Chapter Twenty-Nine
The minute the screen door slammed and Ben was out of sight, Addison stuck her nose under her arm and took a whiff. Not awful—but certainly not the essence of lilac that Gicky’s bottle of shower gel assured. She stripped off her clothes in the outdoor shower, washed her body, and even ran a razor over her lightly stubbled legs. Inside, she followed the whole thing up with a coat of moisturizer and threw on a cotton sundress and a pair of sexy undies.
She was feeling vulnerable, which was new to her. Vulnerability may have been the number one thing that Addison had steered away from in her dating life. Granted, she had felt a host of emotions this summer that were unusual for her—beginning with failure—but this type of raw emotional exposure felt exceptionally risky. She brazenly slipped off her panties, knowing that when Ben reached under her dress and realized that she was naked, it would make him crazy. That’s not why she did it though; it would also make her feel as if she were in control. And with that thought, she felt more at ease.
Get out of your head, Addison.
She knew only one way to do that. She went to the studio to meditate, leaving the door ajar so that she would hear Ben return.
As she sat on the floor counting back from one hundred, everything released in her head. Her heart, her mind, even her pores were all open. When she finally opened her eyes as well, she found Ben sitting on the floor—staring at her. She did not know how long he’d been there.
“What are you doing?” she asked, amused.
“Counting your freckles.”
“There are forty-seven,” she laughed.
“You counted?”
“My sister counted when we were kids.”
“You have a sister?”
“Yes. Ivy. Three years younger than me.”
“I guess we put the cart before the horse. Should we fix that?”
“OK, go!” she said with a funny sense of urgency.
“Where did you grow up?”
“In a suburb of Chicago. You?”
“Jersey. College?”
“School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”
“Nice! Wesleyan undergrad, then Columbia for journalism.”
“I may have guessed both, smarty-pants.”
“Favorite author, aside from me, of course?”
“John Irving. You?”
“Same.”
“C’mon.”
“Pinky swear,” he said, holding out said pinky.
They looped their pinkies together, and the tiny touch sparked ripples of warmth.
The cross-examination changed course.
“You’re very beautiful,” Ben whispered, placing his other hand on her leg, its smoothness resulting in a shy smile. She nodded, a permission of sorts, and he released her pinky and slid both hands upward, beneath her dress. Her nakedness registered on his face, and his smile widened. His hands grazed her bottom before he rested them on her torso, pulling her toward him and realizing how they were somewhat lined up. Toes against toes, lips against lips.
“And tall,” he added with an even wider smile. He brushed a wayward hair from her eyes and kissed her gently on her lips. When he reached his hand between her legs, he was the one who moaned. He pulled her dress over her head, and even with the bright light flooding the room—making her all the more naked—she completely gave in to it. She anticipated every movement of his hungry eyes and even hungrier mouth. By the time they actually made love, she couldn’t control her body from shaking.
She had seen the words quivering loins in books, and it always made her laugh. Quivering loins, written by men like Ben, only to be topped in the humorous category by a throbbing member. But there they both were. Her loins quivering, his member throbbing. Her thoughts stopped.
They lay spent on the floor afterward, and he whispered, breathlessly, “Addie?”
“Yes, Ben?” She suddenly liked her nickname.
“Was this your one-night stand?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking.
She rolled over on her side to face him.
“It’s not even noon—ask me again in the morning.”
They both laughed, and he tickled her side, which led to them starting up again. She wrangled away from him, stood, and stepped back into her dress.
“Come with me,” she said.
He took her hand as she led them to her bedroom. The room was still cold from the air she had blasted the night before. The unmade bed, with its white rustled sheets and linen duvet, was crisp, delicious, and inviting. Addison pulled her dress back overhead, and they found each other, under the sheets. Entwined in each other’s arms, they drifted off.
An hour or so later, Addison slipped away to the bathroom. Ben didn’t flinch. She wondered if he always slept so soundly, especially in the middle of the day. On her return, she watched him sleep for a minute or two—his broad chest rising and falling and rising and falling. A faded suntan line cut across his triceps. She traced it with her finger before leaning over him and depositing butterfly kisses on his eyelids. Still, he didn’t stir. She kissed the place where the dimple usually appeared on his cheek. No movement. She straddled her legs around his torso again—careful not to put her weight on him—and planted more kisses, circling his chest and tracing the line that divided his abs with her mouth. He finally stirred, and she continued kissing and teasing and running her hands everywhere but where he wanted it most.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her mischievously, before scooping her up and flipping her onto her back. He couldn’t wait a second longer.
“Should we get dressed—go to the beach? It’s gorgeous out,” Addison asked afterward. The pressure to enjoy the beach on a sunny day always weighed on her. Ben didn’t seem to care. Addison was still a newbie, but after all his years on the island, Ben was an old schooler at this point. Old schoolers knew better than to reproach themselves for missing a great beach day. It happens. Plus, there was no doubt that the two of them sitting together on the beach would fuel the gossip mill.
“Or we can watch Love Is Blind?” he suggested instead.
“Shut up, you watch Love Is Blind? I may love you,” Addison said, not thinking much of her revelation.
“I may love you too,” Ben said before searching the nightstand for the clicker.
Somewhere in the middle of episode two or three, they made love yet again. This time slowly, and with their eyes burrowing into each other’s souls. For real, it felt like that. Addison, in particular, couldn’t remember ever having felt that unguarded before.
“Want to help me with something?” she asked afterward, with a hint of seductiveness.
“Are you seriously not satisfied yet?” he asked. “I need a little time.”
She laughed. “It’s about the attic. I need to get up there before the white elephant sale.”
“Ugh. I should definitely take part in that this year,” he moaned.
“Well, if you help me, I can return the favor and help you.”
The color drained from his face, and he looked suddenly nauseated. She noticed, and thought of the sun hat on his porch and what Shep had said about him. She redirected the focus from his dead wife’s belongings back to her dead aunt’s.
“Don’t worry, I have most of it sorted. I just can’t bring myself to look in that attic.”
Her redirect worked. Ben laughed and declared, “By all means open up the attic, let the bats fly free,” before explaining that her aunt Gicky loved to say that. He thought it hysterical.
“I even put it in a novel,” he joked.
“Well, I hope she didn’t mean it literally. That’s kind of what I was afraid of.”
Now, a melancholy look settled on her face.
Ben clocked it.
“Don’t worry. I got you.”
“That’s not it. Everything I have learned about Gicky makes me so angry that my parents kept her from me. You know I hadn’t seen her since I was a little kid?”
“I know all about it. That’s how I went about convincing her to let me have the house for a song.”
“And what song was that? Was it something by Cheap Trick?”
“Very funny. C’mon. Let’s do this.”
Ben wiggled back into his shorts and took up the challenge. The attic was surprisingly bare—no bats, no raccoons, and very little stuff. He handed her a box of empty votives, a couple of throw pillows, and something resembling a polka-dot-covered papier-maché deer’s head.
“Can I keep this,” he asked, “as a consolation prize?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you!”
Addison laughed. “What’s up there—on top?”
“Hold my legs,” he asked, before standing on his tippy-toes and pulling down what looked to be a painting that was balanced on the attic’s wood frame. It was wrapped in brown paper, same as the two that Gicky had left for her friends. Ben read the names written on it as he passed it down to Addison.
“Beverly and Morty.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “It’s for my parents. Gicky left a few pieces of art for friends,” she added in explanation.
“And enemies as well, it seems,” Ben quipped.
“I don’t know if you would call them enemies. My dad once told me that his relationship with his sister, or lack thereof, was his biggest failure in life.”
“And you don’t know what caused it?”
“Something so awful that they never told me.”
She held the picture up in the air. “It’s heavier than the others were.”
“Are you gonna open it?”
“They’re supposed to come next weekend. It can wait.”
“All right.” He waited for her to put it down before moving on to the next thing, but she didn’t.
“Maybe take a peek,” he suggested. A mischievous smile spread across his lips.
“I can’t. I mean, I’m beyond curious. Even so, it feels wrong to open it.”
Ben climbed off the ladder. “I’ll do it.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t,” she said, following up with an exaggerated wink.
She leaned the picture against the wall, and Ben carefully untied the string that held the brown paper in place, and took a peek inside.
“Well?”
“It looks like one of those mosaics. You know what I mean?”
“I think so. But there must be more to it. Show me the corner.”
Ben pulled down one corner, and Addison saw that it was a collage made of broken china. Not just any broken china, but her mother’s pattern, famously passed down to her by a wealthy aunt on Addison’s father’s side. Her mother loved to say the only thing they ever got from Morty’s side of the family was indigestion and a pristine fifty-two-piece set of fine Ginori china.
Addison ripped off the paper with a vengeance. The china—which was broken into a hundred tiny pieces—was set in cement in the form of a broken heart.
She was mad with a rage she’d never remembered feeling before. If she were an emoji, she would be the one where a head explodes. Could the Big Terrible Thing be about a broken plate? She picked up her cell phone to call her parents, taking a small beat to get rid of Ben. Yes, they had sex multiple times, and yes, she was feeling all kinds of feelings that she had not felt in a long, long time, if ever, but there was no way she was blowing this by turning into a raving lunatic in front of him. The Irwin family’s particular brand of insanity should not be revealed in the honeymoon phase. She told it like it was.
“You don’t want to be around for this discussion.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, I kind of do. I’ll catch up with you later.”
He wrapped his arms around her, engulfing her in a big eye-to-eye, rib-squeezing, belly-bumping hug. It made her even more annoyed with her parents—for tainting the perfect day.
As soon as he was out of earshot, she dialed.
“Hello, darling,” her mother said, picking up on the first ring.
“Mom. I need you to tell me that the whole Big Terrible Thing between you and Aunt Gicky wasn’t over a plate.”
Her mother laughed, “Of course it wasn’t over a plate.”
Relief exuded from every inch of her body, every inch. Between the meditating and ocean swimming and the sex and the freedom of being unemployed, she had been feeling, well, blissfully unaware. She knew it couldn’t last forever, but the Summer of Addison was still in session, and she was not interested in cutting it short with family drama. She took a deep meditative breath to seal in the relief and then…
“It was a soup terrine,” her mother said, with zero emotion.
The words brought her right back to the spring of 1998.
The scene from the last time she saw her aunt flashed before her eyes. It was a Jewish holiday—Passover, the second night, with only the immediate family plus Aunt Gicky. The evening before, at the first Passover Seder, they had had a full house. Given her mother’s tendency to behave like a Stepford Wife in front of company, the whole thing may have turned out very differently had there been a bigger crowd present on day two. Addison’s mother had “the help,” a lovely Polish woman named Anya, serve the matzah ball soup directly from the pot in the kitchen. Once everyone had a bowl, her mother took her seat, while quietly lamenting, “If I had the soup terrine that went with this beautiful set, I could have served right from the table.”
It was a statement that Addison and her dad and sister had heard before, one that didn’t need a response. Even at that young age, Addison knew all about the missing piece in the set. She knew that her mother had flown to New York to retrieve the blessed china when said aunt passed and how the fifty-two-piece set was inexplicably missing the pièce de résistance: the soup terrine. Beverly had famously ransacked Morty’s aunt’s apartment before it was sold, searching every corner for it. She referred to the china from that day forward as the fifty-two-piece set of china minus one.
Beverly brought a spoonful of soup to her lips and gently blew on it as Aunt Gicky casually announced, “Oh, when you come to my house for a holiday, I will serve you from it.”
All eyes went from Aunt Gicky to Beverly, who stood up, pushed in her chair, and said, “Morty, take care of this.”
If you have ever been to a Passover Seder, you know that the timing of this dramatic revelation couldn’t have been worse. Everyone was on their third cup of wine, and had been waiting patiently for the meal to begin after sitting through an hour’s explanation of their ancestors fleeing slavery. Meaning that everyone was both tipsy and hangry.
Addison and her sister were handed a couple of pieces of matzah and dismissed to the basement to play Barbies. The two girls sat on the top step instead and listened as best they could. Over the crunching of their cardboard-like meal, they heard shouting and crying, and things said that most definitely should not have been said. And while they were too young to really understand what was up, they knew it was bad.
When they were finally fetched from upstairs, Aunt Gicky was gone. To this day, Addison never, in her wildest dreams, put two and two together. In fact, the only reason to think that the soup terrine was the trigger of the Big Terrible Thing was that she still remembered the incident vividly, considering she was all of six years old at the time.
All she managed now was, “Put Daddy on the phone.”
Addison was furious. Not so much at her mother, the most Waspy Jew on the planet, who avoided drama and confrontation at all costs, but at her dad. Beverly Irwin would rather write someone off than work through a conflict. But Addison expected more from her father. Her father was a wuss who literally kicked his only sister to the curb to save himself from dealing with his insufferable wife.
As she held the phone, there followed a lot of painful yelling (hers), and a lot of painful silence (his). For Addison, it was hard to process, after a lifetime of thinking otherwise, that her parents, particularly her father, were just people. Flawed people. They didn’t always have the right answer; they didn’t always do the right thing. And they in fact could stop talking to their closest relative over a gold-leafed floral soup terrine.
Morty Irwin was undeniably a wimp.
Maybe it wasn’t her grandfather’s infidelities or the humiliation of Jeffrey Pearlman kissing Sofie Bonelli that had shaped her future with men. Maybe it came down to the old adage about girls marrying their fathers. Or in her case, dating them.
Or maybe it was a combination of all three.
In the end, she disinvited Morty and Beverly for the following weekend, which was met with obvious relief on their part, and hung up. She went directly to the clay, relishing in the powerful sense of connection and escape. Losing herself in it once again, she gave her girl a skirt. A long flowy skirt, which she carved with tiny flowers, not unlike the pattern on the infamous china. Sometime after dark, Sally appeared at the studio door with a note tied around her neck that read Miss me?
She cleaned the paint-splattered washbasin that had become, for some inexplicable reason, her favorite thing in the house, and scratched Sally behind her ears. She pulled out her phone and texted Ben.
Want to go out on the town?
A few minutes later, her phone vibrated.
I’ll pick you up at nine.
Addison looked through the suitcase that she hadn’t fully unpacked yet and paired a bright strappy camisole dress with high-tops. While she sat in front of the mirror doing her makeup, she realized she’d barely even worn mascara since being there. She put on an extra coat and smiled at herself in the mirror.
This happy state she had found herself in came with a natural glow.
Ben arrived promptly at nine with a bouquet of cut flowers from his garden tied together with string.
So sweet.
He explained their options while she put them in water.
“There are two choices here. We go to town, and by morning the entire island will know that we are, you know—”
“What? Doing it?”
“I was going to say an item.”
“An item? Addison laughed. “What century were you born in?”
“You sound like Julia.” He smiled. She did too. She was happy that he was comfortable reminiscing about his wife in front of her. She hoped it would continue.
“It’s just I’d rather keep this between us—get to know each other a little more before fueling the rumor mill.”
Addison was really beginning to feel like she knew him, the man who had carried her bags onto the ferry and counted her freckles, that is. Though she realized she didn’t even know whom he voted for in the last election.
“Makes sense,” she said, thinking of when to bring up politics.
“OK. Grab a jacket. We are taking a water taxi to the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove.”