Nantucket (23 page)

But I don't want a cooling-off period, Andrew said silently. And by the way, Judy is wiser than she looks.

“So you want to go back to New York with Shiva this evening?” said the Governor.

“Not necessarily,” said Rosemary. “I might want to stay here tonight. I might want to have another chat with your daughter. I doubt her mother told her much about men. I know a bit about men – especially Shiva. And by the way, you might want to talk to Shiva.”

“You think he should ask for my blessing?” said the Governor. He made a joke of it, but the thought was there.

Rosemary didn't answer. “And then there's Janis,” she said.

“I have to get her off the island,” said the Governor. “If you and Judy both stay here tonight, there will be a seat for her on the plane to New York. I assume Andrew's billionaires have commitments – and Cynthia has to be on television early tomorrow morning. If Janis can go to New York this evening, she can catch the last shuttle to Boston from there and be in her office early tomorrow and not arouse anyone's curiosity.”

“I assume Sally who isn't Cathy will be taking the fourth seat,” said Rosemary.

“What's real Cathy – damn it, I've known her for thirty years – what's
Cathy
going to do?”

“Andrew hasn't told me.”

It seemed very odd of Rosemary to speak of him as if he weren't there. If she was sending Andrew a message, he didn't like it.

“Well, they can't very well stay together now that she's come out,” said George. “Dramatic, the way she did it, showing up with her hair cut off.”

“You and Lydia have stayed together for a pretty long time,” said Rosemary, “despite your different natures.”

“At least we're both heterosexual,” said George, “as Lydia was at pains to point out. Some people have suggested I am excessively heterosexual, in fact.” He seemed to be
annoyed
at Cathy for being a lesbian.

Rosemary waited for George to finish parking at the shop before she spoke again. “So why did Lydia put up with you?” she said.

“I assume she found me attractive – at least at the start. Some women do. Not my fault. Maybe she wanted to live in the White House some day. How should I know what goes on in women's heads?”

Neither of them seemed inclined to get out of the car yet. Andrew held his breath.

“Maybe she loved you,” said Rosemary. “If someone loves you, you
should
know what's going on in their heads. Or at least you should try.”

Again Andrew wondered if Rosemary was speaking to him, though she continued to pretend he wasn't there. But how was he supposed to know she was worried about Judy – or what Rosemary thought about Janis, for that matter? She'd encouraged Judy to sleep with Shiva in the first place. They were both nice girls, and he didn't want either of them to get hurt, but they weren't Rosemary's concern, he would have thought. They hadn't been up to now. What was Rosemary up to?

“Well, I can't do much about what I'm like at this point,” said George. “But what am I supposed to do about Judy?”

“You
are
concerned, aren't you? You just didn't want to admit it, even to yourself. Typical male behaviour.”

It occurred to Andrew that Rosemary was making it all up. She wasn't a conventional woman, and certainly not one who complained about stereotypical male behaviour. She was a goddess, and goddesses didn't complain about men. They turned them into frogs or struck them dead.

“So what would you have me do about Judy?” said George.

“Take an interest. Examine the situation. Talk to Shiva. Talk to her. There's clearly a powerful infatuation. What do your instincts tell you about the longer term?”

“My instincts all have to do with politics.”

“Meaning dreams and weaknesses,” said Rosemary.

The Governor stopped talking and stared at Rosemary for a long moment – not something many people could make George do. “My profession in a phrase,” he said. “My whole life, actually. I wish I'd met you when I was in college.”

George had always had a fund of pick-up lines.

“Then I would have met Andrew sooner,” she said – which was nice. “But I would have been eight,” she added.

“True,” said the Governor. “But go on about dreams. I like them better than weaknesses.”

“Dreams compress reality,” said Rosemary, “same as poems do. If you think about it, dreams are poems and poems are dreams: alternate manifestations of the same essence. That makes you a poet, George.”

“Now you sound like Shiva.”

“No, I sound like me. He learned how to do it from me, if the truth be known. He read engineering at Oxford.”

“Andrew talks that way too, sometimes,” said George. “Or he used to in college. He did very well at Harvard, you know. Sort of a waste, his ending up on Wall Street. But his family didn't have any money, so he thought he ought to make some.
Which he has. Which is commendable.”

Fuck you, George, Andrew said to himself.

“It is easier to imagine him as a professor than as a Wall Street titan,” said Rosemary. She paused. “Except for the courage.”

What was that supposed to mean?

The way they had now both embraced the convention of acting as though he wasn't there suggested there was something they were trying to tell him. Or Rosemary was trying to tell him.

Or maybe she was just filling space with sound. She hadn't expected him to come to the store at all, so she had to be improvising. She'd had a plan to have a private conversation, which Andrew had frustrated. So now they were playing an impromptu game of talking about Andrew and pretending he wasn't there. They were teasing him.

Andrew was playing along because...well, perhaps the best explanation is that he did so automatically. In twenty years as an investment banker he had trained himself to shut up and listen when a chief executive started to talk, to hear especially the messages the speaker wasn't conscious of sending. Not everyone in his profession had acquired that skill, which was remarkable. If you could learn what the man across from you thought or wanted, you could tailor your pitch accordingly and improve your chances of being hired.

Sitting there in silence, the message Andrew thought he heard being inadvertently conveyed by his companions was that their understanding with each other was superior to anything Andrew might think he had with Rosemary. George and Rosemary had sex appeal beyond what an ordinary mortal like Andrew could offer or withstand. The Governor quote had to get Janis off the island unquote, so he and
Rosemary could have Olympian sex.

Pretending to care about Judy was a
clever
improvisation. It was a natural subject for Rosemary to raise with the girl's father. And it was something that would be awkward to talk about in proximity to either Judy or Shiva, so it was a plausible reason for her to have wanted to be alone with George. But she couldn't really care about Judy.

“You believe in dreams,” said Rosemary. “Joe believes in reality. Shiva believes in his own divinity…”

“And Andrew?”

“He's been through a lot in the past few days,” said Rosemary. “He may not know where his head is. But if he does, I wish he'd tell me.”

“Andrew believes in work,” said the Governor. “Always has.”

“Worse than that,” said Rosemary. “He believes in virtue.”

“But look,” said George, having nearly exhausted his capacity for thinking about anyone else's problems. “It is quite unlikely I can deter Judy from going to India. She's a very determined person. You should have seen her in the study.”

“I have no intention of going into that study,” said Rosemary. “What happens there is men's business, even if your daughter and her friend choose to involve themselves.

“What you must do about your daughter,” Rosemary continued, “is to show concern. If she's unhappy a year from now, she'll like it that you paid attention. She'll talk to you. Look at poor Andrew. He doesn't seem to have paid sufficient attention to his daughters and now one of them hates him.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a phase,” said George.

“One other suggestion,” said Rosemary, abandoning the matter of Eleanor, “and then I'm done. Ask Janis's advice.” The
Governor didn't respond. Rosemary offered no explanation. “You stay here,” said Rosemary, opening the car door.

Maybe he and George were supposed to talk. George must have thought so because he kept clearing his throat.

“You realise what's going on here?” George asked him.

“Probably not,” said Andrew.

“She's feeling guilty about leaving her husband.”

“But her husband is having an affair with Judy – which she herself encouraged.”

“Maybe I should have said she's feeling
nervous
about leaving Shiva. She'll go back to New York with him,” said George. “You watch. And she's persuading herself that she's doing it out of concern for Judy.”

Andrew didn't like what George was saying, but George had always known more about women than he did. Or at least he went out with prettier girls. Frighteningly beautiful girls, in fact. Like Rosemary. Andrew didn't really believe George and Rosemary were plotting to jump into bed together, but
something
was going on.

They sat in silence. Andrew was reminded of the scene in
The Godfather
, where a thug in the back seat strangles the thug in the front seat with a piano wire. A hand grenade of anger exploded in Andrew's brain. “You know a lot about women, don't you George?”

“No. I've just slept with a lot of them.”

“But you think Rosemary is going back to Shiva?”

“I do, but it doesn't prove anything that I think that. And Andrew, I should have said this long ago: do not envy me my quote success with women. It is as much a burden as a blessing. I have never had a successful relationship that lasted more than a few months, and I don't expect I ever will. Once I possess a
woman, her fascination has a half-life. But these lovely girls keep presenting themselves, and when one does it makes me irrationally hopeful.”

“You get manic.”

“You think I don't know that? You think I don't feel stupid every time?

“You know, I married Lydia because she
didn't
fascinate me. I'd finally learned how to work hard – in law school – and I said to myself, what I needed, as a future politician, was not a dream marriage but a
workmanlike
marriage. That was the word I used. Be like those clever Indians. Marry someone
suitable
and don't ask for too much. My marriage to Lydia was an arranged marriage, only I arranged it myself.”

“It didn't work.”

“Obviously. I'm stupid about love even when I am not in love.”

More silence. Finally, Andrew asked the question he had been avoiding: “Are you planning to sleep with Rosemary?”

“Of course not,” said George. “I never plan anything. Sex is something that happens to me. But Andrew, in thirty years of friendship, have I ever stolen a girl from you?”

“No.”

Rosemary got into the car and George drove the three of them back in silence. Andrew had had a dream, the previous night, he now remembered. In parts of the dream he knew he was dreaming and in parts he thought he was awake. Like most dreams, it was confusing, though no doubt there was insight to be extracted from it, provided you had the energy. The fact that something made no sense didn't prove it wasn't valid. Dreams are a category of reality.

One of the ways Andrew had succeeded on Wall Street

– this was clear in the dream but also true – was by not taking himself too seriously. This was one of the reasons his technical boss so pissed him off. The man pretended. First of all he pretended to be smart and in charge and important. The fact that he was all these things only made it worse. Second, he pretended to know what was going on – or as black Americans in the movies sometimes put it, what was going down. Which he didn't. The reason Andrew hadn't grown up with a house on the Jersey shore, only an understanding that they could rent the same one every July, was that his father worked for the government, which of course didn't pay much. And about the only satisfactory thing about his relationship with his closed-up father was that when he was sixteen he had realised that his father did something secret and important, and he'd never asked his father any questions, and his father had appreciated it. If your father's an intelligence officer, not asking questions is a way of showing him respect.

When it occurred to Andrew, in his dream, that something of a spy nature was going down, he could only laugh at himself for thinking that. He was a middle-aged investment banker. His father had been dead for ten years. There could not be shadows in his garden.

But there were. Andrew knew a lot about shadows. Shadows in the market were what made deals possible.

In the dream, he'd been asleep, and had been awakened by an absence of sound. One of the reasons he knew he was not making up the threat was that when he whispered in Rosemary's ear that there were unexplained people in the house she put her hand on his mouth, very gently.

“Do you have a knife?” he'd asked her.

“I'm not Rosemary,” said Janis. “Remember?”

“Sorry,” he'd said.

She didn't go on about his forgetting who he was in bed with, which was just another example of her excellence. It would not have been a good moment for a lot of arm-waving. Also, he didn't think he'd spoken either name.

“There's a wine glass,” said Janis, “if that's helpful.”

“Umm,” said Andrew.

Improvise a weapon, Andrew's father had told him, in a rare unguarded moment. So he got out of bed, delicately broke off pieces of the rim of the glass, and went into the hall, where some people he didn't know had just finished dealing with an individual who probably wasn't a Unitarian.