The summertime rate for a direct flight from Newark to the airport near Edgartown is two-seventy-five round-trip, and the flight takes an hour and twelve minutes, to which he has to figure another hour to the airport from the city — all told a journey well worth it. He left his office at two-thirty this afternoon, and it is now only twenty past five. They have been renting here on the island for the past seven years now, from when Helen was pregnant with Annie. And even though the place is overrun with writers, movie stars, and politicians, among them — God help us — even a president of the United States, David still finds in their Menemsha cottage a haven truly distant from the stresses of the city and the incessant turmoil of his patients. Here among the pines and the inland marshes and the soaring skies and sheltering dunes, he feels honestly at peace with his family and himself.
Lobster dinners are a tradition every Friday night. Then again, anything the Chapman family does more than once becomes an instant tradition with Annie. Sucking meat from a claw, she listens wide-eyed as David relates the tale of this afternoon’s bicycle theft in Central Park.
“You should have minded your own business, Dad,” Jenny says. “What you did was extremely dangerous.”
“It was,” Helen agrees.
Each of them looks so gravely concerned that he feels like leaning across the table and kissing them both. On the other hand, Annie wants to hear more.
“Did he kill her?” she asks.
“No, honey. Just hit her a lot.”
“Urgh,” Annie says, and pulls a face, and then asks, “Mommy, can you crack this for me, please?”
Helen takes the claw Annie hands across the table.
“Who was she, do you know?”
“Kate something.”
“There’s a girl named Kate in my class,” Annie says.
“This isn’t the same Kate,” Jenny informs her.
“Duhhhhh, no kidding?” Annie says, and twists her forefinger into her cheek, a repeated gesture David has never understood.
“Kate what?” Helen asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, didn’t you ask?”
“No.”
“Suppose she needs you?”
“For what, Mom?”
“Suppose they catch the guy?”
“They won’t,” David says.
“They won’t,” the girls echo simultaneously.
“Won’t you have to testify?”
“I doubt they’ll pay much attention to a stolen bike.”
“They better not steal my bike!” Annie says, and makes a threatening gesture with the lobster claw.
“Still, Dad,” Jenny says, “you could have just called the cops or something. You didn’t have to rush in like a hero.”
“I am a hero,” he says, and flexes his muscles like a weight lifter.
“Some hero,” Helen says. “The guy got the bike, anyway.”
“Ah yes, but I yelled at him,” David says. “At the top of my lungs.”
“Daddy is a hero,” Annie says.
“He is, darling,” Helen agrees. “But he should have been more careful.”
“Suppose he had a gun or something?” Jenny asks, frowning now.
“Daddy would’ve yanked it away from him.”
“Pow!” David says, and swings his fist at an imaginary assailant.
“One out of every two teenagers in New York has a gun,” Jenny says.
“Where’d you hear that?” Helen asks. “Who wants more corn?”
“Me.”
“Me.”
“In the Times. It’s a fact. Me, too.”
“This one didn’t have a gun,” David says.
“How do you know?”
“Because I didn’t get shot, did I?”
“Daddy didn’t get shot, did he?” Annie says, nodding, buttering her corn.
“Or a knife,” Jenny persists. “He could’ve had a knife.”
“Daddy would have grabbed it like Crocodile Dundee.”
“Is she going to report it to the police?” Helen asks.
“She said she would.”
“She should.”
“I told her.”
“I’d be afraid,” Jenny says.
“No, something like that should be reported.”
“I’d be afraid,” Jenny says again.
“Not me,” Annie says. “Could I have the salt, please? If I’d’ve been with Daddy, I’d’ve broken his head.”
“You’d have broken my head?” David says in mock alarm.
“Not yours,” Annie says, and begins giggling.
“Who’s for dessert?” Helen asks, and begins clearing.
“Me!” Annie says, raising her hand at once.
“Me!” Jenny says, raising hers a beat later.
“Let me help you, hon,” David says, pushing back his chair.
“I’ve got it,” Helen says.
A look passes between them.
Private, almost secret.
“Sit,” she says, and smiles and goes out into the kitchen.
There is a spectacular sunset that night.
Annie calls each night’s sunset a tradition.
The house they are renting affords lavish views of both Menemsha Pond and the Bight. They stand on the deck overlooking both, the pond in the near distance, the bight and Vineyard Sound further to the northwest. The pond has already turned pink. The waters of the sound are still a fiery red. As they watch, the sky turns first a dusky purple and then a dark blue that becomes yet deeper and darker and eventually black and finally...
“Boop!” Annie says.
They put the children to bed and then sit on the screened porch, listening to the clatter of the summer insects and the murmur of the distant surf. Whispering in the stillness of the star-drenched night, they hold hands as they had when they were young lovers in Boston, discovering that city together, and themselves as well, discovering themselves through each other in that city. She was thinner when he’d met her, perhaps too thin, in fact, with incongruently abundant breasts — well, 34C, she told him, the first time he’d fumbled with her bra — and hips made for childbearing, she also told him. She is still slender, what he considers slender, although she constantly complains that she can stand to lose a few pounds. As they whisper in the hush and the dark, he keeps remembering the wind blowing her long skirt back over her lovely bare legs.
In bed later, the little black hook-latch fastened on the white, planked, wooden bedroom door, she spreads her legs for him, the sleek smooth legs he loves to touch, the feel of them under his searching hands, the children asleep down the hall, stroking her legs, his hands gliding up to the secret flesh high on her inner thighs, the soft hollows hidden on either side of her pubic mound. As she did the very first time they’d made love in a rented room on Cape Cod, she gasps sharply when his fingers part her nether lips, and raises her hips to accept his gently questing fingers, touching, finding her, moist and ready.
If Annie knew — and perhaps she does — what transpires each Friday night in this bedroom with its salt-dampened sheets and its windows open to the ocean winds, she would most certainly call it a tradition. For here in Helen’s fiercely welcoming embrace, David finds again the young girl he once knew, and the desirable woman she’s become, and is replenished by both. Overwhelmed by her beauty, stunned by her passion, moved almost to tears by her generosity, he whispers as he does each time, “I love you, Helen.”
And she whispers against his lips, “Oh, and I love you, David, so very very much.”