Chapter 1 #2
Emily’s white bikini accented her flat, tanned belly.
Her blond, wet rope of hair stuck to her breast. She had the sense that her beauty was a story told about her and she wasn’t its author.
She didn’t know how to make her beauty mean other than what people decided that it meant, yet its value was obvious: a currency she possessed even though she was poor.
The soles of her feet burned against the deck.
Hours earlier, they had been cool on the terra-cotta tiles of the villa that Jack had rented in Positano.
One wall in the bedroom was formed by the side of the bare cliff, rugged and chill to the touch.
On the terrace that morning, a housemaid swept bougainvillea petals into a vivid pink pile.
The brush of the broom echoed the waves against the rocks below.
At first, Emily had felt uncomfortable with how much Jack spent on her.
Lavish gifts. This vacation. But he urged her to let him.
He wanted her to see how much he loved her, which made the luxury he offered hard to resist. And why resist it?
She felt elevated, relieved of care. Dazzled.
Her beauty allowed her to enter a more valuable kind of beauty—this boat on the sea, that villa on the cliff, the ease of a life maintained by others.
The bliss of never having to worry about how to pay.
Emily wasn’t merely an example of beauty, or its witness; she now lived inside it. She belonged, and it belonged to her.
Earlier that week, they had taken the ferry to Capri and swum in grottos whose spectral light painted their bodies blue, then went to Pompeii because she had studied Classics and wrote her senior thesis on Etruscan mirrors.
The plaster casts of the volcano’s victims didn’t haunt her.
The frescoes in the brothel held her attention but she forgot them later.
What stayed with her, out of all the relics of Pompeii’s long dead, were the empty fountains in homes for the wealthy.
She imagined the fountains as they once were: the chandelier of water, the calm before catastrophe.
The volcano killed the rich, too. This was a lesson from the past. Emily shouldn’t let herself be carried away by how nice Jack made life by having money and loving her.
Nothing lasted forever. No one was immune from tragedy.
Pliny the Younger had written about the indiscriminate disaster of the volcanic eruption, seen from across the Bay of Naples, its cloud like an umbrella pine.
The air after Vesuvius’s eruption had been so hot that it could turn brains into glass.
She should remember that. Wealth’s protection was not perfect.
But it felt perfect. After the excursion to Pompeii, Jack opened a bottle of Barolo on their terrace and told her that it was a superior vintage.
It was delicious. The sea below was silver.
He ran a large hand over the Oscar de la Renta dress he had given her.
It was hard not to get carried away, because he wanted her to get carried away.
It made him happy, and his happiness—like his wealth, his love—felt good.
“I can’t imagine my life without you,” he said. She blushed with delight.
One night, Jack sailed their boat to Praiano, a village tucked into a cove, where they dined in sight of the black sea and begging cats.
Clamshells littered Jack’s plate. Emily had thought that maybe it would happen then, but it didn’t.
It didn’t happen when they sailed back to the house, even though the Milky Way floated above them like a vast bolt of metallic fabric.
The time was right, but it didn’t happen then either.
Jack pointed toward Li Galli. “That’s where the sirens sang to Odysseus,” he said, which she knew. She was touched by his effort to please her. Jack was a romantic. She had been reading The Odyssey when they first met. “Go on,” he said. “Eat.”
She bit into the tomato. It was salty from the sea and tangy from the lemon.
Its taste unleashed a memory. It tasted like her first kiss, at seventeen, almost four years before she met Jack, but it was as if she had been an entirely different person then.
On a hot day, she and her friend Gen had gotten lemonade and sat on the back of Gen’s pickup truck, watching a storm blow in.
Gen’s hair had been wild in the wind. Gen shoved her hair out of her face.
Emily leaned to kiss her, and they stopped being friends.
In the gently rocking boat, Jack went down on one knee, a smile on his handsome face, the diamond beaming from its box. She couldn’t breathe or move: one hand clutched the gunwale, the other held the tomato so lightly that it might fall. She was crying even before he asked her to marry him.
A castle with a vineyard in the Loire Valley, roses planted amid the vines to draw aphids from the grapes.
The flare of poppies in the far, high grass.
A powder-blue vintage car. A piece of paper in her pocket: her Something Old.
When Emily had protested, saying that a destination wedding would be too expensive, that some of her friends couldn’t afford to come, or her parents, Jack had said he would pay for their travel and lodging.
Of course he would. He wanted everyone she wanted to be there.
Her mother drained her glass of champagne. “Where’s Gennifer Hall? Your other high school friends came.”
“Gen couldn’t make it.”
“She turned down a free trip to France? What a dum-dum.”
Emily wished that Jack were by her side. Where was he?
Her mother said, “I thought she was your best friend.”
“That was a long time ago.” Emily’s mother didn’t know that Gen had become more than a friend.
Jack did and, once he recovered from the surprise, found the knowledge unthreatening.
Emily wished that Jack would save her from this conversation.
She didn’t want to talk about Gen, whom she had invited at the last minute, yet who never would have come.
A warm hand touched the small of Emily’s back. She turned gratefully into Jack’s kiss, the drift of his hand. He had been looking for her, just as she had been looking for him.
Jack dropped the towel to the pool’s edge. Water snaked down his neck and trickled over his hard chest. “You think you can tell me how to raise my son? How dare you criticize me, after all I’ve done for you?”