The Last Book Party Page 2

  The fog was lifting slowly, revealing the hills of wild grass and bearberry that rolled down to the marsh, where soon enough I could see grayish pools of water and feathery islands of grass. As I sipped my coffee, the houses on the other side of the marsh came into view, emerging from the mist like images sharpening on a Polaroid. I loved how kindly the weather changed on mornings like this, as if sparing you the shock of awakening into a bright, clear day and instead taking your hand and gently guiding you from the cloud of sleep.

  A car pulled into the gravel driveway; my mother’s ride had arrived, and she’d be leaving for her aerobics class in Wellfleet, which meant I could go inside for breakfast without being interrogated. When I heard the front door close, I went into the kitchen.

  As I peeled the paper from a muffin, my mother poked her head back inside. She looked as orderly as ever, a pink terry headband keeping her dark hair in place. “Dad’s out fishing. Be a love and pick up some skim milk and a bottle of olive oil. You can check out Jams; it’s quite nice.”

  I was surprised to hear a good word about Jams, which had been disparaged by several people at the party for its high prices and unfortunate catering to the growing contingent of “yuppie” families summering in Truro. There was a lot of nostalgia in town for Schoonejongen’s, the dusty old general store that Jams had replaced, and widespread disappointment, which I shared, that the battered old post office on the hill, with its FBI Most Wanted posters by the door, had been closed and relocated to a bland box of a building next to Jams. These changes were not seen as improvements, at least by summer people, though complaining about Schooney’s, as the old store was known, had been a Truro ritual for decades.

  It had been impossible to shop at Schooney’s without being barked at by Ellie Schoonejongen, a doughy woman with thinning, white-blond hair who spent her days slumped by the cash register complaining that customers bought either too much or too little. Once, when my mother and I stopped by to get fruit for the beach, Ellie shrieked, “Only three peaches? Take four!” When my mother took another peach to appease her, Ellie sneered and said under her breath that there was no price too high for summer people to pay. Truro’s seasonal crowd embraced the unpretentiousness of Schooney’s, as they did the irony of the TRURO CENTER sign on Route 6, which marked the tiny settlement of a handful of buildings—the slightly rundown shingled building that was now home to Jams, the institutional-looking post office, a small Realtor’s office that handled summer rentals, and an unassuming news shop called Dorothy’s, whose most important purpose was ensuring that every summer visitor who so desired could get a copy of the Sunday New York Times.

  What drew people to Truro was its unspoiled and open beauty. Just south of Provincetown, with its gay bars, restaurants, and art galleries, Truro was Cape Cod’s most rural town, with well over half of it containing the vast protected forests, sand dunes, and empty ocean beaches of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The rest of the town, which stretched only a few miles from the ocean to the calmer waters of the Cape Cod Bay, was marsh and rolling hills and winding roads, some paved and some little more than rutted dirt paths, along which were simple saltbox houses and newer summer homes.

  When I opened the screen door to Jams, I caught a whiff of the sweet smell of fresh-baked pastries. The store was bright and clean, with buttery, wide-plank wooden floors. Along with staple groceries, the shelves now held luxuries like Camembert and Brie, marinated artichokes, and imported olives. A deli had been added in back, which offered rotisserie chickens, baguettes, and a menu of sandwiches named for Truro beaches: the Corn Hill, for the spot where, as every Truro resident knew, Myles Standish and his band of Pilgrims landed before heading to Plymouth, was turkey with coleslaw. Watching fit women with bright rattan beach bags order cold Chicken Marbella and pasta salad with pesto, I understood why my mother liked Jams and why the night before Henry had pronounced that he would never step foot in the place.

  After locating milk and olive oil, I circled the store again, hoping I might run into Franny, which I knew was as unlikely as my standing a chance with him. He was clearly something of a ladies’ man, but I couldn’t help wanting to see him again. It wasn’t just his beautiful eyes and smile or the casual way he had grabbed me to dance. It was also his warmth and instant acceptance of me into the fold that had made me feel aglow, as if I had not only belonged at the party, but might become the writer he’d thought I already was. I wanted to be back in that house, but with all the guests gone. Brimming with books and magazines, paintings and photographs, the house was filled with items chosen because they were beloved and had a cherished story to tell, not because they matched the rest of the décor.

  Before heading back home, I pulled over at the Cobb Memorial Library, just up the road from Truro Center. Alva Snow, the town’s longtime librarian, was one of my favorite people in Truro. Alva, who looked much younger than her seventy-two years, had lived in Truro her whole life. She knew everything about everyone, not just the permanent residents but also the summer people, whom she called “wash ashores.” For most of my childhood, I had regarded Alva much as I had the one-room library’s old furniture, which was worn, comfortable, and not particularly memorable. But the summer before I left for college, after she noted that I was one of the few people who visited the library on sunny days as well as on rainy days, Alva and I began to have longer conversations, which were always rambling and fun. We talked about books, of course, which may be why I felt more comfortable with Alva than with most of the high school girls I knew, who were more interested in discussing television shows like Dallas. Alva loved the detective novels of Ngaio Marsh and P. D. James and nineteenth-century French poetry, while I liked getting lost in long novels of varying literary repute, everything from The Thorn Birds to My Ántonia. For a librarian, not to mention one getting on in years, Alva could be surprisingly girlish and silly. The summer after my freshman year, we talked about how much we wanted to believe the apocryphal story that the mayor of Providence, Buddy Cianci, planned to marry someone named Nancy Ann, so that she could be introduced in the Rhode Island Statehouse as “the esteemed Nancy Ann Cianci.” Every time we said this, we collapsed in laughter, with Alva once giggling so much she began to hiccup uncontrollably.

  When I walked into the musty library, Alva was at her desk gently trying to pry apart two pages of a picture book.

  “Should I come back later—or will the impending diatribe against the evils of chewing gum be brief?”

  Alva put down the book and smiled.

  “I was wondering when you would show up. Please tell me you have finally arranged to spend an entire summer here.”

  “Nope, just a long weekend,” I said, sitting in the wooden rocking chair beside her desk. “I came up for a party at Henry Grey’s. First time I ever met him. Tell me: How did I not know he had a son?”

  Alva took off her glasses and let them hang from the chain around her neck. She folded her hands on the desk and leaned toward me.

  “The plot thickens,” she said.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He was a delightful child, as I recall. He was not much of a reader, however, but was quite the artist. He had his first exhibit of photographs in this very room when he was fifteen. Portraits of fishermen that he printed himself. Not a bad eye.”

  “Not bad to look at either,” I said.

  “You know what they say about judging a book by its cover,” Alva said, with a sly smile.

  “Because you’re a librarian, I’ll let you get away with that.”

  Remembering the milk in my car, I told Alva I had to leave to get my groceries home. In response, she took an old hardcover from a stack of books on her desk, opened the back cover, and stamped the “due by” card on the last page. It was one of my favorites, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

  “How do you always do that?” I asked, flipping through the pages. “I read this years ago and absolutely loved it.”

  I stretched out my hand
to return the book, but she didn’t take it. She put her glasses back on and peered over them at me, saying, “Well, then, you’ll enjoy reading it again.”

  3

  After a late lunch, with Franny still on my mind, I decided to bike to the beach. I changed into my favorite T-shirt and shorts, then pulled my thick hair back and clipped it loosely with a barrette, letting a few strands hang down by my face. I smudged on some brown eyeliner, pleased that it made me appear a little older without looking like I was wearing makeup.

  I set out toward the ocean and flew fast down Castle Road and along the marsh toward Truro Center. After riding beneath Route 6, I turned onto North Pamet Road, a longer route to the ocean, but one that would take me by Franny’s. The air was surprisingly cool, suggesting that the ocean was still fogged in. Paying little attention to the turns in the road, I tried to figure out what I would say if I got up the nerve to stop in. As I approached the house, I slowed down to look through the beach plum bushes toward the tennis court. I heard the pop of tennis balls being hit and then a woman’s shout, “Gin for the win!” I got off my bike and was walking along the edge of the road, peering through the thicket to see who was on the court, when a branch snapped beside me. I turned to find Franny.

  “What do you think? Are they cheating?” he asked, pointing a pair of hedge clippers toward the court.

  “Oh my God, you scared me.” Embarrassed at being caught snooping, I tried desperately to think of an amusing excuse to explain myself. “Yes, there were reports of cheating, which was why the tennis police sent me.”

  “The tennis police?” Franny looked amused. I wished I had come up with something wittier. “Trust me. That tennis game is not even worth watching. By this time of day, they’re generally too tipsy to keep score, let alone play well. And after last night, everyone’s a little shaky.”

  “It was pretty wild,” I said, remembering how I’d danced at the party. When my white-haired tango partner had dipped me back so low that my head was nearly touching the floor, I’d seen Franny watching from the corner of the dining room.

  Franny looked up at the white expanse of sky.

  “Not much of a beach day,” he said.

  “I like the ocean on days like this.”

  “Me too. Want company?”

  He suggested I leave my bike on the side of the driveway so we could walk down together. After a few minutes of silence, I asked Franny how he had decided to become an artist. He seemed surprised by the question.

  “It’s just what I always did, who I am,” he said. He’d gone to art school in Chicago, which he hated because it was “all theory and no fun.”

  “Really? That’s what it was like in some of my literature classes,” I said. “It was text, subtext, and literary theory, like we were dissecting frogs instead of reading books.”

  “All head and no heart?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It made me even more self-conscious and critical of my own writing than I was before.”

  “That’s why I dropped out of art school,” Franny said.

  “You just up and left?”

  “Yup. An easy and excellent decision.”

  It had never occurred to me that the problem might be Brown and not me.

  Franny had spent the past several years in New Orleans and Santa Fe, working in restaurants and bars so he’d have time to paint and take photographs. He was back east for the summer to figure out where to go next. “Possibly Maine,” he said, as we walked past the path to the old cranberry bog and up toward the youth hostel. We could see the back side of the dunes by the ocean, the windswept landscape beautifully empty of people.

  At the top of the bluff, Franny stopped in front of the hostel, an imposing white building that was once a Coast Guard station. He told me about his dream to paint a mural on the entire ocean-facing side of the building. “I see it as larger-than-life fishermen, maybe whalers, in bold strokes and dark, stormy colors.” The way he spoke, his idea didn’t sound like a vague artistic fantasy, but a pronouncement that the old building would be his canvas, that if he wanted to make it happen, it would.

  Franny was completely comfortable with his identity as an artist in a way that astounded me. I thought of all the stories I had started and thrown away, rarely thinking one was good enough. When I did finish, I kept the stories to myself, shying from criticism and the risk of exposing a side of myself—angry, biting, needy—that I had learned to keep hidden.

  “How can this place not inspire you?” Franny said. “You could write a thousand stories of things that might happen here.”

  As we descended toward the parking lot, I told him about a story I’d written in middle school about a girl walking along the towering sand dunes at Longnook Beach who falls into a secret dwelling created inside the dune by a mysterious boy.

  “She marvels at his hideaway, which has a table and a chair, if you can believe it, and he tells her how he created it, somehow defying physics and propping up the mountain of sand with planks of wood. They talk for a long time, until they hear a rumbling that gets louder and louder.”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “It was … the Wave.”

  Franny raised his eyebrows, waiting for more.

  “That’s it. That was the last line of the story. They were washed away. Awful, I know,” I said. “The story won a prize, and I had to read it to the entire seventh grade. Kids made fun of me for weeks, coming up to me in the cafeteria and whispering, ‘It was … the Wave.’” Daunted by the attention and the ridicule, I didn’t write another story for several years.

  Franny laughed. “It sounds like a great story.”

  The parking lot was empty. The air was misty, and the ocean’s steady roar got louder as we walked up the path between the low dunes, reminding me how unpredictable and inconsistent the Cape weather was, that it could be clear at the bay and blustery here. We had the beach to ourselves. The wind was stiff, and the surf was still churned up from a recent storm. Waves crashed in every direction, ruffling the shore. We left our shoes by the entrance path and walked to the water. A buoy from a lobster pot was bobbing in the foam. It was unusual to see one so close to shore; it must have been pulled in by the storm. Franny looked at the buoy, then at me, and, with a whoop, ran into the water. I stood on the wet sand and watched as he jumped around like a little kid. Every time he got close to the buoy, the ocean sucked it under, and he would spin around, bewildered.

  “There!” I yelled, as it popped up again. “There!”

  He leapt at it again and again, waving for me to join him. “Come on!” he called.

  I’d been warned more times than I could remember about the dangers of a riptide, even in shallow water. But Franny was having so much fun. Before I could change my mind, I ran and leapt into the foamy water and waded through the surf until I was beside him as he continued trying to grab the buoy. Chasing it, we bumped into each other and fell into the surf. Franny grinned and slapped his hand down on the water, sending a big splash up onto my face and shoulders. I shrieked and scooped water toward him, throwing it at his already-drenched T-shirt. He seemed not at all surprised that I was there, as if this were the kind of impulsive thing I did all the time.

  Finally, the buoy surfaced in front of Franny.

  “Grab it!” I yelled.

  He lunged, fell onto his knees in the surf, and then came up, holding the rope. I jumped through the waves and grabbed the rope, which was slick with seaweed. We held on, bracing our legs in the sand and trying not to fall forward as the waves receded. The pull of the water was strong and the lobster trap was heavy. But when the water rushed in, we were able to run toward the beach and drag the trap behind us. We were pulled in, and pushed back, and in again, and out again until finally an enormous wave rolled in, and we managed to run and pull in enough rope to drag the lobster pot into shallow water and then carry it onto dry sand.

  We threw ourselves down beside the wooden trap and looked at each other, soaked and triumph
ant, catching our breath. I turned around to see an old couple up on top of the dune waving at us. They were yelling something, their words lost in the wind and the crashing of the surf.

  Franny threw his head back and hollered, “That was incredible!”

  He was panting and smiling like a child. I was brimming with energy and excitement, feeling as unlatched as I had dancing in the dining room the night before. “Incredible!” I agreed. I whipped my head back and forth like a dog to get the water out of my hair. Franny laughed. And then we turned our attention to the lobster trap. Inside were two dark brownish lobsters.

  Franny unhooked the pot and grabbed the lobsters by the tails and tossed them onto the sand. I glanced back toward the couple, worried they would warn us against taking the lobsters, but their hands were raised over their heads. They were applauding.

  “Are you sure we should?” I asked.

  “It’s fine,” Franny said, looking at the lobsters with pride. “It’s not like we swam out and pulled the pot from the ocean. It practically washed up at our feet.”

  Franny took the lobsters and, facing the water, stretched his arms up into the air above his head, the lobsters nearly touching each other. The wind lifted his hair in a swirl. He dropped his arms and turned toward me with a mischievous grin.

  “Boiled or baked?”

  We started back to the house, each of us holding a lobster by the tail in one hand and our shoes in the other, comfortably silent on either side of the line in the road.

  4

  The inside of the house was dark and worn, like an old ship. A candle burned on a table in the kitchen, its wax dripping into little mountains on a faded cotton tablecloth. We put the lobsters in the sink. Franny gave me a pair of sweatpants and an old wool sweater to change into and directed me to the hall bathroom, where I was amused to find a stack of old New Yorkers in a basket by the toilet. The sweater, which smelled like whiskey, was big and soft, the V of its neck dipping almost too low. In the mirror, I was pleased to see that the wind and the water had left me with pink cheeks. I unclipped my barrette and let my hair hang down in unruly waves.