The High Season(60)

Lark picked up her phone, but at Daniel’s look she put it down on the banquette. “Orient’s cool.”

“I never heard of it before Adeline decided to discover it.” Daniel chewed on a bite of fish. “A little less lemon next time, I think. Balance is everything. What’s your endowment?”

Luckily Doe knew this. “A million and a half.”

“Seat of the pants, is it?”

“Pretty much. But we do a lot.”

“Can we order a bottle of red?” Lark asked. “Daddy, stop quizzing poor Doe.”

Daniel signaled the waiter. “Art is a mind-opener, isn’t it? We don’t get enough arts education in this country. I’m thinking of starting a foundation.”

“What?” Lark rose out of her sulk. “You never said anything.” She put her fork down. Doe knew from experience that Lark only ate half her food.

She put her fork down, too. She knew the rules of this game. You always left food on your plate. And no one, ever, asked to bring something home. Not even dessert. Once out to dinner in Miami she’d asked for the rest of her crab cake meal to go, and the man she was with, an art dealer who taught her so much and then ghosted her texts, said, “No. This isn’t the Cheesecake Factory.” She never did it again.

    “Why not, everyone’s getting one. It’s the newest accessory. That’s a joke, Lark.”

Daniel said this without looking at his daughter. He was looking at Doe. She felt suddenly buzzed and very awake.

“I think it’s time I supported more local causes,” he said.

Doe tried to hold his eye but couldn’t. Was she imagining how intensely he was looking at her? She couldn’t read this glance. She didn’t know whether he was thinking about exposing her or thinking about fucking her. Either way she could be as doomed as a bag of kittens.





35


RUTHIE WOKE UP to the sound of crockery in the kitchen, always a sign that meant coffee was on the way. She hoped Joe hadn’t turned into a tea drinker. Sunlight was pouring through the window and she was nestled in a soft bed and she was filled with something close to happiness if she didn’t think too hard or too long.

“I just can’t help believing!” Joe sang from the kitchen.

She was only a block away from her own house, and she felt as though she were in a secret clubhouse, hidden away in a dumpy rental. Jem was with Mike, and no one knew where she was.

They had danced in the living room last night. They had sipped ice-cold limoncello. Their kisses had tasted of lemon and sugar. They had wound up on the bed, tilting onto it together, hanging on hard because they didn’t want to break the embrace. She touched her mouth. The night had felt like one continuous deep kiss.

Joe stood in the doorway, holding two mugs. “Don’t start regretting it yet,” he said.

    “I wasn’t.”

“Liar. I have a radical suggestion. Let’s tell the truth. Right from the start.”

“Toss me a T-shirt. There’s truth, and then there’s truth at eight in the morning.”

Joe put down the coffees and tossed her a T-shirt. She slipped it on. She ran past him while he chuckled. She thought this was over in life, wearing a man’s T-shirt and examining his bathroom items while she used (this, a mark of their maturity) a new toothbrush he’d left for her on the sink.

When she came out, hair arranged, breath minted, and after a delighted dazed look at herself in the mirror—who was this woman having fun?—he was sitting up in bed, waiting with her mug, in boxers and another T-shirt just as faded and soft as the one she was wearing.

“I want you to know that I regret nothing,” he said. “I’ll even sing it. In French.”

She took the coffee. Last night was hazy, not from wine, but from a certain rushed urgency to the proceedings. Dinner and then he invited her over for a nightcap, an invitation so ridiculously transparent that they giggled. The end of the evening had been inevitable since the moment he put his hand on her knee. Or when she sat down at the table. Or when she saw him again. The truth was simple. When she was with him she felt alive.

They sipped, watching each other. Ruthie spilled a little coffee on his shirt.

“I like this house. It’s nicer inside,” she said. “Outside it’s a dump.”

“Consider it a metaphor. I painted the floors and the walls before I moved in. The kitchen was chartreuse, and not in a good way.”

“The thing is, you don’t have much. It’s very bachelor.”

“Part of my reinvention.”

He didn’t even have a dresser. There was a nautical map on the wall and a single ceramic vessel with sharpened pencils on a table. A stack of books—cookbooks! How promising!—served as a night table for her coffee.

    “No art,” she said.

“We argued so long about the collection that one day I just said, Take it all. Halfway thinking she wouldn’t. She did. A shocking thing happened. I didn’t care. I ended up giving away mostly everything in the apartment. I know that sounds monkish but it’s not that elevated. I didn’t want it, it was from another life. The apartment with the vases and the plates and the books and the trays and the lamps…now I’ve got one set of sheets and towels, three pairs of pants, and seven T-shirts. When things get dirty I wash them.”