After leaving Charlie’s house, Adam drove to the dock of Menemsha Harbor. Ignoring the raw weather, he sat hunched on the pier, staring sightlessly at the battered fishing boats as he pondered Charlie’s questions. He needed to be alone; he did not want his thoughts broken by the emotional static that pervaded his mother’s home.
He wanted Carla—this much he knew. He could imagine making love to her, the intense desire to reach her essence, break down the walls between them. But his feelings were too complicated, and he feared the harm he might cause them both. Nothing he could do felt right or certain. In his life, Benjamin Blaine had done great harm; now Adam feared being too much like him. He felt angry at Charlie Glazer, and untrusting of himself. The inquest hovered over him like an albatross.
After a fruitless, dismal hour in this mental cul-de-sac, the piercing cold forced Adam home. When he arrived, the kitchen phone was ringing.
Clarice Blaine answered it. Her face was expressionless, her tone cool; for a moment he imagined that, against reason but out of some deep need, Carla had called him. Then his mother handed him the phone, saying in her most arid voice, “It’s Rachel Ravinsky.”
Surprised, Adam took the phone. “Enjoying the day?” he asked.
Rachel laughed. “Not really. I was feeling cold even before announcing myself to your mother. She has a lovely way of reminding me I’m Whitney’s daughter.”
Adam glanced at Clarice, who had resumed putting away dishes with an inscrutable expression intended to speak volumes. “You wanted to experience winter,” he reminded her. “I suffered it for years. Hope it doesn’t spoil your writing.”
“Actually, this weather is part of why I’m stir crazy. But the real problem is writing a first novel. I’ve typed in lots of words, most of which form sentences. But it still feels like trying to catch lightning in a bottle—while blindfolded.”
“Sounds dire.”
“Desperate, actually,” she agreed with mock dismay, which, Adam sensed, was deployed to mask her genuine doubts. “And against all odds, I’m becoming tired of myself. But then I saw that you were home, and hoped you might divert me.”
“Saw,” Adam wondered to himself, then realized that her mother’s guesthouse, where Carla lived, was no doubt visible to Rachel. Warily, he asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Catching his reserve, she answered, “Nothing which would complicate your life—unless you have some qualms about allowing a sad and lonely woman to take you out to dinner. I’m hoping you can cure me of seasonal affective disorder.”
Adam could find no graceful reason to refuse. “Where should I meet you?”
The lilt of relief entered Rachel’s voice. “I’ll pick you up about 6:30.” She laughed again, more softly. “If it’s awkward, you can wait for me on the porch. Even without me, your social life must be a sore point.”
She was a provocateur, Adam thought again, and this banter was a form of playfulness, meant to keep him off balance while satisfying her deeper curiosity. But part of him was grateful for this distraction. Blandly, he said, “I try to bring happiness everywhere I go. See you at 6:30.”
Hanging up, Adam caught his mother smiling to herself.
Rachel drove him to the Harborview in Edgartown. It had been dark since 4:30; by 7 o’clock, the darkness was so profound that it felt like midnight. The great houses they passed along the waterfront were vague shadows, abandoned for the winter, and the lighthouse across from the hotel was black against the starless sky. Parking, Rachel observed, “It feels like we’re the last two people on earth.”
This was strangely true. Entering the restaurant, they saw only a few couples, most of them looking stunted by the relentless embrace of winter, the certainty of three more months like this to come. “These are our fellow survivors,” Adam informed Rachel. “By morning they’ll all be dead from nuclear poisoning, leaving us to represent mankind by ourselves.”
Rachel shot him a grin. “Mankind could do worse. Actually, I think I saw that movie—Nicolas Cage’s finest performance, adduced by the great auteur Michael Bay. All that kept it from greatness was the screenplay.”
They sat by a window, its panes squares of black. There was no one near them, and the small candle on the table lent an air of intimacy. “So why are you home?” she asked. “Not that I mind, but I had the impression you’d be gone much longer.”
Adam was tired of reciting his story, and felt no need to do so. “My tour was up. This hasn’t been the easiest stretch for my family, so I decided to take some leave while the company works out the next contract with USAID.” To change the subject, he requested, “Tell me about the novel. Has retreating to the Vineyard helped or hurt?”
Rachel frowned in thought. “Hard to say,” she confessed. “I’m not sure how much of the bleakness I’m feeling is external versus internal. For better or worse, we take ourselves everywhere we go. Though I don’t like myself for it, I’m a person of highs and lows, and right this moment I’m slogging through the slough of despond. A lot of it’s the writing. I’m a gifted miniaturist, I realize—a natural at short stories. But the scale of a novel feels a little daunting.”
“Is your mom any help?”
“Yes, and no. Frankly, and no doubt to my discredit, I’ve always considered her the stereotypical WASP, as a woman and in her novels. Steady and craftsman-like, but lacking that touch of genius and spontaneity that would elevate her from a very observant and thoughtful white lady, the author of well-structured novels dissecting the haute bourgeois.” She smiled wonderingly at herself. “Now I realize I’ve underrated her character, both in life and in her art. The architecture of those novels is near-flawless. Clearly, that comes from knowing the arc of her story before she writes it. A lesson to me, who began my novel without a clue how it would end.”
“Isn’t that often the way?”
“So I hear. But not for my mother or, as I read his novels, your father. Did the two of you ever talk about that?”
“Never,” Adam said bluntly. “It was enough for him to suggest I was incapable of duplicating the genius that made him who he was. The one thing I’m sure of is how dogged he was—drunk or sick or sober, he always showed up for work. Which makes me think he was also pretty methodical.”
Rachel nodded glumly, her dark, expressive eyes sober and reflective. “I expect so. Maybe Melville got up one morning suddenly envisioning a big fish, and decided to see where he was fifty pages out. But somehow I doubt it. Perhaps I should have wondered about that before I set my minnows into motion.”
She sounded a little bereft, Adam thought. “I’ve read a couple of your stories,” he told her. “On my e-reader, just this afternoon. They were too vivid and arresting for this book you’re writing not to end up being good.”
“God, I hope so.” She paused, looking at him gratefully. “It was thoughtful of you to read me, Adam. Really, I’m flattered.”
She was touched with insecurity, he saw, despite her intelligence and exotic looks, the somewhat kinetic air that might be taken for self-confidence. “De nada,” he said easily. “I wouldn’t have reached the second page if you hadn’t engaged me so completely on the first. There were quite a few real insights, I thought.”
Rachel smiled at this. “Years of therapy,” she responded in a mock confessional tone. “I try not to be a danger to others or myself. Whatever my shortcomings in real life, it’s been useful on the page. The only place where I can delete all my mistakes.”
The touch of humor did not quite conceal her underlying ruefulness. As if regretting this, she added quickly, “But enough about me, as they say. Tell me more about your work.”
Over dinner, Adam pretended to do this, spinning a fiction of his own so practiced that it felt like pushing a button. Rachel listened carefully, asking the occasional question, her thoughts obscure. At length, she asked, “Is this what you really want, going forward? I’m sure you’ve seen more interesting things and places than almost anyone I know, following the erratic path of the American Imperium. But what’s it all mean? The life sounds itinerant, and more than a little lonely.”
Suddenly they were closer to Adam’s truth, whatever the lies that had led here. Shrugging, he answered, “Maybe I’m just restless. But I’m giving it some thought.”
This seemed to please her. When the check arrived, she took it with a decisive air. “My treat, remember?” She hesitated, then looked into his eyes. “Why don’t we have a snifter of my parents’ very good Armagnac. Perhaps we can even identify something else for you to do.”
At once he thought of Carla. “Aren’t you writing in the morning?”
“Of course. But I’m a trouper, like your father. I’ll write no matter what I’ve been up to the night before, and tonight I’m tired of my solitary thoughts.” Smiling, she added teasingly, “Besides, we can hardly hang out at your mom’s house, can we?”
When, Adam thought, had he ever turned down a woman this smart and attractive? The reality of the last ten years of his life, which he had reviewed so mercilessly on the dock, did not present a reason to be different. With misgivings and an inner trace of melancholy, he said, “We can’t. So I guess it’s your place, or nothing.”
“Nothing,” she answered quietly, “is unacceptable.”
The Dane’s summer home was commodious and well appointed, decorated in the antiques of New England. “It allows us to commune with our ancestors,” Rachel remarked. “Or at least my mom’s, given that dad’s forbearers washed up here after fleeing a pogrom.”
They took two snifters of Armagnac to the porch, its windows shut against winter. Rachel seemed edgier, the rhythm of her speech quicker and a bit disjointed. When she stopped herself in midsentence, abruptly gazing into his face, Adam knew what would happen.
With an air of resolve, she put down her brandy and put one hand behind his neck, guiding his mouth to hers. Her lips were warm and insistent. Breaking off, she murmured, “I’ve been waiting for this since I was seventeen, remember?”
Thinking of Carla, Adam felt a stab of regret. “So you told me.”
Rachel gave him a questioning look, as though suddenly shy. Seeming to will this away, she offered another kiss that was long and deep enough to leave no doubts. Then she pressed herself against his chest, sighing a little. Though she was tall, her body felt light in his arms.
The rest was up to him, Adam realized. When his hands slid beneath her sweater, touching the slender planes of her back and shoulders, she made no protest.
Still kissing her, Adam unsnapped her bra. He leaned back slightly, touching her flat stomach with his palms, then reaching under her loosened bra to cup her small, firm breasts, the tip of his thumbs grazing her nipples.
He felt her shiver. Mute, she raised her arms so he could pull the sweater over her head. He did that, obscuring her face for a moment. Then the sweater was a clump on the floor, and her eyes held his with an intensity Adam felt to his core. Shrugging the bra off her shoulders, she exposed perfect breasts, brown nipples raised with desire. “Now you,” she whispered.
He took off his sweater. Bending slightly, she kissed the thin line of black hair running down his chest and stomach. Then she looked at him, and gently touched the scar that marked his exit wound. “What happened?”
“I was mowing the lawn. The blades threw a rock.”
Even as her lips opened to form a question, Adam saw her eyes reserve it for later. They had more urgent business now.
Still looking at him, she stepped out of her shoes. As he kissed her again Adam unbuckled her belt, then knelt in front of her, sliding down her jeans, then her sheer silk thong. His lips grazed the black fur between her slender hips and then, briefly, a more intimate place.
He heard the murmur of satisfaction in her throat. Then she reached beneath his arms, pulling him up to her. “My turn, Adam.”
Avidly, she repeated what he had done, helping him step out of his jeans. Then she went to her knees, taking him into her mouth. Her lips were moist and soft, her hand stroking so gently but rhythmically that he stiffened to the point of bursting before she withdrew, standing before him again. Then she took his hand and led him down the hallway to the master bedroom.
It was dark and shadowy, the blinds drawn save for a single window. Firmly, Rachel closed the door, switching on one dim lamp, and Adam saw them captured in a mirror. Following his gaze, Rachel pulled him to her, their bodies touching, watching their reflection in the silvery glass. Then she broke away from him, lying back on the down bed cover. Gazing up at him, she slowly opened her legs, exposing the pinkness between.
“Do you really want me, Adam?”
His voice, thick with desire, concealed his confusion. “Yes.”
He slid onto the bed, kissing the place she had shown him until it was moist, and her torso began to writhe. “I so want you,” she told him, a fervent exhalation of breath.
How long had it been? Adam wondered. Since before Ben’s death, he realized, though it troubled him that he could not recall which woman. Arms raised, he pulled himself on top of her, her hand guiding his shaft inside her, snug and warm and wet. “Deeper,” she demanded.
He gave her all of him, then began moving, slowly at first, then harder, faster, still controlling himself, staying distant from his own desires so that he could please her. “Yes,” she urged him.
He moved faster still. Suddenly she gave a small cry, her hips thrusting against him with primal urgency. He felt her tightening, and then the tightness broke, and with a fierce spasm she cried out, “Oh, Adam . . . ,” his name breaking off in a cry of pleasure, and then she was shuddering more gently until, with a final twitch, she became utterly still, gazing up at the ceiling as though stunned by some revelation.
“My God, Adam Blaine,” she whispered in a tone of wonder, and then looked searchingly into his face.
He smiled a little. “You’re not disappointed?”
“Why on earth would I be?”
“You never found me a job.”
She kissed him gently. “That’s for later. What I want now is to make you lose control.”
Not so easy, Adam knew. He had been too practiced, and too detached, for too long. But she was lovely like this, and she could not read his mind.
She began to move with him, head darting to take his nipple between her teeth, nipping at him to inflict both pain and ecstasy. He willed himself to think about nothing but her, nothing but this. At last he felt his shaft tighten beyond help. With the final excruciating rictus he burst inside her, and then this slowed, his pulse still racing as the warm tingling of release spread through his limbs.
When he opened his eyes, she was looking intently up at him, as though drawing his soul inside her. “That was certainly worth waiting for. I only hope . . .”
He cut this off by kissing her. “It was,” he assured her. “I’m grateful for your patience, all ten years’ worth.”
She smiled with relief. “I thought so, too. Whatever happened with your father and my mother, it couldn’t have been nearly as good as this.”
Close to one o’clock, as happened often now, Carla stirred awake, her sleep broken by the awkward position in which she laid and the discomfort of her swollen limbs and belly. But then she felt the baby kicking and was overcome by gratitude.
Please, she implored him, live.
She had not been to church since the first threat of miscarriage. Now she rose, putting on her robe, and went to sit at her kitchen table.
Her mother’s rosary beads were there. Fingering them, she bent her head, praying that her child be born safe and strong. She felt a deep vulnerability, a consuming love like nothing she had experienced before this—fighting with all her soul and body to bring this child into the world.
A beam of light struck her front window. Apprehensive, she struggled upright, and went to peer through the glass.
A familiar SUV was idling in the driveway of the main house, motor warming in the cold. It was Rachel, she thought, relief mingled with curiosity. Then she saw the man captured by headlights as he climbed into the passenger side.
It was only a few seconds. But she knew him at once. His frame and movements were so like Ben’s.
With a sudden sickness of spirit, she forced herself away from the window and sat back down at the table, shaken. There was only one reason for him to be there at this hour, with this woman. An alluring, talented woman, she amended.
Carla felt her eyes close. She had no reason to feel betrayed, as though Adam had deserted her. They had no commitment to each other, had never made love as he surely had tonight with Rachel. And that must be the least of it for Adam—Carla was known to be self-destructive, and she was pregnant with Ben’s child. She had no right to feel as though her heart had been ripped open.
Perhaps he was truly his supposed father’s son, as other people had experienced Ben—a predator, and Adam’s only model through the years as growing up. But despite her fears, she had sensed a goodness in Adam and imagined an affinity he might feel as well. Perhaps he was a good man, needing only the fresh start she could not give him. Perhaps with Rachel Ravinsky.
But Carla was no judge of men, her life had made all too clear. She felt jealous, confused, craving a certainty she could not find. And, most of all, afraid of Adam and herself. She had made mistakes too many times. All she knew for sure was that she wanted a life different than the one she had had, a man different than all the unstable and selfish men she had known as an actress.
Perhaps this was unfair to Adam Blaine. Perhaps that was why she found herself crying.
“We’ll be all right,” she promised her son. “Just get here, please, and I’ll be all right for you.”
Rachel dropped Adam at the head of the driveway. With feigned concern, she whispered, “Think she’s waiting up for you?”
“Probably. It’s past my curfew.”
Adam still felt strange to himself, as though he had betrayed Carla. He could not shake this; the guesthouse was too close. In this way, he was not Ben’s son.
Interrupting his thoughts, Rachel swiftly kissed him before leaning back to study his face. “I hope this isn’t the last time,” she said softly. “I like being with you, Adam. It feels like there’s more to do, and to say.”
Perhaps there was, he thought. There was no reason, really, not to find out. “I’m getting my own place,” he responded. “The next time we’ll go there.”
Rachel looked at him, her expression briefly vulnerable, as though she had divined his thoughts. But all she said was, “I’ll look forward to it.”