Page 72 of On Fire Island

We sat on the paddleboard in the same pretzel-like fashion for a long while, staring at the vast ocean. His feet were cold and waterlogged, mine warm and perfectly smooth—another perk, I thought. It was definitely time to head back and get ready for the big game, but it seemed as though he had no intention of doing so.

“I’m sorry we didn’t see a dolphin, Jules,” he said out loud.

“It’s OK, baby. It wasn’t in the cards for me.”

Just when we had given up, a dorsal fin appeared in the distance, maybe twenty feet away. As it swam closer, I could see that it was on the back of a creature that looked at least as long as our board. I couldn’t tell if it was a dolphin or a shark, and wondered if Ben, who had reported seeing both before, could tell the difference. I held my breath as the fin came closer. When you go upagainst nature, you never really know what it’s going to throw at you, and this seemed like one of those instances.

Ben took the paddle and tapped it on the board. “Come ’ere buddy,” he said, leaving me to presume it was a dolphin. Though in his state, I couldn’t be sure.

The creature glided through the sea and leaped through the air less than ten feet away, as if to say hello. Itwasa dolphin! As the sun danced on the water, it kept disappearing from sight and reappearing a few minutes later, somewhere completely different. We looked around for the rest of its pod, but it seemed to be on its own.

“It’s an Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin,” he told me, “a big one!”

“Huge!” I said, surprised at the size of the friendly creature.

I’ve heard that dolphins have saved humans from drowning, that they can feel and understand human distress and struggle. The dolphin reappeared, swam underneath our board, and brushed its back against the bottoms of our feet, as if expressing empathy.

Ben’s mouth dropped open in awe. And then, that twinkle—the beautiful, youthful, magical twinkle that I had missed so dearly—returned to his eyes. Mine welled with tears—which surprised me in my current state, until I realized they were tears of joy.

The playful dolphin swam around and up to our board for quite some time before jumping high in the air again and swimming away, its fin finally disappearing in the distance.

I saw a familiar look cross over Ben’s face. His aha look, I used to call it.

“Oh my God—I got it, Jules, I got it!”

He stood with a new strength and paddled us back to the shore.

Sally was waiting for us on the sand. As soon as she saw us approach, she began zooming in and out of the water until we were safely on land. Ben pulled down the top of his wetsuit and let it hang from his waist, tucked the board under his arm, and headed toward the house. A couple was sitting on the top step of our block, deep in conversation.

It was Renee and Tuck.

thirty-nine

For Your Consideration

I’ve spent so much time making sport of dissing Tuck that I’ve neglected to mention his good points. He does have his good points. Like, for example, he loves to read and is very neat—not like neato neat, but actually tidy. Truth is, if none of this had happened and Renee and Tuck had been sitting on the beach, let’s say forty-odd years from now, and Tuck had finally decided to swim and been taken away by the undertow or had choked to death on the olive in his martini, people would have said he was a good man, a loyal man. They would have noted his long and faithful marriage to his wife, Renee, his strengths as a father, and by then, I’d imagine, a grandfather, and how, when his mother was alive, he visited her every Tuesday night at the home with her favorite pea soup and rugelach.

Renee would have thought back to their many family vacations, her favorites being Maui and Norway, and the time they took a bike trip through Tuscany. She would have reflected on their early days with Matty, the two of them armed with the notes they had meticulously taken at a new-parenting class at the 92nd Street Y—one of them nervously barked out the diapering and bathingand feeding instructions while the other attempted them. She would have remembered the time they stayed up all night when Matty had croup or rushed him to the emergency room when he had fallen from the top of the pyramid at the playground near the Met—seven stitches. And she surely would have waxed nostalgic about Tuck’s sweet marriage proposal, when he had taken her to Paris and got down on one knee on the Pont des Arts, after attaching a lock of their own to the famous bridge. The proposal might not have been the most original, but the thought of Tuck meticulously painting their initials and a heart on the aforementioned lock with her jar of Essie Geranium Red nail lacquer made her heart melt.

And she wouldn’t have had regrets, because spending her life with Tuck, dull reliable Tuck, had been just what she had thought she needed. A fulfilled life.

Unfortunately for Tuck, who wanted his old, fulfilled life back, Renee now knew better.

It was a lesson on the dangers of infidelity—not a scare-the-shit-out-of-you lesson, like that famous scene inFatal Attractionwith the boiling bunny, but a lesson just the same.

“I want my family back more than I’ve ever wanted anything. If you forgive me, Renee, I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you—and to Matthew.”

Renee was silent for a beat, then snapped into lawyer mode.

“When did you realize this, Tuck—and why?”

“I made a mistake. The biggest mistake of my life. I know how people look at me. I know I’m a short, balding know-it-all. I see people glancing at their watches when talking to me at cocktail parties or in the market. I wasn’t looking to be unfaithful to you, really, but Lola looked at me in a way no one ever had, andso I looked back. In the end, that was really all it was. I woke up one day a few weeks ago desperately missing my family.”

“And Lola?”

He laughed. “You suddenly care about Lola?”

“I’m just asking. The last I heard from Matty, you two were going to become engaged.”

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