On this day, Deacon’s expression was sad. As he walked across the hardwood floors toward them, he started to cry. Laurel looked up at him in panic. Had something happened? Had he lost his job? Had someone died?
“What’s wrong?” she said.
Deacon hugged Hayes. “Can you go in your room and watch some TV, buddy? I have to talk to your mom.”
Hayes had squared his small shoulders; he was Laurel’s sentinel, her guard. But he wasn’t brave enough to disobey his father, and so he skulked to his room in the back of the apartment.
“What’s wrong?” Laurel said again. “What happened?”
“Laurel,” Deacon said. He sat next to her on the floor and took both her hands.
Laurel had known something bad was coming, but she had not predicted the nature of this bad.
I’ve met someone else, I’ve fallen in love, I didn’t mean for it to happen, it just did. It’s Belinda Rowe. I met her briefly in Los Angeles, and then a couple of weeks later, she came to New York to film and she tracked me down. I’ve been seeing her for four months. Now she’s headed back to L.A., and she wants me to go with her. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I’m going to do it. I’m leaving, Laurel. I’m going to L.A. with Belinda Rowe. I want a divorce.
Laurel had studied her husband. He was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, a pair of black Chuck Taylors. His dark hair fell into his eyes; he had a three-day scruff, which looked sexy on him, but then Laurel realized that he’d started maintaining the scruff about three months earlier. He also wore a heavy silver watch with a dark-blue, pearlescent face, a TAG Heuer, which Deacon said he had bought for himself, a splurge. Laurel had been puzzled and a little miffed at this spontaneous purchase. They had two mortgages—the apartment and the Nantucket house—and Hayes’s private-school tuition to pay for. Their lifestyle didn’t include spending three or four thousand dollars on a watch, but Laurel had eventually rationalized the watch as Deacon rewarding himself. He hadn’t had any nice things growing up.
Belinda Rowe? Laurel said. She was utterly perplexed. The movie star?
Deacon’s eyes lit up before he could help himself, and for this—then, and still now, almost thirty years later—Laurel hated him.
Yes, he said. She wants me, Laurel.
I want you, Laurel said. You’re my husband. You’re my… She couldn’t even come up with a word. She had been with Deacon since she was fifteen years old. She had never even held hands with anyone else. He was her beginning and—she’d thought—her end. He was her everything… My whole world, she said. Then she realized how puny and small that made her sound. She didn’t have a fraction of the sophistication of Belinda Rowe.
Deacon hugged her tightly, and Laurel let him as tears—the realest, saddest tears she had ever cried in her life—wet the front of his T-shirt. She faced the cruel reality that one person’s want was more valuable than another person’s want.
Laurel and Scarlett had swum out to the center of the pond, almost without Laurel’s noticing. She rarely allowed herself to go back to that day in her mind. She thought, with renewed vigor, that she didn’t have one iota of guilt about going to St. John with Deacon.
Laurel reached for Scarlett’s hand and, although they were treading water, they embraced.
“I’m sorry,” Laurel whispered. She telescoped up, up, up, like a camera taking an increasingly wide angle, until she pictured herself as Deacon in the sky, gazing down at the lighthouse, the golf course, the beach, with its crescent of golden sand, and Sesachacha Pond, in which swam two of his wives—his first and his last—comforting each other about the pain he had caused them.
Intermezzo: Deacon and Belinda, Part II
He can’t stand the sight of her. She is imperious, selfish, and a control freak, even when she’s half a world away. She is petty. She resents how close Deacon is to Angie, and so whenever she’s home in New York, she takes Angie on exclusive mother-daughter outings—to the Village to buy jeans, to the theater to see Rent, to MoMA for a Van Gogh exhibit. Deacon suggests the three of them do something as a family, but Belinda will have none of it. She says, “The two of you will ignore me.”
When Angie is eleven, Scarlett is twenty-four, and she tells Deacon and Belinda that she’s quitting in order to pursue a career in photography. She’s had a camera in her hand nonstop for the past few years, taking pictures of Angie to send to Belinda when she’s on location. And now, she wants to turn the hobby into something more serious.
Belinda sets up an interview for her with Annie Leibovitz, and Annie gives Scarlett an internship.
“Good for Scarlett,” Deacon says.
Belinda says, “She only took the job as our nanny so that I would help her when the time came.”
“She was with us for six years,” Deacon says. “She paid her dues and then some.”
“She owes me,” Belinda says, and Deacon sighs. Belinda keeps score in every relationship; it turns his stomach.
Angie is fourteen, a freshman at Chapin. She has a friend who lives on Ninety-Fourth and Fifth named Pierpont. Angie spends way too much time with Pierpont, who is a fast, privileged, egregiously snooty girl. Is there anything Deacon can do to get Angie away from Pierpont? When he is in New York, he brings her to work at the restaurant. She’s a natural, always has been. She wants to be a chef just like him, she says.
One Friday night, Pierpont gets drunk on grain alcohol and loses her virginity to some douche bag named Chas, a senior at Collegiate. Pierpont shows up at the Waldorf Towers at two in the morning, crying. Deacon is home with Angie; Belinda is in L.A.
Deacon sits up with the girls all night. He makes omelets and lots of toast and listens to Pierpont weep—and then vomit. In the morning, Deacon calls Belinda and says there have to be some changes. Belinda has to put her career on hold; she needs to come home and parent. She wanted a baby so badly—but since Angie has been in their care, she has come second to Belinda’s career.
Belinda is outraged. She can’t come back to New York! She has just started filming the series Boarding for HBO, and she has a contract for three seasons. She is also playing opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini in a film called Cryin’ to the Devil, which is being shot in Burbank. Moving to New York isn’t realistic this year and probably not next year either.
“In a few years,” Deacon says, “Angie will be gone. Come home while she’s still a kid.”
“Why don’t you quit your job?” Belinda says. “I make a hundred times what you make.”
Later that year, Deacon develops his recipe for the clams casino dip. He has never imagined that one recipe could make a difference in his career, but he is wrong about that. Gourmet magazine chooses it as the recipe of the year, and Deacon’s career goes stratospheric. The Wall Street Journal runs a profile on him: working-class kid rising up from Stuy Town to the CIA to Solo to heading up the power franchise of Raindance. Then Deacon is asked to appear on David Letterman. When Buck calls to tell him this, they sit in stunned silence, and then they both laugh, as if they have pulled off some great caper. He is going on Letterman!
Deacon crows about this to everyone he knows except Belinda. Belinda has been on Letterman five times, The Tonight Show six times, and Oprah three times; she has hosted Saturday Night Live. Going on national TV isn’t exciting to her; it’s work.
When he does casually mention that he’s going to appear on the show, she says, “Good for you. Back on late-night TV.”
This feels different from Day to Night to Day with Deacon, though he can’t quite explain why. Filming the show felt amateur and decidedly small-time, like a college kid’s film project. This is Letterman!
The night before the show, Deacon can’t sleep. He has persistent worries that he is somehow going to screw up. He is a profligate swearer—it has been said he makes Gordon Ramsay look like the Charmin baby—so he tries to self-hypnotize: I will not say the word f***. He worries he will forget how to make the recipe, even though the script will be posted on the teleprompter. He worries, most of all, that he will be boring. He can’t quite wrap his mind around how many people will be watching—anywhere between 7 and 10 million, if you believe Nielsen—and who might be included in that group. Mrs. Glass from Nantucket might see him; Gary Decca, an offensive lineman from the Dobbs Ferry football team, might see him; his mother might see him. His father might see him! Deacon lies awake imagining his father in some shotgun shack in New Orleans or in a motel room in Reno, watching Deacon on Letterman and filling first with regret, then with amazement at the superstar Deacon has become.