The Gate House   ::   Demille Nelson

I am enraged at this scene, but I still can’t believe that Susan wants to be there, and I wait for her to dive back into the pool and swim away from him. Yet the longer she remains standing naked in front of him, the more I realize that she has come here to meet him.

As I let go of any hope that Susan will dive back into the pool and swim away, she kneels into the shallow water, then moves her face into Bellarosa’s groin and takes him into her mouth. Her hands grasp his buttocks and pull him closer to her face.

I close my eyes, and when I open them again, Susan is lying on her back in the scalloped seashell, her legs are spread wide and they dangle over the edge of the waterfall, and Bellarosa is now standing in the reflecting pool, and he buries his face between her thighs. Then, suddenly, he pulls Susan’s legs up so they rest on his shoulders, and he seems to rise out of the water as he enters her with a powerful thrust that forces a deep cry from her lips. He continues his rough thrusts into her until she screams so loudly it startles me.

“M r. Sutter! Mr. Sutter! Sir, we are descending. Please fasten your seatbelt.”

“What…?”

“We’re descending,” a female voice said. “You need to fasten your seatbelt and put your seat in the full upright position.”

“Oh…” I adjusted my seat and fastened my seatbelt, noticing that Little John was also in the full upright position. My goodness. That’s embarrassing. What brought that on…? Then, I remembered my dream…

I never asked Susan how, when, and where she began her affair with Frank Bellarosa – this is not the sort of information one needs to hear in any detail – but it was something that remained missing from what I did know. My shrink, if I had one, would say that my dream was an unconscious attempt to fill in this lacuna – the missing piece of the affair. Not that it mattered a decade after I divorced her. In legal terms, I charged adultery, and she admitted to it. The state did not require any juicy details or explicit testimony, so neither should I.

The British Airways flight from London to New York crossed over the Long Island Sound, descending toward John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was a sunny day, a little after 4:00 P.M., Monday, May 27, and I remembered that today was Memorial Day in America. Below, on the North Shore of Long Island, I could see a place called the Gold Coast, where I used to live, ten years ago. Probably, if I looked hard enough, I could see the large neighboring estates called Stanhope Hall, and what was once Alhambra.

I now live in London, and the purpose of my return to America is to see an old lady who is dying, or who may well have died during my seven-hour flight. If so, I’d be in time for the funeral, where I’d see Susan Stanhope Sutter.

The presence of death in the coffin should compel us into some profound thoughts about the shortness of life, and make us rethink our many disappointments, resentments, and betrayals that we can’t seem to let go of. Unfortunately, however, we usually take these things to the grave with us, or to the grave of the person we couldn’t forgive in life.

Susan .

But now and then, we do find it in our hearts to forgive, and it costs nothing to do that, except some loss of pride. And maybe that was the problem.

I was sitting on the starboard side of the business class cabin, and all heads were turned toward the windows, focused on the skyline of Manhattan. It’s truly an awesome sight from three or four thousand feet, but as of about nine months ago, the main attraction for people who knew the city was the missing part of the skyline. The last time I’d flown into New York, a few weeks after 9/11, the smoke was still rising from the rubble. This time, I didn’t want to look, but the man next to me said, “That’s where the Towers were. To the left.” He pointed in front of my face. “There.”

I replied, “I know,” and picked up a magazine. Most of the people I still knew here in New York have told me that 9/11 made them rethink their lives and put things into perspective. That’s a good plan for the future, but it doesn’t change the past.

The British Airways flight began its final descent into Kennedy, and a few minutes later we touched down.

The man next to me said, “It’s good to be home.” He asked, “Is this home for you?”

“No.”

Soon I’d be in a rental car on my way back to the place I once called home, but which was now a place that time had partly eroded from my mind, washing away too many of the good memories and leaving behind the hard, jagged edges of the aforementioned disappointments, resentments, and betrayals.

The aircraft decelerated, then rolled out onto the taxiway toward the terminal.

Now that I was here, and would remain here until the funeral, perhaps I should use the time to try to reconcile the past with the present – then maybe I’d have better dreams on my return flight.



PART I

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past .

– F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

CHAPTER ONE



A week had passed since my return from London, and I was sitting at the table in the dining room of the small gatehouse of Stanhope Hall, my ex-wife’s former estate, wading through old files, family photos, and letters that I’d stored here for the last decade.

After my divorce from Susan, I’d fulfilled an old dream by taking my sailboat, a forty-six-foot Morgan ketch named the Paumanok II , on a sail around the world, which lasted three years. Paumanok, incidentally, is the indigenous Indian word for Long Island, and my illustrious ancestor, Walt Whitman, a native Long Islander, sometimes used this word in his poetry – and if Uncle Walt had owned a forty-six-foot yacht, I’m sure he’d have christened it the Paumanok , not “I Hear America Singing,” which is too long to put on the stern, or Leaves of Grass , which doesn’t sound seaworthy.

Anyway, my last port of call was Bournemouth, England, from which my other distant ancestors, the Sutters, had set sail for America three centuries before.

With winter coming on, and sea fatigue in my bones, a dwindling bank account, and my wanderlust satisfied, I sold the boat for about half what it was worth and moved up to London to look for a job, eventually signing on with a British law firm that needed an American tax lawyer, which is what I was in New York before I became captain of the Paumanok II .

I spread out some photos of Susan on the table and looked at them under the light of the chandelier.