The Paper Palace(104)

Maddy and Finn come running over and clamber around him, flocking to him like baby ducks. He swats a mosquito that has landed on his left arm, opens his palm to show the kids that he got it. And in that tiny gesture, I feel an overwhelming sense of relief. And of gratitude.

I head past the living room to the upstairs bathroom. A few of the older crowd have come inside. They are sitting around a fire, engrossed in a conversation about birdcalls.

“For me, it’s the chickadee. Chick a dee dee dee . . . So sweet. Like little hopping bits of corn,” someone is saying.

“The chickadees are disappearing from our property in droves,” I hear Andrea say. “I’m convinced it’s the neighbor’s cat. They refuse to bell it. I’ve called the National Park Service, but they insist there’s nothing to be done.”

“I’m partial to the blue jay’s screech.” I hear Martha Currier, her deep, raspy southern accent. “Though I know that puts me in a minority.”

Dixon’s house has two staircases. The wide stairs I climb now lead to the formal part of the house—the grown-ups’ side. Here the rooms are beautiful, elegant. Each of the guest rooms has antique wallpaper—sprays of pale rosebuds or lily of the valley against a robin’s-egg blue. The master bedroom has always been my favorite room in the world. As a child, I used to dream that one day I would have a room exactly like it. Hand-painted wallpaper with lush white peonies drooping in jade-green leaves; a romantic canopy bed, eyelet curtains, a worn wide-board floor; a fireplace with a neat stack of wood and kindling beside it; a claw-foot tub in the bathroom.

The kids’ stairs are steep and dark with no banister—just the close press of walls on either side to steady you. They lead directly from the kitchen to the “dorm”—a loftlike room with high windows and bunk beds lining every wall. This was the sleepover house when we were kids, the place where we could sneak in boys for spin the bottle, smoke clove cigarettes. The only way to access the dorm from the grown-ups’ part of the house was through a Jack and Jill bathroom that we could lock from our side.

The guest bathroom is occupied, so I go to use the one in Dixon’s bedroom. When I open the door, my heart sinks. Andrea has redecorated. The old-fashioned peony wallpaper has been stripped, the room painted in an eggplant tone. The beautiful canopy bed is gone, replaced by a beige-linen upholstered bed, plank floors tastefully covered in herringbone sisal. There are matching mid-century dressers and Simon Pearce glass lamps. I could kill Andrea. I only need to pee, but I’m tempted to take a shit in the toilet just to make a point.

Instead, I go down the long hallway to where it dead-ends at the Jack and Jill bathroom. I am locking the door behind me when the dorm-side door opens and Gina steps inside.

“Hey,” she says, as if meeting in a bathroom is perfectly normal. She pulls down her jeans and sits on the toilet.

I stand there, mute. He is here is all I can think, heart racing, breathless.

Gina grabs a wodge of toilet paper and wipes herself. “When did you guys get here?”

“Maybe half an hour,” I manage to say. “We walked.”

“We weren’t planning to come, but his mother was threatening to make a tofu stir-fry.” She flushes the toilet and stands up to zip her jeans. She has a full Brazilian. A sudden self-conscious worry blazes through me as I picture my own old-fashioned pubic hair. Did it bother Jonas? Turn him off? He is used to something else. Smooth, childlike.

“Your turn,” Gina says.

I cannot look at her. I cannot look away.

She opens the medicine cabinet and finds a tube of Neosporin, squeezes some on the tip of her finger, takes a Band-Aid out of a box. “I did something to my foot earlier,” she says. “Just a little scratch, but it hurts like hell, and now there’s a blood blister. Jonas thinks I stepped on a crab.”

I watch her rub ointment on the wound in a tidy circular motion. She peels the little strips off the back of the Band-Aid, stretches it over what is clearly a nothing scratch, smooths both ends over her skin just so—lovingly. I’m fascinated by the care she gives herself, the importance of every gesture. It’s like watching one of those women who actually brush their teeth for the full two minutes. I wait for her to leave, but she takes a lip gloss out of her back pocket, leans in to the mirror. I have no choice but to sit down and pee with Gina two feet away, underpants around my ankles, the barest weight of Jonas’s ring nudging me through my dress pocket.

“I forced Jonas to drive here,” Gina says, making a pout, checking that her lips are perfect. “By the time he got home, it was the total witching hour for mosquitoes at our place. God knows where that man disappears to.”

My pee stops midstream in a tiny gasp, before starting again. Gina turns, looks at me, at if she is considering something. I still myself, like a deer sensing a hunter in the blind.

But she smiles. “You won’t believe this, and I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I used to think it was you.” She dries her hands on a guest towel. “It seems so ludicrous now. I actually followed him once. Turned out he’d been trying to find some osprey nest all summer.” She laughs.

“He loves these woods,” I say, and reach for the toilet paper.

Crossing the dorm on our way back downstairs, Gina says, “Have you seen the new master? Andrea did an amazing reno. She finally convinced Dixon to get rid of that hideous wallpaper. They’re gutting the kitchen next.”