I took me nearly three years to relent and agree to accept Grayson’s constant proposals. I dated other men and had a few steamy flings, but I didn’t feel a whole lot for any of them. Nothing like what I’d felt for Jack—who never reappeared in Kennebunkport.
If it had been his face I saw in that window, he hadn’t stayed long. The Poiriers avoided me, and going by their house only made me sad. Life was easier when Claudette opened her own shop so we didn’t have to go to Jack’s neighborhood for fittings.
Aunt Livy was more than generous about buying me clothes. She’d managed to keep me on a strict diet, so now I was a size eight like her. I went to her hairdresser and people sometimes took me for her when I was on the tennis court. I got pretty good. I could beat most of the women at the club.
But never Aunt Livy, of course.
Hanging out with Grayson was comfortable enough. We worked together well and he made no demands. Every so often we’d get drunk enough to fall into bed together, and it wasn’t that bad. If we married, he’d be able to provide me with children. He’d probably even make a good father. Aunt Livy and Uncle Con wanted us to take over Goose Hill, so they could build a new modern house on the cliffs overlooking the beach—where the old guest house used to be.
Maybe it would help erase my horrible memories about Count Santa Claus. And the guilt I could never shake.
Dad was all for the marriage of course, since it meant he’d have a place at Goose Hill again. By the time Grayson and I decided to announce our engagement, Dad had been sober for almost three years. Grayson liked talking literature and politics with him. Together, we made something that almost resembled a family.
The only person who wasn’t into the plan was Wogs. The whole idea made her furious. She kept sending me feminist books and framed posters about letting your spirit be free. She was studying for a degree in counseling and knew all the jargon. She kept telling me if I suppressed my “authentic self” I’d end up a control freak like her mother or Alistair.
“They weren’t that different, you know—Alistair and my mom. Living a phony life can make you mean and crazy. You’ll lose sight of what’s important.”
Maybe that’s why Aunt Livy had liked Alistair so much. She saw herself in him.
Every so often Wogs would talk me into visiting her farm in Vermont, but for a place that was supposed to be all about freedom, it sure had a lot of rules. I pointed out we were all making compromises in order to survive in this big scary world.
But after we sent out the invitations to our engagement party—with a photo of Grayson and me inside—Wogs called me, totally frenzified.
“You can’t go through with this! Look at this photo—you’re not even you any more. She’s remade you in her image. She’s pushing you into a marriage just like hers. For god’s sake, run!”
She threatened not to come to the wedding. Said she’d never speak to me again. It was awful. After she hung up, I sat in my bedroom and cried.
The next day, Aunt Livy asked me if I’d had a phone call from Wogs. She said she had too, and advised me to ignore it.
“Polly will come to the wedding. Don’t worry. She’s just doing this to get at me.” Aunt Livy believed the world revolved around her. She and Alistair sure had that in common.
The next day, Aunt Livy invited me to go into town with her to Pierre’s, where she got the decadent desserts for her VIP dinners. She ordered us each a piece of chocolate amaretto cheesecake.
“But my diet…”
“Everyone needs an indulgence now and then.” She gave me a catlike smile. “Eat it with passion. Savor it. The memory of something wonderful and forbidden will give you more pleasure than a lifetime of cheap supermarket snacks.”
“So this is how you maintain? You have, um, forbidden indulgences every so often?”
I knew we weren’t just talking cheesecake here.
“Of course. And I have my memories. Just as you do. Alistair was a wonderful lover. You will always have that.”
Cheesecake solidified in my mouth. I grabbed my coffee to wash it down and looked away from Aunt Livy’s eyes—from the icy triumph I saw there. How did she know what Alistair was like in bed? Was she admitting she’d slept with him?
Her face went dreamy.
“I have my memories too. I loved someone very special a long time ago. We had our times together and they’re worth much more than a lifetime of boring copulation. Which is what most marriages are, you know.”
I was afraid she was right. I dove into the cheesecake, which looked gorgeous, but turned out to be tasteless and a little slimy.
On the day before the engagement party—a sunny afternoon in late May—I was gathering flowers in the rose garden when I heard the door of a van slide open in the driveway. I was expecting the caterers, so I went out to meet them.
But it wasn’t the caterer’s van. It was one of those public ride-about vans for the handicapped. A hydraulic ramp extended, and from the darkness inside, a bearded man in a wheelchair rolled himself toward me.
“Hello, Nick,” he said.
It took me about a minute to see past the tattered army surplus clothes and tangle of dark hair, but I would have known those eyes anywhere.
“Jack!” I ran to hug him. He didn’t give me much of a hug back, but it was difficult with him in the chair.
“Oh, my god, I’m so glad to see you. Please come inside.”
A thousand emotions zinged around my head as I tried to figure out how to explain Jack to Grayson, who was in the ballroom choosing table linens with Aunt Livy. And worse—how to explain Grayson to Jack.
Jack gave a pointed glance at the staircase leading up to the front porch. That’s when I realized his legs ended in loose, empty pants—no ankles or feet. For a moment, I couldn’t think of one thing to say.
“The back door….” I finally blurted out after the dreadful pause. No. that had stairs, too. “The garden! Come into the garden. Please. The rose garden—there’s a path.” I didn’t know if it was polite to offer to push his chair, so I didn’t.
Jack gave some kind of signal to the driver of the van.
“I’ll be back in a few.” He rolled beside me as I showed him into the garden.
“You look good Nick, but don’t they feed you around here? You look like Twiggy.”
I couldn’t make small talk. Words gushed out.
“I wrote to you. I wrote you a lot of letters. Did you ever get them?” I sat on a stone bench and faced him.
“I got a few. They sent them to me in the vet’s hospital. Took a while. I think I got the Christmas card around Easter. I stepped on a landmine the first month I was in country, and spent a lot of time getting shipped around to different hospitals.”
Tears choked my throat. Here I thought he’d been rejecting me and instead he’d been in hell. I reached for his hand, but he pulled away.
“Hey, I didn’t come to bum you out.” He reached into his pocket. “I came to show you something. Wogs said you had to see these right away. She came all the way to Mexico to pry me out of my weed-and-Tequila haze, so I guess it’s pretty urgent.”
“Wogs? Flew to Mexico to get you?”
“Yeah. I wrote and asked her to show you these herself, but she said it had to come from me.”
“You’ve been…writing to Wogs? Not me?” Now my tears weren’t just for him. “Why? Because of Alistair? Because of the scandal? Do you think I’m a scarlet woman—a killer nanny?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he handed me a yellow and black Kodak envelope with a stack of colored photos inside.
“No,” he said. “You’re not a killer, Nick. I always said so. Here’s proof.”
On the top of the stack was a photo of a man in late middle age, wearing an elegant white suit and a Panama hat. Another showed him hatless, in sailing gear. He was bald, but there was no mistaking that aristocratic face. So much like Alistair’s.
“Count Santa Claus?” My voice squeaked.
“Count Stansilaus Romer. Alive as you and me.” Jack rolled back and forth in his wheelchair. “Maybe more alive than me.”
My head roared. “But the blood. I saw him bleed.”
“Your bullet caught him in the earlobe. They can bleed like crazy. He still has the scar. He loves to tell people he got it in a duel. As soon as I heard him yakking away at the bar of El Cid, I knew who he was—and what happened.” Jack gestured at the packet. “Keep looking. There’s more. I have a Mexican buddy who takes pictures of the tourists for a few pesos, so I had him take a couple of rolls.”
I flipped through the pictures. One showed the Count on the beach with an easel, paintbrush in hand. Several pictured him with a woman. A slim, smiling woman. Because of her colorful Mexican dress, and sun bleached hair hanging long and loose, it took me a moment to recognize her.
I was looking at my Aunt Livy, smiling in a natural way I’d never seen.
“She supports him. Apparently the night he got shot, she snuck him out of here and flew him down to Mexico. A cushy little place on the beach in Mazatlàn. She’s been his lover ever since.”
I stared, as Aunt Livy’s words of last week made horrible sense.
“She and Uncle Con—they share him?”
“I don’t think Mr. Conway knows. That’s part of the deal.”
Another arrangement. Aunt Livy sure must resent Uncle Con if she’d let him think their shared lover was dead.
“What about my mom? He was screwing them all?”
“Who knows? He’s a gigolo. A con man.” Jack shrugged. “I’m sure it made him feel powerful to be lying to them all. That’s what he does. He lies. Nobody knows if he’s even a Count. Wogs thought maybe if you saw that, you’d know your Aunt isn’t happy in her marriage—that you wouldn’t be happy either, married to a guy like her dad.”
“He didn’t die.” I flipped through the pictures, trying to take in the enormous truth I held in my hands. “I. Did. Not. Kill. Count Santa Claus.”
“Wogs was afraid if your Aunt saw a Mazatlàn postmark, she’d keep it from you, which is why she made me deliver those in person.” Jack gave a rough laugh. “Probably Wogs wanted to get me out of that scene in Mexico, too. She thinks I’m a junkie asshole who’s ruining my life.” He gave a grim laugh. “Like it isn’t ruined already. But she thinks yours will go to shit too if you marry this Grayson dude. She said you’re shriveling up.” He looked me up and down. “She’s kind of right. Don’t you ever eat?”
I looked into his eyes. “How do you feel about it, Jack? Should I marry Grayson?”
God, I said it out loud.
“Only you know that, Nicky girl.” He rolled his chair around, moving toward the garden gate. “I gotta go. The van dude has to pick up another guy at four.”
“No! You can’t do this. You can’t just bounce into my life and out again.”
I followed him, but he kept ahead of me by rolling down the center of the path.
“You can’t leave, Jack!”
“My V.A. check goes a lot farther in Mexico. And people don’t stare so much.” He spoke over his shoulder as he wheeled away. “I explained everything to Wogs. She’ll tell you.”
Once he got to the pavement of the driveway, he wheeled amazingly fast.
“Please. Stay. Even if it’s just a little while. I’d rather spend a few days with you than a lifetime with Grayson Bell.”
I didn’t care who heard me.
Jack wheeled around and gave me a stare, his face taut with emotions I couldn’t read. Then he turned to call the driver, who lowered the ramp. As Jack was wheeled into the van, he waved an arm at Goose Hill—
“Look what you’ve got, Nicky Conway. It’s all going to be yours.”
Neither of us said a word as the driver helped him inside. The door closed with a slide and a thump and the van started down the hill.
I couldn’t stand it. I ran after them, calling Jack’s name.
Through a blur of tears, I watched until the van disappeared into the valley below. I wasn’t going to get a second chance at being with the only man I’d ever loved. It was as if I’d died with Alistair. As his beloved Fitzgerald said—“There are no second acts in American lives.”
I had to trudge back up to Goose Hill—the thing I was about to trade my life for. A house. I was just like Alistair Milbourne. I was accepting a house as a substitute for love. I was playing the Gatsby Game.