White Ivy(40)
With a pang of conscience, Ivy thought that she should visit Clarksville more, at least to see Meifeng, who had raised her, and Austin, who was shutting down like an overloaded computer—
Meifeng beckoned her close. “Do you really have boyfriend or was that lie for your mother?”
“I do.”
“Listen. Kevin isn’t so bad. I know you think he’s ugly but looks aren’t everything. Look at your father. Beauty is the wisdom of women; wisdom is the beauty of men. Jojo’s son is already three—”
Ivy slammed the passenger door shut. I’ll never leave Boston, she vowed.
* * *
NAN’S PHONE CALLS the next few weeks were peppered with references to Kevin. He’d brought over expensive ginseng for Meifeng. He’d called to ask after Shen’s cold. He took Austin to play basketball at the YMCA.
Ivy thought of the black Acura, the pulsing sounds of bass and rap as the tires screeched haughtily into the dark night, and bitterness filled her at the idea that even filial posterboy Kevin led a wilder life than she. Ten times a day, she would glance at the little plastic clock hanging above the classroom calendar and agonize over each passing minute… and yet when she looked back on the month, she thought it’d gone by quickly. But to where?
Only on the weekends with Gideon would she feel truly alive. Everything was vibrant, the sensory pleasures—licking melted butter off her fork, crushing grapes beneath her toes, the red globes bursting like fish roe—raw and exciting. The grape crushing had taken place during a wine-making tour outside the city. There were many excursions to wineries that April and May, for wine tasting and wine bottling and wine buying. Sometimes, she and Gideon went alone, sometimes with Tom and Marybeth. Those weekends were a blur of dark cellars, laughter echoing through pungent air, Gideon’s constant hand on her arm—steady now, he’d say, smiling, his crooked teeth beautiful, and she would bite his cheek, emboldened by fumes, he tasted like salt and soap.
Then there were the clubs: the Yacht Club, the Racquet Club, the Algonquin Club, the UClub. Tom had memberships to all of them and often dragged the group along for a morning of squash or tennis. Drinking commenced at noon. Later, Ivy would recount to Andrea the pompousness of these places—gold-framed paintings of cocker spaniels, ancient documents displayed in glass safes, various suits of armor standing guard at the bottoms of spiral staircases carved with Latin crests—but it was easy to fall back on middle-class sensibilities and ridicule the wastefulness of the rich while standing with Andrea at a buffet line in Quincy. Ivy found it impossible to feel anything but fumbling ineptness when socializing among these old-moneyed Mayflower families, who held tradition as life’s highest tenet. Tom Cross could laugh at his own pretensions but Ivy couldn’t laugh. She didn’t know the difference between tradition and pretension. Laughing here would only reveal her own obtuseness.
But as long as she was amenable and admiring, there were many new experiences available to her. On the last Saturday in May, she and Gideon went with Tom and Marybeth to a horse ranch Marybeth’s aunt owned in New Hampshire. Ivy was flying—she literally flew into the air, holding on for dear life, but she managed to clear her first fence on the back of her glossy chestnut-colored mare. Time slowed down: the glossy strands of Marybeth’s ponytail streaming in front of Ivy like a torch, Tom and Gideon cheering from the sidelines, their faces blurry and handsome, the smell of grass and sounds of birds chirping, and the image of her own figure, smartly dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots, reflecting back at her in the split second the mare leapt. “Today was my perfect day,” she told Gideon later when they were back at his place getting ready for bed.
“You were so brave jumping that fence,” he said. “The look of pure determination. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ivy couldn’t hold it in anymore. “We are serious about each other, aren’t we?” she said.
He seemed surprised. “Of course. Sorry, were we supposed to have the talk?”
“Talk is for losers.” She swung her leg to straddle his lap. He’d exchanged his contacts for black-framed reading glasses and when she slid them off his face, she saw the indents on his skin from where the nose pads had pressed, in the shape of little footprints, and her heart nearly broke with love to glimpse him unexpectedly in such nakedness.
He lifted a strand of hair from her neck and let it slip through his fingers. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Ivy listened to the sound of running water. Her entire body ached from riding all day but still she felt restless. Since Valentine’s Day, she and Gideon had slept together eleven times, all sober, earnest, do-you-like-this-or-that sex, and if she thought really hard, she could even list every single kiss. After all, she’d initiated most of them. Gideon was rarely physically demonstrative with her in public, but in her experience, men like that tended to be wild creatures in bed. But for whatever reason, he was holding back. Sometimes, like tonight, when he looked at her with eyes hooded, arms crossed, mouth tight with self-control, she was sure he was suppressing his desire for her, but she did not know why. In her crazier moments, she wondered if Gideon had such bizarre tastes that he was afraid to lose himself in front of her. His deference, his courtesy, his decorum—traits she’d once loved about him—now stood in the way of her getting closer to him.