Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

Kip’s biggest fault was that he was too handsome. Adrienne had been addicted to him physically, to the way he would untie the string of her bikini top at the end of her shift and make love to her on his desk in the back office. He rode a motorcycle and he had taken Adrienne for excursions around Koh Samui-to the hidden temples, to the waterfalls, to the giant gold Buddha on the north coast. He had bargained with a Thai woman at the market in Na Thon for the best papaya for a couple of bhat, then he sliced it open with a machete and fed it to Adrienne with his fingers.

Kip was older, too, ten years older, and he had told Adrienne stories about Eton and Cambridge, Hong Kong, Macao, Saigon, Mandalay. She had nothing to offer that could compare. She was provincially American, with only the gentle and studious Will Novak to claim as a past lover. She was plagued for the first time by jealousy. She wanted Kip to take her to one of the full moon parties on Koh Phangan.

“You won’t like it,” he said.

“Try me,” she said.

Kip gave in, and at the end of the month, he and Adrienne were on an old junk cruising through the Gulf of Thailand toward Koh Phangan.

It was lying on the very soft, very white sand of Haad Rin Beach that Adrienne noticed she was the only woman around, except for four Thai girls who were offering massages for fifty bhat. The beach was packed with men-Israelis, South Africans, Germans, Australians, Danish, Americans. They were all eyeing Adrienne in her bikini, and she felt Kip’s attention tighten around her. She wanted to stay in that spot forever. Kip called one of the masseuses over.

“For the lady.” And he palmed the girl some bills.

“I don’t want a massage,” Adrienne said. “Really.”

Kip said something to the girl in Thai that made her laugh. The girl knelt next to Adrienne in the sand and started kneading her back. It felt wonderful, and Adrienne closed her eyes, trying not to worry if this was some kind of turn-on for Kip or for the other men on the beach. The girl’s hands were as soft as warm water.

Later, Kip took Adrienne to dinner. They hiked down a jungle path to a grass shack that had only three stools at a counter. “The vegetable curry,” Kip said. “I order it every time.”

Adrienne didn’t care for curries, but it would have been useless to say so. The curry she was given was mild and sweet with coconut milk, cilantro, lime. She had left the mushrooms to float in a small amount of broth at the bottom of the bowl, and when Kip noticed, he laughed hysterically.

“Eat the mushrooms,” he said.

She ate the mushrooms.

The rest of the night was a stew of paranoia and hallucinations. Kip took Adrienne back to their bungalow and somehow locked her in from the outside, claiming he had to meet some Americans to buy some hash. When are you coming back? Adrienne asked the already closed door. Later, love, a little later. Adrienne lay down on the embroidered satin bedspread. She was cogent enough to realize that the mushrooms had been drugs, and now the simplest tasks eluded her. She couldn’t get the door open. She was freezing, but she couldn’t turn down the air-conditioning. She had been dreaming of a hot bath since arriving in Thailand months earlier, and this room had a marble bathroom and a deep Jacuzzi. She turned on the water, and then she lost time. The next thing she knew she was lying on her face on the embroidered bedspread drowning in what felt like wave after wave crashing over her.

Kip returned at three o’clock in the morning, high on six different drugs and drunk on Mekong whiskey, to find Adrienne passed out and their entire bungalow ankle-deep with warm bathwater. They left on the first boat the next morning and neither of them said a word to each other. Adrienne was mortified about the water damage (it ended up costing Kip nearly five hundred pounds) and she was livid about everything from the massage to the mushrooms to being locked up like an animal. She couldn’t deny the truth much longer: Kip was a control freak. And yet he was so handsome that when they returned to Koh Samui, and he said he forgave her, it took another month of Kip’s obnoxious demands and e-mailed pleas from her father to make Adrienne leave. She wasn’t even fully packed when Kip announced he’d hired an Australian girl to replace her.

By his own admission, Thatcher “hadn’t exactly been celibate” over the past twelve years, but there had been no one special, he said, and Adrienne decided to believe him. The only other woman Adrienne wanted to talk about as they lay in bed late at night was Fiona.

“Fiona was never my girlfriend,” Thatcher said. “I’ve never even held her hand. I tried to kiss her once when we were fifteen but she pushed me away. She said she didn’t want me to kiss her because she was dying and she didn’t want to break my heart.”

Fiona had cystic fibrosis. It was a genetic disease; Adrienne had looked it up on the Internet. Mucus was sealing Fiona’s lungs like a tomb. She was thirty-five years old, and losing lung function every year. Over the winter, she had decided to put herself on the transplant list, and that was why this was the final year of the restaurant. If she got a lung transplant, if she survived the lung transplant-there were too many ifs to worry about running a business. Thatcher had mentioned a doctor at Mass General, the best doctor in the country for this disease. To look at Fiona, Adrienne would never know a thing was wrong. She was a pistol, a short pistol with a braid like the Swiss Miss and freckles across her nose. A pistol wearing diamond stud earrings.

“What was it like being friends with her?” Adrienne asked.

“I’m still friends with her.”

“Growing up, I mean. What was it like?”

“It was like growing up,” Thatcher said. “She lived in my neighborhood. We went to school together. She cooked a lot and I ate what she cooked. We drove to Chicago for concerts in the summer. She had boyfriends, but they all hated me. One of them siphoned the gas from my car.”

“Really?”

“They were jealous because we were friends. Because, you know, I would eat over there during the week and I walked into her house without knocking, that kind of thing. Once a month or so, she would go to the hospital-sometimes just to St. Joe’s but sometimes up to Northwestern and I was the only one who she let come visit.”

“And what was that like?”

“It was awful. They had her on a vent, and the doctors were always worrying about her O 2sats, the amount of oxygen in her blood.”

“Who knows that she’s sick?”

“Some of the staff know, obviously-Caren, Joe, Duncan, Spillman, and everyone in the kitchen-but it’s the strictest secret. Because if the public hears the word ‘disease,’ they shun a place, and in that case, everyone loses. You understand that.”

“I understand,” Adrienne said. She nearly told Thatcher that Drew Amman-Keller knew. He knew and was keeping the secret just like everybody else, but Adrienne was afraid to bring it up. She still had his business card hidden in her dresser drawer. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Of course not. I trust you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you.”

“Does Fiona know about us?”

“Everybody knows about us,” Thatcher said. “Which is fine. When the public hears the word ‘romance,’ they come in droves. The phone rings off the hook.”

“We’ll have to beat them back with a stick.”

Thatcher tucked her under his chin and buried his face in her hair. “Exactly.”

If Will Novak was too soft, and Kip Turnbull too hard, then Michael Sullivan, the third man Adrienne dated, was just right. Sully was the golf pro at the Chatham Bars Inn, where Adrienne worked the front desk. Unlike Will and Kip, Sully was Adrienne’s age, he had a degree from Bowdoin College, and he, too, was living the resort life with the reluctant backing of his parents, who lived in Quincy, forty-five minutes away. Sully had valued one thing above all others for his entire life and that thing was golf. Adrienne first noticed him on the driving range smacking balls into the wild blue yonder. He was tall and freckled; he wore cleats and khakis and a visor. Adrienne met him a few nights later at a staff party where she tried to impress him by reciting the names of all the golfers she knew: Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Payne Stewart, Seve Ballesteros.