The urge to return had overcome him in January. But that would have been only seven months since his previous visit, which felt wrong. Self-restraint was required. Always, after he flew back to New York, on landing at the airport, he was seized by a desire to return at once to Newport. He had not yet visited twice in the same year, but he kept the cottage vacant in case one day he could not resist the pull this property exerted on him.
Sometimes he thought he should never have left. Maybe he would be happiest if he lived here full-time.
But intuition argued that to make this his only home would put at risk not just what qualified contentment he had found in the past ten years but also his sanity.
He understood that, in his case, creative talent was twined with a tendency to obsession. He needed to stay in touch with this place, this important period of his past; but if he didn’t resist its attraction, he would be consumed by it.
The time he spent here began in denial and hope, but week by week the denial gave way to guilt, and the hope melted into sorrow.
After he had unpacked, he stood for a while staring at the queen-size bed. Then he removed the spread and folded it and put it aside on a bench. His hands trembled when he turned back the sheets.
Later, at a restaurant on the harbor, where the decor was black and silver with blue accents, full-on Art Deco, he had a drink at the bar and then dinner at a window table.
Sailing yachts and motor cruisers plied the waters, returning from an afternoon at sea.
He would dine here most nights. He always did. The food was excellent. If he drank too much, there was strong coffee or a taxi.
He didn’t recognize any of the staff from earlier visits. If any remembered him, they didn’t say so. That was as he wanted. He preferred anonymity and had no desire to engage in conversation.
At the bar and again as he repaired to a table, an expectation overcame him—of what, whether of good or bad, he couldn’t say. Alert, he sat alone at a window table for two, surveying the other patrons, but they were as ordinary as they were well-to-do.
The fleecy clouds alchemized to gold against an azure sky and then curdled blood-red against a sapphire backdrop. But it wasn’t the sunset that filled him with anticipation.
Gradually his presentiment faded as the stars came out. On the dark water of the harbor, reflections of shoreside lights cockled like colorful skeins of rippled-ribbon sugar candy.
He and Emily had come here back in the day, when the decor had been somewhat less glamorous. But she didn’t haunt this place, only his heart.
During the ten-minute drive home, he felt that the night was as incomplete as the half-moon.
He dreamed of the many-chambered cellar, that labyrinth of wickedness and cruelty. Although it was a real-world place, he had avoided watching news film of it; but his imagination took him there again in his restless sleep. So vivid were these nightmare images that when he woke at three fifteen, he went into the bathroom and threw up.
| 4 |
The following evening, Thursday, the horseshoe-shaped bar was busy early. Well-dressed singles in their twenties and thirties were getting a buzz and on the prowl—but not too obviously—for someone with whom to hook up. Eagerness could be easily misinterpreted as desperation. This was a moneyed crowd that associated desperation with economic rather than emotional need; the men and women alike shied from anyone whose net worth might be tied up in the clothes and jewelry they wore and who might be fishing for a catch.
The bar was too crowded for David. He tipped the hostess for the window table at which he’d dined the previous night. She seated him and saw to it that his waiter brought a glass of Caymus cabernet by the time that he unfolded the napkin and placed it on his lap.
The anticipation that had drawn his nerves taut the previous evening rose in him once more. He expected nothing would come of it. Nothing ever did.
Nearby on the harbor, two twentyish women in bikinis, standing on paddleboards, oared their way past the docks, making progress so effortlessly that they were conducting an animated conversation at the same time and laughing with delight.
They were beautiful and lithe, with tanned and silken limbs, but though they gave rise to a certain need in David, they didn’t fill him with true desire.
The swollen sun was still five minutes from immersion in the sea when he glanced toward the noisy bar and saw her. He froze with the wineglass halfway to his mouth and for a moment forgot that it remained in his hand.
She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies.
He thought he must be wrong about her. Then she looked his way and for a moment met his eyes at a distance, and he put down his glass for fear of spilling the cabernet.