The Hotel Nantucket (38)
Alessandra waited a second, wondering if he was having a crisis of conscience. She chastised herself; she had made a poor choice.
When she finally followed him inside, she had to let her eyes adjust to the dark. There was milky moonlight through a window, blue numbers on a cable box—and then hands grabbed her waist and she screamed, genuinely frightened, and realized she wasn’t in charge at all. She also realized Michael Bick had, very likely, brought home women he didn’t know before. Possibly he did it all the time.
But in the pearl-gray light of morning—fog covered the harbor like a layer of dust on an antique mirror—Michael traced one of her eyebrows and said, “Where did you come from, Alessandra Powell?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Alessandra was originally from San Francisco, where her mother, Valerie, waited tables at the storied Tosca Café in North Beach. Valerie and Alessandra lived in a building down the street from the restaurant. Valerie kept their apartment clean, didn’t drink too much (wine occasionally), and didn’t do drugs (weed occasionally); there was always enough money for groceries and for Alessandra to get ice cream down on the pier or go to the movies or, when she was older, take the bus to Oakland and thrift-shop. But there was something a little off about Alessandra’s upbringing. While Alessandra’s friends were opening presents around the tree on Christmas morning, then sitting down to a rib roast, Alessandra was home alone watching R-rated movies on cable while her mother worked a double. She and her mother opened their Christmas presents on the twenty-sixth with eggs and a tin of osetra caviar and Springsteen singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” On Easter, while Alessandra’s friends were going to church and hunting for eggs and slicing into honey-baked ham, Alessandra was watching R-rated movies on cable and eating straight from a bag of jelly beans that her mother bought as a nod to the holiday even though she didn’t celebrate Easter at all.
And then there were the men. Every week, Valerie would bring home married men who frequented the Tosca bar while they were in the city on business. These men would arrive after Alessandra went to bed, but she heard them in the shower the next morning while Alessandra’s mother ransacked their wallets in the bedroom. Every once in a while, one of the men would stay for breakfast and listen as Valerie played her favorite CD and sang along: Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool.
Alessandra knew better than to follow in her mother’s footsteps but it was the only example she had. When Alessandra was eighteen, she seduced Dr. Andrew Beecham, the father of her best friend, Duffy. After Alessandra and Drew had been sleeping together for a few weeks, Alessandra realized she could cash in on the power she had—the power to tell Duffy and Drew’s wife, Mary Lou—and get something valuable in return. Drew was the chair of the romance languages department at Stanford. Alessandra audited a full year of classes—Italian, Spanish, French literature, art history—and then demanded a one-way plane ticket to Rome, which Drew Beecham was only too happy to buy for her.
Where did you come from, Alessandra Powell?
Alessandra answered Michael in her prettiest Italian. “Poiché la tua domanda cerca un significato profondo, risponderò con parole semplici.” She smiled; she had no intention of translating. “That’s Dante.”
Michael Bick kissed her tenderly. She was making progress. She stayed the next night and the next.
She made Michael milk-braised pork with hand-rolled gnocchi in sage and butter and a salad of bitter greens. She made coq au vin. She made scrambled eggs the way her mother used to make them for other women’s husbands—with double the yolks (double-the-yolk scrambled eggs after a night of whiskey, Valerie used to say, felt a lot like love). Alessandra beat Michael soundly in tennis. (In Ibiza, she had taken lessons with Nadal’s first coach.) When they made love, she screamed out in Italian. She didn’t complain that they never went anywhere together—not to dinner or coffee, not for walks on the beach or in the state forest, not for drives to Great Point or Sconset. When the guy came to fix the internet, she greeted him in French and told him she was the au pair.
Secretly, Alessandra secured a job at the Hotel Nantucket that would start in June, though she hoped by then Michael would have fallen so deeply in love with her that he would tell Heidi their marriage was over and Alessandra could simply slip into Heidi’s place. She would go to Surfside all day while Michael worked at home on his laptop (while he was sleeping, Alessandra had hacked into his computer and learned that he traded petroleum futures and in 2021 had reported $10,793,000 in income), and she would accompany him to Cisco Brewers to hear live music and to his standing Thursday-night reservation at Ventuno. She would become best friends with the Laytons next door; the families were so close that they had a set of keys to each other’s house. She would bewitch everyone in Michael’s life exactly the way she had bewitched him.
But this didn’t quite happen. A few days before Alessandra started work, she overheard Michael on the phone with Heidi and his kids, his voice sweet and upbeat and guileless. “How was the game, Colby, did you hit the ball, did you swing? Hey, buddy, did you see Dustin Johnson sink that putt on the ninth?…I love you, I love you, I love you more, kisses, can’t wait to see you all, only two more weeks! I’m getting the boat ready; Coatue, here we come!”
Alessandra felt most affronted by this last bit. She hadn’t realized Michael had a boat.