Jacob's Folly (23 page)

After the scenes were over, Masha hugged all the girls and smiled at the guys. They all congratulated her, admired her ring. They told her to come by and see them once in a while. Hugh just gave her a nod and slipped away. She could tell he was upset, maybe angry with her. As she walked down the hall into the front room, she saw Miriam standing there, clutching her large purple handbag like it was a life preserver. A bolt of fear branched through Masha's belly, flashed into her wrists.

She walked up to her sister and just stood there, her heart pounding.

“I went to the nursing home to talk to you about the wedding during your break and they told me you left, that you usually leave around five-thirty on a Tuesday,” Miriam hissed, taking Masha's elbow and guiding her out the door. “Then, when I walked out, I saw you down the block. I followed you here. I've been waiting two hours.”

“I was just saying goodbye,” said Masha.

“Walk fast. Mommy's waiting.”

“You told her?”

“Of course I called her. You expect me to lie?”

“I'm not asking you to lie.”

“Not telling her would be lying.”

When they got to the house, Pearl was very quiet, tense. She took Masha's jacket from her and hung it in the hall closet. Mordecai was in the living room, pacing the wooden floor, his white shirt wrinkled and half untucked from his black pants, the knots of his protective fringes dangling from his thick waist.

“I don't understand how you could be this sneaky,” he said. “That's what I don't understand. You need to perform? Is that it? Is that what was happening that Shabbos? You need to perform in front of men?”

“Daddy. Please.”

“Just explain to me how you got so devious. How did this happen? I don't recognize you! You aren't my Masha. Who are you?”

“Morty—” Pearl began, wiping a tear from her face.

“Don't—” The gentle Mordecai put up his hand with a rare show of firmness. “This is something that needs to be talked through. This is not a thing to gloss over and pretend it didn't happen. Masha. Sit down. Tell me. How are you paying for these acting classes?”

“With the money from the nursing home. I was just dropping a payment off. I quit the class, Daddy.”

“So you got this job at the nursing home which we were all so proud of so you could sneak away to, and afford, acting classes with a bunch of—who knows who with? Boys, I assume?”

“And girls. It was nothing about the boys—it was just learning how to act. You knew I loved it, it's not a surprise.”

“What's a surprise, young lady, is how willing you were to deceive your family and your husband-to-be.”

“But I quit,” she said miserably.

“Did you want to quit?” Mordecai asked her, his voice softening.

“I don't know,” she said. “I wanted to want to. Yes.”

“I think we have to tell Eli's parents,” Mordecai said to Pearl.

“Please, no,” Masha begged.

“I will not let you turn me into a dishonest man!” said Mordecai, his face reddening.

“At least let me tell Eli myself.”

“Masha,” said Mordecai. “You know I love you and I want you to be happy. This is not a trap, this way of life, this house is not a prison. I hope more than anything that all my children follow the Torah as I follow it, as your mother does. If you leave, you will break our hearts, but: we will not chain you up. This situation is not just about you, what's more. It's about Eli. I will not let you ruin a man's life. He wants a wife, not a—a snake in the grass. Or an actress. We all want you to be something, Masha, we wanted you to get an education, it was your choice to drop out, your choice not to go to Israel for a year.” He looked up at Pearl gloomily. “We should never have let her leave college. It's all this sitting around, this is what it's led to.”

The next morning, Eli and Masha sat at the kitchen table in silence. The house was empty, save for Pearl upstairs with the baby. Eli kept turning his tall glass around and around in his fingers. Masha watched his shivering cola: endless tiny bubbles kept breaking the surface, like feeding fish. The kitchen clock sounded so loud; she had never noticed how loud that clock was. Each tick had a tail, a little comet of sound—like a snare drum.

“I gotta be honest, I'm in a quandary here,” Eli said, his voice cracking. Masha's eyes were fixed on his soda bubbles. “How long were you taking that class?”

“Three months,” she said.

“So the whole time we've known each other you've been secretly going to that class, and you never mentioned it?”

“I wanted to. I just … couldn't get myself to say it. I didn't think you would like it.”

“Well, I guess we'll never know now.”

“Would you have?” she asked.

“Would I have liked you taking acting classes, with guys? No. But … you know I'm not so by the book … The thing is, you weren't just taking that class for fun, you were hoping it was gonna lead someplace, right? I don't understand how you were going in two directions at once.”

“I quit because of you, though,” she said softly. Even as she said it, she felt it was not true. Why had she quit? She couldn't remember. She felt stupid, fuddled.

“Is it more the class, or the not telling you?” she asked, her voice high, meek, not her own.

He was quiet for a while, turning the glass around and around. “I just feel like I don't know you like I thought I did, and it scares me,” he said, looking up at her. His face was reddening, swelling, like an
angry pimple coming to a head. She realized with a shock that he was about to cry.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. Then he got up and left.

Masha walked upstairs slowly and lay down on her bed. She took off the diamond ring and the bracelet, set them glimmering on the bedside table. She felt leaden. Pearl came and sat beside her, stroking her hair until the door banged and the first of the kids came home. As the afternoon wore on, Masha could hear her younger siblings coming home from school in waves. The house filled up with sound. She sat up, her hair a shining cascade. She walked downstairs, touching the mezuzah screwed inside the kitchen doorjamb, then kissed her fingers where she had touched it.

“Mommy,” she said, “I'm going on a little walk.”

“Where?” Pearl asked. “You want Yehudis to come with you?”

“No, please. I won't go far.”

She stood on the boardwalk and looked out. The sky was the color of day-old snow. The sea was camouflage green. A Styrofoam cup was embedded in the gray sand; beside it, a dirty sneaker. Shreds of torn paper napkin swirled in the breeze like frantic white birds. A heavy young jogger plodded reluctantly along the waterline in a maroon sweatshirt, his gaze on the ground, hands in his pockets.

As if a sash blind had been snapped up angrily to wake a lazy sleeper, light washed over the sea, turning it silver-white. The jogger's hoodie went luminous red, the sand a strip of yellow. Lured by the light, Masha walked down the metal steps to the beach, numbly placing one foot in front of the other, staring into the blinding water. The sand dragged at her boots. She felt suspended above her thoughts, incapable of anything but walking toward the sea. Her mind was as empty as a shiny metal bowl, containing only what was around it, in warped reflection: the blinding sea, the pale sand, the jogger's daub of red bobbing along, the sky pale blue between torn gray clouds. This
light was an accident of beauty in an ugly afternoon. It felt like she had walked a long, long way to see this.

She found Derbhan Nevsky's worn business card stowed in the zipper pocket of her purse and called him. He was at Bridget's, ten minutes away. He knew just where she was. He would be right there. Fast as he could. She sat on the cool sand and waited. Once she saw him standing on the boardwalk, hopping up and down like an electrified scarecrow, she texted her mother:
I love you, Mommy. Don't look for me. Will call soon. Masha
. Then she pried off the back of the phone, took out the SIM card, and flicked it into the sea.

L
eslie's stepson, Bud, was naturally deadpan, electively Buddhist, possibly a little depressed. Even as a child, he had always been somber. By the time he was ten, he was sorting Leslie's mail into piles: bills, junk, and personal. On this particular morning, he emerged from the basement carrying his baby girl, Chloe, on one skinny hip. Leslie looked up from his cereal.

“And there she is …,” said Leslie, opening his heavy arms. Bud handed Leslie the baby and watched with his serious face as she bobbed up and down on his stepfather's wide knee.

“She looks so much smaller on your lap,” he observed, untying the plastic cover of a loaf of toast bread.

“Everything's relative,” said Leslie. “Jenny still asleep?”

“No, she's just lying there staring at the ceiling,” said Bud. “She had a rough night.”

“You look okay, though,” said Leslie, addressing the baby, who was sucking on her fist.

“Yeah, she's great. Babies are destructive forces,” said Bud, grabbing his toast as it sprang from the toaster.

“Is she hungry?”

“She just ate,” said Bud, ripping into the toast with his teeth and
slurping a mouthful of coffee. “I gotta get to work. Can you hang on to her for ten minutes till Jenny gets up here?”

“Sure,” said Leslie. “Where's the job?”

“In Quogue. The same guy as last year, remember the addition to the pool house? He's adding to that.”

“An addition to the addition. Always a sound idea,” said Leslie.

“I think he just likes people around. He's an old guy.” Bud fastened his tool belt around his narrow hips, kissed his baby daughter on the head, and walked out the door.

Deirdre came in wearing a fluffy peach robe. “How long has she been up?” she asked, taking the baby.

“Bud just left. Jenny had a bad night.”

“Okay,” said Deirdre, rocking the baby and sniffing the top of her head. “We'll watch you, won't we, Chloe?”

Bud and his nineteen-year-old wife, Jenny, had moved in with Leslie and Deirdre weeks before the baby was born. They just needed a place to start out, Bud said. Leslie helped Bud fix up a little efficiency apartment in the basement for the newlyweds. It had everything they needed, minus light—but they spent most of their time upstairs with Leslie and Deirdre anyway, and out at the pool when the weather was fine. It was lovely having the baby around. But Jenny believed in large families. What's more, she and Bud both had a certain passive openness about them that, Leslie surmised, might not lend itself to the regular practice of birth control. He imagined a baseball-team-sized passel of Buddhist grandkids bubbling out of that basement in the next few years. What he couldn't quite picture was Bud supporting them all.

An hour later, Leslie was walking a slack, unconscious Chloe around on his shoulder while he talked to Vera on the phone. Little mother Jenny appeared, puffy-eyed, her hair in fraying braids, reached up and peeled her sleeping daughter from Leslie's massive shoulder. The baby's body kept a crescent shape, as though she'd been molded to Leslie's arm, her legs folded up tight. Jenny laid her down gently in a little bassinet by the couch. Unfurling, eyes shut, the baby stretched,
grunting and rubbing her nose. She missed Leslie's warmth. Leslie watched as Jenny wiggled a pacifier against the baby's lips, slipped it into the tiny mouth. His granddaughter fell asleep again, her mouth working the rubber, limbs relaxing. He poured Jenny a cup of coffee and handed it to her, the phone still clamped to his ear.

“And finally, a guy just called about a big job,” Vera announced. Her voice was nasal, no-nonsense, reassuringly abrupt. Leslie adored that voice. “Ross Coe. He has a boat he wants you to look at.” Ross Coe. It was that weirdo shipping guy in East Hampton—the one with the rubber face.

“Oh, boy,” said Leslie. “What kind of boat?”

“He says it's vintage, but he won't elaborate. ‘A potential masterpiece' were his exact words.”

“That guy is an unappealing character.”

“It sounds like money, though,” said Vera. “Vintage masterpieces take time. Remember what I said about the Very Rich.”

“I better go out there,” said Leslie. “Where is the boat?”

“He's had it towed down from Rhode Island. It hasn't been in the water for years.”

“Hull's gonna be cracked.”

“All the more work for you,” said Vera cheerfully. “Around two would be ideal, he said.”

Leslie sighed. “Today?”

“He said you've been out there before.”

“Yeah, I know where it is,” said Leslie glumly.

At the appointed hour, Leslie drove his truck over to the Coe house to have a look at that mystery yacht. He crept along the circular drive, gravel crackling beneath his tires, and parked in front of the gargantuan dwelling, which was far bigger than he had realized when he'd picked up Don and Libby on the night of the Green Fairy. It was an old-fashioned, shingled mansion, probably built in the 1920s, with quaint light green shutters pinned back against the brown shingles. Immaculately pruned roses were on parade all along the front of
the house. Ross Coe himself was walking toward Leslie's truck before he'd even turned the engine off, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts, pink polo shirt with the collar flipped up, and loafers. His wavy hair was freshly brushed, and his reconstructed face, shocking at any time of day, wore the pouty smile of a socialite. Leslie realized as he stepped down from the truck that Coe had a woman's face. That's what it was: he was a youngish man, with the face of an older woman who had had a lot of plastic surgery. Leslie wanted to turn around and get right back in his truck, but instead he leaned down, put out his broad hand, and shook Coe's small, soft paw, noticing as he did so that Coe was wearing a smear of gloss on his swollen lips.

“Where's the boat?” Leslie asked, barely able to contain his disgust.

“Just around back, in the big garage,” said Coe. “I can't tell you how glad I am to find you.”

“How long has it been out of the water?” Leslie asked.

“Oh, I'd say three, four years,” said Coe. “The guy who was going to restore her had a fatal heart attack, and the family just left her rotting in the barn.”

He led Leslie around the house, following a strand of the driveway, until they reached a large garage, shingled to match the house. In the background, Leslie made out a long pool and a Palladian-style stone structure, with several columns and a domed roof. Coe noticed him looking.

“That's the nymphaeum,” said Coe. “A folly of my mother's. She was always building Greek doodads. She was Greek. I'll show you around later,” he offered, tugging at the sliding garage door, which rolled up with a clatter. There, gleaming inside, was a large wooden motor yacht. Its black hull glowed dull in the dark of the garage. It was a broken-down beauty. Leslie's stomach lurched at the sight of her.

“A Futura,” Leslie said. “I've never seen one with a black hull.”

“It's the only one they made,” answered Coe, stroking the flank of the boat proudly. “It was custom-built for the son of a Chris-Craft
dealer. Stayed in the family all this time. But it's been neglected for years. It's a wreck, in fact, wouldn't you say so, Mr. Senzatimore?”

Leslie ignored the question and walked around the boat. The hull was cracked, as predicted. The teak decks were buckled in places.

“You'll have to tow her outside for me to get a real idea of what we're up against,” said Leslie.

“But she's a beauty, isn't she?” asked Coe.

“The Futura Sports Express is a great boat,” said Leslie. “They'll last forever, if you take care of them.”

“And I intend to! I want to invest in this boat. I want her to be perfect,” said Coe, clasping his hands together, his Carol Channing face beaming up at the hulking craft. “Boats are in my blood, Mr. Senzatimore. Nothing gets me more thrilled than a beautiful boat that looks like a broken-down old woman. It's just so thrilling, isn't it, to bring a boat back to life?”

“Yes, it is,” said Leslie. This restoration could end up costing hundreds of man-hours. He might even be able to send Stevie to that private elementary school for the deaf if he took this on. On the other hand, he would be working for Ross Coe. And that gave him a very uneasy feeling.

“Come have something to drink while I get the boat pulled out for you.”

“I can come back tomorrow,” said Leslie.

“If you have time I would love you to look at it today. To give me a sense of what it would be.”

“I can't give you a full estimate today.”

“That's all right. Take as long as you need. I would rather the boat not leave the premises, though,” said Coe slyly.

“Not leave the premises?”

“No. I would like you to do the work here.”

“I can't do that,” said Leslie. “I don't work alone. And … my whole shop is set up for boat repair.”

“I have the space. You will have every piece of equipment you
could possibly need. Everything. I will pay for every scrap of an hour you spend setting things up here.”

“I have to run my business,” said Leslie.

“It's just …,” said Coe, looking up at the sky, as if for support, “I want the work to be done here. In my presence. I want to … see it transformed—with my own eyes. That's why I'm spending the money.”

Leslie sighed. This man was repulsive. Taking this job was a commitment to more or less living with him for up to a year. Yet—he couldn't turn it down.

“If you have it towed outside, I'll have a look at it, and then we can talk about whether it's possible to do here,” said Leslie, looking at his shoes as they followed Coe's size fives around the side of the house and up the steps to the wraparound porch. A dark-haired man in khakis and a blue polo shirt was standing at the ready with a tray of glasses and a silver pitcher. The smell of roses was dense in the back of the house. Leslie sat down in a wicker chair. It creaked, and he rose swiftly, worried it would collapse under him.

“You're all right,” said Coe.

The khakied man unobtrusively poured out lemonade. Leslie looked up at him.

“Thanks,” he said. The butler smiled in a self-erasing way. Leslie leaned back in the uncomfortable chair, took a reluctant sip, and glared down the length of the shimmering blue-bottomed pool. Three figures sat at the other end, in the nymphaeum. One of them was gesturing emphatically. He popped out of his seat, waving his arms around and pacing back and forth.

“That's Derbhan Nevsky,” said Ross Coe. “You met him a few weeks ago, when you came by.”

Leslie nodded. He didn't remember the name. Once Nevsky rose and started walking toward them, though, he recognized him. He was still talking, flanked by two very young women. One of them had a fine spray of white-blond hair, and loped along in a pair of tiny
shorts, her giraffe legs unfolding and straightening with each step. The other was wearing a dress to her ankles. She had long black hair. In the rippling heat, Leslie had the sense that she was shimmering, immaterial, like a spirit. Alarm gathered in him as the young woman approached. She was looking ahead, listening to Nevsky intently. By the time she had reached the porch, Leslie was actually frightened. He had no idea why.

“Leslie Senzatimore,” Ross Coe said, “you've met Derbhan Nevsky. And these are my guests, Shelley Douglas and Masha …”

“White,” said Nevsky. Masha looked over at him. It was the first time she had heard her new name spoken out loud. Masha White. Masha White. She looked over at the big man holding a glass of lemonade between his fingers. He was mountainous. His bleached-out eyes looked up at her, squinting against the sun. When she approached him, he was doused in her shadow. He stood up, rising into the light like a swimmer emerging from a dark pond. She looked up at him and put out her hand, as Nevsky had told her to. The big hand felt rough. It was the first time she had shaken a strange man's hand. The feeling of closeness was surprisingly pleasant. She left her hand in Leslie's for a moment, a second too long.

“Good job,” whispered Nevsky. She let her hand fall from Leslie's grip. He sat down, her shadow traveling up his body again.

“So, girls, what's the plan for today?” asked Coe, rubbing his palms together with relish.

“We have elocution lessons for Miss White, and a trainer coming for the two of them,” said Nevsky. “Then a little lie-down. And I have to get them to Bridget's class.”

“Surinder will drive you,” said Coe. “Will we have a late supper afterwards?”

“Don't worry about that,” said Nevsky. Then, seeing Coe's crestfallen expression: “I'll send the girls straight back. I'm hoping to have a dinner date,” said Nevsky.

“Intrigue!” said Coe, pursing his lips.

Masha and Shelley followed Nevsky into a big Victorian house under renovation, just down the street from the Patchogue Boat Club. Coe happened to be turning the house into apartments, Nevsky explained. The girls would be staying in the first finished unit. They walked past several workers carrying boards and hammers, up the circular staircase, down a hall, and into the rent-free apartment. The white room was glazed with light, carved up with brilliant rectangles of sunshine, and smelled of fresh paint. A mod red couch and two black chairs cut streamlined shapes out of the back wall.

“This place is spanking new!” cried Nevsky. “No one has lived in this apartment. You're the only tenants in the building so far.”

“Isn't the furniture great?” exclaimed Shelley.

“Courtesy of Helga Coe. We'll get you curtains,” said Nevsky, trotting past the girls and peeking into the bedroom, then popping his head back out. “Pretty nice, eh?”

“Yeah,” said Masha, walking past him into the spacious bedroom and peeking into the bathroom, which had one bare window with a view of the marina down the street, boats gleaming in the sun.