Chapter 7

hen the women arrived at the beach house Captain Mike and April were loading up the extra golf cart, getting ready to head down to the marina. Dressed in a blue striped polo shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans and flip-flops, Captain Mike had cleaned up nicely. He was not classically handsome, but he was tall and well built, and his voice was pleasantly deep. Mel had no doubt that other women found him attractive.

“So what’s in Wilmington?” she asked casually, stepping off the golf cart.

“The best beer on the east coast,” he said. April stood beside him, methodically punching the buttons of her cell phone, looking young and bored and very pretty. “There’s a microbrewery down on the waterfront that brews some of the best-tasting, coldest beer around.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, thanks for asking us to go.”

He grinned and looked at Lola. “Sorry,” he said. “Where are my manners? It goes without saying that you ladies are invited to join us if you like.”

“No,” Lola said, waving her hand for them to go on. “We’re having a girls’ night.”

They stood in the driveway and watched as the golf cart drove off, weaving in and out of sight along the winding beach road. “What’s his story?” Mel asked Lola. “He’s got ex-military written all over him.”

Lola hesitated and then said vaguely, “I think he might have been in the marines. Or Special Forces. Something like that.”

“I thought so. Divorced?”

“Widowed.” Lola pushed her hair out of her face. She watched as the cart disappeared over a distant rise. “His wife died in a car crash. A few years ago.”

They were all quiet for a few minutes, absorbing this.

“Poor guy,” Annie said.

“He seems so young,” Sara said.

“Are he and April serious or just fuck buddies?” Mel said.

Lola laughed and leaned to pick up her beach bag. “Why don’t you ask him?” she said.

“Fuck buddies,” Sara said. “Very nice.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean you’d like a chance with him yourself.”

“He’s not my type.”

“Keep your hands off the captain. This is a girls’ trip, remember?”

“Even if he was my type,” Mel said, “I’m the only single girl on this trip so if I choose to hook up with the help, that’s my prerogative.”

“As long as it doesn’t interfere with your bartending duties,” Lola said.

“Don’t worry,” Mel said. “Nothing interferes with that.”

It wasn’t that Mel had bad luck with men. In fact, if anything her luck was too good. There were always too many men, too many distractions that interfered with whatever relationship she found herself in at that particular moment. She didn’t understand women who complained that there weren’t any eligible men in Manhattan for women over thirty-five. There were plenty of eligible men if you knew where to look. If you kept your expectations realistic and didn’t fall into the same trap she saw so many women in their mid-thirties to mid-forties fall into—the cult of the knight in shining armor, the savior, the pressure of that old maternal clock ticking relentlessly down to destruction. She saw them everywhere, these world-weary women who wore their desperation on their faces: I want a husband! I want a child! I want them now! A man could spot them blocks away. They exuded hopelessness like a bad smell.

Mel didn’t like children, and she had never looked for a knight in shining armor. She couldn’t have cared less if men found her attractive and so, for the most part, they did. It was an old trick, not caring, and one she’d perfected not long after first arriving in New York, a fresh-faced Southern girl come to seek her fame and fortune in the Big Apple.

In those days in the early eighties, the city was dark and dangerous. John Lennon had been shot dead in front of the Dakota in 1980, and a pall still hung over the city. Mel took a nasty little walk-up apartment off West Fifteenth and found a job as a writer for a company that published corporate magazines geared to everything from the travel industry to the thriving real-estate market. She was shuttled back and forth between twenty or so different quarterlies and found herself writing an article on wahoo fishing in Aruba one week and the next an article on buying distressed property in the Poconos. It was tame, predictable work but it paid the bills.

New York was not what she had expected. It was not the exuberant, intellectual world of the Algonquin Round Table, of Robert Benchley Dorothy Parker, and Robert Sherwood that she had so often imagined. People were brusque and impatient. They didn’t like to wait the length of time it took her to speak in her slow Southern drawl and would roll their eyes or snap their gum irritably when she ordered takeout or asked for directions. She missed the South. She missed the slow, unhurried pace of life. And even though at times it had driven her crazy, she missed talking to strangers in line at the grocery store, the Laundromat, the gas station, the dry cleaners, or while waiting for a table at a restaurant. New Yorkers didn’t talk to strangers unless it was necessary. They weren’t cold but they were wary. Mel missed Lola, married now to Briggs and living in Birmingham, and she missed Annie, married to her childhood sweetheart and living in Nashville. Sara lived and worked in Charlotte, and Mel still talked to her from time to time.

Mel missed the South, she missed her girlhood friends, but mostly she missed J.T.

Their breakup, of course, had been inevitable. Still, there were times, lying in her bed and listening to the rain drum against the windows or waking from a dream with his name on her lips, when she regretted their parting. Then she would rise and go about her business and she would think all day of calling him. Even a year after she first moved to the city when she had grown accustomed to thinking of herself as a New Yorker and was living with Phil, an editor she worked with, she still thought from time to time of calling J.T.

And then one day, she did.

It was a sunny day in early September when the air was cool and pungent, and the trees in Madison Square Park were glorious with the red and yellow foliage of fall. She had been out walking in the park with Phil and they had come in, their faces red from the cold and the exercise, and he had made them a couple of Irish coffees. He lived in the Flatiron District in a large comfortable apartment not far from the park. They snuggled for a while on the sofa, reading, and then Phil remembered some work back at the office and he rose reluctantly and left. Mel made herself another Irish coffee and sat in an overstuffed chair in front of the long windows, sipping her drink. Below her the city moved at its usual hurried pace. Gray metallic buildings glittered in the bright sunlight, silhouetted against an azure sky. Around the distant skyscrapers hazy clouds drifted like smoke. There was something in the chilly air, some quality of light slanting in through the windows and pooling along the hardwood floors, that reminded her of North Carolina. It was on days like this that she and J.T. might throw their gear into a couple of backpacks and hike the Appalachian Trail down into the Nantahala Forest around Tusquitee Bald. Or maybe the Rim Trail from Huskins Branch to Big Stamp, depending on how much time they had to spend.

She hadn’t seen him or talked to him since graduation, but today on this cool September day, lost in her memories, Mel picked up the phone and called him.

The phone rang several times, long enough for her to nearly change her mind. There was a clattering noise as someone picked up the receiver. “Yeah?” he said. He sounded tired, his voice heavy with sleep.

“It’s me.”

There was a pause and a sound as if he’d put his hand over the receiver. She imagined that there was a woman there. She imagined him rising from the bed and taking the phone into another room where he could talk without fear of discovery. A moment later, he came back on. “Hey,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Were you sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“This late?”

“Rough night,” he said. His voice was cold, impassive. “How’re things in the Big Apple?”

“Good. Really good.” She was nervous suddenly, desperate to fill up the long silence between them. “I work for a company that produces corporate magazines. I write articles on wahoo fishing and how to take the stains out of concrete.”

She had meant it as a joke, something to lighten the tension between them, but he didn’t laugh. “What about your novel?” he said.

“I’m working on that, too. In the evenings.” Far off in the distance someone was flying a kite in the park. She could see it dancing on the currents between the tall buildings, bobbing against the dark blue sky like a paper boat on a stream. “What about you?” she said.

“I’m teaching. At a boys’ school for the moment but I’ve applied to Tulane and Duke.”

“Wow. A boys’ school. That must be exciting.”

There was a moment of silence, a dull hum on the line that thickened and spread out between them like a plume of roiling smoke. Mel couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Was there a reason for this call?”

“No,” she said. “No reason.”

“I’ve got things to do.”

“I thought we could be friends,” she said, “but I can see now that that won’t work.”

“This is how you wanted it,” he said coldly, and hung up.

She sat there for a long time in front of the windows as the sky darkened and the lights of the city gradually came on.

She was still living with Phil when she met her first husband, Richard. He was a video editor who lived in Phil’s building, and their first few meetings on the elevator had been erotic but brief. A smile, a furtive meeting of their eyes, a fleeting touch as she pushed past him and got off on the fourth floor, and he traveled on up to the sixth. By the end of the second week they had spoken, and by the end of the third week he had pushed her roughly up against the wall of the elevator and kissed her before the doors to the fourth floor slid open. After that it was inevitable. The next time they met she didn’t bother to push the button for the fourth floor but instead followed him up to the sixth. She allowed him to take her hand and lead her out of the elevator without a word.

There was a scene, of course, when Phil found out. She was still young and naive enough to believe that face-to-face breakups were best, and she had left work early to pack and wait for him to get home. Her explanation was brief and to the point, but as gentle as she could make it. He took it hard, and when there was a knock on the door and Richard appeared to help her move her things, a sudden threat of violence hung heavy in the air. Richard was tall and thin but there was a determined intensity in his dark eyes that kept Phil from throwing the first punch. Richard was not physically imposing but he had the look of a man who would fight hard for what he wanted. And he wanted Mel.

She lost her job at the corporate publishing company—Phil saw to that—but it didn’t matter. Richard was Old Money. In addition, he made a good living as a video editor, and she stayed home to write. They married the following year and moved into an Upper East Side brownstone and Mel published her first novel that same year. Four more followed at yearly intervals, and by the time she reached twenty-nine her marriage had settled into the doldrums. Richard had begun to hint desperately of children. But by then she had already met Booker, a documentary filmmaker three years her junior. The sex was incredible. Mel turned thirty, divorced Richard, and moved in with Booker. They married three years later and their marriage survived its endless pattern of violent breakups and passionate reconciliations right up until the time she turned thirty-eight. That was the year she got sick and learned that the vow “in sickness and in health” did not hold true for some people. Booker left her soon after her diagnosis. Not that she blamed him. Her track record was not much better.

Romantics constantly go on and on about their one true soul mate but Mel had learned that there was no such thing. She had had four soul mates, and she was sure there must be others out there just waiting to be found.

That being true, and she knew in her heart that it was, it was odd that after all this time it was still J.T. she dreamed of at night.