The Beach Club (42 page)

This year when Cal West walked into the lobby, he was as calm and unassuming as ever. He brought one plain black suitcase with a matching garment bag. He wore a maroon argyle sweater vest and a tweed jacket.

“Therese,” Cal said. “Hello.” He shook her hand. Always, with Cal, there was a warm handshake when he arrived and when he left. No more, no less.

“Hello, Cal,” Therese said. “Welcome home.”

Cal nodded; he took everything seriously. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to be home.”

“How was your year?” Therese asked.

“Fine, just fine.”

Just fine: The typical Cal West answer. But this year Therese wanted to know more. Surely there was something noisy, confusing, or messy in his life.

“How’s work?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said.

“What do you do again?” she asked. “You work for a university, but what do you
do
?”

“I work in the provost’s office,” he said. “I process complaints.”

“Really?” Therese said. “What kind of complaints?”

“Professors complain about funding, and students complain about professors.”

“Do you have a lot of student contact?” Therese asked.

“A little bit,” Cal said. He shifted his weight; he was still holding both pieces of luggage. To put them down might anchor him permanently in this conversation with Therese—something he clearly didn’t want. “I process written complaints only.” He laughed. “My God, if I accepted verbal complaints, my job…well, it would be chaos.”

Therese smiled at his sweater vest. “Any special women in your life, Cal?”

“No.” The answer was taut and clipped. He nodded toward the front desk. “I think I’ll check in now.”

Cal moved for the front desk as though it were home base, a place where he’d be safe. Therese puttered around her plants, checking the leaves for waxiness, checking the soil for moisture. She looked at Cal West’s back as he stood at the desk. What would it be like to be married to Cal West? To have life unfold evenly, without stumbling blocks, without unpleasant surprises like having a baby die inside you or waking up and finding your teenage daughter has disappeared? Therese would never know. She chose Nantucket, and the hotel, where things were always changing; she chose Bill. Bill, who climbed up on a widow’s walk during the worst storm in forty years out of devotion to their daughter.

Before Cal headed down the hall and outside to his room, Therese called to him. “Cal!”

Cal turned around. The expression on his face was both fearful and annoyed.

“Let me walk you to your room,” she said.

He stood, unmoving, until she was alongside him. She thought crazily, cruelly, of following Cal into his room and trying to seduce him. The idea of it was so completely out of the question that Therese laughed to keep from hating herself. She liked Cal West; what was her problem? Why did she have the urge to shake him up?

“You know,” she said as they moved toward the back door of the lobby, “I have a complaint to file. Or maybe it’s my daughter who’s filed the complaint. She’s run away.”

“Really?” Cal said. “Run away?”

“She ran away to Brazil,” Therese said. “After a very handsome boy.” They stepped out onto the boardwalk. Cal West always rented room 20, which was only one room away from the lobby. As soon as they stepped outside, they were at his deck.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cal said.

“Never mind,” Therese said. Cal gripped his key tightly in his right hand; no doubt he wanted her to be on her merry way so that he could enjoy the hotel. “No, not never mind. I’m curious, Cal. I’m curious to know what you think about it. You work with young people. What do you think about an eighteen-year-old running away?”

“We don’t get many kids running away from college,” Cal said. “Especially not Ohio State. The kids love it. It’s paradise for them.”

“So you’re saying no one runs away.”

“No one I know of.” He pointed his key at the door of his room. “But I process complaints about grades and things. Bad food in the dining hall. Sorry I can’t help.”

“Okay. Look at it this way. What would you do if your daughter—your only child—ran away to another country for some boy?”

Cal licked his lips nervously and stared at his feet. She was torturing him by asking him such a question, by making him imagine such a thing could happen to him.

“I… I don’t have any children. I really don’t know what I would do.”

“What if you did have children?” Therese asked.

“Well, then, I’d be quite a different person.”

“Cal,” Therese said—her voice was growing belligerent, she could hear it. She was verbally abusing her favorite guest, her fellow clean freak—but she yearned for an answer. “What do you think I should do?”

“I don’t know, Therese. You’re asking me a question that’s impossible to answer.”

Therese touched his shoulder. “You know, Cal,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I could be you for a few days.”

He nodded. “I feel the same way about you.”

“You do?” Therese said.

“Of course,” Cal said. He unlocked the door to room 20 and somehow managed to get himself and his bags inside and turn around so that he stood on the other side of the door, as though he were bidding her good-bye. “You took the risk.”

“The risk?”

“The greatest risk there is. The risk of parenthood. You’re a mother. And who am I? I’m a nobody.”

“You’re not a nobody, Cal. You’re a man with a peaceful life.”

He smiled wanly and closed the door, leaving Therese standing on the steps of his deck, thinking that maybe this was why Cal West was her favorite guest—not because he was the cleanest guest or the quietest, or even the last guest but because something about his calm, safe life made her feel loud and daring and brave. Like a mother.

Vance cleaned his house, literally and figuratively. He’d lived all summer in a rental cottage behind a giant house owned by Frank Purdue’s chief financial officer. The house was called the Chicken and Vance’s cottage was called the Egg. This fact alone had been enough to keep Vance from telling people where he lived. He didn’t want to hear jokes about being an egghead or laying an egg or egg on his face, or which came first, the chicken or the egg—or any other stupid reference that people like Mack and Jem might come up with. Love had been to the cottage, but only a few times, and not for very long. It wasn’t a good place to bring women. Vance didn’t straighten often and so the cottage collected a jumble of CDs and books and tools.

That would all change now that Vance was going to be a father. Finally, after twelve years, Vance had two things that Mack didn’t—a woman and a child-on-the-way. Finally, after twelve years, Vance was released from whatever evil spell Mack cast on him. He was set free with this new life, as a lover and a father.

Carefully, Vance went through everything in his cottage. He packed his books neatly in boxes, he folded his clean clothes and made a pile for laundry. He threw away his poster of Vanessa Williams, his car magazines, he threw away beer bottles and wrappers from frozen burritos. In two weeks, he and Love were moving into the house on Sunset Hill—it was a chance to start over with everything clean and in order.

It was while going through his kitchen cabinets—tossing out any dishes that had chips or hairline cracks—that Vance found Mr. Beebe’s gun. The night after Vance pulled the gun on Mack, he brought it home and hid it inside a ceramic pitcher. As Vance lowered the pitcher from the shelf, he heard a rattling and instantly remembered the gun, a nickel-plated .38. Vance held it in his palm, marveling at himself. How had he ever summoned the guts to point this at someone? It was disgusting, and criminal, and Vance felt ashamed, stereotypical: a black guy with a gun. He’d held the gun to Mack’s head, he poked it into his chest. What made Vance feel even worse was that Love had no idea he’d kept the gun; she thought he sent it back to that creep, Mr. Beebe.

Vance had to get rid of the gun.

It wasn’t the kind of thing he could throw away in a plastic garbage bag with the flawed dishes. What if someone found it and traced the dishes back to him? No, it couldn’t simply be
thrown away
; he had to dispose of it.

Vance wrapped the gun in a pair of his ratty old underwear and climbed into his Datsun. He drove to the beach known as Fat Ladies’ Beach, which could only be reached by unpaved roads. Vance pulled up to the edge of the beach (the only problem with his Datsun was that he couldn’t drive it in the sand). He picked up his underwear and got out of the car.

It was gray and foggy, and gray waves smacked the beach. Vance trudged through the sand to the water’s edge. He looked to the left and the right to be sure no one was surf casting or digging for clams. When he was sure that he was all alone, he wiped the gun with his underwear to remove fingerprints and chucked the gun out into the water. He stuffed his dingy underwear into his jacket pocket and sat on the hood of his car for a minute to make sure the gun didn’t wash up on shore.

October was a great month. He could sit on this strip of beach all day and not see another soul. Vance liked fog, he liked the cool, damp, drizzly weather, especially now that he had Love. This winter, he would bring her to see the ocean every day.

Vance climbed into his car and backed up. He turned to look at the water one last time—and he saw something shiny wash up on the beach. Vance squinted; he felt the beginnings of heartburn and he reached into the console for a Rolaid. Then he pulled his brake and ran out onto the beach. The gun lay there, shiny and wet.

He picked up the gun, wrapped it in his underwear, and ran to his car. He drove away from Fat Ladies’ Beach, wondering what to do.

He drove to the dump.

The dump was crowded with end-of-the-season dumpers with their end-of-the-season rubbish. People hauled bloated, shiny black bags of trash, milk crates of bottles and cans, and decrepit furniture to the dumpsters and recycling center. The gun wrapped in underwear lay on the passenger seat, an unwanted passenger. And now Vance wished he’d brought a bag of some kind to hide the gun instead of his underwear. A pair of white BVD’s, with the telltale striped waistband. More gray than white.

Vance studied his choices for the gun. He could either toss it into a dumpster the size of a mobile home meant for household trash, or he could recycle the gun under metals. Vance decided immediately against household trash. A gun didn’t qualify.

He recycled the gun.

Or tried to. Shoving the swaddled gun under his arm, he walked, head down, for the recycling shoot.

“Vance?”

Vance raised his eyes. Pale orange hair. The white streak. Like a skunk, Vance always thought.

“Hi, Therese.”

She seemed upset, like maybe she’d been crying. Since Cecily had left, she cried a lot.

“I came to throw away some of Lacey’s old things,” she said. “Things nobody wanted.”

“That’s too bad,” Vance said.

“A life lived fully and so much ends up here at the dump.” Therese’s billowing skirt was too exotic for the dump. For the disposal of life rubbish.

“Yeah,” Vance said. “Well, see you.”

But Therese had eyes like no one else. Dirt-seeking eyes.

She tugged at the crotch of the underwear that was sticking out from under his arm.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Old underwear.”

“You came to throw away a pair of old underwear?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. “You men are so funny. I’ll tell you what. Give your underwear to me. I’ll use them as rags. That’s what I do with Bill’s underwear.”

Vance tightened his crab claw on the gun. “Sorry. No can do.”

Therese tugged at the crotch of his underwear. “Come on.”

“Nope.” Vance backed up until he felt the Datsun’s hood against his legs. He opened the door and slid in, the gun pinched against him. Therese regarded him in a way he was used to—weirdo, oddity, freak. Little did she know he was trying to mend his ways.

Vance drove into town and parked at Steamship Wharf. The noon boat was barely visible on the horizon. The steamship workers took their lunch break. Vance walked behind the ticket office where a couple of benches overlooked the harbor, for tourists with enough ingenuity to find them. Some scallopers rigged their boats, but for the most part, the wharf and harbor were deserted. Vance stood on the very edge of the wharf and gazed down into the water. It looked deep, and still. Vance pulled out the underwear, wiped the gun and dropped it into the water. It made a satisfying plunk and disappeared.

Vance steadied his breathing. No cop approached to write him a ticket for littering, the steamship wasn’t cruising into its slip holding seven hundred eyewitnesses to what he’d done. It was October, Vance was the father of a living being, and he was getting his house in order.

He waited a few minutes more to make certain the damn gun didn’t come bobbing to the surface, and when he was confident the gun was gone forever, he walked back to his car.

Steamship Wharf: the place where twelve years before, he’d stepped off the boat thirty seconds behind Mack, thirty seconds too late. He’d spent a fair amount of time over those years bemoaning this fact. But now, he realized, it didn’t matter. He was going to be a father. A father! Vance climbed into his car and drove off the wharf, and it was as close to a fresh start as he’d ever hoped to have.

During her last week on the island, Maribel ran. That was how she wanted to say good-bye—by running, fast and long. It was true autumn now, high autumn, the best season on Nantucket. Colors were vibrant—the dark reds of the bayberry in the moors, the red-orange of flaming bush, the ambers of the dune grass. Some days she was glad to be leaving Nantucket when it was most beautiful; she could always remember it like this. Other days she asked herself,
How can I possibly go?

Maribel ran through the streets of town. Not only Main and Federal and Centre and the streets the tourists knew, but the narrow, twisting back streets as well—Fair and School and Darling and Farmer and Pine, South Mill, Angola. She studied the antique homes, the postage-stamp gardens and friendship stairs, the screened-in porches and widow’s walks and transom windows. She loved the names of the houses—Fair Isle, Left Bank, A Separate Peace, Captain’s Daughter, Beach Plum, Aloft, Nana-tucket, Molly’s Folly, Hunky Dory, Independence Day, Life Savour.
Good-bye
.