Portion of the Sea (37 page)

“Off the record,” he answered. “Yes, I am.”

Marlena looked as if she were about to pull a shotgun out of her purse as her character had done in the movie. “I’m a Democrat,” she said, and then broke into laughter. “But that doesn’t matter. I’m not the one dating you, am I?”

I kissed him on the cheek and told him we girls had better get going. We didn’t have much time together, just a lunch. Marlena and I walked up Michigan Avenue until we reached the Lincoln Park area and then walked into a good Irish pub.

“The eye of the hurricane is probably over Sanibel,” she said, glancing at her watch. “That means it’s peaceful there now.”

We both knew that in about an hour onshore winds could bring the highest tides and likely do the most wind-related damage. There was nothing we could do but wait and hear the news after it happened. We tried talking of other things. She had recently found six gray hairs, and it bothered her, as did talk of a causeway going up that would link Sanibel
to the mainland.

“It’s only talk,” I reassured her. “It probably won’t happen.”

“I think I’ve heard you say that before.”

“What?”

“That it won’t happen. If I remember correctly, it was when I told you I didn’t get the role I wanted in that movie, and you told me, ‘Don’t worry, Marlena. That movie probably won’t even happen.’”

I rolled my eyes, knowing exactly what she was referring to. “So did you go see ‘Pillow Talk’?” I asked.

“Who hasn’t seen a movie that got nominated for a half-dozen Oscars?”

“What do I know?”

We laughed, and Marlena took a swig of her beer. “You think I could have done as well as Doris Day? Be honest.”

“Better,” I said. “I know she got nominated for her first Academy Award, but she overacted in my opinion. You could have done much better.”

“You think? You think Rock Hudson and I would have looked good together?”

“Great together.”

“Damn,” she said as the waitress set our fish platters down. “We probably would have.”

I took a few bites of my sandwich and then dared to ask what I had wanted to know the moment I gave Marlena the hello hug.

“That guy I used to like, you bumped into him on the dock?”

“Lydia,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “He’s hotter than Rock Hudson! And he was pleasant, too.”

“Anything else?” I had been starving for news of him, anything at all, but like an egret perched on the Sanibel Fishing Pier, I wanted my tidbits without looking too eager.

“Nope. I told you everything there was.”

“What do you think of Ethan? He’s an ambitious man,” I said. “His coverage is excellent. I could learn a thing or two from him.”

“If there’s anything to learn from a man,” she said, “I suppose.”

“You’re not one of those man-haters, are you, Marlena?”

“Of course not,” she said, batting her false eyelashes at me. “But I think men are for loving, not learning from. Do you love him?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m still gathering information,” I said coyly. “Not to change the subject, but did you talk with Josh for awhile?” I feared she might hear my stomach growling for more. “I hope he is doing well.”

“I only paid him attention because he’s darn good-looking, the best-looking thing I’ve laid eyes on. All man.”

I was glad when the waiter brought another beer so I had something to down before my curiosities poured out further. But I could see in her eyes that she had more scraps to toss my way.

“He was holding hands at first with a blonde,” she said, glancing at me as she drank.

“What else?” I insisted, wondering if that was why he stopped writing. He could have had the courtesy of telling me. Then, again, our letters weren’t the mushy sort. Neither of us described any relationship or feelings we had for each other or whether or not we were seeing anyone else. We only wrote about our lives, our philosophies, and our day-to-day thoughts. Pretty much we wrote about things that turn friends into really good friends, and I feel like I grew to love him on a deeper level through those letters, a level that couples don’t get to unless they’ve been separated by time and distance and keep on writing through it all. I wrote gooey stuff once in a letter, but then I held it over a candle flame and burned it to ashes!

“Nothing else to report,” Marlena declared.

But there had to be. She wasn’t looking at me straight on, but still from the sides of her eyes. I always knew sources had more to say when they looked at me like that. “It’s not nice to tease a bird,” I said. “What else?”

“I did ask him what he was doing, and he said he’s chartering by day and something about practicing his music at night.”

“Good for him,” I said. “Sounds like the life he had wanted for himself.”

“Write him, Lydia. Why don’t you write him?”

“Why would I write him a letter? He’s got a girlfriend.”

She gave me a suspicious look. “Yeah, but it looked more like that girl was hanging onto him. She was holding his hand, if you know what I mean. The way in which couples hold hands tells you everything. And it looked to me as if she liked him more than he liked her. Does that make sense?”

It did. I knew that to be the case with Ethan and me, only he had stronger feelings for me than I did for him.

“You think I should write a letter to Josh?”

“Absolutely. Your eyes tell me you’re still interested, and I think his eyes said the same.”

“Maybe, but it’s impossible,” I said, then stopping what I was about to say to correct myself when she rolled her eyes. “I mean, nothing is impossible, but right now, it would never work out between us. We can’t go on writing letters forever without ever seeing each other. I think that’s why our letters ended in the first place. He probably got bored or fed up with just writing. Besides, I only knew him a summer, you know. And now I care for Ethan and we’re in a relationship, a real one. So did Josh say or do anything else?”

“Yes, as I was getting into my car, about ready to close the door, he nonchalantly walked over and told me to tell you he found a Junonia shell on the beach. Is that supposed to mean anything to you?”

“Yeah, he’s rubbing it in my face that I couldn’t find one,” I said. “Or it’s another one of life’s reminders that anything is possible. I think I’ll write him.”

Marlena smiled as she reached into her bag and pulled out another set of pages. I should have known Ava was up to something I might relate to in my own life.

“Tell me this,” I said, taking them from her. “Did she do it? Did she commit a crime like she was talking about?”

“Oh, did she ever!”

But that was all Marlena would tell me, for it was up to me to find a quiet spot to spend with my friend Ava so she could tell me all about it in her own words.

Marlena and I finished lunch and then walked back to Michigan Avenue
where we shopped without buying and stopped for coffee twice before continuing on to the art museum. She wanted to look at beautiful art as a way of forgetting about the hurricane for an hour.

After that we parted. She left to meet up with her friend, the aspiring actor. And tomorrow morning, the two of them would drive back to Florida together. It sounded like a chaotic, poorly thought out plan to drive this far for just one night, but there was no convincing her otherwise. Her mind was elsewhere. It was on Sanibel, along with everything precious that she owned, and from what she claimed, bits of her soul lingered there. She had to get back, to assess the damage and to simply be there. And then she’d be flying off to London the following week to start filming on a new movie.

It was early evening when we parted, and I walked to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Chicago Avenue and sat down on a bench near the Chicago Water Tower. It was one of my favorite places to sit in the city, and I found it as relaxing as one finds sitting near a lighthouse. It, like many lighthouses, had survived through disasters.

I opened Ava’s journal and started to read, wondering whether it was going to be a journal entry from prison.

NEW YORK CITY
1905

Ava

As surely as God created the sun and the moon and put the stars up in the sky and the granules of sand on the beaches, so do I believe we have natural resources placed within us as abundant as the sea. But if we don’t believe and we don’t tap into those resources, they’ll lie dormant within. And our lives will never change
.

I was twenty-two years old, and it was the summer of 1898—two years after my mother’s death and one year after inheriting the responsibility for
those three despised girls—when I committed my crime. It wasn’t the sort of crime that sends anyone to Hell, I don’t think. I didn’t strangle anyone—nothing like that. But the crime I committed was a premeditated one. I had given it thought, knowing it would rescue me from my life in Kentucky, from the never-ending daily chores and tedious doldrums of life on the turkey farm and from having to look at the hurt, angry faces of those nasty flowers every morning and from turning myself into a heartless spinster.

What did I do? I married a wealthy man. There’s nothing wrong with marrying a wealthy man, but I married as a heartless woman, meaning I didn’t love him. And marrying a man, when your heart is elsewhere, is a criminal thing to do not only to the man, but also to yourself.

Leonardo DiPluma was an advertising executive from New York. I met him when he was traveling through the Midwest conducting demographic surveys for a mail-order catalog. He came through Kentucky to interview farmwomen on their likes and dislikes at about that time when I had been pondering how I might escape my life. I had been receiving the catalog in the mail for years, and when he walked up to me in town one day with a clipboard in hand and introduced himself, I told him I liked what I had been seeing in the advertisements.

“I know some ladies are put off by your catalog. Maybe because they can’t afford anything, but I hope you keep sending it. I love getting your catalog in the mail.”

“Tell me, what is it that you like so much?” he asked, removing the pencil from behind his ear and writing something down.

“The pictures remind me there’s a whole other world out there, so unlike my own.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I especially like the ads that depict women outside of the home in nondomestic settings.”

“Advertising is leaning more in that direction,” he said. “A few men I interviewed earlier criticized it, saying it’s the advertisements that are pushing women out into the world. I disagree. I believe the women are doing that on their own and the advertisements simply reflect it.”

“Yes, I agree with you,” I said, amazed at how interesting this man was.

“You’re an intelligent demographic,” he said, flipping to a new page on his clipboard.

“I am? Why thank you,” I said. “But what’s a demo … demographic?”

“We break people into categories, age, gender, income levels … things like that.”

“Well, I’m flattered to be one of your demographics and to be on your mailing list,” I said. “It’s about the only mail I get. I especially like the postcard with the handwriting. Are you the one who personally writes that to me?”

He laughed. “No. There’s no way. We send out eight thousand of those postcards. It just looks like someone personally took the time to handwrite it.” He smiled and added something to his notes.

“Now tell me,” he said. “How often do you purchase from our catalog?”

I was embarrassed. I wanted to lie. I didn’t want to tell him that I never had any funds to place an order, but it didn’t mean I didn’t like all the watches, jewelry, shoes, garments, wagons, stoves, furniture, china, musical instruments, baby carriages and glassware. Those items reminded me of all there was in the world and of potential. “Please, don’t be offended when I tell you this, but I’ve only ordered one item. Everything looks lovely and it’s all displayed so nicely, but …”

“What was that one item you bought?” he asked.

“A bicycle.”

He looked up from his clipboard and raised an eyebrow at me. “Really?”

“Yes, I love it. It was like a burst of freedom the day it arrived. I take off on it whenever I’m upset or frustrated or bored. I’m gone for hours, and no one knows or cares, I don’t know which.”

“I see.” His hair was dark and slick and his eyes blue, the color of deep water, and it was the first time I noticed them. I had been preoccupied with his clothes. He wore a brightly colored shirt with a hard, white tubular collar worn under a sporty sack-suit jacket, and he looked like he just stepped foot off the pages of his catalog. He was around thirty years old and good enough looking to be a model.

“With regard to clothes,” he continued. “If you were to purchase any clothes from our catalog in the near future, what would they be?”

“Sport clothing,” I said without hesitation. “A bicycling costume. I saw one where the wearer can buckle the skirt around her legs for complete coverage of the ankles. The same skirt could then be unbuckled for a more ladylike traditional look when not on the bicycle.”

His questions made me feel important, and when the sun that was above us when the survey started was now leaning to the side of us, I noticed Leonardo no longer looked to his clipboard for the next questions. I think he was making them up because he didn’t want our conversation to end.

“Ah, let me remember what else I’m supposed to ask,” he said when I started pacing back and forth impatiently. It wasn’t that I was bored, but nature was calling. “Do you plan to stay in Kentucky or are you interested in ever moving to New York?” he asked.

“I love Kentucky,” I said. “But I’d move just about anywhere. There’s nothing keeping me here.”

“Are you engaged?”

“Is that really a question on your survey?”

“It does apply,” he said. “It’s the awkward part of gathering demographic information.”

“Oh,” I said. “No, I don’t have time for men. I’m too busy chasing after the turkeys and these three wretched girls I care for and …”

“You don’t sound so happy.”

“Is there a demographic category for unhappy women?”