What Remains (10 page)

The next day Buddy faxes the front page of the
Times-Picayune
. There is a photo of the two of us at the dinner, and the caption reads, “Governor Roemer and his date, Carole DiFalco.”

Buddy and I stop off at flirting and Anthony and I inch right along. We are perfect for each other, even if it’s not immediately obvious why. More Newman and Woodward than Taylor and Burton. In love we are both the turtle, slow and deliberate.

I like our relationship. We are both on the road a lot, so there are many hellos and many good-byes, and when we come back so many stories to tell. It all works smoothly until a weekend in September, a year and a half after we met. “I don’t care. Go,” I say to him. He is going to Captiva, Florida, for the weekend with his friend Holly and another coworker. They’re going away, and he’s assumed there’s no need to involve me. I’m in Boston working on a story about the Mob. There is a phone call and a casual mention,
I won’t be around this weekend.

I am suddenly tired of the unspoken rules—of the coming and going as we please. I am angry about this lapse of judgment—wanting to spend a holiday weekend with friends instead of thinking to spend it with me. I am sure he is surprised at my reaction. I am.

“What do you want me to do, Carole?”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do. Figure it out.” I know this is a loaded message. It’s a test, really, and I’m waiting to see how he scores. But he doesn’t know that. We hang up, and I go to dinner, and when I get back there is a message I don’t return. And then the phone rings in my hotel room, late.

“I called you. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Yes,” I answer. And this is all we say.

This is how we fight—silently, stubbornly, neither of us yielding. No passionate explosion, but a slow, quiet burn. We are both determined to finish our own way. I go back to New York the next day, and he goes to Florida. I distract myself with the hearings on Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Two months later, he calls late from his office. “Hi, it’s me, wasn’t sure if you’d be there. Do you want to grab dinner?” And we start back up again in the same easy way. We finish the Captiva business quickly and neatly.

“Did you end up going?”

“Yeah, I did.” And I respect him for being outright. He did what he wanted to do, no apology. I like this about him. He tells me about the place they found, the ’Tween Waters Inn—a great cheap motel right on the beach. “I’m going back for Thanksgiving,” he says. “Do you want to go?”

I don’t say yes or no, but he calls later with dates and flight numbers just the same. “I can’t come for the whole weekend,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll meet you there.”

Whether he believes I will actually show up or not, I don’t know, but he is sitting out on the second-floor terrace when I pull into the parking lot. “Welcome to paradise,” he shouts down, as if he’s been sitting there in that spot for two days, watching for me.

This is when the tides change. It’s hard through the prism of a hospital bed to remember these delicate little heart trembles, the butterfly wings. It’s hard to remember his body muscular and free of lines, running shirtless on the beach and breathless back into our room. But this is how he is the first evening, barreling through the door with big, puffy breaths. “They just launched a shuttle. God, I wish you had seen it!” His eyes are wide. He couldn’t wait to run back here, couldn’t wait to run back to tell his girl, me.

Just like this, we go from being one thing to another.

We leave Florida in a different gear and cruise into the rhythm of a couple—weekends are assumed, holidays are assumed.
Let’s see where this goes.

We rented a house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for the summer—the name,
Sea Song,
painted onto a piece of driftwood at the end of the long pebble driveway. A great field stretched out behind the back deck, and beyond it you could hear the ocean. For a few summers it was our
idyll.

Sea Song is modest by Hamptons standards—three small bedrooms separated by an open kitchen and living area, furnished with Pottery Barn tables and white slipcovered couches. Sliding glass doors open onto the back porch, where the shrubs are overgrown, and off the side deck is an outdoor shower, the hidden jewel. There are no walls around it, just some well-placed trees offering privacy without blocking the view. It faces east, and in the mornings I turn toward the sun with my eyes closed, letting the water stream down. I paint the landscape in my head—the large field of wildflowers, the ocean beyond. Then I snap my eyes open quickly to catch it.

The Hamptons is a collective name for a string of small beach towns along the east end of Long Island. In some minds, I suppose, it’s less a place than an endless round of social climbing and money. And maybe there’s that. But for Anthony and me it’s simply Long Island, a place of barbecues, bike rides, and long walks on the beach, a place to meet up with our friends in the summer. Holly, Anthony’s close friend from
Primetime,
has a house nearby. If it’s a slow weekend, and it usually is, she hires a deejay and we clear the furniture from her living room, drink margaritas, and dance all night. Her dad, Pete, and stepmom, Joan, have a home in Bridgehampton on Rose Hill Road. On some weekends we invite Marc and Lori out. Marc works with Anthony and Holly, and his wife, Lori, works at NBC. Anthony’s family is here, too. His mother’s home is one town over, in East Hampton, a bike ride for Anthony, a ten-minute drive for me. And his cousin Caroline lives down the road from us with her husband, Ed, and their children.

We leave the city on Friday afternoons to beat the traffic and stop at The Palm in East Hampton for steaks and creamed spinach. We get there before the dinner crowd to enjoy the cool air and the peaceful atmosphere of the dark wood and white-aproned waiters.

Anthony wakes up at ungodly hours, always. Weekends, vacations, and summers. “Boarding school, Peanut. They drilled it into us. Up, out, get on with it.” He pops with energy, throwing drapes open, switching the news on, soaking the world in. He likes to watch the morning shows at 6 a.m. when the anchors have barely swallowed their coffee.

I like to enter the day in gradually developed stages, but we manage a middle ground. He turns the volume down on the television, keeps the drapes drawn, and leaves me in bed while he goes for his morning bike ride to Radu’s Gym in East Hampton. And I pull myself upright before he returns for the next thing—tennis, kayaks, a swim.

“Carole gets up at the crack of noon,” he jokes to our friends. It isn’t noon, but most mornings it is true, he has run on the beach, gone for a swim, or biked eight miles each way to the gym, before I am up. I still can’t manage this sort of enthusiasm for the morning.

On Saturdays we pick up meat loaf sandwiches in the afternoon from the General Store on Sagaponack Road—warmed on white bread with ketchup—and go to Gibson Beach at the end of Daniels Lane. We meet up with Holly, who usually comes with the latest gossip. Our friend Richard is always there with the Sunday
Times
and his latest girlfriend. Steve, another friend from
Primetime,
brings his Kadima paddles and hits the small rubber ball back and forth with Anthony for hours.

We split the rental fee, my first summer here, with John, who rarely shows up. But Anthony insists he pay his portion anyway. I meet John the second weekend out. He’d come in late the night before, after we’d already gone to bed. He walks into the kitchen the next morning, in his underwear, grinning and stretching a long arm out to greet me. “Hi, I’m John Kennedy. Anthony’s better half.”

“Has the old boy left you here alone?” he asks.

He is recruiting me, I can see. Comrades in goading Anthony.
Don’t worry, I know. He hasn’t got me fooled,
he seems to imply with his loaded smile, the eye roll, the “principe” and “old boy.”

I tell him that Anthony is at Radu’s and I’m just back from Joe’s body shop in Southampton.

“What?” He perks up. “What were you doing there?”

I tell him I got scratches on Anthony’s Jeep pulling out of the driveway and had to get them buffed out.

“He made you spend the whole morning at the garage with his old Jeep?”

“It wasn’t so bad. I brought a book,” I say. I am earnest, not yet initiated in their game of
got you.
“The scratches were superficial. It didn’t take that long, really. I was only there a couple of hours. It would have been quicker, but the guy had to finish an oil change.” I chatter on, oblivious, and John’s smile stretches out, his head moves slowly back and forth. I am implicating Anthony with each word.

“I can’t believe he made his girlfriend sit alone at the garage on a beautiful summer weekend while he worked out at the gym. What a prince!” He laughs.

He repeats this disbelief to Anthony when he gets back, and to his sister and to everyone who comes around over the weekend.
What a prince!

My first impression of John is
entirety
. He is complete in a way I’ve never seen. My second impression is that he is aware of the effect he has and does his best to dispense with it immediately. He makes everyone in a room feel at ease. He says his name without the
F.
and without the
Jr.,
“John Kennedy,” his hand reaching out. No matter who, no matter where, no matter that everyone in the world knows who he is.

Anthony and John have been sharing a summerhouse for several years, though they are unlikely roommates. John is Oscar to Anthony’s Felix, banging through the house, marking his territory like a teenager, leaving trails of movement behind him: a dirty dish, an empty bottle, books and newspapers wrinkled from spilt drinks. If he has been in the kitchen, every cabinet is opened. In the bathroom there are towels on the floor and a toothpaste cap in the sink.

If Anthony is the angel, the English schoolboy, well-mannered, polite, John is the scamp. Every family has one—the one you feel obliged to frown at occasionally, to disapprove of half-heartedly. The one who’s always late, but for whom you hold up the party because you need him—the charmer, the one who gives a great toast with no notice, cracks the perfect joke in a tense moment.

They have a practiced banter, a routine.

“Carole, do you know that Anthony hates children and old people?” He tells me a story about Anthony in line with his groceries
losing it
over a sweet old woman in front of him who couldn’t seem to find her change in the bottom of her handbag.

“No, but that’s great we have that in common,” I say, smiling.

“John, tell Carole about the camping trip when you almost killed us.”

John complains about the small bedroom. Anthony tells him it’s what he gets for being late. In the evening, we grill steaks and fresh vegetables and drink vodka with grapefruit juice, and I listen to the two of them top their stories of each other all night. Watching them this weekend, I can see they can’t stand too close to each other, and can’t bear to be too far apart.

The following weekend I meet Anthony’s mother at her house on Dune Lane. She invites us to lunch. It can hardly be avoided any longer. I have the feeling they aren’t used to Anthony bringing a girl around. He is thirty-two, but there hasn’t been a serious one. His mother has heard about me, I’m sure—Emilia has likely reported our winter weekends.

Lee and Anthony’s stepfather, Herbert, are waiting for us in the library. They stand up to greet us when we walk in. His mother has a striking face: wide-set eyes and sharpened bone lines. I see Anthony in it. She is friendly, and when she opens her mouth to speak, a lyrical voice delivers the words, like a woodwind instrument, melodic and precise. Herbert is a tall, elegant man, who looks fit for a smoking jacket and pipe. He’s professorial, with distinguished silver hair. A highly regarded Hollywood director disguised as an English gentleman.

We start with awkward handshakes, but Herbert is warm, if unsure how exactly to proceed, and Anthony’s mother, I can see, is naturally curious. We move to the patio, where pitchers of iced tea are set out, a small pitcher of sugar water for sweetener, and a pile of big, beautiful Queen Anne cherries in a wicker basket. Emilia serves us salad—avocado, fresh green beans, and thick slices of peeled tomato drizzled with lemon—as we wander through formalities.

“So where did you grow up?” Herbert asks, and when I tell him, he makes a touching attempt to do something with it. “Suffern, yes, of course, I know it.” He turns to Lee. “I staged a ballet near there, a
long
time ago. It’s a charming little area.” My knowledge of ballet is limited, so I stick to Suffern, spitting out names of towns he might know in the area. “There’s an old hotel,” he says. “Off of Route Seventeen, I think it is. A charming old hotel way up on the—”

“Yes, right. Motel on the Mountain!”

“Oh, yes. ‘Motel on the Mountain.’”

“I don’t know if that’s the real name. My family took that road upstate when I was a kid. That’s just what I called it.”

He knows of this drive for some reason, the back way upstate, though he can’t quite remember how, and he talks about this part of New York as if it’s another country. We have little common ground, and it is obvious but maybe not hopeless.

I become a regular at his mother’s lunches on Sunday afternoons, and this is how my relationship with Anthony’s family unfolds, between tomato slices and endive salad. Between grilled salmon and sorbet. It trickles out through Evian and fresh lemon wedges over the rims of fine crystal. From our level playing field at ABC, I am suddenly thrust into class divide.

Function versus form—this is what separates us. This practice of lunch, for instance, is foreign to me. Lunch to me is what you eat—a quick sandwich or a yogurt grabbed on your way out the door. It is not this formal theater, this dance, this series of small acts: the salads, the drinks, the sequence of courses. The slow waving of forks in the air. The time stretching out between bites.

I am in the habit of eating standing up, out of the refrigerator, or manning a sandwich in the car. Eating is strictly functional, like sleeping. There was a different cadence to meals in the house I came from. The meals my grandmother laid out in her basement were mostly disposed of in silence. After she died, all trace of ceremony disappeared. Food appeared at random intervals. There might be a pot of pasta and sauce or a big tray of frozen fish sticks or chicken potpies at night, or there might not. We were never required to attend meals. If you were near the kitchen, and there was food, you consumed it. And when we were grown, out of high school but not quite settled elsewhere, and having Sunday dinners together, we would all sit down at once and spoon from an enormous platter of pasta. Chairs were squeezed in, assorted settings scattered around. All of us banging elbows, grabbing for Kraft parmesan cheese, bread, butter. Cans of soda slid across the table. If there was something to say, it was at once, never fewer than three conversations in play, with all of us jumping in and out.

But here in East Hampton, meals serve a different purpose. The lunches have a simple feel, but no detail is overlooked, and the seating is carefully planned. They would be interesting merely to watch, but you aren’t allowed to. You are expected to bring something, a story, to the table. You are graded on participation. I met Hamilton on one of these Sundays, and Hamilton always had a good story. I doubt he’s ever gone anywhere without one. He has, in fact, extras, in case anyone comes up short. Lee became good friends with him through her job at Giorgio Armani. They seem an odd match; he’s barely grown-up, a year younger than I. But they are close, spending weekends and vacations together. He and Anthony are close friends too.

There is a hierarchy at these lunches. Usually one person is more highly regarded, and he or she takes the lead role. The rest of the table maneuvers itself in this person’s direction. Stories are saved for this guest. They are currency, after all, and get a higher price depending on who’s listening. You don’t want to waste them. For instance, no one, I notice, is bursting with a story to tell me. The person sitting next to me will offer polite small talk and wait for an opening with the more interesting person on the left or the wife of the mogul across the table. I haven’t quite mastered this art, talking about nothing while waiting for a turn to tell my story.

But I have learned a little. I glance at Dominick Dunne’s column in
Vanity Fair,
because no one seems to tire of social gossip. I begin to save up stories about work assignments. I start to look for them during the week, stories I think worthy of a Sunday lunch. I learn to say
Peter Jennings,
and then just
Peter,
with terrifying regularity.

Then, too, there is the pressure of knowing who people are. In my family, you are expected to be familiar with the Yankee infield, past and present. A newcomer would never recover from
Who is Don Mattingly?
From then on he or she would be politely endured.