Willow (DeBeers 1)

Suddenly, I felt guilty, and not because I had made love to him again. It was more of a selfchastisement over losing direction. purpose. It was the wrong time to fall in love. I was like a teenage girl passing notes in class to the boy on whom she had developed this great crush when the teacher notices and gets angry that she wasn't paying attention to the lesson... only I was the teacher.

Nothing could have brought it home to me more than what I saw after I got undressed for bed and went to the balcony door to close the curtain.

There she was again.

My mother.

On the dock, swinging

her lantern in the night.

Looking for the dream she had been promised.

14

Painted into a Corner

.

Thatcher left a message for me in the morning

that he had to go to a negotiation at an office in Jupiter Beach and would call me later in the day. Just like yesterday, after I had breakfast and came downstairs. I found the house empty and quiet. Bunny and Asher had apparently had another one of their late nights. How people could spend so much of their lives going from one party or recreational activity to another without ever doing very much that was substantial was a mystery to me. Weren't they ever tired of seeing the same people, saying the same things, eating the same food? I bet neither Asher nor Bunny had ever gone into the kitchen and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. With service people everywhere, servants coming out of the woodwork, and business managers handling every single financial concern, what did they do for themselves beside seek ways to be entertained? It was not hard to see why one of the most feared things here was boredom,

Still. I knew lots of people who would say. "Give me the chance to be frivolous. I'll risk fighting boredom as the biggest challenge of my life any day." Who knows. I wondered, maybe they were right and I was wrong. Maybe the rest of us were like the mythical Sisyphus, pushing boulders up a steep hill only to have them roll back down whenever we got too close to the top. We were cursed with endless ambition. The only ambition Bunny and Asher seemed to have was finding a new caterer for their upcoming weekend extravaganza.

I was nervous this morning. I hadn't told Thatcher that I had agreed to go sailing with Linden to his private bay. I was sure he would have been upset enough not only to insist I didn't go but to speak to Linden as well, and that would only have made things terrible just when I was succeeding in entering our mother's world. I really had no choice if I wanted to continue to win his trust.

He hadn't forgotten. He was waiting for me, and not in a pair of old jeans and a well-worn sweatshirt; he was actually wearing what looked like a relatively new sailing outfit, including a cap. I sensed that this wasn't something he did often. His smile of anticipation set off the wind chimes in my head, little alarms of panic.

"Everything we need is already in the sailboat." he called as I started toward him. "And what a beautiful day. Perfect sailing wind. I brought along lunch. too. I thought you might enjoy doing

something different," he said, nodding toward the house and adding. "different from that. It's just something simple,: he said when I didn't react. 'Good bread, cheeses, some wine. If you don't want to, it's all right,' he followed, practically leaping on my small hesitation. "I just thought you might like it."

"No, no, it's fine. Linden. I just didn't want to dominate your day,'"

"Dominate my day?" He laughed. "I don't think of days anymore, or weeks or months. Time just seems to run together for me. My mother usually has to remind me what day it is, sometimes even what month."

We stopped on the dock.

"Well, here she is my yacht." he said. It's nothing at all like the speedboat Thatcher was driving. This is just a twelve-foot, gaff-rigged wooden sailboat. All that's left of the Montgomery navy, I'm afraid."

It didn't look all that much bigger than a rowboat to me. "Is it safe to go out far with it?" I asked,

"The Vikings crossed the Atlantic in a boat not much more than twice the size of this. I'm a good sailor,: he added. "Better than Thatcher. I grew up here on this beach, on this ocean, while he was enjoying the high life, but if you don't feel as safe with me as you felt with him, that's fine. Forget it." he said abruptly.

He was so explosive, like a decanter of nitroglycerin just waiting to be nudged off the table so it could hit the floor and blow up everything around it. One wrong word, one wrong expression, even a sigh in the wrong place, could send him pounding away, his head down, his arms flying up like some hermit charmed out of his cave rushing back to the safety of his silent darkness.

"No, no," I said quickly. "I have no doubt you're a wonderful sailor. I was just curious. I don't know anything about sailing.'

"If you don't know anything about sailing, then how do you know I'm wonderful at it?" he asked.

I shook my head and smiled at him.

"What?"

"Let's just say I'm psychic and leave it alone. Linden."

Even he had to smile at that. "Okay, okay." he said. "Let's go, then."