Page 49 of The Castaways
Tess said, “The band house? No way.”
Delilah said, “Are you crazy? Every woman on Nantucket wants that guy.”
But Andrea approved of Tess’s answer. Andrea had a baby and a two-year-old at home; she was mother superior. She was drinking and having fun like the rest of them—more than the rest of them—but she did not want to see her beloved younger cousin, Tess, disappear into the opium den/syphilis shack that was the band house.
Tess said no, and Greg was fired up. The hunt was on!
“What did he do to get her?” Andrea scanned Jeffrey’s desk for a piece of paper. She wanted to make a list.
“He tried to find out her last name,” Jeffrey said.
“Failed,” Andrea said.
“He tried to get her phone number.”
“Failed.”
“But then someone told him where she waitressed…”
“He showed up at the RopeWalk with flowers.”
“Didn’t work.”
“The next time he showed up with that CD he made her. With ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits on it.”
“Didn’t work.”
“He ordered the lobster dinner to impress her.”
“It was just like Greg to be so misguided,” Andrea said. “Ordering the lobster was not impressive.”
He asked her out each and every time. Where did she want to go? The Chanticleer? The Wauwinet? Beckett Steed’s parents had a Boston Whaler. Did she want to go out on the Whaler?
“She told him she was afraid of the water,” Andrea said quietly.
Did she want to go on a picnic? Would she meet him for breakfast? Coffee?
He showed up at her yoga class; he did all the positions, hoping she was watching him in her peripheral vision. He waited for her by the water cooler, but she breezed past him.
“He borrowed a dog,” Andrea said. “That golden retriever.”
Jeffrey shook his head. “Jesus. I forgot about the dog.”
“She almost fell for it,” Andrea said. “But when she found out it wasn’t his, it set him back.”
“So what was it, in the end?” Jeffrey said. The Greg-in-pursuit-of-Tess story was in fact a well-documented and much-laughed-about legend, and the first-night-at-the-Muse story could easily be told by people (like himself) who hadn’t even been there. But what had flipped her? What had changed her mind? Jeffrey couldn’t remember, or didn’t know.
“I gave her permission,” Andrea said. “I told her the guy clearly deserved a chance, he was going to so much trouble. I told her it was okay to relent. To say yes. And that was all she needed. She did.”
“Oh,” Jeffrey said.
“Thank you, Peach.”
Jeffrey nodded. “You’re welcome.”
He did not tell anyone about Andrea’s visits or about the recounting of Tess’s life in obscene detail. Meaning he did not tell Delilah. This was unprecedented, because one of Jeffrey’s hallmark qualities was that he was an open book. His accounts were honest, his slate clean. He hid nothing; he had no secrets. He prided himself on operating this way; he felt it gave him the upper hand. Delilah had secrets; she had hundreds of hours unaccounted for that fell under the category of “time to myself” and was therefore unimpeachable. She was always hiding something, covering up, making excuses. It was exhausting to live that way; Jeffrey could see the toll it took on her, harboring an entire emotional life she refused to share with him.
He decided to keep Andrea’s visits a secret, not for his sake but for Andrea’s sake. It went unspoken, but Jeffrey was pretty sure the Chief knew nothing about the hours she whiled away in the farm attic. Delilah, if she knew, would get mad, she would feel threatened (though she claimed again and again that it wasimpossibleto feel jealous of someone like Andrea); she would ridicule Jeffrey first, then Andrea; she would degrade their attempts at self-help, at memory as therapy. She would misunderstand it and misrepresent it to others and ruin it.
