“Has anyone spoken to Julianne?” Adrian asked.
“Something else.” Carter snapped, cutting him off.
Carmela reentered the room with a pitcher of water. “Let’s just start,” Carter said to her. “The turkey’s getting cold.”
“Who won the game?” Marion offered, trying again. She smiled at the group.
“Lions got crushed,” Adrian said. He pulled off a piece of crust, crumbs skittering across the tablecloth. He shrugged. “Decimated. We lost forty-seven to ten.”
“Oh my. Against whom?”
“Tennessee Titans.”
“Now remind me why it is that you all root for Detroit every year.”
Like spectators at a tennis match, the rest of the family glanced back toward Adrian. No one else dared to touch the bread. “Damned if I know,” he said. He shrugged, and with pointed disinterest, jammed a bit of roll into his mouth.
When he was done chewing he wiped the edge of his mouth with his napkin and turned to Lily, who was actively glaring. “What?” he said, rolling his eyes. “He said we were starting. I’m starving.”
“Why don’t you wait until everyone’s served?” Lily said crisply. She was sitting up perfectly straight, fingers laced primly together at the table edge. She looked eerily like Ines. Any trace of the erection which had plagued Adrian earlier in the evening was instantly gone.
“My grandfather was one of the original owners of the Lions,” Carter announced, drawing attention back to the head of the table. “He was friends with George Richards, who brought the team to Detroit in 1934.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” Marion said, even though everyone had heard this story before. “Do you still have family in Michigan?”
“Is that story even true?” Merrill asked suddenly. Her voice was laced with an acidity that Paul had never heard her use with her father. Only Paul could see that she was picking ferociously at the cuticle of her thumb beneath the table. It had begun to bleed. Paul reached out to stop her but she pulled away, wrapping her finger discreetly in a napkin.
“Of course it is,” Carter said. He seemed disarmed by Merrill’s tone. Their gazes locked intently. For a moment, it was as though the rest of the table had fallen away and only Carter and Merrill existed. Paul and Adrian both sat frozen in their seats, unsure of what would happen next.
“Because you always say that half the things your dad said weren’t true, and that sounds like the kind of story he would make up.”
“Merrill,” Lily said sternly from across the table. “Stop.” She widened her eyes in the direction of the Penzells. The sharpness of her voice, the angle at which her pale eyebrows had knit themselves furiously together, conveyed an urgency that Adrian evidently found amusing. He let out a sharp, barking laugh that was met with silence from the rest of the table.
The Penzells stared off into space, brutally aware that they had happened upon a private family moment. All evening, they had been trying with limited success not to draw attention to themselves. Sol, unfortunately, had made the mistake of wearing a tie. His was the wrong sort of shirt for a tie, however, soft collared and plaid, and it gave the impression that there had been a last-minute squabble with Marion over the dress code, which Sol had lost. Sol now pulled at the tie, loosening it around his neck, and pretended not to sense the tension between the Darlings.
He sat back in his chair and it rocked a little too far on its back legs, startling everyone.
“Careful!” Lily squeaked reflexively. She reached forward as if she could snag him from across the table. Sol snapped his chair back into place and readjusted his tie.
“Sorry,” he said to Lily. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“For God’s sake, Lily,” Merrill said, exasperated. She turned to Sol and Marion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t think we should start without Mom.” She put her napkin down on top of her plate and rose to her feet. The napkins were linen and lace, like tiny little tablecloths. A red spot of blood about the size of dime was visible at its edge of hers.
“Sit down, Merrill,” Carter said. “Your mother will come down when she’s ready. We have guests.”
“I’m going to go check on her,” Merrill said, and walked out, the door swinging gently in her wake.
“Mom?” Merrill’s voice skipped off the bathroom walls like a stone. “Are you up here?”
Ines paused, her body still for a minute while she decided whether or not to reply. Ines wondered how long they had been waiting for her to come down. Could it already be 6 p.m.? No one cared if she watched the football game. She thought she had heard the Penzells pull up in the driveway, but she wasn’t sure. Outside, the sky had grown dark, and the drive up to the house was dotted with lights.
Dinner must be ready. Ines imagined what was going on downstairs; she could see it exactly. Adrian was probably hungry. Lily was fretting with the place settings, or buzzing nervously around the Penzells, impatient with Adrian and embarrassed that her mother was being an ineffectual hostess. Carter would be hungry, too, but he wouldn’t allow them to start without her. The girls must have discussed it quietly and agreed that someone should check on her. Merrill might have volunteered, but more likely, they had drawn straws for the job. When they were little, the girls used to put their pointer fingers up against their noses when an unpleasant chore was suggested—taking the trash out or helping with the dishes—and whoever was slower to the draw would be responsible for it. Merrill, older and quicker, usually won.
Merrill must have lost this round, Ines thought. Or maybe she had volunteered; Merrill the diplomat, Merrill the peacekeeper.
Ines imagined her trudging dutifully up the stairs, wondering why her mother was being difficult. The conversation among the others would be stilted in her absence. They would talk in circles about football and the coming storm, avoiding anything that had to do with Morty or the business. Or Julianne. Or Ines. Ines felt a pang of guilt, but it was passing.
She had been trying to pull herself together all day. Her makeup bag had tipped over and exploded across the bathroom floor. Shards of powdered bronzer and a fractured mirror had skittered across the tiles. Her expensive foundation had splattered like beige paint. Broken glass from the bottle glistened between the fibers of the bathmat. Ines kept trying to clean up the mess, first with tissues and then with her hands, but it was everywhere. Now she was kneeling on the bathroom floor, trying hopelessly to pick the glass out of the rug before she hurt herself. The fine bones of her feet felt unprotected from the hardness of the tiles. Small red dents had begun to appear on her kneecaps where the edges had dug into her flesh, like the lines that appear on one’s calves when kneesocks are too tight at the top. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sort of pain. It reminded her of being in church, kneeling on the unforgiving surface of the wooden beam that folded out from beneath the pew.
The shower was running. Ines had turned it on to drown out her crying. Tears rolled down her face in salty, hot drops. Her nose ran, too; clear mucus that stung at her chin. Because the trashcan was just out of reach from where she sat, crumpled Kleenex bloomed like flowers across the bathroom floor. Just listening to the shower felt cleansing. Its constant, steady pounding against the marble felt reassuring, too, there was something infinitely practical about it.
She was too tired to bathe herself today. The thought of drying her hair and applying makeup overwhelmed her. No one would notice, anyway. Carter certainly wouldn’t. It had been months since he had looked at her with any kind of sexual interest or even casual physical appraisal. It was as though he no longer saw her at all.
Ines wasn’t a fool. She was practical enough to recognize that her inherent value was depreciating. Her once boundless energy was now diminished. She could hardly keep her eyes open past 10:30 p.m., even at the ballet or a dinner party with friends. She was more forgetful than ever. And worst of all, her body was deteriorating at a rate that felt unbridled. This drove her to distraction. Every year, it seemed, she
had to explore increasingly drastic options (facelifts, juice fasts, liposuction) just to maintain the status quo. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand her husband’s waning interest. But that didn’t make it easier to accept.
Ines knew that she had lost him as a lover a decade ago. It could have been longer than that, though she didn’t like to consider this possibility. She had spent the end of her forties and the beginning of her fifties conceding that struggle. She had arrived at a place where she no longer craved that sort of attention from Carter. Instead, she settled for a platonic strain of admiration, the kind Hollywood bestows upon older actresses. It wasn’t sufficient, but it sustained her. Maybe it was a bad patch, she told herself. Maybe it was temporary.
At the very least, Carter had never resented her. The money had always been theirs, not his. For that, Ines was grateful. She couldn’t stand to be monitored as some of her friends were, submitting credit card receipts to their husbands like a member of the household staff. It always shocked Ines to hear her friends complain of their husband’s resentments about money. It seemed to have gotten worse with age, despite the fact that many of these men were only growing richer by the year. It was as though, once past childbearing age, wives became functionally useless. They lunched and threw parties and bought clothes, but they were no longer sexually appealing. Their children required little if any maternal attention. Their husbands saw them as cash drains, an extra person on the payroll.
Perhaps it was she who had strayed first. It had happened insidiously, sometime between the births of Merrill and Lily. Ines’s focus, once on Carter, shifted to her children. She wasn’t one of those women who romanticized motherhood. There were days that she hated it, all the feeding and the ear infections and the lack of adult conversation. But she tried to do it well, and the girls were hers, in a way that no one, not even Carter, had ever been. A lot of nights she was asleep by the time he got home. In the midst of it, her marriage slipped out of focus, the backdrop behind a portrait of the girls.
On bad days, Ines told herself that she had stayed in it for Merrill and Lily, so that they would have everything she hadn’t. Not just the schools and the houses and the tennis lessons and the perfect dresses but the full family, a father who adored them. Ines’s own father had passed away when she was eight. Her mother fell into a deep depression and was deemed unable to care for her, so Ines was sent to Rio to live with her grandparents. Ines recalled little from her childhood except that her grandfather was kind and forgetful, and their house was silent, and furnished in austere dark woods and stone tiling. She spent her teenage years lost in American fashion magazines and cinema, and resolved to get out of Brazil as soon as she was able. At seventeen, she came to New York to model. After a year, Ines realized that she was neither tall enough nor striking enough to sustain that sort of career. She was, however, stylish and smart and willing to do whatever it took to get where she wanted to go. She found herself a job as a secretary at Women’s Wear Daily. By twenty-five, she was a junior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, working elbow to elbow with Anna Wintour.
She went to a lot of fancy parties in those days, and it was at one of those fancy parties that she met Carter Darling. After their first date she thought that he was a bit of a snob, and also that it was inevitable that she would fall madly in love with him. She did. They got married at City Hall, and afterward went for a long, champagne-soaked lunch at La Grenouille with friends. She wore an elegant white shift and matching jacket from Valentino that she thought made her look like Mia Farrow at her wedding to Frank Sinatra at the Sands. There was no honeymoon because Ines was already pregnant with Merrill and feeling too nauseated to travel.
For a time, she worried that she might eventually fall out of love with her husband, or he with her. They had married so quickly, and so young, and were from different worlds altogether. Yet over the years, they were able to form a partnership that felt more functional and aligned than any of their friends’ relationships. They never fought about money or where they would live or how the girls would be raised. Perhaps they should have, Ines thought sometimes, because then they might have felt more like lovers than business partners.
When he did ultimately fall in love with someone else, Ines didn’t consider leaving as a real possibility. Where would she go? And how could she ever do that to the girls? They were a family. Staying with Carter was a selfless decision, and the right one. Or so she told herself. The fear that it was neither cut her to the core.
“Mom?”
Ines shut off the shower.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Merrill was perched on the edge of the bed like a pigeon. Her face was fresh, a clean-scrubbed pink. Her golden brown hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail, clean and girlish. Though Ines imagined she wasn’t, Merrill looked rested, as she would on any other weekend in the country. It was an illusion, of course, but Ines was grateful for it. Seeing her children suffer was more than she could bear at this point.
By contrast, Ines looked like shit.
“How are you doing, Mom?” Merrill blinked at her expectantly. She looked concerned but not disapproving. “I think dinner’s ready.”
Ines sighed and disappeared into her walk-in closet. From inside it, she said, “I know. I’ll just be a minute.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“What?”
“Your suitcase is out here.”
“I haven’t decided,” she said. She could sense that Merrill was on the verge of saying something but thought better of it.
“Where would you go?” Merrill said, after a minute of silence. “Back to the city? Or somewhere else?”
When there was no reply, Merrill said, “Mom, could you please come out of the closet? Have you spoken to Dad?”
Ines emerged from the closet. In her hand was a cashmere turtleneck.They both stared at the open suitcase, which was lying on the rack beside the bed. The lid was propped against the back wall, revealing a half-hearted attempt at packing. Absently, Ines pulled the sweater over her head without bothering to put on a bra. In the naked sunlight, her body looked old, like some external force had been sucking at her skin until it had started to come lose off her.
The truth of it was that she was terrified to leave Beech House. Carter would return to Manhattan in the morning, and both he and Sol had expressed how important it was for her to go with him. “I need you, Ines,” Carter had said. It had been so long since he had assigned her any importance that she found this almost heartwarming. Then Sol had said: “It will look bad if you’re apart. Anyway, what would you do out here all by yourself?” The two of them stood there like a team. They had rehearsed their pitch beforehand, she realized, her heart hardening. She was just part of the plan’s execution.
The more relevant question, to Ines anyway, was what would she do with herself in Manhattan? She couldn’t visualize it. Should she stay home and watch television, waiting for Carter to return and tell her their life was ending? That the lawyers’ fees would bankrupt them? That he was going to disappear to some country with no extradition treaty, and she would see him again only on the television screen?
She would go to the gym or to the deli or to Starbucks, where un-doubtedly she would see an acquaintance who would stop her and ask after the family and, if they were particularly tactless, express sadness over Morty’s death. Or, after Carter’s mistress was inevitably interviewed on television, they would say nothing to her but simply duck their heads and pass by as though they hadn’t seen her. That’s what she would do if she were they. What could she possibly say to anyone now?
She realized, as she considered these actualities, these threads of what would now be her life’s fabric, that there wasn’t a single person in the world she wanted to see. She would make a lifetime of avoiding the people she had once worked so hard to befriend. Even getting coffee at the deli around the corner would be a gauntlet run. She would have to wear a hat and slip in and out, unnoticed. She’d be embarrassed to
be anywhere—even the deli—like some sort of Hester Prynne. And this was all before the press got wind of everything. This was the beginning.
It would be easier to avoid all that in the country. Days could be whiled away at Beech House, checking on the temperamental boiler, instructing the staff, inspecting the hedgerow. Ines always felt purposeful when she was there. It wasn’t that the tasks were important or could only be accomplished by Ines herself (most of it, admittedly, could and often was delegated to a third party: Carmela or John, an interior decorator, a gardener). But rather, their value lay in the fact that Ines was good at them, and it brought her pleasure to be able to look back on the day and see tangible evidence of what she had accomplished. The apartment in the city, contained as it was within a fully staffed building, ran itself. A relief on most days, but on other days, days when she was alone, the apartment’s self-sufficiency made her feel obsolete, like an outdated coffeemaker relegated to the back cupboard.
Beech House was a place of suspended reality, filled with manicured lawns and porticos and putting greens. Like all summer homes, it had no real purpose. During the summer season, its residents could pretend that the question that pressed most heavily upon their minds was Golf or tennis this morning? Weather discrepancies—impending rainstorms, unseasonable chills—sent everyone into frantic caucus. Even the tasks that Ines clung to as purposeful were, for the most part, manufactured. No one needed an arbor by the swimming pool, for example, and the mudroom furniture didn’t need to be repainted nearly as often as it was. These banalities were merely meant to occupy her, allowing the time to pass gently. Ines could lose herself for days there, even weeks, like Alice down the rabbit hole.
Also, Carter had bought it just for her. Back in the days when he would do anything for her. She could have had a less expensive house, or one requiring far less work. But this was the one she wanted. And what Carter wanted, or so he had said at the time, was to see her happy.
The Darlings Page 22