“It sounds peaceful.”
Especially for Teddy, Adam thought. For his brother, this glade was more than a refuge from Benjamin Blaine. Adam still remembered the day Teddy had discovered it. One of the joys of painting, his brother had enthused, is that you can be out in the world and suddenly find yourself looking at something, the image you might create growing in your mind’s eye-at those moments life becomes art, and nothing is wasted. Listening, Adam saw the world as Teddy did. When Teddy painted the glade, he gave the painting to Adam.
“It was,” he told Jenny. “We both loved it here.”
Jenny smiled. “So do I.”
At the bottom of the cooler was a bottle of chardonnay. “A little wine?” he asked.
“Just mineral water, thanks.” She hesitated, then gave him a tentative look. “I’ve started taking meds that wouldn’t mix too well with wine. A good thing, probably. Alcohol hits me too fast, and I like it too much.”
She was on antidepressants, he guessed, though perhaps her fear of alcohol came from her father. “Then I won’t drink either,” he told her.
They shared the picnic in companionable silence, Adam letting Jenny’s thoughts drift where they would. After a while she took his hand, her fingers interlaced with his. “You’re the only person who ever lets me do this.”
“What, exactly?”
She looked into his eyes. “Sometimes I need to be alone. You let me be alone with you.”
For Adam, there was a world of meaning concealed in those few words. Smiling a little, he said, “I just like being with you. Even when you’re alone.”
A new and palpable affection surfaced in her eyes. She leaned over to kiss him, her mouth soft and warm, then leaned her forehead against his. Quietly, she asked, “Would you like to make love with me?”
Taken by surprise, Adam felt a tightness in his throat. “Yes.”
Wordless, she stood in front of him, eyes locking his. She took off her sweater, then her bra, the nipples rising on her small, perfect breasts. Transfixed, Adam watched her step out of her jeans, then lower her panties, exposing the light brown tuft between her slender legs. Then she turned around to show him everything before facing him again.
“Do you like me, Adam?”
He could not seem to move. “Even more than I imagined.”
“Then why are you still dressed?”
He stood, peeling off his clothes, his desire for her written on every fiber of his body. She kissed him deeply, then knelt to take him into her mouth. “Not that,” he murmured. “It’s you I want.”
“Then lie down,” she said in a husky voice.
He lay on his back. With silent urgency, Jenny mounted him, eyes closing as she took him inside her body. As she began to move with him, her face went rigid, almost blank. Their rhythm quickened, drawing soft cries from inside her. When she cried out more fiercely, her body shuddering, Adam saw tears at the corners of her eyes. Then, all at once, he was beyond wondering why.
When they were spent, Jenny searched his face again, as though rediscovering its features. “Just hold me,” she whispered.
Filled with tenderness and questions, Adam did that.
Seven
Breaking off this memory, Adam knocked on the door of the guesthouse. “Come on in,” a mordant voice said. “Whoever you are, you can’t be my father.”
Adam stepped inside. Though his brother sat in front of a canvas, for a moment Adam saw neither Teddy nor his surroundings. “What’s wrong, bro?” Teddy asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
At once, Adam shook off the illusion of having stepped into the past. “It’s just that I haven’t been here for so long. The last time I saw this room it wasn’t an artist’s studio.”
That much was true. When Teddy, like Jack, had returned to the island, Clarice had pled with Ben to make the guesthouse Teddy’s home. The front room had become his place of work, with painting supplies, an easel, and several half-finished canvases awaiting the artist’s touch. Teddy had turned from the easel, his normally grave features displaying the engaging smile he reserved for those he cared for. Sitting on the sofa, Adam said simply, “I’m sorry about all this.”
Teddy gave him a look that mingled affection and directness. “Not your fault. I know you always felt like it was, somehow. But the only one to blame is him.”
Adam felt himself relax. Within their family, he realized, his relationship with Teddy was a respite, unalloyed by his own complex feelings for his mother and his loathing for the father he too closely resembled. “Did you have any idea he’d do this, Ted?”
Teddy’s face hardened. “Why would I? He’d written me off when he was still alive. He just decided to save the coup de grace for after he was gone.”
“That could have been years from now,” Adam objected. “Dad was the last man who could imagine his own death. Why change his will so soon?”
In the light from above, focused on Teddy’s easel, Adam saw a grim smile play on his brother’s lips. “Don’t ask me to explain the workings of his mind. Whatever they were, he timed his departure quite badly. I’m destitute.”
“Literally?”
Teddy considered him, his left elbow propped on his knee, his face resting in his palm. “Why do you think I came back? Nostalgia? Once I got lymphoma, I hit the financial wall-I was too sick to work, my old paintings stopped selling, and I was all but uninsured. Then Brian died. In a few months, my life had become the train wreck Dad had always predicted. Mom wheedled the money from him for my treatment, then this ‘safe haven’ in which to recuperate-”
“But you’re all right now, true?”
Teddy twitched his shoulders. “As far as I know. Except for discovering that living with him wasn’t the worst part.”
The quiet bitterness in Teddy echoed their mother’s. “How did you get along with him?” Adam wondered aloud.
“Mostly by avoidance. Though it seemed to amuse him to keep me here on life support, and our mother dangling on yet another string.”
The psychology of Teddy’s return, with its cycle of debasement for both son and mother, was painful for Adam to contemplate. But whatever the cost, he knew what Teddy had salvaged. Since boyhood, his brother had burned with the love of painting, the one thing-beyond the sexuality their father had scorned-that defined him. His partner had died; to lose the freedom to paint would have felt like another death, his own.
Turning, Adam studied Teddy’s canvas. The landscape was both unsettling and unsurprising, reflecting Teddy’s originality and the seeds of his defeat. Though it portrayed Martha’s Vineyard, it lacked the soothing elements prized by the purchasers of popular art: the beaches of summer, bordered by sea grass; a sailboat breaching whitecapped waves; verdant farmland and trees at the height of their foliage. Instead, Teddy’s landscape captured winter-not the snowy landscape of a greeting card, but the bleak, pitiless gray of February, when short days and long nights led to drunkenness and domestic violence, families turning on one another. This was the Vineyard seen through a glass darkly, harsh and barren, its shadows distorted, its trees so stripped of life that they seemed the remnant of some terrible disaster, a nightmare terrain that would haunt anyone who saw it. Adam found it startling and unforgettable, evoking hidden truths perceived by a unique vision-and likely unsalable.
As if reading Adam’s thoughts, Teddy remarked dryly, “Seems like I’ve got this corner of the market to myself.”
Adam kept staring at the painting. “It’s astonishing, Ted-surreal yet all too real. When I was a kid, I wondered how you could do this. I still do.”
Teddy smiled a little. “So do I, sometimes. It can be hard to live with.”
Adam looked up at him. “And the Vineyard? Other than the obvious, how has living here been for you?”
“Solitary.” His brother paused, stressing the word. “For a while I had a boyfriend-or thought I did. But then he got strange, in ways I won’t bother to describe. Except to say that I didn’t absorb enough of our mother’s masochism.” Teddy flashed a smile, interrupting himself. “Enough of that. Tell me when you’re escaping Afghanistan, so I’ll know when to quit worrying you’ll get yourself beheaded.”