all, only two more weeks! I’m getting the boat ready; Coatue, here we come!”
Alessandra felt most affronted by this last bit. She hadn’t realized Michael had a boat.
She went to work at the hotel on opening day, disappearing from the house while Michael was on the phone, and she ignored all his calls. Let him wonder. When she walked in the door that evening, he was visibly shaken. “Where were you?” he said.
She narrowed her eyes and tried to read his face. Why did he care? How much did he care? She shrugged. “Out.”
A tirade followed; it was the first time she’d seen him angry (other than when the Wi-Fi went down, but that was different), and it interested her. Worried sick, went driving around looking for you, you just left without a word, the only way I knew you were coming back was your luggage was still here.
Do you love me? she wondered. She thought the answer might be yes, but it wouldn’t be enough.
“I got a job,” she said. “Working the front desk at the Hotel Nantucket.”
Michael’s face turned pill white. “What?”
Alessandra stared him down.
Michael said, “Our…my friend Lizbet Keaton is working there. She’s the GM, I heard. Is she the one who hired you?”
“Yes.”
Michael nodded slowly, then backed away half a step, as though Alessandra were holding a gun. “You didn’t tell her where you were living, did you?”
“Obviously not.” Alessandra didn’t tell Michael that Lizbet had followed her home. Thankfully, Alessandra had spied her in the bike’s mirror before she’d turned into the driveway.
Relief softened his face. “Okay, good. I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”
“What you mean,” Alessandra said, “is that you wouldn’t want people to get the right idea. Which is that you’re keeping a lover even though you are still fully married. Your wife has no idea you needed space. She thinks you came up here to switch out the storm windows for screens and tackle a ‘top secret project’ for work, which seems outrageous, but she doesn’t question it because she trusts you and she’s probably enjoying the time apart—she feeds the kids pizza three nights a week and goes out with her girlfriends to the new wine bar and flirts with the cute bartender and then goes home and curls up with her vibrator.” Alessandra stopped to breathe. “You’re a liar and a cheat.”
Michael cleared his throat. “They’re coming up on the eighteenth, so you’ll need to go.”
“Will I?” Alessandra said.
There was fear in his eyes. He was the one who had chosen poorly. “Baby, please.”
“I’m not your baby, Michael. I’m a grown woman whom you’ve treated like a concubine.”
“You knew what you were getting into,” Michael said. “You can’t tell me you didn’t understand what this was.”
He got everything backward. He was the one who didn’t understand what this was.
“I’ll go quietly the day before your family arrives,” Alessandra said. “On one condition.”
Alessandra walks from Michael’s house to the hotel with a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag in each hand. It’s a stylish walk of shame—or it would be if Alessandra felt any shame. What she feels most is regret. Michael Bick is the complete package. He has looks, money, intelligence, humor, and even a basic decency (if you ignore the obvious). He asks questions; he listens to the answers; he’s generous and curious and thoughtful. The sex was mind-blowing; Michael is the only man Alessandra ever met who didn’t need to learn a thing or two in bed. And they are so compatible. Oh, well. It has been Alessandra’s experience that men like Michael Bick get scooped up early, in college or the first years of living as an adult in the city.
She also feels triumphant. In her suede Bruno Magli clutch is a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars. Michael asked her to name her price and she did so judiciously, unsure of what she could get away with, but now she wonders if she could have asked for double. She won’t worry about it. During their first week of sinful bliss, Alessandra watched Michael punch in the passcode to his phone, and later, while he was sleeping, Alessandra copied Heidi Bick’s number. She also took pictures of herself in different spots throughout the house—in the pool, weighing herself on Heidi’s scale (a trim 105), cooking in the kitchen, even sprawled across the master bed (although they’d never had sex in that room, Michael’s one nod to fidelity).