Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

He said, “You’re right, I shouldn’t have. It’s very bad form. But I couldn’t resist.”

“It’s the Montrachet?” she said.

“I thought you should taste the best.”

The night had ended with their passionately kissing against the side of his car.

He said, “In three weeks, the semester is over. We should wait.”

Zoe agreed: “We should wait.”

But he called her the next morning, and by the weekend they were inseparable.

Even to this day, Zoe could not believe how lucky she had been to be the one who won the heart of Hobson Alistair over other girls like Susannah and Kay. He was magnificent, a prince, a god, a rock star.

How many times had Zoe looked upon her children and thought, You will never know how kind and luminous and talented and dynamic your father was. I can tell you and tell you, but you’ll never know.

“When your father died,” Zoe said to Hobby now, “I was pregnant with you and Penny.”

The pregnancy had been an accident. Faulty diaphragm. At the same time that Zoe was graduating from the CIA, at the same time that she was trying to decide if she should accept the sous chef job at Alison’s on Dominick, the hottest restaurant in SoHo, she was also feeling dizzy and lightheaded and nauseated. Then she missed her period, and she thought, Oh God, no. She and Hobson were madly, stupidly in love. The love was so new, it hadn’t lost any of its sheen. But it was all about Sunday mornings in bed, playing Billie Holliday and drinking champagne. It was about making each other dinner, trying to outcook each other. It was about playing darts at Georgie O’s until two in the morning, then skinny-dipping in the Hudson, Zoe and Hobson floating on their backs naked, holding hands. It was about reading each other passages from M. F. K. Fisher. It was about planning trips to Berkeley to eat at Chez Panisse and Chicago to visit Charlie Trotter. Their relationship was only about the immediate future. It was not about a baby.

And yet when she told Hobson she was pregnant, he was dazzled. He picked her up and swung her around. He said, “I’m going to marry you.” Zoe opened her mouth to protest, and he said, “I’m going to marry you, woman.”

Zoe and Hobson got married. His very proper British parents came, Zoe’s very proper Connecticut parents came, a Justice of the Peace married them in their chefs’ whites, then Zoe changed into a sundress and Hobson changed into a double-breasted navy blazer and they all had lunch at the Boathouse in Central Park, and everyone got drunk except Zoe.

Labor Day weekend, they learned it was twins. Everyone was excited. Who didn’t love the news of twins? Zoe thought, My God, not one but two. At times in the middle of the night she felt as if she were being buried alive.

She managed to make it through the holidays. Hobson was teaching his Meats class, and he did the butchering not only for all of the Institute’s classes but also for the five CIA restaurants as well as a few restaurants in greater Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck. This brought in extra money. Zoe and Hobson attended the twinkling holiday parties on campus and a few more down in the city. Zoe wore the only dress she could still fit into, a stretchy black number with tiny silver rhinestones all over it. People cooed over her; they asked to touch her prodigious midsection. “You look like you’re going to pop,” they said. “Any day now, I’ll bet,” they said.

Zoe said, “I still have ten more weeks to go. I’m having twins.” She sneaked glasses of wine and eggnog. The twins were encroaching on her internal organs, and Zoe found it impossible to eat a thing without suffering from debilitating heartburn.

Christmas passed, New Year’s passed, January set in. It snowed a foot. Hobson and Zoe were living in a faculty apartment. It was nothing special: the countertops in the kitchen were Formica, and the cabinets were plastic laminate, and the bathroom had a molded fiberglass shower stall instead of a tub. Neither Hobson nor Zoe, in her pregnant state, fit in the shower stall properly. Zoe had to shower with the glass door open, and water flooded the bathroom floor. Hobson came home from work splattered with blood. He smelled like pig intestine and head cheese and chicken feet. The mere thought of the flesh and organs that he’d come in contact with over the course of the day made Zoe vomit.

Zoe became convinced that Hobson was romancing someone else, a Susannah or a Kay. She confronted him, screaming and crying, one night when he’d been out late after work. He’d been at the gym, he said, and then stopped at Georgie O’s for a burger. That was it, he promised. That was all he was guilty of.

Zoe could not be consoled. She had been carrying two babies for seven months. Technically, she said, she’d been pregnant for fourteen months.

Hobson had the next day off from work. Sunday. He was taking Zoe down to the city, he said. They would ride the train in; they would do whatever they wanted, eat whatever they wanted, buy whatever they wanted. He gathered Zoe up into his arms and bent over to kiss the top of her head. The good thing about Hobson was that he was so big, he made Zoe feel small even when she was enormous.

“Let’s forget you’re pregnant,” he said. “Tomorrow it will be just you and me.”

“And that was what we did,” Zoe said to Hobby in the dark of his hospital room. “We caught the morning train, we got two cups of gourmet coffee, we bought the Sunday New York Times and read it on the way in.” They’d taken two double seats facing each other, seats for them and their coffee and the paper. “And then when we reached the city, we took a taxi to the Morgan Library.” It was less than ten blocks from the station, Zoe had wanted to walk-why waste the money?-but Hobson had insisted on a cab.

“I thought we were going to forget I was pregnant,” Zoe said.

Hobson said, “It’s not you, it’s me. I’m short of breath.”

Zoe said, “Too much coffee, Meatmeister.”

“The Morgan Library was a wonder,” Zoe told her son. Neither she nor Hobson had been there before. They went to see the Richard Avedon photos of famous chefs-Julia Child, Marco Pierre White, Jacques Pepin, Georges Perrier, Paul Bocuse. But they were amazed, too, by the Gutenberg Bible and the other treasures of the permanent collection. They wandered the hushed rooms, feeling smart and cultured the way one nearly always did in a museum in the city and almost never did in a chilly white test kitchen in Poughkeepsie. “We ate lunch at the café there, at a table overlooking the courtyard. It had just started to snow.”

Zoe looked at her broken, bandaged, comatose son, and she thought about the carrot-ginger soup and the toasted Gruyère sandwiches and Hobson’s big hand over hers and the fat snowflakes falling onto the boxwood hedge.

“In the afternoon, we took a cab to Greenwich Village. There was a doo-wop group on the corner, five black guys, they sounded professional, your father was quite taken with them. He gave them ten dollars. Your dad bought a funny hat with earflaps, lined with fur. Then he wanted to go and find this one particular cheese store. It took us a while, but it was worth the hunt, because this place was a cheese mecca. They had all the stinky, runny cheeses you couldn’t get anywhere else in the United States-the blues from England, the aged cheddars, the fresh goat cheeses and sheep’s-milk cheeses from these tiny farms in the Midwest. We tasted and tasted. They had salamis hanging from the ceiling in loops and these wonderful olive oils. God, we went crazy in there. Your dad loved it.”

They had spent a fortune, but they didn’t care. Later in the week, they decided, they would invite their friends Pat and Dmitri over to try the cheeses and drink some wine. The thought of this had cheered Zoe as she stepped out into the street. She would have a small glass of wine and eat with her friends.

They went to see a French movie at the Angelika Film Center. They ate truffled popcorn and drank fizzy Italian water. The movie was all right; Hobson didn’t mind subtitles, but Zoe had taken six years of French and found herself distracted by the effort to translate. Then she became distracted by the fact that Hobson’s breathing sounded labored. He was sucking air in and forcing air out. He kept shaking out his left hand.

Zoe asked, “Are you okay?”

He said in his poshest British accent, “Yes, my darling, I’m fine.”

Zoe said to Hobby now, “I wish we’d left the movie and gone to the hospital. If we’d gone then, they might have saved him. But that would have required foresight that I didn’t have. I was concerned but not alarmed. If I had suggested the hospital, your father would have laughed at me. He would have said, ‘What the hell for?’ Your father was the healthiest person I knew.”

When the movie was over, they took a cab back to Grand Central, with Hobson’s new hat and their bag of excellent cheeses. They decided to have dinner at the Oyster Bar. Hobson ordered a glass of champagne, and Zoe took a few discreet sips, and between the two of them, they polished off three dozen oysters.

“It was divine,” Zoe said. “So few things in my life have tasted better than the cold champagne and those oysters-fresh, sweet, creamy, with the tangy mignonette.” Hobson had made jokes about how strong his libido would be once they got home, and Zoe had felt sexy and aroused for the first time in months. Sex would be good, it would be great, with her standing and him standing behind her.

Zoe sighed, and tears dropped down her cheeks. “As we were rushing to the platform to make our train, he collapsed. Now, your father was a big man. When he fell, a few other people around us nearly got knocked over. I screamed. Hobson was clawing at his chest. He was having a heart attack. The police were with us in seconds, and then the paramedics. They put Hobson on a stretcher, but it took three of them to carry him out to the ambulance. I followed the ambulance in the back of a police cruiser. There was a policewoman with me, trying to write down your dad’s information. I think she was worried that I was going to go into labor. I’m surprised I didn’t. I don’t know how to explain this, but I was very calm. It was as if I knew-somewhere deep inside me, I just knew.” Zoe stopped. Tears fell. She had never vocalized these thoughts to anyone, she realized, not even Jordan-but it seemed right that she should now be telling all of this to her unconscious son. “Your father and I had something so amazing and perfect that I had always feared it wouldn’t last. I had always thought he was too good for me, that his star was too bright. And I guess it was too bright, because it burned out. When I got to the hospital, they told me he was already gone.”

Zoe got up and went over to the side of Hobby’s bed. She touched his cheek. It was smooth; the nurses had taught Zoe how to shave him. It was one of the few things she could do for him. “But I kept you and your sister safe,” she said. “I did manage to do that.”

It was not at that exact moment but some minutes later-five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes-that Hobby opened his eyes. It looked as if he were squinting at first, and Zoe thought it was a figment of her imagination. She became alert without letting herself feel too hopeful.

And then, just like that, his eyes opened all the way-they were meadow-green-and he was looking at her. He saw her, he recognized her.

And just as Zoe had once known, deep down, that she was going to lose Hobson, so did she realize now that she had known all along that Hobby would come back to her.

“Hi,” she said.

In the days following the accident, there had been room for only one thought: she wished it had been her who died.

She was a criminal. A thief and a murderer.

Demeter vacillated between telling the hideous truth and keeping the truth sheltered and secret inside of her, the coin at the bottom of the well that no one could retrieve.

The latter, she thought. For as long as she could, she would be a sphinx. She had the answer, but nobody knew the question.

From behind the locked door of her bedroom, Demeter heard her mother on the telephone, every second practically, talking to Mrs. Loom or Mr. Potts or Rasha Buckley. Or talking to Demeter’s father, who was at Mass General, where Hobby lay in a coma.

How did Demeter feel about Hobby’s being in a coma? She felt sick about it, just sick. She had been in love with Hobby when she was younger, and those years had been exquisitely painful. Demeter was overweight, doughy, and cumbersome. The boys in her class had called her a dog, a cow, an elephant, and-in sixth grade, when they were studying prehistoric times-a mammoth. They told her she stank. To add insult to injury, she had braces on her teeth, and bits of food would get stuck in them, and her breath did stink. She was unwilling to get undressed to take a shower after gym class, and so on Tuesdays and Thursdays she reeked of body odor.