“I only said that to hurt you.”
“I remember exactly where I was standing. Which, oddly, was on this beach. I even remember what I was wearing. I remember what you were wearing. I felt as though my body had suddenly been hollowed out—the way your stomach drops on a roller coaster.”
“You were wearing jeans,” Jonas says softly. “The cuffs were wet.”
Maddy catches a wave, surfs it all the way to shore. When she hits sand, she stands, does a triumphant little dance before racing back into the sea.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What have we done?” I am choked with dismay. For then. For now. For all of it.
“What we should have done a long long time ago.”
“No,” I say.
“Last night was the best night of my life. The first night.”
I shake my head, my entire body a sob. “It was already too late for this years ago.”
He pulls his hand away from mine. I feel as though I’ve been slapped—desperate now to have him back. Then something brushes my leg. Jonas has tunneled his hand under the bottom of the tent. He runs his hand up my leg, finds the inside of my thigh. “I like this part of you,” he says.
“Stop that.” I swat his hand away.
“Soft, baby skin.” His fingers tug at my bathing suit.
“I’m serious, Jonas. They’re right there. I can see the kids.”
“They’re a hundred yards out. Lie down. Close your eyes. I’ll keep watch.”
“No,” I say. But I drape my towel over my hips, lie back on the sand. Footsteps crunch past the nylon tent behind my head. I listen to a loose Velcro flap scratch-scratching across the sand. The back-and-forth thwack of a rubber ball hitting wooden paddles. A drifting smell of coconut oil.
Jonas pulls my bathing suit bottom aside, traces the rim of me, presses just the tip of his finger inside me.
“Gina’s right there,” I whisper. “Peter.”
“Shhh . . .” he says. “Way, way out. Beyond the break. I’m staring at your husband right now.” He plunges his finger inside me, draws it out so slowly I can barely breathe, opens me up with his fingertips. I moan, pray the wind has carried away the sound. He finger-fucks me then, hard and fast. I move my hips, shoving myself up and down on his fingers, wanting his whole hand inside me. I am on a crowded beach. My children are playing in the waves. And the thought of Gina and Peter a skipping stone’s throw away makes me more turned on than I have ever been in my life.
“Gina’s getting out of the water,” Jonas whispers. He pinches my clitoris hard between his fingers. I come in a hundred shudders, swallowing a scream as she walks up the beach toward us.
“It’s not too late,” he says. He wipes his hand in the sand, gets up, and goes to join his wife.
9
1978. September, New York.
The doldrums between the end of summer and the beginning of school. It’s a day to buy new shoes at Stride Rite—get a free salted pretzel and a comic. No thunderstorms and lightning, no hail or brimstone—just a still, overcast day. But today Anna is being sent away to boarding school in New Hampshire for high school. Her bus leaves at noon from the corner of Seventy-ninth and Lex. The week we got back to the city, Leo was coming home from a gig when he saw Anna and her friend Lindsay standing on our corner begging for change. They were telling a man in a suit they had been mugged and needed money to get a bus home. The man fished a ten out of his pocket and told the girls to take a taxi. Leo waited until the man was gone before stepping out of the shadows.
“Anna,” he asked benignly, “what are you doing out here? It’s late. Shouldn’t you be upstairs?”
“I was walking Lindsay to the bus stop,” Anna said.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s because you don’t think,” Anna said.
“I saw what you were doing.”
“Oh, really? What?”
“Lying. Stealing. Acting like a couple of cheap hookers on Fourteenth Street.”
“You’re such a pervert,” Anna said.
He put out his hand. “Give me the money. Now. Your mother and I will discuss what to do with you.”
“He thinks he can tell me what to do,” Anna said to Lindsay, sneering. “But he’s not my father. Thank god. Let’s get out of here.”
“Your father is gone,” Leo said.
“He’s not gone. He’s living in London.”
“If he wanted to see you, he would.”