The Perfect Couple(57)

Shooter pulls a flask out of his back pocket and hands it to Celeste. She eyes the flask. It’s alcohol, she assumes, but what kind? She is far too cautious a person to drink without asking. But in the moment, she doesn’t feel like being cautious. She feels like being daring. She accepts the flask and takes a swig: It’s tequila. Celeste drinks tequila only when she’s with Merritt, although personally she thinks it tastes like dirt. This tequila is smoother than most, but even so it singes her throat. However, an instant later the tension in her neck disappears and her jaw loosens. She takes another slug.

“I carry that because I hate flying,” Shooter says.

“You?” Celeste says. “But don’t you fly all the time?”

“Nearly every week,” he says. “The first time I flew, I was eight years old. My parents were sending me to summer camp in Vermont.” He leans his head back against the seat and stares forward. “Every time I fly I have an atavistic reaction to the memory of that day. The day I realized my parents wanted to get rid of me.”

“Were you a very naughty child, then?” she asks. She sounds exactly like Merritt, she realizes.

“Oh, probably,” Shooter says.

Celeste hands Shooter back the flask. He smiles sadly and takes a slug.


Later, Celeste will think back on the twenty hours she spent on Nantucket with Shooter alone as the kind of montage they show in movies. Here’s a shot of the airplane bouncing and shaking during turbulence and Shooter raising the window shade in time for Celeste to see bolts of lightning on the horizon. Here is Shooter taking Celeste’s hand, Celeste imagining her parents’ reaction when they are informed that Celeste has died in a plane crash. Here is the plane landing safely on Nantucket, passengers cheering, Shooter and Celeste executing a perfect high-five. Here are Shooter and Celeste climbing into a silver Jeep that Shooter has rented. The sky has cleared, the top of the Jeep is down, and Shooter takes off down the road while Celeste’s blond hair blows behind her. Here is Elida, the summer housekeeper, meeting Shooter and Celeste at the front door of the Winbury property, known as Summerland, and informing them that Mr. and Mrs. Winbury have also been detained in New York but that they should make themselves at home; she, Elida, will return in the morning.

Here is Celeste acting nonchalant when she enters the house. It’s a palace, a summer palace, like the monarchs of Russia and Austria used to have. The ceilings are soaring, the rooms are open, bright, airy. The entire thing is white—white walls, white wainscoting, whitewashed oak floors, a kitchen tiled in white with pure white Carrara marble countertops—with stunning bursts of color here and there: paintings, pillows, fresh flowers, a wooden bowl filled with lemons and Granny Smith apples. Celeste would say she can’t believe how glorious the house is, with its six bedrooms upstairs and master suite downstairs; with its uninterrupted views of the harbor; with its glass-walled wine cellar off the casual “friends’” dining room; with its dark rectangular pool and Balinese-style pool house; with its two guest cottages, tiny and perfect, like cottages borrowed from a fairy tale; with its round rose garden in the middle of a koi pond, a garden that can be accessed only by a footbridge. Shooter gives Celeste the tour—he has been coming to Summerland since he was fourteen years old, over half his life—and hence his attitude is charmingly proprietary. He tells Celeste that he used to have a terrific crush on Greer and had near Oedipal dreams about killing Tag and marrying her.

“Essentially becoming my best friend’s stepfather,” he says.

Celeste shrieks. “Greer?” Celeste likes Greer, but it’s hard to imagine her as the object of teenage lust.

“She was so beautiful,” Shooter says. “And she doted on me. She was more my mother than my own mother. I think she would probably write both of her sons out of the will and leave this place to me if I asked her nicely.”

Celeste laughs, but she’s beginning to believe that Shooter might have the ability to disrupt primogeniture and overturn dynasties.

Here is Shooter pouring Celeste a glass of Greer’s wine and opening one of Tag’s beers for himself. Celeste feels like they’re teenagers throwing a party while their parents are away. Here is Shooter opening a can of cocktail peanuts, then paging through the Nantucket phone book and making a call behind closed doors. Here are Celeste and Shooter clinking wine glass to beer bottle as they sit in Adirondack chairs and watch the sun go down. Here is Shooter going to the front door, paying the delivery boy, and bringing a feast into the kitchen. He has ordered two lobster dinners complete with corn, potatoes, and containers of melted butter.

Celeste says, “I thought it was pizza.”

Shooter says, “We’re on Nantucket, Sunshine.”

Here are Celeste and Shooter after dinner and after several shots of Tag’s absurdly fine tequila headed to town in a taxi to the Chicken Box, which is not a fast-food restaurant but rather a dive bar with live music. Here are Celeste and Shooter dancing in the front row to a cover band called Maxxtone who play “Wagon Wheel,” followed by “Sweet Caroline.” Here are Celeste and Shooter pumping their fists in the air, chanting “Bah-bah-bah!” and “So good! So good! So good!” Here are Celeste and Shooter stumbling out of the Chicken Box and into another taxi that takes them back to the summer palace. It’s one thirty in the morning, which is later than Celeste has stayed up since she pulled all-nighters in college, but instead of going to bed, she and Shooter wander out to the beach, strip down to their underwear, and go for a swim.