Summer Fever, page 6
Madison cocks her head to the side, as she had done in the kitchen, and Laura realizes why it seemed odd earlier, slightly off. It’s because it’s flirtatious – the sort of female body language you might use on a man. She doesn’t know exactly what its evolutionary origins might be – maybe exposing your neck releases pheromones, or signals a willingness to offer yourself up to someone more powerful, like a dog rolling on its back to expose its vulnerable belly. But then Madison reaches for Laura’s wrist again, this time pinning it lightly to the table. Her ring glitters, fracturing the sunlight.
‘So you and Nick,’ she says, after a silence, which Laura is surprised to find is not awkward. She knows she needs to go and buy the items on her list – some of the stalls are beginning to pack up already – but she can’t quite muster the willingness to move.
‘Me and Nick …’ She swallows the last gritty dregs of her coffee and stops a passing waiter, asking shyly in Italian for a Diet Coke, which actually only requires one foreign word: the ever-useful prego. She wants something cold and clinking with ice now. It’s almost eleven and the air is beginning to sear.
‘Oh, I want one too,’ cries Madison, as the waiter turns on his heel. He inclines his head and smiles. ‘Jeez, this is turning into the best day. I’ll be eating gelato next. But don’t avoid the question.’ She trains her blue eyes back on Laura. ‘You and Nick.’
‘What about us?’
‘Where did you meet? When did you meet? Was it romantic? Did you just know?’
‘Oh, God, we’ve been together for ever. We met in our early twenties.’
‘So at college, then? Like Lou? Did you meet in the first week and that was it? There was a couple like that where I went.’ She gives Laura a wry look. ‘Yes, I actually did go to college.’
Something in Laura’s expression must have betrayed her because, it’s true, she wouldn’t have had Madison down as the academic type.
‘Oh, no one thought I’d go, but anything to get away from the town I grew up in. You know those coming-of-age movies set in some deadbeat town where the kids have nothing to do but sit in the back of a flatbed, drinking beer and dreaming of the big city? That was my actual high-school experience. I was even a cheerleader.
‘It wasn’t a very good college. It was about as far from the Ivy Leagues as you can get. Bastian is the brains in this outfit.’ She centres her wedding diamond, which is slightly loose. ‘But, you know, it was something. No one else in my family had done it. Anyway, there was this girl in my dorm who met this guy, and they kind of looked like twins from the start, weirdly, and that was just it for them. They were very Christian so they weren’t doing anything – well, they weren’t doing that, anyway – but they stuck together the whole way through.’
‘Maybe that was why,’ says Laura. ‘All that anticipation.’
Madison laughs. ‘Yeah, maybe. They did marry straight after apparently. We’re lucky, me and Bastian. It’s still exciting. It’s pretty unusual for that to last beyond the first few years. I know that.’
Laura feels herself souring minutely, her growing sense of kinship with Madison draining away a little.
‘But I think that’s more me, if I’m brutally honest with myself,’ Madison continues, as if she’s sensed Laura’s slight cooling off. ‘I’m the keener one. I’m the adorer.’ She shrugs her broad, yoga-honed shoulders. ‘I’m OK with that. It works for us.’
‘The adorer,’ Laura repeats softly. She thinks about Madison looking at Bastian last night, and Bastian looking at her, Laura.
‘Yeah, I think people are one or the other and you need one of each to be a balanced couple. You seek out your opposite without knowing it. Obviously the power balance being equal is held up as the ideal, but I don’t think it’s like that for almost anyone, do you? Honestly? Maybe it shifts about between some people, but everyone I know seems to be stuck in their roles. In some ways, I’ve ended up like my mom, God help me. She did everything for my dad. She brought me up with all this bullshit about how to keep your man happy, like it was a job you never got a vacation from. You know, I never thought of it, but she didn’t have a single close girlfriend. Not a one. I used to fight with her about how small her life was, say she was the original Stepford wife, but without the nice suburban house. I get it more now. He made sure he was all she had. The crazy thing is that I find myself doing some of the same crap. I mean, it’s not like I run to put on red lipstick when I hear Bast’s key in the door, but almost. I check the mirror, you know. I go down on him without being asked.’ She smiles slyly at Laura’s startled expression. ‘I wouldn’t let him go without a fight.’
Laura’s impression of Madison shifts again. For all her talk of being a little woman, she has teeth and claws. But she’s not quite a man’s woman either. She looks up and realizes Madison is waiting for a response.
‘I actually think me and Nick are pretty equal,’ she says carefully. ‘I hope we are anyway.’
Madison begins to laugh, then claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, shit, you’re serious, aren’t you? I’m sorry. But it’s, like, so obvious to me that Nick is the adorer. He’s me, honey. All the way.’
Laura laughs too. There’s no edge to Madison’s words and all the knowingness has gone from her face, if it was ever there. Besides, she’s probably right. Laura knows really that she is. She’d been thinking about it only the other day, hadn’t she? How she’d picked him out and he’d simply gone with it. You, she’d thought across the table in the pub. You won’t ever make me feel so bad I want to die. Not like he did.
‘You’re wrong about set types, though,’ she says, as the waiter reappears with their Cokes: silver cans matte with condensation, two tall glasses full of ice, thick wedges of lime on top. She drinks and fine droplets of fizz moisten her face. Madison waits expectantly, elbows on the table between them. ‘I was an adorer too, once,’ she says and a strange urge to confess more steals over her, though the pain of what happened can still make her wince in an empty room. ‘Never again.’
‘I’m so intrigued right now,’ says Madison.
Laura paints on an enigmatic smile, shakes her head. If she was drinking wine she’d tell. And then tomorrow she would wake with that sinking feeling, the sense that she’d given too much away, too cheaply, and probably without the reciprocated confidences that would have made it an equal baring of souls. One of the reasons she’d loved Lou when they first met was that she was just the same. They had developed a signal to rescue the other when they were over-sharing in public, a mime of someone reeling in a fishing line.
‘Hey, there a guy staring at you.’ Madison’s mouth is suddenly close to her ear, her breath cold from her drink. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’
It’s the mechanic, though Laura might not have noticed him in his off-duty clothes: jeans and a black T-shirt, both tightly fitting. He doesn’t smile but one eye closes in a wink, so quick she almost misses it. Heat flares immediately in her cheeks, as much from embarrassment for him being so cheesy as from her own English reserve.
‘Holy shit, you do know him,’ exclaims Madison. ‘You have to tell.’
Laura silently reminds herself again that Madison is not Lou. ‘Oh, Christ, barely. He works in a garage. I had to take the car in the other week and he was a bit flirty. The men are often like that here.’ She forces herself to laugh. ‘It takes a bit of getting used to but it doesn’t mean anything.’
Madison raises an eyebrow. ‘Seriously, that’s all? I was hoping you were having a torrid affair. I wouldn’t tell Nick, you know. Or Bastian.’ Laura glances quickly at her before she can help it. ‘You don’t betray the sisterhood, right?’
She risks another glance across the piazza but he’s gone, absorbed into the throng of housewives. Her shoulders drop. She doesn’t know now why she’d thought about him so … vividly. He seems completely obvious, even a little oily. She notes the unfortunate choice of adjective, and imagines emailing Lou an update about the oily mechanic.
‘What are you smiling about? Tell me.’ Madison pokes her in the ribs with a sharp finger.
And Laura decides that she will – at least, a watered-down version – partly because she has the urge to, and partly because she finds herself wanting to keep on-side this woman she can’t quite get the measure of. Anyway, the mechanic is nothing compared to what she had felt this morning on the stairs with Bastian. Recalling it makes her breath hitch a little in her chest. She mentally tests herself for sisterly guilt as they drive away from Castelfranco, with only half the items on her shopping list, like pressing down on a new bruise. Now she thinks she might like Madison after all, she should feel bad, and she does, a bit. The trouble is, there’s a stronger impulse. She believes, if she’s honest, that she deserves this … connection. The messages with someone she hadn’t seen for years were one thing, but this – so unexpected, and under her own roof – is real life, happening right now. She’s been going through the motions of life for so long, stuck in a kind of permanent power-saving mode. Energy, electricity, courses through her. She feels like she could spark and crackle with it.
Dusk has thickened and spread so that it’s almost completely dark under the pergola by the time she lights the candles. The dinner table looks perfect. Magazine-worthy. She can’t help the little rush of pride that she has created all this. Nick has too, in a practical sense, but it’s her style and her eye that have turned somewhere tatty and dated into something special.
The tablecloth is old with scalloped edges, the cotton washed fine and soft over decades by Italian housewives she’ll never know. She’s placed sprigs of foliage in narrow glass vases along the length of the table – sage, lavender, eucalyptus and something she doesn’t know the name of. Everything is white and eau de Nil, warm light flickering from tall tapers and tea-lights and the strings of small white globes Nick was instructed to thread through the vines that twist around the slats of the pergola.
When the four of them are seated she sees that they’re all dressed in white or cream. Their skin is smooth and sun-kissed in the flattering light. Even Nick’s pinkish skin is rendered golden.
‘Look,’ she says, gesturing round the table, ‘we match.’ She catches Bastian’s eye and glances down as if he’s singed her. Sensing that he continues to watch, she picks self-consciously at the globules of soft wax that have gathered at the bottom of the candlestick nearest to her. She also, without conscious intention, sits up straighter, pushes out her chest, tucks her hair behind her ear. She licks her lips. Her body does all this before she can help it.
She had drunk two or perhaps it was three glasses of wine while she dressed the table. There’s a new box of dry white in the fridge – an attempt to economize when it’s just them – which she finds hard to resist. She always has good intentions – to have just half a glass – but is then drawn back, pushing the button of the little plastic tap for a couple more perfectly cold inches.
‘You’ve sure got yourselves a magical place here,’ Bastian says, raising his glass. They clink, Laura having to get to her feet to reach Madison’s. ‘Was it like this when you moved in?’
‘God, no,’ says Nick. ‘It looked amazing on first glance but the stucco was falling off, there were two enormous satellite dishes round the back, and the weeds were something else. I had to hire a blow-torch.’
‘And I’m guessing it’s you who’s responsible for all this?’ says Bastian to Laura, gesturing at the table, the whole tableau in general.
She glows, nods.
‘It was a joint effort,’ says Nick, as she opens her mouth to reply.
‘Well, the decor wasn’t,’ she says sharply. She smiles to soften it.
Nick opens his hands. ‘Apparently I’m just the weeds bloke.’
‘And a talented chef, don’t forget,’ says Madison, pointing with her fork at her food. ‘You’re gonna make me fat.’
The night is closing in fast around them now, the gaudy sunset cooled to a deep electric blue. It feels like they’re inside a room under the pergola, but then, somewhere across the valley, music starts up, the sound travelling easily through the inert air. They all notice it at the same time, the bass not regular but with a trip in it.
‘Someone is having a party,’ says Madison, gleefully. ‘We should crash it later.’ She reaches across the table and runs her nails lightly down Bastian’s forearm. ‘Do you remember how we used to do that all the time?’
She turns to Laura. She seems to address Laura more than she does Nick. It’s another unexpected thing about her.
‘It’s just like this in the canyon back at home. You can hear everything for miles. We just follow the sound. No one ever cares if you’re supposed to be there or not. If you act like you belong, people think you do. And, anyway, people in LA are terrified of offending the wrong person. I’d just walk up to the host and say, Hi, how are you? You look amazing! And then we’d be in.’
‘My wife has no shame,’ says Bastian.
My wife. Laura ignores the odd little kick those words give her. She smiles at Madison. ‘I can imagine you’d have fitted right in anyway.’
Madison blows her a kiss.
Bastian reaches over for the corkscrew and pulls an unopened bottle from the ice bucket. ‘So, Nick, you were a journalist back in England?’
Laura sees Nick’s slight stiffening, his eyes on the wine as Bastian turns the corkscrew. His wine.
‘Yeah, well, a sub,’ he says. ‘Headlines, pull quotes, sorting out other people’s shitty copy. That kind of thing.’
‘So you don’t write yourself?’
‘Not really. Once in a blue moon.’
Laura twists her glass round. ‘Well, that’s not quite true, is it?’
Nick shrugs, making her feel slightly weary. In fact, before Italy, he had managed to get a decent-sized feature in every couple of months and Laura doesn’t know why he won’t just say so. Why he doesn’t boast a little bit. It’s hard to see his expression in the next seat but pride always makes him petulant and brittle. Underneath it, she knows, is something deeper: a low-level resentment born of years of being overlooked, a piece of the office furniture without even the security of being on permanent staff. It’s another reason he gave in to the Italy plan, though this, like so much else, also goes unsaid. To discuss it would acknowledge that nothing would ever get better at the paper, that at some unmarked point in the road Nick had gone from being on the way up at a national to being stuck. Don’t ask any more, she pleads silently, but Bastian is already speaking.
‘If you’re a creative yourself, it must be extra galling, making some famous columnist’s writing better. They still get their name at the top, right?’
Nick’s smile is tight. ‘That’s the way it works.’
‘Tell Madison and Bastian about that investigative piece you did,’ Laura prompts.
‘What – the one they hacked down to fifteen hundred words after three months’ research?’
She resists rolling her eyes. Why don’t you want to impress them? she thinks but doesn’t say. He always does this when he’s not comfortable – and always with other men. ‘He’s not an alpha, your Nick, bless him,’ Lou said once. They’d been at a dinner party and Nick had almost got into an argument with a mutual friend’s self-assured barrister boyfriend. ‘I reckon he’s got PTSD from all those public-school dickheads at the paper.’
He’s shrugging now, shoulders slumped. He picks up his glass and goes to drink but it’s empty. Bastian tops him up.
‘The trouble with journalism is it’s still a bit of an old-boys network.’
Don’t get into this, she thinks. She’s heard it a million times. The Americans won’t get it either.
‘But isn’t it really liberal at that place?’ Bastian refills Laura’s glass before Madison’s and looks at Nick expectantly.
‘Supposedly,’ says Nick. ‘I went in thinking I’d find my people, but they all knew each other from these posh London day schools.’ He slightly slurs the word ‘London’ and Laura cringes.
‘And you’re in film production, Bastian, is that right?’ she says. ‘What side do you work in?’
Bastian considers. Unlike Nick he is apparently entirely at ease. Madison smiles proudly. Look at my man. Isn’t he something? Laura can hear the words as if Madison had spoken them aloud.
‘I guess my work is all about connecting,’ he says eventually. ‘I put different people together, create synergies, you know?’
‘Lots of schmoozing, then,’ says Nick. His tone is light, but Laura knows him well enough to detect the barb. He’s taken the bottle back now.
Bastian shrugs, looks down. ‘I’m not pretending I’m saving lives. It’s Hollywood. I guess my job is just to keep all the cogs greased and moving, whether it’s show-runners and scouts or development guys with casting directors.’ His body is still loose, comfortable.
‘LA is nothing but connecting people,’ breaks in Madison. ‘It’s one big networking event.’ She strokes Bastian’s arm. ‘And he’s, like, the best at that. He knows exactly who to put together.’ She leans over to kiss his cheek. He doesn’t look at her or acknowledge the kiss but Laura sees his hand disappear under the table and knows he must have laid it on her thigh.
He meets her gaze then and, for a split second, she thinks he won’t say anything, just keep on looking at her. Then he smiles and she can’t help glancing sideways to see if Nick’s seen it because it’s too much, too knowing, somehow. But Nick is occupied pouring himself more wine and she allows herself a glance at Bastian.
‘So, Laura,’ he says. ‘What about you? What were you running away from?’
Nick looks up at that, making her hurry to answer.
‘I was a teacher. Nothing exciting. At a secondary school – like a high school.’
‘Oh, I can totally see that,’ says Madison.
Laura doesn’t know how to take this.
‘I bet the boys loved you,’ Madison continues.
