The Paper Palace(6)

“Understatement.”

“Did I do anything stupid?”

“Other than refuse to read the Shelley poem for Anna and pick a fight about Quakers?”

“Well, everyone agrees they’re basically fascists,” he says. “Such a violent people.”

“You’re an ass.” I kiss him on his lovely scruffy cheek. “You need to shave.”

He shoves his glasses up his nose, runs his hand through his curly dark blond hair, now graying at the temples, trying to make some order out of it. My husband is a handsome man. Not beautiful, but handsome in an old-fashioned movie star way. Tall. Elegant. British. A respected journalist. The kind of man who looks sexy in a suit. An Atticus. Patient, but formidable when angered. He can keep a secret. He rarely misses a beat. He’s looking at me now as if he can smell the sex on me.

“Where are the kids?” Peter grabs one of the large white sea-clam shells that line the screen-window ledge, turns it bowl side up, crushes out his cigarette.

“I let them sleep in. My mother hates it when you do that.” I take the shell from him, carry it into the kitchen, dump the butt into the trash, rinse it. My mother has almost reached the far shore.

“Jesus, that woman can swim,” Peter says.

The only person I’ve ever known who could beat my mother in a race was Anna. Anna didn’t swim across the pond—she flew. Left everyone behind her. I follow an osprey as it wings its way through the sky, chased by a small black bird. Wind ruffles the lily pads on the pond’s surface. They sigh, exhale.

9:15 A.M.

Peter is in the kitchen scrambling eggs. From the porch, I smell onions frying. A pile of thick applewood-smoked bacon drains its grease into a fold of paper towels on the counter. There’s nothing better than bacon and eggs for a hangover. Actually, there’s nothing better than bacon. Food of the gods. Like arugula and unfiltered olive oil and Patak’s Brinjal pickle. My desert-island-disc foods. That, and pasta. I’ve often fantasized about surviving alone on a desert island. How I would live on fish; build a tree house high off the ground, so that no wild animals could get to me; become really fit. In my fantasy, there’s always a Complete Works of Shakespeare that has somehow washed up on the beach, and with nothing else to do to pass the days, I read (and care about) every single line. I am forced by circumstance to at last become my best self—that supposed potential self. My other fantasies were prison or the army: someplace where I had no choice, where every second of my day was proscribed, where I was too afraid to fail. Self-education and a hundred push-ups and nibbled portions of dry biscuits with fresh water—these were my childhood dreams. Jonas didn’t come into the picture until later.

I wander into the kitchen and reach for a piece of bacon. Peter slaps my hand away.

“No picking.” He stirs shredded cheese into the eggs, grinds fresh pepper.

“Why are you using the deep saucepan?” I hate the way British people cook eggs. It’s obvious: a nonstick frying pan and lots of butter. This stupid, soupy, slow-cooking method leaves me a pan that is completely impossible to wash. I’ll have to soak it for two days. “Grr.” I poke him with a spatula.

Peter’s shirt is covered in splatters of grease. “Fuck off, gorgeous. I’m making the eggs.” He walks over to the breadbox, grabs a loaf of sliced bread. “Toast this, please.”

I feel my face redden, the sudden flush of heat as I picture my underpants crumpled behind the breadbox, a heap of black lace, the nakedness under my skirt, the way his finger traced a line up my thigh.

“Hello? Earth to Elle.”

My mother’s toaster holds two slices at a time. It burns the bread on one side, leaves it raw on the other. I turn the oven on to Broil and start lining up bread on a cookie sheet. I pick up a stick of butter, not quite sure whether to butter first or later.

“What’s our timing?”

“Eight minutes,” Peter says. “Twelve most. Go get the kids up.”

“We should wait for Mum.”

“The eggs will get tough.”

I look out at the pond. “She’s halfway back.”

“You swim, you lose.”

“K. You deal with the fallout.” When my mother feels slighted, she makes very sure everyone else in the vicinity feels equally afflicted. But Peter doesn’t give a shit about her shit. He just laughs at her, tells her to stop being such a loon, and for whatever reason, she takes it.





1952. New York City.


My mother was eight years old when her mother, Nanette Saltonstall, married for the second time. Nanette was a New York socialite—selfish and beautiful, famous for her lush, cruel lips. As a child, my grandmother Nanette had been wealthy—pampered by her banker father. But the Crash changed everything. Her family moved from their Fifth Avenue townhouse into a dark railroad apartment in Yorkville, where the one luxury my great-grandfather George Saltonstall still indulged in was his six p.m. vodka martini stirred with a long sterling silver spoon in a crystal shaker. Their eldest daughter’s beauty was the only currency they had left: Nanette would marry a rich man and save the family. That was the plan. Instead she went to a fashion design school in Paris and fell in love with my grandfather, Amory Cushing, a Boston Brahmin but penniless sculptor, whose sole collateral was a rambling old Cape house on the shores of a remote freshwater kettle pond in the Massachusetts woods. He had inherited the house and the pond from a distant uncle.