A Summer Affair (20 page)

Gavin narrowed his eyes at Lock’s turned back. Affair? It just wasn’t possible. Claire came in all the time looking like she had just spent six weeks in Outward Bound but hadn’t had time for her back-to-civilization shower. This was not the way a woman presented herself to a lover (Gavin had bedded fourteen women in his lifetime, none of them special, but all of them clean). Besides, Claire wasn’t Lock’s type—and it wasn’t only the fact that she looked like she got dressed in a dark closet. She was too casual a person for Lock, she was too comfortable and chummy; she wasn’t refined. If Gavin had suggested to Daphne that Lock was having an affair with Claire Crispin, Daphne would have laughed wickedly and unleashed an invective about Claire that would have made even Gavin uncomfortable, and “unwashed” would have been the nicest of it. Daphne worried about Lock and Isabelle French, and she was correct to worry because Isabelle French was classically beautiful and polished . . . and newly single. (Gavin was interested in Isabelle himself, though she was way, way, way, way, way out of his league.) But Isabelle hadn’t been to the island in months, and she rarely called. When she did call, Lock sometimes asked Gavin to take a message; otherwise the conversations were terse, with Lock conveying unmistakable impatience.

No,
Gavin told Daphne with full confidence.
Nothing is going on between Lock and Isabelle French.

But now there was this vibe, this near
certainty
that Lock, like Gavin, had a secret. Look at him, tapping his foot against the ancient radiator. That was a nervous tic. Gavin recognized it because he monitored himself for nervous tics all the time: the humming, the knuckle cracking, the licking of the teeth, the compulsive checking of his pants pocket: Was the cash still there, all of it? It took a criminal to recognize a criminal, and Gavin recognized a criminal.

“Okay,” Lock said to Claire. “I’ll follow up. Yep, see you.” He hung up.

“How is Claire?” Gavin said. He asked as nonchalantly as possible. Maybe he was just projecting: doing a bad thing came so easily for him that he assumed it would come easily for others.

Lock smiled. Fondly? Guiltily? Gavin couldn’t tell.

“Oh,” he said. “She’s fine.”

C
arter won nineteen hundred dollars on March Madness—which was, he informed Siobhan, a basketball tournament, and a very big deal in America. Siobhan was beside herself about the gambling, even at the win, even after Carter pulled five bills off his wad of hundreds and said, “Go shopping.”

Siobhan did exactly that, despite the fact that she should have put the money right into the bank to hedge against future losses, despite the fact that she should have thrown the money in Carter’s face and told him, point-blank, that he had a problem. The month of March had been dismal for Siobhan—there was no work, only an endless string of hours spent with the kids at the ice rink eating cardboard pizza and stale popcorn and drinking flat diet soda. Claire had been strange and distant—working all the time in the hot shop on the project for the summer gala, attending her “meetings” at night. Twice now, when Siobhan had called to see if Claire wanted to go to 56 Union for a glass of cabernet and a pile of crispy, hot
frites,
Claire had turned her down, saying she had a “meeting.”

Siobhan said, “Who goes to these meetings? Everyone? Or just you and Lock?”

There was a pause. Then Claire said, “There’s a committee.”

Her tone of voice contained the accusation that while technically Siobhan was on the “committee,” she had yet to attend a single meeting. And wouldn’t attend, either, Siobhan thought haughtily. Until they were offered the catering job.

The fact of the matter was, things between Claire and Siobhan had not been right since the day Siobhan caught Claire and Lock heading into the forest at Tupancy Links and Claire flat-out denied it. It was an egregious lie—but it wasn’t the lie, per se, that bothered Siobhan. It was that the lie covered up a slew of other lies. What were all the meetings for? What happened at these meetings? Jason was perhaps too close to see the writing on the wall, but Siobhan could read it. Something was going on. Why wasn’t Claire owning up to it? Claire was hiding something, and Siobhan was offended and hurt by this; she was angry at Claire and angry at herself. Siobhan was too sarcastic, maybe, or too tough—the result of learning to survive as one of eight children—and Claire was as soft as the center of a fancy chocolate. She was afraid to confide in Siobhan. Siobhan was dying to ask Claire, How do you feel about Lock? Do you like working with him? You spend a lot of time together. Do you have feelings for him? Claire’s relationship with Lock seemed to be reaching beyond the normal, beyond the everyday; it seemed to have taken on an intimacy that overstepped the appropriate. But Siobhan was not brave enough to bring it up with Claire. And so they were at an impasse. Claire would not confide in Siobhan about Lock; Siobhan would not confide in Claire about Carter’s gambling or anything else. Their friendship was suffering. It had been a brutal winter.

Siobhan took the five hundred dollars from Carter, stuffed it in her jeans pocket, and went into town. As she was leaving the house, Carter said,
Buy yourself something pretty!
Like he was a gangster and she his moll. What a joke.

Saturday afternoon in the middle of March: Federal Street was deserted—the place was a ghost town—and yet there, parked on the street, was Claire’s car. Siobhan saw it as she walked into Eye of the Needle. This was Claire’s favorite store; maybe they would bump into each other and go to the Brotherhood for a Baileys. But Claire was not in the store. Siobhan stepped outside and called Claire’s cell phone, and it went straight to voice mail. Instinctively, Siobhan knew that Claire was at the Nantucket’s Children office on Union Street—she just knew it. Why not go and see for herself, and end the questions once and for all? Siobhan felt like Nancy Drew, girl sleuth; she felt like Angela fucking Lansbury.

Siobhan scooted down Federal Street, charged with an energy it was hard to describe. She was going to catch her best friend at . . . what?

Siobhan saw Claire tripping down the front steps of the church. Siobhan checked her watch. Four thirty. Mass was at five, but Claire was leaving the church, not going into it, and every good Catholic knew there were only three reasons to go to church in the middle of the afternoon: wedding, funeral, confession. Siobhan didn’t see a bride and groom, nor did she see a hearse.

“Claire?”

Claire whipped around. Guilty. Caught.

“Hey,” she said weakly.

Siobhan glanced, pointedly, at the church. “What are you doing?”

Claire said, “What are
you
doing? God, town is dead.”

“Were you at confession?” Siobhan asked.

Claire looked behind her at the church, as though surprised to find it there.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was. You know, I try to get J.D. and Ottilie to go, but they won’t, so I figure, lead by example or whatever. A little repenting never hurt anyone.”

Claire was the easiest person in the world to read. Now she had two hot spots on her cheeks. Siobhan, girl sleuth, had another clue. Although she had been raised in County Cork, and Claire had been raised in godforsaken coastal New Jersey, their Catholicism was the same. Siobhan hadn’t been to confession since she was twelve years old, and she knew Claire hadn’t, either. It would have to be a
pretty big sin
to send her there.

“I’m out shopping,” Siobhan said. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink? Do you want to talk?”

“No,” Claire said. “I can’t.”

“Just one drink. Come on. I feel like I never see you anymore.”

“I have to get home,” Claire said. “Jason, the kids, dinner. You know what my life is like.”

Siobhan nodded, they kissed, and Claire boogied for her car. Siobhan headed around the corner, ostensibly to check for “something pretty” at Erica Wilson. But she really just moved out of sight so she could catch her breath from the shock. Claire at confession.

You know what my life is like.

But did she?

T
here was a song the kids liked about having a “bad day,” and when it came on the radio, Claire was required to turn up the volume, and the three older children sang along while Zack cried. Claire hated the song; it taunted her. The spring—a season of rebirth and new hope—was turning out to be a disaster for her. She had one bad day after another, after another.

Take, for example, what was going on in the hot shop. For months she had been trying to get started on the pulled-taffy chandelier for the gala auction. But it was all false starts and wasted time. She blew out a beautiful globe, which was to be the center of the chandelier, the body; it was colored a transcendental pink, the most luscious pink Claire had ever achieved because of the painstaking way she had crushed the frit with a mortar and pestle. The globe was perfect, it was Platonic, it was as thin and wondrous as the
Bubbles;
she was back on track, hitting her stride. But then the perfect, Platonic globe shattered in the annealer, and when Claire saw this, she cried for three days. She cried with Jason; she cried with Lock. Both of them pretended to get it, but they didn’t get it, not really, and she was vexed because they both, ultimately, expressed the same sentiment.
It’s okay. You’ll do another one, and the second one will be even better.
They used the same tone of voice; they were, in those moments, the same man. Disturbing. Claire tried to explain that it wasn’t just the globe that was broken; it was her confidence and her will. She did, however, try again, and the result was probably just as good, lacking only the luster of perfection that the first globe had acquired in Claire’s mind. Toward this second globe she acted like an overprotective mother. When it was cool, she set it gingerly in a crate filled with straw, and from time to time she revered it, like it was Baby Jesus lying in his manger.

With the body of the chandelier finished, she moved on to the arms. The arms of the chandelier had to arch and curve. They would have the same pulled-taffy nature as the candlesticks she had made so long ago for Mr. Fred Bulrush—all that twisty, colored glass—but they had to fall like tendrils from the globe, they had to drip. That meant Claire had to pull each arm by hand and get it to curve and bend just the right way, twisting it at the same time. It was impossible, it was beyond her, like certain positions in yoga; she couldn’t make the glass do what she wanted it to do. She tried sixty times to get one graceful, arabesquing arm, and when she finally had it, the one arm, she wept some more because she could see how incredible the chandelier would be if she ever finished it, but she wasn’t sure she had the patience to make seven more arms. In fact, Claire pulled another arm beautifully within her next ten tries, but because she was working by hand and not with a mold, this second arm did not correspond with the first. The angle of the curve was too sharp; if she attached these two arms to the globe now, one arm would look broken. More tears.

Lock said, “There was no guaranteeing that it was going to come easily. In fact, one of the reasons this piece is so valuable is that it is so difficult. We’re paying for your blood, sweat, and tears.”

Claire nearly swore at him. This was a piece for an auction, it was a
donation,
and it was consuming all of her time. It had been a mistake to return to the hot shop; she had lost her touch, the chandelier was beyond her, and yet it was the only thing she wanted to do. So there you had it: she had set herself an unattainable goal, and all it brought her was frustration and heartbreak.

Jason was right. She should have let him bomb the hot shop or shoot it full of arrows. Burn it down. Put Darth Vader into gear and run it over.

Claire placed the globe for the chandelier and the one peerless arm in the crate and set them on top of her filing cabinet, out of the way. She would think about the chandelier later; the best thing to do when the glass wasn’t cooperating, her instructors used to tell her, was to walk away. Take a break. Claire took Ottilie and Shea to get haircuts—and then, as a super-duper special treat, manicures. Claire got a manicure herself, but the mere sight of her hands reminded her of the chandelier, and she left the salon with two giggling girls and a heavy heart. The chandelier called out to her. It haunted her. It was a baby she’d abandoned in a Dumpster, screaming for her. Talk about waking nightmares! Claire managed to make it through dinner, but after the kids were asleep, she went back into the hot shop and fashioned a tiny, bell-shaped cup onto the end of the one and only arm. This was where the bulb would go. It was sweet and precious, this tiny cup, like the blossom of a lily of the valley. Claire felt good about the project for about five minutes; then she started in on another arm. Forty-seven tries later, she was in tears again. She climbed into bed next to Jason, who woke up momentarily and said, “Jesus, Claire, just forget about it. You’re making yourself crazy.”

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Sent: March 27, 2008, 1:32
A.M.

Subject: Auction item

Isabelle—

I am having a very hard time producing an item for the auction. I planned to make a chandelier, which I thought would be a real winner, but it isn’t turning out as I had hoped. I know it’s late in the game as far as these things go, but I wondered if you might be able to scare up another auction item. Perhaps we should revisit the singing lessons, or loge seats to
South Pacific,
followed by a meet and greet with Kristin Chenoweth. With everything I have on my plate right now, the idea of having to produce this piece of art is bone-crushing—it’s keeping me up at night. (As you can see, I am writing this e-mail at one in the morning. I am losing sleep!) Will you please help me explore other options?