Nantucket Nights (5 page)

“John doesn’t even see what that means,” Val said. “He doesn’t understand that nobody likes us.”

“Everybody likes
you,”
Kayla insisted, though she knew this wasn’t true. Some people
didn’t
like Val— they thought she was too uptight for Nantucket, too tough for a woman. She was wealthy, she was powerful, she intimidated people. But Kayla defended Val against the people who muttered
bitch
or
dyke
when Val’s name came up in conversation. Val was Kayla’s first friend on the island; she’d known her longer than she’d known Raoul. Still, Kayla was well aware that Val didn’t help John at all in the polls.

“I feel this deadly combination of disgust and pity for John,” Val said. “Actual pity for him because running for office is his passion. How do I ask my husband to stop pursuing his dream? Do I just say, “Honey, please give up your aspirations, you’re embarrassing me’? Is that what I say? Maybe it is. Because I can’t handle another loss like tonight.”

Six weeks later, when Kayla and Val met for coffee at Espresso Cafe, Val told Kayla she was having an affair. Her passions, she said, lay elsewhere.

Valerie came out of her house holding the largest bottle of champagne Kayla had ever seen. It was almost as big as Luke; the cork was level with Valerie’s head, and the bottom of the bottle was at her waist. Kayla flung open the car door.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

“It’s a Methuselah of Laurent-Perrier,” Val said. She set the bottle down on the seat between them. “I brought it back from France for this very occasion. They had an absolute fit in customs, but they made an exception when I told them it was for Night Swimmers.”

“You don’t suppose we’ll drink all that?” Kayla said.

Val shrugged. “We have a lot to celebrate after twenty years. I’m finally happy, you’re finally rich—”

“I’m not rich,” Kayla said.

“You will be soon enough,” Val said. She closed her door, and Kayla backed out of the driveway. “It’s okay to have money, Kayla, though I know you don’t believe it.”

“I think it’s okay,” Kayla said defensively. “In fact, I think it’s fine.”

Val shook her short hair. She wore a pressed white linen shirt that was so crisp it looked like parchment, and baggy linen pants the color of wheat bread. Beige suede Fratelli Rossetti sandals. She was deeply tanned (from sunbathing nude every weekend at Miacomet Beach), and she wore three gold chains around her neck that were as thin as strands of web. Those chains were her signature jewelry, she said. They defined who she was. Kayla cringed when Val said things like “signature jewelry” in public because it just gave people another reason to dislike her. Who on earth had signature jewelry? Princess Diana? Zsa Zsa Gabor?

As if reading Kayla’s mind, Val fingered her chains. “Did you talk to Antoinette?” she asked.

“I did.”

“How did she sound?”

“She sounded fine.” Kayla threw the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Val said. “We had lunch last week, and she seemed a little reflective.”

“You had lunch?” Kayla said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

Val shrugged. “It was no big deal. It was just lunch.”

“Yeah, but you could have...” Kayla almost said
“invited me along,”
but she caught herself. “You could have mentioned it.”

“I also had lunch with Merrill and Kelly. I also had lunch with Nina Monroe.”

“Yeah, but those are your friends.”

“Antoinette is my friend. Please, Kayla, don’t get sensitive about this. It was only lunch.”

“You’re right,” Kayla said. She couldn’t help but feel jealous in the most adolescent way—there was no reason why Val and Antoinette shouldn’t have lunch alone. No reason why they shouldn’t pursue a friendship independent of her. But, in fact, Kayla had always believed that she was the glue that held Val and Antoinette together; she was closer to both of them than they were to each other. “So she sounded reflective?”

“Yes,” Val said. “Has she told you anything?”

Kayla considered mentioning Antoinette’s daughter, if only to prove that she had some inside information first, but she shook her head. The announcement about the daughter could wait until midnight, when Night Swimmers officially began.

The Night Swimmers had evolved over the past twenty years into an evening of rules and rituals. It was a rule to eat decadent food—lobsters, cheese, berries. It was a rule to drink champagne. And it was a time to share secrets, like the one Antoinette had shared with them twenty years earlier.

As Kayla drove through the moonlit night toward Antoinette’s house, she thought about the secrets she’d shared over the past years. She’d told Val and Antoinette all the secrets from her past—about sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet a high school boyfriend at a disco, cheating on a chemistry test in college, stealing a pair of duck shoes from Murray’s when she worked there her first summer. She told them one year that she was pregnant with Cassidy B.—before Raoul even knew. Val and Antoinette’s secrets were always more interesting than her own. Val told about sleeping with a professor to get on Law Review, she told about a bank account abroad that she kept a secret from John, she told them she overcharged one of her best clients on a regular basis. Antoinette told about being cut from the Joffrey Ballet School when she lived in New York before she was married, she told about how her mother ran out on her when Antoinette was at boarding school in New Hampshire.

This year Antoinette would tell about her daughter coming to visit, and Val would disclose the name of her lover. Kayla—well, Kayla would talk about Theo. The three women would accept each other’s secrets like valuable gifts to be kept safe from the rest of the world.

Antoinette lived off Polpis Road down a long, bumpy dirt path bordered on both sides by scrub pines. Antoinette bought the land with a portion of her enormous divorce settlement, and she hired Raoul to build her four-room cottage. She invested her set dement with John Gluckstern in the early eighties, and he bought her a load of Microsoft at two dollars a share. Val had let it slip that Antoinette now had close to thirty million dollars. She was worth more than Kayla and Raoul and Val and John put together, but her lifestyle required very little. She danced, she went for walks in the woods, she drank chardonnay, she read novels. It sounded enviable at first—Antoinette had enough money to do whatever she pleased, and what she pleased was to go for days, even weeks, without talking to another soul. She had claimed twenty years earlier that she didn’t want friends, but over time she had given in to Kayla and Val in small ways. She joined them for an occasional meal, she sometimes remembered their birthdays, she called just to talk every once in a while. Her desire to kill herself subsided, although she experienced dark periods when she didn’t eat, didn’t dance, didn’t leave the house. The dark periods lasted a few days, maybe a week, and then they ended and Antoinette went back to what she did best, cultivating her loneliness. “I’m lonely all the time, every day,” she told Kayla. “But there are far worse things than being lonely. Like being betrayed.”

Once a year Antoinette opened herself fully to Kayla and Val, she played their game, she returned their love. Every year Kayla worried that Antoinette would withdraw from Night Swimmers, deem it silly and worthless, but she never did. Deep down, Antoinette respected the bond they’d nurtured for twenty years.

Antoinette emerged from her cottage dressed entirely in black: black leotard, black leggings, and her vintage black Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. She was a woman in permanent mourning.

“I come bearing crustaceans,” she said, sliding a plastic tub of lobsters covered with aluminum foil into the backseat. She touched both Kayla and Val on the shoulders. “Hello, white women.”

“Hello, you beautiful black woman, you,” Val said. “When are you going to brighten your wardrobe? I’m reading this book about positive self-image, and it said other people respond to the colors you wear. They tie it right in with your personality.”

“I think Antoinette looks lovely in black,” Kayla said.

“Thank you,” Antoinette said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been called lovely.
Beautiful, sexy, reclusive, yes. Lovely, no.
Lovely
seems better suited to describing a summer day, or a bride.
Lovely
is a poem by Robert Frost. I view myself as a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. Something grittier, more complicated. Do you want to reconsider your choice of adjective, Kayla?”

“No,” Kayla said. “I don’t. I find you lovely.”

“I should read more poetry,” Val said. “I don’t even know who Gwendolyn Brooks is.”

“I smell Coco Chanel,” Antoinette said. “Is that you, Kayla?”

“What can I say? Women are the only ones who appreciate perfume. I don’t know why I bother to waste the stuff on Raoul.”

“What’s this?” Antoinette asked, inspecting the champagne.

“It’s for our twentieth anniversary,” Val said. “I wanted to do something special.”

“Val brought it back from France,” Kayla said. “She was thinking of Night Swimmers as she toured the Champagne region.”

“Well, thank you, madam,” Antoinette said. “I’m sure tonight will be a night we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.” She pointed to the blue numbers of the car’s digital clock. “It’s eleven-forty-seven, ladies. We’d better get a move on.”

Kayla drove down the Wauwinet Road, past the gatehouse, and onto the crooked finger of land that stuck out into Nantucket Sound. Great Point. It was so secluded, so remote, it was Nantucket’s only real destination, the place year-round islanders went when they wanted to get away, when they wanted to feel like they’d
been
somewhere.

Kayla cruised along the shoreline a good ten feet above the water line. The tide was going out, the water silvery in the moonlight, and Kayla had a feeling that this silence would be the best part of the evening. This peaceful coexistence.

She parked in the usual spot, beyond Great Point lighthouse. “Here we are.”

They sprang into action. Val. grabbed the bottle of champagne by the neck as though it were an unruly child and dragged it onto the sand. Kayla turned around to greet Antoinette. Antoinette’s frizzy dark hair was pulled back in a rubber band, and she had something green on her lip. Kayla reached out to wipe it off, exactly the way Jacob had reached for the potato chip that afternoon on the job site, but Antoinette recoiled from Kayla like a serpent, a wild look in her eye.

Kayla retracted her hand. “You have something on your lip.”

Antoinette wiped at her mouth defensively.

“Sorry,” Kayla said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You didn’t frighten me, Kayla,” Antoinette said, and she smiled. “I’m just feeling a little guarded about my personal space.”

Because of her daughter coming, Kayla thought. The daughter whose existence had explained so much twenty years earlier.

“It’s eleven-fifty-eight, people,” Val said. “Let’s hurry.”

Kayla pulled a blanket out of the back of the Trooper and spread it in the sand. Val wrangled the wrapper and cage off the champagne. Kayla set out the cooler that held the cheese, the berries, and three champagne glasses. Antoinette plopped the tub of lobsters down, and Kayla handed Antoinette a chilled glass. Valerie let the cork fly out of the Methuselah with a deep, resounding
thwop!
The cork sailed toward the water.

Val poured the champagne. The three women raised their glasses. In the moonlight, bubbles rose to the surface of the flutes.

Val checked her watch. “Okay, ladies, it’s... midnight! Say it, Kayla.”

Kayla addressed the ocean. “To the night, to the water that surrounds us, to the island of Nantucket, and to our friendship. These things are eternal.”

“Eternal,” Val said.

“Eternal,” Antoinette said.

“Your secrets,” Kayla said, “are safe with me.”

“And safe with me,” Val said.

“And safe with me,” Antoinette said.

They drank the first glass of champagne all the way down—and the golden rush that went to Kayla’s head encouraged her. This part of the ritual always made her feel wild and daring—a nearly overweight, nearly middle-aged mother of four buzzed on champagne at Great Point at midnight. It made her feel exciting things were possible. They set their glasses carefully in the sand and joined hands. Val’s hand was warm and moist, like the hand of a preschooler, and Antoinette’s hand was dry and bony, like a bunch of sticks. They walked in a circle.
“Our friendship... no beginning... no end,”
Kayla said under her breath. Then they dropped their asses onto the blanket, and Val poured more champagne. Night Swimmers had begun.

It took only one more glass of champagne to make Val antsy about her secret. She cleared her throat, sucked in a deep, dramatic breath, and said, “I can’t wait another second. You know I’ve been seeing someone, a man, not my husband—I’ve been sleeping with someone. And I’m ready to tell you who it is. Now I don’t want you to freak out, okay? Especially not you, Kayla. You won’t freak out on me, will you?”

The muscles around Kayla’s heart steeled themselves for a blow. Why did Val think she would freak out? Was Val going to say
Raoul’s
name? Kayla dug her feet into the cool sand as she remembered the year when her
secret had been this: I
think Raoul is having an affair.
This was back when Luke was a toddler and Kayla was still fighting to lose the weight she’d gained while carrying him. Her first suspicion was about Missy Tsoulakis. A picture of Missy popped into Kayla’s mind: her nineteen-year old blondness, her tennis skirt with matching bloomers that peeked out when she bent over to pick up a ball. Missy had taught Jennifer tennis at the “Sconset Casino, and Raoul had always been the one to drop Jennifer off and pick her up. He’d insisted on it. Once when Kayla happened to show up, he was engrossed in the tennis lesson, his fingers wound through the wire fence like claws as he watched them. Missy’s strong tan arms were wrapped around Jennifer, showing her how to execute the perfect backhand. Kayla felt the air being pressed out of her lungs as she watched Raoul watch Missy.
He loves her,
she thought.
He’s obsessed with her.
Kayla felt fat and dowdy—and unbearably matronly in her station wagon with Luke in the car seat in back. She drove past the courts and headed home, thinking of how the first thing she would do was cancel Jennifer’s tennis lessons, and the second thing was go on a diet, and start walking like the other women in her neighborhood. Raoul and Missy Tsoulakis. That night, she asked Raoul if her suspicions were true and he said, “She’s a
girl,
Kayla. Are you
crazy?”