Belonging (7 page)

“What is that?”

“Raise a happy child. Keep a beautiful home. Blair’s a perfectionist. She needs things to be calm. And all this”—Carter swept his hand over Joanna’s body—“this desire … it’s the antithesis of calm.”

But away from her house and its continual demands, living in luxurious hotel rooms in romantic cities, Blair might very well find old habits of desire reviving. Of course she and Carter would make love. And her body would be exciting to him, would be newer, in a way, to Carter than Joanna’s was. Husband and wife, their old passion would rekindle, and they would find a new heat and passion between them …

Joanna jumped to her feet. Perhaps she’d been wrong to come here. It was true, she was exhausted and overworked; but at least in New York she wasn’t stranded in the midst of a perfect family, forced to behold up close and in detail everything she could never have. In New York she could lose herself in work, or office gossip or a new movie or ballet. Tossing her plum pit so far out into the water she couldn’t hear its splash, she stormed on down the beach.

About two hours later she returned to the house, slightly dizzy from so much
sudden sun and heat. The phone was ringing. She ran the last few steps and dashed across the wide porch and into the cool kitchen to snatch it up. It was her assistant, Gloria, with a problem only Joanna could solve. The Chandlers, who’d been scheduled for filming in October, needed to change the date because of a health problem; could
Fabulous Homes
tape them in the spring? This wasn’t a great idea, Joanna told Gloria; the Chandlers lived in a renovated mill on a roaring river in upstate New York; spring was mud season there, which would show murky brown in any window shots; ask them about January, Joanna said. The mill would look picturesque in the snow. And get out their possibles list; whom could they substitute?

Joanna spent most of the afternoon on the phone, cradling it against her shoulder as she and her assistant worked. At some point Joanna pulled a bowl of curried chicken salad from the refrigerator and ate a late lunch. When she finally got off the phone, she had a crick in her neck, so she went to her room and washed her hair and took a long bath, and just as she was wrapping her terry-cloth bathrobe around her, she heard the Randalls come home. She padded down the stairs, leaving wet footprints on the bare wood, to greet them and admire their catch.

All four Randalls were radiant with sunburn, and they smelled of sun and salt and fish. Jeremy displayed a gash he’d put in his thumb while trying to get a fish off the hook.

“Come on, son, I’ll show you how to dress these. You, too, Vick.” John led his kids to the kitchen and Tory hurried upstairs to shower.

“You’re not going to the party?” Joanna asked.

“No. John and I are taking the kids into town for pizza and a movie.”

“Which one?”

“Total Recall.”

“Better you than me.”

“The kids will love it.”

“You are such a good mother.”

“Damn right.”

Joanna went back to her room to dress for the cocktail party, secretly glad it wouldn’t be a family affair. She wriggled into a scoop-necked magenta silk dress with a hammered-gold collar that set off her tan and the sun-gilded honey of her hair. Perhaps some elegant eligible man would be there, someone so amazing and sexy that he’d make her forget Carter. Fat chance.

All the windows were open in the large house, letting sounds drift into Joanna’s room: The Indigo Girls whining from Vicki’s CD player. The phone ringing. Laughter. Jeremy yelling, “Hey,
Dad
! Where’d you put the charcoal?” John’s gruff response. That kid doesn’t have a clue, Joanna thought, how his father, a prominent lawyer who makes men in three-piece suits tremble, loves him. The only time she ever saw John Randall completely content was when he was here on Nantucket, in this house, with his family. It was as if everything else was stripped away, revealing the essential man.

Was that how it was for Carter? No, it couldn’t be. She knew she satisfied something essential in Carter; she knew he needed her. If she wasn’t sure of that, she wasn’t sure of anything.

Joanna found she was standing in her room, just staring at a span of blank blue sky framed by white curtains. Looking at her watch, she saw that she was late, and she hurried down the stairs, yelled her goodbyes to the Randalls, and rushed outside to her little rented red convertible. After switching on the ignition, she backed the car out onto the street, then roared off, hurtling left and right like a race car driver along the village byways, past the Sankaty golf course, and finally down along the narrow Polpis Road.

Now the lazy sinuous path made speeding impossible; she had to slow down. She changed the angle of her foot, pulling it back from the accelerator, and accordingly her entire body shifted. She settled more comfortably into the bucket seat. The convertible top was down and the humid evening air drifted around her shoulders like a shawl of mist. The borders of the winding road were thick with wild grasses, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, day lilies. Her shoulders loosened, her thoughts slowed. All the voices cluttering up her head melted and evaporated, and she heard instead the mellow, golden notes of a James Taylor song floating up from the car radio. The sun sent opal streamers across the pale blue sky. It was not yet twilight.

She passed Sesachacha Pond, turned right onto the Quidnet Road, followed it to the crossroad with Squam Road, turned left. This dirt road was deeply rutted and pocked, and she slowed to a crawl between bushes and saplings growing in such lush abundance their branches grazed the car. She could hear birds calling. Rabbits zigzagged foolishly across her path. Braking to a complete halt for a moment, she gazed out at Squam Pond, a watercolorist’s dream of thousands of pink mallow roses against blue water and a heavenly green grass. Smiling, she drove on. Her hosts had told her their house was on the ocean side of the road, and had no signpost. She was to turn onto a white gravel road.
Coming to one, she did, and went along a driveway so overgrown it was like a green tunnel. Then the view opened up, and there sat the house.

Not her hosts’ house. This house was empty. No lights, no cars. Just the house, simple and calm, against the evening sky.

It was a perfectly proportioned two-and-a-half-story gray-shingled house, with five windows on the second floor and two on either side of the blue front door, which was framed by a rose-covered trellis. Two chimneys. A brick walk curving up from the gravel parking area. It was as complete and perfect as a child’s drawing of home.

It was not her hosts’ home, and she was trespassing, but she had no sense of wrongdoing as she turned off the car’s engine and sat in the silence, studying the house. At one end a screened-in porch extended, blanketed in ivy and rose vines. A green wall of privet, untrimmed and shaggy, straggled from the porch to a small garage, providing a shelter from the ocean winds for a weedy, sadly neglected bed of drooping mums and brave rudbeckia daisies.

Joanna got out of the car, closing the door carefully, quietly, and walked across the unkempt lawn and around the side of the house. The lawn extended perhaps twenty feet, then surrendered to the wild thorny tangle of moorland which in turn gave way to the sandy beach that rimmed the placidly rolling Atlantic. The tide was going out, and the sand glistened wetly in the sinking sun.

Joanna looked back at the house. The windows on this side were boarded up; so the house was deserted. What a shame, on such a lovely summer day.

She wanted to linger, but knew she shouldn’t, and so she crossed back to the driveway, the slender heels of her shoes sinking into the turf. As she slid back into her car, she had the oddest desire to—oh, it was odd!—say something to the house. To connect with that house. So, feeling strangely very much like herself and not like herself at all, she said, aloud, “I promise I’ll be back.”

She hadn’t planned to say those words. She couldn’t imagine why she said them. Shaking her head at her foolishness, she turned her car around and headed back out toward Squam Road. In the rearview she saw the house standing: sturdy, solitary, and proud.

A few hundred feet on, she found the Latherns’ residence. Its drive was packed with cars, but Joanna was able to pull her little convertible into a space between a Range Rover and a gorgeous old classic woody station wagon. Sliding out, she took her time
approaching the house, studying its unusual architecture, which was gray-shingled, according to the dictates of the Historic District Commission, but otherwise was purely modern, utilizing sharp angles and extreme slopes and lots of shining glass.

She could hear the noise of the party out here. When she was younger, just this moment made her heart beat faster: standing on the threshold, wearing a sexy frock, anticipating any variety of significant encounters with the crowd who gathered inside. Now, more often than not, she found herself girding her figurative loins, as if for some kind of onslaught.

She had met her hosts, Morris and June Lathern, last fall when she featured June’s sister and brother-in-law’s house in Austin, and now as she entered the house she was glad to find June just inside, standing next to an enormous bronze sculpture of summer flowers. All the rooms and even the hall were packed with people.

“I’m so glad you came!” June shouted. She and Morris were lawyers, with their own firm here on Nantucket, and as professional women, June and Joanna had sensed a camaraderie. Joanna also liked June for her height: Joanna at five eight, and as broad-shouldered as she was, often seemed to dwarf other women, and too often caught herself slumping or stooping in a crowd. But Morris and June were tall; Morris was six six and June an even six feet; Joanna felt comfortable with them.

“I turned off on the wrong drive,” Joanna informed her hostess. “Coming from ’Sconset. There’s the most wonderful storybook house—”

“You must mean the Farthingale house. I think it’s on the market. It’s got some marvelous old legend connected with it—a treasure, I think. I’ll find Bob Hoover, he’s in real estate, he can tell you about it. First, let’s get you a drink.”

There was no hope of hearing each other, so they didn’t attempt conversation as they passed through the crowd to the drinks bar that had been set up on the deck of the ocean side of the house. This was an older group, in general, undoubtedly a more conservative one; the men wore Nantucket red slacks and blue blazers, the women, sinfully expensive shapeless silk dresses printed in geometric blocks in primary colors, making them look like flags of antagonistic nations. As she walked through the room, Joanna could hear the sudden lull in conversation, and then the whispers, as she passed through. And sure enough, by the time she’d been handed a vodka and tonic, here came the first assailants, a short blond husband-and-wife pair who seemed to have been molded from the same plastic as Barbie dolls.

“You’re Joanna Jones of
Fabulous Homes
, aren’t you?” the wife asked, and not waiting for Joanna to reply, plunged ahead, “I just knew you were. I’m Mindy Whippet and this is my husband, Mark. We own Couturier on Main Street, you must know it, it’s the best women’s clothing shop on the island.”

“I believe I—” Joanna began, but Mindy whipped ahead: “I really do think you should consider doing a segment on our shop. It’s terribly clever. The dressing rooms are nothing like ordinary dressing rooms, and the showroom is posh
and
clever. Perhaps—”

“We don’t do shops on our show,” Joanna replied, smiling as she interrupted the other woman. “We do homes. That’s why it’s called
Fabulous Homes
.”

“Well, then,” Mindy responded, unfazed, “you should do our house. I’m sure you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a Christian house, you see. Mark and I have an altar in our bedroom and every night before we go to bed we give thanks to God for our good fortune. It would be such a valuable addition to your show. Not to be critical, but you do seem to emphasize the decor of the house and underplay the spiritual ambience of the home—”

Joanna stared at Mindy over her tilted glass as she took a long drink of vodka and tonic. How am I going to get away from this creature? she wondered, but almost before she’d completed her thought, a very tall, extremely handsome man decked out in a buttery linen suit appeared in front of Joanna, and as if by magic, the Whippets melted away.

“May I introduce myself?” He inclined his head in a mock bow. “Claude Clifford, year-round resident and artist. But I often hire myself out as an exorcist for people trapped by the Whippets.”

Joanna laughed. “Joanna Jones,” she told him, shaking his hand. “They really are terrifying.”

“Oh, enough about them, let’s talk about you. How do you like my suit?”

Laughing, delighted to be freed from her television role, Joanna walked with her rescuer to a corner of the deck where they could actually hear each other. Claude’s dark brown hair was cut in a dramatically styled high spiky crew, accentuating his long, narrow, bony face. He wore a gold ring in his left ear. They discussed his suit, and her dress, and fashion in general, and their hosts and the guests. Claude gossiped with an air of drama and subterfuge that made Joanna lean closer to him, and he gave off an air, almost an incense, of intense sexuality. He was so very handsome he made the evening
around him appear more vivid. She felt very comfortable with him, and invigorated.

“What do you know about the Farthingale house?” she asked.

“Oh, not very much, I’m afraid. I live in town and don’t get out to the sticks here very much. I know the house has been on the market for years, and there’s some slightly juicy legend about it. Some kind of boodle hidden there.”

“Really?”

“Mmm. Farthingale was one of those sea captains, demented, you know. Where’s Bob Hoover? He knows the scoop.” Craning his neck, Claude surveyed the crowd.

“It doesn’t matter,” Joanna assured him. “I don’t want to buy the house. I’m in New York or traveling, I’d never have time to spend there. It just caught my imagination.”

And although she met several other people that evening, she never did meet Bob Hoover. When she left the party and drove back down the Squam Road toward Tory’s house, she was tempted to turn into the drive of the Farthingale place for one last look, but she refrained. She couldn’t possibly buy a house; she wouldn’t know what to do with one.