Diana’s dismissal from Mercury was sufficiently incendiary to catalyze a deluge of additional unpleasant administrative niceties, but for the most part, this systemic advantage held true. Sure, there was a tepid internal investigation. Reports and counterreports. Lengthy HR interviews with mommy-track part-timers with extensive empathy training and I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager haircuts. The real point of contention, it became clear, had nothing to do with Horace, but rather Diana’s perceived undisclosed conflict of interest re: Ecco and its “business impact” on the Portmanteau sales pipeline (needless to say, Jack hired another firm to run the due diligence). Parker wouldn’t speak to her, not that it mattered much to Diana. She’d been fond of him, but there’s only so much loyalty one can muster for a leader whose own extends solely to the point of self-interest. Besides, other partners were already clamoring to hire her. Diana scheduled a vacation for early August, making her effectively unstaffable in the meantime, and readied herself to enjoy a largely subsidized month on Nantucket.
Dale was considerably less fortunate, as the unfired souls left with an angry client tend to be. While he and Eric Hashimoto only bore Prudence Hyman’s indirect wrath, they bore it at exponentially closer proximity, and there was no shortage of long nights spent in the fifty-second-floor conference room during those last few weeks. Such stretches can sometimes really galvanize a team, whipped into the addicting conflation of type-A stress with teleologic (ontologic?) significance, but the dynamic without Diana just felt forced and bleak, like the illusionless morning after a one-night stand, awkwardly formal in compensation for the prior show of intimacy. The work itself lost any remaining pretense. The impending layoffs just seemed pedestrian and sad. Eric was inconsolably desolate, and particularly pitiable when he developed a head cold in the height of summer’s heat. Dale picked up the slack himself, conscious that the rest of the team, though no one ever said anything, felt rather hard done by, caught in the crosshairs of Olympian conflicts that were none of their concern and above their pay grade. It was just as well. The few waking hours Dale spent outside work were consumed by the ever-elastic exercise of planning for his wedding.
With some conspicuous groveling, Vivien had “forgiven” him almost immediately. Dale understood this quote-unquote forgiveness to carry contingencies, that it was more like a tacit probationary agreement, whereby Vivien would not mention his conduct with regard to Diana Whalen in exchange for the authority to command him as she pleased. This was the form his atonement took: wedding vendor management, support of various last-minute “upgrades,” validation (only validation) of aesthetic minutiae, more-than-cursory participation in seating arrangement analyses. It should be noted that the actual procession of their union had never been in serious jeopardy. Dale’s compliance with his fiancée’s terms were tied closer to a quotidian path of least resistance than any sort of essential relationship-saving. Even if Vivien’s worst suspicions had been true, Dale didn’t think she would have gone so far as to call off the wedding. The invitations had already gone out. And more subtly: she exhibited far too much evidence, however neatly disguised, of that mounting febrile desire most women her age (even if they refused to acknowledge it, even if they themselves found it bizarre or disturbing or even sexist) were on some level consumed by. The great irony was, rather, that the terms of his subjugation realized precisely those daily unpleasantries he’d resisted a textbook affair to avoid in the first place.
As the summer weeks waned, Vivien showed few signs of winnowing reparative expectations. The more accustomed you become to getting what you want, the more it loses its luster, and at the same time needles all the more in those rare instances when you do not. This is a feature of privilege in general, but especially of beautiful, rich young women in the days leading up to their weddings. No one could have credibly used the word Bridezilla, of course. Vivien’s desires were far too refined, and she expressed them with calmness and precision. That she made herself above reproach was part of Dale’s mounting vexation. He began to get the sense she was leveraging her temporary power explicitly in the service of its permanent installation, like a spousal sort of gerrymandering, or a clever wisher, wishing for more wishes. Hints of irritation started creeping into his acts of compliance. At first Vivien either didn’t or pretended not to notice. She was still traveling to New York during the week. But as his resentment grew more manifest, she began, ever subtly, to tug at the veil covering their original agreement. Dale became consciously aggrieved, feeling he’d done quite enough penance for a fundamentally innocent party. Their relationship became increasingly transactional. A wafting malaise enveloped the town house, one no amount of busyness and prenuptial logistics could quite paper over. It was under these curling corners of obligation, in the fractional slits of negative space, that Dale’s mind came to rest newly on Diana Whalen.
He knew she still worked at Portmanteau. He’d been contacted by the internal investigation shortly after the Young Members’ Party, as had Eric Hashimoto. No, I have no reason to believe Ms. Whalen had any prior knowledge of Mercury’s interest in acquiring Ecco; Yes, I have every confidence that at another client, she would succeed. If Diana had been terminated, her E-IM status would have changed to the ominous Presence Unknown weeks ago, whereas she was mostly just Offline or Away, with a little yellow dot next to her photo. On the rare occasions Dale saw it flash green, he could feel the physiological stress response, the moistening glandular anticipation that maybe she would ping him, which he both worked strenuously to quell and seemed unable to resist exacerbating—rolling his mouse over her picture, her name; hesitating, clicking on it, bringing up a little blank window, watching it glow whitely. He thought about typing many things, sometimes going so far as to actually type them, but sent nothing. Still, these little actions, the shifting pixels on the screen, seen by no one else, were the subject of great pleasure and defiance, of torment and somatopsychic anxiety. Sometimes, minutes after she’d gone offline, his stilted inhalations still uneven, his fingers still hovering above the keys, it would hit him. The sheer magnitude with which he missed her. This isn’t to say he experienced regret proper, or even the disinterested sense he might have acted differently. A part of what continued to so arouse him was, indeed, the memory of his own resistance, of which his unsent missives cut a crude facsimile.
He came to covet her E-IM photo, that particular photo specifically. It was an oldish portrait, from before Dale had known her at least. Her hair was still long, natural—gorgeous and collegiately unruly. If Dale had to put a date on it, he would have guessed 2012 or ’13. Technically, it was an appropriate corporate headshot—blue background, wide smile, conservative neckline; a professional photo taken explicitly for use in a professional setting. And yet there was something distinctly improper about it, Dale thought. It seemed to reveal too much of her. It seemed to contain, in a single image, all possible versions of her—an inchoate galaxy you had to know her to see—though Dale had never seen it aside from in the photo. It’s been retouched, he told himself, it’s just Photoshop. Still, the avatar’s special beauty, while surpassing the real Diana’s, recalled her with such emotional fidelity that sometimes, away from his computer, he wasn’t sure whether it was the real Diana or the little portrait with whom he longed to speak.
In mid-August, during his final week at Olympia, Dale’s itch to make contact hit a fever pitch when he overheard the conversation of two young men, nearly indistinguishable in fleece vests and double-monk-strap shoes, hands wedged into the pockets of dark chinos, sauntering toward the forty-ninth-floor elevator with postprandial ease. They were from the rival consulting firm hired to vet Ecco, the little vest logos declared, and it was clear enough from their discussion that Mercury would not be proceeding. When Dale googled it, he found a frothy M&A blog was reporting the same, citing not only inadequate synergies and Ecco’s resistance to Philadelphian relocation, but rumors of a more personal scandal not unrelated to Jack Howard’s strange failure to rehire Portmantea
u, which is usually his go-to advisory—as well as the employer of Range’s wife, Diana Whalen . . . There was an incendiary story circling, the article went on, about a Pomeranian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The author only got about half the details right, and mercifully did not mention Dale or Vivien by name, but he’d held his breath reading it—twice, just to be sure.
—Was the point to make us look like tech douchebags? Yes, and they were eminently successful, Julian complained over the phone when Dale called him a few days later, at Vivien’s behest.
—It just sounded like a bad fit, Julian, honestly. Besides, Murgers & Hackquisitions isn’t exactly a heralded publication. It’s practically a tabloid.
Dale could hear Julian rolling his eyes.
—That’s part of the problem, though, isn’t it? I cannot believe I’m saying this, let alone in the crumbling wake of my brand and prestige—may it Rest in Peace—but I almost feel sorry for Wes. You know, given his history with salacious press.
But Dale did not know, and so said.
—Really? Diana never told you about Wes’s father?
—No? Why would she?
—Interesting, Julian said, ultra-syllabically. I guess I had assumed you two were closer.
Dale sensed a loosening conviction on Julian’s part that he was keen not to retighten.
—Anyway, do you have a navy bow tie? Vivien wants to know.
—Obviously I do.
—She wants you to wear it to the rehearsal dinner.
—Oh, goodie. That will complement my boater hat nicely; its grosgrain ribbon is the same shade of navy. I’ve been looking for excuses to wear it all summer, you know. It’s hard to establish a new affectation, when I already have so many. Please do thank her for me.
—Yeah. Will do.
They hung up, but Julian’s words echoed in his mind. I guess I had assumed you two were closer. When, click by click, Dale learned the extent of Charlie Range’s crimes, Diana’s failure ever to mention them seemed not just odd and curious and wounding but inconceivable. All those lunches in the Underworld, evenings in the backgroundless bar—Paris—where they’d spoken at such great lengths of their spouses, their families, even their in-laws? Of novels and Anna Karenina and the very topic of suicide? It didn’t compute, and the incomputability irked him. It seemed both to mock and intensify his misery, and in the void once filled by her dazzling repartee, his mind searched simultaneously for how to forget and punish her. Dale reflected on their conversations, and imagined new, hypothetical ones. He saw her, too, alone, without him. He imagined, from Diana’s perspective, the critical acclaim of his unwritten novel, concocting ever more gratifying scenarios with rising degrees of fantasy. There she was, in her cold apartment, reading it. Then learning it was to become an HBO miniseries. With schadenfreude and compassion, he felt her swallow a cocktail of emotions—literally swallowing himself, in imitation of his own imaginings, at turns gratified and touched by her pride and rue, her identification, her insecurity. She could see there was a character drawn in her likeness, yes, and was chuffed by the inclusion, to have had some effect on one of her generation’s literary luminaries. And yet she also found it distressing. It seemed unfair to hold no commercial share of his success, to have to watch his work—their intimacy—taken so readily by fawning TV hosts as the brilliant conjurings of fiction. When Katie Couric asked for his inspiration, he’d only said Tolstoy and Melville and Wilde and James. Though Diana would have been embarrassed, too, to be recognized. She was unable to shake the impression it was not the most flattering portrait.
It has been said, and will be said again, that passion makes one think in a circle. Certainly with hideous iteration Dale shaped and reshaped these visions, so pleasing and torturous, with their potential and unreality, until they came to seem a sort of plan, if not a foretold destiny. Dale exhumed a black Moleskine from his bag, made a few notes, and put it back again.
—What will you do for the next two weeks, before the wedding? Eric asked Dale the next day, twirling his suitcase past the white Chesterfield benches for the last time.
—Whatever Vivien tells me to, he said blithely.
CHAPTER XXIX.
In the May 7, 2013, issue of the New Yorker there appeared a 629-word satirical essay by Emma Rathbone, written from the perspective of a bride addressing a stylist, describing her vision for her wedding hair. “I’ve got something kind of specific in mind,” the bride admits, before launching into a series of crisp extended metaphors for the tousled up-do vibe she is going for—sexy Little House on the Prairie, Georgia O’Keeffe–ish sophisticate, your young mom on moving day, who, everyone agrees, “looks prettier when she doesn’t even try.” Vivien loved the piece for its humor, but even more for its breathtaking accuracy. It might have been written expressly for any number of her friends, and its memory served as a catty beacon of solace on the wedding circuit prior to her own engagement. After Dale proposed, she dug up the dog-eared issue again, approaching it with the kind of hip irony that permits one to simultaneously be a part of something and make fun of it without contradiction. When she quoted it to her stylist at her own trial appointment, they’d laughed together—and the stylist understood precisely what Vivien had in mind.
At half past eleven on the morning of her wedding, Vivien sat at her mother’s vanity in a monogrammed white robe and holding a mimosa, studying with controlled anxiety the hands of her stylist as they sectioned and curled and teased according to plan. The spacious, neutral bedroom had been outfitted attractively for the occasion. Vivien’s wedding dress hung in the picturesque bank of farmhouse windows. Across the room, a colorful spread of refreshments had been set up next to the beige linen settee. There were precisely the right number of flower arrangements to convey a general sense of tasteful festivity. Vivien’s bridesmaids—also wearing monogrammed robes, but of a pale blue—distributed themselves about leisurely, looking like the subjects of a late Renoir. They approached the vanity in between bites of gourmet bagel and their own hair and makeup services to pay tribute with compliments so effusively heaping and indiscriminate that Vivien scarcely trusted and largely ignored them, preferring to critically evaluate each step in her bridal metamorphosis for herself. Still, Vivien was glad to have them there, in their pretty matching robes. An equipage is not complete without staff in correct attire.
—A little more volume on top, I think, Vivien told the stylist. More, you know, windswept.
—It already looks perfect, Vivien, Grace Cho declared, licking a globule of cream cheese from her fingers and sinking into the battalion of decorative pillows on Vivien’s parents’ bed.
—Yeah, you look like Kate Middleton, said Jackie Darby.
—Vivien’s prettier than Kate Middleton, Audrey Wimberly corrected her, not to be outdone.
Vivien studied the faces of her bridesmaids in the glass, then she studied her own. She’d lost three pounds in the preceding weeks, and even before contouring, her face and neck had a gratifying angularity that was undeniably Kate-like, enhanced by the softness of its dark, textural frame. Glancing again at her bridesmaids, Vivien decided that while they were being disingenuous, they were also correct.
—Thanks, she said with equanimity—but I’m going more for, like, 1994 Wynona Ryder in Little Women—
—Oh, my god, I love that movie.
—Me too.
—Me too.
—And Winona is so pretty in it.
—So pretty.
—Vivien’s a total Jo, don’t you think?
—Totally.
—I always wanted to be a Jo, but I’m more of an Amy, Grace Cho lamented.
—Jackie’s a Meg, Audrey said.
—I am not a Meg.
—Who is Meg then—who is Beth?
—Gr-ace! Beth dies, Jackie protested.
—Yah, but she’s Claire Danes.
—None of us are Beth, Audrey said diplomatically.
Vivien caught her stylist’s eye in the mirror and gest
ured to the swoop on the long side of her part.
—Just a little more volume, she instructed her quietly.
Downstairs in the sunroom, Dale and his groomsmen performed their concomitant prenuptial rites. While the requisite images of them donning bow ties and cufflinks were photographed for posterity, these mainly revolved around nursing their hangovers by sipping single-barrel bourbon, punctuated by the occasional shot. In contrast to—or, perhaps better stated, on account of the previous evening—the drinking was markedly uncompetitive. Set under twinkle lights in the dimming garden of the Rodin Museum, Dale and Vivien’s rehearsal dinner and welcome reception had created the kind of atmosphere that inclines the elite to drink in quantities that in the absence of privilege would probably be labeled alcoholism, and even with it generated euphemistic whispers that so-and-so (but generally, Harry Sinclair) was having “rather too good a time.” Mercifully no one had done anything so inappropriate as to spoil Vivien’s enjoyment, but they’d all been overserved, and into the early afternoon both Harry and Sebastian were visibly wrecked. The groomsmen’s alpha impulses were thus relegated to lightly roasting Dale, showering him with insults that a disinterested observer might note had more in common than not with Vivien’s bridesmaids’ flattery.
Only in the very final stages of grooming did the conversation veer toward the unironic. There was a lot of “you look good, man” and back-clapping. Was it time to go? No, the photographer had returned to the ladies. “Getting-ready photos,” the wedding planner explained, were only focused on the actual process of getting ready for the groom. The bride’s were often restaged at the end, so she and her maids might be fully powdered not just for the posed photos in their matching robes but also the “candids,” the makeup artist pretending to dust an already-painted face. It was fully another hour before the wedding planner reappeared in the sunroom to announce it was time to head to the club for the couple’s “first look” in the library and formal photographs, which would last approximately two hours.
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