The Hazards of Good Breeding (18 page)

“Maybe half of an hour.”

Faith is silent. It seems that in the distance she can see the dark form of the tanker on the water, illuminated by a few tiny white lights. But then, it is not that clear tonight, maybe she is imagining it. Or maybe it is coming closer. “It's warm,” she says.

Jean Pierre sits up abruptly, his feet coming out of the water and splashing back down as he pulls himself up. “Shall we make a dip?” he says, tossing the cigarette out into the distance.

“A dip?” Faith cannot see his face now that he is sitting up, turned away from the minimal light of the stars and the lantern on the rocks above.

“A swim in the sea.”

“I don't have my suit on.”

“Why do you need a suit?” he says. “In the nighttime to swim without clothes in the sea—this is a great thing.”

“Oh, no,” Faith says, feeling her heart speed up again. “I don't think—”

Jean Pierre is already unbuttoning his shirt; she can hear the rustle of the cotton under his thumbs. When it is off, the skin on his back gleams slightly silver. Faith looks back out at what might or might not be the tanker and sits absolutely still, frozen in the strangeness of the moment, the un-Faithness of the moment, as if she is a passive observer of not just Jean Pierre, but herself. In a removed way, she is curious about what she will do.

Jean Pierre drops his pants and for one second stands naked beside Faith at the edge of the dock, a smooth, dark mass against the paler, less substantial darkness of the night. She is aware of this without looking directly. He disappears for a moment, the surface sealing back up over him, leaving just the night, dark and warm and heavy, punctuated by the lapping of waves, the distant sound of laughter blowing off the rocks. Then his head appears again, a little farther out. “Come on,” he says. “It is wonderful.”

Faith stares at her feet submerged in the water, as if there is some essential piece of information she can glean from them that will give her the cue for her next move. But there is nothing, just the glimmering black surface where she knows they must be. Almost without thinking she stands up, pulls her polo shirt over her head, unclasps her bra, unzips her pants, and tugs her underwear off awkwardly, kicks it free. With blood rushing against her eardrums, behind her eyes, drowning out all other sounds, she jumps in and down until she feels the sticky softness of the ocean floor against her extended toes. All around her the water feels gentle, but pressing, like a more significant kind of air.

“. . . good?” Jean Pierre is saying as she emerges, sputtering, to the surface again.

“Great.” Faith strikes out toward the mouth of the cove. It feels delightful not to be wearing Lucy's frumpy, ruffle-skirted suit, which she has had to borrow since lying about her own on that first afternoon here. When she stops, she is about fifty yards beyond the dock, nearly out of the cove. Behind her, Jean Pierre's head is like an inkblot against the glittery black of the water. Lying belly up, she is aware of the eerie paleness of her body, like something not altogether her own but of the ocean—breasts, thighs, and stomach rippling insubstantially in her wake.

“You are a fine swimmer,” Jean Pierre says, from only a few yards behind her. Faith brings herself upright and begins treading water.

“I haven't swum at night in forever,” Faith says. “I can't even remember the last time.”

“I make a swim in the night every time I am here.” He is close enough for her to see his face now in the moonlight. Close enough to touch, actually.

Faith is suddenly aware of their invisible nakedness, the long ends of their bodies hanging down into the murky darkness below. “Even when it's cold?” she asks.

“Even so.”

It is possible—she does not really want to look, it would be too conspicuous—that Jean Pierre can see her breasts, at least vaguely, just below the surface.

“You are looking very serious,” Jean Pierre says.

“What? Oh, no, I—” But then something—Jean Pierre's hand—is touching her face, stopping the words in midair.

“Here,” he says, tracing the curve of her cheek gently, almost intangibly, letting the flat of his finger graze the corner of her mouth, pull at her lip, which is still too stunned to tense beneath his touch—and then it is gone. Faith feels her whole body change in the water under her—become soft and fluid, but at the same time more alert. For a moment she forgets to tread water.

“When you are on the water,” Jean Pierre says, still looking intently at her, “your face . . .” He lifts one hand out into the air and spreads the fingers.

Faith stares at him, or at his head above the water, like an appendage of the great slippery body they share.

“Come,” Jean Pierre says. “We will swim back together.”

Almost involuntarily, Faith dives under and swims as far as she can without coming up for air, in the direction of the dock. Somehow she has not pointed herself right, though, so when she comes up, gasping for breath, she is still almost twenty yards away. She can see Jean Pierre pulling himself off, shaking dry. By the time she actually gets to the dock, Jean Pierre is buttoning up his pants over his still-wet skin. Should she just climb out naked beside him? Faith hangs onto the side for a moment, looking up at him. His body, clad in only his khakis, looks quite young and fit. He smiles down at her. “You are like a mermaid,” he says, and Faith realizes she is grinning like a girl. “Wait a moment,” he says. “I will run in and get a towel and wine.”

Once he has disappeared up the dock into the darkness, the sea feels suddenly immense and a little frightening. Faith pulls herself up onto the dock and stands dripping for a moment, wondering what she is supposed to do. Above her, a new streak of stars and night sky has been swept out from under the clouds. Well, it is too cold to just stand here dripping, and besides, she will feel foolish with Jean Pierre watching her dress. She picks up her cotton underwear and uses it to dry herself off, then pulls on her pants and blouse, stuffs her bra into her pocket. Underneath her wrinkled clothes she feels damp and, for the first time in ages, sexy. She balls the sopping underwear up in her fist and hurls it as far as she can out to sea.

Suddenly there are footsteps on the dock behind her. “That was fast,” she says, turning around, but then, to her shock, it isn't Jean Pierre but Rock Coughlin, Sr., stumbling slightly on the unsteady dock, glass of bourbon in hand. “Faith,” he says. “What are you doing down here?” His eyes have the haggard, glossy look of someone who has been waiting in a hospital overnight.

Disappointment wells up in Faith as acutely as nausea. She can suddenly feel the places where her clothes are sticking to her, the scraggly mass of her hair, the breeze cold against her back. “I just—” she begins.

“I'm glad you're here, though, you know,” Rock continues without waiting for her to finish, modulating his own voice to a more serious, slightly pained tone. “I've been wanting to find you alone, because, well . . .” He frowns into his glass and shakes the ice cubes, shoves his left hand more deeply into his pocket. “Because I know as well as anyone just because you're not married to someone doesn't mean you're not still, ahhhh, affected by—their troubles.” Here he darts a look back at Faith. So far, he has been aiming this soliloquy off to sea in the general direction of Faith's tanker. “Bottom line—I'm just sorry about this whole mess Jack's in, is really what I've been wanting to say,” he says in a lower, less philosophical tone. “If there's anything I can do—you know, besides try to keep Denise out of it, which, believe me, is harder than it should be—I hope you'll let me know.”

Faith stares at him, trying to extract some sense from what he has just said. “Mess?”

“The whole—” Rock stops short and stares at her. There is a moment of silence between them in which Faith can hear the chains of the dock tighten and go slack, the water lap at the shore, the faint swell of laughter from the rocks.

“Ahhhhhh.” Rock begins making a low lawn mower sound before his voice kicks back into gear. He has turned back out toward the water. “It's not—nothing, really. I shouldn't have . . .”

Faith stands absolutely still, waiting for him to finish. To her alarm, instead of speaking, he thunks himself violently on the forehead with the flat of his fist a few times. “I am such an ass,” he says in an almost singsong voice. “
Such
an ass!”

“What kind of mess?” Faith begins, but is thrown off by the sight of Jean Pierre emerging from the darkness with a wine bottle, towel, and bowl of olives in hand.

Rock starts at the sound of Jean Pierre's footsteps on the dock and then looks back at Faith incredulously. Faith almost feels sorry for him—he looks so upset and startled and she can make no sense of what he is talking about. Somehow Jean Pierre's own look of amused puzzlement gives her a greater sense of calm. Here he has left her naked in the water and comes back to find her soggily clothed, in some incredible conversation with Rock Coughlin. “It's all right, Rock,” she says mildly. “I'm used to not knowing what's going on.”

Rock looks from Jean Pierre, stopped respectfully some feet down the dock, to Faith. “Pardon me,” he says. “I'm just—Pardon me.”

Behind Rock, Jean Pierre is raising his eyebrows and making a face. And off to the side, on the surface of the water off the dock, Faith thinks she can see something white floating, which might be her underwear. How ridiculous! She feels a sudden impulse to smile, which she tries to suppress, but this only makes it more acute. In a second, she is laughing—a cracked, hiccupy sort of sound that probably makes her seem like a lunatic, with her wet hair and damp clothes out on a dock in the middle of the night. She can see Rock's face transform from uncomfortable to aghast, which only makes her laugh harder. Here she is, talking with Rock Coughlin about her ex-husband, with a Frenchman bringing her a bowl of olives and her discarded underwear bobbing alongside like a persistent, unwanted dog.

14

E
LIOT KNOWS FROM THE MOMENT
he wakes up that this will be the day. The sun is bright and insistent, but the air is clear, as if the world has sprung into focus after the blurry heat of yesterday. Outside the window, the lawn is still. No sign of Wheelie or the dogs, just bright, unreal-looking green stretching in an even, almost glowing plane to the edge of the wood. There is a pinging in Eliot's stomach, like a brittle rubber band being flicked, slightly, again, and again, and again. It is not unpleasant, actually.

Seven thirty-three, his watch blinks at him—he has taken to wearing it to sleep. The two threes after the colon have a pleasingly half-finished look that strikes him as auspicious. He has one thing left to accomplish—a simple thing that just requires getting out of the house before Caroline is up to ask questions. Eliot takes the manila folder he has stolen from his father's file cabinet out of the bottom drawer of his desk, opens it once to make sure the white paper with his neatest, blackest, block handwriting is still between its halves, and slides it carefully into his backpack. Then he pulls on his shorts and T-shirt and, careful not to make noise in the hallway, starts down the stairs.

On the threshold of the kitchen Eliot freezes. There is a person standing in front of the sink absolutely still, staring out the window. His father. There is something odd about his pose, arms at his side, shoulders sloping. For a moment Eliot has the absurd but terrifying feeling his father is dead. But dead people fall over; they don't simply freeze. Eliot takes a step onto the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor.

His father turns and looks right at him, but his eyes seem for a moment to be failing, as if they are struggling to make him out through the fogged glass of a windshield. “Eliot,” he says, as if the name has just occurred to him.

“Yes,” Eliot says.

“You're up early.”

Eliot looks at his watch. Seven forty-one. “You're leaving late.”

His father's face shifts and hardens and he stands up straighter, looking more like himself. “I'm on my way out.” He picks his briefcase up off a chair. “Oh—” He stops when he gets to the door. “Are you—do you have a plan for today?”

Eliot freezes where he stands, one hand on the cornflakes box. “A plan?”

“Now that school is out—I could drive you to a friend's house . . .”

The offer is almost as surprising as the question was.

Eliot can only stare at him. “No,” he says finally. “I want to stay here.” The idea of his father driving him to a friend's house is preposterous—he can't remember a time when he has ever done such a thing.

“Okay.” His father looks relieved. “'Bye, then,” he says, and ducks through the door.

A
s soon as Eliot
has finished his cereal, he puts on his sneakers and backpack and heads out of the house, up the driveway, and down Bedford Road toward town. It takes him over half an hour to arrive at Concord Center, but it is not unpleasant to be walking. The town itself, once he reaches it, is still fairly quiet and has a vacant, stage-set-like look—the street is full of commuter traffic, but the sidewalks are empty. A few people bustle in and out of the Colonial Bakery, coffee and newspapers in hand, but the throng of tourists that presses along the sidewalks at midday is blissfully absent.

It is still before nine
A.M
. Eliot has arrived, actually, a little earlier than he had anticipated and the pharmacy is not even open yet. He sits down on the concrete stoop in front of the store, but then it seems possible that this is a suspicious thing to do. So instead he crosses the street and sits on the shady grass outside Concord Academy in view of the pharmacy door. At five minutes before nine, to Eliot's dismay, the owner of the pharmacy himself, rather than the skinny teenage girl who usually sits at the register in the mornings, lumbers up to the front door. He is a huge, pear-shaped man with the unsettling name of Mr. Person. Eliot knows this from all the trips he has taken to use the pharmacy copy machine with Rosita, to copy the pages of her sister's Spanish workbook. Eliot has never had any sort of friendly feeling toward Mr. Person, though, or vice versa. The man was not kind to Rosita:
One at a time
, he would say warningly as Rosita took out her change purse, as if she would otherwise have jammed a whole fistful of dimes and nickels in at once.
How many copies?
He would demand, sighing and shaking his head. He has a broad, unsmiling face and arms like pale, hairy ham hocks, which leave little steamy marks around them when they rest on the glass counter.

When Eliot walks into the store, Mr. Person is squeezing through the small gap between the ready-to-wear eyeglasses case and the cash register counter. His behind, enveloped in yards of forest-green khaki, is being severely compressed by the counter's edge, and his face, when it turns at the jingle of the door chime, looks slightly panicked from behind his glasses. Eliot almost backs out in his horror at having caught the man in such a compromised position. But then, with a heroic heave, Mr. Person clears the narrow gap and stands behind the counter, his face restored to its usual grim, impenetrable expression. “Not open yet,” he says.

“Oh.” Eliot holds out the fistful of dimes he has extracted from his pocket. “I just want to make some copies.”

“Machine's not on.” Mr. Person pushes his glasses farther up his broad nose with his finger, but doesn't seem to feel inclined toward further conversation. Under his other hand the register is making gurgly sputtering noises like a disgusted CPR recipient.

“Okay.” Eliot turns to head back out the door.

“Hold on,” Mr. Person barks. “Give me a minute.” He says it almost peevishly. So Eliot waits, one hand on the door, the other shoved deep into his pocket, still wrapped around the sweaty dimes. Mr. Person manipulates himself back through the gap, with greater ease this time, and waddles around to the front of the store to punch something into the copy machine, which begins making a gentle whirring sound.

“Not yet,” Mr. Person barks as Eliot approaches the machine. “I'll tell you when.” Eliot feels almost faint with the desire to get out of the dim, cinnamon-air-freshener-smelling store and into the sun on the street outside. He can see a long, pale blue, old-fashioned-looking car roll to a stop on the street in front of the store and double park. The figure emerging from it looks at first only vaguely familiar—tall, long hair, wearing a white T-shirt. But then Eliot recognizes him: the filmmaker from the play.

“Okay,” Mr. Person grunts.

Eliot can see the machine's green light blinking
READY
. He approaches it quickly, pulls the folder out of his backpack, lines the page up neatly along the ruler the way he has seen Rosita do it. Then he feeds in one of the dimes he has been clutching and pushes the green button—to his relief, the machine spits out a clean black and white copy. Eliot feeds in the dimes and pushes the button carefully, printing out one at a time.

He is so absorbed in the activity, it isn't until the moviemaker says something that Eliot even realizes the man has come in and is standing almost directly beside him.

“What?” Eliot says, feeling the blood rush up over his cheeks.

“Good morning,” the man says, smiling. “You Dunlaps certainly are a jumpy family.”

Eliot stares at him, uncomprehending. He is without his camera this morning and looks somewhat greasy and dilapidated, but still, there is something out of place about him that, like his camera, seems to bring a certain pressure to the ordinary world around him, like a red spot on a pale blue painting. The tight rubber band feeling picks up again in Eliot, more acutely —as if the rubber band has aged twenty years and is about to snap.

“You're Caroline's little brother, aren't you?”

“Caroline Dunlap?” Eliot asks.

“That's the one.” The man laughs.

Eliot does not smile. He has six more copies to make.

“So what are you copying?” the man asks, leaning over as if to get a peek, but the copies come out face down. Even so, a dart of fear runs through Eliot.

“Nothing,” he says, and then lies on second thought. “It's for my father.”

“
Re
ally.” The man emphasizes the first syllable in a way that gives the word an almost heated sound.

Eliot remains silent.

“He has you do his copying? Here?”

“His machine is broken,” Eliot mumbles.

“I've got something like it here,” Mr. Person wheezes from one of the aisles, to Eliot's relief. “It's not quite what you're looking for, but it might just fix you.”

The man is forced to turn around and face Mr. Person's lightly panting form.

“D-e-r-m-i-t-i-to,” Mr. Person is spelling. “I think you'll find it works nicely enough.”

Eliot gathers his copies in a cold sweat—he will have to forgo the last few. He opens up his backpack and begins dropping the modest stack into it, but one of the copies slips somehow off the top and drifts, face up, almost directly to the man's feet.

“Great,” the man says in Mr. Person's direction, and bends to pick up the paper before Eliot can dive over.

Eliot stands rooted in the position he has lunged into, with the blood pounding in his ears like a contained explosion. The man looks from the page to Eliot, eyebrows raised in genuine surprise. Then he hands it back to him silently. Eliot reaches out and takes it, shoves it hastily into his backpack.

“Let me just ring you up, then,” Mr. Person is saying in a high, breathless voice as he squeezes, yet again, through the counter.

Eliot slips his pack on and darts out of the store, through the insipid tinkle of chimes and the man's “Wait a minute—hey—” and out into the relieving non-cinnamon-scented sunshine.

W
HEN
C
AROLINE WAKES UP,
her father has left
for work already and Eliot's door is closed. Still asleep, probably. Instead of jogging this morning, she will take a swim, she decides. Better for thinking.

Caroline has lost weight over the last few weeks; her bikini feels a little baggy and her skin looks too pale. The usual scattering of freckles across her nose and chest have faded like a leafy shadow under a cloud. Under her bare feet, the grass feels sharp beneath the deceptively soft tips of its blades. The dogs are out; she can see them racing across the back lawn, chasing some poor squirrel or rabbit into the trees. Her father has installed one of those underground electrical fences that gives off a shock when crossed by any animal wearing a matching collar. On the first day the fence was activated, he put on one of the collars and walked over it to see how much the charge it gave off hurt. Apparently, by whatever criteria he was using (painful enough? too painful?), it was satisfactory. Now Caesar and Brutus are free to run around as they please. Caroline opens the fence around the small kidney-shaped pool and shuts it hurriedly behind her.

The pool has not been used yet this year, although Wheelie opened it up almost a month ago. The pebbly concrete around it and the surface of the water are flecked with brown helicopter leaves and dead cicadas, little fuzzy balls of linden blossoms. Caroline brushes off one of the slatted lawn chairs and spreads her towel on it. Then she walks back around to the stairs and steps in, kicking at the surface of the water to send the debris floating off to the edges of the pool. The splash sounds loud and harsh in the morning silence. In its wake, the world feels startlingly empty.

Caroline wades in up to her waist and drops under. She has not swum in ages and it feels good—the pressure of the water rushing in her ears and the smooth muscled effort of moving forward through this thicker substance. After only ten laps, she flips onto her back and floats on the surface. Above her, the sky has a solid, lidlike stillness. She closes her eyes and lets her fingers slip in and out of the gelatinous water.

It is only day three of her job as Stephan's “production liaison” and already she has her doubts about the position. Stephan wants to set up an interview with her father, which, it seems to her, is something of a conflict of interest. The division between production liaison and subject seems to be shrinking. At least in theory; in practice, her father would never agree to such a thing. Stephan may think that since she is his daughter she can persuade him, but this is an enormous misperception. Her father is a man of stubborn and unshakable convictions. He does not bend his own rules on petition.

Poor little Eliot, who has to spend so much time alone with him! She feels a stab of anger toward her mother for leaving him here, in this cold creaky house, to the care of his father. Why couldn't she just have held together until, at least, he was safely away at some boarding school? Caroline drops her feet to the bottom of the swimming pool in a sudden, ungainly movement and pulls herself up onto the rough concrete. She will go see if Eliot would like, maybe, to go out for breakfast. The least she can do while she is stuck here is make Eliot's life a little more pleasant. He is so quiet and remote lately; she can't imagine what is going on in his head. Why, for instance, did he suggest going to Roxbury yesterday?

Inside, Caroline patters barefoot across the kitchen in her towel and wet bikini. “Eliot!” she calls. There is no answer. Maybe, she reminds herself, he is still sleeping. She walks through the dining room, past the long empty table and reproachful-looking form of Sir Percival, through the dim brown reception room and the narrow hallway to the bottom of the stairway.

“Eliot?” she calls again, more gently. Under her bare feet the floor feels cold and an artificial, air-conditioned breeze raises the fine hairs on her clammy thighs. In front of her the broad pine steps are shiny, worn down in the middle by so many years of footsteps. Sold to a different carpenter, on a different day, they could have made a coffin—could lie decomposing in the crowded sod beside St. Bartholomew's. The thought sends an anxious pang up through her.