Indiscretion

“My favorite lifeguard,” she pronounces with a laugh and gives him a wet kiss on the cheek and a quick hug, her nipples grazing his chest. “Once again you’ve saved me from drowning.” She stands back in front of him, as if to say, Look at me. This could be yours. I can’t remember if anyone else noticed the moment. I tried to catch Ned’s or Cissy’s eye, but they were in the middle of doing another dive.

Harry says nothing and looks away as Clive comes up.

“Let me show you how it’s done, mate,” he says.

Claire pulls away from him, but he squats down, saying, “Come on.”

She climbs up without looking at him and just dives off, straight and clean. When she comes up, she says, “Can we go? I’m getting cold.”

The moment has passed. Claire wades back out of the water, shoulders hunched forward, an arm covering her breasts, a hand in front of her loins. She looks at nobody. No one looks at anyone as we hurriedly pull our clothes over our wet bodies. Our mood is postlapsarian.

We drive back to the house in silence. Even Cissy is quiet. When we get out, Claire and Clive hang back. It is obvious they are going to have a fight. The rest of us go inside.

That’s not entirely true. I linger just out of sight and overhear snatches of what they say. “Don’t touch me” and “Stupid cunt” and “Why don’t you just fuck him then?”

She comes in, crying, running past me to the kitchen. To Maddy.

“Is everything all right?” asks Harry. I say nothing, and Clive is standing in the hallway, looking angry. He wants to follow her but knows he can’t, an unbeliever in the temple.

Madeleine comes out. “Clive, Claire seems very upset. I know it’s late, and we’ve all had a lot to drink. But she asked if she could stay here tonight, and I told her she could.”

Clive stares at her, unsure of what to say, of how to react. The words he wants to say fail in his throat. His will is not as strong as Maddy’s.

She senses his frustration and puts a hand on his arm. “She’ll call you in the morning.”

When he gets outside the house, he will find his words again, he will rage, he will think black thoughts, call them all names. But not now. Standing before him is Madeleine, looking like a Madonna. Behind her, Harry, Ned, me. He has no chance. Now all he says is “Tell that cunt I don’t want to see her again,” and he leaves, his car spitting gravel as it drives off.

Inside, Maddy has her arm around Claire, who is apologizing over and over. Her face is wet with tears. Maddy consoles her. We all do. Or at least try to.

“See, I told you I didn’t like him,” I say, but all the thanks I get is a dirty look from Madeleine.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Harry tells Claire. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. If you need us to get your things from Clive’s, I’ll run over tomorrow. For tonight, we can loan you anything you need.”

“Thank you,” she sniffs.

“We are going to have to put you on the couch in the living room, if that’s all right. Ned and Cissy already have the guest room. We’ll get you pillows and sheets. You’ll be snug as a bug.”

I am about to suggest that she would be welcome to stay at my house, as there are plenty of empty bedrooms, but then think better of it.

“Please don’t go to any bother. I don’t mind at all. You’re being so kind. I just feel like such a fool.”

“Not at all,” says Harry. “I’ll be right back.” He goes upstairs and returns several minutes later with pillow, sheets, blankets, a towel, and a large gray T-shirt with the words YALE HOCKEY on it. “I figured you could use something to sleep in.”

Cissy and Madeleine begin to make up the couch. Harry wanders into the kitchen and starts rinsing glasses. I debate having a last drink but then decide against it. It’s already past one in the morning. Instead I say my good-byes, kiss Maddy good night, tell Claire to sleep well and that everything will look better in the morning, and head out to the familiar path that leads through the narrow strip of trees that separates our two houses.

I can imagine Claire, having calmed down, thanks to a few gulps of brandy, getting under the covers on the couch. Madeleine would be there, making sure her newest charge is comfortable and well looked after. Ned, Cissy, and Harry would have already gone up. Then Maddy would have left too, turning off lights, leaving Claire alone in her temporary bed, staring up at the ceiling, happy as a child.

3

SEVERAL WEEKS PASS. SUMMER RAGES ON. THE STREETS OF Manhattan bake in the fierce sunlight. To Claire, the breezes and salt water of Long Island are just a memory. She has been banished to the ordinary world, one inhabited by coworkers, college friends, deliverymen, strangers on the subway. Like Eurydice, she will never again walk in fields of flowers.

Claire has not seen the Winslows. There is no reason why she should. She returned to the city the day after her fight with Clive. Harry and Ned had gone to Clive’s to get her bag and retrieve her rental car, but when they pulled up, no one was home and her possessions had been thrown into the front seat.

Even though Harry and Madeleine had asked her to stay and been so kind, she felt like an intruder, a stranger taken in under false pretenses. She would forget about them. Their lives, which had temporarily intersected with hers, would now continue along a different path.

I thought about her on a few occasions during the days that followed. Hers was an unfinished story, and I wanted to know more of it. What would she do? What turns would her life take? And then it seemed she had disappeared for good.

Until one night Harry announces to Maddy and me over dinner in the kitchen, “I meant to tell you. Guess who I saw today?” He had been in New York, lunch with his agent, a few errands. “Claire.”

“How is she?” asks Maddy.

“She looked well. I was walking out of the restaurant and talking with Reuben, and all of a sudden, I almost knocked her down. What are the odds of that?”

“I liked her,” I say. “Poor thing was wasted on Clive. What a horse’s ass.”

“Maddy liked her too, didn’t you, sweetheart? At least I thought you did. We were standing there chatting about this and that, and she asked warmly after you both, and Johnny, and Ned and Cissy, and she looked a little blue, so I thought, what the hell, and invited her out for the weekend. At first, she said she couldn’t, but I insisted. Hope you don’t mind. She needs being taken in hand. Maddy, you’re just the person to do it, too.”

Maddy does love a project. Even as a child she was always taking in strays. I remember sitting up nights with her, helping her watch over a dying rabbit or chipmunk which the local cat (my cat, incidentally, but she never blamed me for it) had eviscerated. She would keep them warm, use an eyedropper to give them water, and inevitably bury them in the woods in one of my mother’s shoe boxes.

“I’m glad you invited her, darling,” she says. “But we can’t have her sleep on the couch again. Where will she sleep? Aren’t Ned and Cissy coming?”

“Don’t worry about that,” I offer. “They can stay with me. I have lots of room.”

“Great,” says Harry. “Thanks, Walter. And Ned and Cissy can give her a ride out.”

ON FRIDAY THEY ARRIVE, LATE. THE TRAFFIC IS PARTICULARLY hellish on Fridays, especially during the summer. What had been a ninety-or-so-minute drive in my childhood can now stretch out to three hours or more, even for people like me who know the back roads. The farms that used to line the roads are almost all gone. The old potato barns are nightclubs. The quaint little stores where I had once bought comic books and penny candy and donuts are high-end boutiques selling cashmere sweaters and virgin olive oil. Last year an Hermès opened in the old liquor store. The beach and the sunsets are just about the only things that haven’t changed.

Claire is greeted with hugs and kisses. Her face is bright with welcome. She looks lovely. “I brought this for you,” she says as she presents Madeleine with a large, brightly wrapped box.

“It’s heavy,” Madeleine says. “What is it?”

She opens the box and pulls out a gleaming copper saucepan. “Oh, you shouldn’t have. These are very expensive.” It must have been a small fortune to someone like Claire. She works for a magazine, an assistant editor or something, the lowest on the pole. The generosity of the gift, as well as its appropriateness, overwhelms Madeleine, who is a sucker for cookware. She gives Claire another, longer hug. “I love it. Thank you!”

“And this is for you,” Claire says to Harry. She hands him a paper bag. From inside he withdraws a red T-shirt and opens it up to display lettering on the front: LIFEGUARD and a white cross. He puts it on over his shirt. Everyone laughs and claps.

“Another childhood dream fulfilled,” he laughs. “All I need now is a whistle and a clipboard.”

Wine is brought, glasses filled. Harry carves the chicken. It is from a local farm. There is also fresh sweet corn and long green beans crunchy with sea salt. Everyone is happy to be here. Plans are discussed for Saturday. A beach excursion and a picnic seem to be in order. Then Harry announces that tomorrow night they are getting a sitter and giving Madeleine a night off from cooking—“About time!” she cries and we all laugh—and that we will all be going out to eat.

It’s one of our favorite restaurants, a place with red-checked tablecloths and inch-thick steaks dripping with butter. The owners are a diminutive Greek woman and her brother, who spends most evenings drinking by himself in the corner. Some nights I sit with him and listen to his schemes for investing in real estate. Once when I was there, a family of local Indians from the Shinnecock tribe came in. There were six of them, two parents and four children. They ordered a single steak and split it amongst them. It made me feel absurd and fat to be eating the same thing only for myself.

“It’s also got the worst wine list in the world, but that’s part of its charm,” says Harry.

Tonight, though, we are all tired. There will be no midnight swim. Madeleine says she will clean, and Claire offers to help her. Harry excuses himself and goes upstairs to work. I lead Ned and Cissy back through the bushes to my house. It is late when the two women go to bed. I can imagine them in the living room talking, their feet tucked up behind them on the couch, finishing the wine. They are very different, but there is a growing bond between them. It is hard to resist being idolized.

So much has been made about Harry, yet Madeleine has never protested or voiced any resentment. She has given of herself utterly. Since their marriage I had never thought of Madeleine needing or wanting anything other than Harry because she had so much already. He was the missing piece that made her complete. But she is human, too, something that many of us forget at times because she seems immune to pettiness, possessing a serenity that actually grows more pronounced the greater her troubles. She knew she had Harry and Johnny—and me, of course—but can she be blamed for wanting more? What is important is she thought she was the one making the choice.

As I often do, I sit in my room looking across to her house. In the distance I hear the whistle of the night train heading back to New York. Maddy’s light goes out well past midnight, and I crawl into my childhood bed.