Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Present Day
Nora couldn’t believe Max turned his sailboat back.
The sails were filled with crisp Nantucket air, taut and straining as he brought the boat to its spot on a nearby dock.
Overcome with the desire to see him again, to touch his hand and look into his eyes, Nora hurried over to the boat and extended her hand.
With his in hers, they used their body weight to reposition the boat so it slotted between two others.
Quickly, as though they did this together all the time, they tied it up, then stood—Max still aboard and Nora on the dock—looking at one another.
The sun was pink in the sky, and the boat shifted gently on the water, back and forth.
“You called,” Max said finally. Disbelief was heavy in his voice.
“You answered.” She smiled.
Max laughed and strung his fingers through his hair. “I guess you must have seen me, flailing around the boat, looking for my phone.”
“I might have caught that comedy routine.” She shrugged.
“I promise I’m usually not so chaotic.” Max gestured toward the clothes strung out on the sailboat’s deck. “I just bought this boat this morning, and I haven’t had the time to organize everything yet.”
“You can be as chaotic as you want to be,” Nora said. “You should have seen the state of my new house until recently. It was a mess. A perfect reflection of my mind.”
Max beamed. “Your new house? Here on the island?”
“Here on the island.”
Max shook his head. Mysteries enshrouded them. Nora suddenly felt as though too much time had passed, as though it was impossible to digest everything. Maybe it was better to turn their backs on their pasts and keep moving forward. Maybe this was an enormous mistake.
Max asked, “Do you feel like having a drink?”
And Nora said sure. Why not? she thought. She’d called him back, hadn’t she? Maybe this was some version of fate.
Max led Nora down the dock, along the boardwalk, and into a little bar that had a beautiful garden, with seats and tables scattered beneath a canopy of trees.
It was difficult to see from the street, and nothing Nora would have discovered on her own.
Nora ordered a glass of white wine, and Max went for a beer.
They raised their glasses, clinking them, still unable to speak.
Nora thought about that rooftop bar back in Manhattan, how excited they’d been that the bartender hadn’t carded them.
She couldn’t believe she’d once been too young for anything.
Finally, when Nora couldn’t take the silence anymore, she said the first thing that came to her mind. “You bought a boat.”
“I bought a boat.” Max laughed. “If you’re insinuating I’m having some late midlife crisis, you’re probably right. I bought a boat, and I’m in a crisis.”
Nora smiled. His energy was infectious. “I bought a house. I’m in a crisis.”
“People buy houses all the time,” Max said. “At least they’re practical. They’re not on the water, for one.”
“That’s true. It was the first time I ever bought property alone. It felt big to me. Maybe that’s stupid to say.”
Max leaned toward her. “That’s an enormous thing. What told you that the house should belong to you?”
Nora thought back to her days of touring houses with the real estate agent. She thought of the enormous price tags, the multiple rooms. “It was smaller than other places on the island,” she said. “I wanted a cozy house where my thoughts wouldn’t get lost.”
Max nodded. “I can understand that. All these Nantucket mansions have gotten out of hand. They’ve even put the Greenaway house to shame.”
Nora nodded. She’d had the same thought. Even Hilary’s place felt overly enormous to her, although she knew that Hilary’s mother had been the one to buy it, not Hilary.
“Places have a way of feeling smaller when you live in them,” Nora said. “I imagine all these people think their houses aren’t so impressive.”
“They’re probably dreaming about building on. Adding new additions,” Max joked.
“Nothing is ever enough when you get started,” Nora agreed.
“I’ve always found it difficult to balance progress with laziness,” Max said.
“Ever since my career began, I’ve been surrounded by people who want more and more and more.
More publications. Better editors. Better sales.
Bigger houses. More extravagant vacations.
I’ve always wondered what’s enough? When will it be enough? ”
Nora said she’d always felt the same. “Living in Manhattan meant living among people like that,” she said.
“I caught myself playing along, sometimes. I thought about what people saw when they looked at my apartment. What kind of person did they think I was based on the lampshade I put in the living room? Did I seem successful enough?”
Max smacked his thigh. “My ex changed out the lamp shade in our living room every few months! It drove me nuts. I always asked her for her rationale. She always said the old lamp shade was ‘tired.’”
Nora laughed, then hesitated. She hated that her brain was conjuring ideas of what Max’s ex looked like, how beautiful she was. She guessed Max was doing the same about her old life in Manhattan: visualizing who else was there and how happy she’d been.
They quieted for a moment. Nora sipped her wine and glanced at the others in the garden, wondering if they thought Nora and Max were an item. Probably they weren’t thinking about them at all. They were among the older people there. Nobody cared about their stories.
“So,” Nora said, “I saw that you cut your book tour short?”
Max grimaced. “My mom’s sick. It’s part of the reason I wanted the tour to head this way in the first place. But when I got here and saw her, I realized I needed to spend as much of my time here before… You know.” He looked terribly sad, his cheeks hollow.
“Max, I’m so sorry,” she breathed.
Max perked up the slightest bit. “I hate book tours, honestly.”
“You looked natural and happy during the reading,” Nora said.
“It’s an act.” Max smiled and held her gaze for a moment. Nora shivered.
“You know,” Max said. “That’s never happened to me before. An ex has never appeared in line for a book signing. I thought I was dreaming.”
“Was it a nightmare?” Nora asked, trying to laugh.
Max shook his head. “No! It was wonderful. But it distracted me. I was waiting for you to call, but you didn’t.
I told myself I was foolish to write my number in your book, and yeah.
I called off the book tour, bought a sailboat, and convinced myself you wouldn’t call.
And then, on my maiden voyage, you called me in. ”
“Maiden voyage?” Nora said. “Where were you off to?”
“I was going to sail around the island,” Max said. “But I can do that any day.”
Max confessed that he’d googled Nora and knew about her “iconic career” in magazines.
“It wasn’t so iconic,” Nora said. “Especially later. Print media is out. Nobody really reads anything but their phones anymore. It meant that the parts of the job I really enjoyed back in the eighties and nineties were suddenly gone. All that was left was dealing with advertisers and interviewing celebrities and influencers. Actually, the kids don’t care about movie stars anymore, so it’s barely a language I understand. Retiring was a great relief.”
“It’s an art form to know when to leave the party,” Max said. “I’ve often thought that after my next ‘great’ book, after the very best sales and the very best reviews, I’ll retire, too. Everybody wants to go out on top.”
Nora laughed. “But people are loving this book.”
“True.” Max was thoughtful. “Have you read any of it yet?”
Nora admitted that she hadn’t. “Listening to the reading felt really emotional. I’m scared to dig deeper.”
Max nodded. “Obviously, there are themes behind it. Themes from that summer. Things I was never able to get out of my head. Stories I’ve carried with me for more than forty years. I hope you know that the Naomi character isn’t you, not really.”
Nora laughed. “I figured.”
“I mean, I made her really different,” he explained, blushing. “But the character, sort of based on me, falls in love with her. And the emotion displayed on those pages is entirely true and honest. It’s the way I felt about you. I was young, naive, and stupid. But it was real. I know it was.”
Nora couldn’t breathe. The way Max was looking at her made her want to jump up and run away. Even though Isaac had never looked at her like that, she didn’t think.
In a very small voice, Nora agreed. “It was real.”
Max let his shoulders collapse forward. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so intense. Ha. I can get that way. Maybe I was back then, too. Anyway. Tell me everything about your life. I want to know what it was like to live in Manhattan for so long. I want to know who you are.”
Nora gave him bits and pieces from her past. She told him she’d gotten married and had a son named Paul.
She left out the part about having wanted more children.
She didn’t want to get into any “woe is me” stuff, especially when it came to health.
But then, she found herself telling him about Cleo’s cancer, about Paul’s desire for distance from his parents.
Her voice broke, and she lowered her chin, embarrassed.
The server came by and asked if they wanted another round. “Very much,” Max said.
“Yes, please,” Nora agreed, offering Max a smile. When the server came back with a beer and wine, she perked up and said, “I’m going on and on.”
“You’re not,” Max said. “You’ve only given me the outline. But these are the events of your wonderful and painful and beautiful life.”
“You should tell me something,” she said. “I’m tired of hearing myself talk.”
Max heaved a sigh. “Well, I told you I was having a late midlife crisis, didn’t I?
The boat of it all? I just went through a breakup.
She’s French. We’d been living in Paris, mostly, for the better part of twenty years.
Something like that. We have twin daughters, Claudette and Louise.
They’re twenty-three, incredibly smart, and also terrifying.
When I told them that their mother and I were going to break up, they said they had thought we should be apart for a long time.
But they told me that in French, so it seemed much more intense and also flippant. Difficult to explain.”
Nora hadn’t spent a great deal of time with Parisians, but she understood what he meant.
“So I left France and went on this book tour,” he said. “My idea was that somewhere on the way, I would figure out where I wanted to live and what kind of man I wanted to be next. I lived abroad for a long, long time. Too long, maybe. I’ve lost touch with my American roots.”
Nora remembered the scrappy American teenage boy she’d fallen in love with. It was hard to imagine that the same boy had gone on to become an expat in Paris, to father twin Parisian girls. Life was strange.
When they finished their second drinks, it was dark, and the garden was mostly empty. Nora realized they’d been talking for nearly three hours. She wondered what the Salt Sisters would say about this. But did she really want to share the news of this stupendous surprise?
It felt like it belonged to her and her alone.
Max insisted on paying, then led Nora back to the boardwalk, where they strolled beneath the moonlight. Nora told herself not to think of tonight as romantic. It was two old friends, reconnecting after years apart. But then, Max stopped near his sailboat, rubbing his palms together.
“I can’t help but feel that it’s fate, or something,” he said gingerly. “That probably sounds insane to you. You’re a realist. An intellectual. You always were.”
But Nora shook her head, adrenaline pumping through her heart. “It feels a little like fate. I’ve been thinking it, too.”
They stood there in silence, looking at one another. In the distance, a foghorn sounded, and birds squawked overhead. Nora wasn’t sure how she’d ever pull herself out of this spell so she could get back in her car and leave. But eventually, they hugged each other good night and parted ways.
“I have your number now,” Max reminded her. “We’ll be seeing each other soon.”