So what if it wasn’t a big, fancy dream house? It was on Cape Ann, and she could smell the ocean. At night she would hear foghorns and halyards, and it was only a short bike ride to Good Harbor beach.
Maybe she and Frank would start cycling again. They had taken bike trips all over New England when they’d first met, making love in cheap little motels, eating peanut butter sandwiches every day for lunch. People sometimes took them for brother and sister, because they both had dark hair and gray eyes. Maybe they could take a little trip while Nina was at camp this summer.
Or maybe she would take a watercolor class, and Nina could come along with her.
No matter what, Joyce promised herself, this house would be her own private writers’ colony. She would get up early every morning and write five pages. And not a sequel to Magnolia’s Heart, either. This book would have her real name on the cover.
Joyce Tabachnik didn’t sound like the name of a romance novelist. So she had had no objection when her agent suggested a pseudonym; after all, this book was just a means to an end. She and her journalist friends had complained for years about their finances and vowed that someday they’d write a mystery or a thriller that would pay their kids’ college tuition and buy them early retirement in the south of France. Joyce’s dream was a house on Cape Ann — her favorite place on earth, less than an hour’s drive north of Boston but still somehow off the tourist track.
On her fortieth birthday, Joyce had gotten depressed. “I am such a cliché,” she had moaned into her pillow. She wanted a dramatic change in her life, but what? She couldn’t bear the idea of revisiting the high-tech hell of infertility medicine for a second child. And, as she told her book group, years of freelance freedom had ruined her for the office politics that go with a “real” job. She decided that a house by the sea would cure what ailed her, so between assignments for Parent Life (“How to Tell If Your Baby Is a Brat”) and AnnaLise (“Who Fakes Orgasm and Why”), she devoted Tuesdays and Thursdays to writing a romance novel.
Romances were a secret pleasure she had acquired during the last trimester of her pregnancy with Nina, when a near-hemorrhage had landed her in the hospital on bed rest. One sleepless night, a nurse had loaned her a few old Silhouette paperbacks, and she was immediately hooked on the fast-lane plots, the dependable triumph of good over evil, and the sex, which was a little rough but always satisfying.
For years, she made a Memorial Day ritual out of shopping for a bathing suit for her daughter, a new tube of sunscreen, and a pile of well-thumbed paperbacks from a malodorous thrift store in downtown Waltham. She read them all, fitfully, while Nina played on the beach. But once Nina turned nine and started going to day camp, Joyce set aside the bodice rippers and joined a book group dedicated to reading serious literature.
Even so, she never stopped searching for the right premise for her romance novel. Nina’s fourth-grade Black History Month report on women and slavery provided the setting. Joyce read all the women’s slave narratives she could find, engineered a family vacation to Charleston, South Carolina, and studied the cuisine of the Old South, as well as the layered striptease of nineteenth-century lingerie: wrappers, corsets, crinolines, bloomers, petticoats, shifts.
Her heroine was Magnolia Dukes. The blue-black daughter of an African prince, Magnolia survived her master’s various cruelties, learned to read, and triumphed in love with Jordan LeMieux, the second son of a down-and-out white landowner. Magnolia was wild and brave in ways that Joyce hadn’t planned. Frank confessed to being shocked by the violence (especially the beheading), the vertiginous foreplay, the operatic orgasms.
Joyce took Frank’s discomfort as a good sign, which was confirmed by an enthusiastic phone call from the first literary agent she tried. Mario Romano III, a local man, new to the business, actually brought a copy of his birth certificate to their introductory lunch, just to prove that his name was no figment of a genre-fevered imagination. For Joyce, he suggested a nom de romance at that first meeting. “Any ideas?” he asked over salad in Harvard Square. She shrugged.
Mario, short, dark, and very handsome, offered a method reputedly used by drag queens to concoct stage names: combine the name of your first pet with the street you lived on as a kid.
“That would make me Cleo Lehigh,” said Joyce.
“Very nice,” Mario said. “Was Cleo a dog or a cat?”
“Parakeet.”
Mario nodded. “Nice to meet you, Cleo.” He raised his glass.
Within a few months, they had a modest but respectable offer, with an option for three more Magnolia titles. And when Lifetime
TV bought the rights to produce a miniseries, Joyce’s Cape Ann fantasy shifted from pipe dream to Plan A.
Frank, always cautious about their finances, wanted to put the entire windfall into IRAs and bond funds. After months of arguing, he finally conceded that seaside real estate would be a solid investment, too. There was no disagreement about where to focus their search on Cape Ann; both preferred Gloucester to Rockport, which seemed too Waspy for a family of Tabachniks. A remnant of Gloucester still fished for a living, and the city smelled of it.
Which is how Joyce came to be standing in a ten-by-twelve-foot living room covered in blue cornflower wallpaper, staring out at the neatly raked yard.
“Oh, shit,” she said, feeling her mood suddenly plummet.
What on earth had she done? Joyce and Frank hadn’t gone cycling for ten years. Nina would never agree to a painting class with her mother; her daughter was a jock, not an artist. And spending time alone here would only prove that Joyce couldn’t write “serious” fiction.
She was a cliché, a bored and boring suburban baby boomer. With a statue of the Virgin Mary in her front yard.
The five-foot-tall cement statue had nearly kept Joyce from looking at the house. Frank said don’t be silly, but she wasn’t being silly. Just put off.
Joyce was not religious. When asked about her affiliation, she quoted her grandmother’s line: “We’re lox-and-bagel Jews.” She and Frank lit a menorah for Hanukkah and ate too much at their friends’ Passover seder, and that was pretty much the extent of her family’s Judaism. Even so, that statue gave her the creeps. From the window, Joyce had a great view of its modestly draped backside. “The Holy Mother’s tushy,” Joyce whispered to herself.
A warm breeze wafted in through the windows, which gleamed spotless in the bright sunlight. Joyce inhaled the ocean air. There was a sudden blast from a big ship in the harbor.
Reminded of her great good fortune, Joyce looked up at the ceiling and said, “Okay, God, I get it.”
BACK IN HER OLD green Taurus, Kathleen looked down at the seat belt between her breasts. Why on earth had she kept this appointment?
All that Catholic-school training dies hard, she thought. But crying and blurting ou
t her troubles to a stranger like that? She could imagine her grandmother’s reaction: “Family business stays in the family.” The loud echo of Gran’s disapproval surprised Kathleen. But then, she wasn’t herself.