2011

The Monday after the Champions Ball Sandy brought the deerstalker hat with him to the Casino. He would give it back to Alice as a way of acknowledging what had happened without either of them having to say anything about it. He would give it to her with a softness—a gentle smile, a rueful look: something anyway—so she would understand he was sorry. Understand that he was still her friend, that they could still talk, go for rides and stuff, hey? But she didn’t stop by as she usually did. Not after Margo’s individual lesson, or the next day after her doubles league. When he asked Margo about it (“Hey, where’s Alice these days?”), she made cuckoo circles around the side of her head and said the girl was going off the deep end again. And when he pressed her about it—what did she mean? not, like, seriously the deep end?—she grimaced, shrugged like she’d had enough of Alice.

“I’m not my sister-in-law’s keeper,” she said.

So after a couple more days he took a deep breath and set out for the Redwood Library—was this a good idea?—walked the couple of blocks from the Casino down to the elegant eighteenth-century building with its wide lawn and stately trees, and went up to the main entrance. But as soon as he put his hand on the door he was suddenly sure that no, this was not a good idea. The deerstalker hat in his hand, the little speech he’d been writing in his head the past several days, his bare arms and legs (he was still in his tennis whites)—none of it was a good idea. So he had turned around and left, and on the walk back to the Casino gave himself a talking to. Wasn’t this just another type of killer instinct he lacked? He didn’t want to hurt people—he didn’t want to hurt her—but maybe sometimes you had to. There was no helping it. There was nothing short of kissing her, making love to her—loving her—that would make it all right. And he didn’t see how that was going to happen.

Back at the Casino, he grabbed a hopper of balls and went out onto one of the grass courts and hit serve after serve—slice, kick, twist, down the T—until a little crowd gathered. It was something to see, a pro doing what he could do.

And then it rained for three days. His lessons were off, and Aisha was down in Brooklyn minding her interns, so there was nothing to do but stay in the condo, stare out at the rain, make recipes from the owners’ diet cookbooks. He got so bored he read Daisy Miller again, struck this time with how clear it was that the girl wanted Winterbourne to kiss her. And what a dud Winterbourne was.

By the time he heard from Aisha—could he pick her up at the Amtrak station in Providence?—he had determined that he had to tell her what had happened. He hadn’t mentioned it to her yet, hadn’t in fact even seen her since the foggy night, hadn’t brought it up when they’d last talked on the phone because he had been still imagining Alice in a stupid-me frame of mind and not in a seriously deep-end frame of mind. But now somebody had to know, didn’t they? And he couldn’t see himself telling Margo—that felt too much like betrayal—and Tom he didn’t know well enough. It was Aisha who was her best friend.

But back in his condo after the motorcycle ride down from Providence, after they’d caught up, made love, started in on some truffles Aisha had brought back from Brooklyn, he got all messed up in the right and the wrong of it. Wouldn’t this just be a further trespass on the poor girl’s heart? You didn’t go around broadcasting someone’s failed gesture toward love, did you? But at the same time the thought of the girl harming herself, if that really were to happen . . . Couldn’t he tell Aisha what had happened without Alice ever knowing?

So he made some decaf to go with the last of the truffles and they sat on the sofa looking out at the shipyard, Sandy in his boxers and Aisha just out of the shower. She had a towel turbaned around her hair in that way women had, and she had on the silver necklace she’d been wearing earlier, a scimitar-shaped thing that cut from collarbone to collarbone. It was just dusk; they had the lights off, and out the big window the harbor was beginning to sparkle.

“Listen,” Sandy said finally. “This thing happened.”

And he did his best to tell her about it. About the ball, about the fog and the walk through the Point, about Alice drunk and the graveyard and what happened there. She listened quietly, thoughtfully, pursed her lips when he got to the kissing part, imagining—he supposed—her friend’s humiliation. And then he told her what Margo had said, and that he was worried about her, and that he thought she—Aisha—should know so that, you know, she could keep an eye out for things, for how Alice was acting and stuff.

He waited for her to say something, waited for her to give him a sorry look, to sigh Oh, boy! with a grimace for her friend. Instead she sipped her coffee and looked placidly out the window at the harbor lights, at the sparkling water and the grid of hotel rooms out on Goat Island. She spent a minute just sitting and thinking, running her fingertips up and down the length of the mermaid tattoo on her arm, and then turned back to him.

“You could’ve just kissed her,” she said quietly.

He wasn’t ready for that. “Kissed her?” he repeated and he made a face. He had upbraided himself for everything else: for not nixing the whole thing from the start, for not insisting on getting her a cab, for agreeing to be her date to the ball in the first place. But he had never once thought that he should have kissed her, kissed her and thereby—was this what Aisha was saying?—evaded the moment of humiliation, gotten through that night at whatever the cost, and then the next day have had something ready to say, some excuse, evasion, something to help her save face.

“You have to give things to Alice. Give the right amount and she won’t expect more. She understands things.”

He wondered at her. What was the “right amount”? How did you kiss Alice the right amount?

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Sure you can,” she said, turning to him. “You’ve made love to women you didn’t love before, haven’t you?”

She’d said “made love” with a little smile at him. For it was one of the Southern Gentleman things he said, like “geez” or “cripes.” He could never say “have sex.” She kept her eyes fixed on him a moment longer and then undid the turban from around her head, began pressing each individual dread dry. “With Alice you have to give what she’ll be grateful for,” she said. “Attention. Sympathy. You have to find the point where you’ve given her enough. And then she won’t expect more. And she’ll keep her side of the bargain.”

He struggled to maintain an even expression. He remembered Aisha more than once saying that she loved Alice. Was this her idea of love?

“Is that what you do?” he asked.

She stopped drying her hair, checked his face. “I haven’t made any secret of my dependence on her,” she said, and then as if challenging him to say otherwise: “I’m sure in certain quarters I’m seen as using her, as exploiting our friendship. I’m sure there are those who see me as a kind of remittance man,” she said with a little laugh, looking to see if he knew the term. “But it’s a fair exchange. I give as much as I get.”

“I know,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he did. Or if he did, he didn’t like the implication. “But I don’t need to keep Alice satisfied,” he went on a little stiffly. “It’s not a question of kissing her or not kissing her. Or kissing her ‘the right amount,’” he added, and he felt a little thrill at spurning her terms. “I’m not indebted to her. I only brought this up because I was worried about her. I thought someone should know.”

“Because you think she might injure herself.”

He fixed her with a look. “It might be the last straw,” he said. “You should know that better than anyone.”

She inclined her head as if acknowledging his point, then said carefully: “I wasn’t asking you to keep her ‘satisfied.’ I was asking you to be kind to her, to give her something. It helps her.”

Again he shook his head no. “That’s too dangerous,” he said, and he marveled at her. Did she really think that you could make love to Alice and that Alice would understand it wasn’t real love, that it was just “having sex,” and so would be okay with it? Did she think that Alice was like Margo that way, like—he had to admit to himself—like her, Aisha?

“I can’t do that.”

“Okay.”

“I like her,” he found himself saying. “I think she’s funny and—” and what?—“and I think she’s got a good heart, a deep heart,” he said. “If things were different—” And what did he mean by that? if he wasn’t sleeping with Aisha? with Margo? if she didn’t have cerebral palsy? wasn’t bipolar? “I just want to be her friend,” he wound up lamely.

“Okay.”

Except she said it like she was resigning herself to a shortcoming of his. Like he was too simple of mind, too simple of heart, to understand what she was saying. Were they—were all of them, Alice too?—so sophisticated, so counterfeit in their emotions, that they operated one or two steps removed from the substance of things?

“Just look in on her,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay.”

She clutched her shirt around her. “I’ve been doing that for ten years,” she said with a thin smile, and she went in search of the rest of her clothes. He watched, feeling like there was more to say, but what?

“Poor you,” she said when she was ready to go. She raised herself on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “All the girls fall in love with you.”

At which he tried to smile.

When she was gone, he stood at the big window looking out at the night harbor with the breeze coming in and for the first time acknowledged to himself how things were. He was sleeping with two women, neither of whom loved him. And then he immediately felt stupid—quaint—for thinking that. He might better ask himself, did he love them? Surely not Margo, but Aisha? Well, he had been waiting to see—a consequence of his rootlessness, of the shape he was in—waiting to see if something good might happen, if having sex might turn into making love. He had contented himself with thinking that things were just tentative with Aisha, that the constraints of silence and secrecy that had been imposed on them from the start were stunting the natural course of things. But that in simpler circumstances—and could not such circumstances come about once out of Newport?—they would be more free to find one another. And so he had held off scrutiny, kept at bay the misgivings that grew from the apparent ease she had at sharing him, the way she seemed able—and he said this out loud to himself, standing there gazing at the dark harbor, at the thicket of masts in the moonlight—the way she could take or leave him. She seemed to have no quotient of jealousy or possession. A good thing, right? But maybe not when you wanted to be possessed, when you wanted someone to smile and slip her arm in yours and whisper, “You’re mine!”

And how strangely passionless she was! He didn’t mean during lovemaking—that was a different kind of passion. But she was always on such an even keel. Nothing ruffled her. Even just now, what he’d told her about Alice, how calm she’d been! For all her far-out jewelry, and her mermaid, and her dreadlocks, she seemed to approach the world more like an MBA than an artist. It was as though upon meeting him she had wondered how he might be of use to her, and having figured that out, she was keeping him around for some motive that was not visible to him, but which was there all the same. Maybe he was just being snarky, paranoid, hurt, but he always felt that she was two steps ahead of him. That she was never just with him, but always weighing how this or that might play out. She was ambitious, he knew—she readily admitted it—but he could not see how he figured into her ambition. Or maybe he had hold of that by the wrong end of the stick. Maybe he didn’t figure into her ambition and that was the problem. She wasn’t going to saddle herself with someone who was so distinctly not going anywhere. Which meant she was not so far from Margo as he had thought.

“They’re using you, douchebag,” he said to the reflection of his face in front of him. “They’re having sex with you,” he said, and the reflection had no answer to that.