Now, as we approach, I hear Martin catch his breath. “It’s otherworldly,” he says. “The photo doesn’t do it justice.”
I smile and keep walking. “Well, it’s certainly from another time. This is where I write.”
It’s warm for April, and the slate roof glistens in the sun from last night’s rain. Two giant hydrangea bushes flank the door. They’re getting their first leaves now, hopeful celery-colored things, but soon they’ll be bursting with cerulean blue blooms the size of my head. “If you could have waited until July, you would have seen these in bloom,” I say to no one, because Martin has already walked inside.
“This is absolutely perfect,” he says, running his hands over the paneled walls. He pulls out a walkie-talkie. “I’m back in the tea house. Bring the linens for the daybed, I’m going to need three o’clock sunshine coming through the back window. And a mop. Make sure Leo and Naomi are in makeup.”
Meredith gives me a little wink, presumably to make me feel better about the mop comment. I give her a shrug, what do I care? “Okay, so I’ll get out of your way, let me know if you need anything.”
* * *
? ? ?
I go back into my house, relieved to find it empty. Outside every window, there is activity—a catering truck, a woman chasing Leo Vance with a spray bottle. From the largest trailer emerges Naomi Sanchez, somehow all legs in a frumpy housedress. I assume she’s dressed up as how Martin imagined me. I first saw Naomi Sanchez in Hustler’s Revenge when she was about twenty-five. There was a scene where she discovered she’d been double-crossed that was shot so tight that her whole face filled the screen. Where are her pores, I’d wondered. At thirty-two, she is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
I text Kate: Leo Vance was in my house. Naomi Sanchez is exquisite.
Kate: Dying.
I’m having a hard time figuring out what I should be doing. I mean I’m inside my house which isn’t a writing-working space. Inside my house is a mom-ing space. The kitchen is still a mess from breakfast, and it occurs to me that Leo Vance has seen my pancake spatter and has smelled my bacon grease. I’m mildly agitated that he’s been in here as I start to clean. There will have to be boundaries of some sort. I don’t want to walk in here tomorrow and find him smoldering at my dishwasher.
I call my sister, and her nanny, Leonora, answers. “She’s out with her friends,” she says. Penny and her husband, Rick, live in Manhattan and East Hampton and are frequently featured in Town & Country wearing the right things with the right people. This is the first time in my life I’m doing something cooler than Penny, so I leave a message. “Please tell her I called and that Naomi Sanchez and Leo Vance are in my driveway.” Leonora squeals, and I am satisfied.
Once my kitchen is clean, I try to think of what I’d normally be doing. It’s Wednesday, and on Wednesdays we eat meatloaf. Of course! I take a pound of ground turkey out of the freezer and place it on the counter. This doesn’t take as long as I’d hoped.
* * *
? ? ?
I watch through the corner window in the sunroom. They’re filming the scene where I tell Ben that it might help if we both had a steady paycheck. It was the day he lumped me in with all the other people who don’t have the vision to believe in his dreams. I was a drone, a robot, a slave to convention. I’m pretty sure it was the last straw. I imagine my words coming out of Naomi’s perfect mouth, and I start to think maybe this film was cast all wrong. How is Leo Vance going to be able to be as dismissive as Ben was when he’s looking at a woman like that? It seems like people as beautiful as the two of them might have been able to work things out. No man’s going to walk away from Naomi Sanchez.
I’ve been watching the filming for an hour when I realize it’s time to go get my kids. I open my garage to find three guys smoking in my driveway. They drop their cigarettes and extinguish them with their shoes and move to the side and wave me out, like I’m in some kind of valet-parking situation. I have no choice but to drive up onto my own grass to get around the trucks and onto the dirt portion of my driveway that takes me to the main road.
It feels good to put the chaos behind me and drive out into Laurel Ridge where nothing ever changes. Ben bought into this town because he was literally out of choices. He wanted a big life in the city—Penny’s life, to be exact. But when that proved to be too expensive, he wanted a big house in a commutable suburb. That was impossible too. As I got more and more pregnant with Arthur and it became clear that our walk-up studio apartment would never contain us, we were in a race against the clock. We had twenty thousand dollars to put down on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house, and a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house was a lot farther from the city than Ben had imagined.