You Lost Me There Read Free Page B

a postcard to the tourists. As a destination island, we attracted four million visitors a year to smell the lupine. It was Aunt Betsy who’d told me how, around the end of the nineteenth century, a planning committee had renamed the town Bar Harbor, to attract rusticator money and sound more resortlike.
    Previously, the town was called Eden.
    Betsy reached out and pinched me.
    “I’ve been meaning to tell you, I found a poem of Bill’s you’ll like. Remind me, I’ll give it to you when you leave.”
    “That hurt, you know,” I said, and massaged my hand.
    “You’re a fart. Now go inside and set the table.”
    Funny thing was, Betsy Gardner was Sara’s aunt, not mine. Yet I was the chauffeur to Betsy’s doctor appointments, her lunch date on Mother’s Day, her every-week Friday-night special.
    The Gardners had been some of Mount Desert Island’s earliest settlers. They’d gotten a head start on tourism by planting hotels on bedrock, and then turning enough profit so they could bet on steel. Come another generation, the family focused on their daughters: socializing in higher circles, breeding with Hookes and Pughs. There’d been an admiral, Betsy’s father, whose portrait hung above the guest toilet. He was also the author of a family genealogy he’d self-published in four volumes, a Social Register for the extended Gardner clan of which Betsy had recently bequeathed me a copy. My own story wasn’t much to note, just a chain of Long Island pharmacists and roofers trailing back to the Balkans. I was named Victor after my mother’s father, a wife beater no one liked to sit near during holidays. My last name, Aaron, was incidental: it had been assigned to an ancestor by an immigration clerk, since Cikojević didn’t sound much like baseball.
    None of my relatives ever had a head shot of FDR above the fireplace, signed, “Dear Betsy, who ever swam with more grace? Adoring, Franklin. ”
    From her end of the dining table, Betsy related the scoop of the week: A famous fashion designer was whispering about dredging Bass Harbor so that he could park a yacht off his backyard. Fishermen were outraged and neighbors were bearing arms. It would be the scandal of the summer once it broke in the newspapers, Betsy said, with town, gown, and sea rights in a single basket.
    And all I heard was, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?” as if Regina were throwing out a clue for a crossword puzzle.
    More than cartoons, more than an addiction to diet soda, most researchers I knew shared a knack for submerging into musing—or worrying, to be honest—at the cost of social graces. We were well-trained minds, but poor dinner guests.
    Betsy shouted, “You must know Martin Filsberger, Victor, for Christ’s sake!”
    “What?”
    “The Washington Post reporter? No, you’re too busy with a microscope up your fanny.” Betsy threw her napkin down and lit a cigarette. “See here,” she said, “now, Martin was married to Jane Paul. Sort of a canine girl, Jane, with a snout. Martin and Jane used to summer in Pretty Marsh until Martin started running the Jerusalem office. But listen”—she blew smoke across the phone—“one afternoon I ran into Martin at the post office. Now, remember, this was the year of Monica Lewinsky, so I said, ‘Martin, what is the story here? Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. The man was an Eagle Scout . What in God’s name’s happening?’ And Martin took my elbow, we walked outside, and he said, ‘Betsy, I am forced to swear you to secrecy or my editor will have my neck,’ and I said, ‘Martin, if anyone can keep a secret, it’s not me.’ And he liked that, he gave me a nice smile, he leaned down, and whispered in my ear, ‘It wasn’t just a blow job. It was one hell of a blow job.’ And oh, I was dying, Victor, what a card, what a card !”
    Betsy made off for the liquor cabinet. A boat horn tootled from the harbor down the road. Outside, through the window, the night was full