Enchanted August (6 page)

“I would have thought you'd wait till we all arrived to choose the rooms,” said Rose. She was standing her ground. “It doesn't seem right to me.”

“Yes, it's true,” said Lottie. She sighed. “We really should have been the ones to give this room up because you need it most. That would have made us feel quite saintly. But we didn't get the chance.”

Was she mocking him, or Rose?

“We could sleep up here,” Lottie continued. “But we love our little rooms. “They're perfect for us. We don't need all this when we have heaven of our own.”

“Nicely put,” said Beverly. “Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me . . .” He stood at the open door to the porch, with purpose. Surely they would get the hint now.

“You don't want us here now,” said Lottie. “But you will invite us back, as friends, and soon. I see it.” She took Rose's wrist firmly in hers, and the two of them walked out the door, leaving him alone.

R
ose tried to decompress as she sat on her rock looking out to sea. The air, the water, the lobster buoys, the osprey whistling its piercing rising song—for the moment, all was lost on Rose. She'd thought that in this house, the house that she had written the check for, the house she (and Lottie) had found—she'd thought that in this house, at least, things would get easier.

It was stupid. She knew it was. So what if Beverly Fisher was a selfish old goat? So what that privileged Caroline Dester exerted her privileges? The cottage was enormous. Rose didn't ever need to see either one of them if she didn't want to. The turret rooms weren't even so great. The windows were narrow, so both rooms would be airless on a hot day. And the furniture didn't fit properly. And if Rose really wanted a different bedroom, there were a dozen more she hadn't even discovered yet. And all she really needed was a place in the sun to think. Which she had right now.

The waves lapped at the rock she sat on. She wished she could enjoy the taste and scent and chill of the salt spray but she was too filled with regrets. Not about the rooms. She knew she should breathe in, acknowledge her feeling, and then let it go, as her yoga teacher would say. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and breathed out.

Though Rose's eyes were shut tight, she registered that a shadow had fallen over her. She didn't want to open her eyes right now to anyone. Least of all—

“I thought I'd go for a walk,” said Lottie, “to see the island. And the other cottages. Would you like to come with me? We might meet some little lost souls.”

“Let me just settle in some more,” said Rose.

“Some souls may be even more lost than ours,” said Lottie. “But you might just want to keep breathing. I'll see you at lunchtime. I'll make something good to eat. Beverly brought some food!”

Rose didn't care about food. She didn't really care about where she'd rest her head at night. She wondered how the twins were doing. Then she remembered she had come all this way to have some time and space for herself. She breathed in and out, in and out, looking to recover the elation she'd felt just this morning. It worked, a little. A walk might be better.

She concentrated on identifying the different birdcalls, but she didn't know much about birds. They made so many distinct sounds here: a toy horn; a woodwind; the opening two notes of a show tune she knew in the back of her brain. The path was leafy and fragrant, and again her attention turned to the wildflowers that sprang up in patches here and there. Some Queen Anne's lace—that one she knew. Tiny white flowers like daisies. Some cornflower blue ones. A lot of ferns and so much starry moss! She was puzzled by the clusters of twigs and bark she saw at the bases of trees. Were they birdhouses for those birds that stay mostly on the ground? Plovers?

It was only after seeing the fourth or fifth example that Rose realized she was looking at fairy houses. The clue was some rather contemporary glitter on the forest floor, which had led her eye to an equally contemporary fairy cottage that had been embellished by a distinctly modern hand, with a fairy-sized plastic wading pool and a Lego all-terrain vehicle. Fairy amenities, she thought.

She had read about fairy houses before she came up to Maine. They were famous, the websites said, on Monhegan Island, pretty far south of here. Children built them out of twigs and leaves and flowers to invite fairies to visit. She wondered what Bea and Ben would make of them. Bea would build carefully and slowly. She'd decorate her house with flowers. She'd make sure the fairies would have a comfy place to sleep. Then Ben would kick it to pieces.

She shook her head to dispel the Great Preschool Debacle and all that had followed. I'll make fairy houses for them both. She looked at how the other houses were made and felt a little foolish that she didn't know how to do this, and that she was doing it in the first place. But when in Maine . . .

Four sticks were the four corners of the house. Bea's had to be just right, so the sticks needed to be broken accurately. It was very different to be breaking sticks without the twins to tell her how to do it. Sitting here on the somewhat damp ground, the sharp smell of the leaves around her, the rustle of the trees in the breeze—such a different swath of nature than on the playground, even when the park was at its most lush.

None of the twigs she found would do for Bea. She was precise and careful, like her mother. Rose broke another set of twigs, measured, and found them wanting.

The more she looked around her, the more fairy houses she saw. It was a fairy village. As she wondered who had made them, a crowd of children careened down the boardwalk path. Summer kids. Rose had enough presence of mind to get out of their way. They waved to her as they passed, but they were in too much of a hurry to notice her much. One of the boys pushed another off the path as he ran.

“Morning!” came a cheerful voice behind the kids. The voice belonged to a wrinkly man in his seventies maybe, who was bounding down the walk with the springy legs of someone a lot younger. Is everyone fit here?

“Good morning,” said Rose.

“Don't overthink it, now. It's just a fairy house,” said the wrinkly man. And he strode out of sight.

Fred would tell her that too, she thought, and it would have been funny, before all the crap that happened this summer. She wished he were here instead of writing that next blockbuster. Or that he was writing his next real novel instead of the trash he was writing now. The incredibly lucrative trash.

Satisfied with the foundation beams at last, Rose situated Bea's fairy house in a lush patch of moss. Then she looked for bark for the roof.

At first the thrillers had been a lark, just one more thing that Fred could do. He had a gift for spinning stories. That's why she'd loved him so much from the start. She'd practically worshipped him, really. He knew everything. He could do anything. And when they were poor—so poor!—in graduate school they had needed each other so much.

Rose was a poet,
was
being the operative word. She still wrote under her maiden name, Rose Maier, but no one published her anymore. Not that she had been published so much to begin with, but she'd been on track, on that poet's single-gauge literary track from personal rejections to a sold poem in
Antaeus
to possibly getting a slender volume published by Copper Canyon.

She placed a piece of birch bark on top of Bea's fairy house sticks. It was a touch too Flintstoney, so she walked farther into the woods and found a clump of tall, leafy golden flowers. She pinched off a stem, then pulled when it didn't break easily. Then she set it on top of the fairy house, a kind of flower lantern.

She never did publish anything else, or complete her Ph.D., which is why she was now in the ranks of the adjuncts. She'd had a book contract at one point. She'd gotten no money to speak of—Granite Hill Press was a tiny place—but it was a bona fide offer to publish her poems between two covers. Fred and she had shared an agent then too: the miraculous, manipulative Holly. She'd been as poor as they were back then. But she had a nose for success. Just after she'd made Rose's deal, she said she couldn't keep representing the two of them. “I'm afraid it's a conflict of interest,” she'd told them and then diabolically left it to them to decide who would go. Rose knew immediately that what she meant was Fred was going to make money—Holly knew it even back then!—and Rose was not. So Rose went through the motions of talking it through, figuring it out, and of course they decided in Fred's favor. She never could resist Fred. The literary life meant so much to him. And—blame it on what, her background? her era? her inability to internalize her own politics?—she thought it would be better for their marriage if she backed away. And besides, she'd find a new agent: she had her own book deal—until that fell apart when her editor left to get married in New Zealand and the publisher in turn canceled her contract. After that, she didn't have the heart to find anyone else to publish her. So she turned back to her dissertation. But slowly.

And then the MacArthur. The fucking MacArthur.

Ben's fairy house was next. She didn't have to be as exacting with his. She collected bark and sticks, a lot of them. No moss, and certainly no flowers.

At the time, neither of them had an inkling that Fred was even on the watch list for the MacArthur Award. The committee kept it so quiet, until the onslaught of press and praise. The parties! The interest from Hollywood in those bleak, dense short stories. It died down soon enough, but Jesus, it was a fun ride.

Ben's fairy house was essentially a great big pile of sticks, just the way he'd like it. Rose felt a gigantic pang of something close to panic. She had left her kids for a month? But Fred would take care of them. He was better with Ben than she was. She let Ben push her buttons. Fred did not.

Fred had been great when he got the big prize, of course, because Fred
was
great. The only thing Rose couldn't take was the questions that came her way: “Oh, you're working on your dissertation?” The implication being, always, that there was one genius in the family and she was not it.

So Fred overcompensated. Every quarter, when a payment came in, he wanted to give every penny of it away to the hospice in Chicago where he had learned to help people die. He still felt guilty for burning out, and leaving the place. “Then all this money can't touch us,” he said. But Rose said they should find themselves somewhere to live, somewhere modest, but a place that would allow them to be independent and have a family. She could teach at Sarah Lawrence, maybe, once she got her doctorate, and Fred could write. For the rest of their lives.

When they bought the parlor floor and basement of a brownstone on the right end of Garfield Place, it had been modest. Rose loved their house. They could do anything they wanted with it! They could put nails in the wall and buy planters for the half-rotted terrace and marvel at their amazing good fortune. There was a second bedroom for a baby. Mrs. Diorio, who lived upstairs, was a lonely, cranky pain in the neck but she was harmless for the first year. Then when Rose got pregnant before they were ready and she was so sick with the twins, Mrs. Diorio got sick too, but the kind of sick no one recovers from. Fred was there with her to the end. It was a hard, tenuous, sad time in their lives, redeemed by the birth of Bea and Ben. And by the fact that Mrs. Diorio left her half of the house to the four of them.

She ripped up some moss and made it a roof for Ben's house. It looked more like a troll's house than a fairy's, which Ben would like.

That year, Rose stopped writing and even researching altogether. Her genius husband joked that they should turn out some potboilers together, just to get themselves writing again (though he'd never stopped). “I'll do a military thriller,” he said, “and you do a bodice ripper.” And back then, when things were still fun, he ripped her bodice right off and they celebrated their new idea.

Only a genius could turn out a military thriller with the kind of military precision Fred did. He had obsessed over military strategy when he was a kid and he was putting it all to use now. As a joke, he sent his first manuscript,
The Pentagon Conscription
, to Holly, and she said that if he used a pseudonym she could sell it for six figures. She sold it for seven.

Were the twins Rose's way out of producing something equal to her husband's output? She never did write that bodice ripper, needless to say. With twins, you don't have time for anything. So now Fred Arbuthnot, certified MacArthur genius, was turning out thrillers under the pseudonym Mike McGowan. They were a little disappointing in terms of sales at the beginning; then the first in the series was picked up by Hollywood and rushed into production. It starred Christian Bale and almost bagged Keira Knightley her Oscar. Now they were casting the third installment,
The Benghazi Contraction
, this time with a colossal budget. All the book promo was done by texts and social media by Mike McGowan's team—Holly had hired them all—and what made the movie tie-in edition even bigger was the fact that no one knew exactly
which
literary genius Mike McGowan was.

Apparently Jonathan Safran Foer was furious that everyone thought it was he.

Rose stood up and regarded her two creations. A good day's work. And I didn't overthink them. She hoped she'd see the wrinkly man again.

 • • • 

Fred Arbuthnot reluctantly pointed his cursor to
Turn AirPort Off
and almost clicked. He had watched almost an hour's worth of movie clips already, and was in danger of wasting his entire morning yet again. He was still adjusting to the household without Rose. As bad as things had been with them, he'd felt a giant ache when she wasn't beside him last night. He had gathered up pillows and wedged himself into a feathery fort to get to sleep. Very childish.

He only had to babysit the twins for a few more days before he took them up to his sainted sister-in-law's house. Thank God. He was so in love with Bea and Ben but they were merciless. He had a break now—they were at the three-hour “day camp” across the street, run by two enterprising overachieving students from one of the local charter schools. He'd already completely revised the new manuscript to give the female foil more lines, more scenes, more depth. She was the only character in the book who was actually real to him. He'd better watch out or he'd get good reviews on this one.

His new film deal included “meaningful consultation” on casting (after the misstep of Kate Upton as the cross-dressing scientist in the last film—luckily just a cameo), and at first he was willing to leave it all in the new director's hands; Sam Mendes rarely made mistakes. He started watching audition reels of actresses reading for the lead—some of them so famous he wondered why they would even need to audition. He'd only taken a cursory glance at most of them. Until he started obsessing over one of them.