The Divorce Party (24 page)

She turns and looks at Eve. “The storm’s over?”

“Yes,” Eve says, a little enthusiastically. A little too happy to offer some good news. “It’s dry as can be outside, almost like nothing ever happened.”

“Except I have a tree through my roof to prove that it did.”

“As if you need proof,” she says.

“As if I need the proof,” Gwyn says, and smiles. In spite of herself.

Eve smiles too, and it lights her face up, almost makes her pretty. Not quite, but almost. When Thomas starts retreating from Eve years from now—when she gives up on him and heads back to Big Sur—she smiles at him in this exact way, but he has a different thought than Gwyn has now, or at least, he names it to himself in a different way. He thinks,
just leave
. He will tell Gwyn this, and she will laugh because they are friends by then. And because she knows Thomas misses her, misses telling her things, and just misses her. He never abjectly notes that he made the greatest error of his life in leaving her, in how he left her, but after Eve is gone, Gwyn knows he will wonder if this is true. Even if it is too late for him to do anything about it. Even if it is too late to even admit, fully to himself, the cost of it. Who can ever admit that, Gwyn wonders? Probably someone who wouldn’t have left in the first place.

Only right now, Eve is still in front of her, present. More than present. And she is waiting for something more from Gwyn. This is her own fault, Gwyn thinks, for the shared smile—for the joke. It has probably made Eve think that things are about to go another way.

“I really do love him, Gwyn,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Tommy. I love him. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone, for whatever that is worth.”

Gwyn reaches for the doorknob, her hand starting to turn it. This could go one of two ways. At the end of the day, how big of a person is anyone really supposed to be? “Not a lot,” she says.

“Fair enough,” Eve says, and gives her a final, sad smile, and starts to walk away.

She starts to walk away, out toward her vine van to wait at home for Thomas’s call, to listen as he says he isn’t coming to her tonight, but he’s coming tomorrow. He’s coming soon.

Gwyn clears her throat, turns to look at Eve’s retreating back. “But thank you,” she says.

“For what?” she asks.

“For tonight,” she says. “For doing such a nice job. The food was great. Everyone thought so.”

Eve smiles. “Thank you for saying so, Gwyn.”

“Well, someone needed to,” Gwyn says. “And all that the rest of them will remember now is the tree.”

“And maybe the cake.”

She smiles. “And maybe the cake.”

Then she turns the doorknob, leaving Eve behind, and goes inside to her family, for tonight, while it is still hers.

Maggie

Maggie is sitting on the swing, by the edge of the cliff, smoking. She is smoking too many of Eve’s cigarettes. The last time she had a cigarette was during the U-Haul drive from California to New York. Before that, it had been a long time. But during that trip east, when they’d stop at roadside diners, they’d share triple-decker BLTs and sweet iced coffee and one cigarette each before getting back in the truck, trying to drive through the night.
We’re done with these things when we get to New York,
she remembers telling him. Now she is having several and not thinking about it, except to decide whether she is having another. She is deciding to make the next one her last, and is looking out at the ocean, and trying not to think about anything else too much, except for how long she has been out here, which seems long. Too long, already. She should be inside, helping to do something.

She reaches into her pocket to light the final cigarette, and drops her lighter beneath the swing’s seat. She leans down to pick it up, and something underneath the swing catches her eye—writing engraved on the swing’s underside. On a metal plate screwed into the swing’s underside. It is hard to make the words out in the darkness, but she flicks the lighter open and tries.

She thinks it is a poem, at first, but then she realizes it is a song. The lyrics to a beautiful song, a song she recognizes. She runs her fingers along one of the stanzas:

And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I ever felt the pain.

She holds her fingers there, over the words. There is something in them that hits her. It hits her now, when she needs it to most, something about belief. She doesn’t know how she and Nate will get through this, but she also knows that she believes in him. How can that be? Maybe because, in the end, belief isn’t supposed to make sense, at least not all of the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.

She pulls her hand away. She has heard the song before. She can’t remember who sang it (it’s on the tip of her tongue . . . why can’t she remember?) but she starts humming the melody. It is coming back to her a little at a time—the melody—which isn’t the worst way to begin to remember the rest.

And she hears footsteps. She looks up, from beneath the swing, thinking it is going to be Nate, coming back for something, but it is Gwyn, walking quickly toward her—out of her dress, and in a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved button-down top.

“You’re back?”

She smiles. “I just came back to the house to change, and I got some overnight clothes for Georgia, pack her up a suitcase.”

“She’s staying at the hospital?”

She nods. “She’s okay, though. Just a little wound up. Denis just got there, right as I was leaving, and he is going to stay with her. Thank goodness for that at least. And Nate went to get us all rooms at the inn on Second House Road. But he should be back soon. He wanted me to tell you that he’d be back soon.”

She is quiet, not eager to think about Nate coming back, about going to the inn with him or staying here. About anything they have to talk about. Sleep, all of a sudden, seems so far away.

Gwyn sits down on the swing, beside her.

“Are those yours?” she says, and points at the pack of cigarettes in Maggie’s hand. “Please tell me you don’t smoke.”

Maggie didn’t remember she was holding them, and immediately gets embarrassed and starts to explain—
not usually, just tonight
—but then she looks back at Gwyn, who is holding her hand out for one.

“Of course not,” Maggie says, and hands one over.

Gwyn lights it up, taking a long drag, closing her eyes against it. Maggie watches her, considers telling her that they are Eve’s cigarettes she is smoking. Would it matter to her? It seems beside the point. If Maggie is right about Eve and Thomas, or, if she is wrong, it will come out soon enough, and either way these cigarettes are not part of the story.

Maggie points back in the direction of the house. “I’m planning to head back inside and to pack some things up for you guys. Like the photographs along the staircase? Things that seem like they might get waterlogged. If it starts to rain again.”

Gwyn nods. “Thank you for that.”

“Well, maybe you should see what I’ve managed to do before you actually thank me. I am terrible at cleaning.”

“It gets easier.”

“Maybe. But I was standing in the library for less than ten minutes when I saw the swing through the window and decided I had to come out here instead. I had to take a break.”

Gwyn picks her feet up, so the swing swings. “You just described every morning for me.”

Maggie laughs and runs her hand along the swing’s seat, along the wooden boards. “So did Thomas build this?”

“No. Thomas’s parents. A long time ago. It was their wedding present for us, actually.”

“Champ and Anna?”

“Champ and Anna.” She smiles.

“What were they like?”

Gwyn smiles. “Wonderful, really. Very lovely people who liked each other a lot. Anna didn’t particularly like me, though. But Champ did. I made him laugh.”

“Why didn’t she like you?”

“Mother-in-laws are the worst. You know, they don’t like you, they make you feel bad about yourself, they have a divorce party the day you meet them and you have to face the fact that they are crazy. Plus, if you aren’t very sure of yourself, you may start feeling like you are going that way too.”

Maggie smiles.

“I wished you could have met them. You would have liked them. They moved here, for good, after the hurricane of 1938. Anna said Champ was like a man obsessed with Montauk for a while after that. He built the town a library, and helped remake a new town center.”

"And then what?”

“And then it calmed down. But he was peaceful here. He was really peaceful.” She shakes her head. “I think I thought that Thomas was like him. It was important to me. But being absent and being peaceful are two different things. They can look alike, but they are really the opposite.”

Maggie is quiet, thinking about that, hoping that Nate is closer to the second, believing he is. “When did they die? Champ and Anna? I mean I know it was before Nate was born, but—”

“Anna got sick not long after we got married. And the doctors couldn’t really do anything to stop it. I don’t think Champ could take it without her. He died six months after she did.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette. “But they lived a happy life together. Not long enough, but very happy. I think that is better than the other way around.”

“How do you get there?” Maggie asks, turning and meeting Gwyn’s eyes. “The happy part?”

Gwyn smiles. “You get lucky.”

“That’s what you’ve got for me?”

“I’ll work on it, and get you something else when I’m a little less tired.” She pauses. “Avoiding smoking is probably a good starting point.”

Maggie puts her cigarette out on the bottom of her flip-flop, and looks over at Gwyn. “Sounds good.”

Gwyn stands up and Maggie can feel her look down at her— carefully—as though she were trying to figure out whether she should say it, whatever it is that she has already decided she needs to say.

“I know you’re upset with Nate, Maggie, and who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t be? Maybe you should get out now. Maybe when things start to show that they aren’t what we think, we are better off hitching ourselves to a different star.”

“Really?”

Gwyn puts her hands on her hips, shrugs. “Who am I to know? But I have been thinking a lot today, and for whatever it is worth, there are different ways to have trouble. There are different ways to be confused about how someone’s disappointed you. My husband lied about the future because he wanted to forget the past. But Nate lied about the past because he thought it would give you two a future. Don’t confuse the two things.”

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

Gwyn reaches over and, without asking, gently takes the pack of cigarettes from Maggie’s hands. “What I’m trying to say is that it will be okay between you and Nate. Because you both want that. Because you both want that more than anything. It sounds simple, but I’m learning that the problems start when you want different things.”

“Like Mr. Huntington wanting to become a Buddhist?”

“Like Mr. Huntington not wanting to be with me.”

Maggie looks down, gets quiet. Her eyes focusing on Eve’s cigarette, on what she thinks she knows about Eve, on wondering what the truth of it may be doing to Gwyn, may do to her from now on.

Which is when she remembers—an answer popping into her mind. “It’s ‘Sweet Thing,’ right? It’s ‘Sweet Thing’ from
Astral Weeks.
That would have made me crazy, if I didn’t remember,” she says, the whole song from under the swing coming back to her. “And there’s a great story behind it, why he decided to write it. I’ll have to check. I’ll have to look that up again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The song,” she says. “The song under the swing.”

Gwyn shakes her head as though she had no idea what Maggie is talking about, and whether she does or not, Maggie can see it: how tired she is. Like Maggie. Maybe more than Maggie. She is too tired to discuss this.

“You know, I’ll show you tomorrow,” she says.

Gwyn smiles. Then, as if thinking better of it, and doing it anyway, she bends down and kisses Maggie on the cheek.

“It is nice meeting you, Maggie Mackenzie.”

“It is nice meeting you too, Gwyn.”

Maggie watches Gwyn walk away, waits for the car ignition to start, and then taking a deep breath, she gets up herself, gets off the swing, planning to head back to the house.

But instead of going back to the house, she takes the steep fifty steps down to the beach, the rocks meeting her at the bottom, giving way to smooth sand, giving way to the ocean—right there, suddenly right there—for her to step into.

She slides off her flip-flops and walks into the midnight water, flinching as it freezes around her feet, her thighs. She is hoping it will make her feel clearer, but it is only making her colder. Still, she turns and looks back in the direction of the house. She can see it fairly clearly—all the lights on. She can even make out the tree, the injury, still firmly rooted in the strangest place. She keeps looking anyway.

It may not be what she thought she was searching for, but maybe it will turn out to be what she needs. Because safe or unsafe—safe and unsafe—it is starting to feel like it is her home that she is looking at.

Gwyn

There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Is it a moment in the middle when you’ve experienced a loss—a parent’s death, a sickness—and this person gets into bed with you and holds you all night, until you feel guilt, incredible guilt, at any time you ever questioned him? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this person’s eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?

You can only guess at it, where things really end, where they really begin, and so Gwyn knows it is possible that she is wrong that it begins and ends and begins again here. That this quiet moment is her moment. Years from now, it just may define tonight for her, or the end of tonight for her, the end of one part of her life, the beginning of another.