Body Surfing (23 page)

"To spite Ben."

Her head spins. She hasn't eaten since early in the morning. She thinks suddenly of all the catered food that will now go to waste. All those lovely flowers. Mr. Edwards. Julie. Who even now might be waiting, hopeful, downstairs for the bride and groom to emerge--a little tattered, perhaps even a bit bludgeoned, but ready nevertheless for a ceremony in the sunshine.

"I can't marry you," Jeff says. "You see how it would be false."

Sydney shakes her head.

"He wanted you," Jeff explains simply.

Sydney turns her face away, as if to throw off a misheard remark.

"I could see it that first day when we arrived at the house and you were body surfing," Jeff says. "He couldn't take his eyes off you. And then later, after that first boat ride, he said he thought you were different from other women--smart and unpretentious. It was clear to me that he was interested in you."

"But you had Victoria."

"Yes, I did."

She searches her room for some sign of normalcy. There is a can of hair spray on her bureau. The white box the earrings came in is beside it. A book has fallen from the bedside table. When did that happen?

"These things. . ." Jeff gestures to the door, the window. "These things, they're not as coldly thought out as you might imagine. Sometimes it's only in retrospect that you realize what you've done."

Sydney pulls a pin from her hair and holds it in her lap.

Jeff takes a long breath, a prelude to the final confession. "Victoria was once Ben's girlfriend."

Sydney is silent.

"I'm amazed he didn't tell you."

"He didn't tell me."

"Well, that's one for Ben, then."

"This is a game?" Sydney asks.

The blood leaves Sydney's head, her face, her shoulders, and pools somewhere in the middle of her chest. Her hands tremble from shock or from anger. All that she has imagined--her life with Jeff, their marriage, children she might one day take to visit their grandfather--will never happen. None of it was real.

Jeff walks toward her as if to embrace her. She shakes him off, denying herself his sympathy, now fraudulent and treacherous. Already she sees herself walking alone on city streets, pausing to sit on benches or lean against railings, a speechless dread inside her. She thinks of all that will have to be done to dismantle a life.

"Sydney," he says.

"Go away," she says.

Behind her, she hears him shut the door.

Sydney locks the door and lies on her bed. She waits. Occasionally, she can hear a raised voice, a woman crying. From time to time, people come and knock and call her name, but she does not respond. She waits an hour, two hours. She waits long enough that she thinks everyone will have gone home. Certainly, the guests will have dispersed. She hopes that Ivers and Sahir and the others have gone back to Boston. She prays that her parents have had the sense to return to their respective homes. In a minute, she will collect her purse, descend the stairs, and walk out of the house. She will walk in the direction of Portsmouth and from there she will take a bus. To where, she has not yet decided.

She reviews her marital history. Nearly thrice married. Once divorced. Once widowed. Once left at the altar.

When she guesses it's safe, Sydney opens the door. From the landing, she can hear nothing. As she descends the stairs with her black suitcase, she listens for any sounds of life in the rooms adjacent to the hallway. She wonders if they all know she is there, if they are allowing her to leave. Her raincoat hangs from a coat-rack by the front door. It is not raining, but Sydney takes it from the hook anyway. She puts it over her salmon-colored dress.

"Sydney," Mr. Edwards says from the doorway that leads to the kitchen. He still has on his dark suit, but the tie has been undone or ripped off in anger. "I can't begin. . ."

Sydney holds up a hand to silence him.

"I'll call you a taxi," he says. "Do you have money? You're welcome to stay here as long as you like. I am ashamed of my son."

Mr. Edwards takes a step into the hallway. "I want to disown him. . .Julie is inconsolable."

Sydney moves toward the door.

"I bought this house for the family, for the idea of family," Mr. Edwards says. "I imagined it would be a place where the family would gather. It would attract the boys and Julie, make them come to see us more often. Who can resist the seaside? And then later there would be grandchildren, and they would love it here." His lower lip trembles. "The beach. The water. . ."

Mr. Edwards shakes his head. His face collapses. He pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket.

Sydney puts a hand on the man's arm.

"You'll let us know. . .," he says, bringing the handkerchief to his face.

"I loved him," Sydney says.

Mr. Edwards nods.

"I'll let you know," she says.

On the train to the city, Sydney passes abandoned mills, asbestos-shingled houses, a shop called Tom's Autobody. She imagines the atoms of her own body disintegrating into a kind of chaos, an emptying-out of her center.

The trip is meant to last an hour. Or two hours. She has no sense of time.

A young man in a white shirt approaches her. Will he speak to her?

"I'm sorry," he says. "I was sitting there."

Sydney looks up and notes a small duffel bag in the luggage rack overhead. She smells bacon on the young man's breath. Not trusting her legs, she simply shifts to the window seat.

Slightly abashed, the young man joins her. "Where are you going?" he asks.

Sydney opens her mouth.

"Boston?" he prompts.

She nods.

"Shopping?" he asks. "Theater?"

At the best of times, Sydney might have found these questions intrusive. Now they are a torment.

"The city" is all that she can manage.

The word itself an oasis.

The train passes houses and farms and haystacks. Sydney tries to persuade herself that she is in England. She wonders if all of her life now will be an attempt to convince herself that she is somewhere other than where she actually is.

When the train arrives in Boston, Sydney follows signs for the subway to Park Street. Heading toward the exit to the street, she discovers that the escalator is out of order. She has to bump her black suitcase up the stairs. By the time she gets to the top, the handle has broken.

Sydney leaves Park Street station and walks in the direction of the State House, drawn by the gleaming gold dome. She has the idea that if she reaches the top of the hill, something practical will occur to her.

At the summit, she sits on a stone step. She ought to have taken a taxi from the train station and asked the cabbie for advice. She glances down the hill. A doorman is helping a man unload a car. Sydney stands and walks toward him. When she reaches him, she discovers an entrance to a hotel so discreet that it appears to have no name, merely Roman numerals. Sydney pushes through a revolving door into a lobby.

It might be a club. The wood paneling and marble floor are masculine in feel. Black-and-taupe chairs flank a gold sunburst clock on a wall. A glass screen trimmed in wood hides a concierge. Small metal tables like sculptures are arranged about the room. Sydney wants only to sit down, which she does. Nothing in the lobby reminds her of any place she has ever been before, already an asset.

Behind Sydney is a marble staircase with a gold banister. She wonders where it goes. She glances at the clock. It reads 6:20. Would she and Jeff have been on their way to the airport by now?

"Can I help you?" asks a young man behind the desk. He has on a black uniform and seems foreign. Eastern European? Romanian?

Sydney stands with effort, as if she were decades older than she is. She drags the suitcase with the broken handle behind her. She realizes for the first time since she left the Edwardses' house that under her raincoat she has on her salmon-colored wedding dress.

"Have you been with us before?" the young man asks.

Sydney shakes her head.

He enters information into a computer, though she has given him none. She wonders what he is writing. Woman in distress? Shabby suitcase with broken handle? Hasn't been with us before?

"Will it be one adult?" he asks.

The question seems unnecessary. "Yes," she answers.

He slides a paper across the desk. The room rate is more than she anticipated, but moving on is simply unthinkable.

"Room nine-oh-six is available," he says. "It's quite nice," he confides.

The elevator has a glass front. Sydney has a sensation of vertigo as she passes from floor to floor. On each is a table with a bowl of apples, suggesting that the floors are identical. But they are not. As she rises, Sydney tries to discern a difference. By the eighth floor, she has the answer: the art on each is original.

The key is gold-colored and tricky, and she has considerable trouble inserting it into the lock. Sydney imagines this to be a hotel where powerful men have trysts. She pictures well-dressed women with scarlet lipstick and matching shoes.

Sydney might have anticipated the room from the lobby. The walls have been painted a rich coffee color. Mounted on them are black-and-white photographs of gargoyles. Sydney has a corner room with six large windows. Beyond the windows, there is much protruding scrollwork, as if she were being housed on an upper story of an ornate cathedral. She might be in Italy or Prague, though there is something essentially American, even Federalist, about the room's masculinity and solidity. Against one wall is a four-poster bed with a dark canopy.

Sydney wanders about the room, touching objects. She discovers stationery in a wooden box. She pulls out the TV from inside the entertainment console. When she turns it on, the words are harsh and garish. What they are saying is clearly false.

She calls down to the desk clerk. "No newspapers," she instructs.

She has a fireplace, a sofa, a bronze-colored ottoman. There is a chair in black and taupe similar to the one in the lobby. Large hardware is affixed to the doors. She sits on the ottoman and stares. Too much has to be absorbed.

From a room-service menu, Sydney orders a plate of cheese. She hasn't eaten since the sliced apple she had at breakfast. She hadn't wanted her stomach to protrude from the silk dress. What a quaint notion, she thinks now.

She exchanges her wedding dress, which she lets fall to the bathroom floor, for a hotel bathrobe. When she takes off her bra, she discovers the blue handkerchief tucked inside. For the first time since Jeff walked into the house in his bathing suit and life jacket, Sydney begins to cry.

All that effort on Julie's part, she thinks as she fingers the different squares. All that love.

Sydney doesn't pick up the wedding dress from the bathroom floor. She will leave it for the maid. Perhaps she will give it to the maid.

She draws a bath and slides into it. She discovers that if she doesn't move, the water remains completely still and flat. She is becalmed.

No body surfing here.

Later in the evening, after Sydney has had the bath and a plate of cheese, she calls her mother.

"I'm here," Sydney says.

"Where?" her mother asks, relief immediately apparent.

Sydney names the hotel. "It's very swank," she adds.

"Don't worry if it's expensive," her mother says, an atypical response. "What happened?"

"I don't know," Sydney says. She cannot just now explain Jeff's actions to her mother.

"I'm just stunned," her mother says. "He always seemed like such a nice man. I never thought he would be capable of something like this."

"I didn't either," Sydney says.

"What will you do now?"

"I don't know," Sydney answers.

"You'll walk," her mother suggests.

Sydney nods. She thinks this might be the most useful piece of advice her mother has ever given her.

"Maybe some shopping?" her mother adds, immediately ruining the good advice.

"What would I shop for?" Sydney asks.

Sydney hangs up. The conversation has exhausted her. She hates the telephone.

She lies back on the bed, her feet on the floor. For a while, she stares at the canopy over the bed and thinks about what Jeff might be doing at this very second. Is he still at the beach house? Did he go back to the apartment in Cambridge? Or did he take the flight to Paris? Might he have called Victoria?

Sydney slips off the plush hotel robe and crawls under the silky taupe sheets. She pulls the duvet over her head.

The telephone rings, and Sydney thinks about not answering it. At the last minute, she tosses off the duvet and picks up the receiver.

"I'm so sorry this had to happen to you," her father says.

Sydney remembers the Jewish word. Beshert.

"But you know what I always say," her father continues.

"That I'm resilient?" Sydney offers.

For several days, Sydney comes and goes from the hotel. The doormen nod. The clerks behind the desk say good morning or good evening, but little else. Sydney thinks this a perfect arrangement.