Indiscretion. Charles Dubow

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СКАЧАТЬ she hadn’t noticed before. A seascape. On a faded, elaborately carved frame a tiny brass nameplate with the name of the artist. Winslow Homer. She is surprised and impressed. Claire wishes she could inspect everything, study the photographs, learn the language.

      Harry is at the bar. We have a running joke. Whenever one of us or, as it happened once, all of us find ourselves in Venice, we go to the famed Harry’s Bar right off St. Mark’s and swipe an ashtray or coaster to bring back to the bar here. On the wall is a photograph of Harry standing proprietarily in front of the frosted double doors, grinning madly. Maddy took the picture on their honeymoon.

      “Wonderful day today,” he says. “Ned rented a boat in Montauk and we each caught a shark. Jesus, it was incredible.”

      He uncorks a bottle of wine, wincing. “Cut the hell out of my hand, though.” Harry holds up his palm. Claire and Clive can see it is red and blistered. Calmly, gently, Claire reaches out and takes his hand and holds it in her own, running her fingers over the ravaged skin.

      “It must hurt very much,” she says.

      “Oh, it looks worse than it is.” His hand escapes to the glass. “Most of the red is iodine.”

      “What did you do with the shark?” asks Clive.

      “Going to have it mounted. Hang it on the wall over there. It’ll be quite the conversation piece. You know what people are like out here. It’ll drive ’em nuts,” he adds, laughing.

      They walk outside to the porch. On the lawn Ned is throwing gentle spirals to a little blond boy. Claire recognizes him as the boy with the flashlight from the night of the party. They stop when they see them, and the boy waves.

      “That’s Johnny,” says Harry. “Johnny, come here and say hello to our guests.”

      The boy runs to them, his tanned legs long and skinny like a colt’s. Claire sees he has his mother’s blue eyes above a sun-freckled nose.

      “How do you do?” he says in a soft voice, putting out his hand the way he has been taught. But he is a shy boy. He does not look them in the eye.

      “How do you do, mate?” says Clive.

      “Hello, Johnny,” says Claire, squatting so she is at eye level with the boy. “I’m Claire. How old are you?”

      I am studying her. She is good with children. It is obvious. I imagine she must have worked as an au pair during college. She would have been their best friend.

      “Eight.” His voice is nearly inaudible, but at least he is looking directly into Claire’s eyes. “But I’m almost nine.”

      “Almost nine? That makes you very grown-up. I’m twenty-six. What do you like to do? I like to sail and read books.”

      “My daddy writes books.”

      “I know. I read his book. It was wonderful.”

      Johnny smiles. Harry puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. “All right, buddy. It’s time for your supper. What do you say?”

      “Good night. It was nice to meet you.”

      He goes into the house. Claire watches him go, already in love. He is my godson.

      Ned comes up. Despite his size, he is surprisingly quick. I have seen him play tennis. He can still beat men years younger and many pounds lighter. “Hey there.” To Harry he says, “He’s getting a good arm. He’ll make the team yet.”

      Harry smiles abstractedly. Claire senses he is thinking about something else. “Hockey players can do everything football players do, but we do it on ice and backwards,” he says. Then to Claire and Clive, “You should see Johnny’s slap shot.”

      “Only girls slap.” Ned grins.

      They speak in the shorthand of their youth. The two ex-jocks. Members of DKE. Harry was on the hockey team. In his senior year, he was captain.

      I remember long, cold nights in Ingalls Rink, huddling under a blanket with Maddy, sharing my flask of bourbon, watching Harry skate. He was good, very good. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. His hair was longer then, blonder. He would look up at her every time he scored a goal, seeking her approval, knowing in his heart that he already had it. Already they were inseparable.

      Madeleine Wakefield was the most beautiful woman at school. She was the most beautiful woman anywhere she went. Men hovered around her but she had become inured to such attentions. Magazine editors and photographers had asked her to model, but she always said no. To her, beauty was nothing earned. It was a fact, like being left-handed, and it was nothing she ever thought about. While the other girls would dress up for parties, borrowing clothes from roommates, pulling earrings that their mothers had given them for a special night from the backs of their drawers, Maddy never tried. Her normal costume was an old shirt of her father’s, a baggy sweater, blue jeans. Still, wherever she went, the men would forget their dates and stare at her, although few of them were bold enough to approach her, sensing there was something different about her, incapable of knowing the true self beneath that beauty.

      I knew, of course. We had always talked about going to Yale together, but after her girls’ school in Maryland and my prep school in Massachusetts, the reality was almost better than the dream. She had a car back then. A vintage red MG convertible that had been a present from her grandmother, with the plates MWSMG. Freshman year had been a blur of weekends in Manhattan, nightclubs, and bleary last-minute dashes up I-95 to make it, hungover and hilarious, to classes on Monday morning.

      And then, in our sophomore year, she fell in love with Harry. We were in different residential colleges. He in Davenport, Maddy and I in Jonathan Edwards. We had seen him, of course. In Mory’s, where he was usually surrounded by his friends, drinking beer or celebrating his latest victory. He was popular and, honestly, it is impossible to imagine him otherwise. Maddy instantly disliked him, which I should have known as a sign. “He’s very full of himself,” she had said, on those nights when it was just us, which it was most nights. She wanted to make fun of him and to despise him for what she saw in herself. But, in hindsight, it was like watching two lions circling each other. It would have been either death or a lifetime together.

      Maddy and I remained friends—how could we not? She had been my late-night companion since she first climbed out of her second-story window so we could go catch fireflies together. As children, we would walk our bikes silently down the gravel drive and meet for midnight escapes on the beach, where we made fires out of driftwood and listened to the waves lap the sand while we shared our most intimate thoughts and dreams.

      We had to be careful, though. My parents were often away, and I would be left alone in the care of Genevieve and Robert, the childless Swiss couple who took care of the place. Genevieve was short and stocky and cooked. Robert drove and looked after the garden. Both of them were in bed by ten and assumed I was too. I was an only child, pudgy and bookish, so they hardly would have imagined I had this secret, nocturnal existence. Madeleine’s father was more of a problem. He would have beaten her if they had caught her sneaking out. Not that it would have stopped her.

      One time we were playing tennis and I saw the welts at the tops of her thighs when she bent over to pick up a ball. He had used a belt. I wanted to do something but she swore it was nothing and let’s play another set. God, she was brave. She still is.

      The dinner is marvelous. Fresh swordfish, tomatoes and corn, hot bread, and СКАЧАТЬ