Chuck indicated that the girls should take their cigarettes and sit up on the bow. They did. India said, “You have to inhale.”
“Shut up,” Birdie said. She sucked deeply on the cigarette, then sputtered out a terrific cough. India giggled. Birdie wanted to throw her overboard. She glanced back at Chuck. His eyes were over the girls’ heads, on the intricacies of Madaket Harbor. He didn’t notice Birdie breathing fire. She inhaled again. It was better.
Birdie had smoked the following six summers (only when Chuck offered her a Newport, out of view of her parents), and then she smoked more seriously the year she worked at Christie’s. Then she met Grant. Grant despised cigarettes; his father had smoked two packs a day and died, gruesomely, of emphysema. So Birdie gave up smoking for Grant, and in quitting she had probably saved her own life. However, in retrospect, it felt like one more thing Birdie had had to cede to Grant, along with her career and her individual wants and desires. She had liked smoking and she was glad to be back at it, everyone else be damned.
The other thing that Birdie did to assert her personhood was against the Tuckernuck rules: she used her cell phone. If she was feeling energetic, she walked to Bigelow Point, though one day, after too much wine the night before, she drove the Scout. As Barrett had promised, if she took off her flip-flops and walked all the way out to where the water lapped at her ankles, she could get a signal. She could dial a number and the phone would ring and Hank would answer, and when Birdie spoke, he could hear her.
It was astonishing to Birdie from the moment she pulled onto I-95 at Exit 15 how much she missed Hank. Her missing him was like a sickness. Her heart ached; it was difficult to focus. India would be talking about a certain artist or about an Italian film she’d seen, and Birdie would be looking into India’s eyes, nodding, but not hearing a word. She could think only of Hank. Hank on his knees in her garden, throwing dirt-clumped weeds in the bucket, Hank asleep in the hotel bed. (Unlike Grant, who snored, Hank slept silently. When Birdie watched him, she was filled with the desire to touch him, kiss him, wake him up!) He was everything she wanted in a man. Birdie had been guilty of thinking, as they lay in bed after making love, that she wished she’d married Hank when she was young instead of Grant. This felt true but probably wasn’t. Would she have been happy with a young Hank, who started out as a history teacher at the Fleming-Casper School before becoming headmaster? Would she have risen to the responsibilities of being the headmaster’s wife-having to at once represent the elitist values of “the school” while at the same time kowtowing to the parents? Caroline, Hank’s wife, had done this brilliantly, but she had the advantage of personal wealth and of sitting on two other boards during her adult life (the Guggenheim and the New-York Historical Society), so that Caroline’s involvement at the Fleming-Casper School was, to her, just one more philanthropic duty. Birdie and Hank would have been an altogether different couple. They would have been forced to live someplace like Stuyvesant Town, in a rent-controlled apartment, or in Hoboken, or on Long Island. Their children would have gone to Fleming-Casper on scholarship rather than paying full tuition as Hank and Caroline’s children had. Birdie and Hank’s union, while potentially lovely, would have been hobbled by economics. They might have gotten divorced; Birdie might have been dreadfully unhappy.
But now Hank was retired and very comfortable. His children would inherit Caroline’s money, but he would keep the house in Silvermine and the four-bedroom prewar apartment on East Eighty-second Street. He was at a place in his life where he knew what made him happy: food and wine, literature, painting, film, travel, the politics of President Obama, music, gardening. These were the exact things that made Birdie happy. And he was so cute, with his hair and his glasses and his smile. He chewed a certain kind of fruit gum that she liked. He was a wonderful lover. They were not in their thirties or even their forties anymore, but that didn’t matter because they had chemistry.
She had been dating Hank only three months, but it was fair to say she was in love. When he pulled into her driveway on the final day, she saw the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes and she nearly canceled her trip. She couldn’t leave him! She couldn’t walk away from the roses, the romance, the companionship. Here, on Tuckernuck, the days she spent with Hank seemed cruelly distant. The night at the Sherry-Netherland felt fictional, like something she’d read in one of her book club selections. She missed him. It was killing her.
Birdie’s phone calls to Hank were not altogether satisfactory. She had placed the first call on the Fourth of July. Hank had picked up the phone and said, quizzically, “Hello?”
Birdie had said, “Hank?”
Hank had said, “Birdie?”
Birdie said, “Yes! It’s me! I’m calling from Tuckernuck!”
Hank said, “How? Why?” She had explained to him that she would be incommunicado for thirty days. Not only was it against family rules to use a cell phone (Grant had broken this rule liberally; he spoke to the office four and five times in a day and would have done so using a ham radio), but it was nearly impossible to get reception.
She said, “There is one funny little place where I can get reception. You can hear me, right?”
“I can hear you fine,” Hank said. “But I thought it was against the rules.”
“Oh, it is,” Birdie said. “I had to sneak away.” This was true: she had waited until Chess fell asleep on the beach and Tate and India wandered off in search of oystercatchers, and then she’d slipped up the stairs to the bluff. Back at the house, she’d left a note on the table that said, Went for a walk. Which wasn’t a lie. Still, Birdie had felt a twinge of guilt and attendant panic that something would happen while she was gone. A rogue wave would come in and sweep Chess away.
“Well,” Hank said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m speechless.” He sounded uncomfortable, or perhaps he was just taken by surprise. Or perhaps he was embarrassed that she had broken the sacred family rules on his account. Or perhaps he was disappointed in her.
“I just wanted to wish you a happy Fourth of July,” she said. “And tell you that I miss you.” She tried to emphasize the words “miss you” because that was why she was calling. It had nothing to do with the Fourth of July; she had only called on the Fourth because she couldn’t make it another day without hearing his voice.
“That’s very sweet,” Hank said. He didn’t say, I miss you, too. Why did he not say it?
“Where are you?” Birdie asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m at a picnic at the Ellises’ house,” he said. “I was getting my ass handed to me in horseshoes, but you saved me from that.”
The Ellises had been friends of Hank and Caroline’s for decades. There were other couples Hank had mentioned-the Cavanaughs and the Vauls and the Markarians-whom Birdie couldn’t meet because they would not approve of Hank dating while Caroline was still alive. He hadn’t seen much of these friends since he and Birdie had started dating, but he was at the Ellises’ now and this stung for some reason.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you from your game,” she said, though she had walked two miles in the heat of the day to do exactly that.
“Okay,” Hank said. “I hope you’re having fun…”
Birdie said, “Oh, I am…” If waiting on everyone hand and foot could be considered fun, if watching your daughter’s depression up close and not knowing what to do about it could be considered fun, if cold showers and a twin bed and lukewarm milk were fun, then yes, it was fun.
“Well, it’s good to hear your voice,” he said.