Islands Read online

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “People who spend their lives looking after other people often are,” he said. “I see a lot of it. Is that why you do what you do? Because taking care of people fills you up?”

  I looked at him.

  “I do what I do because I like it and because I do it well,” I said. I was annoyed with him. How dare he come into my space and drape his wet clothes on my furniture and presume any sort of insight into me? It spoke of a familiarity I allowed very few people, certainly not people I had met three hours before.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grimacing. “I’ve always been that way. Into my head, out of my mouth. My mother always said I was a throwback to some pirate or criminal or something on my father’s side. She certainly raised me better. I apologize. I have no right to any of your life except what you choose to share.”

  The teakettle sang out, and I went in to it gratefully. They were not the words of a casual acquaintance; they assumed a relationship that did not exist. I did not particularly want a relationship of any sort, and did not know how to handle this man.

  We drank the tea in silence, watching the rain fall and listening to its monotonous spatter on the veranda railing outside. It was almost full dark now. I wondered when he would go home. I felt crowded and irritable.

  “Listen, would you like to order a pizza?” he said. “I’m hungry, and I don’t want to stop after I get on the road. I promise I’ll be out of here right after that.”

  “Are you buying?”

  “You bet,” he said, and went to the phone in the kitchen. I heard him dial almost immediately; he did not have to look up a number, then. This was a man who had a long familiarity with take-out pizza. Well, he was alone, too. People who have memorized take-out numbers usually are.

  The pizza came and we ate it in the living room before my empty fireplace, drinking the half bottle of merlot I’d found. I thought it had been left over from a dinner I’d cooked for Marcy and her boyfriend months before. It was on the brink of going sour, but the warmth of it felt good going down. Predictably, the air conditioner was chilling the apartment.

  I went into the kitchen to turn it down and Lewis followed with our plates and glasses. The window above the unit had frosted with its breath, and he went to it and wrote on it with his finger, Annie.

  I moved up behind him and reached over and crossed out the ie and drew a y. Anny. He looked back at me, smiling slightly.

  “When I started first grade, I wanted a nickname more than anything,” I said. “Everybody else had one. My first name is Anna, so I told the teacher that everybody called me Annie, only I couldn’t spell it, so I just added the y. Somehow it’s stuck all these years.”

  “That’s one of the saddest things I ever heard,” he said, turning to me. “Why didn’t your parents give you a nickname? Why didn’t you tell them you wanted one?”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t make a poor soul out of me,” I said. “I like my nickname. It’s not like every other Annie you meet on the street. But since you ask, nobody was around much to give me one. My father left us when I was eight and my sisters and brother were younger, and by that time my mother was pretty much a drunk. I took care of us, and I liked it, and I was good at it, and I think I was as much parent to them as they needed. They’ve all turned out really well.”

  “I’ll bet they have,” he said. “Is your mother still alive?”

  “No. She died my first year of college. We lived in North Charleston. I was able to stay at home and go to school, too.”

  I took the last swallow of the merlot in my glass.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” I said. “It makes me sound like an orphan of the storm, and I’m not; I have a very good life. It’s the life I’ve chosen. I wouldn’t change it.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “No. Listen, don’t you think you ought to get started? The rain’s letting up and you’ve got a long drive.”

  He did not answer. Instead, he said, “You never had a childhood, did you? You never played, you never had anyone who took care of you.”

  “I had a grandmother who loved us all very much,” I said. “She lived in Myrtle Beach. We saw her often. She was always there if we needed her. She sent us money regularly; it kept us in the house and fed us when I was in school. And I did play. I used to lock myself in my room after the kids were in bed, and I’d dance all over the room, and act out stories, and play the lead in every movie I’d ever seen. I must have read every adventure book in the library. I wrote stories, too, in my diary.”

  “I’ll bet nobody ever saw them,” he said. “I bet nobody ever saw you dance. You know what? I’m going to take you dancing. I know just the place. It’s out on the river. We’ll eat oysters and play the jukebox and dance up a storm.”

  “Lewis, why did you get divorced?” I said. I did not even feel strange asking it, not in the midst of the extraordinary conversation we were having. Turnabout was fair play.

  “I think she finally just didn’t like living with me,” he said slowly. “I’m not a very social animal. Sissy was—is—social to the nth degree. I guess I missed one too many galas. I couldn’t change. Even if I could I wouldn’t have.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “I don’t know. I certainly did for a long time. I just don’t like her very much. She’s not really a very nice person. I hate thinking she’s raising the girls to be just like her, clothes and lunches and parties and all that. They were such funny, good little kids. They’ve left holes in my heart.”

  “Do you see them?”

  “Well, it’s a long way to Santa Barbara. Sissy doesn’t come back here. I get the girls whenever I can manage the time and she feels like it. It’s not enough.”

  “No,” I said, still looking out my frosted, calligraphed window. “I don’t imagine it is.”

  He came up behind me and put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I didn’t think he had to stoop much to do it.

  “Your hair is still wet,” he said. “I’m not kidding about the dancing. I’m going to call you every day until you say yes.”

  I thought of his world; I imagined the rich tapestry of friends and cousins and sweethearts from out of his childhood; the dense, baroque network of connections that was so uniquely Charleston. Lewis Aiken would not lack for women to eat oysters and dance with. Women of his own set. Smart, beautiful women. Downtown women.

  “Lewis, why me?” I said into the window.

  “Why not you?” he said, and kissed the top of my head and went out my front door. I listened to the soft growl of the Range Rover’s engine until it lost itself on East Bay.

  That night I turned the radio to a soft-rock station and I danced barefoot, in my brother’s shirt, danced and danced until I lost my breath and fell into bed, and slept through the wet night without dreams.

  2

  MONDAY WAS ALWAYS a slow day in our office; I never could figure out why. Marcy and the others always maintained that our clients were nursing weekend hangovers, and in many cases I suppose that was true. Whatever the reason, I welcomed the lull. It gave me a small space in which to try and catch up on the ever-present paperwork that is the sodden anchor holding all philanthropies to the earth. And it gave me a chance to meet with my staff and see where we’d been the week before, and where we wished to go in the following one. We also sometimes treated ourselves to lunch out of the office. Monday was almost the only day we ever did that. The rest of the week one of the junior staff grudgingly ordered in and went and collected our lunches, and we ate at our desks. Often I brought my own yogurt and fruit.

  On this Monday Marcy and I had no takers, so we went out to lunch alone together to the funky, enormously popular Hominy Grill, which was close enough for the staffs of the medical complex so that the restaurant and courtyard were usually dotted with white coats. The food was innovative and wonderfully cooked, and there was usually a sprinkling of downtown women
and one or two proper Charleston dowagers, being treated by their daughters. The Grill was nothing if not eclectic.

  Marcy, who is as tall and thin as a crane, ordered the fried-oyster salad. I had the vegetable plate. I knew that I never got enough vegetables; yogurt and frozen pasta are the staples of a single’s refrigerator. The Grill’s collards and squash casserole were sublime. The macaroni and cheese made you weep for your childhood.

  We ate under an umbrella in the tiny courtyard. After we finished our lunches, we sat for a while watching a pair of green lizards seep slowly down the white stucco wall of the restaurant. You could never catch them moving, but if you looked away, you would often find them inches or feet away from where they had been. Lizard watching is hypnotic. We were reluctant to leave our sunny courtyard and go back to work.

  “Let’s go over some of the office stuff,” I said. “Make believe we’re working. We’ll stay…oh, until that smallest lizard gets to the drainpipe.”

  “So how did it go with the Sperrys?” Marcy said. “Did Tiffany show?”

  “Nope. I don’t know why I even hoped she would. I ended up taking Shawna to Dr. Aiken. I had to put her up with the Boltons, and so far as I know, she’s still there. It’s going to cost us a fortune, not to mention giving Adelaine Bolton enough ammunition to keep social services busy for a year.”

  “She can’t just leave her child there indefinitely,” Marcy said in exasperation. Tiffany Sperry was a recurring thorn in our sides.

  “Oh, she’ll show today or tomorrow with some excuse or other,” I said. “The last time it was that her ovaries were swollen and she couldn’t get out of bed. She didn’t say whose. If she’s not back by this afternoon, I’ll call social services myself. She’s flirting with bad trouble.”

  “What did Dr. Aiken say about Tiffany?” Marcy asked, stirring her second glass of iced tea.

  “He thinks she can be helped. Said it was pretty straightforward. He’s going to send me a memo on the consultation, and the name of a surgeon who just might do the operation for free. I’m prepared to beg. Shawna’s a sweet child. She loved Dr. Aiken. As well she should. We got caught in that downpour and my car wouldn’t start, and he took her to the Boltons’ and me to my place. I ended up giving him a cup of tea, and we ordered a pizza.”

  Marcy stared, and I flushed. I had no idea why I was telling her about the evening with Lewis Aiken. I almost never discussed my personal life, even with her. All I knew was that it gave me a surge of pure pleasure to talk about him. I liked saying his name.

  “My Lord, you and Lewis Aiken alone in your apartment eating pizza! What was he like?”

  “Wet and hungry,” I said. “Barefoot. What should he be like? He’s a nice, funny man who likes kids and misses his own. He’s divorced, and she’s got the children in Santa Barbara. I gather it wasn’t a very amicable divorce.”

  “Don’t you know anything?” Marcy breathed. “Amicable! It was the scandal of the year; everybody knows about it. I still hear people talking about it. Everybody knows what a bitch she was; I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love Dr. Aiken. Literally, I hear. I think he’s gone with a lot of women since she left.”

  Obscurely, my heart dropped.

  “Where do you hear this stuff?” I said. “Have you been hanging around the yacht club?”

  “Just eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria sometime,” Marcy said. “There’s not a nurse in there who doesn’t know all about it, and who wouldn’t give a month’s pay to go out with him. I don’t think he dates anybody in the medical community, though. His family’s been here since the Huguenots; he’s strictly a downtown guy.”

  I had known that, of course; it was implicit in the photographs in his office. But I still felt a small curl of desolation, like smoke. I was, of course, quite literally only a port in a storm to Lewis Aiken. The rest—the talk and laughter, the invitation to go dancing, the kiss on the top of the head—were obviously simply spillovers of Lewis’s charm. He would have bestowed them on any woman as easily as he gave his smile.

  “Was she a Charleston woman?” I asked, as casually as I could. “I saw her pictures in his office, and the twins. They’re all beautiful. It looked like a movie family.”

  “No, she’s from Baltimore. He met her when he was at Hopkins. She’s beautiful, all right, but her family wasn’t anywhere near as rich or wellborn as his. Everybody says she never really loved him, but she did love that house, and the boat, and the club memberships, and the place in the country, and the money. I think he was a goner when he first laid eyes on her. Apparently, he stuck with her for a long time after she started running around on him. I hear she had affairs with half of Charleston, and a lot of them were his friends. She was really something; I saw her at a hospital thing once. You couldn’t look away from her.”

  “It can’t be all that easy to have affairs in Charleston,” I said. “You’d be bumping into everybody you knew all the time.”

  “From what I hear, you’d be surprised by how easy it is,” she said. “Either that, or lots of people don’t really care who’s diddling around with who.”

  “So why didn’t he leave her?”

  “The girls, I’m sure. And then I hear he was totally in love with her. I think the divorce almost killed him.”

  “Why did he finally divorce her?” I asked. I was ashamed of myself, but I could not stop probing for facts about Lewis Aiken. He had seemed so open with me the night before, but I saw now that I had not caught the sense of him at all, and I wanted to know him. I hurt for his hurt.

  “She did, not him. They were renovating the house on the Battery—not fancy enough for her, I guess—and she had a really steamy affair with the architect. He wasn’t a local guy, but he was a real stud and he had a good practice here. I don’t think the poor guy had a chance. They were all over the place with it; everybody was talking. Dr. Aiken moved to the country with the girls and she filed for divorce. He just let her. She was going to marry the guy and they were going to live in splendor in the Battery house—on the Aikens’s money. Of course, his family loathed her, and hadn’t spoken to her for ages, and she retaliated by not letting them see the girls. I hear he was going to contest the divorce, but when she went after the house, that was it. The architect didn’t marry her after all, and she hightailed it home to California, where her parents had moved. I hear they bought her a house next door to theirs. I think she got a generous settlement, but it wasn’t what she had had with Dr. Aiken. I’ll bet she regrets that little fling. She had it all, and blew it.”

  “What happened to the architect?”

  “He went back home to his wife in Orangeburg.”

  “What a comedown,” I said, laughing. “Marcy, it’s incredible to me that you know all this.”

  “Everybody knows. He’s a catch.”

  Lewis Aiken called the next day and asked me to dinner.

  “I hear you’re a catch,” I said.

  “Blue-plate catch of the day,” he said. “Wear your jeans and your dancing shoes, and bring some bug spray. This place doesn’t have much but mosquitoes and a jukebox and the best oysters in the Low Country. Pick you up at six.”

  Booter’s Bait and Oysters lies at the end of a flimsy dock that stretches out over the marshes to Bohicket Creek, which separates Wadmalaw Island from John’s Island. I never could have found it on that evening. It seemed to me so deeply embedded in the wild heart of the marsh and swamp country, so far from even the sparse filling stations and cinder-block stores and garages we passed on the way, on the little country road, that we were in another country, one that lay a continent away from Charleston. And in a sense it did. This wild, swamp-cradled, salt-infused country had far more to do with alligators and rattlesnakes and eagles and ospreys and the occasional bobcat than it did with men and their doings. The houses we did pass were shacks and trailers sliding slowly into the tangles of vines and encroaching live oaks. Rusted cars decorated dirt yards; old gut-sprung sofas sat on porches. Skiffs and rowboats
had pride of place in what passed for most driveways.

  “I guess you’re sure about this,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Booter and I grew up together, summers. Our place is not so far from here. We ran wild all over the place. There isn’t an inch of Bohicket Creek we haven’t fished or hunted. He’s a better shot than anybody I know, and he’s the best fisherman in the Low Country. He keeps boats for some of the guys at his dock, and it got so that people just hung around when they came in, and chewed the fat and drank beer, and finally he put a roof over the end of it and a couple of tables and benches, and got a jukebox and a beer license…though I’ve never been so sure about that. People come from all around here for the oysters. Oh, not the town crowd that thinks roughing it is the Wreck on Mount Pleasant. But folks around here. The oysters come out of the water the day you eat them, and there’s only two ways that you can—roasted and raw. Junior Crosby, an old black man who used to work for my father on the Edisto place, does the oyster roasts. He’s got a gallon drum and a sheet of iron and he builds a fire and gets it just right, and then plunks a croker sack full of oysters on it and yanks ’em off when they’re ready, and you take the clumps and open them yourself. Somehow I didn’t think you’d have one, so I brought oyster knives for both of us.”

  “Well, I certainly know what an oyster roast is,” I said. “I’ve been to them at some pretty fancy places, at benefits for the foundation. But you certainly didn’t have to open your own oysters. There were people to do it for you.”

  “You’d get thrown in the creek at Booter’s if you asked somebody to do that,” Lewis said. “But I’ll show you how. And if you slice your finger off, there’s a doctor in the house.”

  We bumped down a dirt road so thickly overhung with moss and branches that it was like driving through a tunnel and abruptly came out into a clearing. I gasped. The creek here was just widening out into a sea of marsh grass, silvered by a small breeze and flushed pink by the setting sun. The line of the trees against the far edge of the marsh was black. Over it all a high white ghost moon rode.