FOUR

Sasha

On birthdays and holidays, special occasions when the wine was flowing, the family would linger over dinner and reminisce, telling stories of bad behavior and shenanigans over the years. Cord would talk about the time he and his high school friends got drunk, then lost, in Paris while they were supposed to be sketching at the Louvre on a class trip. Georgiana would talk about sneaking out after dark down at their club in Florida. They delighted in their flirtations with deviant behavior and cackled away, even when they all knew the stories by heart after dozens of retellings. Sasha loved hearing them, even the ones that were familiar, and she laughed and laughed, but she never contributed her own. She knew better than that. It was because her family stories made their craziest misadventures seem like a night sipping O’Doul’s at math camp.

The truth was, Sasha came from a very wild family. Her cousins were infamous in the small beach town outside Providence where she grew up, and most of them had only avoided mile-long rap sheets because her uncle happened to be the chief of police. For the most part, their antics were met with slaps on the wrist or warnings. But her cousins drunkenly stole Boston Whalers for joyrides, they stayed up all night snorting coke on houseboats in the bay, they crashed weddings at the mansions in Newport, and they claimed to drive better drunk than sober, an assertion countered by their dented fenders and broken fence posts. While Cord may have suffered a broken arm from a ski accident, Sasha’s cousin Brandon suffered a broken arm from falling off a second-floor balcony wasted on Jameson and NoDoz. It was just a different level of bad behavior. On rich people these exploits looked funny, but on Sasha’s family she knew they just looked trashy.

After the disaster that was Sasha’s engagement party—her older brother, Nate, was thrown out of the Explorer’s Club for trying to feed the stuffed polar bear a leg of lamb—she made her father read the entire family the riot act before the wedding, reminding them that their uncle was not the chief of the New York City Police, and that while they should feel free to act like complete buffoons and degenerates in Providence, they would be embarrassing Sasha in front of her new family with that sort of behavior at her wedding. The lecture was greeted with general merriment among her cousins—they loved nothing more than being reminded of outrageous past transgressions—and they proceeded to be utter lunatics at her reception, dismantling a floral arrangement to drink champagne out of a giant vase.

In spite of her family’s behavior (or, truthfully, partially because of it), Sasha loved her wedding. It was grand, it was elegant, and it was just wild enough to make sure nobody would ever forget it. The celebration was held at the Down Town Association, a private club on Pine Street founded by J. P. Morgan as an all-men’s club for bankers. Cord had lunch there several days a week, and they had attended champagne tastings and lectures there in the evenings—once even an Italian-themed dinner with wine pairings that was so boring Sasha accidentally got hammered on Barolo just to survive. The club was three floors of old-fashioned New York glamour, with sky-blue ceilings, dark wooden railings, a walk-in cigar humidor, and a massive marble barbershop in the back of the men’s room, where they filmed the Jodie Foster movie Inside Man.

Cord and Sasha fed each other cake, he swung her delighted mother around the dance floor (all those cotillion lessons as a boy paid off), and Sasha gamely tried to keep up with her father-in-law, who led her in a waltz to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Malcolm and Darley cut loose for once, Malcolm putting his tie around his forehead like a character in Animal House, and when a friend of the family got turned around on his way out of the men’s room and walked in on Cord’s business school roommate feeling up Sasha’s cousin in the barbershop, he laughed and told everyone it was the best party he’d been to in a decade.

Since Cord’s family paid for the wedding (a breach in tradition), Sasha insisted on paying for the honeymoon. She found a deal online for a resort in Turks and Caicos, a place right on the beach, where every suite had its own hot tub overlooking the ocean. She had briefly fantasized that they might get some kind of royal treatment as honeymooners, upgrades and rose petals on pillows, but when the resort van picked them up at the airport she quickly realized the entire place was full of couples like them. As they planned their wedding Cord had rolled his eyes at the “wedding factories,” complaining about the places that pumped through reception after reception, creating cookie-cutter celebrations that were no more special or individual than a suburban prom. Now she worried he would be turned off by a place that was so clearly a factory extension, but he was happily leafing through the resort booklet, planning tennis matches, bike rides, and dinner reservations.

While they had gone to a zillion friends’ weddings together, they hadn’t actually traveled much, and Sasha quickly realized they had entirely different views of what it meant to be on vacation. For Sasha, vacation meant putting on her swimsuit at dawn, walking to the beach, and moving only to get the occasional cold drink or salty snack. Cord apparently felt that vacation meant moving constantly, like a human Roomba, bouncing from one activity to the next. He chartered a boat to Middle Caicos so they could stomp through dark and gummy caves full of bats. He hired a pilot to take them for a noisy loop above the island in a helicopter. He drove them to the famous conch fritter restaurant and they downed the chewy fried lumps with icy bottles of Turk’s Head beer. On the last full day, Sasha begged Cord for the chance to just lie on the beach, and while he brought a mask and snorkel and explored the tiny reef out beyond the sand, she flopped on a warm towel and did absolutely nothing, letting her mind clear until it felt baked clean by the sun.

They had two bottles of champagne chilling in their suite and meant to drink them before they left. After roasting on the beach until sunset, they made their way back to the room, and on their way they stopped in each of the half dozen hotel pools for a dip. They were taking their final soak in a warm-water pool, an oversize Jacuzzi surrounded by hot pink bougainvillea, when another couple appeared through the flowers. They nodded hello and slipped into the water at the other end. They had just gotten married (of course) and were visiting from Boston. After five days alone, Sasha and Cord were feeling sociable, and soon it was dark and they were having so much fun talking that they invited the other couple back to their suite for drinks. They dripped their way from the giant resort Jacuzzi to the smaller one on the screened-in porch off their bedroom. Cord popped the champagne with a knife, a party trick he’d learned to do with a saber, and they all experienced the rapturous head high that comes from drinking bubbly on an empty stomach with borderline sunstroke. It was somewhere toward the end of the second bottle that the guy from Boston removed his wife’s bikini top and everything got weird. How had Sasha not realized what they had done? They had invited another couple to hang out, drunk and near naked, in their hotel suite and somehow not realized they were initiating a sex party? Cord, who possessed a mastery of handling awkward social situations rivaling that of a foreign diplomat, hastily mentioned dinner reservations, provided the topless wife with a bathrobe, and whisked them out into the warm evening. Alone, Sasha and Cord fell down laughing and swore to tell any friends who asked that they had survived their honeymoon with their marital vows intact, and no one need know more than that.

Sasha understood that Cord loved her, but he didn’t need her, and that might have been the most attractive thing about him. He was restrained in his expressions of affection—sure, he loved sex and he was unfailingly kind—but he didn’t say “I love you” every time they hung up the phone, he didn’t bring her flowers or presents without occasion, he didn’t tell her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was the way Sasha wanted it. After all the heartache of her first love, she was done with grand romantic gestures. She had seen the tumultuous underbelly of such passion.

Sasha had fallen in love in high school. His name was Jake Mullin but everyone just called him Mullin. They had known each other since they were eleven, placed in the same gifted and talented program at their public school, a classroom in a trailer near the parking lot. He made her nervous, and she spent years giving him a wide berth. It seemed like he was barely looked after. He never wore a jacket, and even in the snowy winter she remembered seeing him standing on the edge of the playground wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. His family lived across from the wharf in a peeling green house with iron railings, and while Sasha’s own mother packed her lunches with hearts drawn on napkins and plastic baggies full of popcorn made in the air popper, Mullin never seemed to have anything. He didn’t even carry a backpack. Sasha was older before she realized he ate the free lunch, lining up at the cafeteria turnstile holding the small, laminated card at his side.

Mullin could draw. She’d never noticed, never paid attention, but one day in high school she walked by his desk and saw a bird so realistic she gasped. Though Sasha could draw almost as well, it was because she took art seriously, spent all her free time in the school’s art studio, built all her electives around painting and ceramics classes. Mullin would spend English class carefully shading the detailed veins of a leaf and its stem and then, at the end of the period, crumple the paper in the trash.

They got together the summer before junior year. There was a reservoir someone had discovered in the next town at the end of a long dirt road just before the highway. The gate was locked, but if you parked, then hiked ten minutes along shady paths, you came to a breathtaking lake with a stone tower at the center. Sasha and her friends spent the whole summer with a big gang of kids, drinking beer and smoking pot on the edge of the water, skinny-dipping and jumping off the tower. She didn’t know exactly how it started, but over the course of two hot months she became increasingly aware of when he was swimming, when he was stretched out on a rock in the sun, and she wanted to be wherever he was. Their first kiss was out by the tower as they were treading water. When he pulled away, he laughed and said, “I’m probably going to drown if we don’t move this to the shore.”

After that they were never apart. Her brothers and cousins loved Mullin. He had a landscaping job and had saved up some money for a boat, a Boston Whaler. He took them out whenever they wanted, picking up a case of Coors Light and bags of chips so they could spend entire days anchored out by the sandbar drinking and swimming. Whatever that darkness was that had kept Sasha at bay when they were younger had dissipated, and they were inseparable during their junior and senior years, her parents even allowing him to sleep over at her house. It was unspoken among them that Mullin sometimes needed to get away from his own family. His father drank and his brother was a cokehead. Mullin shared a bedroom with his brother and would sometimes arrive at school looking exhausted and strained.

Mullin had less than she did but was generous to a fault. He always insisted on paying for things, sandwiches or drinks or gas when she stopped to fill the car. When he came for dinner at her house, he brought her mother gifts: three pounds of steak from the butcher shop, a paper sack full of corn, a white bag of apples. Sasha knew it was unusual that her parents let her boyfriend sleep over, so she tried to honor that kindness—they never had sex under their roof, instead sticking to the back of her car, the boat, the beach at night.

When Sasha got into art school, he took her to dinner to celebrate. They went to the nicer of the two pizza places in town, and since Mullin’s dad was friends with the waitress, she quietly slipped them two glasses of sticky red wine in heavy goblets. Sasha would be going to Cooper Union in New York, the best art school in the country, famous for having no tuition. Mullin hadn’t applied to art school. He wasn’t interested in drawing or painting; it was just something he did when he was bored. Instead, he would be going to the University of Rhode Island in the fall. He would live at home and commute, keeping his job at the landscaping company. He hadn’t applied anywhere else.

As the summer arrived and Sasha’s move to New York loomed, Mullin became increasingly irritable with her. They went to the movies one night, and Sasha ran into a guy from her French class who was working the concessions. She ordered popcorn and he replied in French that the popcorn was disgusting and sat in the glass case for weeks. She laughed and took it anyway. Mullin was silent for the whole movie, and when it was over, he marched back to her car without a word. As they drove home, he wouldn’t speak to her until, five miles from her house, he demanded she pull over. He screamed at her for flirting with someone in front of him, slamming his hand against the glove compartment. He got out and started walking home. Sasha drove alongside him for a while but finally gave up and left him to walk. Two days later he came by late at night, crying, and she forgave him.

He did the same thing when he came to visit her freshman fall. A guy on her hall dropped by to say hello, and Mullin freaked out that she was cheating on him. He punched the wall in her bathroom, breaking a tile and getting blood all over the floor. He left and then a couple days later started calling her to apologize. He called her over and over and over until she had to turn off her ringer. He went to her house and talked to her younger brother, Olly, who called her sobbing the next day. Her family was all on Mullin’s side. “You know he had a fucked-up home life,” they said. “He just loves you and you left him.”

He showed up at her dorm the next weekend, and she broke up with him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was intent on winning her back. He mailed her gifts, he had flowers delivered, he bought her a diamond promise ring that she knew he couldn’t afford. Sasha wanted to be done with him, wanted some space to move on and make friends and start a new life, but she couldn’t. She loved Mullin in spite of everything, and she also knew that she was all he had. When she pictured him sleeping in his bedroom, his brother awake and blasting music, his father trashed and knocking into the furniture, her heart broke. She had left and he had nowhere to go. They spent that winter fighting and making up, Mullin going into jealous rages and then wallowing in remorse. Sasha’s friends grew to hate him, her mother thought it best she end things, her brothers and cousins still even more committed than she was to making it work. When Mullin hit a guy for talking to Sasha at a party and she was caught in the scuffle, she was taken before the Cooper Union disciplinary committee and Mullin was barred from campus. For her that was the final straw. She was doing something she loved, she was set to graduate free of debt, and Mullin was fucking it up for her. She hardened her heart against him. It was over.

Her family couldn’t forgive her. They still saw Mullin all the time, still went out on his boat, still joined him for beers at the reservoir and the sandbar. When she was home for holidays, her brothers made a point of letting her know they were going out to meet him at Bluffview for dinner, at the Cap Club for drinks. When she brought home a new boyfriend two years later, they gave the guy the cold shoulder and, because he had hair past his ears, referred to him as “the hippie” to his face. When the guy broke up with her a few weeks later, she could hardly blame him. Who would want to get involved with a family like hers?

Ten years later, Sasha still saw Mullin when she was home visiting her parents. He was still best friends with her brothers, still came over to watch the Super Bowl, took them out on his boat—now a bigger and better Whaler. He had his own landscaping business, he was doing well for himself, but instead of moving on he clung to Sasha’s family as if it were his own. Sasha didn’t know if his father still lived in the peeling green house. She made a point of never asking. Mullin had irrevocably changed something between her and her brothers, but also in how she thought about love. She had seen what all-consuming passion looked like, how it felt to ride the currents of intense adoration and fury, and she didn’t want it. She wanted someone stable, someone easy, someone who loved her but not enough to lose himself entirely.