A Summer Affair (4 page)

“I’m glad you like it,” Lock said. He poured himself a glass equal to Claire’s. Was this okay—drinking wine in the office, alone, with Lock Dixon? Had the meetings with his former cochairs gone this way?

“Is Adams coming?” Claire asked. Adams Fiske, a mop-haired local attorney and one of Claire’s dearest friends, was president of the board of directors.

“He’s in Duxbury this week,” Lock said.

“I invited my sister-in-law, Siobhan,” Claire said. “But I doubt she’ll remember.”

“Okay,” Lock said. He sounded like he couldn’t have cared less. He raised his glass. “Cheers!” he said. “Here’s to the summer gala!”

“To the summer gala,” Claire said.

“I’m so glad you agreed to cochair,” Lock said. “We really wanted you.”

Claire blushed again and sipped her wine. “It’s my pleasure.”

Lock was sitting on the edge of his desk. He was wearing khaki pants, loafers without socks, a leather belt with a silver monogrammed belt buckle. His tie was loose and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. Claire found him newly fascinating—but why? She knew nothing about him, other than that he was a rich man. That was interesting. Or rather, it was interesting that he had taken this job (which Claire, as a member of the board of directors, knew meant that he made $82,000 a year) even though he was so rich he never had to work again.

“I think we’ve found someone to be your cochair,” Lock said.

“Oh,” Claire said. “Good.” This was good; Claire certainly couldn’t shoulder all of the responsibility of the summer gala herself. And yet she was nervous about having a cochair. Claire was an artist; she worked alone. There was some sense in which she could call Jason her cochair—the cochair of the family—but if Claire got home tonight and found J.D. on the computer (unshowered, his homework incomplete), the girls lying in bed with tangled hair (you had to comb it out carefully), and Zack zoned out on Jason’s lap in front of
Junkyard Wars,
she would throw her arms up in frustration. “Who is it?”

“Isabelle French,” Lock said. “Do you know her? She joined the board in the spring.”

Isabelle French. Did Claire know her? She pictured a woman with her hair up, wearing dangly earrings and some kind of funky Indian-print tunic that reminded Claire of the Beatles in their psychedelic years. That was what Isabelle French had been wearing at the gala. She had been drinking a cosmopolitan, she had been dancing; Claire had seen her come off the dance floor pink-faced and breathless. Claire wondered if she was remembering the right woman.

“I . . . think so,” Claire said.

“She’s very nice. She’s eager to get more involved.”

“She lives . . . ?”

“In New York.”

“Okay. Does she . . . ?”

“Work? No, I don’t think so. Other than doing things like this, I mean.”

“Does she have . . . ?”

“Kids? No, no kids.”

There was a beat of silence between them. The charity was called Nantucket’s Children; it was for people who cared deeply about children, which generally meant having one or more of your own.

“No kids?” Claire said, wondering if Adams Fiske had been brazen enough to put someone on the board solely because of her pocketbook.

“No kids,” Lock confirmed.

“Is she . . . ?”

“Divorced,” Lock said. “From a guy I went to college with at Williams, actually. Though that has no bearing. I haven’t seen Marshall French in years, and honestly, I know Isabelle only slightly. Adams was the one who brought her aboard. But I know that she’s very nice. And eager.”

“Great,” Claire said. And then, lest she not seem eager herself, she pulled a notebook out of her bag—a notebook she had bought for this very reason—and said, “Should we get to work?”

The Nantucket’s Children Summer Gala: The goal was to sell a thousand tickets. The evening started with cocktails and passed hors d’oeuvres. Cocktails were followed by a seated dinner, during which Lock showed a PowerPoint presentation of the programs that Nantucket’s Children funded. By the time dinner ended, the guests had (presumably) imbibed a few drinks and the wheels were greased for the auction. The trademark of the Nantucket’s Children Summer Gala was that they only auctioned off
one
item (one fabulous item, expected to go for at least fifty thousand dollars). The brief auction gave way, finally, to a concert by a performer or band that had highly danceable hits, like the Beach Boys (2004), like the Village People (2005), like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (2007). With underwriting, the event made well over a million dollars. That money was distributed to the twenty-two initiatives and programs set up exclusively for island kids.

“The most important element, no matter what anybody says, is the talent,” Lock told Claire. “It’s what sets our event apart. Anyone can put up a tent. Anyone can hire a caterer and throw together an auction. But we get music. That is what makes us sexy. That is why people come.”

“Right,” Claire said.

“And rumor on the street is that you know—”

“Max West,” Claire said.

“Max West,” Lock said. Again the smile, this time hyped up with admiration. Well, yeah, of course. Max West was a superstar; he was right up there with Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi, Mick Jagger. He’d had more than thirty hits. He’d been singing for nearly twenty years, since the summer after his and Claire’s high school graduation, when he played the Stone Pony in Asbury Park and an agent heard him, and . . . yeah. Rock star. Claire’s heart had been broken. God, had she cried, every night after the show, back behind the club, where it smelled like empty beer bottles and trash—she had cried and held on to Matthew’s neck because she knew it was ending. She was going to RISD, and he was going to . . . California. To record an album. They had been different people then. He had really been a different person—Matthew Westfield—before he became Max West and played the inaugural parties in Washington, before he played for Princess Diana, before he sold out Shea Stadium six nights in a row, before he recorded a live album in Kathmandu, which went double platinum. Before he got married, twice, and went into rehab, three times.

“Yes, I know him. We went to high school together. He was my . . . boyfriend.”

“That’s what someone told me,” Lock said. “But I didn’t—”

“You didn’t believe it?” Claire said. Right. No one ever believed it at first. Claire and Matthew had been best friends since seventh grade, and then, one night years later, when they were old enough to be horny and curious, Matthew had kissed her—on a school bus, at night. They were in the chorus together, returning from a trip to the old-folks’ home. Not only was Matthew in the chorus, but he was also the lead tenor in the barbershop quartet, and that was the music the old people had liked best. “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” They clapped like mad, and Matthew hammed it up, bowing, and kissing an old woman’s hand. Standing on the top riser in the soprano section, Claire had felt unaccountably proud of him. So on the dark bus heading back to school, they sat together as they had a hundred times before, and Claire rested her hand on Matthew’s thigh, then her head on his shoulder, and the next thing she knew, they were kissing.

“It’s not that I didn’t
believe
it,” Lock said. “It’s just that, I don’t know . . . he’s so famous.”

“But he wasn’t then,” Claire said. “Back then he was just a kid, like the rest of us.”

“The question is,” Lock said, “can we get him?”

“I can try.”

“For free?”

Claire sipped her wine. “I can try.”

Lock leaned toward her. His eyes were bright. He had very kind eyes, Claire thought. Very kind or very sad. “You would do that?”

“All I have to do is track him down,” she said. She wrote on the first line of the first page of her notebook:
find Matthew.
That would be the hard part, finding him. “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

“Really?” Lock said. Now he sounded worried and possibly even suspicious. “Do you think he’ll remember you?”

“I was his high school sweetheart,” Claire said. “You don’t forget your high school sweetheart, do you?”

Lock was staring at her. Claire felt the trill of the piccolo travel up her spine, and the bass notes of the tuba reverberate in her stomach. Being with Lock, alone, in this “meeting,” was messing her up. Or maybe it was thinking about Matthew that was making her feel this way—like a teenager, like she was forming a crush, like the world was filled with outlandish romantic possibilities.

“What else?” she said.

Before he could answer, Claire’s eye caught on something on the bookshelves to the left of the twenty-paned window. It was a glass vase with green and white tiger stripes and a star-shaped opening. It was one of Claire’s pieces, right there in her direct line of vision, but she hadn’t noticed it until that second. It was like not recognizing one of her own children. She stood up and took the vase off the shelf, turned it in the light. Two summers earlier, when she was between commissions, she had made twelve of these vases for Transom, a shop in town. The colors varied, but they all had tiger stripes or leopard rosettes. The
Jungle Series,
she called it. Claire’s glassblowing career had been all about custom-made, one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces for very wealthy patrons, so it had been fun, and liberating, for Claire to do these vases, which were light, easy, whimsical. Transom had sold out of the vases in only two weeks.

“Where did you get this?” Claire asked.

“In town. At that shop . . .”

“Transom?”

“On the corner there, yes.”

“You bought it?”

“I bought it.”

“You bought it . . . for yourself?”

“For myself, yes. For the office. We kept flowers in it for a few weeks, but I prefer it empty. It’s a work of art by itself.”

“Oh,” Claire said.

“I’m a big fan of your glass.”

Now Claire was suspicious. “How much of my work have you seen?”

“We’re friends with the Klaussens,” he said. “We’ve seen the
Bubbles.
”

“Ah,” Claire said.

“And I read
GlassArt,
so I’ve seen your pieces in there. And I’m familiar with the museum pieces.”

“The one piece,” Claire said. “At the Whitney.”

“And the vases at the museum in Shelburne,” Lock said. “They’re beautiful.”

“Wow,” Claire said. Her face bloomed hot and red; two posies would be appearing on her cheeks. She was embarrassed and flattered—Lock Dixon knew her work.
Knew
it, knew it. He read
GlassArt,
which had a circulation of about seven hundred.

Lock cleared his throat. “This is going out of order a bit, but I wonder if you would be willing to put a piece up for bid, as the auction item.”

“At the gala, you mean?”

Lock nodded.

Claire shook her head, confused. The auction item at the gala was something outrageous, something money couldn’t buy: a week in a castle in Scotland with golf at St. Andrews, or an Italian feast for twelve cooked by Mario Batali.

“I don’t get it. We have to make money.”

“Right, so the piece would have to be on par with the
Bubbles
series.”

Claire returned to her chair and polished off her wine. Because she hadn’t eaten anything, her head was vibrating like a tuning fork. “I don’t work anymore. I shut down the hot shop when my son was born.”

“But as I understood it, that was temporary? A sabbatical rather than retirement?”

Claire put her hands to her face to cool her cheeks. Lock Dixon knew more about her—much more—than she would have guessed. Claire was curious. He understood this how? From whom? Claire herself didn’t know when she would resume working. The hot shop behind the house was now shuttered and locked, cold and dormant. Claire looked at the shop with longing—of course she did, glassblowing was in her blood—but also with a sense that she was a woman with her priorities straight. She had four children who needed her. She could go back to glassblowing once she had them all safely in school.

“I’m not working anymore,” Claire repeated.

“So you won’t do a piece for the auction?”

Claire stared at him. Was he taunting her? Was he daring her to say no? He poured her more wine, which she gratefully accepted.

“I’m not working,” she said.

“Just think how that will bolster the price,” Lock said. “You haven’t produced anything in over a year—it will be nearly two years by next August, right? This would be your triumphant return.”

“But art is subjective. What if I make something and nobody likes it?”

“You’re a genius.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“Tell you what,” he said.

“What?” Claire said.

He was quiet, looking at her, the hint of a smile on his face. Claire was confounded. He was teasing her and she was enjoying it. Her sensibilities were aroused, her intelligence piqued. Lock Dixon was, perhaps, the only person in the world—short of her handful of patrons—who cared if she started blowing glass again. But he couldn’t egg her into it just because he was a man, a wealthy man, a man who had poured her a glass of wine, a man whose wife Claire had unintentionally wronged. He couldn’t make her do it. She
did
have boundaries!

“What?” she said again.

“I’ll bid fifty thousand dollars on it myself.”

“What?” Claire said, incredulous now.

He bent over to look her in the eye. His face was so close she could have kissed him. Just the fleeting thought of kissing him put the color back into her cheeks. She pushed him away mentally and backed up a few inches in her chair.

“You will not.”

“I will. Fifty thousand dollars. If you create a piece for the auction, a real Claire Danner Crispin original, museum quality, one-of-a-kind, whatever your mind’s eye comes up with, I will bid fifty thousand dollars on it myself.”

Claire shook her head. He was kidding. He had to be kidding: fifty thousand dollars was the sum of his take-home pay as executive director.

“You’re nuts,” she said.

“Maybe I am,” he said, in a way that seemed to have meaning, and although Claire was high from the wine, she didn’t let him undermine her resolve.