Merrill was slouched against the doorjamb in a manner that was simultaneously alluring and standoffish. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest.
“Hi,” Paul said. “I was beginning to worry you were never going to speak to me again.” Paul realized that she hadn’t spoken directly to him since the Milk Pail, a farm off the Montauk Highway in Water Mill where they sometimes picked apples and pumpkins in the fall. When they had pulled into the parking lot, Merrill was sitting tight-lipped; her face a mask of tears and anger. They had wordlessly picked up two pies and a dozen cinnamon donuts and a jug of cider: their agreed-upon offering to the Thanksgiving table.
She proffered a taut smile, but didn’t budge from her post at the door. A look crossed her face as if she wanted to say something, but thought better of it, and bit her tongue. “Why would you say that?” she said instead.
They stood looking at each other.
“I haven’t heard a peep out of you since the Milk Pail.”
“Dad loves those donuts. I’m glad we stopped.”
“Everyone loves those donuts.”
“Are you coming downstairs? The football game’s on in the den. Veronica will unpack you.”
“Are we not going to finish the conversation from the car? I’d like to talk before I see your dad.”
Merrill sighed, a heavy guttural sigh, her whole body wilting beneath the weight of it. Shutting the door behind her, she went to lie across the bed. Horizontal, her face took on a smooth, blank expression. Her eyes blinked up at the ceiling. They faded in color when she was tired or when she cried, more silver than blue.
“You dropped a lot of information on me,” she said finally. “I’m not trying to ignore you, but I need a little time to process everything.”
“That’s fair. That’s understandable.”
“I’m not angry with you,” she said, though he hadn’t suggested that she was.
“I hope not. Did you read the e-mails?”
“Yes. It’s not that I don’t understand your concern.”
“But?”
“But nothing.” Her voice was calm, but Paul could tell she was suppressing her anger.
“Look,” she said and sat up. “I’m just never going to tell you, yes, go talk to the SEC about my dad’s company. You’ll ruin him. You know that. And I have zero confidence that it would save you, either. It’s like walking directly into a lion’s den.”
Paul shifted away from her on the bed and they both stared at the walls, robin’s-egg blue and cream striped like everything else in the room. The stripes hurt his eyes if he looked too long at them.
There had always been a nascent fear in Paul that when it came down to it, Merrill might choose her family over him. He had never said this, of course, though they had danced around it countless times, during stupid fights about scheduling or the Hamptons house or whether she would ever move out of New York. Some of the fights were real and others weren’t. He thought he had gotten over it, after six years of marriage. But it held him now so tightly in a vice grip, he thought his heart might explode.
“Merrill,” he said. “What choice do I have? Sit and wait for them to come for me? I lied to the SEC. That’s a pretty big fucking deal.”
She was silent. The edge of her thumb was in her mouth and she bit at the nail.
“It wasn’t lying,” she said quietly. “You were just saying what the firm told you to say. People do that all the time.”
“Don’t you get it? We never asked RCM who their counterparties were. I wasn’t outright lying, maybe, but I wasn’t being honest, either. I shouldn’t have been out there saying, ‘We’re on top of it; they’re all triple-A rated or better.’ All that shit. We were all lying to our investors when we said it to them and I lied to David when I said it to him. And the worst part is, I put it in a fucking e-mail. So now they have me. Don’t you see that? Now they have me if they want me.”
Merrill got up off the bed, and Paul was seized by the fear that she was leaving. Instead, she crossed the room and picked up the folder atop his suitcase. He watched as she reread the e-mail, the one he had read a million times since the day before, the one where he gave David Levin the party line about counterparties, and then told him to fuck off, basically. To stop asking questions. He hadn’t thought he was lying when he sent it. That was the scariest part to him, how easily it had slipped off his fingertips. The e-mail, he could see now, read with such arrogant dismissiveness that Paul could hardly believe that he had written it. He felt as though he were reading a stranger’s e-mail, some cocky prick who worked at a hedge fund, the kind who ended up at his wife’s office shortly before being indicted for misconduct. That wasn’t him. At least he had never thought that was him.
Merrill put the e-mail back in the folder. She sat back down on the bed, the folder in her hand. He reached for her thigh. It felt tense and cold beneath his palm. He hated himself for losing his temper with her, and for cursing, which she hated.
“I feel like there are two teams here,” she said deliberately, her face pinched. “And it’s clear to me which one you’re on. And so hearing you talk about switching teams, well, it upsets me.”
When he didn’t respond, she continued, “Obviously, stuff went wrong at Delphic. But at the end of the day, this is about Morty and RCM. Just because he’s not here, that doesn’t mean you guys should pay for it. It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback and say, ‘You should have known’ or ‘You shouldn’t have let this happen.’ But really, that misses the point. This isn’t about Dad, or you, and it’s not really about Delphic. They’re just looking for a sacrificial lamb, because they need someone to blame for what happened. If you go to them now with your hands up and surrender, you’re justifying what they are doing. But if you stand behind the firm, and behind Dad, it sends a very clear message. This is about family now.”
There was a certain kind of comforting logic to what she was saying. More than anything, Paul wanted everyone’s interests to be aligned: his wife’s, his father in law’s, his own. He had always wanted to be one of them. Not because of the money, or the status. Not even the education and worldliness. It was their closeness he craved, their tribal clannishness. They were fiercely loyal to one another, even in times likes this. Especially in times like this. It all seemed so simple when she explained it. Family comes first. Family is unconditional.
Until he met them, Paul didn’t know that kind of family existed. His own was a loose affiliation of people bound by genetics. They had been a full family once, but it was so long ago that Paul no longer remembered the touch and feel of it. There had been five of them. Casey was four andhalf when she had drowned in a community pool. Paul and Katie were eight years old. They had been at a friend’s birthday party when it happened. No one had picked them up from the party. Instead, the sky had gone gray behind the trees and they were the last guests to leave, sitting at the picnic table with paper hats and noisemakers while the birthday boy’s mother placed calls to locate their parents. Paul remembered feeling cold as the breeze picked up; he was still wearing a damp bathing suit and there was water in his ears and he worried that Katie would get sick from having wet hair. He had given her his towel. It was draped across her shoulders, her tiny body shivering beneath it. The streamers that had been tied to the trees fluttered nervously around their heads, and at their feet candy wrappers from the piñata lay empty on the grass.
The Ross house had gone silent after that, like a radio unplugged from the wall. It was a matter of months after the funeral when their father left, happier to start again than to live with Casey’s specter. He was the one who had been in charge that day, taking them to the party and Casey to the pool while Patricia worked the weekend secretarial shift at the office. He remarried quickly, to a woman from Savannah. Paul and Katie went to visit them a few times. They would sit awkwardly in the living room of his new home, eating ice cream on the sofa out of orange plastic bowls and trying to be polite, as Patricia had told them to be. A year later
, the stepmother was pregnant, and the new family moved to New York.
Patricia told Paul and Katie that their father was a banker. She said he was successful, and that he had moved away from them because it was the right thing to do for his career. He called them on their birthdays, on Christmas, and told them he loved them, that he was very busy with his new job and the baby. Paul would try to keep him on the phone for as long he could, peppering him with questions about New York, the Yankees, the weather up north. Paul imagined him in a big house with a silver car out front, and an office that had windows overlooking Central Park. He would tell his friends that his father was a banker in New York whenever possible. Whatever success his father enjoyed never translated into child support for Patricia. The bank foreclosed on their house the month after Paul and Katie turned thirteen. Paul never took his father’s birthday call again.
Patricia was only twenty-one when she had gotten pregnant with Katie and Paul. She had met their dad in high school; he was three years older, and according to Patricia, “going places.” Young as she was, she was sometimes more of a friend than a mother. She and Katie developed together, like the trunk and branch of the same tree. On her better days (or Katie’s worse ones), they could pass for sisters. Both were the type of woman who had never been entirely pretty but instead had always looked as though they might have been pretty many years ago. Their features were plain and unrefined, like oatmeal.
Paul hadn’t seen either of them since his wedding. This worried Merrill; she felt as though she was in some way responsible for the separation. He knew that she wasn’t. To Paul, there was no rift, just a natural separation that had occurred over the course of many years. The movement had been slow enough that it felt almost imperceptible, like a continental drift.
He felt guilty, of course. Patricia wouldn’t take money from him, so instead he sent presents for the holidays that were overly expensive and inappropriate for their daily lives: Hermes scarves, Tiffany bracelets. The only real thing he could offer them was financial advice. A few years earlier, he’d set up small nest eggs for them both at Vanguard. Before that, they had only savings accounts, and mortgages that were unmanageably large for their incomes. It gave him a reason to call them at least once a month, and it gave him something to talk about when he did. Both women were overly grateful for his help. Katie sent him cards at the holidays, updating him on the kids’ lives and thanking him profusely for “everything he did for them” in her loopy, childlike script. Katie’s kids, too, sent letters: “Thank you, Uncle Paul, for the PlayStation” or “Thank you so so so much for the tickets to the UNC game.” The letters kept coming even though he told Katie they were unnecessary. He was their uncle, after all. Family never needed to send thank-you notes.
The truth was that he hated their letters. It worried him how much so little money meant to them. They seemed so helpless, so unable to make even small financial decisions without calling him first. Of course, what was a small financial decision to him was often monumental to Patricia or Katie. They had no idea how much money Merrill had, nor did they know that the Darlings had access to all kinds of resources they couldn’t imagine: private equity investments with half-million dollar buy-ins, money managers, tax attorneys, estate planning advisers. That doesn’t take away anything from them, he told himself. It’s not a zero-sum game. But still, the guilt was pervasive some days, seeping into his chest like rising tidewater.
Now it all seemed inverted. More than once in the past twenty-four hours, Paul had felt an impulse to disappear to Charlotte, taking Merrill with him. Charlotte, or somewhere new altogether—Hong Kong, London, Paris, São Paulo. Somewhere that belonged to them, not to the Darlings.
His phone was ringing. They could both see it light up on the dresser.
“Are you going to answer that?” Merrill said.
“No. Let it go to voice mail.”
“Is it Alexa?”
“I don’t know.” Paul rolled toward Merrill and took her in his arms. Her body felt stiff at first but then she relaxed into him. He buried his face in her neck, kissing it, his eyes closed tight. “I love you,” he said. “I’m so sorry I saw her and didn’t tell you right away. I’m trying to do everything right.”
She squeezed him back, her torso pressed to his. “I know,” she said, kissing his hairline gently. “I know. You would do anything for me, I know that.” From the way she looked at him, it was a statement and a question and an affirmation all at once.
“I would.”
“Please talk to Dad before you decide what to do. Please.”
As they held each other, they heard the sound of a car pulling down the driveway.
“We should go,” she said.
“I love you,” he said again. “More than anything.” But she was on her feet already and didn’t answer.
Downstairs, the table was being set. Ines’s Thanksgiving china, rimmed in gold and emblazoned with tiny turkeys, had been unsheathed from its muslin coverings and laid out on an antique lace tablecloth. Candles flickered against the glittering silver. In the center of the table was a cornucopia overflowing with apples, pears, grapes, oranges, and chestnuts. All temptingly vibrant, but in fact, made of wax. Carmela had to place each fruit out with precision, as she did every year, striving to achieve what Ines referred to as “casual elegance.” Veronica had failed at this the first year—she had stacked the fruits too uniformly—and Ines had been forced to rearrange them frantically before anyone was allowed to sit down. The task had been reassigned to Carmela after that. John had removed one chair from the nine-person table. He had been instructed to bring it all the way down to the basement, completely out of sight. No one, Ines had told him sternly, wanted to be reminded that there was one person who wouldn’t be at dinner. Anyway, the table was really meant for eight chairs; the extra had been brought up just for Morty. It was slightly different from the others.
On the sideboard was a stack of name cards for Ines’s arrangement. She was already thinking about how to place them.
THURSDAY, 5:00 P.M.
Marina was in Brooklyn, of all places.
She hated Brooklyn; hated taking the subway, hated how low all the buildings were. She hated how Brooklynites made it seem as though their decision to live there made them edgier or morally superior. What she hated about it most of all was how dislocated she felt from Manhattan whenever she stepped off the subway platform. It made her feel as if she were moving backward, away from the rotational center of the earth. Marina had come to New York straight from college, with nothing but a thousand dollars in her checking account, her possessions packed into a few brown boxes neatly labeled with a Sharpie, and a conviction never to live in an outer borough. She was proud of herself for sticking to it. She had ended up with two roommates in a Chinatown walk-up that inexplicably smelled like curry. But it was worth it because she was living in Manhattan.
Max had, evidently, elected to live in Brooklyn. Marina knew that six-figure apartments existed in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg and Park Slope, but until now, she had never actually been in one; only crappy tenements in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene. This, as she realized later when she was good and drunk, was because all of her cool friends were poor, and all of her rich friends were too boring to live in Brooklyn.
Max was neither poor nor boring. This surprised her. She had met him only a couple of times, usually at loud parties where she couldn’t hear anything, but he hadn’t impressed her. She had thought that Georgina could do so much better. After all, George was fabulous; she had that perfect, effortless, enviable sense of cool that rich city girls seemed to inherit, like long straight hair and perfect teeth. George had the metabolism of a whippet. Everything looked good on her: couture dresses, sweatpants, men’s button-down shirts. She had grown up in a town house on Eleventh Street that had a back garden and a Cy Twombly hanging above the mantelpiece. She was the love child of a former model-turned-photographer and a guitarist who had once played with Bob Dylan. She wa
s twenty-four. And she was at least an inch taller than Max. Still she was crazy about him, absolutely head over heels.
What George had failed to articulate was that Max wasn’t just a software designer, he was a super-rich, super-successful thirty-six-year-old software designer who basically invented the iPod (or something like that). And his father was a billionaire venture capitalist who had a house in East Hampton next to Carl Icahn’s.
So now it made more sense.
But when Marina had called George the night before, bawling and recounting every horrible detail of the Morgensons’ Thanksgiving Eve party, she knew none of this. Max was simply George’s chubby, curly-haired boyfriend, with his little paunch and scuffed red sneakers, the kind of guy who laughed awkwardly and one second too late, and probably still played video games. So when she accepted the invitation to spend Thanksgiving at his apartment, it was clear what a desperate, defeated state she was in.
The problem was that she had not made a backup plan. This was unlike her. Marina was typically extremely organized, methodical, risk averse (these were the characteristics that were most often cited by her parents in their on-going campaign in favor of law school). Clever as she was, Marina was also sadly prone to bouts of hopeless romanticism. Just as she had romanticized the job at Press (stylish co-workers, fabulous parties, mentorship from of a journalistic icon), she had also romanticized Tanner.
Slowly, she had fallen deeper and deeper into the throes of infatuation with him, the youngest grandson of William Morgenson. As she had done so, Marina had quietly turned down the volume on each of Tanner’s shortcomings. It happened insidiously, over the course of many months, until one day all she could hear when he walked in the room was beautiful music.
Despite her admitted pedigree consciousness, Marina no longer cared that Tanner had gone to fair-to-middling schools. She had made peace with his decision to quit the analyst program at Morgan Stanley after only four months, as well as his decision to spend the subsequent two years “searching for the right opportunity.” Sometimes, though she would never admit it aloud, Marina actually relished Tanner’s unemployment. He was always available to take her to art openings and dinner parties and benefit galas, which was refreshing in a city full of men who lived at the office. And if he could afford the tickets and the tux, really, what did it matter? Tanner was perfect.
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