Page 10 of The Castaways
Okay, fine, forget it, Delilah wouldn’t push it, though the life of a Las Vegas vice squad officer sounded fascinating if you loved the raw and the raunchy, which Delilah did—and it would be relevant besides. But she’d taken a vow of silence and she meant to stick to it.
Phoebe regaled the table with details of her hours by the pool—Okay, does everyone in this town have fake boobs or what?—and Delilah’s mind wandered. It became clear, now that she had stepped out of her role as the conversational master of ceremonies, how firmly established that role was. They all had their roles, each one of them; they had their personalities, proclivities, interests, likes and dislikes. They were adults, they were known quantities. Was this good or bad? They could not surprise each other. They were not likely to change or act out of character. Like the Chief insisting on drinking his beer from a bottle, even here at Le Cirque, because that was how he drank his beer. Utterly predictable.
But the roles gave them comfort, the lack of surprise lent security, a sense of understanding, friendship, family, acceptance. Right?
The Chief was their spiritual leader. He was their man in case of emergency; he was the best problem solver (though Jeffrey was a damn close second). He was the police chief, he knew everything and he knew it first, but he gave nothing away. The man was a vault. If they ever broke him open, what would they find? A treasure trove of secrets and confidences bound up by his honor. The Chief was principled and discreet. He was part of a fraternity across the country, across the world. Law enforcement. The earth’s finest.
Andrea was the den mother, Mother Earth, Mother Nature. Delilah had always thought it would be boring to be Andrea—she was matronly, sexless, she wore skirts to the knee and one-piece bathing suits, she wore comfortable shoes—but Andrea seemed content. She wasn’t looking for anything, she wasn’t searching for herself, trying on identities or attitudes the way Delilah sometimes did, the way Tess and Phoebe did, too. Andrea had a firm grip on who she was, and this left her plenty of time and energy to focus on others (the Chief, her kids, Tess). When Delilah was sixty or seventy, she wanted to be just like Andrea. She said this once to Jeffrey, and Jeffrey made a face indicating that he found this statement ridiculous or inappropriate. Jeffrey had been in love with Andrea years and years ago; they had dated, kissed, groped, copulated, fallen in love, moved in together. They had talked about marriage and kids. But back then, Jeffrey wasn’t ready. Andrea was the first woman he’d made love to (Jeffrey’s long-time girlfriend in high school and college, Felicity Hammer, was a devout Baptist, determined to remain chaste until her wedding day, and so for six years Jeffrey was dragged along on that virginal ride). But Jeffrey didn’t leave Andrea because he had wild oats to sow; he left her because he had real oats to sow, real corn, real vegetables. He’d inherited a hundred and sixty-two acres of fertile farmland, a legitimate business opportunity, and he wanted to succeed. He could not put the farm first and put Andrea first. They broke up. It was, in his words, very sad.
This could have moved Delilah right along to thinking about Jeffrey, but she couldn’t allow herself to deconstruct him. He was her husband, she knew him too well, and she was angry. She would skip him.You really disappoint me.God, it infuriated her, but it did not surprise her.
Addison was talking now, rescuing them from Phoebe’s discourse on life as seen from the chaise longue. He was describing Las Vegas real estate trends (Addison loved trends) and how the old casinos—the Sands, the Golden Nugget, the Desert Inn—were being medicine-balled and replaced by theme-park giants—the Luxor, the Venetian, Treasure Island.
The waiter reappeared, and they ordered. Delilah ordered the salade frisee avec lardons and the steak. Jeffrey wanted the beets, but would not order them because they were out of season. And so he went with the grapefruit and avocado salad and the pasta with lump crabmeat. (Even their ordering could not surprise her. Phoebe ordered a salad with roasted vegetables. Addison and the Chief got the steak, like Delilah.)
Addison was the businessman, the money man. His last name was Wheeler, and every single person on Nantucket called him “Wheeler Dealer.” Addison was tall and thin and bald; he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was part nerd, part aristocrat. His father had owned a carpet and flooring business in New Brunswick; his mother had been a nurse in the infirmary at Rutgers. Until high school, Addison’s life had been very Exit 8. It had been McDonald’s after football games; it had been Bruce Springsteen and summers spent “down the shore.” But like cream, Addison rose to the top. If you believed him, he did so without trying. He was bright, polite, and charming. He had a silver tongue. He was a social genius, and because of this, he stood out. The junior high school principal suggested that Addison make a run at boarding school, where he could take advantage of some real opportunities.
He got into Lawrenceville based on his interview alone. From Lawrenceville he went to Princeton, where he was president of his eating club, Cottage. There was something funny about his graduation, and by funny Delilah meant peculiar—he hadn’t had the correct credits at the end of his senior year to get his diploma. He had finished up the following summer at Rutgers. Had he graduated from Rutgers, then, technically? Or was it a Princeton diploma with a Rutgers asterisk? Delilah had also heard that Addison had beenthrown outof Princeton for conducting an affair with the wife of the dean of arts and sciences, whom Addison had met at a faculty cocktail party he’d crashed. Nowthatsounded like Addison, but Delilah did not have confirmation of that story, and the one time she had been brave enough to ask Phoebe, Phoebe had said dismissively,I can’t keep track of all the stories. The man has had nine lives.
That was the truth about Addison: he had had nine lives. The stories were too numerous and byzantine to keep track of. Which were real and which were lore? He claimed to have lived in Belfast, Naples, and Paris while working as a broker for Coldwell Banker. But he had only just turned forty: how had he possibly fit it all in? He spoke fluent French and Italian, he spokeGaelic,he knew everything there was to know about food and wine, painting, sculpture, architecture, classical music, literature. His first wife was an anorexically thin rubber heiress named Mary Rose Garth, who had a brownstone on Gramercy Park and a penchant for younger men—her personal trainer, the handsome Puerto Rican doorman. Mary Rose had taken Addison for the ride of his life; she had shown him all of the best ways in the world to spend money. But she had been too much even for Addison; they divorced amicably, and Mary Rose now lived in Malibu with their daughter, Vanessa. If you were to believe Addison, Mary Rose and Vanessa shared boyfriends.
Delilah ate her steak. She had asked for it rare and it had come perfectly cooked, seared on the outside, dark pink on the inside. Addison had also ordered his steak rare, but the Chief had ordered his well done. (Predictable.) They had moved on to drinking a red wine from Argentina—shocking, since Addison was a Francophile. But it was the most incredible wine Delilah had ever tasted. It was like drinking velvet. It was like drinking the blood of your one true love. If she said this, everyone would laugh. Phoebe would say,God, Delilah, you are so clever,and mean it, and Jeffrey would shake his head, embarrassed.
Andrea was talking about her kids. Dullsville. But Delilah would not save her.
In her mind, she moved on to Phoebe. Phoebe was Delilah’s best friend, though they were an odd match. Phoebe was blond, stick-thin, never caught in public without perfectly applied Chanel lipstick. She was a cruise director, a cheerleader; she was the pep squad. She was a trophy wife. She liked being all these things; the stereotype was her identity and she relished it. The shopping, the waxing, the Valentino heels, the Dior perfume, her slavish devotion toSex and the City.She did not cook, she did not clean or do laundry, but she did take spinning and yoga classes, she did avoid red meat, as well as chicken and fish and all starches. It seemed like she ate the same way that she drank champagne: sparingly, on special occasions. Tonight she had ordered a beautiful leafy salad with a timbale of roasted vegetables, but at home it was all rice cakes, navel oranges, and mineral water.
What Delilah had learned, however, was that there was depth to Phoebe. The woman was a fantastic administrator. She sat on the boards of directors of two charities, she cochaired events that raised ludicrous amounts of money. She ran her consulting business with acuity; she was as shrewd as Addison—shrewder, perhaps, because whereas Addison was acknowledged as being shrewd, Phoebe was considered ditzy and vacuous.
Phoebe came from a close-knit family from Milwaukee. She had grown up with loving parents and a twin brother, Reed, whom she adored. They were the kind of twins who created their own language; they were, in Phoebe’s words, “just like the twins inFlowers in the Attic, minus all the nasty stuff.” Her parents, Joan and Phil, were still married, still living in a center-hall colonial in Whitefish Bay, still sustaining themselves on the milk and cheese of Phoebe and Reed’s youth. Reed was a fantastically successful bond trader in New York. Phoebe talked to him at least twice a day. He invested her money. He had made her millions.
Something fell and hit Delilah’s foot. It was… Greg’s spoon, one of Greg’s many spoons. (This dinner required the full Emily Post lineup of utensils.) He bent down to retrieve it, a very un-Emily-Post-like move. (How many times had Delilah’s mother told her that when you dropped a utensil, you were to leave it be and ask the server to bring you another one?) Delilah felt Greg’s fingers fondling her left heel. She was shocked, but she kept her expression steady. His fingers kept going; he dragged them up the back of Delilah’s calf to the crease in her knee. This was outrageous. It was unprecedented. There had been new allies forged on this trip, yes, and maybe Greg, like Jeffrey, was recalling their flirtatious afternoon at the Hoover Dam—but to fondle her foot under the table during dinner?
Greg surfaced like a kid trolling the bottom of a swimming pool for coins, holding his spoon aloft.
“Got it!”
It might seem like Addison and Phoebe were the couple who were the most mysterious, respectively unknowable and misunderstood, but Delilah was baffled by Greg and Tess. Because they, somehow, had won. They were everybody’s favorites. They were Boy Bright and Suzie Sunshine; they had what everybody wanted.
With Greg, it was easy to understand. Greg was, after all, their rock star. He played guitar and piano; he sang. He had shaggy brown hair and intense green eyes and a day of growth on his face. He was six feet tall—shorter than Jeffrey by five inches and Addison by three—but his body was that of a professional surfer. He had six-pack abs and the shoulders of Adonis. He had a vine tattoo encircling his left bicep. He wore two silver hoops in his left ear and a silver ring on the second toe of his left foot, which only someone like Greg could pull off. If there was a woman in the world who was resistant to the charms of Greg MacAvoy, Delilah had yet to meet her. In a way, Delilah was immune. (His looks and charm were a virus she had encountered many times before.) She prided herself on being Greg’s buddy, his partner in crime. She did not fantasize about Greg; she did not desire him.
(But this thing that had just transpired under the table—what was this? A joke, she decided. A harmless funny.) She looked at Tess. Had Tess noticed anything strange? She had not. She was listening with ridiculous, eager attention to Andrea talk about Eric’s crush on the elementary school art teacher.
Tess was the ingenue, the baby sister. She was Amy inLittle Women;she was Franny Glass. Adored, coddled, spoiled, adored some more.
It helped that she was small—five feet tall, ninety-seven pounds—and it helped that she had thick dark hair cut into a bob and tucked behind her ears, showing off her pearl earrings or her microscopic diamond studs. It helped that she had freckles and a Minnie Mouse voice. It helped that she was the nicest, kindest, most generous person on the face of the earth. She loved babies and animals. She cried at movies and AT&T long-distance commercials. She sponsored an orphan in Brazil, an eight-year-old girl named Esmeralda, and in addition to sending regular checks, Tess sent boxes packed with brown rice, muesli, coloring books, Crayola markers and colored pencils, jigsaw puzzles, modeling clay, a hairbrush, barrettes, packages of new underwear, a toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, stickers, a flashlight, and a special-ordered copy ofA Little Princessin Portuguese.
Only Tess.
She was a good egg, for real. She never had a mean word for anyone; she loved Greg and Andrea and the Chief and the rest of them with unbridled intensity. It felt good to have Tess like you, to have Tess love you; it felt like sunshine, it felt like warm chocolate sauce over your ice cream.
Greg was no dummy. He could have had any woman he wanted and so he snapped up the prize: Tess DiRosa. He had been playing with his band at the Muse and Tess had been in the front row, wearing—how many times had Delilah heard the story?—jeans and a green bandanna on her hair. And Greg said to his bass player,Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.
They were, now, the perfect couple.
Or were they? Delilah was suspicious. She didn’t believe in perfect couples. She didn’t believe in perfect families. Delilah told off-color jokes and stories, she threw decorum to the wind, and people liked this about her because on some level everyone related. Life was messy. It did fart and burp, it left a stink in the bathroom and bloodstains on the sheets. Polite society had an underbelly. People led complicated, secret lives, and this fascinated Delilah.
But what did she know?
