“The law may not be as glamorous as writing books, but it is more consistently remunerative,” I say.
“Don’t believe it,” says Madeleine. “Walter’s rich as sin. Even if he wasn’t a lawyer.”
My great-grandfather was a founder of Texaco. Unlike many other families, though, we were able to hold on to our money.
“Don’t give away all my secrets, Maddy. I want Claire to fall in love with me and not my money.”
“Too bad your money’s the most lovable thing about you.”
Claire says nothing. She is enjoying herself, I can tell. It is like standing next to a fire; she feels warmed by our friendship and grateful we are sharing it with her. She feels she could stay here all night listening to our intimate banter, not wanting to let it go and return to the world that exists outside this house.
But what is she really thinking? It is always so easy to know what’s on Maddy’s mind. There isn’t a deceptive bone in her body. This one, though, is more difficult. She is more concealed.
M
idnight. The crowd has thinned out. A small group has gathered on a cluster of old wicker furniture in the corner of the porch. Harry is in the center. Also, a couple named Ned and Cissy Truscott. Ned was Harry’s roommate at Yale. A big man, a football player. Now a banker. I have expensively represented his firm on several occasions. In spite of that, we get on quite well. I am fond of them both. Claire is with them, listening like an acolyte. Laughing loudly, showing pretty teeth. She has a lovely laugh. It reminds me of silver bells. Harry is talking. He is a very good storyteller, unsurprisingly.
Clive approaches. He hovers before them, maybe a bit unsteadily, waiting for an opportunity. By this time everyone’s had plenty to drink.
“Hello, Clive!” Harry roars. “Come sit down.” Harry is drunk now too, but he handles it well. Always has. Tomorrow he’ll be up at six, whistling in the kitchen.
“No thanks,” says Clive. “Thanks for the party. Claire, we have to go. I promised this lot we’d go dancing, remember?”
“Oh, can’t we stay? A few more minutes. I’m having such fun.”
“C’mon, stay for one drink,” calls Harry. “What do you want to go dancing for? You can dance here.”
“Thanks,” says Clive with a forced smile. “Houseguests. They want to see all the hot spots. Do the Hamptons properly.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Come along, Claire.”
Reluctantly, she rises. “Thank you very much, Harry. Please tell Maddy how much I enjoyed meeting her.”
Harry stands up too. “Of course. Glad you could come. Watch out for riptides.”
They depart, and Harry begins to tell another funny story.
S
everal weeks pass. It is Saturday morning. Claire has rented a car. She is driving out to Clive’s house. She hasn’t seen him since that weekend. He’s been away, in the Far East, he told her. Or was it Eastern Europe? To her surprise, he has invited her out again. She almost declines, but then he tells her that they’ve been invited for dinner at the Winslows’. How do I know this? I was also invited. What’s interesting is I think that it was my idea.
“You don’t need to rent a car,” Clive had protested. It was a lot of money for her, but she had insisted. She didn’t tell him why. She told me later that she hated feeling dependent on him, had wanted to be able to go where she wanted, when she wanted.
As she got closer to Southampton and Route 27 became increasingly congested, she began to regret her decision to drive out. The sun is high over the barren scrub pines that line the highway, and it reflects off the roofs of a thick stream of expensive cars heading east, blocking her way. They inch forward past gas stations and motels, car dealerships and farm stands. None of the glamour is visible from this road. Cars speed past in the opposite direction on the other side of the median. Claire is hot and irritable. Even the radio is annoying her.
When Clive’s call came, she had almost stopped thinking about him and was ready to move on. Her roommate, Dana, said she was crazy to dump a rich, handsome Englishman with a house in the Hamptons during the summer. She should at least wait until the fall.
She asks herself, not for the first time, why she is doing this. She knows she will have sex with Clive. He is an exciting if selfish lover, but she is no longer interested. It will mean nothing, a small price to be paid for admittance. She will spread her legs for him, and then, when he is finished, she will close them up again and go to sleep, both having gotten what they wanted. I can imagine her. She will make the noises required, rake her nails across his back, gasp appropriately, sigh appreciatively. She is not what she seems.
Who is she exactly? She is half French, she will later tell me. Proud of the fact. It makes her more exotic. Her father was an American officer with an Irish name, a graduate of an undistinguished college, dashing in his uniform and generous with his small paycheck. Her parents had met while he was on furlough in Paris from his base in Germany. Her mother was younger, barely out of convent school. An only child, the daughter of older parents. The father a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. They lived in an old house in Asnières-sur-Seine, a suburb that is perhaps best known for being the home of the Louis Vuitton family. I have been there. It is surprisingly bourgeois.
Her mother married her father shortly before his discharge. It was a small ceremony held in the local Catholic church. Another soldier was best man. It had been a hasty affair, the small bump that was to become Claire barely noticeable under her mother’s dress. Afterward they came to live in his hometown in Massachusetts, near Worcester. Before long there was another baby, Claire’s younger brother. But her mother could never adapt to the harsh winters or reserved inhabitants of New England. The language had been difficult for her. Her accent too strong, too foreign. Claire remembers her mother withdrawing to her room for hours, days, when the long, dark months enfolded their town. She began to smile again only with the return of spring. Meanwhile, Claire’s father strove. He worked as a salesman, then a stockbroker. They bought a new house, a large Victorian in a dreary neighborhood. He had prospered but never became rich. There had been good years and bad. A green Jaguar that once adorned the driveway was replaced by a Buick. Claire had her own room, as did her brother. She went to school, earned high marks, learned how to ice skate and kiss boys. Their mother taught them French and on Sundays took them to Mass.
Every year Claire’s mother returned to Paris to visit her parents, bringing Claire and her brother. Claire hated these trips. She found her grandparents old and distant, relics of another century, another life. What she liked best were the walks through the streets and parks of Paris. It was a world unimaginable to her classmates, who had barely been beyond the aging factories that surrounded their town, and who considered Boston as distant as the moon. She would see French boys her age and pretend that she was meeting them, that they were waiting for her. They would let her smoke their cigarettes and ride behind them on their motor scooters, her hands clasped tightly around their thin, hard bellies. Instead she and her mother and brother dutifully toured the Louvre and visited cafés where they would invariably order the prix fixe. Once, for a special treat, their father joined them, and they traveled down to Nice for a week by the beach. By then her grandfather was dead, and her grandmother had become even more remote, sitting in an old chair by the window in that familiar, oppressive room amid stale biscuits and the smell of decay. That had been the last trip. Shortly after, her parents divorced.
Her father remarried. He moved to Belmont, and before long his wife gave birth to a daughter. He was starting over. Claire was sixteen. She lived with her mother in their old house and communicated with her father on holidays and birthdays. By the time she went off to college, two years later, she had learned that love did not give itself freely. That if she wanted it, it had to be taken. The protective shell that had been slowly growing around her finally hardened into place. She did not resent her father. She only knew that neither of them had much to say to each other. A few weeks after she had moved to New York he had sent her a small check. In a brief note he had written
I hope this will help you get started,
but she had left the check uncashed for many months, despite her low salary, and finally tore it up. He never mentioned it to her.
When Claire was in college her mother moved back to take care of her own mother. After the old lady died, her mother inherited a little money and the apartment, which she sold. She did not remarry. Claire had visited once. Her mother was living outside of Paris in the former royal city of Senlis, in a little apartment near the cathedral. She looked older but more serene. Around her neck she wore a small gold cross. They were more like two old friends chatting than mother and daughter. When Claire left, her mother embraced her but said nothing.
All that was years before. Now Claire was a member of that tribe of independent females, working without guarantees or guidance in the city, hoping to find love and, if not love, success or something like it. She was not promiscuous but she was available, which explains Clive and the men who had come before him and would no doubt follow.
The traffic had been worse than Claire expected. When she arrives at Clive’s house they are already late for dinner. “You took your bloody time getting here,” he says, offering her a perfunctory kiss. He is already dressed, a glass of champagne in his hand. He does not offer her one. “Sorry, traffic,” she says, hurrying into the bedroom to shower quickly and change.
Five minutes later she is rushing down the front steps, carrying her shoes while Clive waits in his car, the motor already running. “All right?” he says, barely waiting for her to close her door before accelerating down the drive, spitting gravel over the grass. She will swipe lipstick across her mouth and brush her hair in the car. “I told you it was silly to drive out,” he says. “I would have been happy to collect you at the station.” She ignores Clive’s rudeness. It is not him she has come to see.
When they arrive at the Winslows’, it is still light. In the west the sky is turning a startling mix of orange and purple. Harry greets them at the door. He is unconcerned about the time. “Come on in,” he says, his hair still wet from the shower. His light blue shirt clinging damply. His nose is sunburned. “Look at that sunset,” he says, presenting it like a gift.
Claire offers him her cheek and feels his lips lightly brush her skin. “Thank you so much for having us,” she says. “I was so happy when Clive told me.”
“Our pleasure,” responds Harry. “You made a big impression on Maddy. Let me get you guys something to drink.”
The house is more magical to her than before. There is no crush of party guests talking, laughing, flirting. Tonight it has reverted to its own quiet, private self, a house where a family lives, where secrets are shared and kept. On the wall she sees a small painting she hadn’t noticed before. A seascape. On a faded, elaborately carved frame a tiny brass nameplate with the name of the artist. Winslow Homer. She is surprised and impressed. Claire wishes she could inspect everything, study the photographs, learn the language.
Harry is at the bar. We have a running joke. Whenever one of us or, as it happened once, all of us find ourselves in Venice, we go to the famed Harry’s Bar right off St. Mark’s and swipe an ashtray or coaster to bring back to the bar here. On the wall is a photograph of Harry standing proprietarily in front of the frosted double doors, grinning madly. Maddy took the picture on their honeymoon.
“Wonderful day today,” he says. “Ned rented a boat in Montauk and we each caught a shark. Jesus, it was incredible.”
He uncorks a bottle of wine, wincing. “Cut the hell out of my hand, though.” Harry holds up his palm. Claire and Clive can see it is red and blistered. Calmly, gently, Claire reaches out and takes his hand and holds it in her own, running her fingers over the ravaged skin.
“It must hurt very much,” she says.
“Oh, it looks worse than it is.” His hand escapes to the glass. “Most of the red is iodine.”
“What did you do with the shark?” asks Clive.
“Going to have it mounted. Hang it on the wall over there. It’ll be quite the conversation piece. You know what people are like out here. It’ll drive ’em nuts,” he adds, laughing.
They walk outside to the porch. On the lawn Ned is throwing gentle spirals to a little blond boy. Claire recognizes him as the boy with the flashlight from the night of the party. They stop when they see them, and the boy waves.
“That’s Johnny,” says Harry. “Johnny, come here and say hello to our guests.”
The boy runs to them, his tanned legs long and skinny like a colt’s. Claire sees he has his mother’s blue eyes above a sun-freckled nose.
“How do you do?” he says in a soft voice, putting out his hand the way he has been taught. But he is a shy boy. He does not look them in the eye.
“How do you do, mate?” says Clive.
“Hello, Johnny,” says Claire, squatting so she is at eye level with the boy. “I’m Claire. How old are you?”
I am studying her. She is good with children. It is obvious. I imagine she must have worked as an au pair during college. She would have been their best friend.
“Eight.” His voice is nearly inaudible, but at least he is looking directly into Claire’s eyes. “But I’m almost nine.”
“Almost nine? That makes you very grown-up. I’m twenty-six. What do you like to do? I like to sail and read books.”
“My daddy writes books.”
“I know. I read his book. It was wonderful.”
Johnny smiles. Harry puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. “All right, buddy. It’s time for your supper. What do you say?”
“Good night. It was nice to meet you.”
He goes into the house. Claire watches him go, already in love. He is my godson.
Ned comes up. Despite his size, he is surprisingly quick. I have seen him play tennis. He can still beat men years younger and many pounds lighter. “Hey there.” To Harry he says, “He’s getting a good arm. He’ll make the team yet.”