“You don’t suppose we’ll drink all that?” Kayla said.
Val shrugged. “We have a lot to celebrate after twenty years. I’m finally happy, you’re finally rich-”
“I’m not rich,” Kayla said.
“You will be soon enough,” Val said. She closed her door, and Kayla backed out of the driveway. “It’s okay to have money, Kayla, though I know you don’t believe it.”
“I think it’s okay,” Kayla said defensively. “In fact, I think it’s fine.”
Val shook her short hair. She wore a pressed white linen shirt that was so crisp it looked like parchment, and baggy linen pants the color of wheat bread. Beige suede Fratelli Rossetti sandals. She was deeply tanned (from sunbathing nude every weekend at Miacomet Beach), and she wore three gold chains around her neck that were as thin as strands of web. Those chains were her signature jewelry, she said. They defined who she was. Kayla cringed when Val said things like “signature jewelry” in public because it just gave people another reason to dislike her. Who on earth had signature jewelry? Princess Diana? Zsa Zsa Gabor?
As if reading Kayla’s mind, Val fingered her chains. “Did you talk to Antoinette?” she asked.
“I did.”
“How did she sound?”
“She sounded fine.” Kayla threw the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Val said. “We had lunch last week, and she seemed a little reflective.”
“You had lunch?” Kayla said. “You didn’t tell me that.”
Val shrugged. “It was no big deal. It was just lunch.”
“Yeah, but you could have…” Kayla almost said “invited me along,” but she caught herself. “You could have mentioned it.”
“I also had lunch with Merrill and Kelly. I also had lunch with Nina Monroe.”
“Yeah, but those are your friends.”
“Antoinette is my friend. Please, Kayla, don’t get sensitive about this. It was only lunch.”
“You’re right,” Kayla said. She couldn’t help but feel jealous in the most adolescent way-there was no reason why Val and Antoinette shouldn’t have lunch alone. No reason why they shouldn’t pursue a friendship independent of her. But, in fact, Kayla had always believed that she was the glue that held Val and Antoinette together; she was closer to both of them than they were to each other. “So she sounded reflective?”
“Yes,” Val said. “Has she told you anything?”
Kayla considered mentioning Antoinette’s daughter, if only to prove that she had some inside information first, but she shook her head. The announcement about the daughter could wait until midnight, when Night Swimmers officially began.
The Night Swimmers had evolved over the past twenty years into an evening of rules and rituals. It was a rule to eat decadent food-lobsters, cheese, berries. It was a rule to drink champagne. And it was a time to share secrets, like the one Antoinette had shared with them twenty years earlier.
As Kayla drove through the moonlit night toward Antoinette’s house, she thought about the secrets she’d shared over the past years. She’d told Val and Antoinette all the secrets from her past-about sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet a high school boyfriend at a disco, cheating on a chemistry test in college, stealing a pair of duck shoes from Murray’s when she worked there her first summer. She told them one year that she was pregnant with Cassidy B.-before Raoul even knew. Val and Antoinette’s secrets were always more interesting than her own. Val told about sleeping with a professor to get on Law Review, she told about a bank account abroad that she kept a secret from John, she told them she overcharged one of her best clients on a regular basis. Antoinette told about being cut from the Joffrey Ballet School when she lived in New York before she was married, she told about how her mother ran out on her when Antoinette was at boarding school in New Hampshire.
This year Antoinette would tell about her daughter coming to visit, and Val would disclose the name of her lover. Kayla-well, Kayla would talk about Theo. The three women would accept each other’s secrets like valuable gifts to be kept safe from the rest of the world.
Antoinette lived off Polpis Road down a long, bumpy dirt path bordered on both sides by scrub pines. Antoinette bought the land with a portion of her enormous divorce settlement, and she hired Raoul to build her four-room cottage. She invested her set dement with John Gluckstern in the early eighties, and he bought her a load of Microsoft at two dollars a share. Val had let it slip that Antoinette now had close to thirty million dollars. She was worth more than Kayla and Raoul and Val and John put together, but her lifestyle required very little. She danced, she went for walks in the woods, she drank chardonnay, she read novels. It sounded enviable at first-Antoinette had enough money to do whatever she pleased, and what she pleased was to go for days, even weeks, without talking to another soul. She had claimed twenty years earlier that she didn’t want friends, but over time she had given in to Kayla and Val in small ways. She joined them for an occasional meal, she sometimes remembered their birthdays, she called just to talk every once in a while. Her desire to kill herself subsided, although she experienced dark periods when she didn’t eat, didn’t dance, didn’t leave the house. The dark periods lasted a few days, maybe a week, and then they ended and Antoinette went back to what she did best, cultivating her loneliness. “I’m lonely all the time, every day,” she told Kayla. “But there are far worse things than being lonely. Like being betrayed.”
Once a year Antoinette opened herself fully to Kayla and Val, she played their game, she returned their love. Every year Kayla worried that Antoinette would withdraw from Night Swimmers, deem it silly and worthless, but she never did. Deep down, Antoinette respected the bond they’d nurtured for twenty years.
Antoinette emerged from her cottage dressed entirely in black: black leotard, black leggings, and her vintage black Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. She was a woman in permanent mourning.
“I come bearing crustaceans,” she said, sliding a plastic tub of lobsters covered with aluminum foil into the backseat. She touched both Kayla and Val on the shoulders. “Hello, white women.”
“Hello, you beautiful black woman, you,” Val said. “When are you going to brighten your wardrobe? I’m reading this book about positive self-image, and it said other people respond to the colors you wear. They tie it right in with your personality.”
“I think Antoinette looks lovely in black,” Kayla said.
“Thank you,” Antoinette said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been called lovely. Beautiful, sexy, reclusive, yes. Lovely, no. Lovely seems better suited to describing a summer day, or a bride. Lovely is a poem by Robert Frost. I view myself as a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. Something grittier, more complicated. Do you want to reconsider your choice of adjective, Kayla?”
“No,” Kayla said. “I don’t. I find you lovely.”
“I should read more poetry,” Val said. “I don’t even know who Gwendolyn Brooks is.”
“I smell Coco Chanel,” Antoinette said. “Is that you, Kayla?”
“What can I say? Women are the only ones who appreciate perfume. I don’t know why I bother to waste the stuff on Raoul.”
“What’s this?” Antoinette asked, inspecting the champagne.
“It’s for our twentieth anniversary,” Val said. “I wanted to do something special.”
“Val brought it back from France,” Kayla said. “She was thinking of Night Swimmers as she toured the Champagne region.”
“Well, thank you, madam,” Antoinette said. “I’m sure tonight will be a night we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.” She pointed to the blue numbers of the car’s digital clock. “It’s eleven-forty-seven, ladies. We’d better get a move on.”