Beauty: A Novel (21 page)
Painter
C
arol searched for Easy’s boat. She searched by quadrants, going from right to left. She didn’t know what she’d do if she saw his boat, but she needed to know where it was. If it was here, and if that was close as she could get to him, she needed to know she was at least that close. She didn’t see it. The
Beauty
. She went back from left to right. The only boats she could distinguish were small ones coming in close, somebody in a rubber rowboat, kayaks, a Windsurfer.
Dave and Ben were moving around to where everybody was, and Carol started to follow them and then worried it would be harder to pick out Easy’s boat if she were in the crowd. She walked out farther on the pier. She was alone. She started searching back right to left. She was short of breath and she had to squeeze her hands into fists, to stay focused in her search. She heard a shout about beauty and paid no attention. She ignored all the sounds drifting from the crowd. Carol was looking. She gazed above the small boats and the oddities to search among the big boats farther out. She realized that she would not recognize Easy’s boat from so far away, if he’d even come. He had to be out fishing for his crew every minute before the regulations took effect.
She heard it again, and she knew the voice, and it was nearby. “Beauty.”
Right here below her, it was Easy in the rubber rowboat, grinning. Carol’s breath got shorter, and Easy said, in a pleased-with-himself voice, “I rowed.”
Carol didn’t feel herself sinking down, but she was on her knees, just like she’d been when he first came to her, when she was an undertaker expecting her own company and had instead found herself buried with all the men and women she’d been burying for years and years.
Easy laughed and said, “Take the painter,” and because of the instant in which she looked around for somebody with a paintbrush, she almost missed catching the rope he tossed up to her. She did catch it, and she laughed herself and held that rope for dear life.
She held it until Easy boosted himself up onto the dock beside her. He tied the rope to something and took hold of her shoulders and stood her up.
He said, “You did it,” and he was still grinning like he had everything just right. “I can fish out of Elizabeth Harbor and bring my fresh catch to you.” Then he let go of her shoulders, and she didn’t know whether to tell him that he shouldn’t let go, that he should hold her, so she reached around and hugged him herself. She smelled him, his sweat and the sea. He’d rowed in from the
Beauty
. She watched his face as he grinned again and then he had his arms around her, and he kissed her like he was supposed to do and she kissed him of course, and out over the harbor, the horns were going again. Which would have been more than enough for Carol, enough for anybody. Except then Easy leaned back, just a bit, and looked at her, and saw her.
Acknowledgments
P
articular thanks to Joe Regal, Jon Karp, Emily Graff, Sallie Bingham, and Justin Colin.
A legion of people read and contributed to one or more of the forest of drafts
Beauty
went through. If I do not name all of those people here, I thank them just the same, a lot, and I beg them to understand their own names among these few souls whose insistence I can’t shake: Ted Buswick, George Stalk, Ron MacLean, David Rosen, and Jack Parsons.
About the Author
PHOTOGRAPH BY LESLIE DILLEN
F
rederick Dillen was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village and raised in a New Hampshire boarding school. A graduate of Stanford University, Dillen worked odd jobs from Lahaina to Taos and New York to Los Angeles, managing a hotel and running a fake ranch, carrying plates and shilling for business. His short fiction has appeared in literary quarterlies and
The O. Henry Prize Stories
. His
Hero
was named Best First Novel of 1994 by the
Dictionary of Literary Biography
. His second novel,
Fool
, was a Nancy Pearl Book Lust Rediscovery in 2012. Dillen and his wife, the actress and playwright Leslie Dillen, are the parents of two grown daughters and live in New Mexico with a yellow dog named Lucy.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
Also by Frederick Dillen
Hero
Fool
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Frederick Dillen
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2014
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Designed by Aline C. Pace
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dillen, Frederick G., 1946-
Beauty : a novel / Frederick G. Dillen.
pages cm
1. Businesswomen—Fiction. 2.
Corporations—Massachusetts—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I415B43 2014
813
'
.54—dc23
2013028658
ISBN 978-1-4767-1692-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-1694-7 (ebook)
Contents