The Beach House (13 page)

Jordana has never wanted anything more out of life. Certainly she never thought she wanted a man who lives in a small, shabby prewar on the Upper West Side, who rides a bike to work, who hasn’t bought an item of new clothing in years—the T-shirts he throws on when he’s not at work all have holes in them and fraying edges, they are faded and torn from years of washing.

But, to Jordana, there is something so fresh about him, so different from Jackson. Jackson who, like her, grew up with nothing, is constantly insecure about how he will be judged, and he needs the McMansion, the Mercedes, the money to prove to everyone that he is as good as they are, that he belongs in the club.

Michael doesn’t seem to want to belong in any club, and he is unlike anyone Jordana has ever met. He is a man who seems utterly comfortable in his skin, who doesn’t feel the need to prove himself to anyone, and when she is with him she feels a security that is new.

Like all women, Jordana is something of a chameleon, able to adapt to whoever her man wants her to be. When Jackson announced, all those years ago, that he liked blondes, she went straight out and got a full head of golden highlights. Now that Michael has admitted his penchant for the natural look, Jordana has started wearing less makeup, flatter shoes, trying to be the perfect woman for him.

But even with less makeup, flatter shoes, Jordana is still quite unlike anyone Michael has been involved with in the past, and as Leo and Wendy sit down at the table to have dinner with their old friend and his new squeeze, shaking hands with Jordana and saying how nice it is to meet her, they exchange a furtive look of quiet alarm.

Carrie had thought that winning Jess over would be easy, but what she is beginning to understand is that you don’t win your stepchildren, or your pseudo-stepchildren, or your boyfriend’s children, over once. You win them over every day. Sometimes every hour. And sometimes every minute.

There is a part of her that understands Jess. She may not have been the product of a divorce, but she had been an unhappy child, had gone through the pre-pubescent awkwardness, had longed to be thin and pretty when all around her were discovering boys and she was always left at home.

But she finds Jess’ s tantrums so jarring. Her parents were not confrontational—unhappiness was expressed through silence, moods, depression, not through shouting and crying—and Carrie is helpless in the face of Jess weeping and wailing, shrieking, as she does, that Carrie has ruined her life, that she hates her.

Carrie tries to ignore it, and there are times, particularly when Richard isn’t around and it is just her and Jess, when Jess is gorgeous—sweet and chatty and clever—and Carrie relaxes, lets down her guard, thinks that they are finally friends, that it will all be fine.

Until Richard reappears and Jess shoves Carrie out of the way, climbs onto her father’s lap, throws a tantrum to get his attention, and Carrie feels, once again, superfluous.

“So what do you think?” Michael and Leo are walking behind the two girls, who are attempting to bond, post-dinner, over window-shopping down Madison Avenue, even though Wendy, a yoga instructor and doula, couldn’t be less interested in looking at designer shoes for several hundred dollars.

Leo sighs, then stops and looks at Michael. “Do you want me to be honest with you?”

Michael’s heart plummets. Whatever it is Leo’s going to say, it’s not going to be what he wants to hear, but he isn’t surprised. “Of course. You always are.”

“I think you’re playing with fire. Not only because she’s your boss, and she’s married, which, as far as I’m concerned, is nothing short of sheer insanity, but because she’s not for you.”

“You barely know her,” Michael says miserably. “I get what you’re saying about her being married and the work and stuff, those are all the issues I’m struggling with myself, but she’s not who you think.”

“Look, she’s great. I’m sure she’s a great girl, and for someone else she’s perfect. But not you,” Leo says. “I believe that
she
believes it when she says she doesn’t want the lifestyle anymore, she doesn’t want the jewelry and the designer clothes. I believe
she
believes it when she says she would be happy living in a farm in the country with you. But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe you’re both having an extraordinary relationship that is incredibly intense and electric, and unsustainable. One or the other of you is going to wake up very soon and realize this is not real.”

“What if we don’t?”

“I don’t know.” Leo shakes his head. “But, Michael, look at her.” They watch Jordana pointing out a floor-length leather coat, trimmed with mink.

“I love that one,” they hear her say. “I’ll have to come in tomorrow.”

Leo turns to Michael and raises an eyebrow. “You really think a girl like that is right for a guy like you?”

“I don’t know,” Michael says. “I still think she’s not what she appears. There’s more to her than meets the eye.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second,” Leo says. “But you asked me to be honest, and I have been. I just hope that neither of you gets hurt, that’s all. It’s a dangerous game you’re playing. Just be careful.”

“I will,” Michael says, and when they reach the corner, all four say their good-byes, and Michael and Jordana jump into the first yellow cab they see.

“They hate me,” Jordana says, as she settles into the backseat of the cab, on their way back to her apartment.

“They don’t hate you,” Michael says, wondering how honest he should be.

“So what did Leo say?” She wants his friends’ approval so badly, but she knows she didn’t get it. How could she have gotten their approval when she had nothing in common with them, nothing to talk about, little to contribute when the conversation moved to politics and Buddhism.

“He said he thought we came from very different worlds,” Michael says carefully.

“And? What does that mean?”

“I think he struggled with seeing us together.” Michael sighs. “I struggle with that myself.”

“We can be together. It’s not about meshing your world and my world,” Jordana says urgently. “It’s about creating a new world for the two of us, and that’s something we can do. Something we
will
do.” She smiles and snuggles into his shoulder. “Just you and me,” she says. “Living somewhere else. Somewhere where we can start afresh.”

Jordana is convinced this is more than an affair and she is spending more and more time talking of the future, of the world they will create together. She is insistent that this must be more because that seems to be the only way she can justify it. If this were just an affair she would not be doing it . . . but this? Michael? This is true love. This is about soulmates.

Little does she realize that everyone who has an affair tries to justify it in the same way.

Today Richard is playing in a tennis match. He collected Jess last night and brought her back to the house. When Carrie came out of the kitchen where she had been cooking macaroni and cheese—Jess’s favorite—and said hello, Jess just looked at her, then shot her father an evil glare and ran upstairs to her bedroom without saying anything.

“Should I go up?” Carrie asked Richard, standing awkwardly in the hallway listening to the bedroom door slam as Jess threw herself on the bed, wailing like a four-year-old.

“No,” Richard said. “Let’s just leave her. She has to learn. You are part of my life now, and she’s going to have to get used to you being here.”

After a while, as the wailing grew louder, he looked worriedly up the stairs. “Jesus,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what to do about this. I think I should go up.”

“Don’t.” Carrie lay a hand on his arm. “I think she does this for your attention. You go up and she gets exactly what she wants. Leave her. Let her calm down by herself.”

“What if she can’t?”

“She’s thirteen years old,” Carrie said with a smile. “Of course she can.” But she wasn’t sure.

When no one went upstairs to check on her, Jess came stomping downstairs, collapsing on the sofa with her arms crossed, shooting evil squinty looks at Carrie, who tried to ignore her. Despite feeling almost crippled with anxiety, with wanting Richard to step in to stop this behavior, she acted as if everything were normal, and Richard eventually took Jess outside to talk to her.

Carrie couldn’t make out all the words, but weeping and wailing soon gave way to normal conversation, and when they both came back in Richard looked exhausted, but relieved.

“I’m sorry,” Jess said, coming back in, looking at Carrie with such sad eyes that Carrie flung her arms around her and gave her a huge hug.

“It’s okay,” Carrie said, stepping back to look in Jess’ s eyes. “I understand. How about tomorrow, while Dad’s playing tennis, you and I go shopping?”

“Really?” Jess’ s eyes opened wide with delight. Money was always tight at home now, and Mom never took her shopping anymore, she was too busy working or she didn’t have the money, and she never wanted to take Jess to the stores Jess wanted to shop at anyway, she wanted Jess to still dress like a little girl.

“I thought maybe we could go to Kool Klothes, or Claire’s. Have a girls’ day. What do you think?”

“I’d love to,” Jess said, so happy and so light that Carrie found it impossible to reconcile this delightful child with the screaming monster of a few minutes ago.

Maybe this is the beginning of a new leaf, she thinks. Maybe a girls’ day is just what they need.

“I can’t help it, you know,” Jess says to Carrie as they sit in the coffee shop, Jess with a large hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream,
and
a chocolate-glazed doughnut (her mother would
never
let her eat this much at the coffee shop—if she was with her mother she might get a bottle of vitamin water and a bagel, so this is much more fun). “I hate it when I scream like that but it feels like a volcano exploding inside me and like I haven’t got any choice but to let it out.”

“I understand.” Tears well up in Carrie’s eyes. She feels so grateful that this child is confiding in her, and she is moved by the pain and confusion she sees in Jess, the pain and confusion she remembers so well from her own adolescence. “I do. I think this must be incredibly hard for you.”

“And my mom doesn’t understand any of it,” Jess says bitterly, taking a bite of her doughnut. “She just shouts and screams and I hate living with her.”

Carrie smiles. “I was a bit like that with my mom at your age. Not the shouting and screaming, we didn’t shout in my house, but I didn’t like my mom for a long time either. Although as I got older I realized she was just doing the best she could.”

Bond, she is thinking. Bond, but don’t drop Daff in it, for Daff deserves nothing but support from Carrie, and how hard it must be to be a single mother of an angry teenage daughter.

“Are you and Dad going to get married?” Jess asks suddenly, catching Carrie off guard.

“I . . . don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s probably too early to be talking marriage, but we’re spending a lot of time together and I think right now we’re quite happy and don’t want to change anything.”

“But you’re kind of living together, aren’t you?”

“Well . . . I’m spending a lot of time at your dad’s place.”

“You’ve got stuff there now.” Jess looks straight at Carrie, who feels her shoulders tense, preparing herself for an onslaught. “First you just had a toothbrush but now you have clothes there. Have you moved in?”

Carrie laughs nervously. “No, I still have my own apartment.”

Jess gazes at her coolly. “I was thinking that I might move in with Daddy,” she says, waiting for Carrie’s reaction. “He misses me a lot and I’m his daughter. No one can look after him better than me.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Carrie says, in a falsely bright tone. “But I’m sure Mommy would be upset.”

“Upset?” Jess snorts with derision. “She’d be thrilled. I think she’s going to talk to him about it.”

Carrie keeps smiling, but her stomach is turning. I can just about cope with this every other weekend and one night during the week, she thinks. How would I possibly cope if this were all the time?

“Can we go to Kool Klothes now?” Jess says, standing up with a bright smile. “I can’t wait to show you this blue top I saw in there last week. It’s just like the one you have with the sequined flowers. We could be twins!” And linking her arm through Carrie’s, they walk out, Carrie floored once again by her mercurial behavior.

“Hi, darling.” Daff opens the front door and Jess pushes past her and marches upstairs with carrier bags full of clothes. “What do you have there?”

Jess ignores her and Daff turns to Richard, helpless. “Is she in a mood?”

“No,” he says, marveling again at how he and Daff can stand here and have these polite conversations as if they were strangers who barely know one another, as if he hasn’t seen her shave her bikini line in the bath, sit on the toilet for half an hour with a magazine, as if he doesn’t know what she looks like just at the moment of orgasm.

“Has she been okay this weekend?”

“She was great. A little rocky when she arrived, but I think these transitions are always hard. We went shopping.” He doesn’t mention Carrie, not yet. He doesn’t want to rub Daff’s nose in it, for he knows from Jess that Daff has no one, and he suspects she would not be ready to hear about Carrie yet.

Richard doesn’t know that Jess, in one of her rare moments of treating Daff like a human being, has told her all about Carrie. In one breath she will say she hates Carrie, hates her for stealing her father, that she never gets Daddy-daughter time anymore, and in the next she will say that Carrie took her for a manicure, or did something fun with her, or talk proudly about something that Carrie has done.

Her conflict is clear, and Daff is careful not to show her pain at hearing about Richard’s girlfriend. It is also clear that this girlfriend is different. Daff Googled her and found a picture of her from the local paper. She looks normal. Pretty. Nice. She looks like the sort of woman Daff could see Richard with.