21. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The Squam Club does a supper at the end of the season. I had decided against it. Then I took the green dress off the hanger.
The dress came first and the decision came second, and anybody who said it happens the other way around has never stood in front of a rail in a rented house.
Pia arrived to collect me and stopped in the doorway.
“Oh,” she said.
The tent goes up on the same lawn. The lights go in the same rigging. The quartet is the same quartet and they still do not know where to put their hands between sets.
The difference was me, and it took most of the first drink to work out how.
Last time I came up that shell path late, with a wet patch on my shoulder and my hair off one side, and stood in a corner waiting to be collected. This time I came in with Pia on one side and two women called J on the other and a dress that fits, and the room did the thing rooms do, and I let it.
Shoulders back, I thought, and then, oh, you absolute cow. You’ve got in my head and I can’t get you out.
Michael was across the tent.
He saw the dress before he saw me. I watched it happen. His whole face went strange, and then he caught it and put it away somewhere, which is new, and which I hate, and then he did the worst possible thing available to him.
He stayed where he was.
He nodded at me across a tent like a man acknowledging a woman he is not going to bother, and turned back to whoever was talking at him, and I stood there feeling as though somebody had removed a step I was already standing on.
“He’s not coming over,” Pia said.
“I can see that.”
“He’s not coming over on purpose.”
“I can see that as well, thank you.”
“Just checking,” said Pia, “because your face is doing something and I’d hate you to be unaware of it.”
I got him in the end, at the drinks table, after an amount of maneuvering I am not going to itemize.
“You’re not talking to me.”
“I’m not not talking to you.” He put the glass down. “I said I’d be at the gate at two and back by six and I’d not ask you for anything. This is a room with your name on it before mine. I’m not walking across it to stand next to you and let everybody watch.”
“You could have said hello.”
“I could have said hello.”
“Well then.”
“Willow, if I come over there I will not manage to do just hello, and every person in this tent will know it inside a minute.” He picked the glass back up because his hand wanted a job. “So I stayed here. That’s all of it.”
“You looked at the dress.”
“I did look at the dress.”
“You looked at it for a while.”
“I’ve had a look at that dress before,” Michael said, “and I have had a fair amount of time since to think about it, and I would like some acknowledgement that I have behaved impeccably all evening.”
“Is that what this is?”
“That is exactly what this is, and it is taking everything I’ve got.”
Then he moved half a step back to let a man past with a tray, and did not use the tray as an excuse to put a hand on my arm, and I have never wanted a man to be worse than I wanted it in that second.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he said.
“I’m having a think.”
“About?”
“None of your business.”
“Right,” said Michael, and looked at the tent pole, and I watched his jaw do something, and neither of us moved away.
Krystal came in with the Pells.
I did not see it coming. She came in on Alice Pell’s arm laughing at something, in navy, hair up, with Charlie Pell behind them wearing the face of a man showing off a new tender.
She has a job. That was the first thing I understood, before anybody said a word, because she was carrying a folder at a party.
“Marina,” Pia said, at my elbow, from nowhere. “Since about two weeks ago. I did try to tell you this afternoon and you were in the bath.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m fine.”
“You’ve gone the color of the tablecloth.”
“Which tablecloth?”
I was not frightened. I was not even particularly angry.
She’s got a folder. A folder and a marina and a man who calls people the help. That’s it. That’s the whole of it, and it is so much smaller than the size I have been carrying it at.
She worked the tent, because that is what she is for.
I did not hear the first version. I heard the third, from a woman at the bar who did not know I was behind her, which is how I hear everything on that island.
“Well, she says it was always an arrangement.”
“Who says?”
“Krystal. She’d know, she ran his whole life. She says the wife came with the pregnancy and the rest was paperwork, and honestly, when you look at it-”
“Charlotte.”
“I’m not being unkind. I’m saying it isn’t a tragedy if it was never a marriage.”
It did not go through me. It bounced. I stood there and heard a woman I have known by sight for years hand my entire life back to me in one sentence, and all I could think was that Krystal had needed three goes at that room to get it landing, and last time she did it in one line at a bar with everyone laughing.
She has lost something. It took me until that moment to see it.
Then the room went quiet, a man started talking without intending to be heard.
Michael was near the tent pole with Levi on one side and a man from the club on the other, and the man from the club had plainly just used the word arrangement, because Michael had stopped.
“Say that again.”
“I’m only repeating what’s-”
“No. Say it again. I’d like it in the room properly.”
The quartet, God bless them, chose that moment to finish a piece.
“I’ve got a wife,” Michael said.
He did not raise his voice.
“I’ve had one since I was fifteen years old, on this island, when I had nothing and she had less, and it has never once been anybody else and it never will be.” He set his glass down on the table beside him. “Anybody in this tent who’s been told otherwise has been told wrong. That’s all.”
And then he stopped.
He did not look at me. He did not look for Krystal. He did not do the second half where a man checks the room has understood him. He picked his glass back up and said something to Levi about the boat, and the quartet started, and the tent closed over the top of it and carried on.
Levi maintains it was the shortest speech ever given in that tent.
I got him by the wrist on the shell path.
“Where are we-”
“Boathouse.”
“There’s a party-”
“I know there’s a party. Walk.”
The club boathouse is down past the dinghy park. It smells of varnish and old rope and the door does not lock, and I got him through it and put him against the inside of it with both hands flat on his chest.
“Say one more word,” I said, “and I’ll go back in.”
He did not say one more word.
He reached for my face and I caught his wrists and pinned them back against the door.
“No.”
His breath caught.
“You don’t get to be gentle right now,” I said. “You stood in a tent and said that in front of the whole island, after a season of being careful, after everything-”
“Willow-”
“Shushushh.”
He shut up.
I let go of his wrists and got his shirt out of his waistband and I did not go slowly and I did not let him turn us around. His mouth went to my throat and stayed there and I got a fist in his hair and held him where I wanted him.
“We can’t keep doing this,” I said against his ear. “Every time you do something right I end up against a wall.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It’s an observation. Hands. Now.”
He put his hands where I told him to. My hips first, then lower, dragging the green silk up my thighs and the sound he made had no shape to it at all.
“You said it out loud,” I said. “In front of everyone. After months of being so bloody careful not to push-”
“I meant it.”
“I know you meant it. That’s the problem.” I got his belt open and his breath went ragged. “I can’t think straight when you do things like that. I can’t stay angry with you when you-”
“Then don’t.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Tell me how it works.” His voice had dropped into something low and ruined. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it. Anything. Just tell me.”
“I want you to stop being so fucking good at this,” I said, and kissed him to shut myself up, because the next thing out of my mouth was going to be something I couldn’t take back.
He kissed me like a man who’d been holding his breath for months. I got my hand around him and he swore once, sharp against my mouth. That man does not swear.
“We shouldn’t-”
“Yeah.”
“The whole tent is up there-”
“Hmmm.”
“If someone comes down-”
“Willow.” He pulled back just far enough to look at me, breathing hard, pupils blown. “Do you want to stop?”
I should have said yes. Every sensible part of me knew I should say yes, walk out of this boathouse, go back to the party and pretend this season hasn’t wrecked me for anyone else.
“No,” I said. “But tomorrow I’m still going to be furious with you.”
“I know.”
“And I still haven’t decided-”
“I’m not asking you to decide. I’m not asking for anything.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m yours,” he said. “Same thing.”
I pulled him back down.
He got the dress up around my waist with one hand and the other went flat against the door above my head so nothing knocked, because the whole tent was at the top of that path and the wind was coming the wrong way, and neither of us needed telling.
My back went against boards older than both of us put together.
“This doesn’t mean-”
“It doesn’t mean anything you don’t want it to mean.”
“Michael-”
“I’ve got you. Let go.”
Fast, and meant to be. I did not want one tender thing off him and he did not try to give me one. He kept his mouth at my ear the entire time and when my legs gave out he took all my weight on one arm and kept going, relentless, like he was trying to prove something neither of us had words for.
I came apart with the shoulder of his jacket between my teeth to keep quiet, and he followed me over the edge with a sound like something breaking, and for one long moment there was nothing in the world but the two of us and the smell of varnish and the distant sound of a quartet playing to a tent full of people who had no idea.
Afterwards he held on to me and I let him for about as long as I could stand it.
Then I got the dress down and pushed him off the door.
“Go back in first.”
“Willow.”
“Separately, Michael.”
He straightened his shirt, ran a hand through his hair, and stopped in the doorway. Varnish and one strip of light off the lawn behind him.
“For the record,” he said, “I’d have said it if you hadn’t been in the room.”
“I know.”
“That’s why I said it.”
“That’s the problem. Go on.”
And he went up that path back into a tent with his shirt half out and a mark on his collar I could see from twenty feet away, and I stood in a boathouse in a green dress with both hands over my face, thinking. We can’t keep doing this and pretending it doesn’t mean what it means.