On the beach at Dogfish Bar, Whitney wept from exhaustion, an aching sense of loneliness and loss. Finally, the shudders wracking her body subsided, and the tears dried on her face. She was all cried out.
What was she now, Whitney wondered, but a strung out girl with an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, her resources too paltry to navigate the nothingness she faced. Then she recalled her journal.
Writers write, Ben had quoted his professor. It’s like breathing—it’s what they do.
Whitney opened it, staring at the next blank page. Then, haltingly at first, she began to write her future.
Her parents sat on the porch in what struck Whitney as a tableau of their former life, Charles reading the Wall Street Journal, with Anne beside him working a crossword puzzle. Regarding them in silence, Whitney felt less anger than sadness, an odd feeling of compassion that she wished seemed more like love than the desire not to jar their fragile hold on this pose of a calm, contented couple. From beneath their veneer, both parents eyed her warily, as though a volatile new element had been added to the play, an ingénue who improvised her lines. With what struck her as exaggerated care, Charles folded the paper in front of him, and Anne placed the crossword puzzle on the coffee table beside her glass of orange juice.
“I’m leaving,” Whitney told them. “This afternoon, I think.”
Fear stole into her mother’s fixed expression. “With him?”
“No. I’m going to Manhattan to look for a job. In publishing, if I’m lucky, but I’ll take whatever will support me.”
“When did you decide all this?” Charles asked peremptorily.
“A few hours ago. But it’s the only thing that feels right to me.”
“I assume you’ll be moving into the apartment.”
Whitney shook her head. “That was for Peter and me, so I’d feel much better if you sold it. I want to make it on my own.”
Anne struggled to comprehend this. “But how will you live, and where?”
“I saved up money from all those summers as a camp counselor and what Grandfather Padgett gave me. I’ll have to make that last to my first paycheck. As for where, I can sleep on friends’ sofas until I find a place.”
Anne gazed up at her in dismay, eyes suddenly moist. “This is so very different than what I imagined for you.”
“Me, too,” Whitney said, then smiled a little. “But it’s not like I’m moving to Nairobi—lots of girls do this. In a week or so, I’ll call to tell you how I am.”
Charles studied her closely, as though discerning something he had not seen before. “Please do,” he said firmly. “You’re not an orphan, Whitney.”
“I know,” Whitney answered softly. “Believe me, I know.”
Her mother looked perplexed, as though searching for her role in Whitney’s new life. “Let me help you pack,” she said at last. “Hopefully we can pick out some clothes suitable for the city.”
Before leaving, Whitney took the path toward Ben’s house.
She did this without knowing her reasons, or what she would say, but that it would feel cowardly just to vanish. Only when she neared his place did she acknowledge the unpredictable part of her that still craved him, and that might impel her to change course.
On the bluff overlooking the guesthouse, Whitney stopped.
Clarice Barkley stood at Ben’s door, her blond hair skimmed back to accent her perfect features. After a moment, he opened it. From a distance he looked surprised—or so Whitney tried to imagine. Then he nodded, and let Clarice inside.
Shoulders slumping, Whitney closed her eyes. Perhaps this was nothing. But she sensed a new dynamic that felt somehow inevitable; she had taken her father from Clarice, herself from Ben, and now their anger at her might feed the attraction between this young man and woman to whom, so recently, Whitney had felt close. Like Whitney herself, Clarice symbolized what Ben must want in spite of his professed loathing—the life of privilege he had never known, the freedom to cross the boundaries that divided a girl like Clarice from the boy who waited on her table. “Poor Scott Fitzgerald,” Ben had once remarked, “forever admiring the rich, like a boy with his face pressed against the window of a debutante’s mansion.” Perhaps Ben understood Fitzgerald all too well. And though Clarice might never tell him of her affair with Charles Dane, through Ben she could exact her quiet revenge on both Charles and his daughter.
Before this moment, Whitney thought, she might have weakened. If so, Clarice had kept her from ever becoming Ben’s wife. Then Whitney had one more intuition: that whoever he married—and she suddenly knew that it might be Clarice—the woman would suffer many hours of regret.
Standing there, Whitney fought back tears. Perhaps she was wrong; perhaps she only imagined all this. But whatever the truth might be, she had cried enough.
Beyond the guesthouse, the water glistened in the sun. It had been a long, golden summer, one that might have ended with her wedding. Now her present had parted from her past. There was no mending the rift; all she could do is move into the future armed with nothing but her own heart and mind.
Turning, Whitney walked blindly away, putting one foot in front of the other, each step taking her towards another life. This was all that she could do, or knew to do, until, in some unknown place and time, she met the woman she would become.