Angels All Over Town Read online

  “You’re sure you’re feeling better?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Much better.”

  “Well, you’re going to feel much, much better,” he said, a devilish grin on his handsome, tan face. When he grinned, the tiny white creases around his blue eyes closed up. I liked that. It meant he spent most of his time in the sun with a big grin on his face.

  We kissed, and Alastair turned serious. Every time we made love, it was as though he was going for the Anaïs Nin award. With his eyes on my face the entire time, he stroked my body, hardly smiling even when I squirmed and giggled when he got to my belly. He kept his eyes on my face as he moved slowly. What was he watching for? Signs of passion? I felt it, so he saw them. When he was finished, he kissed me and fell asleep. I knew he’d be awake in ten minutes. For ten minutes I lay there, eyes on the teak ceiling, wondering what, in the largest sense, comes next?

  That was Newport: sex with handsome sailors. Everybody did it. Climbing off Manaloa, we met Ian, another crew member, with a woman I recognized from the Candy Store. We smiled as we passed. On the dock I couldn’t help glancing around, nervously expecting to see James Cavan standing by the power station, blocking my passage. But he’d had it wrong. It wasn’t sailors with their hands caught in the cookie jar—it was his daughters.

  That night Margo had to work at The Yard office, so Lily, my protector, took me out to dinner at Christie’s.

  “I still can’t believe what that rat did to you.”

  “John?”

  “Yes, John. If I ever meet the guy, I’ll break every bone in his body.”

  “The worst part of it is, I thought he’d be a pretty good contact for you and Margo in the museum world.”

  “That’s bad, but it’s not the worst part. We’ll get jobs.”

  Our waiter brought oysters on the half shell. We stared at them for a few seconds. All of us loved raw oysters and clams, but it took a minute to get used to the idea of something slick and raw sliding down the throat.

  “Dear little oyster from the bottom of the sea,” Lily said, holding it between two fingers. She always had to say that before eating oysters, the way other people say grace or “Bottoms up” or “Skoal.”

  “I don’t know what the word is at Brown,” I said, “but jobs are fairly tight for art history types.”

  “I think Margo will wind up staying in Providence, to tell you the truth. She has a good thing with Professor Allen, and she’ll probably teach and become more of a Rodin expert.”

  “Do you still want to move to New York?”

  “I have one more semester to go.”

  “I know, but after that. You can share my place.”

  “Listen, Buster, when you were with that asshole, you told me I could have your place. I’d like to kill him.”

  “Don’t bother.” The subject of John was making me nervous. “Do you still want to be a conservator?”

  “Yes. Don’t get excited, but I have an inside track to the Tate Gallery.”

  “Don’t go to London—you have to come to New York. Who’s the inside track?” I asked.

  “Guy I met at a party. I know—I know how that sounds. But he’s really nice. He’s on the Tate’s board. He says the department at Brown is regarded very highly at the Tate.”

  “Forgive me for asking,” I said. She knew what I wanted to ask.

  “Did I sleep with him? Yes. But so what?”

  “And is he married with four children and a country house in Hampstead?” My sister Lily was at that instant staring at me with vivid anger in her green eyes. She was brilliant, even without her degrees, but she was naive. “How does the Wild One figure into this, by the way?”

  “Why should he figure into it at all?”

  “I thought you said you’re in love with him.”

  “His family lives in Marseilles, and Marseilles is only a plane ride away from London. But who knows what will happen? I’m not about to tie him down,” she said with unconvincing detachment. More than either Margo or me, Lily teased herself with dreams of marriage.

  Tie him down, Lily? I wanted to say to her. You could be his sails. “What’s his real name?” I asked instead.

  “Bruno.” She giggled.

  “No wonder he’d rather be called ‘the Wild One.’ Do you call him that even in bed?”

  “No. In bed I call him ‘Wild.’”

  At that moment we were interrupted by Sherry Adamson, Queen of the Sailor Fuckers. She collected sailors the way other women collect stamps or commemorative plates. She was short, tan, with long blond hair and huge breasts. She most often wore halters or bikini tops over tight shorts, but that night she wore a backless sundress. For some reason she amused Lily, and Lily tolerated her. Sherry despised me. Before my arrival in Newport, Alastair had been at the head of her list of new acquisitions. When Lily had introduced us, telling her that I was Delilah on Beyond the Bridge, Sherry had said snidely, “Oh, I watch All My Children.”

  “Hey, Lil,” she said. Her eyes flicked at me. “Hi, Una. I thought you’d be back in the city taping by now.”

  “Not for a couple more weeks.” Sherry’s loathing for me was blurred by a desire to break into television. She acted with a group that did farce at a bar on Long Wharf. She loved jargon like “taping,” and she cultivated any person who might turn into a connection.

  “What’s up, Sherry?” Lily asked.

  “Party on Vamp tonight.”

  “What’s Vamp? She’s not at The Yard, is she?”

  “No, she’s a Swan 48 over at Treadway. Owned by Bill Grumbacher—doesn’t that ring a bell?”

  Lily shook her head.

  Sherry exhaled impatiently and sat down at our table without invitation. “Grumbacher Precision? They build instruments?”

  “Like trombones?” I asked.

  “No, high-tech. This guy was a pioneer in Silicon Valley. Big buckaroos at the Treadway tonight, girls.”

  I felt like one of a trio of whores planning to scout the automobile dealers’ convention at the Hyatt.

  “I don’t think so, Sherry. I’m meeting Bruno later,” Lily said.

  I smiled, noting the “Bruno.”

  “Your loss, but I must admit that I wouldn’t let the Wild One out of my sight either. Mind if I order a drink?”

  The waiter brought rum-and-tonics for all three of us. Then he brought our dinners. “Sorry,” Lily mouthed to me while Sherry used her pointy fingernails to eat scallops off my plate and shreds of swordfish off Lily’s. The sun had set behind Jamestown, and a fake Dixieland band had started to play “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” on one of the wharves. Wind sang in the halyards of boats on mooring and lining the docks. I ate my lemony scallops and listened to my sister-protector tell Sherry about the Emmy Beyond the Bridge had won for best daytime drama the year I had joined the cast. But, nevertheless, I felt jealous that Lily had allowed Sherry to stay with us at all.

  After Labor Day the crowds left Newport. Children returned to school, tourists went back to work, and the sailors headed south. Every day docks at The Yard were lined with women and girls, some crying, all waving goodbye to the boats.

  “Why don’t they just go along?” I asked Alastair one afternoon. We were sitting on the bow of Manaloa, half in and half out of the next boat’s shadow, watching two women hold on to each other and sob as Twister heeled out of the harbor.

  “What, the girls?” he asked.

  “Yes, those women. Why don’t they just sign on and crew their way through the SORC? Then they wouldn’t have to go through these painful separations.”

  Alastair fixed his eyes on my face and laughed. He wanted to see whether I was serious. In retrospect I realized that I was picking a fight, but at that moment I felt innocent, even blithe. “Girls in the SORC?” he asked.

  “Those two are not girls, Alastair. They are at least twenty-five.”

  He looked at the two women, still waving at a fast-retreating white blur. “Una, a lady doesn’t like attention c
alled to her age. I call ’em girls to give ’em a lift. I call my aunts ‘girls.’”

  “Don’t do that anymore. Would you like me to call you a boy?”

  “Sometimes, sure. That’s okay.”

  He wasn’t reacting the way I’d hoped he would. I switched tacks. “Well, what’s wrong with women in the SORC?”

  He laughed again, this time nervously. “Una, I know you’re a women’s libber, and that’s fine with me. But you don’t know racing. A girl—a woman—can’t live the way she’s meant to. Most of the boats don’t have the right—facilities. Know what I mean?”

  “You mean bathrooms, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure. I mean, say you’re sailing an upwind leg, and you’re heelin’ as far as you can go, and you have to—relieve yourself. What’s a lady going to do? She can’t hang over the side the way a guy can. And no one would ever want her to. And there’s no way the skipper’s going to let her go below to use the head.” He shrugged his wide shoulders. “I mean, pissin’s not all. It’s not the most important thing. Sure, there are some lady racers, but none you’d want to share your bunk with. You need muscles to sail, Una. It’s not like flapping around in a dinghy, you know.”

  “I know that,” I said solemnly. It was clear that Alastair considered his use of “lady” instead of “girl” a concession to my feminist sensibilities. As I have said, I had previously found comfort in Alastair’s and my banal conversation, but at that moment I felt that he was being used. By me. The way my father had accused me of being used by Alastair, the way I had accused Lily of being used by Bruno. It was a sad revelation. I sat in the shade and Alastair sat twelve inches away in the sun. Our hands touched. I felt fond of him, and even at that moment of disturbing insight, a growing desire. But I found myself sneaking glances around The Yard, just in case my father had come back. I felt dirtier as a user than I ever had felt during any moment of forbidden sex. The thing I despised most was manipulation.

  I was deep in dire thought when the two women who had been crying spotted Alastair.

  “When do you go south?” one of them asked.

  Alastair smiled. “Not till next week. Our stick needs work.”

  “Your stick?” the taller, darker woman asked.

  “Our mast. It’s that really big one over there.” He pointed at the massive silver mast, horizontal on The Yard’s blacktop, glinting in the sun. He winked at me. Alastair’s favorite gags were Monty Python silly walks and double entendres. I shrank farther into the shadow, but the tall woman saw me.

  “Oh, good God. Aren’t you Delilah Grant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love your program.” She stepped closer to Manaloa and grasped the lifelines. “I haven’t seen you for a couple of weeks. Have you run off for good?”

  “No, only for the summer. I’ll be back.”

  “Will you marry Beck Vandeweghe?”

  “I’m not sure.” I leaned against a sail bag and smiled. Alastair puffed with pride, tucked his chin down to his chest, and grinned at me. In my billowing white garb and dark shades, I felt very glamorous, the way I almost never felt in New York. Classmates of mine from Juilliard and actors I knew from dance class were performing for pittances Off-Off-Broadway, burning with the sense that they were creating real art. The day I left Juilliard to accept the part of Delilah, I knew how lucky I was, but even then I had the slightly slimy feeling of selling out.

  “Well, we don’t want to intrude,” the tall woman said, still holding Manaloa’s lifeline. “Give my regards to that hunk of a father you have!”

  For a second my heart stopped, but then I realized that she was talking about Paul Grant, my soap father, not James Cavan. The women walked off the pier toward Thames Street, glancing as they went at me and the headland jutting into Newport Harbor that blocked their view of Twister, now doubtless taking a right turn into the Atlantic Ocean.

  One week later I stood in the spot where the women had stood waving to Twister while Alastair made final preparations to get under way. His fellow crewmates ran back and forth across the white fiberglass deck stowing provisions; checking sparkling stainless-steel winches, halyards, blocks, and cleats; waving goodbye to the gathering throng of women. I felt as if we should all be standing in cupolas or white gingerbread-decked widows’ walks atop the houses along Spring Street, waving farewell to our men with lace-trimmed hankies.

  “Sorry, baby, the season’s over,” Alastair said to me, leaning across Manaloa’s lifelines to give me a final embrace. I hugged his solid body, feeling the muscles on his back, furrowed as a rib cage. His lips tasted of salt and zinc oxide. “Write me a letter in Lauderdale?”

  “Of course. You have my address in New York?”

  “You bet.”

  “Hey, Boom-Boom, kiss her goodbye and get crackin’,” Kanga, the skipper, commanded. He smiled sadly at me beneath his damp brown moustache. He had seen these tender farewells before. He knew about women’s aching hearts.

  The men of Manaloa hoisted her sails, which filled instantly, cracking like gunfire, and she shot away from the dock. Alastair stood on the bow, hidden from my view by the jib. My sisters waited for me at the end of the dock. They wore identical khaki shorts and navy shirts: The Yard’s uniform. Lily filled hers more fully than Margo.

  “It hurts too much to say au revoir, so let’s just say hors d’oeuvre,” Margo said to me.

  “It is sad,” I said, surprising myself. How tender I felt! How deserted! Robbed by the sea of love, alone and lonely. But perhaps my feeling had more to do with the mere fact of being left than with the man who was leaving.

  “Wild leaves tomorrow,” Lily said. “I’m thinking of bagging this place and heading for Fort Lauderdale.”

  “You can’t. You have to be in Providence in two weeks,” I said.

  “Just for one more semester. Maybe I’ll go to Florida in time to miss the snow.”

  “You love the snow,” Margo said.

  “I love Wild more. I am serious about this.”

  “How serious can you be?” I asked. “You have one semester of graduate school left. What about the Tate Gallery? What about New York?”

  “I know, I know.” Lily’s eyes were scanning Dock 2 for signs of the Wild One. The boat he sailed on, Dauntless, looked deserted.

  “Lily, he’s a sailor. Sailors don’t get married, or if they do, they don’t stay at home,” Margo said.

  “Just like Dad,” Lily said, smirking. We all laughed. Our father and his vagabond ways were always good for a chuckle. “Speaking of which,” Lily said, looking at me, “any more sightings?”

  “No. Not since that time in the apartment.” I spoke steadily, without wavering. I ran through the facts in my mind. Dad’s ghost had dropped in for a visit. He had also been to the Algonquin. It might be possible for me to see him at any time. But at the same moment a feeling of craziness clouded my brain. I knew how it sounded. It made no sense. Before I had seen him I had not believed in ghosts, reincarnation, or heaven. Perhaps I still didn’t. Perhaps he had been no more than a foggy dream after a bad year of death, John Luddington, and loveless, guilty nights. I envied Lily for her raw love of Bruno, but I also wanted to warn her: men die or defect, but they leave you one way or the other.

  The following weeks passed in a late-summer haze. Early mornings were chillier, but the sea retained heat and kept the air warm. Restless air currents carried autumn down from Canada, and by our last week in Newport, the trees along Ocean Drive had started to turn.

  “Let’s take a sea cruise!” Margo announced one morning when my anxiety about returning to New York had reached fever pitch and Lily’s empty longing to see Bruno had plunged her to her nadir. We piled into the front seat of our father’s old Volvo wagon and, with Lily driving, me wedged beside the gearbox, and Margo smoking a cigarette out the open window, we drove away, six breasts abreast, toward Ocean Drive.

  The drive winds for approximately six miles along Newport’s southern coast, beginning at Hammersmit
h Farm, where Jacqueline Bouvier spent her girlhood summers, and ending at Bellevue Avenue, where the robber barons’ glittering palaces erected during the last century still remain, each “cottage” now either a museum or a packet of twenty or so condos. In between stretched wonderful Ocean Drive. It bordered the wildest stretch of Atlantic south of Maine. One could see: crashing surf, craggy rocks, dories, calm bays, swans, pheasants, hedgehogs, bowers of wild roses and orange daylilies, owls hunting over fields of dry grass, marshes, fishermen catching striped bass, ships coming home from Liverpool-Genoa-Tangier, flocks of gulls chasing schools of blues, trawlers with their nets out, couples kissing on the rocks, scrubby pines, stone ruins, sheep, Canada geese. The houses were huge, but wonderful, unlike the gross castles on Bellevue Avenue. One looked like a retreat in Normandy, another like a haunted house with sixteen chimneys. One was a saltwater farm, and every Christmas the owners would hand out eggs, milk, and lamb to the poor of Newport.

  Lily, Margo, and I drove along it whenever we had free time. That day we shared a six-pack of beer. We had the car radio turned up. It felt like all the times we had driven together in years past when we had lived in the same house, when our parents had been distracted by their own troubles and left us to our own devices. I didn’t know that day that Lily had already started receding from me, and that it would be our last drive in the front seat of that Volvo—the last drive together in any car for a long, long time.

  I remember that we didn’t talk much that day. We all watched the scenes pass and thought privately. Occasionally Margo would change the radio station. We were preparing to part. It had been our first August together in—how long? I tried to figure it out. Five years? Six? We were grownups. We paid rent for our own apartments, even though Lily and Margo shared theirs. Our father, our patriarch, was dead. We fell in and out of love with men, and we shared advice on birth control. Margo and I favored diaphragms (the safest method), while Lily used the Pill (more convenient, less likely to interrupt the spontaneity). Looking back at that entire summer in Newport, it seemed that all three of us had regressed. Each of us had chucked the real world and woven a cocoon around ourselves in Newport, the raciest port in New England. We found security in promiscuity, in the transience of sailors, in the Here Today, Gone Tomorrow school of love. If you knew what to expect, you could not be hurt. You could go happily to sleep at night in the arms of a man you knew would be gone by September. There was no mystery about it. You said goodbye on schedule, at a predetermined place. You didn’t have to say “so long” because of revelation about one man’s sexuality; you didn’t have to conjure up a vision of your father’s ghost in order to say a civilized farewell, to replace the one you had said to his comatose body. You only had to lower your expectations.