Marina’s friends had become quietly concerned. It was clear to everyone but Marina that Tanner had no intention of marrying her. In fact, word had gone around that they were on the outs and Tanner was on the prowl for someone more suitable. While Marina was very pretty and very well educated, she wasn’t really marriage material for a Morgenson. She had attended Hotchkiss because her parents were on the faculty; she had gone to Princeton on a partial scholarship because she had been the valedictorian of her class at Hotchkiss. Her parents were lovely people with no social connections. As much as Marina had done her best to gloss over these subtle distinctions, they hadn’t escaped the serpentine tongues of her competition. Marina wasn’t unaware that a few of Tanner’s female friends thought he could do better, and told him as much.
Marina’s parents taught at Hotchkiss so that they could give their daughter the very best education available. They had achieved this end, but with an unfortunate side effect: they had unwittingly exposed Marina to a world of obscene privilege and excess of which she wanted nothing more than to be a part. Because she was pretty, she was popular, and because she was popular, the majority of her friends were very rich indeed. She vacationed with them at their homes in Aspen; she borrowed their Chanel jackets for parties at the Ivy Club; she watched as they took glamorous, impractical jobs (jewelry designer, novelist) instead of worrying about their salaries. Somewhere along the way, Marina became determined that she, too, was worthy of all this. She would simply have to go out and get for herself the life her friends had been given. It would require careful planning and execution, but Marina always accomplished everything to which she put her mind. She made a lot of spreadsheets.
Law school was out. It was a reasonably sound next step for a liberal arts major, and the promise of $160,000 starting salary was certainly appealing. But after some consideration, Marina concluded that relegating herself to seventy hours a week of document review among schlumpy, poorly socialized colleagues would be an underutilization of her talents. She was smart, yes. And diligent and logical and all the other things that made for a good lawyer. But Marina knew what truly set her apart from the pack: her looks, her wit, and her innate sense of style. And those she had in spades.
What Marina saw, that her parents failed to see, was that law school was just too provincial an aspiration for her. She loved her parents deeply, but for reasons she could never fully understand, Richard and Alice suffered from limited horizons. They had chosen to live out their lives in quiet anonymity, settling in a pleasant Connecticut town, teaching high school European History (Richard) and French (Alice) when both could have easily gone on to tenure track professorships at major universities or even careers in consulting or law. They wore duck boots and polar fleece, and were almost always covered in dog hair. Their ancient yellow station wagon (fondly dubbed Old Yeller) had, for several years, wheezed like an old accordion when the key was pulled from the ignition. It had ferried the family everywhere, from Marina’s middle school soccer games to her college graduation. Periodically, Richard and Alice revisited the idea of replacing Old Yeller, but Alice would get misty-eyed, as if they were discussing putting down one of the actual dogs, not a seventeen-year-old station wagon with gummy seats and no CD player. Marina knew they would drive it until it literally died on the side of the road.
Her parents were happy, and Marina knew that was all that really mattered. Yet she felt strongly that her own life would be something of a grander and more cosmopolitan construction. She didn’t want to look back on her life choices; her career; and, most of all, her marriage and feel that she had settled.
For a year or so, everything fell into place. Marina landed a coveted spot as Duncan Sander’s assistant, a job for which most socialites would pull out their eyeteeth. She finagled her way onto a few benefit committees, turned up at the right kind of parties. Most impressive, she had snagged Tanner.
Tanner Morgenson was, on a number of metrics, a catch. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t unhandsome, either. He was well liked. He dressed well. No one would say Tanner was funny, exactly, but he was lively and had entertaining friends. He was fun. He took socializing very seriously. It wasn’t uncommon for Tanner to spend whole days drifting from one private club to the next: a long lunch with his father at the Knickerbocker Club; a squash match and a steam at the Racquet Club; a dinner dance at Doubles. Tanner ran with a fast crowd, almost all native Upper East Siders who had known one another since birth, all rich and well connected, but because his grandfather was William Morgenson Sr. (founder of Morgenson Gas & Electric) and his mother was Grace Leighton Morgenson (heir to Leighton & Leighton Pharmaceuticals), very few were as rich or as well connected as Tanner.
Marina had had her eye on Tanner since college. He would come to visit his sister Clay now and again up at Princeton, usually with the aim of hitting on her friends. One dewy spring evening on the cusp of graduation, Tanner appeared on campus without warning. By midnight, he was standing on a table at the Ivy Club, his arms entwined with two swaying lacrosse players who had successfully goaded him into singing “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” into a beer bottle. His Nantucket reds were stained and he looked wild-eyed. Clay confided to Marina that Lily Darling, Tanner’s on-again, off-again sweetheart, had married an older guy who worked for her father. Though Tanner had never been able to fully commit to Lily, he was devastated. Smelling blood, Marina had moved in for the kill.
By the end of the summer, Marina had moved to New York and Tanner was hers. Well, almost hers. She learned quickly that Tanner wasn’t a subscriber to the concept of commitment. She tried not to take this personally. After all, Tanner was universally noncommittal. He had dropped out of two summer camps as a child (hockey camp in Maine; squash camp in Newport), owned but couldn’t play a multitude of instruments (a guitar, a saxophone, a paddle-tennis racquet). He had never stuck with a job for more than four consecutive months (JPMorgan held the record). Dinner reservations were often canceled at the last minute; weekend trips to Aspen or Palm Beach were penciled in on a whim. Marina spent her first fourteen months in New York engaged in an elaborate form of romantic brinkmanship with Tanner, a delicate, diplomatic operation involving seduction, feigned disinterest, patience, impatience, bikini waxing, ultimatums, open flirtation with others, and one extremely drunken couples weekend in the Napa Valley.
By the end, Marina had lost all perspective. Never before had she failed to achieve something, and she wasn’t about to start with Tanner Morgenson. So desperate was she to believe that her affections were reciprocated that she broke a cardinal rule of courtship. She had (eagerly, blissfully) believed Tanner when he said that she was more than welcome to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Immediately, she called her parents and announced that she would not be making it home to Lakeville this year, much to their disappointment. This was an unfortunate misstep, and one that could have been avoided if only she had remembered never to take to heart the words of a drunken man.
“Never, ever, ever believe anything a man says when he is drunk!” George shook her head vigorously after this proclamation, her honey-colored ringlets flying. “And definitely don’t when he’s drunk and about to get laid. I mean, that’s rule number one.” She glared sternly at Marina, who looked away and busied herself rearranging the rack of leather pants and bustiers that they were supposed to be bringing downstairs for a shoot. A moment earlier, Marina had felt effervescent. Then George had come along and uncorked her.
“I know,” she said feebly. “But he wasn’t that drunk. And things are going so well! I think he really wants me there.”
“Were you naked?”
“What kind of a question is that?” Marina scanned the hallway to make sure they were out of earshot.
“Well, were you? Just answer the question.”
“Fine. Yes. So what?” she hissed.
“And he said it before, right? Before you slept with him.”
“I get the point.”
“I’m just say
ing—” George raised her eyebrows in a way that made Marina want to slap her. “Just be careful. Weren’t you going home to see Richard and Alice? They’re going to be so disappointed.”
“Let’s drop it,” Marina said coldly, and pressed the elevator button twelve times in rapid succession.
“Dropped,” George said. She raised her palms in surrender.
Marina stewed for the rest of the day, trying to decide what annoyed her more: that George liked to call other people’s parents by their first names or that George was right about Tanner.
So Marina’s humiliation was complete when she was (1) made to suffer through the Morgensons’ Thanksgiving Eve party, during which time it became slowly but excruciatingly clear that the Morgensons not only had no idea that Marina was dating their son but also that they had no intention of hosting her the following day, and (2) forced to call George to admit what had transpired. She had no one else to call.
“He introduced me to his mother as ‘Clay’s friend from Princeton’!” she said. “His mother. You should have seen her face. Totally blank. No idea who I was.”
“Oh, my God, don’t say another word. You’re dumping him immediately. In fact it’s done; he’s been dumped. You’re coming out to Brooklyn to have Thanksgiving with Max and me. It is going to be fabulous and by the time it is over you will have completely forgotten Theo Morgenblatt the Third or whatever his name is. Fuck him. You can do so much better.”
In the background, Marina could hear Max’s voice, entreating George to get off the phone and come to bed.
Through her snorting, hiccupping tears, Marina thought to protest but couldn’t muster the strength. “Are you—hic!—sure? I don’t want to impose.”
“Please. Max doesn’t even know who’s coming anymore. It’s going to be great. Wear something cute. Oh, and can you bring a pecan pie? I was supposed to bake one, which means I was going to buy one and pretend I baked it, but I forgot.” Max’s snorting in the background was silenced by a thwump that Marina identified as a pillow colliding broadside with his head.
“I’ll bring pie,” she said miserably. “Thanks, George. Love you.”
That was how Marina ended up on the 4 train on Thanksgiving day, having spent the morning wandering aimlessly through SoHo in search of an open bakery. She had slept in and once awake, tried to go to the gym, only to find it was closed. Now she tried to make herself as compact as possible in her subway seat, her purse and a pie competing for prime real estate in her lap. The pie was blueberry, because it was all the bakery had left. She figured that no one would notice. In fact, she figured no one would even notice her.
She had been too depressed to put any thought into what she was wearing, and had settled on an amalgam of black items that disappeared into one another in an indistinct, forgettable way that she knew would not score her any points with anyone. On her way out, she pocketed gold hoop earrings; her thought was to slip them on at Max’s if everyone else looked more festive than she. As she walked to the subway stop, the idea that hoop earrings could, like little lifesavers, rescue her from obscurity became laughably, almost unbearably depressing. She looked awful and there was nothing to be done about it. Not awful, actually; worse than awful. She looked ordinary.
People pushed past Marina on the subway platform, causing her to grip the pie with the protectiveness of a squirrel with a nut. New York had a strange way of making her feel simultaneously claustrophobic and lonely. People surrounded her all day long: on the street, in the subway, in the office. The thumps of the downstairs neighbors wafted into her bedroom every night; her roommates’ laughter reverberated through the paperthin walls; her window looked directly into the bedroom of a young Chinese couple with a newborn. There was a certain kind of intimacy to this physical closeness. But it was no substitute for family or for the friendships she had shared with her college roommates and boyfriends. The proximity of so many strangers made her feel unmoored. New York, she realized, was a sea filled with ships, slipping silently by one another on their way in and out of port.
Marina stared at the people with whom she was currently sharing Thanksgiving. Across from her was a homeless man talking to himself and rocking slightly, his ebony hands so chapped that they looked as if he had rolled them in white chalk. A kid in baggy pants and a backpack slouched next to him, wholly absorbed by his iPod. The only people who occasionally made eye contact were a tourist couple (midwestern, Marina guessed) wearing matching sweatshirts. They were overweight, and because they were holding a map, she made a bet with herself that they would be mugged before their trip was over.
Marina closed her eyes and tried to conjure her parents, alone for the first time in their house in Lakeville. The house would be quiet except for the creaky swinging of the dog door as Murray and Tucker darted in and out of the kitchen. Her mother would be wearing mom jeans, a turtleneck sweater embroidered with autumn leaves. She would have put the dogs in their “festive” collars because it was a holiday. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, because Marina wasn’t there to share it with them. Her father would be in his study while dinner was prepared, his stomach growling because, as he would tell them every Thanksgiving, he was accustomed to eating at specific times (7:30 a.m., noon, 6:30 p.m.), and not just one big meal in the middle of the afternoon. His glasses would have slipped to the tip of his nose by now and he would be squinting through them, grading papers primarily through his left eye because the right one was weaker. For years, Richard Tourneau had relied on cheap drugstore glasses, insisting they worked just fine. Alice had finally gotten him to the eye doctor five years ago, and though he had acquiesced to prescription glasses (“A hundred and fifty dollars!” he had sputtered, but looked so distinguished in them), he hadn’t been back since. His eyes, of course, had weakened; he was turning sixty this year. Instead, he had affected a strange habit of reading and watching movies with one eye closed, like a pirate.
When she emerged from the subway station, it occurred to Marina that nothing would make her parents happier than a surprise visit on Thanksgiving. George wouldn’t mind; Max wouldn’t even notice. She knew better than to hope for a phone call or a last minute invitation from Tanner. Her parents were, she realized with sudden and violent acuity, the only people in the world who actually cared about her. As she stood on the corner of Montague and Henry streets trying to orient herself, Marina felt her face grow hot with tears. Was it possible to turn around and go home? Her chest was wracked with a very deep sort of pain, a hideous feeling that she identified only later as homesickness.
No one would notice if she gave up on New York and went back to Connecticut, tail between her legs. Her friends would miss her, of course, but only for a minute, like that sigh at the end of a good movie. She could live in Lakeville, study for her LSATs (was registration for the December test still possible? She’d have to check). Maybe her father could get her a part-time job tutoring students at Hotchkiss. Knowing this option existed no longer made her nauseated but instead filled Marina with an odd and liberating sense of relief.
Instinctually, she dialed her parents’ number.
The moment her mother answered the phone, Marina knew she could never actually go through with it. At least, not today.
“How was the Morgensons’ party last night?” Alice Tourneau asked enthusiastically. “Did you see the balloons all blown up? Did you get all dressed up?”
“It was nice,” Marina replied vaguely.“There was caviar and blinis,” she added, for color.
“That sounds lovely, darling. Your father’s just beside himself this morning because I decided to make only the apple pie this year and not pecan, too. But one pie is always more than enough, and this year it is only the two of us! Everyone always prefers the apple.” Behind her, Murray and Tucker were tussling on the kitchen floor, yowling fitfully. “Stop it, you!” Alice’s voice sounded distant as she scolded one of them, her face turned away from the receiver.
“How are Murray and Tucker?” Marina asked, feeling as
though she might cry. “Do they miss me?”
“Oh, they’re fine. Well, Murray ate something he wasn’t supposed to just now and he’s bound to throw it up any minute, but other than that, they’re fine. They’re seven this year, you know! Big boys.”
“Mom and Dad’s empty-nest dogs.”
“Yes, well. The house is quiet without you in it! These rascals keep us on our toes.” Though she was trying to sound chipper, Marina knew her mother well enough to hear the shakiness in her voice. They fell silent for a minute, each savoring the sound of the other.
“How’s Dad?”
“Oh, just fine. Harumphing his way through the semester, as usual. He misses you, you know. I know he’s not a big phone talker but it would mean a lot if you gave him a buzz now and then.”
“I miss him, too,” Marina said. She felt overcome with sentimentality, as though she wanted to slip through the phone wire and into her mother’s arms. “I miss you guys so much. I was thinking maybe I would come up for the weekend, sometime soon.”
“Oh, we would just love that! It’s so pretty up here this time of year. You missed apple season, unfortunately. This year’s crop was pitiful. Worst I’ve ever seen, I think. The weather was just so erratic. Our little orchard really suffered.” Alice sighed. “We just had the last of them fall off the trees. I canned what I could. But you know what? Those little apples were delicious. We made applesauce and a pie, and I made strudel for my students. They were just the sweetest apples. Or maybe we just appreciated them more because there were so few of them.” Alice laughed, and Murray let out a single bark.
The Darlings Page 20