The Perfect Couple(5)
New England, Karen remembers now, had sounded very exotic.
They ran low on gas in a town called Madison, Connecticut, exit 61 off I-95, that had a leafy main street lined with shops, like something out of a 1950s sitcom. When Karen got out of the car to stretch her legs at the filling station, she had smelled salt in the air.
She said, “I think we’re near the water.”
They had asked the gas-station attendant what there was to see in Madison, Connecticut, and he directed them to a restaurant called the Lobster Deck, which had an uninterrupted view of the Long Island Sound. Down the street from the Lobster Deck, across from a state park with a beach, was the Sandbar Motel and Lodge; a room cost $105 for the week.
Karen knows she’s not worldly. She has never been to Paris, Bermuda, or even the West Coast. She and Bruce used to take Celeste to the Pocono Mountains on vacation. They skied at Camelback in the winter and went to the Great Wolf Lodge water park in the summer. The rest of their money they saved for Celeste to go to college. She had shown an interest in animals at an early age, and both Bruce and Karen had hoped she would become a veterinarian. When Celeste’s interests had instead run toward zoology, that had been fine too. She had been offered a partial scholarship at Miami University of Ohio, which had the best zoology department in the country. “Partial scholarship” still left a lot to pay for—some tuition, room, board, books, spending money, bus tickets home—and so there had been precious little left over for travel.
Hence, that one trip to New England remained sacred to both Karen and Bruce. They are even further in the hole now—nearly a hundred thousand dollars in debt, thanks to Karen’s medical bills—but there was no way they were going to miss making the trip to Nantucket. On their way home, once Celeste and Benji are safely on their honeymoon in Greece, they will stop in Madison, Connecticut, for what Karen is privately calling the Grand Finale. The Sandbar Motel and Lodge is long gone, so instead, Bruce has booked an oceanfront suite at the Madison Beach Hotel. It’s a Hilton property. Bruce told Karen he got it for free by accepting Hilton Honors points offered to him by the store’s general manager, Mr. Allen. Karen knows that all of Bruce’s co-workers have wondered how to help out their favorite sales associate, Bruce in Suits, whose wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and while this is slightly mortifying, she does appreciate the concern and, especially, Mr. Allen’s generous offer to pay for their hotel. Madison, Connecticut, has taken on the paradisiacal qualities of a Shangri-la. Karen wants to eat lobster—with butter, lots and lots of butter—and she wants to watch the honey lozenge of the sun drop into the Long Island Sound. She wants to fall asleep in Bruce’s arms as she listens to waves lap the shore, their daughter successfully married.
The Grand Finale.
Last August, Karen learned that she had a tumor on her L3 vertebra. The breast cancer, which she’d believed she’d beaten, had metastasized to her bones. Her oncologist, Dr. Edman, has given her a year to eighteen months. Karen figures she has until at least the end of the summer, which is an enormous blessing, especially when you consider all the people throughout history who have died without warning. Why, Karen could be crossing Northampton Street to the circle in downtown Easton and get hit by a car, making the cancer diagnosis irrelevant.
Celeste had been gutted by the news. She had just gotten engaged to Benji but she said she wanted to postpone the wedding, leave New York, and move back to Easton to take care of Karen. This was the exact opposite of what Karen wanted. Karen encouraged Celeste to move up the wedding, rather than postpone it.
Celeste, always obedient, did just that.
When Dr. Edman called last week to say it appeared the cancer had spread to Karen’s stomach and liver, Karen and Bruce decided to keep the news from Celeste entirely. When Karen leaves on Monday morning, she will say good-bye to Celeste as if everything is just fine.
All she has to do is make it through the next three days.
Karen can still walk with a cane but Bruce has arranged for a wheelchair to glide her gracefully down the ramp and onto the wharf. Greer Garrison Winbury—or, rather, Greer Garrison; people rarely call her by her married name, according to Celeste—is supposed to be waiting. Neither Karen nor Bruce has met Greer, but Karen has read two of her books: her most recent, Death in Dubai, as well as the novel that launched Greer to fame in the early nineties, The Killer on Khao San Road. Karen isn’t much of a book critic—she has dropped out of three book groups because the novels they choose are so grim and depressing—but she can say that The Killer on Khao San Road was fast-paced and entertaining. (Karen had no idea where Khao San Road was; turned out it was in Bangkok, and there were all kinds of elaborate details about that city—the temples, the flower market, the green papaya salad with toasted peanuts—that made the book just as transporting as watching the travel channel on TV.) Death in Dubai, however, was formulaic and predictable. Karen figured out who the killer was on page fourteen: the hairless guy with the tattooed mustache. Karen could have written a more suspenseful novel herself with just CSI: Miami as background. Karen wonders if Greer Garrison, the esteemed mystery writer who is always named in the same breath as Sue Grafton and Louise Penny, is coasting now, in her middle age.
Karen has carefully studied Greer’s author photo; both of the books Karen read featured the same photo, despite a nearly twenty-five-year span between publication dates. Greer wears a straw picture hat, and there is a lush English garden in the background. Greer is maybe thirty in the photo. She has pale blond hair and flawless pale skin. Greer’s eyes are a beautiful deep brown and she has a long, lovely neck. She isn’t an overtly beautiful woman, but she conveys class, elegance, regality even, and Karen can see why she never chose to update the picture. Who wants to see age descend on a woman? No one. So it’s up to Karen to imagine how Greer might look now, with wrinkles, some tension in the neck, possibly some gray in the part of her hair.