Up Island (18 page)

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important just because it’s the two of you who want to do it, not to please any man, but just to please yourselves. I remember it from my first year working in Boston, before I met Caleb. It was very heady. Very grown-up, if that’s not too silly a way of putting it. Somehow it defines you for yourself.”

“Grown-up indeed,” I said, and hugged her shoulders lightly. But the euphoria was gone. I really did not know what she meant. I had never done that, never had a grown-up best friend and gone off with her on an adventure designed simply to please ourselves. This was my first sense of it, that taste of liberating, solitary wine. All before had been shared with Tee.

The essential gulf between Livvy and me yawned palpably.

I had not thought of it since we met. The stars seemed to dim a little in their arcs and soon stopped. We walked back to the Jeep in silence.

After that, as if the paling stars had foretold it, things changed.

T
HE NEXT MORNING I WOKE with my head buried under my pillow, a pounding sinus headache, and a dull sense that it was very late. I burrowed out from under the pouf that I had pulled up in the night and saw that though the room was filled with grayish light, as if I had waked before sunrise, the bedside clock read 9:30 A.M. I plodded heavily to the window and pulled aside the curtains. The air was opaque with slanting rain and the stunted trees along the shore were lashing in the wind.

“Shit,” I said aloud to the headache and the day, and crawled back under the covers. I slept again, until Livvy’s voice called me to the telephone.

I took the phone in the kitchen, where Livvy, wearing a tatty old blue sweater that looked to be Caleb’s, jeans, and thick wool socks, was seated at the round oak table making lists.

“Who is it?” I said, my voice dense with sinus and sleep.

“I don’t know. Some woman. Good morning to you, too,”

she said grumpily.

“Sorry,” I muttered, feeling fussy and offended, and picked up the phone. Only then did a little knot of 150

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anxiety form in my stomach. Who could be calling me? My father was still fishing at Homosassa, Teddy was somewhere near Santa Fe with Eddie, and I knew viscerally that Tee would not call. Carrie Davies, with bad news about Lazarus, whom they were keeping? The Eel Woman? My stomach heaved. I had all but forgotten about her; how could I have?

“Hey, sugar, how you doin’?” a sweet voice trilled. Missy Carmichael, my new lawyer. She of the Laura Ashleys, velvet headbands, and the collection of trophy testicles in formalde-hyde she allegedly kept on a shelf in her office. By now I was firmly persuaded of her prowess in divorce court, but the molasses voice gave me the same shock of involuntary dismay it had when I’d first spoken with her. How could that little-girl drawl stand up against the relentless hammering of a ruthless male divorce attorney? How could it stand up to even a headstrong client, which I certainly, so far, was not?

“And those great big brown eyes and corkscrew curls,” I had wailed to Livvy after she had summoned me to lunch to meet Missy. The sharklike attorney Livvy had promised had a full caseload, but recommended his young associate, Missy Carmichael, in such glowing terms that even Livvy was im-pressed. She met Missy before I did, on the pretext of picking something up at her shark friend’s office, and had promptly arranged the luncheon. She told me, with a wicked grin, that Missy had brown doe eyes and a headful of Shirley Temple curls and stood five two in her Maud Frizons. I had called Missy, doubtfully, and the little cricket voice had done nothing to dispel my fears.

“You just wait till you see those big brown eyes
152 / Anne Rivers Siddons

narrow and hear that sugary little voice drop to a growl,”

Livvy said. “Carl told me she’s never yet lost a case that went to court. The whole Suit Rack quails when they see her name on the docket opposite them.”

“The Suit Rack” was Missy’s appellation for Atlanta’s corps of trial attorneys. Their name for her, Livvy said, was unspeakable. Fortunately for me, she added, she had earned it fair and square.

But the disembodied voice still sounded fey and kittenish, and my heart, already heavy with rain and a sort of premon-itory dread, sank. Had Missy been the wrong choice after all?

“Reason I called is that I need a check,” Missy said. She rarely minced words, I had found. “I’ve authorized a whole bunch of depositions and put a good private investigator on retainer, and I need to pay them up front. Stick one in priority mail to me and then I can go do my thing and you can go do yours. You wearin’ your sunblock? I had a sorority sister used to go up there every summer, and she got skin cancer before she was thirty.”

She named a figure that made my mouth go dry, but I promised her I’d mail the check and wear my sunblock and we hung up. It had been our agreement, the only one I thought I could live with: that she would do whatever she thought was necessary to get me the best terms possible in the divorce, and would not report to me or even contact me unless and until it was absolutely vital. The terms were mine, not hers; she disliked them intensely and, I could tell, felt contempt for me for insisting on them. She even told me that in other circumstances she would not touch a case in which she had so little contact with her client. But the partner-shark had

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insisted, and she was coming up for full partnership, and besides, she knew the Eel Woman from bar meetings and by reputation.

“Time somebody sank her little ship,” she had said. “I’d purely love to be the one to do it. She’s givin’ all us girls in the bidness a bad name. And I don’t have much doubt that we can mop up the floor with your honeybaby. For a big Co’Cola doowah he sho ain’t playin’ with a full deck. Brain has descended into his dick; I see a lot of it in guys ’bout his age. I love these cases, I really do. I might’ve taken this one pro bono, except you ain’t poor and I ain’t stupid. The one rule we got to have is when I say ‘Money,’ you say ‘Comin’

right up.’ ”

And I had agreed to her terms, because she had agreed to mine. I knew she would be expensive, but Tee had said anything I wanted, anything I needed, and if he were truly serious about the divorce, he would not object to the checks I wrote.

I had never, in all the years of our marriage, been extravagant.

The large balances he kept in our joint checking and savings accounts remained comfortable. To me, any amount seemed a fair price to pay for getting the thing done with a minimal amount of knowledge, not to mention participation. I had even left Missy a key to the house and garage, because she had wanted to get its contents catalogued and cost-estimated and I had not had the heart for that.

“Was that Missy? I thought I recognized the lisp,” Livvy said when I did not speak.

“Everything okay?”

“I guess so. She needs another check. She’s hiring a private investigator. God, it sounds so—squalid.”

“Well, this
is
getting interesting,” Livvy said. “Is
154 / Anne Rivers Siddons

she on Tee’s trail, or the E.W.’s? I’d have said the latter, but you never know.”

“I have no idea,” I snapped, suddenly fiercely annoyed. My head hurt, and the matter-of-fact talk about the divorce made my heart flutter sickly, as it always did, and I did not like the curiosity in Livvy’s voice. It sounded avaricious and mean.

“You must have some,” she persisted. “Maybe Tee’s got a whole string of E.W.s, everywhere there’s a youth brands market.
That
ought to get you the gold watch and everything.”

“Of course he doesn’t!” I said. “That’s not terribly funny, Livvy.”

“Feeling a little snappish this morning, are we?”

“I guess we are, aren’t we?”

We looked at each other, and grinned unwillingly.

“Sorry,” we said together.

“It’s the damned weather,” Livvy said. “It looks like it might turn into a nor’easter, and that means three or four days of this shit. I hate to lose these last days to that, with Caleb coming and all.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds okay to me. We could have fires and eat soup and read books and listen to music and drink and talk and laugh at everybody we know. You said way back that you’d like to do that.”

“I didn’t mean during the only time Caleb has up here,”

she said. “And I’ve hardly seen anybody yet. None of the really good parties start until the last couple of weeks.”

“Who haven’t you seen that you wanted to?” I said. The implication seemed clear and hurtful to me. “I certainly haven’t meant to keep you from seeing your friends.”

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“I didn’t say you had,” she said, staring out at the rain. “It just sort of hasn’t come up. Usually you see everybody at the end-of-summer parties, but people tend to forego those if the weather is really stinking.”

“Parties…I didn’t think there were going to be any parties.”

“Well, there hardly
are
any till late summer. Oh, there are parties all over, every night if you want to go to them, but not anybody’s that Chappy people usually go to. Ours are just us. You know. You’ve already met almost everybody.”

“Not the men,” I said, feeling somehow troubled and threatened by the talk of parties.

“Well, Jesus, I thought you didn’t want to see any men.”

“I wasn’t criticizing you, Livvy,” I said. “You go on to your parties; I want you to do that. I want both of you to. I’m perfectly happy staying here and reading and stuff. In fact, I’d like that.”

“Well, that’s going to make all these women you claim you like so much very happy. All of them have said how much they look forward to seeing you at their parties. I mean, it’s just what we do up here, Molly, take ourselves to each other’s parties. It’s not like they’re these huge social things.”

“I know. It’s just us. Just you,” I said mulishly.

She was silent, and then turned away and gathered up her lists.

“I have to go into Edgartown,” she said. “We’re out of just about everything. I ought to be back before lunch, but just in case I’m not, there’s some of that bluefish pâté and some crackers left, and I think some of the Greek salad. That’s what I was going to fix, anyway.”

156 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Wait a minute and let me get dressed and I’ll come with you,” I said, feeling contrite. I had been distinctly unpleasant to Livvy this morning. I got up and went over and put my arm around her.

“I’m sorry again,” I said. “I’m being a jerk. I have the mother of all sinus headaches, and I guess I’m still not used to talking casually about all this business. Let me take you to lunch somewhere bright and warm and funky. I’d like to see the Black Dog.”

She hugged me back, briefly.

“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Not in Vineyard Haven on a rainy day in August, you wouldn’t. As it is I’ll have to wait an hour to get on the ferry. I can promise you don’t want to go out in this with sinus. Why don’t you stay and make us some lunch and maybe a hot rum something or other? I do better at the A&P if I can hit it alone and work fast.”

“I just thought I might find something new to read…”

“I’ll bring you something. Really. If you get a sinus infection, I’ll never forgive myself. I won’t be long.”

And she grabbed a yellow slicker from a peg beside the back door and was out and gone in a swirl of rain and a whoop of wind off the bay. The door slammed shut and I stood staring at it.

“Same to you, bubba,” I said under my breath. But the wind really did seem fierce, and the bay water heaved and rolled sickeningly. And the old house did indeed seem to wrap its arms around you…

I took a shower and washed my hair, and put on jeans and a heavy sweatshirt, then went back down to poke in the refrigerator and pantry. Livvy had, of course, only been thinking of my welfare. I felt guilty

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and graceless, and decided to make something hot for lunch, from scratch. The cold pâté and salad did not tempt me at all on this pelting, wind-shrieking day. And Livvy would be drenched and exhausted.

The larder really was bare, but I found some evaporated milk and two cans of clams and three ears of the native corn we had had for supper a couple of nights before. I made a kind of chowder from them, and added butter and a generous dollop of sherry. It was wonderful, hot and thick. I found cornmeal and the not-yet-washed bacon skillet, and made corn bread with the drippings. By noon I had them steaming on the countertop under cloths, and had fashioned a buttered rum thing that was so good I had one while I waited.

By one o’clock Livvy still had not come, and I had another rum. At two I put the chowder and corn bread away, and then put them back out on the kitchen table, coldly ostentatious, so that she could not miss them. Then I went upstairs and climbed into bed to sleep off the rum. For the first time since I had arrived, the house felt cold and damp.

She came in at three-thirty. When she did not come upstairs, I got out of bed and went down. She was sitting at the kitchen table, cheeks wind-flushed, drinking coffee and regarding the accusing chowder and corn bread without expression.

“I wish you hadn’t bothered,” she said when I came into the kitchen. “I feel like a heel. I ran into a couple of the girls in Edgartown and we decided to get some lunch. I’d have come on home if I’d known you were going to do this—”

“It’s no problem,” I said, magnanimous now that I had her on the defensive. “We can have it for supper.”

158 / Anne Rivers Siddons

She sighed.

“I told Gerry Edmondson we’d come for drinks and supper tonight,” she said. “Peter’s just gotten here, and I thought since you didn’t go out today you might like a change of scene. But we surely don’t have to—”

“Oh, no. I’d like to, really. I just thought, with the rain and all…”

For the rest of the afternoon we were unusually silent, for us, and somehow I could never seem to heave things between us back into the old, easy groove.

The evening with the Edmondsons, in a cottage half a block away and roughly the size and age of Livvy’s, was not a success. I knew that this was not because of the chemistry between Livvy and Gerry and Peter Edmondson, both of whom she had gone to country day school with. So it had, by a process of elimination, to be me. I did not know what was wrong. I had laughed heartily and long with Gerry Edmondson at many of the beach club lunches and I knew that she liked me as much as I did her. You can always tell about that. And I liked chubby, sweet-faced Peter Edmondson immediately, and treated him, or tried to, with the same light badinage that I used with Caleb, or Charlie Davies. But things never jelled; Gerry’s laughter was a trifle loud, and she did not often look at me but did often look at Livvy, and clung to Peter as if it had been years since she had seen him, and gradually more and more of their talk centered on people I did not know. After exclaiming and smiling until my cheeks hurt at the antics of people whose names I knew I would not remember, I gave up and went into the little library and read old copies of
Yachting
and
Audubon.
The tone of the sharp-edged, constricted talk