Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Grace sipped her wine and looked out over the flat, blue surface of Nantucket Sound. “You’re right,” she said.

But Madeline wasn’t right.

Three glasses of wine had turned Grace’s attitude around. When she and Madeline parted ways in the parking lot, Grace said, “Thank you for listening.”

Madeline said, “That’s what I’m here for.”

Madeline pulled out of the parking lot toward home, toward her perfect marriage to Trevor and their shared adoration of Brick. Grace decided to call Eddie and let him know about the yacht-club dues, but she was shuttled right to his voice mail, and when Grace called the office-which she was loath to do, because she really didn’t want to talk to Eloise or Barbie, and those two screened Eddie’s calls like he was the CEO of Microsoft-she got the recording.

She stared at her phone. The wine was coursing through her veins. She imagined it taking her good sense with it. My phone is always on.

As she texted Benton, the tops of her ears started to buzz. Will you come tomorrow and have lunch? Just friends, promise. Noon?

She decided she would not move from the yacht-club parking lot until he texted back. If she was there at midnight, so be it. But he texted back right away.

I’ll be there.

She was in the gardening shed, scrubbing the copper farmer’s sink, when Benton came strolling around the house.

“Hey!” she called out. “I’m in here.”

Benton stepped through door and said, “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Grace laughed. “It’s only been four days.”

He walked over to her, and his hands went immediately on her hips. Because it was so hot, she was wearing only a bikini top and a pair of shorts.

“Are the girls at school?” he asked.

She grinned. “Safely at school.”

“And Eddie?”

“Work,” she said.

His mouth met her mouth, his tongue met her tongue, which made Grace feel as if she were going to faint, or die. The kissing was sweet at first and then incendiary. The gardening shed was hot hot hot to begin with, but once she was kissing Benton, they were both sweating and pulsing with insane desire. He closed and locked the door and then lifted Grace up onto the lip of the sink. With a couple of deft movements, he untied her bikini top and pulled off her shorts, and then he knelt before her.

Later, they ate lunch.

Grace served a cold roast chicken, a fresh head of butter lettuce, a crock of herbed farmer’s cheese, and fat, rosy radishes pulled from the garden. She cut thick slices of bread from a seeded multigrain loaf with a nice chewy crust, then she went back into the fridge and pulled out sweet butter, a jar of baby gherkins, a stick of summer sausage, and some whole-grain mustard.

“A ploughman’s lunch!” Benton said. “Like the ones I used to have in Surrey.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Grace said.

“I like everything about you,” he said.

You are not in love.

Benton helped Grace carry everything to the teak table outside, and they sat down with their feast, within full sight of the garden.

Together, they dug in, piecing together bites for each other: radish, sweet butter, and mustard. A slice of bread spread thick with farmer’s cheese and topped with sausage.

Grace’s hands were shaking as she fed him. He nibbled at the tips of her fingers.

He said, “Do you know the song ‘Loving Cup’ by the Rolling Stones?” He started to sing. “I’m the ploughman in the valley with a face full of mud.”

Did she? She said, “I think so?”

“Here,” he said. “I’ll play it.” He plugged his phone into the outdoor speaker, and music filled the backyard.

Benton took Grace’s hand and pulled her to her feet. They started to slow dance to the song right there on the deck, Benton’s arms around Grace, Grace’s face resting on Benton’s chest. She hadn’t even known such happiness existed. What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz.

When Benton left, Grace ran up to her study.

She needed to call Madeline.

The apartment, which had seemed so freeing to Madeline initially, now felt like a jail cell. Madeline had to drag herself there, and when she walked in, she experienced something like panic. She had paid twelve thousand dollars for the place, and now she needed to make it earn its keep.

Pressure.

She couldn’t write a word under such pressure.

She had no ideas for another novel. Not one.

She was plagued with all kinds of upsetting thoughts. They were running out of money, she had promised more than she could deliver, they should never have invested the fifty thousand with Eddie. Trevor would have to ask for it back, since Madeline’s plea had done no good.

She was past her deadline, the deadline Redd Dreyfus had extended for her. Redd had called her cell phone and left two exasperated messages, and both Angie and Angie’s assistant, Marlo, e-mailed and then called. They needed the copy; otherwise she would be bumped from the list and there would be “financial repercussions.”

Madeline capitulated. She had no choice. She would write a sequel to Islandia.

But when Madeline sat down with her legal pad and began an outline, the book she described wasn’t a sequel to Islandia. The book she described was a hot, steamy love affair between a stay-at-home mother of two and her contractor.

I am not writing this, Madeline thought. I am not writing this. But she was writing it. The words were flowing out of her like something she spilled on the page.

Grace had said it herself: Everything was normal and boring. And now… now, my life is a novel.

Madeline didn’t even commit to giving her two lovers names. She called them B and G.

The male protagonist, “B,” is the project manager of the female protagonist’s home renovation. The female protagonist, “G,” is a stay-at-home mother of two girls-Irish twins, born eleven months apart. B and G start conferring every day on the renovation. Did G want an undermounted porcelain sink in the kitchen or a double stainless steel? What kind of countertops-granite, limestone, Corian? Backsplash of decorative tile or plain drywall? What kind of hardwood flooring-maple, cherry, antique knotty pine? What style for the cabinets? What kind of cabinet pulls?

B and G end up kissing for the first time in the first-floor powder room, during a discussion of fixtures for the sink. The quarters are tight-and dark, as the electrician has yet to come hang the lights. G is in the powder room when B walks in, and they accidentally bump hips. The next thing either of them knows, they are passionately kissing.

B starts bringing G Moroccan mint tea every day, as well as a box of four pistachio macarons from the local bakery, which they would share.

Madeline didn’t even bother changing the kind of cookie. She supposed she could have made them white-chocolate melt-aways or peanut-butter truffles. She could have changed the Moroccan mint tea to an iced vanilla latte.

I am not writing this. I am not writing this. She couldn’t turn this in. Grace would sue her. Or kill her. Or both.

But it was good. Madeline could see that it was good. It was spare and compelling. Grace’s affair with Benton Coe did contain all the elements of good fiction: loneliness, desire, sex, betrayal.

B and G fall deeper and deeper in love as work on the house progresses. G’s husband, a real-estate attorney named Ren, short for Renfrew, pays all the bills, including the astronomical bill for B’s services, without complaint. He tells people he’s happy that his wife is happy.

Madeline wrote one sample scene, and that was the scene of the two lovers eating a ploughman’s lunch on the sunny deck. They feed each other; B nibbles on G’s fingertips. And then they slow dance to “Loving Cup” by the Rolling Stones. Madeline couldn’t even bring herself to change the song-“Loving Cup” was too perfect.

She could not write this novel. But she had nothing else, and so she typed up the outline and added the sample scene and e-mailed them to Redd Dreyfus with the subject line I TRIED.

He had a love-hate relationship with Memorial Day weekend. On the one hand, he couldn’t wait for it to arrive, announcing, as it did, the start of summer.

Eddie loved the summer as much as anyone on Nantucket. He loved it not because the shops and restaurants opened, not because the lifeguards in their red tank suits and trunks patrolled the beaches, not because the lilacs were blooming and the weather was finally warm enough for barbecues and Wiffle ball games and outdoor showers. No… Eddie loved summer because summer meant the steamship was low in the water, the martini-and-oyster-seeking crowds milled outside of Cru, a line formed at the Chicken Box to hear the band Maxxtone, the parking lot of the Stop & Shop was filled to capacity, with people illegally parked in the handicapped spots, and the traffic on Orange Street made the year-rounders shout profanities at their dashboards.

Summer on Nantucket meant people. And people meant money-the buying and selling of houses, the renting of vacation weeks.

However, Memorial Day on Nantucket also meant Figawi, a Nantucket tradition that only grew bigger and more obnoxious every year. It was, ostensibly, a sailing race from Hyannis to Nantucket and back again. The genesis of the name was everyone’s favorite fact about the weekend. One year, while sailing in dense fog, some old salt called out, “Hey, where the figawi?” And in this way, the race was named. Because, really-who doesn’t love sanctioned profanity?

Figawi Weekend had morphed in recent years from a sailing race to a drinking race. It was a contest of who could drink the most, who could drink the fastest, who could stay up drinking the latest, who could get up the earliest and start drinking, who could act like the biggest jerk (this was the nicest term Eddie could come up with, although he had dozens at his disposal) while drinking. Figawi was popular with the postcollegiate crowd-kids who had just graduated from Hamilton or Bowdoin or Middlebury or, Eddie’s least favorite, Boston College. (“How do you know if somebody went to BC?” he liked to quip. “They’ll tell you.”) These kids now had jobs in Manhattan or Boston as editorial assistants or Wall Street grunts or preschool teachers, or they were in law school at NYU or medical school at Harvard. They lived in apartments in the West Village or the Back Bay that their parents still paid for, but in general, they were trying to be adults. They met for drinks after work on Newbury Street or in Soho, they skipped church on Sundays and brunched instead, and on summer weekends they “went away.”

Figawi Weekend on Nantucket was made for them. The men wore their faded red shorts from Murray’s; they tied cable-knit sweaters around their necks, they wore sunglasses inside because they were so dreadfully hungover. The girls-or, rather, women-paraded around in patio dresses without underwear. They all thought they were Diane von Furstenberg by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool in 1973. And they all carried handbags that seemed to contain as much crap as a thirty-gallon Hefty bag. Eddie wanted to tell them that they could go on Let’s Make a Deal with all the stuff they had in their purses-but they would have had no idea what he was talking about! Certain women, however, wore outfits that looked like they’d been stolen from the trailer-park clothesline-cutoff jean shorts and tight T-shirts that said SORRY FOR PARTYING.

The women irked Eddie more than the men, probably because he had daughters.

If the weather was sunny, the Figawians-truly their own nation-funneled down Hummock Pond Road in their rental Jeeps with cases of Bud Light in the back. The beaches were patrolled by rent-a-cops on ATVs who had a field day issuing tickets for public consumption and littering. The red-suited lifeguards pulled people out of the ocean left and right because the riptide was notoriously bad in May, and no matter how educated these young bucks were (bucks substituted for dozens of other terms Eddie had at his disposal), they didn’t seem to know that the way to get out of the rip was to swim parallel to shore until the grip of the waves let them go.

But this year, there was rain.

Rain on Figawi weekend was a thousand times worse than sun on Figawi because the activities of beaching and drinking were replaced by drinking and drinking. The epicenter of Figawi drinking was always the Straight Wharf-specifically, the Tavern, the Gazebo, the eponymous Straight Wharf Restaurant, and Cru. These restaurants were bursting at their seersucker and madras seams with screaming, laughing, swearing, hiccupping, posturing nouveau adults who were only just learning how to appreciate a good Bloody Mary and suck down an oyster without dripping onto their Brooks Brothers.