The entire day stretched ahead of her, the same intimidating blank canvas she faced every morning since the start of summer. Bennett was out, a private auction at Sotheby’s. Or perhaps an estate sale in Kennebunkport. An old chum selling off key pieces of her art collection to pay a blackmailer. A famous rock star — who must go unnamed, even though Rosie had no one to tell — needing to fund a stint at an expensive rehab in Switzerland. Sometimes, Bennett was away for the night, even two or three. It was easier than driving home. He stayed with his many dispersed friends, in their cottages and compounds, their penthouses and something he called peed da tear.
What to draw? Rosie stared out at the blue indifference of the sea and felt bloated with boredom. A shower would take 15 minutes, breakfast another 15. That would leave only seven hours before Bennett had said he’d return. She tried to read the books he wanted her to, but even the best of these eventually had her nodding off in the heat. At Parsons, her days had been so neatly collated, classes, assignments, studio time, homework. Was this adulthood? Great slabs of meaty time, hanging loose. Gran had always been busy, scurrying, tired, she worked at a school for special ed children, not with them — they were too needy, too noisy, too messy — but filing, answering phones. This work left Gran exhausted, a fragile exoskeleton, who sighed and placed cold food from the SPED kids’ cafeteria on the table instead of dinner, the food jumbled together, the Jello and the beef stroganoff or what was supposed to be beef stroganoff but rather a fatty, gritty blob that smelled like an armpit.
If Rosie was an artist. Wearing only black. She’d be Georgia O’Keeffe in her red desert, staring through bones. O’Keeffe astride a motorcycle, looking back at the camera, was a woman in complete mastery of herself. She had shed all impediments to her art — the jealous Stieglitz, the noise of New York, the clutter of other people. Childless, she lived alone in a house with large windows and empty rooms in a remote corner of New Mexico. She was an arrow with a singular direction. She was heroic. Even in photographs of her younger self, there’d been no hesitancy — she’d never been a foolish young woman: she stared boldly at the camera.
Rosie lined the pencils up with the pad of paper. The dishes were done, the floor swept, bed made. These days were translucent like eggs without yolks.
She put her hand on her belly. Who was in there? A wayward seed. She decided to walk along the shore to the country club before the plastic heat melted everything. It was not a pretty walk, just hemming the golf course and a narrow, weedy beach. The sea was flat, a few boats bobbed about. The haze folded the water into the sky, giving the feeling of containment. She could just see the shore beyond Southport Harbor — a continuation of the large, leafy properties with private docks and boathouses. The views of the residents were only ever a reflection back of their own wealth, or of the sea. Wealth was Bennett’s word; he’d said the very rich never say rich. “The wealthy don’t live in ocean-front properties,” he’d told her. “They live by the sea.” Rosie still had trouble understanding Bennett’s idea of wealth because her only measure was Lowell, where the rich had big new cars and went to Florida for spring vacation, and had brick and cement gateposts and statues of Roman gods flanking their front doors. They were usually involved in construction or real estate. Yet Bennett dismissed such people as “the kind who wear white after Labor Day.” His voice had lowered in mock horror: “And even white clothing with gold jewelry.”
The beach improved on the other side of the PRIVATE BEACH MEMBERS ONLY sign. There was hardly anyone around this early, just a few nannies and their kids, a clutch of older women in tennis whites, their brittle limbs tanned to a roast chicken tint. Rosie ambled up to the clubhouse, hoping for a glass of water.
A short, tightly muscled man in tennis whites smiled at her as she attempted to sit in a chair on the porch. “Can I help you?”
“I was just —” she began. She thought about the pregnancy test. Bennett wanted to be careful, he’d suggested the pill. Why hadn’t she just gone on the pill? She’d worried it might make her fat. Pregnancy would make her fat all right.
“Are you meeting someone here?”
“Just walking.” She must have said something else — did she? — because he left and came back with an iced water. He stood right there while she drank it. The water was wonderfully cold. Was he a member? A waiter? A tennis coach?
“I’m staying at the Wallace’s boathouse.” She thought he should know this.
He took her glass. “Should I put a day membership on their chit?”
Chit? What was a chit? It sounded like shit but Rosie was certain this wasn’t about shit. Sweat pricked her underarms, she felt nervous, even though there was no threat, this tidy man, here on this warm day in full view of nannies. The lifeguard on the beach was rubbing thick white sunscreen on his face. But something was happening between her and this man — a low frequency transmission.
“Do you know Bennett?” she ventured.
“I know Bennett.” His tone was obscure. She saw the slow sea crinkling in the sun. Long Island, a finger smudge. “But he is not a member here. Either.”
She regarded his blank face. The either was said with a slight thrust. His smile remained fixed, exhibiting nothing but excellent dentistry.
“Thanks for the water.”
“You’re welcome.”
In a way, she was fascinated by how words and their meaning could so completely diverge. She was not welcome at all. She wondered at the invisible power already moving her back down onto the beach, his mind like a leaf blower, getting rid of litter. She was trash. He was Uri Geller. Her face flushed, her mouth was dry as she gave him a little wave and walked back from where she’d come. He didn’t return the wave.
When Bennett came home that evening, she told him, and he snorted, “Chip, what an ass.”
“His name is Chip? Like chocolate chip? Wood chip?”
“It’s actually Charles.”
“How do you get Chip from Charles?”
Bennett opened the fridge and took out a couple of beers, handed her one. “It’s a WASP thing. Chip, Skip, Pookie, Whip, Chat, Buffy, Muffy, Minsy, Miffy, Mitzy.” Then he laughed that private laugh he had. “Matty, Twatty.”
“I don’t know what a wasp thing is.”
“White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Although, occasionally, an Irish Catholic sneaks in the tradesman’s entrance. My mother famously referred to Rose Kennedy as ‘The Arriviste.’ But then my mother married a Kinney, also a papist. Her father was not happy.”
Often Bennett’s sentences were a kind of lace — an antimacassar — full of pretty holes she didn’t understand. “I’m a white Anglo-Saxon.”
“You’re not a WASP.” He explained: “WASPs are tribal, like Jews. We intermarry to keep our money and our bloodlines, we congregate in certain places, dress a certain way, speak a certain patois. We have pugs but not chows, never chows. We have sensitive radars for interlopers and can spot a fake school tie from a hundred yards.”
As this was intended to clarify, Rosie nodded. “How did Chip know I wasn’t a WASP?”
Bennett laughed, “Aside from the way you dress, you have no native sense of entitlement.”