Free The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin

the water, like a porpoise. “I have acquaintances.”
    “Not anymore,” Truman said solemnly. He crooked his little finger and held it out to her. “Best friends. Pinkie swear.”
    Babe smiled, and crooked her own finger through his. “Pinkie swear.” Then her heart—that swollen sac of regret—tore, and she felt something slide down her cheek. She swiped away a tear, as astonished to see it as she would have been to see a lizard floating in the clarion-blue pool, as blue as Montego Bay itself, just down the lush, verdant hill. The air was silky, warm on winter-parched skin; Truman was paler than smoke, while Babe’s flesh was tawny, from years spent following the annual migration of her flock—several long stays each winter in the Caribbean, summers in the country, an annual yachting trip in the Mediterranean. A year spent chasing the sun, in golden chariots. “I’ve never done that before—pinkie swear, I mean. Not with my sisters. Not with my children.”
    “There are a lot of things you’ve never done before, but that you’ll do with me. I just know it. We’re good for each other, Bobolink. Perfect, actually. We’re so alike.”
    And Babe, searching the face of her new friend, so brash and confident, yet because he believed in that confidence, touchingly vulnerable, wasn’t so sure. And then, suddenly, she was. Because, of course, that was how she’d recognized him in the first place, when he, all five feet four of him, wrapped in an absurd plaid scarf, his hands nonchalantly in his pockets as he stood in the front of her plane, blinked to adjust his eyesight from the dark outside to the light within.
    He was exactly like her. Rare and exotic and yet so completely messy and ordinary. Disgustingly ordinary. So ordinary that great pains must be taken to disguise the fact, to protect the feelings of those who invested so much in exoticism and perfection.
    How could anyone else but the two of them ever know the cost?
    “Let’s get out of here.” Truman stood up, shook his tiny white feet, and helped Babe rise. “I want to buy you something. A present—it’s only proper. Your hospitality, as advertised, is legendary and I have to pay you back.”
    “No, Truman, you don’t have to. You have already given me more than you can know.”
    Truman threw his arms about her.
    “Of course you’d say that! But still, isn’t there some divinely picturesque market around here? I’ve heard so much about the colorful Jamaicans—I want to see some! It’s exquisite up here on your mountain, but a tad—well, you know.”
    “A tad isolated and exclusive?” Babe laughed; just down the hill from their cottage was Noël Coward’s. And up the hill, Oscar Hammerstein sometimes vacationed. “Yes, there’s a lovely little market down the hill in Montego Bay. I’ll drive—it will be fun. I so rarely get to.”
    Babe went inside the luxurious villa—all filmy white curtains and palm fronds and wicker, but weighed down by English antiques, a nod to the colonial history of the island—to “freshen up.” She emerged minutes later in the chicest pink linen sundress, not flouncy, but a cool column. She had on white leather sandals, carried a straw bag, and had subtly adjusted her makeup so that her lipstick now complemented the pink. She’d brushed some kind of iridescent powder on her cheekbones, to catch the sun. Truman clapped his hands at the sight of her, causing Bill Paley to look up from a hammock on the veranda and grunt.
    “Darling Bill, we’re just going down to the market for a bit. Would you like me to get you anything?”
    “How about some conch? Do we have any of that around? I like those little conch balls that the cook makes, rolled up and fried in that batter.”
    “I’ll make sure you have some for dinner! We’ll be back before then.”
    Babe leaned over to kiss her husband, who said, “Don’t wreck the car,” before he closed his eyes and resumed his nap.
    The warning was not