Nantucket Read online

  “I need to get back to my guests,” said Andrew evenly. And I need to figure out who is undermining me at work, he said to himself. There was always a price to pay for ignoring the politics.

  “Oh, all right. But come see me Monday morning. I want to understand how you’re spending your time. We have several things to talk about, as a matter of fact. We need to start running this place like a business.”

  “I won’t be back in Manhattan until lunch time.”

  “Well, call my office and book a time then.” He hung up.

  Andrew took a few deep breaths and went back to the table, wrestling with the thought that the weekend would probably come to nothing. In the merger business, most good ideas died.

  “Who was that, sweetie?” said Sally cheerfully, as if any news had to be good. She sounded like Cathy had ten years earlier.

  “Fellow at the office,” said Andrew. “Needed my advice on something.”

  “Did he really need it at nine on a Friday night?” said Rosemary. Her tone was both impatient and sympathetic.

  “Evidently so,” said Andrew.

  “I think it’s very nice that your partners want your help,” said Shiva, which fortunately seemed to close the subject.

  There was some clearing of plates and then the famous cheese course, as Cathy would have called it, which further confronted Andrew with the reality that his guests lived on Olympus and he was just a working stiff.

  Sally brought in a wooden chopping board on which she had laid out the cheese, and a pile of crackers and lightly buttered toast points. She’d tied the shop’s signature dark red ribbons around the board as a reminder of the luxury they were about to enjoy. “This is very spoiling,” she said to Rosemary as she set it down.

  “How did you manage, by the way?” said Cynthia. “I thought you said you’d just arrived from London. That was your Gulfstream we saw, right?”

  “You flew from London to New York and then took the puddle-jumper back to Nantucket?” said Sally in amazement.

  “Andrew told us he had tickets on the puddle-jumper,” said Shiva grandly, “so we reported to the puddle-jumper. If that is the official way to come to your magical island, that is the way I wanted to do it.”

  “Like approaching a temple barefoot,” said Cynthia.

  “Precisely,” said Shiva.

  Andrew had always thought it quite grand to be able to give his guests tickets on the little plane from Manhattan. In the middle of the summer they were hard to come by, especially for the primo time slots like Friday evening. It had taken some wrangling with the airline, years ago, to convince them to issue blank tickets, and further argument, in the wake of 9-11, to get them to keep doing so.

  “In answer to your question, Cynthia,” Shiva continued, “Rosemary had the butler bring the cheese to the airport.”

  “You keep servants in New York,” said Joe, “even though you live in London? I mean, I know you probably have an apartment here…”

  “There’s no point in having a flat if you don’t have anyone looking after it,” said Shiva. “I dislike the smell of a flat that no one is living in. You unlock the front door and stale air pours over you.”

  “And we travel at short notice sometimes,” said Rosemary, as if that explained matters.

  “A butler, a maid and a cook is all,” said Shiva.

  “We get such nice invitations,” said Rosemary, smiling at Andrew.

  4

  Andrew came downstairs in the dark. He couldn’t sleep. He’d had too much wine. He was terrified. He thought he should figure out how to call Cathy, even though she’d told him not to. Then again, he didn’t much want to. That was probably why he’d left his mobile upstairs the previous evening. At some level, he wanted to run away as much as Cathy. He couldn’t help feeling that was what she’d done.

  He was angry about the call he’d gotten from his new boss. He didn’t need to be managed. He certainly didn’t need to be told he was wasting his time. His role, admittedly self-assigned, was to originate big “creative” deals – the sort that added to the firm’s prestige as well as its bottom line. He decided what to work on. He didn’t chew up a lot of associate resources, as some of his colleagues did, insisting on hundred-page presentations that said nothing new. His approach had paid off often enough so that he was entitled to patience and encouragement.

  The weekend had started well, actually. His guests seemed to be enjoying themselves. They probably thought they were slumming and were letting themselves relax. Cynthia and Rosemary were never going to be friends, but they didn’t have to be. Joe and Shiva were enjoying how different they were from each other. You could see it in the way they looked at each other.

  Joe was not getting along with Cynthia, but that wasn’t a crisis. Sally had explained the problem to him: Cynthia hadn’t gotten used to not being the centre of attention, the way she was in her job. She hadn’t been married to someone as rich as Joe before, or as single-minded. Come to think of it, she might not have been married before at all. Anyway, Cathy – correction, Sally – was going to buddy up with her the next day.

  All that really needed to happen was for Joe and Shiva to have time to talk without any distractions. If a deal makes sense, Andrew often told himself, it will find a way to happen. He just needed this one to happen, that was all.

  It was his own fault, of course. No one had insisted he chase big improbable deals. It was a choice he’d made – to live by his wits, as he put it to Cathy, rather than his elbows. He hadn’t wanted to compete with his partners for ownership of the clients who rang the cash register on a regular basis – public utilities who issued debt every six months or conglomerates who shuffled prosaic subsidiaries with shameless frequency. There was a price to be paid for that cowardice: the randomness of success, and permanent anxiety. But if he couldn’t deal with that, he didn’t belong on Wall Street.

  Andrew didn’t turn on the kitchen lights because he knew about visual purple and he wanted to preserve his night vision. He did that on the mornings when he came downstairs before dawn and made a mug of coffee by feel and went out onto the porch to wait for the sky to lighten. “Beginning of morning nautical twilight,” it was called: the point when you first could tell that sunrise was coming though it hadn’t happened yet.

  Some colleague who had served in the Navy had given him that phrase years ago. Andrew liked the way it suggested charts and remote places and the nineteenth century. He often wished he’d been in the Navy. His father would probably have liked that.

  Sometimes he took his mug all the way to the beach, through the bushes and down the wooden stairway it had taken some persistence to be permitted to construct. There was rarely anyone on the beach at dawn, and he was occasionally tempted to set his mug down on the sand, take off his sandals, shorts and tee shirt and go into the water, but he knew better than to swim alone. The ocean is full of monsters, his father had taught him when he was four. At some level, he still believed that.

  Presumably his father had seen it as a form of drown-proofing, a way of making an inquisitive toddler cautious during a vacation on the Jersey shore. His father had been a methodical and cautious man, who knew something about monsters, actually, but parents have no way of knowing which random comments their children will take to heart, what ideas will take root in their young imaginations. Andrew’s younger daughter, Florence, for example, it had recently emerged, was studying architecture because he had once remarked that law school would be boring.

  “You know, I would have made a pretty good lawyer,” she’d said recently.

  “Did you ever think about it?” he’d asked.

  “You told me not to,” she’d said.

  Which wasn’t what he’d meant at all. He’d never even gone to law school. How would he know? He’d meant that in his observation, lawyers needed an appetite for hard work, and that law school probably tested a person on that capacity.

  “Oh,” she’d said.

  How else have I misled
you? Andrew had said to himself.

  “Never mind,” she’d said. “I like architecture. Richard” – that was the boy she thought she was in love with – “he told me I pay attention to details the same as he has to. He says law school has taught him to read. I told him drawing is teaching me to see.”

  Which had brought the topic safely to a close. But still.

  In any event, he always gave his house guests a lecture on safety when they first arrived. And put a copy of Moby Dick in every bedroom.

  Andrew opened the refrigerator door to get a bottle of soda water and…screw it. He wouldn’t be able to see anything for several minutes. He grabbed the bottle, closed the refrigerator door and went into the pantry to get a glass.

  There was someone in the pantry. A shape. A monster? He slowly put down the bottle of soda water and reached out in the darkness, finding…goosebumps, a woman’s body, a shocking frizz of curly hair, wetness beneath. “Oh my,” he said, and even as he said it realised his hand had stayed too long where it shouldn’t have been. “I beg your pardon.”

  Whoever went with the goosebumps grabbed the sleeves of his nightshirt and pulled him toward her. “Relax,” she whispered. “What happens in the dark doesn’t count.”

  “Why are you here?” he heard himself asking. “And naked?”

  “Why are you asking questions?”

  Whispering didn’t extinguish her accent. She had to be Rosemary. His hands found her breasts, which were pushing forward, eager for attention. “Do you even know who I am?” she said.

  Andrew told his hands to behave. “Of course I know. But what are you doing here? Who were you looking for?”

  “I was looking for you. I wish you’d lose this nightshirt.” She began pulling it up, and he resisted. “I want to go swimming,” she said.

  “It’s dangerous at night. And how long have you been here?”

  “It’s not dangerous if I have a life guard. And the answer is I don’t know, maybe half an hour. I was awake anyway. Shiva snores. Your other guests, the newlyweds, finished their duties hours ago. Very traditional couple, if you like that sort of thing.”

  What sort of thing, he wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  Rosemary paused, and changed her tone. “Listen, you’re intelligent. You’re on the edge of being middle-aged. Your wife is a bit distant, if I’m any judge, though superbly trained. It’s three in the morning. Your profession involves sucking up to rich bastards. Wouldn’t it balance things out if we went down to the beach and misbehaved?”

  Andrew didn’t answer.

  “Well, at least come to the beach.” She took his hand and led him out of the kitchen like the first girl he’d slept with, leading him down the hall of her parents’ house one empty afternoon. In the silence he remembered what she looked like. The first girl he’d slept with, that is. He wished he hadn’t stopped touching her breasts so soon. Now he was thinking of Rosemary.

  When they got down the steps from the porch, she began to speak in a normal voice – normal in the sense of not being a whisper, but still aristo English intoxicating. “Do I need to tell you the terms of engagement?” she said. “Neither of us ever tells anyone what we’ve done.”

  “Is there anything particular you’d like?” Andrew said. He reminded himself that he was joking.

  “If I tell you, it may not work,” said Lady Rosemary. She evidently wasn’t.

  “Tell me why you do this then?” he said.

  “You’re right. I do this whenever I can – walk around someone else’s house naked, that is. We get invited to a lot of very large houses. I do it to meet men. Sometimes it works. Now, where are those steps you mentioned that go down to the beach?”

  “Through this little tunnel in the bushes.” Now he was leading her.

  “Oh, I like this little tunnel. It is dark in here. I love darkness. The man I’m with can’t see me, and has to apprehend me with his other senses. Would you like to apprehend me a bit? I liked it when you touched me so rudely in the pantry and didn’t know who I was.”

  Andrew felt it would be a mistake to touch her again. She touched his face. One of her fingers wandered into his mouth. He reached up and gently took her hand away.

  “Hold my hand, then,” she said. He led her through the tunnel and onto the steps, where there was a bit of a breeze, a bit of starlight.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” he found himself saying to her back as he followed her down the steps.

  “If you want beauty,” she said over her shoulder, “why won’t you fuck me? I will become your fantasies.” There was a hint of sadness in her question, uninhibited as it was. A suggestion of struggle. It reminded him of Sally’s “intimacy without sex” – though perhaps the other way round. Sally who was an unexploded bomb asleep in his bed.

  “Because you’re a goddess and I’m a mortal,” said Andrew in answer to Rosemary’s question. There was a point to the Greek and Latin he had studied after all. “Because your husband is a prince.”

  “I thought you might be a poet,” said Rosemary matter-of-factly, starting down the beach. “You certainly have a lot of poetry stuffed in your head, same as me. So you will understand. The fates played a cruel trick on me. I am beautiful, as you say. I say that without embarrassment or conceit because it is not something I achieved or earned.”

  “Not like your first-class honours.”

  “Thank you for knowing about that,” she said. “Take my hand, please. At least that, as we walk.”

  Andrew did so. What a picture we make, he said to himself: naked Venus with a middle-aged investment banker in a red-and-white striped nightshirt, which billows when the breeze catches it. Well, almost middle-aged, he corrected himself. His curly black hair hadn’t retreated yet. He was fitter than he deserved to be, considering how little formal exercise he got.

  “I had to work hard for my first,” Rosemary was saying, “though of course the brains that made it possible were also an unearned gift. But my beauty is just…there. I eat what I like, exercise or not as I choose, wear what I feel comfortable in. Here’s an experiment I tried. I went out to lunch in London in a really ugly outfit. No jewellery. No make-up. Fancy restaurant. The paparazzi spotted me. Next morning one of the tabloids had a spread, claiming this was the newest fashion trend. And, here’s what’s awful: I looked really good.”

  “I’m not sure you have a complaint, my lady.”

  “Let me continue. Along with my looks, I have an enormous sex drive. I want it twice a day, really.”

  “Lucky Shiva.”

  “Lucky you, if you’d just cooperate. I like sleeping with Shiva’s professional advisers – which I take it is what you’re trying to be. I go after you lawyer and banker chappies because you have a strong interest in keeping the liaison a secret. In case you’re interested.” They walked on in silence for a bit. “Also, it’s a way of disrespecting him, fucking his servants. And meaning no disrespect to you, sweet Andrew.” It occurred to Andrew that he was safe, at least for now. The intoxication had waned. She was crazy.

  “Shiva is perverse,” she continued. “He thinks I desire him. He likes thinking that. He maintains it intensifies his pleasure to have me less often than I’d like. He’s told me all this. ‘A beautiful wife is a treasure,’ he says. ‘A wife overflowing with desire is a magical possession.’ He thinks that my being horny makes him smarter. He wants me to be Miranda at the start of the play. That’s why he goes on about The Tempest. ‘O brave new world that has such creatures in it.’ You know that scene, I assume, where Prospero’s daughter, having been raised on an island with no men except her father, sees the shipwrecked Ferdinand. Shiva likes that moment, where Miranda’s desire is awakened but not yet fulfilled. He believes – and I promise you there is nothing to support this in the text – he believes that keeping Miranda pure is what makes Prospero strong. Shiva thinks he’s Prospero, of course.”

  “So why does he call me that?”

  “He’s being polite. It’s your isla
nd. And he’s giving you a hint. Find a way to tell him he’s the magician. He will like that.”

  “That’s very helpful.”

  “But to go on, the other bit of irony the fates hung around my neck like a golden chain is that my beauty frightens most men. I go out to dinner and the boy beside me becomes tongue-tied. I let my dressing gown fall to the floor and so does his erection.”

  Andrew laughed. “Surely not.”

  “More often than you’d think. Even at university.”

  “But you don’t need lots of lovers. You just need a husband who likes sex as much as you do. I hesitate to say this. I am supposed to be winning Shiva’s trust. But have you considered looking for such a person?”

  “Every day. But you know, being rich is addictive. I would get very little in a divorce. I have no grounds. Or none I care to talk about in public. You will understand this, Andrew, being a poet. I’m Prometheus’s unmentioned sister. The eagle of sexual hunger tears at me every night.” They walked in silence for a bit, and she played with his hand. “But when I do find a man who appreciates the gift of my fire, the pleasure for both of us is intense.”

  “That was beautiful,” said Andrew. And then: “We should probably go back.”

  “All right,” said Rosemary, letting go of Andrew’s hand and turning towards him. “But for my pains, one kiss?”

  It was a very good kiss.

  Andrew had one more question for her, though. “Why did you marry Shiva?”

  “I thought I was being clever. One wants to keep on being clever when one has gotten a first. The fact that my parents objected was a further inducement of course.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while, but when they entered the tunnel through the shrubbery, she grabbed his nightshirt again and pulled him to her. “I want to use the darkness again.

  Just touch me somewhere.” He let his hands find her breasts. “You are very brave,” she said. “Whatever happened on that phone call, you managed to lock it up. Don’t worry. You looked fine. But I could tell. If you’re married to a man like Shiva, you see a lot of supplicants. I know what suppressed fear looks like in a man. And I like you, sweet Andrew, who took me to the beach but wouldn’t take advantage of me. I think I’m going to like you very much. Whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish here, I’ll help you if I can. I never pay attention to the business aspects of our existence, you realise. Shiva’s and my existence, that is. All the nice invitations.”