Golden Girl(96)

One night in the final, honey-gold week of August, JP comes home from the Cork visibly drunk. This isn’t the first time he’s come home drunk and Vivi suspects part of the reason the Cork is failing is that JP is imbibing the profits.

He says, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Hallelujah, Vivi thinks. He’s reached the decision on his own—this will be the last summer for the wineshop.

“What is it?” Despite how badly Vivi wants to hear the words come out of his mouth, she’s also busy. She has spent all summer driving the kids around. Willa, at age fourteen, has stopped going to the beach with Vivi—she and Rip ride their bikes to meet up with their group of friends—but Vivi still has Carson, Leo, and Cruz to cart around. Cruz’s father, Joe, has just moved his sandwich business from his home kitchen to a bona fide storefront downtown. The shop is called the Nickel and it’s going to be a runaway success, Vivi knows, but Joe needs help with Cruz, and Vivi is happy to pitch in. Cruz is always grateful for Vivi’s efforts, whereas the other kids just expect the homemade lunches and clean beach towels and boogie boards and umbrella packed neatly in the back of the Jeep. Vivi has just dropped Cruz at home and is trying to get dinner on the table.

“We need to talk in the bedroom,” JP says.

“I’m in the middle of shucking corn,” Vivi says.

“Leave the corn.” JP heads down the hall to their bedroom and Vivi, sensing something is wrong, something more than a failed business, follows him.

JP tells Vivi that he has “fallen for” his employee Amy Van Pelt.

“What does that mean?” Vivi says. She has never met Miss Van Pelt, though JP waxes rhapsodic about her all the time—she’s “sweet” and “cute,” an Alabama sorority girl with an abundance of “Southern charm.” “You’re in love with her?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Yet. But I want to be with her. I’m leaving you, Vivi.”

Vivi laughs. “You’re leaving me? For your twenty-three-year-old shopgirl?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m sorry.”



It feels like a ploy. JP seems like a disgruntled child who packs a pillowcase full of clothes and heads out to the end of the driveway to “run away.” But JP is resolute: He wants to pursue a future with Amy. He wants to break up the family, burn down their hopes and dreams.

Anger, confusion, anger, fury, anger, sadness, rejection, anger—and, finally, more anger.

They schedule an emergency session with their therapist, Brie. (“Cheese therapy,” they call it when they’re in a light mood, which they are not today.) Brie astonishes Vivi by announcing that affairs are the responsibility of both parties.

“If you, Vivi, had made JP feel more treasured, more loved, more central in your life, then he wouldn’t have gone outside the marriage to find affirmation. I’ve been seeing you both for eighteen months. JP has been clear and vocal that his emotional needs aren’t being met but you’ve made no changes. Frankly, I’m not surprised this happened.”

“Wait a minute,” Vivi says. “You’re blaming me?”

“You’re both at fault,” Brie says.

Initially, Vivi wants to reject this. But if she honestly examined her feelings, the ones that she has done her best to sublimate and ignore, she’d have to admit that, over the years, she has lost respect for JP. She has placed him in the same category as the kids. He’s someone she has to support, someone she has to guide. In previous therapy sessions, JP articulated that he didn’t feel important to Vivi—not as important as the kids, not as important as her writing, not as important as her running. Is he wrong? Wouldn’t Vivi choose all of these things (even her running) over JP? Hasn’t she thought, at times, of leaving him? She has stayed because they have a whole huge life—the kids, the house, their friends, their routine. They have stability. Their household is happy, often joyous—which is different from how Vivi and JP grew up.

But now—Amy?

It’s reasonable for Vivi to ask JP to move out; after all, he’s the one who’s ending the marriage. But incredibly, he refuses to go anywhere. He wants to stay in the house; he wants them both to stay in the house while he pursues a new relationship with Amy. It’ll be better for the kids, he says.

“Who do you think you are, Fran?ois Mitterrand?” Vivi says, a question that sails right over JP’s head.

Vivi is not going to live in the same house with JP while he sleeps with his twenty-three-year-old employee. Sorry. They have a lot of whisper-fights in Vivi’s home office, which is the room farthest from the den, where the kids watch TV. Vivi realizes that JP has always been handed exactly what he wants without any accountability—but not this time.

“You stay,” Vivi says. “I’ll go.” Her novel Along the South Shore has sold well over the course of the summer, even though Vivi refused to go on tour. The kids are young and she’s needed at home (besides which, she waits all year long for summer on Nantucket and the last thing she wants to do is leave). What if she were to go on tour now, at the end of August, beginning of September? She runs it past her publicist, Flor.

“I have dozens of requests for you,” Flor says. “You’ve created a bit of a mystique by not going on the road before now. Let me see what I can pull together. How long do you want to go for?”