The Perfect Couple Read online

  If it’s yours, I’ll like it, Celeste thought, but she hadn’t wanted to push. He obviously had his reasons.

  Now, Benji leads Celeste into a high-rise luxury building in Tribeca, right next to Stuyvesant High School, and after greeting the doorman and the man behind the front desk, they get into the elevator and Benji presses the button that says 61B.

  The sixty-first floor, Celeste thinks. Her building is a six-floor walk-up and she lives on the fifth floor in the rear.

  Celeste’s ears pop on the way up and Benji is uncharacteristically quiet. The elevator fills with the scent of the Burmese food, but Celeste’s appetite is quelled by a sudden case of nerves.

  The elevator doors open and Celeste steps into an apartment. She’s confused for a second.

  “So, wait,” she says. She turns around. Yes. The elevator has opened up right into Benji’s apartment.

  Benji takes Celeste’s hand. She is fixated on the elevator. An elevator into his apartment. Did she know places like this existed? Yes, she has seen it in the movies. If she lived here, she might be tempted to press the elevator button just so she could experience its arrival solely for her, even when she didn’t have to go anywhere.

  The apartment has been professionally decorated and it’s immaculately clean. There are black leather sofas, deep royal-blue club chairs, a colorful kaleidoscope of a rug, an enormous flat-screen TV, and, on either side of the TV, shelving that is crisscrossed on the diagonal, which is one of the coolest things Celeste has ever seen. She didn’t even know diagonal bookshelves existed, but now all she wants in the world, other than an elevator that opens up into her apartment, are diagonal bookshelves and books to put on them.

  There’s a gourmet kitchen, which is sleek and gleaming except for a wide, rough-hewn wooden bowl filled with fruit: pineapple, mangoes, papayas, limes, kiwis. The fruit in that bowl probably costs as much as everything in Celeste’s apartment. She feels a sudden hot shame about the futon she uses as a bed, covered with a quilt her mother bought from an Amish market in Lancaster, and about her Ikea side tables and the lamps she took from her parents’ house, the bases of which are mason jars filled with beans. She cringes when she thinks of the vintage zoo posters that she had framed at great expense (they had been ninety dollars apiece and she had blanched) and the rainbow candles her mother made out of melted crayons.

  Benji says something about showing her around and she mutely follows him into the bedroom, where there is a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out on uptown. All of Manhattan is rolled out before them, colorful and twinkling—and one of those lights, just one dim bulb a hundred-plus blocks up and to the east, is in Celeste’s apartment window.

  She presses her hands against the window, then removes them; she doesn’t want to leave prints.

  “You hate it,” Benji says.

  “How could you possibly think that?” she asks. “It… it… defies my humble vocabulary.”

  “My parents pay for it,” Benji says. “They offered it to me and I couldn’t say no. I mean, I guess I could have said no, but you’d have to be crazy to turn a place like this down.”

  Part of Celeste agrees, of course, but another part of her stands in righteous opposition. She thinks of Rocky, who rents a studio apartment in Queens; he rides the N/R train into the city at five o’clock each morning to run the bodega. At night, he takes classes at Queens College. He’s studying to be a teacher. There’s nobility in that, Celeste sees, a nobility and an ethic that’s missing when one lives in an apartment that could easily cost seven or eight thousand dollars a month, paid for by one’s parents.

  “This building has a gym,” Benji says. “And it has a pool. You can use the pool this summer. You can kiss North Meadow good-bye.”

  I don’t want to kiss North Meadow good-bye! Celeste thinks stubbornly. But she knows she’s being silly.

  “We should appreciate this place while we can,” Benji says. “My parents are threatening to buy me a brownstone uptown.”

  A brownstone uptown, Celeste thinks sardonically. Of course; the next logical step.

  “East Seventy-Eighth Street,” she murmurs in spite of herself. When she first moved to Manhattan, before she met Merritt, she used to spend her weekends wandering the Upper East Side, looking in windows, admiring leaded-glass transoms and iron fretwork. The block between Park and Lexington on Seventy-Eighth Street had been her very favorite. She used to gaze at the fronts of the homes and wonder just what lucky people lived there.

  People like Benji.

  “I’ll tell them to look only on East Seventy-Eighth Street,” Benji says. “Now let’s eat.”

  Celeste spends all week feeling uneasy about Benji’s privilege. She can’t exactly claim to be blindsided, she knew it existed, but now that the extent of his wealth and advantage has been fully revealed, her view of him is tinged, ever so slightly, with distaste.

  But then Benji informs her that on the last Sunday of every month, he volunteers at a homeless shelter in the basement of his parents’ church on the Upper East Side. He asks Celeste if she would like to come. It entails serving the guests a hot supper, then making up the cots and staying overnight. Benji would be in a room with the men and Celeste with the women.

  “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” he says.

  “I’ll do it,” Celeste says.

  At Benji’s suggestion, Celeste dresses casually, in sweatpants and a T-shirt. She helps chop vegetables for soup, and during the meal, she pours coffee. All of the guests want sugar in their coffee, lots of sugar; the pockets of Celeste’s pants bulge with packets. One of the male guests starts calling her Sugar Girl. Benji hears him and says, “Hey there, Malcolm, slow your roll. She’s my Sugar Girl.” This makes everyone laugh. Benji has an easy rapport with the guests and knows many of them by name—Malcolm, Slick, Henrietta, Anya, Linus. Celeste tries to be respectful, to pretend she’s working at a restaurant for paying guests, but she can’t help wondering what circumstances life threw at these people that they ended up here. With one stroke of bad luck, she supposes, it could be her. Or her parents.

  After dinner, Celeste makes up fourteen cots with sheets and blankets. She doles out one flat pillow per guest. Benji had told her that the guests go to bed early—even though TV is allowed until ten—because being homeless is cold and exhausting. Most of the women lie down right away. Celeste has brought her toiletries in a plastic bag and she goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. It’s kind of like living in the college dorms, but she suspects Benji is right: this isn’t for everyone. Celeste can’t imagine Merritt here in a million years and his ex-girlfriend Jules even less so. She feels proud of herself for being a good person, then decides that the pride means she’s not so good after all.

  She kisses Benji chastely in the hallway between the men’s dorm and the women’s dorm.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

  “Yes, of course,” she says.

  “I wish I could be with you,” he says. He kisses her again.

  Celeste crawls onto her cot. The sheets smell like industrial-strength bleach, and the pillow is no more effective than a cocktail napkin. She stuffs her winter coat under her head.

  She falls asleep listening to the other women snore. She misses her mother.

  Merritt sends a text in the middle of the following week: How’s everything with the boyfriend?

  Boyfriend. The term gives Celeste pause—but there’s no denying it. Celeste and Benji like each other. They’re a couple, doing couple things. They’re boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re happy.

  And then Celeste meets Shooter.

  Saturday, July 7, 2018, 9:30 a.m.

  NANTUCKET

  Marty Szczerba (Skuh-zer-ba) is the head of security at the Nantucket Memorial Airport. It’s a town job and comes with full benefits, which nearly makes up for the ball-breaking stress of his job in the summer.

  June and July are foggy months. In the early summer on Nantucket, warm, moist
air flows over the colder water. The moist air cools to its dew point and a cloud forms at the water’s surface. This is fog. Marty wishes the town had a budget allocation for a program in Fog Awareness because cutesy T-shirts and mugs that display the slogan FOG HAPPENS don’t seem to be getting the message across. Fog happens. It will happen to you, Mr. Millionaire from Greenwich, Connecticut, and to you, Ms. Billionaire from Silicon Valley. Your flight will be delayed or canceled if the ceiling drops below two hundred feet. You will miss your connection, and your day’s plans—board meeting, daughter’s graduation from Duke, rendezvous with your lover at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris—will have to be canceled.

  On Saturday, July 7, Marty sits down at his desk for his hot breakfast from Crosswinds, the excellent airport diner—a perk of the job he has greatly appreciated since his wife of thirty-one years, Nancy, died—to look over his choices on Match.com. Finding an age-appropriate woman who wants to live year-round on Nantucket has proven to be something of a challenge. Marty has been on three dates in the past six months, but not one of the women has looked a single thing like her profile picture, which has thrown the integrity of the website into question for Marty. His assistant, Bonita, is a thirty-three-year-old single woman and she keeps telling Marty to use Tinder.

  “Swipe right,” she always says. “Guaranteed action.”

  It has become a joke between them; Marty isn’t after “action.” What he would like is a meaningful relationship, a leading lady for his second act. It’s just when he is, for the first time, seriously considering Tinder—could he swipe right, just once?—that a phone call comes in from the chief of police. They have found a body floating out in Monomoy and there’s a person of interest—the name the Chief gives Marty is Shooter Uxley—on the run.

  Marty writes down the name and a description of the guy—late twenties, dark hair, wearing Nantucket Reds shorts, blue oxford shirt, navy blazer, and loafers. Good-looking, the Chief says. Marty laughs because this description fits any of a hundred guys in the airport at any given moment over the summer. He shovels in a bite of scrambled eggs and home fries, clicks out of his dating website, and goes downstairs to talk to the state police.

  Lola Budd has shocked every adult in her life by excelling at her job on the ticket desk at Hy-Line Cruises. Lola’s aunt Kendra, who has been her legal guardian since her mother overdosed and her father went to jail, told Lola she was too young and too immature to handle such a job. Lola Budd has exhibited some uneven behavior both at home and at school, but she convinced her aunt that if she took on a job with a lot of responsibility, she would rise to the challenge. She wants to eventually attend the hospitality school at UMass and she feels a summer job that involves a lot of interfacing with the public will give her an advantage.

  She has been at the job for three weeks now and she absolutely loves it. Unlike school, which she believes is a waste of time, this job makes her feel adult, relevant. She is doing something meaningful, facilitating travel between Nantucket and Hyannis, which is to say, between a summer fantasyland and the real world.

  Lola especially likes her job on frenetic days like today, the Saturday after the Fourth of July, when the line is 117 people long. This boat, the 9:15, is sold out. Every boat today and all of the boats tomorrow are sold out. To get tickets for you, your wife, and your three kids back to America today, you basically had to make that your New Year’s resolution and execute on January second.

  The woman who works at the station next to Lola’s, a sixty-year-old Nantucket native named Mary Ellen Cahill, has a sign in front of her computer terminal that says: BAD PLANNING ON YOUR PART DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART. Although Lola agrees with this sentiment, she finds the most satisfying parts of the job are when she can be a hero, when she can arrange for a last-minute ticket to appear out of thin air, when she can fix a snafu. Mr. and Mrs. Diegnan meant to book the last boat back on Friday, not Thursday, even though the ticket Susan Diegnan was showing clearly said Thursday, which was the day before. No problem! Lola would switch the Diegnans to the Friday boat, free of charge. Lola loves calling a name off the waiting list and seeing joy and relief flood someone’s face.

  This particular day, however, there will be no faces filled with relief, and Lola has nothing to offer but a manufactured expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have a boat ticket available until Monday at four oh five. You may want to check with the Steamship Authority. Their car ferries accommodate far more passengers.” Today there will be people swearing in front of and at Lola. Today there will be people calling the Hy-Line a “Mickey Mouse operation” and a “dog-and-pony show.”

  A dog-and-pony show? Lola thinks. What even is that?

  In job training, Lola was taught to accept all comments with calm reserve. The worst thing she can do is react with anger or indignation, thereby engaging the disgruntled customer.

  “I have a problem,” a puffy-faced pregnant woman says. She’s sweating, carrying a toddler, and she has another child, perhaps five years old, clinging to her leg. “I was holding my ferry tickets for two adults and two children, and I set them down for a second and when I picked them back up I had only one adult and two children, which means someone stole one of my ferry tickets.”

  Lola nods. She has yet to be confronted with accusations of ticket theft, but if it was going to happen, she thinks, then it was going to happen today. On the other side of her counter is a mob of desperate people.

  “Have you checked with your husband?” Lola asks. “Is it possible he took his ticket without you realizing it?”

  “Of course I checked with my husband!” the woman says. “He doesn’t have it. I was in charge of the tickets and he was in charge of handling the luggage, which really means sneaking in one final beer at the Gazebo because he has a crush on the bartender. The one with the…” She gives Lola a good approximation of the eye-roll emoji. “You know how men can be.”

  One of the things Lola has learned on this job is how men can be. Before, Lola knew only how boys could be. She has had a boyfriend for nine months, two weeks, and five days. His name is Finn MacAvoy and Lola loves him like crazy, it’s true love forever, et cetera, and she presumes they’ll end up getting married. Finn lost both his parents in a sailing accident and so he and Lola are both in the same situation—virtual orphans.

  But Lola would be lying if she said she hasn’t been amazed by the power she seems to exert over certain men. She has been propositioned by some and blatantly ogled by others. It’s common for a pale, chubby, balding married dude to confront Lola and find himself tongue-tied. What had he meant to ask her? He can’t recall.

  And that’s how men can be.

  Lola feels bad for the pregnant woman (Aunt Kendra worries about Lola getting pregnant, but this job is effective birth control), but there is nothing she can do.

  “I’m sorry,” Lola says. “I don’t even have one extra seat on this boat. The next seat I do have available is on Monday at four oh five.”

  “But I had the ticket!” the woman shrieks. “I paid for it! And someone stole it!”

  “Unfortunately, we have no way to prove that,” Lola says. “You might have dropped it accidentally and someone else might have picked it up. You do have your hands full.”

  “But my mother is sick!” the woman says. “She’s in the hospital with shingles. We have to get off today. It’s a medical emergency.”

  Lola remembers to breathe. It’s astonishing the lies people will fabricate when they’re desperate. Lola wants to quietly tell this woman that her best bet for getting off the island is to pretend she’s going into labor. She will be taken to the mainland in a medical helicopter and her husband can use the one remaining adult ferry ticket.

  “I’m sorry,” Lola says. “And I’ll have to ask you to step aside so I can help the next customer.”

  The next customer swears she has a reservation under the name Iuffredo but Lola doesn’t see it on her computer. “Could it be under a diff
erent name?” she asks.

  “I have the reservation number somewhere,” Ms. Iuffredo says. She rummages through her purse.

  The phone rings. Lola looks down at her console. It’s the emergency line, one that can’t be ignored. Lola picks it up.

  “Hello, Hy-Line Cruises. This is Lola Budd speaking. How may I help you?”

  There’s a split-second pause, then a man’s voice. “Lola Budd? Oh, that’s right. I forgot you worked there. Lola, this is Chief Kapenash. May I talk to your supervisor, please?”

  “Oh, hi, Chief!” Lola says. The Chief is Finn’s uncle and legal guardian. He is a very important person on Nantucket. He’s the Chief. Of. Police. Lola has the distinct impression that the Chief doesn’t like her, doesn’t approve of her. He probably wishes Finn were dating someone like Meg Lyon, a three-sport athlete with good grades and squeaky-clean behavior. But now the Chief will witness Lola Budd in her new persona as a responsible, competent Hy-Line Cruises employee. “My supervisor isn’t here right now. It’s just me, Mary Ellen, and Kalik and we have a boat leaving in eight minutes so everyone is really busy. Gracie should be back soon, though. Would you like me to leave her a—”

  “Eight minutes?” the Chief says. “Put Mary Ellen on the phone, please.”

  “She’s with a customer,” Lola says.

  “Put her on the phone, Lola,” the Chief says. “This is an emergency.”

  Marty Szczerba talks to Brenner, the state policeman on duty at the airport, and gets more details about the potential murder. The body they have is a twenty-nine-year-old New York City woman who came to Nantucket to be the maid of honor in her best friend’s wedding.