Portia had tried to talk her out of coming here—a bad time to isolate, she’d said. She’s also confided that when she’s alone she sometimes hears their father speaking to her. But Lily needed to get away from her one-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights, which she’d rented on the now-exploded theory that neighborhood trumps space. And also, let’s admit it, to get away from Dagon, whom she’d lately been feeding Rice Krispies, and whose litter box she’d been finding herself unable to clean and refill. Renaldo, the intern she’s kept in touch with since being laid off, agreed to stay with him in return for the three weeks of air-conditioning and a shorter subway ride. On the morning she gave Renaldo her keys, she finally bought cat food and changed the litter, which proved that she could do it.
And then there was this. On the Fourth of July, after a party where the revelers got high to watch the fireworks from a roof garden in Tribeca, she’d shared a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend—Portia being otherwise occupied—and kissed him when he dropped her off at her building, tongues involved, then hands under the clothes. He’s been emailing her ever since, and while she’s been emailing back, she’s managed to avoid seeing him again. So really, doesn’t this speak well of her?
—
It’s after midnight when she gets here: a bus to Torrington, then a taxi along miles of dark country roads. Inside, the house is hot and stuffy; she sets her bags down in the kitchen and goes around opening windows. On the counter, under the keys to the Subaru, she finds a note from Marian Hagerty that goes to the tune of You may go down the lane, whatever whatever, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. Lily is not to drink the wines in the cellar, each laid down by Joe to be opened at such and such a time. (“Not that you would, of course.”) She is not to have parties—“a friend or two is perfectly fine”—or overnight guests. If she uses the court, she is to wear only tennis shoes: i.e., bare-assed and breasts bouncing? Oh well, poor Marian. The once-scandalous second wife, suddenly in her sixties, bereft of her child and having to deal with Joe, now eighty-four and still playing doubles, with neighbors’ young wives as his partners.
Up in Elena’s bedroom, thank God, there’s a big floor fan; Lily puts it on the highest speed, opens a window and goes back downstairs for her duffel and her wheeled suitcase. She takes her orange plastic box of weed out of the zippered compartment and puts it in the freezer, between a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla and a bottle of Stoli. Any one of these three things could lead to the other two. But she goes to bed without. Isn’t that what she’s been doing?
In the morning, she makes coffee in the Hagertys’ French press and takes it out to the shady porch (“Please do not leave food on the veranda—we get the occasional raccoon”) along with a bowl of the muesli she found in the cupboard. The box says both “no sugar added” and “not a low-calorie food”: mixed signals, as if from a man!
Driving into town along the shore of the lake, she spots a farm stand: a rustic wagon that holds an array of tomatoes, squashes, ears of corn. Then a bar called Tony’s, with a green canvas awning. The town is a two-block main street without parking meters; she finds the video store, the organic market and the wine shop, where she is to ask for Victor. A tiny hair salon, so wittily called Delilah’s. In the wine shop, she buys a seventy-five-dollar bottle of sherry—yes! inspired!—for movie time. The younger, more handsome of the two men, the one with the curly hair, must be Victor. Oh, just a guess.
On the way back, she slows down for a better look at this Tony’s, although bars are not in the plan, then stops at the farm stand and buys zucchini, yellow summer squash and a fat tomato. It’s when she opens the kitchen door that she makes her discovery: she’d closed the downstairs windows so nobody could get in, and now it’s actually cool in here. Not a word of this in Marian Hagerty’s note!
She puts on her black bikini and checks herself: today is a good day. She and Portia had been issued the wrong bodies, back in the antecedent life. Lily has the ectomorphic mind—even the ectomorphic name—while portly sounding Portia stole the show, slinky-limbed, in the one ballet recital they did together. After that, Lily begged to take tap instead—all those old musicals their father made them watch—then refused to go when she learned the students had to wear tights: you could see the flesh shaking even on Ruby Keeler’s thighs, for Pete’s sake, when she tapped in 42nd Street.
At the lake, she spreads one of the Hagertys’ towels on the grass and takes her sweet time unbuttoning her shirt, sliding her jeans off, arching her back. From behind her sunglasses, she looks around her: all moms and kids, which is just as well. No, truly. The water’s warm at the surface, icy when you dive down. When she comes out, her body feels cool at the core, and lying down in the sun she’s so calmed it’s disturbing.
She eats a dinner of brown rice with zucchini and garlic, sliced tomato on the side. Then she goes up to Elena’s room, pulls down the shade, slips panties off one leg and thinks up Garrett in the taxi, her hand down the front of his jeans, her other hand down the back, then thinks up reaching into Elena’s blue dress—it’s vacation!—and touches her own breast with her free hand, then brings Garrett back in to play with her and Elena: even alone, you can’t know who’s watching. She makes herself come, twice, in Elena’s bed. Outside it’s still daylight.
—
When they went through her father’s things, Lily took a white shirt with a Brooks Brothers label and his razor, with which she now shaves her legs. In the back of his closet, she found the framed photo of the Shelley Memorial at Oxford that used to hang above the desk in his study; when he got sober, he’d replaced it with a photo of their cottage in Dennis Port. (“What’s your favorite sport?” her father would ask them, turning his head to the backseat, and they would shout back, “Dennis Port!”) When she was little, she would go into the study to look at it: a statue of a beautiful naked drowned man lying on his side; you could sort of see his junk. Neither her mother nor Portia had wanted the thing, so Lily hung it over her nonworking fireplace in Brooklyn. Sometimes she thinks it’s bringing her bad luck. But didn’t she already have that?
Except during the couple of years before he went to Silver Hill, Skip Kiernan had continually reread Shakespeare, Johnson and Wordsworth; their subliminally channeled cadences, he believed, had saved some corporate criminals from doing serious time. He used to pay both his daughters ten cents a line to memorize poems and recite them while he sat in his leather armchair with his drink. Portia stopped because it was babyish, but one night Lily made five dollars on Emily Dickinson. When Lily finally found a full-time job, copyediting at an upmarket bridal magazine, her father offered her ten thousand dollars, on top of her tuition, to quit and go get what he called “your Ph.D.” Behind Matt’s back. So now Matt’s out of the picture, she’s lost the job anyway and she’s just turned thirty-three. Should it be “Woe is me” or “Woe am I”?