What happened last night changes everything, and I have to write this down, I must write this down. Maybe it’s because I can’t tell these things to anyone, that I need to tell them to myself. Dear One, you will never see this, but this is for you. Now that I know you are here and will someday be with me, everything has changed.
It started — started again, I should say — at a party on this huge, elegant motor yacht called Lady of the Bay. It was January tenth. It was a fund-raising party for Brian Dennison, who was running for mayor of Newport. I took the job to get out of the Whale’s Tale, and believe me — you would have, too. Ten years of that place is enough. Plus, I knew the tips would be good and the night would be lovely if the storm didn’t hit early. I was right. It was ferociously cold, with the paper lanterns strung above the deck swaying furiously in the wind. I could feel that wind right up to the crotch of my panty hose, blowing up under that little skirt. I am thirty-nine years old. Thirty-nine years old, married and childless, with legs still worth showing off — the sum total of my accomplishments to date. It is almost the end of the century, and I am just beginning to realize that more of my life is behind me than ahead. Dear One, if you ever have these thoughts at my age, I pray you will understand how much can happen, how much can still lie ahead!
Yes, thought Joseph Goins, you did have legs worth showing off, but you accomplished much more than that, dear Ann. More than you will ever know.
I got there late, just before Lady of the Bay shoved off, because I had a huge load of laundry to do before Ray went to school in the morning. The ship was already full. All of the Power Crowd was there, because they all wanted Brian to be mayor. Brian was a Power Crowd Wanna Be. He was wearing a dark blue suit that must have cost him a grand at least, but the lapels pooched out because his chest was too big and his shirt looked like it was choking him. His eyebrows were bouncing around on his face like field mice. The congressman was there, Cox, just back from Eastern Europe. And Eleanor, the outgoing mayor, hobbling around with those terrible varicose veins she tries to hold in with the ortho stockings. Poor woman. Then all the usual Power faces, Bren from the Irvine Company, James Roosevelt, the catsup people — the Heinzes — who had the Dalai Lama when he won the Nobel Prize, Argyros, the airline owner, the Segerstroms, the Tappans, Kathryn Thompson, even Pilar Wayne and Buddy Ebsen. The Watergate guy was there — John Dean, and so was Mr. Black well with a new face-lift, and Buzz and Lois Aldrin, and I couldn’t believe it, Charlton Heston. Why would Moses care who’s the mayor of Newport Beach, anyway? These people will be dead and gone by the time you are my age, Dear One, but know that these were the movers and shakers in our little city back then. They were the people who made things happen, for better and worse. I wish you could know all this. I know you never will.
I worked the crowd, hauling around a silver platter of appetizers for their Power Crowd Mouths. I didn’t mind them. The difference between the powerful and the rest of us is that we work for them, but they make most of the money. Raymond would disagree; he says that the richest man still quivers before the Law, that the Law is the real power and money only makes people feel safe. Buddy Ebsen and I had a little chat — he’s such a nice old guy. I imagine you’ve seen him in reruns. Then I decided to go above decks and brave the elements to do my job. There was only one group of people there, too cold and windy, but the stars looked like they were about ten feet away and the lights of the houses twinkled like jewels and the leftover Christmas bulbs blipped red and green in the wind. And all the halyards and lanyards chimed away against the masts; it was like music when the wind blew in the harbor then. Is it still, now?
I went over to the group with my tray. It was only four guys. On the left was Harley Wright, the supervisor, smoking a cigar as usual. Next to him was Brian Dennison. Then Francis Messenger, the oil millionaire, and beside him — a man I had known for twenty-five years — David Cantrell. I hadn’t seen him since he moved back to Newport, five years ago. I knew I’d run into him sooner or later, but honestly, I had no idea how it would feel or what I would say. Right then, I just felt nervous.
Harley said to me, “What a sight you are on a cold winter’s night.”
“A sight on any night, Ann,” said Francis, smiling and taking a shrimp off my tray.
“If you gentlemen had any sense, you’d be below decks,” I said.
Dennison asked me if I’d quit the Whale, and I told him this was just a freelance job for a change of pace.
David looked at me very warmly and said, “Hello, Ann.”
I said hello Mr. Cantrell. How strange the words sounded, Mr. Cantrell. He looked pale and tired, but he also had that air of being ready to spring, of something coiled.
Dennison asked me if Becky Flynn had sent me to spy on his fund-raiser. Becky is my best friend, and she was running against him for mayor. It was meant as a joke, but Dennison was always half-serious and suspicious as hell — a true cop.
What appetizers you eat won’t make or break the June election, I said. He really is vain.
She’s a formidable opponent, he said, his eyebrows dancing up and down.
I said, “She’s a good friend, too.”
Supervisor Wright exhaled hugely from his cigar. The wind seemed to be drawing the smoke from his mouth. He is a powerful man who wears his power casually. Too casually, if you listened to people like my mother. Well, he said, if Becky wins, she ought to make you her flack. You’d be great at it, Ann.
“Two jobs is enough for me,” I said. I looked at each of them in turn, but couldn’t wait to get to Mr. Cantrell. He’s one of the few Power Crowders who really came from among us; most of the others are tourists who stayed. Of all the boys I’d known since high school, he had changed the least on the outside, in spite of the fact that he owned half the county and was worth about $3 billion, way ahead of Donald Trump, if you believed the papers. By the time you have grown up, Dear One, the world will probably have forgotten Donald Trump and C. David Cantrell. Back then, they were coastal versions of each other. Trump liked being rich and famous; Cantrell liked being rich and mysterious. And there he was, looking at me with this expression of utter blankness.
I smiled at each of them, offered the tray once more, then turned and leaned against the wind on my way to the stairs. Inside, I felt as uneasy as the ocean around us.
Five minutes later, I was serving some Power Crowd Wives and I got The Feeling. The Feeling is when you know something that there’s no reason to, but you know, anyway. My father, Poon, taught me about it. The photographer was pulling my sleeve to get me away from the Wives — how they love to have their pictures taken — and I just kept moving away from them, through the crowd, past the bar and the piano and the Victorian sofas, past Mr. Blackwell consoling Dori DeWeiss because she’d worn the same dress (beautiful) as Flo Baldwin and oh what a chuckle that was getting — to the stairway, and climbed back up again. Of course, everybody was gone by then, but... well what can I say? I knew he’d be there. He was mostly in the shadow of the bridge deck, just a splash of white shirt against a tuxedo coat, the black triangles of his bow tie, and a bunch of dark hair lifted by the wind.