Indiscretion

Every year Claire’s mother returned to Paris to visit her parents, bringing Claire and her brother. Claire hated these trips. She found her grandparents old and distant, relics of another century, another life. What she liked best were the walks through the streets and parks of Paris. It was a world unimaginable to her classmates, who had barely been beyond the aging factories that surrounded their town, and who considered Boston as distant as the moon. She would see French boys her age and pretend that she was meeting them, that they were waiting for her. They would let her smoke their cigarettes and ride behind them on their motor scooters, her hands clasped tightly around their thin, hard bellies. Instead she and her mother and brother dutifully toured the Louvre and visited cafés where they would invariably order the prix fixe. Once, for a special treat, their father joined them, and they traveled down to Nice for a week by the beach. By then her grandfather was dead, and her grandmother had become even more remote, sitting in an old chair by the window in that familiar, oppressive room amid stale biscuits and the smell of decay. That had been the last trip. Shortly after, her parents divorced.

Her father remarried. He moved to Belmont, and before long his wife gave birth to a daughter. He was starting over. Claire was sixteen. She lived with her mother in their old house and communicated with her father on holidays and birthdays. By the time she went off to college, two years later, she had learned that love did not give itself freely. That if she wanted it, it had to be taken. The protective shell that had been slowly growing around her finally hardened into place. She did not resent her father. She only knew that neither of them had much to say to each other. A few weeks after she had moved to New York he had sent her a small check. In a brief note he had written I hope this will help you get started, but she had left the check uncashed for many months, despite her low salary, and finally tore it up. He never mentioned it to her.

When Claire was in college her mother moved back to take care of her own mother. After the old lady died, her mother inherited a little money and the apartment, which she sold. She did not remarry. Claire had visited once. Her mother was living outside of Paris in the former royal city of Senlis, in a little apartment near the cathedral. She looked older but more serene. Around her neck she wore a small gold cross. They were more like two old friends chatting than mother and daughter. When Claire left, her mother embraced her but said nothing.

All that was years before. Now Claire was a member of that tribe of independent females, working without guarantees or guidance in the city, hoping to find love and, if not love, success or something like it. She was not promiscuous but she was available, which explains Clive and the men who had come before him and would no doubt follow.

The traffic had been worse than Claire expected. When she arrives at Clive’s house they are already late for dinner. “You took your bloody time getting here,” he says, offering her a perfunctory kiss. He is already dressed, a glass of champagne in his hand. He does not offer her one. “Sorry, traffic,” she says, hurrying into the bedroom to shower quickly and change.

Five minutes later she is rushing down the front steps, carrying her shoes while Clive waits in his car, the motor already running. “All right?” he says, barely waiting for her to close her door before accelerating down the drive, spitting gravel over the grass. She will swipe lipstick across her mouth and brush her hair in the car. “I told you it was silly to drive out,” he says. “I would have been happy to collect you at the station.” She ignores Clive’s rudeness. It is not him she has come to see.

When they arrive at the Winslows’, it is still light. In the west the sky is turning a startling mix of orange and purple. Harry greets them at the door. He is unconcerned about the time. “Come on in,” he says, his hair still wet from the shower. His light blue shirt clinging damply. His nose is sunburned. “Look at that sunset,” he says, presenting it like a gift.

Claire offers him her cheek and feels his lips lightly brush her skin. “Thank you so much for having us,” she says. “I was so happy when Clive told me.”

“Our pleasure,” responds Harry. “You made a big impression on Maddy. Let me get you guys something to drink.”

The house is more magical to her than before. There is no crush of party guests talking, laughing, flirting. Tonight it has reverted to its own quiet, private self, a house where a family lives, where secrets are shared and kept. On the wall she sees a small painting she hadn’t noticed before. A seascape. On a faded, elaborately carved frame a tiny brass nameplate with the name of the artist. Winslow Homer. She is surprised and impressed. Claire wishes she could inspect everything, study the photographs, learn the language.

Harry is at the bar. We have a running joke. Whenever one of us or, as it happened once, all of us find ourselves in Venice, we go to the famed Harry’s Bar right off St. Mark’s and swipe an ashtray or coaster to bring back to the bar here. On the wall is a photograph of Harry standing proprietarily in front of the frosted double doors, grinning madly. Maddy took the picture on their honeymoon.

“Wonderful day today,” he says. “Ned rented a boat in Montauk and we each caught a shark. Jesus, it was incredible.”

He uncorks a bottle of wine, wincing. “Cut the hell out of my hand, though.” Harry holds up his palm. Claire and Clive can see it is red and blistered. Calmly, gently, Claire reaches out and takes his hand and holds it in her own, running her fingers over the ravaged skin.

“It must hurt very much,” she says.

“Oh, it looks worse than it is.” His hand escapes to the glass. “Most of the red is iodine.”

“What did you do with the shark?” asks Clive.

“Going to have it mounted. Hang it on the wall over there. It’ll be quite the conversation piece. You know what people are like out here. It’ll drive ’em nuts,” he adds, laughing.

They walk outside to the porch. On the lawn Ned is throwing gentle spirals to a little blond boy. Claire recognizes him as the boy with the flashlight from the night of the party. They stop when they see them, and the boy waves.

“That’s Johnny,” says Harry. “Johnny, come here and say hello to our guests.”

The boy runs to them, his tanned legs long and skinny like a colt’s. Claire sees he has his mother’s blue eyes above a sun-freckled nose.

“How do you do?” he says in a soft voice, putting out his hand the way he has been taught. But he is a shy boy. He does not look them in the eye.

“How do you do, mate?” says Clive.

“Hello, Johnny,” says Claire, squatting so she is at eye level with the boy. “I’m Claire. How old are you?”

I am studying her. She is good with children. It is obvious. I imagine she must have worked as an au pair during college. She would have been their best friend.

“Eight.” His voice is nearly inaudible, but at least he is looking directly into Claire’s eyes. “But I’m almost nine.”

“Almost nine? That makes you very grown-up. I’m twenty-six. What do you like to do? I like to sail and read books.”

“My daddy writes books.”

“I know. I read his book. It was wonderful.”

Johnny smiles. Harry puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. “All right, buddy. It’s time for your supper. What do you say?”

“Good night. It was nice to meet you.”

He goes into the house. Claire watches him go, already in love. He is my godson.

Ned comes up. Despite his size, he is surprisingly quick. I have seen him play tennis. He can still beat men years younger and many pounds lighter. “Hey there.” To Harry he says, “He’s getting a good arm. He’ll make the team yet.”

Harry smiles abstractedly. Claire senses he is thinking about something else. “Hockey players can do everything football players do, but we do it on ice and backwards,” he says. Then to Claire and Clive, “You should see Johnny’s slap shot.”

“Only girls slap.” Ned grins.

They speak in the shorthand of their youth. The two ex-jocks. Members of DKE. Harry was on the hockey team. In his senior year, he was captain.

I remember long, cold nights in Ingalls Rink, huddling under a blanket with Maddy, sharing my flask of bourbon, watching Harry skate. He was good, very good. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. His hair was longer then, blonder. He would look up at her every time he scored a goal, seeking her approval, knowing in his heart that he already had it. Already they were inseparable.

Madeleine Wakefield was the most beautiful woman at school. She was the most beautiful woman anywhere she went. Men hovered around her but she had become inured to such attentions. Magazine editors and photographers had asked her to model, but she always said no. To her, beauty was nothing earned. It was a fact, like being left-handed, and it was nothing she ever thought about. While the other girls would dress up for parties, borrowing clothes from roommates, pulling earrings that their mothers had given them for a special night from the backs of their drawers, Maddy never tried. Her normal costume was an old shirt of her father’s, a baggy sweater, blue jeans. Still, wherever she went, the men would forget their dates and stare at her, although few of them were bold enough to approach her, sensing there was something different about her, incapable of knowing the true self beneath that beauty.

I knew, of course. We had always talked about going to Yale together, but after her girls’ school in Maryland and my prep school in Massachusetts, the reality was almost better than the dream. She had a car back then. A vintage red MG convertible that had been a present from her grandmother, with the plates MWSMG. Freshman year had been a blur of weekends in Manhattan, nightclubs, and bleary last-minute dashes up I-95 to make it, hungover and hilarious, to classes on Monday morning.

And then, in our sophomore year, she fell in love with Harry. We were in different residential colleges. He in Davenport, Maddy and I in Jonathan Edwards. We had seen him, of course. In Mory’s, where he was usually surrounded by his friends, drinking beer or celebrating his latest victory. He was popular and, honestly, it is impossible to imagine him otherwise. Maddy instantly disliked him, which I should have known as a sign. “He’s very full of himself,” she had said, on those nights when it was just us, which it was most nights. She wanted to make fun of him and to despise him for what she saw in herself. But, in hindsight, it was like watching two lions circling each other. It would have been either death or a lifetime together.

Maddy and I remained friends—how could we not? She had been my late-night companion since she first climbed out of her second-story window so we could go catch fireflies together. As children, we would walk our bikes silently down the gravel drive and meet for midnight escapes on the beach, where we made fires out of driftwood and listened to the waves lap the sand while we shared our most intimate thoughts and dreams.

We had to be careful, though. My parents were often away, and I would be left alone in the care of Genevieve and Robert, the childless Swiss couple who took care of the place. Genevieve was short and stocky and cooked. Robert drove and looked after the garden. Both of them were in bed by ten and assumed I was too. I was an only child, pudgy and bookish, so they hardly would have imagined I had this secret, nocturnal existence. Madeleine’s father was more of a problem. He would have beaten her if they had caught her sneaking out. Not that it would have stopped her.

One time we were playing tennis and I saw the welts at the tops of her thighs when she bent over to pick up a ball. He had used a belt. I wanted to do something but she swore it was nothing and let’s play another set. God, she was brave. She still is.

The dinner is marvelous. Fresh swordfish, tomatoes and corn, hot bread, and ice cream, washed down with cold, steely white wine. Maddy has a special way of grilling the fish using pine branches that gives it a wonderfully rich taste. We sit under round paper lanterns, outside on a small, screened-in porch off the kitchen. There are more men than women so I sit between Clive and Cissy. Cissy is very funny. Small, blond, she can talk for hours. She is from outside Philadelphia, the Main Line. She and Ned have been trying unsuccessfully for years to have a baby. I admire her toughness, her lack of self-pity.

Clive keeps trying to quiz me about my clients, but I put him off. When I grow tired of his insistence, I ignore him completely and listen to Harry tell one of his stories, which, if I recall, was about the time when he was seventeen and drove his car into a tree on purpose to collect the insurance money. He had even borrowed a pair of hockey goalie pads for protection. The car was an old heap, and he had hoped to make about five hundred dollars. He thought thirty miles an hour would be a good speed, not too fast or too slow, but the impact was so great, it knocked him out.

“The next thing I know,” Harry says, “there’s a cop knocking on my window with his nightstick wondering just what the hell is going on and why am I wearing hockey pads in the middle of July?”

We hoot with laughter. Claire, on Harry’s right, is in paroxysms of delight. She had been helping Maddy in the kitchen and is the first to jump to her feet to help clear. She is showing off a little, letting us know she is more than just Clive’s latest mistress. We are all of us in our forties, and we can’t help but be a little enchanted by her potent combination of youth, beauty, passion, and brains. It turns out she does the New York Times crossword puzzle, which is one of Harry’s favorite distractions too. They groan complicitly about the creeping influence of pop culture in the clues. They argue over a book review they both recently read, and share a passion for Mark Twain. Is this the best night of her life? I think so.

Clive is not part of this. He dislikes not being the star. This crowd is not impressed by his Aston Martin or his fancy watch or the last time he was in St. Bart’s. He doesn’t really belong here. Claire doesn’t belong with him either. I am willing him to leave.

After dinner we play charades, something else at which Harry excels. By midnight everyone is drunk and Harry stands up and says, “It’s time.” I know what he means, of course. As do Ned and Cissy. Maddy just rolls her eyes.

“Time for what?” asks Claire, but already the others are in motion.

“Time to go to the beach,” Cissy says over her shoulder. “We do it after every dinner party.”

“You all go on without me,” declares Maddy, remaining in her chair. “Someone has to stay here with Johnny.” I could have offered to stay. I normally do. But not tonight.

“Come on,” says Claire, pulling a bewildered Clive to his feet and dashing out the door to the Winslows’ old red Jeep. In the front seat, next to Harry, Ned is carrying a bottle of wine. He is slurring his words a little. Cissy is sitting on his lap. Claire and Clive pile in beside me in the backseat. The house is a short drive to the beach, under five minutes. This time of night the beach is deserted. The moon lights a path across the water for us. The sand is cool beneath our feet.

Harry runs down to the water’s edge, pulling off his shirt and then dropping his trousers until, naked, he rushes whooping into the dark water. Ned and Cissy follow close behind, Cissy shrieking as she dives in. I am slower, but suddenly beside me, Claire is undressed as well. I can’t help but notice her body in the moon glow, her young breasts, the roundness of her hips. I catch a glimpse of a triangle of dark pubic hair. It happens in an instant, of course. One second she is standing beside me, the next she is in the water. A surge of desire seizes me as I watch her run. It is just Clive and I now. I pull off my trousers. “Bloody hell,” he mutters and strips too. We dive in together.

At night the ocean always seems so much calmer. It is like a big lake, the waves barely more than ripples. The water is waist-high. Most women would be crouching in the water, concealing themselves. But not Claire. It is becoming apparent to me that she is not most women. Harry and Ned are having a splash fight, like a couple of boys. She joins in, laughing, splashing hard. It is impossible not to watch her. Clive stands off to the side, as though he were an interloper and not Claire’s lover. Then Cissy climbs on Ned’s shoulders and gracefully dives off. “I want to try that,” says Claire. But instead of climbing on Ned, or even Clive, she glides behind Harry and grabs his hands. He squats obediently under the water while she places her feet on each shoulder. He lifts her easily, and she balances for a moment, drops his hands, and throws her arms out and her head back before smoothly diving off. When she comes up, she wipes the wet hair from her face and yells, “I want to do that again!”

Once again Harry squats, his back to her, and she confidently mounts. And again, she drops his hands and balances, but this time she wavers and falls with a splash into the water. Harry helps her up. “Careful,” he says with a laugh.

“My favorite lifeguard,” she pronounces with a laugh and gives him a wet kiss on the cheek and a quick hug, her nipples grazing his chest. “Once again you’ve saved me from drowning.” She stands back in front of him, as if to say, Look at me. This could be yours. I can’t remember if anyone else noticed the moment. I tried to catch Ned’s or Cissy’s eye, but they were in the middle of doing another dive.

Harry says nothing and looks away as Clive comes up.

“Let me show you how it’s done, mate,” he says.

Claire pulls away from him, but he squats down, saying, “Come on.”

She climbs up without looking at him and just dives off, straight and clean. When she comes up, she says, “Can we go? I’m getting cold.”

The moment has passed. Claire wades back out of the water, shoulders hunched forward, an arm covering her breasts, a hand in front of her loins. She looks at nobody. No one looks at anyone as we hurriedly pull our clothes over our wet bodies. Our mood is postlapsarian.

We drive back to the house in silence. Even Cissy is quiet. When we get out, Claire and Clive hang back. It is obvious they are going to have a fight. The rest of us go inside.

That’s not entirely true. I linger just out of sight and overhear snatches of what they say. “Don’t touch me” and “Stupid cunt” and “Why don’t you just fuck him then?”

She comes in, crying, running past me to the kitchen. To Maddy.

“Is everything all right?” asks Harry. I say nothing, and Clive is standing in the hallway, looking angry. He wants to follow her but knows he can’t, an unbeliever in the temple.

Madeleine comes out. “Clive, Claire seems very upset. I know it’s late, and we’ve all had a lot to drink. But she asked if she could stay here tonight, and I told her she could.”

Clive stares at her, unsure of what to say, of how to react. The words he wants to say fail in his throat. His will is not as strong as Maddy’s.

She senses his frustration and puts a hand on his arm. “She’ll call you in the morning.”

When he gets outside the house, he will find his words again, he will rage, he will think black thoughts, call them all names. But not now. Standing before him is Madeleine, looking like a Madonna. Behind her, Harry, Ned, me. He has no chance. Now all he says is “Tell that cunt I don’t want to see her again,” and he leaves, his car spitting gravel as it drives off.

Inside, Maddy has her arm around Claire, who is apologizing over and over. Her face is wet with tears. Maddy consoles her. We all do. Or at least try to.

“See, I told you I didn’t like him,” I say, but all the thanks I get is a dirty look from Madeleine.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Harry tells Claire. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. If you need us to get your things from Clive’s, I’ll run over tomorrow. For tonight, we can loan you anything you need.”

“Thank you,” she sniffs.

“We are going to have to put you on the couch in the living room, if that’s all right. Ned and Cissy already have the guest room. We’ll get you pillows and sheets. You’ll be snug as a bug.”

I am about to suggest that she would be welcome to stay at my house, as there are plenty of empty bedrooms, but then think better of it.

“Please don’t go to any bother. I don’t mind at all. You’re being so kind. I just feel like such a fool.”

“Not at all,” says Harry. “I’ll be right back.” He goes upstairs and returns several minutes later with pillow, sheets, blankets, a towel, and a large gray T-shirt with the words YALE HOCKEY on it. “I figured you could use something to sleep in.”

Cissy and Madeleine begin to make up the couch. Harry wanders into the kitchen and starts rinsing glasses. I debate having a last drink but then decide against it. It’s already past one in the morning. Instead I say my good-byes, kiss Maddy good night, tell Claire to sleep well and that everything will look better in the morning, and head out to the familiar path that leads through the narrow strip of trees that separates our two houses.

I can imagine Claire, having calmed down, thanks to a few gulps of brandy, getting under the covers on the couch. Madeleine would be there, making sure her newest charge is comfortable and well looked after. Ned, Cissy, and Harry would have already gone up. Then Maddy would have left too, turning off lights, leaving Claire alone in her temporary bed, staring up at the ceiling, happy as a child.

3

SEVERAL WEEKS PASS. SUMMER RAGES ON. THE STREETS OF Manhattan bake in the fierce sunlight. To Claire, the breezes and salt water of Long Island are just a memory. She has been banished to the ordinary world, one inhabited by coworkers, college friends, deliverymen, strangers on the subway. Like Eurydice, she will never again walk in fields of flowers.

Claire has not seen the Winslows. There is no reason why she should. She returned to the city the day after her fight with Clive. Harry and Ned had gone to Clive’s to get her bag and retrieve her rental car, but when they pulled up, no one was home and her possessions had been thrown into the front seat.

Even though Harry and Madeleine had asked her to stay and been so kind, she felt like an intruder, a stranger taken in under false pretenses. She would forget about them. Their lives, which had temporarily intersected with hers, would now continue along a different path.

I thought about her on a few occasions during the days that followed. Hers was an unfinished story, and I wanted to know more of it. What would she do? What turns would her life take? And then it seemed she had disappeared for good.

Until one night Harry announces to Maddy and me over dinner in the kitchen, “I meant to tell you. Guess who I saw today?” He had been in New York, lunch with his agent, a few errands. “Claire.”

“How is she?” asks Maddy.

“She looked well. I was walking out of the restaurant and talking with Reuben, and all of a sudden, I almost knocked her down. What are the odds of that?”

“I liked her,” I say. “Poor thing was wasted on Clive. What a horse’s ass.”

“Maddy liked her too, didn’t you, sweetheart? At least I thought you did. We were standing there chatting about this and that, and she asked warmly after you both, and Johnny, and Ned and Cissy, and she looked a little blue, so I thought, what the hell, and invited her out for the weekend. At first, she said she couldn’t, but I insisted. Hope you don’t mind. She needs being taken in hand. Maddy, you’re just the person to do it, too.”

Maddy does love a project. Even as a child she was always taking in strays. I remember sitting up nights with her, helping her watch over a dying rabbit or chipmunk which the local cat (my cat, incidentally, but she never blamed me for it) had eviscerated. She would keep them warm, use an eyedropper to give them water, and inevitably bury them in the woods in one of my mother’s shoe boxes.