A Summer Affair (26 page)

“Ha!” Claire said. She
had
told Matthew that. She had promised herself she would leave Wildwood Crest with a clean slate. And her life had been happy; it had been blessed. Until . . . when? When had the trouble started? With Zack’s birth—or before that? On the night of Daphne’s accident? Where would Claire start if she wanted to explain about Lock? What would she say?
I love him the way I used to love you, with heedless abandon, with pure emotion in that aching, longing, dangerous way.

“I went to a party last night,” she said. “And I drank, and I had all this
stuff
on my mind. Then I had a fight with my best friend, Siobhan—it was her party—and the fight left me feeling horrible, and then I saw Jason coming down the stairs with this other friend of ours, this woman who is a complete knockout, and I accused him of sleeping with her and . . . God, it’s a mess. I made a mess. Jason’s not speaking to me and Siobhan’s not speaking to me and our au pair probably isn’t speaking to me, and I have one of my little girls upstairs vomiting and I just feel . . . bad about myself. And confused. I’m looking at my life and I’m saying,
What happened? What am I doing? How did I get here?
Do you ever feel that way?”

“All the time,” Matthew said. “It’s fair to say I feel that way all the time.”

“But you’re a big star,” Claire said. “Nobody gets mad at you.”

“Bess is mad. She’s beyond mad. She’s finished. My band is mad. Terry and Alfonso—they’re disappointed and mad, and they have every right to be. I’m letting them down. I’m a big star, but guess what: I’m also a seriously flawed person. I can write songs and sing and play the guitar, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have weak spots and bad days like every other human being. We all fail, Claire.”

She was crying again. “I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you, too,” he said.

“I have to hang up, but I’m going to see you, right? In August? You’ll stay here with us?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You have to stop drinking,” she said. “Just stop for one hour. Do you want me to call Bruce?”

“He knows all about it,” Matthew said. “He’s on his way over here as we speak.”

“You have to be sober for my concert, Matthew,” she said. “For me, okay?”

“For you,” he said. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Claire said. She hung up the phone and spent a moment enjoying the sun on her arms. She was feeling pain about the past twenty-four hours and pain from twenty years earlier. She was as confused now as she’d been then; the world and the people in it perplexed her. She perplexed herself.

“Mommy?”

She went inside.

T
he vacation could have gone either way. Lock and Daphne were alone for eight days and seven nights; things could have gotten better between them, or worse. They had taken two other vacations alone together since Daphne’s accident, one to Kauai, one to London, and neither had done the trick, but there was always the lingering hope that this time would be different. This time the sunshine or the pool or the amenities of the world-class resort would inspire the change Lock had been waiting for. Daphne would snap (!) back into her old self; she would break out of the spell cast on her by her head injuries and wake up, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.
Where have I been all this time?

In the end, the vacation didn’t go one way or the other. Things between them remained the same. Which meant what? The two days at Andover were torture. Heather didn’t want them there. She asked them to meet her off-campus, at a vegetarian restaurant in town. There were other students in the restaurant, some of whom waved to Heather and murmured her name, but Heather did not introduce Lock or Daphne to anyone. Lock couldn’t say he blamed Heather, because Daphne, especially in front of people she had never met, was unpredictable. She began by harassing their waitress about her hair, which was knotted in dreadlocks.

“A nice white girl like you,” Daphne said, only seconds after ordering a leek and Gruyère tart, “sabotaging your looks with that awful hair. You don’t wash it, is that it? What do your parents say?”

The waitress chose to ignore Daphne; she flushed as she scribbled down Lock’s and Heather’s orders, and then she fled from the table while Daphne, inexplicably, clucked like a chicken. Heather glowered, mortified.

“Mom,” she said. “Quit it.”

“Quit what?” Daphne said. “I just wonder what her parents think.”

Lock tried to serve as a buffer between his wife and his daughter; he tried to shield Heather from Daphne’s attacks, but Daphne landed a few jabs anyway. Heather’s calves were too muscular, Daphne said.
You look like a boy. You should think about quitting hockey next year.

“But Mom,” Heather said, “hockey is why I’m here.”

“You don’t want to turn into a lesbian, do you?” Daphne said. “I don’t want you to turn into a lesbian.”

“All right,” Lock said. “That’s enough.”

Heather seemed happier when it was just her and Lock alone, after Daphne went back to the inn to “rest.” Heather took Lock onto campus, introduced him to her art history teacher, showed him her dorm room, where he visited with Heather’s roommate Désirée, whose parents had kindly taken Heather to Turks and Caicos. Désirée’s parents also had a house on Martha’s Vineyard, and Heather mentioned spending the summer there, and Lock said, “Yes, or you and Désirée could spend the summer on Nantucket. We have plenty of room.” But Heather scowled at this, and Lock knew he would never be taken up on his offer. His daughter, at the tender age of fifteen, was gone, and this made him feel unspeakably angry at Daphne. But Daphne’s manner was beyond her. What had the doctors said? It was like someone else was inside Daphne, manning the controls. Some evil green alien, the wife-and-mother invader. Lock could not blame Heather for wanting to spend the summer on the Vineyard; if given the chance, he might say yes to it himself.

Before Lock returned to the inn to shower and change—they were going to a restaurant thirty miles away, at Heather’s suggestion—Heather said, “You and Mom don’t have to worry about me. I’m going to be fine.”

Lock looked at his daughter—her dark hair, her wide, pretty mouth, so much like Daphne’s, her strong legs, her slender, feminine feet in espadrilles—and he nearly wept. He had expected to hear those words when she was ready to embark on her honeymoon, or when she was setting off for college, perhaps—but not now, at the age of fifteen. He thought he’d experienced and expelled all his sadness about losing his daughter’s confidence and her company, but he was wrong. He felt it freshly now.

He was so consumed with keeping things between Heather and Daphne on an even keel—it was exhausting—that he didn’t have a second to think about Claire. That changed once Lock and Daphne pulled away from Phillips Academy, once they were alone together, with what seemed like an endless stretch of alone-together time in front of them. Daphne stared out the window silently for a while, then started on a diatribe about Heather. Her legs were the legs of an eighteen-year-old boy, a cross-country runner, with those ropy muscles. If she stayed at that school, she would most certainly become a lesbian. They had to pull her out. She seemed so unhappy, anyway, didn’t she? Positively morose. She hadn’t smiled once the whole time they were there. And what to make of the vegetarianism? She had been raised on beef tenderloin! The school was to blame—so liberal, so forward-thinking, offering shameful alternatives to the way normal people lived. Had Lock happened to notice the hair on the girl who served them? Heather should move home. They could redecorate the basement, turn it into a hangout with an iPod station and the best speakers, a computer, a plasma TV, a refrigerator—full of hummus, if that was what she wanted! Anything so she would come home!
She’s so set on privacy and independence, we’ll just promise her we’ll never go down there.

Lock was silent. The idea wasn’t terrible. Lock wanted Heather home as much as Daphne did, but he knew it was never going to happen. In response to Lock’s silence, Daphne started to cry, and Lock reached over for her hand, which she flung away in anger.

“We should have had more children,” she said. “I can’t believe I let you talk me out of it.”

It was pointless to remind her that after Heather was born, a cyst formed on one of Daphne’s ovaries and she’d had both ovaries removed. Blame for the fact that Heather was an only child had, since the accident, fallen squarely onto Lock’s shoulders.

At some point during the ride to the airport, Lock remembered Claire, although it would be inaccurate to say he’d forgotten her. Rather, he’d decided, out of fairness to Daphne and Heather, that he would do his best to contain his feelings for Claire. He would put them in a box—a small, gold treasure chest, as he envisioned it—and keep it closed and locked. However, as Daphne railed against him for first one offense, then another, Lock opened the box, just a crack—he pictured Claire driving to the grocery store, pulling a gather from her pot furnace, climbing into bed. In Lock’s mind, she was alone, though in reality, he knew, this was never the case. More images flowed out of the box: He heard Claire’s clogs on the stairs of the Elijah Baker House as he waited, two glasses of wine in hand, breath suspended, for her to pop her head around the corner.
Hey, you
. He thought about wiping away the tears that often appeared in the corners of her eyes after they made love. Claire cried for a variety of reasons: the sex was astonishing, the rush of emotion overwhelmed her, she hated to leave him, it hurt, physically, to rip herself away. And, too, there was guilt—about Jason, about Daphne, about the kids—and there was fear, fear of getting caught, fear of going to hell. Nearly every time they were together, they talked about stopping, about walking away in the name of a righteous life. But neither of them ever followed through. It was cathartic to talk about but impossible to execute, leaving each other. They felt ecstatic, elated, anxious, guilt-ridden, despicable—but mostly, they felt alive. Each day was spring-loaded and tense with possibility—to see each other, to talk, to touch—and it was this emotion that was too intoxicating to give up.

The actual vacation, although parts of it were pleasant—the hot sun, the cool, clear blue water, the delicious food and drinks, the luxurious room, the attentive service—felt to Lock like a vacuum. It was an eight-day, seven-night tunnel of no Claire; it was something to be survived. He had promised Claire he would e-mail, and in fact, the resort had a business center he could have used at any time, but he felt that communicating with her—trying to put words to his emptiness and then subjecting himself to the added torture of awaiting a response—would be infinitely more painful than just putting his head down and enduring. He and Daphne spent long, silent hours by the pool, each of them reading, and while Daphne napped, Lock took walks on the beach, thinking not of Claire (always of Claire) but of what topics he could bring up at dinner that would not incite a verbal attack from Daphne. She did seem marginally better at the resort, though she found ways to insult the other guests (who were primarily British and therefore reserved and inclined to keep to themselves, especially when they heard Daphne lapse into her clucking). There were two evenings of intimacy and these were, perhaps, the most trying times for Lock. Sexually, Daphne was both aggressive and impossible to please. Lock, helped along by three rum punches, strove to remember Daphne as she used to be, before she took to assaulting his manhood at the same time that she was trying to excite him. It was during these intimate moments that Lock thought to himself,
I cannot stay married to this woman
. He would not be able to stand a lifetime of such sexual encounters, but he also knew he would never be able to cut Daphne loose, no matter how bad things got. There wasn’t another man alive who would be willing to take Daphne on, and her parents had passed away, so what this meant was that if Lock abandoned her, she would become Heather’s lot, and Lock could not, would not, burden his daughter that way. He would stay with Daphne.

The best moments of the vacation were when Daphne would look up from her book, take a sip of her rum punch, and say, “Thanks, babe”—this, the pet name that the two of them had used with each other, and with Heather, before the accident—“for bringing me here. I’m having fun!”

The worst moment came at dinner on the final night. It was no surprise that Daphne had saved her poison spear for the final night; that was part of the torture: allowing Lock to believe that they’d made it—a whole week without overt hostility—and then sticking him in the final hour. Daphne was smarter, cleverer, and more cunning now than she had been before the accident.

Over a glass of very fine, pale, bubbling champagne, she said, “I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you find Isabelle French attractive?”

Lock laughed, inadvertently spritzing some of his drink across the tablecloth. “No,” he said.

“You’re lying.”

“I am not lying.”

“Isabelle French is a beautiful woman. Anyone you asked would say so.”

“She’s fine, nothing special. Other people may find her beautiful, but I don’t particularly. I’ve known her a long time. Maybe I’m just used to how she looks. I don’t notice it.”

“She’s after you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Daphne.”

“You heard what she did with Henry McGarvey at the Waldorf?”

“Of course.”

“If you touch her, I’ll kill you.”

“I’m not going to touch her.”

“I mean it. I’ll murder you in your sleep. Then I’ll find a female judge who will let me off the hook.”

“Nothing is going on between me and Isabelle.”

“Really?” Daphne said. She tilted her head. Her eyes held a look of unusual clarity. “Because I’ve noticed a change in you since you asked her to cochair the gala. You work late all the time now.”

“I’ve always worked late,” Lock said. “It’s the only time I get anything done. You know this. During the day, the phone rings off the hook.”

“Lock,” Daphne said. She leaned forward over her champagne flute. Another inch and she would topple it with her breasts. “I am not a stupid woman.”