“Maybe you’re more curious than you think,” I said to Appolonia. “About how it happened.”
She nodded, a faint, indifferent little nod.
“Perhaps. Some perverted form of curiosity.”
“Hey people have lived for less,” I said, backing out of the door and into the color-drenched heat where I belonged, where I could take a few big gulps of air and re-establish my bearings.
But the day had turned cooler, for no reason I could divine. The weather in the Hamptons is like that. It can fool you all the time. You might think it’s a metaphor for human nature, but that’d be presumptuous. A truly pathetic fallacy. Nature as a whole never did, and never will, care all that much about the contradictions of human behavior. The zigs and zags between philanthropy and betrayal, adoration and deceit.
FIVE
JACKIE O’DWYER MADE THE MISTAKE of marrying the first guy she slept with after graduating from law school and moving back to her hometown of Bridgehampton. A mistake rectified when Bobby Swaitkowski inserted his brand new Porsche Carrera into the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree that was protected by the Historical Society, and therefore allowed to define the inside of a very tight curve along a back road connecting Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. The Highway Department moved to clear the hazard—an impulse not unlike shooting a trained bear that’s attacked a tourist—but were immediately thwarted by members of the Society who pointed out that Bobby’s Porsche hit the tree about twelve feet off the ground, which, extrapolating from an abrupt rise in the road some distance away, meant his forward velocity was in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten miles an hour. You could hardly blame the tree for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The chairman of the Society even asserted that Bobby’s estate should cover the cost of a tree surgeon. Bobby’s widow, being a lawyer, advised the chairman and others of like opinion that any payment from her would coincide with a cold day in hell. It was a painful way to launch her legal career, but indicative of the type of law you practiced out on the East End of Long Island.
Bobby left her a house he’d built himself on a heavily wooded flag lot about a half-mile down the road from the old oak tree. He wasn’t much of a carpenter, so Jackie didn’t end up with much of a house. It was a 3,500- square-foot box sheathed in vertical rough-hewn batten and board cedar that was supposed to turn a weathered gray but by now was mostly mildewy black. There was no trim on the casement windows, or exterior architectural detail of any kind. Jackie still drove Bobby’s Toyota pickup with oversized wheels and big lumber racks welded to the frame. I parked the Grand Prix next to it in the driveway and rang her doorbell.
It usually took her about half a second to answer, so it felt funny standing there waiting. Maybe my doorbell karma wasn’t what it used to be. Years of misanthropy catching up. When the door opened, it was a crack.
“Hello out there.”
“Jackie, it’s Sam.”
She swung the door open like she did in the old days, with authority.
“Sam. A sight for.”
“Sore eyes?”
“Yeah. Especially this one,” she said, pointing to the massive bandage on her head.
Since I’d seen her the week before they’d done some more work on her. She was wearing something new, kind of a white helmet with a cap and chin strap that covered most of the left side of her face. The right side was black and blue, which she’d tried to soften with face powder. Jackie’s proudest feature was a mane of wild, tightly curled strawberry-blond hair. Now contained, it made her face seem small and strangely defenseless. There was an opening in the bandage at the back of her neck that set free a shock of blazing frizz, but all that did was call attention to its overall absence, advertising the tragedy.
We stood in her doorway looking at each other until I had the sense to realize she was crying. The kind of thing I was always late to see.
“Ah, Sam,” she said, and fell forward into my arms. I held her with my hand resting on the back of her head, letting her cry into my shirt. I didn’t know exactly what else to do, so I just stood there with her in the doorway and waited it out.
“So you’re doin’ great, huh?” I said, when the sobbing slowed down.
“Couldn’t be better,” she mumbled into my chest. “Top o’ the world.”
“Nice to hear. Wanna sit down? Lie down? Curl in a ball?”
“You hate this, don’t you. Having to act like you’re sympathetic.”
“Not a lot of practice.”
“I know. I’m so damn dumb.”
“No, you’re chatty. Dumb means mute. Wordless, silent. At best reticent, laconic and taciturn. You’re none of those things.”
She pulled back and wiped off her good eye with the back of her hand. She picked at the bandage.
“I’m getting this thing all soggy. What do you think?”
“It’s a look.”
She turned and took my hand and pulled me into her chaotic mess of a living room. We had to pick our way around gigantic piles of magazines and God knows what else, and a collection of engorged cardboard boxes that might have been storage, or might have been furniture. Eventually we reached the massive white sofas that anchored the center of the room, and dropped down into the cushions.
“Wow. That was great,” she said. “Should’ve done that a while ago.”
“I always love a good cry.”
“You’ve never cried in your life, you thug.”
“Yeah, but I’d love it if I did.”
She worried at her bandage.
“They say this ll take a few more weeks to get right. You gotta heal between surgeries. I feel like I been storing my face in a Veg-O-Matic,” she said, slumping deeper into the floppy, marshmallow cushions.
Jackie was one of those people who threw more energy out into the world than the atmosphere was able to absorb. It caused her to ping-pong around through life. You thought you knew where she was heading, and then suddenly, zing, she’d be off in some other direction.
“Hodges said he saw you in Town. Steppin’ out.”
“At the grocery store. First time. I like Hodges, but he always looks at my tits when he talks to me.”
“He sent me around to check on you.”
“Not necessary. I’m a brick.”
“So, you’re okay.”
She stopped picking at her bandage and started picking at her shirtfront.
“No, I’m not. I’m all fucked up.”
“So let’s unfuck you up.”
“How’re you going to do that?”
“By getting you out of the house.”
“I’ve been to the grocery store.”
“No, like out and around.”
“Not like this. The stares.”
“Let’s fix that.”
“Oh, sure.”
I took her into the master bathroom and sat her on the john. I studied the bandage for a while, then went through her closet and vanity for supplies.
“You gotta talk to the doctor,” she said.
“What do they know about it?”
She saw me with her big hair-trimming scissors in my hand.
“Jesus, Sam, what the hell are you doing?”
“Just stay still.”
