The Summerhouse Read online

The kitchen was sunny and bright, the table was set with pretty green and yellow linens, and in the middle there was a platter with a heap of pancakes and strawberries. Leslie was at the stove wearing a bright yellow apron with cherries on it.

  Ellie took one look at the table, then up at Leslie. “Will you marry me?” she asked, eyes wide.

  “I’ve already asked,” Madison said as she stepped inside the house. She’d been outside, Ellie assumed for a smoke.

  Smiling, Leslie put a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of Ellie. “I can’t tell you how good it is to cook for people who like to eat,” she said, motioning toward Madison.

  “Don’t tell me,” Ellie said with a groan, as she nodded toward Madison. “She ate half a dozen of these things.”

  “Closer to a dozen,” Leslie said, then leaned closer to Ellie. “Don’t let her kid you; she’s skinny because she never eats. This weekend’s gluttony is unusual for her.”

  “I heard that,” Madison said. “I don’t eat much because I never have time and I have no idea how to cook.” As she said this, she sat down on the chair across from Ellie, and immediately, Leslie set in front of her a bowl of out-of-season strawberries piled high with freshly whipped cream.

  Ellie groaned again.

  Madison, with a smug smile, lifted a fat, red strawberry and licked the cream off it.

  “I hope you get fat,” Ellie muttered as she dug into the pancakes.

  “So why did you?” Madison asked as she crunched the berry.

  “Really, Madison!” Leslie said. “That wasn’t polite.” She sounded as though she were talking to her teenage daughter.

  Madison was unperturbed by the chastisement. “Last night I told what had happened to me to make me ugly, so now it’s her turn to tell why she’s fat.”

  Ellie had to blink a few times at Madison’s bluntness, but then she smiled. Truthfully, Madison’s question was easier to reply to than other women’s not-so-subtle hints about salads and gymnasiums and personal trainers. “It’s the most marvelous gym and he’s the best trainer in the world” had been said to her more than once, as though Ellie didn’t know that there were ways to get rid of her extra pounds.

  “I got screwed by the legal system and I got depressed,” Ellie said, her mouth full. “I am now a washout. A has-been. I haven’t written a word in three years. I don’t even hear stories in my head any longer.”

  “You were listening pretty hard to me last night,” Madison said.

  “I keep trying, but . . .” Ellie looked up. Leslie had her back to them as she washed glasses at the sink, but she was listening intently. “I don’t know . . . I think I had the heart taken out of me, and I can’t seem to find my confidence again.”

  Turning, Leslie put a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in front of Ellie. “I thought you were going to be an artist.”

  Ellie laughed. “That seems so long ago that I can hardly remember it. I met this man who—”

  At that both Leslie and Madison gave a loud groan in unison.

  “Why do all the stories of all women start with, ‘I met this man’?” Leslie asked. She at last put a plate of pancakes down on the table between Ellie and Madison and began to eat. Not until everyone else was served had Leslie taken a seat.

  Ellie smiled. “He was a musician, twice as talented as I was, and from the beginning I knew that I was in the presence of genius,” she said simply.

  “I see,” Madison said. “So you gave up your career as an artist to help him with his, but he never did anything with his prodigious talent. Instead, you found yourself supporting him, doing his laundry, cooking his meals—”

  Laughing, Ellie put up her hands in front of her face as though to protect herself. “So my life is a country-and-western song. I admit it. But he really was brilliant.”

  “Brilliant in finding someone to worship him,” Madison said, looking Ellie hard in the eyes.

  Ellie wanted to protest that she hadn’t been as stupid as Madison made it sound, but she had no defense. “How do you know so much about this?”

  “One of the women who works with me has the same story. She married a man who welded hubcaps together into these huge structures. He was going to become Someone Famous. That’s with capital letters: Someone Famous. But while he was making his way in the world, all he asked was that she ‘help’ him a bit. She now has three kids, and he hasn’t had a job in four years. She used to say that someone as talented as he is can’t just go out and get an ordinary job.”

  “Exactly,” Ellie said, pushing away her half-empty plate of pancakes. “That’s just what happened. Over these last years I’ve looked back on it all a thousand times, and I still don’t know how it all happened, just that it did happen. One minute I was in New York planning to make a name for myself, and the next I was living with this man and I was taking any job I could get to make money to give him a chance in the music world.”

  “Love,” Leslie said with a sigh as she took the plates to the sink.

  “That’s just it,” Ellie said quickly. “I’m not sure that I ever did love this guy. I’m not sure that I ever—” She looked up at Madison. “Would it make me sound stupid to say that I’m not sure that I ever had a choice?”

  “My friend told me how her husband courted her,” Madison said. “He went after her night and day. There were roses on her doorstep every morning for months. He wrote her poems and letters. There were sexy telephone calls that went on all night. He bought her gifts, talked to her endlessly, listened to her, cared about her. There was nothing about her that he didn’t want to know.”

  “So he could use it later to control her,” Ellie said as she turned her head away, not looking at either woman.

  “Exactly,” Madison said. “A master controller. He saw something in my friend that he wanted, so he went after her.”

  “Right,” Ellie said.

  “What I want to know is how you became a writer,” Leslie said, tactfully steering the conversation away from the bad to the good.

  “I wrote my way out of misery,” Ellie said. “At least that’s what my therapist, Jeanne, said. This is her house, by the way. She’s helped me to see what—”

  Halting, Ellie drew in a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to hear all this?”

  “Every word in chronological order,” Madison said with a smile.

  For a moment Ellie looked out the window over the sink. No, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone the “whole” story. Not yet.

  She looked back at the other two women.

  “Why don’t I make us some coffee?” Leslie said. “Or would anyone like some strong tea?”

  “I’ll have tea,” Ellie said, while Madison wanted coffee. And while Leslie waited on them, Ellie said, “Would anyone believe me if I said that I was working so hard that I didn’t notice what was going on in my marriage? I got up at four A.M. and hit the floor running.”

  Neither woman answered Ellie’s question, and she was glad of that. Here in this house with these women who were at once strangers and her oldest friends, she knew that she didn’t have to make excuses, didn’t have to apologize.

  “Anyway,” Ellie said, “Martin, that was—is—my ex’s name, Martin Gilmore, was brilliantly talented as a musician. He played a guitar, and he could make you weep at the sound. Or laugh. Whatever emotion he wanted from his audience, he could get.” Ellie’s head came up. “Anyway, I thought I was going to be the person who gave the world the opportunity to hear him; then, after he was internationally successful—”

  “It was going to be your turn,” Leslie said. “There’s always the promise that the woman is going to get ‘her turn.’”

  “Right,” Ellie said with a grimace. “When he asked me to leave New York and go live in a small town outside L.A., I agreed readily. Martin said that only in L.A. would he have a chance to become known. So I—” Ellie took a deep breath. “I sold my art supplies and all the work I’d done, and flew out to L.A. with him.

  “And at first