Cheating at Solitaire (7 page)

He went right up to the kitchen window and looked out again. There were people moving along the beach. His throat felt very tight. He had a chill. There didn't look as if there were any police lights there. Oscartown did have its one police cruiser, complete with lights. It didn't look as if there were any ambulance lights, either. Maybe it was one of the movie people moving around, seeing something strange, poking at it to see what she found—but Jack did not believe that. The movie people were just too stupid. They were stupid to the point of stupefaction. Jack had never really believed the publicity that came out of the entertainment magazines, that actors and singers and entertainment people were all morons, that the entire celebrity world was just a grown-up version of high school, but there they were. He couldn't deny it anymore. He had file cabinet after file cabinet of pictures to prove it.

The file cabinets were right there, with him, in the kitchen. He did not use many of the rooms in the house anymore, because they were filled with junk. He just couldn't
seem to keep it going. It embarrassed him a little because he had been brought up with more than a belief that Old Money was the only kind that mattered. It mattered to people on the island to keep their places up. Sometimes he thought he was going to suffocate here. Linda would miss him for a few days and send Jerry Young, and Jerry would knock on the doors and look in the windows and finally let himself inside, and there Jack would be, stretched out on the floor in front of the stove, blue from the lack of oxygen that was Margaret's Harbor.

He looked out the window yet again. There really were people over there. They were making their way down toward the beach. He bit his lip and rubbed the flat of his left hand against his cheek, the way his father used to. He was beginning to look like his father. He was beginning to look old. It wasn't supposed to be this way. He had worked hard in school. He had gotten good grades and good board scores and good financial aid. He had gone off to a reasonably good college. And then what? The college was supposed to flx everything. Instead, he had just turned around and come home, and home had been what it always was.

He went to his file cabinet and used his little key on it. Here was something the movie people had done to him. He'd never locked anything around his place before. The summer people locked their places. Those places were huge, and there were lots of valuable things in them. Somebody said the Rhodes actually had a Renoir. No burglar in his right mind would bother with a place like Jack's when he had the Point to invade, and Jack knew for a fact that security at the Point was a lot less good than Kendra liked to pretend it was.

Jack looked through the little stack of manila envelopes, all of them full to the breaking point, all of them lumpy, and picked the one marked “Las Vegas.” He opened it up and dumped the contents on the kitchen table next to the contents of his backpack. His backpack was full of photographic equipment. Some of the photographers from the big media companies who hung around town these days, waiting for
Marcey Mandret to fall out of her dress, had talked to him about it. There were professional carrying cases and things that professional photographers used. He looked like an idiot carrying his gear around in a backpack. Jack thought he looked like an idiot in any case, because he was older than some of the guys working crew for CNN and CBS, and yet they were there, and he was here, and never the twain would meet.

Except that they would, if Jack had his way. He was suddenly aware of being wet as well as cold. The collar of his parka had soaked through. He didn't know why he was still wearing it. He unzipped it and shrugged it off. It hit the floor behind him, and he didn't notice. The pictures from Las Vegas were good ones. He could get some decent money for some of them. There was the big picture of the whole lot of them when they'd first arrived, Kendra in the center, because she was always in the center, and then the two toy boys, Steve Becker and Mark Anderman. Steve had his hand on Kendra's ass. You couldn't really see it in the photograph, but Jack had taken the photograph, and he knew. Anderman was less intrusive, but his left hand was over Kendra's right shoulder, and the big thick ring on it had spoiled the lighting.

Jack pushed that picture away and tried another one. The one he came up with was the picture of Arrow and Mark in the living room of the Hugh Hefner Suite. The Hugh Hefner Suite had come as a revelation to him. A hotel room that cost ten thousand dollars a night? That was nine thousand square feet? Who could afford things like that? Who would want to? Kendra had stayed in an ordinary suite, without all the bells and whistles, and even that had seemed too garish for her. Las Vegas was not the kind of place debutantes, or ex-debutantes, ought to spend time. The lighting was all wrong.

He went through the pictures one more time. They were good pictures, the kind of pictures the tabloid press really loved. It bothered him that he would never be able to use them. Las Vegas was a tabloid dream. It was a place where nothing was really real. It was supposed to be that kind of place. It was on purpose. What he felt he himself was by accident,
or bad luck, or karma: a facade without anything to back it up. That wasn't exactly accurate. Las Vegas was a facade, but he wasn't even that. He was—something.

He'd been too cold before. Now he was too hot. There was sweat trickling down the back of his neck. The Las Vegas photographs were fanned out in front of him, and they looked like a movie set. All the people in them were too pretty. He thought he should be happy about his anonymity, at least for the moment. Without it, he would never have been asked to go on that trip, and he would never have gotten those photographs, and he would never have been able to sell that one of the whole group of them together to the
Star
for $7,500. It was the most money he had ever made for one photograph, and it had ruined his life.

I have not ruined my life, he told himself. Then he got up and went back to the kitchen window. He had a very clear memory of his first day at Colgate, his father's old station wagon pulled up as close as it could get to the door to his dorm, his stuff coming out of the back in boxes. He was not hopeless. He knew enough, just from living on Margaret's Harbor, to have come in chinos and a polo shirt, and good ones, too. There was still no way to mistake the difference, and not only the difference in cars (that old Ford of his father's, next to the new Volvos everywhere) or in the way the other fathers looked. It was Jack himself who was insuffcient, and he knew it. He lacked that thing these people had, the ability to be really real all the time, to anybody who saw them. It was the same thing people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand had, although they did not have anything else: the ability to be visible. They would not have it for very long, but as long as they had it they would be worth taking pictures of. They were careful, though. Visible people never took up with other visible people if they could help it. It worked out badly.

Jack went back to the table and began to pick up the pictures, one after another, very carefully. In some of them, everyone was smiling. In others, it was obvious that Arrow and Marcey were drunk beyond belief, and so were Steve
and Mark. Kendra Rhode always looked upright and cool. All the interiors were too shiny and garishly colored, as if he'd used cheap film, which he never did. He went back to the first picture and looked at it again. There they were, standing in a semicircle, Kendra in the middle, the men on other side of her, Arrow and Marcey on either side of them. Kendra had told him, that night, that none of the women were wearing underwear. Jack had no idea why she would think this was something he would want to know.

He put the pictures back in their envelope. He put the envelope back in the filing cabinet. He closed the cabinet drawer and listened to the click as the lock snapped into place. It wasn't much of a lock. Anybody who was determined could destroy it in a second. It was a good thing that nobody he knew would care enough about anything he had to try to steal it.

He went back to the window one more time. He pressed his forehead against the glass. There really were people out there, more than one, but they must have come on foot. There was no car parked on the road that he could see, and he would have been able to see the headlights. The lights were coming from the beach, and some of them were moving around, like flashlights. He felt so enormously sick he wanted to throw up right there, but he knew he wouldn't. It was part of his pact with the house never to get it certain kinds of dirty. It was part of his pact with life never to ask it for more than simple survival, but that was what was wrong. That was what was killing him.

He had spent every single second of his existence trying to escape from Margaret's Harbor, and he was absolutely certain that this was his last chance.

9

In the middle of it, plowing through drifting snow in her calf-high black suede L.L. Bean snow boots, Annabeth Falmer began to wonder if she'd been out of her mind. It was one thing to have a sense of responsibility, to feel that it w asn't right to leave somebody to die in the cold when you
had the capacity to see if you could help him. It was another to go blundering around when you had no hope of providing assistance at all. It had been many years since Annabeth had been out in a storm like this. She didn't like to drive in snow, and wasn't good at it, so when it got like this at home she always just stayed put with Creamsicle and her tea. She wondered if it was worse here because of the sea. She seemed to remember something about the Gulf Stream, which she was sure didn't come all the way in to Cape Cod. She wished she'd pulled out a snow hat and made Stewart Gordon put it on his very bald head.

“I can see it,” he shouted back at her.

He wasn't really very far away. He always stopped and checked to make sure she was coming on. She sped up a little now, still thinking about the hat.

“There it is,” he said when she pulled up next to him. “They must have spun out. It's pointing the wrong way for this side of the road.”

She followed the line of his outstretched hand and saw it: an enormous pickup truck with oversized wheels, painted a violent and uncompromising purple.

“My God,” she said. “Has somebody been driving that thing around town? You'd think I'd have noticed it.”

“He's been driving it around some, yes,” Stewart Gordon said. “It's Mark Anderman's.”

“Who's Mark Anderman?”

“I told you, up at the house. Arrow's latest boyfriend. Not the guy she married, and not the one after that, but a new one. Maybe a couple of weeks old. She met him on the set.”

“And he's probably in there.”

“No way to tell from here. Why don't you stay up here and let me go down and see?”

Annabeth Falmer was not a woman most men had found a need to protect, but she recognized the impulse when she saw it. She wondered what he was protecting her from: the climb down, or the fact that this Mark Anderman was very probably lying in the driver's seat stone-cold dead. Either way, she didn't want to be protected. When Stewart Gordon
started down the long bank toward the pickup truck and the beach, she followed him.

It was a bad climb down. Margaret's Harbor was not Maui. It was not a gentle place. The slopes that led from the roads to the sea were covered with scattered rocks, and steep. Annabeth kept hitting her ankles against hard things, and sinking her legs far into the snow so that the wet came in over the tops of her boots. The sea would have been beautiful if she hadn't been so afraid of it. It reminded her of that poem by Matthew Arnold, of the death of religious faith, with the waves crashing against the shore under the great white chalk cliffs of Dover.

They were almost at the truck. Stewart Gordon had stopped to wait for her. “What were you thinking about? You looked like you were thinking about something.”

“I was thinking about trying to write in my office at home when the boys were small, and it would be so cold I'd try to type with gloves on, and it wouldn't work,” Annabeth said. “It would go down to three degrees Fahrenheit and nothing I did could make the house warm, and I'd be aware all the time, you know, because heat's expensive and I'd be running it at full blast, that the bill was going to come in and I wasn't going to be able to pay it. But it was so cold I pumped it up anyway, and then it took forever to get my work done, because it was so hard to type.”

“And your husband? What did he do?”

“Oh, he was dead by then. He died when the boys were small. Three and seven, I think they were. He—my husband, I mean—he worked with computers and things.”

“And your sons are now grown up and they're, what—a doctor and a lawyer?”

“A cardiologist and a litigator, yes.”

“And they like you enough to buy you a house on Margaret's Harbor just because you wanted to spend a year to read?”

“I should have thought of going to Italy. I like Italy. I've been thinking of writing a book about Italy. About Lucrezia
Borgia, maybe. At least there wouldn't be this kind of snow.”

“That's very impressive.”

“A book about Lucrezia Borgia?”

“No. The fact that your sons like you enough to set you up this way after you did whatever it was you had to do to get them where they are. I've seen women like that. Most of them survive by getting hard. You didn't.”

“How do you know I wasn't set up with enough life insurance to choke a horse?”

“The fact that you were afraid of paying the heating bills.”

“Fair enough,” Annabeth said. “I was thinking of something else, though. While we were coming down. There's a poem by Matthew Arnold, called ‘Dover Beach.' ”

“‘… for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.'”