Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
East Hampton, New York, April 1998
ACT V: We Are Tossed Upon the Sea
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Southampton, New York, April 1998
Finale
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Greenwich Village, New York City, April 1998
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
About the Publisher
THE PHOTOGRAPH in Ella’s hand was about the size of a small, old-fashioned postcard. It had a matte finish, almost like newsprint, and the edges were soft and frayed, as you might expect from a photograph over seventy years old. From anything over seventy years old, really, but especially a photograph of a naked woman.
And what a woman.
She sloped along a Victorian chaise longue, wearing nothing but black stockings and ribbon garters, face turned upward to receive a fall of light from the sky. Miraculous breasts like large, white, dark-tipped balloons. Everything black and white, in fact, except her hair, which was carefully tinted red. Ella couldn’t stop staring at her. Nobody with a heartbeat could stop staring at that woman.
And it wasn’t her beauty that so transfixed you, because you couldn’t really see her face. It wasn’t even her incandescent figure, although that was the point of the photograph, wasn’t it? That figure. Ella couldn’t put a name to this mesmerizing force, except that it began somewhere beneath the milky skin of the woman herself and never really ended. You had the feeling that if you stared long enough, willed hard enough, she would turn her head toward you and say something fabulous. From the wall behind her hung a giant portrait, in which a painted version of the same woman languished on the same sofa, conveying all that sexual charisma in raw, awestruck, primitive brushstrokes. The title at the bottom said Redhead Beside Herself.
Ella turned on her side and traced the curve of the Redhead’s hip. No kidding, she thought. Her fingertips buzzed at the contact, but she was used to that, by now. On the bed beside her, Nellie lifted her head and growled softly, and Ella put out her other hand to soothe the dog’s ears.
“Nothing to worry about, honey,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
But the dog kept growling at the same low, loose pitch, and the photograph buzzed even harder beneath Ella’s fingers, like a dial turning right, until Ella forced herself to look up and saw the hands of the clock on the bedside table.
She rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling.
“Damn,” she said. “It’s time.”
BEFORE SHE HEADED UPTOWN to the offices of Parkinson Peters to get fired, Ella dressed herself carefully in her best charcoal-gray suit and black calfskin pumps. Mumma used to say you should dress for your worst moments as if they were your best. Dad said to scuttle the ship with flags flying. Probably they meant the same thing.
After a fine, cool Sunday, the weather had turned damp overnight, and the smell of urine and vomit stuck to the air of the Christopher Street subway station. Ella sidestepped a puddle of spilled, milky coffee on her way to her spot—directly across the tracks from a peeling movie advertisement—and tried to breathe through her mouth. The film starred Jeff Bridges, looking even more scruffy than usual, locked in some kind of arabesque with an actress dressed in a gladiator outfit. Ella had spent the last month of mornings trying to decide whether the two of them were bowling or ice skating. The question was driving her slowly insane, and now, as she stared at the distant object in Jeff’s hands that might or might not be a bowling ball, she thought, At least I won’t have to stare at that fucking movie poster anymore. After this morning, she could stand somewhere else on the platform, instead of the particular spot that would put her on the subway car nearest the exit turnstiles at Fiftieth Street, and stare at some other advertisement.
The rails sang. The train roared softly down the tunnel. Burst like an avalanche into the station a moment later, rippling the coffee puddle, and Ella stepped on board and creased her Wall Street Journal into long, vertical folds that doubled back on each other, just as if this were any kind of regular morning, and she was headed for the office. The electronic bell rang its double tone. The doors thumped shut, found some obstacle, thumped again. The train jerked into motion, and Ella, staring at the blur of words in the newspaper column before her, realized that she had no idea what the name of that movie was. Maybe she never would.
At the Fourteenth Street station, the train filled with Brooklynites transferring from the 2 and 3 trains, and Ella, who was already standing, ended up shoved against one of the center poles, pretending to read her vertically folded Wall Street Journal in the alleyway between two thick male arms, belonging to two men in identical navy suits who were probably not going to get fired this morning.
Fired. Canned. Let go. Laid off, dismissed, discharged. Sacked, if you were British. Query: If Ella were working in the London office of Parkinson Peters, would she be sacked? Or could she demand to get fired instead? She refolded the paper to feign reading the second column and decided she would so demand, damn it. You had the right to get axed on your own terms. The train lurched for no reason. Squealed to a stop in the blackened tunnel between Eighteenth Street and Twenty-Third Street. The lights died. The whir of ventilation vanished, and the sudden stillness was like the end of the world. Nobody moved. The whole car just went on staring at its darkened newspapers, staring at the dermatology advertisements on the train walls, staring at ears and hats and backpacks and necks, staring at anything but someone else’s stare. Sweating palms on metal poles, submitting to the close-packed indignity of the New York subway. There