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Rachel had not liked him.

“He’s a phony baloney,” she had said after she had met him at a large garden party in Southampton, where Mike had taken a rental house that first August. He and Mike had met at the home of his agent, Alan Peden,
whom Mike knew and liked, and by the time Rachel had met him he had taken Mike to dinner three times and to bed once.

“He said he thought I was going to be a dynamite-looking broad when I grew up, just like you, and he wanted to get his name on the list early. But I could tell he didn’t like little kids.”

“How?” Mike had asked, half amused and half annoyed at both Rachel and Derek Blessing.

“Because nobody would say ‘broad’ to a little kid. It’s embarrassing. He thought it was, you know, cute, but I don’t like words like ‘broad.’ You always said tough talk was for boors. I think he’s a boor.”

“I do think it is, mostly, but there are also circumstances when it’s okay. It’s just his way. He’s a very talented novelist, Rachel, one of the most noted ones in the country.”

“He’s a cocksman, too.”

“I really do not like that kind of talk, my dear. Nine is a bit young for it. Where on earth did you hear that?”

“Georgette Peden told me he was, and she ought to know, she’s almost twelve. Besides, I can read. He’s been in
Us
and
People
and all sorts of places. They’re always talking about all his women. I don’t see why you want to go around with a cocksman. You’re probably no more to him than a …”

“Rachel!”

“Well. I don’t care. He’s a phony just the same. He said he’d ridden all the way over here on his bicycle, but he wasn’t even sweating. I bet he has a Lamborghini and a driver.” Rachel was into exotic automobiles that year.

Mike had put the incident down to the natural animosity of a child of a single parent for an incipient rival. She knew Derek Blessing’s reputation, and she also knew his talent. She had read his work and marveled at the surgical delicacy and unsentimental sensitivity with
which he portrayed his female characters. Each one of them fairly sang with life and reality, and their joys and sorrows were meticulously detailed and authentically and memorably moving. She liked them far more than she did the men in his fiction, who were, on the whole, as hard, bright, rigid, and identical as bullets. By the time they had become lovers in the accepted sense of the word, she was aware of the dichotomy between his simplistic, exaggeratedly male public persona and his sybaritic, self-absorbed private one, but it did not concern her unduly. More so than most people, she believed, Derek had layers and strata of reality; grasshopper and ant, ascetic and sensualist, could live happily together inside his pitted and leathery hide. No one who could so light a woman into life in his writing could be a poseur in any essential way. And she was honest enough to admit to herself that some secret core of her expanded like a flower in an April rain at the attention her role as Derek Blessing’s longtime lover earned her.

“You don’t need that kind of identity,” Annie Cochran had said disapprovingly at one of their rare lunches. “You’re as well-known in your profession as he is in his, or you will be. You need to watch that.”

“It’s not the journalist who likes sleeping with him, Annie,” Mike had said. “It’s the woman. He makes me feel like I look as good naked as I do when I’m all gotten up and out at a place like this.” They were in the Bar Room of the Four Seasons—oddly, one of the only places in New York Annie Cochran could be persuaded to lunch. She was a few years older than Mike, black, sardonic, angry, amused and amusing. She was also a brilliant psychotherapist. They had been friends since the first year Mike and Richard came to New York.

“I should hope you know you’re as attractive a woman as you are good a journalist,” Annie said. “I
should hope it doesn’t take a
People
magazine centerfold to make you feel good about yourself.”

“Oh, enough of the psychobabble,” Mike said. Annie sometimes had a way of making her feel like she was pinioned and spread-eagled under glaring white lights. “You have to admit he’s more interesting than Richard,” she added.

“Not to mention the sportswriter before him, or the editor before that, or the minor-league anchorman before that. Or any of the others. I don’t necessarily think you need to be married again, Mike, but I do think you need to be committed.”

“In this day and age? It’s a good thing you’re not a call-in radio shrink, Annie. There aren’t any women left on the East Coast who’d listen to you.”

“You’re not any woman,” Annie Cochran had said, but that was all she did say. Later on, when Mike’s alliance with Derek Blessing had become an accepted fact and then a continuum, she did not mention it again.

Mike wrapped Derek’s thick terry-cloth robe around her and padded into the light-washed bedroom. The sky over the sea was lightening, and far out on the horizon a great sweep of sun lit the gunmetal into a startling milky aquamarine. She dropped the robe on the sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace and bent to step into her corduroys. Derek Blessing squinted at her through smoke from the custom-blended cigarette in his filter. He had ordered both from Dunhill.

“San Francisco must have been a bitch, indeed,” he said. “You don’t look so good, Mike. In fact, you look like you’ve been drowned and washed up on the beach for about six days. And your hands have been shaking ever since you got here, and you’re talking in your sleep, and I’ve never seen you drink as much cognac as you did last night. You’re on something, too; I can tell from your pupils. I never knew you to take so much as
an aspirin before. You want to tell me about it, or what?”

“No.” They never talked of personal problems, beyond the bare bones of information that had to be exchanged. Derek loathed what he called hormonal histrionics, and Mike had an almost British reluctance to fan out her pain. She was, she had told him on their first evening together, determined to anchor no relationship on pity.

This time, though, he surprised her.

“Come on,” he said, pulling her toward him and down onto the bed. He drew the throw back up over them and settled her into the hollow of his shoulder. He smelled good, like cold, wet salt air and expensive tobacco and toothpaste.

“Spill,” he said.

“You’ve got Alan and Chloe,” she said, feeling terror stir and roil slowly in the bottom of the black pit within her, where the sea and the sleep and the drug had banished it. She did not know what would happen if she let it free … “You’ve got the
Rolling Stone
thing.”

“Fuck Alan and Chloe. Fuck
Rolling Stone
. I’ve never seen you like this. I want to know what’s happening with you.”

“You know we agreed,” Mike said. “No gut spilling. We drank to it at the Palm, that first night.”

“That was a long time ago. Things change. You go deeper with me now than you did at first. You’re tough and you’re brave, Mike, but you’re human like the rest of us, like it or not, and something’s doing a fucking awful number on you. I’d be a real prick if I didn’t want to know what it was. More than that, I need to know.”

“Why?”

“Say you’re under my hide. Stuck in my craw. I seem to hurt when you hurt.”

“I … God, Derek, I don’t know where to start. To make any sense at all I’d have to start so far back …”

“Start at the beginning. Start with ‘I am born.’ Surprisingly effective first sentence. I’ve always been intrigued with the notion of your past. Do you realize that I know virtually nothing about you before you left the South and came to New York? You look like a young Hepburn playing Scarlett O’Hara, but you act like you were born last Thursday in the Time-Life lobby.”

“That’s what Annie said.”

“Annie?”

“Annie Cochran. You know, my shrink friend. You met her that first summer when she came out to Southampton.”

“Ah, your black shrink friend. Mammy Courage. How like you to leave out the pivotal adjective.”

“Black doesn’t have anything to do with Annie.”

“Give me a break. It has everything to do with her. It would have to. The fact that you left it out says something to me about your secret past. Except that I can’t really believe you have one. I never knew a beautiful and successful woman so without history.”

Mike knew that she was not beautiful, but was perhaps preternaturally vivid. It often seemed to have the same effect as beauty. Derek called it her white flame, and she accepted the carefully offhand compliment for both the elliptical truth in it and its purpose, which was, she knew, to make her feel better. It did, a little.

“Oh, I have a history,” she said. “It just doesn’t have anything to do with my present. Or I didn’t think it did. But Annie says …”

“Have you been seeing Annie professionally?” He was alert; a soft motor seemed to start up somewhere within him.

“Oh, no. Or just once.”

“When?”

“Friday. Friday night.”

“Before you came here?”

“I … yes.”

“So that’s why you were late. What happened on Friday, Mike?”

“Oh, several things. Nothing that can’t be handled. It was a bad day, but …”

“Mike.”

“Goddamn it, Derek, I had an anxiety attack on the train and had to go back to town, and I thought Annie might be able to help, and she did. Period. End of crisis.”

“No. Beginning of crisis, I think. And so Annie gave you whatever jolly stuff you’re taking, and told you that something in your past was making you nuts. What else did she tell you?”

“That was the sum of it. And it wasn’t nearly as dire as you make it sound. Haven’t you ever had an anxiety attack?” Mike’s voice was riding upward on the crest of the fear that was surging up from its pit despite the Xanax and had reached her wrists. They buzzed horridly, as they had on a few other occasions of great fatigue and tension in the past, when she had been near fainting.

“No. Not in living memory. And neither have you. You’ve been in tight spots all over the country for the past twenty years without turning a hair. Now I want you to tell me about this so-called anxiety attack in as much detail as you can, and take your time. It’s not fair to me to keep it from me.”

“Not fair …
what about me?
What if I don’t want to tell you about it?”

“You have to. You finally have to tell me about your life, Mike.” His voice had softened and deepened. She could feel it vibrating in his throat. “I can’t fix anything for you if you don’t. I can’t help you.”

“Are you going to fix things for me? Are you going to help me? Can you do that, Derek? I don’t think you can.”

“Well, I know I can. Goddamned right I can. I’m not
going to leave you alone with whatever it is that makes you like this. I’m not going to just walk away from you.”

Something seemed to break and flood its warmth out into Mike’s cold, laboring chest. She felt an alien, treacherous prickling behind her eyes and in her nose. Her throat closed as if of its own volition.

I cannot be about to cry, she thought in alarm. I have not cried since … back then. Since that day.

She swallowed and sat up straight in the bed. Derek leaned back against the bookcase wall that served as a headboard and looked at her.

“Well?” he said.

“I really don’t know if I can do this, Derek,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone … all of it.”

“It can’t be any worse than some of the stuff I’ve already written.” He grinned at her, the sudden and strangely sweet grin that was so at odds with his brutal Toltec face. “Tell you what. I’m going downstairs and call Alan and tell him to either get me some time on
Rolling Stone
or tell ‘em to put it up their asses. And then I’m going to bring up not one but two bottles of Moët et Chandon, which I just happen to have on ice, and I’m going to build up the fire up here and put on that goddamned Vivaldi of yours and take the phone off the hook and swathe you in this here dead mink, and you are going to get a little drunk and tell about Mike Winship. Including how come you’re called Mike Win-ship and not Sally Sue whatever. If it takes all day and into next week. Is that a deal?”

“Yes,” said Mike faintly. “I guess it is, yes.”

She lay still while he got up and went out of the room and down the circular wrought-iron staircase into the lower part of the house. She could hear his heavy padding in the kitchen, and the opening and closing of the refrigerator door, and an indistinguishable telephone conversation. Outside the sun stabbed in and out
of the flying clouds over the ocean, a violent and apocalyptic seascape. It looked arctic, Siberian, though she knew that it probably was not. The chill that gripped her emanated from inside her, solid and heavy and cold, like a long-dead fetus. At the thought Mike jackknifed herself into a knot.

Derek Blessing came back up the stairs laden with bottles and glasses and set them on the floor beside the bed. He paused and looked at her, and then drew the mink throw up around her neck and added a goose-down comforter faintly redolent of spilt Wild Turkey.

“Just let me get the space heater out of the closet and hook it up,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s getting colder than a witch’s teat out there. Don’t be afraid, Mike. You can stop anytime it gets too tough. But you have to start. You have to do that, at least.”

She said nothing. She moved closer in upon herself. By the time he had whisked the heater out of the closet and thumped it down on his side of the bed, she was curled in a ball on her side, facing away from him toward the cold sea, knees drawn up, arms crossed between them, fists knotted. Like a fetus. Again, the image of the fetus. Like the fetus she herself had been until she was born.

She lay perfectly still for a space of time, and when she finally spoke, it was in the frail, light voice of a tired child.

“Well, you know,” Mike said, “the very first thing I did in my life was to kill my mother.”

F
OREVER AFTER THE SUMMER NIGHT IN
L
YTTON
, G
EORGIA
, that sent Mike Winship a world away from home, she spoke of her childhood—when she did speak of it—as normal.

“Absolutely average,” she would say lightly at one party or another in those luminous, young, always-twilight first years in New York, when she was still going to a great many parties. “Textbook typical. Tadpoles and apple trees and bicycles and cutting your own Christmas tree from your grandparents’ farm, and braces, and camp in the summer … the works.”