Beach Trip (15 page)

She hadn’t seen him or talked to him since graduation, but today on this cool September day, lost in her memories, Mel picked up the phone and called him.

The phone rang several times, long enough for her to nearly change her mind. There was a clattering noise as someone picked up the receiver. “Yeah?” he said. He sounded tired, his voice heavy with sleep.

“It’s me.”

There was a pause and a sound as if he’d put his hand over the receiver. She imagined that there was a woman there. She imagined him rising from the bed and taking the phone into another room where he could talk without fear of discovery. A moment later, he came back on. “Hey,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Were you sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“This late?”

“Rough night,” he said. His voice was cold, impassive. “How’re things in the Big Apple?”

“Good. Really good.” She was nervous suddenly, desperate to fill up the long silence between them. “I work for a company that produces corporate magazines. I write articles on wahoo fishing and how to take the stains out of concrete.”

She had meant it as a joke, something to lighten the tension between them, but he didn’t laugh. “What about your novel?” he said.

“I’m working on that, too. In the evenings.” Far off in the distance someone was flying a kite in the park. She could see it dancing on the currents between the tall buildings, bobbing against the dark blue sky like a paper boat on a stream. “What about you?” she said.

“I’m teaching. At a boys’ school for the moment but I’ve applied to Tulane and Duke.”

“Wow. A boys’ school. That must be exciting.”

There was a moment of silence, a dull hum on the line that thickened and spread out between them like a plume of roiling smoke. Mel couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Was there a reason for this call?”

“No,” she said. “No reason.”

“I’ve got things to do.”

“I thought we could be friends,” she said, “but I can see now that that won’t work.”

“This is how you wanted it,” he said coldly, and hung up.

She sat there for a long time in front of the windows as the sky darkened and the lights of the city gradually came on.

She was still living with Phil when she met her first husband, Richard. He was a video editor who lived in Phil’s building, and their first few meetings on the elevator had been erotic but brief. A smile, a furtive meeting of their eyes, a fleeting touch as she pushed past him and got off on the fourth floor, and he traveled on up to the sixth. By the end of the second week they had spoken, and by the end of the third week he had pushed her roughly up against the wall of the elevator and kissed her before the doors to the fourth floor slid open. After that it was inevitable. The next time they met she didn’t bother to push the button for the fourth floor but instead followed him up to the sixth. She allowed him to take her hand and lead her out of the elevator without a word.

There was a scene, of course, when Phil found out. She was still young and naive enough to believe that face-to-face breakups were best, and she had left work early to pack and wait for him to get home. Her explanation was brief and to the point, but as gentle as she could make it. He took it hard, and when there was a knock on the door and Richard appeared to help her move her things, a sudden threat of violence hung heavy in the air. Richard was tall and thin but there was a determined intensity in his dark eyes that kept Phil from throwing the first punch. Richard was not physically imposing but he had the look of a man who would fight hard for what he wanted. And he wanted Mel.

She lost her job at the corporate publishing company—Phil saw to that—but it didn’t matter. Richard was Old Money. In addition, he made a good living as a video editor, and she stayed home to write. They married the following year and moved into an Upper East Side brownstone and Mel published her first novel that same year. Four more followed at yearly intervals, and by the time she reached twenty-nine her marriage had settled into the doldrums. Richard had begun to hint desperately of children. But by then she had already met Booker, a documentary filmmaker three years her junior. The sex was incredible. Mel turned thirty, divorced Richard, and moved in with Booker. They married three years later and their marriage survived its endless pattern of violent breakups and passionate reconciliations right up until the time she turned thirty-eight. That was the year she got sick and learned that the vow “in sickness and in health” did not hold true for some people. Booker left her soon after her diagnosis. Not that she blamed him. Her track record was not much better.

Romantics constantly go on and on about their one true soul mate but Mel had learned that there was no such thing. She had had four soul mates, and she was sure there must be others out there just waiting to be found.

That being true, and she knew in her heart that it was, it was odd that after all this time it was still J.T. she dreamed of at night.

hey had dinner down at the Oyster Bar and then drove back along Blackbeard’s Wynd through the middle of the maritime forest. Moonlight fell between the arching branches of the live oaks. It lay in silvery pools along the road and washed across thickets of red bay and wax myrtle. Here and there they passed a large house, set back in the trees with its windows twinkling in the darkness. There were no streetlamps or neon lights, and other than the moonlight, the stars, and the patches of light that fell from the occasional house they passed, the road was dark.

“It’s kind of spooky,” Annie said. She was sitting beside Sara in the rear seat, facing backward. Mel was driving and Lola sat beside her, humming a little song under her breath.

“Can you see where you’re going?” Sara asked Mel.

“Barely.” The headlights of the golf cart did little to illuminate the road in front of them.

“Maybe you should slow down then.”

“Maybe you should drive,” Mel said. She relaxed against the seat
with one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting in her lap. It was almost like flying, she decided, whirring along in the quiet darkness with the night breeze on her face.
This is how an owl must feel gliding above a moonlit field.

“Is that a fox?” Annie asked, pointing, and they slowed down to look.

It
was
a fox, a slight, fragile-looking creature the size of a miniature collie staring back at them from the shadows of the forest. It disappeared without a sound in the underbrush. Mel clamped her foot down on the pedal and they sped on, past the old lighthouse standing in a moonlit clearing, past the small cedar-shingled post office and the interdenominational church with its white steeple and tall arched windows reflecting the moonlight.

“What do y’all say we go back to the house and play a game of Clinker?” Mel asked.

“I’m not up for any drinking games tonight,” Sara said.

“Me either,” Annie said.

Lola raised her hand like she was answering a question in class. “I’ll play,” she said.

“You’re on vacation,” Mel said to Sara. “Live a little.”

“I’m not sure my liver can take a week with you.”

“Oh come on, Sprague, never underestimate your capacity for binge drinking.”

“I’m not Sprague anymore.”

Mel stared at her in the rearview mirror. “No, you’re not.”

They broke from beneath the arching trees. To their left, the wide flat marsh glimmered in the moonlight. To their right, a series of distant dunes covered in sea oats stretched to the sea.

“Take a right at the next corner,” Lola said. “It’ll take us to the seaside road.”

Lola’s house was beautiful in the moonlight, perched across a wide dune with the light from the tall windows spilling across the sand. Captain Mike and April had not yet returned. Mel pulled the golf cart carefully into the two-cart garage beneath the crofter and plugged the electrical cord into the wall. They walked up the steps to the boardwalk. Ahead of them, beyond the sea oat–covered dunes, the white-capped Atlantic slumbered in the moonlight.

“Look at that view,” Sara said. They stood for a moment, quietly watching, and then walked across the veranda into the house.

While the others went upstairs to put on their jammies, Mel made a carafe of espresso martinis. Regardless of what they had said earlier, Mel was confident in her bartending abilities.
If you make them, they will drink.
She poured herself a glass and then sat down at the bar to wait. A few minutes later Lola came out of the bedroom wearing a pair of blue silk pajamas. She crossed to the armoire, took out a couple of decks of playing cards, and set them down on the glass coffee table.

“Here you are, my darling,” Mel said, handing her a martini.

Lola took the glass and sipped carefully. “Yummy,” she said.

When Sara came down a short time later, she noticed the carafe of martinis on the bar and said flatly, “I told you I’m not drinking. My liver’s still compromised from last night.”

“We’re on vacation,” Mel said. “You have to drink.”

“We’re not kids anymore, Mel. You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t make me do things I don’t want to do.”

Mel responded with a derogatory snort. She knew she was bossy and self-absorbed. She’d been told she was enough times in her life: by her father, by her college roommates, by her successive lovers and husbands, by her friends in New York. But they all forgave her for it, because she was entertaining. Mel knew how to tell a good story.

“I’ll have April make us up some wheatgrass shakes with milk thistle,” Lola said, as if that settled everything, “and then you don’t have to worry about your liver.”

Annie, who’d just come in, said, “As delicious as that sounds, Lola, I think I’ll pass.”

Lola raised one delicate eyebrow. “We could take some zeolites,” she said.

Mel said, “Zeolites?”

“Crystals,” Lola said. “Volcanic crystals that take the toxins out of your body.” She reached up into a cabinet and took out a large plastic bottle. “All the Hollywood stars take them,” she said, holding the bottle out to Annie.

Annie sighed and looked at Sara. “Oh, all right,” she said.

“That settles it then.” Mel poured two more fresh glasses and handed them around. “Here,” she said. “Drink your toxins.”

After a couple of hands of Clinker they were feeling pretty festive. All thoughts of an early bedtime disappeared soon after Mel shuffled the deck
and poured the second round of martinis. It was her turn again so she dealt the cards facedown to everyone. “One-two-three,” she said and everyone flipped over a card. Mel turned over a four of hearts and Annie turned over a four of clubs. “Clinker!” Mel shouted and slapped her hand down on the table.

“Damn,” Annie said.

“You lose,” Mel said. “Drink up.”

Annie sipped her martini. She wasn’t drunk—she knew enough to pace herself—but she was pleasantly buzzed. She had once written a college paper on the Mazatec people in Mexico and their use of the hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms in religious rituals. And while alcoholic beverages didn’t usually qualify as “hallucinogens,” the way Mel mixed them did. She knew from experience that Mel’s concoctions could make you forget yourself. They could make you do things you’d regret later.

“No fair,” she said to Mel. “You’ve lived in New York too long. You talk faster than the rest of us.”

“You mean I
think
faster than the rest of you.”

Sara shuffled the cards. “You react better under the influence of alcohol than the rest of us,” she said. “Gee, I wonder why.”

“I can’t help it if I can hold my liquor and you can’t,” Mel said, tossing a peanut at Sara. The next round went on for several minutes until Lola and Annie both turned over Jacks.

“Clinker!” Annie shouted, slapping the table.

Lola giggled. “I’m supposed to say something, aren’t I?” she said, and downed her martini.

“That’s right, Lola, you’re supposed to say Clinker. Before Annie does. And slap the table.”

“I just hope I don’t go home from this trip an alcoholic,” Annie said, grimacing and gathering up the cards.

“Oh, come on,” Mel said. “How often do you drink at home?”