“With a fantastic view at the top, though, you have to admit.”
“And a fantastically hot sun pounding down on us,” Clara replied, tired and cranky. While very fashionable, cloche hats did next to nothing to protect a girl against sunburn. “Be honest—am I red all over?”
Marcus turned to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and surveyed her. “Yes. Red as a ripe tomato.” He kissed one of her cheeks lightly with his velvet-soft lips. “You are quite possibly the most hideous sight I’ve ever seen.” He kissed her other cheek. “You should be glad there are no children on this boat. Their screams would be deafening! The horror!”
“You’re one to talk,” Clara said, and flicked his red nose.
“Ouch!”
“You look like a dipsomaniac. Or like you have a fever.” Sunburned Marcus might have been even more adorable than Regular Marcus.
“Just the fever of my love for you, darling,” he replied with a grin. Then he gave her a kiss that made her forget all about her sunburn.
When they reached shore, they were too tired to journey back to Brooklyn Heights to look for a proper restaurant. “We probably shouldn’t expose you to respectable society, as a courtesy,” Marcus said.
So they found a dingy joint near the Fulton Ferry Landing, where they had a dinner of greasy burgers, a bucket of fries, and a shared chocolate milk shake.
The food was delicious in the way only cheap, greasy food could be. Through the restaurant’s smudged windows, they watched the sun set behind the Manhattan skyline and the way the streetlights glinted off the water. Afterward they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and when they reached the first of the arches, Marcus kissed her with only the moon and river as an audience.
The entire date had cost about as much as Clara’s appetizer at the Colony. It had been one of the best dates Clara had ever had—magical exactly because it was so ordinary.
Now, Clara peered across the table at handsome, tedious Parker, who was rehashing the Gloria Swanson story for his college buddy. Unlike Parker, Marcus couldn’t have cared less about movie stars or celebrities or Clara’s old, raucous life. He only wanted to be with her because of her: the person Clara hadn’t even been sure was actually there beneath all the glitter. Marcus had showed her that she was still real and interesting once all the witty double-talk and sideways glances were stripped away.
And she had let him go. Now he was marrying someone else.
Parker’s friends finally left. “I’m about finished with my pheasant—how about you?”
Clara nodded. “Yes, it was delicious.”
“Shall I order you another martini before we head out?” He raised his glass to her. “They’re the very best in the city.”
Clara drained the last sip of her drink. “Are they, now? They’re a little cloudy for my taste, really.”
He hiked an eyebrow and grinned. Parker, it seemed, was the sort of man who loved a dissatisfied woman. Clara had found that young men who came to early, large success with comparatively little struggle usually did. “Hmm. Well, I just got a silver-plated shaker and haven’t had the chance to test it out yet. Shall we try to give the Colony a run for its money?”
Just a few moments ago Clara had been eagerly awaiting the end of the date. But the image of Marcus and his perfect little fiancée popped up in her mind. The Marcus who’d kissed her sunburned cheeks was lost to her now. Clara could be heartbroken alone, or she could have some company. Even if that company was Parker.
“All right,” she said. “But there will be no shaking. I’m a girl who likes her martinis stirred.”
Clara had thought the view from Parker’s office was good, but the view from his apartment put it to shame.
Through the many floor-to-ceiling windows in Parker’s living room Clara could see the wide expanse of Central Park and the lights of the city floating around it. The room was filled with oak bookcases, and framed articles hung on the walls. A long leather couch curved in an L-shape across a Persian rug, and the dimmed lighting gave everything a lush, classy feel. Parker was a man with real taste. There was no question about that.
“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Parker stood uncomfortably close to her in front of the window, his arm pressing against hers. “I had a bidding war with Richard Whitney from the New York Stock Exchange over this place, you know. He put up some real cabbage, but I won in the end. I couldn’t lose out on this view.”
God, did he ever stop bragging? “Yeah, it’s jake,” she mumbled, bored.
“So, how’s that cousin of yours doing since we sprang her from the big house?”
Clara shrugged and moved over to put some distance between them. “She’s out of town, so I haven’t heard much from her.” Just a postcard from Long Island: I’ll be out of the city for a while—can’t really say why—but I’m doing fine and I miss you! “She’s taking the train into the city for a day week after next and we have plans to get lunch—I’ll give you an update then.”
“Just a day? What for?”
“She has a dress fitting for this wedding she’s in,” Clara replied. She hoped Parker didn’t ask her whose wedding. Talking to Parker about Marcus was the last thing she wanted to do right now.
“Oh, the Eastman wedding?” Parker asked, twisting something in Clara’s chest. “How is that old beau of yours?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Clara said curtly.
“The sap’s probably busy flunking his way out of Columbia. Family money can only take you so far—unless he hires someone else to sit his exams for him.”
Clara scowled. Marcus was one of the cleverest people she knew. When they’d been together she’d loved nothing more than wandering through the Brooklyn Museum with him and listening to his commentary.
On one visit they’d stopped in front of a painting of a worried-looking oarsman in a top hat, rowing down a river. “I wonder what he’s thinking about,” Clara had said.
“Well, that’s obvious,” Marcus replied. “It’s windy, and he’s wishing he could hold his top hat on his head to keep it from flying off. But he needs both arms for rowing! Poor man. That’s why I could never be an oarsman—I’m nothing without my top hat.”
And yet in front of a painting by Frederick Childe Hassam of New York in winter, Marcus had been serious. “We’ll have to come back and look at this again once it’s snowing outside. We’ll be so tempted to complain about the cold and chill that we’ll forget how lucky we are to be here for it. But look at it! New York’s at its best covered in snow. Sometimes you need paintings to remind you to enjoy life’s beauty, you know?”
But Clara and Marcus hadn’t even made it through the summer. If Marcus went back to look at that Hassam painting during the winter, he’d be doing it with his wife.
“Shouldn’t we be drinking martinis about now?” Clara needed some booze to flush Marcus’s handsome face from her mind.
“Let me just chill the glasses.” Parker leaned in for a kiss, but she turned her head so he caught her cheek instead. It might have been a mistake to come here. She and Parker had never kissed, and Clara was beginning to think that she didn’t want that to change.
While Parker was off in the kitchen, Clara crossed into the wood-paneled study. She was surprised at the towers of old letters, papers, and invitations heaped over the oak surface of the desk. Parker was fastidiously neat in the office—it was nice to see a bit of disorder in his sleek, polished life. With barely a scruple she picked up one of the smaller piles and shuffled through it.
She paused when she reached an already-ripped-open envelope with an invitation lying on top.
Celebrate the theater, art, love, and life!
Forrest Hamilton invites
Parker Richards and Clara Knowles
to join him for a night of revelry
at 8:00 p.m.
on September 13, 1924
at 6 Shorecliff Place, Great Neck, Long Island
Clara picked up the envelope and saw that it was dated August 5—back when
Clara had still responded to Parker’s each and every dinner invitation with a resounding no. She clenched the invitation in a tight grip and fought the urge to tear it into pieces. Parker had been bragging to this Forrest character and Lord knew who else that he had managed to bag the Queen of the Flappers.
Clara had known that her editor was arrogant and self-satisfied, but this was a whole other level. Who else had Parker told about this “relationship” of theirs? And what had he said? He must’ve made things out to be pretty serious between them if someone was putting both their names on a party invitation.
“Clara,” Parker called from the living room. “Where did you disappear to?”
She took a few deep breaths, then smoothed a mask of cheeky flirtation over her displeasure. She sauntered back into the living room. “You didn’t offer me a tour, so I had to give myself one.”
Parker was standing behind the expansive oak bar against the wall. He’d laid his navy blazer over one of the leather-upholstered barstools and stood in just his trousers and a silky burgundy shirt. Parker’s dark brows were drawn in concentration over his pale green eyes. The martini shaker stood on the bar with its lid off, next to a bowl of ice and two unmarked bottles. He lifted one of the bottles and put it down, then lifted the other.
Clara was amused by his floundering. “Parker Richards. You don’t know how to make a martini, do you?”
He smiled back. “But I’m very good at ordering them.”
She joined him behind the bar and picked up the shaker. “You do realize this makes me more of a man than you are.”
“You look remarkably good in that dress, then, considering.”
Showing Parker how to mix martinis might have been fun if Clara hadn’t been consumed by the urge to throw her drink in his pompous face once she was finished. And once he was soaked in gin and vermouth, Clara would berate Parker for his idiotic presumptions and the lies he’d spread about the nature of their relationship. She would tell him that she hardly even liked him—and that she could never be even a fraction as in love with him as he was with himself.
But instead, she showed him how adding a dash of orange bitters made all the difference to a martini. And when he mentioned Forrest’s party on Saturday, Clara feigned complete ignorance.
As satisfying as it would be to get her revenge now, Clara couldn’t forget the fact that Parker was her boss. Throwing a drink in his face would definitely be grounds for dismissal. Without the income from her column, Clara would barely be able to get by. Not to mention the fact that if Parker fired her, her writing career would be over practically before it had begun.
So she’d have to be crafty about it. She’d go to this Great Neck party. She’d don her flapper best and flutter her lashes at all Parker’s rich, influential friends.
But soon enough, Parker would wish he’d never met Clara. Much less claimed to date her.
LORRAINE
“You make the best coffee in New York, Becks,” Lorraine remarked, rising from her bed to accept the steaming mug from her roommate. “Or at least, you make the best coffee in this dormitory.”
Becky tucked her yellow curls behind her ears and smiled. She sat on her own bed, neatly settled her pink pleated skirt over her legs, and took a sip from her own mug. “Thank you. I’ll have to bake my shortbread to go with it next time.”
“Ha! Shortbread!” Lorraine exclaimed, slapping her knee. “You and your jokes.”
Becky raised an eyebrow. “I’m being serious, though, I absolutely love—”
“Okay, okay,” Lorraine said, cutting Becky off. “Enough with the jokes, I might throw up from laughing so much.”
Lorraine had expected the worst when she’d met her blonde roommate nearly a month earlier. She wasn’t a beauty—certainly not an exotic one like Lorraine—but her dimples and tiny nose were nearly head-cheerleader adorable. Lorraine had been sure Becky would reject her modern ways and innovative fashion sense just the way the debs in Chicago had. But Becky turned out to be absolutely hilarious. Like those shortbread jokes—hysterical!
Becky was committed, too—she covered every surface on her side of the room with lace doilies and owned a whopping five aprons. Someone who didn’t know her as well as Lorraine would think Becky actually liked all this matronly hooey. But the rumors of Lorraine’s mob past that caused other Barnard girls to turn up their noses didn’t seem to faze Becky one bit. So Becky couldn’t possibly be a real Mrs. Grundy—she was just an amazing comedienne.
“You know what would go even better with this coffee than shortbread?” Lorraine looked through the open window at the quad, where a group of girls lounged on a picnic blanket. They were giggling so loudly that they had to be sneaking sips from a flask. Either that or they were crazy people, and a respectable institution like Barnard didn’t accept crazy people. “A shot of brandy, maybe two.”
Becky rolled her brown eyes. “Lorraine, you know we can’t risk getting caught drinking in the dormitory.”
Lorraine set her mug on her cluttered end table and lay back on the floral bedspread. “I can’t help it! It’s Saturday—everyone knows this is a day for drinking!”
“It’s Saturday morning.”
“Still. If those mob rumors killed any hope I had for a social life, then this Drought is dancing on its grave.” Lorraine hadn’t frequented a gin joint since school started, though not for a lack of trying. All the police in New York knew Lorraine as a shady character, while speakeasy proprietors thought she was a rat. Most of them had her picture on the wall, reminding the burly men who guarded the doors not to let her in—which was so tragically unfair, seeing as how it wasn’t even a flattering picture.
Lorraine had initially named the dry spell “The Great Drought of 1924.” But that was kind of a mouthful, especially considering how often she complained about it. This unfortunate period could go back to its original name when she wrote her memoirs.
Lorraine had hoped her summer spent managing the Opera House would improve her popularity at Barnard. “Hey, look!” everyone would exclaim. “There goes the dame who helped the bureau catch those mobsters! I knew she was brave, but I never expected her to be beautiful, too!” But that lying phony Clara Knowles had destroyed Lorraine’s chances. Thanks to the not-so-flattering articles Clara wrote for the Manhattanite, the popular girls at Barnard wanted nothing to do with Lorraine. And why? Because Lorraine had wanted revenge against everyone’s new favorite flapper, Gloria Carmody.
What a joke. If anyone would listen, Lorraine would explain that she was the flapper queen. Gloria hadn’t even bobbed her hair until Lorraine made her! Gloria hadn’t known how to dance anything other than a boring old box step! Gloria had worn dresses that went down to her ankles! Until Lorraine stepped in and saved her. But now people acted like Gloria was some kind of … hero. It was enough to make a girl want to punch someone.
“I think taking some time away from booze has been good for you,” Becky observed. “You’re so far ahead on all our coursework and reading—you even managed to finish Paradise Lost early, isn’t that right?”
Lorraine nodded. “I wish I’d paradise lost my copy of it,” she muttered, waiting for Becky to laugh. When she didn’t, it only made Lorraine want a drink even more. “Maybe then I’d have had an excuse not to read all ten million pages of it.”
“You’ve got to admit sobriety has given you a lot more free time.”
“Yeah, too much free time.” Lorraine picked up a white woven pillow and tossed it onto her roommate’s bed. “I’m knitting, Becks. Knitting.”
The truth was that Lorraine was actually very good at school—there had always been so many distractions, though, and why study biology in a textbook when you could get up close and personal with an actual boy? Sadly, Lorraine had more than enough time on her hands these days to excel academically. Oh, how she wished she could change that!
“ ‘They say a clean conscience makes a soft pillow, but this one suits me fine,’ ” Becky read from the embroidery
on the pillow and giggled. “That’s funny, Raine!”
“It would be funnier if we were drunk,” Lorraine replied. “Have you heard about any parties or anything? Just because we have all the same classes doesn’t mean you have to be my warden, you know.”
Becky gave her a long, hard look. “Well, it is the weekend.” A slow smile appeared on her face. “And since you’re persona non grata in the city, why not come out with me to Long Island?”
“It sounds long. As in and boring.”
“Only if you go to the wrong parties. The real shoe spinners are on the estates out there, and tonight there’s a big to-do down in Great Neck. You heard of a fellow called Forrest Hamilton?”
Lorraine caught her reflection in the mirror and fluffed her bob. “The Broadway producer? Sure.” The society pages were thick these days with photos of and stories about the handsome young entrepreneur.
“Well, the party’s at his house.”
Lorraine raised her eyebrows. “And you’re invited? Why did he invite you?” Sure, Becky had a more thriving social life than Lorraine’s, but study groups and coffee klatches didn’t count, did they? Who would’ve expected Becky to have such an impressive acquaintance? “Becks, you’ve been holding out on me!”
Becky laughed. “Not exactly. My friend Dorothy’s brother starred in Bug-Eyed Betty, Forrest’s first show, and he was able to snag us invitations. Dorothy says it’s going to be the biggest bash since Sodom and Gomorrah got burned up.”
Raine leaped from her bed to hug Becky, nearly spilling coffee all over her roommate’s pristine bedspread. Finally, a real night out! “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You have no idea the public service you’re doing.” She sat down beside Becky. “Without you I probably would’ve been stuck studying flash cards with Melvin.”
“Oh, right, your friend from Columbia. You should invite him along! He’s cute.”
Lorraine almost choked on her coffee. “Seriously, Becks, you should go down to the Ziegfeld and try out your comedy act there. That stuff is gold! You and Eddie Cantor will be best pals in no time.”
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