The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (15 page)

Children joined in from neighboring towels, and Chris was relieved of his duties. He lowered himself into a folding chair beside Kate and picked up the bottle of sunscreen, smoothing it across his nose and cheeks in an inverted V.

Sitting. Incredibly, they were sitting. “I’d take out a book, but something tells me they’d notice and it’d break the spell,” she said. “I think this is the first time we’ve both sat down at the beach since having kids.”

Out of habit, he looked to the children, now closer to the waterline. “Well, there was the Cape.”

“But they weren’t
with
us.”

“God, no.” He reached over and stroked her shin.

That anniversary year Kate and Chris had rented a house in the dunes for a long weekend away, and Rachel had offered to come stay with the children. When their mother had offered to come as well, Kate was not sure which of them was more relieved, Rachel or herself.

The overcast weekend had driven away most beachgoers. Kate and Chris had sat in the sheltered dunes below their deck, temperatures pleasant enough, reading and dozing, and playing Scrabble pulled from the shelves of the rental home. In the evening they’d brought their dinner and wine into the beach grass at sunset. She was reclining with her eyes closed when he went inside for another bottle of wine, and didn’t notice until he sat casually beside her that he’d strolled out without a shred of clothing. Her braying laugh had drawn the attention of an elderly couple walking below. Back home, they’d said they were lucky not to have left with a summons, or with the beginnings of a child who’d have to be named Sandy.

Piper continued her hopeless relay. Finally, she laid herself full-length in the moat to try to stop its absorption of water, and became distracted by the sensation of wet sand, rolling and basting herself. Kate tried to remember the point at which she’d stopped enjoying covering herself in sand, at what age there was dawning awareness,
This feels itchy
or
This is messy
or even
So-and-so looks nicer than I do in her bathing suit
. She was in no rush for her daughter to be there.

“I found out last night that Elizabeth’s mother died of breast cancer,” she told Chris, burrowing her toes in the warm sand. “She’d been studying art in Florence and came home to take care of her. Just packed up and quit school to come home and be her caretaker.”

“I can see her doing that,” he said. “Man, cancer. That must have been brutal.”

“It sounds awful, the slow deterioration. That’s got to be one of the most horrible ways to die.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lou Gehrig’s disease isn’t a walk in the park. A shark attack would be pretty horrific. Or slow dehydration on a desert island.”

“Don’t joke, Chris. Cancer is so common, it’s scary.” Kate put on her sunglasses and squirmed her chair down lower into the sand. “I’m so glad you quit smoking.”

He made an agreeable sound. She studied him for a moment out of the corner of her sunglasses, looked for a coloring, a clench of the jaw. He stared ahead, expressionless. If she said anything further it would bring them back to that old place of undermined trust, and change the tenor of their vacation.

Five kids now worked with James and Piper by the water’s edge, laboring with their own pails and shovels to create a second tier for the castle walls. Chris called out to them. “It looks good, guys, but make sure the new sand isn’t too wet. If it’s too heavy it’ll collapse your walls.” He pulled his water bottle from the sand and took a long drink. “What did Dave have to say this morning? Are they gonna come out for a visit?”

So that was that, then. They would pretend about the smoking.
She tried to remember which year they’d gone to Cape Cod, which anniversary that had been. Three years ago? It felt like much more.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I invited them again. But he had his polite voice on that says he’ll never really take me up on it.”

Chris nodded. “Dave’s holding things together well, but there’s a lot of politeness going on with him. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him irritated. I get the feeling he lets you see exactly what he wants you to see.”

She palmed a dollop of sunscreen and worked it in circles across her chest and neck. “This morning he asked me how far I’d gotten in the journals. I feel like he’s torn between wanting to find out the truth about her and not really wanting to know.”

Chris shook his head. “To have that loss, and then get that kind of information about the person you thought you knew? That’s as big as it gets.” He watched James straddling the castle, wanting to make himself king. “I guess you never really know people. She’s the last person I would have suspected of fooling around.”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Chris. I mean, she was all about her family. Everything she did was for them.”

Two women in bikinis strolled by at the waterline just below where the kids were repairing the castles. When the sand flying from James’s shovel neared their shins, they jumped back with mincing steps, as if they’d been burned. Both had long, full hair, carefully turned with blow dryers and brushes. As they walked, their breasts bobbed in their bikini tops like buoys in the water.

Chris’s eyes followed them as they passed. Kate looked at him until he noticed her watching him, and then both looked back at the kids at the sand castles.

“Just because Elizabeth was a perfect mom doesn’t mean she couldn’t have an affair. But if that’s what it was, are you going to tell Dave? Or give him the books, or what?”

Fair and sensitive
. Kate watched the women move down the shoreline. “I’ll have to see what feels right. I don’t know what would be more cruel—to hand Dave proof, or leave him wondering what
she was doing. I guess it depends on whether the truth seems like it would benefit him in any way, or just hurt him.”

Chris frowned. “Well that’s a little controlling, don’t you think? Deciding what kind of truth he can handle.”

“I’m not ‘deciding’ anything. I just don’t know how much is appropriate to share. Dave and the kids have their memories of her a certain way, and all that could be shot to hell. That’s not what she would have wanted.”

“Well maybe she should have thought of that before she started screwing around and put it in her diary. Don’t you think Dave deserves to know whether his life was a sham?”

“A sham? Come on, Chris. Everyone keeps little things from their spouse. Something they think, something they do. Or a bad habit.” She tried to keep her voice from becoming too pointed on the last two words, and she stared straight ahead at the water. “But even if she did have secrets, she’s still entitled to her privacy. A person’s wishes don’t stop being real just because she’s gone.” Kate sat back in her chair, surprised by her own vehemence.

Chris turned to her, eyes unreadable behind dark lenses. “Dave is the one who’s still here, and his life counts too, Kate.” He reached for the water bottle, found it empty, and tossed it into the sand. “No offense, but maybe this project has become a little too much about you, and this idea of yourself as her protector.”

She opened her mouth and leaned forward in her chair, but was interrupted by chaos at the castle. Six kids were now within what was left of its walls, including Piper, jumping up and down on the remnants of towers and turrets and screeching with destructive glee. James stood to the side, near tears.

“Don’t! Don’t!” he yelled at them. “I’M THE KING! THIS IS MY CASTLE! DON’T WRECK IT!” But it was too late. The walls had already crumbled.

T
HEIR THIRD WEEK
of vacation had been earmarked for the children to attend farm camp, an island of structured time on the open calendar. Kate had loosely envisioned the new things she’d try solo while the kids were occupied, kayak tours and birding excursions. But each morning, after she pulled out of the driveway with the kids and their backpacks and Chris sat down to his work, there were two things she wanted to do. First, she’d swim in the ocean, rediscovering the fluidity of movement that used to come naturally. Then she would pull on a cotton tank dress over her swimsuit and go to the café to read.

In New York, Elizabeth had thrown herself into a variety of activities. She joined a professional organization of graphic designers, and took a board position with the New York Road Runners club. She became enamored with the city all over again.
My Saturday mornings: run in the park, then get a bagel with lox from the wild yelling deli guy, and watch the roller derby near the fountain. They set up boom boxes and enormous speakers and pylons, and all kinds of people come, kids and cross-dressers and old fogies. I love this crazy place, all these people not worrying how they look, just smiling and skating and being exactly how they are
.

Elizabeth dated many people, some of them met through chance encounters at the gym or in a bar. Once it had not gone well, a man
from the gym whose style went from assertive to menacing, and she vowed not to go out with strangers anymore.
New rules, the Two Points system: I have to have two points of reference, two people to vouch for the person. Get back on the horse, Sourpuss. But it’s two points, no exceptions
.

Kate put the notebook down on the table and looked around the outdoor patio of the café. During culinary school and afterward, Kate had had a wide circle of friends and colleagues in New York. Experiences with total strangers, people without a single person to vouch for them, were uncommon. Except Chris. But there’d been a solidity to him, quiet and assured, reliable; he showed an astute awareness of others and a comfort with where he stood among them, and apart from them. It had seemed the greater risk not to give him her number. But Kate had had the safety net of roommates who’d known where she was and with whom. Elizabeth had lived alone. It was a chancy thing, meeting a stranger in New York.

When Kate arrived in Manhattan for culinary school, it was as if a secret had been revealed, a West Coast conspiracy exposed: in fact, New York, not California, was the greatest place on earth. People moved at her speed and shared her sense of humor. There was a mind-boggling variety of things to do any minute of the day or night. She didn’t mind the noise and overlooked the grime. Kate had become so passionate about the city that her family and old friends in Palo Alto rolled their eyes when she mentioned it. In this way she learned a valuable lesson: most people outside of the city did not take kindly to New Yorkers’ mental map that placed the Big Apple at the center of everything, though of course New Yorkers would never call it that. Later, when she joined the Southbrook playgroup, she found that few of the women went into the city unless it was, say, their anniversary, or they were dressing up the kids in their Christmas best for Radio City. To talk about the city like an insider, to beat the drum about the restaurants in a way that made their suburb sound like a hamlet, was like being that expat who came home and wouldn’t shut up about how much better things were in Europe.

Kate rechecked the date at the top of Elizabeth’s last journal entry. June 12, 1989. At that time Kate had been out of culinary school for a year, living on the Upper West Side, and had not yet met Chris. It was a shame she hadn’t known Elizabeth in those days, she thought, and the thought surprised her. It would not have occurred to her to wish she’d shared those days—childless, a little wild—with Elizabeth.

She had an hour more until camp ended. Kate went back inside the café for a scone and a refill of her coffee.

Elizabeth enrolled in a painting class at an art program in the Village. The instructor had a cultlike following among young artists dazzled by his access to galleries clear to London and his status in the city’s social scene, and Elizabeth studied under him for three terms with thoughts of amassing enough of a portfolio to hold a show. Classes were held in the evenings; soon she was staying after, and eventually, staying over.

It was hard to imagine Elizabeth with men before Dave. For Kate, intimacy had always been as much about the sensual buildup as the act itself: with certain colleagues there’d been a frisson in the kitchen, the heat and urgency and even the tempers simmering, until one night it was inevitable they would not be leaving alone. But there were some women for whom sexuality seemed an afterthought, a point of mere biology. Elizabeth had seemed like one of those women.