“I promise, oh, yes, I promise, I promise.”
He pulled her onto his lap, his sobs transforming to kisses, and she moved her hips to take him inside her as he’d taught her, as she wanted.
“We are going to lunch,” Bennett announced. “At the club.”
“But we aren’t members.” Rosie worried about Chip.
“My club has an agreement.”
What club? Where? An elegant building with white rocking chairs aligned on a broad porch that overlooked a lake. A lake with trout. A private lake. Or the sea, the harbor, where his family kept their boat. Bennett pulled on his seersucker jacket, then carefully selected a tie — a garish yellow with little embroidered ducks. Rosie felt she should understand the tie, it was a message but she lacked the cypher. He handed her a brown paper bag. “Here, wear this.”
Inside was a Perry Ellis chambray cotton dress, expensive and not something she’d wear in a million years. She wondered why he had this dress and where he’d gotten it, new but without the tags. It flattered her.
“Shoes.” Another bag: white Ralph Lauren espadrilles with low wedge heels. The left one fit perfectly, the right squeezed her toes.
Finally, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a gold locket on a narrow chain. The locket was decorated with delicate filigree. “I’ll need this back, though,” he said as he fastened the clasp.
The BMW squealed as they turned off the road onto the club’s drive, and kept squealing until Bennett parked. He opened her door, attentively took her elbow. They entered the cool gloom of the clubhouse. It was surprisingly shabby, the brown carpet scuffed and the woodwork over-layered with gobby paint. There was a smell of cooking grease — French fries and hamburgers, like a seaside food shack. Through the dingy entry hall, Rosie could see the dining room: tables with white cloths clustered under a low ceiling. The walls at first appeared to be covered in mold, but this turned out to be wallpaper decorated with a seaweed design. Lights with tiny red shades — the size and shape of the hats that pet monkeys often wore in old-fashioned children’s books — jutted out from the weedy walls.
Chip stepped forward, menus under his arm. He smiled like a ventriloquist’s dummy, glanced at Rosie. He recognized the trash he’d swept off the beach. “Mr. Kinney, how are you?”
Bennett patted him on the shoulder, “Great, Chip, great. And you?”
“Which guest are you meeting here today, Mr. Kinney?”
“Just me and my girl. We suddenly got a hankering for substandard food.”
The smile ironed itself out so that it became just lips and teeth: “You’re not a member, Mr. Kinney. You’re aware of our policy.”
Rosie felt herself wince. But Bennett held onto her with one hand and with the other deftly pulled the menus from Chip, stepped forward, “The table over here, you said? By the window? Number 10? Doesn’t Barky Decatur usually sit here? Oh, that’s right, he’s got cancer of the balls. He won’t mind then. Super, thanks, Chip.”
A few of the docile guests glanced up from their soup. Spooning it, Rosie noticed, away and not toward. With soup spoons. They smiled vaguely at Bennett, an old hand rose in a wave. The men wore bright ties sporting black Labradors or tiny anchors. Bennett cut a swathe through the tables, Chip followed, “Mr. Kinney, Mis-ter Kinney.”
Bennett was so tall he was merely inches below the ceiling. He pulled a chair out and Rosie sat down in it. Then he sat himself. “What are the specials, Chip, old boy? That runny canned pea soup with lumps of old pig gristle in it, hmmm?”
“You can’t do this,” Chip whispered. Was he going to get the police?
“I’ll have a Heineken, please, very cold, and my girl will have a greyhound. Use the Stoli, not the moonshine Willie gets on discount from the Ukrainian in Bridgeport.” With a flourish, Bennett put the starched red napkin on his lap, and waited.
“Mr. Kinney, as you know there is no cash payment here. Only chit. You are not a member, you do not have a chit.”
“Put it on your chit, then, Chip. Chip’s chit. Now go away and bring us back the drinks.”
“Nice necklace,” Chip noted to Rosie as he swept past. “Looks just like my mother’s.”
“Everything is disgusting here,” Bennett said. “Stick with the club sandwich.”
Resigned, bearing the drinks, Chip returned. Bennett ordered two of the clubs.
“This time.” Chip snatched the menus.
“Whenever I fucking want, Chip. And whenever my girl here wants.” Briefly Bennett watched Chip attempt a nonchalant strut away. “Mincy little douchebag. Brought me his mother’s jewelry and her collection of vintage Hermès scarves to sell. She’s not even dead yet but he’s got a bad drug habit.” Bennett put one finger to a nostril and sniffed hard.
Paper boxes, paper bags, suitcases came and went from the boathouse, items shrouded in tissue paper, in velvet draw-string bags, in leather boxes embossed with faded initials. Bennett was storing them, safe-keeping them, appraising, he was away for a night or two, an auction in Chesapeake, old family friends in Ardsley. “These people really only trust one of their own,” he’d explain. He showed her Chip’s mother’s stash of Hermès scarves. Rosie didn’t like the designs that were mainly horse bridles in bright colors. But the silk was glossy, slippery, thick. Bennett took a scarf in each hand and began waving them about. “Semaphores,” he grinned. “How Buffy and Winky communicate across a crowded room.” One scarf in his left hand moved up and down, he assumed a high, posh voice, “Just been to Paris, Buffy, old girl, got a new one!” His other hand moved in frantic circles, accompanying a different voice, “And while you were there, Winky dear, I fucked your hubby and he gave me this one!”
Rosie laughed, and he kissed her. “My girl,” he said. “My Rosie Monroe.”
She had drawn a pair of white gloves.
She stared at the sketches, the only thing she’d drawn in two entire months.
The gloves were beautifully rendered, the soft texture of the white fabric. The prominent ridge of knuckles beneath, the width and bulk of the hands were distinctly masculine.
She had really tried not to think of him.
She remembered-forgot. There wasn’t a word.
Sometimes, an image of him, or just a feeling of him might shout or flash, in the way of loud music in a passing car. In the next moment, she couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t forgetting, like someone’s birthday, but slipperier.
The lawnmower stopped. Had been stopped for some time, she realized. For the sun had shifted around the boathouse so that its shadow cast outward upon the green shallow afternoon sea. More accurately, it was 6:25. Standing, Rosie realized how her hips and lower back had tightened from the long sojourn in her chair. The table was covered with dozens of sketches of gloves. She had no recollection of drawing so many or the way they articulated his fingers curling and extending. They moved, like a Boccioni, with a relentless momentum. She felt a little insane, or as she imagined insanity to be: a confusion between the selves, as a child resolutely denying knowledge of a broken cup while holding the pieces. Looking at the drawings, she wondered if this is the way memory works, not as film that replays in perfect replication — but in shards or swatches and these are embedded in a dark, frantic scribble of somatic feeling. As if the purpose of memory is to inhibit the act of remembering. Her brain seemed to refuse to disinter the event in its entirety. It wasn’t doubt; she didn’t disbelieve herself. She knew he had been a lodger in the room at the end of the hall and she had called him The Giggle Man. And when Gran had gone out, her bag upon her arm, Rosie walked down the hall and into his room. He pulled on his white gloves. The clock, the light through the trees, and the way, when he was done, she felt sad and —