Chapter Thirteen Caroline #3
She had never really considered telling her mother that Ned had slept with her.
Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe she should have warned Gwendolyn that he was a user, that he was a snake.
But the thought of admitting to her mother that she’d been so gullible, that she’d fallen for a slick talker in a suit, was too humiliating.
She already felt the full force of her mother’s judgment over her professional life, she couldn’t stand to feel that judgment over her heart as well.
That night Caroline looked over her bookshelf and pulled down a copy of Palmer Preston’s Tarbox.
When it had first been published in 1968, he had set out to capture the changing sexual mores of the times.
The pill was newly available, American attitudes about sex were suddenly flexible, it was a huge shift.
People were torn between their puritanical upbringings and the idea that sex could be for fun.
The book was full of affairs, couples meeting for afternoon trysts on the sunporch, hard drinking, an accidental pregnancy, an abortion, a divorce.
Sixty years later the sexual mores had changed in America, but not exactly in the ways Palmer Preston might have predicted.
Sexuality was now understood to be a spectrum, gay marriage was legal, and the whole concept of open marriage had become so normalized there were entire sections for it on Feeld, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge.
“Ethical nonmonogamy” had become the Birkenstock sandal of relationship statuses, ubiquitous, but still frankly unattractive.
The more Caroline thought about how Greenhead had changed since the publication of Tarbox, the more convinced she became that they were living through another huge cultural revolution.
You could see it even among Van’s social circle.
Bailey and Van had a child before even becoming a couple.
Fran and RJ were monogamous but unmarried, hard drinking, and high all the time.
Weed and shrooms were totally acceptable, part of parenting culture the way Valium was for housewives in the ’60s.
Colin was bisexual, first partners with one sibling and now married to another.
Eben and Max were gay, but entirely monogamous and fairly traditional.
Somehow, this little friend group was representative of something larger.
No, it wasn’t San Francisco or New York, it wasn’t kitchen table polyamory or swinging, but it was still something.
The germ of an idea began to form, and Caroline felt a buzz building in her chest. She had been drawn to Greenhead to follow in Palmer Preston’s footsteps.
She just hadn’t known exactly how. But finally, she had an idea. She could turn her heartbreak into art.
For the next four weeks, all through the month of April, Caroline barely left her cottage except to buy coffee and winter fresh sugar-free gum with tooth whitener.
She almost contemplated taking up smoking—it felt somehow right when conjuring the ghost of a 1960s writer and icon—but cigarettes made her stomach hurt and her hair smell, so she chewed her gum until her jaw throbbed and typed late into the nights.
She wrote like a cultural anthropologist, like Margaret Mead, but instead of writing about sex and adultery in the islands of Samoa, of virgins and ceremonial princesses, she wrote about sex and parenthood in the marshes of Greenhead, of perfect Augusta’s hypocrisy, of Fran’s financial ruin, of gay babysitters and the princess of Budweiser Manor.
She changed the names of course, she changed Augusta and Eben’s childhood horse farm to an apple orchard, changed Bailey’s swans to sheep.
She disguised what she could, but told her story, the fact of her own heartbreak, the group’s icy treatment of her as an outsider, the revelation that life in the American suburbs was just as full of sex and drugs as Woodstock in the ’60s, that along the coastal towns of New England the sexual revolution had never really ended.
When Caroline finished writing the short story, five thousand words long, she pitched the fiction editor who had published her at The New Yorker.
The editor read it overnight and called her the next morning.
She loved it, and with all the renewed interest in Preston’s work she knew they could create a real PR moment for the magazine.
Preston had been, after all, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and their offices were going to feature largely in the biopic.
Together Caroline and the editor crafted the logline that would appear with her bio in the front of the magazine: “In Greenhead, Massachusetts, Palmer Preston’s Tarbox is alive, but marriage might be dead.
” They would only pay her $6,000 for the story, but that was beside the point.
It was The New Yorker, and, once again, Caroline had gotten there all alone, no help from her mother, her friends, or even Ned Clark.