A Summer Affair (31 page)

Music from a glass flute. Who had asked for the glass flute? She couldn’t remember, nor could she remember if she’d made it or not. It had to be possible. Lock loved the flute; she knew this because they listened to so much classical music on the Bose radio. She loved Lock; it was wrong, but it was true. How many weeks had she gone to confession, how many weeks had Father Dominic implored her to pray for the strength to stop, how many weeks had she said,
Yes, okay, I will,
but then found herself unable? She wondered how many other people she knew had a secret love. Anyone? Everyone? Not Siobhan. Siobhan thought Claire was a heathen. Claire’s head ached; she had to lie down. She meant to ease her head back, but she misjudged the distance to the floor, and her head met the concrete with a cracking thud. Only two arms left.

Darkness. Heat. Hell.

She came to in the hospital, in an antiseptic white square box of a room, where she was lying, crookedly, on a blue vinyl table covered with paper. Jason was there, and a heavyset nurse Claire didn’t recognize was holding a packet of cool blue gel to her forehead.

Jason said, “Claire?”

“Hi?” she said.

“It happened again,” he said. His face was red and the skin around his eyes was puffy. She had seen him look this way before, but when? She couldn’t remember.

“Two arms left,” she said. She didn’t think Jason would know what she was talking about, but his face clenched in angry recognition.

“Would you excuse us?” he said to the nurse.

“A doctor will have to see her before she’s discharged,” the nurse said. “She has heatstroke. She’s not free to go just because she’s awake.”

“Fine,” Jason said.

The nurse slipped out. Claire looked at Jason. “Heatstroke.”

“Again,” Jason said. “You did it again.”

She waited a minute to see if he would go on or if it was her turn to speak. Everything was moving so slowly, it was practically going backward.

“You have to stop,” he said. “The whole fucking thing. It’s like a
cult
you’ve joined, the gala committee. It’s like a planet you’ve moved to. Planet Gala. It is taking over your life, and you have to stop.”

She meant to say,
Yes, okay, I will,
but instead she said, “I can’t.”

“You have to stop,” Jason said. “I’d like to say you never should have started up again. Fine, I will say it: You never should have started up again. Because it’s dangerous—you don’t know when to stop, you push yourself until it just isn’t safe. You should have learned your lesson the last time. You hurt yourself and we nearly lost Zack.”

Claire started to cry. There was a frozen slab of blue gel strapped to her forehead, she realized, making her head heavy and hard to move. Had Jason just said that? No, he had not said that. It was the heatstroke. It was her guilt.

She looked at Jason. His eyes seemed to be two different colors, but she couldn’t remember which one was true. His eyes were blue, or green? Years ago, when she had made the nesting vases for the museum in Shelburne, she had created one that was the same color as Jason’s eyes. But had it been blue, or green? Or both? “I’m confused,” she admitted. “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real.”

“Because you have heatstroke!” he said. “You were in the shop too long, it was fifteen hundred degrees, you were out of water, you pushed yourself too far, and you fell down again—again!—and you passed out, again. And you almost died. Again! You’re like one of the kids, Claire. You do not listen!”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She remembered apologizing when it happened with Zack, on the operating table, as they took him by cesarean section. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
They don’t know about the baby.
She had thought they were going to deliver him dead, but he had lived and he was fine. Kids developed at different paces, even siblings. Claire tried to sit up.

“It’s not like you even went back to work for a good reason!” Jason said.

“You mean a paying reason.”

“I mean a
good
reason! The gala! The auction item! Lock Dixon asked you! Who cares? It’s not worth it. Let them get something else—a trip to Italy, a Hinckley picnic boat! It’s not worth risking your life.”

“I’m not risking my life,” Claire said. But there they were, in the hospital.

“You’ve become like some
robot
that these people have
programmed!
”

“It’s nearly over,” Claire said. She decided trying to sit up was pointless, so she lay back and closed her eyes. She was tired. “In six weeks, it will be over. And I can’t quit if Matthew is coming.”

“He doesn’t care if you’re in charge or someone else is.”

“The whole reason he agreed to do it is that it’s
my
thing. So now he’s coming, and if I quit, what does that say? That it wasn’t important to me after all? That I don’t care about it? I can’t quit. I made a commitment and I intend to honor it.”

“Even if it costs you your marriage?” he said. “Your kids?”

“Is it going to cost me you and the kids?” Claire said.

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “I just don’t get it. You tell me you want to stay home with the kids, give the glass a rest for a while, you want to be a mom, spend time with Zack and all that—and then out of the blue, without even discussing it with me, you take on the gala, which is like a full-time job and then some. All those meetings—if they paid you by the hour, you’d be making a hundred grand. And on top of that, you’re back in the hot shop, back at the glass, blowing out this piece that’s going to be your magnum opus—great, whatever, I’m happy for you. Too bad you won’t get paid a dime, but Lock Dixon asked you, and the committee, whoever the hell that is, expects it, and now you’re on the hook.” He swallowed. “They’ve stolen you from us, Claire. You’re gone. Even when you’re sitting at the dinner table, even when we’re in bed and I’m on top of you, it feels like you’re somewhere else.”

What could she say? He was right. She was amazed he’d noticed.

“I need you to stick with me for six more weeks,” she said. “And then it will be done. Over.”

“You could have died, Claire,” he said. “If Pan hadn’t checked on you when she got home from the beach, I would be picking out your casket right now.”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“You’re sorry? You were unconscious, Claire. Knocking yourself out, literally, over the goddamned chandelier.”

Two arms left,
Claire thought involuntarily. Then she thought,
He’s right. I’ve been brainwashed. I am not myself. How to return to myself? Quit? Leave Lock? Tell Isabelle to take her “
Petite Soirée”
and go to hell?

The door opened and the doctor swung in. “Well,” he said, “I hear you’re lucky to be alive!”

They were at an impasse. Claire promised Jason she would stay out of the hot shop for one week, but doing so pushed her past her self-imposed deadline. And she only had two arms left—just two! She could do it, she knew she could; she had pulled two perfect arms in an hour and she had it down now, the formula, the rhythm. She said to Pan, “I’m going to work for one hour. Will you check on me in an hour?”

Pan touched her front pocket, where she kept her cell phone. Claire knew this meant that Jason had told Pan to call him if Claire tried something like this.

“Never mind,” Claire said. “I won’t work.”

But of course she sneaked out only seconds after Pan pulled out of the driveway to take the kids to the beach. She found the door to the hot shop secured with a padlock.

She called Jason at work. “You’re a jerk, you know that?”

“You saw the lock?” he said.

She hung up. She nearly called Siobhan, but Siobhan would take Jason’s side—she had already taken Jason’s side, saying, when she dropped off Tupperware containers of chicken salad and marinated cucumbers,
It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself, Claire.

So Claire called Lock, even though Lock was in the office and not free to talk. She told him what had happened—the chandelier, the heat, the sweat, the fall, the hospital, the fight, the padlock.

“He’s a dictator,” she said of Jason. “He thinks he’s my father. He’s not my father.”

“No,” Lock said. “He’s not.”

“Keeping me out of my own hot shop, keeping me away from my work, is wrong.”

“Wrong,” Lock said.

“What am I supposed to do?” Claire said.

“Leave.”

She looked out the window at her shackled hot shop. “And go where?”

Lock was quiet.

Right, it was easy for him to take her side—anything to put him in opposition to Jason, anything to make Jason the bad guy and him the hero. Okay, now Claire was
defending
Jason. Jason wasn’t letting her in the hot shop because he cared about her well-being. The chandelier
was
making her crazy. She
did
need a break. Leave? And do what? Fly to Ibiza? It was unfair for Lock to tell her to leave when he had no intention of leaving himself.

“Claire!” There was a voice in the hallway. Truly incredible: Jason was home, at two o’clock in the afternoon.

“I have to go,” Claire said, and she hung up.

She opened the bedroom door and found Jason standing there, his face a livid purple, his arm outstretched and trembling. In his palm was the key.

“Here you go,” he said. “Take it.”

She took it. He turned on his heels and marched out.

She held the key until it started to sweat in her hand. This was what she wanted. Jason was trying to make her feel like it was wrong. It was wrong; all of it was wrong. She had been abducted. Where was the old Claire? Missing, dead, gone. She closed her eyes, and the thought that came to her was this:
Two arms left.
She filled a thermos with ice water and headed out back.

Forty-nine minutes and eighteen tries into it, she had her seventh arm. Into the annealer! One more arm! She was giddy with her impending triumph. Tomorrow was July 8 and Isabelle would arrive and Claire would be . . . done! The backbreaking work would be finished. Blowing the cups out would be as easy as blowing bubbles with the kids on the back porch.

Claire went back to the pot furnace and took another gather. The first key to success was getting the right amount of gather on the punty. This looked perfect. Claire took the gather to the marvering table and rolled it in the precious pink frit. The gather cooled against the table, so Claire went to the glory hole and reheated; then she took the gather to the bench and rolled it, grabbed her pliers and pulled and bent and twisted and rolled. She went back to the glory hole, got the piece good and hot again, tweaked it some more. She thought of the swoop she felt in her stomach when she saw Lock—that swoop was what she wanted to re-create with this glass. She thought the arm looked pretty good, pretty close . . . she heated it up, she tweaked it a little more, and feeling optimistic, she pierced the arm lengthwise with a long needle—this was delicate surgery, a procedure that had ruined dozens of good arms—so that there would be a thin tunnel through which to thread the wires. It was impossible to tell how good the arm was, however, until she held it up to the globe. Impossible that she would have pulled two perfect arms
in a row
—but yes! When the piece had cooled enough to pick up with tongs, Claire saw it was the missing piece of the puzzle. It fit—like Cinderella and the goddamned glass slipper. Impossible, but true!

Claire had hit a home run, she had pocketed the eight ball with two banks, she had won the pot with a royal flush, she had served an ace, she had skied a black-diamond run in knee-deep powder. Ringer! Hole in one! Touchdown! Goal!

Her self-righteous elation, however, was her worst enemy. She dropped the eighth and final arm on the way to the annealer—she was shaking with joy and nerves and, truth be told, thirst—and it shattered at her feet.

Later that night, as she lay in bed, all cried out, all done apologizing to her husband, and to God, and to herself, she recalled the myth of Sisyphus. It was his job to roll a boulder up a hill again and again and again; the task was never-ending. When Claire was a glassblowing apprentice, her mentor had told her that story. Satisfaction was not to be gained from finishing the task; satisfaction was to be gained from the process.

She feared that, like Sisyphus, she would never finish. The last arm of the g.d. chandelier was her boulder to push and push again. It was her punishment.

T
he caller ID said
Isabelle French,
and Siobhan couldn’t help herself: she picked it up.

Then immediately regretted it.

Isabelle French wanted Siobhan to cater a party that very night—well, not a
party,
exactly, more like an evening at home. “Une soirée intime,” Isabelle said, and Siobhan thought it was a joke, her speaking French, because it was her last name. But no, Isabelle spoke in earnest: the
soirée intime
was the invitation stuffing for the summer gala.

“I’m thinking all-American picnic food,” Isabelle said to Siobhan. “Fried chicken, deviled eggs. My grandmother’s bread-and-butter pickles. If I give you the recipe, you’ll make them?”

“Make them?” Siobhan repeated. She did not want to cater this intimate evening at home. She wanted to turn down everything related to the summer gala. She did not want to make Isabelle’s grandmother’s bread-and-butter pickles.

“I know it’s last minute,” Isabelle said. “So I’ll pay you for your time and effort. Say, three thousand dollars?”

Siobhan coughed. “How many people?”

“I’m not sure exactly. Less than ten.”

Siobhan started scribbling down ingredients in her notebook. “What time?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll be there at six to set up,” Siobhan said.

She could be bought. Especially since Carter had lost six hundred dollars on Wednesday and four hundred on Sunday with the Red Sox. He had to stop gambling that fucking instant, she told him, or she was going to call a hotline. He promised he would, but that’s how all addicts were, right? They promised until they were blue in the face, and carried on behind your back. Siobhan had opened a bank account that Carter knew nothing about, and all the checks from this summer were going right into it. He wouldn’t be able to touch a penny.