The Darlings

by Cristina Alger

  “Fine. But you weren’t doing that. Right?”

  “Never. I wasn’t crazy enough to be doing that.”

  “But you saw it. And there was an unspoken code that, well, you turn a blind eye. Right? I mean, what would be the point of challenging the system?”

  “That’s just it,” Paul said, slightly exasperated. “You can point to Deal A and say, ‘that shouldn’t have happened,’ or Deal B, and say ‘that shouldn’t have happened,’ but what does a guy in my position do? Challenge one? I’d get fired. Challenge them all? I’d get banished from the industry. Then what? Nothing has changed.”

  Now Paul was fired up, cylinders blazing. “You want to ask me if I knew?” he said. “Sure, I knew. Some of it. Not all of it, but yeah, some. But at some point, you put your head down and say to yourself, if someone else wants to go off the reservation, that’s his fucking problem. And you know what? I was wrong. Because now it’s everybody’s problem. So that’s what you wanted to hear: I knew. Think less of me?”

  Carter chuckled. “No, son. I think more of you.” He grinned at Paul. He looked sort of wild-eyed and delirious, and it crossed Paul’s mind that he might be having a breakdown. Maybe they all were. Carter hopped to his feet and paced across the kitchen floor, and Paul could hear the faint pulsing sound of music—was that the B-52’s?—emanating from the pocket of Carter’s running pants. His iPod had been playing this whole time, Paul realized, so faintly that he had edited it out as white noise.

  “You do what’s right for your family. You do it even if down the road the rest of the world is going to chastise you for what you did. I told you son, we’re the same. I had a shitty father growing up, too, and as soon as I was able I took one look at him and said, ‘That’s not the kind of man I want to be.’ And I haven’t been. I provided for my girls. I’ve given Merrill and Lily the world. The fucking world. They’re going to call me greedy: the media, the lawyers, all of our so-called friends. Starting tomorrow or Monday. Maybe for the rest of my life. But they won’t get it. Greedy? I was selfless. One hundred fucking percent.”

  The words hung in the air, and the kitchen felt cold and silent. The sun was almost up now, but it still felt like twilight, an in-between hour. For the first time since Paul had met him, for the first time since he had heard his name, in fact, Paul didn’t want to be Carter Darling. He didn’t want to be a Darling at all.

  And yet, with a sinking feeling, he knew Carter was right. They were the same. One hundred fucking percent.

  “What are you going to do?” Paul asked. He spoke as quietly as he could, as if they were inside a china teacup. The world felt so fragile that the very reverberations of his voice might crack it. “What are we going to do?”

  “It’s very simple,” Carter said, and they both took a seat at the kitchen table.

  When Alexa picked up the phone, she sounded bleary. It was still early.

  “You awake?”

  “Barely. Shit. Stayed up late last night.”

  “Crazy Thanksgiving festivities?”

  She laughed wryly. “Hardly.” She paused. “They suspended David,” she said. “He’s not supposed to go into the office. He’s shell-shocked and we’ve been scrambling. So it’s been an, uh, busy morning in our house.”

  Paul was silent. Finally he said, “On Thanksgiving? That’s very . . . unchristian.” He had a tendency to make jokes when he was nervous.

  She laughed again, her voice was rough and raw. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought he had woken her. “Yeah, well. They basically told him to take an extended holiday. You know, until they’ve done an internal investigation into him. It’s not looking good. They’re already teeing it up so that they can blame him. I told you these weren’t nice people.”

  “Did they—did she—did she say for what, exactly?”

  “Not really. Something to the effect of his mishandling the RCM investigation. ‘Operating outside of marching orders’: I think that was the exact phrasing. Which he was, of course, because his marching orders were to shut the thing down. Whatever. You can tell I’m still seething.” She sighed loudly. Then she said, “Are you going to come in and talk to David today? He’s meeting with Matt Curtis, our guy at the NYAG, later on today. You should be there. David’s working on his resignation statement now.”

  Paul paused and closed his eyes. Then he dove in, knowing that what he was about to say was something he would reflect on for the rest of his life.

  “I’m coming into the city,” he said. “But to be with the family. I’m sorry, but I’m just not in a position to talk to David. Particularly if he’s not with the SEC anymore.”

  He was met with silence, which wasn’t surprising. For a moment, he wondered if Alexa had hung up. “You have to understand,” he said. “This is about family.”

  Then she said, “Don’t be stupid, Paul. If you come in and talk to the NYAG with us now, you won’t go down with the rest of them. You know that.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. But I’m standing behind my father-in-law. You can’t take a whole firm down based on the mistakes of a few people.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I have to go, Alexa. Good luck to you, and to David. Try to stay focused on the real enemy here, all right?” His heart was pounding wildly in his chest. He wanted to leave the door open, just a crack, but he was out of time.

  “I hate thinking of you among them,” she said. “I hate it.”

  But he had already hung up.

  Paul headed straight back to the bedroom. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed beside his wife and hold her. But when he opened the bedroom door, he saw that the sheets had been pushed back and Merrill was gone. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands, wondering if he had made the wrong decision. The stress of the last three days poured over him and he felt submerged in it, as though he were being carried, like flotsam, off on a great tide. The shore looked farther and farther away.

  FRIDAY, 7:50 A.M.

  Paul was gone.

  Merrill felt a rush of nerves when her eyes blinked open and took in the empty pillow. She ran her hand twice across his side of the bed, wondering where he was.

  He’s just down in the kitchen, she thought. He didn’t want to wake me.

  She slouched back against the headboard, desperate for sleep but knowing it would elude her. The house had been alive all night with constant, nervous motion. Someone had moved about on the floor below until dawn, the distant creaking of floorboards stirring her from restless half dreams. At one point, she thought she heard voices on the porch outside; later, car wheels turned on the gravel drive. Both times she had sat up in bed and glanced out the window, but all she could see was darkness. The wind, too, had been coming strong off the water since the previous afternoon, battering the house with blustery gusts. Oddly, Merrill was grateful for the commotion around her. Without it, the house would fall silent and she would be left alone with her thoughts.

  After a minute she pushed herself out of bed and went to the bathroom to wash up. She moved quickly through the motions of flossing and brushing her teeth, washing her face, putting in her contacts as though she was needed somewhere urgently. At the top of her suitcase was a pair of jeans and a turtleneck sweater that she pulled on without consideration. As she dressed, she tried to focus her thoughts on something outside Beech House—a friend’s upcoming wedding in Connecticut, a securities litigation case at work—but her mind felt like a closed-circuit television, looping around and around to thoughts of her father, of Paul, and back again.

  Where had Paul gone? Maybe out for a run? She didn’t allow herself to indulge in the fear that he had left altogether.

  She peered out the bedroom window. If she stood on her toes, she could see the strip of road leading down to the beach. It glistened in the sun, dusted with a crystallized frost. Before the perimeter hedge was the open expanse of the back lawn, the frozen grass as brown and prickly as a doormat. The po
ol lay sleeping beneath a dark green tarp. Metal lounge chairs were lined up along one side of it, their bare backs stripped of cushions for the winter. From October to June, the cushions remained stacked inside the locked pool house like a giant pillow fort. Bone-white snow had collected in the elbows of the trees overnight.

  Only three months ago, Merrill had been sitting on those chairs with Lily, drinking Diet Cokes and feeling the hot sun on their browning skin. They laughed and called out scores as Adrian and his brothers showboated on the diving board. Carter and Paul played backgammon on the glass-topped patio table, their serious faces breaking into the occasional smile or grimace as they took turns besting each other. When the sun dropped below the hedge, Carmela and John had come out to light the mosquito torches around the pool. Everyone smelled of sunscreen and bug spray and salt water and chlorine. Dinner was outdoors—barbequed chicken and corn—and the girls’ hair dried in the warm night air, the sound of ocean waves rolling in the distance. Nights like that felt far away now, like stories about someone else’s past.

  Merrill saw the silhouette of a jogger drawing closer to the house, his face obscured by the shade of the trees. He was tall and broad, like Paul. Her heart quickened a little and she leaned in to look, her eyelashes nearly brushing the windowpane, her palms leaving prints on the ledge.

  When she met Paul, she hadn’t thought much of him, except that his answers in Corporations class were remarkably articulate and that he had a warmth about him that put people at ease. He wore blue button-down shirts and stuffed his hands in the front pockets of his jeans with an aw-shucks honesty that made Merrill trust him despite his handsomeness.

  Merrill had always been quietly guarded, particularly with men. Before Paul, there had only been two boyfriends of any consequence, and she had avoided casual dating in between. Ines and Carter had raised both girls to be cautious of everyone. This is New York, Ines would say about anything from taking the subway to going on a blind date. You never really know who anyone is in New York. You have to be careful. Merrill and Lily had many friends but few acquaintances, and typically dated men who they met through friends and family.

  Sometimes (more often after she met Paul), Merrill wondered what she would have been like if she had grown up outside New York. Would she be herself but more open, less circumspect? Sunnier? Less sarcastic? Manhattan children were like armadillos: sharp clawed and thick-skinned, deceptively quick moving. They had to be. Manhattan was a Darwinian environment: only the strongest survived. The weak, the nice, the naïve, the ones who smiled at passersby on the sidewalk, all got weeded out. They would come to New York for a few years after college, rent shoebox apartments in Hell’s Kitchen or Murray Hill, work at a bank or wait tables or audition for bit parts in off-off-Broadway productions. They would meet other twentysomethings over after-work drinks at soulless bars in midtown; get laid; get their hearts broken. They would feel themselves becoming impatient, jaded, cynical, rude, anxious, neurotic. They would give up. They would opt out. They would scurry back to their hometowns or to the suburbs or secondary cities like Boston or D.C. or Atlanta, before they had had a chance to breed.

  The ones who stayed long enough to raise children were the tough ones, the tenacious ones, the goal-oriented ones, the gold-digging ones, the deal-closing ones, the “kill or be killed” ones, the ones who subscribed to the philosophy “whatever it takes.” They looked out for themselves and slept with one eye open. Being born in New York wasn’t enough to make someone a true New Yorker; it was in the blood, like a hormone, or a virus. Merrill often doubted whether or not she had it in her to stick it out in Manhattan with kids. The older she got, the more she wondered if she wouldn’t be happier somewhere quieter, less stressful, less competitive. Were they really willing to fight tooth and nail the way her parents had, toiling away at hundred-hour-a-week jobs to live in their fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment with its troublesome electric stove, shelling out thirty-four thousand dollars—thirty-four thousand!—a year for a single tuition at Spence. Not to mention what they would have to spend on clothes and nannies and gymnastics just so that their child didn’t feel wildly behind her peers . . . and could they possibly bear to spend every summer weekend with Carter and Ines once they had children? That seemed unreasonable, but of course you couldn’t keep a child cooped up in an apartment in August when all her classmates were playing tennis or riding horses . . . so in addition to the million-dollar mortgage they were already carrying on their apartment, not to mention the appallingly high maintenance charges that they forked over to the co-op each month, they would need to consider at least a small summer rental in the Hamptons . . . what would that run them what, fifty thousand dollars for the season? A hundred thousand? And was it true that a top SAT tutor cost a thousand dollars an hour? Who had the stomach to run these kinds of numbers? For even the very rich, this sort of daily calculus required a steel nerve . . . a ruthless will to succeed. Merrill would see schoolchildren on Park Avenue, golden-haired cherubim in pinafores and Peter Pan collars, and she would think: These are the offspring of killers.

  Now Lily was different. Lily was a New Yorker through and through. Lily had never (Merrill was certain of it) wondered if she might end up anywhere else. Maybe a year in Paris just for fun, or a stint in London with a husband who was sent abroad for career advancement. But Lily would always return. For her there were only two places on the map: Manhattan and everywhere else.

  How enviable, Merrill often thought, when she listened to her sister talk about the future. How inexplicable and enviable, never to want to be anywhere other than where you already are. Merrill had always felt the explorer’s itch. In school, her curiosity had propelled her to the top of the class. Outside of school, she was often lost in the world of one book or another, or dreaming of places that her parents had yet to take them: Paris or Prague or Istanbul or the pyramids of Egypt. She had wanted to study Shakespeare at Oxford more than anything in world, but Ines wouldn’t hear of it. “Too far away!” she was told, and “Your father would just be so proud if you went to Harvard . . .”

  Life would be easier, Merrill realized, if she could just stop wondering what else was out there.

  Dating, for example. Lily had always appeared content with men who regularly crossed her path. The shaggy blond Buckley boys with their blue blazers and untucked shirts; the lacrosse-playing prep schoolers who drank scotch and sodas at Dorrian’s Red Hand on the Upper East Side; the Patagonia-wearing Dartmouth frat brothers with ACK Airport stickers on their cars and bongs beneath their beds; the Racquet Club boys and the Union Club boys and the Maidstone Club boys; the future investment bankers, private wealth managers, hedge funders, and M & A lawyers of Manhattan. The sons of fortune. Lily’s boyfriends had always looked the same, interchangeable with one another and with nearly every other boy with whom they had grown up. Adrian was no different. Merrill agreed that he was probably the best of the lot; the top-of-the-line edition.

  Merrill, on the other hand, never much cared for New York boys. Most of them, she found, were arrogant. Many were charming but not funny, or polite but not kind, or well traveled but close minded. They drank too much and read too little. They had grown up in cold, WASPy households where hugging felt awkward and overly intimate. Merrill would sit through dinners with them at Orsay or J. G. Melon’s, listening to their stories about rowing crew for Exeter or their summer analyst training at Morgan Stanley. She would nod and smile. She would try to remember her friends’ effusive squeals: “He’s so cute!” or “He’s such a catch!” Inside, boredom would incubate and then flower into disgust, coating her insides like mold. She would begin to squirm. She would signal the waiter and try to steal a glance at her watch as her wrist bounced into the air. She would plot an exit strategy; anything to get her home to a nice warm bed and a good book. The handsomer they were, the more quickly her interest seemed to dissipate.

  The first time Paul smiled at her, she felt her cheeks flush like a schoolgirl’s. Oh my God, she
thought, he is handsome. Then: Does he know who I am, or is he just being friendly? All the women at Harvard Law knew who Paul was. He was just too charismatic not to be noticed.

  When Paul stopped her after class and asked her for coffee, Merrill balked. She had trained herself to believe that good-looking men were typically afflicted by the same maladies—arrogance, dullness, self-centeredness, and an appalling sense of entitlement—and so bothering with them was never worthwhile. Also, she was mortified. The fact that Paul’s face—his piercing eyes—and broad shoulders featured heavily in what could only be described as the occasional highly sexualized in-class daydream reduced her to a throbbing lump of awkwardness in his presence. She said no, citing a flimsy excuse.

  He asked again. Twice more, until she finally said yes.

  Grudgingly she went, refusing to wear anything more provocative than a white button-down and jeans. She calmed herself by thinking that, maybe as they sat uncomfortably across from each other at Starbucks, or later over dinner and a bottle of wine, or maybe even after third-or-fourth-date drunken sex, Paul Ross’s charm would begin to fade like all the rest of them. Only a tiny, hidden part of her dared to hope that the opposite might happen . . . that as time went on, she might discover how earnest and tender and goofy and open Paul was, and how he made her feel beautiful even when she was sick or stressed or grouchy, and how he would bring her her favorite black-and-white cookies instead of flowers, and knew exactly how to rub her feet, and what questions to ask about her family so as to appear interested instead of nosy. And most impressive to Merrill, was how hard Paul worked for everything that came to him, while never expecting anything in return. He was unlike any man she had ever met, which was exactly why she loved him.

  So why, then, had she put so much pressure on him to be like her father?