A Summer Affair (25 page)

Claire called up to J.D. and Ottilie again—she could hear the goddamned Doppler effect of the race car game—but she knew they wouldn’t come down, and when they did come down and found cold cereal, they would complain. So forget it. Breakfast was a lost cause.

She slipped into the home office, Zack heavy against her chest, and switched on the computer.

“Computer,” she said, pointing to the screen.

Lock was due home in the morning. Finally, finally. There was no way he had expended the psychic energy on her that she had on him. She was angry at herself, but helpless, too. She couldn’t control her thoughts, and as had been demonstrated last night, she could only marginally control her words and actions, and they all led back to him.

She opened her e-mail. There was the ill-fated message from Edward, copied to Isabelle and Lauren van Aln and the two women from New York who were also on the catering committee. There was no e-mail from Lock.

Claire squeezed Zack, kissed his hair. Upstairs, she heard Shea retching.

She had never felt so lonely in all her life.

She fell asleep across her bed with Zack next to her, which was, she realized when she woke up, a precious gift, despite the fact that she had left the other three children—one of them sick—unparented. She checked the clock: it was nearly ten. There were no sounds from upstairs, which alarmed her. Better she should hear the zooming of the godforsaken race car game or Shea retching, if only to know the kids were still alive. She poked her head into the kitchen. Everything was just as it had been—Jason’s infuriating note, two uneaten bowls of Cheerios. She tried to feed a few Cheerios to Zack, who had resumed his position on her shoulder—she was a pirate, he was her squawking parrot—but he clamped his mouth shut.

Upstairs, the computer was abandoned, J.D.’s room empty (bed unmade, pajamas in a pile on the floor instead of in the hamper), and the girls’ room empty and reeking. Claire had forgotten to strip the bed of the vomited-upon sheets. She, the Laundry Queen, had forgotten the second most important thing, after getting Shea situated. Now the room smelled sour and vile, the odor made worse by the fact that the day was warm and the girls’ windows closed.

But first, the children. The door to the guest room was shut tight and there was no noise leaking from within, not even the muted babble of the Cartoon Network (Claire hated it and would only allow it in her weakest moments). Claire eased the door open, resolved that what she would find inside would not be to her liking—and there she found Shea, asleep upright against the unforgiving bolster of the
C
pillows, and at the foot of the bed, Ottilie and J.D., quietly drawing. It was adorable, really—when was the last time Claire had seen the two of them doing quiet, productive work together? It had been years. J.D. was sketching with a set of sharp pencils. He was drawing houses; he wanted to be an architect. Ottilie was coloring with a set of special markers that Claire had ordered from a catalog. When Claire entered, the kids looked up and smiled shyly, knowing that although they hadn’t eaten a bite of breakfast, there was no way she could be anything but happy with them. They were doing creative work
and
keeping watch over their sick sister. Model children, two more miracles, or so Claire would have thought had her eyes not landed swiftly on Ottilie’s special, ordered-from-a-catalog fuchsia marker, which had the cap off and was bleeding ink, in a perfect circle, onto the precious white duvet cover.

The duvet cover was ruined. It was such a stupid thing, in comparison with everything else, but it was the thing that made Claire’s throat tighten; it was the thing that nearly made her cry.

“Come down to breakfast,” she sniffled.

At ten thirty, the phone rang. Claire was upstairs trying to strip the vomity sheets off the bed with Zack clinging to her neck, and the sound of the phone took her by surprise. She zipped downstairs to get it.
Siobhan,
she thought, and her heart lightened. Or Jason. Or . . . Lock. But no, it was Sunday; he would never in a million years call her house on a Sunday.

The caller ID said
Unknown Number
. Telemarketer, she thought, her heart sinking. Zack started to bang his head against her breastbone and cry. It was not a good time to take a call. But Claire was grateful that anyone wanted to talk to her, even a salesperson. She picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Claire?”

It was a man. It was Lock? It was not Lock, but the voice was as familiar as Lock’s voice. It was ringing the same bells in her head.

“Yes?” she said.

“It’s me.”

She paused, then said tentatively, “Me who?”

“Matthew.”

“Oh,” she said, astonished.
Matthew?
Really, it was Matthew? “Oh, God, I can’t believe it.”

“You got my message?” he said. “Back in . . . ?”

“October. Yes, I got it.”

“I’m home now,” he said. “Well, not home home, but in California.”

Zack was crying. Claire couldn’t hear Matthew. She said, “Can you hang on a second?”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No!” she said. “No, God, no.” The voice all of a sudden made sense; it clicked, that famous voice. It had been so long. “I have to talk to you. I mean, I need a friend, and all of my other friends, and my husband, for that matter—well, I’ve pissed them off. I’m pretty much persona non grata around here.”

“That makes two of us,” he said.

“Hold on one second,” she said.

She set the phone down and tried to shush Zack, but he was in a full-blown tizzy; there was nothing she could do with him. But she wanted to talk to Matthew; they had known and loved each other long before Jason or Siobhan or Lock had come into her life, and there was a reason he was calling now, this morning. It was a sign; it was what she needed.

She buckled. She had no choice. She knocked on Pan’s bedroom door.

Pan opened the door a crack. She was wearing a gray athletic shirt and black panties and her hair was in her face. She had been asleep.

“I am so, so sorry,” Claire said. “But can you please, please hold him for ten minutes? I have to take a very important phone call.”

Pan did not respond, and Claire thought maybe she was sleepwalking. Zack lunged for her, and Pan reached out instinctively, took Zack, and shut the door.

“Thank you!” Claire said to the closed door. “Thanks, Pan! Ten minutes!”

She hurried back to the phone. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Thank God,” Claire said. She moved outside and settled on the top step of the deck, where she sat in the sun. She was warm, outside, for the first time in months. “Thank God you called me.”

“Tell me what’s happening,” Matthew said. “Tell me everything.”

Only then did Claire cry. Max West was a rock star, yes. He had played for the sultan of Brunei, the Dalai Lama, an amphitheater full of Buddhist monks. He had won Grammys and met presidents. But he was her childhood, her adolescence; he was a part of her, he was who she used to be, and he was who she still was, somewhere deep inside. Back when they were friends, before they were lovers, he would come to her house on Saturday mornings and help her with her chores: dusting and vacuuming the front of the house. Before he had his growth spurt, he would stand on top of the vacuum, and Claire would push him around the living room. He showed up, one time, in the middle of the night and found Claire asleep with her hair wrapped in treated paper to straighten it, and they both laughed until they nearly wet their pants. His junior year, he drove a 1972 yellow Volkswagen Bug that had no turn signals and no ignition, and even in February when it was fifteen below zero, he had to crank down his windows and stick his arm out so that oncoming traffic would know he was turning. He had to run alongside that car to get it started, and Claire was right there with him, running, pushing, hopping into the passenger side. He worked as a busboy one summer at a seafood restaurant on the boardwalk, and Claire would meet him after his shift, and once in a while he would pull lobster tails from behind his back.
They were extras. A gift from the cook.
They used to eat the lobsters with their bare hands in the dunes, looking at the black ocean. On those nights of the pilfered lobsters, the breeze in her face and Matthew’s bare leg knocking against hers and the hour growing so late that the lights of the boardwalk were shutting down behind them, she felt something rare. She thought to herself:
I never want my life to change.

But change it did.

“I’m okay,” Claire sobbed. How had she gotten here? So far away from that dune in Wildwood. She lived somewhere else now, and she had four children and a husband and a career and a house and a best friend and a lover and this unwieldy commitment that was causing her so much angst—but the gala was also bringing Matthew back to her, and along with Matthew, these memories. They gave her strength, if only because they were reminding her of who she was at her core. But this second, she was like Zack; she couldn’t stop crying, despite the sunshine. “You talk first. You tell me.”

“I’m drinking again,” Matthew said. “I’m drunk now.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” Claire said, through a blockage of teary snot in her nose. “Oh no.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was away for months, on tour. I was in Asia—remote Indonesia, far-flung islands with dragons—and I was in wildest Borneo, where there are still cannibals. It was a freak show. I thought I could handle it. But then my sponsor got sick and left me on top of a volcano in Flores, where the lakes were pink, purple, and turquoise because of mineral deposits. The lakes were mind-blowing, they were like something Disney came up with, but they were
real
—and then my sponsor, Jerry, Christian fellow, got really fucking sick, and I could tell you that that was when I lost my way, but the fact of the matter is, I lost my way well before that. I started drinking in the airplane bathroom before we even left LAX, and basically never stopped.”

“No.”

“Yes. When I came home to California, Bess divorced me. I let her down, she said. She wasn’t willing to do it anymore. And I said, ‘You knew I was vulnerable. You should have come with me.’ ”

“Yes. Why didn’t she?”

“She hates touring. Hates it. She’s a homebody. She didn’t want to leave the dogs.”

“Ahhhh,” Claire said, sniffling. “The dogs.”

“So we’re done. It’s over. She’s going to marry my accountant and have children. I’m giving her three million dollars, even though she claims she doesn’t want it. And she doesn’t want the house, even though she helped design it and decorate it in that Zennish Bess way, but I can’t live in it—it’s
her
house—so we’re selling it. But she’s there, for the time being, with the dogs—she’s taking custody of the dogs, of course—and I’m renting a place in the hills, trying to keep myself to two gin and tonics per hour.”

“Oh, Matthew.”

“I know. This is the bottom. Everyone thought the bottom was when Savannah and I got caught coming out of the Beverly Hills Hotel . . .”

“That was pretty bad.”

“That was just a media blitz, except for the fact that the husband took a contract out on me with the Belarussian mob. They tried to kill me.”

“Well, no one’s threatening to kill you now,” Claire said. “So this is better.”

“It’s worse,” he said. “Because I am, very slowly, killing myself.”

“You have to stop,” Claire said.

“I can’t stop.”

Right. She had seen it in the tabloids: in and out of rehab, where he was treated and deprogrammed, medicated and talked to, but as soon as he got out, as soon as he was left to his own devices, he sought the very thing he was trying to stay away from. Claire understood it now, better than she ever had before, because she was addicted to Lock. She was unable to give him up, despite the fact that staying with him was ruining her life.

“You can’t stop,” she whispered.

“It’s a disease,” he said.

Claire thought back to Labor Day weekend, 1986, a few nights before their senior year was to begin. There was a late-night party in an empty rental house, thrown by their friend E.K., whose mother was a real estate agent. There was beer; there was strip poker. Claire, for some reason, was the only girl at the party after midnight, or the only girl playing strip poker, and Matthew did not want her to take her clothes off, but that was the game, so she took them off, unconcerned, because E.K. and Jeffrey and Jonathan Cross and everyone else were her good buddies, buddies since nursery school—they were like brothers. Claire sat in the circle practically naked, feeling skinny and sexless—they were her brothers!—but Matthew got quietly upset, he drank and drank and drank, and when the sun came up and they all got dressed again, Claire had to carry Matthew to his doorstep. He was babbling, making no sense, saying,
You make me crazy. I love you. I’m crazy. You make me crazy, Claire Danner.

Claire had considered leaving Matthew draped across his front porch, but she was afraid he would choke on his vomit and die the way they were always warning you of in health class, so she tapped on the screen door, which brought Sweet Jane Westfield outside with her cigarette and her cup of tea. Claire thought Jane would be mad—they had stayed out all night, drinking—but Matthew had four older siblings, all out of the house by that time, and Sweet Jane was used to teenage shenanigans. She took Matthew inside and waved good-bye to Claire, and as Claire wandered down the Westfields’ walk, she heard Matthew say to his mother,
That girl of mine makes me crazy.

When Claire thought of Labor Day weekend, 1986, she thought,
That was when it started.
Matthew’s alcoholism. But that might have been her feeling pointlessly responsible again.
No boundaries!
The truth was, in the years since they’d both left Wildwood, Matthew had known excesses Claire couldn’t even imagine.

“Tell me about you,” Matthew said. “Tell me why you’re sad. Never in a million years did I expect to call and find you sad. I never think of you as being sad. Remember when you told me that once you were out of your parents’ house, your life was going to be perfect?”