Elin Hilderbrand: Beautiful Day

Nothing.

This was not good.

“Pauline.”

She turned to face him, panicked. She sensed, maybe, that he was after sex-which she explicitly did not allow during daylight hours.

“What?” she said.

“Did you take the Notebook from the restaurant last night?”

“What notebook?”

Doug closed his eyes, wishing she hadn’t just said that. He lowered his voice, the way he would have for a hostile witness or a client who insisted on lying to him despite the fact that he had been hired to help.

“You know which notebook.”

Pauline’s forehead wrinkled and her eyes widened, and she did, at that moment, resemble Rhonda very strongly, which did not improve her case. “You mean the green notebook? Jenna’s notebook?”

“Yes,” Doug said. “Jenna’s notebook. I found it downstairs. Did you take it?” The question was ridiculous-of course she’d taken it-but Doug wanted to hear her admit to it.

“Why are you being so weird?”she asked.

“Define ‘weird,’ ” he said.

“ ‘Define weird.’ Don’t harass me, counselor. Save it for the courtroom.” Pauline took a step toward the bathroom, but Doug wasn’t going to let her escape. He stood up.

“Pauline.”

“I need to get in the shower,” she said. “I’m not going to stand around naked while you accuse me of things.”

Doug followed Pauline to the bathroom. He stood in the doorway as she turned on the water. This was the master bath she had shared with Arthur Tonelli for over twenty years. Pauline and Arthur had built this house together; they had picked out the tile and the sink and the fixtures. For the first few years of their marriage, Doug had felt like an impostor in this bathroom. What was he doing using Arthur Tonelli’s bathroom? What was he doing sleeping with Arthur Tonelli’s wife? But by now Doug had grown used to it. He and Beth had renovated their 1836 colonial on the Post Road until it was exactly to their taste, but after Beth died, it occurred to Doug that material things-even entire rooms-held no meaning. A bathroom was a bathroom was a bathroom.

“Did you take the Notebook?” Doug asked.

Pauline tested the water with her hand. She did not answer.

“Pauline…”

She whipped around. “Yes,” she said. “Jenna left it on the table at the restaurant last night and I picked it up.” She widened her brown eyes at him. When they’d first met, her eyes had reminded Doug of chocolate candy. “I rescued the Notebook. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take a shower. In peace.”

“No,” Doug said. “I will not excuse you. Why didn’t you give it back to Jenna? What is it doing here?”

“She was in a hurry, remember? She and Stuart raced away in that cab.”

What Doug remembered was standing out on Greenwich Avenue trying to hail Jenna and Stuart a cab, but having no luck. That far downtown, cabs were impossible to find. What Doug remembered was considering asking the maître d’ to call a car service for the kids, but then at the last moment a cab appeared, and Jenna and Stuart hopped in it. But there had been a full ten minutes, maybe longer, with the four of them outside on the sidewalk. And Pauline had had the Notebook; she had probably stuffed it into one of the enormous purses she liked to carry.

“She wasn’t in a hurry,” Doug said. “We waited around for goddamned ever for that cab. I’m not wrong about that, am I?”

“I forgot to give it back to her,” Pauline said. “I meant to, but then we were so caught up in trying to get them a cab, I forgot.”

“You forgot?” Doug said.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

Pauline nodded once, with conviction. That was her story and she was sticking to it. As Arthur Tonelli’s bathroom filled with steam, Doug realized something. He realized that he did not love Pauline. It was possible that he had never loved Pauline. On Monday, once the wedding was over and they were safely back home, he was going to ask Pauline for a divorce.

He turned and walked out. It felt good to have made that decision.

Pauline must have sensed something dire because she shut off the water, wrapped herself in a towel, and followed him out.

“I need you to believe me,” she said.

Doug watched her clutch the towel to her chest. Her thick, dark hair, out of its ponytail, fell in damp ropes over her shoulders.

“I do believe you,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve presented a plausible argument. Jenna left behind the Notebook, you wisely scooped it up, and amidst all the brouhaha of trying to flag a taxi, you forgot to return it to her.”

Pauline exhaled. “Yes.”

“My question now is, did you read it?”

As Pauline stared at him, he watched conflicting emotions cross her face. He was an attorney; he dealt every day with people who wanted to lie to him.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I read it.”

“You read it.” He had no reason to be surprised, but he was anyway.

“It was driving me crazy,” Pauline said. “The Notebook this, the Notebook that, what ‘Mom’ wrote in the Notebook. Your daughters-and you, too, Douglas-treated the thing like the fifth gospel. Jenna wouldn’t accept one suggestion- not one -from me. She only wanted to follow what was in the goddamned Notebook. And I wanted to see exactly what that was. I wanted to see what Beth had to say.”

Doug didn’t like hearing his second wife speak his first wife’s name. This had always been true.

“So you read it?” Doug said. “You read it today? While I was at work?”

“Yes,” Pauline said. “And I have to say, Beth covered all the bases. She let Jenna know exactly what she wanted-down to the pattern of the silver, down to the song you and Jenna should dance to, down to the earrings Jenna should wear with ‘the dress.’ It was the most blatant exercise in mind control I have ever seen. Beth planned her own wedding. She didn’t leave anything for Jenna to decide.”

Doug wondered if Pauline had read the last page. He wondered what the last page said.

“I think those were meant to be suggestions,” Doug said, feeling defensive.

“ Suggestions? ” Pauline said. “Beth flat-out told Jenna what to do.”

“Jenna is a strong person,” Doug said. “If she had disagreed with something Beth wrote, she would have changed it.”

“And go against the wishes of her dead mother?” Pauline said. “Never.”

“Hey now,” Doug said. “That’s out of line.”

“I offered to take Jenna out to try on wedding dresses,” Pauline said. “To try them on, that was all, to see what else was out there, to see if there was anything that suited her better than Beth’s dress-and she wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t even try. ”

“I’m sure she looks lovely in Beth’s dress,” Doug said.

“You know,” Pauline said, “I thought it was a good thing that you were widowed instead of divorced. I was glad there wasn’t an ex-wife I had to see at family functions or that you were paying alimony to. But guess what? Beth is more intrusive than any ex-wife could have been.”

“Intrusive?” Doug said. “Define intrusive.”

“She’s everywhere. Especially with this wedding. She is a palpable presence in the room. She is an untouchable standard by which the rest of us have to be judged. She has taken on sainthood. Saint Beth, the dead mother, whose memory grows more burnished every day.”

“Enough,” Doug said.

“I just can’t compete,” Pauline said. “I’ll never come first, not with the kids, not with you. You are, all of you Carmichaels, obsessed with her.”

Doug thought that hearing such words might anger him, but he merely found them validating. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t think you should come to Nantucket this weekend.”