Ann finished her cocktail and got herself another. A young man named Ford who attended Colgate (it said so right on his name tag; it must have been yacht club tradition to let people know how well educated the staff was) offered Ann a deviled egg, but Ann declined. She couldn’t possibly eat anything.
She wanted to find Jim and walk down the docks and admire the sailboats, but Jim was off mingling somewhere; he had not heeded her plea to stay within arm’s reach. Ann knew she should introduce herself to some of the other guests instead of spending the whole evening within the cozy ring of her Durham friends. As it was, those six were circled together, talking and laughing, having a fine time. They felt no compunction to meet Jenna’s mother’s cousins or Stuart’s boss, here with his wife and new baby.
But Ann was a politician, and it was in her nature to connect with as many new people as humanly possible. She was good at introducing herself; she should just do it. Helen would get there when she got there; Ann couldn’t fritter the whole evening away worrying about when.
She decided she would start with Doug Carmichael and tell him how touching she had found the rehearsal. But Doug was all the way out by the cannon and the flagpole, talking to a young woman with dreadlocks, whom Ann guessed was one of Jenna’s fellow teachers at the sustainable preschool. Then Ann spied Doug’s wife, sitting alone at one of the patio tables, drinking a very large glass of chardonnay and attacking a bowl of cashews. Ann approached. The woman’s name was Pauline, though Ann always had the urge to call her Paula.
“Hi, Pauline,” Ann said. “Mind if I join you?”
“Please,” Pauline said. She had the demeanor of someone sitting at home alone, rather than smack in the middle of a party, but she snapped to attention with Ann’s words and pulled her hand out of the cashew bowl.
“Lovely party,” Ann said. “This is such a beautiful club.”
“Is it?” Pauline said. “I hate it here.”
Ann tried not to appear startled. “Oh,” she said.
“Nantucket in general, I guess,” Pauline said. “So precious, so… I don’t know, self-satisfied.”
Ann had been thinking the same thing only that morning; she had about as much love for the North as General Lee. But Nantucket had grown on her over the course of the day. There had been the leisurely morning at the hotel, then Ann and Jim had strolled into town. They had shopped at galleries and antique stores. Ann had bought a painting of the ocean, all swirling blues and greens; it wouldn’t exactly blend in with their sprawling Victorian—which had once been owned by a nephew of the tobacco baron W. T. Blackwell, and Ann had painstakingly decorated with help from Southern Living—but it would be a nice reminder of Stuart’s wedding. Ann had also bought a straw hat with a black grosgrain ribbon, exorbitantly priced, but when she tried it on, Jim declared she had to have it. They had eaten a lunch of clam chowder and Caesar salad on the wharf, and Ann had tanned her legs in the sun.
“People seem to love it,” Ann said neutrally. She wished she hadn’t committed to sitting down. She cast about the party, looking for someone else she knew, somewhere else she could go. She saw Ryan with his boyfriend, Jethro; they were standing so close to each other that their foreheads were nearly touching. Ann was a Republican in a southern state, but parenting Ryan had given her an advanced degree in tolerance and acceptance. Jethro had become one of Ann’s favorite people in all the world. He had been raised in the Cabrini-Green housing projects on the south side of Chicago, a fact that had shocked Ann at first. Jethro’s manners were as elegant as if he’d been raised at Buckingham Palace. He was smart and funny, he spoke fluent Italian and French, he was the editor in chief at Chicago Style magazine. But right this instant, Ann wished that Ryan and Jethro would not announce themselves as so openly gay. They were at the Nantucket Yacht Club. The place was as straitlaced as a Junior League event at the Washington Duke back home. But Jethro had never been one to hide. Black and proud—the only person of color at this entire party, except for a Korean gal whom Jenna had gone to college with. And gay and proud.
Ann turned back to Pauline and smiled. Pauline’s nose was deep in her wineglass. Ann scrambled for something else to say, something that would lead her organically to an exit.
Pauline set her wineglass down with a sharp ching!
“Do you ever feel like maybe your marriage isn’t exactly what you thought it was?” Pauline asked.
Ann’s mouth fell open. She was wearing a sleeveless shell-pink sheath, but at that moment, she felt completely naked. Exposed. She turned her head away—she couldn’t meet Pauline’s intense, questioning gaze—and at that very second she saw Helen Oppenheimer enter the party. The crowd seemed to hush; something about Helen’s presence demanded it. She was a six-foot blonde, still as statuesque as ever, wearing a flowing, one-shouldered dress that was the brightest yellow Ann had ever seen. It was canary yellow, the yellow of a bushel of lemons, a juicy sunburst yellow. She was blinding and beautiful. Ann realized then what a terrible, terrible mistake she had made.