Heading up the mountain, Jim took several wrong turns on roads that looked too narrow to be two-way streets and not just someone’s well-paved driveway, but no one particularly minded, because it gave them a better introduction to the island. Mallorca was a layer cake—the gnarled olive trees and spiky palms, the green-gray mountains, the chalky stone walls along either side of the road, the cloudless pale blue sky overhead. Though the day was hot, the mugginess of New York City was gone, replaced by unfiltered sunshine and a breeze that promised you’d never be too warm for long. Mallorca was summer done right, hot enough to swim but not so warm that your clothing stuck to your back.
Franny laughed when they pulled into the gravel drive, so drastically had Gemma undersold her house—another reason to despise her: modesty. In the distance, there were proper mountains, with ancient trees ringing the slopes like Christmas ornaments, and the house itself looked like an actual present: two stories tall and twice as wide as their limestone at home, it was a sturdy-looking stone building, painted a light pink. It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face. A good third of the house’s front was covered with rich green vines, which crept across from edge to edge, threatening to climb into the windows and consume the house entirely. Tall, narrow pine trees lined the edge of the property, their tippy-tops poking at the wide and empty sky. It was a child’s drawing of a house, a large square with an angled roof on top, colored in with some ancient terra-cotta crayon that made the whole thing radiate. Franny clapped.
The back of the house was even better—the swimming pool, which had looked merely serviceable in the single backyard photograph, was in fact divine, a wide blue rectangle tucked into the hillside. A cluster of wooden chaise longues sat at one end, as if the Posts had walked in on a conversation already in progress. Sylvia hurried behind her mother, holding on to the sides of her tunic like a horse’s reins. From the lip of the pool, they could see other houses tucked into the side of the mountain, as small and perfectly shaped as Monopoly pieces, their gleaming faces poking out from a blanket of shifting green trees and craggy rocks. The ocean was somewhere on the other side of the mountains, another ten minutes west, and Sylvia huffed in the fresh air, sniffing for salt particles. There was probably a university in Mallorca—at the very least, a swimming and tennis academy. Maybe she would just stay and let her parents go home alone and do whatever had to be done. If she was on the other side of the world, what difference would it make? For the first time in her life, Sylvia envied her brother’s distance. It was harder to mourn something you weren’t used to seeing on a daily basis.
Jim left the bags in the car and found the front door, which was oversized, heavy, and unlocked. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark. The house’s foyer was empty except for a console table on the left-hand side, a large mirror hanging on the wall, and a ceramic pot the size of a small child on the right.
“Hello?” Jim called out, even though the house was supposed to be empty, and he wasn’t expecting an answer. In front of him, a narrow hall led straight to a door to the garden, and he could see a sliver of the swimming pool, backed by the mountains. The room smelled of flowers and earth, with a soupçon of cleaning products. Bobby would like that, when he arrived—ever since he was a child, when Jim and Franny would drag him along on their trips to Maine or New Orleans or wherever, staying in crumbling vacation houses with mismatched forks, Bobby made his disgust for the unclean known. He detested antique furniture and vintage clothing, anything that had had a previous life. It was why he liked Florida real estate so much, Jim thought—everything was always brand-new. Even the gigantic piles in Palm Beach were gutted every few years, their insides replaced with shinier parts. Florida suited Bobby in a way that New York never had, but he wouldn’t mind this, either. At least not for two weeks.
Jim walked through the archway on his left, into the living room. As in the photos, it was stylishly underfurnished, with only two low sofas and a nice rug, with paintings on the walls in places where the sun wouldn’t hit them directly. Gemma was an art dealer, or a gallerist, or something. Jim’s vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous. The living room led into a dining room, with a long wooden farm table and two rustic-looking benches, which in turn led into the large kitchen. The windows above the sink looked out onto the pool, and Jim paused there. Sylvia and Franny were lying on neighboring chaises. Franny had unwrapped her shawl from her shoulders and placed it over her face. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her legs splayed out to the sides—she was sunbathing, albeit with most of her clothes on. Jim exhaled with satisfaction—Franny was already having a good time.
To say that Franny had been uptight in the preceding month would be too delicate, too demure. She had been ruling the Post house with an iron sphincter. Though the trip had been meticulously planned in February, months before Jim’s job at the magazine had slid out from under him, the timing was such that Fran could be counted on to have at least one red-faced scream per day. The zipper on the suitcase was broken, Bobby and Carmen’s flights (booked on Post frequent-flier points) were costing them hundreds of dollars in fees because they had to shift the flights back a day. Jim was always in the way and in the wrong. Franny was expert in showing the public her good face, and once Charles arrived, it would be nothing but petting and cooing, but when she and Jim were alone, Franny could be a demon. Jim was grateful that, at least for the time being, Franny’s horns seemed to have vanished back inside her skull.
The far end of the kitchen spat Jim out into the narrow hall opposite the entrance. On the other side of the foyer were a small bathroom with only a toilet and a shower stall, a laundry room, a study, and a single bedroom with its own bathroom attached, what Americans called mother-in-law suites, a place where you could stash the person everyone wanted to see the least. Normally, Jim would have claimed the study for his own, or at least fought Franny hard for it, but then he realized that he wouldn’t have anything to do there—there were no deadlines looming, no pieces to edit, no writing to do, no queries to be made, no books to read for any purpose other than his own pleasure and edification. He needed a desk like a fish needed a bicycle, that’s what the bumper sticker would have read. Gallant would soldier on without him, telling the intelligent American man which books to buy, which soap to use, and how to tell the difference between Scotch and Irish whiskey. Jim tried to shake off his discomfort with this, but it lingered as he made his way into the bedroom.
The room was cozy, with a quilt covering the double bed, a large dresser, and a writing desk in front of the window that faced the far side of the house. Uncharitably, Jim thought about whether they could put Bobby and Carmen in that room, and not upstairs, where the rest of the bedrooms must be, but no, of course they would give Charles and Lawrence the most privacy. There was an old-fashioned key sitting in the lock on the inside of the bedroom door, which made Jim happy. If they were all going to be in this house together, at least they could lock the doors. Jim briefly fantasized about locking himself in and playing possum for the rest of the day, a lazy man’s Walter Mitty.
Sylvia and Franny banged in from the outside just as Jim was pulling the door closed.