Off Season (30 page)

She passed the hardware store, the bookstore, and the jewelry store, with windows that were dressed in tinsel,
evoking joy she did not feel. She heard the creak-creak of a hanging sign on which a plump strawberry ice cream cone was painted. It looked silly dangling there in the snow on Christmas Eve.

Silly, lonely, out of place, the way she felt now on the Vineyard, the way she’d thought she’d never feel again.

She snapped her yellow slicker over her thick wool turtleneck and pulled the hood up on her head. She thought of Christopher, who’d said Maurice had enjoyed his weekend there with them, and wondered how he would feel if the news of Ben leaked out, throwing his long-awaited heroine into the fierce cauldron of a morals scandal.

Would it really matter that it was about Ben and not her? Was she denying that Maurice would be consumed by rage?

And would Christopher defend her—or him?

With a mittened hand, she wiped the snow from her cheeks. This seemed like the kind of thing insane people did: walking in misery, letting their minds run to rambling things, catching their death of cold and not caring.

Fact:
Ben had committed adultery.

Fact:
Jill had not been the “wounded” party. It had been his other wife, Louise.

Still, she mused now as she passed the town hall then the whaling church, if he’d done it once, he could do it again.

“Circumstances were different,” he’d said quietly last night.

Yes, yes, she knew that. He had not had sex for a long, long time. He was a man.

Child molestation.

Adultery.

Lies and cover-ups.

Where did one leave off and another start?

Who was the bigger fool here, Ben or her?

Was what she had “almost” done with Christopher any better than what he’d done with Fern?

But she hadn’t done the deed. Something had stopped her, and it hadn’t simply been Christopher’s nonresponse. Something, some switch, had clicked off in her brain before it had been too late.

Not so with Ben. Not once, but many times
.

She spat a flake of snow that had fallen on her lip. Then she cursed every man that God had ever made, especially those she’d known, especially those she’d loved or thought she had.

How would Rita have handled this? Too bad she couldn’t tell her. But Jill wasn’t free to have a confidante, not even her best friend who had known her forever, who had once known everything about her life and had loved her anyway.

But she couldn’t tell Rita because Ben would be upset.

Ben. Whose life and problems apparently had become more important than her own, as if he mattered more than she did, as if her feelings did not count.

She swallowed down a great big lump. Then, at the next corner, she took a left.

“You walked?” Rita asked as she opened the door and hurried Jill inside. “Are you insane?”

“Nearly,” Jill replied, noticing that Rita looked quite round and positively glowing in a red sweatshirt with a jeweled Christmas tree on the front. Jill might have told her she looked terrific if there weren’t other things on her mind, or on what was left of it.

She stood in the living room of the ancient saltbox and breathed in the old, friendly warmth of the house she knew so well, which now stood in the weary yet still welcome light of Christmas decorations and postparty fatigue.
“I thought you could use some help cleaning up. It was a wonderful party, Rita. We enjoyed it very much.”

Rita took Jill’s slicker and hung it on a string of pegs nailed up beside the staircase. “You left early,” she said. “You missed Jesse Parker’s reindeer imitation.”

“From too much punch, no doubt.”

Rita laughed. “He does that every year. God, it’s crazy what we do to entertain ourselves off season.”

Jill could not disagree. She followed Rita into the kitchen and was surprised to see that last night’s disarray had vanished. “Where’s the mess?” she asked.

Tossing a towel at Jill, Rita laughed. “Your daughter came back late to help. It was clean before I went to bed.”

Yes, Amy would have done that. Amy had the caring spirit of Jill’s father layered beneath the fire of her mother’s soul.

“Where’s your mother?” Jill dried her hair, her face, her neck.

“Believe it or not, she’s at the senior center. She’s playing Mrs. Claus at the Christmas party. She drove herself over and I haven’t heard from the police, so I guess she made it without incident.”

Jill set down the towel and tried not to wince when Rita said the word
police
.

“Sit,” Rita instructed. “There’s leftover chowder from last night. You look like you could use some.”

The Formica table in this kitchen was where Jill had spent so many hours of her youth. Sitting there was a welcome, familiar thing to do, an unexpected comfort after learning that her husband, the accused child molester, was an adulterer as well. “It sounds as if Hazel’s planning to stay on the Vineyard,” she remarked.

“She’ll never leave again. Not with the baby coming.”

Jill watched her friend move around the kitchen, pulling crock bowls from the cabinet, ladling chowder, heaping
oyster crackers on a plate, then tearing off paper towels to use as napkins because that was Rita, simply Rita. Jill wondered why she’d ever hesitated to share this pain with her. Because it had been Ben’s request? Had that been good enough?

“It just goes to show you that life sometimes can be surprising,” Rita said, setting a crock of soup and a spoon in front of Jill. “Take you, for example. Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected you’d show up at my door today. Let alone that you’d walk over in the snow.” She set another crock across from Jill and sat down with the thud of unaccustomed extra weight. “Speaking of snow, I guess everyone made it home okay last night. Even Hattie Phillips. I swear that old woman gets feistier every year. She and my mother never got along, you know. But now that so many of their friends are dead, it’s like she wants to be my mother’s best friend. She brought the chocolate mint squares to the party. Did you try one? I probably shouldn’t have, but I had two. Well, what the hell, I couldn’t have the punch.”

“I have something on my mind,” Jill said, interrupting Rita’s happy monologue. “I thought I could handle it myself, but I need to talk it out. I need to talk to you.” She lowered her head. Two tears slid down her cheeks, then dropped onto her lap. “Oh, God, Rita,” she cried, “what am I going to do?”

In a flash, Rita was by crouched by her side. Then Jill felt Rita’s arm around her and Rita’s “sssh-sssh, it’s okay,” whispered in her ear. And then Jill’s tears flowed freely, perhaps more freely than she’d let them in many, many years.

Finally, she could speak. “It’s Ben,” she said.

Rita held Jill’s hair a moment, then pressed her forehead to her friend’s. Then she sighed, stood up, and returned to her seat. She propped her elbows on the table, as if prepared to listen, as if she were not surprised. Ben.
Men. Same thing. Same oil and water combination when mixed with women for too long.

“I found out he had an affair.” Jill surprised herself that those were the words that popped out first. Not “He’s been accused of child molestation.” She did not say that, but rather, “He had an affair,” as if, in the course of humankind, that was the more evil charge against him.

Rita put her hand out and rested it on Jill’s. “Shit,” she said. “They’re all shit.”

Jill nodded as if she’d known that all along.

“Who is it?” Rita asked. “How’d you find out?”

“He told me,” Jill answered. “Only because she showed up at our door.”

“Who?” Rita repeated, louder now, as if she were ready to tear the woman’s eyes out, doing battle for her friend.

“Fern Ashenbach. She’s blond. She wears boots with spike heels. And she’s younger than us. Thirtysomething, maybe.”

“Is she related to Dave Ashenbach? From Menemsha? He just died, you know.”

“She was married to Ashenbach’s son. He’s dead, too.”

“So now she has nothing better to do than screw around with your husband.”

For the first time, Jill allowed herself to cringe. The words evoked an unwanted image of Ben, naked, hard, and wanting, mounting the long-legged, lusty being, kissing her mouth, sucking at her …

She squeezed her eyes shut and let out a moan. Now she knew why adultery seemed worse: it was because she could not imagine him doing that other thing, that other twisted, criminal thing. But she could imagine him with another woman; she could visualize the act.

Denial is the shock absorber of the soul, she’d once read.

If he was capable of one thing, could he not be capable of the other?

Do we ever really know anyone well enough to entrust them with our hearts, our souls, our lives?

“Honey,” Rita’s quiet voice said, as she patted Jill’s hand, “he’s not the first to do this. I know it’s hard to hear, but it probably has more to do with his age and his ego and all that shit than with you.”

Jill blinked. Rita had misunderstood. “Oh, it didn’t happen now. Not while we’ve been married. It was when he was married before. To Louise.”

Rita dropped her head. “Jesus Christ,” she said, then lifted her eyes, grabbed a fistful of crackers, and crushed them into her chowder. “You had me worried for a minute. So he screwed around on his first wife. What’s that got to do with you?”

“Louise was sick, Rita. She was dying.”

Rita picked up her spoon and dove into her bowl. “Well, okay, so it was wrong. But at the risk of sounding ignorant, what does it have to do with you? How long ago was it?”

“Six years. Maybe seven.”

“Jesus, Jill. So now what? She came to your front door looking for more? If that’s the case, then you might have a right to be upset. No, cancel that. You only have a right to be upset if Ben said yes and he jumped into the sack with her.”

Jill opened her mouth to say the rest, but the words took too long getting out. Rita spoke again.

“The trouble with you is you’ve had everything too easy all your life. I know it hasn’t seemed that way to you, but God, Jill, you haven’t had a whole lot of heartache, you know?”

She did not want to argue with that. Her first husband,
Richard, had had countless affairs, but Jill had looked the other way because once she’d stopped denying it, she was convinced he’d outgrow it, which of course he had not. But she could not explain this because she was far too tired, and because Rita might not understand, because Rita had never had a husband—her life had been more difficult than that.

And she could not explain that the second man she’d almost married had turned out to be a cad, willing to sell his soul—or hers—for ratings. And he still was.

And she could not explain the whole story about Ben.

Rita, after all, did not know what it meant to be committed to another, she had not been able to succumb to that, not one time in her life, not even with the man who loved her, Charlie Rollins.

Slowly she lifted her spoon and tried to smile. “You know something, Rita? You’re right. I am an incorrigible brat.”

Rita laughed. “I never said you were a brat. It’s just that you’ve been luckier than most of us. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Ben took the long way back from Gay Head, through Chilmark to Vineyard Haven, then around the harbor to Oak Bluffs.

He knew he was procrastinating. But driving on a snowy day seemed preferable to going home, more appealing than facing Jill again and seeing the huge hurt in her eyes. Besides, the roads were mostly deserted because of the holiday.

Under “normal” circumstances, he’d have been at Carol Ann’s. He’d be sitting at the table, drinking her strong coffee, watching her prepare Christmas dinner. He’d be listening to his grandkids, maybe helping them string popcorn or clumsily wrap presents. He’d be savoring their exuberance that Christmas Eve was finally there.

But he was not welcome at his daughter’s—John had made that clear. And now, if Carol Ann had ever known that when her mother was alive …

He no longer wondered why men committed suicide, when the things they had done to the world, or the world had done to them, had squeezed around their airway and made it impossible to continue breathing the same air as those they’d loved and cheated on or hurt.

He could not believe Fern had come back.

At first, he’d been dumb enough to think that maybe it would help. Maybe she’d remember that Ben was not the sort of man who would do what Mindy claimed. Maybe she would tell that to the district attorney. Maybe that would get the charges dropped.

But she intended to do nothing of the sort.

Maybe he should simply knuckle under and pay her off. How much would she take once she learned that half a million was out of the question? He was wondering this as he automatically pulled into the driveway of his old house in Oak Bluffs—his house, Louise’s house, the house where they’d raised Carol Ann.

He put the car in park and sat there, face to face with his workshop, where he’d built his plans for Menemsha House long into the wee hours of many nights. He saw the kitchen window where Louise had stood so many predictable years, making dinner, washing dishes, keeping their lives uncomplicated. As much as she’d loved their home, she’d loved her work as a teacher and the challenge of the classroom, too. She often shared the pride she’d felt when her students had responded to something they had learned.