The summer passes in a blaze of sweaty nights, dawn breaking over the Hudson and sun slanting into my eyeline; Frappuccinos, slushies, soft serve, bubble tea, the weeks bending and crashing into each other. Cyrus never asks to spend time with me, never says the word “weekend.” He curates a blood baptism using Jell-O mix for a vampire couple, goes back to Cambridge for a yoga funeral, and for three weeks in July is away on a Vipassana retreat, and when he comes back, I swear his voice has dropped an octave and he is at least three times sexier.
On our two-year anniversary, we return to the Book Mill. We stay at Sam and Sam’s again, in the room with the sloping ceiling. I am more in love with him than ever. We seem to have accidentally fallen into a happy rhythm, imposing almost nothing on each other, yet maintaining a deep kind of intimacy, a secret place full of longing, scraps of tenderness we nurture and feed, a little bonsai of love. I’m going to write a marriage guide, I think. I’ll call it The Startup Wife: How to Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time. I’ll tell everyone how great it is to mix everything together—work, love, ambition, sex. Anyone who says business and pleasure don’t mix is an idiot. I can see it in Barnes & Noble, propped up on a table between How to Stay Married and Startups for Dummies.
* * *
Jules’s parents, the Cabots, like to flit around the world—London, Savannah, Hong Kong—but they always spend the last few weeks of the summer in the Hamptons. Jules insists we go for a weekend in August. “You can’t send me into that shark tank by myself,” he tells Cyrus. “You owe me.” We rent a car and drive out late on Friday after the traffic has thinned, Jules driving, Cyrus beside him, and me sprawled in the backseat. They’re playing their favorite car game, where they make up stories about the people in other cars. “Divorcing,” Jules says about the couple in front of us. We can vaguely make them out ahead, a woman behind the wheel with a mass of curly hair, a man in the passenger seat with wide shoulders and a thick neck. “Married for six years and they’re cooked.”
“I don’t know,” Cyrus counters. “I’m thinking brother and sister.”
I sit up, peer between the seats. “They’re having an affair.”
“The brother and sister?”
“No, you sicko, just a regular affair. Her actual husband is nerdy and into Pokémon Go. Either way she doesn’t have kids.”
“How do you know that?” Jules asks.
“On the highway at midnight on a Friday? Where would she leave them?”
“That’s what I said, just plain old divorce, which is what my parents should’ve done twenty years ago.”
It takes three hours to get to Sagaponack, where the Cabots have a family home they call the Farmhouse. We go up a long driveway. Even in the dark, I can tell the house extends in all directions and that there is nothing farmlike about it. Jules hands his car keys to a man who takes our bags and gives us directions to our room. Two flights up a wood-paneled staircase, down a hallway with tiny brass lamps illuminating our way, we find a sparsely furnished room wallpapered in tiny pink flowers. There is a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, and a window seat overlooking the garden, which leads directly to the beach. Crickets and the circular hum of the sea are audible in the background.
I flop onto the bed. “Air-conditioning!”
There’s a soft knock on the door, and Jules comes in with a tray, puts it down on the window seat, and silently shuts the door behind him. Under a white napkin there are oatmeal raisin cookies and two glasses of pink lemonade. I take a sip of lemonade, thinking this is a place where Jules might have been happy, where he might have spent summers in shorts, learning to swim, catching the eye of a cute guy in the house next door. I sense the possibility of happiness, and I feel sad for Jules that this possibility has never materialized.
* * *
In the morning, we sit down at a long rectangular table and eat breakfast with Jules, his parents, his brother and sister, and their husbands and wives and kids. They are all beautiful in a leggy pink kind of way. I try to remember to chew with my mouth closed, and after every bite I run my tongue carefully over my teeth to make sure I don’t have a wedge of brioche stuck somewhere. I make polite conversation with Jules’s sister, Brittany, whose twin daughters, Paige and Peggy, are in matching jumpsuits and pigtails, silently spooning oatmeal into their mouths.
Jules’s father leans forward in his seat and calls down to us from the head of the table: “How’s business, son?”