Page 106 of The Book of Summer

“That sucks,” Bess says, and looks down at her Chardonnay. She really wishes she could drink more of it.

“And, yeah, it sounds awesome and all,” the woman goes on. “But what you do! You save lives! That must be such a rush.”

“Um, thanks. Most of it isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a job, like anything else.”

Who is this person? The more Bess tries to remember, the more faces from her past jumble together.

“Just a job!” the woman trills. She takes several gulps of her red-pink swill. “Just a job, she says. Please! Anyway, it’s so great to see you! To talk to you like this! Hey. Whoa.”

She stops jabbering for a nanosecond and grips the edge of the bench.

“Is it me or is the boat rocking like crazy?” she asks.

“I feel okay…”

“Anyhow, I have a confession to make.”

She goes to pat Bess’s leg, presumably, but misses and whacks her hand on the bench.

“I was so intimidated by you,” she says, shaking out the injured hand.

“Me?” Bess snorts. “When? Why?”

Here is a gorgeous palomino with glacier-blue eyes and a foal’s gait. Bess has no real objections to her own looks, she is general-population attractive and med-school smoking hot, but this girl is full-stop stunning. Bess is more along the lines of Wednesday Addams with bangs. In other words, appealing only to specific tastes.

“At school, silly!” the woman says. “First of all, you’re Felicia’s cousin. Heroldercousin, which was cool in itself.”

“Yes, older,” Bess says. “By all of one year.”

“Yeah, but I mean, it’s stillolder.”

“One year isn’t all that…” Bess shakes her head. “Sorry. Go on.”

How on earth could this person be intimidated by Bess when Bess was always with Palmer Bradlee, the girl who glided through life forever poised and beautiful and en pointe?

“You seemed so mature,” the woman says. “So dark and exotic.”

She reaches out and snags a chunk of Bess’s hair, which feels like a violation though Bess isn’t exactly sure why. You don’t go around petting strangers at parties, right? Or perhaps such social transaction came into fashion while Bess was working weekend shifts and trying to get divorced.

“Huh,” Bess says as the woman continues to grip her hair like a leash.

Though hair is nothing but dead cells, Bess swears hers is getting dank beneath this person’s hold.

“Then there’s the pièce de résistance, so to speak. The De Leudeville Affair.”

“Oh.” Bess clears her throat. “Right.”

Monsieur de Leudeville. The scandal that got one French instructor fired and one student kicked out of school. It was a shocking fiasco for anyone, especially someone like Bess.

“The De Leudeville Affair,” Bess repeats. “That sounds almost cinematic.”

“Everyone called it that. You know you’re involved in a juicy scandal when it gets its own name.”

Sometimes Bess actually forgets that she didn’t leave Choate so much as go down in flames. Bess can’t even remember if she told her ex-husband the story. But the De Leudeville Affair wasn’t an affair, not really. Yes, there was sex involved but it was more an excuse, a circumstance Monsieur de Leudeville himself walked right into. That this blond, drunk publishing person remembered Bess for him and not what happened before was the very point of the letch. And so: mission accomplished.

“He was pretty hot,” the woman notes, and glugs the rest of her drink. “For an old guy anyway.”

“He was twenty-seven. And into sixteen-year-old girls. So not that hot, when you think about it.”