The High Season(3)
“Are we moving to Vermont or 1910?”
“Our town is a barnyard full of hammers and nails,” Mike said. “You can’t walk down a block without hearing a buzz saw. And the storms get worse every year—another Hurricane Sandy moves a degree to the east and we’re finished. How can you time a last chance except by taking it? This could be the moment to cash out.”
“We don’t have enough equity yet,” Ruthie said. “We’re still paying off the loan for the master suite.”
He pressed his lips together the way he always did when she brought up financial reality. He’d grown up as a Dutton, with streets named after his family in Connecticut towns. The fact that his father had run through the money by the time he was twenty should have made him practical, but it only made him less inclined to hear facts.
“She has two years of high school left,” she said. “After that…” After that, what? The ellipsis defined the sentence. She didn’t know.
The problem was, she thought they were lucky, and he did not. For Mike, losing the house for three months canceled out having it for nine. For her, it guaranteed it.
This was what she’d never had and what she always craved. Home, she thought. This. Even if she had to leave it in order to afford it, it was hers. This lovely, perfect village, neighbors who knew her, the bluest hydrangeas, the best view on the North Fork. This!
The only thing she missed, she thought, gazing at Mike’s profile, was that.
“Now Jem’s in that rotten crowd, with the pedicures and the purses and you have to wear pajama pants on Thursdays or you can’t sit at the table at lunch…” Mike shook his head. “Remember that argument when you bought her the wrong slippers? Like you’d stabbed her. We’re losing her.”
“Of course we’re losing her. She’s a teenager. And we broke up. Don’t you think it’s sort of ludicrous for us to leave town together?”
Mike grinned. “Hey. We’re divorced, but we’re family.”
A spark ignited in that tinderbox that was Ruthie’s heart. It continually infuriated her that Mike was so adept at disarming her.
Which could be reason number two for why they were apart.
Reason number one? He’d decided that he wasn’t in love anymore. (“I don’t need a pal,” he’d said to her. “I need a destiny.”)
“We struggle so much just to keep it all going,” Mike said. “We’re still not happy.”
“That’s why you left, so that we’d all be happy. Remember?”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “Look…”
A helicopter passed overhead, not loud enough to drown his voice, but he stopped.
So she obeyed him. She looked. The way he stood, half turned toward her, his hand flat against the screen door, ready to push. A man always half on his way out a door.
“Have dinner with me tomorrow? So we can talk?”
“Talk about…”
“I don’t know, a rethink. Really talk.”
The world shut down into quiet. There was something in his face she hadn’t seen in a long time. He was really looking at her, for one thing. So much of the end of a marriage was exchanging information without eye contact. “I’ve got Spork tomorrow.”
“It’s over at five. After we can go to the Drift.”
The Spindrift was the place they jokingly referred to as “the bad news bar,” a local dive where once they had commiserated about disasters over drafts of beer and free hard-boiled eggs and peanuts. Sometimes that was dinner. Tim would slide the jar of mustard down the length of the bar and Mike would catch it in one hand. Outside light would be falling, Jem would be at a friend’s, the twilight would last forever, their kisses would taste of hops and yolk.
“Sure.” The bar is not a signifier, she told herself. It’s just a bar.
Sound rushed in. Tires crunching over gravel. Adeline Clay swung down the driveway in her Range Rover, three hours early.
2
IF ONE END of Long Island was a fish mouth ready to chomp on the barb of Manhattan, the tail fin was the East End, split down the middle with Shelter Island between the two. Let the billionaires have the Hamptons on the South Fork, with the shops and restaurants and parties that re-created what made them so exquisitely comfy in Manhattan. The North Fork was two ferry rides away, and it showed. It was farm stands on actual farms. It was pies and parades and stony beaches that hurt your feet, banging screen doors and peaches eaten over the sink. Orient was the morsel at the end of the fork, the village clinging to the narrowest ribbon of land, where light bounced from bay to sound and the air was seasoned with salt.
Summer was the crucial season, when the population bloomed and the streets came to life with bikes and dogs and city cars. There were no famous faces in Orient, only famous résumés. There was one country store with world-class baked goods, the yacht club was a former potato shack on a wharf, the dress code was old sneakers. Transportation was bicycles, no helmets needed, just like the old days. But all that shabby hid a secret life of the moneyed, serious cultural class. In the summers there were writers and publishers, artists and gallerists; there was a sizable-for-a-hamlet lesbian population and a smattering of architects. When a lesbian architect rented their house for two weeks last August, Mike had called it the Orient Apotheosis.