The High Season(4)
Ruthie had been surprised last November when Dodge had called from the city, saying that Adeline Clay was looking to rent in Orient for the season. Usually they cobbled together summer rentals in two-week increments. It seemed a watershed kind of change, someone that glam leaving the Hamptons for the North Fork. Not only was Adeline rich, she was visible, well known as one of New York’s most stylish older women, photographed at openings and benefits, all the places rich and famous people posed in front of logo-scattered backdrops together.
Ruthie and Mike had speculated endlessly about why Adeline would be interested in the amount of downscale their house represented—money problems? facelift recovery?—but in the end when the check came they celebrated with bottles of beer on the deck. Bundled up in down jackets and scarves, they clicked their Rolling Rock bottle necks to toast summer and another year of solvency. Inch by inch, they would pay back the bank loans and launch Jem into the world. Adeline Clay was the gateway to the now impossible American dream: a college education without debt, a comfortable retirement, an edge.
* * *
—
ADELINE WORE A delicate blue-and-white-striped shirt with rippling oversized ruffles down the front, white jeans, sandals, and enormous sunglasses. Impossibly thin, she resembled a well-tailored dragonfly. A purse the size of a small suitcase hung on her forearm. Her highlighted hair was short and cut cleverly around her head. Her outfit whispered, I am rich, and this is appropriate summer attire, because this is as beachy as I am willing to get.
From the passenger side a young man slithered out, one tennis-shoed foot at a time. He dislodged a paper napkin from the seat, and it pirouetted prettily on the breeze, fluttering like a heraldic flag. He did not stoop to pick it up.
Ruthie thought of two words she never used. The first was lithe. The second was louche. This must be Adeline’s stepson, Lucas Clay. She’d last seen him when he was a toddler, when she’d worked for his father. He must be about twenty-two or -three now. And every inch beautiful: wheat-colored hair, broad chest, narrow waist. Even from here she could tell he’d inherited his father’s startling light-blue eyes, the ones that photographed almost white.
Jem looked up from her phone, then down again quickly, her cheeks flushing, as Lucas shot her a tilted, lazy smile.
Ruthie noticed she was still clutching the bag of garbage. She dropped it off the side of the porch in what she hoped was a surreptitious move.
“I’m at the end of the world!” Adeline called.
Ruthie had met Adeline twenty years before, when Ruthie had been studio manager for the legendary artist Peter Clay, one of a few male painters whose work was often described by (mostly male) critics as “seminal.” One night in Tribeca the studio assistants had all gone out for drinks with Peter and the blonde who had broken up his marriage. At first Ruthie hadn’t thought Adeline was beautiful, but by the end of the evening she’d realized that none of them could stop staring at her face.
Adeline had been in her thirties then, Ruthie knew. Peter was in his sixties, into his second marriage, and with a toddler. As his studio assistant Ruthie knew firsthand that he’d never been faithful to his first wife, or his second—the breadth of his cheating had been legendary—but he had fallen hard for Adeline and they had stayed married until his death on 9/11. Not in the towers or on a plane, but in an emergency room, of cardiac arrest. For a famous person, it was not a good day to die. For the next year, people would say, “Oh, he’s dead?” No one had time to mourn the passing of the merely famous on that day. It was the one day in America that only ordinary lives counted.
It could be said that Adeline Clay had been unlucky in marriage (if being married to a world-famous narcissistic genius could be classified as unlucky), but lucky in widowhood. Peter had left her wealthy, but as his reputation continued to increase (cited as one of the top five influences on young artists, even now) and her own management skills improved, she had grown even richer, forming the Peter Clay Foundation and becoming a powerful force in the art world.
Most people are awkward when approaching someone from a distance. They quicken their pace, or pretend to check their watch or their phone. Adeline took her time, her gaze roaming over the fa?ade of the house, most likely noting every flaw.
Ruthie imagined how she would have handled the same maneuver. Most likely she would have waved when she got out of the car, then immediately regretted it and felt foolishly overeager. She would have quickened her step, then tripped on a flagstone. She would have made a funny face. By the time she’d reached the porch, she would have defined herself as an overly apologetic, frantic lunatic.
Ruthie knew that Adeline, like her, must have inhaled paint fumes in downtown lofts, drunk too much wine, gulped down truck exhaust on Canal Street. She was at least ten years older; how did she manage to look younger than Ruthie? As a museum director Ruthie spent most of her time knocking on the doors of the privileged, looking for funding. She was familiar with various forms of surgical help. But Adeline’s face didn’t look yanked and manipulated to approximate a younger human. The work had been done skillfully, as though with nail scissors. She resembled a twig-sized ballerina twirling in a jewelry box, lit by soft light and pink satin, breasts little plastic bumps.
“Sorry about arriving so early. We hitchhiked a ride on a bird to East Hampton with a friend. I had the car brought there, and I just hopped over on those two adorable little ferries. It reminded me of Greece!”