“That sucks,” Bess says, and looks down at her Chardonnay. She really wishes she could drink more of it.
“And, yeah, it sounds awesome and all,” the woman goes on. “But what you do! You save lives! That must be such a rush.”
“Um, thanks. Most of it isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a job, like anything else.”
Who is this person? The more Bess tries to remember, the more faces from her past jumble together.
“Just a job!” the woman trills. She takes several gulps of her red-pink swill. “Just a job, she says. Please! Anyway, it’s so great to see you! To talk to you like this! Hey. Whoa.”
She stops jabbering for a nanosecond and grips the edge of the bench.
“Is it me or is the boat rocking like crazy?” she asks.
“I feel okay…”
“Anyhow, I have a confession to make.”
She goes to pat Bess’s leg, presumably, but misses and whacks her hand on the bench.
“I was so intimidated by you,” she says, shaking out the injured hand.
“Me?” Bess snorts. “When? Why?”
Here is a gorgeous palomino with glacier-blue eyes and a foal’s gait. Bess has no real objections to her own looks, she is general-population attractive and med-school smoking hot, but this girl is full-stop stunning. Bess is more along the lines of Wednesday Addams with bangs. In other words, appealing only to specific tastes.
“At school, silly!” the woman says. “First of all, you’re Felicia’s cousin. Her older cousin, which was cool in itself.”
“Yes, older,” Bess says. “By all of one year.”
“Yeah, but I mean, it’s still older.”
“One year isn’t all that…” Bess shakes her head. “Sorry. Go on.”
How on earth could this person be intimidated by Bess when Bess was always with Palmer Bradlee, the girl who glided through life forever poised and beautiful and en pointe?
“You seemed so mature,” the woman says. “So dark and exotic.”
She reaches out and snags a chunk of Bess’s hair, which feels like a violation though Bess isn’t exactly sure why. You don’t go around petting strangers at parties, right? Or perhaps such social transaction came into fashion while Bess was working weekend shifts and trying to get divorced.
“Huh,” Bess says as the woman continues to grip her hair like a leash.
Though hair is nothing but dead cells, Bess swears hers is getting dank beneath this person’s hold.
“Then there’s the pièce de résistance, so to speak. The De Leudeville Affair.”
“Oh.” Bess clears her throat. “Right.”
Monsieur de Leudeville. The scandal that got one French instructor fired and one student kicked out of school. It was a shocking fiasco for anyone, especially someone like Bess.
“The De Leudeville Affair,” Bess repeats. “That sounds almost cinematic.”
“Everyone called it that. You know you’re involved in a juicy scandal when it gets its own name.”
Sometimes Bess actually forgets that she didn’t leave Choate so much as go down in flames. Bess can’t even remember if she told her ex-husband the story. But the De Leudeville Affair wasn’t an affair, not really. Yes, there was sex involved but it was more an excuse, a circumstance Monsieur de Leudeville himself walked right into. That this blond, drunk publishing person remembered Bess for him and not what happened before was the very point of the letch. And so: mission accomplished.
“He was pretty hot,” the woman notes, and glugs the rest of her drink. “For an old guy anyway.”
“He was twenty-seven. And into sixteen-year-old girls. So not that hot, when you think about it.”
Does he have to register as a sex offender? There never was a trial, so the answer is likely no.
“Wow,” the woman says. “That’s scary.”
“What? That he was a perv?”
“No. That if he was twenty-seven, what must we look like to teenagers?” She shakes her head. “Ugh.”
The woman stands. She sways as she works to keep straight.
“You always seemed so badass,” the woman says, going cross-eyed as she speaks. “A steamy affair and you had, like, no remorse. Zero. Felicia said they gave you the opportunity to exonerate yourself but it was like, no thanks!”
“It didn’t happen quite like that.…”
“Can I get you another drink?”
The woman waggles her own emptied glass as Bess glances down at hers, on the bench, still full.
“No, I’m fine. Thanks though.”
“Okay. Cool. I’ll be back. I want to know the details. Hell, you could write a memoir. Like, unapologetic, you know?” She contemplates this. “You were taken advantage of but you liked it. Or would that send a bad message?”
“Uh. Yeah. Very much so.”
“Hmmm,” the woman says, wandering off. “Hmmm.”
As the woman careens away, Bess reaches into her pocket, thoughts of de Leudeville evaporating at once. She checks her phone. Still no word from Evan. And why would there be? What obligation does he have to respond at all?
Bess stands, moves her glass to a nearby table, and turns to go. As she charges down Old South Wharf, the party’s voices and laughter tinkle in the distance. If anyone notices Bess’s abrupt departure, they don’t say a thing.
42
RUBY
Summer 1942
The drill had gone as planned, which was to be expected with Mary manning the show.
Everyone in the neighborhood took cover. All blinds were drawn, no sliver of light able to sneak out. Mary checked the sum total of Baxter Road’s cricks and cracks but didn’t uncover a single violation, though not for lack of trying. The bird loved filing incident reports, no greater thrill than committing other people’s mistakes to paper.
“Golly, Ruby,” Mary said as they went through the house, turning on lights and opening curtains. “You performed aces this time around. For once you didn’t treat it like a joke, or as though you have special privileges since you’re related to the warden.”
“Thanks,” Ruby said. “I’m trying.”
She did take it seriously and certainly never viewed Mary’s position as anything worthy of abusing. But naturally Mary liked to think of herself in such terms. Ruby forgot to turn the radio off once and Mary harangued her about it for seven days straight.
“I can’t say it enough,” Mary prattled on.
Indeed, she could not.
“You’re finally taking things seriously. You even seemed nervous about it! Jittery! There might be hope for you yet.”
Ruby nodded reflexively, still wound up not by the drill but by what she’d found in Topper’s room.
What had she seen? Something. Nothing. A teensy part of Ruby wanted to show Mary, get a check from another stance, but the fuddy-duddy would no doubt misread the situation entirely. Plus, Mary hated Tops’s photography hobby. She deemed it unseemly for his class of man.