Moon Shell Beach: A Novel (7 page)

But no matter how hard she looked, she didn’t see the Laneys.

SIX

2006

L
exi was in the climate-controlled walk-in closet in her husband’s Park Avenue home. Funny, how she still thought of this place as Ed’s home, not hers. Partly that was because she’d never been given permission to redecorate any of the rooms. Ed preferred a dark palette of colors, and heavy, massive furniture that loomed against the walls, seeming somehow judicial. Their judgment on Lexi was:
you don’t belong here
. In the early years, Lexi thought that, with time, she would feel at home in this place. She had
tried
to feel at home here. But now, ten years later, she was still an intruder or, at best, a guest in the gallery of her husband’s life.

This one enclosed room in the large, formal house was hers. Her closet, hushed and orderly, was her refuge. Opening the glossy teak closet doors, she ran her fingertips over her silk shirts, skirts, and dresses, organized by color into a rainbow of luxury. With a touch of her finger, custom-built drawers glided open like silk, exposing layer after layer of perfectly folded sweaters, T-shirts, leotards. In other drawers, on velvet pads, lay her glittering treasure hoard of jewelry—the jewelry not valuable enough to be in the vault.

So much beauty. So much perfection.

And all of it cold and mute and still.

She sank down on the floor, pulled her knees up to her chest, and buried her face in her arms. She’d started her period again today, perhaps that was why she was in such a dark mood. Ed would never have approved of her seeing a therapist, so recently she’d taken to reading self-help books. Now she called upon their advice. One exercise had been to look for the positive, to count her blessings. She could do that, couldn’t she?

Okay, then. To start with, she lived in luxury, that was certain. And she had to admit that she traveled as much as she wanted. With Ed, she vacationed in Tuscany, sunned on private Caribbean islands, and skied in Switzerland or Vail. She heard operas and symphonies in London, Amsterdam, and New York, and attended private parties for the conductors and divas afterward. She gazed upon breathtaking paintings in Paris and St. Petersburg. She even spent a few summer weeks on the Vineyard, which was kind of funny, since Nantucketers considered it a rival island. The only vacation spot she never went to was Nantucket. Because her marriage to Ed had caused such a rift with her parents, Ed never wanted to spend time on Nantucket, and Lexi didn’t push it. In a way, she didn’t want to go there when she was with him, because if she was with him she wouldn’t be herself, the self people on Nantucket knew and loved.

Or, rather, used to love.

Oh, how she missed the island. She missed her parents, she missed the beaches, she missed Clare.

Stop it,
Lexi told herself. Stop obsessing about what you don’t have. Focus on what you have.

She looked around the closet. The clothes. It was such fun, choosing and wearing the clothes she was
supposed
to wear, the more expensive, the better, because it all reflected on her husband. Ed valued her lanky, sleek body, and people around him gushed with compliments when Lexi attended a charity ball in a simple gown and big jewels. She knew the admiration was really only a kind of suck-up to her wealthy husband, but that didn’t dim the pleasure. At the best of times, she felt like her husband’s colleague. Ed would brief her on the people they would be dining with and prime her on whom to flatter, whom to ignore. Earlier in their marriage, he’d liked to have sex after an important business-related event and, in a weird way, that had made her feel useful. But after all these years of marriage, the sex was irregular and brief. She was afraid Ed was bored with her.

And she was unhappy and deeply lonely. Ed traveled constantly and she missed his company, but more than that, she missed having women friends. Most of the women Lexi met were the wives of Ed’s colleagues, and those women were older, or first wives who disliked Lexi on principle. Or they were women with children.

Children. Oh, how she wanted a child.

For a few years, Lexi had been on the Pill. Ed didn’t like condoms, and she knew she was too inexperienced in this new life to be a good mother. When she stopped taking the Pill, after they’d been married for four years, she assumed she’d get pregnant within months. And she did. Two months later, she miscarried.

Ed was kind to her, on his way out the door to another meeting. He didn’t want more children—he already had three. So Lexi never told him about the two other miscarriages. She could never tell him how, as the months passed, with the rise of hope and the plunge of disappointment, she came to hate her body, not for the way it looked but because of what it could not seem to do.

It was impossible to share these deep and intimate emotions with him. She quickly learned, and constantly was reminded, that Ed liked her when she was perfect and distant, but in her imperfect neediness, she was on her own. Lexi had tried to find friends. She gave dinner parties, and networked with other women by doing charity work. She invited women for lunch. Sometimes they invited her back. After a while, with committee meetings and luncheons, she had at least the illusion of friendships. But never did she have that flash of connection she had had with Clare, that sense of being immediately at home, in the same pack. She could never talk about what really mattered to her.

Focus on the positive,
she ordered herself.

Okay, she
did
have one friend. She did have Gloria. Thank goodness for Gloria. Two years ago, bored with herself and tired of feeling insecure because she was less knowledgeable than Ed’s older, more experienced crowd, Lexi told him she wanted to go back to college. Nonsense, Ed said. In the first place, that would tie her down so she couldn’t travel with him, and in the second place, how embarrassing would it be for him to have a wife in college? He had
children
in college!

But he agreed she could have a tutor.

So brilliant, funny, warmhearted Gloria Ruben entered her life—and changed her life. Gloria was ten years older than Lexi, plump, maternal, and energetic. She taught literature and theater criticism at CCNY and supplemented her income with tutoring. Gloria had been divorced twice, she had two teenage children and a constellation of relatives and friends and old and new lovers who were always needing her, but as Lexi and Gloria got to know each other, Gloria made time to accompany Lexi to a new off-Broadway play or a concert at Carnegie Hall.

And when Lexi had a miscarriage, Gloria mourned with her, and nursed her, tucking her in bed with pillows and bringing her chocolates and a pile of new novels. Gloria was the one who insisted Lexi see an ob-gyn about these miscarriages, and when the medical verdict came—Lexi was fine, there was no reason she couldn’t have a baby—it was Gloria who celebrated with Lexi, drinking Taittinger champagne.

Lexi could certainly use Gloria’s warmth and generosity today. Once again a sudden flood of blood and an agonizing clench of pain announced the end to the hopes she’d nourished over the past two months. She’d been scheduled to attend a luncheon for the hospital committee, but she’d phoned and left her regrets.

Her regrets. What a concept,
to leave her regrets.

With each passing day, she regretted the way she’d left the island. In her defense, she had been so young. And she’d gotten carried away with herself, the brand-new fabulous Lexi who’d been proposed to by one of the masters of the universe. In the sanctuary of her closet, helped by ten years’ experience, she burned with shame to remember that last vitriolic battle with her parents. She’d called them narrow-minded, mediocre ignoramuses with a worldview too limited to even comprehend her dreams. She’d raged at them so terribly, she’d been a whirling spitfire, fueled by her fears. But even with all the horrible things she said to them, she had managed to contain her most grievous complaint, knowing how it would have wounded them. She had not said to her parents:
I would not be doing this if you weren’t failing financially! If you could send me to college, if you weren’t so depressed and anxious and burdened, if
I weren’t such a burden to you,
I wouldn’t marry this man.
That would have been the cruelest thing to say, and Lexi was glad she had not said it, even though she believed that when she left, her parents must have felt some relief mixed with their consternation and anger. She’d said horrible things to Clare, too, although Clare—Lexi couldn’t help but smile—had given as good as she’d got.

Those final arguments had been so savage that when she left the island to marry Ed, she’d done it all alone. She’d slammed out of her house, carrying only a small suitcase. No one drove her to the airport, no one waved good-bye or wished her good luck. She’d been delighted to get away from them all. They would have held her back, she told herself. She was going to a more exciting world. She thought she’d escaped from her island life like a butterfly sloughing off its chrysalis.

For a long time, she had enjoyed her new life, and if she ever found herself feeling sad or lonely or homesick, she put that down to sheer exhaustion. She’d had so much to learn, she was always on the run, boarding airplanes, hearing operas, smiling at important people who didn’t speak her language, it was as if time danced along, carrying her with it, and she was engrossed, learning the moves as she went. In those early days she didn’t miss her parents or Clare, because, in an odd way, she brought them with her, as if they were tucked away in a compact in her purse, and every time she opened it, they could see her, sleek, glossy, and having the time of her life.

Those first few years she’d been quite impressed with her new self in her amazing clothes, drinking champagne in exotic places. Looking back, she saw how the communications she’d attempted with her parents and with Clare had been one-part genuine attempt for connection and three-parts sheer show-off bragging. She sent postcards to her parents and Clare, and Christmas cards with photos of her and Ed posed on camels or llamas. She sent her parents expensive coffee-table books about the Louvre or spices from the Nile Valley for Christmas. Her parents returned Christmas cards with stiff messages. “We’re glad you’re happy.” They never thanked her for the presents. That first Christmas, she sent Clare an amazing silk scarf from Bangkok. Clare never responded. She stopped sending presents. If they could live without her, she could live without them.

But the gloss of Lexi’s grand new life was dimming. Her relationship with her husband, never hot, was growing even cooler. Sometimes she thought she received the most attention from him when they were being settled into their first-class seats on an airplane. Ed fussed over her then, being sure she had magazines, champagne, a light blanket. They were very seldom alone in the apartment together, and when they were, he was working, or sleeping. He still found her sexually attractive, but her attempts at pillow talk afterward were thwarted. She was amazed at his ability to fall asleep during her most earnest attempts to gain his interest. She was saddened that he didn’t want children with her, and then, when she stopped taking the Pill and tried to get pregnant, she was even more heartbroken, because she could not share her loss with him. She couldn’t even turn to him for comfort.

She had no one to turn to. Somehow, the worse she felt, the more she felt walled in by her own youthful mistake—for now she understood that marrying Ed had been a terrible mistake. She hadn’t sent her parents postcards for years. Even the briefest note—“Having a wonderful time!”—would have been a lie. And telling them the truth would have been humiliating.

One morning, lying on the lonely expanse of their king-sized bed, she closed her eyes and found herself yearning not for the cosmopolitan streets of Paris or the exotic landscape of Bali, but for the comforts of her childhood room, the soft pillow with the lavender case, the companionship of her stuffed animals, the apple tree swaying just outside her window, the smell of simmering pot roast, her brother’s loud laughter. She recalled being foolish with Clare, both of them laughing like hyenas, literally falling out of their chairs with laughter.
“You girls,”
Lexi’s mother would say fondly.

She daydreamed of phoning Clare, but they had been so mean to each other that last summer, equally mean, Lexi thought, like children in a rage. And after all these years, living so far apart, could they ever get that kind of friendship back again?

Could she get back in touch with her parents and still keep up the pretense of having a happy marriage? She thought perhaps Adam might be a good mediator. He hadn’t been on the island the summer she met Ed, he hadn’t been involved in the arguments, and he’d never weighed in with an opinion. One rainy January when Ed was off on yet another business trip, Lexi had Googled her brother. Adam was working at a veterinary practice in Boston. She e-mailed him just a “Hey, how’s it going?” kind of message. He responded, and from then on, they kept up a casual online correspondence. But Adam was busy, usually having time for only a brief answer to her longer e-mails, and it was clear that while he hoped she’d reunite with their parents, he wasn’t going to volunteer to arrange it.

So she was on her own. No one got to erase the mistakes she’d made in life. The self-help books advocated taking positive action. So she would not allow herself to lurk like a spoiled four-year-old, hiding in her closet, feeling sorry for herself. She’d get out, she’d do something, she’d have fun. She’d phone Gloria.

Ed didn’t like Lexi socializing with Gloria—he said she
shouldn’t be so chummy with the help.
She had argued with him about that, and while she rarely stood up for her own opinions against Ed, she was proud that she’d risked his anger and his contempt by insisting that Gloria was her friend. Today, Lexi could really use a friend.

Just making the decision made her feel better. It was a Thursday, and Gloria didn’t teach at the college on Thursdays. She would take Gloria to lunch at that new Asian restaurant on East 70th Street, and afterward they could take a stroll through the Met—that always cheered Lexi. Wiping her tears away, Lexi left her closet. She walked through the small dressing room that connected it to the master bedroom, and opened the door.