Bess had developed a strong friendship with Matthew’s accountant, a man named Bob Jones, and Matthew assumed the avenue Bess would now pursue was one that would lead her to Bob Jones’s house. She would be an accountant’s wife; she would live a life opposite from the one she currently led. Instead of spending 90 percent of her time alone, walking on the beach, preparing elaborate meals for the dogs, and eating only hummus herself, she would live a life with constant companionship. She would cook nourishing things for Bob Jones, they would do everything together: watch TV, have sex, sleep until they were wakened by the gentle California sun. The nice thing about Bess was that she wouldn’t take Matthew’s money. She didn’t want money. It was useless, she liked to say, in getting the things that really mattered.
Matthew had to admit, he didn’t feel any deep-seated unhappiness about the impending breakup of his marriage. Except, of course, that he and Bess had been trying to have a baby, an endeavor that would now go out the window; Bess would, instead, have a baby with Bob Jones. A baby that could count and add, rather than a baby genetically predisposed to drinking gin. Matthew wouldn’t even mind it if Bess was pregnant now. He liked the idea of having a son or a daughter in the world, and Bess would be a wonderful mother. Her priorities were straight, and drinking, drugs, and rock and roll were all at the bottom of the list.
These, of course, were the thoughts of a man on his way to getting drunk. The butler appeared with two more bottles of very cold Veuve Clicquot, and as Matthew submerged them in ice, he studied himself in the mirror. There were pictures of Max West all over the room, on CD covers, on posters, in newspapers and magazines, but none of these photographs showed what Matthew really looked like. He looked puffy in the face, he thought, and sort of gray-skinned, despite all this tropical sun. His hair was still deep brown, though greasy, and it stuck up in spikes. He had brown eyes that had been described as “soulful” and “deep,” but the whites around them were red, tired, sore-looking. In the skin on the end of his nose he had a pockmark, which he had acquired at age seven with the measles; his stylist usually covered it up with makeup, but it always comforted Matthew to see this little divot, this small imperfection that announced his authentic self. Matthew heard a rustling sound and, in the mirror, saw Ace uncross her legs and then cross them again on the sofa, in impatience. She was not amused by him, nor impressed. He was not a world-famous rock star. He was a mess.
He had had a sponsor on this trip, a sponsor who was supposed to stay by his side every second of the day, except when Matthew was onstage, and even then, Jerry Camel lurked in the dim wings. Jerry was a good guy, he was good company; Matthew had no complaints about Jerry or the ardent way that Jerry loved Jesus. Jerry Camel was a childhood friend of Bruce Mandalay’s; he was being paid by Bruce to
keep Max West sober!
Jerry Camel, however, contracted a near-fatal stomach virus while they were hiking up to see the mystical jewel-colored volcanic pools on the Indonesian island of Flores. There was no hospital on Flores, and so Jerry was helicoptered to Denpasar in Bali and then to Singapore. Matthew, who had been sneaking long pulls off the native guide’s flask of hooch, did not catch the near-fatal stomach bug. Alcohol had saved his life!
But it was killing him, too, he acknowledged as he popped open both bottles of champagne, handed one to his Thai co-ed, and drank from the other one himself. Why insist on formalities like glasses? Ace didn’t seem to mind. She chugged from her bottle. Matthew would be found dead in a hotel room not unlike this one, he was sure of it, especially with Bess now gone. He would die alone, the unintentional victim of his own hand, just like Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Keith Moon. Addictions were an occupational hazard, Max West liked to say, though Bess called this the ultimate cop-out.
Matthew rolled a joint and was freshly pleased that he had company. The rest of his band—Terry, Alfonso, the good family men that Bruce had insisted he surround himself with long ago—were on an all-day tour of Bangkok: the floating markets, the palace that held the Emerald Buddha, the temple called Wat Po with a hundred-foot-long reclining Buddha, and a famous silk merchant’s house that was filled with the finest antiques in Southeast Asia. The rest of his band tolerated a toke or two of delightful bud, but they would lynch him if they knew he was drinking.
So, Ace. Matthew smiled at her as he lit up the joint, but he suddenly didn’t have the energy for small talk—where she was from, what she was about. He wanted to know these things but couldn’t bring himself to ask.
A deep-seated unhappiness.
Matthew tried to imagine the unhappiness residing in him. Was it thriving somewhere in his dark recesses, growing, mushrooming? Was it really due to his father’s leaving? Matthew didn’t remember his father and never wondered about him. In his mind, his childhood had been fine; he’d been loved by his mother and doted on by his four older siblings. His adulthood had been a fantasy, every wish—material and nonmaterial—fulfilled. He wrote songs, he sang, he played the guitar. He regarded Ace, the smooth, brown suede of her skin, the silky line of her black hair, the tender, pale inside of her wrist. She was beautiful and indifferent (he appreciated the indifference more than the beauty), but Matthew knew he wouldn’t sleep with her. It was what he’d expected to do when he let her in, it was what she expected, but Matthew was all done with empty relationships and with touching beautiful girls who meant nothing to him.
A deep-seated unhappiness. Matthew let the champagne flow down his throat, stinging him, nearly choking him. While Max was in Brunei, the strangest thing had happened. Bruce had called to tell Max he would be going to Nantucket Island in August to sing for Claire Danner.
Claire Danner?
Max had said.
I thought you would want to do it,
Bruce said.
I wasn’t wrong, was I?
No,
Max said.
Not wrong. Of course I want to do it.
It was weird the way things happened, the way the world worked, so bizarre and unpredictable that Max could barely handle it sober. No sooner had Bruce said the name Claire Danner than Max was suffused with tender, painful memories of himself as a teenager. And Claire. God, the two of them had been so unformed, but somehow perfect. In Matthew’s mind
,
Claire Danner wasn’t even a person anymore, she was an idea: hand-holding, falling asleep on the beach wrapped together in a blanket; she was his innocence, his sight, his voice. He had learned how to sing by singing to her. They hadn’t known the first thing about love, and that had been better, that had been best—they were innocent. They didn’t know when or how to hide their feelings, and so they shared everything. They were kids; they had been happy even when they were miserable.
Claire Danner,
Bruce said. Max hadn’t seen her in many, many moons, and yet in his mind, she was right there: her milky white skin, her red ringlets, her tiny ears like delicate shells. She had pale eyelashes, skinny wrists; her second toe was longer than her big toe. She had a silent sneeze that made Max laugh every time. She couldn’t drink beer because it made her vomit (he could attest to this), so she had to drink wine coolers. Did they even make wine coolers anymore? He’d started to believe, in the weeks since Bruce had said the words “Claire Danner,” that Claire Danner was the woman he’d known and understood best in his life. Better than either of his wives, and certainly better than Savannah. And he had left her. He had thought he had no choice: he was going to California to become a rock star, she was off to college, she was going to be an artist, a wife, a mother. She belonged to someone else now, and he had belonged to many someone elses. But there was a way—wasn’t there?—in which he would always belong to Claire Danner. Max West, like most rock stars, had built a career on the premise that we were all, in our hearts, seventeen years old.
He passed the joint to Ace. She inhaled with her eyes closed.
“And guess what?” Matthew said. “I’m going there this summer to sing for her.”
Ace tilted her head. “Where?” she said. “Who?”
“Nantucket,” he said. “Claire.”
D
id he feel guilty? Yes and no. It was tricky emotional terrain, and the best thing about his love affair with Claire Danner Crispin was that before she came into his life, he had feared himself emotionally dead. The part of his life where his feelings mattered was over. It had ended, not during the months following Daphne’s accident (because those were the most emotionally turbulent months of his life), but in the months following those months, after Daphne had “recovered.” “Recovered” was not the right word, implying as it did that something lost had been found. Daphne had survived the accident, yes, but the best parts of her were gone. Her charm, her sense of humor, her devotion to him, Lock, and their daughter, Heather. Gone. These things were replaced with anger, suspicion, and a cruel frankness that left Lock, Heather, and everyone else who came into contact with Daphne breathless. Lock would lie in bed—after Daphne had told him that she married him for his money, that she stayed married to him for his money, that he was a piss-poor lover and she had faked every orgasm with him since 1988—and wonder: If the car had crashed differently, if Daphne had hit her head harder, or less hard, or at another angle, might things have turned out the opposite way? Might he have been left with a sweet and loving pacifist for a wife? Why did it happen one way and not another? The loss of the Daphne he had fallen in love with was the first blow, and this was followed by Heather’s exodus to boarding school and then to a camp in Maine. She had even spent the past Thanksgiving with the family of a friend, in Turks and Caicos.
These things happened, and Lock’s well of happiness and love dried up, and then eventually his sadness and disappointment and anger dried up, too. He felt nothing; he was a desert.
It was easier to live this way than he had thought. He immersed himself in work. He loved his job, liked it better than the career he’d built for twenty years at Dixon Superconductors in Boston. He enjoyed being on Nantucket, part of a community where he could make a difference. He garnered genuine satisfaction from fund-raising and from administering those funds for Nantucket’s Children.
Contrary to popular belief, there were kids on this island who were truly needy, as needy as kids in the inner city, kids who lived in basement apartments that housed fourteen people, who only made it into the shower once a week, who got the majority of their clothing and shoes and toys and furniture from the “take it or leave it” pile at the town dump, whose parents worked so hard, for such long hours, that the kids were left to play foosball at the Boys & Girls Club until eight o’clock at night with only a bag of pretzels for dinner. Lock’s circles were wide enough now to include people like this; everyone who knew Lock respected him and thought he was a good man. He was doing a job that needed to be done, even though he never had to work again. He was steadfast with his wife through the maelstrom of her attacks; he was solid. A rock. A desert. He had no feelings. Things were not good, but they were easy.
How to explain about Claire? He had known her for years; she was a face in the background. He had never thought her particularly beautiful; he had never been partial to redheads or women with a Victorian pallor. He had always admired Claire’s glass, but that was solely an appreciation for her work. Something about the curves of the pieces struck him as sensual, and her use of color resonated with his own personal aesthetic. He thought her work was good, technically, and he thought it was beautiful. The
Bubbles
sculpture displayed in the foyer of the Klaussens’ summer home had captured his imagination the way marbles and kaleidoscopes had as a child. He made a point to see the
Bubbles
sculpture in the Klaussens’ Park Avenue apartment, as well as the piece at the Whitney. And then one year, on their way to ski at Stratton, they had detoured to the museum in Shelburne. But Lock’s admiration for Claire’s work was disembodied from the artist; it didn’t explain his sudden fall to her feet. It happened to him like an accident, like a crash, a blow to the head, on the night of the first gala meeting. There was something about Claire that night—she was nervous, earnest, and yet confident (about Max West, about her glass). She had been wearing a jade green T-shirt that plunged to her breasts, and tight jeans; her hair curled in tendrils around her face, and she wore a perfume that made something inside him stir when she walked into the room.
Woman, he thought. Perfume, hair, breasts, smile. And a smile in her voice. When she was talking about Max West, she said,
Back then he was just a kid, like the rest of us.
She was drinking wine and her cheeks flushed; she was a woman and a girl at the same time. When she stood to look at her own work on his shelf—a vase—she brushed past him; he noticed her scent again, and her jeans. She picked up the vase and turned it gently—and at that moment, Lock’s fascination with her was born. She had
made
that vase; she had blown it out with her own lips. This aroused him. He was shocked—because along with his emotional life, his sexual life had also died. Daphne wanted sex in spurts and bouts: twice a day for a week, and then not again for twelve months.
But watching Claire, whole parts of him were suddenly alive with possibility. He might have been seeing her for the first time. Boom, a blow to the head, a blow to the heart. She took the job as gala chair, not because she was power-hungry or needed her name in lights, but because she wanted to help; in this, they were the same. She was darling. He wanted her.
It started out slowly. One kiss, another kiss, more kissing—if she had had any hesitations, she would have asked him to stop, right? He had been through university before the age of date rape and “No means no,” but he was the father of a girl (now a teenager), and hence he understood. He moved things along with Claire very slowly, though there was a tide of ache and longing in him to push it faster. They kissed and he touched her breasts, her delicate nipples, and she gasped as if she’d been burned. He pulled away immediately: Had he hurt her? Had he pushed things too far? She said,
If you stop, I’ll kill you
. And they laughed.