Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

She said, “Shall we celebrate?”

And for the first time in nearly two years, Doug thought another person’s company might be nice.

“Sure,” he said.

She suggested the Monkey Bar, which was the kind of spot that Doug’s partners always went to but Doug had never set foot in. He was charmed by Pauline’s confidence. She knew the maître d’, Thebaud, by name, and he whisked them through the after-work drinks crowd to a small round table for two, which was partially concealed by a curved banquette wall. Pauline ordered a bottle of champagne and a plate of gougères. The waiter poured their champagne, and Doug and Pauline toasted their mutual success.

Pauline smiled. Her face was glowing. Doug knew her to be fifty-four, but at that moment, she looked like a girl. She said, “I’m so glad that’s over. I can finally relax.”

Doug let his own deep breath go; he was still experiencing the winded euphoria particular to conquering his opponent. It was not unlike a good game of squash. Doug thrived on the competition. He wanted to win. His job was to liberate people from the stranglehold of an unsatisfactory union. Many times when a divorce was declared final, his client would spontaneously burst into tears. Some clients saw their divorces as an ending, not a beginning; they saw their divorces as a failure, not a solution. It wasn’t Doug’s job to put a value judgment on what was happening, only to legally facilitate it. But he had to admit that he felt much better about his profession when he was faced with a client as buoyant as Pauline.

Drinks at the Monkey Bar had been a success. Doug had headed home on the train feeling nourished by actual human interaction. He had not fallen in love with Pauline, but he had appreciated the hour drinking champagne and eating golden, cheesy gougères, admiring the wall murals by Ed Sorel, regarding the well-heeled crowd, and enjoying the presence of a convivial, attractive woman. He realized, as he and Pauline parted ways outside the restaurant on Fifty-fourth Street, that he would miss her.

And then the universe had worked its magic. A few weeks later, on the Fourth of July, Doug had played golf at Wee Burn, and then he’d stayed to swim some laps at the pool, where he met up with the Drakes, who invited him to join them on the patio for dinner. Doug had nearly declined-he no longer socialized with any of his and Beth’s couple friends because he couldn’t abide being a third wheel-but it was a holiday, and if Doug went home, he was looking at an evening of drinking whiskey and watching a recap of Wimbledon on TV. And so he stayed and ate dinner with the Drakes and met up with more friends whom he hadn’t seen since the funeral. These friends all mentioned how wonderful he looked (he did not look wonderful) and how much they’d missed him (though what they meant, he suspected, was that they missed Beth), and Doug realized how limited his life had become.

It was at the end of the night that he’d bumped into Pauline. He was sitting at the bar finishing a nightcap when she walked through the room with Russell Stern, who was the president of Wee Burn’s board of directors. Russell Stern was divorced himself; he’d endured a rather high-profile split from his wife, Charlene, who sang with the Metropolitan Opera. Doug wondered for a second if Pauline and Russell Stern were dating. He had to admit, the thought irked him.

Pauline caught sight of Doug at the bar and said to Russell, “You go ahead, Russ, I’m going to stay for a minute. Thanks for everything.”

Russell eyed Doug and waved, then said to Pauline, “You sure you’re okay getting home? I can wait, you know.”

“I’m fine,” Pauline said. “Thanks again!”

Russell Stern lingered for a moment, and Doug felt both a surge of macho triumph and a flicker of worry that, as president of the board, Russell might inflict some kind of institutional retribution-a raise in Doug’s dues, perhaps, or revocation of Doug’s front-row parking spot. Then Russell left, and Pauline fluttered over.

She said, “Hey, stranger.”

He had ended up taking her home that night to the house in Silvermine that he had helped her wrest from Arthur Tonelli’s grip. They had kissed on the front porch, then in the foyer like a couple of teenagers. Doug had been amazed by his level of arousal. He hadn’t even allowed himself to think of sex in years. But with Pauline, his body asserted its natural instincts. He had thought they might do it right then and there up against the half-moon mail table, or on the stairs-but Pauline stopped him.

He said, “Are you dating Russell Stern?”

She paused for what seemed like a long time. “No,” she said. “We’re old friends.”

“Really?” Doug said. “Because he seemed a little miffed that you came over to talk to me.”

“Just friends,” Pauline said.

Doug asked Pauline to dinner the following week. He picked a place on the water in South Norwalk, where neither of them had ever been before. This was important, he thought, for both of them. They had a fine time, and during the dinner conversation, it came out that Pauline and Russell had gone to high school together in New Canaan. They had dated their senior year, Russell a football star and Pauline a cheerleader. They had stayed together for two more years while Pauline went to Connecticut College and Russell went to Yale. They had talked of getting married.

“Wow,” Doug said.

“Then I met Arthur at the Coast Guard Academy, and Russell met Charlene, and that was that. Now, we’re just friends.”

As “Layla” ended, Doug went to the counter to pay his bill. In retrospect, he could see that he had been dazzled by Pauline’s ease out in the world alone; he had been comfortable with her, and he had been intrigued by her relationship with Russell Stern. Pauline was nothing at all like Beth, and so Doug was free from feeling like he was replacing her. Pauline was someone else entirely-a friend, a lover, someone to enjoy. Doug had never fallen in love with Pauline, he’d never had the sick, loopy, head-over-heels feeling that he’d had from start to finish with Beth. And that, he saw now, had been preferable. Pauline wasn’t threatening. She wasn’t going to break his heart. She was someone to do things with, someone to talk to, someone to hold at night.

The problems had started when he agreed to move into Arthur Tonelli’s house with her. Why had he ever agreed to that? At the time, the real estate market had been good, and Doug had been anxious to get rid of his house. The kids were grown, Beth was dead, the house was far too big for him alone, it was filled with memories, nearly all of which were excruciatingly painful, and he didn’t want to take care of the house anymore. And so it had been wonderful to have another place to go, a place he wasn’t responsible for. But he had never thought of the Silvermine house as anything but the Tonelli house.

The bigger mystery was why Doug had married Pauline. More than anyone in the world, Doug knew how dangerous marriage could be. Why not just cohabitate without the messy business of binding their union? The answer was that Doug was old-fashioned. He was nearly sixty years old, he had been married to Beth for thirty-five years, he was used to being a married man. He was comfortable with a ring on his finger and a joint checking account, and one way of doing things. He was comfortable in a union. The thought of him and Pauline “living together,” referring to her as “my partner” or worse still “my girlfriend,” and keeping two memberships at the country club and two sets of finances (his money, her money, most of which arrived in the form of Arthur Tonelli’s alimony checks) was absurd to him, bordering on distasteful.

And so he and Pauline had made it official in a very small civil ceremony followed by a lunch at Le Bernardin.

At the time, Doug could never have imagined the way he felt now. Disenchanted, trapped, eager for his freedom. He had thought that he would live out his days with Pauline in comfortable companionship. He had not predicted that his needs and desires would announce they wanted something more, something different.

When Doug got back to the house, it was only eight o’clock, and the sun was still up. He would have preferred to wait until dark when he could be sure Pauline was asleep, but he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t want to drink anything more with the long, middle-of-the-night drive ahead; he didn’t want to go to the club and get sucked into inane conversation about Mickelson’s chances at Oak Hill. He didn’t have a single person he could talk to. In a pinch, he supposed he could call Edge, but Edge lived in the city, and he had endured so much personal drama of his own that Doug would feel terrible heaping on more. Plus, Edge wasn’t particularly fond of Pauline, and so if Doug told Edge he was thinking of leaving Pauline, Edge might give him too much encouragement. Furthermore, Edge had been distant lately, and increasingly vague about his own romantic life. He was dating someone, Doug was sure of that. Edge had the measured calm and patience these days that he only displayed when he was having sex on a regular basis. But Edge didn’t talk about the girl, whoever she was, and the one time Doug had asked about the lucky woman who was keeping Edge on an even keel, Edge had shaken his head and turned away.

Doug had been puzzled by this reaction. He’d said, “Okay, sorry, not up for discussion, then?”

And Edge had said, “Not up for discussion.”

Doug entered the Tonelli house, afraid of what he might find. But everything appeared to be normal. The kitchen was quiet and undisturbed; the lamb chops still lay in the sink. Doug got himself a glass of ice water. His alarm was due to go off at 3 a.m.; he needed to get to sleep.

He crept up the stairs, feeling spooked by the silence. He had half expected Pauline to meet him at the front door with a frying pan in her hand. He had expected to hear her crying.

The door to their bedroom was closed. Doug thought: Go to the guest room. Sleep for a few hours, then hit the road. But that was the coward in him speaking. Plus, his suitcase was in the bedroom.

He cracked open the door enough to see rays of the day’s last sunlight striping the floor. Pauline lay on the bed, still wrapped in her towel. She was awake, staring at the ceiling, and when she heard him, she turned her head.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. He paused, waiting to see if there was going to be a scene, but she was quiet. Doug sat on the bed and took off his shoes and socks, unbuttoned his shirt and slacks, and stuffed them into the dry cleaning bag. He thought briefly of work and the shitshow Cranbrook case, which was going to trial in the morning. Then he thought about Nantucket and the house and the 150 guests, his children and grandchildren, his daughter’s future in-laws, his wife’s cousins. He had a wedding to host, a wedding his dead wife had planned and he had paid for. He couldn’t let the turmoil of his personal life get in the way of this weekend. In the hottest moment, as he was climbing into the car, he had sent Margot a text message that said, Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding. Now he regretted sending that message.

He climbed into bed next to Pauline, the way he had for the past five years. He had done something truly egregious, he realized, in marrying a woman he didn’t love.

“Pauline,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have read the Notebook.”

The Notebook, right. Doug had forgotten about the Notebook.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“You forgive me?”

“I forgive you for reading the Notebook,” he said. “Your curiosity was only natural. But Pauline…”

“And I can go to the wedding with you?” she said. “I mean, obviously, I knew you were speaking in anger when you said you wanted to go alone. I knew you would never, ever go without me.”

But he would. In his mind, when he pictured himself seven hours from now in the car, he was alone, windows down, singing to the radio.

“Pauline,” he said. But he was stuck. He couldn’t get the words out. Every single client he represented had endured a version of this conversation. Doug had heard about hundreds of them in minute detail, he knew which words to say, but he couldn’t make himself say them. Was it the courage he lacked, or the conviction?

Pauline laid her hand over his heart. She said, “You should get some sleep. We have to get up early.”

Hors d’Oeuvres at the Reception

Nothing with spinach (stuck in teeth) and no smoked salmon (bad breath).

Trust me.

Everyone loves a raw bar. Call Spanky-he invented the raw bar on Nantucket-and he is so in demand that he should be your first call once you say yes.