I met Nola Leary and others in the cast, and I watched Alex play Bo.
He’d managed to get the room through Monday.
It wasn’t until I was on the plane again, flying back to the Hamptons, that I began to look at things in another light. Seeing Alex confirmed what I’d suspected all along: I hadn’t undergone some miraculous change. What had happened to me could only have happened with Huguette, could only have come about as it did. We were “firsts” for each other, without ever intending to be. The big difference was, I had Alex in my life and she had no one.
Then I didn’t blame her for being angry. I blamed myself for not seeing things clearly. And I felt this urgency to see her, maybe to get the Aurora out and go somewhere away from Roundelay to talk. We’d always been able to talk. She had always taken the lead in our conversations, directed the flow. Now I would. Now I could tell her all I’d felt without making her uncomfortable. And I was aware of the tense in which I’d put that thought: I’d felt.
I laughed, imagining her wise-cracking style: Oh, so now it’s felt, not feel, huh? You seduce the girl, then reduce the girl…. Something like that. But she’d be grinning, wouldn’t she? She’d be relieved to be off the hoof.
I caught a cab back to the cottage, tossed my garment bag on the chair, and picked up the phone.
“Are you trying to call Huguette?” my mother said.
“Yes. Did she go out?”
My mother nodded, and I hung up.
“She’s in New York with Mrs. Rochan,” my mother said.
“For how long?”
“She’s gone, honey.”
“Do you know the number?” I was still standing by the table with the telephone on it, as though I hadn’t heard the emphasis she’d put on gone.
Mom shook her head. “She said to tell you to read your key chain. I think she must have gotten her English mixed up.”
“Not this time,” I said. “Was that all?”
“She just said, ‘Tell him to read his key chain and tell him I said good-bye.’”
My mother had a way of never prying when she knew something hit me hard. She’d ask me dozens of silly questions about everything going on in my life, but she always let me handle serious personal stuff my own way.
I took a lot of early-morning, late-night walks on the beach after that. I’d watch the sun come up to shine on Roundelay, or the rain come down on the place, or the lights go on. Sometimes my heart would jump when I’d see another person walking toward me through the dawn fog or the darkness, and I’d dare to hope she’d come back.
All the rest of that summer, I could not really believe that she was gone.
But she never returned to Roundelay.
THIRTY-FOUR
I DIDN’T GO UP to Roundelay after she was gone. I didn’t drive the Aurora, either, or do things or go places we’d gone together.
Neither did I ever mention anything about it to Alex. He’d only want to know what it meant, and I didn’t want to analyze it, explain it, or name it. Even if I’d wanted to, I don’t believe I could have.
Sometimes, not many, I had a few chats with Nevada, mostly about something I hadn’t done the way he would have liked it to be done. A few times he tossed in word of her. The Rochans had found an apartment on East Fifty-third Street. She was enrolled at The Bentley Academy in Pennsylvania.
On the day we were moving out, Nevada walked down to the cottage with the videotape of his appearance with The Failures in Boston.
I’d already read an account of it in the New York Post. The Failures had been described as “reverently in awe of rock icon Ben Nevada,” and Cog Wheeler “nearly dumbstruck by the presence of the higher power, so that he almost forgot to introduce his new song, ‘You Get Nothing.’”
Nevada said, “Huguette suggested that you might like a souvenir.” He handed the videotape to me. “I think you’re the only good memory she has of this summer.”
“Did she say that?” I asked him.
“She doesn’t have to. You’re the only one she ever asks about.”
“What exactly does she want to know?” I persisted.
“Penner, she doesn’t want to know anything, in particular! If someone says how’s he doing, in passing, that doesn’t mean she wants to know what you had for dinner last night or what color socks you wore!”
I knew his bark was worse than his bite, but he still made my mother nervous when he sounded off that way. She got the focus back where it belonged: on him.
She asked him when he planned to make another appearance.
He shook his head vigorously. “Never!” he barked. “It wasn’t a mistake to go back, because if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t know not to do it again. Someone once wrote that the return makes one love the farewell.”
I couldn’t help putting my oar in. “Well, it got Cog Wheeler a lot of publicity.”
“Give him credit: I fell for it,” Nevada said. “That was what he really wanted. But Huguette saw through him, didn’t she? She just dropped him like a hot potato. She learned her lesson with Le Vec!”
Huguette had never told him that it was the other way around; that Cog had dropped her.
And if Cog hadn’t?
If he hadn’t, Huguette and I would probably never have found ourselves together that way.
That night, while Franklin took my mother out for a farewell dinner, I watched the tape.
At the very end, Cog sang the new song.
You shouldn’t go back if you forgot something
You shouldn’t look back if you got nothing.
Lot’s wife didn’t have a name,
Must be she didn’t have a game,
When she looked back she got nothing
If you look back there’ll be something
You’ve got a name (You get)
You’ve got a game (You get)
You’ve got a refrain (You get)
“You
