The female producer at the studio—Nell is her name; she can’t be more than twenty-five—is nonchalant and businesslike. Of course, this is her job; she does it every day, the way that Deacon reduces sauces. She smiles and brings Deacon to the green room, where there is coffee and a fruit-and-cheese platter and a TV hanging from the ceiling that is playing the show as it’s being taped.
“Relax,” Nell says.
Relax? he thinks. He had thought there might be a bar back here, or beer in the mini fridge, but there isn’t, so he takes out his flask of Jameson and throws some back to calm himself.
When he is back in the green room after the filming is done, he takes another hit off the flask in relief. He did it! Somehow, he went out there and faced the cameras and was funny and articulate and poised. He and David had a witty repartee going (“Repartee”: stupid word, he thinks), and David loved the recipe, or he appeared to.
Nell comes back to show him out.
“Did I do okay?” Deacon asks.
She gives him a tight smile, which seems to suffice as an answer. He decides to watch the show by himself—no Angie, no Buck. Belinda is in L.A. Deacon sits in his dark bedroom with a hefty glass of Jameson. He’s afraid there’s something wrong that might be imperceptible to him, sort of like the way he can’t smell himself.
But the segment goes fine, he thinks. He looks scruffy and unpolished, but that has always been his trademark. He sounds confident. He makes Dave throw his head back and laugh, displaying that famous gap-toothed smile.
When the show cuts to commercials, his phone rings. It’s Belinda. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks.
What follows defies the imagination. Deacon is all over the news. The clip of Dave tasting the dip on a garlic-herb-butter baguette, saying, “I literally cannot stop eating this. What’s in it?” and Deacon saying, “A teaspoon of crack cocaine,” is run again and again and again. Deacon is vilified in a statement from the anti-drug people and from the right-wing politician Avery Eubanks. There is a seething editorial in the New York Times that compares Deacon to D.C. mayor Marion Barry. And a man whom Deacon considers a friend, fellow Manhattan chef Quentin York, goes on record saying that Deacon has “single-handedly ruined the reputation of everyone in the food and beverage industry.”
Deacon spends hours on the phone with Buck, trying to put the best possible spin on the situation.
Just tell them it was a joke! Deacon says.
But something more serious is required, something that addresses the insensitivity of the statement in today’s day and age. Seventy blocks north of where Deacon lives, drugs are a plague of biblical proportions.
Buck uses the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity, and it’s true that reservations at Raindance nearly quadruple in all three outposts, but that hardly matters to Deacon. Luther Davey calls to tell Deacon he is being put on leave until the brouhaha calms down. Deacon says, “‘Brouhaha’ is a stupid word, Luther. And you don’t have to put me on leave. I put myself on leave. I quit.”
Deacon’s day job isn’t the only thing going down the drain. Belinda is livid with him. She says, “You weren’t thinking about your brand when you made that comment.”
Deacon says, “I don’t have a brand.”
“Okay then,” Belinda says. “You weren’t thinking of my brand.”
This infuriates Deacon. All Belinda cares about is how things reflect upon her.
She says, “There are crack babies dying every hour at St. Vincent’s.”
Deacon laughs derisively. Everything Belinda knows about crack babies she learned from a six-show guest-star appearance on High Street back in the nineties.
“I’ve had it with you,” Deacon says.
“What does that mean?” Belinda says.
“What do you think it means?” Deacon asks. He and Angie are supposed to fly to L.A. the next day for Angie’s spring break, but Deacon doesn’t want to go. He sends Angie out by herself—and there, at the airport, the second after he watches Angie’s plane take off, he starts drinking, and he doesn’t stop until he’s kicking in the back door of Quentin York’s restaurant and humiliating Quentin in front of his line cooks, an escapade that gets him arrested and—because Buck has just left for his honeymoon in Ireland—calling the only friend he has left in the world.
Laurel.
She answers on the first ring. I’ll be right there, she says.
At five in the morning, after Deacon has been released, they go back to his apartment together. He thinks she might try to lecture him or give him a pep talk, but she does neither of these things. She lets him put his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair.
He says, I just want to get away from my life.
So get away, she says. I’ll go with you.
They book flights to the Caribbean. Five nights in an oceanfront suite at Caneel Bay, in St. John. The suite has two bedrooms. They agree that one room will be for Deacon, one for Laurel.
Are you going to tell Belinda you’re going? Laurel asks.
Definitely not. Angie will be gone until a week from Sunday, and the idea of stealing away to a Caribbean paradise with Laurel has taken up residence in his mind. Laurel is going to be the one to save him… again.
He remembers a night their senior year. Laurel is pregnant—she went to prom in a maternity dress and was still the most beautiful girl in the room by far—and she is helping Deacon write his final essay for English. He needs at least a C to pass the class and graduate, and they both know he can’t get a C on his own. The book is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos while Laurel tells Deacon what to write and Deacon writes it. She says, “I’m trying to turn my words into your words.” At four o’clock in the morning, they fall asleep together on the sofa fully dressed, Deacon’s hand resting on Laurel’s pregnant belly.
Deacon gets a C-plus.
Deacon and Laurel walk hand-in-hand through the town of Cruz Bay. They stop for rum drinks, they buy a mango, Deacon picks a hibiscus blossom and tucks it behind Laurel’s ear. She is lightly tanned, she wears no makeup, it doesn’t take her two hours to get ready, she is happy to hike the Reef Bay Trail to see the petroglyphs, which is something Deacon desperately wants to do. He wants to see something that has lasted thousands of years, something that has endured.
They make love. It’s the same; it’s different.
They swim at night under the stars, then climb into bed with sandy feet. When Deacon has a nightmare, Laurel wakes up with him. She scratches his back until he falls back to sleep.
“I love you, Laurel,” he says.
“I know,” she says.
ANGIE
She knocked on the door of Hayes’s room. Scarlett and Ellery had arrived; Angie needed to give her brother fair warning.
There was a muffled groan from within that Angie assumed was an invitation to enter. She opened the door.
“Hayes!” she said. “What happened?” Hayes was lying flat on his back in bed. Half his face was covered in bandages, and the part that wasn’t covered was black-and-blue. The colors were so dark and vivid, they looked like paint. Angie took a few steps closer. Hayes’s lip had been sewn up, and his cheekbone was swollen. “What the fuck happened?”
“Got beat up,” Hayes said, barely moving his lips. There was a tray of juice and toast, untouched, on the chair next to his bed—and on the windowsill, half a glass of water and a prescription bottle. She checked the label: Percocet.
“When?” she said. “And by whom?”
Hayes shrugged. “Last night.”
Angie sat on the bed and studied her brother. He looked exactly like Deacon, but now like a Deacon who had been through the meat grinder.
“Did you call that taxi driver?” she asked. “The guy redefines ‘lunatic fringe.’ Is that who did this?”
“No!” Hayes said. The vehemence in his voice startled Angie. She thought, Definitely the taxi driver. But Hayes seemed keen for her to believe otherwise. Why protect the pirate? Had Hayes made sexual advances? Was Hayes gay? Angie considered this for a moment. Hayes had the ways of a dandy at times—he favored bow ties and bright shirts and fancy shoes. He used to be very particular about how he looked. That had all fallen to the wayside this week, but, of course, their father had died. In the past, Hayes had always had girlfriends, the most excellent of whom was Whitney Jo. Hayes and Whit went out forever, but she eventually left him because he wouldn’t commit. Wouldn’t commit because…? No, Hayes wasn’t gay. He was protecting Pirate for some other reason.