Isabel settled in at the Messengers’ McLean estate the following day and on Tuesday began to paint Ron Messenger. Her sessions with him were extremely interesting. He was polished and urbane and smacked of old family, New England prep-school, and Harvard, yet there was something very real about him that Isabel liked very much. His interests were art, architecture, and antiques, and his conversation was both enjoyable and stimulating.
Hilda Messenger was a little too much the professional Washington wife for Isabel to feel completely at ease with her. She was a highly polished specimen of a highly polished type, and she made Isabel feel her own rough edges too acutely. But Isabel had to admit that she was very pleasant and went out of her way to be kind.
It would have been an ideal situation, in fact, were it not for Leo. Or rather, the lack of Leo.
Finding time with Leo alone did not prove as easy a task as Isabel had anticipated. The Messengers were very social people and they expected to include Isabel in most of their activities. It was absolutely awful, seeing Leo in the busy whirl of a dinner party, and then leaving him to go home with the Messengers.
It wasn’t until Sunday that they had the chance to be together. Isabel told the Messengers that she and Leo were going to golf and then have dinner. Leo picked her up at one o’clock and they went, not to Chevy Chase, but back to Georgetown. They spent the afternoon in bed.
“This is an impossible setup,” Leo said later. Much later, the sun had set and it was dark outside.
“I know,” said Isabel dismally. “I didn’t reckon on the ferocious Washington social instinct when I made my brilliant plan.” She turned her head to look at him. “I felt like a sixteen-year-old sneaking out to meet a forbidden boyfriend today,” she said with an attempt at humor.
His lips smiled, but his eyes darkened. He picked up her hand and began to play idly with her fingers. “How is the portrait coming?”
“Very well. Ron is a darling. I’m having fun doing him.”
“That’s good.”
“Oh, Leo,” she said miserably and, turning, buried her face in his shoulder. “It’s all such a mess. I can’t stay here like this. It’s impossible.”
“Yes.” He sounded tense. “It is.”
“I’ll be finished with Ron in another week. The work is going well.”
“I see.”
She sat up and shoved her hands into her hair, pushing it back off her face. “I’ll have to go back to New York,” she said flatly. “At least for a while.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I have to, Leo,” she said a little desperately. “My work is back there. Even if I got another commission, I can’t keep on doing portraits indefinitely. That’s only a small part of what I want to do. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Oh, yes, I understand.” He put his hands behind his head and regarded her with veiled blue eyes. “I own half an island,” he said, seemingly at random. “It’s off the coast of Island Views. Ben and the development company own the other half, but I wanted to keep a part for myself. I spent the whole summer there last year. It’s not modern at all; in fact, it’s pretty primitive. But it’s totally private and quiet. Ben hasn’t even started developing the other half yet.”
It was very quiet in the room. “Yes?” said Isabel.
“Would you come and spend the summer with me?” he asked.
“Oh, Leo.” She smiled, radiant. “Oh, darling, I’d love that.”
The shadowy look about his mouth lifted. “Would you, honey? It’s not much more than a shack.”
She laughed. “Then I’ll be right at home. The plumbing can’t be worse than it was in the apartment I grew up in.” She put her hands on his shoulders and bent over him.
“Plumbing?” he said. “Who said anything about plumbing?”
“Leo!” Isabel’s eyes widened in horror.
“I said it was primitive.”
“Oh, well,” Isabel said resignedly, and bent down to kiss him lightly. Her black hair fell about them like a tent. “You Tarzan, me Jane.”
He chuckled. “There’s plumbing. And electricity too.”
She pulled back a little. “Then why tease me?”
He slid his hands into the heavy silk of her hanging hair. “I just wanted to see how much you loved me,” he murmured.
“Very much,” she said softly, and bent forward to kiss him. “Very much indeed ...”
The conversation ended for quite some time.
* * * *
It was April when Isabel finally got back to New York. The apartment, when she let herself in, looked like a place remembered from another life: strange and familiar all at once. She was in the middle of unpacking when Bob came home.
“Isabel!” He gave her an affectionate hug when she came out into the hall to greet him. “How are you, stranger?” he asked.
“Fine.” Their eyes were almost on a level and she smiled into his. “How are you?” She frowned. “You look like you put on weight.”
“Thanks a lot,” he retorted. “I’m not even in the door and she’s telling me I’m fat.”
“I didn’t say that. The extra weight is very becoming.”
“Liar.” He gave her a look of mock injury. “It’s all the meals I’ve been eating out.”
“Italian food,” Isabel said instantly. She knew his weakness.
“I’ve been at Mama Theresa’s four nights a week,” he confessed with a grin.
“There’s nothing in the refrigerator. I already checked. What did you plan to do for dinner tonight? Mama Theresa?”
“No. Tonight we are going to Gramont’s for dinner.” This was said very firmly and Isabel’s eyes flew open.
“Bob! That’s a fortune!”
“I know,” he said complacently. “But as you are now a famous painter and I am a junior partner, I think we can afford it.”
Isabel’s face lit with pleasure. “Bob, you got the promotion. That’s great. By all means, Gramont’s it is.”
They ran into one of the senior partners from Bob’s firm at the restaurant, and he insisted that Isabel and Bob join him and his wife for dinner. The senior partner had a difficult time taking his eyes off Isabel, commenting at least four times on how well she was looking. The senior partner’s wife spent her time extolling the virtues of marriage. Isabel and Bob bore up as best they could, but the dinner was not the one they had envisioned.
“Well, at least we didn’t have to pay,” Isabel remarked to Bob in the taxi on the way back home. The senior partner had insisted on picking up the check.
“True.” His voice sounded a little muffled and she turned to scrutinize his profile. “Don’t mind Mrs. Shore,” she said softly.
He made a visible effort to shake off his preoccupation. “I thought Mr. Shore was going to eat you up,” he said humorously.
Isabel laughed.
“There is something different about you, Isabel,” Bob went on. “I noticed it right away. It’s as though all those banked fires have suddenly burst into flame.”
“Oh, dear,” said Isabel, and bit her lip.
He didn’t say anything until he had paid off the taxi and they were walking together into their apartment building. “Is it a man?” he asked then, quietly. She darted a quick look at his face. “You don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not,” he said evenly.
“Yes,” she said. “It is a man.” There was a pause. “As a matter of fact, it’s Leo Sinclair.”
“Leo Sinclair!” He stopped abruptly and stared at her. Then he began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked mildly.
“You are,” he said. “How serious is this?”
He opened the apartment door and they both walked into the entrance hall. “I’m going to spend the summer with him on an island in South Carolina.”
“On an island in South Carolina. God,” he said, “I’ll be a blimp by the time you get back.”
Isabel didn’t know whether she should feel glad or sorry at his instant assumption that she would indeed be coming back.
* * * *
Isabel rented a loft on New York’s Lower East Side and spent the spring months organizing her paintings. It was absolute bliss working in her own place. For the first time in her life, she told Bob, she felt like a professional.
She missed Leo and kept herself busy in order to hide the ache. In the back of her mind always was the promise of the summer.
At the beginning of July, Isabel left for Hampton Island. She flew into Savannah and Leo met her at the airport. They left the car at one of the Island Views docks and boarded a small boat moored nearby. Isabel’s luggage filled one-half of the tiny vessel.
“There’s no regular ferry service to the island,” Leo told her as he started the boat’s motor. “Not yet, at least. Once Ben gets moving, of course, there will be.”
“No cars?” asked Isabel.
He smiled. “No cars.”
“Sounds blissful,” she said, and leaning back in the boat, she let her eyes devour him.
He had already been on the island a week, he had told her, trying to get things shipshape. He was very tanned and his hair looked even lighter than she remembered. When she first saw him at the airport, her heart had given a tremendous leap and it hadn’t quite calmed down yet. They had greeted each other casually, conscious of possible watching eyes, and their conversation thus far had been such that it could have been overheard without embarrassment by a roomful of total strangers.
The trip to the island took ten minutes. Isabel gazed at the surrounding water, marsh, and sky when Leo’s voice said, “There’s the island. Over yonder.”
Oveh yondeh. How she had missed the sound of his voice. She looked obediently to where he was pointing, and in another minute they reached a small dock. The air was filled with the scent of pine.
Leo tied the boat up and, balancing easily, stepped up onto the dock.
“Can you hand me up your luggage?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Isabel, and reached up her cases; most of them contained painting equipment. Then he held out his hand to her. When she landed on the dock next to him, he reached out with his other hand and pulled her close.
“I missed you,” he said fiercely, and kissed her, hard and long.
“I missed you too,” she said breathlessly when finally he released her. “June went by so slowly.”
“That it did.” He moved from her with obvious reluctance. “Well, let me show you our palatial estate.”
“My bags?” said Isabel, and gestured.
“No trouble, ma’am,” he drawled. “We just pile them in this little old wheelbarrow here,” which he proceeded to do efficiently, “and we’re on our way.”
Isabel laughed as she followed him up the sand-and-shell road into the pines. He pushed the wheelbarrow before him with a jaunty cockiness that she loved.
“This is how we get the groceries from the boat to the house,” he informed her.
“My God,” said Isabel. “Do you have to go to the mainland for all your food?”
“Yep. There’s a developer’s office on the other side of the island and there are cabins here and there, but they’re all deserted. It’s been years since the last families moved away from here.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“No jobs. There used to be farms here—and fishing, of course. But the young didn’t want to stay and the pines grew back over the farmland.”
Isabel saw a small cabin-like house appearing in front of them. It looked a lot more substantial than she had been led to believe. There was a screened porch on the front, and inside, Isabel discovered three rooms: a living room, bedroom, and kitchen. The furniture was old and solid. There was a stall shower in the bathroom. The walls in the living room were paneled in white pine.
“This is lovely,” Isabel said as she walked around. “Did you build it?”
“No. It’s been here for years. I’ve done some renovations, that’s all.”
“I love it,” she said.
He stood against the door watching her. “I kind of thought you might,” he said, drawling a very little more than usual.
Isabel gazed at him, her dark eyes luminous in her thin, intense face. “I love you,” she said.
His shoulders came away from the door in a kind of a lunge and then he was across the room and holding her in his arms. Isabel closed her eyes and stopped thinking. Her whole life seemed to have narrowed down to this room, this man, this moment. His mouth was hard on hers, his hands moving possessively over her breasts, her waist, her hips. She felt his desire, felt also the unnamable, irresistible force in him that called so strongly to something in her. Her head was pressed back against his shoulder and his lips left her mouth and moved, searingly, to her exposed throat.
“Isabel,” he muttered. “God. Isabel.” And suddenly she was swept by fire. Her whole body shuddered and she clung to him fiercely. They almost didn’t make it into the bedroom.
“Would you like to go down to look at the beach?” he asked softly a very long time later.
She had been sleepily watching him in the golden sunlight of late afternoon, and now she raised heavy eyelids and smiled faintly. “If you like.”
He stretched and stood up. “Yes,” he said. “I want to show you. You’ll love it.”
God, Isabel thought, watching him. I wish I were a sculptor. “All right,” she said, and with some reluctance got out of bed herself.
They walked down another path through the pines and came out on a wide and silver beach. The surf rolled in blue splendor and the dead stumps of trees scattered here and there rose in fantastic formation across the wide sweep of sand. It would make a wonderful painting.
Isabel was very quiet. “It’s marvelous,” she said at last.
He looked pleased and, without speaking, held out his hand. Isabel put hers in it and together they walked along the water’s edge, talking in the low unhurried voices of perfect intimacy. They walked for almost an hour before they returned to the house for a late dinner, after which they retired immediately to bed.
* * * *
They swam together for the first time the following morning. Isabel had bought a flowered maillot suit in Altman’s before she left New York; its deep and dramatic hues suited both her figure and her coloring. Leo wore light blue bathing trunks and she looked appraisingly at his shoulders and arms as they walked down to the beach.
“I should have thought you’d burn, you’re so fair,” she commented.
“I watch it the first few times I’m out, and then I’m okay,” he said. He was a beautiful golden color and Isabel smiled ruefully.
“I have never even had a red nose,” she said. “I start off the summer tanner than most people are by the end of it.”
“Don’t brag,” he said, and Isabel raised her arm and regarded the smooth olive-toned flesh. She sighed.
“I’m not. I’ve always wanted to be pale and pretty.”
“You are neither.”
“So gallant, Senator,” she murmured.
“You’re not at all pretty,” he continued peacefully. “You’re beautiful. It’s a very different thing.”
Isabel grinned. “It’s also in the eye of the beholder, but I thank you, sir. You have redeemed yourself.”
Reaching the beach, they dropped their towels on the sand and went down to the water’s edge. There was a mild surf and the water was warm.
Isabel was not a strong swimmer, and she spent most of her time diving through the waves and riding the bigger ones up onto the beach. After playing with her for a while, Leo went out beyond the surf and began to swim. He struck off parallel to the shoreline, and after a few minutes Isabel went back to sit on the beach and watch him. He came out of the water half an hour after she did.
Handing him a towel, Isabel watched as he toweled his hair dry. His golden-brown flesh was glistening with drops of water, and his breathing was only a little faster than normal. He had swum a very long way down the beach and then back.
“Did that feel good?” she asked, and he grinned and dropped down beside her.
“Yep. How about you?”
“I love the water. I don’t swim very well—I can do about the length of a pool before I poop out-— but I love the surf. When I was a little girl, my folks used to take me to Rockaway on the weekends. We’d make a picnic lunch and take the subway. My father and I would be in the water all day.” Her face was bright with remembrance. “My mother used to call us water rats.”
She drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “One summer, when I was ten, we took a bungalow at Breezy Point for two weeks. The beach there is fantastic. Daddy used to say, You can travel the world over, but you’ll never find anything better than the Long Island beaches.” Her face changed, and so did her voice. “Then Mother got sick.”
“How long was she sick?”
“Eighteen months. They gave her the works— chemotherapy, radiation. All it did was make her terribly sick. And then she died anyway. Daddy never got over it. Never.”
“That was his failure, not yours.”
“I suppose.” She drew in a deep, uneven breath. “I haven’t thought of that vacation at Breezy Point for years.”
“It isn’t good to remember only the unhappy things,” he said.
She turned her head so that her cheek rested on her knees and her eyes were looking at him. “No, it isn’t. In fact, it should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?”
“I reckon it should be, honey.” There was a note of tenderness in his voice. “I reckon it should be.”
* * * *
The month of July passed, perfect in sunshine, drenched in love. Isabel painted every morning on the beach, and she knew she was doing the best work of her life. Leo had a veritable library of books and reports he wanted to get through, so he would stretch out next to her in a sand chair, read, and make notes while she painted. After lunch they would swim. Sometimes Leo did chores around the house and sometimes they took the boat out and fished or went over to Island Views to shop or play golf. It was an idyll out of time, and it wasn’t until they were a week into August that Isabel began to think of the future as well as the present.
Time. It was the snake in the garden, she thought as she sat in a mainland laundromat one hazy August afternoon, watching the clothes going around in the dryer. If only the summer could be like that dryer, she thought, endlessly going around, never forward.
There was a click and the dryer went off. Isabel sighed. “Nothing’s eternal, I guess,” she said out loud, and went to remove and fold the clothes. She was just finishing when Leo came in. He had been to the supermarket while she did the laundry.
He carried the basket of clothes out to the car for her and they drove back to where Leo had docked the boat. It was after five by the time they got back to the island and had everything put away in the cabin.
Leo went out onto the porch to look at the sky.
“It’s going to storm,” he said to Isabel. “How about a walk before dinner?”
“Okay,” she replied, and they both left the house and strolled along in companionable silence down to the beach, looking at the gathering clouds in the sky.
“Do you still have the car keys?” he asked her suddenly. She had been the one to lock up the car before getting into the boat.
She put her hand into the pocket of her seersucker shorts. “Yes. I do.”
He put out a hand. “Better give them to me now, while we’re thinking of it. I don’t want to spend another hour searching for them because we’ve both forgotten where they were.”
Isabel stared at that strong, brown hand. A few lines from Andrew Marvell went through her head like a refrain:
But at my back I always hear
Times wingèd chariot hurrying near.
Quite suddenly she felt the need for action.
“Try and get them,” she said, and laughing, took off down the beach. She glanced around quickly to see if he was following her and then she raced along the hard-packed sand. It was a full minute before she realized she was running alone. She slowed down a little, stopped, and then turned to look for Leo.
He stood a hundred yards up the beach from her, hands in the pockets of his summer slacks, staring out at the water. Watching him, Isabel felt her throat constrict painfully.
He couldn’t catch her. He was one of the fastest running backs ever to play the game of football, and he couldn’t catch her. Damn, thought Isabel violently. Damn, damn, damn. Why did I have to run?
Very slowly she walked up the beach until she was near enough to see his profile. He looked very calm. His hands, she noticed, were still in his pockets.
“You’ll get no sympathy from me,” she said fiercely. “None. You did it to yourself.”
“I know.” He sounded weary. “But strangely enough, that doesn’t make it any better.”
Abruptly Isabel turned her back on him. After a minute she began to walk very slowly back the way she had come.
“Isabel.” His hand was on her shoulder, forcing her to turn to face him, revealing to him what she had hoped to conceal: the drenching tears that were pouring uncontrollably down her cheeks.
“Oh, honey,” he said softly. “Don’t.” And he took her in his arms.
She turned in to him and reached her arms around his waist to hold him tight. “Does it still hurt?” she wept into his shoulder.
“The psychological pain is much worse than the physical,” he said into her hair. “And as you so justly pointed out, the fault is mine alone.”
In answer she pressed closer to him and shivered. A few fat raindrops fell on their heads. There was the sound of thunder in the air.
“The storm is starting,” Leo said. “Come on, we’d better get back to the cabin.”
It was raining hard by the time they reached the house, a heavy tropical rain that soaked them through. They went into the bedroom, and as the storm raged and the thunder crashed, they made love with a passion that was scarcely less wild and primitive than the elements outside.
At last the thunder and lightning subsided, leaving only the rain. Leo flung open the bedroom windows and the sound and smell of the rain filled the room. Isabel lay back against the pillow and watched him.
But at my back I always hear— No! she thought. I won’t think about that. I’m only going to think about now.
Leo came back to the bed and she smiled and held her arms out to him. Lying down beside her, he buried his face in the smooth hollow between her breasts. Isabel ran her hand through the golden tangle of his hair, listening to the rain.
Nothing can take this away from me, she thought. No matter what happens, I’ll always have the memory of this moment.