Between the Tides (12 page)

“I thought that your focus is on women and the sea,” says Edna.

She has done her research, and Lainie realizes that she has a shot at something. She might fall into Edna's arms in gratitude.

“Well, yes, always women.” Lainie opens her iPad. “I'd like to take a few minutes to show my latest work. If there's time.”

“Yes, there's time!” Edna points to the screen that is already set up.

In the minute that it takes Lainie, the women start semiwhispering to one another, and the men aren't much better. One of them, the seriously craggy Mortimer Alexander, scowls at the first image that Lainie shows. She quickly moves to the next frame and to the next.

“These seem more decorative than we anticipated.…” Loretta Raine, dowager, comments.

“Do people pay you for these paintings?” Mortimer asks.

Lainie is about to respond to his disparaging question when Nan Ogily, a too-tall woman whose eyes are close together, asks, “What would a membership at the council do for you, Ms. Morris?”

Nan wears solid black and a gold circle pin and gold clip earrings and has smooth gold hair. Altogether I find her elegant, Elliot-style elegant.

“I'm sorry?” Lainie says.

“What are you looking for in a membership?” Blakke Willsin chimes in. She's smaller in scale with the same attitude. “We are very selective about our members. We don't take anyone in willy-nilly. The council serves the community, while the members themselves, well, we nominate our artists very carefully and rarely include decorative art. We hold the bar very high in a competitive atmosphere.”

Edna shakes her head at how the power has shifted and is being drained from her by the second. She gestures for Lainie to take a seat in the second row on the end. The others are pulling their chairs next to one another as if Lainie is contagious. Her response is too earnest; she doesn't understand their indifference or how her husband's position at Elliot Memorial could garner respect at every turn. I mean, why not drop a line about how the family relocated because her husband has been named chief of orthopedic surgery?

In these last ten minutes Lainie has gone from hope to despair. It isn't easy to become one of us, that combination of self-concern, purse shopping, achieving children, successful husbands, and the arts.

That's when I stand up and move toward Lainie. The sound of my stilettos tapping against the hardwood floors causes a hush across the room.

“Lainie, aren't you a member of the National Arts Club in the city? Don't you show with a group, at the very least, almost yearly?” I ask.

“Yes, Jess, I do.” Lainie nods and it reminds me of how talented she has always been. She's out of her element and won't do well with false starts and false promises.

I slip into the chair beside her and trace my right hand over her right hand as if it is some sort of pact we are making. “Hey, Lainie, what can I do with the dead wood around here? I'm sure there's something to do,” I whisper. “I'm the one who schedules the spring events.”

The paradox of it is not lost on either of us. The tide has turned. I have become the prom queen, the “It girl” who has a voice in the town.

“Jess … I would be extremely grateful.”

“We'll see.” I cross my legs. “We'll see about squeezing you into what will be a group show, most likely an early spring or summer event. Based on your new works. Would you be able to offer enough unseen, fresh art by then?”

“I can do that!”

An assignment, from me to her. One that she welcomes, no matter what my ulterior motive may be.

 

FIFTEEN

“Jess?” Although I'm intrigued the next day when I see the name
CHARLES J. MORRIS
come across my iPhone screen, the pitch of his voice tells me that this is no seduction. Instead there is a palpable fear in his voice and I cringe at the sound.

“Charles, what's wrong?”

“Lainie's disappeared and won't answer her phone. She can't be located. I thought she had a doctor's appointment, but it seems she's roaming around the New York waterfront.… She isn't accessible.… I don't believe she'd allow this to happen.” He's pissed.

“I haven't heard from her,” I say. “What did she tell Candy? I'm sure that she knows where Lainie is. Candy knows what to do with the children after school, Charles, doesn't she?”

“Candy has had an accident on the way to pick up Claire and Jack. She's totaled the Jeep. She'll be fine but she's in the emergency room now. The children are stranded. I'm at the O.R. about to start another surgery.”

Out of the blue I become the savior and Charles is relying on me. I imagine him in his scrubs—Charles in his fiefdom. An orthopedic surgeon who specializes in spinal fusion, his brute strength is combined with skill and a portion of brain power. William believes that orthopedic surgeons are not often rocket scientists, rather a population of men who played football for an Ivy League, a brew of discipline, talent, muscles, height, and an uncanny ability to concentrate and cut bone. At the top of the heap is Charles—a feather in my CEO husband's cap, a fine addition to the staff. William views Charles as able to administrate, teach, and conduct research, along with his busy operating schedule. A chief among chiefs, Charles hasn't more than a moment for the call.

Although I've been fairly clever my entire life at how
not
to get siphoned into situations, the arrival of Lainie Smith Morris and her family is proving a major challenge. Regardless of the advanced stage of my social career in Elliot. In a matter of seconds, I find myself weighing the intricacies of after-school scheduling of four children. I have become part of the Lainie and Charles world, where they seem to be counting up their children in order to grasp the enormity of it. Another notable is that Lainie is too smart, I know, too caring in her own way, too much a mother. I'm confident that everything was in order when she left this morning.

“Jess, is there any way that you can pick up the twins? At the elementary school? They are waiting in the principal's office.”

Those feisty children whom I scarcely know. Plus the fact that they were on good behavior that evening at my home. Would they recognize me in a lineup?

“Of course. I'm on way.”

“I don't know how to thank you, Jess. You are a saint.”

A saint
. I've been called many names, but never this.

“Charles, you are most welcome.” How I love to say his name. He hasn't hung up, so I gild the lily, let him know how far-reaching are my talents.

“What about the older two? Can I help out with their afternoon?” That snooty, spooky Matilde who is a younger version of Lainie gone unbridled. The eldest, Tom, is destined to be a heartbreaker. His father's son.

“I've texted them and called Elliot Taxi. They'll be okay, thanks. They'll take a cab back to the house together.”

“Oh, Charles, not necessary for the older ones to wait in an empty house. Let them take the taxi to my home. Let them stay until this is resolved.”

“That would be great, Jess.” He sounds rushed.

“
I'll
text them—I have their numbers. Lainie gave them to me. For emergencies.” Ha!

Before I pull into Elliot school traffic, I work the food chain—texting the two pleaser mothers who beg to carpool my children. Within three minutes we're set, and my children, who also need to be picked up, dropped off, cajoled, spoiled, and placated, are also set. Norine is on call, making me a hundred percent available to subjugate myself to Lainie's children for the afternoon. This underscores my pledge to Lainie and reminds each of us of her absence. I'm choreographing everything so thoroughly that I almost miss the right turn into the Elliot Lower School.

The parking lot is empty, the other mothers have come and gone. How fondly I remember when Liza and Billy were in kindergarten.

I turn off the engine and unbuckle my seat belt, yank down the rearview mirror to primp a moment.

Charles, don't hold anything against her.
I practice in the mirror, sounding saccharine to my own ears. Why not throw Lainie a bone—another bone after the Arts Council meeting? At my end life is moving at an unanticipated clip.

 

PART
FIVE

Lainie

 

SIXTEEN

As soon as I leave Penn Station I load my reusable T.J.Maxx oilcloth shopping bags into the backseat of an Uber town car and climb in. The driver, young with an accent I can't quite place and a shaved head, skillfully navigates us toward City Island. These sandy stretches are the best getaway, close to the city yet a historical, beachy part of Long Island Sound. We cross the bridge and I open my window to smell the salt air and to view the disparate group of boats moored on the western shore. The color has bled out of the sky by this time of year and the water is a stone blue.

With two uninterrupted hours to spare, I unzip my boots and switch to my waders, tucking my hair into a tattered baseball cap that has an insignia of the Cape May Fire Department on the front. I ask the driver to drop me at the Eastchester Bay side, where I unload my goods. First a faded beach towel that was once striped in lavender and yellow, two glass jars, a shoe box, three Ziploc bags, and a square jewelry box from Tiffany that housed Charles's last gift of gold petal earrings—all to collect what the tide brings in for the second panel of
Triptych
.

Three pairs of mallards skim the water as if they are married couples. The male ducks with their vivid green heads are followed by their gray and plainer female counterparts. The geese and white egrets are farther out, fluttering and straining their necks. I take my Olympus from my pocket and angle for pictures of sandpipers and gulls overhead. My waders barely crunch into the hardened sand as I kick aside a used condom, a dead blowfish, and a patch of dried seaweed. I hold my arms out against the light wind and wallow in the rush of water at knee level. I gather the mussel shells, snail shells, and a few slugs with my strainer and drop them into the Ziploc bags.

Two solitary hikers, a woman and a man, walk behind me and then pick up their pace. I wave to them from where I stand and they wave back; they are holding hands. I sigh and breathe in, imagining their day, their afternoon. While not Cape May, it is a homecoming, a path back to the water and the swaying sunlight.

*   *   *

I sit on the train to Elliot in a late-afternoon reverie. How deficient a weekly visit to the city is, a far cry from when we lived on Riverside Drive and I could at least view the river each day. I was able to go to Fresh Kills with Isabelle and Orchard Beach with Cher and be home in record time.

Out the window the stations appear and disappear; Newark Broad Street, Highland Avenue, South Orange. I lean back against the worn leather and consider my slight lie to Charles last night in order to have had a brief respite. Who knows where the truth gets mixed with the lies—saying that I had a dermatologist's appointment when what I planned was more photographs of the midday light across the water. What I dared not reveal is how important these visits are, how I'm making my comeback to the large canvas, to collages that fill entire walls. Today is proof of my intentions.

Then that sense of unease and guilt rises within me—anything might go wrong with one false move. With a wave of panic I realize the peacefulness is partly because I haven't checked my iPhone in hours, years. Nor have I cared to while I collected whole shells, seaweed that scrapes the barnacles. I start digging around in my canvas bag for the phone. I panic until I find it at the bottom, lodged between my sketchbook, pastels, and camera.

The train lurches forward to Summit, my stop. I glance at the texts first, before the calls or e-mails. Charles has been texting every fifteen minutes for the last two hours and so has Jess. Why not Candy, who was meant to assure me that the children have been collected for the day and are safe at home? My head spins and my heart beats in a queasy rhythm.
I'm being punished for my sins.
I read Charles's texts as an out-of-body experience. They begin,
Lainie, where are you?
followed by more imploring messages:
Lainie, Call me, Important; Emergency; Lainie, Call home at once.
Oddly enough, the texts from Jess are practically alongside Charles's texts and also have the same immediacy.
Lainie, please call; Lainie, call me; Lainie, don't worry but check in ASAP; Lainie, this is critical.

I get off the train and trudge through a personal tsunami where the damage and remains are only evident to me. I'm a perpetrator, a thief in the night, the one wanted by the law. My ankles are wobbly and I have double vision.
My children. Tom, Matilde, Jack, Claire.
On the kind of adrenaline that allows a person to lift a 3,800-pound car off a child, I hail an Elliot cab in a matter of seconds and beg the driver to drive as fast as he is able, to speed me home.

“Lady, I'll get a ticket,” the driver says. “Plenty a' cops around.”

I toss a twenty-dollar bill at him and he hits the gas, doing seventy-five in a forty-mile-an-hour speed zone. I arrive at the appointed hour for my original plan, the one I had made with Candy.

*   *   *

Charles's BMW is parked in the driveway. Jess's gunmetal Mercedes sedan is directly behind it. The muscles in my legs twitch and I'm too terrified to open the front door. Jess opens it from the inside and although her face is somber, she is composed.

“Lainie,” she says. Charles appears. They stand together.

“The children?” I ask.
“The children?”
I screech.

“Everyone is fine, Lainie,” Jess says. Charles moves in front of her and she is eclipsed.

“Where the hell have you been? Is there some reason that you can't answer your cell? That you don't answer
all fucking day,
Lainie? Do you know what happened, that Candy crashed your Jeep and—”