A very inconvenient scan.., p.11
A Very Inconvenient Scandal, page 11
“I don’t get all that stuff. You’re one of those genius kids.”
“Hardly. I had to work hard for every grade I got, Carlotta.”
“Wonder is wonder. Maybe scientists just call it one thing, and saints call it another thing.”
“That’s possible,” Frankie said.
“It’s nice of you that you didn’t get insulting on me. When people believe something you don’t believe, they insult you. When they have a dollar more than you have in your jeans, they insult you. I’ve had it happen more times than you can shake a stick at. I think it makes them feel powerful.” She added, “People must say you are like Mack. But I would not say that. You’re like your mom. She had a graceful spirit. That was it, a graceful spirit to all the strays. She was above the pack and she could have acted like that, but she never did. There was always room at the table.”
It was a pretty insightful thing to say. There was just something about Carlotta... Frankie guessed that this was what people meant by charisma. It was more than looks or brains or sexual alchemy, more even than charm.
“Ariel says you stayed right at her side all those years.”
Aware that the door was again ajar, Frankie said, “I hope so.”
“But now everything is tied up in knots for you two.”
“Things have changed.”
“But Ariel hasn’t changed. She’s the same girl she was before the wedding.”
That was precisely what Penn had said; but that simple-seeming affirmation ignored a whole universe of choices and emotions. “That’s like saying nothing we do changes us. In those stories, they always say, he was a nice kid, he was quiet and polite, he kept to himself, but then one day, he kills his whole family. Was he still that quiet, polite kid the day after?” Carlotta looked down at her hands, turning palms up, palms down. There was nothing she could say. The prudent choice was to let Frankie double back on her own absurd comparison. “It’s not as though she did anything bad. But she did something wrong. And she didn’t have the decency to tell me. So now I can’t trust her.”
“What would happen if you do?”
“It’s too big a risk.”
“So if you trust her again, she could hurt you.”
Frankie said, “Exactly.”
“But she already hurt you. You already don’t trust her. All you risk is finding out that you were right.”
Frankie shrugged.
As Carlotta left, she turned back to thank Frankie for the promise of the photos. “Could I come back to visit sometime?” she asked, and Frankie told her of course.
After she left, Gil emerged from the bedroom. One of his greatest joys on earth was to sleep in the sunlight, and he had been doing just that, supine on their bed washed in the honeyed light of the eastward-facing window. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, Frankie,” he said. “But around here, you’d have to be standing out on a sandbar to avoid overhearing some domestic melodrama.”
“I forgot you were there.”
“Not to mention, if she had been here five more minutes, my bladder would have burst.”
“What are you up to?”
“Actually, I don’t know if you remembered, but my mother is coming on Tuesday... I didn’t know what we should do around here...”
To her shame, Frankie had indeed forgotten. For their wedding, it had once been understood that Mrs. Beveque would stay in the bigger house, but with Carlotta hosting barbecues and Frankie’s grandfather now staying on for Frankie’s wedding and the upcoming birth of his grandson, Tall Trees seemed to have shrunk. Their cottage did have two small bedrooms upstairs, which would give Mrs. Beveque more privacy. But Frankie now worried aloud about the stairs, how long the water took to get hot in the bathroom up there, her having to come down whenever she wanted a cup of tea... Mrs. Beveque—Frankie realized she didn’t know her first name—was staying just over two weeks with them, while the rest of the family, his brothers and a close cousin, would arrive two days before the wedding and leave two days afterward.
“She’s Canadian, Frankie. She’s used to a bit of a chill,” Gil said. “And she’s only sixty years old. Her knees are better than mine. I’ll go get one of those electric kettles and a box of Builder’s tea and some biscuits and put it all on a tray up there. She’ll be happy as a queen. I actually prefer to have her here. I would have asked you sooner, but I didn’t know if Americans thought family staying with them was too much...”
“Not at all! And if other Americans thought that, I wouldn’t. But you’re okay with your brothers and their families being at the beach club?”
“Luc and Jeanne say the little girls are making all the children at school hate them saying, we are going to stay in a grand hotel by the sea. If we put them anywhere else, they would consider it child neglect.”
“And they know that my dad is picking up the tab...”
“The tab?”
“Paying for it.” Gil nodded as Frankie said, “That is, in fact, something Americans do. The bride’s family provides for the guests.”
“They’re grateful. These boys aren’t surgeons. Luc’s a primary-school teacher, and Olivier runs the bakery with my father and mother.” Since the Boulangerie Beveque had recently expanded to a second store, Gil’s father, Thomas, regretfully remained behind, promising to join them for Christmas and the birth of the baby. One of the brothers would phone him in for the ceremony, so he could at least make a toast.
“So you’re the big success story.”
“That’s what all the girls say.”
“When you’re out, buy her...flowers and something pretty...a pretty robe or...not one for a lumberjack, not flannel, something silky, ivory or lavender. Get some big fluffy bath towels. And get things she likes for breakfast, because most of the dinners will be at restaurants or some fish-boil thing my father has some caterer coming to do. And make sure you—”
“I’ve got it all under control.”
After he left, Frankie called Ellabella and asked if they could possibly do their photo shoot the following day, since she was preparing for guests. If she waited any longer, until after their wedding, the weather was sure to turn on them. It was benevolent now, low in the seventies with a powder-blue napkin of sky. She would be happy, Frankie thought, to get back in the water however briefly. Though she paddled in the pool daily, she hadn’t been in salt water since she arrived back home the month before. Ellabella agreed to let Frankie photograph her glorious bod, both in the pool and in the salt pond, in exchange for the completion of their chat. She told Frankie she’d spoken about her with some of her professors, to several collectors of her photos, to one of her grade-school teachers (Mrs. Firth, fourth grade), to her aunts and grandmother. About this last Frankie knew because Granny Becky had called to complain. “She’s very inquiring all right. That’s Kitty Steinway’s daughter, isn’t it? I turned it around on her. I asked her if she thought your work and your father’s work on behalf of ocean creatures was valid, when human children are hungry.”
On a day so still and hot for fall that even the birds seemed breathless, Ellabella showed up, announcing herself ready for her close-up. “Will people be able to tell it’s me?”
“Yep,” Frankie said.
“Oh good. So it’s not going to be, you know, pornography?”
“High art,” Frankie reassured her. “But I will let you see the photos and most of the time we can eliminate anything that makes you uncomfortable. I say most of the time, because if I really love something, I might fight you on it, which is where you have an advantage over a Royal gramma fish or a reef shark. They have to take what they get. This is the real reason that I don’t photograph humans. I’m going to pretend you’re a mermaid.”
That was how she looked underwater. In traditional mer-lore, mermaids were supposed to be fierce and bloodthirsty predators, who wanted sailors not for kissing but for devouring, anything but the sexy little jollypops of Disney movies. Still, Ellabella looked like a creature of two worlds, a long pale petal of light poured into the darker medium, her blond hair arrayed around her head like a coronet. Sinking beneath her, Frankie focused upward at Ellabella’s arched and outstretched form, betting on the position of the sun, which, in the later images, seemed to burst from the woman’s shoulders, as if she were falling from the water into the sky.
She felt good to have her trusty Sony A7R back in her hands. In its Nauticam housing, it was the best combination of camera and protector she had ever used, including all the ones she’d borrowed for an hour to try. Some of her cameras were older, some newer, all except one secondhand, and she always brought at least one extra, both so that she could switch to wide-angle shots, but also in case something on her primary rig failed. When she could, she employed a local dive guide to carry extra gear, her snoots and fluorescent filters.
No race car driver ever babied his rig more obsessively. Her small climate-controlled dry cabinet went with her everywhere she traveled and, though she jumped from boats into freezing water, was tossed end over end by waves, beslimed in mud and sand, when she finished each day, no matter how exhausted or even bruised she was, she went through the obsessive ritual of swabbing and housing her camera and paid to have it lab-cleaned every couple of months.
It took Frankie forty minutes to get what she wanted, and then the two of them just drifted, lying splayed across floats, Ellabella naked and Frankie in her underwear. Frankie wanted to know when the story about her would appear and Ellabella said it was scheduled for the magazine insert cover in two weeks’ time. “I have to ask you about your father and Ariel, you know. You can just refuse to talk about it if you want, but, honestly, if I were you, I’d just say something plain that wouldn’t open a can of worms.”
“That’s not fair, though. That’s about my father, it’s not about me.”
“But your father is who he is. And strictly speaking, you wouldn’t be who you are if he wasn’t who he is.”
“The jury might still be out on that.”
“I want to say that you would not be who you are without Mack.”
“I had Beatrice too,” I said. “And she was really the force behind the Saltwater Foundation and all the grassroots projects and community-based research that it pays for. She loved the sea and sea animals.”
“But she was primarily a painter. Not a wildlife biologist. Not someone who could put together what people could really do for the animals in their rivers and oceans.”
One of Saltwater’s defining characteristics had always been the small grants it awarded to unlikely activists. In Bangalore, the so-called crane keepers were children who quietly reported on tourists who might put too much photographer’s pressure on the revered Sarus cranes: the keepers could redeem their tokens for books and bicycles. Saltwater donated lavish kits for elementary-school teachers to study sea-otter awareness and then sponsored field trips to aquariums and other marine institutions vested in protecting the creatures. The organization gave stipends to Mexican fishermen to take several seasons off and allow populations of rare porpoises to recover. The companies that supported Saltwater, many of them family-owned businesses, liked the small, specific, hands-on nature of the projects and the fact that the efforts could be self-sustaining once they were set up. Ariel’s gift for connecting the right people with the right cause was in no small part to thank for the foundation’s prospering. That was much on Frankie’s mind as she tried to shape an answer to Ellabella’s question. “How much does anyone understand someone else’s marriage? It’s certainly easy to see that my father and Ariel are happy. And I suppose that there are plenty of relationships where the people don’t have as much in common.”
“Good,” Ellabella said. “That’s what I meant. People can take from it whatever they want. You could be saying the same thing about peanut butter and jelly.” She lay still. “What do you find underwater? Give me one word. Two words.”
“Silence,” Frankie said. “And color. You know how it is when you see a shell and it’s silver and lavender and orange? Then it dries out and it’s just a shell? That’s what I mean.” She added that it wasn’t really silent underwater, telling Ellabella that sperm whales made clicking noises so loud that above the surface they couldn’t even be processed by your ears as sound: some said those clicks could blow out a human eardrum.
At that moment, Penn came trudging up from the pier with a load of muddy slickers and boots slung over one shoulder. “Whoa! No!” he cried when he caught sight of the two of them. Both women quickly rolled into the water neck-deep. “Think about it, Ellabella. You go your whole life trying not to be a pervert and think about other people’s sex lives, so then, in a couple of weeks, the sex-lives smorgasbord is delivered straight to your own backyard.”
“I can quote you on that, right?” she said. “Come on, Penn! I’m a divorced woman now, and you know what kinds of shenanigans they get up to.”
“Not to mention the other person in the pond is my sister.”
As Penn began sluicing the boots and coats with the power spray from the hose, Ellabella said, “I hear that Ariel and Mack and Penn have a new roommate.”
“How the hell do you hear news like that? And who would care?”
“Don’t be silly, Frankie. Ariel’s mother is kind of a celebrated character even among a big cast of characters around here.” Ellabella swam to the edge of the pond and hoisted herself out with toned shoulders, flashing Penn before she pulled one of the ragged beach towels around her like a sarong. He pointed the power nozzle of the hose at her before shaking his head and turning back to his task. “He’s so cute. Maybe I should... Would you mind?”
“My brother’s romances are entirely his affair. As it were.”
“She had an affair with my father.”
Frankie had to briefly orient herself and backtrack through that cast of characters. So far as she knew, Kenny and Kitty had been married since people lived in trees. Ellabella had two older brothers and one younger brother indistinguishable from Kenny and from each other, all chiseled from the same block of New England granite, and then this swan.
Ellabella added, “And with your father.”
Frankie rolled on to the bank, toweling herself thoroughly and roughly, slipping quickly into her sweatshirt and the pair of Gil’s jeans that would still close around her middle. She shoved her feet into the ragged sneakers she’d cut open to fit her swollen feet. “That’s not even remotely possible, but before I say anything to you, or even ask a single question, you have to promise me that not one word of this is going into some article that is apparently only incidentally about my work...”
“I would never...”
“Because even if all of that was just a rumor, if it got out, it would break Ariel’s heart.”
“And you so care about breaking Ariel’s heart.”
Frankie leveled her eyes and drilled into Ellabella’s. “I think you need to leave now. You had me fooled for a minute there. But you haven’t changed. Small-town gossip. That’s the perfect medium for you, Ellabella.”
Ella literally reached out and took Frankie’s arm. Frankie shook off her hand.
“I apologize. First of all, I give you my word that none of this gossip, and it is gossip, would ever go into anything I write. But not because I want to hide it, or because I’m sucking up to you. It’s because it’s not relevant to this story. I take this seriously. I’m going to do it for my life, hopefully not stuck on this suffocating little island. Second, I have changed. I’m not that mean, spoiled girl I was when we were in high school. And third, maybe most important, would you really prefer I not tell you the things people say, Frankie? Like, if I don’t say it, it won’t be true?”
“I just don’t care.”
“But you do care,” Ellabella said staunchly. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be mad.”
“You have such deep insights now. Who would have thought?”
“You’re just killing the messenger.”
Frankie turned away to look out across the ruffling surface of the ocean...never the same for an hour...and what occurred to her was: Why did she think that Gil would be unlike these other men? Why did she believe her own story would be a different story? Ellabella was speaking and Frankie turned back, ashamed for snapping at her. As it transpired, the Ballengers had separated when Kenny wanted to sell their Boston town house and build a bigger place here. Kitty thought it would be a living death. Kenny was sick of Kitty’s status-seeking: he told her that she could not will herself into being Back Bay no matter how hard she tried, she would always be a girl who grew up in Dorchester. The standoff lasted a long time, which was why Ellabella’s two brothers were so much older. She was the symbol of her parents’ reconciliation, followed closely by one final brother to seal the deal. But while Kenny was on his own, living at the beach club, he’d eaten dinner every night in the bar where the fiery bartender kept everyone’s spirits up, singing Patsy Cline along with the jukebox as the night went long.
A friend of the family.
“Okay, you’re right,” she admitted. “So what happened with my...with Mack?”
“I don’t know if this is true, but according to her—”
“You asked Carlotta?”
“She volunteered it, Frankie. Can you imagine a situation where I said Hey, did you ever happen to sleep with the old man your daughter just married?”
“That is so, so, so creepy when you put it that way,” Frankie said. “And how could it be, anyhow? My mom was just out of college when they got married.”
“Same setup. I guess he was just getting started at the college, young professor, ate at the beach club on Saturday nights when he couldn’t stand the cafeteria food...”
