For his toast, Thomas tells the story of when Thomas and Benji, ages eight and six, respectively, got lost at Piccadilly Circus and how Benji was the one who had saved them from abduction or worse. The story goes that Benji, against his brother’s severe warnings, had approached a group of punk rockers and asked a girl with a bright pink Mohawk to help them find their mummy.
“He said the girl’s hair was pretty,” Thomas says. “He believed anyone with such pretty hair was sure to have deep reserves of cleverness and wisdom.”
Greer laughs along with everyone else, although the story rubs her the wrong way for two reasons. First off, she was the one who had taken the boys to Piccadilly, where she had bumped into a woman named Susan Haynes, who sat on the ladies’ auxiliary at Portland Hospital, a group Greer had been keen to join. Greer had become so engrossed in conversation with Susan that she had lost track of the boys. Her own children. When Greer surfaced from the conversation, she looked around and found the two of them had vanished.
Greer is also dismayed because this is the exact same story that Benji told when he had given the toast at Thomas’s wedding four years earlier. Greer finds it terribly unimaginative for Thomas to recycle the very same story. Greer would like to give Tag a private look to see if he agrees, but he’s… where? Still on the call with Ernie? Greer checks on Featherleigh. She’s in her seat, gazing at Thomas with an insipid look on her face.
She’s blotto, Greer thinks. She has three empty cups of the blackberry mojito punch in front of her.
As soon as the applause for Thomas’s half-baked effort subsides, Greer slips discreetly into the house in search of her husband.
She skirts the kitchen, where the catering staff is plating dessert, an assortment of homemade pies: blueberry, peach, Key lime, banana cream, and chocolate pecan. She heads through the den toward the back stairs but stops when she hears a voice coming from the laundry room.
The laundry room? Greer thinks. She pokes her head in.
There’s a girl with her back up against the stacked washer and dryer, her face in her hands, sobbing. It’s… it’s the friend, Celeste’s friend, the maid of honor. Greer blanks on the girl’s name. It’s… Merrill or Madison? No, not quite. Merritt, she thinks. Merritt Monaco.
“Merritt!” Greer says. “What’s wrong?”
When Merritt turns to see Greer, she gasps in surprise. Then she hurries to wipe away her tears. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just… the excitement.”
“It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?” Greer says. She feels a wave of maternal concern for this girl who is neither getting married like Celeste nor pregnant like Abby. But still, the freedom! Greer wants to encourage Merritt to savor her freedom because soon enough, certainly, it will be gone.
“Come, let’s get you a drink,” Greer says. She beckons Merritt forward, thinking she will lead the girl back out to the party and find Chloe-with-the-champagne. Surely Merritt’s sadness is nothing a little Veuve Clicquot can’t fix.
“I’m fine,” Merritt says, sniffing and trying to collect herself. “I’ll be out shortly. I need the ladies’ room. I should fix my face. But thank you.”
Greer gives the girl a smile. “Very well. I’m on a mission to find my husband anyway. He seems to have disappeared.” She turns to leave but not before catching the glint of a silver ring on Merritt’s thumb.
So it’s true, Greer thinks. All the fashionable girls are wearing them now.
Monday, October 24, 2016
CELESTE
Two days after giving Benji her direct line at the zoo, he calls—not to put her in touch with his friend who may or may not want to bring groups of foreign executives to the zoo but to ask her out to dinner. He wants to take her to the Russian Tea Room on Friday night.
“They’ve redone it since the eighties,” he says. “It’s supposed to be over the top now. Do you like caviar?”
“Um…” Celeste says. She has never had caviar, not only because it’s expensive but also because she has seen sacs of fish eggs floating in aquarium water and… no, thank you.
“Or we could go down to the East Village and eat at Madame Vo’s? It’s Vietnamese. Would you prefer Vietnamese?”
Celeste nearly hangs up the phone. She chastises herself for giving this guy her number. He’s an alien species—or, more likely, she’s the alien. He’s used to beautiful, sophisticated women like Jules, who probably grew up with caviar packed in her lunchbox. Celeste’s rent on East One Hundredth Street is a bit of a stretch, so she rarely goes out to eat. Occasionally, she will meet Merritt for brunch or dinner. Many times, if Merritt is photographed eating at the restaurant or if she posts photos of the food online at #eatingfortheinsta, the meal will be comped. Usually, however, dinner for Celeste is the salad bar at the corner bodega or takeout from the cafeteria at the zoo and, yes, Celeste does know how pathetic that is, but only because Merritt has told her.
“Vietnamese sounds great!” Celeste says, manufacturing as much enthusiasm as she can about a cuisine she knows nothing about.
“Okay, Madame Vo’s it is, then,” Benji says. “I’ll come pick you up?”
“Pick me up?” Celeste says. Her block—which is too far north to properly qualify as the Upper East Side, though too far south to be called Harlem—is relatively safe but neither sexy nor fetching. There’s a laundromat, the bodega, a pet groomer.
“Or we can meet there?” Benji says. “It’s on East Tenth Street.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Celeste says, relieved.
“Eight o’clock?” Benji says.
“Sounds good,” Celeste says, and she hangs up the phone to call Merritt.
First, Merritt screams, You have a date!
Celeste’s face contorts into an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. She does have a date, and it feels good, because normally, when Celeste and Merritt talk, the only person who has exciting news, or news of any kind, is Merritt. Merritt’s romantic life is so populated that Celeste has a hard time keeping the men straight. Presently, Merritt is dating Robbie, who’s the daytime bartender at the Breslin on Twenty-Ninth Street. He’s tall and pale with bulging biceps and an Irish accent. What’s not to love about Robbie? Celeste wondered after Merritt dragged Celeste down to a Saturday lunch at the Breslin so she could meet him. Why didn’t Merritt stay with him?
For one, Merritt said, Robbie was an aspiring actor. He was constantly going on auditions, and Merritt felt it was only a matter of time before he was cast in a TV pilot that got picked up, at which point he’d move to the West Coast. It wasn’t a good idea to get too attached to anyone not firmly rooted in New York, Merritt said. However, Celeste knew that Merritt was afraid to commit because of a truly heinous situation she’d found herself in the year before she and Celeste met.
The man’s name was Travis Darling. Travis and his wife, Cordelia, owned a PR firm called Brightstreet where Merritt had worked right out of college. She had been handpicked for her job as publicity associate from a pool of over a thousand applicants, and both Travis and Cordelia saw Merritt as a rising PR star, the next Lynn Goldsmith. Merritt’s life had become completely intertwined with the lives of the Darlings. She accompanied them to dinner at least once a week; she hung out at their brownstone on West Eighty-Third Street; she went skiing with them in Stowe and joined them for beach weekends in Bridgehampton.
Travis had always been Merritt’s champion. He asked questions about Merritt’s personal life, encouraged her interest in fashion; he remembered her college roommates’ names. He sought out her opinion because she was young and had a fresh perspective. He would sometimes rest his hand on her shoulder when he was standing behind her desk, and he forwarded her racy jokes from his personal e-mail. When Merritt was out to dinner with Travis and Cordelia, he would pull out her chair. If they were waiting at the bar to be seated, he would usher her forward with his hand on her back. Merritt noted these things but she didn’t protest. After all, Cordelia was right there.
Bu
t then.
It was summer and Merritt was spending a weekend in the Hamptons with the Darlings. On Saturday afternoon, the three of them were lying on the beach when a call came in from a client, a supermodel who had just had an altercation with a flight attendant. Words had been exchanged and a fellow passenger had leaked the story—which cast the supermodel in a very unflattering light—to the press. It was a publicity situation that could easily escalate into a publicity nightmare. Cordelia had to go back to the city to deal with the fallout.
I’ll go with you, Merritt had said. You’ll need help.
I have Sage, Cordelia said. Sage Kennedy was a brand-new hire. Merritt had sensed Sage’s ambition and professional envy immediately; Sage wanted to be the next Merritt. Sage was too young and broke to spend summer weekends away, but now that would work in her favor. When Merritt insisted she was more than happy to go back to the city, Cordelia said, You stay here and enjoy. I’ll see you Monday.
Had Merritt been uneasy about staying in the house with Travis alone? Not really. By that point, Merritt had been working for Brightstreet for three years. If Travis were going to make a pass at her, she figured, it would have happened already.
But late that afternoon, as Merritt was rinsing the sand off her feet at the outdoor hose before going into the house, Travis came up behind her and, without a word, untied the string of her bikini top. Merritt had frozen. She was petrified, she told Celeste, but she’d decided to laugh it off as a prank. She grabbed the strings and started to retie them but Travis stopped her. He took both of her hands, pulled her to him, and started kissing the back of her neck. Into her ear he whispered, I’ve been waiting so long for this.
“I was trapped,” Merritt told Celeste. “I could have pushed him away but I was afraid I’d lose my job. I was afraid he’d tell Cordelia that I was the one who took off my top. So I let it happen. I let it happen.”
The affair lasted seven torturous months. Merritt lived in mortal fear of Cordelia finding out, but Travis assured Merritt there was nothing to worry about. His wife, he said, was frigid and possibly even a lesbian and she wouldn’t have cared even if she did find out.
Deep down, she wanted this to happen, Travis said. One of the reasons she wanted to hire you was that she knew I thought you were hot.
As it turned out, Travis was gravely mistaken about what Cordelia wanted. Cordelia hired a private investigator, who followed both Merritt and Travis, accessed their phone records and text messages, then presented Cordelia with all the proof she needed, including, somehow, 8-by-10 glossies of Merritt and Travis showering together in Merritt’s apartment.
Cordelia had swiftly taken the company from Travis, as well as their investments and their brownstone. She fired Merritt and set out to shred Merritt’s reputation professionally and personally—and by then, Cordelia’s friends were Merritt’s friends. Travis forsook Merritt as well. She called and begged him to tell Cordelia the truth: that he had started the affair and he had given her no choice but to be complicit. Travis had responded to her calls and texts by filing a restraining order against her.
Merritt had been suicidal in the aftermath, she confided to Celeste. On bad days she stared at a bottle of hoarded pills—Valium, Ambien, Xanax. On good days, she looked for jobs in other cities, but it turned out Cordelia’s tentacles reached all the way to Chicago, DC, Atlanta. Merritt didn’t get so much as a callback. Every once in a while Cordelia would text her, and each time Merritt saw Cordelia’s name on her phone’s screen, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Travis had come clean and told Cordelia that the affair had been his fault, that he had coerced Merritt, then basically blackmailed her. But the texts were always the exact opposite of apologies. One said: If I thought I could get away with it, I would kill you.
But then, one miraculous day, Merritt received a text from Sage Kennedy, who, Merritt knew, had summarily taken her position in the company. The text said: Cordelia has sold the brownstone on Eighty-Third Street and is relocating Brightstreet to LA. Thought you would want to know.
At first, Merritt didn’t believe it. She was wary of Sage Kennedy. But when Merritt checked Business Insider, she saw it was true. She wondered if maybe Travis had preyed on Sage Kennedy after Merritt left. She was afraid to ask, though she did text Sage back to thank her for the information. She had, essentially, been set free.
Soon thereafter, Merritt found a job in PR with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and although she took a pay cut, she was grateful for the fresh start. She introduced herself to Celeste in her first weeks of work by saying, “You’re the best-looking, most normal person who works at any of our zoos. Please let me use photos of you in the literature.”
Celeste had been stupefied by Merritt’s blunt honesty. “Thanks,” she said. “I think.” They had gone to lunch together in the zoo’s cafeteria, and over tuna fish sandwiches, a friendship was forged. Merritt credited Celeste with “saving” her, although Celeste saw it as the other way around. Celeste had been bound and determined to move out of Forks Township and make it in New York City on her own, but even she had been confounded by just how on her own she actually was. The city was home to ten million people and yet Celeste had a hard time meeting anyone outside of work. She had two sort-of friends on her block: Rocky, who worked at the bodega, and Judy Quigley, who owned the pet-grooming business.
Rocky had taken Celeste on a date to the Peruvian chicken place on Ninety-First Street but then he confessed that although he liked Celeste and thought she was very, very pretty, he had neither the time nor the money for a girlfriend. Mrs. Quigley was a pleasant woman and she and Celeste shared a love of animals but it wasn’t like they were ever going to go out for cocktails.
Merritt was the New York City friend of Celeste’s dreams. She was fun, sophisticated, and plugged in; she knew everything that was happening for Millennials in the city. She told Celeste that her experience with Travis Darling had jaded her, but all Celeste saw was her tender heart. Merritt was remarkably patient, kind, and maternal when it came to Celeste, and she knew that Celeste could handle her pulsing, frenetic world only in small bites.
“I don’t know what to do,” Celeste says to Merritt now. “Benji came to the zoo with his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s daughter. He and the girlfriend were arguing and then I noticed him staring at me. Then he asked for my card. For a friend, he said, and I believed him. I gave him my direct line. So do you think he broke up with his girlfriend already? He wants to take me to Madame Vo’s, which is all the way down on Tenth Street. It’s Vietnamese.”
“Madame Vo’s is on everyone’s list because SJP eats there,” Merritt says. “But I don’t like the way they seat twos. It feels like you’re on a date with the couples on either side of you.”
“Should I cancel?” Celeste says. “I should probably cancel.”
“No!” Merritt says. “Don’t you dare cancel! I’m going to help you. I’m going to transform you. We are going to make this Benji fall in love with you in only one date. We are going to make him propose.”
“Propose?” Celeste says.
Later, Merritt comes over to Celeste’s apartment and she uses Celeste’s laptop to Google Benji—Benjamin Garrison Winbury of New York City. In a matter of seconds they discover the following: Benji attended the Westminster School in London, then went to high school at St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island, and college at Hobart. Now he works for Nomura Securities, which further Googling discloses is a Japanese bank with a headquarters in New York. He sits on the board of the Whitney Museum and the Robin Hood Foundation.
“He’s twenty-seven years old,” Merritt says. “And he sits on two boards. That’s impressive.”
Celeste’s anxiety ramps up. She has met several board members of the conservancy; they’re all wealthy and important people.
Merritt scans through images of Benji. “The mother has resting-bitch face. The father is kind of hot, though.”
“Merritt, stop,” Celeste says, but she peers over M
erritt’s shoulder at the screen. She expects to see pictures of Benji with Jules and Miranda, but if those pictures existed, they’ve all been expunged. There is a photo of Benji with friends in a restaurant raising cocktails and one of him posing on the bow of a boat. There’s a picture of Benji with a guy who must be his brother at a Yankees game, and in the picture Merritt is referring to, Benji poses with a refined older couple, the mother cool and blond, the father silver-haired and grinning. There’s Benji hoisting a tropical drink under a beach umbrella and one of him in a helmet sitting astride a mountain bike.
“Girlfriend is gone, I’d say,” Merritt remarks. “Thoroughly scoured from his feed. Let’s check Instagram—”
“I don’t want to check Instagram,” Celeste says. “Help me find something to wear.”
Celeste meets Benji outside Madame Vo’s at exactly eight o’clock on Friday. Merritt advised Celeste to show up ten minutes late but Celeste is always prompt—it’s a compulsion—and Benji is already waiting, which is, she decides, a good sign. Celeste has borrowed a dress from Merritt; it’s a rose-gold Hervé Leger bandage dress that Celeste knows retails for well over a thousand dollars. Merritt was given it for free to wear to the opening of a new club, Nuclear Winter, in Alphabet City, and when Merritt is photographed in something as much as she was in this dress that night, she can never wear it again. Celeste is also wearing Merritt’s shoes—Jimmy Choo stilettos—and she’s carrying Merritt’s gold clutch purse. The only things she’s missing are Merritt’s wit, charm, and confidence. Celeste calls upon advice her parents have been giving her since she was old enough to understand English: Be yourself. It’s wonderfully old-fashioned and possibly ill advised. Celeste has always been herself, but that hasn’t won her any popularity contests. Genus: Girl Scientist. Species: socially awkward.
The Perfect Couple Page 10