Page 42 of The Castaways
He looked at her. She was in a swimsuit and a matching coverup, she had a bag packed, she was eating a bagel with cream cheese. A bagel with cream cheese? Was that actually a wheel of carbohydrate slathered with fat going into her body, or was it an illusion? Who was this woman? Was it Phoebe Jurgen, the twenty-six-year-old hotshot whom Addison had seen for the first time sunning herself in Bryant Park? Itwas—he could see her, his wife, the woman he had been waiting so long for. But honestly, he could barely bring himself to care. This would be one of those tragic/ironic love stories where they missed each other coming and going.
“Okay,” he said. “Have fun.”
He went over to the MacAvoy house with his list. Where to begin?
I’m afraid you won’t get it.
Are you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you love me?
You have to think of the kids. They need closure.
He had brought a bottle of Jack Daniels.
He would write the book.How to Be the Executor of a Will, Even When One of the Deceased Was Your Lover.
It was ten-fifteen in the morning. He poured himself a drink and got to work.
He was a real estate agent. Houses and the things in them were his area of expertise. Greg and Tess’s house was small, but it was cute, in a garage-sale-find sort of way. He did not mean to sound condescending. He would gladly have lived in this house with Tess; he would have lived with Tess in a shack with papier-mache walls and a corrugated tin roof.
He finished his first drink by ten-thirty, then vowed to slow down.
The fireplace was the house’s best feature; it was made of stacked fieldstone. The furniture in the living room, Addison knew, was a combination of purchases from Pottery Barn (Addison loathed Pottery Barn and the resulting homogenization of American interiors) and pieces Tess had salvaged from the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the dump: a tall cabinet that held her candles and her table linens, a pine bar that she had painstakingly stripped and refinished. Tess had a touch of Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree syndrome. If she saw something pathetic or abandoned, she brought it home. Stray animals, friends of Chloe’s and Finn’s from dysfunctional families, pieces of crap furniture from the dump—and Addison.
He would save nothing from the living room, he decided, except for the pine bar.
He felt much the same way about the rest of the house. There were no treasures, nothing that Addison could present to the experts onAntiques Roadshow,only to discover that it was worth tens of thousands of dollars. Tess had been a big fan of inexpensive embellishments—candles, throw pillows, paper lanterns, glass vases, seashell collections, houseplants (all of these were dead from lack of water, except the cactus), handmade curtains, her children’s artwork, and photographs. Tess and Greg had poured much of their disposable income into sitting for Cary Hazlegrove every year and then having the prints enlarged and lavishly framed. There were black-and-whites of the twins, together and separately, and of the whole family spanning the course of seven years. Tess and Greg hugging, the whole family in a pig pile, smiling, gorgeous, happy.
Addison finished his second drink. Eleven-ten.
There were photographs of the group, too. The entire surface of another take-it-or-leave-it table was dedicated to displaying framed pictures of the eight of them on vacation—in Las Vegas, in London, on Saranac Lake, in Sayulita, Mexico, in South Beach, in Stowe. Addison stacked these pictures and carried them to the slipcovered sofa. He meant to savor these photographs as if each one were a novel.
And indeed, each one was.
In his edition ofExecutoring for Dummies,Addison would warn about getting too caught up in your own role in the life of the deceased.
He took special interest in the photograph of them (well, all of them except Phoebe) in London. London had, hands down, been the worst of the six vacations. Andrea had picked it. She had never been to London, but it topped her list of places to see before she died. They went in March of 2002. Phoebe was still so raw from September 11 that taking her to a major metropolis with traffic and skyscrapers and mandatory sights that attracted crowds and long lines was a terrible idea. Andrea had booked them into an adequate hotel near Selfridges, and when Phoebe checked into their room and saw the chintz polyester spread and smelled room freshener over cigarettes, she cried. Of course, she had been crying for six months, but this crying had seemed to be caused by something Addison could fix. And so he picked up the phone and booked a room at the Connaught. When he told the rest of the group that he and Phoebe were moving to the Connaught, they were thunderstruck. The hotel Andrea had booked was expensive already, considering the price was in sterling. None of them could afford the Connaught. Tess tried to talk Addison out of moving, because this was a group vacation and the whole point was to be together. He remembered Tess pleading,Don’t go! We have to stay together!But Addison’s first priority was Phoebe. They made a deal: they would all move to the Connaught, and Addison, who had plenty of money, who had nothingbutmoney, would pay the difference. The Connaught was the ultimate in luxury, it was the best of London all by itself, and yet once they were all settled in, Phoebe cried harder. The vacation to London was hallmarked by this realization: Addison could not make Phoebe happy. He could not do anything, say anything, spend anything. He tried, but he could not break through. Phoebe spent the week alternately soaking in the clawfoot tub, sleeping facedown in bed, and staring dumbly at the comedies on theBBC, whose humor was inscrutable to Americans. She was on her pills; she was at all times stoned.
Addison joined the rest of the group as they trudged dutifully to St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, the Tate, and Buckingham Palace for the godforsaken changing of the guard in sideways sleet. They went to the British Museum, where Greg spent the whole time ogling the handwritten lyrics of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They went to Madame Tussaud’s and Churchill’s War Rooms, they rode a double-decker bus in thirty-mile-an-hour wind. They ate shepherd’s pie and Welsh rarebit lunches in pubs. They got half-price tickets to a mediocre production ofThe Bald Soprano. They went to Harrods, where Tess bought an electric tea kettle like the one in her hotel room and a tin of Indian curry powder that set her back nine pounds sterling. They went to a dance club in Covent Garden where the band played really good covers of U2 and the Police and AC/DC and they danced with punkish teenagers from the East End, and Greg glowered from a solitary spot at the bar because the lead singer wouldn’t let him sit in. When they stumbled out onto the street, they found that the tube had long since stopped running, so Addison called the Connaught and had it send a couple of cars. Right before he unlocked the door to his hotel room, feeling sweaty and tired and good for the first time since they had boarded the plane, he became convinced that he was going to open the door and find Phoebe dead. ODed like a rock star. He nearly turned around and retreated to the lobby. He nearly cried. It had been six whole months; he couldn’tdothis anymore. Was she ever going to snap out of it? Get better?
He opened the door and found Phoebe asleep facedown on the bed, right where he’d left her that evening at seven. And whereas he was relieved, he also wasn’t.
Addison finished another drink. Nearly noon. And that, he thought, was London.
The other picture that grabbed him, of course, was the photograph taken in Stowe. Taken on the last day, out in front of Jack-the-client’s condo.
In this picture, he and Tess were newly and tenderly a couple. They had only shared the kisses in the parking lot at Nous Deux and then a lot of long, meaningful looks, a few hand squeezes, and innuendo.
How was your day, you two?Greg had asked upon his return from the slopes. He was so high from his own experience of skiing and the demonstration of his prowess that he wasn’t really listening for an answer. He didn’t care how their day had been.
It was heaven,Tess said.
And Addison’s heart floated.
They belonged to each other in that picture. Addison was standing behind Tess, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. If a stranger looked at that photograph, he would think Addison and Tess were husband and wife.
It is important not to get too caught up in your role in the lives of the deceased.
But come on! That was all Addison cared about! The house and its furnishings were boring (he would list the house at $750,000; he would get rid of everything except the pine bar and the photographs). He wanted to find himself in this house, proof of his relationship with Tess, of her love for him. Where was the proof, the evidence only he would recognize? He was drunk enough now to admit that the Tess-and-Greg-ness of this house was gut-wrenching: the photographs of them smiling, Greg’s piano, a framed copy of their wedding invitation. Addison couldn’t take any more. He wanted to find Addison and Tess. Where was Addison? Where washe?
