The Darlings

by Cristina Alger

  Lily had, therefore, accepted her mother’s determination that Merrill was smart and Lily was pretty. The distinction was made so early on that Lily couldn’t remember a time when anyone in the family thought otherwise. Of course, Ines had never come right out and said this. But she did say it, again and again, in those countless small ways that leave a distinct impression, like footsteps on a stone stair. Merrill found books in her Christmas stocking; Lily found Clarins makeup sets and self-tanner. Merrill had French lessons when Lily had ballet. Ines took Lily to Elizabeth Arden once a week, where they would have lunch and get their nails done. It was assumed that Merrill was too busy pursuing important intellectual things to join them, so they never invited her; but then, she had never asked to come along, either.

  Lily understood her mother well enough not to take offense. That Merrill was smart and Lily was pretty wasn’t a value judgment. It was, instead, an acknowledgment of the world’s ordering. Merrill was one genus, and Lily another; separate but equal sub-branches of the same family tree. If anything, Lily secretly suspected that Ines placed a slightly higher premium on looks than on brains. Anyway, Lily was smart enough to keep her mother laughing and engaged when they were together. “Smart enough is what’s important” was a favorite phrase of Ines’s.

  In any case, Ines was a firm believer that neither looks nor brains much mattered if you didn’t know what to do with them. “The greatest strength you can have is to know your own strengths,” she said when Lily was rejected by Tisch, her top choice for college. “You’ve got to figure out what you’re good at and make the most of it.”

  That stuck with her. Lily made the most of her looks, her sense of style, her ability to entertain. Life was simple, really, when you knew what you were good at.

  Lily had always thought that Merrill’s Achilles’ heel was being good at everything. She was an excellent athlete, facile at every sport she tried. In school, A’s came easily to her. Friends did, too; all the girls wanted Merrill to be part of their group. While she was friendly with everyone, Merrill always kept a close circle: girls with names like Whitney and Lindsey and Kate, girls with snub noses dusted in freckles, and ponytails and the luminous skin of the very well cared for. They dressed the same: Patagonia zip-ups and pearl earrings and sherbet-shaded cable knits. They were the “nice girls”: liked by everyone, not too fast for the parents but not too slow for the boys, either. They went off to New England colleges, mostly, Middlebury and Dartmouth and Trinity, to play lacrosse and date boys from Connecticut. They won awards for qualities like “general excellence” and “most well rounded.” The Spence admissions catalog filled its pages with photos of them in the classrooms and in the library, faces beaming, arms looped around each other’s shoulders in enthusiastic sorority. On the other hand, Spence treated girls like Lily with casual indifference, like a movie sequel that had gone straight to DVD.

  From the time she was six, it was clear that Lily had no real business at a top-tier school. She would be kept on, of course, out of respect for her father, and because she was Merrill Darling’s sister, expected to muddle through with C’s, and discreetly shuffled out the door to some college or other at the end of it. There would be no fanfare at graduation, as there had been with Merrill. No awards, no crying teachers, and no celebratory family lunch at the ‘21’ Club. Instead, there would be quiet relief on everyone’s part that she had made it through.

  Having been a failure as a student, Lily tried her best at adulthood. At twenty-four, she had been the first in her circle to get married. Adrian was exactly what Lily imagined her parents wanted for her: He had gone to Buckley and lived on Seventy-third and Lex; he worked in finance; he was a member of the Racquet Club. In a suit, he looked remarkably like Carter: vertical frame and the smile of a winner. Adrian was the most outgoing of the famously attractive Patterson boys. Ines disliked everyone that Lily dated, but she seemed to dislike Adrian least.

  Every girl on the Upper East Side between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-five knew the Patterson boys. All four were tall and tanned with impossibly perfect teeth and jet-black hair. Their father, Tripp Patterson, was handsome in a terrifying, patrician sort of way. He carried himself with the assurance of a pedigreed show dog; he was, after all, the president of the Racquet Club, an ace tennis player, and damn good at backgammon. Tripp, who had never really worked, now managed the family’s assets. This took up little of his time as, after several generations of idle Pattersons, there were few assets left to manage. An unfortunate detail that could only be surmised by the keenest of observers; Tripp’s wife, CeCe, did a remarkable job of keeping that under wraps. She herself worked as a real estate broker, keeping the family afloat on her commissions. She made sure that the whole family was always perfectly turned out, and ever present on the New York, Palm Beach, and Southampton social circuits, even if only as guests of other families. Ines threw out the occasional wry comment about the Pattersons’ lifestyle, which she felt was “financed on fumes.” Still, Ines saw CeCe Patterson as a compelling social ally, and made a point to befriend her long before her daughter took an interest in CeCe’s son.

  The Pattersons’ Christmas cards were legendary. Each year, the family wished their friends happy holidays from the ski slopes of Aspen or the beaches of Lyford Cay or the golf course at St. Andrews. Each year, the daughters of family friends would steal the card and tuck it away in backpacks and bedside drawers, so that they might stare lovingly at the face of Henry or Griffin or Fitz or Adrian well into the new year. Any girl who went out with a Patterson boy in middle school was immediately elevated to interschool royalty. Marrying one was like landing a Kennedy.

  Theirs was a storybook courtship, the kind that begins on a tennis court at the Meadow Club in Southampton and culminates in a two-hundred-and-fifty person wedding at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. Lily was fresh out of Parsons, living at home with Carter and Ines, when Adrian mistakenly hit an errant serve in her direction. Though Lily would later come to terms with the fact that Adrian would neither inherit nor make any real money, he pursued Lily grandly, with resources that most boys her age could never hope to offer. For a twenty-two-year-old, dating a thirty-year-old felt hopelessly sophisticated and titillating. Lily was hooked. After a year of preparing for dates with Adrian and going on dates with Adrian and discussing dates with Adrian with her friends, Lily said “Yes.” And after a year of preparing for what Quest magazine called “the Society Wedding of the Summer” Lily said “I do.” It wasn’t until the honeymoon photos had been uploaded and the registry china had been delivered and the thank-you notes written, that Lily once again began the business of figuring out what came next.

  Down the hall Lily heard the shower shut off, and it occurred to her that Adrian was still home. She rolled over and checked the time. Her heart sank; it was much later than she had thought. She groaned and flipped herself face down into the pillow. She was still lying like that when Adrian banged open the bedroom door, a bath towel wrapped around his waist like a kilt. Without looking at him, Lily could tell he was upset.

  “You set the alarm for 7:30 p.m. instead of 7:30 a.m.,” he said when she sat up. The muscles between his shoulders rippled as he moved. “I missed a call with Asia.” He stood with his back to her, yanking through a rack of suit pants like pages of a boring magazine. The moist heat of the shower steamed off his body, and the back of his neck was taut, as though strung with electrical cords.

  When he had settled on a suit, Adrian let his towel slide off him. It formed a puddle at his feet, blue and wet. Lily stared at it and tried not to be annoyed. Just a week before, Adrian had fired their maid, Marta, as part of an overzealous campaign to reduce household expenses. Marta had actually seemed grateful for the release, which embarrassed Lily terribly. They were, she knew, exhaustingly messy. Lily was always underfoot, padding around the house in a bathrobe while Marta vacuumed or urging Marta to hurry up and go before their friends came over for cocktails at six. Adrian managed to leave be
hind a trail of dirty running socks and pocket change and cereal bowls with a crust of oatmeal still clinging to the rim. Marta could always tell when Adrian and Lily were home. She would follow the mess: a briefcase in the foyer, shoes scattered on the living room floor, a suit jacket thrown over a dining room chair, a half-drunk soda on the kitchen counter, only to find Adrian, feet up on the coffee table, watching SportsCenter in the den or Lily, tossing dresses on the bed as she decided what to wear for the evening.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said weakly, her head pounding. “I, ehm, drank a bit too much last night.”

  “Yeah, I saw.”

  “Ugh, was I terrible? I’m so embarrassed. Did I embarrass you?”

  She flopped onto her back, her head sinking into the pillow. Her blond hair splayed out around her head like a halo. The duvet fell back from her shoulders, exposing her naked torso. Lily never wore anything to sleep. In the morning, she looked as fresh and clean as a newborn. Her skin was a soft, milky white, and the color of it matched the sheets almost exactly. She was the same size, the same smoothness, as she had been at sixteen. There had never been a moment, not one, where Adrian saw her and didn’t want to sleep with her.

  He sighed, carrying his shoes over to the edge of the bed and sat beside her. Lily braced herself for a lecture, but instead, he leaned in and kissed her gently on her temple.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “You were fine. I just want you to take it easy, you know, if we’re going to be trying and all that. Or not not trying.”

  “Will you lie down for just one minute?” she asked, her eyes still shut. “My head’s killing me. Just a minute, I promise. I feel like I never see you anymore.”

  He swung his legs up onto the bed. Then his arm was around Lily, and she snuggled into it, her nose pressed into his damp ribs.

  She looped her leg gently over his, but he didn’t move. Then she pressed her lips to his. Maybe she was imagining it, but she felt him stiffening away from her, and her heart sank as she wondered what he was thinking. Was he annoyed that she was delaying him? Was he just counting the seconds until he had held her for an acceptable amount of time? It was wrong to try to sleep with him in the morning when he was already late to work, she knew that logically, but lately she just felt so hungry for him, and the further away he drifted the hungrier she became.

  Lily had never before worried about their sex life. When she was being rational, she could acknowledge that there wasn’t really a reason to start worrying now. She and Adrian had sex regularly (at least, regularly if the lives of her two married girlfriends with whom she was comfortable enough to share this sort of information could be taken as a guide); they were adventurous (as adventurous as Lily thought people from nice families ought to be); and, as discussed, they had stopped using birth control on their third anniversary. Nothing had changed, to date.

  They weren’t trying, but they weren’t not trying, either. Not not trying. That was Adrian’s expression, repeated like a party line to increasingly expectant friends and family. It was said with a big smile, and met with approving nods. Every time he said it, Lily rolled it around in her head like a marble, inspecting it for traces of unacceptable indifference or nonchalance. Not not trying. She couldn’t find anything wrong with it, but then, she couldn’t find anything not wrong with it, either.

  According to Adrian, they discussed having a baby ad nauseam; according to Lily, not nearly enough. She didn’t know why, but the conversation felt unresolved, like a project that hadn’t been given a red light but didn’t quite have the green light, either. It was all she could think about. It wasn’t unlike Bacall: a live deal, but temporarily held up, waiting in limbo for approvals and funding.

  “I hate when you say that,” she said. Her head throbbed: I will never drink like that again.

  “Say what?”

  “Not not trying. It’s just the way you say it. It sounds so . . . passive.”

  Adrian put his finger beneath her chin and lifted it gently until her big blue eyes flickered open. He examined her tenderly, his eyebrows knit with an almost paternal compassion. There were freckles on her nose, like little flecks of chocolate. She was so frustrating when she was like this: childish and defiant and hopelessly attractive. “Okay,” he said, eyebrows raised. “We’re trying. Better?”

  “No,” she said stubbornly and shut her eyes, though she knew he was saying everything right. For all of Adrian’s childish foibles—his messiness and his perpetual lateness and his tendency to overserve himself at the bar—Lily knew Adrian was a good husband, devoted to her, and to the idea of children, if for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do.

  Adrian’s was a neatly ordered world. It was a world Lily knew well, and would be happy to live in for the rest of her life without much thought of any alternatives. Sure, Adrian broke a rule now and then—a brief suspension at boarding school for smoking weed and a DUI or two—but that was all part of the game anyway, nothing Tripp Patterson hadn’t done, or Henry Patterson Jr. before him. For the most part, Adrian followed the handbook to the letter.

  He dressed as he did—Nantucket reds and bow ties and hunting jackets—without irony. He played lacrosse and drank his way through college, never doubting that a spot in the Morgan Stanley Investment Banking program would be available to him upon graduation (it was), and after that, a job at his wife’s father’s hedge fund. That was just the way it was, the way it always had been. The examples of his brothers, all married, each employed by a hedge fund or large investment bank, one summering in Nantucket and the other two in the Hamptons, offered validation to Adrian’s baseline assumptions. As long as Adrian was in charge, Lily was certain the world would always be as she had known it under Carter’s management. This was deeply reassuring.

  “I just need to know we’re ready.”

  Lily could feel Adrian’s presence beside her, the weight of his body pressing down the mattress and his head partially blocking the light from the bedside lamp. Skin touched skin at the shoulders and elbows and her knee draped softly over his. The musculature of his arm was tight beneath her head and it made her feel safe, if only for a moment. She wanted him to stay beside her all day, to snuggle back down beneath their piled-high duvet and put his forehead to hers and tell her that today was theirs and theirs alone. As long as her eyes were shut he wouldn’t leave. The clock would stop its ticking and they would be suspended in the moment, together, like the second of silence after a performance is over and the applause has not yet begun.

  “I’m thirty-four,” Adrian said simply. “It’s time. I don’t know what else there is to say.” He reached out and massaged her temples. He smelled like the cedar drawer linings they used in the closet, the smell of home.

  The phone rang, breaking the moment. No one ever called their home phone, except for the doorman and telemarketers. They glanced at each other briefly, each wondering who it could be.

  Adrian pulled his arm from beneath her head to answer the phone, forcing her to sit up. Lily’s eyes popped open and the light rushed in.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Adrian said after a few seconds. Through the phone, Lily could hear the staccato sounds of a man talking rapidly on the other end, though it wasn’t loud enough to hear what he was saying. Lily was awake now, charged by the current of nervous energy that seeped through the phone wire.

  Adrian cupped the receiver and hissed, “Turn on the TV.” Startled, Lily grabbed for the remote and flicked it on, smarting a little from her husband’s directive. Adrian was rarely sharp with her. Her nipples grew hard as the sheet fell away from her body and she shivered, suddenly aware that she was naked.

  As she flipped aimlessly through the channels, Lily felt her insides grip with a sickening self-conscious tightness, a familiar feeling. Her mind raced furiously through the events of the past few days. Had she done anything wrong? Had she forgotten to pay the maintenance again? Overdrawn the household account?

  Her stomach churning, she whispered, “Wh
at’s wrong?”

  Adrian shook his head and waved her off. “When did you find out?” He asked the person on the other end of the phone, his brow furrowed tightly into a hard V. Then: “Does Carter know?”

  Lily’s eyes widened, “Know what?” she insisted, louder this time. When he didn’t answer, she focused on the muted figures flickering across the television screen.

  Uncle Morty’s house. Why was it on television?

  She turned on the sound.

  “Jesus, Lily,” Adrian whispered, and grabbed the remote. He muted it again, and covered the ear that wasn’t pressed to the receiver. “All right,” he said to the voice on the other end. “I mean, that’s obviously terrible news. Yes, yeah, I understand. I’m going into the office now. I’m with Lily. . . . No, I haven’t spoken to him. Have you tried his cell? All right, Sol. Yes, thanks for calling. Talk soon.”

  Adrian clicked off the phone and lay back against the headboard.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  Lily turned away from the television, still not quite sure what she was seeing, and her entire body prickled with goose bumps. Adrian’s perfect tan face was a sickly green. He looked, she thought, exactly as he had the time she had found him lying on the floor in the fetal position, and had rushed him to Lenox Hill with what turned out to be appendicitis.

  “That was Sol? What did he want?” Lily said, her voice small, almost inaudible. She wanted to reach out to him but she felt frozen, like a rabbit in the road. This was it, she thought. I knew something was wrong.