The more Claire thought about it, the more angry she became at Isabelle for even asking her to make such a colossal financial commitment. Claire became convinced that this was more of Isabelle’s passive-aggressive behavior. Isabelle had asked Claire, knowing that Claire would either say she didn’t have the money (which would underscore their class differences or, worse, make it seem as though Claire wasn’t as gung ho or dedicated to the cause as Isabelle) or Claire would come up with the money and cut the legs out from under her family financially.
Horrible woman!
Claire ranted.
She could not take this problem to Jason. He would see it only one way because he was a man, because he had no emotional attachments to money other than happiness (or relief) about what it could buy you. He would say,
If we had twenty-five thousand dollars to spend on a table up front at the gala, we would be buying a boat instead.
So in the end, Claire called Lock. She was hesitant about doing so, because more and more lately, it felt like her problems were becoming ones that only Lock could solve. Or only Lock could understand. Or Claire had been brainwashed, somehow, because she believed in his authority (
There is no hell
), and hence he was the only person she wanted to take her problems to, despite her concern that he would soon see her as a person who constantly had problems that needed to be fixed. But this thing, Isabelle, the money, the gala: this fell squarely under his umbrella of expertise.
She called him at work. Gavin answered the phone, and his tone with her was different. Usually smug and impatient, he was now almost friendly. (“Claire! Hello!”) He sounded like there was no one else he would rather have on the end of his telephone (“How
are
you?”); he treated Claire like a long-lost friend.
Lock stepped away from his desk, but let me find him. Hold on, here he is—Lock, it’s Claire!
Weird.
“Hello?” Lock said. His voice was friendly but not intimate. Claire yearned for intimate, for a purr or a growl or a password or a nickname just for her—but this was impossible. Always, she got friendly, solicitous.
“I love you,” she said.
He chuckled. “Glad to hear that,” he said.
“I just got an e-mail from Isabelle.”
“Uh-oh.”
“She bought a twenty-five-thousand-dollar table. She wants me to buy a twenty-five-thousand-dollar table. In the name of leading by example. As cochairs.”
“Right,” Lock said. He sounded uncomfortable.
“Do you see the impossible position that puts me in?”
“I do.”
“Do you?” It was only as Claire had him on the other end of the phone that she wondered if he
would
get it. Lock was masquerading as a normal year-round islander, but in fact he was a millionaire. He made a donation every year that was in the mid–six figures; he could buy ten $25,000 tables and not blink an eye. This thought (which was sort of novel, because she never gave any play time to Lock’s net worth: she didn’t care, she would take him prince or pauper) was followed by another series of thoughts . . . about what Lock planned to do in regard to
his
gala tickets. He could, she thought for one fleeting instant, buy a $25,000 table, and she and Jason could pay him for two seats (she had reconciled herself to the fact that $5,000 was the least she was getting off the hook for), and Lock could fill the rest of the table himself. This had the added bonus of putting Lock and Claire at the same table (and with little or no effort, side by side). They could put Jason next to Daphne and her beautiful tits, and everyone would be happy.
“I do . . . ,” he said.
And at the same time, she asked him, “What are you planning on doing? Where do you sit, usually? You and Daphne?”
“Oh,” he said. Now he sounded really uncomfortable. “Well, when Isabelle called—to get her table, that is—she asked Daphne and me to sit at her table. And I said okay.”
“You said okay?”
“I didn’t see any reason not to. I got the sense that Isabelle is insecure, because of her divorce, you know. She didn’t ask me to join her so much as implore me.”
“So you and Daphne will sit with Isabelle.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” And because further words eluded her, she said, “Thanks!” Her voice was cheerful and plastic. What she thought as she said it was,
Thx!
She hung up and stared at the phone, speechless.
A few seconds later, the phone rang. And Claire thought,
Lock, calling back
. He’d stepped out of the office with his cell phone and was hiding out in Coal Alley, where he could talk more freely. She almost didn’t pick up—she was more stymied by Lock’s news than by Isabelle’s e-mail—but she lacked the willpower to resist him.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi,” Siobhan said. “It’s me.”
T
he house he was renting in the hills was a mission-style bungalow with stained glass and real Stickley furniture, a framed sketch by Frank Lloyd Wright hanging in the powder room, and a gold nugget, allegedly mined in 1851, nestled in a shadow box in the study. Max loved the house. It belonged to a real California family; the husband owned a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants across the state, and the wife composed musical scores and jingles for TV commercials. There were five children, from teenager to toddler, but they—the family—were in Shanghai for a year. The house was cozy, a refuge, a nest, and despite the fact that neither the house nor anything in it belonged to Max, he felt comfortable in it, safe, and free to drink to his heart’s content.
Bess had asked him for only one thing: that he use his influence to speed the divorce along. Dragging it out, prolonging it, insisting on mediation or court appearances, would only make things more painful for both of them, she said. She wanted out, now; she wanted a clean break. There was no need for negotiations; the only thing she wanted was the dogs.
“I’ll give you three million dollars,” Max had said during their last phone conversation.
Bess was silent and Max took this to mean that she was stunned by his generosity. But then she tsk-tsked him—she did have something of the schoolmarm about her—and said, “Oh, Max, I don’t want your money.”
“Just take it,” Max said. “It comes without strings. Three million.”
“I don’t want it. Don’t send it. If a check comes, I’ll rip it up.”
Was she bluffing? How did she expect to live without money? Bob Jones was Accountant to the Stars, but his well wasn’t bottomless like Max’s. How would Bess afford the trappings of her virtuous lifestyle—the bushels of organic vegetables, the comfortable-but-not-inexpensive Donald Pliner shoes?
“Just take the money, Bess.”
“I don’t want it,” Bess said. Her voice was very firm. Had any other divorce in the history of Hollywood proceeded like this—with one party offering a large sum of money, unbidden, and the other party turning it down?
“Is it not enough?” Max said. “You want five million?” Silence. “Ten million?” Max knew himself to be worth about sixty million dollars (and of course, Bob Jones knew this, too). “Fifteen?”
“I don’t want any money from you, Max. Just the papers. Please.”
Bess didn’t want his money because she thought it was cursed. It wasn’t good enough; it wasn’t the kind of money that would bring her happiness. She was rejecting him, Max West, alcoholic, drug addict—and she was rejecting his money.
The divorce papers came in the mail; Max tossed his copies in the trash with the Pottery Barn catalog and the circular from Whole Foods.
Sayonara,
he said.
Adiós. Adieu. Arrivederci. Bayartai.
He could say good-bye in forty languages—that was something. Max made a pot of coffee and called Bruce. Bruce came over, and together they drank the pot of coffee on the deck, barely exchanging a word (Max loved and valued Bruce for this reason). Then Bruce left and Max pulled out the Tanqueray, but he didn’t pour himself a drink. He felt okay without a drink, and how weird was that? He thought,
I should get divorced every day.
When the box came from his mother, however, it was a different story. His mother, Sweet Jane, was moving out of her house in Wildwood Crest after fifty years; she was moving to a posh retirement community in Cape May. Max was paying for the move, and he was paying for the posh retirement community, but Max’s three older sisters and his older brother had volunteered to go to Wildwood Crest to orchestrate the move. Max was expected to pay for everything but not do anything. His mother, with the help of one of his sisters—Dolores, probably—had gone through every closet and drawer in the house. Some stuff went to the dump; some stuff went into boxes. All of Matthew Westfield’s stuff went into boxes because as soon as news got around that Jane Westfield was moving out, a clot of people began loitering across the street, waiting for the garbage. Who knew what Max West’s high school report card might go for on eBay? The handwritten lyrics to “Stormy Eyes”—scribbled on a McDonald’s napkin—could be sold to the Smithsonian or the Hard Rock Cafe. So Sweet Jane and Dolores packed up every last scrap from Matthew’s adolescence and mailed it to him.
He opened the box, and the box smelled like Claire. He went to the kitchen for the Tanqueray, a glass, and ice, and he walked out into the backyard and picked three of the best-looking limes off the tree. He made himself a very tall drink. The box smelled like Claire—or what he remembered as Claire’s smell, but was probably some perfume that teenage girls used to wear in 1986—because it was stuffed with notes from Claire, hundreds of notes, notes that had been handwritten (perfumed!), folded, and passed to him in the hallway, in class, at lunch, in the band room (where he hung out, plucking his guitar), or in the art room (where she hung out, sketching or firing pottery).
He unfolded one such note, carefully, because the paper was twenty years old and as soft as fabric. It said: “
How can I tell you that I love you?” The best song! Everything Cat Stevens sings is so beautiful! You can sing like him—learn the song for me, please! I have a track meet against Avalon this P.M. but my dad is in A.C. tonight, so I’ll be over late. Leave the door open!!! I love you xoxoxoxo
Max took the whole drink in at once, not tasting anything except for the tang of fresh lime juice. Somewhere in the house was his . . . he stood up and meandered through the house, the first drink sharpening his need for the next one. Where was his guitar? He had, at last count, 122 guitars, but really only one, his Peal, mahogany and maple with abalone inlay. It had been his first guitar, acquired when he was fifteen from a rich summer woman who had bought it for her son, who didn’t want it; she had sold it to Matthew for a hundred dollars. Max always used the Peal to play any new song he wrote; it was, in some ways, the only instrument he could truly hear. The guitar fit into his arms the way he imagined his own child would.
He poured himself another drink and tried the song.
How can I tell you that I love you?
He and Claire had been crazy for Cat Stevens; they bought every album and played them again and again, and Matthew figured out the chords and memorized the lyrics. Cat Stevens was outré by then; he had converted to Islam and disappeared from the public eye, but this didn’t matter. Matthew and Claire had discovered him together, unearthed him, dusted him off; the songs were their currency, their gold, their treasure.
How can I tell you that I love you?
Claire, in her track shorts, with her long legs, milky white, with freckles behind her knees. He loved to watch her stretching those legs up and over the hurdles, with her arm out, perfectly timed. She sprinted, too. She was on a relay team, second leg; she took the baton, she handed it off. Claire’s mother would attend the track meets but spend the whole time with her hands over her face:
I can’t watch!
And Bud Danner never showed up at all. Matthew was her cheering section. He was her family.
Another drink. Their senior year, Claire would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night and run all the way over to East Aster and tiptoe brazenly past Sweet Jane’s bedroom, right into Matthew’s room. She would shed her clothes and climb into his bed—he could remember it as if it had happened the night before. He would wake up and find Claire, naked and warm, on top of him. They were seventeen. It was as sublime as love gets.
He read through nearly forty notes—it took him the whole bottle of Tanqueray. And there was other stuff to ogle, too: his diploma; programs from the holiday concert, the spring concert, their senior banquet, their prom; pay stubs from Captain Vern’s, where he bused tables for two dollars an hour; tokens for skeet ball on the boardwalk; a cracked 45 of Billy Squier’s “My Kinda Lover”; an Algebra II quiz on which he’d scored an 84 (if he took the quiz again now, he’d get every question wrong). There were song lyrics, too—stupid, wrong lyrics, and lyrics he’d rethought, rewritten, and turned into Top 40 hits. At the bottom of the box, encased in a large wax-paper envelope, were a mess of snapshots, but he couldn’t look at them. He’d had too much to drink, he was too sad, and the pictures were all of Claire.
They had talked recently and Max thought he’d heard a crack in her voice, a place where he might climb back into her life. Was he deranged? He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen Claire in years and years; she would be a different person now, the mother of four little kids. It was silly, but he thought of her kids as his kids, even though he had never set eyes on them. He was drunk, delusional, but what he was realizing was that Claire Danner lived in his heart and always had; she was a part of him. They were connected by their shared history, by having grown up together and given each other their first attempt at love. He wasn’t New Agey like Bess, and he didn’t even really believe in God, much to his mother’s dismay, but he did believe in connections between people. He had written all those early songs for Claire. She was all he knew; she had been there at the beginning. His subsequent relationships had all failed. He let women down—his first wife, Stacey, his second wife, Bess, and Savannah in between.