Friday Night
The rain has stopped, mostly, but even the lingering drizzle doesn’t impede Felicia Bradlee’s multiboat soirée. And why would it? Bankers and lawyers can rough it in hats and raincoats. They wear their slumming-it shoes. It makes them feel outdoorsy despite so many hours logged in conference rooms.
Bess sits on the bench of Kip’s Folly, a glass of white wine in hand, not a friend to be found. Flick is off humoring guests with work anecdotes and her brusque, infectious laugh. Palmer and Brooks are chasing Amory around, making sure she doesn’t drown in the marina. Bess checks her watch. It’s already past Amory’s bedtime and soon Bess will have no compatriots left at the party. The guest she invited never responded.
If that’s not humiliating enough, even her mother is missing. Cissy promised to attend, RSVP’d even (unlike certain local contractors), but in the end stayed home, leaving Bess to explain her absence.
To Aunt Polly and Uncle Vince: “She’s not feeling well.”
To Flick: “She’s being Cissy.”
And to Palmer: “The engineer told her a big fat ‘NOPE’ on moving Cliff House so she’s hunting down someone willing to give her the answer she wants.”
“Cis, you have to come,” Bess said earlier, as she rooted around her suitcase for something to wear.
She and Palmer picked up new tops and some “darling” wedge heels in town, but diaphanous silk blouses and slick-bottomed shoes weren’t going to cut it in that weather. A gross error in judgment when the party called for the delicate sartorial balance between looking decent and keeping warm, a formula that very much defined life on-island eighty percent of the summer. It’s something Bess should’ve remembered as the woman in the shop swiped her card. Summer People. They have no clue.
“Finding a new engineer is more important,” Cissy said as Bess settled on a cashmere white-and-navy sweater. “As for the party? It was a courtesy invite. No one really wants a sixty-year-old woman there. How come Yelp won’t let you expand the search to ‘entire eastern seaboard’?”
“Of course people want you there, Cis. And it’s rude to bail. You can’t say you’re coming and then not show up.”
“Felicia only invited me to be nice,” Cissy said. “Listen, my back is against a wall. You heard Mike. This predicament is time-sensitive. I’ll attend the wedding. That’s the main event. No one will miss me tonight.”
“Mom, people always miss you. You add a unique dimension to any gathering of two or more.”
Cissy peered out over her glasses.
“Don’t be fresh.”
And so Bess sits alone, on a boat, in a fog so thick she can’t even pretend to gaze wistfully out toward sea. At thirty-plus she should be okay with the solitude, and she is, for the most part. But it’d be nice to not feel so out of place.
Bess takes a sip of Chardonnay: the teensiest, tiniest, most minuscule bubble of a taste. It burns on the way down—more than it should, as Flick surely bought the good stuff. A punishment, Bess decides, though she isn’t sure for what. God, she is pregnant. Pregnant! Thirteen weeks almost. It’s inexcusable to be that far along.
She sets down her glass (glass, on a boat, for the love of all that’s logical) and glances around. Little groups of people wander up and down Old South Wharf, and Bess finds herself scanning the crowd for any meanderers of the male persuasion, approximately six foot two in height. After all, she didn’t request a response, she simply asked him to show up. But people around here only walk in packs.
As Bess returns her focus to the party, she accidentally provokes eye contact with a girl standing a few feet away. The stranger offers a small wave and makes a move in her direction. Bess flinches, but it’s too late to disappear.
The girl, a woman really, is in her mid-thirties, too, give or take. She wears skinny jeans and a gray cashmere sweater. Her hair is pulled back, thick and straight and blond like a horse’s tail. As she approaches, Bess recognizes her from somewhere. Choate? Boston College? Definitely not Nantucket High. She’s too shiny for that. Bess smiles, trying to dredge up a name, but can’t get it anywhere close to the tip of her tongue.
“Hi!” Bess says brightly, too brightly.
“Bess Codman in the flesh!” she says, right out of the gate, showing off her superior facial recognition skills. “So great to see you! You look fabulous.”
The woman leans down for a hug and then plants herself beside Bess.
“Gosh, thanks,” Bess says. “You, too.”
The woman is beautiful, though Bess doesn’t know whether it’s more or less so than before.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” the woman says. “Did you get glasses?”
“It’s not so much that I ‘got glasses.’ I’m just not wearing my contacts.”
“Oh, weird.” She makes a face. “Anyway, what have you been up to?”
The woman sips some reddish-pink concoction through a straw so as not to muddle her lip gloss.
“Uh, er, um…” Bess stutters. “What have I been up to?”
Choate. The woman has to be from Choate, since Flick went to Penn. Although maybe they took sailing lessons together at the club umpteen summers ago.
“Do you work?” the woman asks. “Stay at home? What?”
“Oh. Right. I work in an ED?”
The woman crinkles her nose.
“The Education Department?” she asks. “Is that in Washington?”
“No … no … the emergency … I work in the ER, in San Francisco.”
“Oh! A doctor!” The woman claps. “That makes sense. You were a total brainiac.”
“I was?”
“I work in publishing, which everyone thinks is so cool and so glamorous. People just mob me at parties, peppering me with questions, trying to tell me about some half-baked book idea.” She rolls her eyes. “Everyone thinks they can write a book. It’s so annoying.”
“That sucks,” Bess says, and looks down at her Chardonnay. She really wishes she could drink more of it.
“And, yeah, it sounds awesome and all,” the woman goes on. “But what you do! You save lives! That must be such a rush.”
“Um, thanks. Most of it isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a job, like anything else.”
Who is this person? The more Bess tries to remember, the more faces from her past jumble together.
“Just a job!” the woman trills. She takes several gulps of her red-pink swill. “Just a job, she says. Please! Anyway, it’s so great to see you! To talk to you like this! Hey. Whoa.”
She stops jabbering for a nanosecond and grips the edge of the bench.
“Is it me or is the boat rocking like crazy?” she asks.
“I feel okay…”
“Anyhow, I have a confession to make.”
She goes to pat Bess’s leg, presumably, but misses and whacks her hand on the bench.
“I was so intimidated by you,” she says, shaking out the injured hand.
“Me?” Bess snorts. “When? Why?”
Here is a gorgeous palomino with glacier-blue eyes and a foal’s gait. Bess has no real objections to her own looks, she is general-population attractive and med-school smoking hot, but this girl is full-stop stunning. Bess is more along the lines of Wednesday Addams with bangs. In other words, appealing only to specific tastes.
“At school, silly!” the woman says. “First of all, you’re Felicia’s cousin. Her older cousin, which was cool in itself.”
“Yes, older,” Bess says. “By all of one year.”
“Yeah, but I mean, it’s still older.”
“One year isn’t all that…” Bess shakes her head. “Sorry. Go on.”
How on earth could this person be intimidated by Bess when Bess was always with Palmer Bradlee, the girl who glided through life forever poised and beautiful and en pointe?
“You seemed so mature,” the woman says. “So dark and exotic.”
She reaches out and snags a chunk of Bess’s hair, which feels like a violation though Bess isn’t exactly sure why. You don’t go around petting strangers at parties, right? Or perhaps such social transaction came into fashion while Bess was working weekend shifts and trying to get divorced.
“Huh,” Bess says as the woman continues to grip her hair like a leash.
Though hair is nothing but dead cells, Bess swears hers is getting dank beneath this person’s hold.
“Then there’s the pièce de résistance, so to speak. The De Leudeville Affair.”
“Oh.” Bess clears her throat. “Right.”
Monsieur de Leudeville. The scandal that got one French instructor fired and one student kicked out of school. It was a shocking fiasco for anyone, especially someone like Bess.
“The De Leudeville Affair,” Bess repeats. “That sounds almost cinematic.”
“Everyone called it that. You know you’re involved in a juicy scandal when it gets its own name.”
Sometimes Bess actually forgets that she didn’t leave Choate so much as go down in flames. Bess can’t even remember if she told her ex-husband the story. But the De Leudeville Affair wasn’t an affair, not really. Yes, there was sex involved but it was more an excuse, a circumstance Monsieur de Leudeville himself walked right into. That this blond, drunk publishing person remembered Bess for him and not what happened before was the very point of the letch. And so: mission accomplished.
“He was pretty hot,” the woman notes, and glugs the rest of her drink. “For an old guy anyway.”
“He was twenty-seven. And into sixteen-year-old girls. So not that hot, when you think about it.”
Does he have to register as a sex offender? There never was a trial, so the answer is likely no.
“Wow,” the woman says. “That’s scary.”
“What? That he was a perv?”
“No. That if he was twenty-seven, what must we look like to teenagers?” She shakes her head. “Ugh.”
The woman stands. She sways as she works to keep straight.
“You always seemed so badass,” the woman says, going cross-eyed as she speaks. “A steamy affair and you had, like, no remorse. Zero. Felicia said they gave you the opportunity to exonerate yourself but it was like, no thanks!”
“It didn’t happen quite like that.…”
“Can I get you another drink?”
The woman waggles her own emptied glass as Bess glances down at hers, on the bench, still full.
“No, I’m fine. Thanks though.”
“Okay. Cool. I’ll be back. I want to know the details. Hell, you could write a memoir. Like, unapologetic, you know?” She contemplates this. “You were taken advantage of but you liked it. Or would that send a bad message?”
“Uh. Yeah. Very much so.”
“Hmmm,” the woman says, wandering off. “Hmmm.”
As the woman careens away, Bess reaches into her pocket, thoughts of de Leudeville evaporating at once. She checks her phone. Still no word from Evan. And why would there be? What obligation does he have to respond at all?
Bess stands, moves her glass to a nearby table, and turns to go. As she charges down Old South Wharf, the party’s voices and laughter tinkle in the distance. If anyone notices Bess’s abrupt departure, they don’t say a thing.