Belonging (31 page)

How she wished Jake were here to help her think this through! The old professional side of her longed to put this all on record, even on videotape; a discovery like this could be the focus of an entire show.

Suddenly the nausea flared up, swamping her, pulling her into a vortex of discomfort. Her vision blurred. The message was clear. If she wanted to carry these babies to term, she had to rest.

Sixteen

The evening after they discovered the rubies, Madaket drove Joanna to a dinner party at the Hoovers’.

“My dear!” Pat exclaimed when she opened the door. “How can you even walk?”

“Pat, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’m only in my sixth month.”

“Dear Lord. I wasn’t this big at nine months. Come in and let’s get you seated before you fall forward on your face.”

Joanna wasn’t sure she felt well enough to enjoy the party, but when she entered Pat’s beautiful living room and saw the cluster of people assembled there, and when they came rushing over to greet her and to offer her drinks and canapés, she was glad she had come. Claude was there in a gorgeous burnt-sienna silk suit she would have loved to own herself; June and Morris were there, standing side by side, finishing each other’s sentences, nodding simultaneously; and Gardner and Tiffany were there.

Gardner looked tired, harassed, and jumpy. He wore a beeper on his belt and had dark circles under his eyes and he still had a piece of tissue stuck to a spot on his neck where he’d cut himself shaving. His shirt was wrinkled and the cuff of a trouser leg was unraveling. Tiffany, on the other hand, twinkled like a Christmas tree as she tossed her sparkling golden curls and flashed her engagement ring with every sentence. Her body-hugging leopard-print spandex dress was something Joanna might have worn during one of her clandestine nights of disguise with Carter. Joanna sank onto a sofa, joining Tory and Claude and Tiffany.

“Don’t imagine you’ll be wearing a dress like that anytime soon,” Tory murmured so only Joanna could hear.

“Or anytime in the rest of my life,” Joanna replied.

“Tiffany, you look very Marla Maples tonight,” Claude said.

“Oh, thank you!” Tiffany cooed. “I just feel so like celebrationy, I guess.”

“And why is that?” Claude asked.

“Well …” Tiffany leaned forward. “Don’t tell a soul, but I’ve convinced Gardner to move back to the real world.”

“Child, whyever would you want to do that?”

“Oh, Claude, don’t be dense. You can’t think I’d really be able to live here in the winter. I would like
die
of boredom.”

“I hope Gardner will be here through October,” Joanna said, slightly alarmed.

Tiffany looked at her. “Why?”

“Because she’s going to have twins and Gardner’s her doctor,” Tory snapped.

“Well, the hospital does have other doctors,” Tiffany countered, her voice rising defensively. “This is just the thing I mean, anyway,” she continued. “All these people thinking Gardner is theirs somehow. I said, Gardner, now look. Think of yourself as a kind of technician. Say a television repairman. People don’t have to, like,
bond
with some guy just because he fixed their TV.”

All heads swiveled toward Gardner to see what his response would be, but he was intensely involved with a scallop wrapped in bacon on a toothpick. Conversation stopped. Joanna’s eyes swept the room.

Claude smoothly picked up the dropped thread of conviviality. “Yes, I can see that’s one way of looking at any profession.” Eyes twinkling mischievously, he leaned forward and asked, “What do you, like, do? I mean, for a, like, profession.”

Tiffany scrutinized him a moment, suspicious, then tossed her glittering curls and said, “I don’t
do
anything, Claude. I want to spend my life taking care of Gardner and seeing that we both have some fun. Instead of being at the beck and call of everyone else. Before we get too
old
.” With a meaningful flash of eyes at Tory and Joanna, she finished: “Excuse me. I want to powder my nose.” She rose in one lithe movement and on gloriously sleek long legs strode out of the room, her leopard spots undulating all over her.

Morris asked Bob about an expensive piece of real estate which had just sold and the discussion rose, surrounding Gardner so completely that Claude and Tory and Joanna, seated near one another, could gossip without the others hearing.

“What a little terror!” Claude whispered, rolling his eyes.

“I wonder what her father thinks of her now,” Tory said.

“He adores her. I’ve watched them together. But poor Gardner. He looks like she’s literally chewed on the man.” He flicked his wrist and waggled his eyebrows. “Not that I wouldn’t mind doing that myself.”

“Claude, mind your manners!” Tory said reprovingly.

Joanna sat smiling, pretending to listen to their banter but with her thoughts in a
turmoil. She’d intended to ask the group their advice about how to deal with the business of the rubies, but Tiffany’s announcement drove all other thoughts out of her head.

Gardner couldn’t leave the island! The thought of entrusting her body and its precious cargo to a stranger was terrifying. She would have to ask him point-blank, during the evening, when he planned to leave, or rather, if he planned to stay through her delivery.

Pat called them in to dinner and Joanna was helped up from the sofa and delicately ensconced in her dining room chair, where she oohed and aahed with everyone over the artistic arrangement of the flowers and the food, but she was trembling inside. The conversation washed around her. She nodded and smiled and worried, until over the salad Claude leaned forward and said, “Gardner, I hear you’ll be leaving us soon.”

Gardner flinched. A hunted look passed over his handsome young face.

“Well, ah, um, it’s not definite exactly,” Gardner began, but his fiancée cut in sharply.

“Oh, it is, too.” Looking defiantly around the table, Tiffany announced, “I have to live in the real world.”

“It’s um, uh …” Gardner struggled for words, finally took a big sip of wine, and promptly dissolved into a coughing fit.

“Traitor,” June accused, glaring at Gardner and, whipping her gaze toward Tiffany, pleaded, “Darling, couldn’t you get a pied-à-terre in New York and leave Gardner here? I don’t think we can manage without him.”

“Of course you can!” Tiffany retorted. “And I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you all something! I’m not going to live my life sharing my husband with you. I grew up without a father and—”

“Tiffany,” June said reprovingly, “you had a perfectly wonderful father.”

“No!
You
had a perfectly wonderful physician! My father was never there for me. What do you think happened when I was the star little pony in my ballet recital? Do you think he came? And saw me? And told me how beautiful I was? No. He got called in to deliver some damned woman’s baby. And that’s what happened over and over again all through my life. He couldn’t take me to the father-daughter dinner at my high school. Hell, he didn’t even see me graduate from high school!”

Joanna watched Tiffany. She was very beautiful with rage flushing her face, making her glow and shimmer even more, and as she tossed her curls and nearly
shuddered with indignation, she fairly burned with anger. But at the other end of the table, Gardner sat looking purely miserable. He wasn’t staring at his beloved with awe at her beauty but rather sinking into himself, as if his very chest and the heart within were collapsing.

When Tiffany finally stopped to drink some wine, Joanna leaned toward her. “I can understand,” she began, intending to confide that her father had also been a doctor.

But Tiffany snapped her head, tossing her curls back, and glaring at Joanna, interrupted: “No one can possibly understand.”

The maid entered then to ask people whether they’d like coffee, decaf, or tea with their dessert, which would be cherries jubilee, and as the guests concentrated on this, the little miasma of fury that had settled over the table lifted off and floated away into the night air.

“She’s selfish and self-absorbed and young,” Joanna whispered to Tory, “but beautiful. And passionate.”

“Yes,” Tory agreed. “I can see why Gardner loves her. But God, if any two people in the world ever seemed incompatible, it’s those two. Look at him, Joanna. She’s going to eat him alive.”

“Tory, are you and John racing tomorrow?” Morris directed his calm gaze at Tory, and the conversation shifted to sailing.

Except for an occasional disdainful sniff, Tiffany remained quiet, pouting, for the rest of the evening. Joanna sat back in her chair and enjoyed a few bites of the very sweet dessert. Her stomach was so crushed in on itself by the burgeoning bodies of her babies that she could scarcely work up any kind of appetite. At several points during the conversation Joanna opened her mouth to mention the discovery of the room beneath her house, and the rubies hidden in the room, but each time she changed her mind, closed her mouth, let the others speak. She had no energy left for what would be a turbulent discussion. And there had already been enough drama at the table for one night.

They adjourned into the living room for after-dinner drinks. Joanna sipped on clear seltzer and tried to stay awake. At ten-thirty Pat called, “Joanna, your ride’s here,” and Joanna rose awkwardly and kissed her hosts goodbye and said goodbye to everyone and lumbered toward the front door where Madaket waited.

“Did you have a good time?” Madaket asked. She steered the Jeep along the narrow lanes toward Main Street, which was wide and shadow-swept and flickering with
people strolling and laughing and gazing in shop windows under the swaying canopy of summery lavish-leafed trees.

“Umm.” Joanna yawned and stretched and scratched her belly in blissful abandonment. “But I’m exhausted. Oh, God, these cobblestones.”

“I thought you’d like to hear the street musicians.” Madaket slowed the Jeep. Music drifted in on the warm air from a folk guitarist, a saxophone player, and a bizarre overwrought young man who played “Feelings” on his violin to the taped accompaniment of a synthesized orchestra.

Streetlights flared and dimmed across the windshield as they turned down Orange Street. Joanna trailed her hand out the window in the lake of cool night air.

“I’m beginning to feel a bit decadent,” Joanna admitted, “with you chauffeuring me everywhere. I feel like … some old depraved Roman empress. Next I’ll be nagging at you to peel the grapes.”

Madaket laughed. “I don’t think you know what decadence is.”

“Oh, and you do.”

“Well, I’ve worked in some pretty decadent homes on this island.”

“Such as?”

“Three years ago I worked as a cook for a family who had rented a house on the Cliff for a month. Forty thousand dollars for the month of July. The wife was there only three days, the husband only one. But their children were there the entire time; the son was nineteen and the daughter was seventeen. The wife had compiled a complete set of menus for three meals a day for the entire month. Lots of fresh fish, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit. Lots of homemade desserts and whole-wheat breads. The decadent part was that—never mind that at nineteen and seventeen people should be capable of fixing their own meals—the daughter was anorexic and ate only about three chocolate chips that month. The son had a lot of friends and mostly they drank and ate pizza and vomited.”

“God! Did you tell the woman?”

“I told her secretary. I felt it was such a terrible waste of food. But the secretary said the woman insisted that I make decent meals available in case her children were hungry, and that if I didn’t, she’d find someone else who would. Every now and then the secretary would stop by the kitchen to be sure I was doing my job, and the woman had sent one of her maids over to keep the house clean, and I suspected the maid was reporting on me, too. So that entire month I cooked three nutritious, delectable meals a
day, and set them on the table, and waited for a while, then threw all that beautiful food away.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it. There’s another woman on the island, a terribly wealthy woman, who hates to wait for trees and shrubs to grow and bloom, so she hires a landscaping company to plant full, flowering bushes in her garden, and when she’s tired of looking at them, she has the landscaper dig them up and take them to the dump. But before they go to the dump, the landscapers have to sever the plants from the roots—while she watches. She’s afraid that someone else might take them from the dump and plant them in their own yard. She buys them with her money and she wants no one else to have those plants.”

Joanna had been listening with her eyes closed. Now she opened them and looked over at Madaket to see her expression. “Does all this make you angry? Resentful? Jealous?”

Madaket considered. “I’m sorry about the plants and food. I regret the waste. But I pity the people. I think they must be so lonely, cut off from the important things.”

“But, Madaket, they have so much. You have so little.”

Madaket shook her head. “No. I have so much. You’ll see after you’ve lived here for a year. After you’ve had the seasons on the island. Each day here is like a treasure. And somehow, you get to keep it. It stays with you. A wealth in your soul.”

Joanna searched the young woman’s face as she spoke and saw there a soft radiance that fairly glowed off her. “You are lucky,” she agreed. “To love someplace so much.”

“You will, too,” Madaket assured her, “after you’ve lived here awhile.”

After a few moments of companionable silence, Madaket asked, “Have you thought any more about the tunnel?”

“Not really. Oh, I don’t know, Madaket. I really don’t know.”

“We would only explore it. Look around. Anything we found we’d bring to you.”

“It’s not that. Not the matter of possession. It’s more a matter of—anxiety, I guess. What if the tunnel caved in? I can’t get down there to see it and judge myself.”

“We wouldn’t do anything stupid.”

“I know, but, Madaket, I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”

Joanna spoke honestly, but she meant it in a selfish way, and so she was surprised when Madaket replied in a choked, hushed voice, “Oh, Joanna. I didn’t know that.”