by Bridie Clark
Rita stopped at the top of the stairs, clearly contemptuous. “Maybe I could, but I won’t. And let me tell you something else. I got your note about wanting to ‘fund’ Rita’s Artistic Acrylics. Insulting, Mister. As if I would sell out my own daughter for a bribe like that!”
Wyatt groaned. He’d known that offer was a bad idea, but was running out of good ones. “I’m sorry, Rita, I’m just—desperate.” Wyatt couldn’t believe he was saying that about himself, but it was true.
“Why are you so worked up? I figure a guy like you could get any girl he wants.”
“Lucy’s irreplaceable.”
Rita seemed to soften a little, perhaps sensing his agony. “Well, give her time. Lucy just might come around, you never know.” Wyatt, clinging to the sliver of hope she’d just offered, watched as Rita headed down the stairs and out of sight.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Cornelia scowled into the phone when Anna Santiago’s voice mail picked up again. Bad enough that she was persona non grata at Dafinco, which had immediately yanked her perfume off the shelves and suppressed news about the rash of rashes as if it were another Chernobyl. Bad enough that Daphne couldn’t get the MTV producers to return calls about her reality show.
But what made it all worse was that even Fernanda wouldn’t talk to her.
Despite Fernanda’s blatant disloyalty at the ball, Cornelia had decided to be the bigger person when she heard about her friend’s surprise engagement. (She’d gotten the news from one of her maids, who knew one of the Fairchilds’ maids, and she never received so much as an e-mail from Fernanda herself. She was willing to overlook that, too.) If Fernanda could get over Parker’s distressingly six-figure annual income, then Cornelia would, too. But how could she be supportive if the girl refused to speak to her? Fernanda picked up the phone each time she called, only to immediately hang up in her ear.
Cornelia headed into her white marble kitchen, carefully avoiding eye contact with mirrors. She hadn’t left her apartment since the ball—the perfume debacle and subsequent whispered bad-mouthing had essentially put her under house arrest, and it was shocking how quickly her carefully maintained looks had run wild with nobody there to see them.
Her hair was now kinked and curly, her nails were a ragged mess, and she hadn’t showered for at least two days. It felt strangely good to let herself go. I’ve had to be perfect for twenty-seven years, she realized, pouring some more vodka into her coffee mug, which she used before noon for propriety’s sake. Townhouse would be out in just a few more days, ending the Lucy dynasty and restoring Cornelia to the top of Manhattan’s social order. Then her little vacation would be over.
Returning from their pilgrimage to Costco in Queens, Rita and Margaret appeared in the doorway of Dottie Hayes’s library, each holding a megabox. “Got the Twinkies, got the Bagel Bites!” Rita announced.
“You are the best!” Lucy jumped up from her sewing machine to help them with their loads. “And the wine spritzers?”
“But of course!” Margaret smiled. “We’ll load up Mrs. Hayes’s refrigerator. Keep working.”
“You sent more flowers?” Wyatt was seated across from Trip at their usual table at Bar & Books, a half-empty pack of Dunhills on the table between them. They’d been camped out for an hour, swilling scotch and trying to make sense of the situation. Lucy still wasn’t returning his calls. It had been five days. He had tried everything: repeatedly leaving voice mails with apologies so profuse they startled him; continuing with avowals that his manuscript had been shredded, then burned, then buried; begging a tightlipped Eloise and even more tightlipped Dottie Hayes to intervene. His own mother had stiffly told him to “leave my Lucy alone.” All had failed. He felt like an exile from his own life. During the past three months, Lucy Ellis had become the first person he spoke to in the morning and the last person he spoke to at night, but even still, Wyatt was surprised at how bereft he felt. Without her, and with the burden of his own guilt and hubris, he was a man deprived of oxygen.
“Of course,” said Trip, who had his own problems. “Eight dozen red roses. A dozen for each of the years I’ve been blessed to have Eloise in my life. I’ve been sending ’em every day, I don’t care what that doorman told you.”
Wyatt groaned. “Jesus, you really wanted to remind her of how long it’s been?”
Trip scratched his head. “Maybe that’s why she hasn’t responded.”
“Or maybe she’s buried in roses and can’t see the telephone.”
“Let’s talk about something else.” Trip stamped out his cigarette into the ashtray, now overflowing with their dead butts. “Is your publisher going to let you try another topic?”
“Doesn’t look that way.” Kipling hadn’t been angry at Wyatt for leading him on; he’d been badly, perhaps permanently, disappointed. Thinking about the book reminded Wyatt of Lucy’s hurt expression when he walked in Sunday morning. “She must have flipped through the first half, to get so riled up.” Wyatt rubbed his forehead with his palm. “She doesn’t even care that I backed out of my publishing deal.”
Trip tilted his head. “Well, you should have been up front with her from the beginning.”
“Aware of that,” Wyatt said curtly. “God, I’m starving. Of all the weeks for Margaret to call in sick.”
“Listen, at least Lucy hasn’t already started dating Max Fairchild. Can you believe that guy? What a vulture.”
“What, moving in on a girl whom you left hanging for eight years?” Wyatt finished his drink and gestured for a refill. “Eloise gave you many chances, Trip.”
“Yeah? Well, you spent every day with Lucy. Plenty of opportunity to be honest.”
Irritated with each other and themselves, they both stared glumly into their brown water. Then Wyatt remembered something. “Hey, I owe you this.” He took off his wristwatch and slid it across the table. Thanks to Cornelia’s meddling, he’d lost a bet he knew now he was a fool to have made in the first place.
His friend pushed it back. “Nah. It’s yours, keep it.”
“I insist. Deal’s a deal.”
“I don’t want it!”
“You really are off your feed.” Wyatt watched him with sympathy. “Why don’t you just propose?”
But Trip just hung his head. “Maybe I should. I—I don’t know. I still can’t get there.”
They sat in silence for another moment or two, until Wyatt slammed the table with his palm. “This is absurd. We need to clear our heads, stop our moping. Have some fun.” Maybe he could get Lucy out of his head. Find the guy he used to be before she came into his life.
“What’d you have in mind?” Trip asked.
Eloise watched Max hammering away on the other side of Dottie’s library. His faded Springsteen T-shirt clung to his back a little; he’d been hard at work for hours. She tried not to notice how strong his arms were. Max deserves more than a rebound fling, and I’m in no shape for anything real, she reminded herself. He reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s—a far cry from the custom jeans Trip ordered from Japan and had his assistant break in for six months—and pulled out a Paul Smith hankie to wipe his brow.
When he caught her gazing at him, those light blue eyes meeting hers, Eloise blushed, running a hand through her currently jet-black, short-cropped hair. “This is what you had in mind, right?” he asked, thumbing toward the phenomenal ministage he’d been building all morning. To her amazement, he’d found an old roller-coaster car at a junkyard near Coney Island, spruced it up and painted a whole line of cars into the background, and then constructed a frame around the whole thing. It was incredible. When someone sat inside, it reminded Eloise of a photo taken during the steep downhill drop of a huge coaster.
“Better, actually. You’re really good at this.” Not only had Max offered to take personal days to help them out, but he was an expert carpenter. There was something sexy about a man who actually knew how to do stuff. Trip’s greatest skill—other than choosing investments, of course—was outsourcing
. Once, she’d noticed the house manager scrambling into rooms before Trip entered them to flick on the lights. It got that embarrassing, but he didn’t seem to care.
Max grinned. “I’ve always loved building stuff. In another life, I would’ve loved to make my living at it. It comes a lot more naturally to me than finance.”
Eloise had a flash of Max living in an old stone cottage in Connecticut; a workshop in the garage; kids and dogs under foot. She saw herself whipping up dinner in the kitchen, a good glass of Burgundy next to the stove. Then she gave herself an inner slap. “So why don’t you?”
“Have you met my mother?” He chuckled, returning the handkerchief to his pocket. “Maybe she’ll lighten up now that Fernanda’s engaged.”
“You’re thirty-four years old. Too old to be under your mother’s thumb.” She knew it was absolutely none of her business, and she should hold her tongue—but post-breakup, Eloise had found she couldn’t hold back an honest opinion.
If Max was put off by her forthrightness, he didn’t show it. “You’re absolutely right,” he said, passing the hammer from one hand to the other in contemplation. “Maybe I’ll go for it.”
“Well, that’s the mantra of the week!” she said, smiling. Her BlackBerry buzzed—the buyer from Barneys, calling, she hoped, to confirm her attendance—and she bent to pick it up.
“Just for the record, I think Trip Peters is a fucking idiot for letting you go,” said Max, eyes still on her. He said it with such quiet and unexpected intensity that Eloise froze.
Dottie Hayes surveyed her library, now utterly transformed. Lucy was still sewing feverishly, and Max and Eloise were hammering away on the finishing touches, but everything looked as good as ready. She couldn’t believe the energy of these young people, Lucy in particular.
“Whaddya think?” Rita Ellis, who’d been bustling around the room, stopped for a moment next to her. “Not bad for a week’s time.”
“Not bad at all,” said Dottie, walking over to inspect the stage where she herself would be showcased the next afternoon. “Rita, may I ask you something?” She gestured for the other woman to join her in a quiet corner of the room, where they could talk with more privacy. “It’s about Lucy. I know she’s been adamant about not allowing Wyatt to disrupt her this week, with so much to accomplish. But—”
“How would she feel if he happened to show up on Saturday?”
“Well, exactly.” Dottie was relieved at not having to spell it out. Maybe this Rita woman, garish as she was, had some sense to her.
Rita studied her daughter from across the room. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. Truth is, I don’t know. But they seem to have something special, don’t you think? She wouldn’t have been so upset about the book if she didn’t care about him.”
“I do hate to meddle.”
Rita nodded. “But what if our kids’ happiness is at stake?”
Wyatt tapped his old-school black book against the back of the driver’s seat, trying to muster the proper enthusiasm for its contents, as the two of them sped downtown. “I’ll call my old friend Marietta. Bikini model. She’ll hook us up for a fun night.”
“Great,” said Trip, forcing a fist pump. “Great!”
“The sea is full of fish!” Wyatt proclaimed, watching the city blocks whiz past the car. A night out would ease their loss, offering up countless beauties whose hips didn’t lie. Then maybe the one who wasn’t speaking to him would fade from his thoughts.
Trip pulled out two Cubans from the inside of his jacket. He handed one to Wyatt. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong.”
“To our freedom!” Wyatt seconded. He didn’t much feel like smoking a cigar at the moment, but figured it was in the spirit of things. He thought about how Lucy had been on him to quit cigarettes; a fishwife, really. He pulled out his lighter. “Some new spots opened since I was last out. I really hibernated this winter, didn’t I?”
But Trip, who was checking his voice mail, had stopped paying attention. He seized Wyatt’s arm as if he were having a fever dream. “Somebody called from an unknown number, but the message is just static! I can’t tell who it is!”
Such a response was not in the spirit of things. “Does Eloise have an unlisted number?”
“Maybe she was calling from a pay phone!” Trip played the message again, pressing it hard into his ear.
Wyatt frowned. “Why would she do that?”
Trip opened his mouth to offer a possible explanation, then shut it. Opened it again. Nope, still nothing. “Still, I should probably call her back, just to check.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about them tonight, remember?” said Wyatt, peeved. But Trip was already leaving Eloise a message. Do I sound that pathetic with Lucy? he wondered, listening to his friend pant into the phone.
“I’m calling Marietta,” Wyatt said to nobody. He cracked open the tiny book of phone numbers, carefully annotated over the years, and put on his glasses to read the small print. Next to Marietta’s name, he’d written the word “body.” Had he really written a note like that? It made Wyatt feel kind of slimy, but he dialed her number anyway.
“Hello?” A sultry voice picked up immediately. Wyatt could hear screams of laughter in the background. “Dylan, put that down!”
Here’s hoping Dylan is a lanky model from Fort Worth.
“Mommy said it’s time for bed, Dylan, right this minute”—then Marietta seemed to remember she’d picked up the phone—“who’s this? Dylan, no! Mommy said no!”
Wyatt very quietly ended the call. He turned to face Trip, who was listening to his static-y voice mail for a fourth time. Not helping. Wyatt opened his black book again, read through the names of girls he’d known in a former life. What’s wrong with me? In his hand was a catalogue of some of the world’s hottest women, but he didn’t feel like placing an order.
“Wyatt?” He turned to see Trip watching him. “Sorry, dude, but I don’t know if I’m up for this. I miss Eloise too much.”
Wyatt nodded. Their hearts weren’t in it. He leaned forward and got the driver’s attention. “Mark? You can just take us home.”
“What? You forget something?” The driver was confused.
“Unfortunately, no,” Wyatt said, sighing a little. They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride.
“Oh! You’re here,” said Dottie, startled. “I thought you said you had a tennis match this afternoon.”
“Canceled.” Wyatt looked up from his desk, where he’d been staring at his photo of Lucy and waiting for the phone to ring. He’d had an interview that morning for an adjunct teaching post at Columbia, and they’d told him they’d be in touch soon. The position was the ocean floor on the academic food chain, but it was a job—and he’d realized that he couldn’t rightfully beg Lucy to come back into his life unless he had one. Columbia seemed eager to fill the spot, which had been vacated unexpectedly, and said they’d call him that afternoon. It was now nearly four o’clock.
“Well, that’s fine. I was just going to leave something on your desk. An invitation.” His mother seemed unsure of herself. She approached his desk and held out the piece of paper.
He took it, reading through the details hungrily. “Good for her,” he said quietly, as if to himself.
“Yes, well. Perhaps you should come.”
Wyatt looked up. “She won’t even return my calls. She doesn’t want me there.”
“She says she doesn’t, but—”
“You think she might?”
“Have you learned your lesson? You’ll appreciate Lucy from now on?” Dottie spoke as if he were still a little boy who’d finger painted on the walls. “She’s a special girl. No more of your nonsense.”
Wyatt jumped up from his desk and pulled his mother into a bear hug, catching her completely off guard. “I’ve learned,” he promised, his words choking a bit in his throat. “You really think I should go?”
“Of course,” said Dottie, touched by his unexpected display. “You love this gi
rl, don’t you? You can’t let her slip away.”
Lucy pulled Dottie’s dress away from the sewing machine, snipping the orange thread from the bobbin. She glanced at the clock above the library mantel—only 9 PM. She’d expected to need another allnighter in order to be ready for tomorrow, but to her astonishment, everything was in place and ready to go.
“Hey!” Eloise draped an arm over Lucy’s shoulders. “Come grab a beer with me and Max. We’re just going to Phoenix Park.”
“I feel like I’m forgetting something.”
“I know, but we haven’t. I’ve been through the list five times. We’re actually ready.” She grinned at Max, who’d come up behind them. “This show is going to rock. We all deserve a drink.”