Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

“Give yourself a chance to settle in,” India said. “Please?”

Birdie exhaled smoke, said nothing. Her eyes were far away.

D ay two.

That night, I left the Bowery Ballroom with Michael, and Rhonda left with Nick. My heart was sliced and diced like an onion, or maybe not that neatly. I liked Michael, I did. On paper, he was perfect for me. He was what I thought I’d always been looking for: an Ivy League scholar-athlete with plans to conquer the world. He would, someday, be rich and successful; he would pass on his excellent genes to our children. He was earnest and kind. But I desired Nick; I knew that the first night. Nick was chocolate and cigarettes and whiskey and danger, everything I should stay away from. I asked Michael about him in the taxi to my apartment. He had always been in trouble, Michael said. His life lacked a clear direction. He had barely graduated from high school, and then it took him seven years to get through Penn State. He played the guitar in bars in State College; he recorded an album with a band, then the band broke up. He currently lived in a studio on 121st Street. The apartment was paid for by their parents, but Nick didn’t have any money for furniture, or the cable bill, or food. He spent whatever he made on new guitars, on recording space, on expensive equipment for rock climbing, which was his second obsession after music. But the new band, Diplomatic Immunity, was good, it was great. Nick had to hold steady and not blow it. He drank a lot and he was temperamental. Michael worried about him.

I nodded. “Mmmmm,” I said. Nick, as expected, was not the brother I should be after.

But I wanted him.

I was distraught that Nick had left the bar with Rhonda. Rhonda was irresistible and I couldn’t stand the thought of Nick and Rhonda, together, a floor below me. But as it was, Rhonda reported that Nick had been a gentleman. He delivered her to the lobby of the building but wouldn’t escort her up. (“Which sucked!” Rhonda said. “What better way to end the evening than with some really hot rock-star sex?”) He kissed Rhonda at the elevator bank, then left without asking for her number.

“I think he was kind of into you,” Rhonda said. “He asked me a lot of questions about you.”

“Me?” I said.

I started seeing Michael. I liked Michael. We had fun together. We jogged together after work, then went out for Vietnamese food. I cooked for him in my apartment. He was a good eater, he appreciated the ingredients and the technique, he helped me in the kitchen. We liked the same movies; we started reading the same books and talking about them. He was romantic-he sent me flowers, he took me to Café des Artistes, he made coffee and brought me a cup in bed. He was a good lover, considerate, earnest, eager to please. Too eager? I thought about Nick in bed more times than I cared to admit. I wanted to smolder. There was no smoldering with Michael. With Michael, sex was clean and athletic.

Michael met my parents and it was a tremendous success. My father loved him. My father would not have loved Nick.

I met Michael’s parents. This happened in their house in New Jersey, and Nick was there. He was in jeans and a paint-splattered T-shirt; to earn some money, he was painting the upstairs bedrooms of his parents’ house. This was the first time I had seen Nick since that night at the club, but Michael had a Diplomatic Immunity poster framed and mounted on his kitchen wall, so Nick stared at me and I stared at Nick as I made Michael dinner and as I ate my eggs in the morning.

I said to Nick, “It’s nice to see you again.”

He said, “It’s nice to see you. ” Again, the penetrating stare. He wanted me, I was sure of it, but then not sure at all. I felt lucky to be liked by Michael. I wasn’t vain or confident enough to believe that I could be attractive to Nick, too.

That dinner was tense, and it had nothing to do with Cy and Evelyn. Cy and Evelyn were easy, they were delightful, they liked me, I could tell, and I liked them. I answered all their questions correctly; I got a gold star. Nick stared at me. I would look at him and his eyes would hold me like I was in his arms.

The tension was present between Michael and Nick. They sniped at each other all through dinner. Nick called Michael a corporate ass kisser and Michael called Nick a ne’er-do-well nitwit sponge. Cy and Evelyn didn’t seem to notice, or maybe they did notice and were just used to it. As Evelyn was clearing the plates, she let it slip that the reason Nick’s nose was crooked was that Michael had punched him in the face, back when they were in high school.

I gasped. “Why?” I said.

Michael and Nick didn’t answer. They were glowering at each other.

Evelyn answered from the kitchen, “They were fighting over some girl.”

Before dessert, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and I wandered down the long hallway looking at pictures of Michael and Nick and Dora as children. I loved the eighties hair and clothes, Michael in his lacrosse uniform, Nick in his corduroy suit, his nose straight and perfect. I found the powder room. It was elegant and refined, much like the powder room in Birdie’s house. There was a bowl of soap meant to look like river rocks.

When I opened the powder room door, Nick was standing there. I was startled. He kissed me. His lips were warm, salty, tangy. Then he pulled away. He said, “You taste just like I dreamed you would.” And he disappeared into some nether part of the house. He didn’t reappear for the chocolate mousse. I didn’t see him again that night.

Chess threw the notebook across the attic. It skidded under the dresser, disturbing who knew how many spiders. The confession was hurting, not helping. Robin was a quack.

A few seconds later, Chess lifted herself out of bed to retrieve the notebook and put it back between the mattress and box spring. She didn’t want Tate to find it.

Robin and her medical degree had told Chess that the most important thing to do upon her arrival on Tuckernuck was to establish a routine. The routine should not be complicated or stressful. This made Chess laugh. Nothing on Tuckernuck was complicated or stressful; it was simple and boring.

Still, she tried. Chess woke up between nine and ten in the morning, at which point Tate had already been awake for three hours, run around the island and done six hundred sit-ups hanging by her knees from the tree branch, taken a shower, eaten a robust breakfast prepared by their mother, changed into her bikini, put on lotion, and made her way to the beach. Tate urged Chess to join her.

“I’ll be down in a little while,” Chess said. She brushed her teeth and oozed down the stairs like a slug, still in her nightgown. Sleeping in didn’t make a person feel good; it made a person feel slovenly. Birdie always lingered in the kitchen long after everyone else had finished breakfast so that she could make Chess’s breakfast fresh and it would be hot. And what did Chess do by way of thanks? She picked at her food and let some drop to the ground on purpose, where the ants would get it. After not eating breakfast, Chess returned to the sweltering attic, where she wrote her confession in the notebook.

She then put on her bathing suit, trying to ignore the fact that her body was changing in the most unfair way. She was skeletal in the rib cage, and her breasts were shrinking. The skin at the sides of her breasts, which used to be taut, was slack; she could pull at it. And yet, Chess’s ass didn’t fit in her bikini bottom properly; she had to pull at it to keep the suit secure. The Tuckernuck house had no full-length mirror-in fact, the house had no mirrors at all except for the badly tarnished mirror above the bathroom sink-which was a good thing because Chess was, for the first time in her life, ugly. Her hair was gone. Each morning, she woke up thinking she had long, silken hair, the envy of every woman she had ever met, only to discover that her head was as scruffy as a vacant lot. Her scalp itched. This led to further thoughts: It didn’t matter if she was ugly. She loved only one man and that was Nick, and Nick was gone. And Michael was dead. Dead? No. But yes. She hated thinking. She needed to stanch her mental bleeding.