American Wife

Breakfast, I discovered, was a more haphazard affair than dinner, with people appearing and departing at various times, and if you wanted toast or an English muffin or cold cereal, you fixed it yourself from the buffet set out on a long table; only if you wanted eggs or bacon or waffles did you order from the waiter, a pale and skinny teenage boy with an enormous Adam’s apple.

Some of the children were already in bathing suits, and several of the adults, in anticipation of the day’s competition, were in their tennis whites, the women in pleated skirts so short they would have bordered on the obscene were it not clear that they had been approved at some point in the distant past. Priscilla Blackwell wore one of these minuscule skirts, and very low socks with pink pompoms on the back of the ankle. (It was 1988 before the Halcyon Board of Overseers—which had its own charter and held as a requirement of membership that you first be male and second be elected, so that two men from each family served for five years at a time—decreed that it was permissible to wear non-white apparel on the Halcyon tennis courts. The dissenters in this decision, foremost among them seventy-six-year-old Billy Niedleff and his middle son, Thaddeus, then forty, continued to grumble about the decline in standards for the next decade.)

When I’d arrived at Halcyon the previous afternoon, I had felt a fear that the weekend would pass slowly, but the opposite proved true. While I did have a splitting headache at breakfast, the pain had dulled by late morning. I spent most of the day sitting on a blanket on the sidelines of the tennis courts, observing the matches, either watching Charlie play or sitting next to him when he wasn’t playing. He’d work up a vigorous sweat during his sets, then fill a cup of water from the large thermos by the net, pour the cup over his head, and shake his head like a dog. That morning, when he’d come to Itty-Bitty to find me for breakfast, I’d been awake and dressed, waiting for him, and as he’d entered through the screen door, he’d called, “Where’s my favorite lush?” and I’d said, “Charlie, I’m so sorry for my behavior last night,” and he’d said, “Only part you have to apologize for is getting me all horned up and then passing out, but I’ll take a rain check.” He’d leaned in to kiss me, and I’d felt the great relief of dating a man who does not hold a grudge, or at least not toward you (Simon had been the other way). Then he’d said, “Bring your toothbrush to the clubhouse, because Maj already had to call a plumber out this morning for the Alamo toilet, and the guy’s trying to work a miracle as we speak. Right now the lead suspect for who took the huge shit is John.” I nodded neutrally and—forgive me, John, for my lie of omission—said absolutely nothing.

At the tennis courts, after beating Emily Higginson 7–3, 6–4, Mrs. Blackwell said to me, “I take it a good night’s sleep was just what the doctor ordered.” I was almost certain that she knew I’d had too much to drink, and I wondered if she knew the clogged toilet was my fault as well, but all I did was murmur my assent.

I had brought a novel to the tennis courts with me—it was Pale Fire, which I’d purchased after Nabokov’s death earlier in the summer—but because of the sun and the conversation, I didn’t end up reading a word. I spent quite a bit of time playing with Jadey and Arthur’s baby, Winnie (as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people’s infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I’d always liked babies, since I was a child, but Jadey was the generous kind of mother who acted as if I was doing her a favor by keeping Winnie on my lap). Really, during that day and the next, there were so many conversations and activities and meals, so many changes of clothes, into a swimsuit and out and back in when the suit wasn’t quite dry, back into the water (it was the ideal temperature, cool enough to be refreshing but not chilly, the way Lake Michigan often can be), and then we rode the motorboat to the town a few miles over for ice cream, then back to Halcyon, back into a skirt, up to dinner, and suddenly, I realized I’d acquired a tan on my face and arms. On Sunday morning, an Episcopal priest, Reverend Ayrault, arrived at ten to hold a service for the Blackwell family on the porch of the Alamo, complete with Communion; apparently, he had driven from Green Bay solely for this purpose, and afterward he sat beside Mrs. Blackwell at lunch in the clubhouse. “That’s nice of him to come all the way up here,” I remarked to Charlie, who replied, “Republicans give the good reverend a hard-on.”

The winners of the Halcyon Open were awarded their trophies on Sunday afternoon, small cheap gold figures perched on wood bases, about to serve a ball; the silver vase would be engraved later but was presented to, in men’s singles, Roger Niedleff, and in men’s doubles, Dwight deWolfe and his brother-in-law, Wyman Lawrence. In women’s singles, Sarah Thayer had won, and in women’s doubles, Priscilla Blackwell and her daughter-in-law Nan. “Roger is such a competitive douche bag,” Charlie grumbled as the winners accepted the trophies, followed by twelve-year-old Nina deWolfe playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a recorder. Mrs. Blackwell, for her part, gloated magisterially. As we walked back from the tennis courts to the Alamo—a distance of about half a mile—I thought of leaving the next day and felt a flicker of preemptive nostalgia. I was just settling into Halcyon’s rhythms.

We were nearing the Alamo when Jadey caught up with us and set her hand on my forearm. “Come wash your hair with me in the lake. I’ve got twenty minutes before the baby wakes up and all holy hell breaks loose.” She jogged toward Gin Rummy, the cottage she and Arthur and their children were staying in, and I glanced quizzically at Charlie.

“You heard her,” he said. “Shake a leg.”

“She washes her hair in the lake?”

“It’s to avoid waiting in line for the bathroom.”

In fact, the impression I got a few minutes later as Jadey and I stood in the water near the dock, her plastic shampoo bottle set on the top step of the wooden ladder, was that she washed her hair in the lake mostly because she thought washing her hair in the lake was fun. She held her hands up to her head, massaging, until her scalp was covered in white lather. “Remember doing this at summer camp?” she said.

I laughed noncommittally, having never attended summer camp.

“I’ve been meaning to say, that’s the cutest swimsuit,” she added. “Is it from Marshall Field’s?”

“It’s from a store in Madison owned by a friend of mine.” Jadey’s swimsuit was a Lilly bikini, and mine was red with white stripes. I was not yet aware that Jadey was a superb shopper—she had a sixth sense about when something was about to go on sale or, conversely, when it was worth paying full price because if you waited, it would disappear. It had occurred to me already that Jadey and Dena would have quite liked each other, or else the opposite—as with Charlie and my grandmother, their personalities might have overlapped in just the wrong ways.

“You’re lucky your boobs are still so perky,” Jadey was saying. “Are you thirty yet?”

“Thirty-one,” I said.

“Well, that’s no fair! I just turned twenty-seven.”

“Look at my crow’s-feet, though.” I brought my face closer to hers and angled my right eye to the side.

“Is Charlie like Arthur about wanting you to wear sexy underwear? Arthur tells me to buy these getups that would make a prostitute blush. And I say to him, ‘Until you have been through the hell of childbirth yourself, you cannot fathom what has