Good Family (23 page)

Ian has a face designed for a billed hat and a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth, but he thrives on the pungent fumes of traffic, screeching and blaring, twenty tongues spoken at his neighborhood market, the table reserved at Paolo’s, the hustle and negotiation of cabs, elevators, and doormen. I assure him that we’re still far from Sand Isle, that the farmland is just a warm-up act. Besides, I tell him, it’s not as if he’s
never
seen the countryside.

“I was drunk,” he said. “Doesn’t count.”

“Lame excuse,” I say.

“Touché.” Ian crosses his arms and leans back, taps his improbably expensive shoes on the dashboard of the Malibu. “Are they excited I’m coming?”

I don’t know how to break it to Ian that my family barely knows who he is. I have explained that there is an insulated quality to Sand Isle, but Ian hasn’t yet fathomed that it applies to him. Even my cousins’ spouses (what’s left of them) seldom come. Only Philip with his plodding loyalty—and even Philip has constructed a boat-centric universe all his own. I have
no idea how my family will respond to Ian. I suspect they will scrutinize him, test his humor, his wit, his politics; Adele may try to convert him; Derek may find in him a connoisseur of art. If Ian has musical talent or a penchant for sailing, he may be accepted, but as far as I know, he has neither. He
does
have a gourmet streak born out of rebellion against the bland and the canned, so at the very least, he and Sedgie, his big-screen crush, will have something in common.

“You’ll
love
Sedgie,” I say.

“Are you trying to mitigate my culture shock? Because it’s very condescending.”

I shake my head, but maybe I am. A residual shame dogs me about Sand Isle; I hover between penitence and protectiveness. Ian is holding up his hands, making a screen with his thumbs and forefingers, looking for angles in the bucolic expanse. As a filmmaker, Ian’s vision veers toward the telling detail, while I am more drawn to stories of clashing contradictions and seamy undersides.

He turns and levels me with his stare. “So…
what
is going on?”

Ian is known for his tight shots—the nuances of the forefinger, the protruding tongue, the blinking eye. The subject’s eyes betray worlds. An upward glance to the left shows they are lying. Two or three sharp blinks means your question has hit home.

I take a big, dramatic breath. “It’s harder than I thought.”

“What’s the worst part? Your parents? Sadie?”

“It’s not just Sadie. It’s everything around Sadie, and who I thought I was at the time. I mean, why
did
I marry Angus?”

Dr. Anke likes to say I was doing the best that I could at the time, but the fact remains that I should have done better. I say this to Ian, who rolls his eyes.

“You and everybody else. Look, Maddie—”

“I know, I know, I know.” I just can’t make traction, I tell him.

Ian studies me for the longest time.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

But he persists. “So tell me about Derek and Edward.”

Here is where I choke. Like Ian, I am prone to voyeurism, so his curiosity comes as no surprise. And I agree with him in theory about our secrets being our downfall. But I can’t reconcile my youthful attraction to not one but
two
cousins, each of whom I confused with the other. Even now I can’t say if it was Derek or Edward who enticed me more.

So, like my father, I say, “Nothing to tell.”

As we pull up to the ferry, an early-evening calm has settled on the channel. The hard mirror of water reflects the few clouds that remain after yesterday’s storm like boorish guests who won’t leave a party. I introduce Ian to Mac as my partner.

“Oh, man, you worked on the Feingold film?” says Mac.

Ian’s eyes meet mine, and I fight to keep from smiling. There is a comforting, familiar smell of leather in the old teak boat. The houses sit like regal dowagers swelling with expectancy as Mac motors us across.

“Oh, my God,” says Ian when we get to the other side, and the horse and carriage pull up.

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t, Maddie. You really didn’t.”

The last time I brought someone to Sand Isle, it was Angus. He, too, accused me of understatement. Angus was treated with cordial politeness and a modicum of interest and seemed to avoid the scathing labels of his predecessors like the Criminal or the Chinless Wonder. Angus sailed with Philip, drank cocktails with my parents, and apparently fit in with my family better than I.
Charming
was a word often associated with Angus. I’ve been suspicious of that adjective ever since.

Riding to the house, Ian looks sanguine. “Whose house is that?” he asks when we pass the big one with the columns. When I tell him it’s the Swansons’ and sing a few bars of
Where there’s a swag, there’s a Swanson
, Ian double-takes. “Curtain rods built that house?”

The Aerie, I assure him, is nowhere near as fancy, but when the carriage stops, and Ian sees my family’s grand old house on the lake for the first
time, he leans over and says, “I have no sympathy for you, Maddie. I really don’t.”

L
utherans, Ian once told me, are too parsimonious for ambiguity. Whereas I read everything as words within words, Ian expects people to mean what they say. It’s one of the few benefits of growing up among people with a limited capacity for invention. Ian, for instance, is unembarrassed about picking up a vase and turning it over and saying,
My God, this is Rookwood!
Or looking at our umbrella stand and saying,
Delft!
With this proclivity for collectibles, he turns a connoisseur’s eye toward my family. It’s the Addisons he’s interested in—the Addisons whom I’ve described to him as eccentric relics, my odd assortment of cousins and a dying mother to whom I’ve barely spoken in years.

We’re on our way to Ian’s room when we run into Dana. “You’re going to put him in there?” she says. She smiles embarrassedly at Ian. “I’m not sure it’s even clean.”

“It’s clean,” I say evenly.

“Really?”

“As a matter of fact,
I
cleaned it.”

“Maddie,” says Ian, “is quite the domestic.”

“You should have seen her room when we were kids.”

“I can just imagine,” Ian replies in a chummy tone I could do without. “Well!” he says after we close the door behind us. “Not much faith in you, has she?”

“It’s genetic,” I say, trying to heave his massive suitcase onto a luggage rack whose needlepoint straps were stitched by my mother. “Aunt Pat used to kneecap Mother with nasty comments.”

“Like?”

“Like, ‘Why won’t you come for a swim, Evelyn? Are you worried about your
hair?
’ Or ‘
Peut-être le francais, n’etait-il pas parlé dans le Missouri?
’”

Ian, fingering the lilies I’ve put on his bureau, says, “Meaning?”

“Meaning my mother was afraid of drowning, and my aunt went to boarding school in Switzerland.”

“
Pauvre
Evelyn.”

“But she outlived them all, didn’t she?” I unzip his suitcase and start pulling out khakis, shirts with embroidered polo players, cable-knit sweaters in the softest wool. Ian buys clothes like a dying man—which is what he believes he may still be, given how many friends he’s lost.
Why not enjoy life?
he always tells me.
We’re all going down in the end
. “No wonder you’re always broke,” I say.

“I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that,” says Ian as he folds his boxers into perfection. “These arcane subjects that nobody but us cares about. I’m over it. I just can’t save the world anymore, Maddie. I’m tired.” He takes me by the shoulders, looks down at me with those overcast eyes. “Let’s make some money, Maddie. Let’s go hog wild. Merchant and Ivory did it. Damon and Affleck, for God’s sake.”

“Hey, Mac the ferry captain
loved
the Feingold film. If anything, we should push ourselves. When was the last time either of us did a story on disease or war?” Meeting a blank if incredulous stare, I go on. “Besides, Merchant and Ivory have financing and access to talent. Not to mention the fact that I’m immune to making money. Another genetic defect.”

We’ve had this conversation before—Ian wanting to go more commercial, me angling for another direction.
Why are you so afraid of making money?
Dr. Anke has asked. It’s a subtle point, one I can barely articulate—the relative merit in
having
money as opposed to
making
it.

“
Somebody
made some,” Ian says, waving his arm around like a helicopter.

“Anomaly,” I say. “He was looking for a way to patch his roof and came up with a palliative for chest colds.”

“And the rest is history,” mutters Ian, picking up a plate on the bedside table. “Herend.”

Out of habit, I fold Ian’s clothes and lay them on the bed. Equally out of habit, Ian redoes my handiwork. It’s the way we work together—me laying
out the broad strokes, Ian fussing with the details. We’re made for each other, I often tell him. Including our shared attraction to men, he counters.

“What’s that smell?” he says, suddenly looking up.

“Mmm,” I say. “Sedgie.”

S
edgie?” says Ian, visibly perking. He is padding after me toward the kitchen. For the entire day, I’ve managed to avoid the cousins. When I left to pick up Ian, everyone was down on the beach. I don’t want to face Jessica. I don’t want to face Derek. Derek, I’ve decided, doesn’t remember what I remember: the entrails of paper, myself forlornly in their midst. It’s like Dana forgetting the Indian woman we picked up. Sometimes, according to Dr. Anke, we block experiences out, relegating memories to separate compartments that we seal and never revisit.

We push through the kitchen door. It looks like a party with Jessica wearing the “Kiss the Cook” apron, and Sedgie still in his bathing suit, a Hawaiian shirt thrown on out of respect for Louisa, who didn’t warm to half-naked men in her kitchen. Jessica’s boom box is blasting Bob Marley, and Sedgie’s hips are undulating. “Me some badass Don Ho, what say, niecy cousiness?”

“Whatever,” says Jessica. She eyes me coolly.

Sedgie’s eyes are half-closed as he spins around the kitchen. He’s obviously stoned. Ian, smiling slightly, cocks his head. I want to ask him if he still sees Harrison Ford potential in Sedgie, but from the expression on Ian’s face, I think he sees more than that.

“What’s for dinner?” I say.

“Mmm,” says Sedgie. “Mmm.”

Which apparently means new potatoes in pesto, grilled whitefish, string beans with arugula, and popovers like Louisa used to make.

“Incredible,” says Ian. “You could open a restaurant.”

Sedgie buttons his shirt, straightens up. “Finally,” he says, “a man of vision.”

O
ne by one, Ian meets all the cousins. Adele doesn’t let him down. She glides down the stairs in a violet satin tunic over gauzy see-through pants. She has charcoaled her eyes. Without her hair, the effect is reminiscent of Nefertiti (one of her incarnations, we find out later). When he meets Derek, Ian studies him intently the way he studies someone we’re about to shoot. I’ve told Ian all about Derek. As Ian shakes his hand, I stand behind Derek and pantomime a swoon.

At dinner, the heavy mood from the night before has lifted. Even Jessica and Beowulf seem to have gotten over my outburst. Nevertheless, they sit apart. Dana seems slightly withdrawn, but everyone else is talking animatedly, expertly dancing around any temporary awkwardness last evening may have produced. I compulsively gulp water as if to purge myself. Perhaps because Ian’s here, I feel a sense of relief. At the same time, I feel slightly resentful, as if he’s an intrusion I have to accommodate. I can no longer be left alone to my thoughts. I have to incorporate him into my life—although, as evidenced by how convivial my family is acting, there should be little problem in this.

As the potatoes are passed, Philip asks Ian about the films he makes. I want to remind Philip that Ian and I collaborate, but Ian, by virtue of his outsider status, seems already to have more credibility. Ian sends them into peals of laughter describing Ralph Feingold’s oddly named daughters. Had I told them about our musician friend from Hoboken? Now,
there
is a subject. Not to mention the herpetologist from Brooklyn who looked exactly like one of his frogs. “
Hyperolius Marcus
we called him,” says Ian, “after his own buggy eyes.”

“And his tongue,” I add.

But no one seems to hear me. Everyone seems riveted by Ian, so I give up, stare at my plate, stab my whitefish. With Ian, there are nine people—not nearly as many as there used to be at the height of summer when we used to add a leaf to the table. When my father was a child, they had to
“dress” for dinner. In our generation, at the very minimum, we were forced to wear shoes. No one had tattoos or piercings other than in their earlobes. No one shaved his or her head.

“What are you working on now?” says Jessica.

I open my mouth to say,
Zip
, but Ian says, “Something more commercial. Something that sells.”

I let my eye wander to the ceiling. For the first time, I notice there are stains between the beams—not just one stain, but several idiosyncratic and concentric outlines left by water damage. They could have been there for ages—like circles in a tree trunk marking the years.

“You’re selling
out
?” says Beowulf.

“If possible.”

“I did a movie once,” says Sedgie.

I don’t much remember the dinners where my grandmother presided. I have a vague memory of taking a carrot from a passed plate of crudités, my mother whispering,
Take just
one. After Uncle Halsey died, my father became head of the table, grilling us on politics and sports and social responsibility.
What have you done to justify your existence today?
he would ask. To which there never seemed to be a brilliant or even adequate answer. Even if one of us
had
worked for world peace, as Derek believed he was doing by going conscientious objector, we hadn’t done it
correctly
. CO stood for
cop out
, according to my father. You go, you serve your time, you stand up for your principles.
America is a great country
, my father said.
Hear, hear
, said my mother.