Tea Chapter 7

Chapter 7

“Hey, you’ve got to stay awake and keep me company, my darling.” It was eight in the morning. Miles and Sophie were about forty minutes into their trip to Newport, Rhode Island to tour the mansions on the coast. “You’re the one who wanted to make the most of the days and leave as early as we could manage this morning,” he chided. Sophie had been staring into space when her eyes were open, which was becoming less and less the norm as the minutes rolled along. “Besides, you’re the one that started things last night.”

“Yeah, the first time. Two and three were you and…him.”

“You know you can’t tease.”

“Me? I didn’t do anything.”

“Well. At least you’re alert in the face of accusation.”

“Oh. Piss off. Kiss me.”

“I’m driving!”

“It’s never stopped you before.” He concurred and complied. The drive continued. Driving through New England to reach a holiday destination is like a vacation all of its own. Rolling green hills, true colonial houses lined up along twisting highways, and scenery you swear you have seen on every calendar in every doctor’s office you have ever been in make even the route into town a more enjoyable trip than any other in America.

It was with that backdrop that the mending of the damage from the previous weeks took place. In the time it took to drive through that beautiful strip of early America it seemed as though not a cross word had been spoken between the two lovers. When they found their hotel they were glad that they could not check in for another three hours because it gave them an excuse to walk around Newport and be with only one another.

It was the same sensation they had felt so briefly in New York. It was a feeling of anonymousness in the crowd. No one knew who they were and no one cared too. For two people who were used to having every move they made watched and known, even if passively, it was a wonderful experience.

“Can you smell it, Miles? Can you smell the ocean? It’s right here. So big.” Sophie danced from one side of his body to the other and found a new arm to clasp.

“Yeah, I can, sweetheart. I can.” He squeezed her briefly and continued walking with her. They stopped at a half dozen or so eccentric stores that only a tourist town could get away with establishing but did more browsing than purchasing. They took a late lunch at a Panara and found their way back to the hotel; a cedar shingle Holiday Inn. Miles had never seen such a deviation in a major chain but on the most famous and opulent coast of Rhode Island eschewing the norm seemed elegant.

“Oh, Miles, come look!” Sophie had run to the end of the room before Miles had gotten his shoes off inside the door. Sophie had thrown the curtains open onto a view of a solitary beach. “Oh, it’s perfect.”

“Of course. I planned it that way.”

“Oh, you’re so full of rubbish. I was leaning on your shoulder when you made the reservations on Expedia.”

“Well, believe what you want. But we’re here.” He went to the patio window and slid his arms around her waist to take in the view. “How are you?”

“I’m good, Miles. I’m with you. Only you, for a change.”

“Yeah. We needed this, didn’t we?” She agreed. “”It is a great view. Who would have thought? I don’t know if you even saw the rest of the room, but we have a little foyer with a kitchenette and a coffee table and couch and everything.” Sophie craned her neck around Miles to look.

“It’s perfect.”

“Hopefully not so much that you won’t want to leave. I want to see those mansions tomorrow.”

“Oh, we will, those will be great.” Sophie took a deep breath and stood back from Miles for a moment. “You have been making me sappier and sappier by the minute this weekend, Miles. I can’t say that it’s entirely in character for me.”

“It’s good to try new things now and again.”

“Why do you always have some kind of answer for everything? And why does it never seem to be contrived?”

“Because it’s easy to be honest with you. Be myself. I trust you not to use it against me.”

“That’s a pretty big leap. I could rip you to shreds.”

“Oh, believe me, I know. It’s a risk I’m going to have to live with.”

“God.” Sophie laughed to herself. “Shut up. Come here.” Miles was already there but he knew what she meant. Before they fell onto the bed he flicked the curtain back across the window.

“I’m starving!” Sophie exclaimed. They were lying side by side on the still made bed in the dark.

“I don’t know how many options we’re going to have, now,” Miles answered glancing at the lime green numbers of the digital alarm clock on the night stand across the bed from them. They formed a reading of seventeen minutes after ten at night. “We could drive around downtown and see what’s open.”

“That should be easy. Pretty much everything is on that one main street. Can you get my bra and my shirt?” Miles felt around his immediate self in the blackness and found the rest of Sophie’s clothes. After she reacquainted herself with Victoria and Calvin Klein they headed out onto the town.

There were enough lights on as they came upon the main street that they weren’t too worried. The restaurant they settled on looked like it could have been a church at one time. The inside was all stonework and wooden beams from the kind of trees that hadn’t grown that large in Newport for at least a hundred years. Even the blades on the ceiling fans dozens of feet above them looked bigger than any of the trunks they had seen in the entire state.

“Wow,” Sophie uttered, just inside the door. “This might be-“

“Don’t worry. We’re on vacation, right?” Sophie faintly shook her head and smiled. The hostess found them and they were escorted to a table for two in the middle of the hardwood main floor. Miles swore he spotted bird’s-eye maple underneath his shoe. He shrugged to himself and ordered a pint of Guinness for himself and a Grey Goose martini for Sophie.

“Who are you, and what have you done with my boyfriend?” Sophie asked.

“Well, last I checked I was a little more than that.”

“Not without a ring. Don’t get too cocky, now.” Her smiling blush hurt the credibility of her conviction.

“I guess you’re right.”

“Ooh, say it again!”

“You’re right, Sophie.”

“My goodness, that got me hotter than anything you’ve ever told me, Miles Drake.” Miles put the back of his hand across his mouth and pointed Sophie up with his eyes. Their waitress was standing beside Sophie waiting to take her order. Her blush deepened. She kicked Miles’ shin under the table before speaking.

“I’ll have the Chicken Marcella.” The waitress looked to Miles.

“I’ll have the Blackened Sesame Tuna. And can we get the spinach artichoke dip for an appetizer?” Karen nodded and took their menus.

“You could have told me she was standing there before I made an ass of myself.”

“I had to let her know I was spoken for.”

“Wha-I don’t even know how to respond to that. I’m going to take it as a compliment.”

“That was the intention. She would have thought such a beautiful girl sitting at my table must be a business meeting or my interpreter or something.”

“Just stop it…” Sophie looked around her perimeter before continuing, “…Or I’m going to take you right on top of this table.”

“Again? You jest.”

“Watch me.” There was a wicked vindictiveness in her eyes that Miles could not argue with.

“You know, that first night in Boston…That was amazing, Sophie. Ever since then I knew…”

She smiled cordially and leaned back into her chair. “Why, thank you. I trust there have been other moments?”

“Oh, many others. Hours ago, for instance.”

“That was a moment?”

“For me, yes. The ocean meters away, nothing but you and me in the room with a bed bigger than anything…” Miles had to stop.

“When you put it that way…” Sophie said. She reached across the table and clasped Miles’ hand. “I love you, sweetheart.

“I love you, too. I love you.” After a perfect pause they saw the waitress heading toward them with a tray.

Karen set the appetizer in the middle of the table and after putting plates down left as swiftly as she had come. Miles and Sophie ate in silence for a while once remembered how hungry they were. By the time the main courses were presented they were eating at a civilized pace once again.

“That was really nice. Thank you, Miles.” Sophie kissed her lover affectionately in the street before they opened his car doors.

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.” Miles was still reeling from the fifty-four dollar bill he had received from the restaurant but was not going to show it. They drove back to the Holiday Inn tired and full, and that was the point.

“Ugh. It feels like it’s so late,” Sophie lamented after gracelessly flopping onto the couch in the first half of the room.

“Well, it is nearly eleven. And we did get up at around seven-thirty this morning. Shall we cash our chips in and rest up for the mansions tomorrow?”

“That sounds good to me. I want to take a shower first, though.” There was enough vibrance left in Sophie for a smirk. “You want to come?”

“I could never bee tired enough to resist, my darling.” He followed her into the plushest bathroom they had seen in months.

“So is this what we do, love? Hop from holiday to holiday and rekindle our flame every so often? What is it going to be like after we leave New Hampshire?” Sophie was wondering aloud in the dark, lying as close to Miles in the king-sized hotel bed as she did in the twins of the cabins at the camp.

“I don’t know, Sophie. Isn’t that what most people do in real life? Isn’t that what holidays are for?”

“I guess. I just like feeling like this with you so much. But I don’t feel like this at camp.”

“A lot of people don’t feel their happiest moments are at work.”

“But it’s different for us. There’s no going home. That place is our whole life right now. There’s no separation of work and anything else. We get done with a group and we walk twenty meters to our home. It just makes me a little stir-crazy is all.”

“I don’t know what to do about that. Ontanogan brought us together. That’s a positive, right?”
“Yeah. I just want you to tell me that some day we’ll feel like this all the time.”

“Well, not to get all philosophical, but I think that you have to have some kind of undesirable factors in your life to make you really appreciate moments like these. Think about it. If we were rich and jetsetting all over the world, do you think we would appreciate this little corner of Rhode Island, this room that’s so far removed from our little bits of unhappiness at camp? We would probably be unhappy, and not even realize what was making us that way because we would think we had it all.”

“Wow. That was pretty deep, Miles.”

“Yeah, sorry. I want to make everything roses for you, Sophie. That’s why I take holidays like this with you. But we can’t do it all the time. I hope you can find something you like no matter where you are.”

“I like being with you. That makes everything seem a little better. You’re really nice to me. You make me feel really wonderful, pretty much all the time.” Sophie laughed a contemplative humor. “I imagine if it wasn’t for that I would have either gone crazy or turned into a complete bitch.”

“Good, good. I’m glad I can be…that… for you.”

“I love you, darling.”

“I love you, too.”

The two awoke the next morning with an air of casualty that they were fully aware and appreciative of. Miles wandered into the lobby and found the continental breakfast for the two of them while Sophie was in the shower. They sat on the bed in a square of sunshine and ate tiny muffins and plastic cups of cranberry-apple juice. After fueling up Miles took his turn in the shower and they drove to the coast to start their tour of the mansions.

The mansions in Newport were once summer homes for families like the Vanderbilts and the ffhtht. By the time they were passed on to younger generations, development in the area coupled with the shear amount of land the buildings occupied catapulted the property taxes so high that the heirs donated or signed joke leases to the city. The places were kept up by a society of some sort that does that sort of thing. The mansions were basically reclassified as museums.

For thirty dollars a piece, Miles and Sophie were given tickets to the five mansions currently open to the public. There was a structured tour through all of them so not only was the guesswork and timing of the day not an issue but the adventure came equipped with a knowledgeable guide.

Almost the entire time they toured the first and least extravagant of the mansions along with a group of about ten others their mouths were agape. The building boasted room after room of marble columns, vaulted ceilings, fantastic views, and imported everything. The most illuminating moments came when the guide, a woman just beginning to show silver in her hair and looked like she could have lived in the place in modern times, pointed out the ‘modern’ features. Those features included things like indoor flush toilets, dumbwaiters to pulley food from the kitchen to the dining room, and typewriters.

They were homes in times where people actually had grand pianos in music rooms adjacent to smoking parlors with full-size billiard tables and separated dressing rooms outside their bedrooms.

And the rooms only got bigger and more over-the-top as the tour went on. By the time the group made it to the Breakers, summer home of the Vanderbilts, they thought they had seen it all. They were wrong. The Breakers was ridiculous. Everything Miles and Sophie had seen in the other mansions was intensified by leaps and bounds at the Breakers. The staircases were curvier, the ballrooms bigger, the kitchens way ahead of their times, and the views and gardens more lush than anything else.

“Wow,” was all Sophie could manage as they drove back to their hotel room.

“Yeah. I’m really glad you bought that coffeetable book in the bookstore. Nobody’s going to believe this.”

“Oh, I know. The Breakers was…Can you imagine living in that place? Forty-three staff when they weren’t there?”

“Yeah, and shipping their family silverware with them by train? Crazy.”

“Well, they did own the railroads. May as well use them.”

“Yeah. Are you hungry?”

“Famished. I thought you would never ask.” Sophie leaned over and pecked his cheek.

“What do you feel like?”

“Well, after today, some filet-mingion in a truffle sauce. How about you?”

“I’m going to say McDonald’s. Let’s meet in the middle, shall we?”

“So good at compromise. How did I get so lucky?”

“I don’t know. You should probably hang on to me.”

“You should be so lucky.”

They settled on an Italian restaurant not far from where they had dined the previous night. They were unusually silent over pasta and wine, not for lack of anything to say, but because spending the day on their feet and in constant amazement had sapped them of their usual energy.

Tired feet and full stomachs could not, however, keep the two vacationers from taking advantage of a king-sized bed and anonymous neighbors. The pace of consummation was perhaps a bit more relaxed than usual, but neither suffered for it.

“We need to do this more often,” Sophie sighed happily as she lay at an angle from Miles with her head on his ribs.

“See, I told you!”

“Not this, you twit!” Sophie giggled despite her pretended frustration. “If we did this any more than we already do I think I would die of exhaustion. I mean, go on holiday, just the two of us. I like most everyone else and all, but I like you more.”

“You know, Sophie, I do too.” It was amazing how she could make him realize things about their relationship on a regular basis “I mean, you’re the first girl I’ve ever dated that I actually like hanging out with.”

“Um, Thanks?”

“Well, I mean, usually girlfriends are ok to hang out with and you like them and all, sure, but there’s always that voice in the back of your head wondering what the guys are up to or if there’s any beer in the fridge or whatever. But with you…I mean, I think that if we were just…plutonic friends, I would still want to hang out with you more than anyone else in camp.”

“Same goes for you, sweetheart.”

“I mean, we have lots of sex, and I really like that…Miles paused to reflect on an example involving an ice cube… “But, being around you was fun even before that. I guess I just don’t want you to think that’s what I think it’s all about.”

Sophie rolled from her back to her stomach. “I know, love. If I thought that I would have bagged you a long time ago. But it’s nice to hear you say.” Miles nodded. Sophie swept closer to Miles like an Australian minute hand until she hit twelve-thirty and inched her way up Miles for the midnight hour.