Inside, they unpack their groceries. They’ve found a place in Montauk that sells lobster tails and oysters at nontourist prices, and Dede apparently looks old enough to buy champagne—the cheapest they had. Tonight is an anniversary of sorts, exactly six months from the day they met on campus.
Annie gets the food ready while whistling that Wizard of Oz song “If I Only Had a Brain.” Dede keeps punching her playfully in the arm, but it only emboldens Annie. As much as it gets under her skin, it’s one of the reasons Dede loves her.
Yes, she thinks, I do love her. Dede has no trouble opening her heart to Annie. She’s accepted her sexual orientation for years now. She came out in high school, and she grew up in Santa Monica, where they practically throw you a parade for doing so. Annie, though, had never been with a woman before meeting Dede. Of course, she knew, on some level, but growing up in rural Michigan, she didn’t acknowledge her sexual preference to her friends or her devout Catholic parents, or even to herself. You’d think, by 2007, people would have loosened up enough, but Dede knows as well as anyone that discrimination doesn’t evaporate overnight but slowly fades over time.
Dinner is great. The dining room is over-the-top ornate, full of all kinds of detail on the walls, little statuettes perched around the room, tall windows with ornamental trim, an enormous chandelier hovering over a big five-sided dark oak table that’s surrounded by high-backed chairs with leather cushions. It’s like Henry VIII meets Count Dracula.
On their jam box, they play some symphonic music that Annie, the violinist, chose; she plays maestro, conducting the music with her fork. And the lobster and oysters are delicious. The cheap champagne is like Pop Rocks in Dede’s mouth. It goes to her head quickly, enhancing her euphoria. Annie is it, she thinks. She is my one and only.
The window rattles and Dede turns to it. The wind, surely. But still, she walks over and cups her hand over the glass to block the interior reflection, looking out onto Ocean Drive.
“Is the Scarecrow still out there? I’d be more worried about him, if he only had a brain.”
“You’ve been waiting to say that, haven’t you?” Dede looks back and finds Annie sitting on the windowsill on the opposite side of the dining room. “What are you doing?”
Annie has her Swiss Army knife open, carving into the wood.
“Annie, you can’t do that! This place is, like, three hundred years old. And it’s not like you can just erase that.”
Dede walks over to get a look at what Annie is doing. As Dede suspected, she is carving their initials in jagged letters:
DP + AC
“I don’t want to erase it,” Annie says. “I want it to be here forever.”
Dede puts her arm around Annie and draws her close, breathing in her shampoo. “Forever?” she says tentatively. Her heart is pounding. This is one of those moments when she feels so vulnerable, her heart laid bare to be embraced or trampled.
“Forever.” Annie looks up at Dede. The champagne tastes even better to Dede the second time, on Annie’s tongue.
32
THE GIRLS STAYING at 7 Ocean Drive are now on the second floor of the mansion, the southwest bedroom. The purple-and-gold bedroom, with the canopy bed and the velvet. The master bedroom where, over two hundred years ago, Winston Dahlquist once slept.
They are naked, and they are doing very fun things to each other. Their young bodies are shapely and athletic and limber, fueled by lust and maybe love—who can say?—and helped mightily by the two bottles of champagne they’ve drunk. The alcohol has undoubtedly lowered their inhibitions, and also impaired their judgment a bit—which is probably why they’ve forgotten to pull the bedroom drapes.
Now, to be fair, the bedroom window looks south, toward the beach and ocean, with only one house in between, which is not nearly as tall. A reasonable person would thus believe that, even with the drapes open wide as they are, she would not be visible to anyone.
But a reasonable person might not expect a man to be standing on the beach, peering northward with a pair of binoculars.
The man who thinks of himself as Holden lowers the binoculars and lets them hang around his neck. Wait—no—no, no. He removes the binoculars and throws them into his bag, which he calls his Fun Bag. This time of night, having binoculars is a dead giveaway—no chance of bird-watching or any other legitimate reason for using them, at ten in the evening. You might just as well wear a sign that says PEEPING TOM.
Be more careful, Holden! He likes calling himself that name. It gets him in the mood, in much the same way the alcohol gets those girls feeling more sexually adventurous. He rolls his neck. Stretches his arms. Cracks his knuckles. Jogs in place a moment, some sand kicking up.
He picks up his Fun Bag and climbs the beach onto Ocean Drive. He is happy, almost giddy. The sky is a deep purple and a soft wind plays with his hair. He is healthy and prepared. Tonight, he is Holden, and he can do anything.