The Castaways

ADDISON

T here was only an inch or so left in the second bottle of Mersault. Both Addison and Andrea were quite drunk, but despite the raw and emotionally treacherous nature of their discussion, they were having a good time. Or maybe it was just Addison having a good time. He and Andrea had stopped talking, but they were listening to jazz, bobbing their heads, and Andrea, while not exactly smiling, had softened her exasperated expression.

She said, “Tell me why you got kicked out of Princeton.”

“Ah,” Addison said. “The Princeton story.”

“Ed says it’s a great story.”

“But it’s just that—a story. I didn’t actually get kicked out of Princeton. I just didn’t graduate with my class because I was short on math credits.”

“Tell the story anyway.”

And so he obliged. The week before graduation, Addison and his buddy Blake Croft crashed a garden party that the dean was throwing for donors to the annual fund. Addison and Blake wore straw boaters and pastel dinner jackets. They drank Mount Gay and tonics and ate oysters from the raw bar to improve their virility. The dean, recently divorced, was at the party with an extremely beautiful and extremely young woman named Nadine. Nadine targeted Addison, engaged him in a private, racy conversation, and then led him by the hand to the powder room, where they… Here Addison wiggled his eyebrows, but Andrea did not crack a smile. Addison, in his defense, did ask Nadine about the dean, and she said, “Oh, he’s an old fuddy-duddy.” Addison happened to agree.

When Nadine and Addison emerged from the powder room, disheveled and glowing, the dean was standing there, waiting in line.

“But that wasn’t the bad part,” Addison said.

“What was the bad part?” Andrea deadpanned.

“Nadine wasn’t the dean’s date,” Addison said. “It was his daughter.”

“Oh,” Andrea said, nonplussed.

Addison shook his head. He was very drunk. Perhaps he’d told it wrong.

Andrea said, “Did that story teach you anything?”

“Yeah,” Addison said. “It taught me to be careful about women.”

“But not really,” Andrea said.

“But not really,” Addison said.

There was a clatter at the door. Phoebe and the Chief swung in.

“We’re home!” Phoebe sang out. She looked at the Chief. “Your wife is here.”

Andrea stood up and straightened the skirt of her red dress. “Nightcap,” she said. “And a little bonding. Addison just told me what happened at Princeton.”

“What happened at Princeton?” Phoebe said.

“I’m exhausted,” Andrea said. “I need my pillow.”

“God, me too,” Phoebe said.

The Chief took Andrea’s hand. “I missed you,” he said.

“And I missed you,” she said.

“And I missed you,” Phoebe said to Addison. She crossed the room and fell into his lap. She was quite drunk. She might have been drunker than he was. “Did you miss me?”

“I missed you,” he said.

In the chilly, dark depth of their middle-of-the-night bedroom, Addison and Phoebe made love for the first time in over nine months.

Addison felt Phoebe climb on top of him; he felt her shift her hips and breasts, he felt her mouth on his neck and her hands rubbing up and down his sides, and before he knew it, he was responding. He could not believe what was happening; he could not believe this hot, sweet, hungry person was his wife. She had been this way once, but that was a long time ago. This, right now, did not feel like a rediscovery, not just like riding a bike; it was as though another woman had sneaked into his room to entice him.

“Phoebe?” he said, just to be sure.

“Please?” she said. She thought he would turn her down. He had turned her down earlier in the summer. But tonight it was okay.

Why? He would wonder this only later, once he lay breathless and spent and Phoebe drifted off to her contented dreams. It had to do with the obvious: he had told the truth to Andrea. He had shared the burden, he felt lighter, and this was, he realized, the first step in letting Tess go and getting on with his life. Phoebe was his life. Then there was the other part of the night to account for. Phoebe’s benefit, a gorgeous, elegant affair, and her incredibly generous, surprisingly appropriate and touching announcement: a nature walk named after Tess and Greg. It was a magnificent gesture. The naming of the trail was a great, good thing that Phoebe had done. It accepted Tess and Greg’s deaths instead of trying to escape the reality.

So on a night that included accepting and honoring, letting go and moving on, Addison and Phoebe found each other, again.