The Beach House (12 page)

“What?” Sarah’s voice is croaky.

“I’m going to rent out rooms! My furniture may not have sold but everyone loved the house, so we’re going to turn it into a summer boarding house! I have five bedrooms I could rent out, and that’s the solution! It may not make me a fortune but it will certainly bring in enough to live on. I’m so excited I can’t sleep. Come over in the morning and we’ll start planning it, but, oh Sarah, just imagine it—Windermere filled with people again. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this years ago!” And with a peal of laughter she disappears, leaving Sarah to roll over and go back to sleep.

Daff props her full-length mirror against the wall in her dressing room at just the right angle to take off around ten pounds from her reflection, and smiles in approval. She is smart but casual in dark jeans, ballet flats, a white shirt and a tan belt. The jeans are new—her closet is stuffed full of clothes that no longer fit her, fifteen pounds miraculously melting away during the divorce.

She is now a size six—she has never been a size six in her life, was always a comfortable ten—and although for a while she felt skinny and gorgeous, now she has decided she will be perfect if only she loses another ten pounds, hence the propping-up of the mirror to make her appear even skinnier.

Tonight she has a date. Her first in a while. And she is excited. She is going into the city to meet him at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. She has seen his photo and he is handsome and sounds fun, and Lord only knows she could do with a bit of fun.

For a few months after they separated, Daff had cried herself to sleep at night with loneliness and exhaustion.

As a young single girl, right before she and Richard got together, she had been more than capable, she had thrived. She could do anything herself, from dealing with the IRS when there were problems with her tax returns, to driving to Home Depot and having them cut timber to size so she could build her own bookshelves.

Nothing had been too difficult for Daff before she was married, and yet when she was first single again, post-separation, she found she was overwhelmed by everything. She had got so used to the rhythm of being married—she looked after the house,

Richard looked after the money—and when she had to do everything herself she found she had forgotten how to do it, couldn’t face it.

Bills would come in and mount up in piles in the kitchen, Daff forgetting to pay on time, or not getting around to ordering new check books. Her cell phone was forever getting cut off, her gas running out, not because she didn’t have the money to pay, but because she was so disorganized, so overwhelmed, that she spent her life in a constant state of inertia.

When Richard was still at home they shared tasks, and if ever anything got too difficult, or she didn’t want to deal with people, Richard would step in and take over. Theirs may not have been a perfect marriage—since the day he moved out she had begun to view their marriage in a very different light—but they had found a way of making it work.

While she was married Daff would have told you they had a great marriage, but she knows that Richard would not have looked for someone else, would not have been able to fall in love with another woman, if that had been the case. Partly she thinks they got married too young—neither of them had had enough time to sow their wild oats, and partly they had become complacent. They took one another for granted, and she can admit now that she missed affection. Intimacy. Sharing things.

She and Richard had never had the sort of relationship where they would kiss, or cuddle, or hold hands. It felt, she can see this now, more like a business relationship that worked, even sex becoming a transaction.

What had happened to the loving, excitable, affectionate girl Daff had always been? She told herself, while she was married, that this was a real relationship, this was what grown-ups did, this was how she was supposed to behave, and it was only afterward that it began to occur to her that she had simply been with the wrong man. A man she liked enormously, but a man who wasn’t her true partner in any way.

Dating. The very word filled her with dread. She didn’t think she would ever be ready for dating, but almost as soon as she was single, people started wanting to fix her up. Good Lord, she thought, who are all these single men supposed to be in my town, where everyone seems to be married?

Some of the married couples she and Richard had known were still friends, but many of them were not. She had always assumed, while married, that newly divorced women were a threat, which is why they always complained that they had been abandoned by their still-married friends, but now she understands that she is a threat for different reasons: if her own marriage, her marriage which appeared to be so perfect, could come apart so easily, what did it say about theirs?

The dissolution of her marriage seemed discomforting for many, raising uncomfortable questions about their own relationships that they weren’t ready to ask, so when she stopped being invited to events she would always have been invited to with Richard, she accepted it.

During those early months she had often felt lost, hadn’t wanted to go anywhere, see anyone. She remembers a newly single divorcée at work saying the hidden blessing of divorce was she got to have every other weekend off from the kids, and one night a week to go out and have fun.

Fun?
What does that
mean
? Daff didn’t know. She would go to bed and sleep away her depression—sleeping pills prescribed by her concerned doctor knocking her out until midday.

The weekends when Jess was away were the hardest. Not easy when Jess was there, with Jess already blaming Daff, but when she was with her father, Daff had no idea what to do with herself. She would drive over to friends’ houses, the lone single woman, and the husbands tried to act as if it were normal that Daff would be there without Richard, without Jess, while their own children—many of whom had grown up with Jess, were friends with her—played in swimming pools and followed their parents’ advice not to ask Daff about Jess.

She spent the entire weekend in bed a few times. Watching television, gossip shows, home-decorating shows, the food network, over and over, drifting in and out of sleep, unable to answer the phone or the doorbell.

She doesn’t know when she started to feel normal again, but at some point she did, and finalizing the divorce gave her closure, enabled her to truly move on. She had heard of some people throwing “divorce showers,” celebrating when the decree nisi came through, but she felt a deep sadness on the day of her divorce, sitting in the courtroom with Richard, both of them having shared so much, having created a life, a child, both of them now feeling like strangers.

The train rumbles along the tracks as Daff buries herself in her book. She loves this journey, has started coming into the city once every couple of weeks, to see a play, go to a museum, visit friends. All the things she used to love doing before she got married, before she got buried in suburban life—being home to get Jess off the bus, PTA meetings, school plays.

Through the tunnel and into Grand Central, Daff thinks of Sam’s last e-mail to her, and smiles. She is new to this world of computer dating and is only just starting to dip a tentative toe back into the pool of potential partners. She joined
match.com
last month, and Sam was the first person to “wink” at her.

They have been corresponding now for three weeks. He is in his early fifties, a little older than she would normally have gone for—Richard and she were both the same age, forty-one—but he was fit, and handsome, and funny, at least in his e-mails.

She is first to arrive. She looks expectantly at the men standing around the bar, hoping to recognize him, hoping he will recognize her, but there is no spark of recognition in anyone’s eyes, and she takes a seat, ordering a vodka and tonic to sip until he shows up.

She feels someone looking at her and turns, catching the eye of a nice-looking man in a suit. He smiles at her and she gets up. “Sam?” she says. He doesn’t look anything like the photo, she thinks, but nice.

“No. Sorry.” He shrugs with a smile, and she sees he has a female companion.

“Oh God,” she groans quietly as she sits back down, wanting the ground to open and swallow her up.

"Daff ?” He is late. Daff looks up from where she has been buried in her book the last twenty minutes, and frowns.

“Yes?”
Do I know this man?

“Hello!” Delight is written all over his face.

“I’m sorry,” she is confused but polite. “Do we know each other?”

“I’m Sam!” he says, pulling out a stool and perching next to her.

But you can’t be, she wants to shout. Sam is fifty-one, and handsome, and tall. You are eighty-five and look not unlike my grandfather.

“Well, you
are
gorgeous.” Sam leers at her. “You never know what to expect when you meet these women. Let me tell you, some of those pictures they post up look like supermodels, and then you meet them and they’re dogs.”

Are you kidding?
Daff wants to say this, but doesn’t. Instead she thinks she might burst into tears.

Sam orders a vodka martini, then looks her up and down, running his tongue over his lips as he grins at her, not noticing her suppressing a shudder of horror. “We’re going to have a good time tonight,” he says lasciviously, pressing a knee against hers. “I’m a
very
energetic man.”

“I’m sorry.” She jumps up. If he had been a sweet old man she might have humored him, but this? This is a horror that no woman should have to put up with. “I’m actually not feeling well. I have to go.” She fumbles around in her purse and throws a twenty on the counter. “Here,” she says. “I’ll get the drinks.” Sam looks down at the guilt money and sneers.

“You’re all the same,” he starts, and without hearing whatever else he says, Daff turns and runs out.

One day I will laugh at this, she tells herself on the train going home. But right now, all she wants to do is cry.

Michael raises his hand and stands up, squeezing past Jordana to give Leo a huge bear hug, then turning to Wendy and wrapping her in his arms.

He may not see them that often, but they are among his oldest and dearest friends, and whenever they make it in to New York from their home in Woodstock he always makes sure he finds time for them.

Tonight he had plans with Jordana, but when Leo phoned and said, laughing, they were in town with no kids, Michael canceled his plans and arranged to meet them for dinner.

Jordana is thrilled. Meeting Michael’s friends—not the ones who pop into the shop from time to time, but his real friends, his old friends whose opinions he values—must mean this relationship is as important to him as it is to her.

For Jordana never expected to fall in love at the ripe old age of thirty-nine. Not to mention that she’s married, and up until a few weeks ago had assumed she would stay married, to Jackson, for the rest of her life.

Michael doesn’t know what this is, this . . . relationship he’s having with Jordana, but he does know he feels more alive than he has in years. He who has always been the passive one in relationships, who has always been chased rather than the chaser, has suddenly found himself falling head over heels for Jordana.

But love? He isn’t sure. It feels too all-consuming to be love, too dangerous, too addictive, for that is exactly what she feels like—his addiction. He is living on adrenaline, the thrill of seeing her, the illicit meetings, the astonishingly fantastic, passionate sex.

He may love her, he certainly sees through the image she presents to everyone else—the glossy blond highlights, the tan makeup, the huge diamond studs and high heels—to the vulnerable little girl hiding behind the armor. He loves her best, and she is at her most beautiful, when she has just stepped out of the shower, her hair twisted into a ponytail, her skin naked and clean. She looks real, he tells her then, and too beautiful to cover herself up with makeup.

He would love to see her in jeans and a T-shirt, and not the jeans and T-shirts that she and her friends in Long Island wear: tight boot-legged jeans over high-heeled boots, enamel and gold chains snaking around their necks, huge gold buckles on their cowboy belts. He wants to see her in old faded Levi’s, riding boots, a soft white shirt, with no makeup and no jewelry.

For, despite his obsession with her, whenever Jordana starts talking about a future together—and she is spending more and more time talking about a future together—Michael starts to worry. Not because she is pushing too far too fast—he seems to be traveling at exactly the same breakneck speed—but because, however hard he tries, he doesn’t see how they could fit into one another’s lives, not when she is so concerned with status, money, keeping up with the Joneses.

The way she lives is just so very different from the way he lives. He has no desire to step into her world, and although she says she is fed up with the materialism in hers, he doesn’t think it would be that easy for her to leave it all behind. He doesn’t think she really wants to.

Jordana lives in a 9,000-square-foot colonial McMansion in Great Neck, with an apartment on the Upper East Side. She drives a Mercedes SL (silver, convertible), shops at the best shops in Manhasset (Chanel, Hermès) where they all know her on a first-name basis, and lunches with her girlfriends at Bergdorf’s at least once a week.

She has her hair colored every four weeks at John Frieda, and had been going to Sally Hershberger for cuts long before Sally Hershberger was, well, Sally Hershberger.

She wears full jewelry every day, 8-carat diamond studs being low key for her, and casually slips on an armful of diamond tennis bracelets every morning.

Jordana and Jackson vacation at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach every Christmas, where they go with a group of their best friends, and the women sit around the pool in Juicy Couture and Tory Burch resort wear, flicking through glossy magazines as the men talk sports and business, rarely looking up from their BlackBerries.