Chapter Four Caroline #4
When she asked Ned Clark to lunch, she couldn’t quite tell which kind of lunch it would be.
He was five years older than her, he wore a suit and tie, he knew the coat-check girl by name, and he already had several bestsellers on his list. But he was funny, he smiled at Caroline like they had a secret, he almost always had a vape pen in his hand, and he never once mentioned her mother.
Ned seemed unfazed by Caroline’s proximity to fame.
His own star was on the rise, he owned a loft in Tribeca, and, according to another assistant at Caroline’s office, he had once brought Zosia Mamet as his date to the PEN gala.
He made Caroline nervous, but after their lunch she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
When he had emailed a week later, asking for drinks, she immediately said yes.
But he didn’t try to kiss her at drinks.
They had two cocktails, gin and tonics for Caroline, whiskey rocks for Ned, he vaped surreptitiously at their table, then put her in a taxi at nine.
Caroline thought he liked her but couldn’t be sure.
Why ask to see her again if his interest was purely professional?
When his agency, Megavoice, held a holiday party on the roof of a hotel, Caroline was surprised to find herself on the guest list. Everyone else was a vice president, an executive editor, or a major Megavoice writer.
Caroline borrowed a dress from her friend who worked for Hearst, a blue silk that brought out her eyes, and went to the party alone, planning to sip champagne in the corner while people-watching as the celebrity authors air-kissed and sparkled.
Instead, Ned caught her right by the door as she came in, taking her by the elbow and steering her around the room, making introductions as though she were an important new client.
Caroline kept waiting for him to pawn her off on a lowly Megavoice assistant or excuse himself to talk to someone with a corner office, but he didn’t, he ferried her from conversation to conversation until the bartenders started packing up for the night.
By the coat check Caroline thanked Ned for the party, and he leaned in to brush her cheek goodbye and whispered in her ear, asking if he could come to her apartment.
They took a taxi, Ned playing with his vape pen in the back seat and making Caroline laugh with gossip from the evening, the Granta writer who asked a waiter for cocaine, the CEO who spent the whole party calling Ned’s boss by the wrong name.
Neither of them was drunk, and while Caroline offered to open a bottle of wine, Ned declined, instead kissing her gently and lifting her dress up over her head.
He carefully hung it in the closet before unbuttoning his own shirt and leading Caroline to the bed.
He kissed her while running his hands along her body, he whispered to her, asking if she wanted to keep going.
She did, and while she didn’t come, she almost did, and that was about as good as she could expect from a first time with someone new.
They fell asleep after, but when she woke in the night, her clock reading three, Ned was gone, had snuck out like a thief.
She expected him to text or email the next day, but he didn’t, and not the day after that either.
On the third day, Caroline’s mother called to ask if she’d ever met a Ned Clark.
Caroline said she knew him vaguely, that they’d once had lunch.
“Interesting,” her mother replied before changing the subject.
When Caroline read in Publishers Lunch that her mother had switched agents, had left her longtime agent, Marcy Pringle, in favor of “the more dynamic agent experience at Megavoice,” and that Ned Clark would be taking over her books and television contracts, Caroline called him right away, but he didn’t pick up.
She emailed him, calling him an asshole and a creep, but he didn’t answer those emails either, and the only time she saw him in her remaining year in New York, it was across the room at Quality Italian.
He was having lunch with a famous tennis star, and when she caught his eye, he raised one finger before turning his attention back to his beautiful companion.
That was it. One finger. Like he was telling her to wait for something that she knew would never come.
Strong Maine Pipes
The sun came streaming into the sleeping porch at six in the morning, and Caroline woke feeling headachy and hungover from her insomnia.
She desperately had to pee and hoped that nobody was in the shower.
It was weird to all share the old bathroom, a long narrow closet that hadn’t been touched since the 1960s, with a clawfoot tub and plaid wallpaper.
Happily, Caroline seemed to be the first awake, so she peed quietly, wincing as the toilet flushed and the pipes shook thunderously.
Caroline could hear Lady scurrying down the hall and scratching at the bathroom door.
She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth before sneaking back to the sleeping porch, Lady following closely behind.
“Climb in,” Van croaked from his bed, and Caroline obliged, snuggling her nose into his neck and putting her cold feet on his warm legs.
Van slipped his hand into her pajama top and ran his fingers along her ribs.
On cue, Lady appeared, propping her paws up on the side of the mattress and whining.
Van chuckled and cleared his throat. “What do you want to do this morning? Kayak? Hike?”
“I’m down for whatever.” Caroline disentangled herself from him and forced herself to sound game.
“You’re so cute when you lie.” Van poked her gently on the chin. “Let’s drive into town, just the two of us, and get a big breakfast with bacon, egg, and cheese. I’ll buy you all the coffee you can drink.” Caroline’s heart soared. She had never loved him more.
They grocery shopped after breakfast, collecting everything they would need to make lunch and dinner. Colin and RJ were still asleep when they got back, but everyone else was awake and groggy, and they gratefully accepted pastries and greasy bacon sandwiches.
“Are you feeling okay, Bailey?” Van asked. “I know the beds here aren’t the most comfortable. Could you sleep?”
“I always sleep like a rock here.” Bailey still had on pajamas, a tank top and shorts set, but somehow looked gorgeous, and Caroline studied her, the way she ripped off bits of croissant with her red fingernails, the way her lips looked like she’d been kissing all night.
Everyone wanted to kayak the inlet, but Caroline needed a little alone time, so she spread a towel out on the dock and read her book, Palmer Preston’s Tarbox.
Preston had worked for The New Yorker before he moved to Greenhead in the 1960s with the idea that the salt air would help his psoriasis.
He and his wife bought a house on High Street, the Polly Dole House, and from there created the masterworks that would win him every literary prize in America.
As Caroline read, a black baseball cap shielding her face, she found herself fantasizing about the interviews she might give when her own first book came out.
“Palmer Preston has always been a huge inspiration for me, and it was such an honor to receive his Greenhead fellowship, to breathe the same air he did.”
In the afternoon, Colin and RJ emerged from the cabin with stories about a dive bar with a live band, a white-bearded man everyone called Santa, and their unfortunate decision to eat some of the red pickled eggs the bar sold for a dollar.
“Babe, I don’t think it’s the eggs making you feel so rough,” teased Fran. “I think it’s the twenty beers.”
“But I had to drink the beers to kill the E. coli from the eggs!” RJ protested, and Colin looked sort of green.
Caroline and Van played croquet with Eben and Max, they made grilled cheese with tomato and avocado, and then they all took a walk along the shoreline, winding down the cliffs and across some distant relative’s property to a rocky beach where they swam out to a diving platform and sunned themselves like seals.
That night they grilled chicken and corn on the cob wrapped in tin foil.
Everyone had strong opinions on how corn was best cooked; boiled, steamed, or grilled in the husks.
One of the real perils of New England in the summer, Caroline was learning, was the risk of dying of annoyance over how often people talked about corn.
After dinner the others stayed up to play poker, but Caroline retreated to bed with her laptop to write.
She slept deeply, the sounds of the porch less ominous than they had been the first night, and when she woke the sun was up and she could hear people moving around the cabin.
As she padded barefoot down the hall toward the kitchen, she saw something on the floor and yelped in surprise, “Oh, gross.”
RJ came out of his room and looked at the mess on the floor. “Lady had an accident.” He went to the kitchen, grabbed a paper towel, and scooped it up, dropping it in the toilet and flushing.
“Are you supposed to flush paper towels?” Caroline asked doubtfully.
“Strong Maine pipes,” RJ said, and shrugged.
He was wrong. The toilet was irrevocably clogged, and the more Van tinkered with it, removing the top and attacking it with a rubber plunger, the closer it came to overflowing. He finally turned off the water and called a plumber.
“Bad news,” he reported. “He can’t come until tomorrow, so it looks like we’re peeing in the woods until then.” He turned to the girls apologetically. “I can take you over to one of the other houses and we can ask to use their bathroom if any of you’d like?”